Don't look like a rock and scare off the casual players

Don’t let the seemingly odd title fool you; proper strategy at the poker table can also extend to drinking as well. There’s absolutely no advantage to playing when you’re drunk but giving off the impression of an average gambler looking to have some fun and play some cards can definitely be to your advantage, and drinking at the poker table can help you pull that off. Savvy texas holdem poker players call it “having a good image”, and while it won’t win you a hand in and of itself it can add extra profits in your pocket.

It’s easy for winning poker players to treat playing live poker like a grind, going to the casino and taking their seats and getting right down to business. Having a drink in hand would help since it will help you loosen up a little. Unlike a tourist or a casual player who thought they’d give poker a whirl, there’s little thrill for many poker regulars, causing them to treat their time at the table like any other job. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but even the most inexperienced players can quickly pick up on that vibe, giving you credit for likely being a serious player and inclined to fold a lot of their worse hands that you’d really like them to call with.

Having a drink in front you is a good first step to coming across as a more casual player, as well as smiling and taking the time to talk and chat with your tablemates. With many casinos providing drinks for free, you don’t even have to pay for your improved table image, although you’ll need to keep in mind that your primary goal is to pay good poker. Sticking to beer with 5% alcohol content or lower would be a good start as it allows you to drink more without being drunk.

Needless to say, if you’re playing online poker instead all of the above pretty much goes completely out the window. With no table image to worry about, there’s no advantage to be gained by drinking when playing online poker, unless you’re just having a few drinks to kick back and relax as you enjoy the convenient, instant action at online poker sites.

1. This one is an absolute lock: someone (the smart money’s on Alab) will get with a ladyboy (kathoey) prostitute. Thailand is well known for hookers who have undergone sex changes or are partly through the procedure. I won’t elaborate further, but here’s a SFW link in case you’re curious.
2. Something will go wrong with drugs. Thailand has pills with meth in them, so presumably taking a few of these things can lead you to stay up for a few days, which can only lead to more debauchery and poor decisions.
3. Popular in the Northeast of Thailand, riding elephants present some implicit hazards. Think: falling off and then getting defecated, urinated, and/or stepped on. Maybe this is where the monestary in the trailer comes in.
4. Back to drugs: Thailand has several areas that are used to cultivate various “cash crops.” Mostly near the Myanmar border but the old Leo DiCaprio flick, The Beach, hit upon the plot of stumbling onto a drug dealer’s land and them trying to hunt the intruders. I can picture the Hangover crew trying to do a hike off of a GPS and navigating themselves to hostile territory.
5. Some sort of transportation nightmare. Bus ride with animals, lost luggage. Travel in “developing” countries is never without glitches. Probably why they end up in a seedy motel with a monkey.
6. Back to prostitutes: Thailand has an odd culture whereby the girls prefer to attach themselves to one man for the duration of his visit unlike the system of short-term contract labor elsewhere. If the Thai hookers do their jobs really well, they convince the foreigner to send them payments for a sick mother or some other reason the girl thinks up. I picture one of the main characters semi-falling for a hooker. Considering Andy did this last time, not him. And not Zach, because he needs to be unattached and the loose cannon.

We’ll see how many of these come to fruition. Over under is 1.5 — comment if you feel differently.

The top sites for search terms like “beer calories” and “wine calories” just aren’t very useful. They are old, ugly interfaces and many of the other top sites are the so-called content farms, like Livestrong and about.com. In fact, Yahoo Answers represents the worst of all worlds, because there’s basically no quality control. Hint: Quora is Yahoo Answers for smart people. In any case, rising to the top of search engine rankings is a process that doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, Bing uses domain age for a large part of its algorithm, so it’s obviously much tougher for new sites to rank highly.

Generally speaking, for the site to take off, it has to be more interactive and engaging, combined with a well executed social media strategy. For that, I’m probably going to turn to someone else, because I don’t really have the time or desire to launch a real campaign. Eventually, I’d like to make a mobile app using the site’s infrastructure, but I’m not willing to launch an app into the world unless there’s significant buzz. With all that said, let’s look at some fun stats.

