There is really no need to interview Perry as the spewage is constant. If I took notes in shorthand on speed, it would be hard to keep up with the banter
– Amy Calistri
I wrote that about Perry Friedman in April 2003 - later quoted in Tales from the Tiltboys
. I had played online with Perry before, but it was the first time we physically met. I recognized him immediately from across the decrepit bleachers, temporarily erected in Benny’s Bullpen. His notorious fidgeting betrayed his identity. We were among the fewer than 30 people gathered to watch Chris Ferguson win a World Series of Poker bracelet in Omaha hi/lo.
I moved next to Perry to try to engage him. It was like tapping into a fire hose. In the hours that passed, he orchestrated dozens of outlandish prop bets — but mostly he gushed about his latest business venture. He and a number of other pros were going to launch a new online poker site.
I tried not to be rude, but IMHO the time had passed for online poker entrants. Planet Poker, Paradise Poker, PartyPoker and PokerStars all had healthy head starts in the US online poker market. The upfront software development costs would be huge. It would be a battle, trying to unseat entrenched market leaders with years under their belts. The more Perry babbled on, the more worried I became for his misguided online poker vision. Read More »
I was 11 when I read The Big Wave
by Pearl S. Buck. I still remember my confusion and horror at the end of the book. How could Jiya move back to the same fishing village where his family died in a tsunami? Not only did he return with his new wife but they built a house with doors that opened wide to the ocean.
Some people find it odd that I was risk-averse as a child - a time of life when vulnerability is incomprehensible. They think that because I gave up a good corporate gig, went back to graduate school when I was older than many of my professors, play poker and have mid-six figures riding in the market each day that I welcome risk now. I don’t. I just want my risk to be overt. I can’t control my enemy but — at this point in my life — I need to be able to look him in the eye.
There is no risk-free rate of return. Black-Scholes, diversification, VaR and Bayesian statistics won’t protect me in the market any more than a sea wall protected the Japanese or the levees worked in New Orleans.
To some extent, we have all built houses on the shore. Most people just don’t know it. Or like me, when I graduated college, they think they can control risk. Read More »
In Austin, you can go just about anywhere in shorts or jeans and most people do. So I laughed when the local paper brought in a fashion reporter last year. His first column mentioned French cuffs. I suspected most readers thought he was referring to fancy bondage gear.
It’s not that I don’t have dresses in my closet. Since the Carter administration I bought exactly two; a black cocktail dress from Goodwill and a long evening dress I scored on eBay. Unfortunately, both were a little long in the tooth for my newfound need.
I was working from home one day at the end of January when the marketing boss called. I was a little freaked out because he never calls me. But at the last minute, one of my colleagues couldn’t make a speaking engagement she had scheduled. It wasn’t your run of the mill seminar. It was an investing cruise. He wanted to know if I’d fill in.
The ground in Austin was white with snow. I realize that an inch of snow is barely a down payment for the bill the rest of the country got stuck with this year. But for Austin, it was salt in the wound for a particularly cold winter. I immediately agreed to the cruise. Read More »
When I was about six, my father asked me if I knew what the word “exploitation” meant. I shook my head “no.”
“Get me a beer and I’ll tell you,” he said. I brought him the beer and he said nothing. He just smiled.
I wish I could tell you that I learned my lesson on that very day. But I probably fetched the equivalent of a case of beers before it started to dawn on me.
I think of my father every time I’m on a social networking site. These sites can be useful. But they are also there to exploit you. They don’t want your money. They want something far more valuable. They want your time - maybe even more than my father wanted beer.
There’s a fine line between using these sites and being used. And it all starts innocently enough.
You Need One Thing from the Kitchen and End Up Bartending for Life
For me, it started when my company was looking to hire an editor. There were two financial editors I had worked with previously in Austin. One was now the lead singer for the band Spoon. I had trouble locating the other editor. I suspected she may have moved. But I found her profile on LinkedIn. I signed up so I could send her a message. I never heard back from her. But in the weeks that followed, I heard from everyone else. Read More »
Technically, I shouldn’t have been there. I was the only first-level manager in a sea of higher-ups. My fourth-level manager should have attended the weekly meetings. But he was a single 40 year-old, going on 14. The last thing he wanted to do was burn Friday nights at work. I ended up with the short straw.
The meetings started at 5:00 pm and ran well past every happy hour in town. Initially I cursed my luck. Ultimately, it changed my management philosophy and how I looked for answers.
IBM, like many large companies, harbored a culture of hierarchical empty suits and country club WASPs. Maybe that’s why Herb immediately stood out at the Friday night meetings. He was Jewish, had a PhD and was a little unkempt. In an environment of oily political rhetoric, he was candid and blunt. Yet for all his irreverence, IBM entrusted him with its 1500+ semiconductor research and development team the world over.
In IBM-speak, Herb was a “wild duck.” Over the years I came to equate the term with people who didn’t fit IBM’s buttoned-down ideal but who were too smart to ignore. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that a lot of them were also minorities and women.
The thing that most impressed me about Herb was the company he kept. His managers and advisors were smart, motivated and had integrity. But most of all, they openly challenged his decisions - routinely and publicly. And that’s precisely why he chose them. Read More »
“OK. Well I just hope I can sell this to the Lithuanian,” the voice on the phone concluded.
