A couple of years ago, I spliced together a video that featured random clips from my random travels. The "On the Road" year end video has become a tradition since then.
2009 was an exhilarating year for me. Although I limited my international travel in 2009, I spent a significant amount of time exploring different parts of America when my favorite band got back together. And of course, I spent a nice chunk of time in Las Vegas.
The 2009 video had to be split into two parts...
Enjoy and Happy New Year!
Original content written and provided by Pauly from Tao of Poker at www.taopoker.com. All rights reserved. RSS feeds are for non-commercial use only.
Tweeter @FunnyKeithLyle and I were brainstorming about who qualifies as Douchebag of The Year and I thought he was referring to an actual poll. He wasn't, so we decided to create one. Here it is. If you'd like to host this poll yourself on your site, email me your email address and I'll send along the HTML. It's easy and fun. Now vote. I left out women -- sorry, Carrie Prejean -- and people of too-local interest like Gov. Jim Gibbons. Enjoy and vote! The poll is to your right.
The Tao of Poker: 2009 Year in Review, Part 2
By Pauly Miami, FL
And let's get started with the best of the rest of 2009...
And then I took off on Phish tour. It was only supposed to be a weekend, but I took off for 20 days in total. The reason? I had the Tao All Stars to pick up the slack. I assembled the best writing team in poker to cover the WSOP while I took an extended vacation and returned for the final three weeks.
Here's the sensational contributions from the Tao All Stars...
The biggest personal highlight during the WSOP Main Event... was getting to play in Dream Team Poker... and winning it! Tao of Pokerati (me, Michalski, and LJ) took down the team side of the tournament while I finished in 13th place. Check out Making Day 2 and Tao of Pokerati Wins Dream Team Poker III.
And yes, Michalski blew through all of his winnings while I spent the majority of mine on self-publishing Lost Vegas and the rest funded my trip to the Phish's Halloween festival, fall tour, and the New Year's run in Miami.
This has been sort of a tradition... the brooding closing post about Las Vegas that I write when the WSOP is finally over and I have been freed. This year's piece is titled The Story of the Ghost
Not too much report in August mainly because I was having a fun summer and went on vacation to Colorado, Washington State, and New York. But there are a few gems...
My friend Trisha Lynn wrote a guest post as the Tao's reality TV show correspondent as she covered Tiffany Michelle and Maria Ho's stint on The Amazing Race. Check out... Letters to Pauly: The Amazing Race, Vol. 1.
Not to be outdone, Happy hired Phil Hellmuth as his coach. That inspired a Karate Kid-themed post titled... Happy Hires Hellmuth.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the 15 members of the media who voted on this year's class into the Poker Hall of Fame. As expected, Mike Sexton got a nod... Welcome to the Poker Hall of Fame... Mike Sexton.
Got her for $1 a week or so ago and have been meaning to catch up on my blogging about this. Over the Dec. 18-20 weekend at Paris Las Vegas, Harrah's put out a ballroom's worth of goofy wares at ridiculous prices to sell off excess inventories of tchotkes just in time for holiday shoppers seeking bargains.
Didn't hear about it? No, well, neither did I until the day before it was over. A listener/reader in New Jersey alerted me to the Harrah's version of that Wynn Warehouse event I covered here in November. I even inquired with a Harrah's publicist who told me that the event was for employees and not open to the public. Which was weird because these signs...
...were all over the shopping esplanade at Paris. It was, indeed, open to the public and, in fact, there was a similar one the prior weekend at Caesars Palace. I'm told the next go-around will be in May and that Harrah's generally tries to do them twice a year. I'm really surprised they don't promote this more to the Vegas public; they'd bring in hoards of bargain-seeking locals who might just stay for dinner or a hand of blackjack, y'know?
I made it with 15 minutes to spare until the sale closed that Sunday, which explains why most people are in line to check out in these images.
There was lots of leftover World Series of Poker garb...
...and merchandise from Harrah's properties all over the United States.
