Posts Tagged ‘review’

A few months ago, I began to experience pain along the top of my right forearm. Insert your masturbation jokes here, but realize that this is the arm I use for directing my mouse, and as a professional online poker player, I was spending hours every day moving and clicking my mouse.

With a little research, I found the EVO Vertical Mouse:

As the name implies, you hold an EVO mouse with your fingers vertical, as though you were shaking someone’s hand. This eliminates the need to twist your forearm, enabling you to hold it straight in what feels like a more natural position.

There are some medical/scientific argument on Evoluent’s website for why this grip is preferable to the traditional, arm-twisting method of manipulating a mouse. I don’t nearly enough about ergonomics to evaluate those claims, but I do know that my pain went away within a week of switching to an EVO Vertical Mouse. To me, that was worth the $100 that Evoluent charges to buy directly from their website.

Specifically, I bought the EVO 3, which is the only wireless model available. I believe it has fewer buttons than the EVO 4, but it still has more than my old mouse, which is huge for getting the most out of Table Ninja. There are left, right, and middle (or top, bottom, and middle, really) buttons for your fingers plus a scroll wheel and a thumb button.  Read the complete post...

There is obvious untapped potential for poker games playable on mobile devices. Full Tilt Poker’s fast-paced Rush Poker in particular is a great fit for this format. The relative speed of the game makes one-tabling it more tolerable, and the general aesthetic of speed poker fits well with that of the on-the-go smart phone/tablet user.

While I see tremendous potential here, the current Rush Poker application, playable on Android devices, hasn’t quite got it right yet. It’s close: the graphics are clean and crisp, the interface is uncluttered, and all of the information you need is easy to find and read on a small screen. The major problem is that the bet slider is extremely difficult to control. This combined with the generally short time to act allotted in Rush Poker games and the occasional lag left me intermittently timing out and folding or settling for a bet size that was merely in the neighborhood of what I wanted.

On my Droid X, the application was somewhat slow to load and connect to the server initially, but once it was up and running, the lag that I experienced on the Verizon network, even from rural Texas, wasn’t in itself unmanageable. The only problem is that it ate a second or so off of the time that I had to fiddle awkwardly with the bet slider.  Read the complete post...

I’ve been vaguely aware of both the plot of The Blind Side (homeless black teenager from broken family is adopted by wealthy white family and goes on to play pro football) and the critiques of its racial politics for some time, and despite its unexpected box office success, I’ve had little desire to see it. I’m currently in Florida visiting my grandmother, though, and she wanted to see The Blind Side, so see The Blind Side we did.

I don’t much care for Sandra Bullock, but she’s exactly as good as everyone says she is as the loving, no-nonsense matriarch of a wealthy Southern family. And the movie in general is pretty much what you’d expect: cutesy, saccharine, uplifting, and formulaic. It’s good for what it is though, with a remarkable story, quick pace, witty dialogue, and genuinely likable characters.

As for the film’s racial politics, I can’t say that I entirely agree with most of the critiques I’ve seen, though I do have a few of my own. A. O. Scott’s review for the New York Times encapsulates the most common criticism of Blind Side:

To the extent that Michael represents a social problem (or maybe a whole bunch of them, including poverty, drug addiction and family dysfunction), the solution depicted is individual, charitable and, at least implicitly, faith based.  Read the complete post...

Small Stakes No-Limit Hold ‘em
by Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, and Matt Flynn

Professional No Limit Hold ‘Em, Volume 1 (PNLHE) is one of my all-time favorite poker books and the one that I recommend to anyone looking to get started to the game. I eagerly awaited the publication of Volume 2, which was rumored to deal with short-handed games and more advanced concepts, and mourned its loss when its authors parted ways with Two Plus Two Publishing.

Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, and Matt Flynn ultimately self-published the book now known as Small Stakes No-Limit Hold ‘Em (SSNL), and it’s even better than I’d hoped.

Read the full review including my “Two-Minute Recommendation” in the Book Reviews Section of the site.

Read the full review