• $100 buy-in (I need to have received this money before Sunday kickoff for you to be officially in).
• Each week you select one team. You cannot select the same team twice. This introduces more of a strategy element since otherwise it would be pretty easy to just take this year’s 2007 Patriots or 2009 Colts/Saints every week.
• Once your pick loses, you are eliminated from the league.
• In the event that the final 2, 3, 4… players are eliminated in the same week, they will either chop the prizepool or all advance to the following week. This will be determined by player consensus and factors like number of weeks left, etc. I’ll lean towards rolling it over for the next week when settling any possible disagreement.
• Payouts will be determined prior to Week 1 Sunday kickoff. It will be very top-heavy, but might give some money to 2nd place if there’s, say, 12+ participants.
• I must receive your pick in sufficient time prior to kickoff of the first game of that week’s schedule. If I don’t receive a pick, you will be given the Rams by default. If you have already used the Rams, you’ll get the Bills by default. If you’ve already used them too, you’re out of the league. For this reason, please don’t wait until 2 minutes prior to kickoff in the week’s first game to make your pick so there are no headaches.
• I will keep track of everyone’s picks on a Google spreadsheet that all league members will have access to.
• I know the season technically starts tomorrow, Thursday, with the Vikings-Saints game, but since that’s unlikely to be a game anyone would want to pick anyway, we’re just going to pretend the season starts Sunday.
• For managers who want to change their pick, that’s fine, but just to avoid any possible misunderstandings or confusion, no changes allowed within an hour prior to kickoff for that week’s first game.

That sums it up for the rules. I anticipate that we’ll have, at minimum, 8 participants. But it could be substantially more depending on how much I’m able to promote this between now and Sunday. If you want to play, I need your $100 (and your pick, naturally) prior to Sunday kickoff. Sorry, no IOUs. I don’t want to deal with the headache of having to track down people who haven’t paid yet. If I haven’t received your money by Sunday kickoff, you’re not in the league.

Here’s how you can submit your $100 entry:

PayPal: This is the preferred method of payment. Send $100 to fakekramer [at] gmail [dot] com. ***When sending payment via PayPal, please select the “Personal” tab (default is “Purchase”)***. Leave the radio box on “Gift”. This ensures I receive the full $100 rather than $97.20 or whatever. I’m happy to run the league, but I don’t want to supplement the prize pool in addition to that, even if it is just a few bucks or whatever.

PokerStars: My screenname is Ozone23. City is “Houston”.

Full Tilt: My screenname is OrangeBoy. City starts with an H. Clown avatar.

When you submit payment, contact me at the above email address letting me know that you submitted payment. This will also let me know which email address to share the league spreadsheet with.

Alright, I think that about does it for all of the formal stuff. This should be a really fun and competitive league and hopefully result in lots of sick sweats later in the season for some of the participants.

It’d be tough to make an argument against the Padres being the best team in the NL right now. Yet for some reason, they’re 7:1 to win the pennant on Bodog. If we assume they have about an 75% chance of reaching the playoffs, which I think fair if you put faith into the Baseball Prospectus season simulation, then they should be more like 5:1 to win the pennant and that’s just if you think they’re a flip in any postseason series once they get there. But for a couple reasons, I think they should be given credit to do better-than-a-flip in the playoffs (even though the MLB postseason is unfortunately just a crapshoot).

1. They’ll have home field advantage (probably). At the moment, the Padres have the best record in the NL. If they can finish the season strong, it stands to reason that the road to the World Series goes through San Diego. This certainly gives them a slight edge and would even make 5:1 on them to win the pennant start to seem like a decent bet.

2. They’ve got the secret sauce. Baseball statistician turned political analyst extrodinaire Nate Silver developed a formula for determining a team’s postseason success. He dubbed this forumla the “secret sauce” for doing well in the postseason which includes a combination of three things: a.) a team’s pitching staff’s strikeout rate, b.) it’s quality of defense, and c.) strength of their closer. In these ways, the Padres are nearly second to none (in fact, they were second to none a few days ago, but I see that the Giants have since taken a slight lead on the current secret sauce standings). Basically, in the metrics most predictive of postseason success, the Padres rule.

Since the strongest teams in the league (Rangers, Rays, and Yankees) are all in the AL, the path to the NL pennant is fairly soft for San Diego. Despite this, betting markets seem to be giving them very little credit. In fact, Bodog lists the Giants, who currently trail the Padres in the NL West, as bigger favorites to win the pennant. Also being given shorter odds to win the pennant on Bodog are the St. Louis Cardinals who Baseball Prospectus predicts as being barely more than a coinflip to even reach the playoffs. Who else does Bodog think has a better chance of winning the pennant? The Atlanta Braves, which might not be too unfair, but at nearly doubly more likely than San Diego, 3.75:1, is a joke. Even if you knew they’d be in the playoffs, which is far from certain at this point, you would be hard pressed to expect them to be better than 3.75:1 to win.