(Vegas peeps who may wonder: Paula Deen has her name on the buffet at Harrah's Tunica.)
Yet the big theme at this sale seemed to be Bette Midler-branded stuff. Every item - T-shirts, hats, mugs, shotglasses -- yes, Tim & Michele, I got you one -- and Christmas ornaments going for 100 pennies.
In case you're wondering what kind of discounts were going on, this...
...is what some suckers/fans once paid for Bette Midler ornaments.
There were the odd, weird items, too, like seasonally-themed G-strings...
...and, uh, material for topiaries?
And apparently black people don't fancy these...
...for which they should be quite proud.
Anyhow, here's my loot, mainly stuff I picked up to put in the prize list for Trivia Question winners on The Strip Podcast. I spent a whopping $12 plus tax.
Oh, OK. I wanted the Kiss My Brass mug. And you just never know when Flamingo ashtrays are going to come back into style, do ya?
My ThePetcast.Com co-host Emily Richmond has a cat that's stalking her and her dog, Archie. See?
Hear more about this "problem" on Episode 221.5 of our show. Find it at ThePetcast.Com or subscribe via iTunes. Also on that episode, Emily unfurls her list of the top 5 pet-related stories of 2009.
Here's this week's episode of "The Strip," a sorta double episode pairing up a Louis Prima Jr chat I did but never aired in September with a completely fascinating conversation with Sandy Hackett. No, really. The folks in the live chat on Saturday barely talked, they were so intrigued by the interview. You know it's going well when the source, in this case Hackett, exclaims, "My GOD you've done your research." Click on the date below to make the show play or right-click to save it and listen at your leisure. You can subscribe, too, (it's free!) in iTunes or in Zune.
Nowadays if you’re the offspring of an iconic celebrity, you can get work regardless of your talent as the subject of a reality TV show or by providing vacuous interviews on red carpets. But some of those who were born famous actually spend their lives trying to both make their own mark on the world and protect the legacies of their parents. In this episode, we’ll hear from two men who have done just that, Louis Prima Jr and Sandy Hackett. Prima continues to try to rescue the dying Vegas lounge act that his father made so great and Hackett is a comic and musician in his own right whose Rat Pack production at the Sahara bounces off of his own family history with Frank, Dino, Sammy and Joey. Both have struggled with and enjoyed perks from their famous names and both speak openly about that mixed blessing as well as their fascinating Vegas histories. In Banter: The Aria buffet, Phil Ruffin’s Bellagio play, the Build It Bigger on CityCenter, Forbes on Adelson and Ruffin, the MGM Mirage Xmas Day outage and more.
Rarely is there a day when the editorialists at the Las Vegas Review-Journal do not peer out at an unjust world through their extreme-libertarian lenses and find some form of government spending to bash as unnecessary or excessive or a result of our ever-expanding Nanny State.
And then, this morning on my driveway, I received the fruit of the R-J's very own guvmint handout: a 36-section, 576-page, 9-pound stack of newsprint that went almost directly into my recycling bin. Almost, of course, because I had to take a moment to look more carefully on your behalf at the sort of pocket-lining Socialism that Sherm Frederick, Tom Mitchell and the rest of the Bonanza Road gang are A-OK with.
What is it? Well, that's a printed list of every property and property owner in Clark County and their tax assessment. They do it every year. And, yes, all of this information is readily available to anyone who wishes to find it on the Clark County Assessor's website. You can go right there and find out exactly how much my house isn't worth these days. Knock yourself out.
No, no. You won't see anyone over there bitching and moaning about the $555,000+ waste of Clark County taxpayer dollars mandated by a 100-year-old state law. Nor will you see any reporting in the paper about how a change to that law to end this direct deposit into the local newspaper's accounts passed both houses of the Nevada Legislature in 2009 only to be vetoed by Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons. Strange that the R-J didn't rail viciously against the smaller-government-loving Gibbers keeping in place a system that flushes $800,000 in taxpayer money across the state down the toilet. How many teachers could we hire with that dough?
