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Pleasantly surprised by Neteller’s eventual response to this complaint.
It’s a dollar out, but what are you gonna do? It’s $111.61 more than I expected to get! This text from Sporting Index came alongside yet another promo that I must be able to find a way to exploit this weekend. Register for their mobile betting service, and they’ll cover net losses on sports up to £50, it says. Getting set up turned out not to be as easy as texting some word to some shortcode number, as part one of the text suggested. I’ve still had no response, so I’m not yet convinced this isn’t part of some kind of scam. I know it’s the law 2 make sum abbrvs 4 txt, but would you really expect the compulsory high risk warning that is required by FSA-regulated spread betting firms to look like this?
Can’t complain at a free money promo three weekends in a row. This time I couldn’t even wait for the weekend after checking the terms: it’s valid from 00:00am on Thursday! It’s the same deal as last time, with net losses of up to £30 refunded provided you make at least 5 bets. So I placed the same bets as last time: £6 on red all the way to qualify for the offer, then betting a 2-1 shot to try and win something serious. After the five spins I was two for five: 19, 2, 8, 2, 5. One more try to get back even (followed by doubling up to chase my "losses" if this failed) brought 12 and I was in business. I stuck to lumping £30 on the first dozen for a risk-free chance of £60, not paying attention to the fact that the last five numbers would all have been winners on that bet and, naturally, it landed right in the middle of the table on 23. But if they keep offering this freebie, one day I’ll hit it… it’s worth having a Sporting Index account just for these deals! I looked back at the calculation from my last post where I thought I’d figured out that laying black had a much smaler house edge than betting on red. The software tries to be clever and keep its bet increments in whole numbers although it doesn’t quite work. The closest you get to a £6 bet is selling at 0.94 for £5.67 per point, making it a £6.01 proposition to win £5.33. The expected value with these figures over 37 spins is therefore (18 x £6.01) – (19 x £5.33) = -£6.91. That’s less than 19p per £6.01 bet, or about 3p in the pound – not too different from the normal 2.7% house edge in roulette. So I was wrong in thinking this could possibly be the best roulette bet on the planet. Nobody noticed though, did they… PokerStars offered me a whopping 300 FPPs to complete a survey. That’s worth about 2 quid on Amazon (assuming I ever regain VIP status in order to cash them in) or it’s three fifths the price of a Chris Moneymaker poster. But why would I want to go and do a thing like that? I’m no expert on their range of posters, because I’m not 12 any more, so I don’t know which ones have proved popular. However I did notice that the Moneymaker medallion is the only one still available from the strictly limited edition set of three issued last year. Raymer and Hachem sold out a long time ago. The survey seemed to be geared towards play money players, asking what kind of promotions I’d like to see in order to deposit and why I play for real money at other sites. Not sure why I got this – it’s not like I stopped playing there completely, and I still have a real money balance as well as T$ and W$ to spend. But it only took about a minute to whizz through the answers – all multiple choice – so worth checking your Stars account if you haven’t logged in lately. I was only too pleased to answer this question:
Roulette is not the most thrilling game anyway, but I can appreciate the recording of the £30 I bet with Sporting Index this weekend that didn’t actually cost me anything was pretty much at the bottom end of the excitement scale. Even for me, whose money was almost at risk. This one is slightly better. Ashley Revell bets his life savings on red. Yes, it’s old news, but I never thought to look for it online before and I’m glad I finally did. When this was on TV, the sound quality was all over the place but in this version you can hear what the dealer is saying to him (just try to ignore the DIY Tarantino soundrack). Sky One had to rush to get the program out on time. It was meant to be live from the Hard Rock, but they changed their mind about accepting the bet and in the end the Plaza stepped up but it wasn’t allowed to be broadcast live. For a bet of this size, I think they have every right to be paranoid. The rule that the bet must to be placed before the ball has travelled twice around the wheel is to eliminate the use of any computer devices that can calculate where the ball will land from its speed. Even so, such a device is only accurate in predicting a segment of the wheel (its users have to know the arrangement of numbers on the roulette wheel and bet accordingly) so it’s unlikely to be significant on a red/black bet. The Plaza still have a sign on the "lucky" table to commemorate their huge loss. I didn’t really have time to play the bonus on Party Poker this weekend, but what the hell… 25% up to $100 with a ten times play requirement is pretty good. Playing 4 to 6 tables of $25 NL I thought I’d rattle though it. In fact sleep got the better of me last night – what a lightweight! – and it took a third session today to get there, but the end result was worth it. I was in microlimit heaven 🙂 Hands played: 2070 (for 1000 raked hands) As my Poker Tracker is shafted (it actually ran out of disk space before Christmas and broke the PostgreSQL database, and I still haven’t fixed it) I set up Poker Office to play this bonus, which I