Part-Time Poker Comeback

After a long hiatus from poker and a brief foray into academia, I've decided to return to playing poker part-time. (Most of the rest of my time will be spent watching my two year old and three month old sons, and I'm also doing some politics/skeptic blogging, not to mention my return to this blog.) For the next two months, I'll be playing one to two tournaments a week in Charles Town West Virginia and putting another three to five hours a week into poker research and blogging. That's not a whole lot of time, but my no-limit holdem game was very strong as of 2011, so I'm hoping it won't be too hard for me to translate that into tournament poker once I get the rust off.

One tentative goal I have is to be ready to play in the WSOP in 2013. I will probably only do this if I think I have positive winning expectation. I'm not sure how to determine that.

Live poker was legalized in Maryland casinos on Tuesday via a referendum. So, poker will be spread here quite soon, pending the result of a comically silly lawsuit in which the law's opponents are claiming that it required a majority of "qualified voters"as opposed to a majority of those who actually voted. (I guess if this gets overturned, then so will the gay marriage, gerrymander, and DREAM acts that also passed by referendum on Tuesday here in Maryland. Not to mention the electoral votes given to Obama!) The new law didn't figure much into my decision, though. Indeed, none of the Maryland casinos seem to be much closer to me than Charles Town WV anyway, and, besides, I made the decision to return to poker before the law was even passed.

The two tournaments I will be trying to play each week are at noon on Fridays and Saturdays. The Friday tournament is $100 plus a $25 bounty. I have begun doing some analysis of Bounty tournament strategy, and I hope to have a post up about that next week. The Saturday tournament is a $250 tournament. So far I have played four times and won $225 in bounties (in a single tournament). No cashes.

On my poker reading list:
Poker Strategy by Nesmith C. Ankeny. This is a book written by a mathematician in the early 1980's focusing on draw poker. I had not heard of this book before I found it in my local library system last month, and I'm very interested to see what the state of the art in poker game theory was thirty years ago. I've started it, and so far the author is on target with his poker philosophy, but he hasn't gotten into any real analysis. He has an unusual writing style that can interferes with getting to the point, but it can be amusing. For example (p 5):

A poker player considering luck in planning his moves at the poker table is like the Pope contemplating marriage. The thought is heresy and can only lead to trouble.

Poker Face: Mastering Body Language to Bluff, Read Tells, and Win. Also from the library, I thought this might be a more analytical version of Mike Caro's classic Book of Poker Tells, but after flipping through it, this one looks very fluffy and has no pictures. I'll take another brief look to see if there's anything worthwhile.

Kill Everyone. This book's peculiar name stems from its predecessor, Kill Phil, referring to Phil Hellmuth. One of the three authors is a professor at UMD College Park, and it looks reasonably analytical, so I think it will be worthwhile.

The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition. This is a book I bought a while back because I was interested in a few sections in particular. I really liked the analysis so far, and since it focuses on tournaments, I think it will be very worthwhile for me to read. (Full Tilt's legal issues notwithstanding.)

Should Poker Players Want Jackpots in Their Games?

This is the second in what I hope will become a series of posts on the things that (good) poker players should look for in an ideal casino game. Regular players in poker rooms hold sway with the casino management, and this series can be viewed as my personal commentary on what I think you should be lobbying for if you are a good poker player.

Entering "jackpot" into the search field on this blog yields many instances of my bemoaning their existence in my games, but in truth my disdain for jackpots has waned recently. (This is decidedly not due to the fact that I've won a substantial amount from jackpots, which many of my casino acquaintances assumed would change my negative opinion of jackpots in general. Talk about results-oriented thinking!) There are many different types of jackpots awarded in poker games at casinos. In Los Angeles, the "Bad Beat Jackpot" is by far the most pervasive, but in Las Vegas, I think the "High-Hand Jackpot" might still be more common. Both usually take $1 out of each pot (sometimes only if there is a flop) and award money to players in rare instances such as losing with a very strong hand (Bad Beat) or just winning with certain types of very strong hands (High Hand).

