High-Stakes Roshambo

Greg Costikyan might think that Roshambo - the game of rock, paper, and scissors - is a degenerate game, but that doesn't stop it from being an important decision-making tool. The New York Times reports on what just might be the Roshambo matchup for the highest stakes on record:

Takashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkoh Corporation, an electronics company based outside of Nagoya, Japan, could not decide whether Christie's or Sotheby's should sell the company's art collection, which is worth more than $20 million, at next week's auctions in New York.

He did not split the collection - which includes an important Cézanne landscape, an early Picasso street scene and a rare van Gogh view from the artist's Paris apartment - between the two houses, as sometimes happens. Nor did he decide to abandon the auction process and sell the paintings through a private dealer.

Instead, he resorted to an ancient method of decision-making that has been time-tested on playgrounds around the world: rock breaks scissors, scissors cuts paper, paper smothers rock.

In Japan, resorting to such games of chance is not unusual. "I sometimes use such methods when I cannot make a decision," Mr. Hashiyama said in a telephone interview. "As both companies were equally good and I just could not choose one, I asked them to please decide between themselves and suggested to use such methods as rock, paper, scissors."

Officials from the Tokyo offices of the two auction houses were informed of Mr. Hashiyama's request on a Thursday afternoon in late January.

They were told they had until a meeting on Monday to choose a weapon. The right choice could mean several million dollars in profits from the fees the auction house charges buyers (usually 20 percent for the first $200,000 of the final price and 12 percent above that).

(via Eric Holtman)

Vicissitudes

I'm back now - I've actually been home since Sunday - from two weeks in Portland for school. I had been hoping to make updates while I was gone. Unfortunately, the hard drive of my PowerBook more-or-less crashed on the train ride up to Porland, rendering the machine unusable. I had very little Internet access while I was gone, and blogging had to take a back seat.

The good news is that I had made a full backup just two nights before departing, and that when I got home I was able to get the PowerBook to limp along well enough to copy the relative handful of files that had been modified since then. I've set up the files I need to get things done on the Spicejar server, and taken the laptop in to the Apple Store to have the hard drive replaced. It will be away for something like a week.

Now I'm getting along with using a FreeBSD box as an office machine. There are learning curve issues - cutting and pasting in X11 is ... different. But I'm coping.

Meanwhile, I had been planning on returning to the gym and getting back on the exercise wagon. It's been two years or so since I was working out regularly, and I've gained a bit of weight, gotten a bit soft. I had been telling myself, "I'll get to it after this ... once that is out of the way. ..." The latest "this" was my trip to Portland. On Monday, I got my ducks in a row and went to the 24 Hour Fitness to start out by working my legs, abs, and back. It felt good, although I seem to be appallingly out of shape. I felt a little stiff on Tuesday, but returned to the gym to work on my upper body.

Wednesday my legs were terribly stiff and sore, and my arms started to feel it. Today my legs are mostly recovered, but my upper body, particularly my triceps, are in agony. Getting back to working out after a break is always a bit of a trial, but this is the worst it has ever been for me. I'll get over it, though, and I have the good feeling of working out regularly to look forward to.

Don't Mess With a Domme

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

When Susan Peacher hung up her latex evening gown and wooden paddle for a job with the federal government, the former dominatrix thought she was done with abuse.

She went to work for the Treasury Department in San Francisco, but when she arrived at her new job, she found that one of the office managers was a former client.

This man wouldn't leave her alone, she said in a sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit, charging that he sexually harassed her, attempting to kiss her in the elevator, telling her she had "luscious lips,'' and repeatedly asking for "sessions.''

When she objected to the salacious advances, Peacher says, the manager manipulatively became her direct supervisor and downgraded her performance evaluation. When she complained to higher-ups, coming out of the closet about her previous line of work, she says she was retaliated against and given little to do.

