Nah, personal preference in looks aside, Sasha is an all star pro that can take any pitch that comes her way. Khalifa is that guy you keep on the slow pitch beer league because he usually picks up the bar tab.

Meh different strokes (in a porno chick) for different folks

Thanks brother! No need for the luck exchange, though. It'll turn around.

As a courtesy to the readers, I Googled Mia Kalifha. Actually I Binged her (giggity), because I read somewhere that Bing has a better pron algorithm. She's probably more Sheep86's type, with her very large breastages. I have nothing against that, but I'm more of a small to medium-sized nit.

I'm heading out to the Flamingo tonight to try to get in 6 hours.

SJ thanks for the bing porn tip.

Run good for once at the Flamingo, Jesus you deserve a green result.

Thread has increasing potential every day

I also looked her up and can confirm that the aforementioned chesticles are relevant to my interests. And now I want to see some results from your session at the Flamingo, and they better be green!

I made the 6 hours at the Flamingo yesterday without much of a fuss. There were times though--both when I was ahead and when I was stuck--where I would have ended the session early if I hadn't had the freeroll carrot set out in front of me, so there's the proof of concept. I got into one interesting spot multiway where a check/jam might've been the best play instead of my passive call. Here it is.

4 limps around the table to the aggressive and unpredictable BTN, who makes it $6. SB calls and I call in the BB with A8, assuming that we're going massively multiway with that pot-sweetener sizing and my potential nut flush draw.

I don't like a 3-bet in this spot vs that BTN; I'd seen that he wasn't afraid to pull the trigger on a 4-bet, nor was he going to fold to my 3-bet short of me making it massive, and he was also a habitual raiser postflop. None of this is good for my weak ace heads up and OOP if I don't flop the flush draw. Calling for another $4 and likely getting around 10:1 is fine.

Everyone calls.

Pot ($42) - 7 players

Flop - 9J3

Checks around to BTN who bets $30, a fold to me and I call. EP calls and everyone else folds. I started the hand with around $420 (nice!) and EP and BTN cover me.

Pot ($132) - 3 players

Turn - T

I check, EP donks $75, BTN tank calls, and now here's my chance to jam now that I've picked up a straight draw with my nut flush draw.

Pot ($282) - 3 players, BB (me) left to act.

I have $384 behind. A jam would make the pot $666 (nice!) and would be an additional $309 for either opponent to call. Pretty substantial-looking, but still I'm laying more than 2:1 for the first caller, and better for the second. We're in a 3-way $282 pot on a wet board. Somebody has something premium.

What cooled me off, finally, was that my straight draw was of the one-card, dummy end variety. Q and K are easily out there in one or both of my opponent's hands. I call.

Pot ($357) - 3 players

River - 8

I check. I'm done with the hand, obviously. EP tanks, then checks. BTN quickly shoves around $350 (nice!). I fold. EP tanks and tanks, shows 99, and finally folds it.

Towards the end of the session I had an embarrassing lapse. I don't want to post it here, but I want to be honest. The EP from the last hand was a nice guy, engaging, and a good player. He wanted to talk about the hand, and he eventually drew me into it, and...and...and we started spouting off strat.



I'm sorry. Won't happen again, I promise.

Sometimes, when things get boring at work, it's hard to avoid talking shop, but that's no excuse. If you're a Disney princess for 40 hours a week, you never start talking shop in front of the kiddies. It ruins their experience. It's the same deal if you want to be a poker pro.

Flamingo: 6 hours:
+$207

#yayGreen!

I think you played the hand fine postflop, and don't like x/shove in this situation vs these villains. I know you talked about reasons not to 3bet pre above, but that would still have been my first choice with all that potential dead money out there and taking the rake into consideration. And it would have been a pretty large 3bet.

#thenredthengreen

I think the 3-bet pre is definitely close. I think I'd have to size around $40-$50 on the 3-ball, but then we're looking at folding if he makes it $130+, and otherwise an SPR of 4.2 if he calls, so if I flop an ace with my weak ace, it's going to be harder to get away from it.

