Rio session

Tonight was the first time I've made it over to the Rio since the WSOP began. I've been negligent.

Even during the Series, when I play there my usual choice is the poker room, not the convention center. One reason for that is that I get comps and Total Rewards points in the poker room, but not in the Pavilion Room. More importantly, though, is that I really hate playing in the Pavilion environment. There are tons of people milling around, it's freezing cold, the competing overhead announcements are deafening and distracting, etc. If there are poker tables in hell, I imagine the surroundings are about as unconducive to relaxed, thoughtful poker as the Pavilion Room. But I had reason to think that several people I'd like to connect with socially would be hanging around, and I wanted it to be easy for them to find me, so I sucked it up and played in the big hall.

Here are the hands I played.

(Hint: #7 is the interesting one, if you want to skip ahead to the good part.)

Hand #1

On the fourth hand I was dealt, I was in the cutoff seat with K-Q offsuit. There were a few limpers, so I raised to $13. Three callers. Flop A-10-J. Well, now, isn't THAT pretty? They all checked to me. I bet. They all folded, the last one while telling me, "You must have an ace." Good guess, but no.

Hand #2

AA. I raised, one caller. Some ragged flop, and my c-bet won it.

Hand #3

I had the Mighty Deuce-Four of Crubs in the big blind and called a raise to $8. Flop was 7-8-9 with two more crubs. I called a small c-bet from the raiser, as did one middle-position player. Turn was 3c. Ding! My plan for a check-raise was foiled when action checked around. River was an offsuit ace, I think. I bet about 2/3 pot and got called by the middle guy, original raiser folded. Deuce-Four wins. LDO.

Hand #4

On the button, I joined nearly a tableful of limpers with 5d-8d. The big blind was a tricky, aggressive player. He raised to $18. This looked to me like an attempt to pick up the pot without a fight, and was something he would likely do with any two cards. I decided that a limp-call here would look most like a small pair hunting for sets, and with position and a solid table image, there was a good chance I could torture him with hard decisions, and likely steal the pot. The flop was something raggedy, probably missing him, but it paired my 5. Odds were good that I now had the best hand, so when he checked to me, I read it as him giving up, bet, and won.

Hand #5

KK. Raised, won the blinds. Apparently I had instilled some fear into the hearts of my opponents. Which I don't mind one little bit.

Hand #6

This was the hand immediately after the last one--KK twice in a row! The table bully (he loved big pre-flop raises and reraises) raised to $18. If I reraised, it would be my first three-bet, which he would definitely notice, and he'd either fold or be able to narrow my range down so far that it would be very unlikely that he'd make a big mistake for a lot of money as the hand progressed. (This was especially true given what the immediately preceding hand had revealed about my image.) So, deviating from my usual play, I decided to just call him. I thought this would be a good spot for a one-big-pair call-down. I.e., as long as I didn't scare him off with aggression, I expected him to keep firing whether he improved or not, and I would just let him, since I was severely under-representing my hand. It was a risky way to play it, but I wanted to take a chance on bleeding him maximally. (As a side benefit, if an ace flopped and he looked as though he liked that, I could let it go with minimal damage.)

It didn't work out that way. The flop was 664. I was greatly surprised when he checked. I thought that would look to him like about as safe a flop to c-bet as he could ask for. I was a little puzzled, and decided to change course from passive to active and see what he did. I bet $25. He called. This made me think that he probably had a pocket pair higher than the board but below my kings, and he might keep paying out.

Turn: another 4. He checked. I bet $40. He called.

River: 2. (Oh to have the Mighty Deuce-Four now! It would give me the SuperFullHouse, fours full of both sixes and deuces!) He checked again, which allayed my small lingering fear that he had flopped trips or a boat and was trapping. I tried to guess the biggest amount that he would call with just a medium overpair, with him hoping that I was firing with just a big ace on this double-paired board. I settled on $50. He thought for maybe ten seconds, then called. He chortled when he saw the kings, and said, "That's very good." He mucked without showing.

My best guess is that I had pegged his hand correctly (something between 7s and 10s; with jacks or queens he would have led out on the flop, I believe), and my sneaky pre-flop call got me pretty close to squeezing as many chips out of him as he would ever have parted with. Hilarity ensued, in the form of him picking up his remaining chips and leaving without another word. This was the same guy I had beaten with Deuce-Four, and I guess he had had just about enough of me.

It appeared that now I had the table both scared and confused.

As Mr. Burns is fond of saying, "Excellent!"

Hand #7

This is the one that I think is the most interesting. The player on my right was a late 20s Asian male with a big stack. He was quiet and solid, aggressive, but not wildly so. In fact, I pegged him as the most dangerous player at the table, which is why I didn't do a seat change to one of my usual preferred spots when I could; I wanted him exactly where he was, to my immediate right.

His aggression was manifested by boldly playing for pots when any opponent showed weakness. If there was an orphan pot, he was the one most likely to go for it. He was smart and selective about his aggression. I had misread him several times already when I wasn't involved--thinking he was bluffing when he had the goods and vice-versa.

This hand was the only one in which we tangled for more than $10 or so.

I had A-K offsuit in late position, so raised to $13. A few limpers ran away, and he was the only one who stuck around for the flop. It was A-10-4 rainbow. He checked, I bet $20, he called.

Turn: 8. He checked. I checked.

This is not my usual play. In fact, it is exactly this deviation from my usual pound-pound-pound technique that, I think, is the interesting point. This guy was way too smart to pay off three streets with any hand that could not beat my top pair/top kicker. As soon as the flop hit, I knew that two streets of value was the most I could get from him, and even that was being optimistic.

So once he called the flop, my choices were (A) bet the turn and let the river go check-check, on the theory that he would only call a river bet with hands that beat me. Or (B), be more tricky about it, check the turn, and go for the value on the river.

