Day 2 in Vegas. A draw, and Penn and Teller

We got up yesterday morning at a far too early hour of 8:00. Having gotten ourselves up, we congregated at the stoxpoker booth at around 9:00 so that we could take a group picture, and then get ourselves setup for the first match. Quickly, they threw a curveball at us. Nick, the guy who was supposed to play on the expo floor couldn't start at our designated 1:00 start time, so we had to start him at 11:00. We weren't quite ready, but we did in fact get him started in not too much time. Early on, Polaris was up a very large amount. But as soon as the first break was over at 200 hands, Nick started to play really well on the bad side of the cards to not lose as much as he could have. In the end, the humans tied Polaris with Polaris having a small 5 small bet margin. So Polaris is now 1-1-1 going into the second live match.

My job so far (and probably for the rest of the event) is to run around with my picture and take photos of the various people and the expo so that we can post them on the website. You can see a gallery of photos from day one here. I think I got some good photos, and I'll be aiming to get some better ones today.

After the expo was complete, we spent a little time cleaning up, and posting information to the website, but we had ourselves a relatively free evening. So a group of seven of us went to go see Penn and Teller. I enjoyed the show, but I guess I was a little disappointed at the same time. It felt awfully short to me, and there wasn't enough WOW moments. I mean, there was definitely some. Penn and Teller pulled off a pretty major shock value trick where they switched a person from the audience into Teller on stage. The trick setup was this: They called for someone from the audience who could handle a video camera. They get him up there, but while they are showing him the stage and everything, Teller is behind the set in front of a video camera there and says "this is not the trick he thinks we're doing", or something to that effect. They then go through a routine where Teller provides Penn with all sorts of props to have fun with the person behind the video camera. It's all very funny until the end of the routine where Penn gets up and says that there was a bunch of things that the person with the camera didn't get. There was even stuff the audience didn't get ... like that you are actually Teller. High shock value, and very clever -- although we think we figured out how they did it. I just wish there had been more tricks like it. Anyways, I enjoyed it and certainly thought it was worth my money.

We returned to our rooms to chat for a bit about the show and hang out for awhile. A couple of people who didn't go returned from the poker tables reporting that the games were rather soft. I'll have to sit down for a session or two while I'm here. I got to bed a bit earlier, but I think I'm still not getting enough sleep. One of these days I'm going to crash and need some serious snoozing time.

Diane's doing well, although I wish I could pay more attention to her. I'm glad she's down here with me -- but there's an awful lot of work to do during the matches. She's been taking Mike's video camera around and shooting the event, so it'll be cool to see what we can use those tapes for after the event is all over.

It's almost 9:00, so it's time to start the process all over again!

Morgan

Day 1 in Vegas

I don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to get something put up here about our first day here. Yesterday was a hectic day, which surprised me a litte. I kind of expected it to be a bit more relaxed. After I left that last arrival post, we headed out to get some food at a pretty late hour. We only found one restaurant tha was open called Sau Paulo, and since we were tired and hungry we decided to stop looking for any other options. The food was not too bad, but not incredible. It was cheap though. After dinner we retired to our respective rooms to collapse around 2:00am.

The next morning we got up around 8:00 to have some breakfast at the same restaurant as the previous night. We had walked by the buffet, but ruled that it was too expensive for just breakfast. Funnily enough, several of the people ordered orange juice when they were prompted by the waitress, only to later find out that the orange juice was a hefty $5 a glass!

After breakfast we returned to our rooms to setup a full test of all the software and pieces we needed to run the man-machine match. This was our big testing day, so we needed to make sure everything worked as expected. The testing took us all day. It took way longer than it maybe should've to set up the two sides of the duplicate match. We then had Duane and I play through a duplicate match and we got slaughtered by our own bot. Hmm.

After the test was over we went through a list of all the things that needed doing. The list was long, but we're lucky in that we have a lot of people to assign tasks too. We could never do all the things we're trying to do last year when we had 5 less people. During the test match, Mike B had spent some time setting up the stoxpoker booth and testing our client with the TVs to make sure that it displayed properly. The team then moved down to the expo floor to run a quick 30-hand test match on the expo floor. It seemed to work okay, although that too took longer than I thought it might.

