I've previously shown you definitive, irrefutable evidence that Full Tilt Poker is totally rigged--see this post. Well, here is more proof, as if any more were needed. It is worth noting that all the money got in before the flop, and I had two of the three opponents covered.
Oh, maybe I forgot to mention that once in a great while, the sites are rigged in my favor, and I don't see how anybody can reasonably object to that. You can view the full animation of the hand at the very cool "Poker X Factor" site here.
When the cards were revealed before the flop played out, my heart sank, because I knew that beating the J-J would be difficult with two of the other aces and one of the other kings in view. Then when I saw the queen on the flop, I thought it was basically over, and I'd end up with the third-best hand. It took a couple of seconds for the nut flush to register in my aged brain.
That hand was worth almost 16,000 chips when the blinds were still 80 and 160--not bad, eh? It pushed me into one of the top spots for a while, as well as collecting me two simultaneous bounties (this was a knockout 90-player SNG). Alas, variance caught up to me and I finished just out of the money in 14th place. But that one hand had sufficient entertainment value to be worth the staggering $3 entry fee.
By the way, this was my first shot at this format of tournament. I hadn't ever tried a sit-and-go of more than one table, but this post from Ted at Red Bull and Poker convinced me that these $3, 90-player tourneys might be a worthwhile investment of time. Just on the basis of my first try at it, I'd say he's right about the horrendous quality of play, suggesting a reasonably positive EV. He was also right about how fast they fill up, which surprised me. Not wanting to sit in limbo for a long time was a primary reason I didn't try the larger SNGs previously, but even though I was one of the first three or four to register, the whole thing was ready to go in maybe four minutes. I will definitely be trying this tournament format again.
This is a sensitive subject, one that I've toyed with writing about for months. On Sunday I decided to post about it, but still I put it off, because I'm not quite sure what it is I have to say about it.
But here's the question: Are there any gay professional poker players?
Well, the first problem is defining "professional poker player." There are probably many thousands of us low-level grinders squeaking by. Never mind that group. I'm really thinking about the upper crust of the poker world. Suppose we limit the field to, roughly, the group that did qualify or would have qualified for the Professional Poker Tour a couple of years ago. That field was somewhere between 150 and 200 players. That might be the most restrictive, limiting definition of poker pro that one could reasonably come up with. (They included few if any online tournament specialists, and not many cash-game specialists, so it is indeed a narrow selection.)
Statistically, it would be quite remarkable if there were not at least one gay person in a group of that size, wouldn't it? Yet I am not aware of a single name-brand player who has identified himself or herself as gay or lesbian.
Nearly every professional sport has experienced one or more players coming out of the closet. How can poker be different?
What brought this from an occasional idle passing thought to the point of deciding to post about it was Sunday's broadcast of the first installment of the NBC heads-up championship. In particular, I hadn't previously seen Tom "Durrrr" Dwan on television. During his first match with Phil Hellmuth, I was immediately struck by his speech patterns and non-verbal mannerisms. They weren't quite Jack-from-"Will-and-Grace"/Truman Capote/Harvey Fierstein flagrant--but they weren't exactly subtle, either. They were quite typical of what I've observed in many, many uncloseted gay men.
Since then, I've looked up several on-line video clips of other interviews with him, and seen the same things repeated. I've also searched his name with "gay" and found that at least several other people in various public forums have concluded or assumed that Dwan is gay, though never with any evidence specified.
I hasten to add that I have exactly zero information on Tom Dwan's personal life. I don't know if he's gay or straight or somewhere in between, and as far as I know he hasn't publicly addressed the matter. Furthermore, I honestly don't care, as far as the guy himself is concerned. As a good libertarian, I'm about as purely live-and-let-live as one can get. I'm interested only because of the rather striking (when you stop to think about it) absence of any gay high-visibility poker players, and the possibility that he might be the first to break ranks, so to speak.
Even if it's not Dwan, sooner or later, inevitably, somebody that we all recognize from televised and/or online poker events (even if it's somebody who is not currently well known) will out himself. Every time this little curiosity has occurred to me, I've wondered how this incredibly macho, sexist, swaggering, "I am the MAN" poker world will react to the news. My guess is that there will be a lot of public quoting of the famous Seinfeld line (a la the title of this post), accompanied by a lot of quiet, private, nasty bashing. You can imagine the kind of things that will be written by the scads of anonymous contributors to the poker forums--those who can't make a comment about a female professional player that doesn't involve judging her attractiveness or lack thereof. I don't envy whoever it is who takes on (voluntarily or otherwise) the role of the first openly gay poker pro. I think it will be a difficult mantle to wear.
And just in case the very writing of this post makes readers wonder--no, I'm not. Not that there's anything wrong with that....
Roy West, in Card Player magazine column, April 9, 2008 (vol. 21, #7), p. 106:
I'll remind you of what my boyhood idol, all-American basketball player "Easy" Ed McCauley, said about practicing: "When you are not practicing, someone, somewhere is practicing. And when you meet, he will beat you." Many of your opponents, right this instant, are somewhere studying poker. Many read every word in Card Player and every poker book they can lay their hands on. Many have taken my private lessons. You had better get ready to meet them.
April 17. April 17. That date kind of rings a bell, like it should mean something to me. But I just can't remember for sure. The memory is getting kind of fuzzy these days....
I got six, count 'em, six stories out of a long (for me), eight-hour session at Planet Hollywood yesterday. None of them is particularly profound, and none of them prompts me to write a longer diatribe about some subject, so I didn't think any of them merited a separate post. Instead, I'll just collect them here. They have nothing in common, except for having occurred on the same day in the same place.
