Friday, November 20, 2009
Lawl
You Need A Spirit
Wow. this phone call is amazing, the gay guy calling in and asking "I love beauty pageants, and I'm gay, what do you suggest telling my friends and I to do when we want to get married." Oh my fucking god, straight ambush, go Larry King. Oh, she won't answer the question.
Seriously, okay, this girl has every right to believe what she wants to believe about anything, but I mean when a girl is an obvious 10 she always seems to think she's just a fucking genius about everything and can get away with anything. I'm a pretty confident guy, not hideous, and I have some monies in my bank account, I have gotten "tens" before, and I can't fucking stand them half the time because they're bitches like this. Give me a seven who is chill any day of the week.
Yesterday was a torturous. I never had a pair bigger than eights. I never had anything. All my brilliant plans for hands didn't work. I felt like if I made two folds I would've pitched a perfect game with what I had, but I felt okay with how I played. It was nice to play live, even if I never had anything. I got to flat a lot and the improved structure here allows me to just fuck with people in a way I couldn't do before. I get to flat everything in position and just play small pots, and gather information over three streets.
I had so many goofy hands yesterday. I wish I had time to talk about all of them.
Well, here's the ones Pokernews caught, along with another awesome pic of me staring at somebody looking pissed:
Live Blog
- Fri Nov 20 2009 02:20 GMT
Fitzgerald Makes a Call with Queen High
Alex "Assasinato" Fitzgerald raised to action up preflop and was called in four spots. The flop came down
and Fitzgerald fired a continuation bet. He was called by only one player who he's been battling with all day.
The turn brought the
and with over 15,000 in the middle, Fitzgerald checked. His opponent checked behind.
The river was the
and Fitzgerald checked again. His opponent fired 5,600. The bet prompted Fitzgerald to sit upright in his chair and remove his headphones. He studied for about a minute and then tossed in the call.
His opponent tabled a counterfeited hand, showing the
. Fitzgerald tabled 
, playing his queen-high kicker along with the two pair on board. HIs hand was good and he raked in the pot. He's now up to 43,000 chips. - Thu Nov 19 2009 23:49 GMT
Fitzgerald Picked Off
Alex "Assasinato" Fitzgerald raised preflop and was called by the player in the big blind. The flop came down
. The big blind checked and Fitzgerald fired 1,700. His opponent called.
The turn was the and both players checked, bringing the river and the 
. The big blind checked and Fitzgerald fired 3,200. His opponent went into the tank. This was the same opponent that rivered an ace earlier against Fitzgerald in a hand we reported, in which Fitzgerald paid him off.
"This looks familiar." said the big blind. "What's your name?"
Fitzgerald sat quietly with his headphones on. The only movement was his left hand shuffling chips.
"It's John." said Humberto Brenes, who is seated at the same table."
"John, do you want me to call, John?" said the big blind. Fitzgerald still sat quiet and Humberto began to laugh as he knew he had told the player the wrong name.
"Normally, I would fold, but it's you, so I call." said the player, tossing in the chips. Fitzgerald then showed 
, and didn't look too happy about it. His opponent tabled 
for the winning hand.
"Don't you be raising on my big blind!" he exclaimed as the pot was pushed his way.
Fitzgerald is down to 24,000. - Thu Nov 19 2009 22:04 GMT
Fitzgerald Pays Off Opponent
Alex "Assasinato" Fitzgerald check-called a bet of 3,300 on the river with the board reading
. There was between 11,000 and 12,000 chips in the pot and Fitzgerald's opponent had been betting the whole way.
As Fitzgerald made the call he said, "I think you got it." His opponent then showed
. Fitzgerald mucked, dropping to 21,000. - Thu Nov 19 2009 21:52 GMT
No Bluffing Assasinato
The flop was
and a player bet 1,500 into Alex "Assassinato" Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald made the call.
The turn was the
and both players checked. The river was the and the first player bet 2,000. Fitzgerald made the call. His opponent showed just ten high with 
. Fitzgerald showed 
for the winning hand. He's up to 23,000 chips.
I gotta fucking peace out of here. Oh, and for what it's worth, the Q-6 hand I had a read three guys were folding, because they had preflop tells, it just sucked that all four other players called. The Q-6 call also put me up to 40k. Thanks to Pokernews for finally getting a HH of mine that doesn't make me seem like I'm completely idiotic :)
I got up to like 35k yesterday with no real hand. I ran a set into a made flush at one point. I flopped top pair and top kicker to two full houses. I feel like a fucking genius I'm still even in this tournament. I was real patient, and didn't lose my cool. I was proud of how I played.
