Round 3

Saturday morning proves far more hectic than anticipated. There’s a surprising amount of turnover, meaning students who competed last night but who if they plan on coming at all today have not arrived as of 8AM. Frustratingly, I’m not getting good information from coaches about which of their students have not showed up.

I am used to leading by moral authority. When I ran the BDL, the coaches and students all saw how hard I worked, and most of them knew that I wasn’t paid. I more or less shamed them into making my job easier and doing what I told them to do.

Few coaches and even fewer students remain from my era, and most of the others had never seen me before yesterday. I try to catch up with them as they arrive to confirm which students would be competing today, but I get a lot of eye rolls and brusque “I don’t know, not everyone is here yet,” and despite my pleas to come find me in the tab room if they need to make any changes, no one reports to me despite plenty of changes that should have been made before the start of Round 3.

This results in something like six forfeited debates, with twelve students sitting and twiddling their thumbs for an hour and a half. Had I been on top of the no-shows sooner, I could have reconfigured the pairings so that these six teams debated each other, but instead they all got the morning off. Fine with them, I imagine, but from my perspective a lost educational opportunity. There’s a similar scramble to determine which of our volunteer judges has actually shown up and to replace those who have not.

Round 4

Even once Round 3 gets off the ground, we continue to work in the tab room updating the computer. In the interest of starting at least close to on time, we often made changes and substitutions on the fly, crossing out the names of no-show teams and substituting in judges. Now, to ensure that the computer has accurate information upon which to base the next round’s pairings, we must go through and update the tabulation program with the changes we’ve made by hand.

Debaters, coaches, and judges eat lunch while awaiting the announcement of the quarterfinal debates.

Round 4 seems to get off to a good start, until several coaches poke their heads into the tab room. Apparently two teams who missed round 3 have since arrived, ready to debate round 4. To be fair, we were told about this, but we failed to update the tabulation program accordingly. Now, as a result of our error (and, of course, the students’ own tardiness) they stand to miss both of today’s preliminary debates. It’s getting late to redo all of our plans for the coming round, so rather than reconfigure the pairings, I pit these teams against each other. One is from the Novice division and one the JV, so it won’t count towards the official results, but at least the kids will get to debate. All parties walk away satisfied.

This kind of quick, creative problem solving is my favorite part of running a tournament. There are constantly little fires like this to put out, and a good director will improvise solutions to all of them while keeping the great tournament machine chugging along smoothly. It requires seeing all of the options at your disposal and understanding the ultimate objectives, which are to run a fair, educational, and fun event. Are you starting to see the similarities with poker?

Consistent with my lead-by-moral-authority philosophy, I comport myself as tournament director with an air of hurried authority. I always walk briskly and purposefully, and if someone wants to come to me with a problem or concern, they better walk and talk and keep up. If I’m hunched over the computer, some try to wait for my full attention, but I let them know they aren’t getting it. I can’t afford to stop working, so tell me about the next problem while I’m solving the current one.

Quarterfinals

There’s a lot to do as Round 4 ends. Heretofore, rounds have been “lag paired”, meaning that in Round 4 teams are paired based on their results from Rounds 1 and 2, enabling us to pair Round 4 while round 3 is underway. Now that we’re about to start the quarterfinals, we need the results of all four preliminary rounds to determine the top eight teams in each division.

Once all the data are in, we have to double-check everything up to this point to ensure that the proper teams advance. A few of our last-minute changes have produced some irregularities in the results, data that weren’t properly recorded. All of this must be verified and fixed before pairing the quarterfinal round.

To buy time for this extra bit of tabulation, we coordinate it with lunch. The kids fuel up on sandwiches and cookies while we pore quickly but thoroughly over the results, snatching bites of our lunch with any free second.

Despite this forty-five-minute hedge, we fall behind schedule preparing the quarterfinals. Eager to make up for lost time, I grab the pairings as soon as they’re printed, run off a few copies, and tape them up strategically around the cafeteria.

