Poker

It's been a scheduling nightmare, but I've finally settled on three tournaments to play during the Las Vegas portion of my trip in June.

There are four casinos holding poker tournament series at the same time as the WSOP (at Binions, Caesars Palace, Golden Nugget and Venetian) and I really wanted to play in one event at each but I just can't fit it in.  With the package for my freeroll satellite meaning I need to check in at Harrah's Laughlin on Friday evening, I can't play anything that day that might run for more than a few hours.

So, after looking at all the tournaments on offer I have prioritised and picked the ones that are the most appealing and have tried to fit them around my schedule - and each other - as best I can.

Top of the list is a $500 tournament at Binions on Monday 9th.  The cheaper Binions tournaments only have a 30 minute clock and this one has 45 minute levels, but the main appeal is that it's a chance to play a 10,000 chip event at the birthplace of tournament poker.  Without a time machine, this is as close as I'm ever going to get to the old school World Series of Poker experience.

The best value structures overall seems to be at Caesars.  You can get 7,500 starting chips for $225, 12,500 chips for $330 and 15,000 chips for $540.  On a chips-per-dollar basis the $330 comes out in front, but the $225 isn't bad - which is fortunate as it's the only one that fits with my trip dates.  It'll be the first one I play, on Thursday 5th.

I considered the $330 on Tuesday 10th (my last day) but as there's a chance it could spill over into a second day, I can't risk it.  There's not much point playing for 14 hours if I'm not going to be around to compete at the final table.

The Venetian's Deep Stack Extravaganza is the one I have to miss.  The dates just don't fall right.  These are $540 tournaments with 10,000 chips and a 40 minute clock, but with the high likelihood of needing to play two days if I got into the money (they play until 2am, then re-start at 4pm the next day if necessary) the only dates I could do this would be Thursday 5th (which is actually an Omaha hi/lo event, and I'm not donating $540 to that) or Monday 9th (when I'd rather play at Binions).

So that leaves the Golden Nugget for my final day, and they have a $225 tournament with 40 minute levels and 5,000 chips.  It looks like a bit of a downgrade from what you could get at Caesars for the same money, but I need to make sure I can catch my plane on Wednesday!

So that's a total buy-in of $950 for the three tournaments.  Should anyone be so inclined, I'll be selling 1% stakes for a nice, round tenner.  Time to get Team Donut back together!

Harrah's are labelling their decision to delay the final table of the World Series of Poker Main Event until November an "enhancement".  From a player's point of view I really can't see why it's a good thing.

Taking a day or two off in the middle of a marathon tournament is one thing.  Indeed, if you are drawn to play on Day 1A you already have to take a 4-day forced break before day 2A begins, then everyone gets at least a day off before all the players merges into a single Day 3.  Another day off before the final table after 6 long days of poker is probably a welcome break.  But a four month hiatus once the end of the road is in sight - and when you must be In The Zone to have got that far - is just a bit of a nonsense.

The point has been made that you could use this time to get some coaching and study the play of your opponents, but how exactly are you going to study the play of the eight other unknowns who haven't played a single hand on TV yet.  That's actually the whole point of this stupid rearrangement - to accomodate ESPN.  Are they really going to give the players a few hundred hours of unedited tape to wade through?  I doubt it.

What I really wanted to know though was just how much the players might be losing in potential interest on their payouts as a result of having to wait nearly four months between Day 7 and Day 8.  This is the richest "sporting" event in the world, after all, and the prize pool is pretty hefty.

I'm going to base the calculations on last year's field, because that means the full payout information is readily available and there's no reason to assume there will be wildly different numbers this year.

In 2007 there were 6,358 entrants, each paying $10,000 to play.  There's a total 6% taken from the prize pool for the house and tournament staff which, accoording to my calculator, is about twenty grand more than the $59,784,954 prize pool published.  I have no idea how this number could end in anything other than two zeros.  It's must be just good old-fashioned skimming.

Just over a third of the total prize pool is given to the top 9 spots - $22,019,901 in total.

