LSD's poker blog

March 2nd: Epilogue

noreply@blogger.com (Blog Administrator) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:07:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Blog Administrator) — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:45:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Blog Administrator) — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 03:11:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (Blog Administrator) — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 07:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Blog Administrator) — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 13:30:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Blog Administrator) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 03:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Blog Administrator) — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 10:07:00 +0000

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."