L O S T, Hoyas and a Another NLH Tidbit

L O S T

Wow. What an episode. I mean, even though the entire script had been basically released and known to all of the spoiler sites by the day or two preceding Wednesday night's airing of the Season III finale of Lost on ABC, the show itself still delivered to my expectations when I actually saw it all shake out. I'm not going to do a big rehash here in case anyone hasn't seen it or, more applicably, in case some of you somehow don't watch the best show of the last decade-plus and just aren't interested. But let me just provide this list of some of the interesting questions and issues left open or raised from this episode:

1. Whose funeral was this that Jack attended? Many of the blogs and other Lost sites out there are suggesting Kate's father in law, whom she burned in a previous lifetime, or maybe Sawyer or another member of the Losties' crew. I don't see how it could ever be Kate's father in law, as Jack knew nothing of the man and would not possibly have had the reaction that he did to reading the obituary in the newspaper. But I have no clue whose funeral that was, other than maybe that it could have been the funeral of another person who was on the island with them. Kate's visceral reaction ("Why would I ever go to the funeral, Jack?") suggests that it's not someone she was close with there, but I really don't know what that means, and I wish I did.

2. Who does Kate have to "get back to" at the end? Who is that who's going to wonder where she is? Again a number of outlets have suggested that this is maybe her father in law in some other time, or perhaps another U.S. Marshal sent to capture her. Again I don't really see these possibilities as realities since Kate would not say she has to get back to a Marshall (they would never have let her out to visit Jack like that anyways) and similarly would not have been speaking of her father in law in that way. I suppose it could be Sawyer, assuming Kate and he ended up together, but I've always been of the mind that Kate and Jack may end up together in some way, so I don't know that I believe that either. I don't even really know what to make of this question, or, frankly, if it is even important specifically who she has to get back to.

3. Why does Jack multiple times refer to his father being alive still, if this is truly Lost's first flash-forward after three seasons of flash-backs? In fact, why did Naomi tell the Losties just a few weeks ago that Oceanic Airlines went out of business a few weeks after the crash of Flight 815, and yet we see Jack flying on Oceanic at the beginning of the flash-forward, and he and Kate discuss the "golden passes" that Oceanic gave them for surviving the crash, and how Jack flies across the Pacific every single weekend in a blind attempt to get back to the island. I don't have any good explanation for this, other than two possibilities, one of which I bet is correct on some level. First, maybe Naomi has been lying, which is entirely possibly since she clearly is not who she says she is -- I don't see how or why Penny would lie and say she doesn't know Naomi -- in which case maybe Naomi made up everything about what happened in the Losties' original timeline after the crash, and thus there is nothing odd about Jack flying on Oceanic after being rescued from the island. But this does nothing to explain why Jack's father might be alive and a practicing physician again in the flash-forward. Which brings me to explanation #2, which is again that there is some kind of temporal or dimensional transport going on here.

4. Why would Ben tell his Other companions to only pretend shoot Jack's friends, instead of really shooting them? This seems minor compared to some of those larger issues above, but what was Ben's end game with that move? I don't get it.

Some cool theories or tidbits I've read out there on the Internets regarding the finale and information we learned in the finale:

1. The woman Jack killed by leaving his car on the bridge when he was about to kill himself is in fact the big mistake that Jack makes in his life, ultimately leading to his presence on the island in the first place, in another time period. There are a lot of holes to this theory that still need to be filled in, but basically it posits that all of the main characters on the island seem to have messed up somewhere, made some terrible decision, in their past lives before arriving at the island. On some level this has given rise to all the theories about the island really being heaven, or purgatory, or something like that, and that these people are here to atone for their sins in some form or another. Well, up to this finale we have been led to believe that Jack's big issue has been the bungled relationship with his father, or perhaps his infidelity to and ultimately split from his ex-wife. Now we see that perhaps killing this woman (they referred to her as the "Alden girl" a few times I believe, does that name ring a bell to anyone? It is not immediately familiar to me.)

