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November 27, 2005
Comments
"I can't believe you squandered that money! I swear, sometimes I feel like I'm married to a child."
"You better watch who you call a child because if I'm a child then you're a pedophile! I'll be damned if I'm gonna stand here and be lectured by a pervert!"
-Lois and Peter Griffin
Why is the AQ guy a donkey? You were the one who created the large pot. Don't you know that you should keep pots small? Poor tournament decision there, which resulted in the equally poor choice of risking the rest of your chips on a close decision.Bahahaha. That may be the dumbest poker advice I've ever gotten, and I've received a lot of it. Sounds like somebody has been reading Ken Warren. You know nothing about poker, please don't comment about it here anymore. They have a site for people who memorize a simple rule and blindly apply it to every possible situation. It's called 2+2.
And that's the first time I've heard someone prefer the structure of a Party tourney over a Stars tourney.Then apparently nobody you know knows anything about poker either. Their structure is far better.
just wondering what your beef with ken warren isJust that his advice is awful. Just another donkey trying to cash in on poker. I'll give him some credit, he was doing that before it was popular.
Not only is that hilarious, but I'm not sure if your reply could be more well crafted.After I sent that response they apparently transferred me to the English speaker. I'm telling you, just be mean and you get some service.I'm interested in what their eventual reply was.
They said it was illegal so many times I almost believed it. It's CERTAINLY NOT illegal, not legal though.If it's not illegal it is therefore legal. There isn't some set of laws detailing what is legal from which online gambling is absent. Laws only dictate what is illegal. Whether or not internet poker is actually illegal is a very complicated question though the consensus seems to be that it is not. The DOJ's lack of prosecution of players seems to imply that they agree that it technically is legal, though their public statements say the opposite. Actions speak louder though.
So Neteller isn't totally unaffected by our laws simply by being from overseas.That is only because for some reason they chose to comply with Maryland's laws. They are now a publicly traded company, maybe that is some sort of regulatory hurdle they had to jump through. Maybe they just chose to out of the goodness of their hearts. Maybe the state of Maryland sued them in whichever jurisdiction they reside. Nonetheless it makes sense that if operating an online gambling business is illegal in the U.S. and people in other countries do it, the same could be said of financial processing. With enough intermediaries people will always find a way to get money into the online casinos.
If Neteller decided to block enough US citizens a new company that didn't would spring up quickly. Neteller sucks so let's hope that happens.
don't you make enough money from poker and rakeback to not spend time extorting people who end up fucked over by microsoft?Three thoughts on that one.
1. No, I don't make enough. There is no such thing as enough.
2. The dictionary.com definition of extort: "To obtain from another by coercion or intimidation." I'm not coercing or intimidating anyone who shops on eBay, I'm simply auctioning an item and letting market forces determine the sale price. I'm not sure what the opposite of extortion is, but I'm pretty sure it involves internet auctions.
3. Nobody was "fucked over" by Microsoft. They produced as many units as they could and shipped them, selling them below cost. If anything they were rather generous.
if you want to wait in line all night to make a couple k thats one thing, to go out of your way to get additional systems just for profit....thats beneath youWaiting in line all night to make whatever it is I can make from eBaying one Xbox 360 would just be a waste of time. And I don't see what's wrong with going out of my way to get additional systems. It's not hard to do. Anyone could do it. Best Buy employees are fairly easy to bribe.
I don't at all understand what it is you find so morally reprehensible here, but if you think legally buying something for $300 and then legally selling it for $600 is "beneath" me you obviously don't know me very well.
i do look forward to the post on why microsoft lost money on this since i'm sure you have detailed cost benefit analysis on them shipping what they did now and by christmas or 3x etc more and how that affects profits for the yearNone is necessary or at all relevant to my thesis, though I did provide a link to much of it in the subsequent post since I found it interesting. Asking for something like that is like asking a guy who is trying to determine whether or not to draw at a flush how much he put in the pot. It is irrelevant. All that matters is his pot odds and chance of winning. How much Microsoft made or lost per unit is irrelevant, what matters is that they could have made a lot more and therefore they lost. If you could make $2 but you only made $1 then you really lost $1.
When a company can only make X units, and the demand is for a number far greater than X, it's –EV, definitely in the short run (nobody would argue that) and I feel in the long run as well, to sell them at a loss. I don't have any magic economical formula here, it just is common sense that if an item retails for $300 in stores, sells out in a matter of minutes, then retails for $600 or more on eBay for days after it was underpriced. The only question is whether or not there is substantial long term benefit to selling it too cheaply. I feel that there is absolutely none. I'd love to talk to someone in charge at Microsoft and discover their logic.
As far as them shipping 3x more, I have no idea whether or not that would have been possible and if so if it would have been a good idea. They are reliant on products from a myriad of different sources. I have no idea what it would have cost them to triple their production scale, if such a thing would even have been possible. With new technologies it's not always possible to triple production, and even when it is doing so might inrease the cost exponentially.
I'm not debating their production quantities since I couldn't possibly know anything about that, I'm just debating their pricing. Somehow I'm guessing they spent a lot of time determining how much each unit would cost if they made X units by Y date and deciding which value of X led to the most long term profit.
Posted by themaroon at November 27, 2005 5:38 AM
Comments
I read your blog for takes on the poker world and the likes but reading about you hocking X-Boxes to dorks with money on the internet is pretty funny.
Lumping you in the category of the fat soccer moms buying their beanie babies low and selling them high on the internet is hilarious.
Posted by: KK at November 27, 2005 11:11 AM
I find it amusing that people are chastising Matt or looking down upon him for buying and selling X-boxes...or worse for blogging about it.
The simple fact is that he has determined that it is worth his time/energy to pursue selling these things on e-bay. You can argue that is "gouging" the people who have to pay $300 more on E-bay for one of these things, but you would be wrong. Thats the great part about capital markets. The ebay buyer could have waited in line for 12 hours, they could have pre-ordered it from the internet, they could have driven around to 3 different stores, gotten a fancy-goofy coffee, sat in their car until 5:30 and gotten an X-Box the day of launch, but they didn't. It wasn't worth it to them. They valued their time and sleep more than the extra money they will have to spend on the X-box. People like Matt make it possible for those with the means to obtain a system. Welcome to a free market.
Posted by: Brody at November 28, 2005 10:23 AM
Amen Brody, that is exactly how I feel about the matter.
Everyone that is talking down on Matt for the Xbox thing is just upset that they didn't capitalize on the same thing because they had to get up at 6am and go sit in an office all day while Matt makes more money in a couple hours then they make in a week.
If anything it should be a testament that if you use your brain and take the time you can make money doing anything you set yourself to.
Posted by: brian at November 29, 2005 1:48 PM
I think the logic behind the $600 price is that Microsoft wants a consistent price for a long time. If they sold it for $600 and then cut it to $300, it would create the impression that the system was not a hit and might damage the overall success of the system. They plan to sell these things for $300 for at least a year. If they sold the first batch for $600 and then marked it down, it might retard sales. Not to mention all the returns and re-purchases of units bought in the last 30 days.
Posted by: ddelruss at November 29, 2005 7:06 PM
Just ignore my prior email - I hadn't read the original post yet.
Posted by: Damien at November 29, 2005 7:10 PM