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http://forumserver.twoplustwo.... The author admits that the nemesis (perfect enemy) of this bot would have a win rate of 0.05bb/100 (this is extremely small). So it is not technically solved, but it's close enough.

Then perhaps your particular hotel has a policy different than the reports of hundreds of other people on that site.

Here's more - since obviously you're in denial:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo....

Plenty of failures in that 1,300+ post thread, but also plenty of successes - and it mostly varies by property. Posts below are cherry-picked from the last two weeks.

$20 tip at TI. got me 34th floor, corner room strip view south tower and resort fees waived. Suite wasn't happening given march madness weekend. Always try...but I thought it was great for 4 night stay

Checked-in yesterday for a 5-day stay at the Luxor & got upgraded from a 'Pyramid Deluxe' to a 'Tower Suite'. (MLife Gold card, so that may have helped(?)).

2 for 2 with $20 trick. PH and Paris, both within last year, both were very nice room upgrades with views

Just keep pretending that it doesn't work.

The most intelligent person in the world would not stand a chance versus an experienced, serious chess aficionado. Being good at chess not only requires raw intelligence, but also strategic and tactical insights that just can't be developed on the fly no matter how intelligent you are, and especially not during a speed chess match.

Reminds me of the story of world-class poker player Tom Dwan (who has won millions at poker and is likely very intelligent) losing > $50k in misjudging his chances of beating chess International Master Greg Shahade, who was starting the game down a rook (an insurmountable difference when players have remotely similar skill).

The margin on the books are somewhere around 50% so Amazon would want to push the new book in your example, but that is more an issue of the numbers you are pulling together then the actual point. That is a valid point though that it would be seemless to buy the product used instead of new. I think it will become similar to large video games where you make a significant portion of the money on people buying it as early as they can when the used/pirated market does not exist.

It will be interesting to see what happens. I don't think killing used sales is the answer. Fortunately there is a large group of people entrenched against ebooks that will ensure paper book sales still matter. Probably the margins will have to be reworked between the distributor and publishers since the overhead for distributing ebooks is probably small.

And this is where I got the 50%

Megaupload was the only known location of the videos accompanying http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-variance/bbv-grossest-craziest-night-my-life-very-graphic-tl-mr-240866/

It would be a travesty if these were lost!

You're missing the point. A casino may not be able to pay all the bets on the floor on the spot, but it has enough liquidity to be able to pay very quickly if every chip is cashed in (by quickly, in mean within a day or two) since no chip leaves the casino. Also, while I imagine some frequent players may have accounts to put money in at brick and mortar casinos (not sure, I'm not too familiar with them), most players bring in their money and leave with whatever's left of it. Online poker sites, on the other hand, are a cross between a casino and a bank. Even the smallest money players have some money kept in escrow at the casino. I don't know how much money can be on the floor of a (physical) casino at any point in time, but I am certain it is absolutely dwarfed by the amount of money an online casino keeps. This new development will almost certainly cause a run on the accounts of Absolute Poker and Full Tilt, which may very well force them to declare bankruptcy if the accusations in the summary are true. It sucks for the players, but they should have known better: Full-Tilt and Absolute bet have been caught before in a scandal where an insider was able to look at the cards of everyone at a table and gave the information to someone who played against top tournament and money players. First hand account here.

Thank you DOJ for putting a bunch of tax payers out of work. For those saying online poker is illegal gambling, do a little bit of research.

This plan is worrying. America is probably neck and neck with Canada for having the most efficient freight distribution system in the world (it's far and away more efficient than Europe's), and I worry that this high speed rail plan has the potential to throw a major wrench in this system. The issue is that virtually all major rail initiatives occur on existing freight rail corridors. There are a handful of examples of brand new corridors for freight use (KCS is building one in Texas right now to try to fill in the missing link between the Lazero Cardenas port and its American rail network), but usually building brand new mainline (particularly high speed mainline!) is prohibitively expensive.

...

Yeah, I thought online poker would appeal more to the Slashdot crowd too. The main poker site is the Two Plus Two forums, and there's a lot of good strategy advice to be found amongst a fair amount of childish rants.

