Ridiculous poker :)

So Sandra called on Friday night with an update on her life, and we talked for about two hours, which is about average for us nowadays. I mentioned to her that I was considering an impromptu trip to a casino on Saturday to play a little live poker. That hadn't actually been true until about 5 seconds before I said it, but I realized that I've missed actually playing poker with other human beings physically at the same table. Casino poker is so much more profitable for me, with fewer distractions, and with the fact that I've become pretty decent at picking up physical tells on people. So I decided I would go ahead and go for it. It's been over two months since I made it to a casino.

I started driving at about 9:30 in the morning and was seated at the table by noon, getting in on a new 1-2NL table. It's unfortunate that the nearest casino that offers poker is over a 2 hour hour drive away, but that's the way it goes, I suppose. There's a casino about a half hour from me that doesn't offer poker yet, but is promising it soon; no doubt it'll be kind of a podunk outfit at first, but still, only being a half hour away might make it something I can do almost every weekend.

In any case, I started off running very hot, the very first hand being dealt 7-8 offsuit in the big blind, with like 5 limpers to me. The flop came 6-9-T with two hearts, SB checked, I checked, guy on my left bets $5, and nobody folds, everyone checking their cards. I check-raised, putting an additional $50 in, a pretty substantial overbet, figuring that a) I didn't really want to see another card when likely up against 4-5 different gutshots, b) It was the first hand, they didn't know I wasn't a maniac, and I might get an opportunistic player to attempt to resteal, and c) I might have run up against a maniac myself. I have no idea whatsoever what I do there if, say, a jack hits the turn.

That dragged me that pot, and the next hand I played was the next time I hit the small blind, again with 5-6 limpers in the pot with 6d 8d. The flop comes, I kid you not, 4d 5d 7d. Nice. Only the third time in my life I've flopped a straight flush.

I check, as does everyone to a guy in middle position, who bets out 10. In the one rotation he'd shown some semi-maniac tendencies, and for some reason I put him immediately on a semi-bluff with a big diamond. Two people call and I don't want to kill that vibe, so I just call. The turn bricks (a black ten) and everyone checks to the same guy, who bets out 10 again. Same result. The river is the 2d. I look over at the guy who'd been betting, who seems very comfortable, so I bet out $50. It's folded to him, and he raises to $100. Nice. Folded back to me, I push, he calls, and the dealer almost starts shoving him the chips, until I point out that I flopped the mortal nuts.

Amazingly he had Ad Kh that hand, and limped pre-flop with it! Oops.

I win a few more hands and quickly have my stack above $500. Then I give almost all of it back in a single hand.

I'm the second limper with 4c 4s, limped all around with something like 8 to the flop (that's the way the table was, early). The flop comes 4h Qd As. Nice :)

I check, and it's checked to a late position player who bets out for 20. I call and everyone else folds. The turn is the Ac, for a board of 4h Qd As Ac. I liked that turn, not because it made me a full house that I almost certainly didn't need, but that because if my opponent had a weak ace, he'd think that made his hand significantly stronger and would be more liable to put chips into the pot. I checked again, he bet out again, 30 this time, and I raised it to 75.

He immediately shoved all-in, a pretty serious overbet, as he had doubled and was playing about $375, meaning he had about $275 more. I glanced at him and said, "you're all what?" Looking at him he was very, very strong, and I hesitate for a second. "You don't have AQ, you don't have aces, you don't have queens. You couldn't possibly have A4, could you? No. I call.

Well, he had A4, and I was almost back down to where I started. That's officially now the biggest pot I've ever lost (over $750 total, $375 of it mine), and I'm proud to say that I took it well, didn't even begin to steam, and continued to play my game.

And - well - I don't even really remember how my chipstack grew from there. At 1-2NL, if you're a solid player, your chipstack just has this tendency to grow. You face four limpers from position, you look down, you see AK, you raise up to 15, you get two to three callers, an ace flops, and you drag the pot with a bet, or you look down at AQ, get one caller, and drag the pot with a continuation bet when a high card flops that you can represent. And occasionally, you get some moron all-in who thinks their two-pair might be good when a flush card hits on the river and there's crazy action in front of them. Enough of that, and you're winning a whole hell of a lot more than you're losing.

