The Shagmandu Incident

Paint has let me down, but if I'm right this will be an event that I can and surely will try to duplicate.

After an unprecedented run of overly great hole cards and flops and turns and rivers (translation: bullshit) I have gone from 187k to 838k on PokerStars in two weeks. My 4 top paranoid conspiracies on this are:

1) Keep me online as long as possible to hack and/or sabotage things like Paint.

2) Establish that yes, there are real people here. Lot's of chat after years of humdrum mindless raising and calling with no real humanity behind it.

3) Keep me interested to point out the obvious mistakes here so they can be corrected.

4) Mulder and Scully were right.

I still stand by my claim that I'm talented, but such a meteoric rise in chips is not normal even for

So, the streak finally came to a suspicious end tonight. The game starts with the friendly "shagmandu" offering the obligatory good luck to every one message. Shaggie (can I call you Shaggie? Shagmeister? Shagamundo? Shagmagic?) has aroused my suspicion because shag is a type of carpet. Katmandu is in Asia. Oriental rugs are from Asia. Oriental rugs are not shaggy. Oriental porn stars are usually clean shaven down below. (From what I've been told.) Ergo, this supreme line of reasoning tends to make me think this is one in a long line of not real positions.

So I searched for the username. And the replay was that it couldn't be found. Players other than Shagalicious were found. Yet here I am sitting at a table with someone that doesn't exist.

At the very best for PokerStars this is evidence that the software is so monumentally screwed up that it doesn't work. Past history makes me tend to think otherwise. Which is why I wasn't surprised when I folded my K6s, the flop was three spades, there were three all ins and two other positions had a pair of spades. Naturally one held the nut flush ace. The rest of the table played out like the good ole days of bad beatin' cheatin', too.

Sigh. The party's over.

Until I get screen shots of this crap again.

Okay PokerStars, you win this round

Feasting on my paranoia - good move. I've played some very reasonable poker this weekend and tonight and I'm up to 830k. However. They did it again. Registered me for a game I didn't click on. Thinking I'm buying into a 25k game I find myself at a 200k buy in game.

So I said to myself - nothing because I'm not in the habit of talking out loud to myself. Waste of oxygen and nitrogen and traces of some other gases which I doubt really exist. I mean, face it - it's called the PERIODIC table. They surely must change it around occasionally.

Silence the poisoned pen? Keep me online to hack? Meeting my ransom demands? We'll probably never know.

Another curious event has unfolded. I changed my settings where I need to approve of comments before they get posted. And there;s been a couple in the last week. On a post I made ages ago. The text reads like the emails you get from Olga, your potential Russian bride who is secretly a 55 year old housewife in New Jersey eating bon bons. In other words - dangerous to click on any links.

So readers - both of you - if it's got a line underneath it's a potentially dangerous link.

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Internet Poker Etiquette - Showing your cards

I imagine there must be some kind of setting on when to show your cards. Because to think that you manually have to do it at the culmination of each winning hand is seriously bizarre.

The background for this story:

10k buy in game (plus the maintenance costs - the Internet poker free money mortgage must be paid.) Two tables. Lots of "people" hitting the 14 second warning (i.e. slow) lots of all ins and nobody except me plasying like they care about serious competition.

My patented formula is to wait for two conditions to be met. I must be dealt an ace and I must have folded a hand that otherwise would have won. Once these conditions have been met I've avoided a ton of bad beats and seemingly pre-programmed play. Whether paranoid delusion, or that I might be right about the nature of what's going on it's worked. I know have the most chips on PokerStars since a year ago when I got to sit at high buy in games (25k+) and for my own satisfaction played and watched as the statiscally unreal cards were dealt.

Occasionally, we here at the Big Laydown (me and my Calculatron and a half eaten box of Girl Scout cookies) like to reflect on doing something new and different to shake things up a bit.

A side product of patience, lots of folding and gaining 300k chips in a couple of weeks is admission that first place is a ridiculous dream that just can't happen. So, as I play I have the calming mentality that my George Foreman grill and re-runs on TV will keep me happy. Finish second, yawn, unplug the puter (hacker prevention) eat more cookies, delete cookies, go to sleep and see what's going on tomorrow.

So I said to myself, "Self - what exactly does happen when you nuke your second place stack instead of bothering to play against a rigged better than really can be expected vacuum you used to eliminate all the others?"

The answer is here. Admittedly just bizarre and not concrete. But since I think my credibilty is better than PokerStars I'll mention it.

