Poker

I've never played casino roulette before to release a bonus.  There was a juicy risk-free play on Sporting Index's roulette spread game for a while, but for down-and-dirty bonus whoring the house edge on roulette is usually too high to make it worthwhile.

However, I just found a weekly promotion from Gala Casinos that turns roulette into a theoretical winner.  It's only a £10 bonus, and with a £200 play requirement you should expect to lose just over half of that (figuring a single-zero wheel with 2.7% house edge; forget about it with double-zero) but you can play it every Saturday, and you don't need to keep depositing and withdrawing.  You can just transfer funds between casino and sports to activate the bonus code.

There's also a blackjack bonus every Friday (£10 free for £200 in action, worth at least £8 per week) and a bunch of other random bonuses which may or may not be worth taking advantage of.

Look after those small edges and the bankroll will look after itself.

I did activate another bonus for blackjack last week.  However it could only be played at their live dealer casino and once I saw what was involved I gave up pretty quickly.

Don't get me wrong., if you want to chill out and play some cards online it's probably great.  The concept actually works really well.  The video and sound quality is fine, and the cards have jumbo numbers on so you can see exactly what has been dealt for yourself.  Plus, because you can see a human shuffling and dealing the cards, you can be confident that the game is fair.

Furthermore, if you were so inclined, you could count cards extremely easily.  Use a pen and paper if you want - nobody is watching.  You could even play the spotter and call in a friend as the big player to avoid detection (see the movie "21" or any of dozens of documentaries about the MIT teams for how this works).

However, if you just need to grind through 125 hands at the table minimum to clear a £25 bonus (which, relative to the amounts at stake, is much more profitable than card-counting) it's going to take hours.

Clearly computerised gambling is going to be quicker than anything that is run by a human, but live over-the-internet gambling is much slower still.  A dealer in a casino usually doesn't ask if you want to stand on 20, give a long speech and wait 30 seconds when offering insurance against an exposed ace, or announce the name of each winner after every hand.  I found these delays pretty painful.

Back to the roulette.  It really wasn't much effort to play through £200 for my few quid of expected value while I was cranking up a few poker tables.  It took about ten minutes.

The quickest and lowest-variance way, I figured, would be to bet £99 on red, £99 on black and £5.50 on zero.  It works out very nicely with 50p chips in play: for a £203.50 total stake (instantly releasing the £10 bonus) you'd always get back £198 for a guaranteed loss of £5.50, netting you £4.50 profit.

I actually went for a slightly different approach, hoping to avoid instant detection as a bonus abuser.  My deception wouldn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny if a real person examined my play, but at least I wasn't betting on the both sides of the same coin flip, which would surely raise a red flag.

I placed seven £1 outside bets: red, even, 1-18, 1st dozen (1-12), 2nd dozen (13-24), 1st column (1, 4, 7, ..) and 2nd column (2, 5, 8, ...).

This combination meant that although I covered almost every number on the layout - and most of them at least once - it was still gambling.  I'd lose everything on a zero or black 33.

Or so I thought.  To meet the £200 play requirement, I had to spin the wheel with this £7 bet 28 times (plus a slightly smaller bet to make up the difference) so the odds of hitting a wipeout number were high.  Eventually a zero came - and with it an unexpected lesson in European roulette rules.

I was amazed to see £1.50 returned to me from what I thought was a completely losing bet.  Turns out that you actualy get half back on the even money bets when a zero is spun.

Shows how much I know about roulette, I've never heard of that before.  I don't know how widespread this in in European casinos (Wizard of Odds has some information about this, and some variations) but I know Ashley Revell wasn't going to get half his life savings back if a zero came.

This is fantastic news.  The rule reduces the house edge on even money bets from 2.7% to 1.35% and increases the value of this bonus from £4.60 to £7.30 - assuming that you only make even money bets.  Which, of course, I did from that point on.

It's also opened my eyes to the possibility of exploiting roulette bonuses at other online casinos that offer the same rules.  It's still going to be tough to find a beatable game with a 1.35% house edge, but it's twice as feasible as I thought it was.