None of the action after that point, that I was involved in, is really worth mentioning. However, I do have to share one more hand.

On the turn, the board showed A7A7, and there were three people left in the pot. I had the button, and had folded preflop, and the guy on my left, a tight, solid player, bet out. The middle position player, whose playing style might best be described as super-tight-imbecile (he knew to play tight preflop, but his postflop play was just terrible, way too many calls of big bets with marginal hands) called. The late position player came over the top of them both, all-in. EP player shrugs and says, "okay, I'll chop it with you" and calls. And the middle position player just sits there for, like, over a minute, pondering.

All I could think was, what is this dude having to think about? This was a huge call, over $120 (well, okay, huge for the stakes). The other players on my side of the table are glancing at each other and you could tell we were all thinking the same thing: this guy doesn't have an ace, and he is thinking about talking himself into an atrocious call. There was one guy that was there with me at the table for the whole 11 hours, a good local, and he and I were mouthing the words to an entire conversation: "He has a seven, right?" "Yeah I guess, but it would take a special kind of imbecile to make that call" "Well I think this guy is a special kind of imbecile."

Indeed the middle position imbecile made the call, and indeed he had 7-rag! How stupid can you get! Both of the other players had aces, of course, and were prepared to chop it, when the case fucking 7 hit on the river! The MP-tard scooped the entire fucking pot. The table sat in mute disbelief.

"I wasn't even in that hand", my mouth-conversation partner said later, "and it put ME on tilt."

At the end of the day, I left around midnight for a cashout of $808, $608 of which was profit. The drive home was sleepy, but always nice with the big fat wallet to keep me company.

That win puts my poker bankroll at up over $3000, but I think I want it over $5k before I take a shot at 2-5.

Ben Stein and Bill O'Reilly compete for "biggest idiot" award

Here is a typical creationist video cip that walks the fine line between amusing me and pissing me off. It amuses me that people so clueless as to the nature of science honestly feel qualified to debate specific aspects of it on National TV, but pisses me off because the fact that it involves well-known pundits Bill O'Reilly and Ben Stein means far too many people will take it seriously.

The topics of conversation they go over read like a laundry list of Creationist complaints and misconceptions. In a single viewing of the video I ticked off:

- Conflating evolutionary theory (the scientific explanation for the diversity of life on our planet) with abiogenesis (the scientific explanation for how life arose on the planet to begin with).

- Assertion that an acceptance of evolutionary theory is tantamount to atheism; that by teaching students good science we are somehow teaching them atheism. Clearly neither has ever read Ken Miller, or the hundreds of other scientists that possess strong religious faith.

- Unsophisticatedly linking ID to religion directly, talking about how "ID says that God created it." Actually, no, ID specifically distances itself from any religious implications. Amusingly, their little back and forth has gotten them some flak from the supposed defenders of ID for pointing out what is obvious to everyone, that motivations for support of ID are without exception religious. ID is a flagrant attempt to strip the overtly religious overtones of creationism, in direct response to the Edwards v. Aguillard SCOTUS decision that declared that the teaching of Creationism in public schools unconstitutional. The ID movement has spent the past two decades trying to distance itself from overt religion for precisely this reason, but apparently O'Reilly and Stein didn't get that memo.

- Whining about not getting the opportunity to advance their specifically religious agenda in public high school science classes.

- Treating "I find this unconvincing" style arguments as though they were a legitimate basis for determining the appropriate curriculum for a High School science class.

- Asserting that ID is the target of some sort of fascist exclusion from the scientific community on the basis that it challenges dogma. Hello? Scientists make their living, every last one of them, by challenging existing dogma. Without challenging existing dogma there would be no scientific progress. But unless one challenges dogma via valid utilization of the scientific method, one is just making up stories as one goes along. The few instances of people being removed from established scientific positions for "supporting ID" are invariably linked to people breaking the rules of that scientific establishment in order to get their views published. In contrast, Michael Behe remains in his tenured position at Lehigh despite spouting off his nonsense. As PZ Meyers is fond of pointing out, ID wasn't "expelled" - it flunked.

