Whistler Weekend

One of the questions asked in my job interview was "Do you ski or snowboard?".
I replied, "Yes I was on my high school Ski Team"
"Good, because were going to Whister in January."

This past weekend was what has become the legendary Whistler Weekend. I had heard much lore about previous weekends involving a Major in the US Marines, a coffee pot and Red Bull + Vodka. Luckily being just out of college I knew I could keep up with these fools who had a couple of years on me.

We took Friday off work and drove up. The drive up on the Sea to Sky highway was absolutely stunning. The 11 of us were in a condo right by the village that had a Hot Tub. We were close enough we could walk to the the base. The accommodations were nice. We got up there around 5 and immediately started drinking. We had bought some stuff at the duty free on the way up. Duty free is legit, I got 2 fifths of Beefeater for $20 and a fifth of Bacardi Select for $15. Once I started drinking I forgot that I hadn't eaten dinner and I was completely wasted by 7PM.

We went out to the bar soon after that. We got into the bar and I went up to the bar to order the first round and bartender almost cut me off before serving me anything. I believe his exact words were "You guys look pretty sloshed already, I'll let you have this one, but slow down." While most of the next 3 hours exist as a 30 minutes in my memory, I went and sat down at a table full of girls and just started hitting on all of them. You see, MLK weekend is also College weekend, so there were lots of college girls around. I usually told them that I was a Senior at Michigan, but then soon after would forget the lie and talk about how I worked in Seattle. My biggest problem was that I was too drunk to remember anyone's name. I would start talking to a girl and then instantly have to ask her what her name was again and again. Eventually my friends found me on the dance floor grinding on a girl and to my dismay we left. Somehow I got lost because my next memory is me riding in a bus. But the bar was only like a 5 minute walk from our place. I got of the bus and bit it on a patch of ice. Eventually I found my way home and made it to bed.

Bright and way too early the next morning people were getting up to hit the slopes. It was a gorgeous day and I was proud to have made it to the mountain by 10 AM. There are two mountians that you can Ski from the base of Whistler. One gondola takes you to Whistler mountain and the other to Blackcomb. They face each other and there is a gondola that runs between the tops of both mountains. The gondola just opened up last year and is something like the longest unsupported span for any gondola in the world. It's really cool. The two days before we got there the mountain had been closed because they had a storm dump over 4 feet of fresh powder. The two mountains form the largest ski-able area in North America, and are 54% larger than the next largest (Vail). It has over 200 runs, of which I maybe went down 30. The skiing was awesome.

Saturday night we all went out for sushi and then after some pre-gaming and Rock Band we went out. My co-worker had managed to get us all on the list at a few of the bars. So instead of a 20 minute wait and a $25 cover, we were given VIP access. This time I just stuck with the line that I had graduated in Way. After getting brutally turned down from an Oregon State girl, me and my buddy Dan found two Sophomores at U-Dub who were no joke named Hope and Roxy. I swear those weren't their stage names either. I took the job of Wingman and grabbed Roxy and went to the dance floor. Roxy was less cute than Hope (who had a terrific rack) but she was a great dancer. A few shots and songs later we were making out and it was closing time. Dan gave the girl his number and made her text him even though she was on roaming charges. As Dan and I walked home we met two 30-something year olds that we tried to convince to come back to our hot tub. They weren't having any of it.

Sunday I was super hung over. Between my Unidentified Drinking Injuries (UDI's) and skiing I was pretty beat up. We made it up to Blackcomb and get some fresh powder that had fallen the previous night. We got some solid runs in were about to head over the Peak to Peak gondola to go back to Whistler Mountain. From the chairlift we could see a spot near the top where snowboarders were getting some mad air off of this lip on an ungroomed area. I decided to jump it on my ski's. With everyone skiing down the mountain and on the chairlift watching I decided to go for. Footloose had just come on my iPod so as I raced towards this 10 foot jump I dedicated my jump to Swayze. I shot out of the jump and I was told I was about 15 feet above the lip. I came down about 20 feet down the mountain and landed in 2 feet of powder. The instant my skis hit the powder they stopped and I wrecked face first into the snow. I could hear the collective "OHHHHHH" from everyone who was watching. People up the hill said it they saw me take the header and then it was a cloud of snow. Luckily it was soft powder so except for a mouthful of snow I was fine. The adrenaline rush stayed with me for the next hour.

