When non-poker-players pick license plates

Life update

I have some work I need to do here at home, but had a technical malfunction that is temporarily halting the process. I'm waiting for a fix that I hope will come through any minute, so thought I would kill a little time by telling you about some things that nobody could possibly care about.

1. Poker has been going great, though, unfortunately for the blog, without much good story material. August and September were two of my most profitable months in a long time. Which is nice, after having just made the biggest expenditure of my six years in Vegas....

2. I brought the new car home Friday and sold the old one Sunday. It was sad to say good-bye to the car that has taken me everywhere for the last 20 years, but overall I know that it's a change for the better. The new one doesn't have the speed or the handling of the old one--to say nothing of its character and memories--but it wins hands-down in economy, reliability, flexibility, and practicality. That's a trade that I finally not only became willing to make, but realized that I had to make.

Here it is, just before I drove it home from the dealership:

3. My bike rides have gradually been getting longer and more ambitious. Today, for instance, I went 13.3 miles, starting at--get this--7:29 a.m.! The old Honda could not carry a bicycle unless you first ran it through a metal shredder, but the new one accommodates it easily. This means that I will no longer be restricted to rides that start and end at my apartment building, which will allow me to branch out and explore more interesting rides than are accessible from downtown. This consideration was, in fact, one of the final things that pushed me off of a couple of years of teetering indecision and to the new-car purchase. I'm enjoying my rides, and don't want to be confined to what's immediately around where I live.

4. I found a great Android app for my phone: Velodroid. For $3.09 it elegantly handles GPS tracking of bicycle rides. With a couple of clicks, you can then upload the resulting data to the free RideWithGPS.com site, which spits out lovely, detailed graphic/numeric analyses like this:

That strip along the bottom doesn't need to look so cluttered; for this screen shot I had it overlay elevation, speed, and grade, which makes it too busy, but you can look at any one or two of those parameters at a time. Moreover, you can mouse along that strip and a blue dot retraces your route on the map while you get a read on the elevation, speed, and grade at that point. Very cool. Yes, there are free apps that do basically the same thing, but I tried a couple of them and found them unintuitive or maddening or unreliable or otherwise badly designed. Velodroid is easy to use. It does everything I want and basically has no extra complicating, cluttering features that I don't want. It's damn near perfect. 

5. I am a mechanical dunce. Nothing about the way things work comes easily to me. Nothing is obvious. I'm about as quick a study as you'll ever meet in nearly anything I put my mind to, but the workings of machines is a glaring exception. So when I tell you that I have now learned how to remove the wheels from my bike, remove and replace the tires, and get the wheels back on (including that tricky rear derailleur), you might think, "So what? Most 10-year-olds can manage that." But I'm telling you that for me this is a major accomplishment, which took way more hours and boneheaded mistakes and false starts than a supposedly smart person should require. I started with the most highly recommended guide book on bicycle maintenance and repair (this one), but found that even with its dumbed-down approach, it assumed more basic mechanical competence than I possessed. So I gritted my teeth at the insulting title and purchased this one, which has helped, though incredibly I still need some things spelled out in more painstaking detail than either book does. Sigh. It's hard being stupid. 

6. My friend PokerLawyer sent me a copy of Maus, which, I'm now embarrassed to say, I don't think I had ever heard of before. That's embarrassing because I have come to understand what an important piece of art/literature it is. I don't know how it escaped my attention all these years. Mine is a "complete" edition that P.L. bought while in Germany, and which does not appear to be available in the U.S., unless I'm overlooking something. I finished reading it night before last. It's terribly sad and painful, but at the same time amazing to see what horrors people can survive. The elder Spiegelman's resourcefulness is really astonishing. At various times, he only escaped being sent to the ovens because of being able to speak English, or translate between Polish and German, or mend shoes the way he had observed professional cobblers doing, or garner favors with police or guards, or because he had made previous social connections that he could exploit. It's a story that would be important to tell in any medium, but his son's choice of a graphic novel with the characters drawn as animals somehow makes it feel more universal, even though it's obviously a unique set of experiences. 

7. Remember this adorable little thing? It now hangs from the rear-view mirror of my new car. It's not like I really need googahs to make me think often of Cardgrrl, but it nevertheless gives me pleasure to have this tangible reminder of her affection in my field of vision.

