several mountain peaks rise above the water, forming islands..
Check out a contour map, it might be a little trouble to find it, but worth it. Trace where the land would be if the sea level were 500 feet lower. The chain of islands there now would be joined together in a couple spots, and the land area would be much much larger.
Scientists are bound and determined to place Atlantis ANYWHERE except in the middle of the Atlantic, where it is.
There's a chain of islands called the Mid Atlantic ridge, which, if the water level were lowered 300-500 feet (as it was before the end of the ice age) would be a very large island. You could even call it an island continent.
Plato said atlantis was 9000 years before him, or about 11,500 years ago. We've only learned in the past couple of decades that almost exactly at that time, the mean temperature of the earth raised a significant amount in a short amount of time. If a bunch of ice (North America had a mile-thick layer of ice) melted all at once, and you lived on an island continent, it would seem that your island sank into the ocean.
Quoth the (brown responds) article:
"While hybrid software appears to be the same as open source, it isn't. Hybrid source code can never be true intellectual property. The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as private property, which makes the hybrid source model significantly different from true open source. Noone can ever truly accrue any value from owning hybrid source software"
Same old Microsoft bullcrap. What about Redhat? Eh... IBM seems to be doing okay with it too. They call this "researched", but what they really mean is "quoted out of context and distorted".
Okay. We can play that game too. I'm going to quote only from their article. Here goes:
"Samizdat... will be... pro-Linux... It is our hope that... Linux... is... respected.... in addition... it is in... [our]... best interest... that... the US government... produce... leprosy..."
Earlier in the article they said:
"AdTI... is... Inherently Unstable".
There. Much better now that I've translated it for you.
I'm normally a nice guy, but everytime I hear some @$$holes cellphone ring in the theater, I have this overwhelming urge to twist their head from their shoulders, and shove the phone in the newly-created bloody cavity.
Jeez bud, settle down will ya? I don't carry a cell phone myself, so don't think I'm one of your nemesises, but a ring could easily just be an honest mistake. If you had the very same visceral reaction to someone actually answering the phone and talking in the theater, I'd be a little more understanding. As long as they realize the mistake and turn it off immediately, what's the big deal? Take a chill pill dude.
Much worse is the fellow who brings his children and allows them to talk throughout the movie. A guy with a little girl allowed her to completely ruin LOTR III for me. That's deliberately inconsiderate and rude, and it makes me pretty angry, but I didn't do anything about it. She kept asking questions, because she didn't understand everything that was going on and sometimes she couldn't make out the dialogue. I felt sorry for her, plus I figure he knows it's rude, my telling him isn't going to fix anything. I also have a real aversion to being a snitch.
Anyway, I got off my point, but it is that a ringing phone is likely just an accident, not a deliberate slight. Learn to lighten up a little bit, life's too short to go around peeved at everything and tilting at windmills. You'll live longer if you do. It's a proven fact.
The practice known as "camcording" -- a misdemeanor crime in California -- allows video pirates to steal relatively high quality copies of films within hours or days of their release.
Relative to what? Taking a crap on celluloid?
Do ya think that maybe the MPAA had a little influence on this reporter?
The quality of a camcorder recording is already crap! Both the sound and video are usually awful. Does anybody really buy these things *instead* of going to the movies? A friend of mine bought the LOTR bootleg when he went to NY, as a gift for me to tide me over until the DVD came out, but I couldn't even bear to watch it, it was so bad.
You can pick up a tuner for your GBA sp that will let you watch tv on it, and it still fits in your pocket (if you have big pockets like any respectable geek should). Not sure about battery life but I'll bet it's better than an hour, especially if you have one of those new improved 18 hour batteries from Lik-Sang.
In "By his bootstraps", Lazarus becomes his own grandfather (or considers it a possibility). It's been a while, but I think he wasn't called Lazarus in the story. In a later story, it's revealed that the character was lazarus, under one of his many aliases. I need to go back and read that stuff.
