World blogger championship of online poker

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This PokerStars tournament is a No Limit Texas Hold’em event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 608823

Sign ahead: Crossroad

Oh yes I am alive !!!!

In a slight dilemma right now regarding the road ahead. So I'll spend this post outlining my current thought process (muddled obviously) and hoping that readers (if any are left) will come up with some constructive comments.

Right now I am stuck between deciding whether to pursue an MBA or pursue poker as my longtime career goal (MBA blogs maintain MBA parlance !!).

Each have their own pros and cons, but they aren't mutually compatible. Doing an MBA and getting into a long-work-hour job would essentially mean that between work and family (did i mention im tying the knot in Jan 09) time for poker would be extremely restricted if not completely non-existent. At the same time an MBA is a much much safer option than a high risk venture like poker.

When it comes to taking up poker full-time, heres the kind of timeline based framework I have in mind. My girlfriend finishes her PhD sometimes in 2011-2012, my green-card application wont come through till maybe 2013ish. Thus the earliest I can quit work and start playing pro would be in the 2013-2014 range (remember without a green-card I cant quit work as I'd be booted out of the US in seconds). Also to rake in any kind of decent dough from poker, I would need a poker-bankroll in the 50-60k range, maybe even higher, possibly 75ksih is a good number. My current poker accounts have about 15kish in them, so I have about a 5 year time-frame to get to 50kish. Certainly doable if I dont keep taking my wiinings out and go on binge spending.

Also of great importance is the fact that if I do go fulltime in poker, it gives me the independence of settling down in any city I want, basically in the same place where my girlfriend/wife goes to work. Not to mention the enormous freedom/independence it brings in terms of flexi work-hours.

Just to put things into perspective in terms of numbers, heres this year's numbers:

• 9-5 job : 115kish
• poker: YTD tournament profits: 50k
• poker: cash game profits: havent worked it out yet, should be in 10-15kish range.
• poker: some other significant profits in the 30ksih range
  

I havent done the math regarding how an MBA degree will stack up in terms of ROI versus full-time poker, but might be close, especially if I factor in the feel-good feeling of doing something I love and the flexi-hours and the opportunity of settling down wherever I want. I know of atleast one person (Rizen, see blog on left) who left an accountant job to get into poker fulltime.

Sigh, I hate decisions. Comments welcome

Catching up

Its been a while since I've posted, but unfortunately for the readers of this blog I plan to put them through some more misery before I'm done.

First of: 'Grats to MBA-veggie and Middle of Nowhere for securing the first known admits of the 09 mba blogosphere, and almost surely this is just a start.

As for me life has been kind of meh over the past couple of weeks. Nothing even remotely exciting is happening except that the Indian cricket team is whipping some creamy Australian ass back home. Oh and I finally finished "Frasier" on Netflix. Frasier has almost always been my favourite sitcom, followed closely by Seinfeld, and frankly the deadpan, snobby/snootish, understated and most importantly the refined play-on-word-humor (compared to the blatant physical humor of friends) of Frasier has always had me cracking.

When it comes to the dreaded GMAT preps, much to my non-astonishment I havent made an iota of progress, ah but theres always tomorrow.
Random links/news away from this blog:
Some new priceless sites where I can be found wasting my time:
Engrish
Go-fug-yourself

For you Dark Knight junkies, theres a Bob out there (no seriously the guy's name actually is Bob) making the bat-tumbler and batmobile from scratch. Place your orders with Bob here. View of Bob's home-made bat-tumbler:


Finally some balla-timepieces that successful poker players love to flaunt at the table (snaps taken by Nat Arem at the World Poker Tour 08 Final table):

















Finally heres something that I decided to get for myself as a part of the me-too crowd (this is my first shopping spree of any kind in well over 8 months, so indulge me for a second)

Its a Breitling Super Avenger, waiting for its arrival with bated breath !!!

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.

Quantum of Solace

On Black Monday markets worldwide collapsed by 20%, today we are down just about 9%. Not everything is bad in today's world see !!

In this week's OMG news: I finally managed to ride my first stock to $0.00. I had aggressively bought Wachovia bank-WB when it was part of the financial rally early last month, managing to make a killing as it moved from the 9s (bought a big chunk at 10.x) to the 20s. Even booked a big chunk of those profit, but still held onto a fair number of shares. And today it is at $1.84. Life is good. Oh and yes the market is a bitch.

Cuurently: On life tilt. And contemplating moving my whole equity-portfolio to my poker accounts. To put it in perspective, ROI in poker 35% (essentially it means that on an average everytime I play an online poker game I make $45, extrapolate that to well over several thousand games), ROI in stock (YTD): -13.5%. Did I say life tilt??

