Winter 2007 Report - Part 1b

Lets see, where I last left off was about 15 minutes into the winter blogger gathering, so I still have a bunch to cover. By this point, I had watched Al down close to a Pint of Soco, and turned down a $100 Roshambo match. Various bloggers were now on the scene at the IP hooker bar including Fallstaff, Otis, BuddyDank, Iggy, Pauly, Astin, GCox, Zeem..... I spent a bunch of time hanging in the bar and staying away from the -EV games, but that just can't last forever with all the action so close. I played some $10 Paigow with much of the crew. We had two of the tables mostly covered with bloggers. I broke even my first session, and dropped $20 in a later session. Grabbed about 5 free beers in the process so it was +EV considering the price of beer at the hooker bar.

Al was playing GCox's stack at Paigow. Gcox was a bit concerned. He had $170 or something like that, and Al was pretty wasted. G figured Al was going to donk it off, but he is such a nice guy that he would take his chances.

I loves me some craps though, but I like it cheap so I can properly apply my system. Buddy had never played before and I offered to give him some pointers. A crew of me, Astin, Zeem, Buddy, ScottMC, and Gcox were ready to go. We just had to extract Al from the Paigow tables. We pulled it off, and much to GCox's surprise, Al had doubled his stack up to $350 though an absolute clinic of drunken Paigow, according the the crowd at the table that was in absolute awe. We made the 1/2 mile trek north to the "Casino Royal" made famous by the Bond movie. There they have the holy grail of Vegas strip craps. $3 with 20x odds. They also have $5 with 100x odds which is about 10 times better than the crappy IP craps tables. I play my craps like my poker, in an effective, but poorly understood way. While everyone else is jamming odds and placing numbers up after every point, I chose to build up my table positions slowly by religiously betting the COME every roll, and selectively getting odds up. I guess you could call this tight/aggressive craps. This tends to fight off super cold tables, and benefit nicely (though not quite as quick) when the table gets hot. So Al and Gcox set up shop at the $5 table while the rest of us jumped on the $3. I was showing my approach to Buddy, and the others were doing the typical place em out there and hope approach. The table was a bit cold early, and I was getting a bit low, while the others were keeping pretty even by hitting some of the odds I did not take. I would eventually get all my chips on the table, and then rally all the way back to even over a 1 1/2 hour session that ended a bit past 4AM in the morn. I was the only blogger who broke even. Astin doubled his $200 buy-in. ScottMC at least doubled (Scott was the hot roller for the night), and Zeem and buddy made out quite nice. I must suck at craps. As we were getting ready to split there was quite a commotion over at the $5 craps table. I guess when Al heard it was time to go he threw down $100 odds on the pass and hit immediately. He now had turned Gcox's $170 into a nice $700! Way to go Al.

Gas money to Vegas - ($45)
Corona's at the hooker Bar - ($4.50)
IP Table Games - ($20)
Casino Royal Craps - Breakeven
Lending Al your stack at Piagow and Craps - +$530
Seeing all of your virtual friends in one place - Priceless