2. The Losties are somehow caught in a temporal loop of some time, not to sound all TNG'ish on you. That is, they are each somehow caught in a loop where they are sent to this island, and continue to make mistakes rather than properly live out their right destinies on the island, and are thereby doomed to repeatedly be brought to the island, with no memory of their past lives and past trials there, in an attempt to "get it right". Again, this is really just a bare bones theory with a lot of details still to be filled in, but it appears to have a lot of support out there among the die-hard Lost fanbase. So, for example, Desmond is not really seeing the future with all of these premonitions. Instead, because of his proximity to the hatch and the button when the electromagnetism shot out and took down the Losties' plane originally, he is merely able to see some of the various "other" visits this group has all made to the island in past travels here, where many of the exact same decisions are made. Simlarly, those two skeletons sitting in the caves when the Losties first moved to the caves with the fresh running water back in season I, those two skeletons are actually Jack and Kate's skeletons, there from a prior visit by these same characters to the island in a previous attempt to correctly live out their destinies there, which also failed which is why the group is back there again for our viewing of the Lost series. Another nice aspect of this theory is that when the chica tells Charlie underwater in the finale this week that the code to the communications jamming equipment "was written by a musician", in reality that code was written by Charlie, in a previous, and yet unremembered, time at the island. In the same way, the whispering is Losties from other timelines, possibly trying to communicate with one another and help each other figure out what to change this time around.

3. This may all be a Dharma experiment. They are purposely guiding the Losties in this temporal or dimensional loop. Pressing the button kept them in the loop. It was all Dharma's doing. Once Desmond blew the hatch, he gained this power to see into the other timelines. Suddenly, he could change the future. He warned Charlie about his death, so Charlie got the marker and wrote the list. Because of this, Charlie has the pen in the looking glass station and was able to warn desmond it isn't Penny's boat. Maybe the future was changed in this episode as a result? Also, the hatch blast shot Desmond back to before he met Penny. This worried Dharma as their experiment can only go on with Desmond setting sail and crashing on the island to press the button. To this end, Dharma has sent agents traveling through time (such as the old woman from Desmond's 'ring' episode) to guide Desmond to meet Penny. The old woman might not be the only agent traveling in and out of timelines.

4. Staying on the alternate dimension theme I've been on for several weeks now, maybe being rescued by Naomi's people has led Jack and Kate (and others?) to be "returned", but returned to a different timeline, a different reality, than the one they came from (where they are already dead from the plane crash, per Naomi). In other words, Jack is thrust back into a world where his father is still alive and Oceanic Airlines is still in operation, and Kate is returned to a state where she is not currently under pursuit by U.S. Marshals for her crimes. In fact, the kicker of this theory is that the reason that Jack is so utterly depressed and hopeless after his rescue from the island is that he knows he is not in his "right" timeline. His father is alive and he feels completely out of place and lost (pun intended). Kate, on the other hand, is happier in her "new" place in the space-time continuum (I just had to work that phrase into this post somehow), as she is no longer being chased and at risk of going to jail, and thus she does not share Jack's desire to go back and make things right at the island.

I think that is all I'm going to get to today, but as always on Thursday mornings Mr. Goat is in da house with this take on the world, Lost-wise, so go check him out, always a great read when it comes to our favorite televsion series.

In other news relevant to me in Hammer Land, word is out as of Wednesday afternoon that star Georgetown forward and 2006-07 Big East Player of the Year Jeff Green will leave the school and begin selecting an agent immediately as he plans to remain in the NBA draft and forego his senior year of eligibility at Georgetown. That is too bad, but I think moreso for Jeff Green and less so for my alma mater. Jeff Green is not ready for the NBA yet (I doubt he will ever be), but his presence will be replaceable on this Georgetown team. I mean, Green had a nice career and a great junior season at Georgetown, but his game is not one that is overpowing in any aspect. He's a good scorer (14 ppg led the team this year), a good rebounder (6 rpg) and a decent passer (3 assists per game), but in college basketball these days, numbers like that are not irreplaceable. Especially when you've got the second part of Wednesday's big announcement out of the basketball team in the DC area -- 7-foot-2 big man center Roy Hibbert will, in fact, return to the Hoyas for his senior season. Now, to be sure Hibbert has got a lot of work to do and a lot of improvement to undergo if he expects to be NBA-ready after one more year of college ball. But, he will almost surely have his best year as a college player as a senior in 2007-08, and his presence should make the absence of Green under the boards feel more or less non-existent. Similarly, Jessie Sapp and Jonathan Wallace, both returning next season as well, basically averaged as many or more assists per game already than Green, so I really think the biggest deficit with the 2007-08 version of the Hoyas will be on the scoring front, and more than that, on the leadership front as Green really seemed to be the guy to take a lot of those must-have shots late in games during the Hoyas' late-season stretch run. Whether the team will actually be better next year remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain -- if Roy Hibbert has the game, and the guts, to be a real leader for this team in the coming season, not only will he personally go far in his quest to go at the top of the pecking order in the 2008 NBA draft, but the team is in for great things in the coming season as well.

