The NCAA basketball tourney is down to its final matchup, and I have reached the finals of my own personal March Madness as well. I ran an experiment this past month of not checking my poker results for an entire month, and I must say it was more difficult than I expected, at times even a bit maddening! The goal was to maintain the discipline not to check my Hold’em Manager actual and EV results, or the cashier in PokerStars for an entire month. So in essence the goal was to become completely disconnected from a results oriented mentality.

Playing day after day without knowing your results is like playing game after game in basketball without keeping score. By the end of the month, your victories and losses become blurry and you’re not even sure what your overall record is. But if you’re confident your strategy is better than your opponents, and you play them long enough, then theoretically you should have more points than them at the end of the month or season. So with that said, what is the point of focusing on the short term fluctuations in the score of each game? Those fluctuations are exciting to observers, as any basketball fan knows, but it’s better if we as poker players are disconnected from these swings and remain even keel and thus rationally thinking over the entire duration to maintain the biggest edge over our opponent.

It’s common knowledge in the poker community that being results oriented can cause adverse emotional reactions that are -EV to your game. Examples are playing too long because you are stuck, or not playing long enough because you are up. And when you fall into this trap you’re generally playing your longest sessions with your B or C game, and your shortest sessions on your A game.

This is fantastic in theory, but I must admit I found that even though I was not checking my results I wasn’t able to totally eliminate these feelings, and at times I found myself trying to guess my session results based on intuition. However, great progress was still evident, as I never found myself trying to get unstuck or quitting early to book a win. This was certainly a big step in the right direction for me. And the longer I participated in the experiment the easier it became. So I thought…

Around midway through the challenge, as those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I had a moment of weakness and checked results for one day in particular. I rationalized at the time that it wouldn’t really hurt the overall experiment since I wasn’t going to check results for the entire month, I was just curious the damage done from such a disastrous bout of short term variance. So after repeated moments of internal justification, I pulled up my Hold’em Manager chart for the day. And this is what I had to say about it at the time:

@Wizard0fAhhs 14 Mar
Confession: I just checked results for today to see the damage. Lost $22K. At least I didn’t look at EV, no need. Also didn’t check month.

@Wizard0fAhhs 14 Mar
Not sure why I checked. Was just very curious. But I honestly don’t feel any different, it’s about what I thought it would be. Going to bed!.

That second tweet tells half the story. I didn’t feel any different at the time. I knew I had been rocked badly at the tables, so my frustration didn’t waver much once I saw the total. But there was an unforeseen consequence to my action. That number, $22K, lingered in my mind the next day, and the next day… I know what a $22K+ loss feels like, I tend to have them several times a year and I also know just how long it usually takes me to overcome such a loss. So my mind started to track results, perhaps even on a subconscious level. I developed that “I need to get unstuck” mentality each day. And after a week I wondered if I was close. And even today, I’m wondering if I was able to overcome it. Everything was going relatively smoothly until that moment. I don’t believe the loss itself was responsible for this. I believe that having a quantitative result symbolizing the event was responsible for my continued struggle the remainder of March. The lessoned learned was that even if it seemed relatively harmless at the time, its implications on my longer term mentality are much greater than I realized.

I wanted to get back to the feeling I had a week prior. So I wasn’t going to make that mistake again, no matter how curious I became or how poorly I felt a session might be going. Experiments like these aren’t performed in a vacuum, things aren’t always going to go as planned, but I was able to learn from this mistake and improve for next time.

I consider myself a successful professional of the game, but only recently have I come to terms with the fact that this professionalism doesn’t translate to every aspect of my game. I’m a mental game fish. But now that I have made it past the full spectrum of the Kübler-Ross model regarding my mental approach and lack of self control when it comes to both soft and hard tilt, I’m able to make several productive changes to help bring my mental game on par with my other skills in poker.

I’ve installed software on my machine (almost like training wheels to keep you from falling off track mentally). I’ve been reading Jared Tendler’s “The Mental Game of Poker” to help build a stronger foundation and understand the root cause of my mental leaks in order to fix them. And I’ve taken the focus off my quantitative results as you know through this experiment. I was insane for not making improvements sooner! (insert Einstein’s definition of insanity)

Conclusion:

Would I conduct this experiment again? Most certainly, I’m going to start again tomorrow. It helps me focus more on qualitative results, rating the quality of my play, rather than quantitative results where I tend to make emotional ties with money won and lost, as Jared remarks in his book. I don’t necessarily promote no results checking for everyone (this could be quite dangerous for someone on a tight bankroll that may need to move down in stakes after a big downswing), but I believe it is an excellent solution if you are a solid player who is over-rolled for the games you are playing.

Prediction:

I’m about to check my monthly results in just a few minutes, but I would first like to make a prediction.

I believe I did well overall, even despite knowing of my $22K loss. Not as well as I could have done perhaps if I would have foregone checking results entirely for the duration, but overall I believe the experiment was a success and had a valuable impact to my mental approach. I feel as if I ran and played quite well leading up to that results checking moment, but thereafter I felt like I ran quite poorly and perhaps my play may have reflected this to a small degree.

Clearly checking the results that day had no bearing on how well I ran the remainder of the month, but perhaps it did make the sequence more frustrating and stressful, which isn’t good for people in general, but even more detrimental to someone like myself with a compromised immune system. When stress increases and becomes chronic (for many with a chronic illness), cortisol continuously secretes from adrenal glands and circulates through the body as a response, and ultimately adrenal fatigue sets in, which is followed by impaired cognitive performance, leading to a degeneration in my ability to play at a high level. And thus one of the primarily reasons my spectrum of play, my A to F game, is probably greater than any other high stakes player on PokerStars. This further solidifies in my mind the importance for me to master the mental approach, which is not only important for my success in poker, but in my battle against Lyme Disease.

Alright, it’s time to make a guess! I think I won around $30K or so in the first 2 weeks on a heater and A+ game combination, followed by that big $22K loss putting me down in the vicinity of $10K. After that I believe I made a slight $10K comeback but then proceeded to run poorly. I think my play fluctuated from that point between an A- to B game in the process putting my EV around breakeven. So, final answer, $10K profit plus about $5K in VIP bonuses putting me up around $15K up on the month.

Edit: I just reread this paragraph to see if I was in agreement. And to be honest, I’m really not sure! It’s so difficult to remember, a month is a long time! I feel as if I played quite well overall this month, but since that $22K results checking mishap is still firmly implanted in my mind, it’s difficult to say the final outcome. I suppose a $15K ballpark is as good a guess as any!

Drum roll……………………..

Actual Results:

Wow! Approximately $53K profit after VIP bonuses are included. That’s a lot better than I anticipated! I felt like I was playing well, but perhaps not my A game down the stretch. I really felt like I was getting punished in All-In $EV late in the month. I’m very surprised to see my EV close to my actual.

Note: I originally planned on not checking $EV at the end of the experiment as I didn’t want it to have any bearing on next month’s performance, but I changed my mind after thinking about it earlier today. For the purpose of the experiment I want to see the most accurate representation of my results, and I feel I’m mentally strong enough now to handle the outcome regardless of whether I ran hot or cold over the duration. Also, I feel there is merit to knowing how the actual $EV compared to my perceived $EV.

I do not feel I am quite mentally strong enough to check results at the end of each day yet. And I certainly never plan on checking results during or immediately after a session ever again. So I’m going to stick to the game plan of re-enacting the experiment all over again in April to optimize my success, because this graph may certainly be evidence of a successful experiment.

After seeing the breakdown by stakes,

I’ve concluded that my suspicions of running poorly down the back stretch were actually validated somewhat as you can see in the graph represented by big blinds (bb) rather than $ below.

This is one of the advantages (and at times painful disadvantages) of playing multiple stakes at the same time. It looks like I was fortunate enough to run decently well where it mattered most, the $25/50NL and $50/100NL. If I would have ran as poorly at the $50/100 as I did at the $5/10 and $10/20, I would have lost a pretty Canadian penny this month. Well, I’m sure glad I got that bb/100 run bad out of the way because next month is going to be a full on heater, I can feel it!

Tags: 2011 | australia | deg | discipline | eureka poker tour | gambling | lapt | march-madness | micromillions | napt | portugal

With MicroMillions madness sweeping the virtual tables and March Madness competing for the attention of more than a few Sunday grinders, this week’s Warm-Up almost felt like a relaxing walk in the park. That is, if your idea of relaxation is competing for a six-figure score. 3,280 players came out for the Sunday Warm-Up, smashing through the $500,000 guarantee to create a $656,000 prize pool. 495 players came away with a share of it, with this week’s champion set to earn $102,992.00.

Two dozen members of the Red Spade Army bought in, including Vanessa Selbst, Liv Boeree, Shane “shaniac” Schleger, newly minted EPT champion Mickey “mement_mori” Petersen, Lex Veldhuis, Alex Kravchenko, and Eugene Katchalov. Finishing in the money were a trio from Team Online, Bjorn “Bjoerni89″ Schneider (439th), Anders “Donald” Berg (289th), and a man who’s never met a hyper-turbo satellite he didn’t like, George “Jorj95″ Lind III who finished up in 143rd place.

With ten players remaining, plazein found [Ad][5c] on the button and decided to take a stand, moving in for his last 1.36 million. Mysters_Y, however, woke up in the big blind with [Qd][Qh]. Although plazein flopped a gutshot wheel draw, he blanked the turn and river, exiting on the final table bubble.

Final table chip counts

Seat 1: yurasov1990 (6,576,780 in chips)
Seat 2: johngarvey (1,661,852 in chips)
Seat 3: Maverick 36O (6,850,571 in chips)
Seat 4: SUNDAYKING (1,961,526 in chips)
Seat 5: Mysters_Y (4,575,011 in chips)
Seat 6: dimetriospb (4,705,766 in chips)
Seat 7: kiskin1979 (1,503,686 in chips)
Seat 8: a.S.e High (3,256,824 in chips)
Seat 9: rssoul20 (1,707,984 in chips)

Three hands in, the final table lost its first player. With the blinds up to 100,000/200,000, rssoul20 moved all-in for 1.57 million with [As][8s], but Maverick 36O called from the big blind with [Ah][Ts]. Rrsoul20 did not improve and was eliminated in ninth place. Next to go was johngarvey, who blinded down to 850,000 before he made his move, open-shoving with [Kd][Th]. SUNDAYKING re-shoved behind him with [Ah][9d] and hit two pair on the flop to take johngarvey out in eighth.

A.S.e High solidified his position, moving up to 8 mllion when he picked up pocket queens and doubled through yurasov1990, who looked him up with pocket tens. Yurasov1990 was still in the lead pack with 6.5 million when he opened for 512,499 from the cutoff and was met with a 1,237,475 three-bet from Maverick 36O. With ten big blinds left and [Ad][Kh] in the hole, SUNDAYKING four-bet shoved, earning a call from Maverick 36O with [Qs][9s]. It was all but over on the flop for SUNDAYKING as Maverick36O hit a king-high straight, the board running out [Jh][Td][Kc][9c][6c] to end SUNDAYKING’s run in seventh place.

The next hand saw Mysters_Y commit his last 2.83 million with [As][3h], but he could not improve against kiskin1979′s pocket eights. Left with less than two big blinds, Mysters_Y’s last 382,000 went in on the next hand from under-the-gun, both kiskin1979 and Maverick 36O making the call. The two active players checked down the [9s][9c][3s][8s][5c] board to the river, when Maverick 36O make it 625,000 to go. Kiskin1979 gave up his hand and Maverick 36O revealed [6c][7s] for a nine-high straight. Mysters_Y’s [Kd][2s] was no good and he departed in sixth place, collecting $21,320.

