Galerie Nikki Diana Marquardt

Tomorrow, I am heading to Sin City, a short four-hour drive across the desert. I’m going to meet a friend and her boyfriend, who make the pilgrimmage from New York every year for the first weekend of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m an avowed slot demo player, having already logged 125 hours of live and online play this year, so I’ll be sure to get over to the Bellagio poker room at some point while I’m there (and maybe to the 6-12 game at the Mirage, if I do well at Bellagio). The rest of the time I’ll just be hopping from sports book to sports book, watching the games.

Having made this trip three times in the last nine months, I can honestly say that “The Fertile Valleys” is starting to lose whatever appeal it once had for me, especially since there are at least five perfectly serviceable card rooms in the Los Angeles area. Vegas trips are becoming more and more about meeting up with friends — mainly New Yorkers — I might not otherwise get to see.

Someone’s got to pay for my gas, though, and it’s certainly not going to be me.

Cats and Visitors Smell

Where do the boundaries of friendship, hospitality and common courtesy intersect?

Tonight I’m hosting what was originally supposed to be two friends from New York, which turned into 3 friends from New York a week ago, which I learned in a phone call four hours ago has increased to 4 friends from New York. Now, I live in a 700sf one-bedroom apartment. Said apartment is furnished with a queen-sized bed, a couch, a little loveseat-ish type thing, and a large wicker chair with foot rest. It is all extremely crappy furniture, but none of it is mine, so I don’t really care. The point is, I am not exactly built for hosting four people.

I suppose one person can sleep on the couch, one person can sleep in the bed with me, one person can sleep on the air mattress I borrowed from my girlfriend’s sister, and one person… gets the wicker chair? Or the floor. Whichever. My poor, flatulent cat is going to have to sleep in the bathroom, because she can’t sleep with me like she normally does and she can’t sleep in the living room, as it will be chock full of scary New Yorkers. (She spooks easily.)

All of this is bearable, I guess. “Couldn’t they have chipped in $30 each and rented a hotel room?” my girlfriend asked me tonight. The answer is yes, of course they could have. But originally, when there were only going to be two people staying here, a hotel room would have been twice as much and it would have been no problem for them to sleep here. Plus, they are my friends, and I am trying to be hospitable.

What’s not bearable is that one of them called me about twenty minutes ago to say that they were just leaving the Bay Area and don’t expect to arrive to my apartment until about 3:30 in the morning. This means that I am either going to have to wait up until 3:30 for them to get here (not likely) or have them wake up me and my flatulent cat (man, she really does stink) at 3:30 in the morning to let them in.

Someone’s going to die if they insist on going to Burbank at 7:30 tomorrow morning to get Jay Leno tickets.…

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The Bicycle Casino Stars and Stripes Pragmatic Play Tournament takes place annually at the popular Bicycle Casino card club in Southern California.  The Stars and Stripes poker tournaments begin about the third week of June and go through the first week of July.

The poker tournaments generally have guaranteed prize pools of between $10,000 and $50,000.  Buy-ins are $100 (plus a $20 entry fee).  A variety of poker games are offered including Texas Hold’em, 7 Card Stud poker, and Omaha poker tournaments.

The Stars and Stripes Poker Tournament is one of over twenty annual poker tournaments hosted by the Bicycle Casino.  The Bicycle Casino is a member of the World Poker Tour and the Stars and Stripes tournament is followed by one of the Bicycle Casino’s major poker tournaments of the year, the Legends of Poker.

Erick Lindgren is the World Poker Tour Player of the Year

The World Poker Tour has named Erick Lindgren the WPT Player of the Year.  The 27 year old Lindgren, a Las Vegas resident, won two WPT poker tournaments – the Party Poker Million and the Ultimate Poker Classic – and made it to the final table at the Grand Prix de Paris for total prize winnings of $1,560,568.