Visitors in the past year: 37,600
Most popular countries (% of users)

1. United States (83%)
2. UK (4%)
3. Canada (4%)
4. Australia (1%)
5. South Korea (.5%)

Nothing too surprising here. It’s an English language site, so that’s going to be the reader base. But South Korea? Not really sure how it’s #5.

Most Popular States

1. New York
2. California
3. Texas
4. Pennsylvania
5. Illinois

Again, nothing too shocking. New York is higher than Cali because that’s where I grew up and my friends there did a great job of promoting it. Aside from NY, there’s a pretty strong correlation between visits and population.

Most Viewed Pages

1. Getting to Know the Characters of Boardwalk Empire
2. Home Page
3. Beer Home Page
4. Blog Home Page
5. Inside the Mind of a Bathroom Attendant

So this one is a little screwy. A post I wrote about comparing the characters of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire to their real-life counterparts has attracted the attention of Google and steered a lot of traffic in, even generating 121 Facebook Likes. The home page is #2 because Thrillist linked to it in one of their daily emails last April. The main beer page is one of the core parts of the site, so it should be ranked highly. Livingwithballs.com was helpful promoting that end of things. The blog home is high because the people who stumbled onto the Boardwalk Empire post end up visiting the main blog section if they decide to stick around at all. And Kavorka’s rather hilarious post checks in at #5 because it got picked up by Asylum, Cool Material and DoubleViking. It also gets some great search traffic, like “my son see me pissing in the sink, now he want to piss there too.” I guess most of those words did appear in the post, but I assure you that dispensing parental advice has never been a goal of the site.

So, we’ll wrap up this post with things to look out for in the next 12 months.

1. Social Media campaign
2. A more comprehensive wine section
3. More guest blog posts
4. If things go well, an app

Happy April Fools and thanks for reading and supporting the site!

The monks made a carb-dense beer that was viewed as similar to bread. By cutting off the fermentation process early, you’d be left with a drink with a nutritional profile similar to bread, especially because yeast didn’t exist back then to break down the starches to simple sugars. To pull off his stunt, Wilson enlisted a Rock Bottom Brewery in Des Moines — for those of you who forgot your state capitals, that’s in Iowa.

Here are the facts:

• 4 beers per day
• Each beer has 6.67% ABV and 288 calories
• Lots of water
• Nothing else

That’s 45% efficiency, meaning 45% (130) of its calories are from alcohol and 158 from other sources. Figure a few grams of low quality protein and approximately 37 grams of carbs per beer. That’s just 632 “food calories,” which is going to be close to starvation level over the course of 45 days. Almost all carbs, trace protein and zero fat, as beer does not have any fat.

I’d opine that this diet sucks and he’ll probably alter it or abandon it after getting sick or not being able to function normally. It would be one thing be sedentary at near starvation levels, but it’s another to continue working and try to live “normally.” Daily activities dictate that more calories are needed just to live.

The monks did this fast because they couldn’t eat, but there’s ways to drink calories. Wilson even realizes this, saying he could “drink bacon fat,” which probably wouldn’t be a bad idea. Aside from the extra calories it would provide, the body needs fat to absorb fat soluble vitamins and promote proper organ function. I’d guess that the monks used olive oil to add the fat calories. And for 45 days, olive oil and beer would be an unhealthy but not dangerous diet. What Wilson is doing shouldn’t work.

We’ll follow here and stay tuned to see how it turns out.

Realistically, the only solution was to find out from the brewery itself. Luckily they were helpful. The answer: It’s a reference to a William Blake’s An Island in the Moon, a satire written in 1784 and published posthumously. In the novel, there are three main characters:

• Quid the Cynic
• Suction the Epicurean
• Sipsop the Pythagorean

The brewers then extrapolated from the personalities of the characters to opine on the beer they had produced and was presumably nameless. The Three Philosophers, is a painting from early 16th century Italy, so the beer presumably takes its title from that, as if Blake’s characters were in the painting. If discussing the beer, Quid would question why the beer is necessary, Sipsop would question how it was possible to make such a beer, while Suction would simply enjoy the beer in all of its glory. Blake hated Suction and the materiality he represented. Obviously, the Ommegang brew squad feels differently. It gets kind of meta to think about how a beer was named for three fictional characters theoretically talking about it.

