How I got permanently banned from a casino

Not many people have been banned from a casino. I think that casinos and churches are the two most welcoming places in the world, so to be banned from a casino, you would have to do something very naughty. (As a side note, I once wasn’t allowed into a church, too)

This is how I got permanently banned from a casino

We were playing in a pot-limit Texas Hold’em re-buy tournament at the International Casino Aberdeen (UK) on December 2, 2002. The buy-ins, re-buys and top-ups were 20 pounds and I had paid a total of 120 pounds that night, or 6 buy-ins. A total of 40 players were there, with an average of 4.2 buy-ins per player and a pot of 3,360 pounds. First, second and third place prizes were 2,016 pounds (60% or $3,306), 840 pounds (25% or $1,378), and 336 pounds (10% or $551), respectively.

I played pretty tight. Heck, I chunked an AKo, once because there were two raisers. I later got lucky when my K-rag in the blind caught a K on the river, which kept me alive. I played tight, but I attacked this one maniac that would play with anything. Next thing I know, I am the chip leader and there are 4 of us left, including Stephen, Arab, and Jerk.

It is now 2:10 in the morning and I remember that there is a rule at this casino that if the tournament is still going at 2:30am, the prizes will be given based on who has the largest, second largest and third largest stack. Only once in two years had I seen this rule come into play, but the large field combined with the tight play at the final table made this one really drag out.

Stephen, Arab and I make a very generous offer to jerk to split the money up 50%, 25%, 15% and 10%. Jerk had so few chips this was very much in his favor, but he declined. He actually made a bit of a scene about this, which I found odd. Just decline the offer and play, dude. Then I ask the dealer if I am right in recalling the 2:30 rule, and he says, “Yes.” I also ask if a player gets 2 minutes for each decision and he again says, “Yes.” I then employ the only logical strategy. I call on each street, taking 2 minutes per decision, making each hand last a minimum of 8 minutes, ensuring no more than 3 more hands will be dealt and that I get my 60% prize.

Well Stephen and Arab quickly figure out what is going on and they join in my strategy, which basically assures that this will be the last hand. Then, Jerk freaks out and starts telling me he is going to kill me with his bare hands because I am a “cheat.” Being a foreigner and being the youngest kid in the joint, I keep my mouth shut (and if you know me, you know how rarely that happens.) The dealer suspends play to discuss the situation with the manager.

I am sitting there thinking that there are really only two possible outcomes:

1) They decide what we were doing is ok and that I get my 60%

2) They decide that while we did not break the letter of rules, we broke the spirit of the rules and force us to make decisions in something below 2 minutes, say 30 seconds.

I have so many chips that really under option 2, I do not foresee any chance greater than 1 in a 100 of losing first place.

They come back and decide option 2. OK, Let’s play. No, Jerk says that he hates me so much that he refuses to play with me under any circumstance. So, the manger reverses her decision and says we’ll split the pot 4-way evenly. WHAT?

I have not heard a worse decision since the AFC Championship Game in 1979.

I decide to put the 840 pounds in my pocket before I speak up, because the current trend is for each decision to be worse for me than the one before. I collect my money and talk to the manger. We decide that it is best for us all to go home (it is quite late) and she’ll be happy to discus it further the next day. She tells me, “It is all ok, you did nothing wrong and Jerk is a, um, jerk.”

I get busy at work, so it takes 5 days for me to get to the casino to discuss with her. When I check in, I am told that I have been suspended and must immediately leave the premises. I ask why and ask to speak to the manager (who told me it was ‘all ok’) but am just told to leave. Later I get a letter which is pretty vague about everything except that I can’t play there for 3 months.

Stephen calls me and tells me that he played there 2 days after “the incident” no problem. However, when he returned 3 days after that, he learned he had been suspended for “his behavior 5 days earlier.” He asks why he was allowed to play just 3 nights ago and all of a sudden he now can’t play. He is told it is a private institution and that they can suspend membership for any reason at any time and they do not need to justify their actions.

Stephen did some research and evidently Jerk was overheard telling the manager a few days after the “incident” that if he ever saw me, Stephen, or Arab there again, he would never come back. The casino decides to suspend me and Stephen, but not Arab.

Stephen explained to me that Jerk and Arab both dump a ton of money on the blackjack tables on a regular basis. Basically, the casino made a decision to favor good customers at the expense of two disposable customers.

I call the UK Gaming Board and launch a complaint. They perform an investigation, including interviews of the casino employees. The casino is told that if everything I allege is true, then they will lose their gaming license. The casino employees get their lies straight and tell a very different story than the one I just told. The inspector, after his 2 month long investigation, tells me that he apologizes, but since the key facts on which we disagreed can’t be proven (there was no “eye-in-the-sky”), there is little he can do. The only condolence he gave me was that if what I said was true, I got hosed and the casino deserves to lose their license.

It might not surprise you that shortly after the investigation was complete, I received a lifetime ban from the casino.

True story.

It sure has been a long time since I posted anything here! I meant to make some posts this weekend, but I was running myself ragged with the pre-holiday madness, crazy newly-engaged wedding things, and a touch of the flu that showed up on Saturday night and is just now starting to go away.

As usual, I think I will mostly respond to Fro’s posts: I have my own take on the NL game the other night and the numbers he has for the charity tournament only bolster my earlier arguments against it.

