Goodbye, Andy Reid

Goodbye, Andy Reid.

It's been a good run. A great run, in fact, in a lot of ways. Except the ones that *really* matter. But it really has been a fun 11 years here in Philly, especially compared to some of the schmike we had as head coaches during the 80s and 90s. And I truly have little doubt that at your next team (my money is on San Diego at the moment), you will have loads more regular season success.

I want to be clear about one thing as you leave this team following the unmitigated disaster that is the 2011 Philadelphia Eagles regular season. Obviously, a lot of the blame for this putrid year falls on the front office’s shoulders, for bringing in guys like Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie and Nnamdi Asomugha, neither one of which, it is now clear, can cover their way out of a paper bag. And for not paying speedy wideout DeSean Jackson what he deserved coming into this season, and bringing in a guy like Asomugha at 25 times DeSean’s salary instead. How the front office could have expected DeSean to react, other than exactly the way he has, under those circumstances, is patently ludicrous. Those were hideous moves, obvious wrong moves and I don’t see how people can much blame you, Andy, for that stuff.

But that said, everything else wrong with this team in 2011 pretty much falls squarely on your shoulders. Lets put aside for a minute the fact that you have never won the big game in your life, despite being the #1 seed in the NFC three times in your 11-year tenure, and despite losing the NFC Championship twice at home to inferior teams. On a week in, week out basis, your clock management is laughably bad, and always has been. The use of time outs on this team under your tenure has been enough to make anyone physically ill, and clearly, you have been the major contributor to that. The 2011 season has, sadly, been no exception to this rule.

Similarly, the way you manage unhappy players should be the stuff of legends by now. DeSean was 100% right to be pissed off coming into this season, and after not getting a deal as the season wore on while guys like Chris Johnson did finally get their money and get pizznaid. But come on, Andy, with the benching and the sitting DeSean out for drives, entire halves of games, etc. Andy, you are just too much of a hardass to be able to deal effectively with today’s modern day NFL player, especially the prima donnas that populate the wide receiver position in today's game. We’ve lost parts of like four separate seasons now during your 11-year regime as head coach because of disgruntled wideouts whom you simply have no clue how to handle, while most other coaches in the NFL seem to have figured out how to coexist so much better than you have. Why is it Philadelphia that always seems to have these huge throwdowns between you and the wide receivers, while almost nowhere else do things ever seem to spiral this badly out of control, and result in multi-game benchings, kickings off of the team entirely, etc.?

DeSean will probably still make his money when he signs with the Giants in a few months, albeit probably a little less than what he should have been paid this year by the Eagles after what has been a pretty well disastrous 2011 for him as well as for this team. The Eagles did DeSean wrong, over and over and over again this year. Including you, Coach Reid, not insisting that offensive coordinator Marty Mohrenweig integrate DeSean better into the offense this year. Over the past couple of seasons, DeSean was *constantly* being targeted downfield, at the beginning of games and all the way through to the end, and that strategy undeniably worked very well for the Eagles. This season, however, right from the getgo, all of sudden DeSean just hasn’t been targeted downfield even close to as much, and our offense has suffered greatly as a result. Who (other than the Denver Broncos, obviously) has a good offense in today's NFL without any real downfield threat in this league? It’s an absolute joke, and you, Andy Reid, are about 80% at fault for that. DeSean has literally been targeted around 33% as much as he was last season, all while the team's offense has downright sputtered in many of its games despite being the top 1 or 2 most prolific offense in the league in 2010. How you, as the head coach of this team, could just stand by while this has occurred week after week after week this year is beyond me, and beyond any of us.

And lets don’t even expound on what has happened to the team's defense under your watch, especially here in 2011. Promoting this idiot Luis Castillo -- our former offensive line coach -- to Defensive Coordinator this past offseason has got to be the single stupidest decision made in the NFL by any team or any head coach in at least a year, maybe as much as a decade. I mean, who ever promotes an o-line coach to be a defensive coordinator on a team that struggled mightily on defense in the past season, and then on top of that who also added a number of big-name personnel through free agent signings and trades in the offseason to boot? Who does that? Who else ever thinks that could work in this league? Completely foreseeably, Castillo has been an abject failure, a complete and total bomb, as D-Coordinator, and that one falls 100% on you as the head coach of this team. Not 66%, not 80%, but 100% squarely on you and you alone. And to compound things, you have just stood by and let Castillo suck it up worse and worse and worse all season long, doing nothing to change things up and nothing to get more involved in calling the plays on defense. And my god, could our corners other than Asante Samuel be any worse? Possibly??? Rodgers-Cromartie and Asomugha have been the single worst cornerback tandem in as long as I can remember in the NFL, just two totally worthless players who cannot cover anybody, ever. Asomugha himself has probably been among the bottom two or three starting players in the NFL this season, either getting beat, or committing a blatant hold or pass interference because hes about to give up a touchdown what, 10 different times this year? And yet you do nothing. And this isn't even mentioning the tackling in general on this team, which has been atrocious ever since the very first play from scrimmage against the Eagles this season, when the Rams' Steven Jackson ran for a 54-yard score from behind midfield. Who knew what a harbinger of things to come that one play would be for the 2011 Eagles defense? Well, Andy, your hand-picked guy has led the way with this defense, starting with a couple of the team's biggest offseason pickups, and it has just gone from unthinkable to hideous to putrid as the season has worn on. Last Thursday's 31 points given up to the laughable Seahawks with my dead grandma at quarterback was just the latest in a season full of embarrassments on the defensive side of the ball, and all the while, you have done nothing, nothing at all, to improve things or shake things up. You have simply stood by and fiddled while the Eagles' season burned to ashes.

And lastly, while we're on the topic of Week 13's Seahawks loss, the way this Eagles team has just given up here these past couple of weeks, it is just inexcusable and, once again, absolutely, positively all on your shoulders as the head coach. There is just nobody else to blame for the complete and total lack of heart on this team, none. As far as im concerned, we could take Mike Vick, LeSean Mccoy, Brent Celek and Alex Cooper on offense, and Trent Cole and Jason Babin along with Asante Samuel on defense, and throw every single other player on the team out and start over. At first it was just DeSean Jackson throwing in the towel on the season out of frustration and anger, but now, in a very similar story during your 11 years leading the team in Philadelphia, it has infected the whole team just like it did with TO –- the Eagles are all now a bunch of non-caring losers on this team, plain and simple.

In summary, I blame you as our head coach about 75% overall for the problems of this year’s Philadelphia Eagles. Which, after 11 years of consistently blowing clock management in-game and of rock-solid consistency in stepping down in the big spots, it is clearly time for you to move on. We need to bring in someone new to head this team in 2012, someone with a fresh face for these players, and for these fans who so clearly deserve better. Someone who will not get embarrassed in almost every game by letting the clock run out before we can kick field goals, someone whose players are not so ill-prepared that they are constantly wasting much-needed timeouts before the time when we actually need them. Someone who, while being a disciplinarian, understands far better than you do how to coexist with the ridiculous personas and out-of-control mindsets that, like it or not, now populate all professional sports in this country, with football being absolutely no exception whatsoever.

I want to say again that I truly am thankful for what has been a solid 11 year run in Philadelphia. Believe me when I say, I honestly do not expect to bring in another head coach who will find a way to win five NFC Easts in 11 years. That's never happened before here, and it probably never will again. But like mostly all other Philadelphia Eagles fans at this point in time, I am way beyond the point where I would trade five division titles in 11 years, all for just one Superbowl victory. In a split second. And although I have little doubt that you will take the Chargers, who have long suffered under the hand of the legal idiot known as Norv Turner in San Diego, or some other similar team, and in just a season or two turn them into an 10-6, 11-5 or better type of team. When it comes to regular seasons, you have proven yourself to me beyond a doubt, and I don't doubt that you will have many successes in the regular season to come, nor that you will walk right back into a head coaching job should you so desire within weeks of your firing by the Eagles after this disastrous regular season comes to a close. But the fans of Philadelphia, which despite the recent success of the Phillies, has always been a football town first and foremost, deserve better than you. We deserve better than to go into every season just waiting for the implosion between you and our star player, and always knowing that no matter how good we perform in the regular season, the playoffs are always looming right around the corner, where we know going in we are going to come up just short, and get out-coached when it counts the most.

Give me Bill Cowher. Give me Jeff Fisher. For Christ's sake, go and find a way to bring Jon Gruden back here where he was the O-Coordinator many years ago and got his start before finding his way to the Monday Night Football booth. But most of all, just give me some hope. At this point, now that this disastrous regular season is more than 3/4 gone, Eagles fans just want hope for a championship more than anything else, and you, Andy Reid, are simply not the guy who can bring us back that hope.

Happy Trails, Andy. I will always think fondly of your 11 years here. And when we do finally host that parade down Broad Street with the Superbowl trophy floating by with our name on it, I will think back to the moment of your firing, with a smile.

Thoughts From the Borgata Fall Poker Open -- Part I

That's right -- an actual poker post ahead!!

So I went and played in the Borgata Fall Poker Open last week. Long story short, I made a nice run, played about 13 hours in a one-day event, and lasted through more than 98% of the field before being eliminated just short of the final table. The event I played was a bounty event, and I managed to pick up 6 elimination bounties -- more than covering my full buyin for the event as it was -- plus a small four-figure cash for finishing in 11th place on the day. Although I lost the vast majority of my stack on a dominated suckout that took me out of the tournament instead of vaulting me into the top half of the final table, for reasons I will describe below, I did not and do not feel I had much right to complain about that, and complain about that suckout I will not.

The interesting thing was, I really did not play very well in this tournament. It's not all that usual, but I've definitely had a number of these sorts of runs over my career back in the online poker days, days where I never really get it together, my reads are not really all that perfect, I make some mistakes, but somehow manage to survive through them and make a nice run. But I really did not play very well in this event, and my total lack of current experience playing the game really showed in my opinion, in a lot of different ways.

