Never Play Rolled Up Kings At Stud Hi-Lo

Having played this tournament Thursday night and made the final table, I kinda felt obligated to reprise it, which I did in style. Already in the money, I was dealt rolled up 4s and got into a raising war. A third player stayed the course, but as you will see from this hand, he had no business even flat calling.

canam999 was all-in before me, and I stared in horror at his hand, a prial of kings. Remarkably, my hand paired while his didn’t.

Having survived that horror, it was only fitting I should be busted out the same way, the guy with the massive stack starting with a low draw only sucking out with spades to scoop.

But...as will be seen from the screengrab below, I had no cause to complain. Can Our Hero do even better tonight? Watch this space! Gotta luv electronic cards.

That Elusive Straight Flush

A straight flush is a rarity in poker, but is obviously more of a rarity at 5 card stud than at Omaha.

All the same, you don’t really expect to see two straight flushes in the same tournament, much less be dealt two yourself. This is what happened to me this evening.

This one happened deep into the tournament.

And this one a bit later.

We were already well in the money, and very short stacked, I took a chance with two small pairs. When the flop came 5-8-9, I called for the 7 of spades, and it came. It took me to the next level.

I should have been happy, but I couldn’t help thinking that only at hi lo, you can make a straight flush and still win only half the pot, something I did here twice.

Lying About The Grooming Gangs — A Study In Gaslighting

Over the course of 2020, we have seen many laughable examples of media gaslighting, perhaps most notably, and laughably, by the MSNBC reporter who claimed the protests he was covering were mostly peaceful while a building burned in the background. He did point out that fires had been started, but heck, what’s a fire or two?

Another example of gaslighting is to claim Joe Biden is more popular than Donald Trump, that the Biden of 2020 is more popular than the Barack Obama of 2008, and that Biden’s son Hunter did nothing wrong when he was clearly using his father’s name to enrich himself and the Biden family at the expense of his country.

Having said that, things are not always what they appear. Two men attacking a third may actually be two detectives apprehending a murder suspect. A man dragging a young child forcibly into a car may look like a kidnapping when it is really an angry father attempting to take his recalcitrant son home.

But what does the above photograph look like? These are the mugshots of a child sex grooming gang, one of many that have been successfully prosecuted in recent years. Run the phrase “grooming gang” through your image search, and the photographs that come up are strikingly similar. Of course, there are exceptions. This grooming gang from Rotherham includes two white women. Genuine female sexual predators are extremely rare, because female depravity manifests in other ways. Most female sexual predators have been groomed themselves, or allowed themselves to be groomed, by men, as here.

And yes, there are white sexual predators including white child sexual predators; the names Robert Black, Ian Huntley and Roy Whiting spring to mind; serial child killer, double child killer, and child killer respectively, but how often do they hunt in packs, and how many of them have sexually abused dozens, in some cases hundreds, of underage teens for years? The answer is none. Yet there is now a concerted effort to convince us that the eight lowlifes pictured above are in some way exceptional.

These gangs have been alluded to as Islamic grooming gangs, including by Tommy Robinson. While this claim is superficially plausible, the men pictured here are more likely to be found in Mecca Bookmakers than praying facing Mecca. Under Sharia, rape is capital. Former Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw identified the real problem years ago when he pointed out that certain men of Pakistani heritage regarded young white girls as “easy meat”.

This claim was denounced as “racist”, surprise, surprise, but what isn’t racist nowadays? Is it sexist to point out that the overwhelming majority of sex offenders are men? Is it sexist and ageist to point out that most violent crime - violent with a capital V - are committed by males between the ages of about 15 and 45?

If you hadn’t realised it by now, with rare exceptions, intersectionality - the totem pole of oppression - goes in one direction only.

The official report on the grooming gangs was published last month. Sources cited within it include so-called criminologist Ella Cockbain and self-styled grooming gang “survivor” Sammy Woodhouse. Both these women have gone on record claiming that most offenders are white. Not most grooming gang members, absolutely not.

Although she was indeed a victim, of the predatory Arshid Hussain, Woodhouse was in every sense a willing victim. Some of the claims she makes about Hussain are not worthy of belief, although she does admit that at the age of fifteen she helped him rob a post office. Did he “groom” her to do that?

Woodhouse became pregnant by Hussain not once, but twice. She hated being raped so much, she went back for more. Woodhouse went on to start a petition called “Stop rapists from accessing children conceived through rape”. How many of the four hundred thousand plus people who signed it stopped to think that if passed into law it will allow any woman to stop a man having access to his offspring simply by claiming she was raped?

Not everyone was taken in by her little girl lost act; she was refused criminal injuries compensation because the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board recognised her agency.

The aforementioned Ella Cobain co-authored a paper published by the Institute Of Race Relations in January this year. As might be discerned from its title: Failing victims, fuelling hate: challenging the harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ narrative is more concerned with promoting its own narrative than in documenting actual abuse.

The Institute Of Race Relations is an openly Marxist organisation that has championed convicted murderers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Satpal Ram.

Returning to the official report, its lack of proper citations and its twisted rhetoric are a wonder to behold.

Thus at paragraph 89 we are told:

“Studies have indicated that societal and cultural issues around misogyny may also be an enabling factor. Objectification of women in society has been suggested as a reason why violence against girls may be normalised and accepted.”

This is pure feminist propaganda. Misogyny means arguing with a feminist or simply disagreeing with one. The objectification of women is another piece of feminist nonsense. Physically attractive women are often admired by both sexes; one may admire a bird, a horse, a building, that doesn’t suggest indecency, only good taste.

In spite of this and other attempts to whitewash (pun intended) the grooming gang scandal, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. In December 2017, the Quilliam Foundation issued a report that concluded there was indeed a heavy involvement of Pakistani men in the grooming gangs, even though it did allude to “outdated and sexist views of women”. The way certain individuals or groups view women isn’t and never was the issue; the law should be enforced to protect vulnerable girls, that means recognising and imposing severe punishment on all offenders, whatever their race.