LSD's poker blog

March 2nd: Epilogue

2008-03-03T00:07:00.005-05:00

No, this won't be any sort of return to regular blogging I'm sorry to say, but I have received enough gently-prodding emails asking how things have turned out for me since my last post that I think there's enough of an audience to make an update worthwhile. But I caution in advance that this post probably will probably raise more questions than answers; i.e. I don't think it's going to provide any sort of "closure", at least not in the same way that the last few posts I made before ending the blog. It will be more of a "where-are-they-now" update to give people a glimpse into what I've been up to for the past little while. If you are just discovering this blog for the first time, well it was regularly updated for approximately 3 years, until I decided to stop writing in early 2007, but the archives are (in my hardly-impartial opinion) a treasure-trove just sitting around waiting to be read, and I hope you'll find them worth your time.

Much has happened in 12 months. Where to begin...hmmm. Well, let's talk poker, specifically the 2007 WSOP. I left for Vegas with what I thought were realistic goals:
(i) Play as well as you're able;
(ii) have fun.

That's it. I'm not a tournament player, and I know it. But I figured that with my life being one big question mark, who knew when the next time was that I was going to be able to simply take a 3-week trip to Vegas in the middle of the summer, so I set out for the desert looking for a good time. First WSOP tourney I played in was one of the truly memorable experiences of my life. 900 entrants and I made the final table, and enjoyed 5 minutes of fame on ESPN. Instead of trying to rehash the entire rollercoaster from memory, I've dug up the email that I wrote to friends/family after the first-day of play, and I'm re-copying it here. It's extremely long, but hey, if you've got nothing better to do, give it a read if you want a first-hand account of what it's like to run hot in your first WSOP event ever. If you don't give a hoot about this, skip it and resume reading below.

Subject: "My 9 WSOP Lives"
Body: Alright, you're receiving this email because you've expressed an interest in, contributed to, or otherwise enjoyed the fruits of my degeneracy. I thought I'd keep some of you entertained with periodic reports on me in vegas. It's long, though, so read at your leisure. And if you don't like poker (or me), it will be very boring. Cliff's Notes: I entered my first WSOP NL event today, and right now I'm around 7th in chips out of the 81 remaining players (from around 900 who started).

First of many lives: With about 400 people left, I'm shortstacked and move all-in with 77. One other guy calls and shows AQ, but doesn't hit either, and I double-up, but I still don't have that many chips.

Second life: Still severely shortstacked with 350 or so people left, I move in with AK and get called by a guy with 99. No help for me on the flop, but an ace comes on the turn and again I double-up, but these are the only hands I'm getting so I'm still way shortstacked. I went an entire level and a half (that's 90 minutes) without playing a single hand. I'm doing well being patient, but leaking a ton of chips gradually because of the blinds.

Third life: This one should have sent me to the rail -- with around 300 left, I move in with AT and get called by the tournament chip-leader who shows AJ and I'm in rough shape...first 4 cards come come 22Q9...when no T comes on the river, I start standing up and say "good hand, good luck everybody..." before realizing that the A on the river gave me a chop of the pot since his kicker J no longer played. Whew.

Fourth life: I push with pocket fours and get called by the very same tournament chip leader who shows AK. He hits neither and I double up again. It must seem like I'm doubling up all the time and that my stack would be huge, but i'm getting ZERO other playable hands other than these all-ins and just losing chips to blinds and antes in the meantime so I'm not getting any traction and my chipstack is perpetually at around 6 to 9 times the big blind.

Fifth life: With around 200 ppl left, I move all in vs. the other table shortstack. I have 77 and he has KQ but hits neither. Like all the previous "lives" this would have knocked me out too, had he hit his K or Q. But I'm running good at coin-flips today, and I win this one too. The table has started to take note that I've been all-in like 5 times, and doubled up each time. But I haven't been able to actually "play poker" since very early because I've never had a big enough chip stack to do anything other than push or fold preflop.

Sixth, seventh, and eigth lives: this hand was pivotal, and the only reason I'm still alive in the tourney, and i owe it all to someone else. (FWIW, there really weren't many/any complete donkeys in this tournament...everyone for the most part knew more or less what they were doing, and no doubt fancied themselves star of their respective home games...but the following novice error by another guy saved me) First off, I had just been cripppled because of previous hand: again short-stacked, I get QQ in the big blind. Still with around 200 ppl left, the decent UTG guy raises, and it's folded around to me, and I obviously push all in for my last remaing chips (only around 10 times the big blind). He happily calls and I know I'm behind -- he shows KK, and the board doesn't help me. I had a few more chips than he did to start the hand, so I'm not quite out, but I'm crippled with only 2,800 in chips left, and blinds at 600/1200 with 100 antes...I'm pretty much dead. I pick up JJ the very next hand, and obviously all my chips are going into the pot with it. Here's where things get interesting. 3 other people see the flop (i couldn't really raise anyone out of it preflop with only 2 x the big blind). Board is 2-3-8, so i might be ahead, but if these 3 decide to check it down (like they really should), i'm pretty sure I'd be a goner. The first two people emphatically check, trying to send the signal to the 3rd guy that the gameplan is to just check it down and get rid of me. This really isn't against the rules, and most players know that this is what they should be doing...they can't say out loud "hey, just check, and odds are that one of us will eliminate this other guy who's all in (me) and then we'll be one closer to the money"...it would be collusion if they said that out loud, but it's more or less understood that that's the smart thing to do when one guy is all-in. But for some reason the 3rd guy bets half the pot. The first 2 guys roll their eyes, not understanding why on earth he wouldn't just check (it's not a bad play there if, and oNLY IF guy #3 actually has a monster hand that he wants to build a sidepot with the remaining players with and will knock ME out in the end anyway). Guy #1 annoyedly calls, guy #2 mutters to himself and folds. Turn is another 3, and they both check (looks good for me at this point in that my JJ might be good). River: ACE. Gulp. Worst card in the deck for me, so I think (because Guy #3 had actually raised preflop...for exactly my 2,800 remaining chips and I and the other two guys had just called and that type of action post-flop suggested either a high pair or two overcards, one of which would almost certainly be an ace). Guy #1 checks, Guy #3 now bets half the pot. Yep, looks like I'm going home, and I start to get up. What on earth can I beat now? Guy #1 mutters about having a low pair and folds...But Guy #3 sighs and turns over KQ. What's this? Oh right: ship it to this guy, as my jacks are good and I quadruple up. I basically have Guy #3 to thank for my tournament life, because he made one of the most bonehead moves when in a multi-way pot against one all-in shortstack: he did something called "bluffing into a dry sidepot"...basically, there was NOTHING to be gained from his bluff bets because all they would potentially do is force guys #1 and #2 to fold their hands...and then he'd be left to fight for the pot with me. Sure, this isn't a bad thing IF YOU"VE ACTUALLY GOT A GOOD HAND, but bluffing when there is *no* sidepot to contend for with players 1 and 2 is the cardinal sin of late-stage poker, because all it does is reduce the odds that the all-in guy (me) is going to get eliminated. Why did this save me? Because Guy #2 in that hand had an ace that he would have hit on the river...but he had to fold after the flop because Guy #3 bet/bluffed the flop with his KQ. If they had just checked it down, Guy #2 would have won the pot and I woulda been gone in around 150th place. Anyway, I moved in a few hands later with AQ, got called buy a big stack with JJ...no help until river when I spiked an Ace, and just 5 hands after I had been crippled with my my QQ vs.KK, I now had almost as many chips as I'd had just before (around 18,000 with the blinds at 600/1200 and 100 antes.) Not in very good shape, but alive and with enough chips to make people think twice before calling my all-ins.

At this point, we're down to around 140 players, and the payouts start at 81...you're not supposed to just play conservatively just so u can make it into the money, but the way I'd been shortstacked all day and tempting fate with all my coinflip wins, I am starting to think that I'd be perfectly happy to just make the lowest payout threshold and happily call it a day. But the blinds are now going up, and I simply don't have enough chips to play conservatively...gonna have to make a move somewhere. At this point, I actually get to play with some pros for the very first time. I'm sitting next to Mimi Tran who is annoying as f*ck. The dealer made a small mistake with the antes by taking $25 too much from Mimi, but the table caught it and he fixed it quickly and we were ready to move on. Not Mimi though, who for the next 15 minutes berated the dealer in her broken English about how bad he was. No other way to put it: this is just bush-league all the way, and it got the entire table annoyed and we eventually had to call the floorwoman b/c Mimi was causing such a stir. Worst part about it is that when the floor came over and the other player tried to explain just what was happening, the floor (perhaps with stars in her eyes) thought that it was HIM who was causing the ruckus and basically directed her wrath upon him rather than Mimi. Who cares, Mimi busted out a few hands later, but for someone who supposedly plays a lot, she's got to know better than to berate the dealer incessantly for a mistake that the table quickly caught and fixed.

Evelyn Ng and Phil "Unabomber" Laak are also at my table now and I'm enjoying myself because at least I have a story now about playing with pros. Evelyn is like 6 feet tall, made up to the nines, and sporting some of the biggest, roundest fake breasts you've ever seen. She's shortstacked though and is hardly playing. Laak is a nonstop chatterbox from the moment he sits down -- mostly in an annoying but harmless way -- and me being me, I try to get into the act and give some of it back to him, but he AMOGs the bejeezus out of me, and that's the end of that. Interesting hand comes up with Phil who doesn't have many chips and is playing PSP and not really paying attention when I move all in under the gun with AJ. He simply calls the big blind, unaware that I've already moved all in for about 10x the big blind in front of him. The dealer informs him that I've moved all-in but that he can't get back the 2,000 chips he's already "called" with...so Phil basically can forfeit the 2K in chips and fold, or throw in another 8K to call my all-in. He puts on a prolonged routine and then decides to call and flips over a pair of threes to my AJ. Board comes: 5,Q,Q,K (gulp)......Jack and I double thru Phil; for the first time all day, I actually have a stack to work with (perhaps around 24,000 with blinds at 800/1,600 and 200 antes...still not very strong, but if I can outlast another 40 people I can make the money).

A few hands later, Laak again raises preflop, gets a cold-caller, and I move allin with AK from the big blind. Laak instamucks, and the other guy deliberates agonizingly before calling (uh-oh, I'm not thrilled about this...) but flips up KJ...wasn't a terrible move on his part considering pot-odds, but not too bright in my opinion. My hand holds-up and amazingly I'm now up to 50K in chips, slightly above the average remaining chip-stack.

I'll just mention 2 more hands that I think I played very well...the nerve-wracking part is that we're now down to around 96 players left, so I could probably just fold into the money (15 players later), but I decide that if I see good opportunities, I'm going to have to take them irrespective.

So hand #1: Laak raises for 3xBB from early position, button calls, and I somewhat reluctantly call with 54 of spades. It's a decent speculative hand, but I'm still not looking to take many risks so close to the money after I've exhausted all my coinflipping luck. Flop is 7,8,A (two spades). Hmmm.... I check, Laak bets very weakly (about 1/3 the pot) and button calls. I contemplate making a move here, but button and Laak are playing loose and I think I might get looked up by AK or AQ. Folding obviously isn't an option, so I call, although I'm gonna be shortstacked again if this hand doesn't work out for me. One thing I make absolutely certain of, though, is that I take an awfully, awfully long time to call (like 2-3 minutes...they started complaining actually). I'm clearly getting the odds to call w/ my flush and gutshot straight draws, but a quick call screams flush-draw and I'm trying to conceal that (because anyone in their right mind with a flush draw calls quickly there getting great odds.) Turn is the 6-clubs, filling my gutshot (and I've still got a spade draw to boot). It's very well concealed but I also easily could have had 9-T, which wouldn't be too concealed because I would have been open-ended on the flop...but with the amount of time I took to call, neither one of my two thinking opponents thinks I was on any kind of draw, which was exactly my plan. I'm first to act and contemplate how to play this. I think a check is too risky because a 9 or T on the river might make someone a higher straight, and even if it doesn't it would kill any action I could get (as would another spade). So I count up my 60K in chips and move all in. Laak thinks for a while and mucks...the third guy thinks for even longer and tells me he thinks I hit a set of 8s of the flop (never mind i probably wouldn't have played a set like that b/c flop was so dangerous). He eventually mucks and I take down a big pot. He said he folded AQ, which was a pretty easy fold I think on his part, but I've clearly got him pissed off. I'm very happy with how I played that hand. Very next hand I get KK and 3-bet a raiser and a cold-caller for 1/3 my stack and take it down, so I've now got about 1.5x the average chipstack.

The bubble-boy bursts, and I've now made the money, but we've got 3 more hands before we break for the night. On the very last hand, I reluctantly call a 4xBB preflop raise from the SB with A-T of hearts. Therer was an early position raiser and a cold-caller, so I'm wary that my ten kicker might be in bad shape but I decide to see the flop anyway. So does the big blind. Flop: 7-8-9 with two hearts. Well, if I was gonna play the hand, i don't see how I could have asked for a better flop than that. I check, big blind bets about 1/3 pot, preflop raiser folds, and the preflop cold-caller again cold-calls. I now have a pretty big stack, and I don't see how either the BB or cold-caller could have either a set -- the only thing I'd be worried about, but still be almost 50/50 to win the pot, i think. Even against a made straight I have outs, so I move all in. BB folds, and the big-stacked cold-caller rolls his eyes and folds. He's a nice guy I've been playing with for a while and he tells me after the hand he had KQ of hearts...man, that woulda been fireworks if I'd let him see the turn and it'd been a heart.

Anyway, that was the last hand of the night, and I sit on 111,000 chips, good for around 7th place, I think. The few pros left in the event include Laak, Hellmuth, Evelyn Ng, Steve Dannenman, Norm MacDonald (yes "that" Norm Macdonald)...and a few other guys who play well online.

So that was a glimpse into my first WSOP event -- from the last 80 people, I more or less kept afloat (although there's a few hands I played like a wuss -- pretty sure my tournament inexperience came into play on those, where I was just playing "survival poker" rather than playing to win it. Was a prohbitive short-stack entering the final table, and finally my coin-flipping luck gave out, sending me to the rail with some extra pocket change and a ton of stories. I played two other WSOP tournaments including the main event where I got knocked out on Day 1, but man what a great time. I'm going to copy one more email here, and it's the one I wrote to friends after getting knocked out of the Main Event (no more emails after this one, promise):

Subject: I'm out.
Body: "Bottom line is that I'm very happy with how i played: I think I had my absolute A game going in all 3 tournaments. I rarely found myself all-in as an underdog, and in each tourney, the hand that I busted out with was essentially no worse than a coinflip. Absolutely no complaints whatsoever with the tournaments I played, and all-in-all a successful 1st WSOP. I had a blast.

Anyhow, on to more interesting non-poker aspects of the trip -- last Saturday will rank up there as one of the craziest days/nights of my life. Exhausted after playing 12 hours of poker and busting out of the main event, I was pretty bummed, but resolved to at least try and make a night out of it to raise my spirits. Little did I know what that night would have in store...turning out to be one of the most surreal nights I've ever had. Aaron and I called up our friend from college Paul, who had landed himself a job as a TV sports-anchor for one of the major networks in Vegas: a cool job if there ever was one, and one that fit him like a glove. He looks good on TV, he's well-spoken, and more or less a party animal who has an uncanny ability to talk himself into any nightclub. Aaron and I show up at Tryst, the nightclub at the Wynn around 1am, only to find 300 people in a slow-moving line. I text Paul who's inside, and 5 minutes later he's convinced the bouncer to let us jump the line (with nary a girl in tow, mind you.) The man is truly Batman when it comes to this stuff. We say hello, and he asks me with a big grin whether I want to meet Mayweather. "Who?" Oh, right, Floyd Mayweahter Jr., quite possibly the best boxer of all time, and for all intents and purposes the baddest man on the planet. I wonder just what he means, until he guides us over to a private booth smack in the middle of the club, where sure enough Floyd Mayweaher is sitting with an entourage of around 10 guys, wearing a watch and necklace that were likely 500K+ each. Oh yeah, and he's also got two bricks of cash on the seat beside him the likes of which I've never seen. When I say bricks, i mean *bricks* about a foot tall each. Picture 4 mammoth law books stacked on top of each other. That's how tall one of these bricks was. WTF is he doing with that much cash just sitting beside him in a club packed with 5,000 people? (although as Aaron accurately opined: "who's gonna be the guy who takes it from him?") More on that later.

Anyway, as a network TV sports anchor in Vegas, Paul gets to meet pretty much every athlete on the planet, and since he's just about the most personable guy you'll ever meet, all the athletes love him and remember him every time they come to Vegas, and Floyd's no exception. So while he and his posse (oh, and two 6-foot-4, 350 lb. bodyguards) are being fawned over by every guy and girl in the club, Paul basically walks us right up to this guy's table and I get to shake the hand of the baddest man in the room. Not only that, but he's nice enough to agree to pose for a picture with each of me and Aaron. So Paul takes Aaron's cell phone camera and snaps one of Floyd and Aaron, and then it's my turn but Aaron can't get his camera-phone to "re-set", so this leads to perhaps the most awesomely excruciating 15 seconds of my life: me with my arm around Floyd Mayweather, while Aaron fiddles with the cameraphone, the moment getting more and more awkward with each passing second. After what seemed like an absolute eternity, we finally give up, and Floyd goes back to his booth, as I think about how best to bitch-slap Aaron for not getting the picture.

Just what kind of guy is Paul? Well, about 15 minutes later he received a text, and turned to us to say "Ron Artest is having a hard time getting in, I've got to run out and give him a hand." Yeah, he's the guy who helps grease the wheels for celebrities when their celebrity alone isn't enough. A few minutes later he comes back with a few NBA and NCAA basketball players in tow. Aside: the girls from our group are literally tripping over themselves to go talk to these gangly, average-looking basketballers, while having either ignored me or put up with my idle banter for most of the night. (Note to self: Get Famous.) A few minutes later, we get an answer to just what Floyd was doing with two gigantic stacks of bills, as the DJ puts on Fat Joe's "Make it Rain", whereupon Floyd stands up on the table in the center of the club, and, well, makes it rain, showering everything and everyone within a 20-foot radius with money, and causing a mad scramble among the few hundred people within reaching distance. Alas, we soon realized they were only $1 bills; pretty ballin' nonetheless. I grabbed a few that were fluttering around my head, and pocketed them as my "Floyd money". Later, Aaron and I debated whether Floyd and his posse had pre-arranged this display with the DJ by asking him to play "Make it Rain", or whether he simply walks around with bricks of cash like that and makes it rain whenever the song comes on, irrespective of where he finds himself. Either way, very cool.

Other miscellaneous items from the trip:

- Funniest classic-Vegas thing overheard at the table: a guy in his early 30s gets up after folding to answer his cell phone, and tells his buddy "Hey, would you mind just going up to our room and checking whether everything's alright? I've got around 200-grand in the safe, and Michelle knows the combination. I mean, I trust her and everything, but I've only known her 3 days, so yeah, just go up and make sure everything's OK." Alright, maybe not all that "funny", but in context it gave those of us who overheard it a pretty good chuckle.

- The poker/disability double-entendre moment of the trip: I'm in the $1K re-buy tournament, and the empty seat immediately to my right is soon filled by a guy in his early 40s I'd say, who's in a wheelchair. Real friendly guy, and he and I are chatting it up when he mentions to me that if he makes it deep in the main event, ESPN's going to do a story on him and a pro-am golf tournament he had recently played. According to him, he's a really good golfer, which I thought was pretty cool for a guy who's in a wheelchair, and I wanted to know just how *good* he was, so naturally I say to him "wow, that's amazing, what's your handi...." Now there's a few ways that this situation could have resolved itself without substantial embarassment on my part. #1, I could have just completed the sentence without so much as a pause, and it might have gone more or less un-noticed, other than as a questionable choice of words. #2, I could have called on my brain, flush with $250,000 of education to pre-emptively anticipate the end of the sentence and simply change the question to "what do you typically shoot?". Sadly, I selected neither of these options, and instead stopped dead in my tracks 2 syllables into that fateful word -- drawing contemptuous stares from all of those within earshot (basically the entire table, and some players from tables behind us) -- and earning myself a place in the pantheon of vocabulary choices you wish you could have back.:

So that was my 2007 WSOP. Not an experience I'll be forgetting any time soon. So what am I doing now? I'm a lawyer and I just started working at a well-regarded Toronto law firm a couple weeks ago. Now I don't need anyone to point out the dizzying irony of me accepting a position practicing corporate law after so many of my early posts painted such a pessimistic view of the profession. I don't pretend that I'll be able to completely articulate the thought process that went into the decision in a few hundred words, but if I hope to ward off the inevitable accusations of hypocricy, I think I owe it to my readers to at the very least try. So here is a rambling attempt that might give a little color to my re-entry into the "working world":

I played poker for a source of income for the better part of a year. In law school, I used to play around with some formulas while ignoring the lectures, trying to calculate just how much I could make if I gave the poker thing a full-time shot. I know every poker enthusiast has gone through the same exercise. You know the one that goes "Wow, if I'm playing roughly X hands/hour, and sustaining a Y BB/100 winrate, and getting in Z hours / week, just think if I could instead yadda yadda yadda X+1 / Y+1 / Z+1 = ZOMG $$$$$$$$$$$!" In any case, as much fun as it was making more money last year than I probably ever will again during any year for the rest of my life (depressing thought), you know what I learned? I learned that if x = y, then 3x = 3y. That's it. Now if my tongue-in-cheek algebra was lost on some of you, all I'm saying is that I didn't do much more (from an intellectual standpoint that is) than confirm for myself that 'yes, if I play more hands, I'll make more money.' That's a bit of a simplification, of course, because I did manage to travel quite a bit, made some incredible friends and had some experiences that I'll be talking about 50 years from now, but from an intellectual-growth standpoint, I can't say that I made many significant strides. And I missed it. I missed the challenge of tackling new subjects, even if it means starting at the so-called bottom of the totem pole. The other day, I stopped at an office-supply superstore to buy a new keyboard, and the salesperson, a friendly guy in his mid twenties, whose accent suggested that he was probably a fairly recent immigrant from Jamaica asked me what I did, and I told him I was a lawyer. He asked me whether I liked it, and I shrugged it off, saying it was actually pretty mundane. Increasingly-inquisitive, he asked me whether -- given my apparent indifference -- I regretted the decision I'd made in going to law school, or what advice I'd give to someone who was inclined to do the same. At this point I think I probably smiled inwardly given how much thought I've put into that very question (or perhaps because I wasn't used to such precociousness, nor introspection from supply-store cashiers.) But I admired that he was comfortable enough to ask that most pertinent of questions, and I think I replied with as honest an answer as I was able, which I'll restate here. I've always enjoyed challenging myself. That's a big reason why I went to law school in the first place, and ultimately why I decided that giving the big-firm thing an honest-to-goodness shot might not be the worst thing in the world. In one of the last blog posts I made, I mentioned how I always romanticized the notion of working for Google (since they are a lightning-rod for some of the most progressive and fascinating internet-related litigation around.) Well, last summer I actually found myself in Google's Palo Alto offices, being interviewed by the attorneys there for that so-called 'dream job'. But I didn't get it. The feedback was essentially "Everyone here liked you a lot, and your academic pedigree is easily superior to any candidate we've seen, but listen -- you just don't have the necessary experience. The guy we've offered the job to has been immersed in the kind of legal documents you'd be seeing in this position on a daily basis for the past 5 years. You're smart and ambitious, but we just don't think there's any qualification quite like having DONE this stuff first-hand for the last few years." Hearing that type of feedback got me thinking about what kind of path poker would put me on 5, 10, 20 years down the line. A passion for being challenged is probably why I took up poker and kept at it until I was playing the highest-stakes games around. But it's also what got me feeling a little ambivalent about just what kind of future I'd have in store, intellectually and otherwise. Don't bother trying to dig through the blog archives to find contradictions to what I wrote in the preceding paragraph, because I'll save you the time: you'll find plenty. Yes, I'm a lawyer, but I don't necessarily think that's any sort of fatal indictment of things I've previously written here. I think one of the main selling points of this blog was its authenticity, part and parcel of which is an acknowledgement of the fact that we all learn and grow as time passes, and our outlook on life and happiness evolves accordingly. At the end of the day, I am taking the following gamble: that I will be able to find an acceptable balance between a full-time job and poker. Whether I'll be able to walk that tight-rope remains to be seen. You want my honest guess at whether I'll be able to do it? Alright >> No. I think that's it's going to be extremely challenging to find a good compromise between playing poker and developing as a successful attorney. I had told myself that I would still try and get in 20,000 hands / month, but if my first couple weeks are any indication, I'll be lucky to get in 10,000. But throughout law school, I think I did pretty well for myself balancing poker with a full-time academic schedule and an active social life, and I'm willing to see if I can find the same balance with the practice of law, even if it's a much taller order. Hey, what can I say: I love a good challenge. Thanks for reading.