I got a little roadwork in this morning, some fresh squeezed juice, and a smoke session with my boys. I'm out to go try and grind something up. Buki's going to go mack on every girl in this compound, now that he's out. Dude was banging every single mother there was when he was a tennis instructor. I figure he can work this territory pretty damn well. Lot of frustrated looking women walking around here.
Oh shit, reading this, and iut's 11:50, gotta go.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/18/high-stakes-limit/i-quit-poker-aliases-revealed-151996/
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Still Making My Butter Out Of These Bloodsuckers
We've moved into our condo for the next six weeks and gotten our asses out to the LAPT. I'm tired as hell, since we've been moving shit between houses for the last couple days. The few times I've played I've been really drowsy because of allergies and organics plants that weren't keeping my brain performance enhanced.
The new condo is pretty tight, with a jacuzzi on the front deck with a beach view. We got a big ass TV for our Wii. My air conditioning wasn't working but I think they're going to get it fixed, and I get a sleep number bed.
I can't wait to play. I've been bored lately. Feeling a lack of intensity and focus the few times I do play cash sessions. I don't know why I just haven't been as focused when I've been playing. I've been chilling though and I can't wait to play a big live event again. I'm feeling like my game is way more advanced now, since I don't have to worry about backers or a small bankroll. I can just grind and play my game.
It's going to be weird talking to my poker friends again. I've been moving so slowly through the days, relaxing.
I have big pieces of other players. Ready to grind and watch my horsies gallop.
Monday, November 16, 2009
I Sit Back And Dream...
if I can do this shit,
tell me why can't you?
Playas Del Coco, Costa Rica
Wow, it feels so good to do some unfocused writing. I just got a 1,000 words in. I'm getting better about writing every morning even when it's difficult. It's hard when I have a bunch of shit to do, things are up in the air, nobody who I need to call me is calling me, everybody who I don't need to talk to is furiously trying to talk to me. Ugh.
I have a shit ton of Pokerpwnage lessons to catch up on too. My new video series came out, which I'm pretty excited about. It's a real session where I was teaching Ben, and I was super focused. I'm obviously fatigued from grinding too much on a good connection in Seattle, but I play some of the best poker, and really take down that 50 cubed decidedly. I think everybody who watches it will get a lot out of it.
I wonder sometimes if I'm giving up too much in these videos. I know of regs who play way better against me since those videos came out, and in specific spots I can tell they saw me run a similar play in one of my videos. It's annoying, knowing you caused one of your opponents to become better, but I accept it, and it doesn't happen that often. I just know I contribute to an overwhelming movement of knowledge in poker that I don't really like it. Watchthesea, 99nvrlosez, and I figured out shit years ago that people just give out for free now, and it's fucking annoying. If Pokerpwnage wasn't taking care of me so well financially then I would be pissed. Right now its just different to me, as I don't rely on the checks anymore so I stopped feeling the need to teach as much, but I still enjoy it - and I get paid well. So fuck it.
I'm chill. Life is good. I grinded a few thousand hands at 100 NL on Stars. I've decided if I'm going to be a complete player I have to quit being a table selecting bitch and figure out how to beat 2/4 through 5/10 on Stars. It's way harder than it used to be, especially when I add two tables. I haven't cracked the hardest site yet. I have the bankroll to play 25/50 if I wanted to but I knew I'm not good enough for that yet. I have so much faith in my tournament game, and there's very few people in the world I wouldn't crossbook against if I could, but I know I have a ton to learn in heads up and 6-max cash. I love it though, and I've been making good money on other networks for years, and it's just time to get on my grind and figure out the American sites.
Anyways, my plan with Tilt and Stars is to start at 100 NL (yeah 100 NL, time to get back to basics) and not move up till I have 50 buy ins won at each level, and I feel I'm beating the level for the right clip then I'll keep logging hands. I want to see how regs on those sites come up, what's more popular. I don't feel as confident about my cash game lately so I want to go back to the basics and then start from that framework.
