The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. That is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have deep ties to Donald Trump is deeply disturbing. Trump conducted FIVE completely private meetings and conferences with Putin, and has gone to great lengths to prevent literally anyone, even people in his administration, from learning what was discussed.
According to an ex-KGB spy...Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years.
Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to use Trump real estate to launder money.
In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.
“During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.”
When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider business prospects.
A short while later he made his first call for the dismantling of the NATO alliance. Which would benefit Russia.
At the beginning of 1990 Donald Trump owed a combined $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with $800 million personally guaranteed by his own assets, according to Alan Pomerantz, a lawyer whose team led negotiations between Trump and 72 banks to restructure Trump’s loans. Pomerantz was hired by Citibank.
Interview with Pomerantz
Trump agreed to pay the bond lenders 14% interest, roughly 50% more than he had projected, to raise $675 million. It was the biggest gamble of his career. Trump could not keep pace with his debts. Six months later, the Taj defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin.
In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy.
So he bankrupted a casino? What about Ru...
The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said."The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy."
....ssia
So by the mid 1990s Trump was then at a low point of his career. He defaulted on his debts to a number of large Wall Street banks and was overleveraged. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.
Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Deutsche Bank.
The extremely controversial Deutsche Bank. The Nazi financing, Auschwitz building, law violating, customer misleading, international currency markets manipulating, interest rate rigging, Iran & others sanctions violating, Russian money laundering, salvation of Donald J. Trump.
The agreeing to a $7.2 billion settlement with with the U.S. Department of Justice over its sale and pooling of toxic mortgage securities and causing the 2008 financial crisis bank.
The appears to have facilitated more than half of the $2 trillion of suspicious transactions that were flagged to the U.S. government over nearly two decades bank.
The embroiled in a $20b money-laundering operation, dubbed the Global Laundromat. The launders money for Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB bank.
That bank.
Three minute video detailing Trump's debts and relationship with Deutsche Bank
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground on his biggest project yet.
Directly across the street from the United Nations building.
Russian Linked-Deutsche Bank arranged to lend hundreds of millions of dollars to finance Trump’s construction of a skyscraper next to the United Nations.
Construction got underway in 1999.
Units on the tower’s priciest floors were quickly snatched up by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in.
New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.
“I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.”Lots of Russian and Eastern European Friends. Investing lots of money. And not only in New York.
Miami is known as a hotspot of the ultra-wealthy looking to launder their money from overseas. Thousands of Russians have moved to Sunny Isles. Hundreds of ultra-wealthy former Soviet citizens bought Trump properties in South Florida. People with really disturbing histories investing millions and millions of dollars. Igor Zorin offers a story with all the weirdness modern Miami has to offer: Russian cash, a motorcycle club named after Russia’s powerful special forces and a condo tower branded by Donald Trump.
Thanks to its heavy Russian presence, Sunny Isles has acquired the nickname “Little Moscow.”
From an interview with a Miami based Siberian-born realtor... “Miami is a brand,” she told me as we sat on a sofa in the building’s huge foyer. “People from all over the world want property here.” Developers were only putting up luxury properties because they “know that the crisis has not affected people with money,”
Most of her clients are Russian—there are now three direct flights per week between Moscow and Miami—and increasing numbers are moving to Florida after spending a few years in London first. “It’s a money center, and it’s a lot easier to get your money there than directly to the US, because of laws and tax issues,” she said. “But after your money has been in London for a while, you can move it to other places more easily.”
In the 2000s, Trump turned to licensing deals and trademarks, collecting a fee from other companies using the Trump name. This has allowed Trump to distance himself from properties or projects that have failed or encountered legal trouble and provided a convenient workaround to help launch projects, especially in Russia and former Soviet states, which bear Trump’s name but otherwise little relation to his general business.
Enter Bayrock Group, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and invested an incredible amount of money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management. Bayrock was run by two investors:
Felix Sater, a Russian-born mobster who served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven "pump-and-dump" stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant. He was an important figure at Bayrock, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Micahel Cohen --Trump's disbarred former "fixer" attorney. Cohen's family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother's in-laws. Felix Sater's father had ties to the Russian mob.
Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former "Soviet official" who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic. Arif graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. Trump said in the deposition that Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me,”and that he was teaming with Bayrock on other planned ventures in Moscow. The only Russians who are likely have the resources and political connections to sponsor such ambitious international deals are the corrupt oligarchs.
In 2005, Trump told The Miami Herald “The name has brought a cachet to certain areas that wouldn’t have had it,” Dezer said Trump’s name put Sunny Isles Beach on the map as a classy destination — and the Trump-branded condo units sold “10 to 20 percent higher than any of our competitors, and at a faster pace.”“We didn’t have any foreclosures or anything, despite the crisis.”
In a 2007 deposition that was part of his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against reporter Timothy O’Brien Trump testified "that Bayrock was working their international contacts to complete Trump/Bayrock deals in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. He testified that “Bayrock knew the investors” and that “this was going to be the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, et cetera, and Warsaw, Poland.”
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave the following statement to the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan: “[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In July 2008, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. This was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value. Must be nice to have so many Russian oligarchs interested in giving you money.
In 2013, Trump went to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant “financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.… a Putin ally who is sometimes called the ‘Trump of Russia’ because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings.” He met with many oligarchs. Timeline of events. Flight records show how long he was there.
Video interview in Moscow where Trump says "...China wanted it this year. And Russia wanted it very badly." I bet they did.
Also in 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich.
In 2014, Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programmes. We just go there all the time.’”
A 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, and others, alleged that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes. The lawsuit cites as a “Concrete example of their crime, Trump SoHo, [which] stands 454 feet tall at Spring and Varick, where it also stands monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.”
In 2016, the Trump Presidential Campaign was helped by Russia.
(I don't have the presidential term sourced yet. I'll post an update when I do. I'm sure you probably remember most of them...sigh. TY to the main posters here. Obviously I'm standing on your shoulders having taken a lot of the information or articles from here).

Positions: $RSI 30 03/19 30C
Proof: https://imgur.com/a/swCCMjz
​
*This post is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as investment, financial, or other advice.*
​
TLDR: Rush Street Interactive ($RSI) is the #1 nationwide online casino company and the #3 or #4 sports book depending on the state. Short selling, unwarranted institutional wariness of share dilution and the general market focus on sports book instead of online casino has left $RSI grossly undervalued. A massive blow out at Q4 earnings will result in analyst upgrades and a rapid repricing by market makers and institutions seeking exposure to the emerging sector.
​
**Overview**
"Sports book is really just kind of a warm up in a lot of ways for an online casino where the real money is made" - Niccolo De Masi, CEO dMY technologies
​
Rush Street Interactive ($RSI) operates the BetRivers.com online casino and sports book. They are now fully licensed and operating in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia. They own and operate a casino in New York and already have a New York license making them well positioned for liberalization there. They merged with a dMY Technology Group SPAC on Dec. 31st 2020 with 240 million on the balance sheet to spend on growth.
The online casino business is fundamentally more profitable than sports betting because the average value of a casino player is estimated at $600 while a sports book player could be as little as $20. Estimates put the online casino market at DOUBLE the size of the online sports book market and the online casino industry is really just getting started as more states liberalize.
$RSI is expert at new market entry; they have been first to market in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and Colorado and even when they aren't first they are capable of capturing market share in competitive markets such as New Jersey. They also have products which women play which accounts for at least half of the market in online casino. The female market is one that the pure sports book plays miss out on.
Also for some fucking reason they operate a casino and sports book in Colombia (rushbet.co) and may make large expansions into other parts of south America as legalization continues. This means they have the expertise necessary for global expansion in the future although the states remains their primary focus and growth driver.
​
**The Financials and Strategy**
Unlike other companies in the space Rush Street is already profitable in 2020 and has a strong focus on Return On Invested Capital (ROIC). Q3 gross revenue was $71.9 Million. Q4 revenue is going to be a blow out. Combing through state gambling revenue data and breaking that down by market share my estimate is that Q4 revenue could be as high as $120 Million.
Paired with this blow out will be a **guidance raise to $500 Million for 2021**, which is 2/3 of DraftKings 2021 guidance of $750M.
https://imgur.com/a/xkfcayC
​
What is striking when compared to $DKNG is that their advertising spend was only a quarter of revenue in Q3 while $DKNG spent 155% of their revenue. This will change as they begin to focus on growth, but it shows they are very good at getting return on ad spend. This company should actually be valued close to $DKNG based on growth potential once guidance is raised.
https://imgur.com/a/RQQXtGg
​
Their focus on attracting **female gamers** is also important to their long term growth potential. The sports book plays with cross sells to casino such as $DKNG will not be able to grow through the female demographic in the same way. **This cannot be understated** as one of the major strategic advantages of $RSI.
https://imgur.com/a/xzJj26n
​
As I said before I expect their trend of rapid growth to continue for Q4 earnings, certainly going to be a blow out based on looking at state gambling revenue numbers. My estimate is that their revenue will be around 110M for Q4. I also expect guidance to be raised to 500M for 2021 due to strong performance in existing markets and the recently opened Michigan market as well as their sports book launch in Virginia.
https://imgur.com/a/ckTqHhh
​
**Short sellers have entered the chat**
The short interest on $RSI sits at 5.08 M shares as of 01/14/21 representing a 30% increase. Now why would a company already valued at 2.8 Billion and with a comparative valuation of 8-10 Billion compared with $DKNG and $PENN be so heavily shorted at such a low market cap? My conclusion is that an institution with 10s of millions to throw at shorting this stock wants to take advantage of fear of share dilution from warrant calling or to establish a better entry prior to earnings.
​
**Commander in GILF Cathie Wood is Bullish on the sector**
On Feb. 2nd ARK disclosed that they had purchased 620,300 shares of $DKNG. This is extremely bullish for the sector. I am highly confident that after Q4 earnings ARK will be purchasing shares in $RSI as well due its strategic advantages relative to $DKNG and exposure to the female demographic. For such a small market cap company this will be a major catalyst.
​
**Institutions are bullish**
Fidelity has increased their holdings to 14% as of today: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001793659/8f10b0d8-a3d2-447c-bc75-87587d0a4670.pdf
Alliance Bernstein holds a 6% position reported today: http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001793659/e883778d-e759-4a85-91c1-3242ed110720.pdf
​
**Final notes**
Jerome "The Bus" Bettis, Steelers legend and hall of fame running back, is their brand ambassador... This company knows their target audience and how to appeal to them, likely more 'classic' ambassadors to come to attract even more boomer and Gen X degenerates. Keep in mind these are the gamblers with big money to spend, the average age of an online casino gambler is 42.
This stock has been grossly underpriced due to short selling. The terms of the SPAC deal were not unfavorable and all the insiders held their shares through the merger banking on growth in the market - **management owns 77% of the company**. This is a true value play on a well managed company in an emerging industry with a market size in the hundreds of billions. I plan to hold shares long term.
​
I will post a part 2 breaking down their latest S-1 filing and Q4 revenue by state when they release their Q4 earnings date.
​
Do your own research.
References:
https://www.legalsportsreport.com/sports-betting/revenue/
https://fintel.io/doc/sec-rush-street-interactive-inc-ex991-2021-january-05-18632-947
https://s26.q4cdn.com/794539746/files/doc_presentations/2020/RSI-Investor-Presentation-15-Oct-2020.pdf
https://ir.rushstreetinteractive.com/news/news-details/2020/RUSH-STREET-INTERACTIVE-ANNOUNCES-THIRD-QUARTER-2020-RESULTS-AND-RAISES-FULL-YEAR-GUIDANCE/default.aspx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQWEhWuPmzU
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/draftkings-surges-as-stake-bought-by-ark-next-generation
​
Positions: $RSI 30 03/19 30C
I will be adding 04/16 25cs each week until earnings.
Exit strategy: "What's an exit strategy?" - u/deepfuckingvalue
Update 021321: IMPORTANT after a commenter pointed out that technically they could report as late as April 2nd I AM RECOMMENDING THAT EVERYONE ROLL OUT TO APRIL 16TH 35Cs

