Chicago: More Bars in More Places

powering vegas is destroying the west's rivers

xp i mean you are all otm. just because i think it's fascinating doesn't mean i don't wish that someone would just go ahead and carpet bomb the whole thing. and hit the hoover dam while they're in the area.

awesome site:

http://www.cheapovegas.com

if you gamble you get nothing!

You get to play a game and sit in a weird, weird place! Your results may vary, obv.

gotta know when to hold 'em
know when to fold 'em

i like the sunshine and buffets. eazy has sold me on vegas.

toby wants to go to the grand canyon. this might be a stupid question, but is it doable year round? or does it actually get cold/snowy in winter?

gambling to "get" money ---> addiction and sorrow
gambling to pass the time, get drinks and chit chat with your tablemates ---> can be fun, but only if the stakes are low (for me)

xp grand canyon in the winter is fully snowy

i mean, at the rim. i think there's something like a 25 degree temp differential between the rim and the base, if not more. but i visited in the spring with my parents, and there was snow on the ground, and it was about 40 degrees up top. you have to remember, it's at 5000-6000 ft (?) or something, and in the desert. that equals cold.

gambling to pass the time, get drinks and chit chat with your tablemates
see, this appeals to me zero

i would rather be at moody's playing cribbage.

i mean, horshoe and gambling not-getters: why do you think men have poker night??? to make a little extra spending money?

$9 pitcher + games + tablemates who have been preapproved by me = much much more appealing.

i understand how someone would find vegas appealing, i guess, it's just that it sounds like an awful, depressing nightmarish waste of time for me. poker night makes a lot more sense than vegas.

(I'm not really arguing with anyone here--there's nothing arguable it seems. there's something aesthetic about the experience of gambling that I've never experienced, I guess.)

Chicago Fire v. Club Deportivo Social y Cultural Cruz Azul
10/10 7:30 PM

Lots of tix still available, looks like.

http://chicago.fire.mlsnet.com/news/team_news.jsp?ymd=20070914&content_id=117203&vkey=pr_chf&fext=.jsp&team=t100

(if anyone's interested)

yeah, of course, rw. I know. it's that aesthetic thing that's unavailable to me.

it's basically the same as sitting around and playing cribbage or whatever with your pals, except with the added dick-measuring of who is able to place large bets, and who walks away with everyone else's money

xp and yeah, vegas /= poker night, for many people, but then again going to vegas with your pals is basically poker night on coke, and with more strippers

(many many xposts)

I'd go to Vegas just to see the insanity, probably wouldn't gamble much if at all, probably wouldn't go back unless someone else was paying for it.

lol we r all poor

right, the aesthetic is unappealing to me, too.

but honestly, i've been to some extremely depressing poker nights. sitting in people's basements, listening to deep purple on classic rock radio and seeing some dude lose his car to this other dude? extremely depressing. a valuable experience, but not something i want to do for myself. i mean, he gambled his car away. that's a bad idea.

i guess what i do not like is dick-measuring.

rw, do you think the dick-measuring thing is the content of the enjoyment? that would be interesting if it were true...

(I mean, obviously figurative dickmeasuring, there are women who dig gambling, after all)

(although the other half of why Vegas depresses me=fliers for hookers that get passed out on the corner)

thinking about gambling turns me into Ned Flanders. ;_;

So I take it your screen name isn't a tribute to the establishment in Hammond, IN?

Yeah, Dan OTM, the appeal of Vegas for me has little to do with gambling. I mean, I'd love to go into the casinos and check out the scene, but it's more just about being in the belly of the beast and walking down streets lit up entirely with neon and having a cup of coffee at an all-night 50's-style diner and gazing at the gaudy glass buildings.

Do you play cribbage, Amanda? Did I not know this? Can we do this before it's too cold out in the beer garden?

Gambling as recreation that pays for itself is the ideal. Three hours of poker that costs the same as dinner at Charlie Trotter's is sad. three hours of poker that results in winning a dinner at Charlie Trotter's is rad.

I wouldn't try to talk anyone into gambling any more than I would talk anyone into drinking or drugs or threesomes or whatever. I think part of my interests in poker and wine have to do with moderation, that I don't crave either one and that I wouldn't enjoy them as much if I did.

That said, I know some decent poker players who have enjoyed the recreation of gambling in Vegas but who also profited from playing against tourists for whom $200 is chump change and poker is a goof.

(and I won first place, $380, in a poker tourney a few weeks ago playing against 16 people, including Chicago's finest audio engineers!)

Certainly, part of enjoying the liminal places Kenan and I sometimes enjoy (casinos and bars - I never made it to Clark's) involves enjoying places that other people find severely depressing.

