Easy Free Casino Cash Live

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.

Related posts:

1. Satellites Now Running at DoylesRoom for $1,000,000 English Poker Open Taking place from September 15th to 17th, the inaugural…
2. DoylesRoom.com offers last Satellites to English Poker Open Online poker site DoylesRoom.com is giving players the chance…
3. Free Monday Night Football and Poker Parlay from True Poker Every Monday with TruePoker.com , you have the chance…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

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.

Related posts:

1. Howard Lederer: Team Full Tilt Poker Player Profile Known as “The Professor”, Howard Lederer is one of…
2. Talking Online Poker: House Hearing Today In a little under two hours, the House Financial…
3. Poker Strategy Tips On How To Win The Bodog Poker Open IV photo courtesy bodog.com The Bodog Poker Open IV is…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Had all sorts of busy dreams last night, where I was constantly running around, having to be in two (or three or four) places at once. Probably because there’s a damn lot going on these days, poker-wise.

The PokerStars Caribbean Adventure — the first leg on the new North American Poker Tour — is finally winding down in Nassau, Bahamas. Harrison Gimbel (aged 19) took down the Main Event, earning a head-spinning $2.2 million. And last night another youngster, William Reynolds (aged 21), took down the High Rollers event, winning $526,240.

Meanwhile, the Aussie Millions has gotten underway down in Melbourne and will be running for the rest of the month, with the Main Event happening Jan. 24-30. Follow the action at the Aussie Millions over at PokerNews’ live reporting page.

Another bit of news came out yesterday, via Daniel Negreanu’s blog. The presence of 441 Productions at the PCA — the crew ESPN uses for its WSOP coverage — had suggested the possibility that ESPN would be carrying the NAPT, and according to Negreanu that indeed is going to be the case. Stephen A. Murphy gives us a good summary of that story over on the Card Player site.

The news that ESPN will be there at the Venetian for the next NAPT event — the main event of the Deep Stack Extravaganza series (Feb. 20-24) — certainly will attract a lot of folks to the Venetian who might not have been there otherwise. Will be interesting, too, to see whether this next NAPT event will affect the numbers at the World Poker Tour L.A. Poker Classic, also going on in February, although if I am reading the schedule correctly the Main Event over there doesn’t begin until Feb. 26. Many will play both events, I imagine, although a large number of players may only have the bankroll to choose one. (Links to schedules: NAPT Venetian; WPT L.A. Poker Classic.)

So it’ll be the NAPT vs. the WPT. The Venetian vs. the Commerce. ESPN vs. Fox Sports. And PokerStars vs. PartyPoker (sort of, as Peerless Media, Ltd., a division of PartyGaming, acquired World Poker Tour Enterprises late last summer). And, er, Vanessa Rousso versus Kara Scott? (Scott signed this week as a PartyPoker pro.)

Speaking of conflicts, while we’re all distracted by these other stories, most of us have taken our eyes off of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 after the deadline for the implementation of the law’s final regulations was delayed for six months to June 1, 2010. In what appears a bit of petulant politicking, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), one of those involved in authoring versions of the bill that would eventually become the UIGEA, has discovered a way to respond to the delay. He’s currently blocking the appointment of nominees to fill various Treasury Department posts, apparently as a kind of payback for the decision to delay the UIGEA’s enforcement.

Maria Del Mar gives a good summary of the situation over at Poker News Daily, including some references to comments by various observers, such as Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who are marveling at how Kyl can find it worthwhile to delay the filling of key positions in the Treasury Department while the U.S. continues to try and find its way out of financial crisis. Specifically, Kyl is preventing the appointment of six key officials, all of whom would help manage tax policies and international finance, posts which, as Del Mar points out, “even for the most hardcore poker fans, it should be clear that they ought to have a much higher priority than the UIGEA’s implementation or repeal.”

Among other folks, Del Mar points us to the political blogger Matthew Yglesias for more commentary. Seems more than a little unreasonable for Kyl to hold up the functioning of the Treasury this way in order to make known his grievance over the UIGEA delay.

But then, every single step of the legislative history of the UIGEA has been characterized by such self-serving, dysfunctional applesauce by its authors and backers.

A bill punted around in various forms for nearly a decade gets attached to another and passed into law without debate. Regulations get drafted, failing to clarify even the most rudimentary aspects of the bill (e.g., what constitutes “unlawful internet gambling”). A lame-duck administration finalizes the regulations, scheduling the sucker to go into effect on its last full day of its government. Banks and financial institutions, charged with enforcing the law, continue to plead they don’t know how to do so other than by “overblocking” all suspect transactions, and so a further delay is granted to revisit the issue, and perhaps entertain other legislation related to online gambling in the U.S.

Of course, all of these stories are connected pretty closely, as the fate of the UIGEA will directly affect that of the NAPT, the WPT, the online sites connected with those tours, and more. So, as I say, it will be interesting to see what happens in February in L.V. and L.A. And after that in D.C.

Meanwhile, go check out my interview with Victoria Coren over on Betfair about her book For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair with Poker. Coren was nice enough to take a little time out from her PokerStars Caribbean Adventure to answer my questions.

