by Scott Ian
Upon learning this fun new word I thought back to when I was a kid in grade school and how, when I would learn a new word in class, I would have to get up in front of the classroom and give the definition of the word and then spell that word and then use it in a sentence. I’ve already given the definition, and you can see how to spell it, so I would say to you, my readers, “Abacinate. I would rather abacinate myself than listen to Kanye West.”
So the next time you’re with your friends somewhere drinking and listening to Slayer and “Angel of Death” comes on, you can impress them with this new addition to your lexicon.
“Hey guys! You know what that word abacinate means? That word that Tom just yelled?” And your friends will most likely reply, “Shut the fuck up. We’re listening to Slayer.”
After having this learning experience through metal I was curious and wanted more. Knowledge is power! I listened intently to my Slayer catalog and came up with a few more gems of the English language that I thought I would share with you.
Disapprobation. There’s a word I wasn’t using conversationally. It’s from the song “Criminally Insane”: “Disapprobation, what have I done? I have yet only just begun to take your fuckin’ lives.”
Disapprobation means “the state of disapproving, or disapproval.” Jeff and Kerry are writing about a killer who is saying to those who would keep him/her incarcerated, “Yeah? You disapprove of me, motherfuckers? I’ve only just started to murder you assholes! You fuckin’ think I’m finished? Fuck that shit! When I get out of here you’re all dead!!!”
And to use it in a sentence: “Last year Angus Young was in a state of extreme disapprobation over Phil Rudd.”
And speaking of Phil Rudd, while we are in a state of learning, let me give you a little tip in life: if you’re the drummer of AC/DC, don’t do meth and threaten people.
My next vocabularial treasure is the word modulistic from the song “Piece by Piece”: “Modulistic terror, a vast sadistic feast. The only way to exit is going piece by piece.” Modulistic? I know the word module. I know the word modular. I know a lot of words. Modulistic? Not so much, so I looked it up. I used an actual dictionary and could not find the word modulistic. Weird.
Then I Googled it and got results that seemed like the definition of the word modulistic: “A standardized, often interchangeable component of a system or construction that is designed for easy assembly or flexible use: a sofa consisting of two end modules.”
Nice try, Google, but that reads to me like the definition of a module or a modular system. I’m starting to think I need to call bullshit on modulistic. Then I clicked on the links for modulistic, and they took me to definitions of the word module. What conspiratorial web are you weaving, Internet? If you’re trying to confuse me, you’re doing a great job. Is it module or modulistic? Or maybe even the Internet doesn’t know. Did I just beat the Internet?
After much investigation and some deep, deep contemplation, I decided that modulistic is not a real word.
I could not find a usage for it that modular wouldn’t cover, except for in the lyrics to “Piece by Piece.” Kerry King just knew that syllabically modular doesn’t work where modulistic does. And aurally modulistic just sounds so much meaner. I’ll have to ask Kerry someday after a few shots what he was thinking. Likely answer: “I don’t know!”
Me and my favorite English professor, Dr. Hanneman.
Photo by Scott Ian.
Oh, and I almost forgot to use it in a sentence: “Modulistic is proof that Slayer are so cool they can make up words.”
During my perusal of Slayer lyrics I came across another word I was not friends with in the song “South of Heaven”:
Forgotten children, conform a new faith,
Avidity and lust controlled by hate.
Can you guess which word? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not hate.
Avidity means “extreme eagerness or enthusiasm.”
Here’s how I would use it in a sentence: “Slayer’s avidity to the idea of sending assholes and jerks to hell is quite apparent in the lyrics to ‘South of Heaven.’”
That’s our lesson for today, my friends. I hope you enjoyed expanding your vocabularies to the sweet sounds of Slayer. See how fun learning can be? If only high school English had been so engaging.
I’m the only nerd who thinks about this shit.
ALL-IN
Part One
Once upon a time I was a professional poker player.
Which for me is weird considering I never gamble. I actually have zero affinity for it, never have. Slots, blackjack (unless you’re counting cards), craps, roulette—all sucker bets designed to take your money. The house isn’t in business to pay out on a regular basis. Yes, everyone has had or knows someone who has had a lucky moment when they hit it big, but over time the house always wins, and I’m not in business to lose.
