Play of the final table of this year's World Series of Poker $10,000 No-Limit Hold'em Championship event will be delayed until November 9, 2008, four months after the originally scheduled July 16.

The purpose of the delay is to bring a sense of immediacy to ESPN's broadcast of the final table on November 11. In previous years, viewer interest in and suspense over ESPN's broadcast of the WSOP Main Event final table has been tempered by the knowledge that the outcome of the tournament had been determined months before. This will make the broadcast coverage of the final table more like a sporting news event and less like documentary history.

In my opinion, this will be very likely good for generating interest and viewer ratings for ESPN's broadcast. That, in turn, will be good for the poker world in general as the continuing boom in televised poker translates into enthusiastic new players coming to the game and injecting more money into the booming poker economy as they find their feet in public cardrooms, both brick-and-mortar and online.

At the same time, the announced change has an arbitrary and capricious air to it, leaving many players feeling hurt, offended, and doubtful. Several discussion threads on the 2+2 forums have erupted and caught fire with player debate about the schedule change, with commenters opposing to the change vastly outnumbering its supporters.

2+2 commenter objections to the four month delay include:

• Some weaker players who might stumble into the Big Dance's final table through good fortune and a rush of lucky cards. The four-month delay may enable these players to prepare for the final table through coaching and training, presumably from top-level professionals who had been busted out earlier.
• Because earlier segments of this year's WSOP coverage will be broadcast before the final table is played, this will give final table players the opportunity to review footage of their opponents, at least those who caught the eye of ESPN's crew or happened to play at a TV table in the earlier levels.
• The length of time between the prior levels and the play of the final table provides an unparalleled opportunity for dealmaking and outright collusion among final-table players.
• Some commenters believe that final table players may face violence or threat of violence from supporters of other players.
• Non-US-resident final table players face an additional burden of getting through customs and immigration for a second trip to the US in November.
• The extended time between the earlier levels of the tournament and the final table will likely increase the media spotlight shining upon final table players, and some of these players may not crave this attention.

These objections seem to me (with one exception) to be overwrought reactions to a change imposed by an unaccountable authority. No poker player in her right mind, for example, would want anything to do with the Big Dance if she wished to avoid the limelight. The Big Dance is not just another tournament that happens to provide an overlay because of the abundance of donkeys' dead money. It is widely considered to be the most important tournament in poker, with it's winner identified as the World Champion. This has been true since its inception. Amarillo Slim Preston becoming a media darling, appearing multiple times on the Tonight Show, for example after he took the crown (defeating a field of players three orders of magnitude smaller) in 1973. Some World Champions have claimed that the action they have gotten in subsequent years because of enthusiastic punters who want to take on the champ has been more financially rewarding to them than the actual prize money they won. Winning the Big Dance is about celebrity and notoriety.

The other objections seem small issues to me, except one: the prospect of collusion.

It is tough enough to keep poker clean under normal circumstances; and the final table of the World Series of Poker is about as far from normal as poker gets. Some of us still remember the scandal from the 1997 WSOP, eleven years ago, when Adam Roberts threw the $2500 7-Card Stud event to Maria Stern, allowing Stern to claim the bracelet in exchange for the greater part of the prize money. That scandal rocked tournament poker, and that was before the days of media scrutiny. The new final table play schedule may do great things for televised poker ... but an ugly collusion scandal on a par with the Adams/Stern debacle would cause orders or magnitude more damage to the image of poker than we sustained in 1997, because of the attention of the all-seeing eye of television.

Earlier in As I Please:
World Series of Poker Registration FUBAR
Cards at WSOP Provoke Players' Revolt
WSOP Tournament Director Quits
Fiction TV

Tags: poker world series of poker wsop espn harrahs twoplustwo television televised poker media celebrity collusion cheating

Raise It Up! Originally uploaded by abostick59.