Keep in mind, this is a desperate state that has had to cut just about everything. The Stephens Media Subsidy, however, stayed in place. And the Legislature, which overturned Gibbons' veto a record 41 times, including to heroically grant me fake gay marriage, didn't bother with this one.
Why does the government spend all this money to print and distribute this material? For that we turn to April testimony from the Nevada Press Association, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Old Media which has in the first line of its who-are-we blather that members are "limited to newspapers qualified to publish legal notices in the state." It's their entire raison d'etre. You're not a worthy member unless you're on the take from The Man.
NPA Executive Director Barry Smith appeared before a Nevada Senate committee on April 30 to defend this silliness. According to the transcript, he repeatedly insisted that such public notices are an important service that helps keep the assessors honest and allows neighbors to detect mistakes, inadvertent or otherwise.
He also claimed that having this landfill-fill delivered is far more user-friendly than going on the assessor's website. That is actually a lie. The 576-page behemoth I received today lists everything in alphabetical order. I don't know most of my neighbors' last names and I suspect neither do you. But when I go to the Assessor's website and toss in any address, the site helpfully also lists several others before and after mine. See?
From there I can click on any of them and find out who owns it, how many bathrooms they have, what sorts of improvements they've made and so on. I can even see an aerial photo of the place. I keep pressing the paper I received today, but darn it if nothing ever seems to pop up!
Smith's performance in Carson City was the sort of thing that the R-J boys would be picking apart tasty limb by tasty limb if he weren't standing up for perpetuating their gravy train. He complains that government websites are too complicated and there are so damn many of them, so the people just can't find what they need themselves. Because, you know, the R-J is usually in the business of advocating for government intervention on behalf of helpless and deliberately clueless average Americans.
Smith also waved this "survey" the NPA took that showed that -- surprise! -- 87 percent of respondents said state and local governments should continue to publish such notices in newspapers. In his testimony, though, he admits it was not a random-sample survey which means it also has no scientific value for use in making public policy. Also, the findings make no common sense.
My favorite, though, is when Smith argues that removing the newspaper from the equation also removes "third-party accountability." I guarantee you nobody at the R-J or any other newspaper actually reviews the information they publish for the county. This is an advertiser relationship; the newspaper is in no way acting as a fact-checking entity in this mix. Another lie.
Smith is also gravely concerned that the U.S. Census in 2007 found 47 percent of households with annual incomes of less than $25,000, 45 percent of Hispanic households and 40 percent of households where people have no college education have no Internet access. He doesn't bother to note that it's pretty unlikely those people even subscribe to the newspaper and that people that poor probably don't own homes, either.
And, as an aside, just imagine if that $555,000 a year went instead to provide subsidies to help make Internet access affordable which, in turn, could be used for all sorts of great purposes as opposed to the one purpose it is presently not accomplishing! The R-J Editorial Board would oppose such a cyber-welfare effort and tell people to go to the library to log on, right? Of course. Finally, the R-J's subscription rate is about 170,000. (Probably less, but for the sake of argument, we'll be generous.) There are 2 million people in Las Vegas. This is a penetration of 8.5 percent. According to the Senate testimony, as much as 70 percent of residents have some form of at-home Internet access. That means that by a gigantic factor, the Internet is the more effective means of providing this information.
Ass. Paul Aizley, the Democrat who tried to change the law, told that Senate committee that the 2008 assessor rolls took up 456 pages of newsprint that required 40 million pages of paper and ink in 2008. The R-J has narrowed its margins, which may explain why this year's version is 120 pages heftier, but ultimately the outcome has to be similar. It's 9 pounds of newsprint times 170,000 and that's 1.5 million pounds of paper. Yikes.
I appreciate that that $555,000 is a goodly sum for the newspaper company and I would hate to see more colleagues lose their jobs. But, you see, I take them at their word when they write ad nauseum about being self-sufficient and about shrinking government.
Where's Glenn Cook or Vin Suprynowicz when it's their own salaries at stake? If they don't stand up against such waste even when it costs them and their company personally, I'll assume they were just faking their outrage -- as most people suspect anyway -- all along.
