Monday, July 31: RSS -- fine, I give up.

I get like 2 emails / comments per week asking me to enable RSS for this blog.
I always respond in the same way: I'm happy to do it, but have no clue what to do. If someone wants to walk me through it step-by-step, I will gladly enable it. So either email me or leave a comment to this post, and explain it to me as though you were talking to an infant. Not that I'm an idiot, I just want to spend minimal time setting it up.

Thursday, July 27th: Nomad Life

I have moved roughly 10 times in the past 6 years. I don't mean only within the same city, but rather I've packed up everything I own on an annual basis and hauled it up and down the East Coast without the aid of any movers. From what I can figure, I've gone from Canada to Rhode Island, 4 different addresses within RI, to Queens, NY, to Manhattan NY, back to Canada, down to Philadelphia, and now on to Australia.

And while moving sucks a ton, I find it strangely therapeutic to be able to purge myself of all the useless crap I've accumulated, freeing myself of all the miscellaneous odds and ends that serve no real purpose other than to act as a sort of perverse measuring stick of one's progress in life. I don't even want to think about how many days of my life have been lost to the thought process along the lines of "hmmm...I don't THINK I'll need this incandescent floor lamp shaped like David Hasselhoff's left testicle that I bought from that hobo last year for a can of soup......but what if I meet some wicked Baywatch fans in Philadelphia, then I'll really wish I had it...yeah, I better bring it along."

This last move to Australia was a real doozie, though, since there was a fixed limit to how much they'd let me bring, so every one of my possessions either went into one of my 2 duffel bags, or into the trash -- my twin 20-inch monitors sadly were a casualty of the process, although I was able to sell them to a 2+2'er.

It feels good to throw stuff out, albeit a little wasteful, and I still can't bring myself to chuck some things whose utility in my future I am 99% sure will be negligible. I must have thrown out a few thousand dollars worth of useful stuff in this move, but it felt like a weight off my shoulders -- a mix of regret, nostalgia, yet satisfaction that I've reached a stage in life where I can afford to dispose of belongings that I had once paid good money for.

My first reaction to Australia: everybody here is Asian. Seriously. It is also the dead of winter here (although that simply means that the temperature is in the mid-50's.) Nonetheless, any visions I had of bronze-bodied Australian surfgirls servicing me while I hunt kangaroos with poison-tipped boomerangs were quickly dispelled. The coolest poker-related thing about being here? Probably that with the time change being EST + 14 hrs, peak poker-playing hours are between 8am and 3pm local time...why is that good? Because the hardest thing about getting in enough hours on the East Coast of the USA was that playing at peak times nearly always came at the expense of going out with friends, etc. -- here, on the other hand, I can wake up and play from 9am to noon, for example, then call it a day and simply enjoy myself the rest of the day/night without "missing" any peak poker hours when I go out.

I signed for a nice little studio on the beach -- Not much of a view from the apartment itself, but I walk outside and am greeted by this:




I still can't believe that I live here! There's also a really nice little 9-hole golf course quite literally 5 minutes down the road, only costs $15 / 9 holes, and since it's low tourist season here, I'm looking forward to playing a few rounds / week to improve my game. The first week was a little lonely, when it started to sink in that I didn't know anyone in this entire city, let alone this hemisphere, but I've actually made a few decent friends here now, so hopefully all will be well on the social front going forward. Biggest regret is that my travel down here has precluded me from playing in this year's WSOP in Vegas...oh well, maybe next year.

Thursday, July 20th: The Golden Age of Online Poker?

"How much money is enough?"

