Tuesday, October 7, 2008

A quick buck=running good in life

Those of you who follow this blog might remember this post where I said:

In this week's OMG news: I won a seat via an online mega-satellite (1k buy-in) to the Europeon Poker Tour-London No-Limit-Holdem Championship event, starting October 5th at the Victoria Casino, London. By winning the satellite, I get my buy-in (10k) for the tourney waived, free hotel, free food, free air-fare. I only need to get the visa and everything else is pretty much taken care of, EXCEPT of course freaking work. With a bunch of projects being worked on, my manager is going to flip out if I ask for vacation, lets see how things work out. If I cant make it to London, then I can probably keep the value of the seat I won.

Well as it turned out I could not make it to LOndon due to work commitments, but being the degenerate gambler, I wanted a part of the action anyway. So after several back and forth PMs and emails and AOLs, I bought 10% of Eric Liu's action. In the poker world, in big-buyin (entry fee) live tournaments (such as the 10k EPT london), often players will try and get an insurance by selling a part of their action, that is a backer takes a 10% stake in the player's buy-in and whatever profits (if any) the player makes, the backer takes 10% of that.

Anyhoo to cut a long story short, I had a 10kseat already that I couldnt play in, so I redeemed the seat value for money and bought 10% of Eric's action(incidentally I bought 10% stake in 3 other players for a net 4k investment). And while 3 of my 4 horses came out duds, Eric hit the motherload as he finished 4th --> results here , for a $470k payday for him and a $47k payday for me. I am running really really good in life at the moment, but my taxes are going to get super-complicated next year.

Good luck to all those waiting for your MBA admission results, godspeed.....

PS: I found this interesting blog post by Steve Jacobs (known in the online poker world as stevesbets), he is a Upenn undergrad who dropped out of penn's grad school to play poker professionally (over 1/2 a mill in winnings in 2 years he played pro poker) and last year had applied to several top b-schools (got into fordham, nyc), but was rejected by wharton. He went absolutely ballistic because of the wharton rejection and his follow-up with Wharton and the whole experience associated with that is a very very good read.

4 comments:

TienyChesney said...

OMG, you are a smart and clever man. Seems you got both the book smarts and street smarts- congrats on your investment. And here I am contemplating taking money out of my brokerage acct to put into 3.8% CDs. Oi.

To answer your question, yes, even the holy grail of MBAs (HBS students) are feeling the pain in this market. I spoke to a 2nd year who had turned down a private equity role to go to HBS. He is looking to become an investment manager at a hedge fund (not sure what kind but he is being very specific and selective). He says that he's talked to over 100 people while networking and he's still nervous about securing that dream job post-grad. So yes, even they feel the pain, though you will have to adjust their expectations against yours. More to come in my HBS Visit Part II post...

Dino said...

Dude, I didn't read that far down your previous post. Well, if you ever get another change to get to London, feel free to look me up!

BTW - Sounds like that film, Rounders.

TienyChesney said...

ha, you WERE right. but i've never been so happy to be so wrong ;) now i can set on the path to make half as much as you make currently!

TienyChesney said...

OMGbrother,
Not sure how much time I'll have next year but I will try to help you in any way that I can. Now is a good time if you have early ideas/questions though!