Further to my Backgammon points, what has always intrigued and disturbed me is that these Random Number Generators must be used for all 'board' and similar games. In Backgammon, the nature of the game is so finite that an experienced player soon notices if the dice are somehow loaded and the table isn't straight. Most players immediately notice something a bit off about the internet Backgammon tables. I'm not sure it would be so obvious with, say, Monopoly or whatever other games are played for money.
Strange you should mention Monopoly. My youngest went 3 times round the board from the off yesterday never landing on anything other than chance community chest free parking just visiting or Go. And never being moved either forward or back by the cards he drew. I have no idea of the odds but they must be astronomical. Incidentally he won!
In my experience, the odds of anyone ever actually winning a game of monopoly are essentially zero.
Does someone always lose their temper and overturn the board ? In my family, that usually only happens with Risk.
A Swedish colleague posted on an internal chatroom that Sweden’s ICUs have coped with the demand OK, but that they’re simply not sending patients with a low likelihood of survival, like elderly in care homes, to the ICU in the first place.
Further to my Backgammon points, what has always intrigued and disturbed me is that these Random Number Generators must be used for all 'board' and similar games. In Backgammon, the nature of the game is so finite that an experienced player soon notices if the dice are somehow loaded and the table isn't straight. Most players immediately notice something a bit off about the internet Backgammon tables. I'm not sure it would be so obvious with, say, Monopoly or whatever other games are played for money.
Strange you should mention Monopoly. My youngest went 3 times round the board from the off yesterday never landing on anything other than chance community chest free parking just visiting or Go. And never being moved either forward or back by the cards he drew. I have no idea of the odds but they must be astronomical. Incidentally he won!
lol! Great stuff and alll good fun. No money involved, I hope.
But that is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about in respect of Backgammon, where fairly serious amounts were being wagered. It was generally impossible to calculate precise odds, but repeatedly what you saw happening just didn't pass the smell test.
A Swedish colleague posted on an internal chatroom that Sweden’s ICUs have coped with the demand OK, but that they’re simply not sending patients with a low likelihood of survival, like elderly in care homes, to the ICU in the first place.
Further to my Backgammon points, what has always intrigued and disturbed me is that these Random Number Generators must be used for all 'board' and similar games. In Backgammon, the nature of the game is so finite that an experienced player soon notices if the dice are somehow loaded and the table isn't straight. Most players immediately notice something a bit off about the internet Backgammon tables. I'm not sure it would be so obvious with, say, Monopoly or whatever other games are played for money.
Strange you should mention Monopoly. My youngest went 3 times round the board from the off yesterday never landing on anything other than chance community chest free parking just visiting or Go. And never being moved either forward or back by the cards he drew. I have no idea of the odds but they must be astronomical. Incidentally he won!
In my experience, the odds of anyone ever actually winning a game of monopoly are essentially zero.
His streak was ended by landing on Old Kent Road. Then a double one for Whitechapel. Had hotels up straight away and still more cash than me and the Mrs put together who had spent loads very ineffectively. All over in slightly more than an hour.
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Unless I've misunderstood something here, rolling a 6 and a 1 on two dice is 17-1, not 35-1. Assuming that the two dice are thrown together and are indistinguishable from each other, which I think is the case.
It’s two 5/1 shots in a double isn’t it? 35/1
It's very possible I'm being thick:
- 36 total possible outcomes - two of them are "good": 6/1 and 1/6 - so 2 out of 36, or 1 out of 18. 17/1
Yes, it's a while since I've played now and I think you are right - 17/1. But I'm talking about throwing it repeatedly, say seven or eight times in a dozen throws. The math is a little tricky, but the odds are astronomic however you do it.
Always important to remember to factor in the likelihood of the other things that also would have been interesting.
It's a running joke in my family that the answer to the question "what are the odds of..." is always "100%". Because if it hadn't already happened, you wouldn't be asking about it.
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Further to my Backgammon points, what has always intrigued and disturbed me is that these Random Number Generators must be used for all 'board' and similar games. In Backgammon, the nature of the game is so finite that an experienced player soon notices if the dice are somehow loaded and the table isn't straight. Most players immediately notice something a bit off about the internet Backgammon tables. I'm not sure it would be so obvious with, say, Monopoly or whatever other games are played for money.
Strange you should mention Monopoly. My youngest went 3 times round the board from the off yesterday never landing on anything other than chance community chest free parking just visiting or Go. And never being moved either forward or back by the cards he drew. I have no idea of the odds but they must be astronomical. Incidentally he won!
In my experience, the odds of anyone ever actually winning a game of monopoly are essentially zero.
His streak was ended by landing on Old Kent Road. Then a double one for Whitechapel. Had hotels up straight away and still more cash than me and the Mrs put together who had spent loads very ineffectively. All over in slightly more than an hour.
I hope you reported him to the Gambling Commission.
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Unless I've misunderstood something here, rolling a 6 and a 1 on two dice is 17-1, not 35-1. Assuming that the two dice are thrown together and are indistinguishable from each other, which I think is the case.
It’s two 5/1 shots in a double isn’t it? 35/1
How can you get it so 1-6 works but 6-6 or 1-1 doesn't ?
1-6 /6-1 is 17-1.
Oh yeah of course, because you have two chances on the first throw. So it’s not two 5/1 shots, it’s a 2/1 and 5/1 double, 17/1 @Endillion was right
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
You're doing 11^6. It's 1 in 12^6, so ~3,000,000:1
This as this origin of the virus story is going to gather some wind behind it. The US government is becoming more strident that it came from a lab but some things to note:
1. I've seen a report from the US that there is reasonable concurrence amongst the 17 US intelligence agencies that its origin was in a lab. In reality there are a handful of agencies that actually would have any on the spot focus on such matters in terms of intelligence take and analysis; CIA, NSA, NRO, NGA & DIA The rest probably do not count because they are probably not involved in the original raw take or analysis of it.
