So instead of an arbitrary kelly fraction, we use an arbitrary loss function fudge factor? GTFO smug ass academic charlatan with no skin in the game. Garbage in, garbage out.
You have worked with some top men, but several of them have complained of the same thing. That black death, the scarlet letter, two intersecting lines of doom. The red L. Otherwise capable men were shaken. They couldn’t handle the stench of death. They’d see red on the battlefield and panic. Physically sound and unwounded men had to be sent home because they’d go all to pieces when the bodies stacked up. But not you.
It was always the same. They’d come to you, anxiously taking off their cap, looking down at the ground, fidgeting and they’d inform you of the news and they’d apologise because those men they’d lost were your men too. But you would just look at them vacantly, blink, nod, shrug, and give a perfunctory salute, clapping the heels of your boots together at attention. You had explained it to them so many times before. You just had to accept that that was the way that men are and hope that things would turn around. For their sake.
What made you like that? Had it always been that way? You thought back to the beginning. You recalled a dignified amber autumn afternoon, several years back now, the American west coast when you were just at camp. You were still so young then. A $75 bet and you were trying to find it on Dave’s old TV set. No, you were certainly not #maxedandrelaxed on that day. How did you ever get to this point?
Another image appears. A glass of whiskey. 11 AM. The fall of BetIslands. You’d entrusted a quarter of your force to a band of men who’d gone off the rails in the Central American jungle. If you had known how bad things were, you’d never have done it, but you were gaining ground and gaining ground and by the time you recognised something was wrong, they were in too deep to go back. They had long cracked from the pressure and managed to continue forward only by staying high on cocaine, and the fat lazy scum in charge of looking after them were taking bribes to look the other way and they still had hope it would all turn around but their luck was running out and the chaos and the blunders finally resulted in their complete obliteration and then you lost 50,000 men overnight.
You got the telephone call on R&R at a swimming pool, and none of the tourists around you knew or could have ever understood what had happened. Chlorinated water splashed at your feet, but you just sat and tapped your finger on the table and drank your whiskey and did not speak. That morning’s losses were greater than the populations of most of their towns.
But you bounced back from that and kept forward until the next great struggle. A long slow retreat that began in late 2013, and would see multiple catastrophic battles. You’d been authorised to handle larger forces and you’d devised a clever pincer movement. You’d take a tenth of your forces and send them around on one side, and another tenth and throw them around on the other side. But just as the first group went off, the enemy bombs came hurling down, and your men were trapped. It was all or nothing, and you got nothing. Nobody made it back alive. You’d never had that much at stake before. And it happened three times that week. It was inconceivable. Finally, after taking about third of your strength, you were limited, adding insult to injury. Things didn’t get better. A month later you lay awake in the desolate night, way up high where the bosses meet, but you didn’t feel like a boss that night, nor even a competent officer, and you were separated from everyone and everything, and you were terrified. What would happen if it didn’t work out?
You were down, but still you were not out.
For the next 11 months you’d go to battle every single day across all of the Americas, north to south and back. The next great struggle involved a Chinese betrayal . Foolish. You should have known better than to ever trust the Chinese. But there you were, opening an email, bleary-eyed after a night of debauchery, having toasted to your nation’s independence again and again, (you remember this), and you woke to a notice that over half of your men, deep inside the Chinese border, had been taken hostage. Your heart pounded. For one long month, you could think of nothing but the negotiation to get your men out. You were inconsolable. People spoke to you and you walked past them. What were you going to do? You’d lie there in the thick, lethargic summer evenings of the North American plains, almost shattered. But you did not break. Eventually your resolve prevailed. The Chinese had been outmanoeuvred, and there was nothing left for them to do but return the funds. Still, their pathetic attempt at petty theft had left its mark and you would never forget it.
Another evening comes to mind. You remember, sitting on a makeshift chaise lounge, in the city of eternal spring, talking to another soldier of fortune, and he was baiting you, asking you why you did not throw in more men, and you kept avoiding the question and he’d kept cornering you, not getting the hint, and you were tired. The war had worn you down. This was the low point of the longest and worst retreat you’ve ever had to endure. And for that one moment, you broke. “Because I haven’t made any ****ing money,” you said sharply, then paused. The air went out of the room. Silence. “In two ****ing years,” you whispered. Outside, seven stories below, cars hissed through the valley. You stared off into space. He brought you a drink and nothing more was ever said about sending more men to the front.
You remember things got so bad you consulted another officer, nicknamed Calm for his ability to remain so during even the most intense and trying moments of battle. You had lost around half of your territory from its peak. Had he ever suffered such a period of defeat? How did one endure? “Keep your head up,” he told you. “I’ve been there. We’ve all been there. It will turn around. Show up every day. Plan your attacks well. The luck will change.” That held you together during those last few gruesome weeks of death and dying as 2014 turned into 2015.
But that was the last time you’d ever feel that again. Just two weeks later, it did turn around, Calm was right. The enemy had been advancing on you for too long. Their lines were overextended, limits had been raised, there were outs in every direction. And when you launched the counterattack, they were ruined. You gained ground at an incredible rate, and never looked back.
Of course, there was the catastrophe, years later, when you had been let down by so many in a single day in 2016 (9/10, never forget), but even though you’d lost more than ever before, you had men to spare. You couldn’t talk like that in polite company of course; civilians never understood. Still, that was the reality.
Finally, there were those nights of the winter previous, when you and an Irishman, drunk on darkness and death, of which there was far too much to go around at the time, would chase each other around, delirious, homicidal impulses roaring in your ears and throbbing in your temples, and for four long months Peter and his harlot daughter and their whole incompetent gang could not lose. But even then, though you were constantly on the retreat, you had the sense that you were winning, and it was only a matter of time and you would break them. And you did. On the 4th day of the 4th month of 2017, the war had been won.
