Guess the casino, #196

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Answer: Silverton

An open letter to Caesars Palace poker room management

This afternoon I felt like entering a small-field, low buy-in poker tournament. Scanning an online database of what's available, I noticed your daily 3:00 p.m. tourney: $65, 50-player maximum, with 30-minute blind levels. That sounded perfect.

I was aware, though, that the Mega Stacks series was still running, and wondered whether the daily tournament schedule might be suspended for that. Easy enough to find out, I told myself--check the web site. So I did.

As you can see below, the relevant web page distinctly shows today's date, with the unmistakable impression that the tournaments listed are, in fact, being held today. With that confirmed, I drove to Caesars, parked, made my way to the poker room, and attempted to register.





Imagine my surprise, then, when I was told that not only was this event not running today, but it hadn't been running for the entire duration of the Mega Stack series, i.e., since May 28, five and a half weeks ago. While you're at it, you might also imagine how annoyed I was.

Let me explain something to you, as it is apparently a concept too technically advanced for you to have figured out on your own. One of the advantages of having a web site is that you can change and update information whenever you need to. At the beginning of the Mega Stack series, one of your employees could have added to the tournament schedule web page a note such as this: "The usual daily tournament schedule is suspended during the Mega Stack series. It will return on July 9." That should have taken somebody less than two minutes.

But not only did you not take that simple step, you have the page deliberately set up to show the current date, so that it looks for all the world as if the information is updated daily. Had the page not shown today's date, I would have wondered if the information shown was really valid while the special series was going on, and, as a result, I would have called to verify before wasting my time with the drive.

I saw no need to do so when today's date is shown on the page. After all, what kind of friggin' moron sets up a web page to look like it's showing information very specific for today, when it actually is doing no such thing?

Furthermore, what kind of lazy, inattentive, uncaring, sloppy, negligent, service-impaired poker room management lets this go on for 39 days without fixing it? Please do not try telling me that I am the first one who was led astray by the erroneous information your web site is putting out. I refuse to believe that. I suspect that a substantial number of other people have had exactly the same experience that I did. As some confirmation of that hunch, when I protested to the woman in the cage that your poker room's web site specifically said that the 3:00 p.m. tournament was running today, she said, "I know. But it's not."

This means that you either have your room set up so that employees do not pass on to you information about problems that customers encounter so that the problems can be fixed, or they have passed this notice along to you, and you have willfully chosen to disregard it--or, worse, decided deliberately to leave it in place, the better to lure in more customers with a bait-and-switch. (I understand that the Mega Stack series is doing very poorly compared to the competing offerings at the Venetian, Binion's, Golden Nugget, etc. Good. You deserve to fail.)

This is not the first time that you have behaved dishonorably. Two years ago, you radically changed the promised structure of a freeroll tournament without advance notice, changing it from relatively skill-based event to an all-in card-catching shovefest. I have not entered a tournament in your establishment since then, until attempting to do so today. Imagine how thrilled I am at the prospect of ever trying it again.

Is it really asking too much of you to have your web site display accurate information that actually matches the date that the page claims it is giving information about? Or do you just not give a rat's ass?

Incidentally, while poking around the web site to be sure I hadn't missed something before writing this rant, I noticed that you have conflicting information. The page shown above clearly specifies that the blind levels are 30 minutes. But clicking elsewhere, one gets to this page, which announces "All New Blind Structures," and says that levels are only 20 minutes long. There is no way for a user to know which information is newer and, therefore, presumably correct. Once again, though, I suppose that you just don't care enough to bother fixing it.

It is an astounding level of some combination of incompetence and indifference that you have on display here.

Guess the casino, #195

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Photo digitally altered to remove the answer.




Answer: Palms

Cards in the muck

Two stories from the WSOP make, I think, for an interesting contrast.

Here's the first, as reported here by PokerNews:

This is Why You Never Muck Your Hand Before the River

After a jack-high flop, two players are all in. The first player to show flips over pocket aces and his opponent tosses his cards into the muck. The dealer retrieves his card out of the pile and turns over two kings.

