Hugo's Blogspotting: 4 May

Bigger Deal

Many zillions of years ago Poker was but a small pond whose waters lay serene and still. Al Alvarez came along and threw a small pebble into this pond when he wrote The Biggest Game in Town, the first literary treatise on the game. This is still one of the finest books written about the game and if you haven’t read it yet stop reading this article and go read that instead.

A few years later Al’s great pal and fellow poker playing author Tony Holden threw his own pebble into the pond with his own equally excellent Big Deal (what?? You haven’t read that either! Go to the bookshop now!!). The ripples these two writers created grew into waves and that pond is now an ocean; what was once a quaint subculture is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Sensing this radical shift Tony has gotten round to writing a follow up which is suitably titled Bigger Deal (available now from all good booksellers etc).

In the old days us punters were happy with just getting the book and reading it, but these days it’s not enough, we want more! And to satisfy our insatiable appetites Tony has provided us with the de rigueur blog, biggerdeal.com. This website not only gives us blogs by Al and Tony, but other good stuff from the likes of Lee Jones (former card room manager at PokerStars and poker author himself), Cindy Blake (aka The Moll, Holden’s ex-wife), Joe Saumerez Smith (gaming insider), Grub Smith (a journalist) and the Guv’nor hisself Roy Houghton.

Roy has been cardroom manager at the Vic, the Barracuda, the Stakis Regency, the Gutshot and now the Loose Cannons club. Roy’s enthusiasm for the game knows no bounds (possibly even greater than Tony and Al’s zeal) and remains undimmed after all these years. Roy is famous for a ruling he gave once where a player’s cards got accidentally mucked. Roy asked the gentleman to whisper to him what his hand was and then looked in the muck and fished them out and let the hand continue! I look forward to future posts from Mr. Houghton.

This week I’ve picked out Joe Saumerez Smith’s blog about rake. This is an issue that doesn’t get written about much and it’s interesting to read Joe’s take on it. As Joe says, putting a new spin on the old Big Julie Weintraub quote about the guy who invented the poker chip being a genius,

“If you own a poker room, you might add that the man who invented the rake was an absolute legend.”

He notes a recent interesting situation over in Sweden where a government owned gambling operation named Svenska Spel decided to spread poker. With no advertising or fanfare they managed to attract 70,000 players (around 25% of the Swedish poker market) in six weeks due to the fact that their maximum rake is 2.5%. Let’s hope a few other online poker rooms take note of this.

Scandal at Celeb Tournament

To celebrate Bigger Deal they held a book launch with a small poker tournament at the Loose Cannon Club. It was a fun event that attracted the usual mix of novices and wily veteran players (first prize was an entry to the next EPT main event in Barcelona which is why there were more than a few sharks spotted amongst the runners). As is par for the course at these sorts of things there were plenty of dwell-ups, string betting, rub downs and more, but nothing too bad from what I hear and all went smoothly.

This was not the recent case at a charity event in the Playboy Mansion attended by blogger Terrence Chan. There have been at least a week’s worth of posts on this topic on his live journal and the brouhaha seems to have died down a bit by now, but it’s still worth bringing to your attention. To cut a long story short Terrence made the final of this charity event held at the Playboy Mansion. The entry fee was $1,500 and they were plenty of “celebs” and poker pros in attendance. First and second prizes were seats to the main event at this year’s WSOP.

As is typical of these affairs the tournament overran and the organizers had to start raising the blinds every round to try and get it finished in time. When they were four handed the TD came along and told them they had one round left and the winner would be decided by chip count if nobody had gotten knocked out. At this point actress and fairly experienced poker player Shannon Elizabeth knocked out the fourth player which gave her a pretty much untouchable chip lead. A very drunk Steve Dannenmann (second to Joe Hachem at the 2005 WSOP) was second in chips and our Terrence was third. Shannon now told Steve to just fold every hand. This was agreed by Annie Duke who was no longer in the tournament, but sitting behind Dannenmann. Terrence was forced to go all-in every hand and watched in horror as Annie Duke told Steve Dannenmann to fold his cards. The result of this collusion was that Shannon and Steve won first and second and poor old Terrence got fucked.

If you read Chan’s journal from the post titled SoCal trip Part 2 dated
April 29 onwards you get the whole sorry saga. Most interesting is his account of a telling off he got from the organizer of the event, Joy Miller. Unhappy at controversy being stirred up at her event Joy tells Terrence,

“Remember one thing, Terrence, you're not Johnny Chan, you're Terrence Chan”.

