"The Pen:" Live NLHE Chat Thread
It's been about 9.5 years and 350K posts of epicness, but "It Lives, It Lives" can live no more. The OG LLSNL Chat Thre
To be fair, how many teams are great on offense when their stars are hurt?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Do any of you guys know the current requirements to get a comped room at the high end joints in vegas these days for table games?
Hey haven’t kept up with the thread but randomly saw this when scrolling.
Caesers diamond is excellent full stay nice room comped they even hooked me up with a VIP host.
Never had a losing week. At least 10 weeks. But I do wager six figures weekly.
I can’t imagine what seven stars would be like would love to make a push for that in 2026. Think it’s like $1,500,000 wagered with standard play? Don’t quote me on that.
Obviously a very large dollar sum but you can of course cycle through the same cash. You know the deal, I assume you’ve wagered 1.5M blackjack easy?
I plan to kill myself on Dec 30th, the same day my dad died last year.My life has become competely joyless and it has become clear to me that there is zero justice in the world. I would rather go back to the void before I was born than continue like this.It kind of sucks. I feel like I've done a lot of things right in my life, treated people well, had a lot of cool experiences,
Hopefully you've changed your mind by now. It sure seems like maybe you should try, at the least, a geographic cure. There are so many places where you could live like a king (or pharaoh I guess, with the cats, haha) on what you spend there. Give the mountains a shot, they heal and recharge me every time I visit. Hell, give Texas a shot. Our cost of living is great and supposedly the poker is off the charts, definitely more enjoyable than hanging with the miserable ****s in LA card rooms. Anyway good luck man, if you haven't changed your mind I hope you at least have a plan to really try to enjoy this last week and maybe that will help change your mind.
Merry Christmas from the future!
Just had my morning ocean swim with my kids. My kids are going to spend time with their mother now so we did our Christmas meal last night. Actually very nice to have all the major Christmas stuff done by 10am on 25th
Hope you guys have a good one x
Merry Christmas, gentlemen, its been a while. Hope you guys are doing well. This place just sprung back into my head this morning out of nowhere lol
Hey haven’t kept up with the thread but randomly saw this when scrolling.Caesers diamond is excellent provided you gamble a lot full stay nice room caesers palace Christmas time fully comped free parking priority lines $0 all in. They even hooked me up with a VIP host who has the ability to add money to my account unsolicited. Got $500 last week despite crushing them.. (n
Comp City by max rubin. Book is outdated as I believe the casinos have changed their metric for comps BUT the concepts and the methods for enhancing your appearance of being a whale are the same.
iirc in 21 they assume 60 hands/hr @ a 2% house edge to compute their hourly v you.
I am unsuer of my personal wins from casinos in 21 due to team play but i have wagered well in excess of 1.5mm personally. I can design a bet scheme package to create an ev from -.5 to +1.5 easily. For these pruposes it will be very close to 0 initially. The whole purpose of this is to be a comp hustler and eat some variance and not raise any suspicion or concern for advantage play
I just started working (looking into/thinking) on this and have not investigated 7 stars or any other stuff. @1.5mm their ev would be 30k assuming the old metric. I think they used to return about 1/3 in the form of comps, equalling 10K...Does this sound close to correct???
Very early in my gamboolin career I got heavily into using comp hustling. As a green into black chip player I relied on it heavily to offset expenses and I really liked getting the free stuff and sticking it to the casino. I was able to get R and F at major vegas strip casinos as well as limo service
This is all pie in the sky. Back around 2002 I was one of the most notorious players around due to affiliations and the frequency of getting flyered. THe agency that tracked this is now defunct and I have not been active in a very long time. So my goal is to not raise eyebrows, hope that no one from the old days recogizes me, and my name is not in the new system of the newer casinos I have never played/gotten heat
I will never play poker again to make $. I got into blackjack as a lark. I really like fcuking the casinos in the ass. I pivoted from playing 21 cuz the pendulum swung and i could not get down with the game for reasonable ev. I was forced into poker and never thought it was nearly as ossum as 21. I do not need to work. I like the idea of bopping into vegas, getting treated like baws, pulling the wool over their eyes, and getting free stuff
I spent countless hours perfecting this craft. For a minimum amt of effort and a little variance I can generate a shitton of comp ev and and stick it to da mon which i think is kinda fun
Comp City by max rubin. Book is outdated as I believe the casinos have changed their metric for comps BUT the concepts and the methods for enhancing your appearance of being a whale are the same. iirc in 21 they assume 60 hands/hr @ a 2% house edge to compute their hourly v you.I am unsuer of my personal wins from casinos in 21 due to team play but i have wagered well in exces
Yeah, that’s roughly in the ballpark, but sports Theo is a little different than traditional table/slot math.
