So I just graduated college (yay!) and I subsequently took a short break from regularly playing poker. I have played 2 times in the past… who knows how long… ten days? Seems like forever when you’ve played nearly everyday for nearly 4 years. I have this weird minor phobia that I will take a long hiatus and lose my skill forever. However, I am always pleasantly surprised with how well I play when I sit down and play after a break. I likely  won’t be playing much until May 21st when I go to San Francisco in preparation for my 6 week long trip to Las Vegas for the World Series.

Oddly enough, the moment I get out of school all I want to do is write papers. I’ve been reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis after I did a case study in class about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, which is a great read by the way. After reading one part of the book about how walks and slugging percentage in baseball are more important the speed, defense, and average, I started thinking about the optimal approach to hitting. I thought about factors that would increase the amount of walks someone would get, and realized an odd factor. I realized that it was likely that taking a lot of pitches was not going to yield as many walks as a more balanced amount of pitches swung and pitches taken (One reason for this: The more a pitcher thinks of a player as a “free swinger” the more he will throw the ball out of the strike zone. If a player never swings, the pitcher will simply throw the ball down the middle every time).

Then I got to thinking it would be fun to do a statistical analysis and from it, discover  theory of hitting approaches. Obviously I’d do it for fun, but I considered that I’d likely be well qualified to write a paper on this because I solve a game for a living. I’m interested what people think of this idea?