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.
There were about 5 games this week that had pretty far fetched outcomes. If icantcover picked most of those, it's possible he just got unluckily lucky but still has poor judgment.
Entirely possible. I'll pass along the idea. He shouldn't just give up after three or four weeks...
(...though we all kind of suspected he'd be able to pick winners when he didn't want to)
Agreed. . .it seems like as soon as you want to get your bets wrong you've get all messed up in the head. I think it would only work if other people just secretly decide he can't cover and start asking him for betting advice that they then contradict.