Let's talk about sports.
Please, Jebus, let it be football season again. That is all I ask.
My wife and I listen to a fairly cheesy, at times corny but also generally amusing radio show in the morning while driving to work. This morning they were discussing Barry Bonds and the pending demise of Hank Aaaron's home run record.
They were already talking about the following idea, so I'm not sure who to give credit to it for, as it could have sprouted elsewhere in the general media, but here's the gist of it: Bonds should tie the record, and on his next at bat, with the media circus in full-blown frenzy mode, simply lay down his bat and walk off. Walk out of the clubhouse, out of baseball, and let Aaron keep his share of the record. In an instant Barry would suddenly go from villain to hero, honoring Aaron at the same time that he redeems himself by finally taking responsibility for all the sterioids he pumped into himself.
It'd be a beautiful, perfect ending to this whole sordid affair. Of course, Barry being Barry, he'd never do this in a million kabillion years, so it's pretty much a moot point.
Sports writers and attorneys of the world, you're on notice. The Michael Vick dogfighting case isn't about race. Stop trying to make it be about race. If Tom Brady were instead the one on the hot seat, do you honestly think that the general public would be clamoring for due process, instead of immediately leaping to judgment and wanting his testicles wrapped in savory bacon and a pack of ravenous, hungry dogs set upon him?
Of course they wouldn't. The frenzy and bloodlust is because the charges are pretty horrific and heinous, but, more than that, are an example of a rich, stupid, arrogant athlete who believes they're above the law that all us normal peons must suffer under. That last one is where all of the bloodlust comes from. The fact that Vick is a black athlete adds fuel to the fire, but it's very much a secondary reaction, and not the catalyst.
Stop playing the race card, just because it gives the story more heft and sells more copies/garners more eyeballs. Because you're giving him extra outs when you do that, in what is otherwise looking more and more like an open and shut case, especially with co-defendents turning on Vick and spilling pretty detailed beans.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
"I Have to Call"
As far as my own personal poker play during the WSOP, I managed to cram in a few tournaments at Caesar's (mostly the crapshootastic 11 PM cheapo tourneys they were running during the WSOP), plus a handful of hours at the $1-$3 and $2-$5 NL tables. Basically broke even for the tourneys and ended up down a buy-in at the cash games, so it was close to a wash as far as my poker play goes.
It was interesting, though, playing live tournaments after solely playing SnGs and MTTs online for the last year or so. It's easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom surrounding the status of online poker in the US during the last nine months, but worthwhile to take a few steps back and remember that there's a whole other world out there, as far as playing live.
I tend to forget just how bad most live tournament players are and, ironically, how insanely lucky you have to be to wade through the field (especially when the structure is fast). It's ultimately encouraging, as far as poker continuing to attract large tournament fields with absolutely terrible players plunking down hundreds of dollars to enter, but you also have to temper your own expectations, as you're forced to deal with the absolute nonsensical from time to time.
Case in point. I was playing the $200 noon tournament at Caesar's, which had a much better structure than the other daily tournaments they were running. I managed to stay patient and chip up early, get a couple of timely doubles here and there, and was sitting with an above average stack with about 25 players left, with the top 15 getting paid. We were about 4-5 hours into the tourney, with a lot of the crazies already washed out.
I was sitting in the 9 seat, with about 20,000 chips, and there were a few folds in front of me. I look down to see, for the first time in what seemed like weeks, AA. Blinds are 800-1,600 (I think, in that general vicinity). I'm pondering exactly how much I want to raise, when the 1 seat, thinking I had folded, announces a raise and starts reaching for chips.
Excellent.
The dealer stops him, tells him I still haven't acted, and the guy impatiently exhales/sighs and waits. I actually pondered asking the dealer if he was commmitted to raising anything I bet after verbally declaring a raise out of turn, but didn't want to call any more attention to the strength of my hand; I was already worried that I'd chase him off by raising at all, after he tipped his hand by trying to act out of turn.
I finally raise to 5,000 and he insta-calls, and everyone else folds. I was obviously hoping that he'd come over the top with something like 1010-KK, but just as obviously like the call. He's barely got me covered, so we're both playing for all our marbles here.
Flop is 9 4 2, rainbow. I've got 15K and the pot is ~ 13K. I ponder being cute and betting 7K or 8K but that seems to scream monster pocket pair, so I just shove all-in, hoping he thinks I have AK or a smaller pair to his 1010-KK and assumes I'm trying to push him off the pot.
"Well, I have to call" he says, pretty much immediately, with a bit of resignation in his tone, and lumps in the rest of his chips.
