Chicago: More Bars in More Places

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.

As far as Vegas, I have always thought that I would like to go there in order to be better at hating it.

There's definitely a gambling tradition on my mom's side of the family. My grandmother played bingo a few times a week into her eighties, my aunt and uncle paid for their daughter's wedding by winning the Pick Six at the track. I don't think anyone has either gone broke and gotten rich from it.

Jordan, that lifestyle sounds like a good one. A few years ago, Leonard Cohen found out that he had been bilked by his manager and accountant -- he didn't realize how much money they had stolen because all he wanted basically was $150,000 in the bank at a time, and the rest he assumed was invested elsewhere. Having a set amount in a bank account, and replenishing it when it goes down, would be tha life.

Howard Lederer (poker champ, interesting guy) was a pro backgammon player before he switched games.

TAL also taught us that it makes better financial sense to take the one-time (smaller net) payment, esp. if you are a typical gambler.

i feel the same way about skiing.

-- chicago kevin, Monday, October 8, 2007 9:47 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

oh yr just pushing my buttons

horseshoe, i went to vegas with my roommate while in grad school (he, too, was a grad student). He lost $1,200 in under 90 minutes. I love him to death, but it confirmed that he's a jackass. I sipped free drinks and may have won $11 on blackjack.

Yeah, man! I'd be like hey, my retirement, right there. I could just continue with my 401k 6% matching or whatever, and not have to scrimp to pay the rent or like buy a computer, that's pretty much ideal for me.

free/cheap shit is also pretty dope about Vegas.

$1200 jesus christ. they shouldn't let graduate students inside the Vegas city limits.

big xpost

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.

Right, or they went right out and bought things like cars or houses that they could never afford before, only to discover that they STILL couldn't afford them. $30 thousand a year, trickled down from the state, is not quit-yr-day-job type money.

I think if I had a huge influx into my checking account, though, I would be tempted to buy a bunch of Louboutins. I feel for the lottery winners.

Jenny has a friend whose motto is "you're not really gambling till you're playing with the rent." The thing is, that does not even begin to accurately express how much he gambles.

And we were playing the slots at Delaware Downs.

Turns out that our taking him gambling was strictly against the rules in his domestic partnership....

playing the slots=stonefacedly, endlessly refreshing the ILX new answers page=the most depressing shit ever

I think it would be safe to estimate that he lost a good $500 in slots in less than 2 hours.

He did one-shots with $20s, non-stop.

you can do that?

My mom won $800 out of slots in Reno. That was fun.

Meanwhile I walked out $50 lighter, and had I not had a gallon of beer in me, I would have had a record breaking guilt-anxiety attack.

oh yr just pushing my buttons

-- river wolf, Monday, October 8, 2007 4:50 PM (Monday, October 8, 2007 4:50 PM) Bookmark Link

no, i just hate the cold so paying to be outside in it would make me miserable beyond belief. i didn't always hate it so i can kind of see the attraction but i can't think of many things that would i would like less.