Have you heard of the following thread, confessions of a botter :

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...016-a-1619689/

Interesting read. The botter came in and candidly answered all questions about how to program a bot, how to get away undetected by sites etc., until posters were flaming him badly for ethical reasons and the thread died off... Curiously though, it is active since yesterday where the said botter came back under another pseudonym (but it does not sound like him, tbh...).

edit : not sure if you are looking to dig deeper into the subject/write an article about bots/AIs, but if such is the case, Lessu is who you want to talk to. He did his master's degree a few years back on detecting bots on the virtual felt and was employed by PartyPoker (he use to be active in the 888 and Party forums, but I unsubbed from those a while back...). He also created this thread about bots on 888 :

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...ighlight=lessu

^Going through the bot thread now. Pretty interesting. And it's been almost two years since that thread originated so I assume bots are an even bigger threat now, especially in wake of the ACR scandal of late.

Semi-related, I read a book about a year ago that anyone interested in AI capabilities and its future may want to check out: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. The documentary Lo and Behold (currently on Netflix) is also very interesting in its parts dealing with the same subject matter. I suspect the documentary AlphaGo (also currently on Netflix) is as well, but I haven't watched it yet.

Thanks for the recs, guys. Planning to read the confessions of a botter thread soon. The rise/prevention of pokerbots interests me less than the rise of AI in general, but I think both are fascinating subjects.

RE the AlphaGo doc, I read Cade Metz's article about AlphaGo a few weeks back and don't think I shared it here. He's a great writer to follow for more of the same. I'm looking forward to checking out the docs.

I'm also looking forward to....Lehhbron winning the Eastern conference finals!

Ah, your usual risk taking self. If you really believed, you'd think he could carry them all the way. Just saying.

Don't try to bait me into betting against your rockets.


Chin up dubn, they have a legit shot this year!

This is the book I had mentioned re: surrealism

http://mankinlevine.com/2018/04/read...hina-mieville/

Also, paging Lehbron. Playoffs have started. You might want to show.

Subbed!

This
reminded me of Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast. I'm confirmed lowbrow. Thanks for the writeup!

Are you a believer yet?

April recap?

since you asked...

April Results, May Goals, Hate Equity, Story Equity


[67] Play 75 hours
[17] Study 20 hours
[65] Write 50 hours

I’ve been aggressively word-vomiting every morning—usually about my daily affairs at Harradise and around the city—and that’s helped a lot, I think, as I limp through a few extremely busy months.

[3] Read three books
I read two short story collections: Adam’s Johnson’s Fortune Smiles and Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Of the two, I liked Adam Johnson’s the best. The whole collection is moving and ingenious and devastating. Makes me want to read The Orphan Master’s Son, but I doubt that’ll happen anytime soon.

I also read Sara Saedi’s Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card, an Iranian-American’s coming-of-age memoir. I liked it.

[ ] Win Fantasy BBall League

Epic fail!

Hate Equity, Story Equity

As venerable 2+2ers, you all surely know about different kinds of equity. This month I discovered a new kind of equity from Steve, a passionate liberal who’s been sporting a TRUMP SUCKS hat in tournaments across the Gulf South. Aside from its obvious political statement, the hat doubles as a potentially useful part of the metagame. "I have so much hate equity in these games it’s crazy,” he told me one day. You can imagine hate equity's ample benefits: Trump-lovers tilting their tomato-red heads off, social justice warriors punting stacks whenever they see a MAGA hat. The possibilities are endless.

Steve’s neologism got me thinking about something else: a table's potential to generate interesting stories. Hate equity got me thinking about story equity.

Story equity means table- and seat-selecting based on who looks or sounds interesting. It means showing up at 7 am on a Wednesday. It means leaving your table on a Friday night—when the room is hopping and the games are loltastic—to sit on harradise's steps and listen to someone who’s forgotten more about Nola poker than you’ll ever know. It means checking to see what kind of beer your opponent is drinking after your AK < A8.



For most pokerers, story equity is amusing at best, unprofitable at worst. And yet, for others, there may be mysterious benefits.

May Goals

With the Circuit Event coming to town this month, my story equity is high. Let's ship some anecdotes!

[ ] write 75 hours
[ ] finish story draft

I’m heading back to a writer’s conference in Misippi and have two weeks to write 25 pages, weeeeeeeeee

[ ] play 100 hours

impressive shirt

stellar dog

Poker Faces in the Crowd: Brandon Daigle

This month I interviewed Brandon Daigle, a poker dealer at Harrah’s New Orleans. We discussed his path into dealing, his favorite tipping stories, hypothetical jackpot prevention, and his plans for the future.

Nice write-up, as always

I realize that Brandon Daigle does not originally come from New Orleans, but his anglophone first name followed by his francophone last name made me wonder about the Francophone scene in NO... Is there many French speaking peeps in NO? As a first language or second? Is it ethnical or not at all? From what I recall reading, there is allegedly 1 million+ Cajun/French Canadian descendants in that area of the world...

And a side-note on the tipping issue ; in Dawson in our 1-2 game, the standard tip for a 100$+ pot (which is just about every hand ), is a 5$ tip And it is 10$+ happens a few times a night. I never seen as generous in any game elsewhere. As a pro, it rubs me the wrong way, but as a local that knows all the dealer personally, I am happy to increase their hourly.

I really liked Fortune Smiles! The Orphan Master’s Son by comparison is a bit monotonic; though it's also a tour de force. Johnson also has an earlier novel and an earlier book of stories I plan to get around to.

That is indeed a stellar dog!

tx Dubn!

Yes, there are a bunch in Nola and in Louisiana. They arrived centuries ago, so for many Cajuns today, I think French would be their second language. I know very little about this subject.

An interesting sidenote about Chalmette, an area just east of the Lower Ninth Ward: I noticed when talking to Brandon (and others) that he has a conspicuously non-New Orleanian accent. As the story goes, a convent of nuns moved to Chalmette from NYC--to teach grammar school--and they passed along their accents to their students!

This makes me wonder: what's the biggest tip you've ever given? I'd be interested to know if anyone has topped Brandon's biggest tip ($250)

My biggest tip came on the tail end of an absurd heater, when Moby Dick raised, I 3bet AA, and he called. The flop came A33 and he started donking into me for huge amounts on every street. He did not have quads I tipped a greenbird.

$25 had seemed high to me until I talked to Brandon. Now it seems low.

It was your recommendation in the Books thread that led me to Fortune Smiles. Thanks! I'll let you know if I get to OMS. His research for that book sounds incredible.

Glad you appreciated it! I have many fond things to say about Max, but for now I'll let the stellar pic speak for itself.

May Results, June Goals



I feel so close to you right now
It's a force feel
I wear my heart upon my sleeve, like a big deal
Your love bows down, I mean surround me like a waterfall
And there's no stopping us right now
I feel so close to you right now
#wsop #wsop2018 #wsopc

May Results

[80] write 75 hours
[X] finish story draft
[72] play 100 hours

With the blinds at 150/300 in WSOP Circuit Event #6: $365 No-Limit Hold'em Monster Stack Re-Entry ($100K Guarantee) at Harrah's New Orleans, while I waited for another hand—a hand that I would surely play optimally on my path to a final table that would inevitably result in first-place cash and glory and a coveted gold ring—someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“I don't understand this," Chris said, showing me his phone. There was a picture of a Smurf standing next to three apples. "No way Smurfs are this tall."

It had been forever since I’d seen The Smurfs. "I thought they were way taller," I said. "Like, hobbit-sized.”

“They live in mushrooms,” Chris said.

"Have you tried Google?"

“I am. They’re supposed to be three apples tall.”

To my left, Captain Carl sniffed in disapproval. "No. Two apples max.”

June Goals

[ ] Write 50 hours
[ ] Study 20 hours
[ ] Play 50 hours
[ ] descend upon Vegas

I'll be at the WSOP from June 25th thru the Main. For those of you around, hit me up!

Grinder Gear

Louisiana State Capitol Building

Pedal Car

Count me in the "three apples" camp. Another solid month, nice job!

Poker Faces in the Crowd: Ben “BenaBadBeat” Raven

This month I interviewed PGC hero BenaBadBeat, who recently logged his 500,000th hand at PokerStars’s notoriously tough 500NL Zoom tables. Ben is also a graduate student in psychotherapy. Our conversation touches on Ben’s path into poker, the challenge of integrating poker with psychotherapy, and why most PGCs fail. Was a real pleasure, as usual.

I’m in the “somewhere tinier than Hobbits but taller than one apple” camp.

Thanks for the good wishes! I saw in your PGC that you aren’t coming out for the WSOP. I’ll be sure to endure some misery on your behalf

Speaking of Vegas, I’m slowly but surely heading West. Just wrapped up a fun weekend in Oxford Missippi for a writing conference. For those of you who like gritty southern fiction, you might wanna check out the guy who ran our workshop, Michael Farris Smith.

I got some good feedback on a poker piece, and even managed to fade the inevitable question from non-pokerers

Nice to be running well as the WSOP gets under way!

I’m off to visit Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge. #westwardho #holla

lol NBA, World Record Progression Vids

Now that the least enjoyable NBA finals in recent memory is over, I'll take meager solace in this ode to Lehhbron (courtesy of Makonnen) and my more-or-less-correct predictions itt:



partial credit?

On to the World Cup! I predict that the US doesn't win.

***

For any classic video game lovers out there, you might wanna check out SummoningSalt's YouTube channel. His World Record Progression vids are absurdly well-made, and he also hold a WR in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!. What I enjoy seeing most is how speedrunners collectively maximize every edge for years until a near-perfect strategy is found.

Have u written anything about how the sites could be rigging the games online ??

Nope, been too busy limp/minreraising and watching speedrun vids

Ben, you might be interested in the newly released of The Pursuit of Poker Success, a book written by Lance Bradley interviewing 50 modern poker players about the ups and downs of the grind :

https://www.pokernews.com/news/2018/...oker-31048.htm

Enjoy your summer (and WSOP, I presume...) bro

He Played for His Wife and other Stories (Simon and Schuster, 288 pages)



Everything has its DNA, and poker must have its DNA, but it's harder to decode when there's a gun pointing over the table. Who knows if the code is in the cash or the cards, the coiling smoke or the crocodile faces. You'd expect the gun if this were a movie but it's not, it's your common-or-garden Friday night with pizza that also found the flair to mix a .38 Special revolver in a scene with alcohol, weed, testosterone and poker. To top it off, the owner cheats and still has worse cards than you.

—D.B.C. Pierre, "Five Tables"


I picked this up the other day, have read and enjoyed about half the stories so far. Here's a blurb:

Didn't realize that Jim McManus is writing a sequel to Positively Fifth Street called Good Luck, Everyone. The excerpt is written very much in the same style/persona: an aging Good Jim/Bad Jim hunkers inside Amazon, deep in a $1500 NL donkament, battling not only MAGA-bedizened grinders but also his failing health!

Other highlights include an excerpt from Peter Alson's forthcoming novel The Lucky and the Good, which is set in the world of NYC underground poker; and "Five Tables," a short story by D.B.C. Pierre, whose first novel won the Booker Prize.

There are some lowlights, too, as expected, but overall a decent collection.

Thanks for the rec, Dubn. I'd heard of the book but haven't read yet.

Summer's going well, thanks. Hope yours is too. Heading to the WSOP next week!

June Results, July Goals


After stopping in Faulknerville at the beginning of the month, I drove west through Arkansas and spent a night at an abandoned campground on Blue Mountain Lake, where I snapped the sunset above. I spent another night camping, donked around at the tables in Ruidoso NM, and enjoyed some much-needed R&R in Green Valley—or, as I like to call it, Peccary Paradise.

While there, I wrote a decent bit, dipped into some poker study, and prepared for the next leg of my summer road trip.

[58] Write 50 hours
[25] Study 20 hours
[] descend upon Vegas

I've logged five sessions in the last week or so. My first stop was in Tucson at Casino del LOL, which used to resemble a kind of poker hell in which beleaguered souls grinded 1/2 NL with a $200 cap. But now there are bigger games and a friendly, gambly vibe (on a Friday night, at least) thanks in part to GOAT OMC jrr. I always enjoy stopping in when I get the chance.

Talking Stick was about the same as I remembered. I saw this guy in the parking lot.

The games in Vegas have been either amazing or atrocious. For an afternoon, at least, we Made Poker Great Again at the Wynn. On the other hand, there's nothing I want to do less than sit with mute surly tablet-swiping grinders—whether they're sharks or whales, I don't care—and I'm already missing the friendly Nola poker culture.

[31] Play 50 hours

I'm lagging way behind on my yearly poker volume goal. I might need to book another volume bet in the fall...

July Goals

[ ] Write 75 hours
[ ] Play 50 hours
[ ] cover WSOP ME