[ ] Punt
[✓] Cooler

That's 100% a call, even disregarding the fact you're getting 3:1. Villain could easily have AJ, KJ, 33, even J10.

And yes I'd definitely shove the river when checked to. Checking back fullhouses is for p*ssies. Any J will likely call at these stakes.

Just a cooler/bad beat.

Yeah you should have snapcalled that river if he shoved for that amount. Don't question yourself for these spots, that's just the name of NLHE. You can fold this in Omaha

Thanks for the kind words, guys. I shouldn't have even posted that hand when it's nothing but a whine, but it is indicative of what's been confronting me. I'm sorry that I haven't posted much but all I've had for content is material for complaining, and that gets boring quickly, so I'll try to be brief.

I've been running very bad in very good games--really some of the best games I've seen in Las Vegas so far. My typical play has been as follows: make a good or a very good hand relative to the board and my opponent's range; value bet, value bet, get wafflecrushed. Just imagine a very long montage of that, with each iteration punctuated by the table's fake groans of sympathy.

Now, in the medium term, I haven't lost that many buyins, but in terms of Sklansky bucks I should be up, way way up. And that's enough whining.

Flamingo and Bally's: 12.5 hours
(-$410)

I know my sincere e-groan of sympathy won't help much, but you're getting it anyway: uuuuuggggghhhhh.

I'm glad you've found some juicy games though. When they get worse, you might want to try the Golden Nugget.

Thanks Sheep

Flamingo:2.5 hours:
(-$400)

I've just finished Stephen King's The Stand. The last time I read the book was around 25 years ago, as a sort of a snack (or so I thought going into it) in the midst of several years of me plowing through what Harold Bloom called the Western Canon--which is basically all of the great old dead white guys (for the most part): Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Gibbon, Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Wilde, Yeats, Orwell, Joyce, Conrad, Cervantes, Voltaire, Hugo, Rimbaud, Proust, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Twain, Flannery O'Connor, Singer, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wright, Ellison, Vonnegut, Atwood, Márquez and many more.

So I'll tell you something: the end of the first act of The Stand, where the superflu is in full bloom, having knocked off more than half the population and on its way to taking out more than 99.9% of every living human, and where everything we've known and relied upon about the world is breaking down, there lies that 150 page section that is one of my all-time favorites, and I think it's one of the best passages in all of Western literature. It's that ****ing good. If people are still reading books in 300 years, The Stand will be the one King book that is still around.

Here are a couple of snippets from it.

Because television was a completely visual medium for Nick [who is deaf], he had noticed something about the news broadcast that others might have missed. There had been no film-clips, none at all. There had been no baseball scores, maybe because no ball games had been played. A vague weather report and no weather map showing the highs and lows--it was as if the U.S. Bureau of Meteorology had closed up shop. For all Nick knew to the contrary, they had.
Both newscasters had seemed nervous and upset. One of them had a cold; he had coughed once on mike and had excused himself. Both newscasters had kept cutting their eyes to the left and right of the camera they were facing...as if someone was in the studio with them. someone who was there to make sure they got it right.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Los Angeles Times ran only 26,000 copies of their one page extra before the officers in charge discovered that they were not printing an advertising circular, as they had been told. The reprisal was swift and bloody. The official FBI story was that "radical revolutionaries," that old bugaboo, had dynamited the L.A. Times presses, causing the death of twenty-eight workers. The FBI didn't have to explain how the explosion had put bullets in each of the twenty-eight heads, because the bodies were mingled with those of thousands of others, epidemic victims who were being buried at sea.
Yet, 10,000 copies got out, and that was enough. The headline, in 36-point type, screamed:

WEST COAST IN GRIP OF PLAGUE EPIDEMIC
Thousands Flee Deadly Superflu
Government Coverup Certain

