The tournament started.  It was noisy.  I clicked 'no sounds' in the bottom left of the table.  It went quiet.  I made it to the final table and it got noisy again.  The 'no sounds' thing was still turned on.  I tried turning it off and on again, but it didn't help immediately.  But eventually I managed somehow to get it to shut up again.

Even when "no sounds" is turned on (and why have a toggle with 'no' in its name?  Why not just call it 'sounds' instead, dropping the negative?) there are still sounds if you're slow to act.

My girlfriend tried playing a pmpoker tournament this morning.  She got the 5 MB update automatically, but when the game started she saw hundreds of error messages, just like I used to.  She tried restarting the client several times, but kept getting the error messages.  The ones about being unable to update SQL tables, with JSON debug strings.

I'm waiting for a tournament to start at the moment.  The client is just sitting there doing nothing, but it's still using 25% of my CPU.  That's not really acceptable for an idle process.  What's it doing with all that CPU?

Maybe his Fake address was the first one, so has a "firstbits" of 1fake?

That's the only reason I could think of.

Yes, that's perfect.  It's quick enough not to get in the way, but noticeable enough that I'm not in any doubt as to whether the click worked before.

I think before the problem was that although the screen updated when I clicked 'double bets', the button itself didn't change, and that's where my eye was pointing at the time.  The parts of the screen that did update were small enough that my peripheral vision didn't notice it.

tldr: thanks

there are 100 spots on the table
each spot costs 0.01 BTC to buy
when all 100 spots are sold, one is chosen randomly (?) as the winner and gets 0.98 BTC
the house keeps 0.02 BTC
you get to pick an image and a URL for your spot to link to, so you can advertise anything of your choice, for 0.01 BTC per spot

That's about it, as I understand it.

I really can't think that the drop and reversal were both orchestrated by SD to avoid paying a dividend this month.  The reversal means they've just put off this dividend until next month.  If SD wanted to screw their investors, they'd arrange for a drop and NO reversal, thereby taking the month's profits for themselves.

This stackexchange question and answer may be of interest:

  http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3730/what-is-the-longest-known-vanity-address-generated

I think a more practical attack would be to always get your pool to attempt to mine a block which includes a transaction that spends your coins to yourself, then as soon as you find a block, hold off publishing it for a few seconds while you place a bet at SD double-spending those same coins on "lessthan 1000".  On the rare occasion that your bet wins, you "forget" to publish the block your pool found (maybe claim some other pool beat you to it), and let the winning SD bet stand.  The rest of the time you publish your block, which effectively cancels your losing SD bet.

I don't know if this happens in practice, or whether SD has anything in place to prevent it working.

And don't forget the maximum bet.  If they didn't limit the size of your bet, you could get lucky and bankrupt them in a single bet.

They've very sensibly been reducing the max bet recently in the face of losses.

They're usually fun to hunt down, but they're not all as cute as this one. 

Maybe just make the button go bright when it's clicked, and fade back to normal colour over the next second or so.  That could perhaps be a default behaviour for all the buttons in all the games if it looks nice.

In my case, 43.37% of the initial investment, so far.

In roulette, I often hit 'double bets', and then can't be sure whether I clicked properly or not.  It feels like there's not enough visual feedback that the click was received.  I know the bet amounts double, but they're in a pretty small font.  I'm wondering whether changing the button to "doubling" for a fraction of a second would be useful.  Or something like that.

This has bugged me before, but it seemed kind of trivial so I never mentioned it.  But it continues to annoy me each time I play, so there it is...  Treat it as you will...

It's a little worse than that isn't it?  Not only did they not earn any money last month, but as I understand it they won't earn anything from future house profits until the house wins enough to cover last month's losses.

I still disagree.  Expected profit is proportional to house edge (if we ignore progressive jackpots) and nothing to do with bet range.

Changing the bet range can change the variance, but the expected profit is always going to be the house edge times the amount wagered.

If you have a house edge of 1%, and I wager 1000 BTC, you can expect to keep 10 BTC of it, no matter how I split up the 1000 BTC into smaller bets.

I'm sorry I don't have time now to address your post in more detail.  What you say about progressive pots is interesting.  I suppose it's possible that there are some games out there where the progressive pot is big enough that it's 'worth' playing for the player, mathematically speaking.  I know the SatoshiDice progressive game used to be like that, for a very short time until the rules were changed.

In a true 50/50 game, even if you've just seen 10 reds in a row, the next turn is still 50/50.

The Monty Hall problem, which you're referring to, isn't and never was 50/50.  You picked a door, you have 1/3 probability of having picked the car.  The other two doors have a 2/3 probability of having the car behind one of them.  Since the host knows where the car is, he can always open one of the remaining two doors and show that it doesn't hide a car.  By offering you the choice to switch, he is effectively letting you chose both the other two doors, which doubles your chance of success.  As you can see, this is in no way similar to a new independent 50/50 dice roll.

me: "I'm thinking of a number between 1 and a million.  Guess what it is"
you: "665566"
me: "I'll give you a clue.  the number is either 888888 or 665566.  it's nothing else.  want to switch?"

There's a 1 in a million chance that your first guess was right.
There's a 999999 in a million chance that your first guess was wrong, and that my number was 888888.
If you switch, you have 999999 times more chance of winning.
If you still reason "well, there are two numbers it could be, so it's 50/50" then I don't know how to help you...

Does that clear things up?  I've tried to explain the Monty Hall problem to people before.  Some of them really don't get how it isn't a 50/50 choice even given the above exaggerated situation.  I've never been able to understand why; I don't see what it is they can't understand, but would like to.

Given that we're bouncing around between 7500 and 12500, there's 5000 different integer values it can be.  So about 5000-to-1 against?

But you'd probably be equally amazed if it was exactly 12000, or 12121, or 11111, or 9999, etc.  So in that sense it's less amazing.

And without further ado:

That's a nice bug.  Make a rule that players who aren't present aren't allowed to win any pots, then have a hand where all the players are away.  The code loops around the table skipping the away players trying to find a regular player to give the pot to.