Today my review of Paul “Dr. Pauly” McGuire’s Lost Vegas appeared over on the Betfair Poker site . For those of you who haven’t picked up a copy yet, check out the review to learn what the book covers and my overall take.
I think I might have mentioned something last week about having had plans to interview Kara Scott, the poker player who has appeared as a host or presenter on numerous poker shows, including currently on “High Stakes Poker.” We did get a chance to talk this week, and the interview can now be read over on Betfair . I asked her about various topics, including how she got into poker and poker TV, “High Stakes Poker,” the recent PartyPoker Big Game IV in London, her joining up with team PartyPoker, and her own play, in particular those two deep runs in the WSOP Main Event she has had over the last couple of years (finishing 104th and 238th).
I occasionally talk here about how impatient I sometimes get with poker-related analogies. For instance, about a year ago I referred to the Poker Shrink noting how he wasn’t “a big fan of the ‘Poker is like Life’ books and articles” because, in his view, most of them end up being “too general to carry any more wisdom than a dribble glass.” I agreed with the Shrink in saying I also didn’t care much for these analogies — most particularly when they end up making one’s meaning more vague rather than helping clarify what it is one is trying to express. In other words, I ain’t too keen on someone proclaiming “Poker is like life” and leaving it at that, though I do often appreciate the many ways poker presents us with situations that resemble those we face elsewhere, and thus occasionally provides interesting ways to talk about and assess those non-poker situations
The Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has an interesting new piece in the February 11, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books , a review of Spanish writer Diego Rasskin-Gutman’s Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence of the Human Mind . Much of the article concerns the book, but toward the end Kasparov makes a couple of interesting references to poker — comparing it to chess and talking about both games in the context of advancing research in the field of artificial intelligence — that I thought I’d share here. Kasparov begins by recounting how back in 1985 — after he had defeated Anatoly Karpov and become World Chess Champion at age 22 — he took on 32 chess-playing computers in a much publicized event in Hamburg and beat them all
Ended up playing some more Rush Poker over the weekend on Full Tilt and enjoyed it quite a bit. I’m just one-tabling the sucker, sticking with the pot-limit Omaha games (both six-handed and full ring). Looking at my Poker Tracker stats, it appears I’m playing almost exactly 150 hands per hour
