Guess the casino, #809

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Answer: Flamingo

I do not fear the zombie apocalypse

That is largely because I have seen enough zombie movies to know that zombies are not particularly bright. I think they will make very poor poker players. I therefore expect to be able to take their money quite easily, and become rich.

Bring on the zombies.

Florida, day 1

My first day with Cardgrrl in Florida was spent wandering around downtown St. Petersburg. Photo album available here.

The first picture seems to show that somebody knew I was coming. The second is just a car covered in tree pollen, a fate that also struck our rental car. Must be an endemic problem there.

#3-#10 are shots of a pair of banyan trees that I thought were just glorious. What I didn't know at the time was that we would encounter even grander ones the next day.

My only kind of randomly artsy, non-documentary shot is #13, the lock and chain (found at the entrance to a public restroom), which I kind of like. There's something pleasing to me about the

steel and rust against the colors of the brick, the gate partially painted and partially stripped, and the glint of light off of the edge of the padlock.

There are a bunch of random shots of things seen around the downtown area that don't deserve special comment.

#19-#36 were taken in and around the Salvador Dali museum. We paid attention to all the comments you good people contributed about things we should see while in the area, and this place was mentioned more than any other. I've never known much about Dali, so it was interesting to see so much of his work concentrated in one place, almost all of it previously unfamiliar to me. I don't think I left any more of a fan than I had been before, but I certainly gained a broader view of how productive he was and how his style changed over the decades of works he put out. Unfortunately, no photography was allowed inside the galleries, so I couldn't record the handful of pieces that I liked best. I did enjoy seeing the famous "Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln" in person, and looking at it from various distances and angles, with both direct and peripheral vision, to see how the prominence of the "Lincoln effect" changed.

From the Dali, we took a trolley* to a section of downtown with a concentration of little shops and restaurants and wandered there for a while. That would be a great place to live, with all sorts of interesting things to look at, buy, and eat. Sadly, it was largely devoid of visitors, and we got the sense that the shop owners are enthusiastic but hurting economically.

The last 14 pictures are all of a kapok tree in bloom at sunset, which may be the single most beautiful tree I've ever seen. Unfortunately, up close you can see how it has been marred by several hundred morons who thought that this magnificent living organism would be improved by having their initials carved into it. Were I a judge, I would mete out justice by carving my initials into their flesh with a penknife, and see how they liked it. (Eighth Amendment? What's that? Never heard of it.)

*On rereading, it occurs to me that taking a trolley from the Dali is kind of like taking a Chevy to the levee.

"I never change seats"

I was playing at Imperial Palace last night. The first open seat was #2, so I took it. I immediately asked for a seat-change button, hoping to move either to one of my favorites (1 and 10), or someplace else if it seemed that strategy were to dictate it.

There was a very pleasant man in seat 1. He heard my request, which prompted him to set about telling me how he had made up his mind long ago that he would never, ever change seats under any conditions. His reason? He played in California rooms with bad-beat jackpots, and he never wanted to have to face the realization that he had moved out of a seat where the jackpot later hit and thus have the regret of having missed it.

Maybe I'm overly steeped in statistical and probabilistic thought, but it took me, oh, about one-tenth of a second to see the gaping hole in his logic. I asked him, "What about the regret of failing to move into the seat where the jackpot would later hit? What if you pass up the chance to move to seat 6, and a few minutes later the new player there wins hundreds of thousands of dollars?"

He got a slightly puzzled look on his face and said, "I hadn't thought about that."

You can influence your chance of being part of a bad-beat jackpot by your initial hand selection, so it's not completely random. But given a particular style of play, which seat you're in makes no difference in your chances of winning a jackpot. It also makes no difference whether you decide to stay in one seat for the entire session, or play musical chairs at every opportunity. I think this guy was smart enough to understand that.

He made up his mind about never moving based on a purely emotional factor: avoiding regret. But for some reason, he was only able to see one side of that coin. Having regret for an affirmative action that he had taken loomed large enough that it decided the entire issue for him. He was willing to pass up any strategic advantage, in terms of having certain players to his right or left, in order to avoid wishing he had not moved. But in years of living with and implementing this decision, the possibility of regret over inaction had never even crossed his mind, even though the chance of that outcome is exactly the same as the chance of the one he so desperately wishes to avoid.

You human beings are kind of funny creatures, what with your emotions and cognitive biases and all.

Incidentally, for a thorough discussion of all of the "what-if" questions surrounding poker jackpots, see Grange95's post here. Cliff Notes version: A bad-beat jackpot requires lots of random outcomes (e.g., the shuffle) and arbitrary decisions (e.g., when a player decides to take a restroom break) all to be aligned just so; it makes no logical sense to assign special value to some of them while ignoring others.

Guess the casino, #808

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Answer: Wynn

Guess the casino, #807

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Answer: Stratosphere

More crap from Cereus

Maybe I haven't been paying enough attention, but this post about a bad keno game being offered by Cereus (the fine, fine folks behind UltimateBlecch and AbsolutePuker) was completely new to me. I didn't know they offered keno, nor that a bad random number generator had been discovered by users, nor anything about how Cereus responded to the issue--which was by lying, shifting the blame, stalling, having Joe Sebok make public statements that were untrue, and ultimately doing nothing to admit that they screwed up or refund customers' money.