Now, dear reader, what hand do you suppose he has? I would have wagered lots of American dollars that based on all of the above, he would roll over JJ or QQ. Maybe 1010 and maybe KK. Maybe maybe maybe AK. But I fully expected to see QQ, for all the reasons you should expect to see it.
His actual hand? J7 offsuit. J high, no straight or flush draw. Just J high. The hand that he called a decent raise with pre-flop (after he'd acted out of turned and tried to raise), and the hand that he basically called off all of his chips with on the flop, holding J high.
He nods a bit at the sight of my aces, sadly says "Yep", and then sits there silently as the dealer peels off a J on the turn, and a third J on the river. The guy next to me makes the appropriate "Jesus fucking Christ" comment as I stand up and leave, but all my opponent has to say is "That's why they call it poker" as I walk off, steam boiling out of my ears.
(And it took just about every ounce of self-reserve I had to keep walking and not stop and say "You fucking fucknut, that's not even the correct fucking phrase. It's "That's why they call it gambling" you moronic fucktard. Because that's exactly what you're apparently fucking doing, playing like that."
Except, really, he was right. He is right. That is poker, for better or for worse. Absolutely non-sensical in many cases, but also inevitable. And, as much as it pains me to say, hopeful. Once you manage to shrug off the personal pain from beats like that it's hard not to be encouraged to play more live tournaments, as the donkaments have most definitely not left the building, UIGEA be damned.
It was interesting, though, playing live tournaments after solely playing SnGs and MTTs online for the last year or so. It's easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom surrounding the status of online poker in the US during the last nine months, but worthwhile to take a few steps back and remember that there's a whole other world out there, as far as playing live.
I tend to forget just how bad most live tournament players are and, ironically, how insanely lucky you have to be to wade through the field (especially when the structure is fast). It's ultimately encouraging, as far as poker continuing to attract large tournament fields with absolutely terrible players plunking down hundreds of dollars to enter, but you also have to temper your own expectations, as you're forced to deal with the absolute nonsensical from time to time.
Case in point. I was playing the $200 noon tournament at Caesar's, which had a much better structure than the other daily tournaments they were running. I managed to stay patient and chip up early, get a couple of timely doubles here and there, and was sitting with an above average stack with about 25 players left, with the top 15 getting paid. We were about 4-5 hours into the tourney, with a lot of the crazies already washed out.
I was sitting in the 9 seat, with about 20,000 chips, and there were a few folds in front of me. I look down to see, for the first time in what seemed like weeks, AA. Blinds are 800-1,600 (I think, in that general vicinity). I'm pondering exactly how much I want to raise, when the 1 seat, thinking I had folded, announces a raise and starts reaching for chips.
Excellent.
The dealer stops him, tells him I still haven't acted, and the guy impatiently exhales/sighs and waits. I actually pondered asking the dealer if he was commmitted to raising anything I bet after verbally declaring a raise out of turn, but didn't want to call any more attention to the strength of my hand; I was already worried that I'd chase him off by raising at all, after he tipped his hand by trying to act out of turn.
I finally raise to 5,000 and he insta-calls, and everyone else folds. I was obviously hoping that he'd come over the top with something like 1010-KK, but just as obviously like the call. He's barely got me covered, so we're both playing for all our marbles here.
Flop is 9 4 2, rainbow. I've got 15K and the pot is ~ 13K. I ponder being cute and betting 7K or 8K but that seems to scream monster pocket pair, so I just shove all-in, hoping he thinks I have AK or a smaller pair to his 1010-KK and assumes I'm trying to push him off the pot.
"Well, I have to call" he says, pretty much immediately, with a bit of resignation in his tone, and lumps in the rest of his chips.
Now, dear reader, what hand do you suppose he has? I would have wagered lots of American dollars that based on all of the above, he would roll over JJ or QQ. Maybe 1010 and maybe KK. Maybe maybe maybe AK. But I fully expected to see QQ, for all the reasons you should expect to see it.
His actual hand? J7 offsuit. J high, no straight or flush draw. Just J high. The hand that he called a decent raise with pre-flop (after he'd acted out of turned and tried to raise), and the hand that he basically called off all of his chips with on the flop, holding J high.
He nods a bit at the sight of my aces, sadly says "Yep", and then sits there silently as the dealer peels off a J on the turn, and a third J on the river. The guy next to me makes the appropriate "Jesus fucking Christ" comment as I stand up and leave, but all my opponent has to say is "That's why they call it poker" as I walk off, steam boiling out of my ears.
(And it took just about every ounce of self-reserve I had to keep walking and not stop and say "You fucking fucknut, that's not even the correct fucking phrase. It's "That's why they call it gambling" you moronic fucktard. Because that's exactly what you're apparently fucking doing, playing like that."