Positions: $RSI 03/19 30C
Proof: https://imgur.com/a/swCCMjz
This post is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as investment, financial, or other advice.
TLDR: Rush Street Interactive ($RSI) is the #1 nationwide online casino company and the #3 or #4 sports book depending on the state. Short selling, unwarranted institutional wariness of share dilution and the general market focus on sports book instead of online casino has left $RSI grossly undervalued. A massive blow out at Q4 earnings will result in analyst upgrades and a rapid repricing by market makers and institutions seeking exposure to the emerging sector.
Overview
"Sports book is really just kind of a warm up in a lot of ways for an online casino where the real money is made" - Niccolo De Masi, CEO dMY technologies
Rush Street Interactive ($RSI) operates the BetRivers.com online casino and sports book. They are now fully licensed and operating in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia. They own and operate a casino in New York and already have a New York license making them well positioned for liberalization there. They merged with a dMY Technology Group SPAC on Dec. 31st 2020 with 240 million on the balance sheet to spend on growth.
The online casino business is fundamentally more profitable than sports betting because the average value of a casino player is estimated at $600 while a sports book player could be as little as $20. Estimates put the online casino market at DOUBLE the size of the online sports book market and the online casino industry is really just getting started as more states liberalize.
$RSI is expert at new market entry; they have been first to market in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and Colorado and even when they aren't first they are capable of capturing market share in competitive markets such as New Jersey. They also have products which women play which accounts for at least half of the market in online casino. The female market is one that the pure sports book plays miss out on.
Also for some fucking reason they operate a casino and sports book in Colombia (rushbet.co) and may make large expansions into other parts of south America as legalization continues. This means they have the expertise necessary for global expansion in the future although the states remains their primary focus and growth driver.
The Financials and Strategy
Unlike other companies in the space Rush Street is already profitable in 2020 and has a strong focus on Return On Invested Capital (ROIC). Q3 gross revenue was $71.9 Million. Q4 revenue is going to be a blow out. Combing through state gambling revenue data and breaking that down by market share my estimate is that Q4 revenue could be as high as $120 Million.
Paired with this blow out will be a **guidance raise to $500 Million for 2021**, which is 2/3 of DraftKings 2021 guidance of $750M.
https://imgur.com/a/xkfcayC
What is striking when compared to $DKNG is that their advertising spend was only a quarter of revenue in Q3 while $DKNG spent 155% of their revenue. This will change as they begin to focus on growth, but it shows they are very good at getting return on ad spend. This company should actually be valued close to $DKNG based on growth potential once guidance is raised.
https://imgur.com/a/RQQXtGg
Their focus on attracting **female gamers** is also important to their long term growth potential. The sports book plays with cross sells to casino such as $DKNG will not be able to grow through the female demographic in the same way. **This cannot be understated** as one of the major strategic advantages of $RSI.
https://imgur.com/a/xzJj26n
As I said before I expect their trend of rapid growth to continue for Q4 earnings, certainly going to be a blow out based on looking at state gambling revenue numbers. My estimate is that their revenue will be around 110M for Q4. I also expect guidance to be raised to 500M for 2021 due to strong performance in existing markets and the recently opened Michigan market as well as their sports book launch in Virginia.
https://imgur.com/a/ckTqHhh
Short sellers have entered the chat
The short interest on $RSI sits at 5.08 M shares as of 01/14/21 representing a 30% increase. Now why would a company already valued at 2.8 Billion and with a comparative valuation of 8-10 Billion compared with $DKNG and $PENN be so heavily shorted at such a low market cap? My conclusion is that an institution with 10s of millions to throw at shorting this stock wants to take advantage of fear of share dilution from warrant calling or to establish a better entry prior to earnings.
Cathie Wood is Bullish on the sector
On Feb. 2nd ARK disclosed that they had purchased 620,300 shares of $DKNG. This is extremely bullish for the sector. I am highly confident that after Q4 earnings ARK will be purchasing shares in $RSI as well due its strategic advantages relative to $DKNG and exposure to the female demographic. For such a small market cap company this will be a major catalyst.
Final notes
Jerome "The Bus" Bettis, Steelers legend and hall of fame running back, is their brand ambassador... This company knows their target audience and how to appeal to them, likely more 'classic' ambassadors to come to attract even more boomer and Gen X degenerates. Keep in mind these are the gamblers with big money to spend, the average age of an online casino gambler is 42.
This stock has been grossly underpriced due to short selling. The terms of the SPAC deal were not unfavorable and all the insiders held their shares through the merger banking on growth in the market - **management owns 77% of the company**. This is a true value play on a well managed company in an emerging industry with a market size in the hundreds of billions. I plan to hold shares long term.
I will post a part 2 breaking down their latest S-1 filing and Q4 revenue by state when they release their Q4 earnings date.
Do your own research.
References:
https://www.legalsportsreport.com/sports-betting/revenue/
https://fintel.io/doc/sec-rush-street-interactive-inc-ex991-2021-january-05-18632-947
https://s26.q4cdn.com/794539746/files/doc_presentations/2020/RSI-Investor-Presentation-15-Oct-2020.pdf
https://ir.rushstreetinteractive.com/news/news-details/2020/RUSH-STREET-INTERACTIVE-ANNOUNCES-THIRD-QUARTER-2020-RESULTS-AND-RAISES-FULL-YEAR-GUIDANCE/default.aspx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQWEhWuPmzU
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/draftkings-surges-as-stake-bought-by-ark-next-generation
Positions: $RSI 03/19 30C
I will be adding 04/16 25Cs each week until earnings
Exit strategy: "What's an exit strategy?" - u/deepfuckingvalue
Forgot to add: http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001793659/8f10b0d8-a3d2-447c-bc75-87587d0a4670.pdf Fidelity just doubled their position to almost 15%
Update 021221: Everyone that went in on my initial entry is down 40% right now. As I said I plan to continue to buy 03/19 25Cs each week until earnings. If you’re worried about further losses wait until the day before earnings to load up, you may miss a run up though.
Update 021321: IMPORTANT after a commenter pointed out that technically they could report as late as April 2nd I AM RECOMMENDING THAT EVERYONE ROLL OUT TO APRIL 16TH 35Cs

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-score-media-shareholders-approve-resolution-to-consolidate-shares/
Shareholders of Toronto-based Score Media and Gaming Inc. SCR-T -4.84%decrease voted in favour of a share consolidation resolution on Wednesday, which is aimed at helping the company list on a U.S. stock exchange.
Shareholders voted to approve a resolution that would allow the company to consolidate shares within a range of one new share for between two and 20 existing shares. The range gives the company flexibility to consolidate as much as it needs to meet the minimum share price needed to be listed on a U.S. exchange, which could create the opportunity to raise significantly more capital.
The company, known as theScore, provides sports news and information to users of its mobile app, which has about four million monthly active users. In September, 2019, the company launched ScoreBet, an online betting platform currently available in three U.S. states: Colorado, New Jersey and Indiana.
A source close to the company confirmed that it will expand to the state of Iowa in the near future. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the source because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the expansion.
TheScore’s stock has seen rapid growth in recent months, with investors on the online forum Reddit hoping that one of two bills before Parliament that would decriminalize single-game betting in Canada will pass, opening the Canadian market to sports betting operators. Currently, Canadians can only wager on two or more sporting events, commonly known as parlay betting.
Shares of Score Media traded fell 4.8 per cent following the vote on Wednesday to $4.92 in early afternoon trading.
In 2019, casino giant Penn National Gaming Inc. bought a US$7.5-million equity stake in the company, and struck a 20-year agreement that provides theScore access to sports betting markets in 11 U.S. states where Penn National operates casinos and racetracks.
Eighteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia allow single-game sports betting.

