Mammoth Blog

Hit a few loose shots or three-putt the first green at Nullarbor Links and you'll have plenty of time to think about your errant ways before teeing off at the second.

That's because No. 2 is 42 miles down the highway.

Billed as the world's longest golf course, Nullarbor is set to open next month -- an 842-mile trek through the desolate Outback of Australia's Nullarbor Plains, starting at Ceduna in the state of South Australia and finishing at the mining town of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.

The course is a novelty, for sure, but its organizers reckon the par 71, which includes holes borrowed from existing golf courses and others built from scratch near motels and tourist attractions, is sure to bring out the adventurous player.

"I don't think there is any two ways about it, it will be unique," Alf Caputo, the course's project manager said in a telephone interview from the western city of Perth, where he is organizing the finishing touches on the course for a planned Aug. 15 opening. "The scenery along this stretch of the Eyre Highway is unlike anywhere else in the world."

Ditto the golf course. The seven holes taken from existing golf courses include some with sand greens that are raked, oiled and then rolled to maintain their smoothness.

The first two holes are among them, and they have natural grass fairways, but the 11 holes that are being built for Nullarbor Links will have synthetic tees and synthetic greens -- the most workable plan from a maintenance standpoint due to the lack of rainfall in the flat, dry land of south-central Australia.

"In between the tees and green, we'll leave it as natural terrain, although we'll clear the debris," said Caputo, a former local council member. "We'll leave trees and natural hazards there, because we don't want to do anything to affect the beautiful scenery."

The cost of the course came in at a relatively reasonable $640,000 (euro450,000), with about a third of the funding coming in a grant from an Australian government department which promotes tourism.

"It sounds like a bit of a pipe dream, but when we checked it all out, it was so basic," Caputo says. "It doesn't involve any million-dollar spending. We had the infrastructure at some of the holes already, and we'll pass along proceeds from the green fees to the roadhouses and motels to ensure that maintenance is kept up."

When the course opens, green fees will be a modest $40. A certificate will be issued from tourism centers at Ceduna in the east and Kalgoorlie in the west to those who have their scorecards stamped for all 18 holes.

Bob Bongiorno, a former roadhouse/motel manager at Balladonia, which will host one of the holes, came up with the idea for the course.

"I first thought about it nine or 10 years ago," Bongiorno told the AP from Kalgoorlie. "I had lived on the Nullarbor for 10 years, and I always felt that people just connected east and west along our highway, and traversed the distance quickly.

"They endured rather than enjoyed the trek. They missed what I called a lot of the 'self-find' stuff along the way. The whole idea was to try to create something to slow people down, and make it part of the holiday."

So far, so good in that department. The golf course's Web site had more than 15,000 hits in the three days after word of it first appeared in local media.

The idea took shape when Caputo and Bongiorno, now good friends, sat in a bar and brainstormed "over a glass or two of red wine," Caputo said. "All good ideas come out of a glass of red, don't they?" Out of that session came the setup of the course and the thought of working with local motels and tourist attractions.

Caputo says the average group of golfers will take about four days to complete the course, which, at its most eastern point at Ceduna is 1,300 miles west of Sydney. More than 250,000 tourists annually make the trip across the hot, arid Nullarbor on the Eyre Highway, and there soon could be more: Caputo says a British travel promoter wants to put together a 10-day package which includes Nullarbor Links and topflight courses in Adelaide and Perth.

Included on the Nullarbor journey is the longest stretch of straight road on any highway in Australia. After golfers leave the par-4, 340-yard hole at the Caiguna roadhouse, they won't have to turn their steering wheels for 90 miles.

When they arrive at the next hole at the Balladonia Motel, they can take a side trip to an area commemorating the July 1979 fall to earth of the NASA research laboratory Skylab, which landed in fiery chunks around Balladonia. U.S. President Jimmy Carter is said by locals to have phoned the motel's manager to apologize, and the area's shire ranger, David Somerville, was photographed giving a NASA official a littering ticket, which the council later waived.

The next hole is a par-3, 155-yarder at the Fraser Range -- home of the largest eucalyptus hardwood forest in Australia, some trees more than 100 feet tall. There's also a working sheep station nearby.

Since the holes are designed to be played from either direction, they are not numbered. So the hole at Caiguna near the long stretch of road is called Ninety Mile Straight, followed by Skylab, and then Sheep's Back.

