As Busy as I've Ever Been

Yep, that's my mantra lately. I am literally as busy at my job as I have ever been, in my entire life. And as someone who always carries a heavy workload in comparison to my peers, believe you me: this is not fun. At all. I mean, it's one thing when the airhead across the way, for whom its all she can do to even show her face in the office for maybe 30, 32 hours a week, tops. You give her a bit of extra work, and even though she feels like she is falling off a cliff, I don't give a shit. She deserves it, in fact. Or the lazyshiat down the hall, who will complain all day about the hours he has to work but then somehow manages to "work from home" at least two days a week, when his IM shows him as being completely away from his pc for hours at a time during business hours. But when I get heaped on top of my pile another 25-50% more work than I am already carrying, that really means something, and frankly it takes me to a place where I literally cannot get anything else done in the day but work, work and more work.

Over the past few weeks, I am up at the absolute crack of dawn -- earlier even -- and I'm the first one into my office shortly after 7am, where I proceed to sit at my pc and bang out contracts, dial in to negotiations and participate in various and sundry meetings, conversations and strategy sessions, until around 7pm when the sun is already on its way back down for the night. This week will make a complete five-day work week where I was not even afforded the opportunity to go and grab a quick lunch, not from a deli and not even one of those carts that midtown Manhattan is so famous for. And as if it's not insult enough that I work 12 hours a day in my office when pretty much the entire rest of my colleagues show up for more like the usual 9 or 10 -- on a good day! -- lately, when I finally get home around 8 at night, I have to immediately fire up the laptop and am back working on that contract markup before my work shoes are even off, my lenses are out and often literally before I even sit down. That's just how much I have to get to, how much more than is possibly able to be done by a normal person in a normal day.

So if you've been wondering why you haven't seen me on the virtual tables almost at all in the past couple of weeks (or much here at the blog, either, for that matter), no I haven't changed my username to protect my anonymity, and no I didn't finally stick my head through my laptop screen after one too many 2-outers on the river. I just haven't even had the time to sit the fuck down and do something I want to do, even at night when I'm home after a long, long day in the office.

Here's hoping that Friday night will be my first night truly off from work in about 2 1/2 weeks thanks to a couple of marathon sessions over the past couple of weekends that had me sitting in my office for a full day all alone on Saturdays and Sundays. And if I haven't returned your emails this week, don't take it personally (well, you should take it personally, but the rest of you, please don't). This weekend I am desperately hoping to get that break to catch up on everything else in my life outside of work work work work work.

Random Thoughts

I've been utterly swamped over these past few days with issues both personal and work-related, but I've got about a gillion random thoughts in my head that I thought I would get into a post here in no particular order while I have a minute to come up for air.

Check out Tiger Woods. Divorced for all of one day, and comes out and fires his best round of the year. Nice media coverage while Tiger was hitting rock bottom right in front of our eyes just a few weeks ago, where nary a single reporter, news outlet, blogger or anything else I saw managed to make the connection or even to mention at the time that Tiger was just finalizing his divorce. That weekend Tiger shot +18 and finished in second-to-last place in the tournament, the guy was literally probably having knock-down, drag-out screaming fights with his soon to be ex-wife about money, where to live, what to do with the kids, etc. If you ever doubted that golf was mostly a mental game, what Tiger did on Thursday after the year he has had on the links pretty much puts that question to rest.

And then check out the Philadelphia Phillies. In a crucial four-day period that sees the NL East-leading Braves going to play a tough Colorado team on the road, we have the NL-worst Astros coming in to our house for a 4-game set where we should be able to pick up a couple of games and basically be tied with the Braves for the divisional lead, heading into the last 35-40 games of the 2010 regular season. Instead, the Phils get their asses swept at home by the lowly Astros, missing four chances to pick up games in the postseason race, and leaving themselves a full 3 games back in the division and already out of the wildcard lead as we head into our second west coast trip of the season, where we traditionally have fared horribly. That is as pathetic a performance as this team has come up with in the past few years. As I've said all season long, this team just seems to have lost that "eye of the tiger" that they clearly have had the past couple of seasons. The Roy Oswalt trade was another stroke of genius for this team and GM Ruben Amaro, but it seems less and less like their year in 2010 with every passing week of games in the books.

Does anybody remember what the end of August used to be like when we were kids? I do. It was hot. Effing steamy, sweaty, muggy hot. Every year, all of August was basically hot as hell in the northeast, you could count on it as surely as the sun coming up each day. Well, nowadays have you noticed how the summer is basically over in the northeastern U.S. by the middle of August? Anybody who makes beach plans for the last couple of weeks before Labor Day these days better pack their sweaters and some windbreakers, cuz once again we are looking at 70-degree high days and lows in the evenings dropping into the 50s. Global warming my ass.

This week I had one of the biggest morons I work for -- a guy who is so clueless at what we do that I must have had 50 or 60 conversations with others about how inept and unskilled he is at this job over the past year or so -- advise me "don't ever let yourself think that I am infallible" when he found an error he had made in something that I had not commented on previously. Of course, the first 185 times I found similar errors in his work, I did point it out to him, and 185 times I got a predictably unintelligible response justifying why his language was better than my suggestion, even when pointing out things like obvious typos and blatant problems in syntax with some language in his agreements. But then he finds an error and now I should always remember that he isn't infallible. I'll have to try to remember that. Maybe I'll tie a string around my finger so every time I see it it will remind me that this clown is not infallible. It's just so rich.

While I'm on the topic, we had our annual review process at work a month or two ago, and I really cannot imagine anyone being worse at administering this process than my current employers. These people seem to view the reviews as their opportunity to mention every single specific mistake you've made over the past year, instead of focusing on the way you did your job overall for the past 12 months. I mean, if I respond to every request within 10 minutes, maybe three or four hundred times over a year, but then exactly one time I miss an email and do not respond to one request for two hours, am I supposed to show up at my review and hear all about that one fuckup and how I need to set more realistic deadlines for my work? Or should I hear how great a job I did at setting deadlines and responding promptly to requests over hundreds of instances over a 12-month period? I know I have my own experiences in conducting reviews and others' viewpoints may not necessarily agree with my own, but I feel like this is a very clear answer, and yet the powers that be at my job simply do not get that. I mean, when you've got 24 different people reviewing your performance, and 23 of you know with total confidence that you are a certain way, but then one outlier jackass reviewer makes a negative comment that the other 23 powers that be know is simply not an accurate reflection of how you actually performed, how does that one outlier comment find its way into the review? Can people really be that clueless about how the annual review process is supposed to work?

I guess that's all for now. I've got a million things going on and it's a good bet you'll get to read about most of them in the coming weeks right here on the blog. For now, enjoy what is likely to be the last 90-degree day of the year in the NY area on Sunday and try to get in your last bits of fun before summer officially departs us once again.

Real Quickie

Sorry for the lack of posting lately, but work has come in the way of my personal life more over the past week or so than has ever happened in my time as a lawyer up to this point. So for today I will just say the following:

Johann Santana muhahahahahahahah!

Denial

So, slow weekend in the financial sector, huh?

OK so my pledge to you is that on Tuesday I am going to get it up and write about some fucking poker in this space for the first time in a week. It has been impossible for me to find that within me since this whole miserable mess began to unfold a week ago today, but on Tuesday I plan to force myself to change that and give you guys what you really come here to read about every day -- poker.

For now, suffice it to say that I am hurting. For the sixth straight day, you can expect me to be good n drunk already by the time I lurch off the commuter train at my new suburban home. I can't really deal with reality without it. In a way, today's shocking bankruptcy declaration by Lehman Brothers will be a calming influence on my life and really on the lives of many of the people more directly involved as employees in the company. I need something else to focus on all day while I toil away at my new job, other than the constantly-updating real-time LEH quote always ticking on my screen. Mostly downward, since I started the new job to tell the truth. I need to start focusing on helping my friends and former employees over there move on with their lives, start finding new jobs or new endeavors, be it school, a complete change of industry, whatever. And heaven forbid on my own life, imagine that.

One lasting aspect I cannot get out of my head from all this deals with Lehman assholeprickmotherfuckerhopehedies CEO Dick Fuld's raging denialism. I wrote last week about the fact that Merrill Lynch bit the bullet and sold $30 billion of troubled mortgage assets earlier this summer to Lone Star, an entity that specializes in making such purchases, for 22 cents on the dollar. And how in fact, the price was cheaper than that, because Merrill took the additional step of financing about 16 cents of those 22 cents on the dollar they received. They basically sold $30 billion of mortgages to Lone Star for $6 billion, and they lent Lone Star $5 billion of that $6 billion as it is, including giving Lone Star the right to put a significant portion of those securities back to Merrill if they price dropped significantly from current values as of the time of the sale. Many people would describe (and have described) this as selling the mortgage assets for 6 cents on the dollar, and I would not necessarily disagree with that characterization.

As I mentioned last week, ever since the day Merrill announced this major asset sale, Lehman and CEO Dickhead Fuld have been on the market, trying to sell up to $40 billion of its own troubled mortgage portfolio. But Penis Fuld would not accept less than 85-90 cents on the dollar for his portfolio, despite the precedent set by Merrill just a couple of months ago. As a result, no deal has come close to being reached, and Lehman now declares bankruptcy while holding some $60 billion of distressed mortgages on its books.

