DMLCP

I started in at Bally's a little after 3:00 pm yesterday, part of a new table that was opening. As usual in this situation, there's a lot of down time while everybody gets seated, gets chips, gets cards swiped, the dealer gives the cash and leftover chips back to the floor guy, cards get inspected and shuffled, draw for the button, etc.

I got bored with the waiting, and from my spot in Seat 1 snapped this picture of the women in Seats 3 and 4, sending it to Twitter with the message (referring, obviously, to Seat 3), "I wonder if she has any poker weapons other than distracting cleavage."

What I didn't know at the time was that I had left out of the photo the player around whom the game would revolve--the guy in Seat 2. (I guess I didn't completely leave him out; you can see his hands.) But I had definitely noticed him. In fact, immediately before sending the photo, I had Tweeted, "Game hasn't even started, and the guy next to me already slammed down a whiskey before starting on his beer."

I'll refer to him as DMLCP, because he was a Drunk Maniac Luckbox Creepy Perv.

The Drunk part is self-explanatory.

The Creepy Perv part he earned by trying ridiculously to hit on the two women to his left. Every time he would say anything to either of them, it was accompanied by reaching over and touching them on the hand or arm. This happened half a dozen times or so until, after the two friends exchanged a disapproving we've-got-to-stop-this-ickiness look, Ms. Cleavage said to him, "OK, that's enough with the touching now." He then apologized ten different times or so over the next half hour, repeating himself as drunk people tend to do.

The Maniac part comes from the fact that he raised pre-flop almost every hand--in the range of 90%--making it either $15 or $20 each time. As you can easily imagine, or perhaps have experienced, such a player completely changes the usual dynamics of a $1-2 game.

Luckbox? Well, if you've ever played with a guy like this, you have surely observed that drunkenness is highly correlated with being a card rack. There's a Nobel Prize for whoever works out the quantum physics by which a high blood alcohol level causes a temporary superhero-like ability to hit two-outers. He bought in for $200, and was up to $400 within 20 or 30 minutes, between his bullying and his card-catching.

His conduct had a predictable effect on the other players, who became much more willing to gamble than I think would be their usual tendency. Within the first half hour of play I saw a three-way all-in pre-flop with J-J, A-J, and K-Q, with K-Q taking the massive pot. (DMLCP started the madness with his usual raise, but bowed out after the reraises and shoves started.) The guy with A-J had been in Seat 6, and when he went away steaming mad, I claimed his seat, so that I didn't have DMLCP on my immediate left, where he was a real irritant in both personal terms and poker terms.

My first big confrontation with him: I had the button and Ks-Qs. Given his opening range, this was an easy call when he put in his usual $20 raise. Two limpers called, too. The flop was Kc-Qc-10c. I loved having top two pair, but three clubs and a Broadway possibility were obvious dangers. Both limpers checked. DMLCP bet $20. I raised to $60. Limpers folded. DMLCP called. This was significant, because he had shown a willingness to fold when somebody stood up to him and he had nothing. I didn't think he had a made flush or straight, both because he just called (I think he would have shoved with either made hand) and because it was just too unlikely to believe, even for a luckbox like him.

The turn was the jack of spades. Ick. While that didn't complete any one-card flushes, it did mean that if he held any ace he now had a straight. He checked, and I checked back, hoping to catch a boat card on fifth street. Before the dealer could produce it, however, DMLCP announced all-in dark. River was a blank, but I still had to decide whether to call off the rest of my chips, in the neighborhood of $200. There was $200 in the middle, plus the $200 (effectively) he was putting up, offering me 2:1 on a call. Given his undoubtedly high bluffing frequency, that was tempting.

I finally decided, though, that he most likely did have an ace, and that he had been planning on an all-in check-raise on the turn, which I had foiled with my check. That seemed the best explanation for his dark bet on the river, a move he had not previously made. So I reluctantly folded.

Bally's high-hand bonus for a club royal flush is currently sitting at over $10,000, with each player at the table when it hits getting a $599 share, so everybody was anxious to know if DMLCP had it. He flashed the ace of clubs before giving his cards back to the dealer, and I think we can safely assume that the other one was not the jack of clubs. In any event, it confirmed my read of the situation. It sucked, but I think I played the hand perfectly. I believe that if I had shoved the flop he would have called and I would have lost more.

(I'm not just being results-oriented in saying that pushing there would have been wrong. With an all-club flop, there was a real possibility that either of the limpers had flopped a flush and was trapping; I was prepared to fold if one of them moved all in after my raise.)

DMLCP's course followed that typical of his species. Like a meteorite, he burned brightly for a time, but then crashed to earth. Ironically, his downfall began when he had the best of it. He got into a pre-flop raising war with the table's other luckbox, the guy who had won the three-way with K-Q. They both ended up all-in, with the K-K of DMLCP looking good against the Q-Q of the other guy--until a queen flopped. An $800 pot went to the queens.

DMLCP rebought twice more, and lost both stakes on ill-advised bluffs that got snapped off. Sadly, I never had another bite at that particular apple before he left the table.

Within two orbits of his inglorious retreat, I got on the bad side of a set-over-set situation (first time that has happened in about a year, I think), and lost nearly my entire buy-in. The last $20 or so went in two hands later when I had J-J and lost to A-K with the classic ace on the river. I didn't feel like starting over again, so swallowed the $300 loss and called it a day.

I do hope to run into DMLCP again, though. Players like him make for an extremely high-variance game, but will be profitable for the smart, patient players much more often than not.

Guess the casino, #872

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Answer: Tropicana

Guess the casino, #871

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Answer: Planet Hollywood

Poker gems, #421

Tommy Angelo, in A Rubber Band Story, page 168.

I make a living at poker by choosing when to enter a game and when to leave it. These options give me the freedom to choose my state of mind, and to choose my opponents. My betting decisions are of small consequence, comparatively.

