back to the House of Dave

 

Miscellaneous stuff, new poker hands, interesting time intervals

 

Dave's Bad Beat Poker Story:

Every poker player has a bad beat story - here's mine. I'm playing 7-stud with some friends, nothing wild, and my first 3 cards are 3 queens. Cool - this should happen to me more often - I'm in the pot all the way, baybee. I catch queen #4 on the 5th card, come up for air, and take a look around the table. One guy looks like a potential heart flush, another has paired up once or twice with his down cards, cos he's a semi-savvy player, and it looks like dog meat on the up cards. Another dude has dog meat showing also, but I figure he's in cos he's stupid, not cos he's savvy. Card #6 comes - who cares what mine is, but mr. Heart Flush catches another heart - he's got 4 showing. I have a pair of Qs up, there's also a pair of 10s at the table. Mr. savvy-with-krap-showing has now paired some 6s. Wheeee. Mr. Heart Flush stays (why??), I'm in it for the long haul, the 6s stay, and the pair of 10s melt away as they should have loooong ago. At this point, of course, I'm spending the money in the pot, living off the interest... I obviously don't care about the heart flush, and the 6s smell like a full house or maybe even quad-6s (he's not bluffing, and he knows he must beat a flush). Card #7 comes - mine's a don't-care, heart-flush looks content (he couldn't have straightened, could he? naaaa.), and the 6s are still pitching. We pitch more money in the pot - I'm a raising fool. We're all 3 still in it. I roll my cards over, show the 4 queens, and prepare to rake the pot in.... My friend Chris, mister 6-pair, says "not so fast, Dave" - and rolls 3 kings from his 3 down cards to go with his one king up-card. He caught the final king on the river, on the last card. NNNNNOOOOOOOOO! I lose 4 queens to 4 kings with nothing wild. That's just wrong - it's just sick and wrong. I thought he had me read for queens-full, and had a higher full house.

 

Number series

There are few better ways to play with recursive series than to fire up a spreadsheet program. I use Excel, but anything else would work.

Here's some fun things to do:

1) Fun with Fibo. Put the value 1 into cell A1 and A2, then in cell A3 put the formula

Now copy and paste this formula down the first column. You're seeing the first several terms of the Fibonacci series. But, there's more: you can change the values in A1 and A2 to anything, they don't have to be 1. They don't even have to be integral. Put the number -1 into A2, and notice how the series runs away to +- infinity depending on the value in A1. When A1=1.6, it goes negative. When A1 = 1.7, it goes positive. Where is the breakpoint? Is there anything suspicious about that number? (What if you multiply it by 2, then subtract 1?)

2) 2D Fibo Put 1s in the top left corner. Let all other cells be equal to the sum of the numbers above and left. This is sort of a generalized 2D Fibonacci series, can you derive nonrecursive formulas for the rows and columns? How about the diagonals? Change cell A1 to 2, and notice the dramatic effect on cells far away.

Interesting time intervals

A little while ago (almost two hundred million seconds) I threw a party for my billion-second "birthday" - I'll leave figuring my age as an exercise for the reader. I think 1 billion seconds is the best interval, but there are several others worthy of note. Several multiples of the times below are also reasonable.

500 Months = 41 2/3 years

1000 Weeks = 19 years, 60 days

10000 Days = 27 years, 138 days

100000 Hours = 11 years, 149 days

10^7 Minutes = 19 years, 5 days

7 card poker:

7-stud is a great game, but if you ever want to try out some true 7-card hands, try this ordering (from low to high):

1) High card

2) 1 pair

3) 2 pair

4) 3 of a kind

5) 5 card straight

6) 5 card flush

7) full house

8) 3 pair

9) 6 card straight

10) 6 card flush

11) 4 of a kind

12) 3 of a kind + 2 pair

13) 7 card straight

14) 2 3-of-a-kinds

15) 4 of a kind + 2 of a kind

16) 5 card straight flush

17) 7 card flush

18) 6 card straight flush

19) 4 of a kind + 3 of a kind

20) 7 card straight flush

5 card poker hands

Based on the fact that 2-to-a-straight-flush is actually harder to get than a pair - maybe it should be worth something. If we let 2, 3, and 4 to a straight flush carry value in 5 card poker, we get all kinds of interesting hands. Note that many of the hands below can be made in 2 different ways; for example, hand #4 (1 pair, 1 SF pair) could have the pair and SF pair linked (6h 6d 7d x x) or unlinked (6h 6d 8c 9c x). I did not differentiate between these two.

Notation:

1) High card

2) pair

3) SFpair

4) 1 pair, 1 SFpair

5) 2 pair

6) trips

7) 2 pair, 1 SFpair

8) SFtrips

9) 2 SFpair

10) 1 pair, SFtrips

11) trips, SFpair

12) 1 pair, 2 SFpair

13) straight

14) flush

15) Straight, SFpair

16) flush, SFpair

17) full house

18) 2 pair, 2 SFpair

19) SFtrips, SFpair

20) flush, SFtrips

21) 2 pair, SFtrips

22) SF trips, SFpair, pair (ex: 6c 7c 8c 8h 9h)

23) trips, SFtrips

24) straight, SFtrips

25) full house, SFpair

26) trips, 2 SFpair

27) full house, 2 SFpair

28 SFtrips, SFpair, 2 pair (ex: 6c 7c 8c 6h 7h)

29) SFquads

30) SFquads, pair

31) SFquads, flush

32) SFquads, straight

33) quads

34) quads, 1 SFpair

35) straight flush.

Tiebreaks: For compound hands, the tiebreak is the rarest individual componant. For example, suppose there are 2 hands of #28 at the table. Assuming you don't want to just kick those cheaters out of the game, the first tiebreak is the SFtrips, since that is the rarest component of the hand. Then the 2 pair. Then the SF pair.