And just look at what fucking went down this weekend. Friday closed out with Bank of America being rumored to be the frontrunner to buy Lehman Brothers, which after last week's disastrous stock market performance could probably have been purchased by BofA for what? A billion dollars maybe? Less even? $500 million? Well, over the weekend BofA got its first look at Lehman's mortgage book, and what they saw was not pretty. It was so bad that by Saturday afternoon, BofA had already backed away and removed itself from its candidacy to buy Lehman, at any price. Immediately, some were speculating late on Saturday that BofA was still reeling from its horrific purchase of mortgage specialist Countrywide Financial last year, near the height of the market, and/or that BofA had capital and liquidity problems of its own, and just could not scrape together the cash to purchase Lehman Brothers in these troubled times.

Well lookie what happened. Not only did BofA have the interest and the willingness to buy a large U.S. investment bank, but they had fifty fucking billion dollars to do it. But they didn't buy Lehman, with its $60 billion of liquid shit on its books. Instead they bought Merrill, the company whose astute management bit the bullet and solid their shit for literally pennies on the dollar a few months ago. Just like I said last week, that's a guy who is a leader, someone who is willing to take the short-term hit in exchange for the long-term gain to the value of his company. Cock Fuld, on the other hand, is a jackass who let hubris blind him from doing the very thing that could have saved at least some semblance of his company from disappearing, like it now will. Friday BofA was going to buy Lehman, which they could have gotten for a billion dollars or less, and then on Sunday they instead decided it was a better value for them to spend more than 50 times as much to buy Lehman's competitor who had a horrible mortgage portfolio until a few months ago when they took their medicine and just did what they had to do to get rid of it.

Denial. Anyone familiar with substance abuse or other forms of addiction will know that this always remains step one of addicts dealing with any problem. The human condition simply predisposes us all to be tempted to just deny deny deny our problems, and they maybe will go away. But in this case, Prick Fuld's denial got him everything he would never want for himself and the company that he's been with since fucking 1969. And now the 25,000 employees whom he told to trust him in a company-wide conference call earlier this summer just found out what happens when you put your trust in the hands of a known denialist. What a sick, sick ending to one of the saddest stories in Wall Street's history.

Back tomorrow with some real life poker content. That is my pledge to you.

To Bail or not to Bail, That is the Question

So today might actually be the last day of this space being a Lehman Brothers and finance blog and more of a poker blog, but not surprisingly given the situation, I've got more to say and much more on my mind about the situation today. So as of late Thursday, word is that the U.S. government is working overtime to orchestrate a sale of Lehman Brothers to whomever they can find to buy the beleaguered bank. Bank of America has been mentioned among the large U.S. financial institutions, and HSBC and Barclay's, long rumored to be Lehman suitors back when the company was actually worth something, lead the list of potential acquirors on the foreign bank side. Who knows where this will eventually end up.

One of the interesting rumors I read this morning is that the Fed, the U.S. Treasury and Lehman management -- somehow still the same motherfuckers who got the company in to this whole mess over the past several years and didn't do shit to get them out of it -- are exploring a possible three-way deal, selling the investment management unit to one party, the investment banking operations to another, and the mortgage assets to a third party. Now to this, I ask Who the fuck would ever want to buy those last two parts? We're talking about a combination of the investment banking business and the real estate assets that are valued at negative $5 to 6 billion right by in the market. I don't know the split between the two, but does it really matter at this point? It's obvious the company has or is currently in process of losing most of its investment banking clients. The capital markets (fixed income and equities) division of the company has been crushed by huge losses, poor trading volumes and a focus on fixed income which has seen about 90% of its revenues evaporate over the past twelve months. Who wants to buy those businesses now, without the crown jewel of Neuberger Berman to help cushion the blow? And now Lehman wants me to believe they might have a buyer for their distressed real estate holdings as well? Puh-lease. That one my friends, I'm not just not seeing.

But I have to say, I think the most interesting aspect to this whole talk of a government-orchestrated buyout of Lehman Brothers today is the notion that the U.S. government might once again have to step in with a bailout using public funds. This would be after a similar move with Bear Stearns back in March, and then just last weekend's government seizure and capital influx to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Bear bailout basically involved the government standing behind and agreeing to take on the risk of the last $29 billion of the $30 billion troubled asset portfolio of Bear's that JP Morgan took on when the government "convinced" JPM to buy out Bear to keep it from officially going bankrupt. The Fannie and Freddie actions are even more socialist-sounding, with the government stepping in and flat-out taking over control of the two mortgage giants, at a total cost to U.S. taxpayers of potentially a couple hundred billion dollars. And now many people are saying the government should once again step in to bail out Lehman Brothers as well. Let's discuss.

First and foremost, I completely hate the idea of government bailouts in general, and especially government bailouts of public companies in the financial sector, whose greed and thirst for profits led them to make literally billions of dollars in profits and get all nice and fat -- for them and for their shareholders -- when things were fine, but then as soon as things go bad, then they need the government, and not the fat cats or those fat shareholders to bear the brunt of the losses. That shit to me is just plain sick. Frankly, this article right here I think sums up my feelings on the issue better than anyone else I've seen and far better than I could do it myself.

So all that above being said, I do need to point out for those who don't understand this, the government truly had no choice but to bail out Fannie and Freddie. Between them, these two institutions hold some 75% of all mortgages in this country. Think about that one for a minute. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the fallout from that kind of failure would compeltely crush the the average consumer, the debt markets and most other aspects of the U.S. financial system, probably for years to come, and the end result of all that would be far, far worse than if something was done to backstop the troubles. Of course, where the fuck was the government over the past 5-10 years to stop these two institutions from being in such a position that their failure could actually happen and could actually impact the system in this way? Nowhere, because the companies were making money. Greedy hand over greedy fucking fist. So that's a problem, and one that the current administration should defnitely have to answer to. But given where we were at a few months ago, there at that point was just no choice for the government other than to step in and take over. Those failures would crush the system, and like I said the effect on the U.S. economy and on the financial markets around the world would have been exponentially magnified beyond its true scope because of the fear, the panic and the general collapse that would have ensued.

The better question on whether or not there should be government bailouts I think relate to the investment banks. I think a strong argument can be made that, back in March, the outright failure of Bear Stearns over essentially a two-day period would have had a similarly crushing effect on the financial system and on the U.S. and global economy. Not truly similar in scope to that of Fannie and Freddie, which simply could not be borne by the U.S. or really anywhere in the world without a Great Depression-type of panic effect the likes of which no one reading this today has ever seen, but it probably would have been very, very bad. For whatever reason, I find it harder to swallow bailing out these investment banks though, because unlike Fannie and Freddie whose very existence has always been ultimately to provide mortgages to U.S. residents, a bank like Bear or Lehman Brothers only exists for one purpose: to make money. And that is exactly what they did, for many many years prior to Bear's failure earlier in 2008. I'm too lazy to go and add it up right now, but suffice it to say that Bear Stearns made billions and billions of dollars in profits over the several years prior to this year, and their CEOs made hundreds of millions, the stock grew by billions, the large shareholders got rich off of this profit machine, everything was driven by the huge sums of cash this business spewed out. That was the whole point. I just have a real fucking problem with the government stepping in when things go south because these greedy, hubris fucking bastards' investments all went south and suddenly the whole profit machine broke down.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, at the time I was in favor of the government stepping in to guarantee $29 billion of Bear's troubled debts, because at the time -- and perhaps this judgment is clouded a bit by my working directly in the investment banking industry myself when it happened -- but it seemed to me that a Bear collapse would have been catastrophic enough to parties all around the world, big and smaller, rich and poor, to warrant the government preventing the calamity from happening.

But now I think I see the error of my ways. In retrospect, which of course nobody knew at the time, but in hindsight it is clear to me now that the government should have let Bear fail, and taken on the risk of whatever fallout there was from the 5th largest investment bank in America collapsing. The unwinding of transactions, the massive losses for some of the institutions and other companies and parties most affected would have been tremendous. The losses to Bear's counterparties would have been in some cases catastrophic, and the shock to the financial system at large would have been felt far and wide to say the least. Surely the stock market would have tanked unlike anything else seen so far since the credit crunch happened. But you know what? It should have. The whole house of cards has come crumbling down over the past several months in this country, and a collapse like this, with the unimaginable lack of foresight and oversight from this country's financial leaders and current administration -- and that means idiot Bush and the laughable Congress over the past several years -- when it comes right down to it, is worthy of having caused a huge correction in the stock markets, plus a lot of associated panic and fear to go along with it. We should have been afraid, we should have been panicked back in March. But the government stepped in to stop the full effects from being felt, and look where that got us. That $29 billion backstop from the Federal Reserve back in March to cover Bear Stearns' further losses on their horrible loan portfolio ended up just being the tip of the fucking iceberg, with the government now an additional $200 billion in the hole (of taxpayers' money, of course) to prop up the whole consumer morgage system in the country, on a bailout that believe you me really had to be done.