1. Excellent situational awareness
This occurred on just the second or third hand after I sat down in seat #1. I was not involved in the hand. The flop was A-Q-x, and the turn and river were both small cards, no flush, no obvious straight possibilities. On both the flop and turn, seat 8 checked, seat 2 bet, and seat 8 called. On the river, the same happened again, except that this time seat 2 held an ace up to full view of everybody for about ten seconds as he pushed $35 forward. Seat 8 never looked up, just asked how much the bet was, then said, "I call." He then turned over his queen (second pair), looked up (immediately after seat 2 had put his ace back face-down on the felt), and asked, "Do you have an ace?" The whole table burst out laughing. Seat 8 had no idea what was so funny. Somebody said, "Dude, he was showing you his ace while he bet." At first, seat 8 didn't believe this, but when everybody at the table, including the dealer, confirmed it, he could do nothing but join in the laughter at his own expense for having been too absorbed in his thoughts to lift his eyes a few degrees above the horizon and see the plain evidence that he was beat before he made the final call. I've never seen anything like that before.
2. Not my turn
At one point I was in late position. Seat 9 (PH runs 9-handed games, so seat 9 is on the dealer's immediate right) looked at his hole cards and left the table. This is rude and against the rules, because it suggests that one is folding out of turn, which gives improper information to the players taking their turns. Anyway, the action got to seat 9, and he wasn't there. But his cards were still where he had put them down. He had not pushed them forward or towards the muck, so it was not obvious to me that his hand was dead. For all I knew, he might be a few feet behind me about to return, or maybe he had whispered to the dealer that he'd be right back. The dealer was in the middle of discussing something unrelated with the floorman (about breaks, and who was to push whom, and who would be going home early, blah, blah, blah).
The guy in seat 5 started pressing me to take my turn. But it seemed to me that I couldn't just assume that seat 9's hand was dead; as I said, he might have asked the dealer to hold things up for a minute. Far stranger things than that have happened. Seat 5 apparently thought I was a complete idiot and couldn't figure out what was going on. Three times--each with increasing emphasis--he insisted that I go. I just ignored him and waited for the dealer to take action. Finally she finished what had been distracting her, saw 9's cards, looked around, didn't see him, and killed his hand. I then folded in turn. Seat 5 looked at me disgustedly and shook his head. After all, I had cost him something like a precious 15 seconds of his life.
I still maintain that I acted properly. I just don't have the right or authority to kill another player's hand or to assume that it's dead before the dealer takes action. Yes, I have a pretty good idea what's most likely to happen, but I don't want to make incorrect assumptions, then have a big mess result because of some small fact that I might have overlooked.
3. Today's brilliant strategic advice
There was a funny and attractive young woman in seat 6 nearly the entire time I was there. But she wasn't a very good player. In one memorable hand, she had pocket jacks, but limped in along with about five other players. The flop was something like 6-7-8. She checked it, as did everybody else. The turn was a blank. She made a small bet and got called in two places. The river brought a 10. One of her opponents bet big, the other called. She realized that one or both of them must have made a straight, and folded her jacks face up. Indeed, both opponents did have the same straight and split the pot.
She was lamenting her rotten luck. Somebody asked her, "Why didn't you raise before the flop?" She said, "I didn't want to scare people away." She was then asked, "Why didn't you bet on the flop?" She said, again, more emphatically, "I didn't want to scare people away!"
Ingenius strategy, eh?
For the rest of the session, anytime somebody won the pot with a bet on the flop, the guy in seat 2 and I would quietly make a sarcastic comment about how the winner had misplayed the hand by scaring off all of his opponents. "He doesn't understand that you have to let them catch up and beat you."
4. Underprotecting and overprotecting
Early in the session, before the cool guy joined us in seat 2, that chair was occupied by a grumpy guy I've played with a few times before around town. An odd series of three hands resulted in him leaving the game.
He won a large pot on the first hand. He was then in the big blind, and still busy stacking up the chips as the second hand was dealt. He hadn't even picked up his cards when the under-the-gun player in seat 3 folded. But in the process of flicking his cards back to the dealer, they accidentally skidded across the top of seat 2's down cards, which were still quite far out in front of him, unprotected. The dealer, therefore, correctly scooped up both hands and put them in the muck. (If your hand is unprotected, and another player's discards run into yours, your hand is deemed dead. The underlying reason for this is that in such a situation it becomes impossible to know that you have been left with the same two cards you were originally dealt.) Seat 2 didn't understand what had happened. When the hand was over, he politely asked the dealer to explain it, and received an equally polite response. It seemed that all was well, no feelings hurt.
On the very next hand, however, the opposite problem arose. Seat 2, now being hyperaware of the need to protect his cards, went to the other extreme and completely covered them with his large hands. The player in seat 8 bet on the flop, seat 9 folded, and the dealer thought the hand was over, because he couldn't see seat 2's cards. He had already turned the three flop cards face down when seat 2 spoke up and stopped him. Everything was still playable: the dealer had not intermixed the stub of the deck (that's the cards still in his hand) with the muck, and merely had to turn the flop back face-up to get everything the way it had been. But in the process, he gently scolded seat 2 for hiding his cards, reminding him that the cards have to remain visible to the table at all times. However, no damage had been done, and seat 2 could still respond to the current bet.
Instead, seat 2 mucked his hand angrily, while claiming that he wanted to play it because it was a strong hand, but he said he wouldn't stay another minute at a table where the dealer was treating him so badly. He picked up his chips and stormed off.
The dealer had done everything right. Both I and another player, who was an off-duty dealer, reassured him of that.
Apparently this guy just couldn't grasp that there is a happy medium between leaving your cards unprotected way out in front of you, where they might become fouled by somebody else's discards or accidentally picked up by the dealer, and keeping them completely hidden from view.
Poor dealers: You do everything right, the player screws up, and you get blamed for it. I guess you have to develop a thick skin for that job.
5. Celebrity non-sighting
I had chosen PH rather arbitrarily for the session, not having been aware until after I got there that it was the venue for last night's star-studded premiere of the new movie "88." Apparently Al Pacino was there for the premiere (since he's the star of the film). But he didn't bother stopping in to say hello at the poker room. Bastard.
