Updates from Vegas

Polaris Wins! Our computer poker program took on some of the best poker pros and came out on top!

Sorry for the lack of updates here. If you haven't figured out, my travel blog has moved over to minoragenda, so if you want to read about our adventures in detail, please head on over there. I forgot to post a message like this earlier, so sorry about not letting you know.

I have a big todo list of stuff and not much time to do it. I want to get around to posting photos and post poker reports for the couple of live sessions I've managed to squeeze in. But that will have to wait for a little while.

Hope all is well with you!

Heraldk

On Variance

Something every poker player has to learn is to cope with variance. At times, variance can be your best friend, but at other times it can be your villain that not only kicks you in the crotch, but then slams you with a baseball bat to the head while you're down. Case in point, my latest downswing. I had thought I had made a successful leap to $200nl. After all, I was up a couple grand and was feeling pretty good about how I was doing. Some of that was undoubtedly positive variance, but I figured I could sustain some bad luck.

Little did I know that the fates had it in for me and my bankroll plummetted over the course of just a few days. That's what provoked my previous post about taking an extended break.

I played a short session at 100nl today. I had some free time and thought I'd take a shot and see how I did. This session went a whole lot better, and despite running QQ into KK preflop for a stack, I won two stacks (the small blip at the right edge of the graph above). I don't know how much time I'll have to play over the next two weeks what with the wedding and all, but I'm gonna take it pretty easy still. There's lots of other things to do. Still, it's good to be able to get a nice winning session in after getting my ass handed to me the last time I played.

Heraldk

Stepping Up

It has been awhile since I last seriously tried to move up in limits at Poker. I've only really done it a handful of time. From my starting ground of 0.5/1 full ring limit I moved up twice to 1/2 and 2/4 limit. Then I started playing 6max no limit at 50nl, and moved up once from there to 100nl which is where I've been at for awhile. This past week had been very good to me. I got a Party Poker reload bonus emailed to me, so I decided it was time to go back there and try and clear it. Well, I did rather well playing 100nl. I was up over 7 stacks in 4 or 5 days playing a couple hours per day. I felt confident and on top of the world. So it occurred to me -- what about moving up again? I had been playing 6max 100nl for quite a long time and had made a few grand at those stakes.

A few nights ago I gave it a shot. The first night I had 2 tables open and made about half a stack at 200nl. Not too shabby, but it was a short session. The next night was terrible. I dropped 4 stacks, and it just didn't feel like anything clicked. It seemed like every time I raised preflop I'd get called by people who would call my continuation bets -- but I wouldn't flop anything. I know I made a few errors, and I think I got a bit flustered. But even if I played perfectly, I doubt I'd be better than down 2 stacks.

The next night went quite a bit better. I was down a stack fairly early, but I got pretty comfortable and in the end managed to win a stack and a half or so. That brought me to last night where I thought I played alright, but for the longest time couldn't dig myself out of the one-stack whole I had got myself in. I had a great table with two incredible fish who were just asking to give their money away. It took me several hours to finally get one of them for about a stack and a half to finally draw even for the night.

It's interesting -- I don't think the game is that much tougher than the one I'm used to playing. I think it's just that the size of the swings is a little daunting. Like I said, it's been awhile since I tried moving up. So far, the experiment seems to be going alright even though I'm down a little bit so far. I've got a bit of a bankroll to sustain some loss, so it's not like I'm risking all that much. If I succeed in moving up, then I think my win rate in dollars goes up a fair amount which was the whole reason to move up.

Wish me luck! Heraldk

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

Killer Session

Things have been pretty busy in my camp these days. I keep meaning to post a more meaningful post concerning some things I've been thinking about lately, but I haven't had much time to sit down and update things here. Yesterday I had one of the best sessions of poker I've had in a long time. I rode a wave of spiking cards and stacking players for a glorious run of about 2 and a bit hours of play. I ended up with more than 5.5 stacks of profit, playing $100NL.

I know that a lot of that is just variance, but I can't keep myself from feeling good after a session like that. I'm still kind of amazed at just how well that session went.

More posts to come soon I hope. Heraldk

Busy December

It seems like this time of year is packed fuller than any other time. I think the only night this week that I am not busy doing something is Thursday. Yikes. This weekend was pretty fun. On Saturday, Diane and I made some apple crisp and headed over to her work's potluck Christmas party. The food that people brought was amazing ... I ate entirely too much, but it was super tasty. It's a little weird going to the party though since I didn't really know anyone. I guess I'm still not too comfortable in a setting where I don't really know anyone. The people were nice, but I'm not a strong conversationalist, so there's usually too much awkward silence for my comfort level. Ah well, the food was good!

