O'Shea's fun

About an hour ago I got home after spending the evening playing at O'Shea's (not my first choice, but Imperial Palace had no game going). At one point we had @davidstetler, @mjpitts, @dmuzio, @alaskagal1, me, and @sevencard2003 all playing, with @mitzula standing by watching. It appears that @caitycaity arrived soon after I left. It's not often that six people I follow on Twitter (and who I think all follow me) are simultaneously within card-throwing distance of me.

Why am I writing this? Because somebody on that list (I'm not naming names) told me that he or she expected to see something about it in my blog. So even though I don't have any good stories to tell*, now a wish has been fulfilled.


*I could tell one very funny story, but it would embarrass the butt of the joke, so I am refraining out of mercy.

Guess the casino, #695

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Answer: Binion's

Harrah's = Classy (not!)

An email I received today:




And here's the web page it linked to:



(Notice that which Playmates are promised to appear somehow changed between them sending the email and me clicking on it about two minutes later. Notice also the wonderful headline, "House of Blue Poker Open." As in, y'know, B.B. King sings the blue.)

This is, of course, the same Harrah's corporation that earlier this month introduced had scantily clad young women holding seat number signs as the final nine players in the Main Event were introduced.

This is also the same Harrah's that claims, with a straight face, to hold a special women-only poker tournament in the WSOP because it is trying to make women feel more comfortable about poker.

You figure it out. I can't.

Harrah's = Stupid

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Harrah's inviting me to enter a freeroll tournament. I could choose between poker, slots, and video poker. Well, that's a no-brainer. The offer includes up to two nights at either Harrah's or Imperial Palace.

Today I finally got around to trying to make my reservation. The first problem was that even though the email said that I could use the Harrah's Total Rewards web site to make the reservation, I actually couldn't. I kept trying to enter the offer code from the email into the web site, but the web site kept responding that that was a code that had to be handled by phone instead. Why can't companies get such little things straight?

Fine. I called. I worked my way through the idiotic menu. I gave them my Total Rewards card number and the offer code. The nice lady on the phone asked which nights I wanted to make my hotel reservations for. I told her I didn't really want to say in their hotels, I preferred just staying home in my own bed, since I live in town, and all I was really interested in was the poker tournament. She was sympathetic, but said that it was all a package deal, and if I didn't take the free hotel room, I couldn't get the free tournament entry.

Fine. The tournament is on November 29-December 1, so I picked November 29 for my hotel reservation, at Harrah's. We got that arranged. Then I asked about the poker tournament. She didn't know anything about it--you know, little details like what time to show up. She assured me that I would be given all the necessary information when I checked in to my hotel room.

You do see the flaw in this plan, don't you? She didn't. I gently explained that if I'm checking into my hotel room on the evening of November 29th, that's just a wee bit too late to be giving me information about a poker tournament that will have started earlier that day.

She gave me to understand that there are, in fact, three separate tournaments, and I can enter two of them, so on the evening of the 29th I will be given the required information and can enter the poker tournaments on both November 30th and December 1st.

I'm not going to stay in the hotel room. I know some locals love getting a free "staycation" at the casinos. Not me. To me it's just a bother having to pack stuff for an overnight bag, to be followed by a sub-par night of sleep in an unfamiliar bed and room, followed by having to get up in the morning and drive home before I can do my morning routine things like check my email and RSS feeds. It's just a bother to me with no compensatory up-side.

So what I will do is play poker at Harrah's (or maybe IP) that afternoon or evening, do a fake check-in at the Harrah's desk (I worry that even if I got the detailed tourney info somewhere else, if I don't actually complete the check-in process as scheduled, they'll cancel my tournament eligibility), get the required information and/or tournament entry receipt or whatever, then immediately hand them back the room key and tell them I'm checking out.

