So here are some random thoughts I had recently..

The world needs a distributed backup system sort of like this DIBS project. Basically it’s software that backs up your machine to other machines which have extra disk space. But my idea is to make it much simpler to configure and implement. I have 4 machines at home that are used on a daily basis. If I could back them all up to each other, that would be great, I’d never have to get a backup system at all. To achieve a world of utility or grid computing that IBM is currently pushing, it’d be nice if I could just buy some new hardware, plug it into my network and get an immediate benefit in speed or in this case, data storage. You could tie the system together with Bit Torrent to speed up recovery. Actually now that I’m thinking about this, this would be a perfect solution for internet cafe’s where you could wipe a machine clean really quickly by downloading lots of things via BitTorrent. But instead of backing up all the machines, you could just reload all the machines from one master server. Hmm.. I need to think about this some more. Maybe there’s a product in there somewhere..

My other thought was that the perfect service provider for distributed remote backups would be Google. They have tons of disks, lots of redundancy, excellent network bandwidth. They already cache an incredible amount of content, so having them as your backup provider doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. I know people who have lost whole web sites and they went to google’s caches and were able to restore large parts of their sites.

Here are pictures of our jamaican vacation.

Ya ever have one of those dreams that is weird and but still seems to makes sense while you’re totally groggy and half asleep, but then when your head clears, it makes no sense at all? I had one of those last night. I can’t even remember what it was about now.

Just got back from our Jamaican vacation. I’ll put up pictures later.. Me, Tracy and her sister stayed a week at the Ritz-Carlton at Rose Hall. It was quite a hotel. I’ve never stayed at a hotel that had such a friendly and attentive staff. Part of it is that the Jamaican people are very proud and friendly. The hotel is one of the most luxurious I’ve ever been at. We got an all inclusive package which included meals and drinks(except for super premium drinks) and we sure made it worth our while. For about $60/day each(rough estimate because our package included air and double occupancy room) each, we had up to 3 meals a day and drinks we probably averaged over $100/day because the meals were pretty expensive if purchased individually. On the other hand, we ate a lot more than we should have.

We did a couple of excursions while we were there. We went to the Dunns River Falls, which I had been to before. It’s kind of neat. And if you’re in Jamaica just once, it’s worth going to. We also went on a large sailboat trip and did some snorkeling and visited Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. Margaritaville wasn’t very interesting, pretty much just a bar with a gift shop. The snorkeling wasn’t bad.

It felt weird not touching a computer for a week.

I had a great time last night because I got to play in a decent sized game with no risk. The fish from my tournament table sits down in a game he has no business being in. A 10/10 blind pot limit hold’em game. He and his friend have been drinking while watching the yankees game and they are playing crazy bad. I watch and try to give him some pointers. And then he gets up to go smoke and he tells me to play his chips. He has about 400 or so and he knows I play solid so he lets me play for the whole night coming back every once in a while to check on me. I make $450 for him and after about 4-5 hours I cash out his with $800 and he gives me $200. That was a good deal. The tournament continues, a few of the big names have been busted. I played a couple hours of 10/20 limit and came out exactly even. Dave has been doing better, he had a good run last night but couldn’t bear to play because the guy on his left at the 20/40 limit game fell asleep between every action he had to make. I’ll post a couple more interesting hands later when I get a chance. There’s an interesting contrast of styles between pros. Andy Bloch apparently plays a lot of hands and calls people a lot, not betting as much. Phil Hellmuth supposedly builds his stack gradually by going after a lot of small pots and taking blinds, but rarely getting into big fights and big pots unless he has the nuts.

And here’s Andy Bloch’s home page.

Sigh. OK. I’m already out of the tournament on the first day.

The rounds at this tournament are long 1 hr each. We started with 10,000 in chips and the blinds were 25/50. Then it went to 50/100, 100/200, 150/300, and 150/300 with 25 antes, and 200/400 with 50 antes(which was when I busted).

Here’s a summary of the hands I played. The whole table is playing tight, and pretty much correct poker. I have played with about 3-4 of the players online, and I don’t remember anything particularly good or bad about any of them. At my table are 2 mediocre to bad players, 3-4 solid players, and the famous pro Andy Bloch.

A little bit loose player raises from early position. At 100/200, I call 400 with JJ and we see a flop. It is Txx with no obvious flush or straight draws. He bets out for 600 and I raise to 1200. He calls, turn is another small card putting a flush draw on the board. He checks, I bet 1500, he calls. River is another small card, no flush. We check, I show and win. This gets me to about 13,000 in chips and I’m pretty happy so far.

I pretty tight player limps in early position. I limp in behind for 200 with 33. The button calls and the big blind checks. The flop is J43 no draws. Big blind and limper check, so I bet out small, 200 into a 1k pot. Button calls and limper calls. Turn is a K. I make the mistake of reading the button as wanting to bet because he grabs some chips before I act, and so I check planning to check raise. Unfortunately he checks behind and we see the river as a 2. Early position player finally bets out for 600 and I make the wise decision to just call. He shows 56s for a straight and I kick myself for not betting the turn. That is mistake #1.

Andy Bloch had started out playing pretty loose, but had gotten tighter as the game went on. I was playing a pretty standard tight solid game. I reraised him a couple times off his steal raises. Then the following hand came up. with blinds of 150/300 and antes, he raises from the button to 800. I have AKo and I just call. The flop is K44 and I check. He bets 500, and I checkraise to 2000. He calls and now I’m kinda worried. Turn is an offsuit 9. I check, he checks. River is a J, I check he bets 1000, and I call and he shows KJ. And once again I kick myself for not betting the turn. This takes me below 10000 chips and now the blinds are getting a bit larger and I’m a bit concerned that I’m not making much progress.