8. I saw this license plate Sunday and liked it: 

9. For old times' sake, here a "Guess the Casino" picture for you from a session Saturday night: 

Well, the techno-fix I had hoped would come is not going to, so I'm throwing in the towel on any more work from home for the day. Off to the tables. I hope that I can bring home not only the mobneys, but a good tale or two to share. 

Two license plates

It's been a long time since I posted any poker-themed license plate photos. I have spotted two in the past 24 hours.

I saw this truck at a red light today while on my way to brunch with a friend at The Original Pancake House (an excellent breakfast place). It made me wish I had his plate. (Apologies for the dirty windshield. I need new wipers, obviously.)

And this one I saw on the way home from buying groceries after my session at Mandalay Bay tonight. It may be hard to read, but it says, "LOVPOKR."

Only in Vegas

I saw this one a couple of weeks ago and forgot to post it.

Degenerates unite!

You steal this one, it's all over, baby

It's gotta belong to Scotty Nguyen, right?

More pokery plates

At South Point (where, it should be noted, there was a casino chips collectors' convention going on):

At Rio:

Also at Rio, taken through my car window as I was leaving:

No love

Not much interesting to report on today's WSOP seniors event. I increased my stack by nearly 50% on the first hand, making the nut flush to beat the nut straight. It continued going well for the first five hours, but then I got moved to a new table and ran aground. It wasn't that there was anything really different about the new table; that was just a coincidence. I went from having more than double the chip average to busto in a series of six hands, which included a mix of misreads on my part, suckouts, and lost races, none of them interesting enough to bother retelling.

Oh well. It was a nice adventure anyway. I was right in my pre-event estimation that this field would be even softer than that of the typical $1500 donkament. They were all playing a completely straightforward and transparent game, which left lots of room to take an edge with well-timed bluffs and catching some breaks with oddball starting hands that they never guessed.

One more license plate for you, spotted when I took a walk during one of the breaks:

Again, I was completely blinded by the sun overhead, so couldn't tell what was on the screen until later, which is why the framing is off. You'll just have to take my word for it that the plate reads, "AALLLIN."

More pokery license plates

Once again I had occasion to walk through the Rio parking lot on my way into and out of the convention center area, and once again there were several poker-themed license plates.

I do not have mad photography skillz, as I don't know how to keep my fingers out of the way of the lens. (In my defense, the sun was at a low angle and I couldn't see a thing on the phone's LCD screen. This was taken blind.)

Nice one on a big SUV from California. (Compare it to the second one posted on Pokerati here.)

I get the DB9 part--it's an Aston Martin. But QQ7? I have to guess that somebody won the last pot of a big 7-card stud tournament with QQ7 as his starting hand.

May or may not be poker-related. I choose to believe that it is.

Sorry for the crappy image. I had to use my little pocket flashlight to get anything at all to show up, but it was too good to pass by.

Definitely not poker materials. But I grew up in Champaign-Urbana, and attended the University of Illinois for both undergrad and graduate school, so I felt obligated to give this plate a little love.

Plates R Us

As you might expect, the Rio parking lot is rich with poker-themed vanity plates this time of year. Here are three I passed on my way out to my car.

That just has to be Jimmy Fricke's car.

This is one of my favorite ones ever. The car's alarm went off just from me standing behind it for the amount of time it took to get this shot. Weird.

I get the "holdm" part, but I'm unsure about the "CO" part. Colorado--with Nevada plates?

That's the car's owner you see coming into frame on the left. I didn't notice that he was sitting behind the wheel talking on his cell phone when I started taking pictures of the back of his car. (The first one didn't turn out because of glare from the late-day, low sun.) He came bolting out to confront me. He was plenty miffed that I had the nerve to take a photograph of his license plate. Hey, dude--chill out. It's out there in public for everybody to see already, not exactly an invasion of privacy!

On the road again

As I was driving to Green Valley Ranch on I-215 yesterday, I was passed by this car. In case you can't see it, the license plate is "BIGSLIK."

Out of date

C'mon, dude--everybody knows that it's called the Dank now, not the Mookie. (Or maybe it's not called anything anymore, what with Black Friday and all.)

Spotted in the Harrah's parking garage Thursday night.

