The second World Golf Championship is upon us already so we’ve asked “Mystical” Mike Norman to look into his crystal ball and predict which Europeans and Americans will go well this week. Related posts: The Madrid Masters Betting: Spanish duo can go well on home soil It’s not just football and reality TV that “Mystical”… Alfred Dunhill Championship Betting: Three to look out for in season opener Although it’s only been a fortnight since last season’s..
Cool first day at the Venetian yesterday for the start of the NAPT event. My sense at day’s end was that most everyone — players, tourney organizers, media — felt it more than met expectations. As you’ve probably read elsewhere, the turnout was huge, with 872 players altogether, making the prize pool somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 million
Was looking back over the blog this week — the whole sucker, I mean, going all of the way back to April 2006 — and thinking about what would do for some sort of suitably momentous, whiz-bang-type message to deliver here in post no. 1000. It’s a big, intimidating number.
The Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has an interesting new piece in the February 11, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books , a review of Spanish writer Diego Rasskin-Gutman’s Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence of the Human Mind . Much of the article concerns the book, but toward the end Kasparov makes a couple of interesting references to poker — comparing it to chess and talking about both games in the context of advancing research in the field of artificial intelligence — that I thought I’d share here. Kasparov begins by recounting how back in 1985 — after he had defeated Anatoly Karpov and become World Chess Champion at age 22 — he took on 32 chess-playing computers in a much publicized event in Hamburg and beat them all
Noticed an item in yesterday’s USA Today about online poker, a reference to a newly-published study about online poker called “Social and Psychological Challenges of Poker” by Kyle Siler, a doctoral student in sociology at Cornell University. As usually happens with these articles that try to summarize a discipline-specific study for a wide audience, the USA Today piece boils Siler’s article down to one simple, easy-to-digest claim, essentially announcing that it shows “Poker wins often lead to bigger losses .” In other words, the USA Today article makes it sounds as though Siler’s exhaustive study of a large sample of online poker hands proves that players who win a little tend to lose it back and then some — confirming, in a way, the fears of those who object to poker and/or gambling as an inevitable road to ruin, regardless of one’s short-term successes. The USA Today article is accompanied by a picture of 2009 World Series of Poker champion Joe Cada, who does not actually figure in the piece
