I'll take Geography for $500, Alex

Either Card Player magazine and its columnist, Bernard Lee, are confused about what constitutes the "West Coast," or I am. I was not aware that any part of the states of Nevada or Colorado had been given ocean views. Must be a global warming thing.

Poker gems, #462

Daniel Negreanu, in this week's broadcast of the World Series of Poker Main Event.

There's actually a good quote from the Rocky Balboa movie, where he says, "It's not how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward."* That's what separates a true champion from the rest.

*Here's the full speech, from IMDB:

Rocky Balboa: You ain't gonna believe this, but you used to fit right here.[taps on the inside of his hand] I'd hold you up to say to your mother, "this kid's gonna be the best kid in the world. This kid's gonna be somebody better than anybody I ever knew." And you grew up good and wonderful. It was great just watching you, every day was like a privilege. Then the time come for you to be your own man and take on the world, and you did. But somewhere along the line, you changed. You stopped being you. You let people stick a finger in your face and tell you you're no good. And when things got hard, you started looking for something to blame, like a big shadow. Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done! Now if you know what you're worth then go out and get what you're worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain't you! You're better than that! I'm always gonna love you no matter what. No matter what happens. You're my son and you're my blood. You're the best thing in my life. But until you start believing in yourself, ya ain't gonna have a life. Don't forget to visit your mother.

Josie knows

From last night's "The Dank" tournament on PokerStars:

I hear rumors...

...that the Silverton will soon be re-opening its poker room, under the management of Cantor Gaming.

...that the Plaza, too, is planning to re-open its poker room.

...that the Lady Luck casino downtown is including a poker room in its current renovation.

Mind you, I have no reliable source for these things. They're just rumors I've heard recently.

We shall see if any of them comes to pass.

You don't see this every day in a poker room

I spent from about 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Tropicana poker room, trying to win a share of the $16,000+ they had to give away in free drawings before closing permanently today. I had calculated last night that each person in attendance had an expected value of over $250 just for keeping one of the seats warm for eight hours, which I thought made it worthwhile.

In the early afternoon, Vegas experienced a real gully-washer of a storm, and it even came into the poker room. The table you see here had to be closed down because the water came in, collapsing a ceiling tile, which you can see on the floor in the second photo. Drama!

I didn't win any of the giveaway money, sadly. But I did make $136 from the poker. I know that's not much for eight hours of work. However, I ask you to temper your judgment with two considerations:

First, my table was incredibly nitty. They were there to occupy the seats for the drawings, not for the poker. The poker was just something the rules required them to do to pass the time. I have probably been at tighter tables briefly, but I sure would never have stayed at one for so long if I had the option to move to a better table. People were literally lined up dozens deep waiting for a chance to sit in one of these games because of the drawing money, so there were no openings to move elsewhere. How tight were these players? They spot-welded their chips to the felt, lest they be overcome with a spasm of recklessness and toss one into the pot with less than pocket aces.

Second, within the first hour or so, I dug myself a hole one buy-in deep when I was on the bad end of one of those horrible set-over-set situations. I had 7-7 versus Q-Q on a Q-7-2 flop. I thought I was most likely trapping an opponent with A-A or K-K, given her pre-flop three-bet. But nope--I was the one with the hook in my mouth this time.

So on paper it doesn't look like much, but I consider it to be an accomplishment worthy of a bit of pride. Besides, $136 profit is, as the old saying goes, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who has been present at the closing of the Tropicana poker room on two separate occasions--once in November of 2008 and then again today.

This was not the winning hand

Last night I played the Monday night mixed game at Tropicana for the last time, as its poker room will be closing at 4 pm today. I may be there for the occasion. Oddly, I was also present the previous time that the Tropicana poker room closed its doors.

The game was 5-card Omaha/8 (just like regular O/8 except that you start with five cards instead of four), and the cards you see above are the five that I was dealt. That's right--the dealer gave me a king-high straight flush. Unfortunately, the rules of the game require playing just two from one's hand and three from the board, which means that being dealt a straight flush is kind of a crappy hand. I did flop a draw to the nut straight (7-8), and added the second-nut flush draw on the turn, but the river paired the board, leaving me with nothing.

I am psychic

Late last night, while writing a reply on an online forum, I wrote: "Tropicana's pay-by-the-hour promotion kills all the action during the day, and it's often dead at night. I suspect that room will not survive long."

About five minutes ago, one of the Tropicana dealers said on Twitter that the Tropicana poker room will be closing tomorrow.

You might say that this required no special psychic powers on my part, that anybody could see this coming from how little activity there is in that room, or from the fact that it was briefly associated with Jamie Gold and every poker business venture he's involved with rapidly fails, or from the fact that they have no idea how to run a poker room or take care of customers.

I reject all such mundane explanations. I am psychic, and that's all there is to it.

By the skin of my teeth

After my success in Friday's HORSE tournament at Orleans, I decided to take a crack at their $100 Sunday night version. I have tried this one twice before, with nothing to show for it. But since then I've had the extra experience of three of the tough MGM Grand Tuesday night HORSE tournaments, plus the two Friday ones at Orleans, which I thought gave me enough additional practice at identifying live opponents' playing styles in the non-hold'em games that I might be due for a little success.

Things started off just the opposite of Friday. I sank like a stone. I was playing the same tight-aggressive style, but I had a never-ending string of missed draws and strong but second-best hands. We started at 7:00 with 10,000 chips, and by the first break I was down to 590o. At 8:50--4100. 9:00--2500. 9:10--2000. 9:30--1600. I think that was less than three big bets for that stage of the game.

But time after time when I found a spot to get all the chips in, my hand held up. By 10:00 I was up to 5000. 10:35: 6900. 10:40: 15,100, and above my starting stack for the first time all day.

By that point, the original 41 players had been whittled down to just 18, so I was still well below the average stack size of about 28K, but things were moving in the right direction.

Then at 11:00 I hit a monster, an ace-high crub flush in stud against two opponents, and zoomed up to 47,700 with 13 left, my first time above the tournament average.

At 11:40 I badly misplayed one stud hand, spewing half my chips on a draw that I should never have been chasing, but at 12:05 I got them all back when another club flush gave me the nuts in Omaha--back to 63,000, when the average stack, with seven people left in, was about 58,500. Next hand I hit something else that I didn't jot down, and was up to 87,000.

I stayed at about that stack while two more players were eliminated, and the final five of us were in the money.

The best player at the table was not me, but the guy on my right, who had an overwhelming chip lead. He was being smartly aggressive. Everybody was letting him run over them, because the other four of us had pretty much equal stacks and I assume we all wanted to climb up the pay ladder. He was appropriately taking advantage of our excessive caution.

I decided to play back at him, and doing so pushed me up to my peak of 116,000 at 12:50.

At that point, I should have backed off, changed gears back to tight, and let Mr. Big Stack knock out one or two of the shorties. But I didn't. I kept pressing it too long and too far, and paid the price. In quick succession I played two big hands where I was basically just playing on my table image, but--oops--was up against real hands (one against the guy on my left, and the coup de grace delivered by the big stack), and I was out.