6. The Brotherhood
The big convention in town this week is the National Association of Broadcasters. A couple of players at the table were here for it. Down at my end of the table, a conventioneer in seat 4 asked seat 2 (not the jerk who stomped off mad, but the cool guy who replaced him) whether he, too, was here for the conference. Seat 2 asked "What conference?" Seat 4 said, "The NAB." Seat 2 asked, "What's the NAB?" Seat 4 got an impish look on his face and was obviously trying to think of a clever fake answer with which he could pull seat 2's leg, for not knowing about the big meeting. But he finally couldn't think of one, and had to give the straight answer. I said the first thing that popped into my head: "It's the National Aryan Brotherhood."
This not only brought laughs (fortunately; some people obviously would react differently), but provided fodder for a series of running jokes through the session. When one of the three of us would win a pot, one of the others would say in mock seriousness, "A win for the Brotherhood." We decided that we didn't like spade or club flushes: too many black cards. We declared that we liked aces best, because they had the most white on them. Etc. It was great subversive fun.
There aren't many places left in this country where one can be so openly politically incorrect and not run a serious risk of being fired or arrested or assaulted or sued. Thank God the poker table seems to be one of the last remaining refuges at which one can let humor take its natural course, without excessive self-censorship.
I just watched "The Big Blind."* It is as bad as the worst of any of the poker movies I've previously reviewed.
There's a caveat to that, however--it has a lot more poker than most. It's not very good or interesting poker, but at least the movie does largely revolve around the game. It might better be called "Scenes from a Poker Room," because there isn't any central plot. Instead, there are something like 12-15 characters, forming about five distinct story lines. The only thing they all have in common is the real-life Lake Elsinore Casino.
The production values are about half a step above home movies.
There are a few recognizable poker faces. Here are Matt Corboy, Jennifer Harman, and, in a non-speaking, uncredited role, Daniel Negreanu (looking remarkably like Worm, the Edward Norton character in "Rounders"):
Corboy is best known in poker circles as one of the commentators for the one-season, ill-fated Professional Poker Tour. Here's another shot of him, with a look that the producers of the PPT, oddly, did not ask him to recreate for their shows:
Then there's the inimitable Scotty Nguyen, who plays a character named "Scotty," a poker player. Imagine that. He stars in what I thought was the best scene in the film (though it had nothing to do with poker). He is in a store, gets treated kindly by one stranger, badly by another, and deals with them both accordingly--but never loses his cool, speaking only a few carefully chosen words.
The poker is reasonably true to life, as movies go. The most glaring bit of phoniness about it, as you can see from the next screen shot, is that in this casino they play high-stakes cash games with plain, solid-colored chips--the kind you can purchase at K-Mart. That would certainly make buying into the game a lot cheaper: pick up several dozen generic chips at the discount store for a song, then take them to the casino, where they will be honored as worth hundreds apiece. I can't figure out why they had permission to shoot lots of scenes in the casino, but not use real chips. It's a glaring error, like shooting a war movie with water pistols as props.
But the whole thing is badly written, badly acted, and badly shot, so there's really no reason to expect anything better from the props, I suppose. If you're big-time into poker, you probably need to see this stinker just so that you can say you did. But don't expect much from it.
This customer review from amazon.com (you can buy the DVD used from a few of their affiliated vendors) has it about right, though I think he's too hard on poor Scotty Nguyen:
This is a low budget widescreen movie (in LPCM audio=48 khz,16 bit, 2 chnnl--though, it sounded perfectly fine), sprinkled with a few poker stars. I only rented this, so it was easier for me to watch the whole thing without feeling ripped off. Jennifer Harman (top poker player), does an okay job playing the very minor role of a woman (Linda-I think), who's temporarily playing poker along with her boyfriend Lane (played by Matt Corboy-best known as one of the PPT tv announcers, or as Officer Ray Carlson, in the tv series, "The Shield"), until they win enough to get out of town. Corboy was good enough in the movie as well (he had a goofy, yet, still charming persona), and I liked the way he would often sing Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" (You got to know when to hold 'em...) to annoy people or please himself. After doing well, Lane decides to stay and keep playing, while Harman's character decides to leave town (that's the last we see of her in the movie).
However, Scotty Nguyen is so bad, it is actually quite funny. Half of the time I couldn't understand what he was saying. He plays a wise poker player named Scotty. He says baby, quite often, so I guess he's just playing himself. But he's so bad, he needs to work on even playing himself, before his next small screen appearance. At least at the end, they showed his WSOP win (with audio only at the very end of it). Poker star, Daniel Negreanu, is just in a brief scene near the beginning, sitting beside Jennifer at the poker table. He says nothing and was obviously just doing his real life friend, Harman, a favor.
The movie also features several other characters that are struggling with poker and some who are also ultimately searching for love. It has an annoying narrator, who comments throughout the movie, but after awhile his drab comments blended in with the awful storylines, so I was less repulsed. There is enough poker in the movie, but it mostly centres on bad play and angry reactions, rather than any quality poker.
So, yes, the movie is awful, but if you're a fan of poker great, Scotty Nguyen, and want to see him in a train wreck of a movie, then look to rent it. Whatever you do, don't buy it, or you just might decide to stop watching poker movies, forever! You've been warned, baby!
*The date on this movie is somewhat mysterious to me. The usually reliable IMDB lists it as 1999 (see here), while the DVD is apparently labeled as 2003, at least according to the information on the torrents directory from which I downloaded it. (It's not available for purchase, nor from Netflix, so one's choices for accessing it are limited.) Jennifer Harman is credited as "Jennifer Harman Traniello," implying that she was married when it was produced. According to a book I have, she was married in late 2000. My best guess is that it was shot in 1999, but not released until 2003.
