On New Cars and the 2012 World Series of Poker

Last month, I wrote a blog post regarding my deciding whether to trade in (or privately sell) my three-year-old Honda Civic for a newer, nicer car.  It started a great deal of what I would call spirited debate and opinion; I received many well thought out opinions on either side of the argument.  I would say that those who took the time to present an opinion were equally divided with regard to whether they felt I should take the leap, or stick with the car that I have.

Once I realized what a nerve the argument struck with my friends and family, I realized this was an important decision.  I decided at that point to take some time (about a month) to think about it.  No decision that expensive should be entered into lightly and I really wanted to make sure that, whatever I ended up deciding, I could look back and say to my future self that I took the time to think it over.  In the meanwhile, I priced out various cars and determined the impact that upgrading would have on my monthly budget.  Here's what I found out:

Currently I spend about $300 in an average month (not counting oil changes or other routine maintenance) on driving - that's fuel and insurance combined, and I drive 240 miles a week for work alone.  So all things considered, I don't spend a great deal of money on this expense, it's reasonable to see.  Upgrading my car would add an approximate $250 monthly for the car payment alone.  I would be charged an additional $30-40 per month for insurance, depending on the model I selected (luxury cars are more likely to crash) and with decreased fuel economy and the need to switch from regular to premium fuel, you could also tack another $40-$60 per month onto the budget for gasoline.

So I would be increasing my monthly car expenditure from $300 to $650, which doesn't really appeal to me at all.  But that's just the dollars and cents of it.  Increasingly in my conversations with people who were on the "Buy & Hold" side of the argument, they focused on what else I could be doing with the cash I'd be saving by keeping the Civic.  This, in particular, resonated with me because we have a honeymoon coming up that we haven't even started planning yet (vacations frighten us) and I also think that it's important to travel while the traveling is good.

All of this leads me to My Decision: for the time being, I'll be keeping my low-cost, low-maintenance Honda Civic.  (Certainly where possible I will continue to save for the new car.)  But in 2012, I will be taking my talents to Sin City - Las Vegas, Nevada, to participate in that year's World Series of Poker.

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Many professional poker players say they grew up in families that played cards constantly.  I played enough growing up to know what the suits were, and that Aces were better than Kings in most games, but when the Internet Poker Boom hit, and when an unassuming accountant named Chris Moneymaker won $2,500,000 for finishing first in the 2003 WSOP main event, I had absolutely no clue what Texas Hold 'Em was.  Shortly thereafter I read a magazine article about the event, and I was instantly hooked on poker.  I needed to understand what the craze was about.  It seemed to suit me perfectly.

I started to play online for real money in 2005, on a now-defunct poker site from Australia called Noble Poker.  Having read only one book on tournament poker, Harrington on Hold 'Em Volume 1, and having the good sense to know only to play good hands against aggressive players, I cleaned up.  I'd sometimes show up at my summer internship on Monday mornings saying things like "I turned last week's paycheck into $2,700 over the weekend" just by gambling online.  The online poker pool back then was filled with fish, and with (charitably speaking) only half of the poker skills I currently hold now, I was a giant freaking shark.  I had some upswings and some downswings that summer, but ended up pocketing a couple grand that was very helpful spending money during my upcoming senior year of college.

Over the following six years, I played a considerable amount of Hold 'Em, and at present I can safely say that I'm talented enough that if I can be patient, prudent, and obtain a better-than-average amount of luck, I can play a WSOP event in the game and make the money*.  (NOTE: Some of you may not know what making the money is, so I should explain a little bit about basic poker tournament structure here.  Unlike in a cash game, where players bet chips that represent actual dollars, poker tournaments are paid for with a flat fee, known as a buy-in, for which you receive in return a fixed amount of tournament chips.  About eighty percent of the players who buy into any poker tournament will lose their tournament chips and will not make any money for it, but the top twenty or so percent of finishers will survive long enough to earn the reward - making the money.  Making the money is a nice first goal, especially when you think you might be outclassed by the caliber of players in a given tournament, but because payouts increase exponentially toward the very top finishers, the actual goal is survival and dominance to the very end.) 

