I won't go into the discussion about soft playing, but I will say this:

0

Wayne ****ing Newton

Like most people, I like music from a lot of different genres: anything from industrial metal to classical symphony to old-school country. There are some genres within which I don't care for most of the acts: modern R&B and its boy band offshoot are prime examples, but even within those lines I can still find a few songs which I like.

Pop standards from the Rat Pack era of the 60's were never in my favorites. I enjoy hearing Frank Sinatra sing just to appreciate his seemingly effortless and near perfect intonations, but given my age, the songs will always remind me of grandmas dancing at wedding receptions. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I will also always love Frank for this video, where he flat out tells a bunch of American school kids that they are Nazis.



So, while I was not incredibly excited to be seeing Wayne Newton at Gambelina's invitation, I was still curious and looking forward to it. Newton is one of the last survivors of that old standards lounge entertainer era, largely because he was much younger than the other acts; Sinatra was already 27 years old when Wayne Newton was born.

Newton began entertaining people on a regular basis when he was a small boy. By age 17 he was headlining a regular six show a day lounge act in Las Vegas, and he's never stopped entertaining for any length of time since. Now he's 77 and playing a show at Cleopatra's Lounge at Caesars.

I had skimmed a description of the show beforehand. From that, I expected to see an old guy showing the effect of too many bouts with tanning machines and plastic surgeries, sitting in a chair and playing old clips of his glory days.

I had not taken into account the fact that Wayne Newton is a master at what he does. All he's ever done with his life has involved putting together shows that entertain people, and at 77 he hasn't lost a step. This show is more of a culmination of his lifetime, rather than any sort of tribute.

He looked good, healthy for his age. He sang his signature Danke Schön, along with covers of Viva Las Vegas, Can't Help Falling in Love, You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You, My Way, and others. His pipes are still perfect. He hit all of his high notes: loud, steady and clear.

In a move that would have made Dave Grohl and Trent Reznor proud, he played the violin, the keyboard and the guitar at various times. And yes, he did show a few old clips of himself. These were with Jack Benny, Glenn Campbell and Sammy Davis Jr., and they worked well within the context of the stories he was telling.

The Cleopatra's Barge venue is small: maybe 100-150 people, and the show is billed as Up Close and Personal, and it lives up to its billing. Wayne came out, on time and singing, and he shook hands with half the crowd while he did. He answered audience questions with depth, humor and sincerity, and he made sure to make eye contact with everyone in the room at least a few times. The overall feeling was a sort of privilege of being close up in the arena of a master entertainer. I'm glad that I went.

I should go, thanks for the write up SJ.

My moms side of the family is from Vegas and I’ve always said that everyone else comes and goes but this has always been Wayne’s town

Wow that seems like a pretty good endorsement of Wayne, maybe need to see this while Hess still performing.

Thanks guys! The Big Elvis at Harrah's review is next, and the last of the Vegas fun reviews for now.

Tonight I'm posting a lot of stuff here, then deleting it. Apologies for that. If you see something on here, just give it a half hour to disappear before you reply. Thank you.

All right, I'm better now. I did two marijuanas last night and I was just itching for an excuse to post something from Ray of Light. Luckily I survived, where Madonna's videos did not. Sorry, Maddie.

Big Elvis

What's more to say? He's big, and he's an Elvis impersonator who does a free show three times a day most days at Harrah's, right inside the bar on the left, just as you walk in from the Linq. And his show is the last fun Vegas thing I did with my friend Gambelina before she left for home.

Big Elvis has a beautiful voice and perfect pitch housed inside of a 400-500lb body. In prior times he tipped the scales at 900+lbs, so he's been making progress. Every once in a while he'll pop up from his triple-wide gold painted throne and dance pretty well, which adds to the entertainment experience and can't be bad for his overall health goals.

Big Elvis claims to be the love child of the real Elvis. He says that when his mother Delores was dying, she told him that she'd had an affair with Presley in 1964, which resulted in his birth.

In any case, it's a fun show, it runs around 40 minutes, and it's free (you can drop a couple of bucks into Big Elvis's tip jar if you'd like). I might not make it a destination show, but if you're on mid-Strip in the afternoon, it's worth your time to migrate over for a look.

I'm coming off an appalling week in terms of results, my worst week so far. I put in decent hours and made two freerolls but I whiffed on them both. My bankroll is far from bottomless and I can't afford too many more weeks like this.

I'll get back to work today; it's all I can do.

Flamingo and Harrah's: 6.5 hours (-$20 Flamingo and Harrah's "freerolls"):
(-$136)

Study your notes, adjust and adapt the best you can.

Thanks for the wise words, Nat!

