Hi,
I'm applying now to hopefully start a CS PhD in September 2012. Things about me:
1) BS from Brown in math in May 2008. Got straight A's taking almost all math and physics. (Came to Brown intending to major in physics, but moved to math. Now wish I'd majored in CS obv.)
2) I took 3 CS courses in undergrad: a) An intro to C for non-CS majors that was really easy (CS4 for people who know Brown)
An intro to programming in general through Java for CS majors that's considered to be pretty hard (CS15)
c) A class on algorithms--turing machines, decidability, complexity theory (CS51)
3) I TAed the aforementioned algorithms class. I think that I'd like to research algorithms and complexity theory as a PhD student.
4) I did summer research as an undergrad at the University of Minnesota in combinatorics. I didn't find anything interesting, but did manage to write one paper and get an authorship in another. Neither was published anywhere but the prof's website of course.
5) After finishing undergrad, I went on to become a professional online poker player. I was pretty successful at this.
6) About a year ago, I became interested in the problem of catching poker cheaters. I started by undertaking a monthish-long project to catch a prominent poker cheater on my own using statistics and information that I gathered from the poker community.
7) Since, I've done a bunch of different related things. Uncovered a bunch of cheating scandals.
8) I was hired by a poker site along with a friend to undertake by far the largest independent audit ever done on a poker site using our own statistical methodology and scripts that we wrote ourselves. To test our methodology before accepting the gig, we (mostly my friend) created poker AIs that cheated against each other to run blinded tests, which were very successful. We gave the site a clean bill of health, but some of the incidental false positives that we found proved that our method was extremely sensitive and worked well in the wild.
9) Took a grad-level compiler design course taught by a famous prof and got an A. I wrote a pretty cool compiler for this class, IMO, and the prof will write me a recommendation.
10) Not sure where my other recommendations will come from yet. I had professors who wrote me great recommendations in both math and physics in undergrad, but I've not kept in touch. I'm not sure what the profs that I did research with at University of Minnesota thought of me.
11) Over the summer, I started with a friend a very successful website uncovering some of the darker areas in the poker world. After doing so, I've been featured in various articles, podcasts, etc. in poker-related media, and I've gotten a few mentions in mainstream media, though nothing incredibly impressive.
12) I've yet to take the general or subject test GRE. Given how my practice tests have been going, though, I expect to do near-perfect on both the general and math subject test.
So, can I get into tier one or tier two schools with this resume? Is there anything that I should be doing right now to further my chances?
(I am very easily googleable from what I've listed here. Feel free to google me, but please don't post my name or any links to things with my name here. I'm not incredibly concerned about anonymity, but I figure I might as well preserve anonymity for now at least.)