I agree with you that it's very hard to trust people in the internet where everything could be faked. When it comes to poker courses companies usually team up with big poker professionals that are famous and everybody knows them from the TV live coverage of big tournaments. Having a poker professional who won a few bracelets teaching his strategy in a course is the best advertising you could ask for. The problem is for someone who is a millionaire to sit down and teach you his strategy will cost you a lot of money. I saw some poker material from Fedor Holz which was great, very detailed and advanced material, but his course is also very expensive. You won't get such material for free and it's difficult to decide if such a poker course is going to be worth it. We need to be aware that a poker professional spend thousands of hours playing poker to become an expert. While a poker course can help us a lot to improve our game, it’s not a guarantee to make us professional poker players. When it comes to learn and improving our poker game we will still have to play a lot. Even the best poker strategy is not going to solve all our problems. My advice would always be to give a course a try if they offer some free promotional material. Based on it we should evaluate if the course is worth it’s money or not. Because if we pay too much money for a poker course than we will be left without a bankroll to play actual poker. 

Did miss something or where is your strategy? Maybe I understood it wrong, but basically you and your friends are sharing one betting account together and place bets on 3 matches per day. Since there are only 3 matches you are placing bets on every world Cup match. I like the approach to place bets together with your friends. Like you said this reduces the risk of making a big loss. It also gives the chance that everybody follows different teams more closely and you can make better predictions. Now I am wondering what your initial bankroll was to get a profit 1,000 USD. For me it's been a while since I placed bets together with my friends. We still talk about betting but everybody is having his own account. We have a betting pool at work where everybody paid 5 Euros and gave their two picks for the final match and the winner. Among my colleagues I have only two guys who bet regularly like. I would call my betting strategy very conventional, I only bet on win/lose or a draw. Making exact score predictions didn't really work out for me, so I am sticking with the normal bets.

After their weak game against USA, England looked pretty strong against Wales yesterday. I do think they are going deep this worldcup and hopefully will not be knocked out in the next stage. Same for Portugal this week, they are playing well and should go far. As for today's matches France vs Tunisia is going to be interesting, France is already through with their first two wins and don't need to give a 100% in the match today. But I still think this is going to be a free win for France. Denmark and Australia both are playing for the 2nd place in Group D and could advance if they win today. So a draw is very unlikely, one of the two teams has to win and Denmark seems much stronger. I like the odds for Australia and will place a small bet on them just in case we will see a miracle.  Also in the Poland vs Argentina match they need to play for a winner to make sure that Argentina is advancing in the next stage. I will go with Messi on this one. And then there is the Saudi Arabia match vs Mexico. Both teams could win the 3 points and theoretically still advance to the next rounds. Both of the games should be very interesting and I would expect to see many goals. I am sticking with Mexico on this one as they will do anything possible to try qualify for the next round.

You could argue that people who have enough finances and capital to take advantage of cheap offers during a recession were already rich before the recession started. Companies who sell essential goods are usually less severely affected by a recession and will keep to operate like before. Any business owner of such a company will be doing fine during a recession. It is mostly the smaller business that are affected stronger by a recession. When things are getting really bad than politicians like to save big companies first as there are more workers involved and more potential voters to be convinced. That is why I agree with you, for small business owners surviving a recession should be the main goal. Trying to become rich during a recession is so much more difficult than during a bull market. There are not many anti cycle businesses were we could invest easily. My main goal is now to save as much as possible to have capital available when the recession is over and to profit from rising prices again.

I noticed that more crypto words are trending on twitter over the last few weeks. Not sure though if this is real interest in crypto currencies or an increase in scams. When I click on the trending news the top 3 tweets are always from some fake crypto users who are making some "giveaways". They always ask for a follow, like and retweet and in return they will give away some crypto coins. Strangely the tweets always look the same but are from different users. Hundreds of people are posting their walkers and think this is legit. When I look back at the tweets a few days later I never see any winners posted, or there are no users claiming to have won. To me it seems like an quick and easy way to try abf increase your followers on twitter. Weren't all the Elon Musk fan boys already on twitter before he bought the company? I think there is just less supervision now for the scammers and they are less afraid to get banned.

I can understand that he wants to protect people from making bad decisions, but an outright ban on crypto currencies as retirement investment is wrong in my opinion. Even though a large part of the population might be unfamiliar with cryptos, there are still people who understand them and would like to have them in their retirement investment. Why can't there be better regulation to protect consumers instead of banning it directly? A good approach would be to make sure that everybody who wants to invest his retirement funds in cryptos is aware of the risks involved. In my country most of the private retirement schemes pool the money and buy investment funds with it. These investment funds have fixed guidelines for the assets they can buy. In most cases this is 60-80% fixed income, 20-40% stocks with only a very small fraction of 5-10% in commodities. To me it seems totally fine if we invest in a fund that would also add 5-10% crypto investments. These investment funds for our retirement are very long term investments that are not being traded too actively. Holding some cryptos for the next 30-40 years seems fine and we shouldn't worry about short term price fluctuations.  