For this post, I'll be thinking primarily of the "Bad Beat" type of jackpot, which I think is the worse of the two. I'll be looking at how it affects the three main concerns I mentioned in my previous post:

1. Maximizing Winnings.
2. Having an enjoyable social experience.
3. Playing a pure, intellectually stimulating game of poker.

I don't have anything to say about concern #2 here, but some players may have a strong personal preference for or against jackpots. Personally, I don't like them much. Let's look at concern #3 and then #1.

If playing a pure game of poker is your main reason for coming to a casino, you will hate jackpots, especially bad-beat jackpots. For purists, putting finely-tuned poker strategies to work against real opponents is the essence of what makes playing poker worthwhile. It can be a joyous experience to put theory into practice and have it work out. Jackpots destroy this by changing the players' incentive structure, thereby interfering with the logical inferences about your opponents' decisions that characterize a pure game of poker. These disruptions are most evident in Bad Beat Jackpot games during hands where there are two Aces on board, because the easiest way to win a jackpot is for a third Ace to hit the board while one player has the case Ace and the other player holds a large pocket pair. Winning the actual pot becomes insignificant, with players focusing only on making sure they do not miss out on the 1/40 or so chance at winning a few thousand dollars.

There is another, subtler, consequence of jackpots on the purity of the game that is often overlooked. The $1 jackpot fee is taken from each pot, and this affects optimal play. A slightly smaller pot means that it's optimal to play slightly tighter (and, if other players make are making that adjustment, it becomes correct to play more aggressively). This is a minor disruption, but it is made worse by the fact that another $5 is usually being taken out for the casino's rake, and my sense is that each extra dollar taken out is marginally worse than the previous. (Consider, for example, the effect of taking the first dollar out of a $1000 pot compared to taking the thousandth dollar out after already removing the first 999!) In No-Limit Hold'em, which already has a problem of having too little action when everyone in the game is solid, the problem is especially pronounced. A future post may explore the possibility of adding an ante to NLHE games in order to liven them up a bit.

The jackpots introduce opportunities for corrupt practices by players, dealers, and administrators. Honest players now have one more thing to be on the lookout for in order to protect themselves.

When a jackpot is actually hit, the game comes to a screeching halt. Winners celebrate, decks are examined for evidence of cheating, administrators skim off the top of the jackpot (legally and sometimes illegally), ID's are taken out, and forms are filled out for tax purposes. A nightmare for a purist who just wants to sit and play poker.

I hesitate to call myself a purist (after all, it ranks third on my list of concerns), but maybe I am. Certainly, I'm sympathetic to this way thinking, and I consider "game purity" to be the major reason to dislike jackpots. I previously would have told you that Maximizing Winnings is my primary issue with jackpots, but the effect of jackpots on winnings is actually pretty complicated. Let's examine the pros and cons.

Having often argued against jackpots, I'm well-versed in the negatives. The simplest possible analysis is to look at the EV of each dollar paid into the jackpot. In California, I've been assured that the casino is allowed to take 15% for administrative costs, so each dollar returns 85 cents at best. (This is assuming you can trust administrators not to skim off the top.) The money you put in will sit around for months, on average, so the net present value of that money is slightly less than 85 cents. Then, you are expected to tip. (Tipping can be forgone, I suppose, but everyone I know has tipped after their jackpot wins.) Most players tip 5-10%, so our return is now down to about 75%.

Things are still worse than that, though, for several reasons. First, jackpots increase the volatility of our win rate substantially. Second, the deck-checking is unfairly biased towards delaying the jackpot payouts, because they are occasionally cancelled. (Once in a while the deck-check reveals a bad deck and the jackpot is not paid, but is it very rare for a deck to be checked when the jackpot is not paid out. This means sometimes payments have gone into the jackpot drop in hands that would have been voided had the jackpot been won and the deck checked. To be fair, the decks should be checked every time a dollar is paid to the drop, but this is impractical for obvious reasons.) Third, the slightly smaller pots mean tighter play becomes correct, and this can cut into the win rate of strong, creative players. Fourth, when the jackpot is actually won, the game will be delayed, eliminating winnings you expected to have during that time playing poker. These factors are hard to quantify, but I would say that between the EV and volatility issues another 5% of utility is lost. So, we are at about 70% return, assuming there is no cheating or illicit skimming by the casino management.

