Two poker rooms closed this week

So says Dave Ferrara, writing for Pokerati. Specifically, Jokers Wild and Aliante Station. See http://pokerati.com/2012/11/hpt-rolls-through-town-ante-up-tour-takes-off-jokers-not-so-wild/.

By my count (I'm looking at the records of where I have played), 64 different casinos currently have a poker room or have had one at some point since I moved to Vegas in July of 2006, two of which (Speedway and Railroad Pass) I never got to play at while they were open. Current count is right around 50. Thinking about each of them individually, I count only 23 that have been open continuously and in the same location since I've been in town, and I really think that two or three of the ones I virtually never visit have moved, though I can't picture exactly where they used to be, so I'm crediting them with constancy. If 23 out of 64 have gone basically unchanged in six years; 41 out of 64 have moved, closed, and/or opened in that time span.

Ya think things change fast around here?

Session report generator

Andrew Neeme is a local grinder with whom I have played at the Palms Pokerati game a few times. We were both there again last night. A short time ago he tweeted a link to something about a report of his session. I was blown away when I checked it here. As you can see, it's an iPhone app that lets you generate a poker blog post consisting of hand histories, photos, and your commentary while you're still at the table playing the game. I had not known that any such software existed. (I apparently didn't do anything worth being featured in the post.)

While it's technically impressive, I'm personally not feeling inclined to adopt the practice, even if the same or a similar product is available for Android--and I don't know if it is. I think it would take too much of my attention away from the game. When there's a hand the details of which I want to remember, I still just pull out a pen and the piece of scrap paper I always stick in my pocket before leaving the house, and jot down a few notes.* Then, if it's something worth blogging about, I can later write up what happened as carefully and colorfully as I'm capable of, taking whatever time is required, without my attention being diverted by trying to make money simultaneously.

But even if it isn't my cup of tea, I'm glad to know the product exists. I suspect we'll all be seeing more posts composed this way in the future.

*I keep a stack of printed-on-just-one-side paper next to my computer printer to be used as scratch paper. Before I leave the house for poker, I grab one sheet, fold it up, and put it in my pocket. Its primary purpose is to record buy-ins, cash-outs, and playing times, which I then enter into spreadsheets when I get back home, as I detailed long ago here. I know that there are smart-phone apps that I could use for this, but this system works just fine for me, and I don't feel like investing the time it would take to transfer more than five years of session data to something different.

Addendum, February 26, 2012

Here's another example of the genre from my friend Dave: http://www.pokerchiptracker.com/game_reports/933a4f717f5f90f6760ac13980df77ac-4.html

Pokerati game #3

Hide your women and children, because it's World Poker Blogger Tournament time! This is the third year I have participated to some extent in the goings-on. The shenanigans started last night. I briefly met up with a bunch of the degens at the Excalibur. We then moved over to the Palms poker room. Several of us had agreed to try to get the Palms to spread a low-stakes HORSE game for us, but most of those who said they wanted to play never showed up, apparently getting lost between the two venues. I really have no idea what happened to them.

So as an alternative form of entertainment, I and several other blogger types joined the regular Thursday night Pokerati game. I have played this twice before, losing both times. (See here and here for the sad stories.) Apparently, though I am demonstrably a slow learner, I am capable of some improvement--or at least occasional luckboxing to success--because I managed to pull out a $242 win last night. Most of the profit came from making two big calls against two inveterate bluffers, both of them in situations in which I probably would not have called players with more solid table images. One of them was with just top pair in hold'em. The other was ever scarier, with just top and bottom pair in PLO when there were three possible straights on the final board. Fortunately, I was correct both times.

