That is my conclusion.

At Commerce, 34/hour rake is slowly busting everyone. Feb was a disasterous month for the poker economy… Commerce Casino and Phil Ivey got all the money and, as far we know, they already had a lot.

In the real world, $103 oil and record lows on the dollar means everyone is already poorer than they think. Everyone I know spent too much in the good times and is now losing money rapidly.

I’ve been training hard for the bet with Patrik. I’m constantly fighting minor injuries (first rotator cuff, now shin issues). I can buyout of golf for 50k if I’m injured and he can buyout of tennis for 50k, but other than that there is no injury allowance. This bet has made me realize that my body fat is quite high and I’m basically slow and out of shape. I’ve improved pretty dramatically in the past two weeks, but conditioning and speed are going to be the two main factors for the match.

Illya Trincher was telling me that he was a top ten ITF junior at one point. Benyamine was as well. The two of them have a match set for the summer and Benyamine has already lost forty pounds.

BA

Not sure where my last entry left off, but last weekend my mom was in San Diego and I went down to visit her.

I signed up awhile ago to take the Series 7 exam in LA on Feb 22. It’s a six-hour securities licensing exam and I needed to pass it to trade with Bob Bright’s firm, Bright Trading. I gave myself four days to study for this exam. I stayed in San Diego for most of this time. I thought I would fail b/c one of my best Harvard students took the exam recently and he barely passed after much more study. Then to make matters worse I was perhaps the most undisciplined I’ve ever been during a study period. It’s tedious stuff and not particualy easy to focus on, but I did a horrendous job. I might have studied 9 hours total over four days. I mean, I can’t even recount the various proscratinations. At one point, I spent four hours reading Rolling Stones magazine, including a 10000-word article on Britney Spears.

I stayed in downtown LA on Thurs night and I somehow wrote down the directions wrong to the test site in Pasadena, CA. I ended up in Encino, CA (not close), ten minutes before exam time. It was rush hour, so I got to the exam an hour and twenty minutes late. They let me take the exam but they deducted an hour and twenty minutes from my test time. I thought for sure I’d fail but halfway through I realized that I would be OK. I scored 82% correct; 70% is a pass.

Friday night I went to Madeo with Kenny and a few others, then I went to Goa with some LA friends and ran into D Williams and JR Ballende. I played the 10k LA event on Sat. I mostly played well until there were about thrity minutes remaining. At that point, I made the general comment to the table, “Is it stuffy in here?” It was of course hot and disgusting, with five hundred people crammed into a relatively small room upstairs at commerce. And I was not at my physical peak, having gone out the night before, and having consumed absurd amounts of caffeine in my mostly failed study attempt the week before. So I proceeded to come up with various justifcations for giving away my chips. On my bustout hand, I reraised a habitual raiser with 46s from the button with the intention of giving up if called. He called and the flop came 3-5-10 with one spade. I shipped it in for 1.3X the pot and he called with jacks.

Brandon

I may edit this a bit more later, I was talking on Instant Message with a friend when I realized it would make a good blog entry. I love my wife dearly but sometimes she goes a bit overboard in her quest for adventure. The weird format is a result of the Instant Message format which would have taken a long time to edit. So here it is in the raw.

so my wife wants to go to a trip on the other side of the island

we have 2 days left

the other side is the rainy side

so I am not crazy about it but it is a rainforest

ultimately I know that not going would put me in the doghouse

so I go

we agree to a compromise and the first place we go sucked bigtime

and one of my kids gets physically sick

my wife is trying to put a smile on everything but the reality is that no one is having a good time and besides we could be boogie boarding

she agrees it is best to head back

but on the way there is a spot a lot of cars are at, she wants me to turn back but I resist

she is persistent in a way that I know is not good for me

so I turn back

we get out the car and a windshield was broken recently and there is a sign that says ” do not leave valuable in your car”, she actually has to warn my oldest to not step in the vandalized grass.

