Learn the game before playing it

A couple of weeks ago I had written about online casinos and gaming online in general. When it comes to gaming, there are two types of players (whether playing online or otherwise) – casual-for-fun players and serious-for-money players. The casual for fun players normally hit the slot machines, or roulette, or craps, or other such games. But the serious for money players usually go after games such as poker or black jack. The difference between the two is that while all of them are games of chance, the latter games are also dependent on the skills of the player.

imageNow, if you would like to be in the second category of the players, then you better learn the game that you are playing very well. You can start out by learning the different types of games. These vary a lot, and even within game types, there are tons of variations. For example, poker alone has a large number of variations, different game types, mixture of game types, and so on (with one of the most popular being Texas Hold’em). What you need to develop and learn are the rules of the game that you pick (which is easy) and the strategies of the game (which is hard, given there is no end), and to develop the quality that makes you a good poker player (which is the hardest, since that is so hard to define).

The good news is that at least for the first two, there are plenty of resources out there which can help you out. I am sure there are guidelines and commentaries about the last one as well. How do you go about looking for these tips? Well, you search for them – for example, for Texas Hold’em, you would search for hold’em tips on your favorite search engine, and you should find a lot of information (and to get you started I have linked to one such site). You will get access to guides, tips, videos, psychology (that third point), various aids to quickly calculate the mathematics of the game, and basically everything that you need to turn you into a serious card player.

These resources will even help you find rooms where you can play, with the various characteristics of the rooms along with reviews. There are people who teach these games for a living (and there are a lot who learn). The teachers are past or current professional players. You can watch games being played by other people and learn from them. And you can get access to a lot of training tools which can help you hone your own skills at the game. I have watched some of these games on TV and to say that these are just a game of chance is totally incorrect. They require serious skill, and consequently require serious training and practice to acquire the skill.

Here’s a video of a poker game going on. Watch it and see if it is exciting (there was a reason that Casino Royale – the James Bond flick – was such a thriller – part of the thrill was in the poker game):

October 28th, 2009 | Leave a Comment

FAILURE: Google releases new version, but I can’t get it

I use Google Chrome as my browser (it is just way faster than any other). However, there are a number of things that annoy me about the browser. One of the most annoying problems is that of update. My browser never auto-updates, despite the fact that there are two GoogleUpdate.exe processes running in my task manager all the time. So, the way I keep up with my updates is by manually going to the About box, and checking if a new update is available.

But, today even that is not working for me. Google has released a new update but it doesn’t matter, because I can’t get it. I have been trying again and again to update my copy, but I keep getting an “Update server not available” error (screen shot below).

This is such a failure. I would love to be able to run the latest and the greatest, but these stupid errors keep getting in the way.

May 24th, 2009 | 1 Comment

My top 3 most popular posts of all time

Whoever ignores the important of StumbleUpon for driving traffic to a website does so at their own peril. Here are my top 3 most popular (viewed) posts of all time. And 99% of the traffic to these posts comes from StumbleUpon:

Jessica Rabbit in Real Life – this is the most awesome Photoshop creation I have ever seen.

Best Way to Determine Code Qualitythis is one of the most hilarious software comic ever.

Real Life Rendition of Stewie Griffin – more talented work from the artist behind Jessica.

All three of these posts get a lot of Thumbs Up on StumbleUpon, and so traffic just keeps coming back to them from SU. It has been over a year and it is still going strong.

April 12th, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Looks like LifeHacker is running out of hacks

I love LifeHacker, and should have blogged about it here (but I would imagine, almost everyone in the world knows about this site). Anyway, as a regular reader, I was deeply disappointed with one of their recent posts. Its about a ‘windows only’ screen saver which you can set to turn off your PC in a given time. Why would I even want such a thing when Windows has this built in. Just go and read the comments on this post to get an idea on how dumb everyone thinks this post is.

Since the team at LifeHacker has generally been good over the years, and I believe they are not dumb – the only conclusion for a post like this that I can derive is that they have totally run out of smart things to right about, and in desperation are posting any random stuff. Hopefully, this is a temporary phase.

September 22nd, 2008 | Leave a Comment

TechCrunch – a good site, but poor commentators

I have always followed TechCrunch for my quota of tech news. The great thing was that it used to have a great number of people leaving very insightful comments. Like I said, ‘was’. Lately, there have been more and more shallow commenting on the site.

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September 13th, 2008 | 3 Comments

Earth Day Reality

TruthDig celebrated Earth Day by putting together this cartoon which depicts the chilling truth behind anything we do on the planet today.  However, I felt that the picture is incomplete, so I edited it a little to look a little different. Here’s the original:

Earth Day Original

Here’s my version:

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April 23rd, 2008 | 1 Comment

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