After finally getting everything wrapped up, we went to dinner at Rub BBQ which was a pretty awesome place to eat. There was a great deal of food. I probably shouldn't have eaten quite as much as I did, but it was incredibly tasty. Mmm, pulled pork and beef brisket.

Dinner took a little while, but after we were done we returned to our rooms to work out some of the last remaining details we needed to for the next day. Our room was up until around 2:00am and I think the other room had a similar sleep schedule.

So we're up fairly early this morning to tidy our room a bit since our room will be the site of the hotel room side of the duplicate match. Then we go down to setup the hardware for the match so we can be ready to go at 11:00 am when the expo opens!

Wish us luck! Match 1 of 4 live matches begins today! Polaris is already tied 1-1 with humans so far.

Morgan

In Vegas, Baby!

It's been an awfully long time since I wrote a blog. Diane and I have been terribly busy trying to get ourselves organized. In the three weeks since the wedding, we've gone to visit my grandparents in Rimbey, moved Diane's stuff out of her old apartment, and handled all kinds of little details concerning moving to Ireland. I'm writing this on the plane on the way to Las Vegas. My research group is taking our computer program, Polaris, down to the World Series of Poker Expo. We're going to pit it against several top-notch poker professionals in an attempt to show how strong our program really is. The competition runs July 3-6th at the Rio hotel and casino if you just happen to be in the area ;-). If not, you can follow our progress on the match website here.

After the competition, it's relaxing time for us. Diane and I and a few of the members of the poker research group are going to stick around in Vegas for a few days. On the 10th, Diane and I split from the rest of the group to start our honeymoon. We're headed to San Diego from Vegas via Salt Lake City. After that silly looking flight we'll spend a day or two there and then board our cruise ship bound for Baja Mexico.

We're quite excited about the whole thing! It'll be good to get a break. We've been putting in some pretty long days in the past few weeks between work and moving Diane's stuff, and trying to organize what we need for Ireland. We're quite looking forward to getting some R&R time.

Before we get on the cruise ship, I'll try and make sure to have some relatively frequent updates to the blog. No promises, but I'm gonna try!

We just got into our room so I posted this and now I'm going to go pursue food.

Morgan

Dublin Interview

Diane and I left Edmonton Tuesday night for a quick trip to Dublin, Ireland where I visited Pocket Kings for an interview. If successful, we'll most likely move over there later in the year. Here's how the trip went. Our flight left Edmonton at 7:45 on Tuesday night. Our friend JR was kind enough to take us to the airport, so we arrived with more than the pre-requisite two hours to get through airport security. Having not eaten anything yet, we sat down at the Montana's in the waiting area and had a lazy dinner while keeping an eye on the hockey playoffs. It took almost an hour for the food to be cooked, I'm not too sure why they were so behind, but we had two hours to kill before hopping on the plane, so we didn't mind.

The schedule involved a roughly 8-hour flight to Heathrow airport in London, followed by a 2-hour layover there and a 1-hour flight to Dublin, Ireland. Surprisingly, the flight over wasn't too bad. Diane and I got the middle three seats of the Boeing 767-300. So we raised the armrests and had a chance to have each of us sprawled across two seats to sleep for a little while. I think I got about two hours of sleep on the flight, which wasn't too bad considering I don't tend to sleep well on planes. Diane did a little better than I did I think. As part of the entertainment, we saw the movie Enchanted which was kinda fun. It's not a terribly indepth movie or anything (being Disney), but it was cute.

We landed in Heathrow in around 1:30pm local time, and followed the appropriate paths out to terminal one where we had to catch our next flight. Heathrow differs from other airports I've been at in that they don't announce what gate you will be leaving at until a certain set period of time before your flight departs. So you wait in the large common waiting area for the magic board of numbers to show you what gate you go to, and then you run off to that gate because your flight is probably boarding already.

The flight from London to Dublin was pretty boring. In fact, it was the hardest part of the trip out there for me. We were trying to stay awake so that we could hit the time change running, and that proved awfully difficult on the less than one-hour flight over. But we arrived safe and sound in Dublin, a little dazed from the long travel, but not in too bad shape. We got into the hotel and made a couple phone calls to Darse and Mike who we planned to meet up with to see a little of Dublin and stay awake long enough to make sure we were going to bed at night.

