Ante Up magazine cover

I have now seen the April issue of Ante Up magazine, and it included a brief note from the publishers about the anomaly on the March issue cover, which I mentioned here:

On a quick side note, we'd like to thank the pranksters at Beau Rivage for putting two 9s in front of John Dolan in the Million Dollar Heater victory pose we ran on our March cover.

We were seeking a quick way to find out how many people actually look at our cover, and judging by our full inboxes and bloated voicemail from readers wondering how Mr. Dolan won an event with two of the same card, we happily have our answer.

My amazing week

To say that I am not normally a social creature would be the understatement of the year. But this week saw a confluence of events and out-of-town visitors that brought out my inner mingler. Most notably, my pals Grange95, WriterJen, and PokerLawyer all came to Vegas to celebrate my birthday a few days early. (Well, they all had other flimsy cover stories, but I know the real reason. It's all about me, obviously.) We were joined, at various times, by a bunch of others, including some I always enjoy hanging out with--LasVegasPokers, PinkLadiesPT, PokerVixen, CKBWOP, CureMTM--the last of whom tied us into a new circle of friends, as seen in the first picture below.

The festivities included, in various subgroupings of the above people:

• Penn and Teller at the Rio (my fourth time seeing their show, which is always fantastic)
• Driving and hiking around Red Rock Canyon
• Long but cheap rubdowns from massage therapy students at this place
• Dinners at Lindo Michoacan, Simpatico (former mayor Oscar Goodman's brand-new restaurant inside the Plaza Hotel--maybe the best Italian food I've had in Vegas), and Delmonico Steakhouse
• Profitable poker sessions at Binion's and Venetian

I had expected this to be a rather expensive week of socializing, but for nearly all of the things that cost much, one person or another was generously stepping up and insisting on paying either with casino comps or their own money. I have such nice friends!

Here's the gang at Delmonico. That's right--it's me and eight lovely ladies (seven here, but one hadn't yet arrived), cuz that's just how I roll. (They do not all have devil eyes as it might appear.)

Here's another gang at Simpatico:

One small bit of the scenery at Red Rock:

A nice pair of Ferrari f430s (the convertible version of the car I drove last month) parked at Red Rock:

All in all, it was one of the best weeks I've ever had since living in Vegas, and almost certainly the best one that didn't include Cardgrrl. In fact, one downside to spending so much time with other people is that, paradoxically, it reminds me more acutely of how much I miss her.

Almost all of the visitors have now flown back home, so it's back to the grind for me--which this weekend must sadly include a big chunk of time doing my federal income taxes. Ick.

I can do basic probability calculations

In my RSS feed reading today was a pointer to a site that administers a brief quiz of your ability to quantify probabilities:

http://www.riskliteracy.org/dnn/

I took it and got this gratifying summary of my results:

Congratulations on completing your statistical and risk literacy test!

Your numeracy score is better than about 75-100% of all college educated individuals. Roughly, this means that out of every 100 people who take the test, you will do better than about 90% (90 people) of all other people. This is the highest score one can receive on this test.

Technically, relative to the general population, you are among the most statistically literate in the world.
Based on your score, you are not very likely to experience the extreme difficulty most people have when faced with common types of statistical thinking. However, you should still take care and may want to double check your calculations or seek additional advice when it comes to important decisions involving risk and statistics (e.g., some medical decisions, financial investment, taking consumer debt).

In our uncertain and complex world you are likely to find that your higher levels of risk and statistical literacy are very beneficial and important.

Indeed, your levels of numeracy reflect a skill level that very few people ever achieve… one that is the result of considerable practice.

As the saying goes: " Practice makes perfect."

Anomalies

Two odd poker-related visuals have caught my eye this week.

First, I got an email from Bovada (formerly Bodog), saying how much they've missed me since I haven't played there in a few months. It includes a nice tournament ticket, which I will definitely use, so I kept this in my email in-box to remind myself to check the schedule for when I can use the ticket. But the longer it sat there, the more I thought something didn't look right. I finally looked closely and realized the problem:

It's the geography. Paris is indeed just across the street from the Bellagio, but that establishes that we're looking south on Las Vegas Boulevard from Flamingo Road. But then we see Caesars Palace further south, and facing us. This is wrong, because CP would be behind us, and facing east, the same orientation as Bellagio.

