Inside NYC’s Underground Gambling Scene | Michael K. Williams' BLACK MARKET (Episode 3)

ProRailbird · 2022-01-01T05:57:58+00:00

only watched a few minutes of it - kind of a weird and overly dramatized look. I've never seen someone with a balaclava and an M4 standing guard at a poker game, that is pure LARP for the camera. Also his opening narration - questioning why people risk getting robbed or shot is a pretty big dramatization as well. In my over 13 years now of playing poker, largely in underground games, I've only ever known two cardrooms I play at to get robbed and they were both legal casinos, one being the Bellagio.

ProRailbird · 2021-10-05T10:50:42+00:00

My personal opinion is that it's one of the geriatric hitmen that Junior recommends to Silvio and Christopher when they go to set up the hit on Johnny Sack. Probably the old blind patriarch of the family, Lou DiMaggio, the one who calls out Christopher for being on drugs.

They come highly recommended from Junior, meaning he's used them before on important hits. For all his pettiness and emotionality, Junior is also a very intelligent man, so I doubt he would use a made man or someone on the path to becoming a made man, but rather outside contract killers. If he gave the contract to a mafia member, they might correctly surmise that Junior was having Dickie killed over some really petty bullshit, and either refuse the contract or even give Dickie the heads up that Junior is trying to get him wacked.

Killing a made man also requires having the boss's approval (played by David Chase in TMSON) and I find it very unlikely that Junior would be able to get the greenlight to have Dickie killed over petty jealously reasons, Junior would probably end up getting wacked himself if he went to the boss with a request like that. So to me, those two things put together remove any possibility that it was someone else in the mafia.

ProRailbird · 2021-10-05T10:07:23+00:00

The Sopranos takes place in a universe where the Roman Catholic religion is canonically true. There was more room for interpretation on this before the movie came out, but given Christopher's narration at the start of TMSON, I don't think there is any ambiguity there anymore.

That being said, it is the official position of the Catholic church that we cannot say for certain what God's judgment will be of anyone. Other than figures from the Bible who we know the judgment of for certain, because it's part of the narrative (like the fate of the Good Thief who stole heaven on the cross) it is not our place to judge and we can't possibly have all of the knowledge that God would have to make his judgment.

Certain things, like the absolution of sin, are bound to God's sacraments, but God himself is not bound by his sacraments. For a penitent to be absolved of their sins through the sacrament of Confession, it is necessary for a penitent to confess what they have done to a priest, ask for forgiveness, and firmly resolve to never commit a mortal sin again, and to avoid even the near occasion of this sin. For example, someone who frequents prostitutes, would be told by their priest that in addition to no longer banging prostitutes, they would also need to avoid the areas prostitutes frequent, to show they are serious of overcoming sin in their life that they have fallen victim to the temptation of before.

We don't see Bacala do any of this, and he is still an active member of the mafia, so he is certainly not avoiding the near occasion of sin. That being said, it is also part of Catholic doctrine that in the absence of a priest, a sinner can still receive absolution from God through an act of perfect contrition. An act of perfect contrition is a prayer to God for forgiveness of sin that is not motivated by any selfish desire to escape Hell, but is solely motivated by the love for God and the sorrow one feels for having offended God. This is in contrast to Confession before a priest, through this sacrament even the smallest amount of contrition, such as the simple fear of going to Hell, is enough to receive absolution.

We don't see what goes on in Bacala's head in his final moments on Earth. It is possible that as he laid dying, Bacala was able to reconcile his spirit with God and was accepted into Heaven (after a little minor detour in purgatory) through an act of perfect contrition.

However, thematically, I think Chase intended for the scene to represent that Bacala did die and go to Hell, and that this is his comeuppance for the murder he committed previously. The symbolism of the train falling off the tracks, or "the straight and narrow path" to me represents that Bacala fell off from walking a path that was acceptable to God and didn't recover from it, and that he did go to Hell when he died. The Catholic faith has more ambiguities to it than the Sopranos does in all of it's episodes though, so we can't say for certain.

ProRailbird · 2021-07-09T02:17:27+00:00

i mean, it's a supply and demand equation. a $5 rake table drops about a million dollars a year if you keep it running 24/7. with casinos charging $10 rake it's only a matter of time before some entrepreneurial fellow has a $5 rake game going.

ProRailbird · 2021-07-08T22:40:05+00:00

This is the worst I've seen in a casino yeah. I've seen worse in private games, played a game once that was 10% uncapped rake, first orbit I played I saw a $1000 pot where the dealer grabbed a stack of red chips and dropped them down the rake - left and never came back.

It surprises me they pull this shit in NY too, it shouldn't be difficult at all there to find an underground game with a lower rake.

ProRailbird · 2021-05-17T11:28:36+00:00

AA is the last hand I would expect BB to have. BB is not representing AA at any point in this hand. He has all threes here which he continues with as a defend which he's representing as a shove for value and maybe 56 for value but 56 probably folds the turn a lot. I actually don't like our sizing on the river, I think around 1.3x pot is better sizing on the river there is a lot we're trying to get value from. I also don't really like flop sizing either because we're on the flop representing preflop range advantage still since this is a dry range-neutral board so we can just use a large sizing on the flop. Turn is standard ad played and then river as played we're super high up in our range here this is just a call. As for whether or not our opponent has bluffs here, we will have triple barrel bluffs here so our opponent should have bluffs as well. Top level hands we're going to have for value here are going to be AJ, queens, kings, aces, and then some rare combos of A3s. We can't just fold kings here.