For anybody who doesn't hold any bitcoins yet this is a great time to buy your first coins in my opinion. Let's you don't hold any cryptos at all bd you looking for your first purchase, than I would advise to buy atleast 0.5 in bitcoins and the rest in alt coins. Going for large purchases in the alt coin market is not a bad idea, but we need to be aware that the volatility and risks of the price falling is much higher than when buying only bitcoins. In my opinion every crypto portfolio should hold bitcoins. In case our friend already holds some bitcoins and wants to make his first alt coin purchase, than I would advise him to only buy 0.2 bitcoins and the rest in his alt coins. Owning more than one crypto coin is a good idea to diversify our portfolio. Taking a bit advantage of the low price of Bitcoins right now makes still sense.

As a small boy my grandfather used to take me to the store where he always played lottery and would give me 2 scratch cards when we were watching the lottery girl picking the numbers Saturday evening. My parents still hate gambling to this day, but my grandfather taught me a lot about it with out them knowing. Also my first few card games I learned from him. So I was interested in casinos and gambling at a very young age. During high school I had some probability lessons and we did some roulette and blackjack games in class without money of course. As soon as I turned 18 I wanted to visit my first casino with some friends. We did have some strategies for roulette and blackjack, but lost all our money. We left the casino completely broke. I still remember today that on the one roulette table was a red steak of 7 or 8 numbers in a row and I placed a large bet on black only to see red come one more time. For the first time in a casino it was still fun and a great atmosphere.

Man merkt das Weihnachten vor der Tür steht. Vielen Dank für ein weiteres Gewinnspiel hier im Forum.

Ich probiere es diesesmal mit dem "d" für Deutschland 

d - Mauser

Viel Glück an Alle und einen guten Start in die Woche

P.S. Ist dass die EZB auf dem Titelbild?

I feel like the whole immigration policies we have in Europe for the last 10 years are not really working out in the way they are supposed to. It's been almost 8 years since the large migration from the middle east to Europe, and I am still not hearing about all the positive benefits which were promised to us. It's true that European countries are ageing and we need more young people over here. But what is more critical is that European countries try to get all their young people into universities. It became so common to have an Bachelor or Masters degree over here, that we are lacking a lot of young people doing the actual work. There are more than 1 million people missing from the workforce in specialised works like construction, nursing, electronics or other jobs where you don't need a long theoretical education but rather a practical education. And from what I have heard is that young people who are immigrating to Europe are also not keen to work in those areas. Many parents from abroad doing everything in their power to send their children to university over here. It also doesn't help that university education is for free and the government will give you money for your living expenses without any interest during your studies. This trend is going to get larger in my country, we will have more unemployed university graduates and not enough actual workers doing the necessary jobs. Hopefully with the double digit inflation we have now the income for the lower level jobs is going to rise exponentially to make it more attractive for younger people in school right now to switch career paths.

I have never played Bingo in my life and I am not sure if I have ever seen it played anywhere to be honest. The casinos in my country don't really offer the game and when visiting other casino cities like Las Vegas I don't remember seeing tables with Bingo there. Maybe there were special areas for it and I haven't paid enough attention to it. Bingo seems like the standard game we see in the movies old people play in their retirement homes. Saul Goodman was organising Bingo games to get closer to the old people and represent them in their claims. I really wonder if all the retirement homes have Bingo games in the US. In my country we would probably not have older people play for money in the retirement homes. I know from my grand parents that they mostly play cards or other board games in their free time, but never for money. Bingo seems a bit like lottery, I am wondering if there is a good strategy to make money with the game. Or if the game is mostly to keep older people entertained and get by with the long hours during autumn and winter when nobody can go outside. 

While this is one way to try and lower the financial burden on a family, there are also other option for families who want to have more than one child. I noticed this by friends of mine, they are already in their 30s and have their first child while both are working full time. They are always complaining how expensive a child is while it seems that they are not trying to save any money. They are only dressing their kid in fancy designer clothes, everything they buy is new and expensive. The kid is going to a private school where he is already learning English at a young age. Don't get me wrong, it's good for the kid and he will learn a lot from it. But the parents are investing so much money into even sport gear and music instruments where that their son rarely uses. This is the completely opposite to one of my best friends, they have 3 children and rarely buy anything new. They are struggling financially much more but never really complain. I see that their two younger sons always wear the old clothes from their first born. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion and in among other friends is pretty normal to try and help them out whenever possible. Having and raising 3 kids is a lot of work, but you can make it work with help from friends and family.

Really hard to make a good prediction at the moment, so far we have seen every team play at least one and max two games. There were several surprise during the first week that make finals a bit more unpredictable. Usually I don't bet on the tournament winner before the semi finals. Too many things could go wrong and a strong team might get knocked out early. Just look at Germany for example, they are probably out tomorrow.
So my first prediction for the finals is Brasil vs France, the two teams convinced me the most and I think they get very far during the Worldcup. My second prediction would be Brasil vs Spain, Spain had such a good first match that they could go deep this year as well. Beating a team 7-0 during your first match should make every player on the team hyped for the tournament. I believe in streaks during football games and a lot of momentum will be carried over to the next match.

