Hello everyone! I have only been on Reddit for a few months but I learned so much from it that I figured I should try and give back to the community. English is my second language and this is the first time I ever write a full-length article, I hope you will enjoy reading it and I would be very thankful if you could provide some feedback about my writing, about the topic, or about anything else really… So here goes!
Why you should learn poker and game theory:
My story is similar to that of many: I learned about the game 10 years ago (during the golden age of online poker) when some friends of mine invited me to play a home game. Although I initially thought of poker as just another game of chance akin to playing slots or roulette in a casino, I quickly came to realize that there is a lot more to it as my more experienced friends would repeatedly get the best of me during these home games, which led me to start watching videos and reading strategy books to improve my skill… Little did I know it’d be the start of a journey that would impact many different aspects of my life way beyond the game itself, as most of the fundamental principles learned through poker can be applied to your decision-making outside of the game, especially when it comes to money management and investing. Now, let’s dive into a few of these principles:
​
- Risk management (i.e. Bankroll management)
When learning about how to be successful playing poker, the first big piece of advice most people come across is bankroll management or BRM. To understand BRM, you must first realize that poker has a lot of variance: you might be vastly ahead in a given hand but there is almost always a slim chance that you will lose in the end if one specific card hits. This implies that you will sometimes lose even though you were a 99% favorite, and that you will sometimes get unlucky and lose 2, 5 or maybe even 20 such encounters in a row. THIS is variance. It doesn’t mean that you played bad or that you made bad decisions, but rather that you got unlucky. Over time you will have lucky streaks and unlucky streaks, and these will average out in the long term… It’s just the way the game goes.
Now that we understand variance, let’s get back to BRM. What is it exactly? Let’s say you are the best poker player in the world but you only have 1000$ that you can EVER use to play with. Taking your whole 1000$ on one table and multiplying your stack at an exponential rate might seem like a good idea. Surely nothing can go wrong since you’re the best player in the world right? But variance can be a bitch ;) Even if you’re the best you will lose regularly and you will sometimes get unlucky, it’s just part of the game. The correct move here is to apply BRM, which means only using a small % of your available capital for each game you play in order to reduce the risk of going broke. Using only 100$ per game would already be a lot safer, but you still run the risk of going under on a streak of bad luck. If you only allocate 10$ per game you play, then it becomes virtually impossible for you to ever go broke, even on a huge streak of bad luck. Sure it’s not as exciting and you won’t be making money quite as fast as you could, but this is the way to go to make sure you don’t go broke…
This approach to risk management translates very well to investing:
- Only invest what you can afford to lose. Once the money is on the table it’s as good as gone, which is why you should only use your “spare” cash and never invest with your living expenses or worse, borrow money to invest.
- Diversify your investments. There is always a chance, however slim it might be, that you will lose most of your investment. This is why going all-in on a specific investment is generally a bad idea (this applies particularly well in the crypto space).
Proper BRM allows you to make sure that you will come out ahead in the long run if you play well, which basically comes down to making more good decisions than bad ones. But that’s assuming you don’t let emotions come in the way of your decision-making, which brings us to our next point…
​
- Emotional management (i.e. Handling tilt/Positive mindset)
Nobody likes losing… In the same way we enjoy winning because of the dopamine rush, we feel bad when we lose which is totally natural. Overcoming this and avoiding tilt (irrational decisions made out of angefrustration) is an essential skill for any successful poker player. You might play a sound game of poker and apply good BRM, but you will still lose if you let your emotions get the best of you.
After a loss, rather than being angry and frustrated, you should evaluate your decision-making. If your decision-making was good, you just got unlucky and you shouldn’t worry about it since you are playing for the long run (remember that variance teaches us that anything can happen in the short-term). If your decision-making was bad, you need to learn from your mistakes and move on. The key here is to always have a positive mindset: making mistakes is part of the learning process and should be seen as an occasion to improve. Being angry and ranting, on the other hand, rarely result in anything positive.
Again, this translates very well to investing:
- Don’t be impulsive, don’t let your emotions cloud your judgment. You should not FOMO because the price is pumping, nor should you sell because of FUD or price corrections. If you believe in a project, short-term price changes (did I hear someone say “variance”?) shouldn’t bother you.
- Don’t get stuck up on losses. You bought the top and it crashed immediately after? You sold the bottom right before a huge rally? Don’t let this bother you: what’s done is done and you just need to move on and make the best of your current situation.
- Have a positive mindset. Anger and frustration lead to nothing. Yes you could have bought in 2009 when you first heard about it, hindsight is always 20/20. Stay positive and keep learning/improving yourself.
The good thing about all this is that it goes way beyond poker or investing. Being aware of your emotions and how they affect you, learning how to handle losing even when you were “supposed” to win, etc… All this can tremendously help you in all aspects of life by making you less impulsive and more rational in your decision-making. Now, this leaves us with our last fundamental principle of a sound poker strategy:
​
- Basic stats and probabilities (i.e. Expected value/Odds)
To become an accomplished player, you will inevitably have to learn about these simple mathematical tools that poker players use all the time in their decision-making process, such as odds and expected value. To make it very simple, the expected value (EV) of any bet is (REWARD \ WinRate - RISK), meaning that if you can bet 1000$ with a chance to win 10k$ half of the time, your EV is *(10000\0.5)-1000 = +4000$**. Obviously these are great odds to take as long as you have enough capital to overcome variance. But things would be very different if the odds of winning were only 5% as your EV would then be negative *(10000\0.05)-1000 = -500$.*** Now this is clearly a bet you should not take…
Now that you know probabilities, statistics and game theory are useful decision-making tools in poker, guess what? They are also extremely useful in investing! Even better, the study of game theory with problems such as the “Byzantine generals” or the “Three prisoners” has been, along with cryptography, the foundation on which blockchain technology was built, enabling the trustless and decentralized services that are about to revolutionize our world…
Assuming this was enough to pique your interest and make you want to dig deeper, I’ll just add that just like the other topics we discussed and as you might have guessed, this translates very well to investing and also to pretty much anything in your life:
- Learn how to break down complex situations. Logical thinking paired with a statistical approach will help you break down any complex problem into several easier problems, making the whole thing a lot easier to approach/comprehend.
- Base your decisions on a methodical and rational approach. List every possible outcome along with its associated upside/downside, estimate the probability of each outcome to occur and make the best decision based on the information available.
My point here is that risk management, emotional management and statistics/game theory are all awesome tools that you should definitely add to your arsenal. Not only will it improve your money-management and investing, it will also be beneficial to your decision-making and to your life in general. Of course poker is not the only way to learn about these, but I personally found it to be the best practice ground to refine and improve them, which is why I strongly encourage you all to try it out and study the game.
I hope you enjoyed the article, and I wish you all a happy 2021 bull run! May we all come closer to retirement and financial independence!
​
TL;DR: more than a game, poker is a school of thought. It teaches you to be reasonable, to assess the risk of every single choice you make, to overcome you emotions, to play the long game rather than the short game, to make informed decisions, etc… This has made me a lot wiser in every aspect of my life, which is why I strongly encourage to try it out and read about poker strategy.