I am once again resisting

then I see that we have to climb over barbed wire to get where we are going

and on the other side of the barbed wire is a BIG dead decomposing animal

Flabbergasted Instant Message Friend: lolwtf

me: as we cover up our mouth as to not inhale the dead decomposing stench we are sliding down a muddy path

on the path is a bamboo jungle, so that is cool

you can hear a waterfall in the background

as we go to where the waterfall is there is a steep embankment

we all have sandals on and my wife wants to go down, I have finally had enough and I protest appealing to here motherly instincts, she is not deterred

I don’t feel my sandals are safe so I throw them down the hill and climb down barefoot, which was the only protest I could think of at the time, so I can catch my falling children

my wife won’t look me in the eye because she knows I am judging her

we come upon a ditch

with slippery rocks, all of the people coming up to the ditch have hiking boots on (and they are occasionally slipping), we have on sandals

I threaten to call child protection and that makes an impression on her

we won’t be risking life and limb for a waterfall

Flabbergasted Instant Message Friend: haha

me: but we still need to head back up and luckily as we past the decomposing warthog or whatever the hell it was

Bobby: the girls want to turn back?

me: we see that our car was left alone by the vandals

the girls did not want to go back

one of the funnier parts of the story

is that my girls were cheering on their mom for being a bad parent

concluding that bad parents are the best because they let you do stuff good parents won’t

Flabbergasted Instant Message Friend: lol

me: do you mind if I post this verbatim in my blog?

too much writing and too good of a story to not do that

Flabbergasted Instant Message Friend: Hi Mom

me: ha

i can probably edit this

Flabbergasted Instant Message Friend: oh I see how it is

just change my name to Patrick.Antonius@gmail.com or something

that’ll get em excited

I like homeruns as much as anyone but I’ll always take a triple. Hawaii is a triple, we are on Maui and the traffic is pretty bad so we try not to leave the resort very much. The Four Seasons is as close to a homerun as you can get when you have kids so leaving here is somewhat silly. One of the funny things about being at a place like this is there mention of celebrities that stay here. I have had the good fortune of staying at a few places that celebrities would go and usually the type of celebrities that you see are not the type of people you think of when you think of a celebrity. Like today I saw Steve Young, which is kind of cool but everyone was whispering to their wives and such “I think that is Steve Young”, I mean give me a damn break, the guy is an announcer leave him alone so he can spend time with his family.

Also, to about half of the women here I could care less if you were the 5th runner up from New Hampshire 22 years ago, get the hell out of my sun.

There is a thread on two plus two about busto celebrity poker players and the people that have been mentioned have not even come close to the names I am sure David Sklansky is thinking of, David throws out these posts so people can actually out the people that are actually broke. Saying Daniel or Gus is busto is sort of old news, though in Daniel’s case I don’t think anyone has it 100% correct, my understanding is that he gets 3 million a year from Poker Stars, now he might be down a good bit from a number of things but nothing that 3 million a year won’t cure.

From what I know the names that are busto are new on the busto front. I don’t really see any benefit to me in outing anyone that is bust but people are aiming a bit low in their speculation.

I am reading a book by Milton Friedman which is really interesting.  He refers to himself as a liberal with the meaning of liberal being that centralized government is inherently bad.   I am only halfway through the book but I agree with a lot of theory’s, the book is not light reading but I am glad I picked it up.

I played at Commerce on Tues night. No poker since then.

I’m going to be in LA until the end of February, at which point I’m flying to Cambridge, MA.

I’ve been playing a huge amount of tennis for my bet with Patrik but sadly I overdid it; I’m having some rotator cuff sensitivity that will sideline me for two or three weeks in tennis and probably one week in golf.

I just finished Nassim Taleb’s new book The Black Swan. I participated in a forum about topics from this book for Garp Risk Review Magazine back in April. I don’t think the book came out until early summer, so oddly most of the forum participants hadn’t read the book.

