|
|
I’d seen plenty of screenshots, which in themselves were enough to get me very excited, but only just discovered this gameplay movie of the forthcoming video game This Is Vegas.
http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/this_is_vegas/screenshots.html
I thought I’d be more interested in being able to drive around a neon-lit virtual world of fake casinos than the clubbing elements, but the dancing missions do look pretty special. I particularly like the way the character’s walk changes the minute he sets foot on the dancefloor.
If it’s possible to connect a dance mat controller, this definitely has the potential to be the best game ever.
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!
Even though Krispy Kreme’s invasion of the UK is well underway with about 40 proper stores – and a number of Tesco supermarkets also stocking their products – it’s all down South still. There’s just four stores North of Oxford.
So today we drove to Manchester to buy donuts. Well, it is my birthday. 🙂
I know for a fact I didn’t ask for the two chocolate ring donuts, I think we missed out on glazed lemon filled at the expense of those, but it doesn’t really matter. They’re all good.
I’ve learned that the Krispy Kreme at Trafford Park is open as a drive thru until 2am some nights, and they bake fresh until 11pm every day. This is the actual definition of temptation.
The question of whether a 90-mile round trip is far enough to put me off returning without any other reason for being in Manchester has yet to be answered.
A month ago, I started playing the drums.
OK, that’s a bit of a romanticisation. What I actually mean is I started playing the drum part on the video game Rock Band.
Still, they reckon that if you can master the songs on "expert" level, you could sit down at a real drum kit, make the same movements and you’d be actually playing that song.
I’m sure that if real drum kits only had four things to hit, all of them being the same shape and each one always making the right sound at the correct volume no matter where or how hard you hit it, and with a couple of them doubling up as tom-toms and cymbals, then this would be true.
However, for someone of my limited co-ordination – and having never picked up a pair of drumsticks in my life before – I consider it something of an achievement that I got my first 100% score on hard level today.
The photo is horrible, sorry – I only had my phone to hand. It just about shows Claire getting 99% on guitar (apparently just one silly mistake away from perfection, she’s done it 100% before) and my massive 100% with a 1016 note streak, both playing hard level on The Clash’s "Should I Stay or Should I Go". I will almost certainly make the effort to fetch a proper camera the first time we both nail it at the same time.
That has happened before, but only on medium difficulty (Pixies "Wave of Mutilation" is pretty straightforward for both parts) and we’ve already gained as many virtual fans in the "world tour" mode as we can without moving up to hard level.
I’m not unhappy at acing The Clash, but I actually wanted my first 100% song to be Weezer’s "Buddy Holly" so I had an excuse to embed that video rather than just link to it. Or Nine Inch Nails, because that sounds like it should be a lot harder than it actually is. I’ve been very close on both.
Or for bonus cheese points, it could have been The B-52s "Roam". I don’t care what you think, it’s great fun to play and I already had a 1600+ note streak and came within one brain fart of doing it perfectly!
So, for the next step in my drumming career, I need to decide which route to take. Should I aspire to be as great as this guy, who owns every song on expert level, and has made many top quality videos to prove it?
Yes, he has socks strapped to the drum pads. This is strangely appealing. The only modification I have is a set of Hard Rock logo drumsticks painted with a flame pattern.
Or, should I paint my face blue and start hitting other things? How would that be for a career change?
There’s already an official "stage kit" with lights and a smoke machine due out this summer, but I haven’t heard anything about a paint drumming kit yet. It’s inevitable though, I’m sure.
Apparently Neteller think I’m a VIP. Not really sure how that happened, although I did notice that I now have more than a million Netpoints. They’re probably worth about a buck fifty.
All you can do with Neteller’s loyalty points is use them to enter a prize draw that typically has thousands of entries, and although I’ve no reason to doubt the integrity of the draw this just seems like it would be pouring my points down the drain. I’d rather have the impressive seven-figure balance, thanks. Maybe they’ll even let me buy a t-shirt with them one day too.
