Stud-8 isn't just for dicks!

I'm really trying to blog more as part of a New Year's resolution I made back in 2007. One of the things I promised to share on this blog was stories from the WSOP. Since I'll be out there in Vegas dealing it again this year, I'd better tell some of those stories now before I forget them and replace them in my brain with new stories.

My first time ever dealing Seven Card Stud High-Low Split (aka Stud-8) was in Event #33 - $10k Stud-8 Championship. I had been working one of the graveyard shifts the first couple weeks at the series which meant I hadn't really gotten the chance to deal in many bracelet events. I had only dealt in a couple of the NLH $1.5ks and a couple downs of HORSE (I never dealt Stud-8 in that tournament for whatever reason.) When the DC asked for people to deal it, I volunteered in a heartbeat. Stud is awesome and I wish there were more lower limit stud games around. All of the tables had at least a couple pros at them so I was a little nervous at first. My first table had Thor Hansen and Nick Schulman at it so I was super psyched. Unfortunately, one of my worst moments of the series happened at this table.

When a tournament first starts, either a restart or a fresh tournament, sometimes as a dealer you get locked into that first table for a few downs. Sometimes the DCs just don't have enough dealers to immediately push into strings and give breaks. Hey, whatever, shit happens. So, at my first table that I had to deal three downs in a row to, I had a guy who I'll just classify as a dick. As much time as I've spent in cardrooms, I've definitely run into a dick or two or hundred in my life. However, this was the first time I'd run into one from the other side of the table. He was talking amongst the other players in a manner that suggested that they knew him. The TV in the room had the US Open golf tournament on it and the off-topic conversation was mostly about Rory McIlroy and his dominant play.

Our friend in seat five had dumped some chips over the course of a few hands and I could tell that he was tilting somewhat. I don't claim to be an expert at stud-8 but he was calling with some tweener boards against people with much better-looking boards and always having second best.

Thor Hansen said something funny (I don't remember what exactly, he was a very friendly and seemingly likeable guy) and the whole table laughed, myself included. Well, this did not go over well with five-seat. He said something along the lines of, "hey dealer, why is it you're smiling while I'm getting cocks shoved in my ass?"

I told him I didn't need him to use that language or berate me and if he didn't agree with that I could have a floor come and explain it to him. He looked like he wanted to argue for a second but then he shut up. I was a bit unnerved by the altercation but I calmed down when I finally got pushed and moved to the next table. Pros at the next table included Phil Hellmuth and Mike Sexton. Despite what you see on TV, Hellmuth is actually a pretty nice guy and mostly quiet. The shenanigans are just a show for the cameras. The real poker pros don't berate the dealers, they have too much class than to do that.

A couple downs later was a player break and I told the floor about five-seat. He told me I handled it well and not to worry about it. I'm pretty sure he busted out of the money so whatever!

I've got a story about when I dealt to Hellmuth in the main event, but that's for another time.

My LFR virginity is gone

A shaman buddy of mine asked me if I wanted to try out LFR today. I hadn't done it yet and I'd been working on my pally's gear this whole time for something, right? So, off we went into the queue and a few minutes later we were blasting away at some boss, I don't even know. The whole experience was a blur. Here's how it went down:

1. Buff, beacon on tank, etc.
2. Boss fight starts
3. Watch raid frames and heal people taking damage
4. Repeat #4 ad nauseum
5. Roll on loot
6. Watch random people yell "OMG U SUXOR NOOB"

LFR is simply awful. I had to log off the game afterwards to clear my head.  If I had never raided before in my life and this was my first experience of it, I probably would never do it again.

When I was a kid...

I've been in a terrible mood today and little things are getting under my skin. I fired off an email to the company that distributes the junk mail to my house every week and told them to "stop sending me all this garbage."

I also left a comment on this post because it just rubbed me the wrong way. If you join a battleground and the mage decides not to drop a table and you decide because of that you're not going to heal him, that's fine. But publicly abusing the mage for not dropping the table and saying "HEY, DON'T HEAL THAT GUY, HE DIDN'T DROP A TABLE!" is elitist and absurd on a level that I can't even begin to imagine. None of the other classes dropped a table and a few of them probably didn't even give you a buff. By that logic, none of them should be healed at all. Especially rogues... with their no buffs and their being invisible and their poisons and blinds and whatnot.

