Try Empire:Total War (or any earlier entries from the series) for a strong focus on strategy -- you won't be sorry. The strategic map is a complete game in its own right, and the tactical battles in Total War games have been enjoyable since TW:Rome.

Everyone will have hot or cold runs over thousands of hands of poker - those matter only in the short term. The point is this: a strong player will lose less money with a losing hand (generally by folding earlier and not chasing expensive draws), extract more value from a winning hand (by keeping other players in the hand), and occasionally converting a losing hand to a winning hand (bluffing). Those factors have nothing to do with luck - luck only affects the cards, not the actions a player chooses to take reacting to those cards. The cards are merely a vehicle for the "real" game to take place, which is the act of deceiving of the rest of the table.

For illustrative purposes, consider this 2-player game, which serves as an abstract oversimplification of what happens at a poker table:

Roll (fair) 20-sided die.

If result is 1-19, you pay other player $10.

If result is 20, other player pays you $250.

It would be foolish to play only one roll of this game. Played out over 50,000 rolls, you should make a tidy profit because the hot & cold streaks will balance out.

To anyone browsing this thread who believes that poker is at its core a game of chance, Rary has just provided a very nice complete & concise explanation of how skill enters the game of poker. Read it as many times as you need to, and ignore any other posts on that topic. Does anyone know if there's a visual aid describing this anywhere on the 'net? That's the one thing that could enhance this post.

Jury nullification works both ways

The other way around (finding a technically innocent person guilty) may be distinguished as jury vilification.

Every time you send a resume in somewhere, follow it up with a phone call, and ask whether the relevant person has received your resume.

This is fine, and may even increase the likelihood that you pass some initial filtering.

since you already have them on the phone, give them a thirty second spiel about why you would be good for the job

Please don't do this. Until the applicant field is down to 15 people or fewer, the last thing a hiring manager wants is to be stuck on the phone for even 30 seconds with an applicant eager to show their stuff. This is what your cover letter is for, or maybe a follow-up email. Entry level positions of any type most places will result in over a hundred applications, and nothing's more annoying than applicants who won't leave you alone, especially when there are many of them. This is not the impression you want to leave with someone who will be making a hiring decision.

A fine seems fairly reasonable to me. If that car IS stolen, someone has to pay for the police work to track it down (or more realistically, the tow to impound and processing when your car's stripped husk is found two weeks later in a Burger King parking lot). I've got no problem with my taxes being offset by fines issued to the people who are contributing to rising costs of enforcement.

Funny, mine does that exact same thing (shower off, within 30 seconds there's a cat on the toilet), except it was all his idea and I'M the one that learned that scratching him then means I'm left alone to dress.

Yes, I was certainly trained by a cat.

I think the darker tone would be well-suited to the Knightfall storyline (Bane [believable villain] breaks Batman over his knee and his less-morally-upright trainee replaces him as Azrael). I'm not certain they could fit the whole thing into a single movie though.

Anyone with greater comic book knowledge care to comment?