I could never have imagined this 20 years ago – last night I saw Kylie Minogue in concert. The girl who was a significant part of the reason my family’s bought their first video recorder puts on quite a show. I do remember that first summer holiday of a twice-daily Neighbours fix – new episodes at lunchtime, repeated the next morning – with a skewed teenage fondness. Eventually the BBC caught onto the fact that this was actually the biggest TV programme on the planet and moved it to the early evening slot it has had ever since, but until then I know we were far from alone in the world in compulsively recording half an hour of Australia’s finest export every day.
Let’s be honest – Kylie made some shocking records early in her career. But this was a greatest hits tour, so all the offenders were there and stood up to be counted in suitably cheesy fashion. The karaoke version of Especially For You was somehow nothing like as bad as it should have been and I just found myself laughing uncontrollably during I Should Be So Lucky – not so much anything to do with the show, more the fact that I realised I was actually enjoying a live performance of a song that I detested with a passion.
Amongst this and other retro campness, including a candidate for t-shirt of the year – "Kylie Says Relax" (you don’t need a picture) – there was even, surprisingly, a moment of musical genius in the swingin’ cabaret arrangement of The Loco-Motion. Absolutely stunning (really) and God bless YouTube and camera phones for letting me share it here.
The only new information I have had about Poker Dome in a month.
Regarding ground transportation, we take contestants from the airport round trip to Caesars. Since you’re coming early on your own and staying elsewhere, it’s your responsibility to get to Caesars.
Airport to Caesars = 3.8 miles
Strat to Caesars = 2.7 miles
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Updated 26/1: I take it back, they did actually send a car for me, and I didn’t even have to ask again. I was probably meant to tip.
Whether or not the Gutshot verdict will spell the end for Europe’s Busiest Card Room remains to be seen. Following the trial, Derek Kelly announced, "There will be poker played at the Gutshot tonight – but we may have to change the way we do it". He went on to finish in the money in a £5 rebuy game of chance and skill.
Clearly many Gutshot regulars, as well as other keen poker players throughout the UK, are disappointed by the guilty verdict. Amongst the comments of appreciation, sympathy, disbelief and outrage on their forum are calls to arms – write to your MP, or let’s start a petition and see what we can do. Even if there is no court appeal, there is still a fight to be fought, and it will be fought by more than just one gallant Irishman.
Boycotting Grosvenor Casinos is another suggestion. This is the organisation that commissioned the investigation that ultimately led to Derek’s prosecution, after the police were uninterested in taking matters any further. They have, effectively, outlawed private poker clubs (except for clubs that can somehow cover their costs by charging the 60 pence per player per day allowed by law) whilst also hiking their own charges earlier this year. It is only an interpretation of the Gaming Act that allows them to call their a registration fee a "session charge" and charge more than the permitted 10%. The Gambling Commission approves of this loophole, however, and I cannot see it being tested in court.
We eagerly await a formal statement from Gutshot to see just how they intend to proceed.
There has been a story in the news about some crooks being jailed for, apparently, cheating at poker. I first heard this in a brief report on the radio so my first thought was exactly what they’d been done for – even in a fully licenced casino, the house pretty much can’t (or wont) do anything about a poker cheat, on account of it being a game that’s played only against other players. If they’re not stealing from the casino, the worst that will happen is a swift ejection from the premises. They usually want to keep punter-worrying stories quiet, especially when they don’t have to worry about getting their money back.
The crime in question took place in September 2005, but with the story breaking less than 24 hours before a verdict is expected in the Gutshot case, and showing the public – and the jury, if they are allowed to watch TV – that a licenced casino is a very safe place to be, the timing is impeccable. I may very well say more about the Gutshot defense and their shocking definition of gambling and expert witness who does not understand conditional probability after judgement has been served later today.
Footage of the scam taking place confirms that the three men had actually been caught cheating at three card poker. Just having the word poker in the name of the game will help to carry the story in the media, but really this is just a poker-style carnival game, played against the dealer and featuring a juicy house edge.
According to the ITV news report I saw last night, they got away with "three and a half (pause for effect) thousand pounds", suggesting that these guys were stupid enough to not only hang around long enough to be seen repeatedly winning at a game with horible odds, but also that they only got away with a little more than one month’s minimum wage each. The BBC coverage, however, suggested a much more respectible figure (although only a guestimate) of £250,000, won over a four month period.
Yau Lam and his partners in crime – Fan Tsang and the fabulously named Bit Wong – used a lipstick camera concealed in his sleeve, positioned to see the faces of the cards as they were dealt. The pictures were transmitted to a nearby van where his accomplice could speak the relevant information to a hidden earpiece. Sky News has pictures of the kit.
As only 26% of hands in three card poker are decided by a pair or better, even seeing just one of the dealer’s cards is very valuable indeed. After placing an initial ante bet, the player has the choice of "raising" – doubling the bet to find out if he beats the dealer’s hand – or "folding" and forfeiting his bet immediately.
The basic strategy is to raise if you hold a Q64 or better, otherwise fold. However every time you have a queen-high hand but see that the dealer was dealt an ace or king, you can save a bet by playing opposite to the normal strategy because you already know you are beaten. Quite clearly though, if you are only investing more money on winning hands, the casinos is soon going to notice.