Yurasov1990 had been slowly bleeding chips since doubling up a.S.e High and with 21 big blinds left, he picked up [7d][7s] in the small blind and three-bet to 1.11 million behind a.S.e High’s 500,000 button min-raise. Maverick 36O, however, was still lurking in the big blind and holding [Ah][Kh], decided to cold four-bet to 2.3 million. A.S.e High released his hand, but yurasov1990 shoved and Maverick 36O called, setting up an 11 million-chip coinflip. This time, the sevens held for Maverick 36O and yurasov1990 suddenly found himself on the rail in fifth place.

The remaining four players decided to pause the action and discuss a deal, but their negotiations were short-lived. With half the chips in play, Maverick 36O wanted more than his opponents were willing to offer and a.S.e High wouldn’t deal for anything less than a $73,000 share of the prize pool. Confident in his abilities, a.S.e High put the kibosh on the deal, but not before offering up some choice words.

a.S.e High: im clearly the best player here and trust me youre a flip away from 4th
a.S.e High: so think hard
a.S.e High: before you take any decision
Maverick 36O: I’ll take 100K in a deal sir.
Maverick 36O: it’s in your court
a.S.e High: youre from Netherlands right ?
a.S.e High: are you high right now ?
Maverick 36O: sure, want to visit?

Once the cards went back in the air, it took only five more hands to decide the tournament. No, not to eliminate another player, to finish the whole dang thing.

Hand #1 saw Maverick 36O open-shove for 17.1 million and get no callers. A.S.e High opened Hand #2 for a min-raise to 600,000 and was met with a 2.33 million shove from dimetriospb in the small blind. Kiskin1979 re-shoved behind him and a.S.e got out of the way, demetriospb’s [Kd][Td] up against kiskin1979′s [As][Js]. The ace-high held up and demetriospb ended his run in fourth place, collecting $37,720.

A.S.e. High successfully stole the blinds with a min-raise on Hand #3 and Hand #4 saw him open again for the same amount. Maverick 36O three-bet to 1.5 million, and kiskin1979 came over the top for the rest of his chips, 6.24 million in all. A.S.e High folded once again and Maverick 36O called, turning up [9s][9d] to kiskin1979′s [Ah][Kd]. Maverick 36O’s pair survived the [Jd][6s][2h][4s][6d] board and kiskin1979 hit the rail in third place, earning $54,120 for his finish.

Heads-up chip counts

Seat 3: Maverick 36O (24,677,457 in chips)
Seat 8: a.S.e High (8,122,543 in chips)

Final table host Sigge “ClarkKent89″ Reichard barely had time to congratulate kiskin1979 before all the chips were in the middle again. Although his [Ac][2d] trailed a.S.e High’s [Th][Td], Maverick 36O hit an ace on the flop and rivered a runner-runner wheel, just for good measure:

Congratulations to Maverick 36O on the Sunday Warm-Up title and a $102,992 payday. For his runner-up finish, a.S.e High earned $76,752.00.

PokerStars Sunday Warm-Up results (3/18/2012)

1. Maverick 36O (Netherlands) $102,992.00
2. a.S.e High (Romania) $76,752.00
3. kiskin1979 (Belarus) $54,120.00
4. dimetriouspb (Russia) $37,720.00
5. yurasov1990 (Belarus) $27,880.00
6. Mysters_Y (Russia) $21,320.00
7. SUNDAYKING (Sweden) $14,760.00
8. johngarvey (Denmark) $8,200.00
9. rssoul20 (United Kingdom) $5,248.00

Tags: Asia Pacific Poker Tour | Battle of the Planets | facebook | liv boeree | news | pokerstars macau | TOC | World Series of Poker

By Pauly
New York City

Time flies, eh? Hard to believe that 2012 is around the corner, but I’m kinda glad that 2011 is over. This year was one of the roughest, saddest, and most excruciating that I experienced since I ventured into the poker world. I can only be optimistic about the future, because it can’t get any worse… right?

Without further ado, here’s the best of the Tao of Poker…

* * *

January 2010

God’s Cell Phone Number – Things got a little crazy while betting on the NFL playoffs and I successfully pulled off a Band of Brothers reference…

Sometimes I refer to God as Gretzky. At least, that’s what I have him labeled on my cell phone. I’d hate for someone to steal my phone and than have a direct number to God. Hence, why He’s coded as GRETZKY. He doesn’t gives those out to anyone. It’s one of the perks of attending a Jesuit high school. You learn Latin, Greek, and get God’s cell phone number… MORE

Dispatches from the PCA: You Enjoy Myself – My lovely girlfriend won a satellite to the Ladies Event, so I flew down to Paradise Island in the Bahamas to attend the PCA as a civilian and professional railbird. I also drunk a shit-ton of rum and gambled at the sports book.

The cabbie pulled into Atlantis and I tipped him fairly decent, enough that he tried to sell me a bag of blow. I politely declined. Do you know the six words that aptly describes cocaine from the Caribbean? Clumps together, but only cut once… MORE

Dispatches from the PCA: Divided Sky – I spent a lot of time watching the Dead People Channel and then hung out on the rail to sweat Change100 during her victorious run in the Ladies Event.

It’s no secret that I feel uncomfortable and unwelcomed at any Ladies Only events because I’m getting thousands of daggers shot at me from evil glances from the players, many of whom on principle hate men, not to mention a slew of female players who think I’m an asshole because my writing glorifies misogyny and the poor treatment of women by condoning prostitution and promoting stripping… MORE

Tao of Pokerati Podcast: Bahama Mama – Change100 Scores Ladies PCA Title – Listen to a super quick podcast that I recorded with Change100 after she beat Lauren Kling heads-up to win the PCA Ladies event.

Looming Municipal Debt Crisis the Key to Online Poker Legislation? – The majority of the states in the union were faced with severe budgetary problems at the start of 2011. I hypothesized that some states will look to legalize online poker in order to make a dent into their ginormous debt obligations.

The future is grim no matter how you look at it. That’s why there’s very little chatter in the media about the looming municipal debt crisis. It’s sort of like an asteroid ready to crash into Earth — it’s much easier to be the ostrich with its head buried in the ground, and let everyone go about their daily lives, rather than clue them in on the reality of the situation and that the end of the world could be right around the corner…MORE

Dan Shak’s Hedge Fund Nearly Blows Up the Gold Market – Speaking of finance… did you hear the one about Dan Shak nearly causing a financial tsunami?

Talk about a trader who has a set of titanium balls! That’s what I love about Dan Shak — he made a ballsy trade, it went south, he cut his losses, shrugged it off, and wants to get back in the game… MORE

Eight Voices and a Sea of Trouble – I broke down the eight different voices inside my head that often get me into gambling trouble.

Accessing the future for my own financial gain is an unattainable pipe dream. I meet people all the time in Vegas and in poker circles who claim that have foolproof systems for blackjack, roulette, the horses, stock options, etc. I’ve met lots of shit-talkers, but I’ve never crossed paths with a legitimate psychic who can accurately predict the future. Believe me, I scoured the world for a seer and found lots of charlatans, but came up empty…MORE

* * *
February 2010

Your Hands and Feet Are Mangos, Part 1 – For one week, I conducted an experiment — do nothing except drink rum and bet on sports.

In the last few years, what used to be a ravenous love affair with sports betting had become a coarse, listless, co-dependent relationship. Each bet used to be like riding a rollercoaster for two hours while jacked up on cocaine. But not anymore because watching each game was more like being prisoner on a cruise ship adrift in stormy seas that’s inducing you to puke your nads out….MORE

Your Hands and Feet Are Mangos, Part 2 – Here’s the second and final installment of my rum-inspired sports betting diaries, which started out as a social experiment but over a long weekend, I nearly lost my shirt on college hoops and had an accident that left our kitchen floor all… sticky.

“Good news and bad news,” I barked and then inspected my soaked jeans. “Bad news is that the kitchen floor is pink and sticky. Good news is that thanks to the supreme technological advances in developing plastics, the shatter-proof bottle prevented the rum from exploding.”…MORE

Syracuse Point-Shaving Rumors Debunked; Major College Basketball Betting Scandal Averted? – The Syracuse point-shaving rumors blew up overnight and what would have just been whispers among paranoid bettors, until it became a national scandal.

College athletes have become pawns for corporate entities. All of those annoying redundant commercials during March Madness made you nauseous, but it’s a clear indication at the significant money that is thrown around by major advertisers. Someone is making a buck on college athletes, everyone except the athletes themselves….MORE

Tao of Pokerati Podcast: Exotic Betting on the Super Bowl with Change100 – I recorded a quick podcast with my girlfriend, who was excited to bet on how long it was going to take Christina Aguilera to sing the National Anthem.

Live Sumo Is Rigged – If you didn’t know, the national sport of Japan has a shady past of rigging matches.

Taking a dive was a dishonor yourself, let alone a sincere dishonor to the entire Sumo community of wrestlers, trainers, promoters, fans, and even the guy who gets paid to wipe the arses of ginormous wrestlers…. MORE

The Bluff Power 20; Howard Lederer Has the Juice – Howard Lederer was named the most powerful person in poker.

Deadhead. Former bookie. Poker pro. Online poker visionary. Top dog. Top gun. King of the Hill. The Godfather… MORE

* * *
March 2011

Closing the Sahara – I took a walk down memory lane when I found out that the Sahara Casino in Las Vegas was closing its doors.

Las Vegas rose up out of the nothingness of the sand. A former Mormon missionary outpost had transformed into a gambling Mecca by gangsters, real estate developers, and bankers. Mecca is actually an inappropriate word to describe Las Vegas because there’s nothing religious about a pilgrimage to modern day Sodom and Gomorrah — the epicenter for the orgy of consumption… MORE

Orphaned Cards – I cannot explain why, but sometimes I find random cards in the middle of the street.

Rolling Out the Magic – If I was a TV exec and I could rig a final table, I’d pick nine specific personality types.

Television executives in poker are faced with two rigorous obstacles: 1) inaction at the tables, and 2) lack of stimulating dialogue. Both are detrimental to ratings. Lackadaisical ratings gave poker a blemish, which is why the suits in charge of programming banished poker to uncoveted late night slots, where stoners and insomniacs alike watched with an indifferent glaze. The few remaining programs were lost in the shuffle at the farthest ends of the satellite spectrum, embroiled in fierce competition against 1,000 other stations…. MORE

Sweating Sachin Tendulkar – New low as a degen gambler… I bet on cricket.

Despite being plagued with a short attention span, an 8-hour sporting event like cricket is a definite commitment, both physically and mentally, but due to medical breakthrough and advances in technology, 8-hour long cricket matches are conductive if you have proclivities to specific time-released pharmaceuticals…. MORE

* * *
April 2011

Down With Diseased Monkeys – I began the month betting on baseball and went on a horrid losing streak.

Sports betting is a huge life leak, but it’s also a life sweetener, or a bottle of hot sauce that spruces up mundane aspects of daily life, which is why it’s inherently dangerous. Finding the perfect balance between entertainment, merriment, stroking the ego is essential to healthy lifestyle. It’s when you cross over the proverbial demarcation line in the murky, cloudy grey area that you takes strides away from the light and rush toward the dark…. MORE

Black Friday, Vampire Squids, and 1,000 Masturbating Monkeys – I was in Lima, Peru when Black Friday hit and waited until after I finished climbing Machu Picchu before I wrote about my take on the worst day in the history of online poker.

What was the point of even sending the PPA to Washington? Instead, we should have sent a hundred masturbating chimpanzees to lobby for online poker — they would have accomplished the same fucking thing as the PPA, but at least we’d have some cool YouTube videos of monkeys jerking off on the steps of the Capitol…. MORE

* * *
May 2011

Aunt Emma – Another installment of the infamous Pai Gow Diaries.

