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January 31, 2007
Preaching To The Choir
Allyn Jaffrey Shulman apparently agrees with me on the issue of payment processing. Her legal commentary (unlike her poker commentary) is usually interesting and insightful, so check out the archives of her writings if you're interested.
Posted by themaroon at 3:05 PM | Comments (1)
January 30, 2007
O&A vs. Daniel Negreanu
Does anyone have the audio of Opie and Anthony cracking on Daniel Negreanu? I'd love to hear that.
I like their show, but what Daniel says is often true. They are sometimes unorganized and don't know anything about their guests. That can be pretty funny for the listener at times, but I'm sure less fun for the interviewee. Jim Norton is hilarious, pretty much every day. He is, I think, one of the better stand-ups around. And I've seen/heard them all.
And Joe Rogan, who is a frequent guest but not a show regular, is one of the least funny comedians I know of. He's a low budget version of some of the more popular unfunny comedians like Dave Attell and Dane Cook. Rogan does pretty much the same bad jokes as those comedians but doesn't have the superb delivery they do, so he gets nowhere.
Daniel's right, a lot of comedians use vulgarity to mask their poor performances and go for the cheap laughs, and Rogan is definitely one of them. And I should qualify that statement by saying that I'm not a Tim Allen fan. A little swearing (or a lot) doesn't bother me. My favorite comedians are Lewis Black, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, etc. I just think vulgarity in comedy is a lot like aggression in poker, it's often used to compensate for fundamental flaws.
Either way though the O&A show is often the funniest on the radio, so I'm curious to hear what they said. And I'd love to know what Rogan said about Daniel's wife that pissed him off.
Posted by themaroon at 2:35 PM | Comments (6)
January 27, 2007
Bankroll
People have been asking me a lot lately about bankroll/variance in no-limit hold'em. I always tell them I really don't know much about it. And I don't.
I know that no-limit is significantly lower variance for a given win rate. In technical terms it's probably much higher variance (when expressed as big bets per hour or big bets per 100 hands) but since your win rate at a no-limit table is much higher when expressed the same way that isn't a useful comparison. A $30/$60 limit player might only have to play $5/$10 no-limit to make the same hourly. So while a $30/$60 limit game is going to have much lower fluctuations than a $30/$60 no-limit, it's going to be far higher than a $5/$10 nl.
And I know that limit players often experience bad streaks lasting over a hundred thousand hands. Multiple people I know were solid winners over a long time, had a losing 100k hands or more, and then won again for a long time. I've experienced losing over 130k hands in the last year, though I haven't played much since.
I know a lot of people who've played a lot of no-limit and have solid records. In fact, I probably know more of them than I do limit players. None have ever even had a losing streak of 50k hands. Most of them say that even losing over 20k hands is very are.
I think that's a large part of the attraction to no-limit. You can make more profit on a given bankroll. And it makes emotional endurance, in some ways, less a part of the game. Still not as little as a tournament, where one bad beat often eliminates you, preventing you from tilting. But far less than in limit hold'em.
It's also nice because it allows you to make more meaningful determinations about your game. If you lose over 50k hands in limit you might be playing as well as anyone alive. You probably aren't, but you can't really get any idea. In no-limit it is much more likely that you're playing badly.
But really, that's about all I know. For any information I'd have to refer you to the forums. I'm sure tons of people on there have written about this stuff. I usually find in every game I play that my win rates (and those of some other players I know) and variance are higher than the general forum consensus believes to be typical, but the variance is at least pretty close. So if anything their bankroll recommendations are probably a little conservative, and that's a good thing anyway.
I'm also generally a bad person to ask about bankroll considerations because I'm extremely conservative. I have no gamble in me. I never play a game without many times the recommended bankroll. I have enough saved up to live comfortably playing at ¼ of the limit I safely could be at. In the long run I think it's better that way.
For a while, before my bad streak, I had a few times the bankroll necessary for $100/$200 sitting in my Neteller account and only played it a few times. In the long run I could probably make more money by being more adventurous, but I can barely maintain sanity dealing with the fluctuations of $30/$60. In the long run mental health is simply more important to me.