On Sunday I spent the afternoon at home playing some poker for the first time in a little while. I ended up with a pretty profitable being up more than 4 stacks playing 100NL. I enjoy winning! The session started out real slow. I stacked off with KK against a set, but made that back fairly quickly when my AK beat AQ when we both flopped two pair. After that I went on a pretty big rush, flopping several sets as well as winning a KK versus AK allin preflop situation. There were a few significant setbacks but I kept the hot streak going throughout most of the session to make a tidy profit. Cake poker is turning into a pretty nice place to play. I think I've pretty much decided to clear the deposit bonus there before moving on. I'm about 1/3 the way through that now, and am already up quite a bit. I've heard other people describe cake poker being pretty soft, and I think I'm agreeing with them.

This week I have a dinner party to go to, as well as my condo's annual general meeting, and an evening to play poker with the members of the UofA CPRG. Should be a fun week!

Heraldk

End to Carbon Poker

Wow, it was awhile ago already when I last talked about what's going on. So I finished off the carbon poker promo in about a week, having played about 4 sessions. I ended the sessions up $500 plus the $120 bonus from PSO. Pretty sweet deal, I must say!

I've got my eyes set on a new camera lens, but I think I'm going to force myself to win the money for it through poker, so hopefully I'll get some time to play a little more in the coming weeks. It's been pretty hectic lately, so no guarantees. It looks like I need to win another $500 to buy the lens I want, so I'm looking at 1 or 2 more promos I'm guessing.

What else ... gaming! There are so many good games to play, I don't have enough time to do that either. I bought guitar hero 3 yesterday, and it's a lot of fun. I also have Metroid for the Wii on loan from a friend that I haven't touched ... and then there's the addictiveness that is puzzle quest. *sigh* - maybe I need to drop video games - they take too much damn time out my life.

Diane and I are doing great. We've started getting plans for our wedding down, and hopefully we can get a lot of the stuff we need to done well before the day of so that the day is smooth and fun. Fingers crossed! Diane's sister is off to Vancouver, so before she left we had a pre-wedding wedding party party (isn't that the best sentence ever?), where the people we chose for the wedding party got to meet each other -- those who hadn't yet. It was pretty fun, and included some good food from Vi's for Pies. (If you haven't been there I highly recommend it!).

So yeah, life is good, and busy, and I wish I had more time to work on side projects!

Heraldk

Back to Poker

I had an urge last night to play some poker for the first time in quite awhile. The last time I had played any poker at all was in August when I needed to clear some money at Party so I could cash out. So I logged into my trusty PSO account to check on the latest promotions and found 4 promos that I haven't done yet. I chose Carbon poker because I could get the highest amount ($120 worth) of PSO points. I went through the typical steps to start the promo and sat down for a couple hour session. There wasn't a lot of action at the $50 NL tables, so I stepped up to $100NL, a limit I haven't played since January or February. I just opened two tables, partially because it was a higher limit than I had played recently and partially to get used to the new interface. The first thing I noticed is that the software seemed very responsive and slick -- it's certainly better software than many sites have. The second thing I notice? There's an All-In button in a primary spot on the screen. This is a one-click-put-all-your-chips-in-the-pot button. Man do I ever hope I don't make a bad misclick with that button!

I got off to a fast start early on. Within a couple rotations at a six-max table, I get dealt pocket aces. I make a standard raise and get called. The board comes up 655 with 2 diamonds. I make a healthy bet, and the guy across from me pushes allin. I call and he shows JJ and I take down almost a full stack!

Another hand a little later, I flop 3 clubs holding the king of clubs. I make a bet and get raised a small amount so I call and turn a fourth club giving me the 2nd nut flush. My opponent promptly shoves and I call - he shows Q6 of clubs, and I win 3/4 of a stack there.

Later on, I'm up over two stacks and get to see a free flop with 64 and flop trips. Unfortunately, I run into a guy who had A6, so I lost a bunch in that hand. I probably lost more than I should have, although it was tough to fold to the guy's river bet.

I made back a bunch of money with KJs when I flopped a flush draw and turned the nut flush to beat my opponent's trip aces. That got me back into the 2.5 stack profit range.