It’s taken me quite some time to decide whether to tell anyone about this. With Mardi Gras coming up again soon, I wanted to make sure people were warned, and know what happened.
Something happened at Mardi Gras last year. And it’s being covered up. Every word of what follows is true.
My friends and I decided to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I’ve always heard that the city was a non-stop, twenty-four hour, year round party. I’ve also heard that the days leading up to Mardi Gras take this to the extreme.
There were three of us altogether. Myself, Chris, and Sam. We decided to arrive three days early and build up to the actual day of Mardi Gras. We drove down, taking turns at the wheel so we wouldn’t have to stop at any hotels along the way.
------------------------------
The First Night
Saturday was our first night there. We’re from New Jersey, where it was about 30 degrees (Fahrenheit) when we left. But when we arrived in New Orleans, it was in the 80s, and very humid.
Our hotel was right on the Mississippi River, and our room had a waterfront view. We settled in, cleaned up, and went out to walk around and check things out. We slowly aimed ourselves toward the French Quarter, checking out as much as we could along the way.
I was a bit shocked that we could just buy beer from vendors right on the street and walk around, unbothered by police. We can’t do that in Jersey.
All in all, we had a great time, great food and drink, and retired to the hotel around 4 am, while the city was still buzzing. As tired as I was, it took a while to fall asleep, due to the loud people partying in the hallway and surrounding rooms.
------------------------------
The Second Night
Sunday, we went to check out Harrah’s (the casino), and then we made it back out to the streets for the atmosphere and alcohol once again.
While walking around, we met a girl named Antoinette (Toni for short), who told us that she was a local, and that she was going to college there.
Toni suggested we all go to a little restaurant just slightly out of the area, called Le Bon Temps (pronounced: Lay Baw Taw). That translates to “the good times” in English. We all headed down together, and it was a pretty cool little place.
While we were there, I witnessed something that I had previously thought was only done in sitcoms. In the middle of our dinner, the door to the kitchen flew open, slamming against the wall. Out from the kitchen walked a large man, using one hand to carry a smaller employee by the back of his shirt collar. The guy being carried looked like there was something wrong with him. His eyes were half closed and bloodshot, while his face was almost pure white, completely void of expression.
The larger man carried him by the back of his shirt all the way across the restaurant to the front door, where he pushed him outside and shut the door behind him.
On his way back to the kitchen, the large man said “Sorry, folks, but you just can’t show up to work stoned out of your gourd like that.”
There were some giggles from the patrons in reply.
We all drank quite a bit that night and I ended up staying at Antoinette’s place, about a mile away. Chris and Sam said they were going to stay out for a while longer and then go back to the hotel.
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The Third Night
The next day, Monday, I texted my friends that I’d meet up with them later that evening.
I spent the day with Antoinette, and we had a great time. I started wondering if this was too much for me to be getting into, allowing myself to get involved with a girl like this when I live so far away. She was definitely someone who I would want to pursue a relationship with, but I knew I’d be leaving town without her in just a few days. I decided to push these thoughts away, and let the proverbial chips fall where they may. We had two more days. Anything could happen.
While Toni and I were walking back downtown later, I noticed there was a girl walking about a block behind us who seemed to be pretty out of it. I couldn’t tell if she was drunk, high, or what. Toni told me to just ignore her, as she hurried me along.
Once we got to the corner where we were meeting up with Chris and Sam, things began to get strange. As we were crossing the street, I felt a hand on my back, almost like someone was pushing me, although rather weakly. I turned around, and realized that it was the girl who was walking a block behind us earlier. She wasn’t actually pushing me, though. It appeared that she needed to hold onto something to avoid falling over.
We stopped and asked her if she was ok, and she just sort of grunted. At this point, I think we all became concerned. She started mumbling a bit, saying things like “My name is Emily,” “I was with friends, but now I’m here,” and “I live here, that way,” pointing in a direction that was blocked by a parade route.
I asked her, “What happened? Did you lose your friends?,” to which she did not reply.
We were standing right in front of a Burger King. I asked the crowd if someone could get a cup of water for her. Everyone who heard me just looked the other way and kept walking, some giving me the evil eye, as if I had done something wrong. A BK employee near the door said “You get her out of here, now!,” slamming the door shut.
I noticed that Toni was staring at Emily with a very serious look on her face. Toni whispered into my ear, “She isn’t drunk. We should get out of here.”
I replied, “But, shouldn’t we help her? She’s really messed up. We can’t leave her here to die.”
Toni begrudgingly said “Alright, but let’s make this quick.”
We each got on one side and carried Emily along with us down the block, where we came across a security guard standing in front of a parking structure. I stopped and asked the guard if they could help. I explained that we didn’t know what was wrong with her, but that she needed attention, and possibly a ride to the hospital. The guard looked at me like I was stupid. Toni gave her a shrug. The guard then re-focused on Emily. She reached into Emily’s backpack, rifled around a bit, and pulled out an ID card. The guard then said “I’ll take care of this and get her an ambulance. You can go on your way.”
Toni started pulling me along, as I said “thank you” to the guard.
As we were all walking, I asked Antoinette, “What did you mean when you said she wasn’t drunk? Is there something going on that we don’t know about?”
Toni just said, “There’s a lot of strange things going on around here that you don’t want to know about. And neither do I.”
My friends kind of laughed, and we moved along. We had some drinks and got back into the celebratory mood.
Chris mentioned that he had been wanting to check out one of the New Orleans cemeteries that he had read about. Toni did not look enthused.
But, Chris was already in motion. He walked over to one of the police officers who were standing guard, and asked “Hey, do you know where the closest cemetery is?”
The officer looked him dead in the eye and stared for a few seconds. Then… And no, this is not a joke, even though it sounds like a bad slasher movie line… He said, “There’s one just a few blocks over that way, but you don’t want to be going down there.”
Chris smirked. “Why not?”
The officer replied, (And again, he really said this. It’s not just a cheesy line from a horror movie.) “They don’t really like your kind over there.”
I have to be honest. I was kind of freaked out by this interaction. And Toni wasn’t looking happy.
Chris said, “Come on, nothing’s going to happen. This isn’t a horror movie.”
After a long sigh, I replied, “I guess it can’t hurt. I’ve heard that the cemeteries are a sight to see around here.”
We embarked on Chris’ quest, much to the chagrin of the rest of the group.
There was quite a change in the look of the city as we got closer to the cemetery. It went from historic New Orleans chic to… something much less visually appealing. As we drew closer, I started to see and feel eyes on all of us.
As we walked the final stretch to the cemetery entrance, there were at least a dozen people standing on their front porches and in their front yards, looking at us like we were about to do something really stupid.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Toni said quietly.
“Well, we are here, so let’s just be quick about it.” I said.
When we got to the front gate, it was locked. Apparently, visiting hours were over.
“Oh no, I guess we have to leave! Too bad,” said Toni.
Despite our misfortune, we could still see all of the large, creepy and wonderful burial structures through the wrought iron fencing. Because New Orleans is below sea level, bodies are buried above ground. The arrangement of the structures in the cemetery actually looked like a small city. A city of the dead.
The eyes were now piercing the backs of our heads, and we knew something was going to happen if we didn’t get out soon. But, Chris started walking the perimeter of the fencing until he happened upon a crevice big enough for him to try and squeeze through. He told us to follow him. I was hesitant, and Toni was telling me that we need to leave, but I figured a quick adventure inside couldn’t hurt. We’d be gone in a few minutes, not even enough time for police to arrive and catch us. So, we all squeezed through, one by one.
It was getting pretty dark now, and this was really starting to feel wrong. I was just waiting for the doors to start opening and the dead to come out and greet us.
I decided I was done with this place, and said to Chris, “Alright, we’re going back. This is just disrespectful, and the locals obviously don’t want us here.”
He shot back, “Scared, huh?”
I ignored him.
We all squeezed back out, one at a time. Toni went just before me, and I was the last one out. I had a feeling like someone else was behind me, even though I was the last one. Before going through, I looked behind me… And I could swear that in the darkness, the door on one of the structures looked like it was sliding open. I could even hear the faint sound of a cement block scraping across the ground. I’m sure it was just my imagination, but this made me decide to get the heck out of there with the quickness.
We walked silently at a much quicker pace back to the more populated downtown area. The noise and lights in the French Quarter seemed to welcome us home.
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Tuesday. Mardi Gras. Carne Vale. A Farewell… To The Flesh.
Today, the streets were twice as crowded as they had been the night before. This was the big day. Tons of new tourists filled the streets, to the point that we literally couldn’t even walk on Bourbon Street. We attempted to, but got stuck in the crowd like someone had tried to fit 100 crayons into a box that was only meant for 50. If anything happened here, we simply wouldn’t be able to move or get out of the way. For the rest of the day, we stuck to the side streets.
As the parades carried on, it became more and more difficult to even go anywhere else, as they were blocking the streets, and thus blocking any way for us to go in the direction that we wanted.
At this point, we kind of gave up and decided “If we can’t beat ‘em, we join ‘em.”
“Let’s just go watch one of the parades,” I said.
The others were indifferent. We all grabbed drinks and walked toward one of the main streets of the city as nightfall was beginning to close in on us.
On our walk, we came upon some sort of dance troupe in the street. There were probably a dozen people in the troupe, all dressed in dark red, tribal looking outfits. Along with their dance, a few played hand drums, and they were all singing in what may have been French. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, though. At some point, the woman in front who appeared to be the leader of the troupe caught my eye and stared with a look as if she was not happy to see me. I saw her look over at Antoinette, then avert her gaze as if she had been caught.
“Let’s go,” said Toni.
As we walked away, I looked back and saw that the woman was staring again, with the same unhappy look on her face.
A few minutes later into our walk, we started to see ahead down the street where it was looking more and more congested with people, to the point of it looking like the main floor of a sold-out rock show. I wondered how these people could deal with being so compressed together.
Toni spoke up.
“We want to stay away from anything that crowded,” she said.
The rest of us agreed.
I said, “Well, let’s just get a little closer. We don’t have to get right in the pit, but I do want to see what’s so exciting over there.”
We kept walking.
As we got closer, something started to seem a bit more clear. Not all of the people were making noise because they were having fun. Some of the merry-making noises turned out to be screams.
As we moved closer, despite Antoinette’s objections, I noticed a small huddle of people in the center. Someone was on the ground. I hurried up to the circle and pushed my way to the inside. What I saw there left me frozen in my tracks. There were two people. One was laying on their back, motionless. The other… was on their knees, hovering over the one on the ground, and it looked… like they were eating their face. Blood was spewing everywhere while gawkers screamed in terror.
Toni grabbed my arm from behind and said “I told you, we have to go!” She pulled at my arm, but I couldn’t avert my gaze from what was happening. Eventually, she pulled hard enough that I lost balance, sort of fell over, then got back up and started retreating with her.
When we got back outside of the circle, we saw that there was another of the exact same scene happening maybe 20 feet away from us in another direction.
“What is happening?!” I screamed.
Then, the first circle we saw was dispersing rapidly as the flesh eater abandoned their meal and started seeking dessert in the crowd. Just like that, another was incapacitated on the ground, becoming seconds.
But there was something else that I noticed while the thing was rising to look for its next victim… It was Emily, the girl who followed us the previous night.
Toni told us that we were going to need to get to her place. As we began running, there were more and more of these things attacking and eating others. Where were they all coming from?
If this wasn’t horrifying enough, I then received the answer to my question. Some of the flesh eaters were missing faces themselves. Just bone, blood and remnants of skin where their faces used to be. And they were using these skeletal faces to eat those of others.
They weren’t ‘coming from’ anywhere. They were being created by the other flesh eaters. As one walked away from their meal, I saw the body of their victim rise and begin chasing their own mark.
I was transfixed on this horrific, spontaneous public meltdown of society happening right before our eyes, when I was suddenly thrust to the ground with great force. I never saw it coming.
I had no idea what was happening. I eventually focused, and realized that I had one of these faceless flesh eaters hovering over me. Blood was dripping from their jowls onto my face. I knew it was all over for me.
Before I could even scream, Antoinette suddenly appeared face to face with the creature hovering over me. Except, she looked different. Her eyes were blood red, and she appeared to have a large set of fang-like teeth protruding from her open mouth.
She used one hand to pick up the creature, bringing it face to face with her. She stared directly into its eyes and let out a guttural, terrifying sound like I’ve ever heard. Whatever this was… The creature was afraid of Toni. She dropped it, and it scrambled off immediately.
She looked at me with her new face and shouted, “Get up and follow me. They won’t touch you now.”
We ran behind her the rest of the way, tears in my eyes as I tried to figure out what was happening.
When we got to her place, Toni locked the doors, and then shook some sort of liquid out of a bottle onto the floor in front of each of the doorways and windows.
“This won’t be over until morning,” she said. Her face was back to normal now.
We all stayed together in the living room that night. I knew that Toni would keep us safe.
When daylight broke, she alerted us that it should be safe now, but that we needed to leave the city and go home immediately. We piled into her car so that she could drive us back to ours at the hotel.
As we drove, I noticed that the streets were now empty, save for what appeared to be clean-up crews picking up the aftermath. Some were power washing the ground where there appeared to be dark stains. There were no bodies, and no flesh eaters out seeking breakfast, from what I could see. We were all dead silent for the entire drive, focused on what was happening outside our windows.
Toni turned on the radio to a news station, and they were reporting that several people had died in what they called “parade float accidents” the prior day.
As Toni said goodbye to us, she hugged me and put a note in my pocket.
I haven’t had the courage to read it yet.
​
CHX