If you assume ~3–4% theoretical hold on sports over a massive sample, $1.5mm in handle implies something like $45k–$60k in Theo. Historically that’s meant maybe 20–30% back in comps, so low-five figures in total value, depending on the property and how they rate sports.
The wrinkle for me is that despite the theoretical loss, I’m actually +EV over very large volume, so in practice I get the best of both worlds — meaningful Theo without long-term losses. Obviously retail is a different ballgame once the action is sharp — that’s really the angle here. On paper the handle and Theo look normal, but the experience diverges quickly once the bets are consistently efficient.
I’m aware of the 10× multipliers and similar promos, but in my experience those only really matter if they’re used very precisely beyond just hitting Diamond. Multipliers or shortcuts make sense on a recreational scale, but from my view they don’t really add much when you’re talking about a true VIP experience, which is driven far more by sustained, organic handle than by promo optimization.
Longer-term, my view is that the real path to Seven Stars is putting up $1.5MM+ in organic handle over the course of the year. That’s been the most effective way I’ve seen to drive $100k+ in comp value while still staying profitable overall, rather than trying to manufacture it through multipliers.
I will never play poker again to make $. I got into blackjack as a lark. I really like fcuking the casinos in the ass. I pivoted from playing 21 cuz the pendulum swung and i could not get down with the game for reasonable ev. I was forced into poker and never thought it was nearly as ossum as 21. I do not need to work. I like the idea of bopping into vegas, getting treate
At a high level, my edge comes from consistently pricing off institutional-grade reference points rather than retail numbers — think Citadel / Susquehanna–style derivative lines, AI-driven market makers, and sharp offshore openers, with heavy emphasis on late information flow and limit behavior.
That framework has allowed me to beat essentially every Vegas book over a very large sample, with the possible exception of Circa depending on market and timing. For obvious reasons I wouldn’t ever lay out specifics publicly, but it’s the kind of top-shelf insight I’m always happy to talk through in person.
Most online accounts are effectively nuked at this point with a couple of edge-case exceptions, so the real angle now is retail execution — using brick-and-mortar limits, timing, and market structure rather than chasing promos or multipliers.
Nope. Colorado is 4 moves back at this point. Stationed in Alabama, which is not nearly so awesome a place.
rtp how long you been in the sports game?
i didn't know that was something you were into - feel free to reach out if you have any questions or just want to talk shop
rtp how long you been in the sports game?
i didn't know that was something you were into - feel free to reach out if you have any questions or just want to talk shop
I started dabbling in late summer and ramped up a few months ago. I’m now moving lines and shaping prop markets, beating the closing line north of 90% (excluding injury-driven outliers), which has led to limits and effective bans across most platforms and pushed me to take it more seriously.
I operate it as a business with extensive record-keeping. As an itinerant working almost exclusively away from my tax home, most related expenses are deductible.
It’s still unclear how upcoming tax changes will ultimately affect things, but given that my ROI might end up being north of 10% anyway, it’s unlikely there will be any impact.
All of these posts were written mostly with Squid in mind, and I’m just sharing my experience with him in case it’s useful
@Mr. McLovin - There are an absolute shitload of inefficiencies in the gamboolin market. With some creativity and outside the box thinking a sharp person can create a fcukton of ev. The key is being able to do it over and over without getting nuked.
