Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[tikay]

It was clear he is from good stock, he has that good bearing, holds himself well, posture etc. I took an immediate liking to him. First impressions count for a lot, & he had a good handshake, eye-contact, & smiles readily. Dressed "just right", too.

So it was exactly like the first time you met me?

In EVERY way Andrew, bar the clothes-sense. Though in your case, you remind me of those posh types who cba to make an effort, & sort of deliberately dress shambolically. It does not fool me though.

Well done on a decent run in the UKOPS Main last night, though you failed to beat Posh Alex & Plump Jakally, I note. You outlasted me though, as did most. Ugh. A surprising number of blondes played it. The winner took home a rather pleasing £12,000, whereas I went home alone.

Yeah - my first online poker in ages. Decent bad beat to go out as well - AA v KK for what would have prob been the chip lead.

Decent numbers in the tourneys as well - the bean counters must have been happy this morning.

Well you know bean-counters, never completely happy.

But yes, goodly numbers all week, 33 Events & the Prize Pools came to about £340,000.  Quite good for a stand-alone independent, until you happen across a 'Stars WCOOP flyer, with $895 zillion Guaranteed.....

Been a pretty busy period for me, too, never spun so many different plates at once as I have in the last month, & I'm glad of a little breather now. SPT, UKOPS, Ch 861, UK Poker Championships, it all peaked in ther last 2 weeks.

MTT's are a relatively small part of any Online Room, of course, but these Fessies get people onto the Site, & then some migrate across to the Cash Tables, where the bulk of traffic/income is, & also, assuming a Common Wallet, across to other parts of the Site - Sports Betting, Slots etc. And that database of names just grows & grows, more people to sell more things to. It's much "deeper" than I ever realised, the Marketing behind Online Gaming, & devilishly clever. But I guess you know all that.....

[Marky147]

Think it was'Poker Poka', or  'Poka Poka' if I remember correctly.

[tikay]

Think it was'Poker Poka', or  'Poka Poka' if I remember correctly.

BOOM, you got it.

You invested too, then?.......

That would be around 2006, whilst I was with PNL. Remember it clearly now. Poka Poka.......

[Royal Flush]

Charity thing Tony i will explain to you in person its all rather messy

[Marky147]

Think it was'Poker Poka', or  'Poka Poka' if I remember correctly.

BOOM, you got it.

You invested too, then?.......

That would be around 2006, whilst I was with PNL. Remember it clearly now. Poka Poka.......

Not an investor, just a memory that stores lots of useless information.

[tikay]

Charity thing Tony i will explain to you in person its all rather messy

One's drift is duly received.

[ripple11]

Ha you sum him up so so well.  He would have been a good ambassador for victory that's for sure.

Dan flyshman (spelling) was the CEO of victory poker a poker room based in Vegas that was made up of the balla Vegas crowd, esfandiari, laak, dan blitzarian etc

They has a lot of playboy girls as pros, Andrew robl and other guys got involved and all the pros at the time were pretty cool. They did huge Vegas promotion parties but flyshman was the business guy behind it all. I know a consultancy firm I had a small gig at we're speaking to him regularly and he as big plans and the guys behind him all had money.

They did an international contest for players to join the team and mark was one of the 5? Winners in a pretty huge deal then try just stopped contacting then after everything was signed iirc. May not be right about things being signed.

I'm not sure is much Bearing Black Friday had but I think it was already looking a little,dodgy before. I'm not 100% sure about the charity stuff though.

Ahh yes, I do remember them now. They were at "Poker in the Park" I think, 2009/10?, pretty sure they signed a World Champion Boxer, I may even have done an interview with him for next door.
By strange coincidence, within a few Posts, both "Black Friday" (poker) & "Black Monday" (share prices) have been mentioned. You were not even born when Black Monday went off!

EDIT - strike that. It was Evander Holyfield, & he was with "Real Deal Poker". Whatever happened to them, I wonder?

