I was driving home from work on Friday when I got the text:

cnn.com
pokerstars execs indicted
domains seized by fbi


I didn’t believe it at first. But I checked the news and sure enough, the day that online poker players had always feared was finally upon us. The government had shut down the three biggest online poker sites, effectively ending online poker in the U.S.

While online poker is perfectly legal in most countries, it has been a gray area in the U.S. since 2006, when the SAFE Port Act was passed. It was mainly about port security, but an online gambling measure was added at the last minute. It essentially said, “Well, we don’t know if online poker is legal, but if it’s not, then it’s illegal for banks to process transactions for poker sites.”

Some poker sites stopped accepting U.S. customers altogether. Others were willing to let them play, but the problem was how to get money into their accounts. Since most payment processors didn’t want to get involved in this legal gray area, the poker sites had to find people who would. And they figured that as long as they were forced to do something a little bit illegal, they might as well do something a lot illegal.

That amounted to bank fraud and money laundering. The funny thing is that that’s really all this is about. No federal court has ever ruled that online poker is illegal.

I can’t really defend money laundering, but the government could just fine the individuals responsible instead of shutting down the whole industry. Really, the same government that couldn’t be bothered to prosecute the perpetrators of the financial meltdown has decided that they’re not going to let people play cards?

Looking at the tables on PokerStars, I see players from Russia, Chile, Argentina, Taiwan, Canada, China, Australia, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Israel, United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, New Zealand, Mexico, Ukraine, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil, Serbia, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Estonia, Denmark, South Korea, Norway, Honduras, Paraguay…basically the whole world, except the United States.

Why don’t we have the same rights as people in these countries? What happened to the land of the free? Regardless of whether you happen to like poker, this is not a good precedent. Millions of people have lost a beloved hobby, and some people have lost their dream job.

What’s the point of trampling on this harmless pastime? The government couldn’t stop alcohol, and they can’t stop poker either. They’re just going to push it underground, missing the opportunity to regulate and tax it.

I’m going to go to work tomorrow (if software development is still legal), punch my time card and make a living without poker. Yes, I’ll survive, but the roses will smell a little less sweet, knowing I’ve lost this shot at the American Dream.

“You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em
Know when to walk away, and know when to run
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done”

- Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler”

In the Old West, poker was a game played mostly by drunk gun-toting cowboys just itching to say their favorite stock phrase – “Them’s fightin’ words!” Its image improved only slightly over the next century, as it was still considered no better than the other vices so popular in the seedy underbellies of gambling towns.

Things changed with the use of hole cams in televised poker (which made it fun to watch), the invention of online poker (which made it fun to play), and the 2003 World Series of Poker win by amateur Chris Moneymaker (which gave hope to everyone that they too could beat the game).

Poker is now popular enough to be shown on ESPN, where online poker sites are advertised despite being illegal the U.S. (OK, technically they advertise their legal play money .net sister sites, but can’t we all see through that? BTW, consult an attorney regarding the legality of online poker in your country – this post is fictional and for entertainment purposes only.)

The number of World Series of Poker entrants has grown from dozens to thousands, millions of people play online, and James Bond is now playing poker instead of baccarat (the change was made in the film version of Casino Royale). And yet, I have to wonder if any of this would have happened, had five card draw and seven card stud not been supplanted by Texas hold’em.

What’s so great about hold’em? Mainly the use of community cards. Instead of everyone playing a separate game at the same table, they’re trying to outplay each other at the same game. It’s a totally different feel, and people seem to love it.

I’ve been playing less than two months, so I’m just scratching the surface. But it’s clear to me that poker is far from a game of pure luck. It’s about strategy, psychology, self-control, risk assessment, and making decisions under pressure with limited information.

Crandell Addington, founder of the World Series of Poker, says skills he learned through poker helped him succeed in the business world as CEO of Phoenix Biotechnology. He said, “I’ve been trying to get someone’s attention about this for years. Poker is a microcosm for life.”

So what life lessons does poker have for us?

1. Pick your best game.

There’s no one game called “poker.” Poker is a family of closely related games, but even slight variations can produce vast differences.

