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Britney can ask the question for me this time.
I’m selling 1% shares in my action at the Gala Casinos British Poker Tour in Liverpool for £10 each.
I have already registered for the three main tournaments
– Wed 17th Sept £100+£10 freezeout
– Thu 18th Sept £200+£10 freezeout
– Fri 19th Sept £500+£10 main event
The total buy-in is £880 so I’m rounding up a bit to get to £10 per share, but whether I drive to Liverpool each day or find somewhere to stay up there, I’m not going to see much change from a grand for the whole event – if any!
The main event is a two-day event with two day 1s. I’m confirmed to play on Friday and will return on Sunday 21st if I get far enough.
If you’d like to share in my inevitable winnings, leave a comment, email chris(at)luckydonut.com or contact me via any other means you happen to know.
The four month slog to become World Series of Poker champion began earlier today.
Which means that about six thousand lucky Poker Stars qualifiers will have taken the special VIP shuttle they’ve put on to get you from Palms to Rio.
Seriously? You’re about to spend (potentialy) fourteen hours sitting at a poker table and you don’t want to walk a couple of hundred yards across the street to get there?
I expect it’s a little quicker than walking if the bus takes you directly to the Rio Pavillion entrance so you don’t have to walk right through the casino to get there, but there’s probably not much in it.
[Rio’s hotel towers are the two red and blue buildings. Palms says "Palms" on it like twice]
This is the first time I’ve played with Google Earth with the 3D buildings turned on. Give it a go, it’s pretty cool when you have this many massive buildings so close together and can zoom and spin around them in great detail.
Zip code 89109 gets you pretty close to the Strip, or fly direct to "36° 6’52.99"N 115°10’49.83"W" to get to the intersection with Flamingo Road.
However it would be even better if all the building models were on the right z-plane.
The view doesn’t quite look like this at the start of CSI…
I saw that Claire had set one of her classes a maths homework on quadratic equations, which she’d abbreviated to "Factorising Quads".
My immediate thought was "that’ll be two pairs then".
Sleep time now. Got to be up before 7am to catch a plane 🙂
A big thank you to all my backers for the tournaments I’m going to play in Las Vegas over the next week. Between them they have 33% of my action.
The team list looks like this: Chris, Dan, Dave, David, Gareth, Geoff, Monty, Neil, Paul, Rich… and Sidge makes eleven.
Eleven oughta do it, don’t you think?
Oh wait, that’s not quite right…
EDIT: There’s always one isn’t there? 🙂 Vij called me while I was at the airport and said he’d take 5%, although he’d totally forgotten about it and was calling about something completely different. He remembered when he was deafened by an announcement in the terminal. ty Vij.
The very first mission on Grand Theft Auto 4 begins with you having to drive your cousin to a back room poker game.
Because I’m crap I had to tackle this mission twice, but that did mean that I heard two different versions of the conversation between the Bellic boys as they drove around Liberty City.
Both times I was treated to an extremely clever poker joke. I wish I could play this mission over and over again to see if there are any other gems I’ve missed.
This may not be 100% accurate as I’m doing it from memory, but the dialogue is so good it’s hard to forget.
First time:
Roman: "You know why they call me The Janitor? It’s because I always clean up".
Fantastic.
Second time:
Roman: "I read this book called May Contain Nuts. It’s about how you have to convince the other guy that you have the nuts in your hand".
Nico: "If you have his nuts in your hand, wouldn’t he already know?"
Just sheer genius.
It’s been a scheduling nightmare, but I’ve finally settled on three tournaments to play during the Las Vegas portion of my trip in June.
There are four casinos holding poker tournament series at the same time as the WSOP (at Binions, Caesars Palace, Golden Nugget and Venetian) and I really wanted to play in one event at each but I just can’t fit it in. With the package for my freeroll satellite meaning I need to check in at Harrah’s Laughlin on Friday evening, I can’t play anything that day that might run for more than a few hours.
So, after looking at all the tournaments on offer I have prioritised and picked the ones that are the most appealing and have tried to fit them around my schedule – and each other – as best I can.
Top of the list is a $500 tournament at Binions on Monday 9th. The cheaper Binions tournaments only have a 30 minute clock and this one has 45 minute levels, but the main appeal is that it’s a chance to play a 10,000 chip event at the birthplace of tournament poker. Without a time machine, this is as close as I’m ever going to get to the old school World Series of Poker experience.
The best value structures overall seems to be at Caesars. You can get 7,500 starting chips for $225, 12,500 chips for $330 and 15,000 chips for $540. On a chips-per-dollar basis the $330 comes out in front, but the $225 isn’t bad – which is fortunate as it’s the only one that fits with my trip dates. It’ll be the first one I play, on Thursday 5th.
I considered the $330 on Tuesday 10th (my last day) but as there’s a chance it could spill over into a second day, I can’t risk it. There’s not much point playing for 14 hours if I’m not going to be around to compete at the final table.