The players with aces was furious, saying the cards can not be pulled out, but after a floor person ruled that in an all-in both hands must be shown, the cards stayed out of the muck as the remainder of the hand was played out.

The turn was a complete blank, however....

The river brought a king.

This is a rules question that I hadn't considered before. Here's the relevant rule, from the 2009 WSOP rule book:

56. All cards will be turned face up once a player is all in and all action is
complete. If a player accidentally folds/mucks their hand before cards are
turned up, the Tournament Staff reserves the right to retrieve the folded/mucked
cards if the cards are clearly identifiable.

So it is definitely correct for the dealer in this case to pull the cards out of the muck and show them, assuming that they were clearly identifiable (an assumption I'm granting here). But are they still live? The rule does not specify that. The purpose of the rule is presumably to prevent collusion, and that end is served equally well* if the hand is live or dead. Put another way, nothing in this rule explicitly or even implicitly counters the usual rule that when a player puts his cards face down into the muck, his hand is dead.

I think that point needs to be clarified in future editions of the WSOP rules, as well as in the Tournament Directors Association rules, from which this one is derived. (The TDA rule has only the first sentence quoted above, not the extra part about retrieving cards from the muck.) It seems to me most fair and most consistent with other long-established rules and procedures that if the player puts his cards into the muck, or pushes them toward the dealer face down and the dealer puts them into or on top of the muck, they are dead. Whether they can be retrieved to be shown, as required by the anti-collusion rule, is a separate and situation-specific question, but there seems to me to be no reason to violate the usual practice about mucked cards. They should be dead, whether or not they are or can be retrieved for showing the table.

Had I been the floor guy, I would have done what they did, except add the caveat that the hand was dead, and was being shown only for purposes of fulfilling the anti-collusion rule. If and when the guy with the kings then protested because he ended up with the best hand, I'd tell him, "That's what you get for being so stupid." And I'd give him a dope slap on top of the lecture. And then I'd have every other player at the table give him a dope slap, too. Maybe everybody in the entire Amazon Room. He deserved no less for his monumental idiocy.



The second story happened during Cardgrrl's run to the money in Event 36. It was the evening of Day 1, and I was standing at the rail next to her table. The big stack was Seat 3--a guy who looked so much like Jack Black that (1) I'll call him that, and (2) at one point another railbird excitedly called a friend on his cell phone and said, "I'm watching Jack Black play poker!" (He was not kidding. But he was wrong.) There were two or three limpers. Action got to Jack and he put in a substantial raise. Fold fold fold fold.

Jack showed Jd-Jh. There was no doubt what they were; even from the rail at the far end of the table, I could see them. At this point, I tuned out, went back to the book I was reading, and another 30 seconds or so passed before I became aware that there was more to the hand than I had noticed. The floor was being called. As it turned out, neither Jack nor I had noticed that Seat 1 was still in the hand, and had not decided what to do when Jack showed his cards. (His cards were unintentionally somewhat hidden by his chip stacks from Jack's vantage point.)

As Cardgrrl related the critical points to me later, Jack had done his courtesy show, then turned the cards face down and took his hand off of them, but did not push them forward. The dealer immediately grabbed the cards and put them in the muck while saying said, "Your hand is dead." It was only then that Jack became aware that Seat 1 was still live.** [Edit: See comments. I misunderstood. Cardgrrl says that the cards were still face up when the dealer grabbed and mucked them.]

The dealer was clearly wrong--so wrong it's hard to know what he was thinking. Nobody these days (as far as I know) uses a rule that says that your hand is dead if it is shown prematurely. The 2009 WSOP rules explicitly provide (rule 52): "A player exposing his or her cards with action pending will incur a penalty, but will not have a dead hand." How does the dealer not know this???

At the very least, he could have handled the mucking differently--for example, by tapping the cards on the muck, then showing them to everybody, just in case somebody at the other end of the table hadn't seen them in the courtesy show, or just drop them on top of the muck rather than shoving them in. He also could have done it with sufficient delay that Jack would have time to react and protest before the cards disappeared.