And don't forget Caputo's and Bongiorno's favorite hole -- the 19th.

"We've got a great bar at either end in Ceduna or Kalgoorlie, but the beauty of this course is that every hole has a 19th hole," says Caputo, laughing. "Some just steps from the green. How good is that?" source>>>

It's cold-truth time for golf now that we've had a day to catch our breath from the Tom Watson Open, won by Stewart Cink.

Watson's run at the British Open was a great moment for golf, and particularly needed in a tournament where Tiger Woods failed and Phil Mickelson stayed home. But while everyone marveled at a 59-year old stepping up, what did that mean?

It was fun to watch at the time, but it didn't say much about the game.

It said that the younger generation pulled a vanishing act when its two leaders were gone.
Bacon: British Open Winners and Losers
Heartbreak at Turnberry | Watson's Play Challenges Age Rule

And it said that if golf wants to be considered an actual sport, and not just a refined, difficult skill set, then it has a lot of explaining to do.

Early in the week, Watson said that golf is a young person's game. By the end, after watching the young people, he was enlisting the media to try to fight against the Open's age-rule, which suggests that 60-somethings can't compete.

So let's start with the younger generation because Watson -- and Mark Calcavecchia and Vijay Singh -- set up a battle of the generations in this tournament.

I think what we learned is that Tiger's greatness has been hiding the shortcomings of the guys he's beating.

Turnberry is a course well-suited for the older guys, because it doesn't play long. You can't just rip it to shreds, as Lee Westwood put it. Watson said that his experience on the links course made a big difference because many of the younger American players haven't seen that type of course.

Calcavecchia, by the way, who's 49, said that experience is completely overrated.

But whatever. Watson knew to bounce the ball up onto the greens, using the hard fairways, while the younger Americans rolled up sleeves and pounded their usual high-arcing shots that were affected by the wind.

"I see some of the kids, they're not playing the shot the way I would play it,'' Watson said earlier in the week. "Take some of the element of risk out of play. That's the way I think I'm playing.''

Well, is there some reason why today's young American players couldn't have figured that out? It sounds like the same problem with American tennis, where the young guys can only flex muscles, and not use strategy.

Watson's success was a condemnation of today's younger players. With Woods and Mickelson out of the way, you would think everyone from the current generation would have been salivating. This was their big chance.

Instead, they hid meekly while Watson made his move. Cink is hardly washed up at 36, but he's not one of the young supposed-stars, either.

He said that no one had ever included him in the talk about greatest players never to win a major.

Sergio Garcia. Rory McIlroy. Anthony Kim. Hunter Mahan.

Couldn't one of those guys beat out a guy who just had his hip replaced? Couldn't one of them have even contended? At least Chris Wood did.

This generation surely has more depth than any past generation. But what about at the top of the game? Padraig Harrington has all but lost his swing. It was a grand time for a new superstar to emerge.

Not an old one. And can a guy seven weeks from turning 60 really do what Watson did if golf were an actual sport? All week, I saw John Daly smoking a cigarette on the 18th fairway and pushing a weight-loss procedure, and Calcavecchia talking about his wide base helping him putt, and his four beers a day.

Watson is surely in great shape for a 59-year old, saying he works out occasionally. But the muscular athlete (Woods) went home after two days.

It's about your definition of a sport, I guess. But if Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were to skip the U.S. Open, you would not see Jimmy Connors winning it. Joe Frazier could not compete for a title anymore.

If advanced age and lack of fitness don't eliminate you from the top level of the game, then it's hard to see how it's a sport.

In the end, that's just semantics, though, and maybe a good tavern-argument.

But of more serious concern to golf should be the shambles that Watson made of the younger generation with Tiger gone.

It's hard to imagine if Watson, say, had a bad Open in 1978, with the other stars of the day competing, that someone from the 1940s or '50s would have nearly won instead, especially if that someone's career had already wrapped up a quarter of a century earlier.

Maybe Watson had just one fluke week on a favorable course, but it just seemed strange that so few players from this century stood up at all.

So few seemed able to adapt their games.

At 39, Mickelson, who was home taking care of his sick wife, is already well past the young-gun age. Maybe no one will be there to clear him out of the way. Or if he just decides to go someday, then who knows?
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Researchers for the first time have linked air pollution exposure before birth with lower IQ scores in childhood, bolstering evidence that smog may harm the developing brain.