Three Philosophers represents a pretty far-out idea to use an arcane novel as inspiration for naming a beer. For that, it’s an awesome name.

Three Philosophers: The Beer

Three Philosophers is a Quadrupel Belgian-style ale. It’s known for it’s dark flavor and has one numerous awards, as well as being highly-rated by a number of publications.

Since, this is The Efficient Drinker, getting calorie information is sort what we do, but the brewer didn’t provide that information directly. Using 9.7% ABV and doing some geek math on the Original Gravity and Final Gravity gets us to an estimate of 290 calories per 12 ounces, or about 65% efficiency. Not bad for a tasty beer!

expired, but totally fine

The big domestic breweries have amusing ways of differentiating their flagship beers. Coors Light is made with water from the Rocky Mountains, which change color depending on the temperature of the beer. FYI, cans start to turn blue at 48ºF and are fully blue at 44ºF. Interestingly, the bottle labels are calibrated to turn blue two degrees lower. [Please comment if you have a theory] Miller Lite alternately prides itself on tasting like a full-bodied beer, or the opposite: that it has the least carbs of any of the mainstream light beers. Bud Light advertises itself as a beer for grown-up frat boys and generally has the funniest ads. Lastly, Budweiser brands itself on its ingredients and its freshness, which is described by Born On Dating.

The dating seems silly, because I couldn’t possibly care less when my beer came off the line in St. Louis or wherever it’s produced. If in the situation where I’m drinking it, maybe I do want to know if I’m going to be assaulted by skunkiness. The issue is that skunked beer is usually caused by exposure to light and fluctuations in temperature, rather than time elapsing. Sure, with more time, it’s more likely that the beer has been exposed, but not if it’s been sitting in a cool basement or other area that ’s dark and doesn’t experience wild temperature swings.

The above picture is an example of when I drank a beer that was well over it’s suggested time for consumption, although by how much is a mystery. I was in Mykonos, Greece, where beers at a bar were €7 a few summers ago. Needless to say, visiting a store that sold expired Bud (why not Budweiser?) for €1.50 was a smart move. And the fact that it was “expired” wasn’t much of a deterrent. Unlike food, beer isn’t going to spoil. The alcohol in the beer kills off germs, so it’s not going to be like old meat or bread where there’s mold, fungus, bacteria, etc. At least according to a professor who made beer from communal spit in a pot of corn.

So, it’s not dangerous or anything to drink expired beer. I wouldn’t recommend it as a practice, but you could probably return it if it is skunked anyway. While skunked beer might make you sick in the drinking sense, you’ll be fine in the medical sense.

1. Engraved flask – So many uses, but my favorite anecdote about a flask comes from a friend who moved to London after college. He was so disconcerted that their mixed drinks were both expensive and weak (premeasured to 30mL or about a shot), that he solved it by re-spiking his whiskey and cokes with extra whiskey, smuggled in via flask. A brilliant idea, but be stealthy or risk getting tossed. Pictured is the $25 “Bobcat” from eFlasks, where you can get them engraved. The leather works well for using this outside in the winter cold. Should be used more often as a groomsman’s gift.
2. Wine Opener – The basic ones work well enough, but if you’re going to spring for something, you could go with the semi-automated route, where the Oster checks in highly. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of random clutter plugged into the kitchen, so I prefer the Metrokane Rabbit. It’s not automated, but is an impressive (and elegant) looking piece of machinery. Its leverage is akin to cutting down a weed with a chainsaw, which seems like a very American approach.
3. Homebrew Kit – I don’t own one, but that has to changed in order to realize my vision of home-brewed, awesome tasting, low-carb, highly-efficient beer. It seems like a sure bet that unless I figure out how to do it, it isn’t going to happen. Mr. Beer Premium Gold Edition Home Brew Kit seems like the way to go, for the novice.
4. Beer of the Month Club – I’ve never gotten anyone this, but it seems like an awesome gift to get. I like this one, because they have a nice clean website with history that tells me that these are craft beers that aren’t so easy to acquire.
5. Wine of the Month Club – Wine clubs seem like a super competitive industry. It’s a great markup, for a product that is generally well-traveled. I can go to a local liquor store and have a reasonable selection of Chilean wine, which is sort of absurd and not the case with beer (in terms of distances traveled). Regardless, a wine club membership would be preferable to a random gift that won’t be used. A quick Google search gets you spammy sites and a few clubs themselves, but the few I checked out were a little too high end for this pauper’s tastes. I’m a big fan of the wine columnists at the Wall Street Journal, who try to dig up value in the $10-30 range, so I’ll recommend the WSJ Wine Club, which they advise.
6. If I had to say there’s one book that I learned a lot from in the past year, it’s The Wine Bible. The first 80 pages are the best intro to wine that I could possibly imagine — if you can comprehend 25% of those pages, you can trick someone into thinking you’re a oenophile. The details on regions are great and  although it was written 10 years ago, not too much has changed. Why is it oenophile? I had to look that one up. It should be vinophile.
7. 