2. For clarity, the Wuhan facility were mixing viral components together, its no secret and never hidden. That in itself is not necessarily a smoking gun but if its mentioned as a claim to suggest something sinister, its not a revelation. Maybe it is sinister work, maybe it isn't.
3. Its viable, probable even, China lied its arse off about Sars CoV 2 in particular around its knowledge of it, the timelines and potentially information around its nature,severity and casualty rate, especially early on in proceedings. The follow up weird and wonderful disinformation is deflection but for what purpose. Plain embarrassment or something more calculated and worrisome?
4. As yet no one with any authority claims it was a deliberately engineered release and as yet no one has quite yer stepped up to say it was created 100% artificially even if done in the course of medical research.
5. The process of ramp up of claims & pressure from the US (and perhaps more notably from Australian officials who are very aware of China upstream) is only likely to be calibrated such for three reasons:
a). They are pushing from a position of considerable knowledge and are progressively going to embarrass China and eventually release take.
b). They are pushing from a position of considerable knowledge but are possibly reluctant to reveal the take (which they may have to)
c). They have plenty of fragments but cant quite put it together so are stirring the pot.
I'd refer to any decent story sourcing that refers to the Aussies with due attention. Their investment in monitoring China is as proportionally sizeable as anyone.
The above doesn't refer to political side of this. Its pretty clear how the current administration could and will use the situation but it shouldn't take away from the questions about exactly how China handled the whole situation.
It seems unlikely that the Wuhan lab would do anything so detrimental to China's interest as deliberately releasing the virus into the local population. Virologists seem certain that Covid-19 has the characteristics of a naturally occurring virus originating in bats. The Wuhan was doing normal virological research into these viruses.
Accidental release of the virus into the neighbourhoood is plausible given the proximity of the lab to the origin of the outbreak, but there doesn't appear to be any evidence for this.
And there is no suggestion in the above that there is strong evidence of either.
Yeah but if the baseline is that a naturally occurring virus being studied at the lab might have been released accidentally but probably wasn't, that may say more about the sources you quote and their "position of considerable knowledge" than the practices of the lab and those of Chinese authorities.
Remember this is not a case of showing your hand, its not how it works. We don't know what raw information Western agencies have or how they have interpreted it and its unlikely to come out unless they can protect sourcing and methodology. If they can, then they will release it but how do you show say intercepts of logs of a computer for example. That's your source blown. How do you show intercepts of telephone conversations and so on.
What I'm trying to do is suggest how this may go forward, because its likely to become a bigger story and source of conflict.
Equally it doesn't take top secret intelligence to suggest that there was suppression at work. Not even the Chinese appeared to deny that they muzzled a doctor, who later died, that wanted greater attention to & warning of the severity of the situation. Also there are suggestions based on local reports that the death toll in Wuhan and wider Hubei was way way larger than the authorities stated. There are reports, on record, of concerns over the Wuhan site's bio security before this thing ever kicked off. There are stories that the EU has confirmed Chinese attempts at public disinformation in the West over SarsCoV2
None of those is intelligence agency sourced but add them up and the you'd be asking what the fuck were the Chinese at and why.
I will say this though, Western agencies try very hard to keep an eye on anything and anywhere that may be involved in dual-purpose activity. Its doubtful they'd not try to monitor the Wuhan facility and its doubtful they don't have some picture even if fragmented.
The reports of concern about (one of) the Wuhan sites’ biosecurity included requests from the Chinese for help in improving it. The details are unclear, as the US hasn’t published those cables,
One of the problems is that we’re nearly four years into a US administration almost as mendacious as the Chinese.
I'd be interesting in understanding more about that Chinese request for help. Do you have a pointer to that published anywhere?
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Unless I've misunderstood something here, rolling a 6 and a 1 on two dice is 17-1, not 35-1. Assuming that the two dice are thrown together and are indistinguishable from each other, which I think is the case.
It’s two 5/1 shots in a double isn’t it? 35/1
It's very possible I'm being thick:
- 36 total possible outcomes - two of them are "good": 6/1 and 1/6 - so 2 out of 36, or 1 out of 18. 17/1
Yes, it's a while since I've played now and I think you are right - 17/1. But I'm talking about throwing it repeatedly, say seven or eight times in a dozen throws. The math is a little tricky, but the odds are astronomic however you do it.
Always important to remember to factor in the likelihood of the other things that also would have been interesting.
It's a running joke in my family that the answer to the question "what are the odds of..." is always "100%". Because if it hadn't already happened, you wouldn't be asking about it.
Yes, I'm aware of the statistical and philospical conundrums around this topic, which is why at the end of the day the smell test is vital. You really couldn't play internet Backgammon for very long without pretty soon thinking that something somewhere was terribly wrong.
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
You're doing 11^6. It's 1 in 12^6, so ~3,000,000:1
Sure you are right but can you talk me through it? There are three major doubles (4,5, and 6) so that's 3 chances in 36.....which is 11/1. No ?
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
No, you need to use the 12.0 form of the odds and multiply through - or you'd get Even money streaks being certainties.
How do you get it so 1-1 and 6-6 don't work though ?
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Unless I've misunderstood something here, rolling a 6 and a 1 on two dice is 17-1, not 35-1. Assuming that the two dice are thrown together and are indistinguishable from each other, which I think is the case.
It’s two 5/1 shots in a double isn’t it? 35/1
How can you get it so 1-6 works but 6-6 or 1-1 doesn't ?
1-6 /6-1 is 17-1.
