Billy's plan was working. He had started to call himself flash three card poker. When he went into a store, he would say, "Hey there. I'm Billy, flash three card poker, McAlster, and I'd like a beer. People started to look at him differently. They didn't know what flash three card poker was, and he wasn't letting on that he didn't know either! Billy had seen an advertisement on TV. for flash three card poker, and he had decided to reinvent himself. He was tired of being a boring old Gardner by day - he wanted something to spice up his night. And flash three card poker would be the spice.
Billy knew that it was funny to have a nickname for something he didn't even do. Hey - he didn't even know what flash three card poker was. But, he knew that he was ahead of everyone else in town because they had never even heard of flash three card poker. At least he had heard of it - and was ready to take it on as a middle name. Billy was feeling pretty good about himself, until he saw the ad in the paper for the flash three card poker championships coming to town. Billy knew that he was in trouble if he didn't figure out what flash three card poker was - and fast!
Monday, November 10, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
World Poker Crown Tournament
All roads lead to Barcelona this week as some of Poker masters will take part in poker tournament for World Crown Poker that will be held on May 8 in Barcelona. So every poker lover has to be hurry to register now at one of the world's best online poker room on the net 888.com World Poker Crown to become the participant of the poker high-profile events. All what you need is just to click the Poker "Download" and then choose "Save" and click "OK". Also you can make your bet on the player who you suppose be won the WPC just voting to win a free WSOP $17,000 package!
One of the most dramatic and at the same time popular and attractive varieties of poker in the world is Texas Hold'em of course. This game has become more and more popular every day, and one of the main reasons for that is the ease with which players can pick up on the rules. Texas Holdem really takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. And no doubt that online poker rooms are a great place that provides you great opportunity to master your skills – only there you will get the top poker rooms that boast reliable software, best bonus offers, high level of security, and convenient deposit/cashout options. Anyway enjoy these luxuries, but you have to act now!
One of the most dramatic and at the same time popular and attractive varieties of poker in the world is Texas Hold'em of course. This game has become more and more popular every day, and one of the main reasons for that is the ease with which players can pick up on the rules. Texas Holdem really takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. And no doubt that online poker rooms are a great place that provides you great opportunity to master your skills – only there you will get the top poker rooms that boast reliable software, best bonus offers, high level of security, and convenient deposit/cashout options. Anyway enjoy these luxuries, but you have to act now!
Monday, March 31, 2008
Flash 3 Card Poker
I had never exactly been what one could call creative. I just wasn't that way inclined. But I really wanted to be. I somehow had this suspicion, that inside of me was a painter lurking to get out. I don't know what but I just felt like I was a painter. Anyway, in the meantime, like they say, I did not give up my daytime job. But in my spare time I found an additional (very fun) way of making money; I started playing flash 3 card poker. Playing flash 3 card poker gave me a fun way of making money and while I was struggling to be creative, it was nice to do something like that which in a sense, still made me feel like I was creative. It was like playing flash 3 card poker perhaps touched on my creative bone or something.
Well, the flash 3 card poker must have touched on some bone because after a few games, I started painting. But the paintings I made were no ordinary paintings, you should know. They were simply stunning...in fact, they were paintings that could probably be sold. They were really good and the creativity I had used to make them was clearly inspired by flash 3 card poker.
Well, the flash 3 card poker must have touched on some bone because after a few games, I started painting. But the paintings I made were no ordinary paintings, you should know. They were simply stunning...in fact, they were paintings that could probably be sold. They were really good and the creativity I had used to make them was clearly inspired by flash 3 card poker.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Play 3 Card Poker Instead of Jogging
Since I discovered that the fishermen on the pier play 3 card poker while waiting for the fish to bite, I have been going 'jogging' much more often than before. My wife thinks it is great that I am getting so much 'exercise', but little does she know. The fishermen began to play 3 card poker a few weeks ago to pass the time while fishing and I used to walk past and see them. Then I began watching and learning the basics of how to play 3 card poker...and then they invited me to join them. Well, that was a mistake. I became hooked. I love the game, I simply love to play 3 card poker
My exercise routine has not all gone totally out the window. I do get some exercise while I play 3 card poker. Mostly its when I run very fast to the pier in order to get there in time for the game, and that I do not miss out on any good hands. The other exercise I get is helping the fishermen with their fishing. Those who are too busy while they play 3 card poker to watch their fishing rods - I come to the rescue if its not my turn to play poker. All in all we spend a good couple of hours together on the pier - fresh air, good laughs and some exercise.