While we took our time skiing down Whistler I went down a part of run where they are doing the Super-G in the Olympics in a few weeks. It was sweet, and even though my legs were like jello I shot down it. That night we went out to a Japanese steakhouse for dinner and then back to the condo. We were too beat to go out so instead we invented a drinking game for The Hangover. It involves drinking everytime they say the name of their lost friend Doug. It is great because you get to drink at least once every five minutes, and there are a few parts where you really need to chug. Like in the desert drug dealer scene, and when Ed Helms sings his ballad about Doug. I was drinking out of an abandoned two-liter bottle, so even though I only had two drinks, a liter of G n' T and a liter of Rum + Coke really put me on my ass.

Part of The Stroll in the Village

Overall, I came away super impressed with Whistler. The Skiing is unmatched. The village is beautiful and fun. Maybe it was just because it was college weekend, but the crowds seemed to be more fun too, unlike at Aspen where everyone is trying to be sophisticated and classy. Also, as an added bonus, all of the employees are from Australia. I don't need to detail what I would do for a girl with an Australian accent. My only complaint about anything would be that the lift lines were pretty long. Usually they were around 15 minutes but a couple of times they were over 25. But that's somewhat minor.



After consuming McDonald's for breakfast, Beef Jerky and 5 hour energy for lunch and eating massive dinners, my digestive system is completely wrecked. But one of the guys we were talking to on the lift told us how his hang over cure was - no joke - Red Bull and Pedialyte. The other guy on the lift then chimed in "Yeah, that's always what I do too". Is this common? How have I not heard of this yet? It makes sense though, Pedialyte is like packed full of hydration. I just need to figure out how to buy it without looking crazy.

So I'll leave you with a list of my current injuries and how they occurred:
Right shin scabbed up - Ski Boot
Left knee scabbed - Skiing mishap
Right armpit bruised - Co-worker body slam
Left bicep bruised - ????
Right elbow sore and bruised - Falling on the ice
Right pinky blood blisters - ??????
Tailbone - Falling on the ice while blackout/body slam
Whole body soreness - Whistler Weekend '10

NFL Bets Analysis

See the previous posts on my NFL betting strategy here and here.

This year, I tested the waters of NFL season over/under bets. I made this statement before the season began.

Again, the theme was bet on unders, and most likely there will be more teams that finish with less than 5 wins than Vegas predicts.

My three bets went 2-0-1 with Tampa Bay and Detroit both hitting the under and Miami resulting in a push. Also my prediction that there will be more teams with less than 5 wins than Vegas predicts was spot on. Vegas predicted there would be one, there were actually 5.

Check out this sweet chart I made. Then check out the badass graph I made.



So I did the full analysis to see if my system of betting would have proved profitable this year. With my system I would have bet on 18 unders and 14 overs. I would have ended up going 18-11-3. So in theory if I would have place $100 on each bet I would be up $700 at the end of the season. But the way sports betting works is that payouts aren't always 1:1. Usually you have to bet $110 to make $100. So if I bet $100 on each team and went 16-16 I wouldn't necessarily break even. I would actually be down like $160. Some bets pay out better than 2:1 though. This is because bookies will change the payouts to get even betting on both sides. This season even though I would have won 7 more than I lost I would have only made $535.

But one of the issues with betting on every team is that my systems sometimes finds the Vegas odds to be nearly identical to my odds. Then putting a bet down is like a coin flip. But it can be worse if the payouts are less than 1:1. So if I paired down my system to only the biggest differences between my predictions and Vegas odds and bet those I would have gone 10-6 and won $335.

While I've only looked at one season I am confidant that my systems works pretty well. But the real question is if my system is a better predictor of wins then the sportsbooks are. As a side note, my system relies on the Vegas odds to make my predictions. So I guess my systems relies on Vegas to be at least somewhat close to the actual odds, and from what I can tell they are.

