I won't be the one who pours you a glass of gin. Sorry not sorry.

Probably for the best. How about a GINger ale instead?

Just bought a six-pack of that **** for maximum ale-aments. I shipped the first one. Planning on shipping another later. Speaking of shipping, when's the flight?

What do you think about Arizona Ice Tea? I wanted to invest back in '89 but the office said that Don Vultaggio wasn't interested in selling shares to the public.



Chicago: Jack and Stella: always a lovely couple.

Their Arnold Palmer isn't bad. A little sugary for my taste, but definitely a great business model. Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Damn, Stella is one of the worst beers...

Luckily it's not going in your body

Double the Jack, hold the Stella.

Stella's an okay beer, better than the Bud Light, Shocktop and the over-hopped IPA choices I had at the time. I think the fault lies more with the entire pilsner family rather than any of the brands in it. Pilsners are never exciting beers; they're made for pounding down when you're hot and thirsty, or when your flight is due to board in 7 minutes.

I'll be checking out Harrah's tonight. I poked my head into the room a few weeks ago and it didn't look at all reg-infested. I'll take a longer second look today.

Chip porn requested.

[✓] You're right, the Pilsner suite is lame and tame.
[✓] I like my IPAs over-hopped.
[✓] Stella << Shocktop.

Shocktop <<<<<<<<<< Blue Moon

Yeah, it doesn't say much about Shocktop, just that Stella is really that meh.

I'm at home, still goofing off, having accomplished nothing other than going to the bank and picking up some poker cash. I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and liking it a lot. I haven't read this book before, nor have I seen the movie. Most people will recognize the latter for generating the Tommy Lee Jones newspaper stare meme.



This is the third book of his that I've read. I read Blood Meridian back in the '90's and The Road when it came out in 2006.

His prose is something else. It's a bit like Hemingway but even more laconic and emotionally shut away if that's even possible. His stories always brim over with shocking violence, but very little of it is personal or fueled by anger or envy or rivalry. His characters never actually come out and say "sorry about that," when they blow each other to kingdom come, but it wouldn't come as a surprise if they did.

McCarthy doesn't use quotation marks in his dialog, and it works for him. You always know when someone is talking, and you can hear them in your head perfectly fine.

Señor, Moss said.
Bueno, the old man said.
You speak english?
He studied Moss, holding the broom handle in both hands.
He shrugged his shoulders.
I need a doctor.
The old man waited for more. Moss pushed himself up.
The bench was bloody. I've been shot, he said.
The old man looked him over. He clucked his tongue. He looked away toward the dawn. The trees and buildings taking shape. He looked at Moss and gestured with his chin. Puede andar? he said.
What?
Puede caminar? He made waking motions with his fingers, his hands hanging loosely at the wrist.
Moss nodded. A wave of blackness came over him. He waited till it passed.
Tiene dinéro? The sweeper rubbed his thumb and fingers together.
Sí, Moss said. Sí.

He also does this thing with sentence fragments.

He looked away toward the dawn. The trees and buildings taking shape. The gerund 'taking' is only barely a verb that turns the latter fragment into a sentence. It should come across as awkward, but it doesn't; quite the opposite.

I would have written it: He looked away toward the dawn, looked at the trees and buildings taking shape, and it wouldn't have been as good.

There's a definitive dearth of commas in McCarthy's writing, not to mention very few instances of exotic punctuation: colons, semicolons, ellipses or em dashes. As someone who rarely passes up the chance to punch out a seven-jointed, compound sentence lovingly filled with all of the above marks, I find McCarthy's writing to be fascinating.

For instance, when I want people to read a section of text quickly, I'll shave off the punctuation and try to throw in mostly short words broken up with a few compound words that seem to prime the pace even more for whatever reason. Like this bit from Nit-tastic Tales:

The flash came from a man dressed in a grey Champion hoodie, loping in a quick beeline straight from the mall hallway to the back of my store. I sidestepped out to the center aisle and caught sight of him. He was holding a big black shopping bag and heading towards the back. I looked away almost immediately and thought of other things to do.

Boombada boombada boom.