Today before I go I thought I would throw in another little tidbit from David Sklansky's recent work on no-limit holdem, this one about preflop raise-sizing. Those of you who have read a lot of poker books will be familiar with the common views and strategies on sizing your preflop raises in nlh. The most common refrain on this point is to always use the same or similar size for any preflop raises, on the thinking that this way no one can ever glean any useful information about the quality of your starting hand from the way you bet it. This is a strategy that I have followed often, in particular in nlh tournaments. Then Phil Gordon's Little Green Book came along and changed my thinking somewhat on preflop raise-sizes. Gordon argued for a slightly modified approach, one where you also always raise the same amount in similar situations, but where you raise less from up front, an average amount (around 3x) from middle positions, and more, maybe as much as 3.5x to 4x) from late position. There is good logic to this preflop raising strategy as well, and many players I know of -- again, myself included on occasion -- have adopted this or a similar strategy based on different size raises not based on different quality hands so much as on different positions from which you are raising with those same hands.

In his no-limimt book, Sklansky turns this idea on its head by explaining that it is preposterous not to raise certain types of hands more or less than other types of hands based on the nature of the hand and their capacity to win big or small pots. Sklansky classifies starting hands with some promise as either "big pot" hands or "small pot" hands, referring to the likely size of the pot you can win with such a starting hand. For example, according to Sklansky, flopping a set is the classic "big pot" scenario, where you play 44 against a guy with AK on a flop of AK4, and you proceed to stack his ass from here to China in a large pot. In such a situation, when you are dealt a small or medium pocket pair, Sklanksy argues that your best chance of stacking someone in a large pot is going to be if you put in a significant raise preflop. Now, obviously you can't go around bumping it up 10x every time you see a pocket pair before the flop in no-limit holdem cash games, but at the same time Sklansky argues for a somewhat larger raise than "normal" with this sort of a hand under the right circumstances. He gives a good mathematical explanation for how even a $50 larger preflop raise can lead to a $200 larger flop bet, and $600 or more larger bets on the turn and river than if a small preflop raise is used instead, mostly because bets on later streets in deep stack nlh tend to be based on the current size of the pot, which of course includes all previous raises into that pot from before the flop came down.

Sklansky contrasts such a "big pot" hand like a pocket pair -- another fine example is a soooted Ace which can nail a big flush -- with a hand like AK, which Sklansky explains to be a classic "small pot" hand. He classifies AK in this way because, Sklansky argues, you can rarely win a big pot with a hand like AK, but your best chance for a profit is against a dominated hand like AQ or AJ, hands which are more likely to fold if you put in a large preflop raise. So with a "small pot" hand like AK, the argument goes, you are better off putting in a somewhat smaller than "normal" sized raise before the flop, than you are with some of the other hands mentioned above.

The net of all this is to say that Sklansky presents I think a very strong argument for actually varying your raise sizes in big-stack nlh cash games based on the strength of your hand preflop, much in contradiction to the advice provided in the vast majority of poker books in my experience (and I've basically read them all). Of course one must always be careful not to be too robotic in one's application of these rules, lest someone pick up on your preflop raise-sizing tendencies and be able to tell the nature of your starting hand by how much you raised it up preflop. Here Sklansky just makes the very correct observation that, if done correctly and at appropriate times, just a little bit of misdirection on this front -- raising larger with more typical "small pot" hands, and vice versa -- is enough to completely prevent your opponents from being able to get a good handle on the kinds of starting cards you hold in your hand.

Real quick, congrats to Willwonka (I hope that link is right since I never know which wonka is which) for taking down the Mookie last night. I did not play due to Lost, but this week's finale means that, starting next Wednesday, I will be back in the house in a big way and ready to take my shot at my first-ever Mookie title. Will I meet my goal of winning a Mookie sometime during 2007? Only time will tell.