Plateaus and Updates

So I've been stuck on my weight loss for a couple weeks and it's getting irritating. For the last two weeks I've bounced between 216 and 217, which is only really annoying because 215 is a magic number for me. At 215 I will have lost 50 pounds, which is 2/3 of my total weight loss goal. And no matter how much I ride, or how little I eat, I can't seem to break that barrier. And it's PISSING ME OFF.

Ok, I feel better. I know it'll pass, and I know it's just a momentary setback, and all that shit, but it is still annoying.

So on to the updates - the number of people already signed up for the Winter Gathering currently exceeds the total number of people who played in the shitty little tournament the Orleans threw at us (note - not FOR us, but AT us). So it's gonna be a great time. With returning regulars like the Good Dr., The Rev. Al, Gracie, The Rooster, 142 Pounds of Fury and the Man of 1,000 Hair Products, we're sure to have a great time.

We've got a bunch of new folks coming out for their first WPBT Vegas gathering, and it's always something I love - the meeting of new people and corrupting them at the Pai Gow table (right, Astin?). Some of the Virgins this time 'round include The Poker Tart, The Poker Peaker, Bacon Bikini Mary, and in a highly anticipated WPBT debut - Kat's Hunny Bunny, putting aside all rumours of his imaginariness.

Yep, just invented another new word - imaginariness. So fucked up in its composition that Blogger's spellchecker didn't even try. Heh. But it does tag spellchecker as being misspelled.

So far I've received zero confirmations from the G-Vegas crew, and neither of the brothers Bracelet have confirmed, although the Endowed One has been known to make a surprise appearance at these events before.

So the time is drawing nigh, and hopefully before too long Pauly will repost his Vegas WPBT primer for all the new folks to get the tips on how to survive their first blogger Vegas gathering (even for folks like Jordan, who lived through a Bash at the Boathouse, Vegas with these nutjobs is something even bigger).

On other fronts, I've been riding a bunch, and if I keep this pace I'll pass September's total mileage by the end of the third week of October, which is nice. I'm averaging 65-70 miles each week, and I'm going to try a 26-mile ride this Saturday, if I can drag my ass out of bed early enough to get down to Chester, SC for a 9 AM start time. That part has potential for extreme sucking. My attendance is entirely dependent on the end time of the poker tournament at BG's place this Friday night.

Strategery

So after my miserable play last weekend, I went into the home game this week with a new plan. o really, I had a plan for the home game. It may sound ridiculous on the surface, but when you realize that there's something like $6-700 on the table, there's money to be made in this home game. My plan?

Stop calling preflop raises with shit, and play my big hands harder.

Yeah, that was it. It doesn't take a whole lot, really. Just tighten up a bit preflop and jam my big hands more. I still feel like the right way to play this game is to see as many cheap flops as possible, and then if you hit something big on the flop, take full advantage.

So it's not that I was trying anything tricky. Just the opposite really, I was playing much more straightforward than usual. Since nobody at the game ever gives me credit for having decent cards, I don't need to get creative. Just wait around to catch decent cards, and then play hard when you get them.

Now my definition of decent cards is a bit looser than most, and includes suited connectors are one-gappers as low as 8-6, but all it took to reverse my fortune from last week was that minor adjustment in my game.

It didn't hurt that Nate didn't catch every single hand he chased this week. I hit a fair number of draws, but missed or folded just as many. In general, I decided to play tighter than normal and take advantage of the fact that everyone assumes I play nothing but shit cards.

Yeah, I know most of the folks in my home game read this from time to time. It doesn't matter, they still won't give me credit for any decent cards. And by the next time we have a game, I may have decided to go back to playing looser than a JV cheerleader.

I gotta boogie, Monday Night Football is on, and I took Don's advice and took the Falcons. 5 minutes into the first quarter and it looks like good money. Still plenty of time for it all go pear-shaped.

Not sure how to feel about this...

But I heard from a reliable source that the company I was supposed to be directing a show for (until they cancelled it) has closed down. On the one hand, I hate to hear that any producing entity, especially in this less-than-artsy town, has shut down. One the other hand, the vindictive little part of me is thinking "If you'd let my show happen, your company would still be around."