But yeah, I've been grinding a bunch and relaxing. Buki, Angel, Ben, and I went down to the beach the other day, and boogie boarded for a few hours, and then played soccer on the sand with a volleyball because Cello punctured and killed the soccer ball. I caught a few good waves for a nice ride. The sun feels so good and the ocean is so warm, and nice to swim in. You can all enjoy Zoloft and caramel lattes on your own for a while in Seattle, I'm addicted to this place for now.
Working out is nice here. I just put on my
We finally actually got out one night. I started drinking during the end of my session, just these huge Henny and cokes Ben was pouring, and fourties of Imperial. I was stumbling out at the start. I don't know why I was in the mood to drink so much. I've really been laying off recently, but I was bored with the grind and just writing. Angel rolled a really good joint, between clubs we smoked it and that just got me. I was way out of it, but had a great time. I met this girl who was Pakistani and Costa Rican. Just really interesting skin complexion. Cool girl, turned out to be a physical therapist who also sings for a metal band here. It was weird to hear a Costa Rican girl who was struggling with her English bust out into a perfect Lacuna Coil impression.
The few Costa Ricans I've met or done business with here have been really laidback, way more my speed. You go out in Malta and every guy looks like he's trolling for pussy and every girl looks like she's protecting hers with her life. Here there's prostitutes running around certain bars, and those girls seem to keep most of the instant assholes (just add alcohol) out.
Sunday morning we all rolled out of bed with three hours of sleep and huge hangovers. The Creeper took us through the nausea. Buki made breakfast and we all chilled around the pool. Smoking dro looking at the ocean while girls float around our own pool makes me feel pretty pimpish. I look around a lot and just smile.
I went down to the beach with that girl to get a snow cone and chill for a bit. Buki and Ben went and hooped. We all came back a few hours later to grind Sundays. I only grinded five tournaments or so because I was on flaky internet. Of course, the internet was fine the whole day and I could've gotten through it playing 50 tournaments like I prefer grinding out Sunday. Instead, I just made a bunch of buy ins killing people at 100 NL. I considered starting at 200 NL but I wanted to fucking kill people mindlessly at 100 NL for a while so I started looking at 6-max tables as candy again instead of glittering morsels of shit and despair.
I built up a few stacks, cashed FTOPs knockout and had a big stack in that huuuuuge $50.000 tournament with 200 left (out of like 9,000) but I blew it/ran like shit. I pushed things too hard because I was hungover. I didn't lose much on the Sunday because of the 10+ buy-ins I won at 100 NL or whatever, and the couple I won at 200 PLO HU. I hate blowing chip leads, or playing poorly because I was out drinking the night before. I've cut it down quite a bit but I'm human, male, and single...so I know I'm going to fuck up sometimes. Whatever. When I got done I knew I played really well, just not my absolute best. I was so exhausted I just passed out at 7:30 PM. I woke up at 3:30, got high, read a bit, watched How High (there seems to be a trend emerging...damn sun and chill times) and passed out again till 8:00, woke up and got a long jog in. I feel great. I think I'll play well if I grind this week. I can't wait to play any kind of live poker again, hopefully this time for some real money.
We might be moving out of this temporary house and into our condo here today, but we haven't heard anything from the internet people. I'm kind of liking having my own pool, and this internet just got reliable. I don't want to pack again, but I guess soon we're going to have everything worked out soon so I can just chill, fly my friends down here, surf, learn Spanish, and grind.
I gotta figure out flying back to Seattle for Christmas. Getting proper rations before we pzo of here and go to LAPT: Costa Rica. I gotta figure out getting the women in my life down here after Christmas. Can't wait to see how my little sister likes it here. Then I got a bunch of lessons to do. We're trying to getting a satellite system as a backup here for tournaments, since we lit a bunch of equity on fire here one day. Looks like its 1.2k to get the initial equipment and $200.00+ a month for service, but it'd be totally worth it for us. All of the times I've been in bum fucked nowhere Europe with my connection going out when I was deep in a major, all the tens of thousands I've lit on fire...I can't believe I haven't thought of getting this before. Probably because I wasn't in the financial position. But yeah, got a bunch on my mind, and we might be moving out here today, then there's LAPT in a few days. Should be fun.
Currently Listening To:
Fort Minor - We Major
Lil Wyte - Doubt Me Now
Hilltop Hoods - State Of The Art
Project Pat - Walkin' Bankroll
Juno Reactor - Beyond The Infinite
Shaggy - Intoxication
Friday, November 13, 2009
Scientific American Magazine - March 31, 2008
The Doping Dilemma
Game theory helps to explain the pervasive abuse of drugs in cycling, baseball and other sports
By Michael Shermer
Biofuels can be produced from a wide variety of biomass sources. Which of the following do you think is most viable?