VPN app

I just downloaded the brand-new-for-Android VegasPokerNow app. I've only spent a few minutes with it, but I'm already glad to have it. If it did nothing else, just having all the poker room phone numbers makes it worthwhile; now I don't have to have my contacts list cluttered up with them. But additionally, it has current room promotions, tournament schedules, visitor room reviews, maps, and more. At least a few times a month somebody at a poker table asks where there is a tournament for a certain buy-in range at a certain time. Previously I have directed them to the printed schedule that's always in the back of Card Player or Poker Player magazine. Now I can just whip out the LG Optimus V, press a couple of buttons, and hand it over like the modern man I aspire to be.

The app is free. Just go to the Android market and search for "Vegas Poker Now" or "VegasPokerNow"--either way works.

Someday I would love to see the app incorporate the next level of usefulness--an idea that I had long ago and wrote about here back in January of 2008: A continuously updated database of what games are currently being played at each poker room, and how many tables of each. It doesn't seem nearly as much of a stretch as it did when I first thought of it five years ago.

Guess the casino, #870

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Answer: MGM Grand

Poker gems, #420

Tommy Angelo, in A Rubber Band Story, pate 145.

So now I was well on my way to establishing my preferred [table] image, which is WET (weird-tight).

Guess the casino, #869

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Answer: Hard Rock (before they moved the poker room)

Poker gems, #419

Tommy Angelo, in A Rubber Band Story, page 137.

[There is a] common, ancient rule, which states, "If you show someone your uncalled hand, then everyone is entitled to see it, but only after they do the show-one-show-all chant with disdain."

Guess the casino, #868

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Answer: Treasure Island

Fleas

Sounds kinda like the El Cortez:

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/lifestyle/the-other-side/casino-staff-forced-to-wear-flea-collars/story-e6frfhk6-1226062003533

Guess the casino, #867

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Answer: Paris

Impressive fold

Saturday was the last episode of this season of "High Stakes Poker." As always, there was plenty of good stuff. But what impressed me most was, of all things, a fold.

Watch this:

I suppose I might have been able to fold in that spot, but I certainly wouldn't have been able to do it so fast. Johnny Chan had not even announced an amount; he just said "raise" and Phil Laak flicked his cards into the muck. He had had a few seconds' warning that a raise was coming, because of how Chan was counting out chips, but it was still fast. I think I would have had to take time to ponder whether Chan would raise with, say, trip aces with a king kicker, or maybe K-10 for the Broadway straight.

In the long run, we all get dealt the same cards. You can't rely on getting better cards to be a winner in poker. Instead, you have to figure out (1) how to win more money than other people when you have the best hand, (2) how to win pots when you don't have the best hand, or (3) how to lose less when you don't have the best hand, or some combination of those three things. I have become convinced over the years that #3 is both the most important and the most difficult. It is the one that I think most definitively separates the long-term winners from the long-term losers.

Phil Laak seems to have that all figured out.

Guess the casino, #866

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Answer: Mandalay Bay

Nice touch, Ali!

In this week's installment of the NBC Heads-Up Championship, we see Erik Seidel paired against Andrew Robl. In their final hand, Seidel flops a full house and improves to a better boat on the river. Robl starts with pocket queens and has two pair on the river. Seidel moves all in. Robl is tortured about whether to call and possibly thereby lose the match. In the voiceover, Ali Nejad intones that Robl "cannot win this hand and yet he doesn't know it."

I laughed out loud. It was a wonderful tidbit of a reward for viewers who know their poker history. When Erik Seidel got heads-up against Johnny Chan, those were the exact words used by the TV commentator in their final pot, and Nejad even aped his tone and pacing. You can watch that hand play out here.

I heartily approve of such nods to history.

Tony and me, strangers and strangeness

This is one of the rare times I'm writing when I have only a vague idea what I'm going to say. I don't have a particular point, no story with a clear moral, no narrative path with a beginning, middle, and end--just some semi-connected thoughts and experiences and observations tumbling around inside my head. So together we'll see how it comes out. It was a year ago almost to the day that I last wrote about my personal history of oddness, of otherness. Warning: This threatens to be more of the same.

A series of otherwise unrelated events has put me in this brooding state of mind.

1) Last night I went to the Tropicana primarily to watch a $1000-each, winner-take-all, heads-up no-limit Omaha/8 match between "Tony Big Charles" (about whom I've written once before, here) and a guy named Dave. I originally became acquainted with both of them through allvegaspoker.com, though more recently both of them have moved to the newer upstart site, VegasPokerNow.com. Tony's blog (in the form of an ongoing forum topic) is here. Dave hasn't updated his poker blog in a long time. (He finished grad school and moved out of state to take a teaching position.) The two of them had done a similar challenge a couple of years ago. Tony won, and I think it has been a burr under Dave's saddle ever since that he lost to a man he considers an inferior player. He was coming back to Vegas for a visit, so they arranged a rematch.

I got recruited to use a cell phone camera to record Tony's hole cards, so that the owners of the VPN site can put together a reconstruction of the match. In the end, Dave won the best two out of three tournaments and the money. But it was very close. They each had one victory, and on the final hand of the third round they were close in chips and got it all in with very similar hands, which were probably close to 50/50 equity. The board went Dave's way, but it could just have easily gone Tony's. That wouldn't have quite finished the match, but Dave would have been left so short-stacked that it's unlikely he could have recovered. Basically, after a couple of hours of play, the whole thing came down to a coin flip.

Tony--as anybody who has met him, read his adventures, or even heard of him undoubtedly knows--is autistic. Within minutes, often just seconds, of meeting him, most people will notice that he is definitely "different," even if they can't put a specific diagnostic label on him. His list of quirks and idiosyncrasies is longer than that of the title character of "Monk." It is not the personality profile you would expect to make for success in a game like poker, where discipline, consistency, patience, focus, and social virtuosity are valued traits. Yet against all odds, Tony somehow manages to eke out a living playing poker.

