Nat Arem's Blog

Friday was not the most fun day I’ve had. I woke up to my business partner IMing me with the addresses of AP and FTP asking me if what he was seeing was real. I also got some IMs asking me if it was some sort of hack. After taking about 5 minutes to get out of my morning stupor, I began to realize what was going on. I can’t say that I was surprised by what I saw but I was certainly in a bit of shock. Of all the hits poker has taken from the UIGEA to Party leaving the US to NETELLER to ePassporte to Prima skins to whatever, this is by far the biggest. Getting all of these companies to leave the US is simply stunning. I know I’m just repeating the obvious though.

So what do I think will happen from here? I don’t think much except maybe some random small networks taking relatively unsuccessful shots at the US market. I think there’s a decent chance that we’ll see some intrastate online gaming attempts but I don’t even think those are going to work out. Even the state lotteries in New Hampshire and North Dakota have had significant troubles with credit card processing because they get coded as internet gambling and subsequently blocked by Visa/Mastercard. I’m not even sure the DOJ wouldn’t pressure a state into backing out of any attempts to set up an intrastate poker network. In my mind, there is no chance in the near future of a federal solution that is at all recognizable as actual online poker. I’d love to say that having Zynga, Caesar’s, Wynn, etc on our side would be a big help but I just don’t see it happening. As I’ve said in the past, there is way too much friction in the political community for that to work out. I think our best hope is for a state solution to come out and then just to wait for gradual acceptance of the idea of legal/regulated online gaming as people watch the rules/procedures evolve over time. Then at some point in the far future (read: years, probably a number of them), I can see a federal attempt being made although who knows how many states would be involved in bigger networks. Either way, I am a pessimist.

In terms of my personal future in poker, I’m leaning towards getting out of this business for the time being. I have an employment contract that currently runs out early next year. While I think it’s possible my contract will be extended, there is a decent likelihood that I will either be seeking employment, looking to start up a non-poker business with some friends or looking to start up something on my own. I’ve actually purchased a couple of premium domain names recently (one being grocerystores.com) that I’d like to launch and develop so maybe I will work on those. Oddly enough, I actually bought grocerystores.com the day before Black Friday and I was thinking “hrmm, I don’t know if this is smart to buy this when I won’t have much time to work on it.” Weird timing. All that being said, it’s sad to think of leaving poker because I’ve really enjoyed this roughly six year run that I’ve had in the poker world. But, unfortunately, online poker with a US focus just doesn’t seem like all that great of a place to be these days. I will obviously finish out my contract and re-evaluate around the end of this year or so. Should poker ever come back in a regulated fashion in the US, I could easily see myself jumping back into the fray.

I hope everyone gets paid by Stars, FTP and AP/UB. It would be awful for many reasons if one (or more than one) of those sites ends up not paying. Hopefully it will be like the NETELLER thing and it’ll just be a delay followed by eventual payment.

Lastly, sorry to everyone who effectively lost their job (at least temporarily) last Friday. I hope it works out for all of you, best of luck.

I’ve been thinking about do this for a long time but I finally decided to switch my laptop hard drive to an SSD, or solid state drive. I swung by my local Fry’s here in Las Vegas (well, the only Fry’s in Las Vegas), picked up a 120gb Corsair F120 and a computer screwdriver. Here are the install pictures (a bunch are kinda screwed up because the stupid image resizer I used is an awful POS program… photoshop being installed again ASAP):

The hard drive, sorry the pic is a bit blurry:

The first few screws off of the bottom of my MacBook Pro:

All of the screws out, lifting up the bottom cover of the MacBook Pro. The hard drive is in the upper right:

This is the old hard drive still attached. I just took a few screws out to get to it. You can see that it has some small screws sticking out of it which it uses to bracket itself in. There are four of these total and they needed to be moved to the new hard drive:

Here is the new hard drive with the bracketing screws moved over. The new hard drive isn’t plugged into the computer yet though:

Here’s the new hard drive all plugged in and situated properly in the computer. Now, just to put the bottom back on the computer:

Here I am reinstalling OSX. I could have imaged my old hard drive and brought the image over but I was kind of hankering for a fresh install anyway so I went with that. Once I put the old hard drive in as a second drive (see below), I will just be able to boot into either one if I really want to use something on my old install.

