Since I finally had a free moment, I started putting together my SXSW calendar. So far I’ve picked 15 bands, most of which I’ve seen before, using the sxsw.com calendar feature. After adding the first fifteen, I took a look at my calendar, only to realize that the fifteen I wanted to see happen in 7 distinct slots. And it looks like I’m going to be spending a lot of time at Beauty Bar (or at least on the patio). I’ve never been there before, but its proximity to Mugshots makes it an instant winner in my book. See you in two weeks.
Monthly Archives: February 2007
so this is the (chinese) new year
In celebration of Chinese New Year I spent as much time as possible with as many Chinese people as I could. No, I didn’t go to the festivities in chinatown. It’s stinky down there and the only thing worse than being around a bunch of smelly Chinese people is being around a bunch of smelly Chinese fish markets. Yuck. I went to Atlantic City, where my mother assures me all the Chinese people will be, since they are all addicted to gambling.
Atlantic City knows that all of China is going to be there too, which is why all the AC hotel rooms were either already booked, or more expensive than I was willing to pay. Which is why I made this my first hit-and-run trip. No hotel, no luggage, just my jacket and the money in my pocket. In the end, it really wasn’t much different than normal, only instead of going back to my hotel room at 8am, I got something to eat and caught the bus out of there by 10:30am. I got just about the same amount of sleep on the bus that I would have gotten in the hotel, and when I woke up, I was almost home. Really not so bad. Though I do think I should start eating earlier. It seems that I get really caught up in the drinking and gambling and skip dinner every time I go. Maybe this is why I get uncontrollably drunk? Naw, it’s probably just all the Jack Daniels.
how stella got her groove back
I’ve had this post in my phone for a while, but apparently my grasp of technology is not yet good enough to actually get it back out in a timely fashion.
AC – Round 2
After my first successful AC trip, I decided that going right back the following weekend would be a good idea. Once again, I pricelined the sheraton for a reasonable $100 Saturday night stay. This trip was going to be different though, I was determined to both visit different casinos and play some good poker.
Cue the violins
I’ve been a real funk with online poker, really since PartyPoker dumped their US customers. My game has been terrible: pushing with hands where I know I’m behind, straight calling with losers, ignoring starting hand value – you know the business. I was really in need of a pokertracker plugin that could just look at my stats and say, “gus, what the fuck? You used to be good at this. You’re terrible now, go do something else.”
Repeat performance
My second trip to AC was the first time in a long while that I have gotten up from the table feeling good about my play. Tight, aggressive, smart = money in my pocket. I played for two hours and was basically card dead for the majority of it. It didn’t distract me. I play three good hands and I capitalized on them as best I could for $100 in winnings. But more importantly, I left the table feeling like a good player again.
Other AC notes
Caesar’s is an awesome casino but their poker room sucked. The tables and dealers were fine, but the management left a little to be desired. My table was down to four players before the floor manager said anything about moving us to another table. And even then, immediately after he told us it was going to take time to move us, he seated a new player at the table we were waiting to join. Lame-o.
Resorts is a fucking terrible casino. They’re like the Delta Airlines of casinos. I will never set foot in that place again. I spent over half an hour getting a players card and the woman working not only spelled my name wrong, she got the order wrong too, and she did it all in just under 30 minutes. I should have known right then that it was time to go, but it apparently takes me too long to learn my lesson.
I headed to the poker “room”, which was really a roped off area in the main floor. In the middle of the afternoon there were only two tables running and no one there to seat me at any of them. I quickly gave up on that idea and headed to the craps table. That was my third and final mistake. It was either my dealer’s first day, or he is just an incompetent fuck. Either way, he tried to give my payouts to the people standing next to me and most times calculated the odds payout wrong. After 10 minutes of this I was ready to go. This is when I looked up and noticed the 45+ minute line waiting at the cashier. Resorts was having some stupid event and didn’t have enough employees working to deal with the crowds. I dumped the rest of my buy-in and left Resorts forever. I should have set my player card on fire outside the door. They would have never caught “Enriqe Gunzales”.
Eh-Vegas
Kat and I made it out to Katitude’s inagural blogger event in Toronto a few weeks ago, so I figured I should throw in my two cents.
It was really cool meeting all the bloggers: Jules, Graham, Guin, Astin, and Iakaris.
Kat and I went out on Thursday, flying on a Delta voucher that Kat picked up when she was forcibly bumped from a flight. She’s always hated Delta and now I know why. They are seriously the worst airline I’ve ever flown. I remember a while back there was a big scandal at Delta because some flight attendant took naked pictures of herself in her Delta uniform. That explains a lot about the airline. Rather than focusing on running a good airline, they’ve got the whole fucking company looking for Delta porn. Their argument was that it was bad for their image. Are you kidding me? You’re telling me that skeezy male business travelers are going to purposely stay away from the airline where the flight attendants get naked? Right.
Thanks to Delta’s incompetence we arrived to Toronto late on Thursday, so we just had a couple drinks with Katitude and called it a night. Before parting ways though, she gave us all the details for how to take the tai-pan (chinatown) bus to Casino Rama.
Casin-o-rama
Having already been to Toronto before, I wasn’t particularly concerned with seeing all the sights, and honestly it was too cold to be walking around a lot anyway, so going to Rama seemed like a good idea. I also wanted to get an idea of how long it really takes to get there, which I didn’t find out because the Tai-Pan bus stopped all over Toronto (3 Chinatowns!). Rama was fairly uneventful; we played 2-5 limit HE and came out slightly ahead, which is always good. No craps, no blackjack, just poker (that’s a first in a long time for Kat and I).
After we finally made it back to Toronto, we caught up with Katitude, Jules, Graham, Astin, and Guin in the Distillery district. Dinner was delicious and after drinking roughly a bottle of wine it was time to hit the club for some poker action. This was one of the first times I’ve gone to a poker room specifically to play NL. Thankfully, the deck was hitting me like crazy, so I didn’t get into many situations where I really had to rethink my play. At one point I think I was up around $600, but my luck started to run out and I doubled up Katitude (I think twice) and Astin. I believe all of those times my trips TK got the smackdown from flopped full houses. That doesn’t feel good.
The Tournament
The next day was a hungover day for most everyone and Kat and I spent the majority of it going to Niagara Falls with some Austin friends. We made it back just in time to wrap up dinner and head to the club for the tournament. A random player from the club asked to join in our tournament since there was no game running. I don’t think he knew what he was signing himself up for. Three hammer drops and this guy had no idea what was going on. It was no surprise when he busted first. There were really only a couple noteworthy hands: Astin’s quads over Katitude’s boat and Iak’s pocket jacks holding up against Jules’ AK in dramatic fashion, with the king coming on the turn and the 2-outer jack hitting on the river. After dropping Jules, Iak probably had 80% of the chips and gave us a lesson in playing the big stack, pushing us off of pots over and over again. The race for 2nd between Astin and I just came down to who could luck out. Astin had one bad all-in against Iak and put me into the money. It probably took all of three hands for the game to end.
We immediately jumped over to the cash game afterward and my luck was really starting to run out. I think I had to rebuy on the first hand when my TPTK got destroyed by 2-pair. Really just a horrible read on my part, I interpreted his overbet to be a steal and it wasn’t. Ouch. There were also a number of other situations where I showed my inexperience with playing NL cash games, but such is life. I did, however, get the chance to drop the hammer. I think I showed it down three times, much to the dismay of the table. Overall I ended the cash game down about a buy-in which put me up for the trip. No complaints here.
Overall it was a really good trip. Katitude is a fantastic host and took care of everything we needed. Now if only she could control the weather.
no-fly zone
So like a retard, I didn’t book my Austin flight until the last minute. Apparently this is a hard weekend to get there. Neither of the airlines that I have free flights on has any availability either Friday or Saturday. So, it looks like i’m going to be spending the weekend re-enacting Home Alone 2 – Lost in New York. Everyone should go to the marathon and cheer Kat on in my absence.
[ed- now that i've seen how jetblue (or here in case you missed yesterday) did today after the storm I feel a little less stupid. There is a high probability that even if I would have booked the flight I would have spent the weekend at the airport.]
It’s a race
I bought a new phone. I got the T-Mobile Dash. At long last, I am the proud owner of a phone with internet access and a full keyboard. This means I can be totally distracted from the disgusting people on the subway, I have something entertaining to do on the bus ride to AC, and most importantly, I can once again veg-out on the couch and hold conversations with people through IM (without having to own a laptop).
So far I don’t have a lot of complaints as far as the quality goes. I wish I could re-order the home screen, but it’s likely possible and I just haven’t figured it out yet. I have to admit that even as a long-time windows user, some of the smartphone configuration is more complex than I would have expected for me. Having a full keyboard is fan-tastic though. Now I can write from anywhere, getting me closer to my goal of eliminating the need to handwrite anything, ever. Except for graffiti, that I’ll still continue to do by hand.
And to those of you that asked yourselves why I didn’t just wait for the iPhone to come out. I will kill you in your sleep. With my T-Mobile Dash (I’m pretty sure it is sturdy enough to get the job done). And then I will take a picture with my phone (at 1.3 megapixel) and send it to your girlfriend, because she’s in my five.
(ps – I find it hilarious that someone videotaped their tv to capture that commercial)