I've Discovered How to Fix Social Security.

All you have to do is forbid anyone over 55 from entering a casino.

I guess I should back up a little bit. I took Wednesday off from playing poker, and then made an unspectacular showing on Thursday night at Sticks. On Friday, though, I took third place, which was worth $15 in food and stuff (woohoo), and not a moment too soon, b/c I'd spent all of the $60 I won there two weeks before.

On Saturday, the weather was gorgeous, so I went to check out Garden of the Gods park. There were really big rocks, as promised, and I had a great time driving through there, and even hiked a little bit (maybe a half a mile total; the rocks weren't close enough together to provide any shade). Then, it being so pretty and all, I went for a drive.

You're not going to believe this, but somehow I ended up at a Casino. Ok, so you'll probably believe that part, but the serendipity of the thing was uncanny. I was just cruising along these mountain roads, taking in the sun and wind and big rocks, and enjoying the absense of traffic, when I saw the sign for Cripple Creek (no relation to the crippled tribe of the same name). I recollected that there was an establishment there that claimed to have poker tables, and, seeing as how I'd been a good sixteen hours without playing, thought I'd stop by.

Sure enough, at about 9800 feet, right next to the DalaiLama's summer home, there's a whole mini-vegas thing. Whodathunk?

Anyway, I found the place I was looking for, called the Midnight Rose (not a rose in the place, by the way, especially by Pasadena standards). I was duly shown to the Poker Room, and allowed to purchase chips. This was a new thrill for me, but, what the hey. You've got to speculate in order to accumulate. I put up a sum that was modest by their standards, and played at the cheapest table.

Ten hours later, I had lost 75% of my initial buy-in, won it back and risen to 200%, then lost that, slowly and excrutiatingly. While not strictly profitable, at least I was losing much slower than the other people at the table. The game was limited, as opposed to no-limit, hold 'em, so that was an adjustment. Plus, nobody ever busted out and left, or the few who did were quickly replaced. The blind stayed the same all day, and the food and drinks were free...all in all, it's a setup I could get used to.

Anyway, it turns out I was probably the youngest person at the table, and I haven't felt so much animosity to previous generations since...well since the last time I thought about 20th century history, or any of the history before that. But this was the first time I'd ever thought about punching a guy on a respirator (so smug, making his Darth Vader sounds, with enough chips in front of him to call anything).

It's not that the people were beating me by playing well; they just played every hand without regard to the value of their cards, hoping to catch all kinds of unlikely hands. Granted, I made a couple of stupid calls (usually involving holding two pair and going up against somebody with a flush draw), but I watched old people pay out money faster than an ATM in Times Square.

The trouble with the table was, they were just good enough to know not to beat me, but bad enough to lose to everybody else. I'm good at knowing when to fold, and in fact yesterday I won second place (and a $10 tab) by doing just that (in the whole tournament I didn't pay for one river card without wining the pot, and only invested in two turn cards before having to fold). I'm not as good at bluffing, especially against people whose sensitivity to losing money is nonexistant and in a limit game. I would've gladly left when I was up, but I wasn't in a condition to drive, so I stayed put and watched my luck, and my money, run out.

Anyway, I figure I only lost about six dollars an hour, and was well taken care of the whole time, so it was a good trip. Most people I've talked to said it was a heck of a roll for $60, especially since it was my first (and last, if I know what's good for me) casino venture.

Irreplaceable

I guess it speaks to my misanthropic tendencies to admit that the closest I've come to crying in the (I'm drawing a blank trying to come up with a less over-used word than "wake", "aftermath", or "devastation") of Katrina is in reading about the loss of decades of research data and thousands of laboratory animals. I realize of course that everything they were working on can be restarted, although some of the studies involved covered decades, and that the people lost can't be restarted as easily. Maybe I can appreciate data loss more because I'm closer to information than I am to people, or maybe it's just that the loss is easier for me to wrap my mind around than the human cost.

I've tried to refrain from joining in the pundit-party surrounding this Kat 5 deal, but one more of us isn't going to hurt. I'm getting tired of hearing about how long the response of FEMA took, because frankly it's just a smokescreen preventing people from asking the hard questions. Yes, the federal help could have come faster; yes, red tape prevents numerous obvious things from being done; yes, FEMA is run by people who are even less qualified to lead than the Bush administration itself; naturally the gross incompetence and terrifying inefficiency that characterizes practically everything the Department of Homeland Security stands for was laid naked for even the most obtuse observers to see. However, in my humble (yeah, right) opinion, none of these things are central to the problem at hand.