I’ve been going to Las Vegas since the 1980s on tour, and when the rest of our crew is running for the tables as fast as they can, I’m looking for somewhere good to eat. You can eat really well in Vegas. I would drop a grand on food and booze at Joël Robuchon any day of the week in lieu of watching it disappear into the hands of some dead-eyed dealer at a card table filled with yellow-fingered emphysema candidates. The epic meal becomes a gold-tinged memory for my lifetime. Losing a grand? That’d make me start smoking.
I’m not even just talking about gambling with money. I don’t gamble on decisions in general. I am a meticulous planner and approach every situation in life the same way: I think it through with Spock-like logic using experience, instinct, and the information at hand for the best possible outcome. In other words, I like to win. I guess that’s why I got along so well with poker.
And it all started because I wanted a free trip to Las Vegas. Who wouldn’t? It was back in 2006, and I was still drinking somewhat heavily, not up to my late 1990s levels, but enough to warrant a couple of days in Vegas with Pearl on VH1’s dime. Yes, VH1, the network that gave me a job hosting the Rock Show back in 2001 when I oh-so needed one and then kept me gainfully employed over the years after that as a talking head on their endless I Love the… programs and assorted other list shows as well as casting me on their reality show SuperGroup, which was shot in Vegas earlier that year. VH1 was having a poker tournament, a “Rock & Roll” no-limit Texas hold ’em poker tournament in Vegas with Ace Frehley from Kiss, Dusty Hill from ZZ Top, Vinnie Paul from Pantera/HELLYEAH, Sully from Godsmack, as well as a couple of other players who would win their seats playing in a no-limit Texas hold ’em tournament on an online poker site called Ultimate Bet. I read about this tournament online on some metal news site. I barely knew how to play poker. As a kid I would play seven-card stud with my mom, and my memories of that were vague at best. I didn’t know anything about online poker or no-limit Texas hold ’em. I just wanted a free ride out to Vegas for a few days to party. I emailed my friend Erik Luftglass; he was a bigwig in the talent department at VH1 and the man responsible for all the love I got from VH1. I asked him if I could be a part of the tournament, and he got back to me right away, saying he had spoken to Lisa Tenner (the producer of the show), and she thought it was a great idea to include me. Sweet! Three days in Vegas with my lady, raging with Vinnie Paul on VH1’s tab. Perks! I neglected to tell him that I didn’t know how to play hold ’em. I would need to do something about that, so I Googled no-limit Texas hold ’em for info on how to play. There were dozens of sites that had the basic rules. It seemed easy enough, but so much of the poker language they used—phrases like under the gun, check-raise, gutshot straight, nuts, suckout—I had no idea what they were talking about. Almost every article I read about learning Hold ’em pointed to Doyle Brunson’s book Super System as the go-to book to learn the basics. I got that and may as well have been trying to read ancient Sumerian. Pot odds and playing in or out of position and variance—I didn’t have a clue. Reading wasn’t cutting it for me. I needed to actually see how to play, to know what was going on, so I started
watching the TV show High Stakes Poker, which was hosted by Gabe Kaplan (Mr. Kotter, to those of us in a certain age group) and my shotgun education in no-limit Texas hold ’em had begun.
Kind of. I didn’t have time to sit around and watch poker on television all day. I watched two or three episodes and watched as poker pros won and lost huge amounts of money, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. I couldn’t believe how they could just lose so much money and be cool about it. They’d sit there casually chatting, as one guy would be stacking up a mountain of chips he had just won from the other guy. How could they do that? I would lose my sanity. Chat casually? I’d start hitting people with chairs screaming, “GIVE ME MY FUCKING MONEY BACK!!!” That’s why I would never ever be in that position. I gleaned a bit of info from watching, basics like posting blinds and how the button moves around the table, but that was it. I really wasn’t paying attention; I was just looking forward to a crazy few days in Vegas and that would be the end of poker in my world.
Crazy how things don’t work out sometimes.