My exercise routine has not all gone totally out the window. I do get some exercise while I play 3 card poker. Mostly its when I run very fast to the pier in order to get there in time for the game, and that I do not miss out on any good hands. The other exercise I get is helping the fishermen with their fishing. Those who are too busy while they play 3 card poker to watch their fishing rods - I come to the rescue if its not my turn to play poker. All in all we spend a good couple of hours together on the pier - fresh air, good laughs and some exercise.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Playing Poker Online
Nowadays playing Poker online has become a popular hobby. Thanks to technological advance and Internet in particular, one can enjoy various games even without leaving his favorite sofa. Just choose the most appropriate site and enjoy your game. Moreover, if you have never tried to play cards or any other games, there are a lot of various sites which offer you to learn different strategies. Of course, it doesn't mean that you will win every game, but it helps you to create your own strategies and tips as well. Various forums and chats provide you with the opportunity to find like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest news in the world of gambling and just choose the people with whom to play online. And of course, don't forget that it is just a game. So, enjoy it!
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Poker Online News.
Poker champion Phil Laak is going to win when he sits down this week to play 2,000 hands of Texas Hold'em -- against a computer.
It's only a matter of time before machines take a commanding lead in the war for poker supremacy.
It may be the last chance he gets. Computers have gotten a lot better at poker in recent years; they're good enough now to challenge top professionals like Laak, who won the World Poker Tour invitational in 2004.
But it's only a matter of time before the machines take a commanding lead in the war for poker supremacy. Just as they already have in backgammon, checkers and chess, computers are expected to surpass even the best human poker players within a decade. They can already beat virtually any amateur player.
"This match is extremely important, because it's the first time there's going to be a man-machine event where there's going to be a scientific component," said University of Alberta computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer.
The Canadian university's games research group is considered the best of its kind in the world. After defeating an Alberta-designed program several years ago, Laak was so impressed that he estimated his edge at a mere 5 percent. He figures he would have lost if the researchers hadn't let him examine the programming code and practice against the machine ahead of time.
"This robot is going to do just fine," Laak predicted.
The Alberta researchers have endowed the $50,000 contest with an ingenious design, making this the first man-machine contest to eliminate the luck of the draw as much as possible.
Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami. The two will be in separate rooms, and their games will be mirror images of one another, with Eslami getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against Laak, and vice versa.
That way, a lousy hand for one human player will result in a correspondingly strong hand for his partner in the other room. At the end of the tournament the chips of both humans will be added together and compared to the computer's.
Don't Miss
Computer plays perfect checkers
The two-day contest, beginning Monday, takes place not at a casino, but at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, British Columbia. Researchers in the field have taken an increasing interest in poker over the past few years because one of the biggest problems they face is how to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information.
"You don't have perfect information about what state the game is in, and particularly what cards your opponent has in his hand," said Dana S. Nau, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland in College Park. "That means when an opponent does something, you can't be sure why."
As a result, it is much harder for computer programmers to teach computers to play poker than other games. In chess, checkers and backgammon, every contest starts the same way, then evolves through an enormous, but finite, number of possible states according to a consistent set of rules. With enough computing power, a computer could simply build a tree with a branch representing every possible future move in the game, then choose the one that leads most directly to victory.
That's essentially the strategy IBM's Deep Blue computer used to defeat chess champion Gary Kasparov in their famous 1997 match. No computer can calculate every single possible move in a chess game, but today's best chess programs can see an astounding 18 moves ahead.