Now, don't get me wrong, despite what it sounds like, I'm not defending the mages for not dropping a table. If I had all the money back that I'd spent dropping tables in random BGs then... well... I wouldn't have that much money since the reagents are so cheap. Maybe the person playing the mage just forgot to drop one or maybe he dropped 18 in a row in BGs and forgot to stock up on reagents. Or maybe he just doesn't care since he just lost five randoms in a row because he's been playing with M&S all day. My point is, asking "hey, could a mage please drop a table?" sounds a bit better.

I guess since people don't run into other players in groups/BGs anymore then being rude seems like the good first option since there are zero lasting repercussions to doing so.

In other news, I've been healing with my pally since I hit 85 a few days ago and I already have almost all 378+ gear (missing a trinket and a weapon.) I spent a few thousand gold on a couple items, spent points on a couple more and got the rest as drops. I find it ridiculous that I'm already end-content raid ready after hitting 85 and only running maybe 12 heroics? Don't get me wrong, I like loot as much as the next guy but I'm a big fan of challenge too. Surely there has to be a point between the raid loot from vanilla and what we have now.

I have a buddy who's been playing WoW most of it's existence who quit the game a few months back. He came back with a ten-day trial, geared up, killed Deathwing and promptly quit the game again. It'd be nice if Blizzard could hit some sort of sweet spot between vanilla MC "maybe you'll get a piece of gear this month" to "oh, you're 85? Here's all your gear, go kick some ass!"

I remember in vanilla running all over the place to put my "Tier 0.5" dungeon set together. Even though I was frustrated as hell that that STUPID MAGISTER'S HELM wouldn't drop off of that STUPID ASSHOLE GANDLING in Scholomance, once it did it was oh so super sweet.

My mage is still level 80. Next week he'll be 85 and the week after that I'll kill the final raid boss in the game with him. No biggie.

On a Thursday

Football season has come and gone and left us with a new Super Bowl champion. The Giants still managed to win even though the Patriots looked like the better team most of the game. Welker doesn't drop that pass or one of a couple other plays going the other way could've changed the outcome of this game completely. Around the end of the third quarter Devon, who had been watching the game with me, said, "This game is boring."

Huh. I guess it was. All of the excitement happened near the end I guess.

After what I thought was a pretty good football game, the important stories from the day emerged:

• OMG LOL Madonna is old!
• M.I.A. gave America the finger! LOLWUT!
• Gisele yelled at fans of the other team for razzing her about her husband's play.

Speaking of M.I.A., I learned some things about her. #1, did you know she's an actual person? I assumed with a name consisting of an acronym that she was a group of people. As I was watching the halftime show, my thoughts sounded like this:

"Hmm, Madonna isn't as terrible as I expected her to be. Is she lip syncing? I can't really tell but yeah, probably. Who's that girl with the big ass? Oh, um... yeah, her name is Nicole Minaj or something like that. What about the girl on the other side? No idea. I guess they put a random dancer up there to balance out the stage. I hope Madonna sings 'Ray of Light.' "


Thank god that's over. Less than two weeks until pitchers and catchers report!


*****


I've been playing a bit of World of Warcraft again to pass the time. I hadn't played more than a tiny bit since Cataclysm came out. I played the beta so much I didn't feel like playing the actual expansion. I've been leveling my pally and playing the glyph market. The game is fun but the world seems smaller than it did way back when I first started playing. Also, leveling is waaaay faster. Guild perks + heirlooms means I did 67-80 in almost no time at all. I'm almost 85 now (84.51 to be exact) and I'm not sure what I'll do when I hit 85. I think I might get my hunter to 85 next.

Playing the game at my own pace and not feeling obligated to be on at certain times to raid feels refreshing.

Twilight

I haven't read the books or seen the movies, but I've gotten the gist of Twilight and its sequels from their being lampooned frequently in pop culture. Oh Noa has brought Reasoning With Vampires to my attention with her "Funny Bitch Friday" post. It's a great rebuttal to those Twilight fans who claim that Stephanie Meyer is a good writer despite what you may think about the books.

Google Reader

I don't like the new Google Reader interface at all. Before it was compact and easy to navigate. I understand they're trying to mix it together with G+, but I wish there were a way to use the legacy mode.

I can't tell if this is annoying or awesome...

I was trying to copy and paste a line from an article on one of my favorite time-waster websites, cracked.com today when I noticed the clipboard had extra text added to it. Example:

If you hang around Internet message boards, about once a month or so somebody will announce they're fed up with America and want to move abroad. The reasons vary: they want to escape to Canada to get away from the corrupt corporations, or they fear a President Bachmann. Maybe they want to go to Japan and get a job as President of Anime.

