Car wreck
When I got out of the Navy a long time ago, my wife had gone ahead and was in Baton Rouge, and I drove from San Diego, almost straight through.
I had a cold, and stopped in El Paso at the Army base there and got a bottle of strong cough syrup. Back then strong cough syrup with coedine was sold over the oounter.
So, I'm tooling down the hiway, with this coedine laced cough syrup between my legs (I was 19, I wasn't very smart). Everytime I got a tickle in my throat I took a swig.
I got to Uvalde, Texas, and was going through town (no Interstate 10 back then) and I fell asleep at the wheel, went off the road, hit a parked car, went throught the windsheild.
Woke up 3 days later in a hospital. I was fine. They told me they were going to keep me a couple more days, I called my wife in Baton Rouge to tell her what happened. I was still kind of groogy and after I hung up she realized all I'd told her that I was in the hospital in Uvalde, Texas, and hadn't told her what hospital.
She was staying at my parent's house while looking for an apartment in Baton Rouge, and she got frantic and told my dad that I didn't tell her what hospital I was in.
My dad said, "Well, how many hospitals do you think they have in Uvalde, Texas?"
This guy had been a professional heavy weight boxer before his 15 years in San Quentin, and was the prison yard weight lifting champ in prison.
Anyway, somebody shoplifted a bottle of something or other. Chief (my freind) confronted the shoplifter who stabbed Chief in the chest and took off running. The knife was lodged in Chief's ribs. Chief caught up with the guy at an intersection a block or so away. In the middle of the street he grabbed the guy and started beating him. He beat him until he fell down, then he picked him up and beat him some more. He finally dropped the guy when he fainted from the loss of blood from the knife wound.
The guy was dead.
chief was laying in the middle of the intersection, right next to the dead guy, and a garbage truck came along. It missed the dead guy, ran over chief. The knife was still lodged in chief's chest.
The knife was surgically removed, he had to have surgery on his spine and hips, he more or less recovered. The killing was no-billed as self-defense. It seems there were some outstanding warrants on the guy he killed for some armed robbery, rape, assault, various stuff.
Whenever anybody says something about a tough guy I think of Chief.
Some of my favorite sites
- RecPoker.com -- a web access to the rec.gambling.poker newsgroup
- Lou Kreiger's website Lou is the author of a bunch of poker books
- Cardplayer.com -- The website for Cardplayer magazine. Nice place to read the current issue, but I find the site hard to navigate.
- twoplustwo.com -- Site, with discussion forum, of 2+2 publishing -- Sometimes has interesting discussion threads. The main problem is the heavy handed censoring by Malmuth. He's a little prickly about perceived personal insults.
- Danny Negreanu's site I really get a kick out of Danny's adventures.
- Poker Magazine.com I write for them, and they pay on time. They have some good stuff from other writers also, a connection to rec.gambling.poker, and other stuff.
- Andrew Prock's website. He's the author of pokerstove, a freeware poker hand analyzer. If you're a student of poker you should have a copy of pokerstove.
- KillTheRake.com, a site I've been making contributions to
- Barry Greenstein has some stuff about his book, about some of the players he plays with, about neptotism in celebrity poker, and other stuff.
PokerRoom offers frequent freerolls, but sadly you can't collect your winnings without earning players points, so you have to make a deposit to collect on a freeroll. But, they also offer a strong first deposit bonus and their bonus bucks aren't difficult to work off
House prices
When I moved from Chicago to SF in the early 80's I sold a two bedroom condo near the loop for $52,000. The best price I could find on comparable property in SF was $140,000. But I could rent a comparable apartment in the Marina for $600 a month. So I rented.
Horseback
I grew up in the city, in Austin, but my daddy had grown up in Alpine, Texas, cowboy country.When I was 6 he decided I needed to learn how to ride a horse so we went out to some trail horse rental place in the hill country and rented two horses.
My daddy was kind of nuts about that cowboy stuff, when I was 3 he bought me a $20 felt cowboy hat (1952 $20) and I took it down to the creek to see if it would float.
