A Note on Gambling

I find it quite interesting noting the reactions of various people to gambling. As you probably know by now, I play a "little bit" of online poker, and have once in awhile been known to throw away some money playing blackjack or craps at a casino. I guess part of it is that my Dad's side of the family (which happens to be Chinese) is a group that loves to gamble. The other part of it is my love for any sort of game that involves some thought. There definitely is a bit of a thrill when you win at a gambling game. The more money at stake, the bigger the thrill when you win. I experienced this particular phenomena when I managed to get in on Mansion's $1000 free bet on the Pittsburgh Steelers at the start of last year's NFL football season. My friend Mike and I sat in front of the TV glued to it until the last play of the game and we were cheering like crazy throughout the game. When there's a fair amount of money on the line, it's exciting and fun.

So it's pretty easy to see how the gambling thing can be a problem. Fortunately for me, I know enough about the math behind the games that I know who has the edge most of the time. I would never slap down a $1K bet without first making sure that I was a) sure that my edge was there, and b) sure that I was okay with losing that money if worst came to worse.

So I don't really truly gamble in the same way that so many people get themselves in trouble do. I mostly play poker where I have definitely shown that I have an edge for the limits that I play. The couple of times I've done other gambling, I've either known I had an edge (like that $1K free bet at mansion where the edge was huge since it was free), or I've been willing to throw away $60 playing blackjack or craps for a couple hours.

Playing poker so much though has changed my outlook on a lot of things. One thing that is definitely different is my outlook on money is a little different. Once you've played poker for awhile, the face value of the currency you're playing with changes. It kind of loses its meaning in the sense that $100 is just a stack of chips you could lose or win at any given moment. It's kind of weird, but being able to sit down for a few hours and win a couple hundred dollars playing $100NL with .5/1 blinds makes it possible for me to add to my yearly revenue by a significant amount. It's only really bounded by the amount of time I have to play (which these days isn't that much, but I still get in a few sessions most weeks).

I kind of think that that effect of poker on my life has been a bit negative. It's hard to regain a respect for how much money is worth and how hard it is for most people to earn it after you've played online poker seriously for as long as I have (and I haven't really been playing that long really). The other negative aspect that is less severe for me is a bit of a crisis of conscience when you realize that the money you're winning is being taken from the wallets of people who may not have the self control to realize that they've lost next month's rent cheque. I deal with that thought with the following argument: "Will those players stop playing if I don't play? No. Well then I'm not changing anything by playing and being the one to take that money from them". Think that's faulty reasoning? Let me know. I'm curious about this issue. Without a doubt, it is a parasitic action, but I'm not sure what I can do about the other person's problem - particularly if they are an unknown person I'm facing through online poker (which is how I play the bulk of the time).

So there's some negative effects of playing poker, but there's a lot of reasons that I continue to play. The financial results certainly don't hurt, but it's not just that. I enjoy the competition. Playing these games lets me battle wits with other players and it can keep me sharp. When I'm playing my best, I'm seeing a lot of things happen in front of me and I can tell you a lot of what's going on.

Playing good poker also teaches patience and handling of tough times. The variance in poker is sky-high, and that means that to play well you have to be able to take the tough luck hands without letting them get to you or you'll start playing poorly (on tilt as it were). You need to be able to objectively back away from a particular situation and assess whether you indeed made the appropriate decisions regardless of the outcomes. This is a skill that helps a lot with life.

Poker contains a lot of mathematics, some of it simple, some of it quite a bit more complex. There is a lot you can do with math (despite people who will tell you that poker is primarily a psychological game), and learning to apply math to specific situations in poker is an essential skill to getting good at the game. Likewise, mathematics helps you with situations in life too. To tell you a quick story, my mom was telling me about some advice she heard some people were giving in a "learn what to do before retiring" seminar. The advice was that you should replace all your appliances a year before retiring, with the idea being that these appliances would then not likely need replacing throughout retirement saving a lot of stress. This advice struck me as pretty wrong considering that there was no part of this advice that took into consideration how old the existing appliances were. You might be replacing an appliance that is still working great and has an expected lifetime of 5 or 10 more years - effectively throwing away part of your existing investment in the appliances you currently own. And who's to say the appliances you buy aren't going to fail during your retirement? The proper solution here is to replace appliances that need replacing, and wait until your other appliances require replacing. Meanwhile, the money you didn't spend on new appliances gains interest. I fail to see why this is a worse solution.