Might be a poker player

Seen at the Palms tonight.

Pictures from around town (1)

I took a bunch of pictures of this and that and the other over the last ten days or so while hanging out with Cardgrrl. Now that she has gone back home, I have a little time to sort through and post them. I'll do it in chunks, because Blogger's stupid interface makes it awkward to handle more than a handful of photos in any one post.

First up are some license plates that I saw while walking past the valet area outside the convention center at the Rio last Wednesday night (June 16), as I was on my way in to sweat Cardgrrl in the $1500 HORSE event she was playing.

This is Vanessa Rousso's Lamborghini:




I'm guessing that this guy won a big Omaha tournament with J6AQ as his final hand:




This one is just fun:




Cardgrrl was at a table on one side of one of the "hallways" inside the Amazon Room. On the other side Tom Dwan was playing in another event. It was only a few steps away, so I wandered over to try to get a picture:




What I didn't realize as I was trying to get a decent shot was that he was extremely short-stacked. In fact, though I didn't know it at the time, that proved to be his last hand of the tournament. I clicked the shutter again, but he had started moving and it came out all blurry:




Why was he moving? Well, I didn't know until he stood up and walked away with no chips left at his spot at the table, and I realized he wasn't coming back. So if you've ever wondered what Tom Dwan looks like two seconds after he learns that he busted out of a WSOP event, now you know!

Seen today on Las Vegas Boulevard

Poker plate

Seen earlier today at the Rio parking garage. What game do you suppose he was there to play?

License plate FTW

I very much liked this plate, and the car to which it was attached, seen earlier today in the Rio parking garage.

Cause and effect?

Spotted in the parking garage at the Palms.

In the Rio parking garage

Just have to ask--Utah?

Hodge-podge post

I collected a bunch of mostly unrelated stories and observations today, so I'm throwing them together into a garbage-can post.


New chairs at Rio

One table at the Rio poker room has these new chairs. They've been there for a couple of months, but for some reason I've never played at that table. Until today. I was pleased to get a chance to try them out. They really are much more comfortable that the plain-Jane chairs that most of the Rio tables have. The padding is deep and the construction obviously solid, the better to accommodate the growing number of 300-400 pound poker players. The photo below is terrible, because I was just trying to capture the manufacturer's name printed across the back in order to be able to look it up later. You can see better photos at their web site, here. I believe that the Rio is using the "Barona" model, covered in a reasonably breathable black cloth, but I couldn't swear to that.




Cocktail waitress declines tip

LOL--I accidentally typed that headline as "Cocktail waitress declines top." In Vegas, that wouldn't exactly be earth-shattering news. Freudian slip?

Anyway, this happened a couple of weeks ago at the Rio, and I forgot to write about it at the time. Cocktail waitress came around to take orders. I asked for a bottle of water. When she returned, she didn't get it to me, and I was in a hand so didn't notice her until she was walking out of the room. It was another 20 minutes or so before she came back for another round of drink orders. I told her I'd still like a bottle of water. She was clearly embarrassed that she had forgotten, and apologized. It was no big deal, and I told her so. She had an extra bottle on her tray and gave it to me. As per my usual practice, I handed her a $1 chip. She declined it, saying, "No, I didn't get this to you when I was supposed to. You keep it." I reassured her that it was fine, and pressed the chip on her again. But she was very insistent, and wouldn't take it. I gave up.

I have never before seen or heard of a cocktail waitress declining a tip because she felt that she didn't deserve it. Quite a sense of personal integrity.


Best hand of the day

I bought in for $300 (the max). This is a recent experiment I've been trying, a departure from my habitual $100 starting buy-in. As I gain more experience with it, I'll put up a post about what prompted me to try it, and how it has gone. For now, I'll just say that it has made for much more profit than I would otherwise have had. Sooner or later, I'll get stacked for the whole amount and regret it, but obviously if the number of times I double up greatly exceeds the number of times that I lose more than I would have with a shorter buy-in, it's a worthwhile investment. We'll see.

So anyway, I had slipped down to about $225 when this hand came up. I was in middle position and limped in with the Mighty Deuce-Four offsuit. The guy on my left was, by my estimation, the most potentially tricky and dangerous player at the table. He raised to $15. He could do this with a wide range. He got a couple of other callers, so I decided to take my favorite hand into battle and see what would happen.

