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The holiday season is upon us, so it’s time for the lastest issue of Terrible’s Magazine to showcase their mascot’s new wardrobe. I loved their efforts last year, with Mr Terrible as a mummy doing jazz hands. This year, he’s dressed as a scarecrow, a pilgrim and Santa. Each seasonal persona, obviously, is giving away lots of money.
I do try my best to make sure it doesn’t happen too often any more, but now and again I still have to pay for a Las Vegas hotel room. For this Christmas I’d already scored 5 nights for free at the Rio and several months ago I booked the remaining 6 nights at South Point – purely because I thought there was a chance it was mispriced. Only New Year’s Eve was listed at a higher than usual rate (many hotels bump up the cost of December 30th as well) so it seemed unlikely back then that we’d get a better deal by waiting until nearer the time. Sure there’d be some more comps to come, but those 6 nights include a Friday and Saturday as well as the most popular (and costly) night of the year. A weekend comp is a possibility, but for New Year’s Eve it’s extremely unlikely. We might get 2 or 3 nights somewhere else, but it would mean moving hotel at least twice in order to try to save a few quid and still have to land on a good deal for NYE. That Rio comp began life as 4 nights free and a 5th which seemed worth paying for at $50 so that we didn’t have to move hotels on Christmas Day. I booked it way back in April, just as soon as the Las Vegas offers started to appear on my Total Rewards account. Then we gave Harrah’s some more Las Vegas action in the summer on their only good video poker machine in town (which, of course, has been removed now) and they decided they loved me more than ever. The rate calendar showed the $50 night was now a COMP so I asked if I could still get this rate and they said "sure", because they seem to think I am some kind of high roller. Then Las Vegas got desparate for tourists and the room rates fell. The basic rate calendar says that those five comped nights which I had noted should have cost me $70, $70, $70, $90 and $110 are now listed at $60, $60, $60, $60 and $60. Even paying full price, $60/night is a steal for an all-suite hotel, this would have been unheard of a year ago. I guess off-strip hotels are the least recession-proof, with those that are still making the trip to Vegas wanting to be in the heart of the action. In fact, I had a general mailer today (i.e. you can book the deal without even having a player club account) from Harrah’s that’s offering certain nights for October to December at the Rio for as little as $45. Anybody can book that deal using this link: http://www.harrahs.com/halloween/ So with the Rio is slashing their rates, I thought it was worth checking what kind of deal we might get if we decided to stay on for the remaining 6 nights of our trip. I’m glad I asked – here’s what they quoted:
In total that worked out even cheaper than any of the rates I could see online (which I couldn’t use, because I was already getting staying too many nights for free) and even though NYE was a higher rate for that night, the total was only $30 more than the deal we’d already booked at South Point. No brainer. So yes, I’m paying for part of the trip but it’s still an immense discount. If you were to book this same trip (the last 11 nights in December) via harrahs.com using the regular room rates – even now, with room rates at rock bottom – it would still cost $1300! To complete the coup, all we need now is to hope for a strip-facing room for a view of the fireworks. The room type I’ve booked does say "mountain view" but in June the same booking got me upgraded to an excellent Strip view. You never know… I’m a bit disappointed that Four Queens haven’t started sending me any offers yet. The amount of play needed to max out their excellent summer promotion was also meant to be enough to start getting me free room mailers. Maybe it’s too early still, or maybe as that’s the only time I’ve ever played there (on my players card, at least!) they’re going to wait until I play again without a massive edge before giving me anything for free. Still, Claire has been getting room offers from them for a couple of years and this month it’s suddenly been upgraded. I don’t know if this counts as a full RFB comp (it would be our first if it is) but the deal reads:
In the small print it does say "food limits apply", but they list almost everywhere there is to eat in the hotel and then there’s a dinner at Hugo’s as well. It’s definitely more than one meal for free – it could easily be all of them! Unfortunately this invitation is only good for one weekend in November, but Claire is going to contact a host to see what they can do for us at Christmas. Definitely has potential. A comped hotel room for New Year’s Eve and a free Christmas dinner would be living the dream. I don’t think we’re quite there yet though! The latest batch of mail from my US mailbox has arrived and thanks to the global economic downturn it’s a good one. Hooray for recession, I think. Let’s start with one of the most peculiar Las Vegas casino offers I’ve seen.
This mailer came out of the blue from the Las Vegas Hilton. They must have been desparately trawling back through their player databases of yesteryear to try to drum up some business. We last stayed at the Hilton in December 2004 and have only been back since to watch several NFL games all at the same time on their giant HDTV setup. Their excellent Sunday football party with $1 hot dogs and $2 parlay cards is absolutely the most fun you can have for $3, and it’s about the only thing left to keep drawing people in since the Star Trek Experience closed down. Unless you really like Barry Manilow. $115 for 2 nights, including six buffets! Definitely good value, but it’s a pretty silly deal if you’re going solo. Six buffets in 48 hours? You’d probably explode. It’s still a pretty extensive food comp even if you are sharing a room. I guess if you have dinner for two after you arrive, a lunch or dinner the next day and breakfast before you leave on day 3 it’s easy enough to get full value from the offer but it does restrict your dining choices somewhat. However if you can stomach it all, there’s at least $90 of buffets thrown in (it’s worth $108 if you leave on a Sunday and have brunch) making the room rate ridiculously cheap. The reward credit promo – effectively a 4x points multiplier – is attractive. The Hilton has some reasonable video poker, which would be a break-even or slightly better with this deal, but it’s an all-or-nothing proposition and to earn $50 in reward dollars would take $50,000 of coin-in. That’s in the region of 40 hours of play on a 25c machine! The best bit though? "Offer can be used multiple times, with a minimum of 4 days between trips". I think you’d need 4 days off to recover from all those buffets. It’s official. These two appeared right next to each other in my Facebook news feed today.
