The Lucky Donut

It's not a freebie, but I'm still pondering this offer I had in the mail from the Palms.

Inside, it offered me:

Not a bad deal.  In fact, Claire had almost exactly the same offer.  Hers said:

Which I guess means the Palms thinks I'm worth exactly $10 more than she is.  Bling!

This is notable because, despite playing at the Palms more than anywhere else in town the past couple of years, this is the first piece of mail I've had from them for something other than "get a credit card with our logo on it". 

The Palms caters for tourists who want to party and locals who want to gamble.  There's not much overlap, and they definitely don't seem to care too much about tourists who want to grind out some free shit on a positive play machine.  Room offers are something of a rarity so it's fantastic to finally get one.

Although it's not a free room, I'd already been considering taking advantage of some heavily discounted room offers just because they're there, and room rates as low as they are right now can't last forever.

MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay and Planet Hollywood all currently have offers where you can get a room for $50-$70, with goodies or gambling money back to the value of at least $25.  As long as you only stay one night, it's a fairly cheap way to check out a hotel I've never stayed at (I'm intrigued by the movie-themed rooms at the P-Ho) or get access to some nice swimming pools.

MGM Grand works out at (effectively) $24, and Mandalay Bay $44.  Anyone can get these deal without needing to be a rated player.  Pretty damn good.

So we can add the Palms to that list now too.  What's most interesting about this deal, though, is the rest of the promotion - and the reason for the Southwest plane on the front of the mailer.

As they say, 400 points gets you $1 back in comp or slot play, and as you earn 1 point for every $1 played through a machine, this adds 0.25% to your expected return from a game.

The ability to swap points for slot play is a new thing and is only valid on points earned since June this year, and when this change was introduced we had a bit of a scare.  At first they'd said that any older points had to be redeemed within a year or would expire. 

After some mammoth sessions the last few trips, Claire and I have nearly $700 between us on our cards.  That's a lot of half price buffets and movie tickets!  It's not that I'm not up for a Brewster's Millions type challenge, I'd just rather spend the comp the way I want to than be forced to eat expensive meals that I don't appreciate at restaurants where I don't really fit in.

When 10,000 base points on video poker gets you a $50 gift card, that's worth another 0.5% on top of your points value.  Where it gets really interesting is if you could combine a triple points coupon from one of the frequent swipe-and-win days - which would take your base earning rate to 0.75%, a total of 1.25% when you include the gift cards.

The very best video poker machines will probably be excluded from the deal, but with 1.25% added to the expectation you could legitimately play 99.2% Bonus Poker - which is never marked as excluded from promotions - with an edge.

Of course, things happen much more quickly if you play slots.  One gift card for every 2,500 makes the the promotion worth a hefty 2%!  I can't remember if the Palms has any certified 99% payback slots, but if it does this promo turns them into winners.

The question, really, is what use is a Southwest airlines gift card to me, and the answer is not a great deal.  We've toyed with the idea of going to Disneyland to get away from... well... the grown up Disneyland but it's so much easier to drive to California than fly to Florida - where there's still plenty of good theme parks - I don't think that's likely to happen.  So I'd be looking to sell them on eBay for about 90% of face value.

It's definitely a good deal.  But whether it's good enough to justify actually paying for a hotel room to be able to use it, I still haven't decided.

It's always sad day when you grab a faithful pair of socks from the draw, pull apart the opening to start putting your foot inside and hear that horrible cracking sound.  It's like fingers on a blackboard to a sock aficionado, and it can only mean one thing - the elastic has given up the ghost.

I'm especially saddened by my latest casualty.  It's my longest serving pair of Las Vegas casino socks.

Say it with me:  "Hard. Rock. Socks".

I can't put a precise date on how long I've had these, but it's at least five years.  Possibly closer to ten.  They were the ones that started my casino sock collection, and I've been trying to replace them for several years to no avail.

Believe it or not, the World's Largest Hard Rock retail store doesn't sell a pair of logo socks any more.

I can't bring myself to throw them away yet.  I'm not sure whether to let them go out with a bang and put up with them slipping down when I wear them for one last outing, or simply to have them preserved.

Would that be called "soxidermy"?

