Congratulations on three months, keep it going!

Congrats Suited, all positive stuff

I know that feeling of using that next belt notch and that happiness that comes with the losing weight progression

Yeah great stuff SJ!!

Congrats on three months.

Thanks guys!


The last time I tried to do this, I tried it alone. I wanted to be the cool, stoic Clint Eastwood's Man Without a Name and power through it, and it sucked. Every day sucked.

This time, knowing that I can post, rant, speculate, philosophize or brag about the journey, and Gentle Readers will have my back, has made the effort much more pleasant and sustainable. I appreciate you so much.

Chasing after the above 3 hands cost me around $150 last night. I was dealt hands like 96, 43 and 62 8 or 9 times during the session. The poker room also had their final course of $3k random drawings last night, drawing every 3 hours from noon until midnight. I was in attendance for the duration and bricked everything.

On the slot front: 8 more +EV machines were pulled from the floor yesterday and replaced with -EV ones, while still more new slot grinder faces popped up on the floor. Right now, the advantage slot players are like brewer's yeast: multiplying every day, sucking in less and less sugar and shitting out more and more poison.

On a positive note: I found a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk outside the MGM entrance. As I snatched it up, I thought the bill was going to be one of those fake ones with bible verses printed on the back, the kind of pamphlet that absolute dirtbags sometimes leave their servers in lieu of a tip, but the bill was real, and no one accosted me as I scooped it up and moved on quickly. I used it to subtract $20 from my slot losses for the day.

Day off today. I'm heading to CVS to look at half-priced Easter candy, if there's anything good left after yesterday's rush.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$87.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
(-30.76)

2024 Running Poker Total: 184 hours, +$2169.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 106 hours, +$5387.77

2024 Grand Total: 290 hours, +$7556.77

At CVS, the remaining Easter baskets and bunnies are not on sale. Some of the related candy is listed as buy one, get the second for $1. As poker players, we know that that pot is not 50% off, more like 25%-45% off. The "dollar" store is going with only 25% off all Easter candy at the moment.

****ing greedheads. I walked out of both stores without spending a dime.

Yep. Anytime you need to blow off steam, we're here.

Thanks golddog!

Also, I left quietly. I never berate staff for anything that's above their paygrade. When I was a lad, the convenience store I worked at was the first in its area to go over $2.00 a pack for cigarettes, and 18-year-old me, making $5.25 an hour, took a lot of crap for that, while the owner of the chain probably bought his second boat.

The Perils of Being Weak-Tight

The $8000 6-high straight flush in spades is still alive, as are the other two $4000 straight flushes. I spent around $30 chasing them yesterday; not much, but that's $30 that I don't have today.

I had a standard weak-tight player on my right yesterday, sitting there with his $100 stack and preserving it like the crown jewels. A hand comes where MP limps and it folds around to W-T in the SB, and he completes. I check the BB with A6.

I'll raise in that spot with a lot of aces, but I like to be suited, or have my kicker be 9 or higher for value, or 5 or lower for straight possibilities. A6o is a pretty weak ace.

Pot ($6) - 3 players

Flop: A55

W-T bets $10 and my spidey senses go off. He has not initiated a post-flop bet in the 2 hours I've sat next to him. Still, W-T likely has a better ace, MP could have worse than us and still come along. Then an ace, a high broadway card or a 5 could hit and W-T and I can chop up MP's money. This is a very easy call. I watch in disbelief as my cards hit the muck. WTF am I doing?

Pot ($26) - heads up; hero is out

Turn: 5

W-T bets $15 and MP calls. Goddamnitsomuch.

Pot ($56) - heads up; hero is out

River: A

Huh? Two aces on the board and my ace in the muck. Two players left. That's five aces. What did MP call the turn with? In any case, the board is a boat and we would have all chopped if I hadn't made such a weak-tight fold.

Not in any case.

W-T bets $25 and MP calls.

Pot ($106) - heads up; hero is out

W-T shows 52 for quads. MP flashes the case ace as he mucks.

If W-T hadn't been so weak tight, he could have started off with a $300 stack instead of a hundo. With our aces and a different bettor, MP and I would have called big bets across 3 streets: $15, $40 and $150 respectively, and those quads would have pulled in a $600 pot instead of just a hundo.

I complimented W-T on his hand and didn't tell him what I'd folded. And since he'd played 52, we talked about the 6-high spade straight flush promo.

Two hands later, W-T calls in the CO after a few limps with 54. I have complete junk and fold. W-T flashes me his hand.

Flop is Q28. Someone up front bets $12 and W-T folds.