I’m considering printing out this screenshot and framing it as a reminder that, occasionally, when your dominating ace-king gets called by either a weaker ace or total garbage, it doesn’t necessarily lose. In this case, both types of hands had a crack – and didn’t make it. Yippee!
America’s favourite sickly sweet, highly calorific roll of lard has come to London. Hello Cinnabon my old friend! I discovered this by accident yesterday when I just happened to be walking through Picadilly Circus, killing time after a meeting which turned out to be much shorter than I expected. In fact I carried on walking right through to Leicester Square past the venue where the World Series of Poker Europe is current taking place. You’d think I might have been a bit more interested in that than I actually was, particularly with time on my hands. Apparently not. It’s still a travesty that the Empire’s iconic marquee sign was torn down to make way for the dullest casino frontage you could imagine. At least now that there’s a major international event taking place, they made a bit of an effort to hang a nice big purple vinyl banner over the balcony. Classy. Anyway, Cinnabon only has a tiny store on the outside of the Trocadero, but it still smells as gorgeous as I remember when you walk past. Which I did several times before taking the plunge. "You want four? In a box?". I didn’t think my order was too complicated, but it took a while to sink in. The store is pretty new, and this could possibly be the first take-out order they had. Turns out they did actually have boxes. I knew this because I’d seen them, right there on the front of the counter. I can’t imagine who put them there though, because the staff seemed oblivious. They also didn’t have any bags big enough for said boxes. But never fear, I got an awesome improvised handle made out of sticky tape.
I’m absolutely positive that must be how they do it in America. Yeah great, I’ll fit right in walking through the West End with that stuck to my fingers. Fortunately I managed to squeeze the box inside my laptop bag and it didn’t travel too badly.
They were definitely similar in shape to their American counterparts, but seemed to be lacking in the addictive white sugary gunk department. The stock photo on wikipedia confirmed that I remembered this right: we’re definitely getting stiffed on the good stuff. And the reason for that? Of course it’s the Great British business model of trying to squeeze every last penny out of customers by selling them something extra that costs next to nothing and should already be part of the deal. In the same vein as Burger King charging 20p for a little packet of ketchup with your £5 meal, Cinnabon have decided that pots of their trademark sugary goodness are 50p each. It can’t be long before somewhere introduces a pay-per-napkin policy. I’m pretty sure that the last time I had a box like this in America, they just threw a handful of those pots into the bag (yes, they had bags). I kinda OD’d on the stuff (needing an extremely greasy cheeseburger afterwards to dilute my blood sugar levels) so I remember that there was a lot of it. Anyway, I ate one at night and I felt my pulse quicken almost immediately and it kept me awake for hours so they still have the same active ingredients. £3.50 each or £10 for 4, in case you’re interested. Not cheap, but a very pleasant way to get one step closer to coronary disease. I think my Poker Tracker just broke.