Late in my session, I flopped top pair of tens with TJo. I bet the flop and get called and then turn two pair. I bet again but get raised so I just call and the river is another J to give me a full house. I promptly push and get called by a guy who flopped trips on the flop. Whoops! Got lucky there.

All in all, I finished my session up $300, and a little less than 1/4 done my PSO promotion. Not too shabby for not playing in a couple months! Hopefully the rest of the session goes as well!

Heraldk

Lovely Edmonton Sunset

Before I move on to the next photo session, I think I need to catch up on a few other highlight photos from awhile ago. This is the sunset Diane and I saw before heading back out to our campsite at Elk Island. We had just come out from a family BBQ at my Uncle's place. The sky was gorgeous, and I totally had to get my camera out. Enjoy!

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

Match Aftermath

So the match is over, and I had a mere four and a half hours of sleep. Ouch. Still, it was a lot of fun. I got up and got some coffee and breakfast at Tim Hortons before heading up to the poker round table. I think people's tempers were short which meant that there was a bit of unhappiness amongst some of the team members. I hope things sorted themselves out, but it wasn't too pretty for awhile. Anyways, it was cool to meet up with some people who've started to gather and research computers playing poker. It should be cool to see what these guys come up with as they come up to speed. After the round table, I hung around to see the general games playing man-machine match. From what I'd heard, the generic game playing competition was poorly run this year, and it even ran with some controversy. The games that were selected for the playoffs were all very similar and were from a class of games that the best preliminary round player had trouble with. Ugh. Plus, the man-machine match they had was a little pathetic. The played a game that if the humans figured out how the rules work, it was trivial for them to win. So ... that's not a good thing to have in a "fair" match. Oh well. My friend Yngvi won the title, but that was partly due to an error by the other program. Yngvi himself knows the system for the games competition needs fixing, so hopefully changes are made soon.

After witnessing that, I worked on the man-machine web site for awhile as I spent my first session in a real AAAI talk. Heh - too much stuff for me to do. The man-machine web site needs a ton of work, but I'm gonna have to get to that slowly over the next few days. Lots of press articles to link to!

In the afternoon I got the video done that you see in the post before this. I felt that it needed to get done and uploaded since people needed to see what Ali and Phil said about the bots and the outcome of the match.

After that I hung around for awhile and ended up going to the poster session. That was really cool - there was a bunch of food, and I got to talk to a few people including Brett from the University of Minnesota who started working on poker. We talked for a long time about DIVAT and variance and vexbot, and ... how to calculate celcius from fahrenheit. Fun times.

After the poster session, we had found out that there was going to be a huge fireworks display in town. Apparently they do a fireworks contest and so Spain's turn was today and Canada's turn is Saturday. So we bustled down to river front and I borrowed Neil's tripod and I got a ton of photos. I hope some of them turned out! It was hard since people kept moving into my photo :P

So now I'm just waiting for my photos to finish copying and then I'm gonna crash for the night. G'nite all!

Heraldk

Match Day 1

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

The Prep Day

IE: Vancouver, Day 2. Today was preparation day. I woke up without aid of my alarm at about 8:00 local time, and went and checked my email. The poker event that we're doing has been picked up by some major news sources including the Associated Press New York, and PokerNews.com. Weeeee!

Tomorrow's the big day, so we needed to get stuff setup. Darse, Alexandra and I went and got breakfast at a place below us that served some decent omelets with some huge crossiants on the side. Sweeet. We wandered over to the hotel where we met with Phil Laak -- he seems pretty distractable in person ... pretty much like on TV. It's pretty cool to meet someone you've seen on TV several times and never expected to meet. This is about as close as I want to get to fame -- I'm not really looking to be famous :P

Apple lent us 6 laptops so we picked them up from the hotel and went to go get them setup. Unfortunately, setting them up was quite a pain, and we didn't get away for lunch due to the room prep and the laptop setups. The press conference was at 1:00. We didn't get a huge turnout, but BBC had a radio crew there and there was a set of people from other news sources. We expect more media to show up during the event. We'll have to see how that turns out!

After the press conference we had a player's meeting in which we met up with Phil and Ali to discuss the rules and things to make the players comfortable. We want them to be treated well since they're doing us a pretty big favour here. Everything went smoothly. Both Phil and Ali are very agreeable and I'm looking forward to seeing them in action tomorrow. I'll probably learn a few things!

