The Lucky Donut

Multitasking man

I’d been meaning to fish out this clip for a while but forgot all about it until I started to hear the results from the WSOP final table.

Craig Marquis is awesome. He can like do twelve things at once cos he like grew up with computers man. If you’re struggling to multi-table at online poker, the reason is probably that you’re not young enough.

Steve Friess from The Strip podcast was not impressed. (3 minute clip, direct link)

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Craig finished ninth. Say it ain’t so.

Immortalised

A few years ago Claire had a birthday cake made for me that immortalised my likeness in marzipan.

Today, a similar honour has been paid to me by Silverton Jim who has immortalised me as an actual walking, talking donut.

Read episode 7 of Stick to Vegas to see what this is all about. Jim assures me he was not on crack when he wrote it, but I’m not completley convinced…

Going for going for gold

I’m such a sucker for a tiered loyalty program.

The number of turbo sit-and-gos I play on Poker Stars each month tends to mean that I can just about retain SilverStar, and if I’m running a little short of points as the end of the month approaches I’ll make an effort to play a bit more in order to keep that precious status.

I don’t know why I bother really. I worked out the actual value of doing this is about $12 per month.

The benefit of SilverStar (1500 base points per month) over BronzeStar (no qualification required) is that your FPPs (the points you can spend, not the VIP points that determine your status) accumulate 50% faster at the higher level. Once you have that level you keep it right through to the end of the following month.

So the difference between earning your first 1500 points in month as a BronzeStar player vs SilverStar is 750 FPPs. One FPP is worth about 1.6 cents, so those extra points are worth about $12.

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Like I said, I’m a sucker for it. But you know that without people like me these schemes just wouldn’t exist.

I do wish I hadn’t bothered going out of my way to keep my status at the end of last month though.

PokerStars are currently running an promotion where you get a bonus if you increase your VIP level this month.

If you upgrade from bronze to silver, you get $50, so if I’d actually dropped back to BronzeStar last month this would be an easy $50 for not really any more play than I’d usually put in. Much better than the $12 worth of player points from maintaining that level.

But now I need to bypass silver (1,500 points) and get to gold (4,000 points) for a $100 bonus.

It’s not even real money, it’s a bonus in your poker account that you then have to earn 7x the dollar amount in points to unlock. But the thing is, I just can’t say no.

$100 for free, and all I have to do is play about two and a half times as much as normal, and then make sure I play again next month too? Sure, sign me up.

Well, I started off thinking that’s how it was going to be, probably looking at 3-4 hours a day to stay on top of it, but Claire convinced me I should take the opportunity to move up levels (which will earn points twice as fast, so I don’t have to play for as long).

I was some way off the latest win goals I’d set myself before taking another shot at the next level, but in the absense of having the stats to back up a decision it does help to have someone to blame if it all goes wrong. 🙂 So I’m going to go for it.

I never wrote about what happened last time I tried this though.

Everyone loves a graph, and this one has even been annotated to add trend lines as I saw fit. You can even click on it for a high def version. You lucky, lucky people.

This is my entire PokerStars single-table SNG history for 2008 so far (apart from steps, which can’t be measured the same way).

I’ve marked four zones on the graph. Starting from the left, the first section is all $16 tournaments, and I was winning. Then I moved up to the $27s and crashed and burned. Next, I dropped back down to the $16s but played 6 at a time instead of the 4 I was used to, where I carried on losing – albeit slightly slower. Finally I dropped back down to 4-tabling and things seem to have settled back down to how they used to be.

I’d only given myself $500 to play with at the higher level, which lasted just over 200 tournaments. That isn’t really enough to know for sure whether I was getting killed by the game or I was just running bad. I’m still optimistic that it was the latter, but the downward trend seems pretty consistent after the initial spike.

The thing that really stands out when I look at those results is the number of times I cashed for the least possible money.

Overall I finished in the money almost as often as I did with the $16s (38% vs 40%) but on the $27s I had more 3rd place finishes than the total of my 1sts and 2nds put together! With 1st paying two and a half times as much as 3rd, that’s going to make quite a difference to my overall return, and I’ll need to watch closely this time around to try to see if there’s a reason I’m a habitual bronze medalist.