The "problem" is that over a HUNDRED THOUSAND HUMAN BEINGS with lives and loves die EVERYDAY with many deaths accompanied by the immeasurable suffering.
Yeah, well what if the population of the Earth doubled and instead of a hundred thousand, it was one million? And it wasn't old age, but death by starvation that killed them? All because we rushed forward with the plan to extend everyone's lives without any planning, just unbridled optimism.
Optimism is not a substitute for preparation.
You entirely discount the possibility that longer lives and better technology will help build a world where the problems you talk about can be avoided...
No, I don't discount that possibility, but that's how I view it. As a possibility. You view it as a foregone conclusion. I'm saying there is planning and discussion that has to be done before we can rush headlong into something so drastic and earth shaking. You are the one dismissing possiblities, not me. Your attitude is "Forward! Into the unknown! Damn the consequences!" That is irresponsible and absurd, with something of such great magnitude as this.
I've provided you with information that bears out my argument that our interference with life and death can cause more harm than good, and in fact has already done so. I notice you have studiously avoided the issue, and just done more of your flag waving. Goody for you. See no evil.....
You say that because there's a chance that 'negative' things might happen of which you are unsure.. we shouldn't try to make the world a better place?
You completely ignore my arguments and assert that the world would be a better place, and do a bunch of hand waving and spout feel good truisms, but you haven't proven that it would be so. You haven't even come close.
You say that life is better than death, period, end of story. Even taking for the sake of argument that that is the case, are you absolutely sure that making everyone essentially immune to old age wouldn't cause an even higher percentage of death and suffering in the long run, at the very least without proper planning to deal with it? You certainly haven't addressed any of my concerns on that issue, you've merely given a Pollyanna-like speech about the virtue of life, and dismissed my concerns out of hand.
It's a fact that our decreasing the infant mortality rate in Africa has greatly increased non-infant mortality. We didn't gain anything by it, we merely traded one problem for another. Does this mean that I think decreasing infant mortality is the wrong thing to do? Of course not. However, it is the wrong thing to do if we're not going to deal with the problem of overpopulation at the same time, and allow a large percentage of the "infants we saved" die of STARVATION afterwards!
If we're going to do this, at the very least, we need a plan to keep us from destroying ourselves. Science marches forward with technology, but so very rarely considers the moral, ethical, social, and biological implications. The person this article is about dismisses these issues out of hand as well, and that is totally illustrative of the problem.
someone should have stood up in the early 1900's when we were proposing lowering infant mortalilty and premature death
First of all, your statement implicitly discards the question of degree. Isn't it possible (for the sake of argument) that raising life expectancy to a certain amount could be beneficial, but after a certain amount be detrimental? These issues aren't as cut and dried as you make them out to be.
Is it a good idea to lower infant mortality in a country where people typically have a dozen kids apiece (because the historical mortality rate was 90%), then refuse to give them good contraception education? You know what happens when you do that? We don't need to speculate, it's happening in Africa right now. More children are born, and more of them starve.
This blind rush to lower death rates has to be balanced by something, but we little Pollyannas take the attitude that the first priority is to lower death rates and worry about the consequences later.
Extending life is one thing, making people invulnerable to old age is another. If that's really what we want to do, we can't go into it with our eyes closed, we have to study the ramifications *first*, not *afterwards*.
In regards to overpopulation.. as cultures rise in affluence and economic ability, birth rates go down.
What if the old age death rate slows to near 0? Has that ever happened? No. Are birth rates going to exceed death rates by a dangerous amount? I don't know and neither do you. You're just taking an attitude that extending human life to far, far beyond what is natural is a good idea, and we can worry about the consequences later. That's so irresponsible, and so typical of our mad rush to better technology without regard for consequences, that I barely know how to begin to argue with you.
and anyone who suggests that the suffering and death of millions is desirable and that the "negative" changes to our world that would come about by extending life couldn't be dealt with should take a real hard look at what they are saying...