This is the time of year that I love and hate equally. Sometimes it's fun to sift through the static and find a few gems, but most of the time I cringe as I re-read the incessant ramblings that I churned out over the year. I also start fresh in January and remind myself that less is more. Someday I'll listen to my own advice.
Anyway, here's the first part of the 2009 Year in Review for the Tao of Poker...
I started the year on an assignment in the Bahamas covering the PCA for PokerStars. After my first day on Paradise Island at the equal swanky and overrated Atlantis resort, I penned Welcome to Hog Island.
In the Bahamas, Benjo and I recorded an episode of the Tao of Pokerati...
PCA Afterthoughts: Midnight Ravers... is something that came together when the PCA came to a close and I reflected on the events, drunken hijinks, and other sordid tales.
In industry news... my friend and colleague John Caldwell resigned from Poker News in early January. I was saddened at the news. Once he left the helm, I found it difficult to want to continue to work/do business with the company.
Flipchip took some salacious pics of porn stars, meanwhile, I appeared on a poker industry Roundtable with the likes of Barry Greenstein, Matt Parvis, Jeffrey Pollack, and super agent Brian Balsbaugh as we weighed in on several topics.
When I returned to L.A. after the Bahamas, I focused primarily on finishing Lost Vegas. The book took up most of my time, so the quantity of posts slipped dramatically on Tao of Poker, however, the quality per piece increased substantially. Looking back at the blog, there was a period in late January and early February when I cranked out some of the better material I had produced in a very long time.
The Lost City of Tunica wondered what happened to the Tunica buzz as more pros have been pulled away from the Southern gambling Mecca in favor of international pursuits.
I delve off the deep end during a discussion of addiction in Chasing the Dragon. It's a dark, raw, and honest piece. One of my favorites from 2009.
The Day the Music Died marked the anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly and how he tragically lost his life by a mere flip of a coin.
Where's My Bailout? is my skewed take on the big banks feasting on billion dollar welfare checks from the government.
Soul Cards was originally the opening chapter to Lost Vegas, yet that got trimmed. I posted the scraps for public consumption.
Reader Mail: Busto Brad was the most fun I had writing a post in a very long time. It involves the above photo.
Welcome to AmsterVegas is my suggestion to the Vegas power brokers to seriously study the Amsterdam model to boost tourism after the city and casinos posted another dismal quarter. How about bringing legal prostitution and the decriminalization of marijuana/hashish to Las Vegas? Or maybe just leave that to the Dutch?
Slim pickins in March on Tao. I was bogged down in the slums of Beverly Hills writing Lost Vegas and then took off for two weeks; Vegas for March Madness and Virginia for the Phish reunion.
The Feeling I Forgot is an inside look into the Phish Reunion including scalpers, hippies, drug dealers, and local law enforcement types.
The Ides of Imperil is the beginning of the end of me. March Madness. Sports betting.
March Heater and Dream Team Poker tracks my progress early on in the college hoops tournament and on the cusp of playing in my first Dream Team Poker event.
Dream Team Poker at Caesars is my report on how I was the last player standing on my team, Tao of Pokerati, with Michalski and Shaniac.
And of course, we recorded episodes of Tao of Pokerati...
Here is when I introduced the masses to Guess Her Muff. Since that moment, I'm up several hundred dollars wagering on the daily pictures on that website. When in doubt, go shaved.
I went to Argentina on a work assignment and covered the LAPT with Mean Gene, Joe Giron, Change100, and Otis. Fun times. Lots of hot models. Heavily armored cops. Oh, and there was the bar fight. I wrote a three part series aptly titled... The Vicodin Diaries.
I also recorded a couple of episodes of Tao of Pokerati...
Episode 11.1: South American Models... Pauly and special guest MeanGene discuss the highlights from LAPT Grand Final in Argentina while they drank at the LAPT wrap party hosted in a club in a sketchy part of Mar del Plata. They discuss their favorite parts of Argentina especially the sleek and silky models hired by PokerStars that were all over the tournament area.
