Withnail’s Guests

The Paperboy visits the Colonies...

Tue, 8 Jun 2010 12:22:00 +0100

So to the Far East courtesy of those generous fellows at Withnail’s Poker School. An overnight flight to Hong Kong (Cattle class on Virgin Atlantic) resulted in two hours fitful sleep. Just as I joined the throng at the immigration queues, I asked someone about the connections to Macau. I was in the wrong queue. He directed me to the ferry desk where they took 200 Hong Kong dollars (£18) off me and my baggage details. Within the hour, I was on the efficient turbo jet ferry to the Vegas of the East. And your bags can be transferred straight through. An excellent arrangement.

Upon disembarkation in Macau, the few on my boat scrambled for the exits and the nearest casinos. But for me, not the cheap clip joints I usually patronize on poker trips. No sir, I'm heading for the most expensive joint in town. They held the Pokerstars APPT in the Lisbao Grand. And grand it is too.
A massive structure, like a golden inverted coffin reaching for the sky. At the reception desk in the voluminous lobby (full of bizarrely monstrous art exhibits), they had no record of me but after some words with my sponsor I was billeted to a giant room with spectacular views across the Macau straits. To the left, I could spot the Wynn and the MGM, in front the three bridges to Taipa island, to the right the residential areas of the old Portuguese town.
The plan was to play Wednesday's session but The Coach decided a trip to Happy Valley racecourse was opportune that evening, so we all elected to play on Thursday's instead which turned out to be a mixed decision because although the racing was a write-off, Day 1c gathered the most entrants (about 150 of a total of 342 entrants).
 I got what seemed a quiet table. On other tables the Aussie commentator was continually commentating on a series of unlikely all-in scenarios with various horrible holdings cracking aces and kings. Eventually, at about level 3, the madness spread to our table. A local player and a Malaysian got all their chips in on a flop of 2-5-10; one held 58 the other K5. The Malaysian had complained earlier of a lack of sleep. Perhaps that it explained his crack up. Suitably emboldened our hero with K5 began to bully the table, annoyingly attacking my blinds with regularity. I re-raised him once with A2 but the bugger immediately re-raised me all-in. I thought it was a bit early to make a stand. Nevertheless various other solid players cracked up in the next few levels and I survived as predicted to Day 2, with a miserable stack of 13000.
 Day 2, and I was seated immediately to the right of none other than the esteemed Withnail. Doh! Better not fock up, impossible to gild the lily if I got busted. Fortunately on the very first hand I picked up my best hand of the whole tournament. (JJ was the best I picked up on the first day). The big Aussie in first position moved all-in with QQ and my KK held up. This still left me way off the pace, such was the miserable stack I had nurtured from Day 1. Sometime later, one of the locals pushed a tiny stack all-in, I re-raised with A10. But Withnail re-raised and I was forced to pass. His AK took down the pot. From that point I won one more coin toss. Eventually I found 99 on the button, another Aussie (the same geezer that knocked out Withnail a few hands earlier) decided to call me with 2 'overs' and I was eliminated at 78 or 79th position. Some way off the money unfortunately.
So it was now time to funk for the Coach. After I watched him crack AA and 77 with his KQ I was confident he would go deep. In fact he made the final. However he had the smallest stack and my funking powers were unavailing as he finished ninth, still an excellent result as he never developed a big stack on the last 3 or 4 tables. And not a bad result for Withnail’s poker school (Although I failed to break the Guest’s Curse). On balance a trip to be recommended in future.
A few negs. The town seemed expensive compared to Vegas, the side action was good but the rakes very heavy especially in the smaller games, 2-4, 3-6 games attracted a rake of 5% capped at the equivalent of £15 pounds, the larger games better value with a cap of £20. A small walk to the Wynn to find the only legal Omaha table in the territory. At 10-20 it was too big for my pocket so most of my down time was spent in the bars and clubs and ridiculously expensive restaurants. The Coach generously bought me two decent cigars and Withnail paid for various crazy cab journeys around the two main islands on our only real sight-seeing effort. My only coup was finding an entertaining late night watering hole and disco populated with many ladies of dubious morals. However Withnail and I sat quietly in the corner watching the Champions League final live at 3am. A rare bonus as the casino insisted on featuring rowing and show jumping on their sports screens!
Many thanks to Withnail (and the Coach) for the massive steaks and indeed the massive stake.
Lawrence Robjent

Dave Colclough in Las Vegas - Part 2

Tue, 8 Jun 2010 12:10:19 +0100

...I spent the next couple of days acclimatising (god I love the sun and the heat, why am I so white?) and re-adjusting the body clock to be wide awake at high noon Vegas time, with all the grey matter buzzing at full speed. So I also played a couple of the warm-up tourneys to get my eye in.