I think it's a horrible idea, and that those who think about tampering so drastically with the natural order of things should take a hard look at what they are saying.
We have enough problems with really really rich people living a long long time and making the rest of us miserable while enriching themselves, without making them live 1000 years. I shudder to think that Rupert Murdoch could live to be that old, or Ted Turner, or Rev Sun Yung Moon.
The old needs to be replaced with the new. Sometimes science doesn't advance until the old guys die off and the new guys run with their new ideas. People get opinions that they stick with until the day that they die, regardless of the evidence for or against. I see a stagnant, bleak world in our future if this happens.
How will we prevent overpopulation? (sorry, I don't have a subscription to fortune mag) Are we going to limit reproduction? So what we will have is a lot of people getting older and older, and very few babies being born? Is that really a world you want to live in? I sure don't.
Re:Simple advice from Brett Maverick
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Geeks and Poker?
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For example, by this person's logic, if you had 4 cards to a flush and your opponent had a pair, you must always fold. Well, thats clearly not true; if the pot has $20 in it and your opponent only bets $2, then you should call, because you have the odds to call.
Rule #2 only really applies to stud games.
If you're playing 7 stud, and you have a four flush working, and your opponent has a pair showing, and there are three cards left to come, you should probably fold.
Sure, the pot odds are good on this card but if you call all the way to the showdown, even if your opponent doesn't raise the stakes, in your example you end up contributing 6 extra dollars to a $32 pot for a flush draw.
That does just barely qualify as a pot odds call still, but only just barely, and not nearly as much as it did on the first card.
Sure, pot odds calculation is a good thing, but it's not for beginnners. With those Bret Maverick rules, someone who had never played the game before could do pretty well with his buddies (assuming they aren't sharks). Of course, there was more to the book than that, and I read it about 12 years ago, but I remember it fairly well. Another one of his rules was never bet an inside straight. Again, not a world class player rule, because sometimes you should call with an inside draw, but a good enough rule of thumb for beginners. Most of the time it is the right move to fold it.
Well, okay, not as in they like to board ships and plunder booty, but they actually do hijack resources forcefully from innocent people. It's a lot closer to piracy than copyright infringement is, anyhow. From now on, instead of spammers, we should call them pirates, and confuse the hell out of the RIAA.
The biggest threats to the whole industry is (1) their inability to control costs on marginal product and (2) over-saturation of the market with expensive product.
And pepsi commercials. I stopped going completely when they started that crap. I PAID to see the movie, not f(*)ing commercials. I don't like previews either, but I'm willing to tolerate them.
Luckily, here where I live there's a place called the Alamo Drafthouse, that serves food and beer during the movie, and never shows commercials before the movie. In fact, they show entertaining clips from old movies that are somehow related, or previews to old movies that are related. If they ever start showing commercials (they won't) I will stop going to the movies altogether.
Most people I talk to aren't as incensed as I am about it, but I think it could have something to do with the fact that people are going to the movies less. I mean, whether they admit it or not, the hassle of getting there early to get good seats and then sitting through 20 minutes of commercials has to be a deterrent.
I mean, as if anyone with a hook for a hand could actually operate a camcorder. Well, maybe if the arm was on the same side as his eyepatch.
No, the only way to deal with pirates is to board their ship and make 'em walk the plank. Either that or hang 'em. That's always good for a lark.
Disembowelment sounds like a barrel of laughs, but then you have a big mess to clean up. Plus it's just plain unsanitary. The same goes for beheading. You get too much blood on the deck of the ship and it's just a lawsuit waiting to happen when somebody steps in it and falls and breaks a leg or something.
Re:Dunno - newbie pack is formidible
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Geeks and Poker?
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IT IS NEVER THE CORRECT PLAY TO FOLD ACES PREFLOP
My other example was really a borderline case. Let me give you a better one.