The results are in a study of 249 children of New York City women who wore backpack air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy. They lived in mostly low-income neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx. They had varying levels of exposure to typical kinds of urban air pollution, mostly from car, bus and truck exhaust.

At age 5, before starting school, the children were given IQ tests. Those exposed to the most pollution before birth scored on average four to five points lower than children with less exposure.

That's a big enough difference that it could affect children's performance in school, said Frederica Perera, the study's lead author and director of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health.

Dr. Michael Msall, a University of Chicago pediatrician not involved in the research, said the study doesn't mean that children living in congested cities "aren't going to learn to read and write and spell."

But it does suggest that you don't have to live right next door to a belching factory to face pollution health risks, and that there may be more dangers from typical urban air pollution than previously thought, he said.

"We are learning more and more about low-dose exposure and how things we take for granted may not be a free ride," he said.

While future research is needed to confirm the new results, the findings suggest exposure to air pollution before birth could have the same harmful effects on the developing brain as exposure to lead, said Patrick Breysse, an environmental health specialist at Johns Hopkins' school of public health.

And along with other environmental harms and disadvantages low-income children are exposed to, it could help explain why they often do worse academically than children from wealthier families, Breysse said.

"It's a profound observation," he said. "This paper is going to open a lot of eyes."

The study in the August edition of Pediatrics was released Monday.

In earlier research, involving some of the same children and others, Perera linked prenatal exposure to air pollution with genetic abnormalities at birth that could increase risks for cancer; smaller newborn head size and reduced birth weight. Her research team also has linked it with developmental delays at age 3 and with children's asthma.

The researchers studied pollutants that can cross the placenta and are known scientifically as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Main sources include vehicle exhaust and factory emissions. Tobacco smoke is another source, but mothers in the study were nonsmokers.

A total of 140 study children, 56 percent, were in the high exposure group. That means their mothers likely lived close to heavily congested streets, bus depots and other typical sources of city air pollution; the researchers are still examining data to confirm that, Perera said. The mothers were black or Dominican-American; the results likely apply to other groups, researchers said.

The researchers took into account other factors that could influence IQ, including secondhand smoke exposure, the home learning environment and air pollution exposure after birth, and still found a strong influence from prenatal exposure, Perera said.

Dr. Robert Geller, an Emory University pediatrician and toxicologist, said the study can't completely rule out that pollution exposure during early childhood might have contributed. He also noted fewer mothers in the high exposure group had graduated from high school. While that might also have contributed to the high-dose children's lower IQ scores, the study still provides compelling evidence implicating prenatal pollution exposure that should prompt additional studies, Geller said.

The researchers said they plan to continuing monitoring and testing the children to learn whether school performance is affected and if there are any additional long-term effects. source>>>

Tony Romo played all kinds of sports as a child, especially basketball, and figures he never would have become the Dallas Cowboys' quarterback if he had concentrated on just one sport as many youths do today.

"People sometimes today are predominantly putting their kids into one sport," said Romo, who took the first-round lead into the 20th annual American Century Celebrity Golf Championship at Lake Tahoe on Saturday.

"Age 10, they're going to do one thing the rest of their life. I have a hard time with that because, shoot, I was like a basketball player as a kid. I would have just concentrated on one sport, soccer or something," he told reporters after shooting a 3-under-par 69 on Friday.

"I never would have been able to do what I'm lucky enough to do -- play football," he said.

Romo went undrafted out of Eastern Illinois but signed with Dallas as a free agent in 2003. After three years as a backup, he earned his first start against the Carolina Panthers in 2006, leading the Cowboys to victory to begin a run that has seen him become a two-time Pro Bowl selection.

Born in San Diego, he said he wears No. 9 because that was Roy Hobb's number in "The Natural," the baseball movie starring Robert Redford. He's a firm believer that athletes -- young and old alike -- benefit from playing multiple sports.

"I use the tools that you get mentally on the (golf) course for football," Romo said.

"Anytime you're in a pressure situation or something happens where you have to rely on your mental strength or discipline or all of a sudden you get nervous, blood starts racing, heart starts going, the more you're in those situations the better off you're going to be," he said.

"I think that is exciting to be in those situations on the golf course because then all of a sudden when you're at the end of a football game, you felt your blood pressure rise, you felt this stuff go through your brain and you have to rely on your fundamentals. ... I think my fundamentals are probably a little better at football, but I think that it's a neat thing to kind of use that in something else."