This company is just unbelievably corrupt and/or incompetent. I'm not sure which attribute is most responsible for this particular part of the scandal story, but in terms of deciding whether you want to trust them with your money, does it really matter?

Catching up

I'm still trying to catch up on laundry, finances, blog-reading, magazines, TV shows, leftover work, etc., that got missed while I was gone. I'm also still combing through my hundreds of photos, trying to find the best ones to share. Until I get that done, I recommend looking through the last nine or so posts at http://www.somebeaut.com/ to see Cardgrrl's best photography from our Florida trip.

Guess the casino, #806

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Rio

Poker gems, #411

Dusty Schmidt, in Card Player magazine column, March 9, 2011 (vol. 24, #5), page 70, on why he thinks staking other players is a bad idea.


For the most part, if a player is as good as he thinks he is, he should have the money and not need a stake. But for the sake of argument, let's say the person asking for the stake is right: He can crush the games; he just doesn't want to wait six months or a year to get in on the big action. What that person is telling me is that he's lazy and impatient, two traits that will lead to the demise of any poker player. This is the sort of player who'll take too many unnecessary risks, won't put in the hours away from the table, will go on tilt, will get lax during good runs, and won't function well as his own boss. Literally every poker player I've known who's both talented and broke has some extreme quality to his personality of which I don't want to be a part. Patience and personal responsibility are absolutely essential to poker success; without them, you might as well not even try.

Things might be about to get interesting around here

This came in the mail today. In 32 years of eligibility, I've never been called before.

Clean hands, see?

I'm watching "High Stakes Poker" from last weekend. I was intrigued by this disclaimer, which came in the middle of an ad for the Bellagio spa. (HSP is taped at the Bellagio now.)

My guess is that this message has a very small target audience--specifically, the members of the Nevada Gaming Control Board. It seems to be saying, "Hey, we just provide the table and cards and chips here, as we are properly licensed to do. We have nothing whatsoever to do with those patches on the players' clothing. We would never, ever enter into a partnership with a law-breaking place like PokerStars, the way that nasty, naughty Venetian did. We are good boys and girls, and want Santa to remember that fact come Christmas."

Proofreading fail

I noticed this full-page ad in the new issue of Bluff magazine. Apparently the good folks in the advertising department of DoylesRoom never learned the difference between cardinal and ordinal numbers. How do you earn "14th bracelets"?

Poker gems, #410

Corwin Cole, in Bluff magazine, April, 2011, page 38.


You probably thought, all this time, that what you needed to do was to learn more strategy. After coaching dozens of prefessionals over the past five years, I can assure that you were mistaken. What you actually needed to learn was how to implement the strategy you already know as well as possible. If you played to your full potential on a daily basis, you would be surprised just how good you already are, without learning anything new.

Poker gems, #409

Jennifer Tilly, in Bluff magazine column (April, 2011, page 65), on installing a heads-up display for her online play, then abandoning it.


At the end of each day, there is a nasty little graph tumbling downhill to show how much I lost in that session. And in case the graph is confusing to me, there is also a concise summation with a minus sigh followed by a very large number....

Maybe, eventually, I will go back to the HUD again.... But for now, I think I will just go back to playing the old-fashioned way. I don't need to be reminded every time I turn on my computer that I'm not as good as I think I am. I was tapping on my own fish tank.

Guess the casino, #805

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Orleans

Heading home/Charlize

I'm at the Tampa airport. Cardgrrl just left on her flight home to D.C. I have about two hours before mine leaves for Vegas.

It has been one of the most enjoyable weeks of my life. We had the world's most perfect weather. I enjoyed meeting Cardgrrl's aunt. We picked a nice variety of activities. And the company, of course, was not to be surpassed.

The highlight was Sunday spent on Sanibel Island. We spent the afternoon riding rental bicycles through the Darling National Wildlife Refuge, then had yummy homemade ice cream at Pinocchio's. To end the day, we wanted a sunset on the beach, so we headed to the northern tip of the adjoining Captiva Island, where we hit pay dirt. The beach was beautiful, and the sunset was spectacular beyond words.

To top it off, a great blue heron swooped down on the beach just before sundown, and just waded around for 20 minutes or so, occasionally plucking a small fish from the Gulf of Mexico. The combination of the magnificent bird posing for all who wished to photograph it and the pinks and oranges with which the sun was painting the sky was so absurdly picturesque that we laughed out loud about how easy great nature photography was under such circumstances. I even suspected that the heron was a robotic model sent by the local Chamber of Commerce to provide tourists with a literally picture-perfect experience.

We named the bird Charlize The Heron, for her ridiculous beauty and acting talent. Between us, Cardgrrl and I took over a hundred shots of the scene. You can see her best result here. I couldn't settle on just one, but here are my favorite six. (Click on them for full size.)














There's much more about the trip to report, of course. I'll probably do it in several smaller pieces over the next week or so, while I get resettled into my daily routine. But Charlize couldn't wait.