For example, limit and no-limit Texas hold’em differ only in the betting structure, yet they are completely different games. Limit is more analytical, no-limit is more psychological. It’s very unusual for someone to be world class at both of them because they require completely different skills. Likewise, tournaments are different from cash games, heads-up play is different from full or short-handed tables, etc.

One of the most important decisions you make in any game is whether to play. Be sure you make the right choice here. My no-limit friends make fun of me for playing eight limit tables simultaneously, but my response is always the same – I’ll switch games if and when I find one that works better for me.

Are you in a career that’s the right game for you?

2. Keep your bad beat stories to yourself.

They say that opinions are like bad beat stories. Everyone’s got one, and no one wants to hear it.

A bad beat is when you have a hand that is heavily favored to win, which ends up losing. Bad beats are inevitable, but they can be hard to deal with when you lose a lot of money, especially to someone who made a mistake and just got lucky.

Here’s an example from limit hold’em that happened to me. (Sorry if you’re not familiar with hold’em jargon, but it would take too long to explain.) With pocket aces, I re-raise the opener before the flop, and he calls. The flop is A-rag-rag rainbow, I bet my top set, and get called by the initial opener. The turn and river look good, so I keep betting, and keep getting called. I have the best possible hand…almost. There is technically a possible A-5 straight out there, but he’d have to have 4-2 to fill it.

So I’m thinking, “OK, the straight would have me beat, but there’s no way this guy raised before the flop with 4-2.” But sure enough, he raised before the flop with 4-2. The river fills his unlikely straight and beats my three aces. His bad move paid off only because of miracle cards.

Here’s another example, this time a bad beat reversal. I flopped an ace-high flush, a nearly unbeatable hand. Unfortunately for me, the turn gave someone a full house. Unfortunately for them, the river gave me a straight flush. Their chat comment said it all: “nooooooo!”

Now, there is apparently an unwritten rule in poker that says when you suffer a bad beat, you should carry it around with you for the rest of your life and talk about it to everyone within earshot. Or you can choose to explode right then, a la Phil Hellmuth, “the poker brat.” In a typical game, he’ll say something like this more than once:

“You’re an idiot. What kind of idiot calls a $20,000 bet with queen-ten? I would never do something that stupid, that’s why I have eleven bracelets. But you internet kids, my advanced strategies don’t work on you because you’re too dumb to know any better. Maybe for you this is just poker, but for me it’s my whole life.”

Yeah, no one likes taking a bad beat (getting fired, divorced, etc.), but how is going on tilt going to help you? And especially if a bad beat comes from a lucky mistake someone made, their bad play helps you in the long run. Vent respectably if you must, but then let it go and get your game back on.

3. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.

This Randy Pausch quote from “The Last Lecture” is as true in life as it is in poker.

Do you spend too much time wishing you could change your cards?

4. Nothing is certain. Play anyway.

The best possible starting hand is A-A. It has about an 85% chance of beating a random hand. A clear favorite, yes, but far from a guaranteed win, and that’s against just one opponent. The vast majority of the time, you’ll have less than A-A, and more than one opponent. But you can’t be overly intimidated by anything that could possibly beat you. You can’t win if you don’t play.

Are you missing out on anything because you’re afraid to take a chance?

5. Play your best bets.

The worst possible starting hand is 7-2 offsuit – the two lowest unpaired cards that can’t form a straight or a flush. Even if you’re lucky enough to flop two pair with 7-2, it might not be enough. You could possibly flop a monster hand, but it’s not worth paying for that shot in the dark. Dump it, and a better opportunity is just around the corner.

Are you investing too much in a 7-2 offsuit job or relationship?

6. Your biggest losses come when you have the second best hand.

It’s easy to fold when you have nothing. But the hands that you just can’t get away from, the ones that make you keep throwing in chips while drawing dead, are the ones that are almost good enough. The king-high flush. The ace with a weak kicker. The low end of the straight. These are the hands that cost you big time.

It’s like with a job that’s almost secure enough, an insurance policy that offers almost enough coverage, or a crippling balloon payment that will almost certainly never come due. Know where you’re weak, and tread carefully.

