Day 3: A loss, and some live poker

Yesterday morning we got up having got a bit more sleep. After stumbling out of bed and getting ready we wandered down to the expo hall to get things setup. Everything got going basically without a hitch and the matches got under way basically on schedule. Polaris had some tough luck this match. To my eye, it looked a lot like the player downstairs was very aggressive and he won a lot of money in his huge upswing. On the other side of the cards, the human played more defensively and managed to lose less than Polaris in that downswing. The frustrating thing about that is that because the styles differ so much, there is just more noise. By more noise I mean more luck. If the cards had been reversed so that the lucky cards were upstairs and the unlucky cards were downstairs, Polaris could very well have won the match!

So our team was a bit disheartened at the loss. It means we're 1-2-1 going into the last two matches. If we can get a win today we'd still have a shot in the last match to win the whole thing. I truly hope we don't get unlucky.

After the session was over I wandered the expo a bit and also went off to check out the world series of poker (wsop) which is being played in Vegas while we are here. There is a *huge* room full of poker tables, and it was pretty incredible to me what it's like. There's a huge number of people playing poker, or watching from the side. You wouldn't think about poker as a loud game, but with so many tables, the roar of chips clattering together is actually quite substantial.

After checking out the feature table for a bit, Dave and I wandered back to the expo which was wrapping up right away. So we packed up and headed to dinner -- back to the Rub BBQ place! I'm hoping we get a chance to try a bunch of different restaurants, but this was a good decision because it meant we didn't have to wait in line with a huge group of people. In a few days the number of people we hang out with will drop down to a more reasonable number which will making getting into some restaurants a lot easier.

After dinner, our group split up into two groups. One group of us went off to play poker, while the other went to go check out some July 4 festivities. You'll have to have Diane tell you about the July 4 festivities -- I went to go play poker.

The tables in the Rio are a bit weird, but I think I'll save most of the poker talk for my other blog when I get the chance. For the time being, I'll just say that I didn't fell all that uncomfortable, but I also feel like I got a bit lucky to be up $180 at the end of the session. It's kind of fun though to sit around a poker table and chat with some people about what's going on in Vegas.

Vegas is ... interesting. It's so over the top, it's crazy. I don't really fully understand it, but every time I've looked around there's more stuff that makes me say "woah", or "wow". I'll have to post about that later I guess since I'm running out of time before heading back down to the expo this morning. The only thing I really don't like though is the smoke. Every morning I wake up with a bit of a sore throat because of the smoke I inhaled the day before. :\ I'm glad the expo floor has smoking disallowed.

I'm not sure what the plan is for tonight, but I feel like seeing a bit of Vegas. I hear we are planning on seeing a Cirque du Solei show tomorrow. I believe it's the water one, but I'm not totally sure. We'll see if there's still tickets today I think.

I hope things are going well in E-town!

Morgan

Day 2 in Vegas. A draw, and Penn and Teller

We got up yesterday morning at a far too early hour of 8:00. Having gotten ourselves up, we congregated at the stoxpoker booth at around 9:00 so that we could take a group picture, and then get ourselves setup for the first match. Quickly, they threw a curveball at us. Nick, the guy who was supposed to play on the expo floor couldn't start at our designated 1:00 start time, so we had to start him at 11:00. We weren't quite ready, but we did in fact get him started in not too much time. Early on, Polaris was up a very large amount. But as soon as the first break was over at 200 hands, Nick started to play really well on the bad side of the cards to not lose as much as he could have. In the end, the humans tied Polaris with Polaris having a small 5 small bet margin. So Polaris is now 1-1-1 going into the second live match.

My job so far (and probably for the rest of the event) is to run around with my picture and take photos of the various people and the expo so that we can post them on the website. You can see a gallery of photos from day one here. I think I got some good photos, and I'll be aiming to get some better ones today.

After the expo was complete, we spent a little time cleaning up, and posting information to the website, but we had ourselves a relatively free evening. So a group of seven of us went to go see Penn and Teller. I enjoyed the show, but I guess I was a little disappointed at the same time. It felt awfully short to me, and there wasn't enough WOW moments. I mean, there was definitely some. Penn and Teller pulled off a pretty major shock value trick where they switched a person from the audience into Teller on stage. The trick setup was this: They called for someone from the audience who could handle a video camera. They get him up there, but while they are showing him the stage and everything, Teller is behind the set in front of a video camera there and says "this is not the trick he thinks we're doing", or something to that effect. They then go through a routine where Teller provides Penn with all sorts of props to have fun with the person behind the video camera. It's all very funny until the end of the routine where Penn gets up and says that there was a bunch of things that the person with the camera didn't get. There was even stuff the audience didn't get ... like that you are actually Teller. High shock value, and very clever -- although we think we figured out how they did it. I just wish there had been more tricks like it. Anyways, I enjoyed it and certainly thought it was worth my money.