I play micro-stakes cash games. Last night I played 1000 hands and lost six buy-ins, but I think I played reasonably well nonetheless. Statistics backs me up as I turned a small profit according to "all-in expected value" (a calculation that removes the luck factor from hands where all the chips went in with cards still to come). It's just a bit annoying as I was hoping to move up stakes soon, and it will probably take me several thousand hands longer now.

If it's almost all luck then why is this line so straight (just one example)? http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-variance/axxit-100nl-hu-562546/

You can read a good summary of that scandal here.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/ub-scandal-sticky-251207/

Some of the comments I've read on this article are embarrassing, and honestly, this article itself is embarrassing.

I play poker professionally on multiple sites, and have done so over the last few years. The scandal this article references is old news, and was discussed intensively on the 2+2 poker forums. The site was not cheating its customers. An employee supposedly warned Absolute about a security hole that would allow for a superuser account that could view his opponents cards, and when he was rebuked, proceeded to do so on his own.

Online casinos have very little to gain and everything to lose by doing something like this. The operating costs compared to the rake that they take in is certainly a huge gap in favor of the site, and having superusers out there to take $50 (a limit that most people that claim online poker is "rigged" play at) off their customers here and there is absurd when you consider the results of being busted doing so. Further, when players claim poker is "rigged" for action to increase the rake, they obviously just do not understand that there is almost always a cap placed on the rake these sites take, a very low one especially in comparison to live casinos, and as such building big pots would net them very little. Generally these claims of being rigged are made as players claim to see a disproportionate amount of strong hands, not considering the fact that online poker tables see as many as 10x the hands that live tables do, and so unlikely hands like four of a kind and straight flushes are much more likely to occur.

In general, all the comments made so far claiming that it is "obvious" that online poker is rigged have no idea what they're talking about and are merely losing players. In this particular case, an employee found a security hole that was only even accessible by someone with inside access, reported it, and when it was not acted upon, abused it. This is certainly a problem, but one that is not as rampant as many players would lead you to believe.

The fraudulent activity was enabled by unauthorized software code that allowed the perpetrators to obtain hole card information during live play. [...] Our investigation has confirmed that the code was part of a legacy auditing system that was manipulated by the perpetrators."

It looks like the cheaters had a separate connection to the auditing app that showed them hole cards. I don't think the stock client app had access to extra hole card information.

That's called collusion and although it's used from time to time, the regulars pick up on it fast and the software recognizes it even faster. What people aren't understanding about online poker is that it's not the same as "placing a bet", it's a game based on mathematical probability. Online poker players have databases full of information on themselves and their opponent. Every single decision made is either positive expected value or negative, and after a while the better players learn to recognize what situations will yield a positive result. This story has been around for a few years and the real interesting part about it is the fact that it was an online community of poker players who ended up exposing it. This scandal has been developing for quite a while now and if anybody feels like getting the whole story go to the community where it all happened. There's real interesting reading there and I'm surprised it has gone unnoticed on Slashdot as long as it has.

another link, better link for more 2+2 information:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/29/news-views-gossip/ub-scandal-sticky-251207/
(found through the msnbc page)

o my....story time...
The phrase of the day is "superuser"
This data was given to many professional online poker players who analyzed the data in late 2007 (see 1 year ago, 10/16/07 to be exact) when they requested the data from the online site "Absolute Poker".

Instead of the site giving them the usual data which hid the opponents cards unless they had shown them during the hand, they sent all the raw data which included the opponents hole cards, and specifically every player and spectators player number. One of the spectators was player number "363" I believe which was incredibly low (one of the first ever to register on the site).

When designing the software they must have used several "superuser" accounts to make sure that it was working correctly, so they let it see all the cards on the table. Someone inside Absolute Bet discovered(or knew they entire time) that the loophole was still open and used multiple accounts to siphon hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars off of their high stakes users. This was used also over other websites running the same backend software.

What made this so obvious, simply put, to the high stakes players was that these players were playing perfectly over thousands of hands which isn't possible unless you know all the cards on the table.

For more reading see:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/the-absolute-poker-cheating-scandal-blown-wide-open/
or for more poker talk:
http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12523924&page=0&fpart=1&vc=1

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12097244&an=0&page=0#Post12097244

This has been known about for a month for many people.

