I think it's a great outcome. Many of you undoubtedly disagree. Let's set that aside from now on and hope Obama is a good leader (and, oh yeah, fixes online poker and stuff).

While I type up a full postmortem, here's what happened on Intrade last night:

Before election day, I had a solid plan backed up by a decent sized investment fund that I promised would have a conservative approach. With an effective six figures on the site, I could both move my own lines when I wanted them to move and spread out my picks so that the fund would get the safer, conservative lines while my own money went to riskier, but higher return lines. What I wound up doing was to park the bulk of the money in the main President contracts and their derivatives because of their liquidity, then spread the rest out to state and Senate races. The fund mostly focused on complete locks like PA, IA and WI; my own account was riskier and had large positions all over the map. Both, however, had much bigger sums bet on the very early poll closing states (VA, NC) and at the end (CO, NV) than the ones in the middle (MO). The reasoning was that either the early states would close and I would have the money freed up to roll over to the late time zones, or I'd see the danger signs coming and be able to get away from the late betting while I could. In addition, every contract had sales posted at 5 or 95, in order to release the cash ASAP.

Even the best laid plans do not survive first contact with the enemy. Instead of an orderly rolling out of results, what happened was that the first set of states was the closest and the polls were off in exactly VA (where I had lots of money) and IN (where I put in a lot after initially seeing good numbers; I overestimated the turnout in Lake County) while being on the dot everywhere else. Especially given Intrade's terrible layout and that I was juggling two accounts over multiple browser windows, I was forced to focus on those early, unexpectedly close contracts and couldn't keep up with the rest, which were doing what I wanted them to, anyway. As a result, while I eventually made a nice profit on IN (down a few hundred)/NC (up a few hundred)/VA (huge win)) combined, all of the other contracts duly released at 95 and I mostly lost out on those final 5 points while being unable to really coordinate things the way I wanted. I also wound up negative in MO and on Franken, although for small amounts.

With that said, the site didn't go down, I did eventually make the right calls in most places, the night was very positive overall, and even with the missing 5 points and unwieldiness relative to market size, the investment fund did very well, posting a 13.5% ROI (including Intrade's gigantic fees, mind you) in two weeks.

Next time - and there will be a next time - I will be ready for all of that, the market will be even more crushed, and I'll probably gloat about it somewhere.

Tomorrow will bring two things: the election of Barack Obama (no jinx plz) and the end of my year-long Intrade experiment. Although I'll leave some cash on the site to experiment with, it'll be the end of me obsessively refreshing 538.com every half hour, pouring over every poll internal and following returns by county while lining up the next state to roll over the profits according to the time their polls close.

I'll miss it :(

I promised myself I'd write a summary and postmortem of the Intrade experiment, and I'm already working on it in my head. It'll be a very long article that I will likely be putting up on the 5'th or 6'th, after my hangover wears off. It'll be interesting to see how much of what I write at the end of this long, strange trip applies in '10 and '12 - you can be sure I'll be back at it next time, probably using 100% of the cash I can spare.

In the meantime, here's who to vote for. If you're a McCain supporter, I apologize in advance. If you're voting for Obama, there's a party at my friend's house tomorrow - PM me for directions.

After that...time for poker. I'm already antsy to get some hands of cash in. It's been a while, but I haven't forgotten how to play and I'm anxious to prove it to a few MSNL regs :)

First, the very short term: I'll most likely have another article on P5's either this weekend or on Monday. It'll be about Obama and poker - I'll have to post an exact topic and maybe repost the article after I write it, but if you've been reading the blog or my posts on 2+2, you already know most of what I think on the subject. Suffice to say I am optimistic about the chances of a UIGEA repeal under Obama and feel that the game would be better off with him in office. (I also did make a CR video - it should be up sometime next week.)

Second, in a surprising development, the AP/UB story is *still* slated on 11/9 and might actually stay there :) (If not, it shouldn't be pushed back past 11/16.) For the last couple of weeks, I've been working with the Washington Post on the newspaper and online side of the story, and they'll be hosting an online, live Q&A segment for an hour or so the day after it is released. It'll be in an ESPN-type live blog format where people ask questions and my answers are released one at a time; I have to admit I'm looking forward to it a little bit because it'll be the day after 60M airs and seeing myself getting interviewed by Steve Kroft on national television, then answering questions about it is gonna be kinda cool. At any rate, I don't have the URL yet but will post it on the Sunday of the story.

