The Lucky Donut

I keep finding three chips in my pocket that I came away with from The Vic last week.  A reminder to actually write down what happened on my first visit there, I suppose.

I usually play the 1 rebuy tournament at Gutshot if I'm in London on a Wednesday but the last week in each month is now the Team Gutshot satellite.  I didn't qualify for any bonus chips (awarded for playing regularly or finishing on a final table) so essentially I'd be starting with a crippled stack

So last Wednesday I went to the Vic and played their £30+£3 freezeout.  I handed over two twenty pound notes and got a £5 and two £1 chips as change.  Naturally, I never cashed these in before I left.

Although I did actually forget I had them after I busted out, I may well have bottled it anyway for the sake of £7, hoping that I'd go again soon, get more change in chips and eventually have something resembling an amount worth cashing in.  Not that I'd feel quite right about even bothering to cash in £7 of chips there.  It's a very swanky joint, considering it basically occupies the attic above Woolworths on a street of tower blocks.  Too much for me - I ran straight back outside after registering and found a nice cosy McDonalds.

With their scratchcard promo I won a McChicken Sandwich for next time.  You have to scratch off two panels from four to win (a 1 in 6 chance of winning, assuming there are only two symbols the same).  The card I won with had the matching symbols behind boxes 3 and 4, as did another I lost on.  I've since seen another three scratchcards which all had their winning symbols behind doors 3 and 4, but have just decided to try to lose a stone before Vegas (let's see how long it lasts this time) so probably won't get chance to see whether this is always the case.  I make it 1295-1 to find five out of five with the winning symbols all in the same position.  I'm sure Claire will correct my maths if I'm wrong...

Back to The Vic.  Back through the revolving door, and God forbid you push the door round yourself - they have someone to do that for you (this place is wasted on me - all I could think is how much they would save by investing in a door motor).  Back upstairs to try and find the other half of the cardroom.  The one I'd found, and registered at, had tables with numbers nowhere close to the one I was meant to be sitting at.  It turns out there's more tables on the second floor, where I'd accidentally stumbled earlier to be greeted with stares of "you don't really know where you're going, do you?" from someone in some kind of uniform at the top of the stairs.  Ha!  Turns out I was meant to be there after all.

Regular tournaments are limited to 72 players.  That's 8 tables of 9.  The worst way I can think of to describe the shape of the tables is like a 50p coin, but with two more sides.  The correct word, I always thought, was nonagon, although I've since discovered that enneagon is also acceptable.  I'd never heard that word before, and I've also never seen a poker table like these.  Not only were they an unusual polygon, they also had chip racks embedded in which everyone was using.  Stacking and riffling chips was possible, but I didn't want to be the only one doing it.

The tournament kicked off very slowly, with 1500 chips each and 25/25 blinds, moving to 25/50 and 50/100 after 20 minutes.  Then it went mental, taking nearly ten minutes to remove all the 25 chips (I nearly said "green chips" instinctively, but of course they were some other colour that I can't remember, but probably different to anywhere else) without stopping the clock and jumping straight to 100/200 for the remaining half a level then on to 200/400.

Double, double, double them blinds.  And so the crap shoot began, and I stayed lucky long enough to make it down to the last two tables, along the way apparently forcing 99 to fold on a very low board when I moved in with my pocket 8s.  KQo called me with his overcards though.  Can't ask for much more.

Then with blinds at 600/1200, rising to 800/1600 within a couple of hands, and a stack that had dwindled to 4900 after a couple of rounds with no opportunities, I felt I needed to push with any two cards when it was folded around to my small blind.  For Harrington fans, my M is less than 3, and with 14 players remaining, the average stack of 7,700 was still in the red zone.  I ended up in very bad shape with my Q2 racing against QT and not finding the miracle it needed.  The poker in this tournament was long gone, and I didn't quite get lucky enough.

And they're still looking after another seven quid of mine.

