constant crises

Fantasy football... Sometimes you win and sometimes you get into the playoffs as the number three seed only to see your pretty-boy quarterback do absolutely nothing for you and then your star wide receiver on monday goes nuts for 2 td's but you still lose by less than a point because your opponent had steven jackson and he caught two balls in a garbage time last-minute drive. And then you feel bad. Awesome.

i don't spend too much time criticizing the bad behavior of professional athletes. i never considered them role models, even when i was young. i always had my grandfather for that. as a result, i always find myself pleasantly surprised when a star athlete is actually all of the qualities that you would want to impress upon your children: confident, humble, gracious, kind, and pleasant. i just watched ladainian tomlinson (LT) on leno and was struck (again) by how genuine of a person he seems to be. when you've listened to as many sports radio shows and interviews as i have, picking out the athletes who pretend to be modest and kind (shane battier, shaun alexander, curt schilling, jerry rice, mark mcgwire) from those who are actually humble (elton brand, grant hill, derek jeter) becomes fairly easy. LT is certainly representative of the latter. it's hard to not root for a guy that great. go chargers, i guess...

bear in mind, i don't have allegiances to any of these teams involved (except for loving the fact that usc and notre dame both missed out on the national title game. i'm entirely excited to see their fan bases lose out), but unless you went to michigan or are related to charles woodson, you have to know that florida deserves to play in the national title game. i think mark schlabach makes the case pretty well. i hate the arguments that i've been hearing from random sportswriters the past few weeks: "well, ohio state and michigan are clearly the two best teams in the country." oh really? i guess that means you're capable of comparing teams that have never played each other before just by thinking really hard. heck, maybe they shouldn't even play the games, since you can tell us who the best teams are. let's face it: nobody knows who's better between michigan and florida. but anyone with two eyes and some football understanding saw that ohio state is definitely better than michigan. and if we already know that we don't need to see them prove it again, especially when florida has gone 12-1 in the toughest conference in college football (statistically and subjectively). it'll be a sad day for college football if michigan's playing ohio state again, this time for the national title. the one positive will be that, if florida's president's initial comments are any indication, the SEC presidents will start screaming their heads off and determining a national champion will finally be about something other than money.

the best way to finish up the longest work day you've ever had? DEFINITELY getting out to your car and seeing that you have a flat, because the thing you really want to do at 9pm is put your spare on. yay!

i was plugging away on the treadmill at work just now, watching a little wsop coverage on espn. they were showing phil hellmuth at the featured table of the first day of the main event, when i saw some young kid in seat seven squeeze four chips into the pot in the MOST familiar way. when i saw his last name pop up next to his cards i did a double-take: he's a guy that i played with in a bunch of homegames while at school. i came home and checked up his name on cardplayer.com, finding him in the player database with four recent tournament cashes... these moments always give me pause. as i spent my time at the company gym, trying to work off thanksgiving turkey, he was probably sitting behind deep stacks in a nice cash game somewhere. strange the routes that our lives take us. is he envious of me? i'm envious of him...

back when i was working at oracle, i used to have a real commute (note: i say that because i do not have a real commute now, as 1.9 miles doesn't count). after working at oracle for a few weeks, and making the drive back up to san francisco, i started noticing something funny about the traffic: as i approached oracle from the north, there would be a horrific traffic backup every day at the ralston exit, but it wouldn't actually start at the exit, it would start just after the hillsdale exit, which is one north. while heading north home, there would always be a hellacious backup from oracle all the way to the bend left on 101 around burlingame. i started paying attention, as i couldn't figure out why there were these tiny little jams, when there was never an accident. what i discovered one day driving to work early is that there was no traffic around the hillsdale exit until around 8am, when inevitably one idiot merging onto 101 from hillsdale would do something stupid, like slowing to 15mph so he could merge, causing a cavalcade of brake lights behind him. on the same day, i left early for home and realized that the traffic jam from oracle to the burlingame veer left happens because every day (EVERY DAY) some number of morons gets freaked out by this slight left turn and slows down to like 20mph. suddenly everyone thinks king kong is hiding around the corner and they slow down too. an hour later? that moron's mistake turns into me waiting for 20 minutes to get onto the highway. so what's the point? well i started trying to FIGHT the traffic slowdowns by driving slower than other people, but just driving consistently (not hitting the brake lights). i'd have huge gaps in front of me, but intuitively it would help since people behind me would never freak out by seeing red brake lights in front of them, so they wouldn't propagate the "wave." i had no idea if this worked, but i did it every day anyway. well, to my surprise, i saw the following link on reddit.com (great site by the way, as long as you're a little geeky) today: Traffic Wave Experiments. apparently it actually works! awesome... just thought i'd share. if you've got an ugly commute, you might want to try it. it won't help you, but it'll help those poor saps behind you...

as a good google employee, i've decided to stick my google reader "shared items" in a clip on my blog (over on the write. look!). i use google reader to subscribe to a dizzying variety of blogs, including: a random law school student in chicago, a myspace blog for a poker radio show, a well-read web 2.0 blog, a wine blog, and countless sportswriters. if you haven't tried out an rss reader, go take a look at google reader; it's a really nice reader now that i used even before i started at the big g. anyhow, sticking the clip on my blog is really simple and hopefully you'll find some of the random links interesting. if i remember to tag things to share, you'll get an idea of the random unconnected nature of my interests :). happy thanksgiving!

so just got back from booking a nice win at garden city. i arrived around 8:30pm and found a ridiculous list on every game but 6-12, so i was quickly sitting at (seriously) one of the BEST limit hold'em tables i've ever seen. anyhow, rather than regale you with silly stories of donkey players, i'll just recount one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me at a poker table (good story, even for non-poker players): about 90 minutes into the session, a young asian guy (YAG) sits down to my left. i can pretty much tell right away that he's at least a pretty good player, just by the way he handles his chips. well, no matter, because the other 7 at the table are all TERRIBLE with deep pockets and we can both pick on them. yet somehow, YAG has some bizarre alpha male syndrome, where he resents all other decent players at the table. very strange. he's constantly re-raising me and trying to bully me, which i just decide to let happen for a while. anyhow, in one key hand, he sucks out on my QdQs by hitting a pair of aces on the turn (with A5 after re-raising me preflop and calling two bets on the flop). when i re-suck out on the river by hitting a flush to win a monster pot, he starts mouthing off about how lucky i got. whatever, i'll take the pot and he can talk more. but wait, that's not the GOOD part. so if you read my post on "ship it!", you'll know how much i detest the phrase. anyhow, we get caught up in a pot. i make it three bets on the button with AhJh and he calls out of the small blind, (as do like twenty other players, many of whom run from other tables just to call me). the flop comes Kh2hTs, probably as good as a flop as i can get without hitting a pair. after it gets checked around to me and i bet, YAG's the only caller. the turn is a blank (6c), he checks, i bet, he calls. at this point i'm pretty sure he has a shit hand, but he thinks that i've been on steal the whole way and is going to call me down no matter what. the Th comes on the river which is a gin card since it makes me the nut flush and he might've even improved his shit hand. he checks, i put on the full slow pause and act like i'm thinking about bluffing one last bullet. finally i bet and he insta-calls. i flip up the nut flush and the dealer says "he's got the ace-high." at this point, YAG proceeds to proudly flip up his Ac2s (ragged pair of deuces), standing up and screaming "sorry, BUDDY (sarcastic)... ship it!" he yells it so loud that people from other tables come over to see what happened. in fact, he even starts to reach for the chips in the middle until the dealer grabs his wrist and says, "i'm sorry sir, but he has the ace-high FLUSH." at this point YAG looks at the board with pure bewilderment on his face. i look at him, smiling while some of the onlookers laugh, and mutter "nice call." hilarious. moral of the story: never use the phrase "ship it!" you might look like an ass.

the truth of the matter is that games billed this large (with their own ESPN pages, in fact) rarely ever live up to the hype. that doesn't stop sports fans from getting excited though. i've got no allegiances today, so i'm just hoping for a good game. still, i wish i DID have some allegiances. anyone who has ever been watching a game of that magnitude while rooting for one of the teams knows how tense and exciting it can be and, ultimately, awesome or disappointing. maybe i should have put some money on it...

of all the heinous things to say at a poker table, by FAR the most obnoxious/asshole-like is the phrase: "ship it!" for those of you that have never sat at a live poker table (and don't realize how mean-spirited this phrase is), let me explain: literally, the phrase "ship it!" is an order to an opponent and/or the dealer to 'ship' the chips in the player's direction. seems pretty harmless, right? when would you use a term like this instead of saying, "excuse me sir, would you please graciously pass me the chips that i have just won from you?" well let me tell you: THE SUCK OUT: you're sitting in a no limit hold'em game (cash game, tournament, doesn't matter), and the meathead down across the table with the cut-off t-shirt, jersey accent, and body odor is annoying everyone at the table. you finally get him to stick all his money in as a huge underdog, and he hits a suckout of epic proportions. maybe he hits a straight-flush against your boat, drawing to one card. you're slightly stunned, and then he says it: "ship it, baby!" THE FEUD: you've been verbally sparring with another player for about an hour. he's a real jerk and won't get over the argument. he also happens to have a yankees hat on his head, a duke basketball sweatshirt on his torso, bright yellow lakers sweats on his legs, and a 2cm penis above his peanut balls. you get involved in a hand against him and he comes out victorious. to needle you, he slow-rolls you while flipping over the nuts and, with a dirty smirk on his face, says the words "ship it!" while motioning with both hands towards himself. THE ASSHOLE FRIEND (less frequent): one of the above two morons (Moron) does not actually use the term "ship it!" himself. instead, one of his drunk idiot friends is standing behind him and has been bragging to the entire poker room for the past ten minutes about how he just made out with a really hot chick at the club. Moron wins a pot and drunk guy stands behind him yelling out the phrase while Moron rakes in the chips. it's pretty much guaranteed that anytime you hear the phrase "ship it!" at a poker table, the words will be uttered by someone who is a) angry at his opponent in the hand, or b) a complete asshole. so what's the best way to deal with a "ship it" guy? after all, getting pissed (because you will) really doesn't solve the problem, as you'll either a) go on tilt and dump off all your chips to the rest of the table, or b) jump across the table and try to strangle "ship it!" guy (don't laugh, i've seen at least five people get kicked out of high-class poker rooms for this exact scenario). i've developed a method for online play that is so ridiculous that it is failsafe (and yes, this did happen an hour ago, verbatim): flop comes AcJhQd, i have JsQh, my opponent (aka Moron) has Ah9d. we get all the money in the middle. final board: AcJhQd5s5d. i lose about $85. and then this occurs in the chatbox: Moron: ship it! smallchou: awesome! Moron: yeah baby smallchou: great! i'm so happy for you! Moron: ? Moron: are you talking to me? smallchou: yeah! you're awesome. i just wanted you to know that. that's why i shipped the chips to you! Moron: ok buddy, whatever [edit: for dane cook fans, you will recognize that "buddy"] smallchou: "whatever"! you're a genius! Moron: ? smallchou: i love playing poker with you! Moron: shut up smallchou: oh sorry, i thought you were really excited about sucking out on me. i just wanted to be excited with you. Other Player 1: lol Other Player 2: hilarious Moron: go fck yourself first of all, doing this usually gets me into a really good mood again, if i felt like the beat was actually going to get on my nerves. this particular Moron was of the angry variety, but sometimes you can actually get the moron to laugh and say he's sorry for the suckout. the angry ones are the funniest though, because suddenly THEY actually get on tilt. then maybe YOU will be the one with the chance to say "ship it!" back. while this option will feel remarkably satisfying, i encourage you to take the high road and just smile. don't be the "ship it!" guy...

one of the those strange things that you can only ponder after 11pm on a weekday, but i wonder why i never got into sportswriting. or sports writing. when i was a freshman in college, i was deadset on taking some time to figure out what program i wanted to major in. my first quarter i took math, ihum (humanities course), econ 1, and a class called 'the jet engine' because it sounded fucking sweet. a pretty good start to "being open-minded about my major," yeah? yet somewhere along the line, i swerved sharply technical and ended up with a degree in computer systems engineering. it's true, i did enjoy a large amount of the CSE coursework (notably computer architecture, digital design, and the HCI business), but i don't think i've ever gotten over that feeling that maybe i just fell into CSE because it was "easy". not easy in a logistical sense, but easy in a personal and mental sense. i just finished reading a beautiful old piece by gay talese called 'The Silent Season of a Hero' in this collection The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. originally printed in esquire, the magazine piece is a short peep into the world of joe dimaggio, post-baseball, including his love for marilyn monroe. it's very subtle and it's a great bit about a famously-private man, showing so much with a careful frugality of words. emotions evoked: admiration and jealousy (of talese) at the same time. and i guess i don't have much more to say beyond, "i sort of wish i had written something so good that it had that kind of impact on someone else." and why couldn't i have gotten into writing about sports? after all, do any of these sportswriters love the games more than i do? probably not. did they learn how to conjugate verbs better than me? probably not. i'm not disappointed by the path i chose, but i just wonder why these thoughts never crossed my mind when i was 17 and spending 30 hours a week reading about, watching, and playing sports. strange, isn't it...

so first my oakland a's decide it's time to hang out in fremont [editor's note: FREMONT?!], and now my 49ers have decided to run from famous candlestick point to the glorious urban center of santa clara? what a week for bay area sports! in all seriousness though, what the HELL is going on? as much as i enjoy both of my favorite professional sports teams moving closer to me geographically, i'm wondering how we've come to this. simple answers... oakland athletics: oakland doesn't deserve a professional baseball team. i'm sorry, but it had to be said. this is, after all, a team that has gone to the playoffs multiple times in the past few years with absolutely zero home-field advantage in the second-most decrepit (more on that later) professional sports venue in the entire country. honestly, it has been pitiful. would i have rather seen the a's go to a city like san jose, a large city that has already proved an ability to support a team (the sharks! it's hockey for christ's sake.)? yeah. but you know what, fremont is a nice-enough place and games will be close by. i just hope they don't actually call themselves the fremont a's. yech. san francisco 49ers: network associates (oakland) coliseum is the second-worst professional sports venue because monster park at candlestick point is THE worst. have you ever gone to a game there and tried to exit the parking lot? stoops and i once finished watching the niners-browns game, got to his car, threw a football around for an hour and a half, drank a couple of beers apiece, and THEN sat in traffic for an hour (true story!). and that doesn't even touch on the horrific nature of the stadium itself. honestly? i'm happy that the niners are leaving, because i don't think they would have ever gotten the stadium done in the city. yes, it makes me sad to actually agree with john york, but i'll do it just once. i'm just happy that they're sticking with the name "san francisco 49ers." so there you have it. all in all, i'm pretty happy about the whole thing (surprisingly). after all, finding asian food before baseball games just got ten times easier.

i just watched an entire one-hour show on the food channel about fried chicken. now i didn't really watch and listen to the whole thing, but it was on tv while i was been sitting here doing other things. they showed plate after plate of delicious-looking, golden brown poultry that left me actually hungry. i now have a ridiculous craving for some good fried chicken, but i really can't think of a place that will actually live up to what i've been seeing on television. where can i get some good fried chicken around here?

i just returned home after the usc-stanford drubbing at stanford stadium. it was, as all stanford games have been this year, an extremely sobering experience. there was a time when we were actually competitive on the field. stanford fans today now refer to the tyrone willingham years as "the good years". we may have lost some games back then, but we NEVER got embarrassed. but these years under buddy teevens and walt harris have been truly debilitating as a stanford fan. it has been so atrocious, that a column in the san jose mercury news this week suggested that it's a good thing because it's SO bad that our administration will need to consider relaxing admissions standards. in any other situation, such a column would make me respond in a heated email to the writer, but this season has been so painful that the column actually made me pause for thought. after all, i used to resort to the same silly comebacks that stanford fans tend to use when we lose any sort of game. choose one of the following: 1. we're smarter than you 2. you're winning because you let mentally deficient "student"-athletes into your school 3. you'll work for me one day 4. you're attending one of our safety schools these spiteful remarks are simply a result of frustration most years. just stupid comments that come from the pain of losing. but this year's football team has been so embarrassing that stanford fans look like complete jackasses when they say these things, no longer just frustrated and disappointed fans. we're not competitive. we're not frustrated because we lost the game. it is way beyond frustration. it's just pure embarrassment. our team is so embarrassing that, for any reasonable stanford fan, it outweighs any director's cup trophy that we win for the umpteenth year. i want my football team to win games, i don't want to tell people how we have "the best overall sports program in the country," because i honestly don't give a shit about that anymore. actually, scratch that, i just want my football team to be decent enough that i actually want to defend them when someone rags on them. i want them to be decent enough that i don't wish i hadn't spent $90 (a tiny amount) on season tickets. most of all? i want them to be decent enough that i don't feel like a +23 point spread is a lock for the other team, every week. so what should we do, as a school. open up our academic floodgates like so many other schools, as wilner suggested in the mercury column? no thank you. i still enjoy being able to laugh when ignorant sportscasters talk about how notre dame and stanford are on the same academic level (as tyrone said WHILE he was coaching the irish, that is preposterous). but i don't think it's unreasonable to have a competitive team without giving up academic standards. after all, didn't we go to a few bowl games just a few years ago? i'm tired of trying to come up with excuses for the pitiful nature of our football team. every game looks worse and every season looks more disappointing. i just want a decent team. not even a good team (right now), just a decent one. otherwise we might as well join the ivy league. stanford football: stop making me sick. edit: just as i finished this post, the stanford-usc lowlights came on abc. i turned off the tv.

i finished up the book high fidelity while i was on the plane last night. it's actually rather remarkable that i had never read the novel, considering how i've had many people (who know me pretty well) over the years tell me how much i would enjoy nick hornby's work. so high fidelity was number two on my list of hornby novels, the first being about a boy. first of all, i'll start by saying that the movie version of high fidelity, starring john cusack, has absolutely no chance at providing an accurate reproduction of the novel. there's just too much introspective and masculine mumbling to properly transfer to the hollywood visual medium. the reason that's important is that the book is great, while the movie is, depending on who you ask, good or garbage. i never really put much stock in comments like, "he writes men/women very well," but somehow i found myself saying that while i read high fidelity. hornby has a frank and honest male voice, filled with all of its truthful inadequacies and asshole qualities. it's the kind of narrative that i would hear in my own head if i was, er, more of a jerk and much more bitter. he's not complicated, but he's so perfectly expressive. which brings me to why i find people like nick hornby amazing. whenever i jot something on paper (or in this case: bits), i find it hard to transfer pure honesty and self-reflection into writing. people like nick hornby humble me because i can read what he writes and find myself saying, "man, his writing is exactly how i would feel there." it's inspiring, and maybe that's why i'm gonna start writing here more often again. promise. oh, one more note: when i got to the end of the novel, i finally saw a picture of hornby and was shocked to see a very plain-looking bald english man. not sure what i was expecting, but that wasn't it. i guess i expected someone who knew me so well to share SOMETHING in common with me. ah well...

Prohibition II: Good Grief When government restricts Americans' choices, ostensibly for their own good, someone is going to profit from the paternalism. By George F. Will Newsweek Oct. 23, 2006 issue - Perhaps Prohibition II is being launched because Prohibition I worked so well at getting rid of gin. Or maybe the point is to reassure social conservatives that Republicans remain resolved to purify Americans' behavior. Incorrigible cynics will say Prohibition II is being undertaken because someone stands to make money from interfering with other people making money. For whatever reason, last Friday the president signed into law Prohibition II. You almost have to admire the government's plucky refusal to heed history's warnings about the probable futility of this adventure. This time the government is prohibiting Internet gambling by making it illegal for banks or credit-card companies to process payments to online gambling operations on a list the government will prepare. Last year about 12 million Americans wagered $6 billion online. But after Congress, 32 minutes before adjourning, passed its ban, the stock of the largest online-gambling business, Gibraltar-based PartyGaming, which gets 85 percent of its $1 billion annual revenue from Americans, declined 58 percent in one day, wiping out about $5 billion in market value. The stock of a British company, World Gaming PLC, which gets about 95 percent of its revenue from Americans, plunged 88 percent. The industry, which has some 2,300 Web sites and did half of its business last year with Americans, has lost $8 billion in market value because of the new law. And you thought the 109th Congress did not accomplish anything. Supporters of the new law say it merely strengthens enforcement; they claim that Internet gambling is illegal under the Wire Act enacted in 1961, before Al Gore, who was then 13, had invented the Internet. But not all courts agree. Supporters of the new law say online gambling sends billions of dollars overseas. But the way to keep the money here is to decriminalize the activity. The number of online American gamblers, although just one sixth the number of Americans who visit real casinos annually, doubled in the last year. This competition alarms the nation's biggest gambling interests-state governments. It is an iron law: When government uses laws, tariffs and regulations to restrict the choices of Americans, ostensibly for their own good, someone is going to make money from the paternalism. One of the big winners from the government's action against online gambling will be the state governments that are America's most relentless promoters of gambling. Forty-eight states (all but Hawaii and Utah) have some form of legalized gambling. Forty-two states have lottery monopolies. Thirty-four states rake in part of the take from casino gambling, slot machines or video poker. The new law actually legalizes online betting on horse racing, Internet state lotteries and some fantasy sports. The horse-racing industry is a powerful interest. The solidarity of the political class prevents the federal officials from interfering with state officials' lucrative gambling. And woe unto the politicians who get between a sports fan and his fun. In the private sector, where realism prevails, casino operators are not hot for criminalizing Internet gambling. This is so for two reasons: It is not in their interest for government to wax censorious. And online gambling might whet the appetites of millions for the real casino experience. Granted, some people gamble too much. And some people eat too many cheeseburgers. But who wants to live in a society that protects the weak-willed by criminalizing cheeseburgers? Besides, the problems-frequently exaggerated-of criminal involvement in gambling, and of underage and addictive gamblers, can be best dealt with by legalization and regulation utilizing new software solutions. Furthermore, taxation of online poker and other gambling could generate billions for governments. Prohibition I was a porous wall between Americans and their martinis, giving rise to bad gin supplied by bad people. Prohibition II will provoke imaginative evasions as the market supplies what gamblers will demand-payment methods beyond the reach of Congress. But governments and sundry busybodies seem affronted by the Internet, as they are by any unregulated sphere of life. The speech police are itching to bring bloggers under campaign-finance laws that control the quantity, content and timing of political discourse. And now, by banning a particular behavior-the entertainment some people choose, using their own money-government has advanced its mother-hen agenda of putting a saddle and bridle on the Internet.