Jeez, some sites have sunk without trace down the years.

signed by the man........no reasonable bid refused  

[RedFox]

Made me think, that, "Trillion Poker", "All-In Poker" (a sort of pyramid-selling thing), blondepoker......

blonde even has  shares in a poker room, forget the name. It was run by Dave (?) Eastwood & some Northern lads, I think James Browning was involved. Must be worth a fortune now. Ish. It was such a good investment that they hawked shares around to everyone, & sold 50% of the Company to businesses like blonde & others. So good, they sold the Shares.  

I'm not certain anyone ever paid for the shares though, everyone owed everyone else bits of money, or favours, & they'd offset the debt or whatever by taking shares. Standard stuff really, until the music stops.

I remember Dave and his good lady when they used to tour the festivals - some reason in my head the site was a name connected with King(s).

[Tal]

5 November. Only one bloke for Google to have as its homepage.



Raymond Loewy, of course.

Ok, maybe I haven't heard of him but, after reading his wiki this morning, I feel guilty that I haven't. Blimey! What a CV!

[tikay]

5 November. Only one bloke for Google to have as its homepage.



Raymond Loewy, of course.

Ok, maybe I haven't heard of him but, after reading his wiki this morning, I feel guilty that I haven't. Blimey! What a CV!

Literally just opened google & saw that. Never heard of him, but I need to go have a good rummage now.

How about this for starters?


Born in France to a Jewish family, he spent most of his professional career in the United States. Among his designs were the Shell, Exxon, TWA and the former BP logos, the Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, Coca-Cola vending machines, the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 and S-1 locomotives, the Lucky Strike package, Coldspot refrigerators, the Studebaker Avanti and Champion, and the Air Force One livery. His career spanned seven decades.

[Tal]

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/studebaker-avanti1.htm

Raymond Loewy's Early Life

Raymond Fernand Loewy -- designer of the Studebaker Avanti -- was born in Paris on November 5,1893, the youngest of three boys. His father was an Austrian-French journalist. His mother liked to remind her sons: "It's better to be envied than pitied."

One of Loewy's brothers became a surgeon, another a banker. Young Raymond showed a lively interest in motorcars, airplanes, and locomotives, sketching them endlessly in school.

Raymond was also very bright. At the age of only 12, he entered the University of Paris, where he majored in electrical engineering. Three years later, in 1908, he designed a rubber-band-powered model airplane that won a J. Gordon Bennett competition by flying further than all rivals. Still in his teens, Loewy patented this design, manufactured airplane kits, and sold them in France and England.
In 1910, he enrolled in the Ecole de Laneau, hoping to earn an advanced engineering degree. But World War I intervened, and Loewy enlisted in the French army corps of engineers, rising from private to captain by the time he mustered out in 1918.

Loewy later enjoyed telling people that his first uniform was so baggy he couldn't stand to wear it, so he had it tailored to fit like a fine suit. Loewy also decorated his muddy trench with Parisian wallpaper and artwork.
Laying telegraph cable was an early wartime task for Loewy. He ran it night after night from lonely French outposts as far as possible into German territory, usually squirming on his belly while dragging a great spool of wire.

Loewy received the Croix de Guerre with four citations, plus an Inter-Allied medal. Toward the end of the war, he served as a French liaison officer to the U.S. Expeditionary Forces, an assignment that helped him polish his English.
Loewy finished college after the war. Then in 1919, with just $40 and only his blue officer's uniform to wear, he boarded a ship bound for America. His brother, Georges, a doctor and medical researcher in New York, paid his way.
On the way over, someone asked Raymond for a charitable donation; since he had little money, he sketched a portrait of a young lady who was on board and put it up for auction. To his surprise, the drawing brought $150.

The buyer was none other than the British consul in New York, Sir Harry Armstrong, who was so taken with Loewy's charm and talent that he introduced him to Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines.
With that, Loewy began his American career as a fashion illustrator. It wasn't long, however, before he turned to the budding business of industrial design and began landing major clients like Gestetner, Westinghouse, Hupmobile, and Sears-Roebuck. He added Studebaker in 1936, and soon designed its most popular car in years, the 1939 Champion.

By 1953, Raymond Loewy and Associates had grown to a firm with 200 employees, an annual income of over $3 million, a posh New York headquarters, and branch offices in London, Paris, Sao Paolo, Los Angeles, Chicago, and -- just for Studebaker -- South Bend, Indiana.

[tikay]

LOVE these sort of tales, real something from nothing stuff.


On the way over, someone asked Raymond for a charitable donation; since he had little money, he sketched a portrait of a young lady who was on board and put it up for auction. To his surprise, the drawing brought $150.

The buyer was none other than the British consul in New York, Sir Harry Armstrong, who was so taken with Loewy's charm and talent that he introduced him to Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines.
With that, Loewy began his American career as a fashion illustrator. It wasn't long, however, before he turned to the budding business of industrial design and began landing major clients like Gestetner, Westinghouse, Hupmobile, and Sears-Roebuck. He added Studebaker in 1936, and soon designed its most popular car in years, the 1939 Champion

[Tal]

http://www.rockpaperink.com/content/article.php?id=1418

The Raymond Loewy Pencil Sharpener

Click to see full-size image.

Raymond Loewy comments: "There seems to be for each individual product (or service, or store, or package, etc.) a critical area at which the consumer's desire for novelty reaches what I might call the 'shock-zone.' At that point the urge to buy reaches a plateau, and sometimes evolves into a resistance to buying. It is a sort of tug of war between attraction to the new and fear of the unfamiliar … When resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in, the design in question has reached its MAYA — most advanced yet acceptable — stage. We might say that a product has reached the MAYA stage when thirty percent (to pick an arbitrary figure) or more of the consumers express a negative reaction to acceptance. If design seems too radical to the consumer, he resists it whether the design is a masterpiece or not. In other words, the intrinsic value of the design cannot overcome the resistance to its radicality at the MAYA stage." The pencil shapener's form is streamlined, futuristic, perhaps modeled after a dirigible, which had become an icon of technological progress until the Hindenburg disaster in 1937. Once the product is identified as a pencil sharpener, its use is intuitive: insert the pencil into the hole, turn the crank. Pencil shavings are tidily collected in the base, which is removable for cleaning. The design never went into production, and its function never refined to work properly — but function has nothing to do with this design. His patent filing confirms this, without apology: "Be it known that I, Raymond Loewy, a citizen of the Republic of France, residing at New York, the county of New York, in the State of New York, have invented certain new, original, and ornamental Design for a Pencil Sharpener.…"

[tikay]

That is just brilliant.

Do we even have pencil sharpeners in this day & age? That piece got me thinking.

Pencil sharpeners were important, & symbolic. Waste not, want not. Pencil gone blunt, sharpen it. Often it would end up as a little stub, an inch or two was all that remained. EVERYONE had a pencil sharpener. Offices & schools had desk-mounted ones, but we all had a personal one. Cheap, garishly coloured plastic, "MADE IN CHINA", & the posh kids had beautiful stainless steel ones.

I doubt schools use pencils these days, & if they do, I suspect they just throw them away & replace with new when they go blunt.

So many of life's metaphors in there.

We had no money as kids, but we'd no sooner go to school without a pencil sharpener as run around naked.

Typically, they'd be one of the "under the tree" Christmas pressies.

Click to see full-size image.

Click to see full-size image.

[Tal]

I do a lot of my notetaking at work in pencil. The main stuff I do on a computer of course, but I am happy to have a shelf in my top drawer for half a dozen pencils (ratio is 4:2 HB:B at present) for scribbling.

Not sure I've seen many of my colleagues so minded. Never really stopped me before, mind.