In short, betting markets have no love for the team that should probably be considered favorites to win the NL right now, so I’ll give them some love and hope they return the favor this fall.

Gooo San Diego!

I’ve had a crazy last 36 hours during which I went from being almost entirely certain I wasn’t playing the Main Event to bagging up chips for day two.

4:00 pm Wednesday

I put $100 on a 7-team baseball parlay to win $10,500. I was already up a bunch from betting Spain against Germany, so figured I’d give a bill back and try to luckbox my way into the Main Event. I text a couple of friends telling them which seven teams I need to run hot with, including Ray Coburn (Exitonly), who asks me why I don’t just sell pieces of my action on the 2p2 marketplace. “Hmm… I actually hadn’t thought of that, but I have no way of getting a bunch of Stars money into the Rio cage on such short notice anyway.”

“No worries,” he says, “I’ve got plenty of cash and need money online. I can give you an instant cashout.”

Huh. You don’t say?

5:00 pm

When my baseball parlay seems to have no legs, I text a couple of friends to see if they’d buy any Main Event action at a rate of 1% for $125. I get an overwhelming response and even sell a few shares to 2009 Card Player POY Eric Baldwin (basebaldy). “Hmm… maybe this could actually work,” I think.

5:15 pm

I call a friend and dictate a post to make on the 2p2 marketplace (I was away from computer). He tells me I can’t post in that forum until I get moderator approval. Dang, big snag. I text Ray wondering if he has any advice on how to get around that. “PM the forum mod,” he says. My friend does that on my behalf.

5:45 pm

After a short wait, my friend texts me to say that I’ve been approved to post in the forum. Sweet! The post is up and strangers from all over the world are checking out my Hendon Mob database and contemplating whether or not they have any interest in buying my action.

9:00 pm

I’ve sold a lot of action and playing in the tournament is starting to look quite viable. My friend Sebastien Sabic (Seb86) offers to buy a decent-sized chunk. Sold. Only need around $3,500 more. That’s doable, right?

11:30 pm

I get home from dinner with a friend and sell a few shares to my roommate. Only need to raise about $2,500 more to play, but there’s just 12 hours left to get the money and I’ve hit up most of my go-to sources. I go to bed totally uncertain if I’ll be playing the next day and hoping to wake up to emails about Stars transfers.

8:30 am Thursday

I wake up fairly early knowing there’s work to do in order to get into the tournament. I raised $500 while I was sleeping. Okay, just $2,000 more to go. It would be a shame to get this close and not play. I leave for the Panorama Towers to pick up some cash from Ray while continuing to hit up potential investors.

10:00 am

Ray hooks me up with two $5,000 Rio chips in the parking lot of Panorama. I thank him profusely for everything he’s done to help get me into the tournament. He’s still half-asleep and heads back upstairs. I wonder if he’ll even remember giving me $10k.

Another $1,000 sold to two friends.

10:30 am

I get to the Rio and head to the cashier’s cage to register for the Main Event. Even though I have about $1,000 more I’d like to come up with, I figure there’s no way I’m going to get that close and not play, so I go ahead and register.

11:15 am

While eating a salad wrap in the poker kitchen, I field posts on 2p2 and PokerTips and sell off more action. $9,625 raised. That’s good enough. I close the sale.

12:00 pm

Emmitt Smith announces ‘Shuffle Up and Play’. What? It’s ‘Shuffle Up and Deal’, Emmitt. Five yard penalty.

1:00 pm

My table is absurdly tight and passive.

3:00 pm

Table breaks. Bad beat.

Oh but wait… new table is just as tight and passive, if not moreso. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is playing tight and all pots are really small. This is fine by me – I can push them around in small pots and know that I won’t be in any spots where it makes sense to play a big pot light.

6:40 pm

Lebron James announces he’s going to the Miami Heat and the room erupts with chatter. A few guys at my table begin to hypothesize with significant confidence what Lebron’s reasons for going to Miami are. “Like they really have any clue,” I think.

7:00 pm

I leave for dinner break with 27k (from a 30k starting stack). Not ideal, but hard to expect to have a ton of chips at a table where no one is making any mistakes in big pots.

9:45 pm

I spot ESPN commentator Norm Chad walking by our table and get his attention to ask him if it ever gets boring just wandering around the WSOP all day. “Yes, but I self-medicate,” he tells me. He makes small talk with a couple people at our table and asks me if this is my first Main Event. “Nah,” I tell him. “Do you remember Michael Carroll catching a three-outter in 2008?”

“Yea, AJ vs. KJ or something like that.”

