"The Pen:" Live NLHE Chat Thread

I’m pretty sure bears play dead when they see SPC

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This is fascinating stuff. I was listening to a recent Gambling With An Edge Podcast that discussed the recent Blackjack Ball. This year’s ball included the acceptance speech from last years winner, Maria "the Greek", 2023, the co-founder and one-time manager of “The Greeks” blackjack team. I believe you were on one of her teams?

Also thanks for posting the article on SPC. I just recently moved to France from USA#1. I intend to do a lot more biking here. The town had an event where you can see the different clubs and associations. Me and the wife are going to sign up for the mountain biking one. There’s hundreds of kilometers of off road trails around here we intend to do. Also plan on doing some vacations centered around biking. Almost did one recently that involved biking along one of the French coasts. I’d like to a Belgian one that involves visiting breweries. There’s also ones along the Danube in which you bike during the day then go onboard and sleep on a boat.

@Da Nit - I formed the greeks with maria and nick (her brother). They are my oldest and dearest gamblin buddies. I have always said I am the least successful of all my gamblin pals. After the greeks maria worked on a super duper sophisticated AP BJ strat that won untold sums and has long since retired stupid rich. Nick began running his own $ and found great success playing mid/hi steaks pokerz on line after the team dissolved. He is also long retired.

I am sure you will have a great time in france. They absolutely love their recreating.

do it

extremely budget friendly (hostels + food + wine = about 20-40 euros a day and that's living it up not budgeting) and just an amazing experience, a lot of spaniards do it in chunks ie we have 1 week and will do this section this year and the following section next year etc

Wow that’s really cool you Greek bastard, didn’t realize you were one of the founders.

It is indeed amazing how much more the Frenchies are into recreation, it’s like WTF. In USA#1 only kiddos and retirees get together for recreational activities at this level.

while abroad, i could always easily pick out the groups of french expats

is there a large group where half are smoking?
are they barely touching their food/drinks because they are so busy talking?
are they laughing non-stop?

if all 3 then it's definitely a group of frenchies

by rickroll P

do it

extremely budget friendly (hostels + food + wine = about 20-40 euros a day and that's living it up not budgeting) and just an amazing experience, a lot of spaniards do it in chunks ie we have 1 week and will do this section this year and the following section next year etc

This is really cool, thanks, will definitely look it into it. It’s really interesting how much more bike friendly it is here.

most people walk it but you can bike the entire thing

there's enough people doing it that you can just rent a bike at your chosen starting point and then just leave it at your end point and they'll pick it up

and if you really want a chill ride, you can either have your rental company pick up and drop off your gear for you each day so instead of putting your change of clothes etc in panniers on your bike and carrying it, you leave it at the front desk of your hostel and sometime during that day they'll pick it up and drop it off where you'll be stopping that night

did the camino carrying gear, for the alps my dad did the gear shuttle - so i've done both, while it was nice not lugging stuff over the alps and not needing to restrict too much (ie you can then bring your laptop etc etc) the lack of flexibility was annoying, like we'd hit an amazing town and want to stop but our gear and reservation is two towns away so we would keep going or we arrive at a place and figure the next town will probably be better but we already have that reservation and gear dropoff so just stay there whereas on the camino with all the gear we could just pick our stopping point wherever (oh this town has a cool looking bar/bridge/tower etc, let's stop here for night)

most people start the camino at st jean in france but you can easily start from many places and it's very likely that there is already a spur which passes through or nearby where you live

we'd bump into people who had started in rome or jerusalem or morocco etc as this was a major pilgrimage route in the middle ages so while there won't be many people doing it until you get to france or spain there are definitely camino paths you can follow

now that i know what to look for, i see these all over europe whenever i visit, saw a ton of them on my bike ride through the alps despite that maybe 0.01% of camino people ever took those far off routes

also my favorite thing about europe is that when you choose "bike" on google maps it'll actually route you through a dedicated bike path quite often that's not even following a road or anything, just something on its own

Her picanic basket is too healthy for Yogi.

Nick the Greek!? I just noticed how often that one nationality suffices for a common nickname The Greek. You never hear someone nicknamed 'Heinz the German.'

Yessir. Building the organization from the ground up to 200+ on the roster is something that i take immense pride in. I have done a lot of stuff with advantage gamboolin and everything else pales in comparison. Solo gambling is isolating, lonely, and draining. High steaks team play is stressful but being out there getting down with your pals and pulling the wool over the casinos eyes for table max steaks were some of the most exciting, crazy, fun times I have had.

pullovers wrapped around their necks
shrugging
surrendering the moment they saw a German

This is the most interesting part of your team and one of main reasons why Maria is in the hall of fame. Managing such a large group of counters is really impressive.

FYI that was BLS and we are part of DOL, yet they somehow take the credit for our data.

FWIW we didn't "come clean" - we do a revision every year at the same time. That was the biggest revision ever and the largest in about 15 years. And contrary to what has been reported, we do have upward revisions (there was one of +500,000 in the past 6 years).

The reason for the revision is the availability of new data. We get the monthly jobs report from surveys of employers. The yearly revision comes in when we can clean up the data using yearly data we get from the states, in particular from state unemployment insurance and payroll data. Unfortunately, since the Pandemic employers have become less reliable in some of their reporting to BLS which has affected the quality of the preliminary estimates.

FWIW I expect the Fed to go slowly on the cuts as we get a better look at the data. Your inflation expectation is definitely on the high end, and even with rate cuts, if the softening in jobs is as real as I think it is and we see continue to see rents and some other core inflation numbers continue to ease, I would expect to see inflation mostly stay sub-3% but above the 2% Fed target.

Feely… would you like to explain this?

by AcePlayerDeluxe P

Feely… would you like to explain this?

Looks like zoltan tbh.

Zoltan is more likely to do it too

Skippy gotta ruin my tin foil hat fun… smh

.. I mean there was an incident with a phone and a wall once.. you have a point

Serious question- Why not just look at federal tax withholdings that are low latency and huge samples?

by AcePlayerDeluxe P

Feely… would you like to explain this?

it's pretty grim stuff isn't it?

our cash rate currently 4.35% after peaking at an extremely gnarly 7.8% in Q4 2022. I'm very much hoping we get a cut before the end of the year as not only has it slowed our economy all the way down but it's also damaged business confidence.

which...when your business is in the jobs market in the advertising sector, where spend is generally the first thing that gets cut....is not ideal.

* also not an ideal time to be selling your house and then having to give 55-60% of your wealth to the alcoholic junkie you've been sharing it with

Lot of **** timing for you. Are Aussie divorce laws specifically designed to **** men over?

IRS cannot legally share that data with other federal agencies or use it for anything other than what the law allows. It would literally take a law through Congress to make the change. There also may be some timing issues but I don't know if that is a factor or not.

I was actually in a meeting last week where this was brought up (along with some other IRS data) and the new commish is asking again but this Congress will never go for it. We are improving some of our inflation statistics using some outside data sets where can.

FWIW the ADP payroll figure (private data) that comes out around the jobs number is also serious ass and has been for years.

lol government.. sharing aggregate job and payroll info would be nothing sensitive and just shed bloat.. oh yeah, gov lives on bloat. Ah makes sense now

(Not rooting for them to cut you Skippy.. maybe the only good dollars they spend)