This year, once the final table has been determined, each of the remaining players will be given 9th place money straight away and when they return in November they'll be playing for the difference.  9th place last year was worth $525,934, so, based on last year's numbers, that would be a further $4,733,406 paid out in July.

Therefore the amount of the prize pool left unpaid during the hiatus is $17,286,495.  A cool seventeen million - or about $1.9m per player - still to play for.

The interest rates for savings on the US Dollar are far from great at the moment.  However, after a quick shop around the net I found a certificate of deposit product that offers 3.3% APY, but over a four month fixed term.  That's almost a perfect example - the delay before the final table is 117 days.

I just plugged these numbers into an online interest rate calculator and the answer comes in at round about $180,000.

That's 18 Main Event buy-ins.  Or, it's twice as much as the nine remaining players will have paid for their seats in the first place.  Although it pales in comparison to the $3.8m total rake taken out of the prize pool for this tournament, $180,000 is hardly insignficant.

Quite what it's worth to Harrah's for hanging on to it for the same amount of time I couldn't really say.  $17m is probably just a drop in the ocean to the world's largest gaming corporation, but nevertheless it's money that doesn't belong to them, yet they know that they will have custody of it for a fixed - and reasonably long - period of time.  It's certainly investable, one way or another.

Suddenly the offer of an all expenses paid trip for two for each of the finalists to return to Las Vegas in November to play out the end of the Main Event doesn't seem quite quite as generous.  Even I can get a free suite at the Rio!

Apparently Neteller think I'm a VIP.  Not really sure how that happened, although I did notice that I now have more than a million Netpoints.  They're probably worth about a buck fifty.

All you can do with Neteller's loyalty points is use them to enter a prize draw that typically has thousands of entries, and although I've no reason to doubt the integrity of the draw this just seems like it would be pouring my points down the drain.  I'd rather have the impressive seven-figure balance, thanks.  Maybe they'll even let me buy a t-shirt with them one day too.

But this VIP promotion which I had in my email is very, very juicy:

It's taken a while to get my head around what I actually have to do to get some free money here.  I wrote to ask them to explain exactly how the calculations had been done, because whichever way I looked at my statement I couldn't see how on earth they had worked out such a high six-weekly average.  My total transactions since the start of the year are only slightly more than that!

They replied:

The six week average was calculated by taking the average of your weekly transactions between January 1 2008 and March 31 2008. Only weeks that you had at least one accepted transfer to a merchant were used in calculating your average. The weekly average was then multiplied by six to give a total average for six weeks (because the offer period is six weeks long we had to calculate your original average over the same time period).

The VIP bonus offer is based on your total transfers to merchants between April 20 2008 and May 31 2008,only transfers to merchants will be included in calculating your bonus (only funds that you send to merchants).

So it sounds like they've inflated the six-weekly average by ignoring weeks where I had no activity.  It doesn't really matter though.  They've said that this offer is based on precisely my next six weeks of activity - no further calculations required - and because they've told me what my target amount is, I can make sure I achieve - and surpass - it.

Basically, Neteller is going to pay back a percentage of their fees to users who exceed the target level of transactions.  Using Neteller to transfer money in and out of gaming sites costs the player nothing - instead Neteller charges transactions fees to the merchants.

They charge 3.9% on deposits (the same that you pay as a user for a person-to-person transfer) and 2.0% on withdrawals.  Getting back 1.5% of your total deposits amounts to nearly 25% "fee-back", however because you never actually pay those fees yourself, it's just free money.

It's Neteller that's the real winner of course - they just want to grab as much in transaction fees as possible - but it's a no-lose proposition for the player.  It'll be the casinos and poker rooms that get hit who pay for it.

Just think about the numbers.  I've started off abusing this promotion with a $1,000 deposit into UltimateBet, who were offering a 20% (max $200) deposit bonus today.  I already had more than $500 in bonus dollars sitting in my account that I've never had the inclination to play for.  Apart from a few satellites and the odd game of roshambo, I never play there.  Hopefully, depositing in response to an email promotion should make my deposit look a little less out-of-character than it really is.

This deposit cost UB $39, and I intend to cash it out as soon as possible which will cost them another $20.  This is one of the fussier sites in terms of getting your money back because you have to be seen to play some poker before a withdrawal is authorised.  Still, there's no way I'm going to generate $59 in rake before getting my money back.

