First, the very short term: I'll most likely have another article on P5's either this weekend or on Monday. It'll be about Obama and poker - I'll have to post an exact topic and maybe repost the article after I write it, but if you've been reading the blog or my posts on 2+2, you already know most of what I think on the subject. Suffice to say I am optimistic about the chances of a UIGEA repeal under Obama and feel that the game would be better off with him in office. (I also did make a CR video - it should be up sometime next week.)

Second, in a surprising development, the AP/UB story is *still* slated on 11/9 and might actually stay there :) (If not, it shouldn't be pushed back past 11/16.) For the last couple of weeks, I've been working with the Washington Post on the newspaper and online side of the story, and they'll be hosting an online, live Q&A segment for an hour or so the day after it is released. It'll be in an ESPN-type live blog format where people ask questions and my answers are released one at a time; I have to admit I'm looking forward to it a little bit because it'll be the day after 60M airs and seeing myself getting interviewed by Steve Kroft on national television, then answering questions about it is gonna be kinda cool. At any rate, I don't have the URL yet but will post it on the Sunday of the story.

About myself: Unlike Bond, who is a sicko to begin with and who's without a girlfriend for a month, I'm a lazy, lazy man and have my wife with me. Therefore, I'm continuing to focus on Intrade and only play on Sundays until the election. My schedule during this time period is only a handful of the bigger tournaments, so I was fairly sure that I was going to have zero decent results for a while. This last Sunday, however, I did wind up making an FT of a small major, the Cake 50K warmup event. Although I promptly finished ninth and didn't really make any money (and was annoyed with that enough not to post it immediately or on Monday), it's nice that I'm getting there. I also find myself posting on 2+2 again and thinking about hands, which is usually a sign that I'd like to, like, make money and stuff. After my 11/5 post-electoral hangover wears off, I will be spending a lot of time on my game, both on Cake and elsewhere.

I never really "quit" doing CR so much as I just quit playing tournaments (outside of Sundays, at any rate.) As you guys know, for the last two months I've been concentrating on politics (Obama '08? More like my wallet '08) and haven't been playing much. That, in turn, has led to zero decent hand histories worth submitting to CR and zero videos - I keep my standards kinda high and don't really want to do a vid about any old tourney with no interesting hands. But CR has recently asked me to do a leakfinder video, which doesn't involve my own HH's, and I'll likely get to that on Saturday. This'll be kinda interesting because the HH they gave me is one of my students', so he'll get a free session at the cost of having all his leaks pointed out to a few hundred people. I'll have to ask him how that turned out a few weeks afterwards.

The bad news is I had a Washington Post photographer over for their online version of the AP story and asked him about the timeframe. It looks like it's getting pushed back again, this time to after the election. The new date is 11/9 - hopefully that's the last one, but, y'know, as long as they air it this year I'll be happy.

I'd like to say that something interesting happened for me in poker last week, but no, not really. I only played extensively on Sunday. Results: my dad, who'd been sweating me, calls me up telling me Full Tilt is rigged. I had a good laugh, but really, it'd be nice to run good or something. I'm not asking to crush the villains and hear the lamentations of their women like Vivek does whenever he sits down at a live table, but winning slightly more than a little under my share of coinflips would be nice.

At this point, though, I'd like to talk about something else. You might've noticed this site has gotten a little less busy of late. I'd like to think it's because I've been slacking and everyone waits for my next post with bated breath, but in reality, I'm guessing it's because we all managed to collectively take breaks from poker at the same time as the economy imploded and everyone stopped caring. Trying to update a site about what most of the world (although not all of it) sees as a hobby isn't as easy when your dozen most favorite relatives' collective life savings have decreased by a third or so over the last month. I'm doing my best to singlehandedly reverse that via running an Intrade investment pool (yes, really), but I can only make 20% in three weeks so many times, y'know?

(Warning: the following has nothing to do with poker whatsoever)

I do believe that a recovery of sorts is coming, though, and I would like to get this down in writing so that I can hail myself as a visionary and quote how awesome I am:

FWIW, I think we're on the cusp of something extremely different from everything that has gone before. I know very little about market fundamentals, but I do understand human psychology, especially as it pertains to gambling and, yes, trading. My intuition, derived solely from the media and an occasional friend in the sector, is telling me that a)Wall Street thinks/wants the worst to be over and b)we have hit something at least resembling a bottom on Thursday and Friday, but c)this is because (and Wall Street likes this) the way that markets operate is now going to be hugely altered. Even six months ago, the announcement that the United States, along with Europe, now owns large chunks of many major financial institutions would not be viewed as remotely positive for anybody; now, the analysts are praising the move and traders palpably want it to work. I don't claim to know whether the economic underpinnings of this idea are solid, but the bottom line is that the G8 finance ministers have collectively undertaken a largely socialist action potentially costing trillions of dollars and the markets are *cheering* this.

