My friend Tomas has too much money. So much money, in fact, he has decided to try his luck at the stock market. Even though doing exactly that is one of the things on The ListTM1, I honestly believe that no one really knows how the stock market works and that the only way to make big money is through inside trading.
Having said that, I’m contradicting myself; we all know how the stock market works: Through inside trading. Since I doubt that Tomas has any connections that will allow him to trade like that and the fact that he is an honest man, I find it likely that any profit that he makes has to be credited mostly to luck and not so much to knowledge. No offence to him, but the stock market is unpredictable and run by people with knowledge they are not supposed to have.
Reading through the above paragraph I realise that I sound like a conspiracy freak, but y’all know that I’m right.
That didn’t really help, did it?
Anyway. To prove my point to him, I proposed a bet: I will earn more money than him during the month of May this year playing Texas Hold ‘Em poker online than he would make on his stock market speculations in the same month.
Since my opponent has picked up and read quite a few books about the stock market he now has a fairly good theoretical background before May. So it’s only fair and square that I should be allowed to do the same. To be honest, Texas Hold ‘Em theory is not the most exciting subject I read, so I decided to skip most of it and head straight to “learning by doing”.
For no particular reason, I decided to try PokerStars and Fullt Tilt Poker. My only real requirement was that whatever provider I decided to go with had a Mac client available for download. They both had and I must say that even though the graphics might be a bit different, the two applications are very similar in every other aspect. I guess you can’t really present and play Texas Hold ‘Em in that many different ways, so the bottom line is that it doesn’t really matter what provider you chose to use.
In the end I settled with PokerStars. Right now I’m only playing with Play Money, credits you get for free when you create an account. They can’t be converted to real money, but for me it’s good to have something to play around with before I start to play for cash. As it looks right now, though, it’s very likely Tomas will win the bet no matter how much money he earns, because my poker skills are rather crappy.
While we’re on the subject of The List: Having just read through it, I realised that I actually did something last year that enables me to remove another item off the list. More about that later. Also, I guess it’s time to make a revised version of The List; there are a few things on it that I’ll never do. ↩︎
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KristofferIt looks like you're using Google's Chrome browser, which records everything you do on the internet. Personally identifiable and sensitive information about you is then sold to the highest bidder, making you a part of surveillance capitalism.
The Contra Chrome comic explains why this is bad, and why you should use another browser.