“Yea, exactly! I was the anonymous victim in that hand.”

“I remember that. Brutal!” He says with a surprising amount of empathy.

12:00 am midnight

Disappointed, I bag up 18.4k after losing several small pots in the last hour. I was the most aggressive player at the table, but it just never paid off for me; I never flopped any big hands that people paid off light because of my image. For that matter, I didn’t hit many flops at all and, apparently, everyone was hitting flops against me. That or maybe they were playing ABC poker against each other all day but coming out of their shells and out-playing me.

2:30 am

I go to bed utterly exhausted from a wild 36 hours feeling slightly agitated at the number of chips I’ll take into day two on Saturday but mostly grateful and appreciative that the stars aligned in order for me to play as well as optimistic about my chances for turning things around in a tournament where there’s certainly ample time provided to do just that.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog. I haven’t played any poker since busting out of Event 49 in 150th nearly a week ago. A week off has been so nice. My girlfriend was in town the whole time and we had a really nice week just doing various stuff around Vegas most of which didn’t involve poker.

On Saturday, we went to the Rio to check out some of the celebs in the Ante Up for Africa tournament. When she saw the WSOP (for the first time), she immediately noted that she didn’t understand how someone could play every day for the whole summer without going totally insane. That made me feel a little better about having gone kinda insane after five weeks of continuous poker!

There was a point on a dinner break last week where all I wanted was to get away from poker. Like, badly. I just wanted to go somewhere where I could sit down, enjoy a meal, and not be around anyone talking about poker. I tried a Thai restaurant about a mile from the Rio. Just as I was about to dig into my Pad Thai, I overheard this woman in the restaurant saying, “I three-bet him preflop with Seven-Six…”

AHHHHH!!!

I thought I was losing my mind. Is there not anywhere to go in this city to get away from people talking about various poker hands? It actually seems kind of funny to me looking back on it, but at the time I was losing it due to poker overload.

Hearing my girlfriend’s perspective on the WSOP was pretty interesting. It’s second nature to me at this point, so I’ve kind of lost perspective on how an outsider would be likely to view the poker culture. She just didn’t see how people could sit at a table all day every day without going insane and noted that a lot of the people we encountered apparently lacked basic social skills and kind of seemed like a part of this zombie sub-group incapable of functioning unless they’re gambling or talking about gambling.

Five weeks of being immersed in the poker community can take a toll on your sanity. Vegas and poker is such a false reality that I think hearing someone point out what an abnormal lifestyle the poker playing community has was kind of refreshing. It’s like, “oh yea, a bunch of people passing around millions of dollars over a deck of cards for six weeks is pretty nuts, isn’t it?”

I know it sounds like I’m dogging on poker and poker players, and in a way I kind of am, many of them are truly insufferable people, but I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t love poker or the poker culture. I do love poker. I have a blast playing poker and really enjoy the types of conversations you can have with poker players that are hard to achieve with people unaccustomed to forbidding emotions from playing a part in their thought process. But with that being said, everyone reaches their breaking point, and I think I reached mine after five weeks of nearly daily exposure to poker and poker players, so a week off felt really, really nice.

Okay, that’s enough about the psychology of poker. It’s time for a celebrity photo dump! (Apologies in advance for the picture quality that lies ahead; all of these were taken with my phone).

A few nights ago, I was hanging out with a friend in Aria who pointed out a gentlemen at a roulette wheel that he thought might have been Roger Clemens. I walked over for a closer look. Yup! That’s definitely Roger Clemens. I wanted to take his picture (I mean, it’s Roger Clemens!) but I figured he probably gets sick of being bothered in public, so I decided I’d just snap a picture of him on my phone from a few feet away. I really didn’t expect him to notice me, so I figured it was win-win: I get a picture of Roger Clemens, Roger Clemens gets to avoid being bothered by some fanboy.

There was just one problem: he noticed me. Right as soon as I was taking a picture of him, he wagged his finger at me and said, “dude, it’s not a zoo, if you want a picture all you have to do is ask!”

“I’m really sorry… but would you mind?” I asked, feeling pretty embarrassed to have gotten caught and called out. “Not at all!” he said. I gave my phone to my friend and pulled my girlfriend in for a picture with him. (I photoshopped her out since I dunno if she wants her picture on a poker portal that gets thousands of daily visits).

He was a really nice guy, and huge, too; I thought he was going to crush my hand when he shook it. We chatted with him for maybe a minute about Houston (since he’s played there) and about the WSOP (he asked what we were in town for). I told him he should give the Main Event a try and offered to coach him, but he said something to the effect of wanting to leave that stuff to the big boys like Hellmuth.

The next afternoon, we were walking through the Forum Shops at Caesars and noticed Pete Rose signing autographs at a collectables store (he’s the one with the hat on).

