*************

Kyle had been telling me for the past year that the live players at the WSOP tended towards a very low average skill level. For example, I played(and hosed) the $1500 no-limit holdem event today. I had initially expected the skill level to be somewhere around the level of online $530s. Or at least, $215s.

Today was about the level of online $55s or $33s.

To say the least, I was not impressed with the general level of play. Sure, I could identify a fair number of good players at each table, but rather than having 1 or 2 donks at each table on average, there had to be more like 4-5 donks a table. At least, I was seeing some plays which were completely beyond my comprehension, implying that they were either strokes of genius or complete idiocy. My money’s on the latter.

Multiple people were getting on me for shaking, thinking that it was a tell. However, as former roommates can attest, my leg tends to twitch/shake constantly anyways, so this probably doesn’t indicate anything aside from me being the spastic type.

Anyways, we started with 3k chips. 1 hour per blind level, 2 levels to a break. At the first break, I had 4.5k. Going in towards the second break, I was moved to a new table and had about 8.5k chips. One of the dudes there looked familiar. I thought I knew who he was, but didn’t say anything. As I sat down, Famous Dude butted heads with a slightly shorter stack at the table and lost, leaving himself with about 2.2k.

Blinds were 150/300, 25 antes. Famous Dude was in the big blind. I raised to 1k from mid-position with 77. People fold around to FD, who calls(?!). Flop comes JT8 rainbow. FD jams his remaining 1200 chips, I call. The rest of the table gasps. I turn over my 77. FD turns over…66. He scowls, doesn’t get any help on the turn or river, and I bust him.

As the Famous Dude leaves, people at my table are like “Wow, ballsy call there” and “Amazing call.” Someone asks me “Do you know who that was?” I feign ignorance. “Should I know who he is?”

The guy next to me says “That was Ted Forrest.” [Ed. note- Forrest is considered one of the best 7-card stud players in the world, and a formidable holdem player. He's played $100k/$200k limit holdem against Andy Beal before.] I continue to act clueless. “Is he really famous?”

The rest of the table laughs at me.

Really, this sums up the general skill level of today’s event. With 1200 behind, I was going to call Forrest no matter what came on the flop. That’s a purely mathematical decision. Even if he had 2500 chips left, I would have called, because my take on it was that Forrest would think “This kid probably knows who I am and can be intimidated into folding via a stop-and-go play.” But for 1200 more chips, I’d have to have been drunk, stoned, and running a 102 fever before considering a fold.

Unfortunately, I was getting crap cards for most of the tourney. I did see AA and JJ once, and AKo twice, but that was it over about 6.5 hours of play. I ran into a flush a bit before the third break, leaving me with 2.5k going into dinner. Shortly after dinner, I hosed.

Despite that, I’m reasonably satisfied with today. I was concentrating well the entire time, I finally grokked that live play here is definitely not at a skill level that’s beyond me, and by encountering a top pro and coming out well, Mystique and Aura take a couple more steps towards being dancers at a nightclub. I’ve busted bracelet winners online before, but this felt different.  The game is not nearly as foreign as it was this morning.

While there, we talked about various promotions and comps that casinos had. One comp involved going to a shooting range, where a store had many comparatively exotic firearms for rent such as M249s and Barrett .50 cal sniper rifles. A few minutes ago, we had been talking about pets and animal shelters, so I suggested a new comp thing where people could use their comps to go to the shooting range and donate to animal shelters. In exchange, when shelters needed to euthanize animals, they would instead be turned out onto a shooting range where people would take aim with the Barrett .50 cals. Considering that a bullet that size would blow a 200-lb mule deer into pieces, it’d red mist a typical housecat or pet dog.

At this point, everybody was staring at me, and one of the other degenerate gamblers in the group asked me what the hell was wrong with me.

Hey, it seems like a much kinder, quicker death than the asphyxiation methods that some places use. If I had to pick, getting my head blown off by a bullet the size of a paperweight seems a lot faster than being strangled.

Last month, I joined Kyle and a bunch of other degenerates in Vegas as part of a team organized by a guy nicknamed Fixer. There was a casino- a decent sized one, in the Strip area- which was having a double payouts promotion for jackpots from midnight to 11:59:59 pm for one day. This was big. Depending on what game was available, it could turn something which is ordinarily a 95% game- that is, returning 95 cents for every dollar wagered- into a 130% game. We were looking at being able to pull a profit of about $1500 per hour per person.

Unfortunately, when we got there, it turns out they had Nerfed the two best plays. Sadly, this dropped things to around a 107% game- still good, still running around $300/hr per person, but not quite what we were hoping for given that most of the team had flew in for this. But hey, it could still turn out to be a solid profit if we could get in a half dozen hours of play before they pulled the promo. If we could get in a marathon session, so much the better. We’d work in pairs and sit spread across the gaming floor, hoping to avoid identification as a team.

