WSOP Main Event

Desperately short of funds, my significant other has decided to sell 50% of herself in the upcoming WSOP Main Event. She can be found nightly at the Rio hooker bar and is very approachable.

Please stop calling!

By all rights, I should have a quiet Father's Day as I have no children. Yet with alarming regularity, this peaceful Sunday is always shattered by phone calls from all over the world.

It started at 6:35am with a "Hyvää Isänpäivää" (Happy Father's Day) from a young Finn claiming to be my long lost 15-year-old son. "Äitisi nai poroja" (your mother fucks reindeers) I mumbled and went back to sleep. At 7:23am I heard some Dutch kid yelling "Vrolijke vaderdag" and promptly dispatched him with a "Je moeder is een hoer" (your mother is a hooker).

This continued all morning with greetings in Thai (สุขสันต์วันพ่อ), Persian (روز پدر مبارک ), Turkish (Babalar günün kutlu olsun), Hungarian (Boldog apák napját), French (Bonne fête Papa) and many others. As is my custom, I "thanked" them all in their respective languages.

What are they trying to tell me? That their whorish mothers lied to me years ago when they promised they were practicing birth control? That I happenstanced upon the 1 packet of condoms that didn't fall within the 99.9999% quality control specifications? That I was the victim of a swallow and switch? I'm not buying any of it.

Nothing new under the sun

We have been blessed with multiple controversies currently raging in the blogger universe. This is not surprising and when they die down and are forgotten, they will be replaced by new ones as sure as your flopped set will be pipped on the river by a backdoor flush.

2008 WSOP - II

"Maybe you too can find a single player to babysit the entire event and report their every move." - AlCantHang

With this in mind, I decided that I would cover the journey of my good Australian friend, Bruce Kelly, in his attempt at taking down the coveted 2008 WSOP Main Event bracelet.

Bruce is about 10 years my junior, the bastard son of an alcoholic sheep farmer and an out-of-work actress. He, like myself, is currently unemployed and shares my passion for poker, though he does rent an apartment of his own. The bugger has a real temper and my sole concern is chaperoning him through the entire tournament and preventing one of his classic blowups. And by blowup, I don't mean à la Hellmuth or Matusow. No, a Bruce Kelly blowup is something that the Rio Convention Center has never been privy to. And that's the way I'd like to keep it.

Last year, Bruce had occasion to communicate via telephone with VicRoads, the government body responsible for licensing and registration of motor vehicles. Unfortunately for all concerned, the call was recorded (warning - offensive language) :




So here we are, 6 days into the Main Event, with 643 players left. We are nearing the bubble and the tables are playing hand for hand. Bruce, sitting on a healthy 2.5 million chip stack, looks down at his cards. I have a mounted telescope set up in the back row of the spectators' gallery and can see by the throbbing carotid artery in his neck that he's picked up a big hand. I also have a dismantled elephant gun, together with tranquilizer darts, within reach.

Bruce, who is UTG, raises to 100,000. Everyone folds to the button, Allen Cunningham, who makes it 400,000. The small blind folds, but the big blind, Jamie Gold, pushes all-in. Jamie has Bruce covered. With everyone's attention diverted to the all-in, I slowly start assembling the elephant gun.

Bruce calls without hesitation and Cunningham folds his jacks. Jamie Gold sheepishly turns over pocket tens and Bruce gleefully tables 2 red aces. The rush of the media to the table gives me enough time to finish assembling the rifle. Better safe than sorry.

The flop comes

T 7 2 rainbow

Gold leaps triumphantly into the air. I load the dart, cock the rifle and locate Bruce's still throbbing carotid artery in the crosshairs of my sight.

The turn is a harmless 8.

I decide that waiting for a 2 outer on the river may be too risky as Bruce would probably be completely out of control, making an accurate shot almost impossible.

As Bruce slumps forward flat on his face, the river card, the black ace of spades, hits the green felt. I rush toward the table, fumbling for the bottle of concentrated Epsom salts in my shoulder bag.

2008 WSOP - I

You fine folks at Full Tilt, sitting in your comfy chairs somewhere in Louth, don't seriously expect me to grovel to your demands to "showcase my ability to provide journalistic coverage for the biggest poker event in the world".

Read this blog and you will readily find glowing examples of Pulitzer quality poker coverage. Ask around, make some phone calls. Everyone will corroborate my natural aptitude for covering major events like the WSOP - with a twist of course.

The best WSOP coverage

For those of you fortunate enough not to be physically present at the 2008 WSOP, read all about it here :

Pokernews.com

Tao of Poker

LasVegasVegas

WSOP fever

Excitement abounds as everyone awaits this Friday's opening of the 2008 WSOP. I snapped the shot below of one of the painting crews at the Rio applying the final finishing touches to the pool:

Random musings

Random.org is a great site to read up on random numbers, with Bo Allen highlighting some differences.

Bitmap generated by a True Random Number Generator (TRNG) via atmospheric noise :



Bitmap generated by a Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) :

Still waiting

Watching Chris Ferguson take down the National Heads-Up Poker Championship on NBC this afternoon brought back some memories.

A few months after moving to Vegas, I had occasion to email Andy Bloch with an important technical question. He never bothered to reply. I didn't have a blog back then, so I just kept my opinion about Bloch being a rude prick, and undoubtedly the worst FTP ambassador out of the 15 pros, to myself.

Now I have a blog.

The injustice of it all

I finally scrape together a few shekels so that I may grace the virtual felt once again, only to be kicked in the junk by some specious algorithm devised by extremely cruel people who are at this very moment probably rubbing their hands with glee.




