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This is exactly what’s supposed to happen when you limp out of position and then call raises with medium pocket pairs. Although of course it hardly ever does, so it was particularly sweet to catch a miracle – and get paid – twice in a row.
Button ($37.40)
SB ($21.12)
BB ($8.50)
UTG Hero ($50)
UTG+1 ($22.05)
MP ($20.25)
MP ($17.50)
CO-1 ($48.75)
CO ($50.45)
Preflop: Hero is UTG with 8 8
Hero calls 0.50, UTG+1 raises to 2, 1 fold, MP calls 2, 5 folds, Hero calls 1.50.
Flop (6.75) Q A 8
Hero checks, UTG+1 bets 5.50, 1 fold, Hero raises to 48, UTG+1 moves all-in for 14.55.
Turn (74.80) T
River (74.80) 4
Hero shows 8 8
UTG+1 shows A Q
Hero wins 74.80 with Three of a kind, Eights
Button ($20.87)
SB ($8)
BB ($50)
UTG Hero ($72.50)
UTG+1 ($20.25)
MP ($15.50)
MP ($48.75)
CO-1 ($50.45)
CO ($37.40)
Preflop: Hero is UTG with 7 7
Hero calls 0.50, 4 folds, CO raises to 2, 3 folds, Hero calls 1.50.
Flop (4.75) 9 3 7
Hero checks, CO bets 4, Hero raises to 70.50, CO moves all-in for 31.40.
Turn (110.65) 8
River (110.65) J
Hero shows 7 7
CO shows A A
Hero wins 110.65 with Three of a kind, Sevens
I promise these were back-to-back hands on the same table. It says I was in the same position for both, which makes that sound a little fishy, but it’s totally true! A new player sat down to my right to take the big blind for the second hand, so I really was first to act on two consecutive deals.
Seeing as I’d already unticked "auto-post blinds" and was just getting ready to finish for the night, I’m quite glad he came along to give me one more hand…
It’s been a few weeks since there was a nice juicy promo from Sporting Index. In fact they tried to run one last week that I was going to play, but it got pulled due to "technical issues". I was a bit worried they’d realised they were giving too much away, but the same deal is back this weekend: net losses refunded on their new virtual game up to £50.
Weekends apparently now start on Thursday morning too.
Springo is a spread betting game based on bingo where you can bet on all sorts of wacky number things. There’s a card with 24 numbers and balls are drawn from 1-80. You could bet on how many numbers on your card are matched in 55 balls drawn (the spread is 17.4 to 17.8), or how many balls are spat out until your first hit (2.9 to 3.2).
You can also gamble on whether the numbers you match on your card form a particular patterns, like a plus sign, bullseye or heart.
Or for the truly degenerate, you can play one of the markets where numbers are multiplied together to get that oh-so important volatility. The spread for "First hit x Last hit" is 1385-1405 – bet £1 per point and you could win £3845 or lose £1385.
So here’s how I played it. There’s no even money bet in this game, or even anything that’s equivalent to fixed odds. So I took the least volatile market and the smallest stake possible: I played "Draw to a hit" ten times, buying at 3.2 for the minimum stake of 91 pence per point.
That bet meant the worst downside was £2 each game, with a maximum theoretical win of £43.50. The maximum likely win is much, much lower, as you’d have to draw 55 balls without hitting a single one on your card and that doesn’t leave much room for error. That’s every single number you don’t have except one. It’s so unlikely, in fact, that I can’t even be bothered to start working the odds. Astronomical. But there’s still the chance of a decent win for a controlled stake if things go the right way.
The first two games I played I matched the very first ball. That £4 maximum loss was not a good start, but playing this strategy it all comes down to the last game anyway: just try to lose as little as possible until you’ve qualified for the refund and then lump whatever you have left on one bet. Or, if you win during the qualifying period, you can just take that money and leave.
After 10 spins I was actually up by one unit: a massive 91p profit. But I decided to let it ride.
Buying for a pretty random £23.14 per point meant the maximum downside was £50.91 – perfect. The result was a good one too… five balls before a hit! A 1.8 unit win, or £41.65 in real money. Kerching!
