Poker and Obama

I've finally changed my "books" list to reflect stuff I've been reading lately. I got called for jury duty in early November, and since I had just finished the big project I figured it was a good time to serve. It turns out that I was part of a criminal jury pool - in NYC you're pooled together with a whole ton of other people as potential jurors for the week - when a judge wants to select a jury, the judge requests some number of jurors from the pool (probably 2-3 times the required number of jurors), the clerk randomly draws names from the pool, the selected potential jurors go through the voir dire process, some are selected, and the rest are tossed back into the pool.
At the time I showed up, there was a really high-profile murder trial that was going to begin the selection process, so the judge ordered _all_ the pool (about 200 of us) to go to the courtroom. The judge explained that the case would likely take 4-6 weeks, and told us that if we had a reason we couldn't go, we better give it now. Since I already had our vacation planned for later in the month, I told the judge I couldn't serve without losing all my pre-paid items (airfare, hotel deposit, etc), and she let me off the hook. That was the closest I ever got to serving on a jury - the rest of the time I just sat there. So, at lunchtime on the first day, I purchased "The Audacity of Hope" at the nearby college bookstore, powered through it over the next two days, and decided right there and then that I'm voting for that guy.
For our trip (I'll have to write about that in another post), I borrowed "Dreams From My Father" from the library, and again was struck by what a great writer Obama is. I don't believe I had ever read a book by a politician before - I always imagined that they would be dull - but I really enjoyed those books. Incidentally, when I checked the book out of the library in mid-November, there were probably twenty copies sitting on the shelf (it was filed away in the History / Biography section) - keep in mind this was the main branch of the library, but there are probably another 50-100 copies scattered around the NYC library system. Later on, I tried to renew it online (it was raining and I was lazy), I found that there were almost a thousand people on the waiting list for the book! So, it looks like a lot of people are really interested in checking it out.

On a completely different front, I've started learning how to play poker. I've been playing for about 10 days now and I have to say I'm enjoying it - the time I normally play is between 11pm and 1am, after Clau goes to sleep - I usually play in one tournament per night. So far, I'm 10 bucks down, which isn't too bad! I got the book "Bigger Deal" from the library on a whim and I read it while we were in Turks and Caicos. A bit boring and dry, especially if you don't play poker, but it did get me interested - theoretically it's about the author trying to improve his game sufficiently to have a shot at the WSOP (he ultimately wins a satellite to enter, but does poorly in the actual event), but there's a lot of history and fun facts about the game interspersed throughout the book. So, I figured that since I'm something of a dilettante, I would be best suited to borrow some books from the library and see if I can get anything out of them.
After reading a bit about poker, I've discovered that the really interesting thing about it is that it's a game of both math and psychology - on one hand, you need to be able to quickly figure out what you have, what you _might_ end up with and the approximate odds of you ending up with it, as well as what your opponent(s) might have and the approximate odds of _their_ ending up with something better than what you have or might end up with. Sound complicated? It is! But, of course, most people (like me) can only get a general idea of these things, and particularly when you're playing online and the action is fast and furious, you don't have adequate time to really think all these things through - however, the more you can calculate in the short amount of time you have, the better off you'll be.
Now, if it were just a game of math then it would just be math nerds who excelled at the game - but then you throw bluffing into the mix and it gets really interesting. I've never played with actual people before, although some friends have a ongoing game that I'm planning on checking out next week, but even online you've got to build a quick profile of your opponents - do they call a lot of hands, do they raise more often than they should statistically have good cards (i.e. do you think they're bluffing or at least semi-bluffing), do they almost never play and then, once in a blue moon, start throwing all their money into the pot, etc? These styles of play all have different strengths and weaknesses, and it's a lot like paper-scissors-rock: what works against one style can get completely dominated by another, but there's no one style that beats all others (or else everyone would be playing that way!).
Finally, of course, there's dumb luck - sometimes the cards are coming your way and sometimes they're not. I haven't really learned what to do about that yet, although really good players can certainly take those lemons and turn them into lemonade. But, as you can tell, I'm definitely enjoying the learning process, especially since I can play a tournament and get a lot of practice for two bucks. And, truthfully, there's a lot of lessons that can learned from poker and applied to your everyday life - a lot of decisions in life are based on the same criteria: where do I currently stand, what are my potential payoffs, how likely is this to succeed, what's the likelihood of failure, what are the benefits of success vs. the costs of failure. Plug numbers into machine, chug chug chug, and out comes the "correct" answer - then you have to decide what to do with it. Not a bad series of life lessons for 5-10 bucks a week!

Long time no write

Well lots has happened - as everyone knows we went to Brazil, it was great - my Portuguese has definitely improved since last time, and it was an interesting experience to talk to a lot of Claudia's family for what felt like the first time. We also went to Joao Pessoa, the hometown of our friend Andrea, and stayed with Andrea's family there - they remind me a lot of Claudia's family: they're very close, very warm and wonderful people. Unfortunately Clau and I really wanted some time by ourselves and we didn't get it - normally we take a few days "off" in the middle of the vacation and retreat somewhere by ourselves, but we used that normally reserved time to go to Joao Pessoa. The funny part is, I think we were a bit of a burden on Andrea's family as well, but it was a cultural etiquette problem more than anything else; we didn't want them to think that we were using them as a hotel, and they didn't want to invite us to their city and not be there to guide us every step of the way. But, like I said, if you're going to be stuck with folks in a strange city, Andrea's family are great folks to be stuck with.
Other than that the trip was relatively uneventful - as always there are lots of fun things to gossip about going on in Clau's family, but then again what family isn't like that?
Doing some interesting work lately - I was pretty much twiddling my thumbs for the better part of November and December, but now things are picking up. I can't really get into stuff in progress, but suffice it to say that I have (at least on paper) a very cool job, and things have hit a good level of busy-ness, so that I'm not working my butt off but I'm also not bored. Overall not such a bad deal.
I know this isn't very interesting and I'll cut this off now, just that folks have been asking how life has been for the last few months - truthfully Clau and I have settled into a groove - if it were any city other than New York I'd probably call it a "rut", but since there's always stuff going on, it hasn't gotten boring yet. We both come home from work tired, if we're up to it then one of us cooks, if we're not up to it then we order something (this is one thing we're trying very hard not to do, but we're still at about 50% home cooking at this stage). On Fridays, if we have the energy, we go out with friends, if not then we stay at home and watch TV or a movie, on Saturdays we talk about all the errands we have to get done over the weekend and end up vegging all day, then usually go out on the town for our weekly drinking binge. On Sundays we vow to start taking it easier on Saturdays, or at least to start taking care of our weekend errands on Saturday so we don't need to do them with a hangover on Sunday. On Monday we go back to work and play bocce at night, Tues-Thurs we come home, get changed, and cook/order food.
Like I said, a groove.

I've got some resolutions, I'll write about those separately. One of them, however, is to write more entries to this blog, for my own posterity if for nothing else...