Rather than sit idly at her desk, Peacher spent her time studying workplace harassment and labor law. She also accumulated an arsenal of damning evidence: phone logs, e-mails, documentation of encounters with her alleged harasser.

Last month, Peacher, 45, reached a settlement with the government, which did not admit liability or fault. She will receive $35,000 in compensatory damages, $25,000 in attorney fees, a job transfer, approval to work at her South Bay home one day a week, and the restoration of almost 800 hours of assorted leave.

"I don't think they expected me to fight as hard as I did,'' Peacher says.

When Rhetoric Becomes Reality

David Neiwert is right: commentators and pundits' use of metaphors of violence and extremism might be explained away as jokes, but those "jokes" have a way of giving permission to angry people to turn them into reality.

Case in point: When Kevin Drum shot himself in the foot[1] last February over the issue of the prominence of women in political blogging, he said in passing, "My guess is that it's a bit of both, and the proximate reason is that men are more comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing — both writing it and reading it." [emphasis added] I'm not saying that Kevin is the first to compare punditry with food fights, but his use of the metaphor was picked up by many of the people who responded heatedly to his argument.

Food fighting must be in the psychic field. At the end of last month, conservative Uberpundit William Kristol was hit in the face with a pie by a student at Earlham College, where Kristol was giving a speech. Just two days later, a student doused commentator and sometime presidential candidate Pat Buchanan with salad dressing while Buchanan was speaking at Western Michigan University.

The latest example of a metaphor gone too far is the case of David Horowitz. A protestor hit Horowitz in the face with a pie at Butler University, where Horowitz was speaking, campaigning against what he calls liberal domination of college campuses.

There's more to a pie in the face than an old vaudevillean's joke. Teresa Nielsen Hayden will be the first to tell you. She was pied by Dan Steffan at Corflu 3 in 1986. (Her husband, Patrick, retaliated by squirting whipped cream up Steffan's nose.)[2] What might seem to be a lark or a joke bears a remarkable resemblance to assault. A pie, even a cream pie is remarkably solid.[3] The assailant, whose aim might merely to be to humiliate the victim or render them a laughingstock, might actually succeed in choking the victim, or getting food or crust in their eyes. It seems like harmless fun, as the saying goes, until someone loses an eye. The pie filling can stain the victim's clothes. The traumatic experience might trigger aftershocks from earlier traumas.

So let's be careful with our language. When we unmindfully toss around metaphors of facefuls of lemon meringue, are we no better than the Ann Coulter's advocacy of the truck-bombing of the New York Times or Tom DeLay's or John Cornyn's hints that murdering judges represent the rightful expressions of popular wrath?

[1] I am completely aware of my own use of a violent metaphor here. If angry or disaffected extremists see this as encouragement to inflict gunshot wounds upon their lower extremities, so be it.

[2] The roots of food fights and pie-throwing in political blogging run deep into the history of science fiction fandom: A decade before this, Ted White was pied at a Lunacon by an assailant allegedly hired by Charles Platt (father of Rose Platt). (The assailant bore Platt's namebadge, clumisly modified to read "Charles Blattey".)

[3] Experts recommend, when staging a pie-throwing, to use not a real pie but a tin pieplate – or even a paper plate – filled with whipped cream. Shaving foam is another good choice, one which reduces the risk of permanently staining clothing.

Stupid Cheater Update

I wrote: If I were low enough to collude in an online poker tournament, I don't think I'd be so amazingly dumb as to post about it in my LiveJournal. Hell, I'd at least friends-lock the damn thing. The post is now friends-locked. I guess the torrent of angry comments he got from Paul Phillips' pointer clued him in.

He writes in his current entry:

paul phillips taught me a lesson today.

a lot of posts will be friends only for the time being.

One hopes the lesson he learned was more than just "if you're going to cheat, don't post it publicly to your blog."

Meanwhile, I sent the post to the PokerStars support team, and this is the response I got:

Hello Alan,

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately there is not enough information here to identify the player in the journal. We offer dozens of these qualifying tournaments every week, and there are many qualifying players in each one. It is nearly impossible to find one player based on the information provided.