May I be among the first to openly show my support for, and in fact to encourage, Dusk Till Dawn bringing in house-banked casinos games. Because at 11:30pm on Sunday night, just after my pocket kings ran into pocket queens without me making a straight, I couldn’t be bothered to hang around waiting for spot in a side game to open up, so I just left.
I really don’t want to see this club fall victim to its own pretensiousness. I already mentioned the state-of-the-art bathroom and thug-ass bouncers, didn’t I? Good job I had the right shoes on, or my feet weren’t getting under any of their tables. My word they think they’re great.
Indeed, it is all very fancy. I was particularly impressed with the variety of colours of the poker tables. Particularly the hot pink cloth. Sadly I only got to play on a blue table, and that alone is probably enough to get me back for a second visit. The bathroom was just as pictured, with the exception of a few puddles. Some people just don’t respect a designer piss pot.
I certainly don’t want to see the incredible hard work it’s taken to get the venue finally open, in the face of extreme pressure from the major casino chains, go down the drain. It should be of some satisfaction to the owners that word started to spread that Gala’s tournament only had 34 runners. The resident know-it-all at my table – from whom I learned that iPhones do not have a screensaver and constantly display what you’re listening to in full screen; he was rocking out to Gold: The Best of Spandau Ballet – said there’s usually 80 or 90 in the Sunday game.
Dusk Till Dawn’s entire reason for existing is to be a poker venue that is not a casino, depsite requiring a full casino license to operate. It’s been a conscious decision to snub the more profitable games such as blackjack and roulette and remain purely poker.
There wasn’t even a single fruit machine machine in sight, or even one of those equally-rigged but extremely popular "skill bingo" games where you slap "accept" or "reject" as quickly as you can to match balls to your card as they are drawn at a speed just just slow enough to stop you from winning with a perfect game, unless it’s time to satisfy the minimum payout criteria.
Before DTD opened I often said, only half-jokingly, that it would surely only be a matter of time before house-banked casino games start creeping in "by popular demand". It’s not that I’m desparate to play blackjack or roulette in between hands – in fact my vote would be for video poker, although a poker-based table game like Let It Ride or Carribean Stud would also be a good fit – but I really can’t see how it would do more harm than good.
So I’m more than a little worried that the exclusivity they have striven to achieve, the very thing which sets them apart from any other casino, could also be an obstacle – and not just in terms of developing new players and generating enough revenue to keep the place afloat once the novelty wears off. It’s just great poker. I do mean great poker, but it is just poker.
The tournament on Sunday was a superb structure. 5000 starting chips, a 30 minute clock and every possible blind level you can think of (in fact, they slipped in 150/300 with no ante in addition to the levels listed on the web site). I figure this structure has a half-life of about 3 hours, and when I busted after nearly 4 hours, there were about 40 players left from 90 who started, and (somehow, in an invitation-only tournament) one alternate. The blinds were 200/400 with a 25 ante and the average stack was about 11k – about 30 big blinds – so it’s not even close to becoming a pushfest at that point.
If my estimates are right, there’d be two tables remaining sometime after 1am, with the final table kicking off between 3am and 4am and average stacks of about 20 big blinds. A little short, but it’s far from over as dawn approaches. If you get this far and don’t have to go to work the next day, you’ll have a huge edge in any deal-making – just stall until you get the price you want!
So what is there to do when you get knocked out? When I went to check, there were two sit-and-go lists, both for twenty quid and with a choice between normal (10 minute blinds) and turbo (6 minute blinds). It’s awesome that they’d make such a distinction between getting three hands per level versus as many as five. Quite the opposite of the main tournament, and remembering how much I hated the $60 SNGs at the MGM Grand (which had a massive 15 minute clock, and automatic shufflers) I decided this wasn’t for me. Where’s the dice table?
