Brides Maids -- Review

With the new babysitter working out well so far, Hammer Wife decided to push our luck this past weekend and pull of the first "two movies in two weekends" of the entire time we have had kids, and head out to see "Brides Maids" at the ultramodern new theater off the highway a couple of towns over. This was a movie I had pegged as wanting to see from the very first preview -- after starting off kinda iffy about her, I have really grown to love Kristen Wiig, and I think she is pretty much the best character actor they have had on SNL at this point in several years. She's got a great sense of humor, and even though most of the SNL movies end up proving to be ridiculous, immature and unenjoyable for me (are you listening, MacGruber?), I just had a feeling from the first time I heard about this one that it was going to be a good choice for my wife and I to go and see together.

Boy was I right. This movie was so much funnier than last weekend's "The Hangover Part Two" that they're not even in the same league. Honest to god, there were no fewer than thirty or forty times during this film's very fast-feeling two hours where both my wife and I were laughing out loud, along with everyone else in the theater with us. Literally, cackling like children, doubled over with real-life, uproarious laughter. I'm not sure if it is the characters themselves, or the writing -- probably I imagine a good deal of both -- but something about this movie just spoke to me, and to Hammer Wife as well.

Ultimately, the story for "Brides Maids" is pretty similar to one we've all heard and seen several times before: Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph (also of SNL fame) are two single, lifelong best friends, but then wen Rudolph suddenly gets engaged, Wiig's feelings about the whole thing slide quickly from elation to indifference, and eventually pretty much to disgust. It sounds cliche, and ultimately I suppose parts of it are, but I have to say, "Brides Maids" went about this admittedly cliche plot setting in a different way than I think I've ever seen before. The levels to which Wiig sinks before hitting her own personal rock bottom are some of the funniest, and almost downright hard to watch scenes of the film out of sheer embarrassment for her character. And even though Wiig tries her best to pull through for her friend in the end, the resolution is not nearly as cliche as it might otherwise have been in a different movie. And along the way, the writers weave in a convincing romance involving Wiig and a local policeman who pulls her over one day for not having her taillights fixed.

As I mentioned above, the story itself was good, but really nothing extraordinary as far as movies go. It is the characters, and the writing for those characters, that really make this movie so enjoyable. "Brides Maids" features a number of funny lines between Wiig and a long-running "boyfriend" (John Hamm) she sees from time to time who makes her feel horrible about herself, and some of the stuff Wiig does in connection with her friend's wedding is downright shocking to the viewer, in a very funny way. But the supporting cast of characters at the wedding really add more to this film than almost any movie in recent memory that I've seen on the big screen. The groom's sister -- played by Melissa McCarthy, the chick who plays Molly on tv's "Mike and Molly" -- is highlarious as a man-eating, quasi-lesbian-looking spark plug who is much too high on self-confidence for her own good, busting out with laugh-out-loud lines at the engagement party, on the plane on the way to the bachelorette party, and pretty much everywhere else she turns up in the flick. Even though it is obvious that two of the other bridesmaids in the wedding were originally intended to have bigger roles that were then just dropped (edited out, I am sure) in the final version, Wendi McLendon-Covey has me rolling in the aisles with the sharp writing and acute edge to her lines, and Rose Byrne also does a great job filling the role of Kristen Wiig's "enemy" among her best friend's roster of bridesmaids.

For a movie starring two current SNL comediennes in lead roles, "Brides Maids" was a major upside surprise. As I mentioned, this movie blows away "The Hangover Part Two" in terms of hilarity and just general enjoyability, and it probably would put up a good fight to be as funny as the first Hangover flick as well. In all, thanks to some great characters and truly inspired comedic writing that is delivered in a top-notch fashion by a cast very well suited to play the roles the actors and actresses are playing, I would have to give "Brides Maids" a pretty solid 7.5 overall on the Hoy Movie Scale(TM). And since this scale is ordered like the Richter scale, yes that does mean that "Brides Maids" is approximately 10 to the 16th power times better of a movie than 2010's "Inception". If you're looking for a funny comedy that will have you laughing out loud right alongside of your significant other, this is definitely the movie for you.