7. The best hand is not necessarily the most profitable.

Flopping quads to your pocket aces may give you a nice feeling, but it does you no good if everyone instafolds. Only once have I been able to get good money into the pot after flopping quads. I had pocket 4s in the small blind, and the flop was A-4-4. I slow played it, and fortunately someone liked the ace enough to bet. The ace was important to them, and therefore it was important to me.

People don’t care how much you want them to stick around; they only care about their own motivations. Because everyone is listening to the same radio station: WII-FM (what’s in it for me?). The biggest mistake people make when trying to do any kind of persuading is not understanding the difference between features and benefits.

8. It’s hard to be your own coach.

You could be making lots of mistakes without knowing it, and you won’t necessarily get better through practice alone.

I’ve found that playing limit 5 card draw has improved my limit hold’em game because it let me observe myself better. The simpler and faster paced 5 card draw let me see more clearly the consequences of position, aggression, bluffing, etc., most of which transfers to hold’em. And watching no-limit hold’em on TV has obviously helped me in that game.

Are you blind to certain problems that may be obvious to an outsider? Can a life coach help you see yourself in a new way?

9. All you need is a chip and a chair.

This poker aphorism reminds us that a miracle comeback can always happen. Anyone, anyplace, anytime.

It may have originated at the 1982 World Series of Poker main event. Jack Strauss pushed in all his chips on a bluff, got called, and lost everything. As he got up to leave, he discovered a $500 chip under his cocktail napkin. Had he actually said the words “all-in” on his last bet, he would have had to surrender this chip. But because he didn’t, he was allowed to continue playing. Two days later, he went home with a bracelet and $520,000.

Luck comes and goes, but good players win in the long run. If you’re down but not out, there’s always another chip somewhere.

Photo by Ross Elliott

Once upon a time, there were two brothers, Mario and Luigi. They were humble Italian American plumbers whose prospects didn’t seem particularly bright. For all their hard work, they couldn’t seem to find a better job than pest control in the New York sewers.

But one fateful day in 1985, Mario and Luigi were offered an opportunity. They were approached by a panicked citizen from the Mushroom Kingdom, who was clearly in need of help. Princess Toadstool had been captured by Bowser, king of the Koopas, and Mario and Luigi were the only ones who could save her.

Little did they know that their response to the challenge would change their lives forever.

Luigi spoke first. “Hello, mushroom man. This is most troubling news, and I certainly hope that Princess Toadstool is rescued as soon as possible. But what exactly would saving her entail? Would it be a fairly straightforward quest?”

“I’m afraid not,” the mushroom man answered. “Bowser has taken over the whole Mushroom Kingdom. Our people have been turned into inanimate objects, and Bowser’s thugs now roam the land. You will be greatly outnumbered.”

“But I’m not a fighter,” Luigi replied. “How can I defeat all these enemies? I don’t even know how to beat one of them, let alone a whole army.”

“You won’t at first,” the mushroom man said. “But you’ll learn with practice. Every enemy has a weakness that can be exploited, and once you get the hang of it, it won’t seem so hard.”

Luigi was still having grave doubts about this whole thing. “But I don’t want to have to go through a big learning curve,” he said. “I only want to face enemies that are really easy to beat, and no danger at all.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be the case here,” the mushroom man said. “Even the smallest enemy is bigger than you, and if one so much as touches you, you’ll die!”

“Egads!” Luigi shouted. “I can’t do that! Only a fool would choose to do something so risky. If I’m not sure that I can succeed, then why would I take such a big chance?”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as you think,” the mushroom man replied. “You’re more powerful than you know. You can jump on the enemies and smush them. There are also power-ups scattered throughout the land to help you. A magic mushroom will make you double in size. A fire flower will let you throw fireballs with your bare hands. And a starman will even make you invincible for a brief period of time.”

“Invincible?” Luigi asked. “That sounds a little hard to believe. Is it completely guaranteed?”

“Well, no,” the mushroom man admitted. “You would still be vulnerable in some ways. You could fall down a bottomless pit, or your time could run out. Nothing is ever perfectly safe, and you’re not immortal.”

“Now you tell me!” Luigi was now getting quite agitated. “This is starting to sound really iffy. I don’t know if I can take such a big risk. Do I have enough talent? Am I too old? Do I have enough life insurance?”

