Off to Vegas this weekend. A bunch of the yahoos who hung out with the childhood chum of one of my college roommates (long story) are mostly turning 40 this year. This weekend is the summary birthday party.
For me, this entails taking a bottle of Ardbeg and a couple hundred dollars and spending most of my time playing blackjack in a six deck shoe, with a buddy who is also marginally competent at keeping track of card distribution. We play for a couple hours, and then go out to dinner.
On occasion, however, one winds up hanging out with The Gamblör. He’s one of the same crowd of blokes, who works at a job that gives him a decent amount of disposable income, and he likes to shoot craps.
Shooting craps is the second best option in Vegas. Occasionally at the blackjack table in Vegas the odds are in your favor, but usually the house percentage is somewhere around 3%. The house percentage at craps is between 1.5% and 6.66% unless you’re silly enough to bet the center of the table (which I don’t, unless I’m winning and then it’s a $5 bet for the guys running the table, not for me).
However, craps is a really fast game, and unless you play very conservatively, you wind up with a lot of money out on the table and that old man Seven will come and take it from you.
Gambling with The Gamblör is dangerous. You can win $800 playing blackjack over the course of a night, and lose it all in less than 60 seconds if you go stand with The Gamblör and play the way The Gamblör plays. Of course, standing anywhere near The Gamblör is intoxicating if he’s winning, because he rakes in piles of cash that make that $800 look like chump change.
Over the years, I’ve learned to take almost all of my stake to the room, and fill the scotch flask before seeking out The Gamblör. Hang back, root for the team, and buy the 6 and 8 and hope he gets hot, then take my free dinner ’cause he’s happy to share the love with anyone who is with him when he gets hot.
I’ll never win like he does, but I’m not going to lose like he does, either. I’ve been The Gamblör myself a time or two, and I’m too old for that today. Such is life. Have you ever been The Gamblör, yourself?
One of my friends is The Gamblor. Smartest guy I’ve ever met. He played poker in Vegas when the bubble was going on and that’s how he made his living. When the bubble popped, of course, his source of income stopped coming… so he went to Asia and programmed a handful of gambling websites for folks who gave him insane amounts of money to program gambling websites.
He tried to teach me to play poker and I tried to learn but… I never got better than winning some money in the occasional daily tournament that they have in most of the casinos.
He’s still out and willing awesome outcomes into existence. There’s a rumor he’ll be hitting Vegas come Thanksgiving… which is also the *BEST* time to go to Vegas. (You would not believe the Thanksgiving buffets.) So I hope to post that I will be going there come November.
Good luck! (See a show while you’re there!)
I used to live where I could see Mohegan Sun from the top of my driveway. I’m glad I only lived there for 4 months.
(Still, playing 5 buck tables and 345 odds, I can normally ride out the fluctuations with a 200 buck stake. Esp playing the darkside. But now I find I can ride out a low limit poker table with a lot smaller stake and just be down a bit on average by the end of the night. Which is unlike Jaybird’s friend, but it’s good enough)
One comment I made was about how long I was able to stick it out.
“Our goal is not to lose slowly, Jaybird. That is not why we play poker.”
When the really dumb money was out there in the mid-decade poker boom, I was good enough to come out positive most of the time. But that wave has crested.
Oh and the real divide between The Gamblör and the ordinary folk is how many W-2G’s one has received. My lifetime count is 1, so that’s still very much poseur territory.
We play poker to take everyone’s money. All of it. Or in the words of Bill Cosby, “At least as much as they can sign for.”
Playing poker with friends is more dicey than playing Diplomacy with friends.
I don’t play poker in Vegas. I used to, but the rooms are now populated by 80% rubes and 20% regulars. It’s tough to buck 20% regulars. Not so much because they’re better than you, although in many cases they are… but because they know one or two other people at your table. Know them, really know ’em. More than they know you by reading you. And then know when that guy is going to do what he’s going to do.
When two or three have that kind of read on each other, they have an advantage that outweighs who reads players they haven’t met better. They’re playing at two levels of abstraction at once.
I’ll stick to blackjack. There I’m just playing The Computer.
*shrugs* I know two people who can win at poker at Hooters. One can count cards in his head, the other has a photographic memory. Neither would have fun doing it.
Much more fun to play -anything else- with someone smarter than the rubes.
Counting cards and photographic memories aren’t going to do you a damn bit of good at poker.
Blackjack, that’ll help quite a bit. Did you mean to say blackjack?
Yes, it can be “work” in a lot of ways, whereas poker isn’t. But the drinks are free and I’ve got a buddy and we like to talk a lot of smack at the table, and that’s its own brand of fun.
Pat, How about the largest, most destructive thermonuclear weapon on this planet? Would love to get a mathematical breakdown of that-yield, radiated heat, diameter of fireball, fatalities within that perimeter, radioactive fallout, survivability 100 miles away from ground zero, effects on environment—do temperatures go up or down?
