The "Ignore It and Hope It Goes Away" Game: Success Story #34

Several weeks ago I was up in Indiana for some reason... I forget why. Probably to plant some corn or talk about basketball or something. Anyway, I had a rental car from Enterprise that I had put nearly 1,000 miles on in a week. On mile #975, I backed into my friend's mailbox and put a foot-long scratch down the side of the car.

When the kid behind the Enterprise counter offered me a chance to buy insurance on the car, my response was a prompt, "nah... screw that. I'mma gamble." So when I hit the mailbox 97% of the way through the trip, I was in disbelief.

I mean... this wasn't some tiny scratch. It like stripped the paint completely off and put a small dent in the door panel. How have I dealt with this problem? The way most problems should be dealt with: the ol' "ignore it and hope it goes away" approach.

After the incident, I called the Enterprise office and the lady told me that she didn't know how much the damage would cost and that she'd get back to me. That was like six weeks ago and I haven't heard a thing from anyone. The fact that I called her in the first place made me very upset with myself. What was I thinking?!

Tip of the Day: It's not your problem until someone makes it your problem.

As of now, the several hundred dollars of damage I inflicted on that rental car might very well wind up not being my problem. I don't know what's going on at Enterprise and why they aren't all over my ass about this, but they're not, and that's good enough for me.

Before dealing with any problem aside from a lump on your testicle, try ignoring it first. You gotta test the problem out; see what it's made of. Make the problem earn your time. You don't walk up to a random girl in a bar and buy her drink straight away and you don't spend your time solving a problem that might not even be worthy of having you solve it.

New Orleans Wrap-Up

Three New Orleans $5k events, three second-to-final-table finishes. Last night, I technically got a taste of what making a final table there would be like. We combined to one table of 10 players. I was pretty short stacked and moved all-in with Tens. Two guys behind me woke up with Aces and Queens. Not much you can really do there, and I wasn't too disappointed with bubbling the final table; from the time there were 18 players left until I busted, I was really short-stacked. Quite frankly, I had expected to make an exit much sooner than 10th, but everyone flamed out quickly making a final table seem pretty reachable for a few moments.

At the very least, it was a good morale cash. Sometimes when you've been really cold in tournaments for a while, you kinda need a decent finish just to reassure yourself that you haven't "lost it" or anything like that. :)

N'awlins Day One

Just finished up day one of the $5,000 buy-in "Winter Bayou Poker Classic" in New Orleans. Only 102 players came together for this one. Thirty-three of us made it to tomorrow and I'm sitting really healthy with 92,000 (average is about 60,000). This was all thanks to getting Kings all-in preflop against David Fox's Aces and hitting a King on the turn for an 80 big blind pot. I've been on David's side of that and I know what a sick feeling it is. I felt especially bad that it happened against him since he's a really, really nice guy.



Aside from the Kings vs. Aces cooler-turned-suckout, the day went really well. I was at an incredibly soft table all day. You could look around the room and see a lot of young "regulars" with hoodies on. Typically, those guys are pretty good players. My table was filled with the opposite: 40+ amateurs who like to say stuff like, "boy... can you believe I got dealt big slick twice in a row?!?"

They're paying 18 places, so I've got a pretty decent chance to make it 3-for-3 cashing in New Orleans $5k events tomorrow. Kaelaine from PokerPages is here doing live coverage. If anyone wants to follow the day two action, you can do so here.

Idea for Monetizing Facebook

Okay if you don't know much about how the business of running a website works, here's a quick crash course:

You make a site that (presumably) gives people something they want. Whether it's information (PokerTips.org), entertainment (YouTube), or a medium through which to connect to their friends (Facebook), the idea is the same in each situation: get a bunch of people to come to your site where you can expose them to advertisements that you make money off of.

This is why almost all successful sites have advertisements (and why this blog doesn't). Now, some sites make more money per visitor than other sites. In some cases, they make wayyyyy more money. It all depends on the quality of traffic.

Take PokerTips for instance. PokerTips' traffic is worth quite a lot compared to most other websites. People find PokerTips by searching for "poker strategy" or "poker advice". They are looking for is something very precise: poker information. And not only is poker information precise, it is also very profitable. I don't think you need to know much about online poker to know that those rooms make a lot of money, and therefore are willing to pay a nice premium to sites who refer them customers. So as you can see, a visitor to PokerTips is pretty valuable since online poker rooms pay affiliates a lot for sending them a player.

Facebook's traffic is basically the antithesis of "high value traffic". Most of their visits are from returning visitors (which are worth a lot less than new visitors). The visitors are there for a very vague reason (and thus hard to convert into buying specific products or services). And most importantly, the visitors are completely worthless and usually poor (teenagers and college kids whose time is worth next to nothing).

So Facebook has a big problem. Sure, they get a ton of traffic... but all of that traffic is virtually worthless!

Since Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, turned down an offer a year or so ago to sell the site for $1B, he clearly thinks that the site is worth a lot. The problem the Facebook team is facing is: how do they monetize their site to make all that traffic actually worth something?