That's the question that I think lies at the epicenter of the Poker Opportunity Cost theory I've written about before...and although the question begs an answer in the form of a simple dollar figure, I'm just not so sure that it's all that clear-cut. I don't like what I see happening to a good portion of the new generation of youth (god, I sound like my dad) who think that poker is the answer to their life's finances -- a couple weeks ago, I hung out with an acquaintance in his late teens who plays a lot at the medium-stakes, and had no shame in crowing loudly in front of his friends about how he anticipated earning $180,000 to $220,000 that year, and his friends were only all too familiar with the new Lexus he had just bought for $30,000 in straight cash. It's not that it's ostentatious or pompous (god knows we've all had our moments) -- it's just downright disrespectful to talk that way in front of friends who have to work a side job to make ends meet, or who are 6-figures in debt because of their educations. I know I must come off as pretty self-ritcheous with that statement, but there's nothing that bothers me more than this new breed of successful poker youth whose poker success has left them utterly oblivious to the rest of the modern world's conception of money. I've written about it before, but as I gradually moved up in stakes, I began to talk about poker less and less with my friends until it got to the point where many of them ask me if I still even play all that much (to which I answer 'no' because it's just easier that way.) I'd rather have them think of me as just a guy who got lucky and then lost most of his winnings back than as someone who regularly wagers pretty significant sums of money -- the truth of the matter is that there are probably under 20 days this year where I didn't win or lose more than $1,000 -- that's simply NOT NORMAL! You might say I'm a bit hypocritical for making that announcement after just expressing my distaste for youth who throw big numbers in their friends' faces, but understand that that's one of the greatest benefits of this blog (for me)...a more or less anonymous audience to discuss the ups and downs of higher-stakes poker without worrying about how it makes me come off in front 'normals'.

So just how much money IS enough? At what point do you say to yourself 'ok, I've made enough this day/week/month, I'm going to spend the rest of the day/month/week on more social or educational pursuits.' I won't deny that I actually have a difficult time with the eminently reasonable point that nobody knows how long this online poker 'boom' will last (because of better bots, legislation, waning interest, etc.) and that there is a pretty strong appeal to the argument that I should 'make hay while the sun shines': e.g. maybe play a lot more than I actually want to over the next couple years to build myself a nest egg for when this poker thing starts to fade. Is this the "Golden Age" of online poker, or have we not even scratched the surface of the kinds of profits that will be made?

I find the easest way to approach these questions is by starting at the extremes, and gradually narrowing the range. Let's say I won the PowerBall jackpot for $100 Million. Would I even play any more? Without the financial incentive, I think I'd find it pretty hard to justify spending more than an hour or two each week clicking away playing poker; in fact, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't play at all. It's the classic question that schoolteachers pose to their grade school students: what would you do for a living if you never had to worry about money again? (I can promise you this: the halls of our nation's law schools would be substantially emptier than they are today.) Now on to the other extreme end of the continuum: given that I'm NOT rich, would I be happy never playing poker again, knowing that I'm passing up on a pretty penny? Heck no. There's no denying that online poker is a boring F'in way to spend one's life. Socially alienating, not all that worthwhile to society as a whole (not that I think it's any worse in that regard than other careeers whose contribution to society is equally negligible, although I don't care to enter that quagmire here), and employing such a limited percentage of our intuitive and creative faculties. But damnit if it also isn't the golden-egg-du-jour, creating a whole new generation of wealthy yet one-dimensional humans walking around. I wish I had an answer, but for now I think I'm limited to framing the boundaries of the dilemma: just what is the optimal amount of time to devote to this lucrative and sometimes-enjoyable pursuit? 100% is clearly incorrect, as is 0%.

In other words, as we gradually move in from those extremes, just when do I reach the point where I say "hold on, the money I'm going to make playing this next hand just isn't worth the opportunity cost of enjoying the time I'm missing out on pursuing other life pleasures." I suppose that a rigid economist would simply call it the point of diminishing returns, but "life enjoyment" isn't exactly the easiest label to slap on the axis of a coordinate chart. I'll try to map out my own philosophy, although in no way do I claim it's the 'correct' one...I also acknowledge that it can't necessarily be extrapolated to everyone, since it's necessarily tailored to my own financial situation. I guess you could call the following a life/poker-mission statement, although I've never tried to do anything like this, so I'll probably stumble through it.