After the player's meeting we continued making room arrangements. A few of us split for a late lunch at an express noodle place. It wasn't too bad -- a bit too oily on a couple dishes for my liking, but the food was alright.

We returned to the room to continue setup. It went well, but there's a lot of stuff to do. We also needed to get the system up and running in order to test everything out. Hopefully everything works as advertised! Fairly late we found a problem with the power supply to the room. Apparently we were all hooked up to one outlet! That'd be 5 or 6 laptops and two huge projectors along with a camcorder. Yup, that's not good. It looks like we've got the power sorted out now. Tomorrow we'll have to double check the setup and see how things go.

We went as a huge UofA group to dinner at Earls. I didn't really like the choice -- we're in Vancouver for goodness sake! Josh from our group used to work at Earls though and he suggested a pretty good drink: A Keith's Iceberg. It's a Keith's India pale ale with some lime margarita mix in the top. It pretty much makes the Keith's taste like strongbow which was pretty cool.

After dinner I bought some plastic poker chips to play some poker with my colleagues. There was a lot of action hands ... and it appeared that people played pretty well even with no money on the line. I played really well (and also got really lucky, hitting some good cards). Then I lost a key hand where I flopped a set of 2s, but the guy who pushed into me had an open ended straight draw and a flush draw. His straight hit on the turn, and his bigger straight/flush card came on the river. No love for me. That crippled me, though I doubled up on the next hand with 33. Unfortunately I lost my stack on the next hand when I flopped top pair of 7s only to lose to Neil's better kicker. Oops.

So now I'm back at the hotel trying to get my photos from today uploaded to my laptop so I have a clean memory card when I go in tomorrow. I need a clean memory card since tomorrow I'll likely fill my card with photos!

Anyways. That's day 2. Tomorrow is the first 2 session of the man-machine poker match!!!!

Heraldk

Back to UB

I returned to ultimate bet this weekend to play there a bit last night and this morning. Last night went terribly - I didn't get any action on my big hands, but kept getting played back at when I didn't get a hand. So I dropped two stacks at $100NL before calling it a night. This morning, on the other hand, was beautiful. I got myself back up to even from last night's losses and then proceeded to stack another couple players for a net session profit of $425. So in two days, I'm up $225-ish. Sweet. In a little while, my grandparents are coming over. My Grandma is going to teach me how to bake her bun recipe. Let me tell you: these buns are awesome. I can't wait to have a batch tomorrow morning -- hot and steaming straight from the oven. Mmmmmm. I'll try and get some pictures part way through and of the end product.

Heraldk

Work and Poker

Yup, that's what I do. Diane was away for a few days last week so I spent a lot of time finishing up my interpoker bonus for this month. Unfortunately I tanked, and ended up only up $190 for the month in poker plus all the associated bonuses ($300) and rakeback (probably around $150). So, while I made some money, I certainly wasn't up near as much as I'd like to be.

The good news is that I sat down for a session at UB, and I think I'm gonna stick around there for a bit longer this time around. The players were noticeably worse than at interpoker. Where it was a struggle to win chips against some of the grinders at interpoker, UB was almost immediately profitable. Sure, it helped that I hit some hands, but some of those players were playing brutally. I made $180 in one two-tabling session tonight! Sweeet. A lot of that came on a hand where I rivered a full house against a maniac player who had actually flopped a straight. I couldn't put him on a straight and had to call his all in with a set of queens. Another notable fact from tonight is I made TWO straight flushes. Its been weeks/months since my last straight flush and then I make two tonight ... and both of them I stacked a guy (less than full stacks though). I did suffer a couple bad beats, including one where I flopped a set of deuces and lost to a guy who rivered a jack for a bigger set. Oh well, those things happen.

In other news, work continues at a good pace. I'm getting stuff done and that feels really nice. I have a pretty productive office environment which is helping me stay more focused than I was before. I'm pretty happy with where my life is at the moment. It is pretty exciting!

Heraldk

Downs and Ups

Tonight was a wild night for poker. I played a quick 45 minute session before dinner and raked in $70-ish dollars in short order. After dinner I played for several hours ... but the first couple hours was pretty rough. One guy stacked my twice while playing $100NL. The first hand, I raised 24s from the button first in. I hit a 4, but not much else. However, I get to see the turn and river cheaply and hit running 2s for a full house. Unfortunately for me, the guy in the big blind had trip 3s which also filled up. There goes one stack! A few hands later, I get AKs. Make a standard raise from late position and get called by the same guy who stacked me the first time. Hit top pair aces, so I continuation bet. I play this hand the same way as the last big hand ... and hit an ace for trips on the river. Fully expecting to win, I get it all in on the river and ... lose to another boat. Holy. Crap.

So, I was $200 in the hole at that point. However, those beats I didn't feel too bad about. I wasn't going to get away from those all that easily, so I felt like I played them alright. So I continued playing. I won back two stacks over the next half hour and crawled back to take a slight loss overall today (including the session before dinner). Oh well, it sure beats being down more than that. In good news, I'm still up a few hundred dollars this month at Interpoker and need to clear just 430 points or so to complete my remaining $200 bonus (so I'm more than 2/3 done the total $200 bonus). That plus rakeback should leave me in a pretty profitable position ... assuming I can avoid being stacked too many times!

Heraldk

Thesis Progress

So Jonathan returned my thesis to me on Tuesday with modifications almost entirely fitting into the minor modifications category. So for the rest of the week I made the appropriate modifications and talked to Darse about the sections that needed a little work. So now Darse is doing a full read of my thesis and hopefully that goes well for the state of my thesis!This weekend I was notified about giving the GAMES meeting talk this week on DIVAT, so I'll be working on the presentation all this week. On the whole, however, my thesis is getting close to finished. Soon I'll be defending and then on to finding a job (scary thought).

In other news, this past week was crazy busy even though it was shortened by Thanksgiving (a Thanksgiving, I might add, that I had a dinner on each night!). On Wednesday, one of the new grad students hosted a games party with the idea of holding one on a weekly basis. I'm excited about the chance to play some of the games that don't really belong at games parties. On Thursday, Mike Smith had his free beer for successfully defending his masters thesis. So Diane and I joined him and several others for drinking beer and watching the oiler hockey game. A very exciting game, I might add! On Friday we played our second session of a Serenity RPG. Its interesting, though I'm having a little trouble getting into it.

Saturday was the games party at Michael Buro's place. It was really fun - I played three new games ... one of which was a new party game of Curtis'. Its kind of a cross between apples to apples and Balderdash. Lots of fun was had by all!

So life has been real busy lately. I'm trying really hard to keep the distractions from killing my productivity. Let's see how I do!

Heraldk

Poker Bankroll Building Part 3

This post is going to be quite a bit more choppy than the previous ones since this is when I stopped getting physical documents and really started utilizing Neteller for maximum bonus clearing power. This is going to be a complete rundown of my bankroll building up to the present day, so it might be a little long. After this, I plan on giving an update every couple of months so that I don't fall behind like this again! So this update will be a little different than the last. I will be talking about just my poker bankroll building leaving the casino bonuses to the next post. I'm going to separate each session based on poker room rather than by dates because otherwise this will be supremely confusing to follow!

Noble Poker

PSO launched an exciting new room with a gigantic bonus (at the time) of 100% match of $500. This room was called Noble poker, and I just happened to have close to that amount in my neteller account so I deposited in April 2005. I would play there over the course of several months. I did very well very early and was able to cash out my initial desposit on June 14, and continue playing there until I had cleared my entire bonus. In the end, I made $897 plus my $60 in PSO points.

Net: $897 + $60 PSO points

Paradise Poker

During my time at Noble I also started the paradise poker promo through PSO. From my $200 deposit, I made another $80 cashing out only a week later. In addition, PSO paid me $60 in PSO points. I rather liked my experience at Paradise, so much later I would attempt a reload bonus there in November 2005. This time, however I would lose $195 ... perhaps because I had grown accustomed to having poker tracker stats of players!

Net: -$115 + $60 PSO points

Party Poker

Party Poker figures into a lot of short play segments partially because they had one of the fastest cashouts available. As a result, I would deposit there for a bonus and then withdraw via cheque to actually aquire my funds. Since then, I have been using neteller cheque withdraws since they are fast and only cost $2. This way, all my cashouts happen from the same place and are logged. The early times caused some confusion in recreating my play history!

Anyways, I played several sessions at party poker having mixed results: June 23/05: $87 profit Oct 6/05: $4 profit Apr 12/06: $150 profit (Party gave free money and I went on a nice run) Jul 13/06: $8 profit (Received a gc for a casino bonus, this was the poker play part)

Net: $249 profit

Poker Rewards

Another PSO promo with a healthy deposit bonus, I deposited $400 in Jun 2005, and cashed out $654 just a couple weeks later with yet another $60 in PSO points. Much later, I would deposit for another deposit bonus in April 2006 to qualify for a PSO freeroll. I didn't do too well on that deposit losing my bonus and $21.72 on top of that. Thankfully, the freeroll was both underpopulated and I finished in the top 20 which paid my $200.