Guess the casino, #804

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Imperial Palace

Guess the casino, #803

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Answer: Caesars Palace

Guess the casino, #802

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Answer: Caesars Palace

Guess the casino, #801

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Answer: Venetian

Guess the casino, #800

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Answer: Venetian

Guess the casino, #799

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Answer: South Point

Time out

Tuesday morning I'm heading to Florida for a week with Cardgrrl. Thanks to all for the nice list of suggestions of things to do and see. I have a ton of stuff to do before leaving, so I don't expect to be posting until I get there and find something to share. Or maybe not until I get home--who knows? We'll just have to see.

Stupid new rule

Go read about it here. (I added a comment to the post pointing out an additional bit of stupidity.)

If you come across this in any Vegas poker room, I encourage you to talk to the floor person (away from the table), and point out how idiotic it is. Maybe if enough of us do that, it will go away.

Guess the casino, #798

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Answer: Monte Carlo

Charlie Sheen: Tiger blood and Adonis DNA

My friend Jennifer posted on her blog a thoughtful critique of the seemingly cavalier attitude many people have about watching what she perceives as the self-destruction of Charlie Sheen. I started writing a comment to that post, but as it grew far longer than is appropriate for a comment to a blog post, I decided to put it here instead, even though it has nothing to do with poker.

Jen:

I understand your perspective, and I'm not totally unsympathetic to it.

But.

I don't think that even the broad, generic diagnosis of "illness" is certain here. I'm not wearing rose-colored glasses. What I see in that clip (which I had not seen before) and what I’ve heard in other snippets in news media is absolutely consistent with the manic phase of a bipolar disorder, among other possible diagnoses. If he were to get put on lithium, calm down, look back at the record he left this month, and say, “Wow, I was SO out of it,” well, that wouldn’t surprise me.

I don’t go as far as Thomas Szasz and say (in essence) that there is no such thing as mental illness. But I definitely think that there is a lot of gray between the white of “normal” and the black of “mentally ill,” and within the gray zone I’m not sure how to label things.

As I’m sure you know, there is a long history of association between bizarre personalities and amazing creativity. From what I can tell from other sources, Mozart really was rather as he is portrayed in “Amadeus,” and surely the same uniquely connected network of neurons was ultimately responsible for both his shocking conduct and his unparalleled musical genius. It’s easy to blame Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson’s strangeness on drugs, but maybe not. Maybe their quirks were hard-wired in, tightly bound with their literary creativity, and the drugs were either self-medication or just amplifying already-present characteristics.

Vincent Van Gogh. David Foster Wallace. Sylvia Plath. Ernest Hemingway. Charlie Parker. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. It’s almost trivially easy to reel off a list of people who have had both staggering talent and terrible demons. For them, it may be that the one could not exist without the other.

I remember reading, in Oliver Sacks’s “The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat” the story of his patient with Tourette’s syndrome. He could squelch the tics and verbal outbursts with antipsychotic medications, but when he did so, he lost his ability to improvise as a professional jazz musician. His melodic creativity and his Tourette’s were inextricably linked.

What I’m getting at is this: Sheen’s recent rants, while far from being immortal prose that will be studied for centuries, display undeniable creativity. He has single-handedly put a couple dozen new, interesting, catchy memes and phrases into the language and culture. (To be sure, there’s a lot of bile mixed in, too.) I don’t think that appreciating such a burst of originality is clearly wrong, in the same way that it would be, say, to gawk or even laugh at somebody self-immolating himself in the town square without trying to stop him or call for help.

Perhaps the most useful criterion for judging how far toward black the gray of startlingly odd conduct—a label that clearly fits the recent Sheen—is becoming is that of function. Is the person able to perform the activities of daily living—food acquisition, preparation, and consumption, maintaining shelter, at least rudimentary personal hygiene, etc.? If not, if he or she is clearly failing in such a way as to be in real danger, then it really doesn’t matter whether the lapse is due to drug usage, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s dementia, depression, or whatever—friends, family, and society in general should intervene. At some point, we have to value preserving life and health over autonomy and leaving each other alone to lead our own lives. The threshold should be high, but it does exist.

I don’t know how Sheen would come out on such a test. It’s certainly true that with enough money you can hide or disguise terrible dysfunction a lot longer. If I reliably knew that he was setting fires in his home and narrowly escaping the resulting carnage, or cutting his wrists, or whatever, then yeah, my ambivalence would turn to sympathy and a wish that he would be given help—involuntarily, if necessary. But I place a high enough value on the liberty of an individual to be himself, even if his behavior is well off the reservation, that I’m not yet ready to declare Sheen at the point of imminent harm where we collectively say “enough” and move to get him help that he doesn’t seem to want.

For now, he appears to be enjoying himself. I’m not convinced it’s wrong to enjoy the ride along with him. I would agree that for those who are persuaded that he is mentally ill and heading rapidly over the waterfall, pointing and laughing at the spectacle is pretty reprehensible. For that reason, I admire the consistency between your analysis that he is, in some way, sick, and your condemnation of those who are looking forward to watching the train run off the tracks. I’m just not sure that that conclusion is correct. For all we know, this could all be an elaborate piece of performance art, like Joaquin Phoenix.

