I have this app on my Droid called Akinator. The app is basically an automated 20 questions game. You think of a character, and the app asks you a bunch of questions. It is quite amazing how often it guesses the character correctly. After it guesses correctly, it tells you how often other people have picked that same character. Moral of the story: It’s a cool app.

Me and a friend made up a side game with this app. We tried to pick characters who we thought were picked by the most people. She ended up guessing the winner, and after that we tried to figure out someone who could beat that character, but to no avail.

So my question to you is: Who is the most popular character in Akinator? Answer to come next blog post.

Last year Max and I got inspired after reading this thread on twoplustwo about real estate investing. Hearing this guy talk about REI was pretty inspiring, so we decided to get our feet wet and a buy a triplex in our hometown we saw on the market. It was definitely a good buy price wise. REI may indeed be a good way to make a good ROI on your money, but if you do choose to go this route, I give you one piece of advice.

Don’t become a landlord, it sucks royal ass. Hire someone to manage your property.

That is all.

Sorry for the long hiatus. As you can imagine, April 15th left me uninspired to write anything on my blog. Since then, I have basically been doing nothing. I’ve played golf and attempted to self teach myself guitar. I went to EPT Grand Final last week and busted out of the ME the first day. On that trip, I had a lot of fun with Max. We talked a lot about day trading and I think it’s something I’m now going to consider doing.

However, I really don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. As of now, I’m still a professional poker player. I’m going to the WSOP for 6 weeks and playing a lot of tournaments. I’m also going to grind satellites while I’m there, which I’d recommend highly for anyone going. They are very easy and a good money making side opportunity.

So as far as what my plans are for this blog… I guess it’s going to be both my transition from an online poker player to (???). I’m going to give myself a lot of time to make that decision. But in the meantime, I’m going to write about some random topic of interests and use the blog as a journal when I get to Vegas.

Gl to all the online American grinders in your future endeavors.

There hasn’t really been an update from Danny or myself for a while. Obviously, that has a lot to do with the fact that Full Tilt and Poker Stars doesn’t allow US players anymore. And because most of our poker is played online, there isn’t really much to update about. Luckily with EPT Madrid and the WSOP coming up, you’ll get some poker related updates soon enough.

A lot of players, in light of recent developments, are already trying to figure out where to move and how. However, I’m taking a different approach. 5 days before “Black Friday” my friend, who does futures trading, was talking about how he’d like to teach me how to trade, but thought I wouldn’t be interested because poker was going well. I literally said this exact phrase to him, “Well, online poker isn’t going to last forever.” Foreshadowing anyone? (That being said, I do think there will be either regulated state or federal poker by the end of the year). I already was putting some time into trading before all this crap happened, so once I realized I had to move to play on Stars and Tilt again, I decided to put all my time into learning how to trade instead of flying to Thailand. I started trading for real money a few days ago, trading 1-2 contracts on the Russel 2000. If I had to make a poker equivalent to it, it’s like grinding 100nl. So far I’m down about $250.

It’s exciting and interesting learning something new like this. While poker and trading aren’t the same thing, I see many parallels. First and foremost, both trading and poker are games where you play against other people. Secondly, both are games with fundamental principles that you can use to figure out how to make the right move. And lastly, in both you are trying to make as many profitable bets as possible so you may win the most in the long run. All these things are expressed wildly different ways but, in essence, are the same. That being said, I could be wrong about this given I’m still a relative newbie.

I’m going to use this blog journal about trading and, when I can, write about the tournaments I’m in. Next stop is EPT Madrid, which starts in less than a week. Hopefully EPT Madrid can be the start of a great summer tourney run.

http://theppa.org/takeaction/

Dear readers,
The ppa makes this very easy. Just click a few buttons and you can send a prewritten letter to the president, your congressperson, and the Attorney General. The more people we can get to do this, the more likely online poker will be legal and regulated. Please take a minute to do this and encourage others to do the same.

One of my biggest goals while playing poker, a goal that I document often throughout this blog, is to be able to play poker and have my hours put in, level of studying, and level of play be unaffected by the results of poker. For a minute today, I felt like I had a moment where this was the case. But I was wrong, sort of.

I saw Imper1um sitting at 5ks today and, having player him before, sat thinking I had a pretty significant edge. And as I played him I saw that edge come out, I got it in good against him several times and when I didn’t, I was pretty certain my play in the hand was good if not great. Sadly, I ended up down about 23k against him. And when he finally declined our last sng, I stayed seated for a second and absorbed the moment. I felt great. And for a minute I thought wow maybe I am starting to get it.