Just as importantly, I had a great time. The lineup was stellar entertainment, including @lasvegaspokers, @bricklv, @pokerati, @grange95 (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GRANGE!) @TheWookieWay, @TarpieFish, @onafolddraw, @alcanthang, @drizztdj, @caitycaity, and Dr. Chako (to whom I can't link, because he seems not to have a Twitter account anymore and his blog is locked). Stacey was the big winner of the night. Starting with $300, she had well over $1200 in front of her by the time I ran out of energy and left at about 2 a.m. (Included in her stacks were at least eight of the all-important and very lucky Palms lesbian chips.)

It's a challenging game, and the competition last night included a bunch of people who are more experienced at PLO and/or much more willing to gamble than I am, making for a tougher environment in which to make money than I usually encounter. But it turned out to be both fun and profitable. I don't know what more I could ask from a poker session than that.

Next up: Mixed-game hijinx tonight at Aria.

Poker gems, #438

Tom Schneider, today on Pokerati.

The one thing I’m most curious about is Chris Ferguson. Why Jesus? Why did you let this happen to us Jesus? Why did you need that much money? It’s obvious that you didn’t spend it at the barber. Your clothing budget couldn’t have been very much since you have worn the same long, black, scary leather jacket for the last ten years. The poker community after review of all of the facts should take a vote on whether Jesus should be able to keep his name. Whatever, we probably couldn’t even organize that.

Warning: Dangerously funny

Remember the Monty Python sketch about the joke that was so funny that everybody who heard it died of laughter? I was reminded of that when reading the press release, posted at Pokerati (here), about today's sale of Cereus (UltimateBlecch and Absolute Puker) to a company called Blanca Games, Inc.

If you're willing to risk death, let's look at a few of the howlers in the memo.

"Stuart Gordon, Chief Executive Officer of Blanca Games, said, 'The acquisition of Cereus is a significant opportunity for us. Cereus is a major platform of well-managed assets.'"

"Well-managed assets"! That's a good one, Stuart! It's so well-managed that it's bleeding money and needed to sell before it attained a value of exactly zero.

Mr. Gordon continues: "From our perspective, we have acquired a large, sophisticated online gaming operation with state-of-the art capabilities, ranging from compliance to business intelligence to online marketing to customer service."

Oh, he's piling them on now! "State-of-the-art capabilities," by which he presumably means an operation that doesn't encrypt the data stream, so that anybody on a wireless local network is vulnerable to having their hole cards read in real time, as well as having their account data read, and their funds subsequently transferred to a thief. Or maybe he meant software that awards to the pot to the company's most prominent sponsored pro, instead of to the player who actually had the best poker hand. "Compliance"? I guess that refers to "complying" with the absurdly low standards of the Kahnawake Gaming Commission--which basically only requires that they keep paying their licensing fees and pay a fine when somebody discovers wrongdoing (the "somebody" never being the KGC itself, which can't be bothered to actually, y'know, regulate anything or anybody, especially when it is tightly enmeshed in ownership of the entity supposedly being regulated). "Business intelligence"? This, one must guess, refers to the highly profitable business practice of owning a poker site and using one's privileged status to play against one's customers while looking at their down cards. "Customer service"? I reckon this is a sly reference to running the biggest and longest-lasting online poker cheating scheme in history, then lying about it to your customers for several years after being caught.

Gordon continues with yet another knee-slapper: "We intend to leverage the existing strengths of the Cereus Poker Network, particularly in the areas of security and customer service. Although we are impressed with many of the new security features on the Network today, security is and will remain our top priority." Stop, stop--you're killing me!

Whew! I somehow survived reading that thing for a second time. I fear, though, that I may have killed off a substantial fraction of my readers. Oh well. There's more where they came from (as UB and AP clearly feel about customers).

Negreanu, the WSOP, and the poker media

You may have read or heard about Daniel Negreanu's complaint, via Twitter posts and a recent blog post, about the PokerNews chip counts--how they're updated so infrequently and inconsistently as to be worthless. He said that coverage of the events would be more worthwhile if the whole PN team just kept the chip counts up to date, and dropped all of the story-telling that they do about specific hands, bustouts, etc.