In other age-related sock death news, I think these fantastic Mirage socks with reversible cuff only have one more wear left in them too.

They're also irreplacable.  I've checked at every available opportunity the past few years.  The Mirage does still sell socks, but only Siegfried and Roy branded children's socks.

But these ones are threadbare in several places and I need to let them go with at least a little dignity.

I don't use Moneybookers very often, but I have an account there for the odd times I need to receive money that way.

This was one of those times.  I was sent a sum of money, originally in British Pounds but it got converted to US Dollars as that's the currency on my account.  It landed in my balance as $96.20.

Then I went to withdraw it.  As I hadn't really taken any notice of the actual amount in dollars so far, I just agreed to everything - including a $2.50 withdrawal fee.  It said I could withdraw up to $93.69 and I asked for the lot.

Did you spot it?  $96.20 minus $2.50 cannot result in a number that ends with a 9.  There's a penny missing somewhere, and I almost wan't paying enough attention to notice.

Thankfully, it showed me a handy statement afterwards:

Great, everything balances in the end.  They just made a penny disappear to compensate for the error.

$2.51 minus $2.50 is zero.  Apparently.

I don't think there can be anything more embarrasing for a wannabe bank than not being able to add or subtract two amounts of money.  Perhaps that's why their software has this error correction built in: "If something goes wrong, we'll just pretend that it didn't and hope nobody notices".

Guess what.  I noticed.

The penny is insignificant, especially when the amount of money we're talking about has already been converted to once and will be converted again to end up back in a GBP bank account.  When that happens, you have to expect to be hit by an unfavourable exchange rate and that they'll skim off fractions of a penny at every possible opportunity.

But that's not what's happened here.  The statement simply does not add up - it is blatently wrong.

We're not talking about a dodgy online casino that only has to pay a sum of money to a random island nation in order to call itself licensed.  This is a financial institution regulated by the FSA in the UK, and it's very worrying that such an organisation could make any sum of money vanish without an audit trail.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's not hard to make sure that your software handles decimal numbers correctly.  And, yes, I am available for consultancy work.

Let's see what they say...

I just had this offer in an email from Party Poker.

Wow, a $975 bonus.  It's a random amount, but it's huge.  How can I resist?

5,850 Party Points sounds like a fair chunk, but to be honest it's so long since I played there I couldn't even remember how you earn them.

Playing tournaments, you earn 2 Party Points for every $1 paid in fees.  You pay $2,925 and get back $975, so it's equivalent to getting precisely one-third of your fees back.

Not a bad deal.  But do you remember the last time you paid three grand in tournament fees in a month?  Me neither.

Admittedly, I rarely play much higher than the $20s, so I'd be looking at around 70 sit-and-gos a day for 21 days to unlock this bonus.  That's a full time job - assuming you can play a dozen at a time, and I can't.

It's more achievable for high stakes SNG players.  The $100s have a $9 fee and Party have capped it $10 per tournament for higher buy-ins, right up to the $5,000 tournaments.  It would take 325 $100 tournaments or 293 at any higher level to get there.

That's roughly 15 per day, which is still high for a casual player, but it's more realistic.  However I can't help thinking that if you can play that many of high stakes tournaments, you're serious enough about poker to already have a rakeback at least as good as this elsewhere and that you wouldn't want to jeopardise your VIP status by taking a few weeks out for this bonus, when you'd get almost no perks from Party after the bonus is over.

So... if it's going to happen, it'll have to be cash games.  A few years ago when Party Poker bonuses were just great, I used to clear them playing $1/$2 limit, which meant relatively soft games with fairly low variance, and the numbers meant that Party was actually giving away more in bonuses than you paid in rake.  It was awesome.

Now, things have tightened up.  At this level, it takes 57 raked hands to earn 10 Party Points, so for this promotion, you'd need to play 33,345 raked hands!

From my past experience, it takes about 5 hours four-tabling $1/$2 to play 1,000 raked hands, for which you'd pay about $55 in rake.  It's possible, but it's a lot of work.  In fact, it's a full time job again, about 7 hours of solid play - that's one-third of the 21 days you have to complete the play requirement.

For what it's worth, the rake you'd pay is about $1800 so the $975 bonus is equivalent to a little over 50% rakeback.  Not bad at all.

