The Weather

And all over the world
Strangers talk only about the weather
All over the world
It's the same
It's the same

   - "Strange Weather", Tom Waits

I've spent the last week on a cruise, and therefore have had ample opportunity to observe people interact with strangers in 20 second snippets - elevators, specifically. And here's how that breaks down:

1. About 3 out of 4 conversations center on the weather.
2. The remaining 25% are about my children, but that depends on me having them with me. "Awww, how cute!"

Why the weather? Why is this such a fascinating topic, the default fall-back when you feel you have to say something but don't know what? Why is this apparently a human universal - regardless of whether I'm in the elevator with Germans, Americans, Spaniards... Okay, maybe not a fair cross-section of humanity, but you get the idea. But having thought about it a bit, it really is the ideal topic for when you want to say something to a stranger.

• Weather is dynamic, as opposed to static or entirely predictable. This makes it an infinitely more interesting topic than, say, pointing out that a month is about 30 days long, or that Obama is the president of the US, or anything else that hasn't changed for a long time or is likely to change anytime soon.
• Weather is of some kind of interest to everyone. Very few have no interest whatsoever in the climate around us, it affects almost all of us in one way or another even if it's only to a small extent. Contrast this with a comment on, say, the variations in the value of Microsoft's stock today. Most people aren't interested because they own no stock. Note how it satisfies the first critera, however.
• It's neutral. No one is to blame for the weather, if we leave the climate change debate out of this for now. The same cannot be said for any kind of political discussion, or religion, or even what foods you like. However miniscule the risk of offending someone with a comment on a topic, nothing can be safer than the weather. No one will be upset or cause a ruckus over you saying that you find it a bit chilly today. If you complain about last night's cabaret show, there's a tiny risk that the person you're talking to was in it - or has a daughter who was, or whatever.

You can't go wrong with the weather. Or saying that someone's baby is cute: that one is pretty safe, too.

Clouds.

I've had one, repeat, one (1!) night with clear skies since I wrote the last post. I did make the best I could of that and hopped in the car armed with binoculars and some idea of what I wanted to look at. I stayed with Orion because, well, because I need to start somewhere.

So I went over what I already knew about it; Betelgeuse, the Orion nebula, and then stayed with Rigel for a minute or two. Realized that I don't really recognize as many constellations as I thought I should and had a look at what little I knew I could name: The big dipper and follow the backside of the "cart" (the Swedish name for it, Karlavagnen, means a cart not a ladle) up until I find Polaris. Okay, check.

Then took the binoculars down and looked up and around. Found a very bright star seemingly alone, straight above me. What is it? Well, here's where my SkyView app came in handy. I pointed it straight up, and it told me the name of the star. What was it? I don't remember. But then tonight, as I was writing this post I used the simple fact that I'm still in the same place, it's the same time of year, and even though it's a cloudy night SkyView doesn't care what the outside looked like. So sitting in my couch I pointed my phone up and, sure enough, there it was. Capella.

Capella is a pretty cool star in that it's not a star at all. It's actually four stars, but the two that you can see (although "they" sure looked like "a" star through binoculars) are two giant stars circling each other very closely. How closely? About the distance of the earth to the sun! Two stars, the smallest of which has a radius of 9 times the sun, circling each other closer than our sun is to us. To put that into perspective, if that can be done, it's... Well, if you're on the surface of the bigger of the two stars and look up at its sister in the sky, it would take up (if my calculations are correct, see picture) 7.5 degrees of the sky, or fifteen times the apparent diameter that the sun has in our sky.



I haven't done trigonometry for quite awhile, but I had help from a Certified Math Teacher who I'm married to who made sure I wasn't getting too far off track in doing the calculations. Once I was done, I tried to find out if there was a way to look up the answer online and found out that someone - of course - has written a Wikipedia article on angular diameter which is used for specifically this. Still, I feel a little bit smarter for figuring out the equation on my (mostly) own instead of googling it.

Now, please - some clear skies!

Amateur astronomy starts now

New hobby: Amateur astronomy. New function of the blog: Astro log. That's all I have to say about the transition from poker to astronomy.

--

Step 1 was to buy a pair of binoculars, and I went with a pair of Celestron 15x70 (that is magnification x aperture, or width of the main lens) which are decently heavy but pick up a lot of detail, pictured below. I'll get to buying a telescope eventually, but have now decided that there's plenty to look at and learn before I take that step.

I've had a couple of peeks at the night sky already, but as I'm starting the log tonight, I'll add only tonight's views to it:

Venus
Low in the sky, very visible, looked crescent, but hard to tell.

Jupiter
I can't help myself - have to look at Jupiter now that it's so close, despite having done it every time I'm outside and it's clear in the last two weeks. Got a decently still view of it by leaning against the wall to remove jittering of shaking hands. Seeing Jupiter's moons is so. Very. Cool. Looked basically like this (but two on the left and one on the right instead of all four tonight):

(Picture courtesy of 10 Minute Astronomy)

Moon
It's really very blinding without a filter and I find that it's actually nicer to look at it through a light cover of clouds. But it was a full moon, and I had to give it a look. Note to self: Learn some of the names of the major landmarks. Especially that crater in the "southwest" corner that, as my mom put it, makes it look like it's an orange. Investigation still ongoing.

