No Limit comes to Washington

Well, sort of.

While playing poker in casinos has been legal as long as I remember, Washington has a screwed up set of laws.  First the maximum poker bet in tribal ("Indian") casinos has been $500, but in card rooms the max was $20 when I started playing several years ago.  They upped the maximum to $40 about 3 or 4 years ago which led to a bunch of 20-40 limit games, which is actually decent stakes, and some 2-40 spread limit.  The 2-40 game was a huge improvement over the 3-6 and 4-8 limit games that dominated the area.  Not only could you bet enough to get people to fold but you had huge implied odds which made it "correct" the play a lot of speculative hands, even against raises.  This led to much more action and much more profit.  But still it wasn't even close to no limit -- the $40 max came into play in almost every raised pot.

The Washington Gaming Commission has been debating higher limits probably since the day they upped the limit to $40.  Finally a month ago they decided to allow a trial of hold 'em with a $100 max bet with the law going into affect 30 days later.  Friday the 15th was day 30 and The Hideaway was one of the places that got a 3-100 spread game going.  It's still not true no limit but in playing a few hours I only saw one hand where the $100 max came into affect.  With a $200 max buy-in, you run out of chip before you run into the cap.  Note that if someone bets $40, you can then raise to $140.  It's really hard to have a deep enough stack and big enough pot that you'd want to bet more than $100.

Anyway, I played in the inaugural game after work on Friday.  Lots of people were interested in playing or at least willing to try.  The game was really good.  I doubled my buy in over 3-4 hours and it would have been much, much better had I not lost a huge pot on a bad suck out.  But that's poker.

I expect I'll still play at Snoqualmie with the 2-5 no limit, but this game is a good alternative.

Here at Last

Finally the last day before the election. Likely tomorrow, we'll know who the next President of the United States will be. In fact, it's likely the major networks will call it officially at 8 PM Pacific when polls close in California, Washington, and Oregon giving Senator Obama 73 additional electoral votes and pushing him over the top. However, since not much West of the Mississippi is up for grabs, we'll really know three hours earlier if they can call the "close" states shortly after the polls close. Actually, at 4:30 Pacific time, Ohio and North Carolina close their polls and Florida and Virginia will have been closed for a while, and it might be over.

My prediction is Obama 53-45 nationally and winning 379-159* in the electoral college. He takes all of the Kerry states plus NM, VA, CO, OH, FL, NV, MO, NC, IN, the second district in NE, and MT or ND. I'm pretty convinced that the national polls underrepresent cell phone users and African Americans and both groups will come out strongly in support of Obama.

Best place to follow the election is HDnet or CNN on TV or fivethirtyeight.com online.

* Originally I wrote 382-162 but that's inconsistent with my breakdown as that would mean Obama would win MT and ND.

Five Thirty-Eight

This may be the most fascinating site on the Internet right now.

Nate Silver is well-known for his work with Baseball Prospectus and PECOTA and now he's build a projection system not a prediction system for elections. This should be must read for every American at least once per week.

Before the Democratic convention, 538 projected an even race with a slight edge to Obama in electoral votes, popular vote, and likelihood of winning. Now it shows a big lead for the Democrats. That said polls are a bit of a trailing indicator and there aren't any polls that fully reflect the Republican convention. The projections attempt to adjust for that however. Have to read the latest blog posts to see where Obama has been gaining.