In case you’d somehow forgotten, it was actually the World Poker Tour that invented fucking tiny cameras (not Noel Edmonds or Timmy Mallett as I believed in my younger days). If the police didn’t get these guys, WPTE’s lawyers would have done, and that’s a much scarier prospect than a few years of porridge.
I’d wiped the slate clean on my poker results spreadsheets on 1st Jan. Things didn’t go exactly to plan with me playing a pretty random collection of tournaments and running quite cold indeed. This one was random too – it was just whatever was starting after I managed to get online from my hotel in King’s Cross.
PokerStars Tournament #40451369, No Limit Hold’em Buy-In: $10.00/$1.00 1101 players
You finished the tournament in 7th place. A $363.34 award has been credited to your Real Money account.
It all went my way early on, getting some stupidly easy payoffs every time I hit a hand and I then managed to maintain and stay in the top pretty much all the way. This was a 10 minute level tournament – not quite a speed game, but faster than usual and by the end the monster chip leader only had 20 big blinds in his stack. I ended up busting after I pushed with KJs and ran into an eager caller with AJ in the blind.
I was deliberately not looking at my results spreadsheet to see how much I had to win to get back even for the year, or I’d probably have played much weaker and tried to limp into as big a payoff as possible, whilst never standing a chance of winning the thing. This is a very good payoff for a $10 tournament and three hours work (although, of course, first place was over 2 grand) but it still doesn’t quite get me out of the hole. Nevertheless, I’m pretty darn pleased with the result, and in terms of performance against a large field, this is probably my best MTT result ever. Certainly my best result on Stars.
As I’ve now been back from Vegas for longer than it is until I go again (T-8!) I should probably lay to rest the stuff have from the last trip that I haven’t talked about yet but would definitely have blogged if the crappy net access didn’t let me down.
I had two tournament cashes. I already wrote about the result at Binions, but I also hit a $964 payout at Caesars Palace. This was a 12-way chop that gave everyone remaining a prize just better than the third place money. Amazingly, only eleven accepted the deal to start with. Blinds were about to double (they skip some levels in the lunctime tournament to get it over with quicker than the evening one) leaving nobody with a stack much bigger than 10 big blings. He soon came round though, and I got to experience the bureaucratic nightmare that is a Harrah’s casino poker payout of $600 or more. Form-filling-tastic.
Somehow I’d lost my Total Rewards card (or at least I thought I had, it did turn up much later) whilst playing video poker at Caesars, resenting the downgrade from 9/6 Jacks or Better (99.5% payback) to a pathetic 7/5 paytable (96.1%). To get the payout from the cardroom, I needed to hand over both my ID and the players card. I tossed in my passport to let them get started on the paperwork and went hunting for the card, with paranoid visions of neither my passport nor my money being there when I got back. The card wasn’t where I thought I’d left it, so I had to beg the players club staff to give me a new one: at first they insisted I needed my passport to get it reprinted, but eventually they believed my story that I’d had to leave my ID in the poker room and just let me write my name on a piece of paper, found me on the system and asked me if the address on screen was correct. A peculiar security procedure to say the least, especially after nothing else I had on me was acceptable proof of ID – including a Visa card that has a photograph on it, that they wouldn’t even look at! I was pleased when I eventually found my old card however – it was a World Series of Poker edition card from the summer and these things matter! 🙂
I did meet another English player who’d cashed in that tournament who passed on some useful information on how to be an illegal immigrant. He’d been living there for some time now with his friends who play poker for a living. He, he insisted, was not that good yet but tagged along and still enjoyed some success. "How did you get a visa then", I obviously asked. "Don’t need one mate", he replied, going on to explain that as long as you leave the country every three months you can take full advantage of the visa waiver. Nobody at the airport pays attention to when you were last here, he insisted. As I’ve been a bit concerned about my return next weekend so soon after this trip, especialy travelling alone this time and almost certainly fitting some kind of profile, this was quite reassuring. "The only thing is", he advised, "if you get into any kind of trouble they’ll try to kick you out. But we know a guy. He’ll take you Mexico for $99, then next day you can come right back".
That was my largest win of the trip, and a good result at the right time really, putting me back into the black for the trip.
My only other win of note was a profitable session playing $1/$2 No Limit at the Golden Nugget. Apart from one session last summer playing $1/$3 in a local’s game, which didn’t help a great dea;, I was a complete noob to this game. I played almost nothing all night, and somehow ended up leaving with $129 more than I came with after nearly six hours. I’m still unsure whether loose no-limit games could suits me – I have a long way to go to be confident enough to take full advantage of the weaker players and the donators, but at least I could spot who they were. The bigger pots I won, if I recall correctly, came from a well-timed check-raise holding only second pair – which I felt very good about – and a bizarrely played ace-jack that I might still hold back for another entry in the future. All I can think looking back on that hand is that I played it like it was limit poker, and somehow it worked. I know I have much to learn.