Except, really, he was right. He is right. That is poker, for better or for worse. Absolutely non-sensical in many cases, but also inevitable. And, as much as it pains me to say, hopeful. Once you manage to shrug off the personal pain from beats like that it's hard not to be encouraged to play more live tournaments, as the donkaments have most definitely not left the building, UIGEA be damned.
Friday, July 27, 2007
FDA Confirms that Spastic Rabbits Cure Malaise
Many thanks for the comments on the last couple of navel-gazing posts here. I'd be lying if I said that such matters of malaise and greater life purpose weren't prominent in my mind these days (obviously), but I can also be a bit melodramatic at times. Long story short, yeah, that stuff is bugging me, but not to the point that I'm losing sleep and torturing myself.
Jobs are weird. I've had tons of crappy jobs over the years, so I definitely realize the necessity and the relative cushiness of my current job (as well as the fact that pretty much anything turns into a boring day job, at some point in time, if you do it long enough). My current dilemma isn't so much in finding the perfect job and pursuing it, but deciding whether or not being bored out of my skull is worth the relative comfort and safety my current job supplies. I'm pretty resigned to doing something less than ideal; I just don't want to feel as if I'm sleepwalking through 40 hours each week completely on auto-pilot.
As far as scanning the horizon for other things I could possibly do, real estate (both renovating and building new homes) would be the obvious choice. I do sort of geek out over that stuff in general, and could definitely be happy and relatively fulfilled doing it full-time. The timing for a leap into that is pretty crappy, though, with the general doom and gloom surrounding the housing industry. Things aren't so bad here in central Texas but it's not clear whether we're just trailing the general decline or if conditions are truly different here. It's also a capital intensive endeavor, especially on the home-building side, and would take a much greater leap of faith to pursue.
The slightly perverse part of me wonders about just leaping in and doing something completely and utterly opposite of what I might otherwise choose, if left to my own devices. Yeah, I could probably ramp up the Web design/hosting/SEO/content creation stuff I do into a full-time job, but I don't necessarily get a lot of pleasure out of that work and it's not really anything different, as far as staving off boredom and malaise. So I wonder what would happen if I scanned job ads, found something that would normally make me absolutely cringe (like something in sales), and did that for awhile.
I get locked into the idea that I'm stuck at my current day job, as the necessary job skills are pretty narrow and don't translate to many other jobs, but that's pretty dumb. I make decent money but nowhere near enough to feel chained to this job or industry. All my extra side endeavors produce enough income that I could take a decent cut in pay and we wouldn't really suffer that much or have to alter our already pretty simple lifestyle.
So, in the end, who knows. Not me.
Completely changing gears, we once again have a furry animal in the household:
That's our new dwarf rabbit Creasy, who we've had for three or four weeks now. Mainly my wife's doing, as she's been clamoring for a bunny for years now, and I finally caved in right before I left for Vegas, as she correctly played the guilt/abandonment card at the correct time.
He's not quite as entertaining (or smart) as a rat, but he's pretty amusing, especially when he gets all spastic and races around the living room at top speed, careening off things and generally imitating a whirling rabbit dervish. It's been kind of nice to have animals running around the place again, so that's been cool. We should be getting a couple of rats in a month or so, too, so the menagerie will once again be at maximum capacity.
Jobs are weird. I've had tons of crappy jobs over the years, so I definitely realize the necessity and the relative cushiness of my current job (as well as the fact that pretty much anything turns into a boring day job, at some point in time, if you do it long enough). My current dilemma isn't so much in finding the perfect job and pursuing it, but deciding whether or not being bored out of my skull is worth the relative comfort and safety my current job supplies. I'm pretty resigned to doing something less than ideal; I just don't want to feel as if I'm sleepwalking through 40 hours each week completely on auto-pilot.
As far as scanning the horizon for other things I could possibly do, real estate (both renovating and building new homes) would be the obvious choice. I do sort of geek out over that stuff in general, and could definitely be happy and relatively fulfilled doing it full-time. The timing for a leap into that is pretty crappy, though, with the general doom and gloom surrounding the housing industry. Things aren't so bad here in central Texas but it's not clear whether we're just trailing the general decline or if conditions are truly different here. It's also a capital intensive endeavor, especially on the home-building side, and would take a much greater leap of faith to pursue.
The slightly perverse part of me wonders about just leaping in and doing something completely and utterly opposite of what I might otherwise choose, if left to my own devices. Yeah, I could probably ramp up the Web design/hosting/SEO/content creation stuff I do into a full-time job, but I don't necessarily get a lot of pleasure out of that work and it's not really anything different, as far as staving off boredom and malaise. So I wonder what would happen if I scanned job ads, found something that would normally make me absolutely cringe (like something in sales), and did that for awhile.
