New player type itt. BMAWG.

Also, still love that SLAG OMC.

Oh man, SLAG OMC is my spirit animal. I love that guy. For all I know he might be me from the future, coming back to play in the dwindling poker Silver Age before it all went to ****.

I'm writing up the second bus incident report now, hopefully I'll have it finished before I have to head out to work. 40 hours is too damn long. We need to advocate for a 32 work week.

Bally's: 8 hours:
+$538

Not enough time in the day, damn it. Here's the tl;dr backstory that sets up the Second Bus Incident, but not the actual incident, which will be shorter, I hope. I'll try to write that in the next day or two. For now, it's time to get ready for work.

The thing you ought to know is that I was a bully for a few years when I was a kid. If you've ever wondered what kind of people bullies grow up to be--well, I can offer myself as one example. I can't help you with other bullies, as I never hung out with them. I can tell you that I wasn't stupid, and I wasn't a sociopath. I was capable of empathy, but not willing to put it to use where it was needed.

This is the part where I tell you that I'm "not proud" of what I did. Not proud doesn't cut it. I was atrocious. There was no excuse for it, no mitigating circumstances. I was an infected dickhole, and someone who richly deserved the beating Scut Farkus took at the hands of Ralphie at the end of A Christmas Story, every single day of my young life.

Fate was kinder to me, at least in the short term. My Ralphie, when he'd finally had enough of me, confronted me at a hardware store one day while our parents looked on in accumulating surprise and shock.

I know it sounds glib, but the kid punched me with his words. There's no other way for me to say it. He didn't insult or belittle me. All he did was clearly lay out the effects my behavior had had on his daily life: he was afraid to go to school, to move down hallways, to eat lunch, to go to recess, to walk out to the bus after school, to walk home from the bus. Every minute of his day was spent in fear that I would pop up out of nowhere and mess with him. He didn't want to live like this any more. Could I please stop making his days so bad?

On hearing this, my mind went blank for a few seconds while everyone's eyes bore down on me. Then some kind of filthy coarse knot inside of me unraveled and let go, and I broke down; I blubbered and I and cried and I apologized sincerely to the kid. He did something--he took my hand between his and he forgave me right there and then...like, with all of his heart. I didn't deserve it, but it was a moment of grace.

That didn't absolve me of my crimes. I had hurt other kids, and they never got the chance to confront me, and I never apologized to them.

I'd like to tell you that I was never a bully again, but that would not be true. I left the normal kids alone, but I still picked on the other bullies, and not because they may have deserved it--this wasn't a vigilante operation--it was more about managing my place in a prison yard hierarchy that I had bought into and had helped perpetuate, and whose rules and regulations I could not escape. In other words: I was afraid that the other bullies would turn on me like Alex's droogs at the end of A Clockwork Orange after the scientists had neutered Alex's aggression.

In the summer before my freshman year of high school, my parents moved us to another state. I had always been bigger and stronger than most of the other kids my age, but this was the year my early growth spurt gave up, and many of the other boys shot up and passed me. You might guess what happened to me at my new school: I was relentlessly bullied. Karma had shown up to cash in on its piece of me. It took a lot of weight training and exercise and finally a late growth spurt in my junior year for me to crawl out of that hole, but I had managed to pick up an detailed appreciation of what it was like on the other side.

As an adult, I've actively forgotten about all of this. It is incompatible with my grown-up identity, and therefore to be ignored, forgotten, never mentioned, and never thought of. Writing this was as hard as hell. But never mind that, because what it means is that the aggression is still inside, poorly processed, and waiting for an opportune moment to reemerge.

Aside from the movie spoilers this is another great poast, Suited. Interesting subject, too. I would never have pegged you as a former bully.

Thanks Sheep! I had a long internal debate about whether or not to talk about it, but something Stephen King said in his writing book made me decide to go with it. To paraphrase him, he wrote that every villain is the hero of his own story. I think it would be inauthentic, insincere and ultimately kind of boring if I only wrote about being on my best behavior.

JFC, I have a hangover today for the first time in forever. Nice going, *******. I won't be doing any long form writing. I need a nap, then the plan was to try to tackle the Red Rock $2/$5 for a challenge day.

Harrah's: 8 hours:
+$94

My personal limit is like 300-400 ml of solid-good whiskey and even then that’s usually playing with fire. If I keep it under 300 I can still wake up and go crush the next day (still in my early 30s so we’ll see how long that last.

One problem is my neighborhood bar running their half price across the board drink special every night from midnight to 2AM. If I'm heading home at that hour, I feel like I'm missing value by not stopping in.

I didn't make it out to Red Rock Station, felt like I wasn't up to my A game, and I was right about that. One more full day and I'll have the 40 hours wrapped up. I'm going to bed fairly sober, so that's a start.

TGIS.

Golden Nugget: 8 hours:
(-$98)

If the local happy hour is unsurpassed value then over indulging is the point of diminishing returns. Going to that point makes the time of trying to obtain the value a net loss.

It’s often easier to understand and accept this then it is to practice it. Everyday is a new opportunity to do better, though!

FWIW I’m at about 350 ml right now and trying to hydrate to Balance out this peppermill breakfast

LMK when you're moved in. The first two rounds of drinks are on me.

Well, I made the 40 hours. I would not have done it without the whip of the challenge in the forefront of my mind the whole time. I'll need to find a more consistent incentive--short term profits are not a factor in this business--I could work for 16 hours one week and make $2500, and work for 45 hours the next week and lose $1400. This was an okay to decent week, +$780 or thereabouts, without any freerolls to add to the kitty.