Turn: 3
River: 6

The good news is that the hand is still alive. Hopefully it's available when I return tomorrow. I was going to play today, but it snowed here. One of the perks I allow myself is to never again have to drive to work in the snow, not after so many years of it. Nowadays, if it's snowin' I ain't goin'.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 7 hours
+$6.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
(-47.70)

2024 Running Poker Total: 191 hours, +$2175.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 108 hours, +$5340.07

2024 Grand Total: 299 hours, +$7515.07

Continuing with my great movie catchup, I went with Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest from 1959. I've been remiss about watching Hitchcock movies; before this one, I'd only seen Psycho and The Birds, both of which I'd watched when I was a boy.

Part of it, I think, is my aversion to black and white. I'm a history nerd, but the world before I was born was experienced in color, not in black and white, not in sepia tones. I like to see what the world looked like, in color.

Fortunately, Hitchcock shot 14 of his movies in color, and North By Northwest was one of them. It was great to see 1959 New York portrayed this way. Some of the shots are exceptional in their composition. The UN building is one:







And the villain's Vandamm House—clearly an homage to Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural work—is another:





The set piece stunts are great for the time: a crop duster pulls off a wild stunt with a tanker truck, and later on the heroes and villains clamber around all over the presidents' faces on Mt. Rushmore.

This was also the first good look I've had at Cary Grant, as he retired from acting in 1966 at the age of 62, only a year older than Tom Cruise is now. Grant was everything I've read about: handsome, cool, suave, urbane, and dryly humorous, only he was around 3x more of these things than I thought possible.

Grant's co-star was Eva Marie Saint, one of Hitch's famous strong, mysterious blondes; captivating women who were not particularly overburdened with morals or scruples.



The main characters sleep together on a train a few hours after they've met, and this is a difficult plot point to pull off in 1959, during the reign of the Hays Code, which specified that movies should be censoring any sort of licentious behavior. Couples, even married couples, should not be shown sleeping together when the implication is that they're having sex.

Hitch expertly tiptoes around this until later on in the movie, when he can't seem to help himself. He shows Grant and Saint in their pajamas making out on the train, and then he cuts to this scene...



North By Northwest was quite good, so I've added Notorious and Rear Window to my movie list.

The next movie has Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds in 1966, just at the beginning of London's Swinging Sixties.

North by Northwest my favorite Hitchcock. I know nearly everybody else puts Vertigo as the best (or very nearly) movie ever made, but I prefer this one. A couple things:

Heard somewhere over the years that during the filming of the cropduster scene, know that Grant had an aversion to spiders, Hitchcock put a tarantula in the field right where Grant was to dive. Hence the legit terrified reaction.

Also, that last shot is jut to assure the audience that Mr. and Mrs. Thornhill were getting back to NYC safely, with no other implications.

The Rope is incredible and personal fav ; one shot sequence and with tints of Crime and Punishment nihilist philosophy absolutely got me

Bro it’s mental to allow a limper and small blind to see a flop without a raise when you have any A in your hand. Should have made it 12 or 15. Just play your weaker Ax hands as bluffs repping as a premium A and if you meet significant resistance just over fold. I know it’s offsuit but you gotta punish thee limpers. PUNISH THEE!

Also if you’re going to play the promo-chase hands I would probably mix them into my bluffing range alongside your low suited Ks and As. Might as well balance your pre flop opening range. You’re gonna get some sick looks when you open the 6s4s and stack JJ after calling a small 3bet when the board comes out 5s-Js-7x-2x-8x lol


Otherwise love to see you posting green numbers and congrats on the sober months. It will keep correlating to positive work results so keep it up


E

I really did laugh out loud at the train in a tunnel shot. And I did not know about the spider. Seems like Hitch could be a cruel but funny bastard at times. Also, thanks for reminding me to add Vertigo to the list.

All right, Rope is on the list, and it's his first film in Technicolor, so that's a big plus. So now I have four Hitchcock movies on the list, and that's one too many, imo.

Notorious
Rear Window
Rope
Vertigo

I think I'm going to cut Rear Window, as I know the basic plot outline from the Simpsons episode, and Rope already has Jimmy Stewart.

Thanks Nat!

Look, I was the enforcer goon for #teamneverlimp for several years, but I've been watching a lot of Bart Hanson lately, and he says that occasional checks and completes in the blinds are okay at tables where big raises like $17-$22 often go 4-6 ways to the flop, and that's Springfield MGM in a nutshell.

I will often raise 54s and 64s, because they can stand multiway action, where A6o cannot. Holding A6o or K9o and pretending that we have pocket aces bloats the pot and does not get 5 people to fold nearly as often as we'd like.

The Trouble With Harry features not only Shirley McClain, but Leave it to Beaver -- and was shot in color.

The next movie is Blow-Up by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, set in London in 1966. The movie is also spelled as either Blowup or Blow Up, which says something about the style of the movie: informal, indefinite, and with more than a touch of nihilism to it.

I talked about the Hays Code in the Hitchcock review. The Code was on its last legs in the mid-60s, when foreign films like Blow-Up were showing nudity and drug use and the public order was not breaking down due to that. Ultimately, the Hays Code would be replaced by the MPAA rating system in 1968.