my name is jack. i have a blog that, like, ten of my friends read. i almost forgot about it anyhow, sorry for the lack of updates lately. things have been moving fast and it feels good. one of the underrated experiences in the world is being busy and booked enough to feel full. i think that's a good way to say it. for some reason i was never the type of person to feel stressed about things. it was always, "ok, let's get organized and pack my schedule in a little tighter." that always felt good and "right" to me. it sounds kind of sick, but in high school i was always invigorated by returning home late (7pm) after basketball practice and needing to finish hours and hours of homework before heading to bed. it made me feel accomplished and 'in motion'. i can only remember once when i felt truly overwhelmed, but that's when i was a freshman in college and on medication. we'll write it off to those two reasons. i'm heading to las vegas on friday, for actually only the fourth time this year. this comes after a 2005 in which i went around eight or nine times (that's a lot). interestingly enough, this'll also probably be the last large-scale vegas soiree that i try to direct. by now i generally have an idea of who actually enjoys going to vegas, who doesn't, and who doesn't but thinks he does. like chris noted the other day, "you shouldn't have to CONVINCE people to go to las vegas." he's right: vegas sucks if you don't have the right interests. there's no need to try to pull those people in. for degenerate gamblers like myself it's awesome :). seeing a lot of wsop coverage on espn the last few weeks has been jogging my memory back to july when, if you don't recall, i parked my ass at harrah's on the strip for an entire week and did nothing but play poker. i think the biggest overriding lesson (besides "Tell Better Stories", "A Healthy Disregard for Money", and "Poker is Tiring") is that i could never play poker for a living for a lifetime-significant period of time. the reason i use that wording is that i could imagine doing it for a constrained period of time (and i imagine i will at some point). but honestly? there are a lot of things to do in the world and i'd be unfulfilled playing poker every day for the rest of my life. i think that's a message that has needed a few months of reflection to properly drill into my head, but it's there now. i'm glad i know. but for now, i'll be happy to do my weekend trips 4-8 times a year and perhaps take a week off in the summer to play a bit of the wsop every year. i think that's enough for me. playing poker for a living? mm, no thanks... on that note: vegas, here i come...

i always get the sense that sports non-fans have trouble understanding why we sports fans care so much. in fact, sometimes i even forget why we care so much. but occasionally, a sports moment is so special that you immediately remember what it is that we love so much about sports. i was at old pro (we're gonna start calling it OP from now) this afternoon, watching the end of the detroit and new york american league division series (that's baseball for any of you non-fans). now certainly everyone knows who new york's american league team is (the yankees), but you'll certainly be excused if you don't actually know that detroit's team is called the 'tigers.' that's because, for the past twenty years or so, the tigers have been crap. at times, much worse than crap. in fact, for the past ten years, seeing one of your fantasy baseball pitchers ready to face detroit has meant comfort and relief. the tigers have been so bad that they turned a once-proud baseball town into a baseball graveyard. that's until this year, when jim leyland (baseball's grandfatherly tough nice guy, one of the most respected managers in the game) came to town, just as the tigers' 20-year rebuilding process was ready to come to fruition. mix in a few nice free agent pickups, and voila! playoff and (now) ALCS appearance. and they're not done yet. but why is this worth writing about? because anyone who watched the postgame celebration by the tigers couldn't help but feel great for them. i've had about ten skin-tingling sports moments in my life (the first definitely being john taylor's super bowl winning catch and the latest being tiger woods' sobbing british open victory this year) and today, sitting at the OP, watching the postgame (with no audio, mind you) was the latest. first came the eruption of elation by the entire bar as the yankees were knocked out (that's standard in any sports bar outside of new york city). but it was much more than the usual "goodbye yankees" cheers. the group of true tigers fans in the bar screamed and hugged each other as if they had just been released from prison. and on the screen? a postgame scene unlike any other for an anti-climactic 3-1 division series victory. every fan stayed standing at his seat, deliriously cheering, screaming, and singing even as the tigers players ran into the lockerroom to spray champagne on one another. but the fans were not disappointed, because soon the entire team had returned to the field, champagne bottles in hand, to spray on the fans themselves. kenny rogers, he of the embarrassing camera incident a few years ago, snuck out of the dugout with three bottles, passing them out to fans and dumping the third on a uniformed security guard. groups of detroit players literally skipped down along the field walls, slapping hands with the fans and sharing a special sports moment. i cheered for the tigers this series precisely because i knew detroit would enjoy it more, but even i was surprised by the celebration. it was great and i loved it. and off on the side, the camera caught an emotional moment. pudge rodriguez stood celebrating with another player, as leyland came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. they exchanged a quick nod and a genuine smile, and hugged each other. no words, just the respectful and fatherly acknowledgement of a great manager with a great player. that is why we watch sports, for moments like today. congratulations to detroit the city, detroit the fans, and detroit the team. i hope you lose in seven :).

so sad day for the online poker world today. apparently the us senate decided to stick a little provision into the defense bill that aims to stop online gambling. it is yet to be seen how this will actually affect online poker, but one the world's largest online poker site (party poker) has already said that they'll stop operations if/when bush signs the bill into law. full tilt published a little bit more contentious of a response today on their blog. you probably know where i stand on the question of whether poker is a game of skill or a game of chance (there's chance involved, but anyone who believes it is solely gambling wasn't sitting at the same stud eight-or-better table as me tonight). but let's not even get into that. let's get into how ridiculous it is to outlaw online gambling, when i can walk down to garden city today and chuck hundreds of dollars into live poker games or (even worse) california blackjack. i guess the only good thing is that banning online poker might drive a lot of these online players into real cardrooms on real felt. that should prove pretty lucrative for those of us who play live regularly for a while. i can't wait to see the numerous beginners' tells i'll get to see at garden city in the next few months...

whew! i'm back. it took two weeks, but i feel like i really got a sense of what australia (specifically new south wales and queensland) has to offer. some things i learned about or while in australia: :: sydney is most definitely a beautiful and mature international city. the harbor is gorgeous. it's clean and crisp and sophisticated. really unlike any harbor or wharf that i've ever seen in a big city. the opera house really is one of those architectural marvels that you need to see for yourself. the streets are bustling at waking hours, but strangely quiet on crisp sunday mornings. a coworker described it a few weeks ago as "a cleaner san francisco, fused with los angeles beach culture." i think that's very accurate, though i don't think it has the vibrancy and diversity of san francisco. it's casual and formal at the same time. oh, and the food is fantastic, as one would expect from such a modern city surrounded by eclectic nations of diverse tastes. some quick photos: :: australians, despite their insistence on being part of a "great beer-drinking nation," have no idea what good beer is. i tried nearly every australian beer that i could get my hands on, playing havoc on my weight (more on that later), and i found only two that were even worth thinking about drinking again. unlike other enthusiastic beer-consuming countries (belgium, ireland, germany...), australia's beers taste like ass. my theory is that australians adopt the american attitude of, "i'm gonna drink a lot of it, so might as well make sure it goes down easy." when i got to the country, i laughed about how no one there actually drank foster's. by the time i left i was wishing that i could find a foster's. :: i always thought lists like "the world's top 10 beaches" were stupid. i mean, what could be so spectacular? then i went to whitehaven beach in the whitsunday islands. i'll give you a few pictures, but suffice it to say that i will no longer doubt the worth of such lists (which mostly seem to include whitehaven). spectacular? incredible? a dream? the sand was supposedly silica, but it felt more like soft flour spread over 6 kilometers where the jungle met water. absolutely insane: :: i was reminded on this trip how loved and incredible of a city san francisco is. yeah, you read that right. EVERY australian who mentioned visiting the united states raved about how much he/she loved our own city by the bay. even our b&b owners in port douglas, who talked about how unimpressed they were by america ("i don't think people who live in new york are tough, i think they're stupid to live in a place so beastly," and "america's so BORING. except for little pockets, it all looks the same"), praised san francisco top to bottom. i don't know if they were correct, but they were certainly objective compared to americans. if nothing else: australians love san francisco. :: the great barrier reef sounds so cliche, but you're a fool if you don't go see it for yourself. i've never snorkeled before, but moments after overcoming the initial panic of "holy shit, i'm in the middle of the fucking ocean and these waves are enormous," i was able to calm down and take a look around. when you cross the water level, it's like dipping into a whole different world of brilliant colors and plentiful marine life. i'm hoping some of my underwater camera pictures come out, but i have a feeling that my wounded duck swimming technique might have left something to be desired. we'll see. but whether or not the photos come out, just know that it was one of the most remarkable sights of my life. go see it, you won't be disappointed. :: and lastly, i was reminded of how good it can actually feel to come home. yes my (new) room still looks like a disaster area, but it's slowly coming together and it's good to be in my own place. i'm not, by nature, a traveler. at some level, i find myself needing to emerge from my comfort zone just to immerse myself in a new and different place. my travel shyness means that i'm always a little relieved to come home to comfort, but it also means that i forever appreciate even short jaunts to new worlds. i'm lucky to have the means to travel. like our rain forest guide said on wednesday, "when you're heading home all you can think about is how nice it will be. but once you get home all you can think about is where to go to next." so where to next? i'm open for ideas :)

i'm excited because tomorrow i'm jumping on a long-ass plane flight Down Under. i don't really plan on having absurd adventures while i'm down there, but hey, you never know. i think that when i'm at work and in the grind, i tend to lose focus on some of the more important aspects of being 24 with some financial freedom. for instance, i feel like seeing as much of the world as i can before i have real responsibilities is probably a really fantastic idea. when i think about it, there will be decades to work on a career, and only years to pack up and fly away to random places for indeterminate amounts of time. i need to remember to make that a priority more often. so in the theme of "tell better stories," i think that someday i'll remember spending two weeks in australia much more than i'll remember sitting in a cubicle plugging on my keyboard to earn some extra cash. i think. and for that i'm willing to invest: time, money, and my life. 9/15: fly out of sfo to sydney 9/22: fly out of sydney to cairns 9/29: fly back to sfo there are lots of things in the middle there, but we'll start with that and fill in the details later.

five years ago today, i was a 19-year old college student still reeling (perhaps alcohol-induced) from my freshman year of college. i was in kotzebue building some websites for maniilaq association and a few other organizations in the rural alaskan town. in other words, i was pretty much as far away (both in distance and culture) from new york city as i could be within the united states. i remember the summer well, spent with the johns (lincoln and stoops) doing various ridiculous things that could only make sense to 19-year old college kids or residents of kotzebue. on the morning of september 11, i was fast asleep in the bottom bunk of john lincoln's room at his family's house. there was a family room with a tv just a step outside the door. stoops was sleeping on the top bunk and lincoln across the room in his bed. i can remember somewhat groggily listening to mrs. lincoln burst into the room, frantically talking about twin towers and airplanes and crashes. as i came to consciousness and mrs. lincoln left the room, lincoln muttered the words, "wait, they CRASHED into the buildings?" i think, even today, that's a perfectly succinct way to phrase the immediate response of most anyone. the three of us stumbled out of our beds and stood watching the television coverage. i was planted there completely shocked for a good 20 minutes, staring at the craziest television images i had ever seen, mouthing words like "oh my god...", and clothed by just a pair of boxer shorts. i remember it all vividly, like a painting seared into my brain... it was, of course, the singular "where were you when..." moment of our generation. it's obviously not important, but i wonder whether 9/11 will come to replace president kennedy's assassination as the event standard by which all "where were you when..." moments are compared. i took ivy to the airport last night, as she headed out to sydney and then adelaide. as i watched her slowly make her way through the careful security process, i couldn't help but think about how different airplane travel is today because of this day five years ago. and who can even count the other things that have changed... so where were you when you heard, five years ago today?

chuck klosterman's team usa proposal is not only entertaining, but also (honestly) pretty damn intriguing as a real option for our national basketball team. what i see when i watch our guys out on the court (in the world championships or anywhere else) is a group of players that are playing scared to fail. if dwyane wade, lebron, and company go off and win the olympics, the collective response from americans will be, "about damn time! sheesh, when were those greedy players ever going to get off their asses to not embarrass us?" if they lose at the olympics, the collective response from americans will be, "again? when will those greedy players ever get off their asses to not embarrass us?" in case you've never played sports, this is what we call a "no-win situation" ========= main event chips fiasco: somehow, at the main event of the world series of poker this year, two million random chips were thrown into the prize pool at some point. let me repeat that: two million random chips showed up between day one and the end of the tournament. i'm glad that the writers figured out where those came from. now we just have to figure out how harrah's can stop screwing things up. of course television has been integral in the poker boom, but just as important were the rise of honest card rooms, tournaments, and internet sites that let people play the game without feeling like they might get cheated... ========= businessweek wrote an article on the best places to launch a career and i almost puked on myself (even though my new employer made the list, though since i didn't start my career there i'm completely screwed). lists like this are so absurd that i can't don't even want to start getting into the utter uselessness of them. how exactly do you judge the best places to launch a career? here are the criteria, in their words:

With this ranking, BusinessWeek has put together a guide to the employers that really shine. Unlike other such rankings, BusinessWeek's incorporates feedback from three different sources. First we surveyed directors of undergraduate career services to find out which employers were creating buzz on campus. Next we asked those finalists to complete a questionnaire about pay, benefits, retention, and training programs, which we then compared with other employers in the same industry. Finally we asked Universum Communications to supply data from its survey of more than 37,000 U.S. undergrads about the finalists at the top of their list of most desirable employers.

great. so 2/3 of your feedback is going to come from people who are students (who haven't even started a career), from people who listen to what those students tell them, and from the companies themselves. shouldn't they rename the article to "places that college students most want to work at"? i guess that wouldn't have the same ring... ========= honestly, i think we'd be better off getting life and career advice from people like gene weingarten at the washington post. i especially like number five, about how using the bathroom will eventually become more satisfying for me than using the bedroom. great. looking forward to it... ========= you're crazy if you thought i wasn't going to at least MENTION opening weekend of the nfl season. the niners looked ok which, believe me, is an enormous step up from the vomit that built up every time i thought about them last year. one of these years, i'm going to actually fulfill a life dream of finding some way to watch every single nfl game in real-time on the first day of the season. it'll be a complicated plan that will involve getting all of my friends to bring over their own tv's while i configure an intricate wiring scheme to turn the directv signal into ten separate games, all at the same time. hopefully my niners'll be winning again by then...

a few months ago, i wrote a post entitled Short stack is power? in which i discussed a theory that i had involving the power of a short stack (i.e. 40-50x the big blind) in a no limit hold'em cash game. in my experience up to that point, playing with a short stack in a no limit cash game had been profitable and i concluded that having a short stack in a no limit cash game, where blinds are non-escalating and create no additional pressure on the players, is the optimal way to play. interestingly enough, over the past few months as i've built greater discipline and self-reflection in my poker game, i've come to realize that the short stack approach is, in fact, not always optimal. like everything in poker, there are situations at the table where starting with a substantial stack is truly beneficial for cash game play. let's take a quick example hand from my week-long vegas trip in july. i was playing in a $5-$10 no limit game and was sitting with around my starting stack at the table. i had bought in for $400 and had lost a small pot to leave me with $370. certainly 37 big blinds fell well within my range of 'small stack cash game play', so i was fine. in late position, i picked up AcJs behind an extremely loose player who had raised to $30. he had me covered by a lot and i felt that i had a good read on his style of play. i called in position and the big blind called as well. the flop came down Jc-3d-4h. a great flop with me, with no flush draw and no real straight draws. after the big blind checked, the loose player put out a bet of $90. i was certain that i had the best hand given the player's style and figured that i was looking at a J with a worse kicker. the big blind looked as though he was ready to fold. in thinking over the situation, i debated between calling his bet of $90 (leaving me with $250 behind) or raising him immediately. i elected to call, wanting to make sure that i got all my money in against his probable 2- or 3-outter. this is, in fact, the small stack approach: find places to double through other players at the table. when the turn came with a blank and he stuck a bet of $150, i moved in for $100 more and he quickly called. he did, in fact, have J9 and i doubled up. hooray, right? a couple of weeks later, as i thought about the play of the hand, i started to realize where the 'small stack cash game' approach fails. in the hand described above, i had a great read on the player and the amount of money that i won was capped only by the size of my stack. if i had started the hand with $500, i probably would also have been able to double through him. in fact, even if i had started the hand with $800, i might have been able to double through him. my edge over him was substantial, but i had handcuffed myself by limiting my own value in the hand by having a small stack. at the same time, the opposite is also true. if my opponent had held a hand like QQ, leaving my stack size at $350 would have limited my loss in the hand. but when you have great positive EV in a game or against a player, why would you be interested in limiting the magnitude of your wins? as i thought back on my no limit cash game play from the week, the first things i remembered were the horrific bad beats. but as i reviewed the play further, i came to realize that the size of those bad beats were huge because i didn't always get full value out of other hands where i was certain to be a huge favorite. poker's a difficult game with lots of ambiguity. in the cases where you know and like where you stand, wouldn't it make sense to get as much of your money out there as possible? playing with a large stack takes careful understanding of the intricacies of hands. it's substantially more difficult than playing a small stack in a cash game. but if you're comfortable with your standing in the game, buying in for a substantial stack can make more sense because of the added value from your winning hands. at the end of the day, it depends. the size of your buy-in for a cash game is contingent upon not just the size of the blinds, but on your playing style, your edge in the game, and your ability to skirt past tricky hands. there are many factors to consider and i was wrong: a short stack is not always power...

i'll occasionally link to my friends' blogs, but i almost never outright TELL people, "go read this stuff." i think will's new blog is probably worth your time though, so you should go take a look. it's not really a blog, as much as it will be insightful glimpses into his trek through south america. the short background is that, having finished two years teaching in the new york public school system, will decided to take, oh, at least a half year to travel all of those countries to the south, accompanied by his backpack. i'm excited for him and proud that he has the balls to go travel in such a way. he's much braver than i am, in countless ways. so far, he's taken a 30-hour bus ride from atlanta, georgia to el paso, texas, before jumping (not literally) the border into mexico. so set your bookmarks, rss readers, or whatever. it should be at least interesting. oh yeah, and he doesn't know spanish. be safe, will. and write often.

it's late, er, early and i can't sleep. time to do some writing instead, since i've been neglecting all of you out in reader land: firefox 2 beta 2 - mozilla firefox 2 is finally in a decently-stable beta form and 700 tech nerds spread out all over the bay area are rejoicing. in all honesty though, there are some nice things about the beta. for one, they finally got the closing of tabs right. also, subscribing to rss feeds is now a seamless user experience (big win). oh, and it looks nice. i'm still waiting for some really new sizeable innovations, but it's a nice upgrade from firefox 1. and... now that i've written this, i'm not sure how it's actually important to your life. but hey, it's 4am so you should be happy you're getting anything legible. moving again - i'm moving. again. it seems like i've spent the last six years of my life carting things around from place to place. you would think that doing so much moving would make me pack lightly, but you would be oh so wrong. somehow, such choice items as my dead ikea wall clock and a busted electric toothbrush have continued to make the cut every move. this time i'll be taking residence in a nice 4-bedroom house in mountain view. each room has its own shade of nice new paint (i'm staring down the barrel of green, blue, or red) and there's a quiet patio out back, perfect for barbeques. anyone who enjoys lifting heavy things should contact me soon :). financial nerdiness - i think one sign that you've become a personal finance nerd is if you actually think the following sentence to yourself when reviewing your new employer's benefits: "oh sweet, we offer a roth 401(k). this is so fucking bomb." note to self: describing a roth 401(k) as 'fucking bomb' is not only strange, but also probably inaccurate. i'm not sure where that tidbit was going, but hey, it's 4:17am. poker's easy. sometimes. - i was playing in a 45-person sit-and-go to kill some time this afternoon, when i found 3d3h on the button with two limpers in front of me. i limped, the small blind called, and the big blind checked. as i looked back at the table a few seconds later, i did a double-take as i saw the flop 3c-2s-3s. yahtzee! but all four player checked to me. i tossed in a bet of about 1/4 of the pot to get the action going and had three callers. as i worried about how to get all of the money into the middle (we were pretty deep-stacked and i had all three players covered), the As rolled off on the turn, putting three spades on the board. before i even had a chance to act, the small blind pushed all-in (for about 3 times the pot), and the next two players also pushed all of their money into the pot. after i paused to make sure i wasn't seeing things, i called and saw them flip over (in succession) KsQs, 2d2c, AdAc. amazing. sometimes poker's so easy :). filed under 'cool': flickr geotagging - i know that it's officially part of the enemy, but i'm still a flickr user. and, as a flickr user, i have to admit that i think the new 'geo-tagging' functionality is, for lack of a better word, 'cool'. i just happen to hate the name (geo-tagging? can't there be a better name than that?). i'd tell you what it is, but maybe it's easier to just show you my photo map. note that not all my photos are geo-tagged yet, but i think it's pretty neat anyway. it's not going to change anybody's life, but (as you all know) i love visualizing information in clever ways. this would qualify. australia, here i come! - and i'll leave you with this sobering news article. yes, i am actually going to be in port douglas in, oh, about three weeks. really good for the worry-meter there...

one thing that i've learned in the first few days of work is that i'll be needing to make copious use of the gym facilities here. remember when you got to school freshman year and suddenly all of the food was prepaid and all-you-can-eat? and you summarily packed on 10 pounds chewing on rubbery chicken tenders and sucking down beer by the gallon? well, my new job is like that, but there are no nightly keggers and the food is really good. in other words: food budget down, new balance running shoe budget up. so i haven't discussed it on here yet, but in a few weeks i'll be trekking to australia to visit for the first time. it should be a really great experience and i'm excited about it. the itinerary for me? sydney (described by my new cubemate as a cleaner version of san francisco, fused with socal beach culture) and then cairns (only as a pitstop to the whitsunday islands and port douglas). my fourth continent and my first real travels since europe (no, walking from the venetian to paris on the strip doesn't count). time to get my camera ready... not much to report on the poker front. i've been playing low-limit omaha-8 and stud-8 online. i'll also be instituting a new evening for garden city trips (wednesdays are now shot), which should be easier now that i'm closer. this sunday i'll probably make a run to the good old gc, or maybe a jaunt up for the 6pm no limit hold'em tournament at artichoke joe's. i haven't played in that tourney in a while. in any case, time to get back at it this weekend. as with all returns to the felt, i'll be instituting my "play four orbits, take a one orbit break" rule to keep focused. eventually, i think i want to get up to that 20-40 game at gc. first stop back: the 8-16 w/ half kill... more writing to come this weekend... maybe.

if you think about it, there are only a handful of times in your life that you sit down and sign a document called "At-Will Employment Agreement." this is one of those nights. a few months ago, i came to the realization that i needed a change. more precisely, i needed to affect change, which is something that is related but different. one of the frustrations that i always felt at oracle was an inability to truly influence things. working at an organization like oracle always feels like you're riding in a tour bus. it's going somewhere and it's going to get there, whether you contribute or not. it's not going to get there any faster if you bust your ass and, even worse, it's not going to arrive any slower if you scrape by every day. accurate or not, that's how i felt. don't get me wrong, i'll be eternally grateful to oracle and my two years there. i met and worked with some tremendous people. i learned lessons small and large. i grew more comfortable in my own skin. and, most of all, i got my feet soaking wet in the working world. in reality, it was a helluva better choice than many other jobs i almost chose. but i think, all along, i sort of knew that it wasn't really the place for me. tomorrow i'm going to start finding out if google is the kind of place that i'm looking for. i want to learn and i want to enjoy myself. but most of all, i want to feel that i'm affecting change that is proportional to my effort. that sounds very boring, but it's simple: i want to make a difference. i don't think it's too much to ask.

i realized just now that i'm still young enough to care too much. this whole week, i've been hammering away at a mountain of work that i NEED to finish. my (soon to be ex-) coworkers are all amazed that i'm working so hard in my last few days. when i told one dev manager yesterday that i was working on a piece of documentation and asked him a few questions, he looked at me like i was crazy. with a bewildered expression on his face, he said:

"when's your last day? friday? this friday? and you're working on this? i wouldn't."

i took it as a good sign that i was still willing to pour in so much effort three days from departure, but just now i realized it might be depressing to care so much sometimes. i was downstairs on a conference call with someone who'll be starting here and moving to the bay area soon. considering that we weren't going to have any time overlap, i thought it'd be great for the company and my team if i spent a few hours in a web conference with him, getting him prepared and excited. i spent a solid hour beforehand digging up old slide decks and outlining all of the various ongoings. after briefing him on the current projects, giving him tidbits on the new exciting features in the pipeline, and advising him to stay out of the tenderloin when looking for housing, i was rewarded with a heartfelt 'thank you' and many kind words. awesome! i came upstairs, practically bouncing from the good deed and genuine appreciation. sound great, right? with just an hour or so left before 5, i was ready to plug away at some work and call it a day (i mean, it IS wednesday on my last week of work). i was greeted with sobering news: due to circumstances completely out of my control, a project that i had been working on for many moons had been shelved. organizationally, the move makes complete sense and i support it wholeheartedly. but like so many things in the big corporate world, the news on the ground looks a lot worse than it does in the air. and now i just feel disappointed. i've got two more days left at work here. i'll probably never work at this company again. i'll probably never work in this industry again. and yet i'm crushed that this piece of code isn't going out the door. is this strange? i'm thinking i just care too much...

the wsop main event final table is today and jamie gold, the chipleader, is apparently quite the winning personality. every time i've read a cardplayer hand history, it's been some ridiculous hand like 'jamie gold calls off a bunch of chips with 78 and flops a straight.' that's the thing about poker though: sometimes you just out-flop people... for eight days straight...

i think anyone who follows poker is probably rooting for allen cunningham. espn did a nice feature story on cunningham a few days ago, but people who follow poker already knew him to be one of the best players in the world, adept at every game and experienced in every situation. it'd also be great to see such a seemingly nice guy and quiet personality win the main event, after seeing how many asshole poker players are out there these days (check out shane schleger's post for an example). it'd be nice to see a good guy like cunningham win.