I could have got into a £5/£5 No Limit Hold’em game, but I’m not ashamed to say that’s a little on the large side for my cojones. There was also "4/5/6 Card Omaha" on the menu at the same limits. Seems like a gamblin’ game to me…
The smallest game was £1/£2 NL. Hell yeah I’d be buying in short, but you know it makes sense. The rake is high (5% rake is attractive, but a £10 cap much less so) and I expected the competition to be tough. But there was a list, and I just couldn’t figure out what I would do in the meantime. Who knew how long it would be to get a seat, or start a new table? The tournament was busting players slowly and there’s no and I didn’t think many people who were already in a game would be calling it a day just yet. What I really needed was a way to spit off a few quid on a different type of card game.
Call me impatient – I know I am. But I also couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t come alone. The venue is built for players, not spectators, so if you’re hanging around for a companion who is doing a little better than yourself don’t even think about being a railbird. The dramatic ampitheatre-style layout actually means there isn’t actually a rail where you can stand and watch the action. In fact the tables are a little too close together, with seats 4 through 7 on adjacent tables both getting bumped when someone walks between them.
It’s a bit easier to get a view of the ground-floor final table (they were still playing from Saturday night when I arrived) but you could go broke after a couple of hours and, if you’re not interested in side games, have nothing to do but admire the bathroom for another six before there’s anything to be cheering for.
I guess I’m lucky then to be content being a poker loner, and to have a partner who even encourages me to piss off on my own to play cards now and again. At least, I think that’s a good thing…
I only managed to get this crappy photo before I decided that suspiciously hanging around the Dusk Till Dawn car park with a camera – which had already alerted three bored bouncers to my activity, when I’m sure I’d specifically told it not not to flash – was probably a bad idea.
In case you can’t actually see anything, it’s a Chrystler MPV, registration: K10 DTD.
So whose car is this? Simon "king-ten" Trumper doesn’t quite have the right ring to it, does it?
After I’ve enjoted the champagne and canapes at the last of the Dusk Till Dawn opening weekend parties this evening, I’ll be playing a little cards.
Palazzo, the Venetian’s sister resort in Las Vegas, has delayed it’s "soft opening" from December 20th to December 28th. Which means that I’ll be actually be in town for it, although I’m not sure if that’s really something to get excited about.
The casino will open, obviously, but there’s no rush to get all the amenities completed for this date. The "grand opening" isn’t until January 17th and even pre-delay we knew the retail mall – an extention to the Grand Canal Shoppes and, naturally, to the canal itself – wasn’t going to be ready until Jan 18th.
I don’t imagine that missing out on a few days’ business either side of Christmas will make a whole heap of difference. Anyone with an existing reservation has been moved to The Venetian without them breaking a sweat – there’ll be no shortage of rooms to be able to do that at that time of year.
The new opening day is the Friday before New Year, and with the 31st falling on a Monday the busiest weekend of the year in Vegas is going to be an extended one.
I don’t know how many of the 3,000 all-suite rooms in Palazzo are actually expected to be finished in time for the soft opening (let’s face it, I doubt anybody will even notice if the hotel isn’t ready as long as the casino is open) but they are taking reservations at $599 and upwards a night for New Years Eve alone, and relocating guests to a suitable alternative on the busiest night of the year might not be quite so easy if there are further delays.
I’m sure I’ll check it out, but there’s really no specific appeal to me of another Venetian; there’s not going to be another poker room (not much need with the major one in the Venetian) and the two resorts will share a players club, so there won’t even be a new member signup bonus to take advantage of!
The closest thing anyone gets to a picture postcard these days, from my dear sister, who I’m sure is just trying to make me jealous…
So within just a couple of hours of landing we have:
[X] Drinking in the afternoon
[X] Likelihood of eating excessively
[X] No intention of sleeping
[X] Wanna gamble…
A+ message delivers. She’s off to a cracking start.
It’s a lousy picture because I ripped it from a PDF copy of a magazine article that’s been optimised for print, and I have no idea how to convert that back to a version that looks good on screen – short of printing it and scanning in back in. It’s not really worth that much effort.
This is a picture of the bathroom at Dusk Till Dawn, the UK’s first dedicated poker club and, self-proclaimed prior to opening, "Europe’s Premier Poker Venue".
"All our basins are done in cherrywood veneer. A lot of expensive finishings have been done in this place. Nothing has been done on the cheap".