For what it's worth, I made £8 today.  It's not really worth getting excited about, but with several small bonuses available at the moment, my money is working harder for me in the Bank of Gala than any bank I can think of.

It's awesome to break even.

I'm serious.  I mentioned this before - if I can hold my own and not lose any money at the table on the iPoker network, I can make money over the course of the month from bonus awards and rakeback.

I could only be happier with how my bumpy ride through April ended if I thought I was good enough to actually win money in these games.

Never mind the variance (it's a $400 swing from the lowest to highest point) - I lost 93 cents.  How much closer to breaking even could I possibly get?

When you add everything up, this puts me up over $400 on the month; $170 in bonus already released, $115 in rakeback to come, a $100 win from a VIP freeroll in the bank and enough player points earned to put me a quarter of the way to redeeming for another iPod nano (figure it's worth about $30; I got £90 for the last one on eBay).

The freeroll is a $2,000 prize pool, usually with about 100 runners making it worth about $20 per week.  It's the first time I've made the money, and I wasn't sure whether to count it in my monthly haul but as the amount I won is about the same as the EV of playing in it every week I figured I probably should.

I was an overall loser on fixed-limit games but an overall winner on no-limit - but somehow the two numbers cancelled each other out almost exactly.

That 6.76% of hands won figure on $2/$4 is a bit worrying.  Yes, I play tight.  No, I wouldn't expect to win 10% of hands in a full-ring game (I'd hope to win larger than average pots to offset this).  But I need to work out whether I've just had some bad luck, or if I've been giving up pots too easily.

A bit more analysis on Poker Tracker also shows that when you total up all the hands that I called a raise on the big blind, I lost more money than I would have done if I'd simply folded every one of them.  I'm profitable when I re-raise (thankfully - it's almost always with premium cards!) but I need to take more care when it costs an extra small bet to play mediocre cards out-of-position.  I'm happy to have found the leak so that I can try to do something about it.

However it's a reassuring start to the first month that I've played no-limit on iPoker for anything more than a few short sessions.  The sample size is still pretty insignificant, but the row is green and that's about as much as I could ask for.

Let's see if I can't win a few cents this month.

Not content with running into quads virtually every time he appears on High Stakes Poker, Daniel Negreanu is also subjected to a savage beat by Katy Perry in the video to her song "Waking up in Vegas".

Sure, it's a music video, but Daniel's acting is good (as you can see from his sad face, above) so just in case you were wondering whether they'd used real game footage, here's the first clue that this is fake: the audience of predominantly attractive female poker fans in the background.

We don't get to see the betting, and the resolution of the cards is pretty crappy in these screen caps, but it looks like Negreanu either ran pocket kings into pocket aces for $17.2m pre-flop, or got it all with quad kings on the flop.  Whichever way it happened, Perry's pocket aces make runner-runner quads to end up as the best hand.

If Poker Stars had a sense of humour, the logo in the corner of the screen would read "lol riverstars".  Or they'd put a caption saying "look, it does happen in live poker!"

I really think they missed a trick by playing this one straight, but I guess they want to compete with Bwin's product placement in that awful Lady Gaga song.  All credit to them, they've found their own song that's almost as bad.

Anyway, after the flop, pocket aces are s 900-1 or so underdog... but it can happen.  Perry drags down a huge pot in predictably classy fashion.

It all works out nicely for Daniel in the end though. Apparently he had enough chips left to stage a dramatic comeback, and taunt her by showing off his bling.

This time he cracks Katy's pocket aces with king-ten of clubs.  At least I think that's the hand.  There's a reason that poker on TV uses simplified card rank and suit graphics, not little pictures of playing cards.

The flop is all paint and all black.  Let's assume he has a pair of kings and an open-ended straight flush draw - actually a slight favourite over the pair of aces at this point - and that they get the money in on the flop.

The turn brings another ace, but Daniel now has straight against Katy's three-of-a-kind and is a strong favourite (78%) to win the pot.  She needs a jack, queen or king.

The ace of clubs on the river (so that four of a kind is beaten by a royal flush) is unnecessary, but it's great for television.

Despite this pot being $17.2m - exactly the same size as the one Daniel just lost - Negreanu somehow has enough chips to cover Perry.

