^Thry got the wrong Affleck.

Styrofoam cups are for wimps!

Zeno is an environmentalist.

^^^
Early morning or late at night?

Thanks to double promo payouts for the NFL playoffs, the wait for a $1/$2 seat on Sunday was 4 1/2 hours. Fortunately, the promo ran for all three games, so I was able to get on at the start of the second game, long after having signed up (1 1/2 hours) early for the first game.

Springfield's list cuts off at around 60 players, so I don't know if I surpassed my personal worst signup position of #135 from the Boston Encore a few weeks ago, but it's likely that I did. I was tempted to sign up for $2/$5, play tight and let the now $50/hour promo EV rain down on me, but the $2/$5 list was around 45 players long, and they only play on 2 tables, vs $1/$2's 10 tables.

To use an old expression, everyone showed up to wet their beaks. It will probably be like this for the 8pm game tonight. I'll be shooting for a 5:30PM signup in an attempt to be sat in time for the game. I suppose that I could ask to leave work early, as there's quality gambling to be done.

I used my downtime wisely, making a close inspection of the entire slot floor, and I found three more +EV titles that I'd missed before during my casual walkthroughs. I also caught my slot-grinding rival checking a fourth title, so I'll have to look into that one as well.

I found my first play on Regal Riches/Prosperity Pearls, and then a second play opened on the adjacent machine right after that, and I was able to pull around $80 out of that elusive title.

Not much to report on the poker front. My table was soft and stationey, and I hit the promos for $250.00.

Weeeeeeeee!

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 3 hours
+$390.00

Running Poker Total: 130 hours, +$6310.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$232.83

Running Slot Total: 14 hours, +$775.72

Grand Total: 144 hours, +$7085.72

I feel the slot grinding is going to be the more consistent hustle. I’d be really curious next time you make it to Vegas with your newly acquired slot grind. Vegas is either going to have a ton of opportunities or a ton of hustler competition.

Can’t wait for a 2023 Fremont fun run.

Also we talked about GWAE podcasts a while back. Check the newest podcast which has a slot hustler as a guest.

https://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/gamb...-pro-slots-cs/

I should check out that podcast. Seems relevant.

As far as Las Vegas goes, I think I might skip it this year. I've been there--either as a resident or a visitor--almost every year going back to 1997. I've had my fill of the place, for now. This year I have in mind some sort of tropical island gambling, or perhaps even a poker cruise. They've started a promising thread for the latter in Venues and Communities. I'll keep my eye on that.

Last night I took a minor hit in my slot results when I whiffed on a couple of 50c and $1 Five-play spots on Ultimate X poker. At $12.50 and $25.00 a pop respectively, these whiffs can be expensive.

Fortunately, the doubled-up football promo was still insanely beneficent, to the tune of $300 in payouts, and my table was soft again. I ran bad at the beginning, finding myself down almost $300 within the first half hour, but I stayed patient and let the game come to me, and I clawed that back and more by the end of the session.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5 hours
+$508.00

Running Poker Total: 135 hours, +$6818.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 1 hour
(-$27.96)

Running Slot Total: 15 hours, +$747.76

Grand Total: 150 hours, +$7565.76

All right, I've made it to Tattoo You (1981) in my Stones playthrough. You would think that after 18 studio albums up to that point, they'd have been at least a bit played out, but you'd be wrong. They still had it going on.

Some Girls is quite good all the way through. My four favorite Stones albums so far are 12x5, Let It Bleed, Some Girls and Tattoo You. I know that I'm supposed to love Exile on Man Street, but I liked it instead.

I'm into the mid-80s now, and after listening to Undercover, I don't know if I'm going to pick up a another favorite album from them. The good news is that I'm through the disco era.

Some really good songs on Undercover but it reflects the times when released.

Their best album, and probably their last, that you should listen to is Blue and Lonesome.

Yes, I saw the blues album at the end of their discography--released in 2016--and I'm excited for it; but then again, I was excited for Aerosmith's late blues album Honkin' on Bobo, and it left me cold.

Apples and oranges again, I suppose, but Aerosmith took a lot of their music and swagger from the Stones, so maybe oranges and grapefruits.

Two months ago, I had only a vague idea of who Brian Jones was, but now I miss him on harmonica. Mick's shrill thin harmonica on Black Limousine, the one I posted upthread, is the weakest link in the song.

Nevertheless, I am looking forward to that last album. They said that they weren't going to make any more without Charlie Watts.

No football promo last night, but I showed up at the tables regardless, as I'm trying to put more hours in, for reasons that I will discuss in the next post.

My table was a problematic mix of meh regs with deep stacks and splashy fish with short stacks. This particular dynamic tends to generate a large number of multiway pots involving high variance in stack sizes as well as in player skill sets, and it results in frequent spots which are difficult to navigate.

I have seen otherwise good players being baffled by this setup, and putting themselves on tilt when things didn't go their way. Often, the uninitiated higher-stakes grinders will start 3-betting more pre to reduce the number of players seeing a flop, but given how rare 3-bets are at $1/$2, denizens of these splashy combo-type tables are always quick to spot the light 3-betters, and to adjust to them by either shoving their short stacks, or just calling, and the good players find themselves faced with either being priced in to call a ~$100 all-in from a stronger range, or with 3 cold callers for their $45 3-bet, in a bloated, low-SPR multiway pot, and holding a marginal hand.