The Nugget is actually now home to the coolest swimming pool in the world. That would be because it’s got a goddamn shark tank in the middle of it! And a water slide where you go right through the sharks! On a chilly evening in December – definitely not swimming weather – the Nugget opened its doors just to show this baby off as soon as they’d finished building it. And quite rightly so. Best pool ever.
I must also mention that we finally went to see Wayne Newton. I’d heard that his voice isn’t what it used to be, and they weren’t kidding. His orchestra and backing singers did a fairly good job of making just enough volume that you couldn’t quite tell how badly he was choking. There were plenty of talky bits for recovery time between musical numbers and he was also professional enough to always cough and splutter away from the microphone. It was a very odd experience to be in the presence of greatness but have to imagine what the Wayne Newton experience is actually meant to be like. He is clearly a fantastic entertainer, and still puts on a decent show, but it looks like he was way past his best several years ago. Nonetheless, it’s something that had to be ticked off the "things to do in Vegas before I (or they) die (or get eaten by a tiger)" list.
So I think that’s it – that trip is finally put to bed. Until I remember something else, anyway.
Harrah’s have announced the schedule for this year’s WSOP. Someone who is disgustingly well bankrolled has 55 ways to win a bracelet in 2007 – 9 more than last year. That is, of course, providing she is a female casino employee aged 50 or older.
The 52 open events now include much mixed-game fun: a $1000 buy-in SHOE, $2500 and $5000 HORSE and $1500 and $5000 mixed limit/no-limit Hold’em events. These are in addition to the return of the $50,000 HORSE "real world championship". Gone are the $1000 and $1500 bracelet events that took place alongside days 3 to 7 of the main event, and in fact you’ll only get to play a $1000 No Limit Hold’em tournament at all if you are a lady or a senior. The buy-in for these so-called World Championship events is almost as patronising as the fact that they have to take place at all.
"As part of our commitment to innovate for the benefit of all players, we’ve added nine bracelet events", says WSOP commish, Jeremy Pollack. Yep, that’ll be the reason. Harrah’s are, after all, world-renound innovators. Like the groundbreaking conversion of Caesars Palace from one of the classiest, most opulent resorts in the world into – well – just another Harrah’s with a few columns on the outside. More likely it has something to do with the certain drop in the number of internet qualifiers this year and the huge amount of rake they’re going to lose from the resulting smaller Main Event field.
They’re still planning for 9000, which is 1000 more players than last year’s capacity – the final total also includes several hundred alternates. The World’s Most Vacuous Cardroom is being expanded to accomodate up to 3000 players at a time and Main Event Day One will be split into three days, rather than the four they had last year. Day 2, which was split into two, is now scheduled for one day only. If they do manage to sell 9000 seats – I guess we’ll just have to wait and see about this – it’s going to be a very long first day, with over two thirds of the field having to bust out before the end of play.
Just got home to find a beautiful home-made Christmas card in the mail, apparently from Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. I guess I haven’t been paying enough attention to realise that these two were connected in some way, other than both offering insane amounts of reload bonuses – it’s basically free rakeback for everyone as long as you keep cycling money through.
I haven’t played on Absolute for, probably, a year. Their bonuses attract a huge number of rocks – probably female rocks if their marketing is successful – so the games just aren’t that good. My hand history shows nothing more than me dumping a free $5 bonus on blackjack in September. I’ve played maybe three or four tournaments on Ultimate Bet in total, never really got going on there after signing up because of some of the satellites they run. I’ve never had any freebies from them.
But in the spirit of Christmas, here’s some free money! And not just a few dollars to my poker account with a play requirement before I can actually withdraw it… inside the Christmas card was a disposable American Express card preloaded with $25!
That’s as good as real money. If only I could think of somewhere that will actually accept it…
I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, but this will change everything, one way or another.
Gutshot’s trial kicked off this morning at Snaresbrook Crown Court. Although quickly adjourned because of some kind of legal thing that I won’t pretend to understand, it’s still very much game on for the CPS and the UK casino industry vs a bunch people who just want to play cards. No more delays – this is all expected to be settled, one way or another, in eight days.
Derek Kelly, who is facing criminal charges under the 1968 Gaming Act, published an article on Gutshot.com this morning, confidently looking forward to the challenge ahead whilst also taking time to reflect on how things had come to be this way. In a week’s time, it may be looked on as the first eulogy for what was once Europe’s busiest card club. Meantime, this along with the expected daily updates is essential reading for anyone who gives a shit about poker in the UK, not just the twenty thousand registered Gutshot members.
I still can’t see any result being a good result. If Gutshot win, it’s also an easy victory for all of the imitators that have been springing up around the country playing the "if they can do it, so can we" card. Unlicensed, unregulated, law-unto-themselves card clubs will spring up almost as fast as Subways (can you believe that even Stoke – surely the only city in the world still without any kind of franchise coffee house – has five Subways that I’m aware of, probably more, and another is apparently opening opposite the train station soon). It’s difficult to see whether that’s much better – not taking into account, of course, the consequences for Mr Kelly – than if they lose. The game – for those not wishing to play bingo poker at the major casino chains and pay a 25% rake – simply becomes underground, unlicensed and unregulated.
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