Let me be blunt: Tony is paranoid about people and his surroundings, addicted to gambling, emotionally labile, undisciplined, self-destructive, often offensive to others (mostly unintentionally, but with bursts of intentionality about it), full of strange ideas and opinions, and can be downright annoying. But try as I might to dismiss and ignore him, I can't. And, try as I might to dislike him, I can't do that, either. That sounded wrong. I don't actually try to dislike him. A more accurate way to phrase it is that his most obvious and prominent personal characteristics are ones that usually make me want to avoid at all costs the one possessed of them. But Tony has a different effect on me. It's not that I want to become BFFs and hang out in my spare time, but I have developed a definite soft spot for him, after following his blog stories for the past couple of years.

Last night was, I think, the longest prolonged contact I've had with Tony. We played in adjacent seats at a NLHE game for about 30 minutes before the heads-up match got underway, and then, as mentioned, I sat next to him for the roughly two-hour contest, looking at his hole cards, and thus gaining some insight into his play.

Perhaps more important than observing Tony from short range, in terms of being fodder for today's rumination, was watching how Dave treated Tony. Dave is the kind of person I'm naturally inclined to like: he's funny, extremely bright, interesting, friendly, accomplished, musically talented, poised to make a real contribution to the world. He's also a superior poker player. But in recent months, Dave has become increasingly nasty to Tony, via posted responses in Tony's blog/forum. I have found it reading these verbal missiles sufficiently cringe-worthy to tarnish my impression of Dave in a major way. You can think the world of somebody, but if you happen to spot him kicking a puppy, it's unavoidably going to shade everything you think of him thereafter. And Dave has been kicking at Tony relentlessly and mercilessly.

I had hoped that it was just the cold, impersonal medium of textual exchanges on the Internet that was doing it, that things would be different in person. But they weren't. To the best of my recollection, Dave never said a kind or even sportsmanlike thing to Tony all evening. On the contrary, he continued his bashing. This seemed to me not to be friendly trash-talking between mutually respected rivals, but seriously mean-spirited, intentionally hurtful, hostile to the core. Of course, I'm entirely capable of grossly misreading people and emotional situations, so maybe my assessment is wrong and unfair, but that's how it seemed to me.

To his credit, Tony did not respond in kind. Of course he gloated about hands he won and sometimes sulked and made excuses for hands he lost, lamented instances of bad luck, and so forth. But I did not sense any cruelty, spitefulness, or hurtful intent in his comments. He was just wearing his emotions on his sleeve, as he always does. I was also surprised but glad to see that Tony did not appear to get upset at the loss. Frankly, I had expected he would blow up, but he didn't. He quickly got himself back into the NLHE game, and appeared to be handling himself just fine.

The unexpected net effect of observing these interactions for a couple of hours was to make me feel less inclined to want to be friends with Dave, and more inclined to feel compassion and even fondness for Tony. This, despite the fact that by all appearances and usual methods of accounting Dave is about a million times more the type of person I would usually tend to prefer to have in my life and spend time with.

Lately I've been more open with my opinions in Tony's blog when I think he's doing something dumb, self-destructive, or unworthy of the professional that he aspires to be--though I hope that my comments come across as the constructive criticism they are meant to be, rather than just put-downs. I could spend whole pages listing the things about Tony that I don't "get." But placed above all of that is the single thing that I don't "get" about Dave, which I sadly have to conclude is a really ugly streak of cruelty. Tony has plenty of faults, but I haven't been able to find cruelty among them.

I guess it comes down to this: I find characteristics such as emotional volatility hard to put up with, but I find deliberate meanness completely intolerable.

2) Last night after I finished playing at Bill's, I decided to use some of my accumulated food comps for the steak-and-eggs late-night special at Bill's coffee shop. While I was eating, I continued my reading of Don't Listen to Phil Hellmuth on my new cell phone. Another guy got seated just a couple of feet from me, at an adjacent table. He started talking to me:

"How'd you do?"

At first I wasn't sure he was talking to me, let alone what he was talking about.

"How did I do at what?"

"Gambling."

"It turned out OK."

"Where you from?"

"I live here in town."

I turned back to my book and food, and apparently was successful in signaling him that I wasn't really interested in chatting, as his questions ceased. After all, I cannot believe that this guy actually cares how my gambling session for the day went, nor where I live. I think he was just bored and lonely, and felt that small talk was better than silence. But it isn't--not for me, anyway. It's torture, and I didn't feel like being tortured in order to alleviate some random stranger's boredom.

It was one of countless interactions I've experienced that remind me that I don't fit in well with the crowd. To use the classic phrase from kindergarten report cards, I don't play well with others.

3) Something on Twitter today led me to an article on the Psychology Today web site, and a link in the margin there led me to a blog by a woman with Asperger's syndrome, and specifically to this post from December, in which she ponders what the world would be like if "Asperger's was the norm, and non-autistics or neurotypicals were the minority." (Asperger's is basically a mild form of autism.) Among other things, the author imagines:

Those who insist on saying ‘have a nice day' and other polite exchanges of fairly empty niceties are taught to be honest and say what they think. People who go to shake hands are simply thought unhygienic. And of course, you would never be expected to hug someone just because they shared an ancestor or a common acquaintance.

I rather liked her imaginary world. I think I could get along better there than I do in this one.

4) Last Sunday was the conclusion of this season's "The Amazing Race" on CBS. I was pleased that they had brought back for this season Zev and Justin, who had fallen short on a previous season. Zev has Asperger's and you can tell almost at a glance that he's kind of "off." But he is extraordinarily good-natured. He's smart and funny and persistent, and Justin obviously both accepts and loves him in spite of all his quirks. I enjoyed watching these two best friends on both seasons, because they never got angry at each other, worked exceptionally well as a team, and always supported each other. They always managed to make the best of any bad situation and roll with the punches. They didn't win this year, either, but I was pulling for them all the way.