Pearl and I got to Vegas the day before the tournament. I was a little stressed about not knowing how to play and making a jackass out of myself, so we figured it would be a good idea to calm that by staying out all night drinking with Vinnie Paul and friends. It worked. I woke up the next day still drunk and not worried at all. My plan was to be out of the tournament right away and then to start drinking again to stave off the hangover and then go eat a fabulous meal somewhere. See how I thought that through logically? Always planning.
I had to be at the Flamingo Hotel at 10 a.m. for the tournament. Pearl, my partner in crime and trooper that she is, woke up with me after maybe three hours sleep, and we got our shit together and headed over to the Flamingo. They were going to shoot all of us band guys being tutored by poker professionals before the tournament.
Here’s the thing: all the other guys playing were veteran poker players. Ace and Dusty had been playing since they were kids. Vinnie Paul is Vinnie Paul. He’s a hard-charging drinking and gambling motherfucker. And Sully? Sully was practically a pro. He’d cashed in the main event of the 2006 World Series of Poker that summer, coming in 713th out of 8,773 people for $17,730. He’d go on to cash in the 2007 World Series as well, coming in 237th out of 6,358 people for $45,422, and then in December of 2007 he placed second out of 307 in the Doyle Brunson Five Diamond World Poker Classic $5,000 buy-in tournament for $307,325! Sully was badass. The other three guys playing with us were all players who won their seats by winning tournaments online, so they were all real dudes as well. Then there was me, sweating and still drunk from the night before, ordering a coffee and a Bloody Mary as soon as I walked into the studio: the extent of my poker knowledge? That pairs were good hands.
Double-fisting, I sat down with poker pro Antonio Esfandiari, aka “The Magician.” He was and is a big deal. In 2012 Antonio won $18,346,673 at the World Series of Poker Big One for One Drop $1 million buy-in tournament. Yes, you read that correctly: He had the balls to put a million of his own money on the line, and he won over $18 million. In the tournament 11.11 percent of each buy-in would go to the One Drop charity, and they raised over $7 million from that one tournament.
Antonio asked me how often I played, and I lied and told him, “I played a lot on tour.” He started right in, talking about raising three-x to open and bet sizing and pot odds and a whole bunch of other beginner stuff that I couldn’t compute in my post-all-nighter, pre-all-dayer state of mind. He ran a few hands with me, and I was able to learn a few things, one of which was “raising three-x” meant raising three times the amount of the big blind if everyone folded before me and I was going to bet. So now I knew that and having two aces was really good. After meeting with Antonio I went to another room to get some instruction from Phil “The Unabomber” Laak, another big-deal poker pro. His nickname was the Unabomber because he always wore a hoodie, making him look like the police sketch of Ted Kaczynski. Phil was really friendly, an affable guy. We joked around a bit and I told him I didn’t know how to play. He laughed it off and went over the same basics with me that Antonio did. He wished me luck and then it was time to shuffle up and deal. I was ready! Poker pros Phil Hellmuth Jr. and Mark Tenner were hosting the tournament and would also be doing the play-by-play commentating. They introduced each player, and we walked out onto the set through a dramatic cloud of some fog-machine-generated smoke. Bloody Mary in hand, I took my seat at the table.
Tournament director Matt Savage cried, “Shuffle up and deal!” And we were underway. I was nervous. I sat there as hands were dealt, and I kept folding: I didn’t have anything even close to a hand. Even with the buzz I had going, my nerves were on fire. I was trying to talk myself down, my inside voice telling me, Just be cool. You got this. You’re not even playing with your own money—it’s all for charity, so just chill and have fun. How hard can it be? I didn’t even know that you were supposed to actually say “bet” and “raise” when you were going to bet until I heard the other players do so. I was very focused on the action. I made sure to post my blinds when it was my turn so as not to hold up the game. I made sure not to check, call, or fold out of turn. I started getting used to the rhythm of the game and the basic mechanics, and I started to relax after a couple of rounds. I didn’t look like an idiot. The Bloody Marys were helping as well. I was in some kind of new weird head place, the adrenaline from playing was counteracting the lack of sleep, and the drinks were kicking the shit out of any potential hangover. I felt good, really good. I was into the game, busting balls and having fun. Then I picked up a hand.
