Now that the primaries are essentially over, I think I can safely post my Intrade experience. I just made a long post on 2+2 that I'll copy here.

[...]I estimate my final primary election wager results at around +10K (on an initial 10K roll on Intrade and another 2K or so in Paul bets). On the one hand, this does represent a nice 250% or so yearly ROI. On the other, I actually thought I could do better.

[...]

Postmortem:

In addition to being very profitable, the first phase of this experiment has definitely taught me some valuable lessons. In fact, the reason I'm writing this post out is to gather my thoughts; although the market between now and November only contains a handful of good opportunities, I want to get some of the more useful information down on paper in order to remind myself of these concepts down the line.

These lessons didn't come cheap. Although, as I said, my yearly ROI is ridiculous, had I done everything right, I think I would have broken twice that. In fact, I missed out on a few hundred dollars last night solely because I didn't follow a very strong read that, in retrospect, is a signal of a wider issue. Rather than elaborate on it here, I'm gonna postpone that for a few paragraphs in order to bring you a more ordered listing of...

The Things I Did Wrong:

1)Did not come into this with a set plan

I was spectacularly right that this market is flawed, but less so in my approach to beating it. Initially, my strategy to beat the system was nothing more than "follow the polls". That, alone, was usually enough to make a solid profit, but it quickly backfired when Obama lost NH despite being ahead. FWIW, in retrospect, the polls were *right* - in my opinion, the missing factor was Hillary's tear ducts, which kicked in at a critical time and duly began the segmenting of the white working class/women voters too late to register. Nevertheless, it's not as if I followed proper bankroll management (or do now), so being down 25% of my total investment on Intrade (even if Paul mostly made up for that in actual $) less than a week after starting kinda sucked. There's no telling how much being unable to leverage that missing 25% cost me, but it's quite a bit.

What I should have done before starting this whole thing was to plan out a strategy based on a combination of bankroll management, the polls, demographic data, and laddering (that is, leveraging continual small profits into each other.) I did get there in the end, but it took me a while, and I don't pretend to be perfect. Regardless of whether I'm decent at this now or not, though, having some idea of what I was going to do for the first two weeks besides "well, Ron Paul is free money to short and I can show up the Internet by doing it, so let's start there" would have been nice.

2)Did not appreciate leveraging enough

Again, I came into this with the basic theory that 'hey, this market is incredibly dumb and so is Ron Paul, so combining the two of them = free money'. That theory was totally true. It was also quite useless in the long run, because Ron Paul didn't finally bottom out until February, while having money tied up in his plunge from 10 to 1 prevented me from using it on the nice MI -> SC -> FL -> etc. free money ladder that would have tripled what I got from him. (When I say "free money", I mean the "Obama isn't on the ballot in MI but is trading at 10. And who thinks he'll lose South Carolina, or that Hillary will lose Florida with no ads allowed?" completely and totally risk-free type of free money.)

Given the sheer amount of such things on Intrade, the only reason to go long on a contract is when it gives you more points than you will get from three or four steps of this type of thing, or, alternatively, when the volume on those steps just isn't there. For example, I was not particularly active in the post-Wisconsin state markets because, had I put in five digits into a given state, I could not have easily turned around and sold it if the polls went the other way. Overall, however, leveraging is by far the better play on a market like this, and I'm saddened that I didn't figure this out until mid-January.

3)Decided to put money on Intrade on 12/24

Had it gotten there before 1/4, maybe the 3K I'd have made off Iowa would have also been lost in NH...or maybe not.

Having said that, The Things I Did Do Right:

1)Laughed at the media

Goddamn, our media is full of milquetoast blather. Why can't all our news channels be International CNN?

I think Olbermann's co-host last night said it best when she described Clinton's campaign as "post-rational". After WI, everything I read in the papers, saw on TV or clicked on online could best be described as "post-rational". I mean, I certainly understand Hillary's motivations for pretending that pledged delegates didn't count, the "uncommitted" supers (read: Obama supporters looking for a way out of declaring it publicly) were actually uncommitted, and somebody somewhere was going to hand her the entire FL/MI delegations if she just spoke about it long enough, but to have this stuff actually repeated over and over as if it had a chance in hell of happening was beginning to depress me. (It hasn't even ended yet; somebody somewhere is already writing the "Hillary's crushing WV comeback proves something" headline.) Wright Part II was certainly a bad thing to hit...the presidential nominee. What, you bought into the idea that 200 out of 300 people were going to take the Democratic nomination away from a black guy who won the agreed-upon nominating process? Really? Next, you'll tell me that Hillary had a chance to win a state where 1/3 of the voters practically unanimously united against her and where she never broke 43%...

