The Grind

Daniel Persson and Mike Haid Scam Millions From Players and Affiliates via RakeUpdate/RakeReducation/EliteAffiliateSoftware

2011-08-29T12:12:00.000-07:00

Since Black Friday the RakeUpdate, RakeReduction, EliteAffiliateSoftware, Mike Haid, Daniel Persson et al scam has kicked into high gear. All of the sites are currently offline and players and affiliates are reporting on forums that they have been scammed for millions of dollars. I guess my five figure sum was just the beginning for these fraudsters...

All of the details are not yet known, and may never be, but so far I know the following:

Sometime around a year ago one of the original owners, Mike Haid left the business and Daniel Persson took over. Daniel Persson (dpersson@simianplay.com the other original owner) remained and turned all support and functions over to EAS.

Immediately after the change in ownership site started dropping payment percentages to both affiliates and players, cutting off some affiliates completely (like me - I had a great relationship with Daniel for years but once I was turned over to the new owners everything went south and my payments stopped completely), daily cashouts became inconsistent and were eventually canceled altogether and generally everything about support, payments and affiliate relations suffered. A site known for its honesty, integrity and prompt payments and customer service seemed to deliberately be turned into the worst kind of rakeback scam.

Fast forward to about three weeks ago, the sites are now all offline and support and payments have stopped altogether. They have absconded with millions of dollars in players' and affiliates' money and show no signs that they have any intentions of ever repaying it or even operating their websites on an ongoing basis.

If you were a player scammed by Mike Haid, Daniel Persson, Niclas Elfstedt, RakeReduction, RakeUpdate, EliteAffiliateSoftware or any of their associated businesses, you can reach me at the email address at the top of this page so we can attempt to pressure them into returning our and everybody else's. Please also get in touch with me if you have any additional information on these criminals that can be added to this or future posts.

Anybody has my permission to distribute this post or any part of it on their blog or website or on forums etc.

Elite Affiliate Software are scammers...

2011-06-17T07:11:00.000-07:00

Had a sub affiliate deal with Elite Affiliate Software (EliteAffiliateSoftware, RakeUpdate, RakeReduction etc) and after paying me for awhile when I requested my cashout of around $5k they have completely stonewalled me and denied even knowing what I was talking about and that the person who I had been working with was no longer with the company, even though he is, was and is still the owner!

Daniel was my contact, they passed me off to Randy (i.e. Ridge randy@eliteaffiliatesoftware.com) and now nobody will respond to my emails.

I would strongly advise to avoid these guys. They currently owe me well over $10k and it is clear they have no intentions of ever paying me...

Kim Van Der Velde dating scammer Constant Rijkenberg

2010-12-02T12:58:00.001-08:00

According to his Facebook page, Constant Rijkenberg, the EPT San Remo scammer, is dating Kim Van Der Velde.

He is also attending the University of Amsterdam, set to graduate in 2012.

Despite winning more than $2,000,000 at the 2009 EPT San Remo and still regularly playing high buy-in live events, Rijkenberg has made no efforts to repay his stakers and owes several hundred thousand dollars.

Evidently Van Der Velde doesn't mind dating someone with such a sketchy history, as Google is littered with negative articles about him, or maybe she doesn't care and is just a gold digger after what money he has left.

You can reach the author at grindblog at gmail dot com

Horrible Thailand Robbery Story

2010-03-05T05:01:00.001-08:00

Just read this in the 2+2 Thailand Thread:

I've never heard of anything like this happening in Thailand involving foreigners, or even directly involving Thai's (just 4th hand, urban legend type stuff). These are two guys who met each other on 2+2!

Very disturbing. I hate to have to issue this warning as I've always been trusting of any poker person who came to Thailand because of those threads - but it appears you can no longer do so. Stick to people who've been here awhile and be wary of random's that want to meet up with you:

Beware of criminal 2+2er in Bangkok(or any other turd foreigner)

A month or so before I arrived in Thailand, I received a PM from Requiem4ever, saying hey lets meet for a beer etc etc. So I say sure I'll message you when I arrive. He sounded like a decent dude, and I couldn't have been any more wrong.

Last Thursday evening, we agree to go out to bar/club or whatever. He calls 30 minutes later and says he wants to go to my place and drink beer. I thought he meant go to a bar around my place(I was in a condo off of suk 13, many places to drink), he had a slight accent, I didn't understand him 100%. He arrives at my place and I walk out to the lobby and didn't see him. So I call him and ask him where he is. He's out in front of the Family Mart, which is about 50 meters to the left.

He had 2 bottles of Chang with him, I'm like WTF? This guy just invited himself to my place. He didn't look physically imposing or sinister, so I'm like ok whatever and invite the dude in (says his name is Alex/Alexis). So we shoot the breeze for a little bit, he was quiet, but seemed like a nice enough guy. So we finish the beers and go to Boss club. That place sucked but we end up shooting pool, finishing his bottle of Scotch, and taking 2 girls from there to the next place.....Bossy. (fwiw, i never been to these 2 places before)

We get there, and he has a friend there, and he comes up with 3 beers and hands me one. I take a few drinks and as it turns out, they put something in my drink that made me lose consciousness.

(Some of the following events might be out of order, I don't remember a lot of details)
I awake the next morning/afternoon at the girl's condo (i don't even remember being there)and find that my wallet and key are gone. The 2 girls take me to the police station to file a police report. We go to my condo and this dirtbag cleaned house. My laptop, monitor, a lot of nice clothes, credit cards, camera, ipod, luggage, and cologne were gone- ALL GONE. Miraculously, they didn't find 2 ATM cards that I removed from my wallet before I went out to meet Reqium.

For a moment, I thought the girls were in on it, but they explained everything to me, which most of it i don't really remember at this point, nor does it really matter, and came to a pretty fast conclusion that they were indeed not in on it, requim simply told him he was a friend and they took it hook, line, and sinker. By the time they caught on, it was too late. Actually, I'm pretty sure it was his friend who robbed the joint, Requiem was also at the girl's condo, but apparently would go back and forth to the condo and net cafe below. Most likely, he was communicating to his friend where my condo and what my room number was, and making sure I was out like a light. I was out alright, the Thai girl was almost scared I was dead and would periodically check my pulse and was thinking of calling a doctor.

A week before this happened, I was out with an American/Lao friend who happened to be in town. In the back of the cab, he was telling me to watch my back, there's a lot of desperate people with nothing to lose who will not think twice of taking what you have- he was referring to the Thai locals. Never did it cross my mind that it would be a foreigner to be so desperate and insidious to do something like this.

In retrospect, I think of what I could have done to avoid this, its easy to say I could have done this or that differently- hindsight is 20/20 as they say. I'll just chalk it up to experience and am fortunate that I'm still alive and in relatively good spirits, considering the circumstances.

I think its a longshot he'll ever be caught or that I'll ever run into him, but if I do, I won't show him much mercy. I'll leave him the same way he left me-, but instead of a drug, I'll use my two bare fists..

but beside that night, I had a great time!!

Check this out

2010-02-10T08:27:00.000-08:00

William Franceschine at the 2007 EPT London. Nice beard sir!

New Jersey to legalize online poker?

2010-01-29T03:32:00.000-08:00

A New Jersey state senator has introduced a bill that would legalize online poker in the state. He estimates there are more than 500,000 players in the state currently. The bill would grant licenses to the many brick and mortar casino's in the state to operate their own online cardrooms. There is talk of similar legislation in California and Nevada. I'm a big supporter of any form of licensed and regulated online poker in the USA, even if it is (at first) limited to people in any given state. It will be a step in the right direction. Good luck senator!

Rush Poker Strategy Video

2010-01-21T16:45:00.000-08:00

Full Tilt Poker 'Rush Poker' Strategy Video on my new blog.

Constant Rijkenberg scams his backers

2009-09-12T04:41:00.001-07:00

EPT San Remo winner Constant Rijkenberg has scammed many of his backers, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Read more about it here:

Constant Rijkenberg

Red Light District Ripoff?

2009-03-23T23:10:00.001-07:00

A very scary and interesting story from a reader about a Red Light District Scam. Posted on my new blog.

Stock Speculation FTW?

2009-03-23T23:09:00.001-07:00

I'm having some good success speculating in blue chip stocks. Posted on my new blog:

My thoughts on the 'economic crisis'

2009-03-23T23:07:00.000-07:00

Posted on my new blog:

‘Prosperity has always returned and will again’ - John D. Rockefeller

Moving to wordpress

2009-03-06T08:35:00.000-08:00

I know I've said it before but I'm pretty sure I mean it this time. I'm moving the location of my blog. I think I've outgrown both the name of this blog as well as much of what is written on it.

I don't play much poker any more and when I do I'm probably a losing player overall. However I still have a strong web presence with my various sites and will likely always have that - and I'm still traveling full-time, and I know some people like to read about that.

I can't promise I'll update the new blog terribly more than I've been updating this one, but hop over to WilliamFranceschine.net for future posts.

A couple more reasons for the switch: I've been using Wordpress with some other projects and I like it a lot better than Blogger, and it is on my own domain as opposed to a .blogspot address which has some pitfalls.

You can still reach me at grindblog at gmail dot com

Cheers

Customs needs a box for people like me

2009-01-29T21:49:00.001-08:00

I don't know if its jealousy and curiosity on the part of the customs officials or genuine suspicion, but whenever I re-enter the states from abroad I am in for at least one hour of interrogation and an ever-so-predictable search of everything I have brought back with me, including a complete manual (and awkward...) scan of my laptop, ipod and cell phone.

Customs needs to add a box to their form for people who are young, self-employed, affluent, geographically mobile and who are not terrorists or drug dealers. There are going to be more and more of them as the internet becomes more of a powerful way to make money.

Where did you arrive from: 'Thailand'
Were you there on business or pleasure?: 'uhh...pleasure?'
How long were you there: 'Six months?'
A six month vacation?: 'Well I sorta live there'
So you live in Thailand: 'Ok...yes'
What is your occupation: 'Uhhh...I'm self employed'
And you work in Thailand: 'No'
Where do you work: 'Wherever I am'
So it was a business trip...: 'No, not exactly'
When was the last time you were in the USA: 'I have no idea, check my passport, probably 9 months ago?
Where were you since your last visit to the USA: 'Hmm, good question, let me see. Singapore, Hong Kong, UK, Cambodia, Holland, France...think thats about it'
What was the purpose of those trips: 'I like to travel'
So were those trips business or pleasure: 'Pleasure I guess'
I thought you said you work wherever you are: 'I do, but I did not go there to work'
Sir I'm going to need you to sit down over there, we are going to have to question you further'

Then the mandatory full body cavity search ensues. So fucking lame.

Last night I came into the UK and got the same deal, except I was detained for more than three hours and finally given permission to enter. The first two people I saw evidently just could not believe the person standing in front of them matched the story they had been given...luckily the 3rd person was a poker fan.

What America needs is some medicinal marijuana!

2009-01-23T10:13:00.001-08:00

CNBC: The Whole Country Needs A Bong Break from AlleyInsider on Vimeo.

Government 2.0: Tell Barack to Regulate Online Poker

2009-01-15T05:43:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama is attempting to revolutionize politics and Government again. He's released yet another awesome feature on Change.gov. Anybody can submit any idea for any issue and others vote the idea up or down, very similar to Digg.

Right now an issue about Online Poker is in the top 10, please vote on it if you agree:

Boost America's Economy with Legal Online Poker

I did not agree with the wording of this one entirely so I created my own, if you like it you can also vote it up:

Repeal of UIGEA and regulation of Online Gaming

If you are unfamiliar with Change.gov I highly suggest checking it out. It aims to be Government 2.0 just as the title of this post suggests.

Barack also named a great head of the FCC yesterday.

I actually feel sorry for George Bush

2009-01-13T07:10:00.000-08:00

He looks utterly defeated. Somebody give the guy a hug!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

One bright spot: He coined a new Bush-ism. 'Sometimes you misunderestimated me'

I wasn't aware there were Americans this stupid

2009-01-06T12:29:00.000-08:00

Click here

I guess I'm lucky that most of the Americans I speak to are intelligent. When you are insulated by intelligence for a long period of time, it is easy to forget how stupid some people are.

Then today I open an email my step father forwarded to our whole family, written by some military official:

Some excerpts, all related to electing Barack Obama:

Now that America has shown us all that affirmative action even works in politics...

...anger at my countrymen's stupidity...

the ultimate goal...is socialism--and soon, sharia law.

We just elected a man with the full endorsement of every major terrorist group in the world. It's the political equivalent of hiring a child molester to babysit your kids while you leave for the weekend.

The others are subjective and most people should see how dumb they are. This one is just blatant stupid logic. Lets go with the fact that every major terrorist organization endorses him (it isn't true, but lets go with it)...how the fuck is that anything like hiring a child molester to watch our kids? That somebody endorses Obama does not mean that he endorses them. Some people go to Thailand to molest little boys, some of them might also play poker...so if they are a fan of mine from reading this blog does that mean I somehow endorse them? No, I hope they all die the worst kind of death...as I imagine our new President hopes about anybody who kills Americans.

I worry about our country and our new president if there are millions of idiots walking around our country right now all thinking this way. I worry even more about the country we will leave for our children if they are permitted to procreate.

Tragic New Years in Bangkok

2008-12-31T21:28:00.000-08:00

For those who haven't heard the news:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/31/AR2008123103094.html

I am ok and I do not know of anybody who was at Santika, however of the probably 100 foreigners I know who are in Thailand, it would be hard to imagine one of them not being at this club last night.

Santika is a very popular club with upper class Thai's and with foreigners. It would rank in my top three favorite clubs in Bangkok and I have been there many times.

The following videos are disturbing, so watch them at your own risk:

I really hope everybody from 2+2 and from our friends in Thailand are ok. The reports I am hearing now have the number dead as high as 58 with possibly more than 200 injured.

If you have any news please email it to grindblog at gmail dot com and I'll put it up here.

UPDATE 1: Two girls I know were at the club but were seated near the door when the fire started and got out fine, nobody in their party was injured.

UPDATE 2: Everybody from 2+2 appears to be safe. One guy I haven't met reported he was there and got away safe, though a girl from his party is still missing, a friend of his girlfriend, and she is presumed to be one of the victims. RIP.

Top 10 Secrets of Being an Online Poker Super Affiliate

2008-12-29T23:20:00.001-08:00

I have contemplated making this post for a long time, and have finally decided to do it. Many people will not like that I have posted this, however for many others it may give them a ticket out of the rat race, as it has done for me. So for all you guys slaving away at jobs you hate, this is for you, read carefully. Be sure to send me a thank you note when you quit your day job.

10 Most business comes by referral. It is hard to build traffic to your site. It is hard to get new signups. Once you get people, you must make them happy and treat them well, so they refer their friends. Once you have a large group of loyal users, it will snowball and grow on its own.

9 95% of your earnings will come from your top 3 sites. Don't waste your time promoting 30 poker rooms. It will take a month to setup all of those affiliate accounts and it will be a huge pain in the ass withdrawing all of that money. Find the top three rooms that work for you, and push those ones hard. You'll get bigger MGR or CPA deals faster and it will cut down on a lot of your work. And no matter how hard you try and how many rooms you promote, you'll never beat the golden rule...95% of your earnings will come from your top 3 sites.

8 Make partnerships The largest drivers of affiliate signups are large poker content websites. You have three choices...you can buy a large content website, and grow it...or you can build one from scratch. Or you can take the third choice and find somebody else who has already done one of those, and partner up with them. You can offer to provide their links, run a rakeback program on their site, run banner space on their site for a share of the revenue and on and on and on. Many webmasters are not great affiliates. Many affiliates are not great webmasters. These people make perfect partners. Go find some! Send sincere emails expressing interest to work together...and list some of your credentials. Keep it short and simple and respectful. Look for some kind of an 'in'. Either you know something who knows them, you know them or you know somebody about their product or service or site.

7 Most people signup to new sites when changes happen. In relatively uneventful times there is just a slow trickle of people signing up at new rooms. However when major changes occurr, there is a short and powerful rush of players to new sites. So stay on top of the news, on what rooms are changing networks, entering and leaving countries and what is happening with the UIGEA. Then when you spot an opening, buy a case of Red Bull and work 16 hour days signing people up until it is over.

6 Be your own affiliate. There are several companies in business providing links for existing affiliates promising you can make more money by providing their links to your players than you could get on your own. However this is often not the case...all you have to do is follow these steps and you can likely get more on your own. These companies make all of their profit because people simply don't understand the system. And they work hard to keep you in the dark. They will also often not give you individual trackers so you have to trust the numbers they give you, causing further problems.

5 The rules are flexible. Such and such site doesn't allow rakeback. Such and such network doesn't allow US players. Such and such forum said this. Nothing is what it seems in poker affiliating. Nearly all rules are flexible, yes that one too. You just have to know how to ask, who to talk to, and above all...you need to learn to keep your mouth shut. (yes, I see the irony).

4 Get a parent affiliate. At many rooms you get a 20% or more override for referring affiliates. No you can't simply create an account for your brother and keep his...both affiliates have to be active and real. However you can approach an existing affiliate and ask them to refer you. They can't give you anything back out of this, but they will have a strong vested interest in seeing you succeed. I have learned most of what I know from the people who referred me and I give all of my sub-affiliates training, advice and coaching, because when they succeed, I succeed.

3 The published rates are for noobs. Every single poker room will give you a higher rate if you contact them privately and make a compelling case for why they should give you one...many rooms you simply have to ask.

2 The top poker affiliates make far more money than the top poker players. And with far less variance. The top poker affiliate sites on the internet are PokerListings, PokerNews and PokerSourceOnline. It is a convervative estimate that the owners of these sites make more than $2,000,000 per month. Every single month. That is more than Durrr, Phil Galfond, Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey or Phil Hellmuth make from poker, by far.

1 You know those ebooks you see advertised, promising to show you how to get rich on the internet in your spare time? They are all bull shit. Poker affiliating is the real deal Holyfield. Nobody makes eBooks about it because the only people who know how to do it don't want anybody else to know how to do it. Well now you know too.

enjoy

Everything I Know About Business I Learned From Poker

2008-12-29T07:10:00.000-08:00

This is a great blog post from Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com. Here is his Wiki bio:

Tony Hsieh (pronounced "Shay") is the current CEO of online shoe seller Zappos.com. Prior to joining Zappos, Hsieh co-founded and sold the internet advertising network LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265M in 1998. Hsieh graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Computer Science.

Like Tony, I agree that everything I know about business, I learned from poker. The only area he did not stress enough in my view is networking. That is the one thing which has helped me the most in both poker and business. I was a terrible poker player when I surrounded myself with other terrible players. When I met great players and surrounded myself with them, my game took off.

In business it is well known that relationships and connections, often times, mean much more than how hard you work or how smart you are. Having the right mentors, business partners and advisers in business can make all the difference. Much like poker.

Sailing around the world

2008-12-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

This is a great, great read. Very similar to my Thailand thread and story. An American sold all of his belongings, bought a sailboat and sailed around the world for a year with his brother.

Very inspiring stuff, whether or not you would be motivated enough to do the same thing.

thread here

pics of sailing around the world

I have the time and resources to try something like this, and it sounds like it would be a lot of fun...the two things that give me strong pause are: I have a strong and irrational fear of dying. I can't even handle flying. I imagine after the first major thunderstorm I would swear never to sail again. I'm also terrible with fixing things. I was never good at working on my cars when I was younger, or fixing things around the house. I even pay the technicians in my building to come change light bulbs for me! Evidently when you own a boat, things are always breaking and you have to constantly be fixing them.

Nevertheless it is an inspiring read and you can't help but want to try it after reading that thread.

Brag: On CNN...Beat: Thailand Sucks

2008-11-26T08:45:00.000-08:00

I submitted an article to iReport.com (CNN's user generated news site) and within two hours it was the 2nd most viewed submission on the site in the last 24 hours. I got a phone call from a CNN producer and it has been chosen to be on CNN.

Here is a link to the article:

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-154013

Please Digg it if you check it out.

The bad news is the content of my submission. I am not in Thailand now and am not going back until this situation settles down. For the first time I am actually scared for my safety and well being in Thailand. Checkout the article for more.

Al-Zawahiri's Message to America, Obama and the World

2008-11-19T17:02:00.000-08:00

Prominent Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri created a new video supposedly lashing out at Barack Obama.

Part 1
Part 2

While it is true that he did criticize Obama, the message was much more a criticism of the Bush Administration and our failed efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There were also a lot of positive messages to Obama, the World and the American people. Especially if you read between the lines.

I found the clips he chose from Malcolm X very powerful, and telling, especially this one:

...one thing that I found in all of my travels was that all of the Africans, not only the Africans but the Asians, and the Muslims, look upon us as their long lost brothers...

I'm not advocating this man or his methods. His people have done terrible things to our nation, and we have done terrible things to theirs. I just wanted to point out to anybody who might read this, that his message was nothing like is being depicted by the American media.

It's a new day

2008-11-10T03:31:00.001-08:00

Sick quote about Barack

2008-11-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk...Martin walked so Obama could run...Obama is running so our children can fly -Jay-Z

Don't Vote!

2008-10-02T05:52:00.000-07:00

Do Not Vote!

Life Fish

2008-09-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

I've been buying up lots of domains and looking for ways to monetize them. Stumbled across something called BANS sites and decided to pay the $100 to join their forum and use their software. I was reading through the introductions in the forum and this post made me lol. This guy will never succeed at being an entrepreneur. I don't need to know anything else about him. He needs to get a job, or keep his job if he has one. Some people are just fish.