Hello everyone! I have only been on Reddit for a few months but I learned so much from it that I figured I should try and give back to the community. English is my second language and this is the first time I ever write a full-length article, I hope you will enjoy reading it and I would be very thankful if you could provide some feedback about my writing, about the topic, or about anything else really… So here goes!
​
Why you should learn poker and game theory:
My story is similar to that of many: I learned about the game 10 years ago (during the golden age of online poker) when some friends of mine invited me to play a home game. Although I initially thought of poker as just another game of chance akin to playing slots or roulette in a casino, I quickly came to realize that there is a lot more to it as my more experienced friends would repeatedly get the best of me during these home games, which led me to start watching videos and reading strategy books to improve my skill… Little did I know it’d be the start of a journey that would impact many different aspects of my life way beyond the game itself, as most of the fundamental principles learned through poker can be applied to your decision-making outside of the game, especially when it comes to money management and investing. Now, let’s dive into a few of these principles:
​
- Risk management (i.e. Bankroll management)
When learning about how to be successful playing poker, the first big piece of advice most people come across is bankroll management or BRM. To understand BRM, you must first realize that poker has a lot of variance: you might be vastly ahead in a given hand but there is almost always a slim chance that you will lose in the end if one specific card hits. This implies that you will sometimes lose even though you were a 99% favorite, and that you will sometimes get unlucky and lose 2, 5 or maybe even 20 such encounters in a row. THIS is variance. It doesn’t mean that you played bad or that you made bad decisions, but rather that you got unlucky. Over time you will have lucky streaks and unlucky streaks, and these will average out in the long term… It’s just the way the game goes.
Now that we understand variance, let’s get back to BRM. What is it exactly? Let’s say you are the best poker player in the world but you only have 1000$ that you can EVER use to play with. Taking your whole 1000$ on one table and multiplying your stack at an exponential rate might seem like a good idea. Surely nothing can go wrong since you’re the best player in the world right? But variance can be a bitch ;) Even if you’re the best you will lose regularly and you will sometimes get unlucky, it’s just part of the game. The correct move here is to apply BRM, which means only using a small % of your available capital for each game you play in order to reduce the risk of going broke. Using only 100$ per game would already be a lot safer, but you still run the risk of going under on a streak of bad luck. If you only allocate 10$ per game you play, then it becomes virtually impossible for you to ever go broke, even on a huge streak of bad luck. Sure it’s not as exciting and you won’t be making money quite as fast as you could, but this is the way to go to make sure you don’t go broke…
This approach to risk management translates very well to investing:
- Only invest what you can afford to lose. Once the money is on the table it’s as good as gone, which is why you should only use your “spare” cash and never invest with your living expenses or worse, borrow money to invest.
- Diversify your investments. There is always a chance, however slim it might be, that you will lose most of your investment. This is why going all-in on a specific investment is generally a bad idea (this applies particularly well in the crypto space).
Proper BRM allows you to make sure that you will come out ahead in the long run if you play well, which basically comes down to making more good decisions than bad ones. But that’s assuming you don’t let emotions come in the way of your decision-making, which brings us to our next point…
​
- Emotional management (i.e. Handling tilt/Positive mindset)
Nobody likes losing… In the same way we enjoy winning because of the dopamine rush, we feel bad when we lose which is totally natural. Overcoming this and avoiding tilt (irrational decisions made out of angefrustration) is an essential skill for any successful poker player. You might play a sound game of poker and apply good BRM, but you will still lose if you let your emotions get the best of you.
After a loss, rather than being angry and frustrated, you should evaluate your decision-making. If your decision-making was good, you just got unlucky and you shouldn’t worry about it since you are playing for the long run (remember that variance teaches us that anything can happen in the short-term). If your decision-making was bad, you need to learn from your mistakes and move on. The key here is to always have a positive mindset: making mistakes is part of the learning process and should be seen as an occasion to improve. Being angry and ranting, on the other hand, rarely result in anything positive.
Again, this translates very well to investing:
- Don’t be impulsive, don’t let your emotions cloud your judgment. You should not FOMO because the price is pumping, nor should you sell because of FUD or price corrections. If you believe in a project, short-term price changes (did I hear someone say “variance”?) shouldn’t bother you.
- Don’t get stuck up on losses. You bought the top and it crashed immediately after? You sold the bottom right before a huge rally? Don’t let this bother you: what’s done is done and you just need to move on and make the best of your current situation.
- Have a positive mindset. Anger and frustration lead to nothing. Yes you could have bought in 2009 when you first heard about it, hindsight is always 20/20. Stay positive and keep learning/improving yourself.
The good thing about all this is that it goes way beyond poker or investing. Being aware of your emotions and how they affect you, learning how to handle losing even when you were “supposed” to win, etc… All this can tremendously help you in all aspects of life by making you less impulsive and more rational in your decision-making. Now, this leaves us with our last fundamental principle of a sound poker strategy:
​
- Basic stats and probabilities (i.e. Expected value/Odds)
To become an accomplished player, you will inevitably have to learn about these simple mathematical tools that poker players use all the time in their decision-making process, such as odds and expected value. To make it very simple, the expected value (EV) of any bet is (REWARD \ WinRate - RISK), meaning that if you can bet 1000$ with a chance to win 10k$ half of the time, your EV is *(10000\0.5)-1000 = +4000$**. Obviously these are great odds to take as long as you have enough capital to overcome variance. But things would be very different if the odds of winning were only 5% as your EV would then be negative *(10000\0.05)-1000 = -500$.*** Now this is clearly a bet you should not take…
Now that you know probabilities, statistics and game theory are useful decision-making tools in poker, guess what? They are also extremely useful in investing! Even better, the study of game theory with problems such as the “Byzantine generals” or the “Three prisoners” has been, along with cryptography, the foundation on which blockchain technology was built, enabling the trustless and decentralized services that are about to revolutionize our world…
Assuming this was enough to pique your interest and make you want to dig deeper, I’ll just add that just like the other topics we discussed and as you might have guessed, this translates very well to investing and also to pretty much anything in your life:
- Learn how to break down complex situations. Logical thinking paired with a statistical approach will help you break down any complex problem into several easier problems, making the whole thing a lot easier to approach/comprehend.
- Base your decisions on a methodical and rational approach. List every possible outcome along with its associated upside/downside, estimate the probability of each outcome to occur and make the best decision based on the information available.
My point here is that risk management, emotional management and statistics/game theory are all awesome tools that you should definitely add to your arsenal. Not only will it improve your money-management and investing, it will also be beneficial to your decision-making and to your life in general. Of course poker is not the only way to learn about these, but I personally found it to be the best practice ground to refine and improve them, which is why I strongly encourage you all to try it out and study the game.
I hope you enjoyed the article, and I wish you all a happy 2021 bull run! May we all come closer to retirement and financial independence!
​
TL;DR: more than a game, poker is a school of thought. It teaches you to be reasonable, to assess the risk of every single choice you make, to overcome you emotions, to play the long game rather than the short game, to make informed decisions, etc… This has made me a lot wiser in every aspect of my life, which is why I strongly encourage to try it out and read about poker strategy.
Edit: I couldn't crosspost from cc so I just copied the post as I figured it is relevant here too :)