This "can't have one without the other" would make some sense if I were paying for the room, like a "buy one get one free" offer. But that's not what this is. It's a free room. I don't want the free room, I only want the free poker tournament entries that come with it. I suppose the corporate thinking is that if I'm physically staying in the hotel, I'll gamble and eat in their restaurants, drink at their bars, and they'll make money from me that way. But I won't, other than poker. Even if I did stay overnight (which isn't my plan), I would either just drive home to eat, or maybe have a free breakfast at their cafe, using my Total Rewards comp points.

It's sheer corporate idiocy. Why can't they just give me the free tournament entry, without making me jump through stupid hoops that will end up costing them money (an unused room, staff time to get me checked in and out, etc.)?

Guess the casino, #694

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Answer: Aria

Why is Caesars lying to its guests?

I played poker at Caesars Palace this afternoon. On my way in, which requires a walk past the sports book, I noticed this sign. Actually, I've seen it there other times, too, but just not thought much about it.

If I had seen such a sign three years ago, it would not have surprised me. I remember the Hilton security people being absolutely fanatical about people being on cell phones in the sports book area, even if they were obviously just passing through quickly and paying no attention to the Big Board of Betting Lines.

But such a sign is out of place now, because the Nevada Gaming Commission repealing the regulation cited (22.135) in August, 2008. You can see the letter announcing this on the state's own web site, here.

That means that Caesars Palace, by continuing to have this sign out, is engaging in an ongoing lie to its patrons.

Why are you doing that, Caesars?

Guess the casino, #693

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Answer: Treasure Island

What am I missing?

During the run-up to the recent elections, I was puzzled by a series of Twitter posts from well-known professional poker players not only expressing their support for Harry Reid, but saying or suggesting that he would be good for online poker, while his opponent, Sharron Angle, would be bad for online poker. Here are the ones I remember, from Andy Bloch, Howard Lederer, and Barry Greenstein:









Erik Seidel took a more humorous approach:



I responded to a couple of these, asking what evidence they had that Reid had been or would become a friend of the online poker industry. My questions were ignored.

I have not heard of any explicit public statements from either Reid or Angle on the subject of online gambling generally or online poker specifically. (Lederer provided no pointer for his claim about Angle's stance. I checked at the time, and could find nothing about it in her web site's list of formal positions.) I thought that I was sufficiently tuned in to poker-related news that if either of them had made an election point of either supporting or opposing online gaming, I would have heard about it. But the Twitter statements from Lederer, Greenstein, and Bloch left me wondering if I had missed something.

Apparently not. In the current issue of Poker Player newspaper, Wendeen Eolis reviews what the last election did for online poker. Here are a few excerpts about Reid:

The powerful Majority Leader who won a hard fought election helped the
Democrats hold onto control of the Senate. He was the beneficiary of substantial support by online poker interests but yet to be settled is his commitment toward affirmative online gaming legislation this year.

The wily Senator, whose constituents include casinos around Nevada, has been slow to warm up to online gambling. Even in the face of vigorous support by the likes of Harrah's, Sen. Reid has done little more than give equivocal lip service toward U.S. Rep. Barney Frank's supportive bill to regulate online poker.

As of today, Senator Reid is still holding his cards close to his vest....

The online poker lobby sought to turn Sen. Reid's hotly contested re-election bid for his Senate seat into an opportunity, plowing significant support into his campaign, but Reid has continued to hold his cards close to the vest, presumably weighing the incomplete unity of the casino industry. Casino operators remain splintered over the best strategies in the development of online gambling....

Sen. Reid's continuing equivocation has been matched by Representative Frank's fading optimism toward passage of a bill during the upcoming lame duck sessions.

So I appear to have been correct: Reid has neither expressed nor demonstrated support of online poker. Here's a political truism: If a politician seeking your support during an election is unwilling to go on the record as being in favor of your interests, he's not.

Of course, the same would have been true of Angle. I would not have counted on her to support any expansion or explicit legalization of gambling. Even lacking any clear statement from her one way or the other, it's easy for me to believe that her hard-core religious views would win out over the general ideas of freedom, leaving people alone, smaller and less intrusive government, etc.