For starters, I got very little in the way of cards for the first several hours in this tournament, but I handled that fact much more poorly than is necessary for any aspiring successful poker tournament player. Like, I got no good starting cards. At. All. My first six hands of the tournament all had a 2 in them, and 9 out of my first 10. I could not believe it. That's about as bad of a beginning run as one could ever imagine for sure (what are the odds? 2/13 of having a 2 in any given hand, right? so 6 in a row to start is 2/13 to the 6th power, right? For those keeping score, that is 0.0000136, or 13 in a million for those less math-inclined), and that's not even counting that the next three hands after my 7th hand did not include a 2, also had 2s in them again. But aside from the astonishing math behind this occurrence, I handled this horrific string of starting cards as poorly as could be imagined. I mean, here i was having driven two hours to play this tournament with some blogger friends, and here I was completely tilted out of my mind after what, 30 minutes of play? And I hadn't even gotten sucked out on, or even lost a pot yet for that matter. But you should have seen me. I was complaining to my fellow players, showing my cards after every fold to players already out of the hand, and just generally driving myself crazy over what was, albeit a mathematical freak show, just 10 bad starting hands to start a tournament. That's all. But I literally had to get up and take a walk around the luxurious Borgata poker room after the 10th hand was dealt to me, that's how out of my mind I was just from seeing all those 2s in my pocket cards. Clearly, I was out of the right mindset and out of experience in playing mtt's, and it really showed.

Similarly, after months and months generally away from the game, my instincts were no more in no-limit form than one would expect them to be. After managing to calm myself down once the 2s stopped flowing almost exclusively to my hands, I proceeded to bet or raise a few times with total garbage either before or on the flop -- I had to try to play with something, didn't I? -- based largely on what I perceived to be weakness among the players in front of me, and I was generally wrong about as often as I was right. Almost every time I tried to open-steal in the earlygoing from middle or late position, some clown behind me who I had been sure was looking like he would fold, would instead reraise, and I would end up sheepishly folding. Around the three- or four-hour mark, I was getting to be around half the average stack (I was never really above average in this entire 13-hour run, it would turn out), and I made two different flop raises against guys I had read as tight and weak, and on both instances was forced to fold when my opponent surprised me by reraising me allin. Yes, I made the good fold in each case, but both folds -- in particular the second one -- were crippling to my already weakened stack. Although I obviously made a number of good reads as well to have lasted as long as I did, I simply could not count on my instincts to carry me very well in this tournament, something which I know stems from a total lack of experience playing the game over the past seven months time.

Lastly, I sucked out not once but twice with almost all of my chips in the middle just to last as far as I did. After the second big flop fold on my bluff that I mentioned above, I was down to around 4000 chips (starting stack had been 12,000) and a good 20-25% of the average stack. I was basically done. The action folded to me in middle position on the very first hand of the 5th hour, and I insta-pushed with A9s. I support this move of course, being as totally short and desperate as I was, and what I really wanted (within the realm of reason) was a hand like 66 or 88 to call me and give me a fighter's chance for a double-up. But unfortunately for me, the big blind woke up with AQs, instacalled my short ass of course, and I started to pack up my stuff when a 9 fell on the flop, which amazingly held and I was back at least to around half of average, and more than 15 big blinds which at least gave me some room to move. But I had gotten it in totally dominated, and had won a 1-in-4 chance just to be able to survive.

I made an even worse read later in the tournament, after picking up some more chips when I made my first two playable starting hands of the entire day, both during Hour 6, when I was dealt JJ and AK in two out of three hands. That was a long-ass time to wait for a freaking starting hand to play, and I had to suck out once allin preflop just to even be around to see these cards dealt to me, but at one point after accumulating some chips from those two hands, I started just plain beating on the guy two seats to my left, who was always the big blind to my button. He had shown himself to be totally and openly tight as hell, and so I had started raising his c-bets with abandon, and just generally constantly putting his entire stack at risk in situations where I simply did not think he had the fortitude to gamble it up without a very strong hand that I did not think he had. And it had been working. I had made him fold three separate times on three stone bluffs from me, and he was getting pizz-nizzed with me and made no bones about it with his facial expressions and mannerisms. This guy was just fixing to mix it up with me, and I knew it because I could read his emotions like a book. But, I let my lack of sharp poker instincts get the best of me by falling into the worst kind of trap with these tight players. I think it was Tommy Angelo's book where I saw this excellent tidbit about playing against tight players -- when you pound on these pussies enough and make them fold over and over again because they're too afraid to play a big pot without the nuts, these guys absolutely are fixing to play a pot against you. But they're tightass pussies, so they're not fixing to take a big bluff up against you. They're just waiting, holding on and praying for a hand like pocket Aces. That's the kind of hand these guys are praying to mix it up with you with. They're generally not the types to try to take you on with a big bluff, because that's not their game.

Well, about 7 hours in, I forgot all about that and made a dumb call against this tightass in my big blind, and I nearly lost my chance for a score as a result. At this point there were probably around 60 players left out of the 251 who started in the $350 buyin event plus the $100 bounties, and I open-raised from the button for the umpteenth time against his big blind, this time with me holding A9s. The tight big blind just called, so I knew he wasn't super strong (because no tightwad just calls with AA or KK in that spot, take it from me, they're too afraid of getting sucked out on and they're too angry and disbelieving that I have any hand after I try to steal from them for the 15th time over just a few hours time), but I figured he had to have something. The flop came down K94 rainbow, giving me middle pair top kicker, and knowing that the guy had to strongly suspect me of stealing from him again, I figured I was actually in pretty good shape here so I went ahead with a standard c-bet of around 2/3 the pot. Well, Mr. Tighty finally grew himself some balls and pushed allin, which for me represented about 90% of my remaining stack. I would still be alive if I called and lost, but only in theory as I would have had just a few big blinds left to play with. Effectively, this was an allin push against me, and as I sat there replaying the hand, his expressions and mannerisms, and just running through the history I had built up over a couple of hours of play abusing this guy over and over again, I think I let my instincts convince me of what I at first knew to be true -- this guy had top pair. I don't think his tight ass would have played TT, JJ or QQ with just a call of my stealy-looking raise preflop, and I did not think he was loose or aggressive enough to throw away a chance at even min-cashing (the top 27 finishers would get paid in this event) by moving in here with pocket 8s or lower given the two overcards on the board. So I stared at the K94 on the board, and I even noted that absolute lack of real draws available (thus giving more credence to his bet representing a made hand of some kind), but as I kept thinking things through, I could feel myself convincing myself that I should call. "This guy is furious at me", I told myself (which was undeniably true). He's just been waiting to push back at me and get some of his chips back for hours, I said inside my own head (also obviously true). And yet, even though at first I clearly saw him for having some kind of a middling King in his hand -- because, after all, a la Tommy Angelo, the tightwad player isn't waiting to bluff me with nothing, but rather to push 'em in when he honestly believes he has the best hand -- the more I stared at the board, the more my fuzzy and out-of-practice poker instincts chipped away at what was clearly the right inclination -- to fold. I distinctly remember asking myself "Come on, what are the chances that this guy happens to hold one of the other three Kings in the deck, in the big blind no less?" Ahhh, the favorite move of the guy convincing himself to make the wrong play. The answer to that question, of course, was that the odds of him holding a King were pretty damn high, given his action in the hand and what I knew about his play over the previous few hours. I also distinctly remember telling myself that, given my A9, I beat all hands but top pair, so if he was in there with a hand like J9 or 89 or A4s or something, I was well ahead and in great shape. All true mathematical points, mind you, but simply inappropriate attempts to get myself to make a big call with second pair top kicker against a super tight player who would not have been in there without a good hand himself. Now, you throw in a couple of draws on the board, and my second pair top kicker starts to look a little better, even against a tight player like him, but the rough texture of that board should have told me all I needed to know, and the right move was to fold there, for sho.

But instead, after agonizing for some time, I made the call, slowly flipping up my A9 semi-confidently after all the self-convincing I had done, but of course I was deep down not surprised to see the tight guy table KJs. It's the perfect hand for him to have called my stealy-looking preflop raise with, and to push allin with on the K94 flop. It was obvious even, in retrospect. I mean, I should have been able to predict his exact hand more or less down to either KT or KJ with that action and what I knew about this player. But again, my less-than-honed poker instincts took over and convinced me to make the play that I started off the flop knowing to be wrong. Basically, almost any time in my entire poker career when I have actively convinced myself to turn a fold into a call, I've been wrong, and it's something that I almost never used to do when I was playing poker regularly. But take half a year off from the game with any regularity, and here I was, screwing up and making the ultimate rookie mistake against a guy whose play was so awful that a child could have known my second pair was behind. I asked how much his stack was and cut out the chips, lamenting the tiny pile I would have left to toss in on the very next hand and clear out of dodge, and as a result I didn't even see the Ace fall on the river to give me the hand and a new lease on life in the tournament. I made "the face" to the guy I had just eliminated, taking his $100 bounty chip for my third bounty on the day in the process -- you know that face, the one that any guy who's played a million poker tournaments gives when he knows how pissed and disappointed the other guy is because he himself has been sucked out on and outplayed someone only to get beat by dumb luck more times than he can count. To his credit, my opponent gave me back the "it's ok, it happens" face -- a look I have still not even close to perfected, myself -- and from there I was able for the very first time all day to play with at least a little bit of chip utility in my stack.

All this is to say, I made a nice deep run in the tournament last week, but I got my usual dearth of playable starting cards, and my instincts were about as off as they ever get. I simply did not play great poker on this day, but I was lucky enough and played just well enough to survive and actually manage to win some decent cash despite my poor instincts at the tables. Despite all of this, however, one thing I did do in the tournament was make a number of solid laydowns -- despite the one stupid screwup against Mr. Tightie that I described above -- including one pretty big laydown in what turned out to be by far the biggest pot I saw all day. More on "the pot" in tomorrow's post. And yes, that will mean two poker posts in two days, so just deal with it.

Did You Ever Wonder About Joe Paterno?