Have a good weekend!

Related posts:

1. PokerStars launches North American Poker Tour Free online poker site PokerStars.net is glad to announce…
2. UIGEA compliance date delayed until June 2010 With less than a week left before the implementation…
3. The North American Poker Tour Debuts (The Return of PokerStars-vs.-PartyPoker?) Am following with interest the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure play…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Noticed an item in yesterday’s USA Today about online poker, a reference to a newly-published study about online poker called “Social and Psychological Challenges of Poker” by Kyle Siler, a doctoral student in sociology at Cornell University.

As usually happens with these articles that try to summarize a discipline-specific study for a wide audience, the USA Today piece boils Siler’s article down to one simple, easy-to-digest claim, essentially announcing that it shows “Poker wins often lead to bigger losses.” In other words, the USA Today article makes it sounds as though Siler’s exhaustive study of a large sample of online poker hands proves that players who win a little tend to lose it back and then some — confirming, in a way, the fears of those who object to poker and/or gambling as an inevitable road to ruin, regardless of one’s short-term successes.

The USA Today article is accompanied by a picture of 2009 World Series of Poker champion Joe Cada, who does not actually figure in the piece. I suppose there could be some implication here being advanced about the possibility of Cada’s not holding onto his winnings, but I think it more likely this was the first available poker-related photo that came up following a quick search.

I was curious to read the study, especially because the way it was presented in the USA Today article seemed more than a little sketchy. Took a little bit of work to get a look at it, but I did manage get a copy and have now read it through.

Siler speaks knowledgeably of poker and the online game, and as far as I can tell seems to be operating within accepted expectations for sociological research and argumentation. He also shows an understanding of economic theory and applies some of those ideas when appropriate. Siler additionally brings in many references to “poker literature” — both to strategy texts and to narratives — which help ground the study within conversations about theory and practice with which we poker players who have read those books are versed. Those references to people like Sklansky, Caro, Harrington, Brunson, and others also make the article more fun for poker players to read than probably would be the case with most dry, academic treatises.

All in all, I think Siler’s article is smart and interesting, and while its findings mostly confirm ideas we already had about what strategies are most successful his study is nonetheless useful for its having found support for those ideas in the data. I also think it is obvious that the USA Today writer probably only skimmed the study, coming away with a vague, uncertain understanding of its findings.

Here, let me take a shot at summarizing this sucker a little more carefully…

“Social and Psychological Challenges of Poker” by Kyle Siler appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Gambling Studies. Using Poker Tracker, Siler examines roughly 26.9 million hands of online poker played over a five-month period at different stakes in order to try to determine “which strategies are conducive to winning at these different levels,” and therefore perhaps draw some conclusions about the “social and psychological challenges” the game presents. The game on which Siler focuses is short-handed (6-max.) no-limit hold’em, and the hands he’s looking at come from games played at NL50, NL200, and NL1000. In all, he was able to gather and analyze stats on around 295,000 different players.

After crunching the numbers with Poker Tracker, Siler reaches a few conclusions which he does a good job explaining, also using charts and graphs to help him further illustrate what he has found. Those conclusions include his having discovered that

“tight and aggressive strategies have the best return across all levels”;

one finds “an increased proportion of aggressive players as one moves up stakes,” where also “the number of passive players decreases”;

there is an “overrepresentation of loose and aggressive players” among the biggest winners and the biggest losers at all stakes;

“None of the biggest winners at any of the levels were even close to being in the top hundred win rates,” having made their money via higher volume (the “grinders”);

“a high win percentage (i.e. the percentage of total hands won by a player) is negatively correlated with win rate.”

It is this last item that I think caused the USA Today writer to stumble a bit. The point there is that in no-limit hold’em winning a lot of pots doesn’t mean one wins a lot of money, and, in fact, when one looks at millions of hands like Siler did, one discovers that the big winners tend to win fewer (though bigger) pots relative to the rest of the player pool. That correlates with the first finding, namely, that the tight-aggressive strategy has the best return.

The USA Today writer took that point and mangled it into a declaration that “players who played a lot of hands and often won ended up losing more money than others.” He then quotes from Siler’s study in a way that makes it sound like Siler is agreeing with that somewhat vague claim, but he’s misrepresented Siler’s findings.

Siler does conclude the study with some thoughts about how moving up in stakes presents players with new challenges, and does a nifty job relating how the stress of adapting one’s style — necessary to succeeding at the higher levels — presents especially difficult “social and psychological challenges” to poker players. He ends with the point that “the biggest opponent for many players is themselves,” an idea familiar to any poker player who has struggled to improve his or her game.

Like I say, a smart study that I recommend if you can somehow get access to a copy. And I’m sorry to see it somewhat misrepresented in USA Today the way it was — that is, as seeming uncritically to confirm fears about poker as just another unhealthy avenue to degeneracy and self-destruction — and thereby soliciting further misinformed, unrelated comments like “this is the reason why the house always win[s]” and “that is why they call it gambling.”