LOS ANGELES--Some of the soldiers purporting to be National Guardsmen helping out during the current ongoing tragedy are career soldiers with as many as four ten-year pips on their sleeves. Part of their job is to assure terrified Los Angeles residents that the superflu, known as Captain Trips by the young in most areas, is "only slightly more virulent" than the London or Hong Kong strains...but these assurances are made through portable respirators. The President is scheduled to speak tonight at 6:00 PST and his press secretary, Hubert Ross, has branded reports that the President will speak from a set mocked up to look like the Oval Office but actually deep inside the White House bunker "hysterical, vicious, and totally unfounded." Advance copies of the President's speech indicate that he will "spank" the American people for overreacting, and compare the current panic to that which followed Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast in the early 30's.
The Times has five questions it wishes the President would answer in his speech.

1. Why has the Times been enjoined from printing the news by thugs in army uniforms, in direct violation of its Constitutional right to do so?

2. Why have the following highways--US 5, US 10, and US 15--been blocked off by armored cars and troop carriers?

3. If this is a "minor outbreak of flu," why has martial law been declared for Los Angeles and the surrounding areas?

4. If this is a "minor outbreak of flu," then why are barge-trains being towed into the Pacific and dumped? And do these barges contain what we are afraid they contain and what informed sources have assured us they do contain--the dead bodies of plague victims?

5. Finally, if a vaccine really is to be distributed to doctors and area hospitals early next week, why has not one of the forty-six physicians that this newspaper contacted for further details heard of any delivery plan? Why has not one clinic been set up to administer flu shots? Why has not one of the ten pharmaceutical houses we called gotten freight invoices or government flyers on this vaccine?

We call upon the President to answer these questions in his speech, and above all we call upon him to end these police-state tactics and this insane effort to cover up the truth...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And at the very end of the first act, after all its panic and road blocks and crowd suppression and riots and massacres, it's all just quiet. No hero emerges to save the day with a last-minute vaccine. Nearly everybody dies and all of everyone's proclaiming and screaming and acts of terror and oppression and bravery and flailing around turn out to be for nothing. And the quiet at the beginning of the second act is mournful and peaceful and beautiful.

The only criticism I have for The Stand is the one that I have for a number of King's books ranging from the mid-70's up through the mid-90's: and specifically it's that--with Mother Abagail--King once again draws from his well of the Magic Negro (aka Magical Negro).

I've had an essay on King and the MN trope bouncing around in my head for a few weeks now, but upon researching it I found that it was already well and thoroughly covered 15 years ago by another King fan who had a lot of talent and more--pardon the expression--skin in the game than I do, so I will defer to her. Check the link above, if you're interested. It's a very good read.

I will list Ms. Okorafor's Five Points of the Magical Negro here though, because they are both brief and comprehensive.

1. He or she is a person of color, typically black, often Native American, in a story about predominantly white characters.

2. He or she seems to have nothing better to do than help the white protagonist, who is often a stranger to the Magical Negro at first.

3. He or she disappears, dies, or sacrifices something of great value after or while helping the white protagonist.

4. He or she is uneducated, mentally handicapped, at a low position in life, or all of the above.

5. He or she is wise, patient, and spiritually in touch. Closer to the earth, one might say. He or she often literally has magical powers.

To be fair, King seems to have wised up to the MN trope in the last couple of decades, and he's drawn his black characters more realistically of late.

Next up: Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash:

Oh good Lord, this book has got some issues, as they used to say back in the day.

An update would be much appreciated, Mr. Suited!

I feel the run bad has extended

SJ stop doing Stephen King writing exercises and go make the Monies

Sorry guys. I'm all right. I've run through my first health bar as far as the bankroll goes, and I've spent the last few days contemplating whether or not to deploy my second and last health bar, and I've concluded: **** it; let's do this. I worked a regular job for more than 30 years, and I still don't want to go back.

I'm going to liquidate my modest investments, but it will be a week or two before I get the money in and start playing again.