So in a span of like 15 hours, we saw two of the most famous baseball players of all-time, both of whom, incidentally, have had their storied careers overshadowed by controversy. Pretty ironic.

At the Ante Up for Africa event, we saw Matt Damon (black hat in the one seat; note the very DOJ-friendly table draw of Lederer and Ferguson seated together):

Jerome Bettis (ten seat) and Don Cheadle (seven seat):

And David Alan Grier:

I was surprised at how short Matt Damon is. He stood up at one point when his table broke and was like… little. The internet says he’s 5′10″, but he didn’t look an inch over 5′7″ to me. All in all, the celebs in the tournament seemed to be enjoying themselves. You could tell poker is still new and exciting to them. Ahh… I remember those days.

Today is Day 1A of the Main Event and I’m still not sure if I’m playing or not, though I would say it’s pretty unlikely at this point. I might try a couple of satellites, but barring luckboxing one of those, I doubt I’ll play this year. I’ll be fairly disappointed if I don’t end up playing, but what can you do?

The plan for the next few days is to bet soccer (Netherlands over Uruguay and Spain over Germany both for fairly big bets) and try to run hot in a couple of satellites or something. If push comes to shove, I might put a couple hundo on a number on roulette and try to spike a Main Event seat (how good does that story have the potential to be?). I’m taking suggestions for what number to bet (0-36). The suggestion with the most logical reasoning for why that number will hit might just get my action!

I guess it’s been a couple of days since I’ve written anything here. On some evenings or mornings when I’m contemplating whether or not to write a blog entry, it is not uncommon that I take a pass on account of not really having done anything since the last time I wrote. I know it might seem like being in Vegas for the WSOP could never get boring, but when every day is very similar to the one before it, it’s easy to start to feel a little bored after a few weeks here.

Two days ago, I busted out of the $1500 no-limit event in level three. I think it was probably the worst event I’ve had all summer in terms of how quickly I busted out and how small my peak chip stack was relative to the starting stack. We started with 4.5k in chips and I’m pretty sure I was never over 5k before losing a handful of pots and shoving 1,700 after looking at one Ace on the button during 75/150. The big blind quickly called with Kings. I squeezed a pointy-card, but alas, it was the Ace’s tranny cousin, a 4, and I was making my way out of the Rio as early as I have in any tournament this summer.

Later that night, I met up with my buddy and infrequent PokerTips blogger Steve. He and I joined my friend Dave, who was a blogger on here last year but is too cool for PokerTips now or something, for a meal at Isla in Treasure Island (excuse me, TI). Isla is a decent Mexican place which has guacamole and margaritas, both of which were exactly what I was in the mood for.

Steve and I parted ways with Dave after dinner in search of some single-zero roulette. I didn’t even know you could find single-zero roulette anywhere in the US, but Steve assured me that Venetian has it. For those of you who don’t understand the ins-and-outs of pit games very well, most roulette tables in the US have two green zeros. The wheels in Europe have just one. Single-zero roulette has a much lower house-edge than US-style roulette (2.7% vs. 5.4%). Sure enough, there it was at the Venetian in all its glory: a roulette wheel with just one zero. Unfortunately, it was a $100 minimum bet table which was a little more than either of us were looking to gamble.

Steve mentioned that Aria, the newest casino on the Strip, also has single-zero roulette and that when he was there at 2:00 am last Friday, it was just a $25 minimum table. So we made our way out of the Venetian on a quest for the cheaper single-zero wheel at Aria. On our way out, I saw this:

I knew it was just a matter of time before I saw someone playing online poker while seated at a brick-and-mortar table.

As we crawled down the Strip in my Infiniti from Treasure Island to Aria, Steve explained to me how his whole single-zero session at Aria last week came and went without ever seeing the ball land on the zero. His perspective on roulette is that it’s a vig-free game except for when the ball hits the zero and then all of your bets on the table are just your way of paying vig. That doesn’t change the house-edge or anything, but it’s a nice, comforting little way to view the game.

Not too long after we pulled up a chair at the $25 single-zero table at Aria, the ball found the zero. “Damn,” we exclaimed, “I guess we’re paying vig tonight.” Rather than collecting each of our $25 that was resting on red, the dealer took away three of the $5 chips and added three $1 chips to the top of our two remaining $5 chips. We both just looked at each other in disbelief. Is what we think is happening really happening? Yup! At Aria, they give you half of your bet back when the zero hits on their roulette table! We were like a couple of nerds who just cracked some secret code. “Holy crap! Roulette with a 1.3% house-edge in the nicest casino in Vegas! This is great!”

