Inational Business Case Halp by Spitfiree, January 06
I'm supposed to present a case of a company entering a market they've never been on to and problems involving that and the way they solved it. I'm sure someone can suggest some interesting topic, otherwise i have to go with something stupid like Mercedes entering China or Walmart trying to enter the Far East or something dumb like that. I was thinking about marijuana suppliers in the USA - would be cool since the society i live in has a conservative socialism based view of weed, but that's a domestic market so it seems out of topic and I can't think of anything else. I guess it doesn't necessarily have to a successful case as long as I'm able to spot what went wrong and how it should've gone, but theorycrafting is easy when done in class so it should be fine
So last year was horrid from a poker point of view. Did not play or study enough and as a result I suck and play lower now. Fairly sure I actually lost money overall last year.
Gonna relearn this damn game so that I can make enough money to try out a few new things. Trying to write a book or two, and some other things.
Anyway, gonna watch a ton of poker videos, play a decent bit and post hands. Will be back in a few days with my first batch of hands trying to figure them out again.
If there are any natural French communicators out there who are willing to help me with some translation: Mostly dealing with Sartre, poetry, and french language and style please let me know here or pm.
TL;DR - I have a 100k USD/yr job but my US legal status is expiring, at the same time I am thinking about doing a startup company in China with my friend, and I need advice on which is more +EV. Thank you in advance!
Haven't been able to stably play poker for the rest of 2014 since last blog post.. Was pretty sad about that. I think I was breakeven for the most part from September to December, which doesn't sound too good lol. But this is not the purpose of this blog post. I think I am going into a turning point in my life, so I need some advice from all of you smart individuals. I would love to hear what all of you would do if you were in my shoes.
Just to give more background on the spot, I am currently working as a Software Developer at one of the biggest tech companies on the west coast of United States, making about 100k USD/year (picked up poker just for fun, but some serious fun lol). However, I am a Chinese National instead of a US citizen. And one of the biggest problems I am facing is that, I don't have a stable immigration status to stay in the US for good. I am currently on a student visa with a post-graduation training permission to work for a company until December 21, 2015 (Did undergrad here in the States from 2009 to 2013).
In order to stay in the US/my current job, I do have several options. I have a chance to grab my work visa (H1-B) by getting into a government lottery system on April 1, 2015. Last year there were 180,000 people squeezing their heads into 85,000 spots (20,000 for graduate students, which I don't get). This year it will be around the same, and more towards slightly worse (more and more people try to get the visa every year). If I get the lottery, I will be able to apply for the visa and be back on stable status in the US and be back on track. Otherwise, I will still be able to work with my company and hopefully have them put me in either Vancouver, Canada/Beijing, China for 1 year and come back into the States with another type of work visa (L-1). Of course pay will be adjusted, so definitely preferring Vancouver for the $$$ over Beijing.
If the problem were this easy I don't think I would be writing this post lol. Having been working for a big company for a little over a year, I am feeling a little bit burnt out, and lost. I have always loved programming since age 11 and programming has been my biggest passion of my life, until I started working. 8 hours of work each day is slowing chewing me away and I started to hate it. Work is often times pretty dreadful, despite doing "creative work" for the most part. I don't have the motivation to get better at programming outside of work, and the technology stack we use is behind compared to, say, the startups. I really miss the days at school where I learn some cool languages and stuff outside of classes and do something fun with it, and now I need to use some ancient/company-specific stuff like Perl/Java every day and do repetitive tasks like bug fixing/pulling data from other teams and rendering into HTML, etc. I guess I am either not getting challenged, or my job has been a bit too stable.
Recently I took a 3-week vacation to come back to my hometown in China. Talked with one of my best friends who quit UC Berkeley with 1 semester left and came back to China to start up his own tech company. He has been messaging me while I was in the US, saying that he would love me to join his company, as a partner. And this time we finally get some face-to-face time and we talked about everything about the company, things that happened in 2014 and game plan for 2015. He has been doing lots of reading and researching on everything, and he really wanted me to join him and build the next big thing, mainly wearable electronics. Currently the Chinese market is booming at a ridiculous rate in terms of internet business and comsumer electronics like smartphones and wearables. He told me that I would be leading a team to research and develop that next big thing. It is definitely not easy, and it is quite a gamble, since I won't be having much income working with him during the research phase. The company will also be doing software consulting, building websites for various clients on the side. Last year the company made about 300k-400k CNY in 2014 with just 1 project and had about 200k CNY left after all the operational costs. He ensured me a spot of partnership and I will be getting around a third of the company stock (we have another good friend of ours and he is currently a co-founder, but he is still working on his PhD at Harvard so he is not doing much of the business for the company).