For those worried about Thailand

2008-09-16T07:01:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a lot of emails from people concerned about me being in Thailand or about them coming or going etc. I just got an email from Best Western about it and they summed it up perfectly:

All other areas in Bangkok remain unaffected by the rally. There has been no significant disruption to life and business in the capital beyond added traffic congestion in a few areas. The vast majority of the city, including all the major tourist spots (including The Grand Palace, Wat Pho, Wat Arun-Temple of Dawn, and Sanam Luang – The Royal Ground), shopping centres and riverside attractions, as well as all roads and public/private transport systems are functioning normally. Bangkok's city taxi and rail services are unaffected. All hotels and resorts in Bangkok and throughout Thailand are open for business as usual.
Suvarnabhumi Airport (Bangkok’s international airport) and all regional airports around Thailand are operating normally. Rail services in provincial areas of the north and northeastern regions are operating normally. Service has also resumed on most of the rail services to destinations in the south. (Call Centre: 1690). Major surface routes between Bangkok and other parts of Thailand are unaffected. Travel to key destinations around Thailand, such as Pattaya, Chiang Mai, Phuket, Northeastern Thailand (Isan) and other parts of the country remains unaffected.

Basically if I didn't follow the news I would have no idea anything was going on. Everything is normal here. It is as if there were a huge demonstration in Sacramento and people who lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco should somehow be worried about that. Doesn't bother me :)

The domain game

2008-09-09T03:56:00.000-07:00

Over the last year or so I have been studying buying and selling domains a fair amount. Lately I've kicked it into high gear and am making some solid progress. The premise behind the industry is very attractive, buy a web address and hold onto it, then sell it for an insane amount of money at some point down the road. When I started out though I was a fool. I registered anything and everything that popped into my head, and probably wasted a good $3-5k on pointless names.

Now I think I've gotten the basics down though. Some of the rookie mistakes I made:

-Registering the name of an existing company is not a path to riches, it is a waste of money. They can sue you for trademark infringement and nobody will buy the name from you anyway. An example of this is one name I bought, www.paypal.bz. I thought it was going to make me a bundle. It is worthless.

-For all intents and purposes, .com is the only way to go. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, registering names with any other extension is going to be a waste of money.

-The most liquid and valuable domains are names that I thought were silly when I started out. Names such as TVD.com and QR.com are worth an insane amount of money. If you find the right buyer (a company with those initials) they will pay a fairly unlimited amount of money for the name.

It is quite fun and I've recently started making some actual purchases of domains, not just registering my own. Here are some of the ones I've picked up:

www.WUIU.com
www.DETY.net (it means Children in Russian)
www.SAVVYPOKER.com
www.ONLINEFREEROLLS.com

Of the domains I bought previously I think the only ones I have of any value are:

www.POKERPIE.com
www.XOSSA.com
www.RAKEBREAKER.com
www.FORCLOSURECONNECTION.com
www.STRASSA2.com

Maybe one or two others, but I have a bunch of simply retarded names that I never should have wasted money on. Some examples:

www.ADSENSEDOMAINPARK.com
www.CHOCOLATECHIPMEDIA.com
www.KIKKERMEDIA.com
www.ANDERSHEDEN.com
www.HEDEN.co.uk
www.RUNWAY.la
www.POKERRROM.ws

These either: A) violate a trademark, B) are too long or C) are not .com or D) are just stupid.

I'll report my progress as I go along and make more purchases.

Beat: My rakeback players are TOO good!

2008-07-28T04:25:00.000-07:00

Congrats to Craig Marquis for making the final table of the WSOP Main Event. No congrats to me however, he is the latest in a long line of my rakeback players to become a 'Red Pro' on FullTilt. Instead of him earning 27% rakeback from me every month, now he gets $35 an hour and 100% rakeback directly from FullTilt (and I get nothing for his play). Taylor Caby and Jonathan Little both played under me as well, and are now both Red Pro's. I also have pr1nnyraid (Jason Rosenkrantz) and OMGClayAiken (Phil Galfond) on my account and expect them to both become red pro's before long as well. I'm glad they have all had so much success, but I wish it was just a little less =)

Cool New Site

2008-07-21T14:29:00.000-07:00

A buddy of mine just launched a new site, WorldlyDecor.com which sells green eco-friendly home decor and lighting products (much of it exported from Thailand). He gave me a promo code good for 15% off to pass along to my readers. Type in 65DRb15 (case sensitive) at checkout. I don't get anything if you use the code, just trying to help him promote the site, so go check it out!

Greatest Retraction in History

2008-07-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

Cornell Fiji on 2+2 made some statements about Joe Norton, the Chief of the Kahnawake Indian Tribe, and his lawyers threatened legal action if he did not make a post retracting his statements. Below is the text of the post he made for them on 2+2:

Chief Norton,

Sorry for taking so long to make this post but your lawyers sent the letter to my old address.

---

I would like to publicly retract the statement that I made calling Chief Joe Norton "one of the greatest Canadian organized crime figures in the 20th century."

I would also like to publicly retract the statement that Chief Norton was the "center of many organized crime operations" and the implication that he was involved in "gun running, drug trafficking, illegal tobacco production and trade, money laundering, tax evasion and tax fraud"

I tried my best to keep all opinion out of my previous posts as I sought to only restate the facts as I had learned through my research. My research led me to believe that members of the Kahnawake tribe were involved in gun running, drug trafficking, illegal tobacco production and trade, money laundering, tax evasion and tax fraud. It has been a little while since I engrossed myself in learning about the Kahnawakes so I might have forgotten where some of the evidence is but upon a quick review of a sample of the articles that I have saved it seems that there is less evidence to back up my claims of the financial crimes than there is of the other crimes. Upon the threat of a lawsuit I would have to say that I do not have enough evidence of money laundering, tax evasion, or tax fraud to cover my ass in court so I would like to publicly retract my statement that the Kahnawake's were involved in those crimes unless I can find the links to support those claims.

Furthermore, in my previous comments I sometimes associated the 8,000 member Kahnawake indian tribe with its chief of twenty years when in fact they are not one and the same. I should have stated that members the Kahnawake tribe partook in the crimes listed above and that Chief Norton was the head of their organization; I should not have stated that Chief Norton was the head of an organization committing those crimes.

Like I have previously stated, I have not done any first hand research into the tribe or its activities. All that I know about the tribe and the crimes that its members allegedly partook in is gleaned from the sources linked below. Unfortunately, I have lost some of the links from my research but if any of my comments about alleged illegal activity are not backed up in the links below please let me know and I will try to find more evidence of the alleged crimes.

Chief Norton, please let me know if there is anything else that you would like me to publicly clarify on your behalf.

Steve

Police rivalry wrecks Kahnawake raid
(windspeaker news; pro native source) 10/97
http://www.ammsa.com/windspeaker/WIN...anchor10930936
Notice how they brag about and take pride in their coverups.

Quote:

Members of the elected Kahnawake council took action to prevent a joint Royal Canadian Mounted Police/ Montreal Urban Community police operation on their territory, thwarting a raid that the RCMP believe would have yielded important evidence about smuggling and money laundering. The raid was to have been a key part of a massive police operation which resulted in the arrest of 30 people and seizures valued at over $100 million.

You might recognize Joe Norton who was mentioned in this coverup, he is now the owner of AP/UB

Quote:

An RCMP spokesman in Montreal said that raids scheduled for Sept. 10 on Kahnawake properties owned by Matthew "Watio" Lazare were cancelled after council members told police that news of the upcoming raids had been leaked.

Councillors urged government and police officials to cancel the raids, saying the police officers' safety had been compromised by the leak.

But a Montreal Gazette story published several days after the fact revealed that Lazare and his associate Bryan Jacobs did not know about the planned raid. The story suggests that Chief Joe Norton and his council took steps to prevent the raid for political reasons and misled the off-reserve police services in order to prevent the raid.

Quote:

The Mounties allege that the organizations involved "individuals related to outlaw motorcycle gangs, and dealt with various aspects of organized crime, namely: selling and buying bootleg alcohol, dealing in and possession of stolen goods, fraud, drug importation and trafficking, counterfeiting, bribery of federal public servants, alcohol cigarette and tobacco smuggling."

Because of the huge amounts of money involved in the criminal activity alleged by the RCMP and the appearance that the council shielded Lazare from the outside authorities, the perception is that the council must somehow be involved in some of the criminal activity. The Kahnawake council member who holds the policing portfolio is Chief Phillip Jacobs. He hotly denies the council is shielding Lazare but he said he knows where that idea came from.

DRUG TRADE

Online betting, cocaine worth millions to crime ring
(CBC News, Canada) 11/06
http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2006/11...uttoraids.html

Quote:

The organized crime ring with Mafia connections broken up by police this week was running a multi-million dollar online sports betting racket and a slick cocaine trafficking ring at the Montreal airport, the RCMP say

Quote:

"The organization gave [drug] couriers passes from customs and excise so that they could cross the border without any problem," he said. The bookmaking operation, worth about $26 million over the past 18 months, involved an internet site where people could place online sports bets. The site was once hosted on a server in Belize, but had moved to the Kahnawake reserve west of Montreal in 2005. Some 820,000 online bets were made between 2004 and 2006, according to the RCMP.

The organization also ran a marijuana smuggling operation that acquired dope in the Laval and Montreal regions, and used the Akwesasne Territory to ship the illegal substances to Florida, the Mounties said.

Guns, drugs, cash seized in massive multi-reserve raid
(National Post) 3/08
http://www.nationalpost.com/most_pop...html?id=401678

Quote:

Police have arrested 29 suspects and seized weapons, drugs and cash in a massive police crackdown Wednesday on a "criminal organization" involved in the smuggling of marijuana to the United States.

A team of aboriginal, provincial and federal police served notice that they've made a serious dent in what they described as a multimillion dollar marijuana pipeline from Mohawk reserves near Montreal into the United States.

Quote:

Barrels of marijuana worth an estimated $1-million, bundles of $2 -illion in cash, assault rifles, three grenade launchers and some brass knuckles were seized in the operation which mobilized 300 officers.

Tribal police lead cross-border drug bust
(Indian Country Today) 04/08
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096416972

Quote:

Those arrested face charges of gangsterism, drug exportation, illegal weapons possession, drug possession, drug trafficking, conspiracy to traffic drugs, conspiracy to export drugs and drug manufacturing. Police are still searching for two more suspected smugglers.

Kahnawake Grand Chief Mike Ahrihrhon Delisle Jr. issued a statement of support for the arrests, and a warning.

''The Mohawk Council of Kahnawake fully supports this Peacekeeper-led initiative. We are pleased that it appears to have been very successful and, additionally, took place without incident or injury. We do not - and will not - support such illegal activity within the territory. Anyone who chooses to take part in such activities should take warning.''

Mohawks Accused of Smuggling Drugs Across U.S.-Canada Border
(jointogether.org) 3/08
http://www.jointogether.org/news/hea...smuggling.html

Quote:

Police who seized heavy weapons during a recent drug raid say that Mohawk Indian territory is being used to smuggle drugs south into the U.S., the Canadian Press reported March 27.

GUN SMUGGLING

WHAT IS THE WARRIOR INVOLVEMENT IN WEAPONS SMUGGLING?
http://www.caledoniawakeupcall.com/mohawks/weapons.html

Quote:

Reed is now a convicted dealer in illegal weapons in Vermont who claims that he has personally sold about 900 weapons to Mohawks who then smuggle the guns across the border from New York to Quebec. The routes used by the cigarette and liquor smugglers serve the weapons smugglers as well. He claims that two Mohawks from Kahnawake approached him in 1991 to buy guns that they could smuggle into Canada. Guns traced back to Reed have been found with drug dealers, robbers and street thugs from Toronto to Vancouver.

The warriors smuggled guns have been used in five murders, eleven robberies, two assaults, nine attempted murders, twelve narcotics violations, two suicides and two death threats. Another 41 of his guns have been seized by police searches. Reed told a reporter that Mohawks fill out fake U.S. Federal firearms transaction forms, purchase the guns, bribe border custom agents and carry the guns from the U.S side of Akwesasne to the Quebec side. Reed cooperated with the ATF on their investigation. A 1994 Bureau of AFT reports from Burlington, VT show that 67 weapons from Reed ended up in crimes in Canada

Study Claims Smuggling Real Culprit in Gun Deaths
Summary of Mackenzie Institute report. Ottawa Times.
http://homepage.usask.ca/~sta575/cdn...Misc/ott1.html

Quote:

The report draws extensively from RCMP information on their efforts to stem the flow of guns while attempting to eliminate the smuggling of other contraband. The majority of their work is centred in and around the Akwesasne, Ganiengeh and Kahnawake Indian reservations in southern Quebec. Reports from the RCMP in June of this year state that it is doubling the strength of the smuggling strike force along the Quebec-United States border. The largest contingent of officers from the newly formed Border Investi gation Branch will be positioned near the Akwesasne Mohawk reserve, a key crossing-point for contraband.

Gun law doesn't apply to us, Mohawks insist
(Montreal Gazette) 01/01 -- you need to scroll down 20% of the page to find this article, or just ctrl-f for Kahnawake

I believe that this quote is actually a misidentification as the Chief at the time was AP/UB owner Joe Norton though it could be a relative of his named Timmy

Quote:

Council spokesman Timmy Norton was tight-lipped about what kind of firearms currently exist in Kahnawake - at different times alleged to be the centre of smuggling rings for automatic weapons and handguns - and how they are controlled.

Quote:

``There is already a way firearms are controlled within the community with the Mohawk council and the people of Kahnawake,'' Morris said. ``They are in the best position to do so as opposed to trying to impose federal law within our community.''

ABORIGINAL-BASED EXTREMISM AND CRIMINAL ACTIVITY
(Criminal Intelligence Service Canada) 1998 -- summary of CIS report 3/4 down the page. Hit ctrl-f to find Kahnawake
http://www.turtleisland.org/discussi...pic.php?p=1706

Quote:

Machine guns, automatic and semi-automatic weapons were seized by the RCMP on the Kahnawake Reserve, south of Montreal, in September 1997. The seized weapons were part of a black market operation that sold firearms, explosives, drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. Relations between this Mohawk community and police were strained, but there was noretaliation for the seizure.
Aboriginal street gangs continue to expand in the Prairie provinces.

SMUGGLING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS:

(NY Times) 12/98

Ring Is Cracked in Smuggling Of Illegal Chinese Immigrants
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...51C1A96E958260

Quote:

American and Canadian authorities announced today that they had broken up a sophisticated ring that smuggled Chinese immigrants into the United States, and ultimately to New York City, through a Mohawk reservation along the border.

The authorities said the ring, made up primarily of Chinese citizens and members of the Mohawk tribe,

Quote:

Today's announcement highlighted the extent to which the 28-square-mile Indian reservation that straddles two Canadian provinces and one American state has become a haven for smugglers. The foggy creeks and wooded islands of the Indian territory, which is known as the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation on the American side, and the Akwesasne Indian Territory in Canada, have long been used to spirit gasoline, cigarettes, tobacco and drugs between the two countries.

TOBACCO SMUGGLING:

Battle heats up over native tobacco trade
(National Post, Canada) 5/08
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=525586

Quote:

In 2006, the RCMP seized a record 456,333 cartons across Canada. That was a 16-fold increase from 2001, but still a tiny fraction of last year's estimated illegal trade of 50 million cartons. Some of the cigarettes are being produced in facilities on Kahnawake, but the RCMP says most come from illicit manufacturers on the U. S. side of the Akwesasne Mohawk reserve, which straddles the borders of Ontario, Quebec and New York State.

These next two quotes remind me of the KGC / Mohawk reaction to AP/UB

Quote:

And even Kahnawake Grand Chief Mike Delisle, while defending the Mohawks' right to sell tax-free tobacco, acknowledges that the lure of easy money has attracted organized crime to his community. "The infiltration now of outside influence and forces and organized crime -- gangsterism as they call it --it really can't be denied," Chief Delisle said in an interview.

Quote:

Mr. Delisle, the Grand Chief, recognizes that something needs to be done to control the current tobacco free-for-all. At the moment, anybody on the reserve can open a smoke shack and sell cigarettes.

Rules, he said, would have to be set and enforced by the ab-originals themselves. He talked of creating a Mohawk regulatory body to patrol the industry and said he is in contact with other aboriginal communities about co-ordinating efforts.

"If [outside governments] have identified now for 25 years that the majority of the problem rests in First Nations territory, why can't they formally understand that the majority of the answers must rest in First Nations territory as well?" he asked.

Illegal Smokes Pose Challenge for Police
(The Epoch Times, Canada) 5/08
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-5-15/70717.html

Quote:

Mike Delisle, grand chief of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, told the Ottawa Citizen recently that the band doesn't consider the sale and manufacture of tobacco products on their land illegal and warned that "confrontation" can be expected if more raids are carried out.

Quote:

"The better way is to let us as First Nations regulate the business and let us legitimize the tobacco business on First Nations. And if we're able to take a little bit of revenue out of that then that's fine. What's wrong with that? We are a third level of government." He also suggests levying a "health tax," which would go directly to First Nations government and health programs. This would discourage tobacco consumption and "bring First Nations tobacco products in line with mainstream tobacco pricing." Non-natives who buy their smokes on-reserve would also be taxed.

"We've grown tobacco for thousands of years and what we want to be able to do is to regulate it ourselves so for all intents and purposes, for any government, then it is legitimized," says Beaucage.

Not that the US Govt is the most reliable source but...

Quote:

Thompson says American law enforcement agencies have noted that "people associated with Hezbollah have been moving tobacco around" that comes from Grand River Enterprises, a licensed Six Nations tobacco company.

"That doesn't mean that Grand River Enterprises knows what they're doing, they're just selling cigarettes to interested buyers and I don't think they really pay that much attention to the idea that Hezbollah is perhaps profiting from their product," says Thompson.

As well as drugs, cigarettes and firearms, other smuggled items include contraband liquor, illegal refrigerants and illegal aliens, says Thompson.

"Once you've got a contraband pipeline you can move almost anything."

Several articles linked on illegal tobacco trade
(National Post, Hamilton Spectator) 11/07 - 5/08
http://www.smokersclubinc.com/module...ticle&sid=4707

Quote:

The 1990 Oka crisis, which left one provincial police officer dead at nearby Kanesatake and prompted a lengthy Mohawk blockade of the Mercier Bridge next to Kahnawake, is never far from authorities' minds when considering how to tackle crime here.
Two years before Oka, an RCMP raid on Kahnawake tobacco vendors led to 17 arrests and the seizure of $450,000 worth of tobacco products. It also triggered a 29-hour armed standoff when, in retaliation, Mohawks blocked highways through Kahnawake.

Quote:

He cited an analysis of cigarette butts outside school yards in Ontario and Quebec which suggested the penetration of illegal cigarettes amongst children is running at 30%, and up to 70% in some areas of Quebec.
"More broadly, all Canadians must be concerned that a culture be allowed to develop of casual law-breaking," he said.

Pertinant Adam Smith quote:

Quote:

The Mohawks can scarcely be blamed for wanting to improve their own condition. As Adam Smith also noted, this desire is so powerful that "it is alone and without any assistance capable not only of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity but of surmounting the hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws often encumber its operations."

Funny example of Mohawk's disregard for the truth in one of the tobacco articles:

Quote:

The issue became more heated just last week when Elected Band Chief David General issued a warning to the community not to be enticed "to the dark side" by "big money and tobacco."
...He added that he does not know "at this time, if SixNet is pursuing providing their services to on-line casinos."

But a spokesperson for Absolute Poker said SixNet is the provider of Absolute's online servers.
"We've had our Six Nations, or the SixNet, licence for about three years and the games are hosted out of their facility in Ontario," said Jason Reindorp, a media relations spokesperson for Absolute Entertainment S.A, the Costa Rica-based parent of the poker site.

Canadian Smuggling Investigation Continues
(Toronto Globe & Mail) 01/99
http://lists.essential.org/stop-imf/msg00002.html

Native smoke isn't always a sign of fire
(MacLeans) 1/08
http://www.macleans.ca/canada/nation...09_63602_63602

Quote:

Noting Kahnawake's reputation as a smuggling haven, O'Connell laments the "assumption that everything that comes from natives is illegal."

Crack down on illegal smokes: Dumont
(Montreal Gazette) 05/08
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazett...6-290b942cdde8

Quote:

But the government insisted this is not the time for rash action and said governments need to learn from past mistakes, as in the 1990 Oka crisis, in which a police officer was killed.

Native leader warns of confrontations over tobacco strategy
(Canwest News) 5/08
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/na...c-f2db90d4d16a

You **** with the Kahnawake's revenue stream they bring out the big guns (literally)

Quote:

But Mike Delisle, grand chief of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, says it will be a "huge mistake" if the RCMP plan to step up such raids...

"If they're making the statement that raids are imminent, then obviously it concerns me, and I would hope that the federal government or the RCMP in conjunction (with the government) are smarter and take a more collaborative approach as opposed to running roughshod over this community, as they've tried in the past. Obviously, it didn't work out to anyone's benefit," he said.

Delisle said the response from his community could range from a peaceful standoff to "what we've seen in the past in terms of confrontation."

"Our past track records show that we have problem with invasion, regardless of whether you're talking about 400 years ago or 1990. I think they'd get a negative reaction from the community in general if they took that approach."

Underground sales rise as plastic bags with illicit tobacco trucked across Canada
The Canadian Press; 04/08
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2...395731-cp.html

NY Times article on Kahnawake tobacco trade from 1988

Quote:

This week, the trade turned sour. After the Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided stores on the Kahnawake Indian reserve south of Montreal, seizing $365,000 worth of cigarettes and arresting 17 people, young Indians from the reserve dumped tons of gravel onto one of the principal highways leading out of Montreal. The militants, guarding the blockade with rifles, blocked traffic on the highway for 30 hours.

CANADA NOT HAPPY WITH ONLINE GAMBLING:

Quebec fights Mohawk Nation over online gambling jurisdiction: GoldenPalace.com to cough up $2m
(The register, UK newspaper). 12/07
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12...ace_plea_deal/

Quote:

Cyber World operated the online casino from a server on the Kahnawake reservation, which is located just outside of Montreal. About 60 per cent of the world's online gambling traffic flows through the Kahnawake servers, which reportedly possess the largest concentration of bandwidth in North America.