5) To be clear, I don't think that I would be diagnosable as having Asperger's, even if there were a definitive and reliable clinical test for it. (There isn't.) But there is no question that I share some characteristics and have some strong tendencies that parallel those of Asperger's: I'm terribly uncomfortable in most social situations, I can be oblivious to emotional nuances, I lean toward excessively literal understandings of everything, I often fail to grasp people's motivations, I'm blunt where reserve and diplomacy would serve me better, I get easily distracted and annoyed by extraneous aural input, I am baffled by many social conventions, and so on. (Cardgrrl is a valued liaison with the world of normal humans. For example, she recently spent a patient 20 minutes or so explaining the purposes and niceties of the "Tell ___________ I said hi" protocol, a request which I have always found not just pointless but bizarre and inexplicable--all the more so in an era in which a dozen different forms of instant communication across any distance are readily available.)

On one widely used test for the syndrome I score 40. The accompanying information says that "the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher." So you can see why I am sympatico with the Aspies, even if I'm not exactly one of them.

Well, it's about time I wrapped this up with some sort of brilliant, insightful conclusion, something that ties up all of the foregoing with a nice ribbon and bow, rewarding the reader for slogging through it rather than giving me a "TL;DR" or "TL;DGAFF." Unfortunately, I'm no more sure about what it all means than I was when I wrote the first paragraph. But it's what has been on my mind today.

Addendum, May 27, 2011

I just watched the videos of the match here. My memory was faulty. The spot in which they got it all in with very similar hands was a little earlier, not the final hand. In the final hand, Tony actually got it all in as a substantial underdog.

Should Harold Camping be put to death?

Harold Camping, as you probably all know by now, is the guy at FamilyRadio.com who for years has been proclaiming that he had learned how to decode the Bible's timetable, and that it foretold May 21, 2011, as the Second Coming of Jesus.

That, um, kind of didn't happen.

I was thinking about this today, and I remembered this passage from Deuteronomy 18:17-20 (New International Version):

The LORD said to me: “...[A] prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded him to say, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, must be put to death.” You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD?” If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously.

Camping clearly claimed to be speaking in the name of God. His web site today still shows all the May 21 crapola: "Judgment Day--THE BIBLE GUARANTEES IT."

Camping obviously believes in the literal truth of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. He spoke a prophecy about the "Rapture" that did not come true, making him a false prophet by a definition that he would presumably have to accept as being one handed down by God. I don't see how he can escape the conclusion that he is a false prophet and should therefore be put to death.

But my guess is that when he goes back on his radio show tomorrow, he won't be offering himself up for righteous execution by the faithful--which will further show what a major-league fraud and charlatan he is.

Poker gems, #418

Dusty Schmidt and Paul Christopher Hoppe, on choosing between a pre-flop 3-bet and smooth call, in Don't Listen to Phil Hellmuth, p. 44.

The hands where this makes the largest difference are ace-queen, king-queen, pocket twos through tens, ace-jack suited and the like. When you 3-bet these hands, competent opponents will usually fold the hands that you’re dominating and continue only with the hands that dominate you. Furthermore, they’ll often 4-bet with their biggest hands, forcing you to fold before the flop. Instead of taking a flop against a strong hand and getting a chance to stack your opponent when you flop a set, you’re sticking 9 blinds into the pot and folding.

So before you drag the slider bar to size your 3-bet, think about what range you’re likely to get called by and whether you’d prefer to play a big pot against that range, or a smaller pot against a wider range.

Poker gems, #417

Lee Jones, during an online discussion of the monetary value of holding pocket aces, as quoted in Tommy Angelo, A Rubber Band Story, page 73.

How much is it worth to know that those aces are two little pieces of plastic, that you control them, and not vice versa?

Guess the casino, #865

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Green Valley Ranch

Pus in boots

OK, it wasn't literally in boots, but that was as close to a clever post title as I could think of.

Last night I was leaving the Tropicana, undecided about whether to go home or head somewhere else to play, when AlaskaGal and her friend persuaded me to head to Bill's with them for some $0.50/1 NLHE fun. I ended up making $100, so it was a worthwhile diversion. But before the session was done, I had seen one of the strangest and grossest things at a poker table EVAR.

The player in question appears to be a Pacific Islander--Tongan or Samoan, maybe. I've not only played with him several times before, I've written about him once before. That was when we were at the Venetian and he disgusted me by eating two oranges at the table with visibly filthy hands, getting sticky orange juice all over everything, then licking his filthy fingers.

So I already knew the guy was a pig with zero standards of personal hygiene. But as it turns out, I really had no idea of the depths to which he could sink.

Last night he had the mid-portion of his arm wrapped in an Ace bandage. While he was playing in the tournament at the next table, before busting out and joining out cash game, I had noticed him unwrapping and rewrapping his arm. I figured he had a sprained elbow or something. No big deal. It's hard to get such bandages to be tight enough to be supportive without being uncomfortable, so I didn't think much of it.

Once he got to our table, however, I saw that there was much more to it. The Ace bandage was stained with bodily fluids. What was much, much worse, however, was that he unwrapped his arm and pulled off a gauze bandage that was underneath the elastic. Doing so revealed an ugly open wound. He had a boil or an abscess just above the elbow that was actively draining pus, and he reached in and squeezed some more out of it, then replaced the gauze.

Other players were reacting as you might expect: turning away, telling him how disgusting he was, making various noises to indicate their nausea and revulsion.

The dealer, bless his heart, told him, "Joe, you're going to have to go wash your hands before you get back into the game." He did--or at least he left for a while and came back carrying some paper towels. Whether he actually washed or not is anybody's guess.

Just when you think you've seen everything that can happen at a poker table, somebody comes up with new levels of astonishingly appalling behavior.

Idiocy on display

I was at the Tropicana last night. I passed this guy at a video slot machine. As the electronic simulated reels were spinning, he would rub the glass over them, rapidly moving his hand up and down over each "reel" just before it was to come to a stop, thus moving his way from left to right.

