Casino Night

(My sneaky hot Casino Hostess Regina)

I had a lot of fun last evening. Our friends Diane and Lenny invited us to attend a casino night fundraiser. It sounded like a worthy cause and a way to have a nice night on the town. The event was held in a large community center and turned out to be a class act all the way. Numerous restaurants provided an incredible selection of entrees as well as desserts. The event cost $35 a person, included all you could eat from this incredible selection of food, an open bar and, finally, play money to gamble with.

Personally I don't enjoy gambling that much. However, I am a gamer and I really like Texas Hold-Em. It is so much more of a social game and I like the pace of it. I camped out early at one of the Texas Hold-Em tables and set up for a long night. They played by the regular rules except that no one necessarily had to 'go out' since there were unlimited rebuys. The charity was happy to sell you more play money to keep playing. One other significant change is that the blinds never went up so poker was always cheap.

Every time I go to one of these fund raisers I always drop about forty bucks into the various prizes and raffles they offer. So, this time, I just bought $40 worth of extra buy in money for the game. This gave me a huge stack out of the gate, which was a significant advantage.

The evening was on a schedule so you couldn't play to the bitter end and instead I just tried to maximize my take. When it was over I had about three times as much money in chips as I had bought in for. I was the leader at the table and personally knocked out about four people, including one guy twice. At one point in the evening I was dealt some really good cards and I decided to play the power of the big stack and pushed in a large bet. There was one extremely aggressive player at the table who seemed to take every single bet as a personal challenge to his manhood. He rarely folded and had never backed down from a bet all night. When I made the large bet, he started getting really pissed off at me and began mumbling, but plenty loud enough for everyone to hear, how 'easy it was' when you just bought your whole stack. He kept it up and went on about how he saw me buy $50 worth of chips (I actually bought $40). At that time I had about $120 worth of chips, so I had obviously earned some of my stack. Now, I just let it slide but I found this incredibly amusing. How scandalous of me that I donated more money to the charity than he did and he was too much of a wimp not to buy his own big stack. It was a game and I was playing under the rules of the game. The rules were I could buy as big a stack as a I wanted, by donating to a worthy cause, so I did. I saw him get his wallet out at one time and he was fumbling a measly few dollar bills. My heart really went out to the guy. Meanwhile, I tipped the dealer more than this guy brought in his wallet to a charity event.

Whatever...

The other people at the table were a lot of fun and we had a really good time. By the end of the evening there were only three of us left and I had a blast. Once the table closed you cashed in your chips for 'tickets' that you could use as chances to win one of 28 prize baskets. I knew when I sat down that playing Texas Hold-em was no way to come out a big money winner, but I was proud of my $120,000 stack. That is until I found a bunch of people had won over $15,000,000 (of play money) in Blackjack. They had skewed the rules of Black-Jack so it was no longer in favor of the dealer. This, of course, led to people being able to exponentially increase their stake. For those with more than two million in winnings they could opt out of chances on the baskets and instead enter a live auction for some superior prizes. Many people entered the auction with five and six million dollars thinking they were high rollers only to find out the high water mark was measured in the tens of millions.

I look forward to attending next year and you can be sure I will find myself sitting that the Texas Hold-Em table, pissing off a bunch of people because my boundless generosity starts me out with a huge stack.

I am having a Texas Hold-Em party this coming Saturday. My wife and I figured everyone would be doing Valentine's day celebrations this weekend so the 17th would be a good date. However, it turns out that almost everyone who came last year had something conflicting on their schedule. We did have plenty of people still RSVP so it didn't seem reasonable to try to change the date; some of our friends have already made babysitting arrangments. I am adding into the mix a beer tasting element to the party. I plan to buy a wide variety of premium beers, based on the tastes of the guests attending, and we will get to sample a lot of choices of new and interesting brands.

Another event of note is that this week my son John is going into the Army. He is heading off to bootcamp and is going to be entering the Army Ranger program. He is very excited about this and we are happy for him. Tonight the family is going out to dinner to celebrate his first big leap out into the wider world.

Finally, I wanted to say this. This week I worked at least twelve hours a day every day but Friday. I didn't work these long hours because I 'had' to'. I did it because I wanted to. I had no idea how much I was missing working back in game development again. I enjoyed working at Ageia and especially liked the technology and the people behind it. However, I was always anxious to actually 'do something' with it. I would make tools, and samples, and demos that had some value but it was all a bit too theoretical. Now, at Simutronics, I am able to make a real impact on a major game engine. I can't believe every day how much my experience on Planetside still applies. All of the lessons I learned on that project about performance, optimization, engine design, are so relevant to this new work I am doing. I worked long hours all week because I am close to getting a major redesign of the entire physics and collision system completed that will work simultaneously on both client and server, through a single code base. I am getting to use all of the tools I wrote to auto-generate physics content on a database of over ten thousand models!

This weekend I have to focus on my presentation for the Game Developers Conference. I am presenting on the automatic generation of dynamics models. I am much more confident now that it isn't just theory but I am doing it in an actual game environment. My presentation is going to be at 4pm on Friday, the last day of the conference. At first I was a little dissapointed since I figured most everyone has already left the conference or is burned out by that time. It is pretty much the last presentation of the whole show. However, I have since been told that on the last day there are very few talks presented so, even though the total audience is down, you still get good attendence since you aren't competing with eight other talks at once. I know that I am going to be presenting some solid, practical, tools that people can use in their games. It is certainly the kind of talk I like attending rather than something which is esoteric, highly technical, and generally makes my brain bleed since my last math class was in 1982.

If anyone wants to attempt to call me on my Skype telephone the number is: (US) 636-486-4040

If you call that number over a land-line there is a lot of lag and the quality can be iffy. What is much better is to simply install Skype on your machine and call me via your computer using a headset. If you want to do that, the Skype handle is 'jratcliff63367'

Oh, one more thing before I sign off. The photograph at the top of the page is of someone who was described to me as a 'Casino Host'. I have also heard her call herself a 'Real Eastate Agent'. What she really is, is 'sneaky hot'. Previously on this blog I have referred to some of my friend's wives as a 'hot mom'. In fact, our friend and neighbor Diane Brown turns out to be one of the top hits on that phrase when searching google images. I often think she is both flattered and concerned by that.

By day Regina looks like a proper housewife. She wears glasses and shuttles children around. However, in the evening, she is transformed. She takes off her glasses and pulls the old librarian trick of letting down her hair and dressing up. Regina is suddenly transformed by that magical quality we can only call 'sneaky hot'. I believe the photograph at the top of this page demonstrates this quality without question.

Will Regina someday be the top Google image search result for 'Sneaky Hot'? We can only hope...