For a competitive cyclist, there is nothing more physically crushing and psychologically demoralizing than getting dropped by your competitors on a climb. With searing lungs and burning legs, your body hunches over the handlebars as you struggle to stay with the leader. You know all too well that once you come off the back of the pack the drive to push harder is gone—and with it any hope for victory.
I know the feeling because it happened to me in 1985 on the long climb out of Albuquerque during the 3,000-mile, nonstop transcontinental Race Across America. On the outskirts of town I had caught up with the second-place rider (and eventual winner), Jonathan Boyer, a svelte road racer who was the first American to compete in the Tour de France. About halfway up the leg-breaking climb, that familiar wave of crushing fatigue swept through my legs as I gulped for oxygen in my struggle to hang on.
To no avail. By the top of the climb Boyer was a tiny dot on the shimmering blacktop, and I didn’t see him again until the finish line in Atlantic City. Later that night Jim Lampley, the commentator for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, asked what else I might have done to go faster.
“I should have picked better parents,” I deadpanned. We all have certain genetic limitations, I went on, that normal training cannot overcome. What else could I have done?
Plenty, and I knew it. Cyclists on the 1984 U.S. Olympic cycling team had told me how they had injected themselves with extra blood before races, either their own—drawn earlier in the season—or that of someone else with the same blood type. “Blood doping,” as the practice is called, was not banned at the time, and on a sliding moral scale it seemed only marginally distinguishable from training at high altitude. Either way, you increase the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in your body. Still, I was already 30 years old and had an academic career to fall back on. I was racing bikes mostly to see how far I could push my body before it gave out. Enhancing my performance artificially didn’t mesh well with my reasons for racing.
But suppose I had been 20 and earning my living through cycling, my one true passion, with no prospects for some other career. Imagine that my team had made performance-enhancing drugs part of its “medical program” and that I knew I could be cut if I was not competitive. Finally, assume I believed that most of my competitors were doping and that the ones who were tested almost never got caught.
That scenario, in substance, is what many competitive cyclists say they have been facing since the early 1990s. And although the details differ for other sports such as baseball, the overall doping circumstances are not dissimilar. Many players are convinced that “everyone else” takes drugs and so have come to believe that they cannot remain competitive if they do not participate. On the governance side, the failure of Major League Baseball to make the rules clear, much less to enforce them with extensive drug testing throughout the season, coupled with its historical tendency to look the other way, has created an environment conducive to doping.
Naturally, most of us do not want to believe that any of these stellar athletes are guilty of doping. But the convergence of evidence leads me to conclude that in cycling, as well as in baseball, football, and track and field, most of the top competitors of the past two decades have been using performance-enhancing drugs. The time has come to ask not if but why. The reasons are threefold: first, better drugs, drug cocktails and drug-training regimens; second, an arms race consistently won by drug takers over drug testers; and third, a shift in many professional sports that has tipped the balance of incentives in favor of cheating and away from playing by the rules.
Gaming Sports
Game theory is the study of how players in a game choose strategies that will maximize their return in anticipation of the strategies chosen by the other players. The “games” for which the theory was invented are not just gambling games such as poker or sporting contests in which tactical decisions play a major role; they also include deadly serious affairs in which people make economic choices, military decisions and even national diplomatic strategies. What all those “games” have in common is that each player’s “moves” are analyzed according to the range of options open to the other players.
The game of prisoner’s dilemma is the classic example: You and your partner are arrested for a crime, and you are held incommunicado in separate prison cells. Of course, neither of you wants to confess or rat on the other, but the D.A. gives each of you the following options:
- 1. If you confess but the other prisoner does not, you go free and he gets three years in jail.
- 2. If the other prisoner confesses and you do not, you get three years and he goes free.
- 3. If you both confess, you each get two years.
- 4. If you both remain silent, you each get a year.