Oh yeah of course, because you have two chances on the first throw. So it’s not two 5/1 shots, it’s a 2/1 and 5/1 double, 17/1 @Endillion was right
Agreed. In practice though it was more difficult. There would be, say, three or four pieces on the bar. The top five escape routes would be blocked so you had to throw a 1 to get off, plus a 6 to jump out of the home base. If you got a 1 without a 6 you would get out but be a sitting target for a hit. Really the situation should be hopeless but time and again I saw players escape with highly fortuitous streaks of 1s and 6s at the precisely correct moments.
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
No, you need to use the 12.0 form of the odds and multiply through - or you'd get Even money streaks being certainties.
How do you get it so 1-1 and 6-6 don't work though ?
That'd make it a 8-1 shot, much more likely.
Now I understand.
Not sure what your query is though. Do you know the rule of Backgammon? Hard to explain otherwise.
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
You're doing 11^6. It's 1 in 12^6, so ~3,000,000:1
Sure you are right but can you talk me through it? There are three major doubles (4,5, and 6) so that's 3 chances in 36.....which is 11/1. No ?
I think it's the notation that's confusing. 11/1 is the same as 1 chance in 12. Doing that twice is 1 chance in 12 squared, or 1 in 144 (which is 143/1, ie (12^2) -1, not (12-1)^2. Ie, you have to add back the "1" good outcome to the "11" bad outcomes to get 12 total outcomes, before multiplying.
Repeat 6 times, and it's one chance in 12^6, rather than 1 chance in (12-1)^6.
If it was coin flips (which are evens, or 1/1) then 6 in a row would be 1 in 2^6, not 1 in 1^6 (which is the same as a 50% chance!).
Best educated guess at the moment seems to be that there was a local cover-up, quite possibly at a fairly junior level but once this failed and the scope of the problem became evident, the Government opened up and became cooperative. If that is the case, valuable time was lost but at least the concept of 'the comity of nations' was not shredded beyond repair.
I expect to see more heat put on China, but not a complete breakdown in relations.
That's my best guess too, but who knows. A problem is that the Chinese government actually seems more rational than the US government at the moment, though also more thuggish. I can absolutely see the regional bosses trying to smother the early reports and victimising the whistle-blower and then Beijing at some point going shit, this is actually the real thing.
But I'm not inclined to pay much attention to what Mr Trump says about it, and I suspect I'm not alone. Which is a pity, as for all their controversial sides the Americans were generally seen as powerful, intelligent allies who needed to be listened to; now their President and his immediate associates are just seen as unpredictable nutters to be kept in check. When the time comes to look back on the Trump presidency, that change might be one of the most damaging effects at a critical time.
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
You're doing 11^6. It's 1 in 12^6, so ~3,000,000:1
Sure you are right but can you talk me through it? There are three major doubles (4,5, and 6) so that's 3 chances in 36.....which is 11/1. No ?
I think it's the notation that's confusing. 11/1 is the same as 1 chance in 12. Doing that twice is 1 chance in 12 squared, or 1 in 144 (which is 143/1, ie (12^2) -1, not (12-1)^2. Ie, you have to add back the "1" good outcome to the "11" bad outcomes to get 12 total outcomes, before multiplying.
Repeat 6 times, and it's one chance in 12^6, rather than 1 chance in (12-1)^6.
If it was coin flips (which are evens, or 1/1) then 6 in a row would be 1 in 2^6, not 1 in 1^6 (which is the same as a 50% chance!).
Got it. Thank you. Astronomical odds either way though, as your common sense would tell you.
It seems unlikely that the Wuhan lab would do anything so detrimental to China's interest as deliberately releasing the virus into the local population. Virologists seem certain that Covid-19 has the characteristics of a naturally occurring virus originating in bats. The Wuhan was doing normal virological research into these viruses.
Accidental release of the virus into the neighbourhoood is plausible given the proximity of the lab to the origin of the outbreak, but there doesn't appear to be any evidence for this.
And there is no suggestion in the above that there is strong evidence of either.
Yeah but if the baseline is that a naturally occurring virus being studied at the lab might have been released accidentally but probably wasn't, that may say more about the sources you quote and their "position of considerable knowledge" than the practices of the lab and those of Chinese authorities.
Remember this is not a case of showing your hand, its not how it works. We don't know what raw information Western agencies have or how they have interpreted it and its unlikely to come out unless they can protect sourcing and methodology. If they can, then they will release it but how do you show say intercepts of logs of a computer for example. That's your source blown. How do you show intercepts of telephone conversations and so on.
What I'm trying to do is suggest how this may go forward, because its likely to become a bigger story and source of conflict.
Equally it doesn't take top secret intelligence to suggest that there was suppression at work. Not even the Chinese appeared to deny that they muzzled a doctor, who later died, that wanted greater attention to & warning of the severity of the situation. Also there are suggestions based on local reports that the death toll in Wuhan and wider Hubei was way way larger than the authorities stated. There are reports, on record, of concerns over the Wuhan site's bio security before this thing ever kicked off. There are stories that the EU has confirmed Chinese attempts at public disinformation in the West over SarsCoV2
None of those is intelligence agency sourced but add them up and the you'd be asking what the fuck were the Chinese at and why.
I will say this though, Western agencies try very hard to keep an eye on anything and anywhere that may be involved in dual-purpose activity. Its doubtful they'd not try to monitor the Wuhan facility and its doubtful they don't have some picture even if fragmented.
The reports of concern about (one of) the Wuhan sites’ biosecurity included requests from the Chinese for help in improving it. The details are unclear, as the US hasn’t published those cables,
One of the problems is that we’re nearly four years into a US administration almost as mendacious as the Chinese.
I'd be interesting in understanding more about that Chinese request for help. Do you have a pointer to that published anywhere?
