Double Blind

Since Matt was back in Vancouver for the weekend (and I had no chance of getting back) and those guys were most likely playing poker, I decided to join up with my brother who was taking a vacation in Las Vegas for the weekend. Of course in Vegas, that means poker as well.

This time around, I got a Buick Lacrosse to drive from LA to Vegas. The car is pretty good, handles decently well, has satellite radio (which I will have to write about in a future article) and a sunroof (which wasn’t needed due to the fact it never got above 15 degrees celsius). The most interesting feature of the car was that you can get readouts of the fuel economy of the vehicle while you are driving – generally speaking on the freeway, you get 32 miles per gallon at 70 miles per hour, and about 29 miles per gallon at 80 miles per hour.

Getting out of LA in Friday evening is hell, even at 7:00pm when I decided to head out. The eastbound traffic is very densely packed and there is a lot of movement both ways in the north-south freeways. The most brutal part is when you travel through CA-57 north when it intersects (and shares the road with) CA-60. CA-57 is 5 lanes of traffic, but the merge into the other freeway is two lanes in a very retarded design. They’re correcting this problem, but it’ll probably be another two years before that project is complete. Also not helping is that in some parts of the drive out of the city, the rain came down pretty intensely, which had the effect of slowing down people further. Once you cross the I-215/I-15 interchange north, it becomes smooth sailing since you get four lanes of traffic to allow most of the trucks to climb 4000 feet to pass through the mountain range. Once clearing through there, I made it to Las Vegas about 15 minutes past midnight.

I had booked a hotel room at the Plaza in downtown Las Vegas. Unfortunately I wanted to attend the 11:59pm poker tournament, so I was late for that. I decided to check in and examine my room, which was your typical hotel room, with a small bathroom and a view northwards where you could see the freeway interchange. I was on the 19th floor, so it wasn’t noisy, although you could hear some gusts of wind occasionally. The thing that really sucked was that I requested a non-smoking room on the internet, but judging by the (empty) ashtrays in my room, I was in a smoking room. Thankfully it didn’t smell too badly.

I was fairly tired, but I decided to check out some casinos to see what odds they had on the super bowl on their sportsbooks. The most expensive casinos had -300 (1:3 odds, or 75% chance to win) that the Patriots would win, and +220 (roughly 17:8 odds or 31% chance to win) that the Eagles would win. The differential between these bets is quite expensive – right now if you shopped around for sports betting on the internet, you could receive 71.8% or 28.2% on your football team, which is a fairer market rate. Some casinos had slightly tighter spreads on bets, but nothing compares to the internet in terms of how inexpensive the spread is. I went to bed shortly after.

On Saturday, after meeting up with my brother and friends and eating a simple breakfast, I played some 1-3 spread limit holdem at the Excalibur to waste some time and two of my brother’s friends were also on the table. There was a single $1 blind. This table was for players that either wanted cheap booze, or were just starting to play poker and didn’t want to lose too much money. After playing for about two or three hours (it’s rather easy to lose the track of time), I ended up US$11.75. The fish around the table were fairly easy to spot. It was just a matter of being patient and taking a few pots. I ended up playing around 60 to 70 hands and played in about four hands, so it wasn’t the most exciting session. One hand I was dealt 55, and a 5 came up on the flop. I managed to milk about $15 profit out of that hand. The other hands were not remarkable. The rake was 10% to $3, which makes the game very expensive to play since most of the time the pot never reached $30. It also means that playing top pair is not a smart thing to do since you’ll have enough callers to the river and it’s probable that some of them will hit the draws – it forces you to play for flushes only. Two pair usually isn’t good enough either.

After getting out of the Excalibur, we eventually made it to the Aladdin buffet for a late dinner. It was US$25 and we had to eat quickly since the food was going to get removed in 45 minutes, but I managed to load up enough plates – probably the most expensive stuff there was the seafood (salmon coated with pepper and alaskan crab), but the crab was not thawed enough and was only OK. The “Middle Eastern” buffet station, by far, was the best – the lamb was spicy and very nicely done, while the mango-pecan chutney went well with the pork roast and vegetables. Also, I had some cheesecake and tiramisu for desert. The cheesecake was good, but the tiramisu was bland (I can make a better one!).