In addition to the recession, Jack had managed to cock up the schedule with too many re-buy fests and the numbers were desperately down on expectations. I was playing in tourneys with 60 or 70 runners that would have had 600 or 700 runners only a couple of years back... and much of the field appeared European to boot. There were probably more Irish, French and English than Yanks. Erm, not to mention the two Welshmen. One of whom won one of the $1000 NLH comps. Unfortunately for me, it was Iwan Jones.

However, I wasn’t having that bad a time of it. Conspiracy theorists alert! Whilst logged in on a Bellagio IP address I just ran like god online. My negative EV of -12k turned around to +5k whilst on a 30k upswing. In English that means although I won playing well, I was also very lucky. As opposed to the opposite run in sunny concrete jungle Brum back in Blighty. Strange but true. Even stranger is that my EV has now returned to -12k upon my return home. It was fun while it lasted though and put me in a positive mood for the big one.

I had a strong starting table on Day 1 with Prahlad Friedman, Martin De Knijff and a group of the latest internet whiz kids. A couple were ranked 1st and 2nd on some online list somewhere. Neverthelss I was reasonably happy as I have different opinions to The Coach on how good the latest generation of whiz kids are in the live environment.

Over dinner at the end of play, Keith enthused as to how one of ‘them’ had milked him on every street including a nice river value bet with Queens when he had Jacks. Personally I think I, or say Mickey Wernick, could have made exactly the same river bet. Not because we had Queens and he ‘knew’ Keith had Jacks on a 10 high board, but because it is a good bet against most hands. It’ll get called by some weaker ones, it won’t get raised by many stronger hands, and it probably drastically reduces the likelihood of losing the pot to a ‘bluff’. I’d call it an all-round good stopper bet. Keith calls it a brilliant Internet whiz kid read, incredibly thin maximum value, value-bet. Bored yet? Nuff said.

The point is, the kids didn’t appear to be any sort of special problem in my eyes. In fact Prahlad was table chip leader at the end of the day and he is closer to us than ‘them’. Having said all that, I ended the day with fewer chips than I started with. Doh.

With a Day 1 deepstack (100k starting chips) you don’t make your money from a measly one pair like Aces or Kings. You need to hit a few flops and find someone to pay you off. Unfortunately I didn’t. I saw about 20 flops with small pairs without once making a set on a plethora of Ace High boards.

I made a nut flush against Martin De Knijff when he held a lower flush; however the river brought a fourth heart that killed my action. He passed his hand with a look of utter disgust; “How unlucky had he been with that fourth heart giving me a higher flush?” I so wanted to tell him quite the contrary my dear chap, that fourth heart saved you 30k. I already had it. But I patiently held my tongue.

My Day 2 table was altogether different and my hand holding improved as well. I was sat next to the effervescent David Benyamine who spent the first four hours text flirting with seven or eight of his girlfriends. Overnight he was one of the chip leaders, so I guess he felt there was no need to get involved. In between chatting about the old days at The Aviation Club in Paris he casually mentioned he had lost the odd 14 mill online over the last couple of years. No problem though, he was winning well live... where did I miss this boat?

Mr Benyamine went on several days later to make the Final Table of this event along with another of my Day 2 opponents, David Williams. The Williams boy went slightly better than making the final table, as he actually won the whole schamoodle. Strangely though, he hadn’t even turned up for Day 1! For this event, the policy is that buy-ins don’t close until the end of level 2 on Day 2. Believe it or not 20% of the field didn’t buy in until Day 2. It didn’t do David Williams any harm! He was to prove my nemesis. He was ducking and diving, messing about, floating and stealing all over the place. However, the twice I tangled with him, he had me by the short & curlies. The most expensive blow came when my pocket Kings made a set on the turn, but were behind to David’s flopped nut flush. I couldn’t find a pair-up on the river and I was left on life-support.