The naughty parts of Blow-Up are old hat to us nowadays, what persists are some of the avant-garde blocking and shot composition choices:







Thomas, the main character played by David Hemmings, is a high-talent professional photographer. The movie's often stylized shots can be seen to mirror his viewpoint.

Thomas himself is hard to watch, as he is arrogant, entitled and misogynistic. He spends his work hours berating and inappropriately touching the high-end fashion models who make up his main source of income. He treats them like annoying, poorly-programmed beauty robots, but he gets results, as can be seen from the new Rolls Royce Silver Cloud that he drives like a complete ass all over London.

When things start to go a little wrong for Thomas in the third act, I felt like cheering. That's when I realized that Antonioni was up to some interesting and unconventional things with the movie. Thomas is not supposed to be a protagonist in the conventional sense, nor is he an anti-hero. We're not meant to root for or against him, or hope that he succeeds or fails in his journey. Thomas's journey, the plot of the movie, is a red herring.

The plot, such as it is, has Thomas taking pictures of an amorous couple sharing a private moment in a park, and the woman, played by Vanessa Redgrave, catches Thomas taking snaps. She follows him home and attempts to get him to give her the negatives.

Thomas pretends to give those to her, but he keeps copies for himself. Later on, he develops the prints and blows them up, and he spots what appears to be the preparations for murdering Redgrave's lover in the park.

This part of the story seems to play out conventionally until we hit the third act and we realize that Thomas isn't a protagonist; he's not here to solve the mystery. He's merely curious about it. He takes a few vague stabs at it, but ultimately he acts more like a real-life person might. He doesn't call the cops because he doesn't seem to want to get implicated in an investigation where the details are amorphous. He tries to tell his friends about it, but all they're too deeply embedded within the new Swinging Sixties London culture to be bothered with it. None of them deem Thomas's vague accusations to be important enough to peel themselves away from their fabulous new lifestyles.

I believe that Antonioni had a few things to say in Blow-Up about the personal relativity of importance. I posted the Yardbirds video earlier in the thread, but now skip to around 2:25 below, when Jeff Beck smashes his guitar and throws its neck out into the crowd, creating an instant frenzy for it. After a scrum, Thomas ends up with the guitar neck and escapes the building with it. Watch what happens once he's free.



In addition to being a statement on the inconstancy of importance, it stands also a sort of pantomime for the overall mystery plot. I'm guessing that the lack of resolution in the third act bothered a lot of moviegoers, but I believe that that was Antonioni's point. We are not protagonists in real life. We're not the special chosen ones bound to go on a hero's journey. All we can do is to love what we do. Thomas loves to take pictures. His avocation briefly intersects him with a murder mystery, but that doesn't obligate him to turn into Hercule Poirot and solve it.

I appreciated Blow-Up for its great camera work and for highlighting stale movie tropes and conventions by flouting them, and for being a solid piece of postmodern art making some deep philosophical points, but in the end, it wasn't for me. I'm a story guy. Tell me a story and give me someone to root for.

As always, your mileage may vary.

I have seen over 30 Hitchcock movies, and I consider Rear Window to be one of his best. Besides, Rope doesn't have Thelma Ritter.

And Rear Window has Grace Kelly and Raymond Burr, IIRC.

Looks like there'll be a Hitch film festival after all.

A snippet from David Foster Wallace's very long list of things you learn while in recovery, from his Infinite Jest novel:

That nobody who's ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever.

That one will be hitting a little close to home in a few months. I may need to scroll back and find it.

Yesterday I found a rare play on a Hexbreak3r machine and, as per usual, it bit me in the ass. Overall, I am more than moderately down on that machine, but I've only made a total of around a 20 plays on it, so that can easily be explained by variance and a small sample size. Still, the irrational feeling of being snakebit by the machine is hard to shake.

Gambelina found this piece on Twitter about how pairs of Las Vegas scammers are enticing tourists who are inexperienced with video poker to play and build up Ultimate X machines for them, with one scammer asking the tourist to watch his machine while he "grabs more money from his wife", while the second scammer, sitting next to the machine, lies about the mechanics of the game and gets the tourist to build up the bonuses, until the first scammer conveniently returns to the machine to reclaim it, along with the bonuses that the tourist has built up on the second scammer's "advice."



Casinos aren't going to stand for this business, and I wouldn't be surprised if honest slot grinders start getting eighty-sixed alongside of the scammers.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$96.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
(-121.60)

2024 Running Poker Total: 199 hours, +$2271.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 110 hours, +$5218.47

2024 Grand Total: 309 hours, +$7489.47

Imagine being the kind of loser that hustles people into building up Ultimate X multipliers.

I’ve kind of started something similar but watching Sam Peckinpah movies.

I've only seen one of his movies, which was Convoy, which 8-year-old me thought was the cat's pajamas.

Give me one (1) more Peckinpah movie to add to the list.