In short, neither of them could be considered a champion of liberty generally, nor of online gaming in particular. If I had to guess, Reid's loyalties will lie with the brick-and-mortar casinos, and if he ends up supporting anything at all, it will be something that favors established casino corporations entering the online realm, almost surely at the expense of established online operators such as PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. (See, e.g., Grange95's analysis of the amendments to H.R. 2267 earlier this year.) Reid has certainly been a political friend of Nevada casinos, and I see no reason to expect him to be removed from their back pocket anytime soon.

Which brings me full circle. Reid has not been a supporter of any proposal to license, regulate, or explicitly legalize online gaming, and if one had to guess where he would throw future support, it would be toward facilitating Harrah's, MGM Mirage, etc., moving online, and making life difficult for the current online providers. (It is hard to see those two factions ever not being in opposition over legalization, as each would like to preclude competition from the other.)

So why on earth were prominent representatives of the world's two biggest online poker sites shilling for him? Either they're missing something, or I am.

Guess the casino, #692

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Answer: Santa Fe Station

Now I'm officially a poker slut

I played in Gadzooks64's PokerSlut tournament tonight. I played it last week, too, when it was HORSE, and bubbled. Grrrr. Had to make up for it tonight, even though the game was scheduled to be stud/8, which is far from my specialty. And I succeeded. Here were the standings when we were on the money bubble:



Yeah, maybe I can make something happen when I have SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT OF THE CHIPS IN PLAY!

When we got down to heads-up, I had a 7:1 chip lead, and thought it would be a cakewalk. It wasn't. Things kept going wrong for me, the lead kept slipping, and then vanished. And it kept getting worse. At one point he had me down about 3:1 in chips. I was despondent, because I couldn't close the deal. But then the cards came back my way when the limits were sky-high, and I finally finished him off, claiming my proud $27.50 trophy. But I think it was nearly an hour of two-handed play, and I was on edge most of the time. Some players just won't roll over and die the way they're supposed to!




And that's MISTER Poker Slut to you guys.

Simple English FAIL

I saw a print advertisement similar to the above, then took the screen shot of this ad from here. Yet another case in which it seems that a casino and/or its advertising agency has nobody with basic English skills.

Even if I were feeling inclined to forgive the unnecessary hyphenation of bimonthly (which I'm not), using bimonthly (which means every two months) where semimonthly (which means twice a month) is intended is simply wrong.

Yes, I'm aware that many modern dictionaries now give "twice a month" as an alternative definition of bimonthly. That, however, is simply a surrendering to the frequency with which people make this mistake. Allowing bimonthly and semimonthly to mean the same things is intolerable, as it renders both words completely useless. If both definitions are considered legitimate, then one must always follow the use of either word with more words explaining which meaning is intended, in which case it is pointless to use either word to begin with.

There are points of English usage on which reasonable people can differ in opinion. This is not one of them. See, for example, what has become of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage note here. They have basically given up, and advise writers to avoid either word. That is a ludicrous and cowardly solution to a simple problem. The far better solution is to point to the guilty party and laugh in derision, thus shaming him or her into future compliance with the conventional definitions. If necessary, one can taunt the person a second time.

Of course, this error is hardly the Cannery's greatest failing as a company, but I thought it worth pointing out nonetheless.

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.

Nice editing, morons

This notice (probably actually an ad disguised as copy; I am cynical enough to suspect that companies have to pay to get mentioned in this kind of feature) showed up in the November issue of Poker Pro magazine.

Notice a slight contradiction between the text and the image?

Well, what can you expect from a magazine that claims to cater to professional poker players, but spends the last couple pages of every issue listing hand rankings and the best hold'em starting hands?

Problem solved

Ever since I got the new computer with Windows 7, I have had problems with the sound files on both PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. On Stars, the alerts sounded clipped, as if it would play the first bit of the sound file but not the whole thing. On FTP, some alerts played, others didn't, and it would sort of randomly shift over time which ones worked. Neither playing with the audio options nor reinstalling the software helped.

