Changing It Up

So far this year, I haven't missed a day on this blog.

I have also only pursued my other goal, science fiction writing, on a handful of days.

My goal was to write a short story a month, 12 stories total, and sell three of them by the end of the year.

I'm doing great at losing weight, okay at getting out of debt, and lousy at writing the stories.

So starting on Monday, I'm changing things up. Science fiction will now come first, and I'll do this blog after I have my 1,000 words for the day written.

The hope is, out of motivation to get a blog post done before midnight, I'll write the other stuff.

I'll let you know if this works.

Gambling: Craps

I don't understand craps. At all. I'm not even going to pretend I do.

The craps table has a more complicated layout than the interior of my computer. There's numbers, pass lines, come lines, fields, don't pass bars, don't come bars. Sometimes you do want to roll something, other times you don't--I'm lost.

Here's what I know about craps: the bet with the lowest house percentage in the casino is a pass line bet in combination with a free-odds bet. The house PC on this is less than 1%.

Other bets, particularly the ones in the center off the layout, have a PC of 10% or higher--they'll bring you down fast.

And remember--even though this is where your best odds are, that's just your best odds of keeping the money you came in with. Those bets pay even money, so they're not bets you're going to make a million dollars off of in one shot. You'd have to hang around the table a while, and the longer you hang around the table, the more you're going to find your results lining right up with the odds the laws of probability dictate you should get--in this case, still losing about a buck for every hundred you play. Nice, slow way to lose it, but lose it you will.

That's the way in the casino, the carnival, where ever. The more you can win off of something, the lower your odds of winning it. The better your odds of winning, the less they'll give you in return. (So you paid the guy $5 and he guessed your weight wrong, huh? Enjoy your $2 prize.)

So if you like to throw dice, you could stay home and play Monopoly. You might even learn a little about the cashflow benefits of investing in the process. It comes in a variety of editions, ranging from Disney Monopoly to Star Wars Monopoly to Lord of the Rings Monopoly.

Why try to win a few bucks from a casino when you could win the Empire back from Darth Vader?

By The Power Of Grayskull!

Okay, so I'm not quite He-Man. I'm not even that wimpy little geek Adam.

(Come to think of it, wasn't Adam just as big as He-Man? Why did everybody think he was such a dork? Why didn't anybody try to give him a weapon or something? "Hey, Adam," somebody should have said, "You're kind of a nerd, but you have pecs the size of Man-At-Arms' helmet. Take a sword or something, man." But I digress.)

So what I was saying, before my train of thought was derailed, was that last night, Greg and I decided to try to do the exact same upper body workout we did on Friday, same weights and everything. Since we're writing down everything we're doing, including rating the difficulty of the exercise on a 1-10 scale, we were able to see exactly how well we did compared with a few days before.

And I'll tell you what--nothing makes you feel stronger than doing two or three more reps than you did a couple days before. Sure, you could look around the gym and realize everybody's doing twice as much weight as you, but nothing beats being able to beat yourself.

So I say track your fitness training. Even if it's cardio, track how long it took you and how far you went or something. Nothing beats that feeling of knowing you're doing better.

Dell Is Done

My tax return today paid off my $1,200-plus balance on my Dell computer. Since I am now officially done with Dell Financial Services, I do feel it appropriate to point out, one final time, that of the $40 a month I was paying them, $30 a month was going to interest.

I am not going to accuse them of deceptive marketing practices (like a certain class-action lawsuit that they are involved in) simply because their catalogue does not indicate that their "easy payment" options involve paying on the computer until long after the day the computer becomes obsolete due to the sun going nova.

I am not a victim. All terms and conditions of the financing were clearly outlined, somewhere.

However, I will never, ever, ever again finance anything will Dell.

Or anybody else for that matter. But this is one monkey I'm pleased to have off my back.

They make fine computers. They make lousy buddies to borrow money from.

READ MY MAIL -- MAKE MONEY FAST

Actual excerpts from mail I received today:

First of all, I have something very important to share with a limited audience. (I only want to share this invitation with 5,000 people maximum.) So, I asked my list broker to be very careful about who got this mailing.

