Friday Dump Day

Are you going to put up pictures of boobies, or am I going to have to start reading anti-trust law?
--Bobby Blackjack

I think F-Train needs to blog more cause in one night he was assumed to be a gay, Jewish Danish dude.
--Dawn Summers

Alright, alright, you both make excellent points. Things have been sparse on the blog lately. While you strap yourselves in for a lengthy post, I offer my first act of contrition: this NSFW link (but only because Bobby Blackjack doesn't want to become Bobby Trust Buster).

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<Begin Personal Poker Discussion>

I'm off to the Borgata tomorrow, and I'm undecided as to whether I'll fish the chum(p)-filled waters of 10/20 limit, or do my usual thing in the baby no limit games. The last time I hit Borgata's 10/20 game, the action was retardedly good (we're talking 6-way flops for 3 bets retarded), but from a pure hourly win ratio I'm not sure that it's more profitable than baby no limit, where there are often players willing to stack off 100 or more BBs with top pair. It wouldn't be a bad thing to knock some of the rust off my limit game, with a view to taking limit back up and attempting to climb into some of the bigger games, but I'm not sure I'm willing to sacrifice the hourly return in order to do so. Accepting comments on the merits or demerits of either approach.

</End Personal Poker Discussion>

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Final thoughts on the whole Raymer / Negreanu nonsense: Raymer was an asshat, in the end Negreanu wasn't much better (some sort of comment about breast feeding starving children in Africa?).

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Putting the egos aside, the lawsuit is only "good for poker" if it succeeds in getting the WPT to change their release, because I still maintain that the antitrust claims are BS. The comments of Phil Gordon and others betray that the primary focus is getting the release changed (Iggy linked up a whole series of things on this topic), and *perhaps* litigation is a valid tool for doing that. I just wish they could have come up with something better than trying to shoehorn a flimsy antitrust claim in there.

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I realized this week that, as much as I love classic Russian literature, I've never read Dostoyevsky's "The Gambler". It's next on my reading list. And as long as we're doing quick reading blurbs, check out JIL Poker. JIL is a former Columbiatch who was a year behind me in law school and has 100 hours of footage for a documentary he's putting together with two partners that chronicles the turbulent NYC poker scene. They're trying to have a final cut ready for submission to Sundance this year.

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Straying afield a bit, it seems that BetOnSports is giving up the ghost in its fight with the Justice Department. Not only are they ceasing all U.S. operations, but they fired their CEO without even bothering to bail him out of jail. Damn that's cold.

This decision is a huge disappointment - I really wanted to see BetOnSports fight this as a sort of test case, and I'm sure all the online poker sites (and sports books and casinos) wanted to see that too. Too much potential downside exposure for BetOnSports, I suppose. This success at shutting down an online gambling operation is only going to embolden the overzealous morality police in the Justice Department, and the doomsayers in Congress who feel the need to act as our parents and "protect the children" from becoming slavering, action-craving gambling junkies. As if it wasn't bad enough that the NYPD has already shut down my favorite clubs in NYC.

Let's hope that saner heads still somehow prevail in the Senate. The sky isn't falling just yet, but storm clouds are definitely massing on the horizon.

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Finally:

I started rereading Michael Craig's book ("The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time") this week during my subway commute. On page 77, Craig recounts something that Howard Lederer once told him:

There are a lot of poker players that aren't gamblers. Those kinds of players tend to find the level where they can win and they make their living. But if you don't have that need for action in you, you don't push yourself to move higher up. It takes a certain amount of gambling mentality to keep pushing yourself to go beyond.

I hadn't really taken much note of that passage during my first read of the book, but this time I paused and thought "How much gamble do I have in me?"

The very notion of a gambling attorney is an oxymoron. Attorneys by profession are risk-averse. We're managers of risk, but we manage it in such a way as to minimize or eliminate it, and the training that we undergo, both in school and in the working world, tends to beat that risk-averse mentality deep into our subconsciousness. Now to be honest, I'm not sure that I'm wired the right way to remain an attorney for the rest of my career, but that doesn't change the fact that I've undergone this brainwashing along with the rest of my colleagues.

I could get into my long gambling history here (starting with the discovery of my grandfather's Steer Head ceramic gambling chips when I was 10) but that's probably best left for another post. Suffice it to say that with 20 years experience under my belt, I'm no stranger to gambling. In recent years, however, the risk-aversion "therapy" I have received has pushed me away from pure gambles and more towards calculated risks. Are those instances of calculated risk-taking still gambling? I think so, which only begs the questions: How much gamble do I have in me? How high could I push myself? How would I handle the psychological swings of losing thousands of dollars at a time?

I don't know the answer to those questions, but I think it's time I found out.