Saturday Night Cleaver
Jan. 19th, 2008 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksThat really ought to be the name of a movie.
Saturday nights suck for me, unless I have something arranged. The poker is awful. Interestingly, John Fox observed that Saturday evening was the worst time to play in Gardena, and that was more than 30 years ago. DY said that the Vic offered few prospects before 11pm on a Saturday night. Clearly all of the "social" players have better things to do.
And, as a non-drinker, I don't. The restaurants are crowded and, while you can get away with eating alone in a restaurant during the week without being sat next to the kitchens, you have no chance of doing so on a Saturday night. Indeed, going out alone on a Saturday night is not a good idea, full stop, unless anyone has any bright ideas that I haven't thought of. I suppose that I could try the Vic, even though I know that the games will be bad. And liquidity isn't what it was, what with laying out about £25K as part of the purchase of the flat downstairs.
It's part of my very short weekend, and yet it's the one part of it where I often feel vaguely at a loss. Read a book, I guess. I just knocked off 45 minutes on No_IQ and it was torture. Not a mug in sight on any table.
I have to use Party Poker to get my dollar cheques, so when their crap reload offer comes up every month (and I swear that it's actually getting worse) I take it, solely as a means of getting money from Neteller to Party to me in dollar form without Party moaning about the deposit/withdrawal route.
Unfortunately, after a year of running well, I appear to be on a thousand-dollar downswing there. One of the points about putting money in and then taking it out via cheque is that it's not a good idea to lose it in the interim. I don't think that the players there are that good, although there's definitely a difference in style from the IP Network. And I suspect that it's this that has caught me out at least twice. As Andy Ward points out in Secrets of the Amateurs, you need to keep stock of trends, and most of my play now is on the IP Network. Party requires some adjustments. If you run badly as well, it can make life difficult.
I've got round the potential problem of big all-in raises on the turn from opponents (thus "setting me a question") by either betting enough to make it clear to opponent that I am committed or by going into check-call mode. Sometimes the bet decision is significantly more than the pot and is equal to as much as half my stack. It makes the reward to risk ratio look fairly shitty, but it does avoid the threat of the all-in reraise from opponent with air. If opponent all-in reraises anyway and he's got stats like 12/8, I guess I'd walk away. If he was 43/22, I'd have to call. But I would have called the all-in reraise anyway from that guy if I had put in a pot-size bet.
++++++
I watched "Saving Ed Mitchell" on ITV last night. Ed Mitchell is the one-time ITV news correspondent/newsreader who, because of his drinking, ended up sleeping on a bench near Brighton beach. I found it desperately sad, but not for the reasons that most viewers probably found it so. The programmme ended on a note of hope. He had been put into The Priory and, said the postscript, had gone three weeks without a drink. But I make this guy 1-to-100 to be drinking again within a year, and 1-to-50 to be dead within 18 months of that. You can normally tell which people are going to succeed in giving up booze, and the desperately sad thing about this was that I could see that Ed was not one of them.
Obviously I can only speak about personal drivers here, but my experience of people who have given up addictions is that few of them have done it for themselves alone. Their self-esteem is so fucked (and probably was so before their addictions developed so strongly) that you don't feel that you deserve to be saved. You have to have some other reason to stop. And that reason has to be stronger than booze, or gambling, or heroin. Believe it or not, "staying alive" quite often isn't enough. But "staying alive for someone else" can be. Mitchell had and has no-one else to stay alive for. Like I say, desperately sad, and I really do hope that I am proved wrong. But it was a great programme about booze, except for Carol Barnes' farcical comment at the end that about 1 in 20 (or was it 1 in 10?) adults in the UK were alcoholics. I see numbers like this time and time again and they are not helped by the stupidly low "limits" for alcohol consumption before you are defined as having a drink problem.
Let's get this straight. Alcoholism affects the same proportion of drinkers as compulsive gambling affects gamblers. Mitchell, quite defnitely, is an alcoholic. And if you want my definition of an alcoholic, it's not the binge drinker at the weekend. It's the guy (or woman) who needs a drink in the morning, as soon as possible. Anyone who says, after a heavy session the night before "god, I couldn't face a drink at the moment" , just isn't even approaching it.
Of course, alcoholics are only human, and they take a certain fatalistic pride in the self-abuse. I admit that even now I get a certain frisson when I tell people that when I went onto hemereverin to stop me getting the physical side-effects of alcohol withdrawal, that it took me five days without booze for the alcohol in my bloodstream to drop to the level where it was legal for me to drive. In fact, when I walked in there on the first day, the alcohol level in my bloodstream was such that any non-drinker would be dead and any normal drinker would be comatose. Yep, you get a kick out of telling people that, for some reason. It's to show that, even though you have fucked up your life, there is at least something that you were a champion at. I would imagine that heroin addicts are the same, boasting about how much they have to inject these days before they get any buzz.
When people say that they are "a recovering alcoholic" rather than an "ex-alcoholic", the words are chosen with care. Because you are always getting a bit better, every day. In that sense, you are still "recovering". However, that doesn't make all your problems vanish. The strength is being able to face those problems, rather than hiding your head in a sand of booze.