What surprised me most though was the difference between my results on the $16s when 6-tabling versus 4-tabling.

I really didn’t think I’d be giving up too much by playing two more tables – hoping, eventually, to be able to move up to 8 or more tables at a time and increase my volume before increasing my stake. I accepted I might not win as quickly if my concentration was being spread thinner, but I certainly didn’t expect to suddenly be losing money at the same rate I used to be winning it.

The reason I dropped right back to four $16s at a time was to see if I’d still got what it takes to beat that game. It’s not a huge sample size (which is why I was hesitant to move up just yet) but things seemed to change almost instantly. The graph appears to be going in the right direction and the last magenta line is virtually the same gradient as the first one.

So I don’t think I’m broken, but apparently four tables is as many as I can handle.

Anyway, the heat is on and the time is right for me to play my game. Going for gold, four-tabling the $27s. Watch this space.

Paradise spammed

Claire got this email from Paradise Poker trying to tempt her back to play, which almost certainly won’t work unless they bin the horrible Boss Media network and reinstate their kitchy old software with food and drink at the table and flaming cards when you hit a high hand.

Personal greeting – fail. The broken images are a nice touch too. Good effort.

Still, at least they want her back I guess. I haven’t had a sausage.

Free kicks

It’s been a while since Sporting Index last sent out a bet refund promotion. Thankfully the dry spell ended this weekend.

Their new spread game is, as usual, some kind of random number generator apparently based around a computer sports simulation, but with no possible way it could actually be representative of what you see on screen.

This time it’s penalty kicks. The goal area is divided into 35 areas and points are awarded for every goal scored depending on where it hits the net.

That’s if you’re betting on a "points" market. You could just bet on the total number of goals, or the differential of goals (or points) between the two teams. Or you could plump for something much more exotic.

For example, take the shirt number of the striker and multiply it by the number of points for the goal he scores (if he scores) and add them all together. If that number is higher or lower than some other number, you might win money.

The question is: how do you make your decision as to which way or how much to bet when you have no way of knowing how the trajectory of the football is determined?

Each square on the goal grid might be equally likely to be hit, but there’s no reason to assume this is the case. And even if it was, what is the chance that any particular shot is saved by the goalkeeper? You’d have to factor that in too to see what the actual distribution of scores is likely to be.

This is all assuming that the RNG is fair. I’m sure it is though. Online gambling is never rigged.

The workings of this game are further obfuscated by the fact you can choose two teams from a list of five to play the shootout. Brazil is most likely to score from the penalty spot and Mexico the least, they say – and who am I to argue?

As you select your teams, you can see the markets move based on how much better one team is than the other. In fact the values in the markets are the only clue you have as to what’s about to happen.

You can also pick the goalkeeper, although this appears to make no difference to the numbers at all. It’s just there for comedy value: choose from Hans Blocker, Dmitri Tipitova or Claude Le Ballawei. I groaned out loud (GOL?), just like you’re probably doing now.

The offer I received was for a refund of net losses up to £50 on this game, providing I placed at least ten bets each with a £5 minimum risk. Clearly, there’s no way you can lose if you do this right.

I chose the total points market to meet the requirements for the refund, purely because of the numbers involved. For this combination of teams, the price was set at 51 points to buy – meaning that a 10p stake would always have a maximum loss of £5.10. That’s very much a worst case scenario too, as you can only lose the full amount if there are no goals at all scored in ten attempts!

In fact the variance on this bet was pretty low. After 9 spins I’d had a loss of £2 and a win of £2.60 and seven other results somewhere in between. Overall I was down £4.40.

The way I usually like to play these things is to take the full amount of money that I can still bet risk-free after meeting the requirements (in this case £45.60) and lump it all on one bet at even money or fairly short odds.

The only bet in this game close to offering fixed odds is the win index, which awards 25 points if the chosen team wins the shootout, 10 points for a draw or 0 if they lose. I’ve actually played this same bet on a real football match before.

