Nat Arem's Blog

My friend Eric came out to Las Vegas from Monday midday until Wednesday night. His friend Mordy was out here on assignment for ESPN The Magazine. I don’t know if I’m supposed to publish the topic of Mordy’s article but I’m pretty sure that I can say that it’s about poker. So I hung out with them two of them a bunch in the early part of this week. On Tuesday we went up to the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop on Las Vegas Blvd. It’s the pawn shop that is featured on History’s Pawn Stars. Pretty cool to go see it and see what they had in stock. It’s amazing how different it looks in person. I’d actually imagined a much bigger store. I think the coolest items they had there were some NFL and NBA championship rings. Unfortunately they were asking 100k for them so I don’t think I would have been able to negotiate a price that I was willing to pay.

After the pawn shop we looked up a gun range for us to go shooting at. We found a place called Las Vegas Gun Range and all of the reviews said that it was a shitty gun range for regulars and that they just catered to tourists. In other words, perfect for us. None of us had much experience with guns at all. I’d shot an M16 in Israel when I was 16. I actually learned to disassemble and reassemble it too but that was so long ago I’d actually forgot pretty much everything I’d learned about it 11 years ago. So we ended up at this place:

That’s Eric on the left and Mordy on the right. We ended up going with a few different packages. Eric opted to just shoot the handgun while Mordy and I each picked handgun/machine gun options. I also got a t-shirt which I got to shoot up with the handgun. Here I am shooting the machine gun (Eric actually managed to get a shot with the flash coming out of the barrel or whatever it’s called):

That was a cool experience. One downside to being lefty is that the shells come flying out of the right side of the gun and a few of them hit me in the face. I wonder if I can get a lefty gun next time. Anyway, next was the handguns. Here’s a picture I took of Eric shooting the handgun.

Of the three of us, Eric was probably the best. He took aiming pretty seriously compared to Mordy and I. I also have this video of me shooting the handgun at the t-shirt. I didn’t take the first clip very seriously but the second one I actually tried to aim a bit. It’s amazing what aiming will do for shooting accuracy.

Anywho, good experience. I’ll definitely do it again and try to improve my accuracy next time. After Eric and Mordy left on Wednesday I went bowling with Ozzy at Sunset Station. They have a huge bowling alley and it’s amazingly cheap. We bet $20 on the first game. It was not close at all, he was having a lot of trouble finding the middle of the lane for most of the night. He started to get hot the last few frames of the second game (understandably he called off the bet on the second game) but it was way too late. Fun game, I’d like to go back sometime with a bunch of people. Here’s a pic of Ozzy bowling:

After I dropped him off at the Bellagio I went home to play around on my new MacBook Pro. While Eric was here I upgraded to the new Core i7 2.66GHz 15″ MacBook Pro. I also upgraded the RAM to 8GB and got the antiglare high res screen. It’s a very high end laptop but I spend so much time on the computer it’s worth it in my opinion. Eric bought my old 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 15″ MacBook Pro as he was looking to pick up a new laptop and it is still a great computer.

I guess the last thing to talk about is the WPT Championship. I have been down there a few of the days this week and I have to say it’s great to see a lot of old friends here. I have been pretty out-of-touch while living in Costa Rica and Cayman and I’m glad to be back in Vegas. Last night I went to dinner with a bunch of people (ike, his girlfriend, aaronbeen, RandALLin, Ozzy, mastrblastr/Scott Seiver, etc). I haven’t done stuff like that in a few years so I’m looking forward to a lot of that over the next few months during WSOP time and such.

Last night I went to the Arizona Diamondbacks versus San Diego Padres game in downtown San Diego. I know that an April 16th baseball game between two teams that will not make the playoffs is not exactly an exciting proposition but I was in town briefly and I have some family in the area that I wanted to visit with if possible. So we went and it was actually pretty cool. That was the first time that I’d been to Petco Park. It’s located right in downtown San Diego and it has a really cool area around it. Then it ended with a walk-off game winning home run after a late-game rally from the Padres. The Padres were pretty blah for the first two-thirds of the game and it was, frankly, really boring. But the end made up for it. I took a bunch of pictures so I’m putting up a selection of them. Some of them are kind of blurry but I was taking these with a point-and-shoot with pretty limited ability to control the picture… so given that qualifier I think they turned out pretty well.