Romo once shot a 69 in a qualifying round for the U.S. Open Championship and won a playoff to become the first alternate but didn't get in the field. He played Friday at the celebrity tournament with NFL Hall of Fame quarterbacks Dan Marino and John Elway.

"I'll remember that for a long time. Those guys are as good as they get and it was special for me to be out there and be part of it and talk and hang out," he said.

"Obviously it was great to pick their brains a little bit on different things. But it was just fun being around it," he said.

Romo said he had so much fun he suggested playing another 18 holes.

"Elway's like 'My knee's done.' Marino said 'My back, my shoulders,'" he said. "I'll be there in three years." source>>>

If you grew up in the hysteria and bedlam that was Beatlemania, you no doubt remember their concert at New York's Shea Stadium in 1965. First stadium concert ever. Over 55,000 in attendance. $304, 000 in revenue. Those were all record-breaking stats, yet the actual show could be barely be heard because, well, no one knew how to prepare for projecting sound for 55,000 people in a stadium; the boys played through the PA system and even they could not hear themselves.

44 years after this landmark event, Shea Stadium has been torn down and stadium shows are the norm for top touring artists. How things change. But on July 17, the 67 year old Paul McCartney christened Citi Field, Shea's replacement, with a rollicking, sold-out concert that harkened back to the days of Beatlemania, but with better sound quality.

An appreciative McCartney told the screaming crowd on Friday, "These occasions are so cool. I'm just going to take a sec to soak it all in."

McCartney opened the show with the Beatles' "Drive My Car." He followed this with a few songs off his new Fireman album and some Wings hits. But then, it was back to the Fab Four and their classics; the selection ranged from the lively "Day Tripper" to George Harrison's "Something" to the very emotional "A Day in the Life." A pyrotechnic-backed performance of McCartney's James Bond theme "Live and Let Die" and a very somber solo performance of the John Lennon tribute, "Here Today" were also show highlights.

The last time McCartney performed at Shea Stadium, it was in 2008 as a guest during Billy Joel's concert, which was the final performance at Shea. In a role-reversal of that historic show, Joel appeared at Citi Field to accompany McCartney for "I Saw Her Standing There."

"I'm Down," a single off of "Help!," was the Beatles' typical closer for concerts and was the only song performed at the Beatles' Shea Stadium show and on Friday night. Check them both out here. source>>

The Americana Music Association proudly announces that Sam Bush will receive the Lifetime Achievement for Instrumentalist award at the 8th Annual Americana Honors & Awards ceremony, presented by the Gibson Foundation, scheduled for Thurs., Sept. 17 at the historic Ryman Auditorium.

Jed Hilly, executive director of the Americana Music Association, praised Bush's standing as one of the greatest mandolin players ever. "Sam has created his own genre and has become such an integral part of the Americana community," Hilly said. "It's such a privilege to honor him this year."

As cofounder and leader of the seminal progressive bluegrass band New Grass Revival for 18 years, Bush was among the first purveyors of newgrass - the wild bluegrass stepchild that features rock 'n' roll grooves and extended virtuosic jams - and he continues to burn as one of the genre's most brilliant lights, both as a sideman and the leader of the Sam Bush Band. Sam's newest album "Circles Around Me" will be released, October 20th on Sugar Hill Records.

The Kentucky-born Bush - also a champion fiddler alongside his mandolin mastery - has influenced several generations of musicians. Nickel Creek, Yonder Mountain String Band and String Cheese Incident are among the bands indebted to Bush for his wide-ranging choice of material, rock-based acoustic grooves and captivating, high-energy live shows. His status as an in-demand headliner and fan favorite can be seen through annual appearances at noted festivals like Telluride and MerleFest.

The past 20 years have also found Bush performing as a sideman with Emmylou Harris; special guest artist with the likes of Lyle Lovett and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones; spearheading boundary-stretching collaborations with Edgar Meyer, Mark O'Connor and David Grisman; and driving nearly every "bluegrass supergroup" imaginable with his mandolin playing. Sam Bush's ability to be continually touched and amazed by new music may be the quality that makes him such an electrifying performer and bandleader.