Clearly, the optimal strategy is to cycle as much money as you can get your hands on as often as possible.  I don't think it's worth adding money to my Neteller bankroll just for this - you have to pay fees to deposit and then again to withdraw that will reduce the value of the promotion considerably - but certainly for the next six weeks my entire bankroll is going to be in play.  In, out, in, out, play a few hands, do the hokey pokey cokey and turn it around.

That's what it's all about - easy, risk free money.

I used to cycle funds like this at Party Poker all the time.  In the good old days, you could earn 1000 bonus PartyPoints just for making a deposit of $500 and not withdrawing it for a week.  This was way out of proportion to the number of points you'd earn from actually playing as a casual player (if I remember right, 20 raked hands earned 5 points) so this is the only reason I have so much Party gear.  At 2000 points for a polo shirt, you could order one for free after every two deposits you made - without playing a single hand of poker!

I've also been looking for a way to cycle money on a credit card that awards frequent flyer miles, worth about 3p per £1 spent.  The dream is to use up my entire credit limit every month, then settle the card immediately, rinse and repeat.  Unfortunately, unless it's genuine spending this is pretty difficult.  I've looked into laundering through online gambling sites but it doesn't work - you have to pay a cash advance fee on the deposits which costs more than the benefits you get from spending on the card.

No such problem with Neteller though, it's just money transfers and it costs me nothing.  As long as it's a casino or poker site that accepts payment directly in US Dollars, and I'm confident that I'll get my money back pretty quickly then it's fair game.  Even the Cryptologic cashiers that charge $1 for a withdrawal are profitable plays!

After I meet the $2,530 target, which won't take long, every $1,000 I can shift is going to earn me $15.  Doesn't sound like much, but don't underestimate how often I'll be trying this - I've got six weeks after all!

I thought it would be virtually impossible to reach a prize-worthy position in any of the new PokerStars Battle of the Planets sit-and-go leaderboards playing only single table tournaments, but obviously I just forgot how great I am.

Seriously though, look at this unbelievable run of results I needed to even get up to 8th place: 7 x 1st, 5 x 2nd and 3 x 3rd.

That's 15 in-the-money finishes out of 20 tournaments.  Call it a game of skill if you like, but that kind of form takes more than a little luck.

You can see from my profit graph that I've never had a streak quite like it before.  Isn't it pretty?

I know there's bound to be an almighty downswing waiting around the corner, but I can brag while it's going well can't I?

Each Battle of the Planets league ends on Saturday night and resets on Sunday morning so there's still two full days of play left and my position certainly isn't safe.  504 points was enough for both 7th and 8th place last week, but right now 8th place is the best I can possibly get with that score.

If I manage to stay in to the top ten, I'll win some cash (it's $80 for 8th) and a ticket to the monthly $50,000 freeroll.  It's a triple shootout format (729 players max) but with eight different leagues, two "orbits" in each and ten players winning a ticket each week, in a four-week month that's 640 tickets given away for the tournament.  Some players will win two tickets and some winners won't turn up so the value of the freeroll ticket must be at least $100.

If I don't hang on to the giddy heights of top ten stardom, there's still some prize money for finishing in the top 30.  I should have a pretty good shot at that at least.

I realised - completely by accident when I happened to load the right number of tournament summaries into Poker Tracker at the right time - that I'd recently reached $10,000 spent on these turbo SNG entries.  I only mention it because that same money (if I actually had it all in the same place at the same time) would get me one World Series of Poker Main Event entry.

Doing things this way involves a little less variance, though.  Sure, I'm not going to win ten million but I'm also not going to lose ten grand all to one suckout.  It'd take 625 different suckouts.

Here's the magic stats:

I still can't believe that this is close to being a reliable sample size.  My last eight results alone (1st, 1st, 2nd, 4th, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 1st) pushed the overall ROI up from the 16.6% shown here to 18.4%.  Maybe when I've played a few thousand I'll have a little more confidence in the numbers.

EDIT: 5 hours to go and I'm 10th.  Gonna be close.

