These two hands happened within an orbit of each other:

http://cakepoker.com//HandHistory/?Hand=xcLAwMaywbDAw8TExMzGwYjFxcbMxcc%3d

http://cakepoker.com//HandHistory/?Hand=xcLAwMaywbDAw8TExM3HwIjFxcbMxcc%3d

While everyone should check out Bond's new post about MTT grinding, I've never been the kind of guy that does very well playing an 8 hour a day - or 4 hour a day, for that matter - schedule. I wish I were, but I'm not. Nevertheless, once in a while (usually following long breaks) the unwillingness to put in hands lifts and I do spend a few hours in front of a laptop making the Sklansky dollar counter go up. I've been playing SNG's, my new daily grind in between Sundays, since the first of the month, with very good results as usual in those games. I don't think I'm playing perfect SNG poker, especially because Cake can be weird; if you put my decisions for each long individual sit and go into SNGWiz, it usually comes out with 8-10 "incorrect" decisions that turn out to be right once you adjust their ranges from the "on Stars and everywhere normal, he should be calling 100% of his hands" to the "but on Cake, he folds 80% of them" part of the slider...still leaving 1-3 hands per session that are marginal or slightly -EV. But that's nothing a few hundred donkaments' worth of rust removal won't fix. At any rate, even with the game's negative effects on motivation, it feels good to watch the green numbers go up.

Intrade is also going well. The mystery Obama shorter referred to in my last post is back and striking again for 50K worth of action at a time. Adding everything up reveals he's taken at least $150,000 of bets on McCain at odds up to 10 points above where the market was trending, which is even worse than it sounds because we're talking about shares; buying a share worth 25 points at 35 isn't just a 10% mispricing, it's more like 30%. My best guess is he's lost upwards of $25,000 - which will be far more than that if McCain actually wins - on merely buying these shares, not counting Intrade's vig. Moreover, he's still enabling monster arbitrage opportunities for everybody else with accounts on other books - consider this one last attempt to get people to trade on the site. (Hey, the more liquidity on those shares, the more everyone including myself profits against him every time he hits.)

Finally, while I'm here, I've heard a rumor - at this point, only a rumor - that the 60 Minutes piece is airing on the 26'th. This does fit what a couple of people have told me, however, so I think it's plausible and actually a go this time. The novelty's worn off a little bit for me by now, but I still really want to see how it turns out...and kinda hope Hamilton/Tom/Green all get nailed afterwards. Nobody likes the necessity of the police being involved here, but it *is* a necessity; the industry cannot afford the kind of black eye that the twin scandals back to back have given it, and getting the bad apples into court is the first step to resolving that. With the recession/depression/whatever upon us, if poker is going to be a competitor for the reduced entertainment dollar, it's simply got to be seen as a clean, fair game.

While I'm still only playing a little bit, I couldn't really justify not doing much poker-related stuff to myself, so in the interim before I ramp up my schedule again, I've started writing and coaching. Pocketfives asked me to write a computer security article, which came out on Tuesday; in addition, I started to coach a few students that have contacted me earlier.

The most recent reason why my comeback's on hold again is actually legit :), however. In the last few days, Intrade has seen a suspicious trader who has probably made > $100K in McCain bets at well over market prices, artificially depressing Intrade compared to every other political betting site by making very large bets at odd hours. I caught this guy a few days before Nate's entry and have been buying low/selling high off him several times this week. It's now gotten to the point where I'm strongly considering having the site text me at all hours as soon as a certain price point is triggered, because at the amount we're talking about, if he keeps doing it, I can make $500 a day just from being awake at the right time. But this has also forced me to evaluate all of my positions (because I might be able to make more money by buying/selling the Obama contracts than I can with my state picks if I sell them now and buy them back later), and that is time consuming.

The little "prove a point" bet that I made with 2+2 politics about the site in December now looks to be the best idea I had all year, because it's going to provide me with a very large amount of income this year and has sparked my interest in trading in general. Poker is, fundamentally, a relatively simple game. Trading is not, but traders, especially in political betting (and, I assume, sports betting) are subject to the same kinds of psychological issues that poker players are, which makes most of them terrible at important parts of what they do and provides great opportunities.

