Shabbir's Diary

Grim proof that my wife is one of the smartest people on the planet.

As we watched the tragedy in Mumbai unfold through the Web (web tv coverage from India was better than CNN or MSNBC on cable), the horror of it all really sank in.

When the first accounts came out that guests at the Taj hotel were being herded into rooms, locked in and then ignored, I said, "How odd, why would you take hostages and then not pay attention to them?  Why wouldn't you make any demands?"

Sarah said "They're going to blow the hotel up.  That's why they don't care about the hostages.  They're going to kill them in the explosion."

Turns out she was right.

"Mercifully, the group, armed with plastic explosives, underestimated the strength of the
105-year-old building’s solid foundations."

Congrats, you beat 51 people to win an entry into a poker tournament you can't compete for!

Any denials that "I am not a degenerate gambler" just went out the window.

I play sometimes on sportsbook.com, one of the Cake network poker sites that's really a sportsbetting website.  I don't sports bet (if you know me at all, you know my aversion to anything else in a casino except poker) but I've received the occasional bonus there, so it's worth it to play.

They have a frequent player points system, which awards "gold chips" every batch of Frequent Player Points.  The points reset to zero every month, but the gold chips stay.  There are a small handful of things you can do with gold chips, like play in Sit N Go tournaments where the entry is 5 gold chips and the winner receives....more gold chips.   (ha)

I finally happened to see something I considered buying in for: a $425 satellite ticket to win entry into two tournaments in Australia in mid-January plus traveling money.  Basically everyone that enters the $425 satellite is competing for the one prize package.  So I'd have to win two tournaments to get to Australia: first, I have to win my seat in the satellite (no easy feat), then I have to win the prize package.

I didn't pay attention to any of this, and just was excited that I could win something with the "gold chips" besides more gold chips.  I entered the tournament with 50 other players, and the top 5 got the $425 prize package.  I got lucky catching good cards during the rebuy period so I didn't have to make any hard decisions.  I then played my butt off during the middle and bubble sections of the tournament.  I kept myself in mid-chip position until someone finally got too low a stack and shoved and lost.  Five of us got our satellite ticket....for Sunday after thanksgiving.

Except I have plans for Sunday after thanksgiving.  And were I to win that, the Australian tournament starts January 18th, 2009.  Sarah and our new daughter are due to be born January 25th, if she's punctual, so the last place I'm going to be is Australia.

Heh.  Well it was good tournament experience.

Dealing with a blinds thief / stealing the blinds / defending your blind

It happens all the time in Hold'em: you're in the big blind and some jackass goes to steal your big blind.  Stealing blinds is good money in a casino that doesn't rake until the flop, but to be successful at it you have to be able to play after the flop or pick on a weak player who always folds to your raise.  Take the situation I've shown below:

Assuming you've got a small or medium pair, nines through twos, your odds against anything from a tight raiser through a loose raiser are pretty good.  Assuming your opponent is willing to raise with 12% of his hands, you and him are 44%/56%.  Assuming he'd steal with half of all the hands he is dealt, you're actually a slight favorite (54.5% / 45.5%).

Though you're not going to have the advantage of position, if you can play after the flop you might be able to take control of the hand if you hit one of your hole cards on the board.  The pot is offering you a little better than 3 to 1 odds to call, and at no time are you a 3 to 1 underdog with these cards.

But what if you don't have a pair?  I've computed some other useful odds against an opponent who would be willing to raise half of their hands:

Assuming your opponent steals with half his hands
Your hole cards	Your showdown equity
Any two Broadway cards (AKQJT)	59%
Any two suited cards	43.4%
Any pair	62.2%
Any Ace or King	52.8%

The upshot of this is that you're unlikely to be much of an underdog when you sense someone is stealing your blind, and while you may want to call for meta-game reasons, such as you don't want to establish the fact that your blind is easy to steal, you have a little math behind you as well. I computed all the math here with PokerStove, an awesome tool you should be using to scenario out these situations.

Running away to sea

Everyone has their version of 'running away to sea'.  Mine involves getting into the family car and going to Las Vegas or Reno, NV to shark the low-limit tournaments against the tourists for a living.  (Not a very good living, I'd like to point out)

My friend Derick's 'run away to sea' fantasy has always been more literal: he wanted to run away and be a sailor.  A number of different places around the world train sailors and provide a certification that allows you to get work as crew or captain on boats around the world.

Derick ran away to Malaysia to join and started a blog about his experiences.  Check it out.

Safdar Tournament Poker Bootcamp

Attention friends, especially Matt's friend, Lem who will be in Vegas December 5th:

There's talk of a tournament-focused trip to Vegas to reprise the Safdar Tournament Poker Bootcamp from this summer, the weekend of December 5th thru Tuesday December 9.  Most of us have not cleared it with our spouses.

If it comes together, we'd likely arrive sometime friday, and play tournaments (probably 3-4 / day) for 4 days thru Tuesday.  This isn't a lazy trip (though I guess you could laze through it).  We usually work our asses off, playing 8am, 11am/12pm, 3pm, 6pm, and sometimes 10pm tourneys. 