Perhaps he’s in much more immediate danger of serious harm than I think. If it turns out that that is so, I’ll join you in doing the little that I can, which is to turn away and not reward him with yet another audience member. But for now, I’m inclined to sit back and watch (though not much; a little bit of wound-up Sheen goes a long way for me), wonder what’s going on, laugh at the bits I find funny, cringe at some of the rest, and hope that the high-wire act ends well and without irreversible damage. (I suppose you could say that killing his show is already irreversible damage. But I never cared for that show, he doesn’t need the money, and, besides, it is the fate of nearly all TV shows to end somewhere around the seven-year mark anyway, if not long before.) He wants to be a spectacle; in the absence of evidence that he’s really in danger, I don’t feel guilty doing a little spectating.

(A bit of credit: My thinking along these lines was prompted by a thoughtful monologue that Dennis Miller did on his radio show a few days ago.)

Ironman tournament

I went to the Aria today, knowing that it was the last tournament in this year's Ironmen of Poker schedule. I had hoped to spend some quality time with the boys. Sadly, in the four hours I lasted, I never had one of them at a table with me (as far as I know; there are a couple I haven't met, so perhaps one was with me and I didn't realize it), which felt like a big ol' cheat. I should have asked for my money back.

Three things of note happened.


1. Ejection.

A couple of minutes before we were to get underway, I heard a loud call for "Security!" I have heard this much more often as a joke than as a real alarm, so I didn't think much of it. But I looked to see what the source was. To my great surprise, it was Todd Brunson, charging out of Ivey's Room. This was no joke; he was obviously pissed off.

I follow him on Twitter, so I knew that Shawn Sheikhan had been causing trouble for the Aria games recently. Sure enough, that's who the problem player was again. I snapped this picture, which unfortunately is basically useless:



The guy in the dark jacket stepped in front of me just as I was documenting Sheikhan and the other guy nose to nose and chest to chest, looking about ready to erupt in fisticuffs. By the time the stupid phone camera reset for another shot, the poker room personnel had separated them, so the moment was lost.

A few minutes later, Sheikhan was escorted out (via a private elevator that I had never noticed before--just a few steps from Ivey's Room) by four large men in black suits.

Here are the relevant portions from Brunson's recent Twitter stream:








It sounds like Sheikhan may have finally gone too far, and managed to get himself permanently excluded from the property. Seriously, WTH is wrong with that guy? He is Bad For Poker. We don't need people that prone to violence.


2. First hand.

First hand of the tournament, I am happy to look down and see A-A. We all started with 8000 chips, and the blinds are 25/50, so we have 160 big blinds. Because people play the first hands so cautiously, I thought I would probably raise, pick up the blinds, and that would be that. Nope. I raised to 150. Guy three to my left reraises to 450. I add another 1000 on top of that, and he immediately announces "All in." Hmmm, let me think. What should I do? OK, I call. He has K-K. I win.

Doubling up on the first hand of the tournament--that was a new one for me. I wish I could make it happen more often.


3. Telescope.

A couple of hours in, I was moved to a new table. We had a visually impaired player there. I didn't know it at first, because I didn't notice anything abnormal in his appearance or conduct. But I raised my first hand at the table, and he asked the dealer for a estimate of my stack. The dealer had just sat down, and others at the table quickly explained to her that the player really couldn't see that far. (I was across the table from him.)

On subsequent hands, I noticed him using a small telescope-like device to see the cards on the board:





He was, however, apparently able to see his own cards, though it looked like it took some effort on his part.

This was another new thing for me. I've played with Hal Lubarsky, who has an assistant tell him the cards and the action, but I've never before played with somebody who used an optical assist device. I'm really curious what his diagnosis is that makes him unable to see cards less than two feet in front of him, but it didn't seem like it would be polite to ask.

Guess the casino, #797

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below. (The name of the casino has been subtlely erased from the photo. If you look really hard, you might be able to tell where it was.)




Answer: Hooters

Just a thought

The Ironmen of Poker are in town. As part of this year's adventures, they have implemented a "Third World Poker Tour." As explained by Grange95:

Santa has finally implemented a plan he and I have been mulling for a couple of years—The Third World Poker Tour. Ironmen will be randomly assigned—sentenced—to play a two hour session at some of the finer poker rooms in Vegas: Tropicana, Hooters, Excalibur, Luxor, Stratosphere, Sahara, Circus Circus, Riviera, and Imperial Palace. Santa and I agree that one of the best parts of the Vegas poker experience is playing at some of the less-glamorous rooms. Most of the Ironmen are poker snobs who live at Venetian, Bellagio, Wynn, or Aria, and whine about "slumming it" at Mirage or MGM (don't even suggest Planet Hollywood, TI, or Bally's!). Hopefully hilarity, hijinks, and arrests will ensue.

I saw Tweets originating from the Stratosphere today, so I know that the plan is being implemented. It got me to thinking....

