The thing with online poker is that you don't really have time to think in depth about a given hand, because you are not only sitting at one table. Online poker can't be compared with the casual poker play we have friday nights with friends. When playing at a physical poker table we observe how the others play and there only limited hands per hour being played. As for online poker, there a lot of more hands played per hour and there is always a clock on us. When we play 2-6 tables at the same time we need to make our decision very quickly, that is also why there are fixed charts for almost any type of poker game, where you know exactly when to raise and when to fold. It helps a lot to follow a standardised strategy to increase our earnings per hour. Which is going to be the main advantage that ChatGPT is going to bring to the equation, the bot has no problems to run 10 or even 20 tables at the same time. Whereas humans can't keep such numbers up. Also humans are going to get tired eventually and ChatGPT can run 24/7. This could lead to a big problem if there are too many bots out there compared to human players.

It's sweet of you that you want to managed all the money for your dad. Not building a house right now seems like a good idea, in my country as well the building materials are so expensive that it's better to wait. We had 1.5 years of high inflation where every construction company increases prices by at least 30%, it could be the peak right now as prices are expected to slowly fall again. On top of that are we seeing a big increase in financing cost which is going to make any real estate deal more expensive down the road. Your fathers retirement allowance is a monthly payout or a big one time lump sum? If it's monthly payouts and he doesn't need all the money now, then it definitely makes sense to invest that money. Going into bitcoin is a good investment and if you manage everything for him that it shouldn't be any security concern. In case his retirement money is big one time payment that I would advice to split his money into smaller parts. Investing 50% into bitcoins also involves some risks and in case your dad needs the money short term it could be a problem. Being forced into selling at unfavourable prices can lead to big losses.

It is sad that there always some people profiting a lot when millions are suffering. Before the Russia Ukraine war last year, I thought that another big war in Europe would never happen again. The main issue we have is that the world is more divided than ever and every country tries to put themselves before everybody else. As long as we think in national identities instead of the world as a whole we will always have wars. When looking at the last 12 months I see that China, India and UAE seem like the big winner of the sanctions against Russia. Western countries stopping to buy from Russia forced the price down of many commodities considerably, and other countries are happily picking up the bargain now. Again as long as there are ways to get around sanctions and for the world not to speak as one voice, there will be people trying to take advantage of others.  With that being said, poor countries shouldn't be feeling be bad when they are doing the same thing that rich countries are doing. If everybody puts their own country first then the poorer countries need to do the same, there is no point in taking the moral high ground if your people are suffering for it.

I think this comes down to personal preferences and there arguments for both types of portfolio compositions. In case you have one very well performing trading strategy, then it makes a lot of sense to put all your money on that strategy to maximize your profits. The problem is if something goes wrong than our whole money is at risk. When we put all our money in one basket than the risk is much higher than in a diversified portfolio that runs multiple strategies. On the other side is the upside potential also lower for a portfolio with multiple strategies. The chance that all strategies lead to the highest possible return during the same time period is limited. So I think it depends on how well you can handle risk and how much time you have at hand to develop your strategies. Running multiple strategies requires more time in oversight and analysis compared to one strategy. Personally I would always prefer to have multiple strategies that focus on different indicators compared to have only one strategy.

That's exactly the point I see as well why AI based gambling is not going to succeed long term. There are usually two types of motivation behind a gambler, it's either for entertainment or for making money, or a mix of the two. In case we now use AI to gamble for us, then the whole point of having fun disappears. What fun is there if the AI makes all the decision for us. So the only real point to use AI to gamble for us would be if we want to make money with it. Here the problem is that all the luck based  casino games are designed to include a house hedge. This guarantees that the casino makes money longterm and the player strategies are losing money long term.

President of a country is usually not the highest paid job, in the private sector you can find many CEOs that make tons more money that the President. The main feature for a President is to build a huge network and grant favours to rich people, which in return will make sure that you get either free money for campaign so that you get re-elected again, or they will give you a good job after your term ends. When it comes to supporting your buddies there are quite a few jobs that don’t require a lot of work but pay handsomely. For example, putting former politicians on the board of directors seems to be a pretty common way to pay back favours. Also in most cases the presidents are already rich before they become into poor, after reaching a certain amount of wealth it is more about the power than the actual money. For example, being able to fly around in the government jets, getting security detail 24/7 and all the publicity and special treatment what head of states become is what motivates many to get into office. It’s hard to stop when you get used to a certain lifestyle, that is why so many people go into debt when they face financial difficulties. So even when your income can’t sustain your position anymore, many people feel that it’s better to live above their means to project the power they still have.