The latter plan had this great advantage: He had never seen me take the betting lead, then relinquish it by checking. It had not happened even once in this session so far. He was plenty smart and attentive enough to recognize that a check on the turn from me was not how I had been playing. I thought that he would read it as weakness, and take a stab at the pot on the river. He would put me on something like K-Q that had whiffed, or a pocket pair that did not like seeing the ace flop.

The range of hands he could have with which he would bet the river after a check behind on the turn was far wider than the range with which he would call a bet from me on either the turn or river. It included all of his bluffing range plus a good chunk of his value-betting range. E.g., he could easily bet hands like J-T, Q-T, and K-T thinking he was best after I slowed down on the turn, but would never call a second bet from me with such a modest holding.

For that reason, I checked behind on fourth street. My primary purpose was deception--to induce either a bluff or what he would mistakenly view as a value bet on fifth street. It was a line that was tailor-made for this specific opponent's previously demonstrated tendencies, designed to get one more street of value from him with his nothing and one-pair hands than he would otherwise give me.

Therefore, when the river came a harmless-looking deuce, my decision was already pre-made to call when he did what was expected of him and bet $40.

Sadly, though, he had gotten lucky on me. He turned over 8-8 for the turned set.

I lost about $75 on the hand, but I actually felt really good about it. If you take all of the hands with which he would have taken the exact same line (limp-call, check-call, check, and bet), I think I beat far more of them at showdown than I lose to. Despite having lost, I think I played it as well as I possibly could have, given who I was up against.

As it turned out, my attempt to be deceptive worked out in my favor in a completely unexpected way: It saved me money by keeping the pot smaller, and prevented me from having to make a difficult decision if he had check-raised me on the turn.

More hands

I then won a little flurry of small pots that coincidentally got me back to within a couple of bucks of where I had been before that AK/88 hand. As it turned out, that one hand was the only one of the entire session that I lost after having put in any more money than the amount of the $3 big blind. After Hand #6, I had entertained a glimmer of hope that I might complete a whole session never losing a single pot to which I had contributed more than the big blind, which would be truly remarkable. I didn't quite pull it off, but I came awfully close.

Let's count the mistakes

I played at the Rio last night. When I was directed to a table, the only seat open was #2, so I took it. Good thing. It was so advantageous that in retrospect I'm astonished that nobody else there moved to it when it became available.

Its advantage was all about the guy in Seat 1. He was drunk out of his mind. A friend of his at the table said that he had had about 20 vodka/Red Bulls in the past five hours or so. At the rate he was downing them, I believed it.

He was the classic happy drunk--far more interested in socializing and commenting on everything else going on around him than the game. He always had to be pestered into taking his turn, always had to be told about five times to post his blinds, always had to be told what the action was, etc.

Of most importance to the story, he put zero effort into protecting his cards, despite multiple warnings from the dealer, me, and the other players. He never capped his cards with a chip or other object. This is an especially dangerous habit in the two seats next to the dealer, for two reasons. First, the dealer can sweep one's hole cards into the muck much faster and more easily than from other positions. Second, other players mucking their cards can accidentally run them into unprotected hole cards of Seats 1 and 9 (or 10), thus killing the hand. The other way he failed to protect his hand was that he just lifted his cards in front of his face with no attempt to conceal them. I could see them without even trying about half the time.

As it happened, he quickly developed a fear of playing a pot with me, so I made almost no money from him over the couple of hours we played together. In only one hand was my view of his hole cards potentially going to make a difference. He raised pre-flop with 7h-8h. I had A-Q offsuit and called. The flop missed both of us. He put in a continuation bet. Since I knew exactly what he had, it was an easy call. I didn't raise, because the only decent player at the table was still in it with us. He raised, which foiled my chance at playing the hand as a superuser. Drunk guy and I both folded.

OK, now we get to the crazy hand of the night.

Drunk guy was in the big blind, but, as usual, didn't know it, despite the dealer asking him to post a couple of times. I folded from under the gun. I saw one of drunk guy's cards, a jack. Seats 3 and 4 folded. Just about that time, drunk guy says, "All in." It wasn't his turn, obviously. He still hadn't even posted his blind. Seat 5 pushes his chip stacks forward. He must have heard the all-in announcement, because there's no way he would have just open-raised all-in for $135.

So the first mistake was drunk guy acting out of turn. Second mistake was the dealer not quickly stopping the action and clarifying that that declaration was out of turn and would be binding only if there was no raise in turn from any other player before action was properly back on Seat 1. Third mistake was Seat 5 not understanding all of this, and responding as if Seat 1's action had been in turn.

But wait, there's more!

The next player asked for a clarification of what the action was. The dealer told him that Seat 1 had gone all in out of turn, and Seat 5 was all in. He folded, as did everyone else. Then the dealer, apparently having forgotten what he had just said, looked down at Seat 1, saw unprotected cards and no chips out (he still hadn't posted his blind), and absent-mindedly swept Seat 1's cards into the muck. Let's call that mistake 4.

Drunk guy looks down, trying to figure out what happened, and says, "Hey, where's my cards?" Dealer immediately recognizes what he did. He calls for the floor. While he's looking away, trying to get the attention of the supervisor, drunk guy says loudly and repeatedly that he had had two jacks, and pulls two cards out of the muck that he thinks are his. He turns them face up: a jack and a deuce. He points to the deuce and says, "That one's wrong," and starts rummaging through the muck turning cards face up, trying to find his other jack. Finally the dealer notices what he's doing and puts a halt to it. Let's call this mistake 5.

Meanwhile, Seat 5 says, "Go ahead and find those jacks, see if you can beat this!" and triumphantly slams his pocket queens face up on the table. Mistake 6. Why invite your opponent to get a live hand that has a 20% chance of beating you if you might instead get his chips as a freeroll if he is deemed to be committed to the all-in with a dead hand? Of course, an opponent's approval of muck-fishing doesn't legalize it.

