Vegas Jam 2012 March 10-11

[worldbound]

Mathieu: I noticed you don't have an avatar, so I made these really quick just for you.

http://imgur.com/a/TTk5Z#0

6 images in all.

If you want any of them as an avatar let me know and I will resize it for you.

[cd]

Mathieu: I noticed you don't have an avatar, so I made these really quick just for you.

http://imgur.com/a/TTk5Z#0

Nice crank Mathieu!

[MathieuGM]

haha well i guess i have a good crank. But that's weird because i don't feel my foot is like that when i shred. I think it's when i set the bag that my foot looks like that. On stall it's not a MC ou Jim crank haha!

Mat

[Lycanthrope]

ill post a brief writeup later, but just wanted to post quickly about a found bear bag. brown and gray. let me know if you know whos it is.

[worldbound]

Ken's dream:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Db25zDjJzQ[/youtube]

[Lycanthrope]

Okay. sickest weekend ever. won over $100 at blackjack. my shred wasn't on par, but i did hit some things i was really proud of.

This was seriously my favorite jam ever.

also thank you for your donations to me and to the event from everyone who participated. I really hope cory allen had an awesome 21st. Thanks Caroline Birch for coming out. I'm glad we all had a killer time. seriously. best time of my life.

[brianbear]

this jam was pimpin. I played freestyle pretty horribly, and got pick-pocketed, but still had a blast.
Friday night partyin was off the hook and saturday night was... a triiip.

personal footbag highlights: rocked the four square courts day 1 pretty hard, and had an epicly long pendulum launch, lol.

Great seeing everyone and meeting a few new people

oh, and i actually think that bear bag is stanfords (mine)... but not sure.

thanks evan!

[worldbound]

This was by far the best Jam I have ever been to. So many awesome people having a great time! I really need to go to bed, so I might post a lengthy post tomorrow when I have time. I just wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone who helped run this event! I really really enjoyed it!

Excalibur was really fun! Poolside sessions were so much fun to watch and be a part of. The night parties were also a blast!

Ok I really need to sleep. Thanks again! To be continued...

[professor]

Mike, that video is awesome. Your music selection is perfect! Great stuff man. Thanks!

[C-Fan]

So, even though this is almost 2 months overdue, here's my writeup of the 2012 Vegas Jam:


Vegas Jam was amaaaaazing. It was my third one, and I’d say easily the best. The hanging out was awesome, the Vegas experience was great, and footbag was super fun. I feel like after 3 jams there, I now have an understanding of the best way to approach future weekends in Vegas. I’m gonna try and do a detailed writeup, but no guarantees I can finish since work is kind of insane this time of year.

First off, thank you to Evan for throwing this. Who doesn’t want an excuse to go to Vegas and hang out with friends? This wouldn’t have happened if Evan hadn’t picked a date and said it was a go, so thanks for making it happen. It was the most fun I’d had in a while, and I know a bunch of other footbaggers would say the same.

Pre-Tournament

The weeks leading up to Vegas weren’t ideal in terms of preparation. I was dealing with a quad injury I suffered while big-trick-hunting, so I was contemplating sitting out comp altogether. Even before I injured myself, I hadn’t been working on stamina at all, since I was chasing 10 fearless. There were a few sessions where I spent the entire time just chasing 10 fearless, which doesn’t do wonders for your consistency, variety, or stamina. Given that the main event in Vegas is Circle, I boarded my flight with low expectations.

Thursday night

I fly out of Denver without any problems. Once I land in Vegas I make some calls, and its decided I’ll wait for Zach and Anton at the airport before Evan picks us up. I kill the time by filming some establishment shots, some which I later use in my fearless video (the big lizard). Zach and Anton find me, and we exchange hugs. Zach surprises me by giving me a jersey: it’s a Grant Hill Pistons jersey, but it’s the teal one with the flaming horse’s head from the 90s. He tells me he picked that one because it’s especially ugly. I laugh and agree, and point out that the dinosaur dribbling a basketball jerseys of the Toronto raptors from the same time period give them a run for that title. Evan picks us up in a minivan, and the special guest is riding shotgun. Caroline Birch! Holy crap! I never would have expected that, and it makes it that much cooler. Caroline makes every event better, so I know right off the bat that’s a great sign for the weekend. We swing by a 7-11 on the way to the hotel, and we all pick up 6 packs. This is the start of a long night of drinking for me, but since it’s stretched out over 12 hours, I never feel that buzzed. I check into the hotel, and am pleasantly surprised by our room. It’s small but very clean, and its right on the strip. We decide to walk the strip for the night in search of adventure. The highlight is seeing a magician at some bar, who bends all of our minds with his tricks. It’s crazy too, since he’s wearing a t-shirt with short sleeves and no watch, so all of his sleight of hand is super legit. He did some tricks where he put small foam balls in people’s hands, and made them disappear or multiply. His finale was making putting one of those balls in a girls hand, and then having her open it to reveal a big penis complete with set of balls. “He pulled a dick out of her hand!” At that moment I propose that be the slogan on next year’s tshirts. I sing one karaoke song in the bar (buddy holly by weezer), and then we head out. As we walk the strip, multiple people comment on my jersey…most of them registering some combination of nostalgia as well as awe at how ugly the jersey is. That’s good for a lot of laughs for us.