A student quickly brings the problem to my attention: “What rooms are these rounds in?” Whoops. I was in such a rush that I neglected to assign rooms to the quarterfinal rounds. Elbert scrambles to scrawl numbers on the pairings and replace the incomplete copies I hung. Approximately sixty-three thousand people interrupt this process to point out that they don’t know which rooms they’re supposed to be in.

Awards Ceremony

Finally the quarterfinals are underway, but there’s no rest for the weary. The next item on the schedule is the awards ceremony (yes, we have the awards ceremony before the semifinal debates – these tournaments run long, and only a few kids need to stay for the last two rounds, so we arrange things so that the vast majority are ready to go by 5 PM), and there’s a lot to do to prepare.

Yours truly, on the verge of ruining the Novice division competition.

We have awards for not only the losers of the quarterfinals (the winners will get their trophies after semifinals or finals, depending on how far they make it) but also for the top individual speakers, for the schools with the most participating students, and for the best judges. Most of these awards are given in each of the three divisions and announced by a different individual, in the interest of including more people in the ceremony. I need to determine the winners of each of these awards and then distribute this information to the ten different presenters so they’ll have what they need for their part of the ceremony.

We also need a copy of each ballot from the preliminary rounds to distribute to each of the of the teams in each debate. That’s roughly 280 pieces of paper that need to be photocopied, front and back, and then separated into piles for each school.

It’s my own bright idea use BDL alumni in the awards ceremony. I love it when graduates of the BDL come back to serve as judges. In fact, they’re the only judges we pay, a policy that I began and that has lasted into the present day. These alumni often make for the best judges, because as former BDL debaters themselves who are now (mostly) in college, they are uniquely appealing as role models to the current debaters. They are also the judges least able to afford to volunteer. Many work two jobs to help pay for college, and no matter how much they’d like to, most can’t give up their Fridays and Saturdays for free.

Anyway, I asked some of these alumni to participate in the awards ceremony. The ceremony takes place in a large auditorium, and it turns out we have no microphone. The alumni, less experienced with speaking to large groups than am I, struggle on a number of levels. They speak far too quietly and quickly, and they don’t engage at all with the audience. This results in students only half paying attention to the awards and a lot of whispering and noise from the audience.

When it’s my turn to and announce the results of the Novice quarterfinals, I take the time to get everyone’s attention. “Are you ready to hear who won some debates?” Muttered yesses and grunts. “If you’re ready to hear who won the debates, say yay-ah!” Now I’ve got some kids shouting back at me. I raise my voice and enthusiasm. “If you’re ready to hear who won the debates, stomp your feet!” This time there’s a chorus of stomps. “If you’re ready to hear who won the debates… shut up and stop talking so I can tell you.” Gales of laugher, and I know I’ve got them.

I draw out the announcements for full dramatic effect. “In the debate between X from school Y and A from school B, the winner is X. Team A, please come up to collect your trophies.” Repeat for the other three quarterfinal rounds. With each name announced, there’s uproarious cheering from one part of the room and groans from another.

Immediately after I announce the last of the results, one of the alumni judges rushes the stage. “Andrew! Andrew!” I lean over to talk to him. “You got that one wrong. You said the wrong team.” My stomach falls. He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t sure, but I ask him anyway. “Yes I’m certain, I judged it myself. That’s the team I voted for,” he says, pointing to the girls currently on stage collecting quarterfinalist trophies.

“Stay on stage a moment, ladies,” I tell them. They freeze, confused. “Let’s bring the other team up here as well.” Two boys in the front row, grinning from ear to ear, collect a few high fives as they come up on stage. “Guys, I’m really sorry, I just made a huge mistake. The other team are actually the winners.” The girls shriek with delight, while the boy’s teammates howl with laughter and point.

The boys, to their tremendous credit, take it like champs. They shake my hand and accept my sincere apologies gracefully. They hug their opponents as they take the quarterfinalist trophies. I’m embarrassed, but it could have been much worse if the judge hadn’t caught my error. The wrong team advancing to the semifinals would have been a disaster that couldn’t be undone.