Absolute Poker Cheating Scandal

Most of this long post will discuss matters that are also discussed in (much much much) greater detail over at the Two Plus Two Forums specifically in this thread. The blog of one of the people that originally did a lot of the digging in this investigation is here.

Anyone who plays online poker for any significant amount of time will run into the occasional retard that loses a hand and exclaimes "rigged" or something to that effect. It's human nature to assume that when you lose at something, the reason is because the game wasn't on the level. Of course these people are almost always full of shit, either paranoid or either blowing off steam.

Almost always, but apparently not always.

In the past couple of months over at Absolute Poker (AP for short) a player with a very suspicious hand history started winning big at high stakes, to which many top players took notice. The hand history he displayed was beyond bizarre, cold-calling almost every hand pre-flop and yet showing perfect "judgment" when it came to when to bet people off hands, when to fold, and when to extract max value with made hands.

A damning PokerTracker histogram can be seen here. For those not sure what they're looking at, the vertical axis of the graph represents a player's VPIP, or "voluntarily put money into pot". That stat is generally viewed as a general measure of how tight or loose a player plays. The higher it is, the more hands they are willing to see flops with. The horizontal graph is the measure of big blinds won per 100 hands, a general measure of profitability.

So what you're seeing is about what you'd expect: the majority of the most profitable players have a VPIP number between 10 and 40, with a relatively concentrated group between 40-75 or so, probably players that play mostly heads-up (one on one) games where higher-than-average VPIPs are still possible to maintain while being a winning player. And then you have a single point (red in the graph) WAY in the upper-right of the graph, where the player with by far the most winning history in this player's DB (over 4x the BB/100 of the next highest player) is also a player that has by far the highest VPIP - even more amazing when you consider that this player was playing full ring games in addition to heads-up. Even at heads-up, though, most players would consider it statistically impossible to have a VPIP of over 90% and be a significantly winning player over any substantial period of time, let alone show a profitability of over 4x that of the next most profitable player out there.

That's just what this player, who goes by the name "POTRIPPER", was doing, though.

Now cue an incident back from September. Before this highly suspicious cash game behavior ever came to light, this same player, POTRIPPER, had been witnessed to destroy a tournament using the same style of play: see over 90% of the flops, bluff out of the ones where the opponent doesn't flop strong, get out of the way immediately when faced with a situation where his opponent flopped something too strong to get away from. The player who finished 2nd in this tournament, named CRAZYMARCO, spotted the suspicious behavior and had sent an email to AP, who responded as they (apparently) often do to such accusations, by emailing him a file containing the hand histories of the tournament with all of the players' hole cards exposed.

CRAZYMARCO received this file, an xls file that Excel opened as gibberish, and so he forgot about it, until after he started reading on the 2+2 forums about a player named POTRIPPER destroying the high stakes cash games with highly irregular playing patterns. He still has the file in question and posts about it. A database wizard by the name of "N 82 50 24" offers to take a look at the file and is able to make it legible as a hand history. And shortly after, all Hell breaks loose at 2+2.

The raw hand history of this tournament is about the most damning evidence of poker cheating that you'll ever see. A video of the history has been made here, which requires free registration, but is worth it. It's also been captured on YouTube in 4 parts; here's part 1.

In this video POTRIPPER plays exactly how one would expect someone to play who could see the hole cards of the other players at the table, and wasn't trying to hide it. Every single postflop decision is 100% perfect, bluffing at all the right opportunities, value betting for absolute max profit, for over 130 hands. The xls file apparently cut off due to length for the last bit of the tournament, but apparently the final hand was a doozy, where POTRIPPER made an impossible call of a huge turn with 10 high when his opponent was bluffing with a 9 high flush draw.

