How not to Give a Gift

I fancy myself a pretty good gift giver. I look forward to picking out gifts and I think people are usually pretty satisfied with what I give them. But I've noticed that for many gift giving is a source of anxiety, even dread.

It's easier to say what a good gift is not than what it is. With that in mind, here are three common pitfalls.

1. The overly generic gift

I'm talking here about gifts for people you're actually close to, so if it's for a random co-worker or something, sure, get them the Barnes and Noble gift certificate, who cares. But gifts should be seen as an opportunity to demonstrate how well you know someone. Grandparent exemption: if you've already made peace with the fact that you can never understand your grandkids with their videogames and Pokemon, cash is an acceptable backup plan.

2. The gift that is actually for you (the giver, not the giftee)
As usual, The Simpsons provides the classic example. Homer gives Marge a bowling ball already engraved with his name (she's never bowled). That's an obvious example, but it's possible to fall into the same trap in subtler ways, say by getting something associated with a shared activity that you actually enjoy a lot more than the giftee.

3. The gift designed to impose change
The gym membership for someone fat, the kite for someone who spends all their time indoors, the knife for an axe murderer. These are the opposite of gifts. A true gift says, "I appreciate and love you for who you are." These kind of gifts say, "Who you are is unacceptable to me, so I must change you." Yet it's a fine line that separates these non-gifts from the very best gifts. The best gifts are things they would not get for themselves -- things they didn't know they'd love, but would, or things they secretly want, but would never actually buy. The best gifts stretch, but do not change.

Excessive Free Time Death Spiral

Day 1: Brainstorming options. Many notebook pages filled.

Day 2-4: Spending a lot of time in Starbucks. Podcast consumption multiplied threefold.

Day 5+: 24/7 Magic: The Gathering Online

The End

Friday afternoon - I sipped my coffee, donned my Snuggie, and settled in for my second session of the day. When I tried to sit in at a table, the client informed me that cash games were not available in my area. Thinking it was a glitch, I tried again, but got the same message. I did a few Google searches to figure out what was going on. In the early afternoon only one of the major news services had an article up, but it told me everything I needed to know. Earlier in the days the Feds released a list of charges and rounded up executives from the major US poker sites. Put simply, online poker was over.

Since laws were passed in 2006 restricting the legality of online gambling, the major online sites have maintained an uneasy status quo with law enforcement, working around the laws in ways the government now alleges were illegal. For its part the government chased the money and sometimes shut down third party payment processors, but didn't take sweeping action against the poker sites, until now.

Now there's no going back. There will be a contentious legal battle -- both sides have substantial resources, and neither will feel they can afford to lose. However it turns out, it's hard to imagine the sites ever operating in the US again. If online poker ever returns (which seems likely, given the demand and the incentive to tax it) it will be on different sites, and probably years down the road.

Casual online players have to find a new hobby. Professionals need to turn their lives upside down. In order to keep playing, it will probably be necessary to move out of the country -- not a simple thing to do. There's also the option of switching to brick and mortar casinos, but that involves a big pay cut and lifestyle change. And then, of course, there's getting a real job.

I have mixed feelings. I've been feeling the grind the last few months, so being forced to explore opportunities outside of poker isn't entirely unwelcome. Then again, there's nothing I can do in the short term that will come anywhere close to my hourly wage playing poker.

Anybody hiring?

Bratwurst 3 ways

1. Put bratwurst on grill. Cook until gas runs out, about one and a half minutes.

2. Move bratwurst to oven. Set broiler to highest setting and cook until bored and hungry.

3. Bite into bratwurst and note raw center. Brush off mustard (optional) and put in microwave. Cook until shriveled and dry.

The Forest or the Streets: Either Way You're in Trouble

"You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2 + 2 = 5 and the path leading out is only wide enough for one."
-Mikhail Tal, World Chess Champion 1960-1961

Chess books say his nickname was "The Magician from Riga," but he was also called "The Claw" because he had only three fingers on his right hand. To call them fingers is misleading: there was the thumb and then two hooks forked like a lobster's tail. He used this alien appendage to play speed chess, smoke a cigarette, and gesticulate all at once.

Tal favored a wild, attacking style, often sacrificing multiple pieces for an attack. Sometimes his moves were shown to be unsound after the fact, but that was scant consolation to opponents who had already been blasted off the board. The Dutch Grandmaster J.H. Donner said he could feel waves of aggression emanating from Tal when they played.