Floor comes over. The correct ruling, in my opinion, should be that Seat 1 is responsible only for the big blind. His out-of-turn declaration is no longer binding once Seat 5 puts in his raise. Since he never moved any chips into the pot, when the action is properly on him, he can call Seat 5's all in, or he can fold. With a dead hand, folding is the obvious thing that any sensible player would chose to do, given the option in that situation--lose the $3 big blind and hopefully learn a lesson from the close call. But instead, the floor rules that the out-of-turn all-in is, in fact, binding. Mistake 7.

Drunk guy accepts this ruling, but clearly does so thinking that he still get a chance to fight for the pot with his long-lost jacks. Mistake 8. Nope. Floor tells him it's a dead hand and instructs the dealer to take $135 from Seat 1 and give it to Seat 5.

Drunk guy is surprisingly sanguine about this. I expected an eruption, but it didn't happen. He quickly resigned himself to it, saying, "Whatever. I don't care. Fuck it."

Floor guy gave him a "final warning" about the f-bomb. (He had issued one previous warning, and the dealers had issued several.) Sadly, about 10 minutes later, one more effenheimer resulted in another call for the floor, and our friend being ejected from the room.

Strangely, this was an outcome that two other players had actively sought, complaining to the floor about how the drunk guy was slowing down the game. Which he was, obviously. But if you're there to make money, having a player like this booted from the game is absolutely the last thing you want to see happen.

When I cashed out later, I told the floor guy how I couldn't believe how short-sighted those other players had been in working to have Seat 1 kicked out. It was like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. He was sympathetic, and clearly knew exactly what was going on. He told me, "I know! I knew he was the action player in the game, so I tried to look the other way and let him keep playing for as long as I could."

Oh well. I made my money from the other players.

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

It's gotta belong to Scotty Nguyen, right?

"You can play your queen if you want to"

I played at the Rio again this evening. In a hand in which I wasn't involved, the final board was 5-5-J-K-2. At showdown, Player A had J-Q. Player B had J-9.

The dealer appropriately chopped the pot. When Player A got his half, it was clear he was expecting the whole thing. He said, "Wait a minute--we both had jacks, but I had a queen with it."

Instead of taking the usual, straightforward approach to the explanation, this impish dealer said, "You can play your queen if you want to. But this guy [Player B] has jacks and fives with a king [pointing to the K on the board], so if you do that, he'll get the whole thing. Still want to play the queen?"

Player A quickly grasped the point and withdrew his objection.

This might sound like it was nasty, but it wasn't. The tone of voice and facial expressions were so light and friendly that he pulled it off. It's kind of a risky thing to do, because it's the sort of comment that some players could take offense at, thinking they're being needled. Still, I liked how the dealer managed the situation.

Big pot

Tonight I had the distinct honor of meeting the one and only Julius Goat. He and Shamus and I had plans to meet for dinner at the Rio, followed by Wednesday night pub trivia at McFadden's. So I decided to get in a couple of hours of poker before dinner.

Shortly before it was time to leave, this hand came up. I had 8d-9d in early position and limped. Middle-position guy raised to $10, followed by a late-position call. Small blind reraised to $25. I would normally not call a raise and reraise with this starting hand, especially from bad position. However, I looked left and saw that both of the other two players already had three red chips in hand, ready to toss in, so I was reasonably confident that no four-bet was coming to force me out.

Besides--and here comes the part for which you are free to mock me mercilessly--I had a feeling. Normally, when I hear players say that they made some decision based on a statement like that, I just roll my eyes and sigh at the stupidity, so I'll understand and forgive in advance if you do the same to me. But I had a rather strong premonition that if I folded this hand, I'd regret it. This is a distinctly uncommon kind of experience for me. It's not like I'm getting such impulses on every hand. It probably means nothing more mysterious than some random neural firing, but I decided to go with it anyway. Again, not my usual approach to poker decision-making, and I won't try to justify or defend it further. I'm just telling you what happened.

As expected, both other players called, giving us a $100 pre-flop pot.

Flop: 4d-6c-7d, giving me both a flush draw and an open-ended straight draw. Assuming nobody else had a bigger diamond draw, that meant I had two pulls at 15 cards that would make me a winner. Not bad. In fact, it's precisely the kind of flop one most dearly hopes for when playing suited connectors in a multi-way pot.

Small blind bet $55--surely a big pocket pair, to be have reraised from out of position, then lead out into three opponents. Pot was now $150, after the rake. I had about $250 left behind. I spent maybe 20 seconds deciding whether to flat-call or shove. I couldn't get any read on what the other two were planning to do. I finally decided to risk losing customers with a shove, primarily because if any of my desired cards hit on the turn, it might then be hard to get any further action. I declared myself all in.

Middle-position guy was taken aback. He was visibly ambivalent about what to do, but finally said, "OK, let's do it," and pushed his stacks forward. He had me covered. Late-position guy, who had around $175 left, likewise shrugged, said, "OK," and moved his chips in. Small blind quickly folded, saying, "One pair is never good in that situation."

Middle-position guy had 6d-3d, for middle pair, baby flush draw, and gutshot straight flush draw. However, he groaned when he saw my cards, because the 5 to make his straight would give me a bigger one, and any diamond for his flush would also give me a bigger one. He had to hope that neither one of us improved and that his lowly pair of 6s would hold up, or that he got some runner-runner full house or his miracle 5d for the straight flush. The other player never showed.

The turn ended the drama quickly: 10h, giving me the nuts. The river was the ace of clubs.

The pot totaled $828. I don't keep track of individual pots, so it's possible that I've forgotten something bigger, but I believe it's the biggest pot I've won so far this year. It also gave me a win rate for today's session of $352/hour, just a tad above my average. I'll take it!

In case you hadn't noticed, I've been running kinda good lately.

Why I almost but didn't quite make it to the casino chip collectors' convention

I mentioned the other day that the year's biggest casino chips collectors' convention was in town this week, and that I would be scrupulously staying away so as to avoid any temptation to buy some collectible goodies that I can't really afford.