I saw such behavior once before, at the MGM, and jeered about it here. Readers then assured me that this is actually fairly common. I spend no time playing or watching others play slots, so I wouldn't know, but I have never noticed it except for these two instances. As I wrote about the woman at MGM, I feel sure that this guy does it because he believes that it enhances his chance of winning. The reality, of course, is that the outcome of each game is determined by a microprocessor a tiny fraction of a second after he presses the "spin" button. He might as well spend the subsequent seconds splashing chicken blood on the machine, for all the good it--or his rubbing--will do.

I don't know why I am still able to be amazed by the level of stupidity people are willing to put on public display, but I am.

Guess the casino, #864

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Bellagio

Veloster (no poker content)

As I was on my way to the MGM Grand at about 6:00 last night, I saw an unusual car in traffic, southbound on Maryland Parkway. It had a Hyundai badge on it, but no model name. It also carried a Michigan manufacturer's license plate. This was clearly a pre-release specimen being driven as part of final testing.

The car is the Veloster, due for release sometime this summer as a 2012 model. I had seen pictures of it in Car and Driver magazine four years ago as a concept car, then a year ago in a "coming soon" feature, then again in January when it was officially unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show. It had crossed my mind that this was another possible candidate for purchase when my old Honda finally dies and has to be replaced. It looks like the Veloster will be both sporty and economical, and I kind of like its styling. (See here for a better picture, including the back door on the passenger side with hidden handle.)

This is the first time I've ever spotted a pre-release manufacturer's test car driving around the streets of Vegas. It felt like a bit of an automotive coup.

Playing with a honey badger

MGM Grand tonight. Two seats to my left was a rather clumsy bully of a player. It was easy to predict what he would do in most hands. He would straddle, and if he got several callers, he'd put in a prohibitive raise to take the limpers' money. He floated blatantly. He was not particularly skilled in these things. The fact that I could usually predict his moves in advance meant that he was being much too obvious and repetitive, not mixing it up. He was like the crazy nastyass honey badger, attacking everything, not caring if he got stung by a thousand bees or bitten by a cobra, as long as it got him a few chips.

Since he was to my left and was usually going to have position on me, I had to adapt accordingly. After an hour or so, the perfect situation finally came up. I raised to $15 after several limpers with a suited A-Q. He called from the button. I had been playing mostly straightforwardly, continuation-betting frequently, but not firing second barrels without good strength. I was sure that he was a good enough player to have noticed that pattern, and I suspected that he was planning to use it against me here.

The flop was A-6-5 rainbow. I bet $25. He called. This was exactly the scenario I had hoped for. Against most opponents I would bet again on the turn, because that's the obvious, straightforward, and usually most profitable thing to do. But against this particular guy, I thought he'd find an easy fold if I fired again, and the only way to get his chips was to feign weakness and let him pounce. No matter what came on the turn, my plan was to check, anticipating that he would bet with any two cards to steal the pot, and I would either flat-call or check-raise, depending on the board texture and whether I judged that his bet had him pot-committed. If he concluded that I had raised with any pocket pair 10s to kings and hated the flopped ace, he absolutely would represent having an ace every time.

Turn was a 3. As planned, I checked. He did better than I had hoped--he instashoved. It was $95 to call, which I did gladly. He didn't show, so neither did I.

River: 4, completing no flushes. He just sat there, apparently waiting for me to show. No way, dude. You bet, I called. After about ten seconds of inaction, the dealer addressed him: "He called you, sir." The guy finally turned over his hand: 7-7. Gutterball straight draw had hit.

So I got the combination obscene suckout plus sickening slowroll. And yes, he knew perfectly well what fifth street had wrought. He was simply maximizing his own sense of drama. Honey badger doesn't give a shit.

It will come as no surprise that he continued his shenanigans with renewed vigor after his double-up, nor that the rest of the table adjusted to his transparent tactics, and he gave away all the chips over the course of about three big hands--all bluffs that got called very thinly. He slinked away from the table to sleep off the cobra poison.

You may think I just used my blog to tell a bad-beat story. I beg to differ. It was a badger-beat story.

(Somebody sent me the link to that honey badger video a couple of months ago. It made me laugh, and I knew right away I needed to find a way to use it in a blog post. This is how long it took me to work it in.)

Guess the casino, #863

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Sam's Town

Another chunk of money I might not see again

Back in January I wrote a post detailing my troubles trying to empty my DoylesRoom online poker account. I finally got the right e-wallet account set up and submitted the request. Then nothing happened. I never got anything, never heard anything. And frankly, I basically forgot about it. Yes, I should have followed up, but I didn't.

Over the past week, I have been reminded to revisit the issue by two events. First, Doyle Brunson announced that he has terminated his relationship with DoylesRoom. They are legally entitled to continue using his name, but he is asking them not to. Second, reports are surfacing that the designated payment processor, QuickTender/UseMyWallet, is having problems getting funds into the United States, and some are saying that transferred funds may have been frozen/seized by some as-yet-unannounced federal prosecutorial action. (See here and here, for example.)

I wanted to look at my DoylesRoom account and see if they still showed me having money there. This turned out to be harder than I anticipated. As I had heard would happen, shortly after my January post DoylesRoom moved off of Cake and to a different network. Customers were assured that their accounts would remain intact. I never fired up the client software after the move. Then in February I had my horrendous computer crash that required wiping the hard drive, reinstalling the system software, etc. I had to manually restore applications. I didn't bother with DoylesRoom at the time. This week I tried it. While I could easily download and install the client software, it wouldn't recognize me as a former player. I.e., despite using the same email address, same street address, etc., it showed no trace of knowing that I had already been a DoylesRoom player before. It wouldn't let me use my old screen name, saying that it was already in use. Since it would only accept me as a new account, my balance is obviously zero.

So I emailed customer support, explaining this problem, and also that I never received the cashout requested back in January. That was on Sunday at 6:54 p.m. Almost four days have passed since then. Nothing. Not even an automated "We'll get back to you" response.

I've got a bad feeling about this one.