Betelgeuse
My first thought was "hey, Mars!" but a quick check using the SkyView app told me differently. What tricked me was the red color, and yes indeed - Betelgeuse is a red supergiant ("the armpit of Orion") ~650 lightyears away. It also twinkled ("cintillated" is apparently the correct term) a lot making it look like it was going through a prism; different colors coming at me but chiefly in red. Looked up the magnitude: A respectable 0.8, making it (incidentally) the 8th brightest star in the sky.

Sirius
Later at night, clouds had covered the whole sky except for a a thin band on the southern horizon and I thought I saw Betelgeuse again, just over some rooftops; very bright start, much scintillation, but... Apparently not Betelgeuse. Nope, again using SkyView has reference i deduced it had to be Sirius, which it turns out is the brightest star in the sky, with a magnitude of -1.46. The scintillation made this too look like it was going through a prism, with all sorts of colors coming at me (is there something wrong with my binoculars? No, probably not).

Having gone through all this twinkling I formed the hypothesis that stars twinkle more close to the horizon because of the extra atmosphere they have to go through. The link above on twinkling gave me the nod on that guess.

Let's hope for clear skies soon again.

"Hypothesis" is not a big word

Our daily routine consists of Lori leaving for work early and me and Benjamin hanging out at home for an hour after she leaves until it's time for him to go to daycare. During this time, we eat breakfast and then usually end up watching the morning kids' show on TV ("Bolibompa"). It doesn't take very long for this routine to be so firmly set that I know every program that they show and in which order. And let me tell you, the coolest one by far is Dinosaur Train. Basically, it's a cartoon about a family of dinosaurs who travel around on the dinosaur train to various place (and time periods) to visit other dinosaurs and learn about them.

What's really cool about it, though, is that in each episode the young dinosaurs - as they learn about the places they are about to visit from the train's conductor - form hypotheses, and even say so explicitly! "Then I have an hypothesis! I'm guessing that ALL insects lay eggs by the water!" and then the conductor usually says something along the lines of, "well, you'll get a chance to test that hypothesis when you get there!"

How cool is that?

And, what's even better, it's not always that their hypotheses hold up - and the show makes a point of this being quite alright. You can't be right all the time, the important thing is that you form an idea based on what you know, test it, and then adjust it when the evidence tells you differently.

So very awesome.

The Nontroversy over Steinman's Nobel prize

On Monday, the Nobel foundation announced that this year's laureates for physiology and medicine includes Ralph Steinman for his work on the immune system. Only, it turns out, Ralph Steinman died Friday, three days before the announcement. This has caused a small media storm in Sweden for reasons I fail to discern.

Yes, the bylaws of the foundation state that the Nobel prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Yes, Ralph Steinman was in fact dead when he was announced as a laureate. No, the board who made the decision was not aware that he had just passed away - and as far as I can tell, the decision was made before he was dead (he just happened to pass away between the decision and the announcement).

This stumped the Nobel committee who now have to decide what to do with it. Recind the Nobel prize from a recently deceased person? Break the bylaws? After a couple of hours of deliberation they decided to keep Steinman on the list. So this "controversy" lasted all of a few hours of meetings.

And this is labelled - in Swedish newspapers anyway - a "controversy." Why? I'm not even sure it could be considered a "mistake," and even less so a "controversy." Should they have checked whether he was alive? When? A final phonecall a minute before entering the stage to make the announcement? Have a doctor in the room with all prospecive laureates who can press a big red button in case one of them happen to die just before their names are called out?

I honestly don't see what the big deal is. Yes, the prize is supposed to go to living scientists but it was no-one's intent to give it posthumously and I feel that they handled everything the way one can reasonably expect them to. The only feeling I come away with from this is sympathy with Steinman; I wish he could have learned about it before he died.

Mark Forster on reading books

I wanted to share this (I think) phenomenal advice for people like me: Book lovers who sort books into two kinds:

1. Books I want to read, and
2. Books I want to have read.

Why even have the second category? Because there are books that have something to teach me but that for various reasons might not be exactly what I enjoy reading the most. Honestly, if it was just a matter of instant gratification, I'd probably stick with Terry Pratchett books and only occasionally throw in some non-fiction. Non-fiction - especially science and philosophy - requires a lot more attention, a lot more focus and a lot more work after you put the book down to absorb the stuff in it. But I want to learn, and sometimes I have to force myself to leave The Fifth Elephant on the night stand and instead work through a chapter of Dan Dennett's Elbow Room. And the best way to accomplish this I've found is to use Mark Forster's technique of having a rotating stack of five books:

 I chose five books as my "active" books and put them in a pile. Then I take the top book from the pile and read as much as I want to in one session. At the end of the session, it goes at the bottom of the pile. Then for my next reading session, I take the next book in the pile, read as much as I want to of that, and put it at the bottom of the pile. The two most important rules are:

1) I don't allow myself to read any book that's not in the pile. If a new book arrives it has to wait until one of the others is finished.

2) I don't allow myself to keep a book on top of the pile for more than one session. Once I've put it down, it has to go at the bottom of the pile.

This works like magic because the variety keeps my interest going. 

Honestly, works like a charm. It keeps my interest fresh in the books I'm reading, I don't find myself "skimming" through chapters just to get it over with when my interest wanes (if I can no longer focus on it, it just goes to the bottom of the pile) and it lets me read a varied range of books. Wholeheartedly recommended if you're anything like me.

