Paving Tucson, Part Deux (Poker Interlude)

So I start off the poker night with a couple of meager wins, but then get into a minor funk. It's a fast game of Texas Hold 'Em - the main goal is to get people out of the house by 10 with a game starting at 7, which means that blinds escalate very quickly (50, 100 after 12 minutes, 150 after 24, 200 after 36, 300 after 48, etc.). Without going into too much math, this means that it does not really pay to be overly conservative, and you are much more at the whim of luck than in a standard poker tournament. That "whim of luck" factor hit me hard - I went in with two pair a couple of times (e.g., Ks and 8s) and lost to a higher two pair (Ks and 10s). The game is a ten dollar buy-in and that gets you $3000 in chips; an hour into the game at the first break, I was down to about $550 in chips with the big blind / minimum bet at $400. Which is, as you may be able to tell, not good. I had really only goofed once - got a little overly aggressive with a pair of aces in hand and scared everyone off the hand - but otherwise felt like I had been taking all the right chances and just getting barely beaten as mentioned above.

Beck had been doing pretty well for most of the night but lost on a big hand just before the break. A couple of hands after we restarted, both of us were all-in at separate tables. Beck lost, but I pulled off a pretty solid win (good timing with my all-in shove). SO I doubled up, but still trailed most everyone by quite a bit. After enough people had been eliminated, we combined tables, and the basic story of the night was that I had a very small stack, was put all-in with multiple people in on the hand repeatedly, and won three or four times in a row. I came back from the dead! At one point I hit a set of 8s on an all-in hand, and I was so confident that I had won that I threw my car keys on the table as a joke. NICE. So I had a slow but substantial comeback, defied death repeatedly, and got respectable relative to others piles. From that point on, everything fell right, I played it well - beat a guy's straight with a flush, beat a pair of jacks with a pair of queens, etc. Lucky hands that coerced people into sticking their guns. Good times. I also took a big chance at one point and hit a pair of kings on the river to beat a pocket pair of jacks. It was a little aggressive, but that was still in the string where it was do or die time.

The mamma jamma hand occurred when it was down to four of us and I was holding 8,7. The flop came up 8,6,8. Nice. Then a 7. Nicer. I bet pretty hard on this as I was still behind a lot. The last card was a 5. Which is fantastic, because there's an open-ended straight on the board, but I am holding a full house that is the highest full house you could have. Lady across from bets big, which is hilarious to me, but I throw back with an all-in raise on myself. She calls IMMEDIATELY and flips over a pair of kings and starts to grab the pile. "Um, huh?" I ask as I show her my full house. She says, "8s over Ks beats 8s over 7s." "While that is true, you do not have 8s over Ks." Turns out she had thought there were three 8s on the board the entire time. Um, no (not to mention had three been three 8s, I would have had four 8s). YES! Big win, I grab about a third of her chips which pushes me just over half of her money. We weed out the other two people and are head to head with me having barely more in chips than she. First hand of head to head, I get A Q and go all in; she had a K 9 and goes all in. Board flops a whole lot of nothing and I take the game with A high. YES!

Back from the dead! The prize was $140 for the overall winner, huzzah! Poor Beck had to sit and watch the last hour and a half, but hopefully it was a little worth it. So $140 minus our pair of ten dollar buy-ins made for a good night. Glad I came back from Tucson.

(Oh, I would be totally remiss if I did not mention the swirling cloud of obnoxiousness that is Staci. She went to the women's poker championships at one of the local casinos before our game - something with a $300 buy-in - and came in 7th overall for a cool $3300 prize. When she arrived to our game late, we gave her a big hand; people were genuinely proud of/ happy for her. And then she spent the next hour repeatedly talking about how her wallet can't even hold that much money, about how she needed someone to walk her to her car because she has so much money on her. She absolutely would not shut up the entire evening; ten hours of poker had apparently ramped her need to be the center of attention to infinity. We also got shrill-voiced detailed descriptions of all the hands she had played that day, to be expected, but they all carried this air of how awesome she had been, and by the way she can't sit down with her wallet in her back pocket because it won't shut because IT'S SO FULL OF MONEY. I can't gripe too much; she did throw some extra cash out of her winnings into our pot. But dios mio, brggadocia in action. And all delivered in a high-pitched Louisianan accent which, let me tell you, did not exactly make things more soothing.