It was in a WaPo story, not exactly slanted towards the Chinese:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ ... The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous. As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003....
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
Personally I mainly play stud hi/lo, partly because I like it but also because it's unfashionable so I reckon the average gang can't be bothered to do sogftware for it. I "know" half the players in that game on the Pokerstars circuit and we chat amicably while we play, which is also something you don't see much in the big Hold'Em tournaments. Also enjoying the 2-player Zoom $7.50 tournaments - a series of duels with single opponents (thus no ganging up possible), and basically more psychology than cardplay.
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
No, you need to use the 12.0 form of the odds and multiply through - or you'd get Even money streaks being certainties.
How do you get it so 1-1 and 6-6 don't work though ?
That'd make it a 8-1 shot, much more likely.
Now I understand.
Not sure what your query is though. Do you know the rule of Backgammon? Hard to explain otherwise.
Yes I play it, just trying to work out how 1-1 and 6-6 won't work for getting off the bar if 1-6 does
Further to my Backgammon points, what has always intrigued and disturbed me is that these Random Number Generators must be used for all 'board' and similar games. In Backgammon, the nature of the game is so finite that an experienced player soon notices if the dice are somehow loaded and the table isn't straight. Most players immediately notice something a bit off about the internet Backgammon tables. I'm not sure it would be so obvious with, say, Monopoly or whatever other games are played for money.
Strange you should mention Monopoly. My youngest went 3 times round the board from the off yesterday never landing on anything other than chance community chest free parking just visiting or Go. And never being moved either forward or back by the cards he drew. I have no idea of the odds but they must be astronomical. Incidentally he won!
In my experience, the odds of anyone ever actually winning a game of monopoly are essentially zero.
His streak was ended by landing on Old Kent Road. Then a double one for Whitechapel. Had hotels up straight away and still more cash than me and the Mrs put together who had spent loads very ineffectively. All over in slightly more than an hour.
I hope you reported him to the Gambling Commission.
He had acquired a couple of Get Out of Jail free cards. We did suggest the return of the death penalty may be more fitting.
It seems unlikely that the Wuhan lab would do anything so detrimental to China's interest as deliberately releasing the virus into the local population. Virologists seem certain that Covid-19 has the characteristics of a naturally occurring virus originating in bats. The Wuhan was doing normal virological research into these viruses.
Accidental release of the virus into the neighbourhoood is plausible given the proximity of the lab to the origin of the outbreak, but there doesn't appear to be any evidence for this.
And there is no suggestion in the above that there is strong evidence of either.
Yeah but if the baseline is that a naturally occurring virus being studied at the lab might have been released accidentally but probably wasn't, that may say more about the sources you quote and their "position of considerable knowledge" than the practices of the lab and those of Chinese authorities.
Remember this is not a case of showing your hand, its not how it works. We don't know what raw information Western agencies have or how they have interpreted it and its unlikely to come out unless they can protect sourcing and methodology. If they can, then they will release it but how do you show say intercepts of logs of a computer for example. That's your source blown. How do you show intercepts of telephone conversations and so on.
What I'm trying to do is suggest how this may go forward, because its likely to become a bigger story and source of conflict.
Equally it doesn't take top secret intelligence to suggest that there was suppression at work. Not even the Chinese appeared to deny that they muzzled a doctor, who later died, that wanted greater attention to & warning of the severity of the situation. Also there are suggestions based on local reports that the death toll in Wuhan and wider Hubei was way way larger than the authorities stated. There are reports, on record, of concerns over the Wuhan site's bio security before this thing ever kicked off. There are stories that the EU has confirmed Chinese attempts at public disinformation in the West over SarsCoV2
None of those is intelligence agency sourced but add them up and the you'd be asking what the fuck were the Chinese at and why.
I will say this though, Western agencies try very hard to keep an eye on anything and anywhere that may be involved in dual-purpose activity. Its doubtful they'd not try to monitor the Wuhan facility and its doubtful they don't have some picture even if fragmented.
The reports of concern about (one of) the Wuhan sites’ biosecurity included requests from the Chinese for help in improving it. The details are unclear, as the US hasn’t published those cables,
One of the problems is that we’re nearly four years into a US administration almost as mendacious as the Chinese.
I'd be interesting in understanding more about that Chinese request for help. Do you have a pointer to that published anywhere?
It was in a WaPo story, not exactly slanted towards the Chinese:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ ... The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous. As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003....
Their slant doesn't concern me its the start point to understand more and find additional sources about the issues with the bio security.
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
You're doing 11^6. It's 1 in 12^6, so ~3,000,000:1
Sure you are right but can you talk me through it? There are three major doubles (4,5, and 6) so that's 3 chances in 36.....which is 11/1. No ?
I think it's the notation that's confusing. 11/1 is the same as 1 chance in 12. Doing that twice is 1 chance in 12 squared, or 1 in 144 (which is 143/1, ie (12^2) -1, not (12-1)^2. Ie, you have to add back the "1" good outcome to the "11" bad outcomes to get 12 total outcomes, before multiplying.
Repeat 6 times, and it's one chance in 12^6, rather than 1 chance in (12-1)^6.
If it was coin flips (which are evens, or 1/1) then 6 in a row would be 1 in 2^6, not 1 in 1^6 (which is the same as a 50% chance!).
Got it. Thank you. Astronomical odds either way though, as your common sense would tell you.
It does sound unlikely. I know absolutely nothing about internet backgammon, so I'm happy to take your word for it that it doesn't feel right.
It seems unlikely that the Wuhan lab would do anything so detrimental to China's interest as deliberately releasing the virus into the local population. Virologists seem certain that Covid-19 has the characteristics of a naturally occurring virus originating in bats. The Wuhan was doing normal virological research into these viruses.