Well, apparently I have a lot of chip collectors among my readership, because I received a surprising number of messages through the blog comments, by email, by text, and even in person at the tables over the last few days, all passing on this thought: You really should go, because it's cool and amazing.

Today is the show's last day. When I woke up late this morning and checked the overnight Twitter feed, I learned a couple of useful things: (1) The Rio's daily deepstack event, which I've been wanting to try, had been pushed back to 4:00 pm instead of its usual 2:00 pm. (2) Daniel "Jungleman" Cates was having the last of his series of ticket giveaways for a seat in the WSOP Main Event at McFadden's at the Rio from 12:30 to 1:30. (You can read much more about Dan in the New York Times Magazine here, and in the cover story of Bluff Magazine Europe here.)

I formulated a plan. I would head to the Rio, pick up my Jungleman drawing ticket, register for the deepstacks tournament while the lines were still short, then drive to South Point, spend a couple of hours looking at poker chips--without buying any--then be back at the Rio by 4:00 to play. As my day-planning goes, this one was positively brilliant: Geographically efficient, productive, and fun.

Let me pause for a minute and tell you about the drawing, because you might not have heard of it. As reported on Cates' blog and a YouTube video, and as I first learned from the Twitter feed of my friend Jason Simon (Thanks, Jason! I owe you one bowl of soup next visit!), Daniel decided to hold a free raffle to give away a seat to the World Series of Poker main event, as his way of giving something back to the poker community from which he feels he has benefited so richly. It's a lovely, generous offer.

The only eligibility criterion was that the recipient had not previously played in a Main Event. However, in order to pick up tickets, you had to go to where Daniel was holding court, in a one-hour window of time, with just a couple of hours of advance notice on Twitter. As a practical matter, that severely limited the field of contenders to those living in Vegas, with a car, with no day job, and who checked Twitter frequently. Hey--that's me!

I don't usually enter drawings and other such things, but I did some mental math on this one. I made a guesstimate that they probably wouldn't have more than about a hundred people able to make it to the locations specified under those conditions. If I did it every time, I might therefore have 1% or maybe even as much as 2% of all the tickets in the bowl. With the prize worth $10,000, my equity in it would be something like $100-$200. If there were four ticket days, my total time expenditure would be less than four hours. That seemed like a worthwhile endeavor. So I did it. I picked up a ticket at each of the four events, scattered between May 24 and today:

Back to my day. I didn't stick around McFadden's, even though I knew they would be holding the drawing at 1:30. I thought my chances of winning weren't high enough to make it worth cutting into my chip-ogling time. Besides, they had been clear that one didn't need to be present to win, and they had promised to telephone the winner.

When I got to South Point, I found the convention center rooms where the casino chips vendors had their displays. As a bonus, though I had read online that it was $10 to enter, a sign announced that entry would be free Saturday, as the show was closing. But I decided to check my messages before strolling around inside the rooms.

You have to understand that virtually nobody calls me on my cell. I give the number to very few people, and, well, even they don't like me very much, so they leave me alone. OK, that's not quite true, but my friends know that I dislike talking on the phone except for short exchanges of information as necessary. I'm not a chatter. I literally get less than one phone call a week.

So when I saw missed-call and voice-mail alerts from an out-of-state, unknown number, with a time stamp of 1:33 pm, you can bet it caught my attention. Could that really be what I thought it might be? I sat down in an easy chair just outside the convention hall to listen to the message:

I bet every one of you would have pressed "4" to listen again. I sure did.

(If I just violated a wiretapping law or something like that with the above recording, well, I'll throw myself on the mercy of the court and hope the judge is a poker player.)

The next thing I did might surprise you. I didn't call him back instantly. Instead, I called Cardgrrl. She means the world to me, and I had to share with her my excitement even before calling to confirm that this wasn't some terrible prank or misunderstanding. She figured out where the story was going even before I got to the punchline, and was interrupting me with "No way!" and Elaine-esque "Get out!" even before I could announce, "I won!"

But I kept it short, and contacted my benefactor immediately thereafter. By the time I was done with a quick call to him, the news was already on Twitter from both @JunglemanDan and @MicheleLewis (who had been recruited to pull the name out of the ice bucket), and friends who knew my real name were translating that that was none other than @PokerGrump. In fact, I was already getting buzzed by text messages from friends urging me to check Twitter, if I hadn't already heard.

I was way too excited to care about poker chips by then, so I left South Point--having made it to within 30 feet of the show's entrance--returned home, picked up all of my drawing ticket stubs, and went back to the Rio, not yet sure when I might need to meet up with Daniel. I'm sure the chip vendors will be back next year, and who knows--by then I might have a little more money I can spend with them!

For the record, the winning ticket was the second one shown above, picked up at PT's Pub on Rainbow the afternoon of June 6.

There are still some details to be worked out, such as Daniel's publicist, Lara, getting verification from WSOP officials that I have never registered for a Main Event before (I promise I haven't), logistics of doing the buy-in, and getting together for some training from Daniel, which is thrown in as part of the offer. (Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, eh?) But that's all just details.

There's one other thing that I have to arrange. I had already purchased airline tickets to fly out to D.C. for a visit to Cardgrrl the week that the Main Event starts. Before I had a chance to point out to her that I'd have to change travel plans, she said, "You'll have to change your plane ticket." Some girlfriends would get in a huff about a visit being postponed in order to play a game. Not her. She is the most supportive person ever, and nearly as excited for me as I am.

A couple of people have already asked me about this, so let me address it up front: I will not be selling pieces of my action. Had I won a satellite for $10,000 in lammers, I would certainly be mulling over how to reduce my variance with various kinds of deals. But this is a gift, and an almost unbelievably generous one at that. After only a minute or two of thought, I knew that selling pieces of a gift seemed, well, kind of tacky. I would frankly feel embarrassed to tell Daniel that I had commodified his kindness in that way.