From that I guess we must infer that only famous poker players won’t get screwed over and that unknown schmucks like us and Terrence will have to lump it. Joy also tells Terrence, “I think you are shit”. I think she got that the wrong way around.

Bluescouse in Freefall

That’s all a bit bleak so let’s see what’s happening at 88%concentration. No! Say it ain’t so bluescouse. He’s down to £5k after doing his absolute bollocks playing £100/£200 –

“i ran fairly dry but deserved. outplayed, outclassed, and outmoneyed.”

The ‘scouse certainly has addiction issues, but you can’t accuse him of being self-deluded about his game. In the comments section Ironmonk sums it all up when he writes,

“fuck, unlucky man.”

Quiet Lion Crushes the Slots

Regular readers may have noticed that one of my favourite bloggers Quiet Lion has been uncharacteristically shy recently with zero updates. Not to worry as our favourite first class flyer is back. As you all know Richard Brodie once helped Bill Gates write Windows but these days he’s a friend of FullTilt. You may wonder why you don’t see his name much at final tables and his latest blog tells us why.

Basically poker isn’t his game, video poker is. At a recent session the Lion managed to get stuck at video poker to the tune of $150k. The Lion is a true gambler though and perseveres –

“The next day my parachute finally opened. I played and played on the same money and then held the queen and ten of clubs and in popped a royal flush for $240,000. Unstuck!”

Richard also wins a further $60k during this session.

“I came back Sunday morning... At first, I wanted to get unstuck and stubbornly played the same machine till it hit. Now I was on a roll and wanted to play it while it was hot”,

which seems fairly reasonable. It turns out that our brand loving, gourmet dining wine lover is right though as he gets dealt a royal flush which is good for another $240k. Wow, from being stuck $150k to winning over $350k; Richard must be blessed. If you have a look at the comments it turns out he was. Anonymous writes,

“By looking at the payout schedule I can see exactly what was wrong with the machine. It was set to be full pay deuces wild, meaning that it was paying back 100.76%. They made a mistake while programming it. Lucky you! You will never find a machine over $1.00 with those payouts again”.

Grrr, I think I’m going to go back to hating Quiet Lion again.

As an aside this post is littered with his usual Brodie-isms. What other blogger can write the following?

“I licked my wounds and took Jenni over to the Wynn where we ate at the only gourmet restaurant that was still open, Corsa. She had an eggplant parmesan that would make Julia Child swear off red meat. During dinner and after, we remembered all the things we enjoyed about each other.”

Ugly Vegas

As usual the Tao of Poker delivers the goods with the entry titled Labyrinth of Avarice dated 1^st May. We find Pauly in a take-no-prisoners mood as he describes working in Las Vegas.

“I understand the plight of the unfortunate souls who have to toil in resort towns or other holiday hotspots as the resentment builds against those they have to serve and be around daily... tourists” he writes, “I grew frustrated with the slew of slack-jawed tourists that flooded the Strip the past few days. It was super ugly one morning at the IP or the Imperial Palace for Inbred Peasants that I've renamed it”.

He goes on to paint us the following tableau,

“In front of the Wheel of Fortune slots, a woman with fake nails spilling out of her jean shorts and wearing one black flip flop screamed at the top of her lungs to a hagged out waitresses wearing a one-size too large hooker pink cocktail dress circa Peggy Sue Gets Married. The accent of the smashed woman was southern, perhaps with a heavy Appalachian twang. Obviously up all night drinking, the waitress wanted no more part of her as a customer cut and her off. When she refused to give her a drink the redneck got right in her face and said, "Fuck you bitch. Where's my fuckin' Bud Light!"

In an attempt to regain his sanity Pauly escapes to the outskirts of Vegas,

“to avoid the hordes of slow walking mobs and soused oafs that pillage and clutter the Strip 24 hours a day”.

This last quote is probably the most accurate description of Lost Wages I have ever read, pure blogging gold.

Got the Time?

Finally here’s our regular shot of balla-ness. N 82 50 24 aka Nat Arem continues to show us his obsession for status symbols by taking a load of photos of various poker players’ watches. All the kids are going apeshit about Patrik Antonius’ timepiece, but my feeling is that this post lends greater weight to the theory that money can’t buy you taste.

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