But now the vultures are circling again over Lehman Brothers, and once again the socialist bitches in this country who don't even realize how socialist they really are, are crying out for the government to step in and backstop Lehman Brothers' debts and losses for whichever financial institution they can convince to buy Lehman on the cheap here. And frankly, without a government guarantee or some form of government protection, there is a decent chance that nobody wants to go near the shitstorm known as Lehman's global mortgage portfolio and the company simply falters, dies and ends up bankrupt in a matter of days. And you all know if you've read here this week how broken up the whole situation and that whole thought makes me, having many of my good friends, hard-working and truly top-notch people and employees, people I myself hired over just the past several months, still stuck there right now inside that building I can see right out my window here. To think of those people all losing their jobs with the company that I know and love going completely kaput in a matter of a week is unsettling and nauseating to say the least.

But you know what? I don't want to see the government step in. I truly hope for the best for Lehman Brothers the company, and for every single person I know there who does not deserve to be burdened and affected by all this bullshit. But I've come to the conclusion over the past 24 hours or so that another government bailout is the worst idea I can imagine right now. Right now the last thing we need is more government action in private enterprise, and more taxpayer money being used to backstop the nasty effects of the greed and hubris of a small number of super-rich asshole leaders who should be jailed for their horrible actions over the past year or two. The U.S. people already don't realize the tremendous price they're going to pay over the coming years as we all -- every one of you out there reading this -- struggle to pay for the ridiculous cost of these bailouts in the form of higher taxes and lesser services from the government. $229 billion dollars and counting just isn't easy to come by or just overlook -- and believe me, there will be more bailouts, with companies like Washington Mutual, the nation's largest thrift bank, already essentially finished -- and we will be paying for this for a long, long time in this country. So I don't even want to think about the government stepping in to back any the $60-70 billion of distressed mortgages on Lehman's books. If they can't find a buyer for this dog at $3.50 a share or whever the stock opens today, then I think, sad as this makes me, the government ought to let market forces drop the stock to $2 a share, to $1 a share, or lower. Eventually, make the price of buying Lehman Brothers cheap enough, and someone will probably be willing to step up and take on the risk. And if worst comes to worst, and nobody wants to take on that admittedly unquantifiable risk for any price, then I think the only real choice is to let Lehman go away. It's a horrible outcome for all the people I know and respect and care about over there, but what else can I say. Now is not the time for another governmental bailout, at least not of Lehman Brothers. Six months ago when Bear collapsed, governmental intervention seemed at the time like a necessary evil to me. Right now, it's just not. Sad but true.

Oh and by the way -- and I know this probably opens a whole can of worms here from all the diggheads who've been arguing politics for the last few weeks on their blogs -- but if the American people elect a man as President who thinks raising taxes on anyone right now is the right move, then they will get what they deserve. It's fine to vote blindly party-line like basically every single person I've seen writing about the election on their blogs seems ready to do, but if you vote blind and without thought, you will elect a blind and without-thought leader who will act blindly and without thought. Please, I urge you, try to use your eyes and your brains this November.

Panic

Too upset to write about poker today. Lehman shares are down another 40% this morning, and the calls from my friends there have turned from sad and scared, to panicked and frantic. Seeing five tv camera crews outside the front doors of the headquarters now two days in a row in the morning as I walk by on my way to my new job isn't helping matters either. Meanwhile, this story is exactly what I am most concerned about with the stock plunging yet again for the fourth day in a row -- and once you go and read that story, keep in mind that those figures are just for the period ending on August 31. That is, a good two weeks before all the shit has his the fan this week. Just wait till the numbers come out for the month of September for this stuff. And if you read between the lines in this story as well, once again I fear the writing is on the wall for the 160-year-old investment bank. Does that last story, the the optimistic title and all, not sound exactly like the dreaded "vote of confidence" that usually comes from ownership a day or two before firing a head coach or manager of a sports team?

Anyways, that's all I've got for today. I finished The Poker Tournament Formula II this morning on the train on the way into work, and I have got tons of stuff coming from that book that you will see here in the near future. I just have to wait until I have it in me to write it all down.

Gotta Know When to Fold 'em

Sorry guys, I know this is a poker blog and of course I am all about writing about poker, but this Lehman stuff is really on my mind today and I'm going to write some more about it today. This is actually stuff that's been swirling around my head for some time over the past couple of months, and me writing this all down is really much more for me than for you guys, so bear with me. I promise this will not turn in to a Lehman Brothers blog or a stock market blog or anything. But if you're at all interested in my perspective on things with the biggest debacle in the stock market right now, feel free to read on for my thoughts.

So I just hung up from listening in on the big conference call this morning that Lehman Brothers held for the investing public regarding its future plans and the truly hideous quarter it reported today. My lord what a clusterfuck. The company lost more than $5.60 a share in Q3, more than basically all of the analysts were predicting even after the company obviously leaked information to various parts of the market over the past month or so that the quarter was going to be truly fugly. One of the highlights of the quarter included an astonishing $7.8 billion of gross writedowns, by far the worst quarter yet in the company's history -- surpassing Q2 of this year and now marking only the second time in the company's history as a public company that it has posted a loss -- and bringing the company's total asset writedowns in the past year to around $14 billion. The total loss so far in 2008 is nearly $7 billion for the firm as a whole, and who knows where things go from here, as fiscal Q4 which just started Sep. 1 has not exactly begun with a bang in the financial markets, so say the least.

But the more disturbing part of this morning's announcement from Lehman management is the lack of any concrete new news regarding the company's plans to fix the problems it faces going forward. Obviously the company needs excess capital -- 8 to 10 billion dollars worth by some analysts' estimates -- to cover the huge losses it has experienced and continues to experience this year. And yet, there is no word of any stock sales, to foreign investors in Asia, the Middle East or otherwise. No news of a concrete sale of the asset management business that has been rumored and now appears to be true according to this morning's conference call. And no word of sales of any of the troubled mortgage assets held by the company, in the small sum of, oh, just another $70 billion worth.

Read that again. Seventy billion dollars of troubled mortgages held by Lehman Brothers on its books right now. Still. One of my favorite parts of the company's plans to deal with this mess is the new idea to spin off these mortgage assets into a separate company called Real Estate Investments Global. Now tell me, who the fizzity fuck is gonna want to own that piece of doggie turd? They couldn't find people to invest in that pig no matter what they tried. So what are they going to do to find buyers for that separate public company? Simple! They're going to spin it off to the existing shareholders of Lehman Brothers stock. Basically force the creation of a market of buyers for this garbage by spinning it for free directly to the existing shareholders. Most of whom who have a single brain cell in their fucking heads will immediately sell the shit, I'm sure, but if it allows Lehman to get the troubled assets off of their books, then hey, just go for it. This is very similar to a move Lehman made earlier this summer when it spun off a couple of new entities it called "hedge funds", and basically funded them with a bunch of risky, hard to value, overvalued and troubled assets that Lehman itself desperately wanted to get off of its own books. Never mind the fact that these two spinoff entities were all composed of Lehman employees, using Lehman computers, networks and other assets, and all sat in Lehman's office space. But with those moves, the troubled assets got off of Lehman's books, and that's all this quick-fix CEO was looking for at the time. Well now it has all come home to roost.

One thing that Lehman specifically denied all through its conference call this morning is that the company is not seeing capital outflows from its asset management business and that counterparties are still perfectly willing to trade with it despite its recent troubles and despite the company's stock literally plunging 50% in Tuesday's trading action. Well you know what? I'm gonna have to call a big fat fucking bullshit on that one. You tell me -- if you had $10 million invested in Lehman Brothers before this week began, you tell me, is that money still sitting with Lehman now? To be more realistic, what if you had ten billion dollars with Lehman, as many of the large money managers, pension and hedge funds have under management? Is all $10 billion still sitting in Lehman's coffers somewhere? When there are plenty of other, more stable financial institutions out there where you could keep that money and not have the completely constant worry of whether your money will still be there tomorrow, and whether the company will still even be in business tomorrow? Of course not. For the company to say they're not seeing any outflows is not surprising, and I can't blame them for lying. They have to lie on this one point. If the CEO gets on the phone and tells the world that customers are taking their money out, then suddenly this is Bear Stearns, and the company will be gone -- yes, gone -- in two days just like Bear was. But for anyone to believe this story is preposterous to a significant degree. Of course people are taking their money and running from Lehman right now. And they would be fools not to, given what's gone on with the stock over the past year, over the past six months, over the past 3 months, over the past month, and now especially over the past few days.

Moreover, Goldman and Merrill and Morgan Stanley can come out all they want like they did after the close of trading on Tuesday and claim that they are all still willing counterparties to trades with Lehman Brothers on the other side. Suuuuuuuuure they are. Goldman and Merrill and Morgan may be a lot of things, but they aren't stupid, and they don't just throw money down the toilet when they clearly know that's what it is. I'm sure, thanks in no small part to extreme pressure from the Federal Reserve over the past 24 hours and over the past several months, that these other three large-cap investment banks are still willing to do some trades with Lehman, generally speaking. But if you think after Tuesday's trading action that this morning, Goldman is lined up to enter into, say, a 10-year interest rate swap with Lehman Brothers worth $15 billion, then you my friend are a jackass. What these companies will do, while still being willing to enter into small, short-term trades with Lehman, is they will immediately begin pulling in their exposure to Lehman by limiting the number of large trades, and certainly the number of long-term trades they will enter into with the company. They have to. They could arguably be sued by shareholders for not doing this, given how obvious and prevalent and public the problems with Lehman's future have become now this week. So sure they all say the right thing, the thing the Fed I'm sure coerced them all into proclaiming publicly yesterday after the market closed, but behind closed doors these companies are acting to preserve their own capital as much as they can, which is exactly what they should be doing. If you were a shareholder in Goldman Sachs right now, would you want them taking $15 billion of exposure to Lehman's troubles in a 10-year swap transaction? Think about that one for about 0.00005 seconds.