I parted ways with the group and went back to the Plaza to enter the 11:59pm tournament. The buy-in is US$60 and you get 2000 chips. There is one optional rebuy of US$50 for another 1500 chips. This makes rebuys not worth it since if you bust out, you will be short stacked if you rebuy. The only utility would be to add-on after the first hour, but there’s not really any point to this if you can double up in the first hour. The cards were good to me in the first hour – I was dealt ace-ace. Blinds were 25/50, and I raised to 150. Everybody folded. A few hands later on I got king-king when I was the small blind. There were five callers around the table, so I raised to 450. One women called me and the flop was jack and 9 of diamonds, and the 4 of clubs. I didn’t want to be too subtle, so I just went all-in, hoping she’d call with a jack high pair, or a flush or straight draw. She thought and folded. Maybe she had ace-king. In retrospect, maybe I should have just put in 600 to entice her, but I was happy with the gain I made.

After that, my cards went dead. I didn’t get dealt anything that you could possibly play. After the first break I had a stack of about 2250 chips. The blinds went to 100/200 after the first hour, so I knew I had to start stealing blinds or double up quickly. A few hands in, I was in middle position and was dealt ace-king. There was one caller (from a person who was playing some pretty speculative hands), so I went all-in. The guy one spot to the right of the button called, and everybody else folded. He had ace-ace, and I got no help on the table and my tournament was done. In retrospect, I don’t think I can be faulted for doing what I did – one of my general rules is that whenever a round of blinds cuts into more than 10% of your stack, you should be thinking about taking blinds quickly. In all of the previous hands dealt before that, there were no adequate opportunities to take blinds, which really sucked.

I went to the 2/4 table (rake was 10% to $3 plus a $1 jackpot drop) and sat down with a bunch of middle-aged men and a couple middle-aged women. I didn’t prefer this table, but only sat there because of the open seat. The other table I was eyeing had a bunch of old women, which generally are not the best poker players and are easier to read. After in for a couple hands, I notice a spot opened on the other table and move my chips over and wait to get dealt in. But after a minute, some guy in a red suit says that you’re not allowed to leave a table and join another one if the table you’re joining has more people than the table you left. I pointed out that the reason why I left that other table was because it was obvious that people had left, but he said that either I can move to the other table or cash out. I picked up my chips and cashed out (the US$100 that I bought in for initially). All I can say is that any casino that doesn’t allow you to sit down on the table where you want to play will not get my business. So I can easily say that I won’t be playing at the Plaza ever again or taking my business there again.

I walked across the street to Binion’s Horseshoe. They have a 2:00am tournament for a $60 buy-in, but I felt that the structure was too short and wanted to join in a cash game with drunk people instead. It didn’t take me long to find the perfect table – two boyfriends with their wives, three ladies (one of them drunk), and one guy that seemed to know what he was doing. So of course I sat down, and some old Japanese guy joined shortly afterwards. This was another 2/4 game with 10% rake to $4. The game was so slow because the one drunk woman was taking forever to play, but I managed to clear out a net of $15 over the 18 hands dealt. That took nearly an hour and I was getting pretty tired so I took my chips and left.

Out of the 6 pots total that I won in Vegas, I think I paid a total of about $12 in rake, which represented about 1/3rd of my winnings. Playing poker in Vegas is very expensive compared to playing online. Actually for that matter, doing anything in Vegas is expensive compared to online. The big lesson that I learned was actually about seat selection – ensuring that you’re playing against bad poker players is probably the biggest determinant on whether you’ll have a winning session or not. The other theory which I came up with on the fly dealt with playing properly with a 10% rake.

On Sunday, I didn’t do any gambling – On the recommendation of CheapoVegas.com, we ate at the Main Street Station for the lunch buffet, and it was pretty good considering the price paid (US$10). They had a nice breakfast selection (pancakes, waffles with strawberry sauce) and a nice lunch selection, with ham, fried seafood, some chinese food, salad bar, italian section and a fairly large dessert bar. I ate a 32984 calorie meal in 55 seconds. After that, visited the Hoover Dam, and then picked up the rest of my brother’s friends and dropped them back at the airport.

The drive back to LA was routine, the traffic wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I suddenly found myself getting sleepy and then napped for about 45 minutes at the first rest stop near the California state border, but other than that and a fuel stop, I drove continuously to the hotel I’m currently staying in. The total driving time in the car took 3 hours and 20 minutes. The net damage report was about $34, which was much better than the last time I was there.