A disheveled woman sat down next to me. She wore a green terry cloth jacket. For a second I thought she walked into the casino wearing her bath robe. But she smelled like she had slept in her car, woke up, blew a snot rocket, smoked the ends of three week-old cigarette butts, then walked over to the Pai Gow table…. MORE

PokerStars Offices Raided in Costa Rica – I just happened to know a few friends in Costa Rica who were around when the federales raided the San Jose offices of online poker rooms.

Black Friday Fallout: Offshore Sportsbooks Fleeing U.S. Soil – The sportsbetting industry also took a hit when they experienced residual fallout from Black Friday.

14 Fun Moments from the 2010 WSOP and 14 More Fun Moments at the 2010 WSOP – I was reminiscing about some fun times I had in the summer of 2010.

Fading the Rapture – I love betting against Jesus Freaks, especially those predicting specific dates for Armageddon.

Glow in the Dark Dragons – And what’s the WSOP without kicking it off by going on dealer tilt at a Pai Gow table?

The new line of Pai Gow bots will not arrive until late in 2011, which means I only have to deal with older version, which are prone to glitches and the occasional error. I guess that’s the only good thing to come out of the Japan quake. Sure, Japan is drowning in radiation soup while traces of radioactive material flutter its way toward North American airspace, but at least I won’t have to worry about an upgraded version of the Pai Gow bots…. MORE

* * *
June 2011 and August 2011

Thanks to Alexander, I got to be on the cover of The Circuit. here’s my interview…

I covered my 7th World Series of Poker on Tao of Poker. Here’s the index of coverage…

Let’s start with a couple of posts that were published before cards went in the air on Day 1. Among those were a few tidbits about the Ivey/Full Tilt lawsuit.

2011 WSOP: Before the Madness Begins – A prelude to the seven-week fiesta of poker.

WTF? Phil Ivey Suing Full Tilt Poker – In one of the most peculiar news stories since Black Friday, Phil Ivey announced he was leaving Full Tilt, suing Tiltware, and sitting out of the WSOP. All of these important announcements were made on his Facebook fan page. Whaaaaa?

Full Tilt’s Angry Response to Phil Ivey’s Lawsuit – The drama-filled start to the WSOP continued with an angry response from Full Tilt’s HQs. That’s the fastest they ever responded to anything in the wake of Black Friday.

Finding Pil Ivey and the Doctor Is In – The video crew at Bluff Magazine did an awesome job with their videos this summer, especially the bit Finding Ivey. I got tapped to tape an interview and you can see a teaser in this video.

The Circuit Cover and Interview – I was fortunate that Alexander asked me to be a part of his amazing photo project — The Circuit. Check out what went down behind the scenes during the photo shoot, including a candid interview about what life is really like on the road following around the tournament circuit.

Okay, and now here are the daily recaps from the 2011 WSOP…

Day 1: Welcome to the Jungle and Phil Ivey’s Titanium Balls – The 2011 WSOP kicked off with lots of questions swirling around about which pros would toe the company line and support Full Tilt Poker, and which red pros would ditch the patches and other FT branding. Phil Ivey fired the first shot with his lawsuit (announced via Facebook), but did he incite a mutiny with other red pros following his lead?

Day 2: Ivey’s Hippodrome and Bare-Chested Scandis – Gus Hansen wandering around with his shirt undone and the ongoing saga between Phil Ivey and Full Tilt were among the more dramatic topics on the second day of action.

Day 3: Moneymaker and Johnny Fucking Chan Win Grudge Matches and Men the Master Cheating Accusations – A Made-for-TV event occupied the Mothership with Chris Moneymaker and Johnny Fucking Chan winning their Main Event “grudge matches”. Meanwhile, in the real WSOP, Men the Master was the center of hurricane of shadiness when he hypocritically accused Hollywood Dave of shorting a pot. A shouting match ensued and both were on the verge of being disqualified.

Day 4: Jake Cody’s Emos, Hooligans, and Hat Tricks – Jack Cody, the latest British wunderkind made history when he became only the third member of the Triple Crown club. His victory did not come without a little rail rowdiness along the way.

Day 5: Apocalypse Now (Guest Post by Change100) – Yes, I had the day off and Change100 stepped up to pen an atmospheric piece on the tension in the air at the start of the 2011 WSOP — the first series in the wake of Black Friday and “money getting stuck on Full Tilt” fiasco.

Day 6: Ho-most for Maria Ho – The lovely Maria Ho went deep in the 5K NL event and came within one spot of winning her first bracelet.

Day 7: British Invasion, Vampire Squids, and the Devil – After the first week of nonstop poker, the first zombie begin to appear at the Rio. The zombies in turn attract the Devil along with treacherous vampire squids.

Day 8: The Marked Cards Conspiracy and the Last 5 Pros I Pissed Next To – It’s not the WSOP unless there’s a controversy involving the cards. There’s always something wrong with the decks. At the 2011 WSOP, a couple of the decks had a printing error that was only visible underneath the groovy purple grow-lights inside the Mothership.

Day 9: Cocking Blocking the Brits – The Brits launched an all-out assault on Las Vegas once again as they threatened to win another bracelet but the bloody 10-level rule was the only thing that prevented them from shipping another bracelet.

Day 10: Banning Booze, World Series of Mormons, and Sweating the Mavs – Despite the financial woes bringing America to the brink of ruin, the WSOP continued to thrive in the face of external adversity on both the political and financial fronts. The influx of players always brought with it a wave of fervor on the rail during final tables. The powers to be did not anticipate a Mardi Gras-like atmosphere inside the Mothership that is a fragile TV set and not a country-western bar. As a result, booze was officially banned at the final table.

Day 11: Social Media in Poker and Tex Dolly Blows Chunks – The poker world has changed for the better (or worst) because of the heavy influence of social media. Oh, and we found out through Twitter that Texas Dolly got ill during the middle of a tournament because of something he ate.

Day 12: Hellmuth Chokes and Prohibition Ends at the Mothership – Phil Hellmuth was on a mission to win his 12h bracelet, yet his attempt was thwarted. Meanwhile, much to the delight of the alkies in Vegas, booze was permitted to be consumed inside the Mothership. Yes, the short-lived prohibition was over.

Day 13: Tweaker City, USA – I experienced a rather sketchy encounter in the parking lot at the Gold Coast while hanging out with Benjo.

Day 14: Subterranean Homesick Alien and Brits Snag Third Bracelet – By the end of the second week of the WSOP, everyone is ridden with homesickness. Despite the malaise, another Brit won a bracelet, meanwhile, we decided to pay homage to old school Vegas with a trip downtown to where it all began — Binion’s.

Day 15: Triple ElkY and The Mark is the 22nd Best PLO Player in the World – The French surged during the beginning of the third week of the series. They won three bracelets in a short period of time and ElkY became only the fourth player to win the Triple Crown. Meanwhile, a close friend of the Tao of Poker went deep in a PLO event. Yeah, The Mark fell short of his first WSOP final table.

Day 16: Le Deux; French Snag 2 Bracelets in 24 Hours – The French surge continued with their second bracelet within a 24-hour period.

Day 17: Mike Sexton Heads-Up for Bracelet and Liquidating the Sahara – The Ambassador of Poker, Mike Sexton, went deep in the Stud 8 event, only to have it suspended due to the 10-level rule. Sexton was heads-up when his tournament was halted. Meanwhile, the big liquidation sale at the Sahara kicked off. Jerome and Camille shot a stunning video of that dreary sale day.

Day 18: No Country For Old Men; Barry Greenstein and Mike Sexton Denied Bracelets – Two poker greats came very close to winning bracelets, yet they fell short of the mark. In addition, the Senior’s Event kicked off with everyone standing to attention when the Stars and Stripes were played.

Day 19: The Donkenator and Eating Death – Dominating a donkaments are never an easy task. Woever wins that bracelet damn well deserves it. I delve a bit into Milton’s Paradise Lost in this recap. Enter at your own risk.

Day 20: The Egregious Case of the $9 Pizza and Stein Shines – It was a matter of time before I went off on an old-fashioned anti-food rant because of the horrendous $9 pizza that the Poker Kitchen tries to pass off as a culinary delight.

Day 21: A Day in the Life; Hellmuth Denied 12th Bracelet (Again) – This is my favorite piece of the summer, mainly because most of the hijinks happened outside the Amazon Ballroom that eventually morphed into my first Memento moment of the WSOP. Anyway, I went on a classic bender at the Gold Coast while Phil Hellmuth went deep once again and tried to win bracelet #12.

Day 22: Slowdown, Rocky Mountain High, and Chau Giang Confirmed Alien – The WSOP caught its breath at the start of the fourth week of play, while I determined that Chau Giang is really an alien.

Day 23: Timex Flashback, Jason Mercier Wins PLO Bracelet, and More Sordid Tales About Chasing the Dragon – I squeezed in a little personal Pai Gow degeneracy in between a recap about Jason Mercier’s victory in the PLO event along with a flashback about the origins of Timex.

Day 24: Dwan Song, Revelry, and Hooligans – Whenever Tom “durrrr” Dwan makes a final table, the entire poker world stops to watch. With a few million in prop bets on the line, Dwan’s final tables always have an added element of excitement. Alas, it was the Brits who sucked up all of the attention in the Amazon Ballroom as they railed their boy Middy and even drank Jager bombs out of their shoes.

Day 25: Rubber Soul, Electric Daisies, and Two-Tabling Pai Gow – The Electric Daisy Carnival swept through Vegas and a quarter million ravers invaded Sin City. Fabrice Soulier shipped a bracelet and became the third Frenchie to win one in 2011. Ah, and I also engaged in a live session of Pai Gow again and two-tabled it. I’m lucky I didn’t get 86′d.

Day 26: The Sickness – If you’ve spent a significant amount of time in Las Vegas, then you’ve seen those afflicted with The Sickness. I spoke about some of my experiences with the dreaded disease.

Day 27: Shaking Down Ravers; November Niner Snags Bracelet – I had a situation when I should’ve rolled a couple of schwasted ravers in the elevator, but I couldn’t cross over to the dark side and take advantage of the party people on the last day of the Electric Daisy Carnival.

Day 28: The Glass Onion; Lamb Leads POY – Donkey slayers, Brazilians, and Ben Lamb seizing the top spot in Player of the Year race.

Day 29: Carnival at the Mothership; Akkari Wins Bracelet – I went to cover a final table and a Brazilian soccer match broke out. The Mothership was transformed into a World Cup final when Brazil’s native son Andre Akkari advanced to the final table and was heads-up for a bracelet.

“Vamooooooooooooooo!”
Days 30-33: OFF

Day 34: Happy Birthday, America – On the Fourth of July, America celebrated with its annual Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island. Only in America can we boast about binge eating to celebrate our creation and independence from British tyranny.

Day 35: Catching Up - After a brief holiday away from the Vegas grind, it was time to catch up on everything I missed.

Day 36: Don’t Stop Believen‘ – Hellmuth and the 50K hit a hard stop. Grumbles ensued.

Day 37: Another Runner-Up Finish for Hellmuth; Whiffs on Three Flush Draws to Lose Bracelet#12 – Hellmuth had another disappointing evening after he whiffed on three big flush draws only to lose to Brian Rast, who won his second bracelet in 2011.

