Miscellaneous gaming/gambling stuff

I’ve tried out Poker Tracker, and I may buy it. It can give you invaluable information about yours and other people’s games. It helps me monitor my variance, win rate and other important statistics. I can also use it to pick out bad players more easily. There’s some question of the ethics of using a program like this to have perfect recall of how an opponent plays. Is it wrong to have a complete history of how someone has played? Is it any different if everyone has access to the same information? Is it different if they do or do not know that you have access to it? How much is that data worth exactly?

It reminds me of a story I heard before one of the highly touted human vs computer chess matches. World reknowned player Gary Kasparov complained that IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer had a significant advantage because the programmers could provide it with all the games that Kasparov had ever played, while Kasparov could not study Deep Blue’s play at all because it was a closely kept secret. If I recall correctly, some international chess federation agreed with Kasparov and he was allowed to have a history of Deep Blue’s play.

Separately, I had an amusing incident the other night where I was playing for 40 minutes of 3/6 stud hi thinking that I was playing stud8. Oops. Good thing I only lost $40. This just reinforces my opinion is that stud hi is a terrible game(the fact that I don’t know when I am playing at it, and that that I am terrible at it even when I know I’m playing it has absolutely positively nothing to do with why I hate the game).

I’ve decided to allocate a bit of my precious free time to a fantasy baseball league. I have no idea if my team is any good, but I suspect it’s mediocre. I figure it’ll help me learn a bit more about current baseball theory. Unlike fantasy football which I actually know something about, this isn’t for any money and I don’t care if I do well at all. I’m still not even totally sure about the rules yet, and it started last week.