When McCarthy cuts back on the punctuation--which is always--and weaves in the alternating small and big words--which is often--it has quite the opposite effect, as it slows me down and gets me reading it at a leisurely pace, like some old Texas county sheriff is spinning a yarn over a cup of coffee, which is the actual case here:

Here last week they found this couple out in California they would rent out rooms to old people and then kill em and bury em in the yard and cash their social security checks. They'd torture em first, I dont know why. Maybe their television was broke. Now here's what the papers had to say about this. I quote from the papers. Said: Neighbors were alerted when a man run from the premises wearing only a dogcollar. You cant make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try.
But that's what it took, you'll notice. All that hollerin and diggin in the yard didnt bring it.
That's all right. I laughed myself when I read it. There aint a whole lot else you can do.


I think it might be the grammar that slows me, 'kill em and bury em, I dont know why, didnt bring it." How is it authentic that a sheriff doesn't use apostrophes in his contracted words when he talks? I don't know, but it just is.

All right, I've goofed off enough. Time to get to the tables.

Waiting to get on the only table playing at Harrahs. There are 3 regs on there now: one good, one okay and the third is notorious super-nit Sleepy Mike.

Lord knows I'm trying, but so far my chip stack has been rated E for eh.

Last night I played at Harrah's with 2p2er, aspiring poker pro and kindred spirit Gambelina, who had already been awake for far too long dealing with airplane and hotel shenanigans when she decided to try a three street all-in bluff on a $1/$2 rando who was holding top pair. A bit of rest ought to cure that sort of sleep deprived early-trip irrational exuberance.

Speaking of rando stations with TP, at the end of the session I pick up AQ and bump it to $12 from EP after UTG limped in. I get a caller in MP and UTG calls.

(Pot $39) - three players

Flop: Q78

UTG donks $13. She started with $165 and she's been fairly active and splashy, so I decide to just call and see if I can catch a bluff. MP folds.

(Pot $65) - two players

Turn: J

UTG bets $20. I think a raise here is not going to accomplish much beyond folding out worse hands and keeping in better. It's not going to charge the obvious draw, because that just came in. I call.

(Pot $105) - two players

River 3

UTG shoves for $120

(Pot $225) - two players, one is all in.

Really? You made the backdoor flush? You limp/called from UTG with Q3 and bet two streets for value with TPNK? You turned 33 into a bluff and got there on the river?

Maybe a trap with T9s trying to get me to raise the turn, but damn, it's just a polarizing size on the river after two microbets on the flop and turn. And whenever I commit to taking a bluff catching line with the high end of my range, I shouldn't be folding every time I face a chunky bet on the river when there aren't a huge number of combos that beat me.

Now, let's add in a bit of extra information. Gambelina had this player previously at her table before they'd both moved over to mine. Prior to this hand, we'd had a brief discussion about reads on the players at our table. Gambelina's read on UTG was that she always bet the flop then checked back later streets unimproved. I trusted Gambelina's read here and I made a tough fold.

JK, I called.



Harrahs: 3 hours:
+$101

Yesterday I played another 6 hours at Harrah's. They've downgraded their freeroll payout, but the game has become a lot better, so the hourly EV may just balance out along supply and demand lines--worse freeroll; better game.

Gambelina joined me for 5 of those hours, and she picked off a sizing error I made on a double barrel bluff attempt vs a reg where I was stuck with AQ and trying to rep AK with <1/2 pot-sized bets on a wet board. It's good to have a wingman watching your play when the hourly grind increasingly invites laziness, lapses, backsliding and shortcut-taking.

In return, I raised one of her (thankfully rare) open limps with air and I took down the pot 3 ways with a flop c-bet, after which I shook my finger at her like a schoolmarm, "NO OPEN LIMPING."

Harrahs: 6 hours:
(-$73)

I had a chance to do something touristy with Gambelina, so we went on the Highroller: that's the big Ferris wheel behind Bally's and the Linq. At 550 ft, it's currently the world's tallest. The cars are designed to pack in as many as 40 people, but we ran good and had only the two of us and four others in our car on a Saturday night.

It was an excellent view.




We ran even better and caught the Bellagio fountain show just as we crested the top of the ride. I didn't take many pictures of it except for this blurry one from the very beginning of the show, and it doesn't do it any justice. Instead, I put the cell phone away and just took it in. It was a very nice Vegas moment.



Harrahs: 4 hours:
(-$108)

Yesterday Gambelina wanted to check out the Bellagio poker experience, so we played a 2 hour session there, afterwards peeking into Bobby's Room, but not recognizing any of the players.

From there we walked down to Picasso Steakhouse for a drink and another great view of the Bellagio fountains. The bartender there overheard us talking over hands, so he pulled out a deck of cards which he'd managed to have signed by a number of famous poker pros who'd visited his bar over the last 20 years.