Quebec Fines Online Site; More Headaches for Kahnawake Mohawks
(PokerNews.com) 12/07
http://www.pokernews.com/news/2007/1...-challenge.htm

Quote:

CBC News reported this week that Cyber World Group, parent of GoldenPalace.com, has pled guilty to two charges of illegal gambling and has been levied a $2 million fine by the Quebec provincial government. While unfortunate for Cyber World Group, the case signals what may be the long awaited jurisdictional showdown between the provincial government and the Kahnawake Gaming Commission.

The charges against Cyber World Group stem from an investigation launched more than a year ago, punctuated by a raid of their Montreal offices. But the Surete du Quebec, Quebec's Provincial Police, have been investigating the Kahnawake reserve's online gaming business since at least November, 2003. Loto Quebec and Quebec's alcohol, racing and gaming board have long contended that the Kahnawake operation is illegal.

Kahnawake's resident cybercasino giant fined for illegal gaming
(CBC News, Canada) 11/07
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/st...9.html?ref=rss

Quote:

The company that administers the world's largest internet casino — Golden Palace.com — has pleaded guilty in Quebec to charges of illegal gambling

Canadian Goverment Targets Kahnawake Online Gambling Sites
(Online gambling insider.com) 03/08
http://www.online-gambling-insider.c...-03-09-08.html

Quote:

March 9 - The Canadian federal government is reported to be targeting what it sees as illegal gambling sites in the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal.

Kahnawake- A Regulatory Overview
(Gamblingcompliance.com; subscribers only) 4/08
http://www.gamblingcompliance.com/node/13401

Quote:

Kahnawake’s future as a remote gambling licensing jurisdiction has been subject to much debate over the last year due to allegations of cheating and a rejection to be included on the UK "white list" of approved jurisdictions. This report looks at the development of gaming in Kahnawake and examines the legitimacy of the jurisdiction from a historical, political and legal perspective.

TAX HAVENS AND TAX FRAUD:

Mohawks To Be "Offshore" Banking Power
(first nations drum; pro native group)

http://www.firstnationsdrum.com/busi...t00_mohawk.htm

Quote:

The Kahnawake Mohawk Nation in Quebec says it will establish its reserve as a "sovereign financial territory" and transform it into a major "offshore" tax haven, with out federal or provincial government approval.

Quote:

The plan now is to lure investors with a range of financial services and accounts "hidden ... for obvious tax reasons," according to Chief Rice.

"Why can't we take business from Antigua and put it on the St. Lawrence?" he said.

"Of course Canada and others will say that it's impossible, that what we're doing is illegal ... [That] will be our battle."

OKA CRISIS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oka_Crisis

http://www.turtleisland.org/news/news-oka.htm

http://www.bcgreen.com/~samuel/lubicon/1990/G&M0830.txt

http://www.warriorpublications.com/?q=node/38

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/weblog/2...e_a_siege.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...971078,00.html

OTHER:

http://www.parl.gc.ca/36/1/parlbus/c...es=1&comm_id=1
Transcript of Native defense statement in a Canadian Parliment hearing from 03/99 which discusses the Mohawk's reputation as a criminal enterprise

A very throurough and detailed forum post about Kahnawake's criminal past including Kahnawake Gaming Commission and Absolute Poker
http://www.canadaka.net/forums/nativ...gs-t15432.html

In addition to the gun running and smuggling, the drug dealers moved into the communities
This is a thourough timeline Kahnawake's recent sordid history
http://www.caledoniawakeupcall.com/mohawks/role.html

The Long Fall of the Mohawk Warriors
http://www.mackenzieinstitute.com/19...y_Mohawks.html

Mohawk Nation News
http://www.mohawknationnews.com/

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5217

Quote:

"Mohawk Nation News March 27 2007. It looks like the psychotics from the U.S. have hijacked Canadian policy taking Canada back to medieval blood lust. A 250-page field manual on counterinsurgency is being put out by Canada's Department of National Defense DND for its soldiers and officers. Jon Elmer of Global Research wrote on March 25, 2007, about these new methods of fighting insurgents like the “Taliban”, the “Chechnyans” and the “Mohawk Warrior Society”. Wait a minute, that’s us!

Let’s not kid ourselves. The main purpose of an army is to shoot and kill. "

Joe Norton consults with company that produces tracking devices, agrees to mandate devices for Kahnawake members:
(McGill) 10/04
http://www.mcgillbroadcast.com/news-...g_Brother.html

Quote:

Former Kahnawake chief, Joe Norton, has been hired as a consultant. His services are appreciated because he brought the Assembly of First Nations on board. Joe Norton, Amanda Grainger and Mark Cushing met in late October 2004 in Ottawa with the AFN. The AFN then met with the Minister of Indian Affairs and got his support.

So this is how things work in Canada. A private American company with ties to the U,S. government gets an idea. They sell it to the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake. Joe Norton sells it to the AFN, which sells it to Indian Affairs. It’s probably not even necessary to slip another revision of the Indian Act past Canada’s sleepy M.P.’s. And there you have it. Smart cards get their foot in the door and Indians get ruled by American Big Business.

Other links involving Joe Norton (registration required):

http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/...ckval=GooglePM
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/...ckval=GooglePM
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1144800.html
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-30475796.html
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-22070959.html
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-15155111.html
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-30213685.html
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-30172971.html
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1138193.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...rce_login=true
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Land...\29602842.html
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Land...\29602842.html
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Land...\14685784.html
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Land...\28026913.html
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Land...\27979149.html
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Land...\28026913.html
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Land...\27979149.html
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Land...\14685784.html
http://www.newspaperarchive.com/Land...\29504357.html

Great blog, NatArem.com

2008-07-04T04:43:00.000-07:00

NatArem

I've seen this blog before a few times but never spent any time on it. I just spent the last couple of hours reading his last six months of posts. Wow. Great stuff in there. Thats the kind of blog I've been wanting to write for over a year but didn't know I could? Or something lol. He's got some fantastic articles in there about business, website development etc. Also a good writer, very humble guy. I'm going to take some cues from that and start posting random stuff here about business that pops into my head.

I finally got my own forum!

2008-06-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

psstakes.com

It is a forum founded to match people looking to get staked into MTT's and people looking to stake others into MTT's. We are expanding it to include general poker strategy and off-topic discussions as well (I started an 'Ask Me' thread about Thailand).

Come join the forum and say whats up!

time for the next chapter in my life

2008-05-27T10:04:00.001-07:00

i'm just not sure yet what that is going to be. i'm not interested in traveling the world as aggressively as i have been for the last couple of years...i'm going to stay stationairy for awhile now. i've totally burned out on playing poker, i just have no drive to improve my game anymore, or put in hours. my businesses are fairly in auto-pilot and i have a ton of free time on my hands, so not sure really what to do with myself. it seems to be a fairly common thing among guys like me...we've made some money and been in poker for awhile and are young and smart, but what to do now. taylor caby and andrew robl are two guys who appear to be in a pretty similar 'funk' if thats what you want to call it. i know 95% of the world would love to have our 'problems' heh. hopefully i come up with something interesting to do with myself.

DIY

2008-02-24T10:20:00.001-08:00

If you are in nevada

2008-02-23T08:31:00.002-08:00

Go to Bally's at some point today and tell as many people as you can to go. Barack needs our help

For Sale

2008-02-07T07:37:00.000-08:00

$xx,xxx per month in stable recurring revenue, amazing business with obscene growth potential. Serious $x,xxx,xxx all cash offers only

Every American MUST Watch This Video (Barack Obama Speech @ Google)

2008-01-27T01:01:00.000-08:00

Every American MUST watch this video.

I will go so far as to say that anybody who does not vote for Hillary or Obama after seeing this video is Absolutely of very low intelligence.

2007-12-29T02:48:00.000-08:00

PokerStars froze my account and I emailed them and asked why:

It has come to our attention that the last logins to your account from
from Thailand, USA, Netherlands, France, UK, and Spain. Kindly explain why this is the
case.

My reply:

'because I'm a baller?'

My new blog

2007-12-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

Purple Euros

I've no idea wtf I am creating there, but I like it. Check it out.

Purple Euro=$750 bill in Europe. So like, if something makes it onto that page, its 7.5 times better than one of these

DegenPoker

2007-12-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

DegenPoker

Help me organize the Thailand thread if you have an interest.

PS I'm looking for a few good guys in blue jeans who want to get rich. Must Know Development.

mmm dumpster food

2007-12-01T01:13:00.000-08:00

http://columbuspatrick.blogspot.com/

Thats my friend Patrick's blog. He's a nut ball, likes to eat food out of the dumpsters of grocery stores. He even did this in Thailand where a very high quality street meal is less than $1

Bay Area Beast

2007-11-28T08:03:00.001-08:00

"I think that 30% of this is that you guys don't know what is going on"

"No, 30% of this is that Bill wont shut the fuck up. BILL LEAVE THE ROOM"

Two Years on the Road

2007-10-19T00:02:00.000-07:00

Exactly two years ago I took my first trip to Thailand. That trip started a journey that I will hopefully never end. I've changed quite a bit in that two years, for the better and worse, and it has been without a doubt, the best two years of my life.

I'd take a walk down memory lane in this post but if you really care to see where I've been and what I've done over those two years, just click down the side bar at previous months...it has been a very eventful time. What I'll talk about instead, and plan myself in writing it, will be to map out what the next two years could look like.

When I started out on this journey I never thought I'd be in the position I'm in now. I can do nearly anything in this world. I could go get a masters (in anything I choose) from one of the finest Universities in the world, on any continent...I could start a passion based land based business like opening up a baseball card shop (my first entrepreneurial pursuit...I used to promote shows and had my first business, 'Billy's Cards', before I was legally able to drive). I could take a trip around the world and make a book of pictures about it, I could put myself fully into business for a year some place and come out the other end of it with more money than me or my kids could ever spend.

I'm still kicking things around but I'm having a very hard time justifying any more meaningful or time consuming work. I don't want to wait until I am retired to enjoy what my brain and good fortune have earned me. At the same time I don't want to leave up heaping gobs of EV on the table so I can go and checkout Museums in strange countries.

I'm searching hard for a balance of the two and hopefully I'll be able to do both. I'm picking up a lot of time management skills and working on streamlining all of my business endeavors...the book I recommended before has been absolutely sensational with this...definitely give it a read if you like freedom with your money...Four Hour Work Week

The next three months at least will be a mini-sabbatical. I'll take time to try to figure these things out while...taking pictures of museums :)

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Culture Shock

2007-10-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

I did my own laundry today for the first time in a year. I'm not sure I'm ready for western civilization.

That is all.

EPT Busto

2007-09-26T03:29:00.000-07:00

EPT was fun. I played with Johnny Lodden and hung out with some of the biggest names in the game at the Hilton, where Stars put up all of the qualifiers. Amazing hotel and service, all around a wonderful production by PokerStars. They even let me buy-in to the event at the last minute with W$. So, not only did I save 3% on my buy-in, but I was able to get the discounted rate they had worked out at the Hilton. A+ to Andrew, Lee Jones and John Duthie at the EPT, as well as the owners and management of PokerStars. EPT London and APPT Manilla were by far my favorite high buy-in tournaments I have attended. Harrah's and MGM-Mirage could certainly learn a thing or to from the EPT about what players want!

I got a bit of coverage on the PokerStars blog. Obviously all of that I said above is completely fucking biased because I am of the opinion that any organization that finds me newsworthy is amazing and all the rest can kiss my ass

William Franceschine PokerStars Blog Entry

Great writing that is right there. I've never contacted the writer of this nor spoken to PokerStars at anything more than an arms length business level But ya, it is as if the writer read my blog for 2 years, or at least did a summary of it the night before he wrote that. It is pretty spot-on. When is the last time you read something on PokerNews or CardPlayer that was spot on? PokerStars also dominating in the reporting elements of high buy-in event coverage.

update on 1/27/08: PokerStars should seriously consider buying 2+2 imo

The best birthday present ever

2007-09-17T19:26:00.000-07:00

I turned 27 yesterday. 25 and 26 both felt really old to me. I don't think I was ready to be an adult yet. 27 feels really young. I've finally reached a stage in life where I know I am not a kid anymore, I now feel really lucky to be 27 and in the position I am in. Many people in their 40's aren't doing this well after 20 years of 50 hour weeks. I'm reading a great book right now called 'The 4-Hour Work Week' that I'd highly recommend to anybody who'd like to get out of the rat race. Much of it sounds like exactly what I'd write if I wrote a book, but there are some great tips in there too. Though the author lives life to the fullest more than me, jumping off of cliffs and motorcycle racing etc. I sit by a lot of beaches and read books.

Ok anyway, on to the amazing gift I just got. I woke up this morning and checked my e-mail and this had come from my mother:

I've been thinking alot over the last few days about
the last 27 years. I had you ...and was the proudest
mom in the world. 27 years later and I'm still the
proudest mom on earth. I have raised a son who is
fulfilling his dreams and enjoying life. Most mothers
can't say that. Most mothers say "He's working here
or there". I get to say Billy's in Thailand living a dream
and enjoying his life. I hope you always live your life
this way honey. I'd rather have you half way around the
globe enjoying your life then right here in town being
miserable like I see most people.

Pretty sweet feeling to get that. Thanks mom.

I'm hanging out in Pattaya now, taking golf lessons, reading and playing lots of poker. Didn't do well at all in the big Sunday's yesterday. Got a sick beat in the Warm-Up and didn't feel like playing at all after that and proceeded to purposely dump about $1500 worth of buy-ins on other tournaments. Pretty stupid. Though it was my birthday and I had better things to do than play poker, especially since I wasn't enjoying it anyway.

Re-scheduled my flight to London yet again and will be taking off on the 21st. EPT London next up on my schedule.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

on the brink

2007-09-12T00:34:00.001-07:00

i'm on the brink of a huge MTT cash. playing great poker and improving my game a ton. have been playing 5-12 MTT's a day lately.

today i got down to 25 in the 100r on Stars and lost to a 6 outer on the river and with 5 left at the Stars nighly $100k final table i lost to a sick runner runner straight when i had flopped two pair. if i win either of those hands i'm the chipleader of the tourney. whatever though, standard fare. jon little made multiple huge money final tables and went out in similar fashion before his cards finally held up and now he's top 10 for cardplayer player of the year. thats coming for me, i can feel it. mark my words, i'm going to have an insane MTT win/cash very soon.

two awesome hands today:

109r: deep in the tourney.

i open KK from ep, get re-raised and then the SB pushes. we are all big stacks with a bunch of shorties at the table. i'm the table chip leader and have been reasonably tight. i mucked it. he said in chat he had AA but who knows if thats accurate. ansky from 2+2 said it was a terrible fold but everybody else i talked to liked it. i like it.

final table of the 100k, one of those hands that just make you feel like a god of poker:

PokerStars Game #12011515356: Tournament #60479611, $150+$12 Hold'em No Limit - Level XXII (6000/12000) - 2007/09/12 - 02:54:14 (ET)
Table '60479611 89' 9-max Seat #9 is the button
Seat 1: Menyook (1025808 in chips)
Seat 2: Alcide78 (588820 in chips)
Seat 3: VietCutie (204596 in chips)
Seat 4: SBRounder (197455 in chips)
Seat 7: FearltSelf (464578 in chips)
Seat 9: BarFine600 (518743 in chips)
Menyook: posts the ante 600
Alcide78: posts the ante 600
VietCutie: posts the ante 600
SBRounder: posts the ante 600
FearltSelf: posts the ante 600
BarFine600: posts the ante 600
Menyook: posts small blind 6000
Alcide78: posts big blind 12000
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to BarFine600 [5s 9s]
Menyook said, "i had AJ"
Menyook said, "whatd u have"
FearltSelf said, "AK"
VietCutie: folds
SBRounder: folds
FearltSelf: folds
FearltSelf said, ",feregdfgisfdgs"
BarFine600: calls 12000
Menyook: calls 6000
Alcide78: checks
*** FLOP *** [3c Tc Kh]
FearltSelf said, "i retire"
FearltSelf is sitting out
Menyook: checks
FearltSelf has returned
Alcide78: checks
BarFine600: bets 24000
Menyook: raises 48000 to 72000
Alcide78: folds
BarFine600: raises 93000 to 165000
Menyook: folds
BarFine600 collected 183600 from pot
BarFine600: doesn't show hand
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot 183600 | Rake 0
Board [3c Tc Kh]
Seat 1: Menyook (small blind) folded on the Flop
Seat 2: Alcide78 (big blind) folded on the Flop
Seat 3: VietCutie folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 4: SBRounder folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 7: FearltSelf folded before Flop (didn't bet)
Seat 9: BarFine600 (button) collected (183600)

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

MTT Sunday

2007-09-09T23:30:00.000-07:00

Every Sunday there are a ton of big online MTT's. The problem is that they start at like 2am in Bangkok and go through the afternoon. I'm trying to get a schedule down so I can make all of the big ones. Yesterday I woke up at 11am and went to bed early at 11pm then woke up at about 3am. This allowed me to play every big tourney besides the Stars Sunday Million.

I got very deep in three tournaments after catching some lucky breaks in a few and catching the luckiest break of them all for the day...very few of my big hands got sucked out on all-in PF. Especially on PokerStars, this is nothing short of a miracle.

At one point I was the chipleader in two tournaments and top 4 in another two. That is a pretty sweet rush but I'm obviously not maximizing my EV there. I ended up finishing top 30 in the $150+13 $50k Guaranteed on FTP, 11th in the $100+9 $25k Guaranteed on Stars and then final tabling the $100+9 rebuy on Stars.

This one had a 1st prize of $42.5k and I was chipleader or 2nd stack from 50 players down to 7. Then I had a chance for a huge chiplead and lost QQ vs ATo all in pre-flop. Pretty disgusting timing to finally get sucked out on today. I ended up busting 6th and taking home about $7k.

Total profit for the day in the $7k ballpark after buy-ins and my other two cashes. Savvy Poker

I'm definately picking up a lot of confidence playing all of these online tourneys and making some good money as well. Nothing like I was making a couple of months ago in cash games but I enjoy this a whole lot more. It doesn't matter if the tournament is $10 buy-in or $2500 buy-in, it is a very satisfying mental challenge to try and outlast the field.

I postponed heading to Europe for a week. Going to try and get my girlfriend a visa to come over with me. I also decided it was probably best to skip the $20k buy-in WSOP Europe as if I end up losing all of the other events I have planned...I may well regret losing that $20k. So next live event will be EPT London on September 25th.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Poker is Good For You!

2007-09-07T09:11:00.000-07:00

David Sklansky & Alan N. Schoonmaker, Ph.D. wrote a fantasitic essay in the latest issue of the 2+2 internet magazine about the positive aspects of playing and learning poker. You can find the orignial article here and I've pasted it below. A must read.

POKER IS GOOD FOR YOU

by David Sklansky & Alan N. Schoonmaker, Ph.D.

Many people have argued that poker should be considered differently from gambling in general. This argument has been made in discussions of legalization and related topics. Their argument is usually that poker is a skill game, while other gambling games are much less dependent upon skill.

We agree, but believe that they have not gone far enough in explaining many of poker's unique attributes. Poker does not just require skill. It demands and develops many skills and personal qualities which are essential for making all types of decisions, such as choosing a career, investing money, performing a job, and buying a house.¹

POKER IS A GREAT TEACHER.

Research clearly proves that people tend to repeat rewarded actions and to discontinue punished ones. Poker teaches by rewarding desirable actions such as thinking logically and understanding other people and by punishing undesirable ones such as ignoring the odds and acting impulsively.² Other learning principles also apply to poker.

Learning Depends Upon Feedback.

Rewards and punishments are valuable feedback. The faster and clearer the feedback is, the more rapidly you will learn. Unfortunately, for learning many desirable qualities the feedback cycle is slow or unclear. For example, if you make a mistake with an important customer, you may never know why you lost his business. At the poker table you often get much quicker feedback.

Until fairly recently, most people learned how to play poker primarily from trial and error. Over the past few decades a rapidly expanding body of books, videotapes, DVDs, classes, and coaches has helped millions of players to speed up the learning curve, but there is no substitute for experience. You have to make good and bad plays and get rewarded and punished to learn poker's most important lessons.

The More Frequently You Get Feedback, The Faster You Will Learn.

Most important real life decisions are made infrequently, and some of them - such as choosing a career - may be made only once. Poker players make and get feedback on hundreds of decisions every session, which greatly accelerates the learning process.

Lessons Learned In One Situation Often Generalize To Other Situations.

If poker's lessons applied only to how to play games, we would not have written this article. But its lessons apply to virtually every aspect of life. For example, if you are impatient or illogical or can't analyze risks and rewards, you will lose at poker, and you will make many mistakes in business and personal relationships. If poker teaches you how to control your emotions, you will be much more effective almost everywhere.

Young People Generally Learn More Quickly Than Older Ones.

Poker's enemies often insist that they are protecting young people from developing bad habits, but they are really preventing them from learning good ones. Young people love to gamble, sometimes for money, often for much more "things" such as grades, pregnancy, and even their lives.

They get a kick from taking chances, and some of their gambles are just, plain stupid. They risk dying or becoming crippled by crazy stunts on roller skates, bicycles, and snowboards. They get pregnant or AIDS by taking easily avoided sexual risks. It is as impossible to prevent young people from "gambling" (in its broadest sense) as it is to prevent them from experimenting sexually.

Life is intrinsically risky, and learning how to handle those risks is an important part of growing up. Poker teaches you to think of risks and rewards before acting. If it taught nothing else, poker would prevent some young people from making terrible mistakes. More generally, most of poker's lessons will help young people to make critically important decisions.

POKER IMPROVES YOUR STUDY HABITS.

Because you want to be respected, you and nearly everyone else naturally develop high status qualities and neglect low status ones. Unfortunately, status among Americans - especially young ones - is based primarily on physical attractiveness and athletic ability. The highest status people, the ones others envy and want to date, are physically attractive and good at games such as football, basketball, and soccer. Of course, the good looking, athletic children will probably end up working for the more studious ones, but they may not learn that lesson until it is too late.

