Month: September 2011

Beautiful Schadenfreude

ks as an usher and he got us better seats in left field, about a dozen rows back.  Those seats were good enough to catapult us into the moment, not just metaphorically, but also literally: when J.J. Harding hit a two run shot to put the Orioles up 2-1, the ball tipped off the hands of the guy in front of us and then skipped behind us. If you watch the highlight, you can see Brad falling over and spilling my beer amid the flurry; I’m in the blue shirt, white hat, beard. But not catching the home run was the only thing that went wrong, so let me tell you about this magical night. The press has already trumpeted Wednesday as one of the greatest nights of regular season baseball ever, and rightly so.  They’ve covered every detail of Tampa Bay’s historic September comeback (one noted statistician put the odds it at 278,000,000:1) and Boston’s unprecedented month-long collapse, all of which culminated with two unbelievable games of epic proportion. But to be there, on the ground, and watch one of those games unfold in person was something else altogether.

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Guest Blogger Bill Ordine: On the Trail of the Missing Money

However, recent revelations in a 103-page Department of Justice  amended civil complaint that skewered some of Full Tilt’s poker-celebrity owners also shed light on a heretofore little-discussed facet of the poker website shutdowns and the frozen assets. Here’s the blockbuster — some, perhaps even many, customer-players had been profiting from the payment processing problems that had vexed the online poker industry for months and years prior to April 15, and led to online poker’s tumble.  That profit to players was about $130 million, apparently over eight or nine months, according to the DoJ

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