But then I realized a couple things. 1) Throughout the session it would be clear to anyone watching that I played well and 2) I had won a couple sngs at the end. What I realized was that although I was happy despite the monetary results, I think I would have been angry if it went a different way even if my level of play was the same. Let’s say I played 1 sng with Imper1um, and going in I felt like he was the type of player to fold to overbets. I get into a spot that seems like a good spot to overbet bluff, and I do. However he times down and calls me with middle pair. Did I play any worse in this scenario? No, but I would have felt worse.

I hope to see one day in my future where I play a 6 straight hours of poker, lose 20k, run bad, get it in bad, and have several hands where I get outplayed. When that session happens, and I sit for a minute afterwards and realize I still feel great about game, I’ll know that I’m getting somewhere.

Winklevoss twins lose case

The link above is to an article about a court case involving Mark Zuckerberg and the so-called Winklevoss twins. The Winklevoss twins settled for a pretty large sum of money after suing Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea which Zuckerberg turned into Facebook. The article is about how they tried to get out of the settlement because they believed they were misled about the settlement.

Scroll down to the comments section. The comments all have an interesting theme… can you guess what it is?

It seems that everyone who posted has seen the Social Network, which isn’t a surprise. What is surprising is that they all seem to think that this movie, that is based on a fictional novel is the absolute truth. The movie portrays the Winklevoss twins as rich, snooty brats who had some idea for a social networking site that wasn’t really facebook. In reality, we don’t know who these people really are and we don’t know whether Zuckerberg stole a vague idea of Facebook (This is what the movie implies), the entire idea, or something in between. But everyone assumes that what they see on a screen is the truth, even when the makers of the movie openly acknowledge its speculation. This is probably why Michael Moore documentary’s and 9/11 conspiracy movies are so effective, if a movie that everyone is supposed to know is fake is taken as reality, then a documentary telling them what its showing is real, when it’s not, must be the word of God.

It’s crazy how many people think this way.

This post may be way too personal, but I’ll risk it just because it’s meaningful to me.

I’ve been struggling recently in poker, which, like a typical poker player experience, has been depressing. It’s especially tough considering how well I have felt like I’ve been playing and how poor the results have been of late. There are so many financial pressure coming up, taxes, the WSOP, etc. that this downswing has been especially taxing (Ha! no pun intended).

I went to a therapy session this morning to try to become more clear on exactly what about the downswing bothers me and work through it. Going into the session, I felt like what I would probably get out of the session is that I can’t be attached to the monetary ups and downs, and need to stay objective about when I’m sitting down, if I’m playing well and am in a good game or not. But as I talked to the therapist and she helped me work through my thoughts, I realized that my skill of looking at my poker game objectively was fine, what wasn’t fine was my ability to look at my own life objectively.

I looked back at what life was like when I didn’t have money. What I realized is that I wasn’t as liked as I am now. When I had mild poker success, as far as I know people looked at me like any other guy. I wasn’t anything special, but I was a pretty decent friend, brother, son, grandson, etc. This assessment of what people thought of me could not even be true, as my Mom always says, you never know why someone likes you or how much they like you. But this was the impression I got from everyone, and there was nothing wrong with that. But when I really took off in poker, made a shit ton of money, had a major tournament score, and got on TV, people noticeably started to think of me differently.

Some people started to think of me as super human, especially admiring friend poker players. Some started to think I was destined to become a multi-millionaire. Suddenly ,I started to hear how amazing I was of a person. People seemed to want to be closer to me simply because of my small town celebrity. It all made me feel just like that. And I got attached to that, and was afraid doing badly would cause those high esteemed opinions of me to change.

What I came to realize though is that no one knows me better than myself. I’m not as cool, stupid, smart, jerky, nice, or superhuman as people think I am, so using others as a barometer of my self worth is flawed. In poker, the short term results can make you think things of yourself that are far from the truth; that you are a perfect poker player when getting lucky, and a terrible poker player when running badly. In life, what people think of you can make you think things of yourself that are far from the truth; that you are superhuman or a terrible person. But in both cases, to recover, what I must do is go back to my objective analysis of myself, and trust my own judgement.

All of the bluffs worked. So I guess it was a thinly veiled brag of sorts, but I felt like all the hands were pretty interesting bluff opportunities. On the first two hands he tanked, on the last hand I don’t remember how long he took.

So yesterday I set a goal to play 400 SNGs in a day because I wanted to play more when I a) felt tilted and b) didn’t feel like playing.

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