Pull Up The Ladder Chief, I'm In (2)

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Enjoy The Silence

My software website is no more. It has run its course and I have dropped the website and the Email address. This has the pleasant side-effect that on my return today I no longer have 15 new Emails offering me red-hot penny stocks or 2 days of sex for $3.99 *. If you need to Email me you should find the address via my profile. At this point I would like to thank everyone who supported the software in various ways, not least buying it ! I hope it helped.

I suppose in a post entitled "Enjoy The Silence" I should be extra careful to GIQ but enjoy it while it lasts I say, so although I failed to cash in the E100 on Betfair yesterday, the £1500 I trousered for finishing 3rd in the £50 made up for the disappointment. Ahhhh. That's well worth an afternoon off. Nap time I think. Enjoy the rest of your day at work ;-).

* You still have to provide your own partner, I checked

Making The Rounds

Various bits and pieces that have engaged my interest this week :

Pull The Ladder Up Chief, I'm In !

I popped down to Gutshot yesterday to buy in for the £500 on Saturday. Anyone who has ponied up 3 large to play at the Vic this weekend really needs to sit down and think about their game selection. Sportingodds are adding £10K to the prize pool which is brilliant, this is the kind of sponsorship we have to encourage and support. More than that though, the relative strengths of the line-ups are surely going to be worlds apart. I'm already in, as I say, so book early to avoid disappointment !

I do hope it sells out before any second-chancers from the Vic (which starts on Friday) find their way in. Gutshot though have inadvertently given themselves a bit of a problem by scheduling a satellite on Saturday afternoon. Now, if it's going to fill up, do they keep seats back for the satellite and turn people away until then ? Or cancel the sat ? Either way, some people will be disappointed. I don't mind which they do (not least of course because I've got mine), as long as they don't take the Barcelona route of pleasing an extra 10% by making it 11-handed and pissing off everyone else who was organised enough to sort themselves out before the last minute.

If they do hold seats back for the satellite, it might be interesting on Saturday. What's the betting a bunch of faces, eliminated at the Vic on Friday, roll up to the Gutshot satellite and break all known records for rebuying. The cries of "It's Not Fair" from 2-bit Gutshotters trying to qualify on £30 will echo the length of Clerkenwell Road. Needless to say I wouldn't have a lot of sympathy. You've had two months to implement a two-phase plan. 1) Win £500 in a poker tournament and 2) hold on to it. If you couldn't do that you'd be drawing a bit thin in a £500 comp anyway.

Incidentally I'd never play a multi-table satellite on the same day as the event in question anyway. Come 2 am you'll have been playing 4 hours longer than most of the field. If that's not a disadvantage then you have more stamina than I do

Take No Prisoners

From BBC Sport today :

"Leicester and QPR have been charged by the Football Association with failing to control their players during a match at the Walkers Stadium on 24 September. There was a mass brawl during the game, which QPR won"

Yes ! No one fucks with the SuperHoops !

And no one fucks with Johnny Giles either. Here is a selection of his comments on last night's Liverpool-Chelsea irrelevance (courtesy of Football 365)

"Didier Drogba....look, there he is again, rolling around like a big baby. Chelsea are notorious for this....look! he's up again. Get on with the game like men and don't be rolling around the bloody floor!"

"How on earth Traore gets into this team is beyond me. And he's a Champions League winner? Gimme a break. They've Riise sitting on the bench who's a different class to this fella."

"Luis Garcia would want to be scoring a goal a game to justify being picked. His touch and general play are absolutely awful."

"At least Liverpool are trying to take the game to Chelsea. Chelsea's approach has been totally negative, and on the evidence of this game, very boring.."

"They tell us that Lampard and Gerrard are the best midfield players in the world. Neither of them have strung two passes together all night so how can we tell?"

"That was just stupid play by Drogba. He's a very stupid player"

"I think Mourinho just likes annoying people. He's annoyed everyone in the stadium here tonight with the way he's approached this game."

Now that's punditry. And who would argue with a single point ? If Sky had Giles doing this on a regular basis, I'd still be paying as much as they wanted. Marketing weasels around the world seem to think that if you say something often enough, people will eventually believe you. Wrong. If you say something that's blatantly not true often enough, people will eventually lose respect for you.