EDIT: Sodding eleventh.  A big fuck you to "$tr8t Hu$tla" who not only has a shit screen name, he also waited until the very last minute to score 521 points.  I hope I get the chance to bust you soon!

As the Gutshot poker club no longer exists, while I was staying in London for work earlier in the week I headed down to the Powerhouse Sporting Club to enjoy their coffee bar and see if I could get a game of Jenga or Connect 4.

As it happened, there was a poker game about to start but of course it was definitely not for money. I did not pay £50 to enter, and there was no additional £5 bounty.

There was also definitely not any pressure for players to leave a voluntary donation.  I did not buy in with three £20s, so obviously they did not not offer me any change.

53 players turned up to enjoy only the thrill of the competition and to battle it out for no more than bragging rights.  It's a game of skill... yada yada yada.

We started with 3500 chips and I picked up pocket aces on the second hand.  Blinds were 25/50 and an early position player raised to 225.  His neighbour called and I was next, making it 800 to go.

The player to my left called in a flash and it got folded round to the early raiser.

"How much to me?", he said.  "Five... what.... six...? fift...?  seventy five?".  He figured it out eventually and made the call, but not before proving what I'd always suspected: a raise to a "normal" amount plus one small chip has nothing to do with any strategy, it's just so you get to see two different pretty colours tumbling through the air when you make your bet.  Wheeee.

I expected to see this player make a three-chip flop bet and show us all that he could count to 625, but in fact he checked, as did I and the third player.  The flop was a king and a ten and a seven, all different suits and I didn't want to get too excited with one pair so early on.  In truth, I wasn't really ready to deal with a tough decision yet.

The turn brought another ten - now I had two pair, for what that's worth - and the first player bet 250.  With all that pre-flop action, the pot stood at 2475 so it may as well have been a check.  I raised to 800, again a tiny bet in relation to the pot, but I hoped it might buy me a little information - or a free showdown - while still keeping the pot quite small.  This line is either genius or ultra-weak, I'll let you decide.

I didn't have a great handle on the situation, but I figured that if a player who had only called my re-raise out of position pre-flop now decided to 3-bet on a king-high board, pocket aces were almost certainly not good and I would be able to fold and still have more than half a starting stack to play with.

However, if the third player decided to stick around (he'd already called two raises cold pre-flop, why not call a bet and a raise again now?) I was going to be completely stumped.  I was very glad indeed when he folded.

In for two fiddy, in for eight hundy, the other guy called and we went to the river heads up.  I don't remember what card it was.  I didn't look until he'd checked, and I already knew I was checking behind anyway unless it was another ace.  I flipped up the aces and he slid his hand into the muck.

"I had pocket nines", he said.  And now, the punchline: "I put you on ace-queen".

That was as interesting as it got though, I hardly saw another hand worth playing before I ended up flipping a little pair against two big cards and losing.

I took a nice long walk back to my hotel, thinking about what I could have not won.

A week ago, Poker Stars launched their "Battle of the Planets" leaderboard week for sit-and-go tournaments. You get points whenever you finish in the money, then your best blocks of 20 results (the "low orbit") or 100 results (the "high orbit") determine your league position.

As I happened to be playing quite a few SNGs at the moment anyway, it's looked to be a nice free shot at some extra money.

My first set of results is now in: not even close.

The likely difficulty for single table sit-and-go players like myself is that although the leagues are divided by entry fee you also have to compete against players in the 18-man and 27-man tournaments, and they receive nearly twice as many points for a first place finish as you do for winning a 9-man SNG.

Of course, whatever you play it would take a pretty insane run of luck to win one of these things, but five or six first places in 3-table tournaments from a block of 20 seems much more achievable than ten or eleven single table victories in the same period - that would be first place at least every other game - to get the same number of points.

ryan422323, this week's winner in the "Earth - low orbit" (blocks of 20 for $10-$19 tournaments - the level I'm playing at), looks like a losing player who suddenly got lucky at the right time. It happens.

As expected, Sharkscope reveals his most recent results are from a mixture of 18-, 27- and 45-man sit and go tournaments (although the 45-man results don't count for this leaderboard - that's apparently enough players to be considered a real tournament).