I think, however, that this will be my last visit to Las Vegas for quite some time.

You can goto www.aircanada.ca and book a sample flight from Vancouver to Toronto for $99 each direction. Considering that the equivalent drive (one way) would be 2700 miles and about CAD$210 of fuel, you’re getting a pretty good deal.

But wait! There are taxes and surcharges. There are $53.60 worth of taxes on each direction, which amounts to 35% of the total ticket price! Some of it is due to an “airport improvement fee”, while the other is for NAV CANADA air traffic fees, and security fees. Still, when you look at a $154 ticket vs. driving, Toronto by flight is the superior option.

But what about the future of these surcharges? As long as flying is a visibly cheaper (in terms of time and fuel) alternative to driving (or any other mode of transportation, such as taking a train), I don’t see any reason why airports and NAV CANADA can’t continue increasing their rates, while the airlines are effectively forced to collect these tax dollars for them. My prediction is that additional charges, as a percentage of the ticket price, will most likely increase in the future over time.

More efficient airplanes such as the Airbus 380 will continue to let airlines provide even cheaper tickets – right now a trip from Vancouver to London costs $908 (plus fees), while in 10 years I wouldn’t be surprised if that number dropped to $600, even factoring in the increasing cost of fuel. There’s just too much competition in the airline industry for any of the companies to make money. This is one reason why I don’t invest in airlines – they will all go bankrupt.

Instead, the agencies making the money are the ones imposing the mandatory fees. What if Pearson International (Toronto International) doubled their airport improvement fee? The answer is that the airport would stand to make most of the money, while the airlines would suffer due to reduced passenger traffic at that airport. What are the airlines going to do, land at North Bay and expect their customers to drive?

I’ve been receiving a barrage of advertisements in the mail with my bank statements that hype up the latest and greatest RRSP tips and products that you can waste your investment dollars on. While the concept of investing in your future is good, how to go about it is a little more difficult. Most of the literature published has nothing to do with individual circumstances, but there are some generic rules that can be applied which has merit. If you intend on making an income in the next tax year, you can always choose to invest in an RRSP then instead of now.

First of all, if you are in the lowest marginal tax bracket (i.e. you are earning less than $35,000 a year in 2004 in BC), I wouldn’t bother with RRSPs at all if you intend to invest it in stocks. Money that would otherwise be invested in RRSPs can be better utilized in dividend producing investments in a non-tax sheltered account – due to how dividends are taxed, somebody in the lowest tax bracket would pay approximately 4.4% on dividends. A handy marginal tax rate calculator can be found here. The only reason why somebody in the lowest tax bracket would invest in an RRSP is that each dollar invested would bring back 22 cents in tax savings. Also if you work for a company that matches RRSP contributions then that is a great incentive.

In the middle tax bracket ($35,000 to $70,000 in income), there’s a bit more incentive to invest into the RRSP because the marginal rate on dividends and capital gains is approximately 16%. Each dollar invested in an RRSP returns 31 cents in tax money.

If you are fortunate enough to earn more than $70,000 a year, then by default you should probably invest as much into your RRSP as you can at the higher tax brackets. For example, if you earn $85,000 in 2004, if you invested $10,000 in your RRSP, you would be getting a $3970 tax credit back from the government. Generally speaking, investing in your RRSP at a higher than 33% marginal tax rate is a good thing to do.

So this leaves the problem of where to invest that money. RRSPs, in general, are suited towards income-producing investments. This rules out owning stocks in an RRSP – it’s better to keep them outside. What does this leave? Bonds and income trusts. A well managed portfolio of these securities can probably yield around 8-9% a year. Everybody knows about the miracles of compound interest – if you invested $5000 in yourself for 10 years in a row, if you earned 8% compounded, you would end up with $775,000 in your account. The only problem is that investing at 8% a year, consistently for 40 years is something very difficult to do.

Because of the various rules in Canada concerning Old Age Security and the Canada Pension Plan, one has to ask themselves whether investing in an RRSP is worth it. You can effectively twiddle your thumbs and receive a guaranteed $12,800/year after-tax income from the government when you turn 65. If you earn a full CPP, that goes up to $16,000/year after-tax. The problem is that every additional dollar taken out of an RRSP at this point is taxed approximately 2/3rds when you factor in MSP, GST rebates, and the Old Age Security clawback.