Nobody with the slightest knowledge of poker could watch that video and conclude that there's any way that POTRIPPER is playing on the level. The timing of his decisions is too perfect for too long for it to be anything other than cheating. The tournament was fairly high-profile with over $1,000 for the buy-in, so many of the players in it are regulars at 2+2 and other sites, and have come forward saying it's legit, that that's what they remember from the tournament when they played it, so it's highly unlikely that it's a fake or prank (somebody playing over 90% of the hands of a tournament and winning it isn't something you'd exactly forget). It's a legit recreation of the hand history provided which has been corroborated.

So, with evidence in hand that cheating has beyond a doubt occurred, a bit of an Internet sleuthing operation takes place, probably the most impressive and detailed I've seen. First off, apparently the file sent out also tracked the spectators that watched the game, whose ip addresses were logged. And there was a user, tracked by his user number #363 (an improbably low number that would surely date back to before the public opening of the software). Speculation immediately ensues that this account #363 is a "super user" account that is able to see every player's hole cards, and that POTRIPPER is viewing his table with this user on the #363 account while simultaneously playing on his "POTRIPPER" account with the knowledge that this super-user observer was providing him.

And incredibly enough, the IP address of both the player and of this "superuser" account trace back to a man by the name of Scott Tom, who is one of the co-founders of Absolute Poker!

I won't go on to describe all of the evidence, suffice it to say that points directly to a certain Scott Tom, but AP has since come forward saying they are prepared to admit that their systems were compromised but that they are saying Scott Tom, who hasn't been officially involved in the site for a couple of years, had nothing to do with it, and that an ex-programmer is the guilty party.

Regardless, if and when the full truth comes out, this will be a fascinating story that should be picked up by the mainstream media. It already has been, to a degree, with brief articles at msnbc and the NYT, but the story is fascinating enough to have legs. Truly an incredible cyber-sleuthing job.

Perhaps the most incredible portion of this story, to an online player, is that the cheater(s) in question were only caught because of outright stupidity on their part. Whoever was playing under these accounts was extremely dumb. It would be far smarter to sit back with normal stats, occasional losses in cooler situations, and general good postflop decision-making and calmly and collectedly earn a fortune by posing as a typical pro that just makes very good postflop decisions. A great many top players, through experience and careful analysis of betting patterns, almost seem to have a kind of "sixth sense" anyway, and players beating the top games don't get an extreme amount of scrutiny provided their stats are in line with what's generally expected of a winning player. Choosing to play virtually every hand as the player does is basically screaming to get caught. One has to wonder if there are smarter cheaters out there, hounding this and other poker sites without sharing this particular cheater's abject stupidity.

It remains to be seen whether or not this was an actual "inside job" or the work of one rogue programmer that was able to hack the system, but the brick wall put up by AP as the questions started to mount up certainly seems more than a little suspicious.

Fascinating, fascinating story.

I love the Internet

It makes these days (weeks? months?) at work where I don't have much to do go so much faster. How the hell were people unproductive before they could post on online message boards?

Juno

So, over at the Telluride, a little Jason Reitman film named Juno is apparently the darling of the film festival. This is the sort of news that just makes me smile, ever since I read a cnn article about a Minneapolis girl that became a stripper on a whim, kept up a popular blog, and eventually published a memoir (Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper). It sounded interesting and giving the blog a quick visit, I quickly ordered the book and devoured it in a single day. It was amusingly written, compelling and funny, with a prose that seemed to jump off the page. Unchallenging, but that wasn't a fault with this sort of story. I fell for it immediately.

I remember reading on her blog about how said author, who goes by the name Diablo Cody (which was her blogging pseudonym that just sort of caught on and stuck), had written a screenplay which became a bit of a hot commodity in Hollywood. Said screenplay was picked up and eventually directed by Jason Reitman (who made the wonderful Thank You For Smoking). I had a feeling it would become a good movie. Apparently it has, drawing a massive standing ovation and, notably, earning several glowing reviews from Roger Ebert. There's buzz about a potential Oscar nomination, though that's a little premature at this point.