January 20th, 2007: Great Expectations

2007-01-19T20:45:00.000-05:00

This is my final post. Perhaps the 2-week pause since my previous post was a function of some subconscious ambivalence about ending this blog. To be sure, it isn't something I'm 100% sure about; I'd be lying if I said that there weren't some times -- especially when I read encouraging comments or emails from readers -- that I think to myself "man, this has really been a gratifying experience...such a shame to call it quits..." I've certainly got some forces pulling me in the other direction, but unlike the previous times when I contemplated wrapping things up, I feel relatively at peace with the decision this time around.

Will this page be updated in the future? I don't want to close the door on it completely; I plan on playing in several WSOP events this summer, which I'm sure will provide me with some interesting stories that I might post about, but in the interest of closure, I won't get ahead of myself. Time marches on, and I'm happy to have had these experiences, but the timing is simply right to draw the curtain, so for all intents and purposes, let's say our goodbyes now.

My Australian sojourn has drawn to a close; I left just as their incredible summer was starting to roll in, and came back to North America…settling into another lovely Toronto January. I hated to leave Australia just as I felt like I was starting to put down roots and make good friends, but I left happy, content in the knowledge that I really made a lot of these past few months. A few weeks ago I made it out to the Great Barrier Reef, which was one of the places I really didn’t want to miss before I left. A Dutch friend and I took a 3-day sailing cruise out to some of the Whitsunday Islands, many of which really have to be seen to be believed. There’s a beach called Whitehaven that is easily the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen – I’d heard that it was a nice beach, but I thought to myself “yeah, whatever, I’ve seen plenty of nice beaches before – heck, I live on Bondi Beach, one of the most famous in Australia; white sand, blue sky, I get it...yawn.” Whitehaven shattered every last skeptical bone in my body. I want to post a picture here, but a) I still haven’t uploaded them to my computer, and b) I’m worried it still wouldn’t do it justice. Because the reef is so shallow, the sheer number of greens and blues in the water is astounding. And the sand, wow. It’s like talcum powder under your feet. And white. Not that sandboxy yellowish-white that you see on the nicer beaches of Miami and Hawaii. This is white-white: the color of the undershirts in a Downy commercial. And to top it off, the island is uninhabited, so there are never more than 40 or so people on this expansive beach at any one time. Complete silence, except for the tide rolling in. Mindblowing. (Alright, I found a picture of it online, but I’m going to give the caveat that as nice as it looks below, the picture still doesn’t do it justice.)

My entire Australian experience really got me thinking seriously about age, which is a topic that I’ve addressed in passing a couple times, but I haven’t quite given it the treatment it deserves. First off, in nearly every country in the world not in North America, law school isn’t a graduate program, but rather an intensive undergraduate program, so the final year law students in my classes down there were mostly much younger than me…typically 22 to 24. There were a handful in my age range: 26-27, but I was among the older students, even though I probably look a little younger than I am (not to mention that I act like an 18-year old), so I never really felt out of place.

Among the 25 sailing guests on our boat cruising the Whitsunday islands, most fit into one of a few identifiable categories:

i. College students (19 – 21 years old)

ii. Recent college graduates either traveling before their jobs began, or taking their first vacation, or traveling after having just left their first job out of college (22 – 24 years old)

iii. A few older guests, usually couples (30 – 38)

You know what there weren’t any of?? 25-to-30 year olds who were traveling for no other reasons than that they possessed the inclination, the opportunity, and the ability to do so. Oh wait, scratch that. There was one. Me. In many ways, our little sailing trip was a microcosm of the frustration I often feel that I meet so few other similarly-situated individuals…on the one hand I feel incredibly blessed that I’m able to take these great trips at a relatively young age, and yet I’m equally frustrated that it sometimes feels that I’m the outcast, even though I’m doing exactly what seemingly everyone else my age professes to want to do. I find it a source of endless frustration that so many people let their age – which comes down to nothing more than a digit on a birth certificate – dictate their life decisions.

Isn’t the theoretical permutation of the issue the following: in a true vacuum, would individuals naturally gravitate toward the same pattern of expectations associated with one’s age that our culture currently subscribes to, or is it merely a function of our society’s historical development. I guess what I’m trying to get at is whether there’s anything “magical” about why we assign certain expectations to the ages of 20, 25, 30, and so on, or whether perhaps it’s nothing more than a relic from times gone past: a self-perpetuating set of expectations that might merit reconsideration for ‘modern times.’

Apologies if the previous paragraph seems a tad esoteric…I’m still ploughing through Atlas Shrugged, which is undoubtedly rendering my writing abstract. In fact, let me just restate it in the simplest possible terms, since I think it’s a pretty straightforward inquiry, and an important one at that. Here goes >> Our society has come to expect certain accomplishments or life milestones by certain ages…graduation from high school in the late teens, and then graduation from college in one’s early twenties, first job soon thereafter, marriage in the mid-to-late twenties, children between 25 and 40, progressing to middle- and then upper-management by age X (depending on profession) etc, etc, etc. I’m sure that I’ve railed against these preordained sets of expectations in prior posts, so all I’m asking now is whether there’s anything “real” about them, or whether they’re merely the product of (antiquated?) custom. I mean, besides menopause (something I’d consider a “real” constraint; e.g. women need to have their kids before around 41 or so), and a couple other ‘non-negotiables’ (such as graduation from high school) it’s really quite surprising how much life “we have to work with”, and yet how stubbornly rigid our society is in perpetuating a certain set of expectations for us as we reach certain ages. I don't want to be the guy shouting into the wind; I'm not suggesting any massive paradigm shift...just something that my experiences to date have got me thinking about to an ever-greater degree.

Anyway, I am currently studying for the New York bar exam -- a place I really didn't think I'd be when I took my leave of absence from law school a couple years ago (and doubly ironic because I don't even live in the US.) I think back to the meeting I had with the dean of students when I told him that I wanted to leave school; I remember walking down the street afterward relatively secure in that decision, and truth be told, I thought it more likely than not (maybe 60%) that I wouldn't be returning at all. But I don't for one second regret returning to school, nor completing my degree. I couldn't even count how many times I've been asked in recent years what kind of law I want to practice, which I always answer by saying that I don't really want to practice law at all, which inevitably draws an incredulous response along the lines of: "Wait a minute -- you're in law school, but you don't want to be a lawyer!??" Yes, that is correct. I don't. But I can't think of any way I would have rather spent the previous three years: I met some of the best friends I've ever made, and with whom I had an absolute ball. It was intellectually stimulating and challenging, even when I was having doubts about how it would contribute to my eventual career. And maybe most important of all, it allowed me to discover poker -- an odd thing to say, I know, but I think one of the reasons that poker in North America is becoming increasingly dominated by the 25-year-old and under set is that it's that age bracket that really had the disposable time to devote themselves to reading, learning, and practicing (read: playing hundreds of thousands, and even millions of hands.) I'm grateful to have discovered the game while I was in a position to really indulge my passion for it, a rather unique opportunity, which I'm not sure would have come along later in life. I don't think there's any one sentence, nor paragraph, that can possibly sum up the past few years of my life, other than to say that it's all in the pages of this blog -- the veritable life cycle of a poker player, from my initiation into the online game, to my progression up through the stakes, and all the accompanying psychological states and insecurities. Perhaps what I'm most grateful for is having developed over the past year or two what I felt to be a great balance between school, work, travel, leisure, and poker; an equilibrium that's about to change dramatically, of course.

While I say I don't want to practice law at this point in time, who's to say how I'll feel about things 5 or 10 years from now. I'm sure a day will come when I'll be happy that I'm an actual lawyer and not just a law school graduate. Besides, if I don't study for and take this exam now while the general workings of the law are still relatively fresh in my mind, I doubt I'll ever come back to it later in life, and if I do, it will pose quite a formidable challenge. You ever come to a decision point in life and your instinct simply tells you that one option is the "right" one? Well this is one of those for me >>> I simply know that studying for and taking the bar exam is the right call. So I'm gritting my teeth for the next 7 weeks to take care of business. (Sidebar: in fact, there is one aspect of the law that I happen to find fascinating -- I really mean it: I follow this stuff for fun >> Google has been on the receiving end of dozens of lawsuits recently because of its practice of selling "keywords" to corporate competitors. Basically what's going on is this: Nike can "purchase" the search term "Reebok", so that any time somebody Googles "Reebok", a banner ad for Nike is displayed alongside the search results. Reebok cries trademark infringement. There's just one problem: Nike isn't actually using the trademarked term. All they've done is contractually agreed with private company Google that any time the user searches for Reebok, an ad for Nike shoes will be displayed. And there's no risk of "consumer confusion" here...all users see is an ad for Nike shoes...it's not Nike passing off their goods as someone else's. There are actually a number if very interesting legal questions here including (i) whether Nike is using the term "in commerce" (a requirement for a finding of trademark infringement), and (ii) whether Google is even the right party the plaintiff should be suing...after all, it's Nike that's making use of the trademarked term, not Google >> they're really just facilitating it. Of course, this isn't really an issue in my hypothetical example of Nike vs. Reebok because both Google and Nike have deep pockets to satisfy a multi-million dollar judgment. BUT, in reality, there are a lot of big corporations who claim that little mom & pop operations are inappropriately buying trademarked search terms through Google's keyword sales...so the big corporations think to themselves "gee, even though it's the little mom + pop shop that's infringing our trademark, let's go after Google and the keyword sales program itself because they've got the deepest pockets for a potential settlement, etc." Anyway, I don't know how I got off on this track, but I really do find that area of internet law fascinating...because it's so new and completely unsettled. So I've been making some overtures to Google (and their legal department) and some IP law firms who work on these types of cases. If anyone out there has any connections they think might be of interest to me, I'm all ears :)

But I digress. Between the time that I'm putting into study, and the Neteller bombshell that dropped the other day, this also seems like a rather opportune (and perhaps necessary) time to scale back on poker. As a bit of a "last hoorah" I went to Atlantic City last week for a couple days of poker, and played something like 30 out of the 48 hours I was in town. FWIW, I absolutely crushed the 5/10NL game there (to another commenter who asked about why I didn't post much anymore about my online results...well, I guess I simply don't find that aspect of the game all that interesting to talk about; there's an ample supply of such braggery in the 2+2 BBV forum; just didn't want to cast my lot in with those yahoos, even if reading that forum is a favorite guilty pleasure of mine.) One comment about playing NL live: It's absolute cake (easy to say, I guess, when you clean up.) I played a little scared for the first hour before realizing that out of 9 opponents, at least 7 of them had absolutely no clue what they were doing post-flop, and you could read them like the Sunday Times. It wasn't so much about picking up on tells but rather simply betting pattern/sizing -- (digression: God, how I love the inexhaustible supply of Bridge & Tunnel trash who fancy themselves good poker players because they can, quote, "read people" well, not realizing that this is a game of math, not perception.) No one wanted to get caught making ill-advised bluffs (or worse: calldowns), so it was remarkably easy to bully people out of pots when scare cards hit, and easier still to get out of their way when they picked up a monster. In 30 hours at the table, I can count on the fingers of one hand the times when I saw anyone make anything that could be classified as a real "move". Anyway, that marathon session really sapped the poker lifeblood from me, at least for a week or two, so I feel a little more comfortable eschewing the felt in favor of bar study.

So I guess this is it. Do I have any remaining words of wisdom culled from these past few years?

Well, it's funny: I try to compare the state of my life as a 21-year old finishing my undergraduate studies, and a 27-year old graduating from law school, each experience being accompanied by a certain degree of uncertainty about the future. But there are differences, too. At 21, I had hooked up with my fair share of girls, but I didn't know the first thing about dating or relationships. I had plenty of friends, but I didn't know anything about actually socializing. I'd held down a number of jobs, but I didn't know squat about working. At 21, I knew absolutely jack-shit. At 27, I still know jack-shit, but I know that I know jack-shit. Do you follow? In the 5 intervening years, I accrued experience and humulity at approximately the same rate. Keep an open mind.

Let me close with a brief story. One of my passions has always been comedy. No particular aspect of it; I just love the science of it. I love a good sitcom, old-school Marx Bros. movies, good stand-up (I even tried my hand at it a few times, which was a real rush), well-timed sarcasm, pregnant comedic pauses, stinging satire, snappy comebacks to stupid questions, and so on. I used to think that my dream job would be as a writer for The Daily Show, or some other smart comedy. Anyway, it just so happened that the executive in charge of original programming at Comedy Central is a graduate of my alma mater, so I used the alumni network to look her up, and send her a few letters asking if she might spare a few minutes to talk to me over the phone about work in the industry. (This was during my first year of law school, when I was just starting to get disillusioned with the whole enterprise.) I sent her a couple emails, and a letter by post, but got no response for over a month, so I figured they hadn’t reached or, or she was simply too busy to grant me an audience. So I forgot about it for a while. Then a couple weeks later, just out of the blue, she called me, catching me very off-guard, since I had more or less written her off. Because I was a little flustered, I bumbled awkwardly through some generic questions and answers, until we started talking about my ongoing law school education. In filling a bit of a prolonged pause, I lobbed her a softball, asking her what she thought of law school, and whether it could help in her line of work, expecting the standard “well, a law degree is so versatile, it would certainly prove advantageous no matter what field…blah, blah blah” response. But her firm and bleak answer took me by surprise.

“No,” she offered flatly.
“Oh…” I replied, somewhat caught off-guard.
“Well,” she continued “I just don’t really see what use a law degree would be in the field of comedy. I mean, I guess if you were going to work on artists’ contracts, or something, but that’s work for the law firms…doesn’t really have much to do with what we do here at Comedy Central.”

She didn’t speak with any reproach, and didn't intend her comments as a rebuke of any kind, but that’s exactly what it felt like to me. It was like an indictment of everything I was brought up to believe: that if you just study and work hard, everything else will take care of itself. That may indeed be a prescription for a life free of overt hardship, but I think it very far from a recipe for life fulfillment.

‘Of course law didn’t have anything to do with comedy,’ I thought (in many ways, it’s the complete antithesis!). ‘What on Earth could lead anyone to think otherwise?!??’

Her comments stung a little, but also carried with them a very important message; one that I had largely repressed until that time, but whose authenticity was undeniable: You are in control, nobody else. Deceptively simple, but it’s a message that has informed nearly every decision I’ve made in the past few years. Would you rather be playing poker than attending but ignoring a law school lecture? Then LEAVE, you’re not nailed down to the seat. Want to travel? Buy that plane ticket. Want to work on interesting projects? Well, you can interview for a position at a law firm and hope some interesting work finds its way across your desk once every couple of years, or you can decide what you want to work on and go seek it out. People love to come up with reasons why it’s not a great time to take a vacation, but you know what: if you wait until everything in your life is absolutely perfect before you take that trip/buy that house/talk to that girl/get in shape/have a baby, well, you’ll wake up old and wrinkled one day and wonder where it was you made a wrong turn. And maybe, just maybe you’ll come to the depressing conclusion that it wasn’t a wrong turn you took anywhere along the way, but rather it was your reluctance to make any turn at all. To cite a dumb and cliched example, I have never: N-E-V-E-R, not ONCE, regretted approaching a girl even when (as was the case all-too-often) she simply wasn’t interested in me, but man-oh-man I can recount with stunning accuracy the dozens of times when I was just too riddled with “what if I fail / look like a jackass” nerves to even open my mouth.

You can passively wait for knowledge and experience to wash over you, but that’s just about the least efficient way to go about things. Who you are and who you become is determined by the decisions you make and the actions you take. One of the somewhat-ironic realizations that I’ve had in keeping this blog is that we can’t merely think our way to happiness or fulfillment; so many of my blog posts have lamented the fact that I seem to continuously present problems and frustrations, and frame their parameters, but rarely do I approach an actual solution. But that’s what life is: more questions than answers. I used to love the somewhat-juvenile expression “Do it for the story!” While perhaps a tad elementary, I think it stands for the proposition that ultimately we are all destined to grow older, and eventually get very sick and die. One day we will all be elderly, shrunken shells of our former selves, devoid of the charisma, beauty, and intelligence that once defined us, and all that will be left to distinguish us from the other aging men and women on the planet are the experiences that we have accumulated, and the stories we’re able to share with a younger generation. I’m fiercely proud, content, and spiritually fulfilled with how I’ve spent the last few years of my life, and I’d like to think it’s a blueprint, of sorts, for how I might seek out similar degrees of satisfaction in other domains of my life going forward, even if/when I leave poker behind in favor of other life pursuits. Thanks for reading.

Friday, January 5th: Ayn Rand on Money

2007-01-05T22:11:00.000-05:00

Welcome to my penultimate post. And it's a bit of a copout post at that because it consists nearly entirely of an extract from Ayn Rand's epic novel Atlas Shrugged, but it's one that discusses money and resonates with me more than nearly any other passage I've read on the topic. I ask for a little leeway just this one, since I've been trying to put my more original thoughts into a post that I'll make within a week that will be my last.

You don't need much background info about the plot to appreciate this passage, but in short, the book (to the point I've reached, at least) is a story set in Depression-era America, where a few ambitious industrial visionaries are finding themselves increasingly under attack from a set of lecherous but politically-connected "boys club"-types (both in industry and in government)...the type of people who have achieved their high posts in business and politics as a result of family lineage and political favor, but who have no real business savvy, and have made a living off of riding the coattails of the "real" industrial trailblazers. (Yes, there's several more plot elements later on, but this isn't a book report -- it's just a smide of background info so that you can appreciate the following passage with a little bit of context.)

Anyhow, this scene takes place at a wedding party. Francisco is apparently one of the few genuine industrial visionaries (I say "apparently" because his character is complicated, and I anticipate quite a few twists with him later as I keep reading, but that's not important for now), and gives the following oration to a group which consists of the business-"leeches" and their spouses/friends. One of the "leeches" remarks how "money is the root of all evil", and Francisco takes issue with it. I've taken the liberty of highliting in bold a few parts that resonate particularly well with me, but feel free to read it with an open-mind. All I ask is that you not get turned off by the somewhat philosophical style of the speech / make a mental effort to commit yourself to the passage, and I think you'll find it worthwhile -- for me it felt a bit like a hurricane slowly gathering strength as it passed over the ocean...I found the speech's forcefulness really gathered strength as it went on.

From ATLAS SHRUGGED, by Ayn Rand, page 387:

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil—and he's the typical product of money."

Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor— your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is MADE—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of GOODS. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth— the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the LOVE of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it."

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of DISARMED victims—then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while your damning its life-blood—money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves—slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers—as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a COUNTRY OF MONEY—and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to MAKE money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out."

>>>I'm not even going to attempt any analysis of the above...nor am I sure how qualified I am to pursue such an undertaking, so I'll just let you form your own opinions and conclusions. What resonated most with me? I really enjoyed the paragraph about not envying a "worthless heir"...in fact, I think it parallels the concept I've mentioned a couple times that leads multi-million dollar PowerBall lottery winners to squander their newfound fortunes and find themselves living hand-to-mouth just a year or two after their "big score." I loved the assertion that the only man "fit" to inherit wealth is the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started, which is an idea that I think I was nipping at the outskirts of in my "Trust Fund Babies" post (linked to in the Top Ten post I made last week.) I asked just what the difference was between an individual who was wealthy as a result of a "windfall" inheritance, and a successful poker player (who some might 'accuse', as they would the wealthy heir, as having accumulated his money without 'earning' it, at least in the traditional sense, requiring "hard work", either physical or intellectual.) While I know that ending this post here leaves that question relatively "open", I think the preceding passage nonetheless informs our consideration of the issue. And it's late and I need some sleep...

Monday, December 25th: Best of...

2006-12-25T02:26:00.000-05:00

Yikes -- a whole 2 weeks since my last post; I hate it, but things had been really hectic: I've slept in beds in Sydney, LA, NY, Philadelphia, and Toronto in the last 2 weeks, and then came the holidays, etc. (Yes, my Australian interlude has now come to an end.) I've actually sat down and started no fewer than 4 posts, each of which on topics that interest me greatly, and which I'm pretty motivated to finish, but I've been frequently distracted and interrupted...but I guess the silver lining is that I've got at least a few more (hopefully) good posts in me before throwing in the towel...for now, though, I'm going to do something I did at the end of last year: in the spirit of all the year end "best of" review shows on TV, I've gone back through my posts from 2006 and picked out my 10 favorites. Yeah, it's a little bit of filler, but I'd like to think it's not a complete waste of your time...in fact, in re-reading these myself, I'm reminded of how worthwhile I've always felt it to be glancing over my shoulder to remind myself how far along this path I've come.

10. Tournaments Are Gay

One of the more controversial posts I made, but I still like it -- the post is undoubtedly somewhat colored by the fact that I have a particular distaste for tournament poker because I just don't know how well it reflects actual long-term expected value, but that's my math background speaking. I think they attract a lot of people lured particularly by the prospect of fame, whereas I'm more inclined to continue to grind away relatively anonymously in the cash game circuit. As I wrote before, though, I think I'm going to play in a few events in this year's WSOP just for fun; more to experience the spectacle than anything else.

9. The $20,000 Day!

Not sure how "good" a post this one actually was, but it was important in teaching me how to deal with a downswing the likes of which I had never seen before (nor would I have even believed it were possible, had you warned me in advance.) The 2+2 forums have seen scattered reports this year from very well-regarded players (especially on the limit side) who have been getting crushed -- absolutely crushed for amounts of 1,000 big-bets and more. Just a year or so ago, 300 big-bets was assumed to be an appropriate bankroll for an average-or-better LHE player, and anyone unlucky enough to suffer through a 300+ big-bet swoon was quick to be labeled a fish who undoubtedly had simply been running well beforehand. How times have changed -- consider as illustrative the admissions of bicyclekick, a relatively well-regarded high-stakes LHE player who has played as high as 300/600, but who found himself relegated to the 5/10 games after a downswing of over 1,500 big bets. These stories are popping up with alarming frequency, and should give serious pause to anyone thinking about giving poker a serious go...can you mentally handle swings like this? Because they're not just for fish anymore, but coming to a poker table near you.

8. Hard Work and Leverage

I'd like to have put this a little higher on my list, but I'll keep it at #8 for now, even though I think the stuff I wrote about leverage might be some of the more important content I got down over the course of keeping this blog. In fact, I've gone back and re-read this post perhaps more than any other, simply because when living a poker-fueled lifestyle, it's so easy to forget the motivation and drive that helped me get to this point...so I'm constantly on guard against allowing too much complacency leak into my life.

7. Deep Thoughts, Part I, and Part II

A heck of a lot of mental masturbation. Not sure I ever came to any concrete conclusions, but they were thoughts that had been nipping at the fringes of my psyche for what had seemed like the entire duration of my poker "career".

