Long ways to go to make $15

PlayersOnly still has their monthly $200 deposit bonus: deposit $200, get $200 free, play through $8200, and withdraw whatever you have left. Blackjack's the best game available to do this with, but the variance the last two months has been brutal, and my impatience hasn't helped.

In March, playing a flat $5 per hand, I ended up ahead $389. In April, wanting to do just as well, I increased my bets when I fell behind, which made me end up even further behind, and eventually -- several hands short of meeting the wagering requirements, I ended up at $0.

This weekend, learning from my April mistake, I went too far the other direction and played a flat $2 per hand, grinding through 4100 hands. With a standard deviation of 1.2 and a variance of 1.44, then 66% of the time, I'd end up between +$101 and +305. And 90% of the time, I'll end up between -$150 and +$457. I was in the latter variance this time, ending up -$90.

After weighing the hassle of requesting a $110 check, waiting for it to clear, depositing it, and having it as a reminder of my lost $90, I tilted a bit, decided to take it to the baccarat table and place a bet with the absolute lowest house edge in the casino. $110 on the banker. Fortunately, I won, and withdrew $215.

That site's gonna give me an ulcer if June ends up just as icky.

Fourth best night ever

Back in the summer of 2006, the heyday of bonus hunting, before the UIGEA scared off all the online casinos from taking US players, I had some good winning days:

• $900 from Vegas Strip Casino (it took 15 days after wagering was complete to get the money in Neteller)
• $790 from Prism (which took five weeks to extract from their accounting department, and they've spammed me incessantly ever since)
• $610 from Silver Sands Casino (which showed up a couple days later)

But since the UIGEA, it's been slim pickings out there. This week, though, I played the Wednesday bonus at PlayersOnly, and netted +$504. This is better than the $400 I made from the same casino last November.

Now that's a good start for the year. They limit me to one withdrawal a month, and I did one January 2, so I'll need to wait a couple of weeks before I get cash in hand. I hope they stay in business that long.

Matching Wednesday scaled way back

In my mailbox from PlayersOnly.com this morning:

Starting in December the Match200 bonus will not be awarded every Wednesday of the calendar month. Instead, you’ll be able to register for this promotion and receive 1 bonus per month per account or household.

I figured that Matching Wednesdays was too good to last for long (deposit $200, get $200 more, playthrough $4200, profit!). In the four Wednesdays I played, I was +$100, +$400, +$100, and +$22. Not bad for a few hours work. It's still a good deal at once a month, and it'll help my cash flow to be able to get the payout check before I have to make another deposit. My gambling funds envelope is looking awfully thin with four $200 payments removed.

On top of that, I've started playing in their poker room. They're either really bad players, or my loosening up of starting hands is paying off. I'm inclined to think it's bad play, though, because the first time I did really well at online poker, it was at another casino that had a poker table "on the side." Kind of like my adventure at the bowling alley in Wenatchee a couple of years ago. Or, as my cousin used to tell it, like Tower Lanes in Tacoma (amazing -- link still works!).

Matching Wednesday

It's been a relatively gambling free few weeks, with one exception.

Three weeks ago a newsletter I subscribe to announced that PlayersOnly.com had a surprisingly good bonus offer. Deposit $200 on Wednesday, bet $200 on Wednesday, and you get a $200 bonus the next day. To collect the bonus, playthrough is 20x, or $4000.

So basically, deposit $200, get $200 more for free, and wager $4200. If you play blackjack, a 0.54% house edge game, you'll have an average loss to the house of $4200 x 0.0054, or $22.68, for an average net profit of $177.32. Even at $5 a hand, it goes fairly quickly.

The first week, I ended up $100; the second, $400 more.

PlayersOnly has the appearance of a fairly solid online casino. They've had glossy multi-page ads in Card Player and Poker News for several months now; they've gotten very little bad press on Casinomeister.com; and they have the recommendation of OBJ as one of the few sites that still take US players. I goofed on week 1 and deposited in their sister site, Sportsbook.com, and the withdrawal of a check for those funds arrived fairly quickly.

The only drawback -- any withdrawals after the first one each calendar month are assessed a $40 fee. Essentially, it's one withdrawal per month.

First card ace, second card ace, third card ace

I played the First Card Ace coupon again today at Palace. I was dealt another ace, and split them against the dealer's 5.

My first hand became A5, and my second became AA. I split my second hand, so it became A8, and my third hand became A8.

So I've got A5, A8, and A8 against a dealer 5. Very nice. The dealer takes his first card -- OMFG, it's a 6. He takes the next card, and I breathe again: it's a 2. He takes a fourth card, snags an 8, hitting 21, and taking my $75.

Ouch.

Back in black

I keep a fairly detailed history of my gambling wins and losses, mostly so I don't lie to myself and think I'm a better poker player than I am, but also for tax purposes. For 2007, my total wins have been in the red after losing $52.80 on PokerStars on February 16.

Until last night.

I swung by Happy Days to use my match plays at about 10:15 p.m., winning both hands of blackjack (+$40). I then went to Palace and played poker for about three hours. It was a quiet table -- which usually means a tight table -- and with a husband/wife pair in seats 1 and 5, I figured there might be some unintentional soft play between them. She won a straight flush jackpot and a quad kings jackpot, which was great, because she saw almost every flop and then folded the majority of the turns. He earned the nickname "The Fisherman" for his ability to fish for a card on the river and catch it (busted my jacks with a rivered 9 for a set; rivered a flush on me twice; did it a lot more with several other people).

I got to the point that whenever he was in going to the river with two of a suit showing, we'd all ask The Fisherman what bait he was using, whether he was going to catch anything, and so on. "A real big lure!" he beamed, and the majority of the time, he'd hit a card that helped.

Contrary to how I might have felt in the past, I really like players who draw to the river to try and beat me. He had a 1-in-22 chance to get his nine (1-in-45 really, since his wife mucked the last nine), and the pot wasn't $132 going to the river. Late in the session, a pair of ladies moved over from another table, one with a poker t-shirt "I can't believe you played that crap" and one with a denim jacket from The Riviera hotel in Vegas. They played tight, but I took my final monster pot from Riv holding KJo on the button, with a board of T3J/K/J, when she held JT.

Raising drawing hands in late position: that's where the hole in my game was. I wasn't doing it nearly enough. I've been doing it for more than a month now, and the change is dramatic. +$200 at Palace last night.

Then, at 1:30 a.m., I returned to Happy Days to use the match plays. Blackjack was full, so I played Pai Gow, winning one and losing one (+$10). I'm +$165 in match play, 22-28. I grabbed another four Gambling Journals from Palace, and was going to grab the last two from Happy Days, but the guy to my right at the Pai Gow table asked about the coupons, so I showed him where to get them.

For the night, +$250. This brings my 2007 gambling winnings back above zero, to $74.32. Excluding bonuses and other games, my poker winnings for 2007 are just below zero, at -$5.47. I'm a happy person.

Bonus not better after all

On Tuesday, the dealer told me that the bonus coupons were limited to two per day instead of three; the pit boss confirmed. My guess is that the poker room match play coupons are allowed three per day (one of each color), but that the newspaper coupons I have are limited to two per day. Whether "day" means calendar day (midnight to midnight) or business day (11 AM to 7 AM), I'm not sure, and I've doubled up a few days, thinking I might find out.

Seeing that there's nobody there at 6:30 a.m. who was there at 5:00 p.m. the previous calendar day, and that nobody who was there at 5:00 p.m. was there at 6:30 a.m. the previous business day, I was able to play four coupons per day. With the previous two-per-day poker match play coupons, a pit boss has told me in the past "you can only use two at this table, but you can move to another table to use your other two." I don't know if I'm acting unethically or not. I'm thinking I might be, and in spite of the fact that I'm getting an advantage against the EvilCasinoIndustry, I'm not comfortable continuing to do that if I conclude that it is unethical.

In my Happy Days bonus hunt, I'm 17-23, +$115.

(Aside: A couple of times this week, the blackjack tables have been pretty full, so I've used my match play on pai gow instead. Washington is fairly unique in that pai gow is commission-free. In Vegas, for example, the house takes a percentage of all your winnings. That makes it very close to a game with no house edge. If played the house way, the only advantage the casino has is if the rank of all seven of the dealer's cards match the rank of all seven of the player's cards, unless there's a flush in one of the hands. In the event of a seven card tie, the house wins.

The reason it's offered is that there's a "fortune" side bet, that pays off three-of-a-kinds or better. The house edge on that side bet is something like 5%.)

Bad variance, no biscuit

I've lost 5 of the last 6 bonus hunting hands, bringing my win/loss record to 11-18, net +$35. Bah.

The bonus gets better

At tonight's game, the dealer told me that management has changed the terms on the coupons. They will now accept three per day instead of two. Sweet.

I ended up +$10 tonight. The first two coupons were losses (-$20), but the third coupon was dealt A5 versus the dealer's 4. I doubled down, got a scary A58, but the dealer busts, I get +$30.

It's back to trying to hunt down copies of the Western Gambling Journal this week. I'm suddenly about 33% short.

Bonus coupons secure, sir

Happy Days had a big stack of Gambling Journals in their entryway yesterday. I've got enough to almost last me until the coupons expire, and plan on picking up the remainder this evening. Through yesterday, I've won 10 and lost 13 so far, and I'm up +$55. Expected result after 11 sessions would be somewhere around $105, but the $55 is within expected variance.

