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A word of warning to anybody who is looking for a Las Vegas package deal with Virgin Holidays – don’t get excited too soon when you drop on a bargain deal online. In fact, to be safe you should probably wait until you step onto the plane before you start counting down the days. T minus, err, zero.
I found out just what a gamble they can be by trying to book a holiday for my sister. She’d already booked the week off work and found a deal on Expedia for about £500 each, then called me to ask if it was a good deal or if could I do better.
Now that’s a challenge I can never refuse…
I thought I’d done exceptionally well when I found this deal with Virgin for two return flights and seven nights at the Luxor:
£546 would be a phenomenal price for just the flights, never mind with a week’s accomodation into the bargain too. At this price it was either an insane promotion or it was priced wrong. Either way, I was going to try to take advantage of it.
Laura found out that it was a mistake the same evening when she got a phone call telling her that the price on the web site was actually for just the accomodation and would she like to add on the flights now for another £500+ each. The answer was obviously "no".
I don’t completely believe their story. The breakdown above shows line items for air passenger duty (although only £20 each, when it costs £40 just to leave the country), a fuel surcharge and an economy seat discount. This all suggests that the flight is included in the total. It even let me log in to the Virgin Atlantic site and select seat reservations, where it also cruelly showed a countdown to a holiday that didn’t really exist:
But the chances of them honouring the published price are, as you might expect, zero. Option one was to cough up for an overpriced flight. Option two was to forget it ever happened.
Now, more than three weeks after cancelling, I’m still waiting for a refund. In fact it was only after I called the bank and they set up a three-way phone call to find out what was going on that we got any joy at all. What a shambles. Even then, they tried to deduct a £120 per person cancellation fee. I don’t think so…
OK, so I knew all along that something had probably gone wrong and that they might try to get out of this booking, but it did reveal a frightening feature of the Virgin Holidays online booking system.
Once you fill in all the information on their web site, including payment details, you still have to wait up to fourteen days for written confirmation of the booking. Until it arrives, you just don’t know for sure whether or not you have a holiday. They can still cancel it at any time.
Even if they charge your credit card, even if they book you a seat on the damn plane, they can still change their mind.
While I would expect that in most cases they’re probably not interested in simply cancelling your booking just because they can, what’s to say they wouldn’t pull the plug on your package deal if your plane suddenly became very popular and they could make more money selling it as flight only (which, as far as I can tell, is a confirmed booking the minute you press submit). A delay of up to two weeks for confirmation of a flight booked online is just not good enough.
In the end Laura rebooked with MyTravel for £294 each and snubbed the rock-bottom rate I found her for Imperial Palace in favour of the Excalibur for just a little more. Not a bad decision.
Overall, it was still about £200 cheaper than Expedia. Mission accomplished!
I just downloaded my latest credit card statement, and I knew it was going to be big because it’s been a particularly extravagant month.
I’ve booked two Vegas trips for myself and one for my sister (I’m sure you’ll hear more about this), plus enough first class train tickets to requalify for Virgin Traveller. Apparently I’ve been to Cheltenham five times this week, who knew?
There’s also all my new office furniture. My desk is up, and it’s all the right colour, and it turned out to be a marvel of engineering. The Hoover Dam of desks. The lady in Ikea said it would never work, that it’s just not meant to go that big. I’ve proved her wrong just by using two steel tubes and one extra leg. The over/under on it collapsing is three weeks.
Then there’s all the other random crap that usually goes on there, which this month included car insurance renewal and, obviously, Spice Girls tickets.
New Balance: £4,983.46
Minimum Payment: £9.20
Not forgetting the really important bit:
BMI Diamond Club Miles earned: 7,313.04
I really wouldn’t mind if they rounded down the point zero four miles, that won’t get me very far.
So let me get this straight. Even if there was no interest on this card I would be paying it off at just over nine quid a month, which would be 542 monthly installments – a mere 45 years to clear the balance.
Given that if you pay your credit card automatically by direct debit you have just two options – full balance or minimum payment – this special rate (the card terms say the minimum payment should be 3% of the balance – nearly £150 in this case) has to be a crafty angle they’re shooting to try to rack up a lifetime of interest. Or at least a couple more months until you realise what they’re up to.
Can anyone lend me five grand?
I now have my download link for Radiohead’s new "pay what you think it’s worth" album, In Rainbows.
I paid 50p.
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The reason it feels like I’ve been offline for the past week or so if that my home office is being reconstructed. After nearly four years of stepping over boxes that I hadn’t quite unpacked since moving in, as well as the debris from my organic, floor-level filing system, the time has come to do things properly.