Rigged in favour of the big stack, obviously.

We see her throwing her last chip towards him.  Like you do.  And Katy's sad face is even better than Daniel's.

You can see the whole thing here, although the poker scenes do only last about four seconds in total:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x94a5w_waking-up-in-vegas_creation

This player's screen name might be "italian62", but the poker software shows his location as Amsterdam, and he definitely talks trash in Dutch.

Most of his comments up to this point in the game had been along the lines of "pfffffffft" or other such language-neutral noises, and at times it was just a string of random characters - presumably caused by banging his fists on the keyboard in rage.

He was pretty tilty.

The little "holding hands" icon shows that he'd made my buddy list.  In fact, by playing more than 50% of hands I'd been datamining, he'd actually made the list before I sat next to him.

I won two hands back-to-back before this outburst:

1. He limped in and I raised with JJ.  He called and then immediately folded, first to act on an ace-high flop.  He was obviously more scared of the ace than I was.

2. He limped, I raised with AQ and he called.  We both caught a pair on a Q72 flop and he called down with 87 when I bet on every street.  Hardly spectacular.

Then, he made actual words: "Kanker donut".

According to Babel Fish, it means "cancer donut".  However that's a very literal translation which really doesn't convey the subtle idiom of the insult.

Is he telling me he wishes I would get cancer?  Is he likening me to a horrible disease?  Or am I completely missing the point?

If I could ascertain this, I think I could have a pretty good guess at what his next insult (sadly, not aimed at me) meant: "Kankerhomo".

Smoke and a pancake?

Here are some of the photos Claire and I submitted for the PokerStars "Monkey Madness" promotion, and some others that didn't make the cut., from our trips to London and Salzburg earlier in the year.

Monkey at Buck House:

The weather was just grim the whole time we were there, which makes the photo a bit dismal really.  This was the best of a gloomy bunch.

If the sky looks crap, crop it tight to avoid the sky.  Fine in theory.  But in this one, somehow we managed to completely miss two girls with their heads up a statue's arse. 

Monkey at the foot of Nelson's Column:

I really like this angle, but the picture could benefit from just the slightest hint of colour in the horrible English sky.  It's one of the reasons I'm finally learning to use Photoshop...

Monkey at Thorpe Park:

I thought we'd have big fun taking him on some coasters.  Two problems though: not only the shitty weather (surprise) but also half the park was closed, so this was actually the only photo op we got.

Monkey in Salzburg:

Nothing says Salzburg like a statue of Mozart.  In fact the whole town is nothing but Mozart Street, Mozart Museum, Wolfgang's Bar and Grill, the Amadeus toothpaste factory, etc.

The only other famous thing associated with Salzburg is The Sound Of Music.  So why on earth wouldn't there be a painted lifesize cow to celebrate this?

Of course, I would have taken some photos of Monkey in Las Vegas if the competition had allowed for it.  Unfortunately, the closing date was this Wednesday, so the timing was just slightly wrong.

However I did use a little trickery to try to create some "Monkey <3 Vegas" shots.  I'll set those to post on here tomorrow while I'm on a plane, and then try to take the real thing next week.

I'm actually packed now too.  So is monkey.  Vegas here we come!

Math - or, if you prefer, maths - is not idiotic, despite what Barry Greenstein might say.

I'm referring to an incident on last week's episode of High Stakes Poker.  In a nutshell: Greenstein sucked out on Tom Dwan's pocket aces in a hand he played horribly, then made a meal of spitting out his supposed new catchphrase: "Math is idiotic".

A couple of years ago, posters on the 2+2 poker forums pledged money to Greenstein's charity if he'd say "lol donkaments" on TV.  He did it - and made over fifty grand for Children Incorporated.

For an encore, he decided to go again this year.  But this time, instead of a ubiquitous internet poker phrase he plumped for something more obscure, which his son came up with.  It's a phrase that hardly anybody outside of the Greenstein family's own poker site seems to have heard of, is not funny and doesn't even make sense.

Nothing against his charity work, it's a fine cause, but seriously - that's the best he could do?

