We’ve added a page with the odds table for Hold’em outs. You can get to it by clicking on the “Odds” tab at the top of the website. There is also a mobile version at:
To use the table, first figure out how many outs you have. For example, if you have a flush draw after the flop, you have 9 outs. Look for 9 under the “Outs” column and see the percentage in the corresponding rows for the turn and river.
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While I was in Vegas for the AEE convention, I decided to checkout some of the poker rooms in Vegas. A guy at a tournament in LA told me to go see the Hard Rock poker room so I did.
Even during a big convention weekend, there were only about 4 or 5 tables open so it wasn’t very busy. However, there were a lot of action players throwing money around. They have $1-2 and $2-5 no limit tables. The $1-2 is $100 to $300 but the $2-5 is $200 to $2,000. No, that’s not a typo. $2,000 with $5 blinds. This makes for some really interesting poker when a guy walks up with $2,000, while other guys are playing with $200, and the $2,000 buy-in raises to $100 pre-flop every other hand.
Another interesting rule is their “Hard Rock Straddle.” This is a live straddle on the button, who will act after the big blind, if there are no raises. However, if the big blind were to raise, all the others go in turn, all the way around back to the button. It’s very strange but it gives the button a huge advantage. Many people raise on the button just to inflate the pot for themselves, but people often get suspecious. You don’t have to worry about that because you are blind raising before you see your hand.
Basically, unless there are super aggressive people at the table, you should always do this straddle on the button. Even if somebody raises out of position, you can flat call and still try to flop something and be in position to take advantage.
While I was there, most people bought in for $500, but a few came in for the maximum $2,000. Be ready for action, especially when drunk people come to the table.
COMMERCE (KABC) — Armed deputies moved in on their targets early Saturday morning, cornering two suspected robbers in their car at a gas station in Hollywood.
Officers said they found a bullet-proof vest, a helmet and pepper spray inside the trunk of the car.
The suspects were identified as 21-year-old Jonathan Atkins and 18-year-old Raymond Little. Both men were wanted for a string of follow-home robberies from area casinos.
“The male victim was followed home from the Commerce Casino to his residence in Lake Forest,” said Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Jansen. “When he got out of his vehicle he was approached by two or three suspects, one had a handgun.”
Officers say the men demanded money that the victim had won at the casino.
Investigators say the case is ongoing and aren’t saying much else. However, officers said there may be more arrests. Authorities had set up surveillance in order to track down the suspects, who would watch people when money at the casino and then follow them home.
Officers still say they are not sure just how many people were involved in the crimes, but wanted to shut down the operation before anyone was seriously hurt.
Both men arrested are being held on $100,000 bail and are scheduled to be arraigned on Monday.
Once again, I returned to Hustler to try my hand at their tournament. This time, it’s the Oktoberfest $500 buy-in no limit tournament, with 7,500 in starting chips, and 40 minute rounds.
This is the type of tournament structure that I like because it gives you plenty of time to make your moves, and you can make 2 or 3 small mistakes, or even 1 big mistake and still have enough chips to play.
Before the tournament, I decided my strategy was going to be to play a lot of pots and try to accumulate chips to push people around in the later rounds.
In the first round of play, I limped in with 6, 9 
and 3 others were in the pot with me. The flop was 9, 5, 3 rainbow. One guy bet 200, and everyone folded to me and I just called with my 6 kicker.
The turn was the 8 which put the second diamond on the board, giving me top pair and now a flush draw. The guy checks and I bet 350, now feeling better about my 6 kicker. That lasted about a second because he check raises me to 1,350.
I had played long enough at the table to notice that this guy was pretty tight and didn’t look like a guy that would bluff this early in the tournament. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was, but I felt pretty sure he wasn’t on a flush draw so my 9 high flush would be good if I hit it.
The river was the 3 giving me a flush. However, the guy comes out betting 1,000. Since I hit a back-door flush, I felt I could get some value out of raising and made it 3,000. He thought it over for 3 seconds and called. I showed my flush and he flips over pocket 8s for a full boat.
Whoops. Crap. I made 2 mistakes in one hand. First, I should have raised on the flop and he would have probably folded. Then on the river when the board paired 3s, I should have just called the 1,000.
This put me in a big hole but I wasn’t out yet. Unfortunately, the same guy got pocket Kings when I got pocket Jacks, and I lost more chips. Amazingly, I was able to get away from my pocket Jacks pre-flop so I didn’t lose all my remaining chips.
Eventually, I had to make a big bluff to try to get some chips and the move failed and I was out.