So I'm unhappy with my end game, but very pleased that I exercised appropriate patience and spot selection when I was down so short. Fifth place brought me the minimum cash of $295, which is basically tripling my buy-in, and works out to about $32/hour for the six hours it took. It's far from life-changing money, but given how dismal things looked for me for so long, I deem the outcome an absolute success--nearly a miracle. Of course there is the question of what might have been, had I not overdone the aggression on those last two hands. But that's a lesson I can tuck away and remember for next time, without letting it defeat my pleasure at having snatch at least a partial victory from the jaws of defeat.

Another strange rule at Mandalay Bay

How many times have I used some variation on that post title? About a dozen, I'd guess. Every time I think I have come across every oddball rule in their book (a book, incidentally, which players are not allowed to see), I'm wrong, and there is another to be discovered. It's like they have an inexhaustible horn-o'-plenty of weird house rules.

I was there last night. I got into a hand against a regular local. I had 5-5 and position. He raised, I called. Flop JJ8. He bet, I called. Turn 2. He checked, I bet, he called. River queen. His check-call on the turn had made me think that he might have missed the flop but still have a higher pocket pair than mine, like 7s or 9s--and if he didn't, then that queen on the end might have done me in, so I checked behind on the river.

I waited for him to show his cards. He didn't, instead pointing at me and saying, "I called your bet." Before I could say anything, the dealer intervened, telling him that since the last round of betting had no action, showdown went in clockwise order from small blind to button. That is indeed the standard rule.

But this guy insisted that Mandalay's house rule is different, and when there is no betting on fifth street, first to show is whoever took the last aggressive action (bet or raise) on a previous betting round. This player has enough time in the chair that I thought he could easily be right, so I kept mum and let the dealer handle it. The player insisted that the dealer call the floor. He did so. Floor confirmed. I have heard that casinos in Europe tend to follow this practice, but it is not the standard way in the U.S.

Anyway, I showed my 5s. He then showed his A-Q and took the pot.

In terms of that hand, my consolation is that at every point where I was ahead, I put money into the pot, and when I wasn't, I didn't. That's how it's supposed to be, right?

In terms of the rule, there's a follow-up discussion to be had. Readers with elephantine memories may recall that I wrote about a similar situation, also occurring at Mandalay Bay, in one of my very earliest blog posts, on November 9, 2006, when this blog had existed for less than two weeks.

But I got things wrong in that post. I've known this for a long, long time. Probably within a year of having written it I had gained enough additional experience at the tables to know that I had made a mistake. Once in a while a situation at the table would remind me of it and I'd think that I should publish a correction, but then I never got around to it. Today I repent of that ongoing neglect.

In that situation, there was no betting on the last round because I had moved all-in on the flop, and my only opponent had called. Back then, my understanding was that such a situation was functionally equivalent of there voluntarily being no betting on the last round, even though both (or all) players still in the hand have chips left and could bet if they wanted to. Furthermore, my reading of Cooke's rule book did nothing to dissuade me from that view. His wording seems to support it, though it's not explicit. (See that old post for the citation.)

Krieger and Bykofsky's The Rules of Poker is also ambiguous about whether these two situations should be handled the same way. From page 135, rule 5.18:

On the final betting round, the last player who actively bet or raised the pot (and was then called) is required to show his hand first. Once he shows his hand, other players reveal their down-cards in clockwise order. If all the remaining players check on the final round, the showdown begins with the player who is seated to the left of the dealer in community-card games such as hold'em and Omaha, and the player whose board requires him to act first in stud games.

I can't tell for sure what these authors' meaning is for situations like the one I described in 2006, when there is no betting on the river because there are no more chips left to bet. The first sentence seems to imply that the question reverts to whoever made the last aggressive action on a previous street. But even that is not really clear because of the introductory phrase, "On the final betting round." It could be that the wording of their rule is unclear because they just didn't anticipate that specific question. (I think that is the most likely explanation for Cooke, too.)

Robert's Rules of Poker, though, is explicit on this point:

If everyone checks (or is all-in) on the final betting round, the player who acted first is the first to show the hand. If there is wagering on the final betting round, the last player to take aggressive action by a bet or raise is the first to show the hand.

So he plainly makes the two situations (i.e., no betting on the last round by choice or because there is no more action possible) equivalent.

My experience, however, is that the uniform practice in Vegas poker rooms is that an all-in and call prior to what would otherwise be the last round of betting means that the showdown order reverts to that final action, and the aggressor shows before the caller. Except, apparently, at Mandalay Bay.

Back in 2006 I was right about the point that this is how Mandalay does it, but I was wrong about that being the standard practice. M.B. is, in fact, the odd man out, as it is on so many other small points of poker order. I have long known that I got that post wrong about what the standard practice is (and I'm now embarrassed to see how I spoke of the benighted fools who were not nearly as savvy as I). I had come to assume that what the floor supervisor told me that day was simply an error. What I learned last night is that he was correct--but only because Mandalay's house rule is different from the standard rule.

Kennections

Y'all might want to try this week's "Kennections" quiz from Parade Magazine:

http://www.parade.com/games/kennections/k/ken-puzzle-11.html

That was a close one

Today I played the weekly Friday noon tournament at Orleans, which is a $75 equestrian event--i.e., HORSE. I tried this for the first time last week, and though I went out mid-pack, I got the clear impression that this should be a hugely +EV event for me. With a handful of exceptions, the players are easily lumped into two categories: The uber-nits who fold everything except premium hands, and the passive, loose calling stations who play nearly everything they're dealt, and keep calling when there is any hope of improving. That makes playing against both types incredibly straightforward. Against the former, you stay out of their way when they proclaim themselves to have a real hand. Against the latter--who outnumber the nits something like 5:1, you play a significantly tighter starting range than they do, and value-bet the hell out of your hand as long as it appears you're good. Easy peasy.*

Note how different this is from the Tuesday night HORSE tournament at the MGM Grand. I've done that one three times, and you're lucky if you get one player per table who is so easily pigeonholed and conquered. That thing is mostly populated with the city's best lower-stakes mixed-game connoisseurs. I am not alone in this assessment. My friend Brad Willis, a.k.a. _Otis_, played it a few weeks ago. After a short time in the game, he tweeted, "It appears I grossly underestimated the quality of a $120 weekly HORSE tournament." A little while later, he added, "And I mean GROSSLY underestimated." As Bill Clinton might say, I feel his pain. I have never felt that I have any edge at all in that event.

The Orleans Friday noon, though--well, let's just say that it's a HORSE of a different color.

I started off like gangbusters today. I had a tricky tactical situation, with three of the passive calling stations on my right, but one of the rare ultra-aggro young guns on my immediate left. They called for completely different approaches, and when both were in the hand, it became challenging. But Mr. Aggro went away fairly early, after I got most of his chips in a razz hand in which I made a wheel while he had a 7-perfect. (His style was terribly ill-suited for the opponents he was up against. Trying to bully calling stations into folds is to commit tournament suicide.)

I was also getting clobbered by the deck: quads, flushes, wheels, etc. So 45 minutes in, I had doubled my starting stack, and I had nearly tripled it by the first break. That isn't terribly uncommon in big-bet games (no-limit and pot-limit), but in limit? Unheard of. This was the proverbial running like God.

