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I was sure I’d done a player-to-player transfer on Full Tilt before today, when I just sent a few bucks to Paul Sandells for a stake in his action in the WSOP Circuit event next month.
But I’m sure I would have remembered this screen.
I just don’t get why this is useful. If you’re going to give me some kind of verification that I entered the right username, what’s the problem with telling me the full name of his city?
This is what other poker sites do, if they even give any verification at all. I mean, really, anyone who is transferring real money to another player is going to make sure they have the right username and look back at what they’ve typed, not just hammer the keyboard randomly and hope it ends up in the right place. Are they?
Is that actually this player’s avatar displayed? How would I know unless (a) I’m sending money to someone I’ve actually played with before (which I’m not) and (b) I have your horrible cartoon monkey/gnome/dude with afro avatars switched on (which, for the sake of sanity, I don’t).
Sometimes you won’t even be sure what city the other guy will have put on his account, but you’ll know roughly – and this was the case with Paul. Even seeing London rather than Lisbon, Lima or Los Angeles here would give me a clue as to whether this is the right guy. That "L" really doesn’t narrow it down much.
Jeez, if you’re worried about giving out too much personal information just show the name of the country he’s from, or a little flag picture if you want to be super cool. You can already see any player’s country at the poker table without even siting down.
That would be much more useful than making me play bloody I Spy whenever I want to send money.
Some suckouts are just brilliant. Hopefully this is the turning point for me tonight after 8 straight out-of-the-money finishes in sit and go tournaments. I finished 3rd – it’s a start.
It was the first steal attempt I’d made in this tournament, and it all went badly wrong. I open-pushed ace-five from the button and got called immediately by pocket kings and then immediately afterwards by ace-queen suited.
When the cards were turned over I said out loud, "Oh great, I can’t win". Nobody was there to listen, or to remind me I actually had a 9% chance of taking it down.
The flop brought hope in the form of a mighty gutshot draw. "Oh, I can now – with a two", I continued for the benefit of the audience at home. You don’t always have to call it a deuce.
And the sweetest turn card sealed the deal. Ship it.
The pictures in the spam got all screwed up, but the offer is still a good one…
Been a while since I had one of these. Thanks, Al. Keep your head on…
Play it right and it’s a completely risk free £50 bet. You just have to pick a bet based on a fairly even matchup, with a limited downside and as few different possible outcomes as possible. That way you don’t need a freak result to win big on a no-risk spread bet.
 The Win Index on a football game is usually a good candidate, and I’ve picked the glamour fixture Drogheda United vs Shamrock Rovers for this bet. I don’t know anything about football these days, so an Irish game is as good as any. With three apparently strong favourites (Man Utd, Liverpool, Chelsea) playing in the English televised games this weekend, the market on this game is a better fit for this bet than any other.
 The Win Index awards 25 points fora a win, 10 for a draw and nothing for a loss. By selling Drogheda at 15 for £5 per point, I lose exactly £50 (maximum value from this promotion) if they win the game. A draw wins me £25 (£5 x 5 points) and if Shamrock come out on top I win £75 (£5 x 15 points).
It’s all settled after one game, even with a draw, as both winning outcomes are good returns on a £50 free bet.
I had to check to be sure, but yes – Shamrock Rovers do play in green.
EDIT: Seventy five quid, tyvm. Shamrock Rovers won 1-0, thanks to an early goal from a dude named Murphy.
I was marvelling in the summer at how a junk shop pretending to be a Las Vegas casino memorabilia store had managed to put a standard Hooters carrier bag up for sale as "vintage" gear and price it at $7.50. But perhaps they saw something coming.
The Review Journal has reported that breast-themed Hooters Hotel and Casino is to be sold and redeveloped. The property celebrated its 2nd birthday just last month.
There’s not a great deal I’ll miss about the place, although I had discovered that Hooters was a good place to park when the major hotels on the South end of the strip were busy and limited to guests only.
However the casino had no games that I’d bother going out of my way for and the couple of times I walked past the poker room there wasn’t even a single game going on.
 I tried to get some value out of the slot club signup offer. The cuddly owl mascot in a Hooters T-shirt was almost as tempting as a free buffet or even cash, but only after I’d signed up did I realise you had to earn slot points on three consecutive days to get him.