But this VIP promotion which I had in my email is very, very juicy:
It’s taken a while to get my head around what I actually have to do to get some free money here. I wrote to ask them to explain exactly how the calculations had been done, because whichever way I looked at my statement I couldn’t see how on earth they had worked out such a high six-weekly average. My total transactions since the start of the year are only slightly more than that!
They replied:
The six week average was calculated by taking the average of your weekly transactions between January 1 2008 and March 31 2008. Only weeks that you had at least one accepted transfer to a merchant were used in calculating your average. The weekly average was then multiplied by six to give a total average for six weeks (because the offer period is six weeks long we had to calculate your original average over the same time period).
The VIP bonus offer is based on your total transfers to merchants between April 20 2008 and May 31 2008,only transfers to merchants will be included in calculating your bonus (only funds that you send to merchants).
So it sounds like they’ve inflated the six-weekly average by ignoring weeks where I had no activity. It doesn’t really matter though. They’ve said that this offer is based on precisely my next six weeks of activity – no further calculations required – and because they’ve told me what my target amount is, I can make sure I achieve – and surpass – it.
Basically, Neteller is going to pay back a percentage of their fees to users who exceed the target level of transactions. Using Neteller to transfer money in and out of gaming sites costs the player nothing – instead Neteller charges transactions fees to the merchants.
They charge 3.9% on deposits (the same that you pay as a user for a person-to-person transfer) and 2.0% on withdrawals. Getting back 1.5% of your total deposits amounts to nearly 25% "fee-back", however because you never actually pay those fees yourself, it’s just free money.
It’s Neteller that’s the real winner of course – they just want to grab as much in transaction fees as possible – but it’s a no-lose proposition for the player. It’ll be the casinos and poker rooms that get hit who pay for it.
Just think about the numbers. I’ve started off abusing this promotion with a $1,000 deposit into UltimateBet, who were offering a 20% (max $200) deposit bonus today. I already had more than $500 in bonus dollars sitting in my account that I’ve never had the inclination to play for. Apart from a few satellites and the odd game of roshambo, I never play there. Hopefully, depositing in response to an email promotion should make my deposit look a little less out-of-character than it really is.
This deposit cost UB $39, and I intend to cash it out as soon as possible which will cost them another $20. This is one of the fussier sites in terms of getting your money back because you have to be seen to play some poker before a withdrawal is authorised. Still, there’s no way I’m going to generate $59 in rake before getting my money back.
Clearly, the optimal strategy is to cycle as much money as you can get your hands on as often as possible. I don’t think it’s worth adding money to my Neteller bankroll just for this – you have to pay fees to deposit and then again to withdraw that will reduce the value of the promotion considerably – but certainly for the next six weeks my entire bankroll is going to be in play. In, out, in, out, play a few hands, do the hokey pokey cokey and turn it around.
That’s what it’s all about – easy, risk free money.
I used to cycle funds like this at Party Poker all the time. In the good old days, you could earn 1000 bonus PartyPoints just for making a deposit of $500 and not withdrawing it for a week. This was way out of proportion to the number of points you’d earn from actually playing as a casual player (if I remember right, 20 raked hands earned 5 points) so this is the only reason I have so much Party gear. At 2000 points for a polo shirt, you could order one for free after every two deposits you made – without playing a single hand of poker!
I’ve also been looking for a way to cycle money on a credit card that awards frequent flyer miles, worth about 3p per £1 spent. The dream is to use up my entire credit limit every month, then settle the card immediately, rinse and repeat. Unfortunately, unless it’s genuine spending this is pretty difficult. I’ve looked into laundering through online gambling sites but it doesn’t work – you have to pay a cash advance fee on the deposits which costs more than the benefits you get from spending on the card.
No such problem with Neteller though, it’s just money transfers and it costs me nothing. As long as it’s a casino or poker site that accepts payment directly in US Dollars, and I’m confident that I’ll get my money back pretty quickly then it’s fair game. Even the Cryptologic cashiers that charge $1 for a withdrawal are profitable plays!
After I meet the $2,530 target, which won’t take long, every $1,000 I can shift is going to earn me $15. Doesn’t sound like much, but don’t underestimate how often I’ll be trying this – I’ve got six weeks after all!