In just about every book about Texas Hold'em that I've read[1], the authors discuss starting hand selection in the same way: They sort starting ranges by position, starting with early position (under the gun and the next two seats, in a ten-handed game), middle position (the next three seats), late position (the cutoff seat and the button), and the blinds. Hand selection is invariably presented in that order of position. starting tight in early position, and loosening up in later and later position.

But that is directly the opposite of how hold'em players experiences multiple hands of poker. The dealer button moves clockwise each hand, and in each hand the action runs clockwise from the dealer button. After each hand, a player's position gets earlier and earlier. Rather than starting out tight and loosening up as one's position gets better, as the books recommend, a player following their recommended strategy should be playing more and more tightly as one's position gets worse and worse with each hand — until one takes the blinds and is rewarded with the dealer button and can open up one's play again.

The early-middle-late convention for outlining hand selection is an old, time-honored format. Bobby Baldwin's chapter in the original Super/System, originally published in 1978, follows the convention. I don't have a copy of it on hand to consult, but I recall John Fox's Play Poker, Quit Work and Sleep Till Noon (1977), about Gardena-style five-card draw, also followed the convention in its coverage of starting hand selection.

If I were to write a textbook about hold'em, which would surely include discussion of starting-hand selection, I would start with play on the button, and proceed through the earlier positions, just as players actually experience the situations about which they must make decisions.

[1] The significant exception is Gary Carson's The Complete Book of Hold 'Em Poker, which is a detailed discussion of what kind of hold'em hand is playable in what circumstance under various game conditions, and only at the end of the chapter does Carson offer a table of hands with which to open the betting under the gun.

Tags: poker holdem hand selection pedagogy poker books poker theory position

Guerrilla improvisational theater group Improv Everywhere went to a Little League baseball game in Hermosa Beach, California, and turned it into a major-league experience, giving the players and spectators alike a taste of The Show.

(via Debbie Notkin)

Tags: baseball little league improv everywhere video youtube funny humor wtf

Over at the 2+2 Mid-Stakes Limit Hold'em forum, forum members are discussing the virtues of bluffing and thin value betting after the last card. I take the position that a player should bet for value on the river when there is enough likelihood of being called by a player with a worse hand, but that bluffing should be reserved for one's very worst hands, the ones that have no chance of winning a showdown. Game theory tells us that the size of the range of losing hands that should be bluff-bet relates to the size of the range of the hands that should be bet for value the way the bet size relates to the pot size. And there should be a wide range of hands with which a player checks and calls a bet, and a range where the right move is to check-fold.

Here is a hand I played last Thursday that illustrates bluff-betting done right. I was playing in the Oaks Club, in Emeryville, in the $15-$30 hold'em game. I was in middle position in seat 4. The player under the gun, in seat one, limped in. I squeezed my cards and saw the queen and nine of hearts, good enough for a call in this spot. I limped in, and the player in the cutoff seat raised. The player in the big blind called, under-the-gun called, and I closed the action with my call.

The flop came 8-7-6 rainbow, giving me overcards and an open-ended straight draw. The pair outs to my nine were probably no good, because they would very likely make someone else's straight. The big blind checked, under-the-gun checked. I chose to check and see how many bets I would have to pay after the preflop raiser bet. To my surprise, though, he checked after us, giving us a free look at the turn card.

That card was the deuce of spades, putting two spades on the board. Big blind checked. Now the under-the-gun player fired a bet. I called with my estimated nine outs (six straight outs, two queen outs, and spades that make my hand counted as half an out and rounded down). The preflop raiser and the big blind dropped out, leaving me head-up with the turn bettor. While the dealer burned and turned the river card, my opponent loudly said, "No spade!" The river card was the three of clubs, making the board 8-7-5-2-3, with no possible flush. My opponent bet out once more.

Now it was time for me to go into the tank. I had planned to check after him if he had checked to me, hoping that my unimproved queen-high was enough to win a pot. My opponent was a loose-agressive player who bluffs a fair amount, and sometimes makes a point of showing his bluffs. When he does show his bluffs, they are low cards that miss the flop — precisely the sort of cards one should be bluffing with, because they have no other way of winning. So I figured either my hand was way behind a strong hand like a straight, or it was very likely ahead of a pure bluff. Would the villain be bluffing more often than one time in seven in this spot? I thought it very likely.

I called the bet. "Good call," said my opponent. He didn't turn his hand over. I didn't turn mine over either. "No pair," I said. He held onto his cards. He clearly didn't want to show his hand. I turned over my unimproved queen-high. He stared for a moment, and mucked.

"You called me down with queen-high!" he said. "You didn't show me any respect at all."

"Actually I called because I do respect your play," I replied, quite sincerely, while I stacked the chips.

I described the hand later to Debbie. She paid me the wonderful compliment of saying that my call was a "Sabyl call."

Tags: poker bluffs bluffing game theory oaks holdem two plus two hand history

Fafnir is back, and Giblets has got him!

(via just about everyone)

Ed Felten tells us about the discrepancies in vote tallies from electronic voting machines manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems and used in the New Jersey primary election on February 5.

Candidate totals Party totals (image source: Ed Felten)

The summary tape from a Sequoia AVC Advantage digital voting machine shows the individual vote counts for candidates: on the Democratic side, Barack Obama is shown as receiving 182 votes and Hillary Clinton with 179 votes; on the Republican side, Rudy Giuliani has 1 vote, Mitt Romney has 13 votes, John McCain has 40 votes, Ron Paul has 3 votes, and Mike Huckabee has 4 votes. The "Option Switch Totals" section of the tape shows a total of 362 votes on the Democratic ballot and 60 votes on the Republican ballot.

But 179 + 192 = 361, not 362; and 1 + 13 + 40 + 3 + 4 = 61, not 60.

(Felten provides a TIFF of the entire tape.)

Quoth Felten:

What’s alarming here is not the size of the discrepancy but its nature. This is a single voting machine, disagreeing with itself about how many Republicans voted on it. Imagine your pocket calculator couldn’t make up its mind whether 1+13+40+3+4 was 60 or 61. You’d be pretty alarmed, and you wouldn’t trust your calculator until you were very sure it was fixed. Or you’d get a new calculator.

This wasn’t an isolated instance, either. In Union County alone, at least eight other AVC Advantage machines exhibited similar problems, as did dozens more machines in other counties.

Sequoia Voting Systems doesn't understand how to handle a PR crisis. Edwin Smith, Sequoia's Vice President for Compliance/Quality/Certification sent Felten a nastygram stating that if the state of New Jersey presented Felten's group with a Sequoia machine for analysis, the state would be in violation of its contract with Sequoia. Smith goes on with a threat of vaguely-worded legal action if Felten published results from such an analysis.

Yes, that's right: Sequoia's VP for QA is attempting to suppress independent QA on his company's product. Someone should tell him about how Johnson & Johnson handled the Tylenol tampering.

Earlier in As I Please:
Howto: Hack a Diebold Voting Machine (As I Please)
How Not to Talk to Reporters

Tags: new jersey voting electronic voting machines sequoia voting systems ed felten error unreliability politics

ABC's Brian Ross says that Eliot Spitzer, caught red-handed in a prostitution scandal, was investigated because a bank tipped off the IRS. This doesn't sound right to me.

When banks and other financial institutions are suspicious about customer transactions, they are supposed to file "Suspicious Activity Reports" with the Financial Crimes Enforecement Network (FinCEN), a unit of the Department of the Treasury that is distinct from the IRS. FinCEN reviews the information and passes it along to the appropriate law enforcement agency.

FinCEN is not part of the IRS. This is a mistake on a par with saying the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section were a part of the FBI.

Someone in the loop here doesn't understand how money laundering and other financial crimes are investigated. Maybe it is ABC's Brian Ross. Or maybe Ross is just being a stenographer for his source, and his source was being sloppy.

Or maybe his source was one of those Regent University School of Law grads who infest the Bush Justice Dept., who have a better understanding of team play and party loyalty than they do of, well, the law.

