The (temporary) Death of Online Poker

April 15th, 2011 is now being known throughout poker circles as 'Black Friday' as the Department of Justice goes after some of the top executives of Full Tilt, Pokerstars and UltimateBet. If you are playing on any of these sites, you will not be able to play real money poker online if you reside within the United States.

This will be tough for a lot of players who depend on online poker for their living. Despite this setback, I firmly believe that a compromise can be reached between the DOJ and the proprietors of online poker sites within the next couple of years. There is just too much money out there for the government not to be regulating and taxing online gaming. We'll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, underground live poker will probably spread like wildfire. Watch out!

Finally

It's about fracking time.

The Greatest Song Ever Made

Breathtaking violins, beautifully crafted lyrics and a true ensemble of sounds help make Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve the greatest song ever made.

Getting Back Into Tennis

It's been difficult, but quite satisfying trying to get back into tennis these last few months. I still have things to tweak and fix, like my serve and ground strokes, but all in all I'm playing so much better than I could ever remember playing in high school. For my own inspiration, here are some slow-mo videos of Federer and Nalbandian. Enjoy.

Interesting Words

Words from the ancient Indian Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which I believe, to my limited knowledge, is a part of Hindu scripture.


"From delusion lead me to truth
From darkness lead me to light
From death lead me to immortality."

The Obama Doctrine

I discovered a fascinating article about Obama's radically different approach to foreign policy and the members of the think tank that are behind it. Can this be the solution to the currently flawed American foreign policy? Let's see.

My NCAA Tournament Prediction

I'm not a huge college basketball fan, nor will I ever expect to be one. But like so many others, I'm fascinated by the craziness that is March Madness. Even non-fans have come to appreciate the maddening task of trying to predict the NCAA tournament bracket. Although I'm not a college hoops fan, I am a fan of games. So one night I had an idea to come up with a program that would randomly pick the winners in the bracket.

Using no other information other than the bracket seedings, I assigned values to each of the teams. #1 seeds had values of 16, #2 seeds had values of 15 and so forth. I then added a random number ranging from 0 to 16 to each team's value. Using these values, I pitted each of the teams against each other. To reduce my deviations (too many upsets), I ran each of the simulated games three times (adding a new random number each time), which would give higher seeded teams an edge if the simulation ran infinitely, but was still random enough to allow for upsets. Whichever team won the most simulations out of the three runs was considered the winner and moved on to the next round. Applying this formula for every game and every round, I finally came to a tournament winner. And so the 2008 NCAA Champions will be..........

the Memphis Tigers.

Let's see if my crap shoot will pay off. Here's a picture of my complete bracket. Tell me what you think.