So now what decision should the floor make? I think two options are reasonable. First, because the cards were clearly seen by multiple witnesses, he could fish them out of the muck, give them back to Jack, and allow Seat 1 to decide what to do. If he calls (or reraises), Jack is playing the rest of the hand with his cards face up, a pretty serious handicap. Second, he could keep Jack's hand dead and in the muck (with an apology for the dealer's erroneous action) and return to Jack the amount of his raise, awarding to Seat 1 the rest of the pot (i.e., the blinds plus the other limpers' money). With either option, Jack gets whatever the standard penalty is for prematurely exposing his hand (one hand? one orbit? I'm not sure).

But no. The floor guy compounds the error. He not only refuses to retrieve the cards and let Jack play out the hand, he awards the entire pot to Seat 1. I'm sure that the reasoning behind this is that Seat 1 is the only guy with a live hand left, so there is nobody else the pot can go to. But Seat 1 is getting an undeserved windfall here; he is picking up the amount of Jack's raise when he had not yet decided whether to match it. You can't win chips when you did not put into play and at risk an equal number of them. Suppose Jack's raise had been all in? Would Seat 1 then get a free double-up, when he had only limped in and hadn't yet decided how to act on the raise? Or suppose Jack's raise had been all-in, and he had fewer chips than Seat 1. Would Jack be out of the tournament, when Seat 1 hadn't called that bet? That makes no sense at all--especially when the problem was caused by the dealer's flagrantly erroneous action.

As some sort of weird compensation, though, the floor guy gave no penalty. The conversation took place far enough away from me and in a sufficiently noisy environment that I could hear only pieces of it, but he said something about losing the pot serving as sufficient penalty.

Bad dealer. Bad floor decision. Just bad all around.


Do you see the contrast between these two scenarios? In the first case, the tournament staff was willing to fish cards out of the muck and make them live again, even though nobody had seen them, and even though the player unambiguously had voluntarily thrown them away. (It isn't clear from the story how the retrieval was done. Perhaps the dealer just dropped them on top of the muck so there wasn't any doubt, or perhaps they asked the player what the cards were, then found them--which is a bad idea, if that's what happened.) But in the second, the floor refused to retrieve the cards even though (1) everybody had seen exactly what they were, so there was no possible mistake to be made in the retrieval, and (2) the mucking had been the dealer's error, rather than the player's own foolish/rash/careless/mistaken action.

Yes, the situations were different, but you can see how grossly inconsistent this is.

The general principle is that cards touching the muck face down are dead. There can be exceptions, and the cards can be retrieved and declared still live under unusual circumstances, but (1) the cards have to be clearly identifiable, and (2) there has to be a compelling fairness reason for doing so. Both conditions were present in the Jack Black story, yet the tournament staff didn't do it. In the first story, though, the second condition was definitely not present, and we don't really know if the first was--yet the tournament staff did fish the cards out and declare them live.

It's a bizarre contrast, if you ask me.



*Or equally badly. Does anybody really think this rule prevents chip dumping? The player who gets caught in an apparent dump only needs to say that he made an ill-timed bluff if he was the aggressor, or a bad read if he called his stack off.

**I think Seat 1 had an ethical duty to speak up as soon as he realized what was happening--i.e., as soon as Jack showed his cards. I don't know why he didn't. But I grant that sometimes things like this catch people off-guard, and it takes them a beat or two to figure out what's going on and react, and by then it's too late. So I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. But if he was deliberately holding his tongue hoping to gain an advantage (more advantage than he already had by seeing his opponent's cards), he was behaving badly, and shame on him.

I keep trying to tell you people

This is from a 180-player $4.40 SNG I did on PokerStars today (actually am still in it as I post this):




And this is from one of the early hands of a $1 HORSE MTT on Stars, which I am also still in at the moment:





If that isn't enough evidence for you, consider this Tweet from LasVegasMichael earlier today (cash game at Harrah's): "Flopped the wheel with deuce four off on my button straddle against a big ace and aces up. Love the button straddle!"


