The Tiltboys

When we talk about Dave Lambert, aka Diceboy, we are often accused of exaggerating, if not flat out lying. We claim Dave is six sigmas out on the distribution curve for luck over the average human lifetime. At times, this seems too conservative.

six sigmas out: Here’s how lucky six sigmas is: If you buried your wedding ring on a beach anywhere on Earth, and gave Diceboy one of those buckets kids use to make sandcastles, he would pick a beach at random, start scooping, and find it sometime before the tenth bucketful.

There was a 12-hour window once when we thought Dave’s luck had run out. Two days after moving in, his girlfriend announced she was quitting her job to return to school. The next day, we learned that she’d be studying for her massage therapy certification. And she’d need to practice on Dave several times a week. This was shortly after she complained that they were having sex too infrequently.

When Rena then told Dave she wanted to share the rest of her life with him, but wasn’t interested in marriage, it was a foregone conclusion that she would propose to him just a few months later.

[...]

Naturally, Dave eventually gravitated to the stock market, and quickly become a seasoned investor. In Dave’s case, “seasoning” is measured not by passage of time, but rather by heaping tablespoons of sigma salt. We saw the first hints of his sigmatude back in 1996. This was before the market went crazy, before anyone with an eTrade account could quadruple their money using a bottle of tequila and a dartboard. Dave started with a small portfolio of several thousand dollars to ‘test the waters’, and accidentally ran it up to six figures in less than a year. Among his many investment coups:

Dave takes a cold call from a telemarketing stockbroker, blows him off, but decides to use the ‘hot tip’ anyway. The stock triples in a few weeks. The kicker? Dave had invested in a random company, having typed the wrong ticker symbol into his online account.

Dave decides to purchase some shares of a friend’s company. All the Tiltboys pile in for the ride, delighted that Dave won’t hit the jackpot without us this time. At the next Wednesday night game, Dave innocently asks, “Did anyone else get sent certificates with double the number of shares they paid for?”

Dave takes another hot tip from a phone solicitor. This one would prove to be one of the largest stock rigs of the year. Unbeknownst to Dave, the company and the story were an outright scam, and the brokerage that was making a market rigged the stock for a run-up over the course of a week. The SEC investigated, trading was halted, and the stock opened the next day at three cents per share. Dave, meanwhile, had sold half his shares at the absolute peak -- a ten-minute window of opportunity -- for a 1600% return.

Bruce remembers Phil coming into his office looking ill, describing how Dave had just made $40k in three days. It seems Dave had asked him to co-invest, but Phil had dismissed it as an absurd idea. We’ve learned that if a given event can result not only in profit for Dave but also tilt for Phil, the likelihood of that outcome rises to 100%.

Stern didn’t feel any better about ignoring his own stock tip:

A guy on a plane to Toronto gave me a tip about a Canadian stock. I told Dave I didn't remember the exact details, but it was a Canadian gold mining company with symbol XXX and the guy seemed certain it was a lock. I never bought the stock, but Dave did. The stock price stayed flat for over a year, then suddenly tripled in two days. Only then did Dave get curious, and he did a little research. Turns out the "Canadian gold mining company" was in fact an oil exploration company, and they struck oil somewhere down in South America, not Canada.

We’ve pretty much come to terms with the Diceboy Singularity. As Rafe notes, “If he says he’s heading to the craps table, any of us will immediately drop what we’re doing to join him, even when what we’re doing involves two supermodels and a can of whipped cream.”