A Little Bit Of Politics

You may have heard this story, but if you haven't then do take a look. The canned version is that an 82-year-old man was thrown out of the Labour Party Conference for shouting "nonsense" at Jack Straw. Not only that, he was legally barred from re-entering the building under the Prevention Of Terrorism Act. You remember, the one where they voted themselves almost unlimited powers in case of "emergency", but said it was OK because they'd only be used strictly in the interests of national security. Cunts the lot of them. Right, time for the E100 on Betfair.

Finally Some Recognition

http://www.qpr.premiumtv.co.uk/page/Home/0,,10373,00.html

About time the QPR website's top story featured a picture of me bursting through to score.

Thieves In The Temple

I picked up a couple of cheap books in HMV yesterday ; (how's that semi-colon Pete ?) the rack full of poker/casino/gambling type books may tell us that the bubble is yet to burst. Amarillo Slim's book I quite enjoyed, although when he tells you what a straight-up guy he is you should always remember what happened at the first Heads-Up tournament in Paris. Ron Rose moved all his chips in, Slim said "let's go", Rose showed a pair of Kings and Slim said "let's go on to the next hand". Classy.

The book I wanted to talk about though is "The Great Casino Heist" by Richard Marcus. The style and tone is very similar to Mezrich's card-counting book - travelling round all the casinos, trying to avoid the heat, escaping the back rooms, getting away with the money. But there's one very important difference. Card-counters, to my mind, aren't doing anything wrong. It may be technically illegal to use mechanical counters in your shoe and so on (I can't remember if Mezrich's team did that or not), but basically they were using open information to beat the game. Marcus' gang were no better than common thieves. On top of their "past-posting" methods (swapping in a bigger chip after a bet has won) they thought nothing of taking chips from other players. At no point in the book (I haven't finished it, I may not) does the main protagonist even ask himself about the morality of what he's doing. There's no justification in terms of the ethics of casinos themselves - nothing. They just do it. It's all rather depressing.

Just as I was about to give up though there was one moment of humour, albeit probably unintentional. While trying their luck in London, Marcus notes that "for some reason [London casino people] held American gamblers either in contempt or with outright distrust". It may be that they shouldn't do that, but frankly I think it's a bit much complaining about it when you yourself are a thieving cunt. Stealing isn't cool.

Insane In The Membrane

This is a joke, right ? I mean, please tell me that someone didn't actually say this without being laughed out of town ?

I don't know what's worse : if this guy actually believes what he's saying or if he's cynically using the disaster to further his own bigotry.

So God killed at least 400 people because a lesbian presented an awards show. It's the kind of thing that makes me think "If that's your God of Love, you're welcome to Him"

15/9 Later : Many thanks to Joe Speaker for informing me that this is, in fact, a joke. Whew. I had been forwarded the link at work and didn't check the whole site. I am going to leave this post up to remind myself not to be so stupid in future. It had been a long day ...

Next On The List

Citizen Smith used to carry a list around with him. When anyone really pissed him off he would ostentatiously write their name on the list - the list of his enemies who would be first against the wall when the Tooting Popular Front rose to power.

It's a nice thought isn't it ? Onto my list today went credit card company Mint, for charging me a £20 late payment fee. My outstanding balance at the time was £12. So I'm not going to throw a strop, I'm just going to cut your card in half and add one more name to the list. No doubt that was in the small print, but there is such a thing as taking the piss and there is only so often you can do it. In the case of non-essential credit cards, that would be once.

But what happens when you're paying through the nose for something you love ? I was thinking today along the lines of "How much is too much ?". At what point do you say, "that's too expensive", even when it's for something you love ? When Harrah's are taking $4 million out of a 9 day poker tournament, and their staff are slagging players off for not leaving MORE. Is that too much ? When Rangers expect people to pay £58 * to watch them play Luton and Leeds, inside 4 days. Leeds, by the way, being the only home match in a spell of 10 consecutive Saturdays. Is that too much ?

