If I was an optimist, I’d say that means things can only look better in 2012. Unfortunately, I’m more of a pragmatist (I like to think I’m a realist, but I know that’s debatable), but whatever you call me, the fact is, optimism isn’t my default setting in life. I’m much happier when I look at things skeptically and expect the worst so that I can be pleasantly surprised when things occasionally go as planned or, perhaps, even work out better than expected. I know it’s not always the cheeriest way to go through life, but I never claimed to be cheery either.

With all that in mind, I’m currently sitting here in the NYC ‘burbs, trying to figure out what 2012 may hold. To begin, I’m going to assume the Mayans are right, and that the world will end sometime in the next 12 months. It’s not that I believe this is really going to happen, but it’s that whole glass half empty approach to life that I mentioned earlier. If we make it to this time next year… bonus. If we don’t? At least I won’t be disappointed in the outcome. Either way, my expectations will be met or exceeded.

Potential world destruction aside, the thing I’d really like to find in the next 12 months is some sort of stability. For me, that means a new, steady source of income and a new place to call home. I have some prospects for these things on the horizon, but I can’t really tell how close I may be to achieving either of these goals right now. In the meantime, I’m floating along with the current, trying to make the best of a murky situation.

In the short-term, I’ll be using NY as something of a hub while I bounce around the East Coast for a couple of months. My expected travels with take me north to New England (Boston, Newburyport, and Becket, MA) and south toward Philly, DC and, perhaps, Greenville, SC. I may even end up on a plane and journey back out west with stops in Vegas, and both the LA and San Francisco areas. Like I said, nothing is very clear right now, except for the fact that nothing is really clear right now.

With my life currently in this state of general chaos, you might think I’d have some sort of resolution in mind for the new year. The thing is, I don’t. Well, not really anyway, since the only resolution I ever make is to never make New Year’s resolutions.

With the Earth completing another journey around the sun, I know it’s easy to take this time and tell ourselves that everything will get better in the next 365 days if we just put our minds toward making it so. The thing is, we can say this at anytime of the year and make it true. January 1st isn’t some magical day with the power to provide us the willpower we lacked at other times during the previous 12 months – it’s just the start of another calendar year.

Am I saying the next year won’t be better than the last? Not at all. Instead, I’m saying that the next 12 months are what we make of them. In my case, 2012 has a solid shot at being better than 2011 only because, for me, it’s hard for it to be worse. As for you, my friends and readers, I can only wish you the best of luck in achieving your goals for the next year.

Right now, I’m sitting on the couch in the house where I grew up enjoying the ability to access the Internet over the new wireless network I set up at my Mother’s house. My plan is to stick around here and NYC for a few days and then, perhaps, travel up to Boston for NYE. Of course, any “plans” I’m making right now are extremely fluid and subject to change, but that’s pretty much true for me wherever I may be. So, while I figure out my next steps, I’ll just take a minute to wish everyone who celebrates the holidays (whichever ones they may be) a happy, merry, festive, uneventful, (insert holiday name here).

For the few of you who saw yesterday’s post, you’ll remember that I negotiated a deal to sell my car to a local BMW dealer. All was good in the world, and I agreed to stop back today to hand over the keys. Which I did. And that’s when things went to shit, because the person I was dealing with – and/or the used car manager – apparently has the intelligence of a hamster.

Honestly, that’s the only excuse I can come up with, as I don’t know how you agree to purchase a vehicle and then, in the paperwork phase of the deal, realize that your corporate bosses have put a freeze on new (used) acquisitions because you’re “over stock.” Seriously, that’s what I was told less than 24 hours after the dealer had agreed to purchase my car. How fucking stupid are you people?

In most cases, this wouldn’t be a big deal, as I could hold onto the car for a while longer or sell it privately. Of course, my deal wasn’t most cases, as I’m scheduled to board a flight to the East Coast in less than 24 hours, and keeping the car around while I’m out of town isn’t a viable option. So, across the street I went to CarMax where they were happy to purchase my automobile – albeit at $2.000 less than I would have gotten from BMW.

Of course, beggars can’t be choosers, and with my back up against the wall, I had no choice but take a deal for significantly less money than I wanted. So, with that in mind, I just want to take a second and say fuck you very much to the good folks over at Desert BMW.

But, I digress.

As part of my impending departure from Vegas, I found myself having to sell my beloved BMW. And, due to the rather quick nature of my decision to leave town, putting the car on Craigslist was not a viable option. Couple that with the fact that someone recently side-swiped me in a local parking lot, and getting my driver’s door fixed didn’t comfortably fit into my schedule, I was left with very few options.