The Venetian’s Deep Stack Extravaganza is the one I have to miss. The dates just don’t fall right. These are $540 tournaments with 10,000 chips and a 40 minute clock, but with the high likelihood of needing to play two days if I got into the money (they play until 2am, then re-start at 4pm the next day if necessary) the only dates I could do this would be Thursday 5th (which is actually an Omaha hi/lo event, and I’m not donating $540 to that) or Monday 9th (when I’d rather play at Binions).
So that leaves the Golden Nugget for my final day, and they have a $225 tournament with 40 minute levels and 5,000 chips. It looks like a bit of a downgrade from what you could get at Caesars for the same money, but I need to make sure I can catch my plane on Wednesday!
So that’s a total buy-in of $950 for the three tournaments. Should anyone be so inclined, I’ll be selling 1% stakes for a nice, round tenner. Time to get Team Donut back together!
Harrah’s are labelling their decision to delay the final table of the World Series of Poker Main Event until November an "enhancement". From a player’s point of view I really can’t see why it’s a good thing.
Taking a day or two off in the middle of a marathon tournament is one thing. Indeed, if you are drawn to play on Day 1A you already have to take a 4-day forced break before day 2A begins, then everyone gets at least a day off before all the players merges into a single Day 3. Another day off before the final table after 6 long days of poker is probably a welcome break. But a four month hiatus once the end of the road is in sight – and when you must be In The Zone to have got that far – is just a bit of a nonsense.
The point has been made that you could use this time to get some coaching and study the play of your opponents, but how exactly are you going to study the play of the eight other unknowns who haven’t played a single hand on TV yet. That’s actually the whole point of this stupid rearrangement – to accomodate ESPN. Are they really going to give the players a few hundred hours of unedited tape to wade through? I doubt it.
What I really wanted to know though was just how much the players might be losing in potential interest on their payouts as a result of having to wait nearly four months between Day 7 and Day 8. This is the richest "sporting" event in the world, after all, and the prize pool is pretty hefty.
I’m going to base the calculations on last year’s field, because that means the full payout information is readily available and there’s no reason to assume there will be wildly different numbers this year.
In 2007 there were 6,358 entrants, each paying $10,000 to play. There’s a total 6% taken from the prize pool for the house and tournament staff which, accoording to my calculator, is about twenty grand more than the $59,784,954 prize pool published. I have no idea how this number could end in anything other than two zeros. It’s must be just good old-fashioned skimming.
Just over a third of the total prize pool is given to the top 9 spots – $22,019,901 in total.
This year, once the final table has been determined, each of the remaining players will be given 9th place money straight away and when they return in November they’ll be playing for the difference. 9th place last year was worth $525,934, so, based on last year’s numbers, that would be a further $4,733,406 paid out in July.
Therefore the amount of the prize pool left unpaid during the hiatus is $17,286,495. A cool seventeen million – or about $1.9m per player – still to play for.
The interest rates for savings on the US Dollar are far from great at the moment. However, after a quick shop around the net I found a certificate of deposit product that offers 3.3% APY, but over a four month fixed term. That’s almost a perfect example – the delay before the final table is 117 days.
I just plugged these numbers into an online interest rate calculator and the answer comes in at round about $180,000.
That’s 18 Main Event buy-ins. Or, it’s twice as much as the nine remaining players will have paid for their seats in the first place. Although it pales in comparison to the $3.8m total rake taken out of the prize pool for this tournament, $180,000 is hardly insignficant.
Quite what it’s worth to Harrah’s for hanging on to it for the same amount of time I couldn’t really say. $17m is probably just a drop in the ocean to the world’s largest gaming corporation, but nevertheless it’s money that doesn’t belong to them, yet they know that they will have custody of it for a fixed – and reasonably long – period of time. It’s certainly investable, one way or another.
Suddenly the offer of an all expenses paid trip for two for each of the finalists to return to Las Vegas in November to play out the end of the Main Event doesn’t seem quite quite as generous. Even I can get a free suite at the Rio!
As the Gutshot poker club no longer exists, while I was staying in London for work earlier in the week I headed down to the Powerhouse Sporting Club to enjoy their coffee bar and see if I could get a game of Jenga or Connect 4.
As it happened, there was a poker game about to start but of course it was definitely not for money. I did not pay £50 to enter, and there was no additional £5 bounty.
There was also definitely not any pressure for players to leave a voluntary donation. I did not buy in with three £20s, so obviously they did not not offer me any change.
53 players turned up to enjoy only the thrill of the competition and to battle it out for no more than bragging rights. It’s a game of skill… yada yada yada.
We started with 3500 chips and I picked up pocket aces on the second hand. Blinds were 25/50 and an early position player raised to 225. His neighbour called and I was next, making it 800 to go.
The player to my left called in a flash and it got folded round to the early raiser.