You are at the final table with 5 other people. You are in 5th place. The tournament pays -
$1000 for 1st
$500 for 2nd
$250 for 3rd
$175 for 4th
$0 for 5th
Each of your opponents has exactly 50 times the amount of chips that you have (meaning they all have equal size stacks)
One of your opponents folds, the other three go all in.
You hold AA. What should you do?
Any answer except fold is the wrong answer. If you fold, unless there is a split hand, you win $250, because 2 people are about to get knocked out.
If you stay in you run a large risk that you will get $0, and even if you win, you will still be greatly outstacked (over 12 to one by the person who folded, over 30 to one by the person who won the all-in).
Let me remind you that I said it was a very very very rare situation that would find you folding AA. I just wanted to plant the idea that such a situation was possible in the complicated world of poker tournaments.
In a ring game, you are correct. Unless I'm mistaken, there is never a situation where you should fold AA pre-flop. Ever.
The same goes for a winner-take all tournament.
However, those proportional payout tournaments are a tricky beast, and if you even start a sentence about PPT strategy with "you should never", you're probably incorrect.
I've never read any Bruce Sterling. Now it is a lot less likely that I will.
He continuously conflates the issues of nuclear weapons vs nuclear power, seems to think that somehow we can put pandora's spirits back in the box, and generally doesn't say anything useful that might get in the way of his sarcasm.
The article he intellectually defecated upon has a very serious point. If we don't stop burning oil and coal immediately (or maybe, even if we do at this point), we are in a serious world of hurt. Fission power, even with its shortcomings, is a better solution than burning carbon.
What does Sterling offer as an alternative? Starvation, essentially. He says, first Kyoto or something better, then we'll talk about nuclear power.
Well, what are we supposed to do in the meantime, genius? Eat cake, I suppose.
Let's get together and work out a solution that works. If you bury radioactive material in concrete and put it in the desert, it's really not so bad. Expensive? Yes. Better than burning carbon? Abso-freaking-lutely.
Or we can write a bunch of pithy comments and sink into the ocean.
Howeevr "Green" is a well-known label for a political movement. It has a lot of attached stigma because the average "Green" is an ignorant nut. Maybe if that doesn't describe you, you're not a "Green."
Lol. I must say, that's a pretty cogent argument.
On second thought, maybe you are the ignorant nut, and a troll to boot.
Yeah, I like that argument better.
Re:Dunno - newbie pack is formidible
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Geeks and Poker?
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IT IS NEVER THE CORRECT PLAY TO FOLD ACES PREFLOP
What if you are on the bubble (one place out of the money) with a small stack, and there are three people all in before you, one of the players has a stack bigger than yours, and two of the players have equal size stacks (meaning at least one of them is going to be out of the tournament)?
You should probably fold, because if you do you are virtually guaranteed to win money, whereas if you call you may not. It's more complicated than that of course, it would depend on the relative size of your stack and your EV from calling, but to say that it is never right to fold aces is incorrect. There are definitely very rare situations where the EV math says you are wrong.
That is why I said very very very rare. Normally you should not even think about folding. I probably shouldn't have brought it up because it isn't good to confuse new people too much, and I knew it might cause a ruckus.
Re:Dunno - newbie pack is formidible
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Geeks and Poker?
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Suppose you start with the best possible cards - AA.
Newbies around the table hold bullshit-crap
I forgot to mention what you should do in a ring game (where you buy in for what you want and leave the game when you want). You should do the same thing you would in a winner take all tournament. Press your advantage as hard as you can before the flop.
After that try to skate to the river if you get no help and there are bets before you, or try to get people out if they got no help either (or less than AA). You need to be wary of traps. In a limit game, just calling if you get no help after the flop might be a pretty good idea. It depends on your position and the bets on the table.
Re:Dunno - newbie pack is formidible
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Geeks and Poker?
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but this means that there are on average seven people sitting at the table that would beat you if they stayed in.
err.... make that - 7 times out of ten there is at least one person that would beat you if they stayed in.