'Looking down their nose at you': GameStop frenzy showed a fresh contempt for hedge funds. Why do Americans hate them? Updated 2:25 pm EST Feb. 11, 2021 In the middle of a pandemic and slow economic recovery, Americans think they’ve identified their Wall Street villain: hedge funds. Their nemesis is summed up in a few searing images: a hedge fund manager who makes millions betting that the subprime mortgage market will collapse, without warning them. Or another relaxing on a yacht as the economy tanks. Years of anger culminated late last month when a group of angry small-time investors on Reddit took on a few of those firms in the GameStop “short squeeze” frenzy. That spurred millions of others to join in, as their effort to drive up the price of a stock perceived as undervalued soon shifted to a campaign to “Stick it to Wall Street." They used the "squeeze" to rally the share price and make profits for themselves while forcing the hedge funds who had bet it would fall to buy it to prevent greater losses. What are these funds, and where does this resentment come from? Hedge funds, known for using higher risk investing strategies, are private investment vehicles that typically wealthy individuals use to get higher returns. They control more than $3 trillion in assets globally. They've angered many Americans by gutting companies such as former American retail icon Sears, causing layoffs and engaging in questionable financial practices that contributed to the near collapse of the U.S. financial system in 2008, experts say. 'This is life changing': Meet the Redditors behind the GameStop saga “Most people see it as guys in suits looking down their nose at you,” says Adam Bixler, 28, an active user on the WallStreetBets Reddit forum, whose members led the charge against the funds. “How I feel is probably how a lot of people feel when thinking about the financial crisis and the massive wealth inequality that exists in this country.” Radio Shack, Toys ‘R’ Us and Payless ShoeSource, along with mall-based retailers such as the Limited, Wet Seal, Claire’s and Aeropostale faced further financial woes after hedge funds and private equity firms loaded them up with debt. A fight is raging in the stock market: Should you worry about your 401(k)? Where to get vaccines: CVS, Walgreens to begin delivering COVID-19 vaccines on Friday “The idea that you can crack open a hedge fund like a piñata and redistribute all this money to people in the form of a short squeeze is very appealing,” says Bixler, who lives in Boonton, New Jersey, and works as a product manager for a company that makes software and tools for the advertising industry. “These are the stimulus checks that everyone wanted.” Proponents of hedge funds say the firms identify and support distressed industries such as retailers and newspapers. These funds are owned by groups of big investors pooling the savings of millions of unionized workers, such as teachers and firefighters, who count on hedge funds to grow and protect their nest eggs. Even so, hedge funds are viewed as vultures by many Americans. Kaysha Apodaca, an emergency room nurse in Dallas, was furious last summer when she lost thousands of dollars after CytoDyn, a biotechnology company she owns, was hammered following a negative report from a “short selling” research firm, about one of CytroDyn's drugs in clinical trials. The post with the research was later pulled. This year, Apodaca thought she missed the opportunity to jump in and buy GameStop or AMC, so she supported the Reddit campaign against hedge funds by investing a few thousand dollars into shares of Nokia, another beaten-down stock discussed on the forum. “I hate hedge funds. Even if this goes to zero, I’m OK with it. I’m not selling, just to prove a point,” Apodaca said. “Hedge funds have unfairly made money off retail investors for years. Now they’re getting a taste of their own medicine.” For Iris Findlay of Orlando, Florida, joining the movement was a way for Americans to show their strength in numbers. “I’m definitely not OK that there are so many billionaires hoarding their wealth while people are struggling, especially during the pandemic,” said Findlay, 31, who is disabled and retired from the Air Force. A large portion of hedge-fund assets are owned by institutional investors, such as pension funds and endowments. Hedge fund research has been critical in exposing an array of accounting fraud scandals in recent decades, including the one involving energy firm Enron. “Hedge funds do play a very important role in the financial ecosystem, but at the same time, they have a PR problem,” says Andrew Lo, a finance professor at MIT Sloan School of Management. They are an easy target, experts say, because some high-profile managers' massive wealth offends Americans who struggle to make ends meet. Michael Burry, founder of Scion Asset Management, is an investor whose billion-dollar bet against the housing market was chronicled in Michael Lewis' book "The Big Short." He personally collected $100 million and made $750 million in profits for his investors. These managers “are seen as multibillionaires that really don’t care about the public good and are focused on enriching themselves and their investors,” Lo says. “But I think that’s a caricature, especially given that hedge funds now have become much more institutionalized as pension funds and endowments are investing in these financial vehicles.” Who do Americans blame? When asked who was the “most in the wrong” in the trading mania that set off one of the biggest short squeezes in history, nearly half of Americans polled said it was either hedge funds (27%) or online brokerage Robinhood (22%), according to a Harris Poll survey conducted Jan 29-31 that was given to USA TODAY exclusively. Just 8% said it was the Reddit retail investors on the WallStreetBets forum, who angered hedge funds that had bet GameStop's stock would remain low. The small-time investors used the forum to help drive up the prices for shares such as GameStop, theater chain AMC Entertainment and several other companies. Many respondents were angry that hedge funds were shorting stocks – betting that the share prices would fall – of companies that average people use and love, according to John Gerzema, CEO of the Harris Poll. “This wasn’t just an attack on a few weak companies,” Gerzema says. “These are companies that are a part of middle-class America and ordinary people’s lives.” How did these funds begin, and how did they grow into such big villains in the minds of so many? What are hedge funds? Hedge funds are financial partnerships between a professional fund manager and investors who pool their money into the fund to earn active returns. Hedge funds can be traced back to the 1940s when Alfred Winslow Jones, an investor, sociologist and former Fortune magazine writer, created a "hedge" by “shorting" stocks he thought were poised to fall. The "hedge" was meant to reduce risk and protect against market fluctuations. It was unconventional at the time but remains the basic strategy for these funds. Hedge fund strategies today are more diverse and run the gamut of extremely risky to fairly conservative. There's another theory about the origin of hedge funds, and this one is connected to a more beloved figure. Some people credit the founding of hedge funds to Benjamin Graham, a mentor to Warren Buffett and the author of "The Intelligent Investor" – the bible of everyone who loves Buffett's method of investing. Buffett, one of the world's richest people and a folksy inspiration to small-time investors, argued that Graham managed a fund with a "hedge"-like strategy in the 1920s. So you made a bundle on GameStop: Get ready to pay the taxes How did hedge funds evolve? Hedge funds have gained in popularity over the past two decades after many of them delivered hefty outsize returns in either up or down markets, an attractive selling point for savvy investors. Some of the world's largest hedge funds include Bridgewater Associates, founded by billionaire Ray Dalio; Renaissance Technologies, founded by billionaire Jim Simons; and Pershing Square, run by Wall Street billionaire Bill Ackman. They have historically charged much higher fees than mutual funds, which are professionally managed funds that invest in stocks, bonds or money market instruments. Since hedge fund managers are nearly always paid a performance fee, or percentage of the gains they create, they have a strong incentive to make money for their investors. For the hedge fund managers to earn performance fees, their investors have to make money first. Hedge funds charge an expense ratio and a performance fee. The common fee structure is known as two and twenty – a 2% asset management fee and a 20% cut of generated gains. How did they become villains? While many Americans lost money during the depths of the financial crisis, some big-time investors did astonishingly well, including those who predicted and profited from the buildup and collapse of the housing and credit bubble in 2007 and 2008. For those Americans who had their livelihoods upended in the financial crisis, it left a bad taste in their mouths, experts say. “They’re associated with ruthless financial institutions that are out there to make money and not care where it’s coming from,” says Itay Goldstein, a professor of finance and economics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. A big winner from that time is billionaire investor John Paulson, a hedge fund manager who netted $20 billion in profits when he bet against subprime mortgages at the peak of the credit bubble in 2007. In general, short sellers keep stock prices in check by voicing their opinion on where they believe a stock is valued, says Dennis Dick, head of markets structure and a proprietary trader at Bright Trading in Las Vegas. “I’m concerned with this public image that ‘evil short sellers are betting against America’ and that it’s ‘un-American to short stocks,’” Dick says. “It’s not like every short seller is making bets against America. They’re making calls on whether a stock is overvalued or not.” GameStop: Reddit ran a 5-second Super Bowl ad in honor of WallStreetBets, GameStop stock volatility The hedge fund industry has faced a rough stretch in recent years and underperformed the broader stock market but produced its best return in a decade at 11.6% in 2020, according to data provider Hedge Fund Research. Some received a boost from shares of technology firms and companies that focused on goods that people used when stuck at home during the pandemic. Americans who don’t invest directly in hedge funds still receive a benefit from the returns that hedge funds generate, according to Daniel Smith, a partner at ACA Compliance Group, an advisory firm for financial services. Of the $4.5 trillion in state and local pension plans, about 6.9% is allocated to hedge funds, according to data published by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, the Center for State and Local Government Excellence and the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. ”Hedge funds help secure the retirement of more than 26 million teachers, firefighters and other public employees by helping pensions navigate all market conditions and meet long-term financial obligations,” says Bryan Corbett, president and CEO at Managed Funds Association, a hedge fund lobby group. GameStop and questions of power The rollercoaster involving GameStop, Reddit and Robinhood has prompted Capitol Hill’s harshest criticisms of Wall Street in years. Several prominent lawmakers on Capitol Hill have warned of such moments, cautioning that companies and hedge funds have too much power. One of these lawmakers, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who is well known for her disapproval of Wall Street, called on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to address the dramatic swings surrounding these companies. Warren wrote in a letter that it is “long beyond time for the SEC to act” and asked it to investigate the rallies in GameStop, AMC Entertainment and others that “have seen huge shifts in their share price driven by similar internet reading schemes.” "These wild fluctuations are just the latest indication that many private equity firms, hedge funds, and other investors, big and small, are treating the stock market like a casino, giving little consideration to the companies, communities, workers, and consumers that may be affected by these risky bets," she wrote. The House Financial Services Committee will hold a virtual hearing Feb. 18 regarding “recent market volatility” involving GameStop and the other companies. According to Politico, the CEO of Robinhood, Vlad Tenev, is likely to testify. GameStop-Robinhood stock revolution: Not a secure retirement plan Does the movement have legs? Questions have been raised as to whether the populist movement threatening to disrupt the financial system will be sustained. It’s too early to tell, experts say. “It has the potential to gather momentum. It depends on whether we see other related episodes in the next few weeks that show the same kind of patterns in the financial markets," Goldstein says. "We live in a period of so many unusual things going on that it will probably take the edge off this event." Hedge funds such as Melvin Capital Management took the brunt of losses from soaring stock prices of GameStop and other heavily shorted stocks. Others made a ton of money on the rally, including Senvest Management, which had a profit of nearly $700 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. “Is it sticking it to Wall Street? Only temporarily, but in the long term probably not,” Goldstein says. “At the end of the day, the sophisticated financial institutions will find ways to recuperate and make money out of this.” Lo of MIT agrees. “This incident highlights the growing dissatisfaction, distrust and dislocation that many people feel with respect to the financial sector,” Lo says. “It suggests that people are sick and tired of being disenfranchised and being pushed around by large financial institutions.” Contributing: Savannah Behrmann

