Eh, he was smart and got a change over to the drunk table before I could.

May they felt him multiple times.

July 2nd - 5th, staying at Luxor for $41/night, see you then, sir

Yes!

After dinner, the regs piled in to Harrahs again, and the game went from good to bad within an hour.

On the subject of hours, I'm not working enough of them. I'll need to address that.

Flamingo and Bally's: 6 hours (total, over two days):
(-$149)

Very nice job Morph

Thanks Morph!

Today I had the privilege of playing cards with 2p2er mendicant loafer--a confirmed +EV player at life. Good conversation made the grind fly by, and his younger brother's 75bb preflop blind open shove was a thing of grace and beauty.

Well... it was a fun move, in any case.

Flamingo: (Bally's freeroll +$85): 6 hours:
+$406

Mendicant Loafer has played poker for a couple years now and has seen a number of cool things take place. Did he tell you about the most memorable hand he has played in?

So, Mendicant Loafer was dealt pocket 6's. A third 6 landed on the flop, along with a 2 and a Queen. A few bets are placed, and then one dude raises by going all-in. Mendicant Loafer calls. There's another guy left in the hand who has his cards covered. Mendicant Loafer doesn't see him. Mendicant Loafer turns up his cards revealing his set of 6's. The guy on Mendicant Loafer's left turns up his cards to reveal a set of 2's and lays them down. Mendicant Loafer double facepalms himself, realizing he just made a horrible blunder. The turn is the 2 of diamonds. This makes a flush for the guy still in the hand but gives Mendicant Loafer a full house, and thus Mendicant Loafer wins the hand. Mendicant Loafer's horrible blunder ironically ended up saving him a ton of money. The dude on Mendicant Loafer's left obviously would have called had Mendicant Loafer not shown his cards, and he would have won with quads.

Interesting, right? What is your most memorable poker hand?

weird. i kind of remember that hand. but i'm pretty sure i had the 2's.

matt shoves blind pre-flop. dealer calls the floor. hilarity ensues. fun times until villain flops top-set.

also enjoyed the evening. thanks for the compliment. i've had more than my fair share of good fortune the last few years.

nice river bluff with air after several orbits of tight. nitastically played.

mendicant loafer is a real person with siblings!

TIL

Actually, like me, he's a talking animated cat living in a dimension where the humans don't make a big deal of it.

You might be too young to have seen the Paula Abdul video.

Oh, I know exactly what you're referencing

Yeah, it's Corollary 1 to Godwin's Law. As an online thread grows longer, the probability of a reference to MC Skat Kat approaches 100%.

But enough about that.

I played the challenge tonight for 2 hours, and one of the main shortcomings of the limited buyin, no top-up system became apparent over the course of two consecutive hands.

On Hand One I started with $300, ran top two pair into a straight and doubled up Villain's $200 stack, leaving me with $100 and her with $400. I didn't top up, per the challenge rules.

On Hand Two, against the same Villain, I ran a full house into her top trips and she doubled me up to $200.

Now let's back that up and give me the full Orleans $500 buyin to start, and have me top back up to $500 after Hand One.

In that universe, I start with $500; she starts with $200. I double her up to $400 and I'm left with $300, and I pull out $200 and top back up to $500 in my stack, before Hand Two starts.

We start Hand Two; me with $500 and her with $400, and I stack her with my boat over her top trips (later on, she stacked off big with TPTK, so she would have felted her top trips there all day). I now have $900 in my stack and she has nothing, and I'm $200 ahead instead of $100 behind.

Same two hands.

In any case, I'm not changing the format here in the early going. This is a money management experiment based on some presumed advantages in place to counter actual detriments such as the above, and I'm sticking with it for now.

My main problem now is I'm not playing enough hours. Monday and Tuesday are off, and I will be making every effort to hit 40 hours within the coming Wednesday-Sunday work week.

I'll be checking out Jared Tendler's and Eliot Roe's poker mindset podcasts to see if they have anything that will help me get my mind back on the grind.

If anyone knows another podcaster or YouTuber who has content on how to churn out the hours, please feel free to post a link.

Three Stacks $600-$60,000 Challenge:$1/$3 Level:

Link to Challenge Rules

Starting bankroll: $600
Last bankroll: $1463
Challenge day progress:$-88
Current bankroll: $1375
Bankroll needed for $2/$5: $1875

One thing I haven't noted about my situation out here is that I don't own a car. My last car was company owned, and I gave it back to them when I quit. Up until this year, I also didn't have any sort of credit rating. I never cottoned to the idea of going into debt, so I've always saved up for necessary big ticket items, and then paid for them in cash. Out here, I've foregone a new vehicle for now in favor of allocating that chunk of money towards my playing bankroll.

Addressing the credit situation, I picked up two credit cards this year, and I have them set up for on-time automatic payments, so at some point I should have enough credit to finance a car. Until that happens, I will be riding the bus.

I don't mind the bus. The last time I was out here, I rode it for several years before I bought a car. Riding the bus is also the only real contribution I've ever made towards shrinking my carbon footprint, so there's that as well.