And like that, Aria is now my favorite casino in Vegas. I already liked it a lot before discovering their generous roulette rules; they built a really nice, trendy casino without taking it too far over the top on the douche-factor (like, say, Wynn does). I guess they also have blackjack switch with player-friendly rules too which is a great game that’s tough to find in most casinos. Aria will definitely be seeing most of my pit-game action on this and future trips to Vegas.

————

Yesterday, I woke up early again for soccer, a practice that is becoming routine for me during the World Cup. After watching Uruguay put away South Korea, which was the result I was rooting for, I have money on Uruguay to win it all, Dave and I headed to Lagasse’s in Palazzo to watch the US-Ghana match. This is hands-down the best place I’ve been to in Vegas for watching games. They have TVs absolutely everywhere and a ton of different bars, couches, and chairs that allow you to have whatever viewing experience you wish. There is no other place in Vegas I would care to be for watching the US during the World Cup.

Unfortunately, this was the last time for a while that I’ll need Lagasse’s for US World Cup viewing purposes. Ghana played great and scored two goals on the few opportunities they were able to create; US just couldn’t capitalize on their chances and like that, they’re out of the World Cup. I was pretty depressed when the game ended and decided to drown away the pain with a distraction: the $350 event at Venetian. It worked pretty well. After a couple of hours of playing poker, I had mostly put the US demise behind me.

The tournament was nothing special: I lost a race for a 35k pot during 300/600 and got my last few big blinds all-in with King-Seven suited against pocket Queens in a blind-vs-blind battle.

————

Soon, I’m heading out the door for Day 1B of this weekend’s $1000 donkament special. One of my best friends in poker and the guy more responsible than anyone else for helping me grow into an adept tournament player, Ray Coburn (Exitonly online), is 7th in chips with 35 left in the $1500 event that I mentioned busting out of earlier. So it looks like it’ll be a long day for me at the Rio regardless of how I do in the $1k: Ray is one of the nicest guys I’ve met in the poker world and is as deserving of a bracelet and a huge score as much as anyone could ever be “deserving” of such a thing; I look forward to sweating him at a WSOP final table!

Another washout.

Today was a $560 at Venetian. Things were going nicely for a while, I won some pots, flopped a set and dodged two outs, and was sitting on 45k during 300/600 when I lost a 65k pot with KTdd all-in against TT on a 932dd flop. A few hands later, I got AJdd all-in preflop against the same guy’s 99 for a 28 big blind pot and watched him flop quads. Run better against me in races, dude.

One individual at our table was setting records for how long it took him to fold each hand. An older gentleman at the table timed him and determined that he was taking an average of 9 seconds to act preflop. If that doesn’t seem like a long time, believe me, it is. When most players fold preflop, they do so in about 1-2 seconds from the time the action is on them. Nine seconds is considerably long. I told him that I’ve never seen someone take so long to play each hand. If he was wasting 7 seconds per hand more than a replacement player, that means he was wasting a full 5 minutes and 15 seconds per hour if we assume we were playing 45 hands per hour. Five minutes an hour wasted waiting on this guy to fold!

On one hand, my lone opponent began to reach for his chips to make a bet on the flop and I just went ahead and folded while he tried to determine his bet size. I told the table, “I’m trying to re-coup some of our time that this guy is wasting.” Everyone laughed since they were all equally annoyed at him. Despite the chastising, he seemed unfazed and continued wasting time every hand. I would love to have it in me to be that selfish and inconsiderate to others. Life must be a total charm when you can do whatever you feel like and not be least bit affected by how your actions impact others. I’m sure he never uses a turn signal and likes to smoke cigars indoors too!

Something I got to thinking about at the table today was how much poker players seem to discuss strategy right at the table with their opponents and why this is obviously dumb from a value standpoint. I know making comments like, “I figured you were three-betting fairly wide there otherwise I probably wouldn’t have shoved that hand,” is just harmless social small-talk, but it’s actually pretty dumb for a few reasons.

First, you’re basically announcing to the table that you’re a good, thinking player. Why make it easy on them? Second, you’re encouraging bad, non-thinking players to become thinking players. I understand that away from the tables people are going to talk about poker and improve, but do it away from the tables! Let’s not forget that when you’re sitting at a poker table, the other people at the table are your opponents. You are playing a game where the objective is to beat them. I have no problem with people being social at the table about things that have nothing to do with poker, but why would you be social/friendly when the discussion topic is poker? It just doesn’t make sense to me and is a leak that a lot of players seem to have.

In general, players seem to discuss strategy at the table so regularly that it can be exploited. Since so many players give away information by verbalizing their exact thought process on key hands, the practice has become common enough that it’s gotten to the point where players almost expect you to disclose information! It seems like there’s always a few people who like to ask, “would you have called if I shoved there?” or “I wasn’t sure if AQ was in your three-betting range there or not…” that they make it really easy on you to mislead them. That’s what poker is about, right? Misleading people and inducing mistakes? Some players seem to make it all too easy to do this. You can set up whatever image you want to have with your words almost easier than you can with your play.