Here we have one of the best and most respected players in the game saying not to worry about whether you're in a good spot or have sufficient pot-odds to draw to your hand, just go with it if you have a feeling.

I know the luck vs skill debate will run and run, but there can't be many viewers of High Stakes Poker who would actually think they are watching a programme that showcases the world's best guessers pitting their gut feelings against each other for hundreds of thousands of dollars?

The way this hand played out has rather spoiled High Stakes Poker for me.  I find it very difficult to believe that Barry would gamble $240,000 in such a poor spot (actually a 3-1 underdog after the flop, which is about as good as he could hope for) just in case a miracle happened so he would get to crowbar in his new catchphrase in order to try to raise a few pennies for the kids.

His EV on this hand is roughly -$200,000.  The charity would make, hopefully - and if the economy wasn't shot to buggery - another $50,000.

The subsequent clip (which, notably, wasn't necessary two years ago to explain "lol donkaments") with Greenstein talking about his charity and his lucky feather and how we know math is idiotic while Dwan can't keep a straight face just makes me more sceptical that there must have been some funky off-camera shenanigans and the whole thing is just a set-up the magic of television.

Anyway, as if I needed to prove it, here is one of the best examples I've ever seen that maths is indeed anything but idiotic.  This is taken from a book that Claire bought yesterday, under the guise of being something she can use in class.

The book is "A Passion for Mathematics" by Clifford A. Pickover, and its main selling point was that the author appears to have been on acid when he wrote it.  Questions include "how many digits of pi can you display using a deck of cards?" and "could Jesus multiply two numbers"?

The protagonists in his problems are often rabbits, robots or aliens.  Or robotic alien rabbits.  He writes very colourfully, setting them in scenarios that have little or nothing to do with - frankly - anything at all, and frequently embellishing with oblique conjecture and unnecessary levels of irrelevant detail.

This one, despite being relatively down-to-earth, was my favourite:

You work for a computer company.  Suppose that about 2 percent of the people in your company have AIDS.  A nurse named Julia tests all of the people in your company for AIDS, using a test with the following characteristics.

The test is 98 percent accurate, which we define as follows.  If the individual has AIDS, the test will be positive 98 percent of the time, and if the person doesn't have AIDS, the test will be negative 98 percent of the time.

You are tested, and, sadly, the test turns out positive.  You lose your health insurance.  Would you conclude from this that you are highly likely to have AIDS?

The significance of the nurse's name, the type of company you work for or the response of the insurer?  Who cares?

It's almost certainly the most outrageously tasteless probability exercise ever to grace an actual maths book, yet it still has a grounding in (an albeit grim) reality and shows how mathematics can be applied even in a horrifying life-changing situation.

The answer (look away now if you want to work this one out yourself):

.

.

.

.

.

It's a coinflip.  Precisely 50-50 whether you have it or you don't, given the criteria in the question.

You can read the explanation in full here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13270973/Clifford-a-Pickover-A-Passion-for-Mathematics.  It's answer 5.30 on page 365 of the book (page 381 of the document).

Anything but idiotic, I hope you'll agree.

A couple of days ago I was kicked off the iPoker network while playing on two tables.  I knew it wasn't a problem with my internet because I was still connected to PokerStars at the time, and carried on playing without incident.

A similar thing had happened earlier the same day, when I wasn't playing at the time, just datamining.  However the second time I had (carefully chosen) seats on two tables and by the time I reconnected (which took less than 30 seconds) I'd been booted and someone else was sitting to the left of my good buddies, SirFishio and McDonkalot.

This happening twice so close together seemed a bit weird.  I didn't expect anything to come of it, but I wrote to support on the offchance that they could use the information to help find a problem, which I suspected was coming from the network itself.

The result, basically, is that I think they tipped me.

Chris, please be informed that it been determined that you were in fact
disconnected from the table "Hastinapur" (1509348483) as a result of temporary connection problems with the card room.  As a result, a refund of $1.50 will be credited to your poker account shortly.