Downside is you need to keep five bookmarks on hand. Quite the first-world problem.

A Test for Consciousness

An article in the June edition of Scientific American called "A Test for Consciousness" (full version available online only for subscribers, so if you're not one you'll have to take my word for what the gist of the text was) proposed something interesting about consciousness, namely that an important part of it is the ability to integrate many components of an experience, much like the human brain does when it looks at a room, and...


Well, to take the room I'm currently in as an example, I see - without necessarily lifting my eye above my laptop screen - a guitar, a TV, a book shelf, a couch, a lamp and a fireplace. These items in the corner of my eye activate parts of my brain that activates other parts of my brain, and so on. For instance, the guitar triggers thoughs about music, the books make me think about "knowledge" (and my love for books) and the whole environment all taken together, especially TV and couch, makes me think this is a living room. Of course, I know this is a living room, but anyone of you looking at this picture of it would have drawn the same conclusion. Right?

Now, seeing "the whole picture" like this allows me to answer some questions that a computer could not. For instance whether something that is here shouldn't be here. Had I photoshopped it to include a Boeing 747 next to the fruit bowl on the table, you might have raised an eyebrow. And this is what the proposed consciousness test consists of. In the article, they give the example of two images: Both with a computer screen, but one with a keyboard in front of it, and one with the keyboard exchanged for a plant, that partially obscures the screen. A computer, they point out, typically couldn't tell which picture "makes sense" but a human could because we would see that the keyboard "belongs" to the monitor, whereas the plant didn't. In short, the authors suggest this as an updated version of the Turing test.

While I think they have an interesting idea about consciousness, I disagree that the kind of test they propose will necessarily detect or reject it. To put it in the simplest terms, I believe that Abraham Lincoln was conscious, but I don't necessarily think he would have passed. And I don't think it's just that particular test (computer screen + plant) that is the problem, I think it would be hard to come up with any test of this kind that wouldn't classify a large part of the human population (living or dead) as not-conscious. The image online (picture of a man photoshopped to look like he's resting on the horizon) is a good test because computers would have a hard time figuring out that in order for that to "work" he'd need to either be several miles tall, or violate the law of gravity or some other very basic assumption about how the world works.

But again, is it clear that a tribesman from Papua New Guinea would pass this test? Would they understand what they're looking at when they see a photo taken from a helicopter or airplane (which I assume this is)? And it's not okay to say "well, you could explain that to them," because that would be cheating. You're presumably not going to "explain" to the computer if the computer couldn't parse it (whatever an explanation in that case would mean). On a sidenote, what's to say that the guy isn't just falling? I suppose it's a bit of a giveaway that he's checking his watch (something unusual for a guy plummeting to his death to do) but this is again a hint-of-something-wrong our medieval ancestors would necessarily overlook.

So I think they're on to something good - we draw on many different intuitions in order to make sense of the world, and that's an important, maybe even defining, part of consciousness - and while the tests they propose in the article don't appear to me to be doing the job they say they are, I'll happily acknowledge that getting a computer to pass a test like this (quite regardless of whether or not Honest Abe would have) would be a major milestone on the way to true AI. But that said, if you have a test that we already know could easily yield false negatives even in living humans, then we should ask ourselves what kind of AI we're actually trying to test for. A machine that thinks, no - experiences! the world exactly the way a modern westerner does? While that would be a fascinating machine indeed, I don't think that's the best goal for artificial intelligence, or likely to ever succeed even if that was someone's intention.

If ("when" would be my bet) we manage to create a conscious machine, the idea of it being anything like us in how it perceives the world, or in the conclusions it draws, or in its experiences through its sensory instruments seems to me to be very unimaginative. What's wrong with just getting it to truthfully answer the question "how do you feel?"

"Belief"

The other night I had a near-Storm experience, when the topic - over wine - ended up for a short while about evolution and then the words "but science is also just a belief, really" were uttered. I did object to it, but I think my objection was lost/ignored/misheard/ruled out by generally loud conversation that quickly spread like wildfire to some other topic.

But I'm bothered by the statement, not because it's untrue, but because semantics force it to be true. Yes - science is also something that one "believes" in, much like some deity, the fairy godmother or Santa Claus. So the statement, taken literally, is true. There are serious differences between the two kinds of belief that are sadly jumbled up into one concept, but the English vocabulary does not allow for them to be easily expressed. Neither, by the way, does Swedish. Which leads me to wonder if there's a language that actually has separate words for the following two states of the brain:

• Accepting a statement about reality because it seems likely, or feels right, or makes sense, compared to:
• Accepting a statement about reality because it has been proven true.

I have more to say about these two sentences in a little bit. First, I want to also address another beef with the word "belief" - that it doesn't separate between "likely" and "virtually certain." Anything anyone deems just past the line of 50% probability gets the tag "belief." All the way up to 99.99%. And, for reasons having to do with social conventions and politeness in discussion, quite a chunk of the one-hundred-percenters, too. For instance:

• "I believe it will rain tomorrow."
• "I believe my wife is at work."
• "I believe my team will win the championship."
• "I believe this shirt is too small for me."
• "I believe evolution is true."
• "I believe there is a fly in my soup."