This is a fabulous book, one of the best popular econ/finance books of the last few years (another, The Misbehavior of Markets, covers similar territory and is written by a friend of Taleb’s, the legendary Benoit Mandelbrot). I was quite surprised that I liked this book becuase, for me, Taleb’s first book, Fooled by Randomness, covered overly familiar territory and used trite examples. Also I found the author’s tone a bit annoying. I was shocked that it was seen as an innovative, insightful book on the Street. If someone recommended the book to me, my opinion of them instantly went down.

How can an author improve so much on the second try? Taleb is now someone I desperately want to meet. My theory is this….
If you write a book, you do so (if you are not deluded) under the expectation that very few people will read it.
Thus at a certain point, you say, “OK, additional progress is hard fought at this point. My book is almost as good as it’s going to get. I could read this and read that and edit this and edit that. But I’m ready to finish up.”
Now possibly your 80% effort is, in the case of Fooled by Randomness, OK, and for one reason or another a lot of people happen to buy it.
You then get a big advance and a guaranteed readership (in the case of Taleb, he knows that at least 100,000 people will read his book, a staggering number is this genre).
With this guaranteed readership, the marginal investments of time now become worthwhile for you to undertake and you produce a second book that is dramatically better than the first.

I just replied to a popular post on twoplustwo about “online poker millionaires”. My post…
most people who make it don’t hold on to it.

i was reading bluff last week. there was an article about the WPT and lipscomb made some comment about the fact that wpt tournaments had made 90 poker millionaires (can’t remember exact number). it would be fun to go through and see how many of the ones who were made millionaires (meaning they didn’t have a mill before and they didn’t have a staker who took most and they didn’t have substantial debts going in), and look at how many are STILL millionaires. let me state the obvious: most poker players are sick. they’re not the best at holding onto money. the ones who aren’t gamblers spend too much when times are good. if you did the above calculation and excluded FullTilt stakes/infusions, the number would be low. below five would be my guess offhand and i haven’t look at the list of winners.

wait they actually have a link for this stuff

http://www.worldpokertour.com/Players/WPT_Poker_Made_Millionaires.aspx

maybe five is low, maybe not. not a fair test for wpt since those who tend to hold onto money are usually somewhat rational re:bankroll management and so tend not to play 10k tournaments without selling pieces or taking backers.

Brandon

This week has seen me hitting the tables again after a long hiatus, I tend to play mostly when I feel it and I had not felt it until just the other day.  Since coming back I have won, not a lot but things are encouraging.  When I stopped I was definitely losing but I would not say it was a major concern, I just did not think I was playing my best.  It is amazing how clear things become when you just have a little clarity.

This morning I called American Express, I travel quite a bit and a friend of mine has a Centurion card (check out the link Neil does a great job explaining the benefits, also known as the Black Card) so I figured I would find out the requirements, it comes with a lot of perks that would be helpful worldwide.  If you are not invited (meaning that you play point guard for some NBA team), yes it is that exclusive, the best way to get one is to spend 250k in one year and then request one.  I am not sure if I will ultimately request one (I have only been an AMEX member for 6 months) but I am going to push all my spending and bills through AMEX.  Currently I have a Blue Card that pays 5 cents for certain purchases but 1.5 for everything else.  To date I have earned almost $1000, which is not chump change considering I pay off my balances so I do not get charged interest.  Mostly though it is convenient to not always have to carry money around and I think AMEX does a great job.

You may have noticed some changes to the site lately; we are really looking to clean up the site so it is easy for everyone to get at the content.  So far so good.  Our next step will be adding more contributors and more additions to the video and podcasts section.  Overall you guys seem to be enjoying the changes.

As you may have noticed Antonio is not blogging any longer, I am pretty sure he plans to explain why soon.  I run MagicAntonio for him so we have not parted ways, he just got one of those opportunities you just can not pass up and I wish him nothing but the best.  He is a great guy and a great friend.

Anyone who has ever met me or even seen a picture of me is going to think this is an odd topic. I just am not crazy about writing yet another blog about how I won or lost a couple of thousand playing some random guy heads up. That gets boring. So I figured I would take on the main reason I think hip hop is on the decline.

Strippers!

