Blinders

WPBT Still Alive and Kicking

2011-12-07T15:43:00.001-08:00

The winter WPBT Blogger gathering is now in the books and the event is still going strong. 2010 was clearly the peak with thousands of extra cash added to the tournament by the now defunct FullTilt, and the now absent from the US market PokerStars. FullTilt also picked up private room for Sundays football games covering all food expenses as well for 50+ bloggers (thanks to money they raided from player accounts, but let's not mention that!). There would be no extra cash added or free rooms to watch football this year, but we still had the core crew of poker bloggers that have built up this gathering over the last 7 years, and that is more than enough. I had a blast as usual, drank too much as usual, and ran semi deep in the WPBT event (25th) without cashing as usual. I was on a serious heater at the NL holdem cash games the entire weekend which was a nice plus. Live games in Vegas have been very good to me since Black Friday. I would share more, but you know the saying "what happens in....". For some reason, I can see this group still getting together long after anyone even remembers what got us together in the first place. Most of us have long abandoned playing online poker, or even writing about poker at this point, thanks to our oppressive government's crackdown on individual liberty.

iPhone 5 Production Issues?

2011-10-05T10:29:00.000-07:00

I love Apple products, almost to the point of being a dreaded fanboy, but I have to admit that yesterday was Apple's worst performance on a new iPhone announcement. Is Apple's best days behinds them, now that Steve Jobs is gone, or is something else going on behind the scenes. Here is my take.

The iPhone4 update to iPhone4s is about the same as the the update from iPhone3G to iPhone3Gs. It is very minor, and should not have taken more than a year to release. Going from an A4 to A5 chip probably does not even require a different circuit board. Going from GSM to GSM/CDMA, is also simply a chip change, and a minor circuit board change. The only other change was a camera upgrade which is also pretty minor. If you are assuming this is all they have in the works for the iPhone, I think you are wrong. My guess is that they wanted to also anounce the iPhone5 which will have a larger screen and 4G compatability, but they are having issues building the iPhone5. This makes sense given the leaks about manufacturing issues, and the Sprint 20 billion dollar commitment to buy iPhones over 4 years. So rather than announce a phone, that they could not deliver in quantity, they simply did not announce it. They were planning to announce it, but once that was removed, the whole iPhone announcement fell flat. My guess is that they will get the manufacturing issues resolved, and announce an iPhone5 exclusively for Sprint WiMAX 4G in the near future. AT&T and Verizon will get a LTE version next year, possible as late as June as they are buiding out the LTE networks as we speak. Apple probably does not want to release a 4G phone on the majors, which will be a battery hog, until there is enough network coverage to support it. That's the story that is missing in the media.

Fuck FullTilt

2011-07-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

Somebody had to say it. It is pretty clear that there is no money left, and FT players are not going to get any of their money back. FullTilt was just a ponzi scheme with the player funds raided by the owners and the indirectly by all of the name pros who made money by recruiting players into the scheme. If the pros were paid with player account funds, which no doubt happened, they are complicit even if they were unaware. It really looks like they were just keeping enough cash around to support day to day operations and systematically drained away the player funds. There is no way ALL player funds disappeared through government seizure. If they had any sizable amount of cash on hand, they would allow for withdrawals now and process all they could on a first come first served basis. There are tens of thousands of accounts with funds who would not even make the request, so they only really need the funds to cover active players first. They simply don't have the funds and never will. No investor is going to cover the losses from a ponzi scheme.

FullTilt was good to the poker bloggers in the past, providing income and added funds for blogger MTTs, but that does not excuse the fact that we basically were sucked in as well into promoting a ponzi scheme. I feel pretty bad for anyone who discovered FullTilt through my blog, and then lost funds because they were unethically stealing player deposits. If I am wrong about this I am willing to eat crow, but I really doubt anyone from FullTilt will ever see their money again. I personally only had a few hundy there, and it has already been written off in my mind.

Bodog Beginner Sit & Goes Still Soft

2011-05-03T09:58:00.000-07:00

Leave it to me, to increase my online poker play as a result of Black Friday. I personally don't like my liberty taken away, so I installed the Bodog Poker client in windows on my Mac and off I went. I still had about $350 in Bodog, as it is my only online sports book. Beginners were filling at a nice pace, so I joined a $16 and two $8s as well as a $3 rebut MTT. For those unfamiliar with beginner S&Gs at Bodog, they are a single 10 player table that pays they top 5 in a very flat payout. I have crushed these in the past, but have not played since I upgraded to a MAC about 2 years ago. I won the $16, took 3rd in one $8, and bubbled the other for a very nice profit. In the $3 rebuy, I bought in for a double stack, and not much happened in the first hour. They give you a fat amount of chips for the add-on (two buy-ins?) and I was sitting with about 6k in chips about 90 minutes in when I called a raise with pocket 6s and flopped a set. The preflop raiser was betting into me from out of position, so I smooth called, and then turned a boat. He bet into me again, and I min raised, and we would get it all in. He would flip pocket 4s for a smaller boat, and then one out me on the river for Quads, and I go home now. If I avoid the one out quads, I have a very nice stack, and probably would have cashed in the rebuy easy. It was a pretty fun 90 minute session, that makes me want more.

So even though the last three majors were taken down, there are still some decent US facing online poker to be found. Bodog is mainly a sports book, so their poker operations fly a bit under the radar. It might be somewhat easy to fund with them, since as a US facing sportsbook, they have had to find workarounds for many years now. I realize that with the smaller guys you are risking your funds to some extent, but it seem like you should be able to cash out (i.e. PokerStars) even if a site like Bodog gets shut down. We even used to have blogger MTTs on bodog, so many bloggers may still have some funds there. I will see if Smokkee is interested in putting a new blogger thingy together.

The Death of The Magic Roll

2011-04-26T14:02:00.000-07:00

It's about time that I weigh in on the death of online poker. To me it has been quite ill for a while, and this was just a matter of time. Since the UIGEA of 2006, I could see this one coming, and pretty much had quit online poker as a result. Sure I played in a blogger thingy here and there, and recently have played a little Rush poker at FullTilt, but my heart was never really into it since the UIGEA. I have had my hands full running a Daily Fantasy Sports start-up which has sucked up much of my free time for poker, but to me I always had played poker to make money, and things just got too tough for many reasons. I feel really bad for all of my friends in the online poker industry, who are going to be hit hard by this. The whole thing is just stupid. Even though poker can be played live in nearly every state for money, and can be played online for money in nearly every country, the United States choose to enact a stupid law that did not even address the actual legality online poker. As a result, they have effectively banned what still could be a perfectly legal activity, by making payment processing illegal. Our rights are simply being taken away one at a time, by a government who wants to control us and the economy in every way. Republicans and Democrats are both to blame here.

So, how am I effected if I don't really play much anymore? Well it looks like it will be the end of the magic roll for me. My magic roll was created with my initial $100 deposit at Poker Stars back in the Neteller days. I used solid bankroll management, and solid play at the lower levels to build up from there, and have never had to make another deposit. The funding issue was never really an issue for me, as I could generate funds at whatever site I still had money. I have played for years on that roll, while pulling out 10s of thousands in cashouts. It payed for my entry to a $1500 WSOP event back in the day. It provided the roll that I used to sportsbook bonus whore prior to the UIGEA. Post UIGEA with no Neteller, and no easy way to move funds around, I was stuck with funded accounts at PokerStars, FullTilt, and Bodog. My two favorite online poker sites, and a so/so sportsbook was good enough for me. Now, with the shut down of FullTilt, and PokerStars, those accounts will be closed, and I will be forced to cash out. That puts my the last of my magic roll at Bodog where I have just a few hundred left. I could cash that out as well, but why not let it ride a bit at that point, and see if the roll still has some magic. I have actually used bodog for sportsbetting much more than FT or PS for poker over the last few years. They even have online poker still me thinks. I am running a MAC at home, so I need to see if Bodog has a MAC client, but I also have windows on my MAC. I could see my self playing poker there again as an FU to the government for now.

Random Thoughts

2011-03-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

Lets face it, this is not a poker blog anymore. I am just going to throw out random thoughts on the world going forward. So here we go.

Charlie Sheen

I think he has a real case against CBS for canceling his show this year. The guy plays an rich, arrogant, alcoholic, loser who bangs prostitutes weekly on the show, and they canceled his show for him being a rich, arrogant, alcoholic, loser who bangs prostitutes weekly in real life. That's called preparation, and all good actors do it religiously. Had the guy not shown up for work, or was missing his lines they have reasons, but he was only "studying" his character. Well he was also smoking boulders or whatever, but they could easily work that into the script and it would be well with-in character.

3D Movies

3D movies suck, and I will never see another one. There I said it. Its bad enough that they bend you over for an extra 5 bucks or whatever, but 3D actually makes the movie experience much worse. The picture quality is drastically reduced when viewed through 3D glasses, and wearing those uncomfortable glasses really keeps you from immersing yourself in the film. I always feel like I am watching a movie and not really part of it with the stupid glasses on. 3D movies are also not more realistic than 2D, because the 3D effects are over exaggerated. We may live in a 3D world, but anything that you are looking at that is more than 10 feet away is going to appear 2D. Since the action is typically from a perspective of more than 10 feet away, 3D is really not required, unless you are going to jab something at the viewers eyes, and that does not happen typically, and is hard to work into the story line. I have a 60 inch LCD TV at home and movies already look better on it than films look in a movie theater. If you make a movie 3D, I will wait to watch it at home from now on.

Public Unions

I don't really like the idea of Unions in general, but I am cool with allowing them in some cases. Where they should never be allowed is in the case of a double monopoly. A double monopoly would be were the product or service provided is from a monopoly, and the labor provided is also monopolized (Unionized). When there is no competition for the product or service, there is nothing to keep union salaries and wages in check with reality. If unionized workers want to make more money and better benefits they need to provide a compensating level of extra productivity. Let's look at a couple of examples. Lets say that in the Auto industry Ford, and GM were unionized, and Toyota, Honda, and Nissan were not. The Auto industry is not a monopoly so unions are fine there. If the unionized workers demand or receive salary and or benefits in excess of the productivity they bring to the plate, they make their company uncompetitive. As the company fails, they will lose union jobs unless they are willing to take pay /benefit cuts. The competitive industry keeps the union demands in check.

Now lets take the teachers union. K-12 education would meet the definition of a monopoly even though there are some private schools, because public schools dominate the scene in every way. You can send your kids to public school for free or pay big bucks for private school, so real competition is very limited. To really see if pay and benefits were fair for unionized teachers, you would have to remove the barriers to competition first. A great way to do this would be to offer vouchers to everyone for the amount of money that a state funds schools per student, per year. You could then use that voucher to attend a public school for free, or use the voucher to pay a private school instead. The state is not outlaying any more money for education, they are just allowing a choice between private and public schools. If the private school was more expensive than public, you would pay the difference. If it was less expensive you would keep the change. As people choose to go to private over public schools, you would close down public schools, and lower the amount of unionized teachers in them. If unionized teachers worked in private schools that's fine to. Allowing parents to choose, keeps union rules, wages, and benefits in check, because they can kill thier employer by making them uncompetitive. So my solution to public unions is to outlaw them for double monopolies, or make the public service competitive so you can keep them.

Superbowl Pick

2011-02-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

I have had this thing locked down for the last few years. This year I don't feel as strong as the last few years, so don't bet the whole farm. The spread is falling between GB -2.5 to -3, and I will be going with Green Bay. This is not a huge play, as I am giving just slight edge to GB of say 4-6 points. My reasons for liking Green Bay are as follows.

1) Strength of Schedule
Green Bay was 3-3 vs. playoff teams in the regular season. Pittsburgh was 2-4 with all of their losses coming against playoff teams.

Edge GB

2) Common Opponents
Both teams played ATL, NYJ, NE, and BUF with the first three making the playoffs. Green Bay did better than Pittsburgh against all 4 common opponents. By large margins in some cases

Edge GB

3) Playoff Momentum

Green Bay has looked very good on the road over three playoff games. Pittsburgh has won two straight at home in the playoffs and has not been overly impressive. The Superbowl will be on a neutral field which should make GB look better and PIT worse than they have looked so far in the playoffs.

Edge GB

4) Game Location (Dallas - Dome)

GB has looked much more impressive than PIT when playing on Turf. Pittsburgh's passing game is significantly worse on Turf, while GB's holds up well. PIT runs well on turf, but not enough to make up for a much worse passing performance

Edge GB

5) Superbowl Experience

PIT gets the edge here, but what happened last year when NO with no experience, knocked off IND who had won recently.

Edge PIT

6) Rushing Defense

PIT is tops in the league, GB is respectable

Edge PIT

7) Coaching

I don't see and edge here either way.

Tie.

Overall Edge: Green Bay in most important categories

RIP SnapDraft?

2011-01-12T10:33:00.000-08:00

It appears that SnapDraft will be joining the long list of well funded Daily Fantasy Sports websites to go under since 2008. SnapDraft was an obvious copy of what we were doing at Fantasy Sports Live, but missed the point of our business model completely. Owned by Fanball.com, SnapDraft wanted to use the high margin model used in season long fantasy sports. They ended up setting their margin (rake) at 20% which was twice as high as anyone else in daily fantasy sports was charging. It was ridiculously high. A $10 heads-up league only paid out $6 in profits to the winner. You would really need to be a fantasy sports God, or find consistent match-ups with complete fish to beat that rake long-term. As a result, we never really considered them as a competitor, but more of a site where people played for fun with no hope of profiting long-term. They also put little to no effort into the structures of their games, or their player cap costs, and were notoriously horrible at customer service. All in all they were pretty bad for the daily fantasy sports industry by attracting players, and then leaving a bad taste in their mouth for daily fantasy sports. If you were a Snap Draft player, and want to try out a site that pays out 92.5 to 96% (vs. 80%) of the fees in cash prizes, Fantasy Sports Live is the place to play. Use bonus code “blinders” and get $10 free with a $50 initial deposit, or $20 free with a $100 initial deposit.

SnapDraft was a property of Fanball.com that has announced operations will cease in mid 2011 after the current fantasy foootball, fantasy basketball, and fantasy hockey leagues complete. There has not been a formal announcement on what will happen with SnapDraft, but they will probably cease operations sooner, as they are a daily fantasy site without long-term leagues. The shut down is pretty complex, and it is possible that some of the pieces, including SnapDraft, could be sold off and continue to operate.

Fantasy Cup, a fantasy NASCAR site also owned by Fanball, will not be running Fantasy NASCAR leagues in 2011. The season long fantasy NASCAR sites have been hurt bad by the recession, and are closing down fast. We will continue to offer Weekly Fantasy NASCAR at Fantasy Sports Live, and hope to pick up many of Fantasy Cup’s customers. We are starting to become the only game in town for Fantasy NASCAR, and we will do our best to serve that community.

What Was the 10 Year Cost of the 2001 Bush Tax Cuts?

2011-01-06T16:05:00.000-08:00

When the initial Bush tax cuts were passed in 2001 with a 10 year expiration date they were budgeted to cost 1.6 trillion over the next 10 years. To extend the same Bush cuts in 2011 for 10 more years would cost an estimated 4.0 trillion this time. The cuts were ultimately extended for two years. Both estimates make the assumption that people’s behavior does not change as a result of tax law changes. This is simply not true. The federal government has extracted between 18-20% of GDP in the form of taxes since 1950. This number has only not moved substantially even though the top income tax rate started at 91% during this period and now stands at 35%.

In 2000, the peak of the dot com bubble with the NASDAQ north of 5000 the government collected $2.023 Trillion in taxes. In Bush’s first year the government collected $1.994 Trillion. Holding everything equal you would expect a drop of $160 Million per year as a result of the Bush tax cuts. Sure enough in 2002 revenue came in at $1.856 Trillion. However, by 2005 the government pulled in new record revenue of $2.153 Trillion, and was up to $2.571 trillion in taxes by 2007. So by 2007 not only was the “lost” $160 million per year restored, we were also pulling in an additional $578 Million a year in additional taxes. Growth in the economy does wonders for tax receipts, and you can’t rule that out as a factor in the extra tax money flooding in under Bush.

Was the economy really primed to grow in 2001?

2001 was the end of the Dot Com bubble, and the end of a multiple year run-up of the major stock indexes. People were fat and happy on free money extracted from the stock market during the late 1990s through the year 2000 when you could do no wrong. Then in late 2000, early 2001 the stock market began to violently crash leading to 10 years of zero returns for the S&P 500, and a NASDAQ market that is still more than half way below its peak. Then on September 11th 2001 we had the biggest terrorist attack ever on US soil for a second massive shock to the US economy. Getting the economy to recover from September 11th, and withstand a massive devaluation of everyone’s stock holdings was no guarantee. If getting the economy moving was so simple, Obama would have done it by now. So Bush put in place tax cuts and got the economy going again, and Tax receipts were way up over even the peak 2000 levels in just a few years. So how do you account for the tax cuts costing 1.6 Trillion? You simply can’t. The number was made up then and was never validated making the 4 Trillion estimates today just as bogus. It gets tough to factor changes in the economy that tend to drive up tax receipts, but I will take a stab at it.

During the Go-Go Clinton years the government collected an average of 18.9% of GDP in taxes hitting an all-time high of 20.6% in 2000 at the peak of the Dot Com Bubble. The 30 year average GDP extraction rate is 18.1%. During Bush’s 8 years in office the government extracted 17.6% of GDP in taxes below both Clinton and the long-term average. But we know that the out years in the Clinton presidency were an anomaly due to the building Dot Com Bubble. We also know that Bush started his presidency at the beginning of the a stock market crash, and was also hit with a major terrorist attack in his first year. To expect baseline type tax extraction under this scenario is quite a stretch, but I will go ahead and assume that is what would have happened without the Bush tax cuts. This gives you a 17.6% extraction rate with the Bush tax cuts and an 18.1% extraction rate without the cuts. Taking 0.5% of the 97.4 trillion in GDP over eight years gives you an eight year cost of $487 Billion. Prorating that to ten years gives you a $609 Billion cost vs. the $1.6 Trillion budgeted for the Bush Tax Cuts. Nobody seemed to notice this discrepancy when they claimed extending them again would cost a much larger 4 trillion.

The facts are pretty simple. The cost of the Bush tax cuts were more like 60 Billion per year, which is about what they just spent to extend unemployment insurance. It is a drop in the bucket compared to the 1.4 Trillion deficit in 2010. The 60 billion per year “lost”, was not lost at all, but kept by hard working tax payers. The tax cuts were able to help the economy recover and grow from two gigantic shocks that hit it in 2001. Now the deficit did rise significantly under Bush, but this was not a result of his tax cuts. This was a result of spending increases far out pacing revenue increases. There was a huge debate on not extending the Bush tax cuts for the top earners, but they only accounted for less than 25% of the cost. Is $15 billion a year going to fix your 1.4 trillion deficit hole? Think again. Spending needs to be cut fast, and extending the Bush tax cuts may even help on the revenue side if they can help get the economy going again. The United States has a spending problem not a tax problem.

The Concession

2010-12-24T12:02:00.000-08:00

I have officially thrown in the towel on my multi-sport daily fantasy sports challenge with Buffalo66, and he has graciously accepted. Buffalo66 is without any doubt in my mind the best overall daily fantasy sports player alive and really dominated me throughout the challenge. I put up a strong effort with expansive player projection models for all sports, but was edged out in Fantasy Baseball, and thoroughly dominated in Fantasy Hockey and Fantasy Football. His scoring average against me in Fantasy Football was ridiculously high, and was often one of the few players beating me at the site we were playing at. Overall, I won a decent chunk of change during the challenge against other players with my challenge teams, but shipped a good portion of it over to Buffalo66 in our $25 leagues. You can see a recap of our challenge here in the Rotogrinders Forum

I wanted to use the challenge to step up my daily game and see if there was money to be made out there. Also, it was great experience to play on a competitive site, and see daily from the player's perspective. Ultimately, this will lead to improvements at Fantasy Sports Live. As far as making money in daily fantasy sports, it can be done, but requires good table selection skills as well as a high level of dedication each time you play. Even with a good player projection model, it can still take an hour or so to nail down an ideal line-up considering all of the other outside factors. When table selection was easy in fantasy football, I was making some good money, but it got tough pretty quick where we were playing at, and has never been very good for the other sports there. After the challenge, I still think FSL is the place to play if you want to profit. We have much lower rake which makes it much easier to profit long-term. We also tend to nurture the newer players with beginner leagues and in many other ways before sending them out for slaughter against the best of the best. The site we were playing at is just a giant blood bath for beginner players and tends to send them packing before they can build up some confidence. It would be nice to find a site with a ton of action and lots of new players around all the time, but it does not appear to exist yet.

Income Inequality?

2010-12-23T10:25:00.000-08:00

When did income inequality become a bad thing? It is actually a huge virtue of capitalism. It is not a problem no matter how large it gets, and the government needs to stop trying to balance things out through “wealth redistribution”. If you want income equality you want communism plain and simple. The reason that capitalism creates so much more wealth than communism is because it incentivizes wealth creation. As a result a much bigger pie of wealth is created and available to those who would like to go out and work for it. This tends to drag up the quality of life for everyone, except the ultra-lazy. Ultimately the income inequality “problem” is the result of government meddling, and it will not be fixed through additional government meddling.

Let’s take the highest paid CEOs as an example. Let’s say they are making $25 million a year while the lowest level employees are making $25k per year (1000x). In a pure capitalist economy, this does not really make much sense unless the CEO is bringing 1000x the value to a company as the lowest level workers. While, I would like to believe this could be true, I simply don’t believe that it is. So, there must be something not pure capitalist about our economy that allows for some individuals to be paid much more than they are actually worth. I am going to point to government regulation of the economy as the cause of these inflated CEO salaries. In a pure capitalist economy, there should be ample competition. If a company is making enough money to pay their CEO $25 million/year, surely there is a smaller company out there who pays their CEO less that $1 million per year that has a much lower cost structure. Normally you would expect these smaller, more nimble companies to attack the big and bloated $25 million CEO companies across many fronts with much success. They can undercut on price with a lower cost structure. They can be closer to the customer than a giant corporation can be. For some reason this is not happening now. What has happened is that large companies send large armies of lobbyists to Washington, who have a large influence on the industry regulations that are written. The complex regulations end up favoring the big established companies by creating huge barriers to entry via endless red tape that small businesses can’t afford to deal with. As a result consumers don’t get real competition, and end up subsidizing a fat CEO paycheck through higher prices. Rather than just jack up the tax rates on the CEO you just need to lower the barriers to entry by eliminating the overregulation of businesses.

Jacking up the income tax rates on the rich has never worked anyway. A change in the tax rates does not equate to a change in tax collections. This is a fact that is completely ignored by the CBO and those in power today. The “cost” to extend the Bush tax cuts is widely reported at $4 trillion over 10 years, with $700 billion over 10 for the top tax rate alone. Where does that number come from? It does not come from reality that is for sure. Reality would look at income tax collections before and after the Bush tax cuts were implemented to see what the “costs” actually were. The Bush tax cuts were implemented in 2001 and 2003. In the latter part of the decade through 2008 income tax collections were up substantially over what was collected before the tax cuts were implemented. While there was a brief reduction in collections, immediately after the cuts, the economy recovered to the point where record income tax collections were possible and happening once again. The ten year “cost” of the Bush tax cuts when they were first implemented will be less than zero after 10 years have expired. Claiming that extending them out another 10 years would cost $4 trillion is an estimate that is wrong by more that $4 trillion. It is a complete joke that completely ignores what actually happened. Raising taxes does not equate to higher tax collections. Income tax collections have held steady at around 19% of GDP over the last 60 years regardless of tax policy. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire would likely damage the economy so much that income tax receipts would fall. Not extending them would have a cost, while extending them is free.

Income inequality is what makes America great. It is the incentive for anyone including the poorest of the poor to work hard and earn a better quality of life. If you take it away, you remove all incentive to work hard. The classic example is a real example from an economics class where the students were pushing the idea that socialism was a more just economic system. The professor said that if the whole class agreed to it, he would use a socialized grading system. He would average the student’s grades and give everyone in class the same grade. The students agreed, and for the first exam the best students worked hard, and the worst students did not study, and the class got an average C+ on the test. This discouraged the top students who tried less hard for the next test, and encouraged the worse students to not try at all. The next exam the class got a D+, and by the end of the semester the entire class got an F. The real economy is no different. If you incentivize laziness, and de-incentivize hard work, everyone loses. Income inequality is the incentive system that keeps America strong.

The Rise and Fall of Beginner NL Holdem at MGM

2010-12-16T15:18:00.000-08:00

I’m back from back to back weekends in fabulous Las Vegas. As usual I like to play my live poker the MGM poker room. The first weekend after putting my name in at the usual $1/$2 level, I noticed that they were spreading something called beginner NL holdem. I asked what it was, and they said it was a $20 to $50 max buy-in $.50/$1 game. Now the 10% max $4 rake is a bit tough at the $1/$2 level, so at $.50/$1, it might be a bit tough to overcome unless the competition is really bad. I thought about it a bit and figured this really would attract the beginners, and with the small stacks they would be less afraid to get involved in pots. Seemed like a goldmine to me so I signed up. They were only running it at three tables. The wait was a bit long, but I sat down and figured if I could get a quick double up, I would have some chips to do some damage. I dropped about $20 early, and re-bought back up to $50, when I caught TT the next hand and built a decent pot preflop. The flop came 755, and I got right to work building a pot. I caught a nice T on the river and ended up getting all in three way for more than a full triple up and I was in business. The game is played with dollar chips so the mound of chips reminded me of dragging a massive pot in the old days at $3/$6 limit. From that point on I just grinded away a nice profit, while slamming all the free drinks I wanted.

Fast forward to the next night, and I am back at a beginner table with even worse players. The two guys to my left were folding preflop out of turn every hand, and the dealer did not seem to care. I got another easy double up and played for several hours and another nice profit.

