I originally posted a problem about a week ago here and an update with a hint here. If you haven’t read those, please do and give it a try before reading the solution.

Here’s a restatement of the problem:

You deposit $400 in an online casino and are given a $100 bonus immediately, so you have $500 to bet with. You can withdraw only after betting a total of $2500. Let’s say you play a game where you flip coins and if you win you get 1.99 times your bet and nothing if you lose. This has a 99.5% return like blackjack, but I’m abstracting it because in blackjack you can run into bad EV spots where you make a bet and then don’t have enough to split or double down. The table limits for this game are minimum bet $1 and maximum bet $100. How much should we bet to maximize EV, and why?

Solution:
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a few days since I first posted my puzzle. If you missed it, you can find it here. Aside from the comments there, there is also some discussion about it going on over at Poker VT which you can see here (no account needed). People have also talked to me in private about the problem.

In my history of asking this problem, there are some common solutions that people come up with:

Bet $1 because you have less risk of busting.

When I did bonuses like this years ago, betting $1 is exactly the method I used precisely for the reason that I was risk-averse and had a limited bankroll. Such reasoning doesn’t apply to this situation, though, where we don’t care about variance, only EV.

Bet whatever you want because it doesn’t matter.

Some people reason that it doesn’t matter what bet we place, since a $100 bet has the same expectation as a series of 100 $1 bets. This is true, however despite the truth of this statement it’s not a valid reason as a solution to the problem.

Martingale.

Some people come up with the martingaling strategy, doubling bets every time you lose and such. Many people believe this is not only the best strategy, but one in which you can’t lose. This, also, is not right. Plenty of good information on the subject is available here.

A note about martingaling, and here’s a hint about the correct solution: martingaling has no worse EV than betting $1 repeatedly. Would it be possible for me to convince you that martingaling has a higher EV than betting $1 at a time?

The solution will be posted in a couple of days.

I saw a discussion the other day that reminded me of a problem I came up with and I posed it to a bunch of friends. None of them were able to get the right answer and reasoning, so I figured it would make a good blog post.

I originally thought of this in the old days when online casino bonuses were prevalent. If you’re not familiar with them, you would deposit some amount, get a bonus, and have to meet a wagering requirement to withdraw the bonus. So you’d do something like deposit $100, they’d give you $20 on top of that for free, and you’d need to wager $1000 at blackjack to withdraw. Blackjack pays back around 99.5% if you play perfectly, so you’d end up losing $5, thus profiting $15 after the bonus. This is actually how I started my bankroll many years ago.

So, here’s the problem:

You deposit $400 in an online casino and are given a $100 bonus immediately, so you have $500 to bet with. You can withdraw only after betting a total of $2500. Let’s say you play a game where you flip coins and if you win you get 1.99 times your bet and nothing if you lose. This has a 99.5% return like blackjack, but I’m abstracting it because in blackjack you can run into bad EV spots where you make a bet and then don’t have enough to split or double down. The table limits for this game are minimum bet $1 and maximum bet $100. How much should we bet to maximize EV, and why? Does it even matter? If so, why? If not, why not?

Time and variance are not factors in this problem. We don’t care that making lots of small bets takes more time than making a few large bets and we only care about maximizing EV.

Post answers or discussion in the comments. I’ll reveal the answer in less than a week and may drop some hints if nobody gets it.

So, one of the cooler videos I did for Poker VT a while back was on variance.  I don’t think most people truly appreciate how crazy variance can get.  In one of my earliest videos I showed off a program written by RVG (who later went on to create HEM) that was an ROI simulator.  It got the job done for my purposes for the games I was playing, but it had some limitations.  The biggest one of which was that it only supported 7 payout spots.  So the program was fine for looking at variance in 9 man games, but wouldn’t cut it for larger MTSNGs and MTTs.