So this allows me leeway to get mildly ****ed up and then to go places without spending extra money on an Uber. Case in point: today.

I've talked about the cannabis gummies before, and how I built up a fairly quick tolerance to them. So yesterday I thought I'd try the liquid infusion instead, only I screwed up and picked up the 3 mg version for cheap. The usual dosage is 10 mg per dropper, administered under the tongue, so the stuff I got was weak sauce in the literal sense.

Arriving back home yesterday, I tried a dropper full, then waited two hours: nothing. I tried two more droppers full and waited two more hours: eh, slight buzz.

This morning, I decided that I wanted to see the Wreck-it Ralph sequel, because I'm a big kid who still loves animated movies. Of course I would have to be high for this. I pulled the dropper out of the bottle, and I gave my self a full dose under the tongue. Then I tipped the bottle up to my mouth and drank more than a third of it, probably about seven droppers full. That was more like it.

I hit the road out to the Suncoast buffet, and by the time I'd finished making a pig of myself, I had a good buzz going: probably a 6 or 7 out of 10--still in control and nothing like the 10/10 guy.



Everything was going according to plan. I had just enough time to hit the bathroom before the previews hit. I fronted up to the urinal, unzipped, and I could not find the front flap of my underwear.
JFC where is the ****ing piss flap here? Oh lord, I'm digging around down there like an old pervert. Everyone's going to think I'm a goddamn freak. I'll be arrested any minute. Any minute--Pee Wee Herman, Fred Willard and now me.

I realized then that I may have put my underwear on backwards.

Butters, I believe, is the South Park character who either doesn't know or doesn't care how the piss flap works, so when he pees, his pants and underwear are always down around his ankles.

I had no choice but to pull a partial Butters: undo the belt and pants button, pull down the undies and go over the top. I grew even more self conscious and I could not get a flow started down there.
HFS I look even worse than before with my goddamn pants half pulled down. I gotta go I can't not go the movie is two ****ing hours I...all right, let's make up a semantic exercise as a distraction from my anxiety: name the US presidents in order starting with George Washington, along with one or two facts about each one...

I had made it as far as #14 Franklin Pierce (serious drunkard, three dead sons, nagging Temperance wife who locked herself in her room in the White House) and had finally gotten things started when two loud friends walked into the bathroom and only left one empty urinal between them as they chatted away, breaking two cardinal men's restroom rules.

(1) Split up!
(2) No talking!

The stream died, and I had to get back up as far as #19 Rutherford B. Hayes (lost the popular vote, needed 20 out of 20 disputed Electoral College votes to win, was awarded all 20 of them by a congressional committee and one Supreme Court justice leaning towards his party, nicknamed 'His Fraudulency' because of that,) to get the stream flowing again.

Finally, I finished up, made my way to the movie and got home without any further high-nanigans. Once I got home, I dropped trou with the intention of setting things to rights, only to realize that I'd had my underwear on the right way for the whole time.

LMFAO

An awesome poast once again, Mr. S. Do you know all fifty state capitals as well? Sheep does.

Taking the bus in Las Vegas would be horrible. So many freaks here.

Even worse in the summer when it's hot.

Ever consider downtown Las Vegas to play?

I liked the monorail.

Thank you Sheep!

Wow, the capitals thing is impressive. I might be able to name a few cities for each state, but I probably couldn't do all the capitals. Sometimes the capital is not even the 3rd biggest city in the state, like Montpelier VT, which only has 8000 or so people.

The buses have good AC usually, like everything here--and wifi.

I've had maybe one issue on a bus in all the years I've rode (ridden?) That was just recently, coming back from Asia with all my luggage.

A young white kid got in my face, telling me he was going to throw me off the bus for 'staring at him.' I told him that I hadn't looked his way even once, and that if he touched me I would have him arrested for assault (it's battery, technically), and that he should just sit back down and leave me alone. And he did. Kind of anticlimactic, but that's life for you.

The Golden Nugget $1/$2 is intriguing. There is no cap to the buyin. The last time I was there, I heard a story--possibly an urban legend--about a reg there who always carried around $15,000 in a briefcase and would buy in to the $1/$2 game with that, until he got robbed.

If and when I get set back to $1/$2 in my $600-$60,000 challenge, I might play there for the $1/$2 phase.

What's it called?

I pulled an 8 hour shift yesterday, and got stuck $300 early from some standard beats. I made one loose call for $30 on a river where I was almost never going to be good, and that pissed me off a lot more than having my aces cracked twice for $80 and $70.

Some players can't leave when they're stuck. I'm the opposite. I tell myself that I have a losing image, and that everyone is going to play back at me due to it; but in this case, I was committed to the 8 hours, and I needed them to be at the Flamingo in order to make the freeroll tomorrow. I stuck around, and honestly, nobody seemed to notice that I had been losing. I was getting walks on my opens, and folds on my c-bets.

Players were also failing with their value-betting, and checking back in spots where I would have called a fair chunk. That might be the biggest leak that okay $1/$2 players have. I have a few hands to illustrate this, but I need to get to work for my 8 hour shift, so I won't be able to post them.

Flamingo: 8 hours:
+$39