When I was a little boy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl was my favorite book. I'm sure I read it more than a dozen times. The desk in our family room always had some notepaper in a little wooden holder that my brother had made, and one time, when I was in about sixth grade, it was stocked with yellow-orange paper. To my small eyes, it looked like gold. I took one of those 3" x 5" slips and copied onto it the entire text of the Willy Wonka golden ticket from the book. I had to write really small, because there were so many words to fit onto it. But when it was done, it allowed me to feel the way I imagined that Charlie himself must have felt when holding that precious piece of gold leaf. I held on to that imaginary ticket until I moved out of my parents' house when I got married at age 23.

Today is the closest I've come to that feeling since I made my own Willy Wonka ticket. Thank you, Daniel, for giving me a rebirth of that sensation of hope and anticipation of great things about to happen. I will try not to let you down.

(Image from here.)

Addendum:

I see that a couple of other sites have already beaten me to posting about the drawing results. See Wasted Aces here (though with my name misspelled), Michele Lewis here.

I understand that there will be other PR moments associated with this. Obviously I'll keep you up to date as I learn about any such things.

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:

WSOP chips

While playing another round of pub trivia last night, another team member, David Shapiro, asked if I had picked up the WSOP commemorative chips. I knew nothing about this. He informed me that they had put out four special $5 chips for collectors. Who knew?

So after our team squeaked out a one-point victory in trivia, I went to the Rio's main cage and asked to buy some of these chips. I just wanted one of each. The guy went into the back, and when he returned, he was beaming. He told me that I would be the last person to obtain a complete set, because one of them was the last one left. (I don't know which one is the first to run out.) They aren't matching numbers, or even particularly low numbers in the run of 500 each, but I don't really care.

I see on eBay they are being offered for starting bids of $9.99 for one or $34.99 for the set. I suppose I could sell them, but where's the fun in that?

Have there been similar such chips issued in the previous several years that the WSOP has been at the Rio? I have dozens of Rio chips, but have never seen one issued for the WSOP before. But that might be because they all get snapped up by collectors and never make it into circulation at the poker tables, which is the only place (usually) I would obtain them. I didn't investigate thoroughly, but a little hunting on eBay found a 2007 WSOP chip from the Flamingo, another from Harrah's, and a 2006 one from the Rio. So maybe there are lots of such chips, issuing from several different Harrah's/Caesars properties, and I've just been blissfully unaware of them.

But that's OK. I like picking up unusual chips that happen to catch my eye when playing poker, but I'm not going to let myself get obsessive and hunt down one of every specimen ever produced. That way madness lies--not to mention poverty. My rules are simple: No chip over $5; I never pay more than face value; and I don't go out of my way to find them, they have to come to me. I have compromised on the $5 rule only insofar as buying one Wynn $8 chip each year when they come out with a new one celebrating the Chinese New Year, because they feature absolutely adorable animal photos. Last night was one of just a handful of times that I've bent the method-of-procurement rule.

By happy coincidence, the Casino Chip & Gaming Token Collectors Club is having its annual convention right now, June 22-25, at South Point. I'll be making it a point to stay far away from temptation.

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!

In pursuit of trivia

Every Wednesday night I see Tweets from a group of casual friends of mine about a bar trivia thing they're doing. Cardgrrl is always telling me I need to socialize more, so I decided this might be a worthwhile thing to try.

The event is run by Vegas Pub Quiz. I showed up tonight at McFadden's inside the Rio, expecting just to watch; I had envisioned a kind of College Bowl thing, with teams up on the stand pushing buzzers with lightning reflexes, and wanted to scope it out before humiliating myself. To my surprise, it's much more casual. Teams just sit at their bar tables filling out paper worksheets as the questions are read. As a result, it was no problem for me to pretend to be part of the team (they don't have formal rosters or anything) and toss in an answer here and there when I knew one.

I suppose with a little thought, I might have realized it wouldn't move fast. After all, the bar's goal is to keep people there longer than they would otherwise stay. So what should have been about 30 minutes' worth of questions was stretched out to a little over two hours.

But it was fun. The core of the team was Katie, Chris, Bob, and David. Bob's housemate Cheryl was there, too, though I had not known her previously. All contributed, and there were many questions for which more than one person knew the answer, but I think there's little doubt that Katie was the anchor, with the strongest distribution of weird bits of knowledge.

And we won! I think there were 80 questions in all, and we pulled out a squeaker with 64 points; second place had 63. I counted four instances in which I seemed to be the only one who knew an answer:

1. Capital of Australia.

2. "Ode to a Grecian Urn" poet.

3. State with physician-assisted suicide law upheld by the Supreme Court in 2006.

4. Hard substance underneath tooth enamel.

(Answers are at the end of the post.)

Of course, I messed up a couple, too. I apparently persuaded the group that one answer was sarsaparilla when the judges were looking for "root beer." "Popular Chicago department store founded in 1893" had both Katie and me vacillating between Marshall Field's and Sears. I finally pushed for the former, but it was the latter. I also dissuaded the group from going with "John Wayne Gacy" as the answer to a question about a serial killer's last words before execution, on the grounds that I thought he had been murdered in prison. Wrong. Oh well. Even if I shoulder full blame for those, I still contributed a net one point. Good enough for the margin of victory!

The prize was a $100 McFadden's certificate. It's entirely possible that I'll show up again next week and have a bite to eat on the house, and try to contribute a few more bits of arcana. My thanks to the gang for welcoming me so openly.

As a bonus, after leaving the bar, I went for a short session at the poker room, and had the rare treat of doubling my buy-in on the very first hand I was dealt. I had 7-7 against my opponent's K-Q, and he unwisely slow-played when the flop came Q-Q-6. It was checked five ways. Turn was a 2, and he bet $6 into a roughly $30 pot; I was the only caller. River was my gin card--a third 7. He checked, I bet $25, he check-raised to $60. I shoved, correctly reading him for having a queen he wouldn't fold, and he called.

