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