A 3 hour tour?

Greg: [pointing on a zombie in the water] Shoot it!
Captain Victor Kirk: What do you think I am trying to do you fucking moron...

"House of the Dead"

I don't know if it was intentional or not, but "house of the Dead" was so hilarious because of how bad it was. I saw it a couple of months ago, and it is now the benchmark for bad movies. "The Punisher" was close, but in the end seeing a human nose pock out of a corpse costume got Dead over the line.

I was fortunate enough to poke around at Star City Casino at about midnight Sunday morning. The website says they will have Omaha, Texas and so on that I listed before. When I got there, they had four tables. Not of each, four tables all up. 2 tables of 5/10 Manila, and 2 tables of 5/10 Texas Holdem. Sydney has 4 million people. Lets say in any given year, another million people visit the city. Texas Holdem, the most popular form of poker going around, has been granted by the Star City powers-that-be one table for every 2,500,000 people. Ok, maybe not all 2,500,000 people were trying to play on the opening weekend, but most of them were. The wait for a seat was "capped" at three hours - meaning that when you registered, or more correctly went over to the registration desk to be disappointed a few seconds later and walk away, they told you it would be impossible to get a seat within 3 hours minimum. Even though their website says poker will be 24 hours on the weekends, they shut up shop at 4am. They play it funny too, there is no rake. Every player is required to "buy" their cards from the house for 75 cents. That means every player is paying $7.50 in rake every orbit. That seems pretty crappy to me, but then again I didn't bother to do much more of the maths besides that.

Got to say though, even though I did not sit down for obvious reasons, the dealers seemed very competent considering this would have been their first time dealing in this casino. There seemed to be a lot of American players at the tables too. You can tell, because they try to tip the dealer which is illegal in Australian casinos. So I guess the 75c per hand is ok when you consider you can't tip. Probably all comes out even in the end. The play was very passive, lots of callers. Every flop had at least 5 runners, some times more. A few people needed the rules explained to them a few times, like introducing new chips to the table mid-hand. It was funny too seeing a bunch of players under say 25 doing their "chip-tricks" at the table. There is a school of thought that if you do chip tricks at the table, it gives off the illusion that you are a seasoned player. This however is lost if you keep dropping your chips and knocking your stack over when trying to shuffle them. Take it from me, the "WGPBE" - don't drink and chip-trick. Drive home very fast instead.

Since I could not sit down at the casino, I sat down online over the weekend for mixed results. The $25NL tables at Party have been brutal. I am down 3 buy-ins, two of them due to runner-runner flushes, and the third was on a pre-flop raise of 3 BB, the board cam QQ3, 2 spades which looked good for my KJs. Short stacked, I re-raised the minimum bet all in for about 7BB. The minimum raise turned over Q3 for the flopped full house, and not even for a second do I think I am getting my runner-runner outs here.

I have signed up to Ultimate Bet for the first time though, and I have a great record there so far, even if it is some an extremely small sample. From 3 SNG's, my finishes have been 2nd, 1st and 1st. The last one I have to admit I did deal out a bad beat which was very kind to me. Being the big stack, I forced the third place (out of five) to go all in on the big blind, when I had KJs again. He called, and flipped over the Rockets. You wouldn't believe how often this happens to me. I had a Jack on the flop, then a Jack on the turn and a King on the river. I was nice about it though, and she wasn't a dick so all was good. Anyway, the SNG's cut my losses back to about $30 for the weekend. I also placed 12th in a $2.50 MTT at Pacific Poker. I have to confess, I kind of threw it away because I was going nowhere. I was also most pissed off when with about 20 or so people left, I had the absolute nuts and I went to make a small raise on the river, but the Pacific software didn't recognise it and let my timer run out to "check". At least the other player checked too so I didn't fold them, but it should/could have been more profitable and catapulted me into the top five. Every body was folding, waiting for the final table and trying to limp into more money. I had a $6 profit, or 300% (yeah, that sounds better) so I went all-in on a marginal hand that escapes me right now. I was called by the Rockets again and sent packing, but it was still ok. Just as Iggy swears by the fish at Party, I am telling the blogging world - The MTT at Pacific are the best on the damn net. Reasonable size tournaments (I'm not interested in 1000+ MTT, 400 is enough), guaranteed prize pools, no rebuys or add ons, and pretty reasonable play. If you like tournament play, I say that Pacific is where you should be.