Perhaps it has happened other times, but offhand I can recall just one other time that I doubled up on the first hand after sitting down at the table. That was at the Venetian. My chips hadn't even arrived when I won. When the chip runner came back, he was puzzled to see me sitting behind a stack. He asked if somebody else had already brought them for me. Nope--I won 'em on credit!

It's a nice way to start a session, that's for sure.

Answers:

1. Canberra.

2. Keats.

3. Oregon.

4. Dentin.

(Hat tip to Cardgrrl for suggestion of post title.)

I know who robbed the Rio

In case you hadn't heard, somebody stole about $30,000 worth of chips from the Rio this morning. See, e.g., here.

Normally I wouldn't have anything to contribute to solving this crime, but a couple of details about the robber caught my attention. Police say that he was wearing a tan jacket and a fedora.

Hmmm.

My mind flashed back to a photograph of Hard-Boiled Poker's Shamus that I took about a year ago, in conjunction with this post:

What do you see there? A TAN JACKET AND A FEDORA!

What more proof could anybody ask for?

No need to call 911 to make the report. I have already done so. But I'm not going to sleep easy until this criminal mastermind is behind bars.

All-in fake-out

I played at the Rio last night. At one point, with a large pot between three players, the action was to start on Seat 2. The guy in seat 1, who was not in the hand, loudly said, "All in!" The dealer was looking down, counting her tray at the time, and so didn't immediately know where the announcement had come from, and without looking up just repeated for the table, "Player is all in."

There followed a few seconds of confusion for the other players in the hand--just as the joker had intended--but it got sorted out before any apparent damage was done.

When the hand was over, one person who had been involved was visibly upset at the jokester. He told him, "If you do that again, and it causes me to react and somebody else gets a read on me as a result, I'm going to have the floor make you put all your chips in the pot without any cards."

Well, that's just silly. There is no rule that would either allow or require one player to forfeit his chips to another with no cards.* I can't imagine any floor person in any poker room making that kind of ruling.

But the upset guy does have a perfectly legitimate point. An "all in" announcement at a critical moment by somebody not in the hand--especially when repeated by the dealer, as happened last night--could very easily cause a muck by a player not paying full attention, or could cause some sort of dismayed look on the face of one player with a mediocre hand that could be noticed and acted upon by somebody else. While there is no specific rule that directly forbids such a phony outburst, it is surely sufficiently covered by the general admonition not to talk about the hand that is in progress, because it has obvious potential to queer the action.

I was surprised and disappointed that the prankster last night was not even given so much as a warning from the dealer or anybody other card room employee. The outraged player's stupid threat was all that was said about it. Had I been the dealer, I would have called the floor over. Had I been the floor, I would have sternly warned both the offender and the rest of the table that any future such action would result in expulsion from the room. Like telling the TSA employee that you have a bomb in your luggage, such things just cannot be tolerated, even if done jokingly.

I remember one time on an early season of "High Stakes Poker," there was a hand between Daniel Negreanu and Antonio Esfandiari. Esfandiari folded when Negreanu wasn't watching him, so didn't realize what had happened. Esfandiari took advantage of the situation to scare Negreanu with a verbal "All in." Oh, look--I found the clip on YouTube!



There's nothing wrong with this little prank, as the action was over, so there was no way to influence the outcome of the hand. But I wonder if people have seen this and decided that it's a good joke to emulate, not realizing that it's an entirely different matter when there is still action pending.



*Certainly a player can be ejected from a tournament for a variety of rules infractions, and his chips forfeited, but they are simply removed from play, not given to any other player. Also, it is possible for a player to have to forfeit his chips to another with no cards in the specific circumstance where he has legitimately declared himself all in, gets called by a bigger stack, then fails to protect his hand and his cards are accidentally mucked by the dealer. But, obviously, neither of these situations is what I had in mind when making the generalization above.

"You've got to have a look"

There's a small but wonderful playhouse in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, called the Park Square Theatre. I used to get season tickets every year when I lived there because the productions were always first-rate. Back in 2001 I saw Terrence McNally's play "Master Class," which was about Maria Callas teaching opera singing to music students late in her career, after her own voice was shot.

One of the memorable lines from it (as witnessed by the fact that I still remember it) was her advice about standing out from the mass of other people who will be trying out for the same roles: "To be remembered, you've got to have a look." She then picked out students who, in her view, had accomplished this important objective with their style choices, and those who had failed.

For some reason that came back to my mind today while playing at the Rio. I looked over at the next table and saw this:





This young man has picked a look, all right: Kneeling on a backward-facing chair, leaning over the table, butt high in the air, jeans low, six inches of boxers showing.

It's not a particularly flattering look, mind you, but it is indeed a look, and he will therefore be remembered. Well done, sir!

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!

Genius in the house

I just remembered a little incident from Sunday night at the Rio that I neglected to include in my collection of stories.

Often at a poker table you will have a guy who likes to show off how well he can figure out what cards people have, and so announces his predictions just before the reveal. Well, we had one of those. But, like most such people, he wasn't really very good at it.

The situation was two players left in the hand, final board Q-4-5-6-7, no flush possible. First guy bets $100. Second guy moves all-in. First guy insta-calls.

Our genius hand reader announced, "One of them's got a straight. Maybe both of 'em."

Wow. Just wow. I am awed, sir, by your divine and borderline mystical way* of knowing your opponents' hands. I will now be looking for a thick lead card protector so as to keep you from peering at my hole cards, given that you clearly have x-ray vision.

Fascinating how some of the things that people do in an attempt to show how smart they are actually reveal their profound stupidity, though they themselves never notice it.



*Yes, that was a random "Carnac" reference, for those paying attention.

Night at the Rio

Just home from a session in which I not only made a little money, but I picked up a whole bunch of little stories to tell you. This pleases me.