It’s taken me quite some time to decide whether to tell anyone about this. With Mardi Gras coming up again soon, I wanted to make sure people were warned, and know what happened.
Something happened at Mardi Gras last year. And it’s being covered up. Every word of what follows is true.
My friends and I decided to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I’ve always heard that the city was a non-stop, twenty-four hour, year round party. I’ve also heard that the days leading up to Mardi Gras take this to the extreme.
There were three of us altogether. Myself, Chris, and Sam. We decided to arrive three days early and build up to the actual day of Mardi Gras. We drove down, taking turns at the wheel so we wouldn’t have to stop at any hotels along the way.
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The First Night
Saturday was our first night there. We’re from New Jersey, where it was about 30 degrees (Fahrenheit) when we left. But when we arrived in New Orleans, it was in the 80s, and very humid.
Our hotel was right on the Mississippi River, and our room had a waterfront view. We settled in, cleaned up, and went out to walk around and check things out. We slowly aimed ourselves toward the French Quarter, checking out as much as we could along the way.
I was a bit shocked that we could just buy beer from vendors right on the street and walk around, unbothered by police. We can’t do that in Jersey.
All in all, we had a great time, great food and drink, and retired to the hotel around 4 am, while the city was still buzzing. As tired as I was, it took a while to fall asleep, due to the loud people partying in the hallway and surrounding rooms.
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The Second Night
Sunday, we went to check out Harrah’s (the casino), and then we made it back out to the streets for the atmosphere and alcohol once again.
While walking around, we met a girl named Antoinette (Toni for short), who told us that she was a local, and that she was going to college there.
Toni suggested we all go to a little restaurant just slightly out of the area, called Le Bon Temps (pronounced: Lay Baw Taw). That translates to “the good times” in English. We all headed down together, and it was a pretty cool little place.
While we were there, I witnessed something that I had previously thought was only done in sitcoms. In the middle of our dinner, the door to the kitchen flew open, slamming against the wall. Out from the kitchen walked a large man, using one hand to carry a smaller employee by the back of his shirt collar. The guy being carried looked like there was something wrong with him. His eyes were half closed and bloodshot, while his face was almost pure white, completely void of expression.
The larger man carried him by the back of his shirt all the way across the restaurant to the front door, where he pushed him outside and shut the door behind him.
On his way back to the kitchen, the large man said “Sorry, folks, but you just can’t show up to work stoned out of your gourd like that.”
There were some giggles from the patrons in reply.
We all drank quite a bit that night and I ended up staying at Antoinette’s place, about a mile away. Chris and Sam said they were going to stay out for a while longer and then go back to the hotel.
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The Third Night
The next day, Monday, I texted my friends that I’d meet up with them later that evening.
I spent the day with Antoinette, and we had a great time. I started wondering if this was too much for me to be getting into, allowing myself to get involved with a girl like this when I live so far away. She was definitely someone who I would want to pursue a relationship with, but I knew I’d be leaving town without her in just a few days. I decided to push these thoughts away, and let the proverbial chips fall where they may. We had two more days. Anything could happen.
While Toni and I were walking back downtown later, I noticed there was a girl walking about a block behind us who seemed to be pretty out of it. I couldn’t tell if she was drunk, high, or what. Toni told me to just ignore her, as she hurried me along.
Once we got to the corner where we were meeting up with Chris and Sam, things began to get strange. As we were crossing the street, I felt a hand on my back, almost like someone was pushing me, although rather weakly. I turned around, and realized that it was the girl who was walking a block behind us earlier. She wasn’t actually pushing me, though. It appeared that she needed to hold onto something to avoid falling over.
We stopped and asked her if she was ok, and she just sort of grunted. At this point, I think we all became concerned. She started mumbling a bit, saying things like “My name is Emily,” “I was with friends, but now I’m here,” and “I live here, that way,” pointing in a direction that was blocked by a parade route.
I asked her, “What happened? Did you lose your friends?,” to which she did not reply.
We were standing right in front of a Burger King. I asked the crowd if someone could get a cup of water for her. Everyone who heard me just looked the other way and kept walking, some giving me the evil eye, as if I had done something wrong. A BK employee near the door said “You get her out of here, now!,” slamming the door shut.
I noticed that Toni was staring at Emily with a very serious look on her face. Toni whispered into my ear, “She isn’t drunk. We should get out of here.”
I replied, “But, shouldn’t we help her? She’s really messed up. We can’t leave her here to die.”
Toni begrudgingly said “Alright, but let’s make this quick.”
We each got on one side and carried Emily along with us down the block, where we came across a security guard standing in front of a parking structure. I stopped and asked the guard if they could help. I explained that we didn’t know what was wrong with her, but that she needed attention, and possibly a ride to the hospital. The guard looked at me like I was stupid. Toni gave her a shrug. The guard then re-focused on Emily. She reached into Emily’s backpack, rifled around a bit, and pulled out an ID card. The guard then said “I’ll take care of this and get her an ambulance. You can go on your way.”
Toni started pulling me along, as I said “thank you” to the guard.
As we were all walking, I asked Antoinette, “What did you mean when you said she wasn’t drunk? Is there something going on that we don’t know about?”
Toni just said, “There’s a lot of strange things going on around here that you don’t want to know about. And neither do I.”
My friends kind of laughed, and we moved along. We had some drinks and got back into the celebratory mood.
Chris mentioned that he had been wanting to check out one of the New Orleans cemeteries that he had read about. Toni did not look enthused.
But, Chris was already in motion. He walked over to one of the police officers who were standing guard, and asked “Hey, do you know where the closest cemetery is?”
The officer looked him dead in the eye and stared for a few seconds. Then… And no, this is not a joke, even though it sounds like a bad slasher movie line… He said, “There’s one just a few blocks over that way, but you don’t want to be going down there.”
Chris smirked. “Why not?”
The officer replied, (And again, he really said this. It’s not just a cheesy line from a horror movie.) “They don’t really like your kind over there.”
I have to be honest. I was kind of freaked out by this interaction. And Toni wasn’t looking happy.
Chris said, “Come on, nothing’s going to happen. This isn’t a horror movie.”
After a long sigh, I replied, “I guess it can’t hurt. I’ve heard that the cemeteries are a sight to see around here.”
We embarked on Chris’ quest, much to the chagrin of the rest of the group.
There was quite a change in the look of the city as we got closer to the cemetery. It went from historic New Orleans chic to… something much less visually appealing. As we drew closer, I started to see and feel eyes on all of us.
As we walked the final stretch to the cemetery entrance, there were at least a dozen people standing on their front porches and in their front yards, looking at us like we were about to do something really stupid.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Toni said quietly.
“Well, we are here, so let’s just be quick about it.” I said.
When we got to the front gate, it was locked. Apparently, visiting hours were over.
“Oh no, I guess we have to leave! Too bad,” said Toni.
Despite our misfortune, we could still see all of the large, creepy and wonderful burial structures through the wrought iron fencing. Because New Orleans is below sea level, bodies are buried above ground. The arrangement of the structures in the cemetery actually looked like a small city. A city of the dead.
The eyes were now piercing the backs of our heads, and we knew something was going to happen if we didn’t get out soon. But, Chris started walking the perimeter of the fencing until he happened upon a crevice big enough for him to try and squeeze through. He told us to follow him. I was hesitant, and Toni was telling me that we need to leave, but I figured a quick adventure inside couldn’t hurt. We’d be gone in a few minutes, not even enough time for police to arrive and catch us. So, we all squeezed through, one by one.
It was getting pretty dark now, and this was really starting to feel wrong. I was just waiting for the doors to start opening and the dead to come out and greet us.
I decided I was done with this place, and said to Chris, “Alright, we’re going back. This is just disrespectful, and the locals obviously don’t want us here.”
He shot back, “Scared, huh?”
I ignored him.
We all squeezed back out, one at a time. Toni went just before me, and I was the last one out. I had a feeling like someone else was behind me, even though I was the last one. Before going through, I looked behind me… And I could swear that in the darkness, the door on one of the structures looked like it was sliding open. I could even hear the faint sound of a cement block scraping across the ground. I’m sure it was just my imagination, but this made me decide to get the heck out of there with the quickness.
We walked silently at a much quicker pace back to the more populated downtown area. The noise and lights in the French Quarter seemed to welcome us home.
------------------------------
Tuesday. Mardi Gras. Carne Vale. A Farewell… To The Flesh.
Today, the streets were twice as crowded as they had been the night before. This was the big day. Tons of new tourists filled the streets, to the point that we literally couldn’t even walk on Bourbon Street. We attempted to, but got stuck in the crowd like someone had tried to fit 100 crayons into a box that was only meant for 50. If anything happened here, we simply wouldn’t be able to move or get out of the way. For the rest of the day, we stuck to the side streets.
As the parades carried on, it became more and more difficult to even go anywhere else, as they were blocking the streets, and thus blocking any way for us to go in the direction that we wanted.
At this point, we kind of gave up and decided “If we can’t beat ‘em, we join ‘em.”
“Let’s just go watch one of the parades,” I said.
The others were indifferent. We all grabbed drinks and walked toward one of the main streets of the city as nightfall was beginning to close in on us.
On our walk, we came upon some sort of dance troupe in the street. There were probably a dozen people in the troupe, all dressed in dark red, tribal looking outfits. Along with their dance, a few played hand drums, and they were all singing in what may have been French. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, though. At some point, the woman in front who appeared to be the leader of the troupe caught my eye and stared with a look as if she was not happy to see me. I saw her look over at Antoinette, then avert her gaze as if she had been caught.
“Let’s go,” said Toni.
As we walked away, I looked back and saw that the woman was staring again, with the same unhappy look on her face.
A few minutes later into our walk, we started to see ahead down the street where it was looking more and more congested with people, to the point of it looking like the main floor of a sold-out rock show. I wondered how these people could deal with being so compressed together.
Toni spoke up.
“We want to stay away from anything that crowded,” she said.
The rest of us agreed.
I said, “Well, let’s just get a little closer. We don’t have to get right in the pit, but I do want to see what’s so exciting over there.”
We kept walking.
As we got closer, something started to seem a bit more clear. Not all of the people were making noise because they were having fun. Some of the merry-making noises turned out to be screams.
As we moved closer, despite Antoinette’s objections, I noticed a small huddle of people in the center. Someone was on the ground. I hurried up to the circle and pushed my way to the inside. What I saw there left me frozen in my tracks. There were two people. One was laying on their back, motionless. The other… was on their knees, hovering over the one on the ground, and it looked… like they were eating their face. Blood was spewing everywhere while gawkers screamed in terror.
Toni grabbed my arm from behind and said “I told you, we have to go!” She pulled at my arm, but I couldn’t avert my gaze from what was happening. Eventually, she pulled hard enough that I lost balance, sort of fell over, then got back up and started retreating with her.
When we got back outside of the circle, we saw that there was another of the exact same scene happening maybe 20 feet away from us in another direction.
“What is happening?!” I screamed.
Then, the first circle we saw was dispersing rapidly as the flesh eater abandoned their meal and started seeking dessert in the crowd. Just like that, another was incapacitated on the ground, becoming seconds.
But there was something else that I noticed while the thing was rising to look for its next victim… It was Emily, the girl who followed us the previous night.
Toni told us that we were going to need to get to her place. As we began running, there were more and more of these things attacking and eating others. Where were they all coming from?
If this wasn’t horrifying enough, I then received the answer to my question. Some of the flesh eaters were missing faces themselves. Just bone, blood and remnants of skin where their faces used to be. And they were using these skeletal faces to eat those of others.
They weren’t ‘coming from’ anywhere. They were being created by the other flesh eaters. As one walked away from their meal, I saw the body of their victim rise and begin chasing their own mark.
I was transfixed on this horrific, spontaneous public meltdown of society happening right before our eyes, when I was suddenly thrust to the ground with great force. I never saw it coming.
I had no idea what was happening. I eventually focused, and realized that I had one of these faceless flesh eaters hovering over me. Blood was dripping from their jowls onto my face. I knew it was all over for me.
Before I could even scream, Antoinette suddenly appeared face to face with the creature hovering over me. Except, she looked different. Her eyes were blood red, and she appeared to have a large set of fang-like teeth protruding from her open mouth.
She used one hand to pick up the creature, bringing it face to face with her. She stared directly into its eyes and let out a guttural, terrifying sound like I’ve ever heard. Whatever this was… The creature was afraid of Toni. She dropped it, and it scrambled off immediately.
She looked at me with her new face and shouted, “Get up and follow me. They won’t touch you now.”
We ran behind her the rest of the way, tears in my eyes as I tried to figure out what was happening.
When we got to her place, Toni locked the doors, and then shook some sort of liquid out of a bottle onto the floor in front of each of the doorways and windows.
“This won’t be over until morning,” she said. Her face was back to normal now.
We all stayed together in the living room that night. I knew that Toni would keep us safe.
When daylight broke, she alerted us that it should be safe now, but that we needed to leave the city and go home immediately. We piled into her car so that she could drive us back to ours at the hotel.
As we drove, I noticed that the streets were now empty, save for what appeared to be clean-up crews picking up the aftermath. Some were power washing the ground where there appeared to be dark stains. There were no bodies, and no flesh eaters out seeking breakfast, from what I could see. We were all dead silent for the entire drive, focused on what was happening outside our windows.
Toni turned on the radio to a news station, and they were reporting that several people had died in what they called “parade float accidents” the prior day.
As Toni said goodbye to us, she hugged me and put a note in my pocket.
I haven’t had the courage to read it yet.
​
CHX

