Thank You, Boston College

Made it through the first day with my brackets largely intact, although BC nearly kneecapped me. I didn't jump on the suddenly sexy pick of UCLA to go deep but I did hop on the BC bandwagon, putting them through pretty far in all my brackets. Found it amusing that they also managed to somehow cover the 8 point spread, despite it taking 2OT to do it.

Syracuse semi-screwed me, but that's what I get for picking a choke-prone team that wasn't very good to begin with to win 2-3 games in the tourney. Upset picks did okay, with U. of Wisc/Milwaukee and Alabama coming through but no love from Utah State. I really need to get over my irrational blanket dislike of all Pac-10 teams, as it usually doesn't serve me well this time of year.

Today's the real test, as far as my crazy-ass picks. Come on Oral Roberts, you've got Jebus on your side, let's see you smite some tigers. It'd also be nice of Northern Iowa to come through and prove just how overrated Georgetown is this year, too.

ScurvyRat is cracking my ass up lately. Rats are funny little creatures. At times, he's the most microbrained of microbrain creatures, unable to deal with the simplest of tasks like carrying more than one of his food pellets at a time. You give him one pellet, he sticks it in his mouth, runs to his cage, and all is well. Give him two pellets and the whole thing explodes, as he refuses to leave one behind to come back and get later but he also can't cram more than one in his mouth, so he sits there, endlessly rearranging them, trying to make it work, but never getting anywhere or, you know, actually eating the food.

At other times, though, he picks up things in no time flat. We've been letting him roam a little more of late when we let him out for exercise, as the house is pretty rat-proof now and he's never shown any interest in chewing on electrical cords or escaping to deep, dark nether regions of the house. As part of the morning routine I usually give him carrot, and in the past I'd get him from his cage, scratch him, and give him his carrot. The last week or so I've just been letting him out while I get the carrot, and he runs around a little, I get the carrot, go to his cage, and then wait for him to finally realize that hey, that dude by my cage has food.

This morning, though, he beat me to the refrigerator, sat there patiently waiting, and as soon as I opened it to get his carrot, he takes off hauling ass back to his cage. By the time I get back there he's sitting there, patiently waiting, looking at me like "Dude, gimme my damn carrot."

The Coinflip Gods continue to bend me over but I actually managed to book a decent profit last night/this morning. Still having fun but methinks that a lot of long-term success at these can be boiled down to mechanical persistence and a certain level of skill/knowledge, as far as playing many of them simultaneously and not getting involved with speculative hands early or anything that might be construed as "creative" play.

It feels good to successfully re-steal and make assorted moves but I imagine in the end your long-term profitability basically boils down to learning to successfully manipulate the sizes of your bet at certain junctures, relative to the sizes of the stacks of other players, to achieve the outcome you desire a certain percentage of the time.