Feeling famous

The first unusual thing that happened was that I sat down next to a reader, though neither of us knew it for a while. She was chatting with somebody else about blogs, and said she read a lot of them. I asked if she read any poker blogs, and when she said yes, I asked which ones. She said she browses lots of them, but specifically mentioned F-Train and Poker Dealer, both friends of mine. I have to admit it was a slight ego blow that the first words out of her mouth were not "Poker Grump," but when I asked about that blog, she said yes, it was on her list. She got a suspicious look on her face and asked if that was me. I fessed up. She proved that she really does read it by mentioning, first, that "That's the one with all the photos," and, second, that I had recently taken time off to go out of town to a wedding. Right on both counts.

Apparently she has a blogger friend who is an even bigger fan of mine. (I jotted down the friend's blog's name, but now find nothing of the sort, so I must have written it incorrectly. Sorry I can't give a little plug.) She texted her to say that she was sitting next to me. Her friend seemed quite excited back in Ohio, and demanded a photo for proof. I gave her a faux grumpy face. Hope it filled the bill. The whole thing made me feel very slightly (emphasis on those two words) rockstarish.

(I told her that this session probably wouldn't result in a post, because it didn't seem that anything of particular interest was happening. I was wrong. All the other story-worthy stuff happened after she left.)


Angry about--what???

The worst beat I took this session: I raised from the small blind with A-A. Guy who had limped under the gun shoved for about $60. I called. He had A-Q. I'm a 7:1 favorite. Usually that's enough. Not tonight. Flop: K-10-x. Turn K. River J.

"He beat me, straight up. Pay him. Pay that man his money." (OK, I didn't really say that. I believe one has to be highly selective in one's deployment of "Rounders" lines during poker games.)

Anyway, a little while later he did another shove re-raise--a rather ridiculously large overbet. When the original raiser (player to his right) folded, my nemesis flashed him his hole cards before passing them face-down to the dealer. Naturally, I was interested in what range of hands he might do this with, given that his first instance was A-Q. I asked the dealer to show them. She did: Q-Q.

The guy stood up, looked at me, and asked, "Did you see them." I said yes. He said, "So you got what you wanted?" There was unquestionable hostility in his voice. I was a little flummoxed--had I done something wrong?--so I hesitated in answering. I guess I didn't need to respond, because before I could think of how to reply, he picked up his chips and said, "Good. I'm glad you're happy. But bad decision for you." And he stormed off, cashed out, and left.

I'm at a loss to understand what the problem was. Surely he knew that when he showed one player his cards, that opened the door for anybody else to see them. Jeez, dude, if you want to keep it secret, just don't show anybody. It's real easy.

I've only once before seen somebody get that bent out of shape over the completely standard practice of exposing a hand that was shown to another player; I told that story here. I still don't get it.


Table jumper

We were short-handed after a few people left nearly at the same time. We had three empty seats. A new player sat down in one of them, but immediately left to go have a chat with a friend at another table. When she came back, she picked up her chips and announced that she was going to play at that other table instead. The dealer politely informed her that she would need to get the floor's permission first. The woman replied, "He said it was OK."

I watched where she went, and it was to a table that had only one open seat. It seemed very strange to me that the floor guy would approve that move, unless there was some special circumstance that wasn't apparent. So I asked the dealer to call the floor. Turns out that she had neither asked for nor been given permission to move. He fetched her and brought her back. She was not happy to have been caught.

She obviously knew exactly what she was doing and that it was against the rules. Lie, cheat--what does it matter, as long as you get what you want, right? Why should she have to be concerned about what effect her actions have on other people? People are so scummy.


Premature evacuation

In one dumb hand, I had 10-6 in the small blind--but it was SOOTED! So I threw in the extra $2. There were four of us in the hand. The final board was something like 3-5-7-8-J. I.e., it hit all around my cards, but didn't quite connect. It was checked all the way down. At showdown, one guy just pitched his cards into the muck without waiting to see anybody else's. I flipped over my lousy 10-6, with about zero expectation that it was the winner. The big blind then mucked, so apparently I had him beat. About the same time that I was showing, the woman on the button said, "Ace high," but she didn't expose her cards.

Hearing that, the dealer picked up my two cards, and dumped them face down on top of the muck, and started to push the pot toward the button. I protested: "Why are you killing my hand?" The dealer stopped and fished my cards from off of the pile. Only after all of this did the woman on the button finally show her hand. She did indeed have an ace, and took the pot. The dealer shot me a dirty look, as if I had wasted her time and annoyed her by insisting that we go through the formality of, y'know, having an actual showdown in the showdown portion of the hand.

I suppose if one were to ask this dealer, "At showdown, can a player just announce that he or she has the best hand and thereby claim the pot?" she would answer, "Of course not." But in actual practice, that's exactly what she appeared to be willing to do.

I remember when I was in poker dealer school, they drummed into us over and over again: "Don't kill an exposed hand until somebody shows a better one." It's a rather obvious procedural point.

The less obvious factor in effect here is that given my cards and the texture of the board, it's a situation in which another player could easily think--in error--that I had made a straight. The player on the button has to look at my cards and the board, figure out what my hand is, and decide whether hers beats it. If she is prone to mistakenly thinking that my hand is better and as a result decides to muck hers unseen, well, that's a little bonus pot for me, and I'm happy to take it. The dealer killing my hand when the button says "Ace" is a clear signal to the player that an ace is good enough, without the player having to reach that conclusion on her own. In effect, it violated the "one person to a hand rule" by providing unwarranted assistance.

Of course, the player on the button doesn't have to make that assessment; she can just flip her hand over and let the cards speak. But if she's going to decide whether to show based on whether she decides she has the winner, that is an evaluation she must undertake all by herself. It is also true that the dealer can (and probably should) announce my hand verbally and/or push up the board cards that go with my hole cards to make my best hand. That much assistance to the player on the button is perfectly appropriate. But what she did was beyond that.

I'm not sure I've ever before seen a dealer kill a live, exposed hand in favor of one that was announced but not shown. Strange stuff.


