Friday, November 23, 2012

Niner niner

Several months ago I read the screenplay of the 1980 movie "Airplane" on my Kindle. I thought the movie was hilarious when I first saw it, and still think so. The humor is innovative on many levels; the movie loves to play with our expectations, constantly surprising us by parodying and breaking cinematic conventions. One convention it breaks is the one where the audience is supposed to accept the performance of each actor at face value, without taking knowledge of their real lives into account. The famous basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar plays the part of airline pilot Roger Murdock, but his real life keeps intruding on the fiction, to the point where it's clear he's not an airline pilot at all, and has to fake knowledge of how to fly the plane. Here's an excerpt from the script:

                        MURDOCK
         Listen, kid, I've been hearing that crap
         ever since I was at UCLA. Tell your old
         man to drag Unseld and Lanier up and down
         the court for forty-eight minutes.
              (into mike)
         Ah...Denver Control, this is Flight two-
         zero-niner continuing on a heading two-
         niner-niner...niner, ah...niner...niner.

The movie riffs on the fact that in air traffic control communications, the word "niner" is always substituted for the number nine.

Last night was a "niner niner" festival at the table I joined. On hand 1, an opponent was dealt pocket nines and won a pot worth $81,100 with them. On hand 9, I was dealt pocket nines and hit a set of nines on the flop; an opponent put me all in and I called, winning a pot worth $76,300. On hand 10, I was dealt pocket nines again, but folded on the flop when I didn't hit another set. I called it a night at that point.

During current Hold'em session you were dealt 10 hands and saw flop:
 - 1 out of 2 times while in big blind (50%)
 - 0 out of 1 times while in small blind (0%)
 - 2 out of 7 times in other positions (28%)
 - a total of 3 out of 10 (30%)
 Pots won at showdown - 1 of 1 (100%)
 Pots won without showdown - 0

delta: $34,150
balance: $6,246,537

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