That is really sad, it's been such a hard year for all of us and it looks like the end will not be any better. In my country we don't really celebrate Thanksgiving, we mainly focus on Christmas. It's the biggest holiday of the year and everybody is usually gifting something to each other. Also for the companies December is the most important period to make a profit and save the rest of the year. But this year looks really terrible so far. I read that 1 out of 5 families will not buy any presents at all and save the money instead. Last year people spend on average 309 Euros, while this year it will only be 235 Euro for presents. With such a bad end of the year, 2023 will probably not going to be any better. We are living in such uncertain times that the best thing we can do is to save money and avoid unnecessary expenses.

I wouldn't go so far to call England bad after only 2 matches. Their first match was great and with scoring 6 goals against Iran they are fine in terms of goal difference to a similar scored team. There was no real reason to exhaust the players in the second match, a draw is fine to them. Luckily I forgot to place a bet on England, I still thought they would win against USA. For me England is the favourite in group B, their next match against Wales is much more important as they are both in the United Kingdom and more rivals than USA. They will put in more effort and should easily win against Wales. The USA vs Iran match is going to be a bit closer and probably more exciting. After losing some money on the Germany - Japan match I am looking forward to France playing Denmark today, that is going to be a good win for France. Also the Mexico vs Argentina is going to be a nice match, both teams need the win and will fight very hard to get it. I think that Argentina is pulling through as they need to win their next two matches to advance and not get kicked out. Also Poland vs Saudi Arabia is going to be interesting to see if Saudi Arabia can pull off another crazy victory, not going to bet on them though.

I have never been involved with cock fight and to be honest with you, I can't imagine myself to ever take part in such an event. Maybe it's just different cultures, but to me it feels like animal cruelty to watch 2 animals to fight each other to death and bet money on it. I understand that there is a lot of history involved and people don't want to give up their traditions. Do we really need to watch real animals fight in 2022? Couldn't there be an alternative that is less harmful to animals? I would rather watch and bet money on animals racing than on fighting. It feels a bit like what the sailors did a few hundred years ago with scorpions on the ships. Nothing wrong with people getting together and having a good time while betting money on some events. But if there are animals dying than I don't it could be a mainstream event that could be displayed in casinos. Imagine the public outcry if all the big casinos would start having daily cock fights. There would be a lot of protest by the animal organisations like peta in front of the casinos and media coverage could lead to bad publicity.

It's always nice to bring the Bitcoin price into perspective by comparing 5 or 10 years ago to today. Even though BTC had a terrible year and is down 65% year to date, we are still up 50% over the last 5 years. Over the last several weeks the number of threads of people asking "is bitcoin going to survive" increased a lot, it feels a bit like people lost confidence in bitcoins. Looking at past prices should calm our nerves even if we didn't buy so cheap. There is clearly a longterm upwards trend in bitcoin. Also thinking back 5 years should help us to decide that it's a good time to buy right now, rather than wait for price to drop to unrealistic low levels. I don't think that the bitcoin price would be the same today if more people bought in 2015. If most people bought their Bitcoin for 400 USD back in the day, why would anybody be buying now at 16,000 USD or 60,000 USD one year ago? Bitcoin wasn't popular back then, which is where the price rise is coming from once all the new investor joined the crypto community.

#72 - Mauser please

Thanks Mopar for the giveaway and Happy Holidays!

Good Luck to all

In my opinion gambling should always be legal in a country. Having a nation wide ban on gambling is wrong as it will never remove gambling complete from society. The only thing that a ban is going to do is shifting it not hiding from the government. Private underground casinos will pop up and still satisfy the demand for gambling and sports betting. The government is missing out on taxes and also will not offer a legal framework for the citizens. It should be every persons choice to decide if he wants to engage in gambling or not. And as long as it's legal a gambler doesn't need to be afraid that he will scammed out of his winnings, he has the law on his side. In my country sports betting is a big market and is part of the culture over here, if politicans would try to ban it then there would be a public outcry. As for the metaverse I think it's the future and will be a big part for people watching sports, betting and engaging with each other while sitting on the couch at home. I would only be wearing a costume in the metaverse if I am getting paid for it. It feels a bit like making a promotion on Facebook or Instagram, as everybody else is going to see you with it. And a company should offer some goodies or monetary reward for people to promote their business.

Right now is the worst possible time to sell any of your coins. The prices are so low that at any point over the last year it would have been better to sell than now. I think that most longterm abf HODL investors are aware of that and are not considering selling any of their crypto coins. Short term volatility should have never any influence on our decision making, it's better to hold for another few tears than to sell now. For a trader things might look differently, he more concerned with shortterm profit.
Even though there are still plenty of HODL investors I don't think the bitcoin price is going to rise at the end of the year. The demand for cryptos is not strong at the moment, people are trying up get by with the higher living expenses and with Christmas around the corner there is not much free capital to invest left. The good thing of longterm investors not selling their coins is that the price is not falling further. We have to wait for 2023 for prices to recover.