Friday

Mat wakes up way before me or Chris Dean, so I go pick him up at the pool. As I walk around looking for him, I’m struck by how awesome the pool area is. There are multiple big pools, multiple hot tubs of generous size, and lots of cute girls in swimsuits. I make a mental note to come back the next morning so I can do the pool properly. We arrive at the site, and I decide I won’t play at all, since my quad is still tight and comp isn’t til Saturday. In order to force myself not to play, I go get a huge hamburger. Sure enough, that takes me out of the competitive game the rest of the day. When I was in line to buy it, I saw I could get a can beer for just one dollar more. I decided to exercise some restraint after the previous night of boozing, and don’t buy it. The second I sit down at the site to eat my burger, Caroline whips out one of my beers from the previous night, and says: “hey you forgot this last night.” It was like the universe was telling me I was in vegas and should cut loose.

I was good about not freestyling much, though I think I did a few tricks in my baggy shorts. I filmed a bit, and played a bunch of foursquare. Despite my 4square strategy of ignoring points and just playing like a jerk, I somehow managed to win a game!

Friday night was pretty chill and quiet, since we all wanted to be fresh for competition the next day. We end up hanging out in Nate Linscott’s awesome suite, and getting a poker game going. We had the luxury of having Caroline run it for us, which is sweet because she’s worked at casinos before. It was nice having somebody there to figure out sidepots and to raise the blinds. We played a $5 buy in no rebuys. I didn’t get many face cards and don’t think I had pocket pair a single time, but I played the right hands and bought enough pots to make it to the final 3. Around this time, Mike gets plastered, and ends up folding most of his hands. This ends up being a good strategy, since he had a big enough stack that he could wait it out and sober up, while his remaining opponents (Chris Dean and myself) duked it out. Sure enough, I finally knock out Chris, and then it’s just me and Mike heads up. I play aggressively and win it, marking the second year in a row I won the poker game at Vegas Jam. Sweet.

Saturday

Saturday starts off well. We figure comp will start in the afternoon, so we take advantage of the beautiful pools at the hotel. We pick up some pastries and coffee slushies from Starbucks, then go lounge at the pool for a couple hours. The pool was awesome. Kevin Regamey and Mathieu hit some good tricks by the pool for Mike’s camera, and I have fun watching in between dips in the pool. Mike asks me to hit something on camera, but I suck barefoot. I decided to try TATW, and I surprise myself by hitting one on my 3rd or 4th try! I figure I’m not going to top that, so I spend the rest of the morning swimming, dipping in the hot tub, and watching others shred. Eventually we decide to go to the event site, though we toyed with the idea of skipping comp and just staying at the pool all day.

At the site I warm up slowly, and am happy to find my legs feel good! I decide to caffeinate, to help give me a boost. In the months preceding Vegas, I had drastically cut down on my caffeine intake, with the idea that I’d want it to have an impact if I needed it. Sure enough, this was the case. First round of circle I feel great. At one point I realize I’m going to win and advance, but I still push myself hard on every turn. I don’t know how much energy I’ll have for finals, but at the least I want to know I turned in one solid round of comp, and I do.

I think I was in the first pool of comp, which means I have to stay warm through two more rounds of Circle before competing in finals. I do my best, but it’s hard to stay springy that long. Circle finals ends up being Brian, Evan and myself. Right before we start, Brian comments that it feels appropriate for Vegas finals to be us three. I couldn’t agree more. Rules for finals are announced as 4 turns of variety and 4 of difficulty, and I lobby to reduce it to three a piece. 8 turns almost always means the last two turns are crap from everybody, but we end up doing the long version. Sure enough, I’m running out of gas by the end, and feel like my muscles are shutting down during my last turn. Overall I feel like I put in a solid performance though, which I’m happy with.