Re:Simple advice from Brett Maverick
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Geeks and Poker?
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While these ideas are in the correct spirit, they are a bit oversimplified.
Of course they are, that advice will not win tournaments for anyone, but they will serve a new player well. Pot odds are a very important part of advanced play, but you could win most soft home games just by following those four rules.
Many books have been written about poker, it's not possible to boil it down to four rules. But those four are a very good start, and will give a good enough foundation to build on. Advanced play is about learning when to break those rules.
As to your remark that you don't want to be deceptive too often, I agree, but remember rule #1. As a beginning player, you should only be opening with fighting hands anyway. And by "overplay" and "underplay", I don't mean a wild deviation from a value bet every time, that depends on the situation. I do think that generally playing medium strength hands slightly stronger, and strong hands slightly weaker is a good idea, and I stick by that advice.
That having been said, rules 3 and 4 should probably be amended to say "You should often think about....", rather than "you should often...."
If you find that there is someone who has altered their play to call you more often, you can use this knowlege to your advantage and win extra profit by raising your requirements for playing against them. If you know you will get more calls than expected from this individual, then you can afford to play fewer hands against him.
But too much information at the beginning stages for a new player is a bad thing. I think you have to start out and get a feel for the game before you can learn about EV calculation and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out a contour map, it might be a little trouble to find it, but worth it. Trace where the land would be if the sea level were 500 feet lower. The chain of islands there now would be joined together in a couple spots, and the land area would be much much larger.
There's a chain of islands called the Mid Atlantic ridge, which, if the water level were lowered 300-500 feet (as it was before the end of the ice age) would be a very large island. You could even call it an island continent.
Plato said atlantis was 9000 years before him, or about 11,500 years ago. We've only learned in the past couple of decades that almost exactly at that time, the mean temperature of the earth raised a significant amount in a short amount of time. If a bunch of ice (North America had a mile-thick layer of ice) melted all at once, and you lived on an island continent, it would seem that your island sank into the ocean.
Someday I'll be proven correct. I just know it.
Same old Microsoft bullcrap. What about Redhat? Eh... IBM seems to be doing okay with it too. They call this "researched", but what they really mean is "quoted out of context and distorted".
Okay. We can play that game too. I'm going to quote only from their article. Here goes: "Samizdat ... will be ... pro-Linux ... It is our hope that ... Linux ... is ... respected. ... in addition ... it is in ... [our] ... best interest ... that ... the US government ... produce ... leprosy ..."
Earlier in the article they said: "AdTI ... is ... Inherently Unstable".
There. Much better now that I've translated it for you.
Jeez bud, settle down will ya? I don't carry a cell phone myself, so don't think I'm one of your nemesises, but a ring could easily just be an honest mistake. If you had the very same visceral reaction to someone actually answering the phone and talking in the theater, I'd be a little more understanding. As long as they realize the mistake and turn it off immediately, what's the big deal? Take a chill pill dude.
Much worse is the fellow who brings his children and allows them to talk throughout the movie. A guy with a little girl allowed her to completely ruin LOTR III for me. That's deliberately inconsiderate and rude, and it makes me pretty angry, but I didn't do anything about it. She kept asking questions, because she didn't understand everything that was going on and sometimes she couldn't make out the dialogue. I felt sorry for her, plus I figure he knows it's rude, my telling him isn't going to fix anything. I also have a real aversion to being a snitch.
Anyway, I got off my point, but it is that a ringing phone is likely just an accident, not a deliberate slight. Learn to lighten up a little bit, life's too short to go around peeved at everything and tilting at windmills. You'll live longer if you do. It's a proven fact.
Relative to what? Taking a crap on celluloid?
Do ya think that maybe the MPAA had a little influence on this reporter?
The quality of a camcorder recording is already crap! Both the sound and video are usually awful. Does anybody really buy these things *instead* of going to the movies? A friend of mine bought the LOTR bootleg when he went to NY, as a gift for me to tide me over until the DVD came out, but I couldn't even bear to watch it, it was so bad.