* * *

2011 Main Event Coverage

Prelude to the Killing Fields – The 2011 Main Event
With a Little Help From My Friends: The Michael Stevens Story by Change100
Day 38- Main Event Day 1A: Dolly’s Abyss
Day 39 – Main Event Day 1B: Luck Rack of Lamb
Prope Bets with Remkos and Micros WSOP Episode
Day 40 – Main Event Day 1C: One More Saturday Nite
Day 41 – Main Event Day 1D: Spiderman Big Records, Perma-Bans, and 6,865
Day 42 – Main Event Day 2A: Torturing the One-Eyed Clown, Hellmuth Awakes, and the Euro Surge
Day 43 – Main Event Day 2B: Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Day 44 – Main Event Day Off; Annie Duke Wins Media Tournament
Day 45 – Main Event Day 3: Poirier and Jace Are Million Men and Tilt-A-Scandi
Day 46 – Main Event Day 4: Soft Bubbles, Zombie Apocalypse, and the Reincarnation of JRB
Day 47 – Main Event Day 5: There Must Be Some Way Out of Here
The Skinny: Day 6
Day 48 – Main Event Day 6: House of the Rising Sun; NOLA’s Ryan Lenaghan Leads with 57 Remaining
The Skinny: Day 7
Day 49 – Main Event Day 7: Buy the Ticket, Survive the Ride
2011 November Nine Set

* * *

And here’s the Best of Tao of Pokerati… which are some of my favorite episodes of the Tao of Pokerati podcast that Michalski and I recorded from the 2011 WSOP featuring special guests Benjo, Snoopy, KevMath, Remko, and AlCantHang.

Episode 6: Ivey’s Lawyer (4:17) – Dan and Pauly chat about the Ivey drama that transformed the opening days of the WSOP into the “World Series of Phil Ivey.” Dan also shares some inside info on Ivey’s lawyer, renown criminal attorney David Chesnoff.

Episode 7: Sahara Liquidation with Remko and Benjo (6:12) – Benjo and Pauly discussed the Sahara Casino liquidation sale/auction with one of the members of the Dutch press, Remko. Both Remko and Benjo expressed a keen interest in acquiring a slot machine for super cheap, while Pauly has his eyes set on a Pai Gow table. Meanwhile, Benjo and Remko try to figure out how to ship a slot machine from Vegas to France and Holland.

Episode 12: The Tweaker Edition with Benjo (4:02) – Benjo and Pauly hang out at the Gold Coast and watched a tweaker get 86d by security. They later encounter the tweaker in the parking lot, and Benjo asks Pauly for a quick tutorial about the seedy Las Vegas meth scene.

Episode 14: Old School Cheats with Johnny Hughes (6:02) – Pauly sat down and chatted with a special guest — the legendary Johnny Hughes — who has been in poker circles for 50+ years. Pauly asks Johnny to share some stories about old school poker cheats and the “fear” of getting caught, which kept a lot of shady characters in line.

Episode 16: Brickless Cash Games Reprise (3:22) – Dan and Pauly recorded a quick follow-up to their previous episode while they hang out on the rail of the high-stakes cash games. They spot Eskimo Clark, “Cowboy”, and other broke dicks lingering around seeking handouts from the high rollers.

Episode 17: WSOP Fashion Report with KevMath (5:10) – Pauly chats with KevMath, who is a self-described “fashion expert.” The two compare and contrast the different styles of clothing worn by members of the media. KevMath also reveals why he won’t wear shorts.

Episode 19: KevMath Keno System with KevMath (6:01) – Pauly and KevMath hang out at the dive bar in a bowling alley at the Gold Coast. KevMath was in the middle of crushing a video Keno game, when Pauly asked him to share a couple of his big secrets to beating the game.

Episode 20: Adieu, Benjo (8:40) with Benjo – After almost a week of speculation and rumors, Benjo confirms that he’s leaving Las Vegas and heading home to France. His brief stint at the WSOP is officially over. One chapter ends, and a new one begins. Dr. Pauly, Dan and Benjo hang out in the dive bar inside the bowling alley at Gold Coast to listen to Benjo bid his farewells.

Episode 21: New Dynamic Duo with Snoopy (5:59) – Pauly holds auditions for a new sidekick with only one requirement — a outrageous accent. Snoopy, a writer from London, nails the audition. In this episode, they discuss modeling their new dynamic duo on the Batman & Robin television series, in addition to re-locating the Bat Cave to England and installing bat poles in the press box.

Episode 23: Brazil’s Mothership Invasion with AlCantHang (2:50) – Pauly and AlCantHang are on the rail inside the Mothership watching the heads-up battle between American Nachman “The Landlord” Berlin and Brazil’s native son Andre Akkari. Al and Pauly record a quick episode moments after Akkari won a decisive pot to cripple Berlin, and the Brazilians went berserk.

Episode 26: Main Event Begins! (6:34) – The Main Event is upon us and before the cards went in the air, Pauly is hanging out and listening to TD Jack Effel’s long-winded introduction and a quick rundown of the rules to all Main Event players. Jack then introduces Texas Dolly to utter the famous phrase, “Shuffle up and deal!”

Episode 27: Almost Famous with Snoopy (3:32) – While players return to their seats after the dinner break, Pauly and Snoopy notice Jason Alexander posing for pictures with fans. Snoopy explains why Seinfeld wasn’t a big hit in England and Pauly discovers someone dressed as Snow White in the crowd. Pauly also wonders if Snoopy would ever dress up in a costume for the Main Event.

Episode 29: Media Mania and Golden Toilets with Change100 and AlCantHang (3:08) – Pauly is still in the media event, so Change100 takes the opportunity to chat with AlCantHang. They both busted rather early, especially AlCantHang, who won a dubious honor of being the first player to bust out. His reward? A Golden Toiler trophy for last place.

Episode 33: Two Brits, One Irishman with Snoopy (5:09) – Snoopy gives Pauly the latest British report with three tables remaining in the Main Event. Snoopy clues us in on the two Brits (Sam Holden and JP Kelly) still alive along with Eoghan O’Dea from Ireland. Even though O’Dea is Irish, Snoopy and Brits are still keeping an eye on their “adopted” player.

Episode 36: KevMath WSOP Exit Interview with KevMath (8:50) – Kevin “KevMath” Mathers is officially done with his WSOP assignment, but he stopped by the Rio to watch the action on Day 8. He bumped into Pauly, who sat him down to discuss his favorite moments (and least favorite) during his first ever WSOP. Pauly also quizzes him on any strange “fan” encounters along the way.

Episode 37: Pseudo-Final Table (6:02) – Dan and Pauly are on the rail of the Mothership as action resumes for the pseudo-final table of ten, otherwise known as the November Nine bubble. Plenty of tension in the air because the final table will be set with just one more elimination.

Episode 39: Bruno’s New Toy (4:20) – Fun Warren brought a batch of dolls to the WSOP. The dolls, resembling famous poker pros, were custom made in London . He left a couple behind for Pauly and Dan. Pauly got Phil Hellmuth, while Dan seems a little disappointed with Daniel Negreanu. Dan suggests that he’ll probably give the Negreanu’s doll to his dog Bruno, so Bruno will now have a new play toy.

If you want to listen to more episodes from the 2011 WSOP, visit Tao of Pokerati podcast archives.

* * *
August, September, and October 2011

I took three months off and moved to San Francisco. I only posted 19 times in that stretch. Less is more, eh? Here’s a few gems from the hiatus months…

Hot Sauce
A Brief Letter to Full Tilt Poker: Fuck You, Pay Me
Full tilt Ponzi Poker
Rocketman and Welcome to the Ice Palace
The Degen Market
I Didn’t Know I Was That Far Gone
Superstitions, Jinxes, and River Rats

* * *
November 2011

I returned to semi-regular poker writing with the November Nine on the agenda and the conclusion of the 2011 WSOP Main Event Championship.

Betting guide to the 2011 November Nine
2011 November Nine – Sunday LIVE Blog
November Nine Down to Three; Germany’s Pius Heinz = Chip Leader
2011 WSOP November Nine – Tuesday Live Blog
Pius Heinz Wins 2011 WSOP Main Event

Michalski and I also recorded a few special Tao of Pokerati podcasts….

Tao of Pokerati Podcast – 2011 November Nine Edition
Episode 1: Evolution
Episode 2: Naming Names
Episode 3: Betting on Belize
Episode 4: Non-Silence of the Lambs
Episode 5: Giannetti Lives
Episode 6: Quad Lambs
Episode 7: Poker Hall of Fame Ceremony
Episode 8: First Hand Fireworks
Episode 9: Heads-Up Outfits
Episode 10: The Final Hand
Episode 11: Hooker Bar Farewell

* * *
December 2011

The year ended with the annual blogger gathering to Vegas, which inspired a three-part trip report and as the year ended and I began to reflect on 2011, I sounded off on a few topics.

Four Haikus – Lost Vegas
Ocho – WPBT, Part 1
Ocho – WPBT, Part 2
Ocho – WPBT, Part 3
Zombie Poker Apocalypse
Puppeteers of America

* * *
That’s it. The highlights from 2011. I hope you have a happy new year.

And if you like what you read, I encourage you to vote Tao of Poker for Best Poker Blog in Bluff’s Readers Choice Awards. Thanks for your support.

Tags: 2011 wsop | armageddon | deg | elky | gambling | gold | las vegas | On the Road | pius heinz | politics | rise poker | twitter

By Pauly
San Francisco, CA

Eight?

It’s hard to believe we’ve been emissaries for eight years. The WPBT’s annual Winter Gathering thrives even in the wake of online poker prohibition. Black Friday did not deter an eclectic group of a hundred or so people from descending upon Las Vegas for a weekend of lurid debauchery.

The WPBT began as a bad inside joke like a half-baked Saturday Night Live sketch that morphed into a global phenomena and yearly pilgrimage. In his next book, Malcolm Gladwell should write about the compelling story of how an innocuous weekend in Las Vegas became a sanctuary for an unusual group of people, which originated from a couple of potheads from the Bronx and two cynical brothers from Michigan. For as long as I can remember, I flew from NYC to Las Vegas twice a year with my brother to occupy the sportsbook for a couple of days (March Madness in the Spring and another sojourn at the end of the year to bet on football). Our trip in 2004 was enticing to our friends, BG and Bobby Bracelet (back before he was even given the “Bracelet” moniker by my brother), and they instantly joined in the fun. Once the peanut gallery found out, the trip ballooned to over 30 poker enthusiasts.

When I (loosely) organized the first Winter Classic with the Poker Prof, we thought it was going to be just a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet virtual friends, many of whom we had never met before. The first trip was a whim for many of the participants involved, yet the first gathering spawned a yearly pilgrimage. The group grew. Fast. Infectious. Huge. Then things got out of control as it became a flash mob of several hundred, inebriated degenerates clashing with cowboys on the Strip.

Eight years later, the weekend still exists which is a testament to the people involved. The original weekend in 2004 was never about online poker, gambling or a pissing match — rather it was a whimsical leap of faith in an attempt to nurture a sincere, yet genuine connection that we all made through the virtual world with online poker as our portal. Many of us originally booked their flights because we were seeking out a shared visceral experience in Sin City. The rest is history.

The inaugural WPBT gathering occurred right smack in the middle of the glorious poker boom during the halcyon days of “blogs” before Facebook and Twitter hijacked the social media cloud. From the outset, we were a rag-tag bunch of geeky writers and online poker addicts, which is why the Big Business vultures were circling around our gatherings. They dispatched savvy marketing agents and seized the weekend as an opportunity to bribe the poker blogging community. Any publicity is publicity. Simply put, the slithery tentacles of the poker industry octopus would hand out free shit with hopes that we’d write about it (and link it up) on our blogs. Fair enough.

Everyone loves two things: kittens and free shit. Alas, handing out furry adorable felines inside a poker room seems a little weird, even by Vegas standards, but the rest of the free stuff was welcomed. Over the last eight years, major online poker rooms competed with each other to get the attention of the WPBT. Some marketing ploys succeeded. Some definitely missed. Some of the online rooms outright exploited us. Maybe it wasn’t a fair deal for everyone involved, but in the end we all had a good time and acquired some free shit. Let’s not forget the last-longer pots were sweetened and the liquored flowed, while the industry unloaded tons of free trinkets (made in China, of course) like decks of playing cards, card cappers, t-shirts, and hats.