Thankfully, I recently received the following letter:

Dear Mr. Katkin,

I sent you a letter just a few weeks ago regarding our special, invitation only Inventory Buy-Back Event scheduled to run through November 30, 2011. While we were able to successfully acquire many pre-driven vehicles, the overall demand for vehicles like yours still exists. Because of this unexpected demand, we are extending our Inventory Buy-Back Event through January 16, 2012.

Serendipity.

So, a few days ago, I stopped in at my local dealer and asked for an appraisal. As expected, they lowballed me. However, having sold cars before, I knew there was some wiggle room in their offer, so I walked out figuring I’d come back a little later to renegotiate. Seeing as I’m leaving town on Saturday, I made my way back to the dealership this afternoon.

I walked in and was quickly approached by a salesman. When I told him I wanted to sell my car, he pulled up my information and was surprised to see that I had gotten a quote on the car just a few hundred miles earlier. The conversation went like this:

Him: We gave you a number

Me: I know. I want you to do better.

Him: What do you want?

And here’s where I apparently screwed up. Prior to walking into the dealership, I decided to try and get an extra grand out of the car. To do that, I figured I would have to ask for $2,000 more than I was originally offered so that I would have room to negotiate. For some reason, however, I wimped out at the last minute and only asked for $1,500 more than I was originally offered.

With a “Let’s see what I can do,” the salesman stepped away and spent the next 10 minutes talking with the used car manager. What happened next, however, completely surprised me. Instead of coming back with a counter-offer, as I expected, my sales guy walked back to the desk and said “You’ve got a deal.”

I’m not sure, but my jaw may have actually bounced off his desk at that point and, slightly dumb-founded, I had no option but to say “Great.”

So, the good news on the day is that I picked up an extra $1,500 just for spending 10 minutes at the dealership. The bad news is that I think left at least $500 on the table during what turned into my non-negotiation.

I guess there are worse problems to have.

Now, I’m preparing to leave town and, truth be told, I still don’t really know where I’m going to end up. I have some hope that I may, before too long, find myself back in California, but I can’t guarantee that will happen as I write this. In the meantime, I’m taking some time and heading back east to catch up with friends and family that I haven’t seen in too long a time. Will I stay on the East Coast? I don’t know, but at this point, anything is possible.

There’s plenty that I miss about the New York/New England area where I grew up and there’s a certain appeal to returning to the area. Green trees in the Summer. The leaves changing in the Fall. Cities where you can actually walk from one place to another. Culture that isn’t all manufactured by Guy Laliberte and the strangely flexible people who star in the myriad of Cirque De Soleil shows you can find on the Strip. Really good pizza, deli, and bagels. You get the picture.

What don’t I miss? Winter. It’s not that I mind the cold all that much, but rather, what comes along with it… shoveling driveways, digging cars out of snowbanks, digging parking spaces out of snowbanks…. Basically, I don’t miss snowbanks. I like snow, however, especially in the city. There’s a certain peacefulness you’ll find during a snow storm in New York or Boston that you won’t really find anywhere else. It’s special and almost magical, at least for the few hours before the sanders and snowplows come out to play. Or before the snow inevitably becomes rain, turning all that fluffy white powder into large, gray hunks of ice and huge, frozen snowbanks, which, trust me, are even more annoying than regular snowbanks. Still, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a real Winter, and a change of pace may not be the worst thing in the world for me.

What about poker?, You might ask.

I will certainly miss having more than 20 poker rooms within a 15-minute drive of my couch, but since I haven’t been playing much over the past few months, the withdrawal shouldn’t be that bad. That said, when I do get the urge to play seriously, I’m going to have to think ahead and schedule two to three hours in order for me to get to Foxwoods or Atlantic City, depending on where I’m staying at any given time. And yes, thoughts like this make me miss online poker even more keenly than I have over the past eight months.

Still, I’m playing the hand I’ve been dealt right now and that means, the East Coast is where I need to be for the next month or so. I’ll miss my friends here in town but, honestly, I not going to be heart-broken to put Vegas behind me. At least for a while.

Apparently, the French are craftier than anyone thought, announcing today that they have agreed to buy what’s left of the struggling poker site for an undisclosed price that will include “repayment of Full Tilt Poker’s world-wide players in full….” So far so good, it seems, except for one thing. Any deal between FTP and the potential new owners is subject to a number of conditions, not the least of which is a “favorable resolution with the United States Department of Justice.

