How do they know?

The new issue of Card Player magazine (November 28, 2012; vol. 25, #24) has a two-page article by Craig Tapscott on pages 28-29 in which he interviews Alex "Assassinato" Fitzgerald about the latter's thought processes during a hand he played in one of the 2012 WCOOP events.

Here's the second page:

It's the graphic that has me puzzled. If you read the interview, you see that the hand ended when Fitzgerald bet on fourth street and his opponent folded.

So where do they get the river 2c in the graphic? And how do they know that the villain had the Ks-Qs?

My first thought was that the whole graphic was an error, meant for another hand. But no--the cards shown for Fitzgerald perfectly match the text of the article, as do the flop and turn cards.

I also thought that maybe the opponent showed his cards before mucking them, and/or that this occurred on one of the online poker sites that allow rabbit-hunting, in order to see what the last card would have been. But that can't be, because they specify that this occurred during the WCOOP, which is on PokerStars. Stars does not have rabbit-hunting, and does not allow players to show their hole cards when folding.

So who put those false, extraneous pieces of information into the graphic? And why?

Also, am I the only one who notices stuff like this?


ADDENDUM: See comments for explanation of the hole cards, though the 2c river remains a mystery.

New Harrah's poker room

Yesterday my friend "Apollo" tweeted a picture of a new poker room at Harrah's. This surprised me, as I had not heard that a move was in the works.

Today by coincidence I was at Harrah's. I have a friend visiting from out of town, and we decided to see the Mac King magic show. While I was there, I stopped to have a peek at the new room:

I don't play much at Harrah's, because it's a place where for some reason I have historically tended to lose more than I win. But on the occasions that I did play there, the things that I especially liked were that it was basically a hermetically sealed room. It was as perfectly isolated from casino smoke and noise as any poker room I've ever been in.

No more. Now it's right out on the casino floor, with just a low half-wall marking its border. Which means that there is no protection from the noise, and people will come and stand right next to the wall and smoke while they watch a poker game two feet away. Ick.

So now I'll have even less reason to play there than I did before.

I also stopped by the old poker room to see what was being done with it. Kind of hard to tell:

This is taken from the door leading to the sports book area.

The old Harrah's poker room is also where I first met Cardgrrl. She was standing about where that plastic bag in the foreground is.

Everything changes in Vegas.

If only

Ten minutes ago I won a pot of over $1000 by rivering quads for a one-outer. Specifically, my 4-4 beat J-J on a board of J-4-2-2-4.

So why the post title? And how am I able to be posting about it so fast?

Because ten minutes ago I was sound asleep in my bed.

"Multi-Action Poker"

New way to deal live poker will be tried at Aria starting tomorrow. Kind of like multi-tabling live. See details here.

I've seen the table at Aria. It's pretty funky. Several people have Tweeted pictures of it, such as this one from John Kim.

WPBT hike

The poker bloggers of the world were in town for the annual December gathering this past weekend. It was, as always, good to see so many smart, fun, interesting, interconnected people at once. Here's the group shot of the bunch of us just before the start of the Saturday tournament at Aria, which, shockingly, I did not win. (I had the honor of Wil Wheaton mock-derisively declaring my tournament starting table "bullshit.")

This year, for the first time, Dan England organized a hike for Friday morning. I was one of the people to show up for it. Those who survived are pictured here. Those who succumbed to wild burro attacks did not get their pictures taken. (Burro bites, like moose bites, can be pretty nasty.)

The chosen hiking path was the 4.2-mile Oak Creek Loop, just outside the Red Rock Canyon scenic drive. I took a bunch of pictures. I wasn't going to post them, because when I got home and looked at them on my computer, I found them disappointing. Josie (who doesn't get a link now cuz she isn't writing anymore) griped at me for not having blogged about the weekend. I told her that I had no good stories and the pictures were crappy. She looked at a couple and said they were better than I thought, so fine, I'm doing it. Album of hike pictures is here.

But I still have no good stories to tell.