Still, reading her book, you'd know she had a future in the pencil-and-paper business. Good for her.

Misc. Roundup

So, let's see what's been going on.

The computer is back up and running, after a great deal of pain and suffering in getting everything installed again. I'm running Windows XP Home Edition now (instead of the hogish Media Center edition that came with the laptop) and had to download rougly 854GB in updates.But things are going well with it, and I just got out of a nice session of World in Conflict :)

Speaking of World in Conflict, it's my newest obsession, multiplayer real-time tactics game that's pretty much unlike anything I've ever played, seen, or even heard of before. An original concept for a game, executed beautifully. The idea of having a fluid quasi-RTS where people can join in at any time should have been thought up long ago.

Over at ScoreHero the latest leagues just finished up last weekend. I made it to the Semifinals of the top Expert league for the Xbox360 for the second season in a row, and set two records: First place all-time scores for "Drink Up!" and "Laughtrack" on the 360. "Drink Up!" is a 360-exclusive song, so I can truthfully claim the highest score ever achieved on that song. My Laughtrack score would put me at #6 or so on the PS2 ladder (which is much more competitive), and is leading the 360 ladder by over 1,000 points, an unheard-of margin for such an easy song.

The trip to Joe's was fun. We beat Halo 3 on Heroic difficulty (not very hard, truth be told) and had lots of good food. The only hitch in the trip was the fact that my flight back to Kansas was delayed until takeoff was at 11:30ish in the PM. I got off the plane at around 1:30am and was in bed by roughly 2:00. That's making the week at work a bit challenging, but it's not like I have much to do at work anyway :)

Computer woes

Grr... stupid computer.

So, I come home on Tuesday to find my computer most displeased with me. I'd left it on during the day, and attempting to fire it back up to install my recently-purchased Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. Instead I see a black boot-up screen that's stuck on the BIOS not being able to find a system file. Uh oh, that's not good.

I'd suspected something was up for a while now, as one of the laptop's hard drives had developed a mysterious periodic "click" that experience has taught me is symptomatic of an impending crash, but having it finally happen still kinda sucks. Anyway, I try to boot up, mess around with the BIOS, no dice. Diagnosis: total hard drive crash.

The computer in question is an Alienware Aurora m9700 laptop, a sexy sexy machine that can run pretty much anything at its highest settings. I got involved in other things Tuesday night (catching up on a little TV, and watching Knocked Up, freaking hilarious movie), and resolved to fix it yesterday. So yesterday after work I stopped at Best Buy on the way home and picked up a new 2.5" 80GB SATA Seagate hard drive, which turned out to be the exact model that was already installed in the laptop. It was probably unnecessary to pick up the new HD, as it was only the one drive that crashed and the computer had 2 drives installed in a RAID-0 setup, so by removing the RAID I could have just run with the one drive that was still good, but now I have two good drives and will probably run in a master-slave setup to allow for 160GB of storage.

In any case, after some playing around in the BIOS, and searching for my good screwdriver (doesn't finding things after having moved just suck?), I installed the drive and removed my RAID setup, installing Windows XP and my drivers. The laptop is back up on the Internet, now, and I've started going through the lengthy Windows Update process, as well as installing some of my old software. Apart from a few dozen Company of Heroes replays and shoutcasts, a couple of Civilization 4 saved games, a few thousand hands of poker tracker history, and some recent tweaks to my FFXI macros, I should make it out with nothing lost, as I didn't keep anything non-recreatable by itself on the laptop.

I've gotten pretty good at getting a system back up and running from scratch, I've gotta say, and I was never actually worried that the laptop wouldn't be operational in time for my trip to Minnesota this weekend, where we're going to hang out, drink, go out for good sushi, and likely play copious amounts of Halo 3.

Speaking of which, I bought Halo 3 this week, but haven't played it yet, largely because I wanted my "virgin" experience to be in co-op. I'm a good friend :)

Tonight, after work, is going to be getting everything installed and up and running, playing around with Opposing Fronts, and packing. Tomorrow I go straight from work to the airport, and don't fly back until Sunday night.