I thought it would be virtually impossible to reach a prize-worthy position in any of the new PokerStars Battle of the Planets sit-and-go leaderboards playing only single table tournaments, but obviously I just forgot how great I am.
Seriously though, look at this unbelievable run of results I needed to even get up to 8th place: 7 x 1st, 5 x 2nd and 3 x 3rd.
That’s 15 in-the-money finishes out of 20 tournaments. Call it a game of skill if you like, but that kind of form takes more than a little luck.
You can see from my profit graph that I’ve never had a streak quite like it before. Isn’t it pretty?
I know there’s bound to be an almighty downswing waiting around the corner, but I can brag while it’s going well can’t I?
Each Battle of the Planets league ends on Saturday night and resets on Sunday morning so there’s still two full days of play left and my position certainly isn’t safe. 504 points was enough for both 7th and 8th place last week, but right now 8th place is the best I can possibly get with that score.
If I manage to stay in to the top ten, I’ll win some cash (it’s $80 for 8th) and a ticket to the monthly $50,000 freeroll. It’s a triple shootout format (729 players max) but with eight different leagues, two "orbits" in each and ten players winning a ticket each week, in a four-week month that’s 640 tickets given away for the tournament. Some players will win two tickets and some winners won’t turn up so the value of the freeroll ticket must be at least $100.
If I don’t hang on to the giddy heights of top ten stardom, there’s still some prize money for finishing in the top 30. I should have a pretty good shot at that at least.
I realised – completely by accident when I happened to load the right number of tournament summaries into Poker Tracker at the right time – that I’d recently reached $10,000 spent on these turbo SNG entries. I only mention it because that same money (if I actually had it all in the same place at the same time) would get me one World Series of Poker Main Event entry.
Doing things this way involves a little less variance, though. Sure, I’m not going to win ten million but I’m also not going to lose ten grand all to one suckout. It’d take 625 different suckouts.
Here’s the magic stats:
I still can’t believe that this is close to being a reliable sample size. My last eight results alone (1st, 1st, 2nd, 4th, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 1st) pushed the overall ROI up from the 16.6% shown here to 18.4%. Maybe when I’ve played a few thousand I’ll have a little more confidence in the numbers.
EDIT: 5 hours to go and I’m 10th. Gonna be close.
EDIT: Sodding eleventh. A big fuck you to "$tr8t Hu$tla" who not only has a shit screen name, he also waited until the very last minute to score 521 points. I hope I get the chance to bust you soon!
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.
A week ago, Poker Stars launched their "Battle of the Planets" leaderboard week for sit-and-go tournaments. You get points whenever you finish in the money, then your best blocks of 20 results (the "low orbit") or 100 results (the "high orbit") determine your league position.
As I happened to be playing quite a few SNGs at the moment anyway, it’s looked to be a nice free shot at some extra money.
My first set of results is now in: not even close.
The likely difficulty for single table sit-and-go players like myself is that although the leagues are divided by entry fee you also have to compete against players in the 18-man and 27-man tournaments, and they receive nearly twice as many points for a first place finish as you do for winning a 9-man SNG.
Of course, whatever you play it would take a pretty insane run of luck to win one of these things, but five or six first places in 3-table tournaments from a block of 20 seems much more achievable than ten or eleven single table victories in the same period – that would be first place at least every other game – to get the same number of points.
 ryan422323, this week’s winner in the "Earth – low orbit" (blocks of 20 for $10-$19 tournaments – the level I’m playing at), looks like a losing player who suddenly got lucky at the right time. It happens.
As expected, Sharkscope reveals his most recent results are from a mixture of 18-, 27- and 45-man sit and go tournaments (although the 45-man results don’t count for this leaderboard – that’s apparently enough players to be considered a real tournament).
 Second place finisher jellycz has had a rather better tournament career, with Sharkscope showing a long term return on investment of 19% across his PokerStars tournaments.
Still, he would have had to do much better than that over the block of 20 that counted towards his leaderboard position.
In fact we can work out just what kind of return is needed to win the Battle of the Planets from the final points totals.