Exhausted!  Took advantage of daylight savings time and got up at 7am to start playing as many multi-table tournaments on Empire Poker as I possibly could before I dropped dead.  Discovered the hard way that Empire doesn't allow more than six tables to be open at a time (I'm sure it used to be 10..). In the end, I played 29, cashed in 7 and walked away with a profit of $131.

More importantly, though, I racked up 77 regular VIP points and 841 bonus points (29 squared!).  If I'd really tried I think I could have squeezed in maybe three more tournaments, but it's not a bad effort.

Seven or eight more days like that and I'm in the Royal Flush Club!

I really don't want to say this.  I'm still not completely sure I believe it.  But the figures look good - there is a very real chance that I can actually beat the $2/$4 game on PokerRoom now, and for a decent rate too.  There have been two monster bonuses the last couple of months - $250 and $500 to mark the launch of their Silver Room and Gold Room programs respectively.  This has given me a much bigger sample to look at than any of the Party Poker bonuses I've played, and then posted up the mindnumbing stats.

Here are the equally mindnumbing stats from my last two months grinding PokerRoom.  I've really had to guess at how long I spent playing in total, sometimes I only played two tables, but usually, and particularly the past few weeks, I played four at a time.

Hands played:  9140      (for 7500 FPPs)
Hours played:  132.6     (approx 40 man hours)
Rake paid:     $796.00   (they make $46.00 from my action)
Amount won:    $827.60   (2.26 BB per 100 hands)
Win rate:      $20.69/hr
Bonus awarded: $750.00
Rate w/bonus:  $39.44/hr

Now, if you don't mind me saying so, this is bloody good!  I've made more than two big bets per 100 hands in a sample size of over 9000 hands.  Not a massive sample by any means, but big enough to suggest to me that, even if I did run pretty hot towards the end, I could turn a steady profit here.  Before this, I have 13,000 hands logged from PokerRoom $2/$4 and ran at a a loss of $168 (0.33BB per 100 hands).  The deposit bonuses more than made up for this, but it didn't leave me with a great hourly rate.  I don't know how significant this really is, but I'm staring at a losing record before the summer and a winning record since I got back from four weeks in Vegas...

Here's the vitals.

Vol. Put $ In Pot:       15.97%
Pre-flop Raise:           9.77%
Post-flop Aggression:     3.35
Won $ When Saw Flop:     38.62%
Went to Showdown:        30.72%
Won $ At Showdown:       57.41%
Folded SB to Steal:      87.76%
Folded BB to Steal:      55.92%
Attempt to Steal Blinds: 36.30%

I won more with KK than with AA, even though I had it fewer times, and my worst losing hand was AQo ($76 lost in 84 hands).  I was profitable with KQo to the tune of 50 cents.  Still room for improvement then...

Only problem is PokerRoom have already stopped American players depositing, and in less than two weeks they'll be blocked from playing completely.  Even if the games are still suited to my style with whatever players remain (I still don't feel confident enough to call the games "soft" with any certainty), four-tabling there is not going to be possible very often.  I think it might be time to try PokerStars again and see how badly I get my arse kicked on there now.

It's booked, we're going at Christmas!  Eight weeks tomorrow!

It looked doubtful for a while with horrendous flight prices but the triple miles offer made it just too juicy to resist.  A few years ago, we'd get a Christmas trip for two for about £600 all in.  This time it ended up at over double that, and that's not even a direct flight on the way out.

The days of an utter bargain Las Vegas holiday are almost a distant memory, but there's still value to be had now and again.  With the 3x miles promotion, silver member status, and the bonus miles for booking on a bmi Mastercard we'll end up pocketing over 75,000 miles which is worth roughly 1.6 USA flights (45,000 each).  It's very close to being a free holiday!

