As many of you know, Phil and I started Bad Beat on Cancer while on the Ultimate Sports Adventure, a year-long sports road trip in which we raised money for PreventCancer.org

Well, now there is an heir apparent, Jay the Tailgate Guy, and he's raising the bar with his "Take My Ride Challenge". And you can help, and possibly win Jay's tricked-out RV in the process.

Click here for details on Jay's $100K "Take MY Ride" Challenge.

From: Brent

Hi. I played with you in Event 36 yesterday, at Table 36, Seat 3. I was the tight guy that got knocked out with Js vs. As.

I know not many people want to give up anything they get on opponents, but I was curious if you saw anything in my game that might have made going farther in the tournament more difficult on me.

I know, after awhile some of the cards I was getting were really starting to get frustrating, it just seemed like I wasn't getting anything I would be even remotely comfortable with defending a blind or even coming over the top a previous raiser.

In that four-hour period I saw a pair of 4s, a pair of 8s, and a pair of Js. I managed to steal some blinds with the 4s, and there was a pretty hefty raise, and a call with my 8s before me. Considering the chips I had to play with the only play I saw was coming over the top all-in with the 8s, but I figured at best I would be in a race, and at worst dominated.

There were two hands, looking back on, that I should have played. I had a K, J suited with a raise and one call in front of me, and had A, Q os when the player to my right said, "Now is your chance to double up."

Due to the talking, which he really didn't do in the middle of a hand, and the chips he put on his cards when he capped them (it seemed he put more chips on his stronger hands than his weaker ones), I put him on a strong hand, A, K or K, K, which would have given me some troubles.

I also know that I started to let some of my frustration show with some of the hands I was getting.

Hey Brent,

Happy to share my thoughts.

The basic thing you could have changed is play less tight at that table, and more importantly, play the other players' hands instead of your own. The table itself was playing very timidly (except for the guy who was moved to seat 1 after the first person there busted). This means that you should be looking for opportunities to pick up chips independent of what your own cards were, just based on the situation.

For example, mid position standard steal raise, limp from button, limp from small blind. It almost doesn't matter what you have in the BB, you can push there and the only person who can call you is the original raiser, who you think might be stealing anyway and also has to worry about beating the two limpers in addition to beating you. Standard squeeze play. And remember, for you to lose that pot, first he has to call and then he has to beat you. As you know, unless he's paired or has you dominated, you are never worse than about 40%, and with all that extra dead money in the pot, you have positive equity even if he does call.

A variant I like there even better is a modified stop-and-go, depending on your stack size. Assuming it's a reasonable size raise to bet a third of your stack, do that with the intention of jamming on the flop no matter what happens. You may get reraised all-in pre-flop anyway, but then you are in no worse shape than before. The advantage is if you do get just called pre-flop, then you have an extra chance to pick up the pot w/o a showdown. Remember that unpaired cards in your opponent's hand will fail to pair the flop about two thirds of the time. Even if he suspects what you are doing, he will have to fold most hands once you push all in, whereas if you had gotten the money in before the flop you'd have to beat him in a showdown.

Generally speaking, I would recommend watching the play develop and look for spots where you see opportunities like the above. There are many variants that come up depending on what kinds of reads you have on the players, what their various stack sizes are like, what yours is, what your table image is like, etc. Of course you shouldn't look at your cards before it's your turn to act anyway, but I would even recommend occasionally not looking before making an opportunistic play such as the above if you are likely to chicken out or give away information by looking. But pretend to look regardless :-)

Best of luck, and let me know how it goes.

Sunday million, 345 players left 306 make the money, blind are $500/$1000 with $100 ante. I have about $21,000 and a solid table image, I have only showed down quality hands for the position I came into the hands and only raised early and shown AA JJ QQ AKs the situations were Raise, small stack all in and call, in the last hour. The hand in question I had AKo and first to act, raised to $3500. It folded around to the BB and he goes all in for about $11,900 more, I have $17,500 left, $20,000 in the pot. I think I know this player well and believe he would only do this with QQ or better. My thoughts were I was 50/50 or dominated, and if I lost I would not make the money, if I fold now I can fold to the money. If I call and win I'll be able to keep stealing blinds for 5-10 more minutes. After careful consideration I decided that I wasn't willing to put that much in at this stage. I folded and he showed QQ. Many questions are now floating around in my head, this is the first time I have shown weakness at this table. Should I be raising with AK at this stage in early if I'm not willing to call off more chips? Should I be raising more than $3500, maybe all in? I know I should be taking advantage of the short stacks trying to make it, but now I am one. I am very curious to get your perspective on this.

Here are my general thoughts on playing AK. Specifically above, I would have done one of two things depending on the rest of the players to act behind me. If they are all short-stacked enough that their only real move is all-in, then I would have beat them to the punch with my 20 big blinds. Yes, you could get unlucky and find AA behind you, but picking up the blinds and antes outweighs that small chance. Even against KK you are still 33% to win, and a short stack could easily call you with a dominated hand like AQ down to A8 or so.