The Hangover Part Two -- Review

A few days ago Hammer Wife and I took a brief sabbatical from the kidlets to head out for a nice, suburban restaurant chain dinner, followed by a rare date night trip to the movies. Yes -- actually in the theater! I know! It really happened, and basically it was Hammer Wife's desire to see the sequel to The Hangover, which just recently came out, that led to us being there. We headed into town and sat down to a maybe 75%-filled theater to watch Bradley Cooper, Andy Bernard, Zack Galifinakis, and that other guy who got left on the roof let it loose for another round in The Hangover Part Two.

I'll be honest -- my expectations for this movie going in were pretty low, for several reasons. I had never even heard they were doing a Hangover sequel until suddenly seeing the commercial during some big sporting event or something like a month ago, and frankly, that started me off right away with the idea that this thing was kind of hastily thrown together, in a desperate attempt to nab some extra sales while the original movie is still somewhat fresh in the vernacular of pop culture (it certainly still is). I pretty much still think that's exactly what happened, for that matter. But it didn't give me much in the way of optimism for the movie going in. On top of that, I feared going in that this movie was going to suffer from the same problem that certain other movie sequels suffer from -- Speed and Home Alone most immediately come to mind -- just how the fike are they going to explain these four guys managing to get together, get fucked up and have another night of hijinks again, when they just did it and had that ridiculous night just last year? How can they even explain Zack Galifinakis ever getting together with those other three friends again? He was just the weirdo brother of the bride in the first movie, and was a total freak at that, but why on earth would those guys ever do something like this with him again, especially after Zack drugged them the last time -- intentionally -- to lead to all the problems in the first place? How stupid is this going to be?

Without giving too much away, let me just say this: the people in charge of The Hangover Part Two opted to kind of face these questions head on, and in doing so they decided to make basically the exact same movie as the first one all over again. In other words, they basically went the Home Alone route here -- the first movie was such a success for what it was, that when it came time to do a sequel, they overtly just reproduced basically the same movie, with the same basic plot, all over again, only in the case of Home Alone II, it was just with different supporting characters and in a different setting. Whereas the first movie was McCauley Culkin defending his home while left alone in suburban Chicago, Home Alone II was again Culkin, but this time miraculously left again, this time in the middle of New York City. In the first Home Alone, it was the scary old man who Culkin first avoided like the plague, then had a chance meeting with and ended up liking perfectly well, and who at the end came through in a pinch to save Culkin's life after Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern had once again finally just gotten their hands on him. In the second movie, it was the scary bird lady in the park who played essentially that exact same role in the story. It was basically the same movie in a new setting -- the uncle's nyc apartment under renovation vs. the family's home in Illinois -- replete with the paint cans, nails in the floor and all the other crazy booby traps that no real 10 year old could or would ever do.

The Hangover Part Two was basically the same thing, only in this movie's case, they kept most of the same characters, and simply changed the setting. This time instead of Las Vegas, it was Bangkok. They took five minutes to set up how Galifnakis ended up with the "Wolfpack" again -- a pretty lame excuse but they pulled it off ok if you're willing to suspend reality and just enjoy the movie, and then the gang was off to Thailand. But otherwise, without trying to give away too much here, let's just say that they go to have one drink, it turns out someone drugs them again, and they wake up the next morning with no idea where they are, how they got there, or what the F is going on. And, naturally, a key member of their gang has gone missing, and they must find him right away to avoid totally ruining yet another wedding that is happening just one day later in Thailand. What ensues is a number of scenes in tattoo parlors, strip clubs, bars and the crazy nightlife that only Bangkok is known for as the gang attempts to find their lost friend and make it back in time to fix the wedding. Andy Bernard gets with another prostitute who he falls in love with (kind of), there's another scene where they unlock Mr. Chow from a trunk-like thing and he jumps out and kicks the crap out of them, and instead of a tiger in this movie there's a very humanesque monkey coming along on the group's travels. And so on and so on. And the parallels even run down to the nitty gritty -- the guys get attacked out of nowhere by a gang of thugs and it turns out they've gotten themselves mixed up in another of Mr. Chow's shenanigans gone wrong, just like in the first movie. They then spend a half an hour finding a miraculous way to actually get out of that horrible situation, just like when they win Mr. Chow's 80 grand back in the first movie. And just when they believe they've got their friend back, they realize -- just like out in the desert with Chow in the first movie -- that they don't have him at all, and they aren't any closer to finding their friend, and it's basically too late to fix it. So just like in the first movie, Bradley Cooper makes the call, and just while Cooper is spilling the bad news that they aren't going to make the wedding, Andy Bernard has another stroke of insight, a rush of memories from the night before, and he knocks Cooper over before he can finish the call and proclaims that they'll make it home in time but perhaps a little late for the ceremony. They all remember, their friend was left somewhere they should have known all along, and they make it back just in time in crazy fashion but in time to save the wedding. Andy Bernard even tells off someone who had been being an asshole to him for a long time at the actual wedding. Again, just like that great scene with his girlfriend at the end of the first Hangover flick. The movie even ends with the missing guy finding his phone with photos of the entire night no one can remember and showing those pics along with the final credits!