Lindgren made it to the Party Poker Million championship tournament in March after winning a $162 satellite tournament on Party Poker.  He won the tournament championship and took home a million dollars.  Lindgren will be easy to spot at the World Poker Tour tournaments this season.  He will be the one wearing the WPT Player of the Year jacket, a perk of the position.Matt Matros Finishes Third in World Poker Tour after Entering Party Poker Satellite Tournament

Matt Matros, a 26 year old graduate student in fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, finished third in the World Poker Tour Championship, winning $706,903, after entering a $100 poker satellite on Party Poker.  He played consistent smart poker against a table of top players, only outlasted by poker pros Martin Deknijff of Sweden and Hassan Habib of California… Matt Matros World Poker Tour

A New Vegas Horseshoe Casino?

Harrah’s Entertainment Inc.’s top executive today said prospects for opening a fourth hotel-casino in Las Vegas using the “Horseshoe” brand look good and that the company is “taking a look at growth prospects for Las Vegas.”

World Poker Tour

The second season of the World Poker Tour culminates Friday, April 23 at Bellagio in Las Vegas when one winner will walk away with $2,728,356, the largest-ever prize paid to the first place finisher in a televised poker tournament or North American sporting event.  The World Poker Tour Championship attracted 343 players to Bellagio for a record-smashing $8.6 million prize pool, the highest ever in tournament poker, with the player finishing 50th earning $33,266.  The buy-in for the tournament was $25,300, the largest in the sport.  Last year’s WPT Championship at Bellagio drew 111 players with victor Alan Goehring taking home a $1,011,886 slice of the more than $2.6 million purse.

Organizer of Televised Poker Tournaments Files for IPO

WPT Enterprises Inc., the organizer of televised poker tournaments, officially filed for an IPO on Thursday.  WPT is a subsidiary of Lakes Entertainment Inc. in Minnetonka which currently owns about 80 percent of WPT.  In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, WPT said it hopes to raise about $32.2 million by offering 4 million shares at $5 to $7.  The money will be used to expand WPT’s activities.…

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As I have said many times in the past, if you are going to reseat the players then random is wrong. What is the purpose? So if you are going to reseat them, why not balance the tables?

As BJ has pointed out below, going into today’s Final Three tables the chip counts per table look like this.

Chip Count Per Table

Table 1 … 34,010,000

Table 2 … 24,135,000

Table 3 … 30,101,000

Now you are never going to get a perfect balance when the chipleader has just a monster stack, as Jamie Gold does today. But the Sommerfeld Reseating System helps a lot. Jamie would be at the first table, then the next chip stack is at two, and the third at table three. The order is reverse and chip stack four is at table three, five at two and six at one. Reverse again and keep going. Do that with these final tables and even with the monster chip lead you get more reasonably balanced tables.

Chip Count Per Table

Table 1 … 32,880,000

Table 2 … 27,846,000

Table 3 … 27,520,000

Yes, you could in theory almost completely balance the tables but that would mean putting most or all of the short stacks with the huge chip leader and that would spell disaster for the short stacks and the rest of the field as the Sihoki Slot pounds them into submission. This actually is close to the situation we have today; Jamie Gold is on table #3 in today’s draw, so he has 13M of the 30.1 M at his table and will be blasting away at those short stacks.

Analysis of Chip Counts and Table Draws – Final 3 Tables

Here are the breakdowns, by seating position, of the final 27 players. Poker Shrink gave you the view in chip count order, but this gives us a different perspective.

There were three players with different “official” chip counts released by Harrah’s and CardPlayer.com. Looking at the errors, the most likely scenario is that one person read the chip counts to somebody typing them in, and the typist misheard or transposed a few numbers.

I listed Harrah’s numbers first, with any CP discrepancies noted after the player’s name. Later, in my analysis, you’ll see why I believe the Harrah’s numbers are more likely to be correct.

TABLE 1

1 … 3,275,000 … Richard Lee … (CP shows 5,275,000)

2 … 2,650,000 … Allen Cunningham

3 … 3,670,000 … Kevin Aaronson

4 … 2,130,000 … Kevin O’Donnell

5 … 7,735,000 … Erik Friberg

6 … 1,785,000 … Eric Lynch

7 … 3,275,000 … John Magill

8 … 3,765,000 … William Thorsson

9 … 5,725,000 … Michael Binger … (CP shows 5,275,000)