Second place finisher jellycz has had a rather better tournament career, with Sharkscope showing a long term return on investment of 19% across his PokerStars tournaments.

Still, he would have had to do much better than that over the block of 20 that counted towards his leaderboard position.

In fact we can work out just what kind of return is needed to win the Battle of the Planets from the final points totals.

Regardless of the buy-in, the points you receive are based on the prize distribution rather than the actual dollar amounts won. The number of points is the same as the prize money would be for a $10 buy-in. For example, first place in a 9-man SNG gets 45 points - although you actually win $67.50 for a $15+1 stake or $112.50 for a $25+2, the prize is always 4.5x your stake. First place in a 27-man SNG wins 8x the stake, so you receive 80 points.

So, with 637 points the winner would have received $637 in real money if he had played 20 sit-and-go tournaments that cost $10 each. That's an amazing 219% ROI! Second place with 552 points is still-insane 176% ROI.

My hottest block landed me 369 points, with 11 in-the-money finishes out of 20 (5 x 1st, 4 x 2nd, 2 x 3rd). That's a fiendishly good 85% ROI, and I finished 256th.

The Rt Hon Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, spotted this evening on BBC television wearing a Party Poker shirt.

OK, it's actually a Leyton Orient football strip so it probably doesn't count.  But I did get a bit excited for a moment and think that maybe he'd bought it using his PartyPoints.

As the USA flipped onto daylight savings time a few weeks ago and the UK don't put the clocks forward until next weekend, it's actually a 7 hour time difference right now rather than the usual 8, and I've felt a little less jet-lagged than usual.

Even so, after an early start for a bunch of pre-breakfast gambling and a long walk along the Strip all the way down to Sahara I was ready to crash pretty early last night and ended up flipping TV channels in bed until I came across Deal or No Deal.

The contestent, Mary Beth, was a self-proclaimed great poker player who had actually played in a live tournament one time and finished like 9th or something.

However her interest in poker actually came into play in one of the offers she was made. In addition to $138,000 in cash for her case, the banker added an extra special prize.

Look, it's Annie Duke!

We're reminded that this leading female player "won two million dollars in a televised poker tournament". But not that she only had to outlast nine other players - sucking out on most of them - to take down that freeroll.

So, take the deal now and the offer also includes admission to some women-only poker seminar thing, but the really special part is that it would also include a whopping four hours of private poker tuition from the special star guest.

Annie was really giving it the hard sell trying to get the contestent to take the deal, quoting impressive-sounding results from people she had mentored the past. She said she hardly ever gives personal lessons, so it's really a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. And a fast track to easy money, obviously.

Her efforts made perfect sense when we found out the reason that there might be a shortage of takers for her private tuition.

The value of this little package, Howie Mandel revealed, is $25,000.

Twenty five grand for four hours work.

No deal, apparently.

Although I've been playing single table sit-and-go tournaments for as long as I've been playing online poker, I've never really played then in enough volume or taken them seriously enough to have a realistic idea of how well I could do.  That is, until this month.

After throwing away far too much money chasing a dream with EPT Steps on PokerStars - a series of single table tournaments that play with turbo blinds (in the lower levels, at least, the first time I got to Step 4 I was completely unprepared for the "normal" blind structure!) - I'd started to feel I was getting on OK with that format but never quite got lucky enough to parlay $5.50 into a twenty grand seat package.

There's no prizes in between worth speaking of, just odd dollars here and there, and although a poker trip to Warsaw would be nice - as well as a little bit scary - I wasn't going to go mad over it.  So  I thought I'd play a few more for, like, actual money.

Turbos SNGs never last more than an hour, and often they're over in 30 minutes - even if you make the money.  I soon realised that this speedy format should give me a chance to play enough tournaments to see a pattern emerge without having to stick with it for months and months - particularly once I became comfortable playing four at a time!

Here, three weeks later and thanks to a spreadsheet I had to knock up in Excel as I couldn't work out how to get Poker Grapher to read my tournament results, is that pattern.