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so if you're a little confused about how i went from the statement that 'my whole trip was this amazing experience that i haven't digested yet' to 'the two lessons i learned from my trip are that poker is tiring and you need to not care about money,' then this post is for you.

between my week spent in chicago catching up with the stoopsons (stoops, will, pseudostoops, and baby stoops) and my week spent in las vegas, i had a host of small experiences that made me realize one thing: i'm way too young to be doing things that i don't want to do. i think this was really driven home when stoops told me about a man we'll call 'father of pseudostoops'. most notably i was startled to find out that, before becoming a very successful business man, 'father of pseudostoops' played several years of beach volleyball for a living. i'm not quite sure why i was so stunned by that fact, though i have a theory. somewhere in my life i became convinced that if i wanted a 'successful career,' i had better get my ass out there right out of the gate. i never really argued this fact in my head; i just took it as fact. considering that being a professional beach volleyball player is probably not 'career-advancing' for anyone besides beach volleyball players, i suddenly found myself thinking about things differently. i mean, if pseudostoops' dad could play beach volleyball for several years before launching into a wildly successful professional career, what exactly did that say about the necessity of getting on the corporate ladder as soon as possible?

what does that have to do with a week of poker? a few months ago, i had a conversation with a few friends where i noted that i hadn't done very many 'notable things' (actual words) since i left school. i felt like i could count the number of such events on one hand. as you can imagine, that was in fact the conversation that sparked my plan to live in las vegas for a week, and it worked. twenty years from now, i'll look back on the week that i spent living out of a suitcase in harrah's as a great experience. i'll fondly recount the time that i got all my chips into a huge pot as a 9:1 favorite and subsequently got crushed. well, maybe not fondly, but you know what i mean. i'm glad i spent that week because i was doing something notable (in my own mind) that i loved. sure i was in a rush to win chips, but it's more that i was in a rush to do something that i wanted to do. i'm pretty sure 'father of pseudostoops' didn't think he'd be playing beach volleyball for his whole life, but it was something he wanted to do.

now all of that is great, but what's the actual implication for me? well, i used to at least believe in the idea of a Deferred Life plan. 'save now so you can enjoy it later.' 'put in time at work now while you're young.' 'get started on your career early.' 'work here for a few years until you're ready to go to business school. THEN you can do whatever it is you want.' actually pretty much anything that starts with 'do this for a few _______ until you ______.' all of these ideas are some variant of a Deferred Life plan. and i now think they are all bullshit. working in a job that you don't like for some kind of other benefit (money, ladder-climbing, early retirement, etc.)? that's bullshit. when i'm 60 years old, i'm not really interested in sitting around sunning myself in my huge mansion, happy that i saved so much money in my 20's. i'm not into Deferred Life plans anymore. money is far less important than not wasting time. the tagline i like the most? Tell Better Stories.

so what am i planning in the next couple of months to not let that time slip away?

• taking a new job (more on that later)
  
• visiting a new continent
• playing more poker

there'll be a time in my life when i'll have to do lots of things that i don't want to do. there'll be time for compromises and sacrifices. i'm 24, that time's not now. i'm way too young to be doing things that i don't want to do.

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oh! i almost forgot about the best hand of the week last week, when my own girlfriend busted me in a big $3-$6 pot. i thought i should write about this since you would all find it so amusing.

ivy wanted to get started in poker, so she sat down in the 1 seat of a $3-$6 game and i sat in seat 2, giving her advice on hands to play. i told her i wasn't going to soft-play her in hands, since she needed to learn, so when i picked up AhQh on the button, i raised her limp. the two blinds called and she called. $24 in the pot.

the flop came 8-8-3, with one heart. everyone checked to me and i made a standard bet with position. all the players called. $36 in the pot.

the turn came with the A of spades. gin! i thought i probably had the best hand even on the flop, but i'd find out now for sure. the blinds checked and ivy checked. i, of course, bet and got one caller from the blinds and ivy sneakily flat-called me. $54 in the pot.

on the river came a 9. clearly i was going to bet here for value when it inevitably checked around to me... until ivy bet INTO me. what the hell? i looked at her trying to see if she had slowplayed an 8. i thought i told her not to play most hands with an 8 or lower in it. could she have 99 and hit a boat? maybe a worse A? she bum-rushed me into calling by laughing at me (clearly a sophisticated reverse tell) and dragged the $66 pot when she showed me the stone-cold cooler of A8.

kids these days, they learn so fast...

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phil ivey said on the circuit yesterday that, "if you're not willing to take a thousand dollars out of your wallet right now and set it on fire, then you shouldn't even consider playing poker." while this is being said by a guy that plays $4000-$8000 every day, meaning that the exact sum is probably not applicable to players at lower limits, the point is valid: you need a disregard for the amount of money you're playing for to be successful.

it's actually rather ironic when you think about it: poker players spend all day pursuing large amounts of money, it would seem that the money is important to them. in fact, at the table, the opposite is true. to play effectively and play un-scared, a poker player needs to have a disregard for the amount of money he has on the table. it's meaningful only in terms of acquiring more chips. now this is something i read about in numerous books, but i didn't really understand it until last week.

i sat down at a $5-$10 NL cash game last tuesday at the wynn, and immediately the difference from 2-5 was evident. guys were sitting at the table with mounds of chips, and 3-inch thick wads of 100's behind them. i asked one player how much he had back there, and he absentmindedly replied, "about 25." that's not 25 hundred (incidentally, i realized quickly that my 'short-stack' thoughts on cash games is slightly incorrect. i'd write on this, but you'd be bored).

in the first hand i watched, i got some insight into what ivey meant. two players raised and re-raised each other before the flop and saw an AKQ flop. the first player, clearly a high-action asian guy of about 21, pushed in for about $900 into a $600 pot and the other player (an older tight guy) called instantly. i was positive that they would be flipping over set vs. set, or at the very least AK, which is in fact what the tight player showed. i jumped out of my chair when the asian guy flipped over 9T and rivered a J. he justified the play by saying,  "i thought he had jacks or tens," while he nonchalantly stacked about $2000 in chips.

now i'm not saying that 9T guy made a good play that will be profitable in the long run. he made a play at a pot with four outs. it was reckless and he got lucky. but he made a play at a pot without fear, based purely on a (very incorrect) read. is it a much more reasonable play with a flop like 673? probably. but his disregard for $1200 of his own money was telling.

after a few hours, i was finally comfortable at the stakes. but in retrospect, comfortable isn't the right word. it's just that i had "forgotten" the stakes that were in play. i know it sounds weird, but once you've been in the game for a few hours, you no longer worry about how much you bought in for. you just play poker. i'm not sure if that's the disregard for money that phil ivey was talking about, but i think it might be.

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the first thing i learned from last week is that being a full-time poker player is tiring. really tiring. sure, it's not in a physical sense (because, after all, i sat around a table all day), but it is in a type of mental exhaustion that i've never felt before. i can remember spending hours studying for a class while in school and never feeling NEARLY as zombie-like as i felt every day last week after playing 10+ hours of poker. you can ask skratch, but when i got up from the table each night i could barely focus on talking about anything. part of that may have been the taxing emotional bad beats that i took (for personally disturbing amounts of money), but i think most of that was all of the time spent THINKING. why did he bet that much? what kind of hand would play that way? how should i play this hand? how much is in the pot? how little should i bet? who's this new guy? how does that person play? when you sit at a table for ten hours a day thinking through all of these decisions in your head non-stop, you start getting tired, even when you don't know it.

on wednesday i played at caesar's. i spent about three hours trying to set up this over-aggressive player who would overcall lots of hand. this guy was so hellbent on getting broke with one pair that i just needed to find the right spot. i eventually got a sizeable stack (about $450) into the pot very good against him and he sucked out on me HARD. so hard that even the dealer said, "wow, that's pretty rough." it's fine. it happens. but in thinking back on the day, i was sick about what happened AFTER the hand.

about twenty minutes later, with another reasonable stack, i re-raised the hyper-aggressive norwegian guy on my right (Norway, for short) to $65 with KK, after he had raised to $20 with (probably) a shit hand. i knew Norway was an idiot and was glad to play my whole stack against him when (i imagined) he would inevitably push me in for $200. but things changed when the solid player in the SB (Solid, for short) re-raised to $250 even in the easiest motion i had ever seen. as Norway decided whether or not to call with KcTc (by the way kids, KT is a crap hand), i studied Solid, trying to figure out if he was strong or just trying to re-steal (since i very well could have been stealing from the donkey). he looked very strong.

because this is a story about how being tired can affect your play, you obviously know what happened. Norway laid down his monster two-card royal flush draw and i stuck my chips in the pot senselessly as a heavy dog. if there was ever a time to lay down kings before the flop, this was it. given a fresh brain with my read on the situation, KK is a tough but sensible fold. given a tired brain twenty minutes after a sick beat, KK is unfortunately an instant call. and subsequently an instant loss. i actually knew even before my chips got into the pot: poker is tiring and i can never get kings to catch up on aces.

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i've started this post five times and ended up stumped each time on what to say. in other words, i'm still digesting my week in las vegas. it was a tremendous eye-opening experience to peer into the life of a professional poker player. much of it was good, some of it was bad, and some of it was just surprising. when i'm done processing everything that happened, i'll probably have something insightful to say about it, but for now i'm just sort of still confused not to be sitting at a table. i'll just say that it was a great experience with lots of interesting tidbits to mull over. and in reflection, it's not out of the question as a temporary profession.

that reminds me: if anyone is interested in starting up a weekly home game in the area, let me know. stakes are entirely negotiable. the catch? the game MUST be a mixed game, with at least five different games if hold'em is in the mix. the most fun i had playing poker the entire trip was playing a $6-$12 mixed game of Razz, Badugi, Stud Hi, 2-7 Triple Draw, Omaha Eight-or-Better, Hold'em, and Stud Eight-or-Better for six hours. hit me up if you're interested.

if this past week taught me one thing, it's that there are some really interesting ways to make a living out in this world. i'm not just talking about poker players and dealers either. as ivy and i stood in the taxi line at the venetian last night, we realized that the Taxi Dude (guy opening the doors) makes BANK. at a clip of around 3 cars per minute, he was being tipped around $240/hour. yeah, you read that right. not to mention that he was being paid to stare intently into female, um, eyes to ask questions as insightful as "can i take your bag?" and "where are you headed today, miss?"

so let's make that lesson #1 from vegas: if you're a single guy out there, you might want to pursue the taxi door-opening opportunities in las vegas. at best you can sneak in a smile. at worst you're cashing over $200/hour.

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i might not have mentioned this, but i'm currently on vacation. i flew out to chicago yesterday (tuesday) and immediately attended the cubs game at wrigley. that's kicking off about five days in the second city, where i will thoroughly attempt to answer the question: "why is chicago the most unhealthy city in the country?" the list of things consumed so far:

• shawarma sandwich (near wrigley)
• three bud lights at the sports bar across sheffield from wrigley
• two 'old style' beers at one of the country's most beautiful ballparks
• a 'wrigley dog'
• three hoegaarden's at jonny o'hagan's in wrigleyville
• a two-piece chicken meal at 'Harold's Chicken Shack'
• a rainbow cone, courtesty of pseudostoops
• pita chips and hummus dip at La Casa de Stoops/Pseudostoops
• a  boatload of mussels, sandwiches, and fries
• a nice variety of belgian brews from Hopleaf

what's left on the list? a nice corn-fed dry-aged rib eye. chicago-style stuffed pizza. a dining experience at some place called Mr. Beef. a trip to this mythical Wiener Circle...

and i wonder why chicago seems to have a larger percentage of overweight people than anywhere else i've been in the world.

after chicago, i'm heading to las vegas on monday morning. i'll be camped out in the city of sin playing LOTS of poker and generally trying out 'the life'. i'll sleep at a decent hotel, eat as cheaply as i can, write often (lucky you!), and try to have some fun. more writing and pictures later. talk to you soon...

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somewhere off in the upper reaches of this company, some power-that-be decided he wanted to do a live in-studio presentation at 8:30am pacific time today. he called down to the oracle studios and told the technician to get a room ready for 8:30am sharp.

why does this matter? well the technician (we'll call him technician A) then promptly bumped the 8am presentation recording that was supposed to happen in the studio. by 'bumped', i mean 'cancelled'. nevermind that the 8am presenter had scheduled this particular timeslot a month ago because he's leaving for vacation next tuesday and needs to get this recorded before then. the result was this:

jack: "hi *shake hands*, i'm a product manager with customer data management. i'm doing a recording at 8am."

technician B: "hi *looks confused*, i don't actually see you on the schedule. lemme call someone to ask.... (he calls larry, or president bush, or the olsen twins, or someone equally important). sorry, i don't see you on here. i think your recording got cancelled and no one told you. sorry about that."

jack: "that's awesome. i love my life."

technician B: "great."

and that is why i'm sitting in my cube at 8:15 writing instead of speaking into an oversized microphone.

i'm honestly not irritated, though i probably will be when i realize at 4pm that i'm insanely tired. when you work at a large LARGE company, sometimes strange things will happen and there will be no justification beyond a shrug and a smile. maybe sipping this green tea will help.

much more irritating however, was wednesday afternoon, when i jetted out of work at 5:10 sharp to head home and make the 6pm $69+$6 full tilt tournament (still trying to win a seat to a bracelet event). i've discovered lately that the traffic on 101 south seems to be getting worse, which is of course why i left myself a whole 50 minutes to get home. clearly you know how this story ends. as i walked in my apartment door at 6:03pm, i was able to take solace in the fact that in just a few hours i would get to dust off my chips in the 9pm $200+$16 tournament and then take a bad beat for a LOT of chips in a cash game. awesome!

i think the particular bad beat story is worth telling not for the sympathy that it will garner from scores of kind souls (because no one ever cares about bad beat stories), but just to note how ridiculous the hand was:

on the button, i found KhKc. as two players had limped around to me, i raised to 3x the BB. this might look like a tiny raise that isn't sufficient to drive out limpers, but i always raise to 3x the BB, whether i have KK or 97 suited. the small blind folded and the big blind IMMEDIATELY moved all-in for 50x the big blind. yes, 50. that's about 8x the entire pot.

it was pretty clear that the player had a medium-sized pair that he was afraid to play after the flop out of position. he probably also thought that my button raise was a steal (a huge mistake by online tournament players when playing cash games). figuring he has the best hand, he doesn't want to get played off of it when an overcard hits the flop. it turned out he had ThTs.

as i waited for the two limpers to fold so i could call, i considered how ridiculous this play was.

- he hadn't seen me play five hands, so he really couldn't have an idea of how i played.

- by raising to 50x the BB, he was forcing out every single hand that he was a big favorite over. i certainly wouldn't call 50x with 99 or 88.

- by raising to 50x the BB, he was going to get called only by hands that dominated or raced with his tens (AA, KK, QQ, AK, AQ, JJ).

- there's no way i could actually be stealing in that position. with two limpers in front of me, how could i be trying to steal the blinds with a raise to 3x the BB?

as i watched the inevitable T spike on the turn, followed by a very kind exclamation in the chatbox ("send it!" which is roughly equivalent to those cheating, flopping italian soccer players), i couldn't help noticing that all the money would have gone in on the flop anyway. with a 7-high flop, there was no possible way either player would get away from the hand. i just wonder whether the other guy knows how insanely he played the hand. judging by his response, i would guess not.

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while the new reports on barbaro's medical situation are nothing to laugh about, i couldn't help but chuckle at the following quote by his doctor:

"Right now, he's happier," Richardson said. "He's got a normal heart rate, normal temperature, he's eating like crazy. He's very hungry. He's making lots of manure."

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one play that i've tried to introduce into my play is the idea of inducing bluffs. 'inducing a bluff' means that you find a way to encourage a player to bluff at a pot when you're fairly certain that you have the best hand. it's another way to extract value out of a hand.

layne flack (clearly a greatly superior poker player to me) wrote an interesting tip about the idea of inducing a bluff in this full tilt poker tip, but reading the article didn't necessarily help me much because what he is really talking about is inducing a bluff when you have a monster. the example he gives (flopping the K-high flush and extracting chips) is so rare that it's hard to incorporate it consistently into your game.

lately though, i've noticed online that there are many situations to induce a bluff out of a reckless opponent (of which there are certainly MANY online) when you have just a semi-strong hand. last night i observed the following hand in a $1-$2 NLH game on full tilt:

player A was a reckless maniac on the big blind. the kind of player who makes huge bets at unreasonable pots, playing hyper-aggressively. he had shown little ability to slow himself down. he had about $150 in front of him. player B seemed to me to be a solid player who was making good decisions and playing tightly. he was on the button and had about $250.

all the players folded around to player B, who raised to $6. a standard play from the button, he really could be raising with many hands. even for a player as tight as he was, i could imagine a raise with any decent ace, KQ, JT, etc. and any pair larger than 66. (it turned out that he had AcTc)

player A was the only caller. as i noted, being a maniac means that he would defend his blind with a call with really any hand. he would re-raise with most any decent pair or overcards (maybe even all-in), because (of course) he is a maniac. also, player B could be fairly certain that the maniac would throw out a huge overbet of the pot after the flop no matter what. it turned out that he had 8h5h. it's important to note right here that defending his blind with a hand like this is really not all THAT unreasonable, even against a tight player on the button. it's very likely that he has two live cards and the pot is laying him better than 2:1. what he did next, though, IS unreasonable.

the flop came AsKs2c, and player A immediately bet out $27. now leading out with a $27 bet into a $13 pot should really never happen. against hands that can't call, a $10-$13 bet would accomplish the same thing. against hands that can call or raise, you're just giving away money. it's also idiotic because the flop hit so many hands that player B could have.

now the natural reaction if i was player B, would be to raise. the only hands that i could imagine the maniac having to beat me right now are A2, 22, and K2, none of which he would bet that way. considering that information against the flush draw on board, i would be inclined to raise.

but there are a couple of factors to weigh here:

- if he has a flush draw, he's a maniac and will either call without pot odds or re-raise all-in, putting me at a tricky decision. and while the odds would probably dictate a call, who likes to gamble against a flush draw? against a maniac you can still make a lot of money (on this hand or later hands)

- there are lots of hands much worse than mine that he would fold or re-raise all-in with.

when you add all of these things up, it makes a lot of sense to just call and control the pot size. it also adds some deception to your hand. this is exactly what player B did.

on the turn, the 3h came off the deck. and player A checked. now here's where player B induced the bluff. after calling on the flop, he checks behind on the turn. a normal player would probably then put player B (as a tight player) on a weak ace hoping to check the pot down, but certainly willing to call a maniac. the maniac sees this as a chance to rip at the pot. and when the 6c falls on the river, player A puts in an overbet of $100. player B makes a relatively easy call, given the action and has successfully induced a ridiculous bluff by the maniac.

now i don't know whether this method of inducing bluffs is really the correct way to play. the majority of the time i would prefer to raise on the flop and take the pot down with a hand like AT. but it certainly turned out to be the perfect play for player B in this particular hand and it deserves some thinking over. instead of gambling with the maniac, he was able to control the size of the pot until he was fairly certain he had the best hand and induce a bluff out of the maniac player with no outs. that sounds like a pretty good way to play poker to me...

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seeing this newsvine article today, i couldn't help but think back to being in europe at this time two years ago. i was thisclose to taking the overpriced train ticket to pamplona, just to take in the festivities. at the last second i chickened out because of the horror stories i heard of visitors having to sleep on muddy streets as the tiny town's hotels and hostels were already overrun with tourists (paying exorbitant prices to sleep in closets). somehow that didn't appeal to me as fun.

instead, i took an easyjet plane trip and a ferry ride to the land of guinness, and spent four days in one of the world's most gorgeous hostels. despite all of that, for some reason i now wish i had gone to sleep in the mud. it would've been a better story.

the golden rule? always go for the better story because someday you'll be sitting in a rocking chair with only those to tell your grandchildren. make sure they're good. :)

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i would bring my ipod with music and the circuit podcasts, notebook/pens, running shoes, and a couple of poker books. paul graham would take other things...

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if you were a small child in the eighties (like i obviously was), you probably grew up watching a tv show called Transformers. i know i did. i was in love with the show. even now, years later, i can think back on it fondly.

when i was a kid, my brother and i used to worship the Transformers. we would watch it religiously and argue over the relative merits of optimus prime and his cohorts. i even remember my brother once saying (when my mom refused to buy us a particular transformers toy), "when i grow up and have money, i'm going to buy EVERY transformers toy there is." i remember thinking to myself, "that's a pretty good idea. when mike buys all of them, i can come over and play with them after work." somehow when i hit the age of 22 and started making some actual money, the thought of going out and buying every available transformers toy didn't really appeal to me.

i swear, when i saw the link http://www.transformersmovie.com/ a few minutes ago, my eyes opened wide and i mouthed the word 'wow.' and that was without even clicking on the link. i don't know if the movie will actually live up to the expectations in my head. after all, there's something gloriously wonderful about the colorful robots that a live action film just might not be able to encompass. but for now, i'm giddy over the thought of the movie anyway. hmm, maybe i should make a run to the toy store this weekend. somehow i think my salary could buy me a lot of these. hmm...