Posted by themaroon at 4:57 PM | Comments (5)
January 22, 2007
A Little More Info
Today I remembered that I know a manager at a large online casino/sportsbook. I gave him a call to ask what the situation was. He told me I could summarize what he said here, but couldn’t mention his name or the casino he works for. I wanted to post his email address here in case people had questions, but I guess his schedule is busy enough now trying to limit the damage caused by Neteller’s recent actions.
He said he talked to Click2Pay earlier today and they are going to continue taking U.S. customers. I was correct in guessing that their support is worse than normal lately due to being overwhelmed by new customers, but I had no idea the extent of it. Apparently it’s to the point where they have a tremendous backlog of new accounts and they temporarily shut off registrations because of that. They should be opening them back up in a couple days. That seems like a pretty dumb idea to me, but their registration system is very labor intensive, even on their end, so I can see how they got to this point. If I were running the show I’d just let the backlog grow and sort it out later, but whatever. I’ll be curious to see if people are able to set up accounts there a week from now.
My friend’s opinion was that Click2Pay has essentially no business outside of gaming and therefore has no reason to comply with U.S. laws. He said basically what I’ve been saying, that the only private companies that will stop taking Americans are the ones whose founders can’t live without coming here.
His casino is considering adding ePassporte. Apparently their fees are a little on the high side, which is why they aren’t as widely accepted as Neteller, Click2Pay, and some of the others. He talked to them recently and they plan on continuing to service American customers permanently, even after the regulations are published and are working on contingency plans for anything the U.S. might do. My friend seems to think that the e-wallets have the advantage in this cat and mouse game. I’m not so sure about that myself.
Some casinos, his included, are now starting to register foreign bank accounts for their VIP customers, of which I am fortunate enough to be one. I will automatically have a checking account set up and be given a debit card with which to access it. That’s brilliant, but I don’t know how well that will work for poker. I’m not sure how that will help a new random schmuck get up and running on PokerStars. Maybe sites could automatically create a new British bank account for every customer, I don’t know and didn’t really think to ask.
He pointed out that his casino is currently able to accept many credit cards, and as one of my commenters pointed out, so is PokerStars. I have no idea how, but I do know that credit card companies have been trying to stop this with mixed success for over five years now. The fact that they’re often inable to makes me think that the banks are correct and any regulations will be hard to comply with.
He also seemed to think that Western Union will remain an option. I have no idea how the hell that could be either. How hard would it be for Western Union or the FBI to put a stop to that? You just sign up at a casino, tell them you want to Western Union them money, and see who the recipient is. Then you tell WU to no longer allow transfers to that recipient. It would seem that the U.S. definitely would have the upper hand there, as I’m sure WU would comply immediately. It’s baffling to me that that hasn’t already occurred.
He also said that bank wires are still working fine and the people at his company who deal with that stuff think they will continue to. You’re wiring from an American bank to a foreign one, and there’s no way in hell the U.S. can simply ban all transactions to major banks overseas without facing serious international resistance, or so they said. Again, I know enough about technology to never say anything is impossible.
He mentioned some of the other payment methods. Payspark he said is owned by some big bank and has stopped taking Americans. Has anyone else confirmed that? I signed up with them maybe a week ago, but never really used it. Moneybookers he didn’t know about because they don’t use it, and I’ve heard conflicting reports from people. I have an account there from long ago and it seems to be functional, maybe I’ll try tossing it into a casino.
And all the rest you’ve surely already heard. I’m interested in knowing what you guys are using to deposit.
Posted by themaroon at 11:33 PM | Comments (18)
January 21, 2007
Let's All Calm Down A Bit
I'm starting to think that poker players have all gone nuts. The UIGEA and the fallout since has driven them to insanity. They're losing their capacity for logic.
I keep hearing doom and gloom predictions of all internet poker sites and payment processors closing their doors to us. That's just crazy talk. It just doesn't make sense.