“Don’t worry,” the mushroom man said reassuringly. “It’s really not that big a risk. You’ll start out with three lives, and if you need more, you can find the hidden 1-Up mushrooms or collect coins to get extra lives. And if all else fails, you can always continue not far from where you left off. You haven’t really failed until you stop trying.”

“OK, mushroom man,” Luigi began. “Here’s what I’m gonna do for you. Yes, I’ll save Princess Toadstool, but only if you agree to my conditions. I want you to draw me a map showing the locations of all the hidden mushrooms. I want to start out with all the power-ups and infinite lives. I want to know about all the secret worlds and warp zones. I don’t want to go near fire, I don’t want to jump long distances, and I don’t want to get wet. Oh, and I also don’t want…”

The mushroom man had stopped listening by now. “Maybe I’m talking to the wrong brother,” he said. He turned to look at Mario, but he wasn’t there anymore – he was already off on his quest! Because Mario had simply decided that he was going to save the princess, and that was enough to get started. He’d figure out the details on the way.

Mario ended up saving the princess, and Luigi may have tagged along, but it was clear who was running the show. They had no choice but to name the game Super Mario Bros., and it became the best-selling video game of all time (it was finally outsold by Wii Sports in 2009, 24 years later).

Mario went on to star in many other games that bore his name, and he took his rightful place in history. He got his own TV show, movie, comics, and merchandise line. And Luigi was there for the ride, but he was always known as Mario’s sidekick.

Now, when duty calls, will you be a Mario or a Luigi?

Having discovered that perfect play in nuclear war is always a draw, “Joshua” from WarGames sees no point in playing it.

When people play games, they often make mistakes. Hopefully they learn from these mistakes and get a little better each time, uncovering the game’s secrets and inching ever closer to perfection.

If a game is simple enough, even casual players may figure out a system for “perfect play,” or a guaranteed way of choosing the best possible moves. Even if a game is complicated, expert players may still be able to get close to perfect play, not being completely flawless, but able to capitalize on an opponent’s single mistake.

Of course, if a person can play a game well, a computer probably can too. A computer can use its fantastic memory and processing power to look much further ahead, analyze many more moves, and become practically invincible. And if they get as far as achieving perfect play, you don’t even need to play them – you already know the outcome.

But is perfect play always achievable for a machine? And if not, can a human hope to play better? Here are five games, listed in order of increasing complexity, that offer a glimpse into what it takes to reach perfect play as man or machine.

Tic-tac-toe

Tic-tac-toe is simple enough that kids discover perfect play on their own. They realize that starting in the center gives the most options, and they take it from there.

Soon enough, they figure out that tic-tac-toe is what’s called a draw game – perfect play on both sides results in a tie. And since perfect play isn’t hard to achieve, kids quickly get bored and move on to more challenging games.

Connect Four

Unlike tic-tac-toe, Connect Four is not a draw game – the first player always wins with perfect play. So in theory, a person can beat any machine as long as they get to go first. In practice though, people don’t stand much of a chance against a perfect play program, even if they go first.

There is only one correct opening move – the center column (shown above). Any other move is a blunder against a perfect play opponent. If you start in a column adjacent to the center, you’re now playing for a draw at best. If you start in any other column, you’ve already lost. And even if you get the first move right, what about all the others?

Connect Four has 10¹⁴ possible positions, making it simple enough that the best programs can achieve perfect play, but complicated enough that people probably can’t. With practice, nearly perfect play is achievable for a human, which will be good enough against most other people, but not against the best programs.

Checkers

Photo by scott*eric

Marion Tinsley, world champion of checkers (English draughts, to some of you) from 1955-1958 and 1975-1991, is considered the greatest player ever. He lost only 7 games in 45 years, and said he could visualize 150 moves in advance. (He’s also an example of the 10,000 hour rule, having studied checkers for about 10,000 hours in grad school.)

Impressive, but how would that stack up to a computer? Well, checkers has about a million times as many possible positions as Connect Four, which put perfect play out of reach of computers for a long time, and making man vs. machine competitions interesting.