I've never written about this before here, but one of the saddest things that's gone on at Lehman Brothers during the past year as the credit crunch has deeply impacted business at the bank is the paralysis among so many of the employees there, who know deep down they should be looking for employment elsewhere but who simply cannot get themselves to unfreeze and take the plunge. And I say "sad" because that's just what it is, people who are simply paralyzed by fear, or by circumstances, or both into inaction. I personally know it to be a fact that most of the people at any real level of seniority at Lehman have been making way way more money than they are otherwise worth in the marketplace. This is a cold, hard fact coming from someone who has implicit knowledge of exactly what I speak about here. My old boss, for example, I know what he does and I know what those jobs pay elsewhere outside of the investment banking world, and I can tell you with absolutely no hesitation at all that he has made a good 200, 250k more a year at Lehman over the past couple of years than he would ever make at any job he could ever get if he leaves right now. Ever. He probably makes a lot more there right now than he will ever, ever make again in any job in the rest of his life. No joke and no exaggeration there. I also know that his boss makes about 350k to 400k more than he could ever make if he left Lehman Brothers right now, doing what he does. I mean it, I am talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars more than what they are really worth. And that guy's boss, whom I also personally know, makes a good 500k or more above what he could expect to make anywhere else.

Now putting aside the obvious problems associated with the fact that this company who is quickly running out of cash is somehow paying all of its employees two to three times or more than what they're actually worth, this mass overpayment of the senior-level people has contributed more than anything else to the paralysis among employees that I personally observed over the past year at the bank. Take the first guy I mentioned above as an example. He's known for a while that things are bad -- beyond bad even, horrible is probably a better word -- at the company for some time. For months, literally. He knows that the prospects for the company recovering to any semblance of its former self, and the prospects for him continuing to make the money he's been making there these past few years, are very low. He knows this. But he has been making literally $250,000 more than he could make if he leaves for any other company on the earth. Period. So in his mind, if there is even a 1% chance that his job at Lehman Brothers might persist, and that he might be able one day in a few years when things have calmed down and perhaps Lehman finds a way to survive to get back to making that kind of redonkulously inflated compensation again, he feels like he simply cannot leave. He can't bring himself to give up this ridiculous cash cow that's been dropped in his lap over the past few years. Think about it -- the thought of him willingly leaving that 250k a year on the table and taking a job for the "measly" money that he is actually worth for what he does, while someone else gets his grossly overpaying job, makes him want to throw up in his mouth. He can't face it. His boss can't face leaving his 600k a year job for the 200k he is worth anywhere else in the world, if there is even the slightest chance that he could have stayed and kept making 600k a year (and more) for the rest of his life if things turn around. The thought of giving these ridiculously over-inflated incomes up is making all the people making any kind of big bucks at the firm freeze in their tracks. And I have to tell you, sitting around and watching that go on with everyone around me as clear as a bell, that has to be one of the saddest things of all to me given my own perspective on things. These people just can't bring themselves to leave, even though they've seen the writing on the wall for quite some time.

Which takes me to I guess my last point for today, and after all this there actually is a poker point to it all. It's like the famous Kenny Rogers song, "The Gambler" -- what does he say in that? "You've gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em." Maybe my poker experience helps me to see these things more clearly than some others out there, I don't know. But as a rule I know when I'm beat. I know when to hold em, and I also know when to fold 'em. Now it's true, I'm not making as much money as a lot of the people I mentioned earlier in this post at Lehman, and maybe my thought process would have been different if I were. But I don't think so, and I know it shouldn't have been. I know the people I mentioned above will never again make the kind of money at Lehman that they'd gotten used to over the past few years. As the absolute best case scenario -- something which I would rate as maybe a 5-10% chance at this point, nothing more -- maybe Lehman somehow finds a way to remain independent through all this bullshit and maybe in some number of years -- and I don't mean anytime real soon -- these guys could be making some real money again. But for me, I'm not interested in waiting five years or more for that, a 5-10% shot as it is, and I knew I had other options. So I got out, found a better job at a far more stable company at this point, in a far more stable industry, and in the end I will clearly make more money at the new place over the next few years than I would staying in the investment banking world. But so many of the people I spent the past three years of my life working with just don't get it. They've got down the part about knowing when to hold 'em, but they just dont know when to fold 'em. But just like I can lay down those pocket Tens on the board of TJQ when I've got two allins ahead of me and one player still to act behind me after there was a raise and a reraise already before the flop, I hung 'em up at the bank and have moved on to better things. I can only hope most of my old friends at Lehman can do the same soon.

"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done."

No Utility Today

I had another post already written for today talking some more about utility odds in tournaments and responding to some of the commentary to my post from yesterday, but you know what? Fuck utility odds. Just look at this shit instead:

LEHMAN BROS HLD(NYSE: LEH)
Last Trade: 9.29
Trade Time: 11:59AM ET Tuesday, Sep 9, 2008
Change: - 4.86 (34.35%)
Prev Close: 14.15
Open: 12.92
Day's Range: 8.00 - 13.10
52wk Range: 12.02 - 67.73
Volume: 137,421,857
Avg Vol (3m): 58,416,800
Market Cap: 6.86B

Is that fucking sick or what?

See, this is exactly why I recently left this company for a new employer. I saw a company that had a ton of problems, sure. Anyone could see that. And I think I could have lived with that on its own, maybe, if things seemed to be being dealt with adequately. But the biggest problem and the biggest reason I felt the need to get the fuck out of there is that I saw a senior management team at Lehman that was focused solely on denying its problems rather than doing whatever it had to do to fix them.

Look at Merrill Lynch -- a couple of months back they sold friggin $30 billion of shitty mortgages for literally 22 cents on the dollar, and at that they even financed 16 cents of the 22 cents on the dollar that they sold these for. It was a massive, sick haircut for them and a huge black mark for management and for the firm as a whole, but it got the company rid of a significant portion of the huge problem assets that had been plaguing the company for some time and were perceived (correctly, obviously) to be likely to continue plaguing them if they didnt get the mortgage assets off their books. So their management team bit the bullet and they just did it.

Lehman's CEO, on the other hand, has been reportedly shopping between $15-40 billion worth of Lehman's own messy mortgage portfolio for the past two months, basically ever since the day that the Merrill announcement first hit the wires. But by all reports, the donkey in charge at Lehman refuses to take more than a 5-10% discount on the current value of the mortgages, even while Merrill, a company in not nearly as desperate of shape as Lehman, took an 80% or more hit on its own very similar portfolio.

Similarly, Lehman has reportedly been in talks with KDB and a few other large banks in Korea and China about acquiring a controlling stake in Lehman (too lazy and pissed and upset to link these, but the stories are everywhere if you do a simple search on Google or Yahoo! Finance), and now those deals have fallen through, which is the proximate cause for today's huge, sickening selloff. But why have those talks ended without the capital infusion that Lehman so truly desperately needs? Because reportedly the donkey CEO is insisting on selling the shares for 50% above Lehman's book value. Without getting into the details of exactly how book value is calculated, suffice it to say for this dicussion that book value is a paper value, an accountant's calculation, based on the value of assets in the company at the levels they are currently marked to on the books. Lehman's book value is currently $34 a share. So the CEO basically wants someone to buy 50% of the shares in the company for $51 a share, when it is currently trading even before today at $13. Smarrrrrrrrrrrrt.

Current leadership at Lehman Brothers refuses to accept the basic fact of business that when a seller is a distressed seller, meaning that everyone out there, including all the potential buyers of what they're trying to sell, knows that the seller is desperate to conclude a transaction, that hurts the price that someone is willing to pay for whatever is on the market. This isn't my opinion, this isn't something which a man or a management team or an entire company can just "decide" does not apply to them. It just does. Lehman management also refuses to accept that it is at this point commong fucking knowledge that the company is not worth anywhere near the value of assets as currently listed on their books. These hubris-infused fools have literally sat by insisting on the world for their low-value assets and highly dubious stock price, all while the rest of the financial markets and now Lehman's own share price have crumbled all around them. And what are they left with now? That's right -- absolutely nothing.

It is criminal how negligently poor this company's response has been to all the bullshit of the past year. What Lehman's leadership is doing and has already done to so many thousands of the company's employees' lives cannot be forgiven or even forgotten. I care about the damage done to the investors in the company's shares over the past few years, sure, but at least those people knew when they were investing that they were taking a gamble. Anyone who's gotten in at any stock price over the past 14 or 15 months has certainly been (or should have been) well aware of the credit crisis and at least generally the ramifications that could be had on the world's big investment banks. But it's the employees of the company, whose jobs, livelihoods, whose families' financial security depends on the company, whom I feel for the most.

Right now I just hope that management of Lehman Brothers gets what's coming to them, either in this life or the next. Somebody should be held accountable not for the credit crisis per se, which surely cannot be blamed on any one person and obviously not on Lehman Brothers specifically, but for the reaction (or total lack thereof) that has gone down at Lehman over the past year, and more specifically over the past eight or nine months, that has now led us to that beautiful stock price quote at the top of this post.

