Posts tagged casino
Building Computers
Aug 28th
Well apparently I’ve gotten in a habit of building computers for people. Odd. I built a computer a couple weeks ago for Diane, and yesterday I put together a new one for my Dad. It is amazing to me the amount that the cost of computers has dropped over the last few years. The fact that I can easily put a value system together for $500 impresses me to no end.
Anyways, once again I need to make more of a push on my thesis. Lots of work to do, and I want to get it out of the way so I can do other stuff. I’m getting to the point where I need to start filling in details, and that is gonna be harder to do than the basic exposition that I’ve been doing for the most part so far.
Lots of bonuses in casino/poker land. I’m working on the new PSO promo room DreamPoker, plus one of boogster’s promotions for play65 (backgammon). That and I did a couple of casinos last week but broke even on both of them. *sigh*.
Time for me to go in to school. Take care everyone!
Heraldk
Foxwoods Casino
Jul 23rd
Mike and I met in the lobby on Friday morning all set to take a bus to Foxwoods casino. This was to be my first live poker ring game experience, and I was pretty excited. The bus ride was about 2 hours long from Boston, and we arrived at Foxwoods sometime in the early afternoon. Foxwoods is an amazing sight – it is absolutely *huge*, with three buildings of hotel rooms, slot machines, poker tables, and other casino table games.
Instead of heading to our hotel right away, Mike and I checked our bags and headed straight for the poker room. I sat down at a 2/4 limit table, and Mike joined a 1/2 no limit game. My first impression? These players were *terrible*. I got frustrated though because I couldn’t get cards to take advantage of it! After about 4 hours of play, I was down about $60 or so.
Mike was really hungry, and I my stomach was fast to agree, so we left to get some food at the Hard Rock Cafe. We seriously had the best service at a restaurant so far this trip there, which was pretty cool so we left a pretty good tip. It helped that Mike was up almost $200 at that point!
Before returning to the poker room, we wandered around for a few minutes to take in some of the atmosphere. Really, it felt like any other casino I’ve ever been in … just that it was ginormous. We stopped at a craps table and played a few rounds where I won about $25 … not too shabby. Craps is one of the only casino games that I find fascinating because at a full table, there’s so much going on. People placing bets like crazy, and yelling and cheering as the dice are rolled – there really isn’t a game more fun that craps in a casino environment. Plus its a low house edge game if you know how to bet, so that’s another advantage!
Anyways, after our brief break we returned to the poker room. This time, I got a rush of cards and pulled up about $50 at one point … only to hit 3 bad hands for me in a row including twice running into pocket aces with a big pair of my own. I swung up and down quite a bit, but ended up only down $30 when Mike and I decided to head back around 3 in the morning.
We caught a cab back to our hotel which was just a few minutes away, and checked in. I got to sleep a little after 4:30 in the morning which is officially the latest I’ve been up all trip. I woke up around 10:20 to the alarm clock so we could catch the shuttle in after a bit of breakfast. The hotel had free breakfast before 11am, including these awesome belgian waffle makers that were all set up for the perfect one every time. So I rather enjoyed breakfast!
Mike and I caught the 11am shuttle back to the casino. We had about an hour and a half to kill before we caught the bus (so we thought) … so we returned to the poker room for a little bit of play. I started up fast – with 3 hands in a row which I raised preflop (ATs, JJ and JJ again). I won the first two and lost the third, but was up for a decent amount of time. Not too much later though, I had a terrible beat. I had A6 of hearts and limped in. The guy in the blinds raised so 4 players and I all called. I flopped a flush draw with a Jh 4h 2s, so I check and called with lots of odds. The turn was a 2c, which looked a lot like a blank. Again I check and called with one lady also staying in. The river was the queen of hearts giving me the nut flush. Unfortunately, the preflop raiser had just made queens full. Ouch!
So I took another $25 hit, but all in all I don’t think I played terribly. I should probably have laid down my Jacks to the Aces last night, but besides that, I felt really comfortable and the amount I lost was totally within reasonable statistical variance. Still, it would’ve been nice to come out of foxwoods ahead!
Mike is up about $100, which is nice for him. It pretty much pays for the sidetrip to foxwoods for him with a little on the side. Apparently I should’ve been playing no limit.
I typed up this post when I was waiting for the bus to show up at the bus terminal. Turns out that the bus was almost a full two hours late! So we waited for a long time for the bus to arrive and then were late arriving in new york to meet up with Mike and Nolan.