Addendum

About 20 minutes after posting the above, this hand came up in the NLHE SNG. One good bet on the flop and another on the turn, and I take it down.

As expected, we are now all officially embarrassed to be poker players

Guess the casino, #194

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Answer: Luxor

Guess the casino, #193

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Answer: Fitzgeralds

Scenes from the Poker Palooza expo thingy

Shamus had the day off from blogging for PokerNews, so he suggested we try to get together at the Rio for dinner and to see the Poker Palooza gaming expo going on in association with the World Series of Poker Main Event, which started today. Good idea.

There were countless booths selling poker-themed clothing. This one had some of the better selections. Stuff at most of the other booths was even more lame.



It doesn't seem like many people would go to a poker expo in order to find Jesus, but just in case one did, he's there waiting for you:



There was a reggae band playing, which was really annoying, because (1) only about a dozen people were listening to it, and (2) it was so loud that it made conversation with vendors nearly impossible.



For the most part, the expo struck me as a collection of enlarged versions of the same ads that one seens in every poker magazine. For example, this automatic card shuffler:



More poker clothes. Seriously, that was the dominant product category on display, followed closely by custom poker tables.



Some different card protectors:



These chairs look like they would be ultra-comfortable for long sessions of online poker. Maybe too comfortable.



At this point, an embarrassing thing happened. Apparently in the process of flicking in and out of camera mode on my cell phone, I entered the wrong sub-menu and changed the preferred image size without knowing it until I got home and downloaded the photos to my computer. So these last three are the actual, maximum size at which they were stored. Oops.

This is the main entrance to the expo. It's hard to see here, but the thing on the left is a big house of cards, which is roped off and which all sorts of signs warn you not to touch.



This poor woman was selling some rather bizarre poker-themed art. Her web site is here, in case you want to see the products more clearly. She seemed like a very nice lady, but I can't say I fell in love with any of her work.



Big Jack Link's truck. I got a free meat stick.



That's the end of the photos. A few more miscellaneous notes:

There was a booth promoting a new online-only poker magazine, which I had not heard of before: http://www.thenutsmagazine.com/. I haven't checked it out yet, but will do so soon.

One place was pitching a new online poker site that has an innovative twist. It's PokerbyInvitation.net. (I know this because they handed me a free deck of cards with that printed on them.) However, the site isn't live yet--next week, we were told. The twist is that in addition to a regular lobby showing cash games and tournaments, each player will have a "private lobby," from which you can send out invitations to your friends to play with you. You will also be able to set up tournaments with whatever structure you want--pick your own combination of blinds and progression, starting chips, length of levels, etc. I have long thought that both features (being able to have tables that you reserve just for people you invite to play against you, and being able to make custom tournaments) were kind of obvious things for the big sites to add, but they never have. In business terms, frankly, I doubt that this outfit has any more of a chance of surviving than most of the other online poker sites that start up and shut down within a couple of years. (Right, Johnny Chan?) But I wish that the big boys would learn something from this newcomer and build such capabilities into their systems.

At one point I saw a guy looking at some wares, and from the back I thought he had hair as crazy at Joe Reitman's. A few seconds later, I was surprised to see Annie Duke come over and put her arm around him. Oh, it was Joe Reitman!

Overall, the expo isn't really much to see. If you don't get there, you're not missing out.

Shamus and I then left the convention center area and went to the Rub BBQ restaurant. It was OK, but not as great as I had sort of built it up in my mind to be. And I forgot to bring my $10 off voucher left over from my WSOP event. D'oh!

On the way to Rub, the Masquerade show in the sky was going on, which I had not seen before. Lame. Completely lame. I snapped a few pictures, but they were from far away, and given the image size, they're completely worthless, so I'm not even posting them.

Oh, and one other completely unrelated note: The guy who picked me up to take me back to the car repair shop is married to the woman who cuts Doyle Brunson's hair every two weeks. Isn't that exciting?