Talk about a true real life donkey. Somebody get this guy a poker blog right away please.

Next

Needless to say, a lot has happened in the past couple days here in Hammer Land.

Of course, I gave my notice at work. Once I am gone maybe I'll spend some more time writing about it, but suffice it to say that the past year or so in this job has been some of the most tumultuous and really just the craziest times I have had in my professional life of more than ten years as a corporate lawyer. My company has basically gone from the best-performing company (stock market wise) over the past fifteen years in a very high-flying sector of the marketplace, to the biggest decliner in the group with suddenly significant doubts about its ability to survive very much longer at all. How exactly this happened remains a mystery to us all as employees as much as it is to investors and anyone but I imagine the extremely in-the-know within this company. But living it has been, in a word, horrible.

Yes, I have had well-documented issues with my boss with regards to my own individual situation at work. But in the end, all that stuff became trivial basically as soon as 2008 began, when our stock really began declining, and the rumors started swirling that the company might actually be in some trouble. Ever since then it's been like a downward spiral. Truly, I am one of the lucky ones getting out now as it seems more and more likely every day that we will become insolvent, get bought, or undergo some other major corporate transaction. The thought of the great, great people I've worked with all having the ongoing existence of their jobs threatened literally makes me sick to my stomach. I have to try not to think about it several times every day. But it just makes it all the more clear why I have to leave.

And no, I'm not planning to be a professional gambler.

It's funny to me, really. Would any of you out there doubt that I am among the most pompous assiest people who ever lived? Certainly I'm not arguing it. But the funny thing is, even I don't think I could make it as a professional gambler. And you know I think I'm better than you at poker, make no mistake about it. But even I don't actually entertain actual thoughts of actually playing poker for a living. Never. I mean, I used to. When I first started playing regularly online a few years back, that was like my ultimate dream. F the Man, quit my job and just play online poker and be rich, of course that's what I wanted.

But then I got realistic. I got a whole lot of poker experience, probably a million hands in my first year or so (edit: ok fine, that number is far too high, what's the diff though?), hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of tournaments under my belt, and I realized how utterly foolish those plans were, for me. I literally would not be able to make nearly enough money to live the way I want my family to live if all I did was play poker. There is no limit in any game in cash, and no buyin level of poker tournament, where I could make anything approaching the money from my day job, nor anywhere near enough to live on. Not even a very poor existence, I couldn't even support that. My ROI in tournaments just on full tilt this year is what, about 10%? That means I would have to play $300,000 worth of tournaments a year just to make 30 large? I could not come close to playing 300k of tournaments, nor could I come close to living on 30k a year at this point in my life.

And don't get me wrong. It is patently obvious that there are a good number of people out there who can make it in life playing professionally. Some people can live a whole lot cheaper than I am looking to live right now. And that's great, if it helps you to be able to make all your money just from poker, then I think that's the coolest fuckin thing in the world. Other people are a hundred times better than me at the kinds of poker that can make them the most consistent money. High stakes cash players who are good, for example, can make sickass money from just regular good-player win rates at the high levels. I blow at high stakes cash. Similarly, the truly greatest online poker players have big big ROIs and can easily win hundreds of thousands a year in online mtt profits.

But that is just not me. I'm not good enough. I'm not devoted enough. I'm not patient enough. I'm not even-keeled enough. I always play at my best when I'm having fun, and poker as a fun hobby on which I don't rely in the least for personal income has been the only way the game has ever worked out for me. If I had to play to make money to support myself and my family, I just know I couldn't do it. I'm just not cut out to be a professional poker player. For all my pomposity, I know I don't have the mentality or the game for it.

I get a lil' bit of a kick whenever a blogger leaves their current job for whatever reason, and suddenly everyone is all "go pro! go pro!" on their asses. I appreciate greatly the support, but being a poker pro is just not for me. And unlike almost every lawyer I know, I absolutely love my day job. I mean, I really love what I do. And I'm going to move on to another company to keep doing my thing. Like I said, once I am gone from this place perhaps I will write more about my experiences after what I truly believe has been a noteworthy experience that an actual good writer could probably put out an awesome book about, about working in this industry, and in particular at my company, for the past year since the onset of the crippling credit crunch that has gripped our country. But starting now I guess I will have a whole new company -- my new employer -- to protect and to not reveal the identity of here on the blog.

More to come. Looking forward to the Mookie tonight, the only blonkament I am really in to these days to tell the truth. 10pm ET on full tilt, password as always is "vegas1".

Notice

I noticed it from the moment I woke up this morning. As usual my own personal alarm clock for the past nearly five years straight has been my daughter M. Literally my wife and I haven't set an alarm clock even once that I can recall since I think the very day she was born. Anyways, from the second that I first opened my eyes on Monday morning, from the very moment I first reached that tipping point between the fog of sleep and the dawn of recognition, I could tell something was different.

I think I first noticed the visual signs sometime during my morning shower. It's hard to pinpoint the exact difference, but I think it was mostly along the edges of random objects. A little shine on the corner here, a glint on an edge there, that sort of thing. When I saw myself in the mirror for the first time after I stepped out of the shower, I thought I looked a little different too. It's like I was seeing clearer or something, more in focus than I had before. Definitely something like that.

The symptoms only grew as the morning wore on. On the subway, my balance was impeccable, like I was sharing a purpose with the train or something. When people spoke, I was hearing nuances to the sounds that I had never noticed before, hidden intonations I never knew were there underneath. As I walked towards my office building in midtown Manhattan, the normal city smells of coffee, cigarettes and the occasional garbage truck wafted through me at levels of intensity I could not recall. Approaching my building entrance, I remember remarking to myself that I could barely feel my legs moving or even touching the ground at all. I floated from street to street, intersection to intersection, as much a part of the rat race as ever, and yet somehow feeling for the first time in a long time apart from it. Above it even.

As I boarded the elevator up to my office, I thought to myself that this is one of those mornings that is kinda like the Matrix: you really can't describe it, you just have to experience it for yourself. Words cannot describe the feeling on a day like this, all the little ways that things look, smell and just seem different thanks to the richness of a new perspective.

Ten minutes ago, I left my boss's office after giving him my notice that I will be leaving his employ.

My boss is so cute. He sincerely believes management is going to come up with a bunch of cash and promises sufficient to get me to stay. Sadly, my company is more likely to need money from me these days than it is to have any money to give me.

So in the immortal words of George Kostanza, "I'm out, baby!!!"

And it feels sooooo good.

Work Tilt Update

Well, I'm still tilting off my ass today from my work situation. I berated the shit out of my boss like I was chatting to him in the pokerstars chatbox yesterday, which felt great in a way but also highlighted just how disgusting my work situation has become. I do appreciate everyone's thoughts on the topic, most of which I agree with 100%. And FWIW, I have been looking and will continue to look for jobs, which has not proven too difficult for me to do thus far thanks to a solid resume and a lot of experience in my field, so something will happen for me I'm sure. And believe you me, you all will be among the first to know when it does.

I've done the most amazing thing this week with respect to my poker game, something which definitely shows the first concrete signs of maturity with respect to tilt that I have ever really shown before. While I've been so everloving work tilted, it has been very, very obvious to me that I cannot play even close to my optimal poker game. I come home from work in a piss-poor mood, I can't even really help putting the kids to bed because I know my temper is super short and they do not deserve to bear the brunt of that (and those of you with young kids will know how impossibly annoying putting them to bed can be sometimes). I just don't have the temperament for it, and so I've been avoiding it, to good results.

Similarly, when I sit down to the pc, I have actually made the smart fucking decision not to play so much poker. I can feel it in my bones that I am on perma-tilt right now, and there is no way I can play poker at even approaching my normal level. There have been a few blonkaments that I've wanted to play despite the rage I feel swelling up inside, so I have sat down for them, but otherwise I have pretty much stayed away from my normal mtt routine that I have gotten used to for this year. Lately I've been satelliting in to the 5050 on both pokerstars and full tilt, in addition to some other nlh, omaha or other tournaments and some sitngos on each site, for total nightly buyins of probably around $250 or more on average. But for the last few days, I haven't spent much more than a fifth of that on any night, playing just enough to get me into the nightly blonkament of my choice plus maybe one or two other smallish tables just to keep me occupied during my normal ubertight play (ha ha). This is honestly the first time in my three years plus of playing regular online poker that I have consistently and purposefully reined in my play based purely on my being on tilt even before I sat down at the pc. And I have to say, it's definitely a good idea, and more than that, I feel good doing it. I feel smart doing it.

So who knows when I will be back to my regular poker routine. Right now things are all messed up at work -- my boss and I, who are normally quite close, have not spoken a word in two days, and as far as I'm concerned that can continue forever because I am enjoying it and I can physically see it eating him up inside. This guy fucked with the wrong marine as far as I am concerned, and I have nothing but coldness and pitilessness for his plight at this point, knowing that as usual he has no one to blame but himself. It will all work itself out, but in the meantime I just don't quite know when my game will be back to being itself. But I do know that I'm not going to go and tilt off 2/3 of my roll while I wait for that to happen, and that if nothing else is a nice improvement from the previous times I have been on non-poker-related tilt.