I am, therefore, forced to conclude that the idea/market goal of laissez faire capitalism is dead. (Yes, I do realize that the markets were never close to that, but that isn't really the point.) The Bush administration in particular and long-held US policy in general has trended towards constant deregulation of the markets and a hands off attitude; it's now safe to say that this will never happen again in my lifetime. The series of moves the people in charge of the situation have taken may or may not work - it's easy to criticize them on the Internet, but I doubt more than ten people on the planet fully understand the ramifications right now, anyway. But what I do know is that the market participants themselves seem in favor of this socialism-type action and are trading on the assumption that it is a positive, and what *that* means is nothing more than the beginning of a fundamental, permanent shift in the way we think of economics/capitalism. Even if the interventions fail miserably, there will be a distinct lack of traders arguing for hands off, deregulatory approaches for a very long time to come.

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I make no pretense that I know what I'm talking about. My only experience with doing anything properly in this area is accurately calling the oil bubble early this summer, again based on psychology ("if the talking heads saying oil will never drop remind me of the pets.com sock puppet, it's probably going to tank soon" seems like a good rule to go by.) But hey, it's cool to have a blog I can post random gigantic speculation on!

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Also, a cameraman is gonna film me for the Washington Post's online featurette on the AP/UB scandal this Friday. That's going to come out at the same time as 60M - again, I'm guessing at the end of the month.

These two hands happened within an orbit of each other:

http://cakepoker.com//HandHistory/?Hand=xcLAwMaywbDAw8TExMzGwYjFxcbMxcc%3d

http://cakepoker.com//HandHistory/?Hand=xcLAwMaywbDAw8TExM3HwIjFxcbMxcc%3d

While everyone should check out Bond's new post about MTT grinding, I've never been the kind of guy that does very well playing an 8 hour a day - or 4 hour a day, for that matter - schedule. I wish I were, but I'm not. Nevertheless, once in a while (usually following long breaks) the unwillingness to put in hands lifts and I do spend a few hours in front of a laptop making the Sklansky dollar counter go up. I've been playing SNG's, my new daily grind in between Sundays, since the first of the month, with very good results as usual in those games. I don't think I'm playing perfect SNG poker, especially because Cake can be weird; if you put my decisions for each long individual sit and go into SNGWiz, it usually comes out with 8-10 "incorrect" decisions that turn out to be right once you adjust their ranges from the "on Stars and everywhere normal, he should be calling 100% of his hands" to the "but on Cake, he folds 80% of them" part of the slider...still leaving 1-3 hands per session that are marginal or slightly -EV. But that's nothing a few hundred donkaments' worth of rust removal won't fix. At any rate, even with the game's negative effects on motivation, it feels good to watch the green numbers go up.

Intrade is also going well. The mystery Obama shorter referred to in my last post is back and striking again for 50K worth of action at a time. Adding everything up reveals he's taken at least $150,000 of bets on McCain at odds up to 10 points above where the market was trending, which is even worse than it sounds because we're talking about shares; buying a share worth 25 points at 35 isn't just a 10% mispricing, it's more like 30%. My best guess is he's lost upwards of $25,000 - which will be far more than that if McCain actually wins - on merely buying these shares, not counting Intrade's vig. Moreover, he's still enabling monster arbitrage opportunities for everybody else with accounts on other books - consider this one last attempt to get people to trade on the site. (Hey, the more liquidity on those shares, the more everyone including myself profits against him every time he hits.)

Finally, while I'm here, I've heard a rumor - at this point, only a rumor - that the 60 Minutes piece is airing on the 26'th. This does fit what a couple of people have told me, however, so I think it's plausible and actually a go this time. The novelty's worn off a little bit for me by now, but I still really want to see how it turns out...and kinda hope Hamilton/Tom/Green all get nailed afterwards. Nobody likes the necessity of the police being involved here, but it *is* a necessity; the industry cannot afford the kind of black eye that the twin scandals back to back have given it, and getting the bad apples into court is the first step to resolving that. With the recession/depression/whatever upon us, if poker is going to be a competitor for the reduced entertainment dollar, it's simply got to be seen as a clean, fair game.