Having made the challenge and avoided the mandatory gift to charity, I have decided to choose my own venue. I want to thank everyone for their suggestions, and I apologize for not picking one of them this time. Your suggestions will be live again if I do another challenge and fail it.



Gold Coast and Harrah's: 8 hours:
+$223

Mr. suitedjustice giving back to the community itt

^It's Golden Nugget and Harrah's lol. Gold Coast doesn't have poker.

Mr. suitedjustice on the gold coast itt

I'll post this here and now, so if a strikingly similar movie comes out in a few years, my lawyer can use this as a reference to get me my cut. I reserve all rights to all material, story, characters, ideas and situations below.

Movie Pitch: The Bubble.

The Bubble is a ticking clock suspense movie. The clock here is the hero's dwindling stack on the stone bubble of a $25,000 entry main event which is paying a mincash of $44,101. His is the shortest stack in the tournament and--thanks to plot complications--he is the only player not at his seat.

Hero is similar to me in that he moved to Las Vegas to become a live poker pro and met with initial success, all the while blogging everything online. For the sake of interest, let's make the crowd following him online much larger than mine, particularly since he made it a lot further along on his own $600-$60,000 challenge. Hero made it all the way up to the $50/$100 NL game at the Bellagio.

And that was his downfall--3 x 100bb stacks at this level is $30,000. Hero had made $30k working his way up through the challenge levels, as designed, but he had mixed his winnings in with his life roll, and he had lived a little too high on the hog along the way, and when he'd lost the $30k to the sharks who'd followed his blog and who'd built a game around him at $50/$100, he was stone busto.

Busto except for an invitation to a live $25k main event, won online starting with a freeroll and then following up with six more ascending step tournaments in a row--the Seven Steps to Main Event Heaven.

Hero wants the money, obviously, and not the ticket to the tourney. His landlord is threatening to evict him. Every normal online poker skin pays their seat winners their buyin money plus some expenses, but not this online poker skin. Hero is known already for his blog, for coming close to winning his $60,000 challenge, and for coming up from nothing to a $25k tourney entry through the Seven Steps. His poker skin has sponsors who are crawling all over them; so no, he can't have the money, and he can't sell the ticket--no play, no pay.

The first 3 or 4 days before the bubble (I'll have to crunch the numbers with runners and blind levels and whatnot to figure exactly how many days), hero goes on a tear and enters the day of the bubble somewhere between having way above average chips and being the overwhelming chip leader (I'd prefer the latter, but again I have to crunch some numbers to get it to work out.) The bubble will hit around 13 hours into this fateful day.

Unfortunately, hi-jinks and shenanigans have ensued the night before and hero has been pulled away from the tournament to find something or to solve something crucial, we'll call it the Macguffin, and his abandoned stack is slowly but inexorably blinded down over the course of the 13 hours before the bubble hits.

The Macguffin might involve hero trying to sell pieces of himself in the tournament, but it turns out that his prior $30k cash loss at $50/$100 NL was livestreamed, and let's just say that he wasn't playing his A-game that day (possibly for backstory reasons,) and he was exposed by the sharks pretty badly, and no one whom he can find on short notice has any confidence in him.

Hero is kept up to date on his stack throughout the day by calls and texts from his frenemy at the tournament, with whom he has a last longer bet that he can't possibly pay unless he mincashes. The Macguffin may be wrapped up with the frenemy, and there are some other higher stakes between them that are going to have to be hashed out. There's room in the story for a current or a lost love interest as well, to be sure.

Towards the end of the Third Act we'll see two or three players with stacks shorter than hero's make incredible double or triple up suckouts, and that will ultimately place hero's stack in dead last on the stone bubble, and everyone there will know that they just need to fold a few more hands, if hero doesn't show up, and they'll all make the bubble.

That's the bare bones of the pitch so far. I think it might have some potential.

Two quick addendums. One: If you're going to hire an actor (or an actress,) whom the camera loves, to be the hero, then they'll have to be a vlogger, not a blogger, so they can work their magic properly. Two: Phil Laak needs to be one of the cash sharks.

Okay, fine... I'll star in your god damn movie.

Thanks Phil! Now if you can talk to your girl Jen Tilly and get her aboard on this project, that would be fantastic!

Today my ranging and hand reading were off and I was betting nonexistent streets of value. Instead of there being any street, there was only a dirt side lot strewn with used syringes and dog ****, with me standing there in dirty boxer shorts, tossing small handfuls of red chips at passersby.

Here you go.
Here you go.
Here you go.

Harrahs: 5 hours:
(-$392)

and YOU get a chip, and YOU get a chip, and YOU get a chip, you all get a chip!

Light rain all day in Las Vegas, which is the flooding equivalent of 3 days of heavy rain in most other places. Soon after hitting the street, I soaked one foot in a cold, deep roadside stream, and I intermittently sloshed along for a while until I'd properly soaked the other foot, and somehow the balance made it better, or at least more endurable. All this for the Harrahs freeroll, in which I lasted less than 30 minutes. I'll be calling this day on account of rain and starting up again tomorrow.

Harrahs "Freeroll": 0.5 hours:
(-$10)

I had to catch a taxi from the next casino because everything was flooded out.

Vegas doesn't handle rain well.

I wonder how many tunnel people drowned