And btw, those of you who play on pokerstars will note that a quick email to their support has corrected my address from the mythical Toronto to the true and correct New York City. Sorry for any confusion.

Don't forget the $1 rebuy donkament tonight at 9pm ET on full tilt, password as always is "donkarama". I may or may not be there, I guess it depends on how much shitsucking my fragile psyche can handle tonight. If I'm a man, I will play. I guess we'll see.

Almost No Poker Content

Oh. My. God.

Right now I am experiencing work tilt of a kind I never dreamed imaginable. I don't even know how much detail I can get into here because there is always this nagging concern that I will somehow get outted by this blog, a move which would almost certainly lead to my immediate firing. It's not like the blog has even the slightest bit to do with my job, me doing anything illegal or unethical, I'm not disclosing confidential information of my employer, nothing like that. But I work at the dorkiest of dorkworks as you know, and it is just very obvious that this place would not be able to handle the truth if it came to them discovering what I do in my "other life". There's just no way, and I know that for sure.

It's a shame about my megatilt too. Normally today I would be on here talking about how I logged in this morning and saw that fucking Surflexus won his seventh fucking Mookie tournament last night. Seven Mookies!!! That's right, that shit is worthy of three exclamation points right there, deal with it. I know there is a great blog post or ten with that story (Surf's A6 > AK three-handed and then his KJ > KQ with one card to come on a King-high flop in heads-up play not the least of it), and normally I would be attacking that one head-on, including how Surf has obviously figured out the Mookie formula so fucking badly that he should probably not be allowed to play it anymore, or at least not without starting with half as many chips as the rest of us or something like that. But instead, I'm seeing red today and I can't even think about anything as mundane as the Mookie right now. The tilt actually happened Wednesday afternoon at my office, and so those of you who are normally used to a little more chatter and humor from me in the Mookie chatbox, sorry to disappoint last night. I shouldn't have even played at all. It was nothing personal. Just business.

So let's see, how can I describe what has gone on here at work in a way that I am comfortable with. Let me put it this way. There are a couple of people here in my small group of lawyers who have been taking advantage of my boss -- who hasn't ever even heard of a fucking testicle, let alone having any -- for the past year. I've written about this stuff before, maybe not in a whole lot of detail, but enough. Anyways, yesterday I found out that, for about the third or fourth time in a major way in the past few months, my boss's complete ineptitude, his complete inability to deal with any situation or have any kind of confrontation or manage his way out of a paper fucking bag, has once again led to me getting fucked. Hard.

Now, I have had many dealings with the exact same people who have abused the shit out of my boss for the past year, and miraculously I haven't let them take advantage of me even one time. It's not hard -- I am not a pussy, I know what I am doing, and I don't let anyone push me into doing anything I don't want to do, or allow anyone to do things that I know are not right. But I am also not afraid to tackle an issue head-on, unlike my pussyboss, and that's how I have avoided falling into the traps that he falls into every single day. The man will run and bury his head in the sand over just about any issue whenever the fuck he is confronted with one. Anything to avoid having to deal with it. It's frightening, really, to think that this guy has been entrusted with leading a group of lawyers at a major company, and in reality he isn't even fit to be the fucking mailroom guy at my firm (no offense to mailroom workers, I'm sure most of them are really lovely people). He somehow managed to use an earlier relationship with a senior person here to trick that person into hiring him into a management position at this company that he was clearly not ready for (and obviously never will be, seeing his track record here), and the thing that gets me just shaking mad is that his pussyosity does not only affect him. As the senior member on his team, and the person entrusted with doing about 90% of the work in his group, I cannot escape the continual ass fuckings that stem consistently from his unbelievable level of unprofessionalism and ineptitude.

I mean, it's one thing if you want to be a pussy loser at your work and you let it impact your professional life. Maybe it makes you unhappy at work. Maybe it makes you incapable of performing your job responsibilities. Maybe it makes you unable to ever advance at your job because you clearly cannot handle where you're already at. Maybe it's all of those things, or maybe it's something different entirely as far as a negative consequence to you from your own professional faults. But my situation is far different from that. In my case, it is my boss's ineptitude, my boss's faults, my boss's loserness that is causing all of the problems, and nearly 100% of the negative effects of all that are felt by me and me alone. He fucks something up being a goddam pussy, I have to clean up the mess because he does not have the skills to do it himself. He mismanages a personnel situation that results in someone quitting the firm, I have to do their work to fix things because no one else here (him included) has even a clue how to do it. He promises me some form of benefit, and then is a megapussy and gets outfoxed by a con artist into losing that benefit before giving it to me, and I pay the price. It has happened so many times here by this time that I am just beside myself. I am beyond beside myself. I'm BBM. I am BBM at my work at this point.

All through my life as a lawyer, I have kept a constant eye on my own weaknesses and worked to better them at all times. I'm not saying I'm perfect, but in a way it's a lot like my poker game. I have constantly assessed and re-assessed where I'm at a thousand times over in both poker and lawyering, and almost every day I am making active strides to get noticeably better at both. Some days it's a tiny little improvement, other days it is more tangible, but the one constant is that I am always improving. And I've seen clear results from that approach in both poker and in my professional life as an attorney. But see, the great thing about poker is that I am my own man, and I alone control my destiny. I mean, to be sure poker has so much pure luck involved that it's not like I can actually claim to be able to control winning and losing with any sense of seriousness, but it is beyond comforting to know that I can't be negatively affected directly by so many of the bozos out there who don't focus on their game or who just plain suck at it. Sure they can suck out or luck out on me repeatedly, but that's just random luck and it is expressly a part of the game we play. Their lack of ability or lack of improvement cannot directly affect me, only bad luck can.

But within the four walls of my office, for the first time in a decade as a lawyer, I have found myself in a situation where another man's complete and utter ineptitude and stupidity has a direct, significant and continuously negative impact on my own life. And because that man is my boss, while I continue to work here, I will continue to be trapped. Trapped by his own bumbling idiocy, and really his pussy wussy pussy fucking nature more than anything else, to remain condemned to suffer repeatedly the brunt of his own massive shortcomings. As an employee (he does nothing but hurt this company with his every action), as a lawyer (he is beyond terrible) and as a manager (he has no leadership, communication or management skills whatsoever), my boss is simply not fit for the job. And my own professional life suffers every fucking day as a result of that one indelible truth. And it all leads me back to one inescapable conclusion, the same thing I have been saying for over a year now but as yet have not done anything about.

I have got to get the fuck out of here.

Work Tilt, More FTOPS, and Mookday

Well, it's Mookday and that means we are getting on near half way through the work week, which for me already feels like it's been a good 25 or 30 weeks long. All the stuff I've written about before about my job is all coming to a head these days, including the one person we hired that I've mentioned a few times before continuing to be more and more of a total and complete flake, and my boss being an abject pussy who is afraid to stand up to this bitchcock and do something about it. The end result is an entire team of pissed off employees, and a total lack of respect for anything my scrotumless boss says or does anymore.

I always thought of this as common knowledge myself, but for those of you who are bosses or otherwise manage other employees out there, please do not ever underestimate the ability of one bad hire, one horrible employee on a team, to affect all the others around him or her. And never, ever underestimate the affect on the rest of the team, in the present and for ever, if you consistently allow that person to walk all over you and the others on the team without doing anything about it as the boss and the leader of the group. I read this in a cheesey management book once, but it's as true as it is cheesey -- if a boss lets mediocrity infect an organization, it will affect everything and everyone. Even the best employees will be affected forever by the boss's acceptance of mediocrity. And here's another thing from that same cheeseass book: hire slow, but fire fast. There it is right there. My boss certainly took his time hiring this bitch to begin with, and yet it was obvious within maybe two weeks or so that she was simply not working out. I'm not sure if it was the insistence on hiring outside counsel to do her work during her very first week on the job, or maybe it had something to do with the 15 sobbing sessions in my and my other colleague's offices during those first couple of weeks, but whatever the kicker was, it was poignantly, painfully obvious during that very first month that this chica was not going to work out. Period. She's unstable, she's lazy, and as it turns out, she is a raging con artist who makes up lie after lie, excuse after excuse, to get out of coming to work, to get out of doing work even if she is here, whatever she has to say or do. She takes at least one day off every single week with some cockamamy bullshit excuse, and meanwhile our boss does absolutely nothing. Since all this started and our boss has knowingly allowed it to continue and in fact consistently get worse, the other employees here don't work hard anymore either, don't come in to the office before 11am (and the boss still does nothing about that either), and when we are here we basically sit around trashing on him and on this bitch from morning till night. It's a horrible situation.

Now, although of course the lazy shitbitch we hired is the root cause of all the problems I've written about here in my office, in my mind this ceased being about her a long time ago. It's been 8 months or something that she's been here, and we've all known exactly what she's all about for about 7 1/2 of those 8 months. No, at some point several months ago this ceased being the bitchass's fault and became my boss's fault. And you know what the worst part of it all is? The reason my boss won't do anything about the cuntass in the office up the hall? Because he went to bat with his big boss to hire her, and had to convince him to hire her because I guess the big boss saw something alarming in her that my boss did not. Still, the big boss let my guy make the final hiring decision, and he went ahead with her. So now, there is no way my boss has the fortitude or the confidence to admit his mistake to his big boss. Instead, he decided a long time ago to just keep quiet about her, and pass off all her work myself and little bit on the other lawyer in my group, and to do the rest of her work himself. Publicly, in front of all the rest of us. Do you have any idea how much I would love to have my boss take most of my calls, handle most of my negotiations, at this job? Can you imagine how much better client service I could provide if instead of the 85 deals I currently have active on my plate, I only had 2 or 3 deals to focus on like the vagishit up the hall does? But yet he only does her work, and has myself and my other colleague do the rest of it, for almost an entire year now, and it's all done to save my boss's own skin with his own management. The whole thing is such a clusterfuck I can't even really begin to describe it in a post like this. But there I tried it anyways. Suffice it to say, work fucking blows conch these days. And I'll be doing something about it sooner or later, make no mistake.

