Nat Arem's Blog

This is pretty scary…

Forbes story about Calvin Ayre

Here is a little bit that might scare some poker players:

The U.S. government recently seized $24 million from bank accounts linked to Bodog, the giant, illegal-under-U.S.-law Internet gaming operation founded by Canadian tycoon Calvin Ayre.

Federal filings make very clear that a serious criminal investigation of the Bodog enterprise is ongoing. At a minimum, word of the seizures is likely to rattle the confidence of U.S.-based online gamblers that they will receive their winnings, not only from Bodog but from the industry’s other remaining participants.

I don’t think anyone has to worry about receiving their funds.  But I do think people have to worry about the general level of aggression on the part of the DOJ since it has been a little while since anything major like this has been announced.  I am personally hoping that the DOJ is going to stick to RICO and sports-betting stuff because it’s potentially deadly if they decide to take on a poker-only case.  Of course it’s also potentially great, but… that’s a pretty big gamble.

This also reminds me of something my Dad told me a few years back…

In early 2006 Ayre rocketed to international prominence–and the cover of Forbes magazine’ annual issue on the world’s billionaires–for his stewardship from Costa Rica of Bodog Entertainment Group and his open flouting of authorities in the U.S., his major market. The story headline: “Catch Me If You Can.”

That’s dumb. Does he really want to flaunt that sort of thing in front of the American public and humiliate the DOJ? That’s like putting a target squarely on your back. Unless he thought the publicity outweighed the risk somehow, doing a cover like that is really dumb. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think the publicity comes close to the risk of a more toned-down interview/cover … or just not doing the story in the first place.

Oh, and what my Dad told me a few years back was that it’s dumb for offshore gaming people to flaunt themselves. I’m sure that it seems obvious, but the DOJ *really* doesn’t like it and I think the people in charge there take actions like Ayre’s to be an aggressive stance against their Dept and they also think that it’s something they have to fight. While I rarely talk about my family on here for good reason, at one point in time my Dad (an attorney) did work for someone doing something related to gaming — that’s about as specific as I will get on a topic like that on my blog. But anyway, I also remember him telling me that one of the guys involved was really being dumb when he did all sorts of interviews and generally let every single person possible know about his success (to that point). Lo and behold, the guy gets nailed. So basically, if that wasn’t a lesson to every online gaming exec, this should be. Keep quiet, keep a low profile and hope to avoid attention. Let someone else take the spotlight.

This is what has been on my mind lately.

1. Why do people speed up after they pull over into the right lane to let you go by in the left lane?
2. Why do people get fake married to someone on facebook?  I see tons of straight girls “marrying” other girls.  Is it supposed to be funny or something?
3. Why does our travel system suck so much?  It took me 14 hours door-to-door to take a 3.5 hour flight without significant car rides on either end.  It seems like the only part that ever works smoothly is the takeoff to touchdown — which I suppose is good, since it would be far worse if something went wrong in the air.
4. Is it just me or is SportCenter absolutely terrible post-NBA but pre-NFL?  I usually miss being able to watch normal SportsCenter (ie, not the crappy ESPN Deportes which is basically ESPN Soccer) quite a bit when I’m in Costa Rica, but then I got back to the States for a bit and I realized that I wasn’t missing much at all.
5. How do shortages of something like the 3G iPhone happen?  I can see it when a bunch of bumbling idiots at Nintendo screw up supply for a solid two years and forgo billions of dollars of revenue in the process — but Apple?  They normally launch things smoothly.  It seems like they always have enough supply to meet demand even on new products.  And their products stay in demand because in a bunch of markets, they have the best product hands-down.  Anyway, I’m tilted that I can’t get one.
6. 3G problems notwithstanding, why is Apple so awesome and why does everyone else suck so much?  I just don’t get it — Apple has the best laptops, the best phone, the best monitors, the best music player, etc.  How do they “get it” so much better than HP, Dell and the rest of the buffoons out there making the same old crap over and over?  Don’t they see Apple growing and growing?  It baffles me that they’ve let this show go on for this long and haven’t put the clamps to Apple by coming out with similar hardware but with lower prices.  If there’s one place Apple is vulnerable, it’s pricing — and Dell & Co could really hit them hard.  But yet, Apple is still better.  Maybe some day…
7. How is Waffle House, a restaurant that appears to be dirty, shady and low quality, also so goddamn awesome?
8. Holy crap Atlanta is hot in the summer.
9. What is the most powerful entity in the world?  Google?  I might say military because of nukes and whatnot, but the problem is that the military can’t actually use nukes because doing so is like hitting a self-destruct switch.  On the other hand, Google can do whatever it wants and it could be considered the most powerful single tool in the world because of its ability to determine what people see and what people read online.  Anything else that could be considered to be above Google in terms of power and ability to use that power?
10. This is pretty awesome, even though I don’t know who the site is that got it made or what their agenda was in getting it made.  I still laughed at a bunch of it.