Read more: 6 Reasons Your Plans to Move Abroad Might Not Work Out | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19363_6-reasons-your-plans-to-move-abroad-might-not-work-out.html#ixzz1V8U68X2Q

My first reaction is "wow, that's annoying, I bet they have some sort of javascript on the backend that does that." So, with a little bit of searching, I discover that a lot of websites are starting to do this and they use a service called tynt to do so. Rather than using a third-party to insert the text, another person has found a way to do it in javascript. It's a clever little script that doesn't modify the clipboard contents, but rather the buffer of selected text as it gets copied to the clipboard.

Now if i just want to post a one-liner to someone from one of these websites, I have to manually sanitize it through notepad. Thanks, web 2.0!

News and Notes

• Just got a new job, going to be dealing at the Horseshoe of Southern Indiana (the one in Elizabeth, not the one in Hammond, since there are two casinos named Horseshoe in Indiana.) I haven't dealt since the WSOP so we'll see how rusty I am.

• My good friend Matt got me to play City of Heroes/Villains with him. I'd played it off and on a bit before but never really got into it. I'm having a lot of fun with it now. I made a mind/energy controller and I enjoy having mobs attack each other instead of me. I'm almost level 30; I should hit that tonight and I'm going to be creating a new costume. The character customization in the game is awesome, 100x better than anything WoW has. My other favorite activity in the game is exploiting the Black Market (Auction House). People really like to leave a lot of money on the table at the benefit of dumping an item quickly.

• I haven't told any stories from the WSOP yet, but I promise I will. Here's a taste: http://bit.ly/q4Td03 I totally dealt this hand.

Back from Vegas

So, I'm back from working in Las Vegas for 2+ months. I had a lot of fun out there. I'll try to write about some of my experiences in my upcoming posts.

The flight out there sucked. I'd been flying Southwest recently, but I found a much cheaper flight on American so I went with them. I'd been flying with Southwest so long that I forgot that other airlines charge you to check bags. The woman behind the counter was unsympathetic and frankly was a fucking bitch. Another AA employee I encountered later was also being shitty, so needless to say, I won't be using AA for my travel needs in the future.

I went with United on the way back (two months later) and the people I encountered with them were much more friendly. There were issues with the flight that were out of their control but they handled them as well as I can imagine. My flight back to Louisville had an hour layover in Denver. As I was getting ready to board in Denver, there was a slight delay as storms moved into the area. They stopped long enough to let us get on the plane, but then more storms kept us trapped on the plane for another hour.

The flight was fine after that, but then once again, more storms in the Louisville area and we had to circle for 45 minutes. Eventually, the pilot told us we were in danger of running out of fuel, so we had to land in Indianapolis to refuel. By the time that happened, the storms in Louisville were over and the airport was reopened. We landed a little after 2am, instead of the scheduled 11:15pm. To top off the wonderful night, the power was out when I got home and didn't come back on until 9am the next day.

Okay, I guess I'm done bitching for now. I had limited net access while I was in Vegas, so I have lots of blogs and tweets to catch up on. I'd really like to write a lot about dealing in the WSOP but I want to doublecheck the legality of doing so as to not endanger my working relationship with Caesar's/Harrah's. I believe their terms specify badmouthing the company, but I don't have any plans to do so. I'd rather be safe than sorry however.

One quick note though: they were talking on the radio about whether or not the Yankees should bat Jeter lower in the order. If your immediate answer isn't "yes, of course they should" then you need to take Jeter's dick out of your mouth and start asking yourself what the ultimate goal in baseball is. Is it to pander to once-great players egos or is it to win games? Too many people are concerned about the former.

MLB2K11 and WoW

I spent some time over the last few days playing both of these games. I'll talk about MLB2K11 first and then WoW in my next post. I have a 360 and not a PS3, so I'm talking about that version of the game. Unfortunately, this also means I can't play The Show, which I've heard by all accounts is a better game.

First of all, I have to say the controls are much improved over last years game. The step hitting timing was so difficult for me that I could only do slap hits and my offense sucked ass. Also, even though I'm bad at pitching, I'm better this year. Last year, if you were only a little bit off on a gesture, you'd throw a "meatball." This year, it's better at figuring what pitch you meant to throw and at least makes some semblance of that pitch.