Net: $832.28 + $60 PSO points

Ultimate Bet

This is my rakeback room, so I would play here many times, but not for very long segments since I jumped around to do new PSO promotions as they popped up. This is a very confusing thing to track as well because I deposited several times in order to rack up deposit bonuses that don't expire. I still have a lot of bonus money to clear there! I made deposits in Jun/05, Dec/05, Feb/06, and Apr/06, and to this day still have money in that account. I did not play well there though, and frustratingly saw net losses at several points. Thankfully, that seems to have turned around the last time I was there plus all the rakeback I've received.

June/05: -$32.90 losses Dec/05-Feb/06: -$67.76 losses Apr/06-present: $130 profit PSO Rakeback: $147 in PSO points

Net: $29.34 + $147 in PSO points + 1 poker book from player points

Aztec Poker

This is another rakeback room that I started because I was I wanted some variety for my rakeback rooms. I didn't play there much because I ended up not liking the room very much, and ended with slight losses Net: -$16.05 losses + neglible PSO points

Full Tilt Poker

Probably one of my favourite online poker rooms so far, I have played for many months at Full Tilt enjoying fairly decent success. It is the room where I moved up to 2/4 limit eventually and started winning regularly there. I probably still make many errors, but between the deposit bonuses and my small winning rate I turned a neat profit. I'm disappointed that I don't have rakeback there, or I would play there more often. Even now, I still like to go back there. I played there enough that I saved enough player points for a very snazzy micro-suede full tilt jacket.

Jul/05-Nov/05: $607 profit + $60 in PSO points Jan/06-Feb/06: $201 profit Apr/06-Jun/06: $250.35 profit Jun/06-Aug/06: $425.45 profit

Net: $1483.80 profit + $60 PSO points + 1 micro-suede jacket

Titan Poker

After my success with Noble Poker, I was enthused about having another shot at it when it was rebranded Titan poker and re-available as a PSO promotion in Sep/05. This time, however, I did not enjoy the same success and ended up losing $72 on the deal. Fortunately, the PSO bonus was $90 in PSO points, so I barely gained on the promo.

Net: -$72 losses + $90 PSO points

Sun Poker

Another PSO promo I attempted in Oct/05, this one I eeked out a profit on even though I didn't like the site due to the lack of tables to play at. It did however get me my very first and so far only royal flush!

Net: $24 + $60 PSO points

Absolute Poker

I returned to Absolute to play in the PSO league that happened earlier this year. I did well in the first league event, but after that played rather poorly and stopped playing after it became clear I wasn't going to be able to compete for the big prizes. In ring game play I also did rather poorly, so I cashed out with a $70 loss.

Net: -$70 losses

Pokerroom

Pokerroom was the very first room I got a start with way back when, but I never deposited any money there. I learned from PSO that if I had them close my account, I could open a new one through PSO 6 months later and take advantage of the PSO bonus. In Apr/06 this period had passed so I deposited and made a decent $198 profit plus my PSO bonus

Net: $198 + $90 PSO points

Pokershare

Pokershare was the newest PSO promo in Jun/06 and it is by far the worst I've done on any promo. Unfortunately, there was almost no limit action there so I was either forced to play 2/4 shorthanded or no limit both of which were not comfortable games for me at the time (and still at the moment). I managed to get through the promo losing $138 which was countered with the $90 PSO bonus.

Net: -$138 losses + $90 PSO bonus

Dream Poker

Dream poker is currently the newest PSO bonus room, and I finally took advantage of this promo in Aug/06. I deposited for the full deposit bonus, but today I cashed out having only received 1/4 of it. Being a prima poker room, I didn't like the lack of games in the evenings (since the majority of the players who play there are european). However, I made a decent profit playing 1/2 shorthanded and cashed out $124 profit plus my PSO bonus.

Net: $124 + $60 PSO bonus

PSO Referrals and Other points

My referrals kept rolling in at a regular but slow pace and I made a startling $250 in referrals since the last post. In addition, there was a forum contest that netted me another $25 in PSO points.

Net: $275 in PSO points

Totals!