After I had finished making that video on variance I decided to write my own Monte Carlo simulator.  Since it was just a little project for my own usage I didn’t do anything fancy, make it nice for user input, or create any executables.  It’s sloppy, obfuscated, and has no real documentation either.  You can grab it here if you like.  If you can find RVG’s old ROI simulator program you can use that for games with fewer than 7 payout spots and the results will agree with what my program produces.

For those of you who have seen my variance megapost on Poker VT, a lot of this post is straight from it.

Before giving you the output for various runs of this program I’ll explain what the output means and how to interpret it:

$6.00+0.50 9-man game
Payout distribution: 50.0% 30.0% 20.0%
Finish distribution: 12.7% 12.5% 12.6%
Theoretical ROI = 4.84%
100000 simulations of 1000 games:

---

90% CI for ROI: -2.88% to 12.65%
90% CI for downswing: 21.82 buy-ins to 72.35 buy-ins
90% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 54.80 buy-ins

The top part of this describes the type of simulation we’re running. A standard $6.50 SNG with normal payouts and finishing in 1st place 12.7% of the time, 2nd place 12.5% of the time, and 3rd place 12.6% of the time. This corresponds to a 4.84% ROI. It also prints out the ROI and how many buy-ins it represents. It then tells the number of games in the sample size and how many simulations were run.

Below that we have confidence intervals (CI) for ROI, the biggest downswing and the lowest drop from the starting point. So, if you know you are a 4.84% ROI player, in a 1000 game sample 90% of the time your actual ROI will be between -2.88% and +12.65%. Remember that confidence intervals are centered over the median, so 5% of the time the actual ROI will be worse than -2.88% and 5% of the time it will be better than +12.65%. If someone said to me “I believe I am a 4.84% ROI player but my results over my last 1000 games are -3% ROI” then I could confidently say to them that there is less than 5% chance that they are actually as good as being a 4.84% ROI player.

Likewise, 90% of the time we can expect to have a downswing in that 1000 game sample between 21.82 and 72.35 buy-ins. 5% of the time it will be worse, 5% of the time it will be better. If you knew you were a 4.84% ROI player and you had a downswing of 80 buyins over a 1000 game sample, for example, you could say you are running exceptionally bad.

The lowest drop represents the largest drop below the starting bankroll. This is, by definition, going to be equal to or less than the downswing value. This is a good way to know a risk of ruin for a particular bankroll size. Remember that because the CI is centered on the median, that means that the risk of ruin over 1000 games with a bankroll of 54.8 buy-ins is 5% (100% – the “middle” 90% – the “top” 5%). You can look at the downswing values this way as well. You could say that 95% of the time we are going to have a downswing of more than 21.82 buyins.

Now, compare this data and interpretation for the 50% CI:

50% CI for ROI: 1.69% to 8.00%
50% CI for downswing: 29.55 buy-ins to 48.89 buy-ins
50% CI for lowest drop: 5.38 buy-ins to 26.82 buy-ins

What does this mean? It means that as our confidence goes down we are able to get closer to the median. For ROI this will start to converge on the true ROI. For downswing and lowest drop it will start to center on the most “common” downswing. From these numbers we can make interpretations such as “75% of the time our downswing will be 29.55 buy-ins or more” and “75% of the time our downswing will be 48.89 buy-ins or less”.

When we finally get down to 0% CI, we’re at the median:

0% CI for ROI: 4.84% to 4.84%
0% CI for downswing: 37.58 buy-ins to 37.58 buy-ins
0% CI for lowest drop: 13.60 buy-ins to 13.60 buy-ins

As expected the ROI converged to the theoretical ROI, and it always will for a large enough number of simulations. We also see the exact medians of downswing and lowest drop. The 13.60 buy-ins would correspond to a risk of ruin of 50% (half the time the drop will be better than the median, half the time the drop will be worse than the median).