Semifinals

Now, at last, the hard part is over. There’s a bit of a scramble to find judges for the semifinals, since it’s getting late and many volunteers are going home, but the time pressure is off. A good 70% of the students and coaches will leave now, and the atmosphere will be much more relaxed. It’s almost anticlimactic the way things quiet down even as the most important debates take place. It’s actually reminiscent of the atmosphere last days of the WSOP main event (thinly veiled brag), with most of the fanfare has wrapped up even though the stakes are the highest.

These kids don’t leave a lot of food behind, but lucky for me the vegetarian sandwiches are the least popular. I finally have time to get a meal and chat with the other volunteers. Much like many of our debaters, Elbert grew up in a poor family and joined the debate team at a high school that was otherwise rather lackluster, academically. He credits debate with opening his eyes to the world and getting him into college. He now works for the Federal Reserve combating fraud in military meal cards.

Finals

There are only six semifinal debates, so tabulating those results and pairing the three final rounds (one in each division) is a breeze. I decide to finally watch a bit of one of these debates I’ve been scheduling all day, so I sit in on the beginning of the Varsity finals.

It’s not a coincidence that two of the three students in the whole tournament whom I know are debating in this round. They are a brother and sister team, she a senior and he a junior, with a combined seven years of debate experience between them. They are also the only two white students at a high school in Roxbury, Boston’s historically black neighborhood where Malcolm X once lived. I don’t know their whole story or how they ended up there, but I have feeling that this experience has a lot to do with their facility for arguing.

“Tom” speaks first, delivering an eight-minute speech in favor of reviving the US space shuttle program. Apparently this is essential to secure US hegemony and eventually colonize space, ensuring the survival of the human race even in the event of catastrophe here on earth.

An excellent speech delivered from a makeshift podium.

If you’ve never seen competitive policy debate, you have no idea how much can be said in eight minutes. Tom is nowhere near the fastest, but he is nevertheless spitting out more than two hundred words per minute. Contrary to popular opinion, policy debate is not about public speaking. It’s about logic, evidence, and refutation, and there’s strong incentive to make as many arguments as possible in your allotted time.

The Negative team, two African-American girls from a high school in South Boston, does not look familiar to me, but they know their stuff. “Melissa” calls into question the ideology of colonization. According to her, the very idea is premised on notions of European superiority and entitlement to rule the entire world, dangerous ideas that ought not be extended into space. She also talks about budget cuts that funding the Affirmative’s plan might entail, but it’s evident that the critique of colonialism is the real meat of her team’s strategy.

The other two girls deliver their speeches, clashing over the meaning of colonialism and its importance relative to the threat of human extinction. These are strong speeches, but nothing remarkable.

It is Melissa who blows me away the next time she takes the “podium”, which is really just a chair stacked on top of a desk. Her team’s colonialism argument, though interesting, rests on some pretty complicated philosophical foundations. It’s a topic I’ve rarely seen argued well by college debaters, let alone by students at a high school that struggles to meet state literacy standards.

Yet Melissa knows what she’s talking about. She quotes William Spanos applying Foucault’s critique of disciplinary power to US foreign policy. She explains, clearly and in her own words, the parallels between the bloody European conquest of Africa, Asia, and the Americas and the Affirmative’s proposed colonization of space. It’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever seen in a BDL debate, and though I leave before the final three speeches, I have a sneaking suspicion that the round is over.

I head back down to the tab room to await the results of the Novice and JV finals. The less experienced debaters tend to finish their rounds more quickly, and sure enough they are waiting eagerly in the cafeteria for their results when the Varsity students finally finish.

An impressive number of debaters have stuck around. In addition to the twelve who were still competing in the finals, roughly twice that many friends and teammates remained to watch, learn, and cheer them on. The debate I watched was packed with spectators eager to learn from two of the best teams in the League at the top of their game.