This suggests that the RRSP is best used as a bridge between early retirement and when you turn 65 years of age – for example, you quit working at the age of 55 and use most of your RRSP between 55 and 65 as your primary source of income. The first $8500 will be tax-free. The rest of it will be taxed at 22%. Then when you turn 65, you get the government benefits and don’t have to rely on RRSPs.

But then again, it depends on individual circumstances. How much money do you think you’ll need in 40 years? It’s a tough question.

I haven’t been posting lately since I’ve been busy in the Orange County area on business. However, on weekends, I take road trips to get out of the Los Angeles area. LA is interesting to visit, but not a place to live. I’ve unfortunately had my fill and don’t find it interesting anymore, although I’ve probably only scratched the surface of about 10 percent of the area. I find it amazing that the metropolitan area has about 16 million people, all of them presumably wanting to live there, probably for employment purposes. The cost of living is high relative to Vancouver. Just as a one data point example, you can buy apples for CAD$0.80 a pound in Richmond, BC. You buy the same type of apples for US$1.40 a pound in the USA. Houses and properties that cost US$700,000 in LA would cost CAD$400,000 in the Vancouver west end. The only thing cheaper, it seems, is gasoline and computer hardware.

January 7 to 9, 2005: Drove to Arizona, specifically Phoenix on Friday night. On the California side, the weather was very rainy, although people outside of the cities seem to know how to drive in the rain, so that was no problem. Otherwise the drive there was a smooth 6 hour drive. Explored the city (and surrounding area) on Saturday. Went around the south-eastern side of the state on Sunday. Phoenix in the winter is a nice place to visit – the weather is very mild. Was cloudy, temperature was around 15 degrees celsius. Most of the urban area reminds me of downtown Surrey – strip malls all over the place.

Observations – Downtown Phoenix is occupied primarily with commercial buildings, no residential. The scummy area of town is southwest of downtown, but it’s safe to drive around (at least in daytime). There was one guy’s front yard that had an impressive collection of auto parts. The urban freeways have very smooth concrete and are ten lanes wide which made navigating the city easy. The surface streets also were very good, they were 7 lanes wide (3 lanes in each direction plus a left turn bay). Scottsdale is east of Phoenix and contains the highest density of art galleries to people. You can venture inside these places, and all the pieces have price tags, ranging from US$500 to US$20,000 for various pieces of works. Some of them were nicely blown glass, some were metallic structures, some were abstract art. If I ever had a billion dollars in my bank account, I’d go shopping.

It’s fairly obvious that the economy in Phoenix has done fairly well. The big employer of the area seems to be General Dynamics, a defence firm. I spotted quite a few (massive) buildings with their name on it scattered across the metropolitan area.

There are lots of cactuses in Arizona. There’s also a botanical garden that has a world-class collection of cactuses. You get used to the desert terrain after awhile, however, it does give the impression of bleaching everything in sight. The landscape is flat except for some large hills.

On Sunday, I drove to southeast Arizona. This is where a bunch of old western movies were shot. It’s also close to the Mexican border, so presumably a good flow of illegal immigrants make their way through the area. The region was arid desert – not a lot of vegetation would provide cover. I took Interstate 10 east to Arizona state highway 80, which headed south. I really want to go visit Roswell, New Mexico, but that would have been another 8 hours of driving, which is time I didn’t have.

The first location of significance on Arizona route 80 is the town of Tombstone, where the battle of the O.K. Corral was fought a century ago. There was nothing else at Tombstone except for a few insignificant buildings, most of them in ‘western’ style. The place looked like Barkerville, BC. One “funny” building though was the western-style “internet cafe”. I didn’t visit, but just passed by it and laughed at the irony. They did have a daily “shootout at the O.K. Corral”, but I had no idea when that was going to be and I was on a rather tight timetable. The road to this point was getting considerably more hilly, in contrast to the nearly straight-line driving that it took to get there.

Bisbee, Arizona, was a little more interesting. The town was next to a copper mine which closed down in the mid 1970′s. Apparently a bunch of artists took over the town and changed the look of it. I went into the downtown area (the residents look like they’re embedded on the hillside) and walked around. There were various arts and crafts and a coffee place. Next to Bisbee is a view of the open pit copper mine. If you’ve never seen an open pit mine before, let’s just say that it’s a huge pit. But what I found fascinating is that the pit has structure so that trucks can get in and out. That takes quite a bit of planning. Also the ground around the open pit was quite red.

