So much to blog about so little free time...  So here are a bunch of quick notes...

* J.O. (the popcorn lottery winner) seems to have liked my comments (a 2+ page write-up of the things he is leaking money on) and hopefully I'll hear back from him some time next year on progress.  He doesn't play a lot of hands, so it may be a while before we get any kind of decent sample.

* I just narrowly averted my first losing month in three years.  A special thanks to the Rakeback Gods for making this possible.  Of course if their cousins, the EV Gods didn't wang me for $6K in -ev, this would not have been necessary.  Hmm..  maybe I need to update my popular post on the Poker Gods.

* A few readers seem to be interested in my trading background so I created a new Label called "trading" on the right hand column.  Now, you can just click on that link to read all my old posts on trading, rather than have to wade thru hundreds of posts containing my ramblings.  There's also a "best of" label, in case you want to read all the posts that the readers seem to have enjoyed.  People don't seem to be giving me any feedback since Black Friday, so I haven't updated it since then.  But I can if there's interest.

WHAT'S FOR DINNER?

Since someone asked about our Thanksgiving...

Thanksgiving at the Fly's is not just one meal.  It's a long series of meals.  We went over to a friend's house for Thanksgiving, but Mrs. Fly got the itch to cook up a storm.  On Tuesday, she started us off with a palate cleanser of baked ham.  We were about to gorge ourselves on poultry the ensuing days so she thought this would be a nice change of pace.  We hadn't had a baked ham in about a year.  I don't know why we don't have it more - it tastes so much better than the regular deli ham.  Unfortunately, we got the "regular" smoked ham instead of the "low sodium."  The regular is so absurdly salty it takes away from the ham flavor imo.  Americans sure love their salt.

Mrs. Fly enjoys cooking during the holidays and she wanted to make something nice for the family, so Wednesday night we she made us a feast.  That's a roasted goose.  This was the first time she tried making it and it turned out pretty well.  The skin was crispy and the meat extremely flavorful.  If you like duck, you should try this - it's a nice change of pace.  The orange thing in the casserole dish is Mrs. Fly's sweet potato casserole.  She recently won her second "Breakfast Queen" nod in a row for it.  It's almost like a dessert - it's so savory.

Then on Thanksgiving we went over to a friend's house.  They almost feel like family.  We recently helped their son with his college essays, so hopefully he'll get into the college of his choice.  Imagine that!  An Asian kid wanting to go to Rice.  The stars were a regular turkey (left), a fried turkey (right) and a baked ham (back right). 

The other side of table was where all the bench warmers hung out - all the various forms of starch and veggies.  I thought this bread cornucopia thing was very clever.  I had never seen one before - probably because I don't do the shopping, and on the rare times I do go, I'm usually hanging out in the meat and seafood departments.  Imagine that!

Dessert was okay.  The host baked a pecan pie that was pretty good - and we had a bunch of stuff I didn't really try for fear of gaining all my weight back.

I was in too much of a food coma to remember what I ate on Friday.  I think we went out.  Damn tryptophan!

Yeah!  Yeah!  That's the ticket!  It was the tryptophan and not my senility!

Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving, I thought I would share my list of Top 5 Unobivous and Stupid Things I'm thankful for.  It goes without saying that I'm thankful for family, friends, health, etc.  But here are some things you would would never have guessed.
 
5.  Thankful...  to the Scheduling Gods for making the 4 days of Thanksgiving so awesome.  A day of gluttony and football.  Followed by a day of shopping.  Followed by a day of college football.  Followed by a day of pro football (handegg for you Europeans).

2.  Thankful... that the Merge BBJ is finally back above $250K.  It's kind of depressing thinking I'm flushing 50 cents down the drain on very flop I see.  I play a lot of hands - over 100K hands a month...  altho the lags out there would laugh and say "yeah, but you don't see any flops, nit!"  Now that it's $250K, the BBJ finally becomes +EV. Gotta get in some heavy grinding now!

3.  Thankful... for that Twisted Kilt billboard on highway 35.  That stretch of highway is kind of industrial looking (lots of auto dealerships and gas stations)...  so the Tilted Kilt billboard is an oasis in the eyesore desert.  It's apparently like Hooters.  But tartan miniskirts >>> t-shirt and shorts.  Looove plaid skirts.  Hmm...  I'm starting to sound like a pedophile.  Looove plain skirts ON WOMEN.  Oops!  Did I just drop my fork?  Again?