American students score abysmally on tests of math, science, and verbal skills partly because so many of them think that study is unimportant. They are not stupider than Europeans, Asians, and South Americans, but they are taught from birth that they will be rewarded for looking good and playing athletic games well.

Worse yet, they learn that being studious is often punished. Their parents may be delighted when they get good grades, but young people care immensely about their peers' opinions. Good students are called "nerds" and "geeks."

This anti-intellectualism continues indefinitely. Americans reward good looks and athletic ability far more than studiousness. Models, actors, and athletes get paid several times as much and have much higher status than scientists, teachers, and scholars.

Young people resist studying math, psychology, logic, risk-reward analysis, probability theory, and many other subjects they will need as adults because these subjects seem unrelated to their lives. They don't see how learning them matters in the competitions they care about, the ones for status, popularity, and dates. Since people rarely study these subjects after graduation, many Americans never learn them.

Poker quickly teaches them the value of these subjects. The "nerds" who study poker and subjects such as math, logic, and psychology crush their more attractive and athletic opponents. They even beat smarter people who are too lazy or complacent to study. Winning increases their status and confidence and makes them much more likely to get dates and influence their peers. Poker doesn't just develop study habits and other important qualities; it also increases the value people place on them.

POKER DEVELOPS YOUR MATH SKILLS.

Americans are terrible at math. Our students get abysmal scores on math tests, and most people don't even try to learn math after leaving school. Their weaknesses remain uncorrected forever.

Many people are not just bad at math; they don't even want to get better. They essentially say, "Who needs it?" When they play poker, they quickly learn that they need it. The winners understand and apply it, while the losers either don't try or can't perform the necessary calculations. After their children started playing poker, many parents have exclaimed, "I'm amazed. He actually wants to study math."

POKER DEVELOPS YOUR LOGICAL THINKING.

Many authorities are appalled by Americans' contempt for logic. Instead of thinking logically, too many of us make poor assumptions, rely on intuition, or jump to emotionally-based conclusions.

Poker teaches you to respect and apply logic because it is a series of puzzles. Since you don't know the other players' cards, you need logic to help you to figure out what they have, and then more logic to decide how to use that information well. The same general approach that works in poker will help you to make much more important decisions.

POKER DEVELOPS YOUR CONCENTRATION.

The first step toward solving poker or real life problems is acquiring the right information. Without it you will certainly make costly mistakes. Poker develops information-gathering qualities, especially concentration. Every poker player has missed signals, including quite obvious ones, made mistakes, and then berated himself, "How could I be so stupid?" We can't think of a more effective way to develop concentration.

POKER DEVELOPS YOUR PATIENCE.

Americans are notoriously impatient, which damages many aspects of our lives. We owe trillions of dollars because we buy things on credit instead of waiting until we can pay for them. Our businesses overemphasize short-term results and lose market share to more patient foreign competitors.

Poker develops patience in the most powerful possible way. If you wait patiently for the right situation, you will certainly beat the impatient people who play too many hands. In fact, for most players poker's first lesson is "Be Patient."

POKER DEVELOPS YOUR DISCIPLINE.

Many people lack discipline. They yield to their impulses, including quite destructive ones. Poker develops discipline by rewarding it highly. Virtually all winning players are extremely disciplined.

Their discipline affects everything they do. They fold hands they are tempted to play. They resist the urge to challenge tough players. They avoid distractions, even pleasant ones like chatting with friends or sexually attractive strangers. They don't criticize bad players whose mistakes cost them money. They control their emotions. They have the self-control to do the necessary, but unpleasant things that most people won't do.

Television has created a ridiculously inaccurate image of poker. After seeing famous players screaming and trash-talking, viewers naturally assume that such antics are normal. They are utterly mistaken. Television directors show these outbursts for "dramatic value," and a few players act stupidly to get on TV. You will see more outbursts in a half hour of television than in a month in a card room. Please remember that controlled people are often called "poker faced."

POKER TEACHES YOU TO FOCUS ON THE LONG TERM.

Impatience is not the only cause for short-sightedness. Learning research proves that immediate rewards have much greater impact on people than delayed ones. For example, most American adults are overweight because the immediate pleasure of overeating is more powerful than its disastrous long-term effects such as heart attacks.

Poker players quickly learn that a bad play can have good results and vice versa, but that making decisions with positive, long-term expectation (EV) is the key to success. If you make enough negative EV plays, you must lose. If you make enough positive EV plays, you must win. It is just that simple.

If people thought more of the long term, some of our most serious problems would be solved or become less troublesome. Because of short-sightedness, millions of children drop out of school or get pregnant, and millions of adults neglect their health and finances.

POKER TEACHES YOU THAT FORGOING A PROFIT EQUALS TAKING A LOSS (AND VICE VERSA).

Economists call lost profits "opportunity costs" and they have written extensively about them. Unfortunately, most people haven't read their works, and, if they did, they probably wouldn't agree. They would much rather pass up a chance to make a dollar than risk losing one. They therefore miss many profitable opportunities.

Poker teaches you that lost profits are objectively the same as losses. For example, if the pot offers you 8-to1, and the odds against you are 5-to-1, you should call the bet. Not calling is the same as throwing away money by making a bad call when the odds are against you.

POKER DEVELOPS YOUR REALISM.

You and everyone else deny unpleasant realities about yourself, other people, and many other subjects. You believe what you want to believe. Poker develops realism in the cruelest, but most effective way. If you deny reality about yourself, the opposition, the cards, the odds, or almost anything else, you quickly pay for it.

Hundreds of times a night you must assess a complicated situation: your own and the other players' cards, what the others are going to do, the probability that various cards will come on later rounds, your position, and many other factors, especially your own and the other players' skill and playing style. If you are realistic, you win. If you deny reality, you lose.

POKER TEACHES YOU HOW ADJUST TO CHANGING SITUATIONS.

Most people don't ask themselves, "How is this situation different?" They just do whatever they have always done. Poker demands adjustments because the situation is always changing. One card can convert a worthless hand such as a four flush into an unbeatable one. The player holding the flush and all the opponents should adjust immediately. The player with the winning hand should do whatever will produce the most profit, and the others should cut their losses.

Other things are changing as well. One hand after being in the small blind, the worst position, you have the button, the best position. Every time someone quits and is replaced by a different type of player, the game changes. Every time someone surprises you by folding, checking, betting, or raising you should re-evaluate the situation and adjust to the new information.

Adjusting to real life changes has always been necessary, but it has become much more important because the pace of change has accelerated enormously. We now experience more changes every year than our ancestors encountered in decades. Technology, the economy, social and moral attitudes, and a host of other factors change so dramatically that Alvin Toffler: "coined the term 'future shock' to describe the shattering disorientation we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time."³ He argued, "Change is avalanching upon our heads, and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it."⁴ Poker can help you to cope with our constantly changing world.

POKER TEACHES YOU TO ADJUST TO DIVERSE PEOPLE.

Most people - especially younger ones - have little experience with diverse people. They live in relatively homogenous towns and neighborhoods and usually relate to people who are fairly similar to themselves.

In online and casino poker games, you have to play with whomever sits down. You must compete against very different kinds of people: aggressive and passive, friendly and nasty, educated and uneducated, quiet and talkative, intelligent and stupid, emotionally controlled and uncontrolled, and so on.

You therefore learn how to understand and adjust to people who think and act very differently from you. The faster and better you do it, the better results you will get. Since you will certainly meet diverse people in more important situations, learning how to relate to them is extremely valuable.⁵

POKER TEACHES YOU TO AVOID RACIAL, SEXUAL AND OTHER PREJUDICES.

Prejudice is always wrong, but it is especially destructive at the poker table. It causes you to underestimate your opposition and make expensive errors. To play well, you should be "gender-blind, color-blind, and just-about-everything else-blind, because in the end, winning is based on merit."⁶

Poker provides an extremely "level playing field." In no other popular competition is everyone treated so equally. You can't play golf against Tiger Woods, but you can sit down at any poker table. You can play against anyone from a novice to a world class player, and you will all be treated as equals. If you get the cards and play them well, you will win, no matter who you are.

POKER TEACHES YOU HOW TO HANDLE LOSSES.

Many people can't cope with losses. A lost job, argument, or - God forbid -romantic relationship is a massive tragedy. They can't accept the loss and may even obsess over it. It takes over their lives, making them look backward rather than forward.

Poker teaches you how to cope with losses because they occur so frequently. You lose far more hands than you win, and losing sessions and losing streaks are just normal parts of the game. You also learn that trying to get even quickly is a prescription for disaster. You have to accept short-term losses and continue to play a solid, patient game. You can't be a winner - in poker or life - if you don't learn how to get over losses and move on.

POKER TEACHES YOU TO DEPERSONALIZE CONFLICT.

Many people take conflicts too personally. They may want to beat someone so badly that they "win the battle, but lose the war." Worse yet, if they lose, they may take it as a personal defeat and ache for revenge. Anyone who has seriously played games with painful physical contact (such as football, boxing, and soccer) is less likely to take conflict too personally. Getting hurt teaches some athletes that conflict is just part of the game and life. Alas, many people never learn that lesson.

Poker teaches you to depersonalize conflicts because it is based on impersonal conflict. The objective is to win each other's money, and everyone's money is the same. It doesn't matter whether you win or lose to Harry, Susan, or Bob. Everybody's chips have the same value, and everybody's money spends the same.

Poker quickly teaches you that being bluffed, sandbagged, outdrawn, and just plain outplayed are not personal challenges or insults. They are just parts of the game. Poker also teaches you that taking conflicts personally can be extremely expensive.

If you ache for revenge, you may act foolishly and lose a lot of money. Beating "your enemy" can become so important that you play cards you should fold, try hopeless bluffs, and take many other stupid, self-destructive actions. The Chinese have a wonderful saying, "If you set out for revenge, dig two graves: one for him, and one for you." Poker teaches that principle to every open-minded player.

POKER TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLAN.

Many people don't plan well. Instead of setting objectives and planning the steps to reach them, they react impulsively or habitually. Poker develops your planning ability for an extremely wide range of time periods:

This betting round
This entire hand
This session
This tournament
This year
Your entire poker career

Planning for all of these periods requires setting objectives and anticipating what others will do. For example, pocket aces are the best possible hand, and you hope to build a big pot with them. In early position in a loose-passive game, you should raise because your opponents will probably call. In a wildly aggressive game you should just call, expecting someone to raise, others to call, so that you can reraise.

Poker also teaches you to plan for the entire hand. You use chess-type thinking ("I'll do this, they will do that, and then I'll …"). You may sacrifice some profit on an early betting round to increase your profits for the entire hand.

You can also sacrifice immediate profits for longer-term gains. For example, you may overplay the first few hands to create a "Wild Gambler" image that will get you more action on later hands. Or you may be extremely tight at first to set up later bluffs. Poker teaches you to set clear goals, think of what others will do, plan the actions that will move you toward your goals, and always know why you are doing something.

Good planning requires thinking of multiple contingencies. You should do many "what, if?" analyses. If the next card is a spade, you will bet. If it pairs the board, and Joe bets, you will fold. If it seems innocuous and Harriet bets, you will raise. Most people don't consider nearly enough possibilities. When something unexpected happens, they have no idea what to do.

Planning in real life is so obviously valuable and so rarely done well that we don't need to give any examples. You know that you should do these "what if" analyses and plan your work, finances, and life in general, but that you probably don't plan well.

POKER TEACHES YOU HOW TO HANDLE DECEPTIVE PEOPLE.

Many people are easily deceived. Just look at those late night infomercials that promise you'll quickly get rich, become thin, or relieve all your aches and pains. The promoters wouldn't pay for them if naïve people didn't buy them, and they are only the tip of the iceberg. As Barnum put it, "There's a sucker born every minute."

Because poker players constantly try to bluff, sandbag, and generally deceive each other, you learn how to recognize when someone has a good hand, is on a draw to a good hand, or is flat out bluffing Those skills can help you to spot and react effectively to deceptive people everywhere. A lot of people want to deceive you, and you should learn how to protect yourself.

POKER TEACHES YOU HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST "GAMES."

"Game" selection is critically important in both poker and life. Poker teaches you how to evaluate yourself, the competition, and the overall situation, and then pick the "games" that are best for you.

Serious poker players recognize that the main reason they win or lose is the difference between their abilities and those of the competition. If they are better than the competition, they win. If they are weaker, they lose.

A secondary consideration is the fit between their style and the game. Let's say that two poker players have equal abilities. Player A will beat a conservative game, but lose in an aggressive one, while Player B will have the opposite results. Obviously, they should choose different games.

Both factors affect your real life results. If you are less talented or have weaker credentials than your competitors, you should switch to a softer game. You should also select a game that fits your style. For example, you and a friend may have similar abilities and credentials, but different temperaments. Perhaps you should work in a large organization, but he should join a small company or start his own business.

Most people don't know how to evaluate themselves and how well they fit into various "games." So they make huge mistakes that they may not realize for many years. Just think of how many people have changed "games" in their thirties and forties. They finally realized, "I don't belong here."

POKER TEACHES YOU THE BENEFITS OF ACTING LAST.

If you act last, you have a huge edge. You know what your opponents have done before acting, but they acted without knowing what you will do. Position is so important that any good player would raise with some cards in last position that he would fold in early position.

Poker is an information-management game, and there are many similar games such as selling and negotiating. The primary rules of all these games are:

Get as much information as possible.
Give as little information as possible.

For example, when negotiating, you want the other person to go first to learn his position before expressing yours. Let's say you have to sell an unusual house quickly. A licensed appraiser has said that it is worth approximately $250,000, but that it is so unique that he can't put a precise value on it.

Before offering a price, you want to know how this potential buyer feels. He may love, hate, or be indifferent to its unique features. If he makes the first offer, you get some inkling of his feelings. He may even offer $275,000! Since he seems to love its uniqueness, try for an even higher price.

Job interviewers know the value of acting last. Most employment applications contain a question such as: "Approximate starting salary expected." If you answer, you have given the interviewer your position without knowing what he is willing to pay. Since you are unlikely to get more than you ask for, try to avoid making that first offer.

POKER TEACHES YOU TO FOCUS ON THE IMPORTANT SUBJECTS.

Focusing on unimportant subjects causes expensive mistakes at the poker table and in real life. Serious poker players know that all mistakes are not created equal. Trying too hard to avoid small mistakes can cause much bigger ones.

Overreacting to any opponent's small mistakes can cause the deadly mistake of underestimating him. For example, you may see that an opponent overplays a mediocre hand such as queen-jack offsuit. It's a mistake, but a relatively harmless one, especially because he will get that hand only a few times a night. If he plays the other hands well, don't conclude that he is a weak player.

Your own mistakes should also be analyzed, and some of them can be quite subtle, but very important. For example, you may be so intent on playing "properly" that you seem too serious for the weaker opponents who just want to have a good time. So they avoid you, which reduces your share of the money they give away.

Another error is taking a "by the book" approach that can cause strategic mistakes. For example, you could play your cards in a technically correct way, but almost never bluff. You would lose the profit you could gain from good bluffs, and your opponents will not give you much action on your good hands. The same principle applies to always playing hands the same way. The predictability costs you more than you gain by always being technically correct.

A business analogy would be running your organization so rigidly that all the ordinary decisions are made well, but:

Your employees are not motivated to be creative when the usual routines won't work. In fact, they may fear being punished for violating procedures.
Your organization can't respond effectively to the inevitable surprises.
Your good employees quit.
Your organization becomes a typical bureaucracy, filled with deadwood and unable to achieve its goals.

POKER TEACHES YOU HOW TO APPLY PROBABILITY THEORY.

If you are like most people, you don't think in terms of probabilities, or you do so very crudely. You think something:

will happen
won't happen
probably will happen
probably won't happen

You are unlikely to make finer distinctions such as between 30%, 20%, and 10% probabilities.

Poker teaches that these distinctions are important and develops your ability to calculate them. You learn that you should sometimes call a bet if you have a 30% probability of winning, but fold with a 20% probability. You also learn how to estimate probabilities quickly and accurately.

This neglected skill can be applied to many real life decisions. For example, if you have to fly to Los Angeles for a sales call or job interview, it may be worth the time and expense if the probability of success is 30%, but not if it's 20%. Hardly anyone thinks that way which causes many poor decisions.

POKER TEACHES YOU HOW TO CONDUCT RISK-REWARD ANALYSES.

These analyses are a more formal way to use probability theory. Since life is intrinsically risky, you probably can't win at poker or life without accurately assessing risks and rewards.

Risk-reward analysis is a form of cost-benefit analysis which also includes the probabilities of each possible result. Let's say that the pot is $100. You have a flush draw that you expect to win if you make it, but lose if you miss. It will cost you $20 to call the bet. The odds against making your flush are exactly 4-to-1. If you make it, you will win another $20 because you are sure your opponent will call one last bet. You are sure you cannot bluff. Should you call the $20 bet?

You will certainly lose more often than you will win, but the potential gains may outweigh the potential losses. Because we are concerned only with the long term, let's do it 100 times:

You will win $120 twenty times for a total win of	$2,400
You will lose $20 eighty times for a total loss of	-1,600
Your net gain for 100 times will be	$800
Your expected value for each call is	$8
You should obviously call the bet.

Poker players constantly do risk-reward analyses, and these analyses are often much more complicated. For example, in deciding whether to semi-bluff⁷, you should estimate the probabilities, gains and losses of:

winning the pot immediately because your opponent(s) fold
winning because you bet again on the next round and your opponent(s) fold
winning because you catch the card you need to make the best hand
losing because you get called and don't catch your card.

The math can get difficult, but advanced players learn how to make these analyses quickly and accurately.

The same sort of analysis should be done whenever you have a real life risky situation. Unfortunately, most people don't do it. They buy stocks or real estate, take a job, open a business, or take personal risks without identifying all the outcomes and estimating the probabilities that each will occur. So they make many bad decisions.

Poker is such an excellent teacher for risky decisions that Peter Lynch, former manager of The Magellan Fund and Vice Chairman of Fidelity, once said that a good way to become a better investor was to "Learn how to play poker."⁸

POKER TEACHES YOU TO PUT THINGS IN CONTEXT AND EVALUATE ALL VARIABLES.

People often ask poker experts, "How should I play this hand?" They are usually frustrated by the standard answer, "It depends on the situation." The expert then asks them about the other players, their own position, the size of the pot, the action on previous hands and betting rounds, and many other subjects. Most people don't want to hear, "It depends on the situation," and they definitely don't want to answer questions.

In fact, they usually can't answer them because they have not counted the pot, thought about the other players, and done all the other things that experts do. They want to know the two or three simple rules for playing a pair of aces, or a full house, or a flush draw, and the experts won't tell them because there aren't any simple rules.

If you play seriously, you will learn that the KISS formula (Keep It Short and Simple) does not apply to poker. More importantly, it does not apply to most significant real life decisions. It has become popular because people want to believe that life is much simpler than it really is. Poker teaches you to ask the same sorts of questions about investment, career, and other decisions that you ask at the poker table so that you make much better decisions.

POKER TEACHES YOU HOW TO "GET INTO PEOPLE'S HEADS."

Poker teaches you to understand and apply psychology because understanding others is absolutely essential. In fact, poker has often been called "a people game played with cards." If you don't understand the other players, you can't win.

We have already discussed psychological subjects such as avoiding prejudice and selecting the right games. We will end this long essay by briefly discussing poker's most important psychological lesson: teaching you what other people perceive, think, and want.

The first step is shifting your focus from yourself to them, and poker forces you to make that shift. If you focus on your own cards, you can't win because poker hands have only relative value. The important issue is not how good your cards are; it is how they compare to the other players' cards. A flush is a very good hand, but it loses to a bigger flush or any full house or better. So poker quickly teaches you to think of what other people have. It also teaches you to think about what they think you have. And even what they think you think they think.⁹

We and others have written extensively about these subjects, but space limitations allow us to give only a few examples. Good players always consider the other player when making any decision. With the same cards and situation, they would fold if Charley, a very conservative player, bets, but raise if Mary, a very aggressive player, bets.

Good players would also think about how their opponents think about each other. For example, if a perceptive opponent bets into someone whom he believes is very likely to call, he is probably not bluffing. If a good player reraises a maniac, he probably has a much weaker hand than if he reraised a tight opponent. Understanding his perceptions of these other players greatly improves your decisions when you are contesting a pot.

Understanding other people is vital in virtually every area of life. You can't have good personal relationships or succeed in business without being perceptive about people. Since its value in personal relationships is so obvious, we will discuss only two subjects, negotiating and investing.

"The absolutely essential step toward negotiating effectively is to shift your focus from your own position to their position. Unfortunately, most people focus on their own position. Their actions say, in effect, 'If I could just get them to understand MY facts and MY logic and MY needs, they would make the concessions I need.' The other side is saying exactly the same thing.

"They therefore have parallel monologues instead of a genuine dialogue. Both sides repeat themselves again and again, hoping to convince the other to accept their position. But eloquence is no substitute for understanding, and you cannot gain that understanding without shifting your focus and sincerely wanting to understand the other side."¹⁰

All good poker players know and apply David Sklansky's "Fundamental Theorem of Poker."¹¹ Less well known is his "Fundamental Theorem of Investing:"

"Before making any investment ... you must be able to explain why the other party is willing to take the other side of the deal... if you cannot come up with a good explanation, your buy, sell or bet is almost certainly not as good as you think."¹²

Unfortunately, most people don't seriously analyze the other party's reasons. Their attention is focused primarily on themselves, their economics, their analysis, and their reasons for buying or selling. If they thought about the other party's motives and perceptions, they might realize that they are making a disastrous mistake.

The principle is very clear. You should always determine as accurately as you can why the other party is willing to sell, buy, or do other business with you. If you don't understand his reasons, "all the statistics, income statements, balance sheet data, or analysts' recommendations mean little. There is still some reason they are taking your bet - and, if you don't know it, you don't like it."¹³

We could quote many other authorities on the value of understanding other people, but there is no need to do so. Instead, we will close with a quotation from one of the best selling books of all time: How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie: "If there is one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as your own."¹⁴

Since you can't win at poker without seeing things from other people's angle, you will learn this valuable lesson. You will then become much better at winning friends, influencing people, and making decisions about virtually everything.

