I got up relatively early this morning. I had had trouble sleeping due to being excited about today's match! After getting up and ready to go, we wandered over to the hotel to finish setting stuff up. Our match started at noon today with Ali Eslami taking the first match in the public room and Phil Laak in the private hotel room. After getting everything setup, the match began with a bunch of fanfare from Jonathan Schaeffer. For the blow by blow details, check out the official home page for the blog that I worked on throughout the two sessions in the public room. To make a long story short, we drew the first session and won the second session by a large margin. We won! Wow, that was an incredible feeling. I'm frazzled right now, so I need to head for bed. Let me quickly give some other hilights from today before I run. I didn't really get a chance to eat lunch before the match started so I was starving by the time the first session was done. When a group of four of us (Neil, Nolan, Josh and I) descended to the lobby to go find food we ran into Phil, Ali and Ali's girlfriend Ana who were about to pursue food themselves. So they asked us if we wanted to join them and we said ... YES of course! So we went to a restaurant called Cactus Luv Cafe and got to chat it up with these poker pros (all three are pros: Ana plays limits of $100/$200), and talk about technology, and research, and life. It was awesome. All three of them are incredibly nice people and I'm so glad I've gotten a chance to meet them and talk to them about stuff that interests me.

After the match I had to make some updates to the website and finish off the liveblogs for the day. I then ran DIVAT analysis on the matches, and those graphs will hit the webpages when I get the chance to do it. Ali seemed incredibly interested in the DIVAT analysis and where they went wrong. It'll be interesting to see how they adjust tomorrow.

Anyways, I'm off to bed. This is incredibly exciting, but I'm totally beat and I've got another long day of blogging ahead of me. Woohoo! G'nite all!

Heraldk