Poker without fistfights?

Poker for the first time in 4 months was wholly underwhelming. Nick and I were first out. We played Boggle before going back to a cash game. Rob, George and I left last at about 4 a.m. This was last Wednesday.

Friday we watched basketball at the pub. We even cajoled Bert and Elizabeth into coming. Afterward I came back to my apartment filled with the "worms crowd."

Yesterday we sought out Sheffield's for the basketball. The Dallas game was amazing! With 30 seconds left in the first quarter, the Spurs made an amazing shot to be up by 3. This was the first time they led all game. Good timing, eh? With little over 20 seconds left, Dirk tried a layup. All the Spurs had to do was not foul! He'd get his two points, they'd have possession, and they could run out the clock. And they'd win. But Ginobili fouls Dirk (the 90% free throw shooter, mind you), and the game was tied at the end of the 4th. Thank you Ginobili! Dallas dominated in overtime, and thankfully live to see another day.

My sister is flying in today. Actually she was going to arrive at 9 a.m., but that flight was canceled. Instead, she'll arrive at 3 p.m. She'll be leaving tomorrow.

Ordinarily, today would be pool, but as my sister's in town I'm not going. I'm not even playing this session anyways.

Thursday, the Csima's are having me over for dinner. Should be fun. And I'm leaving this god-forsaken place very soon now. Moving south for summer? I have a lot of crap to do.

GO MAVS!!!

The Dallas Mavericks are hot right now! There are three series yet undecided in this round. Dallas is soundly thumping San Antonio 3-1. The Detroit vs. Cleveland and Phoenix vs. LA Clippers series are closer at 2-2 and 3-2 respectively. I'm presently at last place in our pool, 19 points down from the lead, but I'm still in it. The key is Dallas. Only I have Dallas winning the whole tournament. But even if things go as close to my bracket as possible, I'll only win by 7 points. It's still anyone's game.

Dallas is essential for me. If they don't win the whole shebang, I am mathematically eliminated. The only series for which I picked a different winner from anyone else (excluding Jayadev) are the Dallas series. Since I'm so far back, these are evidently very important. The tricky part is both Elizabeth and Linda also have Dallas getting all the way to the final. And even if Dallas wins it all, their point totals will be very near mine. (They are currently ahead of me.)

So to analyze my chances, let's assume Dallas will win it all and see how I stack up against Elizabeth and Linda. Presently, Elizabeth is 19 points and Linda is 12 points ahead of me. The Dallas series this round won't make a difference. We all said it'd last 7 games, so we'll all get the same points from it. The Dallas series next round will be interesting. Linda and I said it'd last 4 games, and Elizabeth said it'd last 7 games. So I will gain 4 points relative to Elizabeth if it really only lasts 4 games. (If it takes 6 or 7 games she will gain more over me.) Then there's the final. I'll gain between 17 and 21 points on the both of them.

Then there are the other series. Elizabeth and I both said the current Detroit series would go 5 games, and Linda said 6. If Detroit does win, it'll take either 6 or 7 games. This means Linda will gain another 2 or 4 points relative to me. Then in the next round, I said Detroit would win in 4, Elizabeth said 6, and Linda said 7. So if this is a short series, I have the chance to gain some more points on them. (On the longshot Detroit loses this round to Cleveland, this whole discussion is moot, and none of us get any points. But I have friends rooting for Detroit, so let's hope not! A Dallas vs. Detroit final would be fun.)

Then there's the Phoenix vs. LA Clippers game this round. We all have Phoenix winning it, and if they do it'll take 6 or 7 games and I'll lose on both of them. It'd be preferrable if the Clippers won. Aside from not falling further behind, it might make for a short Dallas series next round. And it's always fun to root for an upset team. (GEORGE MASON!)

I really need Dallas to win the final. Even so, my fate is not guaranteed.

Tomorrow, Liz and Nick are hosting poker. It's the first time since the incident. I hope they have cable so we can watch the games.

Oh and by the way, I probably won't be in Chicago for very long. Cheers.

NBA Playoffs

Rob's running a pool for the NBA playoffs. They started about 3 weeks ago, and last until sometime in June. Part of the fun of March Madness was watching our relative standings in the pool updated almost live. ESPN did it all for us. So when Rob started the pool, he called me up and asked how much work it'd be to make such a website. You see, ESPN doesn't have one for the NBA. I said it'd be a few hours of work, but I didn't commit to doing it.

This past week I've had a little extra time on my hands. The result is here. There are a few things I still want to do:

• PPR! As you can see from the table, there's a spot for the possible points remaining. The scheme for awarding points makes calculating PPR somewhat more complicated than it might seem at first glance. A correct pick gets 2, 4, 8 or 14 points depending on the round plus 4, 2, 1 or 0 points depending on how closely the series length is predicted plus an upset bonus if applicable. The upset bonus is awarded when there is an upset, i.e. a lower seeded team wins. The upset bonus is the difference of the seeds. This is what makes it tricky! It's entirely possible that someone can maximize his points by losing a series one round, in order to get the upset bonus in the next. One has to take this into account to faithfully calculate PPR.