To put this into context, bmi just gave us both 4,000 bonus miles after complaining about a check-in fiasco on the way back in the summer.  Frankly I think it should take less than 12 complaints to earn a completely free flight!  The line was over two hours long, and we should have been able to jump it with the silver membership card.  One of the perks is "use any check-in desk", but the snooty clerk insisted her desk was for business class only - also turning away premium economy passengers, who had paid extra for a few inches of leg room, a different (they say better, I don't really know why) meal, and not having to wait to check in.  There was not a single member of bmi staff at McCarran Airport, and on a Sunday it was too late to call Diamond Club to see if we really were being stiffed.  The triple miles offer is worth about five complaints on top of your regular miles. 

We'll actually be there for Christmas Day, which is a first for us.  I have no idea what to expect, so I need to start trying to find out just what will be open.  I'll post my findings here no doubt, and we can learn together...  The casinos won't shut but places inside them may do, and I guess we'll need reservations somewhere for Christmas dinner.  Maybe at the top of the Strat, if it's open.  I'll choose my festive hat carefully.  We have to move hotels on Christmas Eve too, after learning that some hotels do not allow Saturday check-in, even on what will surely be the quietest Saturday of the year.  So we have one night in The Fitz, the self-proclaimed "luckiest casino in Las Vegas", before moving (literally) across the road to Fremont.  Won't even need to move the car, just grab the bags and walk under the world's largest canopy made out of lightbulbs.

Although the schedule hasn't been announced that far ahead yet, I'm hoping that arriving on the Saturday will give me up to four shots at a televised Ultimate Poker Challenge tournament at Binion's, which takes place every Saturday, Sunday and Monday.  Although on the first Saturday - the day we arrive - I'll probably need more than one wierd shit energy drink to make it past level 1.  May not be a good idea...  Staying within very easy walking distance of Binion's and at least three other downtown cardrooms (Plaza, Golden Nugget, Fitz - there may be more by December, and I haven't even included the two tables at "the All New Historic El Cortez") will definitely be a plus.

Claire just asked me to print off directions for her to get to John Rhodes Way in Tunstall.  It's just off Reginald Mitchell Way, the A50 bypass named after the creator of the Spitfire.  Mitchell was born and grew up in Stoke, although didn't really do anything useful until he left the area.  That's good enough though.

Wikipedia lists several John Rhodes, including a mathematician, a racing driver, a September 11th victim and a UFO expert (who said Wikipedia isn't a real encyclopedia?).  The driver is the closest option to being likely; he was at least born in the same county - at least he was back when Wolverhampton was in Staffordshire.  His mostly raced minis and only grand prix was the 1965 British Grand Prix.  He began in last place on the grid and did not finish.  The connections to the area, and to fame, are tenuous at best, and I've now started to wonder whether he actually added the entry to Wikipedia himself...

So I must have the wrong guy here, making this probably the most useless blog post ever.  Sorry.  Really I'd hoped it was the UFO spotter but I'm thinking now it was probably a soldier awarded the Victoria Cross in World War I, but the only references I can find to him are the location of his grave and a rather bizarre list of why Stoke is apparently great.

However I genuinely did not know that I the place I live was also the birthplace of Meals On Wheels, and home to the composer of the theme tune from Neighbours.  Fantastic.

The similarities between Las Vegas and Blackpool are much stronger than I first thought. Let's look at the evidence...