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in march, i attended the sweet 16 games at oakland arena. if you'll remember, i watched the ucla-gonzaga showdown, which was preceded by a rather uninspiring blowout of bradley by memphis. because the memphis-bradley game was so lopsided, i spent the entire second half watching a player on bradley named Patrick O'Bryant. a long-armed 7-footer, o'bryant picked up some notice the week before the sweet 16 by contributing in a surprising upset of kansas in the round of 32. some of the nba writers (chad ford, etc.) were touting him as a sleeper for the upcoming draft, so i took to specifically watching mr. o'bryant for the last 20 minutes of the game. my impressions? let's just say there's a reason that patrick didn't make the first-team of the missouri valley conference. soft, unathletic, and unimaginative, o'bryant appeared to be the definition of a 7-foot stiff. pairing an undeveloped offensive game with a lack of understanding in simple defensive principles, o'bryant sucked. hard. i was unimpressed, to say the least. worst of all, he didn't seem to CARE. his team was losing in the sweet 16 and i watched him jog up and down the floor, nonchalantly calling for the ball in the post and chucking up fading 10-footers. fast forward to monday night, when tim and i had this conversation:

jack: "you know who's going to be the biggest bust in the nba this year?" tim: "who?" jack: "that patrick o'bryant guy. i can't believe teams are talking about taking him in the top ten. i watched him up close for 40 minutes and thought he was the sixth best player on the floor."

over the years, my analyses of nba prospects have largely been accurate. save for a few occasions, when i've misjudged, say, a mike dunleavy jr.'s impact on the league, i've done a pretty impressive job of handicapping the performances of the different picks. yet rarely have i had the opportunity to make an opinion based on in-person observation, which should only serve to sharpen my judgement. i was absolutely sure that patrick o'bryant will be a huge nba bust. a 7-footer with little athleticism, no strength, no offensive game, a lack of understanding of team defense, and no heart? a pretty sure-fire bust. now fast forward to tonight when, of course, the warriors decided to select mr. o'bryant! awesome! go bay area sports teams! believe me, i'd more than love for him to prove me wrong and for someone to track down this post in one year's time to demonstrate to me how incorrect i am. unfortunately, that's not happening. the only solace the warriors front office should take tonight is that isiah thomas is still running the knicks to make them look good...

and then there is this minor league manager meltdown. hilarious.

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oh, one thing you also shouldn't do as a coach is back the commissioner into a corner and make him suspend you for being an ignorant jerk, hiding behind your lack of command of the english language. if bud selig doesn't grow some balls and suspend ozzie guillen, he'll look like a joke for as long as he's commissioner of baseball.

oh wait, too late!

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i realize that i know little about how the world of futbol actually works (from a personnel standpoint), but everything i've seen or heard about bruce arena leads me to believe that he might not be the best coach in the entire world.

i'm not talking about strategically on the field (which eric wynalda rips arena on all over the press), because i don't really know all that much about the tactical aspects of the sport. but being a former coach myself, i know that there are certain things that a coach should almost always do:

1) don't call out players in public: after the U.S. loss in the first game against the czech republic, arena immediately ripped on his players and called them out for playing poorly. to the press. now i've never coached athletes with media scrutiny, but i would think that maybe talking to your players first might be a good idea. trust with your athletes is something you build as a coach. ripping them in public is an act that can ruin any trust that you have.

2) don't whine ALL the TIME during the game: for some reason, every time they panned to bruce arena during the games, he had the look of mark cuban on his face. every call that went against his team was an occasion for him to throw up his hands and whine his ass off. now i don't know THAT much about futbol, but if it's like any other sport, arena needs to be judicious with his whining. whining to referees feeds into your players and creates an atmosphere of "we're getting screwed!" that is not a positive.

3) don't blame referees when it doesn't matter: now unless it is the very rare case where you TRULY get screwed out of a game/championship (read: 1972 USA vs. USSR Basketball), shut your MOUTH about the referees after the game is over. seriously. mr. arena, no one wants to hear about the referees. all we care about is that your team didn't play well enough to win. that is it. end of story. lose gracefully, zip up your mouth, and show some dignity when you're representing our country.

4) show some backbone: as much as i dislike duke basketball and the yankees, every time i see bruce arena in an interview, i can't help thinking about coach k and joe torre, who are the epitomes of class and proper behavior as a coach. but not only that, coach k displays strength and leadership every time he talks as the coach of duke basketball. i couldn't ever imagine him saying "Right now, I'm just an idiot." the proper answers to the questions arena were asked for this article? "I have greatly enjoyed being the coach of U.S. Soccer. It has been a tremendous privilege and I feel like I've accomplished a lot, with a lot of room to grow. I hope that I'm able to return as the U.S. coach." period. end of story.

5) show some class: after the loss to ghana, arena (apparently) walked off the field, briefly waving to Ghana's coach and shaking no one's hand. my lasting memory from the 2006 nba finals will be even mark cuban, the biggest whining crybaby in all of the nba, walking down to the court after game 6 and clapping for the winners. as a coach, you need to set an example for your team by losing gracefully. you especially need to do this when the Ghana team has accomplished such a proud feat for its country. luckily the players didn't follow his lead on this. it's pretty sad that the U.S. coaching representative can't walk across the field to shake the winning coach's hand.

6) accept the blame: most of all, your job as a coach is to take responsibility. sometimes you need to say things in post-game press conferences like, "Our team didn't play well. As a coaching staff, we should have done a better job preparing our team to win. We didn't accomplish our goals here at the World Cup and we are disappointed by our own performance. We congratulate the teams from Italy and Ghana."

oh, and the proper response to the question 'Was the penalty kick play right before the half a foul?' is "I'm not sure if it was a foul or not, but I want to be clear that the call is not the reason we lost the game. Calls will happen or not happen in any sporting event, but a winning team will find a way to work through them. The bottom line is that we didn't get the job done on the field and we have no one to blame but ourselves."

people don't write news articles about quotes like that, but they do respect you.

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this might sound vain, but i'm glad that i'm me. not so much because i'm stunningly handsome and charismatic (cue laugh track), but because i can speak convincingly without yelling. now the ability to get my point across without twisting the volume wheel 25 clicks might not seem like a big deal, but there is a guy on our floor (let's call him Yelling Guy) who reminds me why it's so nice to be me.

every time i walk near Yelling Guy's office, the door is slightly ajar and i can hear his accented voice screaming. and when i say 'screaming,' i don't mean speaking loudly or harshly, but really YELLING. like it always sounds like he's firing somebody for incompetence. i always expect Yelling Guy to be cursing people out, throwing chairs, and kicking computer monitors. he has the type of voice that i used to associate with extra laps on the track and suicide drills until i puke. yet, whenever i walk by (cringing, afraid that he's going to pull me into his Yelling Abode to yell at me), it turns out that he's having a very civil meeting that (if i was deaf) is no different from any work meeting that i've been in. it's actually very similar to talking to someone who was just at a really loud concert. and yes, i have considered the remote possibility that Yelling Guy moonlights as a security guard at heavy metal concerts and has no ear drums left. Yelling Guy yells so much that I really can't discount this possibility.

one of the best things that i ever learned (and i can't remember where i learned it, maybe from stoops) is that if you want people to listen to you, speak softer not louder. speaking softly gives your mind room to think and convinces other people to listen. plus, no one wants to be the asshole who speaks over people (unless he's the asshole who speaks over people), so speaking softly discourages people (even Yelling Guy, probably) from interrupting you and generally looking like a dick. i've done heavy research and found that if you can find a way for people to avoid looking like complete jerk-offs, they'll take it.

so what about Yelling Guy? well, i'm pretty grateful for him. i like to walk by Yelling Guy's office in the middle of the day, both for self-gratification and a good laugh. i'm serious! i'll walk by his office, snickering to myself about how ridiculous the yelling is. in fact, i'm going to do it right now, because i could use the humor. i just need to walk quickly though, or else he might start yelling at me. oh, Yelling Guy...

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but this is a foul, despite what mr. cuban says

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unfortunately, another tournament, another finish short. with the proper hours to think about my effort now, i'm pretty happy with how i played, but disappointed in the finish. rough one :|. next time...

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when i was in eighth grade, i couldn't sleep. i went through a period of about six months where i (literally) could not, for the life of me, fall asleep. every night i would roll around anxiously waiting for The Anvil of Sleep to drop on my head. the wait would ultimately culminate in a bizarre panic over my insomnia, which would (of course) keep me awake.

my brother thought i was a little bit crazy. he eventually took to telling me to get the hell out of his room (where i would sit late at night complaining about my lack of sleep while he plugged away at high school homework). eventually my mom took me to the doctor, where it was determined that i needed to 'calm the hell down and get some damned sleep'. i'm paraphrasing, of course.

interestingly enough, the doctor made some assumption that i was depressed, probably due to the enormous bags under my eyes and how insanely tired i was (hey, you try not sleeping for a week). apparently, instead of jotting down "can't fall asleep," he wrote "mild depression," meaning that even today when i go to any doctor, he/she asks me if i feel depressed these days. instead of going into a long tirade like: "no, i don't feel depressed. and i never did feel depressed. i just couldn't friggin fall asleep!" which would probably make him jot 'extreme violent tendencies to accompany his depression,' i just politely say "no, i'm feeling great these days." it's much easier that way.

the funny thing was, of course, that i was the furthest thing from depressed in eighth grade. i had blossomed into a reasonably good athlete while being honestly disappointed by any score less than 100 on tests. and (strange for an eighth grade boy) i wasn't uncomfortable about my laughable ineptitude around girls. no, depressed was not the term for me, nor was it the reason for my lack of sleep. if anything, i was mentally excited. TOO excited to get to sleep, i think. eventually i got over my insomnia by 'calming the hell down', and since then i've slept like a log.

i bring this up because last night was the first time i've been completely unable to sleep because of excitement since eighth grade. maybe it's my upcoming two-week july trip to chicago and las vegas (though i'm not sure how i'll keep up my workouts while i'm there there. pseudostoops, is there a gym in your building?). or maybe it's my planned september trip to the Lost island. or maybe it's yesterday's realization that i'm 24 and can recount only five *really* notable things from the past two years since i went to europe. whatever it is, i'm feeling kind of excited. bring it.

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people are bugging me about the lack of actual "check out what's going on in my life" type posts that used to be a staple of my old xanga journal. the truth is that i don't know really know where they've gone, but here goes.

semi-inspired by helping ivy train for a marathon the past few months, i'm planning on racing a half-marathon sometime in the october-november time frame. i've just embarked on a training regimine that includes healthy dosages of 6-8 mile runs (about 4-5 days per week), a few days of various cross training (for instance pedaling furiously on a stationary bike in front of the sweden vs. paraguay game just now), and three La Costena burritos per week. throw in a couple of in-n-out burgers and a few beers a week and i'm set!

in all honesty though, i am going to be taking this training thing pretty seriously. i'm hoping to book around 30-35 miles a week, with about 10 of those at a pretty high clip (i.e. 6:30 per mile). luckily i'll have my trusty ipod handy to play hour-long episodes of the circuit (which also double as a timer for my runs). the goal at the end of the day is to run a half marathon in under 90 minutes. that's my stated goal and i'm sticking to it until i pass out from heat exhaustion. remind me of that when you come visit me at the hospital.

when i sat down at my computer just now, i found a couple of great e-mails waiting for me. one from a friend i haven't talked to in a while (even though colin says he was reminded of me by a nytimes article about addiction to online poker) and one that i had to dig out of the Trash bin of gmail because (i think) the lack of consonants in bonnie's email (brkl...) makes it look like a spam address. it's so easy, as a "grown-up" to forget about the power of personal writing. a simple description recounting your first experience at fenway park. a quick note to remind a friend that you left on a month-long europe journey on this exact day two years ago. simple notes like that can make a huge difference in the grand scheme of meetings, documents, and designs. moral of the story: go write an e-mail to somebody right now.

oh, last note, about those runs, i'll be sticking most of them up on http://del.icio.us/smallchou/runs if any of you are interested. (and yes, i DO know that the times up there are not that great. working on that)

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the interesting part of the A's Esteban Loaiza getting arrested for a DUI while doing a cool 120 on the highway isn't that he was a professional athlete recklessly driving drunk. it's that esteban loiaza, the somewhat journeyman pitcher who was good for a few years (note: read previous post), owns a ferrari.

a ferrari. even pretty good major league players are driving ferraris.

i need to get myself into the professional baseball industry. anybody know where i could get into that?

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saw this poll on espn.com last week and was not surprised by the results (though i imagine the folks over at espn were expecting something different): the reason the results turned out so negatively is that they simply asked the wrong question. when i watch a baseball game now, i don't see a good performance and guess that the person is on steroids. instead, i associate someone with steroids when i see a BAD performance by a formerly good player. that is, in fact, going to be the legacy of the Steroids Era. all of these players (the bret boones and jason schmidts of the world) will be under tremendous pressure to not start tanking. if they do, they will be indicted unofficially with sammy sosa, barry bonds, mark mcgwire, and all the rest. good luck with THAT, baseball.

ivy and i skipped up to napa valley this past weekend, traipsing around to a variety of some of california's best wineries. i'd regale you with a spirited list of our favorites, but that would probably just bore you to death. i will say that, as a guy who previously was ambivalent to fermented grape juice, i'm now somewhat of a convert. no more r&r canadian whiskey for me! (and if you don't know what r&r is, consider yourself lucky). i also feel much more smarter (that's a joke) about wine and its characteristics. i might even be able to call myself semi-savvy.

the most interesting part of the trip (well, besides ivy tasting too much on friday and getting hammered) was exploring a region that is 100 miles from silicon valley, but culturally a world apart. it is, without a doubt, the kind of place that can make a normal working person straight-up jealous. not jealous of the jobs that winemakers have, mind you (though that too). but rather, jealous of the enjoyment and passion with which they ply their trade. they like what they do, and that's why they do it.

i bring this up after reading pseudostoops' post about her sad realization regarding corporate law, not to mention phil's relatively depressing blog about the utter soul-lessness of investment banking*, to remind everyone that there are indeed people that enjoy what they do, as much or more than what they make. seems like there are a lot of those people in napa valley. good for them...

* = hey you i-bankers can argue, but when you put yourself through a profession that causes you to write things like: "We talk big and dream big and look to the day we can stick it to the Firm for robbing us of girlfriends, lives, dreams, sunny days, day games and passions and replacing them with this incessant need to remind everyone not in banking that Hey, you, YOU are NOT in banking, because if you were, you wouldn’t look so fucking happy right now, you poor, ignorant douche-bag." i think you also admit to not having a soul.

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i went down to garden city on wednesday and played in an 8-16 limit hold'em game, hitting a string of cards that should have been pretty profitable for a 3-hour session. and somehow, i left just $50 winner. for you scoring at home, that's about a one-big-bet-per-hour session. which is, in reality, atrocious considering the cards i received.

as i drove home, i frustratedly thought about how i should have made a much larger score than a measly three big bets. the table was great. my cards ran good. i had good reads on a lot of the players. so how did i win just three big bets?

and therein lies the difference between limit and no-limit hold'em. in a no limit game, i certainly would have left with a mountain full of chips, playing against those players and with my cards. i would have gotten my money in 'with the best of it' (as a big favorite) multiple times and probably quadrupled up. but limit hold'em is about extracting every little bit of value out of your winning hands and losing a minimal amount on your second- or third-best hands. in addition to giving a player a free card to lose a big pot, i made many small mistakes in value extraction. here's a quick example:

an ultra-tight lady raised from under-the-gun and a loose donkey called behind her. in the cut-off seat, i looked down at two red 10's. i decided to three-bet the hand, in hopes of defining the initial raiser's hand a bit and to squeeze out the blinds. additionally, if she capped the pot (4 bets), it might also squeeze out the donkey. the blinds folded and the original raiser just called out of position, as did the original caller. 10.5 small bets ($84) in the pot.

at this point i wasn't particularly worried about the second player, but figured the original raiser (the tight player) for a pocket pair less than QQ or overcards (AK, AQ). not a bad position to be in. the flop came KJ3 rainbow and it was checked to me.

being last to act, i naturally bet to protect my hand and was check-called by the tight player. the third player folded. now what kind of a hand would the lady check-call a flop like that with? at this point i could be certain she didn't have AA or KK, as check-calling would be suicide. she could certainly check-call with QQ, TT, 99, 88, with the overcards on the board. AK or AJ also (i suppose) as she seemed to be tight and also conservative. AQ seemed out of the realm of possibility for such a tight player.

the other possibility was a flopped monster (KK, JJ, KJ), but her body language didn't seem to look it. i felt relatively good about the hand. 12.5 small bets ($100) in the pot.

when the turn came with another blank KJ3-5, she checked. i bet. she called. now at this point i should have been fairly certain that i was up against the same hand (TT), a dominated hand (99, 88, 77), or a one-pair hand that had me dominated (KQ, AJ). she was playing far too passively to have AK, i believed. the reasonable spot for her to check-raise would be here on the turn (for a big bet), so i was positive she didn't have a monster. 8.25 big bets ($132) in the pot.

with any blank on the river, this was an obvious situation to bet out one more time. if she held a dominated hand, she would probably call me down for an extra bet or fold. if she held the same hand as me, the worst i could do is a chopped pot and i could possibly get her to release the hand. and if she held AJ, i could give myself a chance to win $132 for $16. i only need to make that play work once in 9 hands for it to be profitable. really, it was an obvious bet, especially when the river came with KJ3-5-2

so, of course, being the donkey player that i am, she checked and i rolled my hand over. at the time, i justified the play by noting that she might have a J to check-call with, but this was a situation where she would call me with many second-best hands. and i had a reasonable shot at beating a J if i bet. as soon as i flipped over the cards, i felt sick as she nodded and patted the table, flipping over 99.

these are the types of subtle bets that good limit hold'em players never miss. it doesn't seem like much, but if i made 9 or 10 such mistakes over three hours, it meant turning a big win into a tiny one. limit hold'em is so much more subtle than its no limit counterpart. i'm out of practice, need to get back into it.

oh by the way, in case any of you were wondering, i think she was a complete maniac to call the hand down that far with 99. there aren't exactly a whole lot of hands i would three-bet pre-flop that would be worse than hers to that point. AQ is about it.

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i was sitting at my parents' house last weekend, when my dad (as he is known to do) commented brusquely on an article he was reading in the newspaper, about the $100 Laptop project. Speaking more about the entire idea of the $100 laptop, he said something to the effect of:

"I don't understand these people. They're so stupid. Why would they try to build a $100 laptop. It's so stupid. The hardware companies would never go for it. How would they make money?"

after a short argument with him about the topic, he brushed me aside (as he is known to do) and i was left muttering to myself about why a $100 laptop is a great idea. if we consider the Software As A Service model of technology, it's not wholly-impossible that we could (in the next ten years) see nearly all of the tasks that you perform on your computer move to the web. honestly speaking, there is very little that i do today on my computer (work or home) that i couldn't somehow accomplish on the internet. do these services (word processing, calendar, etc.) work as well as ms word or outlook? not yet. but i'm not entirely sure i need them to.

let's look at this another way. do this quick experiment: unplug your network connection on your home computer and see how many normal tasks you can perform on your machine before you're itching to plug that think back in. my guess is probably not a lot. the internet is already an enormous part of how you use your personal computer and it's just getting bigger.

and i think that's precisely why a $100 laptop could be so useful. my dad's argument is that hardware companies will never jump on-board because they don't care about social good, only financial good. and if their margins are lower to build these $100 laptops, then why would they produce chips at that performance level? but i can't remember the last time that i lamented about how slow my computer was. and, for most buyers, increases in hardware speed are not really going to provide tangible benefit for their user experience. if they're not asking for faster, they're going to ask for cheaper. and hardware companies will certainly listen to THAT.

bottom line: a $100 laptop could be very useful. it could accomplish 95+% of what a normal user (particularly a young student) needs it to accomplish, by leveraging web applications. is it ideal? probably not. but for a hundred bucks? i'll buy one if it can do all of what i need it to do. sure beats shelling out $2 G's for a prettier one...

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getting ready for the jump off of a four-day weekend, so without a lot to blog about, a semi-interesting poker hand: i was playing in a 6-player no limit hold'em sit-and-go the other night on full tilt when the following hand took place.

Seat 1: SSkterprep (1,220) Seat 2: Donald Leroy (2,000) Seat 3: smallchou (1,435) Seat 4: Kanill111 (2,135) Seat 5: yourgonnapay (860) Seat 6: hkyfrk (1,350) SSkterprep posts the small blind of 40 Donald Leroy posts the big blind of 80 The button is in seat #6 *** HOLE CARDS *** Dealt to smallchou [Ks Td]

under-the-gun, i picked up a very marginal hand, but here's some additional context: the table had been playing very tight and so i had changed gears, stealing a few blinds and raising a bunch of pots. the player on the button (hkyfrk) seemed like a relatively solid and aggressive player, but on the tight side. with such a marginal hand like KT, i would generally muck under-the-gun, but instead...

smallchou raises to 240 Kanill111 folds yourgonnapay folds hkyfrk calls 240 SSkterprep folds Donald Leroy folds

i made my standard 3x the BB raise and got a caller by the player on the button. that troubled me a bit because he was probably calling with a hand that was better than mine, such as overcards or maybe a medium-pair. he certainly wasn't the type of guy who was going to go nuts with AK in a big spot, so he could even be playing that for a smooth-call.