Flop: J-K-2 rainbow. Action checked to the bettor, and he put out $25. The others folded. I called. I wasn't so much counting on the 2-4 being good here, nor on making trips or two pair on the turn. I just wasn't convinced that he had hit this flop, and I wanted to see what he'd do next. He could easily have raised with a small or medium pair, and my flop call could slow him down, allowing me an opening to steal it. I thought this was especially so since there weren't many good draws present on that board. In other words, if he had a small or medium pair, he'd pretty much have to assume that I had either a jack or a king in order to be able to call.

But the turn was another deuce. This was ideal. If a 4 had come, I'd have to worry at least a little that he had K-J for a better two pair already. Of course, he could have a set of jacks or kings, but that's only a small part of his possible range, and not particularly likely. To make things even better, he's not going to put me on quads now, and other than 2-2 there isn't a hand with a deuce in it that he should consider in the range of hands with which I would have called him pre-flop.

My sense of him at this point was that he felt confident in his hand and would bet again if I let him, so I did. Sure enough, he pushed forward a stack of $50. I thought a while, then check-raised all-in for my last approximately $185. He called almost instantly, and had me covered.

I showed him the 2-4, and he groaned. "You've gotta be #$^&*! kidding me!" He showed his pocket aces. I was kind of hoping for an Allen Kessler, "Oh my god! What's wrong with you?" But I didn't get it. He was drawing to just one of the last two aces for the win, and that didn't happen.

He let loose a torrent of invective like I haven't heard directed my way in a LONG time. He pulled out a thesaurus in order to be sure he used every synonym of "idiot" in the book. He recounted the hand history: "You called $15 preflop from out of position, and then you thought bottom pair with a horrible kicker was good when I bet again?" Etc. I'll spare you the whole diatribe. It continued, on and off, either out loud to anybody who would listen or under his breath for a good ten minutes. I never uttered a word of explanation or justification or apology or sympathy--just stacked the chips while he ranted.

He proceeded to go on Super Monkey Tilt and donk off the rest of his chips before storming away. I found it most satisfying and amusing.

I'm afraid he left still not grasping the fact that he was cold-decked. It wasn't his fault, it wasn't my fault. When you pit the two most powerful starting hands in poker against each other, somebody's going to get hurt. That's just the way it is.

All hail the Mighty Deuce-Four!


Another pokery license plate

After racking up a decent profit at the Rio, I felt I had a little mojo left in me, so I decided to head over to Imperial Palace and play there. On the way, there was a big traffic jam on Flamingo because of road construction. Two lanes over I spotted a California plate:





It's the blue BMW two lanes to the right. If you look at the photo full size, I think you can just barely make out what the plate says: "BIGSTAX"

Nice.


Compare and contrast

The Rio game had been stocked with laggy Scandis and Crazians who presented a more formidable challenge that I usually find there. That was actually the main reason I left--I was steadily building my chips, but they were in more danger of me making a critical slip-up than usual, and I was getting tired. Not a good spot to be playing sub-optimally in.

The Imperial Palace table could not have been more different. It was mostly occupied by highly inexperienced tourists who didn't know how to tell when it was their turn or what the current action was. They were weak, passive, scared calling stations. One guy made bad bluffs a lot and was running through his bankroll.

I played for about another two and a half hours, and walked away winner, with a rate of about 14 big blinds/hour at Rio, and 30 at IP.

I realize that this is a basic, necessary skill for success, but I was pleased to be reminded that I have in my game sufficient range and flexibility to move from one extreme style of play to the other, adapt accordingly, and still profit. It's not often I get to test that range with such dramatic contrast in one day. Most $1-2 and $1-3 games around here are interchangeable, and it's pretty easy to develop a default approach to the game that works pretty well and doesn't require too much effort or adjustment on most days.

Glad to know that I still have a couple of gears that can be trotted out when they're called for--the "keep up with the crazy table" fast one, and the "never, ever bluff" one.


Hey, that face looks familiar...

Another story from a few weeks ago, which I forgot to relate at the time. The IP tables are huge and covered in cloth on which are depicted two attractive young women in skimpy, vaguely IP-ish outfits. I just assumed that they were models hired for the photo shoot.