Related posts:

1. Mike McDonald: Team CardRunners Full Tilt Poker Player Profile Canadian poker player Mike McDonald has earned over $1.8…
2. Mike McDonald: Team CardRunners Full Tilt Poker Player Profile Canadian poker player Mike McDonald has earned over $1.8…
3. Dealing with regulars At the mid and high stakes, you will start…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Am following with interest the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure play out down in Nassau. Checking in on PokerNews’ live reporting as well as the PokerStars blog for all the latest.

Sounds like over 1,500 runners sat down for the two Day Ones, a new record for the PCA. Of course, yesterday the big news coming out of the Bahamas was how the PCA is in fact the first event of the new North American Poker Tour (NAPT). The tour’s next stop will be in Las Vegas in February at the Venetian, then over to the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut in April. Oh, and it sounds like ESPN might be shooting these NAPT final tables for broadcast, a not-insignificant part of the story.

Our buddy B.J. Nemeth has written some about the new NAPT and its challenge to the World Poker Tour (for which Nemeth does live reporting). Check out Nemeth’s post “NAPT vs. WPT: The Battle for North America” for some of his thoughts on the subject. As Nemeth notes, that next NAPT event at the Venetian will directly compete with the WPT’s L.A. Poker Classic in February, so we’ll see right away how the first round of this here fight will go.

Nemeth also alludes in his post to the purchase of World Poker Tour Enterprises by PartyGaming from last year, which reminds me that I had wanted to write a little something on that story again here.

I wrote a couple of those “top ten” lists at the end of 2009 — one compiling the top stories of the year and another listing the top moments of the decade. Such lists are more difficult to pull together than they appear, especially if one is trying to rank the items against one another in some fashion. They’re certainly fun, though, as debate starters. Hell, I immediately felt like challenging my own choices as soon as I made them.

There were at least a couple of stories from 2009 I had considered including in my “Top Poker Stories of 2009” list but ended up leaving out. One was Daniel Negreanu having passed Jamie Gold as the all-time tournament money winner, thanks to the Canadian’s runner-up finish at the 2009 WSOPE Main Event. (Phil Ivey would pass Gold as well following his seventh-place finish at the WSOP.)

Another story I had in the list for a while but then ultimately dropped was the one regarding the purchase of World Poker Tour Enterprises by PartyGaming back in late August 2009. I know several others kept this one in their top ten stories lists for 2009, but I ended up deciding that for the average poker player or fan it hadn’t really registered all that much. I could certainly see, though, how some might view this “insider”-type story as having real some importance down the road.

The news of Party’s purchase of WPTE came not long after we’d heard a story that WPTE had been sold to a group called Gamynia Limited (for $9.075 million). Then Peerless Media Ltd., a division of PartyGaming, came along with a better offer and was able to buy the WPT for $12.3 million. Steve Lipscomb, WPTE’s President and CEO, noted at the time how he looked forward to PartyGaming being able “to provide a strong vehicle for the WPT brand to continue its global expansion and return to online gaming.”

I did write a little something about the purchase here at the time, noting both the relatively small price tag and how it seemed kind of interesting how the fate of poker no longer seemed all that closely tied to the livelihood of the WPT. Such wouldn’t have been the case just a couple of years before, but in 2009, with the European Poker Tour and a host of other tours thriving all over the globe, the fortunes of the fading WPT just didn’t seem as crucial, big picture-wise.

The reason why the purchase — which includes Party getting the WPT branding rights — is viewed by some as a potentially big story is tied to the possibility that the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 could get either overturned or pushed out by new legislation to license and regulate online gambling in the United States. It is thought that by purchasing the WPT brand, PartyPoker will have themselves a handy “vehicle” with which to reenter the U.S. market.

Seems like a lot has to happen, though, for that sequence ever to play out in quite that way. Someone who knows a lot more about these things than I do, Bill Rini, offered some thoughts on the story as well back in August. Rini outlines some of the difficulties Party might face when it comes to returning to the U.S., with or without the WPT brand as a kind of protective shield. Not at all a sure thing, it seems, but perhaps we’ll see.

Going back to Nemeth’s post, the new NAPT — sponsored by PokerStars — now means we have kind of a “PartyPoker-vs.-PokerStars” thing happening again here in the U.S. in the form of these competing tours. Kind of recalls what our little world of online poker was like when I first started this blog in the spring of 2006, back when Party & Stars were the big dogs in the U.S. (with Full Tilt just starting to yap at their heels). Will be very interesting to watch how it all plays out, and, of course, what effect the UIGEA getting overturned and/or bumped by new legislation could have on the competition.

If you’re interested in more on this “insider”-type stuff, I’d suggest listening to some of our fave industry insiders over on The Poker Beat, who return this afternoon (I believe) with a new episode.

Related posts:

1. PokerStars launches North American Poker Tour Free online poker site PokerStars.net is glad to announce…
2. Fox Sports En Espanol teams up with Pokerstars.net to broadcast Latin American Poker Tour in the U.S Fox Sports en Espanol, the country’s top Spanish-language sports…
3. PartyGaming to buy World Poker Tour WPT Enterprises, Inc., owner of the World Poker Tour…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.