Net this post: $3496.37 profit + $1052 PSO points + 1 small poker book + 1 microsueded jacket

Net Poker Winnings to date: $4582.37 USD + $3490 CAD + $1442.50 PSO points + 1000 chips + 1 poker book + 1 microsuede jacket

It isn't enough to make a living off of, but I think I've proven that I can make money at poker online. I've had some rocky patches, but that's how it goes! Thanks to WoW, I haven't been playing much online poker lately, but I intend on returning to it and learning how to play no limit well.

There will be one more post in this series that summarizes my online casino bonus gathering. I've been pretty successful at that too, so I look forward to showing how profitable that can be!

Heraldk

Last Conference Day

Well today was the last day of the conference, so tonight is the last night in Boston. Man, time goes by quickly, particularly when you're being kept crazy busy! Tonight's post is only one day of coverage so shouldn't be quite so long. This morning was another 8am wakeup. The night before we had Brad and Chris stay the night in our room since they hadn't had a place for the night. Apparently the hotel hadn't managed to find them a room in the hotel for them that night despite them being on the waiting list for a room over a month ago. Plus a couple people we personally know booked rooms since and got in. Weird.

Anyways, we got up and proceeded to get breakfast again before heading to the first paper talks of the day. The hilight of the day were the talks by Mike Smith and the other speakers at the "Hall of Champions". The first speaker was from Austin, Texas and he talked about their general game playing program (they had the 2nd annual competition this year at AAAI). The 2nd speaker was from the DARPA grand challenge winning team from Stanford. It wasn't the same guy as the last talk from the same group - instead it was the lead programmer. Not a long talk since it was for a paper, but it was still very interesting to hear them talk about the sort of challenges they had to deal with. Mike did well at his talk, considering he had to follow up such a crazy intelligent presenter. The pool stuff is actually really cool, so I don't think there was much trouble having people pay attention to his stuff.

After the talk, we wandered over to a session that was pretty much a UofA hilight session. Michael Bowling gave a talk, his student gave a talk, and Doug (another UofA grad student) gave a talk as well! All told, Michael Bowling had his name on SIX AAAI papers this year, which is pretty insane. That's a whole lot of work he's got his fingers into.

Lunch was the next thing on the plate, so we organized and went out for lunch again at the LTK. It was okay, though they weren't quite so snappy with the service that we've seen in the previous visits, so I wasn't as impressed. Still, I was happy.

The last talk we attended was the results for the three competitions that were run. In particular, these were the general games playing competition, some sort of robot interaction/integration competition, and of course our poker competition. Yay for the UofA!

We had the afternoon/evening free from the conference as this pretty much wrapped up the events. So we got up and headed out to find an ice cream place Nolan claimed was supposed to be really good. It was called Toscanini's, and it was actually not bad but I'm not too sure it was worth the long trip and the cost of the ice cream itself. It wasn't the marble slab! Still, one cannot argue with ice cream!

We returned to the hotel to meet some people after wandering around Harvard with our ice cream. Then we headed out for dinner - and got lucky. We tried the "Barking Crab" which looks like a popular place. Unfortunately, so popular that we had no chance of getting in in time to sooth our hungry stomachs. So we left and headed downtown - and caught the kitchen still open with about 10 minutes to spare at a bar called Coogans or something of that flavour. The food was alright, but nothing incredible. Still, it was good to get some food. This being the last night, several people drank heavily but I didn't really feel like having too much. I did join them for a drink called the "Dirty Girl Scout" which turned out to be a drink with Baileys, Creme de Cacao, Creme de Menthe and Kahlua. It was *really* good - so you should try it sometime!

We stayed for awhile until the bad bar music got on our nerves and several of us left. I had brought my tripod and got some neat shots of the tower that was close to the quincy market. There was a fog over the city almost all day and this made for some interesting pictures.

And now we're back in the hotel room. I'm gonna try and pack up most of my stuff so I just have to shower and meet up with Mike - we're off to foxwoods tomorrow morning! w00t! Wish me luck!

Heraldk

Boston Conference Begins!

I haven't had a large amount of time to actually sit down and keep up my journal, and I'm falling rapidly behind as a result, so I think I'm going to try and very quickly summarize what I've been up to. After exploring the MIT and Harvard campuses, we returned to the hotel via transit and joined several others for an excursion to find dinner. So ... apparently Bostonians don't eat dinner on Sunday nights. There were very few restaurants that were actually open, and it took us a couple hours to find a restaurant suitable for all of us. Finally we did though, and enjoyed a dinner at an Irish pub called Ned Devine's where I got myself some fish & chips.