And THEN, we get an e-mail from her later in the week - a mass e-mail, sure, but sent to all of the people who had been at our poker game - recounting the exact same stories of too much money and how she took a photo of herself rolling in her money in bed and she won SO MUCH MONEY. I couldn't take it; I e-mailed Jason and embraced my inner football announcer when I said that she needs to act like she's been there before. Jason laughed. I followed up:

"She's the Chad Ochocinco of low stakes poker."

Which pretty much nails it.

So, to whatever degree I am coming off like a CO of even lower stakes poker, please note that I got so lucky it's crazy, just hit some good hands on big blinds and such that kept me in the game zombie-style. I will take credit for knowing when to cite Kenny Rogers tunes, but otherwise this was a big fat ball of luck. And re: the money, we ordered fancy pizza the next night in celebration and will probably go on a dinner-date movie tonight. And may use whatever's left toward renewing our home warranty. I know, it's just so glamorous. LOOK AT ME EVERYBODY).

Paving Tucson

Sorry that these "real life" posts are getting so sporadic. Work calls, etc. Hard to spend time a-bloggin' when the pile of reading / assignments / preparing for lectures never gets smaller.

Last weekend (Sept. 12-13), I traveled with Sprawl down to Tucson with Sprawl for Club Sectionals. I was still (and am still, really) in knee-gimp mode - the last time I played "for real" was in Denver at the beginning of August - so I wasn't going to risk limping around for days afterwards by playing at Sectionals. I did feel guilty for the extent to which I had let the team down, injury-wise, so I met with BP (team captain) earlier in the week to talk about calling sub lines for the weekend and otherwise being a sideline coach. Seemed like the least I could do, and besides, with someone else there to coach / call lines, the captains could focus more on their playing. Hooray for small deeds.

Actually, I'll give myself two points of karmic value; driving down to Tucson for the weekend to just watch others play (and become more and more miserable at the fact that you cannot) is a hair above the call of duty. I had plenty of schoolwork to do as well as a lecture to get ready for this week (more on that later), so it's not like a trip to Tucson wasn't costing me anything. SO yeah, good job Nyet for helping out the team at your own expense. Borderline altruistic. Plus, any thoughts I had on bailing for the weekend were killed when I agreed to give Paul, Cisco and Stoli a ride to Tucson. Nothing like a little interpersonal commitment to prevent one's moral failings. Actually, that was a pretty fun little 1.5 hour car ride that we took 4 times*; good convo and hanging and listening to a miscellaneous collection of four and five star songs**.

* - I really don't like going to tournaments and sleeping in a hotel or on someone's floor unless absolutely necessary. We used to drive to Austin and back from Rice (2.5 hours) back in the day just for the privilege of going to Rice parties and sleeping in our own beds, and it was always worth it. So yep, we drove down and back, down and back again in the two days. It was well worth it (more later), even if mother nature did have to take a second hit to her carbon-load.

** - Paul tried to nominate me car DJ, which I resoundingly rejected with "I am not DJ by nomination, but by divine right." I didn't have a ton of time to make mixes as Beck and I had a date that night - a terrible, terrible Italian place around the corner, ugh - so I just collected my four.five star songs, shuffled them, and recorded the first six mp3 discs worth of songs for the drive. Turns out that the iTunes Shuffle feature really likes the Beatles, as a disproportionate amount of Fab Four songs, even for my collection, showed up on the first disc. Oh, well. Good tunes / times, and yes Eric, a hip-hop number or two showed up later.

