Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[Kid Grimsby]

Just like a newly married couple.......................  enjoy

[the sicilian]

Good fun though. The Venetian is SUCH a lovely room to play in. As almost always, Mr & Mrs Shulman were in attendance.

Any of you that have played at The Venetian will be familiar with Mrs Shulman, aka Allyn, wife of Barry, the Cardplayer.com owner. She was/is co-owner of Cardplayer, & is their Attorney. Decent player, won a WSOP Bracelet in the Seniors around 12 years ago for ~$600,000, & won a big Deepstack Extravaganza affair for over $300,000, so knows her way round the table. I happen to like her very much, a view not widely shared, but she does strike quite an imposing image with her posh shades, long blonde hair, menacing cleavage & opinionated views.

It did quite amuse me though the way she casually slung her $700 Versace scarf over her chair in such a way that everyone could see it. To be fair, I do the same with my Tesco scarf.  

Click to see full-size image.

 

Click to see full-size image.

'Menacing clevage' I have to admit I lolled

Ha, Mr Spangles, all sorts are popping out of the woodwork.

Listen, when a 70 year old woman with a push-up bra & half an acre of cleavage gets in your face, believe me, it's scary. You never been in a Golf Club Locker Room on Gentleman Seniors Day? Not nice, not nice at all.

You see much of the Fen Flouncer these days? Go to the sane Gym, perhaps?

Sadly very few sightings of the flouncer..did bump into him a little while back at the G.. looked very buff and seems to have traded in his midlife crisis muscle car for a much more sedate soccer mum SUV

[celtic]

Just like a newly married couple.......................  enjoy

ooh, got some news to share?

[tikay]

Just like a newly married couple.......................  enjoy

ooh, got some news to share?

Ha, no, bad read there Vinni.

[tikay]

Any more poker tournaments planned or is it the train stage of trip ?

Love the food pictures and the Orleans stories certainly bring back many good memories

Hi Simon,

I'll be playing a $300 Big O at Venetian on Friday. I'm a bit out of touch with Live MTT structures, but FIVE HOURS of Late Reg in a 1 dayer seems a bit OTT. Anyway, I'll enjoy, whatever.

I scheduled 3 MTT's, (1 x $150, 2 x $300) & in each case budgeted for initial entry & two bullets. So far I've played 1 x $150 & 1 x $300 & not used any bullets, so in a way I'm in profit to the tune of $900...

Hopefully no bullets on Friday, but if I need them I'll take them.

There's also a $150 Limit O8 thing at Orleans on Saturday, but that's bad timing, as I'll be taking Gill to the Airport for her flight home. Not sure "Get a taxi, I'm playing a $150-er at Orleans" would be too well received.

Probably play cash at Orleans later today.

[tikay]

Well we did the Vegas - Santa Barbara - Los Angeles - Vegas round trip yesterday, & everything went perfectly, the sole exception was driving from the Airport to Palazzo last night taking over 2 hours due to the Strip being gridlocked again by the pesky F1 road re-paving works.

Santa Barbara is real God's country. Beautiful climate, perfect beach, nice old wooden pier, hard to fault it really. Very twee & posh, in the same way as, say, Lancaster, Cheltenham or Harrogate. Prices for everything were off the scale.  

Santa Barbara Airport is very small, think Leeds/Bradford or Southampton, & it cost $45 + tip for a taxi to the promenade.

The train from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles was everything - & more - we hoped it would be. Absolutely fabulous experience. We got a nice window seat on the right hand side so had a great view as the train headed south pretty much along the beach for the first hour or so. Amtrak is unbelievably old-fashioned, very slow & clunky, even buying a ticket is a 20 minute affair, with the ticket clerk using a variety of rubber stamps & 1950's ticketing paraphernalia. Very cheap though - VERY cheap - so worth upgrading to Business Class (equivalent to 1st Class on a UK train) for just a few extra bucks.

From Union Station LA to LA Airport we got the FlyAway bus, ($9.50 each) & watched in amazement at 12 lane highways absolutely jam-packed with commuters.

No way I was missing this photo-op at Union Station, in which I think I look quite manly & fetching.

Click to see full-size image.

[tikay]

The kill or half kill is sometimes, often?, set off by the size of the previous pot. I played it is a complete mug in the mirage in the late nineties. I was about to bet the river when my opponent in the hand, who had previously announced that he was leaving, pushed my bet back and said - "I have nut nut - I trapped you".

It took me a while to work out that the extra bets would have made it a kill pot and he would have been forced to put in the extra profit as a blind bet in the next hand and possible be caught up in something costing him more, when he had planned to leave.

Also add me to the "I approve of this waffle" list.

Very good point.

At Orleans, Half Kill is triggered by scooping a pot that goes to showdown. So if playing $4 $8, the winner is forced to post a $6 "forced blind" or ante, and all subsequent betting levels increase throughout the hand, so pre flop & flop, $6, Turn & River $12. At $8 $16 it becomes $12 & $24. The Big Bets increase to the "Kill" stakes too so if dealt half a hand it can get very expensive.

[tikay]

Good fun though. The Venetian is SUCH a lovely room to play in. As almost always, Mr & Mrs Shulman were in attendance.

Any of you that have played at The Venetian will be familiar with Mrs Shulman, aka Allyn, wife of Barry, the Cardplayer.com owner. She was/is co-owner of Cardplayer, & is their Attorney. Decent player, won a WSOP Bracelet in the Seniors around 12 years ago for ~$600,000, & won a big Deepstack Extravaganza affair for over $300,000, so knows her way round the table. I happen to like her very much, a view not widely shared, but she does strike quite an imposing image with her posh shades, long blonde hair, menacing cleavage & opinionated views.

It did quite amuse me though the way she casually slung her $700 Versace scarf over her chair in such a way that everyone could see it. To be fair, I do the same with my Tesco scarf.  

Click to see full-size image.

 

Click to see full-size image.

'Menacing clevage' I have to admit I lolled

Ha, Mr Spangles, all sorts are popping out of the woodwork.

Listen, when a 70 year old woman with a push-up bra & half an acre of cleavage gets in your face, believe me, it's scary. You never been in a Golf Club Locker Room on Gentleman Seniors Day? Not nice, not nice at all.

You see much of the Fen Flouncer these days? Go to the sane Gym, perhaps?

Sadly very few sightings of the flouncer..did bump into him a little while back at the G.. looked very buff and seems to have traded in his midlife crisis muscle car for a much more sedate soccer mum SUV

Chomps has a Soccer Mum SUV? Well well, most interesting.

The big craze out here these days are giant "tonka toy" pick up trucks, huge tyres, 6 litre V-8 engines, 8MPG sort of thing. The drivers are always middle-aged blokes with cowboy hats, Cuban heels &, I always like to imagine, very small willies.

Click to see full-size image.

[tikay]

Complete change of topic here.

The BBC News feed over here is different to what we see in the UK, (for starters, it had ads, ugh), so you may not have seen this.


UPS parcel delivery drivers in the USA have agreed a deal which will see them earn a pay package of $170,000 per year after 5 years service.

Seriously?


"UPS said the average full-time driver would earn about $170,000 (£135,000) annually, including healthcare and other benefits, by the end of the five-year contract.

That is up from about $145,000 now".



https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66445496

Click to see full-size image.

[tikay]

As you can imagine, Trump hits the front page every day out here as the Court cases & indictments pile up.

One oddity of the wall-to-wall Trump coverage is the complete news blackout on mentions of Melania. What's that all about? Not seen a single mention of her in months, other than articles speculating on exactly that. Most odd. 

Click to see full-size image.

[tikay]

Those O8 games at the Orleans...

Eight people limp.

We see a flop.

One bet. Six callers

Turn

One bet. Five callers.

River.

Check it down.

Everyone turns their cards over.

Everyone looks at all the other cards. Stand up, obviously, squint and raise glasses.

Everyone sits down.

Now, either one of two things happens, depending entirely on the dealer:
1) the dealer informs the table that seat 2 has won the high with a flush and seats 4 and 7 split the low.
2) the dealer lets the players sort it out for themselves and distributes the chips as instructed, irrespective of whether it's correct.

It's the best poker game to watch when learning the game. Working out the two sides of the pot with 20 cards to choose from is a skill worth learning.

A perfect summary of an O8 game at Orleans.

On a bit of a tangent here, but was it you a while back that suggested I should watch the Aaron Hernandez documentary on Netflix? Well I spent a pleasant hour in Barnes & Noble yesterday & managed to buy the book version, "All American Murder". Fabulous read, I simply can't put it down. Very well written, but by way of an oddity, the Chapters are very short - 97 Chapters in a 390 page book is most unusual. I write longer sentences.

Aaron was a huge NFL star in the making, had a $40 milly contract with the Patriots, & then things went badly wrong. A tragedy in so many ways. I'm returning to Barnes & Noble today to try & get a book about Michael Vick, which is a similar story in many ways. I don't derive any pleasure from seeing these young lads have their careers destroyed, not at all, but I do find it fascinating.

It's been a bit of an eye-opener for me to realise how many NFL lads go wrong, & end up doing drugs, mixing with gang culture or running with bad sorts & getting in trouble. Made me wonder if the Premier League footballers might eventually go the same route? I know there are a few bad eggs in the English PL, but I'd be surprised if there were many. 

397 pages, & I finished it in under 3 days, what a page-turner it turned out to be. No spoilers, but it had quite a twist.

Off to Barnes & Noble today to try & get some books on Michael Vick. Many parallels with the Aaron Hernandez thing.

Click to see full-size image.

Click to see full-size image.

[RED-DOG]

If I liked to imagine willies, small or otherwise, I wouldn't admit it on here.

[redsimon]

were you at Orleans when the omaha bad beat jackpot was hit . couple f really bad hands clashed

  vs J s   on a run out!

[tikay]

were you at Orleans when the omaha bad beat jackpot was hit . couple f really bad hands clashed

  vs J s   on a run out!

Hi Simon,

No. I was there for around 5 hours yesterday playing Cash, but heard nothing about that.

[tikay]

Off to Barnes & Noble this morning to try & get that Michael Vick book, & hoping I can pick up a copy of this too;





 

Click to see full-size image.