Project for peace

My brother has started this project for peace and reconciliation: 9/11/11. One of the things that bleeding-heart, save-the-world liberals (like him) and cold-hearted, save-yourselves libertarians (like me) share is a deep antipathy to the use of violence, both conventional war and terrorism, to resolve international conflicts, so I'm happy to give his new site a little attention here.

Guess the casino, #862

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Sam's Town

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.)

Guess the casino, #861

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Palms

Guess the casino, #860

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: M Resort

Getting grabby

I'm watching the NBC Heads-Up Championship from yesterday. They go to a profile of Andrew Robl, part of which is about two seconds of the shot you see above.

As it cut away, I was left with a strange impression--what was that I was seeing in the background?

I went back and looked again. Sure enough, it wasn't my libidinous imagination at work. There really is a guy with his hands planted firmly on the butt of a young woman. Click the screenshot for the full-size image, and you'll see what I mean.

Which just raises all sorts of questions. Where was this shot? Who are those people? What were they doing there? Why are they in the shot? Is there some connection between them and Robl? Did other viewers notice this, or is it just my weird Rain Man tendencies at work again? Did the NBC people know this was there when they aired it? After all, surely they must have taken enough B-roll for purposes of this piece that they didn't have to use this exact shot.

Good riddance, Sahara

Grange95 just put up a blog post with this title, which I liked enough to steal borrow. The sincerest form of flattery, you know.

I have done 15 prior posts with the Sahara label. Few if any of them have anything good to say about the place, except that it has always served as a reliable money-maker when I can take enough anti-nausea medication to be able to stand being there for a session. As I recently noted, the Sahara is 2nd or 3rd on my list of profitable poker rooms, when counting those that I have been to a minimum of ten times. But I always hated being there. It was smoky, noisy, full of annoying players whose bad habits were ignored by staff, and it had the worst dealers in town.

I wrote about the awful playing environment here. I wrote about the awful dealers here and here and here. I wrote about the awful players here. The only good Sahara story in my archives is that of one of the most horrendously bad beats I've ever inflicted, told here.

Almost four years ago I wrote about the Sahara poker room, "I really detest the place. I've never--not even once--had what I would consider an enjoyable time there." That remains true today, the day that wretched old casino closed its doors for the last time.

Erik Seidel knows

They should have put the "100%" graphic next to Seidel's cards as soon as he was dealt the Mighty Deuce-Four.

Interestingly, Seidel took a little while (maybe ten seconds) to call Selbst's bluff check-raise. When the hand was over, she asked if he had been contemplating a reraise. Clearly he wasn't. She seemed genuinely shocked that he would take any time at all to choose between a call and a fold in that spot. My guess is that Seidel has had third-nut hands beaten a whole lot more times than Selbst has, and hence plays them more cautiously than is her inclination.

Guess the casino, #859

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Golden Nugget

Entry fee?

I was thinking about entering a play-money tournament this evening on PokerStars. When I looked at the registration page, I noticed something odd about the buy-in: It was 500+30 points.

I certainly understand why online poker sites have a separate buy-in and entry fee for real-money games: The buy-in goes into the prize pool, and the entry fee is what the site keeps as its price for running the game. But when it's all fake money, why do they bother having a separate "entry fee" that is not put into the prize pool?

I have scratched my head for about ten minutes now trying to figure this out, and it's about to start bleeding, so instead of continuing I'm posting the question here.

King me

At Hooters last night, I had two kings in my hand, and found another two of them on the flop (along with a queen). That pretty much gave me most of 'em--along with a small pot and a $100 bonus.

Too much sensitivity training?

Last night I played for several hours at Hooters. For most of that time, I had on my right a rather odd duck. He was, shall we say, sensitive.

I first became aware of this when the player to his right--a generally obnoxious pig, to be sure--sneezed directly into his own hands about a dozen times. Mr. Sensitive asked him to go wash his hands before continuing to play. Pig derisively refused. Mr. Sensitive then went to ask the floor guy to make Pig go wash his hands. I could overhear only bits of that conversation, but floor guy said something about that not being a rule that he could enforce. Mr. Sensitive returned, all huffy that his ideas about proper poker-table hygiene were being ignored.

Hey, I'm with him about how gross poker players are. But it's just silly to single out one particular instance of such filth for special attention, while pretending that everything else is all pristine. Almost four years ago I wrote in some detail about how disgusting poker chips, cards, and players are: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-think-im-going-to-throw-up.html. Getting one guy to wash his hands one time hardly makes a dent in the load of germs involved, so it doesn't make much sense to get all bent out of shape about it.

The second episode involved me more directly. I had been pretty chatty on Twitter. I was also trying to figure out how to get my new Android phone to do various things, without a lot of success, partly because I had only spotty 3G signal coverage. So, yeah, I had had the thing out and was playing with it a lot more than I usually do. But I never slowed down the game, never failed to notice when it was my turn, and always put it away as soon as I got involved in a hand.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of this, Mr. Sensitive asked me, "What is it you're doing with that?" I told him I was chatting on Twitter with a bunch of friends. He said, kind of snippily, "Well, I'm finding it very distracting."

Mind you, we were in end seats, rotated far enough away from each other that he couldn't see anything on the screen, and the phone was on mute and not emitting even the slightest peep. The thing could have been off with me just pretending to be fiddling with it, and he couldn't have known the difference. This was not a case of something visual on the screen or audible in the air that was bothering him. No, it was just the fact that I was doing something other than watching the poker game--or maybe he had some paranoia that I was writing about him. (I wasn't then, though I am now!)

Again he tried to enlist the floor guy, but the floor guy told him that I wasn't breaking any rules, and cell phones were allowed as long as players didn't slow down the game. In fact, Hooters is the only poker room I know of that actually has a sign posted on the wall prominently announcing "Cell phones OK." (See photo of it here, though they have removed the "Smoking OK" sign since I took that picture.)

