Nat Arem's Blog

Nat Arem – 12:14
http://www.rebelsport.com.au/ecom/rebel/product_detail.aspx?id=24215&cat=257
you should get a glove sponsorship
like rizen

yellowsub86 – 12:15
omg i want subgloves

Nat Arem – 12:15
yea clearly
those gloves are ideal for playing poker
like kitten mittens make sense for loud cats

yellowsub86 – 12:15
yea mittens

**Kitten mittens will make sense if you watched It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia a few weeks back…

I’m currently home in the US for various Thanksgiving get-togethers. My first stop was to fly to NYC last Friday. On Saturday I met up with Dani Stern (Ansky/supernova9) and Jay Rosenkrantz (krantz/pr1nnyraid) along with my friend Eric Strauss from thepokerfilm. This was my first time meeting krantz although I felt like I knew him a bit already from watching 2M2MM. And long-time blog readers will know that I used to be pretty good friends with Dani before we kind of fell out of touch. I still consider him a good friend though and I’m really glad he’s making waves in the poker world.

We went to Sushi Samba in the west village and it was great. I always love good sushi and, while it was overpriced for the quality imo, it was still a very good meal. We chatted about industry stuff, current events, etc, etc. Nothing really new and exciting came out of the conversation but we did talk about some cool new things that krantz is planning on doing with DeucesCracked and possible partnerships with sites like PocketFives and maybe PokerTerms as well. I’m all for it so I’m going to be doing my best to get a good working relationship going with DC and krantz.

Instead of credit card roulette, I suggested that we play shaniac’s favorite method for splitting a bill. Shane likes to have everyone write down a guess of the bill total before anyone can look at it. While there’s a huge possibility for an angle shoot with this sort of game if you spring it on people the way I did (ie, just as the bill is being put down), it’s a ton of fun if everyone is honest about it. I barely looked at the menu because Dani did all of the ordering so I’m pretty sure everyone knew I wasn’t scamming them (although I don’t think they would think that about me regardless, hopefully). My friend Eric bought out for 25% of the bill and the three of us wrote down our guesses in our phone. I was so far off it was ridiculous. There were some strategic reasons for my lower guess but, as I thought about them more, they were actually probably wrong. Also, I never really looked at the menu so I never saw the prices — and I did a horrible job of guessing how much stuff we ordered. Plus I didn’t have any idea how much the saki was because that sort of thing is so variant. So I ended up guessing 207 and both krantz and Dani were around 300. The bill was something like 430 I think. Oops. Their guesses were obviously not good but mine was absurdly bad. Given that I’ve played this game very well in the past I don’t know what I was thinking but clearly I was a huge fish at it last Saturday. Great time though — I’m glad we did that instead of a straight flip.

Saturday night was a pre Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of friends. My only close friends at the dinner were the three guys sitting below:

I cut off most of the other people at the table because they probably don’t want to be on a random blog. Those three guys (other than me obv) are my closest friends from high school and mostly everyone else that was there is a friend or relative of the guy in the light sweater — his name is Ben. BTW, those two fingers in front of my face are obv the girl sitting next to me. I don’t have painted fingernails. Also, I am wearing a large native american headdress. Long story how that happened so I won’t get into it.

The dinner and party afterward were both a ton of fun. Ben and Megan (they got married almost 2.5 years ago…) throw a great party… seeing all of the effort they put into it was really astounding. Even with all of the food and drinks that people brought they still had a ton of stuff to do. And they were both great hosts. They have a cool backdoor area with a firepit (how many people have that in the NYC area?) so we were making s’mores and drinking around the fire for awhile. I think we ended up staying until after 2 am but I can’t remember the exact time we left. They do it every year and I’m already looking forward to next year.

On Sunday I didn’t do anything of great significance during the day. At night I headed up to stevesbets’ apartment and we got dinner then watched the football game. I invited Dani to come up to hang out and he was like “I’m always up for an adventure” and he took a cab up from his place. They have a somewhat colorful chat history from a bunch of heads up SNGs that they’ve played on PokerStars. Obviously the chat mainly consists of Steve tilting on Dani but whatever. Steve tends to, by default, dislike (or at least tilt on) any poker player who he hasn’t met. But then he usually ends up thinking that the ones that he actually talks to are pretty cool. Same deal with Dani. Anyway we just watched the Eagles for a bit and then I took off to go back to Eric’s apartment to sleep.

On Monday I headed home to Philly and now I’ve just been here for a little over a day and I’m spending time with family. I go back to Cayman on Saturday but I have a pretty busy schedule in between now and then. Should be fun!

Unfortunately it’s a bit too wide so I needed to shrink it for my blog.

