Episode 53: Shooting the S#$! with Gareth Chantler

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It’s time again to catch up with our old friend Gareth Chantler. From Trondheim, Norway, he tells us about his new job as a Full Tilt Poker blogger and gets Triple Draw advice from Nate Meyvis. Plus Zoom/Rush Poker strategy, Ricky Gervais is unkind to Andrew, and an epic Nate Meyvis rant.

Timestamps

0:30 Nitcast Meet-Up Announcement
4:39 Hello and Welcome
16:30 Triple Draw Strategy
24:00 Blogging for FTP
38:00 Gareth on David Foster Wallace and Nate on Dave Eggers
51:00 Andrew Brokos vs Ricky Gervais
1:01:30 Zoom/Rush Poker Strategy

 

46 thoughts on “Episode 53: Shooting the S#$! with Gareth Chantler”

  1. If Nate is ever accused of a crime, it would be appropriate for his future to be determined by chance. He would be brought to an arena and forced to choose between two doors. Behind one is the One Billion Hands database and all the free food and drink he wants. Behind the other he would be tied to a chair and forced to listen to Miley Cyrus read the complete works of Dave Eggers.

      • Obligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/1282/

        Miley Cyrus is fairly boring, at least if you consider watching people do what their publicists tell them to do is boring. But IMO she’s far from the worst singer. Better her singing something good than a good singer singing Eggers.

        As for the hypothetical–it’s fairly chilling. Though as cool as the OBH database is, I can think of poker-related IP I’d rather have access to…

  2. I think the play is clearly that he watch Miley Cyrus gyrate while listening to the complete works of Dave Eggers, as read by the author, natch.

  3. The eggars preface to Infinite Jest is a confirmed abomination. I forget the exact details, but it nearly stopped me reading the book or made me put it aside for six months or something.

    And the c word is pretty much as bad as it gets in the UK, but I think that we have a tendency to be more informal in spots where North Americans are less so. That said, I couldn’t tell you the last time I used it.

    • I’ve just reread it. I hadn’t looked at it since the first time I read it–when I didn’t know who Eggers was, when I was expecting to like the introduction, when I had no agenda or axe to grind at all. I do remember wondering why the author was so lukewarm, why the praise so often had to do with the book’s size and how it made Dave Eggers feel, and whether I was really making a good decision to start _Infinite Jest_.*

      Let’s just say that rereading the introduction hasn’t changed my view of Dave Eggers. Neither did reading an excerpt from _The Circle_ in a recent half-hour of weakness.

      * “If we think it’s our duty to read this book, it’s because we’re interested in genius. We’re interested in epic writerly ambition. We’re fascinated with what can be made by a person with enough time and focus and caffeine and, in Wallace’s case, chewing tobacco. If we are drawn to Infinite Jest, we’re also drawn to the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Songs, for which Stephin Merritt wrote that many songs, all of them about love, in about two years. And we’re drawn to the 10,000 paintings of folk artist Howard Finster. Or the work of Sufjan Stevens, who is on a mission to create an album about each state in the union.”

      • I just went and searched out what I said about it on 2+2 when i read it. It was remarkably restrained, amazingly so in comparison with Nate’s rant:

        “i just read the forward to my kindle copy of infinite jest. Now I’m gonna have to go and read something else until i forget how annoyed the forward made me, before i can read the book.”

  4. Having just finished the first half of this episode, I have three distinct oservations: 1. Fuck Dave Eggers; 2. Fuck Dave Eggers; and 3. Fuck Dave Eggers. I must admit that I have never read Infinite Jest, nor am I familiar with Eggers’ body of work. I do, however, love a rant and it is always entertaining to listen to a man come unglued in real time. Nate, some will say that the use of profanity is intellectually lazy. F those people. It’s encouraging to hear you talk like a real person, and not manufacture a podcast facade for our consumption. Although I too have struggled with the role that profanity occupies in my personal lexicon, don’t be too embarassed by your tirade. I listen to this podcast as much for the hosts’ interesting personalities as the poker content, and minor meltdowns like this give texture to what could otherwise be mistaken for just a lovely vocal delivery. On that note, I’ll steal a line from a movie review I recently read and compare Nate’s podcast voice to Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan having an elocution contest at the bottom of a well.

    • “It’s encouraging to hear you talk like a real person, and not manufacture a podcast facade for our consumption.”