It’s taken me quite some time to decide whether to tell anyone about this. With Mardi Gras coming up again soon, I wanted to make sure people were warned, and know what happened.
Something happened at Mardi Gras last year. And it’s being covered up.
My friends and I decided to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I’ve always heard that the city was a non-stop, twenty-four hour, year round party. I’ve also heard that the days leading up to Mardi Gras take this to the extreme.
There were three of us altogether. Myself, Chris, and Sam. We decided to arrive three days early and build up to the actual day of Mardi Gras. We drove down, taking turns at the wheel so we wouldn’t have to stop at any hotels along the way.
------------------------------
The First Night
Saturday was our first night there. We’re from New Jersey, where it was about 30 degrees (Fahrenheit) when we left. But when we arrived in New Orleans, it was in the 80s, and very humid.
Our hotel was right on the Mississippi River, and our room had a waterfront view. We settled in, cleaned up, and went out to walk around and check things out. We slowly aimed ourselves toward the French Quarter, checking out as much as we could along the way.
I was a bit shocked that we could just buy beer from vendors right on the street and walk around, unbothered by police. We can’t do that in Jersey.
All in all, we had a great time, great food and drink, and retired to the hotel around 4 am, while the city was still buzzing. As tired as I was, it took a while to fall asleep, due to the loud people partying in the hallway and surrounding rooms.
------------------------------
The Second Night
Sunday, we went to check out Harrah’s (the casino), and then we made it back out to the streets for the atmosphere and alcohol once again.
While walking around, we met a girl named Antoinette (Toni for short), who told us that she was a local, and that she was going to college there.
Toni suggested we all go to a little restaurant just slightly out of the area, called Le Bon Temps (pronounced: Lay Baw Taw). That translates to “the good times” in English. We all headed down together, and it was a pretty cool little place.
While we were there, I witnessed something that I had previously thought was only done in sitcoms. In the middle of our dinner, the door to the kitchen flew open, slamming against the wall. Out from the kitchen walked a large man, using one hand to carry a smaller employee by the back of his shirt collar. The guy being carried looked like there was something wrong with him. His eyes were half closed and bloodshot, while his face was almost pure white, completely void of expression.
The larger man carried him by the back of his shirt all the way across the restaurant to the front door, where he pushed him outside and shut the door behind him.
On his way back to the kitchen, the large man said “Sorry, folks, but you just can’t show up to work stoned out of your gourd like that.”
There were some giggles from the patrons in reply.
We all drank quite a bit that night and I ended up staying at Antoinette’s place, about a mile away. Chris and Sam said they were going to stay out for a while longer and then go back to the hotel.
------------------------------
The Third Night
The next day, Monday, I texted my friends that I’d meet up with them later that evening.
I spent the day with Antoinette, and we had a great time. I started wondering if this was too much for me to be getting into, allowing myself to get involved with a girl like this when I live so far away. She was definitely someone who I would want to pursue a relationship with, but I knew I’d be leaving town without her in just a few days. I decided to push these thoughts away, and let the proverbial chips fall where they may. We had two more days. Anything could happen.
While Toni and I were walking back downtown later, I noticed there was a girl walking about a block behind us who seemed to be pretty out of it. I couldn’t tell if she was drunk, high, or what. Toni told me to just ignore her, as she hurried me along.
Once we got to the corner where we were meeting up with Chris and Sam, things began to get strange. As we were crossing the street, I felt a hand on my back, almost like someone was pushing me, although rather weakly. I turned around, and realized that it was the girl who was walking a block behind us earlier. She wasn’t actually pushing me, though. It appeared that she needed to hold onto something to avoid falling over.
We stopped and asked her if she was ok, and she just sort of grunted. At this point, I think we all became concerned. She started mumbling a bit, saying things like “My name is Emily,” “I was with friends, but now I’m here,” and “I live here, that way,” pointing in a direction that was blocked by a parade route.
I asked her, “What happened? Did you lose your friends?,” to which she did not reply.
We were standing right in front of a Burger King. I asked the crowd if someone could get a cup of water for her. Everyone who heard me just looked the other way and kept walking, some giving me the evil eye, as if I had done something wrong. A BK employee near the door said “You get her out of here, now!,” slamming the door shut.
I noticed that Toni was staring at Emily with a very serious look on her face. Toni whispered into my ear, “She isn’t drunk. We should get out of here.”
I replied, “But, shouldn’t we help her? She’s really messed up. We can’t leave her here to die.”
Toni begrudgingly said “Alright, but let’s make this quick.”
We each got on one side and carried Emily along with us down the block, where we came across a security guard standing in front of a parking structure. I stopped and asked the guard if they could help. I explained that we didn’t know what was wrong with her, but that she needed attention, and possibly a ride to the hospital. The guard looked at me like I was stupid. Toni gave her a shrug. The guard then re-focused on Emily. She reached into Emily’s backpack, rifled around a bit, and pulled out an ID card. The guard then said “I’ll take care of this and get her an ambulance. You can go on your way.”
Toni started pulling me along, as I said “thank you” to the guard.
As we were all walking, I asked Antoinette, “What did you mean when you said she wasn’t drunk? Is there something going on that we don’t know about?”
Toni just said, “There’s a lot of strange things going on around here that you don’t want to know about. And neither do I.”
My friends kind of laughed, and we moved along. We had some drinks and got back into the celebratory mood.
Chris mentioned that he had been wanting to check out one of the New Orleans cemeteries that he had read about. Toni did not look enthused.
But, Chris was already in motion. He walked over to one of the police officers who were standing guard, and asked “Hey, do you know where the closest cemetery is?”
The officer looked him dead in the eye and stared for a few seconds. Then… And no, this is not a joke, even though it sounds like a bad slasher movie line… He said, “There’s one just a few blocks over that way, but you don’t want to be going down there.”
Chris smirked. “Why not?”
The officer replied, (And again, he really said this. It’s not just a cheesy line from a horror movie.) “They don’t really like your kind over there.”
I have to be honest. I was kind of freaked out by this interaction. And Toni wasn’t looking happy.
Chris said, “Come on, nothing’s going to happen. This isn’t a horror movie.”
After a long sigh, I replied, “I guess it can’t hurt. I’ve heard that the cemeteries are a sight to see around here.”
We embarked on Chris’ quest, much to the chagrin of the rest of the group.
There was quite a change in the look of the city as we got closer to the cemetery. It went from historic New Orleans chic to… something much less visually appealing. As we drew closer, I started to see and feel eyes on all of us.
As we walked the final stretch to the cemetery entrance, there were at least a dozen people standing on their front porches and in their front yards, looking at us like we were about to do something really stupid.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Toni said quietly.
“Well, we are here, so let’s just be quick about it.” I said.
When we got to the front gate, it was locked. Apparently, visiting hours were over.
“Oh no, I guess we have to leave! Too bad,” said Toni.
Despite our misfortune, we could still see all of the large, creepy and wonderful burial structures through the wrought iron fencing. Because New Orleans is below sea level, bodies are buried above ground. The arrangement of the structures in the cemetery actually looked like a small city. A city of the dead.
The eyes were now piercing the backs of our heads, and we knew something was going to happen if we didn’t get out soon. But, Chris started walking the perimeter of the fencing until he happened upon a crevice big enough for him to try and squeeze through. He told us to follow him. I was hesitant, and Toni was telling me that we need to leave, but I figured a quick adventure inside couldn’t hurt. We’d be gone in a few minutes, not even enough time for police to arrive and catch us. So, we all squeezed through, one by one.
It was getting pretty dark now, and this was really starting to feel wrong. I was just waiting for the doors to start opening and the dead to come out and greet us.
I decided I was done with this place, and said to Chris, “Alright, we’re going back. This is just disrespectful, and the locals obviously don’t want us here.”
He shot back, “Scared, huh?”
I ignored him.
We all squeezed back out, one at a time. Toni went just before me, and I was the last one out. I had a feeling like someone else was behind me, even though I was the last one. Before going through, I looked behind me… And I could swear that in the darkness, the door on one of the structures looked like it was sliding open. I could even hear the faint sound of a cement block scraping across the ground. I’m sure it was just my imagination, but this made me decide to get the heck out of there with the quickness.
We walked silently at a much quicker pace back to the more populated downtown area. The noise and lights in the French Quarter seemed to welcome us home.
------------------------------
Tuesday. Mardi Gras. Carne Vale. A Farewell… To The Flesh.
Today, the streets were twice as crowded as they had been the night before. This was the big day. Tons of new tourists filled the streets, to the point that we literally couldn’t even walk on Bourbon Street. We attempted to, but got stuck in the crowd like someone had tried to fit 100 crayons into a box that was only meant for 50. If anything happened here, we simply wouldn’t be able to move or get out of the way. For the rest of the day, we stuck to the side streets.
As the parades carried on, it became more and more difficult to even go anywhere else, as they were blocking the streets, and thus blocking any way for us to go in the direction that we wanted.
At this point, we kind of gave up and decided “If we can’t beat ‘em, we join ‘em.”
“Let’s just go watch one of the parades,” I said.
The others were indifferent. We all grabbed drinks and walked toward one of the main streets of the city as nightfall was beginning to close in on us.
On our walk, we came upon some sort of dance troupe in the street. There were probably a dozen people in the troupe, all dressed in dark red, tribal looking outfits. Along with their dance, a few played hand drums, and they were all singing in what may have been French. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, though. At some point, the woman in front who appeared to be the leader of the troupe caught my eye and stared with a look as if she was not happy to see me. I saw her look over at Antoinette, then avert her gaze as if she had been caught.
“Let’s go,” said Toni.
As we walked away, I looked back and saw that the woman was staring again, with the same unhappy look on her face.
A few minutes later into our walk, we started to see ahead down the street where it was looking more and more congested with people, to the point of it looking like the main floor of a sold-out rock show. I wondered how these people could deal with being so compressed together.
Toni spoke up.
“We want to stay away from anything that crowded,” she said.
The rest of us agreed.
I said, “Well, let’s just get a little closer. We don’t have to get right in the pit, but I do want to see what’s so exciting over there.”
We kept walking.
As we got closer, something started to seem a bit more clear. Not all of the people were making noise because they were having fun. Some of the merry-making noises turned out to be screams.
As we moved closer, despite Antoinette’s objections, I noticed a small huddle of people in the center. Someone was on the ground. I hurried up to the circle and pushed my way to the inside. What I saw there left me frozen in my tracks. There were two people. One was laying on their back, motionless. The other… was on their knees, hovering over the one on the ground, and it looked… like they were eating their face. Blood was spewing everywhere while gawkers screamed in terror.
Toni grabbed my arm from behind and said “I told you, we have to go!” She pulled at my arm, but I couldn’t avert my gaze from what was happening. Eventually, she pulled hard enough that I lost balance, sort of fell over, then got back up and started retreating with her.
When we got back outside of the circle, we saw that there was another of the exact same scene happening maybe 20 feet away from us in another direction.
“What is happening?!” I screamed.
Then, the first circle we saw was dispersing rapidly as the flesh eater abandoned their meal and started seeking dessert in the crowd. Just like that, another was incapacitated on the ground, becoming seconds.
But there was something else that I noticed while the thing was rising to look for its next victim… It was Emily, the girl who followed us the previous night.
Toni told us that we were going to need to get to her place. As we began running, there were more and more of these things attacking and eating others. Where were they all coming from?
If this wasn’t horrifying enough, I then received the answer to my question. Some of the flesh eaters were missing faces themselves. Just bone, blood and remnants of skin where their faces used to be. And they were using these skeletal faces to eat those of others.
They weren’t ‘coming from’ anywhere. They were being created by the other flesh eaters. As one walked away from their meal, I saw the body of their victim rise and begin chasing their own mark.
I was transfixed on this horrific, spontaneous public meltdown of society happening right before our eyes, when I was suddenly thrust to the ground with great force. I never saw it coming.
I had no idea what was happening. I eventually focused, and realized that I had one of these faceless flesh eaters hovering over me. Blood was dripping from their jowls onto my face. I knew it was all over for me.
Before I could even scream, Antoinette suddenly appeared face to face with the creature hovering over me. Except, she looked different. Her eyes were blood red, and she appeared to have a large set of fang-like teeth protruding from her open mouth.
She used one hand to pick up the creature, bringing it face to face with her. She stared directly into its eyes and let out a guttural, terrifying sound like I’ve ever heard. Whatever this was… The creature was afraid of Toni. She dropped it, and it scrambled off immediately.
She looked at me with her new face and shouted, “Get up and follow me. They won’t touch you now.”
We ran behind her the rest of the way, tears in my eyes as I tried to figure out what was happening.
When we got to her place, Toni locked the doors, and then shook some sort of liquid out of a bottle onto the floor in front of each of the doorways and windows.
“This won’t be over until morning,” she said. Her face was back to normal now.
We all stayed together in the living room that night. I knew that Toni would keep us safe.
When daylight broke, she alerted us that it should be safe now, but that we needed to leave the city and go home immediately. We piled into her car so that she could drive us back to ours at the hotel.
As we drove, I noticed that the streets were now empty, save for what appeared to be clean-up crews picking up the aftermath. Some were power washing the ground where there appeared to be dark stains. There were no bodies, and no flesh eaters out seeking breakfast, from what I could see. We were all dead silent for the entire drive, focused on what was happening outside our windows.
Toni turned on the radio to a news station, and they were reporting that several people had died in what they called “parade float accidents” the prior day.
As Toni said goodbye to us, she hugged me and put a note in my pocket.
I haven’t had the courage to read it yet.
​
CHX