Yet poker involves not just myriad possibilities but uncertainty, both about what cards the opponent is holding and more importantly, how he is going to play them.
"It's mandatory for you to understand how the other guy approaches the game. This is critical information in poker, and it's not true of any of these other games that we've studied in academia," said Darse Billings, a recent Alberta Ph.D. who has worked on the robot for 15 years -- except for a three-year break to play poker professionally.
The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move. There isn't even a best strategy. A top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior. He bluffs against the timid and proceeds cautiously when players who only raise on the strongest hands are betting the limit. He learns how to vary his own strategy so others can't take advantage of him.
That kind of insight is very hard to program into a computer. You can't just give the machine some rules to follow, because any reasonably competent human player will quickly intuit what the computer is going to do in various situations.
"What makes poker interesting is that there is not a magic recipe," Schaeffer said.
In fact, the simplest poker-playing programs fail because they are just a recipe, a set of rules telling the computer what to do based on the strength of its hand. A savvy opponent can soon gauge what cards the computer is holding based on how aggressively it is betting.
That's how Laak was able to defeat a program called Poker Probot in a contest two years ago in Las Vegas. As the match progressed Laak correctly intuited that the computer was playing a consistently aggressive game, and capitalized on that observation by adapting his own play.
Programmers can eliminate some of that weakness with game theory, a branch of mathematics pioneered by John von Neumann, who also helped develop the hydrogen bomb. In 1950 mathematician John Nash, whose life inspired the movie "A Beautiful Mind," showed that in certain games there is a set of strategies such that every player's return is maximized and no player would benefit from switching to a different strategy.
In the simple game "Rock, Paper, Scissors," for example, the best strategy is to randomly select each of the options an equal proportion of the time. If any player diverted from that strategy by following a pattern or favoring one option over, the others would soon notice and adapt their own play to take advantage of it.
Texas Hold 'em is a little more complicated than "Rock, Paper, Scissors," but Nash's math still applies. With game theory, computers know to vary their play so an opponent has a hard time figuring out whether they are bluffing or employing some other strategy.
But game theory has inherent limits. In Nash equilibrium terms, success doesn't mean winning -- it means not losing.
"You basically compute a formula that can at least break even in the long run, no matter what your opponent does," Billings said.
That's about where the best poker programs are today. Though the best game theory-based programs can usually hold their own against world-class human poker players, they aren't good enough to win big consistently.
Squeezing that extra bit of performance out of a computer requires combining the sheer mathematical power of game theory with the ability to observe an opponent's play and adapt to it. Many legendary poker players do that by being experts of human nature. They quickly learn the tics, gestures and other "tells" that reveal exactly what another player is up to.
A computer can't detect those, but it can keep track of how an opponent plays the game. It can observe how often an opponent tries to bluff with a weak hand, and how often she folds. Then the computer can take that information and incorporate it into the calculations that guide its own game.
"The notion of forming some sort of model of what another player is like ... is a really important problem," Nau said.
Computer scientists are only just beginning to incorporate that ability into their programs; days before their contest with Laak and Eslami, the University of Alberta researchers are still trying to tweak their program's adaptive elements. Billings will say only this about what the humans have in store: "They will be guaranteed to be seeing a lot of different styles."
Even so, Laak and Eslami are top-notch players with a deep understanding of poker's mathematical fundamentals. They should be able to keep up with the computer -- this time
by NEW YORK (AP).
It's only a matter of time before machines take a commanding lead in the war for poker supremacy.
It may be the last chance he gets. Computers have gotten a lot better at poker in recent years; they're good enough now to challenge top professionals like Laak, who won the World Poker Tour invitational in 2004.
But it's only a matter of time before the machines take a commanding lead in the war for poker supremacy. Just as they already have in backgammon, checkers and chess, computers are expected to surpass even the best human poker players within a decade. They can already beat virtually any amateur player.
"This match is extremely important, because it's the first time there's going to be a man-machine event where there's going to be a scientific component," said University of Alberta computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer.