But a big part of me just doesn't care. I shouldn't have become involved in the project in the first place, I only took it because it's tough to get directing gigs in this town, so I wanted to take the show. But I wasn't passionate about the show, and while I worked hard on it, I never felt a great connection to the script. I was never upset that the show wasn't going to happen, just that the cast wasn't going to get the chance to do the show.

Oh well, doesn't matter now. I've decided that the only shows I'm doing at this point are shows that I can get emotionally invested in. I love theatre, but it's only worth doing if it's theatre I love. Otherwise, I'd rather ride my bike(s).

Coming to Vegas? Let Me Know!

If you're coming to the WPBT Winter Gathering and you haven't already updated all your info on the spreadsheet, please email me at johnhartness AT gmail DOT com and I'll send you the link to the spreadsheet so you can plug in your attendee status, whether or not you're playing the tourney, your cell phone number (so we can call you if we notice any missing wheelchairs) and other shit.

So email me and I'll send you the link to the spreadsheet.

No, leaving a comment doesn't count, especially if I don't have your email address!

Reversal of Fortune

Some nights, you can do now wrong. Some nights, you sit down at a table to sling come cards and chips with a few friends and you just sense that it's all gonna go your way. Some nights, no matter how far behind you may be, you know that it's all going to work out in the end.

Me? Oh hell, no! I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about Crazy Nate. Friday night Nate took almost five hundred imaginary dollars out of my home game, which is ridiculous when you stop to consider that it's a $.25/.50 game. At one point I looked down at the $200 sitting in front of me and thought I was doing pretty good.

Then I realized that I was $400 into the game. By storming back to finish the night down $160, I decided I was a winner. Just because I wasn't the biggest loser. Nate caught every ridiculous thing he chased, including two rivered gutshot draws for pots worth well over $100 each. And once he got chips, he played the table bully as well as anyone I've ever seen. It was truly ridiculous.

One of my great joys in my home game is to watch the faces of people that have never played with Nate. He's an old dude, 78 to be exact, and he's played poker for ever. And it's probably never been very good poker. But here are a few things to understand about Nate.

1) His entire game is predicated on making you fold. Therefore, he could teach Brunson a thing or two about aggression with trash.

2) He doesn't give a shit about the money.

3) If he calls a bet on the flop, there's practically no bet he won't call on the turn or river. He will chase whatever he is chasing until 9th street if you let him, and he will not lay down middle or top pair no matter what. He will sometimes lay down an underpair or bottom pair, but don't count on it.

4) If he raises preflop, he has an Ace. It may have a 3 kicker, but there's an Ace in the hand.

5) Unless he has pocket Aces, in which case he will limp.

6) He also limps with Kings.

7) He also limps with 8-4 offsuit.

I asked him at one point after he took down a pot by hitting his gutshot on the river to crack my flopped two pair "Nate, do you call an all-in on the turn if I bet it?"

"Yup."

He was sincere. My all in would have been over $100 into a $25 pot, and he would have gladly called it.

We couldn't be upset with Nate for having a good night, because he frequently loses $200 a week in the game, but it certainly didn't feel very good to give it all back to him in one night.

Bring it!

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 2059579

WPBT Winter Gathering Update

So there's this little get-together coming up in December...

And there's usually a little poker tournament associated with it...

And some of you are wondering where and when that will take place...

And some of you are wondering about structure...

So here's the deal -

Saturday, December 8th

The Bloggers go Italian as the WPBT Winter Gathering Tournament hits the Venetian!

Format - Freezeout

Buy-In - $125 ($100 to prize pool, $25 juice)

Chips - $4,500 in chips

Starting Blinds - $25/50

Adder - $1,500 in chips for a $10 staff toke (optional)

Levels - 30 minutes long

I'll put up the final structure as soon as I have it confirmed, but it will most likely be the one I posted a couple weeks ago with more play early, shooting for having a 75/150 level and one other, and cutting out a couple of later levels.

If you haven't let me know that you're in for the Winter, please do so now! I will start pulling together a list of attendees, in a spreadsheet that will be distributed to all peeps coming.