Alright, that’s enough about poker. Let’s talk about soccer. I feel like those two words describe my whole summer: poker and soccer.

I made a couple of World Cup outright winner bets tonight. I took Japan at 100:1 (Pinnacle has them at just 75:1) and Uruguay at 15:1. Both of those teams have fairly soft paths to the semi-finals. In the case of Japan, there will be quite the handsome hedging opportunity if they can get there.

A couple of other bets I’m eyeing are England at 10:1 and Netherlands at 8:1. Before the tournament started, England was 7:1. They allowed one fluke goal in their entire group stage, advanced, and are now 10:1?! The consensus seems to be that England is a disappointment, but I think if their attack can improve a little, people will be quickly reminded of why they were one of the favorites coming into the tournament. In the case of Netherlands, I just love them. They’re able to get away with being so attack-focused because their mid-fielders win a lot of balls which allow them to skimp a little defensively without consequence. My only concern with them is that they’ll almost certainly have to face Brazil or Spain in the quarterfinals which is unfortunate. If they were able to avoid playing the Big 3 (Argentina being the other one) until the semifinals, it would be a much easier position to derive hedge-value from. What am I saying? Hedging an 8:1 is pretty nitty. I’ll just bet it and root for them to win it all if/when US is eliminated.

Tomorrow is a $1,500 at the Rio.

The matchup features the league leader in ERA (Jimenez, who threw a no-hitter last month) and Roy Oswalt who has the 19th lowest ERA in the league at a stellar 2.62. No matter how good the offenses are for these teams, the over/under would still be really low on account of these two stud pitchers. But as it happens, the Astros offense is laughably bad while the Rockies are just average. These factors have combined to set an over/under of 6 runs for this game. I’ve been following baseball lines for a few years now and I don’t think I’ve ever seen an over/under of 6 in a baseball game. Most over/unders are between 8.5 and 9.5. A high total would be over 10 while a low total would be 8 or less. Occasionally you’ll see a total get as low as 6.5, but I’ve never seen 6. I’m not saying it’s never happened before – I’ve just never seen it.

What will probably be the lowest over/under in 2,430 MLB games this season seems like a pretty good line to me. In other words, I have no plans to bet either side of the total. Instead, I’ll put a little on the Astros who, on account of their Triple-A caliber offense, are substantial home underdogs against a mediocre team despite one of the best pitchers in baseball going to the hill for them. To put into perspective just how bad the Astros offense has been so far this year, teams 1-29 on the team on-base percentage rankings come in at .367 to .308. The Astros are dead last at .277. This offense is orders of magnitude worse than anyone else. Hopefully they can muster one run against Jimenez, but it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising if they don’t.

At any rate, this is really cheap entertainment. I got six tickets to this game for a total of $19 on StubHub. The first year I lived in Houston was the year following the Astros’ World Series appearance. You couldn’t get a ticket to a game for less than $20 that season no matter where you sat. Now you can sit in the first row of an upper deck section for $3 a ticket!

“Do you play professionally?”

“Yup.”

Suspicion confirmed.

He told me he’s a pitcher for [a major league team] and was flying back to Phoenix from Alabama (via Houston) after receiving Tommy John’s surgery from Dr. Andrews, a famous sports injury surgeon. He’ll be in Phoenix for a year rehabilitating his throwing arm. We chatted some. I learned that he was drafted in the second round and has played roughly one full season in the major leagues. I asked him his name and told him I’m rooting for him to have a good recovery and resisted the urge to grill him any further with a bunch of fanboy questions since I sort of gathered that maybe he wasn’t in the mood to be interviewed.

Once I arrived in Phoenix, I did what just about anyone would do after sitting next to a pro athlete on a flight: Googled his name.

The results were shocking.

He’s a professional baseball player, alright. Was drafted in the 4th round by [the team he said he plays for] (not the 2nd like he told me). But that wasn’t the only stretching of the truth. In addition to being drafted two rounds later than he said he was, he’s also yet to make his MLB debut. I couldn’t believe it! The guy sat there and told me he’s pitched about a full season in the majors for [his team] when the reality is that he hasn’t thrown a single pitch! He even said [his major league team's home ballpark] is his favorite stadium to pitch in. The reality is: he’s never even played there!

Now I could out his name and potentially lead employers, teammates, family members and girlfriends to this page whenever his name is Googled for the remainder of his career, but I really have no reason to do that to him. Despite having lied to me about the accomplishments of his career, he generally seemed like a decent fellow so I’m not really compelled to potentially devalue his life in any way by listing his real name in this entry. However, he may not be as fortunate with anyone else he stretches the truth with in the future.