The Happy Days bonus hunt continues

In the Happy Days bonus hunt, I'm up to 13 games. It's a statistically unlikely* 4 wins and 8 losses, plus I split aces once for another +$20 win and a loss. At 5-9, I'm up $10.

Palace was out of Gambling Journal's today. As I feared, as the month progresses, the coupons will be harder to find. I've got three coupons left. Maybe Freddy's in Fife has some.

Surprisingly, in my seven brief bonus hunting visits, six of the dealers had never seen these coupons before. The seventh didn't act like they were anything strange.

The pit boss today says that they've brought back match play coupons for poker tournament play. However, instead of two match play coupons, they only give out one per game. Before they cracked down in April, they were giving out two match play coupons for the $25 tournaments, and with three tournaments a day, players were either using six coupons a day, or were following the restrictions on the coupons and giving away their extra four. Now, they can use all three coupons each day.

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* My calculated guess is that there's a 15% chance of running this poorly after 14 hands, based on the Excel function =NORMDIST(5,7,1.87,TRUE), which the Wizard of Odds' June 27, 2003 column implied was the right calculation to use here.

/Oh, and that's my actual chip in the photo, not random clip art like I usually grab. I've never actually held on to a $100 chip for more than a trip from the roulette table to the cashier's cage before. I feel special.

No more match play at Happy Days

It's been two weeks since I played the Happy Days tourney, and it looks like they've made a lot of changes, none of which are particularly good.

• No more 2x $10 match play coupons with the $25 buy-in. The dealer I talked to said that management finally did the math and realized what a good deal it was for the players. They figured players would have to play 30 hands for the casino to break even, and players generally weren't doing that. This change effectively increases the cost of the tourney by about $9.80.
• The $1 blackjack is gone. It's up to $3 minimum bets, which makes it just like everywhere else in town.
• In tournaments, when a waiting list player gets seated, they're required to post the missed blind. They've never done that before, and they don't seem too sure of how to do it now. The worst situation I saw was at the $400/$800 level; someone sat down UTG and had to post $900 of their $5000 starting chips. $500 was dead money; to play the hand they had to throw in another $400. That's a quarter of their stack committed, just for sitting down with a mediocre hand. That's dumb enough that I'm considering not playing there again; it'll bite me soon enough. I didn't stick around long enough to tell if it applies to players who channged tables. Logically, it should, but that's even more stupid. I pushed my 66 against a QQ and went home.
• Until yesterday, they still had the $120000 bad beat jackpot, but finally gave up, realizing that it'll be forever before someone wins quads-over-quads. The state requires the money to go back to the players, so they're awarding an hourly high hand prize of $100 for the next 1200 hours, starting this morning. The result, from the chatter around the tournament table, is players who will play any Axo or Kxo, hoping to get a high full house. KKK22 won the noon prize today.
• At least the coffee cups have gotten better. They're glass instead of styrofoam now.

Weekend of tournaments, Event 1: Happy Days 7 PM

(Edit: originally titled "Four for four: respect my authoritah!") After yesterday's rant about how I seem to suck at low limit brick and mortar ring games, I spent a few minutes talking to my wife about it. As I described it to her, I think I discovered what the problem is: I play very tight, and very aggressive, and in online play, and in tournaments, that aggression is rewarded -- I frequently take down pots unopposed. In low limit ring games, where true donkeys will call with almost anything, aggression is very rarely rewarded with an uncontested pot. Somebody's gonna go to the river, and somebody's gonna hit two pair.

The only solutions I see: tournament play only. I don't know that playing higher stakes would make a difference, and I really doubt that I could play as aggressively at the higher level; it's too intimidating.

So, with the wife and kid on a trip this weekend to Ocean Shores, I'm spending the weekend playing as many tournaments as possible. It's started out well -- at tonight's 7:00 Happy Days tournament, I placed third, netting $156 (plus $10 in blackjack match play, plus another $10 in non-match play BJ waiting for the tourney to start.) I've placed in the money every time in the last four Happy Days tournaments, and have won four of the seven brick and mortar tournaments I've entered this year.

I tried something new tonight, which allowed me to finish in third place instead of fifth, which is a big chunk of change: when it gets down to the final table, don't worry about getting blinded out. Almost everyone has a small stack compared to the blinds, and you're going to lose a couple of players every orbit. Let the other players knock each other out. Even if your on the big blind of 10000, and your stack has only 10000 left, there's no need to call with a less than premium hand. You've got another orbit left in you -- let some other people get knocked out, and you'll end up in the bigger money.

Net: +$176