I first reported the alarming trend of mysterious ink stamps on the backs of $100 bills here last month. Nobody supplied me with a convincing explanation of where they are coming from. I have continued to notice them. Here's the latest batch from my wallet.
I tell ya, folks, this is something big and sinister. I can feel it. I think maybe they're coming from some Satanic cult. Or terrorists. Or Satanic cult terrorists. Yeah, that's the ticket--Satanic cult terrorists.
Gadzooks64 had this in her blog, and it made me want to check my own level. Pretty damn low, for a blog that is primarily dedicated to bitching (oops--may have just upticked there), and many of them are just me quoting other people.
I just tried doing something new and demented. I played a $5 no-limit hold'em sit-and-go at the same time as a $5 HORSE limit sit-and-go, both on Full Tilt Poker. It was a little crazy jumping back and forth. I kept looking for the raise amounts in the limit games, and accidentally putting in min-raises in no-limit. I also made mistakes that I probably wouldn't otherwise make, such as thinking I had the nut flush in Omaha with just the ace and a four-flush on the board. D'oh!
I won the NLHE tournament. The HORSE, not so much--was leading, though, until I donked off most of my chips chasing draws in Stud, about which I know nothing.
It was a fun challenge, just to see if I could pull it off. But it made my brain hurt.
Go to the NBC Sports poker page here. Click on the "Heads-Up" section. Even if you don't want to watch the whole 64-player match, or even the whole two hours of the first show (which aired earlier today), at least treat yourself to the three-hand match in which Phil Hellmuth busts out at the hands of Tom "Durrrrrr" Dwan. It's "1st Round--Clubs, segment 2." It's only six minutes long.
For a second, it looks like Phil might handle the bad beat in a sportsmanlike manner, but then his true self shines through, and he starts haranguing and criticizing and making fun of his opponent for bad play.
The above is an actual photograph of Phil, taken just moments after this match ended.
...anything different about that last post? If not, here's the secret: For the first time, I managed to figure out how to embed HTML links in the text, rather than include an entire URL.
I realize that this is something already known by every other blogger in the universe (yes, including those on Alpha Centauri), but it had escaped me until now. Even though Blogger provides a one-click wizard button for doing it, so that one doesn't have to mess with manually inserting tags, I'm so technologically backwards that for a long time I couldn't deduce how to make it work. I tried several things, then gave up. Then, because Blogger's help files are not particularly good, it took me 30 minutes of searching to find the simple instructions on using it. Oh--you highlight the text before clicking on the button! Why didn't anybody tell me this? And what's wrong with my brain that I couldn't figure it out on my own?
So this should address the objections that a couple of commenters have had in the past about long URLs uglifying my posts.
Slowly, slowly, step by step, I'll catch on to how things work. Unless somebody volunteers to put in the work of site design at no charge (and please don't take this as a fishing expedition to get such a volunteer--it's not; I kind of like it being a one-man operation), you'll just have to put up with things improving very gradually.
These are some scattered thoughts about getting a massage while playing poker.
1. In Las Vegas, they are available at Caesars Palace, Rio, Venetian, Palms, MGM Grand for sure. I assume they probably are also available at Mirage, Bellagio, and Wynn, though I don't play at those places often enough to have noticed. If they are available anywhere else in town, it's news to me.
2. The standard rate seems to be $2/minute, though I was surprised that the one time I indulged in one at the Rio I was charged $2.50/minute. At the MGM, you can't pay in chips--cash only. That's the only place I've seen that policy. I assume it was implemented because some players objected to anything more than trivial amounts of money being taken out of play.
3. Beware of a player contesting the pot while he's getting a massage. Most would rather sit back and enjoy the experience and sort of tune out of the game for a while, and will tend to play only premium hands, and get out of it if they don't improve. I have never yet seen a player caught bluffing while receiving a massage. It seems that there's some sort of fundamental incompatibility between trying to pull off a bluff while relaxing at the hands of a masseuse.
4. I think I've had a total of six table massages--all of them 10 minutes each--in nearly two years of playing here, so I can hardly claim a wealth of experience. But it seems to me that I don't play as well after it's over. I think I get feeling so relaxed that I lose both focus on and interest in the game. I kind of go through the motions, but tend to stay pretty much stagnant in chip count thereafter. So while I'd like to think that the massage is a nice way to break up a long session and get reinvigorated to keep playing, so far my experience is that it effectively ends any serious money-making. As they say, your mileage may vary. I'm sure there are others who get the opposite reaction, feel charged up by it, and can get back into the game even more aggressively than before. That's what I thought might happen the first few times I tried it, but it never works.
5. It's a sample of only one, but the young woman at the Rio was the roughest massage therapist I've ever encountered, in or out of a poker room. My shoulders hurt for two days after she was finished with me. Not a pleasant experience. It was also the only place at which the masseuses do not have cushions for their clients to use, which meant that I had to rest my chin on either my hands or the hard back of the chair--mighty uncomfortable.
6. Sometimes it feels so good that I want to propose marriage on the spot. Luckily, I have so far restrained myself. (Because, obviously, none of the young women would be able to resist such a tempting offer, and then I would be stuck.)
7. I usually only go for a massage when my infraspinatus is hurting me (see this post). I use this not only to help direct the therapist's attention to where it is needed, but as sort of a test for whether they are really licensed massage therapists, as all claim to be. If they don't know where the infraspinatus is without me telling them, they probably didn't go to school. So far, all have passed with flying colors.
8. You know that there has to be something to gripe about on this subject, right? Well, here it is. Several times, in the larger rooms, when more than one massage therapist is present, I have overheard men planning to get a massage, and discussing with their pals which one to choose. Invariably, the selection is made not in a rational manner (e.g., by having watched their styles as they work on other players, and picking what looks like it more or less matches what you know you like), but by physical attractiveness. It seems uber-important to these guys to be sure to get their massage from the "hottest" woman on duty.