Hey everyone, I am a former Wall Street trader and quant researcher. When I was preparing for my own interviews, I have noticed the lack of accurate information and so I will be providing my own perspectives. One common pattern I see is people building their own algorithm by blindly fitting statistical methods such as moving averages onto data.
I have published this elsewhere, but have copy pasted it entirely below for you to read to keep it in the spirit of the sub rules. Edit: Removed link.

What it was like trading on Wall Street

Right out of college, I began my trading career at an electronic hedge fund on Wall Street. Several friends pitched trading to me as being a more disciplined version of wallstreetbets that actually made money. After flopping several initial interviews, I was fortunate to land a job at a top-tier firm of the likes of Jane Street, SIG, Optiver and IMC.
On my first day, I was instantly hooked.
My primary role there was to be a market maker. To explain this, imagine that you are a merchant. Suppose you wanted to purchase a commodity such as an apple. You would need to locate an apple seller and agree on a fair price. Market makers are the middle-men that cuts out this interaction by being always willing to buy or sell at a given price.
In finance lingo, this is called providing liquidity to financial exchanges. At any given moment, you should be confident to liquidate your position for cash. To give a sense of scale, tens of trillions in dollars are processed through these firms every year.
My time trading has been one of the most transformative periods of my life. It not only taught me a lot of technical knowledge, but it also moulded me to be a self-starter, independent thinker, and hard worker. I strongly recommend anyone that loves problem solving to give trading a shot. You do not need a mathematics or finance background to get in.
The trading culture is analogous to professional sports. It is a zero sum game where there is a clear defined winner and loser — you either make or lose money. This means that both your compensation and job security is highly dependent on your performance. For those that are curious, the rough distribution of a trader’s compensation based on performance is a tenth of the annual NBA salary.
There is a mystique about trading in popular media due to the abstraction of complicated quantitative models. I will shed light on some of the fundamental principles rooted in all trading strategies, and how they might apply to you.

Arbitrage

One way traders make money is through an arbitrage or a risk free trade. Suppose you could buy an apple from Sam for $1, and then sell an apple to Megan at $3. A rational person would orchestrate both legs of these trades to gain $2 risk free.
Arbitrages are not only found in financial markets. The popular e-commerce strategy of drop-shipping is a form of arbitrage. Suppose you find a tripod selling on AliExpress at $10. You could list the same tripod on Amazon for $20. If someone buys from you, then you could simply purchase the tripod off AliExpress and take home a neat $10 profit.
The same could be applied to garage sales. If you find a baseball card for $2 that has a last sold price on EBay for $100, you have the potential to make $98. Of course this is not a perfect arbitrage as you face the risk of finding a buyer, but the upside makes this worthwhile.

Positive expected value bets

Another way traders make money is similar to the way a casino stacks the odds in their favour. Imagine you flip a fair coin. If it lands on heads you win $3, and if it lands on tails you lose $1. If you flip the coin only once, you may be unlucky and lose the dollar. However in the long run, you are expected to make a positive profit of $1 per coin flip. This is referred to as a positive expected value bet. Over the span of millions of transactions, you are almost guaranteed to make a profit.
This exact principle is why you should never gamble in casino games such as roulette. These games are all negative expected value bets, which guarantees you to lose money over the long run. Of course there are exceptions to this, such as poker or card counting in black jack.
The next time you walk into a casino, make a mental note to observe the ways it is designed to keep you there for as long as possible. Note the lack of windows and the maze like configurations. Even the free drinks and the cheap accommodation are all a farce to keep you there.

Relative Pricing

Relative pricing is a great strategy to use when there are two products that have clear causal relationships. Let us consider an apple and a carton of apple juice. Suppose there have a causal relationship where the carton is always $9 more expensive than the apple. The apple and the carton is currently trading at $1 and $10 respectively.
If the price of the apple goes up to $2, the price is not immediately reflected on the carton. There will always be a time lag. It is also important to note that there is no way we can determine if the apple is trading at fair value or if its overpriced. So how do we take advantage of this situation?
If we buy the carton for $10 and sell the apple for $2, we have essentially bought the ‘spread’ for $8. The spread is fairly valued at $9 due to the causal relationship, meaning we have made $1. The reason high frequency trading firms focus so much on latency in the nanoseconds is to be the first to scoop up these relative mispricing.
This is the backbone for delta one strategies. Common pairs that are traded against each other includes ETFs and their inverse counterpart, a particular stock against an ETF that contains the stock, or synthetic option structures.