On the pro side, a big 3-bet from a tight player always looks strong in live $1-$2, and if he calls, I might get a fold with a C-bet on a lot of boards and pick up a $100 pot.

On Thursday I played 7 hours and suffered the death of a 1000 cuts from either whiffing on the flop multiway or picking up good second-best hands when I didn't whiff. Also, I had two of my second-barrel semi-bluffs shipped back into my face, and I had to fold, not getting the right odds to call off. These sorts of things add up quickly.

By far the worst play I made, though, was to double up Sleepy Mike. Mike plays by a simple and face-up algorithm. He buys in for a hundo and folds and folds--only occasionally limping along to setmine--until he picks up TT-AA, AK. At that point he shoves over any opener. When he did it to me, I had AQs and he had $85 in his stack.

I could have easily roughed out the math right there at the table--in fact, I should already have it memorized, since I play with Sleepy Mike so much. Instead, I called and handed Mike my 17 Sklansky bucks, all day. So stupid!

Other than that highly preventable lapse, there were no real hands of interest, but I did see one player steeple his fingers when faced with a big bet on the river.



Conventional wisdom has steepled fingers as a reliable strength tell. He folded.

Thursday: Flamingo: 7 hours:
(-$486)

Friday: Flamingo "Freeroll": 3 hours
+$280

Heading to Bally's for my first overnight shift in a while. Hopefully the action will be juicy.

5th on Bally's waiting list. Instead, I walked over to Flamingo and got right on.

I was grumbling to myself about the light rain tonight until I realized that I'm wearing a hoodie and can...you know...pull the hood up to keep some of the rain off. Slow start to the day stratwise.

Three tough aggro players on my left and three TAGs on my right. JFC. The other table is full, so no transfer. I'm Audi 5000 and back to Bally's.

Reg at the Bally's table pointed out two obvious colluders to me when I sat down. I've taken them for a hundo so far. Details when I get home.

Haha, a big gambly station on their left has cooled them off by essentially calling all their isolating bets and raises. Unless, of course, he's with them

Professional play imo. I would have been thinking about it 6 months later and gone, "Hey, I should have put my hood up!"


Professional play imo. If they're stupid enough to get caught, they're not doing it right and will play until they're broke, or until they find someone even stupider who goes off a bunch.

Thanks Phat Mack! I had qualified for Day 2 of ACR's $30k gtd that went off this morning (and I subsequently whiffed on the money), so I didn't go to bed until noon today. Now here it is 3 o'clock in LV. I'm awake, technically, but I can't make sentences do what I want them to do, so I'm going back to bed and I will...um...write the full thingy about the thing in a few hours.

Last night I sat down at Bally's in seat 3 and listened to the reg sitting to my right quietly predict exactly how seats 8 and 9 were going to play each street of a hand before they made their plays. He performed this feat for 3 hands in a row before I turned to him and said, "Wow, so they're together?"



Basically, seat 8 would open over limpers for $10, then seat 9 would put in a 3 bet for $25, and if that chased everyone out, then seat 8 would call and they'd check it down. If they had another taker for $25, then seat 8 would put in a donk flop bet for $45 or so and seat 9 would call.

In one hand, I saw seat 8 check the wheel--which was the nuts--on the river, and seat 9 checked back. Now, I could have caused a scene there, but since I'd only been at the table for 10 minutes, I'm not sure that my accusation would have been taken very seriously by the floor. Also, this was not exactly a big money scam here; they were just taking off people's limps and trading small pots. Besides that, I saw the potential for an exploit, which came up fairly soon, with me picking up QQ in MP and limping along.

I can't remember the last time I limp/reraised QQ; it's possible that I never have. It's a bad play. But in this spot, it was the mandatory play. Instead of raising the limpers then 3 betting as usual, seat 8 limped along and seat 9 raised it to $15. I would put that lapse down to ineptitude rather than strategy. These guys were not good players. Seat 1 called and I made it $55 to go. Seat 8 folded. Seat 9 and Seat 1 called. The flop came a dry Kxx and I took it down with a chunky c-bet.

