May 19
I just watched my first beating/stabbing. I’ve lived in Chicago (the city part) for almost 9 months, so in a way I was due. I’ve had friends get attacked while strolling the gold-paven streets of Evanston. And if the well lit paths of Northwestern’s campus invite assault, the mean streets of Chicago seem to guarantee it.
Riding the bus this morning, my attention on a book, I suddenly snapped to alert when the bus slammed it’s brakes while blaring its horn. A few passengers around me stood up and looked over my shoulder through the window behind me. I turned around to see three men fighting in the street. After a moment I realized that it was actually two men standing up, beating on a third man crumpled upon the ground. One of the attackers looked to be holding something and brought it down with both hands into the third man’s abdomen. The bus driver yelled and the two guys ran off into the sidestreet and quickly disappeared. The man on the ground didn’t move for a few seconds, then slowly rolled over and stood up. He had blood on his face and moved pretty slowly, but I was happy that he wasn’t dead. I’m not sure whether he had actually been stabbed or not. Maybe the attacker had been pounding him with his fists together, the way a gorilla would crush a small animal. The man walked to the street corner where I hope he found a police officer. As our bus drove off, the man sitting across from me said he thought the attacker was holding a long spike and had stabbed the man. That’s what I had thought at first, too. But I would think that a person who had just been stabbed a few times by a long metal spike wouldn’t be able to stand up and walk afterwards. Maybe this guy is just incredibly tough. At any rate, I hope he is ok.
UPDATE: I just came across this link. It is a Google Maps meets Chicago Crime-scenes. Check it out.
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I suppose I should write a post to follow up on my trip to the shady casino in Michigan. There is certainly a lot I could talk about it, but I wonder how much of it would be interesting. At any rate, on Friday night I drove to Mt. Pleasant, Michigan along with my brother and our friend Ben. The plan was to hit the Soaring Eagle casino and make a lot of money. I wasn’t totally excited about the idea for a number of reasons. First, it seems like a huge waste of time to drive 5 hours to go to one casino when I can drive 30 minutes into Indiana and have my choice of 4 others. My brother is only 19, though, so the only place he can gamble is an Indian casino, and the closest one is in Mt. Pleasant. More important than the time investment, I couldn’t afford to lose any money. They say that the cardinal rule of gambling is to never risk what you can’t afford. Pretty sound advice, but I have to tell you, gambling is far more exciting when you can’t afford to lose. Game 7 of a series is always more exciting that Game 1. I’m not the type of person to let budget or consequence to control my actions, and so I emptied my bank account, borrowed a few hundred dollars from Lukas, and sped off to Michigan.
We didn’t leave until almost midnight so we didn’t arrive at my grandparents’ place until around 6am (time change, everybody). The three of us slept a few hours and then woke up around noon to get a jump on what we expected to be a long day. I felt bad about using my grandparents’ house simply as a place to sleep when we weren’t gambling, but when I woke up they asked for some help with their tv. I spent about an hour reading through diagrams and manuals and finally managed to split their cable signals and give them picture-in-picture. They really wanted the P-in-P but had been told it was impossible. Anyway, I played with the wires for a while and got it to work. That mad them both so happy that I didn’t feel bad about using them anymore. Once everything was working and explained, we left for the Soaring Eagle.
We decided to play 3-6 hold em and because our names were together on the waiting list I ended up at the same table as Ben. I had the 9 seat, Ben had the 7 seat. Within the first half hour Ben was up around 200 dollars. Within that same half hour I lost a little over 100 dollars. What the fuck, though, I drove this far to play so I went and bought another 40 dollars in chips. Over the next few hours I gradually worked my way back to even while Ben held steady at his initial profit. We started playing around 2:30 in the afternoon and by about 6 we were starving and decided to go grab some food. In between bites of Polish sausage, Ben and I reflected on our game thus far. After his initial streak Ben had basically folded every hand for the past 3 hours. Meanwhile, I was just over even, a profit of maybe 10 dollars. I was really happy about that though, because in our minds I wasn’t even at all. I was up more than a hundred dollars since my initial loss. We agreed that the table was incredibly weak, and there was no reason we shouldn’t leave the casino considerable winners.
When everyone is equally matched, limit hold ‘em is a card catching contest. You have to hope that your cards are better than everyone else’s. Hope that you get more winners than losers. While this isn’t necessarily true at higher limits, at 3/6 there will always be at least one (and usually a half dozen) callers to every bet you make. The only way to win most hands is to show down the best cards. In short, bad players can’t be bluffed. Still, this doesn’t always make winning a game of luck. With all things being equal, luck would dominate skill. But in this particular game things were nowhere near equal.
After an hour or two my brother requested a table change and took an open seat at our table. Eric took the 10 seat, just to my left, while Ben remained in the 7 seat, two to my right. I dont know what the rules are on this sort of thing. Or even if the rules allow it, I’m not sure of the ethics. Either way, the people at our table didn’t have much of a chance. The other players meant well, but they simply couldn’t match our combination of aggression and experience. The casual player at our table didn’t understand the low value of one pair and would call along, ultimately losing to our superior hands. The more experienced player at our table knew the odds and percentages but wasn’t willing to gamble and play back at our raises. With the three of us at the table together we each won another hundred dollars within the course of two or three hours.