6. The Golden Age of Online Poker

This was another one of those posts that I had swirling around in the nether-regions of my cranium for months before I actually decided to take a crack at it. In fact, as I re-read it just now, I remembered how much I had been preoccupied when I wrote the post with the question of just how much poker I should be playing, and just when the financial incentive simply wasn't worth the opportunity cost of missing out on "real life." I think I laid out my philosophy relatively succinctly at the end of the post, but I've got to admit that I always feel a twinge of remorse every time I see 2+2 posts with guys who manage 6-figure profits in a month, not because they have higher winrates than me (in fact, their rate is sometimes 50% or more lower than mine), but simply because they have the discipline to sit at their computers for 10 hours / day, and get in 90 to 100 thousand hands / month. I don't think I've ever cracked the 40K-hand mark. Even when I did my $40,000 surgery recovery challenge, where I had nothing to do but sit in my apartment with my jaw wired shut and play poker, I "only" managed 51,000. The idea that there are people out there who routinely play double that amount hurts my brain to think about.

5. Mike McWho?

Actually, I would have liked to put this post higher on my list, if for no other reason than that Rounders is the quintessential poker movie for so many guys of my generation. And yet it has so quickly been superseded in so many ways, as I mentioned in the post. Amounts of money that were supposed to stagger the viewer in the movie are now won and lost every few minutes online by twenty year olds who have bankrolls that would have poor ol' Mike McD soiling himself.

4. Table Selection

It's no secret that this blog isn't exactly chalk full of strategy info (nor have I ever claimed as much, but I think it makes up for it in other ways), but there are a few nuggets in here that I think are especially worthwhile to assimilate. I'm still shocked at how little emphasis most "good" players put on table selection, preferring instead to just take the first seat that becomes available. Well, do yourself a favor: buy PT and PAHUD if you don't already have them, invest the time to learn how to datamine, etc. and watch for an immediate reflection in your winrate.

3. The Great Beyond

I wrote this at a time that felt as though it were some kind of "crossroads" in my life (although I've since come to appreciate that these 'decision points' are more illusion than fact.) All of my friends from law school had just taken the bar exam (they all passed, by the way...it was a much higher passage rate last summer than the years before...for first-time test takers from ABA-accredited law schools, I think the passage rate last summer was 85%, instead of the mid-70s that was the norm; I only know a couple kids who failed.)

2. 24/7 P.O.C.

I know I hammer away at this principle like it's my job, but I do so for one reason: no aspect of poker has changed my life away from the table as much as this one -- to be able to assign a quantitative value to the sands of time that pour through the hourglass that is our brief time here has really changed in a surprisingly positive how I think about and value my leisure time, and that spent in the company of my family and good friends.

1. The unfortunately-titled Poker-boomers, trust fund babies, and bears -- oh my!

A post that was months in the making, although as much as I enjoyed finally getting these thoughts down "on paper", I'm not quite sure that I "solved" anything at all...because I still have those persistent thoughts: e.g. I'm happy about the modest degree of financial independence that poker has brought me, but I've got a few friends who are financially comfortable via family/inheritance and it's still sometimes hard to decipher just how we're differently situated...I actually just read a passage on money (and the making of it) from a classic book that resonated with me more than any other passage I've ever read, and I'm going to post it here in the next few days for a little perspective.

Well, that's all for the countdown for now, but as I wrote above, I've got a few half-finished posts that I've been working on for a while that I hope to publish here soon...

happy holidays,

Saturday, December 9th: Secret Superheroes

2006-12-09T08:30:00.000-05:00

To first address a couple reader comments – one person suggested that I thank the readership of this blog, which was a bit of a kick in the butt, reminding me that if I haven’t made clear by this point how much I appreciate the audience and the consistent feedback, it’s merely a function of carelessness, and not ingratitude. I would have stopped writing long ago if it weren’t for the steady stream of emails and positive reinforcement that I’ve got from you guys, with many of you penning heartfelt emails and comments, which I’ve always done my best to respond to. While the blog may have started out as a purely personal project that provided me with an outlet for my own angst about my journey up the poker ladder, that benefit to me was long ago outstripped by the significance I think this thing has taken on to others as well. And although it may resonate as a purely selfish motive, the primary reason I’ve kept at this thing is…well, because I got the sense that it mattered to people, which was a feeling I’d never really experienced and which is pretty satisfying. So to ensure that I don’t forget to say so explicitly before the sun sets on this blog, the past year of posts has been fueled nearly exclusively by the interest of my readership, and I say “thanks”.

Second comment I saw was something that keeps popping up as a reaction to individuals who enjoy a certain degree of financial success playing poker, but who wonder what role it might play in a long-term career. To paraphrase the opinion in question, it’s something along the lines of “Listen, just build yourself a nice little nest-egg via poker, even if you’re not really digging it all that much at the moment, and then you’ll have the financial freedom to do what you really want in life.” It seems so intuitively appealing: bite the bullet now, and then you’ll be able to pursue your real passion. And it’s not a train of thought restricted only to poker…in fact, it’s probably invoked far more in the context of high-stress / high-income jobs in the financial and law sectors, where junior employees take home a nice paycheck but get worked to the bone. I present the following only for consideration, without passing judgment on the issue myself. I read a book a couple years ago by Po Bronson called What Should I Do With My Life. (Sidebar: You can download it as an e-book from Amazon. E-books are great little tools, which I really exploited at my old consulting job, and I encourage anyone with an office job that drags at times to do the same: buy e-books and read them at work. It’ll look like you’re actually reading something work-related if anyone walks by, and it really helps you “make time” for reading, if it’s one of your hobbies that you don’t find time for anymore.) Anyway, back to Po Bronson’s book: it was a pretty fascinating concept: the book was collection of a few dozen interviews with people who had done complete one-eighties in their professional life, abruptly giving up careers that they had prepared themselves for their entire lives for something they were truly passionate about. If I recall correctly, there was an interview with a high-powered financial executive who one day up and decided that he hated his job and wanted to start a salmon farm in the countryside. So he did. There was an interview with a med school graduate who, within weeks of her graduation, decided that she wanted no part of medicine and left to pursue something else. The thing is that they weren’t just a collection of “success stories”…a lot of the interviewees admitted that they often had a really tough go of it, and experienced significant self-doubt about whether they had made the right decision. But the book was one hell of an inspiring read: it was like a jolt of energy reminding me that I’m at all times in control of my own life, and changing any aspect of it is as easy as making a single decision.

Anyway, that’s enough background about the book…why do I bring it up here? Well, even though I read it 4 years ago, one thing has always stuck with me. Po Bronson says that he interviewed hundreds of people for the book, and you know how many of them had found success with the “nest egg” philosophy mentioned above (e.g. building up one’s bank account, and then pursuing one’s life passion.) Zero. Not a single one. Of all his interviewees who had dramatically changed their career path, not a single one said anything about the decision being made easier because of money they had accumulated from their previous, unfulfilling careers. The money was never cited as an enabling factor; rather, the interviewees by and large testify about an overwhelming belief that they were not following the pursuit for which they were meant, irrespective of their financial situation. Bronson cites that as the most surprising revelation of the entire process for him, and I found it pretty amazing as well. Because so many of us subscribe to that exact train of thought: who among us hasn’t gritted our teeth while carrying out some tedious task at a job we dislike, driven only by the conscious reminder that we’re making a few bucks that will one day allow us not to perform tasks such as that one. It’s related to something that I wrote a long, long time ago in this blog about how the popular interpretation of retirement as an incentive is just so maddeningly perverted: ‘I’ll work my butt off at job X so that one day down the road I won’t have to do X anymore.’ There’s an old (stupid) Yiddish joke about a guy coming across another man who’s repeatedly bashing his head against a brick wall, and he asks him “Why the heck are you doing that!??”, to which the man replies “Because it feels so good when I stop.” And yet Bronson feeds us this idea that based on his interviews, it just might be that this “nest egg” philosophy that we find so intuitively appealing might be a big fallacy subscribed to exclusively by people who don’t have the courage to take the scary and undefined steps required to pursue one’s life passion, at the expense of security. Anyway, I’ll just leave that hanging out there without taking sides, since it’s something I’m always reminded of whenever I hear the “Tough it out now, and then you’ll have the money to pursue what you want” philosophy espoused..

Here’s another quickie that’s neither here nor there, but which for me held a certain refreshing appeal as I try and decide what role poker is going to play in my life going forward. I was absent-mindedly perusing an online photo album belonging to a friend of mine who I’ve only hung out with a half-dozen times, and who struck me as friendly and outgoing, although perhaps unremarkable, when I came across a series of drawings from her sketchbook that simply blew my mind. Here’s one of them:

Don’t ask me why, but I’ve always been impressed to no end by artists…it’s just something that’s so foreign to my own set of abilities that those who possess the talent seem almost like magicians. Next time we talked, I think I gushed about how incredible her drawings were, and about I had no idea that she had that kind of talent (especially because it’s not what she went to school for, nor had she really pursued it professionally since.) She responded by saying something that I found pretty endearing: that she liked to think of herself as something of a superhero, and her artistic talent was like her secret super-power. And she even liked how well-hidden it was, because it made people all the more astounded (as was I) when they discover it. It reminded me of a mid-career guy I used to know at my consulting firm, who struck everyone as a bit of a weirdo (and with whom I had personally had a pretty serious confrontation about my work, although he wasn’t a bad guy…just completely socially inept.) Anyway, at some point we found out that he actually moonlighted as a concert violinist with a symphony in New York…I forget which one it was, but it was a pretty big deal in music circles. A bunch of us went to watch him perform, and it was incredible how seeing his “secret superpower” on display absolutely transformed him in the eyes of his peers, and almost overnight he went from being the office recluse to a guy that people really respected, even if he still struggled with social awkwardness. I’m not going to entertain a discussion about whether elite poker skill has the potential to “wow” people to the same extent as musical or artistic expertise (I think the short answer is that it doesn’t), but I found it to be a pretty neat little validation that it’s OK if one of your greatest skills doesn’t form the backbone of your professional career. It’s a lesson that’s so easy to forget, since every day we’re inundated with imagery of athletes, actors, and orators – in short, nearly anyone whose profession has a substantial presence in the public domain – who do exploit their chief talent as their principle life pursuit. But meeting these “secret superheroes” was a refreshing reminder that I may very well find career fulfillment with poker playing no more than a supporting role.

Monday, December 4th: School's Out

2006-12-04T22:26:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago, I did something that I had never done in the 2.5 years since I began playing online: feeling that I needed to do some preparation for my last set of law school exams, I withdrew every penny I had from every site where I play (which wasn't all that much, since I was still licking my wounds from one of my top 2 losingest days ever: -16K / yuck). And I didn't play for a whole 5 days. Cue the band.

But the good news is that as of last week, I am -- believe it or not -- a law school graduate, rendering the title of this blog somewhat inaccurate...or at least misleading (since i guess I'm still technically a 'dropout', albeit one that returned to school and finished up.) The past few weeks have been rife with activity, some good, some bad: birthday #27, conclusion of formal education, grandmother's unfortunately rapidly-deteriorating health -- a lot of stuff going on in my head. A ton of stuff I'd like to write about, so I'd imagine the next few posts will kind of run into each other, and might at times seem a tad disorganized. But such is life. At the very least, they'll come at more frequent intervals: the past couple weeks were a bit of a blur, since I was trying to make up for the past few months of academic delinquency.

I'm 27. I have without a doubt dragged this school thing out as long as freakin’ possible, and I've come to the following conclusion: I don't want to hear any college or grad school kid ever complain about how much "school sucks", or the like, because the fact of the matter is this: school rocks. I miss it already. The only people who say that and actually believe it are those who have never held down a real job -- the kind that gives you 2-3 weeks of vacation / year. Don't feel like going into work? Hung over? Just all-around lazy? Too bad. The freedom you get in school is like nothing you'll really ever experience again, so don't take it for granted.

Sidebar: In the 2+ years I've been part of the 2p2 community, I've noticed an interesting little evolution in the tone of responses to posts from kids who are thinking about dropping out of college, or taking some time after high school to play poker full-time. The general responses those posters used to get were very pro-poker, along the lines of: 'go for it!', 'strike while the iron's hot', 'don't let your parents tell you what's best for you!’ Funny to see how the standard response has changed in a somewhat-encouraging, or at least more responsible way. "Stay in school, idiot!" is the new official 2+2 party line when it comes to "dropping-out"-type posts. Could it be that 2+2 is growing up?? I don't think that's all that misplaced a suggestion either: the 19-20 year olds who were the high-volume posters a few years ago are now 22-23, and it's actually somewhat refreshing to see that the more poker they've played, the more they've come to realize the importance of a having (at the very least) a college degree in this world. Of course, that's not the only factor that has fueled this new attitude: the legislation, of course, better competition and decreased win-rates have really drilled into our collective minds the precarious nature of this golden-egg.

Being completely done with school, and just sitting here without any responsibilities or deadlines is a strange feeling. It’s somewhat reminiscent of how I felt after I moved to New York after undergrad…and it didn’t really phase me until I’d been there a week or two, and settled into my apartment, and I was walking home after work one day down the tree-lined street, watching a couple kids shoot hoops in a park, and moms push baby strollers, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks: This is my life. This is it. This was where the charted waters ended. I had somehow made it 22 years without making any real decisions for myself: primary school, high school, college (as if any of those were an actual choice), and then I had interviewed for and accepted a consulting job in New York. Maybe one of the most well-worn paths ever trodden, and there I was: “free” for the first time ever, and at the same time petrified, suddenly wishing for some kind of structure or safety net. That’s probably one of the factors that led me to enroll in law school in the first place: it was in many ways the ultimate security blanket: study hard, pass the bar exam, and go work for a law firm, and there’s really no way you won’t be a millionaire in 10 years. It's a fool's paradise that I've written about many times. So it’s somewhat strange now that I’ve more or less soured on that career path to be sitting around wondering just what direction I’m going to take my life next.

I've been battling some really frustrating demons the past few weeks as I contemplate the crossroads that I’m at, and I take stock of all the differently-situated people in my life. All my good law school friends graduated in May (as I would have had I not taken a semester off way back when), and have been working at their respective law firms for anywhere between 2 and 8 weeks. It’s been interesting to observe how they’ve all adjusted to firm life, many of them being flung into 70-hour work-weeks within their first 10 days on the job. Nearly all of them I’ve spoken with had to go into work either 1 or 2 days of this 4-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Some of them hate it, others claim not to mind it, while others take a bit of a helpless approach, acknowledging that their #1 priority is paying off their law school loans within 3 to 5 years, and viewing Big Law as the only reasonable option to do so. All the while I watch the situation unfold with binoculars from an ocean away.

While I don't know if the following is related, for maybe the first time ever, I’ve been overcome with a desire to do something worthwhile with my life. Something from which I can really derive a sense of pride. A lot of people frame the issue as one about contribution-to-society, and expend a lot of mental energy evaluating whether playing poker is any less of a contribution than many other so-called “respectable” professions: stock traders, real estate brokers, etc. I've often contemplated the same. But lately, I've felt driven by a different need: the need to do something worthwhile with my life. And perhaps it's just a semantic switch, but the idea of a "worthwhile" life strikes me as different than merely making a contribution.

In the first few months I kept this blog (immediately after I had left law school), I posted a lot about how frustrated I was that most people in the field of law seemed to be so unhappy and unfulfilled, and I did a lot of soul-search about the importance (or potential lack thereof) about choosing a profession that contributes something toward our society.I look at my fellow law school graduates now, and instead of evaluating the actual importance of the roles they are playing as cogs in the legal machinery of our society, I have begun to realize how high a value I place on doing something that gives me a sense of pride. It’s even a little refreshing to see that even when my friends are bitching about the hours they put in, they derive a sense of pride over what it is they do for a living, and it’s got me thinking that there's only so much pride one can take in being an elite poker player.

When I was working in my consulting job prior to law school, I remember asking one of my coworkers what she most wanted out of her career, and her life; e.g. what she thought would make her happiest and most fulfilled. And she gave me a definition that, while I didn't quite realize it at the time, I have yet to see equalled in terms of personal resonance: She said that whatever she did, she just wanted to feel as though she were applying all of her natural and acquired talents to the maximum of her ability. We're not all blessed with the athletic talents of Lebron James, or Sydney Crosby, each of whom was being touted as a potential superstar as early as the age of 12. Nor do we all necessarily possess the intellectual capacity of a Da Vinci, Einstein, Hawking, and so on. So what? Does that mean that we should just throw in the towel because we'll never equal those prodigies in their respective strongsuits? Of course not! The only way we "lose" in this game is if we don't put what we have been blessed with to optimal use. I've been blessed with some pretty impressive natural abilities, but I've also worked my ass off to get to where I am today, and poker, while it has fulfilled my intellectual and emotional needs for the past few years has simply been doing so to a lesser and lesser degree of late. I'm certainly not at the top of the food chain, but I'm damn close, relatively speaking. It just doesn't challenge me like it used to. "Challenge": that's an interesting concept. It's the reason I've taken (and then quit) jobs, left girlfriends, changed majors, traveled abroad, etc. I need it. I crave it. Poker has fit that bill for quite some time now, perhaps because it contains such an instantaneous and measurable barometer of progress, but I'm wondering if I've taken it nearly as far as I can. The fact of the matter is that I've got 2 Ivy League degrees. Is poker really the most worthwhile contribution I can make to this world? Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't, but this much is sure: if you had told me when I started at college that the career path I'd choose would be one that could be mastered by high school dropouts (Negraneu) as readily as Stanford PhD students (Ferguson), I would have wondered whether my life had taken a wrong turn somewhere! Making money was a very important objective of mine when I was younger, but it's funny how actually reaching certain financial summits has made realize how important other life pursuits are as well. I can’t play poker full-time for the same reason that I would turn down an offer to pump gas for the next 10 years, even if it was accompanied by, for examle, a $5 Millino / year salary: it’s just not the reason that I’m here. Creating and nurturing a solid academic foundation isn’t important solely for its ability to command a healthy income, but for producing, creating, improving, teaching. Sigmund Freud, when asked what he believed was the meaning of life, responded “to love, and to work." When I'm on my deathbed and I'm asked by my wife, or grandchildren, or spiritual advisor whether I'm satisfied with the way I spent my life, I'm faintly beginning to grasp the idea that I want a tangible body of work to look back upon that will allow me to say "I took my God-given abilities, and I used them to the absolute best of my ability. " And the question I find myself asking more than any other of late is to what extent teaching myself to be an expert poker player will contribute to that, if at all. These thoughts I know are pretty jumbled at the moment; I dragged my feet for a good week in making this post, fearing that not everything would come out as eloquently as I would like, but decided to go ahead and post it, and hope that perhaps when placed in context along with the next few posts, they'll contribute to a more complete picture.

Thursday, November 23: 1 WSOP buy-in down the drain

2006-11-20T05:07:00.000-05:00

Bodog rakeback

I typically try to keep this blog free from affiliate/rakeback stuff, mostly because I'm weaning myself from the RB-business...ever since I moved up to higher-stakes games last year, I found that it just wan't worth my time to track and pay players...but I still get quite a few emails asking about it (I think in one of my earlier posts, I mentioned that I was an affiliate.) I've also got quite a few emails from Americans since the US legislation, asking about US-friendly sites that still offer rakeback.

So although I'm loathe to talk about it, I thought I'd mention a particularly cool little offer for Bodog, which is one of the sites that has taken a staunch pro-US stance and remained open to Americans. A good friend of mine is an affiliate there and offers 25% rakeback, but the cool thing is that even if you've already got an account there (on which you're not getting RB), he can switch you to his affiliate account, provided you're not currently tracked to an affiliate. That's a big "if". You may or may not have signed up under an affiliate when you originally opened your Bodog account...in fact, you may not even remember...but if you did not, it's cool that Bodog has allowed him to just transfer you into his affiliate account so you can start getting rakeback there. He just moved me over to his affiliate account last week (i wasn't currently tracked to an affiliate), and he's got a website with online tracking, and all that good stuff.

Email me at everywherejim at hotmail.com if you're interested. The info I would need from you is:
1. Real first and last names
2. Email address associated with your Bodog account
3. Bodog account # and screename.
I then have these sent to the Bodog affiliate manager who will say one of two things:
i) "Great, that player wasn't linked to an affiliate, so we switched him!", or
ii) "Sorry, that player was already linked to an affiliate, so you're out of luck."

Alright, enough with that, on to more interesting things.

Single biggest losing hand ever

I'm happy to say that I've gotten quite comfortable at the $2,000 and even the $5,000NL tables. I've been stacked a few times for the full $5,000, but this hand really obliterates that prevoius "best": after buliding my stack up to almost $14,000, I took a nice little $9,300 hit. I'd been running over the table this particular session, and I knew that a lot of my opponents were getting sick of my aggression; this session, I'd guess my stats were areound 35/22, which at a full table is pretty darn LAG. A few of them had started playing back at me...the SB in this hand was the only other somewhat aggressive player at the table, and he had come over the top of my raises a few times already. He made a quite strong play here, re-raising an UTG raiser from the SB, which typically screams strength. I almost folded, but his LAGgy image, combined with my having position on him, and both of our big stacks led me to call. I'm very happy with the way I played the rest of the hand. There was only 1 hand I had to be worried about, and several (AA, and all the AK combinations) that were likely going to pay me off here. Of course, that sense of self-satisfaction isn't going to bring me back the WSOP buy-in that I lost on this hand.

I have made a decision that these next couple months of posts will be this blog's swan song. It's been almost 2.5 years, and I always wanted to go out on a high note, so to speak; e.g. to end this blog before the quality of posts started deteriorating...and I don't think I've quite crossed that threshold just yet, which is a good thing. There were a few other times where I thought about ending this thing, but each time I was persuaded not to because of a few factors:

first off, I was still having fun...I still found posting here to be a therapeutic outlet for poker-related angst that just didn't lend itself easily to expression in the 'real world.'
Secondly, I was still getting a few emails each week from people telling me that they found my story inspiring and helpful vis-a-vis their own situation, which in turn inspired me to keep at it...to paraphrase a somewhat-corny old U.S. army recruitment slogan that I've always identified with: "if someone wrote a book about your life, would anyone want to read it?" And perhaps it just plays to my own feelings of insecurity, or the universal human need to feel that one's life is relevant or significant, but you know what: I do think my life, to this point, has been quite an interesting trip, and keeping this blog has played an integral part in reminding me of that fact, at least with respect to the last couple years.
Lastly, I could never quite bring myself to stop posting, because...well...I always felt like I still had more to write about. I nearly ended things at the end of 2005, and then thought about it again in May of this year, when I finished my second-to-last semester of law school and decided to do this whole Australian junket. But each time, something told me that I hadn't quite tackled all the things I wanted to talk about, and I knew that there was still value in those unexpressed thoughts. And I'm grateful that I've kept posting this year, because I think some of the more important concepts have crystallized for me during that time, such as my thoughts on what I called "Poker Opportunity Cost", which is something that continuously informs my life and the decisions that I make, and my entry here about how the psyche of a successful poker player might differ from that belonging to an individual who was born into wealth. It was never a struggle to come up with new material, because there was always some nagging issue that I wanted to find some expression for. But things have changed in the last couple months; I've found it harder and harder to come up with new topics; frankly, I've found that I've just plum run out of things to talk about. I've covered a hell of a lot of ground in my journey from a 2/4 grinder, to a $5,000 NL regular. I'm sure there are stories left to be written about where Fortuna will take me from here: I think I'll take a good run at playing in some WSOP events next year, since it's clearly a feather I want to have in my poker cap, irrespective of how I do. But after a few years of writing about my poker travails, I wonder just how relevant my future exploits will be to my present audience. It's been really strange to meet people who have read my blog and have them know more about my life, and more personal thoughts, goals,and insecurities than some of my best friends (since I share this blog with so few of them.) I've met some really interesting 2+2'ers, some cool, many not-so-much, and it's kind of jarring to launch into some poker theorum only to have them say "oh yeah, I remember reading that in your blog a little while back ." I'm not saying I mind :) but it's kind of funny when it happens.