The Lifetime Achievement Award for Instrumentalist is one of several career honors that will be handed out during the awards ceremony on September 17th, along with six-member voted best of the year-end categories. Hosted by Jim Lauderdale with Buddy Miller leading his all star band, the event has earned a reputation for the coolest and best live music awards show around.

From September 16th-19th, 2009, the 10th Annual Americana Music Festival &Conference will offer seminars, panels and networking opportunities at the Nashville Convention Center by day, and bring a stellar lineup of musical showcases each evening. Conference registrations currently at the early bird discount rate of $350 for members and $450 for non-members are available at the Americana Music Online Store: source>>>

eBay is slated to make an announcement the last week in July that will reveal major changes coming to the site in September. eBay will give sellers more analytical tools and will impose restrictions to ensure users are following best practices when selling on the platform. The changes reflect CEO John Donahoe's focus on improving the buyer experience and transforming eBay into a more mainstream retail marketplace since he took the reins from Meg Whitman last year.

New Seller Responsibilities Policy
eBay will introduce a Seller Responsibilities policy that combines existing policies with new policies and best practices. Sources say the policy sets out some common-sense guidelines for sellers to follow when conducting all aspects of business on eBay, although some aspects of the policy are subjective.

Shifting Insurance Costs to the Seller
As part of the Seller Responsibilities policy, eBay will prohibit sellers from offering shipping insurance as an optional fee, but it will require sellers to make sure their item arrives as described. Sellers will be able to tack the cost of shipping insurance on to the item price, or they may incorporate any insurance fees into the handling charge.

Sellers will be required to charge actual shipping cost and actual handling cost, which can include the cost of packing material and insurance, but may not include any other costs.

Best Match Tool - More Data for eBay Sellers
Until fairly recently in eBay's history, shoppers conducting a search on eBay would see results sorted by "items ending soonest" as the default. They also had several ways to sort results, such as by item price. In recent years, as fixed-price listings have become more prevalent, eBay introduced a sort-order called "Best Match" that sorts results by relevancy, now the default order.

The Best Match algorithm has left many sellers scrambling to try to optimize their listings so they will appear at the top of the results pages. This is similar to webmasters who conduct search engine optimization (SEO) to get their websites to appear high on Google and Yahoo search results.

eBay is readying a tool for sellers to show them their product rankings and help them compare their results with competing listings by category and by keyword. But eBay will not expose details about how much weight is given to Best Match factors (such as free shipping and item cost), which vary by category and listing format. source>>>

eBay will change its PowerSeller program in the United States later this year by adding a top-rated seller designation. (We wrote in April about a survey eBay had conducted to gather feedback on a proposed "certified seller" program.) DSR requirements for PowerSeller eligibility would be raised from 4.5 to 4.6. While not all of the details have been confirmed, it seems certain eBay will be rolling out the new program as part of its September release, to be announced later this month.

eBay will remove the PowerSeller branding from buyer-facing pages, but the program would continue to set seller standards by which eBay rewards or punishes sellers through monetary discounts and exposure in search results. Only top-rated sellers would have a badge appear in listings and public pages.

According to sources, eBay may be planning to give PowerSellers a 5% Final Value fee discount and a 10% free-shipping discount, and giving top-rated PowerSellers a 20% Final Value fee discount and a 20% free-shipping discount.

The minimum average DSR criteria would be evaluated on a trailing 12-month period but would remain a 3-month period for high-volume sellers. It's uncertain whether eBay would keep dedicated customer support for PowerSellers.

A new DSR rate calculation based on the percentage of low DSR ratings (1 and 2's) would be a factor in distinguishing seller classification. However, only DSRs from US buyers would factor in that calculation.

Exposure in Search
eBay top-rated sellers would receive increased exposure in eBay search results, while PowerSellers and casual sellers would receive "neutral" exposure. Under-performing sellers would be demoted in Best Match search.
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Affiliate marketing is a very good way for many to make money online. How does affiliate marketing work? In order to get started with this type of marketing, first and foremost you need to select a product that you wish to promote, next build a website or blog from where you can promote the product(s) and generate sales, unless you reply on other avenues of promoting like emails, newsletters and postcards.

However, keep in mind that affiliate marketing is not everyone's cup of tea. If quick and easy money is what you plan to make, quit immediately. For being successful in this business, you need abundance of patience and will power. If you have those, there will be none stopping you in your quest of earning big online with the affiliate marketing business. If you are the one who wants result very quickly and are not willing to wait, then affiliate marketing is just not for you.