You should note that what the players did was actually very stupid. Not only was it against our rules, but it was also strategically a dumb play. If the players had enough chips to be able to limp into the prizes when they combined stacks, they had enough chips to try and both make the prizes.

The term chip dumping is reserved for players who share chips in order for both players to last longer in a tournament. It does not apply to players trying to knock each other out and halve their total possible payout.

If you have any further questions about this or anything else, please let us know!

Regards,
Dan
PokerStars Support Team

If the PokerStars hand history database is in any shape at all, using the information in the post ought to be very straightforward. It should be all the more easy given that ronny bojangles described in detail the play of more than one hand. If I had a zipfile containing all PokerStars hand histories from March 16 and 17, I guess that I could pinpoint the hands in question and identify the perpetrator in something on the order of an hour, most of which would be spent debugging the perl script.

Secondly, that's a very restrictive definition of chip-dumping. If one player in a group of colluders has an overlay in terms of playing ability in a tournament (or even is a substantially better player than the others in the group), then the expectation of the group as a whole is increased at the expense of the other players in the tournament if the weak players in the group blow off their chips to the strong player. This doesn't fit "Dan"'s definition of chip dumping, which demands that the practice enhance the likelihood of all participants' winning, but it is clearly collusion, it clearly has a negative impact on the non-colluding players' EV, and it falls within what most experienced players would label as "chip-dumping."

"Dan"'s reply makes me substantially less confident in the ability and willingness of PokerStars' management to confront collusion. Maybe Ed Felten is right and I was wrong about whether countermeasures against collusion can keep it down to a reasonable level.

Stupid Cheater of the Week

Think of this as the Poker edition of Jeralyn Merritt's regular Stupid Criminal of the Week feature on TalkLeft.

Paul Phillips points us to this amazing post on LiveJournal by one ronny bojangles:

so I've officially gone from poker player to strategist.

tonight, seth (played wednesday night cards with us last week) and I played a $10+$1 turbo/rebuy tourney for a seat to the $215 NL buy-in $350,000 guaranteed weekly on pokerstars. I think around 62 total people in the qualifier. after rebuy/add-on period was over, 8 places qualified, 9th paid $170.

it got down to about 18 people and me and seth were at the same table. I was 1-up on him (sitting to his left, acting after him most hands). I had about 6000 in chips and he had about 4000. The only way we figured either one of us would get a spot is to dump our chips to each other. blinds were so fast that if we played alone we'd get knocked out around 11th and 10th, which pays nothing. since I was in best position, we both decided that we should dump chips.

I was in SB, seth was on button. BB had around 10x BB, so with a raise and a call he would probably fold. Everyone folded to seth, who I told to go all in with A8o. I had 87d and I reraised all-in over Seth. BB folded his 3k, so that was guaranteed to one of us as is. If I sucked out a 7 or diamonds on seth I'd have more than enough chips to qualify. If seth's hand held up he'd have more than enough chips to qualify. We decided that we'd shoot for one seat and take the payout.

I lost the hand to seth, and lost my remaining 800 a couple hands later. Seth got a qualifying seat to the $215 easily. We sold the seat for $180.

Seth spent $33 between rebuys and add-ons. I just spent the original $11. So we worked out the deal that we'd take our buy-ins out of the $180, then split the rest of the money 60/40. In the end, I earn $54 and seth earns $82. And it was all so easy, but very lucky.

The highlight of the tourney was right before the first break. I was in about 11th position out of around 44. Under the gun, I go all in with KQo, hoping to pick up the blinds or get a low stack to call. The whole point of turbo rebuy tourneys is to get as many chips as you can as fast as you can. I ended up getting called by 3 people, and lost that pot. I was down to $90, and after the break the blinds were going up to $100/$200. I'm BB first hand, so I'm all in regardless. I get 1 call, AQ vs my 98. I end up getting a straight. Two hands later, I have AJ. I double up again.