I’d love to know if they’ve made the same effort with the Ladies’ bathroom, or are even anticipating any female members at all given their heavily tit-fueled promotion regime, but alas I’ll probably never actually know.
I’ve been 4-tabling 50NL on the iPoker network for about a week and starting to get some decent data into Poker Tracker. Not yet sure if I’ll make a mission out of it like I did on PokerStars earlier in the year – I’m not convinced it’s a great game, and there’s barely enough time before the end of the year to get in enough hands for a reasonable win goal.
Mostly I just want to retain the VIP level I achieved playing $2/4 limit (running like God for a couple of weeks, then crashing back down and giving up) for a sweet $100 monthly cash bonus. Playing for points is only marginally foolish, of course.
I’ve been thinking that there are a lot of super-tight – I mean really stupidly tight – players on there and have been seeing some Poker Tracker stats to that effect, but I just wasn’t really sure if it was just an anomoly at first. There’s always some nits in every game, but when I seem to be always sitting down to see table averages of % flops seen instantly pop up in single figures, it’s a little unusual.
Sure, I still don’t have enough data to know the figures are accurate, and I often have only half the table tracked, but it’s still a whole load more rocks that you’d like to see at the table.
As my data is grows, these trends continue. Just now I was playing against two of the nittiest players I’ve ever seen.
The first had paid to see 6.3% of flops – that’s 30 hands played from the 480 I’d seen him be dealt. Even 12% would be awfully tight, and he’s playing half that. It’s just one every 16. That’s only just more than the frequency you should be dealt a pocket pair. Even if that’s not his strategy, we know he has a very narrow range of hands when he does decide to play which means he’s a fairly predictable opponent (which I like) but he’s using a seat that could be taken by a player who is more likely to dump off his stack the next time I get a lucky flop (which I don’t like).
The other was an impressive 1.8% VP$IP ("voluntarily put money in the pot") over 220 hands. That’s just 4 non big blind hands played from a sample that’s one less than enough to include every possible starting hand (it won’t – that would be a statistical freak – but it’s big enough to start seeing patterns). Of those hands played, we saw two at showdown: he raised JJ from middle position and completed a small blind with 88. Those crazy gamblers.
There are many more players sitting at about 10% VP$IP and that means I’ve been jumping around tables a lot trying to find somebody to actually play with. There is the occasional juicy loose player that helps to keep the table average out of the gutter, but actually very few who fall in-between these extremes. A cynical man might say it’s just full of bots and shills…
It does seems like it’s been much easier than I’m used to to steal blinds and stab at pots, but also much harder to get payoffs with monsters so I’ve tried to start adjusting accordingly. I’m hesitating to go too far with the all-out aggression though because it just seems so unlikely that there would be so many players in one place – a poker site, of all places – who just don’t want to play poker.
I was starting to think that it never, ever went to 3 bets pre-flop in this game, and that all-ins were never called unless it was AA vs AA, or occasionally KK on a short stack. Plenty of ratholers about, but mostly also sitting back and waiting for a big pair. Seemed like winning a full stack was virtually impossible.
But you wait around for a week, then two come along at once.
My pocket kings got it all in pre-flop against an ace-jack for a full stack and it held up, and I flopped the nut straight with AK and re-raised all in against two players to be instacalled by AT – bottom pair, but top kicker. Yummy.
The other player – a 12% rock – said he folded a set. I believe him.
Those two hands literally doubled my win rate on the week. Obviously, I still need more data but here’s a graph that I can savour for the time being.
One of the online casinos I have been bonus-whoring at has a blackjack game with a "7-card Charlie" rule. If you manage to draw seven cards without busting, your hand is automatically a winner against anything except a dealer blackjack.
I know every little is meant to help, but according to The Wizard of Odds, this rule is virtually worthless. It reduces the house edge by just 0.01%.
If you think about it, even with six decks of cards there’s only a very small number of ways you can be dealt a seven card hand like this if you’re playing basic strategy.
You could do it just with 2s and 3s, but it’s going to help if there’s at least a couple of aces in there, and if your first two cards are aces, you always split them so any combinations beginning with AA are never going to go to seven cards.