My worthy opponent managed to catch his 1 outer on the flop, yet I couldn't reciprocate with a 2 outer on the turn and river. In the grand scheme of coolers this barely makes the scale, yet on a personal, psychological and financial level it has set me back months, if not years. I'll recover, I'm sure of it, but I write this post as a legacy to the pain and anguish I now feel having been brutally robbed of $33 by some evil collection of bits and bytes.

FullTilt.org - a site review

If you're interested in playing on Full Tilt Poker, then you must check out FullTilt.org, a well-designed and comprehensive poker portal. This informative online resource has the latest promotions and bonuses, tournament information and detailed profiles of the 15 Full Tilt pros.

There are podcasts and video casts to help you brush up on your game, and for entertainment you can watch a collection of the great FullTiltPoker.com commercials, some of which have never been aired on television.

If all of this has whetted your appetite for some online action, you may download the software in the Full Tilt Poker Download section of the site, and qualify for a 100% deposit bonus up to $600 by using the Full Tilt Poker Referral Code FT600NOW.

Good luck at the tables!

Update on live multi-tabling

It's no secret that Las Vegas is feeling the pinch of the economic slowdown. Hotels are laying off staff, and poker rooms are not overflowing with players as they were this time last year. In an effort to fill the empty seats, especially during the quieter periods, a major Strip casino has allowed me to multi-table their $2-$5 no limit games. Initially I was limited to 4 tables, but with a larger than expected drop in patronage, this was raised to 6 tables as of last Tuesday.

Management has been extremely pleased with the pilot phase and intends to grant multi-tabling privileges to additional qualified applicants. I have been assigned the task of recruiting suitable candidates, so if you're a Las Vegas local and feel up to the challenge, please leave a comment or drop me an email. Preference will be given to those with rollerblading skills.

Foucault's Poker Academy

Andrew Brokos (Foucault) is a poker player and writer with many fine articles to his credit. Topics range from book reviews to poker strategy. In his latest blog entry, he lists the "Top Ten Tools to Learn No Limit Hold 'Em Tournament Poker". He claims the list is for both live and online, though I think it is a little skewed towards the latter. So while it contains forums, books, training sites, software (tracking, HUD, equity calculators), I think an important omission is training software like Poker Academy Pro. As a live player, I have no use for most of his software categories, but certainly find a tool like Poker Academy Pro indispensable for brushing up on my no limit hold'em tournament play. It's the closest I can come without actually having to part with the requisite buy-in. And for an under-rolled railbird like myself, that means everything.

Still, a good list.

I'm with GCox25, Change100 et al.

Apparently I made the right decision when I limited myself to 4 events only in the BBT3. Tonight in the Riverchasers, I called VBPro7 a turd after a comment he made when he re-sucked out on me in an all-in hand. I don't regret the substance of my comment because he most definitely behaved like a slimy douchebag. What is disappointing, however, is that I was naive enough to think I could still play one of these things with chat turned on. But how else are you supposed to play a blogger event?

Sorry fellas, no fun anymore.

Breakthrough

After extensive negotiations lasting several months, I am pleased to announce that the management of a major Strip poker room has given me permission to multi-table live $2-$5 NLHE, up to a maximum of 4 tables. This should lower my variance and keep me fit at the same time. I am the first player to be granted this privilege and if all goes well, the multi-tabling option will be extended to some of the regulars.

I will keep you posted.

LeCheese II

I finished just 12 places out of the money in RakeBrain's LeCheese Challenge II freeroll, which is a nice way of saying 13th last. Thanks Joe for the invite.

Poker Hall of Shame III

TassieDevil from PokerNews describes a hand in the PokerStars.com EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo in which Antonio Esfandiari goes through his now-familiar shtick of questioning his opponent to try and get a read, followed by some drawn-out call/fold feigning.

"Do you have a set of threes? Or do you have shit? Do you want me to call sir?" probed Esfandiari, all of which was simply ignored by Rasmussen. "Dealer, is he allowed to not answer me like that?"

After much hesitation and some near-calls, Esfandiari finally folded and Rasmussen flipped pocket fours for a successful bluff.

Following the hand, Rasmussen called the floor person over to lodge a protest against Esfandiari's near-calls/folds, which could be described as gamesmanship to try and get a read from his opponent. Rasmussen complained that Esfandiari's cards crossed the black line painted on the table and they should've been scooped into the muck. However the TD informed Rasmussen that the line actually has no enforceable qualities about it and is simply a visual guide for players and dealers.

After some more heated words from both players, everyone settled down and got on with the next hand.

Antonio pulled a similar stunt on High Stakes Poker in a hand with Barry Greenstein. He pushed a bundle of cash forward and then folded. If he's prepared to pull these angles in high profile play, I can only imagine what he's gotten away with since the beginning of his career. Even more perturbing is the fact that he is an immensely talented player who has no need to resort to such dubious tactics in order to come out on top.

In a completely unrelated story, Antonio Esfandiari is the chip leader at the end of Day 3.

We'll be back after this break

The new WPT season is airing on GSN. Alas, it is impossible to watch, with the actual content to commercial ratio even worse than the fawking Travel Channel. Greedy bastards won't be getting my eyeballs.

Vanity?

Summer's coming so it's time to start dieting. That's me on the left, last year :

Gimme Shelter

Foreclosure papers were served on our shelter this morning. I have 30 days to find a new roof over my head.