Onwards and upwards. Let's have a look at the $100 buy-ins. They might be a bit looser by now.
Saturday nights suck for me, unless I have something arranged. The poker is awful. Interestingly, John Fox observed that Saturday evening was the worst time to play in Gardena, and that was more than 30 years ago. DY said that the Vic offered few prospects before 11pm on a Saturday night. Clearly all of the "social" players have better things to do.
And, as a non-drinker, I don't. The restaurants are crowded and, while you can get away with eating alone in a restaurant during the week without being sat next to the kitchens, you have no chance of doing so on a Saturday night. Indeed, going out alone on a Saturday night is not a good idea, full stop, unless anyone has any bright ideas that I haven't thought of. I suppose that I could try the Vic, even though I know that the games will be bad. And liquidity isn't what it was, what with laying out about £25K as part of the purchase of the flat downstairs.
It's part of my very short weekend, and yet it's the one part of it where I often feel vaguely at a loss. Read a book, I guess. I just knocked off 45 minutes on No_IQ and it was torture. Not a mug in sight on any table.
I have to use Party Poker to get my dollar cheques, so when their crap reload offer comes up every month (and I swear that it's actually getting worse) I take it, solely as a means of getting money from Neteller to Party to me in dollar form without Party moaning about the deposit/withdrawal route.
Unfortunately, after a year of running well, I appear to be on a thousand-dollar downswing there. One of the points about putting money in and then taking it out via cheque is that it's not a good idea to lose it in the interim. I don't think that the players there are that good, although there's definitely a difference in style from the IP Network. And I suspect that it's this that has caught me out at least twice. As Andy Ward points out in Secrets of the Amateurs, you need to keep stock of trends, and most of my play now is on the IP Network. Party requires some adjustments. If you run badly as well, it can make life difficult.
I've got round the potential problem of big all-in raises on the turn from opponents (thus "setting me a question") by either betting enough to make it clear to opponent that I am committed or by going into check-call mode. Sometimes the bet decision is significantly more than the pot and is equal to as much as half my stack. It makes the reward to risk ratio look fairly shitty, but it does avoid the threat of the all-in reraise from opponent with air. If opponent all-in reraises anyway and he's got stats like 12/8, I guess I'd walk away. If he was 43/22, I'd have to call. But I would have called the all-in reraise anyway from that guy if I had put in a pot-size bet.
++++++
I watched "Saving Ed Mitchell" on ITV last night. Ed Mitchell is the one-time ITV news correspondent/newsreader who, because of his drinking, ended up sleeping on a bench near Brighton beach. I found it desperately sad, but not for the reasons that most viewers probably found it so. The programmme ended on a note of hope. He had been put into The Priory and, said the postscript, had gone three weeks without a drink. But I make this guy 1-to-100 to be drinking again within a year, and 1-to-50 to be dead within 18 months of that. You can normally tell which people are going to succeed in giving up booze, and the desperately sad thing about this was that I could see that Ed was not one of them.
Obviously I can only speak about personal drivers here, but my experience of people who have given up addictions is that few of them have done it for themselves alone. Their self-esteem is so fucked (and probably was so before their addictions developed so strongly) that you don't feel that you deserve to be saved. You have to have some other reason to stop. And that reason has to be stronger than booze, or gambling, or heroin. Believe it or not, "staying alive" quite often isn't enough. But "staying alive for someone else" can be. Mitchell had and has no-one else to stay alive for. Like I say, desperately sad, and I really do hope that I am proved wrong. But it was a great programme about booze, except for Carol Barnes' farcical comment at the end that about 1 in 20 (or was it 1 in 10?) adults in the UK were alcoholics. I see numbers like this time and time again and they are not helped by the stupidly low "limits" for alcohol consumption before you are defined as having a drink problem.
Let's get this straight. Alcoholism affects the same proportion of drinkers as compulsive gambling affects gamblers. Mitchell, quite defnitely, is an alcoholic. And if you want my definition of an alcoholic, it's not the binge drinker at the weekend. It's the guy (or woman) who needs a drink in the morning, as soon as possible. Anyone who says, after a heavy session the night before "god, I couldn't face a drink at the moment" , just isn't even approaching it.
Of course, alcoholics are only human, and they take a certain fatalistic pride in the self-abuse. I admit that even now I get a certain frisson when I tell people that when I went onto hemereverin to stop me getting the physical side-effects of alcohol withdrawal, that it took me five days without booze for the alcohol in my bloodstream to drop to the level where it was legal for me to drive. In fact, when I walked in there on the first day, the alcohol level in my bloodstream was such that any non-drinker would be dead and any normal drinker would be comatose. Yep, you get a kick out of telling people that, for some reason. It's to show that, even though you have fucked up your life, there is at least something that you were a champion at. I would imagine that heroin addicts are the same, boasting about how much they have to inject these days before they get any buzz.
When people say that they are "a recovering alcoholic" rather than an "ex-alcoholic", the words are chosen with care. Because you are always getting a bit better, every day. In that sense, you are still "recovering". However, that doesn't make all your problems vanish. The strength is being able to face those problems, rather than hiding your head in a sand of booze.