Tell the truth now....Didn't you ever wonder how in the fike Joe Paterno has managed to keep his job as the head coach of Penn State, when the team hasn't really been great for going on a decade now, and hasn't been a true national championship contender since before the turn of the millennium. Oh, and while the guy has slowly marched on to what is now 85 years old? When the guy can hardly move anymore, when he hasn't really been able to speak even for a decade? When you know nobody on that team can understand what he is even saying? When he has basically been suffering from senility for the past several years? The guy is 85 years old man, and his team has totally dropped off the national radar from what it once was when Paterno was a younger man (in his mid seventies)?

Well, now we know. It's going to come out that Paterno has been able to keep his job because he knows about this incredibly disgusting business with longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky and his penchant for, you know, butt-fucking 10-year-old boys against their will in the Penn State locker room. Jo Pa might not even have had to have affirmatively threatened to blackmail the Penn State Athletic Director -- although I bet you he did, when the school tried to get rid of him four or five years ago -- but that doesn't matter. The implicit threat has always been there, ever since Joe Pa was first alerted to his assistant coach's dalliances with underage penises back in 1998/1999 timeframe. Once the administration (and Joe Pa) chose to do nothing and not even go public with the allegations, Paterno's career was set in stone at Penn State, for as long as he wanted to stay.

Penn State, I hope you got what you wanted. Some of these people are going to go to jail for a loooong time. Probably not Joe Pa -- probably unfairly -- but as I guy with young kids, I have precisely zero sympathy for anyone guilty of covering up this kind of sordid criminal behavior. And if Joe Paterno is not forced to resign over this whole mess, then Penn State will probably never recover anything close to the glory it once had as a proud institution of higher learning.

The Fix Was In

Man it is good seeing the Chiefs find a way to pull that game out of their asses on Monday night against the Chargers. I mean, I'm no kind of Chiefs fan, although I'll freely admit that I have no clue why there is so much animosity and lack of faith in relatively new head coach Todd Haley there, with whom I think the inescapable conclusion is that he has done a pretty damn good job with what I would not consider to be a plethora of talent or anything. But the reason I was so happy to see the Chiefs take that game down was not at all because I like the Chiefs.

It's because I like fucking fairness.

Did you watch that game? Let's see. First, the Chiefs guy intercepts Philip Rivers for the first of what, 15 times on the night, there in the first quarter? He makes a small return, gets tackled from behind, and after sitting squarely on the ground for a few seconds, taking some time to shave, say his daily prayers, and have a convo or two on his cell phone, the ball finally gets stripped out of his hands. Of course the refs ruled him down by contact on the field -- because it wasn't even close -- but then Norv Turner, raging idiot that he is, decides to challenge the ruling on the field even though there isn't any possible way in shit that any single human being could ever rule that a fumble. I mean, don't assholes like Norv have a guy sitting up in the booth somewhere, with access to the replay, a DVR, something? Just somebody who can tell him, "Don't waste your time, you boob, that play wasn't even fucking close to a fumble, you'll just look like a horse's ass if you waste a timeout challenging that very clear tackle." Is it possible that they don't?

So while the network takes a commercial break, both before and after the break they're showing the replay, and even the dickhead announcers -- who generally speaking interpret what they see incorrectly in terms of missed calls at least 66% of the time, much to the fans' enragement -- had already dismissed this as the worst challenge ever, that even if the call on the field had been a fumble, you would have to reverse it based on this very, very, plainly obvious replay. And then of course what happens, since this is the NFL, Roger Goodell's minions the refs walk out from under "the box" and announce that the call on the field is being reversed, it's a fumble and the ball goes back to the Chargers, instead of to the Chiefs who already had a 7-0 lead and would have been very close to making it 14-0 in gaining possession there deep in Chargers territory. It was without a doubt the single worst blown replay call I can ever recall -- and this is the NFL, where there are inexplicably obvious missed calls with a regularity greater than my daily bowel movements, and to think that anybody on the fucking earth had seen the clear and convincing evidence needed to overturn the call on the field, there are just no words, and just like that, boom the NFL darling Chargers were gifted pretty much a 10-point swing in the score early on.

But it didn't stop there. Later in the second quarter, Chief's quarterback Matt Cassel is hit as he goes to throw the ball, and this time the call on the field is that he threw an incomplete pass, that his arm was just starting to move forward when he got hit and lost the ball, so thus not a fumble and thus it is still Chiefs ball (the Chargers had picked up the incompletion on the field). The Chargers challenge again -- they shouldn't even have had another challenge to call there, but thanks to the early blowjob for the Chargers, they still had that challenge left in the first half -- and this time, lo and behold, this time the moron refs saw clear and convincing evidence needed to overturn and -- shocker of shockers -- give the ball back to the Chargers. Again. Personally, unlike the first fumble play which was the worst call I've ever seen in any professional sport in the history of mankind, this one was very close, and I could have seen it going either way. Give me an unbiased, even choice and I would probably have called it in an incompletion, but his arm was very close to either about to start moving forward or just started moving forward, and I can handle that call going either way. But what there clear evidence to overturn there? Not on your shitkicking life there was not. But hey, the decision got the easily-sellable Chargers offense the ball again, so Roger Goodell got to keep his boner for another few minutes there and that's all that matters.

Fast forward to the second half, as the game is really coming down to the wire, and the Chargers have to score two late touchdowns, including a 2-point conversion on one of them, just to tie the game up at the end, and first the refs award a touchdown to the Chargers after reviewing a play where the Charger player basically got the ball just barely over the end line before having it stripped out of his hands for a fumble that would have -- for the third or fourth time on the night now -- all but won the game for the Chiefs. On that one I tend to agree with the call that it was a Chargers touchdown, but lord knows I've seen that call go the opposite way at least 5000 times over the past five years in the NFL. And then came yet another stunning F-off to the Chiefs, when the Chargers player attempts to run in the 2-point conversion after catching a pass around the 2 yard line, where he was nailed by a fabulous defensive play by the Chiefs' gritty defense, and the fucking refs motherfucking again awarded the Chargers the score -- a crucial score to tie up the game with just a few minutes left to play -- based on a replay that maybe, possibly just showed the nose of the ball accidentally graze the plane of the end line as the receiver was unthinkably running sideways instead of just trying to punch it in there. I mean, this Chargers guy did everything in his power to give the refs a reason not to award him a touchdown, and I still cannot believe as I look at the replay that the Chargers got that call in their favor as well, but they did.

Suddenly it is 20-20, and after a short possession by the Chiefs, the Chargers march down the field, and they're just lining up on the Chiefs' 16-yard line when Rivers unimaginably muffs the snap, and the Chiefs clearly recover the fumble. I could just picture Goodell's tiny little limpy dick shriveling up like a prune when it happened too, because there was simply no fucking way they could find to award that ball back to the Chargers. And I'm sure they tried to, too, don't get me wrong. I bet you Goodell had every guy he knows rifling through the rulebook to try to find some reason why a fumbled snap by the road team in a tie game does not lead to a change in possession if in the final minute of a regular season game, you name it, the stupider and less substantiable the better. But they couldn't, and we went to overtime, where the Chiefs won it in "amazing comeback" fashion.

The only thing amazing about the Chiefs win last night is how badly they outplayed the Chargers from the first whistle to the last, and yet how close the game was because, if the referees are willing to be big enough assholes, it can be almost impossible to overcome a fix like the one that was clearly in last night.

Go ahead, I dare anyone reading this to tell me in the comments that I am mischaracterizing what happened with the calls last night. The first person to comment that I am mischaracterizing what happened has no penis. Sure I've included some factual inaccuracies in this post to give the tinydicks something to complain about in the comments, but I triple dog dare anyone out there to tell me the Chargers did not get the most ridiculous dicksucking treatment by the refs last night anywhere this side of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Fuck you, Roger Goodell. Karma's a bitch, ain't it, you piece of shit.

Unbearably Bad Baseball

Best World Series game ever? Are you freaking serious?

I have heard that term used at least five separate times already to describe Game 6 of the 2011 World Series from Thursday night, when the Cardinals snatched victory from the jaws of defeat repeatedly in winning the game and forcing a deciding Game 7 with a walkoff home run in the bottom of the 11th inning. And my first thought when I heard that description was "What are these people, four years old?"

Come on guys. Best World Series game ever? A game in which:

The home team gives up a run in the top of the first inning, in a game in which they have to win, or go home.

The road team then follows up by immediately giving up two runs in their defensive half of the first inning, in a game where they had already grabbed a lead that, if it held, would bring them their first world championship in franchise history?

A game with five errors, including multiple crucial missteps by the Rangers in the late innings to blow not one, not two, but three separate leads after the 7th inning?

Not one, not two, but three blown saves by the Rangers? All in one game?

28 hits allowed by the two teams in 11 innings? 19 runs?

Come on, guys. This might have been an exciting game, but please don't fall into the clueless monkey's trap of just calling whatever the most recent game is, the "best game of all time". My lord. I can think of at least five better World Series games than this, just in the past decade or so. Anybody remember John Smoltz vs. Jack Morris in 1991, still the best World Series of my lifetime? Anybody remember the infamous Dodgers - Oakland game featuring Kirk Gibson and "I don't believe what I just saw!" in 1988? I mean, it's not like I'm going back 80 years or something. The list just goes on and on and on of far better ball games than last night's straight-out massacre of the game of baseball itself.

Game 6 of the 2011 World Series was a freaking embarrassment is what it was. And, sadly, it's a microcosm for what this entire World Series has been. In addition to being the least-watched World Series in modern television history, these two teams have butchered what are generally considered the tenets of great post-season baseball over and over again, night after night, like two blind kids with sticks just bumping into each other and swinging blindly game after game. Believe me, as a lifelong baseball fan and especially as a Phillies fan, it has been absolutely painful to watch.

As bad as the Rangers have been about giving up 1st and 2nd inning runs to the Cardinals in this Series and then having to play the rest of the game from behind, you've had the Cardinals' starting pitchers not make it through the 4th inning three times already in six games. I mean, just think about how bad that is! And they've actually won three of these games anyways! It's like these teams are just putting children out there on the mound, lobbing 'em in, and letting the other team just whack away, batting-practice style. They might as well just set up a tee on home plate and play a good old-fashioned 1st grade little league game. As a longtime baseball fan who is used to pretty much always seeing good pitching in the Series, this matchup has truly been an abomination to behold.