Well, on this particular day, the cocktail waitress caught my attention. She looked extremely familiar--a face that I had seen very recently. It took a few seconds, but then it clicked. She was one of the models on the poker tables. The resemblance was so striking that I didn't have much doubt, but I asked anyway, and she confirmed it.

Kind of a strange sensation to have been looking at a face that you sort of assume you'll not have occasion to see in real life, then suddenly have its owner standing right next to you.


I'm not trying to turn into a comp whore or anything, but what's the deal?

Every time that Cardgrrl takes a trip to either Atlantic City or here, she seems to have the room comped for basically as long as she wants, along with at least some of the food, and the round-trip bus trip when it's A.C., all through Harrah's. This has puzzled me greatly--even intense sessions a few days at a time just can't add up to the number of hours I put in routinely. At least that's how it seems to me. (She wrote a post on this subject earlier this year here, and admits that it sort of puzzles her, too.) Sure, I get the $1/hour food comp credit, but that's it, as far as I know.

Last night we got chatting about this via Skype. She asked me about my points and status. I had no idea. I didn't even know one could check such things on the Harrah's web site. Turns out that I have a big mess of "rewards" points, but very few "tier" points, and it's the latter than translate into the generous room comps. Oh, and I have zero "offers" pending. Harrah's never contacts me by mail or email to offer me stuff. With Cardgrrl, her "offers" box has stuff they're wanting to give her all the time.

It's so unfair.

Frankly, I'm not sure what I'd do with room comps even if they were pushing them at me. But last night I was experiencing a sense of outrage over it anyway. Why does Harrah's throw everything at her, and nothing my way? Well, apparently Harrah's in A.C. has for a long time been giving "tier" credits for poker hours, while the Vegas properties don't--or didn't. Harrah's just recently changed this, I learned, and now one racks up "tier" points at 28/hour. (See, e.g., here and here.) Don't ask me about any other details. I still find the whole system baffling and opaque, and I had never even heard of "tier credits" until last night. (Well, that's probably not completely true. When Shamus and I went to the Wednesday Poker Group at Binion's in April, there were some news items, and something about new Harrah's credits was mentioned. I paid no attention at the time, but that was probably it.)

But maybe there are other factors at work. Maybe the system is tweaked to offer rooms and other stuff more liberally to those coming from out of town than for locals. Maybe women get more than men. I don't pretend to know.

I just know that I have my butt in a Harrah's chair a helluva lot, and they have never seemed to notice or care.

Cardgrrl suggested that I try an experiment of dropping $20 or so in a Harrah's slot machine, and see if that primed the pump, so to speak, suggesting to them that I might be a more lucrative customer than I have appeared to be in the past.

So I decided to try it tonight on my way out of IP. I spotted the bank of four "Star Trek" slots. I thought that might be fun. It wasn't. I found it to be just like the "Sopranos" slot machine was when I stuck a dollar in it in December, 2007: completely perplexing. I had no way to judge whether it was better to request 1 line, or 5, or 10, or even 25. It was not at all obvious what combinations of things would win. There was a bunch of stuff thrown up on the screen about bonuses, but it was all gibberish to me. I just threw a $20 bill in, hit "max credits per line," and let it go. It took only about 5 spins for me to be down to zero credits. Nothing interesting whatsoever had happened, except that at one point it said I had made some sort of bonus (see picture below). It wasn't clear to me what, if anything, I was supposed to do about it. I never got to whatever point it is that causes the machine to play cute little clips from the original Star Trek series. It was all just completely stupid and pointless. I cannot understand why people sit at these machines for hours upon hours, draining both their bank accounts and their souls.

But anyway, maybe a switch has now been thrown in the Harrah's computer system that says, "Oooo, this guy gives us money," and the offers will start coming in the mail and/or electronically. We shall see.

In the Rio parking lot

This car pulled in right behind me as I arrived at the Rio today, so I saw who got out of it: it's one of the Rio poker dealers.





You can't see it very well, so I marked where I parked with a red arrow. One of the closest possible spots to the entrance I use near the Rio poker room. Good parking karma often portends a good day at the table, and that was true today.

As I said with the wallet things: It was a good day before the poker even started!