The reg in Seat 2 left, and I think that Seat 1 by this point had cottoned to the scam. He had to have heard the reg between us calling them out. He started limp/calling everything from Seat 8 and Seat 9, then stationing down on them postflop, and occasionally bluffing the turn or river after they gave up. The would-be colluders weren't bet/raising postflop like they were pre, just donking and calling, thereby setting up the perfect spots for Seat 1 to exploit them.

I went card dead, so there wasn't much I could do to insinuate myself into the dynamic, short of trying some big money bluffs with air, and I just didn't feel that I could justify stone bluffing three other players, particularly when one of them was a huge station.

Seat 1 eventually changed the colluder's dynamic, and they settled down and just played normally and badly for the rest of the session.

Flamingo: 1.5 hours:
+$89

Bally's: 4 hours:
+$98

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

1/2-read Review.

The Fifth Season is the first of the three books in the award-laden speculative fiction trilogy: The Broken Earth. With The Fifth Season, Jemisin became the first African-American writer to win the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Novel. This happened in 2016. A year later, Jemisin won the Hugo again with the second book in the series. The year after that, she won it again with the series's third and final book, for an unprecedented back-to-back-to-back sweep.

The Fifth Season kicks off with all the careful stage-setting and deliberate pacing of a title that was planned to be the first of three volumes, so really I'm reviewing 1/6 of a trilogy instead of 1/2 of a book. As such, I can't dwell on the plot, as much of what I've read so far has been necessarily given over to world building and character introduction. The world on its own, however, is interesting enough to deserve a detailed write-up.

The story is set on the world of The Stillness, a massive Pangaea-like continent stretching around 16,000 miles (26,700 km) North-South by 10,000 miles (16,700 km) East-West. It's the only landmass on the planet, and The Stillness is in the process of breaking up, just as our Earth's Pangaea once did. This process is happening quickly in geological terms, but in human terms it's been ongoing for at least the last 12,000 years.

None of the landmass has broken apart on its own just yet, but earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic activity are common across The Stillness, making a mockery of the supercontinent's name. Every few hundred years, The land or the sea belches forth an event that we on Earth would designate as extinction level, in that it kicks up enough particulates into the atmosphere to trigger an extended winter lasting for years or decades. It's something the residents call a Fifth Season: as in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Death and Darkness.

From Appendix 1 of the book:

The Season of Teeth: 1553-1566 Imperial. Proximate Cause: Oceanic shake triggering a supervolcanic explosion. Location: Arctic Cracks. An aftershock of the oceanic shake breached a previously unknown hotspot near the north pole. This triggered a supervolcanic explosion; witnesses report hearing the sound of the explosion as far as the Antarctics. Ash went upper-atmospheric and spread around the globe rapidly, although the Arctics were most heavily affected. The harm of this Season was exacerbated by poor preparation on the part of many comms, because some nine hundred years had passed since the last Season; popular belief at the time was that the Seasons were merely legend. Reports of cannibalism spread from the north all the way to the Equatorials. At the end of this Season, the Fulcrum was founded in Yumenes, with satellite facilities in the Arctics and Antarctics.

If you want to know what a comm or a Fulcrum might be, then Appendix 2 has the glossary. Every good trilogy needs a glossary, imo. It is the first thing I start digging through once I run into the opening bit of trilogy jargon, which usually happens around page 2.

I hold out high standards for trilogy glossaries. If the thing is too extensive--say more than 20 pages long--then the author is likely using too much jargon, so much that it's likely distracting the readers away from the story. On the opposite end, if a glossary is too concise and easy to use, then the author won't have us digging around in it, looking for answers, and thereby discovering more and more cool things about their world. The glossary game is a fine balancing act, and Jemisin pulls it off with aplomb.