Flamingo and Bally's: 3.5 hours:
(-$407)

Meanwhile, I've been trying to satellite into ACR's $6 Million GTD Venom tournament on the cheap. Easier said than done, but I've done it before.

Since you’re going for broke mix up where you play

You have nothing to lose but money at this point and looking at the thread it’s already being lost at the bottom end CET props - might as well mix it up and try some new scenes

gl with the 2nd bullet!

I might listen if you come back from self-exile.

Thanks, fid!

Ground rules for the second bullet are:

(1) No drinking at the table. Period. My fundamentals don't suffer much, but I think I was losing a step on tougher turn and river spots, and those add up to a lot of EV. Also, forget about tells: IMO alcohol was dulling my intuitive grasp of other's micro-expressions, vocal intonations and movements. And tells mostly come into play during close spots and big pots.

(2) More playing time, obviously, and more study. If Red Chip is offering a free month, I'll be taking it and exploiting it hard. If things go well and I feel I'm ready to move up, I'll consider buying some coaching.

If all goes according to plan, I should be back in business on Friday.

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is a cyberpunk novel published in 1992; the book is now 27 years old. It was Stephenson's third novel and his big breakout hit. I read it once in the mid-90s and I haven't read it since, until now. I love Neal Stephen's writing, but now that I'm finished with the book it's going into the trash, but not for the reasons that one might expect.

Trash-binning a book is a big deal for me. I love books. I hoard books. I came very close to crying when I had to donate half of my stash to the library before my move out to Las Vegas. I can count on one hand the number of books that I've thrown away. This might be the third or the fourth one in my lifetime. I can't remember the titles of any the other throwaways. They went down the memory hole when I tossed them out.

You would think that a book from 1992 written about a future that happens roughly around the mid '00s would be more or less laughably passé by now, but Stephenson does a virtuoso job with the futurism in it. It's one of his many strengths. His online Metaverse is very similar to Second Life with PvP enabled as seen through a pair of virtual reality goggles, and he describes in the finest detail a bit of software very similar to Google Earth, along with an AI Librarian reminiscent of Wikipedia. He also popularized (but did not actually invent) using the Sanskrit term 'avatar' to describe an online person's visual icon. Also, there are those 'rat things,' which are essentially cyborg nuclear powered Boston Dynamic robot dogs on hyper-steroids.



Snow Crash would go on to be hugely influential within the cyberpunk genre for decades after its debut. Writer Ernest Cline was one of many who ham-handedly ripped off Stephenson's Metaverse as late as 2011 in his bestselling book, Ready Player One. To be fair, Stephenson gets plenty of things wrong about our future past in Snow Crash, but he does so in an engrossing manner.

In the world of Snow Crash, the US Government has all but collapsed into a penurious bureaucratic black hole, having sold off most of its territory and possessions--including the entire US military--to huge private corporations and interests, which also includes the revamped Mafia, who among many other things has the monopoly on pizzas delivered in 30 minutes or less.

An economic collapse and hyperinflation have made even the US trillion dollar bill worthless, and it's the quadrillion dollar "Gippers" that stand in as the equivalent of fivers or ten-spots. Mostly, Americans in that era use the stabilized Kong Bucks from Hong Kong, which is another of many interests that have franchised themselves out to communities across the patchwork remnants of the former USA.

Stephenson is one of my favorite writers in that he's brilliant across a very wide variety of subjects: futurism, pop culture, semiotics, deep language structure, neuro-linguistic programming, nanotechnology, ancient mythology, biblical legends, Enlightenment Era calculating devices, software development, MMORPGs, time travel and much more. He also writes cracking good action scenes in every book, replete with levels of derring-do rarely seen from writers sharing his sort of esoteric interests. He's sort of a Dan Brown with 40 more points of IQ and a lot more irons in the fire--and I like Dan Brown. For the record, I also liked Cline's Ready Player One. What can I say? I'm a soft touch when it comes to speculative fiction.