As soon as a seat opened up on the far end of the table, he spoke up for it and moved far away from me. I can't know for sure if it was because I was bothering him, but I suspect so.

Can you believe how easily annoyed some people are???

Having skin in the game

You probably think the biggest news in the poker world in the last 24 hours has something to do with the suspicious ongoing delays in payouts from Full Tilt, or maybe the goings-on at the WPT Championship at the Bellagio, especially the controversy over alleged cheater Ali Tekintamgac being allowed to play, and other players being prohibited from talking about the accusations.

Nope.

The biggest poker news of the past 24 hours is that we learned the status of the foreskin of two of the games most prominent players. In case you missed it, here are the relevant Twitter posts:

TexDolly Doyle Brunson
Enjoyed playing with @RealKidPoker....had someone to talk to. Even about who got "snipped." :-)

RealKidPoker Daniel Negreanu
@TexDolly "same team" no snip crew! Can't imagine if I ever have a son that I'd let the doc snip his pecker.

In retrospect, this is clearly what Bluff magazine's Jessica Welman had been referring to with this earlier Tweet:

jesswelman jesswelman
Never in my life did I think my job would entail listening to @realkidpoker and seven other guys discuss circumcision.

To which I had cheekily responded:

PokerGrump Poker Grump
@jesswelman You didn't read the fine print in the contract, obv.

Guess the casino, #858

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Sahara, where the Beatles stayed in 1964 while playing at the Convention Center, and which is going to close tomorrow.

Guess the casino, #857

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Luxor

Talk about run-good

Check this out: http://blogs.forbes.com/halahtouryalai/2011/05/13/one-mans-blackjack-hotstreak-wipes-out-casinos-profit/

Winning one for the good guys

I took quite a long break from online poker, starting with my trip to Florida, then the whole Black Friday thing. There wasn't any particular reason I didn't get back into it in between those things; I just didn't.

This week I've played, I think, five small buy-in tournaments (i.e., $20 or less) as I'm getting back to it, but had only one min-cash to show for it--until now. Today's tournament was the kind that makes such efforts worthwhile: I took it down, for a $600 win on the $22 entry fee. There were 98 players, so it didn't quite make Bodog's guarantee, and we had a small overlay.

I entered the final three as the short stack, and ended up extremely proud of how patiently I played it, since that is rarely my strong suit. I let the big stack on my left bully me endlessly, until I lowered the boom on him the first time and got a double-up, then a second time to knock him out, in the process giving myself a 5:1 chip lead going into heads-up play. Then it took less than 20 hands to first chip away at the other guy to get him down to fewer than ten big blinds, then knock him off.

By far the most significant hand that propelled me into a commanding chip position, from which I could pretty much coast to the final table, was my old friend, the Mighty Deuce-Four. Bodog is in a big battle with the various companies that make hand-reading software, trying to prevent them from datamining and giving players heads-up displays, and as a result make it really difficult to post hand histories. This set of images is the best I can manage. It's cumbersome, but you can still see what happened, which is that I flopped the nuts and slow-played it, trapping the player with top pair:

There were two felicitous outcomes. (1) I picked up a ton of chips. (2) Hilarity ensued. Here's the chat transcript that followed:

[dukedaddiee]: u called me with ***king 2 4 off?
tms9054: nh can't believe u called with that
[dukedaddiee]: ***king dik
[dukedaddiee]: calls 1400 pre with that and flops nutz
[dukedaddiee]: what a ***king JOKE
tms9054: sry bro
MrMoose123: why can't I ever get free chips like that???
[dukedaddiee]: wpw
[dukedaddiee]: ill note u ***king dik
[dukedaddiee]: 2 4 off
[dukedaddiee]: cmon
tms9054: hard to believe he called with that
[dukedaddiee]: dude i raised to 1400
[dukedaddiee]: wow
[dukedaddiee]: cant belive that BS u u***ing dik hope u run awful for months dude
[dukedaddiee]: gl rest of u
[dukedaddiee]: couldnt write anymore notes
[dukedaddiee]: bodog suks fills up to fast
[dukedaddiee]: ***king jerk
[dukedaddiee]: 2 54 off
[dukedaddiee]: latr

I think it's safe to say that Bodog players fail to grasp the awesome power of Deuce-Four.

What's in a screen name? #24

I knew something strange was going on when I got moved to this table and the 1812 Overture was playing.

Guess the casino, #856

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Gold Coast

Whatever happened to...

...the future ban of male players entering the women's event at last year's World Series of Poker?

On June 11, 2010, WSOP Communications Director Seth Palansky was quoted by Card Player as saying, "We will have our repercussions against any man that entered the ladies tournament. There are consequences for actions, and they’ll pay the price." Also, "The good news is at the World Series of Poker, we have the right to refuse service to anyone at any time at any point that we deem, as operators of the event."

Note that the threat was phrased not as a possibility, but as a guarantee. It was not, "We may have our repercussions," but "We will have our repercussions," and not "they may pay the price," but "they'll pay the price."

This cannot reasonably be read as just an implication that those involved would suffer natural consequences of social disgrace or loss of reputation from the poker community. That would not fit the obvious implications of "We will have our repercussions," or of that bit about the right to refuse service.

So what, if anything, has the WSOP done to those male players? I sure haven't heard of anything. At the time it happened, I predicted that this would turn out to be a pure bluff:

Assuming, as would seem to be the case, that it is illegally discriminatory for a place of public accommodation to forbid men from entering the tournament, it must surely also be illegally discriminatory to refuse them equal access to public events in the future on the basis of their legitimate participation today.

Suppose that some racist restaurant owner didn't want to serve blacks, but wanted to get around the anti-discrimination laws. So he says, "I'll serve you today if you absolutely insist, but if you do, then I'm going to ban you from the premises forever, because I'm free to take or reject the business of anybody I want to."