What I'm angry about is not the timeliness or organization of the reaction; it's the total lack of foresight at all levels of government for what happened to New Orleans. Everyone had access to the obvious information that (1) the city was below sea level and sinking, (2) the levee system was not designed to handle greater than a moderate hurricane-level storm surge, (3) the only evacuation routes from the city were likely to be severely disrupted, and (4) in the best case evacuation scenario, thousands of people would, for a variety of good and dubious reasons, fail to get out of harm's way. The problem was that few people in power (and I use the term loosely here, as the distribution of discretionary authority in this country is one of the Constitutional and bureaucratic quirks we live with) acted proactively on this information.

Granted, before 9/11, the general public was blissfully unaware of the vulnerability of our urban centers and the fragility of our infrastructure. Now, after sacrificing billions of dollars, and priceless Constitutional liberties, we're no better off than we were before. If we can't handle one little storm with 72 hours' advanced notice, imagine what would've happened if some Al Qaeda operative had invested a couple of thousand dollars in pipe bombs and set it off at the bases of one of the levees. It's not a pleasant picture, but after the last couple of weeks, it's one we can at least begin to fathom.

Of course, they wouldn't stop at just one city's worth. It would much more likely be a simultaneous attack in six or eight places, each calculated to cripple the first responders' ability to respond first. It's taken us two weeks to get a handle on this (local) crisis, using every possible response mechanism from all over the country. Imagine if a series of attacks of this (moderate) scale were coupled with explosions on a few critical interstate cloverleaves, knocking out Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, etc. If you think the Katrina response was a debacle, you'd best think again.

I'm not even going to bother pointing out that if anything even quasi-atomic had gotten loose, we'd have the problem of quarantining a city of half a million people. If everyone is irradiated, there's no herding them into stadiums or sheltering them in other parts of the country. We would've had to station armed guards everywhere to shoot all Cajuns on sight. I'm wondering what the trillions of dollars spent on Cold War preparedness bought us in terms of our ability to clean up a real mess.

Wanted: New Hobby

So I've been pretty negligent on the punditry front for like a week and a half, and there's no excuse for that in my case, as I'm rarely more than a few feet from access to the internet, and you the reader. The main reason for this is a nine-day poker binge, during which I played somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 tournaments. I managed to win a $60 gift certificate at one venue, plus a few other small prizes.

In the Benchmark Gaming league, I'm currently 24th in the city out of 687, although the bottom hundred and fifty or so of those haven't played. It took them forever to update the stats, and I might have had a higher rank earlier in the week if they'd updated it quickly enough. The restaurant and bar trips required for this pursuit would really add up if I weren't already doing that.

Tonight I'm in the finals at On the Rocks' in-house tournament (played without the aid of Benchmark). Should be fun, but I have a feeling I'm going to need help against all of the better betters. Cards are the best way to win, although plenty of players use other techniques half the time. I'm guessing they won't get away with any of that tonight. I'm brushing up on my probability, but I'm still gonna have a tough time coming out on top. Last year my roommate won a t-shirt, so that's something to aspire to.

52 Card Pickup

I wouldn't have thought this to begin with, but there are more single women playing poker than there are swing dancing, it seems like. Maybe it's just that the poker players are easier to talk to, or that women are less comfortable dancing alone. Then again, I haven't been keeping the most accurate statistics.

Speaking of statistics, you can now check my ranking in one of the local poker leagues at benchmarkgaming.com. I won another turbo tournament last night, and might have fared better in the main tournament if I'd had a seat at the start of the round, but I didn't, on account of a clerical mishap, so I had to play as an alternate, entering after the blinds had already been raised twice. That's really just an excuse, though. Anyway, it doesn't look like they've finished updating the stats from last night's games. This season the total prize money for the whole thing is like $2000 (all the tournaments are free; the money comes from the restaurants), and first place takes home $600+ of that.

That reminds me; I need to fill out my 401(k). Not as much fun as Poker, but a more respectable kind of gambling I guess.