This is so messed up it's hard to know where to start. How does the therapist's attractiveness tell you anything about her skill or technique, or even her personality, for that matter? Why do her looks matter, when she's going to be standing behind you, out of sight? Do you harbor some fantasy that she's going to want to date you as soon as she has touched your back? Do you think your friends watching will think less of you if you get a table massage from a rather plain therapist? Hear this, you meatheads: HER LOOKS CAN'T POSSIBLY MATTER!
One time at Caesars Palace there were two therapists available, one of whom was substantially more conventionally attractive than the other, and after watching for a couple of hours, the more attractive one was frequently busy, but the other did not get a single client, as far as I noticed. I had been watching to try to see which one looked more my "style" (I like gentle--I'm just a big ol' softie, you know), but I couldn't get any information on the second young woman, because she never got hired.* It was a horrendous imbalance, and the reasons for it must have been painfully obvious to both women. So when I had seen enough, I waited until the underemployed one wandered by, and asked her to work on me. It was a complete crap-shoot, as far as I was concerned, which one would be more to my liking, and I found it an easy call to let the decision be made by doing my small part to even the score between the two of them. I'm willing to say that the players who made their choice that night based on comparing these young women's looks were loathsome, shallow, warped pigs. I'm no hero for making the opposite choice, but I think that a touch of human sympathy is a far better motivation for a choice than the misguided ego-stroking that appeared to have behind the selection made by everybody else that night.
I think that a male trying to make his living doing poker table massages would go broke fast. But how does that make any sense? I'm ashamed of the degree and prevalence of sexism and chauvinism in the poker-playing population. Most of them seem to be about as shallow and homophobic as George Costanza (below, in two parts)--and how unflattering an assessment is that?
Oh, and by the way, that massage was the physically nicest, most perfect of the six I've had. I'd pick her again in a heartbeat.
*Yes, I know that I can tell them what I want. But as with picking a barber, it's just a lot nicer and easier to luck into one that automatically "gets it" than one that you have to direct in minute detail.
Addendum, May 18, 2008
I was at Mandalay Bay's poker room last night, and saw two massage therapists working the room. I had never noticed them there previously. However, it's not one of the places at which I spend the most time, so they could have been there for a while without me knowing it. Or it could that they're only there on weekends, so I just haven't been there at the right times to see them. Anyway, you can add Mandalay Bay to the list of places where table massages are available.
Addendum, October 31, 2008
Since writing the above, I've also seen massage therapists in the poker rooms at Red Rock and Excalibur.
Addendum, February 3, 2009
I can now also add Aliante Station and Boulder Station (yes, Boulder Station!) to the list of poker rooms in which massages are at least sometimes offered.
Addendum, February 7, 2009
Last night saw one wandering around the poker room at Imperial Palace offering massages, so the list grows again.
Addendum, February 14, 2009
Yet another addition: I saw massages being offered at the Harrah's poker room last night.
In the post I wrote a few minutes ago (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/04/nice-call-with-6-high.html), I told of winning a big pot with a 6-4 at the Luxor, and the story reminded me of another in which I similarly made a big hit with a suited 6-4 at the Venetian. That got me thinking about another story that I haven't previously told here, from the Golden Nugget. I remembered that it, too, was a 6-high, and thought maybe it was yet another 6-4--but upon checking, I see that it was actually a 6-2. Shucks. So much for the trifecta. Anyway, I think it's an amusing story, though it's one for which I can't claim to have any larger point to make--it just is what it is. This is one of many stories I have in my email archives, things I wrote to a friend back home in Minnesota before I started this blog. This was written August 20, 2006:
Last week at the Golden Nugget, there was a woman who had an abnormal love for flushes. Maybe even an obsession with them. How did I know? Because if she hit a flush, bet, and an opponent folded, she’d show it, and if she missed and had to fold to another player’s bet on the river, she’d show her hand and say, "I missed my flush." People are so dumb—they have no idea how valuable information like that is, and they’re just giving it away proudly. She would call nearly any bet when she was on a flush draw, without respect to pot odds.
So there’s a hand in which I’m in late position with 2-6 diamonds. Now, normally this is a throwaway. But you have to play garbage hands once in a while, for several reasons that I think you know: You may get a situation in which a bluff will work, in which case it doesn’t matter what your cards are; when a junk hand hits a monster, they’re extremely difficult for opponents to suspect and can make lots of money; when you win with one, opponents can go seriously on tilt; showing that you played one can get you extra calls later when you have AA, because people mentally label you as a junk-hand player, etc.
On this occasion, I hadn’t seen any good cards for a while, and nobody had raised, so I limped in with my 2-6. This woman was in the big blind and checked it. Flop was 2-6-K, giving me 2 pair and almost surely the best hand—and a complete stealth hand that nobody would expect. Sweet. Two of the flop cards were hearts. This woman bet, and I suspected she was on one of her flush draws. I called.
Turn card is another 2, giving me a full house! Oh, I’m starting to feel something big happening here! She doesn’t have her flush yet, though, so she checks. I make a smallish bet just to sweeten the pot, knowing she’ll call. She does. I'm praying for another heart on the river.
The wonderful dealer provides the beautiful, glorious, perfect third heart. My ditzy opponent has made her flush. She bets. I try to look a little uncomfortable, stare at my chips, picking up little stacks of them, as if I’m not sure what to do. Finally I put in a little raise. She pushes all her chips in, looking like she has sprung her trap. Little does she know….
I call, of course. She is beaming, radiant as she turns over her A-8 nut flush. I really wanted to pretend that I was a complete novice, and say something like, “Let’s see, I just have these two 6s and three deuces. Is that any good?” But I didn't torture her that way. I just quietly said “full house” and turn over my pathetic little 2-6.