Free stuffed toy, or never having to come back here again… Turned out it really wasn’t a tough decision.
The downfall of Hooters is, presumably, because if you’re looking for the thing guys want to see more than anything in the whole wide world (see one minute video below, if you really need it explaining..) you have quite a few options in Las Vegas.
With so many strip clubs, topless shows, hot girls direct to your room and legal whorehouses just an hour away, do guys actually come to Sin City to eat chicken wings served by a girl in a tight t-shirt and orange hotpants – just like they can get back at home?
Now, where can I get a beer sandwich?
I’ve finally heard the sad news that broke over the weekend about the death of game designer and writer Barron Vangor Toth.
I was a devotee of Barron’s weekly poker column on Gutshot.com. He wrote mostly about fixed-limit Hold’em and somehow managed to turn his accounts of probably the least dramatic poker game there is into a compelling read.
He died from cancer aged 34.
That’s so sick.
It’s T-21 and the traditional jumbo-playing-cards-above-the-fireplace countdown to my next Las Vegas trip has begun:
Everything is finally booked now and it’s going to be a bit of a jaunt – four hotels in 9 days!
We start off at the charred remains of Monte Carlo for a pretty good $69.95/night. With tax the total is $152.50, but the package includes $25 in food credit, $10 in slot play and $5 to spend at Starbucks. I’m sure it will all get used!
Effectively that makes this stay just $112.50 – a bargain for that resort, but it’s still three times as much as we’re paying for the rest of the trip. Six of the next seven nights don’t cost a penny!
On Day 3 we drive out to the Colorado River for a complimentary night at Harrah’s Laughlin. We could spend as much time as possible here racking up Total Rewards credits on the video poker at Harrah’s to try to extend that elusive Diamond status for another year. Or we could play a better game at almost any other casino in town.
For days 4 and 5, we’re back in Las Vegas at Terrible’s. It’s a better-than-free deal: they’re giving me $50 in free slot play just for showing up. In fact, I have a feeling that Mr Terrible has a complex about guests actually showing up. He charged a $50 deposit to my card (for my complimentary room) when I booked, and apparently I’ll get this back at check-out.
So, if I actually turn up they give me $50 to play through their machines. And if I’m still there two days later I get my $50 deposit back. Really, the place isn’t that bad.
From day 6 we finally stay put for a few days. It’s four nights at the Four Queens, three of them comped and one more for just $35. Claire arranged this all over email, no credit card required even for the paid night. Apparently a little bit of video poker play goes a long way here still.
She did get a second offer for three more nights in April, which is just too late for this trip. However the same mailer also has an offer another $40 slot play for free though, which it looks like she will be able to claim on the morning of April 1st, just before we fly home. Lovely.
So all in all, we have all 9 nights booked for a total cost of about $190. But there’s $130 coming back in food credit and slot play! Not quite the totally free trip we were aiming for, but it’s getting closer!
This junk email just in, with a little inspriation for Mother’s Day.
I can honestly say I would have never thought of this.
Hey Mum, where do you want to go? Stansted is meant to be nice this time of year, but I heard they have a fantastic multi-story at Leeds-Bradford.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the clinking of a single champagne glass. I’m finally done playing on Paddy Power Poker, and that’s cause for a mini-celebration.
I actually quite like the iPoker software and there’s usually good game selection at the levels I play, but the problems is that I never really knew where I was with those games. Mixing and matching so many different limits probably didn’t help though.
I was up and I was down and I was swinging all over the place. Every limit I played I was in the green for a while, and then it swung back in to the red and back up again. Some of them stayed there. While 23,662 hands is be a reasonable number to start seeing getting an idea of how I played, it’s not much use with only a few thousand hands on each of the fixed limit games.
However, looking at the percentage of hands I played at $3/$6 compared to the other limits, I should probably re-evaluate whether I’m actually comfortable playing for those stakes. The only thing that kept me coming back was my data on the players at that level suggested they could often be much looser than the usual nits at $2/$4, and so I thought I was finding good spots. I just never really made them pay.