But all good things must come to an end, and that 3x-stack benchmark seemed to be my upper limit. I couldn't exceed it for another two and a half hours. (When playing a tournament, I amuse myself by jotting down my chip count every ten minutes or so. It makes an interesting record of the ebbs and flows.) By then, I had long since stopped being chip leader, and was just a little above average with ten players left out of the original 25. That dropped to a little below average with eight left.

Then with just five left, disaster hit. I made a straight in stud and raised a guy who had been getting out of line more than his demographics would suggest likely. But he reraised me with a pair showing on 6th street. He could see my 6-7-8-9 plain as day, and it did not faze him in the least. I reluctantly concluded that he would only do this with a full house, and that I was therefore drawing dead. It hurt like hell to do so, but I folded, after having invested two-thirds of my stack. He gave me the courtesy show that I had been correct.

That made me the shortest stack with just five players remaining, and only three spots were to be paid today. It looked gloomy for me. I had that awful feeling of foreboding that I was going to be either bubble boy or bubble to the bubble.

I clamped down tight on starting hand requirements. With the blinds becoming huge relative to everybody's stacks, the chip lead was bouncing around the table, except for me. Finally, two huge hands collided, and one big stack knocked out another, putting us on the bubble.

At that point, somebody proposed a $75 save for the bubble boy; i.e., whoever went out next would get his entry fee taken out of the prize pool and returned to him. My stack was much, much shorter than the other three at this point, so I readily agreed to it. I would not ordinarily do so if I had a dominant or even reasonably competitive position, with somebody else's stack as crippled as mine was. Poker is not a game in which showing mercy is rewarded.

But I was not the one to take advantage of the save. I picked a couple of good spots to get the chips in and doubled up twice. Then I was the one to bust the bubble boy on my left, and we were in the money.

It was not immediately obvious who was ahead. All three stacks were comparable to a quick visual inspection without an actual count. We could guess that we all had between 60,000 and 70,000, and the limits were now 8,000 and 16,000--meaning that we all had around four big bets remaining. That in turn meant that it was almost purely luck as to who would go out in which position if we kept playing. I might get the $650 for first place, or the $390 for second, or the $260 for third, all with approximately equal likelihood.

With that understanding, we all quickly agreed to an even chop of the prize money. We decided that whoever had the biggest stack by actual count would get the odd extra dollar. That turned out to be me. I had 68,500 and both of the others were in the low 60s. So I'm just gonna go ahead and say that I won the tournament. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I got $434, the other two $433 each. We each put $20 into the dealer tip pool.

It was quite a ride, going from hitting everything early, to stagnant for a few hours, to critically short, to a miraculous rebirth just in time for the payout. It was kind of like, oh, I dunno, riding a bucking bronco?

I'm not about to commit to making this a weekly affair. But I'm pretty well convinced that there is a lot of value to be mined, if one can tolerate the large variance due to the luck factor, and I think I will keep it in mind for semi-regular sampling.

*Given the venue, the type of game, and that description of the most common players, you might form a general impression of the typical player demographic. You would be correct. At age 51, I was easily the youngest among the final five left in the tournament, and there were no women among the final ten or so. This is a geezer game.

Card Player takes another crack at it

Apparently somebody at Card Player magazine saw my post from yesterday and took a stab at fixing some of the spelling and punctuation problems I listed in their news story. But while I identified where the problems were, I did not specify what the correct form should be, leaving the staff writers at Card Player to figure this out for themselves. This task proved to be too much for them.

They corrected the two instances of it's where its was called for. They apparently still haven't reset their clocks, and left "PST" (for Pacific Standard Time) unchanged. They corrected getting the run around to getting the runaround.

But the best part, the one that made me literally LOL, was this: They "corrected" back peddled to back-peddled!

Who are these people, and how did they ever get jobs in the writing business?

Does Card Player magazine have any copy editors?

Card Player's print magazine is pretty bad in terms of copy editing, but the web site is just awful. From just one news story today, I bring you these examples:

The Partouche Poker Tour guaranteed an ambitious €5 million prize pool for it’s [sic] annual main event in Cannes....

Instead of providing the players with an overlay, it appears that tournament officials have back peddled [sic]....

After getting the run around [sic] from the floor, many started playing the tournament under protest....

There were rumors circulating various social media sites that the tour would reluctantly do the right thing and put up the overlay, but as of 9:00 a.m. PST, the prize pool remains unchanged. [Apparently Card Player has not yet gotten around to changing its clocks to daylight savings time.]

By all accounts, it appears the tour has taken it’s [sic] ball and gone home.

Maybe my post title asks the wrong question. Maybe it's too ambitious. Maybe I should instead ask, "Did anybody at Card Player magazine manage to pass fifth-grade English?"

That didn't last long

Sunday I reported about my first visit to the new Ellis Island poker room. It's a good thing I got there when I did. Without warning, the room has already been closed down.

Compare this shot I took of the place Saturday night...

...with this one taken by Dave Ferrara (aka RandomPoker), a contributor to Pokerati, and posted yesterday on his Twitter feed:

(Photo used with Dave's kind permission.)

It may not be immediately obvious, but the two shots were taken from nearly the same spot. Now, however, both tables are covered and the signs on the wall have been ripped down.

Gone are the days when, in order to have a successful poker room in Vegas, all you had to do was build it and they would come. Now you have to do marketing, compete for business with the 50+ other rooms offering basically the same thing, and give potential customers some reason to pick your place over the others for their poker games. Ellis Island utterly failed to do so, and suffered the inevitable consequences.

Easy game

Tonight was the first time I've been back to the Palms since I tried their new poker room and didn't like it, which was back in May. I go even to places I don't like once in a while for variety and to keep an eye on what's going on and what may have changed.

I took my seat, folded the first two hands I was dealt, then saw 2h-4h on the third hand. OK, let's play!

I rather liked the flop:

Now, usually I'm pretty good at masking any reaction I might feel to cards hitting the board. But I confess that I felt my eyebrows rise in astonishment briefly. I suspect it looked something like how Mr. Spock looked when he was surprised:

Fortunately, I don't think anybody was watching me.

I was first to act and checked. This was not a straightforward decision. On the one hand, I obviously want to get as much money into this pot from as many opponents as I can. On the other hand, when one has the board so utterly crushed as this, it's difficult for opponents to have enough of a hand that they're willing to proceed. I decided to check, not so much for purposes of deception, but to allow a free card and hope that it gave somebody a strong flush, a full house, trips--anything that they'll feel comfortable betting on.

Fortunately, as it turned out, one guy had pocket 3s and had flopped a set, which was enough for him to start the action with $11. Two people folded. I called. With the 7d on the turn, he bet $11 again, I check-raised to $30, and he called. I led out with $50 on the river and he folded. Dang. I probably could have gotten his whole stack if the board had paired, giving him a boat. Oh well. It would be unseemly to whine about the results.

I won the pot plus a $100 high-hand bonus.

I think this is the fifth time I've flopped a straight flush during my years in Vegas, plus several more picked up on later streets, though those are not as dramatic. (But still no royal, dammit! This baffles me. I'm definitely due.) The other four flopped straight flushes were recounted here, here, here, and here. With three of those, there was no possible combination of cards that any opponent could hold with any cards coming on the turn and river that would beat me; I had an absolutely lock on the hand, the mortal nuts. But with today's, as with one other time, I could theoretically end up beaten. If an opponent held two cards from the 6, 7, 8, and 9 of hearts, and the other two from that group of four came, I could get one of the worst possible bad-beat stories, having my flopped 5-high straight flush crushed by a 9-high straight flush. I was, however, not too concerned about that happening.