Accidental release of the virus into the neighbourhoood is plausible given the proximity of the lab to the origin of the outbreak, but there doesn't appear to be any evidence for this.
And there is no suggestion in the above that there is strong evidence of either.
Yeah but if the baseline is that a naturally occurring virus being studied at the lab might have been released accidentally but probably wasn't, that may say more about the sources you quote and their "position of considerable knowledge" than the practices of the lab and those of Chinese authorities.
Remember this is not a case of showing your hand, its not how it works. We don't know what raw information Western agencies have or how they have interpreted it and its unlikely to come out unless they can protect sourcing and methodology. If they can, then they will release it but how do you show say intercepts of logs of a computer for example. That's your source blown. How do you show intercepts of telephone conversations and so on.
What I'm trying to do is suggest how this may go forward, because its likely to become a bigger story and source of conflict.
Equally it doesn't take top secret intelligence to suggest that there was suppression at work. Not even the Chinese appeared to deny that they muzzled a doctor, who later died, that wanted greater attention to & warning of the severity of the situation. Also there are suggestions based on local reports that the death toll in Wuhan and wider Hubei was way way larger than the authorities stated. There are reports, on record, of concerns over the Wuhan site's bio security before this thing ever kicked off. There are stories that the EU has confirmed Chinese attempts at public disinformation in the West over SarsCoV2
None of those is intelligence agency sourced but add them up and the you'd be asking what the fuck were the Chinese at and why.
I will say this though, Western agencies try very hard to keep an eye on anything and anywhere that may be involved in dual-purpose activity. Its doubtful they'd not try to monitor the Wuhan facility and its doubtful they don't have some picture even if fragmented.
The reports of concern about (one of) the Wuhan sites’ biosecurity included requests from the Chinese for help in improving it. The details are unclear, as the US hasn’t published those cables,
One of the problems is that we’re nearly four years into a US administration almost as mendacious as the Chinese.
I'd be interesting in understanding more about that Chinese request for help. Do you have a pointer to that published anywhere?
It was in a WaPo story, not exactly slanted towards the Chinese:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ ... The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous. As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003....
Their slant doesn't concern me its the start point to understand more and find additional sources about the issues with the bio security.
I get that. My point was that given the tenor of the story, that detail was perhaps unlikely to be fabricated.
Spoke to a university friend who lives in Brooklyn last night and he said the sirens were certainly much less regular than they were a few weeks ago
It does seem that NYC and the wider tri-state area are probably past the peak of this wave, but the decline is low and slow. I don’t think we’ll be reopening this month although upstate may.
It’s all the places around the country with half-hearted lockdowns or which are even lifting their restrictions where the brown stuff is really going to hit the fan, and soon.
This is a view that I have held for a long tme but which still seems to be aired very little.
NY and Jersey seem to be past the worst, but control procedures around the country are so different and often haphazard that other States must surely pick up where NY and NJ are leaving off.
You wonder if the USA will ever be free of the bug, short of some miracle cure.
And btw, shouldn't we be stopping incoming flights from the States now?
Spoke to a university friend who lives in Brooklyn last night and he said the sirens were certainly much less regular than they were a few weeks ago
It does seem that NYC and the wider tri-state area are probably past the peak of this wave, but the decline is low and slow. I don’t think we’ll be reopening this month although upstate may.
It’s all the places around the country with half-hearted lockdowns or which are even lifting their restrictions where the brown stuff is really going to hit the fan, and soon.
This is a view that I have held for a long tme but which still seems to be aired very little.
NY and Jersey seem to be past the worst, but control procedures around the country are so different and often haphazard that other States must surely pick up where NY and NJ are leaving off.
You wonder if the USA will ever be free of the bug, short of some miracle cure.
And btw, shouldn't we be stopping incoming flights from the States now?
They'll be free of it quicker than most if they let it run wild. Might have some other consequences though...
I haven't moved from my computer since lockdown started and I've lost 100 pounds on online poker.
I've been considered getting back into online poker. There must be a surge of fish rushing to the tables to relieve lockdown boredom.
I wonder of there are PL Omaha HiLo games these days.
This works both ways: some of the people coming back in aren't fish. But I think you're probably right that the overall quality level has dropped.
SkyBet used to have PL Omaha HiLo tables, although I don't think they were ever as popular as HoldEm, and I haven't been round that way in a while.
The joy og the PLOHL tables back in the day was the idiots who thought they could play not only could they play Oamaha HL but that they understood how PL worked.
Playing PLOHL with good players would be a sure fire route to misery. Only playing Limit Omaha HL would be worse
I may have misled you; I have no idea what any of that means; I just remember that SkyBet had the thing you said. Omaha scares the living daylights out of me so I stick to HoldEm.
I would warn off people playing off a number of types of online games these days for any serious money (even if you were decent back in the day). And I would be very careful which sites. Outside out PokerStars and Party Poker, most just don't have the resources to battle the widespread abuse of TOC and cheating.
Any sort of short stack game like HU SnGs or Spin n Goes are an absolute no-no. These are totally dominated by cartels from top to bottom, many of whom have been caught using real time assistance software, which provides Game Theory Optimal (GTO) solutions. Even those not cheating provide extremely detailed information in regards to GTO strategies.
NL / PLO cash games, again I wouldn't. Same problem, but to a lesser extent with real time assistant software. But, coaching for profit stables have become widespread, who again disseminate high quality GTO information.
Due to much lower cost of living in places like Eastern Europe, you even get this even at very low levels like 50NL for NL cash games.
I would just stick to large field MTTs...the level of improvement is much lower, but even then be aware that big stables exist, and plenty of suggestion of ghosting / coaching if a horse makes it deep.