What he was waiting for

I was rather short-stacked (this hand actually marked the beginning of my comeback), and had moved all-in on the turn with top pair/top kicker (A-10 on 10-high board). I had thought my lone remaining opponent was on a draw on the flop, and the turn wouldn't have helped him, prompting my move.

He groaned, made some faces, and clearly had a difficult decision. He eventually showed me his cards: Nut flush draw plus a gutshot straight draw and an overcard (ace, which would be no good if it hit, but he didn't know that).

He was taking a long time to decide. He finally said, "Sorry to take so long. I'm waiting for the alcohol to kick in so I have the nerve to call you."

It's rare that somebody can break my stoicism while in the middle of a hand, but he made me laugh out loud.

He eventually folded, but I had to concede to him that he had delivered the line of the night.

What goes around comes around

Last Friday night I was playing at the Rio, sitting on about my starting stack of $300. I had a J-10 of diamonds on the button, so decided to call the under-the-gun raiser, whose stack was nearly identical. Flop was J-10-6, giving me top two pair. He bet $25. I raised to $75, largely because of the draw-heavy board (two hearts in addition to the obvious straight draw). He looked unhappy about it, but called. Turn was another 10, making my boat. He led out for $100. I moved all-in. He again looked not thrilled about the situation, but gave me the resigned shrug, and said, "I call." I showed my hand. He winced and turned over A-10. Looks like a double-up for moi. But don't count your chickens before they hatch. River: Ace. Bye-bye stack.

Tuesday night I was at Luxor, again with almost exactly my $300 starting stack. Under-the-gun player raises to $10. I'm next in line with A-A, and push it to $30. There are very few pre-flop reraises in this game, and the move practically turns my cards face-up, but I still thought it was the best choice, on balance, since this passive table could easily all call $10 and leave me in a very difficult predicament. Everybody folded to the small blind, who called. The UTG player moved all-in. Unfortunately, it was for $48--$2 less than would have been required to re-open the betting, so I could only call. BB called, also.

Flop was J-8-3. BB quickly grabbed a $100 stack and put it down in front of him. (He had me covered by a little bit.) This caught me off-guard. I didn't think he would call a reraise--especially from out of position--with 8-8 or 3-3. I also didn't think he would lead with J-J. He was a good enough player to realize the limited range with which I had put in the reraise before the flop, so surely he would expect me to make a substantial c-bet if he checked to me, and, given the stack sizes, I'd be pot-committed. Therefore, if he had flopped a set, I'd think that the check-raise would be the better play. This line of reasoning made me conclude that he most likely had Q-Q or K-K, and was making this bet to take the pot if I had A-K (it seemed possible that he hadn't done the math to realize that I couldn't raise again pre-flop after the UTG shove, and on that basis decided that I might have only A-K instead of a big pair), or find out if he should get away from it if I shoved, on the assumption that this would mean he could be fairly certain I had aces.

So I shoved. He called immediately. I showed the aces. He showed 8-8. Oops. I don't know exactly what his thinking was, but I had misread the situation somehow. But I had little time to stew about it. Two seconds later, we both saw the dealer give me a fourth-street ace-ball, and that was that.


It's pretty uncommon that I win or lose $300 in a single hand. When it happens, it's really, really rare that the outcome is decided, either way, on the basis of somebody hitting one of just two or three possible winning cards after all the money is in the middle. But I guess that this week the universe decided that it should set things right on the first three-outer by giving me the second one.

Karma can be a bitch

One episode from my cash game at the Rio last night was both amusing and perversely satisfying to me.

Two seats to my right was a very large man, with commensurately large hands. He had the bad habit of keeping one hand over his hole cards while playing, and that was enough to make them mostly invisible.

At one point, the woman to my immediate right acted out of turn. I was suprised when the dealer stopped her and indicated that it wasn't her action, because I, too, thought that it was. It was only after the dealer pointed to Big Guy that we noticed his cards. I could see only one little corner of them peeking out from under his hand, and both I and the woman next to me had overlooked them.

She and I both pointed out to the dealer that this was problematic. He didn't see it that way. "His cards are right there," he said.

Idiot dealer doesn't see that this is a problem. This is the first dealer I've ever encountered who isn't willing to insist that a player keep his cards plainly visible. So I decide that rather than call the floor over or otherwise make a big fuss over it, I'll put up with it for 30 minutes, and presumably the next dealer will be willing to do his job and ask the player not to cover his cards.

About 20 minutes later, in the middle of a hand, the same dealer tries to get me to take my turn. But this time the tables are turned (so to speak). I have noticed that Big Guy has cards and hasn't acted yet, and it's the dealer who missed seeing them, because Big Guy has his hand over them. I say, "It's not my turn," and point at Big Guy. Dealer then notices the cards, drops his head in embarrassment, and gives a wry smile. He obviously realizes the irony in the situation.

I'm still pretty annoyed that he refused to take action when two players were telling him that this was a problem, so I needle him. "What's the trouble? His cards are right there." Dealer shoots me a dirty look, but I'm not done. "Seriously--it's not a problem when the players can't tell that he has cards, but then it is a problem when you can't?" Dealer is now clearly peeved with me, and he says, "No need to get smart about it, guy."

Well, yes, there is a need to get smart about it. It is to drive home a point to somebody who is demonstrably either too stupid, too stubborn, or too uncaring to deal with it otherwise. If one player is covering his cards to such an extent that the two people to his left can't easily tell if he is still in the hand or not, that is a problem that needs to be dealt with. Period. It doesn't require yelling or recrimination or chastisement--just a polite, friendly request to the player that he not cover his cards. It's about the simplest thing in the world. If you as a dealer refuse to intervene in such a simple situation, you earn my scorn and my ridicule when you fall victim to the exact same problem. Had you dealt with it when it was pointed out to you, you wouldn't now have to be embarrassed.

Do your job, and we won't have a problem. Don't do your job, and I'm going to mock you when it comes back to bite you in the butt. That's how I roll.