Her jaw dropped, and she stared back and forth between my hole cards and the board several times before she fully accepted that she was beat. She was at the other end of the table, but I could still overhear snippets of conversation between her and the players next to her for a LONG time afterwards, about how stupid it was to be playing crap like 2-6. In another hand later when I raised, she even said “He must have 2-6 again.” TILT TILT TILT TILT TILT!
Tee hee hee. Here’s a chip for the bus ride home, lady. Have a nice day. Thanks for the money.
There are at least four ways that I measure the success of a poker day: (1) How much money did I win or lose? (2) How well did I play? (3) Did I have a good time? (4) Did I get any good stories to write about? Last night's back-to-back sessions at the Luxor and Excalibur were exceptionally good by that last metric, this being the fourth post I've gotten out of them. I think my record is five stories from one session (check the archives for July 28, 2007, my first-ever time at the Palms).
Luxor. An early-position player puts in a substantial raise. It smells to high heaven of jacks or queens. This is a player I've identified as tight-aggressive, but inexperienced--the kind who will have a hard time getting away from a big pocket pair even when he's beat. This makes him the perfect target for a sneaky play. As luck would have it, I'm on the button, and position is huge when attempting to take down a premium hand.
Limit hold'em is a game where you try to have small edges many, many times, and chip away gradually at opponents' stacks. No-limit hold'em, by contrast, is a game in which the object is to swipe away another player's entire stack in one fell swoop. I live or die by looking for and creating such situations.
I held the 4-6 of spades. This is a pretty good hand for taking on a big pocket pair. If it hits in the way I need it to, with two pair or a straight or flush or a big draw, it will often do so with a flop that looks very safe to a player--especially a less-experienced one--sitting on a big pair. So I call. It's just the two of us in the hand.
The flop is a red 6 and the 2-3 of spades. I have flopped top pair with a straight-flush draw, on the button, with a board that will look completely non-threatening to a player with a big pair sitting under his card protector. I can't reasonably ask for it to get any better than this. If he has just two big cards, such as A-K or A-Q, I'm already ahead. Even if he has a big pair, I win with any spade for a flush, a 4 for two pairs, a 5 for a straight, or a 6 for trips, giving me 16 outs twice. That makes me a statistical favorite to win.
He bets. I put in a smallish raise, hoping he'll think that I'm just trying to weakly counter a continuation bet or that I have just a flush draw, in either of which cases he would be correct to come back over the top with a reraise. He does just what I hope, and moves all-in. I beat him into the pot with my chips. By the time I get my cards exposed, the dealer has already put out a red 5 on the turn, clinching my win with a straight. My opponent mucked without showing, so I'm left with my original guess of a big pocket pair. I'd be very surprised if it were anything else, given how he played.
I wouldn't bother telling this story if not for what happened next. After all, though it turned out nicely for me, and exactly the way I had set it up, it's just another hand out of millions of poker hands, and not particularly remarkable or memorable in and of itself.
My opponent had a look of mixed disgust and puzzlement on his face. He asked me directly, "What were you doing?" I thought maybe the hand had played out so fast (the dealer was very quick to whip out the turn and river, determine the winner, and push the pot) that he hadn't had a chance to grasp my situation. I don't usually explain myself, but it seemed to be an honest and non-hostile inquiry, so I pointed out, "I had top pair and both straight and flush draws on the flop." He responded, "Yeah, I see that--but I meant before the flop." Here his voice took on an unmistakable nasty/sarcastic edge: "Nice call with the 6-high."
Maybe it was an idiotic move; I'm certainly capable of patting myself on the back for things that much better players would say were stupid moves, with convincing explanations of why I was wrong to do them. But as I said after the last 4-6 story, if my opponent really is a more advanced player and I made an objectively bad play, then he should relish having me there, and welcome every knuckleheaded move I make, because in the long run he will profit thereby. Conversely, though, if it was a reasonable and clever play, then he just looks petty and shallow for not being able to recognize it as such. Either way, the nasty comment works against the one spouting it.
I suppose he got a "good" bad-beat story out of the deal: "You wouldn't believe the moron I ran into at the Luxor last night. Everybody should have been able to tell that I had a big pocket pair, and he called me with a six-high, then hit his gutshot straight draw after all the money was in! What a donkey!"
I not only walked away with the chips, but with what I think is a better story.
Another story from the Excalibur last night. There's a guy two seats to my left. I played a hand perfectly (if I do say so myself), deceiving him into thinking that I was on a steal when I had actually flopped a set of 7s and made a full house on the river when the board paired. He called my all-in with A-8, for top pair and a bad kicker. I stacked him. Just before he did the "walk of shame" to the ATM for more cash (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/taking-walk-of-shame.html), he said, "You really need to work on controlling your hands shaking when you bet. I didn't know if it meant you had a monster or were bluffing, so I had to call to find out. Now I know."
This was clearly meant in a friendly, helpful manner, so I didn't tell him how completely full of crap he was.
First, anybody who knows anything about poker tells realizes that shaking hands is not ambiguous; it's one of the most reliable signs of a player being strong. You might think that you'd get the same phenomenon from nervousness when somebody is making a big, expensive bluff, but it just doesn't happen that way. In Mike Caro's classic Caro's Book of Poker Tells, he rates this as 99% reliable in weak players, 95% reliable in average players, and 92% reliable in strong players, which is as high as he rates anything. He even gives "Caro's Law of Tells #4," which is "A trembling bet is a force to be feared." In the more recent Ultimate Guide to Poker Tells by Randy Burgess and Carl Baldassarre, pp. 58-59, they agree: "[I]t's a huge tell in all forms of poker.... Players who've never seen this tell may have a hard time believing it, but yes, it's that powerful an indicator. Moreover, it can't be faked with any degree of realism." Joe Navarro, in Read 'Em and Reap, says, "When you see someone reaching for his chips and his shaking hand knocks them over, or he looks at his cards and his hands begin to tremble, it's usually a strong sign that something good has occurred." Navarro adds a caveat that it occasionally means the opposite, but I believe he's wrong about that, or at least it's a rare enough phenomenon that I've never seen it. My experience exactly matches Caro's: when it is present, it's perhaps the single most consistently reliable guide you'll get that a player loves his hand. I have saved a lot of money by folding when I have noticed this in an opponent, who then proudly shows off his quads or full house.