What a crazy week this was in the IEM Dallas 2023, we saw G2 getting knocked out by FaZe and also Astralis losing to Mouz. Today are the two semi-finals being played and the grand finale is up tomorrow. The first match is going to be Heroic vs Mouz, where I am going to put all my money on Heroic. I really like the Mouz team, but it was a big surprise for them to even get so far in the tournament. Heroic is still ranked #2 team in the world and should be winning the match easily in a best of 3 setup. Also the two teams already faced each other during the tournament and Heroic won 2-0 without any problems. The second match is going to be ENCE vs Faze, which is going to be much closer. The two teams are quite strong and it's hard to predict the outcome. On paper FaZe seems like the stronger team and should win this game, but the two teams already played each other in the B group and ENCE won 2-0. This might be a psychological problem now for FaZe and they could choke. That is why I am going with ENCE with a smaller size bet. The finals tomorrow will likely be Heroic vs ENCE, where Heroic is going to win.

Sorry to see that you lost your 90k USD bet. What an insane profit you managed to achieve before though coming from only 4k USD. How long did it take you to get up to 90k and does this happen regularly? I would expect you placed a combi bet with a lot of legs to get such a big payout, or did you just bet many times in a row? So far I haven't been as lucky as you to reach such profits, but I am also a bit more risk averse and try to bet on higher odds. Just one more question, why didn't you split out your 90k bet? To me it seems a bit too risky to bet so much money on one single bet. Wouldn't it be better to pick 3-4 different bets all with similar odds to spread out the risk? Hope you are going to recover soon.

For years now I haven't been full time trading, because my profits where below what I would make in my full time job. It wasn't financial viable to stop working and only focus on trading, in my case it made more sense to keep working and do trading on the side, so that it gives a nice second income of top of my salary. Back in university I tried to do full time trading with some friends and we had to adjust our lifestyle to make it work. First of all we moved into an really old apartment outside of the city, which was the cheapest place we could find to live in. Sharing an apartment among the three of us that was in a terrible condition, saved us a lot of money. The problem was that we had to commute almost 1 hour every day to class and couldn't stay out so late as the trains weren't running all night. The next sacrifice we did was to only eat at the university or at home. We tried to save as much money as possible, by not going out for drinks at night and only by eating the cheapest possible food. It paid off that we managed to save a few thousand Euros over the year, which we used as our starting capital. 

I am sorry to hear about your struggle with having a reliable internet connection in Pakistan. Hopefully this is a not regular occurrence as limits your life considerably in the 21th century. It's true that internet is the main issue that leads to problems we can face when dealing with crypto currencies, but we should be aware that internet is being advanced and new ways are developed. The biggest game changer is going to be Starlink from Elon Musk which as already around 4000 satellites in orbit from the required 10,000 they need to cover the world. Once we can use the internet via the sky around the world and don't need internet cables or cell phone coverage, life will be much easier. Especially in remote areas where there is no cell phone coverage we will be able to finally use the internet without issue. In case you have regular internet issues you could contact Elon Musk via Twitter and ask him for help, maybe he can setup Starlink in your town like he did with Ukraine.

ChatGPT will definitely have impacts on the job market, there is no point to argue around it. The  vast amount of data and text that can be produced with ChatGPT offers opportunity in almost every sector. Companies can't stay away from it for too long, it's going to become mandatory. In my opinion the lower skilled jobs are at risk to be taken over by ChatGPT the earliest. But this will also create new jobs, there still needs to be some form of control and oversight over the bots. I would also expect the service industry to grow with the bots, at first it might be nice to communicate with AIs. But eventually humans will prefer to communicate with other humans again. There could be some new premium services that offer human interaction. Also the more we work from home with no contact with other humans the more interesting it becomes to go out in the evening. There could be a rise of restaurants and bars that leads to more people working in the service industry. 

I am not really that good at slots, so I can only answer this question from the sidelines. My first slot game I played when I was 14 years old, and for the last 3-4 years I play online slots regularly. Even with hundreds hours spent on the machines I never managed to win a big jackpot. I do get wins from time to time, but never a really big win. In my opinion beating a jackpot doesn't come down to skill, it's mostly luck based. Sure there are some skills like only playing on games that already have a big jackpot or stick to one type of machine that have a higher chance of giving free spins, but we can't really affect our chances of winning. That's why I don't think that there are professional gamblers that only stick to slots. More pros can be found at the blackjack or roulette tables.

That's quite an aggressive, if you can stomach the risk for 3 years then there is a lot of upside potential. For me personally the idea to invest with borrowed money is making me a bit uncomfortable as it increases the risk a lot. If I wasn't so risk averse I might also try to boost my returns with leverage. Your investment decisions all sound viable, you must have spent a lot of time researching it. The only problem I might see is to solely rely on bitcoin to cover your daily expenses for 2-3 years. That's a long period of time on which the bitcoin price can move a lot. Maybe it could help to run some worst case scenarios where the bitcoin price drops 50% again, just to see if this leads to any serious problems in your projections.