I had just finished negotiating my contract to cover the 2008 World Series of Poker. It hadn’t gone as well as I had hoped. I got more than they initially offered, but not quite as much as I got paid in 2007. And I was pissed.
I was probably more pissed at myself than I was at PokerNews. During the negotiation, it was obvious to me that both I — and my client — lacked leverage. And I was pissed because I knew this day was coming.
I flashed back to 2006 in the food court of the Gold Strike Casino in Tunica, Mississippi. “We’re so fucked,” I belted out to the Shrink.
It was late and the food court was as lackluster as any. But it was one of the only places you could find wireless in the whole Tunica gambling metropolis. It was September 29th and the Shrink and I were posting the latest final table results from the Grand’s WSOP Circuit event.
I tend to surf as I write, which is how I discovered Bill Frist had just tacked the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) onto must-pass legislation one day before Congress was set to adjourn for the 2006 elections. Frist didn’t particularly give a shit about the UIGEA. But Frist had a presidential campaign to orchestrate and the UIGEA was Jim Leach’s pet project. Doing a favor for the representative of Iowa (host site of the first presidential caucus) was a no-brainer, even for a halfwit like Frist. Read More »
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
John Maynard Keynes
I thought a lot about Keynes’ cautionary words during the summer of 2007. But in the end, being early saved me. And strangely enough, the World Series of Poker gets most of the credit.
In February 2007, HSBC wrote down over $10 billion in subprime mortgage-backed securities, kicking off a shit storm in the subprime mortgage world. That spring, the media was still treating it as an isolated problem. But you didn’t have to think very far outside of the box to imagine some kind of spillover to the broader economy.
I was heading out to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker in early summer that year, as I had in prior years. Knowing the hellacious hours I would be working during those six weeks, I figured I wouldn’t have time to watch over my investments. My days would just be getting started as the markets were closing in New York. And if things started getting as dicey as I imagined, I didn’t want to leave my equity and commodity-laden portfolio unattended. Read More »
In July 2010, Paul Goydos shot a 59 in the first round of the John Deere Classic, becoming only the fourth golfer in PGA history to hit that mark. He birdied eight of the last nine holes. In this interview with NPR, Gaydos was asked if he was nervous as he lined up to make his final putt. “I’m always nervous. Nerves mean expectations. And my expectations are very high. I think the day that I’m not nervous is the day that I probably retire.”
Listening to the interview during my office commute, I broke out into a smile. I had recently been interviewed for an internal article. In one answer, I discussed how I constantly sweat every decision, investment, and trend. The question was ultimately pulled from the article. The reason given came with the 1984 Dry Idea deodorant tag line, “Never let them see you sweat.” Apparently, this is like the first rule of fight club in the investment newseltter world.
But I do sweat. And like Gaydos, the day that I stop sweating will be like a flashing neon sign, warning me to move on. Game over. Read More »
Before Stuey Ungar went on to win three World Series of Poker Championships, he was a world class gin player - maybe the best that ever lived. Ungar was so good he had trouble getting action, which is why he eventually took on a suspected cheat. During the match, Ungar’s bodyguard informed him that his opponent was indeed cheating. Ungar said, “I know he’s cheating. Don’t worry. I’ll beat him anyway.” And he did.
But few people would knowingly play in a rigged game, let alone win. This is especially true in poker and investing. Both are zero sum games, where winners are offset by losers. And in both games, information is paramount.
Any edge we have is small, and predicated on our ability to process incomplete information with speed and accuracy. When our opponents cheat, they do it by obtaining information we can’t get, effectively eliminating our edge. In poker, a cheat may know our cards or know the value of the cards yet to come. In investing, a cheat may know about a pending company takeover or financial information yet to be announced. Read More »
Reading Dr, Pauly’s Lost Vegas: The Redneck Riviera, Existentialist Conversations with Strippers and the World Series of Poker was a guilty pleasure. I had always been an avid reader. But when I was freelancing, so much of my effort had to be concentrated on outflow versus inflow.
Starting sometime last year, however, my reading drought ended and became a floodwater. I devour academic papers on any interesting topic. A lot of them have to do with finance, investing, regulation and economics. But they have also included studies on farmland allocation, pain and pain perception, and the ability of pigeons to learn probability.
I read a number of papers that demonstrated idiotic sports betters, en masse, are more efficient at determining the betting line than the pros — and how a sports-betting approach is now being used to select drugs for clinical trials and forecast sales at high tech companies.
I scour dozens of articles from five newspapers and three financial websites each day. My book queue, which once looked like dozens of imposing stalagmites growing up from my office floor, has been reduced to a few innocent piles.
But for all my voracious reading, I suspect Dr. Pauly’s book was the feast I enjoyed most this year. And not just because it was well-written and included the delicious cynicism (replete with crack whores and degenerate gamblers) we’ve come to count on from the good doctor. Anyone who loves poker will relish the shocking tails of professional poker as viewed through Pauly’s Thompson-esque lens. But I loved it because it so beautifully captured the salad days of poker. Read More »