OK, so back to poker. Tuesday night was FTOPS #9, the $216 buyin PLO8 tournament that I had satellited into the night before by crushing the nightly 9:45pm ET megasatellite that full tilt has been running every night during FTOPS time for the next night's FTOPS tournament, usually at a $50 buyin and sporting a good number of guaranteed FTOPS seats. So I sat down ready to play at 9pm ET on Tuesday, but things started off wrong and just got worse and worse for me. My performance overall was funny. Not ha-ha funny but more like kiss my ass and let me punch you in the face afterwards you phucking biatch funny. In the end, I busted out in about 40 minutes after being rivered for big pots five separate times, when I had been ahead on the turn all five times. It was that simple. I had the nut low, top pair and the nut flush draw and got a lot of chips into the middle on the turn, only to see a 2 come on the river to miss the flush, make the ever-drawable 6-high straight for my opponent and counterfeit my nut low. Sweetness. I was rivered on high-only boards two other times with straights, and one time when my opponent called off his stack with garbage only to nail a 2-outer set at the river. The fifth rivering was another situation where I was ahead with both the nut low and a made straight, and when my opponent made a longshot flush on the river that again counterfeited my nut low with an Ace, IGH. I don't even know where I finished, but out of 1330-some entrants, it had to be somewhere in the 1000s or 1100s. I was never above my starting stack, and I never won a big pot all the way through, despite getting in tons of money on the flop and turn when I was significantly ahead. It was frustrating and shitty, and frankly sometimes I don't know why I play donk games like O8, but it's still poker and for me, poker by its nature is fun. But I will stand by my statement I've made many times here -- other than Limit O8, PLO8 is about as dumb a poker game as there is. Get an A2 dealt to you, and you will walk into the nut low automatically in many hands. Ghey. That's not poker, folks, and that's not the way normal poker works. And even at a $216 buyin, that is not nearly enough to get people to stop donkey-drawing with shit hands. I'm convinced from what I saw last night that people don't even know the first thing about how to play this game in most cases. I mean, when you see people taking down pots in O8 by playing hands like K973 with three suits, and, my personal favorite, K862 all clubs, it's not hard to imagine why these guys are calling me down repeatedly from behind and then sucking out. Whatever. F PLO8.

On to the better news -- Tuesday night was actually a fairly positive night of poker for me overall, despite the abomination known as FTOPS #9. First off, with Miami Don's next Big Game coming up this Sunday night at 9pm ET, I jumped back into the 9:45pm ET token frenzy on full tilt for the first time in a few weeks. I got donked on the second hand by some guy who limped as the second limper from early position with what turned out to be pocket Queens. Let me say that again: a guy limped from utg, and then this dude limped as well with QQ. Of course three more limpers entered the pot after him, showing as clearly as I could imagine why limping with QQ as a second limper into the pot is just about the worst possible play. Long story short, I ended up allin with the guy with my AQ and his QQ held up since I cannot win with nor win against the nasty ladies, and suddenly in the chat box comes the comment "You should update ur blog with a call that bad." Yes, so sorry I could not put you on pocket Queens having limped from early position in a multi-way pot. It's always nice to be recognized from the blog at the table I guess, but comments like that can really get to me. That's why it was especially fun when I watched the guy donk out two tables later by calling not one but two allins with his pocket 7s. Ugh. When he busted with that, I made sure to type in "Yes, I will have to update the blog for that call, good idea." He ended up being an ok guy I guess as we chatted a bit more, and I ended up with this:



With this token, I immediately bought into the Big Game coming up on Sunday:



Are you in there yet? Why not? Get into that token frenzy, running every night this week at 9:45pm ET, where for $14 you can win a $75 token with only a modicum of good luck and good play, and the whole thing generally only takes about 80 minutes including a 5-minute break after an hour when you're already getting close to the tokens.

Oh yeah, I also played the $50 megasatellite into Wednesday night's FTOPS #10, the $300 rebuy nlh tournament. This is not something I've even thought about satelliting into, because I'm just not in a position to play a big rebuy like this and actually buy in multiple times for $300 a pop. But I did decide at the last minute to go for the $50 buyin satellite, taking my one and only cheap shot at what will be my one and only rebuy into the tournament tonight. And I played awesome, jumping out to an early big stack and never really relinquishing it, even through the typically horrible bubble period that lasted almost a full hour in this thing before the $322 buyins were finally awarded:



Rest assured, I will not be rebuying in this thing no matter what. But, I suppose that if I make it to the break I will almost surely add on, because not adding on in a tournament like this is just about always a poor strategic decision that is -EV over time, especially when the addon chips are discounted from the original buyin and rebuy price, as they almost always are in these things. But with just the one rebuy and with people playing like uberdonks during Monkey Hour, I recognize that I have almost no chance in the FTOPS tonight. It will more be something to do while I get myself psyched up to win my first Mookie tournament this evening**. Don't forget to be there as the BBTwo rolls on with the Mookie tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt (password as always is "vegas1"). I for one cannot wait to see you there. ***





** Not representative of reality. In reality I will be donked early from the Mookie tonight when some digghead insta-calls me with a dominated hand and then sucks out some bullshit. Typical Mookie in other words.


*** Not true. If you're the fonkey who's going to insta-call me with garbage just to see if you can get yourself ranted about tomorrow, then I most certainly can wait to see you there. I'm just trying to be polite and continue to foster that kind, loving image I have built up over time that you guys all know and love.

Monday Musings

With work tilt setting in upon me again to begin a new week I don't have nearly as much time to write about all the things I've had swirling around my head over the weekend and the past few days. I'm going to have to settle for a kind of a mishmash of a bunch of mostly unrelated ideas. Oh well, it's Monday. Deal with it.

Of course, we begin with the regular Monday morning announcement here at the blog:



Again with the new banner from Duggles, which has to be an eye-grabber if nothing else. Dam. So come by tonight at 10pm ET on full tilt for the latest Mondays at the Hoy tournament. Password as always for my tournaments is "hammer". We love to have first-timers and newcomers to the game so come on out even if you've never played the MATH or never played the bloggers before. Pretty much everyone is terrible in these things anyways so it's a good feeding ground for you tournament sharks lurking out there. You know who you are. And we've still got that 3-way logjam atop the 2007 MATH moneyboard right now, with Bayne slightly out in front of Columbo and then myself, all three separated by like $13 total, so any cash for any of us will mean the lead as we head into the 9th month of the year of tracking the cash won from the weekly Monday night MATH event.

For me and online poker, other than my winning the Dookie (no, not the Mookie, never the Mookie) and the Riverchasers last week, the beats on full tilt just keep on coming. I am always amazed going through a bad run of variance how it really feels, when you know that card is gonna spike on the river, when you just know you're getting four-flushed even just when the draw comes out on the flop. I know you all know exactly what I mean out there, we all experience this unfortunately. But it's true. Last night I had my allin reraise on the flop called by a naked 7-high flush draw and promptly lost to the flush on the turn to get eliminated early from the token frenzy, and then in the 5050 I amassed a decent stack and ran through about 66% of the field before bluffing off a good half my stack on a great scare card that must unfortunately have actually hit my opponent to give him the hand that I was trying to represent that I had. That's never good, let me tell you. Anyways after losing half my stack, I had my allin preflop reraise with QQ called by A5, which brought the requisite Ace on the river, and then still with about 60% of the average stack I again had my allin preflop reraise with JJ called, this time by QTo and a middle stack! I could not believe my eyes. No sooner had I typed "GOOD CALL" into the chat -- which I knew I had to get in right away before the river fell -- when the river brought the requisite Queen, and the game of Pin the Reward on the Donkey was up. Good times. Eff you, full tilt. But I'll always be back, beginning with tonight for Mondays at the Hoy at 10pm ET.

OK some other things on my mind here on a dreary Monday in New York City -- starting with Britney Spears. I don't know how many of you watch things like the MTV Video Music Awards -- hopefully most of you don't because I wouldn't be caught dead with this on if not for Hammer Wife who absolutely loves this shit -- but on Sunday night the opening act was none other than Britney herself, making her first public performance that I've seen in quite some time. And let me tell you -- she looked thick. If you watched it, I know you know what I'm talking about. And don't get me wrong, she is still a hot chick there is no doubt about that. But having watched her writhing around up there with the snake and making out with madonna and shit a few years ago in this very same venue, it is kinda sad to see how time has changed Britney. I got the feeling she was kinda high or something during the show anyways, as she had a pretty blank look on her face and was definitely not performing with any kind of vigor or even interest level one would expect from the VMAs opening act making a big public appearance for her. I found the whole thing just very blase and, to tell the truth, somewhat confusing. And Britney has a good deal of toning to do if she ever expects to look anything like that hot chick from a few years ago, let me tell you. I'm still kinda perplexed about the whole performance.