      I second that. The lack of profanities actually makes me like the podcast *less*. It’s less real, less entertaining, and less honest: It sounds like the speakers are forcing themselves to speak otherwise than how they normally do, and because of that they are focusing too little on what they are saying, and too much on how they are saying it.

      I’m pretty sure that for each person that is turned off by profanities, you’d find at least two who are turned on by them and want them in. I say, abolish the no-profanities policy. Make it all NSFW. Fuck the man. If Burroughs could be explicit, so can you!

      • Thanks for the feedback. We definitely don’t have a “no-profanities policy”. I just think that profanity can be used sensibly or sloppily. I don’t want to be self-conscious or -censorious on the show, but even in my daily life I do strive to be mindful of what I say and how I say it. I don’t think there’s ever been a time during our recordings when I was making a conscious effort to refrain from profanity I would otherwise use. If we come across as prudes on the show, we’d probably seem like prudes to you off-air too!

  5. Here is my unsolicited view on profanity. No words should be barred from adult conversation, nothing is particularly profane, and the more words available with which to express oneself, the better. I think desensitizing kids to profanity early is a good idea — every child is going to go through a dirty mouth phase at some point before they get over it, might as well be on account of the Thinking Poker Podcast!

    • Gareth – “Profanity…more words available with which to express oneself, the better.”

      Exactly.

      Great episode guys, laughed my ass off several times. Showing my ignorance, I’ve never heard of Dave Eggers or Infinite Jest, but Nate’s rant was first class!

  6. When I was a kid all the mothers in my hood never let their kids play with me cause I taught them the word-“FUCK”. When were they going to learn it? When were they going to use it? Its like sex. Parents in my time never talked to their kids about it. Did they think they would never experiment? Im glad I knew that word and those word related to it. Who knew I would become known saying it in the series Deadwood.
    Now that Im raising a 4 year old Im very careful of my profanity though. Ill wait till he’s 5.
    As far as Eggers goes, Ive never read anything written by him but I have read his bio. One can simply sympathize with him. Parents died at an early age. He had to raise his younger 8 year old brother at 21. Sister committed suicide. I feel for the guy. His curriculum vitae certainly gets respect from me. I guess I got to read the book and the intro.
    What a wonderful podcast. Were you guys speaking in tongues at some moments. Some of it went right over my head and sounded so beautiful alien. I hope to get there someday.

  8. [Infinite Jest] is more about David Foster Wallace than anything else. It’s an extravagantly self-indulgent novel, and, page-by-page, it’s often difficult to navigate. Sentences run as long as 800 words. Paragraph breaks are rare. Aside from being incredibly verbose, Wallace has an exhausting penchant for jargon, nicknames and obscure references, particularly about things highly technical, medical or drug-related. … Besides frequently losing itself in superfluous and wildly tangential flights of lexical diarrhea, the book suffers under the sheer burden of its incredible length. (That includes the 96 pages of only sporadically worthwhile endnotes, including one that clocks in at 17 pages.) At almost 1,100 pages, it feels more like 3,000. — This was Eggers in 1996-ish upon the book’s release.

    Then he wrote

    “The book is 1,067 pages long and there is not one lazy sentence. The book is drum-tight and relentlessly smart and, though it does not wear its heart on its sleeve, it’s deeply felt and incredibly moving.”

    in the aforementioned introduction.

    In any case, I did not know that Eggers was the guy who co-semi-interpreted-wrote What is the What, and I was going to write that I really did enjoy that book, but I guess, like Shake Hands with the Devil, you don’t really enjoy these books, you’re just glad you read them.

    The ad read was the funniest thing this episode by a wide margin. You guys had a buffer song to listen to between, but Andrew seamlessly broke into his jinglespiel in real time after the snickering that had proceeded it.

    • Thanks for the synopsis, I’m intrigued by your colourful analysis of the book. As for the author being verbose, I’ll declined to comment on that. I wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite. 😉 Although 800 word sentences are insane!

      May I suggest the following for the author:
      http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/the-short-sentence-as-gospel-truth/

      Shake Hands with the Devil – Yes that’s a real cheery one. But, a must read none the less. Maybe if enough people read it or watch the documentary the next time the world won’t stand by watching, and will actually make more than a token effort to stop such an atrocity.

