Hope the information you gain will be worth losing one bet in the long run.

I wouldn't qualify Depeche Mode as pop music.

A drain pour of Lord Calvert is +EV.

I don't think I would, either. In fact I don't know how to categorize them at all.

Well, they are commonly referred to as synth-pop, so like pop music with synthesizers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synth-pop

Yes but Green Day's music is often referred to as pop punk music. So those references can be misleading.

For me, Depeche Mode is in the broad spectrum of alternative music.

I don't necessarily disagree with synth-pop, but I think it is very different from just general pop a la Madonna.

I look at pop music as a range more than a genre.

At its widest, it's just a shortening of the term popular music: albums and songs a lot of different people have enjoyed. Under that definition, and for albums, we can include Metallica's self-titled Black Album, along with Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, all of them tremendously successful in terms of sales and reach.

For songs within that wide definition, we can even include Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit and Radiohead's Creep. Weird songs; loved by many. Popular.

Now, you might accuse me of being a contrarian and waxing disingenuous for including as pop music songs by two bands who both worked hard to alienate fans of pop music, and you would have a point.

So let's narrow the range...I think at its most narrow--or near it--pop music comprises songs that were written and performed that they might conform to the current top 40 milieu as it existed at the time, with the aim of becoming top 40 hits, or Radio-Friendly Unit-Shifters, as Nirvana termed them.

Offhand, I can think of a few examples: Elvis's Love Me Tender, The Monkees' (Neil Diamond penned) I'm a Believer, The Eagles' Take it Easy, The Bee Gees' More Than a Woman, Hanson's MMMBop, anything by Boys 2 Men or The Backstreet Boys, or anything shat out by those insipid assembly line hit factories Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber.

So the range of what can be called pop music, I think, is somewhere between the two definitions that I've given above.

One week on the wagon under my belt. The first few days I felt like I was on the Skyrim prison wagon at the start of the game; a well-known, oft-repeated event that made me once again impatient for it to pass.

I'd forgotten how irritable and grumpy I am in sobriety. I always forget about that. That's what the alcohol is for...not for the forgetting, but for the mood amelioration.

Of all the various and sundry drugs I've used to self-medicate away my anger issues, from the time I was a very young man until now, alcohol has always been the undisputed tournament bracket champion, with all the other drugs having fallen short by the wayside, one by one.

Alcohol abuse turns a lot of people into *******s. These are the stories that we hear about, recollections from the loved ones who had to endure the nasty scenes for years or decades on end, until finally the miserable bastard keeled over and gave their victims the space to try to heal.

Who we don't hear about--but who I think could be out there in some numbers--are the kids and spouses whose parents or partners were violent shitheads when they were sober, but laid-back teddy bears when they were drinking, and it would have been fortunate for everyone that they happened to be drinking all the time, had it not been that they died young from it.

Morbid thoughts...Where's the redemption? Where are the outs?

Well...a few years ago I rode the wagon for 14 months, and I was filled with bitterness and grievances every day for the entire ride. But in between then and now I spent a few years playing a fair amount of live poker, and through that having many good and bad things randomly happen to me at the tables, a place where improperly addressing the exigencies of fortune will often impose on one a corresponding financial penalty.

Because of this I devoted a part of my studies towards developing a good poker mindset, and it turns out that a good poker mindset is also a good life mindset.

So I have some coping tools on this ride that I didn't have on my last one, which is nice.

On Saturday I visited some friends down in Norwich, CT, and I took the time to stop in at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun to check out their advantage slot situations. I did not have time to play poker at either place, as I had to meet my friends for dinner.

Foxwoods

2+2er FWWM had already tipped me off to the presence of a large number of Cashman Bingo machines at Foxwoods, and I found those and plenty of other advantage titles down there. Unfortunately, the place was packed and almost all of the target machines were occupado. I will have to visit there again during the off hours.



One slot grinder play is to wait around until people get up from the machines, but it's not one of my plays. It's been my experience that the casinos will tolerate slot grinders if they don't make a nuisance of themselves, but hovering over normies until they leave, then jumping on their machines definitely falls into the nuisance category.

Mohegan Sun

Here there were very few advantage machines, especially given the large amount of acreage they have dedicated to slots. Compared to MGM and Foxwoods, it almost seems that Mohegan has made a conscious decision to keep these types of machines out. Here I'd like to point out that their slots were not nearly as full as Foxwoods' or MGM's, so I think they're missing a trick here.

I did find a Rich Little Piggies play at Mohegan, and like a rube at his first county fair I got rooked for $75 on it. I have some very pointed and ambivalent thoughts on the whole Piggy Bank franchise, ranging throughout its 25+ year history, but it's all a little too inside-baseball (i.e. boring) for this blog.

On Sunday I played a poker session at MGM, and I quickly went down around $250, and stayed there for most of it. I originally planned on staying for 3 hours, but after that time had passed, I found that I was playing fine and that the table was good, so I stuck around a little longer until I clawed my way out of the hole.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 4.5 hours
+$43.00

Running Poker Total: 153.5 hours, +$6616.00

MGM Springfield, Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun Slots: 3 hours
(-$95.34)

Running Slot Total: 22 hours, +$608.38

Grand Total: 175.5 hours, +$7224.38

From my humble life experience, it would seem far more the exception than the norm.

Somehow I imagine Eugene from The Walking Dead saying this.

IME almost always peaceful peeps are peaceful peeps and violent peeps are violent peeps whether they are sober or not. Obv alcohol can enhance tendencies and peeps may have themselves moar under control when they are sober. But it's not like peace-loving happy family fathers or what have you will suddenly turn into uncontrollable lunatics when they find some booze or vice versa. That's not usually what happens, it may happen on very rare occasion but only very rare one's. What happens usually is that you have characters that are already unstable/messed up or something but they may have themselves under control, more or less, while sober, but lose that a lot more often when they drink.
Kind of the same with guns. Someone with a peaceful mature personality is not going to go on a killing spree just cos you give them a gun, or at least very rarely will that happen. But characters that are already unstable may ofc do a lot more damage when you give them a gun.

Agree with the two posts above.

↑↑↑
Fair enough.

I played last night for 3 hours, and I was caught trying a triple barrel bluff that would have gotten through on the river had Villain not made a sneaky two pair there.

I couldn't catch any hands for the life of me. The only thing I had going for me was my decision to eventually sample all of the many dozens of flavors available at the free soft drink dispenser in the poker room. I got through two flavors of Vitamin Water™, which is sugar water with--I assume--added vitamins. The orange flavor was quite good. It's hard to do a good orange drink.

At the end of the session, I thought about playing into overtime and trying to claw some of my loss back, but it was a work night, and more importantly the table wasn't great, so I packed up and left.

I'll be back.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 3 hours
(-$245.00)

Running Poker Total: 156.5 hours, +$6371.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 1 hour
+$12.37

Running Slot Total: 23 hours, +$620.75

Grand Total: 179.5 hours, +$6991.75

Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time

Assuming that the elephant doesn't go rotten: sloggy days at work, downswings at the table, and my brain running clever gambits to try to get me to drink again are not necessarily signs of creeping botulism in my elephantine bankroll rebuilding scheme. They're more like the bones and gristle of the enterprise.

Last night I visited with my family. My dad is not doing well. Many decades of smoking have left him in the final stages of emphysema and COPD, so we visit him often.

I made sure that I arrived first to mix the drinks for everyone, taking the opportunity to clandestinely made a virgin concoction for myself.

My family was upset by my last attempt to quit drinking. "You don't have a problem with drinking," was the refrain. And that refrain is a part of a family song entitled We Don't Have Any Problems in This Family (Not Like Some Families We Know, Am I Right?)

So I've hidden my drinking and drug use over the years, quite successfully. It turns out that Scott, my brother's brother-in-law, was doing the same thing. If I had known that, I would have compared notes with him, but he died two years ago of liver failure. At the time, Scott was a year younger than I am now.

So it's back to work now for me, and tonight I'll put in another session at the MGM: two more bites out of the elephant.

Who are they? Who who who who?

I finished the Who's first two albums and started on their third: The Who Sell Out, but I had to go back and give the first two albums a second listen, having been surprised by how offput I was by their early catalog.

I mean, this is The Who. I know The Who. I grew up listening to them. Eminence Front, Pinball Wizard, Behind Blue Eyes: all solid rock songs in a large catalog of the same that exists as such and seemingly doesn't need any special level of interpretation or contextual evaluation.

So but...okay...context: let's go back to the vibe I got from the early albums from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. The impression I had from the first three acts was that they wanted to pay homage to their American blues and R&B progenitors, and they wanted to try to be as cool as them: as cool as Little Richard or Chuck Berry or John Lee Hooker. They also wanted to sell records and get girls.

The impression I got from Pink Floyd in the beginning was that they wanted to realize the grand psychedelic visions of their founder, Syd Barrett. And that they also wanted to sell records and get girls.

Counter that with the message I seemed to pick up from The Who's first two albums, and that was: we are already cool. We're fully formed artists, doing our own thing. This is for us, not for you, and you're lucky we're even letting you listen to it.

Sure, they do a cover of Muddy Water's Mannish Boy on their first album, but it's atrocious. It sounds as if they recorded it as a deliberate parody to take the piss out of their rival bands' penchant for blues covers.

It took me until their third album, The Who Sell Out, to catch up to what they were doing early on.



The Who Sell Out is an art project focusing on the banality of art expended in the service of modern consumerism. As a Gen-Xer, this concept is old hat. We grew up on it. But these guys were on to it years before I was born.

The Who's early work also ties in with a semi-forgotten British subculture known as the Mods. The Mods were young men mostly, dressed in tailored three-piece suits and wearing slightly shaggy haircuts, kids who rode around on Vespa scooters and listened to modern Jazz, blues and R&B.



Later on, the Mods would adopt The Who, Small Faces and The Jam as their bands, and they factor into the Who's movie Quadrophenia.

I've now read a bit about the Mods, and I'll admit that I don't really get them, in the same way that a lot of people didn't get the hipsters of the '00s. But I suspect that I'm not supposed to get them, with the idea being--as with The Who's early work--that we are cool, and you are not, and we prefer not to be understood by anyone on the outside--typical youth subculture stuff.

Anyways, I've made my peace with the first few albums, and grown to like them on subsequent listens. I'll also point out the exception of Keith Moon's drumming, which doesn't ever come across as too cool for school. He's more of the talented lager lout who crashes the cool kid's party and trashes everything, but in a way that's so compelling and liberating that you wouldn't dream of trying to stop him.

Here's an instrumental from the first album where they drop the whole artsy coolness business for a few minutes and just kind of rock out. It sounds like it could be a stylized stealth cover of the Surfaris' Wipeout. I include it because it was one of the redeeming songs from the first listen that made me circle back, and you can also hear how Keith Moon was going to be a very special drummer.

I played a 4 hour session last night. Nothing significant to report, except that Cashman Bingo took me to the cleaners.

These new generation advantage slots carry a lot more variance than the original generation of the early '00s, most of which had bonuses that could be triggered with a single quarter. These new machines can take $6.00 a pop and more in order to unlock their treasures, and the five-play dollar Ultimate X Poker can swallow $25.00 on a single deal; $50.00 if you go for the full bonus, which--being a bankroll nit--I don't.

Tomorrow MGM is running a double payout football promo for the Super Bowl, and I plan on sitting for a marathon session at the tables, signing-in at 9AM, taking my seat around 10:30AM, and leaving around 12 hours later, when the football game ends. Only around 3 of those hours will be within the bonus time, but by the early afternoon, the wait time for a seat will approach the interminable, so the priority will be on getting sat, and that means getting sat as early as possible.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 4 hours
+$206.00

Running Poker Total: 160.5 hours, +$6577.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 1 hour
(-$226.27)

Running Slot Total: 24 hours, +$394.48

Grand Total: 184.5 hours, +$6971.48

The Who could rock.

Report on the Super Bowl marathon session?

Must still be recovering.

Sorry. I dropped a couple gummies last night and was too high to write. Started it this morning but couldn't transfer it to my work email, as my laptop wouldn't cooperate.

I'll try to finish it at lunch.

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/
Gang aft agley

-Robert Burns


Things went aft agley for me on Sunday and they did not gang any better towards the end.

I was the first player to sign up on Sunday morning at 9AM sharp, and at 10AM I sat down with the 2nd-9th early bird signups. Three players turned out to be decent regs, all of whom I learned had hatched the same scheme as I: to show up early and to play all the way through the Super Bowl.

Three decent regs at a $1/$2 table are three too many, especially for a 12 hour session. After an hour of making sure that I wasn't overvaluing the field, I put in for a transfer, but with the chaos of the initial seating process in full swing, it took the floor 90 minutes to get me to another table. During that time, I lost almost $200 in a pot where I had a monster draw on the flop and turn--I should have check-shoved the turn in retrospect, but didn't--and I was left with a marginal hand on the river, where Villain, a decent reg, bluffed me off of it with air.