These are not six equally likely propositions. Yet there is no good way of stating the difference, because we're stuck with the word "believe." Sure, you could try throwing into the mix such phrases as "I hold it to be true that..." or "It seems likely to me that..." or "Surely, it's the case that..." but those are usually awkward. You could also go right ahead and just state matter-of-factly that "Evolution is a fact." Yes, it is. But that actually says something different than sentence number five above. It takes the speaker out of the picture, and I'm a firm believer (see?!) in speaking in first-person as often as I can because I want to talk about how I perceive the world and what I believe, my values, and so on. Maybe this is too fine a point, maybe I'm splitting hairs. But I can't help look at those two sentences and feel a big difference about what they say and what kind of conversation will take place after they're stated.

Maybe it's because of inflation. Maybe the word "belief" was originally used in the sense of "holding something to be true" but was gradually devalued as people used it for less and less certain statements about the world. There are lots of words that have had this happen to them, my favorite being the Swedish word "ganska" which originally meant "certainly" and now means "fairly." We slowly went from being "ganska" sure of what the word meant, to only "ganska" sure about it.

So about the word that is missing, the word that denotes something I hold to be a fact about the world because evidence dictates it versus things I've been told or think I have noticed - what about that? How do we separate between "I believe a full moon gives me headache" and "I believe Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system?" A minimum of one of those are - for most people - on authority. And only one of them is true. But both of them can correctly be summed up as being things people believe, thus implying a hugely unfair (to Jupiter) similarity in degree of truth. It pisses me off. Can I start saying that I "objectively believe" something?

• I objectively believe in evolution.
• It seems likely that it'll rain tomorrow.
• I'm probably over-obsessing about this topic.
• I'm almost certain that very few people will read this.

Oh, whatever. Watch this instead:

Officially retired poker player, am I

So, after quite a hiatus, I finally hammered the last nail into my poker career's coffin: I withdrew all of my bankroll, thus effectively putting to end an era of my life that lasted for 5-6 years, could in many respects be said to have been more formative of my personality than school or college ever was, and from which I bring (almost) no regrets.

And, with that, this blog will either die for real, or be reborn. I'm still not sure. I'm nowadays active on Twitter - @FredrikPaulsson - and I've found myself at times itching to say more than what fits into 140 characters. Perhaps this is the place to do that.

We'll see. Tonight, I'll drink a toast to my poker career, reflecting on its highs and lows, on all the friends I've made, the good times I've had and what I've learned.

Here's to you, poker, old friend. Maybe we'll cross paths again some day.

--FP

I did it.

For the first time in two months, I played poker. 150 hands in total - wouldn't want to overdo it the first session I play after my break. So a short session, a buy-in of profit, and maybe I'll do it again soon. I suppose it's premature to claim that my break is over.

What I have done in the past three months when I haven't blogged (and hardly posted on forums) and haven't spent an hour a day on poker? I've read books. I've worked - oh boy, have I worked - I've hung out with friends and family and I've watched a decent chunk of TV. Oh, and I've played some video games.

Anyway. I'm back, I guess. We'll see how this pans out.

Progressive Tipping

I think it's customary to write trip reports on poker blogs, especially when your travel takes you to Las Vegas, the Mecca of gambling. And I'm sorry if I've let you down. Rest assured that the lack of stories does not in any way correspond to an uneventful time. I had a great time, and a lot of fun things happened, but today I'll just focus on one of them: My experiment with progressively increasing tips for the poker room cocktail waitress.

The idea is simple: I tip the standard $1 the first time she brings me a beer. Then I up it to $2 the second time around, etc. I didn't explicitly mention my intention of doing it - hell, I didn't even have the intention of doing it until I was already well under way. Besides, cocktail waitresses seem to have a very sophisticated sense of tip, so I feel confident that most of them will pick up on it without having to be told.

The end result of this was that as the session went on, my beers became more and more frequent, which is hardly surprising. But here's the kicker: About 90 minutes into the session, my waitress came by our table and went up to me and offered me a last Corona (my beverage of choice this evening). I say "offered" and "last" because

1) I hadn't ordered it (I was still working on the last one she had brought me), and
2) she was getting off her shift but wanted to make sure I wasn't without a drink in the time it would take the next waitress to start her shift and get to our table.

So: She had ended her shift and brought me a beer (that I had not - yet - requested) on her way out. Out of kindness and generosity and care for customers? Maybe. But I bet she also wanted the $7 tip that was coming. So that was funny in its own right.

What made it even more fun is that BelgoSuisse (from Cardschat) who was sitting two seats to my right had tried to order a beer from her just a few minutes prior to her bringing me this Corona and had been told "no, sorry, I'm getting off my shift now." Had I known about this exchange as she brought me the last drink, I would have tipped her $20, because that's awesome.

Bloom

Yesterday, we had our first home-grown salad: Tomatoes and lettuce, with a sprinkle of (our own) parsley and then cheating a bit by adding some store-bought olive oil and garlic. I can honestly say that I'm not sure I ever want to buy tomatoes again. If you've never had home-grown tomatoes, you don't know what tomatoes taste like. I kid you not. There's just such a huge difference in sweetness, texture and aroma that it's not comparable. The best analogy I can come up with is comparing Heinz Ketchup to a really old bottle of generic ketchup mixed with two parts of water.