Correlations

Correlations are mutual connections between two things. When they trend in the same direction they are said to have a positive correlation, and the vice versa is true for negative correlations. A popular example of positive correlation is the number of shark attacks with the number of ice-cream sales. It is important to note that shark attacks do not cause ice-cream sales.
Often times there are no intuitive reason for certain correlations, but they still work. The legendary Renaissance Technologies sifted through petabytes of historical data to find profitable signals. For instance, good morning weather in a city tended to predict an upward movement in its stock exchange. One could theoretically buy stock on the opening and sell at noon to make a profit.
One important piece of advice is to disregard any retail trader selling a course to you, claiming that they have a system. These are all scams. At best, these are bottom of the mill signals that are hardly profitable after transaction costs. It is also unlikely that you have the system latency, trading experience or research capabilities to do this on your own. It is possible, but very difficult.

Mean reversions

Another common strategy traders rely on is mean reversion trends. In the options world the primary focus is purchasing volatility when it is cheap compared to historical values, and vice versa. Buying options is essentially synonymous with buying volatility. Of course, it is not as simple as this so don’t go punting your savings on Robinhood using this strategy.
For most people, the most applicable mean reversion trend is interest rates. These tend to fluctuate up and down depending on if the central banks want to stimulate saving or spending. As global interest rates are next to zero or negative, it may be a good idea to lock in this low rate for your mortgages. Again, consult with a financial advisor before you do anything.

Let's say you're opening up a lootbox from a game, and an item you want has a 5% chance of getting it. Meaning you have a 1 in 20 chance of getting that item if you simply 5/100.
Does this mean that I should mathematically get that 1 item in atleast 20 pulls?
Or does this mean that the odds are like a casino roulette where the odds are completely reset from the beginning of a pull and only a set number of listings, being one spot in a 20 seat list, which then the pull is cast at random to land on a position possibly being that 5% item.
Maybe the odds depend on the item being gambled on, but what would be your best explanation as to how chances work?

Slothrop's Hawaiian Shirt by Zak Smith (2006).
I just want to begin by thanking u/Bloomsdayclock for coordinating this endeavor, for all of the previous posts thus far, and for the enthusiastic interaction and scholarship that’s been happening in the comments for each post. This group read has rekindled my love for this book and is helping me understand it in so many different ways and in such greater depth that it's honestly like I’m reading a different book at this point. Also, kudos to each previous poster for creating a coherent post! The book is complex enough on its own but once you start going down the rabbit hole, sussing out the references, reading through some of the scholarship, etc., I almost found myself paralyzed by information overload (kinda feeling a bit like Charlie Kelly trying to figure out who “Pepe Silvia” is :) ). When this reading group started, I was like, “damn, I’m trying to read this insanely complex novel and the group posts are just as long, dense, and complex” and now I’ve gone and written some super long and dense post, too. To paraphrase either Blaise Pascal or Mark Twain (or Woodrow Wilson or apparently a rather large number of dead white guys from history): I would have written a shorter post if I’d had the time! Apologies in advance!
Anyways, this post will (attempt to) cover the start of the second section of the novel, Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering. The events that transpire are zany and sinister, titillating and deeply sad. There is a mix of images both gorgeous and disgusting and much of the planning and plotting that took place at “The White Visitation” during the first section are starting to come to fruition in part deux. For each “Episode”, I will provide a general summary of the “action” and then some commentary and we’ll finish this post up with a few discussion questions. Let’s begin!
Episode 22
Summary
Slothrop is on furlough/leave at a casino in Monaco (from what I’ve read...I thought it was France before, still not completely sure) that’s been renamed in honor of the big fat slob that led Hitler’s air force during the war. He’s in paradise but wakes up “...[waiting] for a sudden noise to begin his day, a first rocket” (p. 181). His friend Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and a somewhat suspicious friend of his, Teddy Bloat (“[there’s] something about the way he talks to Slothrop, patronizing? Maybe nervous…” (p. 182)), are staying down the hall. They’re talking about meeting some girls but, as the first song of the section reminds us, Englishmen can be very shy. Slothrop is happy to help his “buddies” out, but tells them not to “expect [him] to put it in for [them]” (p. 183). Classic Slothrop!
Slothrop decides to wear a hideous (or amazing, depending on your sensibilities) genuine Hawaiian shirt that he received from his brother Hogan in the Pacific. The shirt seems to emit a glow (once he steps into the sun, it “blazes into a refulgent life of its own” (!) (p. 184), so Tantivy, “friend” that he is, tries to convince Slothrop to cover it up with scratchy Savile Row coat.
The trio hit the beach and the ladies are on them already. They’ve got food and booze and are ready for a nice day on the beach. The morning seems too good even for a bit of the “early paranoia”. And then Bloat ruins everything by drawing Slothrop’s attention to the woman down the beach being attacked by “the biggest fucking octopus Slothrop has ever seen outside of the movies”. Slothrop rushes off to intervene and, left without recourse, starts trying to bash the cephalopod on the head with a wine bottle to no avail. Thankfully, Bloat just happens to have a big, tasty crab on his person, which he tosses to Slothrop with the advice, “It’s hungry, it’ll go for the crab. Don’t kill it, Slothrop.” Slothrop uses the crab to bait away the animal from its current prey, noticing that it does not seem to be in good mental health. He eventually tosses the crab, like a discus, into the sea, and the octopus follows. The damsel has been saved, Slothrop is championed as a brave hero and his first thought is where in the fuck did that crab come from.
The exchange:
“Tantivy smiles and flips a small salute. “Good show!” cheers Teddy Bloat. “I wouldn’t have wanted to try that myself!”
“Why not? You had that crab. Saaay-where’d you get that crab?”
“Found it,” replies Bloat with a straight face. Slothrop stares at this bird but can’t get eye contact. What th’ fuck is going on?” (p. 187).
The damsel thanks Slothrop. Her ID bracelet identifies her as Katje Borgesius. Slothrop feels like he knows her and “...voices begin to take on a touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clap, and the light, though as bright as before, is less able to illuminate….it’s a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in…” (p. 188). How does Slothrop deal with this? By dividing up his present company into a dichotomy: the increasingly drunk Tantivy, “a messenger from Slothrop’s innocent, pre-octopus past” flirting with the girls and Bloat, “perfectly sober, mustache unruffled, regulation uniform [on the fucking beach!], watching [him] closely” (p. 188). And then there’s Katje, who, with her glance, makes Slothrop think she knows something (what?), asking him “Did you know all the time about the octopus? I thought so because it was so like a dance-all of you” (p. 188). Well, fuck me! Katje then tells “Little Tyrone” to be “very careful” and that “Perhaps, after all, we were meant to meet…” (p. 189). Now that’s a “meet cute” for ya!
Commentary/Questions