I didn't expect any compensation.  As far as I know, I didn't lose anything through being timed out.  I wasn't involved in a hand and I'm pretty sure from the hand histories that survived that I'd not posted a blind recently.  So I missed out on playing a few free hands, out of position, and even if I could put a value on this, it wouldn't be much.

So, a buck fifty?  Kinda random, but thanks I guess.

They went on:

However, your connection problem from the "Agartala" (509182411) was not due to any connection problems on the side of the card room.

So while they acknowledged that one was a connection problem with the card room, the other one - at exactly the same time - apparently was not.  Riiiiiiiiiight.

This makes my head hurt, but I guess I'm $1.50 up on the deal...

It's apparently over a year since my last royal flush.  I broke that dry spell last night.

Royals are always pretty, but even more so when you get there against an otherwise identical hand.

We both flopped a broadway straight and we capped the flop.  He led the turn and just called my raise, and I was delighted that he decided to pay off my river bet after I made The Best Hand In Poker with four to a flush on board.

It's not quite as long since I last had quads, but they have never looked prettier than when I managed to hit that last remaining card in the deck to win a massive pot.

$56 is massive for $1/$2.  He'd raised pre-flop and I called from the small blind with a couple of other players involved.  I put in 4 small bets on the flop when I was behind, then won 4 big bets on the turn and 4 more on the river after I sucked out.

It's the first time for literaly years that I can remember hating the four-bet cap in online poker.  Even with a possible flush out there, I'm sure this one was going to the felt if only they'd have let us!

In a marketing email randomly signed by Daniel Negreanu, PokerStars have announced that you now don't have to be quite as important to become a VIP.

It seems to be great news for the player.  Instead of having to earn 1,500 player points in a month to be crowned SilverStar, you only need 1,200.  The price of GoldStar has also been slashed from 4,000 monthly FPPs to 3,000, and PlatinumStar from 10,00 FPPs to 7,500.

So what's it actually worth?

If you currently have no VIP status with PokerStars (they call it BronzeStar, but it means NoStar) then by reaching the SilverStar level 300 points sooner you can use the 1.5x multiplier on points 1,200 to 1,499 this month.  That's a potential 150 more points than you would have got last month, and in real money (1 FPP = 1.6c) it's worth $2.40.

Then because you reach GoldStar 1,000 points sooner than before, you'll be earning 2x on points 3,000 to 3,999 instead of 1.5x.  Get over 4000 points this month and get 500 FPPs more than you would have done last month.  That's another $8.

Shoot for PlatinumStar and you will be earning a 2.5x bonus on points 7,500 to 9,999 instead of 2x.  That's 1,250 more FPPs than previously, worth $20.

The revised point thresholds are only a quantifiable perk if you are moving up a level in any given month.  There's a little value in being able to retain your status by playing less poker, but how much that's worth all depends on how much you play the following month.

Not really worth getting excited about then.

Here's an impressive looking graph from my limit hold'em play last month.

Sadly, it only tells half the story.  I really needed that big upswing to get back even.

The yellow lines on this graph show the end of each month that I've been playing $2/$4 and $3/$6 on the iPoker network. 

Things did not start well, so "about even" is not only a good result relative to how I'd begun, but it also seems to be a very good result in this game.  The tables are overrun by rock-tight bonus-grinders, many of whom play little more than 10% of the hands they're dealt.

As that's exactly what I've been trying to do, it would be hypocritical to call them nits.  Hyponitical, perhaps.

I have to assume that the regulars I see all the time and assume to be professionals are all well-compensated for their efforts because among the familiar names - all of whom are all logging tens of thousands of hands every month - almost nobody is actually making money at the tables.

For me, the extra money I get is 25% rakeback and a $10 bonus for every 1,000 player points.  So while Poker Tracker says that I'm about even, my balance says that I'm actually $766 up from where I started.

I'm also getting close to being able to cash in my player points for an ipod nano.  I don't want it, but their store has a fairly limited selection and it'll sell on ebay.  Call it another $100 in added value, because I should get there in a week or so.

So in total that's $866, and Poker Tracker tells me that I've paid $1460 in rake over nearly 16,000 hands.  Overall, that's equivalent to nearly 60% rakeback, which ain't bad at all.  I'd get a slightly better deal if I played more, too.