You've had the Rangers now with 8 errors in 6 games, including two critical errors in Game 6 to go along with 3 errors from the Cardinals in the same game (the "best game of all time", ha!), with the Cardinals chipping in with five errors of their own over the 6 games so far in the Series. As a general statement, the fielding in this Series has been nothing short of atrocious, with even the big stars on both teams repeatedly costing their teams games by failing to execute the very basics of the game on defense, blowing leads and ruining big chances for either team to grab absolutely crucial wins.

The managing by Ron Washington and Tony LaRussa has been highly questionable to say the least -- enough to make even Phillies' idiot manager Charlie Manuel look smart -- with in particular LaRussa making gaffe after gaffe in an uncharacteristically sloppy show from a guy who is thought to be one of the better managers in the game today. The guy couldn't even figure out how to call for the right pitcher to come in in Game 5, for crying out loud! Is this even real? You would never have believed that bullpen story if you didn't see it with your own eyes. LaRussa has also muffed at least one if not two critical at-bats from Albert Pujols with ill-timed and poorly thought-out steals or hit-and-run calls in very key spots. And meanwhile, Ron Washington is so coked up that he isn't even starting his ace Derek Holland, he of the 16-5 regular season record and the absolute shutdown of the Cardinals in Game 4, on full fucking rest, in Game 7 tonight, in favor of Matt Harrison, who took 73 pitches to get not even through the 4th inning in a Game 4 blowout by the Cardinals, while LaRussa is at least smart enough to take advantage of the extra day off due to the Game 6 rainout and start his ace Chris Carpenter in the deciding game of the Series. Honestly, if you told me to purposefully go out there and manage like an asshole, I'm not sure I would have come up with some of these moves. If Matt Harrison gets shelled again tonight and the Cardinals win the Series, so help me god Ron Washington better get his ass fired, or that franchise will never win a World Series during the lifetime of anyone reading this post right now. They'll be calling it "The Curse of the Cokehead" by the time your great-grandchildren are into baseball, you heard it here first.

So the pitching has been utterly abysmal in this World Series, and the fielding has been almost just as bad. The managers are out there embarrassing themselves and the game of baseball night in and night out. Basically, everything but the offenses have been utterly and completely putrid between both of these teams, now over six games and counting. The baseball audience has been itching for some actual good baseball so badly that in a game with featuring five errors and three blown saves, not just idiot fans but shitheads on ESPN and in baseball are actually trying to claim it's the best World Series game of all time? Oh. My. God. Again, as a fan of easily the best team in the sport during 2011, and one with the greatest pitching anyone has seen in generations, the best I can hope for at this point is that the Cardinals -- who have got to be massive favorites to win the Series tonight -- and the Rangers at least stop insulting the game long enough to play nine relatively clean innings of ball, and that we can declare a winner that, although obviously not really able to say they played "well" in the Series, can at least be able to know that they played better than their opponents by the time all is said and done. But please don't be one of those fools calling Game 6 the best game of all time. "The game where neither team wanted to win badly enough to string together a couple of clean innings of baseball" is about as far as you can reasonably go.

The Cardinals earned every inch of their appearance here in the 2011 World Series, and I'm not even beginning to take anything away from them and you've never heard me say that they don't belong here where they are right now. But my god, the Phillies would have swept this series so badly against the hapless Rangers, they probably would have called it on the "mercy rule" after three games. I hope the Phillies players are out there watching this series and suffering like I am, night after night. Because the play of these two teams just plain sucks.

Unbearably Bad Poker

So I've been watching a little bit of ESPN's WSOP Main Event coverage from time to time this year, moreso here as we wind down towards the November Nine, and I find myself struck by frankly the same thought that I've had in each and every one of the WSOP Main Events I have ever watched over the past decade or so:

These people absolutely suck shit at poker.

Yeah that's right, I said it. It's true. These people play like absolute anusshit. And that, I think, is being kind.

I mean, this is the biggest tournament of their lives by definition. Each and every one of these guys, once we're down to the final 27 players or so, is for sure playing poker for the most money they have ever played in their lives. There is not just the immediate cash payouts on the line, but the sponsorship opportunities involved with making it to the November Nine final table and with potentially winning the tournament. There is a literal lifetime of playing poker and never having to have a real job again within their grasp. All this and more is at stake here for every single player left as the ESPN coverage worked its way down this week to the final table and a half remaining in the WSOP Main Event.

And what are these players doing with this tremendous opportunity?

They're reraising an early-position raiser preflop from middle position with 42o.

They're calling large bets on the flop for a quarter of their stack with just an overcard and an inside straight draw.

They're reraising allin preflop with A7s.

They're calling allin preflop for 50% of their stack with AQs.

And, my personal favorite, a super aggro guy who's been raising all day raises again preflop, this time with pocket Aces. The guy on the other side of the table reraises with JTs. The guy with AA re-reraises again, a fairly small amount, which itself was a truly bad play because (1) it makes it very, very obvious that he has precisely pocket Aces, and (2) the small raise gives the first player now better than 5-to-1 to call the re-reraise with his JTs, well known as the literal best hand to crack what he now knows his opponent has in pocket Aces.

And then the shithead insta-folds his JTs, getting better than 5 to 1 to call the re-reraise!!!

You could not make this stuff up, and you certainly can't defend these plays from a poker perspective. I've watched the Main Event coverage on ESPN for years, albeit some years more than others. But every single year, my reaction to the quality of play I've seen throughout has been more or less exactly the same.

The Main Event is an absolute donkfest. Sure, good skill will work much better for you than no skill, and a player who has played on the big stage before and knows how to extract chips will always have a better chance of surviving than one who doesn't know shit and is quaking in his boots because of the amount of money on the line. But that increased chance of success is still utterly minuscule, given the field and what it takes to survive the kind of indefensible, thoughtless donkery you will be facing right from the first deal on Day 1A, and clearly lasting all the way up to the final table itself. Last year it was that unthinkable idiot Chino Rheem freaking six-betting allin preflop with Ace-rag with just a few players remaining and directly costing himself probably about $15 million in tournament winnings and sponsorships as a result -- if you don't know you're not only beat but crushed after your opponent re-re-re-re-reraises you preflop and you are holding Ace-rag, then you are absolutely, utterly hopeless as a poker player on the big stage -- and this year the play to make the final table is enough to make just about anyone with half a poker brain scratch their head in amazement.

Somewhere, I imagine Phil Ivey is out there watching this week's coverage with that same absolutely classic look on his face as when Jen Tilly didn't bet her boat on the river against Patrick Antonius and then proclaimed that she thought he had pocket Kings, at 2:03 of the clip below:



All I know is this: the raging clowns playing for the biggest money of their lives at this year's WSOP Main Event are doing nothing to help anyone out there who loves to argue that poker is a game of skill and not luck. Sure, there is more than a little skill involved, but for these players to have lasted this long, and to be playing for this amount of money after surviving some 6600 other entrants, while playing as unmitigatedly horrible poker as they are here even at the end, it's certainly not helping the luck vs. skill debate.

Chip Off the Old Block

Donovan McNabb's statistics for the five years preceding his trade from the Eagles to the Redskins in 2010:

2009 14 games 60.3% completions 3,553 yards 22 tds 10 INTs 92.9 qb rating

2008 16 games 60.4% completions 3,916 yards 23 tds 11 INTs 86.4 qb rating

2007 14 games 61.5% completions 3,324 yards 19 tds 7 INTs 89.9 qb rating

2006 10 games 57.0% completions 2,647 yards 18 tds 6 INTs 95.5 qb rating

2005   9 games 59.1% completions 2,507 yards 16 tds   9 INTs 85.0 qb rating


Carson Palmer's statistics for the five years preceding his trade from the Bengals to the Raiders in 2011:

2010 16 games 61.8% completions 3,970 yards 26 tds 20 INTs 82.4 qb rating

2009 16 games 60.5% completions 3,094 yards 21 tds 13 INTs 83.6 qb rating

2008 4  games 58.1% completions   731 yards  3 tds  4 INTs 69.0 qb rating

2007 16 games 64.9% completions 4,131 yards 26 tds 20 INTs 86.7 qb rating

2006 16 games 62.3% completions 4,035 yards 28 tds 13 INTs 93.9 qb rating



McNabb's average numbers over the five years immediately preceding his trade:

12.6 games 59.6% completions 3189 yards 19.6 tds 8.6 INTs 89.9 qb rating

Palmer's average numbers over the five years immediately preceding his trade:

13.6 games 61.5% completions 3192 yards 20.8 tds 14 INTs 83.1 qb rating


Adjusting for Carson Palmer's devastating leg injury three years ago, here are McNabb's average numbers over the two years immediately preceding his trade:

15 games 61.4% completions 3735 yards 22.5 tds 11 INTs 89.7 qb rating

Palmer's average numbers over the two years immediately preceding his trade:

16 games 61.2% completions 3532 yards 23.5 tds 16.5 INTs 83.0 qb rating


Donovan McNabb was traded to the Washington Redskins in between the 2009 and 2010 football seasons for a 5th round draft pick.

Carson Palmer just got traded to the Oakland Raiders for a first round draft pick, and a second round draft pick, that itself becomes another first round draft pick if the Raiders appear in the AFC Championship game in either of the next two seasons.

Mark Davis, somewhere your father Al is smiling in his grave that you have decided to so proudly continue his tradition of pure, unadulterated idiocy. Only, your father was old and senile for years...what's your excuse?

Despair -- Part I

OK. After a few days of serious inner mourning, I think I am ready to go public.

As a Philadelphia sports fan right now, I am in a deep despair.

And I know I'm not even close to alone in this feeling. Like most of Philadelphia's sports fans, I am still kind of in shock about the Phillies embarrassing elimination at the hands of an inferior St. Louis Cardinals team. And with the way it all happened, in a lot of ways there's not much to say, really. I mean, we lost a Game 5 at home by the score of 1-0, so that's just not the kind of game that someone who understands the game can really attack all that much, at least not from most perspectives. But then, if you take a little bit of a step back, the Phils signed Roy Halladay a couple of years ago and paid him roughly 20 million dollars a year, and then this past season they signed Cliff Lee and paid him another 20 mil a year or so, and the whole idea was supposed to be that the team was building more or less the greatest short-series baseball team that ever lived. I mean, who is going to beat Halladay, Lee, Hamels and Oswalt in a 7-game series, especially when Philly has home-field advantage throughout the entire post-season, right?