Now, all this talk about the total parallels between the two Hangover movies is not to say that I hated it. Not at all. For a movie that basically copied the first one with some changes to the setting and the details, if you can get over that hump and spending $12 or whatever it costs where you live to see a movie these days for what is basically a retread of the first movie, The Hangover Part Two was actually quite enjoyable. There isn't a dull moment, it's impossible to fall asleep at, and there are a lot of funny scenes, and just like the first movie, a few really shocking ones as well, in a funny way. It's the characters that we've grown to love from the first movie, and those guys -- Cooper, Bernard and Galifinakis specifically -- really do their respective shticks well from start to finish in this movie. It is well written dialogue, and it had several moments where the entire theater was laughing out loud, groaning or something similar to indicate our engagement with the film and the characters. And, let's face it -- the cadence and overall plot of the first movie, which this one intentionally and overtly mimics more or less exactly, pretty much works well. We like seeing movies about guys waking up completely fucked up and piecing together the craziness that went down the night before. If done well, it's a tried and true proven winning concept (see Dude Where's My Car, which is highlarious as I've written about before here in the not too distant past).

In the end, I'm glad that the producers opted to make The Hangover Part Two's mimicry of the first movie to overt and obvious. They face the issue of how this sequel could ever actually happen head-on, and just ask the audience to suspend a little bit, relax and enjoy the next couple hours of their lives. If seeing essentially the overtly same movie as the first Hangover film over again in a different place with different details is going to bother you -- and I could certainly see how it could, I personally was a bit disappointed about the lack or originality myself with a plot line as rich in possibilities as almost any other comedy out there -- but if you can get over that and are the type to just suspend reality and enjoy the show, then you'll probably like this movie. Galifinakis is pretty much brilliant in this weirdo character he has created to perfectly suit himself, and Andy Bernard and Bradley Cooper are to my mind both quite watchable in mostly everything they do. And make no mistake, this movie is funny -- you'll laugh out loud for sure throughout. And by the end of the sequel I'm sure you will agree that these characters are as likable as ever.

I think if there's a third one, however, they're going to need to go with a different plot. Hopefully they can at least make it better than the third try at Home Alone.

Overall rating: 6.5 out of 10. Would have been in the 7s if the plot were just more original.

Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time (Volume II) -- Review

A year ago or more at this point, I remember posting here that I really enjoyed the first volume of "Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time", the first book by internet poker pros Eric "Rizen" Lynch, John "Apestyles" Fan Fleet and Jonathan "PearlJammer" Turner. Like Gus Hansen's "Every Hand Revealed", these books ultimately take the same approach that I have been for years with my own tournament recap posts, focusing on several hands over a long period of time in the same tournament, using those true-life summaries to help show how these guys won a few of their biggest tournaments. I find this style of teaching very effective personally, and I thought Rizen, Apestyles and PearlJammer used it very well in their first book. There were even several scenarios posed to all three authors, and you could read the differences in how each player would consider and approach the same poker situation. It was really a pretty cool book and I'm sure I wrote here how I was alerady looking forward to Volume 2 coming out, which it was said would focus more on end game as compared to the first book which focused more on early and middle mtt play, accumulating a stack, etc.

Well, Volume 2 finally did come out a month or so ago, and I was among the first to order a copy from Amazon to add to my extensive collection of poker literature. And today I can report here: this book kinda sucked.

Yep, it was bound to happen, and I should have seen it coming. The same exact thing happened with Dan Harrington, eventually, although both of the first two volumes of his seminal books on nlh tournaments (including the second one, also focused on "end game" considerations) were pretty amazing, but eventually even he went to the well one too many times, made the easy money grab, and his Volume 3 ("the Workbook") is about as useless of a poker text as you will ever find, replete with poor examples, poor analysis, and just generally nothing new compared to what he'd already said once if not twice before.