The Canadian university's games research group is considered the best of its kind in the world. After defeating an Alberta-designed program several years ago, Laak was so impressed that he estimated his edge at a mere 5 percent. He figures he would have lost if the researchers hadn't let him examine the programming code and practice against the machine ahead of time.
"This robot is going to do just fine," Laak predicted.
The Alberta researchers have endowed the $50,000 contest with an ingenious design, making this the first man-machine contest to eliminate the luck of the draw as much as possible.
Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami. The two will be in separate rooms, and their games will be mirror images of one another, with Eslami getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against Laak, and vice versa.
That way, a lousy hand for one human player will result in a correspondingly strong hand for his partner in the other room. At the end of the tournament the chips of both humans will be added together and compared to the computer's.
Don't Miss
Computer plays perfect checkers
The two-day contest, beginning Monday, takes place not at a casino, but at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Vancouver, British Columbia. Researchers in the field have taken an increasing interest in poker over the past few years because one of the biggest problems they face is how to deal with uncertainty and incomplete information.
"You don't have perfect information about what state the game is in, and particularly what cards your opponent has in his hand," said Dana S. Nau, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland in College Park. "That means when an opponent does something, you can't be sure why."
As a result, it is much harder for computer programmers to teach computers to play poker than other games. In chess, checkers and backgammon, every contest starts the same way, then evolves through an enormous, but finite, number of possible states according to a consistent set of rules. With enough computing power, a computer could simply build a tree with a branch representing every possible future move in the game, then choose the one that leads most directly to victory.
That's essentially the strategy IBM's Deep Blue computer used to defeat chess champion Gary Kasparov in their famous 1997 match. No computer can calculate every single possible move in a chess game, but today's best chess programs can see an astounding 18 moves ahead.
Yet poker involves not just myriad possibilities but uncertainty, both about what cards the opponent is holding and more importantly, how he is going to play them.
"It's mandatory for you to understand how the other guy approaches the game. This is critical information in poker, and it's not true of any of these other games that we've studied in academia," said Darse Billings, a recent Alberta Ph.D. who has worked on the robot for 15 years -- except for a three-year break to play poker professionally.
The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move. There isn't even a best strategy. A top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior. He bluffs against the timid and proceeds cautiously when players who only raise on the strongest hands are betting the limit. He learns how to vary his own strategy so others can't take advantage of him.
That kind of insight is very hard to program into a computer. You can't just give the machine some rules to follow, because any reasonably competent human player will quickly intuit what the computer is going to do in various situations.
"What makes poker interesting is that there is not a magic recipe," Schaeffer said.
In fact, the simplest poker-playing programs fail because they are just a recipe, a set of rules telling the computer what to do based on the strength of its hand. A savvy opponent can soon gauge what cards the computer is holding based on how aggressively it is betting.
That's how Laak was able to defeat a program called Poker Probot in a contest two years ago in Las Vegas. As the match progressed Laak correctly intuited that the computer was playing a consistently aggressive game, and capitalized on that observation by adapting his own play.
Programmers can eliminate some of that weakness with game theory, a branch of mathematics pioneered by John von Neumann, who also helped develop the hydrogen bomb. In 1950 mathematician John Nash, whose life inspired the movie "A Beautiful Mind," showed that in certain games there is a set of strategies such that every player's return is maximized and no player would benefit from switching to a different strategy.
In the simple game "Rock, Paper, Scissors," for example, the best strategy is to randomly select each of the options an equal proportion of the time. If any player diverted from that strategy by following a pattern or favoring one option over, the others would soon notice and adapt their own play to take advantage of it.
Texas Hold 'em is a little more complicated than "Rock, Paper, Scissors," but Nash's math still applies. With game theory, computers know to vary their play so an opponent has a hard time figuring out whether they are bluffing or employing some other strategy.
But game theory has inherent limits. In Nash equilibrium terms, success doesn't mean winning -- it means not losing.