We returned to our rooms to chat for a bit about the show and hang out for awhile. A couple of people who didn't go returned from the poker tables reporting that the games were rather soft. I'll have to sit down for a session or two while I'm here. I got to bed a bit earlier, but I think I'm still not getting enough sleep. One of these days I'm going to crash and need some serious snoozing time.

Diane's doing well, although I wish I could pay more attention to her. I'm glad she's down here with me -- but there's an awful lot of work to do during the matches. She's been taking Mike's video camera around and shooting the event, so it'll be cool to see what we can use those tapes for after the event is all over.

It's almost 9:00, so it's time to start the process all over again!

Morgan

Day 1 in Vegas

I don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to get something put up here about our first day here. Yesterday was a hectic day, which surprised me a litte. I kind of expected it to be a bit more relaxed. After I left that last arrival post, we headed out to get some food at a pretty late hour. We only found one restaurant tha was open called Sau Paulo, and since we were tired and hungry we decided to stop looking for any other options. The food was not too bad, but not incredible. It was cheap though. After dinner we retired to our respective rooms to collapse around 2:00am.

The next morning we got up around 8:00 to have some breakfast at the same restaurant as the previous night. We had walked by the buffet, but ruled that it was too expensive for just breakfast. Funnily enough, several of the people ordered orange juice when they were prompted by the waitress, only to later find out that the orange juice was a hefty $5 a glass!

After breakfast we returned to our rooms to setup a full test of all the software and pieces we needed to run the man-machine match. This was our big testing day, so we needed to make sure everything worked as expected. The testing took us all day. It took way longer than it maybe should've to set up the two sides of the duplicate match. We then had Duane and I play through a duplicate match and we got slaughtered by our own bot. Hmm.

After the test was over we went through a list of all the things that needed doing. The list was long, but we're lucky in that we have a lot of people to assign tasks too. We could never do all the things we're trying to do last year when we had 5 less people. During the test match, Mike B had spent some time setting up the stoxpoker booth and testing our client with the TVs to make sure that it displayed properly. The team then moved down to the expo floor to run a quick 30-hand test match on the expo floor. It seemed to work okay, although that too took longer than I thought it might.

After finally getting everything wrapped up, we went to dinner at Rub BBQ which was a pretty awesome place to eat. There was a great deal of food. I probably shouldn't have eaten quite as much as I did, but it was incredibly tasty. Mmm, pulled pork and beef brisket.

Dinner took a little while, but after we were done we returned to our rooms to work out some of the last remaining details we needed to for the next day. Our room was up until around 2:00am and I think the other room had a similar sleep schedule.

So we're up fairly early this morning to tidy our room a bit since our room will be the site of the hotel room side of the duplicate match. Then we go down to setup the hardware for the match so we can be ready to go at 11:00 am when the expo opens!

Wish us luck! Match 1 of 4 live matches begins today! Polaris is already tied 1-1 with humans so far.

Morgan

In Vegas, Baby!

It's been an awfully long time since I wrote a blog. Diane and I have been terribly busy trying to get ourselves organized. In the three weeks since the wedding, we've gone to visit my grandparents in Rimbey, moved Diane's stuff out of her old apartment, and handled all kinds of little details concerning moving to Ireland. I'm writing this on the plane on the way to Las Vegas. My research group is taking our computer program, Polaris, down to the World Series of Poker Expo. We're going to pit it against several top-notch poker professionals in an attempt to show how strong our program really is. The competition runs July 3-6th at the Rio hotel and casino if you just happen to be in the area ;-). If not, you can follow our progress on the match website here.

After the competition, it's relaxing time for us. Diane and I and a few of the members of the poker research group are going to stick around in Vegas for a few days. On the 10th, Diane and I split from the rest of the group to start our honeymoon. We're headed to San Diego from Vegas via Salt Lake City. After that silly looking flight we'll spend a day or two there and then board our cruise ship bound for Baja Mexico.

We're quite excited about the whole thing! It'll be good to get a break. We've been putting in some pretty long days in the past few weeks between work and moving Diane's stuff, and trying to organize what we need for Ireland. We're quite looking forward to getting some R&R time.

Before we get on the cruise ship, I'll try and make sure to have some relatively frequent updates to the blog. No promises, but I'm gonna try!

We just got into our room so I posted this and now I'm going to go pursue food.

Morgan

General Gift Thank-yous

It's been a couple days, but I'm still amazed at how generous people were with the gifts they bestowed upon us. It took us over an hour to open all the gifts and note down who gave us what. I'm really hoping we got everything right! It's been a fairly hectic few days since the wedding, but as soon as the photographer gets us our photos, we'll get to work on preparing thank you cards for all the gifts everyone gave us. We feel incredibly blessed, and more than a tad spoiled! So here's a general thank you, to be followed with a more specific thank you in the hopefully very near future!

Morgan