It is a great step in your life when you start to earn a decent income. When I was younger I didn’t really have any particular ambitions in terms of either status or income. But the older I get the more important it is for me to have a good life. And it can’t be denied that that is directly linked to how much money you have to pay for the things that you need to have that life.

Personally I don’t consider myself to be spoiling myself, I just want to have a fashionable way of living.

For example, when I started my new job and got a raised salary I started looking for a new place to leave. First I was looking for a house; somewhere on the country side close to the city where I could have a nice garden and space for myself. But after looking at a couple of houses I realized that I am a child of the city and would find the country side boring after a while. Therefore I started looking at nice apartments in the city core. Some of them were hideous while others were great. I decided to go for a rather small apartment on our main street, but with a beautiful balcony on the top floor, wooden floors, high ceiling and 19^th century details. It was a bit smaller than what I had planned for, but it is the most beautiful apartment I have ever been in.

I also decided to buy a watch somewhat more decent than the cheap plastic Swatch watches that I have been sporting. There are several decent watch stores online, and I have been looking through all kinds of different models and brands. I decided to buy a leather TAG Heuer watch, the one that Brad Pitt carries in their commercial. It is really nice looking and I think I will have a hard time ever going back to something less elegant.

Also, I have started eating out much more than I did when I was younger. Few things are as pleasant as going to delicately designed restaurants and choose whatever you want from the menu. I was so tired of bringing lunch boxes to my job. Now I can choose my lunch from whichever food place I prefer, and it is so great!

I have had the strangest weekend ever. I never knew that poker playing could be heaven and hell to that extent.

It all begun with my buddy calling me Friday night to check if I wanted to tag along to the casino. I know that he pretty much only wants to hang out there in order to score chicks, or, in the best case, to get drunk. But I decided to humour him since I had nothing planned out for the evening, so I got a bit dressed up and met him for a beer. One hour later we were making our entrance at the local casino where the atmosphere was really good. I started playing Blackjack and managed to win $220 which, in addition to the drinks we kept ordering, made me bold enough to hit the poker tables. I am not as good a Texas Hold’em player as I am a stud poker player, so I went for the latter. In the beginning it went all right, but I was folding a lot since my cards weren’t the best. But after about an hour I got a flush and by the looks of my fellow poker players faces they weren’t holding much. So I took the rest of my drink, raised an eyebrow to a cute girl on the other side of the table and went all in. Two seconds later, a grey little guy to my right shows us his straight flush. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I was so annoyed that I hadn’t taken a look at his face before going all in. Another face I couldn’t bare to look at was the cute girl’s on the other side of the table. Oh – she had left anyway.

Embarrassed, upset and broke I went home quite early to my pal’s dismay, muttering that I would never gamble again.

But already the evening after I had a visit from two Canadian friends of mine, who loves to play poker, Texas Hold’em in particular. Over dinner I told them about how I had lost about $340 the evening before, and their consolation was pretty much: “Try again!” I told them that I wouldn’t play more, at least not this week, but I was all right with accompanying them to the very same casino. So, back to the drinks, the chatting… and the playing. Yes, I couldn’t hold myself, especially not since that sweet girl was there that night again.

This time I decided to lay low with the drinking, and the betting as well. My pals didn’t care too much about whether they won or lost, they had a good time regardless. But I was there to get even with the house.

Since the two of them liked Texas Hold’em so much, I decided to go with the flow. So we all started playing, and suddenly I realized my cards were anything but cold. I kept getting double pairs and such, so slowly I started to win more and more. Then suddenly I got it. The royal straight flush. My heart was pounding and all I could think was: “Look concerned! Look concerned!” I went All In and tried to feel as calm as possible. The guy across the table went All In as well, but I beat his hand by far (he was rather drunk), and won $610.

Then I went to buy that cute girl a drink.

What a weekend!

I came home from Las Vegas early this morning. It really is the God-forgotten, yet amazing city you would think.