I doubled up so many times that I was in 4th position with about 26 people left. But the blinds came so fast and my hands were garbage that I just tried to hold out. Then I got put next to seth and gave him my chips.

I feel great because of this. For once, teamwork worked. Everything went according to plan and I'm $54 richer because of it.

If I were low enough to collude in an online poker tournament, I don't think I'd be so amazingly dumb as to post about it in my LiveJournal. Hell, I'd at least friends-lock the damn thing.

Saul Bellow

Nobel-prize-winning author Saul Bellow died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Monday at the age of 89.The latest celebrity death hits closer to home, literally, than most of them. Bellow is family, to a degree: his granddaughter Juliet is married to Debbie's cousin Charles Schulman ("I met a man whose brother said he knew a man who knew the Oxford girl....").

The NY Times obituary coyly steps around the fact, at once amusing and embarassing, that Bellow fathered his fourth child, his daughter Naomi, five years ago at the age of 84.

Stuey

Last night was a movie night for Debbie and I, and because we're the last kids on the block who do not subscribe to Netflix, we drove to Reel. Debbie spotted High Roller in the New Releases section and immediately picked it up. It's a biopic about the life of three-time poker world champion Stu Ungar, written and directed by A. W. Vidmer. We agreed on it as our pick of the night, and rented it.

I'm not at all sorry we did, but I won't recommend the movie to everyone. (More below the fold, including spoilers.)

What I liked about the movie was the picture it painted of life among the gambling wiseguys of the 1970s, with its blend of affection, integrity, violence, and sordidness. Stuey Ungar's choice to live in it was shown as reasonable and appropriate, and its other inhabitants were depicted as human, likeable people. Ungar's early gambling career was as a wizard player of gin rummy. One scene, pitting Ungar against a high roller, depicts Ungar's legendary ability to know what his opponent held after four discards. The poker scenes later in the movie were reasonably well done, although as a poker buff I would have liked to see more of them. It was a valuable look at a world that has since changed almost unrecognizably.

The film is deeply flawed, however. It is not well-written. The dialogue stumbles in many places. The scene of Stuey's father's funeral shows an open casket, which simply wouldn't be the case at a Jewish funeral. A bedroom dispute between Ungar and his wife seemed completely unmotivated and unbelievable.

Moreover, there is a complete disconnect between the people around him and those who figured in the life of the historical Ungar. In the film, Ungar's wife is named Angela and his daughter is Nicole. The real-life Stu Ungar was married to a woman named Madeline, and their daughter was named Stephanie. Everyone except Ungar is fictional. Bob Stupak and Mike Sexton are completely absent from the story; in their place is a fictional "D.J." who bears a passing resemblance to Jack Strauss.

I don't think writer A. W. Vidmer does justice to the role of drugs in Ungar's life. He is shown using cocaine, spinning out, and then cleaning up. The script implies that Ungar died clean and sober, which the real Ungar certainly did not.

WSOP.dk has a list of links pointing to information about the real Stuey Ungar. There's a reminiscence by Mike Sexton on PokerPages, and Ken Churilla has a page of several people's memories and tributes to Ungar on the Gocee.com Poker Center.

High Roller was completed and taken onto the film festival circuit under the title Stuey in 2003. In January of this year it was picked up for cable by Starz, and it was released on DVD on March 15.

Who Will Be the Next Pope?

Place your bets, everyone! Bestbetting.com has the line on who will be chosen as the next Pope.

There are a limited selection of choices, ranging from Dionigi Tettamanzi, currently at 3.6:1 against, to the 99:1 longshot of the Australian George Pell.

Lynn Kendall tells me via AIM that she's disappointed there are no odds listed for the selection of Cardinal Sin. The bookmakers cannily don't provide the odds for the field.

(via Majikthise)