Poker history quiz answer

I was expecting that somebody would figure out the significance of the door marked "16" in my photo in the previous post once I put up a second picture tomorrow. But I was not prepared for the mystery to be solved less than 30 minutes after I posted that one stark image!

OK, Mookie, you got it. You'd win the prize, if there were one.

Saturday will be the 10th anniversary of the death of Stu Ungar on November 22, 1998, in room 16 of the Oasis Motel.

Here's what the Oasis looks like today:







That picture of the parking lot is taken from the far end, looking back toward the entrance on Las Vegas Boulevard. Room 16 is near that entrance, on the south (left in this photo), just this side of the white pickup truck.




Here's how the place is described by Des Wilson in Ghosts at the Table:

As for Stuey, 18 months later he was found lying face-down on a bed in a sleazy
flophouse motel called the Oasis, the kind of cesspool that has only porno
movies on the television set, burn holes in the carpet, seedy drapes, a
cockroach to the square inch, and where you risk your life just breathing the
air. Only Stuey wasn't breathing. He was dead at 43.

I can't confirm the burn marks or the cockroach count, but the place really is nasty. I've stayed in a lot of Motel 6 franchises in my life, and all of them look like the Bellagio compared to the Oasis. Should you want to find it, for whatever reason, it's about a block north of the Stratosphere, on the east side of the street, and about a block south of the Olympic Garden strip club, just south of the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Oakey. By odd coincidence, it's also directly across the street to the east from the White Cross pharmacy that was the locale for a key scene in "Lucky You"--the one in which Huck loses his WSOP Main Event buy-in to his father in a foolish game of "Guts." My guess is that you might be able to see the Oasis through the windows in that scene; the cameras definitely would have been shooting in that direction. But confirming that would require watching the movie again, which isn't high on my priority list.

It had been my plan to bribe tip the desk clerk to let me into room 16 for a couple of minutes to snap some photos, but that proved to be unnecessary. By a nice little stroke of luck, the "seedy drapes" had been left open and I could peek in through the trellis-like wooden grating over the window. The photos didn't turn out great, because of the slats, the horrible grime on the glass, and the darkness inside and daylight outside causing reflections. But this shot lets you see most of what there is to see:



Just out of the picture on the right is a dresser with the TV set on it. The doorway to the right of the foot of the bed leads, I assume, to the bathroom. And that's it. That's the whole room. Given the general nature of the place, it could well be the same bed that was there ten years ago. Hell, it could be the same bedsheets, still unwashed.

Here's how Ungar's final days were described in his biography, One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey "The Kid" Ungar, the World's Greatest Poker Player, by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson, pp. 292-293. (Since I'm about to steal some of their material, let me throw in a plug for the book: Buy it here. I just ordered a copy myself, something I've been neglecting for a couple of years.)










And here's a couple of photos lifted from the same source, thanks to amazon.com's "search inside" feature:





It appears that the stone reads, "A great person, but a greater loss."

I'm not sure that I would describe Stu Ungar as "a great person." Frankly, he was a mess. He seems to have had no idea how to sustain a friendship or family relationship, and tended to mess up the lives of others nearly as badly as he messed up his own. Forget the stupid commercial with the frying pan smashing the eggs. To see your brain on drugs, just look at Stuey Ungar. He burned through relationships the same way he burned through money and narcotics. It's terribly sad to look back and see what a waste he made of a brilliant mind and an astonishing talent for poker. I can only imagine the feelings of those who knew and loved him, as they watched the self-destruction occur in real time.

I do not think that I could have made or sustained a friendship with a person as pathological as he was. Were he still alive, I would probably rail about him on this blog even more mercilessly than I do Phil Hellmuth, because by all accounts he was a terror at the table--not just in how he played his cards, but in how he behaved. He had no manners, no tact, no grace, no etiquette, no respect for others. He is said to have mercilessly berated opponents and dealers alike. James McManus spends a good part of two of his "history of poker" Card Player articles on Ungar (here and here), and says, "He was also an obnoxious winner and a terrible sport when he did lose the occasional match."

I really can't stand people like that. Nevertheless, I can stand in awe of his ferocious, prodigious, unequalled talent at cards. Perhaps the kindest assessment comes from McManus: "The bottom line is that Stuey's financial recklessness and freakish neural circuitry not only broke him and killed him, they were also what made him unbeatable."

Requiescat in pace, Stu Ungar.

Poker history quiz

An event significant to the history of poker took place behind this door. What was it?

For now, I'll tell you just two things. First, this door is in Las Vegas. (I took the photo--and the others that will be coming--this afternoon.) Second, it is not happenstance that this is the week I chose to take and post the pictures. I've been planning this for a couple of months, because we are approaching a significant anniversay of the event in question.

