« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 »
June 22, 2007
WSOP
It sounds like the WSOP is raging on without me. I'm mired in work here in Cambridge and have been almost blissfully unaware of the poker world congregating on the other side of the country. I've lost contact with all but a few poker friends (and most non-poker ones too) so what little I've heard has come through news feeds.
From what I have heard directly though, people who've won seats to the main event are being given the option to just pocket the cash instead. So I expect this year's will be the first in recent memory (and maybe the first ever, but I'm too lazy to look it up) to be smaller than the one previous. I will be surprised if it tops 5,000 players at that rate, and 3-4 thousand seems reasonable.
When you think about it though, that's still pretty amazing. Tournaments with $40 million dollar prize pools were unheard of when I first started playing, and with the exception of Mike Sexton, I'm not sure anyone expected such a thing might happen in our lifetimes.
Harrah's is, of course, doing the right thing from their perspectives. The vig on a few thousand main event entrants is nowhere near worth the legal hassle they'd possibly incur by letting PokerStars and others buy people seats. Within a few years this entire mess seems like it will be sorted out anyway.
Looking through the year's results were surprising. It seems almost entirely like random people winning. I mean, you expect that to an extent, given the size of the fields, but this year it seems like unknowns are bagging far more than the last two.
While I don't really miss poker lately, and am more than glad to be far away from the three ring circus that Harrah's now calls the World Series, I do miss Las Vegas. I haven't seen many of the people I've spent so much time with over the last four years. I keep getting these free trip offers in the mail from Harrah's, and they remind me of the food I'm missing.
Sorry if I haven't been keeping up with this blog, but you've probably come to expect that by now. I've been busy writing in many different places, including some private stuff. And I'm also getting married in under a week. That's been time-consuming, even though I'm a ten hour drive away from my fiancée, who is doing most of the planning at this point.
So since I won't have much time between now and then, I'll set the over/under for this year's WSOP main event entrants at 4,500. What's your bet?
Posted by themaroon at 11:58 PM | Comments (3)
June 11, 2007
WSOP ME
Quick question for you guys. Given the lack of third party buyins (it's my understanding that player who won a main event seat online will have the option of pocketing the $10k, though I could be wrong), how many entrants will this year's WSOP main event have?
And have any of you won a seat anywhere? What's the procedure like?
If people do actually have the ability to pocket the change rather than buy in directly from online satellites, I'll be surprised if it tops 5,000 entrants. Am I way off here?
Posted by themaroon at 10:09 PM | Comments (8)
June 8, 2007
Harrah's
Richard's banning from Harrah's was already getting some serious publicity in the poker world, but now it's crossed over into mainstream news. Even Freakonomics published a brief article about it. He had asked me if he should blog about it when it happened. I guess he chose wisely.
I wonder what I would do in Harrah's situation. If a casino executive thinks a customer is a long term winner at video poker, it can only be for a few reasons. One is that they are using some sort of device to jackpot the machines, and that's fairly easy to check for. And if you thought someone was doing that you wouldn't ban them. You'd catch them and have them put in jail for a very long time (Nevada doesn't mess around when it comes to scamming casinos), so that one is out.
The second option is that your machines have bad payout tables. I don't know what the auditing process is, but again that would be easy to determine, and obviously isn't the case.
The third is that the player is losing at the machines but getting it all back and then some from the comps. So the logical course of action would, at first glance, appear to be to cut off their comps and have your security guards monitor them every time they set foot in the casino, just to make sure it wasn't some sort of foul play.
I'm not sure about the legality of that though. Can Harrah's just say "Sorry Mr. Brodie, we can't continue comping you"? I really don't know, but I would assume they could. I also don't know if they could simply invalidate past comps, but again I assume they could. They typically are granted pretty broad powers in such areas.
So the question is, from their perspective, is a total comp cutoff better than just banning the offender? Banning has at least one advantage. For one, it gives Harrah's the power to have him arrested at a later date. Perhaps they think doing so will prevent other people from legally trying to take advantage of them. Of course it won't, but it seems higher-ups in corporations often think along those lines. I do know of two people who've been arrested for going back into a casino they were blacklisted from, both times just to eat (one ate, left, and returned to leave a tip). It may not be a deterrent to future customers, but it's definitely revenge.
Also it might look unusually shady if Harrah's invalidated comps Richard already had, if he already had any, assuming it's legal to do so. It's probably better from their perspective to tell any other high rollers who catch wind that he was abusing the machines (most of them probably have no idea that such a thing is impossible) than to look as if they just take comps away from people who accrue too many.
But then, it also looks very poor to ban someone who has done nothing more than win, with no real accusation of impropriety. And Harrah's could possibly have made thousands in WSOP entry fees from Richard. Plus he might choose to eat dinner at Caesar's and actually pay for it.
So what I would do, as the Harrah's exec in charge of this, is see if he had comps outstanding, and if so, if I could invalidate them and any future comps. If he had a ton of them saved up and I couldn't legally erase them, I'd probably ban him since it would cost less that way than whatever fallout might ensue.
If he had few or no comps, or if I could legally revoke them, I'd just do that and gladly take the profit from any future video poker play and any poker tournaments. I'd issue a very official "we don't comment on such matters" to anyone, as I would anytime I was publicly asked about those types of situations. I'd lean more towards that option for sure in the case of Richard, who has a well-read blog and is well-known in the very connected poker community.
I do think it sucks for Richard. I've known him for a while, and the streak of good luck that got him banned is definitely far from the only video poker he has played. If it were my casino, I'd welcome him with a smiling host and just wait for the digital cards to average out. At my casino, the comps would be as carefully controlled as the payout tables, so nobody really could take advantage of them. And of course at my casino, he wouldn't need comps since dinner would be on me.
Posted by themaroon at 4:17 AM | Comments (1)