Archive for November, 2007
Gambling is fun!
Yesterday after I left work and ran some errands, I met up with my friend Brighten at the wonderful Tulalip Casino, 35 minutes north of Seattle. While there, we shot quite a bit of dice!
Betting mostly the same stuff (full odds pass line and 2-3 come bets), we ended up going on an insane heater to start the session against a wrong bettor who was betting against himself while rolling and winning. It was one of the weirder things I had seen - the shooter was going on a ridiculous heater and losing his shirt while we were raking it in. We both achieved a major craps life goal - covering all the non-point numbers with come bets and full odds due to a shooter staying hot for over 20 minutes. It was awesome.
After losing some back and then rallying to cap the session up quite a bit, we headed over to The Keg (our go-to standard restaurant), where I proceeded to win the first credit card game* for pre-dinner drinks ($20) and lost the second credit card game ($160). Rigged.
We headed over to Parker’s Casino to play some 4/8 limit and various other table games and act like idiots, where we had a lot of fun. Brighten managed to get even from poker losses at the blackjack table, while I didn’t. Still up for the trip due to craps, we went to his place where I met his roommate Chelsea, who had mutual friend Tyson in tow. After chilling out for a few hours, we played over 100 hands of 1-5 ($5/point) Chinese poker with deuce in the middle and a new variant we invented: Two Badugi hands and one five-card high hand. This game was very mentally taxing and really helped me to think differently about setting my hands. Somehow after the long marathon session, ending at 6:45 AM, there was only a final swing of 2 units (with me winning, thank you very much).
Introducing Tyler and Rob to the new variant of Chinese poker should be a lot of fun - it’s pretty tough and probably introduces a lot more variance, which is always fun.
* Credit card game (also known as credit card roulette) is where all dinner participants put a credit card in a hat and choose one randomly. Whoever “wins” has to pay for the whole bill. As long as everyone has somewhat equal shares of the bill, it’s a 0 EV game and adds a lot of fun. Try it!
On life, death, and the finality of it all.
This was a co-worker of mine at PokerStars.
Alvin Arevalo was an American from California in my training class with me in Costa Rica when we took poker specialist / customer support jobs for PokerStars. He was a fun-loving guy, one who loved the outdoors, watched his diet (didn’t eat too many carbs, I remember), and really took to the zipline canopy tours over the rainforest with Randy (another co-worker) and I. We talked about the glory days of PartyPoker, what we’d do if we were offered permanent positions in San Jose, Costa Rica (he eventually accepted one), and stayed in touch even after I left the company.
It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that we were hiking up the mountains in Costa Rica with our supervisors and other co-workers, happy to be working for such a great company with lots of interesting people.
I’ve been told that the news article is both inaccurate and flat-out wrong in a few places, and that the story is a lot more devious with premeditation involved, but there’s no real reason to expound on that.
Rest in peace, Alvin.