Well I have arrived safely in Las Vegas and slept off the jetlag. Our apartment is pretty cool, bigger than we expected from the photos. So will Scottish poker superstar David Vamplew crush his way to a bracelet? Or can I, Andrew “Some Guy” Ferguson replace a seat at the bar with a final table appearance? We will find out over the next few weeks!

Also a big OI OI to Citizen Sprinkles ( http://twitter.com/JonSpinks ) who is in Day 3 of the $1.5k Stud at 5/12! gl gl!

It’s WSOP season and I’ll be flying out to Vegas on June 13th and I’m awesomely excited about it! Some other Eurodonks and I have rented a house for a full month and I’m pretty sure this is going to be the most fun period of any of our poker lives/careers so far. I’m playing in 5 prelim events:

16th June Wed $1,500 NLHE #30
23rd June Wed $1,500 NLHE #42
26th June Sat $1,000 NLHE #47
28th June Mon $1,500 NLHE #49
2nd July Fri $2,500 NLHE #56

And whichever Day 1 I end up on for the ME. I might add the 3k triple chance to my schedule as I sold a bit more action in myself than I originally planned.

Wifi allowing I’ll be tweeting live from http://twitter.com/FDSaussure and blogging/posting pics here as much as I can.

Vegas gonna get hugged so bad!! :glomp:

A few weeks ago I found myself with my friend Chris still up and drinking at 7:30am in the Penny Black (one of Edinburgh’s more notorious drinking institutions which opens at 6am, conveniently exactly as casinos shut). One of the strangers we were chatting with mentioned that he quite liked chess. “Oh, Chess is a boring game.” I said, “It’s essentially the same game as Naughts and Crosses.” This statement somewhat startled them. It’s a curious artifact of western culture that chess is held in such high regard. It is after all a game that can in theory be solved by completely enumerating every possible move and choosing the one that maximises your chances of winning. Chess is harder than naughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) because it is big, not because it is qualitatively more complex. The same can be said when comparing the east Asian game igo to chess.

The above is not to say that we can’t learn interesting things using chess. The human brain is limited in its computational power and successful chess players utilise interesting cognitive strategies to overcome these limitations. Indeed it takes a very powerful supercomputer to compete with the grandmasters of the chess world. However we should not delude ourselves that this makes chess special, noted chess lunatic Bobby Fischer once said “I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.” Many games are just as, or more, challenging to the human mind than chess and yet chess is considered almost exclusively to be the game worthy of kings and great intellectuals.

So we can see there are two ways to evaluate a game. One is objective: The same algorithm that solves tic-tac-toe can also solve chess, therefore these games are of the same class. The other is subjective to human cognition: it’s too quantitatively difficult for us to solve chess in the same way we might tic-tac-toe and so we have to enlist alternative cognitive strategies. So where does poker fit into all of this? Poker is a qualitatively different class of game. Whereas games like chess are solved by choosing a move that is a function of the game state (hence why Derren Brown could play 8 grandmasters simply by mirroring their moves playing one set of 4 against the other) poker is a game that must be beat by using a combined function of the game state (cards, probabilities) with an opponent model. One of the first things almost every poker book teaches is that you can’t analyse a Hold’em hand without a lot more information than what your hole cards were and what the flop was. In essence, poker requires cognitive faculties such as theory of mind (understanding that others’ knowledge differs from our own) and metacognition (being able to think about what we know) that chess simply does not. This is not even to mention the inferences human poker players frequently make about opponents from very limited data. Consequently a poker playing artificial agent requires parallels of all these capabilities. It is really not surprising that there have been no decent poker bots. My own experience in playing against the super turbo bots that were busted on Full Tilt last year demonstrated the unimpressive nature of these attempts even in a relatively tractable game (although to be honest I don’t think that the people who designed those bots really knew a lot about what they were doing from either a poker or AI perspective).

More broadly, poker is uniquely interesting from a social perspective as well. Unlike other sports (using the term loosely) poker has a low barrier of entry with regards to playing for money. It also has a continuum of money stakes that allow a smooth transition from low to high, from amateur to professional. This contrasts with other sports in that most of them have a small group of high level professionals with a large gap down to the amateur levels which are rarely played for money of any sort. The aspiring poker player faces the lonely task of grinding up his or her bankroll and learning to beat the games they desire to play. Playing poker for the long term poses another set of personal challenges. The winning and losing of money is something that can strike our instincts to effect visceral emotional reactions. Taming both the positive and negative emotions short term poker outcomes cause is an essential part of being a better poker player in the long term. Managing a bankroll reflects understanding of risk management, that medium term outcomes can be affected by short term results. That’s why it’s usually a bad idea to flip all your bankroll on a 50.1% gamble. Improving your poker game requires honest self reflection, a detatchment of ego and pride from hand analysis. It’s no good just blaming the fish all the time.

Over the last four years I’ve met a lot of poker players. some casual, some serious. Some good, most bad. One of the things I’ve consistently noticed is that a person’s poker play usually reflects their personality traits. That guy who goes on monkey tilt every time he gets outdrawn is rarely the most zen guy in the room. As such I believe that poker is not just a beautifully complicated and intellectually satisfying game but also a vehicle for self improvement. The challenges you face to improve your game can reflect the problems you struggle with in other aspects of life. I strongly believe that the efforts put into poker will have positive effects on how other situations are approached and decisions made. And on that note, I better finish this beer and dispose of the dead hooker in my bed. (Joke, I don’t drink this early.)

As the title suggests, what I need to do is to play more god damn Super Turbos. 2009 has gotten off to a fairly good start, after 6 months of grinding 15$ Supers and withdrawing money just as fast as I made it I finally forced myself to grow my roll and move up. Including rakeback I’m currently up just over 4000$ from 1100 15$s and 1200 30$s. I also cashed in the Sunday Million in mid January (for 2.5k$, but I’m staked in that and got to keep 1k$) and have cleared about 500$ in bonuses. Whilst I’m rolled to play the 45$s and nearly the 75$s I definitely want to play a couple thousand more 30$s before I move up permanently. This is easily possible to do before the end of the month if only I stop being so lazy and put in some decent volume. Anyway, here’s the graph for the year so far:

The move up to the 30$s started off with a big heater which was obviously pretty nice, and the swinginess you can see in the middle really didn’t feel like it as it was really a product of a few breakeven days with big up-down or down-up swings in the midst of the session. So here’s a new target:

PLAY AT LEAST 100 GAMES A DAY FOR THE REST OF THE MONTH

I definitely need to get better at doing longer sessions. My affiliate is planning on introducing rake races next month and thats free money just waiting to be taken, as good a motivation as any. Anyway thats it for a boring first blog post, really I just wanted to write this down somewhere visible to shame myself into actually playing more.