In 1990, Tinsley faced off against the program Chinook in the Man vs. Machine World Championship. Tinsley won the match with 4 wins, 2 losses (remember he had only 7 career losses), and 33 draws. Of course, that wasn’t the end of it, because programs are always getting better.

In their 1994 rematch, after six drawn games, Tinsley resigned for health reasons, and died from pancreatic cancer seven months later. Chinook was the world champion, but unfortunately it was never known if he could have beaten Tinsley in 1994.

In 1995, Chinook beat the best living human player, Don Lafferty, with 1 win, 0 losses, and 31 draws. Chinook was retired after that, when the owner decided to solve the game instead of continuing to compete with people.

They solved checkers by brute force in 2007, after 18 years of calculations on up to 200 desktop computers. These calculations proved that checkers is a draw with perfect play, and also gave Chinook an algorithm for ensuring at least a draw in all cases.

Thus, the man vs. machine debate is resolved as far as checkers goes, though you can still play against Chinook if you like (his strength has been reduced so as not to take all the fun out of it).

Chess

OK, but what about chess, the game of kings? The number of different chess positions is more than the square of the number of different checkers positions. Chess is a true thinking game that requires human ingenuity, right?

Well, it’s true that people seem to have something that machines don’t as far as chess goes. For a long time, machines would analyze millions of positions per second to achieve massive lookahead, but they’d still lose to the top human players. It’s not that the people had better lookahead; they just didn’t need it – they simply didn’t see the bad moves.

We’re still not sure what gives great chess players their ability. For example, how is it that any strong player is able to play blindfolded? In 1937, George Koltanowski set the Guinness record by playing 34 simultaneous blindfolded games, winning 24 and losing 10 in 13 hours.

There are conflicting reports about whether top chess players have better memories, better visuospatial abilities, greater intelligence, certain personality types, etc., but it’s clear that knowledge and experience are critical. It also helps to start young and be left-handed.

Anyway, whatever gift the best human players had, it let them trounce the best chess programs for a really long time. But this started to change in the mid 1990s when technology was finally starting to become a threat to the top grandmasters.

The reigning world champion Garry Kasparov, considered by most people to be the greatest (human) chess player of all time, was ultimately defeated by IBM’s chess playing computer, Deep Blue.

In 1989, Kasparov had defeated Deep Thought, an earlier version of Deep Blue, 2-0 in a 2 game match. In 1996, Deep Blue won the first game of a 6 game match, but Kasparov won the match 4-2 (with just the one loss – draws are half a point).

In 1997, a heavily upgraded Deep Blue – the 259th most powerful supercomputer in the world, capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second – defeated Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5 in a 6 game match.

It wasn’t entirely clear that the 1997 Deep Blue was a better player, because Kasparov wasn’t at his best. He resigned prematurely in game 2, believing his position to be hopeless, though later analysis revealed that it could have been a draw. And after being tied at 2.5 after 5 games, he committed an uncharacteristic blunder in the opening of game 6, resigning after only 19 moves.

Kasparov wanted a rematch, but IBM decommissioned Deep Blue, considering the man vs. machine contest to be over. Today, the computer Deep Rybka 3 has an Elo rating of 3238, far above Kasparov’s peak of 2851 (the all-time high for a human).

Chess is generally believed to be a draw with perfect play, though it hasn’t been proven (some people believe that the first player (white) can always win). And while machines are far from achieving perfect play, humans are no longer a match for the best of them.

That’s kind of depressing, isn’t it? What do people still have going for them, if even chess has been conquered by computers?

Well, computers still have one major handicap – they can’t think. When commenting on Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter said:

“It was a watershed event, but it doesn’t have to do with computers becoming intelligent. They’re just overtaking humans in certain intellectual activities that we thought required intelligence. My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now, I realize it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean Kasparov isn’t a deep thinker, just that you can bypass deep thinking in playing chess, the way you can fly without flapping your wings.”

Indeed, previous attempts to make computers model the thought process of grandmasters had failed. Deep Blue succeeded largely on the basis of brute force, with only modest ability to selectively explore the reasonable moves by identifying the bad ones.