I like the pictorial view much more than the dry output from Poker Tracker, which simply tells you how great you are through the medium of green numbers.

So, yes, 425 is not a huge sample size but it's definitely a start and those early signs are looking good.  The Two Plus Two forum FAQ speculates that a "very good player" could achieve a return on investment of 14% at this level, so I think I have every reason to be pleased with this performance.

So what's my next step?  Time for an enforced break now while I nip off to Vegas for a week or so (T-2!) but if I can carry on with these winning ways I'm going to need a plan to try to maximise the money I can make from these tournaments.

The results above equate to a win rate of about $8/hr in real terms (playing four tables and waiting for each set of four to complete before starting again), which is not to be sniffed at but it doesn't compare to most of the casino bonuses I've been playing lately, and even though poker is much more interesting than blackjack this probably isn't enough to keep me focused on playing intently for any longer than any of my previous poker fads have lasted.

So should I consider moving up limits yet?  Or perhaps try to play more tables at once at the same buy-in?  Or maybe I should stick with what seems to be working but look to improve, nay perfect, my game using tooks like Sit-and-Go Power Tools or SpadeICM?

I'll have to have a good think about that over an all-you-can-eat buffet next week...

It's been on the cards (groan) for a while but finally Dan Harrington's latest books started to ship this week.

Yes, books, plural.  It's a simultaneous release of Harrington on Cash Games volumes 1 & 2.  I mean, really, why even try to contain yourself to a single book when you can pad it out a bit by making up letters and colours for things that are mostly common sense, split it in two and charge double?

In fact there's an increase in cover price too, each book is $34.95 - up from $29.95 for each of the three installments of Harrington on Hold'em.  I guess the cost of producing (half) a book must have gone up that much in the past three years.

The email I just got from Las Vegas Advisor trumpeted:

Dan's back -- and this time he's talkin' cash games. Poker's most prolific author has released two more must-read books, these on the cash-game component of expert hold 'em poker play.

Most profilic author?  It's his second freaking book!  OK, not many other poker authors have five different ISBNs to their name, but there's David Sklansky, Mason Malmuth and the late David Spanier, just off the top of my head.  I had to check to be sure, but yes Mike Caro has written more than five and even Matthew Hilger has now written 3 actual, individual books with a fourth apparently on the way this year.

At least with HOH he made us wait a while for Volume 2 to give a degree of credibility to the multi-volume ruse.  He might actually have still been writing it.  In this series, first we learn how to play the early stages of a tournament, and then we think about the later stages.  It almost made sense.  Volume 3 - coming somewhat out of the blue - was just a lovely added bonus.

Now we have two volumes of HOCG coming out at the same time.  Of course there's no obligation to invest in both books, you do have a choice, but the division between them is rather spurious.  Volume 1 teaches pre-flop and flop play, whereas Volume 2 deals with play on the turn and river.

Pardon me for asking, but why would I want a book that teaches me to play half a hand of poker?

Even if I can choose which half...

So you wait weeks for Sporting Index to do another promotion, and then two come along at once.

It's back to back weekends of bet refunds, this time with losses up to £30 given back so you can try out their latest "why wouldn't it be random when nobody knows how it works anyway?" novelty game - Top, Middle or (you guessed it) Bottom.

 Would the real Michael Barrymore please stand up.

And now, hopefully, I'm not the only one with that theme music stuck in my head.

Dooo do-doo do-doo do-doo do-do-do dooo.  Do do de do.

"The principal of this game", the instructions began - pushing my pedantry meter into overdrive after just two words: it's principle goddammit.  What's that, you used the spell checker?  Plstryharderthx.  Shall we continue? ... "is very easy".

Actually it's not very easy.  It took me at least a dozen goes using play money to even start to understand what was going on, so I'll try my best to explain it but can't guarantee it'll be great.

Picking top, middle or bottom reveals a symbol.  You advance to the next column if you pick either a single arrow or you move across two columns with a double arrow.  To get the maximum score you have to pick arrows all the way to the other side of the board and your current score is determined by the number shown at the top of that column.