Long story short, this is what I did all weekend:


That's Skunk, Alan, Rob, Brady and Tom in the relative foreground (um, hey jackass writer, when is the foreground NOT relative?), and me hunched over and recording playing time and plus-minus stats on an Excel file. That's right, not only did I call lines, I went "sauermetric" and calculated our team efficiencies and individual plus-minuses. There is a dork within me; he rears his head often. The info was actually very valuable, not just in terms of keeping track of subs and PT, but in doing at least a little evaluation of teamwide strengths / weaknesses and a little bit of figuring out which players are possibly D players and which are better O players. Good stuff, I'll try to include it in this account.

Saturday was a strange day in Ultimate terms because we only had three games scheduled (four is more typical) and two of them were again the Sprawl B team ("Heat Stroke") and a bad, bad college team from University of New Mexico ("Hanta Virus"). In other words, two easy games and really just one competitive game against a club team from Tucson called Monsoon. BP wanted, however, to give our lines a solid chance to play together (not always easy to get everyone at the same practices), so we didn't really back off in either of the first two games until we were well ahead. Which turned out to be roughly halftime. We crushed Sprawl B 15-3 and UNM 15-2, which is entirely nothing to get hung about. But it meant that we had one game left for the day and a lot of our starters had plenty of gas in the tank. So we were going to throw the book at Monsoon to make sure we won our pool outright and got ourselves into the finals.

A side note about Ultimate line-calling - it's a pain in the butt. 19-20 players for 7 spots on the field, and Ultimate players are far too egalitarian minded to note that, for example, for the majority of sports, half of the guys on the team play not at all in a given game. So everyone is expecting to play roughly a third of the time, even though that is obviously dumb; if our starters are going to grab roughly 50% of the playing time, those extra points have to come from somewhere. I did my best to keep things balanced; in retrospect, I wish we had benched starters after the first few points in the opening two games and let everybody get their kicks and giggles in those contests. Again, those were not the orders, so no go. Anyways, it's tough to call lines - you're trying to give people two points in a row and then some time off, but some points are much harder / longer than others, so that doesn't always balance out. You have an idea about which players you want out on offensive points and defensive points, but if you're killing another team, you play almost exclusively defensive points - half your lineup is getting no PT. You go in with an idea - I want guy A to play 30% of the points, guy B to get 40%, guy C to get 50% - but you can't too many of those 30% players on the field at the same time, and you have to match positions and roles. People get hurt here and there. And worst of all, people stand behind you, reading over your shoulder, making comments about the amount (read: lack) of PT they're getting. Just awesome. Anyways, it's a little complex, and hopefully I did a reasonable job.

So game 3 on Saturday rolls around, and it's book-throwing time. So we do - BP, Justin G., Justin D. (buddy from WEfnuk days), Dixon, Vince, Josiah, Stoli, and to a lesser degree, Trant, all get significantly more points than the others. We throw out lines of Justins, Dixon, BP, Stoli, Vince and Trant for some points, which is pretty much putting a Power Play 1 team out there. Some people were cool with it - I specifically remember Brady and Aaron telling me, unasked, "don't worry about us, just win the game." AKA the appropriate attitude. Others not so much. Ah, well. The all-star lines worked - rolled over Monsoon 15-9, putting us in the finals Sunday morning against Sweet Roll, the New Mexico club team that is simultaneously Sprawl's best friend and nemesis. Sprawl has never *really* beaten Sweet Roll (partial lineups in Flagstaff tournaments this year doesn't count), so everyone was amped for a Sunday 11 AM throwdown. Those three games only took us until 3:45, which was fantastic, as we were headed back to Phoenix by 4:00 and got home by 5:30. WHich means I had plenty of time to run over to Tempe for a monthly poker game that Beck and I play in with Jason and Grant from ASU and some other miscellaneous card not-sharks.

