Return to Macau

I have made the long voyage to Macau again, my first visit there since late 2012. Made it all of the way back, too.

The first time I went was to cover the Asia Championship of Poker. This time I was there to help out covering the Asia Pacific Poker Tour Macau series (both for PokerStars). The previous trip was to Taipa and the Grand Waldo, while this time the poker happened at the City of Dreams on the Cotai Strip and I stayed nearby in the Sheraton Grand Macao.

I was just looking back over my entries here from 2012, in particular the last one detailing what was a stress-filled trip back home that included me missing an initial flight from Hong Kong. That was a foggy day, as evidenced by a picture in that post, and in truth the memory is a bit foggy, too.

All told, the traveling part of this trip went much more smoothly, and while I had a good time there before, the reporting side of things was a bit more fun, too, as I was part of a team this time rather than working on my own. A lot of the new building on Macau of late has happened on Cotai, too, which meant we had a chance to explore several of the new hotel-casinos nearby and be suitably dazzled by the views, both day and night.

For some time now I've been filing an "Inside Gaming" column over at PokerNews that requires me to look in on Macau quite frequently given its influential place in the casino industry landscape.

Thus have I been aware of the significant revenue slide for gaming in the Special Administration Region lasting more than two years (from mid-2014 to mid-2016), and the more recent recovery. The slide followed Xi Jinping coming into power as the President of the People's Republic of China in 2013 and then subsequently instituting restrictions that among other things limited VIPs' ability to move money back and forth to the SAR.

I've also been aware of the new building of late on Macau, including Studio City Macau (opened 2015), the Parisian (2016), Wynn Palace (2016), and MGM Cotai which just opened last month. Heck, Sands Cotai Central (where my hotel was) only went up in 2012 just before my last visit, although I didn’t make it over to Cotai then.

Below are shots of Studio City, the Parisian, and the MGM Cotai. Click all of the photos in this post to embiggen.

It was interesting, then, to see and visit these massive new hotel-casinos I'd been reading about (and occasionally writing about). In between work we had a chance to explore many of them, including sitting down for meals at a few. There were crowds in the casinos here and there, although strolling through the malls the shops didn't seem all that populated.

We even had the chance one afternoon to play a round at the Grado Mini Golf course at the Venetian Macao, a sprawling 18-hole course on the seventh floor affording a pretty cool view of Macau.

The poker was fun to follow and report on, with an exciting Main Event finale in which Team PokerStars Pro Aditya Agarwal just missed winning the sucker, being a card away from sealing it before ultimately losing to Lin Wu of China. The City of Dreams poker room is especially nice, taking up a big portion of the second floor with lots of good restaurants nearby.

Still reeling a bit from the travel -- something close to 30 hours door-to-door, I think, to get from my hotel room back to the farm. Despite the long haul Macau is definitely a fun destination, though, to which I'd like to return and explore even more.

Heads-Up and Humility

Wanted to share a short thought I had related to that Masters championship that concluded on Sunday. Actually the thought was inspired from both an impression of the ending of the golf tournament and after following the last live updates from the PokerStars Championships Macau Main Event final table, also taking place on Sunday.

I say the latter took place on Sunday, although in truth while it was Sunday morning and early afternoon here, it was Sunday evening and Monday morning in Macau, as the tournament didn’t conclude until around 2 a.m. their time. That reminded me of my lone visit to Macau back in late 2012 and the very long and late final day of the Asia Championship of Poker.

That day play didn’t end until around 3 a.m. I’ll skip over the details -- all recorded here in a blog post written after I’d gotten back -- but what followed was a kind of mad scramble by me afterwards to make my plane out of Hong Kong that morning. In fact, I didn’t make my flight, but things worked out in the end.

Much like happened back in 2012, heads-up lasted an inordinately long time at inaugural PSC Macau Main Event. In fact, it lasted about twice as long, as the final two in my tournament went about six hours while the final two last weekend -- Tianyuan Tang and eventual winner Elliot Smith -- went something close to 12 hours before finishing.

I followed the updates while chatting online with some of the fellas there reporting. I also noticed some of the talk on Twitter, with a few judgments passed along here and there about the heads-up skills of the final pair.

Televised coverage of the final round of the Masters began just about the time play ended in Macau, and as you know that ended up with a kind of protracted “heads-up” finish between Justin Rose and Sergio Garcia. By the last few holes those two had broken ahead of the chase pack, then both missed some big putts down the stretch before Garcia managed to take it down on the first playoff hole.

Heads-up is hard, man. No relaxing. No matter if it lasts a few minutes or hours and hours.

Garcia’s a poker player, as many readers of this blog probably know, regularly playing at the Bahamas each January and also turning up in tournaments in Spain. Has even cashed a handful of times, including in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event once a few years ago, although I’m not aware of him ever making it to heads-up in a poker tournament. (He does have a third-place finish, though.)