2.  Thankful... to suddenly be in the sports mecca of the world.  I move to Dallas, and the Mavericks win the Title, The Rangers go to the World Series, the Cowboys are tied for the NFC East lead, and the Stars are ahead in the Pacific.  Luckboxing transferrable?  Considering I watch a lot of sports while I play, this has been a pleasant surprise.  All I need now is for Aaron Rogers to break his throwing hand to have a decent shot of keeping this run-good going.

1.  Thankful... to be alive.  Seriously.  Mrs. Fly seemed to think my last post about the MILFs was just a joke.  Let's keep it our secret, while her computer is broken.  Shhh.

So what was my other community service "fail"?

When we moved to Dallas last spring, we went to G's elementary school and told them we were both at home all day and would like to be involved in the PTA in some fashion.  Well, it turns out they had a position open.  A position so VILE that none of the other parents wanted to have anything to do with it - it was heading the book fair.  It's a lot of organizing, decorating and getting people to volunteer for shifts.  Anyway, Mrs. Fly volunteered to chair the book fair this year.

Mrs. Fly - Book Fair Chair.  Not sure if you guys know how marriages work... but this made me the unofficial... Book Fair Bitch.  Any task too laborious for the Book Fair Chair goes to...  that's right!  The Book Fair Bitch.  All right.  I'm exaggerating (a little) - we knew it would be a lot of work but I told Mrs. Fly the school needed the help and I would help her any way I could.  I never really noticed this before, but everyone in the school is female - the office staff, the teachers and all the PTA board members.  I think I'm the only dad that actually does anything with the school.  So this means all the grunt work involved in the book fair - moving furniture, moving books and...

...making the rocket decoration for the space theme - goes to me.  Not sure why the aliens look like they just spent a week in Area 51.  It probably took me a good 5 hours (over a few days) to cut this out of a cardboard wardrobe box and paint it.  You can't really see, but that's glitter paint.  Mrs. Fly could have just bought one, but the school only gave her a $300 budget, so I was told to make one.  She also wanted a "home-made look."  It turned out okay and some of the volunteers decorated it.  The kids seemed to really like it.  The book fair went pretty well and Mrs. Fly was commended for doing a good job.  She was only $500 short of the high set last spring (they had an evening event last spring to help that book fair out).

But then it got me to thinking... maybe I should have (again) just sat on my ass, watched some (more) football, and instead of helping Mrs. Fly with the book fair, just donated the money from 1 session.  Not only would that have been a more win-win use of my time, but WE WOULD HAVE MADE A NEW HIGH FOR THE BOOK FAIR!!!  Sigh.

On the bright side, many of the PTA moms think I'm quite awesome, and I may have changed some preconceived notions around here about Asian men.  We have souls after all!  A few of them even told Mrs. Fly I was a "keeper."  That works for me...  As you all know, I'm all about creating options for yourself.  So if that cute nerdy looking teacher (I have a thing for hot nerdy looking women), the former state beauty pageant winner (Miss America top 10), or the Charlize Theron look-alike want to have coffee or something, I've made myself known to all.

PS.  If I'm found dead tomorrow, tell the police it was Mrs. Fly.  I fear I may not survive this time.

Congrats to J.O. for winning the Duke popcorn lottery. Full report coming in less than a week!

Today, I want to talk about community service.  Recently I've have two episodes that is starting to make me question the best approach of "pitching in" to do your part.

The first is obviously the popcorn sales.  I'm probably going to spend between 6-8 hours on trying to sell popcorn to you guys - all the blog posts, taking and sending the orders, and doing the database analysis.  And I only sold 9 boxes to poker players!!!  NINE!  500 hits a day on my friggin blog, and I only sold NINE.  The last straw was when G and I schlep all the boxes to the post office and I find out that I can't ship the popcorn in a Priority Mail pouch for $5.10 or whatever.  The letters are a fixed price.  Apparently the pouches are not.  So I had to shell out $10.95 a box to send out the popcorn.  At the end of the day, it was only $6 a box that I was eating, but it was annoying.  Thank God I only sold NINE.