He had accumulated quite a few autographs, notably from from Phil Ivy, Chip Reese, Bobby Baldwin, Scotty Nguyen, and for the pièce de résistance he had Joe Hachem's autograph scrawled across (duplicates of) the offsuit 7 and 3 cards that had given him his 2005 WSOP win.

Bellagio and Flamingo: 5 hours:
+$112

Like to see an update in the green and that you’re spending some decent time with a fellow 2+2er.

Thanks Da_Nit! Obviously, shared experiences make up a lot of the real fun in this town, especially if your highs don't exclusively come from putting a lot of money in bad and hoping for the best.

I always enjoy seeing the groups of folks dressed in theme outfits and striding down the Strip like they own the place, wearing matching tee-shirts that say things like "It's Mindy's 50th Birthday, Mother****ers!" Or the wedding party with the groomsmen dressed in bridesmaid's dresses promenading with the bridesmaids dressed in natty tuxedos. Or the resigned, tightly-smiling and stoic man dressed in only a rainbow-hued grass skirt, holding up a sign that proclaims, "I SUCK AT FANTASY FOOTBALL," marching with his friends crowding around him and shouting out the same details to everyone who can't or won't read his sign, knowing that they might be the one wearing the skirt next year, and so enjoying this year's reprieve more than anything.

In many ways, writing is the opposite of doing. I've been doing a lot of fun and potentially interesting things lately, so consequently I haven't had the time to sit down at the laptop and do them any justice, so to speak. I'll post some results here for now, then later this week I ought to have time to write some long posts.

One of the pending posts will address the issue of soft collusion coming up when friends play together. Taking on that subject when I'm one of its subjects is going to make me uncomfortable, I think, but I'll do my best to address it head-on and without any hedging around my part in it.

Another post will discuss one of our national treasures, Mr. Las Vegas, Wayne ****ing Newton.



Wynn/Encore: $140 Tournament: 2.5 hours:
(-$140)

Flamingo: 6 hours:
+$200

Bally's: 4 hours:
(-$48)

The emotional rollercoaster of computing those different events was VERY up AND down. Do you have a general tournament allowance or does the cash pool and T pool go together?

Also yay net 12 bucks!

Life is a roller coaster, my brother. Poker is just a game. I play tournies for fun, only once in a while, and typically on a whim.

Flamingo: 3.5 hours
(-$800)

So, what is my stance on collusion? Below is someone's BBV post from last year, and my subsequent reply to it, along with the edit line, the latter having been intended as a sort of search engine optimizer.



I posted this before I started playing live on a regular basis.

Now here's a hand that Gambelina and I recently played vs each other.

She's on the button and she straddles for $10--the straddle is 5bb at Ballys on the BTN.

With this type of straddle, SB acts first pre and BTN acts dead last. Folds around to me in the CO and I bump it to $35 with KJo.

So it's just the two of us. Everyone else has already folded before the action gets to me. No one else has been whipsawed between us.

Both of us started with about $300. Gambelina repops it to $100 and I turbo-muck. She shows the AA. Nice straddle!

Now, I had folded without any thought because I knew that Gambelina had the goods here because she'd never bluff me in this spot because we don't want to crush each other's souls.

I brought this hand up with her as a possible example of unintentional soft collusion. I mean, it's not exactly soft play when she swings out the hundo stack on me, but at the same time, isn't it sort of an unabiguous signal that tells me exactly what she has and that I should fold and save my stack?

Gambelina thinks that I'm being utterly ridiculous with looking for nonexistent monsters. It's a game, first and foremost; friends and family like to play it together on the same table and--as long as no third party is in the hand--we shouldn't feel obligated to be always taking optimal EV lines designed to get the other person's stack.

So if playing together without actively colluding is harmless, why do tournament directors routinely split up friends and family at the start of events? Gambelina and I ran into that at the Wynn tourney. I'd wondered, in fact, if they'd thought we were a married couple; I've been asked several times this week where my wife is.

I asked the Wynn TD about the standards for splitting people up and he told me that it was any two or more people who appeared to be together: friends, family, aquaintences, couples (threesomes?) are all assigned to separate tables if possible.

Not so with cash games. Gambelina and I try to get on the same table because we like each other's company, and because we like to talk over hands and share reads (though never during a hand.) Is the latter part fair to the other players at the table? Particularly, is it fair when the two friends are good players? Or am I being a ridiculous game integrity nit?