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.