There's another thing that's in bloom and maturing wonderfully, and that's Sean Gibson's career as a poker reporter. Sean and I go back a few years from CardsChat, but I got to meet him last year in Las Vegas, when he was trying to break into the world of poker reporting. He had some various writing jobs, among others for PokerTableRatings, but at the time (if I'm not mistaken) his future was pretty much up in the air. I got the feeling that he wasn't sure if it was going to work out or not.

Fast forward one year, and we have who I can honestly say I consider the best on-camera poker reporter in the world right now. To combine the two traits of actually knowing what he's talking about and at the same time keeping the interviews light-hearted and being able to connect with the interviewee and make them feel relaxed is, I think, unprecedented in this (admittedly so far relatively small) field. Privately, he seems to have changed as well; more relaxed, much more confident and overall having that look of someone who's really, really enjoying his job and his life, and that's just awesome.

Sean, my friend, you're the home-grown tomato of poker reporting. Keep it up.

Next Stop: Vegas

Heading out tomorrow morning, and should be at the Venetian around 11:30, by my calculations. Taking only a carry-on and checking in online cuts the airport time down to a minimum, which. Is. Awesome. I really don't like airports. To me, they're buildings with thousands of people who can't wait to get out of there, which makes the overall mood in the place pretty damp. Whatever, I'll have my book. Or books, rather, seeing as there's three of them in my bag.

Once in Las Vegas, I'll be meeting up with Debi almost immediately for lunch. After that, I have exactly zero plans - and that's how I like it. Will I play poker? Who knows. Maybe. I'm bringing some change just in case, but I don't expect I'll be spending a ton of time at the tables, unless for hanging out with friends who want to play.

I'm excited about going there, I'm excited about coming back and doing a truckload of shopping, I'm excited about going to my parents after that to get back to my cats, and I'm excited about going home a few days later still. Once home, I'm excited about going back to work for the first time in 6 months, and I'm excited about grabbing my poker career by the horns and turning this year into my best one yet. I'm overall very excited about what's happening in my life right now.

Did I just jinx it? Let's hope not.

Oil.

Two random observations:

1. I'm under the impression that oil is used for a lot of very specific things, among them making plastic. It's a really neat substance. I don't know how much of the "stuff" we have today in which oil is a necessary ingredient, but I'm guessing it's a whole lot.

2. Also, oil is probably one of the most rare substances in the universe, based on the fact that it's what happens to organic lifeforms after millions of years. We don't know any other planet on which it exists.

And we're burning this stuff?

Bwin Blows (and blost a bcustomer)

There's a ton of stuff I could put into this post, including quoting all the emails that have been sent back and forth, but I'll keep it as short and to-the-point as I can (which is still pretty long).

Basic timeline:

Wednesday, June 9th: I open an account at BWin. I deposit $5,000 (their maximum deposit), which is probably a lot for most people, but not exactly an outlandish amount if you're planning on playing the midstakes. I play about 150 hands or so, figuring out how their software works, configuring Holdem Manager, yadda yadda. Some quirks I'm not happy about, some features I wished they had done differently, but game selection looks pretty good and there are no deal-breakers in how their software is built. I'm reasonably content.

Thursday, June 10th. I log a more substantial session, something like 600 hands, trying out what multitabling is like and how I can tile the windows and stuff like that. I win a buy-in or so.

I don't log in on Friday.

Saturday morning, I can't login. Says my password is incorrect. I thought that perhaps I didn't remember it right (I obviously use new and different passwords for all sites, and they're random strings of numbers and characters; easy for my memory to play tricks on me), but I go through their password recovery procedure and have a new password emailed to me. Try to log in. It won't work.

"What the hell?"

So I go back to their webpage and try to log in there - maybe there's something wrong with my client? Success! I can log in on their webpage! Except now there's a little information box that tells me that my account has been closed.

What the hell?

I browse around. No information available as to why my account has been closed. I check my GMail spamfolder; no email from Bwin. I email them, but when I hadn't gotten a reply in the afternoon, I called them. Turns out that their security team have closed my account because they were doing a "routine review." In order to re-open the account, I have to supply them with the customary passport/utility bill combo.

Do you see the problem here?

The problem, of course, is that they closed the account without notifying me. Without telling me why they did it, or for that matter that they HAD done it, and I had to contact them in order to find out what they needed from me. I think that's outrageous. Blocking my $5k without telling me why is not a good way to handle a new customer.

Now, if this was the matter of just an individual security team member accidently forgetting to send an email to me, I would have shrugged it off. On the contrary, though, I was informed (both over the phone and in writing) that this is in fact standard procedure: They do NOT inform customers when they close their accounts. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. What kind of weird rationale could possibly be behind this? I can't think of any. And trust me, I've tried to think of one.

Either way, within minutes of having been told that I need to upload a photocopy of my passport and a utility bill, it's done, and a few days later (Tuesday) I get an email saying that they've re-opened my account. Here's where things really turned sour. Basically, my confidence in how they handle their customers was already shot to hell, and so I went ahead and ran the "cash-out test". That's to say that I wanted to find out if they were the kind of company that would put up a fuss in order to prevent people from withdrawing.

And they were.