3 of us met in high school and we built our 1st robotics team for our high school, and we made 1st place city-wide and state-wide competitions for the first time we did it. We had the synergy to run a company, where my buddy is full of ideas, and I am very good with tech, and the PhD buddy is great on the business side of things. I really missed the time we were together as high school kids building robots. I feel like we could do something big together.
As we talked, I also learned that he was miles and miles ahead of me in terms of the cutting-edge technology that he knows. He got to use the latest Web Technology on the projects that he worked on, and he had a very deep knowledge about it as well. I suddenly felt very behind because I didn't have the extra time to look at these new things, didn't get to use them at work, and more importantly, working at a big corporate killed my drive of learning more about programming every day. Although I would love to admit that I also learned something during my time at the company, but more in terms of stability, maintainability, scalability and performance of my code. I just feel like the things that he has been doing is way more interesting and challenging to me.
One thing becomes very clear that joining him means I will be giving up my corporate job, and the current pay level, which I think I am okay without. But I feel like I do need some contingency plan - If I decide to come back to China, I will do my best to get myself promoted to Software Development Engineer II (SDE2) title before leaving the States. With that on my resume, even if business fails in a year or two, I will still be able to get back into a big company with good pay again. There are 3 big companies in China I can get into, Baidu (the Chinese Google), Alibaba (the Chinese Amazon, which is way better than amazon.cn), or Tencent (the company that bought League of Legends, also does other things), or I might even be able to come back into the States if I wish.
On the other hand, I have a girlfriend and we are together for about 7 years now. We met since high school and I think it is about time for us to seal the deal and get married soon. She is currently working at a company on the east coast, and she is on the same boat as me in terms of immigration status (needs to get the same lottery this year in order to stay in the States). I talked to her briefly about my thoughts on partnering with my friend back in China, and she didn't like that because she didn't think we are (especially I am) experienced enough to run a startup company. Also talked to my parents about coming back to China and I think they were supportive, as long as I am ready.
Alright I think I have enough background for you guys and hope you guys can give some solid advice. Will be doing a poll below so you guys don't have to necessarily comment
went for a trip to Koh Phi Phi/ Koh Phangan / Koh Tao with a few friends on dec 30
in the NYE party at the beach I lost my phone ( prob a suspiscious girl stole from me lol ) with all my pictures and contacts from the last 2 months
next day I wake up with food intoxication, diarhea and vomit every 10 minutes, went to the doctor and I had to cancell the rest of my trip and return to Bangkok
6 hours walking around searching for a stand by ticket at the airport, still with diarhea and vomit every 10 minutes
finally got a ticket, the lady says "wow you are lucky to get this ticket, its the last flight today"
arriving in Bangkok I realized 1k USD stolen from my baggage by the air company( stupid to leave money in checked baggage but I was sick and wasnt thinking straight )
expecting to live 6 more days if things keep like that
Anyone trade options/futures? How is your P&L going and what strategies are you using?
I'm relatively new to this field ~ 1 year. Focusing on options and trading Strangles/Iron Condors/Credit & Debit spreads/Naked Puts & Calls & Combination of these at or around 70-80% probability of success range.
I've been learning off Tastytrades - Tom Sosnoff & his team.
Back to poker for the new yearby Bullshit, December 31
From late 2012 to mid 2014 I pretty much didn't play poker. I Started again playing causally in July and went on a trip to Europe with friends starting from Amsterdam and ending up in Barcelona. I decided to play the EPT Barcelona main while there and made it to day 3 with a big stack and punted it off trying to chip up during the bubble . I got back to Canada after a month in Europe and started playing online again but was pretty rusty and out of touch since I haven't played in a while. When I played online there was no zoom so it took me a while to adjust starting off at 1/2 zoom but it was just like riding a bike and quickly started 4 tabling 2/5 zoom without much problem. I also won a couple tournies for 30-40k but havent played much this december so pretty much all my volume are from nov-sept. I don't really know whats gonna happen to poker so I've come back to take what I can and hopefully I can stay motivated in the new year put in a lot of volume and maybe keeping a blog will help with that.