The annual weekend had become an orgy of consumption, yet this year took a slightly healthier bent when a small group of friends decided they wanted to run the Las Vegas half-marathon. If you haven’t heard, the race was plagued with logistical issues and it’s remarkable that everyone finished despite the clusterfuck. Regardless, the race was the perfect example of the quirkiness of our group — from the runners in the half-marathon to the bunch of us screaming like banshees near the finish line.

Ocho.

We’ve done this eight times. Nothing can top the first one, but the eighth one will always stand out.

* * *
I arrived Friday and was already stuck. I asked StB to put a bet down on a college basketball game on Thursday. It lost. Even though the game was not on TV (nor could I find it online), I was sweating the score via my CrackBerry while seeing the film J. Edgar with Change100 at a theatre around the corner from our apartment in San Francisco. The movie was so boring that I refreshed the score every few minutes. I didn’t even get to the airport and I was already down. That was an ominous sign that the gambling gods were going to fuck with me all weekend.

I departed San Francisco on Friday morning and ran into Katitude at the airport, which was odd because she’s Canadian and supposed to be flying from Toronto to Vegas, yet she had a random layover in SFO. Even more weird? She was on my same flight. SFO > LAS.

I checked into Aria and had a Jerry Seinfeld moment at the front desk because of the reservation snafu. I found paid StB slamming Widmer at the bar in front of the sportsbook and I paid my debt. We went inside and studied the lines for upcoming games. I scanned the different screens back and forth when my brother piped up, “What the fuck is Lingerie Football?”

StB checked his iPhone and discovered the Lingerie League was a legit league with 12 teams of women playing football in pads and… lingerie. It’s the kind of sports entertainment that strikes an angry nerve with feminists and even makes sport purists squirm. Even with a competitive angle, Lingerie Football is classic Americana Whiskey Tango Entertainment. Heck, it’s nearly soft core porn which is why it only appeared on PPV. Even if we bet on the game, we couldn’t watch it. What’s the point to betting on something you can’t watch? You have no sweat equity.

Fantasy versus the Crush. The Fantasy were the favorite and laying 8.5 points. I had no clue if that was good, or not. I couldn’t even tell you the cities the teams were from. In case you were wondering — Cleveland and Orlando. But which one was the Fantasy?

We bet on it anyway. Our first impulsive degen moment of the weekend. Five minutes before kickoff, we stood in front of the sportsbook and pooled our money — Derek, Chilly, Iggy, StB, Maudie and myself. StB walked up to the window. My only regret was that we didn’t bet more.

StB sprinted to the window and tried to joke around with a humorless woman in a Jim Kelly Buffalo Bill’s jersey. She took our bet on the Limgerie Football game, but didn’t care for our shtick. Too bad she wasn’t working when we cashed our winning ticket, because StB would’ve rubbed it in. Bad.

Our career as a Lingerie Football betting syndicate was short-lived. No other games were scheduled while we were in town, so we’d have to disband the group indefinitely. At least we turned a profit. In fact, Lingerie Football was the only bet I’d win on Thursday or Friday. I was mired in a slump after whiffing on a college hoops game (I tried to fade the Ivy League and took Loyola Marymount -9 against Columbia) and a college football game. In a Six Degrees of Separation moment, Chilly randomly mentioned that he knew the head coach of the team I had bet on.

“What the fuck, Chilly? Why didn’t you tell me? Send him a text and tell him he better score lots of points.”

Around Midnight, Chilly hustled me in a prop bet — how many of his toes were painted with nail polish? He gave me 7-1 odds and I instantly bombarded him with questions. After I extracted some answers, I barked out: three. I was wrong as he took off his shoes and socks to settle the bet, much to the delight of the eye in the sky. Chilly revealed his toes, which normally would horrify most sane people, yet the Friday night crowd was distracted with the edifice of Elvis — a bust near the entrance to Viva Elvis, his new Cirque du Soleil show. A steady flow of tourists stopped in front of the bust all night and snapped photos with the bronzed statue of Elvis’ head. A pack of soused cougars took turns molesting and making out with the head, but that all that sexual frisson overshadowed a semi-circle of shit-faced degens standing around Chilly as he wiggled his toes.

Whenever someone new showed up at the bar, Chilly attempted to run the same hustle. We didn’t get busted so I suspect whoever was watching the eye in the sky was a foot fetishist and/or had a thing for portly bald guys.

To be continued…

Tags: 2011 november nine | deg | ept | friends | las vegas | lists | march-madness | online-poker | pokerstars | sports | turkey cup | videos

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

I turn off my phone whenever I write to limit distractions. I had two phone calls this morning and both got sent to voicemail. One was from a broker, the other was from a bookie. One of my friends opined, “Is there a difference?”

“One is located in Costa Rica,” I answered. “The other is on 60 Wall Street. Both operating in a gray area. How gray? Charcoal.”

Funny how the U.S. government determined that one is illegal and the other is perfectly okay. Last time I checked, bookies never imploded the financial system or asked for bailouts when a huge underdog (e.g. NY Giants upsetting a 16-0 New England Patriots team) almost bankrupted them.

I essentially liquidated both “trading” accounts. The stock market is a Ponzi Scheme and I decided to trade commodity futures instead after getting out of equities last year. My broker was trying to churn what little I had left in my account. He wanted to tell me about their latest hot pick du jour. My bookie (actually a VIP manager) from Costa Rica has been calling me daily to inquire about re-funding my account after I pulled 90% of my bankroll offline in the wake of Black Friday.

It’s been almost a month since 4/15. I was in Lima, Peru at the time when Black Friday decimated the American online poker landscape. I made only one call that day — to Costa Rica. I initiated a withdraw. The VIP manager offered me assurances that my money was safe.

“Safe? Ha!” I told them. “That’s what Neteller told me back in 2007, what my stock broker said during the sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2007-08, and what the online poker rooms told me.”

“You’re money is safe here,” said a Costa Rican woman with a near perfect Southern California accent.

“Well, you can see the cyclical activity in my account. My high volume months are November thru January with a bump in March for March Madness. NBA playoffs are almost over and I’m moving to Vegas soon. If everything what you say is true about my money being safe, then I’ll be back in the fall for football season. You’re not going to lose any business if I withdraw. I never bet on baseball. Only degens bet on baseball.”

“But, you’re money is safe here.”

“Isn’t that what Bernie Madoff told his investors?”

“Which (book) does he own?” asked the VIP manager.

“He’s a Wall Street guy and stole billions from his clients.”

“Oh, one of those crooked gringos?”

I had Ben Affleck’s monologue from Boiler Room swirling in my head… “A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock, or he sells you on a reason he can’t. Either way… a sale is made. The only question is: Who is going to close? You or him?”

No offense to the tica on the phone servicing my account, but I wasn’t about to let her persuade me to keep all of my money in Costa Rica (in theory it was in Costa Rica, because I actually assumed it was sitting in an unspecified bank account somewhere in the Caribbean). After a few minutes of negotiating (I left 10% to dabble in the NBA playoffs), she agreed to let me withdraw 90%.

As one of my good friends from Costa Rica once said, “Getting money into a Costa Rican sportsbook is easy. Getting your money out is the tough part.”

He was talking about the variance of betting on sports and the degenerate nature of sports betting — and how it’s hard to walk away with a profit. At the same time, he worked for a few sportsbooks and knows the transfer of money from offshore to onshore is a complex process. Sure, the bookies will do everything possible to keep your money in their account, but the logistics behind getting money to their clients was difficult before Black Friday. You can imagine how much harder it will be now.

Hence, why I wanted to be one of the first players to withdraw funds before a mass exodus of frightened gamblers, or before the books fled the market.

I won’t go into details about how I got my money, but if I was writing the screenplay, I’d say that a guy in a jumpsuit (who could have been an extra from The Sopranos) met me at an undisclosed diner far away from The Strip in Las Vegas.

“Yous the doctah?” he said in a recognizable South Jersey accent.

“The doctor?” I said before a long pause, “Oh, yeah, I’m the doctor you’re looking for.”

That’s when he dropped an envelope on the table and flagged down the waitress for a cup of coffee. And yes, in case you were wondering, he made me buy lunch and told me to bet the Mavericks to sweep the Lakers.

* * *
I was listening to Betting Dork’s podcast on PreGame.com. His guest was Vegas Runner, one of my favorite wiseguys from Philly, who said that Black Friday was a wake up call for offshore sportsbooks. He also mentioned that the sportsbetting community got lucky because no one in either industry, poker or sportsbetting, saw Black Friday coming. Vegas Runner’s theory on why the DOJ went after online poker was because the government is broke and “they’re looking for the easiest way to get (money).” He also suggested if the feds wanted to, they could have ambushed BOTH industries and crippled the flow of gambling funds. As is, the sports betting community, all of the wiseguys and sharps got a huge warning that the federales might be gunning for them next.

You can listen to the podcast here. The segment I’m talking about appears at the 28 minute mark and lasts a few minutes.

I have a few theories on why the sportsbetting companies were not touched during Black Friday:

1) The sportsbooks have some sort of protection from authorities which allows them to operate (and thereby accept American players). Some land-based casinos might have greased the feds because their legal sportsbooks might need the assistance of offshore books to occasionally offset one-sided action. As a result, some of the land-based casinos made a wink-wink deal with the feds to stay away from their money movers.

2) The feds are using the intel that industry rat Daniel Tzvetkoff (former owner of a third party processing company) provided them to bring down online poker, which will help them build a case against sportsbooks. So, it’s a matter of time before they strike and the sportsbetting world will have to deal with their version of Black Friday.

3) Some sportbetting operations have had links to organized crime and a different federal investigation unit (e.g. the FBI) might have an ongoing investigation that they don’t want the DOJ to interfere with.

All of these are half-baked theories I came up with on the fly,however, since Black Friday, a couple of sportsbooks announced that they will no longer be accepting new players from America. The list includes Sportsbook.com and BetUS, which made their announcement last week. As of last night, you can add Sports Interaction to the list. In case you’re wondering, if you already have an account with those sites, consider yourself lucky to have gotten grandfathered in, because you can continue to bet, along with making withdrawals and deposits.

It seem as though many of the sportsbooks are spooked out and they’re taking a proactive approach to prevent the DOJ (through their proxy the OIJ) from indicting them and eventually raiding their Costa Rican offices.

I’m assuming that the future of sportsbooks in America will follow a similar path to what happened with the online poker market in 2006 after the UIGEA was introduced. A few operators will bail while a couple of others will remain and attempt to gobble up the American market share. Yes, Americans are not the only ones who bet on sports and like poker, there’s a thriving international player base, but American players were gravy. They generated such a massive amount of volume due to the popularity of NFL wagering (and to an extent, March Madness), that it’ll be impossible for a second-tiered or fledgling sportsbook to ignore the amount of “free money” available if they step in and accept sports bets from Americans.

If you’re a whale on American soil, then you’re action will be taken care of. Even though Pinnacle doesn’t accept Americans, every huge bettor I know has an account with Pinnacle, or at the least, an agent booking their wagers at Pinnacle for them.

At this point, the federales and corporate gaming entities win because they’ll get my action (and thereby have access to my money). As a result of Black Friday, I’m going to do all my gambling in land-based casinos. I have an account on Cake Poker but doubt I’ll play anytime soon. Live poker is in my future along with spending time at the sportsbook’s window on The Strip.

In the meantime, the next time the VIP manager from Costa Rica calls, I’ll be sure to send them to voice mail, along with my former stockbroker and any other cold caller from a boiler room on WallStreet.