Often you’ll split pairs of 2s and 3s too, and you’ll double down for one more card on your A2 and A3 against a dealer 5 or 6.
If you start with just one ace, you’ll stop drawing cards on a soft 17 or 18 against most of the dealer’s up cards, and you’ll always stand on a soft 19-21. So to get a seven card hand, you have to skip past that "standing zone" quite specifically (for example: A, 2, A, 2, 6) and then carry on taking cards once you get to 12 or higher.
Because you’re always going to stand when you get past hard 17, the only way to get for a 7-card Charlie is to pull a six-card hand totalling 16 or lower, and then hit for one final card that doesn’t bust you.
And once you’ve got that close, a fair amount of the time you’ll hit up to 20 or 21 anyway, which means the value of the Charlie is really very small indeed. A seven-card 20 or 21 would beat most dealer hands regardless of the special rule.
If the rule was for a 6-card Charlie, it would (according to The Wiz) improve the game by 0.16% – still tiny, but just about significant enough to adopt some strategy changes to take advantage of the rule.
If the house offers a five-card Charlie, they give the player back a theoretical 1.46%, and in most games this rule alone could push the game into a positive expectation. Which explains why I’ve never seen it offered in any casino, live or online.
So then, what is the point of a ten-card Charlie rule? This is a variation of the rules in just onegame at an online casino I like very much (they have a $100 bonus that can be easily cleared in a few hours and don’t ask for ID to withdraw!). The help pages say:
It is theoretically possible for the player to draw 10 cards without going bust.
Well, yes it is, but if you are following basic strategy, I have only found of a tiny number of ways that this will ever happen. As you might expect, it involves a whole bunch of aces, and there’s no way it’s ever possible in a single-deck game.
If the dealer upcard is a 2 or 3, we have to stand on a hard 13 or higher, or a soft 17 or higher. There is no possible 10-card hand that can be made against these cards. In fact six cards is the most possible if you start with an ace: A, 2, A, A, A, A = 17. Begin with a 6-card 12 (2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2) and hit once more and you can make a 7-card Charlie.
When the dealer shows a 4, 5 or 6, we double down any soft total if the rules allow it. If it’s not allowed we have to stand on a soft 17 as well as a hard 12, and this still only leaves us a 7-card hand at best: A, 2, A, A, A, 6, A = 13.
If the dealer upcard is 7 or 8, we can hit soft 17 and all hard totals up to 16. Now we’re in business:
– First, we have to be dealt precisely an A, 2 (cards: 2, total: 3).
– Next we have to be dealt 3 more aces, or two aces and a 2 (cards: 5, total: 6 or 7).
[Or four aces is also possible here for a 6-card soft 17]
– To avoid standing on soft 18-21, the next card has to be a 5 or 6, whichever makes the total up to 12 (cards: 6 or 7, total: 12)
– We then need either A, A, A or A, A, 2 (cards 9, total: 15/16)
– Finally we can pull one more card and hope to not bust (cards: 10, total 16-21)
We could also start with a six-card 12 or 13 (six 2s, or five 2s and a 3) to avoiding all the soft totals that would require us to stand, and then draw three aces and one final small card.
Given the very small number of possibilities, it’s quite possible to calculate out the actual probability of getting dealt a winning 10-card Charlie. I’m going to lose marks for not showing my working, but I get an answer in the region of trillions to one. I don’t think the precise number matters particularly when it’s so extremely rare…
If the dealer upcard is 9, T or A we actually have a few more options than for a 7 or 8, because we have to hit soft 17 and 18. For example: A, 2, A, A, A, 2, 4 is a possible a 7-card 12, then three more small cards make a winner.
But even if it’s only in the order of hundreds of billions to one, what is this actually worth? The dealer will bust from a 7 thru A about 21% of the time anyway and roughly half the time your made hand will already win, or at least tie. Roughly. I really can’t try to think about how the deck composition after our ultra-low 10-card hand has come out might affect it.
So I’m going to approximate and just round down to zero. You can be absolutely sure if I ever pull a ten-card hand in blackjack, there’ll be a screenshot coming!
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