OK, so that information gives you an idea of how to consider variance as you’re playing, but what if you’re sitting there saying “I’m a new player and I have played X games and my ROI is Y, how can I use this data?” This is a much more difficult question to answer. Per the comment about ROI claims above if you had an ROI of -10% after 1000 games at the $6.50 level, you could pretty confidently say that your actual ROI is not 4.84% or close to it. If you look at the difference between the high and low ROI, that may help though. For example consider the two outputs:

Theoretical ROI = 4.84%
99% CI for ROI: -7.29% to 16.97%

Theoretical ROI = -0.31%
99% CI for ROI: -12.02% to 11.74%

You’ll notice the difference between the high and low ROI in the first case is 24.26 and in the second case is 23.76. So, with 99% confidence we’re about +/- 12% ROI over 1000 games with these parameters from the theoretical. You could make an educated guess that over 1000 games if your ROI is -10% that your true ROI is probably in the -22% to +2% range with a high degree of accuracy.

With all this data be sure to keep in mind that you don’t play a certain way constantly. You should continuously be getting better. As your game changes, if you want to estimate your ROI try to give more weight to recent games.

Below are some more interesting runs of the program.

These first two show off the difference in variance between a 1000 game sample and a 5000 game sample with all other parameters equal:

$15.00+1.00 9-man game
Payout distribution: 50.0% 30.0% 20.0%
Finish distribution: 12.5% 12.5% 12.5%
Theoretical ROI = 5.47%
100000 simulations of 1000 games:

---

99% CI for ROI: -6.60% to 17.79%
99% CI for downswing: 17.06 buy-ins to 99.25 buy-ins
99% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 84.88 buy-ins

---

95% CI for ROI: -3.81% to 14.83%
95% CI for downswing: 19.88 buy-ins to 79.19 buy-ins
95% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 62.69 buy-ins

---

90% CI for ROI: -2.29% to 13.32%
90% CI for downswing: 21.62 buy-ins to 70.22 buy-ins
90% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 52.00 buy-ins

---

75% CI for ROI: 0.07% to 10.95%
75% CI for downswing: 24.94 buy-ins to 57.72 buy-ins
75% CI for lowest drop: 2.00 buy-ins to 37.09 buy-ins

---

50% CI for ROI: 2.26% to 8.68%
50% CI for downswing: 28.97 buy-ins to 47.75 buy-ins
50% CI for lowest drop: 5.00 buy-ins to 25.16 buy-ins

---

25% CI for ROI: 3.95% to 6.99%
25% CI for downswing: 32.72 buy-ins to 41.44 buy-ins
25% CI for lowest drop: 8.47 buy-ins to 17.91 buy-ins

---

0% CI for ROI: 5.47% to 5.47%
0% CI for downswing: 36.69 buy-ins to 36.69 buy-ins
0% CI for lowest drop: 12.62 buy-ins to 12.62 buy-ins

$15.00+1.00 9-man game
Payout distribution: 50.0% 30.0% 20.0%
Finish distribution: 12.5% 12.5% 12.5%
Theoretical ROI = 5.47%
100000 simulations of 5000 games:

---

99% CI for ROI: 0.04% to 10.92%
99% CI for downswing: 33.12 buy-ins to 150.59 buy-ins
99% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 107.97 buy-ins

---

95% CI for ROI: 1.32% to 9.64%
95% CI for downswing: 37.56 buy-ins to 120.75 buy-ins
95% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 74.94 buy-ins

---

90% CI for ROI: 1.98% to 8.96%
90% CI for downswing: 40.34 buy-ins to 107.59 buy-ins
90% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 60.31 buy-ins

---

75% CI for ROI: 3.02% to 7.92%
75% CI for downswing: 45.44 buy-ins to 90.56 buy-ins
75% CI for lowest drop: 2.19 buy-ins to 41.84 buy-ins

---

50% CI for ROI: 4.03% to 6.90%
50% CI for downswing: 51.44 buy-ins to 77.16 buy-ins
50% CI for lowest drop: 5.34 buy-ins to 27.50 buy-ins

---

25% CI for ROI: 4.78% to 6.14%
25% CI for downswing: 56.66 buy-ins to 68.72 buy-ins
25% CI for lowest drop: 9.00 buy-ins to 19.25 buy-ins