I’m fairly sure that (a) I haven’t actually lost ninety two grand in one day and (b) that I wouldn’t need a computer program to tell me I was struggling to beat the game if I was spewing at a rate of $26 per hand. That’s an impressive loss rate – more than four big bets per hand at $3/$6 limit, which is apparently where these hands all came from (despite me not having played that limit on Poker Stars for over a year!). If you lost that much money every hundred hands, you’d have a pretty big leak. But every hand? You’d have to try really hard. Like bet and raise on every street, hope someone else comes along for the ride and then fold, giving up a huge pot for a single bet on the river. Every time. Actually I guess it could be pretty easy if the other players are paying attention, but any poker site worth their salt would pick up this betting pattern and flag you as a chip dumper before you can say "I cap it!". This wasn’t me, I swear. God alone knows what’s happened, but I think I probably need to reload my database. Today was first the day I could request my return flight for next summer. I made the call to BMI Diamond Club and spoke to someone who was unusually helpful and pretty efficient and offered to put the me on the waiting list without me needing to ask. There were no seats immediately available (quite possibly because I’ve been too eager and they’re not in the system yet) so my request has been passed on to the relevant department to see if they will make a redemption booking for me anyway. Let’s hope so – the whole point of going mental getting enough flyer miles for Gold status was to ensure I’d be able to get those lovely flat bed business class seats using my miles during peak times. I also looked up the Harrah’s accomodation calendar for the same period. It’s pretty good news (click to view): Claire and I had joked about not needing to rent a house next summer with all the comps we’d racked up between us, but it’s almost a reality. Check this out. All four midweek periods have five-night comps showing at Harrah’s, Paris or Flamingo. Or all three. Chances are Bally’s and Imperial Palace will come available soon too – looks like it only has booking data in the system until the end of July so far. Only Friday and Saturday nights would cost money, and even if Imperial Palace doesn’t step up to save the day with a free Luv Tub room every weekend (it’s already available for the first one) we could probably get by with other room offers from Casino Royale and Four Queens. Whether or not I’m game enough to spend four straight weeks in casino hotels is another matter. That’s the whole point in staying away from the action when we go for the summer, so there is somewhere to escape to. Plus, not having the option to cook (read: bung some hot pockets in the microwave) would make eating a whole lot more expensive, and that’s pretty significant for a long vacation. Not to mention getting fleeced $11.99/day for internet, times 30 days. There’s no major rush to decide mind. It’s still T minus like three hundred and something. I guess I should talk about this. For one thing, I can’t leave that embarassing ski-slope graph as the top entry on my blog. I only need 14 more posts to push it off the bottom completely… I lost my stack with one pair in the first level of a major tournament. I completely suck. It was actually the very last hand of level 1, for what that’s worth, and I had realised this as I’d posted my small blind for 25 just before the clock ticked over. That’s only significant, because I’m not sure whether or not the villian has also realised this as he made an early position raise to 300. Was he looking at the clock to see how much to raise, or at the blinds on the table? Did he think that 300 was three or six times the big blind? I really can’t be sure. There were two callers ahead of me before I looked down at pocket queens. I’d already lost a couple of small pots and was down to 8600 in chips. Everyone else involved covered me. I didn’t like the idea of just calling out of position in a four-way pot with a hand that is very vulnerable, but still probably best. With a nice chunk of cash in the pot already, I made it 1500 to go, hoping to take it down – or be able to lay my queens down if a better hand did decide to speak up. No such luck (well, obviously). Villian just called and the player on the button also called. The flop couldn’t give me a tougher decision to make: 852, all different suits. First to act, what to do? The pot is already way too big (4,850) for a pair of queens. I really hate the spot. I can’t check/fold. I just can’t. But check/raise might not even be an option, and if it is I’m only called if beaten. That leaves taking a stab at the pot, and I fired 3,000 – leaving me with 4,000 and a remote possibility of getting away from the hand if the other two players go nuts. The original raiser immediately moved all-in and the button got out of the way. So I have an overpair to a very low, uncoordinated flop. I only have to call 4,000 to win about 15,000 but surely I can’t be ahead? I really really hate the spot now. So what does Villian have? The game’s only been going an hour and I don’t have much information, but he seems to know what he’s doing. And he has a pair of sunglasses. Pocket 8s, 5s and 2s are all crushing me and would be glad to get it all in right now, but I give him enough credit to be able to pass those hands to my pre-flop re-raise, even if he had raised with them in early position. OK, there is a possibility but only a very small one, and any set here is a huge enough hand that just calling to try to keep the 3rd player around would be a better play anyway. Bigger overpairs have me in big trouble too. Aces and kings would all raise from early position, and may over-raise (if he did so knowingly). But in this pot, I would expect him to put in a third raise to force out the other two players. Why would he want to take either of those hands against three other players, especially when he only has position on one of them? Could he have pocket 9s, 10s or jacks? The big pre-flop raise is a particularly popular weak-ass move with pocket jacks, and those hands all look pretty good here. But are they worth going broke with? Not really. Maybe if he gets to do the betting or raising, but they’re certainly not worth a call all-in. But he might figure I can fold some hands that beat his, or factor in the chance that I’m making a play with AK (which I would often play exactly the same way). He could even be making a move with AK himself. The pot is simply too big and what I thought was a worthwhile pre-flop stab and a compulsory continuation bet has turned the hand into a disaster. I should have just mucked those queens, or just called to try to flop a set, then waited another couple of hours for a better spot. But what matters now is this decision. Can I be ahead often enough to justify calling for the nearly 4-1 pot odds I’ve ended up with? Obviously I decided yes, and I obviously was wrong. He had two kings. I blame the other players in the hand. If they hadn’t called along pre-flop, I could have made my re-raise smaller and the pot would stay under control. Also, if they hadn’t been involved I’d have given villian much more credit for a big pocket pair. Oh my god it’s an awesome trap. Oh noes he got me. He got me good. But although he won my chips which clearly makes it genius, I hate the smooth call with KK there. Talk about giving yourself the best possible chance of losing. Either I have pocket aces or I don’t, and the flop made no difference to whether his hand is best or second best so why wait until then to get the money in, after giving two other players a chance to catch up? He has much more information pre-flop about my hand than I have about his. With some certainty he should know that I don’t have 2s, 5s or 8s and so, by that reasoning, I should have been able to narrow his range for making this play down to almost exclusively AA. If that was the case, I’d gracefully admit that I got it wrong and fell for a clever trap and write "nice hand". As it is, I’m just going to say "Kings? What the fuck?". It’s not a great deal of consolation to be honest though. |
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