After Bisbee, I ventured to the border town of Naco, Arizona. I have never seen more of a dump than this town. I saw more stray dogs on the street than people. Near the US border building, there were three stores with their windows boarded up. The rest of the houses looked pretty empty and dead. There were a couple kids biking along a dirt road. I also caught one guy in the trailer park working on his truck. Not a very impressive place. What was interesting is that in order to get there you have to drive down this downhill road. In the process you get to see a good view of the physical border itself – a black wall stretched along the horizon.

I passed through Sierra Vista (nothing there, it’s mainly a town to service the military base next to it) and went to Elgin, which had a bunch of wineries. I stopped by one of them at random, and tasted some stuff and picked up a couple bottles after sampling, which I’ll take back to Canada. I hope they don’t turn into vinegar in the meantime. I didn’t find the taste to be exceptional, but I’ll judge it when I’ve had some more. I think that farming in southeast Arizona would be difficult due to the extreme heat and lack of water, but somehow they manage to do it. I would think that grape farming would be extremely expensive due to water consumption.

Finally, I went close to the border in the city of Nogales, Arizona. What was interesting here is that the Mexican border intersects this hillside. So when you get really close the border you can see this fence on the side of a mountain, which clearly marks the border. There were houses on both sides, fairly close to the fence. When I was walking near that area, some Mexican people were wondering if I needed a ride to Tucson – companies were offering a van service north into the state. Most of the people were speaking Spanish. There were a few stores in that area selling complete junk, which is consistent with my experiences in Mexicali, another border town.

The drive back to Los Angeles was uneventful. I can say that Interstate 8 from Tucson to San Diego doesn’t have many attractions, except that you can easily see that the US-Mexico border is lit up like a Christmas tree at night. The only event of significance was when I was approaching San Diego there was a very impressive display of lightning. Also when approaching the coastline, the rain started to come down really hard, but thankfully this had the impact of getting people off the freeways, so I mostly had all four lanes to myself.

It’s unfortunate that I can’t post entries onto this log while driving, since when driving I tend to have better insights, especially concerning the nature of drivers and how they interact with truckers on the road.

From the perspective of a British Columbian, by far the most important political event that will occur in our lifetime will be the result of the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform referendum on May 17, 2005. The question will ask whether the voter supports changing our current voting system to one using a Single Transferrable Vote (STV). In order to pass, 60% of the province has to vote in favour of it and at least 48 of 79 ridings have to support it by larger than a 50% margin.

There is absolutely no reason to vote no (against the referendum) unless if you are an MLA in a so-called ‘safe’ riding. The STV system proposed in BC (called BC-STV) has a huge advantage over the present system in that during election time, individuals are elected instead of individuals that represent parties. This erodes the power of political parties, which in turn will provide better people to political office. Candidates can no longer ‘coast’ to office, since there is a good chance that a member from the opposite party will be able to garner enough votes to get elected before you.

This referendum is a once in a lifetime opportunity to shape how a government is formed in this province. We should accept it, otherwise there will never be a chance to do it again due to the fact that the present system is designed to entrench politicians in the system. The voting system should be one where you have to positively affirm your candidate each time he/she runs for office, opposed to the present system where candidates tend to get turfed only if the public is sufficiently angry. Our present system is effectively like negative-option billing.

You’ll hear a lot of trash from the establishment in the coming months because STV forces candidates to earn your vote, instead of candidates taking them for granted. You’ll hear “STV is too complicated” and “The results will form too many minority governments causing paralysis” and other arguments, but rest assured that the only reason why they’re arguing against it would be to strip the voter of having the power to vote their preferred candidate in, not just yet-another-nomination from the top two parties in the province.

I will be very blunt about this issue in future posts: Vote YES to BC-STV. Doing so makes your preferred candidate accountable to you.

I’m looking for a .ca domain registrar that is cheap, provides basic DNS service and doesn’t have any frills or BS to get in the way of things.

Initially, I thought domainsatcost.ca was a good choice – $13.50/year (plus GST), but I saw in their terms and agreements this clause:

6. TRANSFERS. You agree that a domain name transfer fee will immediately become due and payable upon your application to transfer the domain. This fee must be paid prior to transferring the domain to another registrar.

So even if I want to take my business somewhere else, I have to pay them a fee? No way I would register with them.