"How much to me?", he said. "Five… what…. six…? fift…? seventy five?". He figured it out eventually and made the call, but not before proving what I’d always suspected: a raise to a "normal" amount plus one small chip has nothing to do with any strategy, it’s just so you get to see two different pretty colours tumbling through the air when you make your bet. Wheeee.
I expected to see this player make a three-chip flop bet and show us all that he could count to 625, but in fact he checked, as did I and the third player. The flop was a king and a ten and a seven, all different suits and I didn’t want to get too excited with one pair so early on. In truth, I wasn’t really ready to deal with a tough decision yet.
The turn brought another ten – now I had two pair, for what that’s worth – and the first player bet 250. With all that pre-flop action, the pot stood at 2475 so it may as well have been a check. I raised to 800, again a tiny bet in relation to the pot, but I hoped it might buy me a little information – or a free showdown – while still keeping the pot quite small. This line is either genius or ultra-weak, I’ll let you decide.
I didn’t have a great handle on the situation, but I figured that if a player who had only called my re-raise out of position pre-flop now decided to 3-bet on a king-high board, pocket aces were almost certainly not good and I would be able to fold and still have more than half a starting stack to play with.
However, if the third player decided to stick around (he’d already called two raises cold pre-flop, why not call a bet and a raise again now?) I was going to be completely stumped. I was very glad indeed when he folded.
In for two fiddy, in for eight hundy, the other guy called and we went to the river heads up. I don’t remember what card it was. I didn’t look until he’d checked, and I already knew I was checking behind anyway unless it was another ace. I flipped up the aces and he slid his hand into the muck.
"I had pocket nines", he said. And now, the punchline: "I put you on ace-queen".
That was as interesting as it got though, I hardly saw another hand worth playing before I ended up flipping a little pair against two big cards and losing.
I took a nice long walk back to my hotel, thinking about what I could have not won.
As the USA flipped onto daylight savings time a few weeks ago and the UK don’t put the clocks forward until next weekend, it’s actually a 7 hour time difference right now rather than the usual 8, and I’ve felt a little less jet-lagged than usual.
Even so, after an early start for a bunch of pre-breakfast gambling and a long walk along the Strip all the way down to Sahara I was ready to crash pretty early last night and ended up flipping TV channels in bed until I came across Deal or No Deal.
The contestent, Mary Beth, was a self-proclaimed great poker player who had actually played in a live tournament one time and finished like 9th or something.
However her interest in poker actually came into play in one of the offers she was made. In addition to $138,000 in cash for her case, the banker added an extra special prize.
Look, it’s Annie Duke!
We’re reminded that this leading female player "won two million dollars in a televised poker tournament". But not that she only had to outlast nine other players – sucking out on most of them – to take down that freeroll.
So, take the deal now and the offer also includes admission to some women-only poker seminar thing, but the really special part is that it would also include a whopping four hours of private poker tuition from the special star guest.
Annie was really giving it the hard sell trying to get the contestent to take the deal, quoting impressive-sounding results from people she had mentored the past. She said she hardly ever gives personal lessons, so it’s really a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. And a fast track to easy money, obviously.
Her efforts made perfect sense when we found out the reason that there might be a shortage of takers for her private tuition.
The value of this little package, Howie Mandel revealed, is $25,000.
Twenty five grand for four hours work.
No deal, apparently.
It’s been on the cards (groan) for a while but finally Dan Harrington’s latest books started to ship this week.
Yes, books, plural. It’s a simultaneous release of Harrington on Cash Games volumes 1 & 2. I mean, really, why even try to contain yourself to a single book when you can pad it out a bit by making up letters and colours for things that are mostly common sense, split it in two and charge double?
In fact there’s an increase in cover price too, each book is $34.95 – up from $29.95 for each of the three installments of Harrington on Hold’em. I guess the cost of producing (half) a book must have gone up that much in the past three years.
The email I just got from Las Vegas Advisor trumpeted:
Dan’s back — and this time he’s talkin’ cash games. Poker’s most prolific author has released two more must-read books, these on the cash-game component of expert hold ’em poker play.
Most profilic author? It’s his second freaking book! OK, not many other poker authors have five different ISBNs to their name, but there’s David Sklansky, Mason Malmuth and the late David Spanier, just off the top of my head. I had to check to be sure, but yes Mike Caro has written more than five and even Matthew Hilger has now written 3 actual, individual books with a fourth apparently on the way this year.
At least with HOH he made us wait a while for Volume 2 to give a degree of credibility to the multi-volume ruse. He might actually have still been writing it. In this series, first we learn how to play the early stages of a tournament, and then we think about the later stages. It almost made sense. Volume 3 – coming somewhat out of the blue – was just a lovely added bonus.
Now we have two volumes of HOCG coming out at the same time. Of course there’s no obligation to invest in both books, you do have a choice, but the division between them is rather spurious. Volume 1 teaches pre-flop and flop play, whereas Volume 2 deals with play on the turn and river.
Pardon me for asking, but why would I want a book that teaches me to play half a hand of poker?
Even if I can choose which half…
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