But seriously, my 6-8 hours would have been better spent had I not even bothered to try and help the Cub Scouts sell popcorn, sat on my ass (like I usually do), watch some football, just play 1 "standard" session of poker and donate that money to them.  That would have been almost $1,000.  Pretty sure if I asked the CubMaster what I should have done, he would have said, "F*ck the popcorn - go play poker, you clueless heathen bastard and give us da moniez!!!"  [Not worth another post, but I inadvertently took my FT folding chairs to a Cub Scouts event and I felt like such a degen sitting there near the front, advertizing a poker gambling site that just perpetrated massive fraud to a bunch of 8-9 year olds in the bible belt.  Nice DoubleFly.  Nice.  O wait!  Who is that knocking at my door?]

Community Service part II coming up next week.

A couple of quick notes...

* Happy Veteran's Day.  As I was scanning through for a funny picture, I came across this one, and was reminded how not that long ago, the world was a pretty f*cked up place.  As horrible as war is, sometimes you have to do what you have to do.  Veteran's Day is officially always on the 11th but it's usually celebrated on a Monday.  It's pretty cool how today's date, 11/11/11 is so symmetric.  It happens only once every hundred years, so make the most of it.

* I shipped the popcorn yesterday.  Thanks again to everyone who bought some.  I can't wait to see who the lucky winner of the database coaching is going to be.  I was looking through some people's databases to see who good candidates for staking were, and I think I can provide some useful insight, regardless of the skill level.

* I also shipped my first stake his money yesterday.  And I'm talking to a few other people about doing some kind of pseudo-staking (50-50), and no staking with just profit sharing.  I mentioned the other day that 20% of winning regs one year become losing regs.  Why not work with a few of them to create a win-win situation?  I guess Vini would disagree (later post), but it' just on a small scale.  It should make for some interesting posts down the line... because the most likely scenarios are: 1) he does better and I can talk about some of the more interesting things we did, 2) he runs off with my money.  Either way, the posts are sure to be entertaining. 

* I am watching The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson right now (have been since earlier this year), and I have to say, he is sooo funny - easily the funniest guy on late night.  This episode from last night (the one with Larry King) was particularly funny.  Leno is a little too PG, Letterman is just tired, and Fallon is too dorky.  I'm not sure I care too much about the ghey skeleton sidekick, the dudes who come out dressed like a horse or asking the guest if they want to touch his glittery ball, but his no-nonsense humor can be hilarious.  Check it out.

Something interesting happened to me the other day...  A long time blog reader emailed me and asked me if I wanted to stake him.  For the non-poker players out there, a "stake" is where one person puts up the cash and another person plays.  It's not that different from when I was a trader.  The bank theoretically gave me a "bankroll" ("capital"), and I used that money to make more money, and they paid me a share of what I made (usually 10-12%).  Maybe I'll talk about how this worked in a later post, in case people are curious how this works in finance.

In a nutshell, he has a full time job, lost a small chunk on FT, promised someone not to deposit until the landscape became clearer, hasn't played since then, and is now getting the itch to play.  I hadn't really thought about staking before, but after some thought, I figured why not?

Having basically raised myself in NYC, I'm not some clueless schlub.  New Yorkers are cynics by nature.  But at the end of the day, I think it could be "interesting" and we're not talking about a lot of money (maybe just a few grand).  And what can I say, I like my loyal readers.

So what's in it for me?
* Allegedly staking "can" be profitable if you find the right people - I seem to be getting some mixed reviews on this.
* I get another pseudo-member in the Poker Coop.  The benefits are different, but the more the merrier.
* I want to see if I can help a marginal winning player be a better player.  I helped "Mark" last year, but I'll have a little more at stake with this one.  When I was a little kid, I always wanted to be a teacher.  That was before I later found out how much they made.  LOL.
* Breaks up the monotony of watching the interest rate curve do nothing all day.
* Maybe I make a poker buddy.

What's in it for him?
* Zero risk of bankroll loss from DOJ or other site-related issues, since it's all my money.
* Zero risk of poker losses. It's like buying a (smaller quantity) call option on a stock instead of buying the stock itself.  Upside with no downside.
* Free leak-finding, some hand analysis and other pseudo-coaching.  He had a million hands on PTR and was a little better than flat over the last several hundred thousand hands at nl200 on FT.  I think the Merge nl100 games might be comparable to those games.  When your win rate is close to zero, 50-70% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
* Free cashouts.  Considering my last Lock cashouts are taking 7 weeks (poker side) and 13 weeks (casino side) AND COUNTING!!!, this is no small benefit.  Just one poker player trading with another poker player, in case anyone from the DOJ is reading.  ;-)

I think you could easily argue that the above is worth at least 30%.  I mean people are regularly paying 15% on 2+2 for every cashout, small to mid stakes coaching isn't cheap (even tho I'm not offering "full" coaching, but that's still worth something - we cover a little bit every month), and he has ZERO financial downside in a volatile and challenging market.  Anyway, we're going to start at 50-50 (winnings+VIP benefits+BBJ; he gets deposit bonus and other minor promos) and see where that goes.

