Recent content by stainless steel rat

not to change the subject, but... your "gay men" reminded me of an amusing happening. My wife went with a friend to NYC a few years ago. They managed to tour much of the city. She called one night and said "you'll never guess what I saw today!". I promptly asked "what?" She answered...

different skills The ability to play chess requires significant visualization ability, so that you can mentally play out a sequence of moves, and "look" at the resulting position to see whether you like it or not. A good memory is also important for remembering opening variations that are...

not quite the way we do it. :) I do lots of testing where I play "game in one second", and it is interesting to watch as the pieces are just a "blur". What I see is "blurrrr", game over, "blurrrr", game over. I only do this to get a quick feel for whether a change is good or bad. Serious chess...

actually the "book" is only used to get the game into a known playable position, rather than something dead lost. But after that, the programs play very much like humans, in that they have some sort of code that moves the pieces around, and another piece of code that says "this position is good...

file sizes. a gigabyte opening book is pretty common. The file "enormous.pgn" many use for opening book preparation is well over a gigabyte of ASCII text. The endgame tables boggle the mind. We have completed the 6-piece endings now, and we have about 1.2 terabytes of data as a result. The new...

computers... are blessed with perfect memory, and near instantaneous access. So the opening book can be as big as you want. For example, how about taking 10 million grandmaster games, cataloging their opening moves, and then using that to play the opening? Trivial to do with a computer. BTW...

When I first started this tracking approach... I kept track of each deck for a 6 deck shoe, then I could calculate how each deck was affected when mixed with its "matching" deck from the second stack. Wasn't too hard, but since the single-riffle is pretty rare (I played at one Indian store...

rumor mill... Rumor has it that the author is doing a major rewrite of the "smarts" of the program, planned debut at the next WCCC event. Might be a few surprises built in as well...

one idea... This all depends on the shuffle used, how many decks are cutoff, etc. For example, at the first "indian store" where the "shuffle-tracking" concept suddenly popped into my head, we were in a 6d shoe, with 1.5 decks cut off. The shuffle was a single riffle, with the cut-off 1.5...

wonder how things will look... Going to be interesting to see what games they offer, since competition will be very limited for a while. Maybe less 6:5 to entice people back? Maybe some decent SD/DD games for a change. Or maybe not. :)

follow-up with more info Checked one of the Beau flyers. Main "drift" was "Visit our properties in LV." Story in today's paper here about the Beau having paid employees for 3 months since Katrina, but they are now stopping that practice, cutting off fringe benefits like insurance in the...

speaking of "the boot"... Any news from Biloxi? I'm getting flyers from the Beau, but only "we will reopen in 2006" or some such...

you missed his point... Just because you quit playing _now_ because you lost N in a row, does _not_ mean that you won't continue that streak when you start to play at the next stop. Streaks can just as easily continue across multiple sessions as they can extend across multiple hands or multiple...

It just doesn't work that way... You are trying to recognize a streak before it happens, and this can't be done in 21. If you bet big, and lose, and then bet small and win, when you should have bet big and won, you just lowered your EV. Best way to beat this game is to play a lot at home with...

query I've played in Vegas a fair number of times, but never been to "Terrible's"? Is this at one specific location? (since I noticed when I was there that several casinos had the name "Terrible's" on the front if my memory is correct. For example, I think I saw one on the way to Hoover Dam...