An even better summary on 2+2

They could have made tons and tons more money if they were just patient. The way the hands played out, there were only two possibilities: 1. They're cheating, or 2. They're luckiest SOBs ever.

Here are some of the damning hand histories: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=beats&Number=12493401&page=0&fpart=1

"But maybe someone can help me out. I still can't find a clear answer as to can US companies offer a gambling service a non-US one is prevented from offering by law"

No one knows, and the answers you get are all suspect as the law has never been tested in this regard.

If anyone tells you otherwise, they are lying. This has been debated more times than I can count, and there is no solid answer. If you'd like to know more, you can get most of what you need here.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=law

Pre-flop odds are all calculated on what your hand is. Statistically you know your chances on winning are. Your opponent's hand doesn't matter to you since it's unknown to you and doesn't factor into the odds.

Actually preflop odds are always computed using a set of hands your opponent most likely has.

For instance, I have a pair of face cards, say QQ. How should I compute my chances against you? Well we could compute those chances against random two cards, and we'd probably have a statistically "great" chance of winning. But that's against two random cards. What are the chances that your opponent actually played 72 off suit? If he has any sense and he's not a "maniac" player then probably not. So we then try to determine his "hand range", meaning a set of cards he most likely holds two from. If we think he's a tight player he may only be playing K10-AA, so we calculate the odds based on those ranges. If we think he's loose in this situation we open the hand range up and then recalculate. You have to have a hand range to have any chance of accuracy.

How do i know this? I've played over 200k hands of poker online in the past year :-)

I'd say it's a hobby but obsession/dream would be more accurate. I haven't won millions yet, but I have paid some bills using my winnings. Maybe one day I'll have the knowledge to play pro. Any lucky duck can win a tournament. It takes real knowledge of the game to win over time and keep winning.

If you have any specific details on poker and it's many forms the best place for answers regarding poker (imo) is http://www.twoplustwo.com/. Plenty of real pros on their forums and a huge archive of data, such as hand histories. Good stuff.

This is a better explanation. And I remember now that I first heard this parable mentioned in one of Richard Feynman's books; the chapter can be found here.

The great unknown is how far into the Internet commerce stream federal regulators are willing to go. The Act requires institutions like the Bank of America and Neteller to i.d. and block transactions to unlawful gambling sites, whatever they are. But, while the Bank of America will comply, Neteller might not, because it is not subject to U.S. regulations. Will federal regulators then prohibit U.S. banks from sending funds to Neteller? And would they then prohibit U.S. banks from sending funds to an overseas bank, which forwards the money to Neteller?

Look at this... no joking!

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat =0&Number=6423527&page=0&fpart=all&vc=1

The goal of gambling is generally to maximize your positive expectation (this means positive outcome. Cf. writers like David Sklansky). While I encountered this statement in a book about poker, I believe it applies pretty well to business and other aspects of life. And the cartels probably understand this more than the genie metaphor.

So if they understand their precipice of a business model, and they are trying to maximize profits (positive outcome), then why are they not trying to really "embrace" alternate distribution? My take on this is that they've done the research and concluded that they can make more money through DRM, scare tactics (lawsuits), and FUD.

DRM is really a temporary solution. It makes copying harder, so it works on the non-technical. Coupled with the DMCA, it creates an end-run around fair use rights as they can sue anyone who releases information about how to bypass the restrictions. It can't last forever, as there are those who want to copy media, and stopping human communication is not possible.

The scare tactics (lawsuits) and FUD could be considered a temporary solution, or you could compare it to any authority asserting power over the peasants. These work (at least in the US, I don't know about other places) because the average person here doesn't research or apply any logic to the corporate nightly news they watch, often owned or affiliated with the same corporations who hold massive copyright interests (ABC, NBC, CBS, WB, FOX, etc). When the lawsuits started, the average person had probably seen or read two things about file-sharing: "peer-to-peer makes copying easy" and then, a bit later "file-sharers go to court". The FUD works in basically the same way.

I believe that public opinion is really key here. Sure, there are those who buy the FUD and learn a distorted view of copyright. And there are those who favor abolishing copyright altogether. But I think that the majority of people are somewhere in the middle. These are the techies who see the ridiculousness of the propositions made by the cartels (in terms of technology), or the soccer moms who want to copy that DVD so Timmy doesn't ruin the original.