CONCLUSIONS

We have described many - but certainly not all - of the skills and personal qualities that poker develops. Most of poker's lessons are variations on one theme: Think carefully before you act. That principle applies everywhere, and far too many people ignore it.

The government's attempts to outlaw poker are based upon a misconception of its nature and value. It is not "just gambling," and it should not be subject to the same rules and penalties as other gambling games. Instead, the government should allow you to play poker in regulated and taxed places because poker is good for you and good for America.

SUMMARY OF POKER'S BENEFITS

Because this essay is so long, you may not want to reprint all of it. We believe that a good summary is simply a list of the headings. Please feel free to reprint as much or as little as you wish.

Poker Is A Great Teacher.
Poker Improves Your Study Habits.
Poker Develops Your Math Skills.
Poker Develops Your Logical Thinking.
Poker Develops Your Concentration.
Poker Develops Your Patience.
Poker Develops Your Discipline.
Poker Teaches You To Focus On The Long Term.
Poker Teaches You That Forgoing A Profit Equals Taking A Loss (And Vice Versa).
Poker Develops Your Realism.
Poker Teaches You To Adjust To Changing Situations.
Poker Teaches You To Adjust To Diverse People.
Poker Teaches You To Avoid Racial, Sexual And Other Prejudices.
Poker Teaches You How To Handle Losses.
Poker Teaches You To Depersonalize Conflict.
Poker Teaches You How To Plan.
Poker Teaches You How To Handle Deceptive People.
Poker Teaches You How To Choose The Best "Game."
Poker Teaches You The Benefits Of Acting Last.
Poker Teaches You To Focus On The Important Subjects.
Poker Teaches You How To Apply Probability Theory.
Poker Teaches You How To Conduct Risk-Reward Analyses.
Poker Teaches You To Put Things In Context And Evaluate All Variables.
Poker Teaches You How To "Get Into People's Heads."

¹ We assume, of course, that you will not become obsessed with poker or play for higher stakes than you can afford.

² These rewards and punishments may not be instantaneous. It may take a while for things to average out.

³ Future Shock, New York, Random House, 1970, Page 4

⁴ibid, page 14

⁵ Adjusting to varied players was the primary theme of Alan Schoonmaker's book, The Psychology of Poker, Henderson, NV, Two Plus Two Publishing, 2000.

⁶ Barbara Connors, "Poker Play" in Maryann Morrison's Women's Poker Night, New York, Kensington Publishing, 2007, p. 26.

⁷ "A semi-bluff is a bet with a hand which, if called, does not figure to be the best hand at the moment, but has a reasonable chance of outdrawing those hands that initially called it." David Sklansky, The Theory of Poker, p. 91.

⁸ "Ten lessons poker teaches great investors," by Christopher Graja, Bloomberg's Personal Finance, June, 2001, p. 56

⁹ See "Multiple level thinking" in David Sklansky and Ed Miller, No Limit Hold 'em: Theory And Practice, Henderson, NV, Two Plus Two Publishing, 2006, pp. 168-175.

¹⁰ Alan N. Schoonmaker, Negotiate to win. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1989, p. 76

¹¹ "The Fundamental Theorem of Poker" is explained on pages 17-26 of The Theory of Poker.

¹² David Sklansky, "The Fundamental Theorem of Investing," Card Player, August 16, 2002, pp. 34-36

¹³ ibid.

¹⁴ Dale Carnegie How To Win Friends and Influence People, NY, Simon and Schuster, 1936, copyright renewed 1964, P. 37. The italics were in the book.

This is true love

2007-09-04T04:27:00.000-07:00

While waiting for my flight today from Manilla to Bangkok I decided to kill some time at the nearby Casino. Was planning to just play small stakes baccarat or something but was very pleased to find they have a poker room. Sweet. I only have about $120 on me and my ATM card hasn't been working in The Philippines for some lame reason, so I buy into a roughly $0.60-$1.20 game.

After about a half hour seat five busts out and there are now two seats side by side empty. A petite and attractive older Asian (I'm assuming Filipino) woman comes and removes both chairs. She then asks the people in the adjacent seats to scoot in, then walks away for a second and wheels over an old man in a massive bed/wheelchair/hospital bed thing. It was huge. He had an IV hooked up to him and a tube going into his mouth with a bottle of water on the back of his seat.

Everybody paused for a second to wonder what the fuck a clearly sick and dying old man was doing in our poker game. Then the woman pulls up a chair next to him and puts a few thousand peso's on the table. She gets chips and gets dealt in. Each time it was her turn to act she would put the cards up very close to the mans face and he would mumble something to her and she would act on her hand. He didn't speak at all and it looked difficult for him to even tell her what to do...he was coughing and looked in really poor condition, but he was playing cards! Check raising and three-betting pre-flop. Didn't even have the ability to drag his own pots or stack his chips, but there he was playing poker.

How fucking awesome is that? It was a bit disruptive to the game and slowed things down a bit, also took away one seat, but whatever...it was moving to see that. I don't know if this was a daughter, sister or wife but whoever it was is an amazing human being.

I hope when I am old and dying and stuck to a chair with an IV in my arm, I can have somebody in my life who loves me enough to wheel me down to the Bellagio to play some cards.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

First MTT win in awhile

2007-08-30T17:37:00.001-07:00

A small one, but a win. i was starting to think i suck at online MTT's but i ran super well in the $150+12 on FTP today. 250ish players and a $10k first prize. I won an all-in with JJ vs KK (J on turn) as the chip leader versus the second stack. i did play really well however and definitely destroyed the final table with only one serious hand that did anything to endanger my stack. 2+2er Matt Suspect had been playing very crazy and got up to the 2nd stack (I had a monster lead on everybody) and re-raised my UTG raise 6 handed, i called with 66 and check raised all in on a 943 flop. very difficult call to make, he ended up calling the rest of his chips (like 1/5th of the pot...he had to call) with AK and i held up. it was a cake walk after that.

Headed back to Bangkok from the gorgeous Philippines island of Boracay soon, then to London for the European WSOP ($20,000 buy-in). I'll bounce around Europe for about 6 weeks playing four total events, attending a conference, visiting some friends and researching some possible places to setup an office and maybe a second home. Estonia and Malta are on the list of possible places. Looking for others as well. I'll definitely visit Barcelona and Austria as well then squeeze in as much backpacker style site-seeing as I can.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

People who detest people like me

2007-08-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Today I woke up at 4pm after going to sleep at 8am. I rarely get out of bed before noon. I do not remember the last time I wore a tie. My whole approach to life seems to annoy a lot of people. These people usually rise soon after the sun comes up, commute to work for at least an hour everyday, pay their bills on time, owe far more money than they have in the bank and wear nice clothes often to impress others.

Some of these people have started to treat me nicer about my methods as I've become more successful. Thats called being fake. They still detest people like me, they just excuse my actions because I've made money. I haven't changed anything about how I do things. I do them the same now as when I was in college.

Just because somebody gets up at noon doesn't make them useless to society. I'll admit I'm a bit lazy, but it is by choice. If I needed to get a job and wake up everyday at 5am, I would. I don't have to, so I don't. This does not make me a bad person. In fact, I think our society should look to people like that with respect and admiration, not contempt.

I like to wear cargo shorts, t-shirts and sandals. I wear these while I am working, while I am not working and a whole lot of other times. I make far more money than 95% of the people who look down on me for my methods and I'd lay massive odds that my IQ is higher than most of them as well....what gives them the right to look down on me? I don't look down on them for being a part of the rat race. That's their decision. If everybody did what I do there would be nobody to provide the goods and services that I need.

Maybe it is just resentment. Makes them feel better about being forced to get out of bed everyday, long before they want to and perform jobs that they hate.

Thanks for reading, now get back to waking up whenever you want!

Wild Bill

APPT Manilla

2007-08-25T02:31:00.000-07:00

I really hope the APPT (Asia Pacific Poker Tour www.appt.com) takes off. The organizers did an amazing job of putting this thing together. It was all of the small details that have made it great such as custom APPT chips, free t-shirts and a buffalo statue for all of the entrants, a Filipino band performing before the tourney got underway and many others. The rake was small and the service was great. The only complaint I had was that they charged us about $5 for water and the cash games have a HUGE rake. Hopefully in the future they can work out a better deal with the casino on these two points. Also the buy-in of just $2,500 makes this a stop on the tourney trail many people wont make unless they have other reasons for wanting to be here. I know several pro's who came just so they could go to Thailand afterward, for instance.

Next stop on this tour is Seoul and then just one more stop late this year in Australia. Next year I hope to see Singapore on the list as they'll have Casino's soon and hopefully one or two other cities such as Tokyo or Macau. This would mean great things for the future of poker in Asia!

As for me, I didn't do too well in the tournament. I ran my stack up nicely on a good rush of cards and then proceeded to my usual Wild Bill Blow-up and bluffed off 70% of my stack in one hand. Bleh.

I think I'm going to skip Barcelona as I'd have to make it to Spain in the next two days and gain access to $20,000 in cash somehow in that time. I'm really going to have to figure out this moving money thing around pretty quickly. Its growing to be a rather large pain in the ass.

From 9/6 thru 10/6 there are a slew of events on the East Coast USA and then immediately after there are three events I'd like to attend in Europe that will keep me busy through 10/16.

After that things slow down considerably, perfect timing for peak tourist season in Thailand...when there is also the best weather.

To hit all of the US events I'd be skipping some great events in Europe so I might push that start date back a bit and go 9/10 WSOP Europe in London then bounce around Europe for a couple of weeks before 9/25 EPT London and then mess around for another week or so until my European events start. This I like better as I never have to step food in Los Estados Unidos :)

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Anybody see me on TV?

2007-08-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

I'm the fat white dude in the black sweatshirt on Doyle's right on Episode 1 of the WSOP Main Event. My first televised poker appearance and the only reason I got it was a lucky table draw, but whatever. I'll take it.

PokerTube has the video's if you didn't see it.

I was in some pretty interesting pots but unfortunately none of them made the final cut.

Checkout this gem:

2007-08-15T05:38:00.001-07:00

RGP Post on Jan 3, 2005

I just found that while Google searching for something else. That was me, pre-2+2 and just before or right when I became a winning poker player. Funny reading that now, I would have thought I would have sounded a lot fishier...but I was actually thinking conceptually in the right way, even before I learned anything about SNG structure. I talked about sustainability and variance and proper bankroll requirements.

From that I went back to that old Gmail account and found an email that I've been wishing I could find for over two years now!

Sit and go's Inbox

Reply
Reply to all Forward Print Add Shannon to Contacts list Delete this message Report phishing Show original Message text garbled?
from xxxxxx
hide details 1/3/05

to xxxx@gmail.com

date
Jan 3, 2005 1:50 PM

subject
Sit and go's

mailed-by
yahoo.com
You wont get much of a response at RGP, but David
Sklansky and Mason Malmuth have some pretty good poker
forums for strategy etc.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=singletable

Thats the single table tournament forum, full of
information.

Good Luck
xxx

My reply:

Reply
Reply to all Forward Print Add William to Contacts list Delete this message Report phishing Show original Message text garbled?
from xxx
hide details 2/8/05

reply-to William Dean

to xxxxx

date
Feb 8, 2005 11:58 PM

subject
Re: Sit and go's

mailed-by
gmail.com
awesome, awesome, awesome

finally a group of like minded SNG'ers

THANKS!!!

This might seem trivial to many people reading this, but thats what started it all for me. I'm going to email that person now and thank them, and depending on who it is, maybe even offer to help them out in some way.

When I received that email and made that post on RGP, I was finishing up my last year at UCSB. I was at a major low point in my life as I had no idea what I was going to do with my future, I was deep in debt from financial aid (and some other things) and generally things just weren't going well.

Today things are much different. I may have found the forum on my own some other way, but that email pretty much sealed the deal and set me down this path.

Pretty cool to find that today. Whenever I get emails from blog readers asking me how they can improve at poker, and I link them to 2+2, I always hope that I'll get an email someday like the one I'm about to send.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Wow there is a lot of action!

2007-08-12T05:01:00.000-07:00

I haven't played MTT's seriously in a long time. With Party out of the picture I just assumed there were a lot fewer tournaments. There are loads more!

On Stars alone today I found 10 (!!!!!!) different tournaments that I want to play. Holy cow! There are at least 3 more on FTP including the $300 buy-in Million Guaranteed FTOPS event. I haven't even checked the smaller sites yet.

After my crap day yesterday I got a taste for what the average day is going to be like, and today I'm going to try hard to get in a good routine to minimize the mental anguish. Everyday that I play, I'm going to go to the gym first. Thats my rule. I AM NOT ALLOWED TO PLAY POKER unless I have been to the gym already. Next is no fast food and I have to read a book for at least an hour. All of this is before I play.

The no fast food+gym part obviously have the side effect of getting me in shape, but the real reason here is that when I eat well and exercise, I have a very clear and focused mind. Reading (non-poker reading, actual books), also helps my mind to wander and forget about results and tournaments and money.

So thats the plan. I don't want to end up looking like Jennifer Harmon in a year if this works out. If you've never seen her live, she looks like she wants to hang herself just about everytime you see her. Playing tournaments for a living clearly takes its toll on your psyche.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

And so it begins...

2007-08-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

Got down to 17 for 7 seats in the Barcelona qualifier, down to 13 for 6 seats in the London qualifier and down to 6 for 5 seats in the Baden qualifier. Two sick beats and one lost coin-flip later and I'm off to a splendid start.

I'm going to keep a running tally here of my buy-ins and cashes:

-$2250 in SNG Satellite Entries
+$3150 in W$ won
-$3150 in W$ for the three $1050 qualifiers
+$750 from the Baden qualifier
-$320 MTT on Stars
-$109 MTT on Stars

Total: -$1929

Think I had better get used to this.

Tentative Schedule

2007-08-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

Either I picked a really good time to start this adventure, or there is basically unlimited action for high-buy in tournaments at any given point in time. I've been having a very stressful week attempting to plan out my next 4-6 weeks. I've had to make and break plans with people I care about and for great events on three continents.

Here is what I've come up with, still probably subject to change, but as much in stone as it has been thus far and as its probably going to be:

Kicking off my tour today with four online tournaments:

$1050 qualifier for EPT Barcelona on 8/28, $1050 qualifier for EPT London on 9/25 and $1050 qualifier for EPT Baden on 10/7...all on PokerStars. The Barcelona qualifier is actually underway as I write this. Then the $100 FTOPS rebuy.

Then 8/13: $1060 FTOPS
8/18 $2620 FTOPS Main Event
8/24-26 $2500 APPT Manilla (First live tournament)
8/28-9/1 EPT Barcelona (whether I qualify online or not)

To come to that schedule I had to leave out a trip with my best friends (family really) from college to NYC, a chance to go see my family in Northern California who I haven't seen in ages, and the Legends of Poker at the Bike in Los Angeles. Very difficult decisions. I'll have a lot of friends in Manilla as well, its much closer to home and I can squeeze in two events instead of one over the same time period. In the end, this just made more sense.

After 9/1 the schedule gets a bit fuzzy again. Options are:

9/6-9/8 WPT Beau Rivage Main Event in Biloxi Mississippi
9/10 WSOP Europe Main Event
9/12-9/18 Several Events at the Borgata
9/20, 23, 28, 30 WCOOP Events on PokerStars
9/24-9/30 Turks and Caicos WPT Event
9/25-9/29 EPT London (if I qualify for this online, that will simplify all of this some)
9/28 - 9/30 APPT Seoul Korea
10/7-10/10 EPT Baden (again, if I qualify online, that will simpify the schedule)
10/30-11/1 EPT Dublin (will try later to qualify online for this)

To further complicate matters, things have been going really well with my Thai girlfriend of about six months, so unfortunately I'm going to probably want to be making frequent trips back to Thailand to see her...or working like mad to get her Visa's to come to some of these places with me. Not that this is an altogether bad thing as far as life goes...but its going to make getting in maximum tournament time difficult.

I'll be doing regular updates like this, mainly just to get my own thoughts down some place and to finalize plans for myself, remember dates etc. But if you come across any big ($5000+ buy in) events that you dont see me mention, please email them to me!

Tourney time, thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

A dream come true

2007-08-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

I forgot to make a post about it, but this blog just had its two year anniversary. It feels a bit odd to say I've been a professional poker player for that time, because for decent stretches I didn't play much at all. I have derived my income 100% from the game of poker however, for over two years now. Pretty amazing. The industry has changed, the game has changed...hell, I have changed. Though I don't see any reason why this will stop anytime in the next 2 years, or even longer. I'm a lucky guy.

Bangkok has gotten a bit boring to me. Possibly I should be happy to be here, living the easy and good life, saving for retirement...but I am not. I am the type of person who can never leave things as they are, I always want to be improving, taking the next step, out-doing myself.

Since I began to get serious about poker, over four years ago, my dream has been to travel the world playing all of the biggest buy-in tournaments. My hero's were Paul Phillips, Phil Gordon and Brian Haveson...guys who didn't need the money they earned from poker (they all retired young thanks to successful business ventures) but played full-time for the sport of it, for the challenge. That has always seemed so awesome to me.

Well I am by no means in their net-worth bracket, but I do have a very solid savings and investment portfolio, and more importantly, a strong income coming in every month that covers all of my expenses and allows me to save a great deal of money. I've also had a lot of success in the limited amount of live high buy-in tournaments I've played.

I think I can do this. Now. I can live my dream, right now. I've been dreaming of doing this for a long time, and to me it seemed so far off in the future. Like maybe if I made the right decisions I could do it when I was 35. There is no reason for that though, I can do it now.

So I'm going to give it my shot. For those of you following along in hopes of hearing more about poker, I think this blog might have just gotten a bit more interesting for you.

I still have to iron out my upcoming schedule, I'm not sure if I'll go to LA for the Legends of Poker or Manilla for the APPT event, but one of those will be my inagural event as a full-time travelling tournament pro.

I can't wait.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Convicted Poker Players AKA The Most Fucked Up 19 Hours of My Life

2007-07-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

*Names and some details changed or omitted, to protect the...uhh...guilty.
*This came out pretty long, but I think it is definitely worth the read

The night started out innocently enough. I heard from a friend that there was a new home game in Bangkok, one he had found from a social networking website. He had gotten to know the host a bit and all seemed fine...the stakes were enough to at least be mildly entertaining so I decided to give it a try. I've been to lots of home games in Bangkok and have never had any problems, of any kind.

We show up at 9:00 and begin the tournament that was planned to kick off the night.

In attendance are:

Rich, the host, an early 30's restaurant manager from Germany, with an impressive poker setup and nice apartment in central Bangkok

Apple, Rich's Thai girlfriend, a few years his junior

Edward: A 70 year old Canadian, engineering professor at one of Bangkok’s top Universities

Ron: 27 year old American owner of a popular Sukhumvit area Bar. Bangkok veteran

Brent: 24 year old American sporting 8 day stubble and a t-shirt celebrating the go-go bar industry. Has been living in Bangkok for years. Enough said.

Jessica: Mid-twenties recent college grad from Washington State, came to Thailand to teach Music just 2 months ago

Pierre: 30ish year old Frenchman who didn't talk much the entire evening. He lives in Bangkok with his Swiss wife and their young son.

Me: Wild Bill

Yo: Late twenties Canadian on his first trip to Thailand

Marvin: Late twenties Bangkok Resident and Australian Citizen who equally divides his leisure time between tennis, go-go bars and poker

Anthony: 35 year old high school science teacher who has been living in Thailand for the last decade.

Josh: Late twenties Canadian Software Engineer and Bangkok Resident

After about 45 minutes of play eleven of us are playing across two tables and one late player arrives. Something is off about this guy from the start. First off he has a horrible speech impediment. Second he is asking all kinds of really stupid questions like whether or not there are any professionals in the game. He asks us to wait just a couple of minutes for his friend to arrive...no biggie, we continue play.

Very shortly six Thai men walked into the room, one by one. I jokingly said to Ron, 'uh oh, we are getting raided by the Thai police', as it is fairly uncommon to see several Thai men in a Bangkok home game, at least in my experience.

Within seconds two of them have cameras out and are taking random photographs of the table and of players. One of them says 'Immigration' and has a big ear to ear grin on. I take this as a joke and start laughing, smiling nice and wide for the picture he takes of me.

I then proceed to limp my button with 65 suited of spaids. I look left to Josh who says, 'they are serious, this is not good'. What the fuck? I turn around, now one of them has a camcorder out and is recording our actions. They are being very nice and polite and a couple of them are smiling and laughing a bit. We are all drinking and in a good mood and the mood remains this way for some time.

Though as the moments wear on everybody in the room becomes aware of the fact that there are six plain clothed cops taking photo's of our home game and videotaping our every move.

Edward begins raising his voice talking about all of the various generals and colonels he knows in the Thai government and we all begin to laugh at the laundry list of people we know between us who (we thought) could get us out of this mess with the push of a cell phone button. So we all began doing this. Ron and Edward in particular were able to pull out all sorts of high ranking officials to talk to the police and attempt to convince them they had picked the wrong group of Farang to fuck with.

I have only two contacts who I could think to call to possibly help us get out of this mess, one a prominent Bangkok lawyer I met through poker friends, the other the father of a good friend who I'll just say is very very well connected in Thailand. I couldn't get either on the phone initially so I just waited it out and try to let the others work the magic with their friends and contacts.

We ended up waiting around for several hours while the officials counted down our chip stacks, put all of the chips in 7-11 grocery bags, took pictures of anything and everything in the apartment and just generally stood around and did nothing. During this several hours they made no demands of us, other than we obviously could not leave the apartment. They continued to let us drink our beer and cocktails, smoke cigarettes, move about the apartment freely and make unlimited calls on our cell phones. We were never searched or even questioned besides 'who was sitting here?' in reference to the poker game.