TBC

Greenday

Who would of thought back fifteen years ago when they were writing lyrics like, "When masturbation's lost its fun / You're fucking lazy," that Greenday would become one of the preeminent political statement bands of their era. They have. In 2003 they released the highly regarded and very political, American Idiot. This year they are back at it with their new album 21st Century Breakdown.

The biggest single hit off of the album is the cry for peace "21 Guns."

Do Yourself a Federeravor

First, read this essay by Joe Posnanski.

Then watch this video. Or watch the video first, who cares. Roger Federer is (old enough to) read Icculus:

Be careful in San Jose

Our last post was about being careful in Las Vegas because the vice cops are working overtime. This time there were no cops on the scene when a series of fights broke out in this San Jose bar, Club Wet. According the San Jose Mercury News, "For the second time in two months, San Jose police temporarily yanked the entertainment license of Club Wet. They quoted the cops, "There has been a slew of different things that happened at this particular club, all related to violence."

Patrick Swayze was sorely missed. Chaos 1 --- Security 0

Be careful in Vegas

The pool at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino
courtesy of Oyster.com

Recently, in our politics section the Clarion Content noted that even the normally slump proof Las Vegas was struggling in this deep downturn. While looking into the issue we did see that there are some great deals for hotels, shows and entertainment in Vegas right now. However, if you are traveling there, dear reader, a word of caution.

Anecdotally we are hearing and reading that in many parts of the country, police are more active, and thereby are generating more revenue for their state, county or municipality. (Many of which are financially in the pits post the reign of King George the II.) This is especially true for speeding tickets, which are not only more expensive, but are being handed out with greater frequency. You may recall our post on not so welcoming Virginia. Insofar as Vegas goes, looks like the cops may be being more active there as well. Of course, in Sin City, the cops who are on the prowl are often vice.

This note in the San Jose Mercury News caught our eye the other day, "Las Vegas police say they have arrested seven people on drug charges and one for soliciting prostitution at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino pool." This was daytime on a Sunday afternoon. The Mercury News continues, "Authorities say the undercover operation is part of an increased effort by police to fight increased occurrences of "illicit activities" at resort pools throughout Las Vegas."

A word to the wise, behave or be careful, even in Sin City.

AR: Joy

Phish - Joy (2009)

Well, I'd be entirely remiss if I didn't tell you that the best thing about the album Joy is that (2009) attached to its end - it's not that it's cool-dude-buddy-bro-sweet that yo-Phish is back together, it's just that I am unspeakably happy that Phish is back together. If you're not me - and you're not - you'll never have a real appreciation for just how blissful this band can make me, how when I find myself in times of trouble, "Punch You in the Eye" comforts me. The real simple take is that I always heard a sound in my head, a band that played in this mystical, eccentric and varied style. It sounded a specific way and I would seek out music that would even hope to touch that crystalline perfection of what I wanted from a rock band, but there were always only glimpses, hints here and there. And then Liz took me to a show in Houston on 9.25.99, and the band from Vermont just stepped in and *were* that sound - the archetype I had heard forever. And everything about them grabbed my brain and on dark nights intimated that all was okay in times when they most definitely weren't. I'm a far cry from the world's biggest Phish fan - um, that's an understatement - but trust that when I say it's good to have them back, it is the *good* to have them back. Joy, indeed.

This is also the first time that I've caught the music in the order proper. Meaning that the typical way a Phish album gets introduced is that the songs get written in between the tours, maybe the album gets recorded, but then well before it's released the band is out on the road working things out, extending jams, rewriting sections, etc. I joined the Phish game in 1999 after most of 2000's Farmhouse songs had already made their debuts in either '97 or '99, and I had a very paltry live show collection. When Farmhouse came out, all of the songs were brand new to me. The horror that is Round Room came out at the tail end of Phish's "hiatus," so all of those songs were originally heard in that studio version rather than being worked out on the road. Some of 2004's Undermind's songs were aired out in concert before the album's release in 2003, but many weren't (some not even making their in-concert debut until 2009). Regardless, that was the middle of some bad times for Phish's sound - another post's topic, sure - so I was following the band nowhere near as closely. With this album, however, all of the songs were put on display over the two summer tours, and thanks to the power of the internet (and Tuftsmen named Ian), I heard pretty much every second of every concert. So I heard the crackling live versions of all these tunes and had them ingrained in my head well before the disc was officially released yesterday.