Well, what can I say to sum it all up... Poker in 2014 was very up and down for me. I decided to start playing again sometime in midsummer and the made the choice of going full boar for the first time ever. The experience has been eye-opening to say the least and I have gained a whole new level of respect for players beating NL200/PLO200+ on a consistent basis. It takes a certain type of a person and a lot of work ethic to do that. Luckily for me, I learned that I probably am the type of person who can get there eventually if I want it bad enough.
Perhaps my biggest error in judgement this year apart from posting boring hands and whining - sorry LP - was obsessing too much over volume and results. In the short-term of poker it's really difficult to find much meaning in your actual results. It's even more foolish when you start to use things like EV, which isn't now and hasn't ever been calculated properly. Street-by-street would be very useful, but for some reason nobody has ever built that despite how easy it seems it would be to do. Maybe it has something to do with increasing the load times for databases who knows.
I'm less concerned with volume now and more focused on studying. I made the decision a few weeks ago to study my game as much as I play the game and it's made a huge difference for me. Mentally it feels better, I feel more productive and I'm enjoying poker more and more. I'm also recognizing a whole shit-ton of spots where I'm quite simply lighting money on fire for no reason. It doesn't mean $50 being tossed in spew-fest style, although once and a while that does happen, it's more the $5-15 I put into a pot where I either don't have much hope of winning or it didn't functionally help me do anything than build my opponents stack. My biggest goal in 2015 is to become as close to a zero mistake player as I can. Play Perfect, as our Starcraft heroes would say.
I've spent an awful lot of the last six months just figuring out how to learn this crazy PLO game. There are so many intricacies and so many different lines of thought out there sometimes it's hard to piece them together. The good thing is I think I've finally figured it out. I know how to learn and how to analyze what's happening in the hands I'm playing and I'm using the right analytical lens to think things through. The result is the last few weeks have left me feeling much better about my game and confident coming into 2015. Below is a summary of my results so far.
Also, a big shout-out to my coach who has been an excellent support both mentally and skill-wise. He's going to make me a crusher in this game as long as I'm willing to put the work in, I have no doubt of that.
Summary of Results:
CGs: -620
VPPs:60K
FPPs: 140K = $2,240 (In $1600 bonuses, when SN is achieved)
Stellar Rewards: $700
Total: +$2320
Goals for 2015
Get to 100PLO in the first six months, get to 200PLO by year end
Continue to use my philosophy of studying as much as I play
Whine dramatically less in hand history posts
Post interesting hands
Talk more poker with good PLO players and build up that network a bit, we're all in it together vs. Pokerstars rake anyway
Edit: Also, shout-out to JoeIngram1 for being an awesome mentor and a genuinely cool human being. Pretty big tip to give me the heads up about the 2p2 conversation and the study of Zoom PLO50 and how few players are beating the rake there. And even though I've now moved away from Zoom for now, I still believe it's beatable, just not when you're making the mistakes I had been. My worthless EV stat is also pretty ugly in that game.
I lost 5 full days so didn't really have a chance. But I'm fine with that, they were spent with the people I love and I didn't expect to have the opportunity to be with them. Sometimes real people are more important than challenges.
In last 18 days (last 2 days going for new year's party. Felt weird before as I didn't know anyone there, but then met the people and will know most of them and they are pretty cool guys so decided to go)
Played 80hrs
went to gym fourteen times
drank alcohol just once at the lady's family dinner - a toast so I don't look like a weirdo.
No dirty movies of any kind whatsoever
I will ship $20 to Devon, and now taking a couple days off for New Year's.
I am happy with how I played except last couple days where the variance just got to me. I cut tables this month played attentive, but ran bad AIEV and normal pots too.
I watched vids quite a bit, love Paul "internet" Otto ones'. Worked on preflop ranges, had a sesh with one of you awesome liquidpoker crushers that opened my eyes to how much more I need to work with my solid game, especially if I ever want to get back to Zoom games.
Points learned/going forward: 1) turning off skype/phone/internet is huge
- The days where I had just poker and the gym and my head was clear were the best ones.
- I need to be able to clear my head, and turn off skype/phone/net and just grind. It's more fun too when I do that I even had a couple 4hour A-/B+ game session. Awesome!
I put on this http://www.internet-radio.com/station/ambientradio/ and want to find background hypnosis music to calm myself down and think more as an alternative.
2)reciprocality
- It's not about what you do, or what they do. It's both. When I managed to believe that my long term winrate is not how I run but how I react to the bad run compared to how other people would, I kept a healthy mindset. When I gave in, opened more tables than I should, opened a video while grinding I reverted to the animalistic immediate results oriented mindset I felt bad and played worse. The very fact that I posted that graph proves that. I managed to stay on track until the very last few days.
It'a about everything really - all I have to do is focus more, sleep better, eat better, exercise more, work on my game more than others and focus on that and I will do well. When I focus on events instead of my reactions to the events I start to get tilted and my mood and motivation drops and procrastination increases.
More on this here: http://tommyangelo.com/articles/reciprocality/
It's not at the tables that counts, but off them too
This is really big as well. There were days where I was working for literally 24 hours.
- poker
- naps (with hyonosis at times)
- gym
- work on ranges
- listening to motivational audio
- just sitting in quiet
- quality sleep.
and those days I felt my fucking best. I want to carry this over not only to poker, but my entire life going forward. Basically do things that are good for me, live my life by the clock most of the time and find the time for the good stuff like quality time with people I love, sleep, relaxation - and see it all as part of the greater picture that is effectiveness and happiness in life.
And the days where I felt the best is those that felt the most simple too. When I play poker, I play poker. When I meditate, I meditate, when I relax, I relax and enjoy it to the max, when I am with the people I love, I am with them and all other worries are gone. I always feel the more I do this, the better I am and that has more to do with life than poker.
Now I want to delete that graph but I'll leave it here - until I looked at it a couple days back I played well and felt good. It's just a past result that has no meaning in the present, especially not in the hand in progress that I have to play my best at and nothing else matters.
Mindset
- I listened to Paul McKenna, Jack canfield, Zig Ziglar every day. Especially Paul Mckenna shows you how stupid the brain is and you can feel however the hell you want, and it almost makes me dumb for ever feeling bad :D Today I feel shitty and yeah - I didn't listen to any of that stuff. It works, it shows you practices on how to increase confidence instantly but as you all know when you feel bad you tend to gravitate towards negativity or distractions and this positive stuff that helps a ton is the last thing you jump to do.
- I failed in relaxing, and overloaded my brain for sure. The more sessions I play, the more relaxation I need to put in, and the EV of meditation/naps/breaks increases dramatically. I am yet to get this and it's really hard when I play longer hours more hands I tend to need more stimuli in the brain.
Scheduling
It was good to keep track of my progress http://i.gyazo.com/435baa4df8b2c3836bb182bd98c71ac7.png
although at times I definitely should have taken breaks as my mindset was bad in very bad sessions and instead I kept going focusing on hours too much which hurt my EV. When all I had to do is take a 5 minute break. Gym/no alcohol/no P goals are great though no drawbacks of keeping track. I might keep having hour targets but just have forced breaks even when it's 5 minutes.
No drinking challenge
I have literally never in my life went out with people and was sober. Until now - I went to party 2x and 2x didnt drink a drop. it's great for the gym, and gym's great for no drinking as I have more energy. It's also fucking bizarre seeing how people change after alcohol, that you remember everything and the 3am ride in tram with all the bloodshot eyed people, people arguing like retards for no reason (I've witnessed an argument for 40 minutes about smn eating a slice of pizza on the tram, and almost everyone got involved :D)
I will do this more often, it's fun. Somehow hangovers were simmilar, I substituted booze for caffeine tho
Gym
if I didn't go away from home cause of holidays and new years the 20/20 is totally realistic when you count light cardio sessions and keep variety. I will keep this up for sure.