Computers are great at tactics, and humans are great at strategy. But as Richard Teichmann said, “Chess is 99% tactics,” which puts humans at a disadvantage. However, an invention of Kasparov’s called “advanced chess” combines the best of both worlds, letting a human and a computer work together as a team, with the human guiding strategy and the computer handling tactics.

But despite the massive number of different positions in chess, and despite a computer’s poor strategic ability, machines can get close enough to perfect play because chess actually isn’t as complicated as it appears.

Even for a human, chess openings don’t involve creativity. They’re based on simply memorizing predetermined sequences that have been perfected over time. Both sides might play out their first 20 to 35 moves without actually having to think, just by following standard openings.

Most people consider e4 (shown above) to be the best opening move for white, with c5 (“the Sicilian Defense,” shown above) being black’s best response. Except that every serious player knows that, so they’ve memorized all the lines that follow from it, so it loses its effectiveness somewhat.

So then people think they’ll mix it up, and d4 becomes a promising alternative as the next best opening move, except that now everybody knows that too, and they’ve memorized all the lines following from that as well.

Anyway, computers are very good at memorization, so after humans have gone to all the trouble of working out the best openings, a program can simply play them out without having to think at all.

Endgames, while often challenging for humans, can be very formulaic for a machine. Once the board is down to a small number of pieces, the perfect moves can be looked up in a database of precalculated sequences, without having to do any thinking on the fly.

The downside is the incredible amount of storage space required – 7.05 gigabytes to store all endings with 5 pieces, 1.2 terabytes to store all endings with 6 pieces, and 7 piece endings expected to be out of reach until 2015. If all endings can be worked out for 32 pieces, chess will be solved.

Some people doubt that perfect play in chess will ever be attained, but regardless, the man vs. machine debate is over. Simply by maintaining a repository of the best opening moves, storing huge numbers of endgame scenarios, and using brute force to search through millions of positions at each point in the midgame, computers have become superior in just about the only game left that some people could do better.

Go

But wait, don’t bow down before the machine just yet. People are still better than programs at Go, the ancient Asian board game. In fact, the best Go programs are routinely beaten by talented children.

There are two main reasons why. First is the computational complexity. While there are “only” 10⁵⁰ possible positions on an 8 x 8 chess board, there are 10¹⁷¹ possible positions on a 19 x 19 Go board. This is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, squared. It’s been said that a computer would need 30,000 years to look as far ahead in Go as Deep Blue could in chess in 3 seconds.

Furthermore, because chess starts with a fixed configuration and works its way down to a small number of pieces, a lot of processing time can be saved by working out openings and endings in advance. Not so with Go, where you start with an empty board, pieces can be played anywhere, and the game gets more complicated as you progress. All this makes brute force a woefully ineffective strategy.

But it’s not just the number of positions that makes Go so complicated. After all, you could simply increase the board size of any game to make it as complicated as you want.

The big problem for computers is that Go isn’t easy to understand logically. Even if computers had terrific lookahead, they’d still have a hard time evaluating the possible positions to see which one was best. Go players can often tell that a move is good, without being able to say why.

For a computer to play Go well, it’s not a matter of increasing processing power. It will take breakthroughs in artificial intelligence: learning, decision making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition, and intuition.

For now, computer’s aren’t very good at these things. And that makes Go just about the only game where it pays to be human.

Let’s hear your thoughts. Will there always be a game, whether Go or something else, where the best humans can beat the best computers? Does allowing people and computers to team up, as in advanced chess, improve the game or make a mockery of it? Is a game ruined when you can simply look up the perfect moves on a smartphone? Is there a point in playing a game you know you can’t win, or is the only winning move not to play?

Steve Pavlina often mentions a computer game he wrote in 1999 called Dweep. He talks about it mainly because of some important lessons he learned from writing it. I finally got around to playing it recently, and instantly became a huge fan.

I found two posts of Steve’s that tell the story of how he created Dweep: Self-Discipline: Hard Work and What I Learned From Going Bankrupt in My 20s That Proves to Be Immensely Valuable in My 30s.

You can read those posts for the details, but I’ll give you a summary of what happened.

He landed a deal with a game publisher, but they inexplicably stopped communicating, then stopped paying, then pulled out of the deal, then filed a frivolous lawsuit against him (then got caught in an accounting scandal, being fined millions of dollars by the SEC). The next year he got a deal with a more honest publisher, but they got into financial trouble and had to pull out.

