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