After Circle ends, we break and decide to do the remaining events the next day. We make an exception for the pendulum contests, which are fun but hard. Brian gives me back a blue G-Unit I asked him to fix for me, and also a bag. The bag is sweet. Saturday night a bunch of us go to New York New York and ride the rollercoaster, which is awesome. Evan’s mom works near there, and gets us an employee discount, saving us all a bunch. Thanks Evan’s mom! I don’t remember much else about Saturday night…did we walk the strip more? I need to get these write-ups done closer to the event.

Sunday
Sunday we have to check out from the hotel at noon. Mathieu lobbies for us to pay extra for a late checkout, which turns out (again) to be the absolutely correct option. We do so, which buys us more time to lounge by the pool. It’s fantastic. Mike brings his go-pro with the waterproof case, and we do some shooting underwater using a chain mail bag. It’s super hard to hit anything since I can’t see what I’m doing, but I manage to hit a smear and a pixie ss clipper. We’re tempted to stay at the pool again, but finally leave and checkout.

At the event site I warm up and feel a bit tight, but overall good. The first even it request contest, which I somehow found really frustrating and annoying. Combos were announced with the new nomenclature, which added a layer of confusion/stress for me. I was also frustrated by some of the combos chosen. I understand that if your mastery of trick elements is good enough, you should be able to hit non-standard tricks and link them. That said, asking somebody to hit an awkward non-standard trick and link out of it in less than 3 tries doesn’t really show mastery of anything to me. I’m talking about stuff like far symp whip to spinning opp pickup. Is that a hard combo? No. Is it a hard link? No. But it’s two tricks nobody ever does, and nobody ever will do in shred, which are linked. I kinda just didn’t see the point of it, and got really frustrated. It felt more like a novelty than a measure of skill.

In past request contests I’d been knocked out due to a hole in my game (e.g. fairy sets, zooming) and came away with the goal of filling those gaps in my game. This time around I was knocked out on something stupid like far symp whip, which I knew I could hit within 3 minutes of skooling (but not 3 tries) and wouldn’t help my game. So I just walked off after I got knocked out. My two main goals for the tournament were to compete, and also to film some fearless with Mike Green’s headcam. It seemed like a good time to do that, so I went off and gave it a go. I was pretty impressed by the camera actually. With the headstrap, it didn’t move around much and was unobtrusive. The only limitation I felt with the go-pro was double spinning, since the camera obstructed the area of sight where I normally spot the bag in between spins. Other than that, I could pretty much play normally. Mike later sent me footage of me hitting 6 or 7 contacts fearless, which was just what I needed to spice up my Fearless Kids video. Thanks Mike!

At this point I’m feeling pretty exhausted, and I know my departure to the airport is looming. I normally don’t like saying goodbye, but this time around I feel even more down about my farewell, and I don’t know why. At the time I thought it was maybe due to the fact that I had had such an amazing time, and I didn’t want to leave my friends. I even comment to a bunch of them how weird I’m feeling. Later on I realize why I felt so weird: after not having caffeine for a couple months, having massive caffeine doses two days in a row gave me mood swings. It helped me compete physically, but I had forgotten how hard it can hit me on an emotional stability level.

Ben Skaggs drops me off at the airport with a few other friends, but they are going to a different terminal. I hug out some goodbyes, and get on the plane. At that point I was still feeling down from the caffeine, but a part of me was optimistic and already looking forward to next year’s Vegas Jam. After going to a few of these, I had the feeling that I was beginning to figure out the best way to approach them. Next year I’m definitely getting a hotel with a pool again, and will also try and take a similarly casual approach to comp. This year was definitely the most fun Vegas Jam for me, and one of the most fun weekends I’d had in quite some time.

Thank you again to Evan for hosting this, to Nate for letting us use his suite as a party suite, to Caroline for being the surprise guest and making everything more fun, and to all my friends who made it out and hung out. I hope to see every one of you there again next year!

[MathieuGM]

Thank you so much for the write up!!

Great memories!

Sorry for making request that way . haha

Hope to share a room with you again sooner then later mister Ken!!

[ObArA'BaRs]

Is there going to be a Vegas Jam 2013 this year?