Conversation drops off quickly when I walk purposefully to the front of the cafeteria. I announce the names of both teams who competed in the Novice finals and have them come stand next to me. They are all new to the activity, and while of course it’s exciting to be doing well, winning isn’t something they’ve dreamed of and worked at for months or years. A panel of three judges decided unanimously for the Negative, who cheer and hug each other as I distribute trophies.

Next I stand the JV finalists on either side of me. Once again, it’s a 3-0 decision for the Negative. The cheering is a little louder this time, and the disappointment of the Affirmative team more evident.

Things get really tense when I call up the Varsity debaters. “In the debate between New Mission High School and Excel High School,” I begin. You could hear a pin drop. Melissa is shaking nervously. I know that the brother and sister team have won tournaments before, but for all I know this could be a first for Melissa and her partner. I shuffle the three ballots in my hand. “Let’s see, here’s one ballot for the Negative.” Melissa starts squirming even more.

“Aaaand, oop, here’s one for the Affirmative!” I say with mock surprise, as though I haven’t already looked to see who won. The audience picks up on what I’m doing to the poor debaters and laughs knowingly. “So I guess this final ballot will decide it.” I pause and smile, to more laughter from the audience and almost uncontrollable shaking from Melissa and her partner. “The final judge voted Negative, meaning…” but the rest of my words are drowned out by squeals and shrieks as the two girls embrace.

Tom and his sister smile politely. They’re disappointed, but they’re one of the best teams in the League, and they know they’ll be back. They hug and congratulate their opponents as I thank everyone for coming and wish them luck in the next debate. A few of the coaches, on the way out, thank me for keeping things running smoothly. “Glad to be of help,” I tell them.

There are 174 high school students registered for the debate tournament I am running this weekend. Roughly 135 will actually show up to compete, but not all of those 135 will be among those who registered in advance. These students will compete Friday evening and all day Saturday. Most of them will, anyway – a few show up, without warning, on only one day or the other. Just as many will be competing simultaneously at another of our schools, most of which are not large enough to host so many debates at once. That other school is not my responsibility at all.

About half as many middle schoolers will debate in their own separate competition at my school on Saturday only. They are kind of but not really my responsibility.

When I stepped down, three and a half years ago, as executive director of the Boston Debate League (BDL), we were lucky to get 40 kids at a tournament. Obviously there was no need to spread them out across two sites. There were no middle school debaters.

There were no paid employees, either, unless you count the alumni of the league to whom I paid a small stipend to judge at competitions. We had a lot of volunteers, some of them quite committed, but I still did virtually everything myself. The new Executive Director was the BDL’s first full-time employee.

When he told me that he’d be out of town this weekend, I jumped at the chance to help out by directing the tournament at one of its two locations. Running tournaments was my favorite part of running the BDL. They were a high that invigorated me to push through the often boring work of fundraising, volunteer and Board recruitment, and league administration. I found an old blog entry from my days as director, in which I described the tournament experience thusly:

“All of this logistical work occurs amidst a blur of commotion: stomping feet, pounding music, beeping timers, and the din of young voices echoing through the vast hallways of this big brick schoolhouse. I puzzle over the constantly shifting matrix of school names and student initials, all the while incorporating last minute changes, pointing late arrivals vaguely in the direction of the auditorium, where donuts and coffee await them, and fending off unimportant inquiries and requests to “hurry, the students are getting restless.” It is as demanding as playing eight tables of poker at once, and I love every second of it.”

This tournament is much larger than the ones I used to run, but I’m not doing it alone. There’s a volunteer working the tournament tabulation program on a BDL-owned computer, another volunteer manning the judge desk, and two employees handling the logistics of feeding all these students, setting up awards, and otherwise ensuring that things run smoothly.

It’s a little unclear, at first, what exactly my role is aside from overseeing all this activity. It soon becomes clear, though, that none of these individuals is sufficiently experienced to know how to resolve efficiently and effectively the multitude of little issues that always arise at these tournaments.