Incidentally, the dealer said this was the first time he had dealt a flopped straight flush.

Despite this, I still have some readers who doubt the power of the Mighty Deuce-Four. Like, for example, this nutjob, who tweeted to me last night, "2-4 is garbage." WHAT MORE MUST I DO TO CONVINCE YOU PEOPLE???

Flopping a straight flush feels really good. But I've gotta learn to keep those eyebrows under control.

Good read

Long essay in The New Statesman, by David Flusfeder, "Las Vegas: The last honest place on earth."

My favorite bits:

The mountains behind, and the intolerable heat, remind any summer visitor who is foolish enough to stray too far from air-conditioning that this is a place in the middle of the desert without any reason to be, except for cupidity, profit, pleasure and need....

The journalist Marc Cooper published a very good book about the city nearly ten years ago that was called The Last Honest Place in America. Its thesis was that Las Vegas is brutal but self-evident: it’s all about money. Anyone can wander into the high-end casino-resorts, and people do, streams and streams of them, looking for bars and nightclubs and adrenalin adventure, drinking luminous cocktails from giant glasses, girls in tiny skirts and high heels, boys trying to act like high rollers, the prostitutes waiting in the casino bars, with the looks they send out that manage to be both candid and modest, You’re a discerning and attractive gentleman. You and I maybe could . . . ? and the disabled people rolling slowly through the aisles between slot machines in wheelchairs and mobility scooters – because, as the recession deepens, the proportion of disabled people in Vegas has risen noticeably: Mammon has finally found its Lourdes. And, if you’ve got a dollar in your pocket, you’re entitled to play....

And I love that you can play poker here all of the time, with many hundreds of games to choose from at any moment in the day. Every cash table, it seems, has at least one of the following: a cocky young man wearing enormous headphones, an implacable white-haired gentleman, an American Oriental who’s a dangerous opponent and a ferocious old lady with dyed red hair who bets aggressively, and whose ancient hands are covered with heavy jewellery and raised veins....

Poker is a revelation of character, as well as capacity. As Al Alvarez reminds us, it is “social Darwinism in its purest, most brutal form: the weak go under and the fittest survive through calculation, insight, self-control, deception, plus an unwavering determination never to give a sucker an even break”....

But all poker players, at whatever level, are used to bad beat stories. Like dreams, the only reason you put up with other people telling you theirs is that it then gives you the right to bore them with yours.

Hat tip to Anthony Holden's Twitter feed for pointing me to this piece.

An entertainment interlude

Yesterday I put in a marathon poker session at the Venetian. I came away up by a couple hundred bucks, but other than that there isn't much to report about it. However, in the middle of it I did have a memorable entertainment interlude.

There are four shows on the Discovery Channel that I watch regularly: Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, Sons of Guns, and American Guns. The last two are, oddly, both reality shows about gunsmith shops, the former in Louisiana and the latter in Colorado. Both places create custom firearms and do restoration work on classic and antique guns. I like tinkering with my own guns (mostly Glocks and Smith & Wesson revolvers, which hardly qualifies me as a proper gunsmith, since those may be the two easiest kinds of guns to work on), so I enjoy watching these programs.

The two main Mythbusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, have been doing a touring stage show called "Behind the Myths." I've seen every episode of their TV show over its ten-year run, most of them more than once. It's easily one of the best non-fiction shows ever aired--interesting, funny, and creative. So when I heard that it was coming to Vegas, it was pretty much a no-brainer that I would be going to see it. I hooked up with two of my buddies from the poker world, Missing Flops and ApolloAVP, to buy tickets the first day they went on sale. (As it turned out, we should not have been so afraid of missing our chance due to an early sell-out. They had so many tickets left unsold that they later began offering them at a two-for-one sale. Oh well.)

I actually found the show a tad disappointing. It wasn't terrible, but it was kind of ho-hum. Being an avid fan, I've seen all the outtake compilations and many, many interviews with the principals. A good portion of the stage show is video montages and audience Q&A, and I don't think I heard or saw anything that was new to me in those segments.

But there were a few cool things:

1. Blendo was on stage. Blendo was a bot that Jamie and Adam designed and built in the early days of the fighting-robot craze. It was one of the first to be really, really violent to its opponents, so much so that after a few appearances, show organizers realized that the thing put audiences in danger, because the early arenas did not have sufficiently strong containment mechanisms. Blendo spun hardened steel appendages really fast, and they ripped huge pieces off of opponents' machines, hurling them in all directions. Here is a YouTube video from 1997 of Jamie and Adam being awarded the heavyweight championship of Robot Wars without even doing a single match, because the organizers could not ensure the safety of the gathered crowd, so menacing a machine was Blendo. Blendo was a real benchmark in the development of fighting robots, and it was neat to see it there on stage. Incidentally, Jamie mentioned last night that Blendo was how they got introduced to the producer of a documentary on fighting robots, which led to their later collaboration to create Mythbusters.

2. They had a sound system installed by Dolby Labs with mega-enhancement of the lowest frequencies, so that when they played a montage of explosions done on the TV show, the audience members got a better visceral sense of the body-shaking reverberations that one would experience seeing them go off in person.

3. Jamie had built a four-barrel paintball machine gun about the size of a VW Beetle. They put a brave audience member inside Adam's own medieval-style knight's armor, and unleashed hundreds of paintballs at him in an unbelievable barrage. If you don't find that entertaining, I don't think we can be friends.

It's not a show I would be interested in seeing a second time, but I'm glad I saw it once.

While I was waiting for my two companions to arrive, a familiar face passed by me. It took me a few seconds to place where I recognized him from--you know that sense of disorientation when you see somebody you know in an unexpected context. Was he another poker player? A dealer? Somebody I used to know in Minnesota? Nope. Then it dawned on me--it was Joe, one of the gunsmiths on "Sons of Guns." (And, actually, my favorite of the bunch. He is quiet, shy, cerebral, and methodical, kind of like Jamie--not your usual reality show personality.) I saw him sit down at a bar a few steps from where I was standing, and then quickly realized that two of the people he was with were Kris and Stephanie, also from the show. Kris is another gunsmith. Stephanie is the receptionist/bookkeeper. She is also the daughter of the shop's owner, Will Hayden. She and Kris got married--in Las Vegas--at the end of the second season. (Because of this, I think the show should now be titled "Son-in-Law of Guns." But they didn't ask me.) Stephanie also happens to be an experienced shooter in her own right. She has designed several "package" gun modifications to appeal both stylistically and functionally to the tastes and needs of female shooters, which Will tends to dismiss with a sneer until he realizes how big that potential market is.

I don't usually bother famous (or even semi-famous) people when they're out in public on their own time, i.e., not in a deliberate meet-and-greet mode. In fact, I don't think I've ever done so before. But on a whim last night I decided to approach and ask if I could snap a photo of them. They were incredibly nice and accommodating. They wouldn't just let me take their picture. Kris said, "It's weird if you do that without being in the shot." So they recruited a passing cocktail waitress to handle my cell phone camera (which, sadly, is really crummy). The first shot was nearly black because of the dim light, so then they insisted on staging it again where the light was better. I was by this point highly embarrassed to be intruding so much on their time, but they wanted it to turn out right.

