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"Your opponent cannot fold if you do not bet or raise." –Abdul

52,000 dead

Posted on | December 28, 2004 | No Comments

This is five times the initial figures released Sunday. More than the population of Beverly Hills and Malibu combined.

Guardian Unlimited: Tsunami Death Toll Climbs to 52,000
By ANDI DJATMIKO
Associated Press Writer

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) – Mourners in Sri Lanka used their bare hands to dig graves Tuesday while hungry islanders in Indonesia turned to looting in the aftermath of Asia’s devastating tsunamis. Thousands more bodies were found in Indonesia, dramatically increasing the death toll across 11 nations to more than 52,000.

Indonesia’s Health Ministry said in a statement that more than 27,000 people were confirmed killed in parts of Sumatra island, the territory closest to the epicenter of Sunday’s earthquake, which sent a giant tsunami rolling across the Indian Ocean.

But the ministry said it had not yet counted deaths along the inundated and shattered towns of Sumatra’s western coast, which soldiers and rescue workers were unable so far to reach – including the district of Meulaboh, where earlier the head of another agency estimated that 10,000 people were killed.

When those regions are included in the ministry count, the death toll could rise dramatically yet again.

TV footage from overflights of Meulaboh and other parts of the west coast showed thousands of homes underwater. Refugees fleeing the coast described surviving for days on little more than coconuts before reaching Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province on Sumatra’s northern tip, which itself was largely flattened by the quake.

“The sea was full of bodies,” said Sukardi Kasdi, who reached the capital from his town of Surang.

How to help:

American Jewish World Service
45 West 36th Street, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10018
800-889-7146

American Red Cross
International Response Fund
PO Box 37243
Washington, DC 20013
800-HELP NOW

Catholic Relief Services
PO Box 17090
Baltimore, MD 21203-7090
800-736-3467

Direct Relief International
27 South La Patera Lane
Santa Barbara, CA 93117
805-964-4767

Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres
PO Box 2247
New York, NY 10116-2247
888-392-0392

International Medical Corps
11500 West Olympic Blvd., Suite 506
Los Angeles, CA 90064
800-481-4462

International Orthodox Christian Charities
Middle East Crisis Response
PO Box 630225
Baltimore, MD 21263-0225
877-803-4622

Mercy Corps
PO Box 2669
Portland, OR 97208
800-852-2100

Operation USA
8320 Melrose Avenue, Ste. 200
Los Angeles, CA 90069
800-678-7255

Category: News

Pirate Adventure

Posted on | December 27, 2004 | No Comments

The PokerStars Caribbean Adventure blog is up, authored by none other than Otis from Up For Poker. If you haven’t read the background story on Otis getting the gig, check it out at Rapid Eye Reality.

Category: Poker

Man vs. Fact

Posted on | December 27, 2004 | 2 Comments

In some parallel universe I could spend my days reading blogs and the New York Review of Books and drive about in a 911 Turbo. In this universe, I have to settle for the blogs and the NYRB. In “How Bush Really Won,” Mark Danner shares his personal experiences with Bush supporters and analyzes the competing campaigns.

Many of the Bush supporters I spoke to were educated, well-informed people. They watched the news and took pleasure in debating politics. And yet they clung to views about important matters of fact that were demonstrably wrong. Steven Kull, the public opinion expert at the University of Maryland who authored the study from which these numbers are drawn, acknowledges that although one reason they “cling so tightly to beliefs that have been so visibly refuted…is that they continue to hear the Bush administration confirming these beliefs,” the prevalence, and persistence, of these misperceptions is “probably not due to a simple failure to pay attention to the news.” Rather, Kull writes, “Bush supporters cling to these beliefs because they are necessary for their support for the decision to go to war with Iraq”: “Asked whether the US should have gone to war with Iraq if US intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or providing support to al Qaeda, 58 percent of Bush supporters said the US should not have, and 61 percent assume that in this case the president would not have. To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions is difficult to bear, especially in light of the continuing costs in terms of lives and money. Apparently, to avoid this cognitive dissonance, Bush supporters suppress awareness of unsettling information.”

It’s somewhat unfair to single out Bush supporters. Cognitive dissonance is a common human phenomenon; just think of an argument between two people over some bit of trivia, where resolution comes after the location of two or three authoritative references, and both parties end up in a bad mood. If it gets that bad over some meaningless thing, think how much worse it might be over a subject that incites more passion and may be tied up in a person’s identity.