To be clear, Volume 2 of "Winning Poker Tournaments One Hand at a Time" isnt even close to bad like Harrington's third volume, but there is just not a whole lot of great tidbits in there like I recall the first book being chock full of. The one very interesting focus I take from reading this book is how much each of the three successful online poker playing authors seem to focus on stack sizes when getting down to the endgame. This is definitely not something I focus enough on in my own game, and I think just the fact that each author appears to be sizing up the stack sizes of his opponents as well as himself before each and every decision they are making when a big-field mtt really gets down to the nitty gritty is something that itself I can incorporate better into my own game. I mean, each one of the authors probably makes stack sizes their primary focus throughout this book, even moreso than position, even more than the absolute strength of their own cards in most cases. That was the one aspect that I will definitely take from this book that will make me a better poker tournament player going forward.

But that's basically it. Otherwise, it is clear to a guy who has done as many tournament recaps as I have that these three authors took only a short period of time in which they recorded all of their hands (like I do most nights) in a tournament in which to find one that they actually won. I say this because, in the end, in each author's section of the book (each author writes one section of about a third of the book which details one particular mtt run from the point where the ITM positions are reached right up until the author wins the tournament) is basically full of hands that are not necessarily representative of good poker logic and skill, are full of what each author in retrospect admits were probably sub-optimal plays made by the hero, and ultimately each one of the three mtt runs described in the book are chock full of stoopid suckouts and unbelievably lucky draws that would have eliminated the author but instead held on to eventually lead to victory.

Unlike Harrington, who basically made up each of his poker scenarios in his books in an attempt to create a specific set of circumstances that perfectly illustrate the point he was trying to make, these authors were restricted by reality in that they wanted (like I do) to use real-life examples hand from real-life tournaments that actually happened to them, and as I mentioned above, coming up with sufficient real-life hand examples to illustrate the many moves necessary to win a large-field online mtt takes many many many trials and many many months of research and of recording every hand you play, and these authors just did not spend enough time amassing great hands from real-life mtts where they ended up winning. Instead, it is easy to see from reading this book that they picked a nice tournament win that occurred for them over, maybe, a 1-month period, and then went back and reviewed every hand that happened to them from ITM to the end. Even it it meant that they showed themselves making a dumb tournament play, semi-justifying it in the analysis in the book but then showing themselves luckdonking their way to victory. In Apestyles' mtt that he depicts in the book, for example, he limps into the ITM positions with barely a stack at all, among the bottom couple of players left in that tournament, and proceeds to make a highly dubious play with an only semi-strong hand, and luckflonks his way into a huge suckout triple-up on the first hand after reaching the money positions to the give him the chips to move on.

Although I imagine that the authors think that their semi-justifications of these plays in the analysis in Volume 2 makes it ok to show them, the bottom line is that, for a guy like me, seeing these authors make what I know to be poor poker decisions and then suck out big time really does cheapen the overall significance of the advice they provide in the books. Sure, everybody makes mistakes from time to time in their poker play, but writing a book that features those mistakes but then attempts to justify them because in reality these authors had no other tournament runs to choose from, is going to take away from the overall value the book brings to readers who are looking to learn how one wins an online large-field mtt. Honestly, other than the interesting focus paid to stack sizes as I mentioned above, I do not see where Volume 2 of this series is going to help that guy who hasn't really quite figured out how to win yet.

Lehman Brothers Book Reviews

Recently I took the time to read through the two books recently released about the fall of Lehman Brothers -- A Total Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, by Lawrence McDonald, and The Murder of Lehman Brothers by Joseph Tibman. The author of the former was a vice president in the firm's distressed-debt department, which means he was at the bottom of the upper class of Lehman employees, and in the good days he was a guy making 7 figures a year. The author of the latter, Joseph Tibman, is unknown, as that name is simply a pen name for "Joe The Investment Banker Man" in an attempt to retain his anonymity. He was, however, an investment banker for Lehman Brothers over the several years prior to and leading up to the firm's collapse. Both stories give some decent insight and stories, clearly from insiders with each their own perspective on what happened over the final few years for the 150-year-old firm that went bankrupt to spark the U.S. market collapse late in 2008.

