You have to do a little bit of spadework and quantify just how low a budget you need to work to (otherwise Marky is going to be spending time on stuff that isn't ever going to happen.)

When you look at the dates, Ballys for £581 or Palazzo for £434 …. not only is 434 a smaller number, but it is a much better hotel.  But it isn't worth doing too much work if your group would just take the cheapest possible and do £199 at Excalibur.  Nothing wrong with doing that on a stag ofc, just easier to help if people can rule some things out.

A quick look on the 14th-19th shows that Virgin is ~ £1800 for a flight, so that's going to pretty much be a showstopper.  It would be a case of finding a week where the hotel price is right AND the flight is right, or the package is right.

As a guide, direct flights will go for £800 or so.  Is that on budget?  If it is, that's the best way for sure.  If the flight needs to be as cheap as possible, you can go "via Amsterdam via Houston" or you can fly from Dublin -- the price will go down but you will probably lose an extra day travelling - is the £ more important than the time off work?  Ofc that's a question only you can answer (on behalf of the group) and neither answer is wrong.  But when you give that answer (and any blackout dates) then I'm pretty sure someone on here (Marky most likely) will find a cracking deal at the right budget for you.

I also did a quick couple of searches, looks like Iberia (?) are taking the Gatwick slot vacated by Virgin next year, might be some cheap direct options with them.

Padraigs 888 blog was fantastic

http://my.888poker.com/padraig888/blog/?pref_tab=blog

There's some more recent ones on cardplayer too

https://www.cardplayer.com/poker-blogs/19-padraig-parkinson

I have a stable, I don't think Paul will mind me giving a 2nd opinion...  Just in case there is any suspicion of a conflict of interest, I definitely won't be staking you

Winning online nowadays is pretty difficult and requires continuous work on a weekly basis to fix leaks and to adapt and evolve as everyone else evolves.

If you had applied to me, I would have asked for your screen name and would have used Sharkscope etc to filter your results for buyin, satellites, game types etc in an attempt to find something encouraging to work with.  Fwiw, I rarely look at results any older than 1 year, the game moves that quickly that lots of 2016 winners are now massive losers.  I suspect that from your writing, your Sharkscope would lead me to say "no thx" right there.  If there was something reasonable, I would have asked you to send in ~ 20 HHs that were fresh.  The buyin wouldn't really matter, but it would give enough of an insight into how your game was, where the leaks were and your situational awareness.  If you didn't already have a reasonable database of your play and use various online tools to analyse your own play, it is almost impossible to believe the play is going to be good enough for it to be a profitable proposition.


So I wouldn't have paid you for the sample, I'm guessing Paul recovers some of the loss from affiliate lifetime value but I have no doubt the trials are a loss leader for him.


I would have given you direct feedback though, it would be fairly short and to the point and the profit/loss would be the most irrelevant statistic of all of them.  If you had shown decent awareness and your stats were reasonable with perhaps a minor leak or two, it might even be possible to start you low and iron out the creases.  If your game was miles off, then it really isn't a good spot for anyone to have to pay money to try and turn you into an expected winner.

I liked one of the comments.... "bet that café is now missing a spoon"

“It was too much for me and we went to Quigleys takeaway for chicken burgers and cheesy chips."

Best wishes Rich

John Hennigan and David Oppenheim I assume would be fav?

1.24 sounds predictably bad. 1.32 readily available in London so $80 extra per £ thousand to figure out if it was worth a detour to collect

I believe Sam Razavi is looking to offload some of his $$$ for £££. Pretty sure you'll get spot rate, Simon. He's usually easily accessible via Messenger. Of course it means going to LV with your £s, but it may work for you.

No good to me this year ;'(


I thought I used to have it set up quite nicely.  Skrill USD to Citibank London USD, to Citibank LV USD to collection in hand.  $1 in and $1 out.  But then the banking system decided to put a stop to all that.

