Posts Tagged ‘casino’

Recently, myself and Norm headed up to the Grosvenor casino for their “Facebook Freeroll” tournament – a £500 guaranteed free roll that I figured was worth a punt. I managed to double up in the buy in period so didn’t need to re-buy, though I wasn’t impressed by the £2 for my coke, even if it was unlimited refills and a no registration fee evening.

I managed to keep going until 2am, at which point I still had 60,000 chips (with an average of 37,000), but I was so tired by this point I started making silly calls and was eventually knocked out after going all in on trip eights, which lost to a flush on the river. Could have been worse though, 21st out of 129 with no re-buy.

Yesterday, I blogged about Poker Stats Library, a couple of scripts I wrote which I’ve now published on Github. On Saturday, it was time to try them out.

I headed down to Grosvenor to take part in their freeroll tournament. I say freeroll, it was a £10 rebuy tournament, which gets you twice the number of chips, so almost everyone buys in again. As I sat down at the table I found myself sitting opposite a guy named Christopher Norfolk – while I’m aware of the laws of probability, it’s still an amusing coincidence.

I ended up placing 11th, out of the 79 that entered. I was doing quite well but having started at 2pm, I had arranged to meet Elina at 6pm and by this time it was 7pm, so I went all in on an ace high for boom or bust and lost. Still, an enjoyable evening none the less.

Last week, we headed down to Alea Casino for a poker night that had been organised by the analysis team.

Row One, aka myself and Jason where there to represent the office and I brought Norm along too. After the night we had, I think future tournaments might be restricted to analysts only though.

As part of an elaborate tactic, I went out first to make sure I wasn’t stealing chips off Jason and Norm. They then went on to place first and second, taking almost all of the prize money. Good times.

On Friday night we headed down to Alea Casino for my birthday celebration.

We almost ran out of space as I had only booked the table for 15 people and 16 people ended up turning up, not that the restaurant could cope anyway – it took them 50 minutes to bring us our starters, of which they then forgotten one, they manged to forget one of the desserts and to top it all off they even got arsey when I told them I didn’t want to pay the service change because the service was rubbish. Food was nice though.

Afterward we hit the casino floor and effectively ended up with our own private table – there was blackjack table down the end that nobody else seemed to know about so we had it to ourselves, even if it was £5 minimum bet. I put down £50 and managed to walk out even but somewhat trailed James’ returns after he hit three blackjacks in a row!

Thank you to everyone who came down, it was a good night.

Oli was in Leeds for a one night special last night so we headed out to the pub, or a few.

I decided it would be good to do some cocktails in the evening so by the time it came to head out to the pub, I was already really drunk. We started at The Library and went through The Dry Dock and Stick or Twist before heading to Fab Cafe. Finally we finished the night at Grosvenor where, despite my inebriated state, still managed to come up even on blackjack before stumbling home.

It’s good to know that even though I’m almost half way through my life, I can still party until the early hours.

For the final stop of the road trip part of our holiday we headed to Monaco to win back the cost of our holiday in the Casino de Monte Carlo.

The hotel was reasonable – though facing onto a building site, perhaps explaining why it was half the price of all the other hotels in the area. The rooms we had next to each other shared a balcony also which was rather genius as it meant we could pop round to each other’s rooms.

It was very warm on an evening but luckily with myself and Norm living in Leeds city centre, simply leaving the balcony doors open all night wasn’t a problem as Monaco traffic, while noisy, pales in comparison to the drunken revelry that happens outside my window on a Saturday night.

One settled in we headed down towards the marina to get a few drinks at a local cafe followed by dinner at the Royal Thai restaurant which was excellent food.

Once it was dark we headed back to the hotel and donned suites to head up to the Casino de Monte Carlo. Meanwhile George decided to head to the local jazz bar to check out the karaoke and ended up spending the night chatting up the Scottish barmaid working there.

The casino was on the big square in Monte Carlo and was lined with needless expensive cars outside – Porches, Aston Martins, Mercades – even the Fiat was the limited edition rally version.

The casino was fantastically grand – something which I think just really rubs it in how much money they are winning from you. Even the bar was expensive in there and no wonder when you have three croupiers sitting on every table.

I was looking forward to doing some gambling but a €25 minimum bet on black jack we soon gave up on that and opted to play the slot machines instead. At least we did get to spend some time talking to some rather attractive young ladies on what is apparently called a Contiki tour. We’d never heard of it, probably a sign of how out of touch we were with the youth of today.

We were due to hit the road early the next morning but having agreed to be ready to go for 6:30, I headed out at 6:40, using our daily buffer of Kieran-Time to go take some shots of the marina before it got light.

I ways always told that gambling doesn’t pay, that you would always lose money and it was a bad habit to get into.

On Thursday we had a work’s nigh out to Alea Casino down at Clarence Dock to take advantage of their special offer dinner which also includes a free chip to use on the casino floor.

After dinner hit the roulette table and to my surprise I managed to hit the right colour several times in a row. I then moved onto strips of numbers and hit lucky again. Indeed by the end of the night I cashed out and left the casino with £1 more than I went in with even after factoring in my coke, a two course meal plus an extra side and two glasses of wine.

What this means is that I have done the scientific research and it turns out that gambling actually does pay! I know, I’m as shocked as you are but there you go. Of course part of the scientific method is being able to repeat the experiment, however most of the office managed to walk out of there having won some cash. So take that science!