Then there's this weird cover photo from the March issue of Ante up magazine. Pay particular attention to the cards:

This is what has become pretty much the industry standard tournament winner's photo, with all the chips, the winner's trophy, and the hole cards the winner had on the last hand. (The only thing missing is the traditional cash.)

But did he really win the final hand of the tournament holding a nine of spades and ANOTHER NINE OF SPADES? Let's all say it together: "Fouled deck. Take your bets back."

Weirdness abounds.

Poetry and photography

Cardgrrl's latest project is a collaboration with a poet friend. I hope you'll take a look at it here:

http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/361914/

M*A*S*H

It looks like my friend Martin Harris has found a new home at Poker Listings for his occasional excellent series on poker's intersections with pop culture. (It has previously appeared at Poker News and Epic Poker.) Today's installment reviews the episodes of M*A*S*H in which poker games show up:

http://www.pokerlistings.com/blog/pop-poker-the-history-of-poker-on-mash

He mentions the episode I most remember whenever the subject of bluffing comes up--Charles Emerson Winchester's bad habit of whistling when he bluffs. (See Martin's summary of the episode, "The Merchant of Korea.") I think of it, however, because of a lack of plausibility.

Even long before I played poker, the discovery of Winchester's tell struck a false note with me because of how it occurs. Mind you, I haven't seen the episodes in literally decades, so it's possible that my memory is faulty. But my recollection is that it is only after a poker session (or perhaps during a break in the game, away from the table) that BJ and Hawkeye are complaining to each other about how Charles is always winning. Then one of them chimes in with another gripe: "And it's so annoying how he whistles when he's bluffing." There's a beat, then a light bulb goes on over their heads. They smile and in unison say, "He whistles when he's bluffing!" They celebrate because they have finally discovered the chink in his armor that will allow them to start winning.

In other words, at least one of them had, while playing, noticed the association between his conduct and his bluffs, but it wasn't until later reflection that he (or they) realized that they could exploit this observation to beat him.

That's just not even remotely plausible. As I said, even decades before I ever played the game, I knew that that couldn't possibly be how such things would go. It rang as false as Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and not starting to fall until he realizes that there's nothing but air under him.

Ah well. It's not exactly a show that one watched for hyper-realism of details. But that particular plot point has bugged me for years and years and years whenever I've thought about it, and now I have finally had an excuse to express my annoyance about it.

Poker gems, #449

Mike Caro, in Poker Player newspaper, April 9, 2012 (vol. 15, #21), page 4.

Simply put, most opponents call more often than they should. And that, in itself, makes bluffing a challenge.

In fact, most bluffs are unprofitable. And all bluff attempts averaged together, throughout the history of the universe, have lost money.

Room updates

1. I played at the Riviera Saturday night for the first time in (brief pause while our hero checks his records) about 11 months. It's not exactly my favorite place. I had trouble finding it, because the room has moved since I was last there, and they apparently can't be bothered to put up any directional signs. If you want to find the poker room, you have to just wander around until you stumble upon it. To save you that trouble, I'll tell you that it's right inside the Strip entrance, that wall of glass doors. Since I was there last, they have also changed their main no-limit game from $1/$2 to $1/$3, a curious move for a small, downscale poker room. Finally, they have installed player's card readers at the table instead of having you log in and out at the desk.

2. I was in a tournament at MGM Grand Sunday, and incidentally learned that they now run a weekly HORSE tournament on Tuesday evenings. This is the one that used to be at the M Resort. This is good news, I think, because (1) M is just too far away to bother with, and (2) MGM will have a lot more touristy types who just happen to be there and decide to give HORSE a try, without knowing the games very well.