Well, it didn't, really, because of the camera's lack of flash, low resolution, and the nice young lady's unsteady hands. But here's what resulted:

That's Joe, me, Stephanie, and Kris. And yes, Stephanie's breasts did brush up against my arm, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. I know you're all jealous.

I assumed that their presence near the Mythbusters show was no coincidence. I asked if they were involved somehow, and they said no, just there to watch. Their presence in the audience was mentioned in passing from the stage, but as far as I could tell they weren't involved in any other way.

An unrelated side note: While waiting for my table at the Venetian poker room (temporarily at the Palazzo during renovations), I saw this guy:

Of course, I've seen these enormously long booze glasses around town many, many times before. But I've not previously stopped to contemplate the physics of drinking from one. He was intermittently sucking on that gargantuan straw that's sticking out from the top. It seemed to take him a long time to get any of the liquid. This strikes me as a really bizarre and difficult way to get a drink. You have to create enough negative pressure to evacuate a large volume of air above the liquid before it will rise to your mouth. This seems to require sucking some air out, pinching off the straw, exhaling, sucking again, etc. All for the "pleasure" of consuming a large quantity of alcohol from an absurdly designed, impractical souvenir vessel.

Add this to the list of peculiar things about Vegas that I just don't get, even after six years of living here.

The once and future poker room

I was at the Venetian today. I wasn't sure whether they had moved the poker room back to its original location after a few months in a temporary spot next door at the Palazzo, so I swung by the old/new location. It wasn't open for business, but they're obviously getting close. A sign in the temporary room at the Palazzo says that the refurbished room will open on the morning of Wednesday, September 5.

Oddly, it appears to have been renamed the "Sands Poker Room" rather than the "Venetian Poker Room." I have no idea why they would do such a dumb thing. I mean, I understand that the Venetian is where the Sands used to be, and that the corporation that runs it is Sands. But why put that name on the poker room? Makes no sense to me.

Anyway, here's what it's looking like:

Addendum, September 3, 2012

I was just talking to my very clever girlfriend about this odd "Sands" thing. She posited that this is in anticipation of legalized online poker. I.e., the Sands Corporation is going to operate an online poker site, and they want their brick-and-mortar poker rooms around the world (just two so far that I know of, Venetian and Macau, but one would guess that they have other long-term expansion ideas) to be recognized as part of the same entity. This makes sense, as we anticipate that Nevada-licensed online poker rooms will allow use of their brick-and-mortar casinos for online account deposits and withdrawals, so there is some benefit to being sure people recognize them as extensions of each other. I find this to be a pretty plausible hypothesis.

Hooters poker chips

I just listed for sale on eBay my set of Hooters poker chips. If interested, you can see the auction here.

Ellis Island

Ellis Island is a little casino just off the Strip on Koval, south of Flamingo. I've been there a few times because they have a tasty and inexpensive barbecue restaurant with outdoor seating (and their own microbrewery, for those who like that sort of thing), which is a great place to take visitors from out of town.

A couple of months ago they opened a two-table poker room. I hadn't played there until last night. I think that's the longest that a new poker room in Vegas has been open without me hitting it up. I just kept forgetting it was there when selecting a place to play.

The game going was $0.50/$1 NLHE. The players were predictably terrible. It was a lot like playing at Bill's, the only other joint in town that has a game of that structure.

I was surprised to learn that EI has a ton of commemorative chips. Here is just a sampling of the ones I had in the stack of chips I bought:

I'm in the process of reversing the flow of chips in my life, so I took this picture instead of taking one of each home, as would have been my previous practice.

They have a $50 aces-cracked bonus anytime the room is open, rather than just certain hours, like other places do. Some will find that a plus. Personally, I hate it because of how it distorts the game. I had aces once last night, and played it as I usually would, winning a pot of maybe $40 or $45. I was roundly criticized for not playing more passively and going for the bonus. Sorry, that's just not how I do it.

They also give you, after one hour of play, a coupon for a submarine sandwich at the newly opened Boardhouse Sandwich Shop. Nice touch.

I won't have much reason to go back. As long as it's basically like playing at Bill's, which is just a stone's throw away, I'd rather be at Bill's. Bill's has games going more consistently, easier access and parking, earns you points in the Total Rewards program, and it's easier to move on from there to other poker rooms (Flamingo, Bally's, Caesars).

When the game broke, I went south one mile on Koval to Hooters. The only interesting thing that happened was that some of the Hooters girls came through handing out Hooters necklaces. I took one, put it on, and took a picture of myself. I call the resulting portrait "Krazy-Eyez Killah with Hooters Necklace":

Hey, I'm on Sharkscope!

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!

Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.

Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 - Johnson, Navin R.! I'm somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity - your name in print - that makes people. I'm in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

[the Sniper points to Navin's name in the phone book]

Sniper: Johnson, Navin R... sounds like a typical bastard.

The Jerk, 1979

It dawned on me today to look at Sharkscope and see if I'm there. I guess I didn't really have any reason to think that I wouldn't be, but I hadn't ever looked to see if I was, either.

Now I just have to be on the lookout for snipers.

Stud rule

Yesterday I played the weekly Friday noon HORSE tournament at the Orleans. Went out mid-pack, nothing exciting.

During one stud hand, the player to my right turned his up card face down, but then looked like he might be second-guessing himself and wishing he had played it. I ignored this and went on with my action, which was to complete the bring-in bet. The next player's cards were in the muck as soon as my chips were out.

At this point, the dealer held up his hand to stop further action, saying, "The action is still back here," pointing to the player to my right. I thought that was peculiar, but decided to wait until the hand was over to inquire about it. Player to my right folded, and the hand played out.

When it was over with, I asked the dealer, "Wasn't his hand dead as soon as he turned his up card face down?" The dealer said, "No, I don't think so. But I'll ask." He called the floor over, though appropriately continued dealing the next hand so as not to make everyone wait.

He was surprised that the floor confirmed my impression, and apologized for having been wrong.

So today I'm looking in my rule books to be sure that my memory on this point was indeed the standard rule. It is.

Krieger and Bykofsky, Rules of Poker, page 178:

7.3.10 MIXING OPEN AND CLOSED CARDS

Turning an open card or cards face down, or commingling open and closed cards together is tantamount to holding. The hand is dead.

Cooke and Bond, Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, page 25:

5.17. SEVEN-CARD STUD: TURNING UPCARDS DOWN; MIXING UPCARDS AND DOWNCARDS

A player who turns upcards facedown or mixes upcards and holecards together when facing a bet is deemed to have folded and his hand shall be declared dead.

So if you're ever playing seven-card stud (or razz, or stud-8) and are faced with the same kind of situation I was--the player on your right has turned his up card face down but has not yet returned his cards to the dealer for some reason--you can safely proceed as if it is your turn, because it is. His hand is as dead as if his cards were already in the muck.

A sobering conversation (no poker content)

About ten days ago there was a bizarre incident at the Dairy Queen nearest to me, maybe 1 1/2 miles to the south. Around noon, a man came in swinging what was described as a Samurai sword, demanding money from the cash register. One of the employees of the store--a son of the owner--shot and killed the robber. You can read more of the details here and here.

