Macau 澳門小游

[chin]

The game is player vs player. The house takes a rake.

It looks to me luck plays a very large part of how likely you can win a hand. But, like you said, posturing & psychology can increase your payoff in the event that you have good cards, i.e. tilting the odds to your side.

[q]

It looks to me luck plays a very large part of how likely you can win a hand. But, like you said, posturing & psychology can increase your payoff in the event that you have good cards, i.e. tilting the odds to your side.

Well regarding the hand a player receives poker is a game of chance, so from the perspective of playing the game without the betting phase the winner is determined by luck.

When betting is introduced to the game, then I think it depends a lot on the rules of the game, and the attitudes/skill level of players.  For instance, it may not be advantageous
for a professional poker player to play with a table full of amateurs, since the game may be too chaotic for a "professional strategy" to apply.

[chin]

We went to Macau again for Chinese New Year. I met up with a friend there who told me some remarkable stories about playing pokers. I will retell the details later.

First some pictures of this trip. This time we stayed at the Venetian Hotel. It wasn't my first choice but the other hotels like Wynn, MGM Grand were fully booked 6 weeks ahead. Anyway Venetian was having a special event getting this guy to build a very large house of cards, using 3800 decks.

[chin]

On 13th Feb, I took these two pictures on the way to Canton for the New Year's Eve dinner.

The light rains make the City of Dreams look a little dreamy. At the door of the casino there the banner says "Luck is here". I am sure it's very true, just that the luck is mostly on the house side.

[chin]

One of the main reason for going to Macau again is to play fireworks during Chinese New Year.

One of our favorite firework is this large blue cone that my kids call "Christmas Tree". It starts kind of lame with slow and low sparks but soon grow to strong fierce volcano-like breathing sparks. Most of the stalls would sell this at $80 to $120. But after a few rounds of bargaining, we usually can get it at around $100 for 3, or $40 each.

[chin]

My kids' another favorite firework is the large rockets (2 to 4 cm in diameter) that shot up and explode into a nice firework. Again the prices varied by very large margins. Many packs of 10 to 20 rockets would start from $300 to $400 per pack and can be bargained down to around ~$100 to $200. On the second night, we paid $700 for 3 packs of total 60 rockets, including 15 very large ones at about 5 cm diameter and about 1 meter long.

The one in the following picture was a medium sized one, and the one in the video was probably a large one.

[chin]

Then comes the real multi-million dollar firework by the Macau Government. Too bad I did not have a tripod with me.

[chin]

More fireworks.

[chin]

Somehow the green, red, blues, colored ones are harder to take pictures of.

Maybe only the white-ish ones were bright enough for hand held photography but not the other colors...

[chin]

I will post more picture and the poker stories in a few days...