Poker gems, #439

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.


The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to.

Guess the casino, #1004

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Answer: South Point

Guess the casino, #1003

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Answer: Mirage

Over and out

I'll be gone for a few days, off to Salt Lake City to visit the parental units.

To tide you over until I get back, here's the latest adventure in the life of the Mighty Deuce-Four:

Guess the casino, #1002

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Answer: Harrah's

Hodgepodge

First up, in the "What's in a screen name" category, we have this excellent example:

Second, it keeps on raining quads for me at Bodog. These two happened in the same game today:

Finally, no post would be complete without at least one example of the Mighty Deuce-Four at work. Here the flop was checked around. I bet the turn, on the strength of my sure-to-get-there draws, got one caller. He called again on the river. He had A-J with no spade. He thought that was enough to take down the Deuce-Four. I pity the fool!

Guess the casino, #1001

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Answer: Excalibur

I am pure awesome sauce

If you should doubt that, just ask Josie.

Screw-ups at Full Tilt

Excellent read about what may have happened, by Bill Rini:

http://www.billrini.com/2011/10/04/screwed-full-tilt-poker/

The part that doesn't ring true to me, however, is the bit about the big investors accepting ongoing payments, when they knew they really shouldn't, because they had to keep up appearances. I just don't buy the premise that Howard Lederer was depositing checks for millions of dollars at a time, while muttering under his breath, "Damn, I really hate that I have to take this money, but it's for the good of the company, so I'll do it."

Guess the casino, #1000

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Answer: Binion's

Poker gems, #438

Tom Schneider, today on Pokerati.

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

Barry Greenstein as judge of character

The news today is that Barry Greenstein and Doyle Brunson say they believe their friends over at Full Tilt Poker may have been incompetent businessmen, but they couldn't possibly have had any malicious, criminal intention.

See http://www.pokerlistings.com/brunson-greenstein-talk-full-tilt-poker-scandal-55027.

I want to focus just on Greenstein here. He is quoted saying, “There’s no doubt in my mind that their thought wasn’t ‘We’re going to steal from customers’ but when Black Friday hit it came at the absolute worst time for them.” Further, “Most of these guys on Team Full Tilt are friends of mine and most of them definitely didn’t know what was going on." And, finally, “I don’t think anyone believes that the initial intent was to defraud the customers, it just worked out that way in their method of fixing the problem."

Well, that's fine and noble of him. But how is Greestein's track record as a judge of character?

Here he is in 2008, speaking of Russ Hamilton, after going to his house to interview him specifically to determine whether Hamilton was guilty in the UltimateBlecch scandal: “This is being investigated and there’s no doubt in my mind that it will end up that Hamilton knew who the cheaters were, but I don’t get the feeling that we’ll be saying that Russ Hamilton is one of the cheaters.” “I didn’t get the feeling that he was that knowledgeable about what was going on as we hoped he would be.” “Russ seemed like he knew a couple of the guilty parties, but in the end, I don’t think it was him.”

We all know how that story turned out.

So it seems to me we have to conclude one of two things:

(A) Greenstein is an astute reader of human minds, he correctly assessed Hamilton's soul, and the poor guy is wrongly accused, as pure as the driven snow, despite all the evidence (only some of which was known at the time of Greenstein's interview), and despite the formal conclusions of the investigating gaming commission.

or

(B) Greenstein is a nice guy and tends to assume that other people are also nice guys, and he has a blind spot to the evil that men do. Furthermore, he has a habit of trusting his own gut feeling about people in preference to objective evidence. As a result, his comments about Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson and Rafe Furst should be viewed as the product of friendship and wishful thinking, rather than a reliable, objective assessment of the whole situation.

I know which way I'm voting.

Guess the casino, #999

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Answer: Tropicana

Guess the casino, #998

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Answer: MGM Grand

Poker gems, #437

Sam Trickett, in Party Poker Big Game 5, episode 2.

There's too many levels in this stupid game.

Bellande 2

Finally found video of the Bellande gambit I mentioned last night. Here ya go:

Deuce-Four at the WSOP

Pathetic little pocket queens try to take on the Mighty Deuce-Four. What do you think happens? LDO!

Personality test

Downtown Vegas is hopping this weekend, primarily because of Bikefest being in town.

The following were among the many unexpected sights seen on my walk to and from Binion's last night. The personality test comes down to this: Which do you prefer to look at?

A) Cute puppy.

(Apologies for the pictures all being so crappy. It was dark, my cell phone camera is not very good under the best of circumstances, and this little guy just WOULD NOT STAY STILL FOR A PORTRAIT!)

(Sorry, Jen, but he might have been ever cuter than Vinny, though that's a hard standard to beat.)

B) This woman (and/or the naked cowboy off to the side).

C) Cupid.

D) A Delorean, complete with Doc Brown impersonator (but, sadly, no flux capacitor).

E) Her. Or, um, him. Or whatever.

Me? I'll go for the puppy first, Delorean second. For the others, well, I think I'd prefer to scoop out my eyeballs with a rusty grapefruit spoon.

Trying Poker Tracker

I downloaded Poker Tracker 3 for its 60-day free trial. I've been waiting for version 4 to hit, but it seems to keep turning into vaporware. "Soon!" we are told endlessly. Well, maybe it will be out by the time 60 days are up. We'll see.

For now, though, I'll play with version 3 and see what it does for me. My initial impression is annoyance, because it puts the stats for a player with the name/avatar of the adjacent player until you manually move every one of the displays around--and you have to do this anew with every table. That's just bad design.

It also seems to have a weird glitch that it recognizes screen names across tables and combines stats for other players, but not for me. In the above screen shot, for example, you can see that "Ape567" has twice as many hands tracked as I do. We were at two tables simultaneously. The software correctly merged the information from both tables for him, but not for me, for reasons that are not at all obvious.

However, I do like being able to see mucked, unshown hands without having to open Bodog's hand history page.

I'm keeping an open mind on whether the advantages are worth the cost and fuss of it.

Guess the casino, #997

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Answer: Hard Rock