The Strip is luminous from neon and blinding lights, mirrors, windows and jewelleries. The fountain show outside Bellagio is spectacular, almost hypnotizing. There seem to be a hotel in every corner, and where there aren’t hotels there are casinos. I barely know how to describe them; some of them are plain but others are quite something. Over-weight Americans are standing at the slot machines in row after row, throwing peanuts in their mouths. Beautiful women dressed like peacocks enter the room. They get a lot of attention from the photographing Japanese crowd and the chatty Germans, while the players at the roulette tables are way too focused to care. Since the alcohol is for free as long as you are playing, many “smart” visitors take a seat at a game just for the sake of the drinks. Within an hour most of them have spent so much money by betting unwisely, that it more than covers the casinos expenses.

Barry Manilow is performing somewhere and there is a lot of talk about that. Celine Dion will not be playing in Las Vegas anymore, making room for Cher.

The hotel is clean and nice, but not particularly fancy. While I pass places like Four Hotels and Caesars Palace I am silently wishing that I was more of a millionaire than I am. Maybe the time has come from me to try my luck/skills at one of the poker tables? Me and my friends decide to pay a visit to the Casino at MGM Grand. It is beautiful in there, and the atmosphere is more relaxed than I thought it would be. We start playing Blackjack, but I am on a losing streak. One of my friends wins a couple of hundred dollars which makes the rest of us think that we could easily do the same. Bad mistake. We go for Baccarat, which usually means fairly good odds. Another of my friends wins about a hundred dollar. Frustrated, and with about a hundred dollars less than what I came with, I sit down at one of the poker tables. The game is Three-Card Poker. I am getting decent cards, but at this point I have been drinking so many White Russians that I bet way too boldly. However, I manage to win back my losses and now I have what I came with. My friends are by the slots, where coins are falling like rain and the lights are flickering. I switch to Let It Ride Poker and finally I am actually winning some. Two of my pals come to join me, and luckily enough they convince me to leave while I am doing well.

We go for a delicious late dinner at Spago. Since we are staying at one of the low budget hotels we can afford a three meal dinner with fine wine. We stay there for the rest of the evening, just enjoying ourselves, talking about the odd Las Vegas culture.

The day after I am back at the poker tables, where the house collects all the money I’d won the night before. Of course.

Who offers the best rakeback?

Rackback is getting more and more common everyday amongst avid poker players. Rakeback is a way for poker players to get some of the money they pay in fees when playing poker online back. It works in similar ways to any bonus programme (i.e. frequent flyer miles) with the difference that rakeback is most often not offered directly to the poker players by the poker sites and that you can get a larger portion back.

Rake is the part of each pot a poker site, or any land based casino for that matter, takes as a fee for running the poker game. It is normally around 5 % of the pot, i.e. a significant part. By playing with rakeback you get a part of the rake you as a poker player have generated while playing back. Rakeback is normally around 30 – 50 % but sometimes you can get an even higher rakeback offer. If you have 50 % rakeback it means that you as a poker player get 50 % of the rake you have generated back.

As you understand this can accumulate to a lot of money if you play poker very frequently. There is poker players that pay their rent with they earn on rakeback so there is no doubt rakeback will be a lot of cash if you play loads of poker.

Mostly you cannot get rakeback directly via any of the different poker sites. Instead you need to register for rakeback via a specific rakeback site. It can be somewhat tricky to know which rakeback site to choose. There is plentiful to choose between and if you make a bad choice there is an evident risk that you will not get your well deserved rakeback in the end.

By this reason I have made list of the best, biggest and most serious rakeback sites that are out there. What is important when you choose your rakeback site? Besides the obvious that they must have great rakeback offers there are two important things according to me; 1. how fast and safe do I get my rakeback and 2. how good and fast is their support.

Rakebacklovers.com

Rakebacklovers is my personal favourite and I give them my best recommendations. It is one the largest rakeback sites and always has great offers, good support and good payment routines.

Rakeback.org

Rakeback.org is just as Rackbackloves one of the largest rakeback site and has been around for a long time.

Rakebrain.com

Rakebrain.com is big, stabile and offers rakeback from many different poker sites.

Rakemeback.com

Rakemeback is another good rakeback site with good offers.

If you play online poker regularly my advice is to get a rakeback deal. There is no reason to pay more in rake then necessary. The poker sites makes enough with cash as it is. I you choose one the rakeback sites above the risk of you getting disappointed is much less.