Better just to 3-bet the best holdings, and to accept the single-raised and multiway reality of these tables for all of the other playable hands, and to call those with enough SPR left over to maneuver postflop.

The important thing to remember here is that you can lose 70% of your 4-way pots and 75% of your 5-way pots and still come out a solid winner in the long run, if you fold your pretty hands correctly when the field makes it obvious that you're beat, and if you value bet your nuttish hands to the moon when your opponents can't let go of their own pretty hands.

The other important thing is to really try to get a good read as early as possible as to who is playing these multiway spots correctly--i.e. straightforward for the most part--and who is still trying to bluff or value bet as if they were heads-up.

These latter players will be your targets. You will call and raise them with some of your pretty hands that you would have otherwise dumped multiway, and the meh regs will get out of your way because they know the standard way to play multiway pots, but they don't have the reads that you do.

All of these multiway pots made for a wild night for my stack, and I was up and down throughout the session. I ended up a little bit down.

On the slot front, someone left a 12x multiplier on one of their 25c Ultimate X Poker hands, leaving me with a chance to make $2400 quad Aces or a $12,000 royal, or 12x anything else, but I whiffed it completely.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 3 hours
(-$84.00)

Running Poker Total: 138 hours, +$6734.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 1 hour
+$20.49

Running Slot Total: 16 hours, +$768.25

Grand Total: 154 hours, +$7502.25

There has been an important constant in my life that I've only hinted at or lightly touched upon in this forum, going back many years now, as far back as the Nit-tastic Tales thread in BBV, and I've never fully addressed it in print. I feel that now is the time to do so...so here goes.



I started my current job in the summer of 2006 after coming back from my first stint in Las Vegas, and with the exception of the interlude of my second Las Vegas stint from 2018-2021, I have held this same job ever since.

I ****ing hate my job. I have always hated it. I have never warmed to it, in any capacity. I love my bosses, mind you. They are two small business partners who are doing their best. They've been more than fair to me. They've been both kind and generous, time after time. It's the job that gets me. The goddamned job.

I sell replacement parts and accessories for large industrial machines. The machine manufacturers sell their own replacement parts, but they gouge them at a huge markup, leaving room for independent aftermarket distributors to find out where the parts come from and then offer them at a fair price. So we're sort of the NAPA Auto Parts, but for industrial machines instead of cars.

I am not mechanically inclined. I'm the opposite of that. After all these years at this job, I still wouldn't be able to install 90% of the things that I sell. I could, maybe 50% of the time, point out the general area on the machine where the part goes.

Most of the replacement parts come from overseas. Lead times for them are generally a few weeks to a few months. When a machine that consists of these parts breaks down, the manufacturer's entire production line often crashes and starts to hemorrhage money at an alarming rate, and thus the parts are needed today, and not 3 months from now.

This is a maintenance supervisor's and a purchasing manager's worst nightmare come true. For me, it's a Tuesday, a small part of a Tuesday. I'm on the other end of the line with the bad news when they call in or email with their desperate missives.

I have recently taken to mumbling, "I ****ing hate this job" over and over again, hundreds of times a day while at work. Eastern philosophy, Western cognitive/behavioral psychology and New Age conventional wisdom all basically agree that this is not a good mantra. So I've been trying to break myself of that obsessive behavior by keeping track of how often I mumble it, and endeavoring to extend the time between incidents. Here are the intervals between mumblings, in minutes, during my first attempt...

2,8,16,13,24,50,45,3.

I had a little breakdown at the end, but you can see that I was making some overall progress. I did much better that afternoon, scoring a 2 hour interval at one point.

So here's the plan: I'm going back to playing the live cash games full time. My parents live close by, and they are in their mid-80's, so I'll be staying in the area for the next few years to be around them. The Springfield MGM $2/$5 game runs often enough for me to make this happen, if I can hack it.

I still need a bigger bankroll, so I will try to be playing more often, and I want to take my two weeks of vacation this year before I quit. My current goal is to start playing full time again in the fall of this year.

Lets go.

LFG GLGLGL

I'm sorry to hear about your job. If it helps, you're doing the right thing. There's no job that's worth making you hate life. It's too bad for your bosses, since you make them seem like the kind of people anyone would really want to work hard for. But you need to worry about you.

You got this Suited, Leggo!!!

Thanks guys

Damn, Steel Wheels is really good. It just jumped on to my top 5 of theirs. I'm glad that I was wrong for suspecting that they were tapped out by the mid-80's.

How often is the Springfield 2-5 good? Is it mainly on weekends? How many tables do they run? Does the buy-in cap at 1k?

Phat; Retire and Move to Switzerland. Life is simpler. And most people speak English. And the banking system is top notch.

Cap is $1k. 1-2 tables--one of them often a must-move--appear to run every day starting in the afternoon. I will not turn my nose up at playing $1/$2 while I wait for a $2/$5 spot, whenever that situation comes up.

As far as the quality of play goes: stick around and we'll find out together, ostensibly at some point before I quit my job.

I would take Luxembourg over Switzerland, mainly for the non-zero chance of hanging out with an Arch-Duke.

Man are they still listening to the same radio station with the same 50 songs? I say buy some headphones listen to your Stones records, see if it helps.

Seems like a good employer but maybe you’ve been doing the current role for too long. See if you can do something different a role without the stress from interaction with customers waiting on parts and freaking out.