I've heard a few good arguments for having jackpots amid many weak arguments. The most worthy argument is that jackpots attracts amateur players.  All else being equal, having to play the jackpot drop costs me about $4 an hour and in the long run I get paid back about $3 in jackpot winnings. So, ignoring strategic effects and time delays, it really only costs me about $1 per hour. On the flip side, a single fish at the table is certainly worth much more than this. Even just a slightly weak player can make up for that $1/hour jackpot loss. Moreover, a good player will tend to play hands that have a good chance at making a jackpot, such as high pocket pairs or big Aces. This means that, for good players, the return on investment should be slightly higher than for weaker players. My sense is that this is a very minor effect, but I could be wrong. It is something, at least.

In conclusion, I would say that the only very significant effect of jackpots on any relevant concern is on the purity of the game. Jackpots are unmitigated disasters for game purity. However, your bankroll will benefit if the jackpot scares off the other poker purists. Purists tend to be good players. If your only concern is for making money, the jackpot might actually be helping you in the long run by attracting worse players to the game. Keep in mind, however, that if these worse players are not in the game at any particular time, you would certainly be better off without the jackpot drop.

*****

I did not get into the UMD College Park Applied Math department. I am leaning towards accepting the position in the PhD program in Statistics at UMBC.

Advice That Will Help Both My Opponents and Myself

Most of the advice and analysis on this blog could easily be used against me if readers found me at their poker table. (Indirectly, it can hurt me even if we never play against each other by marginally improving the play of the average poker player.) I enjoy doing strategy and hand analysis on this blog, and I think it's been worth any small amounts of EV I may have lost.

A commenter (Rick) suggested that I give some advice that would actually help me if it were followed by my opponents. This sounds easy: Just give bad advice! An intriguing idea, but it wouldn't make much difference because my poker-playing readers can mostly discern bad advice from good, anyway. Fortunately, there is another way: Give advice that helps not only me but also my opponents. This is clearly the angle Rick was suggesting. This seems like a good idea, so I'm going to devote a few posts to encouraging behavior that will improve the culture of casino poker.

When I'm in a poker room, I have three main concerns. Players will surely differ on the relative importance of these three factors, but I think nearly all players are implicitly concerned with these three things. For me, I would rank them as follows.

1. Maximizing my winnings. This is an explicit goal of most players, and the main concern of most poker pros. Like other poker players, I tend focus on ways in which I can win money from other players, but there are also plenty of things players can do to help not only themselves but also other players (either all the other players or some subset).

2. Having an enjoyable social experience. Poker is a social game, after all. Occasionally, I will come across players for whom this seems to be the primary goal of their poker games.

3. Playing an interesting game of poker. This is the concern of the poker purists, who play for the love of the game.

The first piece of advice I want to give is conventional wisdom but is very difficult for many people to follow: Be nice to the bad players. This helps the other players fulfill Concern #1 because the bad players are likely to stick around for longer. It usually also helps the bad players fulfill Concern #2. Unfortunately, poker players are often too immature to resist castigating bad players for bad beats and the like. Personally, I also wish that people were nicer to the good players, but that is not necessarily good for fulfilling Concern #1. There are a few of players at the Bike who are so unpleasant that I tend to try to avoid them, and I imagine it is good for their win rate to get me out of their games.

That's it for today. Stay tuned for my next attempt to help improve the culture of casino poker.

*****

I've been taking an online course on game theory run by two professors at Stanford.

*****

I got into the PhD Statistics programs at UMBC and George Washington, but without funding. I'm still waiting on UMD College Park's PhD program in Applied Math, Applied Statistics, and Scientific Computation.

What is one piece of advice you would give to a beginning player?