My life has been affected drastically because of my time spent playing poker. For the most part, I think it has been for the better. I feel like I am able to keep myself sharper and more able to analyze situations objectively, and the monetary considerations certainly don't hurt.

Heraldk

The New heraldk.ca

Welcome! I have decided that it is more than time to put some work into this website again. As part of this work, I'm re-introducing the root level heraldk.ca as a new blog-style format. In it, I'll be posting my rants and thoughts about things. At first, it'll probably be fairly sparse, but I will fill it in over time (hopefully fairly frequently) with my latest rants. I hope the quality will improve over time and that you find some use out of it.

One of the reasons for this is I want to make a distinction between my personal diary style blog entries and some of the more content heavy posts. As well, I want to keep this blog free of poker related content so that I can once again serve up some google ads. The reason they've been lacking is because the policy for google ads does not allow you to place ads on sites with gambling related content. By separating these, I can keep this content separate -- plus many of my random readers probably don't really care that I won $25 in my most recent session of poker.

So I hope you enjoy my new site, and the forthcoming new look for both heraldk.ca and my personal blog.

Heraldk

Poker Bankroll Updated

I haven't been playing nearly as much as I used to, but I have played a couple of PSO promos since the neteller fiasco. Just before neteller closed its doors to Canadians for online gambling transactions, I cashed out all of my money from online poker rooms. Since that time, I've done the new PSO promotions for Pokerstars and Gnuf poker, each worth a $120 bonus from PSO. The Pokerstars one was okay, I lost about $40 at the tables, but since the Pokerstars deposit bonus was $50, I ended up ahead at the site so the PSO bonus was pure profit on top of that. Gnuf poker was pretty interesting. I deposited $500 to max out the deposit bonus only to discover that points are extremely hard to accumulate. It took me almost a month and a half to get through the PSO required 400 points, and the $500 bonus required more than 3000 more points. Screw that. But I did very well at the tables scoring more than $600. Add that to my PSO bonus of $120 and I was quite happy with that outcome. There's been a little bit of nervousness on my part as I tried to get my money out. They finally added another cashout option that looks like it'll work for me, so hopefully everything will all be sorted out soon.

My poker bankroll page has been updated to reflect my latest winnings.

So I'm pretty happy with the last couple of months. I might get into poker a little more once the man-machine match is over and done with. Until then, I think I'll be pretty busy!

Heraldk

Tired

This last week has taken a lot out of me. I've been quite busy working on this poker project -- the results are starting to look really promising, but I'm not gonna talk about that just yet. It looks like we're gonna have to get ready for an exciting event that should be happening in Vancouver in July. But you didn't hear that here first! I had a terrible downturn in poker so between that and the neteller trouble, I think I'm going to take an extended break from online gambling. (I didn't lose all my bankroll, but I might just cash out my money for awhile). I might use some of my PSO points to start a micro stakes bankroll from which to climb back up again ... we'll see if that's worth doing or not. In the meantime, I'm tossing around the idea of buying some lenses for my camera. The basic lens is pretty good, but it is starting to limit me in the stuff I'd like to try. So it is definitely time to purchase at least another lens. I'm kind of thinking a decent low-light/indoor lens with no zoom and a more general purpose zoom lens that borders on some telephoto capability ... If anyone has any helpful suggestions on good lenses or good place to buy such lenses, I'd really appreciate it! I haven't quite picked out the exact lenses I want yet. I'll be doing a bit more research over the next little while before I settle on something.

So that's where I'm at so far. This coming weekend Diane and I will be joining my family for a big reunion. So I won't be in town for most of the weekend. Should be fun, though it might be awkward since many people will be there that I should know/remember. Oh wells. Perhaps I will take my camera down and practice some photography! Hmm - maybe I should buy that 50mm lens I've been looking at *before* this weekend ...

Heraldk

The End of Online Poker

... as we know it? PartyGaming has just announced that due to the internet gambling law that passed through in the US Senate, they are banning US players from real money play. Shares so far today have slid 62%, and I can totally see them dropping even more.

What does this mean for online poker? Well, a huge chunk of online poker players come from the states meaning that the amount of players to play during hours that I play will be dramatically cut. In order to get any sort of competition, I'd have to logon in the morning and play when players in europe are playing late at night there.

I really wonder where the industry goes from here. The US government is being incredibly stupid about the whole thing ... but be that as it may, there's not a lot that we in Canada can do about this. It just sucks to see the entire industry take such a beating because certain people in the US government think that they should "protect" people from the evils of gambling. To be honest, I don't know that much about why they are actually banning it in the first place but whatever the reason, I can't see it being a better argument than this superfluous one. I'm aware that there is political motivation behind this, but I honestly can't understand how one gains political prestige by bringing in ways to stifle people's freedoms (in supposedly a free country).

Anyways, we'll see where this goes I guess. I don't think there's much I can do about is so I'll just watch!

Heraldk

Poker Rush

Well I'm glad I decided to play some poker tonight. I got home a little late from school since it was raining really hard and I didn't really want to get poured on on the way home. When I finally got home, I threw some laundry in and decided to fire up full tilt and play a little 2/4. I ended up over $300 in the space of maybe an hour and a half! (two tables). This was a big relief - I have been having a pretty poor couple of weeks at the tables, so it was nice to hit some cards again. My profit in online gambling has been coming from online casino promos. I cashed out over $700 from casino-on-net on only a $200 deposit (yeah, that's $300 on top of the $200 bonus!), and got a nice win at Intercasino as well on a nice reload bonus. It is this money that will be funding me when I go to Foxwoods in a little over a week! Oh yes! I think I mentioned previously that I will be going to Boston and New York this month. I leave on Saturday morning (at 1:00 am so essentially Friday night). AAAI is being held in Boston and we have a paper there to present. Then a few of my friends and I are going to go to New York with two of us stopping at Foxwoods on the way there for a night. I'm looking forward to giving some live poker a try. I haven't played any real live ring game poker before this, though I do have my half a dozen or so live tournaments I've played in. It's pretty exciting! Then we'll spend a week in New York returning on the 27th.

In other news, my thesis is starting to take shape in my head if not on paper. I have an outline that I think will help organize my thesis a little better. In other research news, the paper Darse and I submitted to the ICGA special issue on poker has been accepted! The reviewer was pretty positive about the paper and his suggestions were all helpful in helping make the paper a little stronger. Yay! Soon DIVAT will take over the poker world! (We think its powerful enough to anyways).

Do pay attention to my photoblog. I plan on adding a flurry of photos in the next week to pre-emptively make up for missing a couple weeks of updates while I'm gone. Enjoy! I'm pretty happy with the set I'm going to upload ... soon!

Heraldk

+EV blackjack!

Well, this weekend was interesting on the gambling front. First of all, a guy on the PSO forums noticed that PokerNow has closed down permanently and offered players to transfer the remaining money that they had at PokerNow to an existing party poker account. The great part of this was that he and several people were transfering totals of less than a dollar to party poker and getting $25 and $50 bonuses! So I decided to try this to see if I had any money left in that account. I had $0.01, and transfered it. I got a $50 bonus! I've got to play 500 hands to clear it which shouldn't take long. I've already made $20 playing the super loose .5/1 games.

Second, I decided to try a second casino promotion. For those who don't know, these promotions can be positive EV if you get a large enough deposit bonus and the requirements don't require you to play too long. My first promotion didn't go so well ... I lost my $100 deposit ... and +EV or not, these promotions still have risk because the variance in a lot of these games are huge. I was still intrigued by the idea of +EV casino games, so this weekend I tried Golden Palace's 300% deposit bonus. This time, after a few hours of blackjack, my account reached $290 from my $100 deposit!

So I'm up $90 in casino promotions. It was pretty fun, and a nice break from poker. I really think I needed a break from poker since the past little while has been a tad frustrating.

Heraldk

Team Canada

Honestly, I can't stand the media. First, what's with the debacle of accusing Gretzky of being involved in the gambling scandal? This man does more for the game of hockey than anyone ever before. He has always been an amazing role model for the kids everywhere and what does he get as thanks? Seriously, if he says he wasn't involved, why don't you believe him unless some reason not to comes up? Jeepers.

And now, with the crazy expectations everyone seemed to have for the Canadian olympic hockey team. I don't really quite understand how Canada is such an overwhelming favourite. If you take a closer look at all the teams, there are very few weak teams out there. In fact, teams like Finland, Sweden, Russia, and the Czechs are all very strong teams with a lot of depth. Sure, I wanted to see Canada win. But just because they didn't shouldn't make us shameful. We have a lot of talented players, but that doesn't mean we'll necessarily win.

Its a very tough transition. These star players on our team are used to being the go-to guy on their team. At the olympics though, they play half as much as they would with their NHL team ... and it can't be easy to get out there and give it your all when you're used to being warmer and getting more chances with your home team.

Bleh. So now we have the media asking questions like "What happened?". I'll tell you what happened. Team Canada lost to some very good teams. Those teams got prepared for the olympics as a team and not as a group of solo star players. Those teams played better than Canada, and so they deserved to move on.

There's always 2010.

Heraldk

Poker!

Well, its been awhile since I last talked about poker. So I guess I will have to now won't I? For the record, I've been playing online poker for almost a full year now. I started playing .5/1 tables, and it didn't take more than a couple months for me to do better than break even. I lost about $30 at party poker whilst getting my chipset, and then I broke even (not counting the sweet $300 bonus) at the gaming club. After that, I started making money at each site I played playing .5/1.

I've since started trying to move up in limits to 1/2. I'm sad to say that I have not had near the same success here as I did at .5/1. I think part of my problem was that I got myself into a little bit of a downward swing, and then frustration would cause me to lose more than I should have. This happened at a couple of sites and its taking me awhile to analyse my game and read some more about the game before I started to feel like I've got my game back. Now, I'm almost finished digging myself out of the hole I made, and am feeling a whole lot better about my game. Hooray!

Keeping this in perspective though - my downward swing was not dangerous in any way. It was only endangering money that I had won at lower limits. My neteller account holds the money that I've won - the money I initially deposited is sitting safely in a USD savings account, and I don't expect I'll ever need to pull money from it again.

I find myself wondering what people think of my poker habit. There's a lot of people out there who view and gambling as a negative thing. I can't quite imagine what Diane's mom would think, for instance, if she knew how much money I was wagering in online poker. I'm not too sure if it matters that I'm up around $1400 US in a year's worth of play (not counting my winnings in that CPT event in January, nor does that count the several hundreds of dollars worth of PSO gifts). I don't think it even matters that I'm taking a studious approach to the game - an approach that requires some heavy reading. The underlying problem though is that Poker is gambling, and thus it is bad. Its odd, and even more odd that it kinda makes me feel guilty for playing. And yet, that guilty feeling has no practical basis!

I guess the main thing is that poker will never be more serious for me than it is now. At the moment, its a fun game that I can spend some of my free time playing and studying. I think everyone in my situation ponders the idea of playing pro ... but that is way too far outside my realm of reality that there's no way I'd ever consider it. I'm pretty sure that the game would lose its fun value the instant it became a job. Plus, I like to do other things besides play poker :)

Oh, and I hit a royal flush the other week. Its about time! I'll post a screenshot sometime soon.

Heraldk

Poker-esque

Like the rest of the world, I've been sucked in. The game of poker is taking the world by storm and there is an amazing array of people who have become interested this intriguing game of strategy and gambling. Why is it so interesting to me? I have to admit that I find gambling fun. The problem is that I hate losing - and any money gambled at a casino is not money you can expect to have very long. Poker represents to me a chance to gamble with money, but also to have the potential to win money in the long run.

I started playing poker for money in November when I heard about the poker promotions offered at Poker Source Online. For those unfamiliar with the site, its an affiliate site with many online poker rooms that offers free gifts for signing up with them. They have the best customer support I have ever dealt with and bend over backwards to try and make sure that you get the gifts you are promised (as long as you follow the instructions). To date, I have received several hundred dollars worth of free stuff from them. If you want to play online poker, there is no reason to not sign up through these guys! I will post later about the PSO promotions and the details on what they offer later so stay tuned if you are interested.

Anyways, I started playing for real money due to this online promotion through PSO and since then I have never looked back. Most players who start making money at poker go through an early learning transition phase where they lose some money before learning the mistakes they made. My transition phase was not very long - I lost about $30 in the first PSO promotion I did, and then broke even on the second PSO promotion. From there, I started making money playing poker online! To date, I'm up roughly $1300 US since November of 2004. Not too shabby for someone who just started playing poker at these low limits!

That monetary figure does not include an amazing run that I had in January. PSO sponsered me and several other people here in Edmonton for the Canadian Poker Tour. I had only been playing poker for money for a couple months at that point, but due to a good run of cards, some good coaching from a local expert, a little skill (I hope), and a lot of luck, I made the finals and finished in 6th place for a prize of $3490 canadian. It was an incredible rush, and I really want to be able to do it again - but unfortunately, even though PSO sponsered me in the followup even in Calgary, I was unable to repeat my performance. Maybe I'll get another chance at it later!

So poker has been awesome for me so far. I'm really quite enjoying myself and the best part is that I can gamble with my money but win money in the long run - which beats blackjack or roulette anyday!

Heraldk