This caught my attention because an average of once a month or so I stop at this same DQ to get myself a treat (most often a Snickers Blizzard) on the way home from a successful evening poker session. I've been in there dozens of times over the years. It's also right next to the Albertson's where I've done most of my grocery shopping (Sahara and Maryland Parkway).

I don't know a lot about the family that runs the DQ, but it's obvious that they are Middle Eastern in origin. (News reports said that they are Lebanese immigrants.) They have all been unfailing polite and friendly to me, even though I don't go in there often enough that they recognize me as a regular customer. They've just always struck me as good, solid, honest, salt-of-the-earth people, the prototypical small American success story of immigrants working hard to make it in their adopted homeland. I'm a softy for that sort of thing. I love that we live in a country where that happens every day, in every city. (And I deplore the wave of anti-immigrant fervor that has perversely enveloped us over the past ten years or so. I say open the borders to any non-criminals who want to come. They make us better, stronger, and wealthier.)

Anyway, I was shocked that these good people who had been a tiny part of my life had been visited by such bizarre and horrific violence.

Last night on my way home from poker at Caesars Palace was the first time I've been to DQ since the shooting. By coincidence, it was the father of the family working alone last night, and I was the only one in the shop. So after he handed me my Blizzard, I said to him two sentences that I had rehearsed in my head while he was making it, so that I wouldn't mess them up: "I'm sorry about that terrible incident that happened here a couple of weeks ago, but I'm very glad that you and your family didn't get hurt."

Now, I couldn't possibly have been the first one to say something along these lines to him, and he doesn't know me, but it seemed that he very much wanted to talk about this. That surprised me. In fact, it is my assumption that people will not want to talk to strangers about terrible events in their lives that usually causes me to just keep quiet when dealing with somebody that I know has had a recent tragedy.

He was not at all bragging about his son being a hero or anything like that. On the contrary, the whole thing had understandably disturbed him very badly. He kept shaking his head and saying that it was all just "Terrible, terrible." He related some details that had not been in the media, such as that the man was swinging the sword at the heads of people in the store, and could easily have caused grave injuries. I didn't ask for or expect this outpouring of facts and emotions. I had thought he would probably give me a perfunctory and practiced, "Thank you," I would turn and go, and that would be that. I was humbled and honored that he seemed to want to make a connection.

I didn't tell him that I have a keen and longstanding interest in the subject of self-defense, particularly self-defense with handguns. That wasn't important to my message to him. In fact, I felt that sharing that fact would make it seem that I cared more about the weapons involved than the people, which was not the case.

Some gun enthusiasts feel like high-fiving each other when a self-defense shooting makes the news and another felon bites the dust. I don't. Each such story is an awful tragedy for all involved. The state marks the death of one of its citizens. One family mourns. Another is shaken to its core. There is not one good thing about it. But this fact remains: The only thing that would be sadder than the death of the bad guy would have been the death of one of the members of this good family, or of one of their innocent customers.

Not everybody in the world can easily be classified into the "good guy/bad guy" dichotomy. But when you have, on the one hand, hard-working, law-abiding family members collectively trying to support themselves by operating an honest small business, and, on the other hand, somebody brandishing a deadly weapon to threaten their lives for the measly sum that was in the till that day, I have no qualms whatsoever in applying those labels. There were a bunch of good guys, and one bad guy, period. There are times when bad guys decide to put good guys in a kill-or-be-killed situation. When that happens, it is not just OK, but a positively good thing that the good guys have the means of effective self-defense, and the courage, skill, and willingness to deploy it.

A few days after the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, in July, Sheldon Richman, a writer for my favorite political magazine, Reason, wrote this:

The criminal, unfortunately, chooses the time, place, and manner of his crime. I don’t like that rule either, but that’s the way it is. Criminals aren’t irrational, so they tend not to pick victims standing near cops. When you are attacked, calling 9-1-1 will do little good. For the record, the police are under no legal obligation to defend you. The courts have spoken on this—not that your survivors’ ability to sue the police would bring much comfort.

The upshot is that, high-flown political theory aside, no one can truly delegate his or her right to or responsibility for one’s own self-defense. Ultimately, you are the only one who can look out for your safety, because you are only one who is with you 24/7 and therefore the only one you can count on when the criminal targets you. That’s just a fact.

Another fact is that while guns are used to take innocent life, they are also used to protect innocent life. The numbers are in dispute—ranging from 100,000 to over 2 million times a year—but no reasonable person can doubt that people use guns to prevent violent crime, often, if not usually, without firing them. Gun opponents downplay this by distracting us with dubious statistics on how often criminals disarm and kill their victims or how often guns are used to escalate arguments over card games and fender benders. The fact remains: Guns save lives.

Many people don’t appreciate this because most such incidents are not reported to police or the news media. Moreover, the national media are uninterested in defensive gun-use stories. Local news outlets pay attention when an elderly person or shopkeeper uses a gun to thwart a would-be criminal, but the national media, which give wall-to-wall coverage to mass shootings, apparently have no time to report life-saving uses of firearms. No wonder some people believe handguns are only tools for criminals.

Even if we concede that tighter gun laws would have stopped the Aurora shooting—unlikely, because a determined Holmes could have acquired guns in the inevitable black market—those laws also would have cost innocent lives, because people who would have used guns to defend themselves would have been unable to do so. Why are those lives less important than the others?

People are not interchangeable. Even if gun control could save one life—or a hundred—in one place, that would not justify putting other people at the mercy of criminals somewhere else. People have a right to defend themselves, and handguns are by far the best way for smaller, physically weaker innocent people (women, please note) to protect themselves from larger, stronger bad people. (If all guns were to disappear, who would gain the advantage?)

I take no joy in the death of Mr. Bongkuk Pak. It's terribly sad that his life was wasted that way. But it would be far, far sadder if one of the Lebanese brothers had tried to stop him without an effective weapon in hand and, as a result, had himself been killed. I hate to imagine what he must be going through, to have to live with the social, emotional, and legal consequences of having taken another man's life, even if the circumstances made it perfectly justifiable. But I'm glad he's still around to endure that hardship, because the alternative is even worse.

I hope that this good family can find peace and comfort.

Some jokes you just shouldn't tell at the poker table

When writing up last night's craziness, I was too tired to include one story with a moral and/or practical lesson in it.

The guy in Seat 9, on the dealer's right, was playing poker in a casino for the first time. He made all the classic errors of inexperience, not knowing the rules and protocols. His English also was not too strong, which compounded his difficulties.

There was one strange hand in which four or five of us had called a pre-flop raise, but then there was no betting from anybody on the flop or turn. The river was the king of spades. Seat 9 was first to act, and he jokingly said, "All in!" and laughed. The only deadly-serious, never-crack-a-smile player was in Seat 8 (on the button), and I noticed him perking up with great interest upon hearing those words. The dealer was already starting to react when Seat 8 said something to him about whether Seat 9's declaration was binding.