As far as what's going to happen to this blog: well, it's staying online, that's for sure; I think it's too valuable a commodity to be taken offline merely because I won't be updating it as frequently anymore. I've thought about perhaps printing it out and getting it leather-bound for myself or something, as a bit of a momento to the work I've put into it. Heck, a few people have actually suggested to me that I look into getting it published. And yeah, at the risk of sounding a tad arrogant, I think the work product herein is extraordinarily valuable...perhaps in a different sense than some of the best strategy books out there, but I don't for a moment suggest that I'm addressing the same material as they do. As a resource to provide guidance to would-be pros or semi-pros, with respect to what to expect as far as the psychological challenges, demons, and insecurities you can look forward to if you decide to give this poker thing a real go, I'm not sure there's a better resource out there. I'd certainly pay $19.99 for something like this at Barnes & Noble. But I'm not sure that that's something I want to pursue at this time. But that's all a bit premature anyway, since I'm not calling it quits just yet...I've got another month or two in which I hope to get a few more thoughts down here, which will hopefully prove thought-provoking as I close the book on the "law school" chapter of my life, and start thinking more about what I really want to be when I "grow up."

Saturday, November 18: Jamie Gold 102

2006-11-18T04:51:00.000-05:00

P.S. One final thing that I could mention about the Gold/Leyser situation: the previous post was long enough without me mentioning it, but one other way that a unilateral promise, even lacking consideration, can be converted into a binding contract is via a principle called "reliance." If one party reasonably relies on a promise (to his detriment), it becomes a binding contract to the extent that he was disadvantaged by his reliance. For example, if I promise a friend that I'm going to give him my BMW once I move overseas, and he relies on that promise and, figuring he'll no longer need the old Toyota he's been driving around, he gives it to the Salvation Army, then the promise I made to him (re: giving him my BMW) becomes a binding contract, because he reasonably relied on it to his detriment (he would, however, probably only be able to recover in the amount of the amount he "lost" -- in other words, the value of the Toyota.) This legal principle exists in order to allow people to rely on reasonably-given promises even before they're consummated, without being worried that they could get screwed if the other party backs out.

What this means for the Gold/CL case is that if CL had been shrewd (or had some shrewd lawyers at his disposal), he might have done an act in reliance on Gold's promise, thereby converting it into a contract. What could he have done? Hmmm...well, immediately after Gold's $12 Million win, he might have gone out and bought himself some expensive real estate (presuming he could have found someone satisfied with his level of credit), which might have established the reliance necessary to convert Gold's promise into a contract. That's a bit of a simplified example, but that's where good lawyers really make their bones: it's coming up with innovative solutions to sticky situations like this that sets the elite ones apart from the schmoes. There were plenty of ways that good lawyers could have approached the situation that would have put CL in position to ensure that he collected his half of Gold's winnings. Filing a preemptive injunction, however, was NOT one of them (unless, as some people have correctly pointed out, there is more to know about this situation, and CL did, in fact, have reliable evidence that Gold was looking to back out -- we'll know much more after the discovery phase of the lawsuit; prob early in 2007.)

Speaking of good lawyers, another perplexing decision by CL was to select poker pro Mark Seif to represent him (at least in the initial negotiations he was having with Gold.) WHAT??!? What the hell prompted that decision?? Seif is an elite tournament player, and by all accounts a real smart guy, but on what basis did CL make that decision?? Seif may have passed the bar exam, but he hasn't practiced in God-only-knows how long! That's a situation where you call up an elite Manhattan or even Las Vegas firm and get one of their prominent contract attorneys to represent you (you'll have a ton of preeminent contract lawyers lining up for the chance to work, even on a contingency fee basis, on a $6 Million lawsuit.) Mark Seif is an outstanding poker player, but this is a contracts issue, not a poker one. That's like a 1st round NBA draft pick hiring Lebron James as his agent. I get it: the guy knows basketball; but negotiating a contract has nothing to do with hoops. When Terrell Owens had his contract dispute with the Eagles, the arbitrator was actually a professor at my law school, and the campus was swarming with ESPN camera crews, one of which asked the guy a question about the NFL, to which he responded "actually, I don't really know much about football." ESPN had some fun at his expense, but that's exactly what the arbitration process needed: a completely dispassionate individual who could take a clean view of the contract issues without letting football get in the way.

In fact, the preceding begs an interesting question about the ownership of sports franchises. Several owners and/or general managers love to tout their status as "fan first, owner/GM second." Sounds noble, and makes for good morning sports talkshow soundbites, but there's something to be said for the fiscally-responsible owner/GM who views his acquisition as an investment, and just goes out and makes sound business decisions. There's certainly a few notable and successful examples of the fan-first approach: like Mark Cuban (Dallas) or the Maloof Brothers (Sacrament0) in the NBA. But also plenty of examples of the business-first approach paying dividends like Billy Beane (Oakland, MLB) (although the majority of these types probably don't get as much publicity, because they pull the strings mostly from behind the scenes). Anyway, this really wasn't the direction this post was originally meant to take, and it's long enough for now, so for now I'll just post a pic of me bungee jumping for the first time ever, and leave the topics I meant to address for next time. Taken in Queenstown, New Zealand, birthplace of bungee jumping. Despite the predilection for risk that you need in poker, I'm actually a big pussy, and was doing my best to talk myself out of actually doing this. Luckily, my 2 travel companions would not have let me get out of the country alive had I weasled out of it, and I ended up with this awesome picture:

Friday, November 11th: Jamie Gold 101

2006-11-10T22:15:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the break -- when law school exams call, I've got to bear down and give them #1 priority sequence.

Thought I'd offer the benefit of my legal education to those wanting to know just what's up with the lawsuit that was filed against Gold by a man named Crispin Leyser ("CL"), claiming that Gold owed him half of his $12 Million WSOP prize. I've more or less had enough of reading the completely ludicrous opinions of others, who have no understanding of the legal system. So I'm going to do my best to explain the story here, in as understandable a manner as possible -- this is actually kind of fun to follow: the equivalent of law-student porn, if you will.

The basic facts (on which both sides more or less agree)

Gold befriended CL a little while before the WSOP; they had both worked in television, and were fans of playing some poker. Bodog Poker had agreed to sponsor Gold to play in the WSOP Main Event (although it's not clear why; e.g. whether he won an online satellite, or whether they were paying for his $10,000 entry fee for some other reason.) At some point, Gold told CL that he thought if CL (who had some connections to the entertainment industry) could get some celebrities to wear Bodog apparel during the WSOP, that Bodog would sponsor CL to play in it too. CL had apparently suggested that he could get Matthew Perry and Matthew McConaughey. But it didn't pan out, and CL only got two D-list celebs: Dax Shepard (from the Punk'd TV show), and Matthew Lillard. Bodog did not end up paying for CL's entry fee.

Now things get interesting: at some point Gold agreed verbally to give CL 50% of any money he won at the WSOP. Just why he agreed to do that is a matter the parties debate, but I'll get back to that soon. There is no doubt that Gold had promised to give CL half. The night before the final table (at which point Gold was already guaranteed to get at least $1 Million in prize money), he called CL's answering machine and left the following message (I have put the important parts in bold):

Hey, it’s Jamie, thank you for your message. I slept pretty well so we should be fine. I have a real good plan on what to do for today. Thank you for all your help. I wanted to let you know about the money. You’re obviously very well protected, everything will be fine but nothing’s going to happen today, that’s for sure. I have the best tax attorneys and the best minds in the business working for me from New York and LA and what we’re probably going to do is set up a Nevada Corporation and it’s going to … I have to pay you out of the corporation. I can’t just pay personally because I could get nailed. So it might take a few days, so please be patient. I promise you — you can keep this recording on my word — there’s no possible way you’re not going to your hal … after taxes. So please just be with me. I can’t imagine you’re going to have a problem with it. I just don’t want any stress about any money or any of that [censored] going on today, or even after the end of the day. I’m sure you’re going to be fine; you’re going to be very well taken care of, absolutely fairly. We’re just trying to handle this properly and after now I don’t even want to talk about it or think about it. But please just trust me. You’ve trusted me the whole way, you can trust me a little bit more. I promise you that there’s no way anybody will go anywhere with your money. It’s your money. Alright, I send you love, thank you for your support …

The preceding voicemail has set the poker world abuzz, with many people (who have no clue what they're talking about) claiming that it's the 'smoking gun' that will ensure Gold loses in court. This is poppy-cock, which I'll explain in a moment.

Aaaaaanyway, after Gold won $12 Million, he immediately got in touch with accountants and tax professionals to start working through the most advantageous way to take ahold of his winnings (there's all sorts of perfectly-legal measures you can take; such as incorporating yourself, or the like that can result in slightly-lower tax liability...and when you're dealing with $12 Million, even a small reduction in taxes can amount to like a quarter-million more in your pocket.)

While this was still going on, CL (apparently worried that Gold was going to back out of paying him the half that he'd promised) filed a lawsuit, seeking an injunction to prevent Harrah's from paying out half of Gold's winnings, on the theory that it actually belonged to him. A judge granted that injunction, so Gold was paid $6 Million, and the other half is still with Harrah's, awaiting resolution of this matter. P.S. an "injunction" is sort of like a temporary restraining order -- it doesn't mean that CL actually WON the case or anything (we're still months away from that). All it means is that the judge agreed that there was a viable enough question about who the money belonged to tell Harrah's to hang on to it. The law allows for these "injunctions" to be granted to prevent people from taking hold of assets and then disposing of them before a claim can be made by an opposing party...for example, theoretically Gold could have taken his $12 Million, and immediately bet it all on one spin of the roulette wheel and lost it, leaving no money for CL to recover should he then file a lawsuit. (But in this case, filing for the injunction was one of the all-time greatest bonehead moves, as I'll explain below.) Apparently miffed by CL immediately pulling the trigger on a lawsuit, Gold seems to have reneged on his promise, and decided that he isn't going to give CL a dime.

And that's where we stand; still with me?

The Legal Stuff

Alright, this is where things take a turn for the sexy.

Yes, there's no doubt that there was (at one time) a promise by Gold to pay CL half his WSOP winnings. Neither side disputes that. And as I wrote before, that's the 'smoking gun' that a lot of people are clamoring proves Gold's "guilt." The problem is that most of the general public watches a tad too much Judge Judy, and thinks that our legal system works something like that: i.e. that each side gets 15 minutes to tell the court what happened, win as many trailer-trash points as they can, and then a judge exercises common sense to determine what decision would be most "fair." Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're living in a dream world.

(By the way, if any of you are wondering just how Judge Judy or any of those other judge shows work: well Judy is indeed a former judge. But what you see on TV isn't actually connected to the country's judicial system in any way. It's just one big TV production. But what about the disclaimer you see that "the cases are real...the plaintiff and defendants are real..."?, you might ask. Well, they are. What happens is that the show's producers scour the docket of the small claims courts, looking for cases that look...well...ridiculous; i.e. where both parties look pretty juvenile, and the facts of the case look like they'd make for some good "wow, those-people-make-my-own-life-seem-so-satisfying-and-relevant" TV. Then they approach the parties and ask them if they'd like to be part of the TV show...if they agree, both parties sign a contract agreeing to appear on the show and be bound by the decision of the "judge", and drop the proceedings from the docket of the "real court." But the fact that Judge Judy actually did used to be a judge really has no value...it could be Kato Cailin in a Big Bird suit up on the bench, and the parties would still be bound by his decision...because they agreed by contract to be bound by it...not because the "judge" has any actual disciplinary discretion.)

Anyhow, back to the matter at hand: Here's the thing (and pay attention here): one of the most fundamental principles of contract law is that promises are not legally binding. Yep, any first-year law student can tell you that. In other words, that voicemail means nothing. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Gold could have stood up on the final table in front of an audience of thousands, dropped his pants, and announced through a bullhorn: "I, Jamie Gold, promise to give CL half of my winnings today", and it wouldn't mean a damn thing. The voicemail may be evidence that Gold is a scumbag for going back on his word, but as far as forming the basis for CL's legal claim to that money, no dice.

So that's what the law ISN'T. Here's what it is. The "full" law about promises is this: promises, without consideration, are not legally binding. "Consideration": that's the operative word here. Roughly speaking, it means that each side must give something up to make the agreement binding. Otherwise, it's just a "promise", or a "gift", and that means bupkiss. In fact, that's exactly what Gold's argument is: that his 'agreement' with CL was just a promise to make him a gift of 50% of his winnings, and not any sort of binding contract. For example, if I say to you: "I promise to give you the deed to my house, if you let me borrow your car next weekend, then there IS consideration: it's you letting me borrow your car -- and hence the promise is binding because the other party is giving up something in return. BUT, if you just say "I promise to give you the deed to my house", it's not binding, because there's no "consideration". Now, there's no requirement that what each side gives up needs to be of equal, or even fair value. For example, in the case above, the deed to a house is probably worth way more than the ability to borrow a car for the weekend, but courts don't really concern themselves with that -- they just need to see something given up in return to make the promise binding.

Hope you followed the above -- so how does that fit into the Jamie Gold case?? Well, Gold is arguing, as I mentioned above, that there was no consideration, and hence the 'agreement' was only a promise to make a gift to CL of 50% of his winnings, which isn't binding. BUT, CL tells a different story: he says that the agreement he had with Gold was to get celebrities to endorse Bodog during the WSOP, in return for 50% of Gold's winnings. And he did just that. They may not have been the A-list celeb's he originally thought he could get, but his argument is that the agreement he had with Gold was a binding contract, conditional on him acquiring the celebs, which he did, and that's what constituted the "consideration" necessary to make the promise a binding contract. Got it? Here's where things get murky, because it's really unclear from the facts that have come out so far just what was the nature of the agreement Gold and CL had. Gold claims that once he saw that the D-list celebs that CL had acquired for Bodog weren't good enough to get Bodog to sponsor him, he simply "felt bad", and decided to promise to make a gift to CL of half his winnings. CL, on the other hand, claims that Gold told him prior to him getting the celebs that he would gift to him 50% of his winnings if CL were able to get them to wear Bodog clothing...and he argues that the fact that the celebs weren't the A-listers he originally thought he could get is irrelevant. Oh, one more thing: in case you were wondering, "past" consideration usually doesn't suffice to make a promise binding; in other words, if Gold had said to CL: "Great job on getting those celebs for Bodog -- sorry they didn't think it was good enough to sponsor you, but you know what: I know how hard you worked to get them, and in return I'm going to give you half of my winnings." That wouldn't be good enough to make it binding. You might think that CL's work in getting the celebs might constitute his "consideration", but notice how it occurred before Gold agreed to give him 50%? That's called 'past consideration', and usually isn't accepted by courts...it has to be consideration that's bargained for at the time of making the agreement. The outcome of this case will depend largely on the terms of 2 agreements: i) the one between Gold and CL, and ii) the one between CL/Gold and Bodog (e.g. just what was the deal with the celebs?? Did Bodog ever agree to sponsoer CL in return for getting them?)

We just don't know the answer to those Q's yet -- all that's been filed with the court are each side's briefs...meaning their "side" of the argument. Early next year, we'll probably get to the "discovery" phase, at which point both parties are required by law to exchange all the documentation they have about the case...once we see that info, we'll have a better idea of whether the promise should be considered a binding contract, not.

Now here's my general commentary on why both sides completely butchered this situation:

#1: Why Gold is an idiot
He reneged on a promise, plain and simple. Doesn't necessarily make you a criminal, but does make you a grade-A jerk, and for a person who's supposed to be an ambassador for a game where honesty and integrity go a long way, it just doesn't reflect well on the way he was raised, or how he'll represent the interests of the nation's poker players . Gold's argument in this case boils down to "yeah, sure I had made a commitment at one time to pay him half my winning, but on account of how much he pestered me during the event, and then his cheekiness in filing the injunction lawsuit, I've decided to change my mind." CL seems like something of a lowlife too, but Gold is essentially saying "yeah, I admit that I went back on my promise, but Leyser did it to himself by being such a jerk." That's an argument that would barely hold water during 6th grade recess, let alone among professional adults.

#2: Why Leyser is an idiot
There are many thigns I could write about here (starting with his failure to get somethig in writing from Gold or Bodog,) but I'll restrict my discussion here to one point: CL -- and possibly his lawyers -- are complete idiots for filing for the injunction vs. Gold so damn early. Why? Because it appears from all indications that Gold did actually intend to pay CL his promised half (see voice message above -- you don't really leave a msg like that if you're intending on ducking out on the guy), but just wanted to take some time to work out the most advantageous way to structure the arrangement for tax purposes: a reasonable request, and one that would seem to be in CL's best interests, in addition to Gold's. Why on Earth would you file a lawsuit and risk pissing off a guy who has agreed to give you millions of dollars and apparently intends to follow through (but does not have a conclusive obligation to do so). CL did not file this lawsuit on his own -- he had lawyers help him draft it; if those lawyers were worth a dime, they should have taken a look at the facts of the case presented to them by their client, evaluated just how strong his claim to the money was, and (once realizing that it might not be a binding contractbecause of the absence of consideration) immediately counseled CL to reconsider for fear of immediately poisoning the guy's perception of you (when he has no legal obligation to pay you the money.) This situation is akin to walking into your boss' office and cursing him out the day before he decides what your annual discretionary bonus will be. There's positively nothing to gain, and everything to lose. Remember, CL's lawsuit was NOT a direct claim to half the money; it was only a suit for an injunction, preventing Harrah's from paying out the other half to Gold until the matter was sorted out. The only way this action makes sense is if CL had a legitimate concern that Gold would dispose of the money and leave nothing for CL to collect. But there's just no way in hell that's realistic. Gold's has a lot of money and modest celebrity -- he simply doesn't fit the profile of someone who's going to flee the country, or somehow put that money beyond CL's reach. It would be another story entirely if Gold had already backed out of his agreement to pay CL half...then a lawsuit laying claim to half the money by CL would be perfectly reasonable...but a suit for an injunction is completely ludicrous, when there's no real risk of flight, and every risk that the guy might simply change his mind regarding a non-binding promise. No upside; huge downside. Lawyers really dropped the ball on this one.

Sunday, November 5th: Bear with me...

2006-11-05T01:03:00.000-05:00

I hate falling into a < 1 entry / week frequency, but I've got Tuesday circled on my calendar as the point when I will officially have this law school exam-period misery behind me, and will have some (hopefully interesting) things to say at that time.

Monday, October 30: Almost there...

2006-10-29T23:56:00.000-05:00

I hate having more than a week break between blog posts, but sometimes it's unavoidable -- in this case, it was because I was getting remaining law school responsibility # 1 of 3 out of the way. Just a paper and an exam left, now, before I'll be required to admit to myself that I've dragged out my education as long as humanly possible, and think about...I dunno...growing up, or something. I typically try and stick with a single theme for blog posts, but sometimes (like this time around), I've just got a miscellaneous collection of thoughts swirlng around so you'll simply have to take this post for what it is: a little bit of rambling poker incoherence.

1. A little twist that helped me out

Here's a very minor, yet very important change I made around 3 months after I left law school and started playing more seriously: I stopped keeping tabs on my results day-to-day (which I had, up until that time, kept in an Excel spreadsheet), and decided instead to only making a note of my wins/losses only at the end of each week. Oh, sure I was aware of whether I was up or down for that week on any given day, but I wouldn't actually enter a final value into my spreadsheet until the end of the week (rather than at the end of each day.) Why did I find this tiny little strategy useful? Well it was nothing more than a psychological ploy, but an important one: I used to hate going negative early in a session and telling myself that I wanted to keep playing at least until I was back in the black. It worked in the other direction too: I could start out hot in a session, and then sometimes cool off and give back all my winnings and (despite having been around the variance block more than a few times in my short life) I would still suffer from some "geez, why didn't I quit when I was up $x" remorse. The point is that when I tracked my profits/losses every single day and was perpetually aware of just where I stood, I lost sight of one of the most important (and in my estimation, poorly understood) principles of long-term randomness / variance: it was like an epiphany when one day I realized that individual winning and losing hands or sessions don't mean a damn thing. Hey, it's nice to go to bed up a few thousand dollars, but once you've played enough hands to have at least a rough conceptualization of your winrate per hand, then it really doesn't matter whether or not you win or lose in a particular session. It's all simply about getting in as many hands as you can without your play deteriorating. But focusing on single winning or losing sessions and getting happy or upset about them has got to be one of the most futile exercises in a game like ours. And keeping daily tabs on wins and losses obscured that point, and it was like a breath of fresh air when I realized how pointless it was to focus on such a short time-frame. Using that time instead to read and practice my game has paid serious dividends.

2. The single most important thing you can do to improve your game

With a header like that, you might think that I was going to reveal some sort of nugget of wisdom that would propel you into the BB/100 stratosphere. Sorry to be a little more pedestrian, but the secret is this: post hand histories on 2+2 for discussion, or if you're too lazy to do that, I'd wager that you can get just as much out of reading other people's HHs. I've just recently rediscovered how incredibly valuable this resource is, after going maybe a year or more without venturing into the strategy forums there. I occasionally get emails asking about what poker books I'd recommend, but the truth of the matter is this bold statement: if you approach them with an open and critical mind, the 2+2 strategy forums are a more valuable resource, and have taught me 10x more about poker than every poker book I have ever read combined. In many respects (and to echo a stand-up comic's commentary about how he felt when he discovered masturbation for the first time): "I really can't believe this is free." Note the "open mind" caveat. I haven't been shy in the past in saying that I think 95%+ of what you read on the forums is complete bullshit, which I still believe to be true. A critical skill you'll need to develop if you're going to get anything out of those forums is the ability to use your own internal BS-meter to parse out the good from the bad. It's an acquired ability, but once you find that sweet-spot, I think you'll realize how much value there is to be found.

What triggered my new love-affair with the strategy forums? Well, despite my successes switching over to NL over the past 6 months or so (which now accounts for around 80% of my play), I still do feel like I'm being flatly outmatched and outplayed by the high-limit NL sharks. It's a new feeling for me, since there are very few limit games where I don't think that I'm the best player at the table...maybe a tad self-assured, but there you have it. But I'm not shy to admit that the sharks at the 10/20 and 25/50 NL games have plenty more moves and tools at their disposal than do I; frankly, I play a pretty straight-forward NL game and it's enough to beat the HSNL tables for 3 - 5 BB/100, but I know that I'm exactly the type of predictable opponent that thinking sharks will eat for dinner, just like I do with decent, but predictable players who sit at my LHE tables.

So that's when I started wading back into the NL strategy forums. And they're a goldmine. And as I wrote before: I'm a lazy guy and typically don't post hands of my own, but just browsing through all the other HH posts has been extremely worthwhile. I haven't changed my tune about 95%+ being complete BS or otherwise unhelpful. But as long as you know that going in, you should be OK. Sure, 7 out of 10 comments on any HH are of the "This is such an easy raise, stoopid. The end." variety, but every once in a while you'll get a really well-thought-out reply that will really get you thinking not so much about what to do, but why you're doing it. That is, without a doubt, the single biggest difference between the LHE and NL games. You can put me in any LHE game, and even when I'm tired or hungover, I can pretty much just turn on auto-pilot, because it's such a mathematically-oriented game (at least up through 30/60). You can get away with never having to engage in any 2nd-level thinking (or higher). But God help you if you think that'll get you anywhere in the higher-stakes NL game. With every move, you've got to be thinking not only about what you have, but what you're representing, and what your opponent might have / is representing. This is of course all very elementary to seasoned NL vets, but it's been somewhat refreshing to re-enter the role of "student" (which was more or less foreign to me since I felt like my LHE game had reached a tedious, albeit profitable, ceiling) and pretty exciting to watch as my game has grown. I know that's a boring answer to "how do I take my game to the next level," and most people reading this would prefer to hear some sort of magic-bullet reply, but it's the most honest assessment I can give. A lot of people, unfortunately, see playing poker as a ticket to easy-street. Sorry to dispel that rumor, but clawing your way to the top requires a lot of reading, hard work, and practice. OK, off my soapbox for now.