United Sovereign Socialist States of America and $700 B

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency”

Yes this is one of the lines in the current 700 billion USD bailout-bill that the Treasury Sec of the United Sovereign Socialist States of America, formerly known as USA, Henry Paulson (formerly of Goldman Sachs) has sent to the Congress for immediate approval. Please re-read the sentence and try for a second to grasp its ramifications.

What this means is that once the bill is passed putting 700B of the taxpayer's money at super-risk,neither the secretary, nor the financials institutes who would be bailed out, are in anyway accountable to the people for either their past actions (no judicial hearings, no congressional hearings on their shady dealings) or for their future actions (meaning we will have no idea where/how/whether the 700 B will be used).

Now for those who are still unclear of what some of these so-called "shady" dealings that the big financial instituions have been practising for so long (out of pure greed) heres a primer (for all you mba applicants/students/alumni/b-school adcoms/faculty, remember while reading , that business ethics is something that the mba machinery has preached like for-ever, to me at this point it looks like eye candy at best, at the end of the day what matters to the mba machinery is $$$$ and nothing else):

• Sub-prime : This is something we all know, but the real problem arose when Lehman and its clique developed financial instruments via which they started trading these mortages as equities.
• Credit Swap: AIG owns a piece of a $500 million sub prime paper (packaged and sold by Lehman), but it aint sure whether the mortagee can pay him back. They go to a $100 million Hedge fund and ask him to cover/insure this mortgage they are holding. Now the insurer (the hedge fund here) has to provide some collateral, usually of the same value as the object being insured (500 mill). But the hedge funds get greedy, AIG hopes no one will notice, and a 100 mill hedge funds acts as an insurer for a 500 mill package. This is credit-swap. Currently the credit-swap market is worth 45.5 trillion dollars (twice the enitre worth of the whole US stock market).
  
• Leveraging : A typical Hedge fund takes 2% of Asset under management (AUM) as management fees and 20% of all profit as benefits packet. For a 100 mill break-even hedge fund that means that 2mill is what the fund-runners get. But hey, thats monopoly money on Wall street. Sheeeeshh. Hold on, suppose we leverage 10:1, so now instead of 100 mill AUM, our books will show we have 1000 mill AUM. What about our management fees, oh yea they went up 10 fold too. Lehman. Goldman, Merryl and the whole brotherhood was leveraged upto 30:1.
  
• Coming soon to a Wall street near you: ARMs (adjustable rate mortages), credit defaults, retail non-housing loan defaults etc etc.
  

But unfortuntaley the near Armageddon that these financial executives have brought in has not yet ended. With the govt sponsored free money (a mere 700 billion) that will soon be in Wall street heres how the bankers are reacting to it (via NYT)

• Wall Street is lining up at the trough for a piece of the action, lobbying to run some of the $700 billion fund — and take huge fees — for their own mess.
• And then there is the jockeying among the banks so they can sell their absolute worst stuff to the government — even loans that have nothing to do with mortgages — and change the rules in the process. The Financial Services Roundtable, which represents big financial services companies, wrote an e-mail message to members on Sunday suggesting, laughably, that “the government bid for the assets should not count as a mark-to-market value for accounting purposes.”

Next time some Bschool reps start preaching about their new course on the ethical business, be prepared for some chosen profanities coming your way. Oh and in the meantime, for those of you still writing your essays, please dont forget to leverage your lies 30:1 or more. I know I'll be doing it. After all its an excellent prep for the business world, especially the finances.

When pictures say a thousand words

For many of us wannabe MBAs, especially those interested in finance, the week of Sept 12-Sept 19th was a once-in-a-lifetime joy(?)ride. Call it a black swan, call it the beginning of the end for I-banks, call it a mere blip for the think-long-term advocates, call it whatever you want, but sure as hell this was one unforgettable week (actually this is turning out to be one unforgettable year !!).

If you fell asleep on the 12th. and are just waking up, heres a view of last week's mayhem (via tradermark):



Interestingly inspite of the absolute carnage in the market (driven almost in whole by the financial crisis), on Friday Sept 12th (week before the carnage) the S&P 500 closed at 1251.7 and on Friday Sept 19th it closed at 1251.3. So if you were truly asleep ala Rip-Van-Winkle, you would have woken up a week later, fired up google finance, and said to yourself "Blaaah, what a boring market, the indices havent moved an inch". Is anybody reminded of the Japanese markets of the mid 90s ?

As I get ready for my MBA apps, I wonder how this market will effect the ROI of a 150k+ MBA education. Will it be something like this for us fin wannabes:



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 pounds) 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.