I just found an interesting article on how one could get poker legalized. Hint: it doesn't involve legislatures:

An easier route is litigation. If the highest court of a state declares that playing poker for money is legal, then it is. Even the U.S. Supreme Court can't overrule that decision, although the state legislature could put on restrictions. There are presently a couple of cases working their way through court systems in the United States, and a few more than that in Europe.

It's worth reading the whole thing.

The idea is to show that poker, like bridge, is predominantly a game of skill and not chance. This is glaringly obvious to all of us here, but apparently not so much to non-poker playing judges.

The author, I. Nelson Rose, also has a book called Gambling And The Law, which, if I read more, I would definitely pick up.

So, anyone have a couple million and a few years of your life laying around and want to get this through the courts?

Wow. An argument at a 1-2 NL table in Atlantic City proves fatal. The cause? Dude busts out, goes to get some more cash, and has his seat taken. He gets in to a fight with the guy who took his seat, and is subsequently stabbed to death by the seat-taker:

When Prince returned to find his seat occupied by Perez an argument ensued, but the floor, according to reports, ruled in favor of Perez keeping the seat. (An NBC Philadelphia report has the roles of the players reversed, contrary to most other reports.) Prince, according to one report, was offered another seat at that same table, but insisted on the exact seat which was at that moment occupied by Perez. This led to more arguments, with both players, according to one 2+2 poster, escalating the situation. At some point, Perez got up from his seat to take a break outside, which is where the argument escalated into violence.

Advice to poker players everywhere: Chill The Fuck Out or you'll get stabbed. Either one of these guys could have stood down and nothing would have happened.

No one is helping the image of a game we all want to see expand by getting super pissed, especially about something trivial.

So I have a confession to make. Until last Monday, I had never played poker in a casino before.

I should probably back up a bit. Jason, myself, our respective significant others, and a bunch more people all met up in Vegas for the weekend. We stayed at the MGM Grand, bought ourselves table service at an awesome night club, and generally behaved like a bunch of jet-set twentysomethings with full time jobs.

So now, to the poker. I decided going in that I was going to buy in for $100 at 1-2 no limit, kiss it goodbye, and have a good time. I play fairly tight in an effort to stay in and gain as much knowledge and experience as possible. The two best hands I had:

1. I get in the big blind, all but 2 players limp and I check. Flop comes . I bet out $12 and everyone folds. Dammit! Looking back I should have just checked and hoped someone had the other king or tripped up a 2.
2. I get in the small blind. Again, most players limp, including me. Flop comes . I check, one player bets 5, one other calls and I call. The turn is a . Oh yeah, I've got trips with a good kicker, time to get paid. So I make it 5 to go, one player calls, the other raises to 10, and I stupidly make it 20. Everyone folds. I made ~$30 on the hand (sorry if the math doesn't add up, I don't have a spot-on memory for this stuff), but I could have made a lot more. My read said no one had the flush, so I wasn't worried about that.

The Guitar Hero Effect

After that, I was up $35. Unfortunately, I didn't get any more good hands and I didn't want to start playing loose, so I did a lot of folding and missed a lot of flops until I was down to $115. Then a strange thing happened, something I like to call the Guitar Hero Effect. Guitar hero is a game of hand-to-eye coordination, timing, and precision. The GHE is what happens to me when I play Guitar Hero late at night. I can't go to sleep because my brain is spinning, trying to process all the information that gets thrown at me during the game. Seriously, I'll involuntarily go through the songs I've played one at a time until my subconscious decides it's dealt with the info.

I had been concentrating really hard on the game for about 2 hours, trying to read players, decide who I should play with, calculating odds, making sure I posted my blinds, etc., when I lost all my focus. I could feel my subconscious struggling to process all the information I had just soaked up and make sense of it. I ended up folding lots of otherwise decent hands ( , , , etc) because I just didn't know how to play them and I couldn't concentrate long enough to think through it. I folded my way to $104 when I cashed out, then spent the rest of the day in this odd manic-sleepy-but-mostly-sleepy state, kind of like when I finished taking my AP tests back in high school.