haven’t used in a long time and had forgotten just how good it was. I particularly like one of the features for multitabling: showing player actions. Poker Tracker doesn’t have this. The overlay projects a series of letters next to each player with C, R or X for whether they called, raised or checked on each betting round. If you’re involved with two hands at the same time and can’t quite remember who raised pre-flop this can be very useful. Last weekend, Sporting Index threw a bonus deal at me because I hadn’t given them any action for atout 2 years. It was effectively free money. I had to deposit to play, but they would refund any losses up to £50 over the course of the weekend. This was a refund of net losess, not on a single bet. As they offer spread betting not fixed odds, taking full advantage of their generosity is a little trickier. I hadn’t planned it that well last weekend and ran out of time before I could get one more bet before the deadline in whilst I’d still not lost the full £50. In fact, on my last bet I committed a cardinal sin – I had ended up with a winning bet, but the only result of that was that I won back some of the money they were going to repay me anyway – not enough to take home a profit! With this kind of promotion, the last bet you place should always make you busto (within the limits of the refund value) or guarantee a profit. With sports spread betting, I found this tricky to anticipate with my hurriedly placed total goals and corners bets. The key would be to find a bet that has a limited downside so you can’t lose more than £50, but also has the chance of hitting it big. A total goals bet on soccer, buying at 2.5 goals for £20 per goal cannot lose more than £50 (for a 0-0 draw) but a three goal match only wins you £10 – you need to find a real goalfest to win a significant amount. This weekend’s promotion is available to everyone, and is in a similar vein – a £30 net refund from your weekend’s bets, but for their virtual games rather than sports spread betting. These games are gimmicky rubbish, allowing you to bet on fake horseracing, fake poker games, fake dice, fake slots and fake roulette as well as some really silly novelty games like a cartoon tank that fires footballs with random numbers into the air. However I liked the look of the roulette game in order to play through this offer fairly easily so I had a go. It’s a single zero game and you create your own market by placing chips as you would in a casino, and then betting higher or lower than an expected win amount that the system generates for you. To keep things simple, I only looked at single unit bets and for every type of bet the market was set at 0.94-1.00. In other words, when you buy the market at 1.00, the amount you win is exactly the same as you would win on a regular roulette table. A single number still wins 36 times your stake and a red/black bet wins even money. The house edge for each bet comes only from the zero on the wheel – 1 in 37, or just over 2.7% – just as it does in a casino. The 0.94 figure is for when you want to bet against the spin producing a winner for whatever bet you placed on the roulette layout. When you sell this market, you can win 0.94 times your stake but you risk the amount of the roulette payoff multiplied by your stake. Betting against a single number, you could win 94p or lose £36 for a £1 stake whereas on an even money bet, you are laying £1 to win 94p. The zero on the wheel works in your favour – you win 19 times out of 37, but the payoff is reduced. If my calculations are correct, the edge on selling bet is very small. For a red/black bet at £1, every 37 spins you will lose (18 x 100) and win (19 x 94), a net loss of 14p. That’s a house edge of 0.38%! I’d love someone (if only I knew a maths teacher, for instance…) to correct me here – that seems far too small, and I wish I’d noticed this before I actually started playing out this bonus! I had also assumed that I would have to buy in any market in order to hit a big payoff. Now I realise this is also not true. I would have been able to cover multiple bets on the layout (e.g. two separate dozens) and sell that market for odds of roughly 2-1. Effectively I’d be betting the other dozen as well as the zero, and this might have been a better bet than doing the bet the "normal" way round. There was a five bet play requirement and although no minimum risk was stated I thought it was wise to at least make sure the £30 freebie was wagered in full. I began with five £6 bets on red, intending to move on to a bigger bet after these five bets were complete. Things didn’t start well: 22, 36, 26, 2, 6 Down to £12. I’d need a 2-1 payoff to get back to be only £6 into profit. It would have to be a 5-1 shot or longer to make it worthwhile. I decided to play it a different way – try to gamble back up to the free £30 and then go for one win for that full amount on a 2-1, aiming for a £60 profit. I put the remaining £12 on red. 21. Hooray. £6 more to get back even, so I played red one more time. 18. Home and dry – almost. Now just the small matter of trying to win something… I bet the first dozen for £30. If I win, it’s £60 profit and I’m cashing out. If I lose, I get my £30 back on Monday. A great position to be in. Click here to watch the spin and retrospectively sweat it with me. Remember, we’re looking for any number between 1 and 12… Both Party Poker and Absolute Poker have thrown free money at me this weekend. Which would be great, if I hadn’t blown it all on blackjack already… Party seem to think it’s my birthday so they gave me $5 to celebrate with. In fact it just looks like I entered the month and day back to front, so I’ll