Meanwhile the late arrival to the game was standing near the door and conversing with the officials, pointing around the room and speaking to them in Thai. It became quite obvious that he was a rat. I said this to the owner of the home and he nodded his head, having already realized that himself. We all began to taunt him a bit, and he sputtered back telling us that we didn't understand and that we shouldn't have advertised on the internet. Probably true. In retrospect it was pretty risky behavior, especially in a country where gambling is illegal and everybody knows that.

Still though, it is my opinion the Farang's (foreigners...white people) in Thailand should stick together in situations like this...as the Thai's clearly do. You're not going to catch Thai's turning other Thai's in if they are doing harm to Farang. I seriously think this guy should have his testicles forcefully removed and fed to him.

After several hours and much talking between the people we called and the Thai girlfriend of our host, along with some connected Thai's who were called in by one of the game participants, it was made clear to us that we could not buy our way out of this situation, and the people we were calling to help us were doing us more harm than good. They rounded us up and led us downstairs into a paddy wagon and drove us down to the main Bangkok Immigration center.

There we sat for hours and hours while they prepared a long confession for us to sign, 100% in Thai. What a nightmare. They were telling us all we would have to do is go before a judge and say we were guilty, pay a small fine and then go home. Though they said if we did not sign the confession, which we couldn't read or understand, that we'd have to sit in jail for a few days and wait for an open calendar spot and go to trial. FOR PLAYING POKER.

I finally got my lawyer on the phone and he said what they were saying was likely true...the government wasn't likely to look upon this crime as a very harsh one, they'd likely give us a fine and let us go, but the judge was in no way required to follow what the police said. Nobody, not even my lawyer, could tell us what the maximum penalty was for our crime, or even the name of the crime we had committed.

We all started to get pretty panicked about this time and small factions of our group began to form. Many people started to be quietly resigned to the whole situation while others (including me) wanted answers and weren't willing to take this lying down.

I'll say that during all of this they did treat us very well. We sat in the back conference room of the Immigration station and they continued to allow us to smoke and drink and they also allowed our friends and girlfriends to join us. We were not put into cells or searched at any point and the officials really had no contact with any of us at all, and allowed us to freely roam around the office, sitting on their couches and using their break room dishes etc. I can't imagine poor immigrants from Laos are treated in this way.

Anyway during the entire process, though we were being treated well, I began to get more and more concerned as they told us we would have to go to a Police Station and be arrested for our crime, then go before a judge later in the afternoon. We would also have to remain in custody this entire time.

In America if you are picked up for a petty crime, they cut you a ticket and tell you when to return to court. That’s the only reference point I had, and coupled with the fact that they had what looked like about ten people working on this, it seemed more serious to me than they were making it out to be. Why would they send an undercover informant into our game and bring six officials down for several hours, then haul us all away and hold us while they investigate for several more hours...if this is a minor crime that they are going to let us walk for?

I learned about Groupthink in college and that started to flash before my eyes here. It is when a group of people all basically just nod in unison, not wanting to be the one to buck the status quo, when going down a slippery slope to a horrible decision...such as being arrested in a third world country and signing a confession they cannot read under duress. I could see this on the Amnesty International website. I began to panic.

I got the idea to call the US Embassy and see if they could send us down somebody to explain it to us and try to negotiate our release. Everybody in the group disagreed with me on this. They said it would blow it out of proportion. I still think that would have been the best course of action, that is why they are there anyway right? But I allowed myself to be stifled by the 15+ other people, along with the immigration officials, telling me this wasn't a good idea.

Though after I made that request, the officials suddenly told us that if we cooperated and settled down (that obviously directed to me as nobody else was making any fuss at all) that we could stay in their facility until court, a place we had obviously grown comfortable.

I had my girlfriend (who had come down a couple of hours sooner to bring me my passport and provide some much needed support) translate the document for us. Other than the fact that we were claiming their was no money involved, it was surprisingly 100% accurate...down to the part where the police treated us very kind and never forced us to do anything. I was shocked. I expected it to be full of lies and exaggerations and huge claims. We were playing a small buy-in tournament, they came in, took us away and were nice about doing that. All true.

So in the end all but one of us signed it.

Soon after we signed it they loaded us back in the paddy wagon and said we had to go to the police station. Uh oh. They had just lied to us. We began to get worried again. For every part nice these people were to us, they were an equal party shady. We must have been told ten different stories about what was going to happen and when we would be allowed to leave. Each time a new story emerged a short while later. All with a nice big Thai smile and an invitation to return sitting with our girlfriends, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.

We got back in our paddy wagon. This was actually quite a fun experience, all in all. Our group certainly wasn't a bunch of hardened criminals. I'd be shocked if 8/11 or more of us didn't have college degree's, several of us own successful businesses and you could just tell by the topics of conversation, these were good people. What the fuck were we doing in a paddy wagon in a third world country? Maybe you had to be there, but most of us couldn't help but laugh about it. Staring through metal bars at the Thai people on the street looking up at us being hauled off like a bunch of drug dealers.

So we arrive at the police station, our girlfriends waiting outside for us. I'll pause here to say that Thai girlfriends are amazingly selfless and supportive, in this type of situation and in general. I'd like to see a group of white girlfriends do this for a random assortment of home game players in the US. None of them ever complained about any of this, they continued to bring us food and drinks and negotiation with the police for us all night...in between taking breaks giving us hugs and telling us everything would be all right. Just amazing.

My girlfriend told me that the police were not going to be as nice as the immigration officials. They are much more corrupt and rude. They ushered us in, looked over the poker chips and talked amongst each other for some time. They then brought us in as a group and one of them said to us, in pretty good English, that we'd all be fine, we just have to pay a fine and we'll be going home. We all were very happy and congratulated each other a bit. He also said we wouldn't have to spend any time in jail or in a cell. Excellent. Lets get this over with.

A few minutes later they ushered us up some stairs and into a room with two other officers. One problem, we look to the back of the room and there were some of the ugliest jail cells I had ever seen. Uh oh, were we lied to again? We all stood around for awhile, smoking and drinking the waters and snacks our girlfriends had brought, wondering again when all of this would be over. Then the head police officer came in and started barking at us to go into the cell he had just opened. FUCK.

We all go in there, as surreal an experience as I have ever had, all of us giggling and just not believing this was happening. There were small, dirty, smelly, shirtless Thai men sprawled out all over the floor of this long hallway with maybe 8 cells in total going off on the sides. Each of us still had everything in our possessions that we had come in with, and our girlfriends began feeding through bottles of water and bags of chips for us. I gave mine 10,000 baht (about $300) to try and buy my way out of this. She said she'd do her best. The look on her face isn't one I ever want to put on anybody’s face again. She felt so bad for me. I was smiling, for a reason I can't fully put into words. It just didn't make any sense and I couldn't help but to laugh about it.

So we all stood around munching on Lays, smoking cigarettes, making phone calls telling people we were officially in a Thai jail and collectively wondering how long we'd be in this hell hole. That is really what it was, a fucking hell hole. Smelled like old feces and dried urine. The walls looked like they hadn't been cleaned in years, the whole place a very dingy yellow color with the types of prison cells you see in movies with bars running floor to ceiling.

Within ten minutes they opened the cell for us and let us all out. We all sat down, laughing pretty hard that we were now released from our stint in a Thai jail. We sat down and were very relieved and told of the deal our girls had negotiated for us not to stay in the cell. I wont release details of that here, as I don't want to get anybody into trouble nor do I want any more trouble myself. I'll just say that we are very lucky men.

We were told we'd have to wait until 9:00 in this room before they would take us to court. None of us had gotten any sleep and the fun was beginning to wear off. We were also getting more worried about what might happen to each of us. The teachers were concerned about losing their Thai jobs, the rest of us concerned we'd get booted from the country...and all of us a bit worried the judge might throw the book at us and we'd be in a Thai jail for years for playing poker.

For the next several hours we watch TV with the police, laughing about the resident crack head who keeps speaking nonsense to us while offering to fetch coffee for us and the cops, goes in and messes around with the prisoners etc. This man has obviously been doing crack (or whatever they use in Thailand) since most of us were small children. The police though did nothing more than occasionally shoo him out the door. You would never see this in America in a million years.

Around 9:30 they finally got us together and put us back in the paddy wagon. Our girlfriends/friends were able to get them not to put shackles on us for the trip, which would have been a fairly humiliating experience. We got to the courthouse and waited for the judge to arrive for over two and a half hours. All of us badly needed sleep and we were getting more worried about what the judge may say. They told us they wanted us to plead guilty and then the judge would give us a sentence.

Here we were in this old, broken courtroom, being spoken to in a language we do not understand, about to plead guilty to a crime who's name we did not know and carrying a maximum penalty we were not aware of, having signed a confession we did not understand. The anxiety was growing thick.

I called my lawyer again, who told me he'd send a Thai down there for us to find out what was going on. He said he'd take about 20 minutes. 15 minutes later the judge (a very attractive 35ish year old Thai woman) finally entered the room.

Obviously the whole thing is in Thai and they do not have an interpreter for us. One by one the defendants behind us stand up and the judge goes through a very quick speech with them, they say something quickly back in Thai, she says a bit more than hands off the documents in her hand to somebody else, they sit down and then she calls the next name. I had no idea what was happening. Then one of the teachers next to me said each of them was being given a fine, nothing more. He also said we were in the misdemeanor court. Excellent news.

She called our names one by one, butchering each of them beyond belief. We all stand up and then she tells the owner of the apartment's girlfriend to step forward. She goes through some process with her that none of the other people had to do, we get worried again. She appears to be giving her oath. She then goes through the same motions as before, and Apple turns to us and tells us that we are accused of playing poker and some other small details (all true), and that we need to plead guilty. My life flashes before my eyes, I'm having nightmarish visions of not being granted an appeal for making huge mistakes in this process...rotting away in a Thai Prison making futile arguments about the injustices of the Thai penal system. Everybody says guilty, I don't say anything in the hopes that I could possibly say later that I didn't speak nor understand what was going on...then the judge begins to speak in Thai. Apple turns to us and says that the owner of the home would be required to pay a roughly $50 fine, and the rest of us about $25, and we were free to go.

WHAT THE FUCK?? They held us for all of that time, wasted countless man hours from seemingly high ranking investigators and others, and it all amounted to a $25 fine!

Sure, here is my money, let me out of here!

So in classic Thai style, it takes another hour for them to finish up, collect our money, and usher us out. But one more suprise is in store for us. We have to get back on the paddy wagon and go back to immigration. Now immigration decides if they want to allow us to keep our Visa's and remain in Thailand. Thailand is notorious for stamping the passports of unwanted people with Persona Non Grata, meaning you are effectively blacklisted from ever returning. As all but one of us have lives here, we were very worried about that.

My lawyer finally arrives and after talking with the Thai officials a bit tells me we have nothing to worry about. We are going back to immigration to sign some documents and we'll be released. He also tells me my poker friend (his boss) is very well connected at all levels of the Thai Government and if there are any problems, I can call him and he'll be glad to help me out. Great news. I tell him there is no need for him to stay but if there are problems at immigration I'll call him.

We get back to immigration and our wonderful girlfriends are again waiting for us. They worked out for us to stay in the same room we had before, instead of the much uglier/more prison-like Immigration Detention Center. We feasted on Pad Thai and Fish Ball Soup, smoking cigarettes and all feeling pretty good. It was about 1pm now, and we'd been in custody for over 12 hours, but we were glad it was all coming to a close.

My girlfriend told me they were working on a solution to speed this up for us and get us on our way (details of which I wont release, for fear of further problems) and it should all be over soon. Then something odd happened. They told us all to head downstairs and we were going to a new building, with more staff, he could get this done quicker.

Another twist. We were all pretty sick and tired of twists. We get over to the Immigration Detention Center and are told to sit around a picnic table and our girlfriends had to wait outside, beyond our view. On the other side of a huge metal fence we see about fifty shirtless and short Asian men squatting and taking instructions from a Thai guard. He is telling them to do things like stand on one leg with something in their mouth and a hand on their head. It looks like ritual humiliation you'd do during a fraternity pledging process, but these seemingly were captured illegal aliens coming from Myanmar or Cambodia. It made very little sense to any of us.

We get our girlfriends on the phone and are told we are now under a different Generals control and any deal that was being worked on before is effectively dead, we should be prepared to be sitting there for a long while, possibly through another evening.

Then we get news awhile later that one of the Thai police thought what we had done was very bad, he wanted to revoke our Visa's and deport us. This would mean a long wait in this jail and that we couldn't return to Thailand. Obviously very bad news for us all.

We had a further problem that several people in our group were unable to produce their passports, further delaying things. Over the next several hours we kept getting conflicting messages...we would be released soon, we wouldn't be released for a long time, they were running background checks (very bad for some of us) to see if we had criminal records overseas, they were working on some type of deal etc etc.

A few times we got news that our release was near immediate, we all got excited and stood around waiting, and then nothing. The despair was obvious by looking at our faces.

Then they told us to go onto the other side of the fence and sit in a row of chairs. We sat there watching TV and wondering if we'd ever get out, when the little guard who had been processing us motioned for us to come over...and he had our passports in his hand! He began calling our names one by one, handing us our passports. I never thought I would be so happy to have my passport in my posession again. I was close to tears. We signed a paper, I have no idea what it said, and were ushered back into our old waiting area. We all had our passports and were just standing there, wondering what now. They never told us to leave. Thai's are so odd about that stuff. I just looked at the guard and said 'Pai Mai?' (we can go, right?). He nodded. We all headed for the exit. Our entourage waiting on the other side. Free men. No permanent records on our passports, our Visa's intact etc. Nobody lost their teaching or other jobs to my knowledge and all is well.

Needless to say I wont be playing any more poker in Thailand, no, not that kind either. It simply isn't worth the risk. That was a very scary experience. If not for our connections, resources (ahem...) and Thai negotiators, we likely would have had a far harsher experience.

I love this country. I may not always live here but I will always visit it. I do not want to lose that rite. We came close. I also love my freedom and for 19 hours I did not have that. All for playing poker.

What a night. Feel free to cross-post this any place you like. It was definately one of the more interesting experiences I have ever had.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Ballin

2007-07-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

This is just awesome. A bunch of 2+2ers got one of the huge Palms suites and Partied like they were in a 50 cent video. The 2+2 thread is here.

Some excerpts:

Posted by Good2cu

-Butler walks in on me having a threesome before everyone arrives.
-2k worth of booze was consumed with about as much blow
-Our hired bartender gets tanked, stops bartending and ends up getting [censored]/eaten out my Skylar with everyone watching in our huge hottub on the balcony (we had the suite the girls got in the realitly show girls next door)
-CTS loses 100k playing blackjack at the Belliago then comes home and passes out in the hallway at the Palms
-Riche_Menlo pukes on a cab driver
-Plans for cokerunners.com worked out
-Butler gets us 60 vicadon pills
-Ordered one of everything from room service
-Dozens of drunk underage girls rounded up my the butler and brought to our room.
-Won a bet with traheo with the line on our room +16.5k (I took the over)
-CTS bought a 20k watch in the morning.

Posted by Traheo

1. I won 8.5k in beer pong w/o playing
2. our rooom was 6200 sq feet, had a gym, sauna, bar, living room, kitchen, poker table, rotating beds, pop out tvs, and two bedrooms with 5 bathrooms
3. i have a huge hicky on my neck that i dont remember getting
4. the butler walks outside and we are all smoking joints and he asks if we need lighters
5. a lot of [censored] got stolen
6. isaac (westmenloAA) banged the second hooker for free (or so he claims)
7. there were condoms floating in the pool
8. it was easily top 5 sickest nights of my life and i'd bet everyone would say the same.

I think somebody should post this on Wikipedia as an example of what Baller is.

Finally a Nice Fat Cash

2007-07-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

Played the $2500 Venetian Main Event, part of their CEO Poker Tour. Played great poker on day 1 and ended as the chip leader. Came back on day 2 and misstepped in a couple of pots, then re-gained the chip-lead and then donked off most of my stack as the final table got underway.

I had to take one coin flip (which I absolutely hate doing late tourney) with JJ v AQ and I held for once in my life, to have 2nd stack with 5 left. I donked around some more and got down to 4th in chips when a deal was proposed. A chip count chop would have given me $60k, and I negotiated $73.5k. I assume they had some measure of respect for my game but the blinds were huge and I had been the only guy all tournament (from 20 players down) absolutely refusing to chop...and I'm sure they had figured out there is at least one screw loose in my head and I'm willing to put all the money in the middle on a moments notice...so they gave me far more than my fair share of the money. I have also been looking into short stacking cash games.

The shorter stack than me also got a nice deal, taking home $59k when chip count gave him 47.

It was a fun experience and also fun finally not to (completely) bust my stack for once deep into a tournament. I'm really really good at getting that huge stack going, and taking advantage of players who want to last in the tournament...but not win, but when it comes to avoiding confrontations with other big stacks and changing gears...I need a lot of work.

Bellagio Cup Main Event today, WPT event and my third ever $10k buy-in tournament. Wish me luck.

The more I play deep in these tournaments, the more confident I feel that I can compete at this level. I'm giving some serious thought to loaning myself $100k as a bankroll for live tournaments and giving the tourney trail a shot. A lot of people from 2+2 have had some great success doing it, no reason it can't be me.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Main Event

2007-07-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

Went busto in the Main Event about 8 hours after we started. A significant improvement on the 2 hands I played last year ;)

I got in some rough spots, had to fold two pair twice and the hand I busted on was probably the third time I should have folded two pair. I limped 54o after one limper, three more came along and the flop was J54. The big blind bet out, I raised pretty big and when it folded back to him he flat called after a lot of thought. A Ten hit the turn and he be out about half my stack and I shoved in frustration. He had pocket fives.

One good note on the day was that at the very beginning of the day when my table broke, I got moved to the ESPN Feature Table with Doyle Brunson. He was on my immediate left and I chatted with him a fair bit. We had multiple camera's in our face all day, the hole-card cam's and a cheering audience the whole time. Not the situation where I'd like to have ended up at that table, but I'll take it. I should get some good TV face time when ESPN starts airing the WSOP.

I was supposed to get on a plane back to Thailand today. I'm having second thoughts. I can't really put my finger on why, but it just doesn't feel right. I do not want to stay in Las Vegas, nor do I want to move back to LA. I'm thinking of taking a road trip...possibly going to see my little brother up in Washington State and checking out Canada with him or something. I'll definately keep my apartment in Bangkok and spend a lot of time there, just not sure if that is home right now.

I'll post again when I have a more concrete plan. In the mean time going to give this 10k WPT event at Bellagio a try.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

69th in Rebuy. Main Event Next

2007-07-05T08:21:00.000-07:00

This picture is pretty sweet. Me at the $1k Re-buy event, in the money and short stacked, making an all-in PF play for all of my chips, Danny Alaei looking on. I busted 69th in this event. A fairly large disappointment, though a solid 2nd cash for me in my 2nd WSOP. My table was stacked with Jeff Lisandro, Amnon Fillipi, Alaei, Alan Sass and JC Tran. I raised Amnon's BB from the SB with Q3o and he reraised. He was the 2nd stack at the table behind me and I decided to make a statment early on and re-raise him huge. This has worked well for me in the past though unfortunately he had KK here and I was forced to call his all-in and double him up. That left me pretty crippled and I ended up busting out before the big money came. It was an amazing experience though and I have no regrets whatsoever. I'm playing some great poker right now and really looking forward to the Main Event.

Took a day off of poker today and played some golf, worked on some websites with my designer (who I flew into town to get some stuff finished) and went out drinking for the first time in Vegas. Fun times. Tomorrow hoping to take a trip to the Grand Canyon or some other exciting day trip, then hunker down for what will hopefully be a long week of poker in the main event.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

2nd WSOP Cash

2007-07-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

That was quick.

Unless I do something really stupid today or get really unlucky again, I should have my 2nd WSOP cash in the bag. $1,000 NL w/rebuys event. Unfortunately for me if I cash I'll still show a net loss for the tournament as I played pretty crazy in the rebuy period and am in for $7,000.

I had a chance to be the tournament chip leader with 300 to go (1,000 started) and lost and all in pre-flop with KK vs QQ. Pretty sweet though that I eventually got all of my chips back from the same guy in three separate pots.

Then I was the tournament 2nd chip stack with 150 to go and lost ANOTHER all-in pre-flop with KK to JJ. That one really got me pissed off. 2nd chance I had to be the tourney chip leader and all I had to do was win an 80/20. Willie Tan is a real nice guy. He came over to the sidelines and patted me on the face like a grandfather and calmed me down. Class act Willie is.

We are down to about 120 players, 98 make the money. I have just a little below average. The line-up in the last 120 players is like a who's who of poker though.

David Williams, Daniel Alaei, Steve Billirakis (MrSmokey...already has one bracelet this year), Carl Olson (Colson10 from 2+2), Jordan Morgan (ImSoLuckyO from 2+2), Noel Scruggs (NetwBuggs from 2+2, a good buddy of mine...go Noel!), Alan Sass (TheUsher from 2+2), Amnon Filppi, Phil Hellmuth (who I played with for a bit, and told him he sounded like a little woman whining over bad beats...god he is annoying), Joe Hachem and several others.

Whats really awesome about this to me is the fact that I have played some amazing poker. The fact that I've had several (there were many smaller ones) sick beats put on me and have still managed to navigate a solid stack in this tournament is something I'm very proud of. It wasn't until the last couple of hours of the evening that I began to play with people who I didnt completely own. I was in the zone all day, taking down so many pots...then unfortunately losing all in several times as a huge favorite...

Ok I'm just whining now lol

Wish me luck today, I need it.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

First WSOP Cash

2007-07-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

I decided to come to the WSOP after all. I've played two events so far, the $5k short handed event, and the $2,000 NL event. I busted fairly early in the $5k event but got pretty deep in the $2k NL event. I was the 17th largest stack going into day 2, though my loose aggressive style was not working out like it had on day 1, and I made my exit at around 80th place. Not bad for a field of 2,000 players...though a bit disappointing as I had high expectations after my amazing day 1. It was just one of those perfect runs where many of my big hands were getting paid off and most of my moves were working out. I crushed the bubble, nearly doubling my stack whilst never going to showdown, all in about an hour's time. So many players really wanting to make it into the money...cashing was just not a big concern of mine...I played to win.