   For just $20, it's all yours, or the perfect gift

   Blanco Basura Army Membership – That’s a literal translation to white trash for the Spanish-language inhibited. Since things that could be quickly consumed were off-limits, this brand’s 5 pack of beer and mini tequila bottle didn’t make the cut, but do make interesting additions to a holiday party. Naturally, the gear is the next best thing. Not only that, but you get stickers and VIP status, which is oxymoronic (VIP white trash), but Kid Rock has it down pat and Joe Dirt was good at it too. PBR trucker hats are so 2006. Jump on the next white trash wannabe bandwagon.

This probably could’ve been more creative, but it wasn’t. Have you gotten a cool alcohol-related gift or want something that isn’t on the list? Please share in the comments section.

So, that’s why the liquor calories page only lists vodka by proof, which is 80 or 100. Unless specifically noted, vodka is 80 proof, though Absolut, Smirnoff and Stoli do offer the 100 proof variety. The rule of thumb:

Calories in a Shot of Vodka (1.5 ounces)

• 97 – 80 proof
• 121 – 100 proof

Note that there is one exception to the 97 and 121 rule in Devotion Vodka. Devotion has added protein, so even though it’s 80 proof, it checks in at 105 calories. Aside from the exception, in anything labeled “vodka,” all of the carbohydrates have been fermented into alcohol. There’s no residual sugar, and the calorie count is a direct result of its proof. So, what makes premium vodka any different than the stuff in plastic bottles? Basically, it’s the purity of the distillation and filtration process. The cheaper vodkas have more cogeners, which are nasty hangover-causing chemicals and the likely subject of a future post.

Vodka Mixed Drink Calories

Since it’s clear that the brand of vodka doesn’t determine calories, with mixed drinks, it’s all about how much is used and what the mixer is. A bartender with a heavy hand is going to make a more caloric drink, but you probably won’t end up drinking as many, so it should even out and be lighter on the wallet. If you’d like to learn more, check out:

• Sip This, Ditch That – Discusses calories in vodka tonic and other vodka-based drinks
• Mixed Drink Calculator – If you want to make your own drink and see how many calories it has

Calories in a Bottle of Vodka

Hopefully nobody actually wants to know the answer to this, but for 80 proof vodka, here it goes:

• 750mL (a fifth) – 1640 calories
• 1 liter – 2190 calories
• 1.75 L (handle) – 3830 calories

In a word, no. Like anything else, it’s drinker beware. Supposedly the college kids were mixing it with vodka, among other things. This is incredibly, incredibly stupid. Each 23.5 ounce Four Loko can is equivalent to:

• 5.6 Miller Lites
• 4.7 Budweisers
• 4.2 Sierra Nevada Pale Ales

So, that’s almost a 6 pack of domestic light beer and more than 4 of what is considered to be a strong, mainstream beer. Because someone can down a can of Four Loko (Joose makes an equivalent product) in less than the time than it takes to feel the effects of alcohol, it’s conceivable to drink 2 cans in a short period of time. More than 11 light beers! Adding vodka to this is outright idiotic. It’s like taking a whole bunch of shots before your body can figure out what’s happening.