I get locked into the idea that I'm stuck at my current day job, as the necessary job skills are pretty narrow and don't translate to many other jobs, but that's pretty dumb. I make decent money but nowhere near enough to feel chained to this job or industry. All my extra side endeavors produce enough income that I could take a decent cut in pay and we wouldn't really suffer that much or have to alter our already pretty simple lifestyle.
So, in the end, who knows. Not me.
Completely changing gears, we once again have a furry animal in the household:
That's our new dwarf rabbit Creasy, who we've had for three or four weeks now. Mainly my wife's doing, as she's been clamoring for a bunny for years now, and I finally caved in right before I left for Vegas, as she correctly played the guilt/abandonment card at the correct time.
He's not quite as entertaining (or smart) as a rat, but he's pretty amusing, especially when he gets all spastic and races around the living room at top speed, careening off things and generally imitating a whirling rabbit dervish. It's been kind of nice to have animals running around the place again, so that's been cool. We should be getting a couple of rats in a month or so, too, so the menagerie will once again be at maximum capacity.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Malaise's BFF: Mediocrity
One thing that's hard to ignore in my recent bout of extreme introspection is that I've gotten pretty skilled over the years at hiding a pretty simple fact: my own personal glass ceiling maxes out somewhere around "high average".
That cuts both ways. On the one hand, I pick up things pretty damn quickly and am wired to throw myself headlong into whatever it is I'm pursuing. Ramp up time for any given pursuit is pretty minimal, and lo and behold, pit me against 75% of the general population in any given activity (investing, poker, chess, making money, darts, search engine optimization, juggling, affiliate marketing, and on and on and on) and I'll come out ahead.
I absolutely hate being bad at anything, especially publicly, and will go to insane lengths to not look stupid in front of people. Insane lengths.
But I'm not really good at anything. And never have been. And therein lies an odd rub, one that I think leads to rising water levels in the sea of malaise.
(And yes, I'm mainly going to babble about the dollars and cents aspect of all this, but I'm not necessarily ignoring the personal edification and enjoyment angle of it, either. Most of my recent tussle with malaise centers around the issue of money and how my time is spent in pursuit of it, so that's pretty front and center in my brain at the moment.)
We're somewhat conditioned to heap praise on the jack-of-all-trades Renaissance Person types, but lately I wonder about that. Sure, in theory its great to be well-rounded, to have a diverse and eclectic skill set, to be open-minded and driven enough to accumulate skill and knowledge in a vast array of fields. But really, in the end, what the hell is that actually worth?
I've played many thousands of games of chess. Odds are if we sit down and play, I'll win. Okay, great. While the ego boost is slightly nice, if I could somehow get all those hours I'd dedicated to chess in the past back, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Offer me $20 to eradicate all knowledge of what en passant or fianchetto means and I'd take it in a heartbeat.
And I can repeat the above exercise for many, many things. By and large, they're all activities that I got no immense pleasure from, even at the time, but pursuits that I continued to tilt at, bang my head on, until I got fairly proficient.
So, umm, why? Boil everything else away and odds are great that much of that loops back to a fear of failing, or, more accurately, of being seen as a failure. Which I can own up to pretty easily. Okay. Fear of failure? Check. Tendency to stubbornly persist in endeavors until proficiency is achieved? Check. Frustration and self-loathing based on pervasive feeling of malaise at realization that much of my time is spent in endeavors that have no greater good or promise of larger greatness? Check.
Speaking from a strictly financial perspective, most successful business types make the vast majority of their money (well, at least initially) from something they're really good at. It might be computer programming, trading soy futures, surfboard manufacturing, corporate raiding, selling copious amounts of weed, or building eco-friendly homes. Typically it's something they enjoy doing, aside from any financial gain, which makes it all the easier to amass great piles o' money.
Much of my frustration and malaise of late is that while I've been generally successful in making a goodly amount of money the last five years from widely disparate sources (day job, real estate, equity investments, affiliate marketing, freelance SEO jobs), I've been nowhere near the big score. I'm pretty good at drag bunts, stealing bases, and pushing runs across the plate with sac flies (with an occasional opposite field home run thrown in here and there), but the walk-off home run is still a faraway dream.