When being in professional treatment for a gambling addiction I wouldn't expect hypnosis to be part of it. We all know the videos where people got hypnotized and believes they were animals, but to me this was always fake and a form of entertainment. I just can't believe that our own personality can be hidden so easily. Also only seeing it on TV and not in reality makes a big difference. Maybe when I would see it happen to a friend or family member I would start believing it. The problem for any addiction treatment is that we need to believe in the process. When we are sceptical and don't trust it's not going to work. So there might be some people for which this would be a good treatment, but I think for the majority it's not going to work.

I am also very critical when it comes to random websites giving away free money on the internet. It's very hard for any company to give every user 5 USD for nothing, how are they able to keep it up for a longer period of time? When looking at such websites, my first question is always how are they making money? There must be some form of revenues to offset the give away of free money. One way would be to run advertisements on the websites and try to earn money on commissions, another way could be for the company to sell personal information of their users. So when you see a lot of popups and banners that offer a variety of products I would assume the company gets money through ads. The problem is how many people are visiting the website and does it really leads to sales. In my opinion it's better to remain cautious and don't give any personal information to that site. Make a fake email to sign up at the website and don't use your full name. Trying out the website doesn't hurt, just don't invest too much time and don't feel bad if you don't receive the money, it's free after all.

I think it's not fair if online casinos change their ToS without notifying their customers, they should at least send an email to all the registered accounts informing them about the change. As for gamblers who play incognito it might be harder to make them aware of the changes. We should look at the changes of the ToS carefully to find out if this something deliberately done to undermine us gamblers or is just usual adjustments that happen from time to time. I would expect that in most cases the casino is not going to change the ToS only for one or two users. The big casinos have thousands of customers and would you really want to make them angry only to prevent a few users to withdraw their money? In case we missed some changes of the ToS there are some websites that save older internet versions, we could try and check the Wayback Machine for internet archives of the casino website.

That's an interesting point, I agree that most gamblers think about quiting at least once during their casino career. Especially after a big loss it's natural to think about if it really was necessary to water so much money which lead to our downfall. But these are usually only thoughts coming from grief of the lost money and are not going to last. Eventually most of us come back to the tables and enjoy the excitement of gambling again. The main question is now if through external factors we could really stop gambling forever or if this is only going to be a short break. I remember reading about addiction treatments that if the patient is not believing in the cause than it's not going to work. The first step should always be to make sure that someone believes in the cause. Threatening someone is not a rational choice as it won't convince him to follow it longterm. Also living in fear is not a healthy way for a relationship.

These are all personal things that can help individuals to be better prepared during high inflation times. The problem is that all of them don't really help to bring down inflation on a country wide level. First of all saving money is good, but your interest rate will likely be lower than the inflation rate, so you are losing value every month. Same goes for investing money, our profit should at least offset inflation, otherwise it's not worth the risk. On a country wide level it would be the best if consumers start working together and punish the companies that raise price too high. It's in the hand of the consumers to pay the prices or not. Why don't we publicly label products that increase their price by 50% in 6 months? If we all would stop but their product they would be forced to lower the price again. Inflation is a spiral that goes across every industry and gives a good argument to increase prices even if production didn't change much. It's up to us consumers to change our purchase habits and find alternatives.

I don't really see anything wrong with such kind of bets, morally they might be a bit questionable but that shouldn't be an obstacle. We can bet on players getting transferred, so why not also bet on managers getting sacked. If there is enough demand for such kind of bets the bookmakers would add them for sure. There has been a lot of trainer changes this season and it would have been cool to make some money of it. After a few bad matches and getting knocked out in a big tournament it should be no issue to find new candidates that are getting fired. The only issue will be to convince bookmakers to offer such bets for a wide range of leagues and teams, and once it becomes clear that someone is getting fired the odds should become pretty one sided.

That depends on what you are looking for to do with the money you saving. Do you have a fixed goal in mind like buying an apartment or new car? Or do you just want to save money? In my opinion crypto investments offer a lot of benefits, but so do other investments. By banking investment I think you mean buying stocks, or is it just a savings account? Saving money at the bank for 2-3% interest makes not sense at the moment, because the inflation rate is much higher and you are only losing value. I would always prefer to save money in crypto currencies than in an ordinary savings accounts at the bank. When it comes to stocks it's something else because they can make much higher returns. The big benefits for me come from the dividends we can earn with good stocks. With crypto currencies we don't earn any income while holding them, but with stocks we can get 3-6% return per year by holding them. This of course means you are using money that you don't need short term and where you won't feel bad if there are some 10-20% swings in the prices. As long as you are not forced into selling the assets at unfavourable prices you have no problem and can wait for prices to recover to sell again.