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La Peste!

Just got email today asking for bank/ACH info to get remissions from Absolute Poker.

<fistpump>

Leaving shortly for western Nebraska for a weekend of star gazing followed by eclipse viewing on Monday, super excited for this! Population of Wyoming is supposed to double on Monday as a significant fraction of the Colorado Front Range descends on the region of totality. I bought a 10 pack of eclipse glasses last month in preparation for this, gave half of them to my unprepared friends already, the rest to be distributed to folks in the viewing area

I'm going to get 2 minutes and 39 seconds of totality! Wife wants me to point out the winter constellations that will be visible during the middle of the day in August.

If it's cloudy or I have a car wreck before the eclipse, I'll know I've pissed off whomever/whatever is responsible for orchestrating this celestial alignment.

Just when I don't think you can impress any further, you go and do something elegant.

I disagree, however, because rock and roll is my religion and my law.

I got it too!

It's for $1.30

Nebraska looking pretty bad from the cloud standpoint. Drive NW...

Or better yet, catch a flight to Nashville that arrives before about noon (assuming there are any seats), disembark and walk outside to view totality.

EZ game. Join the minuscule percentage of the human race that has witnessed such an event.

Lol eclipse content.

My uncle lives in Laramie so we drove up here to visit him and watch the eclipse from Dallas. Should be fun. The Wyoming residents are pretty funny. You'd think the apocalypse was coming the way they are reacting. Scared they're going to run out of gas at the gas stations. Load up your car with food and water in case you get stranded on the highway for 8+ hours.

If anyone misses this Once in a Lifetime Event just come on down to Dallas in seven years. We'll be having one with over 4 minutes of totality on 4/8/24.

eclipse viewing pro tip:

use the selfie camera mode on your phone, turn your back to the sun, and watch the eclipse on your phone.

Or just youtube "eclipse" and get the exact same experience.

Oddly, this did not work at all for me. Even when the sun was over 90% covered, it still looked round on my phone.

The phone only worked for totality and the pics did not come close to the actual view. I even used the eclipse glasses over the phone's aperture and the pix still weren't good. I was so captivated by totality that I forgot to take any pix with my phone. Fortunately, others in the group did.

Up here in Seattle we had approx. 92% totality. We ran good on the weather and had almost perfectly clear skies. I didn't have the glasses so instead threw together a cereal box viewer and still had a fun eclipse experience. A few observations:

Obviously, it got dark, but what was different about it was that the light didn't change color like at sunrise/sunset. Also the angles of the shadows didn't change. The overall effect was a lot like putting on sunglasses on a sunny day.

It did indeed get noticeably colder, and, like they say, the birds reacted pretty noticeably. They were chirping and calling way more than they usually do at that time of day. The neighbor's rooster got going like he does in the morning and evening.

I noticed a cool effect where the sun shined through tree foliage. It seemed like the small openings between the leaves acted like many pinhole cameras, so there were multiple overlapping projections of the eclipse on the ground. I got a couple good photos of the effect on the side of my house.

Overall it was pretty cool, even at only 92%, and I'm definitely considering planning to see the full totality in 2024.

Table conduct question:

So last night, I decided to go full degen and drive to Connecticut to play in a mid stakes mix game for a few hours, as I assume normal people drive 90 minutes from home on a work night to go play cards. Turned out to be a fun game.

The big action player at the table was playing what seemed to be any cards (maybe closer to 90%), coming in for a raise mostly, and was generally very active, doing things like raise/calling boards like AQ4-5-7 with 2 pair / no low in O8. He also was quite possibly the slowest player I've seen in my life (he had been drinking, to be fair). Many times he would stand up, study the board for a good 30 seconds, then start playing with his chips before finally settling on an action (that he'd almost never just verbalize). So he grinded the game to probably 20 hands / hour.

Other players seemed to know this guy better, but he seemed to get annoyed whenever someone would say something to him w/r/t game flow. Is this a situation where we just have to deal with his pacing?

Yeah, I think you just have to deal with it.

No. You might choose to deal with it for whatever reason but I don't believe you are etiquette-bound to suffer in silence. Of course, I think politely asking him if he would mind trying to play a bit faster is a better approach than being passive-aggressive or calling the floor.

If there's another game you can move to I think it is closer, but I still don't think you have any obligation.

that happened a few times in my bellagio mix games this summer with really old guys just taking wayyyy too long, especially in draw games. also they weren't THAT bad at poker, which made it worse.

i suffered in silence mostly because it felt bad manner to chide my elders.

Easy fiix: Start drinking yourself then you can tell them to hurry up and it's fine

Especially if you are paying time its ok to ask the other player politely, won't always help

This was my experience exactly. I also tried using the glasses over the phone's camera and I couldn't tell it was eclipsing at all. Then I forgot to take any pics of totality. I did remember to break out my binoculars for totality and that was really cool. I was in a state park in Wyoming and it was very cool hearing the roar of crowd from the entire park when totality hit. Looking forward to the next one.

I think table changing is okay.

I'm sure I'm just being argumentative and logical, but reviewing the GTO, and my comment that

is entirely true. Perhaps a contortionist could claim GTO is the whole game, but then a realist in computer science would quickly inform you that you're talking about cataloging a game with server space and computational power that is more expensive than the world economy many times over.

I can elaborate on several sub-points to this argument on request. I have given it a great deal of thought. I also can post in the Poker Theory forum on request.