That is all for now.

Does he doctor the cards?

Spotted this license plate in the parking garage at Harrah's Thursday morning. Not really sure what to make of it.

Guess the casino, #192

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Answer: Wynn

My most interesting cab ride ever

Warning: Minimal poker content.


Cardgrrl's scheduled flight out Wednesday night got scrubbed, so she left tonight instead. We had planned for me to drive her to the airport, but my car suffered a serious failure in the afternoon and is now sitting overnight in the shop. So she took a cab to the airport, and I hitched along for the company. I just got home after taking the bus back. (It's only the third time in three years here I've used the city bus system. It's mostly pretty awful in every way, but there's one that runs directly from the airport to a spot about 300 yards from my apartment building's front gate in about 40 minutes, with no transfers, so it's an occasionally useful fallback.)

The ride to the airport was interesting, to say the least. The cabbie quickly asked us the usual basic info--locals or visiting, line of work, etc. That naturally led to the subject of gambling generally, and he mentioned that he aspired to be a professional sports bettor. I told him that I preferred poker, because I had a lot more control over the outcome than with sports betting. He made the rather perplexing remark that sports betting was more of a sure thing, because with poker you don't know how the hand is going to turn out, but with sports, it's right there in the newspaper.

Cardgrrl quipped that, yes, it was easy if you happened to subscribe to the edition of the paper that published the results before the events were played--which is approximately what I had been thinking, too.

This is where it got strange.

The guy said that the results were in the paper before the games were played. You just had to know how to read the clues.

Uh, OK....

He said that, as an example, he got his tip of the day from Doyle Brunson. I naturally assumed that that meant Dolly had taken a ride in his cab, the conversation veered to sports, and Brunson expressed some opinion about a game that the driver thought sounded valid, and put down a bet accordingly. (Cardgrrl later told me that that had been her guess, too.)

Nope.

The cabbie whips out a copy of USA Today that is sitting on his dashboard, and opens it up. Mind you, he does this while he is driving at full speed down Las Vegas Boulevard, which in itself was more than mildly alarming. He found and showed us the large photo of Brunson that had been in the paper today. "Doyle is from Houston, and you see how he is looking up toward the upper left-hand corner? That means to bet Houston to win." Apparently he did, and they did.

A later conversation confirmed that Cardgrrl was feeling, at this point, about as I was: unsure whether this guy was serious or pulling our legs. (Or, as she subsequently speculated, perhaps an elaborate piece of performance art.) But it soon became clear that he was, in fact, dead serious.

He pulled another section of the same paper off the dashboard, again unfolded it--again while driving through heavy traffic--and showed us the front page. A picture of the Statue of Liberty adorned a feature about the re-opening of the crown to visitors. The story is "Statue of Liberty Gets Her View Back." He said that that obviously referred to New York--and specifically the Mets, because the Yankes are always referred to by something that is about the city, whereas this article was more about New York state; please do not ask me how he inferred that--and the title of the article, being optimistic or positive in tone, clearly meant that the team would win.

He said that he had discovered that the way things in photographs were positioned with respect to corners was key. In particular, he had found a phenomenon he called the "dead corner" that was most telling, though he didn't elaborate on what this was or how it worked. He said that recently he had seen a photograph of a torpedo that looked to him a lot like a Marlin, and it was pointed toward one of the bottom corners of the picture, so he knew to take the under in the Marlins game. (How one distiguishes taking the under versus betting against them to win in a money-line bet was, sadly, not explained to us.)

We were informed that USA Today was a far better source of this information than the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which always led him astray. I was a very, very bad boy here; I suggested to him that this was because the casino industry controls the LVRJ and doesn't want the paper giving out good information that would help people win bets. It seemed that this possibility hadn't occurred to him before, and he liked the theory. If there were a crime for contributing to the delusions of a madman, I'd have been arrested.

At one point, he mentioned in passing that it's the "government" that is responsible for both controlling the outcomes of the games and for planting the clues in newspapers. I told him that I thought that USA Today's headquarters was in Washington, D.C.--a factoid that probably confirmed what he had already figured out about who was behind it all.