So about an hour after settling into our hotel, Darse and Alexandra arrived at the hotel to show us around the hotel vicinity a bit and then we hopped aboard the Luas green light rail train headed to downtown to meet up with Mike. We took it all the way to the end of the line to St Stephen's Green station which lets you out next to St Stephen's Green (a relatively large public park with well-maintained flower beds and grass), and Grafton Street (a busy all-pedestrian shopping and pub area in central Dublin). Darse took us to a place he and Xan really like called Bewley's. They were heartily recommending the salads there so I ordered a goat cheese spinach salad that was very tasty and very filling. It had large bacon bits on it (bacon in dublin is a bit meatier and less fatty than north american bacon. It resembles back-bacon a lot more). In fact everyone at the table had a salad and they seemed to be enjoyed by all. I also got the opportunity to try out a Guinness competitor called Murphy's. I rather enjoyed.

By the time dinner was over, it was getting late since we sat and chatted for quite awhile. Before heading back to the hotel though, we tried to pull out some euros from a bank machine. Unfortunately, both Diane and I had trouble pulling money out - Diane even made the machine go out of service! Oops.

So failing that we hopped back on the green Luas and headed back to the hotel more than ready for bed. I tried to get a good night's sleep, but probably didn't get any more than 5-6 hours. I was to have a big day the next day, after all and I just couldn't get my mind settled down enough to sleep. Even after I got to sleep I still woke up at something like 3 in the morning - probably due to the jet lag as well as my nervous excitement about the interviewing the next day. Diane fared a lot better than I did and managed to sleep most of the night.

The next morning we ventured down to the hotel lobby to feast on the included continental breakfast. It was a decent spread, although it wouldn't change at all while we were there. There was some very tasty croissants, a decent selection of breads to toast, a large fruit tray, a cheese platter, some cold cut selections, as well as cereal, yoghurt, juice and even some fruit smoothies.

After relaxing a bit at breakfast, we ventured from the hotel to the pocketkings office. Diane was meeting Xan there to spend some time exploring Dublin while I got grilled and roasted in interviews all day. I'll let Diane tell you about her time exploring.

Okay, so it wasn't really a grilling session. Actually it was quite pleasant. Darse gave me a fast paced tour of the office -- which is spread over two floors in a building the Cherrywood science and technology park. The building is actually right across the street from Dell's Dublin office.

After getting a quick tour and a guest pass to give me access to the many, many security doors scattered throughout the office, I was sat down in a room to meet up with members of various teams within the company. The first person I met with was Aaron Davidson -- a former member of the UofA CPRG (although we never worked on the project at the same time). Aaron gave me a pretty good overview of what the structure of the company was. For those interested, there is a *lot* of breadth across the computer field at the company. Everything from low-level server programming, to hardware, to QA, to internal tool building, to website design maintenance and content, to ... well there's a lot there.

After Aaron, I met with a guy named Diarmuid who is one of the server guys. He drew me a very nice diagram of how the server powering full tilt actually works. It was a little overwhelming, but it was also pretty neat. It's a big event-driven architecture which impressively handles over 10,000 simultaneous users. It's pretty neat, but it also sounds like it'll have some pretty intense growing pains over the next few years. Working there seems like quite a challenge!

I had very short meeting with another member of the server team named Deoni (no idea how to spell that, so I apologize to him). The reason wasn't anything to do with us, but rather that it was lunch time. So we went up to the kitchen where pocketkings has a set of full gourmet chefs cooking up a storm for lunches. Through some sort of legal loophole they charge 0.10 euros for each lunch (just to avoid counting the meals as benefits). The lunch consists of your choice of any or all of 3 main courses, a choice of salads and sides and dessert. And it changes every day. Sounds like if I end up there I'm gonna have to watch how much I eat!