(As a brief aside, I signed up for Click2Pay roughly a week ago, which was a process about as pleasant as a root canal, and was on the phone with them today to verify the deposit they made to my checking. It turns out the rumors of their demise have been greatly exaggerated. They still fully accept Americans and said they intend on doing so for years to come. Their support is atrocious, with email responses taking days, but that might be due to a deluge of new members since the Neteller fallout. Their transaction limits are very low at first too, so overall I can't recommend them.)
People have to realize that you can't look at a line graph and make conclusions here. Stuff is going badly right now, what with BetonSports, Pinnacle, and Neteller, but it's a trend that, logically speaking, has to reverse, or at least not continue on much farther. I admit Pinnacle was surprising, and it boggles my mind, but privately held corporations complying with a law that they don't really have to which wrecks their business is going to be the exception rather than the rule. It has to.
Of course things are trending downward. Nobody ever expected anything else. I never heard anyone say of the UIGEA "this will make the online poker economy better". It's always been and continues to be a question of how bad it will be.
History has taught us that any lucrative service will be provided by somebody. Alcohol, drugs, abortions, the list of things banned in our country is long and every time someone stepped up to provide the service. The war on drugs caused an immediate decrease in the number of users, and now it's higher than ever.
Epassporte is in a prime position to provide that service (much like Bodog and Pokerstars) and has very little or nothing else going for them. Google around and try to find anything else that they appear to make money off of. It looks like they might do a couple porn sites too, but I can't imagine that being much of a source of revenue, since pornography is legal and sites could therefore presumably accept a credit card. No e-wallet can compete with credit cards.
Gambling payments are their business now, and it's a ridiculously lucrative one and has little serious competition. And as long as they don't mind not vacationing stateside, the owners have no incentive whatsoever to stop processing our payments. Who knows, maybe they'll decide they can't live the rest of their lives without coming here, but if they do someone else will take their place. It's absolutely inevitable, and to think otherwise is simply foolish. What we're going through now sucks, but let's not toss common sense out the window.
The only real threat now lies in the US. Sure, one or two more sites might go down, and one or two more will pop up. Same with e-wallets. But there will always be plenty of both. The only reason we haven't seen more right now, I suspect, is the amount of time it takes to get one up and running.
It will be interesting to see just how bad the UIGEA gets. We'll know when the banking regulations come out, which should be sometime before June. It's the government we're talking about here though, so it could take five years. The worst case scenario seems to me to be a blacklist of gaming sites and e-wallets. Both will try to find ways around anything the U.S. does, and the U.S. will try to stop them, and it will be a cat and mouse game, but if it comes to that it will undoubtedly be disastrous. Our government will have effectively won.
Without such a blacklist things probably won't be much worse than they are now. And even with one, the dark ages will only be temporary. This law is simply doomed. There's the fact that it violates international treaties (WTO). There's the fact that large American corporations are or soon will be lobbying in favor of internet gaming. There's the inevitable court battles against well-funded individuals such as Neteller's founders and probably eventually some of the Full Tilt crew.
I'm not by nature an optimistic person, and I'm not saying this because I wish it to be true. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Honestly, I could fund and play at Party Poker or any other site I choose with very little effort if I desire. It's not hard at all really. Actually it's trivial. Now that I think about it, I might do that. Do any of my readers still play there, and if so, how are the games?
Posted by themaroon at 10:21 AM | Comments (32)
January 20, 2007
Also...
Joe Pelton brings up a good point. It's very unusual that trading is still suspended on Neteller shares. Perhaps this means a buyout deal is in the making?
I hope so for their shareholders' sakes. They don't deserve the ass raping they're going to take otherwise.
Posted by themaroon at 3:38 AM | Comments (2)
From a previous comment:
The trouble comes when the UIGEA regulations kick in, and they prohibit financial institutions from transacting with any of these ewallet sites. If this happens we're all screwed. It's for this reason that I think investing in any of the ewallet companies is insanely risky.Either that development or the fact that someone from Full Tilt or Stars has been arrested will be the next bit of bad news I'm afraid.