Maybe it is. Because moaning about it isn't going to change anything. In our great capitalist world, never forget that we have the power. If we stop paying it, they'll have to think again. What's taking a stand and what's cutting your nose off to spite your face is a judgement call.

* £58 for best seats. Two seats behind the corner flag - yours for £50.

Come And Get Me Copper !

I received a letter from Mr Bastard the TV Inspector * this morning, threatening me with a visit from one of his army of sniffers. Just two slight problems with this : 1) I haven't got a TV and 2) I have a licence. Apart from those two things, you've got me bang to rights.

So I cancelled the payments forthwith ; I hadn't done it before because I might do something like hire a TV for the World Cup but to hell with it, if you're going to hassle me you can go and swing. So bust down my door if you like, I may well be sitting here surfing your website or listening to cricket on the radio but I don't have to eat the TV to defeat you. Victory is mine !

* I am aware of the irony of using a TV character to explain this point, so don't bother pointing that out **

** ditto

Sneaky !

I received an Email from Eurobet today. It says "play for a share of $250,000 in cash in our Re-buy Rumble". The carrot being dangled is this :

" And to top it all, the winners of each ‘Rumble’ event will face each other in the ‘Rumble-off’ (Grand Final) for the title of Eurobet Poker Champion – and FREE entry to our ‘Win Stacks’ final for a whole year, a total prize value of well over $1,000,000!"

Now, the more inexperienced online player might just think that "a total prize value of well over $1,000,000 !" means that Eurobet Poker are throwing in, well, a total prize value of well over $1,000,000. The rest of us know that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And, quelle surprise, it is.

The prize on offer is a free entry into Eurobet's weekly $100 tournament ($20,000 guaranteed), for a year. 52 x $20,000 is presumably how they derive "well over $1,000,000 !". But even if you won it every week it wouldn't be $1 million. What I would call the "total prize value" is $5, 200. So Eurobet are throwing in $5,200. Great ! But don't tell me it's a million.

On further thought though, this is even sneakier. Supposing that the guarantee is not met (which it isn't at the moment). Fair enough, they're kicking money in. But giving someone a free entry into a tournament which is already under-subscribed according to the guarantee costs Eurobet, you guessed it, NOTHING !

So there you have it. How to make people think you're adding a million when in fact you're adding sweet FA (on top of what you already are). In truth it costs them exactly $100 for every weekly tournament that the winner would have played anyway. Which may be $4000 or it may be nothing.

I get bored at my job sometimes. Like today. But at least it's not my job to think up shit like this. That's some consolation.

How To Waste An Entire Weekend

Mostly, by bonus-hunting on Party. Losing $30 after collecting the bonus is a fair amount of wasted time. I've never seen so many people flop sets against me. If I wasn't a man of science ...

... but I am, so I simply accept that Party's bonuses are not that attractive because of the time restriction they put on them (you have a week to play the hands). That mostly means a weekend for me. Not just that, by the evening when there are some proper tournaments to play, I can hardly be bothered through over-poker. I think I should give the swerve to any bonuses that are a) restricted time and b) no use in tournaments. It's not even like it's a lot of money, to a man of my cal-i-bre. Not compared to $1800 on Betfair on Thursday, yum, just one yum mind you as I finished third and was a bit disappointed not to do better. Can't complain though.

A break to watch England lumber past Wales (down the pub) hardly stirred the soul, although I did make £10 on Betfair backing Wales +1.5 on the Asian handicap. I reckon the old A/H is value when the away team is heavily favoured and you can get a decent price on a bet that wins even if "your" team loses by 1 goal. It might be worth a look on Wednesday too. Come on Norn Iron !

Could have been worse though. Poor old DY played two days in the Gutshot uber-tournament, only to be caught in traffic on Day 3 and arrive just in time to crash out 18th. Not worth the time mate :-). Meanwhile there must have been some mighty cheers when Gryko bubbled out. Not because he's any smugger than usual but apparently there was some heavy cross-booking action between the uber-sickos.

Right, I'm going to attempt to salvage something from this weekend with a walk in the park. Blinking and rubbing my eyes obviously.