In other words, if the DOJ doesn’t like the terms, rumors of Tilt’s death may not have been exaggerated after all.

Like many others with close ties to Tilt, I’d love to see the company survive and thrive if and when new management takes over, but the fact is, I’m not holding my breath. The company’s reputation and brand are too tarnished to save, and I think the players who’ve had their bankrolls locked up for the past six months will hold too much ill will to ever give a “new” Full Tilt Poker a chance to prove itself as reputable site on which to play.

Of course, I have been wrong before.

Oh, right… there’s that little legal kerfuffle that’s been causing my phone and email to blow up over the past 24 hours.

Since people are asking, here’s what I feel like I can comfortably say about the latest drama at FTP:

• No, I don’t think I have anything to fear in regard to the DOJ coming after me. Like most of the US employees who worked for Tilt, I was a pretty small fish in the pond and certainly had no insight into the top-tier management decisions that have now effectively shuttered the company.
• No, I don’t think FTP will ever come back in any other form. The company is, in my opinion, completely trashed. The brand is ruined and, while the software may be worth something to somebody, you will never see any of the current management working in the poker industry ever again. And, with rumors that the AGGC has already permanently revoked the company’s license, I don’t see anybody willing to take a chance on licensing a reconstituted FTP, even with all new management in place.
• Are people like Ray, Howard, Chris, and Rafe criminally liable for what happened at FTP? Honestly, I don’t know. Having worked and socialized with all of these people during my tenure as an FTP employee, I would like to think that none of them acted with any criminal intent while running the company.

  Did they individually and collectively make bad decisions that ruined the company? Undoubtedly. Were any of these choices criminal? I know that some of their decisions certainly look criminal to my – and to nearly everybody else’s untrained eyes – but I’m not a lawyer and I can’t know for sure that they were. That’s why we have a legal system and why, despite the speculation and our gut instincts, we need to let it work.

• No matter how you slice it, there are absolutely no “winners” here. Did people make millions of dollars from FTP? Of course they did. (I wasn’t one of them, btw.) Is the money worth the harm that’s been done to their reputations? I doubt it. Sure, Howard, Chris, and Ray may all have enough cash stashed away to spend the rest of their days on a secluded Tahitian island, but what’s the cost they have to pay? Is it really worth becoming a pariah in order to live a life of leisure? I certainly don’t think so.
• Will the fallout from the FTP scandal lead to legalization and regulation of online poker in the US? Maybe. Like anything else in politics these days, opponents and proponents of online poker can spin the facts of this case in hundreds of ways to support their various positions.

  As someone who plays poker and who has made my living working in the industry, I’m certainly biased toward the game, but that’s not why I think it should be legalized. (OK, that’s not the only reason I think it should be legalized.) The simple fact is that we’ve already tried prohibition in this country and seen that it doesn’t work. If competent, sane adults want to spend their hard-earned money on something – be it liquor, drugs, or poker – they’ll find a way to do it. That said, we’ve now seen the consequences of what can happen in an unlicensed and unregulated marketplace.

  So, instead of marginalizing and, possibly, criminalizing a game that millions of people love to play, let’s use the FTP debacle as an example of why online poker version 2.0 needs to be a safer and saner place for both the players and the site operators. And, hey, if the government can make a little money off the enterprise through licensing fees and taxes on winnings while at the same time, providing a safe, regulated poker environment, I’m OK with that too.

Before I continue, let me be clear that FTP has been very good to me – and to a number of my friends – over the past few years, and that I have personal reasons as to why I want to see the company succeed. I also want to say that I don’t believe that either Ray Bitar or Howard Lederer have ever intentionally set out to screw over the FTP player base.

That aside, I also need to point out I don’t agree with everything that Full Tilt’s management has done – or is doing – to manage this ongoing crisis. Platitudes and half-hearted statements about how they’re working to make their US players whole again just don’t cut it anymore, if they ever did. In short, FTP needs to come clean with its players, employees and shareholders about the true state of the company and what management is doing to settle the company’s debts and address its legal issues. Without specifics, it’s simply too hard for anybody to trust, let alone believe, that the company’s management has any plan at all.

Part of me still wants to believe that those who are running the company haven’t really screwed things up as badly as the news suggests, but I’m cynical enough and realistic enough to know that’s probably not the case. The company looks like it’s fucked and even if its management does finally take the high road, I don’t really believe there’s anything they can do to save it. Hell, I don’t know if there’s anything that anyone can do to save it at this point.

So, is Full Tilt Poker dead? I think it’s too early to say, but as things stand now, I have to believe the company is most definitely on life support.