WiltOnTilt's PlusEVPoker.com Blog

I really suck at blogging.  I suck at it mostly for a few specific reasons (I think).

One of the main reasons is that I have a really hard time telling people random stuff because my default assumption is that no one cares.  If no one cares, why waste time writing it out?  My hope is that although people probably don't care that much, they might need something to give them an excuse to procrastinate from working.  I know that was one reason why I used to read blogs :)  So here goes...

This reasoning reminds me of a somewhat funny story about my dad.  A couple weeks back it was my son Grant's first birthday.  Very exciting times in my family as he is the first grandchild on both sides of the family.  We were scheduled to had something like 30 people joining for the first birthday party.  In order to feed everyone, my dad and I decided to put a bunch of meat on the smoker.  Me and my dad love bbq and we love eating a lot of good food.   Before we could start, we needed to pick up the meat, so we went over to the grocery store  where they were having beef brisket on sale.  Unfortunately the brisket they had out was trimmed (fat cut off) too much.  If you know anything about bbq/smoking, you know that you need a good layer of fat to keep the meat moist during long (10-20 hour) smokes.  My dad tracked down the butcher and asked him if he had any untrimmed briskets in the back.  Sure enough they did, still in the cryovac (sp?) packaging.

Now, something you should know about my dad is that he is constantly on the look out for a deal.  It's not that he's cheap (well, maybe he is...) but I think it's mostly just the "thrill" or competition aspect about getting something for cheaper than everyone else.  It's like a game to him.  He is constantly trying to find the optimal play, so to speak, when it comes to anything in life.  I think that's a trait that got passed on to me, but I use it mostly in analyzing poker situations.

Anyway, so the butcher brings out 3 "small" briskets in the 7-11 pound range.  Dad decides it's time to work his magic and begins joking around the the butcher about whatever.  Somehow they get on topic of where each of them were from, how they have both managed to run over deer in their car on random highways in mississippi, how the butcher won some free cruise trip, and a whole host of this other random stuff that I can't imagine either of them care about... but it seems like they do?  So somewhere after all this, dad slips in something along the lines of "hey man, you know those trimmed briskets out there that are on sale don't have enough fat on them, and if we take these untrimmed briskets off your hand that will save you some work.  How about you cut the price since we're saving you some time?"  Keep in mind a normal price for brisket is something like 3.99/lb and it was already on sale for 2.99/lb.  So the butcher thinks about it a bit and says "let me go in the back and see what I can do."

A few minutes pass and he comes back with the brisket and has the price down to 2.49/lb and he goes "I'm really sorry but I could only get you down to 2.49/lb.  This is what we paid for them so you're getting them at cost."  He was actually apologizing that the computer would not allow him to reduce the sale price below what the store paid for the brisket!  I'm just standing there shaking my head at the absurdity of my dad hustling this butcher to try to save us like $8.  Also keep in mind that my dad was a D-I college football coach for most of my life and my mom is a pediatrician, and I was the one paying for the meat anyway.  None of us are hurting to save a few bucks, but he cannot help himself to try to get a better deal than the next guy.

After we get the brisket repriced we go and pick out a pork shoulder for some pulled pork and a turkey breast.  In total we got about 28 pounds of meat and the smoker was roaring for roughly 20 hours before the guests were to arrive.  The meat was some of the best we've done yet, so I was happy about that.

Fast forward to the party where I walk over and my dad is entertaining Jared (@jk3a), his wife Megan, and baby Brooke and Doc (@DoctaRocktya), his wife Amy, and baby Adler.  I hear them talking about how Doc is a phd in psychology and how Amy is also working on her phd and will be done soon.  The next thing I hear (I apologize in advance if you are Jewish and sensitive to racial stereotypes), but my dad says "Wow, poor Adler is going to grow up in a house with 2 PHDs ?  How is he going to learn critical life skills with 2 parents who are that educated?"  Someone of course asks "What kind of life skills?" and dad wastes now time: "Who the heck is going to teach this guy how to jew down a butcher?"

And there you have it.

So while some might be offended by what dad said, I'm pretty sure the knowledge of how to "jew down a butcher" is something to be praised and not knowing is where the insult is.  You can be the judge though :)

So in conclusion, somehow I need to learn that telling people stuff that I think they probably won't care about and then listening to other people tell me stuff that I don't really care about might allow me to hustle a butcher someday.  Therefore, I'm going to try to increase my blogging frequency again.  I will say I'm a bit better at telling random stuff on twitter these days and I've mostly given up on facebook... but perhaps that can be a different blog entry some day.

Also, for those of you that haven't seen my PokerSense: A WiltOnTilt Philosophy series on DeucesCracked, you should check it out.  My dad makes a guest appearance in episode 7 and IMO it's the best episode of the entire series.  He talks about relating motivation and confidence in college football to poker and we draw some great parallels there, so check it out.

Here are some pics:

3 of us:

Dad and Grant:

Grant eating bbq:

Grant with cake:

Grant with pointy hat:

Grant after his cake:

Jk3a, Megan, Brooke:

Amy and Adler: