My memory is being jogged and I think I finished 4th-ish because I didn’t know what permafrost was.
I loved intellectual competitions. I literally lettered in swimming and math. I went to some national math competition one summer where we stayed at a dorm at Penn State. I had the second-highest score on the Ohio team, but I was way below the elite guys. I once received an actual cash prize for a math contest. Twenty dollars, but still…
I did well in trivia contests by concentrating on things that the top players didn’t. The poker equivalent would be that instead of trying to out-LAG a LAG and out-math the solver kids, I figure out ways to being annoyingly trappy and think more about psychology to carve out a niche where I’m not an elite crusher but do okay and frustrate good players just enough that they don’t try to pick on me.
Getting back to politics, I think a lot of Dems just think of politics as a job and not a game to be won. In an ideal world where Republicans can function as the loyal opposition, that’s okay, but that’s not the world we live in. There’s probably some analogy out there about Democrats trying to be honest poker player at a table filled with cheaters, except leaving the table and playing a different game isn’t really an option.
A lot of our frustration with Democrats is a function of them just not doing politics in a way that can be modeled as a game. To someone used to thinking about everything in terms of EV, it looks like they’re throwing the game, but they’re really just not playing the same game. They’re like old poker players who used to win back in the day but can’t compete with newer strategies, but they keep trying to play the right way instead of changing with the times. I don’t believe in the “they’re in on it” narrative because they’re not really good enough to implement that strategy.
Me too, but despite being good at math I never particularly enjoyed it, so I didn’t do as many of the math competitions. The Geography Bee I truly enjoyed and worked really hard to study for.
Yeah my instincts are often to run over nits, but the ones who play so tight preflop that they’re not run-over-able can annoy me quite a bit cause I just have to mostly let them do their thing.
Yeah it’s sort of like the people who think it’s mean to steal the blinds from the button and block a chop, or who will never bluff at a pot that’s “not worth it” and roll their eyes at you when you bet at the 2bb pot on the river after they blatantly give-up-checked all three streets. They’re following a bunch of rules that they think are important that aren’t actually rules or at least aren’t being enforced.
Or it’d be like trying to play a $10K online tournament right now on GG poker without RTA. You’d have to be a fool.
Perhaps but they’re smart enough to see what the opposition is doing in violation of norms/rules, and they’re being really well compensated by people who don’t actually want them to win.
I actually have a theory on how to beat some nits. You just have to do some things that make it less easy to exploit other players like limping almost always preflop.
They’re not mercenaries whose votes are completely for sale. The moneyed interests aren’t simply bribing Democrats to make bad votes; they’re picking candidates whose instincts naturally move them towards sub-optimal positions. They want politicians who value stability and believe in gradualism as the normal path of evolution so that even when they see that change is necessary, they won’t pursue radical changes.
Limping behind them if they limp? Or limping in on their BB? Or limping in with them still to act behind you?
The last one seems hard to utilize since they won’t enter many pots.
I’m curious what your thinking is on this strategy, because I’d expect a limp-based strategy you came up with to target lags, not nits.
I agree but I also think there’s just a lot of groupthink on this stuff among the political class. They think, like most people probably do, that the #1 and #2 factors in attaining wealth are intelligence and hard work, so they think the wealthy have all of the answers and they want to be in the in-group with them. So then they’re rubbing elbows with each other at $50,000 a plate fundraisers, and the wealthy are talking about tax cuts this and bootstrapping that, and it becomes this ethos they believe in. It’s not necessarily “Here’s $50,000 and there’s plenty more where that came from, now fuck over the poor.”
I did the national math competitions in Canada all throughout high school. Managed to finish first in my county in my grade 12 year. Grade 13, I had the test in the morning and then went straight to my great-grandmother’s funeral, so had a relatively (for me) poor result.
The university I ended up attending ran the contests, and I sat in on a presentation in my final year of high school by a professor at the math faculty there, who was also one of the people who set up the contests. He told us that, for the Grade 13 contest, the final question (out of ten) the previous year was written specifically for one person in the entire country, to see if he could solve it.
some of my favorite memories were taking the AHSME, AIME (was like 1-2 questions away from making USAMO) and then the Putnam.
math team was fun, but not really for the math. got to go to regionals as team B or C for my county. guy i ended up rooming with at regionals tried to get me to read ayn rand. lol
Kidding. I did all those math competitions, high school math team, all that shit. I remember a total fail in 8th grade. I was in the regional Mathcounts competition and was in 9th place. To determine the champ, they did a heads-up competition, starting with 9th vs. 10th, best of three. Winner goes up against the 8th place kid, etc.
So I was in the first showdown, up at the front of the auditorium. First question, I’m figuring it out, the other kid buzzes in, gets it right. I think to myself, oh shit, I gotta be a lot faster if I’m going to win. So, I hatch a brilliant plan: right when I’m about to finish solving the problem, I’m going to buzz in. I’ll get a few extra seconds to say my answer, so I’ll just be able to finish up real quick and I’ll win.
I did just that. I was almost done solving question number two and buzzed in. Unfortunately, I was not as close to completing it as I thought and had nothing. Other kid got a chance, got it right, and I was done. Got a cool trophy, at least.
A teacher from another school invited me to be on the team to go to the state competition. I got destroyed there, probably bottom third. I was nerdy, but it was a geek festival, holy shit.
Clair Engle (September 21, 1911 – July 30, 1964) was an American politician who served as a United States Senator from California from 1959 until his death in 1964. A member of the Democratic Party, he is best remembered for participating in the vote breaking the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the U.S. Senate while partially paralyzed and unable to speak, shortly before his death from a brain tumor.
However, on August 24, 1963, Senator Engle underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor, which left him partially paralyzed, forcing him to miss several Senate sessions, and he ultimately withdrew from his re-election campaign. On April 13, 1964, the gravity of Engle’s health problems was evident as he attempted to introduce a resolution calling for a delay in constructing the Bodega Bay Nuclear Power Plant at Bodega Head, located in Sonoma County. He was given permission to speak, but was unable; a colleague presented the resolution instead.
Engle officially ended his re-election campaign on April 28, 1964, just four days after undergoing his second brain operation in eight months. He chose not to endorse either of his Democratic challengers, California State Controller Alan Cranston and former presidential press secretary Pierre Salinger. That decision came because state Democratic leaders refused to endorse him unless he provided details concerning his health.[ citation needed ]
On June 10, 1964, during the roll call for the historic, successful effort to break the filibuster on what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when the clerk reached “Mr. Engle”, there was no reply. The tumor had robbed Engle of his ability to speak. Slowly lifting an arm, he pointed to his eye, thereby signaling his affirmative vote (“aye”).[6] The cloture vote was 71–29, four votes more than the two thirds required to end the filibuster.[7] Nine days later, the Senate approved the Act itself.
Won my regional MathCounts in 7th grade out of nowhere (my school only let 7th and 8th graders compete) and finished 2nd in 8th grade to a kid who was just super quick at mental math stuff.
Got to States both years, nothing remarkable 7th grade year. 8th grade year I missed two layups in the Target Round (one was computing the area of 3 semicircles whose diameters were right triangles, forgot to divide by 2 because they were half circles).
Had I gotten those two right I would have gotten 3rd before Showdown round and been guaranteed a spot at Nationals. Biggest choke job of my life.
I did a year long project on Utah and the 11-way tiebreaker question I missed was naming the four corners states and I just choked. Don’t know if I would have made nationals but I had a shot, I knew like 90% of the questions in the finals. Obviously it’s easier with no pressure and given how hard I choked on the tiebreaker I probably would have choked anyway.
My parents were shocked, they were prematurely celebrating when the question was asked because of the year-long project.
I remember in sixth grade, there was a question where I think I more or less independently invented algebra to come up with a negative number as another valid answer that wasn’t listed.
I had a habit of getting the hard ones right but making sloppy arithmetic errors on at least one question, so a typical score for me was 5/6.
[derail]
Yeah for a while Mathcounts only allowed 7th and 8th graders to compete. I got screwed so hard my 7th grade year they changed the rules to allow 6th graders to compete. No, really.
So since a 6th grader was on my team, the whole team was declared ineligible. We understood our team wouldn’t be eligible for overall team rankings, we still thought I would be eligible for the solo awards…nope. So no seriously, I heard the hell we raised led them to changing the rules like two years later.
[/derail]
Also, 7th grade geography bee school champ, 7th AND 8th grade school spelling bee champ right here.
In 8th grade, passed the written test for city to make it to the Georgia state spelling bee.
Correctly spelled “inveterate” and “verisimilitude” on stage under the lights. Clutch.
Busted 9th at state when 1 and 2 went on to Washington for the one on ESPN.
The word that got me was “panegyric,” I sounded it out and went “panageric” and it’s haunted me ever since. I’ve also never used that word in conversation in protest for how dumb it’s spelled.
