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A very quick update, written the night before but post-dated to look like I scribbed it just before we leave for the airport, to introduce the world to my sponsors for the Orleans Open. My first tournament begins Tuesday!
In alphabetical order: AMG, Colm, David, Darren, Geoff, Jill, Matt & Paul.
Eight wise men, if we pretend that Jill is a man.
So that’s eight sponsors sharing 21% of my action across four tournaments. Umm, yeah, I accidentally oversold myself ever so slightly, after I relisted the eBay auction while I had my wires crossed with one of the winning bidders.
No harm done. Except that I know next time to take all the bloody fees into account. Even with the $2.00/£1 exchange rate I’m nearly $20 light from the auction sales…
T minus zero. Off we go.
The Cheque Centre in Longton has been the best place to buy US Dollars lately, and I’ve used it a few times to change up money ready for tomorrow’s trip. Today their rate was a very attractive – and very precise – $2.0000000.
This is a business that sprung up quite recently in a town that few others dare to inhabit – even Kwik Save gave up hope last month and bailed out. Its No Frills boots have been filled by a brand new B&M store. If I had to describe what kind of store B&M is, the best I could come up with is "cheap random crap".
In fact, those same three words could also be used to identify Longton town itself. Perhaps a new motto for the precinct: Cheap. Random. Crap.
The Cheque Centre’s place is all nice and new, with both new paint and new carpets. Quite unusual for the locailty. So why go to this trouble, and still set your rates so much higher than the nearest competitor? The second best on offer today was $1.96 at the Post Office, with the travel agents less than a full cent behind.
Today’s perfect two rate got me thinking. Maybe it just a case of "two dollars to the pound is close enough, right?". This is a business that deals only in money, and always in cash. Perhaps maximising profit isn’t as important as getting the turnover.
Ever feel like you’re supporting organised crime?
If you ever thought the chat box in an online poker game was inane, try online bingo.
Yes, I do have a very good reason for playing bingo. There’s a fantastic offer on quidco.com right now where you get £30 for registering a new player account and betting £10. It told me I already had an account, so I had to do some jiggery pokery using my full name and a different email, but it tracked in Quidco immediately once I’d played through the £10.
 I didn’t win anything, but that’s probably because I’m a bingo donkey. I expect I was seeing too many tickets with weak balls. I guess I also need to try to dab more aggressively with my good numbers.
However, the £20 overall profit from the bonus just about makes up for having to endure an unbearably cheesy online gaming experience. My avatar was a cartoon dabber with a big grin – do I need to go into this any further? It really hurts to think about it now.
Looking back at this screen full of chat is especially painful.
We’ve got the universally standard gl, wd and ul (good luck, well done and unlucky) making an appearance. The tg suffix means to go, so many of these comments are players announcing how close they are to winning a prize – tactics designed to put fish like me on tilt for sure. Makes you want to mark off a whole bunch of numbers much to hastily.
The one that took me a while to figure out was wdw. It means well done winner – a fabulously impersonal way of fake-congratulating an opponent who just outplayed, outclassed and outdabbed you. It’s not like you don’t know who won – it tells you their name and shows you their winning ticket!
It’s like "well I know I didn’t win, so I don’t care who did" so I imagine wdw is said sarcastically just as often as nice hand is used in poker to actually mean nice suck out.
As I didn’t stick around very long, I will just have to pretend that this was a real bingo conversation:
wdw lucky fish u suck
nice miracle numbers
poor play rewarded again
so sick
It could be …
Putting rude words as your name in the high score table on a pub quiz or "skill game" machine.
There should be a snappier name for this wholesome activity. May I suggest "poo-tabling", derived from my very favourite – and almost always first choice – word to use?
It’s short, simple, slightly rude, a little graphic (if you think about it for too long) and obviously not a real name – but hardly offensive, even pre-watershed.
Some machines are poo-friendly, some are not. Yesterday the mix-and-muddle-the-fruit game that I can’t even remember the name of didn’t like like poo, which is a little unfair when a different game on the same machine already had a big cock. Really.
At least it’s clear to see that we are not alone in wanting to – nay, enjoying – testing the limits of a computer program’s profanity filter.
That’s Claire’s finger doing the honours. This poo was a joint effort, and top score on the table won us a massive two quid, after an extremely courageous decision to gamble after hitting the £1 mark. Even so, wanting our first choice of name to be immortalised for days, maybe even weeks, was too much to ask.
Jerry Yang (a new poker millionaire, not the Yahoo! billionaire) took it, with pocket eights against Tuan Lam‘s ace queen with all the money in pre-flop. After getting outflopped, he runner-runnered a two-gap gutshot straight for $8.25m. A true champion.
5 Q 9
(unnecessary long pause)
7
(even longer pause)
6
A novelty side bet, that is. A bracelet… nah, he still hasn’t got one.
Thanks to some dodgy geezer streaming the ESPN pay-per-view coverage on a dodgy web site, I’ve been able to watch some of the Main Event final table live. Although, I didn’t exactly sit and watch it intently because it’s just a little bit on the dull side.
