Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[tikay]

Many cardrooms, The Venetian included, have Auto-Shuffling devices, which speeds up the hands-per-hour ratio enormously

I've never understood why everyone doesn't have these already - surely they pay for themselves in about a day, with more hands per hour and therefore more rake for the house.

Is Compo a vegetarian chess fanatic who tells stories that everyone initially thinks will be worth paying attention to, but which go on for so bloody long that no-one can actually make it to the end..?

Auto-shufflers - absolutely, they are just brilliant. Expect them in England in 38 years. The Concord in Vienna have a few already.

As to the Compo/Tolstoy suggestion, that's so true, & so brilliant, & he does rather enjoy telling flop stories. But that's not the reason John Exley gave, which, really, is blindingly simple & obvious.

snoops is sat next to me, so we asked him if he knew. "Who is Tolstoy?" said the great man.....

[tikay]

The Players Press conference has just ended, but the atmo here is very subdued. The spectator queue to get in the Amazon Room is halfway down the massively long corridor, but the Press Room is almost empty, apart from snoops, & the Poker Week crew. To be fair, most of those with Press Passes for blogging have been banned by the mighty powers-that-be by now! Poo.

[snoopy1239]

Many cardrooms, The Venetian included, have Auto-Shuffling devices, which speeds up the hands-per-hour ratio enormously

I've never understood why everyone doesn't have these already - surely they pay for themselves in about a day, with more hands per hour and therefore more rake for the house.

Is Compo a vegetarian chess fanatic who tells stories that everyone initially thinks will be worth paying attention to, but which go on for so bloody long that no-one can actually make it to the end..?

Auto-shufflers - absolutely, they are just brilliant. Expect them in England in 38 years. The Concord in Vienna have a few already.

As to the Compo/Tolstoy suggestion, that's so true, & so brilliant, & he does rather enjoy telling flop stories. But that's not the reason John Exley gave, which, really, is blindingly simple & obvious.

snoops is sat next to me, so we asked him if he knew. "Who is Tolstoy?" said the great man.....

That's not true, I know who he is, he wrestled The Rock last week.

[tikay]

In the Press Room $20 sweep, Compo/Tolstoy has drawn Rami, & I've drawn Lam.

Simon "Suffolk Punch" Young, has drawn Watkinson. Simon, a proper journo by the way, has also got no Tolstoy knowledge, though I suppose The Sun does not serialise too much Tolstoy these days.

[snoopy1239]

In the Press Room $20 sweep, Compo/Tolstoy has drawn Rami, & I've drawn Lam.

Simon "Suffolk Punch" Young, has drawn Watkinson. Simon, a proper journo by the way, has also got no Tolstoy knowledge, though I suppose The Sun does not serialise too much Tolstoy these days.

Oops, didn't mean to press the quote button there.

[SuffolkPunch]

In the Press Room $20 sweep, Compo/Tolstoy has drawn Rami, & I've drawn Lam.

Simon "Suffolk Punch" Young, has drawn Watkinson. Simon, a proper journo by the way, has also got no Tolstoy knowledge, though I suppose The Sun does not serialise too much Tolstoy these days.

Oops, didn't mean to press the quote button there.

'Tis true. Although Tolstoy's missus was on Page 3 once.

[KingPoker]

Many cardrooms, The Venetian included, have Auto-Shuffling devices, which speeds up the hands-per-hour ratio enormously

I've never understood why everyone doesn't have these already - surely they pay for themselves in about a day, with more hands per hour and therefore more rake for the house.

Is Compo a vegetarian chess fanatic who tells stories that everyone initially thinks will be worth paying attention to, but which go on for so bloody long that no-one can actually make it to the end..?

Auto-shufflers - absolutely, they are just brilliant. Expect them in England in 38 years. The Concord in Vienna have a few already.

As to the Compo/Tolstoy suggestion, that's so true, & so brilliant, & he does rather enjoy telling flop stories. But that's not the reason John Exley gave, which, really, is blindingly simple & obvious.

snoops is sat next to me, so we asked him if he knew. "Who is Tolstoy?" said the great man.....

I looked up the prices of these a few months back and they were around 1700 quid each if i remember rightly!

[Claw75]

OK - here's a long shot at the Tolstoy thing.  Did Compo get his hand nicknames mixed up and refer to  as 'Anna Karenina' rather than the more popular nickname 'Anna Kournakova'?