I simply decided to pick the market which would allow me to buy one team at as close as possible to 10 points, effectively resulting in a fixed odds bet at 3-2 (25-10). I wanted to make sure a draw resulted in a do-over, rather than a win or loss that would affect the amount I had left to play with significantly.

The bet I chose was Mexico vs USA, backing Mexico @ 9.4 points for £4.85 per point. Worst case, I lose £45.59 (just 1p short of getting the full £50 refund, when you add in what I lost so far). The draw is almost irrelevant, but the win is worth a healthy £75.66 for £71.26 profit in total on the promotion.

Mexico surged ahead early, only to choke later on in a frustrating 3-3 draw, which ultimately landed me just £2.91 for the effort. After I stopped shouting at the stupid little pictures of pretend footballers, I increased the stakes ever so slightly and ran it again.

Unfortunately the USA won 5-4 that time.

Was worth a shot though. Ship that refund…

Ghosties in the works

Poker Stars was offline for a while earlier today.

Could it have been because they were installing these special spooky avatars into the lobby, in place of where they normally show a handful of sponsored pros and last week’s leaderboard winner?

Welcome to the cheap seats

At the weekend I went to see the NFL International Series game between the New Orleans Saints and the San Diego Chargers at Wembley Stadium.

There are a million bloggers who actually know what they’re talking about when they write about sports so I’m not even going to bother trying to analyse the game. Except to say that it was a thoroughly entertaining evening and a cracking game and I loved it.

There are some things you can hope to see at a game and some you would probably never dream of.

It was high scoring (67 points on offense) and went to the wire with a hail mary pass at 0:01 remaining and only 5 points between the teams. There was a coach’s challenge upheld, a 4th down conversion for touchdown, an "excessive celebration" (duly penalised) and an onside kick – which was recovered!

Add to that a missed extra point, which almost never happens, and an intentional safety play, which really almost never happens.

I can only remember ever seeing one intentional safety on TV – and that came after a botched punt. This one was run straight out of the playbook:

Plus the team I bet on won, which never hurts.

Compare this to last year where we got to see a team that hadn’t found their form yet slip and slide in the pissing rain against a team who only won one game all season. I think it must have put some fans off as it was a doddle to get tickets this year.

I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to bust a gut to get tickets or pay over the odds to have extremely bored security personnel who thought I didn’t really look like Club Wembley material harass me over my heinous plastic bottle. The "cheap seats" (£55) were still a superb view.

Unfortunately, I only had a compact camera so most of the pictures I took serve only as proof – should it be needed – that "digital zoom" really isn’t any better than no zoom at all. This is about the best of it.

New Neteller debit card more expensive, less safe

Neteller launched its new prepaid MasterCard product "Net+" today.

At least, I think that’s what it is. This part of their blurb isn’t exactly clear:

So it’s a prepaid card that you don’t have to pre-load. That would be free money then?

I think the idea is that it actually takes money straight out of your Neteller account – an idea that I’m far from keen on, given that this type of payment card has absolutely no consumer protection whatsoever. I really wouldn’t want my entire balance to be in play on those terms.

A real bank would call this a debit card; they’d also let you dispute unauthorised transactions and your balance would be protected if the institution went busto. (Compare Net+ terms 2.5 and 4.13).

However most of what I’ve read so far is so badly written and confusing I really couldn’t say with any confidence exactly what is going on.

This is definitely the replacement for the old Altair card though, which is being phased out. That one lasted just over a year.

In theory it’s is a good move, because if Neteller are dealing with both the e-wallet and the payment card, you only have to deal with one make-believe bank instead of two when you want to spend your money.

I’ve used my Altair card take some actual US dollars out of my Neteller US dollar account, from an ATM in America. This is just about the only way to do such a radical thing.

Neteller will keep your balance in dollars, but you can’t take your dollars out without switching currencies, allowing them to use the exchange rate of their choice to cut you a cheque in pounds.

If you take a bank wire, the amount is converted from dollars to euros first at god-knows-what rate. Then, unless you have a bank account in euros, it’ll be converted again by your bank when it lands at god-knows-what rate, plus god-knows-what additional charges.

The last time I tried to withdraw to my US Dollar bank account, I ended up losing $112 on a $3000 cashout. I got that back eventually after complaining a few times, but they told me not to expect the same treatment again and that I would have to live with the unnecessary double currency conversion.

To make things even better, the charges for not being able to withdraw your own money the way you want also went up earlier this year. It’s now $10 for either a bank wire in the wrong currency, or a cheque in the wrong currency. Both used to be just $1.

Of course, now that Neteller operate their own payment card, the fees on that have gone up too. Altair charged $4 for an ATM withdrawal; the Net+ charge is $6.

The thing that really takes the piss though is the new $3 "dormant account" charge, applied monthly if you don’t use the card. If it’s like I suspect, you can’t just run your prepaid card into the ground and throw it away – this fee will come straight out of your Neteller account every month unless you cancel the card. Which costs $20.

Anyway, I sort of saw this coming because at the end of September my old card expired and I asked Altair for a replacement. No can do, they said:

I am sorry, but at this time we will not re-issue you a new Altair Card. Our joint card programme with NETELLER has ended, and they have a new card offering for you.

The word "not" was indeed underlined as well as in bold type for emphasis. But you know I’ve never noticed before that NETELLER is indeed officially written in all-caps. That’s not for emphasis, it’s just their name. The same thing goes NEOVIA, the awkward and instantly forgettable new name for their company, apparently.

Whatever. They barely deserve one capital leter, never mind all of those.

I feared what money I had left on the card, all $33 of it, would be dead. I snoozed, I lost. However, despite their corporate bitterness Altair still offered:

If you would like a refund, we can send out a cheque to you, or if you would like your funds credited back into your NETELLER account please contact the NETELLER Card services team.

This I did. Can you guess what Neteller said?

Unfortunately you will need to contact Altair for your funds thank you we do apologize for the inconvenience.

I asked a second time for good measure.

The funds is with Altair so it cannot transfer back to NETELLER we do apologize for the inconvenience thank you.

A real bank would be able to do something as complex as transferring money from one account to another. How naive of me to forget who I was dealing with.

I got my cheque in the end – in pounds of course. This shows just how impressive a financial instituion Altair was, to complement Neteller’s aspirations of greatness. Hand-written cheque, number 23.

You know Las Vegas is desperate for visitors when…

… the Wynn wants to pay me to stay there.

The Wynn. Me. Really.

I always like receiving mailshots from the Wynn. Their emails and printed mailers all have that fabulous De La Soul kind of flowery pattern on – the same one they have on their most excellent carpet.

I don’t really know how on earth this trippy flower experiment ended up in a high brow hotel, I’m probably missing the point. I just like it cos it’s busy and colourful. I wish they sold shirts with the design on, but sadly they don’t.

As attractive as their mailers are, they don’t usually have great offers. I guess they’re reasonable deals but even a discounted room rate at a hotel which is normally $300/night is going to be more than I’d like to spend to stay in Las Vegas for a week.

This one, however, bucks the trend.

$119 for the room is one of the best I’ve seen, but to sweeten the deal they’ll also throw in $150 of slot play.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that’s an amazing deal – and that if you take it for just one night then it’s instantly +EV.

If you want to push that edge, the Wynn has plenty of video poker at 99.5% payback which would make it a 75c theoretical loss if you cycle the free play through once.

$119 for the room, $0.75 to unlock the free cash. They’d be paying me $30.25 to stay there.

Oh there’s tax and stuff too. But I bet they have some really nice soap to nick from the rooms.

Brag: In Hendon Mob database – twice

Sort of.

This is me, with the results from some real tournaments I played in and a little England flag, but no mug shot.

Then there’s this geezer – an American who dares to have the same name. Apparently he cashed in the WSOP Circuit Event in New Orleans last year, so I know it’s definitely not one of my results!

I’m sure the other Christopher is delighted that the picture adorning his achievement is actually yours truly. This was taken at the Liverpool GCBPT last month.

My staredown missed. Wide left.

The Lucky Donut

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