And please indicate if you're playing in the tourney or not.

You can get in touch with me at johnhartness AT gmail DOT com.

And I'm betting that even with a 2PM start time, at least one blogger is still gonna be too drunk to play, and that Al will still be drunk from the night before when the event starts!

Zoom Zoom

New bike is fast.

Way fast.

I took it for a quick spin around the neighborhood last night before it got too dark to ride safely (since I haven't put lights on it yet), and did 6 miles at an average of 12 miles per hour. I had been averaging around 9 - 9.5 mph on my other bike. So it's fast. I got it up to 21 mph on a downhill, and lemme tell ya, 21 mph on a bike feels like you're screaming fast.

The road bike also works different muscles than the hybrid, since I'm riding more hunched over and focusing more power through my legs. But it's light, it climbs well, and is screaming fast on flats and downhills. Now I've got something that I can put on a longer ride, and I can't wait for the weekend to get the chance to stretch it out a little.

Of course, I've got rehearsal at noon Saturday for a one-night-only event Saturday night, and I've got a 1:30 poker tourney Sunday afternoon, so I'll just have to get up and ride in the mornings.

The Saturday night thing is pretty neat, actually. This year celebrates the 80th anniversary of Theatre Charlotte, the local community theatre. TC is the longest continually-operating theatre in NC, and I've done several shows there over the past few years, including Oliver last weekend. This event is a fundraiser, and it's a concert reading of the first play ever performed at Theatre Charlotte 80 years ago. The cast is a collection of local actors who have been involved at Theatre Charlotte for their careers, some of whom have been involved at TC for more than 50 years. One of the women involved in this performance was actually in a 10th-anniversary production of this play in 1936! So it's neat that I get to play with these folks in this event.

Speaking of Oliver, I went in to actually run the lights for the last two performances, since the board operator had conflicts and couldn't make the last two shows. So I thought "no big deal, I designed it, it shouldn't be a problem for me to run it."

Dumbass.

At some point I became one of those musical theatre designers who isn't happy unless there's a light change for every chorus in every song, so I averaged 2 cues per minute of stage time for Act 1. Thank god the stage manager for the show was top-notch, because by three weeks after opening, I had forgotten everything about the show, and if she wasn't calling it perfectly, disaster could easily have ensued.

For those of you who've never done technical theatre (or theatre of any type for that matter), the way lights happen is this. A designer (yours truly), decides where the lights should go and what each scene should look like. Personally, I can see it in my head, I call it the movie in my mind, because that's exactly what it is for me, a movie of the play, with the lights looking like what I think they should look like.

Then I spend a few hours (typically 6-8 for a musical or complicated play) programming the lights into the computerized lighting board where I set intensity, number of lights and the time that they fade up or down in. Then we go through technical rehearsals and we see how closely the movie in my head matches the movie in the director's head. Usually there are things that I or the director don't like when we see it on the stage and on the costumes, so we spend a few days tweaking color, patterns, intensity or timing.

During rehearsals and shows, the light board operator only has to press one button if things go well. There's a button marked "Go" on the board, and every time a cue is supposed to happen, the operator pushes the button. There's a monitor at the light board that displays what cue is currently running, what the next cue is, and what level (1- 100%) each light is currently at. If something gets all fucked, the board op can jump forward, backwards or sideways in the cue stack to get to the appropriate moment, but nothing EVER, EVER happens, unless the Stage Manager says so. Once the show is open, the SM is in complete control, and nobody pushes any buttons or turns on any spotlights until the word "go" is uttered by the SM. Usually, once the show has begun, the SM won't even use the word "go" in a sentence, referring to it as "the g-word," because when you say "go," something happens. And if something happens at the wrong time, it's often worse than nothing happening when it's supposed to.

Like the time my buddy Jay wondered what that red button was on the stage manager's panel, so he pushed it. Releasing the duck that was supposed to fall out of the sky in Act II. Before the show had ever begun. So as audience was getting settled and getting ready for Beauty and the Beast to begin, this random duck falls out of the rafters and lands in the middle of the stage. That was not Jay's most shining moment.

