I was scouring the ‘Net for new software and I happened across a nifty little poker utility. I’m not a poker player (at all), but I have many friends who love playing poker – so I passed the link along to them.

Days later, I found a second piece of poker software that I thought would be useful – what are the odds? No, seriously – I don’t know what the odds are. The only thing I know about poker is that I can’t play it. I definitely do not have a poker face (though it is quite suitable for radio).

So, if you use Mac OS X, and you like poker – you might appreciate these pieces of poker freeware.

• Tournament Timer: “An extremely simple-to-use timer for poker tournaments. It is aimed at Texas Hold’em, but will work for any game that uses blinds or antes. Its simplicity belies the power of the blinds editor: with the setting of a toggle, editing the blind length, ante, or small blind in one level updates each of the following blinds.”
• Hold Em Hand Strength: “If you’ve watched the World Series of Poker on ESPN, you’ve seen that they show each player’s cards and their relative odds of winning. In essence, HEHS does the same thing. You can enter the cards of the hands in play as well as the cards on the table and calculate the odds that each hand will win.”
• Video Poker Solitarus: “On each hand place your bet (the ‘Bet’ button places down one chip for every press and the ‘Bet max’ button goes ahead and puts the maximum bet of five chips in) and click ‘New Hand’ to receive five new cards. Take a look at your hand and decide which cards to hold and which to discard. Once you’re pleased with your selection(s) press ‘Deal’ and REPLACE any cards you’re not holding.”

Completely free. Completely fun. Completely cards.

• Ponzi’s Garbage Pail Kids

Ponzi’s going to be a Garbage Pail Kid!!! Yes, you all know my fascination with Garbage Pail Kids (even though I’m still mising Bonus Card B5, COLE Gate). A few weeks ago, I emailed Luis Diaz with a small request: that he create a GPK incorporating Ponzi’s two names (well, “Ponzi” is just her nickname – with Latthanapon being her birth name). You see, as I was going through ANS5, she lamented that they never have any GPKs with her name on them. I thought: “Let me see if I can commission an artist to surprise her.” Sure enough, Luis will create a GPK just for you (different options at different prices). He whipped up this sketch:

This will be made into two separate cards: Piercing PONZI and Lust-Upon LATTHANAPON. And today, did a series of watercolors for us to choose from (yes, I couldn’t hold the surprise back when the original pencil GPK sketch came in). We picked the upper far right and the lower far left – which will be arriving in traditional Garbage Pail Kids sticker dimensions soon enough. This is just too cool:

These cards will be priceless! I may ask him to go back and render a full-color version of one of ‘em to make it look like a genuine GPK. Maybe I’ll just commission another one? What about… WINER Diner, Noble SCOBLE, KEVIN Rosey, Scary ARRINGTON, RUBEL Yell, Tin CANTER, PIRILLO Armadillo, Messy MESSINA, or PONZI Screams? Those would be perfect giveaways at Gnomedex.

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