March, 27, 2009playing full tilt poker

This time of year when the weather is changing and we're all dying to get outside and away from the stuffy classrooms it can be difficult for us to stay focused on things that are important. Similarly if you have to work while you are in college then you have even more time spent thinking about the great weather to come and wishing that you could be out there with the blue skies and breezes blowing through the trees. I am definitely one of those people at this point. My current schedule is loaded with economics and math and so I am sitting inside doing calculations with a professor staring down at me and all I want to do is go for a hike every single day. Alas, this is not possible.

Though I do feel this urge to get myself out there it is not to say that I am not voluntarily tied to the educational and digital aspects of my life. I just finished setting up an independent contract for myself for this summer in which I will get credit for spending about two hours a day online playing poker. I know it sounds crazy but that's the beauty of having your own ideas about education. What I will be doing is for my statistics class and it will be a study surrounding the play of online poker. I have always been a big poker fan and thus I have been naturally drawn to number and the study of cost and risk analysis. I have set up an account on a site called full tilt poker. In the full tilt game rooms I will be looking at the game play of opponents and the types of decisions players make based upon my own moves. It is something that has been studied a lot by many very intelligent people in the past, but I am being allowed to do the study in exchange for some basic level class credit. It won't be a hugely professional project at the end but there is a possibility I could use it to do my research in some other class later on so Hopefully it all works out. I'm just excited to be able to sit in the park, play poker, and get credit for it all at the same time.