I can understand why he might have been compelled to stretch the truth. He probably didn’t think of any consequences and instead went with an urge to make himself sound more accomplished than he really is in order to impress a stranger. People do it all the time. However, this is 2010. The world is a pretty small place. He should have enough sense not to lie to someone who can uncover his lie in a matter of seconds with a Google search. He should also have enough common sense to realize that, in 2010, just about any stranger he has an encounter with is going to be compelled to Google his name to see a little more info about the pro athlete they were just talking to.

I’ve had this happen with people before regarding live poker tournament results. Do they not realize every such result is posted on dozens of database websites? You can’t lie to someone about a six figure score and expect them to never find out. Fifty years ago it might have worked like a charm, but thanks to Google, it’s not as easy to deceive people anymore.

Anyway, I had a nice weekend in Phoenix. We went to the Pirates-Diamondbacks game on Saturday. Chase Field is really nice, it reminded me quite a lot of Minute Maid Park in Houston in terms of modern amenities and architecture (both have retractable roofs, both have state-of-the-art scoreboards, etc). I made my girlfriend and sister place a small bet on the game in hopes that it would help them find the game more interesting. This of course worked. We bet under 8.5 runs and had like 30 minutes of intense sweating until, unfortunately, a ninth run was scored. It’s amazing what putting a little money on something can do for making you care about an outcome you otherwise could have cared less about.

We also played a round of mini-golf where both my girlfriend and sister slaughtered me (by five and four strokes, respectively). That was fairly humiliating especially when they each (as is typical with girls on a mini-golf course) just walked up to their balls and hit it with little regard for the outcome while I actually took the time to strategize the best way to play each angle, obstacle, line, hill, etc. Nah… I’m just bitter. I’m sure they lined up their shots, they were just better at it than me, apparently. Luckily we were playing for affordable stakes.

On Sunday, we visited my girlfriend’s aunt and uncle in Scottsdale. Her uncle has an 09 cherry red Corvette convertible. He was super cool and let me take it out for a drive. His 14 year old hockey prodigy son came along. Like most any not-quite-old-enough-to-drive male riding in a Corvette, he sought to live vicariously through me by encouraging me to “hit it”. That was the only nudge I needed to race up to 120 mph using the paddle shifters on wide open desert backroads without having to worry about whether or not he was one to go tell his father the details of his horrific high speed ride with his cousin’s boyfriend.

What a sweet car. Getting back into the Ford Focus I rented as we departed from their home was extra bitter.

I’m writing this entry on my flight back to Houston. I flew a lot on Continental last year (including a trip to Israel) and racked up enough frequent flier miles to make the gold-tier of their elite member program. One perk of the program is first class upgrades when there are available seats, which there often are, including on this flight as well as the initial flight on this itinerary. Normally the extra leg room is reason enough for someone with a 6′4″ frame to enjoy a small fist pump upon news of an upgrade, but it’s particularly sweet on this flight because of free DirecTV access. Watching the Twins home opener in their new stadium at 30,000 feet beats a vaguely entertaining magazine. There’s also an in-seat electrical outlet which means once this game ends in a few more pitches I’ll be able to watch my Entourage DVDs without worrying about laptop battery life. Air travel is starting to get kind of sick.

Here are a few pictures from the weekend:

By the way, Nat Arem posted an article by Bill Simmons called A Fan-Friendly Solution to Fix the NBA on Facebook. It’s an absolute must-read for any serious fan of the NBA. His Entertaining as Hell tournament idea is brilliant.

One final thing: my friend Paul (the guy in the suit from the skit) thinks he’s the greatest sports-bettor in the world. Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t, but I’ve set out on a mission to find out. I made a bet with Paul for a considerable amount of money that he cannot pick 55 (or more) games correctly out of 100 within a year. All of his picks have to be of the -110 vs. -110 variety. In other words, he can’t just take the moneyline on heavy favorites because of course that wouldn’t be fair. I started a site called Paulie B’s 9 Star Locks to track his 100 picks. The site is nothing special, just a spreadsheet basically, but it’s there for anyone to follow along and bet along with Paul or even against him. Granted, 100 picks isn’t a huge sample size by any means, but should give a vague indication whether or not Paul is a savvy sports-bettor. At the time I write this, if you had bet every game the opposite of what his pick was so far, you’d be up money!

It’s such a sick city like that because no matter what happens they’ve got you hooked and you’ll want to be coming back.