Snow Crash starts with easily the most exciting and heightened pizza delivery action sequence in all of literature. Our heroic protagonist, who goes by the rather on-the-nose moniker of Hiro Protagonist, has--due to a catastrophic kitchen fire--just 10 minutes to drive a pizza across 12 miles of congested dystopian Los Angeles suburban traffic at rush hour, or the head of the Mafia will have to bestir himself to apologize to the customers in person if Hiro is late; that's the Mafia's policy, but it's something that apparently has never happened before due to their incredible efficiency at delivering on time, not to mention the implicit threat to the Mafia's delivery drivers should they ever **** that up.

Things go wrong, both in the book and with the book upon the introduction of the other main character: 15-year-old courier Y.T. (short for Yours Truly), when she hitches a ride for her and her decked-out skateboard through snagging a magnetic harpoon onto the body of Hiro's souped-up bulletproof 007-style pizza delivery car.

I'd remembered the character of Y.T. from the last time I'd read the book, back in the 90's, but I'd forgotten about her fate. So let's just cut this short and get this over with, because this isn't a book review in the classic sense.

Y.T. and our Hiro--who's in his 30's--don't end up having sex. Y.T. instead has sex with the villain, who is also in his 30's.



Now, why the early Game Over, when seducing an underage girl is conceivably something within a standard villain's purview? It's the way that Stephenson handles this that sucks, and it kills the book. The statutory rape scene in Snow Crash is written as a straight love scene, and it goes on and on for like 4 pages. I was going to go back and count them but eww.

Stephenson could have easily made Y.T. 19 or 20 years old and still have had her be in touch with the youth culture. It's true that Y.T. lives with her mother, but plenty of 20 year-olds live at home, especially, I would think, in a dystopian USA that's devoid of a lot of higher education options. But Stephenson made her 15 years old and with a penchant for older men, and I should reiterate that I'm tossing the book because of this and that that's enough on the subject.

But...

Why did I forget about it? Why did I forget about that scene? Was it trauma-induced amnesia? I kind of doubt it. The dirty truth, the nasty truth, is that it didn't really stand out to me at the time, because from around 50 years ago to around 25 years ago, the artistic people from Generation X, the Boomers and the Silent Generation before them took a much more laissez faire approach to child sexual exploitation by adults in their books and their movies. There are a number of popular works from that time which exemplify this and that I could mention, but I'm not going to.

That exploitation is something that we as representatives of those generations would like to sweep under the rug and forget about, but it's something that novels like Snow Crash can't help but dredge up.

I'm not sure what my point is here, other than sheesh, what a can of worms. Life and art are gross and complicated yo, and actual people can get hurt because human standards aren't up to snuff in places and at times where and when you'd least expect. In any case, this revelation isn't going to turn me into an activist or anything. I'm just going to throw out the book and move on with things. There; it's gone.

Next up: Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, in which a bitter 19th Century nihilist engages a young prostitute...oh FFS. I wanted the next one to be his book The Gambler but Barnes & Noble didn't have the damn thing. No The Gambler, in Las Vegas of all places.

I'll spend today trying to satellite into the last flight of the $6M Venom tourney on ACR. If I brick it, then I'll return to the cash tables tomorrow. I'm on the fence between the Gold Nugget and Red Rock for my Poker 2.0 debut.

I like both options, should be a good change and good luck on the satellite.

Thanks Da_Nit! I had a nice satellite run, turning around $40 in entries into two $200 bullets, but ultimately not getting there.

I finally got back to the tables today, if only for 2 hours. I wanted to ease my way back in. I'll try for 3 hours tomorrow, then 4 hours Friday, 5 hours Saturday and 6 hours on Sunday.

As usual, the game was good and I went down more than $150 early, but this time I clawed my way back up to even. I had one hand of interest that I may write up later.

Golden Nugget: 2 hours:
+$12

Speaking of interesting hands: here's a Mike Postle one. When the scandal broke, I think I watched one or two videos on it out of curiosity. Now YouTube throws every new Postle video that comes out into my timeline, and of course the insidious algorithm is right about my preferences, as I generally find them instructive and will watch them.

