Bryan Dahmes

NCAA tourney

The NCAA tourney's been a lot of fun this year.  Sure, I was upset that I didn't manage to draft Minnesota, but I was able to console myself with the points that I got from Iowa State.  Basically, in an attempt to make the game more 'skillful', each first round game victory is worth 3 points.  Second round games are 4 points, and so on up to the championship game, which is worth 8 points.  This means that the eventual champion is worth a whopping 33 points, but since the early games have so many points available, 'strategy' in picking the right upsets can get you the win without actually picking the winner.

So, like I said earlier, being a little afraid of busting out on the 1 seeds (and honestly, how much skill does it take to put all your money on the best team?), I went and picked up one 2 seed (Oklahoma State), a couple of fours (one of which was Louisville) and a few others that netted me some early round points.  Bottom line is that I have guaranteed myself of at least 3rd place this year.  I currently have the most points (37), with one of the final four teams (like I said, Louisville).  The guy who bought Illinois (Brian H) pretty much lost everyone except the Illini pretty early, so he has to win it all to outscore me (of course, Illinois is a 1 seed, so they're expected to).  One guy (Kirby) only really had Carolina and Wisconsin, but that was enough to do a lot of damage this year, as he was the only guy with two elite eight teams.  The final team was taken by Bob, and he's got the same fear of one seeds.  I think he bought Stanford last year and learned his lesson.

So anyway, this year I am guaranteed to finish in the money.  3rd place pays $10, so I could be happy with that.  I would really like to win a little more though.  Not for the money, but instead to quietly pay back a couple of trash-talkers.  The fun thing every year isn't really winning (although that's a big plus), it's being able to ridicule the other seven guys for their choices.  If you bomb out early, you're pretty much pitied and everyone takes their time patting you on the head and feeling sorry for you.  That happened to me two years ago, and I'm still getting grief for it.  Brian's been sending out "I can't believe you're doing so well, I was feeling so sorry for you" mails to me.  Really, really want to beat him.  Kirby's the reigning champ, and he's been talking it up with wisconsin and carolina, saying he only needed two teams to beat our 8, and so on.  I've been trying to lie low for a while.  I haven't said anything (and neither has Bob).  Neither of us are big taunters, and we're each hoping that our teams can quietly trounce the big one seeds.  If that happens, I might talk a little smack...but I doubt it.

laptop

I loaned out my laptop to my office mate this week.  I was thinking that I hadn't had my laptop for too long, and he really needed something for this conference that he was going to.  I figured that I hadn't really gotten attached, so there'd be no problem.

Man, it's amazing how quickly you can get to love your little toys.  He came back today, and it was like Christmas.  I usually not much of a tech-lover, but I get attached quickly.  It took me forever to get a cell phone.  I always thought they were too...something.  But now, I take mine with me when I'll be out of the office for five minutes.  It's not that I expect a call, but still...

I think the laptop is turning into the same thing.  I used to really wonder how useful something like this could possibly be...and now I'm hooked.

I can't believe this...

I just got an IM from my brother.  There are times when I consider myself to be in shape.  My brother puts me to shame.  He's about an inch taller than me, but he outweighs me by close to seventy pounds.  Most of that extra weight is muscle, too.  So, when he was taking bodybuilding pretty seriously, he evidentally had a few pictures taken.

Well, one of those pictures has made it into a calendar.  You can see the back cover of the calendar here.  He's the guy in the lower left corner.

more cribbage

So yeah, to be fair, looking at the stats now it doesn't really look like much of a coin flip, but I have an excuse!  Two, actually.  First is, I'm modest and a little superstitious.  If I say I'm doing well, I fully expect Michael to make a 10 game comback.  And honestly, I don't want to deal with the shame.

Secondly, I think that we have the error bars wrong.  Right now we're using a binomial distribution on the winning percentage, but if we actually want to compare our results to what you would expect if we were even players, I think we'd have to change the error bars.  For example, after flipping a fair coin 43 times, you would expect about 7.6% uncertainty on a 50/50 result.  Right now we're 12.8% away from 50/50, which is only about 1.7 standard deviations.  So, while things are starting to slip away from 50/50, you would expect this sort of fluctuation around 10% of the time.  So I'm leaning on the 'safe' side and saying that right now it's a coin flip.  We'll see how things develop.

On the plus side, Michael has started keeping stats regarding wins and the first person to deal.  Those results should get posted soon.  Right now he's trying not to bias himself.  He thinks that the person who deals first is slightly more likely to lose, but he hasn't checked this thought against any numbers yet.  Strange...he's been having me deal recently...

NCAA tourney

So I'm really, really not much of a gambler.  The first year of grad school I would play $5 poker with a few friends.  Nickel ante, that sort of thing.  I would usually win one big pot pretty early, and then I would spend the rest of the night (until the money ran out) pissing off the other guys at the table.  I would never try to win, so I had the luxury of bluffing like a madman.  Since the pots were small, usually two or three people would always come along with me.  One would know he could beat me, so he would stay in.  The others would be pretty sure they could beat me, but they wouldn't know about the other guy.  Problem was, I kept driving up the pot and making things expensive for them.

With that sort of strategy, it's really hard to gamble for a very long time.  So, I don't really do it that often.  My one concession is the occasional texas hold 'em game (usually played for jelly bellies among friends...nobody wants to take each other's money), and the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Problem is, I haven't been paying any attention to basketball this year.  I was psyched to see that the Gophers made it to the dance, and I did actually see five minutes of one of their games this season on ESPN, but that's the extent of my knowledge.  So I'm pretty much free money again.

I always get in to an auction pool with seven other guys.  The buy-in's $10, and we bid (auction style) on all 64 teams.  Depending on the quality of the seeds, there's quite a spread on who goes for what.  The most expensive team (Illinois) was eventually 'sold' for $7.60 (leaving one guy $2.40 to spend on the seven other teams needed to complete his 8 team set).  I tend to try and drive up the price on the 1 seeds, and then try to sneak in and snab a few of the 2-4 seeds that people like but don't have enough money to grab.  This way, I avoid the embarrassment of paying everything for a 1 seed that busts out early (like say, Stanford recently).  I actually did place third once, and that was enough to convince me that I might be on to something...

My only regret?  Well...I ended up taking Iowa State (9) instead of my beloved alma mater, Minnesota (8).  I know, I'm a horrible person.  But I have an excuse!  I was trying to gauge interest in Iowa State, and I bid a little bit too much and got stuck with them.  Towards the end I was down to a measly 20 cents (four others had 10 cents or less at this time), and Minnesota was still on the board.  When they came up I bid all I had, but they were stolen from me for 30 cents.  If Minnesota goes on a tear, I'll never forgive myself.

cribbage

Michael (another UCSB guy, good friend of mine) taught me how to play cribbage last year.  Kind of a fun game, actually.  Usually we'll end up playing a game over lunch, or for an afternoon coffee break, or something like that.  After the first month or so of learning how to play (and getting soundly trounced a few times), I started to be able to hold my own against Michael.  Seeing the way we play, one of the UCSB postdocs wondered if there was any real strategy involved in the game.  If there was a way to consistently be better than your opponent.  Or if the game was just a toss-up.

So, being physicists, we decided to test this out.  Since January, Michael and I have been playing pretty regularly, and (geeks that we are) we started keeping score.  In graph form, no less.  I figure we've gone on for a while, so there's no real harm in posting things now and showing how we've been doing (I also didn't want to jinx myself by talking about it in the middle of a big winning streak).  If you're curious, take a look here and see how I'm doing against Michael.  Currently, it's a coin flip, right?