Newmark's Door

A lot of truth here

"How to Tell You're an Aging Gamer".

Casino tales

"Casino insider tells (almost) all about security".

Even if you are cheating, and they know you're cheating, they might leave you alone if you're not that good at cheating. Take card counting: While counting cards in one's head is not illegal, a good card-counter in blackjack gains a statistical advantage over the house, and if the casino decides the counter is making too much money, he or she will be escorted off the premises.

But card counters have to be really good: One mistake an hour could swing the advantage back to the house. And casinos don't mind that. "If you're not perfect at card counting, you can still lose money," Jonas said. "They'll watch you count cards and if you make any mistake they'll just let you play."   

"Industrial policy" redux?

James Pethokoukis observes that Hillary Clinton sounds like she wants to implement "industrial policy".

Sigh.

My suggestion: conservatives should chip in to buy Ms. Clinton and her political allies each a copy of the newest expansion pack of Civilization. It's fabulous. It would keep them busy for months at a time. And they would get what they have always wanted: a chance to run the world. And we would get what we have always wanted: that they would leave our economy alone.

Pareto improving. Win, win. What more can you ask for?

A question about the economics in computer games

A good question: "Why do economic models in computer games always suck?"

Quite likely a good answer: " . . . a game its supposed to be fun to play, not work. If the economy were realistic casual gamers would all be peasants. Nobody wants to be a peasant: people want to be rich and famous and powerful heroes. In order to make it fun for everyone, including the stupid people, the game designers have to make the game easy to play."

"Most Photogenic [Chess] Players". If you know what they mean by "photogenic" and I think you do.

A cautionary tale about a young man who thought there was easy money to be made speculating on Sony Playstation 3s.

Record Scrabble game

Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a sanctioned Scrabble game, including a single play of 365 points.

The return of "Just one more turn": Civ IV is out.

If you, like me, happen to have dropped a lot of quarters in pinball machines in the mid 70s, and you would like a few minutes of nostalgia, you can reproduce how it felt to play those machines on your PC using a program called Visual Pinball. See here for additional details and links to the program and pinball tables.

Bruce Pandolfini advises a teenager on how to study chess.

Quite possibly more than you'd ever want to know about probabilities in Monopoly, the game.

Top ten poker tells.

Interesting article on EverQuest, including brief discussion of economist Edward Castronova's work on it.

Supreme Ruler 2010, a PC game due out soon, sounds pretty good:

You can focus on top-level decisions, or move in surgically when needed. And, boy, is there some laser-like precision available. Let's take taxation, for example. Instead of merely moving a single slider like in Sim City, you're given no less than eight parameters. There's sales tax, income tax, corporate tax, property tax, pension tax, and more. In this panel alone, you can model an economy based on purist liberal or conservative politics. Want to a socialist, a free-market capitalist, or something else? You might not be able to go wild, but here you can try to create the kind of economy you've always wanted.

Even if you can't get rid of income tax in real life, you can wipe it from the board here in an act of benevolence, or crank it to a brutal extreme if you're feeling like squeezing the people. Even further, you can set income tax for three different brackets. It's like a stress reliever for economists.

How to solve Rubik's Cube really fast.

The "ultimate gaming community": uBetWHAT.

Great time-waster: Plastic Balls (requires Flash).

Now recognized as the #1 Stratego site on the Internet!

NC State professor calculates the correct odds of winning a battle in Risk.

Game theory helps poker players. (NY Times, registration required.)

Computer plays poker and is set to kick humans' butts.

If you happen to bump into Garrett Epps, why don't you whisper to him, "It's only a game!"