I was going to let this go by without comment. But today an "anonymous pro" posted, via Pokerati, an interesting and thoughtful rejoinder to Negreanu, which you can (and, I think, should) read here.

I don't have a well-composed essay ready to pound out here, just a few scattered responsive thoughts. I think most readers know that I worked for PokerNews's for the WSOP in 2008 (behind the scenes) and 2009 (writing nightly recaps). I'm not exactly a deep insider, but that experience gives me at least a degree of credible perspective, I hope. If it means that I have some bias, too, OK, I'll accept that accusation.

1. Just purely as a matter of self-interest, it seems unwise for Negreanu to make enemies of the people who will be reporting on his every move. Now, I know a fair number of the rubber-hits-the-road part of the PokerNews team, and they're classy people who take pride in their work. They are certainly not going to let a sting or a grudge change wholesale how they cover a story. But they're also human, and they are able, at least at the margins, to make coverage-shaping decisions.

I don't know whether they would or will actually do the kind of thing I'm thinking about, but one can easily imagine Negreanu saying something stupid or embarrassing while in an unguarded or exasperated moment at the table. Suppose it gets overheard by or reported to somebody working for PokerNews. They can either make a story of it, or ignore it. Which would you rather have them do, if you were the subject? Which outcome will Negreanu's screed be more likely to result in?

Or set aside the theoretical. Here's an actual consequence, though not involving the PokerNews product that you'd find on their web pages: An informed insider of my acquaintance told me recently that a day or two after Negreanu posted this rant, he was interested in knowing how somebody was doing in a tournament, and approached media row to ask the bloggers. They did give him the bare minimum information he was seeking, but coldly and quickly, without elaboration, whereas their previous interactions had been warm and friendly. He might have gotten more out of them if not for his public shaming of them. Who can blame them for such a reaction? Why go out of your way to help and/or be nice to somebody who has just used his very large megaphone to announce that you're incompetent at your job?

I've shot from the hip in this blog any number of times, only to find that the bullet landing in my foot. (I have reason to think that I once cost myself a poker media job that I was interested in because of how nastily I had lambasted the work of the outlet in question.) I think Negreanu may find that he has done the same thing.

2. As "Anonymous Pro" says, Negreanu has the wrong target in his sights. The problems he complains of are not the fault of the reporters and bloggers. They hustle their tails off doing what they can to report on events so large that they are effectively unreportable, and many of them are the best in the world at what they're doing. (OK, there are a few duds, too.) They are bright, creative, hard-working people, seriously underpaid for the incredibly long hours they devote to the job. The first time I ever set foor in the Amazon Room was two years ago tomorrow. It was Shamus's birthday (happy birthday a day in advance, friend!), and I took a store-bought cake to the PN crew for the occasion. Not much of it got touched because they were all too busy to take the time away from photographing, catching hands, and editing posts. If you read the personal blogs of some of these guys, you know what kind of exhausting hours they put in. Any blame for how things are covered lies with the people at PN who decided to hire a crew that is way too small to do the job right, not with the individuals cranking out the product.

3. Negranu is just plain wrong, in my view, that chip counts are a more valuable part of the reporting than the stories. Not all the posts are gems, but with commendable frequency the PN staff manages to pass on interesting and funny stuff, often with writing quality and wit that far exceeds what one could expect to get under the working conditions of enormous time pressure and mind-numbing fatigue. There are hundreds of examples I could point to, but I particularly remember writing this fawning post because of how perfectly F-Train had told the story of several hands, and how his account conveyed a sense of having been there.* I would not be sitting here two years later reflecting with admiration on a perfectly reported chip count from that event.


I like Negreanu a lot, and I have great respect for the candor he brings to his blogging (e.g., his recent no-holds-barred dumping on UltimateBlecch, here and here). This time, though, I think that while he has a valid point, he aimed at the wrong target. I'm glad that Pokerati let Anonymous Pro supply a needed corrective voice.