Answer: The Cardinals. The Phillies lost 2 out of 3 games at home in the NLDS, and in those two losses the Phillies' starters were Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay. It's that simple, really. The Phillies lost 2 out of 3 games at home with their two near-unhittable aces on the mound. Now, for what it's worth, I think it's hard to say much about Roy Halladay overall in this series, who gave up just four earned runs over two full starts and looked pretty well dominating other than a couple of shaky first innings. But Cliff Lee had one of his bad outings in Game 2, giving up 5 earned in only about half a game, and the Phils couldn't muster enough runs to come back from that early deficit in eventually losing the game 5-3. And in a short series, those two losses were too much to be outweighed even by Phillies' #3 pitcher Cole Hamels' gutsy six inning shutout performance in what seemed at the time like a huge victory in Game 3 in St. Louis.

And let's not just focus on the pitching, as it was really more the Phillies' offense that completely weighted the team down and out of the playoffs for the second straight season. After an 11-run outburst in Game 1, Phillies fans were shocked and frustrated beyond belief in watching the team score just 10 runs in the final four games of the series. And putting even this great pitching staff in the position of having to give up two runs or fewer per game over four of the five games in the series, simply did not work. That strategy does not work in professional baseball ever, period. Carlos Ruiz and Placido Polanco, great contributors during the regular season and/or past post-season runs, couldn't touch the ball throughout this series. Ryan Howard, despite winning Game 1 single-handedly with his bat, totally disappeared in the rest of the series, culminating in Game 3 when Tony LaRussa actually pitched around someone to put him on base and face Ryan Howard -- the league's greatest RBI man over the past five seasons -- with another runner on base. Howard promptly struck out in one of the many horrible-looking at-bats he had in the series, but the fact that an opposing manager would ever even consider walking someone on purpose to pitch to Howard speaks volumes about how far Howard has fallen in the esteem of some opposing coaches (although it should be mentioned that LaRussa made an unbelievable ass out of himself in that same game by intentionally walking Carlos Ruiz and then promptly giving up a 3-run home run to a pinch hitting Ben Francisco to take the loss). But the guy sure had Ryan Howard's number after the first game, there's no debating that point. Some of the other Phillies hitters had decent series at the plate, but nobody was really able to step up and come up with that one huge hit the team desperately needed to stay alive in this series. And when you combine the team scoring 2.5 runs per game through most of the series, with Roy Halladay giving up 3 runs in the first inning of Game 1, Cliff Lee ceding five earned runs in five innings in Game 2, and Roy Oswalt allowing five more runs in 5 innings in Game 4, that is simply not a winning combination, no matter how much better on paper one team is than another.

I think a lot of the reason for the despair right now, at least with me if not anyone else, is that there is just this sinking feeling about the nucleus of this team being past its prime, that there just may not be other chances as good as this season again. I mean, look at this objectively. The Phillies won the World Series in 2008, on a team on which Cole Hamels was the only great pitcher and which saw him win the MVP of every series as he utterly dominated all comers on the way to the franchise's second world championship in 50,000 years of existence. And although mostly everyone fought me on it at the time when I declared this the day after that historical championship victory in 2008, it seems painfully obvious to everyone now I am sure that the 2008 Phillies were, in fact, the best team in the major leagues that year, hands down. So the Phillies won the World Series as the best baseball team in the world in 2008, and then in 2009 they made it back to the Series but lost this time to the Yankees. Then in 2010 with the best record in baseball for the first time in 35 years, the Phillies lost in the NLCS to the San Francisco Giants who also completely shut down the Phillies' lineup, and now in 2011 -- again with far and away this time the league's best record -- the team has lost in the NLDS to a totally run-of-the-mill below average playoff team in the Cardinals. So it's been four straight years of WS - WS loss - NLCS loss - NLDS loss for the Phillies. Anybody else seeing a trend here? And even more disurbing is that the payroll has climbed every year since 2008, and the team has signed major free agents in each of those years as the "star power" on the team has skyrocketed. To think that that 2008 team outperformed this 2011 Phillies squad is mind-boggingling if you just look at the rosters, and especially at the starting rotations. I mean, it's just not close.

But you know what has changed on this team since 2008? The hunger. I wrote about this three years ago, not even knowing until last year's Giants series and now especially this year's with the Cardinals just how right I was, but this team lost the eye of the tiger. That win in 2008 was just so amazing, so special, and so cathartic for those players, the manager, the fans and the entire city of Philadelphia, the team just let up a little. There's just no doubting this fact anymore. They've lost that hunger, that insistence that they win. Whereas in 2008 it was Cole Hamels on the mound instead of Roy Halladay in a big spot like this Game 5, he could have pitched the identical great game that Halladay did the other day, but that scrappy never-lose 2008 team would have found a way to score a couple of runs late in the game and to move on to the pennant. If you knew that 2008 Phillies team like I did, then you know what I am saying is right. Back then, this city, and that Phillies squad, were desperate for a win, they would have done anything for a win, and they did repeatedly, using late-game heroics throughout each series to nab wins from the jaws of defeat and never disappointing the fans at home in the playoffs. Over the past two seasons, however, far superior Phillies teams in terms of raw talent -- I mean, squads that aren't even close if you look at the numbers on paper -- went and lost each of the past two seasons in a one-run elimination game at home in which they never even really put up a significant threat to score and come back to make a game out of it. It's hard to believe, really, but the Philadelphia Phillies won their world title in 2008, and since then they just haven't been trying nearly hard enough, haven't been wanting it nearly bad enough. And they're all guilty of it -- everyone except Hamels anyways, who has been more or less fucking awesome every time he's gone out there in the postseason since and including 2008 -- but everyone else is to blame for this. Rollins, who is a shell of the player he was in 2008. Utley, same thing. Howard, same thing. Ruiz, same. Victorino didn't do much in this series either. Guys like Halladay, Lee and Oswalt, who weren't even on that team in 2008 and never really lived through the lean century the Phillies have just recently emerged from. The list just goes on and on. Like Sylvester Stallone at the beginning of Rocky III, the Phillies have just lost the eye of the tiger, and unless they find some way to get it back under country bumpkin Charlie Manuel, there won't be any more baseball titles in this town anytime soon. And, I should mention, this is why I celebrated that 2008 championship so fucking hard when it happened. Because as a lifelong sports fan, I know how hard it is, how rare it is, for a team to be able to duplicate success like the Phillies had in 2008. Especially in Philadelphia, I don't think that town has ever been ready to deal with having a dynasty yet, which is exactly what the Phillies would have officially become if they had won it all this year. I mean, WS - losing WS - losing NLCS - WS reads a heck of a lot better than WS - losing WS - losing NLCS - losing NLDS, don't it? But thanks to a lack of true desire, effort, and desperation to win, the fans of Philadelphia won't have to worry about this again anytime soon.

And the fans are also depressed here because, after posting the best record in baseball in 2010 with 97 wins, the team shut down on offense and lost in 6 games to the Giants in the NLCS last year. And now this year they posted the best record in the National League in years with 102 wins, head and shoulders above the rest of the league for pretty much the final 80% of the regular season this year, and now the Phils didn't even make it past one round against a team that had all but given up at Citi Field just a month ago. All of this leaves us Phillies fans with this feeling that the regular season just doesn't mean anything anymore. Best team in baseball two years running, and we've haven't even sniffed the World Series? Huh? If you think anyone in Philadelphia is looking forward to next season right now, you don't have a clue how those people feel. Right now, the feeling about the 2012 baseball season in Philadelphia is somewhere between dread and apathy. Many people will just dread being let down like this again next year, and those who don't dread it like myself are certainly at least sharing my feeling that who gives a fuck what the Phils do during the regular season next year. It means nothing. We can't beat worse teams in critical games at home with our ace on the mound anymore when it counts, so why get excited, right? That's how it feels to me anyways, and I'm sure about ten million of my closest friends in and around the Philadelphia area these days.

You ever hear that adage that great pitching always beats great hitting in the playoffs?

Not always.

--Part II of "The Despair" is coming later this week. You can guess what other Philadelphia sports team that has to do with.

Monday Market Mania

Well that was fun in the stock market on Monday, wasn't it?

Let me start by just personally extending kudos to S&P for finally -- for the first time in several years at least for sure -- actually doing their fucking job and telling the truth, and for showing why they have always been considered and always will be considered far and away the most credible ratings agency in the world today. And especially for refusing to kowtow to pressure from no one less than the President himself not to downgrade U.S. debt as is obviously warranted at this time. In a way, I think we should probably be happy to be retaining even an a AA+ rating from S&P, and I am not the least bit surprised to see our debt only only downgraded but put on negative watch for further downgrades even from here.

I mean, it's highlarious to sit and listen to the President on national tv (for some strange reason today) as well as Treasury Secretary Geithner rage against S&P about how unwarranted the rating cut was and how mistaken S&P's judgment is, etc. When in reality you, me and everyone else in the country all know that, literally less than one week ago, this country was straight-up one or two days away from a debt default. Period, end of story, we were one or two days away from some form of debt default, a fact that was made extremely public by both sides of the debate on a repeated and consistent basis and in a very deliberate manner. Longtime readers will note that I have always been all about owning the consequences of your decisions here on the blog, and when the President and the GOP leadership both repeatedly make the decision to broadcast to the world how we are going to default on August 2, we won't be able to make a $60 million interest payment due on August 3, etc., then shut your holes and don't complain when a ratings agency whose sole job is to determine how likely your country is to suffer some form of a default on its debt, decides that maybe you are no longer worthy of the highest possible credit rating indicating the highest possible confidence that no default is ever forthcoming.