Today during a tournament break I tried searching to see if others had reported such a problem. They have--along with a fix. Somebody on 2+2 posted this reply he got from Stars support when he asked them about the problem:

We have received a handful of reports such as yours regarding sound synchronization issues on Windows Vista systems. At this time we
believe this issue to be caused by a buggy Vista feature that attempts to
simulate surround sound on ordinary stereo speakers, when used in conjunction with integrated sound systems of certain motherboards. Of note are AC97 sound systems by Realtek, integrated into many ECS, Asus, and Abit motherboards.

You may disable this surround sound emulation in Vista using these
steps:

1) Right-click the speaker icon in the system tray (lower right)
2) Select "Playback Devices"
3) Select "Speakers" and then choose "Properties"
4) Choose the "Enhancements" tab
5) Check the box that says "Disable all enhancements"
6) Click "Apply", and then "OK" to close the dialog(s)

This should return your sound to normal while playing in a PokerStars
game.

Good luck in your games, and thank you for playing on PokerStars.

Voila! I am using Windows 7, not Vista, but the same series of steps solved my issue perfectly, on both Stars and FTP.

As an added bonus, I had been mildly annoyed at how the "virtual surround sound" feature on my computer treated human voices in sound files, adding something akin to reverb, though not quite. It always sounded as if everybody were trying to do the voice of God from "The Ten Commandments." That, too, has now been switched off. And yes, I do have a "Realtek High Definition Audio Default Device," as the PokerStars memo suggests as the culprit.

If only all of life's problems could be fixed so easily.

Guess the casino, #691

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Answer: Planet Hollywood

Poker gems, #396

Al Neipris, in Poker Pro magazine, November, 2010, p. 75.


I wouldn't be surprised if a few stressed-out card players are already starting to pop up in psychiatrists' offices around the country complaining about their inability to stay off tilt.

Once the shrinks get hold of a thing, can medicalization be far behind? There are pills for anxiety, pills for depression, pills for seeing little green men. The pharmaceutical industry rakes in billions of dollars of profit every year. If they think there's money to be made, you can be sure they'll be trotting out some sort of anti-tilt pill sooner rather than later.

Awkward!

This story is sort of hard to tell in a way that will both make sense and be funny, but I'll try. The main problem in relating it is that, even though it's about something I did, I have no recollection of it, and am relying on a secondhand report.


In the summer of 2009, Cardgrrl came to town for the World Series of Poker. She had fairly recently become a participating member of the discussion forum at allvegaspoker.com, and wanted a chance to meet some of the people with whom she had been conversing, so she put together a little social gathering at Rhumbar at the Mirage. A bunch of people dropped by to get acquainted in person. Zippyboy was one of those who stayed the longest, and we got to chat with him quite a bit. He had just left his job in the Pacific Northwest and moved to town to see about this whole poker thing.

Cardgrrl and I ran into him again maybe a week later in the Red Rock poker room. Then in November of last year he and I ended up as two of the five co-champions (due to a negotiated even chop) of the AVP tournament at Harrah's, which I wrote about here.

Given those three encounters, I knew who he was when we happened to end up in adjacent seats at yet another AVP tournament in March of this year, which I wrote about briefly here.

OK, so that's the setup. Now comes the part I don't remember happening. Zippyboy was in the big blind in an unraised pot against Clem, another AVP regular. They checked it down all the way. Clem showed some random hand first and won. Zippyboy flashed me his 2-4 before mucking it. I told him that he had misplayed his cards (or so I'm told, and it's perfectly believable). This ticked him off, though I didn't know it at the time.

Zippy and I had dinner Monday, and he told me about this. As I said, I remember the tournament, but I have no memory of this particular incident. Here's the key fact that I didn't know at the time: Zippyboy had never read my blog. (Fortunately, since then he has repented of his ways and become a daily checker-inner.) He had no knowledge of the special place that the Mighty Deuce-Four holds for me. Here's what he told me in a follow-up email a couple of days ago, after I asked his permission to tell the story here:

The ONLY reason I flashed it to you was as if to prove what a crappy hand
it was, and that I couldn't possibly have won anyway, and maybe get sympathy
from you (my co-champion at the previous meet). Then, when you snickered and
said "You didn't play 'em right!" (assuming that I read your blog, and that's
the reason I had showed), well, THAT just pissed me off! Like, how the hell
was I s'posed to play a crappy hand like this???