As part of my re-fit, I’m getting the mother of all desks. For reasons that the picture should make obvious, it’s not assembled yet, but this is what it looks like laid out on the floor. The long side is a whopping 2.2m, almost bigger than the room itself and certain to present a very interesting challenge when it comes to flipping the thing over after it’s been built.
Nice job with the end pieces, Ikea. This is "full serve" furniture so I didn’t even have chance to make that mistake myself, it took a trained professional to cock it up. Why would you think to look in the box to make sure everything is the same colour, really?
The picture is distorted a little because I used a super-wide lens, and this also adds an element of terrifying perspective to an already scary carpet. It didn’t seem quite so brown in the shop, I promise.
When the carpet fitter was here, he saw that I was working downstairs with my desk set up on the card table and talk quickly turned to poker and I got the obligatory bad beat story. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Pocket aces flops a set, big stack villian pushes with suited trash, runner-runner flush.
"It’s like they can see what cards are coming", he said. "My mate says there’s a program you can download so you see what everyone else has got even if they fold".
Presumably his mate has heard about the alleged super-user access in Absolute Poker. Either that, or he’s going to fall for a bullshit scam like this (and I realise by linking to the site I’ve just helped to increase its Google rank, but really if you’re daft enough to pay them money, you deserve all the trojans that it’s bound to come with).
I also found out he plays most nights on PKR or William Hill and enjoys six-tabling $1 sit-and-gos with a bottle of vodka. It’s an activity that that I’ll try to review in due course, but sounds like it’s something that needs a name of it’s own. I’m going to go with Absolut Poker. Ithankyou.
I got Spice Girls tickets! And corkers they are too. Block 106, row D – actualy facing the stage. That almost never happens.
Stopped laughing at me yet? OK. Now for the obligatory rant about Ticketbastard fees.
There are so many great advantages to trading online. Having a global presence without needing premises; staying open around the clock without needing extra staff; never needing to actually speak to customers. Reduced overheads produce savings that can be passed on to make you more competitive. At least that’s how it should be.
Absolutely everything you can buy is cheaper on the internet, except for concert tickets. But when the only way you can buy tickets is online and one site has a monopoly, they don’t need to be competitive.
My two £75 tickets cost £169.75. You’re laughing again, aren’t you?
The £2.25 charge for "standard post" I can almost live with. Who doesn’t inflate their shipping costs to build in a little extra profit when they’re selling junk on eBay? I know I do, so it’s a bit hypocritical to take issue with an overpriced stamp.
But the "service charge" on this was the fattest I’ve ever seen. £8.75 on each ticket! Where the hell does that come from? There must be a human involved in the process somewhere along the way so we can’t deny them a little something towards their expenses. And sure, it’s a business so they’re going to want to make money by adding a booking fee. Come on though? A surcharge that’s the same price as a CD (delivered) for every person who goes to a concert?
Here’s the official explanation:
This Service Charge (otherwise known as a Convenience Charge or Booking Fee) is a fee that covers costs that allow Ticketmaster to provide the widest range of available tickets while giving you multiple ways to purchase. Tickets are available in many towns and cities via local ticket outlet locations, our Call Centre and ticketmaster.co.uk.
What a crock of shit. These tickets were only available online – you needed to be selected to get sent a password to stand a chance of booking – and the first batch sold out in 38 seconds this morning. Where’s the convenience in having to be online at 10am on the dot to have to fight through the booking process in record time and take whatever tickets you’re lucky enough to have thrown your way? If you decide you don’t like the look of the seats it’s picked for you and want to try again, you’re probably going to miss out.
Similarly, if you come up against an impossible Turing test, like these, you’re pretty much buggered.
 
Apparently if you relax your eyes, you can see a helicopter in the one on the right.
Tickets from the first show raked in £175,000 in booking fees in under a minute. Then three more dates were announced, and then four more. Overall the juice on just those eight shows heading into the pockets of Ticketmaster shareholders is £1.4 million – I think somebody just got a new yacht. It’s not exactly skilled work stuffing tickets into envelopes. The fees I paid on just two tickets could fund three hours of minimum-wage labour. Plenty of time, even if their equal opportunities policy demands the use of partially-sighted amputees with Parkinson’s disease. It’s somewhat generous.
What’s most annoying is why is the service charge for this is so much higher than for other tickets? Am I somehow getting a much better service than I would, for instance, with my £12 face value ticket to see The Donnas next month (and I’m really not ashamed about that either), which carried a £1.20 fee? The postage on those was cheaper too, at £1.75. Are the Spice Girls tickets really heavy?
Seriously, if people have been successfully taking their banks to court to claim back unreasonable charges for overdrafts I might start keeping a tally of just how much Ticketmaster has ripped me off and see if I can’t do something about it. It would probably pay for my next car.