Of particular dullness are the incomprehensibly long delays where the dealer dutifully freezes (I think he’s also required to not breath) between dealing each round of cards when a player is all-in. They must have to take a moment to drag in a few more cameras, as it’s very important to make sure they can catch the reactions of all two players in the hand, get a fresh look at the prize money, and also see all five board cards as they sprint across almost half a yard of felt. How on earth does the ESPN crew cope with NFL games?
When everyone’s ready the announcer says, "Here comes the turn card". Thanks for that. These guys have been playing this tournament for eight out of the past 12 days. Right now it’s level 32 ($150,000/$300,000 blinds with a $40,000 ante) so that’s about 64 hours, not counting breaks, in total so far. They all know what comes after the flop by now, even if they didn’t when they paid $10,000 to enter.
The live audience may not have been paying such close attention as the players the past fortnight, but they turned up to watch the World’s Slowest Poker Game – it’s not like there’s nothing else to do in Vegas today – so they must have at least a passing interest in the game. I’m pretty sure they know that the last card dealt is called the river.
The folks watching at home (some of them at least) paid $19.95 to have 16 hours of their life drained away, so they probably know a bit of the lingo too. Even if they didn’t, there’s still Phil Gordon and A. N. Sidekick saying pretty much the same thing as the announcer at pretty much the same time. And when it’s shown to the masses on ESPN proper in August, there’ll still be Norman Chad. (I can’t possibly even start to go there).
So back to the victory. Phil Hellmuth was making his way to the commentary booth – which is actually a desk – and Gordon made a bet with Sidekick: how long before Hellmuth mentions his eleven bracelets? The line was set at 45 seconds, and Gordon took the under.
Hellmuth was given a flattering introduction… and then…
36 seconds. $100. Ship it.
The New Frontier closed yesterday.
The decision to close only came a couple of months ago, but it’s been on the cards – and on the Las Vegas Casino Death Watch list – for as long as I can remember, so I made sure I took plenty of photos in January.
Another classic sign goes dark, and now as far as I can remember there’s just one major freestanding backlit sign left on the Strip, at the Tropicana. I don’t remember if the Riviera has one out front, but even if it does neither would surely have very long left.
The Frontier was a dump and has been pretty much left to rot for years. I will have no sentimentality for the casino whatsoever.
The sign, on the other hand, was fabulous…
There are some pictures of the Frontier’s final day here:
http://www.letis.com/dmr/pics/vegas/finfront/
Remember what I was saying about cheap limit tournaments, where most of the players don’t actually want to be there? I had the pleasure of getting my pocket aces cracked by one of them just now, but it was more than made up for when I flopped a set a little later.
This is a $1k guaranteed tournament on Empire Poker that I dropped on during late registration. With 299 players and a $6 buy in, it’s somewhat different to the uber-tight $215 tournament I played last week. There’s just 159 players remaining at the first break – one hour in and nearly half the field has gone broke already. I expect most of them wanted to.
As no hand history convertor appears to work with limit tournament hands, I’ll have to do my best to recount the action using actual words. Skip about four paragraphs if you want to avoid what is technically a bad beat story, even though I couldn’t really less about losing that hand.
I have pocket aces in middle position. There’s a limp and a raise ahead of me, and I 3-bet. Six players see the flop: 5c 3c 9d. Yes, six. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t in Vegas yet. Sadly not – it’s still seven days away. I check/call the flop hoping to see a good turn card so I can punish the draws on the next betting round. A risky play, but nobody’s folding for one small bet here, and I don’t expect anyone to raise ahead of me if I bet.
OK, one player folds for one small bet when it comes from the player to my left, and five of us see the turn: Kd. It looks like a good card for me, except that there’s now two flush draws to avoid in a 5-way pot. I can’t let anyone draw for free, so I bet. At first I’m happy to see the next player raise, although when I work everything out it’s not as good as it first seemed. I realise that I’m way out of practice at counting large multi-way pots: anyone else tagging along now is going to get pot odds of at least 6-1. It’s really as much as I could hope for to try to force out the draws, but it’s not quite enough.
However somehow we’re heads for the river: Jc. It’s now just a case of whether I actually have the best hand and I should probably bet/fold here, but I check/call instead. Of course he had rivered the flush with 7c 8c.
Let re-evaluate: (1) cold-calling three bets pre-flop with a very poor hand (2) open betting a weak flush draw and gutshot on the flop and (3) raising the turn when calling with this draw would be infinitely superior. This beat was actually great news for me. His flop play wasn’t terrible, but I now know that this player wants to play big pots and won’t give up with much of anything. He is playing a death-or-glory strategy and has potential to throw his chips away. I just need to get lucky to capitalise.
Getting lucky happened with pocket deuces. I’d limped and our friend raised pre-flop so I stuck around to see three more cards. One of them was exactly what I wanted. The flop: Tc 2s Kc. Can I check/raise him here? You bet. I check/call the flop, hoping to win at least half a big bet extra by waiting until the turn to speak up.