Some of the common ways how you can promote your affiliate products are :

? Through email marketing

? Using blogs

? Through your website

? Forum Marketing

? Social Networking

These are the proven techniques to achieve success in affiliate marketing. When you start with affiliate marketing, you must choose a niche. You can select a niche based on your interests but it's better to check whether that particular niche has good demand or not. Once you choose your genre, it's time for you to research your target audience and evaluate the hunger of the market. Once you're done with your market research, you can go ahead and select the right product to promote.

1) Join affiliate networks like Clickbank, Paydotcom, Commission Junction, etc. to choose your affiliate products. Once you find the right product, you need to become its affiliate after which you will be given a unique affiliate URL that you can use to promote the products.

2) Remember to check the quality of the product that you promote. You will only spoil your reputation if you promote products that are of low quality. If your customers buy a poor quality product from you once, chances are very less that they will buy anything from you later.

3) Forum marketing is a good way to promote your products. You can use your affiliate links as forum signatures. However, be sure to check with the forum's terms and conditions since there are many forums that don't allow you to put your affiliate links as your signature.

4) If you want to squeeze out the most of affiliate marketing, then you must write articles as well. Quality article marketing can also work wonders in driving optimum traffic to your site. However, it's better to put your own website address or blog address in the author bio box and drive traffic to your site from which you are promoting the products.

5) Another good way to promote your affiliate products is through video marketing. Create a video on the product that you are promoting and submit it to sites like YouTube.

Video and other various forms of marketing offer proven methods of driving traffic to your websites and other promotions. So experiment and see what works best for you. source>>>

AdventureLink has launched a new affiliate partner reservation system with technology assistance from XYKA. The system gives AdventureLink affiliates access to the entire inventory of adventure tours available in AdventureLink's global distribution network and ability for affiliates to sell these tours from their own web site.

AdventureLink is the largest global distribution and reservation network for adventure travel. They offer 60,000+ trips from more than 1,800 tour operators worldwide. "We wanted to build a robust and an easy to use system for our affiliate partner community to help them offer the widest selection of trips to their customers through a user friendly interface", commented Kelly Tompkins, Chairman and Founder, AdventureLink Inc.

The new system includes an easy affiliate registration and approval process, an affiliate dashboard where affiliates can choose from different site templates and products that they wish to sell, the ability for affiliates to look at past bookings and commissions, communicate with their customers and a user friendly interface for affiliate's customers to find, compare and book trips online. source>>>

or a day all about the industry... Affiliate Day.

Affiliate Day is a day to recognize the power of affiliate marketing and all of the folks behind it.

On September 14, 2009, we will be holding several fun-filled promotions over the course of the day, which are designed to increase awareness of the industry, as well as reward affiliate marketers with all sorts of goodies.

Prizes will include passes to Affiliate Summit West 2010, taking place January 17-19, 2010 in Las Vegas. source>>>

Organized crime usually comes with people who have a lot of money, and sometimes, they use that money to lure police officers to help in their operations. That is apparently what happened in Washington D.C.

Police officers are under investigation for helping along a major illegal gambling operation. Surveillance by federal officers, and phone records show a direct connection between the officers and the gambling operators.

The gambling ring brought in some heavy hitters, according to the Washington Post. Major drug dealers have been known to frequent the gambling location. Officers would patrol the premises in uniform.

Prince George has five officers under investigation. The police chief in Prince George, Roberto Hylton, has come out and said he was disappointed about the officers that under investigation. Witnesses have told The Post that officers went to the gambling sessions in marked cars.

The law and the criminals have had a long standing relationship throughout the US. Drug dealers or illegal gambling ring operators use the police officers as protection from any possible raids that may be going down.

In exchange for that knowledge, the dealers and gambling operators pay the officers. It has become a way for officers to supplement their income. While it is looked down upon as a great show of disrespect, dirty cops have always been key to long-running gambling operations. source>>>

I would venture an opinion that a majority of casinogoers look upon gaming as more of a recreational activity than an art or a science.

There is no arguing the fact that mathematical probability is the constant that governs the strategies behind whatever decision making there is in gambling, which would make it a science.

Knowing the math is essential to understanding the concept of gambling, but it isn't necessarily essential to making a bet and being successful.

Luck, interpretation, and empirical decision making come into play frequently enough to categorize gambling as an art.