Because, you know, last week everyone and their mother associated with the U.S. government told the world loudly, clearly, and very deliberately that we were going to, you know, default on our debt on August 2 or 3. There was a stalemate on both sides heading right up to the weekend immediately prior to the scheduled default, and in fact the two sides eventually settled the debate generally by kicking the can down the road (sound familiar? It's unbelievable, isn't it?) until December to determine which programs will suffer cuts, and how much, to help stabilize the deficit in this country.

Anyways, somebody tell me again how President Obama goes nuts all week a couple of weeks back about how we're going to default on our debt on Tuesday, we're going to miss interest payments on Wednesday, etc., and then is back on tv a week and a half later questioning how S&P could possibly decide that U.S. government debt is not worth of what is essentially known as "risk-free" status among the major ratings agencies. That is just about the most thoughtless thing I've heard in the entire Obama term thus far. We're obviously not a triple-A rated country anymore in terms of our sovereign debt, and those of you Americans out there who actually have some scrotum should probably be focusing a lot more on what the fuck Moody's and Fitch could mother fucking possibly be looking at in recently re-affirming the U.S.'s triple-A "risk-free" status for its sovereign debt. As one more reminder, this is the debt that was very publicly a day or two away from literal default less than a week ago. The entire issue is really just unbelievable if you have your head screwed on straight.

Oh, and here's one other topic while I'm discussing the markets. This story makes my mother fucking blood boil -- that AIG is apparently going to sue Bank of America for some $10 billion for fraud related to subprime mortgages leading up to and during the financial crisis. And don't get me wrong -- Bank of America are a bunch of shitbags, and that bank -- the country's largest I believe -- could very well be leading the market and the sector lower as people are sure to start really considering that the bank might require another bailout or at the least a solid round of capital-raising in order to right the ship.

But this is AIG -- the company that essentially invented the notion of writing insurance contracts on other companies' debt defaulting over the past decade, accepting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance premiums to insure the debts of companies like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia, etc. on the blind, thoughtless assumption that none of these banks would ever actually fail, and that AIG was thus merely being paid "free money" at zero risk to the firm of ever having to pay out those insurance obligations in case of the disaster. This is the same company that, when all of those entities I mentioned above did experience defaults or even bankruptcies or near-bankruptcies, AIG of course couldn't even come close to actually paying out what it owed under these insurance policies, and who thus required a $180 billion bailout package from the U.S. government back in 2008/2009, much of which was paid directly by the way to Wall Street banks straight out of the government's coffers.

And now this same true piece of garbage company wants to recover $10 billion from shitbag Bank of America, for "misleading" AIG as to the nature of the mortgages bundled into securities that AIG accepted millions in fees to write insurance polices on. So AIG employees recklessly chased millions in fees and agreed to write countless insurance policies that the firm could not possibly ever pay off in the event of an obviously realistic set of circumstances (since they actually happened), and now they want to recoup from their clients AIG's losses on those insurance policies? Are you fucking kidding me? AIG, are you out of your fucking mind? The whole mother fucking point of offering up insurance on mortgage securities is the process of doing the due diligence to determine whether or not you are willing to provide the requested insurance, and at what price your actuaries have determined you are willing to offer it. That's the whole fucking point.

I mean, I could understand the claim that Bank of America probably made about a billion statements that turned out to be completely and utterly wrong about its expectations with respect to the value of the mortgages packaged into securities insured by AIG. Every company in America, on both sides of these transactions in fact I am sure, was more or less totally wrong about their expectations for the underlying mortgages in just about any debt portfolio five or six years ago. But how a company with the sophistication level of AIG -- the preeminent insurance company on earth as of before the financial crisis, bar none -- can willingly choose to participate for premiums that it agreed to, as an insurer of last resort in an entire securitization system that was truly hopelessly flawed, ultimately do its due diligence and decide to accepte hundreds of millions of dollars in fees to insure these mortgage securities against default at the prices agreed to by AIG in each and every case, accepting those premiums in exchange for promises to insure those securities and then now try to claim that they were somehow "tricked" by Bank of America with respect to what was in the securities that AIG had investigated before quoting its price to begin with, is beyond me.

And the thing that pisses me the shit off the most, by a mile, is that the U.S. government right now owns 77% of AIG. No, strike that -- Americans own 77% of this company right now, even after a large sale share earlier in the summer to reduce the holding from originally 92% after the company's ridiculous bailouts in 2008 and again in 2009. We own this fucking company!! And we're going to stand by and allow them to try to file downright frivolous claims that by definition would eliminate responsibility for AIG's own due diligence as the leading and most sophisticated insurance company in the history of the world? Literally! Why the shit would we ever allow that? We own this fucking company, big time. You and me brotha, we own this shit.

President Obama: if you're interested in getting someone with a head on their shoulders to at least consider voting for you in the next election, I want to see you on the fucking television, wagging a finger right at the camera, and telling AIG that they either withdraw this refluckulous claim today -- like, right fucking now -- or you are shutting them the fuck down once and for all like the filthy fucking crooks that we all already know they are. And then, let's hope they call your bluff and don't withdraw the claim against Bank of America, so you can shut those assholes down and put every one of those 63,000 full-time AIG employees out of business. You know -- our fucking employees. Mine and yours. How dare those sanctimonious shitpieces at AIG, who are only even employed at all right now by the mother fucking grace of having a two consecutive pussies as president who are just too damn afraid to stick it to the people who deserve it most, now demand the return of $10 billion because they didn't even fucking try to do their jobs and actually size the potential liabilities under the default insurance contracts they wrote. But it's not AIG's fault, right? They were "tricked" as part of the financial crisis by the very clients they were agreeing to protect. How unbelievably AIG of them.

What a load of bullshit. I would happily accept a big loss on our $180 billion investment in AIG at this point if it means putting the company's entire 63,000 full time workforce out of business. Tomorrow.

Stock Market Redux

Wow, it has been a looooooong time since I spent an entire end-of-day commute listening to the financial news like the old days. Except back then it was Bloomberg 1130am in New York, the only option available for full-time financial coverage on the radio in my area. Nowadays, it's the live feed of CNBC -- on the sexy and versatile Sirius Satellite radio of course -- but the point is still the same -- even on the way in to work on Friday, there I was again willingly choosing to forego my usual a.m. platoon between Mike & Mike in the morning and Jason & the GM (both of whom I really like in that format btw) on Mad Dog Radio, in favor of CNBC, listening to people talk about the market, opine about what's next, and speculate all over the place about the key July jobs market data. It's amazing how much the stock market can just grip an entire city like always seems to happen, in New York City for I think obvious reasons moreso than any of the other major northeastern cities where I have lived.

I think pretty much everyone who pays attention to such things could tell by early this week that the market was sick. By Thursday it finally just boiled over with a 500+ point drop in the Dow, and it seems to me that a lot of things might have finally sunk in yesterday for the first time for a lot of people who actually pay a little bit of attention to economic and financial matters. For starters, it is becoming increasingly clear that growth not only will be, but already is truly anemic right now. Last week when the government released a paltry 1.3% growth number for the Q2 U.S. GDP reading -- not nearly sufficient to even really call meaningful "growth" in most economists' views -- the at least equally meaningful but less reported part of the story is that the Q1 GDP reading was revised way down to just 0.4% growth. For those of who you haven't followed GDP over time, take it from me: first-half of 2011 growth of 0.4% in Q1 and 1.3% in Q2 isn't close to satisfactory to the markets. I think it's fair to say that an economy at this state that isn't generating at least consistent 2% growth over time will be viewed generally by the market as downright sick, and that's exactly what people have finally been figuring out pretty much ever since those numbers were released last Friday.

As much as I have fought the urge to turn this blog into a financial blog, making this place a forum for political argument sounds even worse. That said, another thing that is just increasingly clear from the past couple of weeks in Washington, DC is that this country really has no leadership at all right now. The American people are literally starting to figure out this very week that President Obama has done nothing on the economic front but kick the can down the road for the past 2 1/2 years. First it was continued massive bailouts and payouts to Wall Street risk-takers to artificially keep them alive. Then it was the silly, huge stimulus plan that really began the acceleration to this whole debt-ceiling mess we've found ourselves in this year, a stimulus plan which amounted essentially to a bunch of printed money, "creating" short-term demand of hundreds of billions of dollars and flooding the system with money that had to be spent in our economy over the past couple of years. But such provisions hardly ever work over history to actually generate "real" demand -- rather, it is common knowledge that the end result of such programs is generally just a big hole when those funds are removed. Sound familiar here, now two years past the stimulus bill's passage? And don't even get me started on the Obama / Bernanke QE1, QE2 and likely QE3 plans, which amount to -- get ready for it -- essentially to a bunch of printed money, "creating" short-term demand of hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. government obligations and flooding the system with "fake money". Sound familiar again?

Anyways, I'm not here today to debate whether you think this is the Obama administration's legacy thus far. What I'm saying is that yesterday was I think the day that the people of this country generally really did first begin to realize that what I just said is true about our can-kicking policy, and that now maybe is going to be the time where we actually take our medicine like good boys and girls. Even if you don't believe that yet, American finally started figuring it out yesterday. We have no leadership right now. Not the President -- who has consistently chosen short-term fake gains over longer-term initiatives to actually stimulate investment, create hiring, etc. and has stood playing his fiddle while unemployment has soared -- and not Congress with all the ridiculous infighting, political motivations, pork barreling even in times of national crisis, and total inability to effect much of anything, and let's not forget these are mostly all the same assholes who voted to bail out the Wall Street banks back in 2008 over the objection of the very people of America who these asshats are elected to serve.