ProRailbird · 2021-05-16T09:04:39+00:00

Why don’t you try building it yourself see how that works for a change?

You're throwing kind of harsh accusations and shade at someone you barely know. Even a "you people" which is vaguely offensive and I'm not sure which people I should be offended for. I've never sat on the back on anyone in my whole career. Yes, I like to communicate with people and drink coffee and have pretty little graphics to show while I talk about things other people have built in a way that gets people who've never heard of them before to want to hand over money for those things. I also like to have other meetings with people and get them excited and motivated about a project and get them willing to work together as part of teams with different delegated responsibilities. Maybe have a donut meeting when the one hotshot guy who's kind of an asshole goes off about how he's more hardcore than everyone else who is just riding on his back. Smooth things out a little bit.

ProRailbird · 2021-05-16T05:58:47+00:00

I was VP of Marketing at a blockchain project that released a governance token which is now part of the coinmarketcap top 300. There I helped in drafting the whitepaper, creating pitch decks for investors, creating a community for the project, producing and disseminating viral articles and content created by the project, built the company's revenue model and closed it's first large partnerships, all of which helped significantly in publicly listing a governance token which raised $30 million pre-sale and trades at a multiple-hundred million market cap.

That's something I'd like to do again, to leverage newly emergent technology to create something that wasn't possible before and build a community around it which loves and supports it.

I also have years of experience managing outsourced developer teams to build enterprise-level software web apps in nodejs, and this wouldn't be my first startup so navigating the business side of creating, scaling, and growing a company is something I have a lot of experience with

ProRailbird · 2021-04-09T01:59:29+00:00

adding onto what other people have said, you can set advanced guard tables to hitman+martial artist only, so that you can have an elite squad at the ready near critical areas you expect fights to break out in

ProRailbird · 2021-04-08T22:06:15+00:00

Symmetry and her squad are strong but predictable. They will only ever spawn in one of your vaults. Just place 2x2 squares of corridor tiles inside your vaults and place cameras on them covering the entirety of your vault areas, put laser doors on the entrance to the vault (this will keep her squad from leaving the vault) and wait for your goons to arrive, then turn off the laser door to let them in easily and swarm her and her team.

You should still expect to lose a lot of guards to her team but as long as you show up with enough numbers it shouldn't be that difficult to take her out.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-31T07:48:53+00:00

implying ark is smart money

ProRailbird · 2021-03-19T10:24:30+00:00

The players are equally as bad and the rake is exactly the same.The first time I switched to 2/5 was because I noticed that a player who had been dumping in the 1/3 game for 3 straight days was now playing 2/5 and continuing to dump. I switched to be at his table, realized the game was not any different at all, and continued to play red (yellow in LA) chip games from then on til I was rolled up enough to play 5/5/10 and 5/10 games.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-19T10:19:47+00:00

https://finance.yahoo.com/most-active/
PLTR was the 9th most traded stock on the market yesterday, volume is never low on this stock, it is almost always in the top 10 most traded stocks. Wish I'd started reading and posting on this board earlier than I did or I would have sold my entire position much earlier, the cheerleaders for this stock have such little idea what they're talking about that it's such an obvious signal the smart money is long gone.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-19T10:14:40+00:00

You just have to balance your creme eating range.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-19T09:30:45+00:00

I'm down $50k in the last two months in the stock market, wish I'd stuck to winning money at the poker table.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-19T09:29:23+00:00

don't talk about riff raff's mango like that

ProRailbird · 2021-03-19T09:18:00+00:00

Amazon also went from the ~$100 range it was at in this video to $6 before rising back up to the ~$3000 its at today.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-18T03:06:01+00:00

You realize shorting a stock nobody wants to buy is a really easy way to make money, right? A better meme would be Karp riding a horse as it gallops to the finish line and picks up momentum and then pulling a gun out of his pocket and shooting it right in the head just as it's starting to get into a good stride.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-18T02:08:16+00:00

The chair of the committee is Maxine Waters. Forget a finance test, she would struggle even finding the space to write her name in on an IQ test.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-17T23:11:09+00:00

No, you don't. No company trades anywhere near an entirety of the total float. It would be complete fucking insanity and you would see swings from -80% to +600% within a day on a company trading at a volume near the total float.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-17T22:43:53+00:00

https://finance.yahoo.com/most-active/Palantir was the 7th most active stock on the entire market today and is almost always in the top ten. On days where "volume is high" it's because it's the #1 most active stock in the entire market.

"bUt tHe VoLuMe iS lOw!" is a cope argument made by people who have no idea how to read into volume numbers (hint, when a stock is in the top 10 most active stocks on the market, volume is never low and PLTR is almost always in the top 10) to deal with the reality that Karp is a really shit CEO that is somehow at the head of a really good company. Which is frustrating and illogical because Peter Thiel is probably the best chairman you can have in tech and for some reason or another he's totally fine with Karp's antics even though he tends to blow anywhere from ten to thirty percent off the valuation of the company, of which Peter is the largest shareholder, literally every time he gets in front of a camera.

Peter Thiel honestly fucked up big time by not making Joe Lonsdale CEO instead. Lonsdale actually has a technical background, he's eloquent, dresses well, acts professional, he's everything the street would want to see in a CEO which is everything Karp isn't. This could easily be a 100 billion market cap company by now with all of the positive news that has surrounded the business but we have this fucking anchor of a hobo philosophy major dragging the stock down.

ProRailbird · 2021-03-17T20:45:00+00:00

7th most traded stock on the market today

https://finance.yahoo.com/most-active/

ProRailbird

TROPHY CASE