Here’s a little piece of Vegas to look forward to, coming soon to a McDonalds near you.
I don’t really know what makes this a Vegas burger, let alone a classic.
If it’s to be a Vegas burger, surely it has to be a "world’s most somethingest" burger.
Like the most expensive, the $777 Kobe Beef and Maine Lobster burger at Paris Las Vegas. Actually I’m not sure whether that holds the record for most expensive, they may have missed out on that honour to maintain the novelty price tag.
But the Carl’s Jr $6000 combo definitely is the world’s most expensive fast food meal deal, and it’s only available at the Palms.
So what about a spectacularly huge burger, like the 9lb Big Daddy Barrick Burger at the Plaza. It’s sadly no longer on the menu, but the web page that bragged that this beast could "feed a softball team" is archived for ever here. The deal used to be that if you could finish it in under 24 hours, it was free (well, you weren’t going to be leaving the casino, let’s face it). The world record is just over 48 minutes, and was set by a girl.
So thanks for the effort McDonalds, but I’m just not sure that simply using cheese that’s a bit more fancy than usual is quite enough.
Word is out that Dusk Till Dawn have finally been granted their casino license this afternoon.
There’s such excitement that the Blonde Poker forum has effectively crashed right now – it just took a good five minutes to load this thread with the announcement, which already contains about 300 pages of awesome MySpace-style graphics or armies of clever dancing smilies congratulating them, with other wittily appropriate comments like "ship it".
The Nottingham card room should now open in November. Good luck to them – they’ll need it.
The delay to the opening, originally planned for April, is thanks to objections from three major casino chains (two of which did not even have a casino in Nottingham when they protested) and has already cost an estimated £100,000 a month. Building the club before being given permission to operate was a fantastic business decision.
They’re also still adamant that no house-banked casino games will take place on the property, even though the full casino license that has been granted would allow them to do this. It is to be a poker-only venue, and poker – particularly low-cost, well structured, dealer-dealt tournaments that the majority of their pre-registration members will be expecting – is just about the least profitable game that a casino can offer.
Winning a license to print money but choosing to produce only a handful of fivers is another fantastic business decision. The club will have all the overheads of a casino, but without any of the cash cows. We’ll just have to wait and see just how soon blackjack and roulette are introduced "due to popular demand".
Meantime, they could use the the "session fee" loophole to charge whatever they need to do to survive, but thanking members for their support in showing that there is indeed enough demand to warrant a casino license by stinging them with a 30% or higher rake just doesn’t seem right.
So they’ll probably have to rely on live action for revenue. Since September 1st, cash games can be raked or charged hourly – and how. I picked up a copy of the new charge schedule at the Vic at the weekend, where they’re more than happy to lighten the wallets of rich Londoners by up to £15 per hour – and that’s without a dealer! If people in the East Midlands are desparate for a game of cards, then maybe they’ll pay that too.
The Vic has a dice table. Just the one tucked away in the corner, but nevertheless it’s the first I’ve seen in a UK casino, amid the gazillions of electronic roulette stations. The roulette there has two video feeds from separate wheels and you can pick which one to bet on. This gives punters a reason to play on two adjacent machines at the same time – for the multi-tabling professional.
Vij had come along on Saturday to watch me set fire to his 5% and clearly had the urge to lose more money after he’d seen me bust out of the poker. Craps was going to be his game of choice, although he’d mostly forgotten how to bet – and how to keep the dice on the table! So Vij concentrated on trying to shoot while I got to call the bets with his money.
The thing with craps is that it has to be a busy, rowdy table to be fun. Well, the two of us made it three (although that miserable bastard wouldn’t bet unless he was shooting) and at one point there were as many as five people standing around the table. We didn’t quite reach critical mass to keep the game going and hi-fiving and shouting were unsurprisingly not present, but if there was even a little bit of a vibe I’d probably have wanted to stay longer. The game wasn’t that bad at all.
They only allow single odds but with 50p and 20p chips in play you don’t get penalised for only betting the minimum. Place the 6 and 8 for £3 each and you win £3.50 when it hits. If you can still find a $3 craps game in Vegas (clue: it’s not on the Strip) you won’t get any change when you press a winning place bet to $6.
Without the change, there’d be no point taking odds on a £3 line bet for any number other than a 4 or 10, but a 6-5 true odds bet pays £1.20 for every pound behind the line. The English denominations actually work out pretty well for the small-timers. They definitely don’t let you bump up the bet to get a round payout – I tried! – and when I only put £2 down for 3-2, the dealers really didn’t know whether that was allowed. To prevent all hell from breaking loose, just make sure your odds bet is the same amount as your line bet.