*** FLOP *** [Kh Qd 6s]

this seemed like a reasonable flop to me. a pre-flop raise and a continuation bet of about 2/3 the pot felt right as i might be able to take down the pot if he didn't hit it. with a marginal kicker like T, i would be happy to take the 500 chips and run.

smallchou bets 350 hkyfrk calls 350 *** TURN *** [Kh Qd 6s] [4s]

he smooth-calls there, which was an interesting decision (more on that later). i started thinking about the hands he would smooth-call with: he either a) thought i was overplaying the hand and he wanted to lock me up on my bluff to take it away later, maybe with a marginal hand (a Q, a 6, or a medium pair), or b) had a big hand that he wanted to milk at this late stage (AK, KQ, 66). i did feel like an AK or a KQ would have raised me in that spot though, so i had a feeling i was still good, especially when the blank hit on the turn.

smallchou bets 845, and is all in

with less than the pot left in my stack, i went ahead and put him in on the turn, thinking that he was likely to call it with a lot of losing hands. if he had 66 and trapped me with it, so be it. if he didn't call, then all the better as i was able to take down a large chunk with a marginal hand.

hkyfrk calls 760, and is all in smallchou shows [Ks Td] hkyfrk shows [Ad Qc]

obviously you all know how the hand ends, as he spikes a 5-outter on the river. but i think the really interesting part of this hand is thinking about it from his perspective, so let's walk back through the hand from his head: a frequent-raiser, who hasn't shown his cards lately but has raised about 3 of the past 4 hands, has raised to 3x the BB from under-the-gun. it's folded to me and i pick up AQ on the button. now seeing as there are only blinds left in the hand, i have a couple of options. i can re-raise here, but it might make a lot more sense to call as we'll probably be two-handed and i have position on the raiser. if the flop doesn't hit me and he continues with his bet, i can lose little on the hand. if it does hit me and he continues (or if i think he's on a bluff), i can put pressure on him with a re-raise. the flop comes QK6 rainbow. and he proceeds to bet out about 2/3 the pot. that's a relatively strong continuation bet. he could certainly have the K, in which case folding is a must. with 5 outs and 2 cards, i'm at least a 4:1 underdog. but he's been playing so aggressively, he could very well be on a bluff or semi-bluff. now here is where i think the player makes a mistake: his options should really be raise all-in or fold here. he's facing a big bet, with an overcard to his pair on the board. if he thinks i'm bluffing, he should really raise here to take the pot down. he has no reason to think that i'm a COMPLETE maniac who is going to bluff off all my chips, so raising will put the maximum pressure on me, which is vital considering that i've been raising a lot of pots. in fact, if he raised my bet on the flop, i would probably lay the hand down with my marginal kicker (KT). raising would allow him to represent a big hand to me (which i had started to put him on before the flop), making a perfect story to sell his bluff. and really, all his chips are getting into the middle after the turn anyway, so why not give himself some extra fold equity? instead, he chose to smooth-call me on the flop, meaning that he committed to calling off his chips after the turn. this is just another situation where raising your opponent, when you're not really sure what you want him to do, is the perfect play. i think he made an enormous mistake by never taking control of the hand and calling as an *cough* 11-89 underdog. then again, he's the guy who won the hand, so what do i know. oh, by the way:

*** RIVER *** [Kh Qd 6s 4s] [Qs]

poker = awesome.

ok, honestly, this Mavericks Outrage is why i cannot, under any circumstances, root for the dallas mavericks from here on out. i just can't stand it when professional athletes and coaches make ridiculous sarcastic comments like:

"You grab, you don't get suspended," Johnson said. "But the rule is clear: You punch, you get suspended. So, next time, grab."

um, hello. you are recognizing that your player punched a guy in the nuts. or even better:

Terry called the league's decision-making "very inconsistent."

um, hello. you PUNCHED a guy in the genitals. in the nuts. i'm sorry, but anybody who doesn't understand how wrong that is has to be female. or mike chen. hitting below the belt is just off-limits, unless you're mike tyson. i understand that everyone is still amazed that reggie evans did not get a suspension for grabbing chris kaman's underparts, but these are exactly the same kinds of arguments that i used to get from my players when i was coaching. well, minus the whole genitals part. new rule, for these childish nba players and coaches: when you punch another basketball player in the nuts, you lose all rights to complain about anything, inconsistent or not. period. end of story. i think that's fair. and why didn't reggie evans get suspended? well, there are only two people in this world who know what happened inside chris kaman's shorts, and the nba commissioner's office is not one of them. but we have video documented evidence of jason terry flipping out and ringing the berries. what are they going to do, NOT suspend him? i don't even like the spurs that much, but at least they aren't whining nut-punchers. go spurs.

as an asian-american and (pretty much) the biggest sports fan in the world, i found today's ESPN.com article on asian athletes to be interesting. have a read...

i was once talking to someone about playing in a no limit cash game in las vegas, when he asked me how much i generally buy in for. i told him about 40-50 big blinds usually seemed reasonable for me. his reaction fell somewhere between shock and "this motherfucker is crazy". after all, wouldn't buying in for $200 at a $2-$5 no limit table at the wynn (where there is no max buy-in and people regularly buy-in for $1000) be complete suicide?

"why would you leave yourself so short-stacked? that just seems crazy when everyone has so much more cash on the table. you have no power."

we've been trained, by espn and the wpt, that big stacks are power in no limit hold'em. the logic is that, without a big stack, you will constantly be crushed by players raising you out of hands while you wait for premium cards to "get your money in good". yes, this is always true for no limit hold'em tournaments where the blinds escalate and the ratio of a stack to the big blind is anywhere from 10-30. in these situations, a poker player isn't only playing against the other players, but also against the blinds (which always seem to be chasing him) and the threat of death (elimination). when you're getting pushed around by a big stack in a no limit hold'em tournament, you're really getting pushed around by three different factors. it's these factors that often make raising on the button with K2 suited late in a tournament correct. in a tournament, the big stack is always best. let's take an example: i'm on the bubble of a tournament, with only about 10x the big blind left. a late position big stack raises to 4x the big blind. it's folded to me. i'm on the BB and look down to see Ad2d. what exactly do i do? i'm handcuffed by his raise. i can fold, letting myself get even shorter. i can move all-in (when he would be mathematically bound to call with almost any two cards) as a favorite over very few hands and risk my tournament life. or i can call the raise, committing another 3rd of my chips to the pot, pot-committing myself for all my chips. calling and then folding on the flop after a bet would pretty much be suicide. but what about cash games? i've often thought that it is a huge misconception that the biggest stack is always best. and then i listened to The Circuit interview, with Gabe Thaler yesterday in which he echoed my thoughts. thaler's contention, seconded by joe sebok, is that in a no limit cash game, being the small stack is not necessarily a disadvantage. in fact, he believes that it can be a great position to be in. in a no limit cash game, two of the three factors that push on a tournament small stack are taken away. busting out of a cash game or getting a stack that's low in relation to the blinds merely means it's time to re-buy. in a cash game, the term "small stack" rarely means 5x the big blind. it usually means 30-40x the big blind, and this is a big difference. without the pressure of elimination, players have time to wait for a big hand and can still get paid out substantially for it. taking our previous example, seeing that bare Ad2d on the big blind in a cash game as the "short" stack is a whole different story. now i have 30-40x the big blind. chances are, i just pitch these two cards into the muck without even thinking about it. i'm not pressured by the fact that i am running low on chips in relation to the blinds. i can wait for a better spot. now what happens when i actually look down at AA instead of A2? i have a ton of different options against one player (smooth-call, min-raise, standard raise, move-in to like a steal, check-raise the flop all-in), with the potential to double-up. and really, that's all i want. i can just sit around waiting, with the sole purpose of doubling-up. on the other hand, being the big stack in a cash game means that you have all of that money to lose. yes, you can put pressure on your opponents by raising often, but if they're smart they will play back at you when they have the goods, making you susceptible to becoming everyone's banker. pushing people around in a cash game isn't quite as easy because you don't have your two henchmen to help you (blinds and elimination). you're the guy who everyone else is looking to trap or double-up through. they're much more likely to flop a hidden set and milk your top pair for a big score. they have enormous implied odds because you can completely fund their double-up. that's not even mentioning the psychological aspect that barry greenstein raises in his book. greenstein says that he always buys in short to cash games because it builds better discipline and focus in his play. the argument against this school of thought (made on The Circuit by Gavin Smith) is that you want to be the big stack because you always want to get maximum value when you make a big hand. if i flop a straight against someone's two pair, i want to get ALL of his money in one shot. the only way to do that is to have him out-chipped. and yes, this is true, but it also means that you need to be making tremendous decisions after the flop, all the time. you need to extract maximum value from your big hands and escape with minimal damage from your second-best hands. most of all, you need a wild and crazy enough image to get action when you want it. that seems like a pretty tough way to play for me. at the end of the day, the wonderful thing about poker is that there's no one way to win money. but i do think that for the player who isn't positive he can always make the right post-flop decision, being the "short" stack in a no limit cash game has its advantages. in some ways, it's possibly more "powerful" than having a large stack. you have all your options available and one goal in mind: double up.

i was spending some lunch time thinking about the demo i saw at sharpcast last evening, which spurred some interesting thoughts about their business (a quick note on that: seems like their competitors will be as much omnidrive and the online storage companies of the world as it will be mobile services startups. after all, users are going to care about access to information everywhere; whether they'd like that to be on all their devices all the time or just in some central accessible place is an interesting question to bet on). but anyway, as i was thinking about sharpcast i thought to myself "hmm, wouldn't this be a nice chance to go look up some blogs on the topic?" after all, isn't a web 2.0 company like sharpcast exactly in the sweet spot of today's blog search engines? shouldn't technorati and (the newly-launched) sphere be able to hit home runs if i just type in the word "sharpcast"? so i went ahead and quickly typed 'sharpcast' into the respective sites, and i was struck by something. i'll just show the photos first (with some key red highlighting), and you can tell me who you think has a more effective user experience: go ahead and look a little closer if you want, i'll wait. now let's forget, for just a second, about the relevance of the results (um, by the way technorati, might need to work on that), and think about just the human-computer interaction. considering the business of a search engine is to provide the most relevant results as easily as possible to the user, which interface seems like it's better focused on that goal? there's a reason that people preferred the google interface to that of countless dead search engines. now i realize searching in blogs is an inherently difficult process. things are time-sensitive and fast-moving. but instead of throwing your hands up in exasperation and littering the interface with invented functionality (tags), grotesque and irrelevant "sponsored links", and a completely absurd banner ad, wouldn't it be a good idea to think about what the USERS want? with a search engine, users want results and they want results that make sense. two things. that's it. it feels like technorati's almost saying, "um yeah, we've got some results for you, but wouldn't it be better if you looked at all of THESE things? especially since they make us money?" considering the average internet user doesn't even know if he's interested in searching for blogs period, i think that might be a bad idea. but that's just me. bottom line: sphere's interface is beautiful and usable (designed by the folks at adaptive path), which means they're already removing one of the impediments to people using a blog search engine. now it's up to them to try to remove the other impediment: finding great content that actually adds value to the users.

so an interesting thing has happened since i moved from xanga to blogger: i don't write about personal things anymore. somehow having a *dun dun dun* BLOG as opposed to just a tiny little online journal can change your state of mind and your writing. i used to have a fine mix of opinions and reflections, and it's something that i miss. after all, am i really so authoritative on any of the issues i discuss that random people should be taking my word for things? i mean, didn't i predict the lakers would quickly discard of the suns just the other day? so i'm going to warn you now: there will be more reflective posts coming up and that's just how it's going to be. in these posts, there will be no insightful comments about watching nba playoffs, perusing web 2.0 applications, or playing 97 suited on the button for a raise against a loose-aggressive player. if you're looking for those things, you'll need to come back the next day, because sometimes i just need to write. then again, if you are who i think you are, you probably would rather read that stuff anyway... i was talking with a friend (we'll say male for anonymity) last night on the phone, and he briefly mentioned that he was going to therapy. i nearly spewed my glass of sunny delight all over the kitchen table. it's not so much therapy that is quite so shocking, but it's the thought that THIS particular person would be seeking the professional help of a described "tall, kinda thin, balding, middle-aged, white guy." my friend, after all, is one of the most stubborn and cynical people that i have ever met in my life. he delayed purchasing an iPod despite being addicted to music and traveling public transit daily, merely because he hates technology fads. so what did i think? i was happy for him, because he needs someone to talk to. and if that someone needs to be a 45-year old dude named lloyd that my friend doesn't know beyond the condescending tone of his therapist voice, then so be it. but more than that, he needs someone that understands, even if that understanding comes in the package of "and how does that make you FEEL?" well all need that understanding, if only for a little while. it can come in the form of a talk with a friend who just started work in the valley at an exciting place or in the form of a comment to "sack up" from a guy you don't even know through a proxy. sometimes this guidance comes at the strangest of times and it makes everything clear. or at least clearer. just for a day. honesty: the new therapy.

one of the really entertaining subplots of the nba in the past, oh, 20 years has been the conflict between LA's two nba teams: the clippers and the lakers. there's really no way to describe the situation beyond taking it out of the context of sports entirely. let's say that a family has two children. one is the good child. he gets straight a's, quarterbacks the high school football team, dates really nice girls, and his parents lavish him with attention and material love. inside, he's actually an incredibly arrogant jerk, but his parents can't seem to see that. that's the lakers, one of the premier basketball franchises in nba history. a franchise where a player as transcendant as james worthy doesn't come close to cracking its all-time starting five. they sell out the arena, jack nicholson comes to watch them play, and dyan cannon remains a pseudo-celebrity just by being a fan. the other child is the clippers. he's spindly and awkward, with bad grades, asshole friends, and no interests beyond hot-boxing the 1980 fiat pass-me-down daily. his parents don't really know what to do with him. they don't want to pour too much money into his interests because he doesn't seem to care about them anyway and, while they say they love both children equally, it's just kinda different. i mean, the biggest "celebrity" fan they have (in LA for christ's sake) is the 35-year old actor that played malcolm in 'malcolm in the middle'. clearly the two children don't like each other either. the older brother's always making fun of the less accomplished son, and is always there to laugh at his failures. heck, they even share the same living space (the staples center), but the favorite son's room is twice as nice (on game days :) ). the younger son's always secretly envious of the favorite's accomplishments. that's how LA professional basketball always was and how it always will be. but a funny thing happened in the last few years. take one part acidic me-first superstar who tears up the lakers franchise. one part nice-guy superstar to put some respectability into the clippers. and mix in one part alien-faced cocky almost-superstar who does a (really bizarre) 'i have huge testicles' dance after he hits huge shots. and suddenly you get this: a potential second round matchup between favorite son and outcast, in which the outcast is actually favored! for emphasis: Lakers vs. Clippers, Western Conference Semifinals the subplots surrounding this potential series are as exciting as you can get in the nba these days. you can tell because the press is already going nuts about it. and if you think that i might be jinxing the lakers by writing about this already, well you're right. but i think some superstars can transcend even the jack chou prediction jinx and kobe might just be one of them. and after kobe and friends have finished off that floppy-haired fake-mvp steve nash, i'm gonna do the only thing any self-respecting basketball fan can do: cheer for the clippers. go clips.

tags: lakers, kobe, clippers, elton brand, sam cassell, nba

draft day's here. just a few quick notes on what i'm hoping from the niners at the top of the draft: 1st Rd, 6th Overall: i want us to pick up the best available here at one of our need spots, which (lucky for us!) is any position but qb really... i'd be happy with vernon davis, the freakish tight end from maryland. i mean, honestly, what kind of a person is a ripped 6'3" and 254 lbs., while running a 4.4 40 with great hands? i'd also be really happy with picking aj hawk to shore up our linebacking corps. i got to watch him some on tv and it'd be a great pick-up. if something crazy happens and d'brickashaw ferguson falls to us, i wouldn't mind seeing that pick either. basically i think we're in a good spot no matter what happens, unless all three of those guys and reggie bush are off the board. now THAT would be a disaster. 1st Rd, 22nd Overall: depending on who we pick up with the 6th pick, i'd like to see a nice defensive pick here: either a DB (jonathan joseph, antonio cromartie, tye hill or someone like that) or an OLB (chad greenway or bobby carpenter?) if we don't get hawk. i also wouldn't mind seeing us pick up one of the wide receivers (chad jackson, santonio holmes, sinorice moss) that fall that far, particularly if we get hawk with our first pick. cross your fingers, as i will be checking in from startup school on my phone.

you know, you have to admit that these e-mail spammers are getting a little more creative.. check out this one that i got from a "lee_pang1":

Due to the sudden death of my husband General Abacha the former head of state of Nigeria in June 1998, I have been thrown into a state of hopelessness by the present administration. I have lost confidence with anybody within my country.I got your contacts through personal research,and had to reach you through this medium. I will give you more details when you reply. Due to security network placed on my daily affairs I cant visit the embassy so that is why I have contacted you. My husband deposited $12.6million dollars with a security firm abroad whose name is witheld for now till we communicate. I will be happy if you can receive this funds and keep it safe I assure you 20% of this fund.I will need your tel mobile numbers so that we can commence communication.I await your urgent reply.
Sincerly Yours,
Hajia
Mariam. 

i mean, what do these people exactly think that i'm going to do? "oh man, i feel really bad for this lady who is apparently looking to go into exile. i wish there was some monetary benefit that i could get from helping her so i could justify using my time in that way. whoa, $12.6 million dollars! nice! i'm totally in."

c'mon now people, let's get a little more sensible here. don't you have something better to do with your life than write these emails? who wakes up in the morning psyched to be coming up with something like this?

i kind of want to write a response that says, "um sorry, 20% is only around $2.5M. i don't help people for less than $3M." i'd do it, but i'd be scared of the crazy porn ads that would spam my inbox. gotta love the internet.

oh, and i'd really like to know how she got my e-mail through "personal research" and was able to decide definitively that i could be trusted with $12M. that's some SERIOUS personal research because i can't even get my friends to hand over that much money.

that dunk was just plain filthy.

ESPN.com - NBA - PhotoId_1132139_

go watch the video highlight here on espn...

so after the comments left on my last post, i think it's probably a good time to put down some thoughts about america's redheaded stepchild sport: soccer. here are some basic facts:

- more children and youths play soccer in the united states than any other organized sport. period.

- soccer is by far the most popular sport in the world by any measure.

- almost everyone else in the world calls "soccer" football, or futbol. it is also referred to in other countries as the "beautiful game"

- no professional soccer league has ever flourished in the united states; it has never come close to approaching the Big sports: baseball, basketball, football, and (now) nascar

so this is somewhat of a strange confluence of facts, don't you think? everyone in the country plays soccer. everyone in the world LOVES soccer. and... for some reason, soccer is not that big in the united states.

first off, let's address my personal thoughts on the game of soccer (futbol). i like it. as a kid i played ayso soccer and enjoyed it enough. heck, everyone i knew played soccer also. i loved basketball far more, but i certainly didn't dislike the game played with feet. i think, in general, americans feel this way about the sport. there is nothing WRONG with it. we enjoy playing it enough. but for some reason, we don't get embedded into the culture and excitement of the sport like other countries do. when i took Sociology in Sports in college, we spent an entire segment of the class talking about this. there were all sorts of theoretical and cultural explanations for the lack of popularity in soccer throughout the country, including "Americans didn't invent the game so they think it sucks." at the end of the day though, i think there are two reasons for its lack of popularity: the television and we're not the best.

i guess it's not really JUST the television, but more the television married with the relatively late arrival of the game in the american consciousness. but let's get to the point: soccer kinda blows to watch on television. it's true. it's a beautiful game with amazing intricacies and fast action, but restricting it to a television screen is impossible for the tv producers of a soccer game. they either have to pan out too far, turning the players into ants scouring around a ball that you can't see, or they have to pan in and see, at any time, the player with ball and maybe 20 meters radially around him/her. in soccer, that does not come close to properly representing the complexity of the game.

let's compare that to basketball, where 90% of the time all ten players on the floor can be seen well within the screen. the boundaries of basketball are restricted to a 94' long playing field, of which participants will usually only use half. in football, players line up in two rows of amassed bodies prior to the snap. true, action often runs off the screen, but the excitement of all running plays can generally be noted on-screen, leaving only passing plays to the imagination of the viewer. also, americans like seeing people hit each other.

baseball can focus on the central figures of the game (pitcher, catcher). nascar is in theory a simple conceptual ordering of cars, meaning that you can focus on a single vehicle and still, based on its standing, have a clear understanding of the overall action of the race, as it is (conceptually, at least) a two-dimensional game. that leaves just soccer and hockey, neither of which display well on television and neither of which have (really) captured widespread excitement in the US.

but why does this matter when actual in-person viewers and players of these sports can clearly grasp the intricacies of them? well, mostly because soccer started "behind" and is trying to catch up. to flourish professionally in the US means to get fans, and fans want to see one of two things from sports they watch on television: 1) excitement and understandable complexity (aesthetic experience), or 2) something that they can't or wouldn't want to do themselves. basketball? people feel like they understand the game (even thought they don't) and they can't dunk. football? people feel like they understand the game (but it's far more intricate than they think) and they don't want to hit or get hit. nascar? people feel like they understand the game and they don't want to risk their own lives. soccer? they can't understand everything that goes on on the field (cuz most of the time they can't see it) and there is nothing particularly dangerous or mystifying that is done on the field.

so that brings us to the second point, because if it's just that people in america need those two aspects of the television-viewing experience to get excited about a sport, then why isn't the WNBA blowing up? one could argue it's because the women don't dunk, but several women have dunked in the past few years and that has led to zero increased interest in the sport. well, it's because americans don't like watching less than the best on tv. we don't watch division II football because "it doesn't matter". we don't watch minor league baseball because the majors are there. and therein lies the problem with the wnba: people inherently treat it like a minor league because we don't perceive the players to be as good as nba players. period. that's it. if the wnba all-stars played the nba all-stars in a full-court 48-minute game and beat them, then people might start watching the wnba. so, for soccer, because we know so many countries have been at it for so long, there's very little chance that we're watching the best players in the world in the mls. and so we don't watch. it's a mindset. so combine that perspective with the fact that soccer is the new guy, and there is zero traction.

so what does soccer need? fostering a grassroots approach to the game is not going to turn it into a big professional sport in america. no chance. people are too entrenched with football on sundays and nascar on whichever day it is that they race on. what soccer really needs in america? it needs the US mens' team to win the world cup, more star players coming to the mls from europe, and some television breakthrough that allows people to better experience the game. until then? until then i guess mainstream america thinks soccer sucks.

as the nba season just ended, i thought this was a good time to roll out an entry that i've been writing for weeks. at a thursday "tim dinner" a few months ago, someone brought up the following question:

If you could pick one basketball player RIGHT NOW to start an NBA franchise with, who would it be?

keep in mind that all of the following factors count:

1) winning games: we want to win games. period. what player gives you the best opportunity to build a team to win? after all, winning ultimately, leads to...
2) filling seats: we want to make money off tickets, concessions, parking, the whole deal. this is a game, but it's also a business. gotta get that paper.
3) team popularity: having a popular team nationally and internationally increases merchandising profits.
4) longevity: having the big aristotle (as an aside: i was SHOCKED to find out there's no wikipedia entry for me to link to for 'big aristotle') might win you games and make you money, but what about five years from now?

i've been thinking about this a lot (yes, i do spend lots of time thinking about these things) and my list looks like this...

Popular choices, but not MY popular choices: Shaq, Steve Nash, Allen Iverson... all for various reasons.

I had a horrific time picking the fifth spot. Here are the other guys I debated amongst. Just missed the cut, in no particular order:
KG (+ versatility... - age, needs help)
AK-47 (+ defense, team play... - injuries, marketability)
Chris Bosh (+ age, overall game... - marketability? winner?)
Dwight Howard (+ age, defense, rebounding... - raw offense game, marketability? winner?)
TD (+ best player in basketball when healthy... - age, marketability)
Dirk Diggler (+ offensive game, clutch performer... - marketability)

5. Carmelo Anthony: i'm still not quite sure i want to pick carmelo at number five, as i struggled with this decision FOREVER. in fact, it's the only reason i haven't posted this till now. i think he made a tremendous LEAP this year. and any time you can get somebody who is that dominant of a scorer at the age of 21, you have to consider him even though he plays shit defense. add the facts that he is one of the top jersey sellers in the nba in one of its smaller markets and that he is incredibly clutch with a great public persona... bingo.