---

0% CI for ROI: 5.45% to 5.45%
0% CI for downswing: 62.25 buy-ins to 62.25 buy-ins
0% CI for lowest drop: 13.47 buy-ins to 13.47 buy-ins

Here are some numbers for 180 man games:

$11.00+1.00 180-man game
Payout distribution: 30.0% 20.0% 11.9% 8.0% 6.5% 5.0% 3.5% 2.6% 1.7% 1.2% 1.2% 1.2% 1.2% 1.2% 1.2% 1.2% 1.2% 1.2%
Finish distribution: 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8% 0.8%
Theoretical ROI = 32.00%
100000 simulations of 1000 games:

---

99% CI for ROI: -11.33% to 82.36%
99% CI for downswing: 45.65 buy-ins to 240.96 buy-ins
99% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 195.42 buy-ins

---

95% CI for ROI: -2.04% to 69.59%
95% CI for downswing: 52.64 buy-ins to 192.69 buy-ins
95% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 139.01 buy-ins

---

90% CI for ROI: 2.89% to 63.14%
90% CI for downswing: 57.05 buy-ins to 171.02 buy-ins
90% CI for lowest drop: 1.49 buy-ins to 113.20 buy-ins

---

75% CI for ROI: 11.14% to 53.35%
75% CI for downswing: 65.28 buy-ins to 141.29 buy-ins
75% CI for lowest drop: 5.00 buy-ins to 79.49 buy-ins

---

50% CI for ROI: 19.41% to 44.03%
50% CI for downswing: 75.06 buy-ins to 118.41 buy-ins
50% CI for lowest drop: 10.81 buy-ins to 53.05 buy-ins

---

25% CI for ROI: 25.73% to 37.33%
25% CI for downswing: 84.01 buy-ins to 104.10 buy-ins
25% CI for lowest drop: 17.79 buy-ins to 37.39 buy-ins

---

0% CI for ROI: 31.44% to 31.44%
0% CI for downswing: 93.36 buy-ins to 93.36 buy-ins
0% CI for lowest drop: 26.24 buy-ins to 26.24 buy-ins

Lastly, someone asked me about MTTs.  Because field sizes change a lot it’s hard to do this sort of analysis.  But if your average field size was about 1000 people, these would be the sorts of numbers you could expect if you knew you were a decent winner:

$55.00+5.00 1090-man game
Theoretical ROI = 53.29%
250000 simulations of 1000 games:

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99% CI for ROI: -24.83% to 159.20%
99% CI for downswing: 66.20 buy-ins to 371.91 buy-ins
99% CI for lowest drop: 0.00 buy-ins to 328.46 buy-ins

---

95% CI for ROI: -10.02% to 130.44%
95% CI for downswing: 78.10 buy-ins to 302.12 buy-ins
95% CI for lowest drop: 1.00 buy-ins to 242.34 buy-ins

---

90% CI for ROI: -1.65% to 116.34%
90% CI for downswing: 85.17 buy-ins to 269.61 buy-ins
90% CI for lowest drop: 3.00 buy-ins to 200.65 buy-ins

---

75% CI for ROI: 12.63% to 95.42%
75% CI for downswing: 98.54 buy-ins to 223.18 buy-ins
75% CI for lowest drop: 8.90 buy-ins to 141.96 buy-ins

---

50% CI for ROI: 27.74% to 76.28%
50% CI for downswing: 114.68 buy-ins to 185.61 buy-ins
50% CI for lowest drop: 19.71 buy-ins to 95.56 buy-ins

---

25% CI for ROI: 39.86% to 62.73%
25% CI for downswing: 129.08 buy-ins to 162.34 buy-ins
25% CI for lowest drop: 32.33 buy-ins to 67.66 buy-ins

---

0% CI for ROI: 51.07% to 51.07%
0% CI for downswing: 144.54 buy-ins to 144.54 buy-ins
0% CI for lowest drop: 47.76 buy-ins to 47.76 buy-ins

With the closure of the two largest sites in the US I’ve taken to playing a lot more live as I live in Las Vegas. I’m still feeling things out and running around to various poker rooms to see what’s going on at each one. Here’s a picture of Binion’s from earlier tonight:

I went in and tried to play a scheduled MTT they had, but it only got 3 entrants so we all just left. I honestly got goosebumps going into the place, though. Ended up going across the street to the Golden Nugget and won a MTT there though! Maybe I’ll throw some info up here about all of that, but in the meantime I wanted to get some news out.