Here is an idea I had that could help their situation:

Force users to watch a 30 second commercial anytime they click on a thumbnail of one of their female friends on the beach.

You might be thinking, "oh wah wah wah, people are going to leave the site if you make them sit through a commercial."

But why shouldn't you be forced to watch commercials on Facebook?

• You turn on a TV... you get a batch of content interrupted every few minutes by commericals.


• You pick up a magazine... you get pages of content divided by full-page advertisements.


• You go see a movie... you're subjected to ten minutes of previews (and depending on the theater, minutes of Coca-Cola and refreshment advertisements too) before your movie begins.

Big, giant advertisements are everywhere you go... so why shouldn't they be on Facebook too?

And what makes my idea great is that you're putting them right before something people are so willing to look at that they'll actually sit through your advertisement rather than flee the site: young girls in bikinis.

What makes this so great for Facebook is also what helped make Joe Francis so rich: the content is complete free! Hoards of college girls post pictures of themselves wearing their bikini at the beach every day! And everytime I become new friends with a cute girl, I immediately go to her photos and scroll through until I inevitably stumble upon her default bikini photo. There has never been an instance where I wanted to see a girl's bikini photo and yet she hadn't uploaded one. They all upload one. Just like getting drunk at a frat party, or majoring in something worthless... it's standard college girl behavior.

And I can tell you that almost all guys look at their female Facebook friends' bikini photos. It's natural male curiosity. "Hmm... I wonder what [dumb blonde college girl] looks like at the beach... let's find out!"

So why shouldn't Facebook subject me to an ad before showing me the bikini photo? I mean... I already spent four minutes scrolling through page after page of pictures of her making a slutty pose with her girlfriends at the club, kissing some random douchebag on the cheek, and standing next to the local monuments around wherever Daddy sent her on study abroad all so I could get to the pictures of her in a bikini! Certainly I'm not about to turn around after making it this far all because of some silly 30 second commercial!

This would be so easy for Facebook to implement too. When girls upload photos to their Facebook, there's a little box they check when it's a "Bikini Photo". Then you pay someone in China twenty cents an hour to go through and verify that it is, indeed, a bikini photo. Pictures that have been tagged as bikini photos are accompanied by a short commercial for anyone who clicks on them.

You can give the girls... I dunno... maybe a little star by their profile if they tag a bikini photo of themselves. Or glitter. College girls definitely like stars and glitter I think. Or maybe that's strippers... I dunno the line gets blurrier every day.

Either way, here's your flow chart on how to get photos tagged as bikini photos:



C'mon Facebook... if you really think your site is worth billions... get your act together and start exposing me to commercials before letting me see the only worthwhile content on your site!

My cut is a very reasonable 10% of revenues made off of commercials shown before bikini photos. Email me and we'll set up a direct deposit.

Getting Back Out There

I could probably write a nice little book titled "How I Went from Poor to Rich and Back to Poor Again All In Six Months", but I suppose that a.) my ceiling was a pretty meager definition of "rich" and b.) plenty of people could write a book with that title given what's happened to the economy this year.

Instead of a book, I think I'll just maintain a mediocre blog that gets updated about once a week!

Upcoming Travels

This Friday, I'm flying up to Chicago, renting a car, and driving up to my half-sister's in Green Bay. We're having a little early Christmas gathering that some other members of my family, including my parents and my sister that lives in Phoenix, will be attending. On Sunday, a few of us are going to the Packers vs. Texans game. I've never been to Lambeau Field before. Right now, the temperature is calling for a high of 27 that day. Hopefully Grandma bought me a sweater for Christmas.

Directly after the game I'm driving back to O'Hare and catching a late-evening flight to New Orleans. The $5k buy-in "Bayou Winter Classic" starts at noon on Monday. In the only two $5k events I've played in New Orleans, I finished 18th and 15th in fields of ~300. There's something about tournaments in New Orleans where everything just seems to click for me. I'm ready for a final table there.

Conversion to WordPress

I'm in the process of converting this blog to WordPress. If you don't know much about blogging, WordPress is basically a more versatile blogging software than Blogger, which is what I currently use. It's essentially fully customizable whereas you're kind of limited with what you can do with Blogger. Anyway, the conversion kind of hit a bump in the road since I'm having a hard time importing all of the entries in this Blogger blog over to WordPress. But I'm hopeful that by the new year, this blog will be a little better.

Wanna Bet on Me?

My cash flow is better than ever thanks to the sell website and poker businesses I run/work for. However, my liquid assets have taken a huge hit lately (whose haven't, right?!) Anyway, if anyone is interested in backing me for the Sunday online stuff and some $1-$5k buy-in live, regional stuff that pops up from time to time, get in touch with me. My ROI both live and online has been solidly in the black this year, and I can provide you with all the necessary data that supports that claim.

I'll make a little "refer a backer" offer to any of my lesser-wealthy readers. If you're able to put me in contact with the right person, I'll throw you a nice little Christmas present for making the connection happen. Let's just say I know the way to most lazy, unambitious poker players' hearts. ;)