I've got a few more misc things to say, but this post is long enough for now, and I've sadly got to get back to take care of business re: my last 2 academic obligations for the rest of my life. When you hear from me next, I'll no longer be the law school dropout, but more accurately the law-school-dropout-cum-re-enrollee-graduate.

Saturday, October 21: The Future, Conan?

2006-10-21T14:09:00.000-04:00

I guess the early returns are beginning to trickle in from the US poker legislation, and things -- while not calamitous -- aren't all that rosy. The Party games are pretty atrocious (don't worry, my Yankee friends, you're not missing much at all), and traffic to the poker sites is down across the board. Can you still find juicy games? Sure, but the days of dropping your lure off either side of the fishing boat and being immediately swarmed by schools of 16-pound marlin are over...or at least on indefinite hold. Fact of the matter is that things are going to be very much decentralized for the foreseeable future, meaning that -- especially for people like me who pray at the altar of the datamining / table-selection Gods -- it's going to take considerably more legwork to grind out profits. I'm even trying to look at it as an opportunity to play against somewhat tougher lineups, which I'm hoping will help me keep growing as a player. Sure, I've got one of the higher winrates around but as I've pointed out several times, I don't think there are many people on the planet more careful about table-selection than me, and my BB/100 is only a function of the juicy games in which I elect to sit. I think it'll be interesting to see how I manage in this environment of somewhat tougher games.

It's also been interesting, even (tongue firmly planted in cheek) tragic, to follow the saga of the thousands of 16-to-22 year olds who dropped out of college, thinking that all they'd ever need in life was an internet connection and PAHUD. I don't for a minute pretend that someone with a blog title like mine is in any position to get all preachy. (But frankly, a graduate degree just isn't a necessity in today's economy in the same sense as is an undergrad diploma.) I just hope that if nothing else, the legislative demantling of the online poker industry is a major reality check for a lot of these kids, as it has been for me. Not that I ever took this golden goose for granted, but it's still disconcerting to see one's entire income stream flicker before your eyes...even more so, I'm sure, for the hundreds of college kids who likely dropped out of school for poker in the weeks leading up to the day when the hammer finally fell.

While I was fortunate enough to get in a couple good rides on the online poker gravy train, I'll point out that I was hit pretty hard by this in a very different way. You see, in August and September I finished work on what had been one of my most exciting and ambitious projects to date. I even dropped a couple hints in the blog, and hoped to announce it here. You see, I've been in the affiliate game for a while now, but really just a small-timer......but I had an idea in the works: something that I thought would be a perfect synergy of the two things in this world that I knew best: law school and poker. And thus, with the help of a few friends, www.lawschoolpoker.com was born. Go ahead, check it out. No, it's not the perfect site, but it was something that was a very long time in the making, and I only just got it off the ground before this legislation dealt it a pretty debilitating blow. It feels a bit like the scene in Jurassic Park after all the dinosaurs had run amok and eaten a bunch of people, where the 2 kids make their way back to the main complex, and find the full gourmet buffet dinner laid out in anticipation of the theme park's first full house of dining guests...but after the havoc of the previous 36 hours, there's nobody there to enjoy it. Kind of like how I feel about LawSchoolPoker -- I was all set to watch this thing take off and hopefully grow, but instead it's like I'm looking at a single balloon lazily descending from the rafters, while I sit at the head table with a party hat wrapped comically tight underneath my chin. And a five-figure bill for a site that's facing an uphill climb if there ever was one, not to mention the embarassingly large amount of money forgone in poker opportunity cost over the 100+ hours it took me to put it all together. Am I throwing in the towel on the whole thing? Far from it -- I'm just bummed that a personal project into which I put so much time, and something I really cared about, not so much as a financial endeavor, but more as a productive intellectual pursuit was so critically wounded by a such a careless and disingenuous piece of legislation.

So what about me, huh? Well, here are my plans for the forseeable future. I am -- believe it or not -- graduating from law school 3 weeks from now. Hard to believe from someone with a blog entitled "The Law School Dropout's Poker Blog", I know, but here we are. I am looking at taking the bar exam in February, too, just about the last thing I ever thought I'd be saying 2 years ago when I traded in my LexisNexis password for a Neteller one.

Sure, you only really need bar accreditation if you're planning on practicing law, and while I've got no inclination whatsoever to do so at this time, I'm also open-minded enough to accept the idea that it might come in handy at some truck-stop along the highway of life. After all, if 3 years ago you'd told me that I'd be sitting in a 25/50 NL game, I would have said that you needed your head examined. And I know that if I don't study for and take the bar exam immediately after law school, chances are good that I'll never come back to it. Besides, going a little easy on the poker games for a month or so will be good for me. I think it's frightening that of the 730 days that make up the past 2 years of my life, the number in which I've played at least some poker is likely north of 650. That's a pretty scary thought...with the quagmire that is the current state of online poker, it might not be the worst time in the world to take a little breather. Analogize this to a poker situation, if you wish: sometimes you take a bad beat, but console yourself with the reassurance that you made the "right" move...well, I feel confident that this is the right life move, even if the dividends aren't immediately apparent.

After that? Wow, pretty big question mark; I've really drawn this school thing out as long as possible -- 4 years undergrad, 2 working, 3(+1/2) more of grad school. I was even toying with the idea of enrolling in an MBA program to extend the endless summer that has been my life, of late, but I don't think that's quite the right move for me at this time. Right now, priority #1 is to just ride out the remainder of my Australian adventure. Then it's back to the land of hockey pucks and maple syrup to begin a new chapter.

Saturday, October 14: Mind the Gap

2006-10-14T10:47:00.000-04:00

Something has been on my mind of late: it's one of those things that you don't really notice as you're taking baby steps up the rungs of the poker ladder, until you get really high up and see how much distance you've put between yourself and the 'masses'. I'm not referring to poker skill or the like, but rather to the incredibly warped perception of personal finances I've developed, as compared to the general public. I mean, the chasm is so wide and deep, I feel like I can barely see the other side anymore. Let me pause to make a critical distinction: I'm not talking about a "having money" vs. "not having money" mentality; this isn't a rich vs. poor thing -- I don't really think I'd qualify as either, to be honest. I just mean that the fact that I can win or lose $10,000 in a day, and still sleep just fine at night is a tad bit frightening, and requires developing a mental fortitude to be able to alternate between one's "poker" and "non-poker" mentalities. You might be saying to yourself -- as I did, when I first began playing for high(er) stakes: "well, treating money capriciously is just a personal weakness that some people have, but I certainly won't ever fall victim to it. I'm never going to let money change who I am." And it's true: I think I've done a pretty good job of staying true to "who I am" and the responsible economic values with which I was raised. But as time has gone by, and I've become more accustomed to winning/losing amounts equal to most people's entire annual paycheck in a matter of days, I don't know whether I should fight this "big-money complacency" or not. In many ways, it's the catch-22 paradox of what I wrote about 2 weeks ago: to be successful playing high-stakes poker, you've got to develop an emotional neutrality to the amount of money being wagered...and at the same time, that very neutrality only widens the emotional disconnect that you develop between yourself other people away from the poker table (aka "real life"). I really didn't count on anything like this: flipping the emotional on/off switch when it comes to money has turned out to be trickier than I expected.

Am I making a big deal out of nothing? Maybe, but maybe not -- I've taken a few classes about leadership/work/life/happiness (kinda foofy subjects i guess), and a common theme that emerges time-and-again, is that those people who are happiest and most fulfilled by their lives are those that don't just look at their jobs as impediments that "get in the way" of their enjoyment of their real lives, but rather view their employment as part-and-parcel of who they are. It's the people who have really developed a synergistic relationship between the two such that their home, family, work, and social "spheres" are not separate but rather critically intertwined. The classic picture of the father who comes home at 6pm, and turns off "work dad" to become "home dad" is no longer the optimal picture, says this synergistic perspective. That's not to say that that approach "doesn't work", but it doens't compare -- in terms of life fulfillment -- to the guy who's developed a synergy between work, family, friends, and spirituality, such that he never feels like he's sacrificing one at the expense the other, but rather that his rising tide is lifting all ships. But the "compartmentalized dad" exactly what I'm running into with higher-stakes poker. At first it was an unabashed positive force in my life, and my friends saw it too. I was doing something I loved, I was happy, more pleasant to be around, and feeling good about, well, everything...but more and more I've found it necessary to turn off my "poker brain / money mindset"...a move that's largely antithetical to the synergistic approach above, which preaches harmoney among life domains.

Here's a really dumb example -- I've got a friend here who lives a few miles away, and when I go to over there, instead of waiting for the bus (which takes around 45 minutes including waiting time), I just zip over there in 10 minutes for a $20 cab ride. After a few of these round-trip taxi junkets, she asked incredulously: "I don't get why you don't just take the bus...I mean, where are you getting your money from?" Now she knows nothing about my poker-related income; as far as she knows I'm just a law student without any kind of job on the side. I mumbled something about having saved up some money from my job last summer, but in the back of my head I was thinking "geez, I can't believe she's putting me on the defensive for a half-dozen taxi rides? I can't even begin to imagine what the line of questioning would be like if she knew the full extent of my poker hobby." At the end of the day, I guess I'm just saying that this world of high-stakes poker is a bizarre little corner of society; and there's no explicit 'changing-of-the-guard' that signals your entry into this club: it's not something that really hits you right away, until you look back over your progress, see where you've come from, and appreciate just how much emotional distance you've put between yourself and the "normies". But it's a story that really hasn't been told yet, and hence is largely foreign to the general public, even to the point of being incomprehensible. I mean, people "understand" the story of the elite investment banker or lawyer who slaves away for a decade, makes partner/MD, takes home a million-dollar paycheck, moves to the nice neighborhood and sends his kids to private school. They've heard that story before. Just like they've heard the one about the guy who inherits a nice chunk of change from a dead relative. Or the kid who's fortunate enough to be born into a wealthy family. Or even the Silicon Valley secretaries who all cruise around in Jaguars because they just happened to receive some Yahoo stock options in 1995 as part of their salary package. These stories "makes sense" because we've heard them before, and can wrap our heads around them. You could tell even a stranger that you were the fortunate beneficiary of one of the above scenarios, and -- while they might be a tad jealous -- they'd at least understand the scenario as one that happens from time to time in our crazy world. But the story of the middle-class white kid who logs onto the internet, clicks mouse buttons for a few hours, and logs off $5,000 richer is one that's only now becoming understood, because this is, in a very real sense, the first time our world has ever seen it. In a bizarre sense, I'd almost rather admit to any of the previously-described "understood" scenarios than to my poker reality, even while at the end of the day they might all result in a some sort of financial windfall.

The following words were once immortalized by rapper Mase: "It's like y'all be talkin' funny, I don't understand language of people with short money." (Sidebar: funny the corners of popular culture that have provided conversation fodder for my blog, from Mase, to WWII documentaries, to Mike McD, to Montgomery Gentry, to Joseph Campbell) And while there's no indication he meant for that lyric to be taken as anything other than: "I'm so much richer than you, you pathetic punk," the white-guy interpretation is that it's emblematic of the emotional distance that newfound financial independence can create between yourself and others. Australia's culture makes this dichotomy all the more relevant, because I find that the difference between upper class and lower class here isn't anywhere near what that difference looks like in America. Maybe it has to do with the salary scale; first-year lawyers in Manhattan will take home $180,000 after bonuses. First-year lawyers here will earn the equivalent of around $55,000 USD. It's not that there aren't rich-folk here in Australia, but that the chasm between the rich, middle-class, and poor isn't anywhere near as jagged as it is in the US. So I guess what brought on all these thoughts of late is the fact that my life right now is a real curious hodge-podge of people, cultures, and social circles: I've got my friends who are starting their law careers in the US, my new Aussie friends, both those in school, and those working minimum-wage jobs, friends in Canada, some of whom have gone on to respectable careers since high school nearly a decade ago, while others still live at home with their parents, some of whom are married, a couple who even have kids. I feel like I'm at the center of a bicycle wheel, looking down each individual spoke and seeing a different set of values, life strategies, and degrees of financial independence, and I just keep whirring around in a circle, having to constantly readjust my demeanor depending on my audience. And it's sometimes exhausting.

Monday, October 9: Charts-r-Us

2006-10-08T08:47:00.000-04:00

Something I did last year that I found moderately interesting was posting charts of a breakdown of my progress, segmented by various games / stakes. I'm doing it again now, since I think it tells an interesting story. I've had a pretty mediocre year (by my standards; no, I'm not complaining), and I've really been struggling to understand where I'm coming up short. So here are 4 charts of 2006, with some director's commentary.

First off, here's a breakdown of limit vs. no-limit results.

Commentary: No real surprises here. Yes, there was that nearly unbearable 50K-hand breakeven stretch, the likes of which I had NEVER see before...but then things turn around as they always do, and all is right with the world again.

Now things get a little more interesting, as I break things down by low-limit (which i define as 30/60 and below, and $2,000NL and below) vs. high-limit (everything else). First the low-limit chart.

Business as usual, more or less continuing what I had going on last year: humming along around 3BB/100 (although the combination of limit and NL hands confounds the calculation somewhat.) So you're probably wondering where all my talk of a "mediocre" year is coming from? Wait for it, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaait for it................

What can I say: high-stakes poker owns me. Had a few other things to discuss, but I'll leave them for my next post; school in Australia has turned out to be pretty intense. I didn't exactly come down here to spend my days in class, but not knowing anything about Australian law, I haven't really had the luxury of being able to space out during class, knowing that I'd easily be able to catch up later. But whatever: 3 more weeks of this, a few exams, and then, in the words of Scotty Nguyen it'll be "all over baby." Might even have to change the name of this blog.

Tuesday, October 3rd: Oh, Canada!

2006-10-03T04:07:00.000-04:00

What has two thumbs and is happy not to be American. This guy!! Alright, you know what: I'm actually going to write this post ignoring the hooplah of the past 48 hours -- if you had your head in the sand, Sen. Bill Frist managed to attach anti-internet-gambling language to a port security bill that was passed resoundingly by both the House and Senate, meaning that it now only awaits the signature of President Bush before it becomes law. Why ignore the elephant in the room? Because people have been losing their collective minds over this thing and nobody - nobody - knows just what type of effect this is going to have. Because it's unknowable at this point in time: the next step is for the US Department of Justice ("DOJ") to formlate a set of guidelines to dictate how the law will be interpreted and enforced. A bunch of uninformed adolescents yelling that the sky is falling serves absolutely no purpose other than to inject an irrational measure of panic into the proceedings. Online poker will survive in some form. Neteller will be fine. Do I have the answers to just how this will affect the internet poker scene? No, and neither does anyone else, so for the purposes of this blog, it's business as usual until we get some more concrete information from the poker sites or the DOJ.

A healthy disregard for money: I don’t think I have it. But something tells me I want it.

Oh, I've got it to some extent...the other day I let a few acquaintances watch me play a few tables (I didn't dare play anything higher than 20/40 for fear of offending their sensibilities), and they were positively dumbstruck that I could shrug off a $400 loss in 15-minutes. But another nugget from The Professor, The Banker, and the Suicide King that really jumped out at me is that these high-limit pros have a very unique ability to treat enormous sums of money like confetti. You would think that people who had lived their lives by the "bottom line" would have a shrewder conception of the value of a dollar, but the exact opposite seemed true. There were tales of a small group of players who, on a lark, each put up $10,000 to have Howard Lederer, a vegetarian for the previous decade, eat a double-cheeseburger at the table. And you didn't at all get the sense that, after he accepted and scarfed it down, their internal monologue was telling them "what the hell did I just do!?? I can't believe I'm gonna have to pay this guy 10 grand for that!!". Conversely, they really, honest-to-goodness believed that they had just made a wise investment of $10,000. That seeing this man eat a hamburger was worth a Mini-Cooper. Other prop bets they had were even more outlandish, with stakes many times higher. How do they do that?? Mike Matusow, after winning over a Million dollars at last year's WSOP "bragged" that it was all gone within 2 months. We're quick to label him a degenerate / undisciplined / idiot for blowing the biggest cash score of his life, but might there be something worthwhile to learn from this devil-may-care attitude that all the pros seem to have about money? I mean, have you ever heard the story about the pro who practiced fiscal responsibility, played within his bankroll, invested wisely, and never forgot the value of each and every dollar he earned? Me neither. I wonder whether to really reach the stratosphere of the poker universe I'll have to learn to develop this 'healthy' disregard for money...I'm getting there, but still have these occasional hang-ups about the amount of real money that I'm putting at risk. "Easy come, easy go" is just about the last expression that I'd use to describe my money management mindset; more like "scrap like hell to get it, and squeeze it like 'til they rip it out of your cold, dead, hand". I've been wondering more and more lately whether that mindset is a limitation keeping me from stepping up to the next rung on the poker ladder.

A successful mid-to-high stakes NL player recently told me that he rationalizes big losses (or losses that would seem sizeable to the general public) by reminding himself that if he had never taken any risks, he would never have built up his bankroll nor enjoyed the success that he has. For whatever reason, that simplistic line of reasoning struck a chord with me. Nothing but a cute soundbite, perhaps, but it speaks to the emotionally neutral mindset you need to be able to rise through the ranks of the poker world. I think I’ve done alright so far. My comfort zone right now is $30/$60 and $50/$100 and $1,000 NL (arguably $2,000 but I'm not so sure of that), and I’m able to play those stakes without compromising my gameplay.

But in analyzing recently why I’ve had more difficulty at even higher stakes, I’ve realized that despite my beliefs to the contrary, I do indeed change my play at stakes like $100/$200 and $2,000NL / $5,000NL. My VPIP/PFR at 100/200 6-max is closer to 25/18 over a few thousand hands, very far from the 31/21 that had been my norm over hundreds of thousands of hands at 20/40 and 30/60. Despite trying to convince myself that I’d simply run poorly at 100/200 (which is why I was playing fewer hands) I think I’m in denial: a few thousand hands at 100/200 is enough to substantiate that I am indeed changing my game, and it’s because…well…$200 bucks is a lot of money! See, that’s what I’m talking about – I've resigned myself to the idea that (as of right now) $100/$200 is the threshold for me – wish I knew what the key was to ‘getting over’ that emotional hump. When I was a low-limit grinder, I used to look in on the $15/$30 games (at that time the highest game Party spread), and wonder how on Earth people could toss around so much money every hand – e.g. “doesn’t he know that 3-bet is a nice dinner for him and his girlfriend!???” I remember equally well sitting in an $8 / $16 game in Atlantic City with my stomach churning with every hand…it just felt so unnatural to be putting as much as $100 of my own money into a single pot. And this was less than 2 years ago. Go and read my entries from early 2005 if you want a glimpse into how hard I took bad beats in my first few $15/$30 sessions…it was almost unbearable, and I think I ranted and raved in this blog to no end…I remember within my first week at 15/30 suffering a $3,500 downswing (I don’t think I’d ever had to put up with any drop bigger than $1,000 before that), and I was just beside myself…that was nearly 1/3 of my bankroll at the time, and it just made me sick to my stomach. Fast-forward to present-day, of course, and downswings of 5 times that magnitude come and go with alarming regularity.

I haven't come up with any "solution", as it were, to getting comfortable other than practice, which in poker parlance unfortunately means having to actually put the money at risk. The other night, with the help of my good friend Jim Beam, I came home and decided that I'd had enough of writing about this mental block and it was time to hold my breath and take the same step that had allowed me to finally break into the $15/$30 games. The $5,000NL games looked soft, so I jumped in head-first on a couple tables. Long-story-short, I stumbled initially, then went up a couple buy-ins, went to sleep happy, tried it again the next day and gave it all back. But I felt pretty darn happy with myself -- I didn't once tell myself "you freakin' degenerate, do you realize you just won $10,000 in an hour, and then lost it just as quickly?? Who does that!???" And I was able to play a pretty good game too (losing the second 5K back w/ KK all-in PF vs. AK). My net profit may have been zero, but I think I took an important step forward in for the first time being able to adopt the emotional vacancy I think I'm going to need to finally shed my uber-high-stakes training wheels.

That's it for now -- if nothing else, the recent legislative mess has really got the old cranial gears turning...it's a bit of a shock to the system to see one's entire income stream flicker...maybe this soon-to-be law diploma's not such a bad insurance policy after all...more thoughts to come.

Tuesday, September 26

2006-09-27T02:30:00.001-04:00

Responding to a comment left to my last post: I mentioned that a common thread you read in biographies of successful entrepreneurs is that they often say that they owe it all to a risk that they took in their naive youth, which -- if they knew what they know now -- they never would have taken. The commentor raised an interesting point, which I had previously also thought about a lot, and it's this: Are the "Andy Beals" of this world the exception to the rule? Are there really 500 failed would-be entrepreneurs who regret straying from the beaten path for every 1 big success story? Mike McDermott once said "You don't hear much about guys who take their shot and miss. But I'll tell you what happened to them. They end up humping crappy jobs on graveyard shifts trying to figure out how they came up short." It's so hard to tell, but man, what a fascinating and important question. Maybe Mike McD is right, and unconventional risks result in disastrous ruin more often than not -- are they just "sucker plays"? Are the Andy Beal-style success stories essentially the real-life incarnation of the LAGgy maniac at the poker table who consistently makes atrocious -EV plays, but runs up a huge stack by catching cards? I tend to distance myself from that position: I don't think it was an objectively dumb move that just happened to pay off -- but I do think that that's a story that a lot of people tell themselves to make themselves feel better about living ordinary and mundane lives. I'm not knocking the people who do think that the Andy Beals of this world just got lucky: after all, there's a certain intuitive appeal to the argument >> it's a lot easier to accept life's rote tribulations if you convince yourself that the few shining stars in the world just won the "life/success lottery." I can't say I have much, if any, actual proof for my position...but I'm not sure just what form such proof would take. All I an do, for now, is to paraphrase one of my favorite passages from "The Richest Man in Babylon" (required reading, by the way; it's < style="font-style: italic;">can put yourself in a position where opportunity can see you. In other words, you can't control whether or not you get lucky, but you can control whether you even give yourself the chance to do so. I concede that this still doesn't address the question of what happens when putting yourself in that position involves a substantial risk that might leave you even worse off than before, but I find it inspiring nonetheless.

Someone also asked about the pending legislation. I am very, very far from being well-informed on this topic, but here is the gist of it, or my understanding of it at least. This week (of Sept 25) is very, very important. In short, we will likely know by the end of the week (or if not, certainly by the end of next) what the fate of the bill (and hence of internet poker in the US) will be. Here's the somewhat underhanded method by which proponents of the bill are trying to get it passed in the Senate (reminder: the bill already passed in the House, so all that needs to happen for it to become law is for it to be voted on and ratified in the Senate, and then signed by the president.) BUT instead of simply bringing the internet gambling bill to the Senate floor for a vote, Sen. Bill Frist and others are doing something a little sneaky: they're trying to attach it to another bill which is GUARANTEED to pass. The Department of Defense Appropriations bill (I'm sure i got the language on that wrong), will likely be voted on in the Senate very soon, and will pass without a doubt. So Frist is trying to hitch the internet gambling bill to that one to assure its passage. Kind of underhanded, but this type of stuff goes on all the time in Washington. What Frist is trying to avoid is a full-fledged debate on the merits of the internet gambling bill -- after all, it's incredibly controversial, so an informed debate might bring to light all of the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the bill; better to slip it through 'under the cover of darkness', so to speak. The good news is that a lot of Senators (even Republicans) are resisting Frist's attempts, claiming that internet gambling is not an appropriate matter to be included in a Dept of Defense bill (how right they are.) But Frist is really stubborn. Some people surmise that he's making a run at the Presidency in 2008, and really wants to shore up his support among right-wing religious groups, and he thinks that ploughing the internet gambling legislation through will be a testament to his belief in "family values", whatever that means. So everyone's just holding their breath now to see what happens. The final variable is that no one even knows what the version of the bill that might get added to the DoD bill will look like. To appease some of his critics, Frist is making some concessions on the language of the internet gambling bill, but no one really knows just how many compromises will be made. Some have suggested the bill might just prevent credit card transactions to gaming sites. That would be pretty good news, because no one in the US even uses credit cards to fund their accounts (they haven't been able to in years, thanks to industry self-regulation by the banks.) Others have suggested that the bill might cut out any sort of bank transfers or even Neteller use by Americans. This I find rather hard to believe, but the key thing to remember here is that the version of the bill that was passed in the House is NOT absolutely identical to the one that is being negotiated over in the Senate. In order to become law, the only requirement is that the version from the Senate needs to have a substantial resemblance to the one already passed in the House...and that's where these compromises come in. In the next 10 days, we'll have a very good idea of just what the final language of Frist's Senate bill will be, and whether or not he succeeds in getting it through the "back door" by attaching it to other pending legislation.