This is where we have to step in. The great thing about this point in time is that most people don't understand much about the situation. I found this out when I was home during Christmas/New Years. I consider my dad to be smarter than average, yet he thought DVD burners might be illegal (he has one in his 2-year-old iMac), and I don't think he really understood me when I didn't want to go to the movies unless there was something I really wanted to see (he asked why, I said "unethical business practices").

So what should we do? Well, we have a situation where public opinion is important and the same public does not understand the issues very well. This means those who want to tame the feudal-style trade groups (cf. Guilds) should find some way to raise awareness about these issues.

There are organizations like Free Culture and Downhill Battle who are trying to do this. They are a great resource for the many slashdot (and similar) types who complain about the copyright situation, yet maybe don't

More importantly, how many 5 year olds could we beat up if we worked together?

All of the major online poker sites have play money games. Play money games are useful for familiarization with the site's software and general poker rules, but not useful at all for learning good poker strategy. People don't take it seriously enough.

I'd recommend picking up Small Stakes Hold 'em: Winning Big With Expert Play by Ed Miller et al. or Winning Low Limit Hold 'em by Lee Jones. They will easily pay for themselves.

For poker discussion, I'd recommend the forums at
twoplustwo.com, unitedpokerforum.com, bet-the-pot.com, and remmy.net.

That is correct. The amount I play varies over the course of the year - some weeks I don't play at all, some weeks I put in forty or fifty hours. I usually play two games at a time.

I haven't quit my day job. While I love the game of poker (been playing for fifteen years, though only the last couple online), I don't want to be in the position of playing to pay the rent. That requires a sizeable bankroll, since sometimes you'll have long losing streaks. Poker is a game of odds - you can balance the odds in your favor, but just like flipping a coin will come up heads roughly one time in a thousand, you can have "the best of it" and still lose hand after hand after hand.

In any event, I'm making more at my day job. In fact, anyone who's smart enough to make it as a professional poker player can make more money doing something else. And this way I can get health care.

You can go to any number of poker sites (I recommend http://www.twoplustwo.com/) and find a good discussion of why it isn't a good idea to go pro. It turns out it only makes sense if your some kind of idiot savante or you just can't (or don't like to) work with other people.

The pros who complain about the newbies... they aren't really interested in playing poker. They're the people who learned how to play tight, became profitable, and never learned anything else. I could teach my dog to play tight, and profitably, but she wouldn't be playing poker.

Pokers popularity will drop, yes, but it will also leave behind another generation of poker players, who will play for life. Losing players who want to go out, have a few drinks, and gamble a bit. This fad seems to be doing a great job at making poker more respectable, and making casino poker less intimidating. These effects will improve the game forever.

Come on geeks, read your books, do your math, go to the casinos or to pokerstars.com. You probably won't become a millionaire, but you'll likely make a nice bit of extra cash, and you'll definitely have a lot of fun.

Hey whiskeytown, stop plugging two plus two, the home of the best poker discussion on the internet. The pros who complain about the newbies... they aren't really interested in playing poker. They're the people who learned how to play tight, became profitable, and never learned anything else. I could teach my dog to play tight, and profitably, but she wouldn't be playing poker. Pokers popularity will drop, yes, but it will also leave behind another generation of poker players, who will play for life. Losing players who want to go out, have a few drinks, and gamble a bit. This fad seems to be doing a great job at making poker more respectable, and making casino poker less intimidating. These effects will improve the game forever. Come on geeks, read your books, do your math, go to the casinos or to pokerstars.com. You probably won't become a millionaire, but you'll likely make a nice bit of extra cash, and you'll definitely have a lot of fun.

Disclaimer -- the only form of Poker I play is Texas Hold'em, Low-Mid Limit and occasionally No Limit tournaments. I can't speak on the other variations of the game and, no, I don't work for or with any of the sources that I am citing.

