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With hip-hop star Jay-Z preparing to visit Las Vegas in March, The Palms Resort is offering a special room and ticket package for two. This package is for arrivals on March 26th with a two-night minimum stay.

Jay-Z will perform at The Pearl Concert Theater at The Palms on March 27th and guests will enjoy this exclusive package, which includes:

• Two Nights in a Palms Deluxe Room
• Two Concert Tickets
• VIP Nightlife Pass with Access to Ghostbar and the World’s Only Playboy Club

Rates for this room and concert package start at $829 or they can be purchased separately with:

Jay Z Las Vegas Tickets on Sale Here

Palms Bookings Here

Terms and Conditions
2 night minimum stay - arrival on 3/26/10. Subject to availability. Management reserves all rights.

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I occasionally talk here about how impatient I sometimes get with poker-related analogies. For instance, about a year ago I referred to the Poker Shrink noting how he wasn’t “a big fan of the ‘Poker is like Life’ books and articles” because, in his view, most of them end up being “too general to carry any more wisdom than a dribble glass.” I agreed with the Shrink in saying I also didn’t care much for these analogies — most particularly when they end up making one’s meaning more vague rather than helping clarify what it is one is trying to express.

In other words, I ain’t too keen on someone proclaiming “Poker is like life” and leaving it at that, though I do often appreciate the many ways poker presents us with situations that resemble those we face elsewhere, and thus occasionally provides interesting ways to talk about and assess those non-poker situations. And yeah, I, too, will indulge in such making comparisons now and again, as it is both fun and occasionally even useful.

That said, one has to be careful not to introduce unwanted vagueness when making such comparisons. Another danger one faces when choosing to employ poker-related metaphors is to fall into stale, overused phrases and clichés — also not recommended if the goal is to engage an audience.

The abundance of poker terms and phrases in everyday English is testament to the game’s popularity and significance. But this abundance also means many of these terms and phrases have become pretty well worn by now. People everywhere are constantly bluffing each other. Or upping the ante. Or noting when the chips are down. Or passing the buck. Or trying their hand at something. Or singing that he can’t read my, can’t read my, no he can’t read my poker face. Or warning you about that guy being a wild card, with an ace in the hole. Or up his sleeve. Or simply being an ace.

I’m reminded of George Orwell’s still relevant 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” in which he laments the decline of the language in various contexts, but most especially in political speech and writing. Among his many warnings listed there, Orwell advises readers to avoid “dying metaphors” if at all possible. In his list of examples Orwell does include one poker-related one — “playing into the hands of” — and I’d imagine he’d list most of those appearing in the previous paragraph, too, as often introducing an unwanted “loss of vividness” in one’s language.

Last week Tiffany Michelle appeared on Fox News to chat with Neil Cavuto, ostensibly to discuss the current status of President Obama’s efforts to introduce health care reform and all of the legislative tangling — and political fallout — that has occurred in connection to those efforts thus far. Why Michelle? Well, because she’s “a professional black jack and poker player” — i.e., a gambler — and someone thought it would be a good idea for a person who understands risks and rewards to comment.

Bill Rini wrote a bit about the segment last week in a post that also has the embedded video. Then he came back and transcribed the whole sucker. As Rini points out, the conversation between Cavuto and Michelle — coming in at just under five minutes — is more than a little cringe-worthy, primarily because of the not terribly successful attempt to describe everything in terms of poker or gambling metaphors.

It appears that Cavuto (and Fox) mainly wanted to say that Obama has “a bad hand” here and should fold. And perhaps — as Cavuto hastily adds at the end — also to charge that the President isn’t playing with his own money, but with the taxpayers’. So they brought Michelle on to help communicate that message, but Cavuto’s questions were so imprecise those (essentially banal) observations barely came through, if at all.

If you’re curious, check out Rini’s transcript and/or watch the video. I actually wouldn’t fault Michelle too much here — she does pretty well, I think, to try to respond to Cavuto’s garbled clichés, and in fact probably saves the whole segment from becoming utterly inscrutable.