Tuesday, Sept 19: "Poker Chose Me"

2006-09-18T21:43:00.000-04:00

Whew, the last few posts were a bit of an emotional drainer; needed a bit of a break, hence the 10-day layoff.

Thought I'd go back to a few interesting nuggets from "The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King" which I recently read. Don't worry: no spoilers here, although it's not really the type of book with twists that can be "spoiled". But if you want to go in 100% fresh, you can stop reading now. Here are a few bits that I found pretty interesting.

1) Inside the mind of Andy Beal

I've always liked reading biographies and autobiographies of successful people, and I found this Andy Beal character just fascinating. Now one of the richest men in the world, he didn't take the 'traditional' route to get there -- there was a great chapter in the book that describes how, at the age of 22 (I think....it was definitely at a remarkably young age), he found himself sitting at a real estate auction, about to bid a few hundred thousand dollars on an apartment building that he figured he could fix up and re-sell for a profit. Now, before you think that he was some sort of real estate prodigy, he had never done anything like that before, and in fact was surrounded in the auction room by middle-age men, most representing huge investment funds and real estate corporations. And there he was -- just a 22-year old college dropout who had never bought so much as a tool shed, with no more sophisticated a thought than "hmmm...seems like this apartment building is worth more than they're asking". He candidly admits that he had no idea what he was doing, but if there's a common theme to all the biographies of successful people I've read it's that they nearly unanimously agree that "if they had knowns what they know now when they were just starting out, they never would have taken the risks or made the decisions they did." So much of our culture reminds us to "look before we leap" (and god knows I see enough of the risk-averse mindset among my law school peers), but I can't help but find it fascinating that so many of the world's most successful people claim that it was their willingness to diverge from that well-worn mantra that laid the foundation for all of their eventual success.

2) Pros = perpetually bust-o.

This really took me by surprise. Almost without exception, all the pros who were interviewed agreed that evereyone -- that's e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e -- goes broke at some point in their poker careers. Each of the pros freely admitted that it had happened to them too, usually many times. There are even rumors that right now, as we speak, pros like Mike Matusow, TJ Cloutier and others are flat broke and only manage to play some of the bigger games because they're being staked by other pros (sidebar: who in their right mind would stake a broke poker pro!!??) How could this happen? I mean: I can't picture myself EVER going broke. Sure, I immediately lost the first $200 I deposited when I played online, but I don't really count that as being "broke"...what these pros were describing was losing their entire playing bankroll well into their professional careers. I can't help but wonder how (if these are indeed intelligent poker professionals) they could run through their entire playing bankrolls. Greg Raymer weighed in on this issue and suggested that he thought that theories of appropriate bankroll management are relatively new, and have really grown out of the internet poker phenomenon, which has allowed teenagers to accumulate as many hands of poker as has Doyle Brunson in his entire lifetime. That accelerated learning curve, goes the argument, has also accelerated the development of sound bankroll management strategies, which weren't really commonly known to the professionals of yore. Still, though, I really was taken aback by this idea that everyone goes broke from time to time. I guess it also depends on what your definition of "broke" is, and the author of the book does caution the reader that "broke" to a poker pro means something very different than to the rest of us. Hmmm....the above section didn't come out as clearly as I wished it had, b/c I feel like i have a lot of interesting things to say about the topic. Maybe another time...

One story that kind of warmed my heart in a schadenfreude (sp?) kind of way was Jennifer Harman's description of succeeding at the mid-to-high limit games, but always getting her clock cleaned whenever she tried moving up to the really high games. This cycle repeated itself at least a half-dozen times, where she would build up her bankroll, only to lose it all and have to build it up at the lower-stakes games again. Until she finally broke through and never looked back, and is now considered the top female cash game player in the world. I've heard complaints by so many friends and acquaintances that they can't beat a certain stakes level, which typically take the form of: "I don't get it -- I beat the (X) game consistently, but every time I try to step up to the (X+1) game, I give it all back, even though the players seem just as bad, and I'm so fed up with it, and can't figure it out." It was somewhat reassuring to read Harman's account and know that top players are not immune from the phenomenon either.

3) Jennifer Harman: "Poker chose me"

There was one quote from the book that resonated with me far more than any other: When Jennifer Harman was once asked why she chose to pursue poker for a living, she replied "I didn't. Poker chose me." I don't know if any other soundbite has ever summarized my feelings about poker more precisely and succinctly as did this one. Yes, it's true that I didn't really start playing hold'em seriously until 2004 -- I guess that would make me a relative Johnny-come-lately in this world, but I don't lump myself in with this new generation of poker-boomers who jumped on the poker bandwagon post-Moneymaker. Gambling has always flowed in my blood from a very young age. I still remember going to Vegas for the first time when I was about 11, walking through the Mirage's gambling floor and being thoroughly entranced by all the casino games. The flashing lights and carnival sounds, the way people so cavalierly pulled money out of their pockets in thick wads; how that green paper life-force that seemed to wield such power outside the casino's doors -- that people argued, married, and killed over -- could be splashed about with such reckless abandon. Every chance I got, I would sneak from our room upstairs down to the casino floor and stand in the aisles watching women play slots or spin the money wheel, until security inevitably came and told me that I couldn't stand there. Eventually I figured out that as long as I was 'moving', they wouldn't hassle me, so I learned to slow my gait to a pace that would let me watch a few full spins; and I practiced feigning a confused expression of being lost that allowed me to stand in one place with being hassled by security. It was all just so mesmerizing. I learned how to count cards at 18 and would make trips to the casino every couple weeks, and still keep count just by force of habit whenever I play blackjack, which is rarely these days. 5 years later, along came poker, which for the first time ever gave me a sense of "This is it! This is what all my experiences to this point have been preparing me for: A psychology / probability major with gambling flowing deep in my veins, and a stronger-than-usual attraction to 'get-rich-quick' schemes. All the poker boom did for me was bring to my attention this perfect complement for my existing skill set.

All in all, I think the book was a worthwhile read -- my only criticism is that it didn't really get too much into the psychology of the players...I mean, Andy's whole rationale for challenging the pros to very high stakes games was to make the amounts so high, that it took the pros out of their 'comfort zones' and get them to play scared. But we never really got much insight into what was going through the pros' heads when they were playing for amounts of money higher than they ever had before (even if it was pooled among them, hence reducing their individual exposure). Nor did we ever really get a good look at Andy's psyche (but this was a biography, and not an autobiography). The storyline of the book broke down more or less to: Andy decides he wants to challenge the pros to high-stakes poker, he playes them, then leaves Vegas, then comes back later and plays more poker, then leaves again, rinse and repeat. I guess what I'm saying is that if you're already pretty familiar with the poker world, and have played for mid-to-high stakes yourself, then the book might leave you longing for a little more insight into the psychological profiles of the characters, rather than a mere description of Andy's periodic travels to Vegas, and whether he wins or loses.

Friday, September 8th: Blind Defense and Your Poker Toolbox

2006-09-08T03:21:00.000-04:00

After a few ‘lifestyle’ / ‘look at me, I’m in Australia’ – type posts, I figured I should get back to some poker talk, even though if you ask me, it’s far more interesting to write about the former, although I may not be winning over any readers. I’ve said many times that I used to be a full-ring limit specialist, but learning to play shorthanded has proven not only to be lucrative but has really improved my blind-defense/stealing strategies for all games, because the vast majority of hands in a shorthanded game come down to a stealing situation.

I want to compare two different lines you can take when defending your big blind, and discuss the different effect each has on your opponent’s play. First, a story about the mechanical way I used to approach this topic: let’s say I was sitting in the big blind w/ A9s, and it was folded around to the button (a somewhat aggressive player) who raised, and the SB folded. Here was my old way of thinking:
I’d be sitting there with my A9s and 3-bet the button pretty much 100% of the time, thinking to myself “Whatever, buddy, I’m not for a second buying that you’ve got a better hand than my A9s (or 66, or KJ, or the like, any of which I used to 3-bet), so I’m going to make you put more money in with the inferior hand.” That’s the old law-school-dropout play (but still the line I take the majority of the time.) But let me now discuss the two lines I want to compare:

Line 1: Exactly what I described above as my old, mechanical M.O.: you 3-bet a hand you’re pretty sure is best, and then lead out on any flop.

Line 2: Instead, you simply call the steal-attempt, and check-raise nearly any flop (b/c the button will follow his steal with a continuation bet when checked to nearly 100% of the time.)

Consider this: in each of the above scenarios, you’re expending 4 small bets, right? But think about the very different messages you’re sending with each line:

With Line 1, you’re saying “Listen, buddy, I’ve got an above average hand too…most likely two high cards, or a medium-to-high pair, and I’m pretty sure it’s better than whatever you’re trying to steal with, so I’m going to re-raise you with what I’m pretty sure is the best hand, right now.” Essentially you’re telling your opponent that you think your 2-card holding is better than his 2-card holding, preflop. In this scenario, your continuation bet after the flop is meaningless…it’s not saying anything about whether you hit the flop; it’s basically just reinforcing that you think your 2 card-holding is better than his.

Compare this to the message you’re sending with Line 2, which is something along the lines of “Well, I’ve given you absolutely no information about my 2-card holding, but I hit the flop.”

Remember: each of these lines has cost you exactly the same number of small bets (4), but you’ve “said” drastically different things with each. How can this help you? Well, think about a holding like KQ in the BB. The button makes a steal-raise, and you 3-bet, because you think your hand is better than his (which it probably is). On a flop of 2,8,9 rainbow, you keep the gas on and lead out with a bet. You’re probably going to get called all the way down by any pair, and maybe (depending on just how frisky the button feels) any Ace as well, to which you’ll lose if you don’t catch a K or Q (and if you do, a button with an Ace might fold rather than pay you off.) Any 2, 8, or 9 is also likely going to the river with you. Compare the above state of events to what happens if you take “Line 2” with the KQ example. With a smooth-call preflop and a flop check-raise, you’re telling your opponent (for the very same price) “My hand may not have been better than yours preflop, but I hit that flop.” Consider how many more hands you’ll get the button to fold. Most decent-playing buttons will fold pairs between threes and 7s. Any Ace-rag like A4, A5, or A6 will (or should) fold, if he thinks he’s drawing to as few as 3 outs (the other 3 aces), but possibly zero. You probably won’t get folds from a button with 2 overcards, but keep in mind you’re holding a K and a Q, you’ve probably got many of the overcards he might be sticking around with dominated.

So how do you use this knowledge? Well, it depends on your blind-stealing opponent, of course. An important stat you’ll want to look at (and get displayed onscreen if you use PAHUD or the like), is WSD%...I think that’s the acronym for it, at least > it’s the one that tells you what % of the time a player will go to showdown when he sees the flop. I think mine is in the 35 – 36% range, which is a tad on the tight side. The percentages I see most often for other winning players are between 35% and 40%. Conversely, I run across players all the time who are modest and consistent losers despite relatively decent-seeming preflop stats (maybe in the VPIP 26 / PFR 18 range for a shorthanded game), but they’ve got a WSD% number of 45% or higher, and I think to myself “man, I wonder if he’s figured out that he’s never going to turn things around until he stops being such a showdown monkey?”) Anyway, I digress: have a look to see whether your blind-stealing opponent goes to showdown a lot – this will give you a good idea of whether you’re likely to get called down by Ace-high. If you’re facing a tighter opponent with a WSD% of 34% or less, you might find a little more value in Line 2, knowing that you’ve got a little more folding equity by checkraising the flop and representing that you hit some piece of it. You’ll also want to look at your opponent’s aggression statistics. That might give you an idea of how “easy” his actions will be able to read, and help you decide whether you’d rather “take control” of the hand with a raise preflop or post-flop.

I will caution now that even though I extolled the benefits of Line 2 in the example above, I’m not arguing that it’s always superior (in fact, I probably use Line 1 more often)…I just wanted to get you to think about the different signals you can send for the very same price. Just more tools to have in your poker toolkit. That’s all I was trying to do with this post: help people think about the advantages of various lines in blind-stealing situations, because at its core, poker is a dialogue between two players: they give each other information (and sometimes misinformation) about their holding via their betting pattern – so you’d be well served to think more about just what you’re saying and what your opponent is saying to you with your bets, and never, I repeat N-E-V-E-R, lose sight of what your dialogue has said up to that point in a hand, and what your opponent might interpret it as having said, and how you might manipulate that dialogue to your advantage. When I start to run bad, it’s almost always because I’ve turned on auto-pilot and stopped doing the 2nd- and 3rd-level thinking that has gotten me to where I am.

Speaking of building up your poker toolkit, here’s a quick hand analysis that might give you a glimpse into the kind of thinking I’m talking about, which I think people should try to develop as they move up in stakes. It’s a simple one, on its face, but I’ll take you through my thought process nonetheless. Here’s the hand, in full.

Party Poker $30/$60 6-handed

I’m in the CO with TJ.

Preflop: Big semi-aggressive fish limps UTG, folded to me, and I call, folded to the BB (solid TAG) who raises, both UTG fish and I call.

Flop: 2 6 7, BB bets, UTG calls, I raise, BB and UTG both call.

Turn: 6, both check to me, I bet, both fold.

Hero wins 6.5 big-bet pot.

Nothing special, perhaps, but I think there’s more to this hand than meets the eye. First off – preflop: A raise out of the BB from a solid TAG shows a ton of strength. He’s saying that he can beat whatever 2 limpers might have.

But let’s talk about the action on the flop, because that’s where the hand was really won. The BB leads out with a bet (which was completely expected after his preflop raise, and a relatively innocuous flop), and UTG merely calls. That’s the first clue, and you should learn to ask what every single action means. This one was easy – UTG, although a fish, was aggressive enough that I was pretty sure he’d raise if the flop was safe and paired either of his hole cards, but he merely called, which told me right away that he had nothing: either overcards or a gutshot straight draw (or a set he was slowplaying, but I thought that unlikely.)

So here’s the information I have so far:
BB (solid TAG): either a big pair, or two high cards.
UTG: overcards to the board, or a gutshot (but did not catch any piece of the flop)

Note what I have: absolutely jack-squat, but it hardly even matters for the purposes of this hand! I’ve got two weak overcards, and while I wouldn’t make the following play often (opting to quietly fold instead), I really liked the undesirable sandwich the BB was in, and I thought I could exploit it, so I raised, knowing that it would essentially force the BB to reveal whether he had overcards or a big pair. He’d almost certainly have to 3-bet a big pair to force out UTG and whatever crap draw he was on, but probably wouldn’t do that with overcards, having to worry about two players left to act behind him.

BB just called, as did UTG (which was very much expected because he was so loose, and in fact was absolutely crucial to the hand, as I explain later), and at that point I knew that the pot was mine if a safe card fell on the turn.

The cost of obtaining this extraordinarily valuable information? A mere 1 big-bet into a 4.5 big-bet pot.

Update on what I know about my 2 opponents:
BB (solid TAG): overcards
UTG: either weak overcards (he didn’t raise preflop) or some sort of crap gutshot or worse; but the board hadn’t paired his hand, that much I knew.

The turn brings an outstanding card for me: a completely harmless 6. Both check to me, and I’m sitting there knowing that the BB is unenviably sandwiched between two players, both of whom may have him beat, so I’m nearly positive a bet now will force him to fold, which he does. UTG also decides to fold his hand (which was probably two weak overcards), but even had he called, I had already decided to bet any river, the only way I was going to take down the pot, and a good investment in this medium-sized pot.

A novice player might look at my play and characterize it as nothing more than a ballsy bluff with a shitty hand that happened to work out this time. But that substantially glosses over the thought process that higher-stakes players put into these decisions. The key to the hand was the squeeze play on the BB – if the UTG had folded on the flop, I would have immediately folded as well. But UTG’s flop call gave me all the information I needed to exploit the situation, making it way too difficult for BB to call all the way with just Ace-high (which he might have done if I was his only opponent) The second 6 that came on the turn must have seemed pretty safe to the BB as well, but when the action was checked to me on the turn, I knew that if I put in a bet, with UTG still to act behind him, the BB simply couldn’t afford to put another bet in when he could be drawing completely dead with two overcards.

Far be it for me to claim that the above was the correct way to play this hand. As I wrote earlier, I don’t always make this play, and more often than not I’ll simply fold on the flop, and still other times I’ll pull this play but end up losing when the BB hits one of his overcards or the UTG makes whatever crap draw he was on. Finding the "correct" play (as if there ever is one) is the theme of a lot of the 2+2 strategy threads, which is why I typically avoid them…far more interesting, I think, is dissecting the thought process of hands like this that (whether they pan out, like this one did, or not) allow me to add little tips and tricks to my own poker toolbox.

Finally: Why I’m not going to Aruba

I’ve adhered largely to the “no bad beat stories” unofficial bylaw of this blog, but I need to get this one off my chest, just once, and then I’ll be on my merry way. I hardly ever enter any big-buyin tourney satellites, but I felt like going to UB’s Aruba tourney in a few wks, so I entered a $300 satellite, and battled down to 4 people (only winner won package), before raising on the button w/ KK, having the terrible BB re-raise me, and instead of coming over the top, just smooth-calling so as to get all his chips on the flop. Sure enough he pushed into me, with this board.

Sigh. The poker gods didn’t even have the dignity to just throw a six up there and end it, but made me sweat it out by dropping a 5, then an 8 for a stomach-churning backdoor straight. The equivalent of a poker-site slowroll. Can’t get all that upset about it, I guess. I had previously been all-in preflop w/ A5s vs. KK, and won that…so I guess you can’t get pissed about an atrocious beat when you were only still alive thanks to a bad beat you laid on someone else (even though I had open pushed w/ A5s when my stack was really low, which was the right play, whereas I seriously outplayed the guy on the KK vs. 66 hand.) On top of that, even had I won the hand, I would only have had a 2:1:1 chip advantage over the remaining 2 opponents…hardly a mortal lock to win the thing. Just sucks walking away w/ nothing.

Alright, that’s my semi-annual bad beat allowance (and yet another reasons why NL tournament are gay.)

Saturday, September 2nd: Poker-boomers, trust fund babies, and bears -- oh my!

2006-08-29T07:28:00.000-04:00

Warning: the following is friggin' long. Make coffee.

I recently finished a book that had long been on my poker reading list: The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King. It's the story of Andy Beal, a very wealthy Texas entrepreneur who decided that he wanted to challenge poker professionals to the highest-stakes game ever played. He studied the game with unnerving diligence, and became, even by the professionals' standards, one of the best heads-up limit hold'em players on the planet. He reasoned that although the professionals still had a slight skill edge, he might be able to negate the advantage by raising the game stakes to a magnitude that made even rich poker pros nervous, thereby taking them out of their comfort zone and making them 'play scared.' The pros countered his strategy by pooling their money, thereby spreading the risk more broadly among their team. They played as high as $100,000 / $200,000. I'll give the book an 8/10: a compelling read, and I have plenty more to say about it, but have elected to leave that discussion for another day -- it is nonetheless a reasonable segue into what I initially wanted to write about this time around: a discussion of whether the new breed of young rich internet poker players can fairly be compared to or learn anything from another group of young adults with money: those born into it. This is one of those topics that has been on my mind for the better part of 6 months, but I always seem to have difficulty fully wrapping my mind around it and expressing it with any degree of clarity...but I think I'm ready to address it here, although I suspect that you'll have to put up with some degree of opacity and literary inelegance. Bear with me, though, because I think there's something really interesting herein.

I have alluded here and there in my posts to feeling as though I'm experiencing a completely unique situation in that I have a modest degree of financial independence at a relatively young age while expending what most would consider to be minimal effort (at least compared to the 75-hour work weeks that my college friends who are rising through the investment-banking ranks find themselves putting in for similar remuneration.) Perhaps in catering to my own self-importance, I have cast the life questions I'm working through as these epic "never-before-faced" inquiries into the concurrent benefits and challenges associated with having some degree of financial freedom at a relatively young age. These are indeed uncharted waters for this new generation of rising "poker-boomers" -- a really stupid term I coined to refer to those who have exploited the poker scene for financial gain over the last 5 or so years: they're young, have a ton of money, and (with some exceptions) subscribe to the dubious assumption that 'the good times are here to stay'. But this conception vastly overstates the actual originality of the situation: even though I pitch these as issues that have never been contemplated by previous generations , I think that description seriously exaggerates the originality of the situation faced by msyelf, and other younger guys who have been fortunate enough to share in the spoils of the online poker gravy train. There IS, in fact, another group of people who have faced these issues before us, and who continue to do so, although they may never have sat around a poker table, and I discuss them below. (Sidebar: one of the habits you pick up in law school is finding cases that, while perhaps having a slightly different fact pattern, can nevertheless be cited as 'on point' for a particular issue, and that's the general relation that the example I'm about to cite bears to my own situation...it's not an exact mirror, but it shares certain elements, and is ripe for discussion.)

I have a few (non poker-playing) friends who are, to be blunt, set for life. Their parents are exceedingly wealthy and, while they would never come right out and say this, if they didn't want to work for the rest of their lives, they probably wouldn't have to. Just how much money their families are worth I'm not quite sure, but I don't think a $30 to $40 Million figure would be altogether misplaced. They don't flaunt it, and you probably wouldn't be able to pick out who the rich kids were if they were put in a lineup of 10 people and you got to hang out with them all for a night, but it's certainly no secret among their friends that they come from a lot of money and enjoy all the resulting benefits. I remember that when I showed up at my preppy undergrad university, I was immediately introduced to a whole new stratus of wealth. Although I myself came from an upper-middle class household -- I went to a private boys' high school, and my parents could afford to foot a $100,000 college pricetag -- the kind of wealth I was introduced to exceeded any 'privilege' that I had previously contemplated. Their families had summer/winter houses and lakehouses in Aspen, Palm Beach, Europe, and the Carribean. They skipped around town in Lexuses and BMW's, which were usually the 2nd or 3rd cars that their parents had bought for them in their young lives. I always wanted to ask them how it was that these giant new entertainment systems and wardrobes seemed to magically appear in their dorm rooms every couple months, but why bother: I already knew the answer. Even those whose parents didn't spoil them to such an obscene extent were secure in the knowledge that, one day at least, they'd be in line to inherit tens of millions of dollars.

So these fortunate souls, whether they fully appreciate it or not, come from enough money to provide for not only their futures, but most likley their kids' and grandkids' futures as well. So back to the idea that I introduced earlier: this hypothesis that poker-boomers are facing these completely novel situations in being introduced to living with money at a relatively young age -- but these aren't really new questions at all, now are they? Is there a significant difference between a college student who grew up middle-class and now grosses 6-figures from poker, and the rich kid of the same age who has similar financial independence as a result of his parents' wealth? Can the former learn any lessons about happiness and life enjoyment from the latter? Just like the fresh-faced rookie that picks a locker next to the soon-to-retire legend in the hopes of gleaning some of the knowledge and experience from his prolific career, I wonder whether the new poker-boomer generation can soak up worthwhile lessons from these trust fund beneficiaries who have had years and years of 'practice' dealing with situations that the rest of us are contemplating for the very first time.

So the first question I ask of you: has my poker journey to this point been nothing other than playing "catch-up" to these even more fortunate guys who have known wealth their entire lives. Let me pause for a moment to make sure that I'm not misinterpreted here: I'm not suggesting that your bank account balance is the definitive measure by which to evaluate your life's worth (in fact, if you've read this blog from the beginning, you'll recognize that that idea is completely antithetical to my prevailing philosophy.) Rather, I entertain the preceding question to get to the more important inquiry which asks just what, other than money, I've gotten from my poker experiences thus far. Because there IS something else, there must be...if there weren't, then wouldn't you have to concede that I'd be in exactly the same position as I am now had I simply won a modest-sized lottery, or derived a similar financial windfall from an inheritance or the like? If you conceptualize the benefits of poker as only financial, then I think you'd have a hard time denying the "catching up" hypothesis I offerred above, which I reject as insufficient. No, there is something else that I've picked up along the way; something that won't show up on an accounting ledger, but what? Just what are these ethereal benefits that I have drawn from the past few years of poker? Yes, there's the money, all good and well, and the satisfaction that I get from not feeling beholden to any particular employer, be it a giant law factory or something else, but those are the easy answers, and still don't differentiate poker-boomers from other young people with money, like the trust fund babies I pick on above. Well here are a few of the things I've come up with:

1) I have probably spilt more virtual ink writing about this first one than any other because, well, it's the most salient and interesting to talk about: money management skills. And yes, it is a "skill". I'm reminded here of the oft-heard accounts of Powerball lottery winners who are suddenly $35 Million richer, but find themselves dead-broke 5 years later. "How can that be?" you might ask yourself, as I did the first time I started hearing these stories. "How could a coal miner who had lived a comfortable, albeit humble existence on $30,000/yr possibly blow through nearly 1,200 times his previous salary in just 5 years. It practically defies comprehension. The traditional explanation for these tragedies is given in Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad book series (it was either in those books or The Richest Man in Babylon...I forget which, but read them both, because they're great), and it's that a lot of these people simply never learned how to have money. If you take a guy with poor money management skills, it doesn't matter if you give him $1,000 or $1,000,000 -- it'll all be gone without a lasting trace in short order (says the extreme version of this view.) All that Poker Opportunity Cost stuff I write about isn't just theoretical mumbo-jumbo. It's life management. In many ways, it is life, or at the very least a parable for the value of our short time here on this planet. Individuals born into wealth may know what it's like to be able to buy any trinket they desire, but so very few people will ever be able to say that they know what it's like on both sides of the fence. Was I happy to work 12 hours / week in the campus burger joint for spending money in college or peddling a new energy service door-to-door in high school to annoyed residents, 98% of whom practically slammed the door in my face? Hell no, but they're experiences that I look back on as invaluable in developing my appreciation for what I have now. Listen, I'm not saying I grew up in Cabrini-Green, but I no longer look at my late teens through mid-twenties and contemplate how much better things could have been had I been as financially secure as some of my peers; rather those were fundamentally formative years and I don't think I could possibly have achieved the poker successes I have without an appreciation of what it's like on both sides of the fence.

2) Gratitude: one of the most unexplored, and underappreciated emotions, in my opinion. I have always heard a lot of successful people talk about it: from Oprah to Tony Robbins (a friend of mine took me to one of his seminars a few years ago; pretty cool) to Superbowl MVPs -- and yet I never really "got" what it was they were trying to convey. It's expressed in different terms: sometimes as a feeling of being 'blessed', other times merely 'grateful', 'fortunate', 'lucky', or 'thankful'. It's a sense of humility. A recognition that you're among the most 0.001% fortunate people on the planet. You might think to yourself "yeah, well it's easy to be 'grateful' when you've got fame or fortune", but that's just the rub: this isn't somehow restricted to society's A-list. It's expressed in equal measure by construction men, teachers, heroin addicts, paraplegics, and incarcerated convicts. Isn't it funny how such a motley crew can be united in their appreciation for this emotion, when their lives are as different as you can possibly imagine? Granted, it's probably triggered by different stimuli for each group, but clearly it doesn't depend on any measure of wealth or stature. What is 'gratitude' doing in this list? Well, for the first time in my life, I think I actually "get it." And it's not just a money thing. I find myself walking around actually appreciating my good health, my cohesive and loving family, my supportive friends, the fact that I can play golf on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific while others get dispatched to fight in Iraq with a 1 in 75 chance of returning in a body bag, To give a somewhat silly example, I was walking through a mall the other day, and I thought to myself that I could not think of a single other person in the entire building who I'd rather change places with; I wasn't anywhere close to the wealthiest, smartest, best looking, or most adored individual in there that day, but I was just overcome by a feeling that I was, perhaps for the first time ever, very happy with my lot in life at that particular time. And maybe this has something to do with poker...and maybe it doesn't. But I still felt it belonged in this list, because it's something I'm feeling more and more these days.

3) High-stakes poker, paradoxical though it may seem, has actually lowered my emotional variance in other life domains. The few people who know how high I play usually ask me at some point how I can possibly play my best when there's so much money on the line -- exactly what I used to think, when I'd peer in longingly on the 15/30 game, while I was a 2/4 nit. But just the opposite is true: it's almost pacifying to me, and actually softens my edge. I used to be far more high-strung, walking around with a permanent chip on my shoulder. But when you've dealt with losing 5-figures within an hour or two (an all too regular occurence for me, of late, unfortunately), it's so much easier to keep life's minor annoyances in perspective. When they get your order wrong at a restaurant, fights with your girlfriend, dealing with stupid and/or slow people (what used to drive me up the wall)...none of it really phases me anymore. It's as though I'm on a 24/7 Xanax...but in a good/comfortable way.

4) This one was also pretty big for me, and it ties in to both my poker play, and the work I put into a few affiliate websites. First a very quick story. I had a friend in college who did a 2-year stint at an investment bank after graduation, hated it, and then got a job as an A&R rep for a major music label. His job was to go to 7 to 10 live music shows at seedy New York bars, trying to find and sign undiscovered talent. So his job was to party and schmooze bands (and also do the business thing in a suit when it was called for in the office.) He got paid next to nothing, but I'd never seen him happier in his life. He'd tell me something that I'd heard from a few others from time to time, but never really believed: that he absolutely loved what he did day-in-day-out, and couldn't wait to get to work in the morning. Seemed to me that's what work should feel like, but I'd heard so few people ever gush about their jobs like that, that I wanted to write it off as pure fantasy. Well you know what: I know what he was talking about now. When I took my semester off from law school and worked on my affiliate website(s), I honest-to-God could not WAIT to get up in the morning and start working. And I've felt the same way about playing poker, as I'm sure many of you have. Yes, you could even say I'm passionate about these things, and I've stopped trying to hide it as though it were some sort of deviant lifestyle, even while most of society wants to write it off as just that. I feel as though my eyes have been opened to what work is supposed to feel like. It's kind of like how I went through the first 22 years of my life happily enjoying ice cream, and then I went to Italy and had the authentic gelato there, and had my mind blown. (If you've ever tried it, I know you know what I'm talking about; if you haven't, don't try to imagine it, because you can't.) But here's the most valuable part of the whole thing for me: the take-home benefit wasn't the happiness that I felt playing poker or growing my internet business; rather the real gold nugget was getting to see what was possible. It was knowing that even if you took poker away from me completely, now that I know what it feels like to wake up in the morning excited to get at it -- now that I know that the stories I'd heard about people whose work didn't just get in the way of their enjoying the rest of their lives, but actually was part of that enjoyment weren't just urban legends -- it's just such an empowering feeling. Like I'm in control now. Knowing you don' t have to settle for less. And that's not something you can just get by somebody handing you a plate of money; you've got to learn it for yourself.

You know what I find to be a depressing thought. Consider the following life: Bob goes to college, works for a couple years at an unsatisfying job, goes to law school, goes to work for a law firm for 4 years to pay off his school debts. He's now 32, so he gets married and has a few kids, and finds that to support his family it probably makes most sense to stick around at his law firm where he's now making $250,000 or so per year, which he needs if he's going to foot 3 college tuition bills. Now he's 55, and while he's happy to have a nice house in a nice suburb and well on his way to having enough money to retire, he doesn't understand why he sees a wrinkled shell of his former self looking back at him in the mirror, wondering what happened to all of his idealism and creativity. I'm not crapping on anyone's career choice -- there are actually plenty of people out there for whom what I described above sounds like an absolutley dreamy existence, and practicing law fulfills every one of their intellectual and emotional needs. But this I promise you: the size of that group is dwarfed -- yes, absolutely dwarfed -- by the number of people who don't choose that path, but rather find themselves wandering aimlessly toward it because it's the path of least resistance. The beauty of this journey for me hasn't really been about poker at all...it's been learning to take control of my life. That may sound unbearably self-helpy, but immersed in a discipline like law that turns out so many unhappy practitioners has really driven home just how prevalent career and life dissatisfaction is in our world. I grew to relish the fact that some of my law school peers looked at me like I had 3 heads when I left school -- "What the hell is that kid doing?? Didn't he get the memo that said that we're supposed to do our 6 semesters of law school, and then go out and be important lawyers?? What does he mean you don't have to??"

I had better stop this post here, since it's already way too long and the fact of the matter is that I could probably write an essay-length exposition on each of the numbered points above, but in the interest of time and decency, I will call off the dogs for now. Whew -- well, I take back the caveat that I gave at the outset warning of a disjointed and erratic post...I don't think it came out as garbled as I had feared. In fact, I'm pretty pleased with this entry; it took me the better part of a week to get it all down. Hope it proved worth your time.

Hmmm...this blog has been missing a little flash lately. Too much text, not enough pics. Here's a shot of me climbing the Sydney harbor bridge.

Tuesday, August 29: Six-Figures and Climbing

2006-08-29T03:46:00.000-04:00

A relatively useless statistic, perhaps, but this blog has now passed the 100,000 hit mark (and no, I won't indulge you in a debate about the differences between page views and unique visitors. My low-tech hit counter says 100,000+ and I'm happy enough with that.) Hard to believe that I've been at this blog thing for the better part of 2 years now; funny thing is that I don't even remember why I decided to start it up in the first place...nor can I really piece together how or when people started reading it, or when it gained any type of momentum; but here we are, I suppose. There were a couple times that I thought about ending the thing; not because I thought the quality was deteriorating, but rather because I felt like I had discussed everything that I had set out to address...and I liked the idea of 'going out on top', so to speak. But I'm very satisfied with my decision to keep at it. Every so often I'll do some internet searches for mentions of my blog, and it's always gratifying to see that it's something that has actually gained a fair amount of independent momentum as something that other people cite as being helpful or otherwise thought-provoking. That's all I've really ever strived to be. And threads like this one, besides feeding my ego somewhat, always give me a little jolt of adrenaline and remind me that this body of work is something that I'm actually quite proud of. I recently met a guy here in Australia who, upon hearing that I was a law student and played some of poker, commented that there was a blog that I should read that I'd find fascinating, and proceeded to give me the URL to my own blog. I felt a little awkward telling him the truth, so I just told him I'd check it out. Anyhow, enough self-aggrandizement for now.

First off, a section entitled: The Game That Cannot Be Beat. I went to Sydney's resident casino, Star City, yesterday -- a mistake that I guarantee will not be repeated. The rake structure there, although I'd heard rumors about it, is indeed one of the most savage beasts imagineable, such that I don't think the limit games there are even beatable. Just how bad is it? Well, I sat down at a 5/10 table while I waited for something bigger, and the rake was, get this: 10% of the pot, capped at $8 (!!!), in addition to a time charge of $5 / half hour. At most American casinos I've been to, there is either a rake OR a time charge, but both!??? That's just unheard of...not to mention an $8 cap!!! Compare that to a typical online $5/$10 rake, which would be in the neighborhood of 10%, up to a $4 cap. Online you're paying approximately 35 cents to 45 cents per hand dealt (rough calculations). At Star City you pay (by my calc's) between 90 cents and $1.10, or thereabouts. Yes, nearly TRIPLE the rake that you would pay online. So just how good a poker player do you have to be to overcome this additional 60 cents / hand you pay in rake? Well, consider that over the course of 100 hands, you'll be paying the house an additional 60 freakin' bucks. That's 6 BB in a $5/$10 game. So unless you were beating the online game for 6BB/100 or more (which is unheard of, by the way), you'll be in the red at Star City. It's nearly incomprehensible how they get anyone to play there consistently, but I guess when you're the only game in town...I guess all of a sudden the Party Monster extra jackpot drop doesn't look so bad.

Anyway, I was there with an Australian 2+2 acquaintance, and we finally got seats at the $200NL table (which had a similarly preposterous rake structure, by the way: a $1 ante from every player every $@#$%#$ hand), and hmmm....I'm not quite sure how to best sum up what I saw there, but I think the most accurate way of putting it is that I was introduced to what can only be considered an entirely novel card game, based loosely on what we in the West refer to as NL Texas Hold'Em. I could say "the players were bad", but that wouldn't even begin to describe the plays that I saw. At the $5/$10 LHE table, there was ALWAYS at least 6 players, usually 8 or 9 to every flop. One hand had 9 to the flop, and the two hands remaining at showdown were 84 offsuit, which was crushed by 72 offsuit, which had flopped 2-pair. These were not blind hands. They were middle-position limps. At the $200NL table there was typically 5 or 6, and at least every other hand a player would call a pot-sized or all-in bet with second pair or worse. It wasn't a matter of these players ranking low on the NLHE skill-o-meter...rather it was as though they had devised their own completely foreign measure of texas hold'em skill. The blind structure and unspeakably shallow stack sizes were also conducive to crazy action. With a $200 max buy-in, and two five-dollar blinds, a proper raise if there had been a couple limpers in front of you would be up to $40 or $50. If/when that was called by the limpers (it inevitably was), it would leave you with around $150 behind, and the pot was also up in the $120 - $150 range...so you really only had one move: all-in for a pot-sized bet, which would nearly always be called by an opponent if he had a pair or any sort of draw. Long story short, in a little less than 2 hours, I left up $500 or so while my 2+2 compatriate left up $1,200. (Keep in mind this is a $200NL table.) There wasn't a single other player at the table who had won a dime while the two of us were there; we had collectively taken them for around 9 buy-ins, and I'm pretty sure there was no love lost when we decided to pack up and call it a day.

Hmmm....I didn't get to any of the things that had been on my mind that I wanted to write about, but they can wait until later this week.

Friday, August 25: Our New Ambassador

2006-08-26T04:23:00.000-04:00

For some reason, blogger was unavailable from my Australian ISP for the last week so I had trouble posting...hopefully this is solved now.

First of all, if you haven't yet listened to (or heard about) the following, if you've got a moment I suggest you listen to the interview with WSOP main even winner Jamie Gold at bigpoker.ca (with which I have no affiliation) -- I was left utterly speechless. Even speaking as a guy who has admittedly never been accused of being too modest, I was practically slack-jawed listening to that interview. This could either be very good for poker in the upcoming year, or very, very bad. We've been blessed with 3 outstanding ambassadors for the game in recent years in the form of Raymer, Moneymaker, and Hachem (in that order, in my own opinion), but this Gold character is a truly horse of a different color. We'll see what comes of this after the ESPN broadcasts...

One of my favorite guilty pleasures on 2+2 is the "Brags, Bad Beats, and Variance" forums. Funny, if you had asked me about how worthwhile such a forum would have been before they created it last year, I would have told you that it was a pretty dumb idea, and would likely be populated by nothing but "online poker is rigged!!" and "check out how bad this beat was" posts. And it IS a dumb idea...but also pretty entertaining to read at times, discussing people's upswings and downswings, and it's somewhat therapeutic when you can read about just how savagely Father Variance can attack even the best players. Whereas most of the other forums retain at least SOME air of decorum and posting etiquette (yes, just a little), the BBV forum is a completely unvarnished smorgasborg of bravado, insult-humor, and pissing contests; a pseudo-Freudian and unapologetic window into posters' poker "ids", and it's occasionally a fun read. One point the forum has really driven home is that the 300-big-bet rule of thumb is very much antiquated. It might be a function of the games getting slightly more difficult, or more aggressive, but I subscribe largely to the belief that it was never really true to begin with, and those suffering downswings greater than the 300BB axiom simply weren't in any rush to divulge it publicly, lest they be labeled big fish. But the BBV forum is now rife with examples that even very good players can and do suffer through 500 to even 1,000 (!) big-bet swoons. Makes me feel a tad better about my recent high-stakes frustrations...I never really calculated just how many BBs it was (my jumps between LHE and NL made that a little complicated), but it was well in excess of the 300BB marker.

I still read the strategy forums every once in a while, but can never seem to muster up the energy to post there...there's just such a thick veil of complete bullshit that permeates nearly every thread. An overwhelming majority of posters simply have no idea what they're talking about, and -- as I've written several times before -- the day my poker education took a huge step forward was the day I stopped treating clueless strategy advice posted by 18-year old Clearasil babies on 2p2 as poker gospel, and realized that I was already playing better than nearly all of them. If you're winning even just 1BB/100, be confident enough in your abilities to realize that you're more skilled than 90% of 2p2'ers, and filter everything you read through your own internal bullshit-meter. One of the biggest problems in strategy threads I believe is the philosophy that there is one, single, correct (or at least most correct) action for every decision point in every hand. That simply isn't true; in fact, an outstanding suggestion that was unfortunately never really adopted on a wide enough scale was the proposal that strategy advice should never be doled out in the form of "this is a clear raise, call, fold", but rather should be given in the form of a ratio like x:y:z corresponding to the percentage of times -- in situations like that -- that one should call:raise:fold. For examnple, imagine a situation where it's folded around to the blinds, the SB completes, the BB raises with AK and the SB calls. Now the flop comes K,7,2 rainbow and the SB leads out with a bet. The BB, sitting there with a very strong holding might make a post on 2+2 wondering how to extract the most from the SB who is unwittingly betting into a very strong hand. The forums are full of knuckle-draggers arguing about the virtues of raising vs. just calling in order to raise on later streets, as though one were correct, and the other were patently retarded. I think a far more illuminating way of approaching the question is an "action ratio" presented in the form of something like 75:25:0, indicating that in situations like this the BB should raise 75% of the time, just call 25%, and never fold. Other, more complex scenarios might produce action rations that look something like 60:30:10.? I think this more appropriately reflects the metagame features of a game of incomplete information; there are substantial advantages to changing up one's style of play, and the stark reality of the situation is that without knowing your opponent's hole cards, there is hardly EVER one clearly-correct course of action in a hand (unless, for example, you hold the nuts and have your opponent betting into you on the river.) Will that "action ratio" proposal ever gain any momentum?? I doubt it; first of all, it relies on the premise that a certain specific scenario could be played out an infinite number of times (or at least with sufficient frequency to be able to employ the ratio with any measure of fidelity). This isn't a Turbo Texas Hold'em environment where one situation can be replayed over-and-over. It's also admittedly difficult to recognize when one decision is 'identical' to a previous one. But most of all, I doubt most 2p2'ers will be ever have the humility to even contemplate that there is nearly always more than one 'correct' course of action -- it's apparently way more fun to respond with "If you think this is a clear raise, you need your head examined, you herpes-ridden douchenozzle."

Tuesday, August 15: Mike Mc-Who?

2006-08-14T06:36:00.000-04:00

Far and away, the comment I hear most often from the few people with whom I share my disillusioned-law-student-turns-to-poker story is "oh, you're just like Matt Damon in Rounders." Yep, good ol' Mike McDermott. Hard to believe that movie was made a freakin' decade ago -- I watched it again in its entirety this past weekend and always forget just how eminently watchable it is. In fact, two things struck me about it:
a) just how far ahead of its time it was (I'm not saying it's "1984", but come 'on: it was made when most major casinos didn't have poker rooms, and those that did had just a couple lower-stakes tables in the corner, and it preceded the poker boom by at least 5 years), and
b) just how quickly so many of the scenes in it have been not only mirrored, but even surpassed by current poker trends, to the point of being rendered almost comical in their naivety.

By our contemporary poker standards, is there a more transparent line than Mike's "I'm gonna go all-in because I don't think you have the spades," schtick as he tries to goad Teddy-KGB into calling (presumably with a flush) when he held the 2nd-nut full-houe? I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think the pot was around $5,000 before Teddy led out with a $15,000 bet, Mike saw the $15K and raised an additional $33,000 (into the ~$35,000 pot). Forget for a moment that few expert players will call there with a mere flush on a paired board...but come one: "I don't think you have the spades"? Is any player worth his salt really going to fall for such a first-level-thinking trap thinking: "Guess what? I do have the spade flush, so you're in trouble buddy"!?? Then again, as a novice I never understood any of that stuff, which is probably much closer to the mindset of the average moviegoer, but it's still kind of funny to watch given my current understanding of the high-stakes poker world. It's also cute to see how dominant Mike's poker skill is portrayed: e.g.:
"I didn't have it"
"Since when do you have to 'have it' to take a pot off a hump like that??"

In the montage where he needs to run up $15,000 to avoid having his head smashed in by Gramma/KGB, they cast him as this poker prodigy whose ability is such that he is a mortal lock to eventually bust anyone less skilled than he. Sure, he might be a poker badass, but he's sitting in some pretty tough games...and taking thousands upon thousands out of live $20/$40 games? Really?? And don't get me started on the Johnny Chan scene...I think it's been pointed out on internet forums several times, but they were playing $300/$600 limit. So Johnny Chan 3-bets and folds to Mike's 4-bet, and then asks "did you have it?" Think about that for a second: "Did you have it?"...and remember, it's a LIMIT hold'em game. Seems to imply that 'it' is some sort of made hand such as a straight, flush, or full house...no one would refer to two pair or even a set as "it"..."it", as Chan uses it, clearly implies that there's some obvious texture to the community cards, like 3 to a straight, or flush, and he folds for one additional bet into a pot when it appears as though he's getting at least 10:1 odds?? It's fun to think about, because the more you deconstruct it, the less sense it makes (but still -- awesome scene.) Mike brags with a steely-gaze to Kanish: "I'm gonna outplay this guy, this hand......I sat with the best, and I won!" Uh...yeah, cuz it sounds like your allegedly world-class opponent made an absolutely inexplicable laydown in a limit game. You "won"? Sounds like you took a pot. Uncork the champagne. Anyway, despite the fun that I have at the movie's expense above, it's still got to be one of my favorite flicks to watch start-to-finish.

Non-sequiter: for sports-fans, if you haven't read Bill Simmons' Rounders-inspired article from a few years ago at ESPN here, it's, for my money, one of the best articles by one of the most popular sports-writers of our generation. He also did one Swingers-style, which was equally as enjoyable. I love how he rips on Gretchen Mol as one of the most objectionable girlfriends ever cast on the big screen -- I never realized it until I read Simmons' article, but now every time I watch the movie, I can't help but want to rip her tongue out.
***Damn, I tried to provide links to the Simmons' columns, but it appears as though ESPN, in their infinite wisdom, has made all sorts of back issues, which previously had appeared on the site free of charge, available only to ESPN "Insiders". You need a password now. Sorry...but if you have a password, and want to read them, just google "Bill Simmons" +Rounders and it's like the first result.