The end result was that Steve had turned his life savings of $20,000 into $150,000 of debt. He and his wife Erin got kicked out of their apartment for not paying their rent, and they had to declare bankruptcy.

But before giving up, Steve wanted to make one last game, one he’d really be proud of.

Of course, he was broke, so he couldn’t compete with the flashy graphics of high budget games. Instead, he decided to make a game that was truly original and very well designed. He spent a whole 4 months just working on the design of his game. This is the step that most people skipped, choosing instead to copy an existing game. After that, it only took 2 more months to do everything else. He got the whole thing done for no money.

Dweep won the Shareware Game of the Year award in 2000. Steve was interviewed in the New York Times, and his company became profitable for the first time.

You can download the trial version of Dweep here. (It’s always a good idea to run downloads through your antivirus program.) If you like puzzle games, you’ll really appreciate how well designed this is. I was quickly hooked.

Unfortunately, Dweep has since been discontinued, so the full version isn’t available for sale anymore (though it must be out there somewhere). The most similar game I know of is Adventures of Lolo, which you can play for free at that link.

Both games will challenge your logical abilities and prevent you from getting any work done today. Dweep has a tighter design, but Lolo has more action. If you’re into puzzle games, give them a go. If you get stuck, I can provide support in the comments.

Games are a waste of time, right? No, Twitter is a waste of time. But a good game serves a purpose. Many games help you improve your critical thinking and problem solving abilities. By keeping your mind sharp, you’re better able to come up with creative ideas when you need them.

Lately I’ve been playing a game called Bloxorz, and I’ve found it very addictive. Thomas Edison stimulated his imagination by playing word games, but I’d like to think he would have played Bloxorz had it been around. I heard about it from Catherine Lawson, who heard about it from Britney, so apparently it’s female friendly.

The goal is to get the block to fall through the hole at the end of each level. Because your block can only move in certain ways, and because pressing various switches affects the environment, you have to carefully plan each move.

If you get stuck, I’ve found that it helps to work backwards. Think about where the block would have to be right before it falls in the hole. Then think about where it would have to be right before that. By doing this, you’re breaking down the problem into smaller chunks that are easier to solve.

You get a passcode for completing each level, so you can always pick up right where you left off (you know, in case you have any other responsibilities in your life). I’ve included the passcodes below if you don’t want to have to write them down, or if you want to skip around:

Of all the levels, I found 29 by far the hardest. It was the only one I couldn’t figure out in my head. Here’s how I did it. (Spoiler alert!)

There are 3 X switches and 3 O switches. I labeled them like this:

X1: leftmost X switch
X2: middle X switch
X3: rightmost X switch

O1: leftmost O switch
O2: middle O switch
O3: rightmost O switch

Then I touched them all to see what they do. It took many attempts because touching some switches makes it impossible to reach others, but here’s what I eventually found out:

X1: makes 2 squares appear, closes the path to O3
X2: makes 2 squares appear
X3: makes 1 square appear

O1: opens the path to X2, closes the path to O2
O2: opens the path to X1
O3: closes the paths to O1 and X2, opens the path to X3

I figured that the key was to make those 5 squares appear. To do that, you have to touch the switches in the right order so you don’t close the path to anything you haven’t touched yet.

In the beginning, you can only reach O1, O2, and O3. O2 is the only one that doesn’t close any paths, so let’s touch it first.

Now it’s safe to touch O1. It will close the path to O2, but we’ve already been there.

Now there’s a path to X2, which is perfectly safe, and it makes 2 squares appear.

O3 will close the paths to O1 and X2, but we’ve already been there. Now the path to X3 is open.

Touching X3 make another square appear.

Now it’s OK to touch X1 and close the path to O3. Two more squares appear.

And now there’s a path to the exit.

So the order in which to touch all the switches is O2, O1, X2, O3, X3, X1.

So give Bloxorz a try. It’s not often that you get to justify something this fun as being productive. But be warned–it’s highly addictive.

Note: I’m away on vacation right now. I’ll respond to comments when I return.