Oh, and I also got four of a kind yesterday, which gets you free stuff if you play at On the Rocks, but since I was playing at Hooters, I just got kudos. On yet another side note, one of the waitresses had just moved here from Dothan, Alabama. I didn't even know they had a Hooters down there, but since I left that town at age 7 I probably wouldn't have noticed if they did.

A Lady Doesn't Wander All Over the Room

and then blow on some other guys, er, cards.

By Frankie's definition, I think I've met a lady, insofar as she is Luck incarnate, carnality notwithstanding.

The story goes like this: I'm playing hold 'em, getting no love from the dealer (some might go so far as to call him a flip-flopper, but your faithful chronicler is above such low-brow wordplay). Anyway, I busted out of the main Monday night tournament without even making the top 15, after a series of lackluster hands (or at least some hack-hustler betting). I can't say that I blame Fortune, since she was right there all the time, I just wasn't reading her signals correctly.

Which is understandable, or at least should be. Sending mixed signals is the Fates' stock-in-trade; it's sorting through the noise that makes a gambler (or suitor) successful. The form in which She revealed herself last night was particularly well suited (no, that wasn't a card pun) to such tactics, and not above capitalizing on it. By all accounts she placed the establishment in danger of running out of alcohol altogether, and I'm not sure she paid for her own drinks once.

If you're wondering what this has to do with poker, I'm getting there (poker, I just met her! (ok, that one was)). During the second tournament (called Turbo, since the blinds go up every time you blink), the Lady was in full force. Now, no one said She could aim. Indeed, in the first hand, five players out of eleven went all in before the flop. I guess I'm not the only one easily enamoured. Fortunately for me, I wasn't among them, as the winner had a big slick of diamonds, which took a flush, knocking out a Siegfried & Roy, a Barbara Feldon, another set of Hilton Sisters, and an a Jack-queen or something). I didn't win those chips to begin with, since I didn't play that hand, but I got them in the end.

After waiting patiently all night, Luck came and sat down next to me, and explained that I should buy her a shot. Although in flagrant violation of the beer-before-liquor-never-been-sicker rule, she seemed willing to take her chances along with my money. While she was negotiating with me thus, my cards seemed to be FedExed from Mt. Olympus or something, because I couldn't lose. In the span of five hands, I had gone from fourth place to second, and won it in another two. I wish I could narrate all the ins and outs of how I did it (for the readers' benefit and my own) but I can't for the life of me remember any of it. This Fate might have been part Siren, part Medusa, but more power to her; she got me more face cards in ten minutes than I'd seen in two weeks.

Anyway, I agreed to her proposal, and told her to put whatever she wanted on my tab. (Note: I'm not a sucker in general, but the way I figure it, by being way too single for way too long, I've missed out on buying things for pretty girls, which means I have too much money to spend on junk at places like Old Navy and Del Taco, so really, it was an investment...right).

Who'dathunk you could hold fifteen dollars' worth of suds in a shot glass?

I don't care, I won, and I can always make more money doing things that aren't nearly as enjoyable as playing poker. It doesn't look like dancing is one of them in my case though, as I found yet another way to cause excrutiating pain inadvertantly.

I finally got the cute bartender to dance with me (she was off-duty), and we were doing fairly well, a swing to "Friends in Low Places (hopefully not new orleans)". Anyway, she hits her foot on the leg of a table and just about cries, which doesn't really add up; bartenders tend to have pretty strong feet, it being in the job description. Turns out she had a brand-new tattoo on that foot, and she wasn't even wearing a sock (presumably so she could show it off). Just goes to show ya, there's more than one way to skin a cat.

// Post-Katrina Update
For those of you not lucky enough to be sitting at around 7000 feet, well above the hurricane's level, you're probably thinking that the tone of this article could stand some improvement. Then again, if you're lucky enough to have power to read this, then you could do a whole lot worse. I thought about delaying the publication of this one, but then again, it seems ironically appropriate that I wrote about the fickleness of Luck on the day before she sacked a dozen or more floating casinos.

I was just about to suggest over at HalfBakery that they make the next round of riverboat casinos be aboard submarines, then figured some other nut would've already thought of that, and I was right. Interestingly enough, the Kentucky legislature had an idea in that same vein, but for a different purpose altogether.