1. Is the casino fully owned and controlled by Them at this point (is César Flebótomo (Spanish for “sandfly”) a(n) (un)willing patsy in Their employ?). Is it the “lab” for this “phase” of the Slothrop experiment. Or is it just secured enough to ensure the results of the experiment aren’t tainted by some unforeseen variable/interference?
2. Teddy Bloat seems like a purposeful pun in reference to the bureaucracy of government/intel agencies
3. Tantivy Mucker-Maffick’s name is also filled with meaning
4. Songs are one way that Pynchon fills his book with “the language of the preterite”, a term from Weisenburger used to describe the “slang, underworld cant, songs, games, folk-genres, and material culture” used by Pynchon to pit “open, unsanctioned, and “low” languages” against the “closed, orthodox, privileged language of a culture”. This idea is expanded on by literary critic/philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin who notes that the “heteroglossic” aspect of novels allows them to be radical, open-ended artworks filled with a variety of voices that each embody a particular time and place (his term for this idea is a “chronotope”).
5. The whole episode is just soaked in paranoia, from beginning to end. Whatever Slothrop thought he thought he was feeling in Section 1 has been taken up a notch. He senses a plot but keeps playing along.
6. Is “Borgesius” a tribute to J.L. Borges?
7. “Little Tyrone” echoes “Baby Tyrone” from Jamf’s experiments and maybe is supposed to make us realize that while the antics in this episode could possibly be construed as a “loss” of Slothrop’s “innocence” that was actually taken from him as a baby.

Episode 23
Summary
Dr. Porkyevitch (“Porky the pig”?) and “Grisha” (“[frisking] happily in his special enclosure”) stare back at the “blazing bijou” of the Casino from their ship, contemplating their future now that they may no longer be of use to Pointsman, yearning for traces of the Russia they’ve been exiled from.
To the casino: Katje is a vision in shades of green and is escorted by a two-star general and a brigadier. Is it Pudding? RHIP :) Slothrop and Tantivy in the dining room. Slothrop raises the “The Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffic” to get the room singing of his friend’s drunken exploits so that he can speak to Katje who uses the cacophony to invite him to her room after midnight!
Slothrop then probes his buddy to see if he notices anything funny going on. Tantivy brushes him off a bit (“there’s always, you know, an element of Slothropian paranoia to contend with…”(p. 192)) but then concedes that the bastard Bloat is receiving coded messages. Ha! And it turns out Bloat has become a bit of a different man over the last few years, something more than being “Blitz rattled”. He’s also warned Tantivy away from Katje (“I’d stay clear of that one if I were you” (p. 193)) and Tantivy feels used by Bloat (“being tolerated for as long as he can use me” (p. 193)). The encounter ends with Tantivy telling Slothrop to be careful and, should he need help, he’ll be there for him.
At midnight, Slothrop leaves for his rendezvous with Ms. Borgesius, “ascending flights of red-carpeted stairway (Welcome Mister Slothrop Welcome To Our Structure We Hope You Will Enjoy Your Visit Here)” (p. 194). Arriving, he teases her about her date at dinner and then about their slightly sinister “meet cute” while examining her closet which is absolutely filled to the brim with a variety of outfits. The “Too Soon To Know (Fox-Trot)” before they get down to it. As he is undressing her, he notices “...the moonlight only whitens her back, and there is a still a dark side, her ventral side, her face, than he can no longer see, a terrible beastlike change coming over muzzle and lower jaw, black pupils growing to cover the entire eye space till whites are gone and there’s only the red animal reflection when the light comes to strike no telling when the light-” (p. 196). Yikes! As they fuck, she wonders if his “careful technique” is for her or “wired into the Slothropian Run-together they briefed her on”. Either way, “she will move him, she will not be mounted by a plastic shell” (p. 196-197).
Then, a slapstick fight with a seltzer bottle (planted by Them?) that has Slothrop looking for a banana cream pie to toss (classic!) after which they fall asleep, lying like two Ss. In the morning, their post-coital bliss is interrupted as Little Tyrone is rudely awakened by the sound of someone robbing his pants in the room next door. He chases after the thief, first naked, then dressed in a purple satin bedsheet. As he’s chasing, from way down the hallway, “a tiny head appears around a corner, a tiny hand comes out and gives Slothrop the tiny finger” (p. 199). Haha! He chases the thief up a tree only to have the tree cut down while he’s in it. The thief escapes and Bloat and some general find Slothrop a mess.
Bloat takes Slothrop to his room where, “every stitch of clothing he owns is gone, including his Hawaiian shirt. What the fuck. Groaning, he rummages in the desk. Empty. Closets empty. Leave papers, ID, everything, taken… Hogan’s shirt bothers him most of all” (p. 201). Nobody knows where Tantivy’s gone off to. Bloat gives Slothrop a uniform (“a piece of Whitehall on the Riviera” (p. 201)) which doesn’t fit but the book advises, “Live wi’ the way it feels mate, you’ll be in it for a while” (p. 201). Slothrop ponders the meaning of the architecture and design of his surrounds, but “shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room [The Himmer-Spielsaal, no less] is being used from something different. Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical….but, but….” (p. 202). THE WORLD OVER THERE. Against this realization Slothrop issues the only spell he knows, a defiant “Fuck You”. Walking, rainstorm, entertainment at the casino, no one has seen the dancing girls from the drunken breakfast, Slothrop is “finding only strangers where he looks” before freaking out in the casino, then getting wet in the rain, then returning to Katje, the only place he knew to come.
Commentary