I’m not really sure if my original plan was a good one or not. Perhaps playing 6, 9 suited got me in the trouble that I got into. If I was playing tight, I would not have even played that hand.
In any case, I’m going to try again next Sunday for their $1,500 buy-in. Wish me luck. I’ll need it.
According to an article on the Vancouver Sun, Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas now offers topless strippers at their pool. This area is separate from the regular area and there is a cover charge from $30 to $50.
The strippers work at Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club in Las Vegas and work at the Rio pool on a part time basis. They get some free food and drinks and sun. The article did not reveal if the strippers are paid to work there by Rio or are there for Sapphire as promoters.
All this is in keeping with Vegas’ move away from the “family” entertainment center to more “adult” entertainment with their “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” slogan.
Technically, it is not illegal for a casino to have a strip club but the Nevada Gaming Control Board has refused to hand out permits to allow this. However, topless poolside areas are not prohibited and several casios in Vegas has created areas for guests to be topless. Rio is the first casino to “hire” strippers to lounge around the pool topless.
This trend is what I’ve been waiting for. Vegas is getting back to it’s roots again. Sin city here I come.
According to an article on MSNBC.com, players on Ultimatebet.com have been accused of cheating, by viewing the hole cards, and winning more than their normal share of pots.
Absolutepoker.com and Ultimatebet.com are owned by the same company and there was a case of cheating reported last year on Absolutepoker.com. In this strange case, there’s a claim of $75 Million in losses, and another company which sold software to Ultimate, Excapsa Software Inc. of Toronto, is being liquidated in an attempt to collect the claim.
How the money from the liquidation will be distributed is another entirely different question. Apparently, there’s more than one cheater involved in this scheme so it would be difficult to trace back to all the hands and pots that all these people were involved in.
What a big mess this is. And this is yet another reason for people to claim that there’s something wrong going on with online poker. Apparently, at least in this case, they are right.
In my opinion, this is exactly why online poker should be regulated like it is in England, instead of pretending like nobody uses it in U.S. Of course, regulation doesn’t seem to work very well when the regulators are in bed (literally) with the people they are regulating, but at least there would be something to point our fingers at.
While the World Series of Poker 2008 is going on at the Rio, Microsoft has put their Surface OS tables in the lounges there. This video shows some “applications” for the Surface, iPhone-like operating system, like games and ways to pickup on the ladies, or vice versa.
Frankly, I’ve never seen attractive chicks like these playing video games, or even touching anything geeky, other than the iPhone. Maybe the iPhone will finally bring in the good looking people into the world of gadgets and geeks. One can dream.
In case you’re not familiar with the rewards program at the Hustler Casino, basically, they keep track of each hour of your play and you get points for rewards. You can either get free food, a coupon for the in-casino store, or the Hustler Hollywood store. Since the food is free at the $300+ tables, I never use my points.
Last year, for Christmas, I took all my Hustler Casino reward points (or whatever it’s called) and bought a bunch of presents at the Hustler Hollywood store. But more recently, I’ve noticed signs and notices at the casino telling me that if I don’t use my points for 6 months, they go away. Damn it.
They must have learned this trick from the airlines and cell phone companies. Oh well. No matter. Since it’s half way into the year, I decided I’d better cash out my reward points before they expire. I went to one of those kiosks and printed out my coupon for Hustler Hollywood.
By chance, they had their Hustler girl Hoodies on sale ($16 off regular price) so I decided to just load up on them and hold them until this coming Christmas. That’s right boys and girls. I’m doing my Christmas shopping in June. Can you beat that?
Pokerstars.com is giving away free entries to the WSOP 2008 main event. What’s the catch? Well, you have to come in the top 50 out of 5,000 in your first level tournament. The blinds go up every 5 minutes. Once you do that, then you get to enter the next free tournament, where you must come in the top 2 to win your entry. Also, you can only enter once a week.
If you’re interested in this, login to your pokerstars account, click on “Events,” then “WSOP,” then click on one of the “WSOP $1M Giveaway: Round 1 Freeroll.”
If you don’t mind paying, there are other ways you can get in. There’s a $33 entry tournament where they give away at least 1 WSOP entry. The closest I got was heads-up where I was all-in with pocket Queens against AK <spade> . The flop brought two <spade> with low cards, and you can guess the rest. Damn! So close.
So far, it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it to the WSOP this year.
The movie “21″ is based on the book, “Bringing Down the House,” by Ben Mezrich. The book is based on the events of the re-generated MIT blackjack team in the late 90’s and Jeff Ma’s experiences. Although I’ve not read the book, reports are that the movie basically changes everything except a few specific scenes.
