Quote:
Originally Posted by bumpking
wait, i didn't get my questions in!
1. where/what did you see in australia for the 2-3 weeks after the tourney?
2. with your skill set, history, tolerance for risk, and programming background, you seem like the perfect person for the stock market and day-trading. like they say, the very, very best top 10 poker players in the world make about $1-2M/year consistently. the top 100 day-traders make $150M/year easily. have you ever tried it. if not why? if so, what were the results?
1) Before the tournament we went to Phillip Island which is about a 3 hour drive south of Melbourne. We drove from the Melbourne airport which was quite the adventure considering that they drive on the left side of the road and I've never done that before, but we made it there safely. On the island are various wildlife parks, and then at night there's a place on the beach with grandstands set up where you can watch the penguins come out of the water and into their burrows on the beach. That was really fun.
After that we flew into Sydney and walked around the harbor that first day and had dinner on a ship that cruised around the harbor that night. The next 3 days I spend playing in the tournament. After that we did a climb on the Sydney Harbour bridge which was really neat. We walked kind of randomly around the town just taking it all in those last 2 days in Sydney.
After that we flew to Cairns, which is about a 3 hour flight north of Sydney. There we spent a night walking around the town and they had a huge Christmas festival going on so we stayed and watched it. It's really weird seeing people singing Christmas carols when it's like 100 degrees outside though (the seasons there are backwards since they're in the Southern Hemisphere).
The next morning we boarded a SCUBA diving boat which we stayed on for the next week. We did something like 25 dives at various places on the Great Barrier Reef.
So then we get back off the boat and to the airport and are supposed to be on our way home, but our flight from Cairns to Sydney got canceled. So now we had to take a later flight to Sydney, which means we had no chance of catching our flight from Sydney to LA, so we had to spend another night and day in Sydney (darn). So we got in kind of late and got a hotel, then the next morning we went walk around in the park and saw these homeless people playing chess on a life-sized chess board. For some reason it was really intriguing and we watched it for at least an hour. Finally we had to go catch our plane so we did and flew back to LA. When we got there the board showed that our flight from LA to Phoenix was also canceled. So from LAX we had to take a bus to Long Beach airport then wait about 4 hours to finally get home. So all in all we got home about 34 hours late.
2) Yeah it's funny you mention that because a couple months ago I ordered a few books about investing and the markets. I could easily see this as something that could interest me, especially if the online poker situation gets any worse in the US. I really don't have much idea what to do yet as far as day-trading though or if it's even something I'd be good at. As of now I've never really tried anything with investing yet except for setting up retirement funds.
Cliff notes version: Australia = fun, canceled flights = not so fun, day-trading = possibility but no experience yet