3. I read that the Palms is closing its poker room, only to reopen it a few days later. The idea, apparently, is that they're contracting out management of the room to Cantor, which already runs a bunch of casinos' sports books. Will this be the leading edge of a trend? I don't know. I also don't know if this change will coincide with the long-promised move of the poker room to a new location. Nobody tells me anything.

A hand of, um, titanic proportions

I played at the Luxor this afternoon. I made a nice profit when a rivered king completed my straight but also completed a set for a guy who had played his pocket kings with complete passivity until he was beaten, at which point he elected to raise. (Brilliant strategy!)

But soon thereafter I locked up the lion's share of the day's profit with more than a double-up. I had Jh-Js and raised to $13 after a few limpers. Two of them called. Flop 4s-Qs-Jd. First guy checked. Second one bet $25. I raised to $65. That was smaller than my usual raise would be, because my ideal scenario was getting the first guy--who was kind of stationy--to call enough that he'd be pot-committed, then have the second guy reraise with what I hoped was either top two pair or bottom set. First guy folded, but second guy did even better than a reraise--he shoved. I called, of course. I had $266 left, and he had me covered. He was holding 9s-10s, giving him both a flush draw and an open-ended straight draw.

He probably thought he had 15 outs, which, if true, would make him a slight favorite if I had top pair or an overpair. But it was not so in this situation. He was actually a 63%/37% dog. This was because (1) I had one of his spades; (2) any runner-runner spades would give me a higher flush than his, and (3) most importantly, because I had seven cards that would make me an unbeatable full house or quads on the turn, and, if I missed that, ten that would do the job on the river.

As it turned out, I didn't have to sweat the river, because a queen on the turn left him drawing dead. The dealer cruelly gave him the 7s on the river to complete his flush, too little too late.

He didn't do anything wrong. Had I been in his spot, I, too, would have welcomed the chance to get it all in there. From his point of view, it was surely more likely that I had just one pair (especially AA, KK, or AQ) than that I had been lucky enough to flop a set. He couldn't know that the situation was much worse than he hoped.

So why the strange title to this post?

After playing, I went up to the mezzanine level and went through "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition." I've been mildly interested in seeing this since it came to town maybe three years ago. But a couple of days ago I read the cover story in the new issue of National Geographic magazine, which was all about the most recent expedition to the shipwreck site to generate a detailed map of the debris field, which revived my interest in the whole subject. I also had heard that James Cameron will soon be releasing a 3-D version of "Titanic," which I haven't seen since its first run, and I thought that might be interesting.

This convergence of Titanic-related releases is no coincidence. Next month is the 100th anniversary of the disaster, and you can expect to hear no end of tie-ins. I suspect the Luxor show will get jam-packed around that time, so today was my attempt to beat the crowd by a few weeks.

It's mostly a really nice, well-done collection. It's not more exploitative than such a thing will intrinsically be. Even for a mostly non-sentimental guy like me, there is unquestionably a sense of both eeriness and astonishment to be looking up-close at objects that went down with the Titanic and sat on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for 80 or 90 years, before being retrieved with the amazing tools modern technology has given us.

There are a lot more dishes, cutlery, and cookware than one really needs to see, but other than that, the selection of artifacts is reasonably interesting. They have good descriptions of what the items were. Where an owner has been identified, the objects are personalized by providing a short biography of the person, focused on the circumstances by which he or she came to be on the ship. The plethora of bios and photographic portraits scattered throughout and the complete list of names on a memorial wall in the final room effectively remind the viewer that the 1517 who died are not just to be seen as an anonymous composite number, but that many unique human beings, who happened to share a tragic fate.

Seeing recreations of the three levels of sleeping quarters was also interesting, and made the vast differences between them more memorable than by reading descriptions or even seeing James Cameron's faithful reproductions in a movie. Similarly, being in a large atrium with a replica of the famous grand staircase and its overhead glass dome conveys a sense of the scale and opulence that photographs just cannot do.

