Brian Wins epic game of risk

I play online risk at a site called Conquer Club. They have many different maps than the original board game, and players have 24 hours to take their turn. I usually go on once a day to take my turns.

Back in September I started out in an 8 person game of a map called Europa (shown below).

The game just finished today; 208 days and 128 rounds after it begun. It was a marathon game of attrition.

Sept 14th - Game Begins
Sept 17th - I capture the Hellenics
Oct 4th - I capture the 5 Mediterranean Island bonus
Oct 5th - First player is eliminated
Oct 9th - Second player is eliminated
Nov 3rd - I lose the Hellenics
Nov 12th - I capture the Italic States
Jan 15th - I lose the Mediterranean Island Bonus
March 4th - Third player is eliminated
March 8th - Fourth player is eliminated. This was the same player that had eliminated the third player just 4 days prior.
March 11th - I recapture the Mediterranean Island Bonus
March 16th - I capture Western Europe
March 18th - I capture Benelux. I am now the most powerful player in the game.
March 29th - I capture Central Europe. If the other players have any chance they need to stop me now.
April 1st - 5th player is eliminated. He attempted to to organize a large attack on me. He is justly killed and the bloody head on the fence post shows the two remaining players that they can't mess with me. I am now too strong, any attempts at resistance is futile.
April 9th - Sixth player is eliminated. The last two players were trying to combine forces to take me on. After finishing him off I am barely stronger than the last remaining player
April 10th - VICTORY! I get promoted to Captain.

It was a thrilling game that for months at a time were sheer boredom. But I emerged victorious because of patience, skill and a solid understanding of game theory.

Baseball Betting Analysis

I've decided to use the analysis I conducted on NFL season over/unders and apply it to Baseball.

The first thing that I did was compare the Vegas estimated total wins for the baseball against the possible number of total wins. I added all the teams over/unders and got 2441.5. Which is amazing because the baseball season only consists of 2430 games. That leaves 11.5 wins unaccounted for. The reason that this occurs is that most sports fans like to bet on their team to do well. Because off all this action on the overs, Vegas moves the lines to attract the betting on the other side.

Not only are the over/unders inflated on the aggregate, they are also somewhat normalized. During the 2009 season there were 5 teams that had less than 70 wins, Vegas predicts that no team this year will have below 70 wins. There have been at least 4 teams that go below 70 wins each of the last 5 years. If I could make a prop bet that at least three teams will have less than 70 wins, I would take it.

Here is a chart that compares this years predictions vs. last years results:
For comparison, I took the variance in number of wins between 2010 and 2009. Vegas predictions have a variance of 46.56 while the actual variance last year was 126.40.

I believe most of those 11 phantom wins that Vegas is predicting will affect teams in the bottom half of the league. Fans being hopelessly optimistic will always believe (and bet) that their teams will do better than expected. For football I actually compared the teams to their schedule and used Vegas's own odds to predict how well they would do against other teams. Since I don't have time to compare a 2430 game MLB season, I think I'll just bet the under on each of the bottom 7 teams. I'll throw a little more money on the ones at the very bottom.

Even though I don't know much about baseball I can still confidently predict the results of teams that I cannot name a player on the roster. 6 months from now I'll see how good my predictions were.

Bets:
Pittsburgh Pirates - under 70
Son Diego Padres - under 71
Toronto Blue Jays - under 71
Washington Nationals- under 71
Kansas City Royals - under 71.5
Baltimore Orioles - under 74
Houston Astros - under 74.5

November 22, 2005

It was a Tuesday. I'll never forget that. Freshmen year Tuesday nights weren't typically ones that produced blogable content. Mostly because I didn't have a blog back then. But this Tuesday was the last day of class before Thanksgiving. I still had a paper and a take home chemistry quiz due the next day but that was on the back of my mind as the noise from the garbage truck woke me up at 7:30 AM. What was on my mind was the Math 115 mid-term that I had that evening. Despite taking the class in high school as an AP I still felt woefully unprepared. I guess that's the way I felt before every exam , but after three months at college I didn't realize it yet. Being a very common Freshmen course it seemed like everyone in in my hall had the exam that night.

It was the type of exam that people didn't talk about on the way home. No one had finished the test early, and we all scrambled to get answers down at the end. As we walked back to the dorms in groups or threes and fours no one wanted to hear about problems that they were unsure of. As exams ended and a mass of freshmen began returning to their 10x11 cells, the only topic of conversation that floated through the Diag was about how blind-asshole drunk everyone was planning to get that night.