I am firmly in the camp, as I'm sure I have mentioned, that values Phish's studio albums. Dad joked last night that the studio albums are "for the record." Wokka wokka wokka. It's nice to have a standardized version, particularly for some of the more intricate / complex songs, and it's doubly, triply nice to have clean, 100% tight and in-tune versions of the ballads and acoustic numbers. But more than anything, in addition to the thrills and energy and ripping seams of live shows, I just love studio albums. For completely different reasons. There's excellence in control, too, in studio tricks, and Phish is a different beast when reined in. Not worse or better, to my ears, just aesthetically different. Not the same vibe, so why compare? I mean, of course, except for the ballads and acoustic numbers, which are clearly better in house. And given that Phish teamed back up with the same engineer / producer from their largely ballad-and-acoustic-driven album Billy Breathes, it would seem that was at least part of the effort here.

Getting to the album: it opens with that rarest of birds, a saccharine poppy ode to friendship that manages to eschew all my cynical, ironic leanings. "Backwards Down the Number Line" is beautifully endearing, the sappiest sing-along number that I will gladly hum along to with pride. I especially love that it's that rare rock song about male friendship - few west of Belle & Sebastian would sing about whispering "in his ear" with a self-assured smile. After all the mayhem that Trey wrought upon himself in the last several years, hearing this sort of earnest, beaming rebirth* is frankly soul-lightening.

* - Now's as good of a time as any to mention that sort of wise sentiment firmly entrenches in a genre that I'd like to dub "SUPER-COOL adult contemporary pop." They are plainly not as ragged and out of control as in years past, and yeah, they're all greying and have kids and are a little weary from all the self-drug-addling. There's a certain focus that this brings that makes them sound austere, stately. I know that's not completely the case - they still, for example, run impromptu dance competitions set to tape-loop effect ambient music in concert (see previous post) - but there's a new graceful age to them, probably that started on the previous album and has really come to a head here. It's a good quality, I do declare.

Next up is a guitar-wailing mid tempo rocker "Stealing Time From the Faulty Plan" which is about angst-ridden as Phish gets. It's allegedly about Trey's state in the aftermath of his sister's death from cancer and his own aforementioned demons. There's some clear catharsis within, and it has a surprising admission of struggle. "Joy" - practically exhibit 1A from my claim that some songs are better on albums than live - follows along the same lines with sentiments of overcoming tragedy and loss. The chorus teeters just on the right side of powerful/cheesy, and part of this is the clarity with which things are delivered - easy to hear the acoustic guitar accents and well-blended vocal harmonies behind it. Great anthemic ballad.

"Sugar Shack" is a Mike number through and through, an offbeat calypso-ish number delivered in only the way Mike TPB can. His nasally falsetto is admittedly strange - nears Weird Al territory sometimes - but the severe quirkiness that accents this otherwise simple number makes it work. And btw, Trey's goofy island lines over the top seal the goofy deal. Very nice that it's followed by another in the large catalog of animal-based Phish songs - "Ocelot" is an easy-going, straight-forward piano rocker accented by more melody echoing screaming leads from Trey. Ends with a nice "Dear Prudence" homage in a fun times bouncy outro. "Kill Devil Falls" is almost an old timey rock n' roll, twist in the dance hall number, a plain effort to fill the floor. Really a workman's rock ditty, this is the type of song that probably could have come from any bar band but gets carried by the weight of the band - they pull a fake ending, and come back with a fade in chorus jam session. Safe fare, sure, but quality.