You can pick up a tuner for your GBA sp that will let you watch tv on it, and it still fits in your pocket (if you have big pockets like any respectable geek should). Not sure about battery life but I'll bet it's better than an hour, especially if you have one of those new improved 18 hour batteries from Lik-Sang.
Oops, I was confused. It's Slipstick Libby that was his own grandfather.
In "By his bootstraps", Lazarus becomes his own grandfather (or considers it a possibility). It's been a while, but I think he wasn't called Lazarus in the story. In a later story, it's revealed that the character was lazarus, under one of his many aliases. I need to go back and read that stuff.
Ahem. Lazarus Long. *Cough*.
Yeah, well what if the population of the Earth doubled and instead of a hundred thousand, it was one million? And it wasn't old age, but death by starvation that killed them? All because we rushed forward with the plan to extend everyone's lives without any planning, just unbridled optimism.
Optimism is not a substitute for preparation.
You entirely discount the possibility that longer lives and better technology will help build a world where the problems you talk about can be avoided...
No, I don't discount that possibility, but that's how I view it. As a possibility. You view it as a foregone conclusion. I'm saying there is planning and discussion that has to be done before we can rush headlong into something so drastic and earth shaking. You are the one dismissing possiblities, not me. Your attitude is "Forward! Into the unknown! Damn the consequences!" That is irresponsible and absurd, with something of such great magnitude as this.
I've provided you with information that bears out my argument that our interference with life and death can cause more harm than good, and in fact has already done so. I notice you have studiously avoided the issue, and just done more of your flag waving. Goody for you. See no evil.....
You completely ignore my arguments and assert that the world would be a better place, and do a bunch of hand waving and spout feel good truisms, but you haven't proven that it would be so. You haven't even come close.
You say that life is better than death, period, end of story. Even taking for the sake of argument that that is the case, are you absolutely sure that making everyone essentially immune to old age wouldn't cause an even higher percentage of death and suffering in the long run, at the very least without proper planning to deal with it? You certainly haven't addressed any of my concerns on that issue, you've merely given a Pollyanna-like speech about the virtue of life, and dismissed my concerns out of hand.
It's a fact that our decreasing the infant mortality rate in Africa has greatly increased non-infant mortality. We didn't gain anything by it, we merely traded one problem for another. Does this mean that I think decreasing infant mortality is the wrong thing to do? Of course not. However, it is the wrong thing to do if we're not going to deal with the problem of overpopulation at the same time, and allow a large percentage of the "infants we saved" die of STARVATION afterwards!
If we're going to do this, at the very least, we need a plan to keep us from destroying ourselves. Science marches forward with technology, but so very rarely considers the moral, ethical, social, and biological implications. The person this article is about dismisses these issues out of hand as well, and that is totally illustrative of the problem.
First of all, your statement implicitly discards the question of degree. Isn't it possible (for the sake of argument) that raising life expectancy to a certain amount could be beneficial, but after a certain amount be detrimental? These issues aren't as cut and dried as you make them out to be.
Is it a good idea to lower infant mortality in a country where people typically have a dozen kids apiece (because the historical mortality rate was 90%), then refuse to give them good contraception education? You know what happens when you do that? We don't need to speculate, it's happening in Africa right now. More children are born, and more of them starve.
This blind rush to lower death rates has to be balanced by something, but we little Pollyannas take the attitude that the first priority is to lower death rates and worry about the consequences later.
Extending life is one thing, making people invulnerable to old age is another. If that's really what we want to do, we can't go into it with our eyes closed, we have to study the ramifications *first*, not *afterwards*.
In regards to overpopulation.. as cultures rise in affluence and economic ability, birth rates go down.