My vacuum adversary and I are heads up. I chat that it was a great game and I have to go and sit out. He compliments me on the great game and proceeds to annhilate me. And I stay and watch the vivisection.

You show your cards. Must be a setting I haven't figure out because to show your cards to an obviously inactive player is meaningless. And since losing in this manner is greased bunny quick I missed the screen shot where he actually raised when calling would have killed me. Human nature says that you're smart enough to play a 10k buy in, pleasant enough to throw in an occasional compliment in chat and that you would simply call every hand that will be a sure fire winner.

But vacuums don't behave that way. They have no remorse. They have no morse code. They have no humanity.

Vacuums SUCK.

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The Bellagio Armed Robbery

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/feb/03/metro-police-announce-arrest-bellagio-casino-robbe/

I have no idea how we here at The Big Laydown missed this little nugget. Because we specialize in a mixture of poker related topics and comedy. If you're like me, read the news and marvel at the comic series of flaws that lead to the arrest. Here's a summary of the best:

Our mental giant in question robs the Bellagio of 1.5 million in 25k denomination chips. And gets away with it! At first.

Now surely he can't go back to Bellagio and cash them in. That's way too obvious. It's not like he can flee to Mexico and cash them in and live a quiet life sipping mojitos and watching the drug cartels shoot at each other. Pretty much the only option left is to find a way to peddle them for cash. And he must have had some success at that. Because he managed to cash in enough to gamble with.

At the Bellagio.

And losing 170k in months of inept playing.

After having gone on record prior to the robbery he was broke and had declared bankruptcy.

Personally, I would have gone for cash instead of 25k chips. They just same a bit too obvious. Like stealing a major piece of art and trying to sell it on the black market within a week of the theft. My friends in the art theft business (the Maximum magazine article I read) tell me you have to sit on the stash for years/decades. But, so interested in returning to the tables the plan was to peddle them through the use of various poker forums. Not a totally bad idea. But still the buyer who we can assume has an iota of intelligence and maybe read the news should question where this magical 25k real money chip came from. For reasons we will never fathom, it must have happened.

Personally, I would have taken my ill gotten cash and gambled in ANY other casino other than the Bellagio in Vegas. Atlantic City Aruba and Indian reservations come to mind. But that's just me.

But wait, the story gets better.

One of the police investigation points was a 25k chip given to the Salvation Army guy(or gal) waving the bell at those cute little buckets they set up at Christmas. When they try to cash it in - no dice (unintentional gambling reference.)

And the police investigation also tracks down a dealer that he played at the table and was quoted as saying, "How hard could it be to rob a casino?"

After some stock reply about casino security the quote is something like, "Nah, can't be that hard. All you need is a black ski mask and a motorcycle, and I already have a motorcycle!"

At the Bellagio, weeks before the crime.

Time to abbreviate a bit. Read more in the link. The police recovered a bunch of his money in the raid arresting him and accounted for most of the rest by gambling losses and sudden change of life style expenditures versus someone who is bankrupt and have watched every episode of all variations of CSI and Law and Order.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not so callous to suggest that the casino wronged you because you have shit for brains gambling on tables you were just feeding every once by your lack of skill. You just picked the wrong crime.

After investigating the collective works of L. Ron Hubbard I have recommendations for the copycats that try to mimic this foolproof plan.

Get yourself an Emeter. Then:

Don't do armed robbery. I have no idea why, but for some reason police tend to get a bit testy and investigate. This includes real police and not just the hot gals on crime shows that have brains and can double as models.

Create a website. Pay your 13 year old PlayStation addicted nephew to help you with it. $300 should be enough. That's about 8 new vid titles. He will surely be up for the plan. Legally change your name on borrowed money from you aging Aunt. Now you have enough "seed" money to customize the website and make it a validly registered site than can be Googled.

Name the site something poker related. After three agonizing days of research we have a few recommendations. "Poker" should be in the title. This may seem counter-intuitive for a site that is eventually not going to really be about poker, but this is what the Calcutron 4xb2700 (my Commodore 64) came up with. Now, differentiate yourself from the other poker sites. Use an innocuous term or a poker related term to match up with "poker" and you're almost there. Use something like "All In Poker" or "Preflop Raise Poker" or "Full Tilt Poker." Trust us. The Calcutron has only been wrong once in the past decade. (Power and modem problems.)

At this point you will start to get some traffic. Spend the money and create a Ponzi scheme. Don't worry about having players wanting to cash out. Put them off for a couple of months and pay them by the deposits from your new players.

Flee the country and sip mojitos. It really is just that simple.

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