2)Listened to specific pollsters/statisticians over others

I'm not gonna lie and say I believed Zogby over SurveyUSA, but I did pay very close attention to everything poblano had to say. (If you don't know who he is, Google him.) Everything I did after 2/5 was either based on his work or fact checked through his website. For example, anyone (except Intraders, apparently) could see Obama would never lose NC, but it took somewhat more than that to get the margin in Indiana - which I never even bothered to predict because I had no clue - that close.

3)Went with base political instincts over 1) and 2)

Media: "John Edwards can play kingmaker through the convention ZOMG!"
Me: "How is a guy with a dying wife who is 0 for the first 25 states supposed to seriously campaign? And wouldn't his dropping
out *now* ensure a better deal for his support [OK, I'm obviously not perfect at this] than if he waits too long?"
Edwards dropped out the day after I matched someone's four digit bet against it.

Pollsters: "Wisconsin is a close race!"
Media: "Wisconsin is a close race!"
Intrade: *prices Clinton at 15 the day before*
Me: "Has Obama ever been within the margin of the margin of error in this thing?"
repeat x 11

Intrade: "Gore has a > 0% chance of being vice president!!!!"
Me: "no"

There's a lot more than that I'm forgetting, so let me cut that short and move to the comedy options:

4)Did not post a single thing on the Intrade forums

Oh god they're a goldmine to lurk on but posting is soooo tempting except it'd cost me money

5)Did post on 2+2 Politics forums

Thanks, guys. You made me 10K and counting, I guess.

6)Did at least short Ron Paul a little

and therefore win an argument on the Internet

7)Did basically prove my point

and therefore win an argument on the Internet


up next for this thread: the glorious dismantling of my hopes and dreams when Obama is revealed to have fathered two black children and Hillary comes back/historic and epic failure in the VP pick sweepstakes. tune in in 2 months!

Last night, I finalized my WSOP living arrangements - all I need to do now is finally buy flight tickets and I'm set. As some people can tell you, the last time I took a flight to attend a tournament, I managed to sleep through a gate change, so as insurance, I promise to blog about anything similar happening this time in the most embarrassing way possible.

In online news, after a week...well, not really 'off' (playing 1-2 tourneys a night for fun > not playing anything, but not actually work, either), it's once again time to spend a few K and a bunch of time on FTOPS events. The bad news is that 1)for whatever reason, I run so awfully at FTOPS that my best finish was in an LO8 event of all things, and 2)since I have little cash online, I'm gonna have to actually do well if I don't want to shift money around. The good news is that...well, it's FTOPS. It's not quite the UBOC or the Bodog series for terrible play, but it's close enough for awesomeness :)

Since I haven't been blogging as much and I want to try and go back to daily or near daily updates again for the WSOP, what I'll do now is to at least quickly recap the FTOPS events I'll actually play. I'm not sure about tonight's since I'm headed out to my parents' house and might not have time to play it, but other than that, I usually play about half the events in a series and I see no reason to stop now. So, expect an update tomorrow or the day after at the latest.

Since my last entry, I've played 2 full tournament days (by "full", I mean "very little", because I suck at volume) and a half day on Sunday. The Sunday was a complete bust, but last Wednesday included an FT bubble on UB and tonight had a 9'th place finish in the Cake 30r. That's the good news; the bad is that I think I played the UB tourney mediocre and probably did something wrong in the Cake tourney, too - I had a 270K (1st) to 110K (2nd) CL with 15 left, lost it on a pretty mediocre PF call, got most of it back with 12 left and then proceeded to bluff a good chunk of it off/not win another pot for half an hour. It doesn't help when people decide to defend their blind with 92s and get there, but that wasn't the entire story; once I got that lead, I just should have done more with it than I did.

It's been a long time since I've been final tabling this consistently, but now that I'm doing it, I need to top 3 and/or win these things, and that's just not happening so far. It feels like a combination of being rusty shorthanded and (still) just running bad in critical spots late, but I can't really complain about that tonight. Regardless, losing money ($100, but still) when you FT something is yucky. Ah well - with the low volume I play, 3 FT's and a bubble over a week is a big deal regardless/being up five figures is nice.