This hand was not close in terms of how I should have played it. It's more of interest as an illustration of how a shortcut like SPR can help you plan your line in real time without having to do some of the more complicated range and read analysis.

SPR is stack to pot ratio. It's a simple formula that you calculate once and once during the hand: that's right after the flop is dealt, and before any flop betting action happens. You never recalculate it after that. SPR is the size of the smallest remaining stack divided by the size of the pot. So if the smallest stack is $180 and the pot is $18 when the flop is dealt, then the SPR is 10. Splitsuit gives a good quick and easy primer on it here.



About 10 minutes after I've sat down, I'm on the BTN with AA. UTG limps, MP makes it $7, I make it $27, BB cold calls and everyone else folds.

(Pot: $64) - Heads Up

BB is a man in his mid-80's sitting with a coffee in front of him. He hasn't played a hand in the 10 minutes since I sat down. He started the hand with $160 so he now has $133 left in his stack.

Flop: JQ4

BB donks $20, I call

(Pot: $104) - Heads Up

Turn: 6

BB bets $40 and I replay the hand

What kind of hands would a potential OMC cold-call a $27 3-bet with OOP, and what kind of hands would he lead two streets with, leaving a 2/3 pot-sized bet back on the river?

We tie the one combo of AA, we're crushing 6 combos of KK and getting crushed by 3 combos each of QQ and JJ. We're also beating 12 combos of AQ, and maybe a few combos of AJ, but I think that holding is unlikely. We're beat by 2 combos of QJs but have a redraw to an A, 6 or 4. But if he cold-called $27 pre with QJs then he also called with at least some of the 4 KTs combos, which we're beating. I guess that 3 combos of 44 are possible, but that doesn't seem OMCish to me, unless he thought that UTG and MP were coming along to see the flop.

And absolutely nothing from the above 2 paragraphs matters, because we have an overpair and our SPR on the flop was a very low 2.1. There is no need for this analysis in this case. It's not a question of getting it in or not; it's a question of how to get it in.

I shove.

(Pot: $177) - Heads Up, one player is all in (effective).

BB snap calls.

(Pot: $250) - Heads Up, both players are all in.

River: K



What SPR does for me here is it allows me to free up brain power that would have otherwise been spent on ranging, reads and counting combos to turn towards figuring out how best to get all the money in by the river.

Another day at the tables: I'm enjoying playing completely sober again. There's more of a difference than I suspected in my attention span, my patience, my reads, and my memory for detail. Most players are fine after a drink or two; I was hurting myself by trying to maintain the fiction that I could be one of them.

I was card dead for most of the session but still a little ahead at the end when I made the mistake of not 3-betting with AKo from the BB after a bad reg opened from the CU. It was my last orbit and I wanted to keep my variance down, but what I actually did was to induce the CU to play her A2o perfectly by collecting 3 smallish bets from me on an A268T runout.

It's all one big session and I need to stop being superstitious about locking up a win on the last orbit. I should go ahead and lose an entire rack on the last hand of a session if it's a +EV spot and it's called for. It's certainly possible that she could have called my 3-bet with A2o--she was bad enough to do it--and I would have then lost a good chunk, but on most runouts I would have her crushed for a nice pot if she did call.

Tomorrow will be a 4 hour session.

Orleans: About 3.5 Hours:
(-$28)

I skipped playing today when I realized that I had just one day left to switch over my ACA insurance to the new Nevada Health Care system, and I expected to run into a lot of bureaucratic snags and red tape and whatnot, but once I got into the system I found that they had automatically rolled over all of my 2019 ACA policy provisions into the new Nevada system, and that I was already enrolled, so the whole process took me 15 minutes, and most of that came from recovering my password on my "grownup life business" email, which tells you how often I check into my grownup life business.

Thanks Obama.