Onwards and upwards. Let's have a look at the $100 buy-ins. They might be a bit looser by now.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
All I hear is Silence
Date: 2008-01-20 02:04 am (UTC)I accept your definition of "an alcoholic" as a far more reliable (and, more importantly, quantifiable) measure than anything the government puts out.
Being an alcoholic myself, however, I would suggest an adjustment to "I can't get through the day without ."
One huge problem is that alcoholism, like any other dependency/monomania/whatever, is a giant food-lot for psychologists and psychiatrists. (There is apparently a difference, but I can no longer tell what it is.) My ex in California was sectioned for drugging herself into (presumably latent) paranoid schizophrenia. I can't begin to describe the hundreds of people whose job depended on people like her doing similarly cretinous things; the crass (but certificated) way they went about their job; the (chemical cosh) drugs that they tried to force down her throat; or the total disinterest that they had in, well, the patient. In fact, the only person who has ever diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic is me. (It wasn't too difficult. She heard voices from behind the fridge, drove around pointing at "listening stations," and cut all the wires in her car at midnight. Twice. Amongst other things. But, what would I know?)
Where was I? Oh yes, a second case history. My best friend's wife got a $5000 bequest from an aunt and promptly went on a bender in Portland (this being California) for around eight weeks. With four kids, around Christmas. She ended up living on the streets, much like Ed Mitchell. She was very definitely a "first thing when I wake up" sort of gal.
I do worry about people like George Best's "friends," who seem to have this theory that "one glass of wine won't hurt you." Which planet do these idiots come from?
I think (hope) that you're unduly pessimistic about Mr Michell. He's certainly long odds against, but I'd be quoting 1/20, or maybe even 1/10. The sad fact is that, like anything else, if you have contacts who can get you into the best of the best (ie the Priory), you've improved your chances massively.
Now, it's 2am in the morning and I've just finished running a series of pointless batch jobs that five years' worth of incompetent & lazy fuckwits have contrived, over the years, to make almost impossible to run in an automatic fashion. Tomorrow will be a bad, bad, day, because the prospective purchaser of the house will be coming round to inspect it.
I believe I'll have a little drinky-winky. (Calvados, in fact.) And no thanks to Russell Trademark, who is obviously a totally worthless cunt.
Re: All I hear is Silence
Date: 2008-01-20 08:13 am (UTC)The Priory itself accepts that only one in three of its patients succeed (and I bet that The Priory has a wide definition of "success" of something like six months). That probably translates in reality to one in 10. But my problem wasn't with the stats. My analysis was based on him. I really don't think that he had the will to make it.
I remember at one point getting to a stage where my body needed alcohol but my taste buds were sick of it. That's apparently near to the vodka stage because, of course, vodka doesnn't taste of that much apart from alcohol --- it's a direct trip to the brain's sensory areas. I reckon that for some drinkers the ideal situation would be a drip feed. Eliminate the middle man before it gets to the bloodstream.
And now, if you'll excuse me, the kitchen is calling me to do some cleaning.... (bad joke. sorry).
Hope that the Calvados was good. It was never one of my favourites, despite being "chic". I was never really a brandy man of any sort at all, with the possible exception of Armagnac, for which I did have a penchant.
PJ
Re: All I hear is Silence
Date: 2008-01-20 10:04 am (UTC)I did however have time to catch the Ed Mitchell program (guaranteed to get a good audience by sitting it between two Corries in which Vera dies). I don't think you know enough to say what his odds are, but Not Good. He still seemed in denial of the problem for most of the time and tellingly on arriving at the Priory the last thing he did before going in was having a last swig of vodka.
He also seemed to still think it was funny (ha-ha). What Steph was jumping up and down about was how he was the best-dressed piss artist one could see despite allegedly having £52/week and a 4 bottles of vodka/week consumpion level. Er, how? I think there might have been aspects of the program that were edited out because they wouldn't have helped make the 'shocking' point.
He certainly didn't seem to be at rock bottom and in some ways I thought Carol Barnes was probably just functioning as just another enabler (to go into psychobabble). A few years back there was a similar program on the descent into bankruptcy and craziness of Ray Gosling, more a radio guy than a TV guy. That did a much better job of being a fly-on-the-wall approach and I found that far more moving. Ed Mitchell seemed like he was an overconfident tosser when he was a famous newscaster and now he's still an overconfident tosser.
Re: All I hear is Silence
Date: 2008-01-20 10:35 am (UTC)Of course, the camera distorts. How much was he going back to his old "Ed Mitchell in front of the camera, here to entertain" mode? Perhaps that led me to be more pessimistic than I should. But, to be honest, he still looked like a guy who wanted to be able to find a way that life could cope with his drinking, rather than one who wanted to cope with life without drinking.
PJ
Re: All I hear is Silence
Date: 2008-01-20 11:20 pm (UTC)This is, indeed, a bad weekend.
I think I'll have another slug of (as Normandy peasants, of whom I have far too many in my background, would say) "chic" calvados.
Aaauuuuugghh!