Petco Park:

Western Metal Supply Co. building out in left field:

Everth Cabrera bunting:

Adam Russell (I think), Padres pitcher:

Bob Howry (I think), Diamondbacks pitcher:

Juan Gutierrez, Diamondbacks pitcher:

Chase Headley taking a cut in the at-bat where he hit the game-winning home run:

Chase Headley game-winning walk-off home run in the bottom of the 9th:

Padres celebrating after the walk-off home run:

My friend Ozzy is currently in town to play the Bellagio events and to play some live cash games. Last night I went down to the Bellagio with my business partner and his wife to get some dinner with Ozzy. We went to Jasmine which is the Chinese restaurant at the Bellagio. Very nice place and it has a great view of the pool/fountains. We saw a few famous people there. Celene Dion’s husband René Angélil was there. Although I didn’t see Celene Dion there. I’ve seen him at a bunch of poker events before so I recognized him. Also, Dana White was there. He’s a huge guy. Not tall but really wide.

Anyway, dinner was good. It’s always fun to catch up with Ozzy. Even though he’s one of my oldest/best poker friends we don’t hang out in person too often because we haven’t lived near each other in awhile. We mainly talked about poker because my business partner is a casual poker player but he’s also really interested in getting better. No better person to talk to than someone like Ozzy if you want to improve your game in the middle limit cash games because Ozzy absolutely crushes them.

After leaving the Bellagio we turned right onto Las Vegas Blvd and we were driving down to Tropicana to get on I-15. Just after City Center we were totally stopped in traffic when we got rear-ended by an idiotic limo driver. It wasn’t like we stopped suddenly at all. We were at a dead standstill for something like 3-5 seconds before he hit us. And when we came to a stop it was a slow cruise to a stop, nothing fast. The guy just wasn’t paying attention. My business partner tilted out of his mind when it happened because it is a brand new car (about 1 week old) and he’s kind of OCD about avoiding dents and dings on his cars. So you can imagine the tilt when someone who is supposedly a professional driver rear ends him for no reason other than total incompetence. We ended up sitting on the strip for a little while to wait for the police. The other driver didn’t have any of his paperwork but eventually his boss showed up and brought the information. It was just a huge annoyance. And now Mike has to go get his bumper fixed and the Carfax on his car is probably going to list an accident. Which devalues it a bunch. Pretty gross situation for him.

The actual accident was kind of weird. That’s the first time I’ve ever been in a car accident of any kind. I didn’t even realize what happened at first, it probably took me a few seconds after it happened to realize why the car had just jumped forward. It kind of felt like Mike had released the brakes and then slammed on them really hard. I know that whiplash is a definite concern even for a seemingly minor accident so I’m being mindful of how my neck feels. Thus far it feels fine. I think I was lucky that I basically had my head on the headrest at the time. The other people in the car were complaining a bit about neck pain last night so hopefully they feel better soon. We shall see.

I wasn’t able to discuss this previously but I just recently moved to Las Vegas.  I relocated here with my business partner Mike and his wife.  It was a pretty crazy last-minute decision.  About a month ago I had no idea I was moving and as recently as a few weeks ago I didn’t even know where I was moving to.  But once we decided to move, we sold stuff in Cayman in a matter of a few days and got on a plane to Las Vegas.  We shipped a whole bunch of boxes and we’re renting a house in Henderson while we search for office space.  Once we finalize office space I’ll get a more permanent place to live.

I bought a car last week also.  I ended up going with a 335i coupe because I wanted a stick shift and it was the best overall option in the area.  I was basically debating between a 335i coupe and a G37 6MT (similar to what I had in Atlanta a few years back).  Here’s a picture of the car:

We still have our office in Costa Rica and we plan on keeping it there. We’re actually about to move office spaces down there as well. But we want to hire some US-based people and this seemed like the best overall way for us to accomplish our long-term goals. I don’t think any of us are so sure how the hiring process will go but we shall see.

While I’m sad to leave Cayman after only a year, there is a part of me that feels really happy to be back in the states. There are upsides and downsides to everywhere but some of the upsides to the US just can’t be duplicated elsewhere. Cayman was ridiculously expensive and moving here has cut my monthly living expenses by about $3k. Maybe even more. And Costa Rica was cool in some ways but the infrastructure there is just incredibly tilting in a bunch of ways. The US (and especially LV) offers a pretty good combination of high quality of living, low cost of living, great entertainment options, etc. So overall I’m happy about the move although a part of me would have been really excited to stay in Cayman for another year or two.

Other than car buying and office hunting I haven’t done too much since I flew in to LV last week. I did go down to the Wynn to meet up with my high-school friend Raphael who was in town for a long weekend. The two of us went to Naked Fish for sushi and I definitely recommend that place. Reasonably priced and very good sushi. Last night I went to Nobu at Hard Rock which was a lot less reasonably priced but very good nonetheless. It’s a good place for me to go every once in awhile but I don’t think it’s worth paying for it on a regular basis. For the stuff I got (cut rolls, nigiri, etc) I couldn’t tell the difference between Nobu and Naked Fish except that one was in a nice casino and one was in a strip mall a few miles off the strip.