With this level of payback, you could sustain a loss rate of 1 big bet per 100 hands and still break even (the actual figure is -$5.41 per hundred, based on my data at $2/$4 and $3/$6).  So if you are able to lose money no quicker than that, there's a clear profit potential from playing poker under these conditions.

Until recently, I was losing a little faster than that: 1.25BB/100.

So, given my sudden change in fortune this month, is is possible that I suddenly started doing something right?

I really can't say for sure, it's much too early to know whether I'm simply on a nice long hot streak.  I'm still finding it hard to believe that I have actually won it all back, and given that I can't recall seeing more than two long-term winning players in this game the whole time I've played it, I'm a long way away from even thinking that I could be the third.

But I did make one change to the way I played this game, which was to adhere to strict criteria about not only which tables I played at, but also the seat I sat in.

In fact my rule is pretty crude: A player makes my buddy list by playing more than 30% of hands, and if I can't sit within two seats to the left of a buddy, I don't sit down.

30% of hands might not sound excessively loose, but the typical range for strong players in this game is more like 15% so looking for anyone playing at twice as many hands as this, and then making sure I had position on them for the majority of the hands I would play, seemed like a good place to start.

That's it.  I hoped that improving my game selection would help me lose less quickly so that I could grind out a little profit from bonuses and rakeback.  If it can actually turn me into a winning player, that would be simply stunning.

It could all turn around again this month though.  Watch this space, graph fans...

Remember the last time you saw six hands all go to showdown?

Me neither.

Sure, three of them ended up all in, but this was still a whopping $100 pot at $2/$4 limit hold'em. Enjoy!

Deoghar 2/4, hand converted by the iPoker Converter at Talking-Poker

Preflop: Hero is in the BB with T K
UTG moves all-in for $4, 1 fold, MP calls $4, 2 folds, CO-1 calls $4, CO calls $4, Button calls $4, SB folds, Hero calls $2.

There aren't many hands I fold for 11-1 immediate pot odds, in fact there's probably none.  I'm certainly going to see a flop with king-ten.

Flop ($25) 5 J Q
Hero checks, MP checks, CO-1 bets $2, CO moves all-in for $4, Button raises to $6, Hero calls $6, MP raises to $8, CO-1 calls $6, Button calls $2, Hero calls $2.

Up and indeed down.  Calling 3 bets cold on a draw?  Well, it's currently a $6 call to win $37, with the possibility of other callers to sweeten the deal.  Or if it gets capped (as it did) I'm paying $8 to have a shot at $47 or more.  The worst case is that I get about 6-1 on a draw that is better than 5-1 to make the nuts on the next card.

Turn ($61) 2
Hero checks, MP bets $4, CO-1 moves all-in for $3, Button raises to $8, Hero calls $8, MP calls $4.

The two players who still have money left could cap it again with me stuck in the middle, and the card was a complete brick so that's fairly likely given the flop action.  However I'm still drawing to the nuts.  My outs are discounted slightly for Ah and 9h making a possible flush, but that's unlikely to help the two villians left in the main pot.

If MP just calls here, I'm getting 11-1 on the call ($8 to win $88); if it goes to 3 bets it's 7-1 ($12 to win $96) and even if they cap it then 5.5-1 ($16 for a shot at $104) is still worth hanging around for.

River ($88) K
Hero checks, MP bets $4, Button calls $4, Hero calls $4

I'm almost certaily beaten, but I did just hit top pair so I'm not letting it go for one bet.  My hand has to be good just 5% of the time for this is a profitable call, which I'll admit is still a bit of a stretch, but the downside of tilting after seeing I folded the best hand in a $100 pot would be far worse!

UTG shows T Q
MP shows J J
CO-1 shows J A
CO shows A 4
Button shows 5 5
Hero shows T K

MP wins $100 with Three of a kind, Jacks.

This is really only marginally interesting, even to geeks like me, but it grabbed my attention for a few minutes.

PokerStars are approaching their 25 billionth poker hand, and promotions abound.

This includes a 25% deposit bonus up to $250 maximum which sounds great, until you realise the daily deposit limit on almost every payment method is $600.