More non-sequiter gossip: When I was at the Bellagio earlier this year, I was in a game with a dealer who regularly dealt the "Big Game" in Bobby's Room, and he was telling some great stories about who the biggest winners and losers were in that game. A few tidbits that I remember: Doyle is a modest but steady winner in the game. His son Todd also does well on a consistent basis. David Benyamine is also consistently in the black. Ivey, allegedly, absolutely crushes it. The fish? Dealer told us that Hellmuth regularly gets his ass handed to him, as does Gus Hansen, but that far and away one of the biggest 'fish' in those cash games was Chan...pro's allegedly can't wait to get into the game when Chan sits because he's apparently such an awful cash game player. ("Awful", is of course relative.) Bellande is a complete dick, as is Farha, and most of them are absolute cheap-asses, hardly ever tipping; Dealer mentioned Ivey as a more gentlemanly exception. He also mentioned that all the pro's make huge loans to each other -- think 7-figures -- on an undocumented honor system right across the table in cash/chips. My legal spidey-senses have serious problems with that, and you can bet your ass whn I sit in that game someday I'll put that shit in writing, if for no other reason than not to forget the details. As I was cashing in my measly $2,000 at the window, Gus Hansen comes up beside me and casually drops $800,000 in loose chips from his pockets into his security deposit box. Suddenly my meager successes don't look so impressive.

As for yours-truly as Mike McD: well, the analogy's not altogether misplaced. He's an analytically-minded law student whose legal acumen is vastly outweighed by his poker prowess, played by one of Hollywood's most sought-after ladies'-men...and I'm...well....most of those things. As far as clear progress markers in my poker career, it's been easy to identify the graduated steps as I've moved up through the stakes from 3/6 to 5/10 to 15/30 to 30/60 and even my latest (less succesful) foray into 100/200 and $5,000NL. But I also remember feeling somewhat proud when I eclipsed the poker accomplishments of the vaunted Mike McDermott (or at least matched him in stakes). In the opening scene, he drops his entire $30,000 bankroll (we'll leave a discussion of the wisdom of playing for your entire bankroll 3-handed against other known sharks for another day). A 30-grand downswing? Shit, I've done that 3 times in he last 2 months alone! I remember watching the movie for the first time (not until around 2001) and wondering how a simple law student could lose "3 stacks of high society" and still function as a human being. I mean, 30 grand in the blink of an eye!! You'd have to be nuts to put that much money on the table, right?!! Well now that I'm also 'drinking the Koolaid', so to speak, it's funny that my mindset in viewing that scene has shifted from identifying more with Mike's "$30,000 / life savings goes poof, someone kill me now" to Kanish's more even-keeled reaction of "meh, everyone goes bust every once in a while -- get back on the horse, I'll stake you." (You might also have noticed, as I did, that the big hand he lost was a $100,000 or greater pot, meaning he'd run his initial $30,000 up to at least $50,000 before getting stacked...uh...I'd have been mighty tempted to get up and walk away having nearly doubled my entire bankroll in one night.)

Relatively unnoticed in the last couple years is how rapidly online stakes have risen. A mere 2 years ago, 15/30 was the highest game offerred by Party, and there were only 6 to 8 tables going. (I remember I was playing 2/4 and 3/6 at the time, and occasionally peered in on those games, wondering how anyone could play at stakes that high and not go beserk when they lost to a suckout.) Then they opened up 2 30/60 tables, for which the waitlists were always 20+ people...and my sense of incredulity about the amount of money that was being won and lost increased only further. Hard to believe that just 18 months later, I'm buying into 100/200 games, deigning the 15/30 'microlimits' -- tables that used to represent the highest echelon of online ranks and elicit feelings of wonderment and awe as barely worth my time. That's not intended to be a brag, but more of an observation on how rapidly our standards have changed; sort of reminds me of growing up and playing the old-school Final Fantasy and Zelda video games...after I'd spent weeks playing to build up my characters' strength, agility, and fighting experience, and outfitted them with the most powerful weapons and armor that you could find in the game, I'd go back to the novice-level villages where they start you out at the beginning of the game, and wander around the forest until I was attacked by the 'entry-level' villains like weak imps, orks, and wolves -- bad guys who were actually kind of hard to defeat when you were at the start of the game and didn't have any strength or good equipment -- and I'd beat the living hell out of them with whatever advanced gamma-ray blaster weaponry I had bought for my players in the more advanced levels...alright I'm not sure where I was originally going with this analogy, but I'm sure that anyone who grew up on Final Fantasy knows what I'm talking about appreciates the effort nonetheless.

By the way: RSS set up!
I finally got off my lazy butt to enable an RSS feed for this blog. The address is http://zbasic.com/atom.xml -- don't ask me any RSS questions...I really don't understand what it is or does and can't answer technical questions...but perhaps some of you who do use RSS feeds can confirm for me that it's working properly. I just followed RSS-for-dummy-bloggers instructions.

Friday, August 11th: Higher Stakes gone wrong...

2006-08-12T02:22:00.000-04:00

OK, after a couple lifestyle/philosophical posts, back to talking about some poker. So back in early July I proclaimed that I'd grown weary of the 20/40 and 30/60 "microlimits", and vowed to step it up to even higher stakes. After all, I thought, I often see games just as juicy as the ones I play all the way up to $100/$200, and it's the exact same game with the same rules, just with different color chips...and it had sure paid off when I jumped from 3/6 to 15/30, and again when I made the move up to the 20/40 and 30/60 games. So I dove in full speed...not adding one or two tables at a time or anything, I was 4- to 6-tabling 50/100 + and $5,000 NL.

Ouch. Yes, I believe that's the word that best describes my higher-stakes experiment. I think I can best illustrate the results graphically: in a somewhat cruel twist, I've managed to sustain a 3+ BB/100 LHE winrate since my early-June proclamation (same as before)...except those BB's have simply come in the 'wrong' games. Here's 2 charts (in dollars) breaking down my results since June 1st, the first showing the game selection that I was previously most comfortoable with -- 20/40, 30/60, and $1,000NL -- and the latter showing my results from the higher-stakes games I had vowed would be my new stomping ground: 50/100 through 100/200, and 2,000 through 5,000NL. I think those results speak for themselves. So I retreat now to the friendly confines of 30/60, which I hope will welcome me back with open arms.

LOWER STAKES

HIGHER STAKES

P.S. that precipitious drop was the result of getting stacked for $5,500 at a $25/$50NL table...funny, I don't even remember what the hand was...but it's obviously officially the most I've ever lost in a single hand.

So just what went wrong? Hmmm...well, don't really know -- really wish I could point to one thing that was responsible besides running unspeakably bad. Here's one thing that I think might have played a role, although it's a bit of speculation on my part. I never really used to pay attention to how good the good players were at a table I sat down at...the only thing I really cared about was finding tables with a sufficient number of donators -- typically my standards are 2 fish for a 6-max table, or 3 for a 10-max. But in reflecting on my higher-stakes experiences, I realize that I should also be taking a hard look at who the other sharks are at my table...it struck me that a SH table of 1 huge fish, 3 mediocre players and 1 above-average opponent is an entirely different beast than one with 2 big fish and 3 very skilled players...and that's exactly the makeup of the tables I typically found myself at when playing 50/100 and up. There were still the same huge fish (still haven't figured out where they get all their money), but the caliber of non-fish opponent was much higher, and I don't think I properly adjusted to that. The fact of the matter is that as good as a limit player as I think i am, the edge I have over other expert players is really miniscule (that is, if I even have an edge at all). Limit hold'em is just so mechanical, that there simply aren't many decisions to be made; raise, fold, call, or check. That's it. That's the whole game. So I found myself sitting at tables with 4 above-average to expert players, all trying to extract money from the same fish or two, and I don't think I properly adjusted to playing other experts...fact of the matter is that I simply don't get much opportunity to do so, because I have been so judicious about my table-selection at the lower limits...playing at a table with 3 other very skilled players is simply not something I've had much experience doing, because even at stakes as high as 20/40 and 30/60, the "good" players are indeed quite good, but I don't think approach the caliber of players that dominate the highest-stakes games.

That's all that's going on on the poker front for now...I'm living a pretty carefree existence. Taking 3 relatively easy classes, trying to improve my golf game on the nice course right behind my apartment...it's mostly par 3s and 1 par four, although far better maintained than your average pitch-and-put, and I'm shooting mostly 4s and 5s, which -- while it may not sound like much -- is pretty good for me. Taking Muay Thai kickboxing classes, which is making me realize that while I'm pretty strong, my overall fitness leaves a lot to be desired....hmmmm...ordered myself a kettlebell, which I'm pretty excited about, as I hear those things kick absolute ass. Funny thing about being down here too: I don't think I've mentioned poker to a single person. Being transplanted to an entirely new location, where I didn't know anybody, has esentially forced me to go back to Square-1 regarding meeting people and and doing the whole introductory song-and-dance: sharing what you do for fun, work, etc. It's really made me realize what a deviant lifestyle I live. Actually, I shouldn't say that I haven't mentioned poker to anyone...my next-door neighbor is a cool guy from the US who is down here investment banking and I forget how we started talking about poker, but I actually let him watch me play for a half hour or so -- I didn't dare play above 20/40, because I could tell that even a guy who made as much money as he did from work was pretty amazed at how cavalierly (sp?) people won and lost $800 pots online...and I realized that in my life I don't think I'd ever let anyone watch me play -- and I remembered why...I got really self-conscious and (despite winning a tidy $500 in front of him) wondered if he now thought I was some trust fund baby who didn't think twice about winning/losing 4-figures within 20 minutes. For whatever reason, I have a complex about making sure that people understand that I DO value money, and understand that I'm in a very fortunate position to be skilled at something that generates good money with relatively little effort. But somoene who doesn't know that I grinded my way up from the 2/4 and 3/6 tables less than 2 years ago, and just sees me plunk down $1,000 to play 20/40 might think that I really am that capricious with money...which I always thought was a quite negative quality. I've actually got much more to say about this, but I feel like I'm rambling now, so I'll end this post now and pick up in a couple days.

Sunday, August 6: The Great Beyond

2006-08-06T08:52:00.000-04:00

10 days ago all of my law school friends brought their scholarly track to a conclusion by taking the bar exam, one of the most daunting challenges in all of academia. The typical course of action is to relax for a couple week in May after finals are over, then begin Bar-Bri, which is basically summer school to prepare you for the bar, consisting of 5 days of 6-hour classes, and (so they recommend) 6 to 8 hours of home study each day. Pretty brutal, and I'm not looking forward to tackling it if I ever sack up and decide to take the bar myself...although I'm somewhat averse to it, I'm slowly coming around to the realization that I should probably do it so that I have something to show for my law school experience...and I know that if I don't take it soon after graduation, I'll probably never get around to doing it. Owing to my semester leave to pursue all things poker, I graduate in December, and would take the bar in February or July next.

So after 8 weeks of Bar preparation courses and few social outings, everyone goes up to Albany, or wherever they're writing their State's bar exam and tries to focus for the 2-day exam, after which they all celebrate by getting blackout drunk and going on what's known as a "bar trip", which is basically a big blow-out travel extravaganza from early August through whenever they have chosen to start working at their law firm...usually in September or October.
The premise of the bar trip is: "this really is our last chance to travel the world before we have to buckle down and start working 12 to 16-hour days 6 days each week as junior associates at our firms." So most of them are currently off on 6-week travel excursions through Europe, Eastern Asia, Hawaii, etc.; a couple are even going to swing down here through Australia and pay me a visit. I find the whole concept of "bar trips" somewhat depressing (although I understand that the modest financial freedom that I get from poker allows me to take that position). While they're generally exciting and carefree (and conveniently bankrolled by $5 - $10K advances from the travelers' employers-to-be), they've got to be colored by a pervasive feeling of dread, like a sword of Damocles constantly reminding them: "this really is the last time I'm going to be able to take a carefree trip like this for a long, long, long time." I shudder just thinking about that.

Sure, some of my classmates are 6-figures in debt and really have no realistic option other than to take a $180,000 salary, which still will only allow them to pay off their loans in 5 to 7 years (I woulda thought sooner, but interest is a killer, so they tell me.) But many others have little to no debt and they're still buying into this whole corporate law thing, even while acknowledging that they're preparing themselves to absolutely hate it. I feel like shouting from the rooftops "You don't have to do this with your lives!!" (In fairness, a few of them are really looking forward to law firm life, and I'm sure will be terrific successes...if they can handle the lifestyle.)

Meanwhle I'm down here in Australia chugging along. It's really curious to watch the busloads of tourists that drive by my apartment, even in the dead of Winter, although it's still in the mid-60s here. The bus stops at the observation deck above the sandy beach, they all disembark with their digital cameras, pose for a few snapshots, some take off their shoes and venture out to the tides in their suit pants, then put their shoes back and get back on the bus, I suppose happily ticking off "see beach" on their vacation's to-do list. It really brings home for me how fortunate I am to literally live somewhere where other people come to vacation...it's an odd dynamic, isn't it? Reminds me of the folk story about the corporate bigwig who takes his family on a Carribean vacation, and the waiter who brings him his drink on the beach hears him complaining to his wife about how many hours he's been putting in at the office, so the waiter asks "Sir, I hope you don't mind me asking, but why is it you work so very hard at a job you appear to dislike?" And the man replies "I work hard because it lets me take vacations like this to beatiful beaches." The waiter, confused, replies "But I serve drinks for only 4 hours per day, and I get to come to this beach 365 days a year." Makes you think about why it is that people assign such a high value to traveling to warm locales just so they can get away from their 'real lives.'

Although I really like the balance that I've found in recent months, and it might seem like I really am 'living the life', it's also eerily isolating...I'm happy and carefree in some respects, but I also feel to some extent like this makes it harder to relate to those who, even against their better judgement, have chosen the corporate rat-race...these are my best friends, and it kind of scares me that our lives seem to be diverging in a rather fundamental way. My experience at the Univ. of Sydney so far has given me a pretty interesting vantage point on this whole thing...see, law school in Australia (in fact in most parts of the world other than North America) isn't 'grad school', as we would think of it in the US where everyone does a 4-year undergraduate degree and then can enroll in a 3-year law school program to get their law degree. Here "law" is more like an undergraduate 'major' that students can enroll in right out of high school, and complete in 4-5 years. So it's populated largely by 19 - 22 year olds...although maybe around 20% of the students are in their mid-twenties like me. So I had a bit of a weird night last weekend, when I was hanging out with a friend from law school here who lives in the school's dorms with a bunch of American study-abroad undergraduate students, so they were mostly 19 to 21, and we went to a houseparty one of them was throwing. It was quite a mindfuck to be surrounded by this whole gaggle of undergrads, and while I don't think I looked all that out of place (since I look pretty young and could probably pass for 20 - 22), it was maybe the first time I've realized that I just don't 'belong' in that scene anymore. I mean, being amonst those undergrads, part of me wanted more than anything to still be that carefree; to still have that set of life priorities; for my goal 4 days out of every week to be to see how drunk I could get and still find my way home; never having to pay a bill of any kind, or wonder what type of career I might find most fulfilling. And so there was one voice telling me "well what the hell's stopping you?? Grab the funnel and relive those glory days." But I couldn't shake the other voice telling me that I just wasn't that guy anymore. I had that window in my life, and I exploited the hell out of it and had an absolute ball...and I don't really know if I want to do it again. To loosely borrow a theory from Floyd in "Dazed and Confused", all I ever really strive for in life is to be able to say 'you know what, I did the absolute best that I was able to, and lived to the fullest during that time in my life, even if I didn't always come out smelling like roses', and I really do think that's a standard I mostly lived up to in law school -- and during most of my undergraduate years (although not so much during my 2 years in New York in between.) And it's just this awfully strange feeling now to be surrounded by images of what I used to be but no longer am, and at the same time see my law school friends go off and start their law-firm lives, all the while not really being drawn to that world either...I've always relished taking the path less trodden, but that approach - bold as it may seem - inevitably comes along with these periods of isolation and doubt, wondering if everything would just be easier if I joined the masses and followed the well-worn path to corporate America that has turned out just fine for generation after generation. Age has always stood apart as one of the more curious labels people seem to get hung up about. We all have these ingrained expectations about things in life we're supposed to have accomplished by certain ages. Education, marriage, employment, promotions, procreation, self-sufficiency, spirituality. I sometimes wonder what I'd feel like if one day I found out that my birth certificate was off by a few years, and I wasn't actually 26 but rather 29. While I currently have all sorts of imagery about what life is supposed to look like at 30, would finding out that I don't actually have 4 years to get there, but rather only 1 change my approach to things, or my assessment of my life's accomplishments to date? People love to remind you that 'life is not a race', but isn't it also undeniable that society attaches certain expectations to your age? Madding in some respects, yes, but if that's 'just the way it is', why should I waste my breath debating the principle's validity? I've written plenty that one of poker's greatest benefits for me has been that I no longer feel beholden to any corporate entity to earn my keep...it's a luxury and a challenge, because making decisions, like it or not, is hard. I don't mean the little "what should I have on my salad?" decisions, but the big ones that shape the direction of your life. My path to this point has been very scripted: finish up high school, go to college (as if that was an option), work a couple years in an office, go to law school...maybe one of the most well worn paths for children of middle-to-upper-class Baby Boomers, and now with mere months to go before I graduate, I find myself reluctantly tip-toeing toward the edge of my known universe and peering out darkly into a world of possibilities that I realize few people on the planet have the good fortune to choose from, and it's exciting, invigorating, and terrifying.

(Oh yeah, I guess this blog is supposed to maintain some poker content. Well, I am retreating from the higher-stakes games with my tail between my legs, back to my 30/60 - 50/100 haunts; details on my painful higher-stakes 'education' to come...)

Thursday, August 3rd: Tournaments are gay.

2006-08-03T10:24:00.000-04:00

So I wrote before that one of the few misgivings I had about coming down to Australia was that the start of school down here conflicted with the World Series of Poker, where a few of my friends were playing this week (although to the best of my knowledge, they've all been knocked out of the main event by now, and they're only just now finishing day 2.) I really wish I could have played there, just for the fun experience, but -- in one of my few moments of life lucidity -- I chose school over poker.

I'm not all that bummed, though, because one of my long-standing beliefs is that tournament poker is one of the worst possible measures to assess actual poker skill, but we (or more accurately, the media) have put it up on this pedestal as the ultimate test of poker acumen. I have infinitely more respect for cash game players grinding out profits than I do for nearly anyone who pencils himself in as a poker shark on the basis of one or more big tourney scores. There's a myth out there, perpetuated over the last couple of years in the media, and it's the myth of the marquee poker professional; the one or two "name" players at every final table that TV poker commentators love to point to as evidence that, despite the luck factor in poker, the "cream" ultimately rises to the top. To quote Chris Rock in pretty much any stand-up set he's ever performed: "Please cut the f*@#!$% shit!" The fact of the matter is that the biggest reason for the presence of a few 'name players' at final tables these days is simply the law of large numbers. Think, for a moment, about how many pro poker players you could either name, or whose name/face you would recognize if you saw it...I think that number would probably be around 300 for me...hmmm...maybe that's a bit high...perhaps more like 200-250. Regardless, while TV commentators hurry to point out poker pro's X and Y at the 10-man final table, they discount altogether the hundreds -- yes HUNDREDS -- who have been knocked out to get the that point, whereas 8 complete donkeys remain.

It's easy, of course, to understand why the media has so much invested in perpetuating this myth: the viability of commercializing TV poker depends on it. Who, after all, wants to watch 10 complete unknowns play poker. No, much better to have a few professionals mixed in about whom you can really tell a story. After all, what makes a more compelling story line: Joe Blow, TV repairman battling and Bill Smith, insurance salesman, or Greg Raymer being seated with Mike Matusow, just a year removed from their memorable trash-talking / Matusow crying session in the 2004 WSOP. The popular media need us to believe in this myth of individual poker greatness in order to sell the people -- it's the people and the individual brands they create that boost ratings and sell advertising. I think it entirely possible that the best tournament poker player in the world today (the word "best" is somewhat ambiguous too, but let's just say it means the most technically proficient) has never won a major $5K+ tournament in his life. You may never have even heard of him/her. That's how much luck is involved in tournament poker.

Here's the problem. One of the most important (and at the same time difficult) concepts people need to grasp in order to play winning poker is variance, and just what constitutes the "long term". A popular question on poker bulletin boards is "Just how many hands do I need to play before I can trust my BB/100 number, or know that I'm definitely a winner or loser?" The answer given varies, but usually comes in somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000. I think one of the most insightful (and likely) responses, however, was given by the poster who claimed, somewhat controversially, that the actual number of hands one would need to play in order to establish one's "true" BB/100 was many, many times higher than the oft-quoted 50K - 100K. That poster actually had a sound mathematical basis for making that claim, which included considerations of standard deviation, risk of ruin, etc, etc, but the take-home point was that, in short, it simply takes a helluva lot of hands to reach "the long run". Nearly all poker players will die before ever coming close to approximating what their 'true BB/100' (that is, the BB/100 figure that their current playing skill/style would generate if continued to infinity) actually is. A lot of people have expressed admiration at the high BB/100 I've been able to sustain, but according to those calculations, my 'actual' BB/100 could vary by as much as 2 or 3 whole big bets / 100 from where it stands now (after 500K or so hands).

Anyway, why have I gotten distracted talking about all that long-run 'nonsense'? Because if you're suprised that 500,000 hands might still not yield all that precise a predictive future long-term winrate, do you honestly believe we can make any substantive determinations from the 1,000 or so that will determine this year's WSOP winner? 1,000 hands is nothing, and yet that's exactly what is going to decide who the media annoints as one of the best new poker players on the planet a week from now. How about the poker wunderkind-du-jour, Jeff Madsen who, at 21 years and 7 weeks just won 2 WSOP bracelets, and made 2 more final tables, out of the 6 WSOP events that he entered this year. Simply put, with fields as large as they are this year, that's probably the single most impressive feat in the history of the WSOP. Is Jeff good? Anyone want to drink the Kool-Aid? Not me. Again, I'm not picking on Jeff in particular, just on the folly of drawing conclusions from any time frame so short in duration. Had 1 or 2 of his all-in coin flips gone the other way, and he's back to community college, and you'd have never heard of him. Read his interview with Cardplayer Magazine here; actually an interesting read, if you ask me.
(First of all, I won't rag on the guy too hard, but "I also borrowed money from my college fund that my grandfather had put away for me. I got just enough money to play in six tournaments and make a run for the final event."?? What the F are that kid's parents thinking? -- alright, no more judgements for now.) This kid will now walk around the rest of his life -- yes the rest of his life -- believing he's a poker natural, because in his "long run", he simply had the exceptionally good fortune of having his "hot streak" come near the beginning of his poker career. Last year's WSOP winner, Joe Hachem, for example, will be a "winning poker player" the rest of his life. I'm not picking on him in particular (in fact, he seems like a really nice guy), but I cite him only because he's won the biggest single prize in the history of poker (until another unknown overtakes him in a couple weeks for $12Million). Does that make him good? How about the fact that he's now going to be seen sitting in the highest-stakes cash games at nearly every casino he visits? Are you impressed yet?

Long story short is it's pretty much impossible to ever reach the "long-run" in NL tournament play, and I'm just frustrated with the undue importance placed on individual tournament wins by the media and public at large. There are several very well-known poker pro's who have made a few big scores in NL tournaments, and thus have 7-figure bankrolls, who are, by all accounts, absolutely terrible players, from a technical standpoint. Whenever they sit in the "Big Game" at the Bellagio, the better cash game players lick their chops at the dead money that's sitting down. Is this post an indictment of all tournament professionals? I know it will be taken by some readers as such, but that's not the intention. A lot of the poker pro's themselves realize the razor thin +EV they actually have over even the worst of the worst in NL tournaments. How else do you explain the complaining that's coming more and more these days from pro's who lament that the WSOP fields are just getting "too big", and that the buy-in for the main event should be raised, or the # of entrants capped. From a purely EV standpoint, they should welcome each and every player who plays worse than they do in a given tournament field. But they don't. Instead a lot of them complain that it's becoming more or less impossible to navigate through the minefield of thousands of "internet donkeys." That counterintuitive line of reasoning is evidence of the relatively depressing realities of NL tournament play.