I have taught probability courses several times, and have already tended to use some examples from gambling and poker. So, what is the difference through using this book? Basically, poker will no longer be just the occasional example, but rather will become the basis of pretty much everything that we do. Additionally, I plan to use class time to have the students actually play poker, in an attempt to obtain full buy-in from all of my students for this framework. I'll be operating under the assumption that some students may have little or no experience with Texas Hold'em, so I'll be starting from the ground up and teaching them the rules of the game and having them play on Day 1.
The appeal of this pedagogically is that, once we get going, it should interest many students much more than the classic examples in standard probability texts. However, as excited as I am about this, there are certainly some valid concerns, as brought up by a couple friends/colleagues on my Facebook wall when I posted about it there.
I'll hold off further discussion of that for later posts, though; once the semester is approaching, I plan to blog regularly about my experiences with this. But, right now I just want to get back in the swing of writing posts. To that end...
A quick recap of the past five years:
I completed my Ph.D., Lish and I got married, we moved to California for my first job as an Assistant Professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and then we moved to the Philadelphia area where I am now an Assistant Professor at Ursinus College.
On the poker side of things, kind of a lot has happened there as well. Towards the end of my time as student at UW, I had stopped playing online after Full Tilt and PokerStars got shut out of the U.S. market (on "Black Friday": April 15th, 2011). I had just over $3k locked up on Full Tilt when that happened, which was pretty huge for a small-timer like me.
Fast forward to our move to SLO in 2013, and the return of Full Tilt player funds was still under negotiations with the DOJ. However, around this time, I decided that I wanted to play online again. I looked into it a bit, and confirmed that while the status on the operating side is fuzzy, there is no law prohibiting the *play* of online poker, neither at the Federal level nor in the state of California. The real problem was, aside from the $3k I had locked up in Full Tilt, the rest of my operating poker roll had gotten eaten up by necessary expenditures as I was finishing grad school. So I was going to have to start from scratch.
Long story short, over some time I managed to rebuild a halfway respectable roll, from an initial deposit of $50 that I borrowed from the Chi Operating Budget. Additionally, some good things happened in 2014. First this, in February:
And then, there was this nice score -- I did this on my last night of JSM (the big annual statistics conference) in Boston:
A few weeks after that, I binked another medium-field, $30-ish buy-in tournament for roughly a grand, and a couple months after that, I took about $1200 from a $3/5 no-limit game at Chumash Casino (about 50 minutes from SLO).
So in 2014, things were looking pretty solid from a poker standpoint.
Around this time, we knew that we would be moving from California, and by January of 2015, we knew that it would be Philadelphia. Simultaneously, the WSOP itch was strong in me again, AND the timing of our move was going to line up such that we would drive through Vegas pretty much right around the time of the Main Event. So I decided that I was going to make a serious push at winning a seat again.
(The one time I have won a seat was in 2006. See recap here, across several posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Since then, the closest that I have come was in 2010 when I went deep in a satellite, made it down to two players, and eventually got it all-in with the best hand but it did not hold up).
So for the 2015 effort... first, I poured many hundreds into online satellites. No luck there. I also played in a live satellite at the Bicycle Casino down in LA (a 3 hour drive from SLO - I had very generous cousins put me up, thx Vince and Esther), for an entry of something like $250. Didn't connect on that either. Meanwhile, I also hit a killer downswing in cash games (on the order of a couple grand), plus I paid taxes on my 2014 winnings, which was a good chunk as well.
We start our move across the country and I'm down to about $2k in the roll. I'm determined to make one final push in Vegas, even if it means wiping out my entire roll... "I've built from scratch before, and I'll do it again if I have to," I tell myself.
So, we arrive in Vegas, and first, I enter a side event:
This was the $777 buy-in Lucky 7s event, a four-day event that drew 4,422 players and had a first prize of $487,784. If things go well for me here, I would put some of it towards a Main Event seat. Unfortunately... no luck for me, as I lasted about 6 hours into Day 1 and that was the end of me.
After that, I basically just played in a bunch of live satellites, with buy-ins in the $200 range. Busted, busted, busted, busted.
So the dream was not to be, in 2015. We rolled into Philly with me having about $300 in the roll, basically not a roll at all by most standards.
I haven't played all that much since we arrived, so that's basically where things stand at this point.
What's on the horizon:
1) The probability class, as mentioned above. This has revived my overall interest in poker. I've been in touch with my contact at PokerNews.com, and will be writing a few articles for them about my experience.
2) In June, I am participating in the AP Statistics Reading, where 800 statistics teachers/professors get together for a week to grade the AP Statistics Exams from this year. One night during this is the so-called "Applied Probability Night" aka Casino Night, where they will run shuttles for us to Harrah's KC. I looked into it, and at least as of now, the poker room at this Harrah's has a nice little $60 re-buy tournament that runs on the night we'll be going there. I posted about it on the AP Readers Facebook wall, and have garnered up some interest there so maybe we'll have a nice crew of us playing in it.
If anything noteworthy happens, that'll be my next post.