I try to play as much poker as I can, until I reach the point where I feel like it's being destructive to more social domains of my life. The rub of course is that it's hard to know when that point has been reached. I'm not proud to say that there have been perhaps 10 to 20 nights over the past year where I've gone to bed, and as I lay there trying to fall asleep could not get out of my head that I'd completely wasted that entire day/night, when I should have been out having fun. It's not even a function of whether I win or lose that particular day; it's just a persistent feeling that when I'm old and wrinkled, I'm going to look back on my youth and will no doubt wish that I could give back every penny to my name for just one more day in my youth, to enjoy myself while I was young and energetic and care-free. And there I was lying in bed after essentially wasting 8 hours of that precious time clicking buttons on a computer screen (I'll leave the question of whether more traditional non-poker employment...oh, let's say as a lawyer...would leave me feeling the same way for another day.) So it's that state of downright self-loathing that I consider to be the ultimate symptom that I pushed myself beyond the point of diminishing returns. But if I can re-spin the above as a 'positive', sure I'm not proud of those 10 or 15 days, but you know what: I'm pretty pleased that I kept it to only 10 to 15...in the grand scheme of things (and given my somewhat compulsive feelings toward poker), if I can look back on an entire year of my life and think to myself "you know what? I know that I've got a personality that lends itself very easily to over-indulging on gambling, and I think I kept it 'in check' except for a measly one or two weeks, and had an absolute ball the rest of the time, I think I've done a pretty damn good job. I remember after I got off the week-long Party Poker cruise in the Carribean, I was sitting in the airport waiting for my flight home and there were a half dozen other young guys from the cruise waiting there too and they all had their laptops open playing 4 tables as they waited for their flights. I remember thinking: god, is your addiction to this thing really so great that the very first thing you can think of after getting off this amazing cruiseship that docked in Grand Cayman and Jamaica, is "man, I can't wait to open up a bunch of online poker tables!" (Not to mention that it was a poker cruise, and they'd spent nearly all of their free time either eating or in the ship's poker room.) It was a bit of a wakeup call for me...or maybe more accurately -- arrogance alert -- a reminder that I thought I'd found a pretty good balance for myself between enjoying life, appreciating the academic challenges of law school (some of the time), and enjoying the time I spend playing poker and the financial benefts that come along with it. For me, that equation came to a little less than 5,000 hands / week...or in the neighborhood of 20 to 24 hours. Of course that's an ever-changing equation, one that was certainly turned upside down this past week when I either packed up all my worldly possessions that would fit into 2 duffel bags, sold or threw out the rest, and hopped a flight to Australia for the rest of the year. Should be interesting...

Thursday, July 13th: A Confederacy of Dunces

So some people have written me asking for my take on the latest internet gambling legislation that recently passed the House. I actually watched C-SPAN for the first time in my life during debate about the bill. Here are my thoughts on the bill and a summary of the relevant provisions, but despite my legal eduaction, don't take this as anything other than a layman's editorial.

1) First off, this bill does NOT prohibit online gambling. It merely regulates how people can fund their online gambling/poker accounts. All it does is prohibit US financial instutions like banks and credit cards from processing transactions with offshore gaming sites. News flash: this doesn't actually change anything. If you tried using your credit card to deposit at a site any time in the last 5 years, you're probably already aware that nearly all US credit card companies haven't allowed transactions to poker sites since 2000 or so. Some sites used to have direct bank transfers available (and still do; e.g. IGMpay with Party Poker), but if this bill passes the Senate and is signed into law then those will come to an end. So guys like me (and you) aren't going to have any trouble continuing to use Neteller or other methods to fund our accounts, but the concern is that any measure that makes it less likely that Joe Blow with a "real job" will drop a few hundred into his poker account on the weekend is bad news. Will it kill online poker? Absolutely not, but it might somewhat impede the willingness of fish (at least American fish) to play.

2) Secondly, we're still very far from seeing this signed into law. What happened yesterday had been fully expected for months...so the bill has essentially passed phase I and II. Phase I: it made it out of "committee" (this is where a bunch of House reps simply talk about the bill and decide what provisions to include...more often than not, the reps can't come to an agreement, and the bill dies here. That it actually made it out of committee was more of a surprise than what happened yesterday.) Phase II: It was approved by a full vote of the 435-member (i think?) House -- like I said, really not a surprise, it had pretty broad support from both Republicans and Democrats, although since it was sponsored by 2 Republicans, the Democrat approval was narrower (about 2:1 in favor of the bill, whereas Republicans were almost unanimous in their support.) Most previous bills seeking to regulate online gambling have died in committee...the reason this is causing a stir is that it's more or less the furthest a bill like this has ever gotten.

So what's next?
Phase III: The bill must now be voted on by the Senate, the other body of Congress for you non-Yankees. Well, actually Phase III-a is that the bill must actually make it to the Senate for a vote...if they have too much other stuff to do, the bill might not make it there before the current Congress expires later this year...other people have written that if that happens, then the bill dies, but I'm not so sure that's the case...I don't see why a bill would be completely dismissed from the Congressional docket simply because it isn't voted on by mid-term election time. But again, I'm just not sure. But assuming it does make it through for a full vote by the Senate, well there is not a clear consensus on how most Senators feel about it right now...my personal intuition is that it would pass the Senate if it made it to a vote...Republicans would feel inclined to vote for it because it was sponsored by Republicans in the House of Reps. and was supported nearly unanimously by other House Republicans...and I think there are enough conservative-leaning Democrats who would vote for it...certainly enough to outweigh any rogue Republicans who opposed it...
Phase IV is that it has to get signed into law by the President, but once a bill has been approved by both the House and Senate, this is really just a formality...a Presidential veto would be highly, highly unlikely.
(Tenative) Phase V is that it would have to survive a Constitutional challenge in court, which I can nearly guarantee would be filed almost immediately after the bill is signed into law, if it gets that far. I'm not entirely sure how likely such a challenge would be to succeed, because the bill doesn't really abridge a protected freedom: there's no constitutionally-protected right to gamble, and certainly not to gamble online. Bottom line is that the government can outlaw it completely (like alcohol during Prohibition) and we wouldn't really have much to say about it.

3) Let's be clear on one thing: this bill is NOT designed to "protect the children", which was the preposterous rationale crowed about in the political rhetoric. It was almost sickening to see the House Reps try and play on peoples' hearstrings during the debate with tales of students who lost so much gambling that they killed themselves or robbed a bank (in one ridiculous and isolated case). If that truly is the purpose of the bill, it will be one of the worst and least effective pieces of legislation ever passed...after all, there are explicit exceptions in the bill for betting on horse-racing, and interstate lotteries. Wait, so you're telling me that you want to 'protect the children' from the evils of online poker and sports betting, but that gambling on horses and State lotteries somehow doesn't pose the same threats? Please. There is one reason, and one reason only that those were excluded from the bill's language -- the politicians crafting the bill realized that it would never pass if they were included: horse-racing has very influential and wealthy lobbyists in D.C. -- not a group you really want to alienate -- and States derive so much income from their State lotteries that they'd never support anything that cut into that revenue stream. So sports gambling and online poker become the whipping-boys of choice. No, what this bill is about is the US government getting its cut in tax revenue. Reps. Goodlatte, Leache, and Sensenbrenner, in defending the bill on the House Floor tried to keep their arguments about "protecting the children", but every once in a while would let a few words slip about how much money was flowing out of the United States and into the coffers of "fly-by-night" and "unregulated" offshore gaming companies, leaving no doubt about what the real motivation for this bill is: the ultimate REGULATION of online gambling within this country's borders so that they'll be able to reap the BILLIONS of tax dollars they're missing out on because they're being drained by offshore gaming companies. Now I'm not saying that everything would be just hunky-dory if they admitted that's what the real driving force for this legislation was -- admittedly, I'd still be pretty exasperated -- but I just hate the hypocrisy of it all. How are opponents of the bill supposed to rationally and logically express their opposition if its sponsors are intentionally or negligently misleading about what their real motivatioons are?