Friday Night’s No Limit Game

Fro and I were the only winners. I won $316 and Fro won $184. There were five other players in the pot, so that means that everyone else lost $100 on average. I know that a couple of guys lost even more than that and the others just lost 2-3 $20 buyins. Two of the other players are very green (JJ and Todd B), one is an habitual bluffer (Baird), one is a relatively tight and cautious woman with a little bit of poker experience (Kim), and the other is Chris, who is a good player.

That said, while I think the results are little bit skewed in Fro’s and my favor – for instance, I would have expected Chris to be a small winner – I don’t think the results are all too unexpected. If you ask anyone who is knowledgable about poker, he will always say that No Limit and Pot Limit (”big bet”) games are the games that most definitively separate the good players from the bad players. Fro and I love to play cards. We talk about poker often and we think about the game nearly all the time. This means that we are better at identifying situations where we have an edge, and then in the context of Friday’s big bet game, we had the maximum means of exploiting those edges when they arose. For this very reason, no professonal cardroom in Vegas or LA ever spreads big bet games. The good players win too much and the bad players lose too much and that makes for action that will eventually dwindle out when the bad players run out of money. Limit poker is designed the limit the amount one can lose on any one hand. A badly played big hand in limit poker might only cost you 8-10 bets; a badly played big hand in big bet poker can cost you your entire stack.

When Fro played his first no-limit game back in October, the quality of the other players was much better than we had here on Friday. While this made for a very lucrative game, it also made for a less-competitive game.

One final thing on the game – I’ve been thinking about our structure of limiting the size of one’s buy-in. Ostensibly, we do this to protect the players from abusive big stacks because it prevents any one person from buying into the game for a lot of chips and then bullying his way through the game. This is a fine idea at first, but I think it’s inherently unfair because by limiting the buy-in of players who have lost their stack, we are automatically setting them at a disadvantage because they are still vulnerable to bullying from the players with big stacks. While these big stacks are not necessarily their “own” money, it’s still a big stack and thus a weapon. In the future, it might be fairer to allow buy-ins to grow as the night progresses or perhaps to allow people to buy in for an amount equal to whatever they already have in the game.

The Charity Tournament

I noted this tournament about a month ago and said at the time that I wanted to think about it. I have thought about it and I think it’s a bad proposition because of the portion that is donated to charity.

Using Fro’s numbers below, the average prize size for the top eight players is $3125 ($25,000 / 8), but those eight players each have $5670 ($210 x 216 / invested in the pot. This is a losing proposition in the long run, because the payout (16:1) does not match the odds of winning (26:1).

Granted, this is poker and the odds of winning are not always even money, they are usually better for more skilled players, especially in a ESPN-Wannabe situation like this. But I seriously doubt that one’s edge would be so great so as to overcome the discrpancy in the payout. You might also make the point that having a chance to play for free in the WSOP or even a WSOP satellite is worth the gamble, but in that case, the grand prize is just an entry into another tournament against some of the best players in the world, and in that situation you’re odds of winning are definitely less than even money! Getting the chance to be dead money to Chris Ferguson or Phil Ivey is not too appealing to me, but perhaps the opportunity simply to play is the appeal to many players here. But not to me.

Then again, it’s for charity and perhaps that and all of the other intangibles are what make a difference in this situation.

Junell pointed out that the prizes include airfare and hotel, so if that has a $1,000 value times 8 people, then the adjusted numbers are

216 Players

$210.00 Fee

$45,360.00 Pot

$11,000.00 Grand Prize (w/ trip)

$14,000.00 2nd-8th (w/ trip)

$20,360.00 Profit to Charity

$94.26 Portion of fee to Charity

$115.74 Portion of fee to Pot

There has been a lot of talk about this charity poker tournament, and I just might give it a whirl. Note that:

216 Players

$210.00 Fee

$45,360.00 Pot

$10,000.00 Grand Prize

$7,000.00 2nd-8th

$28,360.00 Profit to Charity

$131.30 Portion of fee to Charity

$78.70 Portion of fee to pot

So, you are giving away $131 to charity, which I imagine you could put on your schedule A deductions (assuming you itemize).

Last night we played no limit holdem at John’s. As predicted in the post immediately below, it basically played out like a tourney with people either busting out or scoring big. JMG had a monster stack and used it as a weapon. I felt like if I, just once, had a decent hand, he would bluff into me and I would make him regret it. The perfect situation never arose. I ended up winning $184.

The biggest lesson from last night that many learned was to not let people catch up with you…if you have it, bet it. Also, drawing hands were too expensive to chase, so the A-rag hands seemed to do better than, say, suited connectors.

jack-6 was the hand of the night

An email to JG on Friday

…aye, but 1 or 2 hands in NL can make or break you. I am going to focus on the subject of my most recent post and subject of many other ramblings: the change in psycology of players if they are way up or way down.

I’ll pass on the usual strategy of pushing in big money to take advantage of small edges early….I’ll wait till I very much have the best of it. I do much better taking advantage of a man when he is down than the other way around, so I have to avoid an early devastating loss.

When we played NL at my house, it really played out like a tournament, since people would quit after they loss $x and at the end of the night that left only 2 of us. Thus, employing single table rebuy tournament stratgey would be appropriate 2nite…