stevesbets

One thing that I have been very passionate about for as long as I can remember remembering anything at all is Philadelphia sports. The Phillies are currently locked in a 1-1 World Series against the Tampa Bay Rays (as some funnyman said, they renounced the devil and made the world series, coincidence?). I am headed back to Philadelphia to attend game 4 and I havent been as excited for an event for quite awhile. I’ve always maintained that Philadelphia fans are among the best in the country and they have shown it throughout this postseason run.

As adament as I am about following and supporting Philadelphia teams (Sixers, Phillies, Eagles…who cares about hockey), I have to say there is something about my devotion to the teams that bothers me. I pride myself on being an exceptionally logical and rational person. I have been desperate for a Philadelphia championship my whole life, even though them winning one offers pretty much no tangible benefit to me. I was moved nearly to the point of tears when the Sixers fell to the Lakers in 2001, yet them winning would provide nothing for me. The Seinfeld joke criticising a person for coming home from a game saying “we won we won” (he says, “no they won, you watched”) is quite apt in my opinion. Nonetheless I care so much that “we win” and I cannot logically justify it. For now I’ll just have to live with that bothering me. GO PHILLIES!!

On to some less pleasant poker news. If you do not have interest in the inner workings of poker sites (or if you’re shrew), just skip the rest of the blog now since you will inevitably not be able to make it through due to boredom.

There have been two incidents recently in which I have been “victimized” by borderline cheating on the two major sites.  The more recent one was a player on pokerstars named Melville217 playing a bunch of High Stakes heads up sit n goes over a few days and winning a sizable amount. It turns out he was a player that was banned (I think for being a part of the whole JJprodigy mess) and he had nearly 200k seized from his account by pokerstars. I knew I had lost some of this money to him though I did not know how much. I emailed pokerstars to inquire about how they would distribute the funds and I got the following email:

Hello Steven,

Michael J
PokerStars Game Security Team

After about a week, I got this email:

Hello, PokerStars has become aware of a player who was in violation of our poker room rules despite prior warnings. You were involved in one or more sit and go tournaments with this player. You have received a credit as a result. To confirm your credit, log onto your PokerStars account, go to the ‘Cashier’ screen and click the ‘History’ button. Your share will be shown as “Credit Purchase”, followed by the amount of the credit. I regret that we are not at liberty identify the specific games or player in question. Suffice to say that the player involved has been barred from the site and you will not encounter them again. Likewise we will not go into detail regarding the method used to calculate your share of the funds distributed. I can say that it is based on the net amount won by the player, in conjunction with the number of events you played where this player was present. The integrity of the games at PokerStars is of paramount importance to us and we will not abide unfair play in our games. We work hard to police our games to assure our players of a fair, secure place to play. In those rare cases where collusion has actually occurred, we make sure that any players affected are compensated appropriately. Thank you for your continued play here on PokerStars. Please do not hesitate to let us know any time we can be of help. Best Regards, Jeff PokerStars Game Security 

I got a small refund of a totally random number, not divisible by 5500 (the games we played) or larger than 2 units. I find it frustrating that they will not be totally transparent about their methodology however I do appreciate the swift action to protect their terms and conditions.

I CANNOT say the same thing about Full Tilt Poker.

It was quite awhile ago now that sponsored Full Tilt Pro Brian Townsend admitted to having played on a secret account called stellarnebula expressly for the purpose of playing people anonymously. I had a long history playing marathon sessions agianst Brian on his real account which he documented in his blog. Had I known that stellarnebula was him, I would have at the very least played quite differently, and possibly not played at all. I am aware sites should not be expceted to police every legit player playing on different names simply to stay anonymous, however someone that they SPONSOR should certainly be a different story. I expected and still do expect some sort of restitution. I sent full tilt an email explaining my particular stance on the situation and they did not respond, a couple days later I sent them another email saying i expected a reply. Here is what I got:

Hello Steven,

Kevin
Security and Fraud
Full Tilt Poker

That was on September 3rd, it is now nearly TWO MONTHS later and they have not sent me anything further. It seems like they are just trying to sweep it under the rug. Just to be clear, Brian was in an enviable poosition of getting sponsorship, the holy grail that many players seek (myself included) and still exploited other players by playing secretly. Full tilt punshed him only by stripping him of his pro status for 6 months. So they therefore deemed his actions were improper and yet no restitution was made to his victims. This does not seem right in the least. I intend to continue pursuing it with them until I get a satisfactory response.