Things changed since the 2008 financial crisis. There is going to be less government spending. Much, much less, because these entities simply will have to suffer cuts of funding, many of the cuts massive. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth. Cities and states all across America are technically bankrupt, and we've all seen how close the U.S. federal government came to a possible debt default just within the past couple of days. And we're the most secure, stable government in the world -- just look at this mess over in Europe, where we've already had at least two near-sovereign defaults this year leading to last-minute bailouts, and Greece is looking increasingly like it's heading right back to the abyss once again in the true style of AIG. Those governments will be forced, like America will as well, eventually to enact higher taxation, to help balance out the tremendous loss of revenues the governments will receive due to the slowdown, which will also inevitably take a bite out of economic growth. And make no mistake, there will be a slowdown -- a global one -- as the governments of most of the developed nations in the world decrease government funding for programs, decrease government spending, increase austerity programs, raise taxes, and see their domestic economies shrink somewhat as a direct result, which is by definition a several-year process. The generation-long housing boom and all the little industries whose growth was spawned by it -- from building, to materials and heavy machinery, to retail, and on down the line all the way to the huge boom on Wall Street from all the derivatives and securitization -- also led to what was most likely "over-employment", in that it is entirely likely that some portion of the 17% true unemployment in this country right now are people who may be facing very long-term (or permanent) unemployment, because there probably will not anytime soon be the same number of people employed in America as there were in the midst of all that bubblage, say five years ago.

So like it or not, things changed back after the blowups in 2008. Only, in America -- and in Europe, to a lesser extent -- the Obama policy has been to pretend that these structural changes just didn't happen. Very weak domestic demand because the value of investments plummeted 60% and housing that people already couldn't afford suddenly dropped 30%? No problem -- we'll just print 2 trillion dollars and spend it on the American economy for the next two years. Yeah, that will likely weaken the dollar and cause inflation to rise. So yeah, people might be paying $4.00 for gasoline in a couple of years, and $12 to see a movie, and $4 for a gallon of milk. Then we'll just lower short-term interest rates to zero for a prolonged period, and we'll buy up hundreds of billions of Treasuries over the next couple of years to flood the system with even more printed money to replace all the money that isn't in the system because our economy is really weak. What will happen in two years when all the fake money has worked its way through the system, and we're left with that huge gaping hole caused by all those structural changes that still happened, whether our people like to admit or not?

My sense is that now we are about to find out.

I'm not about making financial predictions here on the blog, but I'm going to leave you with a chart that I think is very interesting in what it suggests we could be looking at here:



This is from Doug Short of advisorperspectives.com, and it is a comparison of the multi-year performance of three major indices after pretty much the three biggest market tops and longest bear markets in modern financial history -- the Great Depression, starting with the market crash of 1929, the Japanese Nikkei collapse, starting from its tumble from near 40,000 in the late 1980s and still going today, and the U.S. bear market that Short describes as starting back in 2000. These are inflation-adjusted ("real") charts though, not the nominal highs and performance of each index. It is each index's performance in percentage terms below the top, plotted on the horizontal axis over 22 years following the initial top of each cycle, in each case adjusted for inflation over those 22 years to produce a "real" graph that bakes in the varying effects of inflation over the three 22-year-periods in question.

What astounds me from that chart is just how similar all three of those graphs look. Not exact, mind you, but just downright similar. Like, they all took almost exactly three years after the top until they finally bottomed from the initial precipitous shock. Isn't it uncanny how closely all three indices made their bottoms, in all three cases it looks like between about 32 months and 35 months following the top of the market? And then after that 3-year top-to-bottom shock, all three of the indices rallied solidly -- albeit with a few ups and downs along the way -- for just about four years, or maybe closer to five years with the current market (in blue), once again in an uncannily similar pattern, don't you think? But then look what happened between years 6-9 (7-9 in the current market's case) -- another huge down period, in our case what we think of as the financial crisis, but look at the Great Depression grey line there, which saw the market lose another half of its total value over the ensuing three years after a ferocious four-year almost unstoppable rally following the big crash in 1929. And Japan in the red, once again losing about 40% of its value over those three years between 6 and 9 years following the market top.

Now, if you look at all three charts starting right around year 9 after the market top, you will see that all three put in very sharp bottoms, almost identically again right at that same point, within just months of each other it would seem. Crazy, huh? In the case of both the Nikkei and the Great Depression, it was an incredible 66% surge in the markets over just two years from years 9-11 that must have felt, I imagine, an awful lot like the past few years in the U.S., where we have undergone a ferocious rally to recover over 70% from the March 2009 bottoms by a month or two ago.

And then I look at what's next after years 10-11 following the stock market top like we are at now on the blue line, if those other two greatest bear markets of all time are any guide. And remember, this past week on the chart above only further confirms the consistency of the pattern so far.

Hmmmm.

Back and Stuff

Man, what a difference a quarter makes.

Just three months ago, I was in between several trips back and forth across the country, to some of the grossest places the USA has to offer in fact, and mired in without a doubt two of the very worst transactions my career as a lawyer has ever taken me. I was barely seeing my family, I was struggling to keep up with the backlog at work to boot, and I was as close to miserable as I ever get, and it seemed like it would never end.

Mercifully, with June came the closing of the two deals, and since then I've barely had to travel at all for work. In fact, here just three months later, I've been able to take Hammer Wife and and the kids away to three different beaches along the east coast, for what the Hammer Kids have been calling "Beach Camp" and having a blast. Seeing my older girls get out there with me and bodysurf in the ocean now that they now how to swim is just priceless, watching them get completely wiped out by that wave that nobody even saw coming, disappear briefly below the shallow surface of the water, but then pop right back up, dust themselves off, and hurl themselves back at mother nature for another go-around. It really makes a daddy proud. And to think back even as late as early Spring, I could literally never have even seen such fun times coming in the future. It's just crazy how life can be sometimes.

Anyways, so Beach Camp has definitely had a negative effect on my blog frequency, but the positive effect on life is immeasurable. And now I'm back. I had written a monster post about the baseball season, reviewing all of my preseason over-under picks and analyzing all the teams, and then hungry blogger ate it right up. Gluttonous pig. Rather than re-write that whole thing, I'm just going to post up my random thoughts from the past week or so below and get that all out of the way in short order.

I thought that the Mets might finally starting to understand the notion of buying low and selling high. Right now is clearly the time to offload Carlos Beltran, who is having a strong first half of the season just in time for his go-year to get himself a fatty new contract. Remember the last time Carlos Beltran busted out of nowhere to come onto the scene and get himself a huge mega contract? Remember that postseason blowout with the Astros that led him to the Mets in the first place? The Mets are doing a good job dumping Beltran now when his value is clearly at its highest. They didn't get a ton in exchange for him, but the Giants are only renting him for a couple of months here, and in my view they almost certainly won't resign Beltran at season's end when he becomes a free agent. So the Mets did ok with the Beltran situation, and so did the Giants IMO. It's the team who signs Beltran to the next big deal who's gonna get screwed here, cuz this guy has shown it over and over again: when the motivation (money) is gone, so is the performance.

But then the Mets turn around and make the same mistake all over again, this time with Jose Reyes. Here is Reyes, another guy in his go year to get a new contract, and suddenly he's busting out with far and away his best season of all time, and really his first-ever awesome MLB season. He's not missing 67 games due to a stubbed toe, he's running out all his hits and making a great all-around effort, and he would be at the top of the list for the National League MVP if his team wasn't as bad as it is. But if anybody, ever, was at their highest value right now, it's Jose Reyes. If the Mets knew what they were doing, they would dump this guy in exchange for a big young starting pitcher, and a prospect of some kind, right now. Signing Jose Reyes to a long-term deal will be a total disaster, as the Mets will be forced to pay Reyes his overinflated value right now, only to watch him miss another 70 games in 2012 and hobble through his 30's as the team buys him when he is high instead of selling when they have the chance. As a Phillies fan, I like seeing the vestiges of the old Mets remaining with the organization -- the Wilpons might be the literal worst owners in all of baseball these days -- but it's amazing how obvious the truth can be to some people while others just consistently misread the situation.

Speaking of my Phillies, not many fans want to come right out with this, and I know I've seen some better overall records at this point in the season before, but I'm going to do what most Philadelphia fans are afraid to do right now and just say it: this might be the best Philadelphia Phillies team of all time. There, I said It-That-Must-Not-Be-Said. We already saw in 2010 how the Phillies failed to step up in the NL Championship Series when expectations were at their highest in a generation...now how will the current squad deal with even higher expectations here in 2011?

Oh, and Charlie Manuel: How the fuck do you reintroduce that shitbag Brad Lidge to the mix with this team the other night, after finally being free of him all season long so far? For a guy who is perhaps one more World Series victory away from Cooperstown, the Phillies manager certainly has a consistent way of over-trusting his veterans to the detriment of his team.

And to finish out my baseball rants, how the fuck they allow that umpire to continue calling games after the debacle in the 19th inning in Atlanta the other day is beyond me. I mean, it's just like that assysniff ump with the perfect game from Armando Galarraga in Detroit last season -- there are fucking major league baseball umpires for crying out loud. In that spot -- especially in that fucking spot -- you have absolutely no fucking right to make that call unless you clearly see that a tag was missed, the runner clearly got a step in there ahead of time, etc. Which obviously did not happen, since both calls weren't even fucking close, and in the case of the Braves the other day, that runner still hasn't even touched home plate at all, let alone ahead of the tag. It's simple, really: that idiot Jerry Neals already decided long before the play at the plate in the 19th inning that he was sick and tired of working -- he had already put in more than two full games' worth of work and it was nigh on 2am -- and that the next schmuck who even came close to home plate, he was going to rule safe and call it a day. And an umpire who ever makes that kind of a predetermined decision -- under any circumstances whatsoever -- without a doubt, should be banned from calling baseball games for the rest of his life. They should ban his ass from major league baseball stadiums, period.

Oh, and about my preseason over-under picks. Suffice it to say that right now my biggest misses on the season are the Pirates on the downside, and the Reds and the Rockies on the upside in the NL, and the Indians and the Tigers on the downside in the AL. Overall I am looking at 14 up and 14 down among my preseason picks, with two of the picks a virtual tie at this point with about 104-105 games in the books for most teams on the 2011 regular season. So, as usual, it looks like it's going to come down to the last week of the season to find out if I can continue my streak of over-.500 preseason over-under picks in baseball and football.