Frustratingly, hardways had the same £3 minimum as all the other bets, so there was no chance of a heroic parlay with loose change. The odds were pretty good though (for sucker bets) giving 9.5-1 on the hard 6 and 8 and 7.5-1 on the hard 4 and 10. The deliberately confusing 10-for-1 and 8-for-1 in Vegas actually mean a payoff of 9-1 and 7-1 respectively for a house edge of about 9% or 11% – one of the worst bets in the casino. These adjustments halve the edge, and if only they had made it a quid minimum I’d play a hard six or eight with 4.5% juice all day long.
I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t know how to adjust to the standard of play in the EPT satellites. Particularly on Sunday, it seems I had a lot to learn. The following mania all happened during level 2 (blinds 50/100).
The under-the-gun player raises to 350. A frustrated Scandinavian calls and the next player re-raises to 900. The re-raiser only has 700 left, so he’s going nowhere and I’m suspicious about why he hasn’t just moved all-in already. I find pocket jacks in the cut-off. It’s the best hand I got to see in either tournament, but with an UTG raiser who has me well covered, it’s not a good spot to gamble my stack so I fold. UTG makes the powerplay of a smooth call. Obviously he wants to take the flop 3-way, but the other guy dissapoints him. Naturally with a pot of over 2000, the remaining 700 gets thrown in on a low flop. We see the re-raiser’s pocket 9s hold up against UTG’s T8s.
Lessons learned: Pocket pairs are always raising hands. Folding to a re-raise is weak.
I stayed out of the way for this one. All folded to the button who raised to 350. He had 98o, but the steal attempt is OK. Big blind defends with J5, a little stubborn but in fact the best hand. Soulscan successful. When the flop comes J97, carnage ensues. BB check-raises all-in with his monster top pair and the button decides it’s a great idea to not get pushed around, calling his last 4000 chips to win about 6000 with a gutshot and middle pair. Seat open.
Lessons learned: Always defend your blind by calling out of position with garbage. Folding a straight draw is weak.
That bustee had used up all his luck in an earlier hand when he had raised small preflop with pocket aces, followed by a massive all-in overbet on a 952 flop. Just go ahead and tell everybody how strong you were before the flop and hope nobody caught up. For sure you won’t get called now unless they got very lucky to outflop you. But outflopped he was, by pocket 2s. Then turn 5, river 5 put him back in front in the cruelest way possible.
Next, I limp after three others with 67s. One more player calls and the short stack big blind moves all in. I’m starting to get desparate and wonder if there’s any reason to call here after it’s folded back to me. I decide it’s not even close – the pot odds aren’t good and the raiser has been quite tight. In fact, in the land of the results-oriented, my 67 would have made a straight. I know this because the player on the button called and also made the straight with 63o. Pocket aces went home.
Lessons learned: Limp with any old shit if you have position. Folding once you have put chips in the pot is weak.
I didn’t survive long into level 3. In fact the levels were a complete trainwreck. We were sent on a break at what I thought was the end of level 2, but when we got back it was still the same level. "Another 2 minutes at this level", they announced. About fifteen minutes later, the blinds actualy went up.
In level 3, blinds are 100/200. The only reason there are still t25 chips in play is that antes kick in on level 4. And to think I was worried that I might not be able to make an 8pm train home if I did well.
I was down to a thousand and change on my small blind and with 3 limpers already wanting to take a cheap look I completed with 78s. The big blind pays no attention to the action so far and makes it 500 to go. One of the limpers now decides to fold, but two do come along for the ride. Having been unable to find any spots to gather chips so far and expecting to be called if I actually get chance to open-push in the next orbit, I decide I have to play this hand. I could call and close the betting, then be the first to throw my chips at any flop that looks good, but I don’t fancy pulling a stop-and-go against three other players, and with less than 1/5th of the pot size left to bet. By moving all-in here, I want to re-open the betting to allow the agreesor to isolate, and leave plenty of dead money in the pot to give a reasonable payoff if my second-best hand improves. Not a superb situation to be in, but I’d run out of time and couldn’t expect to see much better.
In fact we take a flop four ways, and it doesn’t really surprise me – even though one of the callers has left himself with just 300 chips now. Never mind. I’m right back in the game if I get lucky here. Flop: 89T with two spades – a pair and open ended straight draw. Could be worse, until I see the other cards. 67 is loving his made straight and I can only split with him. But we’re both actually drawing dead to QJ in spades – the current nuts with a flush draw to boot.
So there ends my EPT journey. £660 for less than three hours of poker. Next year, I think I’ll probably not bother.
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