I guess he can cover, after all.

Oops.

In other gambling news, I got 2nd place in a poker tournament this weekend, and I'm very proud. (Most of the players seemed new to the game and were pretty bad, but still -- achievement.) No interesting hands to report, but there was one intriguing new element that I hadn't seen before: a "bounty" side bet. If you take part in the side bet, your name is added to a list; when you knock someone on the list out of the tournament, they pay you $10 (and when one of them knocks you out, you pay them). There were 31 players in the tournament, and at least 22 were on the bounty list.

I abstained from the bounty for a couple of reasons. For one thing, even though $10 is small relative to the tournament prizes, psychologically players might feel more aggressive against other bounty-ers. Therefore, not being on the list might make people less apt to try to knock me out. (In practice, I don't think that was the case. Though players generally showed interest as to who was on the list, that never stopped them from trying to knock me out. Good for them -- that would have been stupid.)

More importantly, I abstained because of my tournament-playing style. Generally speaking, I don't knock a lot of people out personally. Whether this is good or bad, I can't say. But I think that's the best way to figure out if you should take part in these kinds of bets -- if you're the kind of player that knocks out a lot of opponents, you should obviously take part in the bet.

Hindsight bonus: had I gone on the bounty list, I would have broke even. I knocked out one bounty-er (who was happy to hear I wasn't on the list), and I was knocked out by the 1st place guy. So I guess it didn't matter. Hmm.