If you are playing against some stacks around your size or larger, and/or you are playing against some loose aggressive opponents, the right move might be to flat call and hope someone jams trying to get you off a drawing hand like a small pair. You might trap a weaker ace like this that might have folded to your preemptive jam.

Jamming UTG in that situation is more likely to be correct but is also more likely to just win you the blinds. The main thing you want to avoid is a tough decision against a possible coin flip. Once you are in for that first raise, you are committed, so you might as well just beat your opponents to the punch and put the hard decision on them.

I am experimenting with a new home page, using Zoho Notebooks:

Rafe’s Home Page

I know it’s not ideal, esp since it doesn’t appear to work on Safari, and you have to click to see the content (what’s that all about?) However, I love how easy it is to create non-rectilinear layouts and overlapping content. If anyone knows of a better system with those features, or tricks on Zoho that I’m apparently not aware of, I’d appreciate hearing from you via the comments section here.

Also, as a straw poll, post a comment if you can’t view the page properly since I don’t know what browsers work with Zoho and what don’t.

And if you have any other comments about how to improve the page, what you’d want to see on it, lemme know.

One of my new favorite pastimes is identifying real world scenarios that I think are examples of Parrondo's Paradox.  Here are some from the world of poker:

Full Tilt Poker under Private tourneys tab. Password is "badbeat".

Here's my latest poker post with some tournament advice.

We will be holding an online BBoC tourney the day after Thanksgiving:

Nov 23 @ 12pm Eastern (9am Pacific)
location: Full Tilt Poker (under the Private Tourneys tab)
password: badbeat

Gobble, Gobble!

10pm Eastern / 7pm Pacific.

Tourney is 28674653 located in the Private tab, and the password is "badbeat".

Michael Craig and Rafe Furst both have bounties on themselves.

Hope to see you there!

With a little bit of cleverness, you can read entire books on Amazon.com for free, assuming they have the "Search Inside" feature. Here's how.

Getting Started

When you first click the cover of a book that has Search Inside (for example Tales From the Tiltboys), you will be able to flip back and forth between certain pages, up to a point. Typically, they give you through the introduction, index and several pages of the first chapter. Once you get to the point where the page numbers stop going up by one, you need to go into "search mode". In our book this is after page 6. Search mode consists of typing in keywords into the Search Inside this Book box on the left until you locate either the next page in the sequence, or the one after, or the one after that. You have some leeway because you will be able to flip back and forth several pages from where you end up.

The key to efficient search mode technique is to choose a keyword (or small set of keywords) that are likely to show up on every page. Amazon is smart enough not to index commonplace words like "the", but based on whatever you are reading, there will always be words that are good general choices. For instance "tilt" appears on 90 different pages including 2, 3, 8-9, 17-19, 21-23, 25, 29, 31, 34-35, 37-38, 40-41, 43-44, 46-50. "Poker" appears on 94 pages including 1-5, 7, 12, 14, 16-18, 24, 26, 30-32, 37, 39, 41-42, 47, 49-50. The only pages that are not direct hits with either of these two keywords are 6, 10, 11, 13, 15, 20, 27, 28, 33, 36, 45. And given the two page leeway in either direction, you can read every page in the first 50 with just "tilt" and "poker". In fact you can cover every page in the book with them except for two pages,* which you can easily pick up by adding "roshambo".

Minimal Amazon Covering Set (MACS)

A set of keywords that lets you read an entire book for free on Amazon is a covering set (CS). If the number of keywords in a CS is less than or equal to that of all other CSs for the same book, then it is a Minimal Amazon Covering Set (MACS). There may be more than one MACS for any given book. (And yes, someone who is highly skilled at discovering these could be considered a "MACS book pro").

Freeload it Forward

I have set up a Wikipedia page here where you can add MACS for your favorite books. It's fun and easy to do!

UPDATE: Wikipedia is threatening to be lame and delete my "apparent neologism". If they do, then just post your MACS here as comments and I will set up a true, open wiki if there is enough demand.

Also, if you Digg this post, it will spread faster and more people will add MACS for you to enjoy.


Note to Amazon

Before you look to close this loophole, first check to see your sales numbers are positively or negatively affected. Personally, I find it tedious and not that satisfying to read a book electronically and end up buying the book if I'm at all interested. There's something about being able to physically flip pages and read from print (as opposed to an LCD) that makes it a totally different experience, and one worth paying for.

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* I'll send a free signed hardcover copy of TFtT to the first person who posts a reply with the correct two pages, and a free Final Table Poker DVD to each person who first finds a unique set of two keywords that cover the whole book. If you find a single keyword that covers the whole book, talk to me about a job opportunity. Tiltboys and direct relatives not eligible, Perry.