What's in a number ?

Iphone 4S instead of the much hyped Iphone 5.

Faster processor, 8 MP camera, HD video capabilities and what else ?

Hmm ... I think that's it. Still no flash support, no 4G.

IOS5, Siri, Icloud .... nope. Doesn't count. Those are software upgrades and everybody can get those. Software upgrades are a dime a dozen.

So basically, Apple fans waited in bated breath and giddy anticipation for a whole fucking year for the announcement of something revolutionary and they get SQUAT. Heheheh ..... They get a slightly (emphasis on slightly) updated phone wrapped in Apple goobledygook.

Of course, Apple fanatics will defend their beloved phone and gush about the camera and the faster speeds. But c'mon, who are they kidding ? Android users have had those since last year. Deep inside, we can all stop pretending that nobody is disappointed.

The truth is Apple users and potential upgraders are hugely disappointed. Apple was the victim of their own hype. People overexpected and the product underwhelmed. The worst possible combination. Of course, it will still sell tons of units as it is still a good product. Just not the great product that everyone was expecting. This will obviously lessen the gap between Apple and its competitors. Stock prices of Samsung, LG, HTC went up while Apple stocks went down and rightfully so. Apple really dropped the ball on this one.

By the way, I am not an iphone hater. Although I use an android phone, I do own an IPAD 2. So I'm actually open minded about the whole thing and enjoy new gadgets with no bias. I was actually seriously considering the Iphone 5 as a possible replacement to my HTC phone if it did came out. But I am obviously not dropping serious moolah on the Iphone 4S as there is nothing I want from its feature set that I am not getting from my current Android phone.

So disappointing. =)

NBA Madness

I am sure most of us have heard that the NBA Stars are coming to the Philippines this Saturday and Sunday to play in exhibition games against a PBA selection and the Smart Gilas Team . For an NBA fan like me, this is like one of those WTF ... HOLY COW,,, ARE YOU KIDDING ME moments.

And we're not talking about those over the hill players that usually come here in the past for charity and goodwill missions. We're talking about full pledged all stars from the current era. Kobe, Durant, Rose, Chris Paul, Tyreke Evans. Heck, I'm even excited to see Javale Mcgee and old man Fisher.

It's a once in a lifetime chance to see these guys up close and personal. Unless I hope to travel to the USA one of these days and get lucky enough to watch an All Star game, this is basically as close as it gets. The current NBA Lockout has given a unique opportunity for the organizers to get this done. Normally, these guys would be hard in training for the upcoming NBA season and would not even contemplate coming to the Philippines.

Since last Saturday, there has been a mad rush for tickets and now everything is sold out. Scalpers are making a killing as tickets are now being sold at 4 to 5x their face value and people are still buying. That's how crazy Filipinos are for basketball. And I cannot blame them. Looking at it a certain way, the original ticket prices are actually a bargain. Imagine getting to watch an NBA game live right in our own backyard.

As for me, I basically had to use up all of my known connections and begged and cajoled certain people. But it was worth it as I have in my grubby little hands lower box tickets to the game for my brothers and me. Woohoo. Fucking A.

My connection told me that it was next to impossible to get good tickets at face value as every politician and his mother wanted one. There were even foreigner VIPs calling up wanting to come over and watch. That's how great the demand was for tickets.

So for everyone who's gonna enjoy this live or in TV, let's take a brief moment to thank David Stern, the NBA owners and Billy Hunter. Your greed and pigheadedness may cause an NBA lockout this coming year. But who cares, thanks to you guys, the NBA stars are coming !!!!!

Check from Full Tilt

As indicated in a previous post, I withdrew majority of my bankroll from Full Tilt due to the Black Friday brouhaha. I requested for a check and the first one arrived yesterday.

To my surprise, the check was from a Philippine bank and it was already in pesos. I have already done previous withdrawals from FTP and it was always a foreign check that arrived. But this time for some reason that could be related to Black Friday, it was already a local check.

Conversion was not too bad. Our current exchange rate is hovering at around 43 and I got around 40 : 1 for the dollars that I withdrew. This is certainly better than the rates being offered in Pokermanila forums if you're selling FTP $.

So for anyone reading this post. Withdrawal by check from FTP is actually now a valid alternative. It took about 2 week for the check to arrive in the mail from the time I made the transaction. So the wait was not too bad.

In another bit of poker news, Pokerstars recently changed their rake and blinds structure. This has caused an uproar especially among SNG and MTT grinders. It seems that the rake for the lower buy ins have increased and this has led to a lot of complaints. Marginally profitable players are thinking that the increased rake will totally wipe out their profits.

In my personal opinion, the rake is actually not too bad unless you play the micros which had a really big increase. But if you analyze it, it takes the same amount of server resources to process a micro tournament and a mid level tournament and obviously Pokerstars gets a lot more rake from the higher buyin tourneys. So raking micros higher makes sense from a strictly financial point of view.

For the 5 to 20 dollar tourneys that I sometimes join, the effect is not that big. There was one big change though The 15+1 9man turbos are gone. This is actually one of the most cost efficient SNGs that you can play in the online poker scene. The rake for this tourney is only 6.6% considering that the Industry average is about 10%. So obviously, Pokerstars had to get rid of this one to fuck over all of its loyal SNG grinders.