TABLE 2

1 … 1,685,000 … Rob Roseman

2 … 1,100,000 … Luke Chung

3 … 6,905,000 … David Einhorn

4 … 5,430,000 … Dan Nassif

5 … 2,265,000 … Leif Force

6 … 1,210,000 … Dustin Holmes

7 … 1,190,000 … Sirous Jamshidi

8 … 3,715,000 … Jeffrey Lisandro … (CP shows 3,750,000)

9 …… 635,000 … Mark Garner

TABLE 3

1 … 13,000,000 … Jamie Gold

2 ….. 3,595,000 … Doug Kim

3 ….. 1,700,000 … Lee Kort

4 ….. 6,400,000 … Rhett Butler

5 ….. 1,850,000 … Prahlad Friedman

6 ….. 1,611,000 … Fred Goldberg

7 …….. 675,000 … Siddharth Jain

8 …….. 700,000 … Paul Wasicka

9 …….. 570,000 … Richard Wyrick

For analysis of the chip counts and table draws, click “Continue reading…”…

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I HAVEN’T EVEN GOTTEN TO THE PARTY YET SO JUST BEAR WITH ME

Let’s just skip to the final table shall we. It’s the main event, the part we all came to see. Actually very few of us came here to play poker, but this is the best of it and it certainly deserves a telling.

10 players remained and 5 were sbobet Palmetto proud (This is a South Carolina expression meaning they’re homeboys). In fact, 40% of the final table was comprised of members of the Smith family. I’ve tried all afternoon to think of any event where a single family has shown so much dominance and the closest I can come up with is the Corleones.

The entire table looked like this :

Double As

Dr. Pauly

Wes Nile Virus

Shep Tiltstein

Team Scott Smith

Debbie Smith

The Wolverine (also a Smith)

Lefty

Daddy

Uncle Brian (who knocked me out)

Honorary Feature Table bubble and 11th place finisher = Al Can’t Hang

At the start DoubleAs held a massive chip advantage and Daddy was close behind. The Wolverine cut into both stacks with some very crafty plays. Then shortly after Uncle Brian (Stupid pocket Kings) busted out we had the hand of the century….******* For Much Greater Detail on this hand you must read the END of this post a future post [ed’s correction], but here’s the short version:

Only two players, Daddy and The Wolverine see the flop :

It’s A-7-7.

The turn is a rag.

The river is a 7.

Daddy bets the river and The Wolverine pushes all in. Daddy says, “You have quads don’t you?” Then he lays down, FOLDS, pocket aces.

The Wolverine shows the hammer, Quad 7s.

AN APOLOGY

Meanwhile, the party was rockin’ outside. Four pretty girls dressed, oddly, as Hooter’s girls arrived. They brought dozens of their closest friends. My buddy Ted and his parents arrived and his mother who has very nice Hooters herself begged me to touch the muscles of her thigh. She’d been working out and, while I was uncomfortable, I hate to be rude.

Eva’d made me another LIT and a coupla carbombs too. I’d started tinkering with SoCo and had a head full of beer. After the previous night, it was easy to get the stupid flowing. Dr. Jeff calls it the “shampoo effect”.

THE SHAMPOO EFFECT

You know how when you lather your hair and then rinse, you get a pretty mild lather of bubbles on the hair.

But…

If you follow the directions and actually REPEAT the process you almost instantly get a full head of giant bubbles. The previous wash made the second one quicker.

Likewise, if you still feel last night’s booze, today’s is coming FAST.

Friends my buzz was moving like my Head and Shoulders and Al Can’t Hang is a lousy conditioner. Therefore, I’m a bit sketchy on the EXACT tournament details but I can tell what I remember. Most of my memories begin at the DRUNK OLYMPICS…

SANS CHEESE BALLS

WHAT I REMEMBER

Pauly beat Wes (The Big Pirate). They chopped the pot and then had one had to determine a champion. It was Pauly.

Within moments the gospel spread and the great game was over. Millions of devout Pauly fans shed tears of joy, millions of pirates returned to their jobs at Capital One. Better still, the DRUNK OLYMPICS were ready to begin.

Otis, Al and I dragged a PA system with two speakers to the upper corner of the driveway, Otis plugged it in, and said, “Hello” to the crowd. They were all there by then, and even the Hooters girls perked up.

CJ and BG were the referees.…

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