Well, technically the UIGEA doesn't make it illegal to send money to ePassporte, and since ePassporte is neither a bank nor an American company it doesn't apply to them. Or so I've read. I've also read from major news sources that banks don't seem to think this law is going to be easy to comply with and maybe impossible.
Either way what you mentioned certainly could happen. But it sounds like Neteller is actually a good deal right now without the U.S.
And I fully suspect we'll see some Full Tilters arrested very soon. I give Lederer six months, max, and I'd set the over/under at three. I really hope it happens too. I don't know him all that well (I've talked to him a few times and some of my friends know him) but I'm pretty sure he'll fight for online poker far better than anyone else could. He has the resources, the motive, and the passion. I'd gladly help him out if that happened, though I don't know what I could do. Maybe squirt the water bottle into his mouth between rounds at the Supreme Court trial and cut his eyes open if they get too bloody. I've always envisioned a trial there to be some sort of cross between a disco and a mixed martial arts match, because really what else would you wear a uniform like that to?
Posted by themaroon at 1:59 AM | Comments (11)
January 19, 2007
Neteller Suck
So Neteller threw in the towel. I'm not really sure what they hope to gain from doing so. I doubt the US will leave them or any other such institution alone for it. As far as they are concerned Neteller has already committed the crime. Their founders' arrests were put into motion well before the UIGEA went through. Company employees better reconsider their Las Vegas vacation plans for at least the next few years.
Either way, let's hope private equity snaps them up and reverts them back to their former glory. I really couldn't think of a better way to make money right now than that, providing you don't mind living the rest of your life outside of the U.S. There have to be plenty of Europeans with a couple hundred million in the bank who wouldn't mind turning it into a couple billion, even if it means they'll die without seeing the Grand Canyon.
Neteller had a market cap of roughly $400 million USD before shares ceased trading. Revenues for the third quarter of 2006 were in the $66 million range with a net income after tax of around $30m. This is a company that, if left unmolested, would have stood to make around $120m a year in profit.
So they'd be a steal at $400 million (which is probably why Motley Fool and numerous other stock advice givers were recommending them) and their market cap will be well below that when they start trading again. I see no reason why they couldn't get right back to where they were a week ago if they were taken private quickly and reopened to U.S. customers, or at least close enough to make them well worth a few hundred million. I realize many of the bigger PE firms aren't going to touch this one, but it's a relatively small deal for a buyout these days.
Either way as far as poker goes this doesn't have much effect on me, I've been using ePassporte for the last few years. I like it much better anyway. Virtual Visa + Amazon = happiness. Now at least I should be able to convince the sites to raise my ePass deposit limits to something more respectable. Their fees must be high because none of the sites ever seem to want to let you use it much.
Posted by themaroon at 11:56 AM | Comments (9)
January 16, 2007
Neteller Founder Arrested
When you can't win the war on terror or the war in Iraq the logical solution is to step up your efforts in the war on online gaming. Because we all know gambling is a serious addiction that ruins families and frays the moral fabric of our society, or whatever the hell that moron Frist said, and without the internet nobody would have access to any form of gambling.
So in your opinion what does this mean for us? The end of Neteller for Americans is near by? The end of all online gaming? The end of Neteller's respectable share price? Nothing at all?
Here's my uneducated guess. Trading will reopen for Neteller stock, share prices will plummet, and some private concern will quickly snap Neteller up. It will be business as usual for us. I feel bad for anyone holding a large chunk of their shares right now though.
Posted by themaroon at 1:01 PM | Comments (6)
January 12, 2007
The Difference Between Risk And Difficulty
I was reading Chris's blog yesterday and he was asking for career change suggestions. A number of people suggested restaurant/bar type stuff, and then I saw quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever seen anyone say in my entire life:
jeremy said...restaurants can be very risky as they can be copied easily.
Bahahahahaha.
That's retarded on so many levels. First of all, any business can be copied easily. Please name one business that someone with the time and money couldn't copy. I can't even think of one. In fact, I can't even think of one successful business that nobody else has tried to copy. Most profitable businesses in any industry have very similar competitors who are often also successful. If you make a lot of money at anything somebody else will try to do what you do. It's inevitable.