Was it those darkest moments that hammered you down and bent you, and broke you at the places that would not bend, and put you back together stronger, only to break you and reform you again and then do it all over again and again into what you are now? Or did it have nothing to do with the war at all? Maybe it was that lovely, lively, ludicrous pixie from England you’d met during summer peacetime in an old R&R town from the Vietnam War. It was pure blind blissful madness; and you felt the effects of that one for a while.
Months later, after that winter’s campaign had passed, during a peacetime hike, grey seaside boulders dotted not with bodies but with thorny, twisting African halophytes, their roots dug in between the rocks, you stood, looking out into the ocean, once again, next to Calm. You relayed that pathetic Nihilistic philosophy you’d taken on, temporarily, to survive, and he advised that you’d better stomp that out and get a hold of yourself, general. The wind rushed through your hair and threatened to carry his straw hat off of the cliffside and into the chilly Indian Ocean below. You didn’t tell him then, but you knew he was right.
Nothing since then had shaken you. You remember Natalia now, towards the dying days of your relationship last year, wistfully admiring and criticising, “Nothing touches you.” She waved her hand between her face and yours, tracing it over the imaginary fortress that you’d built.
How could you teach your men to keep their resolve in the face of adversity? How could you ever make them understand? For a second you think and there is a rush of pictures coming one after another, overlapping, and then all at once:
A cheap and dreary Canadian hotel room, a mountainous long-shadowed vista in Patagonia, a Chinese gangster, a baseball player from Colorado, thin air, a home run, tens of thousands of men dead, a discarded motorbike, pieces of Thai street in your knee, a map of plans for digging a tunnel under enemy defences, the beach and the dark blue water in Barceloneta, a stopgap TV-turned-monitor in an opulent Italian flat, that pool and the whisky and the tourists, dim lanterns and a blonde girl in a thin white dress saunters to the couch and sits on your lap, a glass of wine in her hand, puts her arm around your neck, you catch a whiff of her perfume. A keyboard plays a dreamy and deranged string of pastel-tinted notes, and now you’re standing waist-deep in another pool on a rooftop in the Caribbean, a gin and tonic with a lime, the smell of the sea, black text on a white background, editing Denise Coates’ Wikipedia page, exposing her war crimes, a rain-soaked street in a Melbourne alley covered with graffiti, and now a triumphant, euphoric contented baseline slowly marches in, popping a champagne bottle on a sunny morning on a balcony in Africa, and finally the dusty summer streets of that former northern capital, no longer grey, short skirts swaying, long Slavic legs attached to pink and blue and green and orange high heels clicking on the steps of the metro, echoing through the hall.
Death. Destruction. Annihilation.
Exhilaration. Exaltation. Elevation.
The last six years. My struggle. Yes, it was your struggle. Not theirs.
No, they could never understand. But you must keep trying. These are good men.
I miss the days of G getting $10k worth of action on h1 totals in LV on Thurs and Friday. And ducking out to the bathroom, hitting the craps table on the way back with an extra nickel or dime after a hot hit n run.
good call. that was actually the first one i listened to this morning after posting here. i have one dr. Z's old horse racing books and thought it was pretty sharp. decent interview. i've listened to a few other ones already and they aren't as great as i was hoping. cheers mate (learning to talk aussie/british from listening).
Ladies and gentleman, I daresay some of you may have heard some of the more extravagant rumors about what my plans are...I just thought you'd like to hear it from me -- face to face, no great mystery. I've traveled over half the planet to be here tonight. I couldn't get away sooner because my new gnome was getting set up in Buenos Aires, and I had to see about it. That gnome is now betting on four accounts; it's paying me an EV of 5000 dollars a week. I have four other gnomes running and three more in the pipeline throughout the US. So ladies and gentlemen, if I say I'm a professional sports bettor, you will agree. And as a sports bettor, I hope that you'll forgive just good old-fashioned plain speaking.
Now you have a great chance here, but bear in mind: you can lose it all if you're not careful. Out of all men that beg for a chance to bet your accounts, maybe one in twenty will be sports bettors. The rest will be runners -- that's men trying to get between you and the sports bettors to get some of the money that ought by rights come to you. Even if you find one that has money, and means to bet, he'll maybe know nothing about betting; and he'll bet picks from touts. And then you're depending on a tout, who will rush the picks out so he can get more subscribers just as quick as he can. This is the way that this works.
I do my own betting. And the men that work for me, work for me and they're men that I know. I make it my business to be there and to see their work. I don't get my funds held hostage by shady offshore books and spend months fishing for them. I don't use fake documents and get funds confiscated for fraud.
Now something else, and please don't be insulted if I speak about this: internet. Let's talk about internet. Now to my mind, it's an abomination to consider that any man, woman, or child in this magnificent country of ours should have to look upon high speed internet as a luxury. We're going to bet steam here. Steam betting means fast internet; fast internet means Netflix. We're going to stream things here where before it just simply was impossible. You're going to have more media than you know what to do with. Sir, you'll be Netflix and chilling on the regular.
I'm a community man. This is my friend and my partner, Goose. We offer you the bond of community that very few gamblers can understand.
I'm fixed like no other syndicate in this field, and that's because my Argentinian gnome has just come in. I have a string of angles all ready to put to work. I can order a laptop on Amazon and have it here in a week. I have business connections, so I can get Skrill verified with VIP in just two days. Such things go by friendship in a rush like this. And this is why I can guarantee to start betting, and to put up the cash to back my word. I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, no matter what the others promise to do, when it comes to the showdown they won't be there.