Anyway, that's a brief synopsis of what's going down on that front.

Thursday, July 6th: Into the Abyss

Ugh -- hopefully this little 10-day hiatus from posting was a mere aberration. I just hadn't really been feeling in the mood to write about poker, lately. Why? Well, 2 weeks ago I wrote about having an utterly terrible day at the tables: to the tune of -$20,000. Not fun but of course it would turn around, like it always does, right?

Wrong.

The next day was another -$10K loss. And the following day another -$12K. And another 5-figure loss the day after that. Those types of numbers don't exactly inspire the journalistic muse, and hence I needed a little time to let my thoughts about this all coalesce.

While I may seem to refer to these big numbers casually, make no mistake about it: this is a very big deal to me. I may play high-stakes, but for a guy who had only rarely lost more than $5,000 in a single day, to check your numbers and see $60,000 less money to your name than you had a week prior, well, that's not chump change. To say it was confidence-shaking would be a grave understatement -- I went through all the typical 'bad beat' emotions: "geez that was a bad beat," "wow I've never run so bad", "is this even possible?" "have I just been really really lucky up to this point?", etc, etc. All pretty juvenile thoughts when it comes right down to it, but like all people who have run bad at one point or another, they seem perfectly rational at the time. I won't torment anyone with bad beat stories here -- I just ran bad, and that's really all you can say about it. Rather, I think it might prove more worthwhile to my readership here (and more productive for my own psyche) if I jot down some thoughts about how I've been handling the pscyhologically-draining mindset that goes along with a tough stretch of cards -- and man, this was a doozy.

First thing I did was to read some 2+2 threads from winning players who ran especially bad. It just acts as a reminder that it's normal! I spent a lot of time reading through this thread, which describes an apparent 1,500 big bet downswing from a supposedly winning limit player. Now remember: the general consensus is that you should have a 300 big bet (BB) bankroll for whatever stakes you play (in lmit at least), so the mere idea that a winning player could have a 1500 BB swoon is practically incomprehensible. But if nothing else, it drives home the point that there's absolutely nothing magical about that 300 BB benchmark. after all, if you acknowledge that 300 big-bets is possible, then think of the entire universe of people who have gone through 300bb downswings. Of that population, surely there are going to be more than a couple who endure a second 300BB downswing immediately on the heels of their first, n'est-ce-pas?

I also literally forced myself to take 4 or 5 days completely away from the game -- this is a pretty cliche piece of advice, but I finally understand just why it makes so much sense. It's not, as I used to think, simply to prevent tilt, or to stop the bleeding / freefall. Rather, it helps me to avoid getting into bad habits. I can't remember ever having 5 straight losing days, let alone 5 straight of the magnitude that I dealt with last month, but one of the most dangerous mindsets that I've ever been in, I've found, is one where I simply expect to lose. I'll sit down and literally prepare myself to drop 60 - 80 BBs, an unhealthy mindset if there ever was one. And you know something weird: when I finally did get back to playing, it was as though the horror of the previous week had all been a dream. And in many ways it was a complete hallucination. After all, I was the same exact person that I had been before my losses...was I really going to let the number in my Neteller or bank account define what kind of person or poker player I am? When you get right down to it, there are very things in life as insignificant as the number in your bank account...and it just seemed so foolish to have let that get me so down, when it had exactly zero tangible effect on my life.

Anyhow, I'm rambling now, so I'll cut this post short...didn't really feel like it was going anywhere. In case you're wondering, I'm actually around 2/3 of the way out of that unspeakable hole I dug for myself...so hopefully one of these days this will all just be a distant memory: a war story I can tell about how I lost my entire annual salary from a few years back in 5 measly days. Geez, it boggles the mind to just think about it, and really drives home how far I've come with this game in just the last year and a half. I'll post again soon, hopefully something more substantive than the above...forgive me: it's 4:30 in the morning, and I've been working on something extraordinarily exciting that I'll be ready to reveal here in the not-too-distant future.