For example, Elbert, the volunteer on the computer, has used the tabulation program only once before. It would surely be faster for me simply to take over for him, since I have to tell him how to do most things anyway, but I won’t be at future tournaments and he will. He’s a capable and dedicated volunteer, and time invested in on-the-job training for him is well worth it, even if it can get frustrating when things get hectic.

Things get hectic very quickly. Over the next hour and a half, debaters and their coaches trickle into the host school’s cafeteria where several aluminum trays stuffed with salad and pasta await them. My first job is to find the coaches and compare the roster they submitted earlier in the week with the list of students now physically present in the building. For the most part they’re ready with quick and clear information, but there are always a few question marks, students who are supposed to be coming but not yet here.

As I collect updated data from each school, I bring it back to the tabulation room (“tab room”, from now on) and help Elbert make the necessary changes. Everything goes smoothly enough except that five minutes before the pairings for the first round are to be released, one school has not yet arrived. I get the coach on the phone, introduce myself, and have her tell me how many teams she’ll have competing. We can figure out the names later; for now I just need the numbers to get the round paired.

In policy debate, students compete in teams of two. Thus, a school that brings ten students would usually have five teams. A school with nine students would also have five teams, with one student debating “maverick” or by himself. A school with ten students could actually have six teams, if two of their students aren’t getting along and insist on both debating solo. We discourage it, but it’s been known to happen.

The BDL offers three divisions of competition: Varsity, Junior Varsity, and Novice. The latter is a new addition since my departure, and to be honest I’m not clear on the distinction between Novice and JV. For my purposes, it doesn’t matter. I just need to know that they are distinct.

We’ll have two debate rounds, each about an hour and a half long, tonight. Teams will be paired randomly for these two rounds, with the caveat that teams from the same school will not be matched against each other.

There is one, very broad topic that students debate for the entire year. This year it has to do with the US federal government’s role in space exploration. Everyone must argue both for and against such exploration. If you’re Affirmative, arguing for it, the first round, then you’ll be Negative in the second. The computer, thankfully, handles all of this for us.

Elbert and I update team information for the school that is just now arriving and quickly print a pairing for the first round, just in time for the opening announcements. The cafeteria is large and bustling, and when it gets as quiet as it’s going to get I still have to shout to be heard. “Welcome to Tech Boston Academy! Thank you all for coming out to compete today. My name is Andrew, and I used to be the director of the League. I’m really excited to be here today, and I’m simply amazed by how many of you there are here. In my day we were lucky to get 30 or 40 debaters. I’m posting pairings now. Please make your way to your rooms immediately, rounds need to be underway in fifteen minutes.”

Two hundred students, coaches, and judges converge on the sheets of paper even before I’m finished taping them up on the wall. The complaints are quick to follow. “What team am I on?” “Do we have keys?”

The pairings identify teams by school name and a letter: “Tech Boston A”, for example. This is a change from my time, and one whose logic I don’t understand. Apparently students and coaches don’t yet know which team is which and need the tab room to give them a “key” that identifies which students are on which team. Elbert runs back to the computer to print these, and the coaches follow. Ultimately this is a set-back of less than minutes.

The bigger problem is that the judge table hasn’t done a great job of checking-in judges as they arrive. This means that we have only a vague idea of which of our registered judges is and is not actually here and available to judge a debate. We need at minimum one judge for every two teams, which means 35 judges for each round. Judging is technically part of the coaches’ job description, but they hate doing it and do have better things to do, so we use volunteers as much as possible. The drawback of this is that they can’t always be counted upon to show up when they say they will, and there’s nothing we can do if they don’t.

All we can do is put out ballots with the name of the judge scheduled to be in each round and then see which ones get picked up. We instruct all the other volunteers to stand nearby, ready to fill in as needed for those who aren’t actually present. This means that the last rounds to start are a good twenty minutes behind the first, and by the time I and one of the BDL employees walk the halls to ensure that each debate is actually underway, the round is half over.