I've been using this blog to answer questions that I got during the Mathematical Poker talk I gave last month. In the coming week, I'll answer two or three other questions that I did NOT get. They are sort of standard interview-type questions that I thought I might have to answer during the talk, but they didn't come up. I feel like answering them anyway. The first one I'll address is how what advice I would give to beginning players. I am assuming they will be playing no limit holdem.

If I really had to give only one piece of advice, it would be to play as low stakes as possible and fold almost everything as soon as possible. Most new players play way too many hands, most of which they will have no idea what to do with. Even good players would lose if they played that many hands, and new players will probably lose way more with them.

However, the answer really depends on what you hope to get out of poker. The above advice is good if your goal is to play and lose as little money as possible. However, many players will have other goals. For example, if you have played very little poker and your goal is to:

1. Make money. My advice is: don't play poker. You'll probably lose because your opponents are probably better than you.

2. Get better at poker. First, read a lot. If I can give more than one piece of advice: think about your own hand ranges with each action you take. (If your opponent knew your strategy, would he be able to figure out what you have?) Third, keep track of your results and, if you play online, keep track of your statistics.
Fourth, play lots of hands and raise a lot. (This puts you in the action and gives you lots of experience and you will learn how your opponents react to you. The downside is you will probably lose a lot of money in the meantime.) Fifth, play high stakes. (Again, you'll lose a lot, but this is the fastest way to learn how to win at these stakes.)

3. Get better without losing so much. Same as the previous answer, but skip the fifth point above and moderate the fourth point. I would still advise playing hands that yield slightly -EV because this is a good way to gain experience.

4. Have fun but don't lose too much. Think hard to try to figure out what your opponents have and try to exploit them. If this isn't fun for you, you probably do not like poker. Don't try to trick your opponents too often, because this will lose you money. Play very low stakes, fold a lot, and raise a lot. Folding a lot is not fun, but it is absolutely essential to avoid losing a lot. Make your raises bigger than the size of the pot. If this means putting in more than one quarter of your stack or your opponent's stack, just go all-in. This makes it very hard for better players to take advantage of you.

*****

I didn't get into UPenn Wharton statistics or UMD economics. Those, along with JHU biostat, were probably my only chances at an academic career. I'm still waiting to hear back from three other PhD programs that are less competitive. If it doesn't work out, I always have poker to fall back on! Perhaps I could become a professional blogger. (Or I could try to get a late application in somewhere, like GW econ or UMD Law.)

*****

I signed up for a free Game Theory course offered by Stanford.

Would you recommend professional poker or grad school to people graduating with a math major?

I got a question similar to this one at my mathematical poker talk last week: Would you recommend professional poker or grad school to people graduating with a math major?

The answer certainly depends on the individual. Five or ten years ago, poker was much easier and if you liked the game and studied it for a few weeks you could probably beat the players in the casino. The games in the casinos (as well as online) have gotten much tougher since then, and it really takes a lot of work to develop the skill to make over $5/hour now.

Having never been to grad school, it would be difficult for me to say whether it's a good decision. Obviously, I'm planning to quit poker in order to begin grad school, so in my case I decided that grad school is probably the best option for me. However, this doesn't mean that I think I should have gone straight to grad school out of college. If I had done that, I don't think I would have known why I wanted to go to grad school, which might have made it difficult to motivate myself into being a good student.

For me, the desire to go to grad school developed over a number of years of feeling more and more socially irrelevant. Swarthmore encourages social consciousness, and I guess this might have rubbed off on me a bit. Over the years, the feeling that I could be doing something more worthwhile with my analytical abilities has been gnawing at me. As I've become more politically conscious, my desire to try to make a difference has really increased. I'm not sure that grad school is necessarily the ideal way for me to make myself more relevant to society, but I think it is a reasonable enough way to get started on that path.