Episode 11.2: Costa Rican Hookers... Pauly's special guest includes Chip Monkey, who Dan nicknamed 'the Costa Rican Benjo'. Pauly and Chip Monkey discuss seedy Costa Rican strip clubs, the advantages and disadvantages of street corner trannie hookers, and the local narcotic scene.
Lest we forget Otis and the nipple?
When I was in Argentina, I got word that my colleague Justin Shronk passed away. I wrote a tribute titled... R.I.P. Shronk. And yes, you can see his infamous Vegemite prop bet video in that post.
Glass Tappers is just another rant about enduring bad beats at the virtual tables.
With the WSOP approaching, I announced my plans to unleash the Tao of Poker All Stars onto the scene. Yes, afew of my talented friends agreed to write guest posts on the Tao mainly during my days off.
WSOP Food is a good read even if you're not going to the WSOP.
Pusherman Reprise is another take on the Pusherman angle and the underbelly of drugs in Las Vegas.
Step away from the leftover Christmas ham -- or bring some with you, we don't actually mind -- and listen live/join in chat 4-6p PT at LVRocks.Com as "The Petcast" counts down the top pet-related tales (get it? tales?) of 2009 and then "The Strip" holds JUNIOR DAY featuring interviews with Louis Prima Jr. and Sandy Hackett.
The schedule:
4-430p: The Petcast 2009 Countdown 430-515p: Play Sandy Hackett interview 5:15-6p: Miles and I do the normal parts of the show including a review of the Aria buffet, thoughts on the Jenny Holzer installation and more.
[UPDATE #2: The snafu ended around 5:30 p.m. Friday, according to MGM Mirage spokesman Gordon Absher. Poster GoVegas33 at VegasTripping.Com, though, wrote at 5:20 p.m. that New York-New York continued experiencing problems.]
[UPDATE: @VegasRex reporting people at Monte Carlo are not able to cash out at slot machines. That goes beyond how Absher described the impact. He says he just lost the dollar he put in. But he was able to cash out OK at Aria. See VegasRex's pic of the "call attendant" readout at a slot machine at Monte Carlo.]
Poor MGM Mirage. They just don't get a break, not even on Christmas.
Today, an electrical outage at the main IT center for the company -- it's at an "undisclosed location," according to MGM Mirage spokesman Gordon Absher -- has led to widespread problems "at multiple properties." "The power outage knocked some systems offline. The generators kicked in and the systems are reloading and rebooting. It's a minor inconvenience for us at the operations level."
Absher said he's not sure what caused the outage, when it happened, which other resorts were affected or precisely what the impact has been. His understanding is that players are unable to cash out at kiosks and have to go to cages to do so. He said he's unlikely to be able to provide a fuller explanation until tomorrow.
I asked Absher if people sitting at the slots would have noticed anything had occurred until they went to the cash-out kiosks. He didn't know.
A source at Bellagio told me he was informed there was a car crash that precipitated the outage. Visitor Michael Howie, who Tweets at @mchl87, wrote at about 12:45 p.m. PT: "The slot ticketing system is down for Aria and Bellagio, maybe all MGM properties?" He followed that shortly thereafter with: "That means every slot play is a hand pay (slow and annoying) or if you do get a ticket out, you have to go to cashier." In addition, blogger VegasRex Tweeted around the same time: "@Doh! The Aria Poker Room List Screen http://post.ly/GCRy." This was his image:
Absher didn't know if Aria's poker-screen problem was related.
I asked VegasRex via DM on Twitter to let me know what he's seeing at Aria. He wrote back just now that the slots are working fine and he's going to check on the cashing-out process.
MGM Mirage seems to be particularly prone to these sorts of snafus. On Easter Sunday 2004, Bellagio suffered a massive blackout that lasted for four days. In October 2007, a problem with the Opera reservation system caused such huge problems for the internal room-booking system for five days that guests were being given keys to occupied or unclean rooms. And just this past January, another computer problem brought down the online reservations systems for all of their resorts for hours.