What if the old age death rate slows to near 0? Has that ever happened? No. Are birth rates going to exceed death rates by a dangerous amount? I don't know and neither do you. You're just taking an attitude that extending human life to far, far beyond what is natural is a good idea, and we can worry about the consequences later. That's so irresponsible, and so typical of our mad rush to better technology without regard for consequences, that I barely know how to begin to argue with you.
I think it's a horrible idea, and that those who think about tampering so drastically with the natural order of things should take a hard look at what they are saying.
We have enough problems with really really rich people living a long long time and making the rest of us miserable while enriching themselves, without making them live 1000 years. I shudder to think that Rupert Murdoch could live to be that old, or Ted Turner, or Rev Sun Yung Moon.
The old needs to be replaced with the new. Sometimes science doesn't advance until the old guys die off and the new guys run with their new ideas. People get opinions that they stick with until the day that they die, regardless of the evidence for or against. I see a stagnant, bleak world in our future if this happens.
How will we prevent overpopulation? (sorry, I don't have a subscription to fortune mag) Are we going to limit reproduction? So what we will have is a lot of people getting older and older, and very few babies being born? Is that really a world you want to live in? I sure don't.
Rule #2 only really applies to stud games.
If you're playing 7 stud, and you have a four flush working, and your opponent has a pair showing, and there are three cards left to come, you should probably fold.
Sure, the pot odds are good on this card but if you call all the way to the showdown, even if your opponent doesn't raise the stakes, in your example you end up contributing 6 extra dollars to a $32 pot for a flush draw.
That does just barely qualify as a pot odds call still, but only just barely, and not nearly as much as it did on the first card.
Sure, pot odds calculation is a good thing, but it's not for beginnners. With those Bret Maverick rules, someone who had never played the game before could do pretty well with his buddies (assuming they aren't sharks). Of course, there was more to the book than that, and I read it about 12 years ago, but I remember it fairly well. Another one of his rules was never bet an inside straight. Again, not a world class player rule, because sometimes you should call with an inside draw, but a good enough rule of thumb for beginners. Most of the time it is the right move to fold it.
Well, okay, not as in they like to board ships and plunder booty, but they actually do hijack resources forcefully from innocent people. It's a lot closer to piracy than copyright infringement is, anyhow. From now on, instead of spammers, we should call them pirates, and confuse the hell out of the RIAA.
And pepsi commercials. I stopped going completely when they started that crap. I PAID to see the movie, not f(*)ing commercials. I don't like previews either, but I'm willing to tolerate them.
Luckily, here where I live there's a place called the Alamo Drafthouse, that serves food and beer during the movie, and never shows commercials before the movie. In fact, they show entertaining clips from old movies that are somehow related, or previews to old movies that are related. If they ever start showing commercials (they won't) I will stop going to the movies altogether.
Most people I talk to aren't as incensed as I am about it, but I think it could have something to do with the fact that people are going to the movies less. I mean, whether they admit it or not, the hassle of getting there early to get good seats and then sitting through 20 minutes of commercials has to be a deterrent.
Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?
No, the only way to deal with pirates is to board their ship and make 'em walk the plank. Either that or hang 'em. That's always good for a lark.
Disembowelment sounds like a barrel of laughs, but then you have a big mess to clean up. Plus it's just plain unsanitary. The same goes for beheading. You get too much blood on the deck of the ship and it's just a lawsuit waiting to happen when somebody steps in it and falls and breaks a leg or something.
My other example was really a borderline case. Let me give you a better one.
You are at the final table with 5 other people. You are in 5th place. The tournament pays -
$1000 for 1st
$500 for 2nd
$250 for 3rd
$175 for 4th
$0 for 5th
Each of your opponents has exactly 50 times the amount of chips that you have (meaning they all have equal size stacks)
One of your opponents folds, the other three go all in.
You hold AA. What should you do?
Any answer except fold is the wrong answer. If you fold, unless there is a split hand, you win $250, because 2 people are about to get knocked out.