"It has come to our notice that you requested a pay-out before having wagered the total amount you paid into your account on our website. Please note that pay-outs generally can be made only from obtained winnings"

At this point, I asked for a supervisor to call me. I was called back a few minutes later, and was told that this rule (about "waging the total amount I paid into my account") was stated in their Terms and Conditions. I told her that it wasn't. She told me that she was certain that it was. I told her that she could keep repeating that all she wanted, and while probably almost no one ever reads the T&C for these things, I'm that one pesky guy who does (my mom is a lawyer and has taught me well) and I then proceeded to bring up their Terms and Conditions and started reading them to her over the phone. After a minute or so, she told me that I didn't have to read all of it to her. So then we were at an impasse: She claimed that there was a rule that was "clearly stated" (her words) in a text where this rule was nowhere to be seen.

She promised, however, to email me a link to the rule in question. Turns out that it was in the FAQ, not in their T&C (quite a difference, if you ask me), and its wording is:

"- If you request the withdrawal of the amounts you paid into your account instead of using them to participate in our broad line-up of services, bwin is entitled to cancel such requests instead of paying out the money as requested. "

I repeat, emphatically, that their T&C does not state anything of the kind. This information was available in their FAQ under the heading of "Why Is My Cashout Not Processed?" or something of that nature. I think it's fair to require customers to read the terms before depositing. I don't think it's reasonable to require them to read through the entire FAQ as well.

--

At this point, quite a few more angry emails (some of them less-than-totally-polite from them as well) ensued, but I did finally get my money back. It's impossible to say exactly what caused them to change their mind, but I'm betting that me informing them that they pay to advertise on my blog might have had something to do with it. I assume they don't want bad press in a blog they pay to advertise on. And yet, here this post is. Why? I got my money back, at last, possibly specifically in order to avoid this post being written - is this me being vengeful and petty?

Actually, no. I'm not above being vengeful and petty, but this post was written because of a very specific suggestion of mine that was summarily dismissed: Namely that they change their Terms and Conditions to reflect the policy that they enforced on me. If they have a rule in place that you have to wager a certain amount before being allowed to cash out, they should really state that. That's all I asked. Update your T&C. I have to wager $5,000 in order to cash-out - how much of it had I wagered when I requested the cashout? I don't know. It doesn't say anywhere. The supervisor lady on the phone couldn't find out either, she had to send a request to a separate department to find out and they were going to get back to me about that (they never did).

So, Bwin:

For closing my account without notifying me, for blocking my cashout in reference to something in the T&C that isn't there, and for ignoring a simple request to update your T&C to reflect what is apparently a well-known rule internally, you officially suck.

--

I'm back at Party Poker. The contrast was made very explicit when I emailed Party and asked if I perhaps would be allowed to come and hang out for a little while in their VIP lounge at the Rio when I arrive in Vegas, and they explained that although that lounge was intended exclusively for those playing in the WSOP, all I had to do was ask for Sinead when I arrived; she had been informed that I might be showing up, and it wouldn't be a problem.

Thanks, guys.

Back in the saddle

After a few weeks of licking my wounds and contemplating what I want out of poker, I'm back in the saddle with a great deal of enthusiasm and am enjoying the game again. Unfortunately, I only have a few more days of enjoying it before I go away for three or four weeks, during which time I probably won't be able to play at all - at least not online. I might play a little during my brief stop in Vegas, but my online accounts will lie dormant.

But that's a fairly convenient problem to have.

I'm trying to hook up with Taylor to talk over hands as often as we can - although time zones, babies and life in general makes it a little tricky to find an hour of the day when we're both available. Still, we chatted for 90 minutes yesterday and some of the stuff we talked about will be a pretty major step forward if I can just incorporate it properly. I might save a few of the hands we talk about and post them here along with a brief summary of the our discussion.

On top of that, I'm working diligently on watching (and learning from) DC videos. In terms of mid-stakes content, they're a few notches above any other site I've tried out. Learning what I've yet to learn is a huge part of what's making me enthusiastic; if poker is reduced to just grinding out money, I'd... I don't know if I'd quit, but a very large part of the appeal of the game would be gone for me.

--

Pet-peeve time! Note to the world: Chimpanzees do not have tails.

That is all.

Summer Plans

Summer is approaching rapidly, and while a lot of my summer plans are more or less set in stone, some aspects of it are in flux. Among them, how I'll get any poker played at all. The problem, if you can call it that, is that I won't be spending a lot of time in front of my computer in the upcoming months. Step one is leaving for Karlstad (where most of my family lives) a few days after Lori's students graduate and she's off for the summer. Once there, we'll drop off Bennie with my parents and head up to a spa for three days, after which we'll return to celebrate midsummer - a very significant holiday in Sweden. And a few days after that, we'll be leaving for Minnesota to visit Lori's parents, and for a few days during that two week stretch and I'll hop down to Vegas to meet up with some CardsChat friends.

So, I'll be out of town for half of June and half of July and in all of this I want to try to get some poker played. My plan, as it stands right now, is to make sure I wrap up Palladium VIP at Party (similar to Supernova for you Stars players) and then try out another site for awhile. I've mentioned before my preference to have multiple sites my regular ones, the reason being game selection. I can't always play when the games are good, so I want a lot of options in order to make them good for myself. The last network I tried was IPoker (specifically WilliamHill) which was OK, but not everything I had wished for. Next stop: bwin. I'll let you know how it works out. I'm having a little bit of difficulty figuring out what my effective rakeback would be with their "binside" VIP program, but first and foremost I'm looking for game selection and site quality.