Three people I played quite a bit with and got to know pretty well all made the final table, further adding to my misery. I wish them all luck though, three great players. Anna, Roland De Wolfe and Steve.

This is the only picture of me I could find online. Sporting my hood and lucky monkey. I took to wearing the hood because Roland De Wolfe was sitting two to my left for several hours and was absolutely amazing at getting inside my head each time that I raised. I really need to learn how that guy does what he does. He personifies what makes live pro's so much different from online pro's. He's a sound poker player but so much of what makes him great is just a non-factor online. He was pretty ham-stringed at my table and didn't grow his stack (proud to say I was a big part of that)...but evidently he went on a rush after our table broke and he's made the final table.

I'll share two hands from the tournament...both of which are in my top five favorite/most well played hands of my poker career.

Hand 1 was versus Roland De Wolfe. He'd been flat calling a lot of my raises and taking down too many pots from me, all while jabbering away...picking up my monkey and playing with it and generally doing all sorts of things to try and make reads on me. I opened K8 spades from the Cut-Off and he goes into his routine...then finally re-raises me about 25% of his stack...we were both fairly deep but I had him covered by a bit. We are about 20 players to the money and it gets back to me...I smile and look at him and say All In with no hesitation. He turbo-mucks his cards and I take down the pot, and now have a pretty big chip-lead over the table. Roland also never flat called one of my raises or re-raised me again for the rest of the tournament. I think I had made my statement and I proceeded to gain a massive stack after that hand.

Hand 2 was a bit after we had made the money and nearing the end of day 1. A new player came to our table and had a big stack, but about 30% less than me. I raised AQo in late position and he pretty quickly called behind me. Flop A 4 5. I fire out a bet not much bigger than my initial raise (which with blinds and ante's was a pretty small bet compared to the size of the pot). He thinks for a bit and calls. Turn pairs the 4. I think for quite a while and check. He also thinks for quite awhile and then bets out about 1.5 times what I had led the flop for. I think he has an ace, but there is no way he has AK in my mind, he would have re-raised PF or on the flop. I wait about five seconds and go all in. Immediately his frustration is clear and I know now that at worst he has the same hand as me...and at best I'm likely going to bust him, or take down a big pot right here. He tanks and finally folds Ace Queen!! Power poker.

I'll be playing the NL rebuys event and the main event as well. I'm already missing Thailand but had to give this a shot. Wish me luck.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

This was fun too...

2007-06-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

As to why I'm sitting 200/400, just taking a shot...and short stacking while I do it. I've been running very very well and as I've done moving up so far, I'm taking a small piece of my winnings and taking a stab at higher stakes.

I've made over $20k so far at 200/400 ;)

Oh yeah, thats only half a buy-in...

Full Tilt Poker Game #2694084426: Table DSnyder766 - $200/$400 - No Limit Hold'em - 18:43:51 ET - 2007/06/17
Seat 1: Gus Hansen ($23,587)
Seat 4: traheho ($49,409)
Seat 5: whitelime ($40,000)
Seat 6: BarFine600 ($9,400)
traheho posts the small blind of $200
whitelime posts the big blind of $400
The button is in seat #1
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to BarFine600 [Qs As]
BarFine600 raises to $1,400
Gus Hansen raises to $4,800
traheho folds
whitelime folds
BarFine600 calls $3,400
whitelime adds $400
*** FLOP *** [5s Qc Js]
BarFine600 checks
Gus Hansen bets $16,400
BarFine600 calls $4,600, and is all in
Gus Hansen shows [Kc Qh]
BarFine600 shows [Qs As]
Uncalled bet of $11,800 returned to Gus Hansen
*** TURN *** [5s Qc Js] [5c]
*** RIVER *** [5s Qc Js 5c] [2c]
Gus Hansen shows two pair, Queens and Fives
BarFine600 shows two pair, Queens and Fives
BarFine600 wins the pot ($19,398) with two pair, Queens and Fives
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $19,400 | Rake $2
Board: [5s Qc Js 5c 2c]
Seat 1: Gus Hansen (button) showed [Kc Qh] and lost with two pair, Queens and Fives
Seat 4: traheho (small blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 5: whitelime (big blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 6: BarFine600 showed [Qs As] and won ($19,398) with two pair, Queens and Fives

This was pretty fun

2007-06-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

I am BarFine600. sbrugby is aba20 on 2+2 AKA Brian Townsend, AKA the guy who just punked Sammy Farha out of a couple million at the Bellagio.

Full Tilt Poker Game #2670766688: Table Canfield (6 max) - $200/$400 - No Limit Hold'em - 1:59:08 ET - 2007/06/15
Seat 1: maxypaxy ($3,800)
Seat 2: BarFine600 ($7,400)
Seat 3: sbrugby ($40,597)
Seat 4: noataima ($45,304)
Seat 5: Gus Hansen ($78,175)
Seat 6: RonaldKosh ($78,120.50)
PepeLucho2 (Observer): how long 4 maxy to DIE ?
Gus Hansen posts the small blind of $200
RonaldKosh posts the big blind of $400
The button is in seat #4
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to BarFine600 [Ad As]
Erin04 (Observer): highstakesdb.com
MUCKYAHNDIDIOT (Observer): is townshend having a bad evening?
maxypaxy folds
Rangerfan4lyfe (Observer): Mud= moronic
BarFine600 raises to $1,400
sbrugby raises to $4,800
Mister MudFlap (Observer): heheh
noataima folds
Mister MudFlap (Observer): sup ranger
Brian91 (Observer): he has 147k on another table
Gus Hansen has 15 seconds left to act
Rangerfan4lyfe (Observer): lol j/k bro, not much
Gus Hansen folds
RonaldKosh folds
PepeLucho2 (Observer): barfine is SUBMORONIC
Worse than aids (Observer): JCM is right, there is no reason for a site like this to be rigged
BarFine600 raises to $7,400, and is all in
Mister MudFlap (Observer): right on, i killed it last night boy
sbrugby calls $2,600
BarFine600 shows [Ad As]
Rangerfan4lyfe (Observer): you?
sbrugby shows [Ah Kd]
koolry (Observer): WHY WOULD I WANT MY PIXEL DELETED
*** FLOP *** [5s Qs 9c]
*** TURN *** [5s Qs 9c] [8h]
*** RIVER *** [5s Qs 9c 8h] [4c]
StudentOfBlaze (Observer): he was being sarcastic you moron
BarFine600 shows a pair of Aces
sbrugby shows Ace King high
BarFine600 wins the pot ($15,397) with a pair of Aces
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $15,400 | Rake $3
Board: [5s Qs 9c 8h 4c]
Seat 1: maxypaxy didn't bet (folded)
Seat 2: BarFine600 showed [Ad As] and won ($15,397) with a pair of Aces
Seat 3: sbrugby showed [Ah Kd] and lost with Ace King high
Seat 4: noataima (button) didn't bet (folded)
Seat 5: Gus Hansen (small blind) folded before the Flop

No White Chics!

2007-06-03T04:00:00.000-07:00

I think I will be headed back to America for the WSOP. As this heater continues (+ more than $70k now) poker is in the veins for me and playing some big tournaments with the proceeds sounds like a lot of fun. I didn't want to go to the series and potentially lose a lot of my hard earned money but I really have no problem on a few week long freeroll from a nice little online rush.

I have one commitment to myself while I am there though: NO WHITE CHICS. None.

Funny story on that:

Last night me and a couple of friends were at a go-go bar and a semi-decent looking white chic comes up and asks my friend Brad where he was from. He looks at her, looks straight ahead and says very dryly, 'Maine'. The fact that he said Maine after he looked straight again was the key. She said 'oh' and looked kind of puzzled and went back to her seat.

Persistent as she was, she comes back over and sits next to David and starts blabbering away (like white women do). I can't really catch what she's saying but I notice one thing, David isn't saying much besides giving short answers to her questions...and staring straight ahead.

Then an instant classic: She asks David what he does, and he gives some short answer and she perks up and says 'Well I'm a teacher', and a proud smile...like he should care and ask some follow up questions.

Davids reply: 'Ok. Good luck with that'. Turns straight ahead again. The look on her face was pure comedy. Three drunk guys from her own country, looking at dancing girls on a pole, not the least bit interested in talking to or hitting on her...at all.

No white chics.

I've only had one friend in Thailand be at all interested in them, and he's back in California now, probably listening to some girls problems...doing his own dishes and laundry. Sorry bro. Come back soon ;)

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Time to Jinx Myself

2007-05-30T04:57:00.000-07:00

I've been playing $10/20 NL a lot for the last few weeks. Been doing a lot of data-mining, reading 2+2 (though I still can't participate) and going over hands with friends via AIM.

I've made over $30,000 this week, $16,000 in a 90 minute session just now. All of this means nothing of coarse about my ability to beat the game. I've been playing around with it at maybe 5,000 hands per month for the last couple of months...I have a splendid run up like this and then start to play like crap when I stop running hot as the sun.

Up a good $50,000 in the game overall though. Again, still am not positive I can beat it in the long run and definately know I do not have the mental fortitude required to play it 50,000 hands per month. Fun for now though.

Thanks for hearing me brag, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Jonathan Little (FieryJustice): WPT Champ

2007-05-24T21:46:00.000-07:00

The first STT forum guy to win a major event. I've known Jonathan for over two years now and feel a bit proud to have seen him come this far. He made this post on 2+2 in 2005 asking us whether he should quit his job to play poker full-time. He ultimately decided that was the right decision and has gone onto dominate first high stakes SNG's, and now live MTT's. He cashed a ton in last years WSOP and has had a sick sick sick run since then.

Currently he is 2nd in the CardPlayer Player of the Year rankings.

Wow. Just wow.

Well done sir, keep it up!

Looking Good for Internet Gambling

2007-05-22T06:56:00.000-07:00

Two articles recently have indicated that the Treasury Department is dragging its feet putting regulations into place for the UIGEA that pass in October. They gave 270 days, which is almost up, and still no regulations.

http://www.eog.com/news/full-article.aspx?id=24202

http://www.online-casinos.com/news/news4555.asp

I'm thinking of applying to run the following department:

We estimate that about five federal employees working on this could keep and maintain a list of Internet gambling operations

Me and my staff of four will be responsible for maintaining a list of online gaming establishments and payment processors.

Our government is nothing if not efficient...

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Rich Dad Poor Dad

2007-05-18T16:13:00.000-07:00

I just re-read this great book. It was reccomended to me for the first time six months after I had finished University. I was working a $500 per week job, taking the train each day, 90 minutes each way, to work. I had no car, a hugely negative net worth and absolutely no idea how to manage or build wealth.

My future goals consisted of working my way up in my current job, or finding a better one, and impressing my current and future bosses enough to get a high paying salary.

This book opened my eyes. After I read this book I knew I would only work for others as long as was necessary to put its advice into action.

My parents were and are poor. After I read this book, I was no longer poor. I was broke, but not poor. As Kiyosaki states in the book, 'broke is temporary, poor is eternal'.

I'll give some highlights of the book but you really should let the author work his magic and read it yourself. If you have any interest in becoming wealthy, you are only hurting yourself NOT to read it:

1. The poor and the middle class teach their kids how to 'climb the ladder': the rich teach their kids how to 'own the ladder'

2. The rich earn, spend all they can, and pay taxes on what is left over. The poor earn, pay taxes, and spend what is left over.

3. You want to acquire assetts and minimize the acquizition of liabilities.

There is a whole lot more but thats what initially came to mind.

What this book did for me:

It has made me an absolute fanatic about acquiring income producing assets. Websites, debt, bankrolling players, CD's, stocks...whatever I can find. Next up on this list is real estate. If I can find a piece of property where the monthly rent will cover the mortgage, chances are, I'm going to buy it. The problem is that hasn't been possible really in the US for years, but I think it may be soon.

I live a rather lavish lifestyle, at least compared to most people my age, and I cannot yet stop working and have my assets fund my lifestyle...acheiving true financial freedom. Though if I were to lead a more modest existance I could. So theoretically speaking, at the age of 26, I could retire.

Sure I've done some of this myself and had guidance and help from other places and people (and a lot of luck!) but this would not have been possible if I had not read this book...or learned its lessons some other way.

I suggest you read it as well, be sure to send me an email thanking me after you make your first million!

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Ko Tao and Hawaii, and Back Home

2007-04-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

Spent a few days on Koh Tao (one of the most beautiful Thai islands) with the lady and then went over to Honolulu for the Kokua Festival. Both were awesome.

I felt really lame going round trip to Hawaii just to see Jack Johnson play so I invited my mother and brother to go with me. I flew them both out there and treated them to a much needed vacation.

My brother is 21 now and not doing a whole lot with his life. He mentioned wanting to go to college so I think I am going to try and help him do that. Our family doesn't have much money (I put myself through school with help from Uncle Sam) so he could definately get some government money if he got a good semester or two under his belt.

I feel very blessed to be able to do things like this now for poeple I care about. I had many angels help me along the way and to be able to pay it forward now for others is an awesome feeling.

I don't have too much planned for the near future. I've been slacking off dealing with my existing customers and people are starting to get pissed at me. So I should probably spend a week or so getting my house in order.

I've been getting asked a lot if I am going to be headed to the World Series this year and I really don't think it is going to happen. Being in Vegas for any amount of time right now just does not sound like fun to me. If they moved it to Amsterdam I'd be all over it but Vegas, yuck. No thanks.

I've also been putting a lot of thought into writing a book. I don't harbor any delusions that I've done enough with my life thus far to make an interesting book, but I think I have a book in me. I'm brainstorming now for what exactly to write about. Alex Garland's The Beach was probably inspired by his own travels and I could do something like that. I've also considered a book of short stories about people like myself who have done some neat things with the freedoms poker money has provided them. If you have any idea's for me please do email them to me or post here.

Not really looking to make any money or have a super famous book, but I think that'd be a pretty good way to spend six months or a year of my time and feel like I'm doing something productive.

I'm off to enjoy being back in Bangkok.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Respectful Blogging

2007-04-09T05:56:00.000-07:00

NY Times Article

Fuck that article

Fuck George Bush

Fuck his son too

Fuck America

That is all

Monte Carlo and Rome...and a Bit of Poker

2007-04-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

Monte Carlo was good times. Business went well and I enjoyed my time in the South of France. Such a beautiful place. I feel a bit out of place there however, as it is the upper upper crust of society in a very pretensious country. It is nice to have a look around and people watch but after a few days I was ready to go. I didn't want to head stright back to Bangkok as I was already over there so I decided to go checkout my Italian roots on a trip to Rome.

What a spectacular city. I stayed very near the main train station and walked everywhere. Saw St. Peter's Square and Bacilica, The Collesium, Trevi Fountain and a lot of other really really old places. Fun time. Great food. People were also pretty cool. A bit snappy and short with you, kinda like me, but with an underlying caring demeanor. Some people probably find them rude, I understand the way they are. It is pretty similar to Manhatten in that regard.

Back in Bangkok now and trying to get caught up with work. If you have been waiting on me for anything I am really sorry. I am really enjoying this break but I realize some people are still counting on me.

I'm getting in pretty deep in a relationship here which I'm not sure is a good thing yet. Girl is pretty awesome though I am not sure I am ready to be in a long term relationship. No point really and it also acts as an anchor. I'm sure it had a lot to do with why I rushed back to Bangkok ;)

Headed off on another series of trips shortly and trying to squeeze in some time with my new poker coach and at the tables. I've had an impressive run up lately, though the cards are definately falling in place for me. We'll see if I can retain composure when I don't flop sets with 40% of my pocket pairs.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Hong Kong and Monaco

2007-03-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong was amazing. That is the second city after Tokyo that I've seen in Asia that I would consider living in. Well besides Paradise (Bangkok) of coarse ;)

I was only there a few days but it was just one of those places that I clicked with. Great food, clean buildings and loads of nice places to go eat and drink. The cityskape is gorgeous . People don't speak too great of english and there is bad pollution, but other than that, I'd give the city an all around score of 9 or 9.5.

I'm in Monaco now. This place is EXPENSIVE. I paid $100 to get here from the airoport by Taxi for a twenty minute ride!

Beautiful place though. French people are big assholes but they can't ruin this country for me (yes, yes, I know Monaco is not technically France), no matter how hard they try.

I got invited to go to the PokerStars welcome party tonite, to be held at Jimmyz bar. I didn't think that sounded too great until I Googled Jimmyz. From the Worlds Best Bars website:

One look at the menu will make you realise why royalty and the uber-rich are its
stock in trade: cocktails cost more than £20 a go and that bottle of vintage
champagne on the oil Sheik's table will set you back most of your monthly
mortgage...Jimmy'z has seen every celebrity and sports star in Christendom pass
through its doors and models and millionaires are as ubiquitous in here as the
champagne and cocktails on offer.

Sounds like an ok time.

Not sure of my plans yet over the next month but no matter what happens I'm really looking forward to it. I have a feeling these next months are going to be some of the best of my life.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Macau=The Nuts

2007-03-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

This city is great. This and Singapore are my new three day excursion choices.

It is like a cute little mini-Vegas, but without all of the toothless crackheads (a good thing), gorgeous coctail waitresses (a bad thing), slot machines (a good thing) and sadly, poker (a very, very bad thing).

The Wynn here looks identical to the one in Las Vegas except that it is about 1/3rd as tall. The inside looks very very similar but the layout is all table games. Where in Vegas they have rooms and rooms of slots and one or two 'pits' for the table games, here they have one or two rows of slots and rooms and rooms full of Baccarat and a strange version of three dice craps and a few other games.

One really funny thing about the casino's here is that there is very little emotion showed. Whether winning or losing, the players rarely react. They also are not consuming much alcohol. They all look like wealthy asian businessman who are very serious about their table gaming.

The city seems very safe to walk around, there are some pretty nice bar's etc. The nightlife doesn't compare to Vegas but it is still a pretty awesome city.

Headed off to Hong Kong tomorrow and I hope that is just as great.

Had a change in plans and will be heading to Monaco for the European Poker Tour's Main Event in Monte Carlo. Event starts on the 27th. Had an invitation to come to that that I just couldn't refuse. Can't say too much about it but this will be a tax deductible trip and I wont be playing much poker unless I can get really lucky in the last chance satellite in an hour.

After Monaco I think I'll mess around in the South of France for a few days, maybe head to Italy. My buddy Rob in Bangkok wants to take a trip to Japan and that has been on my list for awhile, so that may be where I spend the beginning of April. All pretty flexible right now, and I love that.

One other thing I think I might do is go back to the Kokua Festival in Hawaii in late April. That was so amazing last year and this will be Jack Johnson's only gig in the middle of his two year hiatus. I've turned into a huge huge Jack fan the last couple years and think it would be awesome to go to this festival every year. Eddie Vedder headlines with him this year.

Enough of my ramblings, but life is good now. I am loving my decision to put work on a back burner and focus on life. Spending 2 hours a day answering emails and the rest living life is much much more fulfilling than spending 10 hours a day online looking for ways to make more money.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Bangkok Just Cannot Be Beat

2007-03-18T23:39:00.000-07:00

Singapore, Vietnam and the Phillipines. I went to them all with high hopes and an open mind. None of them compares to Bangkok or Thailand. Singapore was the best of the three with pretty outstanding nightlife, a largely english speaking culture, a very clean and well maintained city and beautiful women. Though at a cost of probably three times as much as living in Thailand, a land locked small island nation and very strict laws on everything, I couldn't see myself as happy living there as in Bangkok.

Vietnam had some nice things about it, amazing cheap designer hats (for some odd reason), very interesting culture and people and was extremely cheap...though it kinda sucked. The people speak absolutely no english, they are abrasive and rude and the government taxes the shit out of tourists. I could never see myself living in Vietnam or even visiting again in the near future.

The Phillipines were hot and cold. The first night in town a very cool reader of this blog showed us around town and we had a blast (thanks Mark, you are the man!). After that we were kinda left to our own devices and were pretty scared really. Manilla is a pretty unsafe city it seems and we kept hearing stories about kidnappings and muggings and the like. Thats no fun. They have a lot of casino's there, a thriving sex tourism industry (where in Asia doesn't?) and the people speak english, but I think I'd also give the Phillipines a pass.

None of this is to say that I didn't enjoy visiting these places. I've had probably 10 serious girlfriends in my life and I regret none of them. Each one of them has taught me something about myself and about relationships and will ultimately make me happier with the woman I do settle down with. The same goes for travel. I just love Bangkok all that much more now.

Next off to Hong Kong and Macau, I've heard mixed reviews. After there to Japan which I went to last year and loved, so I can't imagine this year will be any different. Possibly some mainland China or South Korea. I'd be very interested in any tips or stories anybody has to share on any of these places. My email address is above or just post it here for discussion.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

A New Chapter

2007-03-09T06:07:00.001-08:00

I'm currently permabanned from 2+2. I didn't really do anything recent that warranted this but I have been pretty horrible at staying out of controversey lately (my blog post that I deleted was even cited as a reason). I can't say I fully disagree with the decision. Over two years on the site I've made a lot of great friends and been able to start some awesome businesses, as well as this blog, but I've also made a lot of missteps and some pretty passionate enemies...some of which are now powerful mod's on the site.

Well the interesting part is that this sucked for about five minutes. After those five minutes were up, it seriously feels like a weight has been lifted.

If I had to place a value on my 2+2 account I'd say it was worth $50,000+. Sucks to lose that. But at a later date I can always build up another name or maybe even get that one unbanned, if I care enough.

Though right now I can pretty much just sit back and do not much of anything at all and make far more than most American's. I've even started playing poker again and have had some good results, and at least for now, the focus that has escaped me for so long seems to be back.

My life over the last several months has been pretty awesome but I've spent far too much of it tied to the internet. Scanning the forums, answering emails, looking for new places to advertise and get my name out there.