And speaking of performances at the VMAs, what can you say about that Sarah Silverman! That chica has absolutel balls of steel! I'm serious. Last year she trashed hard on Paris Hilton and a few other of the hot young stars. This year she came out right after Britney left the stage, and immediately trashed the shit out of Britney just about as badly as anyone ever could. She then followed up with moving right back to Paris again, who was sitting sheepishly in the audience (again), and then moved on to Fifty Cent in what was overall seriously one of the most ballsy, funny and just generally irreverent bits I can recall seeing recently. I can't see it at work thanks to the IT dorks in my department, but you have to go find Sarah Silverman's VMAs commentary on YouTube, it is well worth it to see it.

OK so the NFL season was back this weekend, finally at long last, and as usual the league action totally kicked ass and outdid all reasonable expectations among football fans everywhere. The NFL truly has the best product of the four major sports in the U.S., and they only seem to get better every year. And the best part is, teams from New York and LA can't just dominate the NFL like they do in baseball and the other sports to some extent. And as a big fantasy football guy who is playing in four leagues this year, I can tell you there are some players whose fantasy owners are asking themselves a whole lot of questions this morning, while other guys' owners are flying high as the smoke is almost cleared on Week 1 of the 2007-08 NFL.

For example, if you like me own Eli Manning and/or Plexico Burress this morning, you are feeling good. Granted the Cowboys appeared to play utterly no defense whatsoever on Sunday night, but dam did the Giants offense look good. I drafted those guys because Eli Manning looked really good in the preseason this year -- being in New York I got to watch every single snap the man took in the preseason games, and I estimated that, albeit in preseason, Eli looked a good 40-50% more comfortable, more poised and just all-around more aware than he had last year. So to those of you who took a little bit of a chance with a high pick on Burress, and certainly those who picked Eli Manning and were probably (like me) roundly laughed at during your fantasy drafts for doing so, this Bud's for you.

Similarly, if you snagged Randy Moss with a decently high draft pick within the past few weeks, this morning you are styling aren't you? Dam did that guy look good on Sunday in the Patriots' crushing of the Jets which I also got to watch every snap of. Moss looked like his old self at times, not even appearing to expend a ton of effort in catching I think 9 passes for like 180 yards and a score. Moss was everywhere, and the Pats fans out there have got to be salivating at another shot at dual Red Sox - Patriots glory in 2007-08. Honorable mention out to Torry Holt owners, many of whom stayed away this year despite the guy being one of the most solid stone cold lock wideouts in fantasy league in each of the past several years. With another week with a touchdown catch under his belt to start 2007, hopefully that will quiet some of the Holt haters this year, at least for a little bit.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Week 1 of the NFL season was chock full of fantasy players on whom owners doubtlessly spent valuable low-round picks but whose lives are now full of question marks as the first week's games are almost over with. Let's start with Larry Johnson. Just about anyone who has this guy had to use a top-5 fantasy pick to get him, and dam yesterday did the Chiefs suck. Their offense was nonexistent, their defense stunk it up against historically one of the NFL's worst teams, and LJ didn't do shizznot. You cannot be anything but miserable on Monday morning if you drafted that guy in your league, period.

I feel similarly about a guy like Steven Jackson this morning, who was basically held totally in check by a stingy Carolina defense to start the 2007 NFL campaign on Sunday. Jackson, even moreso than LJ, was a top-2 pick in basically any fantasy league where the people knew what they were doing, and this weekend he did ok but was basically unimpressive from a fantasy perspective. Any good fantasy player knows what you need from your top guys, really from all your starters, is touchdowns above all else. Yes I need them to hold on to the ball, yes I need them to pile up the yards, but you need 'em to get in the end zone or none of this other stuff really ends up mattering much in most weeks, and this weekend Jackson was not nearly as active I had been hoping and certainly didn't get the job done in the touchdown department. You just never know about that St. Louis team these days.

Cedric Benson of the Bears also disappointed, with me having expended a first-couple-rounds pick on him in two of my four league thanks to shitey-ass draft placement near the middle-end of the first round in 3 of my 4 leagues. RNG my ass, right? Benson barely stood out with rookie Adrian Peterson picking up so many carries in competition with Benson (despite fumbling in a key spot for the Bears early on in the game), so who knows what I do with that spot on my team in those leagues in future weeks. Along the same lines, my own Eagles' Donovan McNabb went fairly high in most drafts despite the fact that everyone knows he can't possibly play more than 8, 9 games this season without being out due to injury, and this weekend against the crap Packers defense, McNabb did not get the job done. Reggie Brown, 1 catch. Only one McNabb touchdown to an unknown player, and otherwise very little to speak of from the quarterback of what is supposed to be one of the best offenses in the NFL.

Fucking Philadelphia. The Eagles lost to a hideorrendous Packers team that can't even get over .500 for the past few years, with Favre throwing the ball all over the place, launching 'em up off his back foot, while falling over on his side, trying hard to throw picks. But the Eagles still found a way to lose, fumbling a punt into the end zone for Green Bay's first (and only) touchdown of the day, and then fumbling another punt deep in their own territory with under a minute to go in a 13-13 game and allowing the Packers to kick the miracle last-second field goal for the victory in front of the hometown fans, who believe me are fucking starved for some success up in Green Bay after years of ineptitude, even at home in the once impenetrable frozen tundra of Lambeau Field. What a sick, shitass way to begin the 2007 season for the Eagles, whose Philadelphia fans are already cursed with the specter of the Phillies giving back another season and falling just short of the playoffs once again. I'm beside myself thinking about how my Eagles could lose that game against one of the worst teams in the NFL. Dammit.

Anyways, so I start of the NFL season going 1-0 in my picks against the spread, as I ended up avoiding picking all the Sunday games and instead gave you the Colts -6 last Thursday in the opener against the Saints, who looked even worse than I thought on their way to failing to score even one offensive touchdown against the reigning Superbowl champions. I will be making more picks at the season goes on, which you can look for right here on the blog on a weekly basis around the end of the week every week for the next several months. As far as fantasy goes, although a lot is of course riding on Monday night's games (I have Chad Johnson, the Baltimore defense, SF tight end Vernon Davis and Frank Gore in some combination in each of my four leagues), I have already won one of my games, and I am in good shape to win 2 of the other 3 unless something recockulous happens and I get nailed by the proverbial two-outer at the river on Monday evening. I think I mentioned this above, but after Plex Burress's explosion on Sunday night football, my score this week fortunately vaulted ahead of everyone else but one team in the blogger fantasy league. Unfortunately, Schaubs (sorry for the incorrect link there earlier!) was the one guy who still luckmonkeyed the Steelers' defense into the most points of the week, and he also happens to be my opponent for week 1. Great way to start things off, with the 2nd most fantasy points in the league, but still losing to the guy with the most points in the league in week 1. I'm lovin' it.

Which brings me to my last item for today: my NFL Pick'em league. I mentioned this around the middle of last week, but to reiterate for anyone who missed it, I did a Pick'em league that I announced here on the blog last season and it seemed to go over well, and this is something that I have done myself with friends for the past several years. This year will work the same as in past seasons, where we will pick every NFL game every week straight-up (not against the spread), and we will assign a confidence rating (1-16 in full weeks, 1-14 in weeks with teams with byes) to each game each week depending on how confident you are that the team you've picked to win will actually win that particular game. It's a good system and by the end of the season we should have a very good idea of who is the best at picking the NFL winners based on overall Pick'em performance.

I would love to have as many of you as are interested join in my Pickem league this year. For the first time, I am not going to start tracking picks until Week 2, to give everyone a chance to get a look at every team one time via their Week 1 games before we start making our picks, so the deadline to join the league will be this coming Sunday morning, September 16, just before the Week 2 games officially begin.

Here is the information for you to register for my free Yahoo! NFL Pick'em league:

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In order to join the group, just go to Pro Football Pick'em, click the "Sign Up" button (or "Create or Join Group" if you are a returning user). From there, follow the path to join an existing private group and when prompted, enter the following information...

Group ID#: 33287
Password: eagles

Yahoo! will send you a confirmation with further details once you have completed the registration process.

Yahoo! Pro Football Pick'em
http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/pickem

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So come out and join my league for some good old-fashioned fun times and trash talk. If you like the NFL then you should love playing NFL Pick'em with the Big Boys!

Btw, nice job to Michigan and Miami this weekend in getting blown out in historic fashion. My how the mighty have fallen. I mean, Notre Dame always sucks nowadays, they're barely even worth a mention anymore for their suckitude, but Miami got lambasted by the Sooners this weekend by 40-some points, and the Michigan blowout by Oregon, this one also at home in the Big House just like last week's shocking loss to Appalaichian State, has got to be one of the funniest and lamest things I've ever seen in college football. If Lloyd Carr isn't careful he is going to find himself out of a job, replaced by some interim coach or something for the remainder of this year while that program tries to pick itself back up by its bootstraps. Holy shit what has happened to Michigan football guys. Dayummm.

OK that's it for today's "short" post, gotta get back to work before the boss figures out what I'm really doing here in my office. See you all tonight for Mondays at the Hoy on full tilt!