It's kind of amazing, really, that such a huge, sophisticated corporation would be so vulnerable. I don't recall ever hearing of such problems at any Harrah's resorts, for instance. It might be worth a closer look.
Even though I might not be playing poker, I'm making decisions every day and employing some tenets of poker strategy. The rest of the time, I find myself in gambling situations, assessing risk and calculating odds in every day situations. Sometimes, I'm just degening it up.
A few random examples...
* * * * *
Day before Thanksgiving. Long Beach Airport. My flight to New York City was delayed and I chatted up a guy who proclaimed, "I hate people" after a rich-bitch nearly ran him over rushing to the gate, "Whatever happened to 'Excuse me' or 'I'm sorry?'" he bemoaned. That's when he uttered, "I hate people." I figured, this is the one guy on my flight I want to talk to. So we bullshitted about the downfall of modern civilization while we waited for our flight to finally board and we both prayed that the wailing baby at the gate would not be seated next to us.
"Hey, you play poker, what are my odds that I get stuck next to the baby?" he asked.
"Well, there's 27 rows on an Airbus with 6 seats across. That's 1 in 162 chance you will random be seated next to the baby. However, you have to take into account the screaming radius, which I estimate as three or four rows give or take. So that makes it 1 in 6 or 7 that you're seated in a danger zone. Roughly 15 to 18% that you're fucked."
He was amazed that I was able to spit out those numbers. I was amazed that I think in that way. Luckily, I was away from the baby and seated near the front of the plane -- part of my strategy so I could be one of the first passengers off the plane at JFK so I could sprint to the taxi stand and beat the rush.
* * * * *
Winter storm pummeled the Mid-Atlantic states last weekend. I was schedule to fly on the Saturday night redeye out of LAX and scheduled to land at New York City around 6am. The snow was supposed to stop sometime in the middle of the night. Would the JFK runways be plowed by then or would my flight be canceled? On Friday night I made the snap decision to re-book my flight. I was worried about the snow so I took a proactive approach. The earliest flight I could get was 48 hours later and I booked that flight. 12 hours before my original flight was scheduled to take off -- JetBlue canceled that flight along with the next two days of flights. Had I waited, I would have been scrambling with 200 other fools on mega-travel-tilt. I sucked out and got a seat on the first possible flight out of JFK.
* * * * *
Degening it up sports betting again. I had a couple of bucks left in one of my online accounts. I wanted to see if I could pull off a Jesus-like resurrection and run up my roll in time for the NFL playoffs.
On Sunday, one NBA game caught my eye. The Cavs limped into Dallas who were Dirk-less and a +3 home dog. I love home dogs so I bet Dallas and the moneyline. It hit at +165.
I pressed that win on the Monday night football game. The Giants seemed too good to be true at -3. They blew out the Redskins and I was off to a hot start.
Never bet on a game that you can't sweat. I scrambled to find the Fordham/Jams Madison game on the radio. I had James Madison -12. They were getting blown out at home by a crappy team. They trailed by double digits at half time. With 7 minutes to go, they held a 2 point lead then went on a run. They were up by 14 with under 10 seconds to go, but a missed free throw and a last second layup fucked me. James Madison won by 12. Push. Fuck me. At least I got my money back.
Sometimes lines jump right off the screen. I was going to type "page" but I don't look for lines in the newspapers anymore like I used to when I was a kid. I saw the -6.5 line in the UNLV/Hawaii game. Sure it's in Hawaii, but the Runnin Rebs have a Sweet 16 caliber team this year. They're even ranked in the top 20 and should have been a double digit favorite in that game. I let it ride on UNLV. The game was on ESPN2. I passed out watching it and missed the 24 point victory. I was 3-0-1 since Sunday.