Tags: black friday | business | crime | march-madness | news | Podcast | time | TOC

By Pauly
Cusco, Peru

Grubby sent out a semi-cryptic tweet this morning which reminded me of an event that happened on Easter Sunday six years ago in 2005. I was in Vegas for March Madness and had just locked up my first ever WSOP assignment with Poker Prof and Flipchip. To celebrate, Grubby and I headed out to a few strip clubs, not really aware of the fact that Easter Sunday would be one of the worst days of the year to hang out with strippers. We had to assume that a few were more religious than we had anticipated.

Anyway, this portion of Existentialist Conversations with Strippers got cut from the final draft of Lost Vegas, something that I was really bummed about, but I understood why my editor(s) felt that the subject matter was redundant.

So, let’s take a ride in the Tao of Poker time machine and head back to 2005…

Existentialist Conversations with Strippers, Part III

“I would believe only in a god who could dance.” – Nietzsche

We wandered past the credulous tourists and devoted gamblers onto the casino floor. I was staying in Vegas for another day but Senor had to get back to Rhode Island for work. Grubby agreed to drive Senor to the airport and we had about fifteen minutes to kill. Senor wanted to play Pai Gow Poker at some point during his trip. We never had the chance with all the time we spent at the Mandalay Bay’s sports book gambling on college basketball, or playing regular poker, and hanging out at strip clubs. We wasted a few minutes after we got slightly lost and stopped to ogle at all the hot college girls on spring break. We resumed our quest for a Pai Gow table and finally found one. The only problem… it was a $50 minimum table… when we were looking for a $5 or $10 table.

Caesar’s did not spread any low limit Pai Gow. There were six tables and half of them were empty. We walked over to one table where a pit boss was talking to the dealer. Grubby asked the suit if he could drop the minimum bet to $25 since we wanted to teach Senor how to play. We told him we were going to leave in five minutes to take him to the airport. The pit boss agreed. Our dealer Lee, a middle aged Korean woman, quickly explained the rules to Senor. We bought in for $100 each and got four green chips. I won the first few hands and pushed the rest. Senor won $75 in three hands and walked away after he tipped Lee $10. He won enough money for dinner and was satisfied with his first Pai Gow experience. Grubby and I played for a few more hands. I went up $100 then decided to walk away. Grubby was a winner too. On our way to the cashier’s window Senor mentioned, “You won yourself enough money to cover dinner and a few lap dances.”

Grubby drove Senor to the airport but we encountered traffic trying to get out of the labyrinth called Caesar’s parking garage. Grubby avoided the crowded Las Vegas Blvd. and drove down side streets en route to McCarran Airport. Grubby was officially a local and had been living in Vegas for three months. It felt cool to have a different perspective of a city that was so heavily populated with dipshit tourists and jaded locals working in the service industry. After we said good-bye to Senor, Grubby sped off in our quest to do a little strip club hopping. We had already hit up Sin a few days prior, which I loved — especially Jessina. Grubby suggested a handful of places. He and his sister, Grubette, had had a crazy night at Club Paradise a few nights earlier and he wanted to try a different place. We headed to the North part of the Strip and decided to check out Olympic Gardens.

As we drove up to the club, a Las Vegas Metro squad car sat out front with it’s doors wide open. An animated guy spoke very loudly to the two cops as they stood with their arms crossed.

“That doesn’t look promising,” I said.

We parked and walked inside. Grubby pointed out that the doors were wide open and how that was also another bad sign. We took a peek inside and it was empty. We didn’t even bother sitting down and walked right out. I could only imagine what might have gone down twenty minutes before we showed up. maybe we missed a good fight? Or an extremely drunk and frisky customer getting rowdy with the dancers?

We found our way to Treasures and the parking lot looked empty. That’s when I remembered that it was Easter Sunday night.

“It’s not like strippers are religious or anything,” Grubby explained on the walk to the entrance of the lavish strip club.

We paid the cover charge and made our way inside. It reminded me of a cross between an art museum and Anne Rice’s house in a weird fusion of Goth meets Italian Renaissance. A stage with funky lights and a stripper pole sat up front with winding stairs leading up to a balcony which wrapped around the room. If you removed all the smaller tables and booths along the walls, the strip club could have been a great venue for live music. We found a table and a few minutes passed before a waitress came over. I did not spot any available strippers. In the booth across from us, a bald accountant from Ohio happily sat with two strippers. They were laughing and sipping cocktails and the black girl erotically rubbed his chest and while the blonde girl applied more lipstick as we watched and a small wave of envy flashed over us.

“This is just like a regular bar. I’m being ignored,” Grubby said in a dejected tone.

“Easter Sunday,” I reassured him that it wasn’t us, just the fact that strippers were more religious than we anticipated.

Our waitress eventually arrived with our over-priced beers and I scanned the room for available strippers. One danced on the stage as bad Eastern European techno music blasted over the sound system in the near-empty room. A few dancers were scattered around and busy entertaining other guests. At Sin it seemed that strippers constantly walked around and offered their services for a dance. At Treasures, the most action we got was watching the bald Ohio guy get double teamed by the Silicone Twins.

That’s when Julie stumbled over.

Extremely wasted women are a turn off… unless they are completely passed out (Sorry, bad frat boy joke). She was so ripped to the tits drunk that she didn’t even bother using her stripper name and blurted out her real name. Julie then sprawled out on my lap and slurred, “Spank me!”

I obliged and she screamed again motioning towards Grubby, “Spank me!”

He spanked her and I followed up with another “whack.” I wondered if I could add that to my resume?

Special Skills: Knowledge of Java. I also speak three languages fluently, can make a bong out of any household item, and spank strippers.

How could I not get hired with those mad skills? Julie asked us if we wanted a dance. Grubby gave her a quick thumbs down and I reluctantly agreed. She sat up and waited until the next song. She slumped over me and I could smell the liquor on her breath. That’s when I uttered, “You know, Nietzsche died of syphilis.”

That comment went right over her head.

Out of the hundreds of strippers working that night, I was matched up with the Tara Reid of strippers. The new song began and she took off her top and began her tipsy lap dance. A couple of times she lost her balance and slipped off my lap. I caught her each time and was worried that if I dropped her, one of the bouncers would rush over and kick me in the junk. It was a horrible experience and I pissed away $20 on half-assed grope from a soused stripper. Normally, a half-naked woman grinding away to Rick James’ Give It To Me Baby is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aroused by Drunk Julie and couldn’t wait for our moment to end. Our four minutes together was like ordering a bowl of soup and having it served cold with a dozen cockroaches floating around in there and glazed with both a urine and semen sample.

We walked out of the strip club and passed the bouncers. I shrugged my shoulders and looked up into the desert sky. I smiled because I found myself on the bitter end of karmic payback for attending a strip club on Easter Sunday.

* * *
Thus end our Tao of Poker flashback. Oh, and Happy Easter to Grubby!

Tags: dealer | easter | gambling | greed | green | knowledge | las vegas | mandalay bay | parking | poker | pokerstars | rio | time | trip | Vegas

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Every once in a while, a lyric gets stuck in your head on constant repeat which becomes more distracting than entertaining, and eventually drives you utterly insane. When I was in college, the Captain Crunch theme song invaded my brain for an entire semester. I blamed the ether that one of my fraternity brothers stole. His nickname was “Luggage” and he swiped ether from the chem lab. My inner axis shifted ever so slightly after that brief experiment.

At the present moment, there’s a catchy hook playing on a constant loop inside my head…

Waiting for the time when I can finally say
That this has all been wonderful but now I’m on my way
But when I think it’s time to leave it all behind
I try to find a way but there’s nothing I can say to make it stop

The song is aptly titled Down with Disease and performed by one of my favorite bands. I dug the title so much I considered using it for the Las Vegas manuscript, and at one point the working title was Down with Disease: The Redneck Riviera, Existentialist Conversations with Strippers, and the World Series of Poker. Luckily I came to my senses and determined that Lost Vegas was more appropriate title.

My disease du jour is sports betting. I haven’t had an itch festering so badly since the Spring of 2007. My monthly income was much higher four years ago when I was grinding cash games online and before the fall out from the UIGEA completely squeezed the freelance writing market. I often used the Charles Barkley defense back in 2007 — “You don’t have a gambling problem if you can afford to lose.” I didn’t necessarily have a losing year, but I experienced a few massive swings that negatively altered my mood and extracted all the fun out of the process of sports betting. I miraculously emerged from the bender with a profit, but I got lucky because mostly everyone else in my situation crashed and burned before they ate the pavement when they hit rock bottom. I had enough semblance to slam on the breaks when I was ahead before it got too late and I ended up another senseless tragedy of Sophoclean proportions.

But that was four years ago in what seemed like a galaxy, far, far, away.

The fucking itch is back. The feeling can only be described as if a small monkey burrowed itself underneath my skin and it’s trying to kick it’s way out. The omnipresent itch is threatening a mutiny. All out anarchy. Itches create leaks. Leaks create messy problems. Messy problems induce life tilt. Life tilt leads to depression. Depression leads to self-destructive behavior. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Sports betting is a huge life leak, but it’s also a life sweetener, or a bottle of hot sauce that spruces up mundane aspects of daily life, which is why it’s inherently dangerous. Finding the perfect balance between entertainment, merriment, stroking the ego is essential to healthy lifestyle. It’s when you cross over the proverbial demarcation line in the murky, cloudy grey area that you takes strides away from the light and rush toward the dark.

Sports betting is a vacuous vice that sucks you into a vortex of degradation and spits you out into the musty basement of a church, sitting in a semi-circle, sipping a sludge-like substance masked as instant coffee, and re-hashing bad beat stories with other recovering addicts.

Betting on our national past time of baseball is dangerous because of the 162-game season starting in April and ending in October. Football is condensed into Sundays (with a bail-out game called Monday Night Football, one of the most evil inventions ever created) and bettors have a week to make a decision. But baseball is an everyday temptation, just like junk food and vapid reality television. Despite my many battles with multiple vices and frolicking on the perilous fringes of Sin City, I somehow avoided betting on baseball. I had drawn a line in the sand and it was baseball. I knew that whatever morally hazardous behavior I engaged in would always be kosher as long as I wasn’t betting on baseball. It had become my self-imposed Mendoza Line of sports betting.

That is, until a week ago.

I sent Mendoza his pink slip. I embraced the relaxation of the rules just like the thugs on Wall Street celebrated when the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999. Within a decade, Wall Street gamblers nearly imploded the entire financial system after betting on the unregulated derivatives market and repackaging toxic debt as low risk investments.

Sometimes inside information is too damaging because it entices you to take risks you normally would never otherwise. Greed is one of the most rehabilitating of the Seven Deadly Sins. Greed is Gordon Gekko’s mantra and the primary cause of the majority of self-destruction in the financial and gambling world. I’ve been privy to a barrage of tips over the last week. I set aside a tiny portion of my March Madness surplus and decided to fart around on a few games here or there. My plan was to wait until I got tipped off to what Billy was steaming… if the time/points were right, then I’d tail his pick. I entered the Killing Fields with every intention of being an “opportunity investor” by taking advantage of added value due to fluctuations in the betting lines.

It takes money to make money, and I was aware of the hazards of betting on baseball. My buddy Plump is a very savvy bettor and former college player, so he gave baseball shot a few years back. The results were not good. He got an ass whooping. A different friend of mine lived in Vegas in the early 1990s. He and his college buddies using a computer model to predict run totals in baseball. After a horrid losing streak a month into the season, he spiraled into hell and by Labor Day, he had become a full-blown heroin addict. Talk about a pair of pillars of death — being a junkie and a degen baseball bettor.