The winner of this year's X-Factor will be Ben. The simple reason - he has the easiest name to type on a mobile phone. VOTE BEN. It works just fine with predictive text, and nobody is going to come close to spelling it wrong. These things are very important. Last week's evictees, The Unconventionals, were doomed before they got going. VOTE UNCONVENTIONALS. Their voting details stood out like a sore thumb against all the other text keywords. Even though predictive text (on my old Nokia at least) finds its way there if you can spell it at the first attempt, you are really going to have to like these guys to be bothered to vote for them at all. I actually thought they were OK, and with a shorter name they may just have survived. Today we saw the dismissal of Wolverhampton's finest boy-band-on-a-TV-show, 4Sure. Their pre-match interviews have given us plenty of enjoyment remembering how Claire used to speak, and she'll demonstrate that she still can add a "Y" sound to pretty much every woyrd if she trieys. VOTE 4SURE. It is actually possible to do this all in one go with predictive text enabled if you press and hold 4 then type SURE but their name choice could have been better. Voters have to remember the clever pun that makes up their name, and then have to figure out how to type it. Next week it must surely be either the grimfully dismal MacDonald Brothers, or Nikitta that suffers. Neither of these acts spell their name correctly - having it the same way as burger clown Ronald, or the girl from the Elton John song would help considerably - and neither work with predictive text. We end up with VOTE MACE? and VOTE MILITU? respectively. The MacDonalds' time is next week. Surely. Please? As for the rest of the pack, Dionne has problems (VOTE DINOME), Eton Road will struggle (VOTE FUNN) and Ashley needs intervention in order for the message to be sent properly (VOTE ASHLEX). Ray is not as safe as he looks either, despite being the most likeable character on the show. VOTE RAY does get there fourth time, after cycling through SAY, SAW and PAY, but many texters won't bother to look at their screens before sending. Coupled with the fact that he's introduced as "Ray" but the huge scrolling banner lights on stage and the X-Factor web site announce him as "Raymond" (possibly a better choice, with no alternative spellings in predictive text), he might just lose a few thousand crucial votes when it matters most. Similarly, Kerry will come in second to somebody named Jerry who is not actually in the competition. The final three will be Leona, Robert and Ben. Having said all that, it's worth pointing out that I don't actually vote for things like this. I still think the idea of being charged 50p a time to cast a vote or answer a competition question is ridiculous. Instead of paying for a stamp to send in your vote, you're paying the price of two stamps you don't need, on top of whatever your normal text message cost is. If I think back to when I used to enter competitions on Saturday morning kids TV, this would be like Philip Schofield asking me to send in my answer in on the back of a postal order.

File this one under small things that get inside my head for no real reason.  This one grabbed me whilst I was in the shower and just wouldn't let go.

 Now, bearing in mind that I definitely have the geek gene, it almost makes sense that I read this as if it says:

10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

I am having mild flashbacks and my head rather hurts.  The first computer program you ever learn as a junior nerd in the early eighties is a horrible infinite loop and on any home computer that wasn't invented by the great Sir Clive Sinclair you are stuck.

At least on the good old Spectrum it would fill up one screenful and then ask "break?".  And you'd say "yes please", and life would go on.

A genuine voicemail left on my work number.  I have no idea who this is, but he obviously doesn't like the strategic call avoidance system...

Click here to play [EXPLICIT]

Here's the thing with tournaments.

Played 10, cashed once.  Net profit $386.

A terrible record, but a nice result.  I ran sooooo cold to start and wasn't getting anywhere.  I'd already given up - for the second time today.  The first time saw me heading down to McDonalds to be comforted by a Big Tasty and a BLT Deli Sandwich. The diet resumes tomorrow in theory, so I'm allowed a little something with my burger....

I'd decided that the $10 rebuy would be the last I'd play, even though I'd planned on doing a whole lot more (because of the way bonus VIP points are given on Empire, they increase exponentially the more tournaments you play in a single day).  I'd also been playing a few $6.50 turbos on PokerStars, backed into 4th place (4 get paid) once and came nowhere near on the rest of them.  Nothing had gone my way.

I was in this rebuy for $40 - two goes at the rebuy bug to top up my stack without going broke and an add on after the first hour.  That gave me a little bit less than an average stack at the break, but it was plenty to play with.  The top 20 from 190 were getting at least $70 back, but I was over $300 in the hole and really needed 7th place to get even on the day.  It's a funny old game - I ended up outlasting 187 non-Americans before busting out 3rd.

For a $40 investment, not bad at all.  It only takes one good hit to swing you back into profit in multi-table tournaments, which of course I already knew it's just nice to see it happen once in a while.  And I should be a hundred or so VIP points closer to being able to get some Empire Poker junk too.