It appears that Arizona Charlie's has removed Double Bonus from their 5c video poker machines. They still have all of the other bonus options: Bonus, Bonus Deluxe, Double Double Bonus, Triple Bonus etc., but I only play straight Double Bonus in its 5c version, and that is the only -EV gambling game that I will play. I don't like craps or roulette or slots or keno or any of that stuff, just 5c Double Bonus VP.

AFAIK Charlie's was the last place to offer 5c DB with a 9/6/5 payout structure. That's 9x for a full house, 6x for a flush and 5x for a straight. 5c DB with worse payouts can still be found at other casinos, but a worse payout structure is a straight ripoff and I won't play it. With the old 9/6/5 I was playing at around 99% payout, which at 600 hands/hour works out to (-$1.50)/hour EV, easily ameliorated by comp points and free drinks.

It was becoming a tradition for me to head to Charlie's once or twice a week to hit their cheap buffet, then to head downstairs to play away my food coma on a micro VP machine using an algorithm that I've long-since memorized. The ritual was comforting to me in a way that I'm struggling to describe. It makes me think that VP addiction is a different type of gambling addiction, not so much for the action junkies, but more for the escapists who need just enough of a distraction to take their mind off their problems, and that's probably why VP goes so well on bartops--a couple of drinks, an hour or two of tapping away at a simple game, maybe with an exciting hand or two popping up, and all of your troubles seem to melt away for a while.

I was hoping to eventually hit one more royal flush. My last one (on a VP machine) happened more than 15 years ago, and I detailed its circumstances in one of my old Nit-tastic Tales. I've certainly played enough hands since then to be within the boundaries of likelihood to hit at least one more royal, but I didn't ever hit it, and now I never will.

Whitey Bulger story. Very good. Not same story I don't think but still, I associate that with VP now heavily.

That is correct, AF. My last VP royal was on the Whitey Night. Years afterward, someone finally killed Whitey, and we're all just a little bit better off for that.

Whitey probably tried his very best number one scary stare on the killer, and that killer--most likely a psychopath with nothing to lose--absolutely did not GAF.

Today I sat down at Bally's and lost a good chunk very quickly, and after a year at this business I can tell you that there is nothing in this world so lonesome as a low-limit reg on an extended losing streak.

Captain Kangaroo, one of the resident super-nits (and a very nice guy under normal circumstances) likely bluffed me out of a pot.

He saw me for what I was: a wounded animal, bleeding out on the felt, and he took his due.

There ought to be no mercy in poker. My Four Principles are as follows:

No Fear,
No Anger,
No Mercy,
No Whining.

That's the nature of the game. You are a Cobra Kai. Sweep the leg. Don't like it? Play tournaments like Daniel-san.

I quit after an hour because I couldn't stop whining.

Bally's: 1 hour:
(-$150)

I had a hypothesis.

It wasn't a theory. A theory is something that multiple independent researchers have long since confirmed to be true after an historically rigorous and exhaustive series of tests, all of them certified for using best practices within the established scientific method.

A hypothesis is something that we all like to shitpost on the Internet. Here's one of mine:

H0: There are very few young Elvis impersonators because anyone who is that attractive and talented can and will find more lucrative work in a different genre of entertainment, and if not then certainly within a corporate setting.

HA:


So last week was his 35th birthday. Does that mean that we are looking at age-transiting Elvis? Frankly he seemed kind of bummed when the subject of his birthday came up.

I imagine that age is important with Elvis impersonators, given Elvis's life polarization. And when did that polarization occur again? Hell, Elvis only lived to 42, so honestly 35 is right around the time when Young Elvis became Old Elvis, perhaps past time.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Im sorry your on a downswing, sj. and im sorry i may have contributed by being a distraction from your work on my vacation.

are you playing the freerolls this week?

May i suggest you play w tourists that are unaware of your wounded status, not the regs who are. Find the drunks. Take their chips. Feel better.

Even if I wasn't 100% responsible for my own play--which I am--you were not a distraction on the table; quite the opposite. We played a lot of poker and we talked a lot of poker, and I think that we're both better players for the time that we spent together. Thank you for coming out and sharing your vacation with me

As far as playing the tourists goes, you're right. I hit the tables at 3PM, when I should have waited for a few more hours. You now have the experience with these venues to appreciate how the games change within a few hours, and so do I, so putting that into practice will be a priority as I continue on the promo path for the short term.

Hypothesis confirmed:

Wow, I had no idea.

Whenever I see a kid prodigy I always wonder how much of their act or routine springs from their own passion, and how much of it comes from one or both of their parents trying to live vicariously through them.

You can see young Bruno looking off to the side several times for approval, likely from his mom or dad, but is he asking "Hey, did I do that right?" or are his glances more along the lines of "Hey, did you catch any of that awesome **** I just did?" In any case, he seems to have grown up to be happy and successful.