Still no responses on the web designer thing.  I guess no one is interested?  If I was a web designer, I’d be jumping at the opportunity to get my work onto quasi-popular blog that hundreds of thousands of people visit every year.

I know there are always a ton of designers out there, so I might as well put this message out publicly…

I’m going to switch my WordPress theme pretty soon.  I’ve been using this one for awhile and I’d like to revamp a number of parts of my blog.  I’m going to have a lot more static pages (similar to the “about me” and “thepokerdb” ones above) with commentary on things like poker SEO, other websites, TV that I watch, hobbies, website strategy articles, etc.  So I’m going to keep making normal blog posts, but I’ll mix it in with article-type pages.  I also plan on giving people the opportunity to write guest posts and guest pages assuming that the topic is interesting and people would enjoy reading the post.

So… on to the search for the actual theme.  I’m leaning towards a pretty heavily modified version of this theme.  I like a lot of aspects of it, but I would change it to make it more readable.  I want to focus on good typography and good contrast for easy readability — see the Thesis theme for a good example of that.  So, basically, I’m looking for a three column theme with the content column on the left and a split sidebar column on the right, potentially with it being a partially merged/partially split sidebar.  I also want a good text menu across the top for the new pages that I am going to be adding to the site.  And, of course, the blog has to have good SEO — div-based layout, good header tags, etc.

So is anyone out there a really good web designer?  I’m willing to pay, although I don’t think more than a few hundred dollars.  And I’m very picky… I dislike 95%+ of the themes in the WordPress Theme directory.  But then again, I know exactly what I want, so I’m probably not that difficult to work with.  Let me know in the comments if you’d like to work together on a new theme for this blog.

I just received the following email:

Congratulations!

Thank you for using POOL.com.  We have successfully secured the following domain(s) on your behalf:

lifetilt.com

Your account has been charged $60.00 USD.

To review the details of your domain(s) at any time, go to the Successful Backorders tab in your Pool.com account.

http://www.pool.com/MyAccount/domains.aspx

Attention new customers! Within the next 24 to 48 hours you will receive an email from the registrar responsible for registering your domain(s).  This email will provide instructions on how to manage your domain(s) within their system.

Best Regards,

Customer Service
service@Pool.com

I think that’s probably the best domain I’ve ever gotten from Pool.com. Should I move my blog to lifetilt.com? What do you think?

Yesterday afternoon Matt Cutts made the following short post:

Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites.

I don’t care too much about the PageRank values, although I always find them entertaining in some manner. I’m mainly curious about the expired penalties… He says “older penalties”, so I’m assuming that can’t mean the <1 month old poker update that happened. See here and here. But could this update effect poker at all in terms of releasing some long-lost sites from a penalty? Possibly.

Either way, if you’re in the business or an interested observer, the next few days should be pretty interesting to see how the Google results change.

I’m gearing up for a major blog redesign and whatnot, so I went in search of my old blog pictures (I lost a bunch when I switched to WordPress a little over a year ago). I found most of them, although a few are still missing.

Therefore, some classic old picture posts are now working again:

1. Balla Watch Contest: $25K WPT Championship
2. Houston Trip Report (mostly pictures)
3. The Final Table
4. More home game, more winning by N 82
5. Sunday at thor’s house
6. Bunch of pictures, commentary to come later…

Probably a bunch more that I’ve forgotten about. But I took a bunch of cool pictures back in the day, so it’s nice to have them back online. I wish I hadn’t resized them so goddamn small, but so be it.

Look for the redesign in the next week or two.