We were more or less trotting along the trail when his horse just stopped dead. (Later my dad said the horse had seen a snake in the trail). The horse stopped, but my dad didn't. He went head first over the top of the horse, landing on the ground with a pretty big thump.
I thought it was all part of the show, so I stopped my horse and just sat up in that saddle and laughed and laughed. It just looked funny to me.
My daddy never had a need to take me horse back riding again.
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The Complete Book of Hold'Em Poker
Trip to San Marcos
When I was 15 I had a summer job at a resort ranch in Wimberley Texas. There was a beer joint on the other side of San Marcos, kind of like that cowboy bar in Blues Brothers. They had live music on weekends and if you were underage they'd staple a yellow ticket to your shirt collar (you didn't get in if you didn't have a shirt with a collar back then) at the door. At the back of the place they had a little window in the wall so you could order beer. There were no actual employees on the floor. Seating was on picnic tables, with a dance floor and a band stand. I don't recall chicken wire in front of the band, but things did get rough at times.One Friday night me and some friends were coming back from there, going through San Marcos I ran a red light. A deputy gave chase. I didn't stop. West of town I took a turn on a ranch road with no lights and without hitting the brakes. The deputy missed the turn so I lost him. We all went home.
The next day I was out at Eagle Rock Ranch and a kid from town came in and told me that CJ had sent him out to tell me to come into town to talk to him. CJ was the constable (in Texas county precints have constables) and also was a barber with a barber shop in Wimberley.
So, I drove to town (in my car) and went into the barber shop.
CJ says, "You been to San Marcos recently, Gary?"
Me: "No, sir".
CJ: "Well, I got a phone call from the Sheriff this morning".
Me. Silent.
CJ: "He's looking for somebody who drives a car he got a description of".
Me. Oh.
CJ. "It's a chevrolet".
Me. Silent.
CJ. "It's a convertible. 1954"
Me "Really?"
CJ "It's kinda orange colored. But, the driver's door is a light
blue. And the trunk lid is pai
CJ. "You ever seen a car like that?"
Me. "No sir, I don't think so"
CJ. "Well, if you do, you'll tell me, right?"
Me: "Yes sir".
CJ. "Okay, you go on now".
I turned to leave. he says "You planning on going into San Marcos
anytime soon"
Me: "No sir"
CJ. "Well, iffen I was you, I wouldn't go to San Marcos for a real
long time".
Leaving school
I had a professor when I was a grad student who I talked to a lot when I was thinking about quiting the PhD program at Northwestern. He and I were both recently single fathers and spent the morning getting the kids fed and dressed and delivered to day care, then ended up eating breakfast at the student union at the same time.
He told me that to be a successful academic you need to be look around and find problems you could solve, then solve them, and write a paper about your solution and show how smart you are. His impression that such an approach didn't really interest me, that I was more interested in problems that I didn't know how to solve and that's more the kind of thing that confronted corporate operations research analysts.
I sold a car once, it was a 1961 Ford and it was a piece of shit. I sold it for $300. The guy who bought it started counting out a few 20's on my dining room table. Then a few tens, then a bunch of ones. Then started pulling coins out of his coat pocket and counting out quarters. When he got to dimes he was at $287. I was so scared that if we took too long that he might change his mind I just scooped up the $287 and gave him the title saying, "That's enough, that's good".
Getting a Raise
Back in the 70's, when inflation was going nuts, big raises were expected in systems.Then Carter asked for corporations to slow down the raises (and banks were skittish of the Bert Lance fallout) and we complied with a promise of a limit of an across the board 7%. Not an average, nobody would get a raise over 7%.
Our recent training class graduates (we hired trainees in groups of 10 and put them thru a 4 month full time in house training program) had been expecting a raise substantially more than 7% within a couple of months of completeing the training class.
Randy, my new programer asked me is the new rule was going to apply to him. I told him I didn't know, but I'd ask. So I went to Tony, my bosses boss, and asked him. He assured me that the new training class had been led to expect a much larger raise than 7% and he'd do whatever it took to make sure they wouldn't be disapponted. So I told Randy not to worry.
A paycheck or two later Randy got a raise, it was about 6%. He showed me his check and asked me what the hell was that all about.