It works. The turn: a harmless 5d. I unleash the check/raise and he makes it three bets. Well, if I’ve been screwed by another set-over-set here so be it. Much more likely he has one or two pair. I cap it.
River: Ts. Not great. Although I have a full house, he just caught up if he had KT. But, given the high likelihood of spewage, I decide to go for it. I lead straight out, he raises, three from me and he caps. His ace-king is far from good, and I rule. Hello the chips.
A result in this tournament isn’t going to be life changing, although $388 first prize isn’t bad at all for a $6 investment. But still it’s more much-needed limit tournament practice, and hopefully once the field has thinned a little it will play a little more sensibly. I just need to run well enough to maintain a playable stack for a few more rounds.
EDIT: 4th for $104.65. Woohoo. Trip report may follow tomorrow, not sure yet 🙂
I’ve said it before so I’ll say it again: everyone loves a graph.
Just you try to deny it.
So I’ve been fiddling around with an idea I had for posting real time poker tournament updates to my blog, and it’s evolved into something rather more fancy than I first anticipated. The updates will look something like this.
This is not my result. It comes courtesy of mrmacacan on the UK Poker Life forum, where I’ve been making a nuisence of myself looking for testers for the new system. This tournament is all over now and mrmacacan won, which is why he gets the dubious honour of being immortalised right here. You never know, someday someone might even notice.
When I’m in Vegas (T-8, it’s so close now!) the graphs I post here will be live updates with my chip stack progress in real time. For anyone with a passing interest in how I’m doing – and particularly those who have a piece of my action – you can now get that information at-a-glance from a chart, saving you valuable seconds. Stakes in me for the Orleans Open are now sold out, thanks to eBay. Two of the three winning bidders have even paid me already, and I’m delighted that I actually managed to meet my bankroll fundraising goal on the very first try!
It’s a fiendishly simple system, but really quite funky – even if I do say so myself. At any time while you’re playing, you can send your chip counts in a text message and the graph will update itself automatically. So far it only have one UK-based incoming number, but there’s no reason that numbers in other countries can’t be added, so that world domination can ensue.
If only I’d come up with the idea a few weeks ago, gazillions of players at the WSOP could have been whipping out their cellphones to create their very own graph for the benefit of friends back at home. While there’s plenty of live reporting going on at the Rio, your chances of being covered are very slim indeed: first you have to be drawn to sit at a table with a known professional, and then you have to get involved in an interesting hand with them. Self-inflicted live updates are the wave of the future.
I’m still adding features to the software and I’m not prepared yet to say that it’s completely stable, but if you want to have a peek and get your own graph, mosey on down to chipgraph.com.
Of course, it’s extremely important that you understand the house rules regarding cellphones at the poker table, in case you happen to come up against an angle-shooting prick like David Singer. Singer was eliminated from this year’s Main Event on Day 1 after moving all-in with the worst hand, but is still adamant that his opponent’s hand should have been killed when his phone rang. The WSOP rules (rule 82) prohibit players from talking or texting when a hand is in progress, so Singer immediately jumped at the opportunity to try to get something for nothing.
Did his opponent answer the call? No. However, rather than subjecting the table to thirty seconds of whatever dreadful polyphonic soundalike ringtone identified that phone as his own while two players contested a significant pot, he pressed a button to reject the call. I guess if you know you’re about to lose ten grand, courtesy means nothing.
Fortunately, depsite Singer playing the quintessential sore loser and threatening to take the matter to the Gaming Commission, common sense has prevailed.
My computer died today. I fixed it (because I’m great, obviously) but it was the strangest thing.
I’d nudged the base unit with my knee after I pulled my chair under the desk and there came a little strangling noise from the PC. I don’t wish to mock the sound of an actual strangling where a person may really die, but if I had to illustrate the sound in a comic book, it would look something like this.
ZWIP-EEEE-GLUCK-EEEE-CLAK-CLAK-EEEE-VZZZZ-VZZZZ-THWUP-THWUUUUZWUP
On second thoughts, perhaps I’d hire a professional to do the sound effects.
Abruptly, the sound ceased. I thought no more of it until a couple of minutes later when everything went black. The PC powered down, and only then did I begin to notice the rather nasty cooking smell.
Out came the screwdriver. I wanted to find out exactly what was burning, but almost everything was hot and it took me a few really sensible attempts at powering the machine on and letting it die several painful deaths before I noticed the CPU fan was not spinning. Then I noticed the reason why.
Out came the camera. The loose green cable in the picture below is looking a little mangled, but in remarkable condition considering it’s fate. It had somehow managed to wrap itself around the fins of the fan.
So how does this happen? I have no idea. Effectively, someone shoved a stick through the spokes on my bicycle, except the fan spins a lot faster than a bike wheel – 3600 RPM, so the PC says. I can’t even imagine trying to doing this by hand even if I wanted to. It’d just be a painful way to trim your fingernails.
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