I'll post additional hints about every 24 hours until somebody submits a comment that correctly identifies the event, at which time I'll put up the full post.

AVP tournament

My image was captured at another recent allvegaspoker.com tournament held at Imperial Palace. Pic above shamelessly stolen from this thread on the site. That's me in the dark blue sweatshirt. I'm smiling, so the photo must have been taken after I cracked somebody's aces with my jacks by hitting a set on the turn (sorry, Flea!), but before my kings ran into the aces of the blond woman in the foreground.

Speaking of my image, I have had two more recent suggestions of who I look like. For previous posts in this series, see here and here and here. The first suggestion is Bill Gates. I don't really see it, myself:





The second suggestion, though, is more plausible, I think--actor Zeljko Ivanek. You may not recognize the name, but if you've ever watched American television, you've seen him in something, because he has been in just about everything:

The most powerful hand in poker

After I scored a nice W at Binion's last night, I still had some time and energy left, so I wandered across the street to the Golden Nugget. While there, I had an opportunity once again to make some money from what regular readers by now understand is the most powerful hand in Texas hold'em: the deuce-four. (Today I finally got around to going back through old posts where I've talked about this particular hand and how it became my favorite, and adding a special deuce-four label to them, so that they're all easy to find from now on.)

An aggressive player in early position raised to $13. I was on the button, and calling a raise with the 2-4 from the button is my favorite way of deploying it. (The reason for that should be obvious: when it hits, nobody can possibly believe that a tight player like me could have called a pre-flop raise with crap like that, so it's completely disguised. It's a Ninja hand!) The big blind then pushed all-in for a total of $28, $15 more. The original raiser called. Well, I can't fold now, being offered more than 4.5:1 for the call!

The flop is 7-4-2 rainbow, giving me two pairs. I have only about $60 left in front of me at this point, so when it is checked to me, I shove. Sadly, the original raiser apparently didn't catch any part of that flop, so he folded. The turn card was another 4, making a full house for me. The big blind mucked after seeing my hand, so I never learned what either opponent had. But I don't really care, as long as I scooped up the chips.

As evidence by the faces and rolled eyes and post-hand conspiratorial whispering of the losers, the 2-4 once again proved not only its value as a gatherer of chips, but as an unparalleled inducer of tilt. This occurs whether you win with it in a freak hand like this, or miss and turn it into a pure bluff (which is where having position really becomes important) and show it off.

Please don't tell your friends about the 2-4, or post about it in online forums, etc. We need to keep it our little secret, OK?


The image above is lifted from this site, which chronicles the feats of battlefield courage demonstrated by one particular U.S. Army unit that goes by the nickname of "Deuce-Four." I intend no disrespect for the unit or the heroism of its members by borrowing the image for my rather silly purposes here. It was just the most useful thing that came up in a Google image search.

#1002

Hmmm. It seems that I was a bit premature in counting my 1000th post.

Warning: extremely boring technical explanation to follow.

Once in a while I start writing a post and don't know how to finish it, or something comes up and I have to leave, or whatever. The partial post gets saved as a draft. When I come back to it later, often a few days have passed. If I simply complete the original draft, the stupid Blogger software puts it in the chronological order of when it was first saved, not when it was actually published, which means that many people would never see it, because they wouldn't know that a new post had been inserted down the page, between others they've already read. So instead, I just copy the previous partial post into a brand-new one. But then I sometimes forget to delete the partial draft one. While doing some other blog maintenance work just now, I discovered that I had about five old drafts saved. All of them later got turned into full posts and published in due course, but the deadwood was still there. What I had not known until today is that Blogger counts the unpublished drafts in the total post count. When I deleted those old drafts, my total count dropped, making this now post #1002. I hadn't intended to be "cheating" to puff up my numbers; I just didn't know. I'm mortified.

Anyway, the count should be correct now.

Stuffing the ballot box

Over on http://www.pokerati.com/ they've been running an informal poll for favorite pro player's blog (voting section in the center column, a little way down from the top of the page). At some point they added me to the list of candidates. So doesn't that make it obvious what you should do at this point? Just 25 more votes, and I'll overtake Daniel Negreanu, who is currently the big favorite.

Request for suggestions

As I've mentioned a couple of times lately, my nephew has started playing poker online, and it's fun to get into heads-up sit-and-go matches with him for low stakes. We're using Full Tilt, since that's where he has a little money stashed.

The first time we played, we had an IM chat going on the side. I found a table, then sent him an "OK," he did a player search for my screen name to find the table, and claimed the other seat. No problem. He's quick--took him less than 10 seconds. And after the first game, rematches are easy because FTP has cleverly built in a feature that automatically offers another match to both participants.