Anyway, for casual players, the increase in rake is not that noticeable. For grinders, it depends on what games you play. But at the end of the day, its all about making profit and due to Black Friday and the withdrawal of US players. Pokerstars' profits were significantly reduced and all the talk about being customer centric flies out the window if you're not making money.

When there's smoke....

there's fire.

This is an often used quote to describe a situation where if a person sees signs of something unusual, then there is something bad going on and one must be alert and suspicious.

Right now, this is happening for Cake Poker. It appears like the site is having financial difficulties based on the length of withdrawal time and the flimsy excuses thrown at you by their customer support. Before, a withdrawal usually takes a few days. Now, I have a withdrawal pending for a month and its still sitting there.

Their customer support is claiming technical issues but that is a load of crap as my previous withdrawal took 3 weeks and they used the same excuse. How can you have a technical problem with your software for more than 3 months and you still haven't fixed it.

With black friday, one would think that Cake would experience some relief as US players would probably flock to their site as they are one of the few remaining still accepting US players. But I don't know, 1 month is a long time to process a small amount of money.

It was the same thing that happened to Banco Filipino which closed down recently. A few weeks before the actual close. I heard some rumblings about their financial state. It piqued my interest because my wife had some of our funds invested in their time accounts. So I did some research and discovered that they were actually not doing so well for quite some time now. So I asked my wife how much we had invested there and what was the interest rate. My suspicion became full blown paranoia when she told me that they were offering almost double what the other banks were giving out and this has been going on for the past year or so.

HUH? I may not be the brightest guy in this world. But I know one thing from player poker for this long. Nothing in this world is free and of course, when there's smoke, there must be fire. Why would a bank offer you a much much higher rate than the 2 biggest banks ? Did they have some genius fund manager who knew something most of us didn't ?

This led me to the decision to pull out all of our funds there. My wife was a little skeptical since she knew the manager and she reassured her that nothing was going on. She also felt that the interest was "sayang". But I was adamant and she finally agreed. She also told one of her aunts who had money there. The aunt withdrew most of her funds but left some money behind as she was also thinking of the wasted interest.

Exactly one week after our withdrawal, the bank closed. It was open Monday and then suddenly with no warning. It did not open anymore. A lot of my wife's friends and acquaintances got stuck with significant money in the bank. Yes, there is PDIC, but that's only for 500k. The rest is pretty much up to the whims of bankruptcy procedures.

My wife now thinks I have some kind of ESP or something. But it wasn't that or anything supernatural at all. Sometimes we are blinded when there is a chance to earn good money. We do not read the signs for what they are. Greed acts like a blinder. But if you just step back a little. You will see the real picture and you should act accordingly.

This is my last withdrawal from Cake as I have been slowly pulling out my funds and the amount I have left is insignificant. Sharkscope tells me that I am actually a shark in that site with an average ROI of more than 100%. But who cares about ROI and the fishes there if your funds get stuck. If a bank that is tightly regulated can close, what more a poker site with dubious regulations.

Repeat after me. Where there's smoke .................

Back to the Grind

Wow ! Last post was September 2010. That was about 7 months ago. Just to quickly update, I did not really stop playing poker. I was just too busy to update my blog as I can no longer access blog sites thru our office internet. And when I come home, I only have so much time to do all the family stuff plus play my usual hours. So this blog was the least of my priorities.

In any case, the biggest news in the pokerworld is Black Friday where it seems that the DOJ equivalent in the USA has filed fraud and laundering charges against the 2 biggest poker sites: Pokerstars and Full Tilt. This has led to the complete banning of US players from their sites and the freezing of their accounts. For the past week, US players have been in limbo and I would guess that hundreds of online pros who rely on poker for their living expenses are banging their heads on their monitors and shouting WTF.

Based on latest news that I heard, Pokerstars has already begun the process of allowing players to withdraw their money. But nothing definite yet from Full Tilt.

Although the 2 poker sites have repeatedly reassured their non US players that its business as usual. One cannot help feel a bit of apprehension about the continued viability of their business models. Logically, they should still survive and thrive well enough as other countries have no restrictions in place and international players are still populating the tables.

But to be safe, I withdrew 80% of my bankroll from Full Tilt and almost 90% from Cake. Both have been approved and I am just waiting for the checks to arrive. Hopefully, there will be no issues and I can deposit them in local banks with no problems. Since I only had less than a thousand dollars in Pokerstars. I decided to just leave that behind for playing.

Although everything seems ok for international players and my withdrawals quickly approved, I actually want to kick myself for being lazy and keeping a huge chunk of my bankroll in the sites themselves especially FTP. I was confident that Pokerstars and FTP were too big to fall. But the events that have happened has shaken this confidence and although I will continue playing. I will make sure that I only have about 50 buyins in each site that I play in. Everything else will be withdrawn promptly and kept locally.

OK. That's about it for now. Hopefully I can update this blog more often. I don't even know if I have any readers left. Heheh.