If you reveal a question mark you then have to pick one of four boxes.  Three boxes contain your current score value and selecting one of these awards you that score and the game is over.  The fourth box contains a green arrow and you move to the next column and continue.

What is a Hot Spot?  Not a good spot, of course.  But in this game it's a red cross.  Just different enough to avoid a lawsuit I expect.  If you reveal a Hot Cross (not a good cross) the game ends with zero points no matter how far you got across the board.

So far that actually sounds quite simple, but it's complicated no end by the fact that it's a spread betting game, and once you move across the board you are offered the opportunity to quit the game and take the new price offered, but that price is not going to be the same as your score because you haven't actually finished the game until you get all the way across or end it with a red cross or question mark.

Very easy, yes?

Assuming that you are at least 1-in-3 to hit some kind of arrow and proceed is one thing (all the games I played did reveal at least one arrow in every column) but knowing what advancing one step is worth versus how much you're risking to get there is a totally different matter.

To be honest, I just didn't care enough about this game to work it out.  If it wasn't for the £30 free bet I'd have been long gone.  I guess there must be demand for this kind of thing among spread betting degenerates for whom there just isn't enough sport to bet on, but I don't see the appeal.  First they have to get me to understand how the game works (in this case they didn't do a great job) and then they have to get me to trust it, and if it's not based on something that's random in real life that's usually tough.  TV game shows are random?  I think not, and nor does the chap from the video above if you check the comments on YouTube.

Anyway, after a few play money games with the minimum stake, I noticed that if I hit a double arrow the first time or two single arrows I could then take the offer for a £1.50 profit, whereas a cross was a £2.00 loss.  To avoid thinking any longer, this was good enough to start playing a few minimum bets to qualify for the refund - I needed ten bets at this level and finished up £7 down on the deal.

So with a further £23 that could be refunded it was time for one larger bet to try to find a profit.  This worked out at betting £1.15 per point, a maximum loss of £23 and a maximum win of £1160.  Of course, I wasn't going anywhere near far enough across the board to win a grand and decided that a tenner profit or more would do.

I went "middle" and got a green arrow.  The game offered me £5.75 profit - not enough to get me back into profit overall so I would carry on, right after I took a screen grab.

See that timer in the bottom right corner?  9 seconds it says.  Well it took me a bit longer than that to paste and save the screenshot and while I was finishing up I heard a ding and some cheering from the other window.

With my back turned, apparently I had gone "middle" again.  Whether this is a random choice or just a repeat of my last selection I have no idea.  Can't say I was pleased about it making the decision for me.  Surely if it looks like I can't be bothered to play any more, it should hit the "take profit" button and cash me out rather than gambling it up on my behalf?  And really, 15 seconds in total to act?  Why?  What damage, exactly, am I doing to your bottom line by not gambling any faster than that?

Fortunately it was a winner, or I'd really be ranting about it.  The new offer: £17.25, which just pushed me into enough profit to make my target.  A total win of £10.25.

Good game good game? No. 

I was sure I'd done a player-to-player transfer on Full Tilt before today, when I just sent a few bucks to Paul Sandells for a stake in his action in the WSOP Circuit event next month.

But I'm sure I would have remembered this screen.

I just don't get why this is useful.  If you're going to give me some kind of verification that I entered the right username, what's the problem with telling me the full name of his city?

This is what other poker sites do, if they even give any verification at all.  I mean, really, anyone who is transferring real money to another player is going to make sure they have the right username and look back at what they've typed, not just hammer the keyboard randomly and hope it ends up in the right place.  Are they?

Is that actually this player's avatar displayed?  How would I know unless (a) I'm sending money to someone I've actually played with before (which I'm not) and (b) I have your horrible cartoon monkey/gnome/dude with afro avatars switched on (which, for the sake of sanity, I don't). 

Sometimes you won't even be sure what city the other guy will have put on his account, but you'll know roughly - and this was the case with Paul.  Even seeing London rather than Lisbon, Lima or Los Angeles here would give me a clue as to whether this is the right guy.  That "L" really doesn't narrow it down much.

Jeez, if you're worried about giving out too much personal information just show the name of the country he's from, or a little flag picture if you want to be super cool.  You can already see any player's country at the poker table without even siting down.