We don’t need bans on this stuff. It’s a slippery slope — next it’ll be the cheap sweet wines (think Mad Dog 20/20, Thunderbird). Then could traditional sweet wine like Moscato could be considered dangerous to ignorant youth. Who knows where it would end. Use judgement, pay attention to what’s on the labels. If you’re buying Four Loko, Joose, Sparks, or the like, be aware that you need less and don’t respike them with more booze or caffeine.

Any other opinions out there? Should caffeinated, flavored malts be banned?

A rural moonshining outpost

In keeping with the Boardwalk Empire theme, it was time to figure out how people drank during Prohibition, because it’s clear that the flow of alcohol was dampened rather than cut off. Prohibition Agents ranged from inept to corrupt, as agents often used their training to flip to the dark side (much like ex-military working for Mexican drug gangs). Onto the sources of booze during the “Dry Age,” circa 1920-1933. Circa because certain states took longer than others to adopt the amendment as state law. In order from largest sources to the smallest:

1. Imported Liquor – Canadian Club whiskey was initially manufactured in the United States and called “Club Whiskey.” At some point its founder moved factories across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario. Eventually the name changed as well. During United States prohibition, Canadian Club massively ramped up production and with Detroit’s proximity to Chicago, it was Capone’s main business. Why buy whiskey in Atlantic City if it was being made less than 300 miles away? The other main import was rum from the Caribbean. So-called rum runners would bring the stuff over on boats small enough to escape detection by the Coast Guard.
2. Industrial Alcohol – Nothing fancy here. Industrial ethanol (the stuff used in high school science labs) contains a denaturant, rendering it foul-smelling and undrinkable. A common one is methanol, or wood alcohol, which can cause the drinker to go blind or even die. Bigger bootleggers with a chemist on staff would buy industrial alcohol under a sham company and strip out the denaturant. Fly-by-night bootleggers wouldn’t give so much effort and some poor souls got screwed. Bootleggers often added coloring or spices, slapped on a fake label and sold it as premium Eurpean scotch or gin.
3. Moonshine – A tradition in the Appalachians to circumvent excise taxes, moonshine is distilled corn-sugar mash. Moonshine production shot up in the 1920s, with many of the new cooks having no idea what they were doing. As a result, some of the product contained toxic compounds. When the moonshining industry consolidated, gangsters ran large operations and had small-time “alky cookers” producing moonshine right in the middle of their city. That was the Philadelphia-based Lanzetta Brothers’ main supply. Somewhat surprisingly, this stuff is being sold as recently as 9 years ago, as shown by this Philadelphia Weekly article.
4. Beer – The production of O’Doul’s equivalent was allowed by law. Bootleggers simply spiked that to get its alcohol content back to that of normal beer, probably around 5%.
5. Wine and Cider – There was a loophole in the law that allowed the home production of fermented fruit juices, intended to not criminalize an ethnic tradition of making vinegar. Of course that was exploited and California vineyard owners shipped their grapes all over the country, so people made their own wine.
6. Sacramental wine – The amount of wine produced for Christian and Jewish sacraments shot up at least fourfold during the depression. There were more than a few confirmed cases of priests and rabbis producing wine for fictitious congregations or grossly inflating their congregation’s sizes.


Same game, different product

7. Prescribed whiskey – Easily the most amusing of the sources of liquor. Apparently whiskey had medicinal properties and the law provided that an acceptable use was to “afford relief to him from some known ailment.” Hmm, this sounds familiar (see to the right). And apparently women need not apply for such qualifying ailments. As one could guess, doctor prescriptions of liquor increased precipitously in the 1920s.

People got resourceful when it came to procuring alcohol during Prohibition. It’s pretty clear in this case, that the result was a lower quality product to the people and a shift of money from the federal government (excise tax) to the bootleggers and gangsters.

Related Posts:

• Getting to Know the Characters of Boardwalk Empire
• Boardwalk Empire: A Closer Look at Prohibition