A Total Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers is the first book I read on this topic, obviously of special interest to me since I worked at Lehman for its final few years of existence myself and have my own set of experiences, preconceived notions and ideas about just what went wrong and when at the storied investment bank. I enjoyed this book, as it tells a good story from start to finish, albeit IMO focusing a bit too much up front on McDonald's former life before he got his start in investment banking as a convertible bond specialist. But McDonald does a good job of telling the story from the insider's perspective of Lehman's amassing of hundreds of billions of dollars of toxic real estate assets. The author does I think a very good job of giving a basic understanding of the derivative type of financial products which got the country's banks into this mess in the first place -- CMBS, RMBS, CDS, securitization of bonds in general, etc. -- and what Lehman Brothers' role was in the expansion of such financial instruments. McDonald worked in the fixed income division of Lehman, which is where all the shit hit the proverbial fan in 2007-2008, and as a result you really do get a very cool look from the inside from a guy who literally sat on Lehman's proprietary trading desk over Lehman's final few years, including several moments of foreshadowing where, according to the author, the directors in his area called the financial crisis a good couple of years before everything finally collapsed. The particularly good inside stuff in this book includes the stories behind some of the big trades made by Lehman with its own account both for and against subprime mortgage companies over the several months as the credit crunch first began in mid 2007 and into 2008, and especially the details of the secret meeting of 20 or so of Lehman's top managing directors in late Spring 2008 at a swank restaurant in the Upper East Side of Manhattan where it was decided that CEO and COO Dick Fuld and Joe Gregory were going to be overthrown.

One of the downsides to getting this particular insider's view, however, is I think the importance that McDonald seems to put on his group having seen the light all along with respect to the bets Lehman Brothers (and many other large banks) were making on real estate assets. To believe this author, his group and his group alone knew all along that Lehman was betting the firm on U.S. and eventually globally real estate prices continuing their inexorable march upwards, they regularly tried to scream it out to anyone who would listen, but unfortunately his smart leadership continually got pooh-poohed, silenced, or even pushed out of the firm if they did not simply back down from their calls for better risk management. In truth I am sure the reality is somewhere less clear than that, but for whatever reason this is the spin we get from reading A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, which to me smacks of self-servitude and untruth.

The other big downside to this particular book is that McDonald was laid off early in 2008 as the fixed income market deteriorated, and that is where the inside scoop and other details of the daily goings-on of the core of the firm really start to grow thin, because the author was no longer employed by Lehman Brothers and was no longer around in the thick of the battle day in and day out. And unfortunately for McDonald, mid-March -- just after he was laid off -- was the beginning of far and away the craziest, most volatile and ultimately most interesting part of the whole Lehman Brothers saga, including the collapse of Bear Stearns and then the several months of slow-motion downward sprial that eventually led to Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy and liquidation. To have all this great inside insight into what things were really like at the firm from 2005-2008, but then not have any personal insights regarding the period from March 2008 through to September when the firm filed its historic bankruptcy, causes this book ultimately to land far short of its potential if written by someone who stuck around the four walls of 745 7th Avenue all the way through to The End.

The Murder of Lehman Brothers does not suffer from this particular problem. Although the author intimates that he, too, lost his job in the wake of Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy declaration and subsequent sale of the U.S. investment banking business to the UK's Barclays Captial, he at least was present all through 2008, which is really where the rubber met the road on the fall of the company, and ultimately it's what everybody wants to read the most about. Joseph Tibman represents himself as a longtime Lehmanite, different from McDonald who only joined in 2005 while the credit bubble was still ramping up, and as such he includes some more details of the recent history of the firm, and in particular the rise to power of Dick Fuld as CEO of evnetually the nation's fourth largest investment bank. Tibman, like McDonald, does a good job of describing the process behind Lehman's amassing of billions of dollars of overinflated real estate assets. Tibman, being a more senior officer of the company than McDonald (who was just a vice president), also has probably better insights into the character of the leadership of the firm, the changes in the company's CFO, lead Risk Manager and COO along the way and what was really going on behind the scenes with each.

With all of the senior-level focus of The Murder of Lehman Brothers, though, Tibman ends up focusing more on that but less on telling a good story, which shows as his book almost reads more like a factual report whereas McDonald's attempt to chronicle the fall of Lehman reads more like a novel. And although Tibman does not attempt to make his own department look like the only people in the company who foresaw the firm's impending doom and tried to stop it, Tibman does in his own way spend a little too much time glorifying the investment banker lifestyle that he was ingrained with. Believe me, I've worked plenty of hard and potentially mind-numbing jobs in my day and I most definitely do not need a speech about how i-bankers are the best because they live in the moment with each deal, totally engrossing themselves, available 24-7, weekends, holidays, vacations, you name it. That sounds an awful lot like my current job as well as those I have held recently, and that bit gets a bit old for me just like McDonald's insistence on trumpeting up his own people and managers like they were the all-knowing ones trying to save the world.