Thankfully, Round 2 is paired randomly, meaning that the outcome of Round 1 won’t influence it and we can get started on it immediately. In fact, Elbert already has this underway when I get back to the tab room. What he doesn’t have is up-to-date information about which judges are here, which means that we once again have to do the print-and-substitute-as-needed method of judge assignment.

Still, Round 2 gets underway without too much drama, and then it’s time to enter the results from Round 1. We have to record both which team of two won and lost each debate and also speaker points awarded to each of the four students in the debate based on the quality of their individual performance. At the end of the day on Saturday, we’ll give awards to both the teams with the best win-loss records and the individual students with the highest speaker points.

Round 3 is going to be power-paired off of the first two rounds, meaning that teams that won their first two debates will be paired with other teams who also won their first two debates. Thus, we can’t begin pairing Round 3 until all of the results from Round 2 are in. Round 2 is the last one of the night, so students and coaches depart as they finish, until finally only the four of us remain at the school, working diligently in the tab room to prepare for tomorrow.

Elbert and I finish up the Round 3 pairing, which we know will have to change depending on which judges and debaters actually show up tomorrow. Meanwhile one of the other BDL employees sets up another computer and printer for the middle school administrators to use. I can tell from his sighs that it isn’t going well. “I keep getting this printer error,” he tells me.

I take over for him and mess around haphazardly with the printer configuration for a few minutes. He leaves the room to finish cleaning up the food in the cafeteria. I unplug and replug the printer’s USB cable. He returns to the sound of printing. “You’re a genius,” he tells me with a clap on the back. We’ve got the first, shorter day of the tournament under our belts.

For as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve started every year with a series of posts about my poker-related goals and resolutions, and I’ve ended every year by assessing the progress I made towards them. I set goals for 2011- my most ambitious ever, actually- but now it seems pointless to even look at them, as Black Fridayrendered them more or less irrelevant.  The best laid plans of mice and men, eh?

A dark omen in Montreal.

I’m not really in a place to start setting poker goals for this year, either, since I have no idea what the year will look like for me, poker-wise or otherwise. Not since my final semester of college have I felt this level of anxiety and uncertainty about my future. Those Big Questions are back: Where will I live? What will I do? Who will the people around me be?

I’ve spent the last week and and a half fending off questions, some idle and some concerned, at various gatherings of friends and family. My recent life as a nomadic poker professional was strange enough to them that they’ve learned to accept without alarm the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be two weeks from now.

Online poker made enough mainstream headlines that random aunts and uncles knew something had happened. Explaining everything that’s happened to online poker and to me in the last eight months is a mouthful that hasn’t gotten much shorter despite the amount of practice I’ve had spelling it all out.

I want to be clear that I’m “anxious” rather than “worried” or “depressed”. There really aren’t bad outcomes, which is very reassuring. Making big decisions is stressful regardless, but it is considerable consolation to feel confident that everything will work out in the end.

The two big advantages that I have over my 21-year-old self are money and experience. I graduated from college with $10,000 in the bank, $50,000 in student loans, no job, and no plan. OK, I had a bit of a plan, but it was a stupid one.

I never would have predicted it, but poker proved to be the missing ingredient that salvaged that plan. It enabled me to live with my girlfriend in Boston, start a non-profit organization, and travel extensively. What began as a way to make ends meet while searched for a job has blossomed into a full-on career, a phenomenon that was highlighted when I joined PokerStars Team Online. Knowing that I was able to muddle my way through a period of anxiety and make a very satisfying life for myself once before gives me a lot more confidence for this go-round.

The funny thing is that after two years, the whole nomad thing was wearing a bit thin, for me anyway. I wanted a little more stability and to feel at home somewhere. This didn’t make its way on to the blog, but one of my goals for the year was to get more settled somewhere.

Fail. The girlfriend and I returned to Boston intending to settle in place there and work out some big decisions about where to go and what to do in the longer term. Those conversations were taking place in late February and March. You know what happened next.

The breath-taking scenery in the Canadian Rockies was just one of the many hardships I faced this year.