The table below, called the game matrix, summarizes the four outcomes:
With those outcomes, the logical choice is to defect from the advance agreement and betray your partner. Why? Consider the choices from the first prisoner’s point of view. The only thing the first prisoner cannot control about the outcome is the second prisoner’s choice. Suppose the second prisoner remains silent. Then the first prisoner earns the “temptation” payoff (zero years in jail) by confessing but gets a year in jail (the “high” payoff) by remaining silent. The better outcome in this case for the first prisoner is to confess. But suppose, instead, that the second prisoner confesses. Then, once again, the first prisoner is better off confessing (the “low” payoff, or two years in jail) than remaining silent (the “sucker” payoff, or three years in jail). Because the circumstances from the second prisoner’s point of view are entirely symmetrical to the ones described for the first, each prisoner is better off confessing no matter what the other prisoner decides to do.
Those preferences are not only theoretical. When test subjects play the game just once or for a fixed number of rounds without being allowed to communicate, defection by confessing is the common strategy. But when testers play the game for an unknown number of rounds, the most common strategy is tit-for-tat: each begins cooperating by remaining silent, then mimics whatever the other player does. Even more mutual cooperation can emerge in many-person prisoner’s dilemma, provided the players are allowed to play long enough to establish mutual trust. But the research shows that once defection by confessing builds momentum, it cascades throughout the game.
In cycling, as in baseball and other sports, the contestants compete according to a set of rules. The rules of cycling clearly prohibit the use of performance-enhancing drugs. But because the drugs are so effective and many of them are so difficult (if not impossible) to detect, and because the payoffs for success are so great, the incentive to use banned substances is powerful. Once a few elite riders “defect” from the rules (cheat) by doping to gain an advantage, their rule-abiding competitors must defect as well, leading to a cascade of defection through the ranks. Because of the penalties for breaking the rules, however, a code of silence prevents any open communication about how to reverse the trend and return to abiding by the rules.
It was not ever thus. Many riders took stimulants and painkillers from the 1940s through the 1980s. But doping regulations were virtually nonexistent until Tom Simpson, a British rider, died while using amphetamines on the climb up Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France. Even after Simpson’s death, doping controls in the 1970s and 1980s were spotty at best. With no clear sense of what counted as following the rules, few perceived doping as cheating. In the 1990s, though, something happened to alter the game matrix.
The EPO Elixir
That “something” was genetically engineered recombinant erythropoietin: r-EPO. Ordinary EPO is a hormone that occurs naturally in the body. The kidneys release it into the bloodstream, which carries it to receptors in the bone marrow. When EPO molecules bind to those receptors, the marrow pumps out more red blood cells. Chronic kidney disease and chemotherapy can cause anemia, and so the development of the EPO substitute r-EPO in the late 1980s proved to be a boon to chronically anemic patients—and to chronically competitive athletes.
Taking r-EPO is just as effective as getting a blood transfusion, but instead of hassling with bags of blood and long needles that must be poked into a vein, the athlete can store tiny ampoules of r-EPO on ice in a thermos bottle or hotel minifridge, then simply inject the hormone under the skin. The effect of r-EPO that matters most to the competitor is directly measurable: the hematocrit (HCT) level, or the percentage by volume of red blood cells in the blood. More red blood cells translate to more oxygen carried to the muscles. For men, the normal HCT percentage range is in the mid-40s. Trained endurance athletes can naturally sustain their HCT in the high 40s or low 50s. EPO can push those levels into the high 50s and even the 60s. The winner of the 1996 Tour de France, Bjarne Riis, was nicknamed Mr. 60 Percent; last year he confessed that he owed his extraordinary HCT level to r-EPO.
The drug appears to have made its way into professional cycling in the early 1990s. Greg LeMond thinks it was 1991. Having won the Tour de France in 1986, 1989 and 1990, LeMond set his sights on breaking what would then have been a record of five Tour de France victories, and in the spring of 1991 he was poised to take his fourth. “I was the fittest I had ever been, my split times in spring training rides were the fastest of my career, and I had assembled a great team around me,” LeMond told me. “But something was different in the 1991 Tour. There were riders from previous years who couldn’t stay on my wheel who were now dropping me on even modest climbs.”
LeMond finished seventh in that Tour, vowing to himself that he could win clean the next year. It was not to be. In 1992, he continued, “our [team’s] performance was abysmal, and I couldn’t even finish the race.” Nondoping cyclists were burning out trying to keep up with their doping competitors. LeMond recounted a story told to him by one of his teammates at the time, Philippe Casado. Casado learned from a rider named Laurent Jalabert, who was racing for the Spanish cycling team ONCE, that Jalabert’s personal doping program was entirely organized by the ONCE team. That program, LeMond said, included r-EPO, which LeMond refused to take, thereby consigning himself to another DNF (“did not finish”) in 1994, his final race.