Up next? Adventures in New York! Our first visit is apparently the Museum of Natural History.
Heraldk
Ready, Set, Go!
Jul 14th
Well tonight (technically tomorrow morning), I leave for Boston where I’ll be attending AAAI – one of the biggest conferences on artificial intelligence research. Once the conference is over on the 20th, a couple of my friends and I are going to spend a week in new york with a short stopover at Foxwoods casino.
I’m pretty excited. It is pretty fun to travel, and it is also interesting to attend a conference where we can see what sort of research people are doing in other universities around the world. Plus I can’t wait to see what sort of pictures I can get as we checkout the various attractions we see.
I will try and keep my blog updated while I’m gone, but that will depend on both time constraints and availability of internet.
Hope everyone has a good couple of weeks while I’m gone!
Heraldk
Poker Rush
Jul 10th
Well I’m glad I decided to play some poker tonight. I got home a little late from school since it was raining really hard and I didn’t really want to get poured on on the way home. When I finally got home, I threw some laundry in and decided to fire up full tilt and play a little 2/4. I ended up over $300 in the space of maybe an hour and a half! (two tables). This was a big relief – I have been having a pretty poor couple of weeks at the tables, so it was nice to hit some cards again. My profit in online gambling has been coming from online casino promos. I cashed out over $700 from casino-on-net on only a $200 deposit (yeah, that’s $300 on top of the $200 bonus!), and got a nice win at Intercasino as well on a nice reload bonus. It is this money that will be funding me when I go to Foxwoods in a little over a week!
Oh yes! I think I mentioned previously that I will be going to Boston and New York this month. I leave on Saturday morning (at 1:00 am so essentially Friday night). AAAI is being held in Boston and we have a paper there to present. Then a few of my friends and I are going to go to New York with two of us stopping at Foxwoods on the way there for a night. I’m looking forward to giving some live poker a try. I haven’t played any real live ring game poker before this, though I do have my half a dozen or so live tournaments I’ve played in. It’s pretty exciting! Then we’ll spend a week in New York returning on the 27th.
In other news, my thesis is starting to take shape in my head if not on paper. I have an outline that I think will help organize my thesis a little better. In other research news, the paper Darse and I submitted to the ICGA special issue on poker has been accepted! The reviewer was pretty positive about the paper and his suggestions were all helpful in helping make the paper a little stronger. Yay! Soon DIVAT will take over the poker world! (We think its powerful enough to anyways).
Do pay attention to my photoblog. I plan on adding a flurry of photos in the next week to pre-emptively make up for missing a couple weeks of updates while I’m gone. Enjoy! I’m pretty happy with the set I’m going to upload … soon!
Heraldk
Why so busy?
May 2nd
Why do I feel so busy? This weekend wasn’t all that incredibly busy. I mean, I was at a couple of parties, and spent a day with my mom on her birthday on Sunday, but that’s not all that busy. And even though I’ve got a lot on my plate for school, I still come home and don’t do much on school. I’ll keep working on the various poker and casino promos that have made me a tidy profit over the course of the last year and a bit. What inevitably happens though is I’ll sit down and play poker for a bit and then I’ll realize that its getting late, and I end up going to bed later than I really should have. I’m still getting between 6 and 7 hours of sleep a night usually, but I still feel like I really need to catch up on sleep. So what am I doing tonight? Blogging before bed. And I’m going to the gym tomorrow for 8am. Here we go again!
Still, a number of exciting things are happening.
The Oilers took down game 6 last night and boy was I happy. So were many boisterous fans who took to Whyte ave last night. I’m told it was quite an experience to walk down Whyte … crazy people everywhere! The Oilers played a so-so to downright terrible game right up to the third period. That was where they promptly woke up and slaughtered the redwings in dramatic fashion. Nope … the Oilers don’t do things the easy way.
I finished off another casino promo the other day. This one was at intercasino for a value of $150 profit. Hoorah! I am now up $340 in casino promos. I’ve also been playing 2/4 limit at full tilt clearing another deposit bonus. I’m over 2/3 of the way to getting a full tilt microsuede jacket with full tilt points! I like free stuff! Not only that, I made over $160 on one night of play last week. I had a couple of smaller losing sessions this week and then made another $60 tonight. There’s a lot of variance, but I feel like I’m playing pretty well and I’m certainly profiting. I’ve cleared about $70 of my $300 deposit bonus there so far.
Heraldk
Housekeeping
Apr 15th
Not much of a post here tonight. I just wanted to mention a couple of bits of the current news.