So, I looked at the total difference between the actual results and both Vegas and my system. Vegas was off by 61 wins, while I was off by 58.33 wins. My variance was also 1.61 wins compared to 1.65 for Vegas. But I'm not sure that this comparison is valid because Vegas odds are in increments of .5 and my predictions are decimals.

I like the idea of betting the season over/under because the bet can minimize the randomness of football outcomes by aggregating a teams performance over 16 games. Sure they might get upset a couple of times, but they might also pull a few of their own. At the end of the day usually they are who we thought they were. So will I take this action next season? You betcha.

WTTIF Turns Three

I'm pretty sure this blog jumped the shark on Saturday August 15th, 2009. But up until then, this was a pretty strong year for the blog. As the standard for the birthday post, I re-read all my posts from the past year. The upsetting thing is how many absurd things happened over the last year that I didn't blog about. That's why I think I might make a couple of posts about some of the crazy things I never got to blog about.

Who knows what this year will hold. But I hope to blog more. Right now my life is consumed by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and NCAA Football '10 so some posts will have to wait.

Blackjack

When I was first learning to play blackjack and hanging out at Casino Windsor paying 7$ for cans of Molson Canadian I picked up on something. The best people to sit next to at the Blackjack table are the old timers. The type of guys who know there way around the game and can shell out some advice that only 50 years of playing can earn. Although I haven't needed the advice on how to play my hands in quite some time, I still value the way generational gaps can disappear at the table.

A few months back I got talking with a man who looked to be in his mid eighties. He had that aura of a man who had lived quite the life. He had given his kids and grand-kids enough money to keep them at the slots long enough to leave him alone at the blackjack table. He started telling me about his life and I soon lost the count. But I found this guy to be more interesting than any 2% player edge. He told me of how he was stationed as a Marine at the base where I now work. About how during those times it was just an ammunition pier with 50 Marines and a few civilians. About how he met his wife at a dance at the gymnasium on a cold October night. About how he became the post master of a small town where everyone knew his name. Sure, it was like a poor man's Forrest Gump but I found it endlessly fascinating.

I was back at the casino this past Sunday night. As rounders so eloquently put it "Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy... the outstanding tough beats of his career."

I'm sitting at close to a 3.5 count index. I had been playing for 4 hours and that was the best count I had seen all night. I had spent all night waiting for moments to strike, only to get beat by dealer 21's and the guy next to me not splitting his 8's against a dealer 6. I would slowly grind back up on minimum bets only to drop an hours worth of work on the variance of the game. But it was getting late and I had work the next day. I had an opportunity to get back close to even including the $10 I had lost on the Chargers not covering the spread against the Bengals. The cards came out; Ace, Nine, King, Jack, and then to me a Three. Everyone easily got 20's and 19's, but my second card was an eight and the dealer had a five up. This deck is mostly face cards and I have a 11 against a dealer five. I reached into my wallet to pulled out the cash to double down and the dealer gives me a whopping 3. Leaving me with an astounding 14. But the dealer still has a bust card and with this count, anything but a bust would be rare. His under card is a 10 leaving him sitting at 15 just like he should. But his next card is another five. It was a kick in the balls. I drove home in the rain knowing that I played it perfectly but the cards didn't have the same intentions that I did.

But that's not what I wanted to blog about. I wanted to blog about the guy who I was sitting next to for about 40 minutes of the night. Guy looked to be about 65, white with a mop of dirty hair that sat under a well worn hat. He was quite the character. Everyone else at the table seemed put off by him, but I really enjoyed him. He was chain smoking cigarettes and kept ordering straight shots of tequila and whiskey. But the cocktail waitress couldn't understand him as he was nearly unintelligible so I tried to interpret. No matter what he would get he would declare "Whiskey smells funny" before pounding the shot. He didn't keep his chips in neat stacks like everyone else but rather in a big mixed-up pile. After a couple more shot he started rambling about how he was going to sleep in his van that was in the parking lot. Then he started prodding the dealer about it. "I'm gonna sleep in yours [sic] parking lot whadda think about that!" I asked him about it and he started angrily mumbling about the "best damn biscuts n' gravy". Everyone kept looking at me trying to get me to stop talking to him, but I found it too amusing. Eventually he got up and announced to no one in particular "IM GOING TO SLEEP IN MY VAN" and then stumbled out.