I was next to act and just waited, not wanting to complicate the situation. The dealer wisely didn't try to adjudicate it, but just made clear to everyone not to do or say anything more until it got sorted out, and then called for the floor. As the dealer was explaining what happened and Seat 9 was trying to talk his way out of being committed to what he had said, Seat 8 would quiet but insistently insert comments like "Verbal is binding." It could have been that he was just being a stickler for rules, but my sense was that he was eager to have that action stand. The floor's ruling was that the all-in was indeed a commitment of the player's chips, as it occurred when it was his turn. That made it a bet of something like $275 into a pot of about $70.

I had third pair. Had I been last to act, I would have had to seriously consider calling, because it was patently obvious that Seat 9 had nothing at all. But with three others yet to act behind me, that would have been too dangerous. Even if I had been ahead before the last card, it was too easy for one of them to have had a king and paired it. Besides, that king was the third spade, and a flush could now be lurking. Finally, there was Seat 8's behavior. He had literally not said a word to anyone before this, and now he was pressing his point.

I folded, as did the next two. Seat 8 called, showed the second-nut flush, and won all of Seat 9's chips.

Seat 9 took the blow with considerable equanimity, given the circumstances. He admitted that he didn't know the rules, so it was his own fault--which it was, but I think most people would still have been far more upset than he appeared to be.

Like joking to the airport ticket agent about having a bomb in your suitcase, making a joke about being "all in" at the poker table is a quick way to get yourself a whole mess o' trouble that you didn't want.

What a difference a day makes

Some of the players at last night's table of craziness had said that they would be back tonight, so I returned to Caesars to see if I could be on the receiving end of their spewiness again. I did see one of them--in fact, he was on my immediate right. But he was clearly losing and in a sour mood, and the bad beats and cold decks he was experiencing had taken the fight out of him. Last night he was the most aggressive player (discounting the ones who were just shoving blindly for fun), but today he was a pussycat.

This table was the polar opposite of last night's. Nobody was drunk. They all appeared to be studying the game closely. Nobody spoke. Nobody laughed. There were sunglasses, hoodies, and earphones in play. Players were deep-stacked, most buying in for the $500 max. This was not just poker. This was Serious Poker.

I left after 80 minutes with a $280 profit. Strangely, I actually thrive in this sort of game. I understand pretty thoroughly how the better players at this level think, because their baseline play is very similar to mine. To beat them, I just have to see what they're doing, make an educated guess as to why they're doing it, deduce from that what they're afraid of, then convince them that I have what they're afraid of. I started off by hitting a couple of lucky cards and showing down strong winners to establish a reputation of always having the goods, then used a combination of that image, position, aggression, and scare cards to steal pots for the rest of the session.

I ordinarily wouldn't bother writing anything about a session like this, because it didn't generate any specific stories. But it was such a stark contrast to last night's that I wanted to make note of it. This was a much more typical Caesars Palace kind of table. Last night's was the one that was out of character.

Wow!

That's the only word that kept going through my mind as I left Caesars Palace.

The plan had been simple: I arrived around 5:00 p.m. with the idea that I would play for one to two hours, take home a quick and easy profit, chat with Cardgrrl, watch this week's WSOP installment on TV, then get to bed early so that I could get up early for another morning bike ride.*

None of that happened.

I quickly found myself in the loudest, wildest, drunkest, craziest game I've seen in months, maybe a year. We had a shifting lineup of two or three solid, conservative players who knew what they were doing. But the rest of them--my God, the rest of them! It was exactly the scenario we grinders scour the city's poker rooms to find (and Caesars is not usually the most fertile grounds for such games). They were horrible players at baseline, made worse by the free flow of alcohol. They were buying each other shots, going all-in without looking at their cards, calling down to the river after hitting any fragment of the flop, busting and rebuying chips as if they were free. The drunkest man was a pure calling station who hit every hand for the first couple of hours, amassing a stack of $700-800, then facing the inevitable reversal of fortune and giving it all back over the next couple. The drunkest woman apparently had a horn-o-plenty of $100 bills in her enormous purse. She burned through at least $1200 and maybe as much as $1500 in about four hours--I lost count.

Such situations are highly profitable, obviously, but also come with extreme variance. It seemed that my fate was to run in place. For the first nearly six hours, I could not get either up or down by more than $100. Normal poker logic didn't apply; many decisions on later streets devolved to pure guesswork, and I was only hitting about 50/50. As a result, I'd get up a little bit, then slip backward. It was enormously frustrating not to be able to make consistent progress. In a perverse way, I'd have preferred to lose all my chips, at which time I could decide it wasn't my day and go do something else instead. Sitting there for hour after hour with nothing to show for it was maddening, when the chips were flying from stack to stack so loosely.

But I persevered, maintaining my composure and talking myself out of tendencies to tilt after the inevitable bad beats and erroneous moves. I endured what seemed like endless deserts of card-deaditude without giving in to the urge to try to force the action, which would be disastrous at a table like this.

About six hours in, I finally hit the breakthrough hand. Oddly, it turned out to be against one of the few sober, generally solid opponents, not one of the drunk spewers. I raised to $10 with As-Ts, got two callers. Flop: Js-5s-5d. I bet $20. He min-raised me, which gave me decent odds to draw to the nut flush, reading him for the trips. Turn: Ks. Ding! I checked, he bet $50, I raised to $150, he pushed, I called. He had suited connectors, 4h-5h. The 2c on the river did not complete my royal flush for the $500 high-hand bonus, but it did manage to avoid making my opponent's full house, and doubled me up.

This was the most loud, raucous, convivial table I've been at in a very, very long time. Nobody was ever angry. Jokes and good-natured trash-talking were continual. We usually had a ring of onlookers, and people at the other tables kept looking over at us to see what all the commotion was about. F-bombs were exploding all over the place, such that two players would ordinarily have been ejected for ignoring repeated warnings. Fortunately, the dealers all recognized that it was all harmless fun, not provocatively angry with potential to erupt into fights, so they diplomatically disregarded most of it rather than intervene heavy-handedly, else we would have lost the games biggest donors.

The downside to such games is that the hand-per-hour count can come to a near standstill. Nobody is paying attention to the action, and drunk people have no sense of how much time they're taking on their decisions. Again, the dealers were mostly great. As each one sat down, I took advantage of my position in Seat One to quietly inform them that the table needed a great deal of assertive prompting to keep things moving, and nearly all of them adopted a firm guiding hand without getting irritated at the inattentive drunks. Tips were flowing as freely as the booze, which helped.

If you have any sense of my personality, you might guess, correctly, that this kind of table is not the kind of social setting I like best. It was loud and chaotic, neither of which will ever be found listed among my favorite adjectives. However, I not only put up with it, I actually managed to enjoy a couple of the other players--smart and funny people who appreciated and played off of my occasional injections of wit and smart-aleckery.

I stayed much longer than I had planned to because it was so obviously a +++++++EV situation. At least in theory I would have been willing to stay as long as it remained so, and the money did not seem to have stopped flowing by the time I left at 1:00 a.m. But I felt my sharpness, decision-making, and tolerance for the social shenanigans faltering, so I finally decided I was better off pocketing my modest winnings and letting somebody else take over one of the juiciest seats in the Vegas poker world. My net profit was $242 in about eight hours. That's certainly above my long-term hourly average, yet still disappointing under the circumstances, where there was potential for such riches. That's the longest session I've registered in several months--quite a bit longer than I prefer and longer than is optimal for my attention span. But unusual situations call for unusual solutions.