Poker VT has a good 10 or so videos from me. Some review of my own play, some live play at micro, low, and midstakes SNGs, a few purely theory videos, and hand history reviews for the winners of the SNG contest. These should be coming out over the coming weeks and months. The SNG contest is no longer active.

My coaching rates have dropped and I’m being a bit more public about it. In the past I always tried to keep a very small number of students (usually 2 at most) though now that I have to schedule around what games are available and running live I’m willing to take on more students and at a cheaper rate. If you don’t know, I won the FTP SNG high stakes leaderboard before and lately have some pretty decent turbo/super-turbo MTT results as well. For coaching info check this page.

I still intend on continuing with the strategy blog, so check back for that stuff

I’ve cleared a lot of old posts and I’m going to be making this a SNG strategy blog in the future.  I’ll be going over a lot of stuff related to SNGs, ICM, and plenty of theory.   A lot of it will probably be the same type of stuff I go over on my “Strategy Grab Bag” series on Poker VT and if I come up with something new and interesting then you’ll probably hear about it first if you’re a member there.

Here’s a recap of some of my prior strategy posts:

• Probability and outs
• Should you ever fold aces?
• A few truths about double-or-nothing SNGs
• SNG calculations and edge

And a few other useful posts:

• Laptop buying guide for poker players
• Security for the online poker player
• Tommy Angelo’s Elements of Poker

My future strategy posts will be probably a lot more specific and with a lot more detail than the ones I’ve written before.

Lastly, I’m updating my twitter account more, so be sure to follow me there for updates.

Help JCarver is writing all these posts and taking over the website!!!

No really they’re worth reading, so be sure to go check them out.

I’ve got some interesting stuff in the pipeline, one is a review of probably the first poker book I’ve read in almost 2 years, and it’s not me making fun of T. J. Cloutier. The other thing is I’m working on an interesting theoretical study related to some MTT data analysis. If you have a lot of MTT hand histories I’d like to hear from you so I can use them in my study. All results will be anonymous, although if you participate I’ll tell you who you are. If you have 500 or more MTT hand histories let me know.  The only poker games I can use in my study are NLHE  MTTs, and so that means no SNGs, MTSNGs or cash games.

Also the first SNG contest in months over at PokerVT has wrapped up.  For better or worse there were 27 participants, and it paid out $400 to 6 people, with $145 to the top prize winner, MxKlptz.  To compete all you need to do is play in 8 $3.40 SNGs with me over a month’s time on PokerStars at 5 PM Eastern on any Sunday.  Considering that only people who have played 8 games have won prizes and that 15 of the 27 people in December played 8 games, that’s almost 100% ROI in EV on top of whatever you make while playing the games!  For more info about the contest check here.  And if you’re signing up to PokerVT don’t forget to use discount code NotAProblem to get a better-than-usual discount.

A while back I wrote a pretty comprehensive and lengthy post about computer security (which I will update soon or make a new version) because a lot of people have asked me about it over the years.   I’ve found that a lot of my poker playing friends and a lot of PokerVT members ask for laptop suggestions, so here’s another lengthy post with a lot of details on the subject.

Because prices and deals change I’m not going to talk about specific models or parts too much but rather about manufacturers, stores, and specs you should be aware of.

