Today’s treat is an interview with professional poker player Force O Will.  Who is Force O Will?  I’ll let you figure this one out.  Trust me, this player is the real deal.  His answers to my questions below are anything but uninformative, as he gives a lot of valuable poker information, and some of the best advice I’ve ever seen on how to become a professional poker player.  Enjoy!

Suber: Who is Force O Will?  Can you give us a little bio, including how and when you got into professional poker.

Force O Will: Well, I’ve always been competetive in different types of games like card games, board games, video/computer games, and often fantasy-based games. During college in the late 90s a friend of mine introduced me to Magic: The Gathering, a strategy card game closely related to Dungeons and Dragons.  I became involved with this game, eventually reaching higher levels of play and playing the international Pro-Tour circuit. It was during these Magic tournaments that I observed people playing Texas Hold’em for the first time - such as David Williams, Thomas Keller, Noah Boeken, Eric Froelich among others.

(more…)

Yesterday I wrote a post about the upcoming Texas Hold’em match (July 23 and 24) between Polaris, the  poker-playing computer programmed by the computer science team at University of Alberta, and two humans, Phil Laak and Ali Eslami.  The post received a question from Sparky about where the name ’Polaris’ comes from.  I couldn’t find an answer to this question by searching on the Web, so I decided to go straight to Jonathan Schaeffer and ask him for the answer.  

Professor Jonathan Schaeffer holds the Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and is the team leader of the Polaris program.  He was kind enough to give me an answer to Sparky’s question.  He writes,

There is nothing special in the name, other than it reflects that we are the “northern star” in the computer poker world.  It is a subtle hint that we are Canadian

Of course, I couldn’t help myself and just ask one question.  I explained to Professor Schaeffer that I am interested in the concept of luck as it applies to Texas Hold’em, and I asked him whether his Polaris experiment would eliminate all luck as a factor.  And if it didn’t, then in what way did he think that luck would still play a factor in the match?  Here’s his answer.  

It will eliminate most of the luck factor, but not all of it. That is why there is a rule in place for a drawn match. If one side wins by less than 25 small bets (500 hand match) then the match is declared a draw because the result is statistically insignificant.

(Thanks for your answers, Jonathan, and I look forward to seeing your silicon Bot kick some carbon butt! - Suber)

Marc Salem is considered to be one of the foremost authorities on non-verbal communication.  A few weeks ago I had a chance to speak with him by phone and ask him some questions about playing poker.

Marc is not a poker player.  In fact, he has never learned the game, because he says he has an addictive personality - not that it’s a problem - and he feels that if he were to enter a casino, he might never leave due to the adrenaline rush.  But after watching a profile of him on 60 Minutes, I thought he would be a great person to interview for PokerMoments, because of his seemingly uncanny ability to read other people’s minds, a talent that any serious poker player would die to have.  To get an idea of Marc’s skills, check out the video on his site.  I was amazed!

What follows below are some of Marc’s interesting tips to poker players about how to read peoples’ minds, especically when they are faking.  He says that ”lies leak out,” and that a person who is faking often exhibits behavior that indicates this.

(more…)