After lunch I spent some time with Darse chatting about bot detection techniques, and then I had meetings with Chuck and Brendan who are both leaders of various teams. The meeting with Chuck felt a lot more like an interview since he was asking me some of the typical interview questions. He was quick to explain what he was trying to do though -- he was trying to figure out how I would fit into the company, along with several other things like whether hiring me would be a good investment for the company since each employee requires a fair amount of training. I'm not too sure how well that conversation went, but it ended abruptly since I had to go talk to Brendan. That was a nice conversation -- we talked about several things including what direction the company is going and what challenges they are going to face over the next little while.

I was a bit overwhelmed at this point having met so many people and having had some fairly intense discussions, but Darse had two more people for me to meet: Henry and Shawm who are members of the Biz-Int (business intellgence) team. This team is the one that makes decisions about what games to run, what the policy of the site should be, the marketing, game fairness, and all that sort of thing. So that conversation was pretty interesting since both Henry and Shawm play poker and we got a chance to talk about things like the man-machine poker match and stuff that is near and dear to my heart lately.

After that meeting, I relaxed for a bit before we headed out to dinner with several of the Biz-Int team to a high-falutin (yup, I used your term, Darse) restaurant called Divas. I felt a bit underdressed since I hadn't dressed up for the interviews (if I had it would've been a bad move since the company isn't like that). The staff at the restaurant asked to take our coats when we entered, the food was fancy, expensive and small-portioned, and they didn't even serve beer! Still, it was a pleasant evening with lots of wine and we had more than enough food which admittedly was pretty tasty.

After dinner a bunch of us went down the block to an Irish pub to meet up with some of the server guys who were out having dinner to say goodbye to one of their members. So we sat down and I enjoyed my first pint of real Irish Guinness. It was pretty tasty, although to be honest I didn't really know how to tell the difference from home. I guess I hadn't had enough guinness in Edmonton to compare to it.

After dinner Diane and I caught a cab back to the hotel and fell into bed. It had been long day for both of us, although Diane got considerably more exercise than I did sitting around the office. I did decently for sleep that night although I was up and awake around 7am still wired and excited about the next day. I was considerably calmer than the previous night though since the first day of meetings went so well.

So we got up and grabbed our continental breakfast again and then I cabbed it into the office by myself this time. Diane had plans to meet up with Xan again to explore more of Dublin (I'm so glad that Xan did this for Diane so she didn't have to be all lonely for two of the three full days there!).

The second day at the office was much less demanding than the first one. It seemed that most of the meetings with new people were over, so I sat down with Darse for a good chunk of the morning talking about bot-detection. I think I've even contributed something to his efforts ... but we'll see how that goes.

Before lunch I met up with another member of the team who I can't remember the name of (sorry!). I enjoyed our conversation immensely, but I think part of the reason was just that I wasn't repeatedly exposed to his name ... and people who know me know how bad I am at absorbing names. In fact, I'm quite happy with how I managed with names while I was there! Anyways, we talked a bit about some of the not-directly-server-related topics that he was working on. He's building tools that can abstract important subsets of the gigantic event stream coming in into various views on those events that can be used to do useful things. Stuff like viewing "hands" is difficult on the event stream without a tool to help you do that.

We had another tasty lunch, and then I sat down with Aaron for a little while to take a look at some of the actual code in the server. It's a pretty intimidating system -- but it's nice that it actually has a fairly intuitive underlying design. It's just that the implementation definitely has it's quirks that make it a bit of a headache to deal with. So was pretty cool.

After that I kind of just sat around for the rest of the afternoon catching up a bit on some reading and hanging out around the server guys who were all working. We had dinner out planned with the server team, so I had to wait until after 6 before we left for dinner. It felt a bit weird not having people to meet then, but no one else had scheduled meetings with me and I didn't really know what else to do.

So after waiting for awhile we left for dinner. After the goodbye evening the night before though, only 4 of us ended up at the restaurant. Still, it was a good time with the conversation touching all kinds of different topics from poker to various work things to holidays and even some office gossip!

Dinner went fairly late, but Diarmuid was kind enough to give me a lift back to the hotel where I met back up with Diane and heard about her day. And then we got some sleep so we could enjoy our explore Dublin day!