This trip was just disastrous in every way imaginable for me on the gambling front. I mean, we’re talking 99th percentile in terms of statistical “run bad”. I may never have a trip like this again from just a sheer “odds going against me” standpoint. I lost everything. I mean everything. Overpairs vs. underpairs in poker for a $5k NAPT seat. Got rivered. Doubling down on 11s, I musta been 0/14 on catching a Ten. Sports bets? Forget it. Anyone who had taken the other side of my sports calls and put triple their normal bet on it would be clinking together glasses of champagne on a yacht right now and having a hearty laugh with their friends off the coast of Monte Carlo. I mean it was that bad but of course I’ll still go back in a couple months.

On our last night there, we were at this place on the 58th floor of the Palms that is like a hybrid between a nightclub and a casino. They’ve got blackjack tables and a roulette wheel so if you want to gamble and skip all of the dancing and socializing, you can. After three nights straight of going out to fancy-shmancy places, all I really wanted to do was sit down at a blackjack table and leave the dancing to the new arrivals.

My friends were pretty much feeling the same way, so they joined in. One friend, I’ll call him Terry since I don’t know how he’d feel about his business being aired on the Internet for everyone to read, had won a ton of money playing slots of all things. I mean, everyone knows that there are plenty of sucker bets in Vegas, but slots are the sucker bets of the sucker bets. Even the three card poker players view the slot machine players as total suckers. But Terry likes to overlook this fact and sit down at the slots thereby making all of his friends uncomfortable since playing slots is a very chick thing to do. How does Terry do at the 15% house-edge slots? Kills them, of course. So while Greg (another fake name) and I are getting killed at things we’re good at (poker) and things that don’t have thaaat bad of a house edge (blackjack), Terry is absolutely mutilating the slot machines to the tune of a couple thousand.

And it’s not like he hit some big jackpot either. He was just spiking $100-$200 scores on the slots all day like that type of thing just happens normally.

So we’re up there and Greg and I are just getting killed. Absolutely killed. I finally catch a good card. I hit a 13 against a 10 and spike the perfect 8. Sweet! I am finally going to win a hand. Before the dealer showed their down-card, I said, “if I don’t win this one and somehow push, I’m done. I’m out of here.” Dealer’s down-card is a 2, draw card is, you guessed it… 9.

I grab my chips and leap up out my seat. “Nyet! I’m outta here. I’m going back downstairs. Screw this place.”

After I walk away, Greg tells Terry that he should play the next hand that I would have been dealt if I hadn’t left. He was like, “listen, I know you don’t like blackjack, but you’re basically the luckiest guy in the city right now. You need to put $100 on the next hand that Cory was going to be dealt. You’re a guaranteed winner.” Terry complies and of course gets a blackjack.

Near the very end of the night, we wind up at a blackjack table downstairs where there is this Asian male dealer. At this point, I was totally down to the felt. Whatever money I could lose on this trip was pretty much already gone. I had maybe a couple of bets left in me before it was time to take that long, painful walk to the elevator with nothing but your room key in your pocket.

At some point we learned that the Palms blackjack tables allow surrendering. If you don’t know what that means, don’t sweat it too much; it’s basically just a nice alternative to hitting or standing that can save you half your bet when you have a really bad hand.

So I get dealt a 16 against a 10 which is pretty much the worst statistical scenario you can find yourself in at a blackjack table. I motion to the guy that I want to surrender my bet. Now this is how cold I was running… I had already lost so much hand over fist that it had gone from being frustrating to just being funny. So I motion surrender and the dealer looks at me, swear to God, and says, “why?”

Pause… pause…

I look around in disbelief with my arms in the air and just say to him, “I dunno man!!…. CAUSE I SAID SO!! Since when is that not good enough?!” My friends and I just lose it. Even he started laughing. I mean… I was running so cold that I couldn’t even get the dealer to just do what I wanted him to without having him drag me over the coals about it! What makes it especially startling is that surrendering is what you should do in that situation from an optimal-strategy standpoint! I mean… really?!?! What do you mean, “why?” For one, because you’re supposed to, but more importantly, why on God’s green earth are you asking me? Just deal the card!!

The whole thing was a pretty good laugh. It truly did feel like something out of a movie where there was a moment where you couldn’t even believe what was happening. He turned out to be really cool and ironically reminded me that surrendering was an option when I was later put in the same 16 vs. 10 scenario on the biggest bet I made of the night (it’s easy to forget that surrendering is allowed since it usually almost never is). That was a moment I’ll never forget. I’ve played thousands and thousands of hands of blackjack before but never once has a dealer just looked at me and said, “why?” after I declared my decision.

Vegas is such a terrible place. Think about it… where else in the world can you visit, have the worst luck imaginable all trip, and on the flight home agree wholeheartedly when your friend says, “we should go back in April!”

Note: I didn’t really want to write much about poker in this entry since I already did so in an article on PokerTips.