try to correct that and see if I get the same offer again when it actually is my birthday! $5 won’t get you very far in any of their poker games, so trying to spin it up playing blackjack seemed like a good idea – the play requirement was $25 in total bets before being allowed to withdraw. This is an eight deck game with the dealer hitting soft 17, and wizardofodds.com puts the house edge for these rules at about 0.8%. No point grinding through 25 $1 bets here to keep the swings to a minimum and cash in as much of the $4.80 expected value as possible – go for glory! The plan here was simply to try to double up three times to $40 (actually $35 in total wagers – reducing my EV by a few cents) to get to an amount worth withdrawing. With the possibility of a 3-2 blackjack payout, it could even be a little higher than this. However I only got to see one hand – a hard 15 against a dealer 6, and the dealer did not bust. Second try then. Absolute actually sent me two promotions for the price of, well, none. The first said "here, have $10" and the second said "here, have $20". Indeed this was a good mistake, as I found $30 waiting for me in my account. Both emails told me they missed me in slightly different ways. Funnily, I hadn’t been missing their clunky software and super tight players at all. The only play requirement for the free money was to play something – anything would do. But I couldn’t be bothered to try to make something happen with poker – I already have a Party Poker bonus to clear this weekend – so this also came down to one hand of blackjack. Absolute use six decks, but the dealer still hits soft 17. The house edge for these rules is ever so slightly better: 0.76%. Actually, playing just one hand for your entire bankroll messes up these figures somewhat – not being able to split and double down in favourable situations gives the house a bigger edge. Again, only giving up a few cents here in exchange for an easier life. I saved this hand for posterity. They gave me a brief glimmer of hope for my useless hard 16 against a dealer’s face card, but it wasn’t to be. Click here to view the hand in action! EDIT: Of course, since replaying this I noticed the "surrender" button light up, which is the correct play here. I never even looked for it, dammit. I could have had $15 back to go on one more hand..! Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Congratulations, it’s an apostrophe. Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall & Saloon has now replaced Barbary Coast in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip. Before:
After:
Nice photoshop work, but are Harrah’s so ashamed of this place (or perhaps the name) that they had to crop out the neon Flamingo logo from their own hotel next door? Just like the Imperial Palace – the property just the other side of the Flamingo that they also bought to knock down – they’re not associating it with their other Las Vegas casinos. The slot club is independent of Total Rewards, and you won’t find any hotel information on harrahs.com. Big Elvis is still playing there, but are all drinks still $2?
This has been something of a mission of mine for a long time, but it’s taken a long time to get there. The Empire Poker loyalty points program doesn’t let you spend anything on junky merchandise until you’ve earned 5000 points and become a VIP, so otherwise all those hard earned FPPs are useless. Points are awarded in bizarre fashion, with ring game players penalised for playing too much – they number of points they get is the square root of the number of hands played in a day – whereas tournament players are rewarded for playing insane sessions – bonus points are awarded equal to the square of the number of tournament they play. Since Party Poker took over, the number of qualifying daily tounaments has increased, and it would be possible to play over 40 tournaments in a day – thousands of bonus points! – if you were so inclined. I’m don’t quite have that stamina yet, but I’m getting there… On Sunday I’d worked out that I needed 642 points to become important, and so I played 25 tournaments – 625 bonus points, plus a few others based on the entry fees – which just pushed me into VIP territory. 5000 points should be enough for several shirts, caps, stress balls or blankets (I really wanted an Empire Poker blanket). But now that I finally made it, the VIP store appears to have been cleaned out. No key fobs, no playing cards, no mouse pads. Just cash. 5000 points is $50 cash, which is not to be sneezed at, but I wanted junk! I ended up about even. Of course. About $50 down in real money, but also with a seat into a $215 tournament on Friday. In real terms, it’s a profit. Not bad at all, considering I was having to play 6 tables at a time at some points, and clearly wasn’t making great decisions when some all-in gambles I wouldn’t ordinarily take would have the upside of having more chips and the downside of being able to concentrate better on other tournaments. To get that far, I’d played 13 hours non-stop and was thoroughly knackered. Better get in training if I want to go for maximum points next time… I also fell foul of bad karma after turning down a final table deal for the first time ever. My stack was crippled with four left, but my chip count offer was still less than third place money, so I didn’t think it was worth it. Of course, I busted on the next hand. So my next goal is the Royal Flush Club at 15,000 points. This opens the door to a monthly $100 bonus with no play requirements. It’ll be worth it in the end… probably take a year or so to get there though at the rate I’m going! |
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