I only rented the game for five days and I spent the majority of my time playing My Player mode. I made a left-handed 1st baseman in the Cubs organization. I figured if I could build my guy up through a year in the minors, I'd have a shot of making the major league club the next year, depending on what direction they wanted to go. So, I messed up on my "clutch moment" at the beginning of the game and began my grind.

Every at-bat, the game gives you a task to try to complete for points you use to increase your players attributes. These tasks include get on base, get an extra base hit, drive in a run, don't swing at pitches out of the zone, etc. They add to the fun of each at-bat.

I found hitting to be very streaky. I'd go a few games getting a hit or two or three in a row, then I'd go cold for a week. I know hitting a real baseball is incredibly difficult, but the timing just seemed to be off a lot more than it should be. After playing the game a bit, you'd get into a pretty good rhythm, however sometimes you'd just start being very early or very late on all pitches. Also, "power hitting" is incredibly sketchy. They should've called it "pop foul back hitting" instead. You could get a four-seamer right down the middle of the plate, perform a power hit, and the ball would fly straight up and back and get caught a few seconds later by the catcher. I found contact hitting to be much more reliable. I only hit one(!) home run in the minors and that was with a contact swing. As I kept putting points into the necessary categories, I did notice my guy was making better and more solid contact with the ball.

Unfortunately, the hitting was the best part about My Player mode. The defense was kinda terrible. To minimize the amount of time you're actually controlling your guy during a game, you'll only be active on defensive plays where you're going to be making a play. As good as this is for speeding up the game, it means that if you're asked to play defense, you're *going* to be making a play. Playing first base was basically following the exact same steps:

Ball is hit. If line drive, catch ball, play over. If bouncer, if you moved to left, catch and step on bag. If you moved right, catch and toss to pitcher. If play started with runner on first, throw ball to second to start double play. If ball is hit over head into right field, do nothing. If ball is popped up, move to target to catch ball.

There, I think I just covered every scenario. It was so bad, that sometimes the guy would ground the ball foul. If this happened, he would often ground it to the exact same place 2-6 more times until he eventually grounded it fair and you could step on the bag. I only made one error at first base when I accidentally put too much oomph on my toss to the pitcher and winged the ball into the dugout.

Baserunning was the most time consuming part of the game. If you got a single with zero out, you'd often spend as much time on the bases that inning as you would spend playing the rest of the entire game. You press the right trigger to increase your lead and the left trigger to decrease it. You can increase your lead from first four "units." If you increase it to 3 or 4, sometimes the pitcher would throw over to first and you'd have to go back. So far so good. However, to signal a steal, regardless of your lead, you hold down the right trigger until the controller gives a very slight vibrate. 99.9% of the time when you did this, a second later, the pitcher would throw to second and your guy would start running to second. You'd immediately have to hit left trigger to retreat him to first, then the second baseman (or shortstop) would throw the ball to first and you'd easily be safe. I literally did this little dance twenty(!) times in a row. Signal steal, start for second, back to first, Signal steal, start for second, back to first. If you try to wait until the last possible second to signal a steal, for example, when the pitcher comes out of the stretch, it's too late. You can't start the runner until the ball is either caught by the catcher or hit. It's *incredibly* frustrating to be given a task of "complete a hit 'n' run" and you can't even leave first base early.

So, despite all of the problems, I played an entire minor league season with my guy. The only stat-based requirement I fulfilled was "play 15 games" I did not get an average of .260, OBP of .300 or a slugging % of .400. I only had 21 RBIs, 1 HR, a handful of extra-base hits and five steals for an entire season. I did complete all of the skill based requirements save one, and I thought I'd possibly get called up in September. My team, the Smokies won their AA championship but I didn't get called up. The Cubs didn't make the playoffs, but I remember the Angels beat the Brewers in the World Series.

Before I returned the game to the store tonight, I got invited to Spring Training. I only played ten games or so, and I was batting .200 with 4 RBIs. The team was in an odd state at the beginning of 2012. The organization didn't resign Carlos Pena, or any first baseman for that matter. Even my terrible guy was a shoe-in to get the starting job, considering I was the only listed first baseman in the entire organization. The Cubs did sign one guy though: Grady Sizemore was our new center fielder. Other than the unfun defense and baserunning, I also didn't like how the Spring Training games were going. You'd expect the lineups to be different so other players could get to play, but no. It was just the regular season lineup and rotation.

The game has a lot of problems that make me not want to purchase it. I'm really eager to try out The Show now.