It's story time.  In the summer of 2009, I was mired in a huge poker playing slump when I drove to the Borgata in Atlantic City to play in a $100 buy-in tournament that guaranteed at least $10,000 in total payouts.  (For whatever it's worth, my slump actually lasted into 2010, but this was a highlight amidst a very long run of sub-par poker play on my end.)  That particular night, however, I ground it out for hours, with my self-preservation reflex in full control.  I played solid, small-ball poker throughout most of the tournament, until I became hot at exactly the right time - when about fifty players were left, out of the original 350-plus - accumulating piles and piles of chips as we entered the money.  With only thirteen players left at 2 AM the following day, those of us still alive in the tournament elected to stop playing and divide the money amongst ourselves (the chop), and I took home a nice payday of $3,000 for my troubles.

I think back to this tournament a ton, because (a) it reminds me that, if I could play that well when I was in a huge rut, I could conceivably play much better given that I'm playing much much better poker on average right now; and (b) on the other side of the coin, it reminds me that lots of people play these tournaments without giving the game nearly the amount of thought and rigor that I do, and that should in the long run give me an advantage.  Poker is very much a game played within the margins - by that, I mean that the difference between great play and terrible play is very slim and can only be detected over a long series of games - and on Any Given Sunday, I could be able to beat even a group of players more talented than I.

(If you've made it this far, click the link below, watch the video, and get ready to run through a goddamned brick wall.)

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Ahem... the above video leads me to my next point.  My life philosophy is dominated by thoughts of my own mortality.  We're all alive for a short and finite amount of time, and playing in a World Series of Poker tournament event will cross a crucial item off my bucket list.  Now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't play in the $10,000 buy in main event because it's too expensive, and also it's the most popular event by far and over the years it's turned into a lottery.

I wouldn't want to play for those high stakes right now unless I were certain I had a potential advantage, and in the main event any advantages are diluted by the sheer number of people who sign up to play the damned thing.  My likely destination would be one of the many $1,500 buy in events that precede the main event.  Hopefully other poker playing friends of mine would choose to join me for this tournament, just to say they played in the real deal.  Who knows, maybe one or two of us would get lucky.

Realistically, the odds are against me winning a great deal of money on this excursion.  I could lose all of my chips in the first 30 minutes of the tournament, after wagering those chips with the best hand - that's just how the game of poker works.  But I will practice over the next twelve months to become the best poker player I can be, so that win or lose, I can say I put every ounce of effort I had into the tournament. 

Intelligently, the folks who run the WSOP have over the past few years started a traveling "circuit" of events around the country.  These are generally smaller-scale versions of the WSOP itself, with equally modest (respectively speaking) fees for entering the events.  I'm aware that playing in the WSOP in Las Vegas, I would be playing a higher caliber of player than in regularly scheduled tournaments in Atlantic City.  Thusly, it's important that I "train" for next summer by exposing myself to a few tournaments over the next year that have slightly higher buy-ins than I am currently used to.  As such, my training begins in earnest this December, at the WSOP circuit event in Harrah's in Atlantic City, New Jersey. 

Let's shuffle up and deal...

Grading Recent Commercials, Part V: The Game Within The Game

I'm bringing back one of my favorite blog post themes after a fairly long hiatus, because lots of commercials these days deserve to be analyzed, criticized, and demonized (that's a little Walt "Clyde" Frazier, for y'all) and I'm a little tired of blogging about serious topics like homeownership.  I'll get back to that theme later this week, but I finally have some time to watch terrible TV and of course I also paid attention to the advertisements.  So without further ado... boys, let's get to it (to it)...

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Commercial #1: Another Case of Playing Dumbly to Gender

As someone who very strongly feels that the country is transitioning toward a post-gender mentality (by this I mean that fewer and fewer topics, decisions, and emotions are "only for women" or "only for men"), I am routinely dismayed when commercials exist for products that strike me as intuitively gender-neutral, but are pitched in such a gender-specific way that my fiancee and I can both watch the commercial and get pissed off for completely different reasons.

I am going to ignore the feminist argument with regard to this sausage commercial, because I'm not here to make the feminist argument (it's ripe for the taking, though). I am here, however, to argue that making a commercial like this is retarded, business-wise.  Imagine that you are tasked with the responsibility to pitch sausage.  Sausage is so easy to sell, it's almost as easy as bacon.  It's delicious, salty, and applies to lots of recipes.  Hell, I'm eating sausage right now, as I type this.