      • If you’re referring to what I think you are, that was Dave Eggers’ analysis of the book, not Gareth’s. As much as I like Infinite Jest, I do actually agree with some of Eggers’ criticism there. Some of the slang/jargon does feel forced, and it rolls off the tongues of characters one wouldn’t really expect to be so well-versed.

        • For something as bold and imaginative and complex and huge and experimental as Infinite Jest is, I think it’s understandable if it’s not all ‘drum tight’. My experience of reading it was a roller-coaster, sometimes loving it, sometimes wondering what the hell he was bothering going on and on about, but ultimately coming out on the side of the former.

          One of the things that strikes me about it though, as someone who’s read a bit but not a lot of the analysis surrounding the book, is the question of the extent to which anyone really gets what DFW was trying to say in the book. There are people who treat it like a murder mystery to be solved, and I think that there are some pretty compelling outlines of what was going on (which I would never have really grasped without reading them), but there are other themes he was trying to weave into the story, some of which I think have been well identified, but it seems as though there were a bunch of things that he built the story around, which maybe have only really been partially understood. Does that matter? I dunno, maybe not, but it does strike me as a bit sad to think that perhaps he goes to this huge effort to built this great intricate work of art, and perhaps no one really grasps what he was on about.

          • I agree, Ian. I think there’s a lot we know about IJ and plenty we (or at least I) don’t. And the book is very frequently misunderstood. Ars longa, vita brevis, and all that.

        • Andrew – “If you’re referring to what I think you are, that was Dave Eggers’ analysis of the book, not Gareth’s.”

          Ah yes….denoted by how Gareth started the paragraph “[Infinite Jest] is…” and of course the even more obvious clue would be “— This was Eggers in 1996-ish upon the book’s release.” Lol….oh well missed that one by a mile…that’s what I get for posting at 4 in the morning when I should be asleep.

          All that aside, you guys have tweaked my interest in it.

    • Gareth,

      I’m in agreement with you about the ad read…you and Nate made that the most special one to date. During editing, I had a momentary inclination that I should cut your mic and Nate’s during the TPE spiel, but it didn’t seem fair for only me to enjoy the bonus snickering.

  9. Yo, big fan of of the podcast here in Shenzhen. I’m curious, what’s the best way to send you hands or questions?

      • Hey guys, you’ve got at least two fans in China. I’m in Beijing and wait on each new episode with an almost embarrassing eagerness. Thanks for all the hard work you put in to provide us with free stuff, it’s definitely appreciated.

  10. That was a truly superior rant, Nate. The best thing about it, by far, is that I utilised the anger it generated to mould an awesome pizza dough, onto which I arranged the pepperoni and olives just so, creating a likeness of myself, thinking.

    • I was just frantically looking for a like button, getting really annoyed I couldn’t find any way to up-vote this gem.

  11. As Ian says, the c-word is undoubtedly the worst swear word in the UK too, and not a word you would ever use in polite company. My understanding, which may be wrong, is that it has specific (and generally deliberate) overtones of misogyny in its US usage, which don’t exist in the UK, and thus it may well be an even more charged word stateside. It’s often argued by some feminists in the UK that because of its etymology it has implicit misogynistic undertones in any usage, and whether it’s truly possible to divorce it from its etymological context is an argument that has been had many times.

    However, whatever side you come down on, in the UK there IS an argument to be had, and thus there isn’t the overt misogyny that (I think) exists in its usage in the US, and it’s absolutely the case that the vast majority who use it won’t have this explicit intention. Many people on all parts of the political spectrum (and people on no part of the political spectrum) will use it as, basically, the worst thing you can possibly call someone.

  12. I like that we have some words reserved to carry special heft. They are deprived of their power if they are used too often.

  13. As someone with kids who used to listen to podcasts around them – it is nice to know which podcasts are either ‘safe’ or ‘not safe’.

    I don’t care if my kids curse but they aren’t old enough to understand when it is OK and when it is not so it is better for them IMO if they don’t learn bad words yet.

  14. Nice! Nate was spot on when he said I’d like this episode when responding to a comment I’ve made on the last one. I have been railing those 2-7 games and I’m happy to hear that my observations on the 2nd draw strategy for the player in position was correct… I guess I can get a stake now to play versus Gus (lol).