Regarding the whole iPhone versus Android debate, I made the switch to Android earlier this year. I used to use an iPhone 3G and it was just so slow. I loved the hardware and the software options but I couldn’t deal with it taking like 10 seconds to start a call after I pressed call. Everything took forever. So I got a G1 made by HTC. It’s so much better than the iPhone and I can’t imagine going back … even for the 3Gs which I hear is much faster. I love the Android system. And as much as I love Apple hardware and OS X, I can’t stand the closed nature of the App Store and all of their proprietary formats for everything. The closed nature of their mindset really bothers me and I don’t want to support it unless they make a product so compelling that it’s just stupid to miss out on it due to principal (ie, I can be broken :p).

Anyone here also using Android instead of the iPhone? If you’re not, give it a shot. I think you’ll find it’s way faster and pretty comparable on other grounds.

EDIT: Oh yea, forgot to link this: LOL, milf rebels

I’ve supported Firefox for years. As soon as it came out I switched to it from IE. IE7 was so awful and slow I constantly preached Firefox’s benefits to anyone who would listen. The problem with Firefox has alway been two-fold for me. First, it always gets really slow with a bunch of tabs open and it needs to be restarted to get back to being snappy. The second is that it’s freaking awful re: Javascript speed. There might be other problems but those were the ones that always got to me. For the most part I put up with it because it was still better than IE and I love the extensions that are available.

Tonight I think I finally reached my breaking point. I was trying to tag some pictures that I put up on Facebook and it was soooooo slow. Like unbelievably slow. I was clicking on the person and it was like a 5 second delay for it to pull up the list of names. And then it was taking a few seconds each time I typed a letter. Unreal. So I decided to download Google Chrome because I know it’s built for speed, particularly with Javascript. It’s so refreshing to use this browser instead. It’s so fast. Blows Firefox out of the water speedwise. I still want my extensions, particularly Roboform. But there are some ways to run Roboform and Chrome together so I’m going to play around with those tomorrow. If I get that working it’s probably bye-bye Firefox except for occasional use for a specific extension.

Viva Chrome.

I’ve been hitting the work stuff hard lately. I’m working on this awesome click tracking system which will tell me a lot about outgoing (ie, affiliate) clicks on a bunch of our websites. Basically I’ll be able to find out a lot about which countries are doing the best, which operating systems do the best, etc. It will also allow me to do a lot of a/b testing to figure out which sorts of things are converting at the best rates. While I’m doing this for a specific site of ours (a site that 99% of you have never even heard of), it will be applied to a bunch of sites of ours and I think it’s going to make us a lot of additional money in the long-run if we apply it correctly.

I’ve also been working with a new employee of ours on Poker Terms. The site is starting to get some real traction in terms of traffic and in the search engines. The new employee is a long-time P5er who we hired and he moved to Costa Rica. He’s still new to a bunch of the things we do in our company (ie, search engine optimization) but he’s got a lot of poker knowledge. That alone puts him way ahead of the curve for most people who we would consider hiring. Being a good writer, smart, dedicated and poker-savvy is like 95% of being a really valuable employee for us. I think we’re all hoping that he can eventually take over running some of our sites so this is really the beginning of the training process. It’s hard sometimes because I’m in Cayman and he’s in Costa Rica but I think we’re making good progress so I’m excited about that. I’m also excited about what Poker Terms can become over the next six months or so.

Lastly, I found out that we’re going to be doing a major redesign of PocketFives. I’m also going to be more involved at the site than I’ve been over the last few years. I’m excited about this because I think it’ll give me a chance to reconnect with the online community that I’ve gotten more and more disconnected from over time. While I still have tons of friends in poker and poker stuff is my day-to-day life, I don’t have the same connection with the best online poker players in the world. I look forward to getting back into that world and doing some really cool things with P5s.

As part of my job to get back involved at PocketFives, I’ve spent a lot more time reading the boards than I normally do. There are a lot of issues out there that I don’t really feel connected with. Things like people being upset with Bodog aren’t new. That will probably never change because I don’t really think Bodog cares about doing what poker players really want to see. At least not to the same level that sites like Stars, FTP, UB, etc are willing to do to get the poker players in the door and playing. Obviously they do have some decent online poker tournaments but they will never get big until they allow interaccount transfers and get a professional in there to make a real tournament schedule and promote the crap out of it.

Anyway, enough Bodog talk. The point is that some things are old and some things are issues I’ve never really dealt with. Like all of the deposit and bounced check issues that people seem to be having are pretty foreign to me. My heavy poker playing days occurred in the Neteller and Firepay days. And even though I played a bit after the Neteller thing I never had to deal with any of the EWallets or anything like that. I need to really re-familiarize myself with contemporary online poker issues, complaints, players, etc. It’s going to take me some time to get involved again but it’s a challenge that I look forward to.

This weekend, I’m off to Athens, GA to see the Auburn game with yellowsub86 and co. I’m also going to visit with the Bluff guys in Atlanta and to pick up some stuff from the states which I can’t buy in Cayman.