The check raise is a very powerful move in poker. It signals to your opponents that you have a very strong hand and they would be well advised to fold theirs. Not surprisingly, it is also a move favored by bluffers.If one were able to accurately distinguish between the two- strong hand vs. bluff- when confronted with a check raise, that’s money at the poker table. Recently I was confronted with two check raise situations, in both of which I ended up making the wrong decision. Here are some lessons learned:

Check raise on the turn = the nuts or pure bluff

Decent players never check raise a strong but vulnerable hand on the turn. It is way too risky to let someone draw to a straight, flush, or whatever for free- one should always bet the turn to defend their hand. Unless you have the nuts of course, and don’t need to worry about anyone catching up. Therefore, the only hand that legitimately check raises on the turn is the absolute nuts.Now, if you had the nuts and decided to check raise the turn, how much would you raise? Since you have the nuts, you want your opponent to call, not fold. Most likely you would double, at most triple their bet. Any raise larger than that makes no sense.

A giant check raise on the turn is most likely a bluff. If confronted with a small check raise, you are facing a monster.

Check raise on the river = monster

There is virtually no reason to check raise on the river. A strong hand would bet out for value. A medium strength hand would check call. A weak hand folds. A bluffer would bet out first, representing a strong hand, rather than check raise. The only time anyone check raises the river is if they are certain that 1) you are going to bet, and 2) they have you beat.

I’ve been browsing the OpenSocial API docs just released at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/. Here are some initial thoughts and observations.

* The friend model is simple and, as far as I can tell, non-extensible. Basically each person has a list of friends that can be retrieved via the API. There is no way to express different types of friend relationships (e.g., friend vs. acquaintaince). Also, for apps/sites that distinguish “friend” from “follower” (e.g., Twitter, LiveJournal), one needs to be able to distinguish between mutual friendships and one-way friendships. From what I’ve read so far, OpenSocial doesn’t handle this at all.

* There’s a typo on the front page – “and/or access from othter websites” With all the attention this is getting, didn’t anyone bother to proofread the docs?

* The persistence API seems incomplete- for example, there’s no access control. Can an object be marked as accessible to friends only? Nope.

* The activities API is the news feed. You can query all the activities generated by a given app, or all the activities for a user, but you can’t get the activity feed for a user’s friends. Of course, one can query for the user’s friends and then pull each friend’s activities individually, but then 1) that’s a lot of queries, and 2) the activities need to be interleaved by the client.

Overall I get the impression that the API was rushed out the door, and not designed by anyone who has thought broadly about social apps. I am curious how portable the data model will be to sites other than Orkut (again, it can’t even capture the basic “mutual friend” vs. “follower” distinction). It’s a decent start, but there are a lot of missing pieces to be filled.

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Tags: opensocialfacebook

Whoa, I can post directly to my blog(s) from Flock. Crazy.

I’ve got both a wordpress and a blogger blog! Now if I only had one on TypePad…

Maybe with readr, I will try to start blogging now..

I must say that the wordpress.com interface is pretty wonky. That just goes to show how much opportunity for improvement still exists

wordpress.com is alright, but it could definitely be *much* better. The UI is a bit wonky- why are themes under the “presentation” tab? Also I can’t for the life of me figure out how to add arbitrary content to the side panel.

i just saw matt at ritual.

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