To be fair, there's a lot to be said for playing small ball. It's safe and predictable, once you get the hang of it. You're never risking very much at any given point in time. My wife and I are very comfortable right now. We've got basically zero debt other than mortgage debt, have a heap of money in savings, own investment property, and pour money into 401(k)s and IRAs each month. All of which I'm very grateful for, and much of that comes from all of my far-flung schemings and money-making endeavors. But it's not close to being a life-altering sort of thing, as the contraption in its current configuration (day job, business on the side, freelance gigs where I can find them) would need to continue to revolve for quite a few more years before any stopping point was reached.
Despite many small successes, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed in myself, in many ways. Better than average success isn't a bad thing, by any stretch of the imagination. I'm truly grateful for it. But part of me can't help but wonder what I might be capable of if I stopped flitting around from thing to thing, if I put it all out there and for once in my life focused on one single, solitary thing, with enough potential reward (and risk of ruin) involved that the stakes would be more than meaningful.
That cuts both ways. On the one hand, I pick up things pretty damn quickly and am wired to throw myself headlong into whatever it is I'm pursuing. Ramp up time for any given pursuit is pretty minimal, and lo and behold, pit me against 75% of the general population in any given activity (investing, poker, chess, making money, darts, search engine optimization, juggling, affiliate marketing, and on and on and on) and I'll come out ahead.
I absolutely hate being bad at anything, especially publicly, and will go to insane lengths to not look stupid in front of people. Insane lengths.
But I'm not really good at anything. And never have been. And therein lies an odd rub, one that I think leads to rising water levels in the sea of malaise.
(And yes, I'm mainly going to babble about the dollars and cents aspect of all this, but I'm not necessarily ignoring the personal edification and enjoyment angle of it, either. Most of my recent tussle with malaise centers around the issue of money and how my time is spent in pursuit of it, so that's pretty front and center in my brain at the moment.)
We're somewhat conditioned to heap praise on the jack-of-all-trades Renaissance Person types, but lately I wonder about that. Sure, in theory its great to be well-rounded, to have a diverse and eclectic skill set, to be open-minded and driven enough to accumulate skill and knowledge in a vast array of fields. But really, in the end, what the hell is that actually worth?
I've played many thousands of games of chess. Odds are if we sit down and play, I'll win. Okay, great. While the ego boost is slightly nice, if I could somehow get all those hours I'd dedicated to chess in the past back, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Offer me $20 to eradicate all knowledge of what en passant or fianchetto means and I'd take it in a heartbeat.
And I can repeat the above exercise for many, many things. By and large, they're all activities that I got no immense pleasure from, even at the time, but pursuits that I continued to tilt at, bang my head on, until I got fairly proficient.
So, umm, why? Boil everything else away and odds are great that much of that loops back to a fear of failing, or, more accurately, of being seen as a failure. Which I can own up to pretty easily. Okay. Fear of failure? Check. Tendency to stubbornly persist in endeavors until proficiency is achieved? Check. Frustration and self-loathing based on pervasive feeling of malaise at realization that much of my time is spent in endeavors that have no greater good or promise of larger greatness? Check.
Speaking from a strictly financial perspective, most successful business types make the vast majority of their money (well, at least initially) from something they're really good at. It might be computer programming, trading soy futures, surfboard manufacturing, corporate raiding, selling copious amounts of weed, or building eco-friendly homes. Typically it's something they enjoy doing, aside from any financial gain, which makes it all the easier to amass great piles o' money.
Much of my frustration and malaise of late is that while I've been generally successful in making a goodly amount of money the last five years from widely disparate sources (day job, real estate, equity investments, affiliate marketing, freelance SEO jobs), I've been nowhere near the big score. I'm pretty good at drag bunts, stealing bases, and pushing runs across the plate with sac flies (with an occasional opposite field home run thrown in here and there), but the walk-off home run is still a faraway dream.
To be fair, there's a lot to be said for playing small ball. It's safe and predictable, once you get the hang of it. You're never risking very much at any given point in time. My wife and I are very comfortable right now. We've got basically zero debt other than mortgage debt, have a heap of money in savings, own investment property, and pour money into 401(k)s and IRAs each month. All of which I'm very grateful for, and much of that comes from all of my far-flung schemings and money-making endeavors. But it's not close to being a life-altering sort of thing, as the contraption in its current configuration (day job, business on the side, freelance gigs where I can find them) would need to continue to revolve for quite a few more years before any stopping point was reached.
Despite many small successes, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed in myself, in many ways. Better than average success isn't a bad thing, by any stretch of the imagination. I'm truly grateful for it. But part of me can't help but wonder what I might be capable of if I stopped flitting around from thing to thing, if I put it all out there and for once in my life focused on one single, solitary thing, with enough potential reward (and risk of ruin) involved that the stakes would be more than meaningful.
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