look, i don't want to get into a big fight about this. not all americans have access to neteller. those that don't have no better option than to withdraw via check.

i requested a 9k withdrawal from bodog. here is how they handled the request:

- told me that they would send it in 3k intervals
- waited three weeks to send the first check
- first check bounces
- i ask them to look into why the check bounced. they respond by locking my account. (wtf?) they have been 'investigating' for two weeks now.

if you want to give the book a pass for this, that's fine, and it might even be more rational than writing them off. but i would rather not do business with a company that treats its customers this way, and i don't think it's irresponsible to state my opinion on the issue.

i haven't tried to cash out lately from wsex, although i hear they're not doing so hot. however, in the past, wsex has been fine cashing me out, and if i don't like their withdrawal options, it costs me nothing to send the money to a book that's good at it, like the greek or matchbook or the like. bodog doesn't offer these transfers, and this isn't the first difficulty i've had with them; they sent me a check last year and then e-mailed me to inform me that the check was no good and that i shouldn't attempt to deposit it. at least that time they gave me an advance warning.

A reasonable rebuttal, but the sensationalism about financial solvency is quite absurd.

Bookmaker is another example of a company who despite having a fairly small number of clients is constantly losing a variety of processing methods.

BTW all internet fights are big. This is the internet, there is no other way.

here's one writeup on the subject.

i don't think the sample size is large enough to draw any conclusions. it's worth noting that there's basically no variation among the 0-2 hour samples.

Good thread. Thank you.

Did BP ever fix VORP? Does that situation make you worry about other advanced stats (not just that there was a mistake but BP's response when the mistake was discovered)? I'm not sure if you follow Football Outsiders but Will Carroll is a big part of that website so sometimes I wonder about people's devotion to FO's stats (including mine), especially considering they did a big overhaul of them over the off-season.

Check out this article from Beyond the Box Score. They "fixed" VORP by creating JustVORP.

you can check out kyleb's link, although it's not that useful for betting purposes since they won't be releasing projections using it.

BP has announced plans to "fix" WARP, but not VORP so far as i know. WARP would be the more useful stat anyway, but right now it is hopelessly broken.

How do you think MLB's capturing of Pitch f/x data will impact baseball knowledge? Have you considered incorporating Pitch f/x data into any of your models?

In the past, you struggled with creating a good model for predicting MLB run totals. Why do you think this was and is this something you have worked on further?

i'm not the right person to ask about this. certainly the sabermetricians i respect believe that pitch f/x data is going to be huge, but i find it difficult to draw any conclusions that i can take to the bank.

i'm still working on this, but i think it's a more difficult task than doing money lines. if a team is 12-0 but their pythag record is 8-4, you can be pretty sure they're going to regress, but if scoring is way up early in the year, isn't it possible that MLB is juicing the ball? at least if they're doing that, it should affect both teams roughly equally.

i'm also not really into things like umpire tracking, even though i believe they do make a difference.

Josh Kalk (the guy who does the PITCHf/x tool and player cards) writes for my site, or used to, anyway. He says the PITCHf/x data is so unreliable from stadium to stadium that he needs to correct it manually to come up with consistent data. Even then, he's far from believing that the data is perfect.

Every year they get closer to being a perfect tracking tool, but for now it's a semi-reliable novelty. The work he and Mike Fast have done on nRuns100 and other metrics based on PITCHf/x data is a good start.

Should we subject ourselves to 4 hours at Robuchon, with Thremp, for 16 courses during the opening week of March Madness? I've eaten there and it's def worth it.

I owe you many many drinks, at least, for your shared success in 2007. Or I can pay you back in 1st/2nd round touts...

i survived 27 courses at alinea with him, so another 16 can't be too awful.

Haha. That was a damn good meal. I liked the mint leaves. Occasionally when I drink Mojitos (at home... alone) and find a surplus of mint, I do the same exact thing.

So after reading all this Crock. I informed Ston the other night while at my house about Thremps comments....and your response's....he laughed and continued to drink and then a binny's run was in our future.....Also when will the monkey fights be happening?

this is an excellent primer on why i have basically given up on the working-for-the-man dream.

Good read, but lol @:

lol donkaments

i also like that the guy is criticizing other people's poker skills when playing in a tourney that takes out 25% of the prize pool

Yes, that's a fine rake.

Sad, but I guess that's what you get when you have an enormous supply of cheap labor and low demand for it. The people who actually go through all that must want it just amazingly bad to the exclusion of everything else in life. I mean I'd love to be a GM but $450/mo. at a concession stand in Idaho no thx. Add to that the fact that, I dunno, at least a third of current GMs are mentally ******ed to the point that any smart person with a rudimentary understanding of baseball could do their job better than them...how demeaning.

The guy who called w/ the gutshot was probably Jim Bowden.

The best way to get into an MLB front office is to start a website or contribute to one with a bunch of original work for a few years and then aggressively market your ideas to people in the business. It worked for the BPro crew, TangoTiger, and Carlos Gomez of The Hardball Times (currently a scout for the Diamondbacks). They don't want to have to train you, I think.

Most teams go by the consultant route as I understand it anyway.

And lol @ Jim Bowden. At least he wasn't drawing dead; if he was, it would have been Colletti or Sabean.

Yeah, sometimes your dream job turns out not to be what you wanted at all. I had my 'dream job' and after a few years of 95-hour weeks and 3 days off one year I realized I didn't really want to do that for another 7 years to get a 'real' position of influence etc.

OTOH, that job did motivate me down my current path where I have a job that is pretty close to my dream job. Things could always be better, I could always get paid more, but like Crock says after a while free time becomes the most valued currency. [Along with being your own boss.]

it's funny how things work out. i remember learning about the stock market as a kid and telling my dad that i wished there was a stock exchange for sports teams, because i would beat it. and eight years ago, if you told me i could get a job outwitting other people with regard to predicting baseball results, i would have jumped at the chance. however, i never really thought about doing it seriously until i fell into it.

or maybe i was subconsciously planning for this all along? i did take six probability courses in college, though i rationalized it by being lazy and trying to get easy As while learning as little new material as possible. plus, that strategy left more free time to study sabermetrics and +EV gambling strategies.

I wonder if we were in some of the same classes

i went to class so infrequently that i doubt i would know either way

LOL, me too

though something tells me you would've noticed the Cards jerseys on me