The crown jewel of the collection is the "Big Piece." It's the largest piece of the hull recovered so far--26 by 12 feet, weighing some 15 tons. Walking past it from just a few feet away, and knowing that it's maybe 1/30th of the length of one side of the ship makes it easy to mentally fill in the rest, and be impressed by its size.

Also emotionally powerful, I thought, was the remnants of the actual wheel that quartermaster Robert Hichens turned hard to port after a scout shouted the famous alarm, "Iceberg, right ahead!" Much of the wood has been lost to decay, but the hub is intact in its housing, and a few pieces of the wooden spokes are still attached.

No photography was allowed, and the prominent surveillance cameras everywhere were, I suspect, actively being used to enforce this, so I didn't even try to sneak a picture. I was sorely tempted, though, when in one display case I found playing cards and poker chips recovered from the ocean floor. The placard next to them said that the captain had circulated a warning among the passengers that three suspected professional card sharks were on board (it gave their real names and aliases), and advising them not to join the poker games that were being offered in private rooms. I did not think to check the wall at the end to see if the poker players survived the disaster.

Though the visitor is left with a sense that the whole subject is treated by the exhibition with a fitting level of dignity and respect, that feeling is utterly demolished by exiting through the tacky gift shop. Among other things, you can buy actual artifacts from the Titanic: tiny pieces of coal meant for the boilers, scooped up off the ocean floor. $25 apiece.

I'm glad I went. It made the whole catastrophe feel more real and tangible and immediate than the Jack-and-Rose story does.

Protect your hand

See Rob's blog post for an excellent story illustrating the importance of this simple concept:

http://robvegaspoker.blogspot.com/2012/03/protect-your-hand.html

Matching or non-matching suits?

In the March 26, 2012, issue of Poker Player Newspaper, Mike Caro's column has some questions and answers about probability. As one example, he asks the reader to consider the situation in which pocket sixes are pitted against pocket aces. Do the sixes have a better chance of winning if they match the suits of the aces, or if they are of different suits?

Caro knows the reader will expect the answer to be "different suits," because then the each of the sixes has a small chance of making a flush to win, whereas if the suits match, then any flush made with a six is automatically beaten by the higher flush made by the ace of the same suit.

Caro says (page 21) that this intuition is wrong:

And, no, it isn't better to have different suits if you hold sixes. That seems like the logical assumption at first glance, but it's the other way around. If your suits are both different, that's slightly worse than if one suit is duplicated. And one duplicated suit isn't as good as two duplicated suits, from the perspective of [the person] with sixes.

Although it's true that different suits means the sixes will win some hands with flushes that would have been impossible if the suits were the same, there's a second factor. And the second factor overwhelms the first. When your sixes are of the same suit as the aces, the defensive power overwhelms the offensive power. You prevent the aces from making enough winning flushes that you can afford to sacrifice all potential winning flushes of your own.

So, 6c-6d does better against Ac-Ad than 6h-6s does.

I was surprised by this. It is the opposite of what I had always assumed to be the case.

In fact, I was so surprised by it that I decided to do a blog post about it in the form of a quiz, asking readers this: If you have to be stuck on the bad end of a roughly 80/20 chance of winning (which is basically what all overpair/underpair situations come down to), which sixes would you choose to maximize your win percentage?

I fired up PokerStove so that I would have the exact answers available. But when I ran it, I discovered something interesting: Caro is wrong, and the conventional wisdom is correct.

Specifically, when tested against Ac-Ad, I find:

Hand Win % Tie % Equity %

6c-6d 18.66 0.22 18.886

6h-6d 19.36 0.18 19.542

6s-6h 20.05 0.14 20.199

This was run under the "enumerate all" option. Running a Monte Carlo simulation produces very slightly different numbers, depending on how long you let it run, but the pattern is always the same as shown above: The sixes with suits matching the aces do worst, those with different suits do best, and those with one matching and one different are about halfway in between.

I don't suppose PokerStove is infallible, so I did the same comparisons using an online poker odds calculator, this one on the CardPlayer.com web site. It generated numbers identical to those shown above. I also tried it using the calculator at twodimes.net, and again got identical results. This gives me considerable confidence that the numbers above are indeed correct.