Stars are pretty good as I had my account frozen, not because I was cheating but while playing the early stages of a tournament was doing some testing on a piece of software I was writing. Merely an analyser for the hand logs you can get and they picked it up even though it doesn't give real time info. Let them see the code and they unfroze my account
I lost a lot of money playing on-line backgammon. Given my skill level, I should only have lost a bit and I couldn't figure out why my results were so bad. Eventually I figured the table wasn't straight. The Random Number Generator [RGN] did not appear to be entirely random. I have my own ideas as to how it was fixed, but didn't hang around to prove it. Haven't touched the game in years and wouldn't touch on-line gaming for money with a barge pole now.
I am extremely sure the RNG on the big poker sites is on the up and up, and even today you can still make a good living at it.
The warning I was putting out that if you aren't already in the right circles, just trying to come back to the game now after a number of years out of the scene, you are going to get steam rollered in many game types.
How would you know?
I made enquiries about the auditing of the RNG and got no satisfaction. The random numbers were produced by an Australian company and audited by another. For all I know the two companies were connected. It was impossible to find out anothing of worth about them.
My enquiries into the method of auditing drew a complete blank. The site owners were either ignorant, or deliberately stonewalling.
What for Pokerstars?....their RNG has been tested and accredited by a company called Gaming Labs International.
Gaming Labs are an absolute massive worldwide operation that accredits all the big gaming outlets, physical and online. Most gambling regulatory organizations state that for a gaming product to be passed for use, it must pass their certification. It is basically the gold standard.
See my answer to RobD. The integrity of the RNG only takes you so far. You MUST test the live data - i.e. real games that have actually been played. I don't know that anybody does this. The Backgammon boys certainly did not.
Pokerstars absolutely does....
I have huge criticisms about them as a company now, but on game integrity they are world leaders in security and technology.
Also, I have also personally worked with datasets of "live" data from their site that contained 100s millions of hands.
And due to a scandal on another poker site, where the operator had a "god" mode and got involved in the games, lots of very smart people have repeated looked at Stars data and never found anything that implicates the Stars as an operator.
I'll take your word for it. Please take my that the Backgammon tables stank, so badly that I packed in.
This was at least five years ago so things may have changed but let me give you a couple of examples that I will always remember. I was bearing off with an 80 point lead. My opponent threw six consecutive high doubles to beat me home. The odds against one high double (double 4,5, or 6) is 11/1 against. So the odds against doing is six times in a row? Astronomic. The kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime even if you play regularly. Next day the same thing happened, although this time I was the beneficiary. (Ironically my opponent accused me of cheating.)
On another occasion, my opponent and I both remarked on the frequency with which doubles were coming up. This culminated in one game in which over half the throws were doubles (memorably I threw 20 double 5s.) We were laughing about it. But would you play for money on a table where this happens?
One other piece of weirdness I recall concerns escaping from the bar. You can engineer it so that your opponent has to throw a 1 and a 6 to get a piece out. I've seen this rolled repeatedy at odds of 35/1 against to spring succession of pieces off the bar, but only in intenet play. If it happened in a casino, there would be a riot.
Around 3 million to 1 against !
I thought it was about 1.4 million but I'm not enough of a maths man to argue. Common sense tells you though that you shouldn't see it twice in two days!
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
No, you need to use the 12.0 form of the odds and multiply through - or you'd get Even money streaks being certainties.
How do you get it so 1-1 and 6-6 don't work though ?
That'd make it a 8-1 shot, much more likely.
Now I understand.
Not sure what your query is though. Do you know the rule of Backgammon? Hard to explain otherwise.
Yes I play it, just trying to work out how 1-1 and 6-6 won't work for getting off the bar if 1-6 does
Got it.
1-1 gets two pieces off the bar, but in this kind of situation the next step of the escape (throwing 6s) is likely to be closed out quickly. Or you may have more pieces on the bar so having made the 1 point (with a double 1) you then need to throw more 1s and then when the bar is clear, you must start throwing 6s (assuming the exit isn't now completely blocked.)
Obviously the losing player here is in very deep shit. What was remarkable was how often the game swung round with a suspiciously large number of well-timed 1s and 6s.
It really put me off playing any kind of internet games apart from chess. Probably a good thing.
She is distressed because stories from the Internet and major media have repeated a tenuous suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally leaked from her lab—despite the fact that its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied.
Perhaps it was in one of the bats waiting to be studied?
Spoke to a university friend who lives in Brooklyn last night and he said the sirens were certainly much less regular than they were a few weeks ago
It does seem that NYC and the wider tri-state area are probably past the peak of this wave, but the decline is low and slow. I don’t think we’ll be reopening this month although upstate may.
It’s all the places around the country with half-hearted lockdowns or which are even lifting their restrictions where the brown stuff is really going to hit the fan, and soon.
This is a view that I have held for a long tme but which still seems to be aired very little.
NY and Jersey seem to be past the worst, but control procedures around the country are so different and often haphazard that other States must surely pick up where NY and NJ are leaving off.
You wonder if the USA will ever be free of the bug, short of some miracle cure.
And btw, shouldn't we be stopping incoming flights from the States now?
They'll be free of it quicker than most if they let it run wild. Might have some other consequences though...
Canada has done a good containment job so far which has included a closure of the border with the US. Some leakage is nevertheless to be expected, and if the USA lets it run wild, the Canucks are not going to be best pleased.
This as this origin of the virus story is going to gather some wind behind it. The US government is becoming more strident that it came from a lab but some things to note:
1. I've seen a report from the US that there is reasonable concurrence amongst the 17 US intelligence agencies that its origin was in a lab. In reality there are a handful of agencies that actually would have any on the spot focus on such matters in terms of intelligence take and analysis; CIA, NSA, NRO, NGA & DIA The rest probably do not count because they are probably not involved in the original raw take or analysis of it.