That's more or less how I answered the question during the talk. Let me now expand on my answer a bit. The lifestyle of a poker player has many benefits that I could document, but the bottom line is that it can be very stressful if you don't have BOTH the right mindset and the ability to win comfortably. It also helps to be financially stable from the outset. I had the good fortune to have no debt and in fact quite a bit of savings when I started. I also happen to have an ideal temperament for poker: I don't get at all upset or angry about bad luck. This is part of what I mean by having the "right mindset." The right mindset also includes focusing on making good decisions as opposed to focusing on your financial results. Basically, having the right mindset involves adjusting your perception of money in order to subordinate its importance to the importance of good strategic play. Even if you have the ability to have right mindset, though, it's not going to work unless you are also a substantial long-run winning player. If you're just barely a +EV player, I think it's going to wear on you. A $1000 loss is going to take an average of 200 hours to make up if you only win $5 an hour. That is likely to be stressful even if you are predisposed to having the mindset to focus on strategy instead of results.

For me, poker was an ideal way to take a step back after college and a short stint at a sort of dreary job and decide how I wanted to proceed with my life. Some people may be able to do this while working for a year or two, and some people may already have it figured out by the time they graduate from college. One big change for me (and it may have something to do with getting married and having a kid) was that I decided it was worth the extra work and stress in order to have a greater impact on society. Different people may come to different conclusions on this point in different points in their lives, but now when I look at people who dedicate their lives to poker, part of me is surprised that they aren't plagued by the same sense of irrelevance that haunted me the past few years.

Question: Is it really optimal to play pure strategies in the [0,1] no-fold one-raise game?

I got this question, or something like it, while presenting the example game theory solution in my mathematical poker talk. The solution to that game is that player X will check-call with hands worse than 4/9, check-raise with hands better than 8/9, and bet the hands in between. If X bets, Y will raise with 2/3 or better and call otherwise. If X checks, Y will bet with 1/3 or better and check otherwise.

This is one of the games in The Mathematics of Poker, except, as with all the [0,1] games in that book, Chen and Ankenman define lower hands to be better, so 0 is the best hand and 1 is the worst. Also, there is a typo in one of the indifference charts for this game, but it does not affect the resultant indifference equation.

The answer I gave during the talk was correct: yes, they do really play pure strategies here. I hadn't reached the point in the talk where I explain pure and mixed strategies, so I used this opportunity to introduce those concepts. A pure strategy would be if the players always play the same way given any particular hand. This is true everywhere except for the indifference points. As an example, I pointed out that in this game, if X held the hand 1/3, he always checks and then calls. An example of a mixed strategy would be if X sometimes check-called when holding 1/3 but sometimes chose another play (such as betting) when holding this hand.

That's what I said during the talk. Let me expand on it a bit.

In Texas Holdem and other common poker games, there are only a few "indifference point" hands where mixed strategies make sense (like X with 4/9 or 8/9). The rest of the possible hands require pure strategies. This is complicated a bit by the fact that real poker games are dynamic, with hands changing value as new cards are dealt, but I think the principle still holds that most hands have one play that has greater EV associated with it than the other available plays. This is why I so often argue against randomizing your play and instead advocate just choosing which hands are your indifference points. This wouldn't have been appropriate to address during the talk, since I didn't want to discuss any real poker games such as Texas Holdem; many people in the audience weren't familiar with the rules of those games.

One thing I wish I did add during the talk was an explanation of why, for this particular [0,1] game, mixed strategies were not appropriate. It would have been very difficult to succinctly prove the point without preparation, but I could have at least elucidated the general principle that was at play: players in a Nash equilibrium will never make a play that has less EV than another available play in any situation, nor will they make a play that has the same EV if that play can then be exploited by an opponent.

With the hand of 7/9, for example, player X has the same EV whether he check-raises or bets. However, this is not his "indifference point" because if he check-raises here instead of betting like he "should" in the Nash equilibrium, he allows player Y to change his strategy and improve his (Y's) EV. This violates the definition of Nash equilibrium (in which no player can change his strategy to improve his EV). I think the more fundamental point that the professor was getting at with this question may have been this: isn't it worth mixing up your strategy with every hand in order to avoid becoming predictable to your opponent? The answer to this is no. I'm not sure why this answer meets with such resistance among poker players (necessitating my repeated refutations), but it really does seem to offend most players' basic idea of what good poker looks like. I guess they think that their opponents will be able to figure out what they are holding if they play their hand the "right" way every time. However, this problem of predictability is completely solved by simply playing other hands the same way. Player Y cannot know which of the hands in the range [0,4/9] and [8/9,1] X has checked with. [Edit.] No need to sacrifice any EV trying to throw your opponent off any further. Sacrificing EV is, by definition, always the wrong play unless you gain it back somehow. In this case you gain nothing back.

