October Wrapup
October was almost a good month. The first three-plus weeks found me up over $3000 and I was headed for Vegas, a place where I'd always had success.
You all know how that turned out.
Vegas treated me like I was Ned Beatty in Deliverance ("Squeal like a pig!") and over the course of the week I lost all of my profits for the month. I ended the month down about $100 for my first losing month since May.
Online Poker
More importantly, however, is that I'm finally learning to take better advantage of all online poker has to offer. I recently signed up for Empire Poker (a PartyPoker skin) through an affiliate which should give me a good percentage of my rake back. I have about ten sites I play at now and what I do is I go around to each one and take advantage of deposit and reload bonuses. Taking advantage of rake-back and bonuses I expect should add between $500 and $800 a month to my bottom line.
If I may plug one site, Interpoker is a great place to play (and no, I'm not getting a penny from them for saying that). Horrible players, monthly bonuses and the ability to play poker in Pounds and Euros are making this one of my favorite sites. Because many of the players are British, you can also play at non-peak hours here in the States. For example right now it's about 1:30 PM here in Austin--definitely not the best time of day to be playing--but in the UK it's 7:30 PM which is just the start of peak times. And also, it sees as though the British players really are just a lot worse than American players.
Playing in Pounds or Euros is fun because it's much less psychologically taxing. For example, the current exchange rate is $1.80/1 Pound. If I play 2/4 or 3/6 in Pounds, I experience, numerically, the same swings as I experience at $2/4 or $3/6 but I'm really playing $3.60/7.20 or $5.40/10.80. So at the end of the day, I see a fairly modest win, but then once I translate it back into dollars, it's suddenly a lot more impressive--without my tearing my hair out for at one point being down 80% more than I thought I was.
Overall of course I still much prefer live poker. My win rate per hand is much higher live than online which I think mostly has to do with being able to read and learn players better. Online, you can sit at a table and it can have 100% turnover in the course of 30 mins. Take all the notes you want, but except for a few regulars you'll still rarely run across people you know. Also, you can't watch the nuances of how people play online--a bet is a bet and they all look the same whether the guy is completely bluffing or he has the stone cold nuts. Live, you can glean a lot of information based on how the person is betting one hand to the next.
But, there's something to be said for online. The $3 rake, the fact that I can play unshowered in my boxers in my own room, and the fact that I can see 150 hands an hour playing three or four tables make it very enticing. Last month I won $1500 online and this month I'm already almost halfway there. We'll see, but online might become the bigger source of income for me.
Vegas Outtakes
There were a few semi-interesting stories from Vegas that I forgot to include in my trip report.
First was an interesting hand that I was not a part of. I don't remember how the action particularly started, but on the turn there were three people in it, with two of the guys, EP and LP, going nuts, raising and reraising each other. The third guy, MP, was calmly sitting there between the two calling every amount it was to him, often two bets at a time. There were two diamonds on the board, one of them the Ace, and it was obvious to everyone that MP was on the flush draw.
The river brings a third diamond on the unpaired board. EP now checks in an exaggerated and flamboyant manner--obviously he knows what just came home--and MP innocently bets. LP mucks in disgust and EP throws his cards face up into the middle of the table. AA for a flopped set of aces.
At this point, everyone at the table pretty legitimately though that was a fold, an admittedly tough laydown to make for most people. MP thought it was a fold, too, because he took his cards and, being in seat 1, pushed them halfway into the muck awaiting the rather large pot. The dealer, though, late in pulling in all the bets from both this and the previous round, then turns to MP and says "Where are your cards?"
MP: "What?"
Dealer: "He called."
MP: "No he didn't!"
Dealer "Yes he did."
MP then reaches into the muck and extracts the two cards that were obviously his and turns them over to show the Jd7d for the flush everyone at the table knew he had.
Uh oh.
The dealer, distracted from having practically the whole table begin talking at once, didn't actually see that the cards had physically been in the muck. MP of course claimed that he had pushed them in to the dealer but not actually into the muck. EP saw what everyone else saw and said that they had been in the muck and so it was a dead hand and the pot should be his.
However, no one had actually seen EP call and so everyone also thought he had folded.
The floor was called, it got ugly, but because the dealer hadn't seen the cards touch the muck and because, really, everyone knew that MP had had the winning hand and had only mucked because he legitimately beleived that EP had folded, no one protested when the floor awarded the pot, about $800, to MP.
To his credit, EP, although obviously steamed remained rather composed outwardly. He simply got up and then went right to the phone to call the Gaming Commission. This prompted the Bellagio to do something I've never seen done before at a poker game despite the most egregious of errors by dealers: review the videotape.
In the end the Bellagio paid him off, cutting him a check for the full amount of the pot.
So what happened, had EP called or not? The two people who saw EP call, besides himself of course, were the dealer and one person sitting next to me who also was a dealer. The person sitting next to me said the EP had definitely called, and I trust her, so the only thing I can imagine is that EP flung his cards face up into the middle of the table to show his hand and only then did he put his chips out to call. Everyone else, distracted by looking at the set of aces in the middle of the table didn't see him put out his chips, chips that got mixed in with the previous round of betting and were almost immediately pulled into the pot by the dealer.
Needless to say, both EP and MP were stupid. Heads up, throwing your cards face up into the middle of the table, every time I've seen it, is concession. You are saying that you are beat. You are folding. If you must fling your cards somewhere, but would still like to call, call first, perhaps even vocalize that you are calling, and only then fling away. MP also needs to get out of the habit of mucking his own cards. If there's one thing I stress when talking to someone who's never played poker in a casino before, it's this: Do not under any circumstances let go of your cards until the pot is actually being pushed in your direction. I've seen more people lose or almost lose pots than I can imagine because they think everyone has folded and so they're tossing their cards in with the pot still just sitting there. It may seem like the risk of losing a pot in such a manner is very small, but after you've spent all your money and effort investing in the pot, isn't it worth the extra three seconds of caution to protect it? It only takes one time, one $600 pot, for someone's lack of diligence to result in disaster.
Okay, off my soapbox.
Another amusing story, this one may interest only me. Maybe you had to be there.
I was eating at Coco's, a time-honored tradition for me in Vegas, when I noticed the group of people at the table right across from mine. They were 1) a mother, 2) her pretty cute daughter, probably 16 or 17, and 3) her daughter's new boyfriend of about the same age.
Now, this is an amusing situation just to start. I remember being 17 and meeting the parents of the girl I was dating, and that has to be the absolute worst, most stressful thing one can go through. Awkward doesn't even being to describe it. I also remember all to well being grilled like this guy was getting from the mother.
"What do you do? Are you in school?"
"Do you plan on going to college?"
"What kind of life do you want?"
And then there was the grandaddy of them all
"What are your intentions toward my daughter?"
Inside, I was laughing. I wanted to reach over and smack her. Look, lady, he's seventeen. He has exactly one intention towards your daughter!
At that point the waitress came by to take my order so unfortunately I didn't hear his reply. I can only imagine he didn't answer truthfully because after the waitress left, they were still there having a pleasant meal.
I guess I find it highly amusing that this lady, in her forties, could possibly still be under the illusion that any seventeen year old guy, no matter how upstanding, polite and accomplished, can think of anything more than getting into her daughter's pants. But then, maybe guys have changed since I was 17.
Finally, there was a confrontation between a dealer and a player. Nothing new, you might think, but this one was something I had never seen before.
This one man had been playing for a few hours, treating the dealers with increasing belligerence as the night went on. Finally, after one bad beat, the man got up from the table disgusted and said to the dealer, "Go to hell! I'll get you!"
The dealer, who always seemed like nothing more than a calm, nice man, immediately morphed into a tough guy, replying, "Don't you threaten me, I'll take you down!"
"Let's go outside and settle this right now!"
"I'll tell you where I live, I don't care, you don't stand a chance!"
Oh, by the way, did I mention that both of these guys were in their seventies, so old they could barely move and that the player even had "old guy voice," weak and wheezy? It's one thing if the guys involved are, say, anywhere from 20 to 50--in fact it's a mood killer--but it's another thing when they're so old they're drawing social security. It was grandpa against grandpa and it was high comedy--the whole table was absolutely dying, laughing hysterically.
But once again, maybe you had to be there.
Comments