The number of hands that are raked increases slightly as you move up limits, but that's not as significant as the amount of rake you pay.  That's why at $3/$6 you only need 14 raked hands to earn 10 Party Points.  That brings down the total number of raked hands required to 8,190 - or about 40 hours of play four-tabling.

It's a pretty attractive bonus, but it's also pretty inaccessible to the majority of players and I guess that's the point.  They're trying to deter the small-timers and serial bonus whores and get players who are prepared to commit a big chunk of time to Party Poker, then hope they stick around afterwards.

I'd love to be able to find a way to do exactly what they don't want, but as I only have a week left before I head off to Vegas, I just can't see it happening...

As well as recording myself playing the fake drums, I decided another good way to put my new camera through its paces was to see how it coped with some fast action shots.

A roller coaster that accelerates from 0-80 mph in less than 2 seconds seemed to meet the brief. That would be Stealth at Thorpe Park, and as I couldn't be bothered to queue for 90 minutes to get on the ride, trying to take pictures of people's scared faces was the next best thing.

This is one of my favourites:

The picture looks a bit crappy this close, but it was taken hand-held from the ground to the very top of a 200ft high ride against nothing but bright sky.  I don't think I can grumble given those conditions.  Certainly not going to cry about it, like this fella.

The pictures where I didn't have to zoom so much or point at the sun gave better results.  Watch the guy in the red shirt, looking all excited as it starts to launch...

... and screaming like a little girl on the way down.

This could become one of my new favourite pastimes.

What I want to know, though, is where did his glasses go?  I didn't actually believe this could happen until now...

I've been saying for months that I had more free hotels rooms than I could use during my trip to Las Vegas this summer.  Between us, Claire and I have already booked 24 unnecessary nights.

You know - just in case we want to use their pool, or we run out of soap.

Then today (T-12!) another batch of post arrived with even more of them.

First up, it's an old favourite: Casino Royale.

It's not the greatest hotel on the Strip, but what their rooms lack in electric curtains and decorative pillows is made up for by the guarantee of a coffee machine and a fridge.  For me, that goes quite a long way.

Claire and I both got this offer, and although we won't use it this time, it's always useful to know that we still have either 4-6 free nights every month in the bag for when we need it.  Casino Royale lets two players combine their comps into a single stay too, which is great.

Next, I got this one from the Fremont casino. 

This is a no-brainer.  I don't care about the room particularly.  I probably won't use it.  If they still have Pick'em Poker (99.9% payback before slot club perks) I'll be giving them some more action to hopefully keep the room offers coming, but it's worth turning up for the free slot play alone.

Which brings me to Laughlin.  Harrah's Laughlin are still sending me so many great "just for turning up" offers that I am having trouble choosing between them.  In addition to the $85 cash and $50 food credit I wrote about last month, I can now take another $85 cash (but no food, sadly) on a choice of dates in August.

Then there's a slot tournament August 7th-9th which includes $100 in free slot play as well as the tournament entry, and a 5x Total Reward Credits multiplier for the entire weekend.  That improves the value of their slot club from a paltry 0.1% to a very reasonable 0.5%.

That would be enough to make it absolutely (theoretically) free to retain my Diamond card if I could play it all through on 50-line Jacks or Better at 99.5% payback, but apparently those machines - the ones I hit ten grand on last year - have been downgraded to 97.3% payback.

There are 3 machines left in the casino that would be playable on this offer ("not so ugly" deuces wild - paying 99.7% before perks) but they are $1 single-line machines; so not only would I have a dog-fight on my hands if I wanted to sit down among all the pros wanting to grind their 0.2% edge, it would also take virtually all weekend to pump the required $100,000 through this game, even at $5 per spin.  I figure it would take 25-30 hours of play - and that's if I knew how to play that game quickly.  I don't.

In a similar vein, on selected dates in July I could take part in the Macy's Gift Card promotion.  As well the promise of a $100 gift card to get you through the door, they're sweetening this one with tickets to a comedy show.  In addition, every 250 RCs gets you another $25 gift card.