4. Kobe Bryant: regular readers of this blog know how much i detest kobe bryant. he is selfish, arrogant, and a bad teammate. he shoots too much. he demands the ball too much. and... he is the most dominant player in basketball. this guy takes shots that i used to yell at my players for even contemplating. he'll jumpstop at the three-point line, pump fake a guy in the air, and THEN pull up for a 25-footer. and the craziest part is, you're always shocked if he misses it, no matter how ludicrous it is. i heard an unnamed expert on the radio a few weeks ago say that he thought kobe was the most dangerous scorer he has ever seen on a basketball court. think about it: mike, kareem, and all the others always had a few spots on the floor and a few moves that they went to. they murdered you from those spots. but kobe? what's his "signature" move? is there any move or shot on the basketball court that he doesn't have in his repetoire? not to mention he also plays his ass off on defense and has big-game playoff experience. after all this, he's only 27. that's astounding. and if being charged for rape didn't hurt his popularity with his fans, then really nothing short of pulling an OJ will. painful choice...

3. Chris Paul: before the draft last year, i wrote this about chris paul:

I still think this guy is the easiest pick to be a perennial all-star for the better part of two decades. he's strong, fast, ultra-quick, smart, hits big shots, talented, supremely confident, defends like a beast, interviews well, and he has a ferocious mean streak....
ceiling: isiah, without the blatant homosexuality. marbury's game with a winning attitude.
floor: steve nash plus the ability to defend my mom, not to mention real nba players.

the two biggest ass-faces in the draft last year? atlanta and utah, both of whom NEEDED a point guard. neither of whom went with the easiest pick in ten years. best of all, he seems to be a class act who plays his ass off with no baggage. awesome.

2. Dwyane Wade: as crazy is it is to pick anyone but my number one, i came thisclose to doing it. when wade was a junior at marquette, i was a huge fan. i picked them to go to the final four and thought wade would be a fine pro. he was versatile, defended SO well, understood the game, and seemed to have a quiet confidence that was obvious. i thought all those things and i never once thought he would be as good as he is today. he's getting better every ten games, he's getting stronger every year, he seems like a great person, he's a top-level defender, and he is one of the five best in the league in the last five minutes of a game. i think he's 1a. john hollinger thinks he's the mvp this year.

1. Lebron James: let's be honest, his birthday was December 30, 1984. i'll type that again: 1984. that means that he's 21 years old. 21! at 21 i was trying to figure out what beer to drink. he's 6'8" and 240 lbs. he has credibility with white corporate america and urban culture. he has "the look" and "the swagger". but most of all, he's one of the top four players in the game from minutes 0-46 and he's getting better. only time will tell if he becomes the same in those last two minutes, but i think you'd be nuts to pick anyone else. of course, we'll see how he does in the real show, starting saturday at 12pm pacific.

of course, the beauty of sports is everyone gets their own opinions. feel free to let me know where i've gone wrong...

tags: sports, nba

probably a little-noticed piece of news today, but the Niners picked up the 22nd overall pick in the upcoming draft from the Broncos for two lower picks (2nd round 37th overall, 3rd round 68th overall).

as a niners fan, i was elated by the trade, but not because we duped the broncos or anything like that. nfl front office people are inherently a suspicious and careful bunch, particularly teams that are in the higher echelons of the league. a small misstep in the nfl, with its salary cap and collective bargaining agreement, can damage your squad much worse than it can in baseball, for instance. so it's not like the niners pulled a fast one on denver.

but for both teams, this trade makes a lot of sense. for denver, a team that feels it's at a level where they are consistently competing in the playoffs, the draft is really about maintaining a high-level of performance. it's about being able to place some well-timed bets on talent in the hopes that you can develop and blossom it into future stars to replace your current stars. with the salary cap structures and their ability to waive players' unguaranteed money at any time, nfl front offices often backload nfl contracts with money that players will never get (for example: TO's tiff with the philly front office last year over non-guaranteed cash that would NEVER have hit his bank account). the result is that most nfl contracts that look huge are not really so huge because the team can waive it at any time, paying only the guaranteed money (signing bonus, etc.). so a team like denver, with veteran stars and a decent cap number today will probably need to make adjustments further down the line to shrink their cap numbers; not everyone on the denver roster today will see all the money that's in his contract.

think of it like this: every nfl team has a small greenhouse (the salary cap) and they fit all their plants (contracts) into the greenhouse today. but most of these plants are going to keep growing (back-loaded contracts) and eventually they will have to either throw plants out (waive players) or snip them a bit to make sure there's room (re-structure deals). for a team like denver, with a nice, blooming garden, they don't want to bring in another young plant that is already huge (first rounders make a lot of money) when they have a nice-looking collection already. they'd rather take two smaller plants that have potential for a lot of growth. then when some of the older large plants grow too much, or get too large for how ugly the look, they can junk those since these two youngsters are playing the cover-2 well, er, blossoming.

a couple of teams that have done well with this are the patriots and the eagles. a few years ago, the eagles had a couple of shutdown corners named bobby taylor and troy vincent. these were two of the best cornerbacks in the nfl and they were part of a great secondary and defense. so what did the eagles do in the 2002 draft? they took two cornerbacks name lito sheppard and sheldon brown. huh? sure they weren't going to start over taylor or vincent. but 1) the eagles didn't need them to start (or even play) immediately because the team was already so good, and 2) the eagles knew someday they wouldn't be able to afford taylor and vincent. maybe sheppard puts it best himself:

"When I came here, I was in a great situation where I didn't have to step in there right away. I got a chance to learn from the best corners to ever play the game. Along with what I brought to the table, I got some smartness of the game from those guys. When I did get the opportunity, I wasn't perfect, but I was ahead of a rookie coming in." philadelphiaeagles.com

lo and behold, a few years later, taylor and vincent are elsewhere, and sheppard and brown are part of one of the best secondaries in football.

of course, for a team like the niners, this strategy doesn't work. we need people that can step in and play right away. could you find that in the second and third rounds? probably, but it might take some searching and some luck. in other words, our greenhouse is, how do i say, not as filled as that of other teams. we can bring in some big plants that have room for growth, but also have sizeable cap numbers, er, space requirements today. i like the move to pick up the extra first-round pick. those fifteen spots between the 22nd and 37th picks can make a big difference, especially if mike nolan and company have someone that they really like in the 20-25 range. now let's all cross our fingers and hope we make some good picks.

either that or package the 6 and the 22 for reggie bush :).

technorati tags: niners, draft, nfl, eagles

he's going to be too humble to write about something like this in a public place, but check THIS shit out:

sharpcast blog post

some of you will, of course, wonder what that has to do with anything and who the hell is this charles guy. well, the 'charles' is my buddy charles srisuwananukorn (sorry for ruining the anonymity). this is, of course, the same guy who used to claim that he was going to be a medieval studies major at stanford... after he'd already taken about 25 CS courses. he has also been to me, at times, a minesweeper competitor, "Chuck", a drawmate, and a good friend. and, of course, also 'my bitch'. he has also been to many other people, 'the guy with the sisters.'

so congratulations to sharpcast on luring charles away from microsoft. i enjoyed reading gibu's perspective on their difficulties recruiting against the behemoth pseudo-startup enterprises of the bay area. they sound like they're probably pretty excited.

i'm just excited he'll be around the bay area to con into drinking beer on a tuesday night.

technorati tags: charles, sharpcast, recruiting

conversation between me and phillus... [10:04] smallchou@gmail.com: i'll invite you on google calendar [10:04] lehman.p@gmail.com: whoa...cool [10:04] lehman.p@gmail.com: how do i get to that? [10:05] smallchou@gmail.com: yeah [10:05] lehman.p@gmail.com: is there a link to it from gmail? [10:05] smallchou@gmail.com: ah HA so i'm still wondering where that link is. also, all the reports about the calendar seem to say that it will semantically determine when a gmail message includes an event and give you the option to directly add it to your calendar... not seeing that yet... c'mon google, get it together Grouch...

tags: google, calendar, product

i am not driven by money. i'm not. the funny thing is, i just realized this a few weeks ago. how does one go about determining that he is not driven by money? well, a couple of months ago, i was talking with phil (about a bunch of random topics) and he said something to me that was particularly sticky. i'll paraphrase:

'i have these two conflicting desires. one is to do something good for society and make a real positive difference. to really help people. the other... the other is to drive a maserati. and i *really* want both of them.'

and he meant it. this is by no means a critique on phil and his desire to own a maserati. after all, somebody builds maseratis, meaning that it is perfectly reasonable for someone to dream about buying one. what's wrong with that? i have often gazed longingly at a beautiful piece of machinery like a ferrari or audibly wondered, "how'd he get that fing thing to BUMP that loud?" i wouldn't mind owning a maserati someday, but having one doesn't drive me as a person. i actually find that unfortunate because it'd be pretty frickin' easy if i could fulfill myself by owning a tricked out 2006 bmw m5.

whew. figured that out. IT is not money. so what is IT? and here is the difficult part, as i've spent the last three months asking this exact question of myself. i went through several iterations of thinking about this and got nowhere.

i thought long and hard about professional sports. after all, i know more about sports than just about anyone i know. i have strong opinions about sports about on-the-field issues, management decisions, and philosophical (chuck klosterman) levels. what better role than to implant myself into the sports world? however, in addition to realizing that whoring myself out to professional sports is harder than it sounds, i realized that i would inherently detest the business of professional sports (or at least i think i would). and there was just something "missing" about it. so scratch that.

what else do i love? well, i love poker. i enjoy playing it when i can. i've made a really solid chunk of money playing it in the last few years. i enjoy talking and thinking about the games. maybe i should go do that for a living? then i thought back to a conversation i had with a local pro at mirage in november. we had been sitting at a 2-5 NL table for most of the day and had progressively built up some sizeable stacks. he asked me whether i was 'local,' implying a local pro. i told him i wasn't but i had thought about becoming one. he told me that he had been paying the bills by playing at the mirage for about four months:

"it's much more of a grind than i ever thought it would be. when i take a big loss, it's no longer just feeling like shit. it's actual worry about where my rent will come from next month. when i book a big win, it's more like relief than excitement."

hmm, not exactly a ringing endorsement for being a professional poker player. i think i also realized that playing poker for a living would never fulfill me deep down. i would always feel that i was missing something. 'missing what,' you ask?

the answer came to me last week at work. i had been assigned to handle product management duties for a quick (almost emergency) project. it involved elements of interaction design, usability design, information presentation, and infrastructural understanding (ambiguous i know, but can't really talk about it). because it was such a quick project, we were freed to some degree from the usual constraints of product design at a gargantuan software company, with all of its restrictive technologies and processes. it was product management without the over-management. it was product. i loved it.

for the first time in several months, i felt excited about my work. i made concerted design decisions and spent all day thinking about my users. i debated for an hour about whether there should be a line break in a certain place and obsessed about font/icon colors. it made understand that "missing" feeling was when i thought about playing poker for a living: the challenge, excitement, and sense of pride in building a product. it's what i wanted to do in the first place and it's why i chose product management (over consulting or more technical roles). now i just need to find a place where i can really get that feeling every day. search in process.

last week was the first time i ever paid for an online service. true, i paid for ESPN Insider before, but that's not so much a service as it is a personal necessity like food (i guess it is a service too :) ). of course i've paid for products online (amazon.com, etc.), but never a service. my reasoning? there are so many free services available that i just find it infuriating when a web service can't figure out a business model to keep itself afloat without charging me. last week though, i purchased a flickr pro account. the reason? they forced me into it! they forced me into it by providing a service that i found so fantastic that when i hit the monthly upload limit for free accounts, i thought to myself: "you need to spring for the $2/month so you can upload all those europe photos." (short aside: when i returned from europe in july of 2004 i wanted to post all of my photos online to share with people, but i never did it because all of the photo sites had poor sharing features or wanted people to sign up for their service to get access to the shared photos. i thought that was total horseshit. not bullshit, horseshit.) kudos to flickr for sucking me in. so the next question is, of course, why did i find the service so fantastic? as a product manager and a product designer, i find myself constantly thinking, "this product/service/widget is completely shit/wonderful because..." for flickr, it's the ease of use (which is how an online photo sharing site should be) and the carefulness of their design decisions. they really know their users. my favorite example of this is a tiny little option that you, if you're a flickr user, may not have even noticed. on the Organize page, there is a tiny checkbox: i looked at this checkbox, read the text again, and had to smile. everyone knows what the "zoom thing" is. when you mouseover a thumbnail, the interface automatically zooms into the photo so that you get a better view. i mean, it's the zoom thing. the thing where it zooms. how do you explain the zoom thing in ten words or less and in text that everyone can understand? i mean, it's the 'zoom thing', but we can't call it that, can we? we could call it 'thumbnail zoomer' but that's making up a word and not exactly descriptive. we could call it 'zoom on thumbnails when mouse pointer is over the thumbnail' but that would be ridiculous. i love the decision by them to just call it "zoom thing" because it represents an understanding of their users. flickr users are casual and friendly. they want a casual and friendly application that works with them. if i was labeling a similar feature in Customers Online, there is no way in hell that i would ever call it the "zoom thing". our users are behemoth corporations and IT departments who would scoff at the colloquial text. "zoom thing". good for flickr, not good for oracle. yeah, maybe the "zoom thing" text was just flickr being lazy, but i kinda believe that it wasn't. i think they actually sat down and thought the labeling of the checkbox through. maybe they started out with it as "zoom thing" with the intent of changing it and realized that there's just really nothing better for their users and their appliation. that's good design, recognizing what your users want and need, and delivering it without complicating it.

tags: flickr, product

my brother asked me today why ucla seems to get no love from the "experts." it seems that, for their fourth game in a row, the bruins will enter tonight's game as the underdog. this must be somewhat strange for the selection committee considering they gave ucla a higher seed than all but one of those four teams. i thought for a while about this topic. indeed, it seems like the experts have all jumped on the gators bandwagon. i read the articles on espn by doug gottlieb and pat forde. i read the simulated result. and i listened to a two-minute standard dickie v rant. all of them picked florida. gene wojciechowski was the only espn writer pimping the bruins. the answer that i've come up with? east coast bias. before you chalk me up to another crazed west coast fan, let's go over why i think that: all of the talk on saturday night, all over sports radio and the internet, was how surprising ucla's performance was. let's recap: they put up a 59-45 drubbing on lsu that wasn't nearly that close. the talk centered around: 1) how stingy ucla's defense was, and 2) how impressive (and surprising) the offense looked. listening to this banter made a pac-10 fan like myself wonder: "have you watched a single ucla game outside of the tournament this year?" while i drove with ivy on saturday night i even yelled at the radio several times calling a host an idiot for spouting off about how "surprising" ucla was. why are they idiots? 1) how stingy ucla's defense was: this was, of course, a ucla team that held high-flying memphis to a similar 45 points last saturday. why exactly was the national media surprised by the 45 lsu put up the other night? in the second half of the gonzaga game, they held the bulldogs to 29 points even though all i can remember from most it was adam morrison and jp batista making big shot after big shot. the fact that the national media was surprised by ucla's ability to stop a team of freshmen and sophomores with no dependable backcourt (after they had put the clamps on a much more athletic and talented memphis team) speaks only to the media's lack of knowledge about ucla. as the lsu and ucla players divulged after the game, lsu wasn't ready for ucla's intensity on defense. their intensity allows their wing defenders to get up into the space of wing players while still containing dribble penetration and expecting help. anybody who has ever played basketball against someone who played that physically against you can describe the difficulties the style causes. 2) how impressive (and surprising) the offense looked: ucla scored 59 points on saturday. great. now exactly how impressive is that considering it was the seventh-lowest point total they put up ALL SEASON? i understand that they looked good on offense, but if any of the national media had watched them this season, they would know that ucla's impotence on offense against memphis and gonzaga (first half) was the anomaly, not the norm. did they really think that ucla won 31 games at that point by averaging 50 a game? of course the most telling details have been the backhanded compliments of ucla as a "tough, big east or big ten style team." i always used to hate similar statements about montgomery's stanford teams. what exactly about playing tough defense is specific to the big ten or the big east? even during dickie v's prediction of a florida win, he touted ben howland's tough defensive style that "he brought from the big east." news flash, dickie: ben howland came from the west coast (oregon). he coached on the west coast (gonzaga, ucsb, northern arizona). he developed his style on the west coast. and THEN he went to the big east (pittsburgh). sorry to disappoint you. maybe ucla won't win tonight, but i think they will and i'm going to explain this one more time: ucla shortens games and that's how they win. they play defense by being physical at all five positions, bumping EVERYONE, moving their feet very well, blocking out effectively, and helping often. does this leave them susceptible to teams with creative and athletic wing players who can break down players off the dribble and create (brandon roy, washington; adam morrison, gonzaga; and maybe taurean green, florida)? yes. does it allow them to cover up some deficiencies? yes. they push the ball to try to get easy shots against undisciplined defensive teams (lsu). does this prove useless when a team like gonzaga provides good court balance? yes. they enjoy using the whole shot clock to get a shot because it makes the other team play defense for 35 seconds and that, in and of itself, is difficult. they rely on their guards at end-of-shot-clock situations and aren't afraid of shot clock violations because it helps their tempo much more than a quick, unbalanced shot will. will they win tonight against florida? i'm pretty sure they will, but if they don't it will be because the florida guards are effective attacking the basket, hitting outside shots, and creating opportunities for their big people. if florida doesn't do that, i think we're looking at a ucla championship. hopefully the national media won't be too surprised. **edit: well, that didn't work out too well. was anybody else stunned by the way that game played out?

tags: sports, basketball, ncaa, ucla

when i was back in school, i always used to marvel at people who talked about how busy they were. i can remember scoffing at people who didn't have time to go get a beer (or fifteen) because they needed to study/eat/sleep/read. i realized the other day that i've become one of those people. i lament about how packed my schedule is. i struggle to fit workouts into my day. i question why i have a pile of books seven deep ready to be read. i wonder where my time goes on a nightly basis. the result? i feel unfulfilled, lazy, ineffective, unmotivated, and progressively heftier. time to turn that back on its head. morning workouts start back up tomorrow. i'm going to plan my time on a several-day basis to make room for the things i want and accomplish the goals i have. less "i'm just so busy" and more "what's next?" the theme? more investment: + invest physically: re-dedicate myself to working out extensively. i feel more productive and energetic when i've pushed myself physically. tangible goal: get back to 35 miles a week. get this running done in the morning at least three times a week. + invest mentally: read more and think more. i need to spend more time reading great writers and reading great thinkers. i also need to spend more time writing. tangible goal: read at least one book every two weeks. write in this blog about *something* at least three times a week. + invest financially: my finances are in order but i'm not satisfied by what they're doing for me. tangible goal: spend two hours every week making sure i'm on track financially. get in 6+ hours of table time every week :). + invest personally: actively spend more consistent time with people that i value on a personally. i have great friends. tangible goal: see friends more. time to get after it.

enough with the dabbling: i decided yesterday that i will be mostly playing stud hi/lo split eight-or-better for the next few months. granted, it probably will not provide the best monetary value (especially considering that the limits are 4-8 while the new no limit game at garden city is generally juicy), but i want to get good at the game. stud hi/lo is a much more intricate and complex game than limit hold'em. the variances in possible hands and the amount of information that you can gather from the board greatly change how much information is in just the cards. it is a game of math and feel and skill. it's a game of realizing a small edge and maximizing profit or realizing a small disadvantage and minimizing loss. for example: last night i looked down at JT-Q on third street. with several people matching the bring-in bet and nobody completing yet, i was getting great odds to "take one off" and try to pick up an open-ended straight draw on fourth street. that was, of course, until i looked again out at the board and saw two K's and 2 9's already out. the chances of me picking up such a draw went from 8 in 42 to 4 in 42 just like that. the hand became an easy fold. if we just do a quick mathematical count, in an eight-handed game of stud, on third street i will see 10 of the 52 cards, meaning that all further odds are in terms of 42 unseen cards. compare this to hold'em where, when we first make a betting decision, we have seen exactly 2 of the 52 cards and you can understand the intricacy involved in the game. i'm excited to spend time improving my game in stud hi/lo. last night in a six-hour session i could recount at least 15 different mistakes i made, whether they be missing a bet, missing a raise, or missing a lay-down. i need to fix these things and become proficient at the game. once i feel confident in stud hi/lo and am able to beat the game at garden city consistently, i will probably move back limit hold'em and try to move up to the 20-40 game. i'm excited about these challenges. wish me luck.

bud selig and baseball announced yesterday that they are launching an independent investigation into steroid use in baseball. i think the common response by most baseball fans is: "now?" if we backtrack over several years of baseball history, the inklings and suspicions of baseball were always there. the massive growth of a multitude of average baseball players. the rapid rate of home runs across the majors. sammy sosa breaking maris' record after being an average, base-stealing outfielder for most of his career. the low-level rumor mill, mouthing out whispers of in-the-ass injections. the admission of steroid use by ken caminiti. bret boone suddenly spraying 37 home runs in 2001 in the largest ballpark in the majors. the book of jose canseco. mark mcgwire taking the "high road" in front of congress. rafael palmeiro apparently taking the low road in front of congress. despite all of the information, somehow baseball didn't begin steroid testing at all until 2003, five years after sammy sosa's arms ballooned like the governator's. isn't that a little odd? all along, over the years of baseball's resurgence, bud selig sat on the side and let the elephant in the room grow and grow. what's sad is that he isn't pushed to this investigation by an overwhelming feeling of morality, but by a book about barry bonds. because people love to hate barry, as a proud and arrogant black athlete (see: jack johnson, muhammad ali, etc.), the public outcry over barry extends far beyond all of the other indicating steroid factors. much to the horror of major league baseball, the steroid problem that they avoided for years has come front and center, so large that selig can no longer ignore it. what does the commissioner of baseball do? start an investigation to wipe his own hands clean. sorry bud, the steroid era happened on YOUR watch. you let it happen because you wanted the money, the new stadiums, the returning fans, and the adulation that came along with a baseball resurgence. you shut your mouth and let it happen because you were too afraid of what would happen if the steroid usage came out in the press. you sacrificed the honesty of baseball for money and prestige. in other words, you are no different from barry bonds and his alleged steroid use. now you want to "clean it all up"? i hope dearly that what george mitchell finds is a massive several year period where everyone in baseball looked the other way in the face of relentless news about steroids. and i hope that you, bud selig, are implicated as the sniveling, gutless disgrace of a commissioner that you are. you wanted your legacy to be new ballparks and the return of baseball. instead it will be steroids and the dishonesty of the game. we can all see it in your face: you're as guilty as jose canseco, ken caminiti, mark mcgwire, sammy sosa, and the rest. you ARE barry bonds. edit: looks like buster olney agrees...

tags: baseball, steroids, bud selig

interesting perspective by mike lee in the comments of my last post, though i don't think i ever said i watch sports to see gonzaga (or any other college kids) choke away games. if it didn't come across in the post, i think we watch sports because on any given night, something that is stunning, unthinkable, amazing, or terrible could happen. about the game: i don't really believe that gonzaga just gave the game away. i believe that gonzaga lost because they were not in the mental mindset to win the basketball game over 40 minutes. as memphis demonstrated on saturday, short contested misses and turnovers are not necessarily unforced events. i think we should give ucla some recognition for that. i hate the term "battle-tested" to describe sports teams, but in this case i feel as though perhaps gonzaga just wasn't battle-tested. as for gonzaga: i like gonzaga. i like the program. i like the coach. i think adam morrison is a fine player and a good pro prospect (great, before thursday night). but if you got to watch the game from where i saw it on thursday, you'd know that they bitch and complain far too much for a junior high school team, much less a college team. there was a great moment in saturday night's ucla-memphis game when jordan farmar started to talk to a ref after being BLATANTLY fouled with no call. the camera cut to ben howland, directing farmar very clearly to "shut UP." i thought that was a great example of how players should be expected to respond to officiating adversity. it's a demonstration of toughness and character. don't like a call? put your head down, dig in, and play harder. don't lose focus on the game. and therein lies my problem with adam morrison crying, kid or not. it wasn't the fact that he was crying, but that the game wasn't OVER. they were down one point. there were seconds left on the clock. yet morrison was already thinking about losing. there were enough seconds, in fact, for either of: 1) a steal and bucket to win, or 2) a foul, long pass, and bucket to win/tie. were these longshot ways of winning the game? yes. but so was scoring the last 11 points of the game to win by two. if you're going to cry after a loss, at least do it AFTER the loss. there is no shame in that (jj redick, randy foye, etc.), particularly for a 21-year old. i wasn't celebrating a gonzaga choke. i was celebrating a very telling comeback win by ucla and commenting on a very telling moment about adam morrison. it's a comment that i think is fair considering some nba team will be paying him several million dollars in a few months.

and that is why we watch sports: games like tonight's. unbelievable game, i can't believe i got to watch it in-person (thanks phil). the first game of the night, memphis-bradley was rather lackluster as the tigers used their superior athleticism and aggressiveness to run bradley into the ground. the arena was about half full. as we neared gametime for ucla-gonzaga, the seats started filling up. you could feel a palpable buzz in the air as tip-off came. to be honest, i've never felt something like that before a sporting event, even in the great stanford-arizona tilts. then the game started. and ucla was in trouble. they couldn't hit a shot. they couldn't defend morrison and batista. they couldn't keep their hands off players, repeatedly fouling. and, perhaps most of all, they couldn't keep arron afflalo on the floor (to score buckets and defend morrison). and yet, at halftime they were *only* down 13. i turned to phil and said, "i can't believe they're not down by 25." from my seat eight rows back from the court, you could tell that ucla came out to play in the second half. it's as if howland told them in the locker room, "we might foul every one of our players out of the game, but we're going to play our asses off." early in the second half, jordan farmar shoved derek raivio in the neck with a forearm, knocking him to the ground. when raivio turned and complained to the referee, i figured ucla had a chance. why? because tough teams know that you need to go out and TAKE games away. any team with a point guard that would spend that much time crying to the referee was expecting to be given something. still, i was stunned at the end of the game. i think stunning is the only word to describe it. at the end of the day, ucla made the plays when they mattered, scoring the last 11 points of the game. the most telling moment came with 2.9 seconds left, as morrison cried on the court, with the game still going on. it was the perfect example of why ucla won the game: they were determined and they WON the game. they didn't cry about bad calls. they didn't pout about missed shots. they didn't wonder about missed opportunities. they just wanted the game more. they were what we should (now) expect from ucla teams: tough.

tags: ucla, sports, gonzaga, basketball

on espn.com, chat session with bill simmons...