Fulcrum: A paramilitary order created by the Old Sanze after the Season of Teeth (1560 Imperial). The headquarters of the Fulcrum is in Yumenes, although two satellite Fulcrums are located in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, for maximum continental coverage. Fulcrum-trained orogenes (or "Imperial Orogenes") are legally permitted to practice the otherwise-illegal craft of orogeny, under strict organizational rules and with the close supervision of the Guardian order. The Fulcrum is self-managed and self-sufficient. Imperial Orogenes are marked by their black uniforms, and colloquially known as "blackjackets."

So what's an orogene? They are human, ostensibly, and they're part of the reason why extinction level events don't cause total extinction on The Stillness. As with all the animals and plants on the supercontinent, the humans--again, I'm assuming they're human--have adapted to the planet's constant and occasionally catastrophic seismic events.

Most people on The Stillness can feel when something seismic is about to happen in their area due to adaptive developments within their brain stems. Orogenes, who comprise a tiny percent of the population, kick this ability up by several orders of magnitude. They can draw power from any kinetic or heat energy source nearby within the ground, or lacking that, they can draw it from the living things around them--and thereby freeze said living things to death--and redirect the energy to either calm a seismic event within their area, or to make it even worse.

The power of the orogenes is instinctual, manifesting involuntarily at birth, and is nearly unlimited within a given orogene's range. Their potential to cause mass destruction and death makes them feared and hated, and they are hunted and captured at an early age to be brought to the Fulcrum, where they undergo a strict regimen of training and conditioning techniques designed to bring them to heel and to hone their powers for the sake of redirecting seismic events to minimize casualties in population centers around The Stillness.

Orogenes who cannot or will not toe the line at the Fulcrum are either killed or are surgically induced into a catatonic state and hooked to life-support machines, a process that keeps their instinctive seismic-calming abilities active while eliminating any pesky free will from the equation. That such an advanced process exists in a world which runs on roughly late-19th century technology tells us something about the Empire's priorities.

In essence, orogenes are slaves; they're even strongly pressured into participating in an internal breeding program designed to breed more captive versions of themselves, and any orogenes found outside of the Fulcrum system are treated much like escaped slaves.

One of the first trilogy jargon words I found in the book was rogga, and I couldn't find that in the glossary at first, but after some digging around I found that it was a derogatory variant of orogene, similar in usage and impact to the N-word here on Earth. The orogene's overseers at the Fulcrum never use the word or allow it to be used, as their interest lies in keeping the orogenes sold on the idea that they are not slaves, but are instead elite paramilitary recruits necessary for the survival of the population.

The conundrum of The Fifth Season has to do with whether or not such a system is necessary. What is to be done with a subsection of people who can freeze entire city populations to death and rend the continent into flinders, but who thereby are also necessary to keep the continent from rending itself into flinders?

This notion comes into prominence very early in the book, when an extremely talented orogene essentially breaks the continent in half and triggers an unprecedentedly disastrous Fifth Season, one with the potential to plunge The Stillness into winter darkness for hundreds or even thousands of years.

I would like to address some of the main characters, here in this 1/2-read review, but Jemisin is pretty coy about them early on. The storyline of the first half jumps back and forth in time, touching down at points before and after the breaking of The Stillness, and at least two of the main characters are actually just the same person found at different times in a different role and operating under a different name, so a lot of what I might have written about the characters here would likely turn out to be wrong.

I do have one nit to pick, however, with Jemisin's narrative handling of one of the main characters, in that she is always addressed in the second person point of view: as in...

You think, maybe, you need to be someone else.

You're not sure who. Previous yous have been stronger and colder, or warmer and weaker; either set of qualities is better suited to getting you through the mess you're in. Right now you're cold and weak, and that helps no one.