Every hip hop song is about shorties on a pole. At first it was mildly funny the thought of rap artists flaunting their new found riches at the local strip joint but when those songs start getting sung by 7 year olds that hear them on the top 40 stations the writing was on the wall.

Strippers were just a short cut. Great beats need good lyrics not short cuts and so few artists are doing that well and that is why hip hop is on the decline.

Want proof, check this out it is Run DMC’s Rock Box, which I think is still the best hip hop record ever (though the video is lacking a bit).

By the way, if I could meet one guy in business that guy would be Russell Simmons. I watch Run’s House just for his cameos. He is so brazen and uncut it is refreshing.

I have had two instances in the last few months where random people both out of the blue mentioned that New Orleans should not be rebuilt basically because it will happen again at some point.  Both arguments were the same that their tax dollars should not go to a region that will be ripped apart at some future point.  In one example I was chatting with this guys wife while he was away (we were at a poker table) and I found out they were from the Quad Cities.  So when he came back he had no idea I had this knowledge.  So when he randomly brought up the topic of New Orleans my retort went something like this:

“New Orleans is arguably our most historic city, a lot of who we are as Americans is because of that city.  It is not like some no name place no one cares about like Davenport or Rock Island.”

He then says, “Hey, be careful, that is where I am from” to which I said “well I am from New Orleans”. 

Given both of their arguments many of our best cities should be torn down, Los Angeles and San Francisco certainly should not exist.    

I think it bothers me most not because it is where I am from but because we are so willing to disregard our history so easily.  New Orleans seems to have become a symbol of poverty that is viewed the same way the middle class viewed welfare during the Reagan years.  Recently I was in London and I was talking to a cab driver and I mentioned that I was originally from New Orleans (ironically no one knows where Minnesota is but everyone knows where New Orleans is) and he said something funny “I would have never known what a levee was if it were not for Katrina”.  

Growing up in New Orleans used to be a cool thing, now when you say it all people can think about is Katrina.  Which I suppose is fair.  Whether people want to or not people will rebuild New Orleans, with or without government help.  But if you had a list of 5 cities that are unique in the United States and you should save at almost any cost New Orleans would certainly be on that list.

I’ve been in Palo Alto for the last week.

Can’t remember where the last blog left off, but basically I was tilted by a huge bluff that Guy Laliberte put on me in PLO, and I immediately booked a flight out of Vegas.

I’ve mostly been hanging around my apartment. Watched the Super Bowl last Sunday. I once played neighborhood football with Eli and Peyton when I lived in New Orleans… this is my claim to fame in major athletics, as I never played organized football, scored 0 goals in my soccer career, and was a mediocre baseball player before I failed to prevent a baseball from getting past my glove and breaking my skull (left orbit bone).

I was at one point a half decent tennis player. At my best I was ranked around 150 in FLorida in the under-14s (which surprisingly is pretty good. These days I would imagine it’s even more competitive). I quit at 15 or so, and my closest friend (Will Brown, who was ranked about the same as me in the 14s) went to Nick Bolleteri Tennis Academy and ended up playing at the University of Florida after being ranked top 20 nationally in the 18s.

Now this bet with Patrik has me fired up on the tennis front.
The bet is 100k in tennis in July, 2 of 3 sets straight up, on clay, and 100k in golf, 18 hole stroke play on a fairly difficult course. Right now he’s way behind in golf (like 20 shots behind) and I’m way behind in tennis (prob 6-1, 6-2 if we played now) and he’s an infinitely better athlete. Plus he’s in shape and I’m not. I think I’m the favorite b/c if I play a lot of golf I’ll have him drawing dead there and there’s no way that I’ll be dead in the tennis if I work. Plus from what I can tell he has more money than me, so on the margin my incentives are better.

I read a short little book this week that’s hugely popular in Silicon Valley… it’s called The 4-Hour Workweek. This thing is hilarious, you have to get it. I want to meet the author. Among his views….Email and texting are the biggest waste of time in modern life. You should check your email twice a day and not in the morning, as that tends to derail you for the rest of the day. You should have a ‘to do’ list every day, but on that ‘to do’ list you should highlight two critical tasks and make sure you get those done…. this will put you ahead of the game since most people have a long list and accomplish nothing.