Fast forward to the blogger gathering last Friday night at the MGM. The blogger table wait was too long to deal with, and bloggers were spread out around the poker room as a result. I put myself on the beginner list and hung out with the bloggers near the sports book bar for about 30 minutes as I moved up the list. When I found my seat, dollar signs were flashing in my head. I had a guy on my left playing out of a full tray of $1s. To his left was an agro kid pushing the table around on nearly every hand, but showing down pretty much crap. I had a lady to my right who had never played before, but had watched her son play. A bunch of other fish filled the table. This time the fish were getting a little luckier, and my stack was yo-yoing up and down a bit. I never really got into the hand I needed to double through and walked away with my stack down 20% (-$10). Ouch, but cost effective for the number of free drinks. Well there is always tomorrow night.

Fast forward to Saturday night, and they are no longer spreading beginner NL holdem. To bad, as it was probably more profitable than $1/$2 for a decent player. The rake was probably too low to take for the house. A bunch of small pots would go un-raked post flop, and the play was a bit slower due to the beginners. I thought that it was more of a loss leader type idea to get people to move up to where they make good money, but the MGM probably got tired of giving up the extra $20 or $30 per hour vs. a higher stakes table. Overall, I liked the concept, and hope some other poker rooms try it.

Daily Fantasy Sports Blogging

2010-11-12T10:24:00.000-08:00

It seems like the daily fantasy sports industry has finally hit the inflection point where it's popularity is starting to explode. Fantasy Sports Live has been growing steadily since our launch in June 2007, but without much help from a strong daily fantasy sports industry. We now have some well funded competitors who are driving awareness of the concept, and annual prizes paid out are starting to approach the 10 million dollar amount. Daily Fantasy Sports is now just as legitimate as online poker was in its beginning and new cottage industries are developing to support this expanded popularity. Rotogrinders is a perfect example of a site that could not have existed two years ago, but can exist now with a critical mass of daily fantasy sport players.

When I started my poker blog, I was a bit late to the game. Poker blogs had existed for a few years, and I was just offering my unique perspective to the game. As I got better at blogging, I was able to break some new ground in some of my poker strategy posts but this was tough, because most of the concepts had already been beaten to death by other bloggers. With daily fantasy sports, it feels like being the first one to have a poker blog. There just are not a lot of people blogging daily fantasy sports, and new ground can be broken all the time. Since this site is not where people would come to look for daily fantasy sports strategy posts, I have been writing for Rotogrinders. It is like I am writing the first posts on continuation bets, or check raises, or floating for value which is a pretty awesome feeling. I am in the unique position of having created the industry (I have been thinking about daily longer than anyone else) and I am also a serious fantasy grinder on some of FSL's competitive sites. This dual owner/player perspective may end up placing me as the grandfather of daily fantasy blogs when all is said and done, similar to what Iggy did for poker blogs.

Posting over here is just not happening much lately, but if you would like to see what I have been doing with daily fantasy sports, check out these links below.

Table Selection and Hourly Rates in Daily Fantasy Sports

Third Level Thinking in Fantasy Football

NFL Advanced Metrics

Why Andriod Will Not Be a Long-Term Success

2010-11-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

The unending hype from the tech industry about how Android is crushing the iPhone is pretty laughable. Sure the tech industry hates Apple, and Android is the next best thing to iOS, but they are missing the big picture. To win long-term requires good customer service practices, and these simply do not exist at Google. Apple has been around since before the internet, and has never adopted the internets lack of customer service business model. When you are Google or FaceBook, and have millions and millions of customers, and a limited budget for customer services you need to make some choices. For example if you have one customer service agent per 5 million customers, you have issues if you publish a support email address or support phone number. The support load would be overwhelming if you allowed your customers to actually contact you, so they simply avoid this at all costs. They use Forums, and FAQ pages, and their contact pages do not provide actual contact information, just more hoops to jump through and links back to the FAQ pages. I know this from personal experience. Google is probably a top ten worst company in terms of customer service. You simply can’t contact them, even if your problem or issue can’t be solved by a FAQ page. If you are a customer of Google and have an issue you are simply fucked. Fucking your customers over is not a solid long-term strategy for growth.

So how does customer service for the Andriod OS work?

I will tell you right now, that you will not be getting any from Google. Google gave away the OS for free, and as a result does not have to support it. So the device manufacturer will have to support the software that they did not provide. Good luck with that one! So if your android device is having an issue you can go the manufacturer, and they will claim it is an OS issue. You can’t go to Google so you will need to just take their word for it.

How does customer service work for the iPhone work?

Apple not only makes the phone, but they also provide the OS and software. They are completely responsible for the device, and can’t point fingers elsewhere. They also have a brick and mortar retail presence that allows you to speak directly with Apple customer service agents. They also have actual contact info on their website. So at apple they can take ownership and resolve the issue, while with android there is no single owner, and OS support will be non-existent.

Which OS requires more support?

The Andriod OS clearly will require much more support than an iPhone. There are simply more versions of both the OS and hardware out there, and Android phones are much more customizable from their base configuration. The iPhone is also much easier for non-techies to use and understand than an Android phone. So the support levels will need to be higher for Andriod, but the support is crippled by Google’s lack of participation.

Ultimately, consumers are free to choose the Smartphone operating system that they want, and many are currently choosing Android. Consumers are a fickle bunch, and once they catch wind of major customer service issues with Android, they will not be sticking with the OS long-term.

Top of the Food Chain Part Duece

2010-10-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

Last Football Season, I started dabbling in Weekly Fantasy Football at a competitor’s site. The site put all entries into a hat and then auto-matched the entries. I figured that if I could hold my own against the best, I could “Stuff the Ballot Box” with my entries and get all of the match-ups available on the site. I started out completely crushing the site, but got discouraged several weeks later and stopped playing. There were a couple of key things that I did not like. First, most of my match-ups were against the better players, and not so many against the bad players limiting the chances of long-term profits. There were other’s taking my same approach, and only one player can be at the top of the food chain. Second, the way they calculate player cap values is defective, and leads good players to nearly identical teams under their pretty loose cap. I realized that my leagues were being decided mostly by how the kicker did (big variance), and not by my solid selections at the other positions.

As my Multi-sport Daily Fantasy Sport Challenge with Buffalo66 moves on to fantasy football, I figured I would give it another go this year. If I am going to put several hours building a team to compete with Buffalo’s, I might as well leverage that into some profits in other fantasy football leagues. The player cap values are just as defective as they always were, but I found a new and very lucrative angle for this year. The site has evolved a bit from the pure throw your entry into a hat model, but the organization of the site is confusing, and many people do not understand the changes. Most people take the old, easy option of throwing multiple entries into the hat for the site to find the match-ups on Sunday. However, now you can now look inside the hat and hand pick out your match-ups. They also give you detailed information on the player’s winnings with a single click. So rather than throw my entries into the hat, I simply choose my matches among beginner players only. With a small amount of work on Saturday and Sunday morning, I picked the hat clean of all beginner entries, and had my way with them. I ended up going 29-1 in Heads-up matches at the standard structure. My one loss (of course) was to Buffalo66 who seems to know how to do just enough to beat me every week. I also entered two “expert” leagues and lost them both. I don’t really like the expert leagues anyway, as they force you to choose overvalued players to get under the cap, which is sub-optimal. So if you only count my structure of choice and eliminate my nemesis, I was 29-0 against the beginners on the site. I absolutely crushed them to with a 134 score, and only a couple of them breaking 100. It was not even close, though I have to admit I had a pretty good team last week. I had my entire bankroll at work, and I plan on doing it again this week. As long as I am matched against beginners only, I should be able to win even if I have an off week. The other great thing about taking all of the beginner matches, is that it leaves only tough matches for everyone else, making it difficult for the regulars to profit after the rake. Frustrated users, should start looking for better alternatives like www.fantasysportslive.com, where it is much easier to profit from your Fantasy Sports knowledge.

Five and Seven

2010-09-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

The Daily Fantasy Baseball phase of my challenge has come to a close and I am sitting at 5-7. My plan going in was to "hold my own" in the fantasy baseball part of the challenge, and I can say that I met that objective despite starting out a horrible 1-5. I lost a bunch of close ones along the way, and could easily see myself at 6-6 or better right now if I caught a break or two. Buffalo66 did outscore me over the 12 leagues so he should get all the credit for his 7-5 start and for being better at fantasy baseball than me. Mathematically, fantasy baseball has a lot to offer a numbers guy like myself, but the variance is very high, the version offered at the site we play at is pretty horrible, and I am not a big baseball fan. I am very glad that it is over, and will not be playing anymore fantasy baseball for a while, thank God.

We will be starting fantasy football in Week 4, and that I am looking forward to. I feel I have an advantage in football, and will need to start building a lead prior to the basketball/hockey portion of the challenge. I still think this thing is going to go down to the wire, and my chances are still pretty good having moved past one of my worst fantasy sports.

Anatomy of a Fantasy Football Score

2010-09-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

Fantasy Football has been used recently to help students learn math, but it is more of the basic stuff like how to calculate a player’s fantasy score from a boxscore. Not much has been written on the actual mathematics of how a player’s individual fantasy score is determined for an individual game. I thought I would go ahead and take a stab at it, and possibly break some new ground in the process.

You can spend hours and hours projecting out player fantasy football scores for the week, but then you get Arian Foster putting up 41 fantasy points last weekend, and Andre Johnson putting up 3 fantasy points and most people just start shaking their head at a problem that seems unsolvable. Well it is not an unsolvable problem, its just the math will never lead you to an exact answer for a players upcoming fantasy score due to modeling accuracy issues and most importantly variance. So let’s take a look at what factors determine a player’s weekly fantasy football score, and how you would go about solving for those factors.

Baseline Fantasy Score (Bfs)

A player's Baseline Fantasy Score is the average fantasy score they would put up if unlimited trials were run against a perfectly neutral match-up. This is the score you would expect the player to make against a match-up that was not favorable or unfavorable to that player, and before game variance is applied. If you could run unlimited trials you could remove the variance factor, but that is not practical in the NFL.

Match Up Factor (MUx)

The Match Up Factor is an aggregate of all of the factors that would tend to cause the player to score higher or lower than their Baseline Fantasy Score in the upcoming match-up. This is where all aspects of the match up are accounted for. Sub factors can include the opponent’s defensive strength, if the game is at home or away, if the player has been running hot or cold lately, if the player will be getting more or less snaps, and other match-up factors. When you have an accurate Match Up Factor you multiply it by the players Baseline Fantasy Score, and you will get the players average fantasy score if the game could be played an unlimited amount of times.

Game Variance (GV)

Game Variance is what accounts for all of the crazy and unexpected things that actually happen in a specific game. It is also different for each player depending on how consistent that they are. What this does is cause a spread of actual fantasy scores around the average fantasy score obtained over multiple trials. This is how Arian Foster who was expected to score in the 10s puts up a 41 last weekend. If you ran that game 10 more times, it is likely he would not score that high again. His large unexpected score was a product of his Baseline Fantasy Score being underestimated, his match-up factor being not favorable enough, and most importantly him catching the right side of variance in a big way. Over the long run (1000s of games) an equal amount of good and bad things that can’t be accounted for will happen to your player during the game washing away the variance. However, over an individual game, the variance component can easily outweigh all other factors and become the predominant determination of a players fantasy score.

Fantasy Score Equation

At long last I present the equation for a players fantasy score.

Fantasy Score = Bfs x MUx x GV

A player’s fantasy score is entirely determined by his Fantasy Scoring Baseline, multiplied by an aggregate of the Match Up Factors affecting his upcoming fantasy score, multiplied by a Game Variance factor that is the single trial deviation from the player’s average expected score.

How are Bfs, MUx, and GV determined?

The first thing required if you would like to solve the Fantasy Score equation is an analytical player projection model that includes as many match-up factors as possible. You then need to run player projections for the top 25 or so players at each position, and compare the actual fantasy football score results to your score projections for all of the players. Using 100s of players and multiple weeks, you can get close enough to the long-term where the variance term drops out of the equation. If you sum up your projection errors over all of these trials you will find that you are either projecting too high or too low, and you can go back and play around with your match-up factors until your projection errors sum out to near zero. At that point you will have a pretty good projection model where MUx can be determined with decent accuracy. You then go ahead and assume that MUx is perfectly accurate and try to back your way into each players Baseline Fantasy Score.

The Baseline Fantasy Score is much tougher to get for Fantasy Football than other sports, because to get it you need many weeks of data (to remove the variance), but the season is way to short to get enough data. Your only hope is to assume that variance has washed away in your small sample size, and use the equation below. As the season progresses your Bfs values will become more accurate, but you will need to accept that there will always be some errors in your estimates due to a lack of data.

Bfs = Average (Fantasy Score 1 / MUx1, Fantasy Score 2 / MUx2, Fantasy Score 3 / MUx3, …)

Once you have the Bfs for each player and an accurate model for MUx you can use simple statistics (correction advanced statistics) to determine the standard deviation of the projection errors for each fantasy player, and solve for their Game Variance (GV). The math gets pretty tough because you are not running multiple identical trials, with the same median value, but independent trials with independent medians based on MUx. You can just accept that there will be variance, but if you go to the trouble to determine a player’s individual Game Variance, it can be very helpful. Players with low variance are better selections than high variance players, if you are a good fantasy player. Bad fantasy players would prefer the opposite because high variance players give them a better chance of beating a better opponent. A skillful player does not need variance on his side to win long-term, but a poor fantasy football player will need variance on their side to win short-term.

Once you have done all of the legwork, picking your weekly fantasy team at Fantasy Sports Live is a simple. You select the team that will score the highest (Bfs x MUx) that fits under the cap while preferring players with lower standard deviations where possible. To do this properly you will need the cap values of each player so you can calculate the cost per fantasy point, and minimize that value on your team, while spending the entire cap amount.

Sundays with Dr. Pauly 2010 With $1000 to $2000 Free Bonus Cash Added

2010-09-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

For 2010 we thought we would step things up a bit with our Sundays with Dr. Pauly promotion and increase the free bonus cash up to $1000. For qualified sports or gaming bloggers this year, all you need to do is play in our regular SWDP leagues, and we will double any bonus cash you win for up to an extra free $1000. That increases the potential amount of bonus cash added up to $2000. Not bad for just playing some fantasy football. The details are below and week 1 leagues are already forming.

FantasySportsLive .com announces the new and improved Sundays with Dr. Pauly promotion for 2010 with at least $1000 in free bonus cash added. In Sundays with Dr. Pauly you get to compete against one of the top gaming bloggers in the world, Dr. Pauly himself, as well as against the other participants in the challenge. Sundays with Dr. Pauly will run throughout the 2010 NFL football season and offer multiple ways to earn free bonus cash. Simply enter the weekly fantasy football leagues called “Sundays w/Dr. Pauly” to qualify for your share of the free bonus cash. Bonus cash will be distributed as follows:

$150/$75/$25 will be distributed to the top three individual weekly fantasy football scores obtained during any week that Sunday’s with Dr. Pauly runs.

The series will be broken out into three 5 week mini-series with the winner of each series receiving $75 and entry into the week 16 Tournament of Champions

$250 will be added to the Week 16 Tournament of Champions. To gain entry into the Week 16 tournament, you need to either win a 5 week mini-series or beat Dr. Pauly’s fantasy football score over four consecutive weeks during weeks 1-15. Anyone beating Dr. Pauly’s score in the TOC will receive a pro-rated share of the $250 added based on the amount they beat Dr. Pauly’s score by. If Dr. Pauly scores highest in the TOC, he wins the entire amount.

$150/$75/$50 will be awarded to the top three cumulative scores over the entire 17 week NFL season. Only the top 15 scores will be counted for each entry, so you can miss a week or two if you have to and still earn the bonus cash.

As an additional bonus, if you are a sports or gaming blogger and participate in the challenge we will double any bonus cash you receive. To be eligible for a doubling of the bonus cash prizes you must have an active sports or gaming blog that has existed for at least one year prior to September 1st 2010, and must post the Sundays with Dr. Pauly image, with a link to www.fantasysportslive.com. Approved blogs will have links to them shown in the Sunday’s with Dr. Pauly standings that will be updated on the FSL blog.

Sunday’s with Dr. Pauly leagues will have an $11 entry fee and payout 91% of the fees in regular cash prizes not counting the added bonus cash. We will offer a choice of either a 25 player league paying the top five or 10 player leagues paying the top 3 each week. We will try to keep SWDP leagues available until the league start-time, but we can’t guarantee this, so please enter the leagues early to reserve your seat.

So Far, Not So Good

2010-08-09T12:19:00.000-07:00

We are now 4 matches into the 50 match, multi-sport, daily fantasy sports challenge, and things are not going very well. It is early, so I am not overly concerned yet, but I would have liked a better start. I won the first fantasy baseball match, and then lost the next three. I worked hard to get up to speed on fantasy baseball, but my record has been pretty horrible on the site we are playing at. I keep telling myself that it is just variance, but I have no proof that this is true. My biggest problem so far is in hitter selection. I think I am doing a pretty good job here, but my hitters just don't seem to produce much no matter how good they are, or how high their daily projection is. My hitters have pretty much not shown up for three of the four leagues. In the one league that they did do well, my pitcher bombed for the first time, and I lost a close one. One big issue is the cap structure for individual players at the site we are playing at. It is just pure crap, and takes a big chunk of the skill aspect away. I don't know who came up with the formula that they are using for individual player prices, or even how it works, but it manages to misprice just about every player on the site. They should fire that guy! The mispriced players force you to draft a team from a narrow sliver of players that have any reasonable value at all, and ties your hands as to the types of teams that you can draft. For starting pitchers this is a HUGE issue. The top pitchers for the day, cost about half as much per projected fantasy point as any fantasy hitter on the site. As a result you almost have to take the top projected pitcher. Our pitchers have exactly matched in two of the leagues, and in the other 2 leagues Buffalo66 had my second best pick for pitcher. Keep in mind that there are typically 30 different starting pitchers to chose from, so this would not be the case without mispriced players. The site just does not allow you to choose a lower projected pitcher. If you drop down about 1/2 of the way down in pitcher cost, you will have enough cap left to pick any hitter you want. If you select one that is cheaper than that you will be left with tons of cap money that can't be spent. It is pretty pathetic. At Fantasy Sports Live the cap values are simple and transparent, and allow you to pick any one from the highest projected player to a scrub who is going to do better than average without any penalty.
This allows the your skill to shine and lowers the variance.

Fantasy Baseball just looks to be high variance in general, and taking skill away just increases the variance. I will need to work on my lucksacery a bit more I guess. My approach to daily fantasy sports projections is that past performance history, can help determine future performance. Intuitively this makes sense, and if it was not true, you really would not be able to beat fantasy sports long-term. So, I have built up a pretty advanced projection model for fantasy baseball based on that assumption. So either, my model needs some work, I have just been unlucky, or Buffalo66 is just better than me at this and I will not get there no matter how hard I try. My model has not been validated like my model for Fantasy Football was last year. So I will spend sometime validating my baseball model, tweaking it and seeing what happens. If I catch back up, it is going to be luck, skill, or some combination of both.

Multi-Fantasy Sports Challenge Begins Today

2010-07-30T15:33:00.000-07:00

My challenge with Buffalo66 kicks off today with our first daily fantasy baseball match. I spent about a week getting used to the fantasy baseball on the site we will be playing at. My record so far is pretty poor. There are a few reasons for this. The first few days I was climbing a pretty steep learning curve and getting burned as a result. After that, I have simply been on the wrong end of variance (unlucky). Daily fantasy sports is a bit of a beast. Because you are playing another human it is a combination of how good your score is and how bad your opponent's score is. While I have won by huge margins in most of my wins, I have lost most of my matches by small margins. I just can't seem to line my score up against a slightly worse score, but that will start happening overtime. I developed a daily projection model that to me seems pretty solid, and should be able to beat daily fantasy baseball, and hopefully buffalo66 as well. One big issue I have is the cap values of the individual players at the site we will be playing at. Unlike www.fantasysportslive.com the players cap values are not proportional to their average fantasy points scored per game. They try to make some sort of adjustment for a players recent performance, and pitchers are grossly undervalued compared to hitters. Also, the range of values for hitters is way too flat and does not represent the fantasy scoring discrepancy between the best and worst fantasy players. All of this tends to reduce the level of skill you can apply to the game, which makes for more similar teams among good players and more of a crapshoot as a result.

Problems with Projection Based Caps

You simply should not try to adjust player salary cap values based on non-obvious factors. Lets say that you developed daily fantasy score projections for fantasy baseball and used them for your player cap values. Now lets say that you worked on them until they were so sophisticated that they became as accurate as any other projection system used. The fact that you are using the most accurate player projections for the player values, means that the game has become 100% luck based. Any and all fantasy teams selected that used the full amount of cap available would be of equal likely to win under as system like that. Results would be determined entirely by luck. It's almost like if there was some perfect way to play poker, and online sites automatically pointed out the perfect play to every user every time. The skill edge would be completely removed. Pricing your players based on accurate projections removes the skill edge, which is something you do not want unless you are at a skill disadvantage.

Challenge Accepted!

2010-07-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

Fellow poker blogger Buffalo66, and longtime customer of FantasySportsLive issued a challenge a while back to the Daily Fantasy Sports community. He challenged any takers to a series of Heads-Up matches across all of the different fantasy sports disciplines (Football, Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, and NASCAR). This is kind of similar to HORSE in poker. While some people are good at some of the poker games, the best all around poker player would be the one who is best at HORSE or a combination of all of them. So his challenge was to see if he was the best all around daily fantasy sports player around. He has had no takers up until now. I was reminded of his challenge when reading his interview over at RotoGrinders which just launched earlier this week. Rotogrinders is to Daily Fantasy Sports what PocketFives is to online poker. They were created by the same people, and we are hoping the extra buzz around daily fantasy sports will finally push it into the mainstream. For example you can check out Kaiseroll13 winnings at RotoGrinders and see that he has won close to 100k on Fantasy Sports Live alone since March. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the challenge. I figured that I have me some salary cap based daily fantasy sports skillz. I mean I practically invented (correction - invented) salary cap based daily fantasy sports for money. So since he had no takers, and I feel it is a worthy challenge, I decided to take him up on his offer.

Challenge Details

Total Heads-Up Matches: 48
Matches Per Sport: 12
Buy-in Per Match: $25
Total Buy-in amount: $1200
Fantasy Sports: Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, and Football

NASCAR was dropped because there are not many good offerings outside of FSL and this challenge will not be held at FSL so I can keep my winnings.

Whoever has the best W/L record over the challenge is deemed the current best all around daily fantasy sports player in the world.

Handicapping the Challenge

This one is probably going to go down to the wire, but I obviously would not have taken the challenge unless I thought I had a good chance. On the surface, many will be wondering what I am smoking. Buffalo66 is #2 on the FSL all-time leaderboard with over 3500 cashes in Fantasy Sports Leagues at FSL. He most likely is sitting second overall in cashes in the history of fantasy sports, as thousands of cashes really was not possible before daily fantasy sports started. He is going to have a pretty healthy edge on me in fantasy hockey, and I should have a decent edge in fantasy basketball. The dropping of Fantasy NASCAR works to my advantage, because he would have held an edge on me there as well. So that leaves fantasy football and fantasy baseball. If you go back and read this post you can see that I attempted to take over all of the fantasy football action at a competing site, and crushed all takers including the #1 player all-time at FSL for a 71-10 heads up record over weeks 11-12 last year. I did not continue to win at that pace, and gave up my quest shortly after getting frustrated with the looseness of the cap structure and the tendency of teams to be nearly identical for the best players on the site. The fact that I was arriving at the nearly the same but slightly better optimal team as the best players reinforced that my system is solid for Fantasy Football. I believe that I will have a decent edge in the fantasy football part of the challenge as a result. That leaves fantasy baseball. Buffalo66 has an edge there as of today. I am not familiar with the structure details on the competing site, and have never played it before. I have some solid ideas on what to do having written daily fantasy baseball strategy guides for FSL, but I am lacking in experience, and that will be a disadvantage. I really think it will come down to if I can hold my own through the baseball portion, and then really run my numbers up at basketball and football enough to make up for hockey where there is no way I can hold my own. Now if you ask Buffalo66, he probably thinks he has me in baseball, hockey and possible football, but is probably a bit concerned about basketball. It's his challenge, and he went for the max stakes, so he has to feel confident going in. Should be fun, and I will pop some updates here along the way.

Romer Spins 3 Million Lost Jobs into 3.5 Million Gained

2010-07-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

The white house must think we are very stupid. When you ram through a massive stimulus package that is supposed to create 3.5 million jobs it is pretty tough to argue that you were successful when 3 million jobs have been lost since it was passed. They love to use the "save or created" language, but that is not how the stimulus was originally sold. The numbers below are from Romer's report on the job impact of the stimulus package, prepared in January 2009. It shows an increase in Total Payroll of 3.675 million jobs by the end of 2010 if the stimulus package was enacted, vs. not enacted. With total payroll numbers at 134M prior to enactment, and 137.5M after enactment in her table. Total payroll numbers have actually dropped to the 131M mark since the stimulus package was enacted. So not only did the stimulus not create any of the jobs they claimed it would, it actually cost us another 3M in lost jobs. You would not know that, by the wild claims of success from the White House. Romer also claimed that unemployment would not rise about 7% if the stimulus was enacted. She has zero credibility, and would have been fired for incompetence by now if we had a real leader. The worst part about the whole stimulus package is that if it did in fact save any jobs they were all government jobs, and not construction and manufacturing jobs that they claimed would be created through "shovel-ready" projects. Construction and manufacturing jobs have been lost in every month since the stimulus package passed, because the "shovel-ready" line, was complete bullshit. It was more of a handout ready plan that did nothing but destroy jobs. Please stop insulting my intelligence with patently bogus claims.

Table 1
Aggregate Effect of the Recovery Package on GDP and Jobs in 2010Q4
Real GDP (billions
of chained 2000 $) Payroll Employment
Without Stimulus $11,770 133,876,000
With Stimulus $12,203 137,550,000
Effect of Package Increase GDP by 3.7% Increase jobs by 3,675,000

Does Blackjack Teach Tight-Agressive Poker?

2010-07-06T09:23:00.000-07:00

Before I caught the poker bug, I used to mainly play Blackjack in Vegas. Sometimes even going on all night Bobby Bracelet type benders. Since I started playing poker, I don't play much Blackjack anymore. It's just not that appealing, and seems to "brainless" to play anymore compared to poker. I was in Vegas over the weekend, and had some down time at a locals casino and sat down for some $2 blackjack. It finally dawned on me that correct blackjack play is "tight-aggressive". Anybody who has played blackjack for any amount of time and is not just spewing chips plays it tight-aggressive. The tight part is learning how to stay on non-winning hands like 12, 13, 14, 15 when required. The loose gambler hits those types of hands too often in the wrong situation and looses as a result. You have to play tight and be willing to stand on those types of hands to have a chance. So what's aggressive about blackjack? The tight-aggressive poker player tends to hold on to his/her chips, until they have the best of it, and then they have no problem firing at the pot. In blackjack you do the same thing to some extent. When you have a pair or an 11, or 10 the rules allow you to double your bet. If it looks like you have the best of it, then the tight aggressive blackjack player get aggressive and gets the chips in while good. Ultimately, I ended up being a tight-aggressive style poker player, and I am starting to wonder if all of that blackjack training set me up to play that way. Any thoughts?

Obama Getting More Done in 18 Months Than Bush Did in Eight Years

2010-07-02T14:08:00.000-07:00

Obama is off and running and out to break all of Bush's records. On deficit spending, Obama will easily pass Bush's reckless eight years of red ink in less than 18 months. How about getting American soldiers killed in Afghanistan? Once again Obama is on pace to pass to shatter Bush's 7+ year total in less than 18 months by upping the pace of deaths 5x since he took office. Now I figured he had the deficit spending in him, but war deaths? Bravo Obama! I am just wondering why Obama does not get any love from the Media on the war death thing. When Bush was president they used to read off the names one by one on a daily basis. Now that Obama is president, you would hardly know that War deaths in Afghanistan are at record levels and heading up towards IRAQ type numbers. I hope we get those last 50 Al Qaeda members soon, so Obama can focus on breaking Bush's abuse of presidential powers record. Obama is so close he can probably smell it. He just needs to focus more.

Capitolism Requires Capitol

2010-06-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

The biggest reason that the world economy will not be recovering soon, and is headed into the depths of depression is that the socialist governments of the world (United States now included), are starving the world of capitol. Pretty much all of the world powers are running massive government deficits. To finance those deficits, they need to compete on the open market for capitol allocation. The are competing well, and starving the world of investment capitol. We need to stop talking about bogus GDP numbers and think about the concept of wealth creation. The government simply does not create any wealth, while private industry does. Starving private industry of capitol hinders wealth creation and leads directly to the hopeless economy we now see. It's been a long time coming.

When a private company borrows money to build a factory, they create jobs and real goods when the factory opens. You end up with a factory that has value and goods that have value to society when you are done. When the government borrows money to run a massive deficit, the money goes towards paying people to not work (unemployment insurance extensions), and paying bureaucrats to come up with new levels of red tape and to generally hinder private businesses. Also the high level of taxes required to support a bloated government, is a huge disincentive to even try to build a new factory. So when private industry raises capitol, wealth is created. When the government raises capitol, wealth is not created, but is likely destroyed.

The Keynesian economic theory that the governments need to deficit spend to increase aggregate demand at the time of recession is just a theory. There is zero evidence that this works in practice. All of the US recessions since the great depression were resolved through fiscal policy (low interest rates), and/or individual tax cuts. Stimulus spending was not required. Now after the great depression we did try to government stimulate our way out, but it did not work at all. The great depression dragged out for years until World War 2 ended it. If stimulus spending by the government works, why did in not work the ONLY time it has ever been tried???

There is also this huge problem with the government thinking it needs to be in charge of the economy. If the government has to run massive deficits now to increase aggregate demand, how good would the economy need to be before we could completely stop defect spending? How good would it need to be before we could take 1 trillion dollars of tax money and not spend it, but use it to pay down the debt instead. Is the economy ever strong enough to risk pulling that kind of money out of it? The facts are simple. The money borrowed today has to be paid back in the future with interest. The government wastes tons of money and does not create any real wealth. At some point that money (2x or so) needs to come back out of the economy, and that is going to hurt way More than stimulus now can help.

The only hope is for massive reductions in government spending to balance the budgets, and stop starving the world of the capitol required for wealth creation. The Europeans get this, but Obama does not. He looks like a village idiot when he goes on and on about how the recovery is fragile, and huge stimulus actions are still required. Is he the last person on earth that does not see that reckless government spending and deficits were the cause of this depression, and the solution is not to double down and spend more. The solution is to stop spending so that private industry can raise capitol to create jobs and wealth. Think about it this way Mr. president. Once all of the wealth is gone, how are you going to redistribute it? It's in your best interest to let private industry create some wealth, so you can steal that wealth from the hard workers and give to the lazy per your agenda.

Lost - Making It Up As They Went Along

2010-05-24T08:17:00.000-07:00

I did not follow lost for the first couple of seasons. I watched a few minutes here and there, but just could not get into it. Then after reading some of the poker blogs that recapped the show, it seemed more interesting, so I started watching. There were some many twists, turns, and unanswered questions, that I found myself convinced from the beginning that they were just making the story up as they went along. As a result there would be no way to tie everything together and explain everything at the end. I found myself watching this season, just to see if they would even try to explain everything. After about 15 minutes into last nights series final, it was obvious that they had no intentions of explaining anything (because they could not), so they went with the "It Was All a Dream" type ending. No reason to explain what happened in a dream, right? So if you make the story up as you go along, and can't conclude things, you just call the whole thing a dream. Sorry, but you guys are not cutting any new literary ground here, you are just literally lazy. A good writer knows the end before the writing starts. That's how you keep things consistent. With no idea how the thing is going to end you just leave a giant unresolved mess. That's what the ending of lost was. A giant unresolved mess.

Now the losties that were interviewed after the show loved it, and claimed that it answered their questions. LOL. What was exactly explained? To me there were still more questions than answers in the final. Lazy viewers impressed by lazy writers. That's all. I am not going to bother trying to give my thoughts on the island stuff, since it never really happened and was all a dream. A couple things bothered me in the final though. After all this build-up, the smoke monster gets killed by getting shot? And after the smoke monster is killed, he retains to form of Locke? I thought the smoke monster was just arranging the smoke to look like Locke? How does this work when he is dead? He should have just dissipated or returned to his original human form, but again lazy writing. Now for the church ending. You really can't have it both ways here, but that’s what the writers went for. If the whole thing (island sequences, flash forwards, flash backs, flash sideways) were just a dream to those who died in the crash, and never really happened, then how come these people are so special to each other that they had to reserve a meeting place in heaven or wherever they were. If the whole thing was a dream, then they are just random people on a doomed airplane, and have zero connection beyond that. You really need the island to be real for these people to mean something to each other. You can't have it be a dream, and a meaningful reality at the same time.

Now for those losties out there that can't wait to rewatch the 6 years now that they know how it has ended, to better understand it, you are simply crazy. The writers did not know how it was going to end back then, so anything you notice on rewatching, has zero to do with an ending that was not conceived at the time. What powers did the island ultimately have? The power of cupid. Look how many hook-ups the island gods made happen with just a handful of people of the island. Lost island is a great place to go if you are a complete loser and need to find a soul mate, as long as you are willing to die before any of that really happens.

Retarded Congress Still Investigating the "Flash Crash"

2010-05-20T10:18:00.001-07:00

Last week the Dow dropped 10% intraday before recovering most of it's losses. The mid-day sharp drop off was called a "Flash Crash". There was speculation that a single error by a trader caused this, and measures need to be put in place to stop it. Congress is just getting more retarded by the minute here. This is what really happened. The Fed has been building another stock market bubble over the last year or so. They have interest rates so low, that you can't earn any return on safe investments like savings accounts or CDs. That puts a ton of pressure on people to move their money into the stock market, to get some form of reasonable return. These people do not want to put their money into the market though, because it is not safe, and is way overvalued. Now that the bubble is pretty well inflated, people are looking for any sign of trouble to get out. A bad start to the trading day last week was the sign of trouble people were looking for, and they got the fuck out of the stock market. They were behaving rational, while the stock market is not. So how about this Congress? The stock market is way overvalued as a result of the Fed's easy money policies. The correct value is way below 10,000 for the Dow. The flash crash did not even get us close to fair value, but it was a step in the right direction, proving stock markets can get it right over time. So today, while Congressional hearings continue on the subject, the market is trading near the intraday bottom from last week. This tells me the markewt was simply overvalued and moving towards a correct valuation, but I knew that already. Congress should be investigating why the market snapped back intraday during the "Flash Crash", as that was a move that can't be supported by fundamentals. How about this? If you don't want to see the stock market crash, quit creating stock market bubbles. Bubbles can never last, and this one will not either. When you see the stock market running up day after day, you know something is not right. This was the behaviour prior to the Tech bubble in the late 90s, and we know what happened after that. Learn some lessons from the past, and stop with all these bubbles please. And don't act stupid when a bubble you created bursts. It just makes you look even more retarded than before.

Both Wars and Economy now Officially Obama's

2010-05-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

Obama promised to do many things when he ran for office. He promised to end the war in Iraq within 16 months and close down the Guantanamo detention center. He promised to fix an economy that he claimed was broken by Bush. He promised to bring positive change to Washington. Well you have failed on all promises and now its time to own up to your own actions and stop blaming Bush for the problems you have created or allowed to continue.

Iraq War

You have had your 16 months and we are still there with no end in site. This war is now your war Barrack Obama.

Afghanistan War

You chose to execute a surge strategy vs. cutting our losses and getting out of a war that can never be won. What would winning in Afghanistan look like anyway? This is now and will forever going forward be your war Barrack Obama.

Guantanamo Bay Detention Center

You signed an executive order your first week in office to close this facility with-in one year. Its been way past a year now, and it is still open with no plans to close it. This is now officially your terrorist detention center Barrack Obama.

The Economy

You have spent 10x the amount of money that any president ever has in an effort to "fix" the economy. You have had the Congress on your side, and had the ability to get just about any bill you wanted through. You spent the second $400 billion of the Tarp funds. You signed a $800 billion "Stimulus" bill. You have had a never ending string of programs like "cash for clunkers", "cash for caulkers", and numerous foreclosure prevention programs. You point to the GDP numbers and the stock market, and take credit for turning the economy around. With all the money you have spent, and all the programs (your programs) you have initiated over the last 16 months, it is pretty hard to argue this is still Bush's economy. Bush would have had it fixed by now like he did after 9-11 by actually cutting taxes. It is now officially your economy, and your problem. Unemployment has risen from 6% to 10% during this time when all the money was spent, and it is not coming down anytime soon as a result of your retarded policies that incentivize laziness, and discourage hard work. Foreclosures in the recent quarter are at an all-time high, as are mortgage delinquencies. You have completely wrecked the housing and private employment markets, and it is time you own up to this Barrack Obama.

Positive Change in Washington

OK, you did not technically run on positive change. You ran on just plain change, and change things you have. You are not willing to work at all with the Republicans, who are the only ones with actual solutions. You have cheated and bastardized the system to ram unpopular bills though. You have lied over and over again about the contents of bills, while accusing your opponents of distorting the facts. We are stuck with your crappy health care bill that will bankrupt the country, and does not lower costs or the deficit as YOU yourself promised over and over again (The American people never believed you and were solidly against this bill). Now that the CBO has re-scored the bill to show that it does not lower costs, and increases the deficit over the next 10 years, an honest politician would be looking to fix those two substantial issues, and deliver what he had promised. Are you going to revisit the health care bill now that you have been proven wrong, or are you just going to throw it over the fence so the next president can repeal it before it takes effect. You are a slimy Chicago politician, who lives and breaths corruption, and will go down as the worst president ever.

BBT5 Musings

2010-05-12T15:08:00.000-07:00

Well I am not off to a great start in the BBT5 to say the least. I have played in just 4 of the first 7 events, with no cashes. I bounced out first or second in my first attempt. This was noticed by Hoyazo who grouped me in with some other bloggers who he believes are playing poorly so far in the BBT5. I already recapped the hand, and I will stick with my play ( I had much more than top pair BTW) in that one. The other three that I have played I really got nothing going early at all. Early in MTTs when I am deep stacked, I play pretty much automatic poker. I just play my game and let what happens happen. I never go into a MTT expecting to win or even trying to win. I go in expecting to play my special brand of MTT play that I know works. If I play well and play my game, I am happy regardless of the results. I was profitable in each of the prior (4) BBT Series taking this approach. So even though I have 4 poor results so far, my play has been decent with no major mistakes. I just have not been getting into any good situations early on. When this happens, I am perfectly happy skipping along the bottom of the leaderboard from the mid-point on, waiting for things to start going my way. In the Mookie, last week this was the case, and I skipped along the bottom until about 2/3 of the field was gone before running my QQ into JJ all in preflop on a 14k+ pot that would have finally provided some breathing room for a final table run.

So tonight brings another Mookie that should have about 100 runners. I am running out of time for a TOC seat, and for some cash to get me positive on the BBT5. I am not expecting to win, but I am expecting to have an easier run through the early stages one of these times. When I run good early, it helps me to focus and target the final table. Looks like I could use the help.

BBT5 Info

Tournament: Poker From the Rail
When: Monday, April 19th through May 24th starting at 22:00ET
Game: Deepstack NLHE
Buyin: $24+2 (or token)*
Password: 2010WSOP

Tournament: The Mookie
When: Wednesday, April 21st through May 26th starting at 22:00ET
Game: Deepstack NLHE
Buyin: $10+1*
Password: vegas1

*Winner also receives ToC entry

Tournament: Battle of the Blogger Tournaments Invitational
When: Sunday, April 18th through May 23rd starting at 19:00ET
Game: Deepstack NLHE
Buyin: Restricted freeroll**

**$2,000 Prizepool + 1st and 2nd place receive ToC entry

Tournament: Blogger Battle Royale
When: Sunday, June 6th starting at 14:00ET
Game: Deepstack NLHE
Buyin: Freeroll for BBT participating bloggers

The Difference Between Greece and US Debt Issues

2010-04-28T09:59:00.001-07:00

What's the difference between the huge debt issues facing Greece and the United States? Greece is actually doing something to address the problem, and the United States is actually doing things that makes the problem worse. Its just a matter of time before there are riots in the streets here in the United States. The sooner tough choices are made, the better, but don't hold your breath.

The thing about defect and debt reduction, is that only actual results count. You can plan to do it, and talk about doing it, but unless it actually happens it simply does not count. If the Obamacare Bill actually lowers the deficit in year 10 than the president at that time can take the credit. It will be that presidents budget that lowered the deficit, not Obama's.

So lets look at Obama's track record and actual results to see if he really cares about the deficit and the debt. First off, we need a clarification about the numbers. In the old days when Social Security and Medicare were running surpluses, they would count those surpluses against the debt. That way Clinton could claim a surplus on the budget where none existed. Since Social Security and Medicare are entitlements, that money collected must be paid out. It is almost like a company taking out a loan, and calling the loan revenue in there financial statements. Anyway, now that there are no longer surpluses in Social Security, the government has decided to report the deficit differently than they did in they Clinton years and not include Social Security. So when you look at the chart above you can see that Obama's deficit was close to 2.5 Trillion in 2009, not the 1.7 Trillion that is reported. We are 2.4 trillion more in debt after one year of Obama, than before hand. The deficit for 2009 alone represents close to the entire debt accumulated by the U.S. through the year 1980. So Obama's deficit spending in one year exceeded the sum of all deficits through our countries first 200 years of existence.

The chart above shows 10 year periods before the year 2000 and 1 year periods after that. You can see how Clinton who was president for much of the 1990s was not really any better on the debt than Regan/Bush Sr. before him. in the 1980s. So now lets look at the most recent Bush. He racked up a ton of debt, but was making some progress on the deficit until 2008 when the economy collapsed. 2008 ended in an unheard of and unacceptable deficit of 1 trillion. Obama, has now got that number up to 2.5 trillion in just one year, and it is not a one off deficit to deal with the economy. The deficits will be massive as long as he is in office and keeps spending. So he can talk about deficit reduction all he wants, but his actions make him the most irresponsible president ever. He will have us in worse shape than Greece in a year or two. To get out of this mess, Greece is cutting union wages and benefits. Do you think that will happen on Obama's watch?

The last thing you need to know about the debt is debt servicing. Right now interest rates are at all time lows and it is not costing us nearly as much as it should to carry the debt. Since we have no plans or ability to pay it off, we are at the mercy of the credit markets to stay afloat. If interest rates go up (and they will) we will have no choice but to pay the higher rates. Lets say that we are paying 3% on average right now on our debt. A single point increase in interest rates increase our interest expense by 33%. A 3% rise in rates doubles our interest expense. A 6% rise triples our interest expense. We can't even afford the interest payments now, as we just borrow more money to pay it, so we really can't afford the interest rate increases that are bound to happen. So under our current leadership we are rapidly approaching a Greece level deficit/debt problem, and have no immediate plans to address the situation. Rather than cutting spending like the Greeks, we just continue to increase spending, relying on "rich people" to someday dig us out of this mess. What happens when we go to the rich people for help and the tell the government to fuck-off because they are moving to New Zealand, or anywhere else but here. Rich people will not stand for socialist level taxes without socialist level services, so they will simply stop working or move. When this happened the destruction of America will be complete, and we might as well just default on our loans.

Rush Poker and BBT5 Rush Exit

2010-04-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

I am a little out of the loop, but thanks to wawfuls comment I was able to jump into my first BBT5 event last night only to be the second player bounced out. I can't really fault my play, though I have to admit, I can never remember getting bounced so early before. I remember the hand something like this (a bit fuzzy I will admit). I pick up AKo early and open 3x to T150. I am reraised to a little north of T500 (stacks are about T3000), and I smooth call and my AA/KK alarm bells are going off. Flop comes down Kxx with two clubs, and I have the ace of clubs. I check/call T800. I am still pretty concerned about AA based on the preflop action for some reason. Turn drops a K of clubs giving me trips with top kicker and a draw to the top flush. I think I check/called again at this point, but was pretty committed. River is a blank, and I lead out for most of my remaining stack, and get reraised all-in. I call, fully expecting to see AA, but it is a low suited gapper for the made flush, and I am out. I think iIplayed it ok, and my opponent played it pretty bad preflop, getting over 1/6th in on a crap hand preflop early in a deepstacks MTT but oh well.

Logging in for the first time in a while, I noticed the rush poker games, and $5 offer so I tried it out. On the surface this looks to be a pretty cool idea, though I do not fully understand exactly how it works. I played some .25/.50 NL and was pacing close to 300 hands/hr on a single table. If you are used to multi-tabling, and making instant decisions there seems to be a huge advantage with rush poker. First off, there is no need to pay attention to the players you are against when you get a new table every hand. That is an advantage to the multi-tabler vs. the single-tabler. Also, it is just great to plow through your crap hands as you nit your way to gold. There is pretty much zero down time as a result. What is not clear to me are the required adjustments. With the fold now option, people will be abandoning their blinds and late position hands more than they should I would imagine. Blind defense and blind stealing are probably key to beating rush poker long term. The next thing is how your position at the next table is determined. It says that the BB is determined by the player who has played the most hands without posting a BB at that table. It is not clear if all other positions at the table are determined the same way. What you will notice if you play and are rapidly prefolding your junk hands is that table position at the next table appears to be somewhat random. You may be late for a few hands and then be early for a few. It is pretty much impossible to guess when you will hit a blind. It appears that the rapid folding types like me, may be posting the BB more often then normal, because they would be more likely to have a high number of hands since the last posted BB. To make it work right, they may have to make rapid folder post the BB more often, and then you better be able to defend well to win at rush poker. Any thoughts?

Poker Still Meh

2010-04-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

A played a little online poker a few weeks ago at FullTilt. I am still pretty much in "meh" mode. Poker just does not do for me what it once did. I guess in the old days, there was the dream to go pro some day, and that was a strong reason to keep working on my game and improving. No such goal for me anymore, and as a result, no such motivation. I still love the game, and my skills have not diminished by too much yet. It is just really hard for me to commit to play, even though I do have the time. Are blogger tourneys still running? I have not played in one since the last blogger series. Those were always a blast. I do like the fact that they have non turbo token S&Gs now at FullTilt. I scored a $26 token in an 18 player S&G after about 90 minutes of work. Played a few tourneys as well, and took some horrific beats. Don't really miss flopping top set, and pricing out the draws only to see a flush hit on the river. I played the midnight madness MTT which is a pretty cool set-up for a west coaster. Doubled up on my first hand, then pissed most of it away when I overplayed TT preflop after an open and a smooth call. I jammed, and both called. Initial better had A5s, smooth caller had QQ (?), and A5 pulled a straight for the win, after getting it all in three way preflop. Still tons of donkeys out there that's for sure. I rallied back and was sitting pretty low as the cash bubble approached. I took a stand with A9 and got bounced by AT. Years ago I would have folded into the money, but the low end payouts are simply not worth it, so rather than cash in my first MTT in a long time, I took the stand hoping for more. I will see if I can force myself to play some more, and do some poker posts, but I will probably continue to post about the end of America as we no it, as a result of the Obamunism being shoved down our throats.

ObamaCare in a Nutshell

2010-03-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

Now that the 2700+ page Senate version of ObamaCare has passed, I thought a few people would be interested in what is actually inside it. Pelosi, said that after it was passed we could find out what is great about it. I will break it down into three simple problems, and three government solutions in the bill.

Problem #1: Too many people do not have health insurance.
Solution: Make it a law that all people must have health insurance.

Problem #2 was caused by the solution to problem #1

Problem #2: Poor people can't afford to buy health insurance, even if mandated.
Solution: Have the government pay for poor peoples health insurance.

Problem #3 was caused by the solution to problem #2

Problem #3: The US government is broke, and can't pay for poor peoples health insurance.
Solution: Raise taxes on the rich.

In a nutshell this is a massive welfare program where wealth is redistributed from top wage earners to non or low wage earners, and not much else.

Any problems with the above solutions.

Solution #1 is an unconstitutional taking of liberty (a constitutionally guaranteed right), and a violation of the commerce clause as well. Before this Bill, I had the liberty to determine my own medical care. That has now been taken from me. Liberty is a right granted by God, that can't be taken by congress.

Solution #2 is not a solution because the government does not have a surplus to pay for any additional entitlements.

Solution #3 is not a solution because raising tax rates does not raise tax revenues. This has been proven over the last 50 years where Federal tax revenue has been about 19.5% of GDP regardless of tax policy. Raising taxes on the rich does not produce any additional tax revenue unless the GDP goes up as a result. Tax increases in a vacuum lower GDP. This tax increase on the rich will lower GDP and lower overall tax revenue. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 raised and did not lower federal tax revenues for example.

What was Obamacare Sold As?

A way to bend the cost curve down.

What does it actually do?

Bend the cost curve up.

Why?

Because there is no such thing as a free lunch (see the laws of thermodynamics). There are lots of insurance goodies that sound nice, and sound free, but they are not.

1) Eliminate the lack of pre-existing condition requirements
Raises the amount of money insurers must outlay without any additional premiums. Insurance premiums must go up.

2) Let children stay on their parents policies until 26
Raises the amount of money insurers must outlay without any additional premiums. Insurance premiums must go up.

3) Eliminate the annual coverage limitation.
Raises the amount of money insurers must outlay without any additional premiums. Insurance premiums must go up.

4) Eliminate the lifetime coverage limitation.
Raises the amount of money insurers must outlay without any additional premiums. Insurance premiums must go up.

5) Vision, Dental, and Well Baby Care now must be covered.
Raises the amount of money insurers must outlay without any additional premiums. Insurance premiums must go up.

6) 10 billion per year in new taxes on insurance companies.
Raises the amount of money insurers must outlay without any additional premiums. Insurance premiums must go up.

Insurance companies typically pay out 70% of premiums in claims. Assuming this rate will continue until 2014 when ObamaCare starts to fully take effect, each of these early changes will raise insurance premium costs. Otherwise, all of the insurance companies will simply go out of business. Would you continue to operate a business whose costs keep going up, but could not raise prices? Individual policies will be hit the hardest, because pre-exisitng are almost never allowed in individual policies. Ultimately, insurance premiums will go up across the board as the goodies listed above become law. Insurance companies are not evil, they just want to earn a fair profit. If they are earning abnormally large profits, the free market system would incentivize new entrant into the industry which would lower prices. The fact that the health insurance industry appears to be not operating as a free market, is 100% the fault of government over regulation. In this case the government is both the cause of the existing problem and the proposed solution with ObamaCare.

What about getting people covered by insurance? When does that happen?

That does not happen until after 2014. The travesty of this steaming pile of crap bill, is that as urgent as Obama made the problem seem, the Bill is written to do nothing about the problem for 4 more years. When Obama signs it into law this week, he will be assuring that nothing will fixed or reformed in health care until he is long out of office, and the bill is likely repealed. Nice work chief.

iPad Pants

2010-03-18T14:45:00.001-07:00

Lately I have been shopping for iPad pants. I need to be prepared for when the Ipad with 3G is released, and iPad style pants are tougher to find than you would think. Alright blinders, WTF are you talking about? What are Ipad pants? iPad pants are pants that have large cargo pockets below the normal pants pockets. Large enough to slip your 10 inch iPad into so you can bring it anywhere you would have brought your iphone. Most of my shorts already have these pockets in them, and I have some casual pants that do as well. What I have been shopping for is more dress type pants that I could wear to my daytime job, so that lugging around my iPad at work would be less of an issue. If you are like me, you work for a company that restricts Internet access at work in some way. Before I could pull out my iPhone if a certain site was blocked. That still works, but it is just slower, and less convenient to surf on the much smaller screen of an iPhone. I guess you could lug a personal laptop to work with a 3G connect card, to bypass the Internet security, but that is pretty blatant. What if you boss asks why you are using your personal laptop at work, when you work PC is right there. Better have a good reason ready. The iPad is a great solution for this, and thats why you got to get iPad pants. So much more under the radar than a laptop in hand, but serves the same purpose. I plan on using the calendar feature to replace my Franklin planner, so I will already have a reason to bring the iPad to meetings. If the meetings get a bit boring, I can always fire up Safari for some unrestricted surfing.

I am pretty excited about the new iPad. The above reason is just one example of a powerful use for it. For promoting FantasySportsLive.com the iPhone was a descent tool, but the iPad is perfect. Now when we are out at events and talking up the site, we can just hand someone the iPad, and show them the site, and get them to sign-up. That works ok with the iphone, but there is too much pinching, scrolling and zooming. The ipad presents the full webpage in viewable form without zooming. The iPad is going to be HUGE for FSL.

Most of the people who think the iPad will flop, simply do not understand the superior form factor. Lets face facts, laptops were not designed to be easy to use. They are designed to be portable. Would you really hinge the keyboard to the monitor, and use some crappy pointing pad, if you were designing it for usability? If you want to sit at a desk and do work a laptop is OK, but still awkward. But this is a portable device. Why is it designed to work on a desk, where you already have a much better desktop solution? Apple did what they do, and thought outside of the box. What if I wanted to surf the Internet from the comfort of a couch, or while standing in line at the DMV? Here a laptop simply fails, and the iPad shines. While standing you can hold the iPad with one hand and operate it easily with the other. Try that one with a laptop while standing. While sitting on the couch the same is true with an iPad. With a laptop, you have to balance it on your knees, and extend it away from you so you can type. Sure a laptop can have a bigger monitor, but you cant really use it very close to your face. The 10 monitor is not a negative at all. It will actually work better than a laptop monitor, because the orientation can be flipped.

Apple stock has been running up in anticipation. Pretty much a no brainer. Apple has already developed this device, and it looks like they will pre-sell a million or so before launch. The development expense has already been paid for, so all of these sales drop straight to the bottom line. Apple can also book 100% of the revenue at delivery, because there is no cell phone contract required. It really took someone like apple to get a tablet out that could suceed and this one is it!

The Difference Between Tax Cuts and Tax Credits

2010-03-08T07:51:00.000-08:00

There is a pretty huge difference between tax cuts and tax credits. They are not interchangeable terms. For example the 900+ billion dollar stimulus plan did not contain any tax cuts in it. Obama and the media over and over talk about "tax cuts" in the stimulus plan, when there were none (they know the difference BTW). Repeating the lie over and over again does not make it true. So what is the difference? Tax cuts apply to everyone equally, and the tax is never collected. They simply starve the government of some revenue. Tax credits are more like legislating (spending) through the tax code. You pay your normal tax like everyone else, but then you get a credit back from the Treasury for fitting into some special class that the government wants to spend money to incentivize. For example if you offered a 10k tax credit for installing solar panels on your roof, you pay your normal taxes like everyone else, but then you get paid back out of the treasury pool the 10k. The government has just redistributed 10k from everyone else to you, because you did something they wanted you to do. Lets say this program costs 1 billion per year, you could also do a tax cut to the lowest marginal rate that would cost the same amount instead. As a result every tax payer would be able to keep their money instead of paying for a handful of solar panel installations. If everyone got to keep there money instead, they would spend it more efficiently and for things that they actually want and need, instead of what the government wants.

Recessions have ended before with tax cuts. They have never been ended before with tax credits. Of the three recent large recessions, two were ended via across the board tax cuts, and one was ended via fiscal policy alone before tax cuts were required. The Carter/Reagan recession was ended via tax cuts. This is not disputed by anyone. The 2001 Tech-bubble/9-11 recession was ended via tax cuts. You may not like the Bush tax cuts, but they did end the recession. If anything they worked too well. The Fed needed to slow things down after the economy was on fire shortly after the Bush tax cuts, but never did and hence the housing bubble. The across the board nature of both the Reagan and Bush tax cuts are designed to incentivize anyone who works for a living and pays taxes. The more you make the more your incentive for these types of tax cuts. These types of cuts work, because they incentivize hard work, and the money goes directly and immediately (through lower payroll deduction) to the workers who can spend it in the most efficient way for their individual needs.

Now lets contrast that with some of the main tax credit in the stimulus plan. I think it is called the make work pay tax credit or something like that. It is a tax credit of up to $400 for individuals and $800 for couples. The credit phases out at 75k/150k and is completely gone at 90k/190k. You can get the credit even if you did not pay any taxes as you can be eligible from your social security/medicare withholdings. So if you are not paying any taxes this is obviously not a tax cut in anyway, and simply a welfare plan. Besides that point, the government is incentivize you to not make more than 75k, and there is no incentive at all to make more than 90k. The amount of the credit is also way too small to have any meaningful impact on the economy. If the entire stimulus plan amount would have gone to an across the board tax cut the recession would be over now. So there is no incentive to work extra hard and be a top earner in the United States. If you make 95k a year, there is some incentive to work less hard, or less hours and fall below the credit cut-off amount.

Next up is the continued extension of Unemployment Benefits. This is not a tax credit or tax cut, but pure welfare. I really do not have a problem with an extension beyond the normal 26 weeks in very difficult times like now, but it has to be a one-time extension only. After you are 9 months unemployed you need to find a way to fend for yourself. I was on unemployment once many, many years ago, and I never bothered to look for a job. When they extended the benefits, again I did not look. When my benefits ran out, I went out and got a job. Extending benefits does not help the situation, because it incentivizes people to not get a job. People need to be doing something productive, anything productive, to help society. Unemployment insurance for 9 months is plenty. After 6 months start figuring out how you will survive without the governments help. You would be surprised what can and will happen when individuals are pushed to the edge. New home businesses spring up to fill a niche. A down economy can be a great time to start a business because rents and salaries are down.

The fact the Obama is refusing to do what historically works to end deep recessions, and that is specifically across the board tax cuts, is keeping the economy from recovering. I guess you can start to argue that Obama is ideologically opposed to an end to the recession. This is what is leading us towards depression.

Climate Change Soon to be Called "Weather"

2010-02-15T15:57:00.000-08:00

Obama loves to make the claim that "Climate Change" is real, and we must do something about it. Lets think about that for a second. Climate change is real? So he is saying the the climate of the earth is not steady state, but it actually changes overtime. Hmmm? Not going out on a limb much there. Just insert any other known scientific fact and claim it is real and we must do something about it. There were reasons that he did not call it AWG or "Global Warming". Lets face facts, the scientific train wreck that used to be called AWG (Anthropic Global Warming) or human caused global warming has simply lost its credibility in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. Rather than admit that they were wrong or at least that it is way too early to act like we can predict the climate 100 years out or even really understand what is going on today, they just retreat and retreat until they find a claim they can defend. After it turned out that it was pretty difficult to scientifically link man to the climate, they just dropped the "A" in favor of the much easier to defend "Global Warming" hypothesis. Unfortunately for them, the earth stopped warming. No statistically significant warming in the last 15 years and global cooling since 2003 is hard to ignore. So they dropped "Global Warming" in favor of "Climate Change". So we are not blaming man anymore, and we don't even care in what direction the climate moves (warmer or colder). We just think that climate change needs to be stopped no matter what the cause is, according to Obama. Continuing along this line, it is just a matter of time before "Weather" replaces "Climate Change" as the term of choice. You can see this with the snow storms in Washington. This weather event is now considered proof both for and against "Climate Change", whatever that means. Washington DC broke its all-time 1899 record for snowfall this year. So 111 years ago the climate or "weather" was similar in Washington DC as it is today. If climate has anything to do with this winter and the extreme snow storms, then the climate is really not much different than it was 111 years ago. Even climate change is starting to get tough to defend. So why not just call it "Weather" or "Weather Change"? They can defend that one. We all know that the weather does change. As long as you make no claims as to why, I think they can safely make that claim. Weather is real and it must be stopped! Good luck with that one.

Sticking With The Aints

2010-02-06T11:31:00.000-08:00

I don't believe this year is as strong of a pick as last year, but I am still loving the Saints in the Superbowl tomorrow. You can grab them at +6 at Bodog which seems like a no brainer based on the following.

W/L record.

Both teams were 13-0 before mailing it in a bit at the end. Slight edge to Indy for winning one more meaningless game than the Saints.

Strength of Schedule

Both teams had somewhat easy schedules and faced three playoff teams in the regular season. No edge here.

Results against like opponents.

The Saints actually have a huge lead here with better results pretty much across the board against like opponents. Indy lost to Bills and the Jets while the Saints crushed them both. Indy edged out Miami and New England, while the Saints beat them both by large margins. Both teams crushed Arizona (Saints did it in the playoffs). The only edge here you can find for Indy is that the crushed the hapless Rams, while the Saints edged them on the road by just 5 points. Huge edge here for the Saints.

Team Offensive Statistics

Again the Saints hold a pretty big edge here if you look at the numbers. The Saints put up 6 more points per game than Indy, and win their games by 4 more points on average than Indianapolis. They bring a much more balanced attack with 50 more yards per game rushing than Indy while just being 10 yards per game short in passing. Huge edge here for the Saints.

Team Defense Statistics

Indy gives up 2 less points per game and brings a slightly better passing defense to the table. They are also slightly better on turnovers. Slight edge here for Indy.

Injuries

Indy seems pretty banged up compared the the Saints. Freeney and Powers, two defensive starters, are questionable. Wayne and Addai are probable with shoulder and knee injuries. Other than Meachem and Moore with slight ankle injuries the Saints look pretty healthy even after a tough Minnesota game.

Overall

I see no reason why Indy should be favored in the Superbowl. One extra win at the end of the regular season does not overcome the fact that the Saints are better on paper, and did much better against like opponents. You could even make the case that the Saints should be favored in this one. Take the points or bet the money line with the Saints and earns some tomorrow.

Early Superbowl Chatter

2010-01-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

I figured a few may stop by here to see what I have to say about the Superbowl match-up this year. Last year I said to Bet the Farm on Arizona, and those who followed my advise have two farms now, or may have traded up to live in the city. For once it looks to be a competitive Superbowl on paper which is nice. While watching both New Orleans and Indianapolis this season, I found them to be the two most over-rated undefeated teams ever. Sure they both got to 12 or 13 wins before facing a loss, but both teams tended more to come from behind to win then simply blowing teams out week after week like New England was doing a few years back. I did think that they were the two best teams and was expecting this match-up when the playoffs started. It looks like the line opened at Indy -4 with some pressure to move the line higher. At his point I like New Orleans for several reasons which I will list below. This is an early call and subject to change.

Reasons for New Orleans

1) Teams appear to be fairly matched so take the points

2) New Orleans beat the crap out of Favre on Sunday. Pressuring and hitting Manning is key to beating Indy, and New Orleans seems to have what it takes.

3) I like New Orleans coach better, but he needs to learn from a few big mistakes made on Sunday.

4) Minnesota's Defense is better than Indy's and N.O. still put up 31 points on them. New Orleans should score more than that in the Superbowl, which means Indy will need to put up 40+ points to cover.

5) New Orleans never let Minnesota take a big lead, though Indy did get way behind the Jets in the first half (not counting two missed FGs).

Reasons for Indy

1) It's a bit scary that New Orleans got 5 turnovers against Minnesota, and needed to go to overtime. Some of this was bad coaching, but I do not expect them to get 5 turnovers in the big game.

Coaching Issues from Sunday

Two big mistakes jump out at me from Sunday's New Orleans Game. They are subtle but important. When New Orleans got the ball late with a 7 point lead inside their own 10 yard line, they started playing not to lose, instead of to win. They should have assumed that Minnesota would get another TD, and been playing for more points, and not ultraconservative protect the ball football. They ended up punting, and Minnesota did get the TD to tie it. They should have tested them deep when Minnesota was expecting them to be careful. The last mistake nearly cost them the game. Minnesota was driving for the winning FG, when they completed the ball at the 32 yard line of New Orleans with about 1 minute left. With the clock running, for some reason N.O. used their last timeout, basically granting Minnesota an extra timeout. With the clock stopped for the stupid N.O. timeout, Minnesota was able to save one of their timeouts. Later when faced with third down from the 37 with a few seconds left, Minnesota would have been forced to kick a long FG. Instead, they had time to run one more play which was intercepted, but could have got them the yards for the winning FG. When N.O. got the ball back in decent position, they would have still had a timeout left, and may have been able to win in regulation. The wasted timeout was just a huge mistake IMO, and I am hoping they will learn from it.

Constitutional Rights?

2010-01-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

In the past, U.S. Constitutional Rights were reserved for U.S. Citizens. This meant that you either needed to be born a U.S. Citizen, or had to go through a lengthy application process to become a U.S. Citizen. There is now a fast track status to U.S. Constitutional rights. Simply commit an "Act of War" against the United States, and you get full U.S. constitutional rights according to the Obama administration. This does not surprise me one bit from a president who values the rights of terrorists, over the rights of Americans. It does not surprise me one bit from a president who is not even constitutionally eligible to be president. I am not taking about his place of birth, which is in question. I am talking about the known fact that his father was not a United States citizen at the time of his birth (His father also never became a U.S. Citizen). Section 1 article 2 of the U.S. Constitution states:

"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States"

Requirements for Natural Born Status are listed below:

Anyone born inside the United States *
Any Indian or Eskimo born in the United States, provided being a citizen of the U.S. does not impair the person's status as a citizen of the tribe
Any one born outside the United States, both of whose parents are citizens of the U.S., as long as one parent has lived in the U.S.
Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is a citizen and lived in the U.S. for at least one year and the other parent is a U.S. national
Any one born in a U.S. possession, if one parent is a citizen and lived in the U.S. for at least one year
Any one found in the U.S. under the age of five, whose parentage cannot be determined, as long as proof of non-citizenship is not provided by age 21
Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is an alien and as long as the other parent is a citizen of the U.S. who lived in the U.S. for at least five years (with military and diplomatic service included in this time)
A final, historical condition: a person born before 5/24/1934 of an alien father and a U.S. citizen mother who has lived in the U.S.

_{* There is an exception in the law — the person must be "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. This would exempt the child of a diplomat, for example, from this provision.}

Since Obama's father was a British subject as the time of his birth, he can't be Naturally born just because he was born in Hawaii. Lets just leave it at that for now.

So should terrorist who commit acts of war get U.S. constitutional rights. The answer is absolutely not. An enemy combatant captured during an ongoing war, can be held as a prisoner of war, indefinitely. This as what we should be doing with captured terrorists. We should lock them up and throw any the key, until Al Qaeda unconditionally surrenders to the United States. Until that happens, the war is still on going, and we have the right to hold onto the prisoners of war. Also, since this is ultimately a religious war, I would lock them up with no access to the Koran, and no special religious treatment. If someone wants to make the case that this is not a religious war, I will listen, but I would not allow captured prisoners of war to practice the religion that they are fighting the war over. Sorry! If, and when the war on terror ends, we can then decide if we want to put any of these prisoners of war on trial for war crimes. Until the war is over it is completely inappropriate to put these guys into a media circus type trial.

The other huge problem with giving terrorists who commit acts of war on the United States constitutional rights, is that it allows them to "Lawyer Up", and avoid answering questions that may stop a future act of war on the United States. We are at war people! Giving Terrorists constitutional rights puts American lives at risk. What if the underwear bomber was one of several terrorists trying to smuggle in a Nuclear detonator for a nuclear bomb already on U.S. Soil. Are we really going to let this guy "Lawyer Up" instead of actively trying to stop a Nuclear bomb from killing millions of Americans. This whole business of protecting the rights of people who commit acts of war just makes me sick.

Ultimately, the constitution is just a piece of paper. If the president/congress/supreme court have no interest in defending it, it is completely worthless. Now I will admit that Bush took a crap on the constitution from time to time, but Obama appears to piss on it every morning, and wipe his ass with it every night. It will eventually just get flushed down the toilet, if this continues. I have no idea what can be done to get our elected officials to enforce the Constitution, but it needs to happen soon.

Winter 2009 WPBT Trip Report

2009-12-23T10:50:00.000-08:00

The report is late, and will be a bit short, but here we go. I rolled into town around 8 PM Friday night, and hit the MGM poker room by around 9 PM. I found the infamous blogger heavyweight game which had a list a mile long. I watched them go nutzo playing 1/2 NL for a while, and talked to a few bloggers while waiting on the list. I was eventually called to a 1/2 NL table near by that was a lot of fun. I was catching cards like mad, and sweeping pots. A few hours later, I had downed about 8 Blue moons, and was up a nice $150 for the session. I moved over to the Blogger HORSE table for a while, but could not get anything going, so just before 2 AM I decided to shut things down. Just for fun, I decided to check out the Aria hotel in city center that I thought was opening that weekend. I wandered into a completely empty casino, except for some construction workers here and there. I gave myself a tour of the unopened Aria casino, and nobody seemed to care.

Saturday morning, I slept in till about noon, and got myself to Caesars just in time for the Blogger Tournament, but not in time to get anything to eat/drink yet for the day. So instead of pounding drinks right away, I laid low awaiting a break to grab some lunch. I had a great starting table that featured over my stay Iggy, Bayne, Pauly, Garth, Smokkee, Astin, April, and others. I had a tough time early on, gifting Bayne a few chips, but making a good fold. A couple breaks in I was still around the starting stack of $7,500 and in push or fold mode. I was executing the push or fold like a champ for a while eventually doubling through on a 40/60 all-in preflop hand. I would then get it all-in preflop with 99 against 55 for about a 30k pot (1.5x average stack), but you guys can guess what happened. I regrouped for a Saturday night session at MGM. Saturday night, I was off on my own table and winning nicely again. I caught AA and got into a 3-way All-in pre flop hand. I would catch AA again and win another nice pot. I noticed PokerPeaker, and Dr. Chaco's wife at an adjacent table, and decided to make a move off of a pretty fishy table. I had to rathole a bunch of chips to get down to $200. I stopped catching cards at the new table, but it was great to catch up with peaker, and the the others at the table were super talkative and friendly. I was going nowhere in chips though until I caught AKs around 2AM. This was a tough hand, and I probably screwed it up, but what are you going to do at 1/2 NL. So I raise it up to $10 from EP with AKs and get two callers. Flop drops 442 with two of my suit. Pretty much a jackpot flop at 1/2 NL with 15 outs. I open up to $15, get reraised to $30 by a semi-shorty, and then get popped again to $85. WTF! I tank, and really want to fold here, but it is tough. The $30 reraise does not bother me because I have odds to catch against him. The $85 re-reraise seems way out of line for a set, and it is not a good board for a set. Naked 4 out there after a $10 open? The $85 re-reraise just screams of an overpair. 99-AA probably. AA or KK don't look likely because no preflop re-raise. So all 15 outs still look good. I do the math, and I don't need much in implied odds for even the one card draw. I make the call, other guy folds. Turn is a blank. I check, and my opponent shoves all-in. I tank again. Pot-odds are good if I have 12 outs. So as long as this is not AA I am cool with a call here. I eventually make the call, and lose to 22 (a flopped boat). The $85 re-reraise preflop through me completely off. I personally think that was a bad play, because with anything less I would have folded and not paid the boat another penny, but it worked this time. In how many ways did I screw this hand up? It was around 2:30 AM so I packed things up, down about $75 for the night.

Sunday morning, I took care of some FantasySportsLive.com business, and headed over to the blogger football party. The room they had reserved was sick, with a pool table, leather couches, and a bunch of flat screen TVs. One was bigger than anything I have ever seen before (80+ inches?). I did not have any bets on the early games, but took San Diego +3 (+110) for $80, after Joe Speaker showed me his $100 moneyline bet on the same game. I booked it online with bodog. Around 3PM, I packed up and headed home. Never played any -EV games the whole trip, but won some decent cash playing NL holdem, and another $88 when the San Diego pick came in. As usual it was quite a blast, but too short for my liking.

Week 13 Fantasy Football Results - Blogger Trip Status

2009-12-10T13:50:00.000-08:00

After my 0-5-1 performance in week 12, week 13 was an improvement. Not quite as good as things look on the leaderboard below with me tied for first in wins, and third in cash. I was 17-18 overall, with a winning weekend snatched away by a late meaningless play in the Sunday night game. That shit happens, so no complaints here. The real problem with my team was that my Quarterback, Kicker, and Defense, who were all projected to be the best by me, or one of the top three by pretty much all published projections all sucked big time. Pittsburgh giving up 3 TD passes in the 4th quarter at home to Oakland, come on? Anyway, I learned another important and inexpensive lesson in week 13. Do not over spend on your kicker. Kickers are the highest variance position by far. There is no reason to spend big and then have your kicker disappoint on Sunday. You should always select a cheap kicker who does not need to put much up to minimize your variance, and save the money for elsewhere. On site x, because they never update the player cap values, that means I will be going with either Barth or Stover from now on. Since we are running out of time this season, I plan on going much bigger this weekend , and taking over first on both cash and wins be next week.

I will be out for the Winter 09 Las Vegas festivities, but can't make it until Friday night. I will see everyone at the MGM, after I roll into town.

Week 12 Fantasy Football Results

2009-12-02T10:26:00.000-08:00

It was an interesting week over at "site x". They decided to run thanksgiving only leagues (we are so flattered that they copy everything we do), as well as there usual assortment of offerings. Most of my solid picks for the week were playing on Thanksgiving, so I tried out a Thanksgiving only league, and found out that my perfect team was well under the generous (unadjusted for the lack of games) salary cap. This basically made the thanksgiving leagues "no cap", and with only three games on the schedule, the risk of identical fantasy teams is too high, so I decided to pass. So to get my Thursday picks in play, I would need to enter the Thu-Mon leagues. The problem with a Thursday through Monday Fantasy Football League is that there are a bunch of injury game time decisions on Sunday, and you will not have access to that info on Thursday. Also, I would be in Vegas for the Thanksgiving holiday, so I decided to skip the Sun-Mon leagues.

Ultimately, I just entered (10) $5 leagues this week. I was only matched in 6 leagues, so I guess they only ran (6) $5 leagues that included all games for the week. The risk of setting a fantasy football team too early is very real, and I paid the price when Warner did not play (I did not have him, but did have Fitz and Boldin), and the Arizona receivers had a poor week as a result. I ended up going 0-5-1 for the week which is a big disappointment, but I think I learned an inexpensive lesson. I will now only enter the Sun only leagues or possible the Sun-Mon leagues, so I can have complete injury info. I will probably go all-in in week 13, because week 16/17 are not good for fantasy football, and I have just three weeks left before I quit until next season.

Profiting From Fantasy Sports

2009-11-23T14:13:00.000-08:00

There has been a ton of competition out there since we launched FantasySportsLive.com in June 2007. Daily Fantasy Sports is very beatable long-term just like online poker is, but I can't play on my site, and the competitive sites just really have not been there yet. I mean, it would have to be worth my while to get my fantasy game up to top level, and unless I am going to get paid for that, why bother? Well in a way there is a dream come true out there. There is a new site, that was specifically designed for daily fantasy sports contest hogs. A site where there can only be one top of the food chain, and that one player gets to take ALL of the website's action. I would drop a link right now, but I am not sure if I can actually recommend it. I mean if you play there at the lowest stakes you will get randomly matched with either me, or the other two current contest hogs on the site. Since all three are pretty good, it probably would not be worth bothering, unless you have some cash to contribute. Just head over to Fantasy Sports Live where you can a least chose your competition and not get stuck against one of the top three daily fantasy players in the world every time.

Top of the Food Chain

So I decided to start this grand experiment last weekend for Fantasy Football. The contest hog ability of this new site is flawless. They only offer one Salary Cap Structure that is way too loose, and makes for much less fiddling with your team. I built up some fantasy football player projections for Daily on the FSL blog, and used them to build my team. I found out immediately that I could get 5 to 6 of the top choices easy. So I spent about an hour agonizing over the last 3 to 4 picks. I deposited $50, got a $10 bonus and entered (12) $5 Heads Up leagues. Contest hogging is a breeze on this site, as with two mouse clicks you can enter the same team over and over (you could enter 1000s of $5 leagues in less than 10 minutes). Sunday morning I tweaked my team just a bit, but left it as is in two of the 12 leagues. I ended up going 9-3, and would have gone 10-2 had I fixed all of my fantasy teams. In these 12 leagues, I was matched up against the number one player from FSL and beat him 3 out of 4 times, only losing in a league that I did not update (Could have been 4/4). So far so good, but am I ready to take a stab at the top of the food chain yet? My projections seem pretty solid, and better than most for daily. They are also purely statistical projections, and a bunch of projections out there are not statistical, and are less accurate as a resut. So I entered (18) $5 leagues that included Thursdays game. I was matched with the top player from FSL again a bunch, and I beat him again. I also noticed that his QB selection was interesting. Looking again at the cap levels, I found that Warner was grossly undervalued, and that even though he was not projected as the top QB, I would be forced to pick him up for value. I adjusted my team accordingly, and figured that for the Sun/Mon leagues I would get him as my matchup again in most leagues, and that 6 of our players would be the same. For the three different picks, mine would each be better. I basically had what I felt was the best possible team anyone could possibly make under the cap. I deposited $300 more, and entered a shit load of $5 and even a few $10 leagues. Top my surprise, the top player from FSL did not show up at all on Sunday. It was the top player from this new site, and he must have entered 85% of the leagues that they were running, as I was matched with him in like 85% of my leagues. Oh, shit! Well I looked at his team, and though different then what I had expected to be up against, I still had the better team. 6 identical picks, and I am still better in the odd 3 choices. Well I had a pretty good run on Sunday, and all I need is 6 fantasy points out of Chris Johnson tonight to sweep the top player and continue my god like running. Johnson has scored at least twice that in every game this year, so I am not very worried. I will post a screen shot of my win loss record in HU tomorrow and it is going to be ridiculous. Based on how strong I feel my team is next week, I will probably just let it all ride again, and try to get to the top of the food chain. Once you can beat the top player on the site, he should back off, and let you get the easy match-ups. I may be just a week away.

Edit: Win Loss Record Through Two Weekends Shown Below

Week 10 Results

9-3

Week 11 Results

62-7

Week 11 Sun/Mon League Results

50-1

Note: All results are for Heads-Up Leagues

Global Warming Finally Exposed as Scientific Fraud

2009-11-22T07:38:00.000-08:00

It's been a bad few months for the Global Warming Alarmist community. They were recently forced to release data relating to a peer reviewed 10-year old paper that created the original "hockeystick". The data showed how a single cherry picked tree in Yamal Russia was used to show a hockey stick for Global Temperatures where none existed. In normal science, you must release all data at the time of publication for replication purposes. Climate science is not normal science. It is simply a massive fraud. The main and most well known players have actually been fudging the data, using "tricks" to make temperature graphs go up when they should go down, blocking all skeptical arguments from publication, and claiming with solidarity that the science is settled when they don't even believe that internally. A whistle blower has finally exposed all this to light, by providing access to 1000s of internal emails among the climate science community. They expose what I have always suspected, massive scientific fraud.

If the scientific community wants to regain the public trust, this must be taken seriously and the offenders seriously punished. Many of the emails show outright criminal activity, where requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act were thwarted by destroying the data, or any emails relating to it's existence. The various peer reviewed authors who have now been shown to fudge data and graphs to present a preconceived point of view rather than actual science need to be stripped of their scientific credentials. All papers that use data in question from these authors should no longer be cited and should be marked as scientific fraud in some way in the journals that published them. Scientific Journals need to get their act together and do a much better job of peer review, and insist on full replication of any statistical study, and all data, code and methods for any scientific paper.

The response from the Climate Science community to the released emails is pretty much typical. Rather than acknowledge what they reveal, they are busy making there illogical arguments. Stealing the emails is illegal, how do we know they have not been edited, there is nothing wrong in any of the emails..... Sorry, but this is your normal playbook. Never actually acknowledge anything wrong with the science, and just try to move on. If the climate science community has any credibility left, they need to use this opportunity to clean up their act. Admit that the people in question have actually committed scientific fraud, and start putting together a way to prevent this going forward. How about actually releasing all data and code required for replication? How about letting actual statisticians review statistical studies before they are published? How about acknowledging that the science is in fact not settled, not even close? If you want the public to believe in Global Warming tell us what the equation is. Be honest about the uncertainties. Most importantly, quit being political, and try to do real science.

All of this would have been exposed eventually. You can try to argue the earth is flat or whatever for 100s of years, but if it actually is not somebody will figure this out and prove it, and it only takes one. The original person who claimed flat earth may have looked good while he was alive, but 100s of years later he looks like an idiot. If you do good, replicable science you will never look like an idiot. Seek scientific truth, not an agenda, and the truth you will find. This will go down as one of the biggest setbacks for science to date, and you can basically thank the progressive left for funding this massive fraud.

WSOP ME Backing is for Suckers?

2009-11-10T19:57:00.000-08:00

Backing somebody in the WSOP ME has got to be the worst investment you could possibly make. I am saying this now, as once again we have a backed winner making it look like easy money to the ill informed. Lets look at it from a pure economic perspective. Poker is not a zero-sum game. There is a significant rake in the ME that will need to be overcome. Most backing agreements are not 100% either. For example this year's winner is paying out 50% based on 100% backing from what I understand. So you need to overcome the rake and then double your money on top of that to break even. Now lets look at who is entering the ME. Sure we have a bunch of donks that lucksacked through an online donkalite, or rich/celeb types who don't care about the 10k. Then you got your part timers, pros, wannabe pros and the like. Most real pros can probably cover themselves. So the part-timers and wannabes should be decent winners to even take a stab at a 10k MTT. So a good portion probably saved some winnings up from cash games or whatever they play to cover their entry. Other breezed their way through a satellite on in. Out of the remaining players not in with their own winnings or a satellite win, you get your players seeking backing. Tons of losers are already in, but nobody from this group. So out of this group you pick out your gem and look for a double up plus to break even, in a marathon where anything can happen and you you will need to get a week deep for any kind of payback.

Variance is an issue in big MTTs. I get that. The problem is that backing can't possibly help. You need to run 1000s of trials to get long-term in the WSOP ME. Sorry, but you are not going to get there backing a handful of players each year. Not even close. It's just another way to gamble, and if you have 1ok to waste and you are in to that type of thing go for it. Just don't argue backing players is some long-term profitable strategy.

"Its the Economy Stupid"

2009-11-06T08:47:00.000-08:00

Obama continues to fiddle while America burns to the ground. Has he forgot the number one issue during elections is the economy? "It's the economy , stupid". Fiddling with health care and climate change while your house burns to the ground is what Obama has chosen to do. As a result the fire is spreading. Drop health care and the environment and fix the economy now by incentivizing hard work, or we will throw your cronies out next year. Without your yes men in congress you will be impotent and worthless during your last 2 years. You are setting yourself up to be the worst president of all time, and you deserve the title because you are truly a joke Mr. Obama.

Is the Treasury Department a Giant Ponzi Scheme?

2009-10-30T13:06:00.000-07:00

Think about this one for a second. If you replaced the U.S. Government with a giant multinational corporation, and the Treasure Department with it's financing arm it seems like all you are left with is a giant Ponzi scheme. Lets say you have this big company, and it raises cash to invest through its financing arm by issuing short and long term bonds at market interest rates. These bonds are given the highest ratings allowable due to the strength and stability of the underlying big company. They get favorable low interest rates as a result. The business that the company is in does not matter, but lets just say they have a natural monopoly. It is believed that they can raise their prices across the board or for certain higher end customers at any time they would like, and this would increase their revenues. This has never been proven, yet it remains a widespread belief. This is a pretty good thing because the underlying business of the company has been losing money for over 30 years now with huge losses in the most recent years, and massive losses project into the future. But this does not matter much, as the financing arm just issues more bonds to cover the losses. So rather than the funds from the bonds issued going into some tangible investment that could earn the returns required to cover the interest and pay back the principle, it goes to pay for the companies operational losses, and for interest and redemptions on previously issued bonds. So now after 30+ years of this, and a huge downturn in the economy that has crippled it's revenue it is left with 12 trillion in outstanding bonds, and not a penny left to pay any of it back. In fact the company is projected to lose an additional trillion+ dollars a year for the next ten years, and will have to issue more bonds to cover that. So pretty soon we are going to be looking at 2o trillion dollars owed, with none of it invested in anything tangible, and still no prospects to pay any of it back. Is this a Ponzi scheme? If this was the U.S. Government and Department of Treasury does that make it not a Ponzi Scheme?

Fantasy Sports - Art vs. Science

2009-10-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

In the classic post Art vs. Science, back when I used to post about poker, I made the case that a different set of skills were emphasized when playing cash games vs. tournament poker. Cash games were more science than art, and tournament poker was more art than science. Ultimately, to be successful at poker you should be good at both, but the arty types tend to prefer MTTs, and the math nerds cash games, all else being equal. So what about Fantasy Sports, and specifically Daily Fantasy Sports (most similar to poker) like we run at FantasySportsLive.com?

It turns out that success at fantasy sports requires the same two skills sets. People use both art and science (or one or the other) to try to beat Fantasy Sports for a profit. Lets say that art is your sports knowledge and feel for who will do well in a given match-up. You have watched a ton of games, and followed a ton of teams, and as a result you just know who to pick each day for your fantasy team. You found out that some rookie will be getting a start, or just remember a favorable match up from the past and adjust your team accordingly. You are playing based on feel for the game, and don't need to run any numbers to confirm your selections. If you have a good depth of sports knowledge, and a good understanding of specific match-ups, that is all you should need to make money at fantasy sports. The poker player who plays like this has never studied pot odds, and does not give a crap about outs. He/she has played enough hands to get a feel for what is the correct move, and they simply go with there instincts.

Next there is the science approach. Lets say that you don't have any sports knowledge at all, but wanted to earn a few extra dollars playing fantasy sports. You learn the fantasy scoring system for a given site, and start crunching the numbers. You take a pure statistical approach to the game. While the art guy may know a hitter does pretty good against left handed pitching, the stat guy knows exactly how well every player in the league does against left handed pitching. The Art guy may make a pretty good choice here, but the science guy has the numbers to see if any other possible choices are better. The science guy simply uses historical statistics to forecast what will happen in the game that will be played today. He does not need to know a thing about any individual player, just that player x is the best statistical selection for position y in today's match-ups.

Now for the blended approach. Statistics can lie, and unless you keep going to deeper levels you may not be able to get the results that you want. For example lets say that a certain rookie has been coming off the bench all year, but due to an injury will be starting going forward. The Art guy is all over this. He has the rookie in his line-up immediately, because his sports knowledge tells him that's a good choice. The Science guy does not see this. Historical stats are still crap for this player. Now if the Science guy is weighting recent performance (going to a deeper level), he will start to see after a few games, that this rookie has become the best selection. So the science guy eventually gets it right if he digs deep enough into the stats. If this same thing happens, but this time on an obscure team the Art guy does not follow closely, the Science guy catches it way before the Art guy. So just like with poker you should use both approaches for the highest level of success.

There is a key difference between poker and fantasy sports though that I have left out. When people play by feel at poker, they are often pushing people around at the table. For example lets say you are drawing to a flush with one card to go, and you need to call a bet to continue. The science guy runs the numbers, and knows if he has "pot/implied odds" to chase the draw, and makes a decision based on that. The art guy also runs though all the similar situations he has been in in the past and probably comes to a similar conclusion. Now lets say the draw was missed, and you are bet into again and are holding top pair or something weak. The science guy may call based on the odds of having the best hand, but will probably not get out of line here. The feel guy, may shove all-in on the missed draw, and force a better hand to fold. The key difference here is that you can't be pushed off your fantasy sports team like you can a poker hand. A maniac, that may be hard to deal with mathematically, and force you to play by feel, can't exist in fantasy sports. They can only do what you are doing, and pick the best possible fantasy team. For this reason I think the Art edge can be substantially reduced, and Fantasy Sports could be played effectively with a nearly pure Science approach. The maniac in poker can be dealt with scientifically, but it requires game theory, which is tough to solve for complex situations like a poker game. You don't ever need game theory in fantasy sports, so success in fantasy sports could be as simple as determining proper drawing odds, and making sure that you get them when drawing.

Longtime No Online Poker

2009-10-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

OK, I realize poker content has been lacking over here at BlindersPoker. It would help if I played more, but I can't seem to get myself motivated. Since the last BBT, I went on a cash game binge for a while to clear a FTP bonus. I won some cash, but never played enough to completely clear it out. That was about a month ago, and I have not been online since. There is a local cash game every weekend that I finally dragged myself to last weekend. It is .10/.20 NL with straddles welcome. Playing live with friends is about as fun as poker can get. Flopping quad 8s for a pretty massive pot (considering the blinds) helped as well. So all in all, I still appear to have the skillz to beat poker for a profit (live or online), but not the motivation to actually play. The online games appear soft again, so I don't really have any excuses. Just wondering what it will take to get me back in the game.

So, I have been writing a bit about politics instead lately, which I would guess most readers here do not like. I think we are in some pretty crazy times right now, with the American Dream getting trampled all over by our wealth redistributionist leader. It is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. His policies are not popular, and make no sense, yet he continues to push for them. I see a bloodbath coming in the midterm elections, and the end of Obama's unrestricted power. The ObamaCare bill is a complete disaster. It was pitched as a way to bend the cost curve down for all Americans. What we have is a bill that will increase costs for all Americans (unless you are poor enough for free health insurance), at a faster rate than if we did nothing. ObamaCare is just a new massive entitlement for the poor, at the expense of everyone else and the economy, pushed through at a time when our country could least afford it. The economy will never improve until Obama stops intervening. Drop the health care, and climate change bills if you want the economy to improve. Until all this needless uncertainty is removed, rich people and businesses are going to sit on their hands and not take risks. If the Democrats can somehow get this pile of shit passed against the will of the American people, they are going to get tossed out on the street next year, and a new congress can start undoing Obama's damage.

The latest talking point that drives me nuts is the notion that Obama saved us from the brink of a depression. First off, I am still in the depression camp. Until the economy starts to actually recover, you can't say that we have averted a depression. These talking points will come back to bite if the economy never improves under Obama which is very likely. Secondly, what exactly did Obama do to save us from the brink? TARP was passed by Bush, and 1/2 of the money went out to the banks long before Obama took office. Most of the Bush TARP funds have been paid back at this point. Obama requested the second half of TARP and pissed it completely away by bailing out GM and Chrysler, sending more money that will never be repaid to AIG, and by converting Preferred shares at that carry interest and must be paid back to common stock that gets no interest, and will never be paid back. Obama did pass the stimulus bill that has been a complete failure, and has done little to stimulate the economy (not a thing for small businesses) despite a near trillion dollars in borrowing to pay for it. So again I ask, what exactly did Obama do to avert a depression? I see a bunch of things he is doing to cause a depression, like pushing through a massive entitlement that we can't afford (ObamaCare), or pushing for an end to U.S. manufacturing as we know it, by unilaterally increasing energy costs in the United States (Cap and Trade).

The politics stuff I guess is more interesting to me than poker right now, so until I can drag myself back to the felt, you might find me bitching about U.S. Politics here more than some douche who check raised me on the turn with a naked draw.

ObamaCare Donkey Math

2009-10-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

Leave it to congress to use the donkiest of math when trying to justify a new massive entitlement at a time of massive federal deficits. The latest bill comes in at an $825 billion dollar price tag, and reduces the deficit by $80 billion over the first 10 years. Donkey math at its finest. We are going to spend $825 billion in order to save $80 billion. I knew the government was inefficient, but come on. The $825 billion will be a combination of about $500 billion in cuts to Medicare payments, and $325 billion in tax increases. So what if we went ahead and cut the Medicare and raised the taxes, but did not do ObamaCare? Then we could use the $825 billion to pay down the debt, and would forgo the $80 billion in savings. So the actual ObamaCare bill is a negative $745 billion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years, not the donkey math result of positive $80 billion. If the politicians were honest with us, they would admit that this is just a new healthcare entitlement for the poor, that we are rolling out at a time when we can least afford it.

Pay As You Go

Pay as you go simply does not work when you are running a massive budget deficit. Pay Down The F-ing Deficit should be the policy. If they keep raising taxes and cutting programs to "Pay As They Go" for new spending and entitlements, they are completely ignoring the debt problem. There are only so many programs that can be cut, and taxes that can be raised. If you dedicate all of your new taxes and program cuts to new programs and spending, we will never make a dent in historically massive deficit we are running. Pay As You Go needs to be redefined as operating under a yearly balanced budget, and not in the perverted way it is now, or America is toast.

Random Brand Thoughts

2009-09-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

Below are some random personal brand impressions I have had lately.

Toyota:

I have had a highlander for 8 years and put about 145k on it before I blew the tranny recently. I was kind of expecting 2ook before a major problem like this with a Toyota, so their quality image is a bit tarnished. Customer Service was not impressive either. I will say that a Jeep would probably be on its third transmission by 145k, so its not like Toyota is horrible quality. I bought a new car recently and it was not a Toyota/Lexus.

Bose:

I have never really been a fan of Bose. I used to sell Stereos long, long ago, and was not impressed by Bose when compared to a "real" speaker. The saying went "no highs, no lows, must be Bose". In my new car I had the option of upgrading to a package that included a Bose 277w 10 speaker stereo upgrade, Sirius, CD changer, and Moonroof for about 1.2k more. I figured I would do it even if the Bose did not make it much better. I have to say that I am totally impressed with what Bose can do in a car. The technology they use is ideal for optimizing the sound quality in a small confined area like a car. The system sounds much better than I thought, and better in some ways than the $1,500 upgraded stereo I had in my highlander with much more power.

Sirius:

I got 6 free months with the car, and figured I would not use it much, and definitely not renew it after 6. After just two week, I don't think I have used anything else, and plan on extending it for sure.

Apple:

I love Apple products, though I was a late adopter on the mac and ipod side. I bought a new 24 inch iMac the day they came out earlier this year for work. It had worked out great until it popped off while I was using it the other day and would never boot back up completely. I have never had a PC completely die like that in the 1st year before. So much for mac quality? I have not dealt with their service before, but you basically need to make an appointment to bring it in to an Apple store. So three days later, I lugged the 24" mac into an Apple store and they were able to fix it at the genius bar in about 45 minutes. Software issues I guess.

Microsoft:

I found the first MS commercial with the 6-ish year old Asian girl a bit misleading. She put together a quick slide show, and sent it out to the grandparents or something. It seemed a bit easier to do in the commercial than it actually is, but it was at least plausible the 6 year old could figure it out and do what the commercial showed her doing.

Well now we have this new commercial with the same girl. Except now she is building up a Widows 7 hype presentation by "chance", because she "happened" to see these "happy" words on her daddy's computer screen. The words chosen were obviously hand picked by Microsoft, and the production value and music chosen (though not the pics), make this one completely implausible. So we are left with Microsoft using a lying 6 year old as a shill to sell their latest operating system. Its some pretty sick stuff IMO.

I love me a good marketing campaign, and you can't fault what they are trying to do, but could this one possibly work? You have the new CEO of GM walking around the design studio and saying that he was just as concerned as you might be about the quality of cars at GM. Well, he has taking a quick peek, and it turns out GM cars are the best in the world. May the best car win, and GM it turns out has the best cars. Well let me ask you this, if you have the best cars, why did you literally just go bankrupt? And, if we can be honest enough that you did not have the best cars prior to bankruptcy, are we expected to believe that in just a couple of months you have turned everything around, and are now putting out the best cars in the world? Well good luck with that one. If they pull it off though, this could go down as an important model for re-branding going forward. Just dust off the old Joe Isuzu technique.

RIP DraftMix Part 2

2009-09-14T19:40:00.000-07:00

Despite all of the fanboy denials that you can see as a result of my original RIP Draftmix post, Draftmix has in fact officially thrown in the towel on daily/weekly fantasy sports. Checkout their facebook application if you are in to that sort of thing.

Blue Frog Gaming is sorry to announce that Draftmix.com will not be running fantasy football drafts for the 2009-2010 season.

You can check on the BF website for any future updates and to try out our sports related applications on Facebook.

Thank you for your patronage,

Blue Frog Gaming

2009 Blogger Fantasy Football Battle

2009-09-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

For 2009 we decided to roll the Blogger Fantasy Football Battle into the Sundays with Dr. Pauly promotion at FantasySportsLive.com. An extra $250 in bonus cash for bloggers only will be added to the existing $500 in bonus cash available to everyone. Last year you could enter both the Blogger Battle and Sundays with Dr. Pauly for $11 each and compete for $1,000 in extra cash. This year you just need to enter the one $11 Sunday's with Dr Pauly league to become eligible for up to $750 in added bonus cash in addition to our standard 91%+ payouts. There were several reasons for the change this year. The blogger battle had become less exclusive in it's second year with more non-bloggers than bloggers competing. There are also a bunch of bloggers who regularly compete in Sunday's with Dr. Pauly, but not in the blogger battle. This way we actually get more bloggers competing for the title, while reducing the work required to run and track both promos. The blogger battle payouts are set up so that bonus cash can be won by entering a SWDP league any weekend. Bloggers can get $75/$50/$25 in bonus cash for the highest weekly score of the series and this can be won in a single weekend. In addition if it is the highest score overall (including non-bloggers) $100/$50/$25 can also be won. A lucky blogger who played just one weekend and nailed the high score would win $175 in bonus cash, and gain entry into the blogger TOC. A bonus cash summary is shown below. See the FSL blog for complete details.

$500 added for all users

$100/$50/$25 - Top three weekly scores of series

$125 - Added to TOC (Beat Pauly's score three straight weeks)

$125 - Added to Super TOC (Win a 5 week series)

$75 - $25 prize for each 5 week series winner.

$250 added for sports or gaming bloggers

$75/$50/$25 - Top three weekly blogger scores of series
$100 - Added to Blogger TOC* ($75 for 1st, $25 for second)

*Bloggers can gain entry into the TOC by having the highest blogger score in a 5 week series, having the highest individual blogger fantasy score during the series, having a top 5 blogger overall fantasy total over the 15 weeks, or by beating Pauly's score for three straight weeks.

Wake Up and Smell the Roses Obama

2009-09-02T09:29:00.000-07:00

It is getting pretty interesting watching this train wreck of a presidency. Obama is quite the campaigner, but leadership is not one of his strong points. He is still in campaign mode, but if he does not wake up, he may go down as the worst president in American history. His popularity is dropping off of a cliff, because he is pushing polices and bills that the the vast majority of Americans do not want. Don't you realize that if you ram through unpopular policies, it makes you unpopular? Obama should know better. Lets look at three foolish things that he is currently trying to push through against the will of the American people.

ObamaCare

67% of Americans surveyed do not like this bill, and do not want it to go through. Keep pushing this one at your own peril.

Torture of Terrorists

71% of Americans surveyed support full on torture of terrorists if it will reveal information that saves American lives. I am not talking about water boarding which by the way is still not torture in the U.S.A. (Just cause Obama calls it that does not make it so). If Obama wants to prosecute the interrogators that got actionable intelligence that saved American lives via legally water boarding three high value terrorists, he is simply going to piss off the vast majority of Americans. Obama's initial stance was that no actionable intelligence was obtained, but it is clear now that that is not true, and hundreds if not thousands of American lives were saved. Going after these guys is a huge blow to the CIA which kept us safe for the 8 years since 9/11, and makes America much more vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Obama's stance that he would rather see thousands of innocent Americans die, vs. water boarding a captured terrorist who planned the 9/11 attacks, has got to be one of the worst political calculations ever.

The Afghanistan War

57% of Americans (including me) want the war in Afghanistan to end. Obama really likes the Afghanistan war for some reason, and has already sent in a "surge" of troops with more planned. We went in there originally to displace the Taliban that was allowing Al-Qaeda to train on their lands. This has already happened, and Al-Qaeda has moved on to Pakistan and elsewhere. I am not sure what we are currently trying to accomplish now, or how we will know when the war is won. The whole thing just seems pointless, and it is puzzling that a passivist like Obama continues to push this policy. We could simply pull out right now, and leave behind a bunch of predator drones to drop bombs on the bad guys risk free.

Vegas Run for the Super Draft

2009-08-27T08:57:00.000-07:00

I am heading out to Vegas in a few hours for the first ever Las Vegas Fantasy Football Super Draft. It looks to be a pretty crazy weekend with 6 or so VIP parties and a live draft at the Hard Rock Hotel over just three nights. We are bringing out tons of FSL swag with the plan of signing up hundreds of new Fantasy Football users at FantasySportsLive.com with a top secret special offer. If you happen to be in Vegas, I should be reachable on the FSL support number through Sunday.

The Expectation Value of Health Insurance

2009-08-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

Two key concepts bubbled to the top for me over the last few weeks on this overly complex health care reform issue. These may be the two most important points of all, and until congress grasps these two items, any health care reform will do more harm then good. Let’s call these two concepts, the expectation value of health insurance, and the probability of success with a communist Russia type economy.

Let’s start with the first one. 46 million uninsured is the number that Obama loves to throw out there, but it is simply a lie. There are 36 million uninsured Americans (2007 census report), the rest are illegal aliens. Assuming that Obama knows the difference between the two of them, he is lying to help his cause with that number, but that is not what’s important now. Out of the remaining 36 million you have about 25 million called “indestructibles”. They are 18-28 year olds who could probably afford health insurance, but choose to not take it because they feel they are indestructible. After that you have about 10 million poor, who could qualify today for Medicaid, and say about 1 million others. So let’s forget about the 1 million others, and the poor who could already have coverage. That leaves us with the simple task of getting the indestructibles on health insurance to solve the alleged problem. So let’s ask ourselves a very simple question. Why do the “indestructibles” choose to not carry health insurance, and is this a rational economic choice for them as consumers. If you start to think about it at all, you can see that the system is set up to simply rip off indestructibles, and that their choice to stay out of the system is a +EV choice. You need to understand that the health insurance market is not free. It is highly regulated, and is the only insurance where the premiums can’t be set based on the individual policy risk. Think about that for a second. When you buy car insurance, your individual cost is based on numerous risk factors (value of the car, your driving record, how many miles you drive, where you live…). When you buy home/fire insurance, again it is based on individual risk factors (value of the home, type of roofing material, location of home). When you buy life insurance it is based on risk factors (your age and your health history). Health insurance could also use a multitude of risk factors as well (your age, your health history, pre-existing conditions, if you smoke, if you are overweight, if you are a heavy drinker, the size of your family...). The government simply does not allow this for heath insurance, and forces companies to “pool” people together to spread the risk, while charging each similar policy the exact same amount. So now we get back to our “indestructibles”. These guys are the lowest possible health insurance risk, but get charged exactly the same as a 75 year old with a history of heart disease and diabetes. They would have to pay 7-10k per year for health insurance they will likely not need for many years, unless they break a bone or something like that. Even if they can get the same coverage for 3k through there employer, it is still not worth it to them. The expectation value of buying insurance for them is -$3,000 (subsidized) or up to -$10,000 without employer help. The expectation value of not carrying insurance is much larger (less negative). Their only issue is variance. If you wanted this class of uninsured to choose to take insurance, you need to stop ripping them off, and make them pay what it actually costs to insure them. Yes, costs for high risk groups would have to go up, but it should for them. Take the car insurance analogy. A very bad driver who totals his car every other year, and has multiple speeding tickets, pays the exact same rate as a perfect driver with no accidents and no tickets. And if you allow pre-existing conditions, the bad driver can stay off insurance until he totals his car, and then sign-up to get all the good drivers to subsidize his risk and repair bill. The worst thing about the health care bill is it appears to make health insurance mandatory by law. The people most harmed by the bill are the 25 million uninsured (the problem according to Obama), who will be forced to take health insurance at complete rip-off rates for their individual level of risk.

Now on to the second concept. The argument that I hear over and over again is that the government can create a public, government run, option that can compete effectively with the health insurance industry to lower costs. The argument goes like this. The evil insurance companies are wasting marketing dollars advertising against each other, are inefficient because they can’t get economies of scale in processing claims, and on top of all of that make a profit that comes directly out of the care provided. If the government were to take over the entire system, they would not have to advertise or make a profit, and could set up one efficient system to process all claims. On the surface this seems to make sense to the average person, and I think that’s why this claim is repeated over and over by the many talking heads out there. There is a big problem with this argument though. The health insurance industry is really no different than any other competitive industry. So you really can make the same argument anywhere. Let’s look at personal computers for a second. We have Apple and all of the various Microsoft windows based PC vendors. There is tons of advertising going on and efficiencies that could be gained if we went to a single manufacturer. So the government should just take over the entire computer industry, because if they did we would get better and less expensive computers as a result. After they get done taking over the computer industry, they should do the automotive industry (already ½ way there), the banking industry, consumer electronics, clothing, the airlines and more. Doing all of this will save Americans money because the U.S. Government is a beacon of efficiency in a highly inefficient free market system. It starts to become absurd at this point, right? The government is simply not efficient at anything they do, and can’t compete on a level playing field with a profit motivated company. The profit motivated company will find ways to reduce costs, and improve their offering until they eventually displace the government competitor while still earning a profit. For an example of a country where everything was run by the state, look at communist Russia. Not exactly an economic powerhouse. If the government is really capable of out competing private industry, Russia would still be around, and the American economy would be near the back of the pack of all developed countries. The fact that after all of these years we are still an economic powerhouse under a free market system, and all other countries with more state ownership of the economy lag us economically, is simple proof that our system is the most efficient. Going to a government run health care system can only raise costs, and kill all innovation. The only way the government can compete with private industry is cheating by using tax payers to subsidize losses, or by changing the rules to the benefit of the government competitor. You can already see this with GM. Now that we own them, we start pushing their products with Cash for Clunkers and electric car subsidies, and then rewrite the EPA mileage standards so that a hybrid, plug-in car (The GM Volt), can get an absurd 250ish MPG rating when the gas engine on board will probably get less that 40 MPG.

Photo Dump and Contest

2009-08-20T08:49:00.000-07:00

A was out on vacation for a while, so sorry about the lack of posts. I thought I would do another photo contest so here we go. Whoever is the first to answer all of the questions about the below photos gets a $10 transfer to the online poker, or daily fantasy sports site of their choice (limited to FullTilt, PokerStars, or FantasySportsLive). If nobody gets them all in two weeks, whoever has the most correct answers wins.

Name This Surf Contest

Name This Lake

Name This Building

Name the "Avenue" where this Tree House is Located

Name The Place Where This Guy Hangs Out At

Name This Building

Cash for Clunkers Donkey Math

2009-08-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

Well congress thinks they finally have a winner with the “cash for clunkers” program, and are looking to extend it for another 2 billion tax payer dollars. Let’s just take a peak at the donkey math and see if this makes any sense to the taxpayers that are paying for the program. First off, not all of the 1 billion (soon to be 3 billion) will be distributed as rebates. The government has to administrate the program, and that costs money. Out of the first billion spent the costs averaged $6000 per rebate. As with all government programs, they get to skim some off the top for themselves. Next, we do not actually have the money to pay for the program, so we will need to borrow it. So we will need to pay back the 6k per car with interest. So let’s try to calculate the amount of interest we will end up paying by the time it is paid back. Interest rates are pretty low right now, but there is also no plan to pay off the deficit anytime soon. Obama’s budget plans for 1 trillion dollar deficits for the next ten years. We can’t start paying off the 3 billion for cash for clunkers until all of the subsequent borrowing after the program is paid back with interest. Since we know that we will be borrowing at least an additional 10 trillion over the next ten years, and we will have to pay that back first with interest, I think you can see that it is going to be at least another 30 years or more before we start to pay off the 3 billion. Even worse is that we are borrowing most of the money in short term T-bills that will need to be continually rolled over at market rates over the 30+ years. So it is basically just like putting the program on a maxed out credit card with a risky adjustable rate, and no plan to pay it back. Under these assumptions, we will pay somewhere around $12,000 in interest in addition to the $6,000 in principle for a total taxpayer expense of $18,000 per $4500 clunker rebate. Genius!

Well it even gets worse from here. People will argue that we are saving the earth by getting the bad gas mileage cars off the streets and getting people into better mileage cars. That’s the whole point, right? That’s some pretty simplistic thinking. The program is actually worse for the environment than no program at all would be. Lets me explain. It costs energy to make a car. Lots of energy. You have to melt and form all that steel. You have to make and ship all of the parts. You have to assemble it by moving large items around the assembly floor. You have to ship the car from the assembly line to the dealership. Making a car is an energy intensive activity. If we are going to take a car that is still running, and may have 2 to 4 more years left, and throw it in the trash for a better mileage new car, then the energy cost to make a new car needs to be low, or you don’t actually save any energy. With the energy cost of a new car being so high, saving 4 to 10 miles per gallon over the 2 to 4 years the clunker would have continued to run, simply does not pay for the extra energy required to build a car that was not needed yet.

So in summary, the cash for clunkers plan costs $18,000 per car to taxpayers over a 30+ year payment schedule, and actually increases United States energy consumption, even with a 4 to 10 MPG improvement per car.

Warning! Poker Content

2009-08-04T09:51:00.000-07:00

Post #500 on this blog

For some reason I am back to playing cash games at FullTilt. It’s been a couple of years. I played for a while after the UIGEA, but eventually the games felt and were measurably tougher IMO. I switched over to beginner S&Gs at Bodog (still easy to crush), and the occasional blogger or other MTTs mainly on FullTilt. Realizing that it would be a long time before I would be playing cash at FullTilt, I removed most of my funds. I also tend to transfer funds to friends out of the FT account. This steady drain of funds can easily outweigh the meager blogger and MTT winnings I get at FullTilt. Lately, I have not even been playing MTTs and S&Gs. It’s too much of an open ended time commitment. I like the idea of playing as long or short as you would like to, and online cash games are the only way to go for that. When I found out they were doing a $100 no deposit bonus, I figured it was time to get my feet wet again over at FullTilt. The last time I played cash I was 4 tabling $1/$2 NL. Looking at just over four hundo in the FT account, that level would not be possible. I like to have 10x the buy-in for multi-tabling. So I started off at .25/.50, and then started mixing in some .50/1.

I switched to the new lobby from the software upgrade, and sorted for low stakes NL cash by percentage seeing the flop, and then added filters for 8+ players and $7 min. average pot (to filter out the lowest “Low’ stakes). To my surprise, an amazing number of tables were meeting my table selection criteria. When I have wanted to dabble in the past, it seemed like it was way too hard to get on multiple tables that met my basic criteria. Now, with what appears to be increased traffic on FullTilt, and the advanced sorting and filtering it was easy to find juicy tables. After about 500 hands mixing up the stakes and moving the roll closer to $500, I decided to just commit to .50/1, even though I was under rolled. I play a very low variance playing style, and that allows me to play under rolled to some extent. With the $100 bonus clearing quickly while 4 tabling .50/1, I should be able to offset running bad, and if I started running good, I might get quickly to a safe bankroll.

After committing to 4 tabling .50/1, I was able to play about 1000 more hands, and ran my bankroll up to $675 (about $250 up total), while clearing about $40 in bonus funds. I am feeling pretty good about my game, and it feels like most of the cash game rust is already gone. I have not been stacked or even gotten very low on any table yet. I also seem to have a pretty steady positive accumulation that makes me a winner in nearly every session. I like to play against short stacks, and it seems like there are way more people playing with 1/5th of a full stack lately. I even had the pleasure of holding court at a .50/1 table where I had a full stack and the rest of the table had $30 or less for over an hour. I can’t really remember that ever happening before. For some reason I tend to beat up on shorties. I think it is my squeaky tight preflop, hyper aggressive post flop play. I am so tight preflop, that when I do play, I am often good enough to call down a shorties preflop push. Post flop, because of my aggression and their lack of stack, I am putting them to the test a bunch for their whole stack. If I raise preflop, and then fire $5 on the flop, the shorty is forced to commit right there. So my $5 bet is almost leveraged like a $20 all-in. I had grinded up nicely before the gift hand below.

I pick up AA UTG and limp it. This was my first UTG limp with rockets in a cash game in forever. A late position player with $100 behind raised it to $5.50, and the button with $130 called. I reraised it to $15 to try to kill the set mining odds, and get it down to one player. The initial raiser folded, and the button called. The flop was T high rainbow. I continuation bet $25 into about a $35 pot. I was reraised to $50. I figured based on the preflop action, the only hand I needed to worry about here was TT. Hands like JJ, QQ, KK, and ATs were much more likely and could have been bet the same way. I decided to just jam right there, and was gift called pretty quickly with AKo. A blank on the turn, and the $260+ pot was mine. Not sure what this guy is thinking there, but I will take his money.

I have another $60 in bonus to clear, and will probably knock that out this week. If I can get the roll north of $1K, I may start moving back up to $1/$2, and posting about poker more often.

It's Just Seasonality Stupid

2009-07-28T14:36:00.000-07:00

The economic headlines continue to distort reality to my amusement. If you can't find any actual real growth out there in the economy, you can just try to find a seasonal signal and then claim that it is real growth. Simply forget the fact that year over year something is down 20%, when you report a 2% month over month gain. Forget the fact that housing starts tend to improve in the summer (when the weather is seasonally better), that housing sales tend to spike in the summer (when families prefer to move to minimize disruption), and that housing prices tend to rise in the summer as well (because of the increased demand). Call it Dennis Kneale accounting or whatever you want. So we get a couple of normal, seasonal, month to month gains in housing prices, housing starts, and houses sold, and every douchebag, idiot on TV claims the recession is over and we have a housing bottom. Sorry, but it does not quite work that way. All three measures continue to be around 20% down year over year. Until that number shrinks down to closer to flat, you can't really be calling a bottom.

If you look at that past two major recessions (early 80s and 90s), housing prices did not rise until 2 to 4 years after the unemployment rate peaked. Both of those recessions may end up being milder and have quicker recoveries than this one. Unemployment is not expected to peak until sometime next year, so realistically we are looking at 3-5 years or more before housing prices start to improve. Between now and then we will find a bottom, but we are not there yet by any real measure. A bottom would mean that year over year prices are flattening, which they are not doing now.

I have been playing the market a bit lately, because it really wants to rally, but has no where to go. It is pretty easy to ride it up until it exhausts itself (where it is about now), and then get out and wait for it to drift back down and catch it's breath. I think the latest rally is the market pricing in the positive of health care not passing. Any negative shock, or sign that the health care package may still have legs should send the market right back down at this point. Q2 GDP numbers are due Friday, and its hard for me to imagine that they will not surprise to the negative side. Tax revenues are down about 25% this year, but GDP only about 4% officially so far. Seems like the GDP numbers have some catching up to do with the horrible economy as indicated by tax receipts, and that may include some negative revisions to earlier quarters. Be prepared to get out quick when things go south.

BlindersCare

2009-07-21T14:23:00.001-07:00

Rather then just bashing Obama’a approach to healthcare, I would like to offer up a few suggestions that could make the system better, and not cost the government or taxpayers any extra money.

Health Care Fee Reform

I think there is a fundamental problem with the way fees for services are determined. The way the system works now different patients are charged wildly different amounts for the exact same services. This is completely unfair and a huge problem with the current system. If you are a Medicare/Medicaid patient a small amount is charged. If you have health insurance, you will be charged different larger amounts based on what brand/type of insurance. Lastly, if you are uninsured you will be charged way more (sometimes 5x) what the same insured person would pay. This last part artificially inflates the “cost” of the uninsured on the system, and makes it prohibitively expensive to not have health insurance. Fees should be mandated to be identical for all patients, and should be set by the provider at a competitive rate of their choice. Medicare, Medicaid, and Private Insurance can say what the maximum fee they will cover per procedure is, and the patient can pay the difference if any. This allows for higher levels of service for patients willing to pay for it, and can allow for low levels of service for Medicare/Medicaid patients. It also allows for people to forgo health insurance altogether, and just pay as they go without getting completely ripped off by the provider on the same exact services. If people had a reasonable option of not getting insurance, it would help to keep a lid on insurance prices. Also insurance prices could be held in check on some policies by not increasing the payout amounts, and forcing the patient to pay a larger difference amount over time.

Tort Reform

Part of the increasing cost of health insurance is due to the many expensive lawsuits that are lost and defended every year. I would fix this, by having a two-tier fee schedule. The low base fee would come with an agreement to settle all claims in arbitration with a 2 million dollar cap. For an extra fee of $10 to $20 per procedure, you could waive the arbitration requirement, and waive the max. settlement cap. The extra fees would pay for the insurance to cover the extra liability. This way all patients do not have to pay for the costs associated with massive lawsuits.

Emergency Room Reform

Nobody should be turned away from an emergency room with an immediate life threatening condition or after a serious accident. However, if you show up at an emergency room for a regular doctor visit of some sort, and not with a life threatening condition, hospitals should be required to deny emergency room care. They simply should be refer the patient to the nearest walk-in clinic, and face no penalty from the government for doing so.

Health Insurance Reform

Government regulations on health insurance need to be greatly reduced. If we simplify the fees as stated above and go with a transparent/identical fee structure for everyone, insurance plans should be able to just state what they pay per procedure, and offer whatever coverage they want to. There should not be any minimum level of coverage mandated by the government. Where government regulation should exist, is in denial of claims. Once you are accepted for insurance, and have paid your bills you should never be denied coverage for any reason. Pre-existing conditions may get an exception here, but that is it. You apply for health insurance and unless you are outright lying about a major pre-existing condition, you can’t be denied coverage once accepted. This would eliminate tons of headaches and lawsuits from the system. Insurance providers may need to beef up their prequalification process, but that’s the correct way to do it.

Pre-existing Condition Reform

I am totally against allowing someone to go without insurance until some major problem happens and then apply for insurance to cover it. That is simply not fair, but seems to be what the liberals are after. I think that as long as you have had “continuous coverage” of health insurance, pre-existing condition requirements should be waived. If you are laid off at work, and are going to lose your existing policy you should be able to roll your insurance over to a new carrier with no penalties or pre-existing condition checks. If you have not had “continuous coverage” you should have to pay a much higher premium or simply be denied for health insurance coverage. Currently, many people are trapped in their jobs due to a medical condition that would be pre-existing if they switched insurance, but that is really not fair. Denial for pre-existing conditions should only be used against those who do not have current coverage.

Health Care Record Reform

I actually think there is some cost savings to be had here. If privacy concerns, can be addressed electronic health records could be a real cost saver, and help to reduce medical errors. How many times have you filled out the same medical form when visiting different doctors? They should standardize on electronic medical forms, and they should be filled out once, and updated on an ongoing basis. This eliminates the cost of obtaining and entering the same information over and over again in different computer systems. This can be entirely paid for by fees charged to doctors. Charge a $5 fee per medical record pulled for a while to cover the costs. The doctor’s office saves the time and money to print out paper records, and enter them into the computer offsetting the $5 cost.

Dealing with the Uninsured

Well I have not said a thing about what I would do here, or if it is even an issue. I think this is a small issue that is overblown, but I have a solution. The fee reform ideas will allow many to safely go without insurance, and not sacrifice on care. There should be some type of supplemental insurance that only covers major issues (say 10k or higher in bills), that pay as you go types could get. What’s left are illegal immigrants that should not get insurance, and those who simply can’t afford it. For those that can’t afford it, we need to come up with a bare bones policy that has high deductibles, co-pays, and low levels of coverage. No optical or dental should be included and only generic drugs where possible. The monthly cost of such a plan could be kept small, but it would be pretty shitty coverage. When the uninsured show up for treatment, they should be required to apply for the low cost plan, and pay all co-pays, deductibles, and fee differences when seeking treatment. They can ask for assistance there as well. The government then determines if they have the ability to pay all or part of the premiums, and deducts from a paycheck as required for the barebones coverage, and supplements the rest. This way the uninsured get some low level, bare bones coverage at some government expense, but would still need to shell out cash when receiving services. The poor coverage is a great incentive to go out and get a job and get better employer health insurance, or to afford a better private insurance policy.

I think all of the above are good logical steps to take to contain health care costs and get more people covered. The best thing is that none of them include a competing government plan, or require large amounts of government outlays to put the reforms in place. It’s more about writing some new regulations to address the issues rather than creating a costly government run mess to do the same. We simply can’t afford to raise taxes in anyway in the current economic situation. An approach like the one above is all that is currently possible with today’s budget deficit, yet it will still go much farther in reducing cost growth long-term than an expensive government run option.

Economy at the Bottom of Obama’s Priorities

2009-07-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

I think by now it is becoming obvious that Obama has no intention of fixing the economy. Fixing the economy appears to be at the bottom of his agenda. You need to judge a president by his policies, and not what he says in speeches. His policies are all devastating to the economy, and will prevent any kind of recovery unless they fail to pass or are over turned at a later date. He talks a bunch about everything he is doing to fix the economy, but let’s look at what has actually been done so far, and what he is planning to do to fix the economy.

The Stimulus Bill

This was nothing but a pork-barrel liberal wish list with a massive welfare plan thrown in for good measure. It has nothing to do with stimulus, and as a result is an over all negative to the economy. All of the wasted money will need to be paid back with interest in the future. Obama claims that the stimulus is working as planned. We have spent about 10% of it in the first 5 months. Most of it will be spent in 2010, and 2011. If we were planning to stimulate the economy in 2011, than we were planning on the economy not recovering until then. With the recession (soon to be depression) starting in late 2007, it is already about as long as any recession since the great depression. Planning on it continuing until 2011 is like planning on a depression, and doing pretty much nothing about it for a year or two. As you can see there is no actual intention of fixing the economy with the stimulus bill. If you really wanted to stimulate the economy in the short term you need to drastically reduce business and personal tax rates (i.e. Regan). That puts all of the money directly into the economy at a pretty fast rate (depending on how low you go with rates). Having the government spend the money wastes at least half of the actual stimulus portion of the money, and allows them to spend the rest of it on stuff that does not even stimulate the economy. A bunch of the money went to extending and increasing unemployment benefits. If you would have lowered taxes instead of raising unemployment pay, it would have provided for a much larger incentive to go out and get a job, and for employers to stop laying off people. There is no way I would go for additional stimulus offered by the architects of the first bill. However, if you want to actually stimulate the economy, you could cancel what has not been spent, and redo it now as a massive tax cut. That would only happen if Obama’s priority was to fix the economy.

The Health Care Bill

Trying to push a massive heath care bill though right now is laughable. It’s like the guy who has been living beyond his means on credit cards for 40+ years, is at major risk of losing his job and has taken a recent massive pay cut, and yet goes ahead and shops for that luxury yacht he has always wanted. You would call that person insane. No sane person or responsible lender would lend that person the money for the yacht. It works differently though when you can print your own money I guess. So let’s see what situation the United States is currently in. We have been running a budget deficit for 40+ years (living off credit cards). The few Clinton year surpluses were not surpluses net of Social Security, so they do not count. The U.S. tax income is down 22% this year and dropping fast. That’s like taking a huge pay cut with the threat of more cuts or unemployment to come. So now Obama is out shopping for the luxury yacht called “Universal Health Care” that we simply can’t afford. The responsible individual would wait for his job situation to stabilize and pay down some his debt, before even thinking about a yacht. Obama is simply not responsible with America’s money. Now this is being sold as a way to lower costs long term while adding health insurance for all uninsured. Those two things simply can’t happen at the same time. Insuring tens of millions is going to cost hundres of billions extra on an ongoing basis. The cost savings are not really explained. Adding demand to the existing supply of health care will raise the cost according to the law of supply and demand. So not only do we need to pay for all the new people covered, but the cost for everyone will also go up as well because of increased demand. The government simply can’t mandate new lower payout amounts. Doctors and other providers will simply leave the system if it is not worth it any more, causing further downward pressure on supply. Rationing health care will be the only solution to the supply and demand imbalance caused by the bill. Because of the ongoing expenses required to cover this bill, taxes will be going up on top earners. Also, there will be a penalty for individuals and businesses that do not provide or take out health insurance. This is where the economy gets destroyed by this bill. About 60% of the high income individuals own or run small businesses. Small businesses are also the most likely to be hit with penalties for not providing health insurance. This is a double whammy that will continue to depress the opportunities for small businesses that create the vast majority of new jobs in this country. As long as this bill is hanging over the U.S. economy, there will be no recovery. Nobody will be starting new small businesses now unsure of how high taxes are going or if health insurance will be mandated. If it actually passes, small business job creation will crawl to a near stand still, and the economy will not recover. If, Obama’s priority was to fix the economy, he would put this bill on hold until the economy has recovered and the budget deficit has been removed (i.e. indefinitely). Continuing to push for this bill now is a major headwind against economic recovery. Obama could step up and lead, by saying that we can’t currently afford the healthcare bill, and need to focus on economic recovery, but I doubt that happens.

The Cap and Trade Bill

This is just a feel good enviro-nazi bill that addresses a problem that does not even exist at massive expense to U.S. jobs and the economy. The heart of the bill is something like this. We want to double the price of gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, and electricity (from natural gas and coal), so that the cost of electricity produced from solar and wind becomes more competitive. The bill ignores several key facts. Solar and wind by themselves for example, simply can’t replace the electricity that we get from coal and natural gas no matter how hard we try. If electric cars are going to replace gas powered cars, we are going to need more electricity not less. But wait! If the cost of electricity doubles, that makes electric cars less competitive. No problem. Lets triple or quadruple the cost of energy until wind, solar, and electric cars are competitive. Ultimately, this is just a massive energy tax that does not even lower the amount of CO2 produced in the United States since we still will need the energy and baseline energy alternatives do not exist. Nuclear Energy is the only source that could meet the U.S. needs without producing CO2, but nothing in the bill promotes Nuclear. Another problem is that the world is not signed up to do the same. So energy costs go up drastically for U.S. businesses and individuals, while they do not change at all in the rest of the world. This will simply ship jobs over seas where energy and environmental costs are lower. I would love to see how the union manufacturing shops with vastly higher labor costs, will continue to compete when energy costs become vastly higher as well. To get this bill through the House it was watered down a ton, and is not even supported by the top Global Warming advocates anymore. Most of the costs are delayed for about ten years, but it must make energy prices go way up at some point in the future to actually work. The economy is in no shape to take on the uncertainty of a massive energy tax plan, or the effects of a massive new energy tax. This is a job and economy killing bill, and if Obama had the economy as a top priority he would put this one on hold for a while. It would also be nice to see the science behind Global Warming actually debated before taking on these massive expenses. The globe has been cooling for 8 years now, and the current June 2009 temperature anomaly against the 1979-2009 satellite measurement record is zero, meaning that today we are not above the average temperature of the last 30 years. This bill can wait for Global Warming to be confirmed scientifically before we purposely add more headwinds to the economy.

The Government Meddling in the Private Sector.

This simply needs to stop. Anything the government does to help the economy in the private sector hurts the economy. Bailing out weak companies hurts the strong. Recently CIT which is a major small business lender started teetering on bankruptcy and is looking for a bailout. The argument goes that they are the top small business lender and must be saved. Let’s imagine for a second that they became the top small business lender by under cutting their competitions fees and taking on more risk than there competition would. So this business model fails, and the government comes in with a bailout that props up the failed model at the expense of the successful ones. Had CIT failed, the competition would have picked up a good portion of the business with the exception of the loans that should never have been made. This is how capitalism works. Bailouts distort and destroy the free market. The same is true for the car makers. Had we just let them go unassisted into bankruptcy they would have either been liquidated or emerged as much smaller and profitable companies. Ford would have likely picked up significant market share because people do like to buy American. The additional market share would have allowed them to hire a good portion of the employees from GM and Chrysler, and get them working on cars that people actually want. By propping up GM and Chrysler post bankruptcy like we are doing, we are allowing the weaker companies to compete unfairly against Ford. They don’t need to turn a profit because the government is there to backstop their losses. So to move their crappy cars they undercut the competition on price, even if that means no profitability ever. So we are just hurting Ford at taxpayer expense by propping up the weak competition. All these government interventions in the private economy are delaying the recovery and hurting the economy. We need to stop all of it, and support capitalism and free markets as the way out of this mess. The economy may go a bit deeper short-term, but it will find its bottom much faster and set the stage for a natural, unforced recovery. If, Obama wanted the economy to recover, he would get the government out of the private sectors business.

Quit Destroying Americas Job Engine

Small business is the growth engine of the American economy. They have led us out of all of the recent recessions through massive hiring. We will not get out of this recession/depression until small businesses are comfortable hiring again. Enacting policy after policy that hurt small businesses is no way to fix the economy, but that’s what Obama is doing. How about throwing these guys a bone rather than choking them to death. Below are the many ways that Obama is killing job creation in small businesses.

1) Increased or planned increased tax rates on small business owners (Bush Cuts expire, and top 5% pay for health care)
a. Less incentive to start a new business
b. Less incentive to expand or take risks if reward is reduced

2) Mandatory health insurance coverage with penalties.
a. Less incentive to start a new business
b. Less incentive to grow business to where coverage is mandatory
c. Increased costs if penalties apply

3) Increased or planned increases of energy costs
a. Increased costs to all businesses
b. Increased competition from low energy cost countries

4) Increase to Minimum Wage
a. Increased labor costs
b. Less incentive to hire entry level employees

5) Increased regulation and red tape (equal pay laws…)
a. More regulations to follow
b. More lawsuits to defend

6) Bailouts to big businesses only
a. Unlevel playing field that favors the big over the small

So Obama’s many policies are all huge negatives on the economy, while he continues to talk about all that he is doing to fix the economy. He either does not understand economics enough to see the effects on the economy from his proposals, or he is actually proactively trying to depress economic activity to help push through a wealth redistribution agenda. He may be successful in shifting some wealth from the top to the bottom, but he will also be successful in shrinking the overall wealth of the nation. When you take away all incentive to create wealth, and incentivize those who are unemployed or underemployed, you are going a long way to destroy the economy and overall wealth. Let’s just hope somebody can stop this nonsense.

The System

2009-07-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

I have been a pretty big sports better most of my life. Most of the time, I analyze the match-ups, and come to a solid decision on what side to bet based on my sports knowledge. I have also employed betting "systems" in the past. One of the betting systems that I used in the past was for baseball, and it worked really well. I have not used this system in about 15 years, but I see no reason why it would not continue to work. Since IMO the system continues to work, yet I have not chosen to use it in a long time I have no problem revealing it here in detail, for someone who wants to take advantage of it. The system is basically an arbitrage system that takes advantage of the fact that Baseball is thinly bet compared to other sports, and has a very low house edge. The edge from arbitrage can easily out way the house edge, and lead to long term profits for the user of the system. Once you have convinced yourself statistically that the system works, you can ramp up the amounts you are betting and make some significant money on it. When I was last using the system I was betting between 2k to 5k a day as an unemployed UNLV student.

Baseball Betting

There are three main ways to bet on baseball. There is the money line which is a bet on who will win the game. There is the over/under line on what the total combined score will be. There is also a line called the "Run Line" which is a line with the favorite -1/2 run (The favorite to win by 2 runs or more). The system exploits the information from the over/under to find arbitrage opportunities between the Run Line and the Money Line. Arbitrage is simply a way of exploiting inefficient markets. The baseball betting market is inefficient because it is thinly traded. An example of arbitrage would be buying goods in the United States, transporting them to Europe and reselling at higher European prices. If the market is inefficient allowing for price disparity between two markets, and the cost of transport is less than the price disparity, guaranteed profits can be made. Guaranteed profits can be made betting baseball using arbitrage.

The System

So lets take a hypothetical game like the Yankees vs. the Red Sox. Lets say that Beckett is pitching for Boston and Boston is the favorite. The money line might be -145 (bet $145 to win $100) for Boston, and +140 (bet $100 to win $140) for the New York. If the house can get equal money laid on both sides they make a small profit by taking in $145 for every $140 that they pay out. The run line for this same game would be something like -145 for N.Y., and +140 for Boston. While Boston is favored to win the game outright, they are not favored to win the game by two or more runs. In this case, they are the underdog on the run line. Lets also say that the over under for this game is 10 runs. In nearly all cases the favorite on the money line is the dog on the run line unless they are huge favorites. The system is based on the fact that Boston will not win this game by exactly one run more than one in five times. I take $100 and bet it on Boston to win the game by two or more runs (run line), and $100 and bet it on N.Y. to win the game (money line). So I am betting $200 and will get back $240 if Boston does not win by exactly one run. As long as this happens less that one in five times I will collect $200 in profit before I lose both sides, and lose $200. I am looking for an average win of at least $40 in this case, so you shop sports books for lines like this. You also shop multiple sports books to find the best possible lines for each side. Because baseball is thinly bet, the lines are often different at different sports books. You identify the games you are interested in, and find the best lines to make your bets against. A lot of the time you will be able to do better than a $40 average win on a $200 in total bets if you shop around, but that is the minimum acceptable amount.

Before I started the using the system, I studied it against past games for several months to verify that it worked. What I found is that it works for American League games and was close to break even for National League games. Rockies home games were an exception to the rule for the National league. I also looked at the correlation between the over/under line, and the success of the system. I found that the higher the over/under on the games selected, the more successful and profitable the system is. All of this makes perfect sense. High scoring American League games are less likely to be decided by one run, while low scoring National league games, where they like to manufacture runs, are more likely to be one run affairs. So you can use the over/under line as a first screen to select American League games, and then make sure you can earn at least $40 on average based on a $200 successful bet. The higher the over/under, and the higher you can make on average per success helps to increase your profitability. In practice I like to use the system on about 5 games each day. That way you either made a nice chunk of change if everything works out, or you will break even if one of the five games is a one run game won by the favorite. The disaster scenario is losing two of the games, but I think that was so rare it only happened to me once or twice as long as I used it.

You will end up making huge bets with the system, and winning smaller amounts, but that is fine. You will be a high volume player, so you may be able to get rakeback or deposit bonuses at online sportsbooks while using the system. Back before the UIGEA when I was sports book bonus whoring it was not baseball season, so I was using football. This system would have cleared bonus requirements faster than you could blink, so there is some additional money to made there as well. Another great thing about this system, is it is purely analytic. You don't need to know anything about baseball to profit from it. Let me know if you have any questions or plan on trying it out.

Vegas Trip Report

2009-06-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

I'm back from a quick trip to Vegas over the weekend. It was a interesting weekend that went something like this. I rolled into town Friday night, and headed over to the Rio. I found Dr. Pauly in the press area, and we had a nice chat about Fantasy Sports Live's plans for the next year including a new and improved Sunday's with Dr. Pauly coming this September. I also asked him about his 30 day break from the WSOP to travel the country following a concert tour. To me a nice break from the grind of the WSOP would be several weeks in Maui, vs. a travel heavy concert fest, but to each his own. I like Pauly's idea of coming back fresh for the 50k horse and Main Event, vs being burned out by the time the biggies roll around. I don't know how some of the bloggers can get through the grind of an ever longer WSOP schedule. I watched a bit of the 50k HORSE which is always cool because the field is small and the tables are star-studded. Phil Helmuth was not in the HORSE event, as he was still playing in an earlier event that was down to the last few tables. After that I headed over to Slots-a-Fun for a quick $3 craps session and off to the MGM for poker.

I put my name on the list, and was looking around the poker room, when I noticed Hoyazo, Chad and CK playing at a $1/$2 NL Holdem table. I asked to get moved over there, and after about 20 minutes I was seated. Hoy said the table was tight and they could use me to liven up the action a bit, lol. I played a pretty long session with them, and watched Chad put on his usual cash game clinic, and CK accumulate over 1k in chips. I was horribly card dead, and did not get my first pot until about three hours into the session. A couple interesting plays from Chad were as follows. Someone opened to $13 preflop and there were a couple of callers, so Chad raised to $152. I said something like "Don't you think that is a bit excessive?". It folded around until a guy with QTo stated he wanted to gamble and made the call. Chad's JJ held up. There was also this really young looking guy who thought he was some sort of poker genius. Chad and him were going at it constantly. At one point he opened to $17 preflop, and I said "that's one dollar for every year he is old." Chad called with a low suited 5 gapper, and after hitting the flop slightly took down a massive pot from the child prodigy. I love watching Chad play cash, because he plays pretty much exactly opposite of how I play, and still has success. I was folding away with bad cards and not catching any flops as well. At one point, I had K9o and had limped from a blind in a four way pot. It checked through to the river, and I had nothing, but took a $5 stab at the small pot. I don't mind taking down the orphan pot, but I also don't mind getting called down for image purposes. As tight as I play preflop, I like to get caught bluffing once and a while so that people will think I am a bluffer in the back of their minds. Hoy made the call and dragged the pot with a 3 for bottom pair. I said "you better not make a play like that tomorrow (in the WSOP)". Eventually, I would win my first pot with a Jack high hand, and then shortly later, I would call a $13 open in a four way pot with KQo, and spike two kings on the flop. Hoy would stab at the flop, and I called. On the turn Hoy check folded to my bet. It was getting close to three in the AM at this point, and Hoy, CK, and Chad called it a night. The table got much easier immediately so I hung around for a while. Sometime after 4 AM I packed it up myself, and quit a 5 hour + session where I won just two pots and was down $150.

I slept in till about 1PM the next day, and got back the the MGM shortly after 3PM for another session. It was another card dead nightmare. Two hours into another session, and I had not won a pot yet. I had not seen a single hand like AK, AQ, AA, KK, QQ, or JJ in over eight hours of poker. It really starts to wear on you after a while, and I was even starting to make some bad plays which is not acceptable. I ran into Russ Fox and Weak Player who were at the MGM for the Clapton concert that night. Later on Chad would show up, and commented that I looked depressed. I pretty much was. I came out to Vegas to play a bunch of live poker, and was simply getting crushed. In this session, I finally started to catch some middle pairs like JJ, TT, and 99. I would raise preflop, and get a bunch of callers. The flop would come with one over, and it would check to me. I would stab at the pot and get pushed off by an immediate reraise. Basically, the medium pairs were just accelerating my losses. Eventually, I would just get up to clear my head after a three hour+ session with just a single small pot won and loss of $190. I knew things would turn around eventually, but I was not in the right mental state. I split the MGM and headed over to the RIO were I ran into Mr. Al Can't Hang. We talked for a while in the press booth, and then I headed over to a Final Table with Lee Watkinson.

I then headed over to Casino Royal for a $3 Craps session, and ended up back at the MGM around midnight. I could not find any bloggers (Hoy was off making a big score at the Venetian), so I sat down for some more $1/$2 NL and started running like a God. Second orbit I picked up KK and dragged a $320 pot. I would also pick up AA, QQ (2x), and AK (2x) during the session, and run my $200 buy-in up to about $530 over 3 1/2 hours. The session would come close to squaring my losses from the previous two horrible sessions. I called it a night. Sunday morning, I was feeling a bit burned out and decided to head home earlier than planned.

Fed Can't Have It Both Ways

2009-06-26T10:12:00.000-07:00

The Fed just completed their recent meeting with a statement that they are seeing signs of the economy improving, and are going to leave overnight rates at 0%-0.25% for the indefinite future. On one hand they are saying the economy is improving. On the other hand they are saying the economy is crap because they need to keep rates at historic lows for an extended period of time. Many people do not understand how fiscal policy works, but the Fed. should. When the Fed. adjusts their rates there is a 9-12 month lag before the rate change takes full effect in the economy. Because of this huge lag, the Fed. needs to stay ahead of the curve, and try to anticipate where the economy will be in a year. Keeping rates too low in a recovering economy leads to inflation, and was a big cause of the current financial crisis. Had the Fed. kept rates higher prior to 2008, it would have helped to prevent, and/or deflate the housing bubble. It would have been harder for people to qualify for even the sub-prime type loans if rates were higher, and if less sub-prime loans were made, the housing bubble would have been less severe. The Fed. was essentially enabling the housing bubble through fiscal policy. If the Fed. really thought the economy would be recovering in the next 12 months, they would need to start moving rates up now. How about just moving the rate to 0.25%, instead of a range that includes borrowing money for free? The fact is that there are no green shoots, and the Fed. is well aware that Obama's policies, if enacted, will crush the economy for many years to come. They want to be a team player so they are talking the economy up, but their interest rate policy speaks for itself. Holding rates at historic lows for an indefinite amount of time, means that in their opinion, the economy will not be improving for an indefinite amount of time plus 9 to 12 months.

Last Minute Vegas Run

2009-06-25T08:40:00.000-07:00

It does not appear that there will be an organized blogger gathering this summer. That's no reason for me to not make a Vegas run though, is it? I got a bit of business to attend to, and the WSOP is a great place to promote Fantasy Sports Live, so I am going to pack up and head out this weekend. My only plans are to spend some time in the Amazon Room promoting FSL and meeting with some of the bloggers reporting on the event. Also, I am going to play as much live poker as possible (probably at MGM). I don't believe there are any organized blogger events Friday-Sunday, so I am going to play it by ear I guess. I don't plan on playing in the WSOP, but that could change if I go on a heater Friday night. Good luck me.

Too Big To Fail

2009-06-19T14:45:00.001-07:00

Nothing makes me cringe more than when I hear the words "too big to fail". Too big to fail is a new and horrible concept. It basically says that there are certain companies that pose systemic risk to the United States economy if they were to fail and file for bankruptcy. Obama's new regulatory plan addresses companies that are too big to fail by regulating them in new ways, while leaving out new regulations for Fannie Mae and Freddy Mack. The new regulations also fail to address the fact that the FHA has become the new sub-prime lender of choice with 3.5% down loans to people with poor credit in a crashing housing market. I guess we never learn a thing do we?

I have a better idea about how to deal with companies that are "too big to fail". The answer is not regulating them. The answer is not letting them exist. Why does America need companies that are too big to fail anyway? What purpose do they serve to us? We should have been thinking about this one a while ago when we let them merge into the size they are now. So rather than regulating them, I say we figure out what companies are already to big to fail and break them into smaller fail-able pieces, and stop letting companies merge into massive too big to fail size. I would say that AIG, Fannie, Freddy, Citi and B of A are in the too big to fail camp and need to be dealt with sooner rather than later. So how about just taking care those five, and then saying that the United States will never bail out a company of any size again, so don't come asking. Capitalism requires that weak companies can fail so that their workers and assets can be recycled by better and stronger companies. This way the overall economy grows as productivity is increased. Artificially keeping failing companies alive can only lower productivity, because resources are not being allocated properly. To grow the economy companies must be allowed to fail big or small. All this government intervention disguised as helping the economy can only do harm.

This all gets down the the flawed notion of growth through acquisition. Small companies usually can grow fine on there own. Medium sized companies can grow on their own, and can also pick up some efficiencies through acquisitions. For fortune 500 companies it starts to get pretty hard to grow at any kind of pace on your own due to their sheer size. So to satisfy the board and stock holders many try to continue to grow for the sake of growth and go out and buy more and more companies that are less and less a good or productive match. The CFOs love this because it allows them to cook up the books during the acquisition period and during the wind down period later on (when the acquisition officially fails), smoothing out earning as required. The ability to take liberties with your financial statements has got to be one of the main reasons big public companies continue to acquire. I do not think that it is a highly profitable or efficient thing for a company to become massive for the sake of being massive, so lets just stop that notion now. Not in America. Stop approving mergers for companies that are trying to become to big to fail, and the problem is solved and capitalism can do its work.

Economy Much Worse Than What Is Being Reported

2009-06-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

Lets face some facts here. The government loves to manipulate economic data to serve their own purposes. According to the government GDP was down about 6% in Q4 2009 and Q1 2009. Q2 2009 numbers have not been released yet (quarter is not over). I started thinking about ways to estimate GDP without relying on bogus government numbers, and also get more granularity than a quarterly report. It turns out that you can easily back your way into GDP by using Hauser's Law.

Hauser proposed a law that total U.S. Federal tax revenues hold constant at about 19.5% of GDP based on the above chart. The law was proposed about 15 years ago, and most economists did not believe it could be true. It has continued to hold since that time even though individual income tax rates have varied wildly. It basically proves that you can't soak the rich with higher taxes as a way to increase tax revenues. Unfortunately, the concept of soaking the rich to pay for new expansions of social programs is the key to Obama's plans. This law will need to be broken for Obama to succeed and it has held for 60 years now. It is actually pretty easy to explain. If you raise taxes on the rich for example, GDP will contract as a result of the higher taxes, and you end up getting a larger percentage of a smaller pie for a wash. The reduction of the top bracket from 90% to 70% in the 60s did not hurt tax revenue at all as a percentage of GDP. When Reagan reduced it again from 70% to 50%, again no reduction. Even the Bush tax cuts to address the economy after 9/11 did not reduce revenue as a percentage of GDP. Since Federal tax revenue is a fixed percentage of GDP, the only way to increase it is to grow the economy. Tax cuts can grow the economy, and as a result increase Federal tax revenues. Tax increases, shrink the economy, and as a result lower federal tax revenues. If Obama really wanted more money for the government to spend he should be looking at tax cuts to grow the economy, vs. tax increases that have never worked in the last 60 years.

So if Hauser's law continues to hold today, which I am assuming it does, then changes in tax revenues are directly proportional to the underlying GDP growth. You can simply look at monthly tax revenues and back your way into GDP. Below is a scary chart showing 12 month percentage change in monthly Federal Tax Receipts.

As you can see Federal Tax Revenues have fallen off a cliff in 2009, and if Hauser's law is holding the GDP growth chart would look identical to the chart above. Through the first 5 months of 2009, tax revenues are down 22.7% indicating a GDP contraction of 22.7% which is much higher than the 6% number that is reported. A contraction of this size puts us easily in the area of a depression. I used a three month rolling average to pinpoint the start of the depression at February 2008. The contraction has accelerated in Q2 to twice the level of Q1. Even the Governments bogus numbers should show a GDP contraction of at least 10% in Q2 when reported in July. This is a massive acceleration of the economic decline. There are no "Green Shoots" and the economy is not getting worse less fast as reported. The downturn is accelerating in Q2 2009, and when the stock market gets wind of this, watch out.

Since Obama's entire economic plan is based on a false premise, the damage can't be undone, unless there is a radical change in policies towards promoting economic growth. I doubt that will happen, so we will be waiting until 2012 to start undoing the damage to our economy caused by the Obama administration.

RIP GameDayDraft and FantasySportsExchange

2009-06-10T09:50:00.001-07:00

Two more FantasySportsLive.com competitors have disappeared recently. Game Day Draft which was the first site to launch under the UIGEA exemption no longer exists. They launched with a confusing web site and a strange pick from player pools structure. They were also located off-shore in Costa Rica which seems a bit shady for a "legal" fantasy sports site. They tried to reinvent themselves by copying our contest lobby, but their site continued to be a confusing mess, and they have finally thrown in the towel. RIP Game Day Draft.

Fantasy Sports Exchange was a sister site to the large offshore sports book World Sports Exchange. They launched about 5 months after us, and clearly used our site as a basis for building their daily fantasy sports site. They threw a ton of money at the software and did a pretty good job with it. I told our partners after they launched that our site would look and function very similar to theirs if we had an unlimited software budget. Their draft interface was more advanced than ours at launch, and we copied some of the things that they did to get to where we are now with FSL's draft interface. Since I can't win prizes at Fantasy Sports Live, I have had my eyes out for a similar site where I could play at and Fantasy Sports Exchange was the best I have seen. Unfortunately, they are an offshore sports book so they can't be funded by PayPal or credit card. I have not had a way to fund offshore accounts since the UIGEA passed, so there was no way for me to open and fund an account with them. They also did not attempt to fully comply with the UIGEA because they did not need to, leaving them with a fantasy sports gambling site per U.S. law. I think the account funding issues are what ultimately killed them. Why play at an offshore sports book when you could play on a legal U.S. site like ours. RIP Fantasy Sports Exchange.

It appears from the rumblings around that interweb that both companies are making it hard for players to get funds out, which is unfortunate. It leaves people with a bad taste in their mouths for daily fantasy sports. Fantasy Sports Live is here to stay though, and we welcome any users from GDD of FSE who would like to play daily fantasy sports on a site that is here to stay. With the departure of GameDayDraft, FantasySportsExchange, InstantFantasySports, and DraftMix from the scene, we are left with just SnapDraft as a major competitor, and a handful of smaller copycat sites with little to no traffic. None of our competition is over a year old now. Our fees are less than 1/2 the fees at SnapDraft, and our structures and transparency is much, much better than theirs. If you want to profit from fantasy sports, we are now the only game in town as Snap Draft is more of a lottery style site that can't be beaten long term. Our decision to profitably grow the company has been key. We are no Facebook. We have a solid business model and are already profitable giving us staying power for the long haul. Check out Fantasy Sports Live if you are ready to profit long-term from your sports knowledge.

Supreme Court Stays Chrysler Bankruptcy

2009-06-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

The Executive Branch of the government is constitutionally required to enforce the laws of the United States. As I stated in Depression 2.0, Obama was attempting to rewrite the U.S. bankruptcy laws in the Chrysler bankruptcy as a way to payback the UAW for supporting him. While Congress refused to stop him from doing this, a small group of Indiana investors successfully appealed to the Supreme Court and the proceedings have been stopped pending a potential hearing at the highest court of the land. The UAW has no claim to anything in this bankruptcy, but were going to be gifted a large stake in the company, as well as cash and warrants. Obama played hardball with the secured investors, and softball with the UAW. Had everyone agreed to this, fine. Many did, but any objection to this would require the Bankruptcy laws to be followed and there were objections. This is great news, because it shows that Obama's unlimited power is going to get checked (as is should be), by another branch of government. I do not see anyway that they will not actually hear the case, and if they do there is no way they are going to allow bankruptcy laws to be destroyed for political reasons. This will also effectively kill the GM "prepackaged" bankruptcy as well. What should have happened is the UAW should have taken nothing, but received the opportunity to save some jobs through bankruptcy. That's how it supposed to work. Had that happened, it would have been possible for Chrysler to survive bankruptcy. You basically go the UAW, and say you will get nothing, and if you do not agree to that we will liquidate the company, and all union jobs will be lost. That is a pretty good incentive to take the deal. Unions are like parasites. They are not supposed to be able to kill the host and still survive. Finally, some much needed sanity from the government, and a chance of continued investment in U.S. companies.

Best Comedy Ever Made?

2009-06-08T10:34:00.000-07:00

I saw "The Hangover" last night, and IMO it is the best comedy ever made by miles. No other comedy comes close to this one, and I love me a good comedy. Imagine if Old School was ten time funnier. That's what you have with The Hangover. When the movie ended it got a standing ovation from the theater crowd, something that I have never seen before. I also can't wait to see it again, and I have never wanted to see a movie twice prior to release on DVD before. I have not decided yet, but it may be my new all-time favorite movie including all genres. Nuff said.

Depression 2.0

2009-06-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

I hate to say it, but I think we are well into our second depression in the United States. A depression seemed so unlikely based on the lessons learned from the last one, but we are facing a very unique set of circumstances here that make depression 2.0 just about unavoidable. The ingredients we have in place are pretty rare, but perfect for causing the second major U.S. depression. We have a systemic shock to the world banking system as a result of the U.S. government allowing loose credit for way too long (republicans and democrats share the blame here). We have an inexperienced, charismatic, president, who does not have a clue on economics, and has surrounded himself with a ton of liberal yes men advisors. We have a democratically controlled congress that is sleeping at the wheel and rubber stamping anything the anointed one want’s to do. We have a corrupt and biased press that refuses to honestly evaluate anything the president does. The only voice of reason here (fiscal conservatives), are completely drowned out by the biased media coverage. This rare stack-up of events puts us on course for a lengthy downturn that will feel much more like a depression than a recession by the time it ends if ever.

The economy is in horrible shape right now. Forget about reports from the biased media that consumer confidence is up, and that housing is improving. The media is talking the economy up as much as they can, because that is what Obama would want them to do. He is paying for good media coverage through kickbacks to GE (parent company of NBC) including Cap and Trade preferences, Universal Health Care preferences, and unrestricted access to the White House. I was flipping channels the other day and found a special on the interworkings of the Obama White House. This was not a Fox News report, because they would never get access like that. It was obviously NBC the most biased and corrupt news organization out there, getting repaid for there biased reporting of the anointed ones election. The media is cherry picking good news about the economy. The economy is not improving, unless your definition of improvement is getting worse less fast. The economy may be getting worse less fast, but it is still getting worse day by day, month by month. Q1 home prices were down by the largest amount Y/Y on record. Home price declines are actually accelerating right now. Tough to find that in the media “housing market is improving” reports. Consumer confidence may be ticking up, but same stores in May (a measure of actual consumer sentiment) were lower across the board. In other words consumer spending continues to drop. The problem with talking the economy up is that it rarely works. Eventually people will figure out that the talk is just talk, and the economy is in truly bad shape. It’s not that hard, go to a shopping mall and see for yourself.

A shock to the banking system is not enough to take the strong American economy down for good. Normally easing interest rates and waiting the nine or so months for the changes to filter through the economy is enough to fix the problems. Rates were lowered early on in this depression. The initial TARP capital injections into the banks were probably also required to stabilize the banking sector. I would say about 300 Billion between AIG and the troubled banks would have been enough. After that, you need to wait things out. Unfortunately, along comes a new president with a wealth redistribution, socialist agenda. Being opportunistic, he sees the crisis as a means to push his agenda. His agenda though is pure anti-growth, pure punish the hard-working, and pure spoil the lazy. Basically a pure anti-American agenda that would have the founding fathers spinning in their graves. I could never really figure out the reason for the second amendment, but those genius founding fathers were looking 100s of years ahead to how our system could be corrupted by the executive branch. The 2^nd amendment is a check against unlimited executive power, and it may be time to use it.

So at a time when only sound economic policy can get us out of this depression, we have a president who could care less about sound economic policy, and cares only about social engineering. We have a president that is spending about $18,000 per tax payer this year to “fix the economy”, with policies that will never work. I think if you asked the average American they would want there 18k back. The problem with spending 1.8 trillion dollars that you don’t have is that you have to pay it back some day. You better get a massive bang for your buck if you are going to put all taxpayers on the hook for that kind of money. When it does not work, it is not free. The repayment of that debt will be a headwind against the economy for the next 50 years at least.

Lets just look at a few of the ways that Obama is damaging the economy with his policies and steering us right into a depression.

