Uncorrelated Observations

The textbook definition of "suckout"

2009-03-22T06:53:00.002-08:00

God, that was sad.

The next hand was KK vs TT - TT hit a set and screwed me. Shortly after that, its AK vs AQ. AQ hit full house and screwed me out of the tournament.

PokerStars Game #26234018002: Tournament #149796320, 15000+400 Hold'em No Limit - Level IX
(200/400) - 2009/03/22 7:45:45 PT [2009/03/22 10:45:45 ET]
Table '149796320 28' 9-max Seat #1 is the button
Seat 1: tooltheman (1405 in chips)
Seat 2: gokoda (2715 in chips)
Seat 3: bighicksb (100 in chips) is sitting out
Seat 4: Cobra8682 (4740 in chips)
Seat 5: HARDxXxCORE (490 in chips)
Seat 6: cccp005 (6350 in chips)
Seat 7: 1chookdii (10105 in chips)
Seat 8: jowr (12425 in chips)
Seat 9: MarvinMTC (7920 in chips)
tooltheman: posts the ante 50
gokoda: posts the ante 50
bighicksb: posts the ante 50
Cobra8682: posts the ante 50
HARDxXxCORE: posts the ante 50
cccp005: posts the ante 50
1chookdii: posts the ante 50
jowr: posts the ante 50
MarvinMTC: posts the ante 50
gokoda: posts small blind 200
bighicksb: posts big blind 50 and is all-in
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to jowr [Kh Kc]
Cobra8682: folds
HARDxXxCORE: folds
cccp005: calls 400
1chookdii: folds
jowr: raises 1600 to 2000
MarvinMTC: folds
tooltheman: folds
gokoda: folds
bighicksb: folds
cccp005: raises 4000 to 6000
jowr: raises 4000 to 10000
cccp005: calls 300 and is all-in
Uncalled bet (3700) returned to jowr
*** FLOP *** [Ah Ad As]
jowr said, "oh my god"
*** TURN *** [Ah Ad As] [5c]
cccp005 said, "lol+"
*** RIVER *** [Ah Ad As 5c] [7c]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
cccp005: shows [Ac Jc] (four of a kind, Aces)
jowr: shows [Kh Kc] (a full house, Aces full of Kings)
cccp005 collected 12650 from side pot
cccp005 collected 650 from main pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 13300 Main pot 650. Side pot 12650. | Rake 0
Board [Ah Ad As 5c 7c]
Seat 1: tooltheman (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 2: gokoda (small blind) folded before Flop
Seat 3: bighicksb (big blind) folded before Flop
Seat 4: Cobra8682 folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 5: HARDxXxCORE folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 6: cccp005 showed [Ac Jc] and won (13300) with four of a kind, Aces
Seat 7: 1chookdii folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 8: jowr showed [Kh Kc] and lost with a full house, Aces full of Kings
Seat 9: MarvinMTC folded before Flop (didn't bet)

Ok, 640k isn't enough...

2009-03-07T19:08:00.004-09:00

Holy shit.

PokerStars Game #25722840222: Hold'em No Limit (100/200) - 2009/03/07 19:26:38 PT [2009/03/07 22:26:38 ET]
Table 'Ismene IV' 9-max (Play Money) Seat #7 is the button
Seat 1: c0achb1lly (40000 in chips)
Seat 2: Karlo10 (323700 in chips)
Seat 3: genuff (142200 in chips)
Seat 4: BigDougie612 (645025 in chips)
Seat 5: RicoWhiz (39800 in chips)
Seat 6: bcloud84 (36600 in chips)
Seat 7: Smokeykoda (32500 in chips)
Seat 8: yen1 (158100 in chips)
Seat 9: jowr (618794 in chips)
yen1: posts small blind 100
jowr: posts big blind 200
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to jowr [7h 7c]
c0achb1lly: folds
Karlo10: calls 200
genuff: folds
BigDougie612: calls 200
RicoWhiz: calls 200
bcloud84: raises 36400 to 36600 and is all-in
Smokeykoda: folds
yen1: folds
jowr: calls 36400
Karlo10: folds
BigDougie612 said, "ok"
BigDougie612: calls 36400
RicoWhiz: folds
*** FLOP *** [Ts 6d 6h]
BigDougie612 said, "lol"
jowr: bets 25000
BigDougie612: calls 25000

I have 6 outs to turn the hand from a two pair into a full boat, which gives me about a 25% chance of hitting.