Fuck all of that. It is time to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I've grown enough. I'm going to spend far less time on AIM and no time at all on 2+2 or any other forums, and way less time on the internet in general.

Think I'm going to start focusing a lot more on poker as a challenge and mental exercise, not for the money, because I really do love the game. I also do not need the money. I'm also going to travel a lot more and get outside during the day a lot more. Exercise more and be a human again.

I've contacted a few poker coaches who have dominated some of the highest levels and I'll be working with them on improving my game, refocusing myself and assuming that I know nothing (which I've always found is the best way to learn anything).

Anyway here is to finding opportunity in life's setbacks. Applying this strategy has really helped me to overcome some pretty sick beats, and come out a better person on the other end. I genuinely feel that is going to be the case here as well.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Smart people shouldn't have to work

2007-03-05T06:23:00.000-08:00

Unless they want to.

I will never have a job my entire life, unless I choose to. I am 100% confident in that fact. I don't know what I'll be doing in ten years, but I am certain I will be self-employed. The one exception would be taking a job which wasn't for money but to do it such as teaching or doing some kind of charity or volunteer work.

Smart people just should not have to work. There are so many ways to make money, I have probably ten different ways I can think of right now off the top of my head that I could make at least $50,000 per year working basically part time hours.

Gmail, Skype, Vonage, eBay, CraigsList, MySpace, Forums, Google and a ton of other websites and services have facilitated such an amazing wealth of opportunities for those who are self starters and intelligent.

I was in Vietnam with my good friend (probably my best friend) Will this week and we were going over options he has for his future and ways to make money. He seems to be stuggling with this notion and coming up with a way to make five or six grand a month to fund the kind of lifestyle he wants to live. I seriously cannot phathom that. I was bouncing idea's off of him and he was just kindof like 'yeah, yeah, maybe'. Wow. If I was faced with the prospect of having to possibly get a job or not being able to travel full time the ends I would go to would be extreme to keep this lifestyle going. I really can't imagine another one. Any other life would be a living hell for me.

Let me think of a few examples that wont cost me any money in case one of you guys want to try them out, or spark your own imagination:

Find a product, any product, in the third world, which you can buy in quantity for very cheap. Research the prices on eBay and coordinate with UPS to have these cheaply shipped and distributed in the United States. Make $1 per item and $2 per item on the shipping. Sell 2,000 of these per month and you have $6,000 net profit. There are some logistics there and you'd probably spend a good 20 hours a week listing auctions and answering emails, processing payments etc. Then another 10 hours per week average (a lot sometimes, little others) getting the products shipped and dealing with headaches.

In the end though thats $50+ per hour from any place in the world you desire.

Other options I can think of have to do with affiliate marketing and I wont go into them a great deal other than to say the opportunities are truly endless for somebody who knows how to use Google and can be creative and deal with some trial and error.

This might be my most unreadable post ever but I think that it might be able to help somebody. Nothing frustrates me more than to see smart people tell me that they want to get out of their jobs or travel or whatever and not do it. It is so fucking easy.

Off tomorrow or the next day to the Phillipines, I'll do a thorough Vietnam trip report with pictures when I can. After the Phillipenes most likely to Hong Kong and Macau and then Japan.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

James Cameron PWN's Christianity

2007-02-24T20:40:00.000-08:00

http://time-blog.com/middle_east/

Very interesting. Looks like what Dan Brown advanced in the Da Vinci code has been proved to some degree by James Cameron. I wonder how long Cameron is going to live...

You can check watch movies online for James Cameron movie links.

In other news I'm leaving in a few days on my trip but it is a pretty horrible time. My main support rep quit on me, I've finally started up a pretty awesome relationship with a gorgeous Thai girl I've been working on for months, and I've been pulling like 12 hour days at the office building sites and improving my businesses.

I sold off one of my websites, RakeReport.net. Pretty excited about that. I've gotten pretty big into non-US affiliate stuff if anybody needs any assistance. Party, Everest etc. grindblog@gmail.com. Can't say too much more than that ;)

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Thailand Video's

2007-02-19T09:44:00.000-08:00

These are some video's I've taken recently in Thailand.

This is Koh Phi Phi Don, a beautiful island near Phuket. Typical laid back and picturesque scenary of the Thai islands.

This is the resort we stayed at on Phi Phi Don. About $100 US per night, which is a fortune for Thailand, but well worth it, as you can see.

This is Koh Phi Phi Ley, where the movie The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed. Phi Phi Ley is one of the most beautiful place I have ever been. I have one more video of Phi Phi Ley on my YouTube page but for some reason can't load it here.

This is 150 seconds of footage on Sukumvit Soi 22 in Bangkok. A very authentic feel for what the average Bangkok street looks and feels like.

Thanks for watching, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Take the DonkeyTest!

2007-02-19T06:21:00.000-08:00

www.donkeytest.com

A friend of mine on 2+2 developed this. I've taken many of these and this is the first one that isn't insultingly simplistic. It was obviously designed by high stakes pro's, for high stakes pro's.

I got a 137 and evidently am smart enough to be a high stakes pro. Though the problem is that even though I *knew* the right answer when being tested on it, I don't always make those decisions at the table :(

How did you do?

Thailand 3 Months In

2007-02-14T08:20:00.000-08:00

And loving it. No plans to leave, ever. Well, at least not for any extended period of time ;)

Me and Will are headed off on what could very well be one of the most memorable months of our lives. We are starting on around the 1st of March in Vietnam and have a loose itinerary of stops we want to see over our journey. The Phillipenes, Japan, China and Indonesia are all on the list of countries we'd like to visit.

No poker at all. I think I should probably change that note up on the top of the blog to read 'Professionally deriving my income from the online poker industry'. I really don't see playing poker to survive as something I'll ever do again. I guess if all else failed and I was faced with going back to America and getting some crappy job, I could borrow a few grand and grind out low stakes SNG's or cash games or something...so ya, I guess poker is my last resort and safety net, from ever having to rejoin the real world.

Business ventures are going phenomenally well, even though I have had some serious image control issues lately. As my sites grow in popularity and exposure, so do the requirements of me to maintain a clean image and manage impressions of me and my business. That really isn't something I'm used to. I tend to kind of do whatever the fuck I want for the most part, and besides making some people not like me along the way (such as the anonymous stalkers of this blog who love to hate me), it really hasn't done me much harm. Lately it hurt my businesses some and I've been advised by people whom I trust and respect to chill out a little bit in the name of making money. So this I will try to do.

I think I might make a new anonymous blog and forum accounts so I can continue to do whatever the fuck I want, but not as Degen and Wild Bill and the owner of my sites. It really just isn't in my nature to take myself that seriously. That was one thing that the employee's of my company in Las Vegas had to say about my management style. They said they thought I didn't see myself like they saw me. I just felt like one of the people working in the office and they saw me as the CEO.

I got lazy and complacent and didn't finish the GMAT in time but also got some feedback from others that kind of made me decide against getting my MBA in Thailand. Got a lot of GMAT studying done and am going to keep preparing for that and try and put a bullet point or two more on the resume to help me get into a top school in Europe or America the next application season. Not even sure if I'd go, but fun to try and get in anyhow.

Happy Valentines day to you and yours.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

My Last Post

2007-01-25T22:44:00.000-08:00

Was clearly a train-wreck. I'm sorry for probably offending every single female reader of this blog and you guys too I'm sure. I put that post up in vivid detail just as I had returned from that horrible night and probably should have waited until I was sober to proof read what I had written.

I'd just like to say that I was in no way bragging about what had happened and to me the only positive of the night was that I got pretty lucky by escaping as I did. As for my actions they were clearly not right and they wont be repeated, that is for sure.

If you didn't read my post, I got into some trouble in Bangkok the other night and had to bribe my way out of it. I'll leave it at that.

Cheers

Wild Bill

MBA Time

2007-01-22T23:28:00.000-08:00

There is a great MBA program created by Wharton and Kellogg right here in Bangkok. The degree will be from Chulalongkorn University and I'll likely have to do some 'selling' to have it recognized as more valuable than toilet paper back home, but then again, I'm not planning on ever applying for or holding a job, so who cares.

I've just submitted my application and am cramming for the GMAT right now. I take the GMAT on 1/30 right after returning from London. I'm predicting a 650-675 with an outside chance of cranking one out of the park and landing a 700-715. I know my raw intelligence is high and with the help of some training manuals I think I can do pretty well. I'm pretty lucky in that the stuff I do well in is exactly what they test. Algebra, critical reasoning and writing have always come easy. Calculus and biology are another story.

Chula isn't easy to get into but I banked a 3.5 GPA and graduated with honors from a well regarded University, and I think I can spice up my resume to look pretty good for post-college stuff.

Term starts in May and it is a two year full-time program. If nothing else it'll be a pretty good way to meet hot girls at the top university in Thailand (they have an undergraduate population in the tens of thousands).

If I should get a top shelf score on the GMAT I think I'll fire off some applications to Harvard, Wharton and Stanford just for kicks, if I got in there I think I'd be pretty much obligated to attend.

Anyway wish me luck.

Wild Bill

I Suck at Poker...and Blogging

2007-01-13T06:24:00.000-08:00

Not sure why but the last couple months I just haven't been inspired to keep making posts here. Hopefully I'll get a second wind soon. Thanks for continuing to check in.

Over the last month I've played poker part-time and am down a good amount. I have been a losing player for at least that last five months. As I continue to do well in other pursuits I need to play at higher and higher stakes to make it matter to me, and unfortunately those stakes are full of great players.

On a positive note Thailand is amazing and I doubt I'll ever leave for any significant amount of time again. I'm also doing very very well in my endeavors into internet marketing. I've made a lot of valuable contacts in my time as a pro poker player and I am fully leveraging them now. Can't really talk too much about what I'm doing, but the fact that poker has turned into a money losing hobby for me really isn't too much of a concern.

I know full well that if things go bad I can re-group and grind out $200 NL and make $100 an hour and still live this life.

My Thailand thread on 2+2 is also still going and several people have made trips over here, for this I am very proud. It's also cool that I'll probably end up with some more people to kick it with over here.

Off to London for a little vaction in a couple of weeks, will see Oxford again and then down to Paris before returning back to Bangkok in early Febuary. Going to Korat in North Eastern Thailand when I return to attend a Thai wedding with my girl. Should be interesting, that is one area of Thailand I've never been to. It is all rural farm land and very poor. The real third world.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Lifestyles of the Sick and Famous

2006-12-25T07:46:00.000-08:00

Thats the name of the article in the current issue of Bluff Magazine written about 2+2's own Raptor and Durrr, AKA members of the notorious Ship It Holla Balla's. These guys have been coming way up in the poker world with there already huge presence on the boards combined with Alan Sass's 2nd place finish to Jason Lester in this years PLHE event at the WSOP.

I'd like to give a huge shout out and congratulations to these guys. I've known several of them for a couple of years now as we came up together through SNG's, and I'm very happy and proud of all of the success they are having and the positive exposure they are getting.

I'm also lucky in that I have partnered with them to help promote RakeAid.com!

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Good News For Online Poker Fans

2006-12-19T10:49:00.000-08:00

Professor I Nelson Rose is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on gambling law. His latest books, Gaming Law: Cases and Materials and Internet Gaming Law, are available through his website, www.GamblingAndTheLaw.com.

The following is an article he recently wrote on the current state of online gaming, it carries an extremely positive message about the future of our industry:

Internet Poker Folds A Winning Hand

The fallout from the new Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 has been nothing short of amazing.

Every publicly traded gaming company is running for cover, and many of the private ones as well. Operators as big as PartyPoker and the payment processor FirePay stopped taking bets from the U.S. when President Bush signed the bill into law on Friday, October 13^th. Other companies have said they will cut off U.S. players once regulations are in place.

The main question is: Why?

The new Act should add little to an online operator’s worries. Legally, it creates a new crime, accepting money for unlawful Internet gambling transactions, that only applies if the gambling is unlawful under some other federal or state law. Practically, this was not a drive by the federal Department of Justice or any state prosecutors. It was merely an underhanded ploy by a hypocritical politician, Bill Frist (R.-TN), to score some points for his presidential ambitions with the religious far right.

Some legal commentators have said that the new Act is something new, because it makes an operator guilty of this new crime in every state, since every state makes non-licensed gambling illegal.

But, half the states do not have laws on the books against bettors. In those states, betting even with an illegal bookie is not a crime.

The other states do make betting under some circumstances a crime. Of course, in the history of the United States, only one person, a sports bettor in North Dakota, was ever charged under these archaic statutes.

I have heard it argued that up until now, the only potential criminal liability was on the bettors in those states, not the foreign operators.

Imagine what such a law would say: It a crime in this state to make a bet, but it is not a crime to be in a gambling business that accepts the bet.

There never has been a law that penalizes only the players and not the operators.

More importantly, these laws were on the books long before this new Act was passed; so were the many state statutes outlawing unlicenced gambling businesses. If an Internet poker operator was violating any of these state laws it was already in trouble.

Years ago, Congress made it a federal felony to be involved in any way in a “gambling business,” defined as five or more people violating state gambling laws for 30 days or with gross revenues of $2,000 in any single day. Worse, if those were state felonies, the operators were already guilty of the federal crime of racketeering, which has far worse penalties than this new Act.

Internet poker operators had looked at the state and federal anti-gambling statutes and concluded that they probably did not apply. The federal Wire Act, for example, was held to be limited to sports bets, while the state statutes are flawed because they do not expressly apply to out-of-state operators.

This new Act does not extend the reach of the Wire Act or any other federal or state anti-gambling law.

There may be good reasons for folding a business that is making millions of dollars a day, including the risk of prosecution. But this new Act did not change those odds.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

The Importance of Rakeback

2006-12-15T03:48:00.000-08:00

Thought I'd do a little Public Service Announcement for you guys.

When playing for a living, I cannot possibly stress how important rakeback is. It gets you through the lean times and adds a significant increase to your profit in the good times. Also in referring others to rakeback sites you can make even more money!

Heidi at RakeAid.com has asked me to let my readers know about their site. They have been in the rakeback business a long time and Heidi and RakeAid.com have my full trust and confidence. I even get my rakeback through them for several sites! RakeAid.com has offers now at FullTiltPoker, Absolute, UltimateBet and several others.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Pattaya, Bangkok, Full Moon Party and Singapore

2006-12-09T23:38:00.000-08:00

These are the main places I’ve been over the past five weeks. When I first arrived I went around the islands with my buddies and had a blast. We spent some time in Pattaya and I quickly realized that is not my kind of town. Whore central of Southeast Asia and not much else to do.

Bangkok has been amazing. Setting up an office and got a sweet 24^th floor apartment overlooking downtown Bangkok for $500 per month. The equivalent in New York or Los Angeles would be at least $2,000 per month, likely much more.

Bangkok has been very good to me in, shall I say, an interpersonal manner. Unfortunately if I were to reveal too many details here it might contribute to my empire crumbling. If you want sordid details I suggest finding my thread on 2+2.

I just spent the last week on Koh Pha Ngan with a lady friend and Will and Zack, had a blast at the Full Moon Party and staying at the best beach resort in Southeast Asia (at least to me), Tommy Resort on Haad Rin. 2500 baht per night for a gorgeous bungalow literally on the beach and just steps from all of the action.

We’re all in Singapore now to get our visa’s renewed and be able to stay in Thailand again for two months. I rather like this system actually, it forces us to take a vacation every two months and hopefully it will be to a new and exciting location each time. On the list for the future are Manilla, Hanoi, Kuala Lumpor, Tokyo, Beijing and Bali.

Singapore is pretty awesome, despite the graphic images on the sides of my $11 packs of Marlboro Lights. We happened upon a huge once a year party here that was pretty awesome if you are into electronic music. Headlined by Ferry Corsten it was on a beautiful beach on a small island off of Singapore. If you are ever in the area this time of year, be sure to checkout ZoukOut.

Unfortunately for us all I’m a retard with small expensive electronics and have lost my digital camera (yet again) and also a digital camcorder I had purchased. Left them in a taxi on the way to the airport. I’ll see about getting some pictures from Will or Zack.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my break from the internet but I do appreciate all of you who have been following along as well as the emails with questions and encouraging words I’ve been receiving. I’ll try hard to update more frequently.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Livin

2006-12-01T23:09:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of updates. I have no internet yet it my apartment in Bangkok.

I've also had little interest in the internet of late so haven't been as tied to this blog or to 2+2 etc.

I'm sure I'll get wired again soon enough but for now am thoroughly enjoyin all that Bangkok and Thailand have to offer ;)

I'm taking tons of pictures and video's and having some amazing experiences, I'll share them with you guys as soon as is feasible.

Cheers

Wild Bill

Leaving Las Vegas

2006-10-31T17:49:00.000-08:00

Hopefully for a long while.

Santa Barbara tonite for Halloween (amazing party) and then the flight leaves tomorrow from LA for Bangkok!

Got a pretty nice travel kit and flying over with my boys so should be a fun flight.

I'll post again when I set down, hopefully with some good pictures and surely some good stories =)

Headed Home

2006-10-25T22:37:00.000-07:00

After four bittersweet months in Vegas it is finally time to head home. I am confident my affairs will remain in order here in my absence. I'm hoping I don't have to come back until Febuary or March, though it might end up being a bit sooner.

My good friend Will is moving over with me. He was my college roomate. Fun guy. He told me his girlfriend used to read my blog looking for dirt on him so I'll just go ahead and leave it at, I am really looking forward to going out on the town with him in Thailand.

I've logged a ton of hands the last few days in 2/4 and 3/6 and though I've had mixed results and am only up a bit, it felt pretty good. I like being able to pot the turn with two pair without shaking and thinking 'THATS TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS OUT THERE' like I had been. Even though I didn't realize it, I think I have been playing out of my comfort level for awhile.

Also it has been pretty nice playing against donkey fish like you don't find in the big games very often.

Time to go pack. Going to be a fun few weeks ahead.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

What happened to my game?

2006-10-21T02:02:00.000-07:00

Looking back since I came to Vegas, my game has gone to shit. A year of success have lead me to a state of complacency. I've grown sloppy and overly-tricky. I don't have one main game and I have stopped learning. I still spend a lot of time on 2+2 and talking to 2+2ers, but the time is spent much less on learning about poker. I've become what I used to criticize. Somewhere along the way I stopped being critical of my own play and over-confident in what I know and what I can do.

I dare say that I am probably currently a losing poker player. It has become obvious to me while living with two winning players. They are constantly discussing hands and scenario's while I brush aside this talk and play super high stakes, for fun most of the time. Over the past weeks I've lost about $20,000 while playing only one or two tables at a time. Over the last four months my bankroll has gone from close to $300k to just over $100k. I've put a lot into my business and have also taken up some pretty lavish spending habits, but at least $100k has gone back to the tables due to my sloppy ways.

I'm putting this here so that I can admit it to myself, and hopefully take some strides to stop the bleeding and fix the situation. I'm not yet sure of where to start to get back to my old ways, but it needs to happen, now. Or I need to make poker just a hobby and play for vastly lower stakes and concentrate on business.

I'm open to suggestions and feedback. Maybe I just need a break from poker or something, put it off completely until I can come back to it with focus and vigor, like I used to have.

In other news things are looking great for me going to Thailand and possibly not returning for a long time. The business is nearing auto-pilot mode. I'm headed to LA in a week to see friends and go to Santa Barbara for Halloween (a big party holiday there), then off to Bangkok November 1st!

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

Update

2006-10-15T21:04:00.000-07:00

Not much to report. Doing the Vegas thing and looking forward to Thailand in two weeks. Got some pretty cool 2+2 roomates, been going out a lot etc. Business ventures are taking up most of my time but am getting some poker in. Not doing terribly bad or terribly well when I do get to play.

Party pulled the plug on the US market but they are the only major room who did so. I had a pretty strong interest in Party continuing to do well, and that went busto, but such is life.

I should have some good pictures up soon about after hours Vegas shenanigans.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill

FullTilt Statement

2006-10-05T23:37:00.000-07:00

With Party still set to pull out of the US market and PokerStars yet to make a decision on that, FullTilt is making a play to become the number one site. They sent out this email today:

As an online poker player, you have probably heard about the new legislation passed by the U.S. Congress earlier this week that attempts to prevent you from being able to transfer money to online gaming sites.

While this new law has prompted some sites to announce plans to abandon the U.S. market in coming days, we assure you that Full Tilt Poker will continue to provide all of its players - both inside and outside of the United States - with a full complement of real money ring games and tournaments for their enjoyment.

After consultation with numerous legal experts in this field, we want to make you aware of the following:

* Legal

The new U.S. legislation does not in any way attempt to criminalize the act of you playing online poker. By playing online at Full Tilt Poker, you are not breaking any U.S. Federal laws.

* Full Access

The passage of the new Internet Gaming law will not have any impact on your day-to-day experience at Full Tilt Poker. We will provide all of our players, everywhere in the world, with full access to all of our games and tournaments.

* Easy Deposits and Withdrawals

We will continue to provide our players with all of the safe, secure and convenient methods for transferring money to and from the site. In fact, in recent discussions with our payment processors, we have been assured that this new law will have no immediate impact on their day-to-day business. And as always, any monies that you have on deposit with Full Tilt Poker remain completely safe and secure.

Furthermore, we firmly believe that online poker is not encompassed by this new legislation. In any event, we will continue to lobby for an express carve-out for online poker and for your right to play a truly American game from the privacy of your own home and computer.

We are excited about the future here at Full Tilt Poker and in the coming weeks and months, we plan to roll out many new features designed to enhance your online poker experience.

We appreciate your loyalty to our site and, in turn, want you to know that we will remain loyal to our valued players in the United States and throughout the world.

We look forward to seeing you at the table.

Sincerely,

Full Tilt Poker

If you would like to switch over to FullTilt and need rakeback there, I can set you up with a very reputable affiliate offering 27% VIP Rakeback there (the highest allowable at the site). Email fulltiltvip@gmail.com for signup information or with any questions.

Thanks for reading, now get back to the tables!

Wild Bill