Party Poker have cancelled virtually all of their guaranteed prize pool tournaments.  That includes the Sunday Million, which tonight was replaced by a $530 tournament with no guaratee.  The actual prize pool was $85,000.  They had 170 players.  The $215 Sunday event on PokerStars, on the other hand, is still going strong.  6157 players turned up, putting over $1.2m in the pot - I think this is a record!

The Party Poker lobby stopped reporting their total number of players connected after they shut down for the big American boot-off on Friday. PokerSiteScout says Stars has about three times as many players right now though.

The inconvenience of not being able to play any more if you are an American?

Hey apologise to the shareholders...

At 10am Eastern Time tomorrow, 3pm in the UK, President Bush is expected to sign the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Party Poker will then, retardedly, close about a gazillion accounts belonging to Americans, for whom online poker will be no less legal that it currently is.

That's just under 24 hours from now. At 10:30 EST I took the screen grab above showing the number of players connected. Tomorrow I will do the same at the same time. I can only speculate what proportion of their players are from the USA, but bear in mind that their stock price has lost over two thirds of its value.  It's quite high.

Actually a sample from a more sensible time (really, how many play poker at 7.30am on the West Coast?) might show a more dramatic slump.  I'll see what I can do...

I always expected the reception I'd get at Stoke Grosvenor would be frosty. This is a regular haunt for many of my former so-caled friends and other ex-poker buddies and I knew that whenever I went odds would be that I would bump into at least one of them.  Tonight for the £20 freezeout it actually took until level five and my second table move until I came face to face with any of them across a card table. As expected, they were ignoring me just as hard as I was ignoring them.

Allow me to introduce some characters: James Welsh, my estranged business partner on a poker-related venture and the mastermind behind UK Poker Info - a forum from which he has subsequently banned me for posting a strategy article with only the slightest hint of superiority - busted out a couple of hands later, moving all in without looking and tabling garbage that thankfully didn't improve. Jim Fryer, the former owner of an illegal poker club that is somehow no longer running, and who still owes me ninety quid for a table, was riding high with about 40k in chips allowing him the freedom of only playing every other hand whilst running backwards and forwards to have a smoke. Negative expection on two counts.

I never got to play a pot with Jim, and only contributed to only two hands at that table before I went home. I'd raised once with AQo and folded to a reraise all in, then made a squeeze play with AJ against an early position raiser and a caller. I still quite like the move, even though I ran into a squeezee (I need to know if I'm the first person to use that word) with AQ. I had a chance to nearly double my stack uncontested, which was fairly likely given the extreme tightness I had shown, and the prospect of taking a race with 4.5k in dead money wasn't too shabby. It's only real bad when you are dominated - and he calls. Which it turned out I was, and he did, thinking he was behind.

Earlier though, I had a confrontation with "Deadly" Darren Sutton. Daz is not someone I know well at all. I can really only remember one time I've spoken more than a passing sentence to him, which was actually at Nottingham Gala on the same day I discovered that my so-called friends from the saturday night game I have such fond memories of were a bunch of ignorant back-stabbers. Let's move on.

Darren comes over to tell me how nobody likes me, and then how I owe various people an apology and how I owe James some money. He tells me "you and him need to sort it out, or I will sort it out". Whether or not he has a point doesn't much matter - none of this is any of his fucking business, but he obviously loves the action. I am brought up to speed as he walks away. "You don't know me. I used to be a minder. I look after people".

Another person he is looking after tonight is Rob Ho, although I doubt this is with his knowledge or consent given that Rob is a martial arts expert and could cripple me as soon as look at me if he wanted. On the very rare occasions we had a saturday game without him, we would gossip around the table about how he is likely connected, a Triad probably. I owe him an apology, I'm informed, because of how I insulted him on the forum - by which he can only mean the "strategy article" I mentioned above. As I walk to the bathroom at the first break, Rob actually yells up from his cash game at me "Hey Chris, are you winning?". I'm so startled, I don't really know how to respond and mumble back god knows what before running away to take a piss. Unless it's part of an overly elaborate and highly doubtful good cop/bad cop routine, then Rob isn't holding a grudge. And I would have gone back to talk to him too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids.

