Blackjack and Poker

Great post by HDouble on the lessons a poker player can learn from Blackjack. I only wish I had read this post before I went to Vegas.

Trackback Help

I’ve just implemented Trackback for my blog. If you’re reading this, and can spare a second, send me a trackback. Please let me know if you experience any problems.

Google Away

I realized shortly after launching the update to my site, that I had broken every link Google had for me. I’ll go into the details below, but suffice to say I needed to fix this quick. After all, Google has indexed over 1,000 pages from my site.

First of, you’ll notice as you browse that my blog URLs have extensions now (html, xml, etc). I decided (against conventional wisdom) to add back extensions because I think they make sense: they describe to the user what kind of file is being served. If the link has .html appended to it, you’ll be getting an HTML file. If the link has .xml appended to it, you’ll be getting a flavor of XML (in this case RSS 2.0).



This decision made it possible for me to generate RSS feeds for 5 different views related to posts:

1. All posts
2. Posts for a section
3. Posts for a year
4. Posts for a month
5. Posts for a day

Sure, the bottom 3 feeds are somewhat useless, but the architecture is flexible, and I like that. The next feature I might implement is search, and the current design makes it trivial to convert searches to feeds too.



So, the problem I had with Google was converting old links (with no extension) into the new format. This was accomplished using the Apache module mod_rewrite. Now, all requests for posts without a suffix will be redirected to the proper URL.

Wed Poker Tourney

Thanks to everyone who came out for DCPoker’s first poker night! We had about 11 or 12 guys and split up into two tables for a tournament. $20 buy-in, blind went up every 30 minutes.



All in all I was pretty happy with my play. I lost half my stack on the first hand when my KK lost to trip Q’s (he had pocket Q’s). Despite this, I clawed my way back, played aggressively, and made it to the final table. I was short-stacked compared to my competition, so I was playing pretty loose to compensate, try to steal some blinds. I went all in with A5 unsuited and lost to Bob when he matched with Q on the river.



There was a side game going on with all the losers that I jumped into for $10. On my last hand, I went all-in pre-flop with pocket Q’s. Eddie matched me and PMo followed suit. Everyone flipped their cards and I couldn’t believe it. Eddie had pocket rockets (A’s) and PMo had pocket 5’s. And guess who won? The 5’s of course.

Burning the Midnight Oil

Since I don’t have access to my server from work, making any big changes is difficult since I have to get it done before I leave for work the next day. Sprinkle in going to the gym and eating dinner, and the hours are few and far between.



In any case, I think I’m on my way to locking down my server. Here’s a before snapshot:

• Apache 1.3 (non-SSL) + PHP + Tomcat
• IMAP (plaintext over port 143)
• Sendmail 8.12.8 w/ old conf file

Here’s how things stand now:

• Apache 1.3 (non-SSL) + Tomcat (my blog)
• Apache 2.0 SSL (my WebMail)
• IMAP (checked over an SSH tunnel)
• Sendmail 8.12.11 w/ new conf file

So, I’m feeling better. Still needs some work, but I’m getting there.

Bad Times

My email is currently down. The problems I was having on my Linux box have not gone away, and as a result I’ve had to shut down my mail server. My friend Mark (who is hosting my box) is looking into it, but things don’t look good. Looks like it’s been hacked in to.



So, my naive view of the world on-line has been shattered. Spam, viruses, trojan horses, and hacking-in-general have been introduced into my life in a harsh way. Long term this is a valuable lesson to learn. At the moment it couldn’t come at a worse time.

DC Poker

The DC Poker mailing list is up and running. Unfortunately, this is coinciding with a problem I’m having with my email server. Some emails sent out for the list have been bounced back (Becca). Other people have reported that the emails are being routed to a spam folder (Greg). So, if you’re having any problems getting the emails, let me know.



If you you’d like to sign up, follow these instructions:

• Send an email to dcpoker-request@cubanlinks.org
• Set the subject line to “subscribe” (no quotes)
• Make sure to send from the email address you want emails to go to

Hopefully this list will grow, and we’ll have a few regular games on different nights in different locations so that everyone gets to play.



If you’re interested in the technical problems I’m having, read on.

Read more...

More Taste, Less Filling

You may (or may not) notice a slight re-vamping to my site. Under the hood, I’ve re-written and re-factored just about every line of code. The most signifact change is that I am now using Hibernate to interface with my database. Once I get the code cleaned up to my liking, I will post the source on this site.



There are some changes that you should notice:

• The list of blogs on the right is now powered by Bloglines, and is seperated by category.
• The URLs now have extensions (.html and .xml). These extensions determine whether to render the page as HTML or as RSS. So, just about every page on my blog is now also an RSS feed. If you only care about when I write about poker, then subscribe to poker RSS feed.
• I am in the process of adding Trackback support. Should be in sometime this week.
• Cosmetic changes have been made. Bueno?

Feed back is always welcome and appreciated.

Vegas, baby. Vegas.

No time for a full recap, but here’s the scoop:



I lost $1400 in black jack over the course of 4 sessions over 3 days. I won $260 in poker over the course of 3 1/2 hours before I had to leave to catch my flight home. I drank enough Redbull and vodka to kill an elephant. I averaged 3 hours of sleep over the past 4 nights.



Big ups to Dougie and Bummy for getting a room in a great hotel (the Hard Rock). Many thanks to Nicky for the hook-up at Coyote Ugly, the private party at Mandalay Bay and a place to crash. Thanks to Jane for meeting up with me and a great night.

Know When to Fold ‘Em

I had a terrible night of poker last night. Easy Eddie was pulling cards on almost every hand and a couple of times I stuck around for no good reason. Some things that are more solidly cemented in my mind (now):

• An unsuited Ace-6 isn’t a very good hand. I need to stop feeling so good about seeing that Ace.
• Don’t get emotional about what might seem like someone buying the pot. You’ll just end up trying to call their bluff at the wrong time.
• Stop getting so excited about low pocket pairs.

Taurus likes to refer to these things as “common sense”. I don’t disagree, but there’s a difference between knowing these things and remembering them during the heat of a game. I’m hoping these lessons will settle in to me by the time I head off to Vegas.