The hosts of The Poker Beat discussed the segment a bit on their show last week, and there tourney reporter B.J. Nemeth did a good job summarizing why it failed — and why I am sometimes impatient with poker-related metaphors that tend to obscure more than clarify. “The whole point of an analogy is to try and make something easier to understand,” said Nemeth, “and I think what they did is took something the [viewers] had some grasp of and made it incomprehensible.”

Then again, as Orwell notes, what Nemeth is describing is often what happens when language is employed for political purposes. Writing in the wake of the second World War, Orwell notes how “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Perhaps the stakes were a bit higher then (to use a dying metaphor). But Orwell’s desire for us to view “language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought” is still worth reiterating.

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The Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has an interesting new piece in the February 11, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books, a review of Spanish writer Diego Rasskin-Gutman’s Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence of the Human Mind. Much of the article concerns the book, but toward the end Kasparov makes a couple of interesting references to poker — comparing it to chess and talking about both games in the context of advancing research in the field of artificial intelligence — that I thought I’d share here.

Kasparov begins by recounting how back in 1985 — after he had defeated Anatoly Karpov and become World Chess Champion at age 22 — he took on 32 chess-playing computers in a much publicized event in Hamburg and beat them all. Then he talks about the later 1997 match that he lost to IBM’s Deep Blue and some of the reactions that event caused, both within the chess world and in the culture at large.

While many outside of chess took Deep Blue’s triumph as “as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer,” Kasparov explains how the top chess players mostly took it in stride, and were in fact surprised it had taken that long for computers to catch up. And, in fact, among the artificial intelligence community — “the AI crowd,” as Kasparov calls them — there was some dismay that Deep Blue, while able to defeat a human at chess, still didn’t really seem to demonstrate human “intelligence.”

“Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition,” writes Kasparov, “they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force.” In other words, for some Deep Blue’s win represented more of a programming triumph than a particularly significant advance in the development of AI.

Today pretty much any home PC has the computing capacity to run a chess program “that will crush most grandmasters.” Even so, chess remains much too complex of a game to be “solved” once and for all argues Kasparov, citing Rasskin-Gutman’s book in a couple of places to support his point. He then moves into a longer discussion of the book, which sounds appealing for those interested in chess and/or discussions of how the human mind works.

I’m not going to summarize that entire discussion here (check it out yourself, if you’re interested), but I did want to share what Kasparov says at the end of the review when he goes back to this issue of chess perhaps not being the best game for “the AI crowd” to focus their efforts.

“Poker is now everywhere,” writes Kasparov, “as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper.” Indeed, there was a time — around the early 1970s — when it looked like chess would experience a “boom” not unlike the one poker has enjoyed this past decade, although it didn’t quite pan out. I wrote a little about that a couple of years ago in a post called “The Failed Ambassador” that was occasioned by the death of Bobby Fischer.

Getting back to the subject of artificial intelligence, Kasparov continues: “But while chess is a 100 percent information game — both players are aware of all the data all the time — and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management.”

As such, suggests Kasparov, poker is perhaps a much better game on which to focus AI research. He refers to the efforts of Jonathan Schaeffer, leader of the University of Alberta’s Computer Poker Research Group (CPRG) that has been developing poker-playing programs “Polaris” and “Polaris 2.0” that have taken on top pros like Phil Laak, Ali Eslami, and the Stoxpoker guys over the last couple of years. I actually had the chance a while back to interview Schaeffer (following that first match with Laak and Eslami), who told me he believed “one of these days — within 5 to 10 years — two-person, limit Hold’em will be solved.”

My sense is that Kasparov isn’t quite as confident as Schaeffer regarding the possibility of “solving” even this relatively less complex variation of poker, though he does recognize how Schaeffer’s “digital players are performing better and better against strong humans — with obvious implications for online gambling sites.”

The question remains, of course, as to whether or not these poker-playing computers are actually thinking “like humans” or not — that is, when Polaris 2.0 defeated the Stoxpoker guys back in the summer of 2008, to what extent did that victory represent a real advance in the creation of artificial intelligence as opposed to a mere triumph in “programming” (as Kasparov characterizes his defeat to Deep Blue)?