I went down to Tony's office. I went nuts. I told him, "I'm getting a raise in August, I don't know how much, but take a $1,000 of it and give it to Randy and don't ever lie to me about my staff again".
Within about 20 minutes there was an emergency meeting called of all project managers (I was one of them). We were told, "Anybody who was in the same training class as Randy is getting an extra 10% raise starting next paycheck. Go ahead and tell them that the checks they got today were a mistake and it will be corrected next payday".
That day become known as the "Day that Gary pissed on Tony's Desk".
Randy was the best programmer who ever worked for me, by the way.
Know your math
This is a story from the early days of operations research during WWII.When early radar devices where first installed on destroyers in the Pacific it basically doubled the radius of detection from what they could detect visually.
Ship captians observed that the number of sightings of jap aircraft didn't just double, it quardupled.
So, it became common knowleged among destroyer captians and crew that the japs could detect radar and, against orders, they would dismantle the radar units as soon as they put to sea.
They were mostly technically trained, many of them with engineering degrees from the Navy Academy.
Think of the equation for the area of a circle.
Common knowledge is sometimes stupid enough to be deadly.
To convince the ship captians of the usefullness of radar the Navy sent civilian physicists to sea with the tin cans (on combat missions) to explain geometry to them.
The cop said or did something, I don't remember what, but I took offense to it. I said, "Who do you think you are, Matt Dillon or something" (for the children in the crowd that wasn't the name of an actor, it was the name of a character on a TV show). He just stared at me and then said, "Yeah", in two syllables. I shut up.
Anyway, my friend showed up and gave the desk sargeant the "fine" money. No charge of reckless driving or any other such traffic offense ever showed up on my driving record. Things were done differently back then.
Erotic Semi-fiction
I used to write porn. I've mentioned that before. We called it "erotic semi-fiction". That was in the pre-video days. Ed Meese seized a bunch of truckloads of porn magazines in North Carolino, putting a bunch of small publishers bankrupt, a bunch of whom owed me money. I lost a few thousand as a result of that seizure -- the asshole never prosecuted anyone, just used economic power of seizures to put them out of business.I got some offers to write some screenplays after that, but I was disgusted and started writing howto stuff for a family of newsletters on human resources, corporate security, plant safety and other such business stuff. The web eventually put them out of business.
Hell, just the writer'd guidelines from some of the magazines back then were better than some of the stuff that passes for porn these days.
I didn't write the books though, but we do have one other poster on rgp who used to write that stuff.
Although I wasn't getting treated at the time, and didn't realize it, but I think I was probably pretty severely manic back when I was writing the erotica.
I had written some when I was playing poker for a living in SF. Not much, but a couple. I wrote a lot of unconnected magazine stuff just so that I'd have some kind of check in the pipeline in case I went busted. Then I got robbed, got disgusted, moved to Port Aransas, Texas. I quit playing poker and started writing erotic shorts fulltime.
The reason I think I was manic was that I was pretty productive, writing everyday and selling everything I wrote, and I was drinking very heavily. Drinking is the way I used to self-medicate when I was manic. It kept me an somewhat an even keel.
I'd get up every morning early, write for 2-4 hours, walk to the post office to mail off manuscripts and check the mail for checks, walk to a bar and if I had a new check I'd apply it to my bar tab, then I'd start drinking until sometime between 10pm and 2 am, go to bed, get up the next day and start a new cycle. A lot of sex was going on in those days also (another sign of mania). That lasted for a couple of years, maybe 3 years, it's kind of a blur.
Carrying Bullets
When I was in the Navy, I was on a gunship destroyer, off the coast of the DMZ, a spot that was called the gun line.We did a lot of shooting at various trees and stuff and got to the point where we used one of our three guns as a parts gun, with it's magazine as a backup store for ammunition. Bullets would be packed to the ceiling in the magazine for the parts gun, and we'd use off watch working parties to carry bullets to the working guns when needed. That way the ship had to make fewer trips off the gun line to re-arm, allowing us to destroy more trees and giving our ships captian more points towards a career boosting bronze star.