If I were trying to misdirect people away from a politicized takedown of a powerful governor from the enemy party, I would want to get the details of my cover story right.

Tags: eliot spitzer prostitution corruption justice dept scandal brian ross irs fincen suspicious activity report sar public integrity section politicization

Tim Goeglein, Plagiarist image source: New York Times

Timothy Goeglein, the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, wrote at least two op-ed columns for the News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Indiana, that were copied substantially from other sources.

Blogger and former News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall discovered the forgery, a column that was largely lifted from an essay by Jeffery Hart that had appeared in the Dartmouth Review. A commenter in Nall's blog discovered another forgery, an column on Hoagy Carmichael that was lifted from a piece by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post

Goeglein has acknowledged one of the forgeries, and the paper has pulled that column.

Goeglein was Karl Rove's right-hand man prior to Rove's departure, responsible for reaching out to conservative and Christian group on behalf of the White House.

It is not known how being unmasked as a plagiarist is going to affect Goeglein's status at the White House. His moral turpitude might appall ordinary Americans, but it is par for the course for the Bush Administration.

UPDATE: Goeglin resigns his White House staff position. (hat tip to David Kurtz at TPM)

(via Atrios)

Tags: tim goeglein karl rove bush white house plagiarism plagiarist scandal shame journalism nancy nall

YES WE CAN HAS is a blog of LOLcat pictures promoting the cause of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Obamamania has spread as far as the world of cute agrammatical animals. Or is it that the cat macro craze is clawing its way further and further into popular discourse?

How far can this trend go? At least as far as a John McCain LOLweasel:

Earlier in As I Please:
LOLPRESIDENT!!!1 - President Macro Contest at Fark

(via Skippy)

Tags: cat macros lolcats politics obama john mccain lolweasels internet culture humor silliness

ann summers Originally uploaded by guerrillaguru.

Amy Gifford at InventorSpot asks, "What is the best way to get your message across about lingerie and sex toys without the use of half naked models?" Her answer is a list of ten print ads, billboards, posters, and guerilla marketing campaigns that are as inventive as they are sexy — except that many of them do rely on that old standby, the half-naked model of the slender European-descended female variety. The images are PG-rated, but they still might not be safe for some workplaces.

My favorite is the X-ray shopping bag from German lingerie vendor Blush, with honorable mention to Stringfellows' pole-dancer posters affixed to Parisian lampposts.

(via Violet Blue)

Tags: sex sexuality advertising marketing photos marketing

image source: The Arbor Day Foundation

The Arbor Day Foundation has on its Web site a Flash-animated map that dramatically illustrates the impact of climate change in the United States. The map shows the changes in hardiness zones between 1990 and 2006.

Hardiness zones are a geographical tool developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to assist farmers and gardners to choose plants to cultivate that will thrive in their local climate, based upon average annual low temperature. The USDA most recently published its hardiness zone data based on climate data from 1990. The Arbor Day Foundation produced its own hardiness zone data for 2006, based on climate data from the preceding 15 years provided by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center.

The animated map plainly shows the northward movement of warmer temperatures beween 1990 and 2006.

(via Pat Kight)

Tags: arbor day foundation map animation flash hardiness zone climate change environment global warming climate weather gardening agriculture

Happy Birthday Originally uploaded by ameliatzeni.

Five years ago today, I posted my first entry to As I Please.

Thanks to all my loyal readers — and I continue to be amazed that I have them.

My next milestone will happen next month, when, unless things go very much amiss, I expect to collect my first Google AdSense check.

Tags: anniversary blogiversary five years blogging adsense

image source Card Player

Poker players, at least those who play in brick-and-mortar cardrooms and casinos, usually wind up handling and keeping amounts of cash that would boggle the minds of most people who aren't initiates of the green felt.

So where should you keep your poker bankroll to avoid having it stolen?

