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