In the end, there are a couple of themes conspicuously common to both books that I thought makes them worth mentioning here. First and foremost, the utter and complete hatred and disbelief towards Dick Fuld, and even more surprising, his #2 in command guy Joe Gregory. Each book absolutely shreds Fuld, depicting him as completely out of touch with what his firm was actually investing in and the positions it was taking, with Tibman repeatedly referring to Fuld's "castle" up on the 31st floor at the Lehman headquarters and how he continually withdrew from seeing anyone but his top lieutenants. Each book also saves special criticism for Joe Gregory, a guy I used to see all the time in my days at the firm, with both authors essentially blaming Gregory for the firm's insistence on building up its real estate portfolio, even in some cases without Fuld's active knowledge or blessing. This surprised me, as I can tell you that within the firm Gregory was not identified as being particularly responsible other than as someone who simply carried out the orders of his superior in Dick Fuld.

The other person who gets absolutely lambasted in both books is Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the man behind the massive financial bailout package as well as the guy at the helm when Lehman Brothers ended up being allowed to fall. Basically, both authors prominently advance the favorite invective among former Lehman employees that Hank Paulson made the most disastrous financial decision in the history of the country in allowing Lehman Brothers to fail, and both authors go on to place the blame for the resulting crumbling in equity prices around the world squarely on the mantle of that decision being made. On this point I believe both authors totally miss the mark and like I said each falls victim in my view to the standard response of Lehman employees whose lives were thrown into total tumult as a result of the bankruptcy. But even with the benefit of hindsight, even having seen what happened to asset prices immediately following Lehman's failure, not only do I not think Hank Paulson "caused" the last and worst wave of the crisis by allowing Lehman to fall, but I tend to think of not bailing out Lehman as the one bright spot in what was otherwise a comically horrible run of decisions coming out of Treasury, the Fed and the rest of the Bush administration during late 2008. It's sad to me in a way that the authors of both of the books to come out detailing the fall of Lehman Brothers are unable to divorce themselves from the dogma that Lehman internally fed to its minions for months and months leading up to the firm's eventual downfall. But back at the time, basically nobody I know wanted the government (read that as "us taxpayers") to bail out Lehman Brothers, and the moral hazard argument simply has to stop somewhere lest we risk every financial institution knowing that they can risk whatever they want, act as recklessly as possible in pursuit of high returns, comfortable in the knowledge that the government will save them if things go sour. So no, I don't agree at all with the conclusion of both Lehman books that Paulson's greatest mistake was in allowing Lehman to fail. As I said at the time right here in the blog, I think Lehman should have been allowed to fail, after its CEO made very obvious gaffe after very obvious gaffe as his back got pushed closer and closer to the wall all through the spring and summer of 2008, and in fact I only wish that Hank Paulson had done a little more of "let failing" and a little less of "bailing out" than he did do throughout the financial crisis in 2008.

The last thing I would mention is that I also think both books did a sorry job of capturing some of the more generalized, less mortgage-specific mistakes that in my personal view as my own sort of insider clearly led to Lehman's downfall. For starters, Lehman Brothers, more than any other bank and frankly more than any other company I've ever heard of, insisted on clearly differentiating between the worth of its "front-office" people -- the revenue centers for the firm -- and the "back office" -- the cost centers. Sure, every large company has a lot of both, but at Lehman this differentiation was purposefully palpable -- almost like a modern-day caste system -- and not a day went by when you weren't impacted by it in some way. The firm's headquarters at 50th and 7th Ave in midtown was essentially reserved only for the revenue people. If you weren't directly generating revenue for the firm -- ie, if you weren't in the fixed income or equities divisions, a trader or a banker in some form -- then you could not even sit in the same building as the revenue guys. Instead of the posh Lehman-owned space in the HQ building, us back office folk were relegated to rented space on floors of other nearby buildings, sans the amenities and sans the cachet of working over at 745. The back office people had a nice holiday party ever year, but you should have seen the investment bankers' party which was always held on the same night but at a much more expensive (and fancy) location. The back office had a separate summer intern program from which I hired an intern in each of my three full years at the firm, but again the events, the expenditure, the opportunities were nothing compared to the business units' summer program, which was lavish to a fault. And the end result of all this palpable and deliberate focus on the non-revenue guys being second class citizens within Lehman had a dastardly effect on the firm in 2008, because among other things, the back office squarely included the Legal, Audit and Risk functions for the firm. When I see such a massive and clear failure of the firm to adequately protect itself in a period of flux in the marketplace, and yet the very functions like Legal, Audit and Risk being treated as lowlifes by the Brahman bankers and traders, more or less ignored for the most part company-wide, it becomes crystal clear that this was a major oversight on the part of Lehman's management that surely had a noticeable effect in the firm's last couple of years. Being a trader and a banker, the authors of these two Lehman books were both too hopelessly on the inside (and at the top) of this quasi-caste system to even see it for what it was, but the in my view the firm suffered immeasurably from this top-down belittling of the importance of the firm's back office functions to the long-term survival of the company.