And to at least begin the 2011 NFL ranting season, can I just be the first to say that the owners officially accomplished nothing by their silly fake "lockout" which was really nothing more after all than a standard negotiating tactic that the owners were not ultimately willing to allow extend into their 2011 regular season. When the Cardinals are paying unproven Kevin Kolb a five-year contract extension worth $63.5 million with $21 million guaranteed -- this for a guy with just a handful of mediocre NFL starts under his belt, and 11 lifetime tds vs 14 interceptions? $21 million guaranteed? And you locked out this year to get this? I mean, just look at the Carolina Panthers, coming off a 2-14 season last year and with a new head coach in town. First, it was defensive end Charles Johnson, whom the Panthers signed for $72 million over 6 years with $32 million of that money guaranteed. Then it was runningback DeAngelo Williams, who scored a 5-year, $43 million deal, with $21 million guaranteed. Sidney Rice signed with the Seahawks for a 5-year deal in the $40 million that includes almost $19 million in guaranteed money. Santana Moss. Santorio Holmes. Steve Breaston. The list just goes on and on and on. The NFL owners have the exact same problem today that they had before their fake lockout that they refused to follow through with in the end -- their player contracts are not guaranteed, so the players simply insist on extracting as much signing bonuses, up-front and guaranteed payouts in the contracts as is humanly possible. The players clearly have the upper hand in the real world in the NFL -- regardless of what the owners say about the outcome of collective bargaining negotiations -- and to think that this is the situation just literally days after agreeing to end their lockout of the players, this is about as weak as the NFL owners have ever looked against what has traditionally been the weakest of the four major sports' players unions in this country.

Now That is a Horribad Call

From wsop.com:

7/7/2011 4:04:33 PM PST (about 1 hours and 21 minutes ago) Arieh Eliminated
Preflop action had left three players still in the hand, including Josh Arieh in the big blind. Together the trio had built a pot of 6,100.

The flop came Q64 rainbow, and the small blind checked. Arieh fired a bet of 2,400, then the player in late position raised all in for about 20,000. The small blind got out, and after tanking for a bit Arieh called the raise, committing his entire stack of about 19,000.

Arieh tabled AQo for top pair, but was behind his opponent's 64s. The turn was an 8and river an offsuit 2, and Arieh -- who finished third in the WSOP ME in 2004 -- hits the rail before the end of Level 2.


Wow. I mean, Josh Arieh is a guy who clearly is supposed to see himself as one of the skill guys in the tournament, that we know for sure. And here he is, calling off a raise of 10x his bet on the flop -- representing 190 big blinds at 50-100 -- with just TPTK. That simply makes no sense. What hand is he ahead of here? Seriously, who is pushing in 200 big blinds on a flop raise with KQ in this spot? In a raised pot no less. That's basically impossible. And on top of that, this is just about the dryest flop in the world -- in a raised pot, there's no way someone is semi-bluffing a draw here, so that raise is absolutely screaming "monster!" How Arieh goes down calling like this just over four hours in to the WSOP Main Event is beyond me. Odds are the guy is still tilted after losing a big chip lead late in the 50k buyin championship event the other day. That is just the kind of play that the predators in this thing are waiting for one of the fish at the table to screw up and make.

By the way, I'm just reading the live coverage that we are looking at just south of 900 runners on Day 1A of the WSOP Main Event. Building in for the usual growing crowds as we head into the later Day 1's, I'm thinking this looks more like a 5000-person field than last year's 7300+.

Tilt and the Poker Media

With the news today that full tilt has been shut down globally after losing its license to run its online gaming operations, I find myself thinking, as I have often as I've read the increasing number of anti full-tilt posts out in the blogiverse over the past month or so, about the free pass that a great many bloggers and other members of the poker media gave full tilt for the first several weeks following the U.S. online poker ban, and even in many cases that is still happening today. As the full tilt saga continues to take affirmative steps that seem headed for the site collapsing under its own weight and not ever being able to find sufficient funds to pay back the full deposits of at least its American players, I can't help but think how funny it is that basically everyone we know in the poker media, among our blogger crew and everybody else in between out there is now taking credit for having been right all along in their predictions regarding full tilt poker ever since the events shortly after April 15. When meanwhile, in actual reality, six weeks ago, it was just me, one or two other bloggers, and a small handful of posters on 2+2 decrying full tilt (they deserved it), stating that the site had commingled funds and did not have sufficient money on hand to pay out their players (they did not), and predicting that things would get a lot worse for our chances of ever seeing our money before they get better (they most certainly have).

Go check it out. Over the past few weeks, I have read no fewer than five poker writers, bloggers or other posters trying to take credit for having been right all along and seeing this coming with the full tilt situation, when in reality you can very easily look and verify that they were there back in late April, swimming right along with the masses of fish all proclaiming that hey, this is full tilt, owned by the poker pros themselves, they won't screw everyone over, especially not with the WSOP coming up. What a joke. Even when the shit is right there to be proven false, linked right there on these people's own blogs, just inches of screen space away from their lies, they all still want to take credit now for having seen this avalanche coming. Right.

Everybody has to claim to be an insider, in the poker media more than anywhere else. Where six weeks ago it was "I know the full tilt guys, full tilt will come through, full tilt would never commingle our funds with their own, of course full tilt has the money", now with the very same people it's all "I always knew something was up, I could smell a rat from the beginning." Nice try, but no. I smelled a rat right from the beginning. You blindly backed your "friends" in the industry, while day by day, chess move by chess move, your rosy expectations and over-trusting naivete showed themselves more and more clearly for just that. You put your faith in a collection of some of the least trustworthy, most shady people out there, and boy did you ever get burned.

It's one thing to be getting screwed by full tilt here. We're all getting screwed, every minute of every day while we do not get our funds back. I wrote here in black and white a good eight weeks ago now that we all already had been screwed, from the moment it became clear to the unbiased and open-eyed among us that full tilt had in fact commingled our poker funds with their own, to such an extent that they could not now come up with enough money to pay all the U.S. players back our own money. So it's one thing to recognize and admit that you've gotten screwed. But to try to take credit for being out in front of this whole full tilt mess now that your "friends" involved with the company have shown their true colors -- when it was so painfully few of us who actually got it early on -- really adds insult to injury. Just own the fact that you got duped like 99% of the country, and maybe try to learn to be a little more open-minded and objective next time.

It was tough for a while back in May, being one of the only people I could find out there suggesting that full tilt might never pay us back our poker funds from their coffers. That our funds might not even exist. People have a lot of money tied up on full tilt, and many make their very livelihood from the availability of full tilt, so I took quite a lot of shit a couple of months back from the bitterest among the blogging community. Many said I was being needlessly pessimistic. A few attacked my lack of knowledge, or my lack of written substantiation for any concerns I was voicing (as if anyone supporting full tilt back then had any such "evidence", obviously). And many simply insulted and attacked me, without any real reason, for having a view that did not jibe with what they desperately wanted to be the truth, even though their view of the truth never sat well with me or seemed all that likely to happen.

For what it's worth, I don't only chuckle at all those people now who should have seen the truth coming like I did a couple of months ago but whose own world view could not allow them to see the forest for the trees so they are now vainly trying to take credit for having seen this all along when in fact they were major contributors to the lack of seeing this problem for what it really was. I actually think the poker media, bloggers, etc. contributed in a small way to the current state of full tilt's business. Most of the major poker media sites, the bigger poker bloggers and other poker outlets on the Internets basically gave full tilt a pass for the entire first month or more after April 15 of this year, and that I think gave the powers that be at tilt the idea that they could maybe actually get away with screwing everyone and live to tell the tale. When you've got some of the biggest and most widely-read writers about poker, many of whom have written or otherwise worked for full tilt or their largest competitors over the past few years, either remaining more or less silent while one of the biggest heists in online poker history was playing out its first act, or outright coming out in blind support of full tilt with obviously no actual reason to do so, it sent a terrible message to the founders of the site, one that I think has stuck with those people right up to now, as we near the seeming bitter end for what was once everyone's favorite site to play at. Of course nobody out there will own up to having done that now, but that's exactly what mostly everyone out there in the poker media in fact did, and I'm telling you, that collective pass and the rush to trust for everything full tilt was doing for 4-6 weeks after Black Friday contributed to where we're at today.

Just imagine if all the same people who have, say, devoted countless hours, day and weeks of their lives to investigating, reporting on, and just generally telling the world the truth about the UltimateBet / Absolute scandal, had spent the first three or four weeks after Black Friday working just as hard to look into the financial situation at full tilt and to make the truth known to the world, with the same fervor and devotion that they accorded to the UB cheating matter. Or, remember when a couple chips went missing during the WSOP Main Event a few years back? We had two or three professional poker bloggers and writers out there covering almost nothing but that story for days and days on end. And you know what? The shit works! If enough people jump on an issue or a story early enough, if they dig deep enough, and if they stay at it long enough, we've seen cold, hard proof that they can really make a difference. Not just in uncovering the truth when they do, but in actually helping to frame the issues and ultimately contributing in some way to the eventual resolution of the problem.

With full tilt, the poker media in general dropped the ball in my view. Not to blame the media in any way for what ultimately is 100% full tilt's own doing here, but the poker media has done a better job in the past on other issues, and should have followed the lead of the very few such as myself who publicly never thought full tilt's story smelled exactly kosher, and done a similar job here right from the getgo in digging to the bottom of the issues and starting to suggest ways to influence full tilt management to do the right thing. Instead, while all your favorite bloggers publicly came to full tilt's defense and told you over and over again for several weeks that of course full tilt will return everyone's funds, attacking all the while those few voices out there suggesting that maybe all was not roses for the former second-largest U.S. online poker site, management at full tilt saw an opportunity to do things clearly against the U.S. players' interests like turning down Phil Ivey's "White Knight" deal and a few other deals that were offered that would have secured the return of player funds in exchange for giving up control of the full tilt asset, and they jumped on that opportunity with the understanding that the poker media was simply not out for bear from them like they clearly have been for AP/UB, the WSOP and others when other similar controversies have arisen in the past. And I can't help but notice the correlation between that unbelievable (to me) level of trust right off the bat for full tilt, and the fact that now it appears more and more almost daily that full tilt could have gotten us back our own money, but now they probably cannot.

This is one story where I can honestly say, it hurts to have been right all along.