This was actual work. It wore me out to handle the monetary swings and the social craziness. Keeping my mind on the poker when others are paying it little attention is mentally fatiguing. Doing so while trying to help foster the carefree interpersonal interactions is, for me, a continual uphill slog. Strange as it may sound, succeeding in this kind of setting did more to make me feel like a professional than when I'm engaged in heavy intellectual combat with comparably experienced foes, although the skill set I had to call on was completely different. I'm best suited for fairly short-duration but intensely focused sessions of a low-variance style, whereas this table demanded a relaxed patience, forbearance, and willingness to take large risks. I don't mind admitting that I am left with a sense of pride that on my better days I have enough flexibility of personal resources to adapt to this kind of opportunity.

I trust that Cardgrrl, who has taken advantage of her share of such unexpectedly profitable games, will understand and forgive my failure to get home for our daily chat as planned. It will probably be a long time before I stumble upon a table like that again.

*Speaking of the bike, I'm astounded by how much ancillary stuff one needs, even for one with no aspirations for anything even remotely looking like racing. So far I have acquired or ordered a helmet, a lock, a bell, front and rear lights, a water bottle and mounting bracket, full-size tire pump for home, tiny portable pump, spare tube, tire repair kit, portable tool kit, two pressure gauges (bike tires have two different types of valves, which require different gauges, and I oddly have one of each), book on maintenance and repairs, pants-leg clips, and an under-seat bag for the tools. Still under consideration are a mirror, speedometer/odometer, and rear baskets for errands around town. I have spent almost as much on the accessories as the machine itself. The world will note with a sigh of relief that Spandex bike shorts are not on this list.

Notes on my first urban bike ride in 30 years

I note that it is the ungodly hour of not-yet-9:00-a.m., and I am back from my first ride on my new bike.

I note that I rode for approximately 45 minutes, and went about 5 miles.

I note that I am hot, sweaty, and [sniffs to check], yes, stinky.

I note that over the past hour I have gained a keen awareness of which areas around downtown Las Vegas are "uphill" and which are "downhill," facts which had escaped my notice over the previous six years of driving.

I note that I have a strong preference for "downhill."

I note that the public policy most urgently in need of being addressed this election year is a constitutional amendment banning "uphill." As a laudatory side effect, this will create countless jobs for bulldozer and road grader operators.

I note that neither Obama nor Romney is saying a damn thing about this. Gary Johnson is an avid cyclist and triathlete. Maybe he'll do the job.

I note that these "uphill" and "downhill" things are not marked on the city's map of bike routes. Perhaps this could be addressed in the same constitutional amendment.

I note that potholes are much more evil than I had previously thought.

I note that one should not forget to take water along on these trips.

I note that I do not suddenly feel younger, as if having drunk from the fountain of youth. On the contrary, I estimate that I used up ten years of my cardiac lifespan.

I note that if somebody could bring me an IV with some sort of life-force-restoring elixir in it, I would be most appreciative. I'll just be over there on the bed, passed out. Stick the needle in any convenient vein.

I note that bicycles should come with a free, 24-hour on-call masseuse for the post-ride muscle soreness, which I am feeling already.

I note that, appearances notwithstanding, this is not about to morph into Bob's Biking Blog. This is but a temporary diversion.

Torn

Once in a while, you'll see somebody at the poker table get so mad at something that occurred (usually a bad beat) that he'll tear up his cards. (Note: Poker rooms tend to frown on this.) But is that torn-up card now sitting on the table really what it appears to be? Or could it be a carefully constructed drawing, intended to fool you?

Hat tip: http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/blog-2/, via @jrswam on Twitter.)

Bicycle--no, not the cards

I'm getting older and fatter. That just has to be admitted right up front. Every year that goes by, I notice that physical things get harder. I go bowling when my sister is in town, or go hiking with Cardgrrl when I visit her, and with the passage of time my capacity for such things drops, the next-day pain gets worse, and the recovery time gets longer. The chief culprit (besides Father Time) is not hard to deduce: I'm too sedentary. My entire day is spent sitting. I've known for years that this is a problem, but it has taken me a long time to get around to addressing it.

I have long had the thought in the back of my mind that bicycling would probably be the most pleasant way to introduce some mild exercise into my life. Renting bikes with Cardgrrl and riding around an island in Florida last year was a major impetus toward solidifying these thoughts. It was the first time I had ridden a bike in nearly 30 years, and it was fun.

In January of this year I started visiting the local bike shops and noticing prices. I also picked up brochures telling me about stuff like the valley's bike routes and trails. But the idea still had to percolate for a while longer.

In May, I happened to catch an interview on NPR's "Morning Edition" with a guy named Grant Peterson, whom I had never heard of before. He was promoting his new book, Just Ride. I really liked his attitude and approach. His basic message is this: Racing has ruined cycling for the rest of us. Cycling has become suffused with the perverse notion that what is good for the world's top pro cyclists is what everybody else should emulate: the clothes, the equipment, the attitudes, the riding position, the training habits, etc. And, Peterson says, that's just bunk. Riding should be fun and practical, not expensive and dreary. So he wrote his book to encourage people to return to the days when you just hopped on your bike and took off, for a short ride or long, going as fast or slow as you felt like, wearing whatever you happened to have on, and not worry about special clothes, tracking your miles or your time, or whether your bike frame was some exotic ultra-light alloy. I read a few short chapters of his book as samples on Amazon, and liked him even more.

I started occasionally poking around online at what features of bikes would suit the kind of riding I might do, and what models I might buy with those features that wouldn't represent an enormous investment. A couple of weeks ago I was getting confused at the different frame sizes and associated questions. So I downloaded Peterson's book into my Kindle, hoping it would have some useful pointers about equipment selection (it did), and burned through it in two days. His words really inspired me to stop dithering about the whole process and get to it.

I settled on a Schwinn Discover, which you can get from Wal-Mart, Sears, and other mass retailers for about $250-$260. It's a hybrid model, which is to say that it's somewhat heavier and more rugged than a pure road bike, but lighter and less rugged than a mountain bike. It's designed for comfortable commuting, urban errand-running, and casual city riding. I ordered mine from Amazon.com, and it arrived Friday. (I'm a cheapskate and selected the free "super saver" shipping, which was estimated to take a week, but the fine folks at Amazon decided to overnight it to me by FedEx at no charge!) I have spent a few hours over the weekend doing the basic assembly from the box.

This process has once again reminded me of the hole I have in my brain where the mechanical aptitude is supposed to go. I get baffled by how screws fit into nuts. I can't put anything together right. My latest evidence is this bicycle. The very first thing I managed to do was blow a hole in the rear tire by overinflating it. I did manage to attach the handlebars, seat, pedals, and fenders, but problems remain. The brakes aren't adjusted right. I can't tighten the nut that holds the front fender in place, so it flaps around. The seat is only marginally tight. I scratched the paint in a few spots. Etc. So tomorrow I'll take it to a nearby bike shop, confess my ignorance, and pay them to finish the job for me, as well as repair the tire that I exploded. Then, and only then, some two years after I started thinking about the whole subject, I'll be ready to take a spin on my new toy.

Which means that by Tuesday I'll be sore and achy, wondered what in the world I was thinking, taking up exercise at my advanced age, and deciding that what my life really needs is more naps.