In the dorms I always snuck in 30-packs of cheap beer in an athletic bag. But since I had planned on having a few people over to celebrate the Thanksgiving break I went classy and sprung for longnecks.

A perfectly stocked dorm room mini-fridge

A couple of friends came over and we had about 8 people kicking back in the dorm room. With the lofts 8 people was about the maximum that could fit comfortably. When we got creative we could fit 20 people into a 110 Sq. Ft. dorm room party. Eventually we decided to play one of our favorite tailgate drinking games: Thunderstruck. For those unfamiliar it's basically a game where you stand in a circle with AC/DC's Thunderstruck on and one person drinks until they say the word "thunderstruck" and then the person to the left drinks until the next "thunderstruck". So beer gets chugged for the duration of the song. I have a picture of it, but this is after 2 people dropped out because they couldn't handle it, and Mark ran for the bathroom because he got caught with both solos.

Now that we were good and drunk, word got around that some of our upperclassmen friends were having a Thanksgiving shindig. We decided to brave the cold to go down to the party on the other side of campus. I remember feeling slightly out of place, and quite under dressed. But those qualms were quickly forgotten about when a super-senior named Elliott handed me a bottle of everclear and told me to chase with mashed potatoes. From there it was darkness.

I awoke the next morning in a dorm room that wasn't my own. The bed was around 9 feet off the ground. I had no idea how I got up there in my condition, but I knew I needed to get down. I felt like I hadn't had a drink of water in days. I climbed down and staggered down the hall sporting just a pair of boxers. I burst into the nearest bathroom which was ladies only, and proceeded to puke in the sink in front of several girls. Not to mind that it was 10 AM on a Wednesday, I looked around at all the girls staring at me and simply said "This isn't where I parked my car" and walked out. I soon came to realize that I was without my room key which explained why I awoke in a foreign bedroom. I could have asked my RA to let me in, but alas he would have opened the door to this scene:


So I spent the next day in a sort of hungover walk-of-shame. Finishing my paper, closing out a memo with my engineering 100 team, turning in a chem quiz and packing up to go home. I've read that college freshmen know if they are going to make it by Thanksgiving, and then fake it until Christmas before they drop out. By Thanksgiving Freshmen year, I knew it could make it, and by Christmas I knew I never wanted to go home.

The Futon

Futons are a lot like fruitcakes. You are never the first person to own it and you're never the last. At least that's what I learned about fruitcakes from sitcoms. Moving into college freshmen year, my sister told me I could take the futon they had at their house. She had gotten the futon by finding it on the street and taking it back to her house. No one knows the history before then.

After getting a new pad for it, we moved it into our freshmen year dorm room. My roommate very quickly decided that he would rather sleep on it then in his bed. Every weekend he and his smokin' hot roommate would sleep on the futon and his buddy from north campus would sleep on his bed. For some reason everyone called his friend "Boner". I enjoyed that.

The futon and the two unofficial roommates

We were on the last floor to get block furniture, so every room on our hall had futons. Sometimes while I was skipping my 1pm Chem 130 lecture, I would go futon hopping on the hall just chilling with whomever was around.

Later that year, I found myself in an opportunity to have local Ann Arbor band Tally Hall film a video on my Futon. That made my futon an internet sensation. I wouldn't even become an internet sensation for another 11 months. I've embedded the video for you're enjoyment.


That summer I moved the futon into my sophomore year house. I spent the next year sleeping on the futon. It was some of the worse sleep that I ever got. But that year the futon got some great stories attached to it.

My room sophomore year. Total college.

I have no idea who these girls are sitting on my futon. It was sometime sophomore year. Can anyone can tell me why these two girls are on my futon? I'm bamboozled.

Same story goes for these girls. Man, college all seems like a blur.

Probably my favorite futon picture. That was sometime after a football game. Perhaps the one where Fritz broke into his own house in a stupor.

Eventually the futon made it's way back home to my house for some repairs. Its legacy continued as it graced my little sisters dorm room. It still exists and continues its glory in her off campus house. Lots of hours, hundreds of friends and a few other things went down on that futon. It was a big part of my first two years of college.

