Heads up

One of my favorite foods growing up was Peking Duck. Last night I took a couple gambling buddies, Benjie and Simon, and my old friend Kevin Hogan to Wynn’s Wing Lei restaurant for the fabulous five-course Peking Duck dinner, washed down with a couple bottles of 2002 Dalla Valle Cabernet. Kevin had to take a redeye home after dinner but Simon and I went over to the Imperial Palace to check out the new heads-up PokerTek table at the release party all the bloggers had been invited to. By the time I got there the room was littered with empty cans and Chardonnay bottles but a few conscious bloggers were playing play-money poker. I grabbed an empty seat at the 10-handed table and played a sit-and-go, which I won using optimal game theory, although Joanne inexplicably beat me in a heads-up match.

The party descended to the Geisha bar where the sober, Argus-eyed Michael Craig wove through the interstices of the swaying assembly and took furious notes for future blackmail use against the besotted bloggers. Iggy held court as usual, the pokerbabes crowding around to be in the presence of his movie-star looks. Mike whipped out a couple of expensive cigars and we enjoyed the last night in the company of the few fellows bitten by not only the poker bug but also the writing one.

Stone Tablet

I played the Ultimate Poker Challenge $340 on Saturday but got cold decked early with KK v. AA. They’re changing the schedule to Fri-Sat-Sun instead of Sat-Sun-Mon and moving the $660 event to Saturday. Both changes seem good to me. My dating counselor Michael Craig took fifth place for $20k+ in the Full Tilt $350k guarantee yesterday – good job! I got back too late to sweat him from dinner at Delmonico with a gambling buddy, his wife, and Carmen (yes, I know she’s hot, no need to post a comment). Delmonico used to be one of my favorite haunts but I rarely stay at the Venetian any more so it had been years. I was happy to see they still had the Foie Gras of the Day. I pointed it out to Carmen and she asked, “What’s Foie Gras of the Day?” I said, “It’s the Foie Gras du jour.” I ordered that and a filet mignon, hold the slab of butter. Both dishes were perfect. We started with a 1999 Veuve Cliquot Rosé Champagne and moved on to the 1997 L’Ermita Priorat, which was drinking spectacularly.

Scott Adams does a serious blog entry every Sunday and yesterday he wrote about free will:

Unfortunately, I can’t convince most people that free will doesn’t exist. I have
tried arguing that the laws of physics clearly apply to brains, and brains cause
your actions. That seems so obvious to me that belaboring it with additional
evidence would be overkill.

Unfortunately it’s not obvious. The laws of physics are models we use to try to understand the way things work, and different models are needed for different corners of the universe. Believing that the laws of physics as we understand them are engraved on a stone tablet is no more scientific than believing in Creationism. One model that works very well for living in society is that by and large people have control of, and are responsible for, their behavior. That is free will. While there may be a deterministic process that produces human behavior given some initial state, unless and until that state can be measured and the resultant behavior predicted, determinism is simply not a useful theory. Given the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it seems unlikely such a precise measurement could ever take place.

More to the point, my beliefs are actually a major source of input to any such deterministic mechanism. That why religions have such a major effect on the world, for good or evil. If you believe people can do anything of value with their lives, evangelizing for determinism doesn’t seem like a good strategy for causing that to happen. If it were me, I’d instead write books illustrating the degree to which we get surreptitiously programmed and how to counteract that and live life to the fullest.

Politics, sausages, and writing

November is Seattle’s worst month, but even at that there’s a comforting quality to the gray blanket of low clouds, the cool rain dripping daily from evergreen needles and thatched roofs, the lazy sunrise and reassuring peek of setting sun well before dinnertime. I remember driving around in the dark, wipers on high but still insufficient to keep the windshield dry, peering out into the night, headlamps making crystal beads out of the fat droplets. This is the time of year to light the fireplace, snuggle on the sofa with tea and blankets, wear sweaters and slippers and dig out the Netflix.

I reluctantly started the much-hated non-Sorkin season seven of West Wing and was surprised at how much I liked it. Clever writing had given way to clever plot lines and it felt more like 24 than West Wing but I immediately ordered the rest of the disks. I also watched The Lady Eve, one of Paul Phillips’s recommendations. An old Preston Sturges con-artist romantic comedy with Henry Fonda, I’m surprised I never saw it before. I should order all the rest of Sturges’s films – talk about clever writing!

With nothing on the rotisserie until Thanksgiving Day I called Mike Craig and asked if this would be a good time to fly down to Phoenix and work on our poker book (second poker book, actually – I wrote one of the chapters in the upcoming Full Tilt Strategy Guide – Tournament Edition) and fix me up with the four hot chicks he keeps threatening on me. It was, so I booked a flight and got a suite at the Westin Kierland. Mike offered me a vacant condo but I wanted a place with a gym so I could continue my workout regimen uninterrupted. Mike is one of those rare writers who actually gets work done, which is why I twisted his arm to collaborate on this book with me. Originally I was just going to publish a collection of my blog entries but as we strategize and synergize it looks like there will be a ton of new material. I’m excited.

I won’t go too much into the inner workings of politics, sausage-making, or writing a book, but suffice it to say that we’re making progress despite taking plenty of time to hang out with Mike’s family, smoke cigars out by the fire, and eat at each of the new Mastro’s restaurants with a different one of his yenta selections for me each night. We also got to see Arnie the Compmeister, whose wife and daughter it turned out the Craigs actually knew already. I’ve been drinking the 2004 Twenty Bench Cabernet by the glass – 2004 continues to be a very promising year for Napa, perhaps as good as 2002. I plan to fly back to Seattle on Thursday, in time for turkey at the Saltas, with a stack of Myspace addresses burning a hole in my pocket.

Moola moola

OK, forget about Chuzzle. My new goal is to win $10 million playing Moola. It’s the latest addition to the non-illegal non-gambling skill game racket, with the twist that you don’t actually deposit any money but instead get paid for watching ads at the rate of about 10 cents/hr. It’s by invitation only right now, but they’re not difficult to come by. Once you find someone to invite you in, they start you off with a penny. All you have to do is double it 30 times and you can cash out for $10,737,418.24. They offer a choice of skill games including Tiltboys’ specialty Roshambo. I quickly analyzed the other two games with optimal game theory and came to the conclusion that in a little over 10,000 hours I could win the top prize. Naturally, I plan to spend the next five years accomplishing that goal, then cash out and put it with the rest. I’m already up to 24 cents.

Michael Craig is doing his best to mess up my love life, identifying cute girls as prospective mates for me and then using his unique wit and charm to send them running in the opposite direction screaming. Fortunately, I’ve punished him by getting him to agree to co-author the Lion Tales book with me. I just shipped him off several hundred pages, which ought to keep him out of my private-parts life awhile.

If you’re still getting these by email, check out Google Reader, a super easy RSS aggregator. I use Google Home Page and have the reader right on the front. It’s way better than the super slow, buggy Newsgator I had been using.

It’s minutes until the election returns come in so I have the TV on, a rarity for me when planes aren’t crashing into buildings. If you haven’t voted and the polls are still open, go and throw the lying cheating bastards out.