Hopes for this died around dinnertime, four hours before the promo started. There was already a group of advantage players sitting around hogging a bank of machines, eating a pizza. They weren’t even playing. Now that’s crass. Elsewhere, little knots of people could be seen, studiously playing nickel video Keno.

By the time 11 pm rolled around and my partner Edmund and I found a couple of reasonably ergonomic and payout-friendly machines, it was obvious the promo wasn’t going to last anywhere near 24 hours. Just from the walk in, I could identify five other teams- and given that I could only see half the floor and that some teams might be less blatant, I figured there had to be at least twice that number present. This was going to get messy. It was entirely possible that the casino would end up losing money to the tune of 50 thousand bucks per hour. People weren’t even trying to be subtle. And through it all, casino employees were remarking to each other about how traffic was unusually heavy for the day and time; how usually there wouldn’t even be a quarter this many people.

Midnight struck and it was like horses bolting out of a starting gate. Within five minutes, we saw someone’s machine light up, indicating a jackpot. Five minutes later, Edmund hit quad aces for the jackpot. Five minutes after that, the other guy next to me lit it up.

It rapidly became apparent that the casino was hideously understaffed. Not realizing what they had done, they kept with the usual graveyard shift staffing level. It took nearly 20 minutes before anyone came to take down Edmund’s information for jackpot processing. Immediately after that, he started playing another machine. He must’ve had his lucky gerbil that day, as he promptly quadded up again.

The place was a zoo. I overheard one harried worker say that over 25 jackpots had already been hit, and the first hour wasn’t even out. There was a kind of distress in their eyes, the kind you see at a toy store on Black Friday when someone screams out there’s exactly one unit left of the must-have toy of the year. At 12:55, they had processed maybe 5 out of the 25 jackpots.

At 1:10 am, they went over the intercom announcing that the promotion was cancelled immediately. What followed is likely going to be one of my defining memories of the outing.

See, in the old days, cashing out meant a cascade of coins hitting a tray. Casinos have gone to electronic tickets and redemption machines these days, but enough people are nostalgic enough for the coins that the the machine will play the sound of coins hitting a tray as it prints out the ticket.

Well, at 1:10, they made that announcement, and then all around me came the sound of cascading coins. Everyone cashing out. All at once. It was surreal.

The game was over. Sort of. Edmund was still waiting for his payouts. By the time he got both, it was 3:15 am. It was an okay trip- since the team got real lucky, we walked away with expenses paid and a bit extra, but not the killing we were hoping for. The funny thing was, the casino still didn’t really realize where it had gone wrong. I estimate that it lost around $55k; could’ve been a whole lot worse.

Coming soon: part 2, or, how I got professional gamblers to ask me what the fuck is my problem.

That being said, some projects are even worse than others. One wonders just what the teachers thought- or how some of these ideas got through in the first place. Though given that one elementary school classmate’s project was called “Astro Ants and Astro Gerbil” and involved sending the family pet up as the payload of a model rocket, I guess I really can’t be too surprised.

“Talk” by Coldplay, a remake of “Computer Love” by Kraftwerk. This is my favorite of the new remakes, and Partyben’s mashup of the two songs is just plain brilliant.

“SOS” by Rihanna, a remake of “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell. I think Soft Cell’s version was actually a remake of an even earlier version, though I don’t know who offhand. Now, as long as Rihanna doesn’t decide to continue taking riffs off of Soft Cell, she’ll be fine. I think Soft Cell’s use of chainsaws and naked dwarves in the video for their followup single “Sex Dwarf” was the quickest torpedoing of a career the early 80s had seen- and you gotta remember this was the age of Nena and A Flock of Seagulls.

“Cupid’s Chokehold” by Gym Class Heroes, a remake of “Breakfast in America” by Supertramp. I gotta admit that I prefer the original for Roger Hodgson’s vocals, though Gym Class Heroes didn’t do a bad job and the video is hilarious.

“Maneater” by Nelly Furtado, heavily inspired by “Maneater” by Hall and Oates. I first heard this at a dance at Nerd Camp a year and a half ago, and it blew my mind how many of the RAs(i.e. camp counselors) didn’t realize it was a sort of sequel to the Hall and Oates song; the same song from the other perspective. Sheesh, I know that I would’ve been booked for a trip to the Carousel by now, but those pups just don’t know where things come from. I mean, I asked people who did “I Want Candy” and pretty much everybody answered Aaron Carter. I know Bow Wow Wow’s version was also a cover, but ouch. It’s weird being a GenXer in the land of Millennials.