Caffeine
sucks.
it's cheating
that makes me more stressed.
pretty sure it has negative impacts on serotonin levels
I am off it completely now, lesson learned.
poker game
implemented rigorous color coding. dark green small fish, light green whale. if one of em is behind me I 3x all positons, if none are I 2.2X BU, 2.5X CO and I might lower UTG MP sizes too now. I did it all month and it works well and you can to it automatically not think about it conciously when you do it enough.
Vs aggro regs I have default preflop ranges I stick to. I revert to them when I want to play back at someone/small samples/when someone pisses me off http://i.gyazo.com/db7a3014105c64cd8f0a90a473452cc6.png
Need to do a 3bet/call 3bet for HU too
and vs 4bet in SB v BU, that shit's hard as fuck tho.
Against regs without blatant leaks that seem like they can hand read some I always look at what value combos I have and decide how many bluff combos I should add and if my hand should be one of them to control my game.
JANUARY
No 2015 goals. Survival mode ftw. This is a hardcore challenge and I don't even have to make an official challenge. I have to do well pretty much, I will give it my all as last couple months have been very tough, spent money on Xmas, ran bad etc.
I have another podcast coming up I need to prepare for. I will play a lot more on the stake, I will keep up with the gym and I will run my life by the clock more, and make sure I make room for plenty of fun, socialising and quality relaxation instead of zombie watching dota/facebook/random chat convos
Well, thanks for reading LP, was a long rant, but a great experience for me. I'm off for a 2 day retreat to a cottage in the woods for New Year's with 7 other people including the best girl in the world
Mix games fail / poker doldrumsby hiems, December 27
I just played 9/18 mix and I got crushed really hard. Played a really long session and am stuck 50 Bbs. Been trying to learn bit by bit but also jumped into it against regulars. Really torturous, experience. I got owned and have no idea what happened.
Mix was badugi, baducy, badacey, holdem, pineapple razz, pineapple stud8, 5 card o8, triple draw, two flop Omaha, pineapple stud Hilo standard.
I'm not sure how to feel about the session. I've been playing some o8, limit holdem,, and mix somewhat often like this to learn and mix up my routine. Overall I am down not insanely down but down a decent amount in my limit/mix sessions. I had a bad 20/40 limit holdem session and this mix session both really bad. I have read a bit but for the most part have not studied these games a ton and I guess I could do things but I'm not sure how worth it it'll be.
I have been doing ok at 2/5NL the past few months I think averaging 4-5k a month with ok volume. But I ventured into limit/mix because I feel like just grinding 2/5 is really not an end game sort of thing. I am not sure how I will fare being a regular at 5/10 nl, and I guess the 40/80 mix game/playing mix games&o8 on pokerstars kind of was this exotic backup type of idea that would make me feel better about myself and my options to move up in the food chain, but right now I feel naive about the whole thing and somehow feel like I am the lemon type that will never be able to beat the big (5/10nl and 40/80 as "big" ) games at all, never get the courage, talent etc.
Long term i know i need something outside of poker, but right now I could use the money. If i can manage to increase my earnings it would help me immensely. Sustaining current winning is also important. So, Not really sure where to go from here. It would be nice to be a winner in the 5/10 games at Bellagio as a start, but it's hard to muster up the courage to change something that has been working ok. I took a shot a few months ago but was playing short and won a half buyin in 2 sessions and then got nervous and lost a full buyin the third. I've ben playing the softest 2/5 in town which is the Bellagio and it is a big jump from a 500cap to 1500cap and i would be curious about the difference in play. I could move up to the deeper 2/5s in town at aria/Wynn. I could also just stick with where I'm "winning" right now, swallow my pride/ego and just try my best to be a lame 2/5 grinder guy.
>be me
>go play live poker
>act socially awkward
>this puts people on massive tilt
>especially when i win
>be one of ten players
>the other nine are playing to specifically stack me
>mfw i steamroll the SHIT out of them
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- was obsessing too much over volume and results. In the short-term of poker it's really difficult to find much meaning in your actual results. It's even more foolish when you start to use things like EV, which isn't now and hasn't ever been calculated properly. Street-by-street would be very useful, but for some reason nobody has ever built that despite how easy it seems it would be to do. Maybe it has something to do with increasing the load times for databases who knows.
Happy New Year all!! 
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