The Poker Track
In the last 15 years, horse and dog tracks have added poker and other games because the race business is dying. This is not the 1920s, when horse racing was prevalent enough to have a song about it open up the Broadway musical "Guys and Dolls." Now the cards (and in...
Best Thing I’ve Read Today
From time to time in my travels, I meet twenty-somethings (almost entirely men) who think they can play poker professionally. None of them has a wife and kids and a mortgage and a retirement plan. Oh, I'm friends with a couple of middle-aged guys with families for...
Phil Ivey Loses Again
In the ongoing saga of poker pro Phil Ivey vs. The Borgata over something called "edge-sorting" (which I wrote about two years ago) a judge has ruled that Ivey and his partner broke the contract between player and venue, and thus must return their winnings: “The...
Craziest Poker Hand I’ve Ever Seen
Someone asked me recently about the craziest poker hand I've ever seen. I've witnessed quite a few, but this is the one that beats them all. I was playing in the $5-10 no limit hold'em game at the Wynn in Las Vegas. The game had been going for several hours and most...
Poker Collusion
There's a scene in the movie "Rounders" where a bunch of professional poker players from New York City are in Atlantic City and end up at the same table with each other. Then some non-pros sit down and, while the pros aren't colluding with each other, they know they...
Betting and Punting
Here's something I wrote in 2004 about an incident at a Las Vegas casino that no longer exists... The Stardust sports book in Las Vegas is considered the sports book, because it is traditionally the first to post the line on most sporting events, and many other books...
The Vegas Squeeze
In June, I wrote about MGM/Mirage beginning to charge for parking at its properties on the Las Vegas Strip (Bellagio, Aria, Mirage, etc), regardless of whether you park your own car or turn it over to a valet: That's going to kill business for the rental car companies...
Good and Bad
The good thing about watching the Final Table of the World Series Of Poker Main Event: no one’s slow-playing and killing the pace. The bad thing about watching the Final Table of the World Series Of Poker Main Event: there isn't much banter among the players -- and...