Some who did go along with the pressure to dope paid an even higher price. Casado, for instance, left LeMond’s team to join one that had a doping program—and died suddenly in 1995 at age 30. Whether his death resulted directly from doping is not known, but when HCT reaches around 60 percent and higher, the blood becomes so thick that clots readily form. The danger is particularly high when the heart rate slows during sleep—and the resting heart rates of endurance athletes are renowned for measuring in the low 30s (in beats per minute). Two champion Dutch riders died of heart attacks after experimenting with r-EPO. Some riders reportedly began sleeping with a heart-rate monitor hooked to an alarm that would sound when their pulse dropped too low.
Trapped in an Arms Race
Just as in evolution there is an arms race between predators and prey, in sports there is an arms race between drug takers and drug testers. In my opinion, the testers are five years away from catching the takers—and always will be. Those who stand to benefit most from cheating will always be more creative than those enforcing the rules, unless the latter have equivalent incentives. In 1997, because there was no test for r-EPO (that would not come until 2001), the Union Cycliste International (UCI), the sport’s governing body, set an HCT limit for men of 50 percent. Shortly afterward, riders figured out that they could go higher than 50, then thin their blood at test time with a technique already allowed and routinely practiced: injections of saline water for rehydration. Presto change-o.
Willy Voet, the soigneur, or all-around caretaker, for the Festina cycling team in the 1990s, explained how he beat the testers in his tell-all book, Breaking the Chain:
Just in case the UCI doctors arrived in the morning to check the riders’ hematocrit levels, I got everything ready to get them through the tests.... I went up to the cyclists’ rooms with sodium drips.... The whole transfusion would take twenty minutes, the saline diluting the blood and so reducing the hematocrit level by three units—just enough.
This contraption took no more than two minutes to set up, which meant we could put it into action while the UCI doctors waited for the riders to come down from their rooms.
How did the new rules of the doping game change the players’ strategies? I put the question directly to Joe Papp, a 32-year-old professional cyclist currently banned after testing positive for synthetic testosterone. Recalling the day he was handed the “secret black bag,” Papp explained how a moral choice becomes an economic decision: “When you join a team with an organized doping program in place, you are simply given the drugs and a choice: take them to keep up or don’t take them and there is a good chance you will not have a career in cycling.”
When Papp came clean, professional cycling slapped him with a two-year ban. But the social consequences were far worse than that. “The sport spit me out,” he lamented to me. “A team becomes a
Papp was never a Tour-caliber cyclist, however, so perhaps the game matrix—with its implications for the rider’s own cycling career—is different at the elite level. Not so, as I learned from another insider. “For years I had no trouble doing my job to help the team leader,” said Frankie Andreu, who was the superdomestique, or lead pacer, supporting Lance Armstrong throughout much of the 1990s. “Then, around 1996, the speeds of the races shifted dramatically upward. Something happened, and it wasn’t just training.” Andreu resisted the temptation as long as he could, but by 1999 he could no longer do his job: “It became apparent to me that enough of the peloton [the main group of riders in a cycling race] was on the juice that I had to do something.” He began injecting himself with r-EPO two to three times a week. “It’s not like Red Bull, which gives you instant energy,” he explained. “But it does allow you to dig a little deeper, to hang on to the group a little longer, to go maybe 31.5 miles per hour instead of 30 mph.”
The Doping Difference
One of the subtle benefits of r-EPO in a brutal three-week race like the Tour de France is not just boosting HCT levels but keeping them high. Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Armstrong’s, crunched the numbers for me this way: “The big advantage of blood doping is the ability to keep a 44 percent HCT over three weeks.” A “clean” racer who started with a 44 percent HCT, Vaughters noted, would expect to end up at 40 percent after three weeks of racing because of natural blood dilution and the breakdown of red blood cells. “Just stabilizing [your HCT level] at 44 percent is a 10 percent advantage.”
Scientific studies on the effects of performance-enhancing drugs are few in number and are usually conducted on nonathletes or recreational ones, but they are consistent with Vaughters’s assessment. (For obvious reasons, elite athletes who dope are disinclined to disclose their data.) The consensus among the sports physiologists I interviewed is that r-EPO improves performance by at least 5 to 10 percent. When it is mixed in with a brew of other drugs, another 5 to 10 percent boost can be squeezed out of the human engine. In events decided by differences of less than 1 percent, this advantage is colossal.