It’s taken me quite some time to decide whether to tell anyone about this. With Mardi Gras coming up again soon, I wanted to make sure people were warned, and know what happened.
Something happened at Mardi Gras last year. And it’s being covered up. Every word of what follows is true.
My friends and I decided to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I’ve always heard that the city was a non-stop, twenty-four hour, year round party. I’ve also heard that the days leading up to Mardi Gras take this to the extreme.
There were three of us altogether. Myself, Chris, and Sam. We decided to arrive three days early and build up to the actual day of Mardi Gras. We drove down, taking turns at the wheel so we wouldn’t have to stop at any hotels along the way.
------------------------------
The First Night
Saturday was our first night there. We’re from New Jersey, where it was about 30 degrees (Fahrenheit) when we left. But when we arrived in New Orleans, it was in the 80s, and very humid.
Our hotel was right on the Mississippi River, and our room had a waterfront view. We settled in, cleaned up, and went out to walk around and check things out. We slowly aimed ourselves toward the French Quarter, checking out as much as we could along the way.
I was a bit shocked that we could just buy beer from vendors right on the street and walk around, unbothered by police. We can’t do that in Jersey.
All in all, we had a great time, great food and drink, and retired to the hotel around 4 am, while the city was still buzzing. As tired as I was, it took a while to fall asleep, due to the loud people partying in the hallway and surrounding rooms.
------------------------------
The Second Night
Sunday, we went to check out Harrah’s (the casino), and then we made it back out to the streets for the atmosphere and alcohol once again.
While walking around, we met a girl named Antoinette (Toni for short), who told us that she was a local, and that she was going to college there.
Toni suggested we all go to a little restaurant just slightly out of the area, called Le Bon Temps (pronounced: Lay Baw Taw). That translates to “the good times” in English. We all headed down together, and it was a pretty cool little place.
While we were there, I witnessed something that I had previously thought was only done in sitcoms. In the middle of our dinner, the door to the kitchen flew open, slamming against the wall. Out from the kitchen walked a large man, using one hand to carry a smaller employee by the back of his shirt collar. The guy being carried looked like there was something wrong with him. His eyes were half closed and bloodshot, while his face was almost pure white, completely void of expression.
The larger man carried him by the back of his shirt all the way across the restaurant to the front door, where he pushed him outside and shut the door behind him.
On his way back to the kitchen, the large man said “Sorry, folks, but you just can’t show up to work stoned out of your gourd like that.”
There were some giggles from the patrons in reply.
We all drank quite a bit that night and I ended up staying at Antoinette’s place, about a mile away. Chris and Sam said they were going to stay out for a while longer and then go back to the hotel.
------------------------------
The Third Night
The next day, Monday, I texted my friends that I’d meet up with them later that evening.
I spent the day with Antoinette, and we had a great time. I started wondering if this was too much for me to be getting into, allowing myself to get involved with a girl like this when I live so far away. She was definitely someone who I would want to pursue a relationship with, but I knew I’d be leaving town without her in just a few days. I decided to push these thoughts away, and let the proverbial chips fall where they may. We had two more days. Anything could happen.
While Toni and I were walking back downtown later, I noticed there was a girl walking about a block behind us who seemed to be pretty out of it. I couldn’t tell if she was drunk, high, or what. Toni told me to just ignore her, as she hurried me along.
Once we got to the corner where we were meeting up with Chris and Sam, things began to get strange. As we were crossing the street, I felt a hand on my back, almost like someone was pushing me, although rather weakly. I turned around, and realized that it was the girl who was walking a block behind us earlier. She wasn’t actually pushing me, though. It appeared that she needed to hold onto something to avoid falling over.
We stopped and asked her if she was ok, and she just sort of grunted. At this point, I think we all became concerned. She started mumbling a bit, saying things like “My name is Emily,” “I was with friends, but now I’m here,” and “I live here, that way,” pointing in a direction that was blocked by a parade route.
I asked her, “What happened? Did you lose your friends?,” to which she did not reply.
We were standing right in front of a Burger King. I asked the crowd if someone could get a cup of water for her. Everyone who heard me just looked the other way and kept walking, some giving me the evil eye, as if I had done something wrong. A BK employee near the door said “You get her out of here, now!,” slamming the door shut.
I noticed that Toni was staring at Emily with a very serious look on her face. Toni whispered into my ear, “She isn’t drunk. We should get out of here.”
I replied, “But, shouldn’t we help her? She’s really messed up. We can’t leave her here to die.”
Toni begrudgingly said “Alright, but let’s make this quick.”
We each got on one side and carried Emily along with us down the block, where we came across a security guard standing in front of a parking structure. I stopped and asked the guard if they could help. I explained that we didn’t know what was wrong with her, but that she needed attention, and possibly a ride to the hospital. The guard looked at me like I was stupid. Toni gave her a shrug. The guard then re-focused on Emily. She reached into Emily’s backpack, rifled around a bit, and pulled out an ID card. The guard then said “I’ll take care of this and get her an ambulance. You can go on your way.”
Toni started pulling me along, as I said “thank you” to the guard.
As we were all walking, I asked Antoinette, “What did you mean when you said she wasn’t drunk? Is there something going on that we don’t know about?”
Toni just said, “There’s a lot of strange things going on around here that you don’t want to know about. And neither do I.”
My friends kind of laughed, and we moved along. We had some drinks and got back into the celebratory mood.
Chris mentioned that he had been wanting to check out one of the New Orleans cemeteries that he had read about. Toni did not look enthused.
But, Chris was already in motion. He walked over to one of the police officers who were standing guard, and asked “Hey, do you know where the closest cemetery is?”
The officer looked him dead in the eye and stared for a few seconds. Then… And no, this is not a joke, even though it sounds like a bad slasher movie line… He said, “There’s one just a few blocks over that way, but you don’t want to be going down there.”
Chris smirked. “Why not?”
The officer replied, (And again, he really said this. It’s not just a cheesy line from a horror movie.) “They don’t really like your kind over there.”
I have to be honest. I was kind of freaked out by this interaction. And Toni wasn’t looking happy.
Chris said, “Come on, nothing’s going to happen. This isn’t a horror movie.”
After a long sigh, I replied, “I guess it can’t hurt. I’ve heard that the cemeteries are a sight to see around here.”
We embarked on Chris’ quest, much to the chagrin of the rest of the group.
There was quite a change in the look of the city as we got closer to the cemetery. It went from historic New Orleans chic to… something much less visually appealing. As we drew closer, I started to see and feel eyes on all of us.
As we walked the final stretch to the cemetery entrance, there were at least a dozen people standing on their front porches and in their front yards, looking at us like we were about to do something really stupid.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Toni said quietly.
“Well, we are here, so let’s just be quick about it.” I said.
When we got to the front gate, it was locked. Apparently, visiting hours were over.
“Oh no, I guess we have to leave! Too bad,” said Toni.
Despite our misfortune, we could still see all of the large, creepy and wonderful burial structures through the wrought iron fencing. Because New Orleans is below sea level, bodies are buried above ground. The arrangement of the structures in the cemetery actually looked like a small city. A city of the dead.
The eyes were now piercing the backs of our heads, and we knew something was going to happen if we didn’t get out soon. But, Chris started walking the perimeter of the fencing until he happened upon a crevice big enough for him to try and squeeze through. He told us to follow him. I was hesitant, and Toni was telling me that we need to leave, but I figured a quick adventure inside couldn’t hurt. We’d be gone in a few minutes, not even enough time for police to arrive and catch us. So, we all squeezed through, one by one.
It was getting pretty dark now, and this was really starting to feel wrong. I was just waiting for the doors to start opening and the dead to come out and greet us.
I decided I was done with this place, and said to Chris, “Alright, we’re going back. This is just disrespectful, and the locals obviously don’t want us here.”
He shot back, “Scared, huh?”
I ignored him.
We all squeezed back out, one at a time. Toni went just before me, and I was the last one out. I had a feeling like someone else was behind me, even though I was the last one. Before going through, I looked behind me… And I could swear that in the darkness, the door on one of the structures looked like it was sliding open. I could even hear the faint sound of a cement block scraping across the ground. I’m sure it was just my imagination, but this made me decide to get the heck out of there with the quickness.
We walked silently at a much quicker pace back to the more populated downtown area. The noise and lights in the French Quarter seemed to welcome us home.
------------------------------
Tuesday. Mardi Gras. Carne Vale. A Farewell… To The Flesh.
Today, the streets were twice as crowded as they had been the night before. This was the big day. Tons of new tourists filled the streets, to the point that we literally couldn’t even walk on Bourbon Street. We attempted to, but got stuck in the crowd like someone had tried to fit 100 crayons into a box that was only meant for 50. If anything happened here, we simply wouldn’t be able to move or get out of the way. For the rest of the day, we stuck to the side streets.
As the parades carried on, it became more and more difficult to even go anywhere else, as they were blocking the streets, and thus blocking any way for us to go in the direction that we wanted.
At this point, we kind of gave up and decided “If we can’t beat ‘em, we join ‘em.”
“Let’s just go watch one of the parades,” I said.
The others were indifferent. We all grabbed drinks and walked toward one of the main streets of the city as nightfall was beginning to close in on us.
On our walk, we came upon some sort of dance troupe in the street. There were probably a dozen people in the troupe, all dressed in dark red, tribal looking outfits. Along with their dance, a few played hand drums, and they were all singing in what may have been French. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, though. At some point, the woman in front who appeared to be the leader of the troupe caught my eye and stared with a look as if she was not happy to see me. I saw her look over at Antoinette, then avert her gaze as if she had been caught.
“Let’s go,” said Toni.
As we walked away, I looked back and saw that the woman was staring again, with the same unhappy look on her face.
A few minutes later into our walk, we started to see ahead down the street where it was looking more and more congested with people, to the point of it looking like the main floor of a sold-out rock show. I wondered how these people could deal with being so compressed together.
Toni spoke up.
“We want to stay away from anything that crowded,” she said.
The rest of us agreed.
I said, “Well, let’s just get a little closer. We don’t have to get right in the pit, but I do want to see what’s so exciting over there.”
We kept walking.
As we got closer, something started to seem a bit more clear. Not all of the people were making noise because they were having fun. Some of the merry-making noises turned out to be screams.
As we moved closer, despite Antoinette’s objections, I noticed a small huddle of people in the center. Someone was on the ground. I hurried up to the circle and pushed my way to the inside. What I saw there left me frozen in my tracks. There were two people. One was laying on their back, motionless. The other… was on their knees, hovering over the one on the ground, and it looked… like they were eating their face. Blood was spewing everywhere while gawkers screamed in terror.
Toni grabbed my arm from behind and said “I told you, we have to go!” She pulled at my arm, but I couldn’t avert my gaze from what was happening. Eventually, she pulled hard enough that I lost balance, sort of fell over, then got back up and started retreating with her.
When we got back outside of the circle, we saw that there was another of the exact same scene happening maybe 20 feet away from us in another direction.
“What is happening?!” I screamed.
Then, the first circle we saw was dispersing rapidly as the flesh eater abandoned their meal and started seeking dessert in the crowd. Just like that, another was incapacitated on the ground, becoming seconds.
But there was something else that I noticed while the thing was rising to look for its next victim… It was Emily, the girl who followed us the previous night.
Toni told us that we were going to need to get to her place. As we began running, there were more and more of these things attacking and eating others. Where were they all coming from?
If this wasn’t horrifying enough, I then received the answer to my question. Some of the flesh eaters were missing faces themselves. Just bone, blood and remnants of skin where their faces used to be. And they were using these skeletal faces to eat those of others.
They weren’t ‘coming from’ anywhere. They were being created by the other flesh eaters. As one walked away from their meal, I saw the body of their victim rise and begin chasing their own mark.
I was transfixed on this horrific, spontaneous public meltdown of society happening right before our eyes, when I was suddenly thrust to the ground with great force. I never saw it coming.
I had no idea what was happening. I eventually focused, and realized that I had one of these faceless flesh eaters hovering over me. Blood was dripping from their jowls onto my face. I knew it was all over for me.
Before I could even scream, Antoinette suddenly appeared face to face with the creature hovering over me. Except, she looked different. Her eyes were blood red, and she appeared to have a large set of fang-like teeth protruding from her open mouth.
She used one hand to pick up the creature, bringing it face to face with her. She stared directly into its eyes and let out a guttural, terrifying sound like I’ve ever heard. Whatever this was… The creature was afraid of Toni. She dropped it, and it scrambled off immediately.
She looked at me with her new face and shouted, “Get up and follow me. They won’t touch you now.”
We ran behind her the rest of the way, tears in my eyes as I tried to figure out what was happening.
When we got to her place, Toni locked the doors, and then shook some sort of liquid out of a bottle onto the floor in front of each of the doorways and windows.
“This won’t be over until morning,” she said. Her face was back to normal now.
We all stayed together in the living room that night. I knew that Toni would keep us safe.
When daylight broke, she alerted us that it should be safe now, but that we needed to leave the city and go home immediately. We piled into her car so that she could drive us back to ours at the hotel.
As we drove, I noticed that the streets were now empty, save for what appeared to be clean-up crews picking up the aftermath. Some were power washing the ground where there appeared to be dark stains. There were no bodies, and no flesh eaters out seeking breakfast, from what I could see. We were all dead silent for the entire drive, focused on what was happening outside our windows.
Toni turned on the radio to a news station, and they were reporting that several people had died in what they called “parade float accidents” the prior day.
As Toni said goodbye to us, she hugged me and put a note in my pocket.
I haven’t had the courage to read it yet.
​
CHX

It’s Coooolin ! Hey there!
Are you new to HUT? About to fire it up for the first time? Here’s a guide for you! ... and tips at the verrryyyy end!!