Before looking

The hardest part of buying a laptop is finding one with an appropriate screen size and resolution with decent performance for the right price.  Keep in mind that a laptop is generally going to be more expensive than a desktop with similar specs.  The first thing you need to ask yourself is if you’re going to be moving the laptop around a lot.  Smaller laptops are better for portability, but larger “desktop replacement” laptops that have screens of 17″ and up are the best for poker.  One option, as well, is to hook a larger monitor up to a laptop to use both screens, or just the monitor screen for tables and the laptop screen for lobbies and other things.

A lot has been said about laptop manufacturer reliability, and you can certainly find a lot of studies.  I’d suggest checking out some like this and making your own decision.  If someone tries to give you advice like “Don’t buy X brand because I had one and it broke after a month!” you should just immediately disregard everything they say.  Yes, everything has a certain failure rate, and some makers are better than others, but the differences are usually small enough to be meaningless.  In the linked article above you see a 2 year failure rate of 10% for the best maker vs 16% for the worst.  If you’re saving several hundred dollars or getting exactly what specs you want in a laptop by taking a slightly higher failure rate then it’s probably worth it.

Relevant specifications

Screen size and resolution:  This should be the first thing you look for.  If you want to play up to 12 tables with no overlap then you’re going to need a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels (also called 1080i, 1080p, or Full HD), although slightly larger 1920×1200 (WUXGA) resolutions are also available (this will give you some space for your taskbar and such.  Most of the time you will need to get a 16″ or larger screen in order to find resolutions this high, althoughI feel like such high resolutions on a 16″ screen make everything too tiny and I would go for 17″ at a minimum.

Screen coating:  Glossy displays are more expensive, brighter, better looking, and easier on the eyes for most situations.  This can be a matter of personal preference though, but personally I wouldn’t even consider getting a laptop without a glossy screen.

Processor:  Honestly if all you’re doing is playing poker, browsing the web, running stuff like PT3 or HEM and other related poker software, this doesn’t matter a great deal although I would strongly suggest going with at least an Intel Core i5.  i5 is the sweet spot right now in terms of price and performance and has been for all of 2010.  If you end up getting a great deal on the slightly worse i3, that’s OK, but stay away from AMD Athlon.  Not only does it have considerably worse performance, but if you find an Athlon as a component in another laptop then it’s a budget laptop, will have worse overall specs, and can run into some overheating issues because of sub-par builds.

Operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium should be the standard option for most laptops.  If you have an option to get Professional or Ultimate, don’t.  The only relatively useful feature is in Ultimate which has BitLocker drive encryption, however you can do the same thing for free with TrueCrypt, which I mention in my security post.  If, for whatever reason, you decide you do need one of the more expensive versions you can activate it online and unlock the features without doing anything complicated like reinstalling.

RAM (memory): Because laptops ship with Windows 7 now, the base recommended RAM is 4 GB.  I would suggest going with 6 or 8 GB however.  Increasing the RAM allows more stuff to stay in memory which means it won’t have to be swapped out to the disk as much.  Not only does this increase speed but it reduces temperature and puts less strain on your hard drive.  If you can’t configure your laptop online or if you can and it would be prohibitively expensive then you can always buy some RAM cheaply and install it yourself.  Laptop memory is extremely easy to install as you can see in this video and is one of those things that even someone with no computer experience could do.

Video card:  Budget laptops will frequently only use on-board/integrated video, and unless you play a lot of the most recent PC games out there this is fine, however there are two concerns for poker players.  First is if you actually find a laptop with integrated video the other specs probably aren’t going to be to your satisfaction, and secondly if you do get one with integrated video then it won’t have useful video outputs, like DVI and/or HDMI, for a second monitor.   Trying to drive a decent monitor using USB or VGA and a VGA to DVI adapter is not going to be pretty.  Things like RAM or manufacturer don’t matter much, although NVIDIA is slightly better than ATI in general.

Hard drive:  You actually have some options here aside from just picking a size that’s useful for you.  If you’re willing to pay a bit extra you can get a system with two drives in it that will do RAID 1 (mirroring), so if one drive fails you still have your data.  Slightly higher price, very slightly lower performance, but greatly increased reliability.  You should be backing up important stuff anyway and unless this laptop will be the computer you use for absolutely everything then I would not suggest upgrading.  Very few makers will offer this option, and if they do it will only be on a handful of laptops.