The bullets for these guns were heavy. They had seperate projectiles and powder cases, the projectiles weighed in at about 75 pounds, the powders about 40. We stood 6 hour on, 6 hours off in the magazine crews, with patrols of about 45 days at sea. So, when we had to use our off time to carry bullets back and forth it could seriously cut into our sleep time. So, even though the stuff was heavy, we would haul as much as we could carry in one trip to get it done so we could back into the rack.
Here's a cartoon that a crewmember drew of me carrying bullets.
Here's a photo of me and my fellow boatswain mates.
My hold'em book
It's not really true that my book aims at low-limit poker.The book was published in 2001, but I actually contracted to do it in 1998 and wrote it in 1999. The delay was because of the bankruptcy of Carol Publishing.
When I wrote the book very few cardrooms spread no limit games. So, I didn't put much in the book about no limit. The full house example I have in that chapter probably isn't a good example for the character of today's games.
If anything, kind of game the book was aimed at was probably red chip games, not white chips games. My most recent experience before I wrote the book was the 20/40 game at Players in Lake Charles in the mid 90's.
At the time I got the contract for the book I was living in Austin and doing photography for a living, I wasn't even playing poker. I did start playing in some local games when I got the contract, mostly white chip, some limit, mostly pot limit and no limit games, mostly dealers choice, more 5 card Omaha hi/lo than holdem.
But, the 20/40 game in Lake Charles in the mid-90's very much fit the definition of a very loose, very aggresive game in the book.
If I would have really had low limit games in mind when I wrote the book I'd have devoted a lot more space to discussing rake issues.
The point of the book wasn't any particular game condition at all. The point was simply that game conditions matter a lot, prior to my book almost evey poker book assumed that you played in the same game they did, and without really getting into what that game type was they told you what you absolutely must do to win.
I thought that was complete shit, and I tried to write a book that pointed that out.
The Complete Book of Casino Poker
A final exam
One of the things I was able to do as an undergrad was sometimes get double or triple credit for some subjects. The computer science department, the business school, and the industrial engineering department would often offer overlappying course and you could get credit for them because they were always afraid if they admitted the courses covered the same material then they'd lose status or something (or funding).So, I took an undergrad operations research course from the IE dept, even though I'd already taken one previously from the QBA dept. I usually went to class, because I was on campus anyway, and the topics weren't an exact overlap, but I was doing fine. My car broke down about 2 weeks before final exams, and I didn't go to campus for two weeks.
The final was just going to cover the last chapter, inventory theory. That topic hadn't really been covered in the QBA course, but it wasn't that tough, and I'd at least been introduced to EOQ stuff in a managerial accounting course. So, I read the chapter, worked all the problems at the end of the chapter, and went to take the final. Going into the final I had by far the highest test average in the class. He had a habit of giving extra credit questions and my test average was over 100.
It turns out that he covered the topic, but didn't use the book. The book had used various greek letters in it's notation, he didn't do that on the test. I couldn't even read the questions. I had no idea what he was asking.
I sat there and stared at the wall for about a half hour. Then I walked up to his desk and asked him, "If I can't work any of these, can I get some kind of credit if I make up my own questions and answer them?". He looked at me like I was from Mars, and said, "Of course not".
I walked back to my desk, stared at the wall another half hour. Then he got puzzled and walked to my desk, asking me "Which question are you having trouble with". I said, "I can't do a single one of these things", handed him my blank test paper and walked out.
A divorce
I had a friend in college who was from New Orleans and his mama was related to Carlos Marcello. He had Sicilian relatives in New Orleans, Miami, The Bahamas, Chicago, Nevada, etc. His daddy was French so he was an inlaw, not related through the male line, and although his brother went into the family business, he didn't have to and he became an economist instead. But, he had plenty of family contact, went to all the family reunions, vacationed at the family casino in the Bahamas, etc.When I was living in Chicago my wife and I split up. We ended up getting a divorce, but when I was talking to David on the phone he asked me if there was another guy invovled. I told him that I didn't really know, but I didn't think so. And, he said, "Well, if there's anybody involved I've got some cousins in Chicago that would be glad to go talk to him".