What would have to happen for President Cahalan to use nuclear weapons on America’s enemies?
No politics here at MD.
You want to know the answers to the questions, feel free to email me (it’s easy enough to find me with Google). I did some nuclear weapon research for a friend who was looking to write fiction, so I have easy answers 🙂
As with so many other things in life, elementary calculus provides us with an elegant visual means of analysis. Let us posit the existence of a quantifiable unit of pleasure, which I will call the “hedon.” Pain is represented by a negative set of hedons, or perhaps by the presence of “antihedons.” (In fact, an antihedon is simply a negative hedon, much the way a particle can be an atom if electrons orbit the nucleus of neutrons and protons, or antimatter if the protons orbit an electron-neutron nucleus.)
Gambling is a function which generates either hedons and antihedons, depending on whether one wins or loses a particular bet. It becomes possible to graph f(gambling) for hedonic result.
Let us further posit that at a relatively low stake, a gamble which pays off generates one hedon for every dollar won is further generated. So if I bet $10 on a hand of blackjack or a throw of the dice, I generate 10 hedons for the gamble if I win. So far, so good. We can graph this out on a cartesian coordinate graph, in which the Y axis represents the size of the stake, and the X axis represents the hedonic function of winning or losing.
What one would expect would be that the curve thus described would be two straight slopes, moving rightward from the origin at constant rates roughly 45 degrees away from the X axis. Win $1, generate 1 hedon; lose $10, generate 10 antihedons, win $100, generate 100 hedons.
But it isn’t like that. The X axis is logarithmic while the Y axis is arithemetic. And the curves are asymmetrical along the X axis, moving more steeply downward than the corresponding curve moves upward. If I bet $10, and win, I generate 11 hedons. If I bet $10, and lose, I generate 20 antihedons — I feel the pain of losing more than I do the pleasure of winning.
Expand the scope by an order of magnitude, and the effect magnifies. I bet $100, and win, I generate roughly 150 hedons (dollar for dollar, it’s more fun to win a big bet than a small one). Conversely, if I bet $100, and lose, I generate approximately 500 antihedons.
A 6% house advantage means that 47% of my bets will generate hedons, and 53% of my bets will generate antihedons. Given that the curves are not mirror images of one another, and the majority of bets will produce antihedons, it is really only a matter of time before I am guaranteed a healthy crop of antihedons out on the casino floor.
Mine is a pessimist’s curve for hedonic gambling feedback because the asymmetry places greater weight on the negative side of the Y axis. This is why I will never be The Gamblör. His f(gambling) hedonic feedback curve must be shaped opposite of mine — he must find greater pleasure in winning that the pain he suffers in losing; his positive Y curve increases faster than does his negative Y curve. Indeed, he may not feel the pain of loss hardly at all. But when he wins, it’s surely an intense rush, better than sex or cocaine with a high stakes bet. Good for The Gamblör, but I the greater hedonic utility for someone like me is to be found at the show, the bar, the pool, the massage spa, and the steakhouse.
The bar and the steakhouse are pretty high on my list, at this point in the game.
I used to write essays about Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. It was part of the Shopping Mall. On the right.
They had these bacon-wrapped figs… stuffed mushrooms… an aouli that, when spread on bread, turned ambrosial on the tongue (who knew that ambrosia had so much garlic!)… and a blackberry sangria that was nectar.
They’re closed now.
There’s a restaurant at Bally’s (in the basement) that has a decent cheesesteak. It’s not as good as the stuff you’d get at CBBR, though.
sigh
the steakhouse at circus circus is the best in LV.
There’s a little holeinthewall thai place that is fantastic (offstrip).
Hmph. commander’s palace closed. sad that.
We used to go to William B’s in the Stardust. Now that the ‘Dust is dust, I’m a fan of this place:
http://www.usmenuguide.com/table34.html
The grilled rack of pork is a suitable payment for an assassination, it’s that good.
Okay Pat. I had a feeling, with your very strong science background, that this subject would be right up your alley.
And have fun in Vegas–maybe you can put all your knowledge about game theory into action and leave with bundles and bundles of hard earned cash! So long. MH
Yo Burt–Whoops, a major mistake there, with above comments to Pat. But hey, not strong enough to deliver the fatal blow, right? And how do the rules apply to walks, or hit by pitch? Or too much resin on the bat, cork in the bat, throwing spitters. On those counts will have to ask the umpire. If still unresolvable, have to give Selig a call.
In the meantime, count is 0-2, so let’s say that last slip-up was just a long foul ball–what do you think?
I wasn’t really thinking politics when writing that–just the science, dimensions, and destructive capacity of nuclear warheads.
See ya. MH
go to the Pinball hall of fame. The fun there ain’t rigged.