I studied the so-called prospectus and accepted every risk before I took the plunge. I opted for a conservative route on Opening Day and cherry picked the best of the best. One game. Just one game. Alas, the monkey’s itch flared up. Searing jolts of vibrating anxiety rocketed throughout my body and I succumbed to the impulsiveness of the inner action junkie. The revolution had begun and I also bet on CC Sabathia and the Yankees.

Viva la revolucion!

That was such a rube mistake, yet I pulled the trigger anyway, intoxicated on three decades of loyalty to my Bronx Bombers. I knew better than to bet on hometown teams, especially the Yanks, because every sharpie in Vegas will preach that east coast teams (Philly, NYC, Boston) in every pro sport are usually overvalued because of the stubborn-fanatic following by their lifelong fans. Millions of them. Betting like mushes. As a result, the punters on the east coast bet with their hearts instead of their brains, which is why I always went the opposite route, the road less traveled, and faded my hometown teams as an emotional hedge. Little did I know it was the correct strategy that the wiseguys exploited for decades.

I nearly jizzed myself after an auspicious start to the baseball season, going 2-0 with a well-informed bet and an impulse buy. The moment of glory was short-lived and the slide began. I lost one, then another, then another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another.

I whiffed on ten consecutive bets.

I couldn’t believe it. Wait, what? Ten? Are fucking shitting me? How can you lose ten baseball bets in a row. Overs shit the bed. Unders shit the bed. Aces got smoked. Chumps looked like Cy Young. I felt like one of the players on Butler chucking up brick after brick during the championship game.

The 10th consecutive loser nearly shattered my left testicles into seven thousand pieces. I had bet the Pirates and sweated the action courtesy of my girlfriend’s swanky iPad and my newly purchased subscription to mlb.tv. She had just left for a trip to NYC and fortunately left her new toy with me. I had unfettered access, but instead of dicking around on Angry Birds or playing backgammon, I fired up the MLB app and streamed the Pirates-Cardinals game. I freaked out the hipsters who lived upstairs from us every single time I shouted, “ARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!”

They must hate me. If it’s not the random expletives I scream at the television, it’s probably the Tito Puente records that I blast at 3am. During the game, I chatted with Mean Gene, a lifelong Pirates fan, who sat in his local corner pub and played video poker while the game flickered in the background. We were trying to determine which one of us was having a more pathetic existence. I felt as though I was the biggest loser in the world who wasn’t a TEPCO executive. After all, Mean Gene lived in Pittsburgh and was a life-long fan so his actions were perfectly acceptable behavior, whereas, I was a self-absorbed degen gambler who should have been writing fluffy pieces about the poker industry, but instead, got schwasted, ripped bingers, and didn’t blink twice about betting on the yellow marauders.

“Go Pirates! ARGGGGGGGHHHHH!”

The Pirates lost — sigh — and for a moment I understood the emotional turmoil that plagued Pirates fans for decades. I had walked a mile in Mean Gene’s moccasins (well maybe not a mile, but at least nine inning worth) and when the Pirates made the final out, a rumbling lingered in my stomach, like the nauseating moment before you puked up a batch of lime-green bile. Alas, I keep my cookies down and regain composure, but for a moment I understood why beleaguered Pittsburgh natives escaped their summer of despair by extolling the quarterbacking virtues of a known sexual predator.

0-10. Sweet Jesus. OH. FOR. TEN. Talk about one of the worst streaks in my entire life — and it happened in less than 100 hours. I smacked my head on the pavement. Rock bottom, eh?

I had to quit. Cue the bass line to Down with Disease.

But wait…I’m not a quitter. I’m stubborn and stuck it out for another day. I finally snapped the losing streak and improved to 3-10. I kept firing away, but once I reached 5-15, I reluctantly threw up the white flag. It took a lot of courage to surrender because it’s so friggin’ easy to keep firing away…and firing away…and firing away.

I try to find a way but there’s nothing I can say to make it stop.

On Thursday morning, my CrackBerry chirped a dozen times. Text messages. Vital intel from a friend in Vegas. He updated me on morning line moves, but I was still foggy and groggy at that hour to pay attention. I stayed up late, too late, eating spiked brownies and hitting the hash pipe during four hours worth of Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War (I got sucked into the 1863-64 campaigns and determined that Sherman was a far better tactician than Grant). I passed out shortly before dawn and could have used an extra half hour of rest, but Thursdays in the major leagues is also get-away-day which meant that a lot of teams scheduled early afternoon ballgames. The first one was slated for 12:35pm ET or 9:35am west coast time. I never told my bud that I was going to stop betting on baseball. I crawled out of bed and eventually stumbled into the coffeeshop to grab a quick breakfast before the Yankees-Twins game started at 10:05am PT. I got distracted by the TV in the coffeeshop that reported a 7.4 earthquake in Japan and I missed a valuable window of opportunity to tail a pick that the betting syndicates were pummeling — the UNDER in the Reds/Astros game. I mentioned the tip to Iggy and he said “Great American Ballpark is a hitter’s park” and that 8 runs was vulnerable. The syndicates moved the run line from 9 to 8. I didn’t like the number but it didn’t matter because by the time I tried bet, the first pitch had been thrown and I got shut out.

Murphy’s Law would have told ya that the final score was going to be 3-2. I missed a winner by thirty seconds. Fuck me. I needed to get my fix somehow after getting shut out, so I quickly forgot my ban on baseball betting. I decided to fade the public and bet against the 0-5 Red Sox. The -190 moneyline on the Sox was inflated because of 1) east coast bias, and 2) everyone was betting with the ‘Sox have yet to win a game, they have to win eventually’ mentality. I bet the Indians the other way for +164. I really put in that bet expecting to lose. That’s no way to live life — expecting to lose like that — but something extraordinary happened and the Indians won a nail bitter by the score of 1-0, and the Sox dropped to 0-6 for their worst start since 1946.

Yes, I won my last ever baseball bet.

And that’s my last bet…for now. The difficult part begins while I resist the urge, the temptation, the insatiable desire to be taunted by that fucking monkey who is hiding somewhere underneath my skin. If you keep scratching an area on your body long enough, you will eventually draw blood.

Can I get the monkey out before I bleed to death?

Tags: 2011 wsop | college | computer-model | entertainment | gambling | greed | light | lost vegas | march-madness | poker-industry | sports | spring | summer | time | Vegas

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Happy hump day. I hope you get laid today. If not, rub one out for me. In the meantime, here’s a couple of nuggets of poker news to keep you distracted this afternoon….

WSOP News: The WSOP announced they will be getting into the Rematch business. Yes, they’re hosting three re-matches featuring some of the most historical heads-up battles at the Main Event. The top billing goes to Chris Moneymaker/Sammy Farha. The other headliner is Johnny “Fucking” Chan/Phil Hellmuth. The third match will be determined by (Facebook) fans by voting (on Facebook): Seidel/Chan, Jonathan Duhamel/John Racener, Jamie Gold/Paul Wasicka, and Greg Raymer/David Williams. I’m bitter that they did not included the infamous T.J. Clouiter vs. Jesus matchup or Hugh Vincent vs. Russ “Pig in a Poke” Hamilton. (WSOP.com)

Business News: shares of bwin.party (a newly formed junta after Bwin merged with Party Gaming) tumbled in London trading after German politics proposed a special gambler tax in excess of 16%. H/T to Kid Dynamite for the article. Disclosure: I do not own any shares of Party Gaming. (Bloomberg)

Pop Culture: HDouble penned one of my favorite posts of all-time is The Poker Wisdom of The Dude. Well, Hank returned to his roots with another epic investigation into The Poker Wisdom of Omar and The Wire (The Cards Speak)

International Tax Laws: What would the infamous Trailer Park Boys say about having to pay taxes on poker winnings? “Fuck that, eh!” Luckily we have an expert, Gaming Counsel, to break down the intricacies of Canadian tax law. GC shared his assessment of this important topic if you’re a Canadian poker pro…. Taxation of gambling winnings in Canada. (Pokerati)

Poker Cinema: I wish I had Shamus a professor in college…I’d actually go to class more. If you dig cinema and have an affinity for the classic Robert Altman flick California Split, then take a peek at California Split and First Impressions. (Hard-Boiled Poker)

Arms Race: The pissing content continues! And thus begins the over-saturation of High Roller events. Los hombres sounded off on the new trend in a post titled The WPT Has a Bad Idea? (Wicked Chops Poker)

Gambling Lit: The literati chimed in about March Madness… In Praise of Distraction. (The New Yorker)

That’ it for. You know the drill. NGTFOOMO!

Tags: business | business-news | cards | facebook | gaming | gaming-counsel | infamous | Link Dump | london | lost vegas | poker | Poker News | poker-wisdom | Vegas | wpt

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

“Please, dude, feed me Billy’s picks when you get them,” begged Plump, a poker buddy who used to play college baseball. “It’s never entirely wise to be on the other side of Billy. He’s a sick fucking freak. I’d give him a friendly neck massage of he was stressed.”

If you bet on sports, then you know about Billy Walters — the J.P. Morgan meets Phil Ivey of the sports betting world. Bookies won’t take Billy’s action because they are afraid of him. As a result, Billy has to employ hundreds of runners from the farthest corners of the planet to place bets for him in Vegas, with regional bookies, and online at offshore sportsbooks.

During the March Madness run, I tailed many of Billy’s picks. It’s usually easy to find out what he bet after his runners put in the bets, but by then your value has decreased because the sportsbooks adjusted the lines and you’re not getting the best possible number. But this Spring, I obtained Billy’s picks a few minutes before the rest of the street heard about them. I won’t say from whom, but I’m definitely benefiting from the relaxed rules regarding using phones in Vegas sports books, so word travels fast. I’m convinced that Billy was part of the reason why the NGC outlawed mobile phones in the sportsbooks in the late 90s and early 00s. But, the suits eventually realized that Billy and other betting syndicates were able to obtain real time line changes due to subscription services over the intertubes. The cell phone prohibition was a futile effort and has since been rescinded.

The ultimate goal is to find out Billy’s bet before he bets it. In other words, find out what Billy is going to do before he moves the line. That critical piece of inside information is nearly impossible to unearth unless you work for Billy, or a competing syndicate, or an actual sportsbook. But the cliche fits — time is of the utmost essence. The sooner I learn about Billy’s bet, the better chance I’ll have to get a decent number by shopping around as quickly as possible. In the end, that’s how you end up making money over the long term as a sports bettor, which you can even apply it to Wall Street as a stock speculator. You can also come out ahead if you predict which side Billy will eventually bet and bet that number before he moves the line, and if he moves the line substantially, then you’re fucking golden.

I explained to my buddy Plump that in the time frame I get Billy’s picks and shoot him a text, the lines have already moved. Billy’s picks are only helpful for him if he’s dealing with his local corner bar bookie in the Midwest, and that’s only if the bookie was not on top of up-to-the second line moves. If Plump exploited any lag time in updating the lines, then and only then could he make money on Billy’s picks.

On Saturday an hour before tip off, my source in Vegas revealed that Billy was steaming the UNDER in the UCONN/Kentucky game. I was leaning toward the under, but didn’t pull the trigger. I quickly changed my stance from a lean to a GO when I heard Billy buried UNDER. I jumped all over it and all I could see in my head was an image of a waterfall but instead of water, hundred dollars bills were cascading down the side of the cliff. The line only moved a point so I was still getting some value. I clued in Plump and he couldn’t have contacted his bookie fast enough. The Midwest line only moved a half point because his bookie is a little slow. Plus it was always good to know if I might be able to manipulate a lagging bookie in the future.

And the outcome? Easy money.

It was more like printing money. I finally knew what Federal Reserve felt like, creating money out of thin air! That’s what makes sportsbetting so fucking alluring and attractive, the fact that any mook at any given time can get free money.