It’s also somewhat unfair to make a blanket statement about Bush supporters. I’ve spoken with Republicans who have admitted Iraq was a mistake, or that the case for war was misleading, but it didn’t change their support for their candidate. Anecdotal, sure, but I think you get my point. I may not have agreed with their perspectives/conclusions, but at least we were talking about the same reality.

The main idea that comes across in Danner’s piece is that it was the Man, and not the facts, the logic, or anything else, that decided this year’s election.

Category: Politics

Winning in Roulette

Posted on | December 27, 2004 | No Comments

For those of you who refuse to bet on my lucky numbers (8, 20, 23, 25) and prefer to play in +EV games where you have some kind of mathematical “edge” instead, consider what would happen if instead of being a 38:1 dog, you were only 6:1, and the house still paid 35:1:

Herald Sun: Scammers scan $3.2m roulette win

THREE gamblers who pulled off an audacious coup at the Ritz in London using James Bond-style gadgetry to calculate where a roulette ball would land can keep their $3.2m winnings.

Scotland Yard, which seized cash and froze bank accounts during a nine-month investigation into the sting, has decided there are no grounds to prosecute the gamblers.
The decision will prompt the Ritz and other casinos to heighten security.

The gaming trio — described by police sources as a chic Hungarian woman, aged 32, and two elegant Serbian men, aged 33 and 38 — were alleged to have smuggled a laser scanner linked to a micro-computer into the casino inside a mobile phone.

The scanner measured the speed of the ball as the croupier released it, identified where it dropped, and measured the wheel’s declining orbit.

These factors were beamed to the micro-computer, which calculated into which section of numbers on the wheel the ball would settle.

This information was then flashed onto the screen of the mobile just before the wheel made its third spin, by which time all bets must be placed.

Having reduced their odds from 37-1 to 6-1, the trio bet on all six numbers in that section to ensure they would win.

On the first night they won almost $250,000. They returned the next night to win almost $3 million. The gamblers cashed their chips, declined offers of a free caviar-and-champagne dinner to celebrate and left.

The casino’s security experts examined closed-circuit television footage and officers from Scotland Yard’s gaming squad arrested the trio at a hotel nearby on suspicion of obtaining their winnings by deception.

They had been reporting to police on bail but have now been told they are free to leave Britain.

The Yard said: “The case has been stamped ‘no further action’. All the money impounded at the outset of the inquiry has been returned.”

Legal sources said the gamblers had to be let off because they had not violated any law. The scanner did not interfere with the ball or wheel. It provided information but did not manipulate the game. – SUNDAY TIMES

Thanks to American Roulette for the original link. Richard Marcus, by the way, claims to be a professional casino cheat. Very intriguing. I guess I’ll wander over to the local B&N to check out his book.

Category: News

Poker Tracker Update

Posted on | December 27, 2004 | No Comments

I played some $50 NL tonight after a terrible day of 1/2 and managed to make back most of my losses (I think I’m going to stop playing limit for a while). After taking some poor guy’s entire buy-in, I decided to relive the glory by checking out the PokerTracker hand history. That’s when I noticed an exorbitant rake for that hand. Wait a tick, that’s a negative number! So for those of you who think PokerTracker is the best thing you ever purchased with your ill-gotten gains (SSHE is in the running for first), you’ll want to get the latest patch:

An early Christmas present from Party – they changed the format of their hand histories stored on the hard-drive with todays “upgrade” for all-in hands.

This patch addresses this problem as well as the following:

FIX – PARTY FORMAT CHANGES – for hard drive hand history files when a player goes all-in. The emailed hand histories did not change. It will be necessary to delete (Utilities/Database Maintenance and Options) any sessions/tournaments where you have seen incorrect total amounts won and negative rake amounts and reload the files once the new patch is installed.

Stupid Party Poker. Yeah, I wish they charged a negative rake. Well, the folks at Poker Tracker (Pat) are simply awesome. So go ahead and download this latest patch. It’s especially helpful for those of us who have been participating in the almost nightly NL blogger sessions. If ever a feller is going to go all-in, it’s in these blogger sessions.

Unfortunately PokerTracker’s delete function only works for entire sessions, so if you have older sessions with these rake errors, you might be SOL. Hold on, just thought of something. PT doesn’t delete these hard drive hand histories. It moves them somewhere else. You might be able to delete the session from PT and reload them from your archive directory. I take no responsibility for anything that happens to your PT db. Make a backup copy and proceed with caution.

Category: Poker
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