First off, let me start by saying that I used to count cards in the 80’s but found it too much work. Meaning my brain power wasn’t good enough to do it for 12 hours straight. I’m still an avid gambler and play poker a lot. Generally, I love casino and gambling movies, I loved “Rainman,” “Casino,” and of course, “Rounders.”
As for “21,” other than the correct explaination of how to use simple counting techniques for blackjack play, almost everything else seemed inaccurate or completely wrong to me.
For example, the team stayed at Hard Rock and were seen all going to the same suite. Then, they played at the Hard Rock casino. No blackjack team would ever do this, and certainly not the famed MIT team. They are seen together too often and too many times. They know the casino has cameras everywhere.
There are several scenes where the movie teaches how simple counting is done. I say “simple” because there are more complicated techniques. My friend that I watched the movie with didn’t understand this section of the movie and I had to explain it more in detail to her after the movie. So I’m not sure if this part of the movie was useful to anybody since it’s apparently too difficult to understand for the untrained, but boring for blackjack counters. It’s hard to balance things like this in a movie.
They also used typical signals to communicate with each other. However, they used the same cross arm signals throughout the entire trip, and even on subsequent trips. Good for audiences to understand what’s going on. Bad for presenting reality.
When the player pretending to be a “whale” would come to the table, the “counter” would stay at the table. This makes no sense since the whale player was perfectly capable of keeping the count himself and the counter player was eating up cards that the whale player could be getting. This, not to mention, having the counter and whale players at the same table increases the chances of the casino taking note of this weird coincidence.
Also, there’s another scene where the “whale” splits 10s. I could be wrong but I think even if the count was very high, splitting 10s is a sure signal to the dealer that you are counting cards.
To illustrate, I was playing at the Riviera, back in the 80’s. It was a multi-deck shoe, and I was playing by myself at the table. I had been playing for a while, doing nothing too strange and winning good money. At one point, the count became abnormally large and I switched from betting $5 per hand to two hands for $50 each. I kept winning and I increased my bets to $150 each. Before the count got back down too low, the pit boss came over and told the dealer to re-shuffle. They noticed me out of all the players in less than 15 minutes.
Instead of getting up, and basically admitting to counting, I decided to risk losing some money back in order to prevent them from tagging me. I stayed and kept playing, lowering my bets only down to $50. By pure luck, I started on a long winning streak at this point, so I raised my bets back up to two hands at $150 again. This time, the pit boss came over and changed the dealer. To make a long story short, they changed dealers one more time on me before I left with about $10,000. The pit boss stood next to the table the entire time I played.
Remember that this was back in the 80’s when they really did beat up counters and cheats. The movie apparently takes place in present time since they were talking about face recognition software. If so, I doubt any large corporation would be using tactics like beating people up anymore. You could argue that the security consultant did this on his own but it’s still a big risk for everyone including the casino.
On yet another occasion in Vegas, I was at the end of a long session and I was so tired, I thought I had a hard 16 against a face card and hit. Before I realized what I did, the dealer brought out a 4. I had accidentally hit on a hard 17 and made 21 with the 4. The dealer immediately called over the pit boss. He looked and told the dealer to keep dealing but watched me play for a few minutes.
These examples show how paranoid the casinos were, (and still are) about cheats and counters alike. I wasn’t even playing with $10,000 chips or anything crazy like in the “21″ movie and they kept checking up on me. This is why what happens in the movie is totally fiction. If they did what they did in the movie, they would have had the casino watching over them like hawks. No way, they could get away with it. I’m sure the book is very different from this fictionalized version in the movie.
Enough mathmatics and gambling. What about sex. Well, other than a unrealistic romance between the protagonist and one of the female counters, their meeting place is a strip club. So as you can imagine, there are the required lap dance and pole dancing sequences. It’s not as nasty as I like, but it’s there. Let’s face it. This is a gambler’s movie. Not a horn dog movie.
All in all, there’s a lot of special effects showing the cards close up with sound effects making the cards sound like rocket ships. As gambling movies go, it’s not too bad. It’s not as good as the Vegas scenes from “Rainman,” but it’s okay. When the dealer peels off yet another card to make 21, while all the players are shouting for “Monkey,” a picture card, your heart will pump a little harder if you’re any type of real backjack player.
Summary
So what’s the bottom line? If you’re a gambler but can’t leave town and you need your Vegas fix, this might be one option. Otherwise just wait for the DVD or Blu-ray.
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