It seemed like it could be win-win.  But in a few months I may be singing a different tune.  But hey!  Sometimes you have to try something to know.

Like that's what I told Mrs. Fly about those hand cuffs and the duct tape, before she punched me in the head.  Eh hem.

I'm starting to talk to another blog reader, so maybe this will make for some interesting posts.

The big news in the poker world is that the DOJ apparently reached an agreement with the Taipe Group to allow US players to get paid. Basically, Tapie will pay out the rest of world players, and the DOJ will pay out the US players.  Tapie will throw the DOJ some money to make this happen.  My initial reaction was, "awesome... now I can sell my FT money for 60 cents."  Because I didn't see how Tapie would fork over enough money to make US player whole.  But then I started to think about it from the DOJ's persepctive...

So if I'm the DOJ, I'm sitting on the following (that I assume was being legally contested by the poker sites)...
* all the processor money I've been sitting on from years of seizures
* all of the FT player deposits that were never processed (allegedly mid-8 figures)
* all of FT's money I just seized on Black Friday (allegedly 9 figures)

And I just agreed to...
* an ADDITIONAL "payment" from Tapie to drop all the legal charges and let them buy FT (I'm guessing 8 figures)
* no responsibility to the players from the rest of the world
* and what I can only assume is an agreement from FT to drop all contests to the seized money listed above.
* and I may get a hearty thanks from my buddies at the IRS for ensuring all current taxes get paid, and possibly some past taxes.

And I can still...
* try and criminally prosecute FT owners (and seize more assets).

By reaching this deal, all the money that I (as the DOJ) was holding that was subject to legal proceedings suddenly become mine!  (more or less)  Just from eyeballing the above sums, the total seems to be WAAAY greater than the alleged $150mil owed to US players.  So that is why I think the US players will be paid in full - eventually.  We are talking about the US government after all - nothing gets done quickly.  Ironically, the rest of the world players may get paid less (depending on the "repayment structure") but they will get paid quicker.

I always thought those DOJ guys were kind of retarded - you know, the guys who couldn't get jobs at a "real" law firm.  Hmm...

But God bless those 'tards for getting us our money back.

The other day, I had one of those sessions where you can't believe you could ever run so poorly at poker.  That's over 10 buy-ins of -ev, and close to a dime.  In one SESSION!!!  I think it may be my worst session EVER - both ev-wise and dollar-wise.  "Ever" = a little over 3 years.  Call me a drama queen.  It just started off poorly and just kept going and going.  And then I remembered I never finished the second part of my "what to do when you run bad" post.  In my case, it was just a day of horrific run-bad, but eventually most poker players will hit that point where they won't be able to beat the games any more *with their current game*.

3) Reassess.  So it's super-important that from time to time, you do a thorough review of your game.  A lot of the time, I'll hear "they were all standard coolers" - but I find that a lot of the time, they are not.  For example, if you are a nit and you seem to be getting in KK vs AA (6 combos) waaay more than you getting KK into AK (8 combos), that's not a cooler.  You created that situation thru your play.  If you are an aggro lag and you are always 3-barreling into the top of everyone's range, that may not be a "cooler" either.  As the games get tougher, balance becomes a lot more important.

Last year I wrote a post where I said I thought 20% of winning regs one year will become losing regs the next.  I still think that is true.  So when you find yourself being in that 20% (and before you reach that point), you need to regularly reassess your game to make sure you stay in the 80%.  No matter how good you *think* you are, you can always get better.

For me, I always start my reviews with a thorough database analysis.  I'll even do a review even when I'm running okay.  Review where you are making money and losing money - that's basically what it all comes down to.  If you can't be objective, maybe you should buy some friggin' popcorn to get someone else to do it for you!!!  Alas, the shop is now closed, but there are plenty of ways you can tweak your game.  "Your game" should be constantly evolving and improving.

Despite my sh*tty session, I still had a pretty solid five-figure month, thanks to rakeback, the Law of Large Numbers, a +ev game and the Poker Gods deciding to give me back my ev losses.