Of course, now I am in awe of deuce-four's obvious invulnerability and
never fold it.

I certainly don't automatically assume that AVP people (or anybody else, for that matter) reads my blog. But when Zippy flashed me the 2-4, I obviously assumed that he was doing so because he knew I was The Grand Poo-Bah of the Holy Order of the Deuce-Four. That also is why I further assumed that he wouldn't mind a little good-natured jab about having misplayed it.

I'm glad that we can now both get a laugh out of the awkwardness that (unbeknownst to me at the time) resulted from our bringing opposite sets of assumptions to that moment.

Jennifer doesn't know

Jennifer Tilly is back writing for Bluff magazine again. I like her columns (even if she is a bit daft). But this month she tells a story of a hand played at a WSOP event in London recently:

Right away, however, I get off to a bad start. I decide to complete the big
blind with the excellent starting hand of 4c-2c. Fabrice Soulier, the early
position raiser has just lost a big pot, and I believe that if he doesn't
connect he will quietly fold. Conversely if I connect, he will never put me on
such a donkalicious hand, and I will suck him dry.

To make a long story short, she makes two pair on the turn, but calls him down on the turn and river despite the presence of a possible straight flush in hearts--which is exactly what Soulier has.

Now we know why she has not attained the highest levels of success in the poker world: she thinks the Mighty Deuce-Four--in crubs, no less--is "donkalicious." (I gather that her first description of it as "excellent" was meant to be sarcastic.) Had she believed in the power of her hand, she would have been the one to make the straight flush. Obviously.

Jennifer, the first step toward overcoming a problem is to acknowledge it. I hereby offer you free lessons in how to play the most powerful hand in poker.

Poker dreaming again

A couple of nights ago I found myself playing hold'em in a most unusual setting. It was me against a whole bleacher full of other players, maybe 40 or 50 of them. I was standing on the ground facing them, while they were all seated. As if that weren't weird enough, we were playing not with cards, but with feathers. This was new to me, and I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. I was given two beautiful, large, black feathers, each of which had a single crimson marking near its base. I thought perhaps this meant they were aces. My father was directing the whole affair, so I asked him, and he confirmed my suspicion.

My first problem was what to do with the feathers physically. I mean, these things were about 18 inches long. I wasn't sure if everybody else could already see what I had. For lack of a better way of concealing my hand, I stuck them in my back pocket.

OK, so I've got two aces. But what to do about the betting? Somebody in the bleachers had already raised to $10 (this must have been a $1-$2 game), and about 10 people behind had called. It was my turn. I had no idea how to do bet-sizing when there this many people already in the pot, and 40 or 50 more yet to act. (I don't think it occurred to me to wonder how there were enough cards to go around. Maybe feather decks have more than 52 in them.) I raised to $40, but I had a feeling that that wasn't really enough, under the circumstances.

The next player to act was a man I knew from church all the years I was growing up--Sherman Brown--who is the most anti-gambling person I've ever known. He wouldn't even allow a deck of cards to be in his home, and took every available opportunity to advise other church members to follow the same practice. So it was a high degree of cognitive dissonance to find myself playing poker against him.

Maybe that was what made me realize that this was too strange to be real (as if the bleachers and feathers and Dad running things were perfectly normal), because that's when I woke up.

Poker gems, #395

Chris Wallace, in Poker Pro magazine column, November, 2010, p. 67.


He began to remind me of the tournament player who says something like: "The next time you come after my big blind, I'm raising with any two."

To a solid player this statement means: "Go ahead and steal my blinds all day. I hate when people do it, and my best defense is to try to scare them because I am not capable of reraising unless I have a big hand."