There's a school of philosophy known as empiricism; an experimental method in which the search for knowledge is conducted by observation and experiment. Scientific methods give way to experience.

In one sense, the math becomes an abstract, and the luck factor becomes reality during the abbreviated windows of opportunity that individuals play games of chance.

Mathematical probability rules supreme over the game itself, not the physical act of playing the game.

If you perceive of luck as blips on the radar screen of gambling during any given segment of playing time, then you can begin to understand how reaching the long-range target of a specific percentage as dictated by the math loses its impact on individual players during select periods of time.

There really is no way to prove that empirical knowledge plays any role whatsoever in gambling. The unwavering laws of mathematical probability debunk the application of empiricism to games of chance.

Most gambling authorities say that playing blackjack at the same table with someone who uses poor strategy has no bearing on your game. They also say that if someone sits down at the table and joins the game in the middle of a shoe, the disruption of the flow of cards will have no impact on whether you win or lose.

Yet almost every time a situation such as those described above develops, the game takes a negative turn for me. There's no logical reason for that to happen. Empirical knowledge? Perhaps.

Or how about when you're playing craps? Reason tells you there is no such thing as a hot or a cold table, or even a bad shooter or a good shooter. But practical experience tells you that there is.

The dice have no memory, and each roll is completely independent of the preceding one, yet any seasoned craps player is aware of the empirical aspects of the game.

Over the course of millions of rolls of the dice by tens of thousands of people as a collective group, mathematical probability works with precision.

As for individual gamblers during abbreviated periods of time, variables occur which can result in fortuitous wins or inexplicable losses.

Approaching your gaming ventures strictly from a standpoint of mathematics and probability may be the most sensible means of attack, but a little empirical knowledge can go a long way. source>>>

Former NBA star Antoine Walker was arrested early Thursday morning (July 16) inside the Harrah's Casino in South Lake Tahoe. His charge: owing nearly $1 million in gambling debts.

According to local news station KVBC, the 32-year-old baller player had a warrant out for his arrest over $822,000 in gambling debts and faces three felony counts of writing bad check.

Walker reportedly took out ten huge loans from several casinos, all around $100,000 each, most of which has not been paid back. Under Nevada law, casino loans are just like bank checks. If you sign the marker, you owe that money whether you win or lose.

He was popped at the Harrah's, and later released on $135,000 bond.

Walker is due in Las Vegas Justice Court on Monday (July 20).

The NBA baller played for the Minnesota Timberwolves last year, averaging around 8 points per game in nearly 20 minutes a game.

Last summer he was dealt to the Memphis Grizzlies, who eventually waived him. He is currently a free agent. source>>>

Series win on Saturday night after he took the checkered flag in The Built Ford Tough 225 at Kentucky Speedway.

Hornaday passed Aric Almirola, who was driving the No. 15 Toyota, with 18 laps-to-go and held on for his second win at Kentucky and the 43rd of his career.

"On Lap 45, if you had told me we'd win this race, I'd have told you were lying," Hornaday said. "We brought the truck back to where we could run (Turns) 3 and 4 wide open. We definitely had to pass some trucks."

The victory boosted Hornaday to a 96-point lead over Matt Crafton, but that could be reduced later this week after the rear-end housing was taken from the truck during inspection on Friday.

Taylor Malsam, who led 12 laps, brought out the race's final of seven cautions when he lost a left-rear tire. The incident set up for a five lap shootout to the checkered flag where Hornaday held off a hard charging Mike Skinner.

Skinner's second-place finish was his ninth top-10 finish of the season.

"I don't wish bad luck on anybody but we didn't have a second-place truck," Skinner said. "We had a good truck - one more lap and we might have had a first-place truck. I really hate it for Tayler (Malsam), the 81 truck ran up front all night and that young man did a heck of a job. I hate it for Todd (Bodine) that he had an oil leak or something there. We finished second, we have to try to stay in the game."

Crafton battled back from a speeding penalty on lap 111 and multiple adjustments on pit road to finish third.

Timothy Peters finished fourth for his first career top five in 55 career starts.

Almirola hit the wall in the closing laps, but was able to hold on for the fifth spot.

Ricky Carmichael was the highest finishing rookie in seventh.

The Truck Series now heads to O'Reilly Raceway Park at Indianapolis next Friday for the AAA Insurance 200. source>>>