Just before the end of the day my adjacent French Friend finally put me to the guillotine in a typical blinds on blind skirmish (It’s not what you’re thinking!), and I was left to support Withnail and The Coach and worry about the volcanic ash clouds and getting home... Did I really want to come home though?

DC

Dave Colclough in Las Vegas - Part 1

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:11:06 +0000

So here we are in Vegas again. I’ve been here around 30 times over the last 20 years and at last this ever-changing city appears to be slowing down. The recession has clamped its iron fists around the ankles of the fastest growing city in the US. The rarity of a new project like The City Centre has finally opened, after a construction stage that lasted several years rather than the usual couple of months needed to knock up a brand new casino gaff such as The Wynn in the last decade.

But somehow our eastern European taxi driver manages to skirt around two or three sides of the latest Vegas addition without getting within viewing distance, while managing to clock up a $30 fare for a journey of three miles as the crow flies ... 13 miles as the Vegas breadline cabbie hustler flies. He’s only trying to make a living though and even Joe can’t be bothered to protest.

I’d arrived via the Virgin Atlantic Premier Economy personal cinema lounge having got through the usual cocktail of big screen entertainment on my, erm, 10” fold away plasma. I’d been over-fed five times in ten hours and my belly thought it was The Camel’s baby brother. So I’m looking out of the window across the strip at The Desert Passage gaff thinking how easy the trip was nowadays when I found myself thinking back to my first trip when Vegas was ‘an experience’, one of those Jack Nicholson bucket list thingies you just gotta do before you die.
In the mid-eighties I’d somehow flown into LAX, cattle class of course, because the small town Las Vegas wasn’t considered worthy of a direct flight from London Town. So me and the missus (that’s four missus’s back...or is it five?) hired a car and drove up to Nevada through the desert. Now that’s what I call living.

We had stopped off in Death Valley for an afternoon ice cream soda. That was actually a coca cola with a lump, sorry two lumps, of Ice Cream floating in it. Gross. But when in Rome, as they say... So now it’s 7 or 8pm and pitch dark. We’re driving up an unlit desert road miles from civilisation or lights in any direction. We probably pass a car in the opposite direction every ten minutes and its dark, really dark. It’s black black as Dylan used to say.

We had the windows down and the air was typical end of desert day sticky but it also had an electric static tension feel to it. Just when those memories of broken down car scenes from Stephen King films were beginning to lurk at the back of the old grey matter, an orange glow appeared on the horizon... .... Vegas.

For a couple of hours we drove through the dark listening to 15 year old Who songs being played on Radio Hicksville (the same Who songs that are still being played 25 years later). The orange glow got brighter and the atmosphere got more tingly and more electric to the point you could almost hear it... now that’s the way to travel up to Vegas. I promise you. It’s a memory that will long outlast even the sickest of those bad beat stories that linger on.

We had no hotel booked and looking back I wonder how we even got past The Gestapo at LA immigration control. Surely tourists weren’t actually welcomed to the US in those days? Nope sorry, I can’t remember. Anyway, the old radio is on and one of the adverts, sorry one of the ‘commercials’, is for The Aladdin Casino, queen size doubles for just $14 a night, and that’s the first place we stayed.

The Aladdin was a victim of the Vegas “bigger and better program”, being demolished around the turn of the century. It was replaced by The New Aladdin, later re-branded The Desert Passage. Aha you see. And here we are now, 25 years later stopping in some gaff with a few fountains just across the road.

So let’s get back to Bellagio 2010. The WPT Grand Final. The event that was once the biggest buy-in (if not quite the biggest prize pool) on the poker calendar. Nowadays I can’t afford to stump up the 25 large ones for this myself but fortunately, very fortunately, the Withnail Insurance Cartel had very generously offered to put me in it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

So after the obligatory nap, I wandered into the half-empty Bellagio cardroom just after midnight. Wow. The recession has really hit Vegas. This cardroom has been an over-flowing, splitting at the seams, throbbing throng of poker activity ever since Chris Moneymaker ran like God for a week. I remember doing battle here in a half-empty cardroom, with a very young Matador Juan Carlos Mortensen in August 2000 just after it opened its doors to the strobe-light of day. But my god, what’s happened now? No more 30-deep waiting lists that cost a twenty bucks back-hander just so you’re not overlooked. I actually had a choice of seats in a choice of 2-5 NLH games. Nice one. I was in, straight in action in what appeared to be the friendliest (drunkest?) game that appeared in the middle of the room. Regardless of the perfect game-selection strategy I still managed to do my $500 in less than an hour, with pocket cowboys (as we are now in Vegas) against a mighty A3 double suited.