Afterwards, we went and got a drink at another bar near by and then wandered back to the hotel to play some poker before bed.

The next day (Monday), I had a volunteer shift at the conference so I got up early to head over to the conference location. My task was to take tickets for the first two hours of one of the tutorials which was a little boring, but not something I was too concerned with.

After my shift was over, I snuck into a workshop session on heuristic search since this is something I'm actually interested in. I stayed for a few talks before I had to sign in for my last volunteer shift. Oddly enough, they had moved the stuff out of the booth I was supposed to be working, and the work there was simple enough that the registration desk could handle it so I was out of some work. I got the assignment of "help out at the pre-registration desk". Huh. Well I got leave to run over and join some people for lunch, and then come back and finish my shift later since I really had no set task.

After lunch, I came back and sat at the pre-registration desk which was actually pretty fun. I chatted with a couple of grad students for awhile about research and several other things. One guy had the same digital rebel camera I had and we talked about flickr and our photography experience together. If you're interested, he's one of my flickr contacts.

My laptop battery ran out, and I took this as a signal to finish the shift that was long since over so I left to go chat with the poker people about setting up our booth. We decided how we wanted the room setup and agreed to meet at 7:30 the next morning (and before the first keynote) so we could setup and get organized.

Monday was an empty-ish day for the conference as people were still arriving for the first day. The evening was the only all-conference people event which was a *very large*. There was snack food of many types, and there was even waiters carrying around more fancy hot food from the kitchen including some chicken satay skewers that were awesome. We were there for awhile, but then a large group decided to head out for some real dinner. A ... very large group.

After dinner, Darse and I headed back to the hotel (rather than joining a group staying out a bit later) because we needed to work on some slides for the next day. We decided we wanted to set up a DIVAT poster so we could use it to discuss our research to people who were interested in it. It took us awhile to get some stuff done, but we did get a couple done before our brains were fried and Mike returned to play some more dealer's choice style poker. Once Nolan and Mike got back we turned it in for bed around 1:00am.

Yesterday was the first full day of main conference talks. I got up early to go to the poker booth and help setup. Darse and I found some time to finish up our DIVAT slides/poster which we printed via our hotels awesome complimentary colour printing. After finishing those, we helped setup everything else and got a display setup for showing matches. We had a fair number of people come in and talk to us which was pretty cool. I have the feeling we're going to see some news articles in the next week or so on the poker competition at AAAI since there was at least two or three press people there.

The first keynote talk was one on the semantic web which I didn't really understand and I was pretty hungry so it was hard to concentrate on it. After the keynote I returned to the poker room to make sure everything was all setup and eat the sandwhich Darse bought for me. I spent a fair amount of time during the day answering questions in the poker display room despite the various talks that were going on during the week. Mostly, I wasn't all that interested in the talks that were being presented. I did attend a talk by the professor who lead the DARPA grand challenge winning team. For those who don't know, the DARPA grand challenge was a race for robot vehicle drivers. Each team was supposed to build a robot to race a vehicle through the desert somewhere in the US. It was a really impressive talk, with a lot of video that was really enjoyable to watch.

Afterwards, I returned to the poker room where we answered questions for awhile. A large group of people planned on heading out for dinner so I joined them. This time there was a significant non-ualberta contingent including a couple of girls from the University of Massachusetts and some people from the university of Maryland, and a few others I can't remember at the moment. We went to an 'asian fusion' place that I think was mostly americanized Chinese food place. It was actually not bad, but I assumed it was more americanized than it actually was and ordered expecting kind of a personal meal. Instead I had a plate of chicken much more like what you'd get at a real Chinese food place in Edmonton. It wasn't bad, but I didn't have much in the way of veggies!

Some of the people who were less fun (kidding) left to go back to the hotel and the rest of us decided to stay out a little longer and go to a bar for drinks and conversation. It sure was good to spend some time chatting with people from not the UofA. Not that UofA people aren't fun to chat with, its just that it seems odd to be at a conference where you're supposed to be meeting some new people.

We stayed out pretty late, and actually ended up getting caught in a pretty good rain storm. So the 4 of us walking back to the hotel were soaked - but we had fun!

It's pretty late and I still need to do email here, but I'll try and get today's and tomorrow's events up sometime tomorrow, but we'll see if that actually happens or not, but I'll try. Turns out that these posts take a long time to write!

Heraldk