Naturally, leave it to my brother to fuck things up. When my brother loses at something he can be a huge bitch. When he wins at something, he becomes arrogant… and a huge bitch. Ben and I were playing quietly, politely taking the other players’ money. My brother couldn’t leave well enough alone. It wasn’t enough to beat them. He felt the need to humiliate them. When he bet or raised he would announce it in a defiant tone, and when he finally won the pot he would make some dumbass comment like ‘Yeah… that’s what I thought.’ The dealers were getting upset and the players were shooting glares at our end of the table. I whispered to him to cool it, just fucking play and don’t be an asshole. He responded with the typical “yeah, I know. What did I say?” The next pot he won he flipped his cards over and casually called out, “Good job. You lose.” I turned to Eric again and told him to shut the fuck up. I looked at the dealer and saw she was gritting her teeth.
“Dude, just be quiet, please.”
“Why? I just told him he lost. It was the truth.”
“I know. But it isnt even what you say, but the way you say it. Try and play with less attitude.”
“Yeah I know. Whatever…”
Things were getting out of hand. Instead of playing poker I was trying to restrain my brother and not get us all kicked out. I mean, we only drove 10 goddamn hours to play here. But then, and I admit this might be partly my fault, I was dealt pocket 3′s in middle position. Everyone had folded up to me so I decided to play a little loose and opened for a raise. My brother, acting just after me, makes the call. Everyone else folds – including the blinds, who probably just didnt want to play against my brother and I. He turns to me and gives me the look I know all so well. This hand isn’t going to be about the cards. It’s personal. But see, thing about me is that I don’t like to get pushed around, especially by my brother. I know that he is in this hand almost exclusively to beat me. Normally heads up we should play softly, keeping the pot small, not taking eachother’s money.
Normally.
Before the cards are dealt I throw out a bet. “3 dollars in the dark.” The dealer turns her head. Betting blind is probably not a normal play at the 3/6 tables in Mt. Pleasant. But whatever. The flop comes, my brother calls. I again bet in the dark, “6 dollars”. My brother raises in the dark. The turn comes out, and I make the call. On the river I actually wait for the dealer before checking. My brother looks at me, thinks for a minute, and checks back. “I probably win, I have a pair of 3′s” I say. My brother mucks his hand. The rest of the table is watching us, some of them pretty upset, obviously many of them could have beat a single pair of 3s. “You raise with a pair of 3′s?!” one man calls from across the table. I shrug my shoulders and turn back to my brother while the dealer pushes me the chips. Now Eric was super pissed. He had high cards, but none of them hit. I knew what he had from the beginning. He knew what I had from the beginning. The hand was only contested as a battle of pride and ego. He didn’t even lose that much money, but he had lost and that was enough. He started talking shit to me, the way we usually do when competing at something. The dealer was becoming irate, finally asked if we knew eachother. We admitted to being brothers and she took that as cause to move Eric to a different table. The floor manager came over and escorted him to an open seat two tables away. I don’t actually think that there actually is a “brothers cant play with eachother” rule, and I’m certain it wouldn’t have been a problem even if they had known all along, but for the sake of civility a change needed to be made and that was the excuse they gave. It was still clear that Ben and I knew eachother, but we were both being nice to everyone so nobody said anything about it.
At the other table my brother didn’t do so well. He was up and down, sometimes a big winner, sometimes a big loser. Eventually he went out to the parking lot, smoked up, then came back to the table and lost the rest of his money. I don’t really feel bad for him. It was his own fucking fault. If he could control himself and not act like a dickhead then we would have all left big winners. As it was, he lost around 100 bucks (far less than I expected he would).
I was the big winner of the day. I bought in for 140 dollars total and after 14 straight hours of play I was sitting on top of 563 dollars in chips. That number is impressive (to me at least) for different reasons. In one sense, it isnt very much. I have made far more money in far less time playing blackjack. However, in blackjack I would be playing for 25-50 dollars per hand and not grinding it out a few dollars at a time. In a limit game they say you should try to win one big bet per hour. So in a 3/6 game I should hope to win 6 dollars per hour. Ben ended up winning around 80 dollars, right on target. However, I averaged around 30 dollars per hour, or 5 big bets. You can’t really expect much more out of a low limit game. What also made the 563 dollars impressive is that I held it entirely in $1 chips. I had 28 stacks, 20 chips high, arranged in a 6×6 triangle flowing out in front of me. On top of the first triangle was a 3×3 triangle with another stack on top of that, all forming a big pyramid of money. I realize they were only one dollar chips, but having a shitload of something, no matter how worthless they may be, is pretty awesome. It took 6 chip racks and two people to cash me out, at which point the man in the cage remarked, “So that’s where all our blue chips went…”
Anyway the trip was a success, and despite the incidents with my brother, everybody had a good time.