2. For clarity, the Wuhan facility were mixing viral components together, its no secret and never hidden. That in itself is not necessarily a smoking gun but if its mentioned as a claim to suggest something sinister, its not a revelation. Maybe it is sinister work, maybe it isn't.
3. Its viable, probable even, China lied its arse off about Sars CoV 2 in particular around its knowledge of it, the timelines and potentially information around its nature,severity and casualty rate, especially early on in proceedings. The follow up weird and wonderful disinformation is deflection but for what purpose. Plain embarrassment or something more calculated and worrisome?
4. As yet no one with any authority claims it was a deliberately engineered release and as yet no one has quite yer stepped up to say it was created 100% artificially even if done in the course of medical research.
5. The process of ramp up of claims & pressure from the US (and perhaps more notably from Australian officials who are very aware of China upstream) is only likely to be calibrated such for three reasons:
a). They are pushing from a position of considerable knowledge and are progressively going to embarrass China and eventually release take.
b). They are pushing from a position of considerable knowledge but are possibly reluctant to reveal the take (which they may have to)
c). They have plenty of fragments but cant quite put it together so are stirring the pot.
I'd refer to any decent story sourcing that refers to the Aussies with due attention. Their investment in monitoring China is as proportionally sizeable as anyone.
The above doesn't refer to political side of this. Its pretty clear how the current administration could and will use the situation but it shouldn't take away from the questions about exactly how China handled the whole situation.
Wow.
I've historically trusted @Yokes on things, but my friends in this field at Cambridge, and @TimT , are adamant that this does not look anything like an engineered virus.
Few posters have a stronger track record but note that he is not saying what he thinks has happened. He is merely indicating how he thinks it is likely to play out on the public stage. In that sense, I am sure he is very likely to be right.
It seems unlikely that the Wuhan lab would do anything so detrimental to China's interest as deliberately releasing the virus into the local population. Virologists seem certain that Covid-19 has the characteristics of a naturally occurring virus originating in bats. The Wuhan was doing normal virological research into these viruses.
Accidental release of the virus into the neighbourhoood is plausible given the proximity of the lab to the origin of the outbreak, but there doesn't appear to be any evidence for this.
And there is no suggestion in the above that there is strong evidence of either.
Yeah but if the baseline is that a naturally occurring virus being studied at the lab might have been released accidentally but probably wasn't, that may say more about the sources you quote and their "position of considerable knowledge" than the practices of the lab and those of Chinese authorities.
Remember this is not a case of showing your hand, its not how it works. We don't know what raw information Western agencies have or how they have interpreted it and its unlikely to come out unless they can protect sourcing and methodology. If they can, then they will release it but how do you show say intercepts of logs of a computer for example. That's your source blown. How do you show intercepts of telephone conversations and so on.
What I'm trying to do is suggest how this may go forward, because its likely to become a bigger story and source of conflict.
Equally it doesn't take top secret intelligence to suggest that there was suppression at work. Not even the Chinese appeared to deny that they muzzled a doctor, who later died, that wanted greater attention to & warning of the severity of the situation. Also there are suggestions based on local reports that the death toll in Wuhan and wider Hubei was way way larger than the authorities stated. There are reports, on record, of concerns over the Wuhan site's bio security before this thing ever kicked off. There are stories that the EU has confirmed Chinese attempts at public disinformation in the West over SarsCoV2
None of those is intelligence agency sourced but add them up and the you'd be asking what the fuck were the Chinese at and why.
I will say this though, Western agencies try very hard to keep an eye on anything and anywhere that may be involved in dual-purpose activity. Its doubtful they'd not try to monitor the Wuhan facility and its doubtful they don't have some picture even if fragmented.
The reports of concern about (one of) the Wuhan sites’ biosecurity included requests from the Chinese for help in improving it. The details are unclear, as the US hasn’t published those cables,
One of the problems is that we’re nearly four years into a US administration almost as mendacious as the Chinese.
I'd be interesting in understanding more about that Chinese request for help. Do you have a pointer to that published anywhere?
It was in a WaPo story, not exactly slanted towards the Chinese:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ ... The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous. As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003....
Their slant doesn't concern me its the start point to understand more and find additional sources about the issues with the bio security.
I get that. My point was that given the tenor of the story, that detail was perhaps unlikely to be fabricated.
The concerns over Wuhan indeed Chinese labs in general working with notable pathogens appeared to have been well before the US government, who helped fund parts of the lab operations, sent their people over in 2018.
There was concern over how Wuhan got through the accreditation process and that the Chinese labs working with the pathogens didn't have good history (some notable blunders handling SARS samples) . That wasn't governments though that was voices within the scientific community. In short it was a reputation that the labs were slack.
It seems unlikely that the Wuhan lab would do anything so detrimental to China's interest as deliberately releasing the virus into the local population. Virologists seem certain that Covid-19 has the characteristics of a naturally occurring virus originating in bats. The Wuhan was doing normal virological research into these viruses.
Accidental release of the virus into the neighbourhoood is plausible given the proximity of the lab to the origin of the outbreak, but there doesn't appear to be any evidence for this.
And there is no suggestion in the above that there is strong evidence of either.
Yeah but if the baseline is that a naturally occurring virus being studied at the lab might have been released accidentally but probably wasn't, that may say more about the sources you quote and their "position of considerable knowledge" than the practices of the lab and those of Chinese authorities.
Remember this is not a case of showing your hand, its not how it works. We don't know what raw information Western agencies have or how they have interpreted it and its unlikely to come out unless they can protect sourcing and methodology. If they can, then they will release it but how do you show say intercepts of logs of a computer for example. That's your source blown. How do you show intercepts of telephone conversations and so on.