Deadly Daz followed me into the bathroom. He followed me into the fucking bathroom! He stood next to me, and carried on with a routine which I pretty much ignored, trying instead to concentrate on whether he specifically was the reason I couldnt go, or just that there was another gent right there who was more interested in me than his own bodily functions. That would usually do the trick.  As I left (he was done before me, and didn't wash) he was waiting near the door to keep yelling across to me and point out exactly where Rob was sitting. I don't know why he was yelling. I didn't stop to see who he was with, whether it was even anyone I'd ever met before. Or whether they were impressed. I just kept walking. I don't know - nor did I care to find out - whether he was all talk. But I was glad to be back on the casino floor. As far as I know, there's no cameras over the urinals...

So there we have it. I was threatened and intimidated - twice - by a guy I hardly know in my friendly neighbourhood casino. Just one contribution to a general air of violence in the Grosvenor Stoke where threats, fights and beatings appear to be an everyday occurrance. When the cash game was announced, some cheerful soul piped up "will there be a punch up tonight?". Apparently there was yesterday, and it sounds like the crowd loved it. And I heard two guys at my table very openly discussing how they might teach someone a lesson. "Careful though, he's the kind who'll run down the cop shop first chance he gets", says one. "Yeah, but what's he gonna do with a fucking broken neck?", came the reply.

There was never really any doubt that Claire and I would be heading to Vegas for the summer again next year.  I just didn't expect that we'd book it this soon.  Last year the flight prices were hideous this time of year before a promotion kicked in on Christmas Eve and we snapped up the seats in a flash.

So when the diamond club reservations system showed availability for the first four weeks of the school holidays - the first time I've ever seen it show dates to Vegas that would be vaguely useful to us - we snapped them up even quicker.  Best deal ever - two flights in the summer for just £240 (just the cost of the taxes, plus 90,000 miles).

Between us we actually had enough miles for two free business class flights.  This was a tough decision, but not being able to combine the miles using online booking, and really not wanting to wait until we can speak to someone to nail down those flights (I'm completely paranoid about losing them once we find a good deal) we made the booking on economy.  I'm going to call in the morning and see if there's any way we can use Claire's miles now to upgrade, but even if not ... what a bargain!

So that's virtually my entire diamond club balance gone, but the countdown to Summer O' Poker III can officially begin.  Two hundred and eighty six long and probably wet days.

I don't think this will be our next Vegas trip though.  If for no other reason (and let's face it, any excuse is a good excuse) we need to go at least once more before the summer to maintain silver status with BMI.  Possibly twice :)  With the current promotion of 3x miles on all flights before the end of the year, and 50% extra on all Las Vegas flights until the end of October, if we can fit in a trip in half term then it's virtually a free flight.  There's a £500 premium economy ticket that almost has my name on it.  Just need to find out if Claire's "training day" on the Monday is an actual training day or a teachers bonus day.

With 50% extra miles on premium, plus the promotions, we're looking at somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 miles depending on just how the offers combine.  45,000 miles gets you an economy flight to the USA.  Can we say +EV!

Some would say I was ahead the whole time.

I played The Powerhouse rather loosely from the small blind with a bunch of limpers, picked up middle pair, then free turn card brought me a straight flush draw. I foolishly ended up paying two bets on the turn, only having one out to the absolute nuts (although the bottom end of the straight flush isn't too shabby).  Very poor.  Another 5 (2 outs) or completing my straight (6 outs) would have got me into a whole pile of trouble with this garbage.

And then, magic.

The other guy had Jc Kc, and the river Ac had turned his second best flush into the best flush, but the second best hand.  Darn that four bet cap...

 

And then say hello to Mr Tilt.  Two hands later, this guy cracked aces with T7o after calling three bets cold preflop and getting involved with whole bunch of action when he flopped middle pair.

I have never been so popular.