So all that explanation was to get to the point that I don't run shows very often. Like not in the past 4 years. And I certainly don't run musicals that I design. Mostly because I write a LOT of fucking cues. And I don't wanna pay that much attention for that long. But last weekend I did, and it actually felt really good to use those mental muscles, and be part of the "crew," working in black and in obscurity to make magic happen onstage. Sabrina is a monster of an SM, and she made my show look just like I wanted it, which is what a top-notch stage manager brings to the table. It was fun to actually run a show again. But I'm perfectly content to wait another four years to do it again.

The challenge...

The boys at the office have challenged me to go for the next 30 days without buying a bike.

That's after I found this puppy on Craigslist.
It's a 2006 Scattante R560 Triple, with a triple chainring up front, Shimano 105 shifters and derailleurs, and a carbon fiber fork and seat post. It also included a computer, water bottle cages and a cargo wedge. I gave $400 for it, and it was about a $1200 bike when it was new. It's been ridden for 425 miles or so and looks almost brand new. And just in tooling around the parking lot at work, it's pretty damn fast. Now we'll see how it does on the road!

My Legs Hurt...

But after the raping I took at the home game Friday night you'd think my ass would hurt, too! Basically I played most of the night ahead or slightly behind, then an orbit of stud where I couldn't hit water if I fell out of a boat, followed by a final hand of O8 where I couldn't catch a cold put me busto for the night when I finally got to the point where I'd rather shove all in and lose the little I had left in front of me than cash out $27. So I did - lose the little left in front of me that is. It was a fun night, with a couple of nasty, nasty stud hands making for big pots.

In one, I started life with rolled up Aces, and led out for $2 (this time we were playing $.50 - $2 spread limit), because as I mentioned "if you have an Ace in the door you have to bet. It's a stud law, right?" As is typical, nobody thought I had anything to go with the ace, since I typically don't. When I hit the 4th Ace on 5th street, I just kept swinging, and people kept calling. Oddly enough, my quads were good.

Fast forward a little to the next orbit of Stud ($1-$5 spread limit now), and BG starts with buried 6s. I pick up two pair, and Jim and Rassler both had really flushy boards, so when I don't boat up on 7th, I dump my Aces up. Good move, since Jim and Rassler go at it with boat-over-boat, and all the chips slide over to BG when he turns over his very own quads to drag a true mosterpotten. Jim ended up the big winner for the night, taking almost all of Nate's money, while I think Rassler finished up almost exactly what I was stuck, so it was a fun evening overall.

We were shorthanded all night, since Uncle Phil phoned in sick and Little Nick got mugged the night before and was in the hospital. Dude was walking home a block from his apartment, in a decent neighborhood, when he got jumped by three of the dumbest crooks in the history of the world. They beat the shit out of Nick, cracked his skull and ran off when the lady whose house they beat him down in front of turned on the lights and called the cops, but then proceeded to use his credit cards at several ATMs (with cameras) and at a nearby drugstore (with cameras). So they'll doubtless get caught, and all I can hope is that they're identified very clearly, and let go. I know a few guys that might want to have a little chat with them. Nick will be okay, they're talking about letting him come home today or tomorrow, once they're sure the blood clot on his brain has been absorbed. He got lucky. If they'd hit him just a little bit harder, he'd be dead.

So after getting my ass kicked Friday night I hop on the bike early Saturday morning and go for a ride. More like I load the bike onto the back of the Toaster and drive to a safe place to ride, but whatever. I put 12 miles on the Schwinn Saturday, and realized that I really, really want a road bike. The Schiwnn Voyageur just is too heavy, and geared too small, and all sorts of other things that don't give me enough power to make anything happen. So now I'm shopping again, and will soon have the Schwinn up on ebay or craigslist. My project manager here at work has a bike that he'll sell me for $600 if he wins the ebay auction he's watching for a new bike, so we'll know tomorrow how that looks. Otherwise, I'm looking at craigslist, since I just can't see me dropping $1200-$1500 on a bike right now. More like, I can totally see me doing that, and it would be a BAD THING, so I'm concentrating on the used market.

Been playing a little poker online. I still suck. No news there.