The value of that is a full 1%, which is enough to turn their 99.1% Double Bonus Poker into a winner - and there are plenty of those games around.  Of course, I then have to find something I want to buy from Macy's to make it worthwhile.

Also at Harrah's Laughlin, if I stay for 3 nights July 24th-27th I can walk away with a lovely plain white t-shirt with a printed Harrah's logo on the breast, after I take them for $50 in slot play.  This one's not quite so attractive, but you just can't grumble at a free $50.

The problem (and, let's face it, it's not the worst problem I've ever had to deal with) is that I want maximum value without having to spend the majority of my trip in Laughlin.  I like the place, don't get me wrong, but Vegas kicks its ass.  I'll definitely stay there at least once, but for the other offers I have to weigh up the cost of getting there against the value of the freebies.

It's about 90 miles each way, and it may be two trips per offer if I don't want to stay three days every time, which pretty much negates all that free money.  However, I suspect they'll screw you if you check out early, as they're giving you the free room to keep you hanging around their casino for three days.  They charge $50 if you don't cancel a free room more than 72 hours in advance, but whether you can check-in, take the free stuff and check out straight away, I don't know.  Yet...

I didn't get in half as many hands this month on iPoker, mostly because I spent most of my online poker time playing turbo sit-and-gos on Poker Stars in order to clear a bonus that was about to expire.

I had less than stellar results at both sites, but I guess I can't complain that despite losses at the tables, they both gave me net wins on the month:

Stars: Lost $189 to release $240 bonus and redeemed 10,000 FPPs for $160.  I was about half way towards both the bonus and the redemption award at the start of the month so I'll count this as earning $200 of bonus and cashback.  Net: +$11.

iPoker: Lost $102, released $90 bonus, received $68 rakeback.  Net: +$56

I have to say, though, it certainly doesn't feel like a winning month.

It wouldn't be the same without a graph, would it?

OK, I lie.  I sweat plenty.  But it's been quite a warm day and the so-called air conditioner I've put in this room is basically just a little fan in a box.  What can you do?

The reason for this video is two-fold.

1. I wanted to try a few different video recording modes on my new digital SLR (Canon EOS 500D) and specifically to see how the 1080p mode (at a reduced 20 frames per second) compared to 720p (at 30fps).

2. I wanted to find out whether it was going to be possible to edit HD video in Vegas on my now-aging laptop, or if it would be a job for my (almost as portable) Mac Mini.

So, in the absense of anything resembling live action going on around me, I thought I'd record a few songs with different settings.  But I only went and aced Reptillia, so I thought that I really should share this achievement with the world and modestly declare just how much I totally rock.

I'd been thinking about making a Rock Band video when Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" becomes available for it.  But although it's on the list of upcoming songs, there's no release date set yet - and of course no guarantee I'll be able to play all four parts well enough, which is what I wanted.  Let's hope this still happens, eh?

Anyway I only picked up the Mac so I could try to learn how to write software for the iPhone (which is going horribly; the language may as well be Martian compared to what I'm used to) but now it's looking likely it will be coming on holiday with me (I'll need to pick up a cheap monitor over there for it), and after that I fear it may only be a matter of time before it becomes the main machine on my desk.

What's that I hear?  A gazillion Mac owners saying "I told you so"?

I never doubted you.  I just liked having two mouse buttons.  And now I realise that I actually still can.  And that I don't actually need a keyboard with that funny squiggle key on it.

Here's the thing.  My PC, which is a dual-core thing with 2Gb RAM and is a little over a year old, struggled even with the lower quality format.  The sound wasn't quite in sync at times and it certainly wasn't playing at the full frame rate.  My laptop (3 years old, mobile Celeron something) didn't stand a chance - what I saw could barely be called video.

Whereas the Mac - on paper a less powerful machine than my PC - lapped up the full HD format without even blinking.  I was even dragging it around the screen manically (even between two monitors) while it was playing - not a hiccup.

So I loaded the clip into iMovie (which I'd never used before), trimmed off the ends (which took literally 20 seconds), hit a button and it went straight up to YouTube.

Well, not quite straight away.  It took nearly an hour to render and upload in top quality, but that didn't matter so much.  I could actually do other things at the same time.

Oh. My. God.  It could be only a matter of weeks before I'm fully converted.