1. I love “The Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffic” and would like to write a similar tune about the inebriated shenanigans committed by my best friend and I during college.
2. The bit about Oxford and Harvard not really existing to educate was a nice touch (p. 193)
3. “Snazzy” is an “Americanism” in the 40s! (p. 195).
4. Slothrop ponders an impending loss of innocence (but, again, it seems like that has already happened). He has nothing and no one in a foreign country and the sensation that his life is being purposefully, possibly nefariously influenced by forces he can vaguely perceive. “It’s here that saturation hits him, it’s all this playing games, too much of it, too many games: the nasal, obsessive voice of a croupier he can’t see...is suddenly speaking out of the Forbidden Wing directly to him, and about what Slothrop has been playing against the invisible House, perhaps after all for his soul, all day - terrified, he turns, turns out into the rain again where the electric lights of the Casino, in full holocaust, are glaring off the glazed cobbles.” And then, “How did this all turn against him so fast? His friends old and new, every last bit of paper and clothing connecting him to what he’s been, have just, fucking, vanished. How can he meet this with any kind of grace?” (p. 205)
5. The word “holocaust” is used quite a bit in this story
6. Setting this all in the casino is a nice touch: there is the illusion of chance and luck in a casino but the house always wins.
7. The juxtaposition of the comic (seltzer fight) with the tragic (Slothrop alone, trying to understand what’s happening) heightens both effects.

Episode 24
Summary
They wake up with Katje calling slothrop a pig, which responds to by oinking. At breakfast, he is taking a refresher course in technical German and learning about The Rocket. His tutor, Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck (who speaks 33 languages!) aiding his understanding of German circuit schematics by way of ancient German runes. Slothrop understands immediately that Dodson-Truck is in on the plot but not sure how (“There are times when Slothrop can actually find a clutch mechanism between him and Their iron-cased engine far away up a power train whose shape and design he has to guess at, a clutch he can disengage, feeling then all his inertia of motion, his real helplessness… it is not exactly unpleasant, either. Odd thing. He is almost sure that whatever They want, it won’t mean risking his life, or even too much of his comfort. But he can’t fit any of it into a pattern, there’s no way to connect somebody like Dodson-Truck with somebody like Katje…. The real enemy’s somewhere back in that London anyways” (p. 207).
Back in the Himmler-Spielsaal: “in the twisted gilt playing-room his secret motions clarify for him, some. The odds They played here belonged to the past, the past only. Their odds were never probabilities, but frequencies already observed. It’s the past that makes demands here. It whispers, and reaches after, and sneering disagreeably, gooses its victims.
When they choose numbers, red, black, odd, even, what did They mean it? What Wheel did They set in motion?
Back in a room, early in Slothrop’s life, a room forbidden to him now, is something very bad. Something was done to him and it may be that Katje knows what. Hasn’t he, in her “futureless look,” found some link to his own past, something that connects them closely as lovers?” (p. 208-209). “It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola.”
No more news from London or Achtung. Bloat is gone now, too. Sir Stephen and Katje with their identical Corporate Smiles to dazzle him while they rob his identity. But! “He lets it happen” (p. 210).
Slothrop is getting hardons after his rocket study sessions and then goes looking for relief with Katje. Sir Stephen appears to be timing these erections! So, Slothrop gets the smart idea to get him drunk via a drinking game and many, many people end up getting sloshed on some high class bubbly. Half the room is singing the “Vulgar Song”. Slothrop and Sir Steve get pretty hammered and start walking through a nice sunset, where Slothrop sees robed figures, hundreds of miles tall, on the horizon. Sir Stephen informs Slothrop that he’s got “potency issues” (which makes him the perfect observer for Slothrop’s sexual misadventures… “no nasty jissom getting all over their reports, you know” (p. 216)). He’s about to tell Slothrop the secret of “The Penis He Thought Was His Own”...
...but then starts waxing nostalgic about Sir Stephen’s son and his wife, Nora and her “Ideology of the Zero”. An interlude with Eventyr, Sachsa, Leni… “but where will Leni be now? Either we didn’t mean to lose her - either it was an ellipsis in our care, in what some of us even swear is our love, or someone has taken her, deliberately, for reasons being kept secret, and Sachsa’s death is part of it too” (p. 218). More on Sachsa’s death.
Then, Sir Stephen vanishes (“but not before telling Slothrop that his erections of high interest to Fitzmaurice House”). Katje is pissed that Slothy got Sir Steve drunk enough to dish on the plot. They fight and then fuck. More rocket study sessions. The rocket taking off looks like a peacock, def pfau. Slothrop pressing for more information, Katje rebuffing, warning/advising“Oh, Slothrop… You don’t want me. What they’re after may, but you don’t. No more than A4 wants London. But I don’t think they know...about other selves...yours or the Rocket’s. No more than you do. If you can’t understand it now, at least remember. That’s all I can do for you” (p. 224).
Then, “They go back up to her room again: cock, cunt, the Monday rain at the windows” (p. 224) (Oh, Tom, you romantic!). And finally, a bit of kazoo music, a final night together, and Katje disappears, too.
Commentary