The flip side of that is Todd Marinovich, quarterback prodigy.



I'll steal some lines from the Wiki about his upbringing:

[Todd's father, Marv Marinovich] opened his own athletic research center and applied the techniques to his young son, introducing athletic training before Marinovich could leave the crib and continuing it throughout his childhood and adolescence.[2] Marv saw an opportunity to use techniques, focusing on speed and flexibility, that later formed the basis for modern core training. During her pregnancy, Trudi used no salt, sugar, alcohol, or tobacco; as a baby, Marinovich was fed only fresh vegetables, fruits, and raw milk.

Todd went on to break the national high school record for career throwing yards with 9914, and he won a slew of awards. Meanwhile, his parents controlled every aspect of his life, never once allowing him to eat McDonald's or other junk food, or watch cartoons or play video games. Sports Illustrated called him the first "test-tube athelete."

What his parents didn't know was that he was sneaking off with his friends and smoking pot every day, and once he got to USC and outside of his parents's purview, he moved up to the big leagues in terms of partying.

Like most people, Todd was able to keep his **** under control for a while. He became the first freshman quarterback to start a game for USC in 45 years, and he had a great season, winning Sporting News's College Freshman of the Year Award for 1989.

By his sophomore year, though, his play started becoming erratic. He quit school after that year and put himself up for the NFL draft, but before the draft he was arrested for cocaine possession.

In spite of that, the Raiders picked him in the 1st round, 24th overall, ahead of Brett Favre. He played a couple of games that season: one very well, and one very poorly--the latter resulting in him smashing a locker room mirror with his helmet.

After that he sort of fell into a hole with cocaine, amphetamine, LSD and heroin. He had one more lackluster season with the Raiders, and following that he never started another game in the NFL. He went on to have a few more fitful starts and stops in the CFL and Arena Football, where he showed some occasional flashes of brilliance, but where he also once cut his hand on a crack pipe at halftime and had to covertly bandage himself before he went back in.



Anyways, I have to wonder about him: if his dad and mom had gone just a little easier on him, would he have been more prepared for the freedoms of adulthood, or would he have just become a burnout that much earlier in his life, having never achieved what he did in high school and college?

Speaking of drugs: Gambelina's awesome friend from work gave her a marijuana vape pen. She and I smoked some of it on her last night here and the two of us got as high as loons. When we finally came down a bit we went out and watched no less than 3 consecutive Bellagio fountain shows. It may have actually been 4 shows in a row. I lost count. Let's just average it and say that we watched about 3.5 consecutive Bellagio fountain shows.

There was still a lot of dope left in the pen when she left, and I inherited it. This happened more than a week ago. Now I've smoked that thing every day since, and it's only just now running out.

Therefore I've had enough time lately to contemplate on my cannabis use and I've come to the conclusion that I like the idea of smoking pot a lot more than I like the actual results. Case in point: growing paranoia and anxiety while high as I get older. Here is a snippet of a stoned conversation that I had with myself while walking back from Subway.

Check your wallet.

Why?

You were flipping through it at the cash register while you were waiting for that kid to ring us up, remember, you counting out the hundos?

Yeah, so what?

What if you left them on the counter?

I wasn't high then. I would not have done that. We're high now and your request is denied.

Just check your wallet, please.

**** no. Do you see where we are? Our neighborhood; you know, the one we walk through every day, at all times of the day and night, always with hundreds of dollars on us? You want me to pull out my wallet and start flipping through hundred dollar bills here? Here?

Nobody's going to see you.

Everybody's going to see me. Everybody watches me walk through here with my backpack, and they wonder what I'm up to. And you want me to start counting out hundos in front of them?

Right now those two Subway kids are splitting up your hundos.

No they're not, ****er, because they're right here in my wallet. We're going to be home in 2 minutes. Shut the **** up.

They're going to buy an eight ball of coke with it.

Shut up!

And so forth. I think it comes down to not wanting to be the guy who turns down a proffered hit at a party, or outside of a bar, or at the bus stop, then soon afterwards being the guy who thinks that everyone knows that he's biting his lips too much, and that he should stop it, but knowing that it's true is making him more nervous which is causing him to bite his lips more.

There just isn't as much upside to smoking pot as there seemed to have been when I was younger, but like a dog returning to his own sick, I can't seem to rein in my enthusiasm for it when I see it. It's never done much for me beyond giving me a few interesting story ideas, most of which were forgotten before I could be arsed to write them down.

When I do write them down they turn out to be either stilted gibberish or at best an interesting concept that makes me wonder how I could have turned it into a story. Here's an example from yesterday.

