The move from wordpress.com is complete. It was a good way to begin but was holding me back from what I really wanted to do with the site.
I hope everyone likes the new design. There are still a few bugs (the archives button is playing up for instance) but overall it wasn’t too painful a move and I think it’s quite an improvement.
We’re now hosted by DreamHost and I’ve just found out that all their hosting is carbon neutral, a nice bonus to what seems like a great company. No complaints so far.
All that remains is to apologise again for the disruption and let you know it’s back to business as usual.
As you’ve probably realised from the disruption, we are moving to a new host. I decided to use this as an opportunity to clean up the design of the site too.
I know things here are a bit “work in progress”, so feel free to use the old site at www.smashvegas.wordpress.com until we’ve worked out the kinks.
Thanks for the patience.
Well who would have thought it would be so hard to keep a blog. It’s not that I didn’t want to keep posting just that I took a break and then kept making excuses to not start again. Tomorrow. Next week when I have a free afternoon. Etc.
I guess we’ll see if I do any better. Doubt we had any regular readers to upset (though I do seem to have a very low level of pageviews per day which is better than I imagined it would be).
I’ve played poker for a long time, but fairly recently I was doing some work with poker A.I. and it made me re-evaluate the way I played. Despite being a mathematician I had always played poker in a very “feelings” sort of way. Needless to say I was nowhere near gifted enough to wing it like that, and had never really been any good.
As I was exposed to the authorities on the subject (my obvious favourite being Sklansky with his mathematical background) I started to research voraciously on the internet. I found it pretty tough going. Lots of websites with a little content, but very few with detailed enough articles for me to continue to learn from. Most of the poker sites weren’t too concerned with gambling as a whole either, which I found a little strange as there are certainly parallels to be drawn and lessons learned between disciplines.
I thought nothing more of this until a friend asked me to write an article on playing blackjack from a mathematical perspective. I knew the rules but had never been a big blackjack player up until this point. I had subconsciously labeled it “one of those games you can’t win that only fools play”. Researching the article soon proved me wrong. This re-ignited my interest in the various gambling disciplines, but once again the internet was a tricky way to find information. Searching for articles on “card counting” is almost as dangerous as searching for porn.
It took me quite some time but I decided to make a website which would discuss as wide a variety of gambling topics possible so that it might be a “one stop shop”. I wanted a blog format so that the articles could be interactive with readers requesting or adding information as needed. The aim is for articles to be detailed enough to be useful without becoming too academic for the average reader. Once articles have reached maturity through feedback the best will be archived to pages by topic so they can form a comprehensive guide to different aspects of gambling.
I hope we achieve at least some of that…
