How to beat poker - the basics

I am not talking about basics like pot odds and winning percentages. There are some principles which are even more basic and fundamental to all forms of poker.

Table/Seatselection
Choose your opponents wisely. If you wanna win money make sure you are the best or at least one of the better players at the table. Playing against better opponents might improve your own game if you are willing to learn from them. But you should be aware that you don't get these lessons for free. Others like to match themself with the best players around. That is just stupid..Leave your ego away from the table. It will just cost you a lot of money. You should also try to be on the left of bad players. This gives you the chance to isolate these players preflop and play one on one against them.

Bankroll Management
Even if you are a winning player poker is still a game of chance. You can and will lose versus weaker players sometimes. And sometimes this might stretch over a long period of hands. Even solid winners of swings of 100 big bets every now and than. So make sure that you can handle these times. You should have at least 500 BB for the stakes you are playing. If you play professionally it should be even more. So you don't have to move down in the stakes you are playing. If you have less than 300 BB for your current limit you should move down to avoid going broke.

Don't tilt/Play your A game
This seems simple, right ? But i guess it is what turns themost players into losers. They know how to play. When to fold or raise but they don't do it at times. I am not only talking about the obvious signs of tilting like going full phil hellmuth and scream at everyone and everything. The more dangerous form of tilt is not when you are in full berserker mode. After a couple of suckouts or setups/coolers you start making bad calldowns or become a maniac. DON'T !
Don't let your feelings influence your game. If you notice that your style of play changes stop playing.

Good luck at the tables everyone!

Klondike Solitaire - is it beatable ?

I am one of those people who can play klondike (sometimes also just called solitaire) for hours and hours. And I was always looking for the best strategy to play. When searching on the internet I noticed that there is next to no websites on strategy and zero information on the expected value (EV) of this game.
One of the few pages with some insight on this topic is OddThinking but this is a slightly different game than the one I am interested in. I prefer the vegas style game where you can only move through the deck exactly once and any card that has been moved up has to stay up.
As stated before I could not find an analysis of this game online which is strange because this game can even be played in some online casinos for real money. So I build myself a simulator to play it automatically. Here are my first results:
My best strategy so far is able to move up about 9.3 cards in average. Which would result in a house edge of 7%. I am confident that it still can be improved.
A Monte Carlo run of 1000 plays per deck (meaning a certain deck or single game is played 1000 times with totally random moves) is able to score a average of 14.5 cards. Of course this value can never be reached by any "real" strategy it will only give a upper threshold.
A "real" strategy has to make a decision on the next move by the information which is currently available (we call this a information set). Since Klondike is a game of imperfect information (because some cards are still hidden) there might be different games which have the same information set. All visible cards are exactly the same but the hidden cards are distributed differently. Our strategy always has to make the same move which of course will result in different results on each unique game. Monte Carlo will choose different moves each time and will ignore the information set. That is the reason why a strategy will never beat the Monte Carlo approach (if the game has imperfect information).

More to follow.....

Miniconomy - economic browser game

Well the blog is also about pc games. So here is the latest browser game i am testing

An economic browser game. It doesn't have the nicest graghics around but it seems fairly complex. Every movement costs gas and everytime you search your land for resources the condition if it gets worse.
You can choose to dig for resources or create a more advanced product. You may even found your own bank or try to get elected as mayor. Even a life in crime is possible. It is totally up to you....Now see you in miniconomy....You can find my shop in Centropolis.

Professional Go player defeated by computer

Some time ago I wrote about checkers being completly solved. And i was happy to say that Go is still something everyone can win against a computer opponent. About 2 weeks ago I was proven wrong :-(
A supercomputer matched a professional Go player. Kim MyungWan, an 8 dan pro (9 is the maximum) was defeated by the program MoGo running on an IBM Power 575 Hydro-Cluster system. This supercomputer (located at Amsterdam, Netherlands) has a peak speed of 60 Teraflop per second. So it is save to say that the average player will not face such a opponent every other day but we all know how fast the computational speed is increasing.
Go still is one of the hardest games for a computer and it seems like only speed and mass (storage that is) enables such a system to beat a human player. It is still a long way to go for all working on artificial intelligence (AI) to make a computer "think".
On the other hand the human brain is nothing else.....and even if we are slow at math and things like that the human brain is working incredible fast because there is so much going on at the same time. And we a freaking good at guessing ;-)
Many of us would struggle to solve a quadratic equation. Still each and everyone is able to catch a ball or at least to teach it by predicting its flight curve. That is just the same and you even do it without pen and paper or even a calculator. Never correct but always close enough to survive. So keep making mistakes but enjoy your games and life.....