For starters, Hold'em, like any form of Gambling for real money, isn't for everyone. Gambling is called Gambling for a reason, otherwise they'd call it Savings. But if you're looking at getting into it, here is some food for thought:

From a geek standpoint, I think one of the appeals that Hold'em Poker has is that it isn't so much a game a chance as it is more of a game of incomplete information. The very essence of living a geeked out existance is marinated in the ability to thrive in environments of incomplete information, whether solving problems or creating solutions. Out of those who consider themselves geeks, I'd have to say that those who are Hackers (whether in the genuine sense or cracking into computer/network/phone systems) would probably tend to have a little more of an edge than most. Aside from the logic and reasoning involved in playing the game, there's a certain instinct that develops, very similar to that certain "something" that enables some people the uncanny ability to take a look at a system, see what isn't obvious and find ways to make that system do things it wasn't originally designed to do. Anyone applying the Hacker Mentality to learning and playing the game will probably find that it won't take long for them to become formidable opponents.

Another way to look at the game is that essentially you're putting together a puzzle, racing to put yours together first, and betting that you can put together a better puzzle than everyone else -- all done by assembling the information between the hole cards that you're dealt, the cards that are flopped, the final cards that hit the table, and the patterns of betting/raising/folding around the table. You're not only competing with others at the table but you're also competing with yourself since there are times when you'll have to fold on seemingly great hands because playing them through to the end of a round will only mean getting beat and throwing your money away. Outside of just plain old bad luck, when it comes to most people losing big at Hold'em, generally you can boil it down to either (1) the know the basic rules but being clueless about the game's dynamics, (2) playing with a lack of discipline, and/or (3) letting their egos dictate the way they play their cards instead of doing what the cards and the dynamics of the table during that particular round says they should do. I'm no expert but this is something I've observed way too often. I've competed in some small stakes Hold'em tournaments locally and walked away with the top prize several times. In each case the people that were easiest to knock out of the game succumbed to any one of those three, usually all of them by the time I was scooping up the last of their chips.

The two foremost authors I've read on the subject are Sklansky and Malmuth. Between these three books -- The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky (ISBN: 1-880685-00-0), Hold'em Poker by David Sklansky (ISBN: 1-880685-08-6), and Hold'em for Advanced Players by David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth (ISBN: 1-880685-22-9) -- alot of patience, and alot of practice with both online poker play (start with play money) and stand-alone versions of the game, it doesn't take long to advance beyond being one of the novices throwing their money away at a table and getting beat like a baby seal. The rest comes with time and experience.

Aside from those books, there are tons of sites out there on the subject. Here are a few that I found to be helpful during the learning processs:

http://www.twoplustwo.com/

http://www.learn-texas-holdem.com/

http://www.holdemsecrets.com/

Als

CardPlayer.com. Poker news, tips and discussions. One of the best of the best. Includes a really good online odds calculator you can use to double check your own math :)

TwoPlusTwo.com. Website run by some of the smartest guys in gambling, David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth. Sklansky has an excellent series of highly-technical poker books for every skill level, including Hold 'Em Poker, Hold'Em Poker for Advanced Players, Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, and The Theory of Poker.

Doyle Brunson's Super System. Regarded by many as the bible on poker. Much of the information is outdated about specific games (the nature of the game has changed) but any respectable poker player knows this book.

PhilHellmuth.com. Phil is a poker geek himself, one of the best players around (and the youngest to win the world championship). His recent book on poker Play Poker Like the Pros is the best "intermediate" book around in my opinion.

PokerPages.com. Best place to find a game, be it a tournament or local game. Great source of poker news.

There are also a great number of high quality poker blogs, including PokerBlog.com, GuinessAndPoker.com and ChrisHalverson.com.

Not to mention of course, the explosion of online poker sites, including UltimateBet.com,

Probably the most famous example of a machine which taught itself, IBM's Deep Blue, which taught itself to play chess better than the human world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.

Poker is an excellent domain for artificial intelligence research. It offers many new challenges since it is a game of imperfect information, where decisions must be made under conditions of uncertainty. Multiple competing agents must deal with probabilistic knowledge, risk management, deception, and opponent modeling, among other things.

If Chess is added to the Olympics, it's only a matter of time before many many other "mental" games are petitioning the Olympic Commission for admission to the games.

Poker is an excellent domain for artificial intelligence research. It offers many new challenges since it is a game of imperfect information, where decisions must be made under conditions of uncertainty. Multiple competing agents must deal with probabilistic knowledge, risk management, deception, and opponent modeling, among other things.