The final hand I play is at 200/400 with 50 antes. I haven’t been getting any good cards, So my stack is down to 6000+ or so. Andy raises from early position making it 1800. I have JJ and decide it’s time to go. I move all in, and he thinks for a bit and calls. He has AK and hits an A on the flop and I’m done.

Dave thinks a possibly better play is to just call preflop and then move in if there’s no A or K on the flop. This has some advantages, but also some drawbacks. If I move in preflop, I push him off AQ, KQ, KJ, and maybe even AK, but probably not. If I call and see a flop then an A or K hits the flop I’m vulnerable to a bluff, but Dave thinks that Andy bluffs enough to make that a huge problem. My logic was that I wanted to double up because I felt short stacked. The reality is that my stack size isn’t a critical problem and I can wait a few more orbits if I just call to see a flop and then foldon the flop.

Otherwise not too much is up here. Dave wasn’t able to qualify for the tournament so we are just hanging out.

Whew. excellent. I got my passport renewed, so I should be fine. I leave tonight. Supposedly ultimatebet.com will have daily updates of the tournament, but I didn’t see anything there yet. Maybe they’ll update their web page when the tournament starts, so check again starting Thursday.

I’m awaiting my renewed passport I used a company called Travisa and they claim to have a good success rate getting passports renewed in the same day. It cost some money, but it’s worth it if I get to Aruba on Wednesday night. I’m still kicking myself for being so stupid. If I have to give up my seat, then I’ll really really kick myself but right now, I think it looks like I will be able to make it.

Arrrgggghhh.. I’m the biggest idiot ever. I didn’t realize that my passport had expired and they wouldn’t let me on the plane without it. I now have to try and get a same day passport renewal on Tuesday because Monday is Columbus day and all the goverment offices will be closed. If I’m very lucky, I might be able to get it done on Tuesday, and fly out Tuesday night, getting me there on Wednesday. I’ve already missed one of the free tournaments that I’ve qualified for. This could easily qualify as the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I’ll post again if I don’t make it. Meanwhile, Dave has been authorized to play for me.

So I’ve been looking around for sites that are going to have daily or live updates of the aruba tournament and I haven’t seen any. I’ll try to keep a log of progress and interesting hands. Dave says that they have a business center with net access, so I’ll post updates when I can. The main event starts on thursday, so nothing really exciting will happen until then.

Before the tournament starts, I’ll give you my reader(yes, there’s only one of you) a primer on how poker tournaments work. Unlike a regular game, where a player can buy in for whatever amount he wants, a tournament has a fixed buyin. In some cases, it’s small as $3 or $5 tournaments online, some are even free these are called freerolls. Every month or so I get to play in a freeroll tournament because I am one of ultimate bet’s better customers. In a tournament, all players start on equal footing with X number of chips. In a tournament chips really have no dollar value. Even though they say you get $1000 in chips that number is meaningless. What is meaningful is how much money you have relative to the size of the game, this is commonly referred to as how “deep” the money is. If you have few chips, then you are “short” and you’ll have to take chances, get lucky and win hands to become a competitive stack. If you are deep, then you can take your time, wait for premium hands and then go after people who are short stacked. Alternatively, you can play aggressive and try to bust other short stacks. If you have a lot of chips you can afford to lose one pot or two for a chance at eliminating the players. The tournament is over when all the players have been eliminated and one person is the winner.

Most tournaments are designed to last between 45 minutes and 6 hours. At the short end, is the popular “sit and go” format of online tournaments. Online games play very quickly so the blinds increase as often as every 10 minutes. As soon as 10 players sit down at the table, it starts. The winner takes %50, 2nd place takes %30, and 3rd takes %20. Most sites have sit and go tournaments of $5 with a $1 house rake(which is very expensive rake and I wouldn’t recommend it. go for the $10 with $1 rake if possible). Most live casino tournaments have buyins between $40 and $200, they take 4-6 hours.

Premier tournaments like the World Series of Poker and various World Poker Tour events are multi-day events. The 2003 World Series Championship Event had 891 players buyin for $10,000 each and took 5 full days of playing.

The event I am playing in is a 3 day event. I hope to last well into the second day. The buyin is $4000 + 100 house cut. There are currently 354 players of which 319, won online tournaments like me. There will be some more satellites and I expect about another dozen entries or so. The payout structure is top heavy like all tournaments. Here is the exact payout.

There are a few things that are deceptive about tournament poker on tv. First off, you only get to see a small portion of the hands. So if an aggressive player has been raising a lot of hands, at some point, the other players are going to take a stand and play back at him. The coverage may not show all the times the aggressive player raised, but they’ll show it when the other players take a stand. So it may be that the aggressive player has a bad hand, but if he’s been winning a lot of pots, then things seem more reasonable. Second the dollar amounts of chips are meaningless. A raise of $1million at the final table isn’t that relevant because it’s not possible to take that $1m and trade it in for cash. The only thing that’s relevant is the size of the blinds and the stacks of each person.

Also, I believe that the commentary is done in post production. So the comments aren’t truly live, which takes some of the excitement out of it. They do a good job of covering it, so I can’t be sure, but it is easier to make comments after the fact.

Someone should do a poker show on regular live game instead of tournaments.

Huh. I had a brainfart on what static class functions and variables do. Interviewer asked me about it. I’ve written hundreds of them, but for some reason, I just drew a blank when put on the spot. That’s weird for me, I’m usually pretty good in quiz/test type of situations. Ironically, I was right on all the questions about things that I never use: virtual inheritance, multiple inheritance, and copy constructors.

Ok. I guess I was wrong about Arnold. It was quite a surprise to me that he won by such a wide margin.