So now I'm stuck with the real headscratcher: Why is Caro insisting otherwise? I cannot figure that out. If he had just said in passing that the underpair with matching suits does a little better than those with different suits, I would assume that there had simply been an error inadvertently introduced in the writing/editing process. Lord knows I've made my share of slips such as that. But Caro spends a good portion of the column explaining why the matching suits is better for the smaller pair. It can't be just a glitch along the lines of saying "better" where he meant "worse," or "same suits" where he meant "different suits."

I sent Mr. Caro an email three days ago, quoting his article and the numbers I found when I ran the simulation myself, and asking him to explain why he says that the opposite is true. I have not heard back from him.

I am genuinely baffled by this mystery.

Return to razz

Tonight I played in my first online HORSE tournament in, well, ages. Probably six months, I guess. I was on Black Chip Poker.

I was cruising along just fine, and then something happened.

What happened?

Razz.

Specifically, I first got a shorter stack all in on 3rd street with my A64 against his 852, and lost:

Then I got another short stack to cap it on 3rd and get it all in on 4th, with my 523-6 against his 827-Q. And STILL lost:

I was a 60/40 favorite on 3rd, 84/16 favorite on 4th, and still a 65/35 favorite after pairing on 5th.

That one-two punch left me very short-stacked, and I was out in 19th place (of 59, with 9 paying) shortly thereafter.

The fog of memory is clearing, and I am quickly remembering why I stopped doing this stuff.

Changing the rules

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/the-man-who-broke-atlantic-city/8900/1/?single_page=true

Really interesting article about the guy who won millions playing blackjack against the Atlantic City casinos. He did it not by counting cards, but by bringing a huge bankroll, playing perfectly, and--most importantly--literally getting the casinos to change the rules of the game. I had read a bit about how casinos will change the payout structures for whales in Double or Nothing, the book about the brief ownership of the Golden Nugget, but this article goes into more detail.

Ferrari man

As promised in my previous post, today I went out to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway (do they really need to specify "motor" when they're talking about a "speedway"? I mean, is there a horse-drawn "speedway" somewhere?) and took a few laps around one of the auxiliary tracks in a Ferrari F430. Here's how it looked from the cockpit:

Random thoughts:

I made several mistakes, which I guess isn't surprising for such a new experience:

• Once I hit the wrong paddle and downshifted when I meant to upshift. You can hear the engine whine in protest and the instructor (Brandon, who was great) chuckles at me.
• For the first couple of laps I kept lifting off the gas when it was time to shift, unable to break the habit developed from years of using a clutch pedal. Dang these new-fangled infernal machines!
• I couldn't figure out the geometry of the hairpin turn combination near the start of the course. On the second time through, you see Brandon reach over and grab the wheel to force me more left than I thought it looked like I should go. I got it right just once, on the fourth lap, and could definitely tell. It was kind of amazing how getting the line just right felt so much different than getting it wrong, and you'll see me smile and hear me comment on the "aha!" moment. It was like hitting the ball with the sweet spot of a tennis racket. But then I missed it again the last time around. Slow learner.

I don't really know if overall I was going faster or slower than most. I got passed a few times (though one of them was by the stunt driver, about which more later), and passed only one other person. Watching a bunch of people before it was my turn, I could tell that there was a pretty broad range of speeds. What I couldn't tell was whether that was mainly due to the bravery (or lack thereof) of the drivers, or due to some instructors being more restrained than others. Probably a combination of both.