Italian sports physiologist Michele Ferrari, as knowledgeable on doping as he is controversial (because of his close affiliation with elite athletes who have tested positive for doping or been accused of same), explains it this way: “If the volume of [red blood cells] increases by 10 percent, performance [the rider’s net gain in output of useful kinetic energy] improves by approximately 5 percent. This means a gain of about 1.5 seconds per kilometer for a cyclist pedaling at 50 kilometers per hour in a time trial, or about eight seconds per kilometer for a cyclist climbing at 10 kph on a 10 percent ascent.”
In the Tour de France, those numbers imply that a cyclist who boosts his HCT by 10 percent will cut his own time by 75 seconds in a 50-kilometer (31-mile) time trial, a race typically decided by a few seconds. On any of the numerous 10-kilometer (six-mile) climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees, on grades as steep as 10 percent, that same blood difference would gain the rider a whopping 80 seconds per climb. If any of the top cyclists are on the juice, their erstwhile competitors cannot afford to give away such margins. That is where the game matrix kicks into defection mode.
Nash Equilibrium
In game theory, if no player has anything to gain by unilaterally changing strategies, the game is said to be in a Nash equilibrium. The concept was identified by mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., who was portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind. To end doping in sports, the doping game must be restructured so that competing clean is in a Nash equilibrium. That is, the governing bodies of each sport must change the payoff values of the expected outcomes identified in the game matrix. First, when other players are playing by the rules, the payoff for doing likewise must be greater than the payoff for cheating. Second, and perhaps more important, even when other players are cheating, the payoff for playing fair must be greater than the payoff for cheating. Players must not feel like suckers for following the rules.
In the game of prisoner’s dilemma, lowering the temptation to confess and raising the payoff for keeping silent if the other prisoner confesses increases cooperation. Giving players the chance to communicate before they play the game is the most effective way to increase their cooperation. In sports, that means breaking the code of silence. Everyone must acknowledge there is a problem to be solved. Then drug testing must be done and the results communicated regularly and transparently to all until the test results are clean. That will show each player that the payoff for playing fair is greater than the payoff for cheating, no matter what the other players do.
Here are my recommendations for how cycling (and other sports) can reach a Nash equilibrium in which no one has any incentive to cheat by doping:
- 1. Grant immunity to all athletes for past (pre-2008) cheating. Because the entire system is corrupt and most competitors have been doping, it accomplishes nothing to strip the winner of a title after the fact when it is almost certain that the runners-up were also doping. With immunity, retired athletes may help to improve the antidoping system.
- 2. Increase the number of competitors tested—in competition, out of competition, and especially immediately before or after a race—to thwart countermeasures. Testing should be done by independent drug agencies not affiliated with any sanctioning bodies, riders, sponsors or teams. Teams should also employ independent drug-testing companies to test their own riders, starting with a preseason performance test on each athlete to create a baseline profile. Corporate sponsors should provide additional financial support to make sure the testing is rigorous.
- 3. Establish a reward, modeled on the X prizes (cash awards offered for a variety of technical achievements), for scientists to develop tests that can detect currently undetectable doping agents. The incentive for drug testers must be equal to or greater than that for drug takers.
- 4. Increase substantially the penalty for getting caught: one strike and you’re out—forever. To protect the athlete from false positive results or inept drug testers (both exist), the system of arbitration and appeals must be fair and trusted. Once a decision is made, however, it must be substantive and final.
- 5. Disqualify all team members from an event if any member of the team tests positive for doping. Compel the convicted athlete to return all salary paid and prize monies earned to the team sponsors. The threat of this penalty will bring the substantial social pressures of “
band of brothers ” psychology to bear on all the team members, giving them a strong incentive to enforce their own antidoping rules.
That may sound utopian. But it can work. Vaughters, who is now director of the U.S. cycling team Slipstream/Chipotle, has already started a program of extensive and regular in-house drug testing. “Remember, most of these guys are athletes, not criminals,” he says. “If they believe the rest are stopping [the doping] and feel it in the speed of the peloton, they will stop, too, with a great sigh of relief.”
Hope springs eternal. But with these changes I believe the psychology of the game can be shifted from defection to cooperation. If so, sports can return to the tradition of rewarding and celebrating excellence in performance, enhanced only by an athlete’s will to win.
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