He held the world championship for only a year. After being blindsided by Tal's aggression in their first match, Mikhail Botvinnik, an electrical engineer known for his scientific approach to the game, dissected Tal's style and formed a game plan for the return match. He steered the games into more staid positions and won comfortably. Tal would never regain the championship, but he was no flash in the pan: he remained one of the game's top players for decades.

If there are two fields best known to outsiders as the realm of cold logic, they are chess and computer science. But if anything the rise of strong chess-playing computer programs has upset players' notions of what makes sense on the board. The rules of strategy have been replaced by the simple mandate of Whatever Works. (When in a post-game analysis session an opponent suggested a better defensive move and asked, "But what is your reply to this?" Tal responded, "Who won?") In fact unexpected, seemingly nonsensical moves are now referred to as "computer moves," whether played by silicon or flesh.

The point is not to play moves entirely at random - that wouldn't work. Rather, sometimes the best move is the one that is most useful in this exact position, not the one that conforms to the usual strategic precepts. Computers taught us that some moves and strategies we believed to be logical were merely facile and pretty.

While his uncompromising aggression made Tal an exception in the chess world, such a strategy is the stock in trade of many of the best poker players. In a post on the poker forum 2 + 2, heads-up specialist MagicNinja described a hyper-aggressive strategy as Street Poker:

"Street Poker is all about game flow dynamics. It's impossible to analyse the amount of future winnings you can make after you bluff someone in a spot they would call 80% of the time, or when you call them in a spot you're only good 15% of the time when they shove pot. I'm not supporting these plays, i'm just saying that when you analyse them on a case by case basis, they are bad; i know they're bad; but it is impossible to really quantify their true effects against players who play in many different ways."

The hyper-aggressive approach seems to be all about swashbuckling flair, but its real value lies in an underlying pragmatism. You force your opponent into unfamiliar territory. If you have to make a mistake to get there, that's okay because the mistakes he'll make more than compensate. But only if on the Street (or in the Forest, or whatever) you know what you're doing.

Marshawn Lynch is a video game

Marshawn Lynch's run from the first round of the playoffs reminded me of Christian Okoye in Tecmo Superbowl. Each player in the game had a set of statistics, one of which determined how hard he was to tackle. Okoye's was off the charts. Against the anemic Colts defense, so long as you avoided diving tackles, he was actually invincible:

Gil Thorp

As you know, Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez was fired yesterday. Of all the negative newspaper pieces written about Rodriguez over the past few years, this one is not particularly remarkable, except for the fact that its author, Neil Rubin, also writes the comic strip Gil Thorp, which turns out to be very remarkable indeed in its own strange way.

The overall experience of reading Gil Thorp is something like tripping acid in the College Football Hall of Fame. Despite being created "for and about teenagers," the characters do not look or speak like teenagers. The strip mixes references to current TV shows like "Glee" and "Project Runway" with anachronistic elements like milkshake parlors. The artistic rendering of many characters changes drastically not just from year to year, but sometimes week to week. The current villain, improbably named Lini Verde, appears to be popular, gay, and a nerd -- a combination rare in life but rarer still in fiction. The eponymous Gil Thorp helms not only the basketball team, but also the baseball and football squads, so he can be forgiven for not grasping the nuances of each sport. Indeed, Thorp's coaching, at least what we see of it, consists mostly of flinging cliches at his players.

This last point is particularly interesting. A lot of sportswriting is, of course, overrun with cliches, but I always imagined that most sportswriters knew the score: while facile analysis may sell papers (although even that is now very much in doubt), to actually succeed as a coach requires expertise extending well beyond common knowledge. This does not seem to be the view of Mr. Rubin. In his imagined world, Coach Thorp instructs his players with the exact same cliches that the sportswriter deploys in his columns.

Mr. Rubin begins his critique of Rodriguez with a prediction that Michigan will win its bowl game (in the event they were blown out) and piles on with a string of lies, half-truths, and pure gibberish. It wouldn't be worth it to debunk the column paragraph by paragraph, but a simple Google search is enough to overturn nearly every assertion in it.

Maybe in the world of sportswriting there simply is no difference between cliche and truth: if people say something enough it is true, and if something is true it is often said.