He told a good story throughout the hand, and I believed it, and then he showed the bluff.

My new table was splashy, and they insisted on seeing most flops 5 or 6 ways, regardless of the initial bet. I had several periods where I was card dead and didn't play a hand for an hour, then I'd open something like 44 or 98s and get 5 callers, to see a flop of AKJr.

Heads up or three-way, that's a C-bet all day and all night, and it calls for a second barrel on most turns, but when the flop is six ways--even if there's a 70% chance on average of each player folding--then it's (.70^5)*100, or only a 16.8% chance of getting a C-bet through that gauntlet.

I've written before that we should not be afraid of tables with constant large multiway pots, as a player needs to win only 20% of six way pots and 25% of five way pots to print money over time.

However, losing 80% and 75% of pots respectively can make for a very long losing streak when the player hits an unlucky patch, which is what I hit on Sunday, all day and all night.

You win monster pots at these tables by making a hand and bet bet betting. It's not uncommon, however, to whiff on the hand, or to make a good second best hand out of six. And that's how things went agley on Sunday.

On the slot front: I started the day ahead, picking up a decent chunk in the hour between signup and cards in the air, but at the end of the day I made a final round of slots and gave it all back.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 12 hours
(-$447.00)

Running Poker Total: 172.5 hours, +$6130.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$1.34

Running Slot Total: 26 hours, +$395.82

Grand Total: 198.5 hours, +$6525.82

Yes they could. At one of their concerts in '76, their sound was measured at 126 decibels at 100 feet. But I'd forgotten that they had started out as sort of an art band.

Listening to Tommy, it starts to come back to me.

My parents had HBO back in the late 70's and early 80's. For me, it was the best thing in the world, because I hated commercials. This was an era when half hour kids shows had like 14 minutes of content and 16 minutes of cereal and toy commercials.

At one point back then HBO was playing the Tommy movie and Saturday Night Fever 3-4 times a day, each. As a kid I put both movies into the same category: adults doing weird stuff with catchy music in the background.

My views on the movies and the music have since evolved, but on listening to Tommy for the first time in 40 years, I was struck by a pleasant nostalgia for a time when I was young and unburdened and had the luxury of watching snippets of Saturday Night Fever so many times that my dad snapped at me to quit watching that crap.

Short session last night. Once again I dug myself into a $250 hole early, then had to dig myself mostly out while being mostly card dead. Ah well, it's not always glamor and intrigue at the lowest limits.

I caught one good hand with the second nut flush on the river, but missed a bet when I checked it with the hope that a known bluffer would do his thing, only to see him check it back.

My fancy play gave me a losing session instead of a winning one. I'll be back on Friday for another bite of the elephant.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 2.5 hours
(-$18.00)

Running Poker Total: 175 hours, +$6112.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 1 hour
($-17.75)

Running Slot Total: 27 hours, +$378.07

Grand Total: 202 hours, +$6490.07

wtf are 'advantage slots' ? there's slots that payout more than they rob? doesn't make much sense capt'n

What Are Advantage Slot Machines?

Last night I forwent the trip to MGM due to the prospect of freezing rain. There are few driving skills for freezing rain that work better than staying home.

Even if you're a perfect touch on the gas and steering wheel, there are other drivers out there who are not, and they will smash right into you, regardless of your skill level.

This morning I showed up at MGM and started off by dumping $120.00 into Cashman Bingo. I've mentioned that CB is the only advantage machine title where the grinder is supposed to use his or her good judgement in determining its EV state. My judgement is not good. I'm going to tighten up considerably on Cashman Bingo plays going forward.

Fortunately, there were several objectively good plays on the various Ultimate X Poker machines scattered throughout the casino. I had originally thought that there were less than a half dozen Ultimate X machines in the place, but upon further inspection I found that there are around 16-20 of them. I just had to dig through some game menus to find them.

When I'd gotten up to around 16th on the poker list, I decided to do one more quick sweep of the slots outside the poker room, thinking that I had plenty of time. When I got back, I found that I'd missed my name being called, and the list then stood at 50+ players. I quit and went home.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 0 hours
$0

Running Poker Total: 175 hours, +$6112.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$22.38

Running Slot Total: 29 hours, +$400.45

Grand Total: 204 hours, +$6512.45