Vinay (Norwalk, CT): At what point do you think Tony Parker finally tells Eva Longoria to just shut the hell up? Can't anything remain private? How bad do you think his teammates rip him for her latest comments about his bedroom skillzzzz? And, in the end, does any of it matter since he's sleeping with a smoking hot Hollywood actress? Bill Simmons: (1:46 PM ET ) Nope. none of it matters. She came to the Clips-Spurs game I went to and spent the whole time talking to people in her section -- the Sports Gal noticed her in the second quarter and watched her for the rest of the game without once glancing at the court. After the game, she decided, "I think Eva Longoria seems nice." We were at least 150 feet away from her. Women are crazy.

Scott Adams has an entertaining perspective on the gender difference.

90% of the gender difference seems to be the male preference for compartmentalizing thoughts while women think everything is somehow connected.

phil hooked it UP with sweet 16 tickets for thursday in oakland. second game? memphis-bradley; an after-dinner drink to be enjoyed after the main course: ucla and gonzaga. given the enormity of the game, let's talk a little bit about my ucla bias... i was always a john wooden fan. i think he is the greatest coach in the history of sports and a tremendous man. i don't like rick reilly as a sportswriter, but i'll never forget reading this article about wooden. the autographed wooden autobiography my brother got me is one of my two most prized possessions (december 15, 2003). when mike started college at UCLA in '97, i immediately became a UCLA fan. for several years, i followed the bruins intensely. in '98, john fong got a couple of courtside tickets to a stanford-usc matchup at maples. he wore his cal sweatshirt and i wore a bright blue ucla fleece. no joke. in february of '00, a friend's mother took me to the stanford-UCLA tilt at maples. it was her way of congratulating me for getting into stanford. i wore a stanford shirt but, to be honest, i remember feeling just fine when jerome moiso dropped in the game-winning basket. yes, i said it. as years went on, i became much more of a stanford fan. attending a school trumps "being a fan," when the two conflict. i get more excited/ angry/ disappointed/ elated when stanford wins or loses than any other team. case in point: february 07, 2004. but about ucla... the day ucla hired ben howland, i had a couple of emotions. one, i was excited for ucla and its fans. two, i was disappointed for stanford. considering that ucla is THE premier basketball program in the country, i always felt through the steve lavin years that ucla deserved better. my brother and i used to talk after every bruins game about the deficiencies of lavin as a coach and ucla as a team. i'm not going to get into more lavin-bashing, because he does seem to be a genuinely good guy and i spent years spewing venom at him on xanga. but let's just say that: being an avid watcher of pitt basketball during the howland years, i knew what would happen at ucla. having ucla become a powerhouse west coast program would hurt stanford's recruiting even more (if that's possible) and make winning pac-10 championships tougher. (on a side note, i loathe the day when cal's administration rids the school of ben braun.) let's look at ben howland's first three years at ucla: 2003-04: 11-17 2004-05: 18-11 2005-06: 29-6, pac-10 championships (regular seasion & tournament) now that's saying something. even though howland attributes the turnaround to "better players," anyone who knows basketball can notice the difference from the lavin years. i think howland himself says it best:

"I tell them, 'You guys want to win championships? You want to win big? You want to play at the next level? You want to win now? You've got to defend,'" Howland said. "And that's your constant, night in and night out. Great teams play good defense in any sport. Period."

they play tough. they play aggressively. they play fearlessly. they play defense. but most of all, they are just getting started. in the next ten years, we're going to see wave after wave of fantastic recruiting classes molded into athletic, talented, skilled, tough, and confident bruin teams. it's concerning for stanford, arizona, washington, and all of the other pac-10 schools. ucla is about to rise up to national prominence and re-place itself at the top tier of college basketball, along with duke, north carolina, and uconn. believe that. i'm happy that john wooden gets to see it.

tags: ucla, sports, basketball, john wooden, ben howland

during the afternoon yesterday, i realized that my "my google" homepage was just not cutting it anymore. the reason? real estate. i understand that google's design goal is minimalism. for something like search, that just makes a lot of sense. compare google to the most broken search paradigm that i've come across lately (linkedin's People Search) and you realize how nice a single box on a search page is. here, take a look at how clumsy/confusing this is: but when it comes to a homepage, i want some density. it's MY homepage. i should be able to convolute the interface as much as i want. if i wanted to make nearly every pixel text, that should be fine. with google, i reached the point where i just ran out of room. "ran out of room?" you ask. "how can you run out of room? can't you just scroll?" well, one of the most basic points of human-computer interaction is that you should never make the user scroll if you don't *have* to. stuff on the page that requires scrolling to view is referred to as "below the fold". and, like its traditional media counterpart, being "below the fold" on a website is ass. so, as i attempted to add my 30 boxes calendar onto google homepage, i ran into an issue: some of the problem is text size, but 1) there is substantial white space on the page that i really don't want, and 2) have you tried decreasing the text size on the google homepage? it doesn't look so hot. now, considering it's my homepage, i don't want ANY of the information to be below the fold, especially when there is all of that white space all over the damn page. so i went searching for a new homepage and finally settled on netvibes. i have to be honest: there is absolutely nothing that google homepage does that netvibes doesn't (well, except for Search History, but who gives an F about that?). the UI is just as slick. i personally think it looks nicer. it has integration with web e-mail providers (including gmail). it has integration with several other sites that i use excessively (del.icio.us and box.net). it has integration with several other sites that i intend to use excessively (flickr and writely). it has collapsibility of the sections. and, most of all, it has SPACE. i've already put substantially more words on the page than i had on google, it's still very readable, and there's still more room. who knows what new things i'll be adding on there in the next month/years, but i think there will be enough space to arrange it on there. i think google minimalism is great for some areas, but i do feel like it just doesn't cut it everywhere (google finance). homepages is one of these places.

tags: web 2.0, google, netvibes, homepage

i'm chilling out at my parents' house, making use of their high-speed internet and big-screen television to (what else?) watch multiple tournament games at once. time to jot down thoughts as they come to me: - too bad iona couldn't finish up on that upset earlier today. that would've been nice. - during a short break from working this afternoon, i logged onto the cbs stream of the tennessee-winthrop game just in time to watch the furious finish. when the shot went down, i yelled out "OH!" like i would at a sports bar. considering i was wearing my headphones, i scared the CRAP out of my cubemate. one of the best tournament shots we've seen in years. - i'm seeing illinois and air force on tv right now and i'm having trouble understanding how illinois hasn't put this game away. they're playing a team that doesn't defend, has no post game, and takes bad shots. hmm. doesn't bode well for the illini. - i think the gumbel brothers (bryant and greg) have collectively achieved a level of 'annoying' that i didn't think was possible for sportscasters. and no, bryant, it doesn't have anything to do with your race. you're a hack. - i saw the back end of that gonzaga victory and if you don't think adam morrison is the best player in the country you're nuts. i see an 18-20 ppg career in the nba for him. he also really really does play like larry bird; it's not just because he's white. - speaking of nba prospects, marco killingsworth looks like he could be a decent one. i just saw him display some nice footwork down in the post. that being said, it's still funny to hear the announcer say, "killingsworth is a man. (silence)." - tv basketball analysts can be so thoughtless sometimes. i just heard seth davis talk about how duke's play is concerning because "they're known for their defense, and they're picking up full court, but they're not forcing turnovers." well, as an 'expert', you should know duke doesn't really try to force too many turnovers in the full court. they're generally just an aggressive man-to-man squad that wants to take you out of your offense. they're not really a turnover-forcing defense, as they rarely trap. how do i know this? because duke is on national tv 25 times a year, of course. - did you know marco killingsworth "is a man"? i just heard that for the twentieth time. that's crazy. i could've sworn he was a fucking water bison. - 'cuse down 9 at half. i could be losing my first sweet 16 team. rats. - i really don't know what i was thinking picking indiana over san diego state. i think maybe i thought i was picking too many upsets. i mean honestly, how could i pick a mike davis-coached team. no good coach can be that much of an emotional disaster. the guy looks like he's going to cry at all times. how can his players possibly look up to him? - i think dick enberg just ripped bilas on national television. after a ball rattled around on the rim before dropping in, enberg tossed to commercial with the line, "i think this is the kind of bounce you were used to at duke, mr. bilas." all in joking, of course. great stuff. gotta love the old guy. - looks like we (USA) just got bounced from the WBC by mexico. honestly, we didn't really deserve to go any further. as i was watching the game on sunday though, i did notice myself hoping for derek jeter to come to the plate in a big spot. when he came up to bat with the game on the line, i found myself thinking "sweet, jeter's up. we win." just more proof that everybody in the world would love derek jeter if he wasn't on the yankees. as it is, the people who love him are yankees fans and all women. - i think jay bilas is going to kiss washington's brandon roy after the game. he's that in love with him. in all seriousness, roy really is a stud. i think he's going to have an excellent nba career. he will be a lock-down defender somewhere, able to guard 1 through 3. on offense i think he's versatile enough to elevate his teammates' games. assuming nothing crazy happens, i'm thinking he'll have the second-best (morrison) nba career of all the guys coming out this year. and with that, off to watch more of him.

tags: sports, basketball, march madness

this is THE best sporting day of the year. super bowl is for the sports non-fans. march madness is for the people who actually care. i think i summed it up best in 2003 when i wrote in this xanga entry on march 17, 2004:

IT'S CHRISTMAS! back when i was a kid, my birthday was my favorite day of the year. it helped that christmas was always the next day (imagine that) and i always felt special that my birthday arrived just hours before everyone's favorite holiday. over the years though, as christmas started losing some of its luster, and i realized i'd never get to actually celebrate my birthday with friends, my birthday started moving to the backseat. and that's ok, i understand christmas eve is supposed to be about family. *shrug*. but anyway, i realized today that, for the past 8 or 9 years, tomorrow has been my favorite day of the year. no, not march 18th, dumbass. i'm talking about the first thursday of the ncaa men's basketball tournament. just about every year, i wake up in a moment of sheer excitement, realizing basketball will be on all day. i'll usually jump out of bed like it's christmas, sit around in my pj's like it's christmas, eat like it's thanksgiving, jump around like it's my birthday, and generally just act like it's a giant national holiday. see, i'm the kind of crazy fuck who gets excited about Soutern Illinois vs. Alabama not only because it's a great matchup in the ncaa tournament, but because Southern Illinois is playing Alabama. i'd get excited about that game in december. i'd get excited about that game if it was 7pm on a tuesday in january. i'd get excited about that game because a missouri valley conference team gets to run-n-gun against the big boys of the southeastern conference. the fact that it's an 8-9 matchup in the greatest of athletic postseasons makes it all the better. so what am i going to be doing tomorrow? i'm gonna get up and walk over to turn my take-home final. then i'm gonna rush back for the first game at 9:20am. then i'm gonna sit. and watch. and want to pick up my phone to yell at somebody about how utep is taking it to maryland. and i'll realize nobody cares THIS much about it. which is fine. it's a little like my birthday i suppose. i share it with a few people who know how i feel across the world. it's still my favorite day of the year. : )

as every year, here's the bracket for everyone to laugh at: one of the great pieces of fun in picking a bracket is trying to find an upset that nobody else likes. i've done the analysis and, as you can see, i've picked Iona (13) over LSU (4). personally, i think all my indicators of a possible upset are there: LSU -- hyped team from an overrated conference. 1-4 record against ranked teams. inexperienced squad with freshmen and sophomores leading them. questionable defense. heavy reliance on the post game and frontcourt. turnover-prone. Iona -- small, scrappy small-conference squad. senior-laden club. guard-oriented. high-scoring backcourt. one star player. of course, the other beauty of picking upsets this large is that no one can ever get on your case about going out on such a limb :). march is really here. let the games begin.

tags: sports, march madness

last week i wrote a post wondering why barry bonds decided to taint his legacy in baseball, when he was already one of the five best players to ever play the game after the 1998 season. apparently here's our answer: jealousy. it's a strange mindset to put yourself into because, realistically, none of us can imagine how absurdly ruthless and competitive athletes of that level can become. i still do find it sad that someone with such a legacy and undeniably great track record, with every tool and ability that you could ever want as a baseball player, could be jealous of two roid-filled hulks of baseball (mcgwire and sosa) who had few skills outside of muscle-bound home run swings. america loved mcgwire and sosa because they were a sideshow for a sport that needed one. maybe bonds never would have reached their level of adulation from the average fan without steroids, but he would have had the tremendous respect of baseball players and true baseball fans if he had just stayed off the juice. instead, now everyone will judge him as the greatest example of baseball's failure.

tags: sports, barry bonds, baseball, steroids

let's see, where were we? i was facing a decision on a T94 board w/ two hearts. i had AdTd and my $65 bet had been check-raised to $165. the pot had $136 in it before the flop. the player had $100 behind. based on the information in the hand, i had narrowed the probable hands of the guy down to a hand that dominated me (AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, 99) or a stone-cold A-high bluff. there was a possibility of a semi-bluff, but doubtful. considering that i hadn't seen this player check-raise a ton of pots, the tangible information told me i was beat. i went into the tank for about a full two minutes, walking through hands, and just couldn't see many other hands that he could have. taking one last stare at him, i had a strange feeling that he was on a bluff. deciding between purely a raise or fold, i mucked my cards. to my horror, he flipped over AhKc: no pair, no draw. damn it! the all-in player to my left flipped over KsQs. a J on the turn filled up the all-in player's gutterball straight and a T on the river made certain that i would've won any sort of side pot. rats. david sklansky, in Theory of Poker, and barry greenstein, in Ace On The River, talk about the right play vs. the perfect play. i do feel as though my lay-down was the right play (the correct play given the information i had). unfortunately, it was not the perfect play (the correct play if i had also known his cards). what is the perfect play? i think that the perfect play in this case would have been to sell the decision extensively and then call the $165 check-raise. considering that the player still had $100 or so in front of him, the weak call would provide him the perfect opportunity to bluff off the rest of his chips on the turn or river. he really has only three outs (3 K's), so providing him that "free" card is not a big mistake. would he have bluffed off the rest of his chips? maybe, maybe not. but re-raising him all-in on the flop certainly would've made him fold. in retrospect, i also should have taken into account one additional piece of information: while i felt like my general table image was good, i had been hammering on this particular player for about two hours. he was a few spots to my right and i had been raising and re-raising him on several pots, picking on perceived weakness in several hands. if i had carefully thought about it, i should have found it rather likely that HE wasn't giving ME much credit for a hand, considering i had spent several hands stepping on him with my position. my call before the flop in position and then strong bet on a, for the most part, rag flop probably looked like another steal attempt to him. in other words, table image was overridden by player image here. if he saw my play as a probable steal, he was much more likely to go nuts and come over the top with no pair, no draw. if that was the case, perhaps coming back over the top on the flop would have been the correct play to "represent a bluff." i thought this hand was an interesting lesson in the correct play vs. the perfect play, as well as keeping in mind table image, particularly against a specific player. at the end of the hand, all i could do was pat the table and say "nice hand." pros say the tough laydown is the hardest (and most important) thing to learn, but it sure sucks when you lay down the best hand. that's poker.

tags: poker

garden city has opened up a new game. they're calling it 3-100 spread limit hold'em, which is a ridiculous name. it's really a 1-3 no limit hold'em game with a $100 cap bet and a $100 min/max buy-in. i've played two separate sessions in the game and, actually, have found both games to be tougher than a normal no limit game in vegas. apparently lots of the 20-40 players are "coming down" to play it, as the upside is still large (i booked a small win on wednesday in the game and a large win yesterday). check it out if you have some time. last night an interesting hand took place near the end of my session. no bad beats here. read on: player under-the-gun raises to $18 pre-flop. he was a relatively solid but unimaginative player who was now starting to loosen up and raise lots of pots. the table was tight-aggressive, but had mostly been a stealing and walking show the last ten hands. two off the button, i looked down at AdTd. not giving him a huge amount of credit, i thought about min-raising to use my position and take control of the hand. i opted to call. guy behind me has $33 and he moves all-in. pretty standard. he was a donkey who could be doing that with any ace or face cards. the button, an ultra-tight player called. now that is a scary call, because he is believing himself to have great 3:1 pot odds probably, meaning he could be calling with hands as poor as 67 suited and 22. the original raiser smooth-called the $33. in my head, i felt like i could safely rule out his having a large pair, as it seemed like he would try to thin the field with such a hand. i was probably looking at overcards or a middle pair (hoping to flop a set). as i said, the man one-off-the-button didn't scare me as his chips were all-in. the button freaked me out a little, just smooth-calling. i called the additional $15 and saw the flop. the pot was $136. the flop came: Th9d4h. a good flop for me, though a flush draw was out there. original raiser checked. i put in a half-pot bet of $65. i was happy to see the button player fold immediately. this is when the original raiser check-raised to $165. i took a quick peek at his stack and saw about $100 behind that. i had him covered by a wide margin. i went into the tank. i'm clearly representing a T. probably with a good kicker to call $33 before the flop. he must know that if he gets called here all of the rest of his money is getting into the pot. possible hands he could have: a) AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, 99: i'm a big dog here. he didn't re-raise pre-flop with these hands, but it was essentially three-handed after the flop. did he feel as though he might be walking into a trap before the flop and wanted to see how it came out? if he was playing the hand that way, his play after the flop makes perfect sense. it just doesn't seem to mesh with his pre-flop play. b) AhKh, AhQh, AhJh, KhQh (overcards with flush draw): i had been watching this guy play for 4 hours and had seen him smooth-call out of position with a flush draw multiple times. he was so wedded to the move that these hands just seemed unlikely. possible though. c) QhJh, Jh8h: no. if you can't figure out why these don't make sense, think a little harder. d) 88, 77, 66: only truly aggressive and confident players would be check-raising a half-pot bet with a hand like this. considering my bet was not weak and my table image was excellent, could he imagine making a play like this? e) no pair, no draw: would he check-raise with a blind nothing? seems so unlikely. he had seemed to be a very careful player. i had put him on overcards as a possible hand before the flop though. to make this interactive, take some time to think about: 1) what do you think he has? 2) what would you have done? put your answer in the comments section (because honestly, i know who's reading this anyway). i'll put out the answer next time :).

tags: poker, garden city

i've realized in the past few weeks that i am in need of intellectual stimulation. i never really thought of myself that constantly need to "think," but considering that the most strenuous thinking i do these days is determining pot vs. implied odds and measuring my table image, i've been feeling rather stupid. so, to rectify the situation, i've done a couple of things: - i bought a couple of malcolm gladwell books. i started reading Blink yesterday. it's a book about the human mind's ability to structure and comprehend large amounts of sensory data within the subconscious, and to do it much more quickly than conscious thought. it seems to be a great read so far. plus the topic is actually somewhat related to... - i've started subscribing to blogs, finding papers, and reading about my favorite academic topic: information visualization. simply put, information visualization is the science/art of representing large amounts of data in a visual way. because the human mind can interpret visual data so much more concisely than written or numerical data, the visualizations can bring interpretations and conclusions for the viewer that he would have a hard time understanding from just the data. they can also be incredibly beautiful. what the hell am i talking about? information aesthetics has a good one posted up today from ibm research: email content visualization. for the more sports-oriented mind, visual i|o also has a cool demo one for understanding when to pull a pitcher.

tags: malcolm gladwell, blink, information visualization, baseball

they just bought writely. would you have ever thought five years ago that anyone in their right mind would go after microsoft office?

tags: google, microsoft, writely

i get the distinct feeling that there's a huge dark cloud over the online storage and online calendar markets. it's called google. vertical companies, like 30 boxes, Box.net, and OmniDrive, and horizontal ones, like Goowy, must be a little nervous of the tiny search company turned financial and corporate behemoth. after all, google is actively working on both a calendar application (CL2) and online storage (GDrive). apparently they also want to buy new zealand. the real problem for these companies isn't just that there are armies of engineers at google working on this (which, honestly, is kind of a problem, but surmountable), but rather that: 1) people don't even know that they need this stuff yet: if i ask 30 of my friends (yes, i do have that many) what online calendar they use, most of them will look at me blankly. same thing with online storage. yet, honestly, they really really need these things. they just don't know it. in three years, they won't even remember a time when they didn't have them. social networking sites like facebook and myspace are useful for connecting, but they're so much more with their extraneous features. social networking sites that build a notion of 'sharing' things (bookmarks (del.icio.us), photos (flickr), professional connections (linkedin), musical tastes (last.fm and yahoo! music), video (youtube), etc.) are going to have incredible, unimaginable utility. just think about how ubiquitous evite has become in our generation, and it has barely scratched the surface of networking. the point is social networking with a purpose, as opposed to social networking for networking's sake. online calendaring and storing are two areas that, for the most part, seem pretty under-penetrated and are enormous opportunities. they'll soon be like e-mail or chat, completely ubiquitous and insanely useful. bet on it. and therin lies the other problem for these companies... 2) google has a massive captive audience of subtle social networks (gmail): i'm trying to think of adoption mechanisms for my friends for these applications. the chances of them going to 30 boxes, thinking "hey, this is pretty cool," and adopting it heavily after i sternly tell them so? maybe 1 in 5. and, honestly, 30 boxes really nails a lot of good things in calendaring. but, the chances of my friends adopting CL2 when google pops it out for real? probably 9 in 10 gmail users, as long as it's done reasonably well. and i know a LOT of gmail users. for online storage the rates for both will be lower until people realize how much utility it provides, but probably similar comparative ratios. so is all hope lost for my favorites (Box.net and 30 boxes)? i don't think so. but to even keep my attention (and i use them a lot right now), one of two things will have to happen. 1) as a heavy gmail user, i'll have to be swayed with functionality and features that are so rich in comparison to CL2 and GDrive, with their probable integrations with gmail and (more importantly) my contacts, that i would be crazy to switch. either that or, 2) google will need to really fuck up those products. if i were the little guys, i'd try to bet on the first.

tags: google, gmail, 30 boxes, box.net, online calendar, online storage, web 2.0, social networking

i just read the sports guys' newest mailbag, which was, by the way, hilarious. here's a small excerpt:

Q: Just read your Cowbell about the Oscars, and how Nicholson is never not the coolest guy in the room … which begs the question based on a recent column of yours: Who'd win the "Coolest Guy in the Room" contest, Jack Nicholson or Charles Oakley? -- Michael, Columbus, Ohio SG: I vote for Nicholson. Even though Oakley is more impressive in person, more people would be impressed if they saw Nicholson waddling through a room with that big smile on his face. In fact, during that Lakers-Celtics game, our entire section was watching him in awed silence until I finally broke the ice with the obligatory, "Did you order the Code Red?!?" joke. Would Oakley inspire that level of awed silence? Probably not. But I think this is like one of those "Who would win in a fight: a bear or a shark?" questions. There's no real way to solve it.

bill simmons is expertly qualified to comment about topics such as this. he's also qualified to didactically comment about other important questions, such as 'how do you keep the strippers at a strip club from badgering you?' and "Where does Jessica Simpson trying to bang every single A and B+ list celebrity rank on the Vengeance Scale?" he answers both of these in his mailbag. that got me thinking: what kinds of things am i qualified to expertly comment about? i made a small list. keep in mind this entails EXPERT knowledge of: - going to las vegas - following sports and sports happenings - working at a large software company - working at oracle - managing customer data across an enterprise - eating ice cream properly out of a sugar cone - coaching a junior high school basketball team - getting into shape after sophomore year leaves you a blubberous fatty - tying shoelaces - analyzing basketball strategically - attending stanford university - beating the low limit hold'em games at garden city - traveling for a month in europe - judging burritos - running a summer basketball camp for little kids - drinking and enjoying beer - driving a 2003 subaru wrx - hanging out on a beach - being asian and having Asian asian parents (the capital 'a' matters) - killing $10 6-person sit-and-gos on full tilt poker - barbecuing tri-tip and/or chicken - living in the bay area - having the name 'jack' i'm sure there are others, but i can't seem to think of them right now. can you think of any? more importantly, what would be on your list?

sounds like buster olney's been thinking about something much like what i posted earlier today: what could've been of barry's career...

let's set some context first. i have long been an admirer of barry bonds as a baseball player. this is no rafael palmeiro or sammy sosa, fringe players that suddenly exploded into stars after a few years of mediocrity at the major league level and a few placed ass-shots of steroids. no, barry is not like them. barry bonds is, without a doubt, one of the most talented baseball players of any generation. just take a quick look at his awards before any notion of steroids (1998). you don't win 3 MVP's (and get robbed of another by writers who hate you) and 7 gold gloves (all before 1998) without tremendous ability. having said that, today's news of the new book detailing his steroid use is beyond damaging. my first thoughts upon hearing the news: "it's sad that barry bonds will forever be remembered as the guy who broke the home run records by cheating." and, really, that's all that i can think about him today. i'm not surprised or shocked by the developments. it would be hard to be when you've seen barry up close, compared his body to his early days, and used some common sense. only the most die-hard and unrealistic barry bonds fans could have been more than 10% sure of his innocence before today. i find it hard to make judgement on any OTHER baseball player around the steroids saga. honestly, for the ken caminitis and jose cansecos of the world, can you pass judgement on their weakness in morals? by all accounts, "everyone" was taking steroids and nobody seemed to care. they saw opportunities to go from good players to great, multi-million dollars a year players. would i have done what they did? i'd like to say no. but given an opportunity, your only opportunity, to make millions of dollars, would you pass? i think i saw an espn poll last year where 50% of americans said they wouldn't. even looking at mark mcgwire, who probably took steroids when he broke the home run record, i can see why he would do it. mashing home runs was his only opportunity to stand out from the hoards of baseball players in major league lore. desperate for recognition and a place in history, he juiced up. ok. despicable, but understandable. but barry bonds? if what the book details is true (that he started taking 'roids in 1998), then i just have to feel sad. here was a man whose place in baseball history was established. a man who was a shoe-in first-ballot hall-of-famer. a man who was one of the top five outfielders of all-time, already. a man who was already rich. a man who was one of the greatest left-handed hitters to ever play the game. and a man who would always be the prototype of the "five-tool" baseball player. instead of playing out the late-prime of his career to universal fanfare and recognition, spurring debates about "barry bonds: is he the greatest ever?" he decided to get bigger. maybe he wanted to end those debates before they would even start. and for what? some extra home runs for a player who was always much more than a home run hitter? some extra applause on the road? some extra "holy shit" moments? for any other baseball player, i would have a multitude of opinions today. for barry bonds, i'm just left with the question of why he would taint his legacy. how sad.

tags: sports, baseball, mlb, barry bonds, steroids

i realized today while i was running that i like my name (yes, i do think about rather odd things while i'm running). why is this interesting? because i used to hate it. maybe 'hate' isn't the write word, but definitely 'dislike'. something about how short the name 'jack' is just didn't seem to mesh well with my equally-short last name. i also thought jack sounded a little too gruff by itself. strangely enough, people seem to love my name. i think the fact that 'jack' is such a well-known yet underused name really contributes to its likeability. i've had friends mention that they thought the name sounds very 'tough.' they were either stroking my ego or they've seen me quick-draw a pistol out of my holsters. it's a sight to see. people even seem to love the combination of my first and last names together. or at least they enjoy saying them together. when i was in high school, lauren steffel and pam aubert joked that they were going to name their first borns, boy or girl, Jackchou. that's a first name, not first and last. i also find that people like to call me "jack chou" when speaking about me in the third-person. i once heard ivy's sister iris tell her, "you're always hanging out with jack chou" on the phone. why do i get both of my names spoken when most people only get their first? i don't know. anyhow, i think i've finally come to peace with my name. yes, it's short and sounds weird next to my last name, but i like it now. i don't know what brought along this sudden self-acceptance, but i just thought i would share. and anyway, it could be worse. i could have a name like "phillip" or "kingsley". then i'd be destined to be a loser.

tags: names

i try to avoid talking about east coast, duke, yankee, red sox, patriots sports bias in the media whenever possible, but i just want to point out one thing (as a card-carrying unc fan). it's 8:55pm, the game ended almost an hour ago, yet espn's front page looks like this: let's get this straight: duke lost. unc won. why is the front page a picture of jj redick shooting a lay-up? shouldn't it be bobby frasor or tyler hansbrough? i find this ridiculous.

tags: espn, sports, unc, duke

a small sports story that doesn't seem to be getting a lot of publicity is the alfonso soriano saga with the washington nationals. for those that don't know, soriano is a 2nd baseman who swings his bat really hard and runs really fast. unfortunately for him, baseball is about more than that, because he is also a mediocre baseball player and a terrible fielder. i wonder whether baseball players from the 1890's would hate soriano or just think he's a complete lunatic. i mean, wouldn't the response of most normal people be "wait, i'm a bad 2nd baseman who can't make contact or draw a walk, but you want to pay me millions to come play in the outfield? um, well, i have no idea how to play in the outfield, but sure!" i also think a hundred years ago, the manager and owners would just say "fuck it, you'll never play major league baseball again. have a nice life." unfortunately, this is not a hundred years ago and that makes the nationals management look like complete idiots. here's a news flash: you're running a multi-million dollar business. you acquired an overpriced piece of human capital. you didn't ask him whether he wanted to do what you're going to ask of him. how do you still have a job? i realize i don't have the experience or baseball knowledge of these guys, but i have common sense. someone give me two years of training and i swear i could run any professional sports franchise on the planet. who would be moronic enough to not call up the guy and ask "hey, by the way, we want you to play a position you've never played before in your life. are you cool with that?" if sports worked like a real business, somebody would be getting fired.

technorati tags: alfonso soriano, washington nationals, baseball, sports

does anyone else find it infuriating when you are informed that YOUR username is already taken by someone on a site? for me, of course, the username is 'smallchou'. i just went to a site and tried to sign up for an account and was told that someone's already using it. what? how dare this obviously less charismatic and far less attractive version of me take my account. maybe that's why mike needs to use something crazy like "ninjaricetaekwandokillpeople". it must suck a lot more for people named "info" or "jobs". try signing up for an e-mail address with THOSE usernames.

technorati tags: smallchou

i got an email from my friend bonnie (last name with an 'a', not with an 'e') yesterday. among other things, it talked about the fact that she's looking to quit her job (with no next job in sight) and travel somewhere (anywhere). my honest assessment? great. she said:

"i want to find a job or situation that scares the shit out of me. i guess that's different than being challenged, because my job has its challenges too, but it doesn't scare me at all... it's a slightly masochistic side that i think some people need in order to feel like they're thriving"

in a way, i think her sudden inspiration is really connected to what malcolm gladwell had to say today in his e-mail back-and-forth interview with bill simmons on espn.com:

"It's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience.... The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder."

regardless of what your opinions may be on phil mickelson and tiger woods, you have to agree that this comment has tremendous merit. everyone has friends who failed through school and cited an inability to keep their red cups filled on their beer pong tables. or perhaps they pretended to not care about studying. or, in the case of stanford, maybe they all CONSTANTLY talked about how they never studied. it is the mantra of our generation: cool is not caring. i think, at the end of the day, that's what bonnie's 'being scared shitless' really means: finding something that she cares about deeply enough to have a tremendous desire to succeed at it. after all, i don't think she really wants to find a job in which she's being chased around by wild coyotes or where she's constantly jousting on horseback against medieval knights (though the second one sounds more fun than scary). i think she's looking for something that is different and contains the possibility of catastrophic, life-altering failure. you know, a job where she could care so much and fail, bringing her not only a lifetime of embarrassment and ridicule, but also ostracism from her friends and society as a whole. ... (ellipses denoting that you should re-read that) do we as young people realize how fucking ridiculous that is? just think about how crazy that sounds. i don't think there are many things short of drug addiction that she could do to elicit that response, and even drug addicts have interventions. maybe that's what we all need: the promise of an intervention by friends if we start getting too crazy. i'll start this one: the "bonnie chan, you've gone too far" intervention, scheduled for 2010. until then, bonnie, scare yourself shitless.

technorati tags: life

oh, i almost forgot to plug william johnson's blog. will is, as friendly readers of my blog know, a close friend from school who now is a teacher in new york city. i'm pretty excited to read about crazy high school kids in the big apple on a consistent basis. i'd also like to say that it is utterly mind-blowing that will, one of the two most anti-technology people i know, now has a blog. crazy.

february has passed and i have officially had a full month where i did not go to las vegas. a miracle! by my count, february was the first month in about 8 months that i didn't spend at least a part of a day in the city of sin. one thing i'm enjoying at work is listening to The Circuit radio shows from Cardplayer.com. hosted by scott huff and mike matusow, the show delves into a fair amount of strategy and information about poker. it also speaks a fair amount about the lifestyle of professional poker players, which i'm sure people find interesting. the show also has great guests on every episode. my favorites were barry greenstein and andy black. definitely worth checking out. on that note i'm going to post about a few of the other sites that i find myself using these days. web 2.0 is an interesting area of the world and since i've started peering around for (perhaps) another job, i've signed up for a ridiculous number of random accounts. some of the highlighted sites that i've found myself using consistently: 30 boxes (http://www.30boxes.com): an online calendaring application, 30 Boxes does a great job of providing a really simple, non-frivolous online calendar. adding events to your calendar is very easy, as is sharing your calendar with other 30 Boxes users. i use it daily to plan my life. feel free to come find me. Box.net (http://www.box.net): since they decided to provide a free account and got a facelift for the site, i've started using Box.net for online storage of "stuff". it's a pretty (no better word for it, sorry guys) interface and it's fairly easy to use. as a person who likes to access files in multiple places (read: office, home, other people's homes), it's incredibly useful. if you're going to sign up for an account, do me a favor and click on . if i can get five of you to sign up i get a free upgrade. yes, i think that counts as an ad, but (honestly) don't use if it you don't think you'll need online storage. Rojo (http://www.rojo.com/): i assure you i've gone on an extensive testing of every possible online rss feed aggregator out there and rojo seems to come the closest to actually providing what i want. i'm not really asking for too much either. unfortunately i do feel like the feeds seem to update rather slowly, which of course only matters to someone who is still evaluating different rss readers (like me). i feel like i vacillate daily between rojo and google reader. Backpack (http://www.backpackit.com): i use backpack to organize my life. time will tell whether that is enough for me to upgrade to an actual pay account, but we'll see. they also write a great blog. what applications do YOU use?

technorati tags: cardplayer, poker, 30 boxes, box.net, rojo, backpack, 37 signals

every now and then you see a comedic sportswriter absolutely nail it. this is one of those times: Bill Simmons' "First Annual Atrocious GM Summit" the premise of the article is hilarious in and of itself (a fake summit for all of the shitty nba gm's of the past few years), but simmons completely nails the lines. my personal favorite part of the article:

Simmons: Let's talk about the draft, guys. What are some strategies there? Worst guy available? Taking someone at a position where you already have someone?

King: See, that's where you're wrong. It's always better to make good picks in the draft -- this way, your fans can become attached to them, then you can trade them for inferior guys with bad contracts. Plus, it throws the media off your scent a little bit. I would much rather draft a decent guy, then trade him down the road, or overpay him with a crazy contract that makes no sense or kills my cap space. If you're openly tanking draft picks, it's too obvious.

Thomas: I agree, Billy. If you look at what I've done over the years, I always drafted well: Stoudamire, T-Mac, Camby, Frye, Ariza … you want to stockpile as many assets as possible, only because it gives you more options to do something dumb.

Babcock: I couldn't agree more. That's the single-biggest mistake I made with the Araujo pick. In retrospect, I should have taken Igoudala, kept him for a year, then traded him last summer for Joel Przybilla and immediately given him an $85 million contract extension. Oh, well. You live and you learn.

McHale: I'm kicking myself right now … I wish someone had told me this before I drafted Ndudi Ebi and William Avery!

(Everyone laughs.)

Simmons: So if you don't want to kill your team with bad drafting, what other recourses are there besides trades?

Thomas: Keep changing the roster -- you don't want any semblance of continuity. Once guys get used to playing with one another, they might start winning. Look at the teams that have done well over the last 25 years -- it's always been the teams that built around a nucleus. I even played for one in Detroit. That's why I like to keep mixing things up every six to seven weeks. Why chance it?

i've been sometimes critical of bill simmons as a sportswriter, but he crushes a home run on this one.

technorati tags: bill simmons, espn, sports, nba

ramit's a guy that i lived in the same dorm with (branner) freshman year of college. he has a blog/site about personal entrepreneurship and finance for young people (read: you). http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/. in addition to entertainment value, i think his articles provide a solid amount of interesting reason. he filed an entry this morning on the importance of experience over getting the green at this age. it actually mirrors my thoughts as i walk through my 24/infinity life crisis. i realize it's easy to say something like that while i sit in a 13th floor windowed office at the world's largest enterprise software company, consistently cashing reasonably-sized salary checks, but i do indeed believe it. i'm ready for a different opportunity. and if that opportunity pays less money, then so be it. i think i'm starting to get a grasp of what i'm looking for. more on that later. but i think it's funny how often i'm starting to hear this refrain from people that i know. i had breakfast with justin smith last week and talked with him about various current pain points in my life (read: career) right now. he's working on a service called Standpoint (http://www.standpoint.com) that you should all go check out. i distinctly got the feeling that he was enjoying the experience greatly and not at all concerned about the money that he could be making somewhere else right now. i think his attitude and ramit's article are refreshing; they give me some validation of the ideas and beliefs that are in my head. just time to go execute.

technorati tags: life, standpoint

an interesting blog entry by mark cuban, owner of the dallas mavericks regarding the playing of music during timeouts, stoppages of play, and even during play at nba games. i was disturbed the first time i heard music being played at nba games DURING game action. i found it to be a strange acceptance (or even resignation?) by the franchises that the nba game is not entertaining enough by itself. i've been to several nba games since i first saw this and i've become a little more accustomed to it. i still do find it strange, especially considering back in high school no artificial noisemakers were allowed to be used during play. i always find myself contrasting the nba situation to that of college basketball games, which are infinitely more energetic (save for nba playoff games). the difference, to me, seems to derive from the relative lack of importance in a single nba game. fans subsequently care less about the outcome of a game than they do in just having a fun time. this phenomenon is even more potent in a mlb atmosphere, where one game is generally meaningless. even my local nba team, the golden state warriors, has shoved the idea of "Warriors Basketball: It's a Great Time Out" down our throats, as opposed to "Warriors Basketball: We Could Win This Year!" i'm more inclined to believe that the warriors' popularity boost is due to their players and style of play rather than the crazy 80's cover band they have playing during the game. if playing music during nba game action gets the fans excited and and energetic, then more power to mark and the other owners. it's certainly better to do that than to not care about the fans. it is certainly a good business decision. i just find it a little strange, as a "purist" of the game. maybe i'm the only one.

technorati tags: sports, basketball, nba, mark cuban

i've played a lot of hands in poker in the past several years, but i'll never forget one hand in particular. i was playing $2-$5 no limit hold'em at the mirage last november, generally building up a good stack. i had run my $200 buy-in up to about $1100. a wild maniac player had been playing at our table for hours (in fact funding much of my $1100). he had just recently bought back in for another rack of reds (read: $500), had doubled up once on a ridiculous runner-runner flush with 64 offsuit, and had picked up several other pots by moving in on guys for $1000 into $40 pots. obviously everyone at the table was itching to be the one to take his money, including me. by then i had a great read on him as he pumped it up to $20 from under-the-gun. not being able to give him credit for much, two players called. i looked down at 33 on the button and called. with his deep stacks (he had me covered), i saw the implied odds of potentially getting ALL of it if i flopped a set (about 1 in 8 shot). those implied odds made the call reasonable. the flop came 9h6h3h. the maniac immediately pushed in a $200 bet (into the $80 pot). a massive over-bet that just reeked of a steal. i knew it immediately: he had the ace of hearts and probably nothing else. i did the math quickly to myself as the other two players folded reluctantly. - he had 9 outs to the flush of the unseen cards, one of which will hit around 36% of the time (2-4 rule) - if he hit his flush, he could still lose the hand to me if the board paired i estimated the odds at around 70-30 for me. cardplayer agrees: poker odds calculator i made the fateful decision of moving in and giving him pot odds of around 14 to 9 on his money to make the call, which would be a mathematical mistake if he had just the Ah. it was the mathematical play. it was the wrong play. i pushed in for 1100 and he called instantly, standing up and screaming for a heart as he flipped over Ah2c. i think everyone knows what happened next. i've thought about that hand a lot since november, trying to determine if i made a mistake or if i was destined to lose $1100 on the hand. i finally came to the conclusion that i should've called the $200 on the flop. when he hit his nut flush on the turn, he probably would not have bet huge, trying try to draw some action. he might've even checked hoping to check-raise for all my chips. i could've hoped for the board to pair on the river and mucked when it didn't, maybe even showing him how lucky he got. probably a $200-400 loss. this weekend i went back and read chip reese's section on seven-card stud in the original super system. he starts the section off with a story not unlike mine, in which he details a hand in an old texas cardroom back in his younger days. he was playing in a stud game against, among others, a drunk. he found himself in a position where he knew that he was a sligh 11 to 10 favorite. in his zeal to win the man's money, he and the drunk re-raised each other 56 times, getting all of reese's money into the pot. you can imagine what happened. his conclusion years later? he should have waited for a situation in which he had a much larger advantage, perhaps 4-to-1, to get his money in because, against a drunk, those situations will arise. i smiled when i read the short story as it made me feel good. not that i played the hand right mathematically, but that even chip reese had a lesson like mine.

technorati tags: poker, chip reese

i'm not a huge fan of the dilbert comic, despite its obvious relevance to life at a large corporation. i will admit that i do sometimes get a chuckle out of it. howEVER, i am a regular reader of The Dilbert Blog, by Scott Adams (the writer). i find adams to be completely hilarious, with the dry and sarcastic type of humor that i love. he comes off as a very down-to-earth person. i, of course, hope this is actually true. he just did a Q&A post, in which he answered reader questions. check out this gem:

Q. Have you ever been asked to sign a hot woman's breasts or draw Dilbert on them? A. Not yet. But if I draw Dogbert, I know where his nose will be.

that's comedy.

technorati tags: dilbert, scott adams

it's a sign of the power of blogging when The Worldwide Leader In Sports rolls out blogs for their two most senior baseball writers: Peter Gammons and Jayson Stark. I was already a frequent reader of Buster Olney's blog, so just a couple more to add to the reader. it'll be interesting to see how their styles adapt to the instant publication format that blogs bring. they are, after all, mainstays of mainstream sportswriting with industry experience and contacts that are unimaginable. i'm excited about getting to read them more than once every few weeks, especially gammons.

technorati tags: sports, espn, peter gammons, jayson stark, buster olney, baseball

for baseball non-fans, the phrase "pitchers and catchers report" is absolutely meaningless. for baseball fans, today is one of the most exciting days of the year. first baseball note on the season: why is this sammy sosa story not a BIGGER deal? this is one of the most prolific home run hitters of any generation. he had a corked bat cheating incident. he has been suspiciously linked through word-of-mouth and common sense to the steroids saga. shouldn't the fact that he's now marginalized to the point of not being able to get a major league contract be pretty high up on the list of crazy things going on in sport? my contention is that sammy sosa has never, even in his homer-bashing prime, been considered a top player. he has always been more of an afterthought and, sort of, a sideshow. that's really the only explanation i can come up with for why he's disappeared. if that's the case, i sure do agree with the lack of interest.

technorati tags: sammy sosa, sports, baseball