Posts Tagged ‘gambling’

The vast majority of people who contact me about “advertising” are actually looking for some shady shit like this, though some of them express it more subtly:

“I work for XXX and we are looking for you to publish some content of ours on your website.  In exchange, I can give you a free £30 free bet at our casino.  Our content writer has produced several reviews of our online slot games.  Would you be interested in posting one of these articles on your site in exchange for a £30 free bet?”

I don’t usually respond, but this one was particularly blatant, so I wrote back:

Sorry, I write my own reviews, and I don’t take bribes.

Wicked Chops Poker is reporting that, with 2400 players left in the main event, Phil Ivey accepted a $20K wager from Andy Bloch at 99:1 that he would win the main event. Now that he’s made the final table, Bloch’s got to be sweating the $2 million loss.

My first reaction was that, this close call notwithstanding, this was a pretty good spot for Bloch. Granted everything I’ve heard about Ivey is that he’s both incredibly good at poker and insanely intimidating in person, but is he really 24 times more likely than the average player to take it down? The one thing I don’t know, which would make a big difference, is what his chip stack was like at the time. I guess if he was already at like three times the average when he took the bet, it might not be so unreasonable to think he’d close out eight times as often as anyone else sitting on a stack that big.

Even against bad players in a great structure, that’s an awfully huge edge. Then again, if Ivey does make it to the final four with a decent stack, I imagine he takes it down a large percentage of the time.

What do you think? Was Ivey getting the best of Bloch when he took 99:1?

By most accounts, Steve Cyr revolutionized the ways in which casinos worldwide cater to the whims of “whales”, the highest rolling gamblers in the world. Flying in the face of received wisdom, his mass marketing and customer service approach to the business upset decades of tradition but ultimately set the standard for the gambler-casino host relationship. Cyr now works personally with the world’s biggest gamblers, Michael Jordan being one of the few names he’s allowed to mention. He most likely has a fascinating job and life.

Deke Castleman’s Whale Hunt in the Desert, though, is not so much a biography or memoir of Steve Cyr as it is a history and exposition of the ways in which Las Vegas caters to, and does battle with, the biggest gamblers in the world. In fact, the chapters that explicitly focus on Cyr are the least interesting, reading as though they were written by an adoring fan (or, as is perhaps more likely, by Cyr himself). Elsewhere, though, Whale Hunt is a fascinating, entertaining, and funny distillation of Las Vegas gambling culture.

An interview with Cyr on the Two Plus Two Pokercast first piqued my interest in this book. Cyr was funny and insightful, telling a few good stories of high-roller degeneracy and hinting at many more. I picked up Whale Hunt in the Desert hoping to find an anthology of these stories.  Read the complete post...

It’s been nearly two years since the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act snuck its way through Congress as a rider on a port security bill. The UIGEA criminalized not the gambling itself but the facilitation of financial transactions for the purpose of gambling online. In other words, you could play, but banks and other financial institutions were not supposed to help you put money online to play with.

The immediate consequences were disastrous: numerous poker sites, including industry giant Party Poker, stopped accepting American business and saw their stock prices plummet. Third party “e-wallets” also closed their doors to American customers, and in the case of Neteller huge sums of money were stuck in limbo for months. Games grew scarcer and tougher, though frankly not to the extent that I feared they would.

That was a dark time for internet poker, but not much has happened since. Federal agencies and US banks locked horns over who would bear the responsibility for identifying transactions intended for unlawful internet gaming. Though a shot over the bow that scared many major players out of the US market, the UIGEA has been without teeth or content since its passage. The games aren’t as good as they were in the “Golden Age” but plenty of us are still making plenty of money.  Read the complete post...

I came out to Vegas a few days early to get into the swing of things, to see some friends with whom I play and talk poker regularly online but rarely see in real life, and to take care of some business. This will be my third time playing in the main event, and it amazes me how much has changed since I first came to Las Vegas two years ago. In 2006, I was a nervous kid who knew no one, was known by no one, and was in awe of every famous player I’d seen on TV.

I can’t claim to be a poker celebrity, but yesterday I got a taste of what that would be like. After waking early, going for a swim, having breakfast, and putting in some non-poker work at my computer, I made my first trip to the Rio. I wasn’t going to play but to meet up with Bill Ordine, a reporter from my hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun, who is working on an article on poker and philanthropy. He’d already interviewed Barry Greenstein, who’s known as “the Robin Hood of Poker” for donating over a million dollars in tournament winnings to a children’s charity, and Annie Duke, who organized a $5000 buy-in charity tournament called Ante Up for Africa to coincide with the WSOP.

The New York Times ran a neat article today about a convention of casino chip collectors this weekend in Las Vegas. In case you need another excuse not to play the slots, you can apparently hit the jackpot even if you don’t deposit your chip:

Last year, Eric Rosenblum, a lawyer from Merrick, N.Y., sold a $100 chip he picked up in the 1980s at the now defunct Desert Inn casino here for $20,000. Returning home from a vacation some 45 years ago, a Missouri woman, Sandy Marbs, threw a $1 chip from the Showboat Casino, once a Las Vegas mainstay, into her jewelry box. Last month, she sold it on eBay for nearly $29,000.