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The continued battle of the “games are good” “games are bad” war plays on with a recent article in Discover Magazine that examines the growing body of research suggesting that video games exercise the mind similar to the way physical activity exercises the body.

Laparoscopic surgery, also known as keyhole surgery or band-aid surgery, involves manipulating controls/joysticks to control a fiber optic camera and surgical tools to perform minimally invasive surgery with only tiny incisions in the person’s body. Laparoscopic surgery has been around for many years now, but doctors have only recently begun to notice a stirring correlation between the top surgeons and video gamers.

Surgeon Butch Rosser, directory of minimally invasive surgery at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, read a reporter’s comments about one of his procedures that referred to him as a “Nintendo surgeon”. This started his thinking that perhaps his apparent gift among many of his peers was because he was a gamer.

Rosser set out to see if there was a correlation by using a standardized laparoscopic training exercise called “Top Gun” to test laparoscopic surgeons that had never played a video game and those that were gamers. “The results were really astounding,” he says. “First of all, if you played video game [at any time] in the past, it was found that you were significantly faster and, more importantly, you created fewer errors than people who had no previous video game experience. Then when we looked at whether you were a current video gamer, we found that if you played video games currently, you were over 30 percent better faster, and created fewer errors than someone who did not play video games at all.”

Alan Castel, psychology professor at Washington University of St. Louis, performed another study where people from different groups are given a series of standard visual tests looking for a particular object (e.g. a letter) among a group of other objects on a computer monitor. “Video game players had faster reaction times on the order of 100 milliseconds, which might not sound like a lot but in this domain it’s quite a strong finding,” says Castel. “And you can imagine, when driving, a difference of 100 milliseconds could really help you avoid accidents.”

The research showed that gamers used the same search patterns as non-gamer, “but video game players were faster and more efficient when carrying out this search,” says Castel.

“Previous research has shown that video game players have more attentional capacity and can carry out search functions in more efficient manners,” says Castel. “Our research was interested in examining whether there were differences in how video game players and non-video game players search the visual environment, how they carry out visual search. We were interested in whether video game players would carry out visual search in a different way relative to people who don’t play video games.”

Castel suggests that not only are video games good “practice” for many mental tasks around activities like military flight training and surgery but that they may also be a good tool for rehabilitation of people recovering from brain injuries.

The mental improvement from video games is clearly there. However, Rosser does point out that surgeons perform better with just three hours of video game play per week. Rosser goes on to say to kids “That Butch Rosser would not be here in this capacity if he played video games and did not have good grades, did not develop perseverance. And I would say to that child out there that thinks that they got a free pass to play video games carte blanche, I say ‘Nooo, sadly mistaken.”

With the current talk from politicians, trying to get “airtime”, of banning video games, imposing regulations beyond other entertainment mediums such as books or movies, and the “detriments” of video games, the work of organizations like the International Game Developers Association, who advocate for a more balanced and fair look at games, is needed more now than ever. Research has shown the positive effects of playing video games and has shown very mixed results of any ill effects.

Those in positions to regulate the video game industry need to take a fair look at the studies in the area before attempting to impose any unfair requirements on the industry. With that said, not all games are appropriate for all ages. Parents need to know what their kids are playing. The industries ESRB ratings are a great first step for this, as are many of the review sites online.

To the kids out there, do you homework, but please play your video games. You may be the one operating on me one day…

Kurt Uhlir, a Chicago technologist and regular commentator on video games by day, oversees products and strategy for Extremely Sharp Swords, Knives & Martial Arts.

It’s risky to chase a poker online hand, but there are times when it makes sense. If you have lots of outs or if the cost of chasing is minimal, chasing might be your best, ahem, bet. Say you have an 8-9 of clubs and the flop comes out 3 of clubs, jack of hearts, and 10 of clubs. The table checks to you, and you are left wondering whether or not it’s worth it to chase your casino hand. You don’t have a hand yet, but count your outs-you have four 7’s and four Queens that can make your straight, but wait, there’s more! You’ve also got ten other clubs in the deck that can make your flush as well. That gives you eighteen cards that can make your hand, and you have two draws (the turn and the river) to get any of them.

Once you’ve decided to chase your hand, you’ve got to defend it. If the turn doesn’t make your poker online hand, nothing will weaken your resolve to make your hand more than having an opponent bet on the turn. A raise after the flop will have your opponents putting you on a hand and will make them a lot less likely to bet after the turn, giving you a free look at the river.

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The guy next to me at the poker online high stakes no limit table would not stop drinking Bud Select and eating loaded nachos at the casino. His breath had begun to make me ill, not to mention his drooling on the green felt and the nudging my ribs to try to get me to have a bite of his cheese and jalapenos, which I politely declined.

The guy had more chips at the poker table than anyone, which he continued giving away hand after hand, more interested in slugging down the free booze and feeding his already enormous cheese gut from the casino’s endless troughs. I had already made $5,800 off of him by his pushing an 8 5 offsuit into my overpair on two different hands. The chips he passed were sticky and covered in spit, but would still spend when I cashed them in.

The rest of the table was hunkering in and waiting for the right spots to take more of his cash, not suffering so much as I having to hear the guy grovel over the chips and salsa, knocking more than three beers into my lap in the course of an hour. He kept calling me by his wife’s name, or some other woman, and asking me to rub his greasy back.

Though he’d paid my mortgage three times over, and likely would three times again, it was a job like any otherbabysitting the sucker hand by hand.

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Actions advertised as online contests, so far, can require an entry fee or testimonial of bribe.

Web based bingo has now become increasingly popular in the British Isles. As a consequence of the ban on smoking in pubs, restaurants and other public places, countless time-honoured bingo meeting places have gone into liquidation — this has expectably brought about countless firms pushing world wide web bingo as by way of an alternative.

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I Love to Dab

What would the perfect poker show entail? Not a poker game, or a “pokern” tournament, as the Germans would say, but a good old fashioned poker play or musical, preferably in Las Vegas, Reno, or Atlantic City (Monte Carlo would be nice too).

You have your usual brand of musical numbers, and some speaking parts, but how would you integrate the game itself into the act?

Here’s my idea: You have two plays in one going on at the same time. The play begins with a few guys and gals playing poker on stage. That’s the anchor. That’s the main event. But sporadically throughout the scene, the something would happen at the table to trigger a flashback event. Since this is a play, on stage in real time, you would have the table lighting go down low, and then a new scene would unfold on another part of the stage.

Say one of the players has something on their mind. The second area of the stage would be where their “thoughts” are played out for the audience. Meanwhile, the poker game continues on the side, in real time, until the secondary scene is completed. Them we return to the table and play that out until the next thought or scene comes to light.

Voila! A poker play!