If one usually plays the lowest-stakes no-limit hold'em games at the Venetian, Bellagio, Wynn, and Aria, then goes "slumming" to the IP, Stratosphere, Sahara, Riviera, etc., would that be considered seeing how the other $1/2 lives?

[Rimshot.]

Guess the casino, #796

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Tuscany

Guess the casino, #795

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Mirage

Submit your photos

Today I put together the next bunch of "Guess the casino" posts so that they will keep popping up while I'm away in Florida. It made me realize that I'm starting to run short of usable pictures (not surprising, after about 800 such posts now).

If you have photos of either the interior or exterior of Vegas-area casinos--limited to those that have or have had poker rooms within the last few years--that you think would make good material for this feature, please feel free to email them to me (address is in the "profile" in the left-hand margin).

I still have plenty of shots of the handful of most obviously visually interesting and photogenic places--Aria, Venetian, Caesars Palace, Bellagio. It's others that I'm lacking.

Small legal points: Please only send photos that you have taken yourself, not ones that you found somewhere else on the intertubez. Also, sending them implies giving your permission to use them, though it will only be for this silly little feature, and only once--I'm not compiling a book or anything. Please also include a notation about how you would like to be attributed, e.g., full name, nickname, anonymous, or whatever. I need your real name on the email (because I'll be suspicious that anonymous submissions are not using their own work), but will publish or withhold whatever you prefer in terms of identification.

Obviously, I can't promise to use everything you might send; I might not think a picture works, or it duplicates something I've already done, etc. But I'd really like to try to use what I reasonably can. Finally, please identify the casino for me--don't make ME guess!

Thanks!

Vegas palaces

Extremely short quiz for you today: How many casinos are there in the Las Vegas/North Las Vegas/Henderson area that have, or within the past five years have had, poker rooms, with the word "Palace" in the name of the casino?

Scroll down for the answer.











Five. Specifically, Caesars Palace, Imperial Palace, Nevada Palace (closed, renovated, and reopened as the Eastside Cannery), Palace Station, and Poker Palace.

Guess the casino, #794

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Answer: Harrah's

New blog

Nelson Rose, one of the most prolific and accessible experts on gambling law, has finally set up his own blog on that subject. It was an instant add-on to my RSS reader.

http://www.gamblingandthelaw.com/blog.html

Nothing to lose

In one of the last matches of the "regular season" portion of the Doubles Poker Championship, an unusual dynamic emerged. Gus Hansen and Johnny Chan were paired up. Hansen could not make the finals, no matter how well his team performed in this last match. Conversely, Chan was the overall point leader, having finished tops in all three of the first matches, and so would finish the "season" in the #1 spot, regardless of the outcome of this last match.

All three of the other three teams, however, had either one member or both who could not afford to be the first out; they needed at least a third-place finish in order to accumulate the last few points required to make the finals. It was as if there were a tournament bubble for everybody except for Hansen and Chan.

The two recognized the situation for what it was, and exploited it mercilessly, raising and reraising with total air, openly daring their opponents to call and risk elimination. They had some motivation to try to win; they would split $10,000 for winning the match. But in essence they had nothing to lose, while everybody else had a lot to lose.

Sunday night I was playing in the hyper-fun Donkey Island blogger tournament. I had been cruising well most of the way, but then had a serious downfall, and was reduced to something like six big blinds. I followed what has now become standard tournament advice, and pounded the hell out of it. If the action folded to me, I shoved with nearly any two cards in order to steal the blinds and/or get called and have the chance for a double-up.

This wasn't subtle; I wasn't trying to look like I was being less aggressive than I really was. It was flagrant enough that BuddyDank, doing live commentary for BuddyDank Radio, commented on it a few times: "Rakewell is stealing a lot of blinds." "Who's going to stop him?"

The run finally ended when I open-pushed from the button with K-10, got called by A-10 in the big blind, and couldn't get lucky.

If I just sat back and waited for a premium hand, the most likely outcome would be getting blinded down to a point where I would have to shove with a stack so small that it would guarantee a call, when even a double-up would still leave me critically short. Doing nothing to save myself would have meant washing out. It was therefore both correct and obvious to take rather drastic measures in a desperate attempt to regain a workable chip stack, because the worst that could happen was what was going to happen if I didn't do so--get knocked out.

The point, though, was that I was playing as if I had nothing to lose, because, well, I had nothing to lose.

You see the same sort of play in free games and freeroll tournaments. When people have nothing invested, they feel as though they have nothing to lose, and so play like complete maniacs. What's the worst possible outcome? They lose...nothing.

It's not too often that one gets to play poker as if there is nothing to lose. It's kind of fun and liberating when the rare opportunity comes along.

Bonus: I'm incapable of thinking along the lines of "nothing to lose" and "can't make it worse" without fondly recalling the great stoning scene from Monty Python's "The Life of Brian." So for your viewing pleasure:

Strange televised hand

Thanks to a Tweet from PokerListings for alerting me to this post on twoplustwo.com, which in turn points to this page, where you can watch a video of one of the strangest hands ever on televised poker. It starts at about the 2:20 mark.

