MindSpill is helping me to realise how fast I gain and lose interest in things. My last pursuit is poker. Actually this is more a rekindled interest rather than a new one, considering I was once going to write a thesis about poker AI. This interest will generally last between a week and three weeks, so this is the time for my poker books and yahoo games profile to see some light.

Today was a very quite day at work so I dabbled with some probability theory analysing different poker hands vis-à-vis different card deck configurations. Locally we tend to play draw poker using a 20 or 32 card deck when 3/4 people are playing which as expected offset the probability balance of the different hands. The following table illustrates the number of possible combinations and the odds for each hand in the respective deck configurations. Since I am no math guru I must give credit to wikipedia – Poker Probability

Since the amount of draw poker games I can play is pretty limited I'm reading and playing Hold'em Up on yahoo games. For starters I am going to follow the pair standards advice on Poker for Dummies for initial betting.

At work our inter-planetary friend spent a whole morning retrying these IQ tests to get a score of 130. Test your IQ on the International High IQ Society

As part of my aim to lower my carbohydrate intake today I improvised a pretty good Chinese like meal. Here is the recipe:-

Ingredients:

1 Carrot
1 Green Pepper
1 Onion
3 Whole Garlic Cloves
Sweet corn
Dark Soy Sauce
Sunflower / Seaseme oil
Pinch of dried chilli
Pinch of black pepper
1 small packet of Cashew Nuts
2 Chicken breasts
Blue Dragon Peking Lemon Sauce

1. I finely chopped the green pepper and carrot using the thick side of the cheese grater and cut the whole onion in concentric rings. I then stirred fried the vegetables in a dash of oil and dark soy sauce, adding the cashew nuts and sweet corn when it was almost done (i.e. when the vegetables start to soften).
   

   Note a: The soy sauce is very important and a dark one works better than a light soy sauce because it gives a better taste and colour in stir fry vegetables. For the amount of chicken I could have added a little bit more vegetables especially onions which tend to disappear. The cashew nuts gave a great taste to the final plate however I think it would have been a better idea to add them in the beginning of the vegetable stir fry.

2. Then I cut the chicken breast in rather thick squares and fried them separately in oil, dried chilli, black pepper and soy sauce along with the whole garlic cloves. The lemon sauce was added later until the chicken was completely cooked.
   

   Note b: The chicken was cut to large. It is best to first slice the chicken thinly then cut it in smaller squares. The garlic cloves did not taste too strongly even though they were present.

3. Finally I mixed the vegetables with the chicken and stir fried once again.