Here is my new twitter page beaniepoker.  Unlike Myspace or Facebook which I genuinely don’t have time to update twitter makes it easy because you can update through text message, instant message or on the site.  I often find myself having thoughts that would be interesting with no place to share them.  Hopefully this can help.  From what I can tell the service is fairly active, though I would imagine Jennicide’s page will be slightly more popular than mine.  Her’s is jennicide.

I have probably written this particular blog 10 times when topics come up about poverty in the mainstream news or something.  I have dumped most of them for fear I might end up sounding like Vanilla Ice.  I lived with my father and we were definitely middle class and lived in the suburbs.  But my mother is married to a black man who was a gift to our family.  So here is a little of that story and how it happened.

My parents divorced when I was 4, initially my mother was given custody but through a crazy series of events that my mother could not control I ended up living with my dad.  My mother struggled after that and ended up going through job after job and relationship after relationship.  At one point she dated a man named Harold (who was African American), my mother didn’t make the best life choices back in those days and Harold was a scumbag, he died of Aids because of drug use and sharing of needles.  My mom got caught up in that lifestyle, eventually I would as well.

I didn’t see my mother a lot at this time but occasionally we would have visits that I couldn’t tell my dad about.  She took me places no kid should go.  I saw a lot at a very tender age.  I also got my ass kicked a lot being the only white kid in a predominantly black area.  I remember being dropped off at people’s house that I didn’t know.  A lot!! It always seemed to be some grandmother who held down the fort for her family, she was normally overweight, cooked great and by nights end I was in her lap and she was my new best friend.  After getting my ass kicked a few times people started to realize I wasn’t a punk and I made a few friends.  Most of this scene happened around a grocery store that my uncle owned.  My uncle was disowned from our family when he married a black woman, this was like in the 50’s.  He ran card games in the back of the grocery store were they played boo-ray and tonk.  Most of the people playing were playing with their net worth, so occasionally fights would break out, I shouldn’t have been there but I often was.  Looking back the games likely weren’t on the up and up.  Occasionally my uncle would take me to K&B for some ice cream, he was like the kind of old guy everyone was scared of but for some reason he liked me.  In fact, everyone liked me, of course there was the whole ass kicking thing, but I was polite and I knew my place, what wasn’t there to like?

My mother and I grew a bit closer when she started living with my grandmother (who I visited weekly) she worked at a grocery warehouse 1/2 block away from my grandmother’s house, I was between 16-17 at the time.  I eventually started working in the warehouse.  I was horrible at everything.  It also didn’t help that I was once again one of the only white people other than a guy named Maurice.  The characters there were so colorful I could write blogs about all of them.  There was Joe, who was the meanest person I have ever met and still is, Arthur, who was the supervisor and eventually he was murdered by his wife for cheating on her.  This was some real raw stuff.  Most of my time then was spent going to work and doing drugs and getting caught up in a lifestyle that was anything but glamorous.

That grocery warehouse is where my mom met James.  James is African American and he is now my stepfather.  James was god’s gift to my mother.  In fact, he was god’s gift to my whole family, from the way he treated my grandmother on her death bed to the way he makes my daughters feel every time we visit.  He also puts up with my mom which is no easy task.  My kids have a black grandfather and I kid you not when I say this to you, they have no idea he is black.  It literally never comes up and never has.  They have gradually started to figure things out but it all seems normal because it is normal for our family.

All if this is fresh in my head after Barack’s speech yesterday.  He captured that moment so well and for people who have straddled the divisive lines that race often creates it was a welcome dialogue.

I will change some of the info and names to make it not so obvious as to who the people are but this is one of the funnier stories (I am not sure if funny is the right word really) I have heard in a while. 

Two guys had basically been playing one account on Full Tilt and agreed that they would not take any out except for living and traveling expenses.  They also decided that they would travel the circuit playing tournaments and then playing online, which brought them to the Borgata.  Both of them had run well and their account was at 200k.  I am not going to bore you with the details because everyone knows what is coming.  They thought they found a soft spot in the 300-600 game playing limit poker.  Within 24 hours their account was dead bust.

This is where the story gets interesting maybe ironic (ok, funny really is a bad choice), the way the scene is described is almost like the end of a good war scene.  Fog everywhere, people walking around muttering wondering what just happened, that type of scene.  It was pretty clear that was all these kids had to the world.  At one point the bigger kid starts getting real angry and upset, his face turned a color of red (this is what I was told) faces shouldn’t turn.  At that point there was no reason in his mind.  If you have never been to the Borgata it is all glass, in his rage he ran at the glass as hard as he could trying to jump out (OK, now I feel like a bit of an ass for thinking it was funny).  As he hit the glass his head hit first and since he was not the first destitute gambler to think of this particular way to die he bounced off of the glass knocking himself out cold. 

As I mentioned earlier, I’m co-teaching a course in applied game theory at Harvard with my friend Andrew Woods. We have two sections of ten students each. We’re splitting up the teaching (12 classes each). I had my first class yesterday. It’s a solid group this year. I’m looking forward to it.

Things are a bit chaotic in my apartment at the moment. There’s no hot water, so I’ve been experimenting with cold showers. This has to be better than coffee.

I played an hour and a half of tennis yesterday. I’m worried that Patrik could actually beat me on the golf. He’s seems incredibly focused there.

We are at $1.53 to the Euro now. We’re all going broke and we don’t even know it. In Martin Amis’ book, London Fields, he has a line something like, “What happens when everyone’s a thief? We hadn’t though of that.” In financial markets these days, it’s more like, What happens when everyone’s broke? Scary world.. things that are supposed to go up go down and everything else goes down as well. You can see I’m not running good.

Not too much poker lined up in next two months…. six days of big live cash, no tournaments.

Brandon