* * * * *
Change100 posted a 29K score on Pac-Man after a couple of games. I told her that I could beat that in one game using her laptop. Turns out her laptop keys are much different from mine and I posted a horrible showing. Double or nothing. I whiffed again but finally adjusted to her keyboard. Doubled up again and won this time posting 59K. I offered her 3-1 if she could beat that milestone -- but she never came close. I won that battle.
Of course after sprinting out to a huge lead, I lost in our Top Chef fantasy pool. I was at a disadvantage going into the final. I had Kevin and Change100 had both Voltaggio brothers - who finished 1-2 while my guy choked and fizzled out in third. Looks like I owe her a meal at any restaurant where any former top chef contestant currently works.
* * * * *
The parking meters in the slums of Beverly Hills start at 8am daily. My breakfalst ran a little long at the coffeeshop. The time was 7:57. I looked at how much food I had left on my plate. I glanced at the copy of the LA Weekly that I was reading. I had about 8-10 minutes left and decided to risk the ticket and kept eating. Three minutes later, I saw a group of motorcycle cops get ready to leave from the back booth. I told the waiter that I needed to feed the meter and sprinted outside. It was 8:02 and I drove the car forward one spot to a "failed meter" (that was originally taken) to save 25 cents. I enjoyed the rest of my meal.
Original content written and provided by Pauly from Tao of Poker at www.taopoker.com. All rights reserved. RSS feeds are for non-commercial use only.
Before we begin, go read the latest article from Matt Parvis titled... Isildur1 Speaks.
The Editor of PokerNews landed an exclusive interview with the Swedish online apparition otherwise known as Isildur1. They had some incendiary things to say about Brian Hastings, Full Tilt, and Isildur1 getting fleeced for $4 million because Hastings did his homework and assembled a 50,000 hand database of hand histories in matches between Isildur1 versus some of his friends.
My two cents?
Full Tilt was gifted a huge headache of a Christmas present. It's obviously in their best interest to keep Isildur1 playing on Full Tilt and now they are forced to reprimand Hastings and his cronies. The publicity blitz in the poker media surrounding Isildur1's epic rise to fame was significantly greater than the snoozer otherwise known as the "durrrr Challenge". Shit if you were lurking on the rail then you know that durrrr's matches against Isildur1 were some of the most entertaining online action to watch in recent memory... even more so than his matches against Antonius.
Brian Hastings is an idiot. I don't know the guy at all and that sentence might come off as harsh, but the next time I cross paths with the guy I'll say the same thing. "You're an idiot for exposing yourself. You should have kept your mouth shut."
Which brings me to the next point... remember that scene in Goodfellas when young Henry Hill gets pinched for the first time and he thought all the mobsters were pissed at him? But then he found out they were proud because he took his lumps like a man?
Jimmy Conway: A graduation present. (stuffs bills into Henry's pocket)
Young Henry: Why? I got pinched.
Jimmy Conway: Everyone does. You did it right. You told them nothing.
Young Henry: I thought you'd be mad.
Jimmy Conway: I'm not mad, I'm proud of you. You took your first pinch like a man, and learned the two greatest things in life. Look at me. Never rat on your friends... and always keep your mouth shut.
Heck watch the scene here...
About the dirty business of data mining... I used to do it back in the day before Full Tilt banned the practice. My opponents were keeping tabs on me and vice versa. That practice falls on the murky side of online poker.
Of course, here's where I call Brian Hastings a genius. Hastings and his buddies discussed and shared information on how to play Isildur1. I'm sure (no proof, just me talking smack) that Martonas and Isildur1 engaged in lengthy discussions about IKEA, snow, and how to beat the Card Runners guys and durrrr in their native Swedish tongue. If they weren't, then they were foolish. Hastings was much more organized which is why he siphoned off $4 million from Isildur1.
Will Isildur1 get his money back? Who knows. I don't think he should. What's done is done. Let Hastings keep the money. In the end, Hastings still beat the unknown Scandi.
But this situation definitely tarnishes any future high stakes matches. Anytime someone takes down a big score, everyone will wonder if there were shenanigans involved. That's why Hastings should have kept his mouth shut. I know, I know... it's important to maintain the integrity of the game blah blah blah. But in the immortal words of Joey Knish, "Maybe this is a game that can be beat."