The good news though – despite being a loser on paper, I’m still leaving the site with about a grand more than I came with, thanks to signup bonuses, monthly cash rewards, player point redemptions and a friendly affiliate referral. But boy was it hard work, and barely worth it.
But now that I’ve used up all of the $600 sign up bonus and been left with a mountain to climb to get back into VIP status (their member level formula looks at the last 3 months activity, so I’d now have to over-compensate for a quiet January) and I’m moving on.
At least I got a nice little hot streak to end it all with. These all happened within five minutes of each other (check out the timestamps on the screenshots!) and were part of a very welcome $200 upswing.
1. My biggest pot ever at $1/$2
 Well, I can’t be sure it was actually the biggest I ever had but it felt like it, and the action was amazing. $65 is a 33 big bets pot, and I took it down with pocket kings which made a full house on a board of 556KQ.
It was capped on every street except the flop, with the two other guys involved seeing something I obviously missed in their KQ and 99 hands.
Click the thumbnail to see the full hand history.
2. Table selection paying off.
 I’d seen a particularly juicy-looking $3/$6 table but it took me an hour to get the right seat. I’m quite fussy about where I sit now. Playing fixed limit in particular, there’s so many good players that you have to try to sit as close to the immediate left of any mark you find to play the maximum number of hands against them in position.
I’d had my eye on seats 6 and 9 who were both seeing over 40% of flops. By the time I got into position in seat 2, two other seats had also been filled by fishy players. Click the table thumbnail to see what a good game should look like. On iPoker, this almost never happens, and especially at this level.
 The first hand I got involved with was perfect. Mr Loose had limped in and I raised him with AJs. Everyone else got out of the way for a magic all-heart flop. He’d limped in out of position with two small hearts, I had two large ones and he paid me off very nicely thankyou.
3. Royal flush, baby
It’s only seven months since my last one, but this always deserves a picture.
 I got called to the river by pocket kings, which had flopped a set but got scared by the possibly flush and straight options.
Shame the board didn’t pair on the river, really. 🙂
The message to Las Vegas bargain hunters is clear: fire is good.
After the blaze on the roof of the Monte Carlo last month, the hotel is re-opening on Friday and has slashed room rates as low as $70 until June to try to fill up the hotel. The deal also includes $25 dining credit, $10 slot play and $5 for Starbucks into the bargain.
I’ve just booked a $70 room for the first two nights of my upcoming trip. It’s still better value than anything I can get from Harrah’s with my Diamond card, apart from Imperial Palace. The next closest competition was Bally’s for $75/night, and that’s without the extra freebies you get at Monte Carlo.
I will get to use Total Rewards for a night at Harrah’s Laughlin though at least. I discovered that even though the rate calendar shows $31/night or whatever, if I actually click some dates to book it then it suddenly turns into a comp. I could book up to five nights at a time for free, it’s just a shame that I can’t ever see us wanting to stay there for that long in one trip.
I had the run of the hotel too; a choice of classic, luxury or premium room in either of the towers. The only differences I could see were a choice between flat screen TV or a view of the river. I went with the view.
The rest of the trip looks like it will be taken care of using comps from Terrible’s (2 nights free) and Four Queens (3 nights free + 1 @ $35). T-38!
"There might be bluff, there might be fluff, here at Premier League poker".
Just one of the dozens of random soundbites that Jesse May has been coming out with for the tape while we waited for this evening’s heat to begin.
One of the perks of reporting on a televised poker tournament is being able to see all the bits that don’t make it to the final show. What I’d do right now for a capture card in my laptop and a sly cable into the live video feed.
Earlier, May introduced Phil Hellmuth as "eleven time WSOP champion" and the pair recorded a punditry piece about the upcoming game.
We don’t get to hear what is happening on the other end of May’s earpiece, but clearly the Powers That Be weren’t quite happy with it, so they had to go again.
But first, Hellmuth had a request. "If you’re going to say ‘eleven’, say ‘record’ baby. I worked hard for that record". Who on earth is powerful enough to argue with that?
They began again. "I am joined this evening by … err … record … err".
It’s the first time I’ve seen the Voice of Poker lost for words, but he quickly reaffirmed his legendary status. He laughed it off for about half a second, put his game face back on and nailed it the second time.
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