Chicken sausage (the product being marketed here) is probably easier to sell than regular sausage, because many people like to eat healthy foods that remind them of not-so-healthy food.  Now, both men and women like sausage - in fact, if you look at men who live alone, I bet almost all of them eat sausage.  So the first problem here is that focusing so much on the woman is counterproductive and limiting.

Above and beyond this, the second problem with the ad is that it's confusing.  What's the "get" here?  Is it the patronizing servitude of the wife (to be honest, I still can't tell whether it's ironic or not)?  Is it the bizarre dance lesson interlude, which makes absolutely no sense because only the woman is dancing and she is wearing 1980's style fitness clothing?  Is the commercial designed for women to like it, or men, or both, or neither?

I seriously cannot tell whether the intent of this ad is "Check us out, we're quirky and unique, you'll love our products" or instead whether they're trying to pull a Sterling Cooper ad circa 1961 with a basket of kisses or some shit.  Did anyone run this commercial through a focus group, and if so, why didn't they ask people if they were confused by the commercial?  Because I can't understand what's going on here, and - given that I work in market research - if I can't understand what's going on, does anyone else?

I think the problem is that too much is going on here.  Commonly when I watch a commercial for something that isn't "designed" for me, I'm able to at least rationalize that someone out there exists for whom this commercial is relevant.  (You can call this the Sarah Palin effect, but for commercials, if you'd like.)  But chicken sausage is something I'd buy, and I'm not sure, in the case of the above commercial, that anyone in the world (or, at least anyone I know) could find it even remotely tolerable.

Grade: F


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Commercial #2: A Matter of Timing

Previously I tore apart a commercial that did too much.  Sometimes a commercial can err on the side of doing too little - witness the above commercial for Worx energy drink.  (Oddly enough, another very similar product, 5-Hour Energy, has the exact same problem I'm about to describe in its own commercials, which makes me wonder whether the two products are owned by the same company.)

Time is obviously a very limited entity in a 30- or 40-second commercial, so to maximize the short amount of time you have, timing is important.  Most commercials get right to the action, with barely a second of silent context (if that) before the dialogue begins.  This commercial is, obviously, quite different.  It's 40 seconds long and only has four scenes - each showing a person who needs an energy boost explaining why the product "Worx" for them.

It's not ineffective from a content perspective, but there is at least two seconds after each cut before the individual starts to speak.  Silence in a commercial these days is rare - we watch TV in an era where it's perfectly appropriate for an actress to scream at the top of their lungs for ten seconds in the middle of a cell phone commercial - but all of these seconds of silence in the middle cost the Worx company money.  People viewing the ad will get distracted, because after all, they aren't paying attention in the first place (unless they're crazy, like me), and they don't need that much context to get the point.  Or, alternatively, Worx could have gotten rid of the long pauses between cuts and saved about ten seconds (and about 25% of their advertising budget, if my math is correct).

Interestingly enough, the actors in the commercials are fairly low key.  I know a few people who use these products, and they're all pretty amped up people in the first place.  I'm surprised by the casting decision, but ultimately not that surprised since a commercial with such glaring problems in the first place had to have been designed cheaply, and in house.

Grade: D

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Commercial #3: Brainssssssssssssss....

Don't get me wrong.  It's not that I feel zany commercials can't work... if the timing is appropriate and the content is funny, zaniness can work very well.  I submit for the approval of the Midnight Society the above commercial, for the Toshiba Satellite laptop computer.  In it, an engineer/decision maker decides that the laptop needs to have a tough casing just in case a future broken laptop leads to a national power blackout and subsequent zombie apocalypse.

Students of zombie apocalypses know very well that drinking spoiled milk does not directly lead to the spread of the virus Solanum (which we all know is scientifically proven to transmit a hunger for brains).  However, this doesn't really matter because zombies are awesome, and also zombies these days are pretty mainstream.  (Hell, the CDC recently posted a legitimate zombie apocalypse scenario online - officially - as a satiric play to get people interested in disaster preparedness.)  It's about time that someone in Ad Kingdom capitalized on this in a unique and interesting way.

The point of any advertisement should be to present an engaging, relevant message that is unique and believable.  You'll win engaging points if your commercial is hilarious, and this commercial is also daring (I mean, look at the zombie still frame above, it's a little disheartening to look at).  But also, it's not hard to get the point of the commercial, and the message is quite clear - Toshiba thinks of everything.  In my opinion this commercial excels, due to its attention grabbing nature, comical and engaging content, and excellent timing.

Grade: A