Brian Wins a Bet

It was the bet of much lore. But today I can finally put it to rest. The bet was issued two years ago when Michigan Basketball was in the midst of one the worst season even by their mild standards. It was midway into a late night session at the Jug and I was arguing with Mark about how good the Michigan Basketball team would be 2 years from now. Mark firmly believed that we would be a top 4 seed in 2010 while I disagreed. I told him that if we were a top 4 seed that I would change my name to Dumpster baby. I even wrote about it in this here blog.

So back in 2008 I decided to send myself an email in the future to remind me about the bet. Today that E-Mail arrived.

Dear 2010 Brian,

2 years ago you bet Mark Ausborn that Michigan Basketball would not be a top 4 seed in the NCAA tournament within the next two seasons or you would change your name to Dumpster Baby. Well, now its time to check. Odds are they are still terrible, or that you've already lost another bet and changed your name to Dumpster Baby. This is totally blogable.

Also remember to punch Pete in the balls. No real reason.

Hugs and Kisses,
2008 Brian

So let's see just how wrong Mark was. Michigan is 13-15 overall and 6-10 in Big Ten play. They are not even on the bubble to make the tourney, and definitely not a 4-seed. My prediction was spot on. Although at the beginning of the season when they were ranked in the top 15 and returning most of their 2009 tourney team I was a little nervous.

This was totally blogable. Now I'm off to punch Pete in the balls.

Picture Memories - Orientation

I'm going to start putting up some pictures that I have from college and maybe snippets or stories of their relevance over the best 4 years of my life.

To start:
Orientation

This is one of the few Pictures I have from orientation. It is my Friend Paul with the very fist girl we met in our Post-High School lives. It always amazed me about how the people you meet at orientation you will actually know throughout college. Like Marky Marky. He was the second dude we met at orientation and since the first one was also named Mark, he became Marky Mark. We would always tell each other about Marky Mark sighting for the next four years until one time at a party we walked in and Evan said "Hey Marky Mark is here!" and he came up to us and said verbatim "Don't call me that".

The story of my orientation took me to a party at the Box house which 2 years later I would move into. The pistons had just won game 3 of the NBA finals and I did my first straight pull of vodka. I also blacked out and dropped trou in the middle of the party. Eventually I ended up in this position.

I had to be driven back to my sisters house, which was only 6 houses up the block. I was woken up at 7:30 lying on a tile bathroom floor and covered in my own vomit. I didn't even have time to go back to East Quad because my enrollment appointment was at 8AM on North Campus. I showed up smelling of alcohol and covered in puke, the advisor took one look at me and sighed.

On the way home from orientation, I knew that I was going to have a hell of a next 4 years.

Work Emails 1

I work with mosty engineers that are about my age. It's amazing to see how quickly emails can go from innocent, professional emails to any direction we decide to take them. Best to start from the bottom.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2010 2:29 PM
To: Sara; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

I like the direction that conversation went. Well done.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sara
To: Jonathan; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

OMG!!!!!!!!

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan
To: Brian; Sara
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

I have nipples Brussels, can you milk me?

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian
To: Sara; Jonathan
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

You can milk anything with nipples.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sara
To: Brian; Jonathan
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

Like for breast milk, with a pump...it's weird

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian
To: Sara; Jonathan
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

Describe this "boob pumping"

-----Original Message-----
From: Sara
To: Jonathan; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

I wasn't sure if you meant like to do construction to put a door on the outside or something. I've never seen anyone use the couch...oh wait yes I have. The one girl used to pump her boob in there...HAHAHAHA so funny

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan
To: Sara; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

I was 100% joking about an office. I think that would violate like 10 codes. And, you'd want headphones in like all the time.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sara
To: Jonathan; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

There is a couch in there, but I don't think it would be big enough for an office. It would be crazy small, almost like a closet.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan
To: Brian; Sara
Subject: ESB 1st floor square footage

B-Russ,

Attached is the square footage of all the rooms (excluding non-office areas) on the 1st floor of ESB. I got this information from the AutoCAD file (not the incorrect Visio file layout. I just used Visio because I could enter in the values). The square footage values are in (RED).

I will work on the 2nd floor next.

Sara,

See the "possible office" attachment. Regarding the gray area- what is this mysterious room in the girl's restroom? Are there couches?

More importantly, could we turn it into an office?

That is all, for now.