Very Cool Writing…

Ok, someone came to my website (verycoolwriting.com) searching for whether or not raising helps you win in poker. DEFINITELY YES! I thought this would be a good post to write.

Many players play with “scared” money. They are afraid of taking chances. They only want to play the “absolute” best hands. People want to “make” money playing poker (it’s ‘ok’ if you do — but they treat the money in their stack as their salary — so are afraid of losing it). If you raise really high — you’ll usually only get people playing high pocket pairs (JJ+), but usually only KK or AA if the raise is high enough.

The Experiment:

For fun (plus I was being a bit of a dork :)), I decided to go into the ultra low limit tables ($0.02/$0.04) where I didn’t really care if I “lost” $5 (well, of course I care, I don’t like losing, but this was a worthwhile experiment :)). So it was worth the $5. (Especially because if I lost it, I would just go to a higher limit game where I could make it back in 2 minutes). (verycoolwriting.com)

ANYWAYS. Basically I went to the $0.02/$0.04 tables and almost every hand raised to at least $0.50 on any semi-decent hand I had. (To put it in perspective, a “big” raise in poker is usually 3x the big blind, in this case it would be “$0.12″, and a “HUGE” raise would be $0.20). Anyways, I was having fun raising everything from $0.50 to $2 in a $0.02/$0.04 game. Almost every single time I raised everyone folded. I very “quickly” made $1.00 in about 5 minutes. (To put this in perspective, it is a 20% increase on your initial investment. So it would be like making $20 in a $1/$2 game in 5 minutes, or $200 in a $10/$20 game in 5 minutes).

I found the ONLY time someone would call (or put me all in) is if they had AA/AK/KK/QQ. Almost every other time they folded. So the strategy was really simple. If someone actually called my bet, then I needed to play ‘good’ poker. (I.e., if they only called, and I saw a flop and didn’t hit, I should probably check to their pocket pair or AQ/AJ/etc which they probably wouldn’t fold anyways). If they put me ‘all-in’ preflop, then it would be a good idea for me to fold (unless of course I had AA :)).

So…

The results:

Basically, as long as I kept raising, I made some ‘pretty’ pennies. I just needed to watch out for the all-in bets, and providing I did so would usually come out ahead.

AND… I’ve also watched the “higher” limit games (I.e., where blinds are $25/$50), and almost always — it seems like there is one guy with a $20k stack kicking everyone elses but because he raises to “$175″ almost every hand. The guys sitting relatively short-stacked (i.e., $1000 vs $5000 max buy-in) would almost always fold to that, and this guy would be cleaning up the blinds. Well — let’s say he does this 5 times in a row, thats 5*75=$375, so he can ‘afford’ to see a flop that one time someone decides to call. And providing he is playing good cards, would win it anyways (because usually someone only ‘calls’ that when they start getting ‘pissed’ and just want to see cards).

So anyways………… If you are feeling like a dork, start raising! Play smart, but raise. It’s called aggressive play, and most of the time you can get other people to fold, and get some nice blinds.

I was just reading an article on supercomputers. How various locations, whether it be the US, Canada, Japan, etc, are all building these super computers. This article is more for fun

50 TRILLION flops second. 200 TRILLION flops per second. Basically mathematical calculations per second, kind of like saying “what is 2+2? Oh! it’s FOUR!”, but doing this like 50 TRILLION times a second.

Well. Here is some info:

If a supercomputer was running Windows Vista…

It would be no faster than a commodore 64. Why? Because every time it tried to make a caculation, the Windows Vista OS would tell the supercomputer “Um, I don’t think you have permission do that. Are you allowed to figure out what 2+2 is? If so, then click here”. And you would have to wait 1 second while it figured out if you were allowed. And then contact the Microsoft Authentication center. Then download an activex. Actually, I would probably be playing games on my Commodore-64 while waiting.

If a supercomputer was running Windows XP…

It would STILL be slower than a commodore 64 and your basic calculator that you punch in by hand. Why? Because it would be crashing every 2 seconds. The supercomputer would start figuring out what 2+2 was — and then would go “aw f*ck this” as the Microsoft blue screen popped up informing the super computer that a restart was necessary. Or it would just contantly say “Are you SURE you want to figure 2+2 out? Are you REALLY REALLY sure? (c) verycoolwriting.com Come on, how can one supercomputer be THAT sure that they want to figure out what 2+2 is?”. So yeah, a super computer running Windows XP, it would suck.

HAHA. Maybe thats WHY they are building super computers… Just getting ready for the next release of windows!

If a super computer was running DOS…

Wow. Now that would be cool. Just write a batch file to figure out what 2+2 was 50 trillion times.

How to make a supercomputer crash

Tell it to figure out women. It would spend two seconds trying to figure out women, then go “Aw……………….. screw this” and just go start playing poker online, win billions of dollars, then try and rebuild itself to try and figure out women, only to burn into smoldering flames 5 minutes later. (Well, ok, some women are cool But. Some, well — leave those to the supercomputer :))

Real Good Uses For Supercomputers

• Playing any kind of first person shooter and/or any kind of computer game. Come on, with 50 TRILLION flops a seconds, it would have a pretty good polygon count. So you could get really cool graphics. Would be decent

Mm yeah. I think that is about it for now.

Well, anyways. Enjoy thinking about how supercomputers can benefit your life.