Now, 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):

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.

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

Best Way to Determine Code Quality – this 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.

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.

Take for instance this post about Microsoft Tie-up with RIM for default search on the BlackBerry devices. Almost all the comments are about how good or bad Live search is, and the rest are about how people are going to give up their BlackBerry because of this. I think that is mostly crap. How many of these users would have used Live Search in the last year to comment how bad Live Search is. And, they are going to give BlackBerry up because they are too lazy to change their default search engine?

Now, I have my complaints with Microsoft, and Google for that matter. But I don’t dismiss them out of hand. I think TC needs to have some type of a comment rating system. At least that way I will be able to ignore the poorly rated comments.

Here’s my version:

Regardless of this fact, it is chilling to see how there are always two sides of a coin, and everything that we do can and will have undesired impact. We need to be careful of what we are doing.