How does that even make sense? If Harrah's doesn't have the legal right to refuse access to a public event on the basis of sex, then it can't possibly have the right to ban that person from future events on the grounds that he accepted the open invitation. I can't imagine how a court, if asked to decide the matter, could come to any conclusion other than the obvious: The future ban is just a different means of practicing the illegal discrimination. There can't be any logical distinction between "You can't play today because you're male," and "OK, you can play today, but if you do, then because you're male, we will never let you enter one of our tournaments again." The perverse consequence of that approach would be that a place of public accommodation could freely discriminate on the basis of sex or race for a person's entire lifetime, as long as they didn't do it this one time.

That's just too bizarre to take seriously. If they really try it, I'd love to be the attorney bringing the suit. Seems like a slam-dunk win for the plaintiffs to me.

I stand by that.

So, Mr. Palansky--what have you actually done in terms of making good on your threat from last year? If nothing, as I suspect, they why did you lie about the situation? And do you have any more empty threats you'd like to issue while you're at it?

Bodog payout change

A few months ago I wrote about an endlessly frustrating experience with one of Bodog's cash-out methods, a prepaid Visa card. As a result, I can only see this email from Bodog as good news:

I'm curious, though, whether this is somehow related to all the Black Friday mess, or just another example of a payment processor moving to the "no longer usable" category.

Guess the casino, #854

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Aria

Cereus press releases compared

Cereus (umbrella company of UltimateBet and Absolute Poker) yesterday released two different versions of an announcement about an agreement with the Department of Justice as to release of players' funds. Some people have already noticed one key difference (deletion of language about third-party processors), but there are others.

Many don't know that Microsoft Word has a feature that automatically compares two versions of a document and notates the changes. In order to facilitate scrutiny of what has changed, I threw both versions, as posted on Gary Wise's web site here and here, into Word (I still use the 2003 release) and had it highlight the changes. Method for doing this is explained here.

Below is the result, captured as a JPEG screenshot. Click for full size. Additions to the original text are underlined and in red; deletions and alterations are noted in the right-hand margin.

I will leave commenting on the interpretation of changes to others. I just wanted to offer this little technical service to those interested in a shortcut method. Permission is granted to anybody who wants to either link to or copy this image; just add a notation as to this blog being the source, please.

Poker probability in non-poker life

While I was in Florida with Cardgrrl in March, somehow we got talking about refractive eye surgery (LASIK and other such procedures). I said that I would love to be free of glasses, but the life consequences of any significant visual loss are too terrible for me to be willing to risk it, even though the chance of such an outcome is small.

She agreed, and noted that playing poker has given her a greater respect for small-percentage results. Playing poker a lot, you see 1% scenarios happen often enough to make a lasting impression that they are real. On paper, that 1% looks like a trivial, negligible fraction, but playing thousands of hands of poker, of course you're going to see a fair number of them come out.

I agree with her that playing poker has changed my perspective on rare events. It's not that I think things happen more often that the math would predict, it's just that I've come to incorporate, in a front-of-the-awareness manner, the reality that small percentages multiplied by a large number of opportunities means that the rare things not just might but actually do occur with regularity.

Translated back to the surgical situation, if I had to have a tumor removed to save my life, of course I'd accept the small risk that the surgery itself would have some freakishly rare adverse outcome. But I'm not willing to accept that risk when the only advantage is losing the little bit of nuisance that glasses represent.

Today I found another example in which my occasional study of poker probability has influenced the way I think about something. I heard on the news that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals hearing one of the big Obamacare constitutionality lawsuits had "randomly" selected a panel composed of two Obama appointees and one Clinton appointee. (See here, e.g.) I'm not normally inclined to conspiracy theories, but that immediately struck me (and, undoubtedly, many others) as a stacked deck. So I looked into it.

I found that the court currently has 13 members, of which five are Republican appointees and eight are Democratic appointees. (See the tally here.) I've run enough poker scenarios to have become reasonably familiar with the math on permutations and combinations, and quickly determined that there are 286 different ways of selecting groups of three judges from a pool of 13. There are only ten ways of drawing panels of three Republican appointees, 56 ways of drawing panels of three Democratic appointees, and 220 ways of drawing a mix.

If, therefore, you ask the question, "What is the probability that a random assignment would result in a three-judge panel of all Democratic appointees?", the answer is 56/286, or about 20%. It's not the most likely outcome, but it's hardly in the range of rarity that makes sensible people don tinfoil hats. It's in the same ballpark as your opponent hitting his flush draw on the river after all the money is in on the turn--i.e., run-of-the-mill unlucky, not extraordinarily unlucky.

I understand probability a lot better now than I did after taking a graduate course in statistics, and it's entirely because of poker. The optimist in me would like to think that teaching everybody poker would have a beneficial effect on the populace's generally abysmal understanding of probability and statistics. But the realist in me remembers all of the stupid ideas about randomness that even experienced poker players develop ("I never win with aces," "I figured he couldn't have diamonds two hands in a row," "Jacks are coming up a lot today," "A new deck of cards will end my bad streak," etc.), and it crushes any sprouts of hope.

Guess the casino, #853

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Sunset Station

LOL

http://pokersmell.com/?p=204

Good interview

As I woke up this morning, on my radio was the tail end of an interview on the local public radio station's daily current-affairs show. The guest was Dan Deveau, an online professional player living in Henderson. I don't think I had heard of him before, but I was impressed. He makes a fine spokesman for the cause. He seems forthright and articulate, passionate but not arrogant.

You can listen to or download the 25-minute show segment here: http://www.knpr.org/son/archive/detail2.cfm?SegmentID=7830&ProgramID=2228

Guess the casino, #852

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Riviera

Aha!

A month ago I opined that the fountains seen through the "window" in the set of "High Stakes Poker" were not what they appeared, but were actually video footage played in the background, or added in post.

In the newest episode, there is conclusive proof that I was right:

This is being shot somewhere inside the Bellagio, but behind the fountains you can see--the Bellagio! This view is from the street or sidewalk.

Nobody expects...

...the Spanish Inquisition!

Guess the casino, #851

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: O'Shea's