The Italy trip is looking like a go ahead for sure. Ryan was looking into plane tickets for us today. Hoorah! Its gonna be a good 16 hour flight to Turin at least. Gotta bring my laptop so I can get some stuff done 
Next, one of the 2 papers I’ve been working on of late was officially accepted to AAAI – one of the top notch AI conferences around. So that’s pretty exciting! I dunno if I’ll be going to Boston for the conference, but it would be cool to do that too.
Next, I did another casino promo, this time at Starluck casino. This time, I was up money almost the whole way through and came out with a $100 profit. Hoorah! I’m gonna wait for my cashouts to clear before I do any other promos. My next plan of action is to do a Party Poker reload followed by a Full Tilt reload. Lots of poker to play in the next couple months!
I am quite enjoying the long weekend. Ryan took us out for lunch today after the hex meeting to the new asian village, which was really cool and nice. I then played a bunch of poker this afternoon and finished up about $60 or so on the day. All in all, the weekend is off to a good start. Sunday I have dinner at Diane’s parent’s place, and then Monday is dinner with my family. Yay Easter food!
Heraldk
+EV blackjack!
Apr 11th
Well, this weekend was interesting on the gambling front.
First of all, a guy on the PSO forums noticed that PokerNow has closed down permanently and offered players to transfer the remaining money that they had at PokerNow to an existing party poker account. The great part of this was that he and several people were transfering totals of less than a dollar to party poker and getting $25 and $50 bonuses! So I decided to try this to see if I had any money left in that account. I had $0.01, and transfered it. I got a $50 bonus! I’ve got to play 500 hands to clear it which shouldn’t take long. I’ve already made $20 playing the super loose .5/1 games.
Second, I decided to try a second casino promotion. For those who don’t know, these promotions can be positive EV if you get a large enough deposit bonus and the requirements don’t require you to play too long. My first promotion didn’t go so well … I lost my $100 deposit … and +EV or not, these promotions still have risk because the variance in a lot of these games are huge. I was still intrigued by the idea of +EV casino games, so this weekend I tried Golden Palace’s 300% deposit bonus. This time, after a few hours of blackjack, my account reached $290 from my $100 deposit!
So I’m up $90 in casino promotions. It was pretty fun, and a nice break from poker. I really think I needed a break from poker since the past little while has been a tad frustrating.
Heraldk
Poker-esque
May 11th
Like the rest of the world, I’ve been sucked in. The game of poker is taking the world by storm and there is an amazing array of people who have become interested this intriguing game of strategy and gambling.
Why is it so interesting to me? I have to admit that I find gambling fun. The problem is that I hate losing – and any money gambled at a casino is not money you can expect to have very long. Poker represents to me a chance to gamble with money, but also to have the potential to win money in the long run.
I started playing poker for money in November when I heard about the poker promotions offered at Poker Source Online. For those unfamiliar with the site, its an affiliate site with many online poker rooms that offers free gifts for signing up with them. They have the best customer support I have ever dealt with and bend over backwards to try and make sure that you get the gifts you are promised (as long as you follow the instructions). To date, I have received several hundred dollars worth of free stuff from them. If you want to play online poker, there is no reason to not sign up through these guys! I will post later about the PSO promotions and the details on what they offer later so stay tuned if you are interested.
Anyways, I started playing for real money due to this online promotion through PSO and since then I have never looked back. Most players who start making money at poker go through an early learning transition phase where they lose some money before learning the mistakes they made. My transition phase was not very long – I lost about $30 in the first PSO promotion I did, and then broke even on the second PSO promotion. From there, I started making money playing poker online! To date, I’m up roughly $1300 US since November of 2004. Not too shabby for someone who just started playing poker at these low limits!
That monetary figure does not include an amazing run that I had in January. PSO sponsered me and several other people here in Edmonton for the Canadian Poker Tour. I had only been playing poker for money for a couple months at that point, but due to a good run of cards, some good coaching from a local expert, a little skill (I hope), and a lot of luck, I made the finals and finished in 6th place for a prize of $3490 canadian. It was an incredible rush, and I really want to be able to do it again – but unfortunately, even though PSO sponsered me in the followup even in Calgary, I was unable to repeat my performance. Maybe I’ll get another chance at it later!
So poker has been awesome for me so far. I’m really quite enjoying myself and the best part is that I can gamble with my money but win money in the long run – which beats blackjack or roulette anyday!
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