As you may know, the slot machine was invented in 1906 by Herbert Mills. It was "unbeatable." That is . . . until Frank Calder came along and broke one in 1938. Frank figured out how to pull and twist the arm of the slot machine so that it delivered cash every time. The Mills machine is now part of history.

But. . . get this. All modern day machines have a secret structural flaw in them too. That means you too can do what I do. You can walk up to almost any machine you want and make it give you cash. If you know what to do. It's a structural flaw. And so far, the casino owners don't know what to do about it.

They know the flaw exists. But they don't know what to do about it.

Tale Of The Tape

On this blog, I've started to spend a fair bit of time guessing what you're thinking. So much so that I should probably change the name of the blog to "The 365 Day Turnaround Into A Mentalist."

(Of course, if anybody would use the comments feature more than once every two weeks, I wouldn't have to read anybody's mind.)

So this time, I'm reading your mind again, and I'm guessing you're thinking, Erik, that's great that you got the kids into Chuck E. Cheese, but how does pizza fit into your diet?

Well, the way I see it, if I got this big eating entire large pizzas by myself, then eating half a large pizza should get me down to half my weight.

But seriously, I just arranged my eating for that day based on the fact I'd be having pizza. I didn't starve myself--but I had a really low-cal protein shake for breakfast and a serving of chili for lunch. Plenty of calories left over for a dabble in late night pizza.

What probably surprised those of you who really know me is that I had soda. Normally I absolutely, positively drink nothing but water. It was a special occasion, though, so I dabbled in a little diet soda.

How did it all work for me? Well, check out the tale of the tape. I'm down another 4 pounds since last week, putting me at 21 pounds since the first of the year, and only one pound away from my short term goal of 240 by April 3rd. Which is, of course, good, because we all know those last 20 are going to be harder than the first 20, so it's nice to be a little ahead of schedule on my goal to be down to 220 by my birthday in July.

And tomorrow, for my cardio, I'll get to move furniture out of the office that flooded and that we were forced to close because of mold.

Life never ceases to be exciting.

Note: Look for another exciting Tale of the Tape update this week, on the financial end, as I experience the power of both the mid-month payday and a tax return.

Sunday Book Review: Games You Can't Lose

So, I know what you've been wondering.

Erik, you say, if you've never laid a dollar down in Vegas, where do you get your information about all of these casino games?

Well, this book is a lot of the answer.

When I was a teenager, my interest in magic led me to an interest in swindles, which led me to this little book, which is full of proposition bets, cheats, and cons.

Wanna know how to take of your suit vest without taking off your jacket? Think you know who the first President of America was? Wanna know how to make an egg balance on end?

All that stuff is in here, along with entertaining stories of famous hustlers and some of the greatest hustles of all time.

The second half of the book is called Games You Can't Win, and features every commercial hustle from the casinos to the carnival to the tracks to the street corner.

Three card monte, "systems" at the track, card counting, it's all in here. There's a remarkable amount of information for such a thin volume. And it's peppered with stories--cute stories, my favorites being "The Man In The Bathrobe," and "The Three Little Milk Bottles."

The Harry Anderson who wrote this is the same Harry Anderson who does the magic shows and who played the judge on Night Court. If you're wondering what his qualifications are to write this--well, the lore goes something like this.

Harry actually started out in San Francisco as a street hustler. After a couple of bad experiences (first he got arrested by the police for playing a game of chance, then he got his jaw busted by a guy who realized he was not playing a game of chance) he found himself back on the street, on now he was teaching how to avoid getting conned by the monte. He was teaching people, with his jaw wired shut at all.

He ended up a Vegas magician, until after some "experiences" that left him barred from playing cards in the state of Nevada.

Is any of this true? Who knows. Even the fact that so much of history may just be a swindle proves there's no better guy to write this book. Admittedly, it's pretty light stuff--this book is to the real world of cons what those pamphlets they sell at Disneyland are to magic--but it's still entertaining reading. It's also a wee bit dated--it was first published about 15 years ago (That also dates me).

So basically, I know so much about casino games because when I was a kid I studied up on scams and found the Casinos were one of the first things they talked about.