The other option you may have is getting a SSD (solid-state drive).  Basically think of it like a big USB flash stick in place of your hard drive.  These are quite expensive though.  A standard 400GB laptop drive is only $40, but a 256GB SSD costs over $400.    The performance increase is very noticable though.  The hard drive is usually the bottleneck of a system and SSD drives are 2-3 times faster than a HDD.  This means faster bootups, faster application launches, better application performance, and better overall system performance.   SSDs are also less susceptible to damage from drops since there are no moving parts like a HDD.  Because of the prohibitively high price, however, I would not suggest getting a SSD.  The price is usually only going to be right if you get a very small drive, and then you will likely only use the computer for poker because the small drive will limit it’s usefulness for other stuff, so then you don’t really need the performance.

Warranty and protection plans:  Many companies will offer you extended warranties and protection plans.  I’m a big fan of things like accidental damage protection.  It’s the most expensive option, but basically if anything ever goes wrong whether you did it or not they’ll fix it, replace it, or give you a newer model if they don’t have the parts/model available.   If you travel with the laptop a lot you will definitely want this, but even if you don’t travel, just regular usage over years will cause minor problems like case cracking, dead pixels, power connector becoming loose, RAM or a HDD dying, etc.  If you are spending around $1k or more on a laptop it is a good idea to spend $200 or so to get a 3 or 4 year plan.  I’ve found most people tend to replace laptops in about 2-3 years, in part to get the latest and greatest, but also in part to get something that doesn’t have a few things broken on it.

Other stuff:  Speakers are not a major concern on laptops, none of them will sound fine and it’s easy enough to hook them up to a cheap system that sounds decent if you are so inclined.  Laptops ship with DVD burners as standard, but some may have Blu-Ray.  If you have the option then you shouldn’t pay extra for Blu-Ray if you won’t use it, obviously.  Every laptop has wireless included so you don’t need to worry about that.  If there’s an upgrade for something like 802.11n don’t bother with it.

Getting the best deal

As far as manufacturers and places to shop go, you should be aware of what companies will allow you to configure your laptop and which won’t.  Configured laptops are generally more expensive than pre-made models, but you will be able to get exactly what you want rather than compromising on certain specs.  Dell, HP, Sony, Lenovo, and Toshiba all allow you to configure laptops on their website.  Asus, Acer, and Gateway do not.

Whether you are going to buy a pre-made laptop or configure one yourself, be aware you can frequently get up to 5% cash back and find all available coupons and sales for stores at FatWallet.  Also be sure to check out TechBargains.  If you’d like to peruse a good selection of pre-made laptops that will have decent prices, check out Newegg or Amazon.  For individual parts (like RAM) check out Pricewatch and for anything related to cables or adapters check out Monoprice.

Personal feelings

So, after all this I feel like I should share some of my personal experiences and feelings on the matter.  10 years ago I felt like Dell was definitely the best but lately I’ve liked HP and Sony a lot more.  I have put my Vaio through hell and it’s held up remarkably well after 2 years, though the only reason I bought it was because Sony has a nice program where you can get a discount by trading in old laptops, even if they are broken, and at certain times they even give you an extra $100 on top of that.  In terms of value for money I feel like HP is the best, though.  When you compare HP to Dell, for instance, you will frequently be able to get equal or better specs all around and for $100-$200 less.

The pre-made laptops are really starting to catch up, though, especially if you aren’t picky.  As a plus, because you don’t have to get someone to make it you will get it a lot faster than the 2-3 weeks it takes for a place like Dell or HP to deliver.

It’s been a long time since I posted a blog update.  I just never have anything interesting to say.