"You basically compute a formula that can at least break even in the long run, no matter what your opponent does," Billings said.
That's about where the best poker programs are today. Though the best game theory-based programs can usually hold their own against world-class human poker players, they aren't good enough to win big consistently.
Squeezing that extra bit of performance out of a computer requires combining the sheer mathematical power of game theory with the ability to observe an opponent's play and adapt to it. Many legendary poker players do that by being experts of human nature. They quickly learn the tics, gestures and other "tells" that reveal exactly what another player is up to.
A computer can't detect those, but it can keep track of how an opponent plays the game. It can observe how often an opponent tries to bluff with a weak hand, and how often she folds. Then the computer can take that information and incorporate it into the calculations that guide its own game.
"The notion of forming some sort of model of what another player is like ... is a really important problem," Nau said.
Computer scientists are only just beginning to incorporate that ability into their programs; days before their contest with Laak and Eslami, the University of Alberta researchers are still trying to tweak their program's adaptive elements. Billings will say only this about what the humans have in store: "They will be guaranteed to be seeing a lot of different styles."
Even so, Laak and Eslami are top-notch players with a deep understanding of poker's mathematical fundamentals. They should be able to keep up with the computer -- this time
by NEW YORK (AP).
Is it legal to play poker online?
Internet poker players are raising the stakes in Washington, Assosiated Press reported.
Threatened by a federal law that restricts online gambling, the Poker Players Alliance, a two-year-old lobbying group that says it represents 800,000 poker enthusiasts nationwide, plans on pressing Congress this week to consider several new bills that would exempt poker from the law or regulate the gaming industry.
It's legal to play poker online, but the law made it illegal for U.S. banks and credit-card companies to process payments to online gambling businesses outside the United States. Supporters of the ban say Internet betting can be addictive and potentially drain people's savings.
But John Pappas, the group's executive director, said the law only forced several public British companies — such as PartyGaming PLC and 888 Holdings PLC — that had financial and age safeguards in place from the U.S. online poker market.
"The idea that we can kind of stop people from doing this seems a bit irrational," said Pappas, who estimates there are between 15 million to 23 million U.S. Internet poker players.
The group is flying in 100 members, including several poker champions, such as Chris Moneymaker, to lobby lawmakers Tuesday and Wednesday to get poker exempted from the law, which already excludes online horse races and lotteries and fantasy sports.
The group also backs a bill to license and regulate Internet gaming, in general. A small tax on online poker operators could net the government at least a couple of billion dollars in revenue, Pappas said.
Chaired by former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato and now lobbyist, the group has also upped its lobbying ante, spending $640,000 in the first six months this year, compared with $540,000 in all of 2006.
Threatened by a federal law that restricts online gambling, the Poker Players Alliance, a two-year-old lobbying group that says it represents 800,000 poker enthusiasts nationwide, plans on pressing Congress this week to consider several new bills that would exempt poker from the law or regulate the gaming industry.
It's legal to play poker online, but the law made it illegal for U.S. banks and credit-card companies to process payments to online gambling businesses outside the United States. Supporters of the ban say Internet betting can be addictive and potentially drain people's savings.
But John Pappas, the group's executive director, said the law only forced several public British companies — such as PartyGaming PLC and 888 Holdings PLC — that had financial and age safeguards in place from the U.S. online poker market.
"The idea that we can kind of stop people from doing this seems a bit irrational," said Pappas, who estimates there are between 15 million to 23 million U.S. Internet poker players.
The group is flying in 100 members, including several poker champions, such as Chris Moneymaker, to lobby lawmakers Tuesday and Wednesday to get poker exempted from the law, which already excludes online horse races and lotteries and fantasy sports.
The group also backs a bill to license and regulate Internet gaming, in general. A small tax on online poker operators could net the government at least a couple of billion dollars in revenue, Pappas said.
Chaired by former New York Sen. Alfonse D'Amato and now lobbyist, the group has also upped its lobbying ante, spending $640,000 in the first six months this year, compared with $540,000 in all of 2006.
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