After sleeping in a decent amount (and missing the continental breakfast), we got in touch with Darse who was kind enough to organize the other people we knew and we left to meet up at St Stephen's Green and wander around Dublin for awhile. After having a quick brunch (at 2:00pm) at the Croissenterie, and finally solving the bank machine giving us euros problem, we walked by several touristy things: Trinity College, Christ Church, Dublin Castle, Temple Bar, and another garden that I can't remember the name of that had a statue of Oscar Wilde. We also stopped in at a cafe in Mark's and Spencer (a department store), a couple of pubs (the Bull and Castle, and the Porterhouse), and eventually ended up going to dinner at Fives. (Lots of food and drink, if you hadn't noticed!).

Aaron wanted to go play some poker that night and I was curious to check out a european card room so Diane kindly let me go play for awhile. She hung out with Xan, and Aaron's wife Christine at Cafe En Seine, which is a nightclub close by the casino. Meanwhile Darse, Aaron and I bought casino memberships and headed inside to play some 1/2 pot limit hold'em. We played for a couple of hours, and both Aaron and I had really good sessions. Aaron made over 200 euro and I made over 240 euro! More details from that session on my own blog.

The ladies came and grabbed us and we shared a cab back to the hotel, saying goodbye to Darse, Xan, Aaron and Christine since our flight left the next day. It was a fun day of exploring, eating, drinking, and gambling! So thanks to all of them for making that possible.

The trip home was an ordeal, but not due to anything more than boredom on the flight home. You know it's a long flight when you watch the first movie, have dinner, and try and sleep for awhile ... wake up after what seemed like several hours only to find that there's still four and a half hours left to go! But we made it back to snowy Edmonton in alright shape. JR and Shelly were kind enough to pick us up at the airport and drive us back into town despite some terrible driving conditions. We counted TWELVE cars in the ditch on the way back in ... and there were still idiots speeding by despite the terrible road conditions.

So that was our trip. I think it went really well, but we'll have to see what happens here. It sounds to me like if an offer is coming, it'll be here within the next week. Wish me luck!

Morgan

Rimbey Trip Feb-23

We’re going to have to visit Morgan’s grandparents more often, even though they have moved to far away Rimbey. Morgan and I took a sunny drive out there on a Saturday several weeks ago and had a very pleasant time. We’ve been back since for Morgan’s grandpa’s 80^th birthday (!!!) and to help celebrate 55 long years of wedded bliss for him and Morgan’s grandma, but perhaps we ought to make that a special post all its own. This one’s from sometime in February...

We arrived at lunchtime and Morgan’s grandparents took us to a local restaurant called Monterey Jack’s. The owner/chef (whose name really is Jack) did his time at NAIT and has built a menu that is fairly extensive by small town standards and very reasonably priced. Not only did he serve us himself, but he offered various off-the-menu options, like grapefruit-and-something dressing for my salad (I don’t know what was in it, but it was great). The experience was as refreshing as the salad – with the small number of potential customers in his area, I guess Jack has to impress everybody to get repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising. Apparently it’s working. You’ll have to try the crème brulee cheesecake if you are ever in Rimbey!

You’ve got to love grandparents – it seemed that no sooner had we made it back to the house full of chicken cordon sandwiches than Morgan’s grandma sat us down for some of her uber-healthy bran+orange+raisin+cranberry+flax muffins, all pre-cut too. Food was kind of a theme for the day. There were certainly more colours on my plate at dinner than I’ve seen in my days of cooking for one – pot roast, spuds, gravy, corn, spinach salad with all the fixings, fresh grandma-made buns… and ice cream for dessert! Morgan and I are pretty sure we weigh about five pounds more that we did at the beginning of that weekend. We came home with freshly baked cookies and muffins, and if we had stayed the night, a hot batch of cinnamon buns could have found its way into our happily stretched tummies.

We did find time for a few things besides eating. We went over bits of the ceremony and vows with Morgan’s grandpa, who has agreed to marry us and who had to get a special one-day marriage conducting permit just for June seventh. We took the tour of the estate and put some holes in the walls for shelves, and then we played a game of “Murder” which is kind of like “Trouble”, but better. It was pretty tempting to stay and eat cinnamon buns and hide the measuring tapes and see the organ at the church on Sunday morning, but eventually we made our way back along the snowy roads to the familiar anonymity of the big city. We’ll definitely have to go back soon!

Diane