I enjoy making use of the '1-click shopping' arrangement on Amazon.com. I heard they even tried to patent that function, which I find kinda funny.

Anyhow, I just got done reading Kitchen Confidential. It's part-memoir and part reflection on the restaurant industry. The author is Anthony Bourdain, whose show on The Travel Channel is currently my favorite show, so I bought the book wanting to know about his culinary background (since the popularity from the book is what's largely responsible for his TV show). One thing I know for sure is I'd never cut it in the culinary industry, the pain in my feet after standing for 12 hours at a time would drive me insane. However the read did give me a greater appreciation for fine dining (something poker players probably indulge more on than their similar-aged friends) and a better idea of how kitchens work.

I think my next read is going to be The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, who is famous for "Moneyball" and 'The Blind Side". Lewis was on The Daily Show recently and talked about his book and the markets, and the extensive poker analogies in the interview were interesting to me, in the sense that the author clearly understood the concept of applied risk whereas Jon Stewart (god bless him cuz I love him) was making references to the craps table

Anyhow the book is largely based on 12 or so investors, examples being Andy Beal and David Einhorn, who shorted the market during the 3-4 year stretch where companies were constantly making bad "bets" on the lending and real estate markets. Most poker players know about Andy Beal (of Beal Bank) from the book "The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King", some people in poker may know Einhorn from his run during the main event that Jamie Gold won (Einhorn donated all winnings to charity). Their names obviously are more popular in the investing circles, I'd imagine.

But anyhow, like the book "Fooled by Randomness" I'm always intrigued at financial thinkers who know and understand applied risk like pro poker player's do, and I also enjoy seeing the traditional guard of non-rational thinkers get crushed. Lewis, a former bond salesman with Salomon Brothers, is definitely keen on exploring the subject with some of his prior works covering the evolution of statistical analysis with football and baseball. So, I may read those books afterwards if I happen to like this one.

Poker-wise is going meh, I've gotten into some good games but just haven't been running well. While I've successfully been avoiding tournaments, I've been mixing up my cashgame play just to keep my workethic going, and along the way I found a very soft 20/40 mixed game on Stars this evening but lost a 3k pot versus the table fish flopping the nut straight and getting checkraised huge, so I opted to go call/call/raise or call/shove hinging on the board texture, the turn paired the top card so I called turn and jammed river for $200 more and lost to a full house (top and bottom pair on the flop). Was pretty meh considering I was crushing in all of the other games, that's one negative part about 8game; you can be running really well in the minbet games and it can be countered by 1 coinflip in PLO or NLHE cooler.

After that debacle, plus the fishy leaving, I went down to my standard 10/20 8game mix and added in a bunch of 100NL fullring tables and found a very pleasant atmosphere in this grind. Will have to make sure to do it again more sometime soon, as it provides a good balance of poker that requires thinking and notetaking (the 1 table of mix) while getting in a bunch of easy volume (the tons of tables of smallstakes fullring).

Lastly, I'm trying to get a mixed game started at my local cardroom, though the timing sucks since the only day I'd want to do it is Saturday and March Madness just started. Guess that'll have to wait, so in the meantime I'm just gonna keep grinding and watching lots of videos. As for making videos, I had one made a couple days ago but didn't think it was worth putting on the site. Tomorrow I'm gonna try and make a microstakes mixed game video while watching March Madness and hopefully it'll be well received. I'll admit to being a miserable LHE player (watching videos to work on that, might get coaching) but I think I play all the other 7 games competently enough to win up to midstakes level.

All for now!