1.24 sounds predictably bad. 1.32 readily available in London so $80 extra per £ thousand to figure out if it was worth a detour to collect

Anyway just check in to The Palazzo, Oh my GOD, room is amazing, never stayed in a place like this, I’m on 49th floor and it’s breath taking. Well done Skypoker for putting this together.

Enjoy the trip!  I think your reaction to the room is one that I would expect a lot of people would have, even arriving in the hotel lobby you know you've made a good decision.  If you are used to travelling around the UK in Travel Inns etc then this is a nice inexpensive (obv doesn't matter on a packagae) way to experience a bit of quality.  One of the areas in the early days of the Vegas thread that a lot of people got wrong (imho) was defaulting to a shabby hotel to save $8 here and there.  Particularly when the organised people can usually catch a great deal in advance and get in for par.  And even more so when they take their saved $8 over to the Rio and punt off a $5k WSOP in level 2.

Played a $175 sat straight after and couldn’t get anything going. Obvs these are high variance but I think a good strategy is maybe to play the $125 and do a $50 last longer with a few people just to even out the variance. Any thoughts on this? Anyone else play them? Pretty certainly I saw Melanie Weisner play a few $575 ones.

The LL makes perfect sense ofc as it is effectively watering down the juice.  The sats there are WTA but usually there is a chop, so there is sort of pseudo-ICM in play.  Plenty of people grind them and ofc plenty of randoms too, so one of the first things to do (as with any poker game I suppose) is work out who knows what they are doing and who doesn't.  In the old days, players really bad at handling chips was a tell-tale sign of inexperience, but ofc nowadays they might be an online crusher that has never played live before...  Anyway, quite often 3handed there is implied collusion between 2 guys that know that the other person knows that they know.... and a recreational player gets taken on, eliminated in 3rd and the rest of it gets chopped up before the poor dude walks away from the table   That said, I haven't played one for 2 years now, it is quite possible there are more sat grinders in there and that some are happy to play it WTA.

Good time to mention to Friedman that you have an ITIN... vbol

Smirk and a fold for me.

This "not going to Vegas any more" is taking some getting used to ~ glad to see you having a blast.

[$2500 mixed triple draw, first break]

$2500 mixed triple draw, first break

End of level two, down to 8,200 from 12,500. A few simple 'didnt get there' spots, but then a slightly yucky but interesting one before the break.

Dealt     in badugi, which is a mediocre made hand. Raise CO at 100-200, hoping to go heads up, most likely against someone drawing two. But, button three bets, and BB cold calls. The button's three bet will be about 70% good one card draws and 30% badugi. The one thing I cannot do is just flat, and stand pat, as I make msyelf vulnerable by turning my weak pat hand face up. So, the right option is to four bet. Button caps to five bets. BB folds and I call. The button now, whilst you can never be certain, should have badugi. I pat, he pats. I check, he bets.

This is nasty. He almost definitely has me beat. The options are

1) Call, pat again and check turn. Hoping for a check down, but planning to check fold turn.

2) Fold now

3) It is actually an option to call and draw three, getting 12.5 to 1 immediate odds. Which is very unusual but not as ridiculous as it seems.

I think I'm slightly short of the odds for 3), so actually choose to fold now. It seems a bizarre play of the hand, to go five bets and then fold to one bet on the first draw, but I think it's the only way to go with an unbreakable hand.

Restarting at 125-250.

Even if a bit short on the odds for 3) you could borrow some odds from the future action you'd get drawing 3?

GL also

maybe you can find someone you trust who you can lock the rate in when you withdraw.

They can lock in the rate perfectly by generating the btc receive code for you.  They get the btc, you get whatever you traded it for at the pre-agreed conversion rate.

Went there years ago, I seem to remember a throwing fish routine at the fishmongers there.  Nice little sketch with a switch to a plastic fish for the finale, which I saw coming, but the victim definitely didn't.  I ended up stuffed to the gills next door on smoked BBQ pork buns and my host seemed offended that I had to tap out after 'only' half a dozen.  Not sure why I remember that bit, must have been proper guts ache afterwards.