Knowing the Menus

There’s a bunch of things to do in HUT under different categories they are ...
• HUT Central
• Solo Play
• Online
• Auction House - sets
• Team
Each of these have various things underneath them, so let’s talk about them.
HUT CENTRAL
First off we have a scroll-through menu on what new content is out.
New content; packs, and players gets released every week day at 5pm EST , unless it’s a Holiday - then we’ll get the content a day earlier.
You will see when the content is out of packs by the timer and the date on the banner shown - Winterinternational Players released Monday were a week long to pull.
We will see new events come into HUT bi-weekly. This event ends soon, so we will see a new Event next Friday at 5pm EST.
Team of the Weeks are Wednesdays at 5pm EST. Available for the Week.
HUT RUSH
What else is there on HUT Central? You can go directly to HUT RUSH game mode by going to the banner using the left stick, highlighting it and clicking “X” or “A”.
HUT Rush is 2 game modes , normally one is Traditional Hockey gamestyle, and other is Arcade Hockey gamestyle with “moneypuck” attached.
Play games, win, get points, rank up in tiers. Get rewards - instantly. You can net 18.5k in coins, and 2 and a half gold collectables normally — or 100 Gold Players for 3 Gold Collectables, once. — willl talk about later. This is a limited time set, ending Tuesday @5pm EST.
Objectives / Milestones
You will also be available to see what Objectives / Milestones are close to completion. Click on this, and you will be shown the “Daily” Objectives. If you do all these, you get a Monthly Collectable, and 1,250 coins for the day.
Weekly Objectives are the same thing, finish all those up within a weeks time (Friday at 5pm EST - Friday at 5pm EST) and get a cool 5k, plus an Untradable Premium Pack - worth 7,500 coins.
Milestones have infinite time, do those for coins, players, packs. Do them all? Get yourself an Icon or Gold Collectable. — I’ll talk about these later.

Solo Play

Under Solo Play there is Squad Battles , and Challenges.
What is Squad Battles?
Squad Battles is playing your team against the A.I. for points. The higher difficulty; rookie, semi-pro, pro, all-star, superstar - and opponents OVR - i.e., 77 or 88 - the more points you can obtain. To get max points, score 5 goals, and have 20 shots on net. Points will increase as more people play, and get updated weekday, 5pm EST. The more games you play, and win the higher the rank you will get. Aim for at least Pro 2 , which is 4-5 games.** Squad Battles resets on Wednesday - 5pm EST and you will receive your rewards on Thursday at 5pm EST. —- some people still don’t know this, so have that memorized and you’ll know more than some people.
Squad Battles affects your win-loss ratio, and Players Stats
Squad Battles rewards you in Tradable Packs, Coins, and HUT Sweats CHAMPS points
Challenges
Challenges are a great way to earn a coin stack, and receive free packs - usually earned at the second last - last challenge in the “Event Challenges”. You will also receive Monthly Collectables throughout doing the Event Challenges.

• Whats unique about this event is that by getting 3 stars, you will earn a Winterinternational collectable!! - will talk about later!

If you opt not to do these Event Challenges, there are “offline” challenges to do - Starting at Rookie, and ending in Superstar you can net a free 200k for doing them all!! It is time consuming, but it’s 200k worth!
Challenge Coin Tiered

Online

Rivals Mode
What is Rivals?
Rivals is playing against people online. PS+ or Xbox Membership is required in order to play online.
Play your first 5 games, get entered into a Division.
Do well - win lots in a row, and you’ll be able to go up in Divisions. This gives yourself better, and bigger rewards. Want to get those rewards in a higher tier, but you’re afraid you’ll lose the division? Hold off, and don’t play. Rivals resets Tuesdays at 5pm EST, Rewards available Wednesday at 5pm EST.
Each game gives you points, as well. You get more points winning than losing, duh. More points will net you better rewards for the week. I normally just aim for Gold.
You can choose from Tradable packs, Untradable packs (2 times the amount as tradable) or coins.
Play a friend
You can play your friend in HUT. They will obviously use their HUT team, and you’ll use yours. You can use expired loan players in this. Make up your own rules, and have fun!

Auction House

Buy players, jerseys, logos, coaches, arenas, cellys, jersey numbers, goalie masks in the Auction House. You can also sell your own, as well. Simply click on the “Auction House” . You can change the category by clicking “X/A” and scroll over to your designated category you want to buy. - Also filter out the things if you want a specific player, or event.
You will have the option to click down and sell players, view them in the next tab and see how much time is left, and also see what price they go for at the very end at the “Sell Transactions” - it will show you what you’ve sold, and by clicking “R2/RT” you will have a timestamp, going back a week, month, year, or all-time. Clicking “L2/LT” you will see your sold items, and expired items — if they didnt sell they’ll go here.
• Since you are new?? There is a “Market Crash” happening right now. Load yourself up with “Base” 84+ cards for cheap - Mackinnon, Kane, McDavid - best Base player - Hedman, Vasilevskiy, etc., —- Tall goalies are “meta” , as well as “speedy” players. —
I would also suggest buying TOTW Players, they will rebound in price.
Sets
Do your re-rolls what even is a “re-roll” ? A reroll is trading in 8 of a specific “level” to 2 of the “next level” players. For example 8 Bronze Players to 2 Silver Players. 8 Silver Players to 2 Gold Players. Lastly, we have 8 Gold Players to 2 Gold Players with one being an 80+ Player. I would not suggest doing the Gold -> Gold reroll
You can also trade in Monthly Collectables you get from the Daily login for a Free Gold Collect / Icon. This costs 30 Monthly Collectables. You can also get packs, or a 80-82 player. You can get 2 per day - Daily Pack you get every 24hrs, plus doing the Daily Challenges.
When a player gets 50 Gold Players, you can lock those into a Gold or Icon Collectable. Each will help your team in various ways, lets look at it.
There is a set right now under “Winterinternational” where you trade in 100 Gold Players to 3 Gold Collectables, I highly suggest this, especially as a new player - redeemable twice
—- The Winterinternational Collectables from the Event Challenges gives you a free Gold Collectable or helps with building a 91/92 random player, or specific player. For the free Gold Collectable you need 21 Winterinternational Collectables. —
Icon Collectable - Untradable Master Icons. 1 Icon Collectable is an 85 Master Icon. There’s 84-89 OVR Master Icons available. Each one requires more and more Icon Collectables.
—- Master Icons will eventually go to 99 OVR. Will require more Icons. Lower OVR Icons will need more Icons to get to Max OVR - 99. Higher Icons - Gretz / Lem. will require less.
To get Lemieux / Gretzy it is 7? Icon Collectables.
Gold Collectables - Tradable / Untradable Event Master Set Players (MsPs). Less Gold Collectables will net you an Untradable MSP , More Gold Collectables will net you a Tradable MSP. You can also get yourself specific 92 MsPs this event by doing their tasks. — They are Untradable. —
Normally I go Tradable, and sell them for more coins. This allows you to build your favourite team the fastest.

Team

Store
Also under this is “Store” . Right now until Tuesday at 5pm EST you can get a free 90 OVR player! What a great way to start! Just pick your favourite one - THERE IS NO WRONG CHOICE!!
Seriously grinds my gears seeing a post “what 90 is the best” “who should I choose?” It is YOUR GAME! What works for others , may not work for you. Pick YOUR FAVOURITE!
Base & Premium Packs are always there. Base packs are 5k coins, Premium Packs are 7.5k coins. Every other weekday we will see a new pack enter the store. New Events bring more packs, containing specific stuff. One guarantees a Gold Collectable, and a Winterinternational Player. Since Boxing Day is today, there are packs out for it!! These packs end on Monday at 5pm EST.
A player can also buy packs by purchasing “points” to purchase points, click the Triangle or Y button in the store.
To see how much a pack is in “points” it is the Green Circle “Pucks” besides the coins. Currently the guaranteed Winterinternational and Gold Collectable pack is $25.
Team
Change your team players, lineups, goalies, coaches, add better players, etc.,
You can change your strategies by going to “Manage Lineups” and “Strategies”.
Also there is the “Settings” to fix your camera, puck size, visual / audio, and controls.
—- My Collection —
Click on this, see every possible card you will be able to buy, and collect. Click “Triangle” to view all your players, jerseys, arenas, etc.,

Free Beginning Tips

• HUT is not a race. Be patient. Better cards will be out every month , OVRs will increase.

My hints?

• PLAY THE GAME YOUR WAY!! BUILD YOUR OWN TEAM!! Use your favourite players for maximum fun, happiness, and enjoyment. So what if no one else uses “said player” its your team - not theres. What works for you may not work for them, vice versa.
  
• Before hitting into a game, click R3? This pops up what Ping you wanna use. It’ll try and find a game below or at the ping you set. If you dont find an opponent within 30 seconds, you’ll be finding an opponent out of this ping zone range.
  
• Use your 100 Gold Players for the 3 Gold Collectables.
  
• Play up on RUSH to try and get Max Tier for the free 84 for your team. This will give you 18.5k , and the 100 Gold players needed for the 3 Gold Collectables.
  
• If you can, try and do the 100 for 3 Gold Collectables, again. This will give you 6 Gold Collectables.
  
• Play Squad Battles, and Rivals. Take UT (second option) for Rivals. This will ensure lots of Gold Players for Gold Collectables. (I always choose UT, even if my team is stacked. You can’t change my mind on doing anything different.)
  
• DONT go for Lemieux or Gretzky. Yes, it is your HUT Team, but don’t go for it off the bat. I’d suggest a tradable MSP - then you can use the coins to play the market, and buy your Master Icons that you want.
  
• Buy Base Speedy players - Doughty, Duchene, Mackinnon, Kane, etc., whoever floats your boat. All are cheap nown
  
• Buy TOTWs for Profit.
  
• Save on Gold Collectables. Have enough to get your first tradable MSP and sell for your coinage.
  
• Save up coinage. Try and do Daily’s every day.
  
• Spend coinage everywhere, one “Star Player” will not help your team.
  
• World of Chel also gives you HUT items, every 10 items if you feel burned out.
  
• Cross - Creases are so normal way of scoring, its no need to get mad about em now, use em to score if theyre open if you wanna play that way, too.
  
• Take into account this while buying points thisss
  

———————-
This is my HUT Guide to you, new HUT player, or Old HUT Player reading this for fun.
I hope you enjoy HUT.
If you get frustrated or run down? I would suggest playing a different game-mode, game, or simply taking a break from the gaming system in general. That way you will be fired up to play again, and have fun!
See you guys when new content gets released for another post!
Comment down anything a new player would need to know to get their game started, and tips!
• Coolin Killin It
(Life is like a puzzle, you just have to find the right piece.)