What a nice game though. Poker players enjoying themselves? Win or lose? It definitely wasn’t like that 25 years ago. Nowadays I’m playing with a couple of internet whiz kids with more physical tells than Jackanory, a bunch of guys from this week’s telecoms conference, and possibly two live pros. 25 years back I was the tourist victim surrounded by a complete table of slobbering-at-the-mouth, hardened live pros. And a couple of the poor afore-mentioned individuals weren’t going to be able to put food in the fridge tonight because they didn’t get my money.

One pleasant change that the Vegas revolution has brought is the clientele. Now boasting around 20 of the world’s 25 biggest, bestest hotels, it has become the conference centre of the world. Outside on the Strip, the plethora of legless Vietnam war vets have been replaced by a couple of million conference attendees. The three varieties of legless Vietnam veterans (those with one leg, those with none, and those with a 24 hours a day alcohol habit) were probably deemed ‘unseemly’ and perhaps they finally got looked after accordingly. There were surely too many of them too get rid of in the desert, Robert DeNiro style....

DC

Neil Channing - Latin American Poker Tour Leg 2, Punta del Este, Uruguay

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:26:03 +0000

Withnail’s Aussie Millions Leg - Julian “YoYo” Thew

Fri, 5 Feb 2010 08:04:28 +0000

What a privilege it was to be invited to a summery Melbourne on Withnail’s ticket.

I was approached in September and just about managed to contain my excitement at the chance of another crack at an Aussie Millions title. It’s been seven long years since I was last there and for one thing the flight via Hong Kong didn’t feel as tedious as I remember, although I suspect the more you fly long distance the more accustomed to it you become.

2010 sees me shifting my focus from tourney-plodder to cash game-grinder so a shot at another big buy-in event was a welcome change from the 1-2 cash game which is currently my regular haunt at DTD.

I played Day1b and the event looked like it had a good structure with a 20k stack and ninety minute levels. My table looked OK, with former champion Lee Nelson, two Brits I knew, no Scandis and a handful of locals.

An hour in and card dead I felt the need to make a play and sandwiched between the two Brits an opportunity arose on the button. The cut-off opened to 250 and I made it 700 with 5-6s, only for the SB to four bet to 1700. Obviously I called and when he checked the ace high flop I fired and fired once more on the turn. He flipped his kings up and I dragged the pot.

Unfortunately that little play was both the most fun I had and the high point, as I met a succession of nasty and nastier decisions. I should probably have sensed all was not well when I got a five minute penalty for texting at the table and taken a longer break in the sunshine.

A few hands later it went call, raise on the button and I three bet to 2000 with AhKh. The raiser called and I happily led out for 2000 on the Ad,Qd,9 flop but was put to the test when he immediately made it 6000. Hating life, I swallowed and surrendered the pot. I’m in my forties now and it felt way too early to be going broke with top pair, top kicker. Die A-K!

More pots where I’d made two pair on a four to a straight or flush by the river came and went. By the time we made level 3 I was somehow down to 6000. Inconceivable. This was still OK though, if you ignored the average. Still sitting with 30 BB’s minus a running ante, I just wish I’d found a fold on the following hand. A tight player had limped, the SB made it up and I checked Jc-8c. The flop fell J,J,3 and the SB led out for 500. I called and the tight guy made it 1500 pretty swiftly. The SB folded and despite having a really bad feeling about the situation my hand just felt too strong to bin so I shipped my last 5000 in and he called pretty sharpish with 3-3. No suck-outs ensued and I was busto.

Very disappointing! Of course there are worse places to wander around when you’re depressed but it still took a new day to shake off the gloom.

The best line I heard in the cardroom was this from a grizzled old gent who was raising every pot in the 2-5. When someone asked why he was so aggressive he replied, ‘I’ve got a million buy-ins’. Now if only I could have convinced him to relocate to Nottingham...

Julian