We come up with concepts. Most of these concepts are utterly worthless, but a very few of them actually serve to help the Universe describe itself to itself, so they end up being useful. That's why we're around in such huge numbers: the sheer ****ing size of us will eventually help the universe to understand itself.

Okay, buddy. Put the pipe down.

I'll be having dinner today with a friend from Taiwan who's in town on business for a few days.

I'll call her Helen. For this blog I either use a person's 2p2 handle or I change their name. Helen is Taiwanese but most Taiwanese have "English" names that they use if they do business with people in the West.

If I understand it correctly, they're given these names by their first English teacher, and if they choose a career in international business or relations, they use that name for the rest of their lives. I picked Helen as her pseudonym because her "real" English name is also kind of rare and archaic.

Anyways, I first met Helen years ago at a trade show in Taiwan. She was working the booth for her company, which made gear pumps. Our company bought maybe a few hundred dollars worth of their product every year--very small potatoes--but we stopped by anyways to get literature and trade business cards and whatnot, and apparently I made an impression on her.

The trade show in Taiwan runs once every two years. Flash forward, then, two years, and at the next show Helen has invited my boss and I to a big factory tour and a meeting with her company bigwigs.

Nothing has changed, business-wise. We're still doing a pittance with them, but a factory tour means free dinner and drinks, and my boss and I like to schedule that sort of perk for at least once a day when we're travelling.

The meeting turns out to be a bust. We are first picked up in a van by Helen and her boss, and after a few minutes of chitchat Helen's boss turns to her and says (in English) "Stop flirting with him," meaning me!

Good lord. She was blinking and smiling a lot, but I'd figured it was just a public relations pitch. Her boss says to me, "Helen wants to marry an American and get a green card." I laugh it off.

We get to the factory, take the tour, and sit through a rather slick presentation from them. Yeah, pumps; we know. We sell a couple of yours a year. There's seven other Japanese and three other Taiwanese companies doing the same thing as you and doing it better.

The presentation ends and they ask us for our presentation! Sorry, ain't got none. We're a small trading company. We're glad to do a small amount of business with you, but there's not much we can do to grow your minuscule share in the US market.

Afterwards, dinner and drinks go fine, if a bit awkward. There's an underlying feeling that somebody screwed the pooch in setting this up, but pleasantries must be maintained and face must be saved.

Two weeks after we get home from the trade show one of my customers requests a pump from Helen's company. I send her an email, only to find out from her boss that she's been fired, specifically as a result of the meeting. Helen was the one who set the whole thing up, apparently just to take her shot at an American.

So, I'm not romantically interested in her, but I am interested; nobody's gotten themselves fired for me before. I have her personal email, so I check with my boss and we decide to try to make her our trading agent in Taiwan, as our current agent there kind of sucks.

Helen agrees. We get her to set up a Paypal account and soon after that we're doing more business with her than we ever did with her old pump company. From that start, Helen's able to network and line up more customers and vendors, and today she runs a full-fledged Taiwanese trading company.

Anyways, she's in town for a trade show and dinner tonight is on me.

The streak continues. Harrah's game was decent but it broke after an hour, meaning they had zero cash games running during Monday Night Football

Harrah's and Flamingo: 5 hours:
(-$99)

Damn SJ hopefully you have some fun with Helen and get out this downturn. I’m enjoying the updated just wish the results where better.

Thanks for the kind words, Da_Nit! The only cure for a big downswing, I think, is more studying and more hours, then more hours and more studying.

The Helen visit went well up until the end. My favorite part was when we stopped at one of the gift shops at the Flamingo, and a jade or a fake jade bracelet caught Helen's eye. I saw that it was listed at $80, and not long after that I decided that I was going to be a Mr. Know-It-All.

Taiwanese culture encourages haggling. More than once when I've been there a clerk, after giving me the price of something, has held his or her hand down as a sort of prompt for the American, like "This is the part where you ask for a much lower price."

So anyways, I told Helen that we don't haggle at most shops in the US, The price is the price. She listened carefully, took in the information, nodded respectfully, turned around and immediately talked he lady behind the counter down from $80 to $55.

So late tonight she made a solid, strong play for me, but she didn't get there.

I don't believe that one person needing a green card is a basis for a relationship.

Sure, then why not just have some casual fun for a night or two? Well, knowing what I know about her motives, I would be distracted with gauging the chances of those nights leading to a text or an email 3 months from now with the subject line: "I'm pregnant. And I'm keeping it."

I'm aware that proven measures can be taken to prevent the above occurrence, but there are also various obfuscations and countermeasures to those. I know that that's a deeply paranoid thought, but it's my thought, and I'll own it.




Flamingo: 6 hours:
+$346