Yeah no. That takes me out of the story, and that might actually be Stephen King's fault, of all people. In The Stand King first introduces us to the tragically snotty and insecure villain Harold Lauder thusly:

Harold edited the Ogunquit High School literary magazine and wrote strange short stories that were told in the present tense or with the point of view in the second person, or both. You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the race-track stars--that was Harold's style.

I suspect that a solid portion of two generations of readers and writers have internalized that little dig at the second person point of view, whether or not we remember where it came from.

But that's just one little nitpick, and I'm getting used to the style as the book goes along. In any case, the trilogy is off to a good start. It reminds me a little of a well-loved series from my youth: The Dragonriders of Pern. In both instances, people on a planet have been forced to adapt to periodic existential disasters that have depressed their population and technological progress, and which shape every aspect of their social contract.

In the case of the Dragonriders, their people had been spacefaring colonists from Earth who had arrived on the planet Pern 2500 years before the start of the main book, and in that interval they had lost their technology while battling for their lives against a periodic spore infestation from another planet.

On The Stillness, the old ruins of more advanced civilizations are extant, and there's a suggestion that there are ancient artificial satellites in the sky, but I don't know if The Stillness was colonized, or if their people just evolved on the planet as we did here on Earth; their records go back 12,000 years, which to me seems an interval long enough for them to have adapted their extra-human powers, given the harsh environment, so it could go either way. I'm interested to know if this will be addressed somewhere later on in the trilogy.

It's likely that I'll finish the complete trilogy. I've liked it so far, and three Hugo Awards in a row is more than a good enough endorsement.

Next up: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

I don't know why the second person POV would take you out of the story. Wouldn't it put you more into the story by making you the narrator, or at least make the narrator one of the characters? Does it come across as an affectation?

Interesting session, Suited. Your post from last week with the nice pot sizes was good too.

Part of it, as I wrote, was from remembering that one of my favorite authors had mocked the idea of using that point of view. Another part is that it's a rare point of view for a story. As readers, we're not really trained to process second person easily outside of how-to books and technical manuals, not to mention that none of the manuals use second person omniscient...

7. Out of laziness, you've used the wrong sized Phillips-Head and stripped out set screw #15a. Now the whole contraption is going to rattle--despite your attempts to glue the hell out of it--until you throw it out in disgust two weeks from now.

Seeing second person omniscient brings up immediate questions. Who is talking to me? Who is the all-knowing voice who's telling me what I'm doing and thinking? Is it God? Is it the Author? In either case, why are they telling me what I ostensibly already know? I've supposedly been here the whole time, thinking and doing these things. Did I have suffer a blackout or some other sort of memory loss, that I need to be told? Only an audience, or a completely different character needs to be told what's happening to a character in a story. So as an author, you're casting the reader as both the character and the audience. This can be distracting.

Now, the resolution of this is that I think the character may be talking to herself. She was a renegade orogene pretending to be a normal townsperson when her husband discovered that their son and possibly their daughter had inherited her condition. He killed the son and ran off with the daughter, and the character is out on the road alone chasing after them in the midst of the big inciting catastrophe, so there's seemingly no one in whom she can confide besides herself.

Still, in that case, third person omniscient point of view has a standard way of handling a lot of internal dialog: just put it all in italics and in the right context and the readers will catch on almost automatically. There needs to be some sort of payoff when the author diverges from typical narrative structure in a way that makes the reader do more work to stay within the story.

In the case of House of Leaves, the narrative structure was the story. That book is supposed to slow you down and get you thinking about how stories are told and what sort of credence we give to certain types of narrators and why is that. I don't believe that this is the goal of The Fifth Season, but I could be wrong. That's the fun of spouting off opinions after only reading half the book.

In any case, I have confidence that Jemisin will come through with the payoff before the end and make it worth the reader's while.

Edit: Second person omniscient is not really the right term for this point of view. The narrator doesn't know everything about the world, but they do know everything about the character. If anyone can come up with a better term, let me know.

Thanks Sheep! The 'nice numbers' thing was a one and done, as it would get annoying if repeated. But I'm glad you liked it!