So all in all, not a terrible session. I ended up (slightly) positive and I learned a whole lot.

Now I can't wait for part B of the Guitar Hero Effect: let your brain process all the info for a couple of weeks, then pick it up again and decimate your old high scores.

Before I sit down to play poker, especially against people I don't know, I try to decide what kind of player I'm going to be and what kind of image I want to portray.

So Saturday night I played Darren's place. The plan for the night was to be Super Tight Guy. I did this because I'm a fairly tight player to begin with, and I didn't want to buy in again. I figured by playing tight I can be at or near the initial buy-in after an hour, when rebuys stopped. I didn't get too many good hands, so playing tight was easy. The only hand I had to think about was UTG. The other players were being fairly aggressive, so I decided to stick to my plan and I layed it down.

After an hour, I decide to work my carefully-honed image. I pick up and triple the BB. Everyone folds to me and I pick up some blinds. Great, I'm thinking. A couple hands later I pick up . A couple people limp in and I make it 800 to go. At this point, I'm thinking I've got a potential over card, flush draw, and straight draw, so even if I get called down, I've got a good shot at winning. I got one caller. The flop comes down . No help for me. So I bet 2000, most of my stack and the better part of my opponent's stack, thinking she'd fold. She calls. The turn is a . I'm sensing that my opponent is on a draw, so I push all in. She calls with and picks up a on the river for the win.

I'm still trying to figure out if I did the right thing. I came away really disappointed - I thought I'd be able to work my tight image in to a decent stack that I could start playing a bit more aggressively with. Did she just have that good of a read?

Looks like California may try to circumvent the awful UIGEA. A bill introduced by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine calls for the California Gambling Control Commission (CGCC) to investigate whether or not the UIGEA applies to transactions done entirely within the state of California - meaning the servers and the participants are in the state. Check it out:

Levine told Capitol Weekly, a newspaper that focuses on politics in California, that his understanding of current laws is that as long as the player and the server are located in the same state Federal laws can"t be used stop online poker. His bill is designed to give California lawmakers and residents an absolute answer to that question.

Unfortunately, the study wouldn't be completed until June 2009, and the bill isn't even a law yet. If you happen to live in Assemblyman Levine's district (Reseda, Northridge, Van Nuys in So Cal), shoot him an email and tell him that you appreciate his work on this.

Turns out you can bet on the outcomes of the primaries. Check out this article about Intrade

In 2004, President Bush won every state in which Intrade's contracts " as of the night before Election Day " gave him a better than 50 percent chance of winning. He lost every state where the traders thought Mr. Kerry was the favorite. Late on election night in 2006, while the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC were still saying that the Republicans would hold onto the Senate, Intrade knew better.

I remember bits and flashes of high school. The good points, a few of the bad, but not a lot of the mundane. One thing I do remember is my government teacher's definition of liberty (wassup Mr. Crippen!!!). He said, "If you were to try to punch someone else in the face, your liberty stops where their nose starts." The non-philosophical meaning of this is that you can be punished by the authorities and sued by the other party when your fist meets their nose, and not before. Doing so would be a violation of the other person's rights, the basic definition of a crime as we know it.

This got me thinking. In the case of the recent police bust of the San Francisco and San Jose Poker Meetup Group, whose rights, exactly, were violated?

It wasn't the player's rights. They knew exactly what they were doing and they did it anyway, because it was fun, and – as stated previously – they have discretionary incomes (gasp!).

The neighbors? Possibly, but what if, instead of playing poker, the group just stayed up late drinking and partying? Would the cops have conducted a 3 month sting operation? No, they would have busted the place a couple of times and had a stern conversation with the owner.

Oddly enough, the only party to this affair whose rights were violated was the same party responsible for enforcing the don't-violate-the-rights-of-others rule: the state of California.

You see, it's in the discretion of the state of California to regulate gambling. Because, you know, it's better for us simpletons that way. Therefore, the game that got busted violated the state's right to regulate gambling, where money was freely risked and exchanged. The circularity of it boggles the mind. Gaaah - I think I'll have to leave it at that to avoid banging my head against the wall to get the stoopid out.