That would be much more useful than making me play bloody I Spy whenever I want to send money.

Some suckouts are just brilliant.  Hopefully this is the turning point for me tonight after 8 straight out-of-the-money finishes in sit and go tournaments.  I finished 3rd - it's a start.

It was the first steal attempt I'd made in this tournament, and it all went badly wrong.  I open-pushed ace-five from the button and got called immediately by pocket kings and then immediately afterwards by ace-queen suited.

When the cards were turned over I said out loud, "Oh great, I can't win".  Nobody was there to listen, or to remind me I actually had a 9% chance of taking it down.

The flop brought hope in the form of a mighty gutshot draw.  "Oh, I can now - with a two", I continued for the benefit of the audience at home.  You don't always have to call it a deuce.

And the sweetest turn card sealed the deal.  Ship it.

I've finally heard the sad news that broke over the weekend about the death of game designer and writer Barron Vangor Toth.

I was a devotee of Barron's weekly poker column on Gutshot.com.  He wrote mostly about fixed-limit Hold'em and somehow managed to turn his accounts of probably the least dramatic poker game there is into a compelling read. 

He died from cancer aged 34.

That's so sick.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the clinking of a single champagne glass.  I'm finally done playing on Paddy Power Poker, and that's cause for a mini-celebration.

I actually quite like the iPoker software and there's usually good game selection at the levels I play, but the problems is that I never really knew where I was with those games.  Mixing and matching so many different limits probably didn't help though.

I was up and I was down and I was swinging all over the place.  Every limit I played I was in the green for a while, and then it swung back in to the red and back up again.  Some of them stayed there.  While 23,662 hands is be a reasonable number to start seeing getting an idea of how I played, it's not much use with only a few thousand hands on each of the fixed limit games. 

However, looking at the percentage of hands I played at $3/$6 compared to the other limits, I should probably re-evaluate whether I'm actually comfortable playing for those stakes.  The only thing that kept me coming back was my data on the players at that level suggested they could often be much looser than the usual nits at $2/$4, and so I thought I was finding good spots.  I just never really made them pay.

The good news though - despite being a loser on paper, I'm still leaving the site with about a grand more than I came with, thanks to signup bonuses, monthly cash rewards, player point redemptions and a friendly affiliate referral.  But boy was it hard work, and barely worth it.

But now that I've used up all of the $600 sign up bonus and been left with a mountain to climb to get back into VIP status (their member level formula looks at the last 3 months activity, so I'd now have to over-compensate for a quiet January) and I'm moving on.

At least I got a nice little hot streak to end it all with.  These all happened within five minutes of each other (check out the timestamps on the screenshots!) and were part of a very welcome $200 upswing.

1. My biggest pot ever at $1/$2

Well, I can't be sure it was actually the biggest I ever had but it felt like it, and the action was amazing.  $65 is a 33 big bets pot, and I took it down with pocket kings which made a full house on a board of 556KQ.

It was capped on every street except the flop, with the two other guys involved seeing something I obviously missed in their KQ and 99 hands.

Click the thumbnail to see the full hand history.

2. Table selection paying off.

I'd seen a particularly juicy-looking $3/$6 table but it took me an hour to get the right seat.  I'm quite fussy about where I sit now.  Playing fixed limit in particular, there's so many good players that you have to try to sit as close to the immediate left of any mark you find to play the maximum number of hands against them in position.

I'd had my eye on seats 6 and 9 who were both seeing over 40% of flops.  By the time I got into position in seat 2, two other seats had also been filled by fishy players.  Click the table thumbnail to see what a good game should look like.  On iPoker, this almost never happens, and especially at this level.

The first hand I got involved with was perfect.  Mr Loose had limped in and I raised him with AJs.  Everyone else got out of the way for a magic all-heart flop.  He'd limped in out of position with two small hearts, I had two large ones and he paid me off very nicely thankyou.

3. Royal flush, baby

It's only seven months since my last one, but this always deserves a picture.

I got called to the river by pocket kings, which had flopped a set but got scared by the possibly flush and straight options.

Shame the board didn't pair on the river, really.