Four more points about randomizing your play...

First, I'm not saying that X should always play the hand "1/3" the same way against all opponents, only that he should play it the same way against player Y, who plays optimally. Against other players, X might maximize his EV by betting with the hand 1/3. In any given situation, X should not be randomizing his play between two or more actions; he should be choosing the single action that seems to maximize his EV based on all the information that is available to him.

Second, the very fact that X sometimes plays this hand differently based on his opponents and other situational factors serves as a sort of pseudo-randomizing of X's play. That is to say, to other players, X's strategy will look random even though it's not. X knows the reason he is playing differently, so he is not "randomizing" his play; he is always maximizing his EV for a given situation. X's opponents, unable to completely discern all the factors X has taken into account before making his play, will view his play as being random. Even if you believe you need to make your play look random to your opponents (which I think is wrong), this should already be accomplished because the situational factors are just to complex for all players to evaluate in the same way.

Third, your play will be randomized because you will make mistakes. No need to add extra "intentional mistakes" when you are playing a game that is hard enough already!

Fourth, your opponents are not likely to be paying close enough attention to take advantage of your predictability anyway, and if they try they will likely do it wrong.

*****

I'm writing this from a hotel in Baltimore; tomorrow begins the recruitment weekend for the Johns Hopkins Biostatistics department.

*****

Edit (3/1/12). This originally said "[0, 1/3] and [2/3, 1]". I fixed it to reflect X's actually check-calling and check-raising ranges of [0, 4/9] and [8/9, 1].

Questions from the Swarthmore Math Talk

I've been thinking about some of the questions I got during and after the talk on Tuesday. I'm pleased with the way I responded for the most part - despite nervousness, I was able to think clearly and give what I think were thoughtful answers to each question. I'm going to use some of those questions as fodder for future posts here on the blog. I know that at least one person other than myself thought each of these questions was worth having answered, which is one more than usual for this blog! I'll share what I can remember from what I said during the talk and add anything else I think is interesting.

Some sample questions I remember:

Is it really optimal to play pure strategies in the [0,1] no-fold one raise game?
Would I recommend professional poker or grad school to undergrad math majors?
How often do I raise?
Do I buy in short or deep in cash games?
Why don't I play tournaments?
Do players at casinos usually know who the props are?

I'll also try to answer other questions if anyone asks in the comments section on this post, especially if you were at the talk (but even if you weren't).

Poker Presentation Slides

I just finished the Mathematical Poker presentation for Swarthmore College Mathematics and Statistics department. There were at least sixty people (I'm guessing), it went well, and there were some good questions afterward. Anyway, for those who are interested, here are the slides I used for the talk.

Poker Talk at Swarthmore

I've been invited by the Swarthmore College math department (from which I graduated) to give a talk about how mathematics is used in poker. The talk will be February 14th and should be added to this page in a few weeks. This colloquium series is open to the public, so feel free to show up if you like. Of course, this is my first attempt at giving such a talk, and in fact it is the first talk of any sort I've given since college, so it might not be very polished. That said, I'm working hard to make it interesting and engaging. I will be drawing inspriation mostly from The Mathematics of Poker by Chen and Ankenman and also Introduction to Probability with Texas Hold'em Examples by Frederic Paik Schoenberg.


*EDIT 5/3/12* Here is the ad for the talk.

I'm planning to argue for focusing on EV for strategic purposes and then do some analysis of abstract simple forms of poker like the [0,1] and AKQ games analyzed in The Mathematics of Poker. The audience will be mathematicians who are not necessarily familiar with poker, so I will discuss pot odds and equity using a [0,1] game example. I will introduce game theory and solve a simple no-fold [0,1] game and a full-street AKQ game that will yield the optimal bluffing to value betting ratio. I will then shift away from game theory and look at an example of using Bayes' rule to model an opponent's strategy. At the end I plan to list several other aspects of poker that can be interesting to analyze mathematically, but I won't do any of this analysis for the talk (unless I am underestimating my timing, which is unlikely... more likely, I'll have to cut out something like the no-fold [0,1] analysis). These other topics include bankroll strategy, game selection, tournament theory, online data mining, and the metagame. Also, I will allude to the sort of structured hand analysis and concept analysis that I have done here on the blog in past years. All this is supposed to fit into 45 minutes, so I will be doing a lot of rehearsing and tweaking in the next few weeks.



*****

I am quoted in the Intro to Probability book by Schoenberg (a friend and commenter on this blog) criticizing Sklanksy's "Fundamental Theorem of Poker." Beyond that, the book's examples are much more interesting to me as a mathematically-inclined serious poker player than I expected. I would recommend the book to anyone who fits that description and also to statistics departments looking to attract more students to their introductory classes. (I can't imagine going through life without a basic understanding of statistical concepts - not the doing of statistics so much as the interpreting of statistics. "Statisteracy" is a term I recently learned and I think for the health of our society it needs to be an educational focus on par with numeracy... although a catchier word than "statisteracy" would be preferable.)

*****

I said earlier that I planned to apply to some statistics Master's programs. Instead, I applied to the following PhD programs:

Johns Hopkins Biostatistics
UPenn Wharton Statistics
George Washington Statistics
UMBC Statistics
U Maryland-College Park Applied Math & Statistics and Scientific Computation
U Maryland-College Park Economics

*****

I have been playing much less poker than I expected. This is largely due to my applications taking longer than expected, but also, the games are tougher than I expected and I've mostly been losing. Last year was my first losing year, but I played less all year than I used to in a normal month. I haven't played at all this year, although I have been invited to a low-stakes home game next month.

Hollywood Casino at Charles Town

I've completed the move to Mt Airy, Maryland, and Calvin is in a daycare center that he seems to like, so I have a bit of time to give my adoring fans an update.

I'm going to apply to Master's programs in statistics, applied math, or biostatistics, planning to start in Fall 2012. I'm not sure what to do in the meantime, but I do have one better-than-expected option. Hollywood Casino in West Virginia, less than an hour away, is much nicer than I expected. I was imagining something akin to Hollywood Park Casino, due to the fact that it's on a racetrack and in West Virginia (which I unfairly imagined as being rather run-down). Also, it's similar name encouraged the comparison. The fact that their HR department was unfamiliar with the term "poker prop" did not seem to bode well, either. 

In actuality, the casino seems new and the casino floor has the feel of an upscale Vegas casino, a la the Wynn. One drawback is that it feels even more packed with loud slot machines, but it's not too hard to get past those and to the poker room as long as I use the East entrance in the future. (Unaware of this, I used the West entrance on my visit.) When I finally made it to the poker room, it was packed. This was an overcast Saturday afternoon, so that was to be expected. I chatted with a floorman, who told me they have thirty tables, and there were usually wait lists on the weekends. They had discussed expanding downstairs, but that would have displaced some valuable slot machines. That's probably okay, though, because I am more likely to go during the week, when he said they usually only have about 20 tables running. The poker room shares an entrance with the stands for the racetrack, which could cause some unexpected disturbances. Their biggest game is a 5-10 NLH $300 minimum buy-in game, which is very similar to the game I got very used to at the Bike last year. Occasionally they have a 10-20 NLH game, too. They also had some PLO games running, which is also supposedly becoming more popular in Los Angeles. 

I asked the floor man about props, and I was surprised to find that he had never heard of them. When I explained them, he assured me that they have none of them and that employees are not even allowed to play at the casino. Oh well. 

In other news, friend and occasional commenter Rick Schoenberg has an awesome-looking textbook coming out in December called Introduction to Probability with Texas Holdem Examples. Reading the blurb makes me want to go back and review some of those concept analyses I wrote two years ago. That will have to wait until several other projects are finished, I'm afraid.