--

Now that Taylor's set-up in his new place, we're trying to make our tiny discussion group (that would be him and me) a more frequent occurrence. We'll see how that goes; we have the time zones against us, but we'll find a way. After talking to him for an hour yesterday, it's readily apparent that I've developed some bad habits in the last few months, and I'm pretty excited to get those sorted out.

Progress or Regress

I remember reading (and I've probably said it myself several times) that when it comes to poker, you have to stay ahead of the curve. Everyone's studying and getting better, and if you're just sitting around and not learning new things, your opponents will overtake you. This is one sense in which it's true that you're either progressing or regressing. However, there's a much more direct way in which it's true, too.

If you made a list of all the things you know about poker, how long would that list be? Hopefully pretty long, but also pretty fuzzy - what counts as "something you know?" Let's be a bit more specific: If you made a list of every situation you know how to play, how long would it be? Still, hopefully, pretty long. I'm not sure I can even estimate it, but there are certainly hundreds of situations I've figured out, like

- Nutflushdraw versus reg with wide range OOP
- TPTK on dry flop in the blinds versus standard button open
- Weak top pair OOP on the river after the turn checks back

... etc. Clearly I could be more specific in regards to stack sizes, reads, hand strength and so on, but the point isn't so much what the list contains, but the fact that it's long. And here's the thing about a long list of knowledge: If you don't maintain it actively, it will deteriorate. I used to be able to cite the entire list of Swedish monarchs that I learned in high school. Not anymore. I've forgotten large parts of it - that's what happens to stuff we commit to memory.

The point, which I hope is becoming clear, is that all the things you know today about poker may not be something you know a month from now. Some of it will start get blurry. Some situation you worked out in painstaking detail a year ago might be a little confusing to you now - should you bet for value here? Or is it a check/call? And what's happened is that you've regressed.

I notice this in my own game when I go back and review some hands I wasn't sure about. Some of them seem eerily familiar, and I realize that I've worked these things out before but couldn't get to the knowledge when I needed it. Seems like bad news, but the coin has two sides. Let's expand on the bad news first:

The fact that I'm forgetting or getting worse at situations I used to have a really good grasp at means that I don't need to just work on new aspects of my game, but I need to actually rehearse some situations. It seems like something that should take care of itself, doesn't it? I mean, if I've worked out the situation at one point and came up with the "right" play, doesn't that mean every time I'm in that situation at the table, I'm rehearsing it? Only, and this is important, if I consciously say to myself "right, and here I'm going to bet for value because ." Otherwise, I'm not reinforcing the knowledge - because the outcome will. In other words, my brain will register how the play worked out (success or failure) and then create some kind of emotional association to it. This is also one of those things that doesn't sound like a problem on the surface, but it is. Because emotional associations aren't necessarily weighted by profit, but by... Other things.

Take the case of check-raising all-in on the turn with a big draw. When it works, I'll be a little bit happy. When it doesn't work, I'll be very sad. The little bits of happiness don't add up the same way that the dollars I make on the play do, because I'm risk-averse: I hate losing more than I enjoy winning. So, given time and repetitions, my brain will gradually start to associate that play with bad feelings, despite the fact that I'm making money off of it. If I don't consciously reinforce it, I'm most likely ending up someday simply not doing it anymore. I might - consciously, whatever that means - want to do it, but I don't get to make that decision before my subconscious has already gone ahead and clicked the fold or call button. Only afterwards might I think "wait, wouldn't this have been a good spot to shove?"

So that's the bad side of the coin. There's an upside, though: This, presumably, happens to everyone in one form or another. Unless they actively rehearse and maintain their game, they will slip into bad habits. And that's good, because that means that despite competition becoming tougher and tougher, there's still a way to outwork our opponents, still a way to stay ahead of the curve even though we're perhaps barely advancing at all in some objective sense. The games are definitely getting harder to beat, but this is not a trend that can go on forever. And the trend will slow down WAY before any kind of "optimal" poker is being played, because we will all build up longer and longer mental lists of "stuff we know" and they will become harder and harder to maintain. Somewhere, I guess, there's an equilibrium between how good we are and how much we work on our game. We work on our game, we learn new things, but we don't really become better. So perhaps our goal should be to have our equilibrium higher up on the learning scale than our opponents.

(A brief related note: If you know whether you're risk-averse, risk neutral, or risk-seeking, you can use that knowledge to examine plays you feel you're in danger of losing due to emotional reinforcement. I was going to say more about this, but not today.)

So, in a nutshell: progress or regress. At some point, we're like Alice in Wonderland: Running as fast as we can to stay in one place. That place needs to be further along than that of the guy we're playing.

Dusty "Leatherass" Schmidt

If you don't know who Leatherass is, then chances are you don't spend a lot of time around poker forums. Basically, he's a poker player who started out heavily multitabling the small stakes games and then moved up the ladder, heavily multitabling, and is now heavily multitabling the 5/10 and 10/20 NLHE games. He was, up until recently, a StoxPoker coach and is now producing videos for DragTheBar. What can be said about him?

If you read about him on forums, the answer is apparently "anything." I think he's been called just about everything a poker player can reasonably be called (although I couldn't say if he's ever been accused of cheating, but I'm sure it's been implied somewhere), and while a lot of people seem to appreciate what he does, his overall online image is, as is usually the case on the internet, drowned in negative sentiments. If you don't have something mean to say, keep it to yourself.