Anyway, I’m writing this post in part because the SNG series is back on PokerVT.   I haven’t run it in many months because of WSOP and then having a lot of eye issues but things are getting back to normal now.  The SNG series gives out $400 in prizes every month (double what it was previously) and you can find the details in this thread on PokerVT here: http://www.pokervt.com/forum/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=9695.  You can view the thread even if you’re not a PokerVT member but if you want to compete in the contest you’ll need to sign up there (use discount code NotAProblem for a better discount than normal).

In addition to the SNG contest starting again, I’ve got some videos coming out on step SNGs on Full Tilt and PokerStars  in the coming weeks.  The first is a slideshow presentation and discussion of the payout structure and how this changes your ranges as compared to a normal SNG.  I also discuss some of the lesser known things about steps, such as the overlay (yes, most step SNGs actually have some built in overlay!) and what your options are if you don’t actually want to go through all the steps, winding up with a PCA or WSOP ticket, but would rather play other tournaments.

As far as my play goes, part of the problem with my eyes was apparently caused by stress so I haven’t been 12+ tabling SNGs lately.  Actually I’ve been playing some tournaments because I can play 2 or 3 of those at once and don’t really have to dedicate my attention to them too much so I can watch videos like this.   I’ve been playing pretty much every super turbo MTT that I see and a handful of turbo MTTs as well, with 6 final tables in the past month.  I’ll probably keep doing this in the near future.

Since getting over being moderately sick for a few months I’ve started to pick things up again. I’ve got a couple of students who are doing good: one went from being a losing player to being up 150 buyins in slightly over a month and has moved up two levels and the other doesn’t play much but is up around 80 buyins in about 2 months.  I’m still putting out a bunch of PokerVT stuff too — I’m up to 30 videos or so.

A week ago I got to tag along with Leo (Superfluous Man) to the NBC HU championship draw party where Gavin Smith about took my arm off barreling up to the stage when his matchup was drawn.  After that was over, apparently Jason (JCarver) was in town on his way to LAPC or something and dropped in to sweat Leo and Negreanu so we went to go get food.  This is always fun because you get to watch Jason sweat and worry about what’s on the menu.

Of course I have the worst sleep schedule ever so I missed the actual games which started at noon the next day.  No spoilers, but while the winner of the whole tournament is disliked by a number of poker players, the result will probably be good from a pr/publicity standpoint.

Jason, Leo, and a bunch of other people came over to my place to watch WEC and eat chicken (obv) on Saturday which was fun.  WSOP is gonna be sick when everyone is in town for a solid month.

I also just ordered a new desktop which I’m pretty excited about.  Basically in the past 10 years I’ve had two desktops, both of which I built myself.  I had a ton of problems with bad hardware on my latest one, and it tends to reboot at random times usually every 1-2 days, though sometimes it might do it 30 minutes after a reboot.  It makes it really annoying to play poker or record a video on.  I have a laptop and even mobile broadband, so if my desktop crashes or if the power or internet goes down I’ll be OK.  If you play cash games and things go wrong, no big deal.  Miss a few orbits of a MTT? Usually no biggie.  If I’m playing a decent number of SNGs and everything dies then I can lose $1500.

Anyway I configured a bunch of stuff on the Dell and HP sites.  Does anyone even do configurable desktops aside from them anymore?  Gateway got bought by Acer, so they don’t.  Sony sort of does but it’s all-in-one stuff I think.  After building a couple of models I really liked I parted it out on newegg/pricewatch to see how much I’d save if I built it myself.  Surprisingly, it was within $100, and that’s with a service plan.  So the new box should be here before the end of the month.  It’s an i7-930 (yeah I know i5 is the sweet spot, but I’m drooling over triple channel and 6 DIMMs, and it was only around $150 more), 12GB DDR3-1066 (6×2GB DIMMs — the board supports 1333 but the manufacturer doesn’t offer it and the speed difference would be negligible), 2×500GB HDD in a RAID 1 configuration, and a Radeon HD 4850 (I don’t play any games really).  Thanks to Eric, nachos, and ultimatemike for letting me bounce ideas off them.