Second, I know with certainty that there is and was no difference in my hands during that pot from any other. You see, this is something I've spent an enormous amount of time and energy on. I have a familial condition that causes a constant hand tremor. It's not horrible, but it's there; you wouldn't notice it under ordinary conditions, but if I held my hands out, trying to hold them still, you'd see what I mean. It hardly ever matters to my life. But part of the condition is that it is greatly amplified by even small amounts of adrenaline. This has been a problem in the past with public speaking (which I actually enjoy, but the adrenaline rush makes my hands shake like crazy, and it looks like I'm terrified), playing the piano in public (which I used to do for church quite often), and my other main recreation, which is competitive handgun shooting (need I explain how shaking hands is a problem there?). Long ago, I started taking a medication called propranolol when I anticipate one of these situations. It blocks the effects of adrenaline on the nerves, so that I'm just left with my baseline, everyday tremor. I use the same little pill before I go out to play poker. (I was fortunate enough to have a doctor who immediately "got" the problem. I started to explain it, but he cut me off and said, "Other players see your hands shake, and you can't get any action when you've got the nuts." Bingo! Got my prescription. Today's lesson: Find yourself a doctor who plays poker!) I have watched myself carefully to be sure, and I know that my hands look exactly the same whether my card situation is strong or weak. This guy was just seeing my baseline tremor, and interpreting it the way he wanted to. It doesn't look anything like the high-amplitude shakes that accompany the adrenaline rush of a huge made hand.
Third, this isn't something that one can voluntarily control. Adrenaline is going to do what it's going to do. People overcome it not by force of will, but by being exposed to the situation of having a monster hand enough times that eventually they stop having such large adrenaline dumps when it happens.
So, OK, the guy needed to soothe his big loss by telling himself that he had spotted something significant and just couldn't pin down its meaning. No big deal. If listening to an unwelcome (and wrong) piece of advice is the price for taking a guy's entire stack, I can tolerate that.
When he returned, he decided to take the open seat on my immediate left, from where he decided that we were best friends and should chat about everything. I hate that. I eventually had to put on the music and headphones to help clue him in that I didn't feel like his oldest buddy. He kept trying to show me his cards while he played hands, etc. So annoying.
But the strangest part of the evening was that three more times he watched me play a big pot. I had the best of it in all three, and won two of them (losing the biggest one to a river suckout, unfortunately--ouch!). After each one, he said something like, "You controlled your hands much better that time," or "You did that one very smooth--good job." He had appointed himself as my own personal "tells" coach, giving me feedback on whether I was effectively controlling my hand shake. My hands were exactly the same every time--the only difference was his interpretation of it.
Before our first confrontation, I had overheard him chatting with another player, making himself out to be a big-time gambler, belittling other people who "don't really understand gambling" like he does. That sort of talk made it obvious that his ego is heavily invested in being a suave, smooth, sophisticated player of all of the games. His conduct towards me was a reflection and continuation of that; it was important to his self-image to be the expert, offering advice to a person he perceived as an inexperienced amateur. It was simultaneously annoying, funny, and pathetic.
One of the most cathartic things about having this blog is that I get to say things to people that I would never say to their faces, partly because of being removed from them when I write, and partly because there's only about a one in a million chance that the people involved will ever read it. So here goes again: Buddy, you haven't a clue what you're talking about. Your advice was flatly wrong, ludicrously misdirected, irritating, unwelcome, condescending, and indicative of a deep personality disorder in yourself that I think you haven't the faintest clue about.
I was playing at the Luxor tonight before I moved over to the adjacent Excalibur. While there, I saw one of the strangest poker situations of my career. It's one of those things that makes me realize there will never, ever be a poker rule book that covers every situation, because nobody could possibly anticipate the exact mix of circumstances that gave the floorman tonight a very difficult judgment call to make.
The two players involved we will call Mr. Straight and Mr. Flush, because one of them flopped a straight and the other flopped a flush. It must be noted that Mr. Flush was very, very drunk.
Mr. Flush had been sitting on my immediate right for a couple of hours. (I was in 9, he had been in 8.) Seat 5 became available, and he decided to move there, for unclear reasons. He picked up one stack and moved it, came back and picked up another stack and moved it.
Just then, the big winner of the day in seat 6 decided that he was done, too (up about $1300). So Mr. Flush changed his mind about where he wanted to sit, and decided to take the "lucky" seat. A new dealer was simultaneously just sitting down, saw Mr. Flush moving to seat 6, and helped him push his remaining chips there. The new dealer, unfortunately, didn't know that the two stacks of chips at seat 5 also belonged to Mr. Flush, because this new dealer hadn't been there when those got moved. Mr. Flush is way too drunk to realize or remember that he now has chips in front of two seats. He takes his hand sitting in 6. He has about $300 there, plus the roughly $200 in seat 5. There is no list of people waiting for a seat, so nobody is coming to claim seat 5, which would have uncovered the problem before disaster struck.
So we have a flop, and Mr. Straight bets, Mr. Flush raises big, Mr. Straight--who is in seat 3, with about $500--says, "I'm all in." Mr. Flush calls. The hand plays out, and Mr. Flush is the winner.
The dealer matches Mr. Straight's chips with the $300 or so in front of Mr. Flush. Mr. Flush still hasn't remembered that he has another $200 in front of seat 5. Mr. Straight hadn't been aware that those chips belonged to Mr. Flush; he hadn't been paying attention to Mr. Flush's seat change maneuvers, and assumed that there was a new player coming in to whom they belonged.