He apparently ticks people off, for whatever reason. Usually something along the lines of being a bumhunting ratholing shortstacker. I won't deal with those accusations here, though, because this post isn't in defense of his character, or an attempt to add new insults of my own. Instead I want to put in writing a couple of thoughts, disconnected and somewhat random as they are, and try to piece together an idea of how Leatherass works that is starting to take shape in my head.

--

He recently (well, by traditional standards, anyway - in the self-contained world that is the Internet, it was ages ago) published a book, Treat Your Poker Like A Business, which I ordered the eVersion of when it became available and read it. My overall impression of the book? Good. Probably even Very Good. Not enough people think about their poker career the way, for instance, a corporate manager would. If I may flaunt an old article series I wrote for CardsChat, I touched on some of the same ideas in what I called 8 Poker Lessons. What stood out from his book, however, wasn't the lessons he was trying to teach me, but a more nuanced picture of Dusty, the person. I had half-heartedly followed his career and his thoughts through the StoxPoker blog, I had watched some of his videos and I had occasionally followed a little of the drama often surrounding him on various forums, so I thought I had some idea of what he was like. Reading his book cemented that idea.

All serious poker players are, it's said, in it for the money. That's all that matters. Old (by the new standards) books by Sklansky et al make this point over and over again. It's not about prestige, not about pride, it's about money. Dusty is the personification of Sklansky's ideal. He will buy in short when the fish at the table is short-stacked (this is why his antagonists call him a shortstacker) and he will only sit at tables where he knows there's a big fish (bumhunter). Et cetera. He plays an insane amount of hands every year, because that's how he makes the most money. Not necessarily the most money per hand played (although he doesn't fare too badly by that standard either), but the most money at the end of the month.

In watching some of his videos after having read his book, an idea started to form about how his overall philosophy of making the most money influences how he plays. I've never actually seen him make this case himself explicitly, but I have reasons to believe it's true nonetheless: If faced with a decision in a hand where the easy decision will yield a clear profit, he's taking it. Alternative lines that may potentially be better are discarded if they're doubtful to work out properly.

This seems like a no-brainer at some level, and completely backwards at another level. The no-brainer part is because it's obviously good to take the easy profit if you're not sure that the "tricky" line is better. Why not just take the money? Well, because it's not always enough for a play to be profitable for it to be good enough. Case in point, open-shoving aces 100bb deep is quite obviously a winning play - but it's a terrible waste of money. And that's the "completely backwards" part: Any play that is by definition not maximally profitable is burning money. Why would Dusty willingly burn money when making money is precisely what he's aiming to achieve?

Obviously I don't think Dusty is intentionally taking a less profitable line in a hand. But I think you have to view some of his actions in a larger perspective: He's often playing 15 tables. When faced with a decision, any decision, he's not just looking to make money in that particular hand, but to maximize earnings across all tables at that particular time. Taking a less-than-optimal line on one table may well make him more money overall if it means freeing up a second of time he can spend on an even trickier decision elsewhere - or even add another table. I think this is a key part to Dusty's success (and he's been called a lot of things, but I don't think anyone will even begin to argue that he's not successful): His ability to repeat profitable decisions over and over and over again for a million hands each year. Even if some of them are less than optimal, he wins that back by playing more tables, more hands, more hours than others.

--

This, I think, is what keeps him from the nosebleeds, where every possible edge in each hand needs to be maximally exploited. But he doesn't need the nosebleeds to make a million bucks playing poker. His is a different recipe for success, and it's certainly viewed as un-sexy by a lot of people. I don't think that's a bad thing, necessarily. Though, and I'm back to flogging an old horse of a pet-peeve of mine here, a good case can be built that his style of play may certainly not suit everybody. I'm personally convinced that 95% of all people who play 10+ tables would make more money if they just tried to play solid poker on fewer tables and stopped viewing bonuses and rakeback as their salary for grinding out a break-even month. But, alas, I've said that before, and I'm certainly convinced that it's not true in Dusty's case. Forever the grinder.

Perspective.

So I ran like crap in March. The whole month was mostly a yo-yo around break-even, which for reasons I can't quite explain feels worse than having a huge downswing followed by a huge upswing, or vice versa. I had a great session followed by a lousy session followed by a great session... Etc. I felt like Sisyphos. Frustrating. On March 30th, I scored a big day, enough to put me back in the black for the month, and I decided to just take the small win and be happy with it, not playing yesterday. I was obviously hoping for more than a 0.12bb/100 win-rate for March.

But, at the same time - and the reason for the title of this post - I also acknowledge that I've learned so much in the last year that had this happened a year ago, I wouldn't be just above break-even for the month. I'd probably be something like down 5 buy-ins. That's the perspective I have, and that I want to have. It's easy, when having gone through a rough stretch, to feel like all the work I put in isn't worth much when I can still get so royally screwed over by the deck. But that's not true. All the work saved me a lot of money. The money saved has as much of an impact on my yearly earnings as anything else. I must remember this.

--

Bennie is learning how to walk. Or, rather, he's learned how to walk, now he just needs to practise not falling over quite as often. He's also getting pretty loud. With his (almost) complete lack of vocabulary, he tends to compensate for that with volume. I presume most of us can identify with that, if we consult our Inner Drunks. The same goes, I guess, for the walking difficulties.

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