If you stay in you run a large risk that you will get $0, and even if you win, you will still be greatly outstacked (over 12 to one by the person who folded, over 30 to one by the person who won the all-in).
Let me remind you that I said it was a very very very rare situation that would find you folding AA. I just wanted to plant the idea that such a situation was possible in the complicated world of poker tournaments.
In a ring game, you are correct. Unless I'm mistaken, there is never a situation where you should fold AA pre-flop. Ever.
The same goes for a winner-take all tournament.
However, those proportional payout tournaments are a tricky beast, and if you even start a sentence about PPT strategy with "you should never", you're probably incorrect.
He continuously conflates the issues of nuclear weapons vs nuclear power, seems to think that somehow we can put pandora's spirits back in the box, and generally doesn't say anything useful that might get in the way of his sarcasm.
The article he intellectually defecated upon has a very serious point. If we don't stop burning oil and coal immediately (or maybe, even if we do at this point), we are in a serious world of hurt. Fission power, even with its shortcomings, is a better solution than burning carbon.
What does Sterling offer as an alternative? Starvation, essentially. He says, first Kyoto or something better, then we'll talk about nuclear power.
Well, what are we supposed to do in the meantime, genius? Eat cake, I suppose.
Let's get together and work out a solution that works. If you bury radioactive material in concrete and put it in the desert, it's really not so bad. Expensive? Yes. Better than burning carbon? Abso-freaking-lutely.
Or we can write a bunch of pithy comments and sink into the ocean.
Lol. I must say, that's a pretty cogent argument.
On second thought, maybe you are the ignorant nut, and a troll to boot.
Yeah, I like that argument better.
What if you are on the bubble (one place out of the money) with a small stack, and there are three people all in before you, one of the players has a stack bigger than yours, and two of the players have equal size stacks (meaning at least one of them is going to be out of the tournament)?
You should probably fold, because if you do you are virtually guaranteed to win money, whereas if you call you may not. It's more complicated than that of course, it would depend on the relative size of your stack and your EV from calling, but to say that it is never right to fold aces is incorrect. There are definitely very rare situations where the EV math says you are wrong.
That is why I said very very very rare. Normally you should not even think about folding. I probably shouldn't have brought it up because it isn't good to confuse new people too much, and I knew it might cause a ruckus.
Newbies around the table hold bullshit-crap
I forgot to mention what you should do in a ring game (where you buy in for what you want and leave the game when you want). You should do the same thing you would in a winner take all tournament. Press your advantage as hard as you can before the flop.
After that try to skate to the river if you get no help and there are bets before you, or try to get people out if they got no help either (or less than AA). You need to be wary of traps. In a limit game, just calling if you get no help after the flop might be a pretty good idea. It depends on your position and the bets on the table.
err.... make that - 7 times out of ten there is at least one person that would beat you if they stayed in.
Of course they are, that advice will not win tournaments for anyone, but they will serve a new player well. Pot odds are a very important part of advanced play, but you could win most soft home games just by following those four rules.
Many books have been written about poker, it's not possible to boil it down to four rules. But those four are a very good start, and will give a good enough foundation to build on. Advanced play is about learning when to break those rules.
As to your remark that you don't want to be deceptive too often, I agree, but remember rule #1. As a beginning player, you should only be opening with fighting hands anyway. And by "overplay" and "underplay", I don't mean a wild deviation from a value bet every time, that depends on the situation. I do think that generally playing medium strength hands slightly stronger, and strong hands slightly weaker is a good idea, and I stick by that advice.
That having been said, rules 3 and 4 should probably be amended to say "You should often think about....", rather than "you should often...."
If you find that there is someone who has altered their play to call you more often, you can use this knowlege to your advantage and win extra profit by raising your requirements for playing against them. If you know you will get more calls than expected from this individual, then you can afford to play fewer hands against him.
But too much information at the beginning stages for a new player is a bad thing. I think you have to start out and get a feel for the game before you can learn about EV calculation and so forth.