I already emailed support and got my limits increased just for this, which was pretty easy but it took a few hours to get it cleared so if you're planning on maxing out this bonus don't leave it until the last minute.

Every million hands leading up to #250,000,000,000 some fireworks will go off and the table that's dealt a hand number ending in six or more zeros will have some free money thrown their way.  Expect to see more 1c/2c tables running than you ever thought possible as the big one approaches.

Anyway, I noticed something funny was going on in the lobby this evening as they began streaming a live update of how long until the next hand, and who got lucky in the last one.

Turns out you needed to restart the client and download an update for this to work properly, otherwise it scrolls through this code, which I've crudely pasted together:

After the update, this is what you see:

Unless the milestone hand is actually in progress, in which case the message is slightly different.

So what do we learn from this about the the PokerStars software?  Not much, only that the scrolling text area in the lobby is not just displaying a fixed message pushed down from the server - it's actually capable of some rudimentary program logic.  Why?  I don't really know.

And we can see that inside the brain of the operation they actually refer to every billionth hand not as a "milestone" but as a "jubilee".

As I said, marginally interesting at best.

I finally made the Royal Flush Club on Empire Poker!  One last marathon session yesterday made sure I reached the giddy heights of their top tier - and earned the right to the promised $100/month no-strings deposit bonus.

I didn't expect fireworks, but I was hoping for something to mark the occasion.  A congratulatory email, perhaps (with details of how I get my free money, preferably).  There's been nothing yet.  But I definitely made it:

Played 33, cashed in 7.  The in-the-money results were far from spectacular though, and if it wasn't for a 3rd place finish in a 60-man $30 tournament, which landed me $371, I'd have wiped out almost all of the good work I did last time.

As it is, I ended up down $226, which is offset slightly by $25 cash back from redeeming the points I earned.  I paid $67 in tournament fees, so that's a reasonable rakeback rate (37%), but that's only the case when you play dozens of tournaments on the same day (because of the "number of tournaments squared" rule for bonus points) .  Otherwise it's virtually worthless.

I can live with that result given the luck I had, and knowing that one or two results going slightly differently could have turned things right around.  I bubbled in a satellite for a $172 seat, and my session ended with aces getting predictably cracked.

I open-pushed, got called by ace-jack and the harmless king-high flop turned to disaster with a ten on the turn and a devastating queen on the river.

Pretty standard.

The other nine times out of ten, I'd have been sitting on a stack virtually guaranteed to make the money ($90+) and in good shape to fight for the top prizes.

Anyway. hit me with that deposit bonus Empire Poker...

I signed up to chipmeup.com a couple of weeks ago.  This is a site where you can buy and sell small pieces of action in poker tournaments.

It's a bit like what I already do with some of the live tournaments I play, but it's running around the clock and you can buy shares for anything upwards of a dollar, mostly for online poker.

I have had mixed success so far backing players, but tonight it's my turn to hold my hand out asking for money.  I'm playing two tournaments on PokerStars: the Sunday Warm-Up ($215) and the Daily Eighty Grand ($55) - although the Eighty Grand is actually guaranteed at $125,000 today.

I offered half of my action in the $55 tournament and it sold out in minutes.  So I decided to go for something a bit more ambitious and have listed 75% of the $215.  I'll still play this regardless of how many shares I sell, but if you want a piece head over to http://chipmeup.pokernews.com/players/show/3874 and snap one up.

Or contact me directly if you can't be bothered to set up an account at chipmeup.com.  To say that their web site could benefit from a usability study is an understatement, but if you can get past that (to be honest, it took me a few attempts) the underlying service is really rather good.

Live updates (click graphs for more details):

EDIT: Sunday Million, finished 890th from 4069 runners.  Went out with the best hand (A5 vs 95) obv.

EDIT: Eighty Grand, finished 45th from 4460 runners.  Bit better :)  Won $401.40, of which 40% goes to my backers.

All you have to do is take me with you.  I still have oodles of room comp, including 5 free midweek nights at the Rio throughout the Series.  I'm open to offers

The 2009 World Series Of Poker schedule is here.