When Garcia and Rose were battling at the end -- and especially after each missed big pressure-packed putts -- there was also some censure of their play. I’m remembering someone describing the play as a “disgrace” and comparing some missed putts to what amateurs might do when playing a round for $20. That’s part of the fun of following major sporting events, though -- the armchair quarterbacking and coaching, I mean. Adds a lot to the overall entertainment.

Anyhow, the combination of these two “heads-up” matches and the crowds of onlookers made me think a little bit of my own experience, in particular that recent poker tournament I played in which I made it to heads-up and with dozens of people watching and cheering came up short of winning the sucker.

I’ve gotten to heads-up in poker tournaments plenty of times before, winning some and losing others. That might’ve been the first time there was a significant rail, though. I remember thinking afterwards that I’d played heads-up okay for the most part, though obviously second-guessed a few decisions and concluded I could’ve handled it differently. I might have thought as well for just a moment or two about what others might have thought about it all, but didn’t waste a lot of time with that, to be honest.

I’ve watched countless number of players going at it heads-up to conclude tournaments before, and I know it’s always very tempting to cast judgments as an observer. Sometimes it’s obvious enough when a player makes a mistake or poor play. In that case, criticism is essentially going to be objective and informed. A lot of times, though, it’s harder to know from the outside all the variables making up the context of each decision and/or action.

Over what is now approaching a decade of reporting on poker tournaments, I’m a long way away from having the judging instinct when watching and reporting on hands. There’s always more information than can be understood or appreciated by a spectator, even when you know the hole cards.

All in all, I’ve become less quick to jump on even the more obvious mistakes competitors will make to betray themselves as less than graceful under pressure. Especially when they’re heads-up.

Image: “one on ones,” Jurgen Appelo. CC BY 2.0.

Poker! That starts with P, and that rhymes with T, and that stands for Trouble!

Been back for a week from Macau, and I’m repeatedly encountering people responding to stories of my trip with references to the new James Bond film Skyfall. Apparently there’s a sequence set in Macau, including a visit to a place called the Dragon Casino (?). I will have to investigate in short order, which shouldn’t be hard to do as Vera has already been indicating she wants to see the flick.

I’m not a huge Bond buff, although like everyone I’ve seen and enjoyed a lot of the films over the years. We did catch Casino Royale in the theaters several years ago, and in fact I wrote up a “poker review” at the time as that film -- released at the height of the poker boom in 2006 -- featured several scenes of our hero playing high-stakes hold’em.

At the time we all remarked on poker surfacing in the mainstream so prominently, although to be honest that was a period when poker was simply everywhere. Such is not so much the case anymore, which is why an episode of The Simpsons from a week ago featuring a subplot in which little Lisa plays online poker stood out as something a little different.

I wrote a “Pop Poker” piece for PokerListings about The Simpsons episode, if you’re curious for more about it. One point I made there was to say that the show’s presentation of online poker was essentially no different than it might have been back during the “boom” -- that is, before the Unlawful Internet Enforcement Act of 2006 and Black Friday and everything else that has significantly altered online poker in the U.S.

Indeed, the Simpsons episode essentially ignores the current reality of online poker altogether, proceeding as though Black Friday never even happened. (In truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea for the story had been hatched before Black Friday -- perhaps several years ago -- and only now found its way into an episode.)

Anyhow, check out that discussion of the show on PokerListings and let me know what you think.

Speaking of mainstream references to poker, there was another one recently when former NBA star Jalen Rose, now a commentator on ESPN, offered some candid thoughts about pro players’ poker playing in a clip appearing over on the Grantland channel. Here is that clip:

Referring to the plane rides between games, Rose speaks of the popularity of poker as a pastime among many players, with the amounts changing hands sometimes climbing up to the $10K-$20K range. Rose weirdly insists on the games’ legality as he justifies them, while also pointing to the way they satisfy players’ competitive desires.

He also explains the reason why players play with chips rather than money on the planes, settling their debts afterwards. “The reason why you bring poker chips,” he explains, “is that coaches and general managers and sometimes... the owners [are] on the plane.... [Therefore, you] don’t want to see guys passing around hundreds and thousands of dollars. It’s just not good etiquette.”

In other words, as much as Rose defends the players’ gambling, there’s still a kind of “underground” element to the games insofar as the true significance of the money being exchanged is in need of being suppressed. If they aren’t doing anything wrong, why bother with such “etiquette”?

Like with The Simpsons episode, I wouldn’t say poker is necessarily being promoted by Rose’s mention of it. In fact both instances seem to reinforce ideas of the game’s “outlaw” status, which is how the game is usually treated whenever it surfaces in the mainstream.

Of course, there was that time, just a few years ago -- say, when Casino Royale was in the theaters back in ’06 -- when it wasn’t automatically the case that poker was considered to be like pool in that song from The Music Man....

You know, starting with P. Which rhymes with T. And which stands for Trouble!