About myself: Unlike Bond, who is a sicko to begin with and who's without a girlfriend for a month, I'm a lazy, lazy man and have my wife with me. Therefore, I'm continuing to focus on Intrade and only play on Sundays until the election. My schedule during this time period is only a handful of the bigger tournaments, so I was fairly sure that I was going to have zero decent results for a while. This last Sunday, however, I did wind up making an FT of a small major, the Cake 50K warmup event. Although I promptly finished ninth and didn't really make any money (and was annoyed with that enough not to post it immediately or on Monday), it's nice that I'm getting there. I also find myself posting on 2+2 again and thinking about hands, which is usually a sign that I'd like to, like, make money and stuff. After my 11/5 post-electoral hangover wears off, I will be spending a lot of time on my game, both on Cake and elsewhere.

I never really "quit" doing CR so much as I just quit playing tournaments (outside of Sundays, at any rate.) As you guys know, for the last two months I've been concentrating on politics (Obama '08? More like my wallet '08) and haven't been playing much. That, in turn, has led to zero decent hand histories worth submitting to CR and zero videos - I keep my standards kinda high and don't really want to do a vid about any old tourney with no interesting hands. But CR has recently asked me to do a leakfinder video, which doesn't involve my own HH's, and I'll likely get to that on Saturday. This'll be kinda interesting because the HH they gave me is one of my students', so he'll get a free session at the cost of having all his leaks pointed out to a few hundred people. I'll have to ask him how that turned out a few weeks afterwards.

The bad news is I had a Washington Post photographer over for their online version of the AP story and asked him about the timeframe. It looks like it's getting pushed back again, this time to after the election. The new date is 11/9 - hopefully that's the last one, but, y'know, as long as they air it this year I'll be happy.

I'd like to say that something interesting happened for me in poker last week, but no, not really. I only played extensively on Sunday. Results: my dad, who'd been sweating me, calls me up telling me Full Tilt is rigged. I had a good laugh, but really, it'd be nice to run good or something. I'm not asking to crush the villains and hear the lamentations of their women like Vivek does whenever he sits down at a live table, but winning slightly more than a little under my share of coinflips would be nice.

At this point, though, I'd like to talk about something else. You might've noticed this site has gotten a little less busy of late. I'd like to think it's because I've been slacking and everyone waits for my next post with bated breath, but in reality, I'm guessing it's because we all managed to collectively take breaks from poker at the same time as the economy imploded and everyone stopped caring. Trying to update a site about what most of the world (although not all of it) sees as a hobby isn't as easy when your dozen most favorite relatives' collective life savings have decreased by a third or so over the last month. I'm doing my best to singlehandedly reverse that via running an Intrade investment pool (yes, really), but I can only make 20% in three weeks so many times, y'know?

(Warning: the following has nothing to do with poker whatsoever)

I do believe that a recovery of sorts is coming, though, and I would like to get this down in writing so that I can hail myself as a visionary and quote how awesome I am:

FWIW, I think we're on the cusp of something extremely different from everything that has gone before. I know very little about market fundamentals, but I do understand human psychology, especially as it pertains to gambling and, yes, trading. My intuition, derived solely from the media and an occasional friend in the sector, is telling me that a)Wall Street thinks/wants the worst to be over and b)we have hit something at least resembling a bottom on Thursday and Friday, but c)this is because (and Wall Street likes this) the way that markets operate is now going to be hugely altered. Even six months ago, the announcement that the United States, along with Europe, now owns large chunks of many major financial institutions would not be viewed as remotely positive for anybody; now, the analysts are praising the move and traders palpably want it to work. I don't claim to know whether the economic underpinnings of this idea are solid, but the bottom line is that the G8 finance ministers have collectively undertaken a largely socialist action potentially costing trillions of dollars and the markets are *cheering* this.

I am, therefore, forced to conclude that the idea/market goal of laissez faire capitalism is dead. (Yes, I do realize that the markets were never close to that, but that isn't really the point.) The Bush administration in particular and long-held US policy in general has trended towards constant deregulation of the markets and a hands off attitude; it's now safe to say that this will never happen again in my lifetime. The series of moves the people in charge of the situation have taken may or may not work - it's easy to criticize them on the Internet, but I doubt more than ten people on the planet fully understand the ramifications right now, anyway. But what I do know is that the market participants themselves seem in favor of this socialism-type action and are trading on the assumption that it is a positive, and what *that* means is nothing more than the beginning of a fundamental, permanent shift in the way we think of economics/capitalism. Even if the interventions fail miserably, there will be a distinct lack of traders arguing for hands off, deregulatory approaches for a very long time to come.

---

I make no pretense that I know what I'm talking about. My only experience with doing anything properly in this area is accurately calling the oil bubble early this summer, again based on psychology ("if the talking heads saying oil will never drop remind me of the pets.com sock puppet, it's probably going to tank soon" seems like a good rule to go by.) But hey, it's cool to have a blog I can post random gigantic speculation on!

---

Also, a cameraman is gonna film me for the Washington Post's online featurette on the AP/UB scandal this Friday. That's going to come out at the same time as 60M - again, I'm guessing at the end of the month.