I'm back in NYC in my old neighborhood in the Bronx. I ran into Vinny the Barber and he gave me a haircut. We spoke about a variety of topics from Tiger Woods to the international date line to the time he told me he ran 32 miles in a single day. He asked me what kind of poker stories I was writing about. I mentioned something about a potential cheating situation.
"You know about that guy they caught cheating at a poker game on Arthur Avenue?"
"No, when? What happened?"
"This was a couple of years ago. They caught him and chopped off his hand. With an axe."
"What did they do with the hand? Toss it in the East River?"
"Fuck should I know? Probably fed it to the dogs."
Original content written and provided by Pauly from Tao of Poker at www.taopoker.com. All rights reserved. RSS feeds are for non-commercial use only.
Here's this week's LVW col, which avid readers of this space recall from its draft form two days ago when it was posted for a couple of hours before I decided to expand it into a full column. Enjoy! -sf
Casino execs: Why all the hatin'? Vegas collegiality only seems to work in times of plenty
By STEVE FRIESS
"There is an unwritten rule within the gaming industry: Don't disrupt another casino operator's grand opening."
Review-Journal gaming scribe Howard Stutz's Sunday column about the decision by Boyd Gaming to issue its Station counter-offer on Aria’s opening day contained this hilarious line. It’s not hilarious because Stutz is wrong. He’s totally right. It’s hilarious because he wrote about Boyd’s untoward acts of last week, when he easily could have been talking about Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, Phil Ruffin, Steve Wynn or even George Maloof.
As Stutz wrote, Boyd did themselves no favors dropping a bomb that would've been front-page news on a normal day last week. But at least Boyd didn't try to steal the spotlight the same way Adelson, Trump and Ruffin did. Consider:
* Adelson gave his onceish-a-year in-depth interview to Forbes' Matthew Miller on Aria's Opening Day. It's a fascinating exchange in which Adelson goes on about how important his Forbes billionaire's list ranking is in a manner I've never heard any mogul speak. And as for CityCenter? "Even though there is a lot of publicity about it, I haven't heard anyone who's seen it tell me it is going to be a winner. They have no strategy. They have no obvious plan. If they try to compete in the travel and tour business, they will cannibalize all their other properties, like the Bellagio. They don't have a convention space big enough to make an impact. So they built it without a strategy. How ill-advisable is that?"
* Trump: He went on "Larry King Live" on Aria Eve to declare CityCenter ugly, "an absolute catastrophe." Norm Clarke of the R-J theorized that Trump was reacting to MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren's remark to me for my L.A. Weekly opus that the Trump tower in Vegas is hardly prime-time stuff. Either way, MGM Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman had probably the most hilarious comeback of the year, telling Norm of Trump, "I can hardly imagine anyone's opinion that matters less than his." That didn't sit well with Trump, who couldn't bear to give his competitor the last word. He dashed off a hand-written note to Norm, who published it on Saturday, that read: "The CityCenter is architecturally unappealing -- It will be the biggest bust in the history of real estate -- good concept but badly designed and really badly executed. Too bad."
* Ruffin: The owner of the Treasure Island is painted in another Forbes piece out this weekend as something of a savior of CityCenter for buying the resort from MGM Mirage when they were desperate for cash. Ruffin's happy to play that role, sure, but then he drops this completely buried bomb: "They have so many billions of dollars of debt on that project. They are going to have to make so much money every month just to service that debt. That's going to force the MGM guys to go through a lot of pain again, and they'll have to renegotiate their debt but probably also sell off another property or two. I've got at least $500 million in cash and loans I haven't drawn down. And I'd love to own the Bellagio or Mandalay Bay." Shame, really, that he's putting Gilley's in the TI when it would've been so great where the underperforming Conservatory is, you know? But maybe he could get Cirque du Soleil to give him a "Cold Beer, Dirty Girls"-themed show for Mandalay Bay?
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