Second, if you get copied, you're probably getting wealthy first. Ask whoever started Domino's, McDonalds, TGI Fridays, etc. You never hear about the guy who started a great business but ended up broke while some copycats got rich. You hear about the guy who started a great business and got rich, and maybe the copycats got even richer, or maybe they got rich but slightly less rich, or maybe they failed. Or sometimes you might hear about the guy who had a great idea but no business skills and ran himself into the ground, but it wasn't being copied that killed him. And the original in any profitable industry (and it's impossible to be original in the restaurant industry anyway) makes a fortune if they do a passable job of handling their business. For a copycat to take over a market they have to actually be much better than the original.
Third, and this is a commonly held misconception, restaurants aren't very risky at all. They're commonly perceived as risky because most of them fail. The notion that restaurants are risky because most fail is poor logic. The high failure rate doesn't make them risky, it makes them difficult. Most restaurants fail because starting a successful one is very hard to do. If you start a good one it will succeed a very, very high percentage of the time, and if you start a bad one it will fail every time. The fact that most restaurants fail just shows that most of them are bad, not that there's any unusually high risk in the industry.
I've never seen or heard of a Panera or Chipotle that went out of business. It might happen, but it has to be pretty rare. They say 80% of all restaurants fail in the first five years, if someone would like to do an over under I'd gladly wager anything that at least 80% of Panera locations will still be in business five years from now. Obviously nobody would take that wager. Same with Chipotle and a few of the other great franchises/chains out there.
That's because they have solid concepts, food that people like at prices they're willing to pay, and the corporations that franchise them only do so to highly qualified owners and have a support team to make sure that everything is done right. And when it is, as is almost always the case, they succeed, 100% of the time, or at least damn near to it.
And there are tons of copycats. There are chains that try to do what both of them do, and hundreds of single location restaurants. And some of them make money too. But I'd gladly take a Panera over any of them any day. But I can't get a Panera, because they know their concept is solid so they'll only license them to people with a proven track record and I've never owned a restaurant. If they would allow me to start one they wouldn't be worth owning. Didn't Groucho Marx say something like that once?
I think the most important thing to realize about any business is that it usually isn't risky. It's difficult. Those are two very different things. If you had to bet blindly on entrepreneurs that would be risky, because a lot of them simply aren't good enough at it to succeed. But the ones who are good enough will succeed the vast majority of the time, the ones who aren't won't, and some of the ones who aren't will keep trying until they get good enough and then they'll succeed. That's true of almost everything worth doing in life.
Poker on the other hand, that's risky. Even the best could have a losing year. That's more tough to deal with when it's your job than anyone who hasn't dealt with it could possibly realize.
So if Chris wanted to reduce his risk the best thing he could do is start a restaurant. He might be a huge dog to succeed, but if he fails it won't be because he got unlucky. It would be because he wasn't good enough at it.
I'd take a piece of his action though.
Posted by themaroon at 11:12 PM | Comments (12)
January 8, 2007
Great Post From Ed Miller
I agree with pretty much everything he says here.
Posted by themaroon at 4:24 AM | Comments (7)
January 5, 2007
New Year
Well, a long, bad year of poker is over. Thank God. It started out well and then became a nightmare. I didn't win very much overall and actually lost a little in limit hold'em ring games. I can't complain too much I suppose because I barely got 100k hands in. Oh well.
I spent a lot more time in '06 on non-poker pursuits and they went well. I made money staking, starting the exchange site and until Party pulled the plug in October rakeback was going very well. It got TKO'd there for a bit but is starting to rebound.
I've been playing a little no-limit lately. If you can't beat 'em, I guess. It's going well so far. The game is much easier and luckily the variance is far lower. I'm learning quickly, and the competition at the $2/$4 and $3/$6 games is very soft.
I've got a side project going on now that I can't say too terribly much about, but it promises to occupy all of my time for at least the next couple weeks. We'll see how it goes.
Posted by themaroon at 11:53 PM | Comments (2)