Okay, press pause for a second. I’m going to go into some detail about the hand, and I’ll be using some poker terms/phrases that I certainly didn’t know back then and that you, my friendly reader, also may not know or understand, so I’ll try to keep it all in layman’s terms as much as I can. I’m not a poker writer anyway, and I don’t know all the shorthand, so if you do know how to play and write out a hand history, pro-style, pretend you don’t. Also, obviously at the time I didn’t know people’s hole cards, meaning I didn’t know what cards they had. I watched it on TV and got to see after the fact. Oh and also, we couldn’t hear Phil and Mark commenting on the game. Okay, press play…
FYI:
Blinds: blinds are forced bets posted by players to the left of the dealer button in flop-style poker games. The player to the left of the dealer button places the small blind and the next player to the left then posts the big blind.
Button: the dealer button is a marker used to indicate the player who is dealing or, in casino games with a house dealer, the player who acts last on that deal (who would be the dealer in a home game).
The blinds were $100/$200. Dusty Hill limps (meaning he just calls the amount of the big blind) with a ten and eight of diamonds (10d8d). Sully raises to $1,000 with a pair of nines, or pocket nines (99). I call Sully’s nines with an ace of hearts and a six of hearts (Ah6h). Ace calls with a pair of fours, or pocket fours (44). The pot has $3,300 in it. The flop (the three community cards the dealer deals and then turns face up) comes ten of clubs (10c), ace of diamonds (Ad), and king of spades (Ks). I flop an ace, giving me top pair. This is very good for me—even I know that then. Ace acts first and checks. Sully bets $1,200, and then I raise to $2,400. Now it’s Ace’s turn. Phil Hellmuth says, “Ace Frehley has an easy fold, as he is a ten-to-one underdog.” Phil knows how to calculate odds in poker like you and I can tell time on a digital clock. Ace either doesn’t know that he’s a ten-to-one underdog or doesn’t care and calls the $2,400, making the pot $9,300. Sully folds. The turn card (the fourth card the dealer deals) is the queen of hearts (Qh). Phil says, “Ace is a twenty-to-one underdog. He needs a four on the river to beat Scott’s pair of aces. I don’t see how Ace can play if Scott bets.” Looking very serious, Ace checks, poker face turned up to eleven. And then, like the novice I was, I check the turn as well. Terrible play—I should’ve bet. Phil even exclaims, “Ahhh, Scott!” If I bet, mayb
e I get Ace to fold his hand. My gut tells me now, after seeing it, that he was not folding no matter what I did. The dealer deals the river card (the fifth and last card dealt), and it is a four. Ace stoically bets $4,000, and I call, making the pot $17,300, and we turn our hands over and I see he made his set (three-of-a-kind) on the river. Ace only had two outs, meaning he could only win if one of the two fours left in the deck was dealt. It was, and I lost a lot of chips, almost crippling me early in the tournament.
I was now what was known as short stacked. I just knew I had enough chips for a few more rounds of blinds, and then I’d bust out and be out the door and on my way to a big greasy breakfast and a well-needed nap. I had no choice but to go all-in with whatever hand I had—it was shove or fold, meaning risking my tournament life every time I played a hand. Lucky for me, when I went all-in, everyone else folded and I picked up the blinds. I was able to pull that off a few times over the next hour or so as well as winning a couple of small pots as I slowly clawed back into the game. I played as carefully as I could, which wasn’t hard because I didn’t know what I was doing anyway, so I only played a hand if I had one. I stayed very patient. I figured I’d let the rest of them battle it out and knock each other out. That strategy wouldn’t leave me with a lot of chips at the end, but again, I didn’t know this at the time. I was in survival mode after almost busting out against Ace, and I was going to last as long as I could. I got into another hand with Ace; I had pocket twos, and he had an ace and a seven off suit (meaning the two cards were of different suits). I bet every street (meaning after the flop, the turn, and the river), and Ace called me all the way down, and my pocket twos (aka ducks) held up. I won some of my chips back to get my revenge, and my comeback was in full swing.