Bet365 has $10,000 freerolls on May 7, 10, 12, 14, 17, 20, 22, 25, 28, and 31. All pay out to the top 50. Absolutely no requirements to qualify. Registration begins six hours before each tourney.
In addition to that, they have regular $5000 weekly freerolls every Saturday.
Well worth it to sign up just to play these -- no deposit necessary. Though if you deposit at least $50, there's a $50 bonus. And if you play 250 raked hands, you'll be qualified for their monthly $30,000 freeroll.
ยงIt's good to be back home. Even better to arrive home and find my car waiting in the casino parking lot. I'd parked there to take advantage of the casino's free shuttle to the airport, then thought perhaps a car with out-of-state license plates in the same place for 11 days might arouse suspicion, what with the bike security I've seen bicycling around the lot.
Next time, I'll valet the car so I won't worry.
It's little "perks" like these that I savor about a place like Vegas. Just the concept of a cheap all-you-can-eat buffet where the food is actually good and prepared in front of you -- I won't lie and say that wasn't a reason for moving here.
My final couple days in LA saw me at the premiere of
A Naked Girl on the Appian Way by Richard Greenberg, another of my favorite playwrights. The title is misleading enough that South Coast Repertory (which commissioned) felt the need to state that the play contained no nudity. More than that, the Naked Girl is only mentioned once and where the play could've taken advantage of that moment and expanded on it, it's just dropped for some heady intellectual banter (e.g., Frasier Crane arguing with his grown kids). It's a funny romp but nowhere near the poignancy of Greenberg's other plays.
SCR is in Costa Mesa, which next time I'll explore more. I'm sure it, along with the rest of Southern California, is expensive, but it has that suburban feel that I like.
I do expect to eventually move to LA, and if possible it will be an area where I won't go into wholesale homicide sitting in freeway traffic. I snagged an
LA Weekly (which I'm going to have to subscribe to, it's such a terrific weekly) and the feature story this week spoke all about apartments in LA and how people are migrating to downtown. I just may move sooner than later if I crash and burn gambling.
Which, after this weekend (the annual Vegas trip of my DC guy friends) and next (Luxor's slot tourney), the gambling will slow down to a crawl. I play online for the match bonuses which are more lucrative and frequent than poker bonuses, but even those have dropped to a $250 match where a couple months ago they were in the $300-750 range. Wage requirements have also increased to 20x playthrough vs. the 10x playthrough previously, and my monthly playthrough is still the same as it was. If they're reducing the reason I continue to play, it's a good a time as any to get out or at least decrease significantly.
One of the online casinos sent me an intriguing gift -- they said to email them with a gift of my creation, whether plane tickets, dinner plans, a sporting event... anything I could think of, as long as it was under $400. I first emailed a request of dinner with Charlize Theron. Either she was unavailable (coincidentally, grubette heard Charlize paged on the standby list at LAX Sunday night) or they just didn't respond, so I followed up with a VCR/DVD Recorder combo. It was more than $400, so I requested a $400 Amazon gift certificate to put toward that.
The VCR/DVD Recorder combo was really more of a MacGuffin because I figured $400 at Amazon would at least buy Christmas gifts. The only thing I really needed was a couch, but I'd just purchased one (and is being delivered tomorrow!). I looked into top-of-the-line MP3 players, but I'm quite satisfied with my iRiver even though I can't stand the armband. Also checked out Harry & David's fruit-of-the-month club so I could get something healthy every month. In the end, I couldn't decide so went the gift certificate route.
I hadn't played live poker since Commerce and Bicycle on my last trip to LA. After a week of seminars and plays, I returned in full force by visiting Commerce, Hustler, Hollywood Park (a great time with the LA Bloggers), and Hawaiian Gardens.
I was impressed with Hustler, even though the game on a Saturday afternoon was tight at best. The way grubette painted Hustler, I'd expected it to be a hole-in-the-wall place to vomit in the corner, but it was very comfortable and swanky. If they dimmed the lights, I would mistake it for a strip club.
Surprisingly, I had winning sessions at all of the casinos this trip. Hawaiian Gardens was iffy -- I was into the 100NL game for three buy-ins before I persisted and grinded my way up. Poker is patience and timed aggression, and fortunately I'd planned to be at HI-G the whole night so I had plenty of the former.
HI-G also has new poker tables with buttons that say Food, Drink, Table, and Chips. The dealer just presses a button and a service person instantly appears.
There's no end to the giddiness I feel being able to order a full meal and eat on a little room-service tray right at the poker table at these California cardbarns. Vegas could take a lesson from California, but they don't, and that's how you know they don't
really care about poker in the grand scheme of things. It's more important to have a poker room present to draw a reason to go, then hope the players and their friends and spouses will play slots and other games.
A separate cafeteria-style poker-only room would be popular here, but casinos would make much more replacing those poker tables (and all salaried employees) with slot machines.
With gaming and trends so cyclical, I wouldn't be surprised if once poker's popularity drops, Vegas again begins closing that valuable real estate that the poker tables take up.
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