Another player points out to the dealer that the seat 5 chips are also part of Mr. Flush's stack. (I hadn't said anything because I thought they were his, but I hadn't paid enough attention to all the goings-on to be sure.) Mr. Flush himself is a little foggy on it at first, but finally remembers that, yes, he did put those there before deciding to take seat 6 instead.
Well, now Mr. Straight doesn't want to cover the additional $200 or so for the chips in front of seat 5. The floor is called.
Mr. Straight's argument is that when he moved all in, he assumed he was only actually putting at risk the amount that he saw in front of Mr. Flush, which was about $300. He says he might not have been willing to risk his entire $500 if he had known that Mr. Flush had about the same total amount. It's not his job to know that a player has distributed his chips between two different seats.
The argument for Mr. Flush (which he was entirely too drunk to think of or articulate on his own; this is the point of view taken by a couple of other players who thought he deserved to have all of his chips counted, and spoke up for him) was this: Suppose that Mr. Straight had won the hand, then discovered that Mr. Flush was actually sitting on $500 instead of just $300. Mr. Flush would surely then argue, "I said all-in, he said call, so he's responsible for the entire amount, even if some of his chips are in front of another seat." If Mr. Straight would claim the whole amount had he won, then it's only fair for him to be responsible for the entire amount when he lost. Besides, Mr. Flush had been hugely overaggressive for hours, bluffing at nearly every pot, so nobody really thought that Mr. Straight would have played it any differently even if he had known the correct amount that he was putting at risk; he was highly confident (but wrong) that he had the best hand when he pushed all-in.
The floor guy did not have an easy decision. I kept my mouth shut, although when it was over and the player on my left asked my opinion, I said that I tended to side with Mr. Straight. Yes, he was probably being less than candid in saying that he might have played differently had he known that their stacks were about equal, and yes, he might well try to claim the entire amount if he had won it--but the larger responsibility, in my view, lies with Mr. Flush, to keep his chips in clear view, and in a manner that isn't deceptive (even if unintentionally) to opponents. It was, in effect, the same as if he had two black $100 chips hidden behind his three stacks of red chips, not visible to an opponent.
The floor guy apparently couldn't make up his mind as to which way to go, so he ended up splitting the difference. He eyeballed about half of the disputed amount, and made Mr. Straight match that. In other words, Mr. Straight ended up losing about $400, rather than the $300 that he thought he should lose or the $500 that Mr. Flush thought he should have to give up. Mr. Flush was content with that resolution, but Mr. Straight was not. He was hopping mad.
I got the rest of Mr. Straight's stack on the next hand, when I recognized that his all-in on the flop--an enormous overbet--was classic steaming, and I called him with bottom pair. I was right--the flop had missed him completely. I was pretty proud of that call, because it was all about understanding Mr. Straight's frame of mind at the moment, rather than what the cards were. Calling that big a bet with bottom pair does not come easily or naturally to me. That's when he reached his boiling point, left the table, and got into the really heated argument with Mr. Flush, who had decided to take a cigarette break maybe 20 feet away. It very nearly came to blows, and they had to call security to separate the two of them.
As I said at the start, this was one of the most peculiar confluences of circumstances I've ever seen. I don't envy the job of the floor, to settle such matters, when there isn't a clear right or wrong.
I noticed this sign during a session at the Excalibur tonight. The capilization of "The Poker Room" is odd, but that's not what really caught my attention.
But I'm puzzled by the claim that the non-smoking status is somehow for my "convenience." I don't see how a poker room is made any more or less convenient by being smoking or non-smoking, except that it's obviously inconvenient to smokers to have to leave for a cigarette break.
1. The quality of being suitable to one's comfort, purposes, or needs: the convenience of living near shops, schools, and libraries. 2. Personal comfort or advantage: services that promote the customer's convenience. 3. Something that increases comfort or saves work: household conveniences such as a washing machine, an electric can opener, and disposable diapers. 4. A suitable or agreeable time: Fill out the form at your earliest convenience. 5. Chiefly British A lavatory.
I suppose you could argue that being non-smoking makes the room more suitable to one's purposes or needs, though that's not obvious--and I'm confident that's not what first occurs to most readers when encountering the word "convenience." If it is taken as a rough synonym of "comfort," then the sign's wording is redundant.
I wonder who decided on the language for that sign, and why. But I kind of doubt I'll ever get an authoritative answer.
At least being confusing and/or redundant is better than being an outright lie, which is what I usually find with signs that businesses put up telling me that something is for my own "convenience." Usually it means that they are undergoing some sort of construction, and the mess makes my time in the establishment significantly less pleasant and/or efficient than usual, which just makes me resent the signs telling me that they are doing the work for my "convenience." Even if one assumes that they are referring to future convenience rather than current convenience, it's still a lie: the only reason that businesses take on such projects is so that they can make more money. What they perceive as my future convenience is merely what they hope is a means to that end. I hate companies that lie to me, especially in such obvious ways. I'd have much more respect for them if their signs said, "We are remodeling in the hope that you will spend more money here when we're finished." Honest and direct--that I could admire.
It's a little hard to say this, because I'm not used to it yet, but I suppose that I'm a professional poker player. I moved to Vegas intending to get a job as a poker dealer, but while waiting to get hired, I spent the days playing poker instead of dealing it, and soon found that I was able to keep the bills paid. So I've just kept on doing it. I play Hold'em exclusively, usually no-limit, and most commonly $1-2 or $1-3, with occasional forays into $2-5 territory. I play tournaments on-line once in a while, but for some reason that I haven't entirely figured out, I'm much more successful playing at casinos than on the Internet, and much better at cash games than tournaments.
You can contact me via email: it's rakewell1 at yahoo dotdotdot com.
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