Brodie is the author of Microsoft Word, a ball and chain that will no doubt follow him to the grave. It’s only fair to say from the outset that the person responsible, however indirectly, for that goddamn talking paperclip will receive very little sympathy from me.
Besides an overpriced, bloatware word processor, I am unfamiliar with his work and his adventures as a gambler and I had not read his blog until today. After a little research, there appears to be enough respect for his writing that I decided that I should not immediately call BS, even though the tale seems a somewhat far-fetched.
I will, however, hold reservations that, just maybe, the story is fabricated (after all, he is a poker player) or that Harrah’s in fact have barred him for some other reason than simply being lucky. We cannot assume Harrah’s will automatically reveal personal information about a high roller, however there’s always a chance that Jan Jones will open her gob again. Let’s hope so.
Brodie has been barred from Harrah’s casinos because they cannot work out how to make money from him.
How ridiculous is that statement? A Las Vegas casino cannot win money. Sorry, I’ll correct that. The world’s largest gaming corporation cannot win money. It really shouldn’t be that hard, and if they’re sweating the action on a $300 per spin video poker machine then the answer should be simple. Pull the machine.
This photograph (click to enlarge) shows Brodie grinning next to his machine having just hit a natural royal flush – on the deal – for $240,000. The machine is almost full pay deuces wild. There’s one variation: 8 coin payback for a straight flush instead of 9. I plugged the paytable into Frugal Video Poker and it checks in at 100.35% payback, compared to 100.76% for FPDW. At $300 a pop, with perfect strategy this machiine is worth $1.08 per spin to a knowledgeable player.
Add on Total Rewards benefits for some extra value. It’s only a paltry 0.05%, but then each hand becomes worth a theoretical $1.23. Grind out 600 hands an hour and you’ve got a job that pays over $700/hr. If you can cope with the swings, of course. Typically you need a bankroll equal to five royal flushes to deal with the huge variance of video poker. That’s only $1.2 million then.
Obviously this figure requires perfect play, which is not that simple, when you have to work out which one or two gap straight flush draws to hold and which to discard, taking into account the slightly reduced payout for that hand. So you have to play a little slower to make sure you make the right holds… maybe it’s only worth $300/hr.
This paytable is rather surprising, given the downgrades Harrah’s have made to the video poker at Caesars (and indeed to Caesars in general) over the last couple of years. Once the best paytables on the strip, they’re now a poor imitation of their former selves. The 9/6 Jacks or Better machines have become 7/5 machines, reducing the payback from a healthy 99.54% to a dreadful 96.15%.
Slightly fewer players with a much larger house edge (in this case, more than eight times larger) generates a bucket load more money for the Evil Empire, and since Harrah’s has the marketing clout to ensure a constant volume of players through their doors, they have absolutely no incentive to offer ther players a good gamble any more.
Claire has been researching video poker availability for her summer assault and has found that although there’s a handful of positive expectation machines scattered around downtown and off-strip, they only exist at the 25c level. The hourly rate, with the very best slot club cashback deals, is about $6/hr. It would take a really creative use of slot club points and fancy free drinks to come close to 100% payback on a $1 machine. For anybody interested in all the numbers, vpFREE is the definitive resource. They don’t even mention the three-coin, $100 machine at Caesars though.
That Brodie has been been lucky is not his fault. Anyone can run hot, but the odds of hitting a royal flush on that machine still remain in the region of forty thousand to one. In fact, on Deuces Wild games you should hit less royals than on other types of video poker, if you are playing correctly – you’ll never discard a 2 to draw to a natural royal flush. The Frugal VP simulation shows that it comes along once every 45,409 hands.
Brodie has indeed been exceptionally lucky, hitting three royals at Caesars in the past year. To hit three royals should require, on average, 136,000 hands, which is a ten day stretch with no sleep if you can maintain 600 hands per hour. However over the course of a year, this is certainly achievable although Brodie doesn’t appear to have played anything like that many hands to get his three jackpots.