If you love poker as much as I do, contact me about logistics.

If your name is Chris Hannigan, you may stay in my hotel room in the second bed for free.

If your name is Jason Kim, you should get your ass out here with us.

The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America

One of the major American economic crises of the last century was the Great Depression. In the year that followed the stock market crash of October 1929, everyone from President Hoover down to line workers at auto plants believed that their fortunes were not inextricably linked to those of the
stock market.  Hoover's quote the day after Black Thursday of that year could have been written and uttered by the current administration or candidate McCain:

"The fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution, is on a sound and prosperous basis." 

The problem isn't that the quote was factually incorrect.  It was right.  The problem is that having good fundamentals in one area of the economy doesn't protect you from failures elsewhere.  These same assumptions have been made erroneously in the last two years.  As I watched the Administration attempt to pump money into the economy and then individual banks, I found an unspoken assumption that this would fix our economy and we'd all go back to buying crap on easy credit.

Obviously this isn't happening.  I began to look to the history of the Great Depression, not as a mirror image of what we're going through today, but as an example of what tactics have been tried before that we might not even realize we're repeating.  Possibly the highest ranking economic expert in the US is Ben Bernanke, who also happens to have spent his life studying the Great Depression, which appears to be useful knowledge in this day and age.  Sadly, it doesn't appear to be enough to move the rest of the government's apparatus to action as quickly as necessary.

There are two texts I picked out to read as I went on my question for information about the Depression for some insight into today.  The first is "The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression" by T.H. Watkins.  Though it is thick, this is an excellent crash course in the Great Depression.  Watkins covers the twelve years from about 1929 through 1941 from every angle,
the White House, the Congress, Wall Street, wealthy Americans, poor Americans, black and white.

There are a number of similarities, and I was struck the number of times I read about events
from the time that could have been written in 2007 or 2008.  Hoover's statement about the fundamentals of the economy was one.  Another was the government injecting cash into financial institutions to restabilize them, and then discover that they had no intention of significantly creating easier credit for lending with that money. 

It was like I was reading a New York Times piece last month, instead of last century, "So When Will Banks Give Loans?"

When I read Watkins section on the stock market that described the Dow Jones as "a rubber ball bouncing down the stairs, spiking up and down, but on the average, always further and further downward" I was particularly hooked.  I felt like I had watched that very same experience over the last 8 months.  See CNBC article, "Barry James of James Advantage Funds likens the current market to a ball bouncing downstairs".

Unfortunately the more I read, the more depressed I became.  The famed projects I had heard about my whole life, such as the CCC and the WPA, actually only employed a fraction of the nation's 25% unemployed.  Furthermore the Depression was followed by a recession.  The only thing that pulled us out of it was the spending on the second world war starting with Pearl Harbor.  As my friend Jennifer points out, "We're already in two wars".  The important implication in this is that war spending at our current rate of $10 billion per month in Iraq and Afghanistan is not enough to pull us out of the current economic crisis.  It's not clear that in our global economy that war spending could have enough of an effect on our domestic economy because so much of what we purchase or spend is produced overseas.

Furthermore, I don't think anyone in this country has any more stomach for war, economics benefits included.

Weirdly, out of such public policy despair came FDR's presidency, when the country's morale was so low.  The parallels to the transition from Bush to Obama are obvious, and FDR's legacy remains today.

Check out the book from the SF Public library or buy it from Amazon.

Shenanigans in Reno, NV

My Obama partner and I have two red staters assigned to watch us. We all sit here in the observer pen.   They complain about everything we do, and have the McCain palin lawyers on speed dial.

My friend in sparks brought me a coat and hat since it's snowing and the McCain volunteer stood close to me to make sure I didn't say anything political inside the 100 foot zone.  I gave her a goodbye hug that carried an unspoken Obama endorsement.

I have three lawyers here dedicated to my team who tell them to fuck off politely.

The McCain people are obsessed with disqualifying voters and have multipage instructions on how to challenge voters right to vote.

I jut watched the poll workers turn away yet another minority they couldn't find on the rolls.  The mccain woman enthuaiastically encouraged her to vote provisional, which is almost like not voting at all.   The obama lawyers standing in the snow flurries just intercepted her to help get her sorted.

I've never seen this up close.  It's not pretty.  I cannot imagine being  able to  work on voter suppression projects and sleep at night..  These people are enthusiastic about it.

UPDATE:

We now have a coterie of 6 lawyers.  3 non partisan and the 3 from the Obama campaign.

My republican babysitter just tried to seperate a father and son.  It was his first time voting and he wanted his dad to help him.  My shadow complained that he might be telling him who to vote for and the guy running the place shut her down.

We're expecting big lines at 7pm closing and were going to buy huge quantities of coffee to serve people in line.  I've won enough money at poker here to buy coffee for hundreds if need be.

For political junkies we're very isolated here without laptops.  We have heard stories about polls closing early in Virginia due to voting machine problems.

The lawyers here have to fight for everyones right to vote.  A standard voter suppression tactic is to send people who haven't turned in their absentee ballot home to find it.  The ACLU put a stop to that and allowed 3 people to vote as long as they sign an affidavit.