Musings

Related to an earlier blogpost regarding our most +EV choices in life.
http://www.liquidpoker.net/blog/viewblog.php?id=923919

I'm at a stage in life where poker makes Zero sense to play.

1) I have a job which gives me great career options going forward and is a constantly challenging learning process. Any extra work I put into learning extra skills and industry knowledge/standards translates to huge long term +EV.

2) I have an investment portfolio that has a much greater long term EV return for time invested (i.e. keeping track of the markets, reading business and economic news every day, studying financials and business propositions of public corporations, etc) than can ever realistically give me for the same number of hours committed. Even if I make GREAT money at poker per year, the per hour return compounded over many decades will definitely lose out to equivalent commitment to investing disciplines.

3) I have a number of pursuits that give me great joy and are healthy pastimes (random coding projects, the odd blogging activity, yardwork -loliknow-, gym ratting, etc.).

The upsides Poker gave me were
a) Monetary gains - countered by points (1) and (2) above.

b) Enjoyment - countered by point (3) above.

c) Meeting people - irreplaceable, but at this point I don't feel the need to actually play the game to sustain or grow this aspect.

I still get mild to strong urges to play Poker again. It's unmistakably a fun game for me to play. But my enjoyment is correlated to winning, and winning tends to be a long term result. Long term means I need to commit many hours to make sure I win, and in turn enjoy the activity.

The dots just don't connect for me anymore, so I try my best to reason myself out of playing the game. I've been successful so far, and hopefully I can build on this track record. It's tough quitting 'the habit', but spending 3-4 hours in front of a monitor clicking buttons and being stressed out about running into the top of someone's range just doesn't seem to make sense for me anymore.

I guess the current hoopla surrounding FTP/Stars does help me out in this regard.

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Quick blog.

Poker - lost like 100bi over various limits and various games (PLO400~PLO25, NL50~NL25) over the last 4 months. Roll from $7,000 -> $200 or so. Looks like it's time to throw in the towel. I was never ever a "poker pro" by any means, but going out in this fashion hurts my pride a bit for sure

Life - Moved back to the Silicon Valley and joined a startup. Responsibilities are pretty close to what I was looking for (between Marketing and Engineering), and the CEO has successfully executed 3 previous startups. I like my manager, and this should be a lot of fun~

Life II - I've spent the last few months learning our family's finances and investment philosophies. The bulk of my own assets are of the buy and hold nature, but I've reallocated a small portion of my funds to a discount brokerage in order to be more actively involved in the markets. Whatever happens to this money won't make or break me, but the experience I gain from this endeavor will be super valuable as I advance in age and attain more assets that I could potentially lose had I not had these "micro-mistakes" and learned from them. Already, I've caught myself making rash decisions based on short term market fluctuation, without sticking to what I believed in about the companies I had invested in. I really enjoy reading analyst reports and connecting "business news" into possible investment opportunities (i.e. devalued stock prices, such as HP's CEO scandal, or BP's oil mess), so it's been quite intellectually stimulating.

We'll see what 2011 has in store for me~~

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Hey guys.

I ordered a monitor from the FTP store today. The site told me to expect 6-8 weeks, but from your experience how long does it take for the item to arrive?

Thanks!

(here are some breasts to express my gratitude)
+ Show Spoiler +

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