1. Slothrop makes an important connection to his childhood and wonders if Katje knows about it/whether she’s with him because of it (ol’ Pynch even manages to work in the rocket, too!): “You were in London while they were coming down. I was in ‘s Gravenhage while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory but also a life. You will come to understand that between the two points, in the five minutes, it lives an entire life. You haven’t even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible or trackable. Beyond them there’s so much more, so much none of us know” (p. 209).
2. More on the import of setting the action in the Casino: “The Forbidden Wing. Oh, the hand of a terrible croupier is that touch on the sleeves of his dreams: all his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to’ve been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel-where only destinations are important, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the House does, of course, keep turning a profit…” (p. 209).
3. A beautiful passage: “‘Holy shit.” This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset...this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted...of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul” (p. 214). Always dualities in this book.
4. “A pornography of blueprints” (p. 224). is a nice turn of phrase.
5. Foreshadowing: “She has her hair combed high today in a pompadour, her fair eyebrows, plucked to wings, darkened, eyes rimmed in black, only the outboard few lashes missed and left blond.
6. Connection to Nabokov: I really do think “Signs and Symbols” influenced this novel. Lines like this, “Here it is again, that identical-looking Other World - is he gonna have this to worry about, now? What th’ - lookit these trees - each long frond hanging, stuny, dizzying, in laborious dry point against the sky, each so perfectly placed…” (p. 225) remind me so much of the atmosphere in the story (itself about paranoia (“referential mania”)). This is a key excerpt from the Nabokov ditty: “In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.” Obviously this guy is, uh, slightly more clinical, but I still think the atmosphere/tone is similar between the two.

Episode 25
Summary
We begin this episode with a Pavlov lecture about the physiological symptoms of hysteria and one of Pointsman’s poems (which he never shows to anyone). Then to the “White Visitation” chaps (Pointsman, Grunton, Throwster, Groast) rumor-mongering about their future. Things are looking bleak. Pudding might cut off funding, “Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day” (p. 227), and Sir Steven’s got the P.M.’s son-in-law making embarrassing inquiries. But Pointsman is calm. Very calm. In fact, “[b]y facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too, of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires - on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman activities - they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter” (p. 230). And then we find out that Pointman’s figured out how to play Pudding to keep his support (more on that in a bit…) as he’s figured out Treacle, Groast, and Throwster, how to use them and manipulate them to get what he wants. What a fucking devious guy!
Webley Silvernail sticks around after the meeting and imagines the lab animals putting on a beguine performance of a song called “Pavlovia” (right after this realization by Silvernail: “From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze...but who watches from above, who notes their reponses?” (p. 229)). And it’s all song and dance for a bit but since it’s Pynchon, it’s followed by an incredible poignant/tragic moment of clarity: “They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest start. Now it’s back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death-death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die…. “I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday - that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level - and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive….” The guest star retires down the corridors” (p. 230). What a soliloquy. [Tangent: almost 50 years later, how prescient is this passage?! This little monologue filled me with so many conflicting emotions: hope (because humans like Pynchon exist to dream this stuff up) and also dread because this paragraph describes a fundamental aspect and egregious flaw (or flaws) in human nature. Reading and re-reading this passage depresses me a little (hence my question about mental health below).
Now Pudding is sneaking about the bowels of “The White Visitation”. He heads past the cells of loonies on his way to a secret rendezvous. It seems like Pointsman may have drugged him at some point to get at hidden desires. We watch as our dear old Brigadier putters from room-to-room, finding items left for him by Pointsman that mock him and describe his descent into a personal hell (for info on the symbolism, the Weisenburger book is quite helpful).
In the final room, Pudding drops to his knees at the feet of his Domina Nocturna (with “her blond hair...tucked and pinned beneath a thick black wig”... “naked except for a long sable cape and black boots with court heels” (p. 233)). Pudding is thinking of the night they first met. He saw “her” “...through the periscope, underneath a star shell that hung in the sky, he saw her….and though he was hidden, she saw Pudding. Her face was pale, she was dressed all in black, she stood in No-man’s Land, the machine guns raked their patterns all around her, but she needed no protection. “They knew you, Mistress. They were your own.
And so were you” (p. 233).
And then he offers her a “nice” memory of a legion of Franco’s troops killing and getting killed at a massacre at Badajoz for which he is “rewarded” with her beating and then pissing and shitting in his mouth… … … …
However off-putting this may be for some (most), it does something for Pudding. He needs pain. “They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet….no it’s not guilt here, not so much as amazement - that he could have listened to so many years of ministers, scientists, doctors each with his specialized lies to tell, when she was here all the time, sure in her ownership of his failing body, his true body: undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by drugs to keep from him her communiqués of vertigo, nausea and pain. Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest worth…” (p. 234-235).
Munching down on a hot turd makes Pudding think of the horrible smells of his service during WWI: putrid mud, rot, death, “...the sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her emblem” (p. 235). After eating her shit, he jerks off (his release), in a style that Domina Nocturna has learned from watching Captain Blicero and Gottfriend (at this point, it is safe to say, Domina Nocturna is Katje. Will we ever be able to look at her the same?).
Pudding is then dismissed to “...a late-night cup of broth, routine papers to sign, a dose of penicillin that Pointsman has ordered him to take, to combat the effects of E. Coli” (p. 236). So thoughtful, that Pointsman...
Commentary

1. The Silvernail hallucination/phantasmagoria seems like something straight out of “The Big Lebowski” had Jodorowsky had a bit of influence over the Coen Bros. art direction. Many of the songs in this section feel “Lebowski-esque” but this one especially so to me. Maybe its the detailed choreographic notes: “They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form circles, curl their tails in and out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns, eventually all form into the shape of a single giant mouse, at whole eye Silvernail poses with a smile” (p. 230).
2. The Franco bit is a nice way of linking facism and death worship
3. Pudding eating Domina Nocturna’s shit really, to quote an earlier passage, gave “de wrinkles in mah brain a process!”. There is so much symbolism there! Instead of ascending to heaven, Pudding heads down to hell. We have so many dualities linked in the act: between young and old, sacred and profane, pleasure and pain, pleasure through pain, WWI and WW2, man and woman, life and death, the general as a slave, even the food transformed through Katje into waste, all linked through the act of eating shit. For a moment they are linked so intimately, so delicately. No parabolas, a circle. And, of course, there’s also the diabolical Pointsman in the background, pulling the strings and manipulating to keep Pudding in line. I remember reading this for the first time and just being shocked and confused and now reading it again and finding so much meaning. That ol’ Pynchon is a devious bastard, hiding such loaded symbolism in such an obscene encounter. The Pulitzer committee had no idea what was coming for them!