*** TURN *** [Ts 6d 6h] [7d]

SCORE.

jowr: bets 100000
BigDougie612: raises 100000 to 200000
jowr: raises 357194 to 557194 and is all-in
BigDougie612 said, "WHAT???"
BigDougie612: calls 357194
*** RIVER *** [Ts 6d 6h 7d] [Jh]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
jowr: shows [7h 7c] (a full house, Sevens full of Sixes)
BigDougie612: mucks hand
jowr collected 1164388 from side pot
jowr said, "OH YES"
BigDougie612 said, "WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
bcloud84: mucks hand
jowr collected 110300 from main pot
yen1 said, "hahaahah"
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 1274688 Main pot 110300. Side pot 1164388. | Rake 0
Board [Ts 6d 6h 7d Jh]
Seat 1: c0achb1lly folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 2: Karlo10 folded before Flop
Seat 3: genuff folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 4: BigDougie612 mucked [9s 8d]
Seat 5: RicoWhiz folded before Flop
Seat 6: bcloud84 mucked [As Qd]
Seat 7: Smokeykoda (button) folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 8: yen1 (small blind) folded before Flop
Seat 9: jowr (big blind) showed [7h 7c] and won (1274688) with a full house, Sevens full of Sixes

640k should be enough for everybody....

2009-03-07T16:43:00.004-09:00

I happen to enjoy poker a great deal, particularally no limit Texas Hold'em. This is the PokerStars hand history for one (what I think is...) of the largest play money wins ever. If not ever, but most certaintly more than anyone on that table, myself included, has ever seen.

I am jowr.

This is a 100/200 blind no ante play money Texas Hold'em table. What's especially fun is that I can sell these chips for roughly 10$ per million chips, so this was a 6 dollar win.

PokerStars Game #25719578984: Hold'em No Limit (100/200) - 2009/03/07 17:25:02 PT [2009/03/07 20:25:02 ET]
Table 'Ismene IV' 9-max (Play Money) Seat #8 is the button
Seat 1: bastinov (106350 in chips)
Seat 2: blowhol (184800 in chips)
Seat 3: genuff (30900 in chips)
Seat 4: BigDougie612 (402175 in chips)
Seat 5: yarak atan (40000 in chips)
Seat 6: abil2000 (113000 in chips)
Seat 8: Dilrosun (18000 in chips)
Seat 9: jowr (552194 in chips)
jowr: posts small blind 100
bastinov: posts big blind 200
yarak atan: posts small & big blinds 300
abil2000: posts small & big blinds 300
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to jowr [9s 7d]
blowhol: calls 200
genuff: folds
BigDougie612: calls 200
yarak atan: checks
abil2000: checks
Dilrosun: calls 200
jowr: calls 100
bastinov: raises 2000 to 2200
blowhol: calls 2000
BigDougie612: calls 2000
yarak atan: calls 2000
abil2000: calls 2000
Dilrosun: calls 2000
jowr: calls 2000

I do not know why I called this, 97 off-suite isn't that good. Off by one hole cards sometimes work though, and this is one of those times.

*** FLOP *** [Qd 8h 6c]
jowr: bets 10000

This is an open ended straight draw. How the fuck could I not make a bet here?

bastinov: calls 10000
blowhol: folds
BigDougie612: calls 10000
yarak atan: folds
abil2000: calls 10000
Dilrosun: folds
*** TURN *** [Qd 8h 6c] [8d]

The turn was bad for me.