*I think this is a funny story, though maybe nobody else will. My very first interaction with F-Train was via Skype instant messaging. I was sitting at home doing on-the-fly editing (i.e., fact-checking and proofreading) of the PN posts during the 2008 WSOP. He had just put up a post about Jimmy Fricke and Howard Lederer being seated at the same table. This was potentially awkward because it was just a few months after the infamous leaked email, in which Lederer had referred to Fricke as "a freak and a very weird dude." F-Train had used some generic headline for the post. I saw a glimmer of potential, and quickly shot him a suggestion: "Please, please change the headline to 'That's very weird, dude.'" Making snarky editorial suggestions was most definitely not in my job description, but he apparently liked the idea enough to make the change (or perhaps decided to just humor the nutjob on the other end of the line to avoid trouble), and we have been friends since.


Addendum, June 11, 2010

Negreanu has posted a response to Anonymous Pro on his blog--a clarification of sorts. See here.

Magically delicious

Words cannot describe how much I love this sneak peek of the new poker show, "The Big Game":




Found at Pokerati, here.

Here's the ugly math. Hellmuth is 86% to win on the flop if they run it once.

Using that as my p value, and the binomial probability calculator here, if they run it twice, Hellmuth has a 74% probability of winning it both times, a 24% probability of winning it once, and a 2% probability of losing both times.

If they run it three times, Hellmuth has a 64% probability of winning all three, a 31% probability of winning exactly two of them, a 5% probability of winning exactly one of them, and less than a <1% probability of losing them all.

If they run it four times, Hellmuth has a 55% probability of winning all four, a 36% probability of winning exactly three of them, a 9% probability of winning exactly two of them, a 1% probability of winning exactly one of them, and a less than 1% probability of losing all four.

In other words, for Hellmuth to end up as badly as you see happen here was a 99:1 shot when the money went in on the flop--a bad beat indeed, and there's nobody I'd rather see it happen to.


Update

Dang. Seems that they changed its status to private on YouTube, so the embed code doesn't work either here or at Pokerati now. Sorry.


Further update, June 11, 2010

A new link, suggested in the comments, now works and I have embedded it in place of the original one.

Trouble for the NAPT and Venetian?

This strikes me as one of the most interesting and important poker-related news stories of the year so far:

http://pokerati.com/2010/05/28/napt-venetian-part-ways-over-row-in-carson-city/

By the way (since the federal Department of Justice seems to be involved in this, as well as, obviously, the recent indictments/convictions/seizures/etc. related to online poker), all of you who somehow got the idea that Mr. Obama was going to be the head of an administration that was friendly to online poker--how are you feeling about that impression now?

Nastiest slowroll ever

Watch the video here:

http://pokerati.com/2010/01/14/two-controversial-hands-from-the-pca/

I'd kick this team out of the tournament for such horribly unethical, unsportsmanlike conduct, if I were in charge of things.

New TDA rules

The 2009 version of the Tournament Directors Association rules has been released. Well, sort of released. For reasons that I can't figure out, it seems that one must be a member of the club to download the latest version, whereas previous versions were freely provided. Nevertheless, Dan at Pokerati broke the embargo (such as it is) and published them anyway; you can view the full set of rules here.

Back in June I did a post about a rules question that arose during a World Series of Poker event. Specifically, is a player entitled to get a count of an opponent's chips (from either the player, or from the dealer if the player is not cooperative) if those chips have not been made part of a wager? The two rule books I have both say emphatically yes. But readers spoke up in the comments section about casinos that seem to employ the contrary rule.

I was most intrigued by a commenter who wrote, "We discussed this rule at great length at the TDA Summit this past Tuesday. You will see this spelled out in future TDA rules." So I looked through the new set of rules eagerly, hoping to see this addressed. I have to guess that they were unable to achieve unanimity on the matter, because it doesn't seem to have been put into a rule one way or the other.