• Automatic updates! The whole point of this thing was to make both Rob's life and my life easier (in the long run). I haven't yet written the script that will update the database. This is actually a pretty simple step thanks to AJAX. I remember back in the day when I might have to screenscrape to do this. But now every website has a nice XML feed so AJAX can automatically and asynchronously refresh its webpages.


• Game progress! When I write that background script, I can get more information than the series tallies the database currently holds. I can follow individual games (scores and the like) and display these on the page. Of course, this means I should also use an AJAX-style refresh, to keep those updates coming. (Knowing the upcoming schedule will also allow for better caching!)


• Clean code! I did this rather quickly, so it's a little messier than it has to be. It'd be nice if it were a bit more intelligible. The files so far total over 800 lines. Isn't that a kick?

I can now run a pool every year! Hah.

Sing on

I got a little tired writing about all the results, so I'll give up on that. What's a little surprising is that I'm still second in our little pool. And in most cases, my losses weren't huge ones. Today I chose A&M to win, mainly because of the Texas connection. And as with every team I chose, they were winning with about 2 seconds left. And they lost! Oh well.

Rob and I are actually in two pools together. There's the small one he started with U of C math people. Then there's the one at the place we play pool. Supposedly this one's pretty big, with people from many bars and such playing in it. Unfortunately, we can't tell how that's going...

In the midst of all this fun, Niles has had friends and his brother over for his "bachelor party." A bunch of annoying drunk people... There is a bright side: Mitya is out of town and everyone else will sleep soundly. Thus, I can leave my tunes playing while I drift off to sleep:

Operator won’t you put me on through
I gotta send my love down to baton rouge
Hurry up won’t you put her on the line
I gotta talk to the girl just one more time.

OK, so it's not "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose," but who are you to judge? I'm from Texas, damnit.

Unlucky me

So the rest of the games didn't help me so much. UCLA won, but everyone and their mothers called that. Fortunately, GW won in overtime by 3 points. I had them over NC Wilmington. LSU won over Iona. They were down at the half, but they continually expanded their lead in the second half. Likewise, Gonzaga was down at the half, but came back to win it. Unsurprisingly, Illinois easily beat Air Force and Duke killed Southern. I got all these.

Now we get into the fun part. Texas A&M beat Syracuse. I'm not sure if I wanted them to win because they are from Texas or because they play decent basketball. Probably the former... It wasn't too close a game though, and it worked out. I said there would be two other upsets though. I said San Diego St. and Utah State would win. They both lost. This wasn't too surprising. Utah had no chance of winning either. They were always down by around 10 points in a relatively low scoring game. However, San Diego was playing well. They were leading by a point with only seconds left. Again, a late score did me in.

Only 10 of 16 games did I get correct. I'm ranked at about 2 millionth of those on ESPN. That is, I'm at about the 27th percentile. What's funny is that EC called 14 out of 16, and she's at about the 99th percentile! Guess how she filled out her bracket...

Go ahead, guess!

That's right. She flipped a coin!

March Madness

I'm in two small pools regarding the tournament. It makes the whole thing so exciting.

The matchups so far have been not bad. Wichita St. beat Seton Hall in a blowout. Florida beat Southern Alabama in an unsurprising game. I got these right. Oklahoma lost in an upset to Wisc. Milwaukee. I got this wrong, but apparently so did the experts. :)

BC won over Pacific in double overtime. This was such an exciting game. I called this, but I must say it was much too close for my comfort. It was tied 65-65 at the end of regulation. With two three pointers in overtime, Pacific brought it to 71-65. Then BC brought it to 71-69, and Pacific made another three for 74-69. BC made a three to get it to 74-72. Then, with seconds left BC's Smith made the tying free throws. (He apparently is not so good with the free throws.) The second overtime was relatively anticlimactic, but BC managed to pull it out.

What was perhaps the most interesting was the Tennessee and Winthrop matchup. Believe it or not, I said Winthrop would win this. I might be the only person too. And it was a close game, the whole way. It was tied 61-61 in the final minutes. Then with 3 seconds left, Tennessee had possession, put it up, and damn it was good. Winthrop had 0.4 seconds left on the clock to get all the way down court and score. Obviously, this did not happen, but they tried valiantly. Final score was 63-61. I didn't call this game right, but I was close. :)

In another uninteresting upset, Montana beat Nevada. More interesting though was the Alabama win over Marquette. It was a 1 point game with 20 seconds to go, but Alabama pulled out a 5 point game. I got these both wrong. :(

So far, I've got 3 out of 7. I'm not doing so hot. I guess that's what happens when you don't regularly follow basketball... Fortunately I had none of these losing teams winning more than one game.

Everyone else having fun with the basketball? :)

Rochambeau

What better honor exists for a French general than to lend his name to a kid's game? I went to the contest at Sheffield's yesterday. It was best 2 out of 3, and I was out in the first round with my first two throws: paper and rock. Aside from the contest, there was a Sierra Nevada tasting. The ladies nearby sampled all of the options, while trying to fend off a persistent suitor.

The place is rather nice. I watched Olympic skating on their 106" screen. They have a pool table, and supposedly it is free until 9 p.m. I didn't try it though. They have a large, reasonably priced selection of beers. I think Rob would've found himself right at home. I had a great time.

Go Sox!

A sweep! The first World Series appearance since 1959! The first World Series win since 1917!