The other factor which was totally ignored in each book but which I contend played a major role in the downfall of Lehman Brothers was the inexperience of the people in management positions at the firm, another thing I have also written about extensively here before. This was a bank where, for whatever reason, a ton of junior-type of people and less-skilled people received promotions and were, by the time the mid-2000s rolled along, occupying many positions of importance within the firm. I personally worked with multiple managers in the risk management function of the bank who were young -- as in, "never before seen a bear market" young, or "weren't even working in finance when the dot com bubble burst not that long ago" young. It was hard enough for any experienced risk manager to be able to decipher the mess of subprime and Alt-A mortgages that were packed into these complex mortgage backed securities that Lehman was amassing and selling in its last few years. To ask a young kid, someone who's never even lived through a time when the market's general bias is downwards, who's never lived through a real-life financial crisis of some kind, to be able to appreciate that risk, let alone to adequately hedge against it, is sheer folly. Similarly, not just some but most of the manager- level traders I used to work for at Lehman were young guys -- in their 30s, some even their 20s, and these were the guys being entrusted to run many areas of the firm's trading desks, to make decisions that impacted the firm's revenues and profits in a direct way during what proved to be a violent inflection point in the marketplace. Shit, even my own boss at Lehman was a 30-something, a guy with absolutely zero prior management experience, and boy did that ever show in how he ran our group. And this was not atypical at all at Lehman -- in retrospect, it was like a bunch of little kids trying to masquerade as if they were running the firm, doing all the "big people" jobs that they all could not believe they were able to land at such young, inexperienced times of their lives. And the result? Extreme pain.

In all, I did enjoy reading both A Total Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, by Lawrence McDonald, and The Murder of Lehman Brothers by Joseph Tibman, but it's hard for me to know how much of that is translatable to those who were not also on the inside while the whole thing went down in 2008. The McDonald book overall is a better story -- more of a true novel, as I mentioned above -- while the Tibman book does a much better job of describing the details of what the final six months or so was like for people working inside Lehman during the firm's final slow-motion collapse to nothing. Each book contains some good discussion of what went wrong with the firm's bloated real estate portfolio, and each is full of the standard ex-Lehmanite rhetoric about our former CEO and what an egotistical, blinded buffoon he clearly was. But at the same time I think each author missed a golden opportunity to really tell the story of what took down this firm, probably because each of them was hopelessly on the inside of the systemic problems I was able to see as so prevalent so easily in my time at Lehman Brothers.

I would be interested in comments from anyone who might have read either or both books, or any other similar reading regarding last year's massive changes in the investment banking landscape.

Check-Raising the Devil

So I bit the bullet recently and purchased a copy of "Check-Raising the Devil", Mike Matusow's autobiography. I'm going to go out on a limb and say something I wouldn't normally say here, but to be perfectly honest I had stalled on picking up a copy of this book primarily because it was co-written by a couple of bloggers, and I figured if that's the case then it's probably not something I'm going to miss. And I guess I've read a few reviews of the book, and they seem ok but to be honest I don't recall reading a single review saying this book was really great or anything. I wasn't thinking about who the writers are specifically -- Mike Matusow himself, along with Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli. Amy's is a blog I don't read often enough, but in a word it really kicks ass and is absolutely always a fantastic read, as Amy really tells a great story in everything she does. Yet I never put two and two together on the fact that Amy was involved in writing this book, and I'm still not sure it even would have mattered if I had as I just don't tend to give most bloggers' actual writing much respect (myself very much included).

Anyways, I was really out of books -- I wrote about this here maybe a month ago or so -- and eventually I bit the bullet and bought "Check-Raising the Devil" along with a stack of other books from trusty Amazon. I read a couple of the other things I had bought first (a couple of Vince Flynn novels so far (decent), and the latest Michael Lewis book on fatherhood (semi-decent)), and eventually I sat down to read about Matusow. I knew I wasn't going to love it but I was just hoping for a decent story about a guy I know is all kinds of fucked up, with hopefully good enough writing to keep me semi-interested for a while, and if I'm really lucky maybe some decent poker stories or tidbits along the way as well from one of the more successful big-tournament guys and cash guys out there today.

What I got was very unexpected. "Check-Raising the Devil" was to me a truly fascinating read. I give this book easily the best review I have seen of it anywhere else. I really liked it. I liked it so much that I even passed it on to my highly discerning brother in law, a claim that could be made only by a small handful of books ever. The authors do an excellent job of starting off with Matusow's roots, born in a trailer park in Vegas, working in the family business, gambling away all his earnings at video poker and slots in the casino across the street. They weave in Matusow's introduction to real live poker by another pro in the casino, and then to his beginnings trying to get a roll together and learn to play the game. Amy Calistri's influence in particular I think can be felt throughout the pages, as the story is told in a very easy-to-read way, almost like it is the "natural" way to tell Matusow's pretty incredible story, if that makes sense. It's a delicate balance and it's hard to describe, but it's there just like it is if you read Amy's blog with any regularity. She is good at telling a story.

Then the book took another surprising turn. Matusow recalls with amazing clarity the details of all of his big cash and tournament wins, and he gives a lot more of those details -- including the way he played particular hands, how he won and lost the biggest pots in the biggest tournaments of his life, everything. In particular is Matusow's details on the tournaments he has won, which are really interesting reads just for the poker in addition to the way the stories are told. It's kind of like reading "Positively Fifth Street" in that sense, if you enjoyed that book like I did. Matusow's and the author's descriptions of not just his winning of multiple WSOP bracelets, other 7-figure tournament wins and others, but the how of winning those tournaments, is really enjoyable for anyone who likes a good poker story with a little more detail about cards and specific hands than you would find in your random best-selling novel or James Bond movie.

Then of course there is the whole drug use and drug bust thing, which I have to admit is a friggin goldmine when it comes to writing a book like this. To your average guy on the street like me, I love reading the details of how a guy slips under the pallor of drug use and then eventually gets set up and busted for scoring some coke for a friend who was looking to buy. Throw in some Amy and Tim Lavalli with that kind of material, and you are once again left with a superbly interesting and well-told version of events. One of the things that I originally thought of as a criticism as I read the book was that it is pretty clear to me that Matusow isn't being totally honest with us in certain parts of this book, including telling 100% his side of the drug story, when I am quite sure the real truth was somewhere measurably worse than the way Mike spins the facts. But I'm not even sure that's a criticism anymore to tell the truth -- being able to see how human Mike is through this book, and how much to this day he is still deluding himself to some extent, it's all part of the whole experience of the book, and frankly if you read it through I think you will feel like me that it's actually perfectly a part of the Mike Matusow the book portrays. In any event, getting to read all about Matusow's drug use tournament poker tournaments, how it affected his game, and his drug regimen generally from back in the day and even today makes for a great read to someone like me and I bet to you out there as well.

Suffice it to say, "Check-Raising the Devil" has great material to work with in telling a truly interesting, enjoyable and nearly-all-true tale of a really interesting life, as told right from the horse's mouth itself. Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli weave a great story that starts with what most of us would consider pretty humble-ass beginnings and details a rise through the big cash games and eventually to the top of the largest poker tournaments in the world. Like many quick rises to fame and fortune, Matusow falls off the cliff and deep into drug use, eventually hitting rock bottom and doing some pretty hard time in jail, which he also describes in very interesting detail for sure. Throughout all this is the theme of chemical imbalance in Mike's body and the need for drugs to keep him emotionally stable, which again flitters in and out of the text at just the right moments to keep the thread strong. What can I say, I really liked this book, and as most of you know by now I have generally pretty strict tastes on these things. "Check-Raising the Devil" gets an 8 out of 10 for me, and is easily worth picking up a copy of for anyone who likes a great story about one of the most truly interesting people in the poker world today.