In any event, much as he reacted to the work of the chess programmers as having exciting implications for his game, Kasparov seems enthused about the work of Schaeffer and his colleagues at the University of Alberta, too. Referring again to poker’s growing popularity, Kasparov notes how there is a “current trend of many chess professionals taking up the more lucrative pastime of poker.”

These chess pros are smart guys. They see there’s more money to be made playing poker than chess these days. But some — like Kasparov — also see poker as offering other benefits, too, such as the opportunity to test ourselves in “partial information” situations in which we much learn to adapt, to weigh risk and reward, and to act accordingly.

In other words, besides being a game ripe for the study of artificial intelligence, poker can help us develop our actual intelligence, too.

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(Las Vegas, Nevada) 2010 will start out on a high note thanks to the online leader in poker freerolls, free poker money and Vegas travel - WeDoitAllVegas. The renowned website will play host to one of the first online poker tournaments of the New Year and will give away the first 2010 World Series of Poker seat of the year, worth $1,500.

The popularity of WeDoitAllVegas has only increased over the last few years, as they have continually enhanced their free poker money program, poker freerolls, prize giveaways and much more. Now the site has upped the ante once again by running their New Year’s Day Tournament, which is open to all members of WDIAV.

The WDIAV New Year’s Day Tournament will begin on January 1st, 2010 at 2:15 p.m. EST and will be hosted by the leading online poker room - Full Tilt Poker. WDIAV forum members, WDIAV rakeback players, Free Poker Cash Bankroll players and affiliates are more than welcome to take part in this one-of-a-kind poker event and should pre-register at the WDIAV New Year’s Day Tournament page to ensure their seat in this online poker tournament. Players have until December 28th, 2009 to pre-register and once registered, players’ names will appear in the Full Tilt Poker tournament lobby 2 days before the start of the tournament.

The 2010 World Series of Poker will be the premier poker event of the year and by winning the WDIAV New Year’s Day Tournament, you are assured a seat next to the best poker players in the world. The grand prize is valued at $1,500 and can be used for the 2010 WSOP event of their choice.

If you are a WDIAV forum member, Free Poker Cash Bankroll player or affiliate, or WDIAV rakeback player, you can pre-register for the New Year’s Day Tournament at: http://poker.wedoitallvegas.com/New-Years-Day-Tournament/

About WedoitAllVegas.com:
WeDoitAllVegas should be your first stop when planning your next trip to Las Vegas. Offering the best deals and information on Las Vegas hotels, shows, events, concerts and much more, WeDoitAllVegas is your best option when you are looking to save money on your Vegas vacation. WeDoitAllVegas also rewards their loyal members by offering monthly poker freerolls, free poker cash at Full Tilt Poker, regular prize giveaways, forum contests and much more.

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Jeffrey Pollack, who served as World Series of Poker Commissioner since 2005, has announced that he’s stepping out from his role with the tournament to “explore new business challenges”. Pollack resignation comes only a few days after the conclusion of the 2009 WSOP Main Event.

Pollack played an essential role in the WSOP expansion and growth. In 2005, Pollack relocated the annual tournament series from Binion’s in the Downtown Las Vegas to Harrah’s Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, doubling the number of entries that year.

The following year, the WSOP Main Event registered a total of 8,773 entries, setting a new record for largest tournament in poker history (by prize pool). Under Pollack’s leadership, the World Series of Poker paid $675 million in prizes, nearly doubling the $367 million combined prize pool paid on the previous 36 tournament series.

Pollack also helped Harrah’s to launch the WSOP Europe in 2007, and forged a solid business relationship between  ESPN, the World Series of Poker and Harrah’s, that has contributed to increase the tournament’s popularity around the globe.

“We appreciate Jeffrey’s contributions over the past four years and wish him the best in the future. The World Series of Poker remains the market leader with this year’s tournament exceeding all expectations, and we are well positioned for the future. There is no intention at this time to replace the Commissioner role.” commented a WSOP spokesperson.

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