I said, "No thank you David".
Andy Glazer's suicide
Andy Glazer was a well known poker writer who committed suicide. I guess becuase they thought it was shameful or something most of what was written about his death lied about the suicide until Steve Badger had the guts to write the truth about it on his websiteAs near as I can tell, Andy was in severe denial about his depression.
I've never met Andy but had known him via email for a while. We had the same agent, and for a time kept each other informed about writing gigs, etc.
But, Andy would get very upset with me if I was critical of anything he wrote.
At one point he got very agitated about an email exchange we had and vowed to do everything he could to see to it that I never wrote for any publication he had any influence over. It was way over the top.
He went into a long explanation of how it was important for him to surround himself with people who could give him positive support, and cut off all contact with those who might offend him or his friends.
In retrospect I feel badly that I didn't recognize the depression, but I didn't. It seems that what he was doing was trying to "self-medicate" by managing his environment, rather than seeking medical help. He was taking a standard new age bullshit approach to managing his condition. Such an approach actually might work if combined with self-reflection about the truth of the condition and general honesty about it. Almost no approach to treating depression works when it's combined with self-delusional denial about it.
Early in our relationship I'd asked Andy if he had a problem with depression, the reason was that his abrupt quiting his law practice and landing in Esalon for a couple of years looked like it might have been motivated by depression. Andy unequivically denied ever having any problems with depression.
All I can say is that depression is a very serious disease, it's very deadly, suicide isn't the only form of death it leads to. If you suspect in any way you might suffer from depression don't hesitate to get help, don't worry about what others will think of you if they know. It doesn't get better, it's a progressive disease which just gets worse and worse if left untreated.
For many years I just didn't know I was depressed. I actually didn't think it was abnormal to be a vice president in Bank of America's Investment Securities Division one year, and be sleeping in a park the next year.
Once I figured out that I really did suffer from depression I got medical help that same day. I'm surprised I'm still alive.
A cowboy
I worked some as a wrangler when I was a teenager, but never worked as a cowboy. I did wear a cowboy hat back when I was about 15 and used to surf on mustang island a lot, but haven't worn one since. I do have a lot of kin who worked as cowboy's, none of them rodeo cowboys. I'd always thought of cowboying as just something you did when you were young if you couldn't get a real job. My grandaddy, whose daddy was a small time rancher in the panhandle, was the only boy in the county in his high school graduating class, had worked as a cowboy when since he was about 12 and who had cowboyed on a cattle drive when he was 14, said that the main reason he stayed in school long enough to graduate was that it was a way out of coyboying. He said he'd have ruthered spend his life in prison than as a damn cowboy. One of my dad's uncles was a rancher with a pretty big place outside of Del Rio. I never saw him wear boots and a hat except once. It was at a family reunion in the Texas Hill Country and he left early Sunday morning to go to a horse auction in San Antonio. He raised cattle, sheep, and breed quarter horses. One of his wranglers was driving a trailer full of horses up for the auction and Noble was going to meet him in San Antonio. I had gotten up early and he and I had coffee before he left and I walked him out to his pickup. When we got out to the truck he sat on the seat and took off his tennis shoes, putting on a pair of boots that had been on the front seat. Then he took off golf hat he was wearing and reached under the seat to get a big ole cowboy hat. In uniform, he drove off to the horse auction. Ranching is different from cowboying in the culture I was raised in and rodeoing is more romantic than fixing fences.Becoming a professional poker player
A long time ago I quit my job and moved to Reno and played poker. The weekday games in Reno where too tough to even bother with so I moved back to SF and moved in with my gf. She had a regular job, was an HR manager for a company in SF, which is why she hadn't gone to Reno with me.After a few months of her working all day and me playing all night and on weekends and me making about 1/2 the money I'd previously made as a corporate dweeb we agreed that I needed to do something. So, I told her I'd think about if for two weeks and then let her know what I'd decided to do.
Two weeks later I announced I was going to quit playing poker and become a freelance writer.
She stared at me for what seemed like about an hour, but was probably 30 seconds.
Her response was , "How soon can you move out?".