“One Word” by Kelly Osbourne, ripped off of “Fade to Grey” by Visage. I posted about this awhile back- the songwriter blatantly ripped off one of the iconic New Wave songs, right down to the girl speaking in French between verses. Fortunately, since then, the threat of a lawsuit has gotten Midge Ure and Billy Currie their just royalties. If taken on its on merits, One Word would’ve been a pretty good song with a pretty good Jean-Luc Godard homage video, but as it stands, it just doesn’t compare well to the original.

These are the ones I can think of- I’m not counting straight remakes like Youth Group’s cover of “Forever Young” by Alphaville. Got any others?

I expect that we could have intentional pronunciation manglings. I’m waiting to see if we’ll have “Fuck you do me!” *clapclapclapclapclap* “Fuck you do me!” *clapclapclapclapclap* chants echoing around some ballpark.

One of the casinos that I play at in the Reno area has a tropical rainforest theme. Now, I’m used to seeing all sorts of garish decor around casinos, but this one is pretty bad even by casino standards.

They have a “Storm Bar” or something which is supposed to remind people of rainforest storms. Every half hour or so, thunder plays over the loudspeakers, the lights around the bar flash, and water comes pouring down into a large(maybe 10′ by 20′), flat rectangular pool a few inches deep. Unfortunately, the water nozzles are all off of a single long pipe running the length of the pool, suspended seven feet above. This makes the entire array look like a giant stadium-style urinal, which I’m sure is the kind of image that encourage people to order expensive fruity drinks.

Far more annoying, however, is the presence of a supposed “bird of paradise” that zooms around the casino regularly. This mechanical contraption(which looks more like a badly painted flying chicken) is suspended from a rail track on the ceiling and emits ear-piercing squawks. The bird also drops chips and cash every so often, giving the impression that the bird is shitting money. I put in play only because it has a pretty good comps and cashback deal, but after a couple hours of listening to that infernal machine, I wanted to ask the casino staff whether I could spend some comps for the use of a 12-gauge shotgun and a box of shells. Blowing that thing out of the sky would’ve been as good as hitting four of a kind.

My housing situation got all sorts of screwed up this summer, since the house I lived in was breaking up due to 5 out of the 7 occupants moving in with significant others. I found a place for this upcoming year, but the problem was that my old lease ended 8/31, but the new place wouldn’t be ready for movein until 9/23. Out of the people who offered crash space, only three households didn’t have furry pets- and I’m really allergic to furry animals. I didn’t want to stay a week at each place- talk about an easy way to get every one of my friends annoyed with me. I figure for pretty much anybody, three days is enough to get one’s hosts mildly annoyed.

The obvious solution, then, was to fly to Reno(tickets essentially paid for by casinos) to stay for free at the resorts for 3 weeks. So I’m back in the Biggest Shitty Little City in the World for a bit, playing some video poker, hanging out with Kyle, and trying to put up with the kind of tourist who comes to Nevada to die.

When taking advantage of a small casino, which has very few machines, I have to put up with whatever hoser sits down next to me when I’m at the advantage machine. However, when at a large casino playing video poker, I didn’t want anyone next to me so I could surreptitiously refer to a strategy cheatsheet every so often on some of the more counterintuitive games(like Double Double Bonus, see previous WHOSAV installments). Plus some of the other people in the high-limit section were chain smokers. I hate smoke.

It therefore became necessary for me to find some way to discourage people from sitting next to, or even near, the machine that I was playing- and spreading stuff around like a snack and a water bottle wouldn’t do it.

The solution, as it turns out, was for me to start singing.

Now, I am at best an awful singer. At worst, I probably make William Hung sound professional. In fact, I often don’t sing along to music because the sound of my own voice tends to disrupt my enjoyment of the music. And given that the casino playlists slant heavily towards the 80s, there is plenty to enjoy.

After a few minutes of me singing The Logical Song, the two other people nearby found other video poker machines to play. By the time the next song- American Pie- started, someone else had come into high-limit slots…and promptly veered away from where I was playing. Even when a preannounced casino ad came over the intercom, breaking up the music, I continued singing. It is testament to how many Nerd Camp dances I’ve been to that when the ad ended, I was still perfectly chronologically synced.

Even after I stopped singing, the fear of me starting up again seems to have kept people away. In Your Eyes came on about half an hour later. I couldn’t stop cracking up though- I kept remembering some old cow orkers of mine, Logan and Christopher, singing “in your thighs” at the chorus.

Speaking of cracking up, Roger needs to post the LOLcat he made of the Peppermill, the World’s Gayest Casino.

[Ed. - Ask and ye shall receive.]

For Part 6 of Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy, click here.