(yeah, the hotels are amazing; if there hadn't been zombie-looking families everywhere, I might have had a good time.)

i mean, i think for some guys it really is figurative dick-measuring: they can bet you off the table when you don't have enough cash OR they walk away with all your money. but that's just poker. blackjack is a game, and, moreover, it's a game that CAN be "gamed," which is why there are so many nerds into gambling.

however, anteing up your car in a friendly neighborhood poker game probably means that you are depressed, and the type of person that actually believes that fortune will smile on you this time, when the truth is that she never ever smiles on anyone ever. no one ever actually wins at gambling. that's sort of the point!

I guess I have a failure to experience the aesthetic at all? like it never rises to the level of aesthetic because I'm too caught up in the mechanics of it all.

xpost to Eric

also, Vegas is too effing hot.

I'll tell you though -- I've played pool and poker semi-seriously, and there is no greater satisfaction than beating someone who is into dick-measuring, guys who get angry when they lose.

ha also I suck at pool and poker and I hate being bad at things because I am a big baby. that might play into this as much as the Flanders stuff.

the simple joy of the pwn

the "loser gambler" that gets stereotyped is fundamentally lazy and romantic, you know? gambling, like the lottery (also depressing, in a way), encourages people to make ridiculously REAL and LARGE financial decisions based on wholly unrealistic assumptions, with the promise that it'll get them out of whatever mire they happen to be in.

i mean, high-rollers are always rich before they become high-rollers. it's a hobby, not a profession.

xposts i'm with eazy: the few times i've played poker, i've managed to walk away with "serious" players money simply by bluffing. i made $3!

nb i am lazy and romantic

the "loser gambler" that gets stereotyped is fundamentally lazy and romantic, you know?

you'd think I'd be into it!

ha xpost

I think it was 2 weeks ago (?) that one of the stories on This American Life was about people who play poker for a living. High rollers, pros, lose and win hundreds of thousands of dollars in a night. It's their job. Fascinating stuff.

in a way, the lottery is worse, because while the casual player (say, my dad) might spend $5/week on a few tickets, betting on the fact that he'll get hit by a piece of airplane, some other person is dropping 50-100 on the extremely faulty assumption that that will significantly increase their odds.

...i'd like to crunch the numbers on how many tickets you'd have to buy to get a statsitically significant chance of return. why don't former lottery winners just buy like a million lottery tickets once a year?

About Chump Change
One night me (Ben D. Straw), Kool-Aid, and my cousin Mike drunkenly figured we should put together a useless punk/ska band. I mean...It's cool to watch people play, but better to be up there playing yourself.

With pool and poker you get guys who really should be playing chess instead, ones who are into geometry and math and who really don't believe in intuitition, and I'm kind of a goofball who to a certain extent needs to be disrespected at the table to win, Mr. Misunderestimated.

I played on a bar pool league where each of us had a nickname from a Guns 'n' Roses song. Isidro Matamoros (hope you google this, man, it's been too long) was the best player and was "Patience". Someone else was "Night Train". I was "You're Crazy".

When I signed up for Facebook, I got back in touch with someone I had played poker with here around 2003 -- she and her boyfriend, in their early 20s, ran a game out of their Wrigleyville apartment and moved to Vegas a few years ago to play professionally. A few days ago her status update was "J____ is broke."

looks like you'd have to drop 10 million to get something close to a 1:100 chance.

http://www.webmath.com/cgi-bin/lottery.cgi?count=6&low=1&high=99

you guys have heard about those MIT students that formed a secret blackjack "team" and fleeced a bunch of casinos, right?

i bet dan has.

xxpost There was another TAL a couple months ago about this dude who was in the business of offering lump sums to lottery winners (much smaller than the actual winnings) instead of the $30 grand or so a year the state would pay you. He reports that he has never met a lottery winner who didn't wish they hadn't won. It apparently brings out your very worst tendencies.

I heard that one, it was v. interesting.

I haven't heard of them, actually, but it doesn't surprise me. I knew a ton of nerds at MTU who made big $ (well, big $for college students anyway) in online blackjack and poker before it started getting illegalized.

I work with a guy at Catch who played backgammon for a living for 5 years. He has semi-quit the restaurant to go back to it. As an alcoholic (self-proclaimed) he finds the backgammon lifestyle more accomadating as the restaurant schedule is too taxing.

Bwahahaha.

I've always thought that the way to go if you win the lottery would be to basically continue your lifestyle, except without worrying about money. You know, maybe pay off your car or buy a house, but just keep rolling with that cushion of lottery money, instead of thinking "omg I can indulge my craziest dreams, wtf do I do with my life?"

maybe gambling freaks me out so bad because I can so easily see becoming someone who turns it into a lifestyle. gambling=graduate school.

understand how someone would find vegas appealing, i guess, it's just that it sounds like an awful, depressing nightmarish waste of time for me.

i feel the same way about skiing.

I can see playing pool or poker for a living, but this guy was a backgammon champ! He made a lot of money.

I don't even know what backgammon is!

I remember in the TAL episode, they talked about how a bunch of lottery winners decided to use their winnings as capital to start a bar or restaurant, which then invariably failed because they had no idea how to actually manage a bar or restaurant.