Mathematically, the odds of hitting an open ended straight after this is exactly 17.7%. However, my stack was rather large and by this point the pot was rather large - 500k is larger than I've ever seen. So I felt that was worth the shot - worst case is that I blow 70k on that, realize I'm drawing dead, and fold.

jowr: bets 25000
Dilrosun said, "fd k 10"
bastinov: raises 69150 to 94150 and is all-in
jowr said, "interesting"
BigDougie612: calls 94150
abil2000: folds
jowr said, "oh dear"
jowr said, "i need to think for a minute"

...I did...

BigDougie612 said, "i had too"
jowr said, "ok"
jowr: calls 69150
*** RIVER *** [Qd 8h 6c 8d] [Td]

FUCK YEAH

jowr: bets 150000

...I do sometimes bluff, and that bet was about 1/4 of the pot at that point. A decent sized bluff hand, just scaled to match my stack and the pot.

BigDougie612 said, "WHAT???"
jowr said, "it is to make you think"
jowr said, "carefully"

...it's true...

BigDougie612 said, "i have trips"
BigDougie612 said, "lets gamble"
BigDougie612: calls 150000
*** SHOW DOWN ***
jowr: shows [9s 7d] (a straight, Six to Ten)
BigDougie612: mucks hand
jowr collected 300000 from side pot
bastinov: mucks hand

...bastinov had pocket kings. He stoped talking mad shit about me roughly 400k ago.

jowr collected 338050 from main pot
BigDougie612 said, "OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 638050 Main pot 338050. Side pot 300000. | Rake 0
Board [Qd 8h 6c 8d Td]
Seat 1: bastinov (big blind) mucked [Kh Kc]
Seat 2: blowhol folded on the Flop
Seat 3: genuff folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 4: BigDougie612 mucked [8s Kd]
Seat 5: yarak atan folded on the Flop
Seat 6: abil2000 folded on the Turn
Seat 8: Dilrosun (button) folded on the Flop
Seat 9: jowr (small blind) showed [9s 7d] and won (638050) with a straight, Six to Ten

Gravitation and non-progress

2009-02-25T14:26:00.002-09:00

Gravitation has and probably always will be my area of interest so I have nothing constructive to say about particle physics. However, there is an analogy between the lack of progress in particle physics in recent years, and gravitation in recent years.

All the major work in general relativity stopped being done in the 60's and 70's, and that is only if you consider the singularity theorems and such by Hawking & Penrose to be part and parcel of the subject. Sure there have been refinements in the past 40 years and the occasional highly interesting bit of work [eg, Teutolsky's black hole bomb: [ hep-th/0404096 ] here and there, but I consider the subject roughly 'done'. That's why MTW - even though it was written near 40 years ago - is still the definitive book on the subject. Or why I

There have been the occasional branchings-out through things like Einstein-Cartan theory which have zero practical hope of experimental testing, and the pointless wandering of the thousand string theories, loop quantum gravity, etc. Nobody has accomplished fuck-all in all this time, even to the point of predicting simple Newtonian gravitation from the constructs.

In the past 40 years, folks have been trying Really Really Hard(tm) to break GR. My lifetime plus a few decades of lunar ranging has put some amazing constraints on alternative theories, and shown us exactly nothing that can't be taken care of by GR. More interesting and useful results like the handful of strong-field tests of GR via binary systems haven't put up anything special despite 30 years of trying [ astro-ph/0407149 ] in one particular example.

More recent fun stuff consists of dark matter, but it looks like GR can take care of that as well - protestations from the peanut gallery notwithstanding.

In fact, I don't see any serious challenge to GR existing right now. Cosmology is more of a challenge to particle physics than it is to GR. Dark matter has confused the bejezus out of the particle physics crowd, and there is that 100-or-so order of magnitude difference on the vacuum energy density [that GR correctly describes].

Sometimes I think gravitation just might not be quantizable and that's the correct way of looking at things. We'll see.

Library finds

2009-02-10T14:46:00.001-09:00

Every few weeks I go over to the research library and poke through the journals that interest me [PRL, APJ, etc] and see what folks are up to. Usually I just commit the interesting shit to the combined memory of my brain [bad] and notebook [much better], but I figure this is a more constructive use of my time!

Find #1: Cuesta and Lambiase, "NEUTRINO MASS SPECTRUM FROM GRAVITATIONAL WAVES GENERATED BY DOUBLE NEUTRINO SPIN-FLIP IN SUPERNOVAE", Astrophysical Journal, 639:371-376, 2008 December 10.

At first blush, this seems pretty stupid - "What the fuck do gravitational waves and neutrinos have in common?" is a less-than-unreasonable thing to think. It turns out that pulses of both are produced at roughly [important!] the same time and in the same part of the star. If nothing else, the abstract taught me that neutrinos have a nonzero magnetic moment [~10^-11 the size of the Bohr Magneton] ...

The current paingiver in determining neutrino masses is that current Earthbound detection methods are only sensitive to the difference of squared masses [3 flavors, lots of combinations!] as opposed to the mass itself. So while the _differences_ are known to decent precision, the actual masses themselves are not. Which is a pain.

The basic idea borrows from that of the neutrino detection of SN1987a: neutrinos travel close to the speed of light, and everything inbetween is effectively transparent to them. The classic charactarization of attenuation for thse buggers is 50% capture through a light-year wide wall of lead.

The authors assume that both neutrinos and gravitational radiation are generated during the "neutronization phase" of a Type II supernova. That neutrinos are generated en-masse during such an event is obvious, that lots of gravitational radiation is produced is not. Let's assume it happens - we don't really know how asymmetric Type II's are anyway, so who the hell knows? It is specifically assumed that the gravitational wave [GW] signal is produced from the neutrino outflow itself, which I find fantastic as neutrinos do jack shit otherwise.

The process that makes all this go is rather complicated - reading the _entire_ paper is advised. Or make inferences based on my summary - whichever.

Step one is our old friend, the core collapse (Type II) supernova. Some poor star went through its' fuel cycle and mistakenly started producing Iron via fission. Unfortunately Iron is the inflection point which decides whether fusion or fission is the energetically favorable thing to do. Given that the star is propped up by the energy output in the core, turning off the power is the sure-fire way to really fuck up the local stellar neighborhood. The upper layers of the star now get to enjoy gravity's loving embrace, and go into free fall.

Assuming the quantum mechanics and general relativity are feeling generous, the access hatch to infinity stays closed and matter continues to function. The infalling core starts, among many messy things, pressing upon what is already there and eventually compresses the hell out of everything [so-called "neutronization phase] until only neutrons remain [neutron star]. Unfortunately for anything within a few light years that is vulnerable to neutrino capture, the p + e --> n process happens to spit out a boatload of neutrinos. The exact value of 'boatload' depends, but it should be kept in mind that neutrinos carry away a significant amount of the energy in a supernova and that a supernova outshines its' parent galaxy in the visible spectrum for many minutes. The number suggested in this paper is in the ballpark of 10^53 erg/sec.

[New word learned from this paper: deleptonization - I need to start playing scrabble]

Now, the authors assume that there is a chirality conversion process in which left-handed and right-handed neutrinos interact with the insanely magnetized [~10^13 gauss] plasma around the core, and convert to and fro. This conversion process is [presumably] asymmetric, from which the quadrupole moment and thus - eventually - the gravitational wave signal can be derived.

After referencing Beacom, J. F., et al. 2001, Phys. Rev. D, 60, 073011 in which the lag time between neutrino emission and gravitational wave emission is derived, it is explained that the lag time is directly proportional to the square of the neutrino mass.

Earlier it was shown that such events, as assumed, produce gravitational wave strain amplitudes that are well within reach of LIGO as it is now. Unfortunately, supernova events like this occur on the order of one per galaxy per century, and there are only a few galaxies within the volume observable by LIGO.

Merging neutrino and gravitational physics together like this is cool as hell.