But the next time we tried it, twice in a row some stranger (different one each time) sat down before he could get in. I didn't want to play anybody else, so I just clicked the "sit out next hand" button and let the other person win by not playing. I'm not terribly bothered by losing $2 that way, but it's annoying not to be able to have any control when I want another specific player to join me. If we were to be playing for higher stakes, then it would start to be a serious annoyance to have to either forfeit the entry fee or battle somebody else for it when I want to be focusing on the game I came to play.

I know about setting up private tournaments through Full Tilt, but that requires emailing them in advance with a particular start time. We need the flexibility to be able to play whenever we both happen to be available simultaneously. If it were a cash game, of course, I could just leave after one hand and move to another table, until we got into one in which my nephew successfully grabbed the other seat before anybody else horned in on the action. But with a tournament format, that doesn't work.

I emailed FTP support, and they had no other suggestions for handling this. But surely there are lots of other people who have faced a similar situation--wanting to play a one-on-one tournament against a specific other person. If you have figured out a way to make this happen, or have heard of a good solution, please post it in the comments section.

Thanks.

New entry in the Grump poker rule book

Players are not allowed to utter the sentence, "That's what I'm talking about," unless the event that triggered the outburst is actually an exact enactment of something that player had, in fact, been describing within the previous 60 seconds. Penalty for violation: The offender's entire chip stack is confiscated and evenly distributed among the other players at the table.

Unexpected sight on Fremont Street

One of the cool things about life in Las Vegas is that one tends frequently to get surprised by peculiar, unexpected things going on wherever one happens to go.

Last night I was walking down Fremont Street to Binion's when I came upon the largest event I've ever seen downtown, outside of a car race: a firefighter competition. This was a relay race. Team members had to race up the tower, hoist up a weight, race back down, use a sledge hammer to pound something, drag a dummy, use a fire hose, etc. It was quite a spectacle.

Living here requires carrying a camera, because strange things are always popping up.

Are you a Fanilow?

Yesterday around 4:30 I was getting ready to go out for some poker, when an email hit my inbox from http://www.houseseats.com/, announcing "last-minute" free ticket availability for Barry Manilow at the Hilton, 8:00 pm.

OK, time for a confession. I'm a straight male who likes Barry Manilow. Not crazy Fanilow level or anything, but I'm a sucker for a good love song or schmaltzy sad one, and Barry fills the bill.

So I speed-dialed my best friend, and, bless her heart, she was willing to sit through it with me, even though her musical taste runs more to the Beastie Boys, The Cure, and Linkin Park. So I nabbed the tickets and off we went.

The seats weren't quite as primo as the ones for Blue Man Group the previous night, but they were perfectly fine: about four rows from the back of the main floor, toward the far right, in what had once been Elvis Presley's theater. Paying full price would have been $137.50 apiece. (That's the second-cheapest price level. They run from $104.50 to $247.50.)

I can't add this to my list of best-ever Vegas shows, but it was certainly good enough that I'm glad I went. My complaints: (1) They started about 10 minutes late. (2) It was fairly short, about 1 1/4 hours. (3) They passed out chemical glow sticks, which just encouraged people to do that stupid slow arm-waving thing. (4) Some idiots in the audience always felt compelled to sing along, apparently on the assumption that everybody had come to hear them sing, rather than Barry Manilow. (5) It was much too amplified. (It's been said that if you think the music is too loud, you're too old. You can imagine, then, what it says about you if you find Barry Manilow too loud.) (6) I had a hard time seeing over the head of the guy in front of me--had to keep bobbing and weaving. (7) Even though the show is ostensibly meant to focus on Manilow's hits (the previous iteration of his Hilton show, "Music and Passion," featured on the poker chip shown above, is no more; this one is called "Ultimate Manilow: The Hits"), he did ultra-shortened and medley versions of many of my favorites in order to cram them in and get them out of the way to make room for pimping his soon-to-be-released album of other people's 1980s hits, as well as his other "decades" collections.

Perhaps most peculiar is that my friend and I both independently concluded that he was lip-syncing at least part of the time. There were spots in which he seemed out of phase with what we were hearing. Once I caught him whispering something to a fan in the first row while his singing voice finished the last second or two of a phrase over the speakers. This was all pretty mystifying, because for most of the show it was perfectly obvious that he was not lip-syncing. For example, he hit an off note once, garbled the lyrics of "American Bandstand" in one place, I heard his voice crack once, and at one point he paused a song to respond to something shouted from the audience--not things you would pre-record. His speaking voice sounded unusually raspy, so perhaps he has a cold or is developing a vocal cord problem, can't sustain an entire show, and thus has some voice rests built in, in the form of recorded music. I don't know. It was kind of weird.