Brodie claims he’s given about 80% of the winning back, which would put him at about $144,000 profit on the year (20% of $240,000 x 3). This is the figure I found most interesting though: for an advantage player that would actually grind through 136,000 hands to hit three royals without being exceptionally lucky, their expected return would still be in the same region: $146,000 won plus about $20,000 in comp.
So clearly the thing to do here is to reduce the paytable or bin that machine completely. It’s a major leak in Harrah’s game.
Instead their answer is to find players who seem to be winning more than their fair share and then do their best to remove the lucky element from their casinos. Is this not just the same as a player who has to sit in a particular spot at the blackjack table, or has to set the dice the same way every time, or has to wear his lucky underpants before going out to gamble?
That kind of thinking is for suckers, so who’s the sucker now?
The summer is nearly here, so we decided to head to the seaside. Using a complimentary weekend train ticket, our destination was fabulous Torquay. This trip didn’t actually work out too bad. It’s a 4.5 hour journey each way, with 6 hours there to soak up some rays, go for a swim, or whatever. I’d never pay for that train, but there’s worse ways to use a free train journey than to head for the coast.
The only problem: no beach. Nothing to speak of, at least. Plenty of water, but only one tiny strip of sand. Perhaps I should have done more research than just try to name a seaside town, check if the train went there and make sure the station was within walking distance of the coast. Maybe it was just high tide the whole time we were there. There were a few bucket-and-spade shops, which suggeests there’s more to Torquay than water, but I didn’t see it. Maybe it’s just a bit further away than we could venture, but by foot we were stuck with whatever piece of coastline was nearby.
Boats. There were lots of boats. Claire asked if I’d ever want a boat, and I said only if the other guy had a flush. Oh how we laughed at the very clever poker joke. I’d seen a pier on the map, but it wasn’t much more than a plank out into the harbour. What a con. At least there were seagulls and the smell of the sea drifting in and out. Not to mention dodgy amusement arcades, where we came across more than one fruit machine pro.
Oh my word, how fast they need to press those buttons to do this for a living. Having waited for me to drop two quid into a machine and walk away, one of them jumped straight in there, pumping it as hard as he could in order to squeeze out the five pound jackpot. Plus EV. I think it only cost him £4 more so that’s a pound clear profit for those who are willing to put in the time to learn the system. If you can do that three or four times a day, then… wow.
But of course the most important things were clotted cream – which it’s illegal to leave Devon without, and which made me very pleasantly sick after we got home – and ice cream.
If the Halifax former building society want to be treated like a bank, they should act like one. There we are with a hundred quid in silver, saved up over many years in a Cadbury’s Roses jar, and she’s all like "only five bags a day". It does say this on the counter too. But I mean, how much effort is it really? They don’t count the coins. They don’t even have to pour them into a sorting machine. She took my five bags behind a partition and presumably weighed them, as the whole thing only took about 30 seconds – including the walk. It might have taken 40 seconds if she’d accepted my full deposit.
Apparently this restriction doesn’t apply to kids’ accounts. Clearly high revenue earners for the banks, children. Especially the ones who have a freaking mortgage with them, like me.
I’m not done though. Sorry, there’s more.
PayPal. For crying out loud.
Last week I attempted to get a refund on a transaction from a seller that has proved to be less than honest. Claire found a nice little sideline in used printer cartridges, buying them from eBay and either recycling at a profit, or sending them to Tesco for 100 Green Clubcard points each – that’s £4 a pop if you use the points towards a Virgin holiday to you know where, or some other Clubcard Deals. I paid through PayPal using my MBNA credit card to earn BMI diamond club miles, towards yet another holiday to you know where.
I have no problem with naming and shaming here. Hopefully search engines will pick this up so that anybody who wants to check out the seller will find our story: Image Warehouse (eBay name imagewarehouse) sold a box of empty Lexmark inkjet cartridges that were just not up to the job. Listed as virgin (not yet refilled) and official, they were mostly neither – a box full of poor quality "compatible" cartridges that were in no state to be recycled. Some of them had literally fallen apart.
The seller agreed that we could return the box for a refund, which in itself cost about £60. Since then he’s not responded to a single email, despite still apparently doing a healthy business on eBay. Right now, he’s had 17 negative comments in the last month, but he shifts enough stuff that this only equates to a 99.3% positive feedback rating. Most buyers wouldn’t even look any further than that.
The problem with PayPal – for buyers dealing with another country, at least – lies in the fact that they will only open a dispute within 45 days of purchase. These cartridges were sent surface mail from the USA so took about five weeks to arrive. After sending them back, it was clearly way past 45 days before we could be sure that the guy was ripping us off. PayPal won’t help and Mastercard won’t start a chargeback over a "quality of goods issue", even though I have emails stating he would refund and proof of shipping. That just encourages honest citizens to lie to their bank and say that it’s a fraudulent transaction, surely? Telling the truth sure as hell doesn’t do any good when the "buyer protection" policies just aren’t worth a damn. We’re pretty much screwed on this one.
On the other hand…
I’ve also been on the seller side of a dispute. A web site I took over a few years ago included a store that sells downloadable software and web traffic. It’s far from being a retirement plan, but it does get the occasional order. The software sales work just fine, but since it’s way down my priority list, I’ve not bothered to keep up to date with traffic prices from various suppliers that I’d resell from and I’ve not accepted an order for some time. I actually care about this web site so little that, rather than hack about with a mess of a web site, I just decided to put a message at the top of the page saying that these products weren’t unavailable. Unashamedly cheap, but I thought it might do the job.
Still, I got an order last month for $129.95 and about an hour later – as it didn’t instantly arrive – the buyer put in a complaint with PayPal. Doing so locked those funds pending a review so I couldn’t use them, even to send a refund. As the buyer clearly couldn’t be bothered to read the massive red text warning, as far as I was concerned he could wait a little while for his refund now – I wasn’t going to make a deposit in order to pay him back and then wait weeks while PayPal decided if I could have my money back, or if he’d actually get refunded twice.
The only option for any kind of communication open to me was to submit tracking information for the sale. I did this, selecting delivery method "online" and tracking number "none", and wrote a message in the comments field to explain that this actually wasn’t tracking information, but it was all I could do. The email confirmation they sent after submitting the information did not contain the comments I’d entered, nor were they visible anywhere in the PayPal screens. I’m not sure if anyone ever read these – it doesn’t look like it – and obviously I don’t have an exact copy, but from memory it went a little something like this:
"This product ordered is not available at present, as is stated clearly on the order page. Buyer needs to pay more attention before entering payment details online. Please refund the buyer in full – I cannot do this as the funds in my account are frozen."
Weeks pass, and I hear nothing. Then this:
"According to the User Agreement, PayPal’s Buyer Complaint Policy applies only to the postage of goods and not to services and other intangible goods. For that reason, we are unable to take any action regarding this complaint."
Result? Err… no.
Now it’s his turn to be screwed by a brain dead PayPal policy that, really, is an open door to online fraudsters. If someone is prepared to send you money with PayPal for anything that you don’t have to ship (software, a web site subscription, an e-book, etc) then you simply do not have to deliver and the buyer has no comeback at all. Why not try it? There’s a lot of money to be made if you’re that way inclined.
This result in my favour is no consolation to me really. I could keep the $129.95 to offset what I’ve lost on the other deal, but then I’d be as bad as Ron from Image Warehouse. I’m still going to refund this poor sucker eventualy. First I just want to make sure he knows how fucked up PayPal really is. (*)
(*) I considered censoring my language here, in case it jeopardised search engine indexing, but a quick search for "paypal fucked up" reveals that I’m not the first to say it, and that it’s just fine and dandy with Google. Good job.
I’ve decided to fudge my poker graphs a little, so here’s where I fess up to what I’ve done.
Before
After
You can click the thumbnails for larger versions if you want, but it’s pretty clear what happened from these tiny versions anyway.
My doomswitch was flipped a few days ago. Everything I touched turned to shit, and the graph I posted on Friday was only the start of it. I’d already sunk four buy-ins on Poker Stars and I thought a change of scenery might do me good. Especially as I’d already achieved Gold Star status on Stars for next month but was miles away from the next level, earning a few more FPPs wasn’t really going to matter.
