by john | Dec 15, 2010 | Poker, Travel, Vegas
This will be a multi-part trip report, spread out over several posts, over several days. Don’t get all impatient when I get sidetracked by – Oh look, squirrel! – and it might take me a while to get back to it, but all the stories I remember will be told eventually. Let’s start at the beginning.
My flight sucked.
Let’s be really clear, here. My flight suuuuccccckkkkkeeeedddddd. I t was crowded, hot, bouncy, and I was uncomfortable for most of the four and a half hours. It’s times like that when I’m supremely jealous of friends like Special K, who get upgraded all the time. Then I think about how much time they have to spend in airplanes to get said upgrades, and I get less jealous. So I got there, and headed to the MGM to crash for a couple of hours before I kicked it into high gear in the evening.
And kick it into high gear I did. The IP is where they’ll stick the hose if they ever give Las Vegas an enema, but for some reason we all congregate there at the Geisha Bar every year to drink like college kids. Since our visits typically coincide with the National Finals Rodeo, there are pretty good drink specials going on around town. So I end up taking extreme advantage of said drink specials, and doing myself grievous bodily harm. Last year I started a tradition, a particularly unhealthy tradition, of drinking cheap beer out of buckets until I pass the blood alcohol content of an Irishman at a Dropkick Murphys concert. So I did.
Then I made my mistake – I decided to play poker. Now I’ve played a lot of cards at the IP over the years, a lot of it with bloggers. But little if any was played when I was as obliterated as I was Thursday night. I bought in for the table minimum ($60) for the first orbit, and blew that away pretty quickly. Then I reloaded for $300, the table max, and tried to play reasonably while also trying to remain upright in my chair. Neither of these things proved easy. But I managed for a little while, and after I’d bled through around a hundred bucks, I decided to get up and join the 8PM tournament as a late entrant.
This is my new strategy for tournaments in Vegas – never play the first level of blinds. Every tourney allows registration for at least two levels after the event begins, and some allow it for up to four levels. And the only saying about not being able to win a tournament in the first level, but being able to lose it then is certainly true. As long as I can come in with a reasonable stack relative to the blinds in level two or three, I’m going to skip the first couple of levels every time. This strategy has proved solid for me a couple of times at the Venetian, and also paid off last Friday at Aria. It didn’t really help at the IP, because although I doubled up on the first hand (of which I recall zero details as I was on pitcher #4 of 7 at that point), I ran into aces with ATo at the final table and resumed my drinking.
Somehow a couple of hours later I found myself back at the IP poker room, seated at a table that included CaityCaity and some other folks that I recognized and am sure were more than happy to relieve me of my money but whom I don’t remember. Apparently at some point there were a lot of people warned and/or tossed from the poker room, but I missed all of that. I may have taken a nap or two between hands. Really, that was napping. I swear it. I left that table because I fear CaityCaity’s poker drunk or sober, and went to sit next to PokerGnome. This was not my best move, because even though I had position on him, the Gnome can also outplay me when I’m sober, much less biblically inebriated. But somehow I managed to triple up at that table, I think at the expense of the civilians to my left, because I’m a drunken out-of-position ninja. Or because I was too drunk to fold. One of those.
I did find myself playing second pair a lot stronger when drunk than I have been sober, which was something I specifically wanted to work on this trip. The playing second pair thing, not the drunk thing. The drunk thing was a given. I’ve been playing second pair like a nutless wonder, folding to obvious c-bets, but after pitcher #6, that didn’t happen. Of course, after pitcher #7, I have no idea what happened. But I did manage to cash out a small profit (if my recollection of only buying in for a hundy is correct), and staggered off to bed around 4:30 in the morning. I made it back to the MGM and did something I haven’t done since college – not puke, but I fell asleep with my contacts in, which led to all sorts of festivities on Friday morning and a huge pile of grateful to the fact that I always travel with a spare set of contacts.
End of Day 1 – down around $200 in poker, probably another $200 in food, booze and cabs.
Still to come – my annual donation in mixed games, tournament silliness, bounties galore, and Full Tilt Food!
by john | Dec 7, 2010 | Real Life
There are a lot of preparations going on around the Casa de Hartness this week. Not only am I getting ready to head off to Vegas to play poker and drink like a college kid with some of my best friends (most of whom I see once a year if I’m lucky), but we’re also getting ready for a houseguest.
An invalid houseguest.
While I’m gone.
And it’s my sister.
If there was any question about the sainthood of my wife, it goes away when I tell you that for the second time in three months, my sister is staying with us after she has hip replacement surgery. She had the first hip done a little over two months ago, and now that the first leg is healed enough, it’s time to get the second one done.
Tomorrow.
So I’m picking her up tonight and she’ll spend tonight at our house, and Suzy will take her to the hospital tomorrow morning in the predawn frost. I’ll go off to work like normal, stop by and visit her tomorrow night, and then Thursday I’ll head west for my annual weekend of ridiculousness. I expect Bonnie will get home Friday, and if it’s anything like the last time, my wife will play nursemaid for the week while I cavort in Vegas and then come home and work just like nothing’s out of the ordinary. Because she does that. Suzy’s got the caregiver gene that I am apparently totally missing, and she takes such great care of anyone who’s sick, be it her relative or mine.
So I might need advice from a couple of my girly friends this weekend on a suitable gift to bring home, don’t ya think?
by john | Dec 6, 2010 | Travel
From the Great White North, although it wasn’t really white, in the sense that there was no snow, but it was cold in New York City this weekend. Suzy and I went up for our anniversary, just a quick Friday-Sunday jaunt, and had a great time. We spent time wandering around Rockefeller Center looking at all the decorations there, then checked out some of the 5th Ave. store window decorations, like the killer windows at Saks, then I took her shopping at Mood Fabrics on Saturday (she’s a Project Runway junkie, so this stop was a must), and I got to pop into Midtown Comics on the way back to the hotel.
Saturday night we saw American Idiot at the St. James, and it was a great show. Except for the seats. Let’s face it, I’m a big guy. I know I’m overweight, but I should still be able to fit into a seat in most places. But the older Broadway theatres are built for midgets! I literally had to sit almost completely sideways in my chair with my legs out in the aisle, because there was no way I was going to fit comfortably facing completely forward. This of course led to a sore neck by the time the show was over. But the show was very good, I highly recommend it to both fans of Green Day and of high-tech shows, because this was certainly a technical bonanza. If you’re looking for deep plot, go elsewhere. We both felt that there were several cliched moments in the show, but that the strength of the popular songs and the incredible lighting covered for it. On a purely lighting geek side, now I see what the new VLX fixtures can really do, and I was blown away by the intensity.
Then we went right next door to Angus McIndoe for a nice post-meal dinner, and I’m pretty sure it was the most reasonably priced, well-prepared, well-served meal we had all weekend. The service was excellent, the food was great, the atmosphere was wonderful. I highly recommend it for a quick bite after the show. We got out for under a hundred bucks, in a restaurant in the heart of the theatre district, so you know you can’t beat that. And we each had a drink with our dinner! Very reasonable prices and great food.
Here are a few photos from the trip –
Rockefeller Center
View from our hotel window – gotta love travelling on Marriott Rewards points! Two nights in the heart of Times Square for free!
The Mood Fabrics shop dog – Swatch
Suzy in front of the big tree
Me in Times Square with the World’s Greatest Hat
by john | Nov 24, 2010 | Real Life
Just as I decided to rip apart the back cover blurb for Hard Day’s Knight, I find this post on the Publetariat today. Pretty nice, so I re-wrote the back blurb to more closely follow that format, and posted it on KindleBoards to crowdsource some feedback. I think within a day or two of working with the folks over there I should have a decent blurb ready to go. Then of course I’ll have to re-do the back cover, adding on the blurb, order a proof and approve it, and then the new copies will be ready sometime next year. Not a big deal, frankly, since I’ve got about 30 copies on order and ten in my truck, so I have plenty to sell until then. Once I’m done with HDK, I’ll probably re-do the back cover to The Chosen to incorporate some of the great reviews the book has gotten. Then maybe they’ll both be pretty much ready for public consumption.
HDK should be good to go in digital format next month. Rob tells me that we’re still on track to get the conversion done this month, and he’s the man, so I trust it will happen this week or next. Then it’s on me, and with Thanksgiving, a trip to Atlanta for work and a trip to NYC for vacation coming up I can’t make any promises. I would like to go ahead and release it for Kindle so that I can get some recommendations going before all those e-readers are given as Christmas gifts. I think the e-book market is going to see a huge swell this January as people load up the kindles and iPads they got for Christmas, so it’s fairly important to have as much product on the market as possible to catch the wave. I also really do believe that we’ll see this happen every year for the next several years, so it doesn’t kill me to only have two books out. That’s about all I can manage with a day job, anyway. And I’m a long, long way from not needing a day job. Speaking of which, I should go do that for a while instead of screwing around on here.
Happy Thanksgiving, folks! I’ll catch up with you after the holidays!
by john | Nov 23, 2010 | Real Life
So the crud that I am now getting over has passed into the wife, and apparently the crud is in reality bronchitis. And my wife, being much more sensible than me, decided to go to the doctor for it. She got a course of anitbiotics and some codeine-laced cough syrup. Unfortunately for her, this was the end of her good decision-making for the day.
Upon arriving home and reading the instructions, she saw that she was to take 5 ml of cough syrup every six hours. Now my first answer would have been to find out how many teaspoons are in a ml, or vice versa. Or alternately to just turn up the bottle and take big swallow. But Suzy did neither of those things, instead deciding that two tablespoons seemed about the right dosage.
Which is correct. If you’re a wildebeest.
So after ingesting 30 ml of codeine-laced cough syrup, my wife is at home high as the proverbial kite, and not enjoying it. You see, while 3-4 times the normal prescribed dosage is about right to catch a nice buzz, six times the normal prescribed dosage makes you itchy and twitchy, at least if you’re my wife. So I’m at work, still coughing up the last dregs of my illness, while she’s at home, looking at the pretty colors on the wall and finger-painting the dog. (I might be exaggerating, but not much).
Good times, kids, good times. In other worlds, I’m now about 5,000 words into Volume 2 of The Black Knight Chronicles. In this episode, our boys fight trolls. Real ones. Real BIG ones.