In spite of the above nit-picking, I had a good time. It tugged at every sappy, soft-hearted, nostalgic bone in my body to hear "Weekend in New England," "Somewhere in the Night," "Trying to Get the Feeling Again," "Mandy" (done in an interesting manner: with Barry singing and playing the piano in parallel with the projected videotape of a 1975 television performance of the same song), "Looks Like We Made It," and my all-time choke-me-up favorite, "Even Now." Manilow is the king of wistfulness. If those last three songs can't reach something deep inside you that still pines for a lost love and wonders what might have been, well, you're lacking one of the emotions that make us human. Carrying an old torch is simultaneously happy and painful, and nobody can stoke those flames more effectively than Barry.

Two good shows in two days--excellent value from my houseseats.com subscription, I'd say. But enough of it for now. I need to get back to earning and to the main subject of this blog, which will soon return to being about poker.

More from Prof. Rose on UIGEA regulations

Our local public radio station, KNPR, has a daily show about current events, mostly local, called "State of Nevada." Today one segment was about the recent announcement of final UIGEA regulations. Prof. I. Nelson Rose of Whittier Law School was the main guest. You can listen online and/or download an MP3 of the 22-minute segment, and see a decent collection of related links here.

Unfortunately, there was little detail--nothing like his recent article. But if nothing else, it's amusing to hear his description of the UIGEA: "piece of garbage" (at about 3:13).

As with the last time this general subject was discussed on this show, there's a caller who says that she once had a problem with compulsive gambling, and therefore she thinks online gaming should be outlawed. This is not unlike a reformed alcoholic deciding that all booze should be banned. It's apparently inconceivable to such people that anybody might be able to indulge in these things in a reasonable, enjoyable, controlled, nondestructive, noncompulsive, socially acceptable manner. The selfishness and myopia of human beings, and their endless urge to control what other people do, never cease to astonish me. Idiots.

#1000

51 days ago I did post #900. You would think that at that point, reaching 1000 would seem like nothing at all. But it actually still felt like a nearly unachievable milepost--how could I think of another hundred things to write? But somehow they come, like a dripping faucet. Sometimes up to nine in a day (I think that's my record), sometimes several days in between. And to get to post #1100, I don't really have to think of a hundred things to say right now; one will do.

I cannot possibly express my surprise, delight, and gratitude that so many people still find it worth the time to visit here every day or two to see what I've had to say. I'm overwhelmed every time I think about it. I shall try to continue looking for amusing and/or interesting stories from my own poker experiences, as well as provide a slightly off-kilter, unconventional point of view on whatever is happening in the larger poker universe.

Please keep reading. Please keep submitting comments, suggestions, questions, critiques, etc. Please keep checking out the sponsors. Your doing those things makes this rewarding for me.

Blue Man Group

I've been a subscriber to http://www.showtickets4locals.com/ for a long time, but I recently also joined http://www.houseseats.com/. The former is free; the latter costs $89 per year. However, it offers a lot more tickets to the premium, high-end shows--things like Barry Manilow at the Hilton and Le Reve at the Wynn. Last night was the first time I've used it to nab some primo tickets: the Blue Man Group at the Venetian. Row 12, on the aisle--two superb seats that normally would cost $132 each.

It's a show I've wanted to see for years, and finally got the chance. It's every bit as good as people say. Describing it seems kind of pointless. Let's see: They show a bunch of signs. They throw marshmallows at each other (and at the audience; I caught one, as evidenced above). They beat on drums that splash colored water in the air. They dine on Twinkies with an audience member. They play with the orange hand lights used to guide jets into their gates. They make tuned drums out of PVC pipe. They stream scads of rolled paper over the audience. They munch loudly on Cap'n Crunch cereal. They teach you rock and roll dance moves. They play around with color perception and the "persistence of vision" phenomenon. They wear TVs on their heads. They never say a word. See? It all sounds really stupid. But it's actually ingenius and creative and and interesting and unprecedented and fabulous. So you just have to go see it for yourself. There is no show like it anywhere.

BMG joins the tippy-top of the best shows I've seen since living in Vegas: Penn & Teller, Ka, Elton John's Red Piano, Spamalot, and Blue Man Group--all absolutely first-rate. (And come to think of it, what a variety! Not one of those shows is even remotely similar to any of the others.)

Plan on seeing BMG next time you're in Vegas (or any of their other venues--see link below). Hey, you might even get a souvenir marshmallow.

http://www.blueman.com/

Fair and balanced reporting?

This post at Pokerati links to a recent New York Times article about the end of the poker boom. I was struck by this snippet:

Poker’s golden era of growth was highlighted here by the $7-million
refurbishment of the poker area at the Bellagio hotel and casino in 2005. But
now poker rooms around Las Vegas are contracting; the one at the Las Vegas
Hilton was replaced last year by 36 Wheel of Fortune slot machines, and the one
at the Excalibur was replaced with dealerless electronic poker tables.

Hmmm. I detect a bit of unbalanced reporting there. How is it legitimate to use as evidence of a poker decline the number of rooms in Vegas that have closed without simultaneously mentioning the number that have opened?

Yeah, the Hilton closed its poker room a year ago, and at about the same time the Stardust was imploded. But since those events, we have had the opening of poker rooms at Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon, the Hard Rock, the Eastside Cannery, Rampart (though it closed again almost as quickly as it opened), Aliante Station, and we have the M Resort set to open in about March.

Maybe we are in a poker decline. I don't claim to know. I'm not even sure exactly how it could be measured objectively. (Does the state Gaming Commission collect stats on poker revenue separately from casinos' other gambling income? I have a vague memory of seeing such numbers once, but I could be mistaken.) My point is only on the bias of a reporter to point to one room closing and one converting to electronic tables without informing readers of contrary evidence: the subsequent opening of six other poker rooms. Eastside Cannery alone has about the number of tables that the Hilton did. Combine all six, and there is a large net increase in poker tables in the valley. But you wouldn't know that from reading the New York Times.

Maybe not so terrible

There is much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth in the poker world today over the last-minute publication of UIGEA regulations. You can read such pessimistic assessments so many places that I need not point you to them. I wish to point you to the interesting opinion of I. Nelson Rose, who says, basically, that it's all much ado over nothing, that the regulations change little, and life will for the most part go on as before. See his analysis here. (Thanks to this note at Pokerati for the link.)

ESPN blows its last "fact" in a major way

The last time I wrote about ESPN's "Poker Fact" series, I thought it might be the final one of the year, but they surprised me by adding one more last night during the broadcast of the final table. They sure went out in style, screwing up the last fact about as badly as imaginable.

The claim: “An Ace has been dealt on the winning hand of the Main Event 7 times.”

I have two main sources to check: The Championship Table at the World Series of Poker by Dana Smith, Tom McEvoy, and Ralph Wheeler (2nd edition, 2004), and All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of the World Series of Poker by Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback (2005). I used YouTube videos for the last few years not covered in these two books. I used the first book as the primary source, and only consulted the second where the first is lacking complete information. This is potentially problematic, because I have previously found that Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler have not been entirely accurate in their hand histories. But it's the best I can do, given limited time to research the matter.

There are two years for which the information is incomplete or in dispute. I'll put those aside for the moment. For the other years, here are the number of aces dealt to the players and to the board, written as players/board:

1972: 0/0

1973: 1/0

1976: 1/1

1977: 0/0

1978: 0/1

1979: 2 (pocket aces)/0

1980: 1/1

1981: 1/0

1982: 2 (1 each)/0

1983: 0/0

1984: 0/0

1985: 1/0

1986: 2 (1 each)/0

1987: 1/0

1988: 0/0

1989: 1/0

1990: 0/0

1991: 0/0

1992: 0/0

1993: 0/0

1994: 0/0

1995: 1/0

1996: 0/1

1997: 2 (1 each)/1

1998: 0/0

1999: 0/0

2000: 2 (1 each)/0

2001: 2 (pocket aces)/0

2002: 0/0

2003: 0/0

2004: 1/0

2005: 1/1

2006: 0/1

2007: 1/0

Just as a fun side fact, it should be noted that both times a player was dealt pocket aces, he lost both the hand and the championship! In 1979, Hal Fowler cracked Bobby Hoff's aces with 6-7 offsuit, and in 2001 Carlos Mortensen cracked Dewey Tomko's aces with suited K-Q. Obviously, if you're heads up for the WSOP Main Event bracelet and get dealt pocket aces, you should just fold.

So the number of years in which at least one ace was dealt face down to at least one player is 17. The number of years in which at least one ace was placed on the board is 7. The number of years in which one or both of those things happened is 20.

This data is complicated by the years for which the information is muddled. For 1974 we apparently have no record of what the final hand was. For 1975, my two sources are utterly discordant. Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler say that the hole cards were 9s/9c and Ac-Kd. They say that "The board cards for the last hand are unknown." Grotenstein and Reback say that the hole cards were pocket jacks (suits unspecified) and Jc-9c, with a final board of 7h-6c-2c-9s-10h. Neither book tells us the source(s) of the information. As you can see, if the first is correct, it makes 8 years in which an ace fell on the board. If the second book is correct, it does not change the numbers given above. I have no way to resolve the discrepancy.

I have to address the wording of ESPN's "fact." An ace being "dealt" is ambiguous. It could mean either dealt to a player as a down card or "dealt" onto the board as a community card, or both. It's just not clear exactly what the assertion is here. It is further ambiguous in what is meant by "7 times." That could mean that the event in question happened in 7 different years, or that over the years, a total of 7 aces have been dealt. I'm going to assume they meant the former.

But even with that assumption, the only way the "fact" is correct is if "dealt" means "put on the board and not given to a player," and if Grotenstein/Reback are right about the disputed 1975 final hand not containing an ace anywhere. But that's perhaps the least natural reading of the word "dealt." Why would it mean a community card but not a hole card? That just doesn't make sense.

During the 2008 WSOP broadcasts, ESPN gave us a total of 13 "poker facts." I scored 8 of them as wrong, 5 right--not a particularly impressive record of accuracy.

Sorry, ESPN, but you blew your last chance to redeem your reputation as a reliable source of poker facts.


Addendum

Within minutes after putting up this post, reader "NerveEnding" submitted a comment (see below) that makes me re-think the whole thing. I had just taken the phrase "winning hand" to be the equivalent of "final hand," but Nerve suggests that it means that the champion held an ace in 7 different years. Looking back on it, I think this interpretation didn't occur to me because of the strange phrasing "dealt on the winning hand," whereas if Nerve is right, it would be more natural to say something like "the winning hand has contained an ace."

But as I think about it, I'm convinced that Nerve has it right, in terms of ESPN's probable intended meaning. So I had to go back and check. As I mentioned before, in both of the years in which a player had pocket aces, he lost (1979 and 2001). There were four years in which each player had an ace in the hole (1982, 1986, 1997, and 2000), so obviously the winner had an ace. (Incidentally, the better kicker held up two times--1982 and 1986--and the lesser one sucked out the other two times.) There were 11 years in which just one player had an ace (1973, 1976, 1980, 1981, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1995, 2004, 2005, and 2007). Of those, the ace turned out to be the winning hand in three (1973, 1981, and 1987). So if you combine the four years in which both players had an ace with those three, you get seven, as ESPN reported.

This is not muddled by the possibility of the disputed 1975 hand, because even if Smith et al are correct about its details, the A-K was the losing hand.

So despite the title I already affixed to this post (I could change it, but I think it's more honest to keep it as originally written, with this corrective note), I guess I'll have to retract my conclusion and say that ESPN got this one right, though they deserve some chiding for stating their "fact" in such an ambiguous manner.

That means I also need to revise my final season score for ESPN to 6 right, 7 wrong--marginally better than before.

Aliante Station opens

I drove way up north to see the opening of the Aliante Station casino tonight. It wasn't quite the madhouse that Eastside Cannery was on its opening night (probably because the gimmicky 11:11 p.m. opening was less convenient for many people), but it was still bad. Traffic horrible, parking horrible. I ended up in the parking lot of a golf course across the street. By the time I left, however, there were spots open everywhere, so I don't anticipate it being bad on typical days.

I arrived at the poker room at about 11:45, roughly 30 minutes after the doors opened, and all 12 tables were full! They wasted no time, obviously. I snapped a few photos (some with the flash, some without) before they politely asked me to stop.

If you know and like the Red Rock poker room, you'll like Aliante. They feel very similar. They are both more elegant than most places in town (excepting rooms like Wynn and Hard Rock), extremely tasteful in decor.

Random collection of observations: One of the four walls is mostly open to the main casino floor; one is glass. Smoke and noise were not problematic. I didn't see any magazine racks, but that's probably just because they hadn't yet had time to get any magazines delivered. Restrooms are very close, about 20 steps outside the poker room. Chairs were what is becoming standard: 5-wheeled office chairs, adjustable for height and back angle. There's way more room around the tables than one usually sees in poker rooms--a great bit of luxury for both players and staff. Autoshufflers are at every table. I loved the nice pumpkin-colored felt. They spread games 10-handed, which I slightly prefer over 9-handed, and there were 10 cupholders built into the rail of each table. Dealers were all good and obviously experienced; I recognized several from their previous jobs at other places in town (e.g., Gina, one of my favorite Binion's dealers). I oberved only one dealer error in my time there (just under two hours); the dealer allowed a reraise after an all-in in a situation where the original bettor should have been allowed only to call or fold, because the all-in was not a full raise--an easy mistake to make. I counted 9 big-screen televisions, maybe a little skimpy for some players' taste. There is certainly room for more of them on the back wall. Personally, I don't care much, since I pay them little attention. Beverage service was fast and friendly, though I wish they would add a water cooler to save on the number of those stupid plastic bottles we're sending to the landfills. Food service is available; I saw one guy eating a burger from Johnny Rockets. Johnny Rockets is one of my favorite burger places, and I didn't even know there was one in Aliante. Cards and chips were all new, which is a rare tactile pleasure. Massages are available; I think I overheard them quote a price of $25 for 15 minutes, which, if correct, is a little below the standard rate of $2/minute. They use "all in" and "call" plaques to help make sure everybody knows the action. They share in the linked Station Casinos bad-beat jackpot. There is also a high-hand jackpot, which I was told is for royal flushes only. There is a temporary promotion (apparently at all Station poker rooms in town): $2500 bonus for quad 8s. Stations also has a freeroll tournament promotion running for November-December. Tables have what appears to be a betting line, and the dealer told me that it is, in fact, just that. They have the same player-management system as all of the other Station properties.

There were some glitches, not surprising for opening day. My name got put on the $1-$3 NLHE waiting list, then mysteriously disappeared without having been called. One player got sent to our table when there were no seats open. The chip runner seemed unsure of how to do fills. As I recently witnessed at Binion's, some dealers used the $2 chips only for the drop, while others put them into circulation among the players.

Overall, it's definitely one of the nicer rooms in Vegas. But the entire casino is targeted to locals, not tourists. It's also fairly difficult to get to. Not only is it a long drive for me, but there are no fast, direct routes from either downtown (where I live) or the Strip. You can either take highways with a lot of extra mileage zig-zagging to get there, or take surface streets that are more direct but slower. For those reasons, I probably won't visit the place more than a couple of times a year. If the thing were magically plopped down near the Strip, though, it could easily zoom to near the top of my list of favorite places.

Enjoy the photos. I set my dear old camera on its maximum resolution, so you can click on them for larger versions.

Seen at the Venetian

The guy pictured above was in a limit game (probably $4-8, but I didn't check for sure) at the table next to mine at the Venetian tonight. He had such an impressive wall of chips (all white $1 chips) that I had to snap a photo of it. He cashed out maybe half an hour later, and was carrying six racks to the cashier.

I'm not sure if he just likes sheer volume, or if he has never heard of "coloring up."





This was my table. You can see, first, the new felt that the V has in place to promote "The Real Deal" show. (BTW, I expect to snag some free tickets one of these days, and of course I'll issue a full report of the experience here.)

Second, you can see the weird card protector being used by the guy in the background (the one too immersed in reading Fast Food Nation to actually pay attention to the hand he's in). It's hard to make out, but it's a clear red plastic giraffe. Things got stranger, though. A while later, I looked up and noticed that he was now using a blue one, though otherwise identical. And within an hour, that had changed to a green one. This guy carries around at least three colored giraffes and rotates them as his card caps. Don't ask me why. Poker players are strange people.


Addendum, November 13, 2008

Sharp-eyed reader "Topset" suggests in the comments that the player with the giraffes is Kevin O'Leary. I hadn't heard of him before that I can recall, but upon seeing his photo in the Poker Pages entry on him, I can confirm Topset's hunch. That's him, all right.

He had an interesting style. His requirements for putting in a pre-flop raise were approximately these:

Being on the button
Being one off the button
Being two off the button
Being in the small blind
Being in the big blind
Having put in a straddle under the gun
Having an ace
Having a face card
Having two cards

But at least on that night, his hyperaggressive style was not working particularly well. The table adjusted to his mania, and after having accumulated a biggish stack for a while, he was in a pretty clear death spiral downward by the time I left.

Three-in-one book review: taxes for gamblers

I have now read three books about income tax issues for gamblers, both recreational ones and professional ones. Since these may be the only books in print on the subect, and since I may be one of the few people who has read them all, I thought it might be worthwhile to do a little comparison here. I will refer to them by their authors' names: Lewis, Johnston, and Scott/Chien. They are listed in the order in which they were published (2003, 2005, and 2007, respectively), which also matches the order in which I read them. I read Lewis shortly after moving to Vegas about two years ago, Johnston roughly a year ago, and I just read Scott/Chien last week.

Not surprisingly, the three books cover approximately the same ground, and hit the same basic points. I don't think anybody really needs to read all three. From any one of them, you will learn the most important facts and have common false beliefs dispelled. Still, each has distinct strengths and weaknesses.

Lewis is the most disorganized. About half of it is a collection of essays by various authors on taxes and gambling, many of which are conceptual (e.g., about how the authors think the system should be). These are interesting, but not especially practical. And although Lewis guides the reader through the essentials, he doesn't emphasize the traps and common errors made by both recreational and professional gamblers nearly as effectively as the other two books do; you could miss something important. Still, there's a lot of interesting material here. Some of it is not covered elsewhere, such as what happens to your heirs if you die shortly after scoring a big gambling win (i.e, the intersection of gambling taxation and estate taxation).

I think Johnston's book is horribly mis-titled. It sounds like it would be a guide on how to conceive of and start up a poker-oriented business. It is not that. It is focused exclusively on tax issues. Her main theme is the question of whether to declare oneself a recreational or a professional gambler. There are major implications for how one's tax returns have to be prepared. She goes through in detail how to work out which one is most advantageous from a tax perspective, although you may not get to choose on that basis. The biggest strength of Johnston's book over the others is the detailed focus on deductions that are allowed and not allowed for professional gamblers. I also liked her folksy style of writing, and how most chapters start with an anecdote from her own poker and accounting experiences of the mistakes poker players make and the misconceptions they have, which she then spends the chapter dispelling (e.g., that if you win money from poker on a cruise, or while in another country, or in an illegal game, or online, that you don't have to pay taxes on it, or that you can just "net out" your wins and losses and declare only the difference, if positive at the end of the year).

I found Scott/Chien to be the most interesting read. They are the most explicit about the huge gaps in tax law as it pertains to gamblers. For example, they spend an entire chapter dissecting what constitutes one gambling "session." The IRS wants gamblers to report the sums of winning sessions and losing sessions, but offers no guidance as to what a "session" is, and there are no court cases clarifying it. Scott/Chien do an admirable job discussing different ways of defining "session," their advantages and disadvantages, which ones are likely or unlikely to pass IRS scrutiny in case of an audit, etc.

They also give a lot more detail than the other two books on group wins--for example, several people pooling money to buy lottery tickets. At first you might think this has no bearing on poker, but it can. Some casinos won't help poker tournament winners with negotiated deals, and will only give the prizes as per their published payout schedule. You thus might end up with the casino showing you to have won either more or less than you actually received. The situation would also come up if you had backers buying a "piece" of your action in a poker tournament. This book details the ways you can legally handle such a situation, which I don't recall either of the other books talking about.

Scott/Chien emphasize how much uncertainty there is about all of this stuff. The IRS has dragged its feet in providing any help to gamblers, so there is a lot that just hasn't been decided by anybody in a position of authority. To make matters worse, as Scott/Chien repeatedly remind the reader, most tax preparers have no training or knowledge about the whole gambling tax issue--and neither do many IRS employees who are supposed to know about it! They relate many anecdotes about mistakes made by tax preparers or IRS people that they had to fight to get corrected. But as reassurance, they also stress that where there is uncertainty, reasonableness is what rules the day, and they spend a lot of space explaining what would likely be considered reasonable or not in various situations of legal uncertainty.

Scott/Chien, being the most recent publication, is also the most up to date--and that's important in an area that changes rapidly. They are also the only authors who address state income tax issues. For example, I didn't know until reading this book that there are ten states (CT, IL, IN, LA, MA, MI, OH, OR, WV, and WI) in which you cannot itemize gambling losses in order to offset gambling wins as a recreational player. They note that this unfair system makes it "almost impossible to gamble with an advantage, no matter how skilled you are" (p. 103). Yikes! Finally, Scott/Chien uniquely have a section of practical advice for what to do in case of an audit.

Overall, if you're going to buy just one book on this subject, I'd make it Scott/Chien, as the most thorough treatment. If you're willing to invest in a second book, then also buy Johnston if you want more rubber-hits-the-road details on how to fill out the forms, allowable deductions, deciding whether to file as a professional or recreational player, etc., or go with Lewis if you just want to read more broadly and kind of theoretically on the whole subject of gambling taxation. And remember--the purchase price of all three is deductible!

My hopes are dashed

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned having found a Tropicana poker chips numbered "1 of 1000." Over the weekend I ran into a poker dealer of my aquaintance who told me that many commemorative chips are done that way, with all of them labeled as "1." In other words, the "1" doesn't mean "#1 out of 1000," but rather, "one of a thousand." If I found other similar chips, they, too, would carry the "1 of 1000" mark.

This is certainly plausible, but I've never seen it before. I have in my collection at least a dozen chips that are numbered (see, e.g., the one pictured here), and none of them is #1. So in my experience, the most common way for chips to be issued is with no numerical markings, the second most common way is simply with the designation that it's a "limited edition of ____" (usually 500 or 1000), with nothing unique on each chip, the third most common form is the sequential numbering system, wherein each chip is uniquely numbered, and the least common is this system with all of them called "1 of _____". The dealer said that in his experience, the last is more common than the sequentially numbered series, at least in recent years.

Anyway, maybe I don't have my retirement fund all in one chip after all.

Let me state for the record that I think labeling the entire run of chips as "1 of ____" is a low-down, despicable, deceptive practice that should be immediately banned.


The illustration above, incidentally, has an intentional dual meaning. I've been in a bit of a poker funk lately, which explains my lack of posting for the past few days. I haven't lacked material, just interest in writing. It happens from time to time, then it passes. This time, it's probably related to having had five consecutive losing days last week, which tends to sour me on the game for a while. But I know from past experience that it turns around again before too long.