Regardless of the buy-in, the points you receive are based on the prize distribution rather than the actual dollar amounts won. The number of points is the same as the prize money would be for a $10 buy-in. For example, first place in a 9-man SNG gets 45 points – although you actually win $67.50 for a $15+1 stake or $112.50 for a $25+2, the prize is always 4.5x your stake. First place in a 27-man SNG wins 8x the stake, so you receive 80 points.
So, with 637 points the winner would have received $637 in real money if he had played 20 sit-and-go tournaments that cost $10 each. That’s an amazing 219% ROI! Second place with 552 points is still-insane 176% ROI.
My hottest block landed me 369 points, with 11 in-the-money finishes out of 20 (5 x 1st, 4 x 2nd, 2 x 3rd). That’s a fiendishly good 85% ROI, and I finished 256th.
The Rt Hon Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, spotted this evening on BBC television wearing a Party Poker shirt.
OK, it’s actually a Leyton Orient football strip so it probably doesn’t count. But I did get a bit excited for a moment and think that maybe he’d bought it using his PartyPoints.
Harrah’s love me now, it’s official.
So I moaned a bit before about not having any good offers since I got Diamond, and they said it was because I hadn’t actually played on any of the shitty games they had in Las Vegas.
Fine, I thought, let’s give them some action and see what happens.
Claire and I spent not much more than an hour pumping money through the best video poker games we could find at Harrah’s Las Vegas. Tucked away in a bank of multi-line games there was one multi-line machine with 5c 10-play 9/5 Jacks or Better (98.5%) and the next best was 7/5 Bonus Poker (98.0%) at 25c. Definitely not great, but the best of a bad bunch.
Between us, we racked up 355 base reward credits on my card which means we must have played $3550 in total. If you reckon on a 2% house edge on those games, the overall expected loss is $71. In fact we won a bit on the day because Claire of course hit about 25 royal flushes.
That expected loss number is not quite as bad as it sounds. We also got a combined 606 bonus reward credits (how these are calculated at any given time is an official secret) taking the total for the day to 961, worth a whopping $9.61 in instant food comp almost anywhere at any of Harrah’s casinos.
Except at Mon Ami Gabi. I found this out the hard way. You can’t swipe your card there because it’s not operated by the casino, although I asked at the players club about this later and apparently you can get a comp slip before you go to dinner if you care to guess roughly how much it’s going to be. However, our fake French waiter (who actually sounded Italian) didn’t think to even tell us this, he just shook his head at my Total Rewards card and we had to pay using real money.
I’d be annoyed about this if it didn’t mean I still had enough comp on the card to have to go back there again in the summer and do it right. It was a fantastic steak with a fantastic view. I’m kicking myself for only taking a picture of the latter.
Anyway, it seems that $3550 of action in Las Vegas was enough to get me on the radar for room offers worth way more than $71.
Finally, the Imperial Palace is free! As well as a "Deluxe Room", sometimes their web site gives me the option to book a "Luv Tub" room (putting a Roman bath in the rooms in an Asian-themed hotel is obvious, no) completely free of charge, and for up to five nights!
That’s pretty cool. The reservations site says "sold out" for every date I’ve tried if I’m not logged in so I don’t know what they usually go for (they might even be restricted to players club bookings) but on the dates I can’t get a comp the Luv Tub rates are about $60 more than a Deluxe room.
We don’t need any hotel accomodation for the summer, but I might just book it anyway and take the little bottles of shampoo. Or if anyone out there is looking for a good deal and the dates are right, buy me a drink and I’ll think about checking you in 😉
There’s also quite a few comps showing for me at Bally’s, Flamingo and Harrah’s and the odd night elsewhere, as well as reduced rates for all the other hotels.
The best bargain I found has to be four nights at the Rio at Christmas (the flights are already booked, need you ask) totally free. In fact, it was only $50 to add a 5th night so I splashed out and went for that too. If enough offers come along later to cover the rest of the trip, I expect I can always cancel that night anyway!
The best part is because every room in the Rio is a suite, I can finally boast about getting comped a suite in Vegas!
|
|
Comments