Creepy Steve

Creepy Steve was our neighbor for two years in college. At first he was just known as Steve but his nickname was well earned. We originally knew Steve trough our neighbor Chris Orr. Chris was a legend in his own right having once been threatened by basketball referee Jim Burr and also for having this quote appear in the Michigan Daily:

Perhaps LSA senior Chris Orr has a better approach. Like Vinny, Orr started drinking early and took a few Nalgene bottles filled with Killian’s Irish Red to class just to “keep the buzz going.” Orr gets regularly bored in class on St. Patrick's Day.

Anyways, over the course of two years our group of friends got to know Creepy Steve rather well. Steve was a big lovable oaf. He was one of the kindest and most unintentionally funny people I ever met at college. But Steve's biggest problem was with women.




As much as Steve would try, he was terrible at talking to girls. But what he lacked in charm and charisma he made up for double in effort. But as much as Steve loved trying to get girls, he also loved booze. (As a short side story, Steve once had his mom coming to visit on gameday around 10AM and he got so drunk that his mom showed up and he was passed out on a couch at the BOX house covered with sharpie). But that worked well because Steve was kind of shy, so he could really only talk to - as he called them - "hot chicks" after having a few drinks. This might have lead to Steve's other problem; he was a rather sloppy drunk. So we would be at parties at our friends houses and for the first hour or so Steve would be in the corner drinking beer. Eventually at a certain point in the night Steve would let everyone at the party know that it was time for him to start hitting on girls. And what was this magical signal? Steve would be so drunk that he would completely miss his mouth trying to drink a beer and pour it all down his shirt. To this day the "Creeper Steve" look is a short sleeved button down with beer poured down the front.

So Steve would go around with his beer covered shirt and start macking on the ladies. Steve was equal opportunity and it didn't matter if a girl was way out of his league or already taken by another guy. Usually the conversations wouldn't last long. This is probably because Steve didn't have a great mastery of pickup lines. Generally he would go up to girls and open with a compliment like "You have beautiful eyes" which isn't necessarily bad except when the girl is with a group of her friends and the guy is extrodinarily drunk. He once told our very attractive female friend that "She had beautiful arms". Steve also once told me how he was going to hit on that hot girl in the corner and then went over before I could tell him that she was my sister. This almost always lead to girls coming up to us and asking who the creepy guy with the beer all over his shirt was. And to that we would reply "Well, that's Creepy Steve"

But the story has a happy ending as Steve now has a girlfriend, so his days of chugging beer and wrestling Chris Orr in the front yard of the BOX house may be behind him.

Routine

Everyday feels the same. Wake up / go to work / come home / pour myself a drink / eat / play video games. Life has gotten stale. But the cool thing is that every two weeks I get paid money, which is nice.

I'm still trying to live the dream on the weekends. Hitting the bars, staying out all night and crashing on couches. But to be honest, it's harder than it was in college. Tonight I was watching the Michigan game on ESPN 2 and they panned over Chris Orr. He was wearing his signature green hat and Neil Diamond vest. I could tell he was about 7 Molson XXX's deep. It made me recall last year when I could slam a bunch Tequila at the Cantina and then yell at Ed DeChellis to "SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN". It was then that I realized how much I miss college.

Texts from last night

My buddy Dan downloaded an app that reads his texts messages aloud as he receive them. This lead to me sending him a number of texts in various social settings last night.

As he is in the bathroom on the ferry:
Dan how is your dump going? Is it as stinky as you expected? Love, Frank

While he is taking a pee in some bushes:
Don't pee in the bushes

While talking with some girls at a party:
It's Frank, I left my underwear at your place last night. Love ya.

In front of our buddy's wife who is Beth and our friend Jon:
Isn't Beth hot? From Jon

While on the way to the bar:
I love to eat sausages all day long

While at a bar called the Alibi Room:
I heard about the time you crapped your pants at the Alibi Room.

In front of some hot girls:
I saw your craigslist ad about you looking for a guy to toss salad with. I have a bleached asshole so write me back.