In the 20th century there were several decent movies being made, where the world of gambling played a part. Among them I would list “Casino” (1995), “Bugsy” (1991),“The Gambler” (1974) and “The Hustler” (1961).

But in the 21^st century, there are three very specific Hollywood productions that rules when it comes to portraying the cheating, gambling and winning life in the gambling business. Naturally I am talking about the movies about the charming villain Danny Ocean and the crew that he puts together in order to various kinds of scams in a semi-Robin-Hood kind of way.

In the first film, the gang is after Las Vegas high shot Terry Benedict and the three casinos that he own, namely the Bellagio, the Mirage and the MGM Grand. Incidently he is also the new boyfriend of Danny’s lost love Tess. Using all the tricks in the book - and several others that you couldn’t find in there - the eleven of them are trying to steal no less than160 000 000 dollar from Benedict. Plenty of things occur during these attempts, to the background of a really great soundtrack.

Oceans Eleven is carried by a bunch of terrific actors, all managing to play their characters with the ease that it takes for this movie to balance humour and tension. Both in this and the two movies that follow, we have the pleasure of watching George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck and Elliott Gould among others.

A few “guest actors” worth mentioning in the trilogy are Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin. Many of the scenes are taking place inside casinos or at poker tables. And yes, there is foul play.

Ocean’s Eleven is based on the ‘60s cult movie with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin as the leading men. The modern version is a bit more shaped by the so called MTV-generation, in the sense that there is more of everything. More editing, more colour, more violence, more jokes, more references to different kinds of popular culture. The Oceans-movies have made it a bit of their trademark to contain a certain kind of dialogue where the characters fill in each others sentences a lot. Pauses and silences are also an important part of the script, with adds a lot to the comedy part of the movies.

Ocean’s Twelve is about the problem that occurs when an old friend unexpectedly collects a very large debt – with interest – and how that problem is solved by stealing more… Once again, poker playing, roulette spinning and wagering are themes throughout the movie.

In Ocean’s Thirteen there are many sequences where it’s emphasized how our anti-heroes are getting older, or at least growing up. There is an adorable scene where super cool Rusty (Brad Pitt), surprises super cool Danny Ocean (George Clooney) watching Oprah, drinking red wine and crying. When Rusty sceptically enters his apartment and sees the rest of the show together with Danny, he himself is moved to tears by how Oprah is doing charity.

All in all, the three movies are of course similar to each other. But that doesn’t stop them from being equally entertaining and worth seeing.

Yesterday it wasn’t that easy to celebrate the arriving spring – it was grey and rainy – so I and my boyfriend decided to go for a drink instead of moping in front of the TV. We went to a terrific little Irish pub nearby and drank pints of Guinness. In my bag I happened to have a deck of cards that I had received as promotion from an
online poker site. We decided to play once we had taken our seats in a cosy booth. Neither I nor my boyfriend has much experience in poker playing, though we both enjoy it, competitive as we are.

Quite soon I started getting the feeling that he had more luck in the game than I had. It might very well sound as though I am just a bad loser, but fact of the matter is that after each round when we compared cards, he had gotten a better hand than I almost every time. This made me very frustrated, since I kept coming out as the loser even though I didn’t play poorly. Luckily enough we didn’t play for money…

After swallowing my pride I decided that the only smart thing I could do was just to play the best I can, regardless of the hand I’d been given. As soon as I really started focusing, it immediately paid off. Maybe I got cards that were a bit better than earlier, but most importantly I realized that I hadn’t played aggressively enough. Instead of folding when I was unsure, I tried betting in a way that made him fold. We started ordering more beers, which was good since it added to the game, but bad because it made me loose focus again.

He kept teasing me when I lost, and I decided that I would do everything in my power to win over him and get that smirk off his face.

Then suddenly I was holding a Ten and a Nine when the flop showed a Jack, a Two and an Eight. “You want to play for the tab?”, I asked in a moment of too much courage. He, apparently holding something – which I in reality didn’t – agreed to this suggestion right away. My heart started pounding a bit harder. The odds for me getting a Seven or a Queen wasn’t on my side. The next card was …a Seven.

I have almost never felt that kind of triumph, actually it made me so happy that I offered to split the bill with him. I don’t care that I had lost pretty much every round up until then. I had won the one that mattered.