That is to say if you bet the right side, and in some dire cases, the right side of the fix.

Over the weekend, Plump and I tailed the biggest swinging dick in Vegas and made a nifty profit. In just one afternoon, I made more money than I could as a poker writer in five weeks of freelance work, ergo, now you know why I haven’t been writing much about poker.

I made my picks for Monday’s championship game once the final two teams were set on Saturday night hoping to lock in the best prices because I anticipated the lines to move (against me) I went with my gut and went with the favorite UCONN -3.5 and the OVER 128 total. I kept a percentage of my roll in reserve to pounce on any major moves in my favor. I said a Hail Mary in Latin that Billy or the wiseguys weren’t going to bury the other side of my bets.

About two hours before Monday evening’s tip off, the line in Vegas moved from 129 to 131. I poked around a couple of online books and noticed the line had moved to 131.5. By the time I talked to Plump, the line had moved again to 132. At that point, everyone in the know knew that Billy and company were steaming the OVER. I couldn’t have been happier. Call it genius or blind luck, but I bet on the same side as Billy before he moved the line. The line moved a total of 4 points since I locked it in. Over the long run, bettors will be profitable if they lock in the best possible numbers.

By the way, I don’t know how Plump finagled a 128.5 total with his Midwest bookie! Now, we definitely know who to call in the future when I have an old tip on a Billy bet. That’s why it’s always important to have different avenues to bet. I’m fortunate to have access to Vegas casinos, offshore books, and the traditional bookie. If you’re smart, you have a couple of bookies, multiple accounts, and people you can trust in Vegas to make a bet for you without fucking it up. In addition, it’s imperative that you shop lines to boost your edge. If you want to purchase a new TV or a car, you’re going to do some research and check out a different stores to compare prices before you make your purchase. Same goes for betting on sports.

Of course, none of us (pundits, bookies, Billy, Charles Barkley, the Pope) expected a black swan event to kick us in the junk on Monday evening. I figured this year’s March Madness had already been chock full of black swans (how else could you explain VCU and Butler in the Final Four?), so the championship game should play out as expected — UCONN winning by 5 or 6 with at least one team scoring 70 points. Alas, the unexpected became the norm; black is now white, and white is now black. Something peculiar happened on Monday, perhaps it has to do with Planet X, or solar flares, or Fukushima radiation, but no one could hit a fucking shot in the first half. The CBS suits were cringing at their fugly product, wit their finger on speed dial ready to call up Charlie Sheen and beg him to run onto the court and drop his pants. Butler looked worst than atrocious; they were simply pathetic. I couldn’t help but think that VCU would have given UCONN a better run for the money.

Another friend of mine from New Zealand was watching the game at work (it was Tuesday at noon the next day for him) and he shot me a text message, “We should suit up.” The Kiwi had a valid point. Could we do worse? I’m out of shape and haven’t played organized ball since my senior year in college (I started at shooting guard for my fraternity in a highly competitive intramural league, which incidentally drew more fans than the varsity team at my D-III university) and couldn’t run down the court more than three times without having chest pains, but I’m confident I could have hit at least one shot out of ten. Both teams were horrendous in the first half and I hadn’t seen any individual shoot that poorly, let alone an entire team (er make that two teams), since John Starks’ anemic performance in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA finals.

A black swan shit all over on Billy’s grand parade and we both lost the OVER bet. Oh well. If given the chance, I’d make the same bet again, especially if I was gifted four extra points. I wondered how much Billy lost on the OVER? $500,000? $1,000,000? More? Or did he make some/all of it back on a second half bet?

On a positive note, once I knew my OVER bet had shit the bed, I saved face on a second half bet. The total was set at 68. Both teams had struggled to score 41 in the first half combined. Even my girlfriend, who barely paid attention to the game and multi-tabled two Rush MTTs while playing Angry Birds on her iPad, declared the UNDER was going to be a lock. She was right. I shoved all-in with the rest of my online bankroll and hammered the UNDER 68.

And it wasn’t even a close sweat. Both teams scored 53 total points in the second half. I recouped my losses from the OVER bet and then some. UCONN pulled away and cruised to an 8-point victory to win their third title since 1999. I cashed a UCONN money line bet at -175 and they also covered the spread. Printing money.

“We’re going to Sizzler,” I joked to my girlfriend.

In reality, we ate dinner at a deli. Pastrami tastes so much better after you bailed yourself out of a hole. I had a profitable Final Four and bounced back after a lackluster NFL playoff season. The good news is that I now have a sturdy bankroll just in time for the NBA playoffs. By the end of June, I’ll either be completely busto, or will have generated enough money to fund the second leg of Phish’s summer tour.

I will never have the balls, discipline, or passion to be a full-time professional gambler, but if I pick my spots carefully, I can supplement my paltry salary by betting on a few games here or there in order to pay for a month-long bender at the end of the summer.

Easy money, right? All I have to do is continue to cherry pick the best bets on the board and hopefully I’ll get lucky and get an opportunity to tail a few of Billy’s NBA picks.

Tags: 2011 wsop | billy | Degens | march-madness | money | pokerstars | sports betting | spring | TOC | Vegas | words

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

It’s been a wild weekend and it’s not even over.

Something happened when March ceased operations and we trudged into April. Maybe all of this freakiness is related to the cosmos? But this has, unexpectedly, become one of the more memorable sports-themed weekends in a long time — March Madness Final Four, baseball’s Opening Day, NHL and NBA playoffs on the horizon, and the cricket World Cup. I surrendered to the flow of my inner action junkie and uncharacteristically spread my bankroll over a slew of different sports. I deviated away from my bread and butter — basketball — and immersed myself into uncharted waters. Baseball, hockey, and cricket. Sometimes, you gotta take a shot, right? But don’t worry, I didn’t bet on NASCAR or women’s basketball — both last steps before I hit the proverbial rock bottom (which itself is the final step before I’m ambushed by a camera crew from Intervention, or I owe bookies so much money that I’m hiding out in a rehab center in Santa Barbara), but then again, I pulled the trigger on a few bets that I had 100% full knowledge that they were totally redonkulous, so I’m actually surprised during a weekend when I showed little to no restraint, that I didn’t piggyback on Buffalo66′s recent NASCAR streak and made bets on race car driving for shits and giggles.

Yeah, it was a shits and giggles weekend when it came to everything not related to March Madness. The bender was a pub crawl of puke-inducing bets ranging from cricket (a bankroll booster), on the NBA (slightly above break even), NHL (um…. no), and MLB (a leak, a potential big leak considering the season is 162 games long, that might be an itch I’ll never be able to scratch). Along the way I also booked a bet (against my girlfriend) for American Idol.

The weekend also included picking up a piece of golden intel about which teams the wiseguys in Vegas had bet. I tailed a couple. Those guys are the tip of the sword, the pro’s pro, the Warren Buffets and J. Peirpont Morgans of the sports betting universe. It would be utterly retarded if I didn’t jump on their bandwagon. However, I can’t sit around and be a parasite by poaching their picks. Sure, it’s important to cherry pick the best on the board because over the long haul that will be profitable, but there’s no intrinsic fun in betting someone else’s hunch. The vibrations rattles a little stronger when you place a bet on a team when you think you have pertinent inside information no one else in the gambling world knows about. That’s feeding the ego…moreso…it’s injecting your ego with steroids. Sports betting is an extremely egocentric gambling activity and when you juice it up with inside info, it’s a recipe for disaster.

After all, no one likes to bet on the wrong side of the fix.

It’s Sunday afternoon as I regurgitate my inner dialogue. Sunny California. Breezy day. Sipping rum and watching the Lakers. The perfect way to cap off a long weekend of betting. I’m sitting in my living room with my girlfriend’s iPad streaming the Seattle/Oakland game, while she’s keeping an eye on the latest SuperStars Showdown with that crazy Scandi Isildur1. I’m digging the ability to stream baseball games on the iPad and sweated two bets (both losers) via mlb.tv, with the Lakers/Nuggets game on the TV in the background. The Lakers are fighting for a #1 seed and I bet the Nugs with points and also hedge with the Lakers -310 with the money line. I’m sweating a bet that’s coming down to the final seconds. That’s good right? The rush is immense. Again.

Ah, and I’m wicked pissed that I missed getting in a wager on the Cleveland game by five friggin’ minutes. I got word at the last minute that the wiseguys were steaming Cleveland. Oh well, I’ll shut about about those bets and focus on the Final Four.

Looks like I went 3-1 with Saturday’s picks. I liked both dogs — VCU and UCONN — and the UNDERs. Nervous players in a dome equals low scoring affairs. Basketball should not be played in a dome, an arena that should be only reserved for football or killing Christians with hungry lions.

I shit the bed with VCU (with the points and moneyline), but the games were low scoring and UCONN won (with the points and moneyline). Overall, it was a positive day, but not the monster day I was hoping after I nailed a bet with India on the World Cup. Ah, I shouldn’t complain about being up overall. I guess it was all those donk bets on hockey and baseball that rained down flaming turds onto my parade.

That comes down to the finals between Butler/UCONN. I tried to figure out the spread in my head before the bookies released the numbers. I closed my eyes and tred to visualize the score. I channeled my third eye and let the scoreboard numbers swirling back and forth until it cleared up for a moment and I recognized two scores: 71-66 and 69-64. My gut was telling me that the final score would be somewhere in that range. So I estimated that all of the inner voices inside my head consulted with one another and agreed that the spread should be: UCONN -5.5 with an O/U of 135.

The actually lines in Vegas were set at -4 and -128. You can guess what I picked…

- UCONN -3.5. Butler killed the hot team and beat VCU by 8, the largest margin of any victory from them in the tournament. Butler wins close games, something they’ve proven/done the last two years. The lost to Duke by a bucket last year, but they have to go up against the other hottest team — UCONN. I envisioned a Huskies victory over the Bulldogs of 6 or more points. It’s hard to ignore my gut. The inner voices have spoken. I haven’t listened to any of the pundits because I didn’t want to be influenced either way. I watched all the games and know what I saw. Same goes to you…stick with your gut. I just hope it’s the same side as me, ha.

- OVER 128. UConn score 56 points on Saturday, tied for the lowest of the year for their squad. UCONN scored fewer than 60 points only three other times this season, and they lost those three with their only victory coming over Kentucky. UCONN averaged 79 in the Big East tournament, but those numbers are inflated because they whooped defensively-challenged and overrated teams. In the NCAA tournament, UCONN posted an average of 69 in March Madness, while Butler averaged 67. I put down a small bet on the OVER and if I get word that the wiseguys are pounding the OVER too, then I’ll jump on that friggin’ bandwagon and shove all-in with my bankroll. I’ll follow those fuckers into hell. I’m hoping they steam the OVER because it will give me an excuse to go for broke. Double up and have a fat bankroll for the NBA playoffs, or go busto and stop gambling until football season. My fate is in the hands of the gambling gods.

Disclaimer: These picks are for entertainment purposes only. After all, gambling is illegal at Bushwood Country Club and in most parts of rural America. The Tao of Poker is not a registered investment adviser or broker/dealer. Readers are advised that the material contained herein should be used solely for informational purposes. Tao of Poker does not purport to tell or suggest which games that readers should wager for themselves. True gamblers should always conduct their own research and due diligence and obtain professional advice before making any investment decision. Tao of Poker will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by a reader’s reliance on information obtained on Tao of Poker. Readers are solely responsible for their own investment decisions.

I shall be tweeting during the game on Monday evening. Follow @taopauly for updates. This concludes the last bit of March Madness musings.

Tags: 2011 wsop | butler | cricket | entertainment | game | march-madness | parade | seattle | sports betting | Vegas | wiseguys