Making a living at sports betting, he was certain, was easy, once you knew how to read the clues the government put out.

The man was genuinely convinced that he just needed a big bankroll so that he could make bets big enough to live off of. Why, you might wonder, wouldn't he be able to build a bankroll starting with a single bet, if he has this foolproof system? Good question.

The problem is that it isn't foolproof. Like a crossword puzzle (a truly excellent analogy that he had thought up all on his own), sometimes you think you know what the answer is and fill it in and it fits, but you later discover, once more is filled in, that it was wrong. Reading the sports clues planted in the newspaper and on TV news (which he scoffed at as being right about half the time but misleading the other half, and therefore pretty much worthless) was like that--sometimes you interpret them incorrectly, and only figure out what the clue-planters were trying to tell you after the fact, when you go back and look at them in retrospect, knowing how the game turned out.*

About this time, he decided to stop chatting about sports betting and instead took the topic back to poker. He said that he doesn't play much anymore because he always loses. He occasionally plays at the Sahara and Excalibur, but "I haven't won a pot in 15 years." All of you who think you run bad, try topping that cold streak! He said that in his most recent serious poker attempt, he had played $2/4 limit hold'em for three days and lost $300.

Toward the end of our journey, he again expressed his hope that he would soon hit it big in sports betting. This was especially urgent since he thought he was about to get fired as a cab driver. "I'm not cutting it," he frankly admitted. Cardgrrl and I didn't press him for information on what the problem might be, but both thought privately that it might have something to do with customers complaining about him driving while his eyes, attention, and both hands were on a fully spread-out newspaper that he was holding up between his face and the windshield.

He finally mentioned that on Monday he is starting poker dealer school at a place that is literally a stone's throw from my apartment building--just on the diagonally opposite corner of the same intersection. Maybe that will tide him over between being fired as a taxi driver and taking the world of sports betting by storm. (Oh, he also said that picking winners in horse races was easy, though there wasn't time left on the ride for him to explain how that worked.)

The guy was extremely nice and pleasant. He seemed like a perfectly decent human being, but lost in a world of his own imagination. I found it simultaneously amusing, sad, and scary.

I don't have any big point to be made from it. It was simply a surprising, interesting, and weird encounter that I thought readers might enjoy. People--and in particular, Las Vegas people--are a continual source of fascination to me.

Hey, Cardgrrl, if you feel like it, can you give me an amen on this story, lest people think I am making it up, exaggerating, or misinterpreting what was said?


*Speaking of crossword puzzles, here's another recent story, apropos of nothing, that I found amusing. Cardgrrl and I were trying to work our second old Sunday New York Times puzzle from a book I have. The clue was something like, "What's lacking in pernicious anemia." She and I each have our areas of fairly useless, arcane knowledge--which is why we seem to do well tackling the puzzles jointly--and this one was clearly in my ballpark. She was giving me just a bit of the stinkeye when I was taking quite a while to come up with the answer. Finally it dawned on me, and I filled in "BTWELVE." Sensing that she was wondering what the delay was, I told her, honestly, "I was trying to figure out how to fit 'cyanocobalamin' into that space." She burst out laughing, and, when she stopped, said something about me possibly being slightly overeducated.

I think I'm going to miss that grrl.

Guess the casino, #191

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Answer: Santa Fe Station

Watch this space

Actual post coming soon!

Finally got a couple of decent nights of sleep. I'm feeling back to normal and ready to resume blogging. Also, the WSOP writing gig ends after tonight's installment. I have a post in mind about a couple of weird floor rulings at the WSOP. Can't do it tonight, though. Also, Cardgrrl, who was scheduled to leave tonight, is actually staying an extra day due to her flight being cancelled (some mechanical problem), so I may or may not get to writing tomorrow. But by Friday, my world will pretty much be back to the way I'm used to it all being.

Guess the casino, #190

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Answer: O'Shea's