What I'm trying to do is suggest how this may go forward, because its likely to become a bigger story and source of conflict.
Equally it doesn't take top secret intelligence to suggest that there was suppression at work. Not even the Chinese appeared to deny that they muzzled a doctor, who later died, that wanted greater attention to & warning of the severity of the situation. Also there are suggestions based on local reports that the death toll in Wuhan and wider Hubei was way way larger than the authorities stated. There are reports, on record, of concerns over the Wuhan site's bio security before this thing ever kicked off. There are stories that the EU has confirmed Chinese attempts at public disinformation in the West over SarsCoV2
None of those is intelligence agency sourced but add them up and the you'd be asking what the fuck were the Chinese at and why.
I will say this though, Western agencies try very hard to keep an eye on anything and anywhere that may be involved in dual-purpose activity. Its doubtful they'd not try to monitor the Wuhan facility and its doubtful they don't have some picture even if fragmented.
The reports of concern about (one of) the Wuhan sites’ biosecurity included requests from the Chinese for help in improving it. The details are unclear, as the US hasn’t published those cables,
One of the problems is that we’re nearly four years into a US administration almost as mendacious as the Chinese.
I'd be interesting in understanding more about that Chinese request for help. Do you have a pointer to that published anywhere?
It was in a WaPo story, not exactly slanted towards the Chinese:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ ... The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous. As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003....
Their slant doesn't concern me its the start point to understand more and find additional sources about the issues with the bio security.
I get that. My point was that given the tenor of the story, that detail was perhaps unlikely to be fabricated.
The concerns over Wuhan indeed Chinese labs in general working with notable pathogens appeared to have been well before the US government, who helped fund parts of the lab operations, sent their people over in 2018.
There was concern over how Wuhan got through the accreditation process and that the Chinese labs working with the pathogens didn't have good history (some notable blunders handling SARS samples) . That wasn't governments though that was voices within the scientific community. In short it was a reputation that the labs were slack.
True. But this appears to have been a worldwide problem dating back to the first SARS outbreak. And note that, unlike others deadly pathogens such as smallpox, SARS, and as late as March this year, SARS CoV-2, were permitted to be handled in much lower biosecurity level labs than the one at Wuhan - BSL2 rather than BSL4.
BORIS Johnson has told how he leapt on to his hospital bed wearing only his boxer shorts just two hours after leaving intensive care — to “clap like crazy” for the NHS.
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In my family, that usually only happens with Risk.
But that is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about in respect of Backgammon, where fairly serious amounts were being wagered. It was generally impossible to calculate precise odds, but repeatedly what you saw happening just didn't pass the smell test.
All over in slightly more than an hour.
It's a running joke in my family that the answer to the question "what are the odds of..." is always "100%". Because if it hadn't already happened, you wouldn't be asking about it.
Correction: isn't it 1,771,561/1 ?
How do you get it so 1-1 and 6-6 don't work though ?
That'd make it a 8-1 shot, much more likely.
As I said, the smell test....didn't pass.
Not sure what your query is though. Do you know the rule of Backgammon? Hard to explain otherwise.
Repeat 6 times, and it's one chance in 12^6, rather than 1 chance in (12-1)^6.
If it was coin flips (which are evens, or 1/1) then 6 in a row would be 1 in 2^6, not 1 in 1^6 (which is the same as a 50% chance!).
But I'm not inclined to pay much attention to what Mr Trump says about it, and I suspect I'm not alone. Which is a pity, as for all their controversial sides the Americans were generally seen as powerful, intelligent allies who needed to be listened to; now their President and his immediate associates are just seen as unpredictable nutters to be kept in check. When the time comes to look back on the Trump presidency, that change might be one of the most damaging effects at a critical time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/
... The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.
As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003....
Bit of a puff piece, but interesting nonetheless.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
NY and Jersey seem to be past the worst, but control procedures around the country are so different and often haphazard that other States must surely pick up where NY and NJ are leaving off.
You wonder if the USA will ever be free of the bug, short of some miracle cure.
And btw, shouldn't we be stopping incoming flights from the States now?
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/China-knew-of-lab-safety-concerns-from-last-year
1-1 gets two pieces off the bar, but in this kind of situation the next step of the escape (throwing 6s) is likely to be closed out quickly. Or you may have more pieces on the bar so having made the 1 point (with a double 1) you then need to throw more 1s and then when the bar is clear, you must start throwing 6s (assuming the exit isn't now completely blocked.)
Obviously the losing player here is in very deep shit. What was remarkable was how often the game swung round with a suspiciously large number of well-timed 1s and 6s.
It really put me off playing any kind of internet games apart from chess. Probably a good thing.
She is distressed because stories from the Internet and major media have repeated a tenuous suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally leaked from her lab—despite the fact that its genetic sequence does not match any her lab had previously studied.
Perhaps it was in one of the bats waiting to be studied?
There was concern over how Wuhan got through the accreditation process and that the Chinese labs working with the pathogens didn't have good history (some notable blunders handling SARS samples) . That wasn't governments though that was voices within the scientific community. In short it was a reputation that the labs were slack.
But this appears to have been a worldwide problem dating back to the first SARS outbreak. And note that, unlike others deadly pathogens such as smallpox, SARS, and as late as March this year, SARS CoV-2, were permitted to be handled in much lower biosecurity level labs than the one at Wuhan - BSL2 rather than BSL4.
Laboratory safety aspects of SARS at Biosafety Level 2.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15098644
Laboratory Biosafety Recommendations for SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19
https://www.labconco.com/articles/laboratory-biosafety-recommendations-for-sars-co