I found a $25 freebie in my Party Poker account and a $100 reload bonus on Empire. Often I’d just blitz through these on $1/$2 limit, but as I have a no-limit goal right now, what harm could it do to carry on playing for my NL50 target on here? Quite a bit, as it happened.
Five more buy-ins dribbled away before I’d unlocked the bonuses. $250 down for $125 of bonus – not good at all. Though I got lucky on Party to start with, 250 hands wasn’t enough to realise that this game plays rather different to what I’d gotten used to. By the end of 1000 hands on Empire, I’d just about figured that out and almost stopped spewing. Almost.
So I’ve decided to write off the hands on Party and Empire. Quite naughty I know, but it makes my graph look so untidy otherwise, and a little deception is worthwhile if it helps to keep me motivated. My original plan was, after all, to see whether I could beat the NL50 game on Stars in particular so I can tell myself somewhat convincingly that it’s not too bad to discard some bad results. OK it’s still cheating, but I’m not counting rakeback or bonuses (so far worth at least $600) in my profit figures, so it all cancels out in the end.
The comeback begins now, with only a four buy-in mountain to climb to get back on track, not nine. Suddenly that seems much more achievable.
Saw the Pet Shop Boys last night, in Wolverhampton. It sounded a little something like this.
When I look back upon my lie-uf It’s always with a sense of shay-um I’ve always been the one to blay-um
The fact that this clip is the best I could find from about twenty thousand cellphone bootlegs on YouTube is surely reason enough to allow people to take decent recording equipment to concerts these days.
If a whole bunch of people are going to stand in front of me holding their phones up in the air, rush home and see who can be first to upload a tiny, shaky recording of half a song with terrible sound that’s not even in sync with what video you can see, I’d much rather they were getting in my way with a decent camera and a boom mic. At least that way I’d be able to see the bits I missed when I got home.
Anyway, what’s so gay about an on stage shiny gold cowboy teaching another cowboy on screen to swing his pants? Am I not allowed to find this entertaining?
Time for a quick poker lesson in how to represent a hand, courtesy of Rickib78.
a/s/l? We assume from the username late twenties, and probably male but using a cool or deliberately feminised form of Richard. PokerStars tells me he’s from Clayton, Victoria. G’day, Dick.
Representing a hand is simple, apparently. Just bet and raise wildly and then your opponent has to assume that you currently hold the best hand available with the community cards that are showing.
Here’s the example :-
Poker Stars – No Limit Hold’em Cash Game – $0.25/$0.50 Blinds – 9 Players – (LegoPoker HH Converter)
So I folded the best hand. He proudly showed QJo, thinking he’d pushed me off a big hand and not, in fact, the weak pair and busted draw that I had.
luckydonut said, "wow u misread ur hand" Rickib78 said, "looool" Rickib78 said, "did u have a straight?" luckydonut said, "you think i folded a straight?" luckydonut said, "lol" Rickib78 said, "loool" luckydonut said, "looooooool" luckydonut said, "whats this, lol envy?" Rickib78 said, "well i represented a flush !!!!" luckydonut said, "you did?" Rickib78 said, "3 spades on the table" luckydonut said, "oh so you represented what on the turn, before you decided to represent the flush, exactly?" Rickib78 said, "on the turn it was a straigh" Rickib78 said, "looooooooooooool"
Looooooooooooooooooooooooooooool. I win.
But really, I don’t know what’s so funny. Clearly I have a lot to learn to take on a player who is good enough to represent a different hand on each and every betting round.
This photograph (click to enlarge) shows Brodie grinning next to his machine having just hit a natural royal flush – on the deal – for $240,000. The machine is almost full pay deuces wild. There’s one variation: 8 coin payback for a straight flush instead of 9. I plugged the paytable into Frugal Video Poker and it checks in at 100.35% payback, compared to 100.76% for FPDW. At $300 a pop, with perfect strategy this machiine is worth $1.08 per spin to a knowledgeable player. 
T
(9 Players)
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