[tikay]

OK - here's a long shot at the Tolstoy thing.  Did Compo get his hand nicknames mixed up and refer to  as 'Anna Karenina' rather than the more popular nickname 'Anna Kournakova'?

EXCELLENT. But wrong.

The clue is that Compo plays an extremely wide range of hands. Making him..........?

[KingPoker]

OK - here's a long shot at the Tolstoy thing.  Did Compo get his hand nicknames mixed up and refer to  as 'Anna Karenina' rather than the more popular nickname 'Anna Kournakova'?

EXCELLENT. But wrong.

The clue is that Compo plays an extremely wide range of hands. Making him..........?

....loose baggy monster?

[AndrewT]

OK - here's a long shot at the Tolstoy thing.  Did Compo get his hand nicknames mixed up and refer to  as 'Anna Karenina' rather than the more popular nickname 'Anna Kournakova'?

EXCELLENT. But wrong.

The clue is that Compo plays an extremely wide range of hands. Making him..........?

As difficult to read as War and Peace?

[tikay]

OK - here's a long shot at the Tolstoy thing.  Did Compo get his hand nicknames mixed up and refer to  as 'Anna Karenina' rather than the more popular nickname 'Anna Kournakova'?

EXCELLENT. But wrong.

The clue is that Compo plays an extremely wide range of hands. Making him..........?

As difficult to read as War and Peace?

We have our WINNER!

Technically, "he's like Tolstoy - hard to read".

[ifm]

Eventually, we set off for the Hoover Dam in the Mustang. Wow, WHAT an engineering marvel, carved out of the rock in a desert that is unforgiveably hot, is that Dam. The entire Construction Contract was for 48 million dollars (in 1930), for which they got the dam, & all the iinfrastructure & power gerneration that goes with it, a new road & railway from Las Vegas, & Boulder City, purpose built for 7,000 workers to live in. Awesome, just awesome.

Actually it was built to house the cryogenically frozen non-biological extraterrestrial AKA Megatron, but he escaped and was destroyed so nothing to fear.

[tikay]

The Americans ADORE queueing.

Down at The Venretian, they have pretend Gondolas & Gondoliers, & a little mock Venice complete with a mini Bridge of Sighs. It's as tacky as tacky can be. (Not forgetting the themed "Grand Canal Shoppes")......

I wandered past there tonight, & the cost of a 3 minute ride in a gondola, which travels all of 80 yards, is $15 per person. The queue to buy tickets was 100 yards long, & once a Ticket is obtained, there was another 50 yard queue.

The Spice Market Buffet in Planet Hollywood is as good as eating gets in Vegas, great food, great variety, & great value. It's down a set of escalators, & they have queue Barriers at the top AND Bottom of the escalator. An hour's wait is not unusual. And yet, once inside & seated, it's obvious that the place is only half-full. The queue is a Marketing whizz, the Americans think "oooh, a queue, let's stand in line". Most eateries use the same system - design a queue, & the punters will join it. Weird.

The nightly queue over at Caesars to watch the girls in the Show do their rather sterile pole-dancing jobbie is huge, every night. Queuing to watch some plastic girls frolicking in their underwear, I mean, ffs.

Meanwhile, the WSOP Party is almost over, & the Cardrooms are starting to suffer already. The $330 at Caesars tonight, which generally attracts 80 or 90 runners, had a paltry 30 tonight. Instead of 20 or 25 Cash Games on the go, there were just 4, & most of them were occupied by those Europeans who are very soon to go home. I just wonder, how quiet are the Vegas Cardrooms in non-WSOP times of the year?

I bumped into Craig "I KNOW IT" Wildman tonight, he's enjoying life here. I also sat down in a Tourney with an APAT-er, the third night in a row such a thing has happened. The APAT-ers are everywhere!

Very tired, this place makes you live life at such a pace, it drains you eventually. 

We were at The Rio early today, & got Jon to give us some more stuff for Poker Week.

Jen & snoops popped in, too, both having slept non-stop for a few days - they are both wrecked, physically & mentally, from a marathon Updating session out here. They, together with Floppy, fly home on Wednesday. They've done a wicked job for blonde.

I was done at The Rio by 6pm, there were just 4 "Exit Interviews" left to be done, & Compo was doing those today, he & Rhow share these. I felt a bit cruel, swanning off to play poker & leaving Compo to work, but them's the breaks I guess.

Tomorrow, we have to wrap up our second Vegas Edition of Poker Week in the morning, then we are off to the Suite at the MGM, where Jon "skalie" Kalmar will join us for some in-depth TV interviews.

And on Thursday, we interview WSOP Commissioner Jeffrey Pollack in his office - address, "1, Las Vegas Boulevard"......!

Compo heads home on Thursday, & the rest of us (except "wormster") depart on Friday afternoon, arriving at Gatters on Saturday morning, & I then go straight to Feltham to do the Sky Show on Saturday night, which I'm muchly looking forward to. On Sunday, at last, after an overnight stay in Feltham, I get home, & collect Angell. I hope he's OK. Wormster, meanwhile, goes off to Saratoga or somesuch, to take in some American horse racing. It's been hard work, but great fun, though I am sure we'll all be pleased to get home, away from this brutal heat.

Saw an 87 wagon freight train today - double-headed by two diesels, with a double banker too. Must have been half a mile long! I pointed it out to Jen, but she showed little appreciation of this rarity. Girlies, eh?

[tikay]

Chirp Alert!

Tonight I somehow won - well, chopped Heads-Up - the $330 at Caesars Palace, from a short field of 30. I had 62,800, Matey Boy had 72,800, he suggested we chopped the money 50-50 & I looked after the Dealers, which I was happy to do.

Thats 3 "wins" & two cashes in the 9 days I've been here, with a handy profit, plus a 20% cut of Compo's $13k payday. (And he had 20% of my last two, though very much smaller, wins). So we are both heading home ahead of the game, & I could not be more pleased. I've got past the stage of shooting for the stars, for me, little fish are sweet, & I love these short fields. This was my second trip to Vegas, both times all expnses paid, & both times I've come home with a nice profit, net of wages. It's all about Bankroll Management to me, I see so many folks head for Vegas with high hopes, having scraped together all their Bankroll, only to return home skint, having "bet the shop". I'm exceptionally lucky, I guess that's the top & bottom of it, but my Live Bankroll will now last through to 2008, even without any cashes, & that's what matters to me.

As to the comp, I had a real Thewy YoYo evening. The 4,500 starting stack was soon 8,000, then I made a truly horrific call from an all-in-er. The flop was....

 

and I bet out wih my  , he called.

The turn was 



He moved in now, & stupidly, with 2 overs, a gutshot straight & a K flush draw, I called. And missed. (He had trip 7's). Bad call, & I'm down amongst the dead men now.

The table was tight passive, & I was soon back to 8k, when this bizarre affair went off.

I had Button-Limped with  , but the BB Raised it up. He was a Scot, from Dundee, now living in Cairo, of all places, where he's a schoolteacher. Anyway, I decide to make the call. Mathematically, of course this is a bad call. But what the books & the maths boys don't take into account is that you don't have to hit to win, you can get folks off pots with rubbish hands. I was fairly confident I could wrest this Pot away from him with a check-raise if need be.

We see this flop......

 

Lovely!

He bets, I move all-in, & he beats me into the Pot, flipping over  . Oops. I just need a club, but it comes two red rags, & I start to stand up to leave, before it's pointed out that the two red rags were a 7 and a 5.........A runner-runner double-up, & I felt for the guy, who took it like a proper bloke.

Later, with 16k now, I R it up with this......

 

....but get called by the BB, who I cover easily. The flop was......

 

Well, LOTS of outs there!

He checks, I move in, he instacalls - and I can't believe his hand -  ........! That some robust playing of a baby pair. I miss eveything, but get this turn & river - running Fives, to counterfeit his pair, phew!

Eventually, three-handed, I'm joint Chip Daddy with about 50k, & I make a play which I think was, tactically, pretty awful. Nice Man moves all-in Pre for about 20k, & I find  on the Button. Now, CALLING with this hand, in this spot, is a bad way to play AK, I wanna be the pusher here. Anyway, I call, & he has the same hand, choppity-chop.

Eventually, we get Heads-Up, & Matey Boy wants a deal. I'm cool with that, & that's that, the job is done. Absolutely delighted, but what a luckbox!

Loved every moment of it. Compo has 20%, which only partly offsets his payment to me after he won $13k a few days back, but I fel a little better for having reduced the defecit by at least a bit.

Ok, bed awaits.