If a 2009 album can be said to have sides, that closes the first one. Side B fades in with a crunchy electric guitar ambient fade-in to the very bright, crisp "Light." This, possibly to the largest degree on the album, sounds like a recent Trey Anastasio solo number. That means that there's a very full wall-of-band sound that is solidly unified behind a very melodic Trey vocal / guitar lead. It's a decent enough, straightforward number that stops at sounding vaguely pretty - it's obvious that this will (and it did this summer) serve as a sore of simple-container jam vehicle, and these sorts of songs aren't my favorites. At its conclusion, someone says, "Hey Page, where you been?" And Mr. McConnell / Phish proceed to deliver a schmaltzy, completely toss-off piano-blues-hall number called "I Been Around." Trey gives a silly duplicate-the-melody, Auld Lang Syne sorta lead riff. The whole thing is so obviously a dicking around in the studio moment that it's a little embarrassing. Not the album's highlight.

Phish then dons their prog hat in "Time Turns Elastic." This tune was released as a single several months ago, so I was already quite familiar with the multi-part, 13 minute opus that supposedly took some 270 takes to get down. It's been called their "Terrapin Station" which is sort of silly, given that Phish certainly had plenty of multi-part, extended compositions before this one. The Grateful Dead started in 1965 and "TS" came out in 1977, which would have been 1996 in Phish years, so it's not like it's a smart stage-of-career comparison. Maybe it's that the "melody...shelter in the darkness" section (that repeats) has a little bit of that GD drums groove sound, and people are more on that. So perhaps "it sounds like 'Terrapin Station'" is what people are really on about. Regardless, yeah, keep those GD comparisons coming, that helps a lot. Anyways, this song works tremendously better in the course of the album than as a single, which should be shock at all. A prog rock song on an island is just odd, whereas one that pokes out of the back half of an album works just fine. It's not anything like one of my favorite long-composed pieces, though it continues to grow on me. The middle intricate and highly varied sections are more interesting than intriguing... I appreciate their proggy* goodness, but that's about as far as it goes. I will say that the best part of the song does come at the end, which is a solid move, because you can view the long sections as a road to payoff.

* - I realize that if the term "prog" doesn't mean anything to you, then that paragraph is probably entirely meaningless. I don't know if it's really a coherent term - bands from Yes to Rush to Genesis to Ben Folds Five have had it applied - but I generally think of it as multi-passage, very serious, long songs with big album themes and motifs, exhibiting technical brilliance and melodies that won't sit still long enough to be remembered even if they were somewhat catchy. It generally requires some pretty intense, concentrated listening to appreciate (a certain tolerance for talk of dragons helps, too). Some people use it derogatorily; I try not to, but it does tend to evoke a certain absurd self-importance. It's not that I don't dig it - some of my best friends are progs! - but the general anti-casual listening stance makes "TTE" an odd choice for a single, especially given the super-accessible vibe of the rest of the disc.

The album closes with another song of slow-down self-reflection called "20 Years Later." Sparsely toned with trickles of keys and guitar splashes. Pretty safe closer, solid enough, and maybe rescued a little bit by the Beatles-esque psychedelic outro that closes the album. The reflection angle makes a nice bookend to the album, so if you leave it on repeat, you jump from that relatively somber self-mirror back to the bouncy ode to friends. Nice.

In case it's not obvious, Joy belongs to a long list of albums with a great Side A that loses steam on the second half, even with the clear opus of the disc on the B surface. Every second, excepting the Page throwaway number, is solid, though, and the sageness of Phish 3.0 exhibited throughout makes this well worth a spin. Many reviews call this album "safe;" I'll join them, but argue that Phish's safe is sophisticated and results in a whole lot of tight gems whose sound is best served by this studio format. So glad to have them back, glad that the band members themselves have all come to places that permit their coming back, and glad to have another discful of the studio-version of my favorite band. That's right: I'm glad, glad, glad...

(It was either that or a Happy, Happy, Ren & Stimpy Joke. You got off easy).

Status: Recommended (solid)
Nyet's Fave: "Backwards Down the Number Line"