Suddenly I was driving to Montreal on Easter Sunday to open a Canadian bank account in the hopes that it would facilitate withdrawal of the money I had online. Of course that was before PokerStars painlessly returned US players’ funds and before that other site did the things that it did (or before we realized what was going on there, anyway). There was a last-minute trip to Madrid, and although I didn’t cash in the European Poker Tour main event, my third top-100 finish in the WSOP main event certainly took the edge off of Black Friday. Then two months in the Canadian Rockies, a European road trip, two months in Vancouver (featuring another deep run in a live tournament), camping in Death Valley (do you know anyone else who flies to Las Vegas to take a break from gambling?), then my mother’s house in Maryland for the holidays and some undefined period thereafter. You can imagine how quickly family members’ initial concern for my professional well-being melts away when they hear that list of “hardships”.

The only advantage that 21-year-old Andrew possessed over the man I am now was having his twenties ahead of him. Before all the 30-, 40-, and 50-somethings start rolling their eyes, let me clarify that I don’t feel old in the sense that my best years are behind me or that I’ll never have the chance to do all those things I wanted to or anything like that. As usual, David Foster Wallace captures the feeling far better than I could:

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.

OK, it gets a little too dark there at the end. My own feeling is that, “It’s not too late but it soon will be”. I’ve managed to make remarkably few major decisions or long-term commitments in the last eight years, but that’s starting to feel less tenable.

As a poker player, my instinct is always to gather more information, and there’s still so much we don’t know about the Whos, Whats, Whens, Wheres, and Hows of online poker in the US. Whether not I’ll be able to supplement my income by playing online poker has huge implications for what I do and where and how I live.

Carpet-Bagging the British Columbia Poker Championships

Poker has also taught me to play the hand I’m dealt and accept that the eventual outcome may not be under my control. At the moment, I’m looking no more than a few weeks into the future. I’ve got a few more days in Maryland, then I’ll be in the Bahamas for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, then it’s a little vaguer but possibly visiting friends and family in some combination of Maryland, New York, and Florida, then in Boston for a Boston Debate League tournament, and then… well, that’s still a work in progress.

Skimming a year’s worth of posts actually turned up a quote that should conclude this little rant nicely. It’s from one of Jared Tendler’s post-Black Friday blog posts, and I originally quoted it in my own post-Black Friday post:

Right now you’re looking for answers. The problem is that some of you are so desperate for answers you’ll listen to almost anything or anyone. That desperation is very similar to feeling desperate to win. You’ll do almost anything to shake this feeling because the uncertainty is almost too much to handle.

The reality is that there aren’t many answers out there right now. If you try to force an answer too soon, you’ll be making the same mistake if you were forcing the action because you need to win money right now. You have to stick to a sound and logical strategy.

Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s make it a good one.

I know this has been a rough year for online poker players everywhere and especially in the US, but let’s keep it in perspective. As my grandmother once told me, “There’s always someone worse off than you.”

The organization closest to my heart is the Boston Debate League, a nonprofit that I founded seven years ago. The BDL now serves thousands of students in thirteen of the city’s public high schools. We (I’m still on the Advisory Council, though admittedly spending the better part of this year outside of the country made it difficult to participate actively) help schools to start competitive after-school debate teams, organize citywide competitions, and train teachers to use debate as a teaching tool in their classrooms.

Debate can have a powerful influence on kids who are not doing well in school. It’s engaging in a way that their usual schoolwork may not be, and it encourages independent, critical thinking. Urban students who debate are 42% more likely to graduate from high school than their non-debating counterparts. A single year of debate increases a student’s reading level by an average of 2-3 grades.

It’s a very effective, and cost-effective, way to address one of our country’s most pressing problems. Your contribution would enable the BDL to bring this incredibly valuable activity to more students. If you believe that all of the free information I provide on this blog has helped to make you some money this year, please kick a piece of that back to this organization that is very important to me. And please leave a comment so I’ll know! I promise it will warm my heart.

You can donate online at http://www.bostondebate.org/give. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have about the organization, or you can learn by browsing the website.

Thanks!