SavingsAdvice.com presents a conversation with someone who ought to know the best place to hide money — a burglar! The anonymous burglar speaks from his experience about where he looked first for money and valuables, and where he wouldn't bother looking.

The best place to keep money, the burglar says, is a bank, of course. But if you insist on ready access to your bankroll after hours:

Your best strategy, then, is to actually leave some money in obvious places for the burglar to quickly find (the same applies if you keep all your money in the bank). This can not only save your other stash of money, but may actually keep the burglar from destroying your place as he looks for where you have hidden your money. If they believe they may have found the cash that you have in the house, they are much less likely to keep looking (remember, they want to get out asap). In the end, if you hide all your money well, you may win a moral victory in not letting the burglar find the money, but you’ll likely have much more damage done to your place that will end up costing you more in the long run....

His number one recommendation for money was in toys in a young child’s room. As he explained, young children don’t have money, they have an abundance of toys and most parents don’t trust a child around money. Therefore, parents will rarely hide money there. In addition, when money is hidden, it is usually hidden away neatly and securely — a child’s room is rarely a neat place making it an unlikely place for money to be hidden. Plus with all the stuff in a child’s room, it is not someplace that a burglar can search quickly and get out (rule #2).

If you have a safe, it should be professionally bolted down so it can’t easily be removed. If you leave some token money for the burglar to find in the places they normally look for money, then anyplace you wouldn’t normally consider a place to hide valuables will usually keep those valuables safe. The underside of trash cans, inside laundry detergent, inside false packaging (but only if the packaging appears real and is in the appropriate place - “When you find a Campbell’s soup can in the bedroom, you have a pretty good idea there is money inside”) were some examples he gave.

There's a follow-up post, Don’t Hide Money In The Toilet: More Conversation With A Burglar, in which the anonymous burglar reveals the places he always looked for valuables, because they are the usual places people with something to hide hide them. Don't hide your bankroll in: the resevoir tank for a toilet, a cereal box, anywhere in your refrigerator or freezer, or in or around your bed.

Tags: poker bankroll money hiding place burglar burglary crime safety tips security cash howto

L to R: Charles H. Keating, Jr., John McCain, Vicki Iseman

Scandalmongers and their eager audience are focused on the hints of sexual hanky-panky between John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman. As Mark Klieman points out, however, the real meat of the scandal shows up clearly in Libby Quaid's story that went out over the Associated Press wire yesterday:

In late 1999, McCain twice wrote letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Florida-based Paxson Communications — which had paid Iseman as its lobbyist — urging quick consideration of a proposal to buy a television station license in Pittsburgh. At the time, Paxson's chief executive, Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, also was a major contributor to McCain's 2000 presidential campaign.

McCain did not urge the FCC commissioners to approve the proposal, but he asked for speedy consideration of the deal, which was pending from two years earlier. In an unusual response, then-FCC Chairman William Kennard complained that McCain's request "comes at a sensitive time in the deliberative process" and "could have procedural and substantive impacts on the commission's deliberations and, thus, on the due process rights of the parties."

McCain wrote the letters after he received more than $20,000 in contributions from Paxson executives and lobbyists. Paxson also lent McCain his company's jet at least four times during 1999 for campaign travel.

In short, McCain intervened with federal regulators on behalf of a major campaign contributor — exactly the same as he did for Charles Keating a decade earlier. That contributor was represented on Capitol Hill by Vicki Iseman. The New York Times article coyly hints that, in McCain's confrontation with aides over his frequent association with Iseman, he "acknowledged behaving inappropriately" with Iseman. The tenor of the surrounding paragraphs implies that the impropriety was a personal one, but Libby Quaid's reporting makes it unambiguously one of quid pro quo influence peddling.

What's more, it's still going on. Today's Washington Post has a front-page story, The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists, detailing the heavy-hitting lobbyist background of McCain's senior campaign advisors, at least some of whom are donating their time to the campaign.

Preaching fiery sermons of integrity and incorruptibility, while at the same time booking first-class seats on the gravy train, John McCain is the Elmer Gantry of influence peddling.