You might not be able to see this but that is the hard drive showing up in the fresh install. It says Corsair etc etc. I would edit it correctly but this is one downside of not having photoshop installed on my fresh install of OSX. Sigh.

Anyway, the next step is to use an OWC Data Doubler to use my optical drive area as a spot for a second hard drive. Obviously I need more storage room than 120gb so in the long run I need another drive for things like big media files. And then I can get a USB enclosure for my optical drive and just use it on the rare occasion that I actually use the optical drive. I pretty much never use it except for OSX reinstalls which I’ve done exactly twice (including this time) in a year. Seems pointless to have that big optical drive in there all the time. I actually think I might save some weight too with the hard drive swap into that spot but I’m not sure about that.

Also, I’ve gotten pretty fed up with overzealous privacy settings on facebook. I blogged about this in the past but it’s gotten even worse with people turning off their wall from friends being able to post, completely hiding their wall, etc. I’m taking a “Brazil Visa” approach to this situation (ie, impose the same requirements that others impose — and letting the others determine those requirements). Anyone I come across on facebook with privacy settings defeating the purpose of facebook is going on my Limited Profile list which is ridiculously limited as well (ie, no wall, no tagged pics, etc). I’m also putting people on my Limited Profile who I’ve never heard of or even met (I get some random facebook adds) but that’s because I have no idea who they are. I don’t see this as hypocritical because I don’t add anyone on facebook unless I’ve met them in real life. I’m happy to take anyone who I’ve met in real life off of that list. I don’t know why this bothers me but I know that it bothers me, especially given the information level skew that is going on in a lot of cases. So, yea, new policy is in effect.

About 2.5 months ago I posted about a pullup challenge that I was doing. I did keep it up for a little while but then it got broken up with a few trips here and there blah blah etc. I didn’t do it exactly as planned but, I have been doing a lot of pullups every day that I’m home. A lot more than I used to do. I would do a lot of days where I would do like 150+ pullups. I’ve gotten way better with my max set being 16 pullups and I think I could do 17 if I really wanted it bad enough. And these are true dead hang pullups, not some shortened range-of-motion hyperturbo pullups that some people do. If I did those, I could definitely do 20+. I’m also not using any kipping on sets with those numbers although I recognize that there is a benefit to doing kipping pullups as well — it just isn’t fair to compare kipping pullup numbers to dead-hang pullup numbers for obvious reasons.

So anyway, earlier this week, my friend John Broz (who is an excellent Olympic weightlifting coach, his youtube channel BROZKNOWS is here) helped me out by using some of my old J-Cups for my squat stand to make a pullup bar. J-Cups are the little hook that you put a barbell onto when doing something like a squat or a shoulder press. I had extra ones because the company that made my squat stand actually recalled the old J-Cups and they’d recently sent me new ones. So even though they were recalled, John was able to reinforce the weld and make them safe to use for this purpose. So these are the parts for the pullup bar:

The J-Cups are the metal that is painted black and they both have square tubing welded onto them. They fit into the squat stand itself. And the crossbar has some smaller square tubing which sits inside of the upright square tubing.

Anyway, since John brought that over on Tuesday, I’ve been having some fun with it. Today I received my Harbinger weight belt (usually known as a dip belt, although I’m not using it for dips). It turns out that I can do about a +80lb weighted pullup and similar for a chinup. I tried to go heavier but it wasn’t happening with the pullup. I think all of the pullups that I’ve done over the last day or two plus my hands being kinda sweaty on the bare metal basically did me in on the attempt at 85lbs. I know that I can do it. Either way, here are the chinup and pullup vids with 80lbs on me.

Pullup:

Chinup:

I don’t have any specific goal with regards to weighted pullups but I can do +47lbs (ie, with a 20kg plate) for five reps so I’d just generally like to keep moving up across a bunch of rep schemes. In other words, make my 1 rep max go up, my 5 rep max go up, my 10 rep max go up, etc. And I’ll just see where I end up. It’s awesome having this attachment for the squat stand!