So today I had my first midterm of B school in the class Math Models for Business. Thus far the class has been pretty much a review of the simplest concepts from 6-12th grade math. I probably should have gotten waived but it slipped through the cracks so here I am in this required class. Now the homework problems were mostly algebra and I never needed a calculator to solve them. With that in mind I did not bring a calculator to the midterm. When I arrived everyone was sitting with their calculators out so I asked the prof if it was necessary and he said yes. Not having time to run home to get it, I figured my iphone calculator would probably suffice. It is very basic with pretty much just the 4 main functions. It does not have the capability of doing roots or powers.

The test was simple and the questions were pretty much straight out of various chapters from the homework. There were a couple times I did need to use powers though. However, if i needed to do 1.34 to the 3rd, it was simply a matter of multiplying 1.34 times 1.34 times 1.34 so the problem could be easily solved. Then I got to the compount interest questions where the professor inexplicably used big numbers when smaller numbers would have easily suffiiced. So the question asked something like, what is 3000 dollars at %8.75 compounded quarterly for 16 years. The answer is 3000(1+.0875/4)^64. After I did the rest of the questions and prepared to turn my test in I asked the professor if that would be an acceptable form since he knew my calculator dilemma. He barely mumbled a respons, “well the questions requres you get the dollar amount”. I respectfully nodded and went back to my chair to do it out manually. I did 1.0875/4 times itself and hit the = button whcih gives me what that number ^2 is, i then hit the = 62 more times to get that number to the 64th. I repeated the process 3 times to assure i did it correctly.

CAN HE POSSIBLY BE SERIOUS? Does ANYONE doubt that by the time we go to business school we can enter numbers into a calculator? I’m fairly certain that in every math class I have been in from 7th grade on, the teacher would find such an answer perfectly acceptable. If this is really how we are to be judged I think I am better off doing pretty much anything else. If I lose points on that problem for faulty computing, I may be so steamed I’ll have to quit.

I can now conclusively say I like the first island in the song a bit better than the second. The hotel is pretty standard but the surroundings are beautiful. The thing I like best about this place is that the beach and pools that the hotel is directly on top of are open 24 hours a day. I have never before stayed in a place where that was the case. I will try to get some pictures up or get Nat to post some.

The tournament is a 5k buy in with an absurd $500 rake per player. On top of that, UB guarentees a million for first which makes the payout schedule realllllly top heavy for the 550 player field. I am still alive with about 156k in chips (we started with 15k) with 100 players left. By far the highlight of the tournament so far was busting Stinger on day 1. I flopped two pair and he made a move on the turn with a gutshot and a flush draw. He followed through after the river bricked and I snap called my 2 pair. Tomorrow should be a long day so wish me luck.

I have had many coaching requests since the WCOOP win and I have not had time to reply to them. I AM going to develop a mechanism to get coaching to everyone that wants it so stay tuned, I will post about that soon.

Switching gears, I have seen some videos of an interview with Sarah Palin by Katie Couric that are absolutely astounding. I pretty much cannot imagine a single person I know sounding dumber than she does in these videos. The fact that she very well may become the president of the United States (according to actuaries there is a 1 in 3 chance Mccain would die during a first term in office) is really really scary for me and I’m usually not all that political. I posted one example below where Couric corners her about what publications she reads to stay informed. Not only is it clear from her response that she does not read, but further she is too dumb to even think of the names of popular publications so she says she reads “All of them”. I honestly think most 5 year olds could come up with a better response than “I read all of them”. Here is the video:

As a final note, since we clearly cannot have America fall in the hands of these people, I want to throw my hat into the race, here is a picture someone randomly made on a forum I thought was funny: