bleh!

i'm going to say something that has probably been said a million times before: stupid germany!

everyone in argentina is crying right now. i'm semi-curious as to whether my germanic-looks will be a spark for some sort of anti-aryan beat-down. i doubt it, but just in case, i've come up with a few phrases in spanish that should get me out of trouble:

"germans smell like eggs"
"germans have sexual relations with dogs (not on purpose, but because they get so drunk they mistake the dog for their mother)"
"in 10 years, germany's economy will collapse due to the effect of an aging demographic on their social welfare system"

Argentina vs. Germany

in a few hours, Argentina is going to whip Germany's collective butts in futbol... and the german players will run home to their blond-haired blue-eyed mommies, cry into their sturdy bosoms, and be consoled by unintelligible guttural-lities.

or maybe their mommies will kick their butts some more.

maybe not. but i do know for sure that IF Argentina wins today, it's going to be insane here in Buenos Aires.

5-panel summary of my life

It's right here, take a look (if you dare!):
Don is a Gambler

MTT update

i've played 45 tournaments i decided to experiment with only playing multi-table tournaments. i'm not really happy with my results-- there were a couple tournaments where i had a real chance to make some money, and then i had melt downs.

i've made money though, just not as much as i think is possible for me. the funny thing about these so far is that i either do really good, or really bad... i'm not having much in between. which i think is a good indication that i'm not playing very good poker most of the time.

i've spent a total of $5500 on the tournaments, profited around $3300, and only finished in the money 3 times. Two of those finishes were 2nd places though, so that's what accounts for me having made any money at all.

tonight was my 3rd second place in 10 days. it was a good tournament and i made 6K on it, but i really wish that i had finished first. in all these tournaments, 1st place is at least 50% more money than second. it's disappointing to make it so far and then only get 2nd.

but i think that i'm going to stick with this for a little while longer and see if i can do better. one good thing is that i don't feel like i've worked much, and it's been more fun.

savings time

today i downloaded the Google Web Accelerator. it's free! it adds a little box to your internet explorer bar that tells you how much time you've saved by surfing things faster.

so far i've saved 1.8 minutes. at this rate, every week i will have 12.6 minutes of extra time-- every year i will get a free 10.92 hours. by the time i'm 70 years old, i'll have saved around 18 days.

i like to think that it's an investment in my future.

but being an american, albeit a dissatisfied and not-proud one, i'm already tempted to start spending this time savings. i was born to be a consumer, it's in my freakin' nature! i have my eye on all sorts of ways to start spending. hell, i might even borrow against my savings for a big-ticket waste of time.

but maybe once i dig myself into a time-credit hole, i'll start surfing more and more in an attempt to save even more time?

IT'S A TRAP! don't do it! nothing in life is free, it really is true! Google's Web Accelerator is a devious product of the man.

Switching to multi-table tournaments?

i'm thinking that maybe instead of completely switching to no-limit cash games, i'll play a lot more multi-table tournaments.

after my big score on sunday, i started thinking about how much success i've had in big tournaments.... over the past 6 months, i've played less than 20 of these... mostly losses, some marginal wins, and two big wins-- winning the cruise/tournament entry package and this last one.

so monday and today, i played only 'relatively' large tournaments... 8 tournaments in total.. 6 losses, 1 marginal win (won back buy-in plus a little extra), and another 2nd place tonight...

the 2nd place win tonight was in a $54 entry tournament at PokerRoom.com against 256 players, paying out a little over $2K... i should have gotten 1st place, but oh well....

but in two days of only playing multi-table tournaments, i've done pretty good (great if I add in sunday!)...

so i think that this is where i'm going to focus my poker-playing for a little while, and see how it goes.

i need to make a schedule of all the daily tournaments that i want to enter on all the different sites.. tonight I was playing 5 tournaments at once at one point, on 4 different poker sites.

what i liked about 1-table tournaments was that i was able to play a lot of them-- poker is streaky, and high-volume ends up evening out the streaks... in order to make playing big-tournaments work, i will need to play as many as possible.

big tourney day

today was a good day.

ever since getting back from the cruise in march, i've been trying to make sundays my “big tournament” days. PartyPoker, PokerStars, FullTilt, Ultimate Bet, and Paradise Poker all have high buy-in tournaments on sundays.

i've haven't been very good at actually playing EVERY sunday-- sometimes i have other things that i want to do, or i forget that it's sunday, or i wake up too late for the 4:30 EST start time of most of them (hey-- it's a freakin' day of rest!). but at least 3 or 4 sundays since march have been “big tourney” days, however-- without great results.

the problem is, these big tournaments are really difficult to win. the ones at PartyPoker and PokerStars regularly have 4000+ players. in order to make it into the money, you usually have to make it at least to the top 20%--- usually around 15%--- and then you basically only make your buy-in back.... the pay-outs are very top-heavy.

and big tournaments are heart-breaking. i've been playing really well, but you need a lot of luck to dodge all the crazy luck that some people have.

but today i played in three big tournaments-- the PokerStars $215 buy-in, the PartyPoker $215, and the Paradise $200. the Paradise Poker tournament is nicer i think, because there is never more than 800 people or so in it.

the PokerStars one was a disaster.... three hands into the tournament i lost 75% of my chips to a moron when i was an 80% favorite. the PartyPoker one i finished something like 620th out of around 4000 people, which paid $300 (but I only netted $300-$215 = $85)... a typical waste of time...

but I scored big in the Paradise tournament... 663 people entered, and I got second place--- winning me more in a single tournament than I had ever won before.... yea!

i'm exhausted though.... 8 ½ hours of playing... high stress decisions... my neck and shoulders feel like i've been doing hard labor.

but 2nd place is pretty good, and it makes up for some fairly blah months.

******

what i've really been thinking about the past few weeks is programming. i've learned a little so far, and made my first program with a Graphical User Interface the other day. i've been exploring some of the open-source scientific and statistical packages that are available for Python, and gradually figuring out what i will be able to use and what i will have to write myself...

i'm excited about the possibilities for an automatic trading algorithm. the more that i dig into it though, the more i realize how difficult it will be to actually succeed.

i'm feeling a little like Max Cohen in the movie PI... like maybe i'm starting down a path to madness, slowly being consumed by this problem... i bought a hard-cover notebook the other day, like a lab notebook, and am slowly filling it with decision-tree diagrams and if-then statements and unanswered questions.

Max Cohen:
"Restate my assumptions:
One, Mathematics is the language of nature.
Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge.

Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature.

Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics;the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile. So, what about the stock market? The universe of numbers that represents the global economy. Millions of hands at work, billions of minds. A vast network, screaming with life. An organism. A natural organism. My hypothesis: Within the stock market, there is a pattern as well...Right in front of me...hiding behind the numbers. Always has been."

so... i have to be like "whatever"... maybe i come up with something, maybe i don't... but i have to find some way of toning down my excitement while still maintaining some discipline to work on the problem.