I don't recognize any of these players, but the one identified as Vicente open-raises with A-J. When he thinks that everybody has folded, he shows his cards--but he has missed the fact that the big blind, identified as Alfredo, has not yet acted. Alfredo, with 9-9, gets to play the hand knowing what Vicente holds. He calls.

Alfredo flops great: 9-2-J. He bets out, gets raised, reraises, and gets called again. J on the turn gives Alfredo a full house, Vicente trip jacks with ace kicker--a seemingly ideal situation for both players getting all the chips in. Instead it's just bet and call.

The river is where it gets astonishingly weird. It's another 2, double-pairing the board and counterfeiting Alfredo's boat. Understandably, he checks. Also understandably, Vicente bets. But then comes the inexplicable:

1. Alfredo check-raises all in.

2. Vicente calls. (OK, that part is not inexplicable.)

3. The hands are revealed, and, though it's hard to be sure, it seems from the reactions that both players think Alfredo is the winner!

So did Alfredo really believe that he had the best hand when he bet his last chips? If so, how did he misread the board and his opponent's hand so badly? If not, did he really think that the top full house would fold for fear of having run into the only hand that could beat him (quad deuces)?

Did Vicente really believe that he had lost the hand when Alfredo's 9-9 was opened? If so, how? I mean, before you call an all-in bet, don't you explicitly list in your head all the hands that might have you beat? In this case, it was only 2-2. Nothing else. So how could he think he had lost to 9-9 there?

I seriously don't understand either player.

Isn't poker supposed to be easy if you're looking at your opponent's cards?

(For extra fun, have Google translate the page and try to follow the action. You get, e.g., this: "It all begins when Vicente, one of the online classified hand opens up with garlic." This in itself is a small comedy of errors. First, the web reporter got the hand wrong. It was Ac-Jc, but he wrote it as "AJo" (ace-jack offsuit). Because the Spanish word for garlic is ajo, that's how Google translates it.)

Guess the casino, #793

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Answer: Excalibur

Guess the casino, #792

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Answer: Treasure Island

Seed and Cunningham know

They know 2-4 always gets there.

"How can I lose?"

I have finished watching the "regular season" portion of the Doubles Poker Championship. One of the last matches had two back-to-back hands worth sharing.

In the first, somebody says the words in the title of this post, and something happens in the hand to cause the priceless quartet of faces you see above (screen shot cropped to eliminate the cards). Try to catch all the things the players say before the denouement, as they greatly enhance the fun.

The second hand is maybe the best example from the shows so far of what happens when two partners disagree on what to do in the middle of a hand. Annette Obrestad was throughout the series the one most willing to be openly critical of her teammates, so it's not surprising that she's in the heat of it again here.

Enjoy.

Guess the casino, #791

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Answer: Santa Fe Station

Doubles poker

I just watched the first three episodes of the "Doubles Poker Championship" that was shown on the Game Show Network a while back. It brings an interesting new twist to the game. 32 players enter for $50,000 each, then get randomly assigned into teams of two. Four teams compete in a match, so it takes four matches to complete one round. Points are assigned for finishing first, second, third, or fourth in a match. They redraw for partners for a second round, which I'm in the middle of now. After the "regular season" four rounds, the top half of the field with the highest point totals go on into the finals, paired up by point totals, and at the end the team that wins splits $1,000,000.

The disappointment is that the structure is obviously fast, and the editing is extreme. In one match, for example, the first hand shown was in level 3. It seems that only a couple of hands are shown before they get to the all-in/fold stage.

But the interesting aspect is the team dynamics. The players alternate streets: A handles pre-flop and turn, B handles flop and river, and they can't discuss it as the hand plays out. You sometimes end up with personality and/or style mismatches.

The biggest clash so far was Annette Obrestad giving Huck Seed a rather severe dressing down for a move she thought he shouldn't have made--raising with two pair on the turn on an intensely coordinated board. As the commentators noted, from the harshness of her words and tone it really seemed that she thought Seed had no idea how to play poker. (I think it's fair to say that his resume would suggest otherwise; he was winning the WSOP main event when she was 7 years old.) Conversely, in a post-show interview, he confessed that he thought she misplayed the river on that same hand--they might have been able to steal instead of ending up with a chopped pot--but he was much more subdued in raising his point. She responded that she didn't know how to manage that spot, because her style of play would not have put her in that situation.

It makes for an interesting and entertaining format, a genuinely new and different twist on televised poker shows.

I wish only two things--first, that they had doubled the number of shows in order to include more play before it got to the shoving point, and, second, that somebody had shown Huck Seed how to use a comb and a razor.

Predictions, rounds 2 and 3

Three of my four divisions are already completely dead; I cannot win any more points in them. Luckily, though, in the Clubs bracket there are two left, and they are exactly the two that I predicted. This makes me feel like something of a genius, in spite of all of the other evidence to the contrary.

Play roshambo against a computer

This is more interesting than it has any right to be. Try the "veteran" version. It's positively creepy to feel the computer analyzing your moves and guessing what you'll do next--especially since it's so good at it. Out of 100 trials, I won 25, tied 41, and lost 34. It seemed not to matter whether I tried to be random, or tried to deduce what the computer would be expecting and then counter it. Either way, I lost more than I won.

For the second round of 100, I decided to enlist a little computer help of my own. I used Excel to generate a random number 1, 2, or 3, and entered my choice accordingly. That allowed me to improve to 37 wins, 32 ties, and 31 losses. Ya gotta fight fire with fire.

Tax court decision

Mayo v. Commissioner.

I was alerted to this case by a column in Poker Player Newspaper (March 14, 2011) by Shari Geller. It appears to be an important decision regarding a couple of previously ambiguous and contested areas of tax law for gamblers--specifically, the deductibility of gambling losses and non-wagering expenses incurred in the course of gambling. Worth reading if this is something that might make a difference in how you do your taxes.

My results, first round

No spoilers here; for all the winners and losers in the first round of the NBC Heads-Up Championship, see here. I'm just here to report that I got right 3/8 Diamonds, 4/8 Clubs, 1/8 Hearts, and 7/8 Spades, for 15/32 overall. Two of the four people I picked to make the semifinals are out already. I think it's gonna be hard for me to win this $10 bracket thingy.

Guess the casino, #790

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Answer: Planet Hollywood

Guess the casino, #789

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Answer: MGM Grand

Heads-up predictions

The NBC Heads-Up Poker Championship match-ups have been set, and I have made my predictions, as noted above. This time I did it without the help of Ambien.

My picks are completely unscientific. Sometimes it's just who I like better or would like to see win. Sometimes it's just voting against somebody I despise. Sometimes it's just a whim or a hunch. Not too surprisingly, I tend to run about 50% in these predictions every year.

I'm picking a dark horse--Olivier Busquet--to win it all.

The ever-amazing KevMath has already set up a place where you can enter your predictions for the entire event, and will be taking $10 entries. Point system, etc., all explained here. I decided to add a little spice to my life and submitted my guesses along with my $10. Maybe I'll clean up. More likely, it's kissing the money good-bye, but it will be fun.

Guess the casino, #788

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Answer: Hard Rock

Guess the casino, #787

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Answer: El Cortez

A calculation mystery

So I played VeryJosie a quick series of four heads-up matches tonight, of which she won three. Nice job, congrats, etc. Not surprisingly, she quickly writes up a blog post about it, in which she claims that in one key hand she got her money in "goot," and that she was "very slightly ahead."

It's true that she was ahead in terms of having the best hand on the flop (when it all went in), but I was actually a favorite to win, with 15 outs twice. She had As-Kh versus my Qd-9d on a flop of 6s-4d-5d. In order to provide her proof of the math, I went to cardplayer.com and entered the cards into their odds calculator. I was puzzled by the results:

It says I'm only 39% to win there, which I was sure wasn't right.

For confirmation, I went to PokerStove, which provided what I was confident was the correct answer:

That's 55% me, 45% Josie.

But I'm left with this mystery: What's wrong with the CardPlayer odds calculator? I really can't figure out how it came up so far off.

"Wait" means wait

Almost forgot a little incident from the Palms last night. I should have saved my purple felt picture for this post. Oh well.

The Palms has a long-running promotion that they call "Diamonds Are Forever." If you hit a diamond flush, your name is entered into a drawing. The next day they randomly select three names from the previous day's list of players who made diamond flushes, and those three people win $100 each. It's not a lot of money, and it's pretty rare to both make a diamond flush and then get chosen for a prize, but hey, something is better than nothing. I have been selected exactly once in the past.

Last night I called a flop bet with a flush draw, made it on the turn, and called another bet, hoping he would fire a third time. He didn't. I bet and he quickly folded.

As soon as he mucked, I said to the dealer, "Wait," because I could see that she was about to scoop up the board cards. She heard me, but continued with her task, and to my horror I saw the board cards gathered up, turned over, and put in with the muck. As she did this, she explained, "It's OK, he folded."

Obviously, she had concluded that my "Wait" request was because I thought she was mistakenly cleaning up the table before the hand was over. She knew that that wasn't the case, so felt free to disregard my plea.

I don't think I've ever seen this before. In joints that offer bonuses for high hands, bad beats, etc., dealers are usually extremely alert for signs that somebody has made one. They will often pause a bit before clearing away the cards, to give a player a chance to reveal his hole cards for proof of the hand. Some dealers will even ask if there is a qualifying hand, should the board cards make one possible. Motives for this conduct aren't hard to figure out; in addition to wanting to be helpful to the players, the dealer can usually expect a nice tip if the player wins free money.

It turns out that the young woman from last night is only a part-time fill-in at the Palms, and, in fact, this was only her second shift there. She usually deals at the Venetian, where there are no bonuses or jackpots, so no reason to keep the board intact for verification when a hand is over. She seemed not to even know about the diamond-flush promotion.

I was able to show my two diamonds in the hole, and two other players joined me in confirming that there were three more on the board, so in the end I didn't lose out. We'll see tomorrow if I get $100 worth of lucky. (The flush came just after midnight.)

But, hey, dealers: If a player tells you, loudly and clearly, "Wait," here's an idea. Stop what you're doing and find out why that request is being made. Sure, sometimes it will be due to a misunderstanding, and it will waste a few seconds with no gain. But since that's the worst that can happen, how about giving us the benefit of the doubt? Once in a while, we might actually have a legitimate reason to be blowing that particular whistle.

Unhealthy marriages

I played at the Palms last night. A few months ago they got new felt on the tables--a lovely, rich, royal purple. It might be the prettiest poker-table covering in Vegas. This photo doesn't do it justice. It looks kind of faded here, but it's not.

The play was pretty boring, and I ended up with no good poker stories to tell. There was one odd incident related to life in general, though. My table had five friends who were in town for a convention. One of them told the others that his 13-year-old daughter had "busted" him that morning. She apparently noticed that his golf bag was absent from the garage, and mentioned it to her mother.

That's all I know of the story, but you can sort of guess at the missing pieces. The whole thing baffles me, though. A couple of years ago I wrote about seeing a slice of a strange marriage, in which a guy called his wife in order to get permission to receive a back massage while playing poker, and was told no. This golf story puzzles me in the same way. What kind of marriage is this?

In what kind of marriage is playing golf while in Vegas something that a husband needs to be secretive about, and a wife gets upset about? Of course, his primary purpose is the convention, but so what? Most people attending meetings here take some time off to relax as part of the trip. It's perfectly normal. And since the weather here makes golf possible in February, when much of the country is in the middle of forced abstinence, who can be surprised that it's such a popular part of winter Vegas excursions?

I think of the women who have been important in my life, and imagine a few other hypothetical ones with various arrays of qualities that I might appreciate. Not one of these real or imaginary women would be bothered if I said that I was going to take advantage of a convention in Vegas to play a round or two of golf. They might be terribly surprised, since I don't golf, but never mind that little flaw in my musing here. I can't imagine getting any reaction except along the lines of, "That's nice, dear--have fun," or "Good--you've been needing some exercise," or, "Well, it's cheaper than you losing money at poker!"

Similarly, I can't imagine ever wanting or needing to try to conceal such plans from my wife. I've learned the hard way that doing things one's partner disapproves of, and trying to keep it a secret, just isn't worth the guilt and anxiety and fights and loss of trust that result. Live your life as an open book to your spouse. Where you have disagreements about activities, work out compromises that you can both agree to in good faith and stick to happily. Cheating on promises and/or going behind each other's backs is cancerous to a healthy, happy relationship.

If this guy reneged on some sort of no-golf promise, and/or if this wife made him enter into a no-golf promise, and/or he lied to her about not playing golf while on this trip, and/or she would disapprove for any reason of his playing golf while in Vegas, well, I just can't see any of those things being compatible with a marriage worth having.

I can understand a wife being bothered if her husband's Vegas convention did or was planned to include a strip club or excessive drunkenness or a side trip to a brothel. But being upset about golf? Or a husband being willing and/or feeling the need to be clandestine about a game of golf? That is one screwed-up marriage, if you ask me.

Incidentally, here's a bit of Palms news. Through February they offered double comps ($2/hour) while playing poker, plus their ongoing promotion that you additionally earn a ticket to the buffet for every 8 hours of play. I learned last night that this offer will continue through the month of March. So for all you nits who plan your play around free food, line up!

Guess the casino, #786

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Answer: Texas Station

It just gets uglier and uglier

I don't follow the minutiae of the ongoing UltimateBlecch/Absolute Puker investigations, but I do read what shows up in places like Pokerati, and, especially, Haley Hintze's blog. Her latest installment, here, drops what was for me an unexpected bomb (though I gather that it won't be as much of a shocker to those who have been following things in more detail)--and that is that the main cadre of cheaters may have included TWO former WSOP Main Event winners, not just one.

It's all just so disgusting. What's most disgusting of all is how the company still goes on pretending that its hands are clean, that it was a victim, that a paper transfer of ownership somehow wiped all the muck and stains away.

No wait--what's even more disgusting than that is that there are apparently tens of thousands of people who continue to play on this site, who continue to hand over their money to these lying, thieving criminals. That I really, seriously, just cannot comprehend. What is wrong with you people?

Might be a poker player

Seen at the Palms tonight.

Florida

I'm booked for a trip to Florida for several days in mid-March. It's theoretically possible that Cardgrrl will be in the same vicinity at the same time.

I've never been to the gulf coast, so suggestions for fun/interesting things to do in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area and the Ft. Myers area are hereby solicited. This includes needing basic info about poker rooms in that part of the state.

Thief

Fellow bloggers, you might want to look at rodmanpoker.com and see if they are stealing your posts the same way they are stealing mine. Predictably, there is no contact information, so nobody to complain to.

Thanks to HighOnPoker for alerting me to this.

Update

I wrote to the site owner and asked him what he was doing. He replied: "Sorry Ill remove it.. I was just messing around with auto blogs.. I don't even have any ads on the sites.. sorry about that." And, in fact, it does appear that the site has now removed the material.

Guess the casino, #785

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Answer: Paris

Guess the casino, #784

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Answer: Mandalay Bay