TARP

TARP was never intended to be used to bail out the car companies. GM and Chrysler both have broken business models and are not savable. Every dollar that we give them is flushed down the toilet. Unless we offer to provide them unlimited funds to stay in operation they will be both be bankrupt for good in short order. Worst of all, Obama corrupted to bankrupcy process to payback the UAW for helping elect him. Unless the Chrysler bankruptcy is tossed out on appeal, our bankruptcy laws will be broken in the United States, and that will dry up investment in U.S. companies. Why be a secured investor in a company, if bankruptcy rules can be changed for political reasons? I also do not understand how TARP can be used to buy 60% ownership of a car company out of bankruptcy. I guess since the bill is 1000 pages long, and nobody read it so Obama can do what he likes no matter how unconstitutional. The initial TARP funds were distributed by Bush as preferred stock would have likely been repaid with the exception of AIG. AIG should have been cut-off after the initial stabilization effort and been allowed to fail. Conversions of preferred stock to common stock (Citigroup) is the same as flushing that money down the toilet. So under Bush they were careful to make sure that TARP would be repaid, and tax payers would not be damaged. Under Obama TARP has been turned into a slush fund of bail out money that will probably never be repaid. If transparency is ever brought to TARP it will be clear that the money distributed under Bush was mostly repaid, and under Obama was not repaid at all for a huge taxpayer loss.

Stimulus Bill

Let’s face facts here; the stimulus bill has not stimulated the economy in any way. It was a welfare bill disguised as a stimulus package. If you gave me 770 billion dollars to stimulate the economy, the recession would already be over. I would have suspended income tax collection, and reduced corporate tax rates until the 770 billion was “not collected”. The key difference here is that not collecting the money is not an expansion of government, and is very easy to unwind. Every working individual and corporation would be immediately stimulated. They may not spend the extra money, but if they don’t it will get saved which is good for the banks. It also gives people an incentive to work, and businesses an incentive to hire. The stimulus package was simply a welfare package, and gives no incentive to work or for businesses to hire. Let’s break it apart a bit here. A massive portion of the stimulus was for the “Make Work Pay” tax credit. A tax credit is not a tax cut, and that is a huge difference. There were no actual tax cuts in the stimulus package despite media and Obama reports to the contrary. The tax credit is phased out for 100k+ earners, and is paid out even if you did not pay taxes. (Refund of your Social Security and Medicare withholdings). So there is no stimulus here for high income earners, and he has raised the marginal tax rate for low income earners disincentivizing hard work. Basically, a low wage earner who qualifies for the tax credit faces a phase out if they earn any more money as well as increased tax rates. The double whammy makes it not worth it to work harder and earn more money because the government will take most of it. 100s of billions of stimulus is welfare for states so they can temporarily avoid tough budget decisions. 100s of billions are to extend and raise unemployment benefits which has been shown over and over again to discourage people from seeking work, and expanded Medicare payments which don’t stimulate the economy at all. The rest is for shovel ready projects of which less than a billion has been spent so far, and for research grants to study liberal pseudo science like Global Warming. The quality of science is deteriorated by government assistance, as it politicizes science. The government will siphon off 75% of the R&D grant funds by administering them. It would have been a much better idea to expand the corporate R&D tax credit. At least corporations would research stuff that could help the economy as opposed the government standard pig flatulence studies.

Cap and Trade

The most scientifically dishonest policy from the president that said he would use sound science to make public policy. Obama’s energy policy will cost the average family $4600 a year in extra energy and related costs in a time of depression, and ship millions of manufacturing jobs overseas where energy will be much cheaper. The policy will also have no measurable effect on Global Temperatures that have been dropping for the last 7 years and are expected to continue to drop in their normal 30 year up and down cycle as determined by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). There is no current substitution for oil, and CO2 is a harmless gas that is essential for life as we know it. If this policy is enacted, not only will a depression be guaranteed, but our national security and quality off life will take a huge hit. Keep in mind that the science of global warming per the IPCC was determined by a show of hands, and not by reproducible experiments. I was not aware that a show of hands trumps an actual scientific experiment, but this is how Obama science policy works. I would really appreciate a public debate on this matter before we head back to the energy use levels of 1905, but it is not going to happen because the liberals would not win, and they are the ones in control now.

Universal Heath Care

Here are the facts. Health care in the United States is the best in the world. Countries that have universal health care ration it with long waits and by letting people die while waiting for treatment. The problem is also greatly exaggerated. I keep hearing 50 million are uninsured. Well 10 million of those are illegal immigrants, and they should not get universal heath care. 8 million more are under 18, and can probably do without. Another 10 million are 18-34, and probably choose to not have it to save money. That leaves just 20 million who are probably too poor to pay for health insurance. Mandating that these 20 million now pay for health care will not work, because they can’t afford it. Once you realize all this, you can see it is just another Welfare policy. Tax the rich and use it to pay for the poor’s heath care coverage. Well there are many problems here. First off, universal health care is a disincentive to work. If you need a job to get good heath care then that is a reason to go out and get a job. If you tax the rich to pay for it that will put a drag on the economy and make them less likely to work hard. Increasing taxes in anyway will hurt the economy and that is a proven fact. Tax the rich enough and they will simply leave the economy. Lastly, the government does not run anything efficiently. Getting them involved just means more waste and worse care. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it is my vote. If this somehow gets through, a depression is guaranteed because they will tax us to death to pay for it. Think about a national sales tax. Think about taxing your company health care benefits. Think about sin taxes. Obama is thinking about all of these, and every one of them will kill the economy.

Reckless Spending Plans

If you combine TARP, the stimulus package, the 2009 and proposed 2010 budgets, and the expanded balance sheet of the FED, we have more deficit spending (planned or spent) in the last 6 months, than the last 30 years combined. This reckless spending is driving up interest rates, devaluing the Dollar, and causing domestic inflation. Mortgage rates are up ¾ of a point in a week. Oil is heading back up to $80. This is all happening before the economy has started to recover. In a normal recovery, the economy starts to move and that causes interest rates and inflation to start ticking up. When it is caused by the economy this is normal and good. When it is caused by reckless government spending it is not good. The economy is already facing stiff head winds as it tries to recover. This is why I do not see the economy recovering anytime soon. Forget about a Q3 or Q4 recovery that the media likes to hype. A recovering economy has never felt headwinds like this before, and the economy is way too weak to overcome them anytime soon. Deficit spending needs to end ASAP so that the headwinds can be removed. Also, the government needs to stop intervening in the economy. You can’t fight off the bottom, only delay it. Obama may be successful in delaying the bottom for 4 years, but that means 4 years of economic decline. If you let the economy find its bottom it will grow again given some time. The only way out of this is to stop bailing out companies, and stop spending money that we do not have. The deficit last year was a historically high $450 Billion. Obama has no problem with trillion dollar deficits for the next 10 years. We will not get fiscal responsibility until he is long gone. I just wonder how much permanent damage will be caused by a 5+ year long depression.

BBT4 Run Recap

2009-06-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

I ended up playing in 18 of the BBT4 events and did not win a TOC seat. I went in figuring I would play around 20 and that would give me about a 50/50 shot at a seat (based on average field of 50) and that’s about what happened. I was heads up once in the riverchasers with the chip lead for my 50/50 chance, but did not convert. Overall, I played pretty well, but was bounced on bad beats just before several final tables. That was evened out to some extent by a lucksack/cardrack run to third in one. I can’t really compare myself on points to those who played most of them when I played less than 1 out of 3. I finished in 48^th overall on points. Only 2 people finished higher than me with 18 or less events, and I finished higher than 22 people who played 18 or more events. I was profitable over the series, though not by a huge margin. I have now been profitable over each BBT series individually. If you look at points per event, I ended up in 20^th place overall for anyone with at least 18 events. I think that’s about where I would have landed if I had played most of them. I think I would have had about a 90% chance at a seat as well if I played them all, but that is not really possible. The timing of these things is horrible for me, and it would have taken a divorce to play in more of them (I took a ton of heat as it was). It was a lot of fun though to play against everyone, and there were some very enjoyable final tables along the way. I wish the best of luck to everyone who made the TOC, and for whoever wins a seat, could you please take the M.E. down.

GM Bailout Math - 33k Per Car Sold

2009-05-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

Over the last six months, the government has provided bailouts for GM and GMAC totaling 19.4 billion and 13.5 billion respectively. GM has sold 1 million cars over that 6 month period. We are providing them a bailout of $33,000 per car sold. In other words, GM needs to get $33,000 in government assistance per car sold to stay in business. Is the average selling price of a GM car even 33k? This is complete nonsense. GM is not close to a viable company and needs to fail now. The bailouts to GMAC show how weak GM is. Without GMAC writing bad loans and leases to move cars, the situation at GM would be even worse. Why are we bailing out an auto-finance company anyway? There are hundred of auto finance companies out there who are still loaning money on cars. You do not need GMAC to buy a GM. Propping up GMAC so they can prop up GM is a joke. This is simply a union job saving move at the expense of non-union jobs. If Obama was honest about what was going on here, the U.S. would simply buy GM out of bankruptcy, and give the surviving company to the UAW. That is exactly what we are doing, but under the disguise of "bankruptcy financing". How about paying GM 25k per car to stop making them. That would save the United States billions, and be just slightly less stupid than what we are doing now. These numbers are simply too big for the average citizen to grasp. There have been so many billion dollar bailouts, we are getting immune to it all. Will the mainstream Media ever step up and do a story like this? I am sure the people would be interested in a 33K per car bailout for a company in a decades long death spiral.

Carbon Cap and Trade Charade

2009-05-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

The Obama Cap and Trade Tax is now out of committee and heading towards passage in both the leftist House and Senate. I doubt any Republicans will vote for it, but it may get shoved through any way. If passed, it mandates that the United States reduces energy consumption to the levels last seen in 1905 over the next 40 years. Since there were not many cars back then, no airplanes, and many people still did not have electricity it is basically a move back to the dark ages for the United States. If we are able to achieve these reductions we will no doubt be to poorest industrialized nation in the world with the lowest standard of living in 2050. Costs over the first 10 years of the program are tallied to exceed 7 trillion dollars. Gasoline and electric prices will double short term, causing the price of everything to skyrocket. People making less than $250,000 per year will face an average additional burden of $1,600 per year at the start (so much for no taxes on this group), and a much higher burden as the free permits expire. If we somehow manage to hit this goal and maintain energy use at 1905 levels, this unilateral reduction in CO2 by the United States looks to reduce the worldwide average surface temperature by a total of 0.07C over the next 100 years (based on global warming model estimates). So we are prepared to hit this collapsing economy with an additional 7 trillion dollar burden, over the next 10 years and drive ourselves into the dark ages, for a temperature change that is completely imperceptible, and well below the margin of error for any model prediction.

I wrote about the global warming scam a while back, and everything I said remains true. There is zero evidence that CO2 causes global warming outside of a few computer models that show zero skill at predicting the future. If your only evidence is models that can’t predict the future there is basically no evidence. The evidence against CO2 being a significant contributor to climate is indisputable. We have very good record of CO2 and surface temp over the last 40 years and there is simply no correlation between the two. We have crappy records that go back 100 or so years, and still no correlation. If someone thinks that a correlation between CO2 and surface temperature has been shown, please provide it in the comments. Temperature is cyclical and driven by natural forces outside of our control. To think that mankind is destroying a 5 billion year old planet though 150 years of activity is pretty crazy on the surface. The global warming hysteria started during a 30 year up trend in temperatures from around 1970 to 2000. The upward trend ended at that time, and we have been in a solid cooling trend for 7 years now. CO2 increases to the atmosphere continue unabated, yet temperatures continue to drop. Unfortunately, the Global Cooling Denialists continue on with even more and more outrageous warming claims. In the face of actual evidence that worldwide sea ice extent is at an all-time high (since we started measuring with Satellites), you still get weekly claims in the media that seas ice is melting away even faster than feared.

There has never been an actual debate on the merits of global warming claims, and there never will be one. The Global Cooling Deniers can’t win a debate on the scientific facts, so they avoid debates at all cost. They simply deny the evidence, personally attack any one who questions them, or use any other number of logical fallacies to argue their case. The facts are the globe is entering into a long-term cooling trend that will ultimately disprove global warming. Eventually the public is going to call bullshit, and let the media have it for supporting this junk science. The reputation of most of the stonewalling Global Cooling Deniers will be destroyed, and science in general will take a setback. Obama called for science to be used to set policy, but it is not being used here.

I have no doubt that if passed, Cap & Trade will be repealed in the near future by somebody with a spoonful of gray matter. Unfortunately, the folly of passing it in the first place will be a huge setback for the United States. We have held back to this point on climate change policy, and have lots of great examples of how Cap and Trade did not work in Europe, yet we still chose to follow in their footsteps. Cap and Trade also greatly weakens the security of the United States, and I think that has been underplayed. The simple fact is that Oil is an incredibly valuable resource, with a limited supply. It is so valuable that no matter what restrictions the world comes up with, it will still be used up in the next 50 or so years. If we choose to restrict our use of oil over those last 50 years, we will become poorer, while the rest of the world stockpiles it. China is already stockpiling oil and other strategic commodities and we should be doing the same. We can buy oil today at $60 a barrel and store it in the strategic reserve for later, or beg China for some oil at $400 a barrel in 50 years. We are obviously in a weaker position by not stock piling now. All of our heavy military equipment runs on oil, and when it nearly gone, those that still have will rule the world.

Worst Invention of the Decade

2009-05-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

It’s a great thing that inventors are always looking for ways to improve our lives. Every once and a while though, somebody thinks it would be a great idea to solve a problem that does not really exist with a solution that makes the original non-existent problem worse than before, and adds a few new problems to the mix as well. It’s bad enough that somebody could come up with such a stupid idea, its worse when the idea is rolled out at great expense nearly everywhere even though it does not come close to working as intended. I present you with the worst invention of the decade, the automatic flush toilet.

I am not talking about the stand up type. Those work fine. I am talking about the sit down kind. They simply do not work right, make the problem worse, and waste twice the amount of water. I guess there was this huge problem with people dropping the kids off at the pool, and then leaving them behind for all to see. I don’t actually remember that being a huge problem. I mean common decency would force all but the sickest of individuals to pull the plug after dropping some kids off. So along comes a solution to a problem that does not exist. Let’s just put a sensor that can tell when you are in drop off mode, and then pull the plug automatically when you are done. Sounds simple right? The problem is that dropping the kids off at the pool is not as simple as that. It’s a 2 part process. First you drop the kids off, and then let’s just say that you stand up to towel off prior to leaving the pool area. So you drop the kids off, stand up to towel off, and then the plug gets pulled automatically. Bye, bye kids. But what to do with the towels? At the pools I use, there is no collection bin. You are supposed to throw them in the pool before you leave. So you toss them in and get ready to leave only to realize that there are dirty towels floating in the pool, and the plug already got pulled. Since there is no manual way to pull the plug, you need to trick the pool into thinking you are dropping the kids off again to get a fresh plug pull. Now I don’t mind dropping the kids off the first time, but it seems a bit silly to “pretend” to drop them off again, just to avoid leaving dirty towels in the pool. So you have a choice here. Leave the dirty towels behind for the next swimmer to find, or trick the pool into draining itself again by pretending to drop off some more kids. Fucking brilliant! My guess is that many people will not go through the motions a second time leaving more messes behind then the auto-drain was supposed to fix. For those that go through the motions and pretend to drop the kids off again, the pool gets drained a second time for no real reason wasting a ton of water. For all these reasons the automated flush toilet is a shoe-in for worst invention of the decade.

Stimulus Job Donkey Math

2009-05-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

In Obama’s 100th day news conference he mentioned that the stimulus package had already “created or saved 150,000 jobs”. As we all know by now, mainstream media is completely dead in this country. This number was never discussed or challenged by anyone. It was like he never said it. He did say it though, and last week some information came out about how he came up with such a number. It’s called government stimulus job math. I knew at the time he said this that only about 14 billion of the $770+ billion had actually been paid out, and that was 100% on Medicare. Not sure how increasing Medicare payments lead directly to created or saved jobs, but it does not need to when you use stimulus job math. You see there is this formula that says for every $92,000 in stimulus money spent, one job is created or saved for one year. 14 Billion spent means 150k in jobs have been created or saved. To hit Obama’s goals for job creation and savings all he needs to do is spend the money. It does not matter if any actual jobs are created or saved. 92k = 1 job-year by government estimates.

Now, I have a big problem with the “created or saved” language. While you may be able to measure jobs created, jobs saved is pretty tough. It allows them to use 92k because otherwise what they are doing would be immeasurable. So are we getting a good deal here as taxpayers, even if one job was actually created per 92k? Not really. The average personal income of a fulltime worker age 25+ in the USA is 40k. So we are spending 92k to create a 40k job. The government skims 57% of the money right off the top and flushes it down the toilet. Now what about the other 40k? Is that what it really costs to create a job? Maybe if the government is doing the creating, but how does it work in the private sector? In the private sector, you need to look at the return on investment for hiring an additional employee. If it costs you 40k to hire someone, and you figure they will produce 50k in additional gross profit, you might go ahead and hire them. In a 40k/40k situation you would not. It really just takes a nudge to get hiring to happen, and assuming it takes the entire salary amount, puts zero value on the extra gross profit you should get with a larger staff. So an incentive in the range of 10-20k would easily be enough to get the private sector to expand. They can’t now profitably, but if we could make it profitable by even a small amount they will start hiring. This could have been done by dropping the business side contributions to Social Security temporarily, instead of refunding the employees SS contribution as a welfare payment like the stimulus actually does. By my math the private sector could create 4-9 times as many jobs per stimulus dollar than the government. Using the government to dole the money out is a complete waste of the stimulus money.

Now what about the math for jobs saved? Spending 92k to “save” a job for one year borders on obscene. Why not just pick up the 40k salary of someone who is about to be laid off, if the company agrees to keep them for at least one more year. That saves 57% right there. Again, this is bogus math. You would not need to offer a company that much to do the same thing. That assumes that people’s contributions to a business are worthless. Assuming that the lay-off is happening because it is becoming slightly unprofitable to keep this person employed, you just need to make it slightly profitable to save the job. 5-10k seems like plenty of incentive to save a job year. That’s 9-18 times more efficient than the government.

I question if the 92k figure is actually generous. Out of the first 14 billion spent I doubt there were more than 1k in jobs created or saved based on where the cash was spent (Medicare). With a lot of the money going to things like extending unemployment benefits and other safety nets a bunch of it will not really create or save any jobs. For the money that is actually allocated to job programs like construction the 92k number may be good. Lastly, if we give Obama the benefit of the doubt for a second, and assume the 150k job number is real. That would mean that the stimulus package is creating or saving 75k jobs per month against a backdrop of 600,000+ new filings for unemployment every month. Total numbers on unemployment are at an all-time high. 75k in jobs a month is not close to putting a dent in this crashing economy. At least at the rate the money is being spent it will take many, many years to spend it all.

Lucksacking My Way Through The RiverChasers

2009-05-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

I have always done well in the Riverchasers events. My squeaky tight play goes nicely against the grain versus all of those crazy river chasers. I typically don’t play a lot of pots, and don’t get it in bad much as a result. Sure, to win an MTT you are probably going to have to get it in bad a few times and get lucky. I just do not like to rely on luck for more than a couple of hands over an MTT. Last night I just about luck sacked myself into a BBT4 seat in probably the craziest MTT I have ever played in. It was a wild ride and not very typical for how MTTs go for me. I got it in bad a bunch, got coolered a bunch, got lucky a bunch, and somehow found myself heads up for the title with the chip lead against HighOnPoker. Here is a recap of some of the craziness.

For the first hour I was very card dead and was treading water. Shortly after the first break, I managed to build my stack up to north of 6k when I pick up AQs near the button. I called a preflop raise, and an AQx flop dropped. We got it all in by the turn, and I was against AA. I am now down to T790 in chips and in big trouble. I shoved from (edit) the cutoff with J9o to try to get some chips to work with. CrackinAA called with A9 I think, and I out flopped him. I would then go on a mini run catching AA a couple times and quickly building my stack back up to 5k. I would then catch KK and crack AA with it by flopping a set. Around the second break, I had the chip lead, and HOP was actually still pretty short with just over 2k. Hoyazo had a ton of chips, and I was thinking about how cool it would be to go heads up with Hoyazo for the seat. When I have this many chips at this point I don’t get too crazy aggressive, but simply try to slowly build my stack as we head to the Final Table where anything can happen.

It took a very long time to burst the cash bubble and get to the FT. Eventually I had to step up and knock somebody out. I would get the final table about third in chips with pretty equal stacks overall. HOP was starting to build an overall chip lead. I was treading water with pretty weak hands, and had drifted down to 6^th in chips with 7 people left. I am only playing for the win at this point, so I needed to be a bit more aggressive than usual. The problem was I kept running into slightly better hands. I picked up A7o in the BB and jammed when the SB bet 3x to T3600. He would flip up AK and I would take a huge hit to my stack. An orbit later I got A7o in the same situation and again the SB raised to T3600. Again I jammed, and SB has TT. A couple of 7s on the flop would keep me alive. I like to jam this situation, because it can help you to get some walks later on, but I kept running into monsters. I would pick up A7o again later on and get it all in against ATo and river a split pot. The poker gods were clearly behind me. HOP did the bulk of the work, and we got down to heads up pretty quickly from there. I had about 17k in chips, while HOP was north of 100k. I asked if he had won a seat and would be willing to chop. I think he laughed at that point. He was jamming every hand to try to end it and I folded through a few week hands before taking my stand with QJs. HOP would flip over KK, and my night was over, right? Not so fast! The Poker gods dug me out again. I caught a couple of big hands and rallied right back to the chip lead. I asked again for a chop. I know that chopping was pretty controversial in earlier BBT series, but it had been done. I am only playing these things for the seat, and could care less about the cash prize. I would have chopped for 1^st and gave Jordan 1^st+2^nd place prizes for the seat, which would have been something like a +$270 EV choice for him, since he already had a seat, but he declined. I am perfectly cool with that. After that it went downhill pretty quick. I kept making hands that were good, but slightly worse than HOP’s and bled away my chips. Those are the breaks. I can’t really complain, because I really had no business being in this situation. I simply luck sacked my way to bridesmaid in the riverchasers.

Live From the MGM Grand Poker Room

2009-05-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

The title is a bit misleading. I am not live blogging from the MGM poker room right now, but I wanted to go over an interesting hand from a session Saturday night at the MGM Grand poker room. I sat down at a 1/2 NL Holdem table and bought in for $200. For the first 45 minutes or so I did not win any hands. This seems to happen to me a bunch live, because I try to stick to my tight online style even when playing live. I will play a few more speculative type drawing hands live, because you tend to get more limpers preflop, but even with that it is very easy to go an hour without sweeping a pot. So over 45 minutes I had limped several times, and had only made one actual bet which was a $10 flop bet, that I was immediately chased off. So I basically had a weak-tight image, and was down to $170 when I pick up AKo on the button. There was a limp or two and then an Asian lady opened to $12. While I will always open raise with AK preflop, I don’t like re-raising with it when I am deep stacked, especially against poor MGM grand type players. In an MTT, where you are rarely as deep as a cash game, it is often correct to go to war preflop with AKo. This was a cash game though, and I had a decent stack, so I just called in position. One of the limpers also called. Flop came down Ax9h8h. It checked to me on the button. I made a standard $20 bet with a TPTK flop. One fold, and then the original raiser re-raised me to $60. FAWK! So I started thinking about the action and what she might have. She raised to $12 preflop (6x). That seems like too much for AA, 99, or 88. With AA you would not want to chase people away, and with 99 or 88 you are killing your pot odds by betting so large preflop. Since I had an Ace, AA was pretty doubtful. So I could fold, call, reraise, or push. It was possible that she was on some type of fat draw using the flush or straight possibilities. If I just called, I would be pretty pot committed. So without much further thought I went ahead and shoved all-in on the flop with just a pair. This is not something that I like to do, but it made sense based on the action. She ended up calling me pretty quick, and I figured that I was dead. You are not required to flip your cards up at MGM so I watched a couple bricks land on the turn and river. I flipped over my pair of Aces, and she mucked her hand with a disgusted look on her face. I swept back a nice $360 pot. So the question is what was she holding and was my smooth call preflop shove on the flop line correct here with AK? My guess is that she had AQ or AJ with at least one heart. She probably figured I would have re-raised with AK preflop, so here pair of aces were good, and she had some outs to a strong hand just in case. Any other ideas out there?

UAW Getting What They Paid For

2009-05-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

Obama ran on change, but all I see is business as usual. He raised more money than any candidate in history, and now it is time to start returning the favors. NBC, which is owned by GE, used completely biased reporting of the election cycle to get their man elected, and he has returned the favor in the form of green job incentives and cap and trade that will earn GE billions. The UAW gives 99% of there contributions to Democrats and now they get this sweetheart deal with Chrysler. In a lawful bankruptcy proceeding, secured creditors get paid first before the unsecured creditors. The UAW would be at the back of the line under this arrangement and under current law and would stand to receive nothing. If the secured creditors can't be paid back, then the Union simply can't get paid. Well in the bankruptcy filing, the secured creditors get next to nothing and the USA not only gets nothing for the 4 billion we have already loaned them, we also are required to lend an additional 3.5 billion that will not be paid back. We also would be agreeing to additional post bankruptcy financing. Well I call bullshit! Who came up with this agreement and why (where is the transparency)? If 3.5 billion is required to get them through bankruptcy, the company is worthless. Whoever supplies that money should get the bulk of the company, because if it was not supplied the company would cease to exist. When we loaned them the 4 billion, it was a bridge to give them time to come up with a plan. If the plan was not acceptable we had the right to demand immediate payment. So the plan they come up with is to not pay us the 4 billion, have us lend an additional 3.5 billion that will not be paid back, and have us commit to additional loans in the future. Lets just liquidate the company already. This is simply political corruption at its worse. The UAW helped to get Obama elected, and now he is using taxpayer money to pay them back. If this is not the case, please explain why the United States taxpayer should accept this deal, and why an unsecured creditor ends up owning 55% of a company after bankruptcy?