Poker in Atlantic City

It was a lazy Saturday morning when Srikanth(my cousin) and I were thinking of going out of NY and at the spur of the moment decided on Atlantic City. My dream was to play poker at a casino and enjoy the experience.

The Caesar's was selected as the casino where we were going to lose money. My uncle and cousin started off with the slots as a warm up. Srikanth and I were roaming around the card tables and trying to figure out the stakes and what types of games are going on. It took us sometime to figure out that poker against players was in a separate section.

I bought the chips and entered a 2/4 Texas holdem limit table. This means that you had a small bind of 1$, a big blind of 2$, bets of 2$ and after the turn card, bets of 4$. There were 8 people in the table already and with me joining, the table was full. I did not quite get a hang of it in the first two rounds in terms of the blinds and then I warmed from the third round onwards. I was not nervous at all and i started playing as if i was playing online. I did not look much at the other players, but they all looked very experienced (i was proved wrong later on). There was a lone woman in the table. I got a feel of things in the first five to six rounds playing it very safe. I made some strong moves from say round 10 to 25 where i got some good cards and was very aggressive in the betting and winning about 5-6 hands. That i realized later was the best period for me in terms of collecting chips. I almost doubled my chip count at this stage and i was feeling quite high. But, i was expecting some backlash from the guys around as they were staring me down. The best hand i won was about 50$ when i won with a two pair of (A,10) against (A,6). That was just amazing!!!!!!!!

The next half hour was bad for me. I did not get good cards and at the same time others in the table were just raising against me whenever i bet. I could feel the undercurrent and i lost a bit of confidence here and backed out of a few hands, which otherwise i might have won. It was like a bell curve where i went on a high and then came sailing low. Then the graph became linear and it was almost a straight line and i won two or three more small hands. At the end of it, I realized i did have a pretty decent start to my poker career and i could hold my own against all these guys. I was break even at the end of two and a half hours.

Few interesting things i noticed was the dealers change every half hour, cards are changed every hour, dealers are normally paid a dollar or two tip for every hand won, smoking was not allowed within the poker area.

Overall a fantastic four hours spent at Caesar's and getting initiated into poker, thanks to everyone.

Economic boom in India

My friend Srini called me and told that there is an interview of Manmohan Singh on Charlie Rose and on subsequent days with other Indian CEOs. He also mentioned that Charlie was a very good interviewer and it was a very sensible show to watch. This was on the backdrop of a discussion that we had about an interview with Jayalalitha (CM of Tamilnadu) by Karan Thapar and it was a lesson in how to not conduct an interview. Karan Thapar always tried to be on the offensive and asking all negative questions and Jaya reacted back appropriately. It was great fun though.

Charlie is one of the really good interviewers that i have seen. The theme of the interviews was the growth of Indian economy and India as a force in the world, India vs China and the dynamics of Indo-US cooperation. Interviews were held with Manmohan Singh, Azim Premji, Nandan Nilekani, Kiran Mazumdar, Ratan Tata and Anil Agarwal. Some of the questions he posed to the Indian top shots were the same and it was quite interesting to see that they were all giving almost the same answers. The questions were really deep and the conversations were enriching.


I would say that these interviews were a good brand building exercise for India. All of them were very positive about India's growth and its emergence as an economic world power. I liked Azim the best in terms of his deep understanding of India and his vision to further improve the quality of life in India. The interviews gave me a good understanding of how the Indian economy has evolved over the last few years not only from an IT perspective, but from other industries as well. I could understand that the growth that we are experiencing is for real and it is going to be sustained.

India's strength being the intellectual capital at reasonable cost, secular democracy (probably the only country in the world that has a muslim as the president, head of the ruling coalition as a catholic, PM being a sikh and the opposition leader being a hindu. Can you beat that?), a country that is going to have the largest working class population in about 5 yrs, spirituality and so on. The weaknesses being infra, infra and infra. Politicians in the country have not come upto speed with what is happening in India.

Everyone identified that China is far ahead right now in terms of the overall economic scenario and were quite positive that India will catch up sooner or later. They also suggested more synergy between the two countries to take advantage of the new world order. The population of the two countries combined is more than one third of the world (2 bill out of 6.5 bill roughly). The videos of these interviews are available for a price of 0.99$.

Interesting times ahead for India and only time well tell whether this century is going to be called 'chindia'.