By the way, I haven’t mentioned it anywhere yet, but I’m co-teaching a course at Harvard this semester in applied game theory (with Andrew Woods). I designed the course and frankly I think it will be the coolest undergrad game theory course in the world. We have a few classes that hit cover stylized card games of the type found in the Mathematics of Poker (Matt Hawrilenko will be a guest in those three classes).

Brandon

For poker purposes apparently Barack Obama not only plays poker but supports a bill to study whether or not online gaming should be legal.  So does Hillary, so as a Democrat for one of my main issues both fit the bill.  Well this Saturday Barack was speaking to 20,000 people right across the street from where I was staying.  So I dropped in.  Now I am biased.  I was probably already going to vote for Barack anyway and the speech really did not change my thoughts in that regard.  Here are some things that struck me:

1.               There were a lot of young people.  Not just college age either, I would say 10% of the crowd was high school aged kids that just wanted to hear him speak.  That choked me up a bit when I thought about it and likely speaks to why he is gaining so much momentum.

2.               Barack is a funny guy.  There were many moments were he really made everyone in the arena openly laugh.  At one point he was talking about his theme of “hope” and how his opponents think he is naïve to have so much hope, he then said “it is like they think I am a hope monger”.

3.               The big criticism of Barack is that he is long on message and short on specifics.  I do not really mind that but I can see how it bothers some people.  Plans should be fluid when you are talking about something like a government.  It is the moral compass that should attract us and I think Barack does a good job with that.

For many reasons I have been a Democrat since I have been able to vote.  For too long our plans have been long on specifics and short on message, it was hard voting for Al Gore or John Kerry because they really did not move you to want to volunteer, or donate.  The Republicans took the fight to them and they caved.   People do not like that in leaders. 

So Guy Laliberte bluffed me in a big pot and it put me on such tilt that I had to book a flight immediately.

1k-1k PLO. Ivey limps for 1k. I get froggy and raise to 5k on the button with Kc3c4s5s. By the way, I don’t know if froggy is a word, but Viffer has taken to using it and I like it a lot.

SB calls, Guy calls from BB, Ivey calls. Flop 4c6cJc. Check, check, check. I decide to check. Turn is Qc. Check, check, check. I bet 20k. SB folds. Guy wants to fold but has chips in his hand. I really want him to call. He calls. Ivey folds.

River is a 9c. Guy bets 30k into 60k pot. I decide that I can’t let him out for 30k.

In retrospect my line should be min-raise, call a push. Why? He can only legitimately push one hand: 8c10c. If he has this hand, he’s going to bet the turn or check and autocall when I bet. Instead he waited forever and acted like he really wanted to fold. This could have been an acting job for Ivey’s benefit with AcXc but he’s not going to 3-bet push the river with that hand. Plus my line (bet after everyone checks the turn, min-raise river after Guy min bets) really makes it look like I’m f’ing around.

If I’m going to fold to a push, I should raise to 70k (instead of a min-raise to 60k) b/c it makes it less likely that he’ll move on me.

The reason I can raise for value is that I can easily have a straight flush with my line. Plus, he can’t bluff me with a naked ten unless he calls the turn with a ten-high flush (like Tc7c) and then decides to turn that hand from a calling hand to a bluffing hand after I raise the river.

At any rate, I did the worst possible thing– I min-raised and then folded when he pushed. He had an Ac and three diamonds in his hand. In other words, he has a billion and change and just decided it was time to push. We were thinking about things a little differently.

I have a bet with Patrik…. around July 10, we are going to play golf for 100k straight up and tennis for 100k straight up. Beating Patrik in tennis might be my biggest goal in life at this point. Patrik is a first class athlete and I am very average. Right now, he beats me about 6-1 in tennis and I beat him in golf by 18 shots.

Brandon