Because I've been neglecting this blog lately and my positions are largely set anyhow, I'll break my silence and give out a few of my picks. If you want to make a free 20% over a month before the election, you should have all the cash you can spare on Intrade ASAP and bet on:

(People with large bankrolls, look here)
-Obama winning Iowa

Iowa has never seriously been in play. It's a state that McCain mostly skipped in the primaries while Obama spent a year practically living there. In addition, McCain came out against ethanol, a major Iowa issue instantly worth 3-5 points against him, while Obama has supported it. Even when McCain was up 3-4 points nationally, he was substantially down in Iowa; he would have to win the popular vote by something like 8 points to put the state in contention and probably by over 10 points to make it red. With Obama up in the polls 40 days before the election and leading in public perception on the handling of the economy issue, the true odds of a 10 point McCain victory are well under 5%, so Obama trading under 80 to win here is an absolute steal.

-Obama winning Wisconsin and Minnesota

Similarly to Iowa, these states are not actually the swing states they appear. The election will be close in both if McCain is up 3-5 points in the popular vote nationally, but with McCain never winning a single poll in either and with Obama's superior ground game, only a landslide would flip them. They aren't free money like Iowa, but trading in the mid-70's still has them 20 points off where they should be.

-Keep an eye on California

I've seen multiple offers on multiple books to sell massive amounts of Obama.CA shares for 90. Essentially, the guy (I can't believe it was two different people) wanted to bet 10:1 that California would go Republican. I took him up on it on another site, but left his Intrade offer on the table and he quickly pulled it. You never know, though - he might come back.

(Small stakes ballas look below)
-Ralph Nader to win < 1% of the popular vote

Ralph got 0.38% of the vote in 2004. Given how important this election feels to the left and how hated the guy still is for 2000, he'll find it difficult to break that this year and impossibly hard to triple that number. But the contract for him to break 1% is trading at up to 40 (although I'm not sure how high it'll stay, because once I finish typing this I'm going to take the tastiest offers off the board...)

-Various small stakes state deals

Do you think there's a 6% chance that Georgia goes Democratic? I don't. A 15% chance that Oregon goes Republican? No way; both are close to 0%. My bankroll's all tied up in better deals than those, but they're worth it for some of you guys.

There are a lot more I haven't talked about, but if you want to ask, feel free to do so on our forums.

The last couple of weeks have been a little hectic. As I said earlier, I had a bunch of real life stuff to do, especially the CLE classes ("I'd like to keep my law license, please." "Why?" "...it sounds cool?") and decided to just take a break and enjoy myself while those were going on. These classes happened to be in a building with no available wireless network, so for the last two days, I managed to come home to more market imploding than I thought was possible in one news cycle. Opeth was a fantastic show (brag: my wife got me tickets for my birthday, went with me and enjoyed it) but when we made it back at 1 AM, I'd gone without any Internet access for over a day.

"What do you mean Vivek FT'd the Borgata? Wait, he WON?!!?! wheeeeeee"

Vivek is, without a doubt, a live poker beast. He live timebanks every major decision, somehow never gets any of them wrong (or gets there if he does), 5 bets light successfully and just plays stunningly good poker. It's not that he's bad at the Internet thing, either; he just takes his game to another level when he's at the tables. It couldn't have happened to a nicer person (except Watts obv), and maybe this'll teach him to be less of a life fish too :) Congrats.


...and then I go to pocketfives to check out the pictures and find out Shaun won a random $144K for first WCOOP to go with the FTOPS. Nice day for tworags imo.

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Minor stuff about me since I can't really compete with the big stuff: I've got a pocketfives article on Internet security coming out sometime in the next 2 weeks and might be writing there more regularly in the future. Also, Intrade is going really well - I'll have some kind of really big writeup on political betting in general after the general election is over.

Nothing in particular is going on - I just got some signs of tournament burnout and am taking a couple of weeks off except for Sundays and the occasional WCOOP (the 4 max NLHE and razzaments tomorrow, in particular, should be really good.) I also finally ditched my old laptop and got a nice replacement, so I've been a little too busy with transferring files over to be online much. Finally, I also spent my birthday last week not thinking about poker at all and am spending a large amount of time next week not doing it, either - I'm usually one of those people that hates being outside, but in the next week, I have tickets to an Opeth concert, a baseball game, and two days of CLE ("go to these if you want to keep having a law license") classes to go attend, which will guarantee me not being around enough to play.

Good luck to everybody in all the WCOOPs and SNG's I'm not playing :)