    When Gareth talked about his note taking ethics at zoom games I remembered a hand he played during a live session on PSO where he had a top fullhouse by the river (queens full of tens, QTTxx or something like that)versus a reg and after getting shoved he said “ah… he can only have quads here) but ended up calling to “prove” his read to the sweating crowd. Can’t get any better than that… hehe

    Have a nice trip.

    ps: and regarding the Halloween post, I think Andrew chose the war vet costume to get some free food and coffee at the streets! quite convincing, I’d toss a dime for sure.

    ps2: any chances of a nitcast meetup in Rio (the city not the casino) hehe?

    ps3: NITS!

    • Oh. I forgot to mention the book-talk was pretty cool also. I just got it in my kindle. I guess I’m fucked now.

      • I was referring to the poetic-masturbational book, infinite jest*.

        ps: “edit” button (not sure that’s possible) would make dyslexics happy 🙂

    • very generous recollection of that QQ v TT hand on QTTXY bc the fact of the matter was that I had a 4s timebank and clicked call when I should have folded 🙂

    • Actually I think he was talking about the episode coming out today, though I’m glad you liked this one too!

      Funny that you said about getting free food, people at the party were joking that I should have taken the bus so I could ride for free.

      Re: Rio, the nitcast crew doesn’t like to pay for lodging. But if we had a free place to stay… 😉

  15. I have Infinite Jest on my Kindle App for ipad. Got it for $5 a couple months back thanks to an ebooks sale I learned of from Nate via Twitter. Haven’t managed to open it up though, and now I am all kinds of conflicted.

    I don’t mind the profanity, but as a former sailor, I probably curse much more than the average person. What I cannot tolerate is when folks want to express the same meaning as the profanity, but opt for a safe replacement. If someone wants to say Fuck, but they say Fudge instead, that is chickenshit. They clearly don’t intend the meaning of fudge as a chocolate confection. They intend to express the meaning of Fuck but won’t use the term. They approve of the meaning but not the arrangement of letters.

    I’m not sure which profane words are considered the worst. It goes back to when I was playing football on the playground at the age of 7. I told my opponent his ass was grass. My mother overheard and dragged me home. At the kitchen table she asked if I ever used other profane words. Not wanting to lie, I was prepared to say yes. But I wanted to choose the mildest ones for my confession. So I told her I sometimes used God Damn. For a woman who attended Catholic all-girls high school, it was the worst thing I could have said.

      • Of course it is. Also when you stab someone, it is felt in the body of the stabbee, not the stabber. That doesn’t mean I go around doing it willy nilly and blaming my stabbing victims for being too sensitive. When you have reason to believe that your words will create a problem for someone (invoke unpleasant emotions or memories, lead to awkward conversations with children who happen to overhear them, etc), you should take that into consideration. We certainly don’t have a no-profanity rule on the show, I just want to be sure that when we do choose to use it it’s a conscious choice that has some purpose. As you said, sometimes you need strong words to express certain things or in a certain way, and I have no problem with that. But I don’t want to use those words as cheap substitutes for “um” or “really” as many people do (myself sometimes included). In that case, nothing is really gained by it, and some people are harmed. The question of whether I think they “ought” to be harmed doesn’t really enter into it. I know that they will be, and I try not to harm people for no reason.

  16. Some of Nate’s thoughts on post modernism mirror mine on hip hop music. I especially like the idea of something being too big to either like or dislike as a whole and the idea that certain things are judged by the worst example of it.

  18. What a wonderful podcast! I have been hoping for some time that you would be doing some sort of ‘Lit Talk’ podcast given the number of DFW and general lit references you both use on a regular basis.
    If this as close as we get I’ll take it!

    Would love to hear your thoughts on other DFW works beyond IJ and ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing..’. Wondering if you’ve had the pleasure of reading ‘Brief Interviews…’ and ‘Consider the Lobster’ (the collection and title story)?
    Also, any thoughts on the works of Franzen (a close friend as well as contemporary of DFW) and Don DeLillo (one of the writers whom DFW most admired).

    And while I mostly agree with Nate’s rant against Eggers and his insufferable preface to IJ his ‘Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ was very good (though not his ensuing novels). And Eggers work at McSweeney’s and efforts to promote writers and good literature surely must be admired.

    Keep up the good work, gentlemen, and feel free to tangent away on any and all interesting, intelligent subjects.

  21. This was one of my favorite podcasts- you guys were all in top form. I lol many times and I appreciate all the comments. The Onion article tops it off!

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