How (and how not) to cheat in in online poker. Related: confessions of a golf hustler. At MetaFilter.

“Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?”

Using the Eliot Spitzer story as his hook, Philip Weiss takes on love, marriage, cheating, and divorce in New York Magazine, against wise counsel: You can go against it in life, but don’t speak against it. The article has a lot of anecdotes masquerading as data, but I was struck by details such as this one:

Consider the Website meet2cheat, in which married people find one another for recreational sex; it charges $59 for a man’s three-month entry fee, $9 for a woman. Cheating wives are harder to come by.

Of course it rather quickly descends into an if only... if only... dream of free-love sextopia, but these things always do.

Via MeFi.

I won't even mention what happened to the Mets, because I'm sure it's still a little too real for people, but I will take a break from my usual ban on sportsblogging to say that the situation with the Patriots reads to me like an interesting non-political example of what happens when the media sees its interests (i.e., its profit) aligned with those organizations that it's supposed to be independent of and in some ways oppositional towards. ESPN loses money, too, when people become disgusted with the NFL—and so what by all rights should be a huge scandal is swept entirely under the rug. (A fine of $500,000 is nothing. I'm no expert, but sounds to me like Belichick and maybe others in the Patriots' head coaching staff should be banned from the sport.)

So good on the Jets ticket holder class action lawsuit.

And in lighter news, the U.S. is once again the top dealer of arms to the developing world. (Via my brother and Frinibarf)