I should also say that I've partly dropped down in stakes. I always enjoyed playing well overrolled for almost everything I've ever decided to try and that still holds - theoretically, I have well over what I need - but with an investment I have going and this summer's likely WSOP spending extravaganza, a lot of my money has been transferred offline. Between that and the Intrade account, I don't really have enough online on every site to play $1K a day worth of buyins (BTW, the fact that I say "1K" should tip you off as to how little I actually play, sigh), and the variance in the larger tourney fields also works against that BR requirement. One of the reasons I was getting really sick of tournaments prior to recent events was simply not going deep enough often enough, which is entirely normal when everything you play has 1K people in it. Because of that, rather than spend a bunch of time on tilt from playing $150's I'm kinda shortrolled for (again, I could afford it, but it's hard enough to transfer money between the usual 4-6 sites these days that it's a pain in the ass for a tourney regular), my weekday schedule now has a bunch of $20-30 rebuys and $50-100 FO's with 200-400 people. The BR requirement is theoretically only slightly lower, but with 5-10K for 1'st, the field is much worse and has a lot more really terrible fish instead of mediocre regs. That, in turn, makes it easier to go deep and harder to get frustrated with poker, so except for Sundays, I think I'm gonna be playing that kind of sched a lot from now until at least the end of the summer.

I'll be leaving for Vegas again in about 4 weeks. It's hard to say whether I'm looking forward to it or not; I like the poker boot camp environment, but leaving my wife and comfortable apartment behind every year is hard. With that said, I think I can use the boot camp thing right now, so at worst, it'll be good to be around a bunch of people and thinking about the game again.

Also, I'm rooming with Bond...so the blog updates ought to be interesting :)

Played only two tourneys today. #1 was a weird, tiny Cake gold card freeroll rebuy where, on the first hand post-rebuy period, I got AA in vs. KT for a top 3 stack (with 18 left/3 2K WSOP packages) on a Kxx board and lost.

#2 was the UB bountyment. I came to the FT with the #2 stack, misplayed a really weird hand, possibly misplayed another (but doubt it), came back, and eventually got someone to call off 40% of effective stacks PF holding A T vs. my JJ 4 handed. The rest went in on the flop, which was 8 high with, of course, 3 spades.

Since I didn't play Monday, that makes 2 FT's in 6 tourneys, plus a very good day on Intrade today when Obama predictably lost Pennsylvania/dragged the political prediction season out another two months. But I still have to complain - I'm just not getting the good breaks late in tourneys that make up so godawfully much of your ROI.

Oh well. Now to go figure out how badly I messed that first hand up.

After a really frustrating month and a half, I finally have a major FT to show for it, the UB 200K. That tournament's been very good to me over the years, and today was no exception. Unfortunately, I ran just like I've run since March once I actually made the final table and took 6'th for 9K after two back to back unavoidable coolers, but I did play really good poker to get there (answer to how long it takes for enough bad beats to make me a little sloppy: right around a month and a half. In fact, I was starting to worry at how long it was taking to get a tournament worth making a video about this month...)

Now to keep doing that and build on the nice after tax season bounce.

Also, bonus hand for those of you who think I'm nitty (nobody post this on 2+2 for a day or two please):

MaximusBets is at seat 0 with 3010.
lowhanginset is at seat 1 with 7250.
PocketOwnage is at seat 2 with 1810.
-BENTLEY- is at seat 3 with 2660.
jas0042 is at seat 4 with 2600.
Vezina_08 is at seat 5 with 1450.
Adanthar1 is at seat 6 with 3900.
BiggDaddyBink is at seat 7 with 3420.
TheLynx is at seat 8 with 7100.
elveee is at seat 9 with 875.
The button is at seat 9.

MaximusBets posts the small blind of 20.
lowhanginset posts the big blind of 40.

MaximusBets: -- --
lowhanginset: -- --
PocketOwnage: -- --
-BENTLEY-: -- --
jas0042: -- --
Vezina_08: -- --
Adanthar1: 9d Ad
BiggDaddyBink: -- --
TheLynx: -- --
elveee: -- --

Pre-flop:

PocketOwnage folds. -BENTLEY- folds. jas0042 folds.
Vezina_08 folds. Adanthar1 raises to 120.
BiggDaddyBink folds. TheLynx folds. elveee folds.
MaximusBets folds. lowhanginset calls.

Flop (board: 9c Qc 2s):

lowhanginset checks. Adanthar1 bets 160.
lowhanginset calls.

Turn (board: 9c Qc 2s 7h):

lowhanginset checks. Adanthar1 checks.

River (board: 9c Qc 2s 7h 2h):

lowhanginset checks. Adanthar1 bets 350.
lowhanginset raises to 900. Adanthar1 calls.



Showdown:

lowhanginset shows As Jc.
lowhanginset has As Jc Qc 2s 2h: a pair of deuces.
Adanthar1 shows 9d Ad.
Adanthar1 has 9d Ad 9c 2s 2h: two pair, nines and deuces.