In fact, if I had one critique of the experience, it was that I'm confident I didn't get anywhere near the outer limits of the car's capabilities. Cornering never felt more violent than when I take freeway off-ramps a little too fast just for fun, and braking was never even close to maximal. The cones to indicate braking points are very conservative; I really wanted to keep accelerating longer and braking later. And I really, REALLY wanted to attack that last combination before the straightaway a lot more aggressively, something close to the car's limits of adhesion. But instead I was a good boy and tried to be compliant to the rules. Later I'll post some video of their scare-the-passenger Corvette driver, and he's hitting the corners 20, 30, maybe 40 mph faster than the customer-drivers. The other exotics are all at least as capable as the Vette, but they're not being pushed hard. I understand perfectly well why they set it up with cushy parameters: They want to keep a large margin of error and not have people spin out their expensive cars. But the consequence is that you never get a real sense of what these amazing pieces of engineering can do, except for a few seconds of flat-out acceleration each lap.

(Speaking of flat out, here's Jeremy Clarkson extolling the virtues of the 430 on "Top Gear," plus Stig wringing every bit of performance out of it on a timed lap. Part 1 and Part 2.)

How fast did I go? I honestly have no idea. I never once looked down at either the speedometer or the tachometer. It took all of my attention to attend to keeping the proper lines around turns and paying attention to Brandon's instructions. But the layout of the track simply doesn't allow one to come anywhere close to its straight-line top speed. I only got into fifth gear once, sixth never, so there was a ton of top end left unexplored.

I think I got shorted a lap. The gift certificate was for five, and they give locals an extra one for free, making six. But I just watched the video again, and I counted only five. Oh well.

The guy doing our pre-drive instruction encouraged us to buy extra laps ($50 each). I'm sure they're glad to bump up the ticket price, but he said that the reason to consider it is that it takes about five laps to learn the course so that you can really start paying attention to getting things right instead of just "what's coming up next?" A commenter on yesterday's blog post said basically the same thing. And they're right. I was, in fact, just kind of getting into the groove of it when it was time to go home. But would it have been a dramatically different or better experience going around seven times than five? No. Just a little icing on the cake.

While watching others do laps before my time slot, I heard one man snicker to another about a woman out on the course, who was going rather slowly. "That's a woman in the green Ferrari that can't get around corners." Except that that green Ferrari was a Lamborghini. (Which suddenly gives me a flashback to what must have been the first World War II joke I ever learned, back in junior high school, the punchline of which was, "Yeah, but this Fokker was a Messerschmidt!") You never look dumber than when you show your ignorance while trying to look smarter than everyone else.

The drive home felt really weird. Five laps was enough--probably because of the intense concentration--to change my brain's expectation about how driving should go. I kept reaching for paddles to shift, looking for cones to aim at in corners, and feeling like I should really be flooring the accelerator. It reminded me of the first time a friend took me skeet shooting--I did it for so long that session that as I drove home and saw birds flying overhead there was an amazingly strong impulse to shoulder a gun and take them down. (For the record, despite all my time with firearms, and tens of thousands of rounds expended, the only time I've fired one at a living creature was to put down a severely injured deer that I had hit with my car about eight years ago. I have no interest in hunting. The birds thing was just a conditioned reflex, not reflective of any underlying desire.)

Overall it was hella fun. I don't think you can go far wrong giving somebody you love a gift certificate for a drive at this place (Exotics Racing--and while you're on their web site, I strongly suggest you entertain yourself with the "screamer of the month" videos, taken inside the drifting Corvettes). Or the next time you're in Vegas, just treat yourself to a completely different kind of afternoon than you'll ever get on the Strip.

I call this magnificent portrait "Dork with helmet":

(They require the stupid hairnet thing, I assume, to keep people's nasty hair goop and lice off of the expensive helmets.)

Me and my speedy steed:

(Thanks to Brandon for graciously agreeing to snap these two photos.)

Addendum:

Just after posting this, I checked Yahoo for the day's news, and found this story of a man who did a dash-cam video from his Ferrari--with results even more embarrassing than mine.

http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/ferrari-owner-japan-arrested-posting-video-high-speed-195346223.html

VROOM!

Here's what I'll be doing tomorrow afternoon:

http://www.exoticsracing.com/

I get an orientation lap around the Las Vegas Motor Speedway as a passenger in a Porsche Cayenne, then five laps driving a Ferrari 430. A gift certificate for this experience was Cardgrrl's present for my 50th birthday last April. I put off scheduling it, hoping that she would be in town at some point during the year, but that didn't work out. So tomorrow is finally the day. I'll probably throw them a little extra money for the in-car video of the laps. If so, naturally I'll post it on YouTube and here. Unless I, y'know, spin out and die in a fiery crash or something. (Here's one guy's video, though he's in the 430 Scuderia, which is a slightly racified version of the 430: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsfaozN_UWc.)

All you Vegas locals will be packing the grandstands to watch, right?

Won HUGE tournament!

That's right--I was luckiest best of FOUR players at turbo razz! Wooooooooooo!

Whom did Josie meet?

OK, readers, which of you will confess to being the Grump reader in this story from Very Josie?

Anyway, I hadn't been playing many hands because the cards were shiat and then I got the mighty 2-4. Now IF I want to play the 2-4 I go in raising. I don't want to be up against other low cards. What I'm looking for is that low flop and it's only good if my fishponents have high cards....so I go in raising. So I raise it up in 2 off the button to 3 times the BB...betting 300. One guy reraises me to 800, 500 on top. Fawk. Everyone folds and fuck it I call. Either I hit the flop or I don't. Bingo! Flop is 2-4-10. I check, he bets, I raise. Turn is a jack. I bet and he calls. River is an ace and I'm not loving this anymore so I check and he checks behind me. He flips over 9-9 and my 2 pair wins. Yay, right? Except the whiner, who wasn't even in the hand, just cannot get over what happened. He just goes on and on about how I called the raise preflop with that hand. I ignore him for a while, but he literally goes on for over 5 minutes about it. Finally I explain that I had 300 in there and 500 wasn't enough to make me fold. He says he didn't realize that I was the original raiser. Okay, whatev. If you're going to bitch and moan you should really pay attention to what you're moaning about. And then the biatch says "You probably didn't even know you were playing a famous hand. (!)

What?

He says "I follow this guy on Twitter. Poker Grump! He's amazing...blah blah blah. He plays that hand you know?"

LOL I tell him that YES I've heard of Poker Grump too. And then he waxes on about how amazing his blog is. I suppose there's no accounting for taste Yes, I did agree with him. Then I'm like....so you read Poker Grump regularly? And he says that yes he does. He says that the poker world on the internet is a small one and everyone reads Poker Grump.

Hmmmm I was tempted to say something like, did you read about this girl Very Josie....Poker Grump made her his bitch? It was right on the tip of my tongue, but what point would it serve other than to point out I was Poker Grump's bitch. Is that a good thing? I think not.

Time to fess up, whoever you are.

Hooker story

It seem that the poker bloggers have informally decided that this is Hooker Week, so who am I to buck the trend? Sadly, I can think of only one relevant story, so paltry is my experience with the breed.

This happened at the now-defunct Hilton poker room. A middle-aged man from the deep South, with a drawl to match, broke a long silence with this observation, made to nobody in particular: "I stopped for a drink in that bar out there before dinner tonight, and I swear I have never seen so many hookers in one place."

Somebody asked him the rather obvious question: "How did you know they were hookers?"

He paused to think of how to phrase his answer, before putting it like this: "Cuz there ain't that many women that actually think I'm handsome."

2nd place that feels almost as good as 1st

I arrived back in Vegas a few hours ago.

My last evening with Cardgrrl we decided to join Mrs. Lederer's occasional Thursday-night All Vegas Poker game. This time around it was the 8-game mix, a real challenge. The coolest part was that Cardgrrl and I were the only two to make the "money" (just free points, sadly). Once we got down to heads-up, I realized that I really didn't care who won, which I don't think I've ever experienced in a poker tournament before. Cardgrrl got short-stacked early on and had to mount an epic comeback to win, so I'm happy that she did.

Arlington day

Cardgrrl and I spent the afternoon hiking through Potomac Overlook Regional Park, which had lovely scenery like this:

Then we went to dinner at Cassatt's Kiwi Cafe, followed by dessert at Pastries by Randolph, which had lovely scenery like this: