Pokerblog – Eamblings

Who the heck is Special K? He is a new contributor to LasVegasVegas.com.

I imagine that my nickname will get me in trouble with the Kellogg’s folks, but that is just how I roll, brave until confronted and then I run like crazy. One lawyer letter and I’ll be Oatmeal McGrits.

Hi, I’m Special K. I’m an amateur poker player. I’m an amateur photographer. I shoot a pretty mean game of pool sometimes. Other times it looks like I rode a short bus to the pool hall (thus the nickname). Mostly, I’m a friend to Flipchip and the Poker Prof and they have been good friends to me.

Continue reading “Meet Special K” »

Posted by SpecialK at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Prof’s Poker Blog welcome’s Gene “Mean Gene” Bromberg to the LasVegasVegas.com family. Gene discusses current issues facing the millions of players pursuing poker’s many rewards. Gene is one of the defining class of Internet journalist. He produces well researched, well written, source linked, in-depth analysis of what’s affecting the poker industry and why. Today’s inaugural post from Mean Gene–Prof

More Damned Lies

It was Mark Twain who said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Well, no–actually it was the British author and politician Benjamin Disraeli who came up with the line, which Twain quoted in his autobiography. Still, most people attribute it to Twain, because they can’t be bothered to check the facts.

No matter who was first with the quip, it’s still certainly relevant today. Every day we’re bombarded with statistics that are carefully constructed to obscure the truth and confuse those who try to parse them. Not that many folks do much parsing–they blindly accept whatever numbers are splashed before them without considering the fact that those numbers might be misleading or even bogus.

Continue reading “More Damned Lies” »

Posted by Gene Bromberg at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I made a fast trip to Los Angeles yesterday to take care of some Poker Prof business in the Southland. The trip was done with no regard to allowing enough time to rest before heading back Las Vegas (someone should report the Prof to the slave labor police). Traffic was relatively light outbound but crowded for the return trip. I guess more people were leaving Los Angeles than leaving Las Vegas. Other than the usual gridlock of LA it was uneventful.

Continue reading “No Poker…Just Heat, Jerky and God” »

Posted by flipchipro at 5:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’m sitting here in DFW waiting for an evening flight to Las Vegas. Grandmother continues her journey on the other side after having spent more than a century spreading her warmth and faith to anyone that got near. I’m one of those people who approaches the “after life ideas” with a degree of skepticism probably as a result of my science/technical background.

At least that was my thinking until a few years ago when I had some minor surgery and the young inexperienced anesthesiologist decided at the last minute a general instead of a local slug of drugs would be better while they probed around in my hand for a glass shard. Of course, I also got some of the muscle relaxant, succinylcholine, and after they located the small glass splinter and put in a single stitch to close the tiny incision I was wheeled into recovery where I suffered respiratory failure. Unfortunately the guy didn’t have a clue what was going on (I know, my ears were working) and damn nearly let me suffocate (It seems I have a very rare condition known as Pseudocholinerase defficiency that prevent me from metabilizing the drug). After a few minutes the incredible pain caused me to blank out. I then went through a near death experience that was similar to the accounts of others, except I didn’t really float around the room or flying out a window, instead I found myself in a dark, peaceful place with a beckoning light at the end.

I was stopped at the border of what was apparently life and death where I spent what seemed to be days (actual unaccountable time was only a few hours) talking to various people from my past. Finally, I was told to go back; but, I was so comfortable there that I refused and insisted on staying. I was totally pain free for the first time in my existence, surrounded by a peacefulness and security I’d never known before or since. I protested going anywhere and insisted on staying, but then I began to hear my family calling me back to reality. What I was hearing turned out to be a group of very real doctors and nurses all telling me to breathe. The journey back was pain of the extreme kind. Incidentally, everyone tells me the same person didn’t return and they like this one much better. Personally, I can’t tell any difference.

I’ve never shared this experience with many people and am doing so now to help me with my grandmother’s death. I’m convinced that she got to the place where pain goes away, replaced by a comforting peace. It a feeling so special that a page full of superlatives can’t do it justice. I’m sure my grandmother is continuing on spreading her sunshine and catching up on the news with some old friends and family she hasn’t seen in many years.

Back to Las Vegas this evening and back to poker as a way of life. This is my closing post for this celebration of the end of a life that lasted a century and I wish to thank everyone for their kind words and consideration. It is much appreciated and brought me much comfort. I will be thanking many of you personally when we gather at the Rio for the 2006 WSOP bash next month.

 

 

A view from the 2005 WSOP main event. Make plans now to be in Las Vegas for the 2006 WSOP at the Rio next month

 

Posted by flipchipro at 8:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

My grandmother passed away on Monday. I’m suffering from a profound sadness that is only relieved by going over her life and my special relationship with this wonderful lady, the mother that raised me. My grandmother was 101 years old.

She took me in as her own son when I was only days old and raised me in a God fearing household that placed truth and honesty above all things. Small of statue, a stretch to reach five foot four, she never hesitated to put herself in harm’s way to ensure my welfare. She comforted me with unconditional love all my life and for this I am eternally grateful. Continue reading my farewell to a pioneering Texas centenarian by clicking below.

As I said I’m in a bit of a funk right now and in a few hours I will be in the air to Texas for the Friday funeral. The next couple of days I’m hoping the Prof will fill in for me, but just in case I will have a laptop. The post is a goodbye, maybe too personal for some, but it’s something I needed to do. Sometimes there’s more to life than than Vegas or poker.

Continue reading “A Sad Day for Flipchip and the Poker Prof” »

Posted by flipchipro at 7:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

I love playing poker in Vegas. And what’s not to love? Card rooms are set up so that you can enjoy playing your game of choice at the stakes of your desire. But not all card rooms are created equal. I was in London a few weeks ago, and their card-room looked like the basement of a speakeasy. And not in a nostalgic cool way either. More like in a “are we playing in the garage so we can smoke?” sort of way.

Just what makes Las Vegas poker rooms so much better than in other cities? Well, let me count the ways in a list I like to call:

Why Vegas Card rooms are so good

1. They have clean, new chips. Have you ever gone to a card room in a smaller city, only to sit down to a stack of chips that stick together? Not only is it disgusting, but it makes it more difficult to play with the chips. It’s hard to intimidate your opponent when you have to crack your chips apart like KGB opening an Oreo before you bet. New shiny chips make a wonderful sound almost as beautiful as the “ping” sound you get when you hit a perfect drive off the tee in golf. SHHHHH! Listen. Can you hear it? “Ping”

2. Sometimes a card room is just a card room. And then there is Vegas, baby. It’s all about customer service and keeping up the pretense that there is no better place for you to be. Remember to take advantage of the fact that Vegas hates to lose a single gambler. Ask for things. Be off the wall. Order a drink but demand that it has a paper umbrella in it as you believe that brings you good luck.

3. All games are spread in Vegas. I have even seen MGM put up HORSE on request for a table last time I was there. Like Omaha? You can find it. Like Low-ball? Its there. Like Razz? Just kidding. No one likes Razz.

4. There are other types of gambling. I am not sure what they are, but I hear you bet on things and the house wins more than 50% of the time. I’m not sure I understand the attraction here, but it keeps a lot of money coming into the casino, which in turn allows them to build cooler card rooms, which in turn gets the casino on TV. Everybody wins. Well, except the people playing the table games. Serves them right for not playing poker.

5. Vegas has distractions. Many, many distractions. This allows poker players and gamblers to pretend that there are other things to do in Vegas. Best of all, when you return without a big winning streak and your friends ask you, “So how was Vegas?”, you can reply “The Blue Man Group was awesome.”

Posted by Columbo at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like it or not, poker’s boom has spawned a number of high and low water marks since Moneymaker won the World Series. With all the good poker’s popularity has brought for the average player, there’s plenty of reasons to rue the day the average Joe figured out Hold ‘Em would be a great way to spend a Saturday night. After the jump, we’ll give you the definitive Las Vegas Vegas take on the good and bad that’s come out of the last three years of poker’s incredible rise…

Continue reading “The Top Ten Best – And Worst – Hallmarks Of The Poker Boom” »

Posted by bg at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

It is common for all Las Vegas visitors who sit down at a poker table to notice the card protectors that other players use to protect their cards. These symbolic ornaments serve both a common as well as diabolical purpose. But first, for those of you who don’t know why these card protectors are in use in the first place, a brief digression. When you decide to play a hand in a card room, players are often urged by dealers to place a chip on top of their hole cards. That way, while your mind wonders around the room, the dealer does not steal your cards. The chip tells the dealer that you are not, in fact, asleep, but rather thinking and thus require a gentile nudge instead of “unceremoniously folding my cards for me”. This is known as “protecting your cards” or “hey dealer, get off my lawn.” If you do not protect your cards, the dealer will treat them as Eve treated the Apple. Oh so tempting. As poker playing progressed, players felt the need to associate themselves with personal objects at the table, much like a telemarketer decorates their cubicle. Over time, players began to replace the act of placing a chip on their hole cards with placing a personal object on their hole cards. Often times, this is a chip like token with some expression of how cool poker is. But more recently has ventured into the more eclectic like a pewter frog or a tiny idol.
There is extra value in these personalized tokens that a mere chip can not duplicate. That is one of association. You are supplying other players at the table a mnemonic or memory association to aid their brain in remembering all the times you bet and made them fold. You can thus “craft an image” at the table for that player, making it easier to trap him when you have a big hand. If you always bet after the flop, “he will remember that the ‘pewter frog’ always bets after the flop”. When you know what he knows, you have an advantage you can exploit. (I leave that part up to you. Enjoy.) Here are some generally accepted guidelines for card protectors:Should be smaller than the actual cards (so the dealer can tell you are in the hand). You would think this would go without saying. Please do not place a boom-box on your hole cards.Small enough that chips cant hide behind them. This may end up causing a ruckus and casinos do not like anything with the word “ruckus” in it.Personal enough that you are tagged with an image.Should not be based on the occult. So, next time you are heading to Vegas, remember to take you new special friend, the card protector.

Posted by Columbo at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’d like to introduce BG from Random Thoughts and Thoroughbred Selections to the Las Vegas Blog family. We’ll give him a bit of room here to stretch out and let you know what to expect from him from here on out.

A long time ago on another gambling-related website, I wrote an article about pro poker player Tomer Benvenisti. In part, the article read:

Like beer-league softball and the great sport of bowling, America has found a pasttime for our morbidly obese. And we’d like to nominate Tomer Benvenisti as the Patron Saint of fat-ass poker players everywhere.

Why Tomer? Well, first off he’s Italian. We fully support the complete range of cured meats that end in vowels, as well as the variety of dishes with awesomely fun names to pronounce like “braciole” and “gabbagool.” Second, he’s delightfully doughy. Look at him, there’s no way he disarms two muggers like Greg Raymer. He’s the perfect role model for today’s sedentary man.

There are lots of fat guys out there to choose from, but give us a guy whose pores reek like the trash can at an Italian deli. Give us a guy who licks his fingers clean, but only after his fifth cannoli has built up the appropriate amount of residue. You can have your Polish and your German tubby folk, give us Tomer Benvenisti and a pound of Prosciutto. He’s the man.

Now that the dust has settled and the Oddjack flag is no longer flying over the landscape of gambling blogs, we’d like to present Tomer’s long lost rebuttal. Apparently, he felt slightly… slighted by our willingness to put him on the heavily reinforced pedestal on which he so clearly belongs.

HELLO [expletive deleted],

MEET ME AT THE MIRAGE, WHERE I PLAY 40-80 HOLDEM DAILY AND AND TELL ME TO MY FACE YOUR THOUGHTS ON FAT [expletive deleted] LIKE ME. I EAT MAGGOTS LIKE YOU FOR BREAKFAST. OH BY THE WAY, I AM ISRAELI AND WOULD LOVE TO STICK AN UZI UP YOUR [expletive deleted].

FAT [expletive deleted] DREAMS,

TOMER BENVENISTI.

I’d like to offer my sincere and heartfelt apologies to Tomer and make a few promises about my role on the Las Vegas blog and on the poker blog you’re currently perusing. Tomer’s eloquent rebuttal aside, I’ve learned plenty more I intend to apply to enhance your enjoyment of our time together. Let’s call this BG’s Ten Commandments Of Poker Blogging.· I shall henceforth fully understand the nationalistic pride inherent in the great people of Israel, and shall never assume a really fat guy with an Italian surname loves the cured meats of Parma again.

· I shall never again hold forth a player of immense talent and skill as a potential hero and/or Patron Saint based simply on girth.

· I shall, however, reserve the right to nominate another player as a role model to those with a similar aesthetic, such as declaring those who battle mental problems at the poker table may find a kindred spirit in Phil Hellmuth.

· I shall never bore you with the details of a hand in which I lost a great deal of money, unless the suckout was at least a rivered three-outer or a non-flush draw runner-runner.

· I shall never profess to tell you how to play Ace King under the gun, in middle position, opening a pot from the button, after a raise, or from the blinds. I shall reserve the right, however, give you 500 aimless words on how much I hate the nickname “Big Slick.”

· I shall never rest until I have made fun of every home game douchebag wearing sunglasses whose picture I find on Flickr.

· I shall, in reviewing the mainstream media’s articles on the “poker fad,” retain the personal mantra that the only thing that has truly “jumped the shark” is the media’s claim that poker has “jumped the shark.”

· I shall strive to never take the easy joke where more complex nuance may be available as an alternate route. For instance, Kathy Liebert may not be an attractive woman, but that joke would be too easy. Instead, I shall find a quote of hers such as, “the top women players are among the top players period,” and play that broadly on the obvious truth that women are too emotionally high-strung to be successful poker players. I shall remember that the truth is always funnier than opinion.

· I shall never let my personal biases against Canadians, pink chip games, Omaha Eight, Vince Van Patten, pocket Jacks, table captains, mule deer, mayonnaise, goths, Oprah Winfrey, MySpace, PartyPoker, and people who defend calling a raise with three-gap offsuited cards they should be doubling down on corrupt my ability to tell it to you straight. Unless, of course, they deserve it.

· And lastly, I shall produce posts in this space that you will rarely, if ever, be able to take seriously.

Poker is a lot of things, but at its core it’s still a game. Suck it up, post your blinds, and let’s deal ’em up kids.

Posted by bg at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

 

Is the Barbary Coast enjoying its last days?

On Tuesday the high temperature in Las Vegas set a record for the coolest day ever on this date, 51 degrees, but don’t dig out the artic parkas because the high on Friday will be close to 80 degrees. I spent part of this record cold day catching up with stuff I pile in the corners of the computer. Going through some of the search requests I find questions that readers asked and thought it might be helpful for our people planning to visit the entertainment capitol of the universe, especially for the first time, to answer them in a public forum.

Q: What time does the sun set in Las Vegas?

A: The sun typically sets in Las Vegas at sundown every evening, but it can be very difficult to actually discern the time of the actual event since it’s masked by the brilliance of the city’s neon.

Q: How many poker chips do I need to win in Las Vegas?

A: All of them.

Q: How can I date a porn star in Las Vegas?

A: Not a clue, but I will do some research.

Q: How can I beat the slots in Las Vegas?

A: Don’t play.

Q: What is the price of admissions to watch the WSOP?

A: See me for some half price tickets.

Q: How much money should I bring to Vegas?

A: Everything you have.

Q: When does Las Vegas close?

A: When everyone leaves.

Enough of the Q & A for now, time to catch up on the backlog of work with our exhaustingly extensive collection of poker photos. Also some time to reflect on where we have been and what lies ahead for poker and Las Vegas. The future of the city has never looked brighter with the strip set for a transformation that will see city sized resorts replace the now aging “themed” resorts designed to appeal to the average American family vacation budget. I like the way Vegas is headed, back to its roots of providing the very best to those lucky adults that can afford the best. And, what direction is poker headed?

Poker’s big move was onto the world’s virtual Main Street, the World Wide Web. Internet Card rooms have literally sprang up on this futuristic boulevard of pixels. These virtual establishments routinely attract hundreds of thousands of players from around the world into the card rooms where they can play with very real money. And, how about brick and mortar live poker rooms? The land based casino card rooms have recently undergone a period of unprecedented growth with rooms opening all across the country and existing rooms in Nevada and California expanding. Do I think the live poker playing bubble will burst? No, many of those hundreds of thousands of Internet players will always have a need for live games. Do I think the popularity of TV poker will continue? Probably, at least to some degree, there will always be an audience for the sport with the proper marketing of the game and its stars.

I am currently reading about three articles a day detailing the anticipated decline in the popularity of poker. Many are from some of the most respected in the news business, “all the news that’s fit…” people, talking up poker’s eminent decline and its all based on some television stats. I don’t think poker has ever been on the decline, recently it just decided to come out of the smoky closet and go legit. This year we will see the WSOP with a $50,000 buy-in H.O.R.S.E. event and later this year a $100,000 buy-in Heavyweight Championship of Poker. Andy Beal was just in town trading millions across the felt of a poker table. Is poker on the decline? Check out the numbers and you decide. Can you imagine a day without poker? I can’t.

Posted by flipchipro at 6:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

 

A rare cloudy day in Las Vegas.

I have a few days of leisure so am not spending much time with the computer or the cameras. I’ve been sleeping late, staying up till sunup, watching movies and playing poker, so the Friday post is more photos from the Jeff Gordon Foundation Poker Classic and the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. The two tournaments were held at the new Caesars Palace Poker Room. I’m impressed with Harrahs’ commitment to the sport of poker and especially tournament poker. From the regularly scheduled daily and weekly tournaments at Harrah’s properties in Las Vegas to the undisputed premier poker event, the annual World Series of Poker, Harrah’s runs class poker events and Caesars is no exception. The next major poker tournament in Las Vegas is again at Caesars when the WSOP Circuit stops in April. The Five Star World Poker Classic plays for three weeks in April at the Bellagio, another class act poker event from master tournament director, Jack McClelland.

We’ve heard talk in the street that the Tilt Boys don’t tip after cashing in major tournaments and after a little ear to the ground I’ve heard that this may be true, but only certain tournaments. Sources say that they do the math and when tournament management has taken what they consider to be an excessive amount from the player’s prize pool they skip the tip which might be their way of saying, “I did the math and decided you can pay your dealers.” Apparently the tip ban didn’t apply to the Heads-Up event at Caesars. The dealers were apparently pleased with the drop. Professional poker players are usually playing for something less than 100% of their buy-in dollar which is the only money in most tournament prize pools. Doing the math for the NBC Heads-Up reveals a prize pool with some money added. 64 players and a $20,000 buy-in is $1.28 million but the prize pool is $1.5 million. NBC added $220,000. The players rarely receive even money back from the buy-ins, but having money added to the prize pool is almost unheard of in major tournament poker. Thanks to Harrah’s and NBC Sports for giving some back to the stars of the show, the players.

Posted by flipchipro at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)