So, if you’ve reached this point, congratulations and I am sorry! Here are my discussion questions. Looking forward to future posts!
Discussion Questions Both On Topic and Tangential

1. Why is paranoia described as a “Puritan reflex” in Episode 22?
2. In Episode 23, as Slothrop peruses Katje’s extensive wardrobe, what is the significance of the line, “Aha! wait a minute, the operational scent in here is carbon tet, Jackson, and this wardrobe here’s mostly props” (p. 195)?
3. In Episode 24, what’s the significance of “the watchmen of world’s edge”? Is this an intrusion of the spirit world? Is Slothrop just hallucinating?
4. In Episode 24, when Peter Sachsa gets the blow to the temple from Schutzmann Jöche, why is his last thought, “How beautiful!” (p. 220)
5. In Episode 25, there’s a line in the part where Pudding is sneaking around: “A voice from some cell too distant for us to locate intones:...” (p. 231). Why us here? Why the change in perspective?
6. How’s this book affecting everyone’s mental health (you know, given that we’re in the end times right now)? Seriously, though, there are times when this book makes me so happy to be alive and proud of humanity and also times where it depresses the everloving shit out of me and makes me think that, as a species, we’re doomed to continue making the same mistakes, over and over again, until we end up destroying ourselves.
7. In a similar vein, do you think people as prodigiously talented and brilliant as Pynchon have any responsibility to counter the evil they see in the world? Is writing books enough or should they do more (lead, teach, etc.) to fight against the awful things they are able to see before the rest of us do?

Resources

• GR Wiki & Annotations - here
• Some Things That “Happen” (More or less) in “Gravity’s Rainbow” - here
• Larry Daw’s reading notes - here
• Weisenberger’s Book at the Internet Archive - here; Zak Smith’s book - here (gotta “rent”/ “borrow” both).
• Notes from a class on GR at Swathmore College - here
• How Pynchon Avoids Cultural Appropriation - here
• “History & Fiction: The Narrative Voices of Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” (2004) by Paul A. Bové
• “A Supernatural History of Destruction; or, Thomas Pynchon’s Berlin” (2010) by Eric Bulson

Any INTP knows the odds are against them all the time and that is enough to deter them. But I've always been a gambler. In middle school I got a multigame mini pool table, table tennis, and Roulette wheel and card table. My friends would come over and gamble money or things. My friend's mom disapproved and made him give me some stuff back (haha). I just didn't know I had to rake games to be "the house." In middle school the black kids taught white kids craps and we'd shoot for dollars. I still love a good dice game. We'd have them on payday after close a couple jobs ago. The shit talking is so much better than poker games.
In HS I gambled poker and chess a lot. My favorite poker game was played where everyone had 2.25g of shrooms in them. No poker faces and it didn't last that long. Not great at poker. I've gambled on Chess pretty successfully. Not great at Spades.
But I'm an INTP and Casinos aren't my thing. Rather gamble at pool at a dive bar.
That said I'm doing a lot of sports betting right now. I once read that a professional sports gambler only wins 55% of the time but they have advanced knowledge in props, parlays, hedging etc. I just figured at college and to a lesser extent pro football, I could pick the winner above 55% maybe even against against--the-spread. My favorite former gf was good at betting on the ponies because she was into horses and leased one, so she had similar inside knowledge as someone who's watched football for 25yrs
I put $150 deposit and got $165 because they passed some BTC savings onto me. First week I bet the full $165. I remember the bets too. $45 on Duke (Lost but beat the spread) Same with the $45 I put on S. Alabama. $45 on Coastal Carolina who won outright against Kansas $45. Because the house rakes the games I'd only win about $40 off each so that's $270. But I put a $30 parlay on all three winning and won $180. Turned $165 into $360 (not exact--change and some numbers were rounded). I qualified for a bonus $165 for betting everything. That's a cool $425.
I thought "Holy Shit I can just go pro" beginners luck. It was also right after I lost my job and I'm moving for a new one mid October. Back to my home city and old neighborhood. Pretty psyched really except moving is a hassle.
Two weeks ago lost $70. I thought that comes with the territory of a pro sports better. I broke even last week. This week I chose a new strategy and bet on 7 games instead of 3. Truth was I don't know a certain percentage. I know games I "know" but I only lost $60. It just feels worse because I went 1-6 instead of two weeks ago when I went 1-2. Plus I lose some change on the low probability parlays.
The problem is that I just dipped into my other $165 to bet on pro football. Put in a couple bets and a parlay. The winnings get transferred into my main account. I'm still up either $80 in my account (I can't cash in the "free money")
My floor is $200 because I wanna make at least $50 off this fun lil exercise but I see how addictive it is for the first time. I even sought out a Bitcoin chess gambling site mainly used by Africans but I don't play because either I'm not better at Chess than Nigerian Royalty or they use chess bots or both. It also was pretty obviously used for money laundering which is what the gambling sites are also used for. Now I'm betting on Sunday football. Not just Saturday.
I guess my cashout ceiling is a grand but I don't see that happening haha.
Point is that wk2 college football this year was like my first joint, the first time I mixed valium-codeine-and a belt of scotch at 14. The first time I painted something halfway decent under a bridge at 16. The first time I fucked a girl at 17. The first time I had an audience in stitches at 22 (standup). All very pleasurable and only relatively routinely done. Except maybe sex and drugs but they have other major downsides.
Hell when I learned to read at 8 I was attached to books my whole life but nobody thinks that's bad. Haha.
Do other people gamble?
I'm extraverted enough that if someone has dice on the street I'll shoot or if they have a chess game at a coffee shop. I'll bet $20.
Best in person bet was with a frenemy in my group who was the epitome of iamverysmart and everyone in my group thought he was a genius. I took $20 off him in front of everyone and he refused to try to win it back. Bad look for him.
I hope I can keep it just for fun. Any other INTP gamblers on here?
Edit: Forgot to mention I won $400+ in a $20 pool for the 2011 March Madness B-Ball tourney. I watched none of the regular season (like usual) but knew UConn was good but nobody picked them as they were a #3 seed. I didn't win most rounds either. Dumb luck. It's funny that I forgot because it was less recent than that grudge match against that guy I played chess against.