The illicit-sex angle of this scandal may be a complete red herring. In another post, Mark Kleiman quotes a lengthy comment from a female acquaintance who is very familiar with the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.:

It is equally plausible that the McCain-Iseman relationship played out differently: Iseman has a job to do so she cozys up to the Senator, they have a few drinks with a few telecomm guys. They get to know each other and like each other (think Hillary and McCain drinking vodka together and deciding the other is not so bad) — he likes having a cute young lady around who fawns over him, she likes the access.

Now she's found her "in" and exploits it. He continues to like having her around. Both know theres a flirty kind of thing going on but nothing actually ever happens. She hooks him up with people she knows and the beat goes on.

The staff, however, have a different view. They don't care what the boss is actually doing, they're worried about appearance. So they make their move and get her out of the picture. This is problematic for her because access is what keeps her bosses happy. They want to know why they had him on a jet last week and this week she can't go to the office. ...

I'm just really concerned about automatically attacking a young woman who is successful (albeit in a shady industry) for doing her job, which is to get close to these guys. Now true, perhaps her intellect should be driving this equation, but she probably made the decision that she'll play the cards she's dealt. It's her brain that will get her through the situation, but if her brain in a cute dress is what gets her there, so be it. She has a job to do. This is the system that needs to be attacked, rather than attacking every single female blonde lobbyist in town for being a vamp and determining that they must be sleeping with the guy.

(via Matt Yglesias and TPM Muckraker)

Previously in As I Please:
NY Times: John McCain Possibly Romantically Linked to Lobbyist
NY Times' Adam Nagourney Whitewashes McCain's Campaign Finance Record

Tags: john mccain vicki iseman scandal bimbo eruption appearance of impropriety influence peddling politics campaign ethics keating five lies corruption

Vicki Iseman image source: Alcalde & Fay

John McCain, the presumptive Republican Party nominee for President, is having a bimbo eruption.

The New York Times reports that Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, had been often seen with John McCain in the runup to his 2000 presidential campaign, visiting him in his offices, turning up at fund-raisers, traveling with him in corporate jets provided by her clients. The frequency of Iseman's presence with McCain led senior aides to suspect a romantic involvement. They warned Iseman away from McCain, and McCain away from Iseman. The Times reports that in one confrontation between McCain and his aides, McCain "acknowledged behaving inappropriately" with Iseman.

The Washington Post corroborates the story, citing a claim by former McCain aide John Weaver that he met with Iseman and told her to stay away from McCain.

Shortly after the Times broke the story, Iseman's staff biography disappeared from the Web site of Alcade & Fay, Iseman's employer. That biography remains on the Wayback Machine, however.

McCain's response to the story is his usual one to trouble: lying about it. Here is a statement from the McCain campaign:

It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit-and-run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.

Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career.

Can anyone believe that John McCain would have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously? At least some of John McCain's violations of the public trust are a matter of public record. John McCain did some great big favors for Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings & Loan, and if that is not a special interest then the words have no meaning. The second paragraph has a seed of truth, however: Nothing in this story violates any principles that guide McCain's career, for the simple reason that he has none.

You cannot prove a negative. Hard evidence — incriminating photographs, say, or a strand of her pubic hair entangled in a used condom containing his semen — could conceivably indicate that McCain and Iseman had a sexual relationship; but no evidence in the world can show that they have not.

But there is a very simple thing McCain can do that would convince me that there was no such sexual relationship: If he claimed that he and Iseman had slept together, I could trust that he was lying as usual.

Previously in As I Please
Open Letter to Duncan Black
McCain's Baghdad Market Stroll Evokes Memories of the 1980s
NY Times' Adam Nagourney Whitewashes McCain's Campaign Finance Record
Does Possible John Glenn Endorsement Mean Hillary Clinton Prepares to Battle McCain?

Tags: john mccain vicki iseman scandal bimbo eruption appearance of impropriety politics campaign ethics keating five lies corruption