My Poker Cruise

Last week, just for the heck of it, Carol and I took a seven-day poker cruise. I say “just for the heck of it,” although it was by no means a capricious act. We bought our tickets back in February, and I thought it might be educational as part of my campaign to play more poker in 2024.

I returned to the brick-and-mortar poker rooms this Spring, having played only private games (and a little online) since Covid. Before the pandemic I was playing fairly often, and even doubled my money in a $600 WSOP event back in the summer of 2019.

This year I’m back in the game, learning my way around again and, at least up to this point, winning a bit of cash. In fact, before the cruise I was averaging just north of $10 per hour in small tournaments and cash games. The numbers don’t look so good now.

The Price

The poker group were roughly 200 players (and friends), a tiny fraction of the passengers aboard. Sort of like the BGG cruise, but for poker. And Carol, while not a poker player, liked the idea of a cruise departing from Seattle. The markup was arguably less than the price of a flight and hotel, for a cruise departing from anywhere else.

With the upcharge for access to the poker amenities, our stateroom cost roughly double the usual price. Carol and I paid $4600 for a midship balcony room, for which the rack rate was more like $2300. The organizers add a hefty markup in exchange for running a full-service poker room, which I can’t really begrudge them in principle. But it was a bit like taking two cruises at once.

Add to this the rather high $6 + $1 rake in the cash games, and the 20-ish percent rakes for the tournaments (which, if you played a satellite for the $600 Main Event, you paid twice), and you’ll probably agree that nobody goes on one of these cruises to make a profit.

Well, almost nobody. There was at least one top-ranked pro in the Main Event, and I’m guessing there were others I didn’t recognize. Maybe someone made a profit on this cruise, or won enough to pay for it. I certainly did not.

But let’s look at this pricing again. The rake they are charging is comparable to a brick-and-mortar joint, which I can walk into for free. So, why is the markup also high? If you count all the hours that the poker room is open (which is being generous; I’d have to play nonstop), it’s like I’m paying $15 an hour just for access to the room. I assume it’s because that room is not always full, that they need some minimum amount to pay their expenses. But if that’s the case, then why the rake?

The organization that runs this event claims that often their prices are lower than the cruise line’s published rates, but in our case that’s far from the truth, even comparing apples to apples. And on other ships and other lines I can often get way better pricing than the rack rate. So hmm.

And yes, I knew all this when I booked. But I figured, maybe it’s worth it?

Creek Street in Ketchikan: shopping, salmon, and prostitutes since 1903

The Route

We sailed north to Alaska, with stops in Ketchikan, Sitka, and Juneau, plus an evening in Victoria to satisfy the PVSA (thanks, Grover Cleveland). Carol and I cruise a lot, but we had not been to Alaska since 2001, and we had fun trying to recognize landmarks from our last visit.

There were two full sea days on this itinerary, during which the poker room was open all day, but mostly the room was open only in the evenings. Like the onboard casino, our private poker room was not allowed to operate while the ship was in port.

Carol and I don’t usually book shore excursions, but we did sign up for one poker-group outing in Juneau. This was a fun two hours of whale watching, combined with a tasty salmon bake. We saw the spouts and fins of a half-dozen whales, ate fresh-grilled fish, and panned for gold in a trough that was doubtless spiked with flakes.

Aside from that tour, we spent our land time walking around the ports. I bought a mammoth ring in Juneau, and kettle corn in Ketchikan. Carol bought a bird ornament and some fudge, and stickers for our child.

The weather was lovely, basically the same as Seattle: mid-70’s, mostly sunny, with just one day of light rain. The game store clerk in Ketchikan said they had just suffered through an unbearable heat wave, where it got above 80 for more than a day.

Meanwhile in Las Vegas, we just went six weeks without dipping below 80. Now that’s a heat wave.

Two Cruises

On a cruise ship, there is always something to do. Even on a 15-day Seattle-Hawaii route with eight sea days (ask me how I know). What’s more, sometimes it’s nice to do nothing. You are, after all, on vacation.

But with our poker room accounting for half the price of this little adventure, I felt like if I didn’t take advantage of it, I was wasting money. And since Carol isn’t a poker player herself, it was a bit like she got a regular cruise for a regular price, while I paid 3x for the poker cruise. This being the case, I found myself choosing between too many things, sort of like paying for too many streaming services at once. (And yes, we do that too.)

No matter what I chose, between the ample onboard entertainment, the simple relaxation of being on a cruise ship, and access to a real live poker room, I was essentially on two cruises at once. I could never have gotten my money’s worth out of both.

For some folks the usual onboard activities might hold no interest, which means every minute on the ship is a minute wasted. I suppose for them, it might make sense to pay extra to have something to do. But in my youth, I worked aboard cruise ships, and never lacked for ways to spend my downtime.

And, because I also live half-time in Vegas, I can play poker whenever I want. I play about four evenings a week, with a far better selection of games, and I don’t even have to pay for parking. Now, obviously if I were with a bigger group of friends, or if I knew more of the regulars, or even if there were more sea days, I'd find more value in this cruise. But ultimately this felt like paying extra for something that I can get for free.

My biggest stack: $74.5k in the Main Event, shortly before disaster struck.

The Poker Room

This floating poker room promised to be better than average: a high deck with a view of the sea. Cruise ship conference rooms are typically in the low-rent zones. Drab, windowless crypts on the lower decks, indistinguishable from a cheap hotel, but for the gentle rocking of the sea. This room was going to be different: Deck 13 aft, with breathtaking floor-to-ceiling picture windows.

This promise was a stretch. The windows were lovely when open, but the shades were often closed, because the windows were gently angled in, and as we headed north at midday the sun was unbearable. Plus, everyone was afraid to ask the floorman to raise the blinds. (Ha ha, poker joke.)

However, windows or no, if you were lucky enough to sit facing in any direction but directly astern, you might as well have been in the crypt. Once in a while I twisted my neck to gaze down through the half-open windows at the bleak ocean below, but it was not the 270 degree view of the inside passage that I had imagined in my dreams.

This room was cramped, of course, with fifteen poker tables packed as tightly as possible. There were often still more players than seats, and I understand they were making the most of limited space. But standing on the rail and waiting for a seat to open up, I felt like a rounding error, the player who wasn’t really expected to play.

There was a cute little buffet and cash bar at one end, a makeshift cashier at the other, and two very strange one-pot bathrooms in the corridor, that required an engineering degree to operate. Push a button on the opposite wall to open the door, then push another button to lock it from the inside, and don’t bother flushing because that button doesn’t do anything, except that if you did everything else right, it will auto-flush when you hit the third button to let yourself out. And whatever you do, don’t open the door with your hand, or they have to call maintnance to reset the room.

The Game

How did I do? Overall, I played well, but lost money. If you know any poker players, you probably hear that a lot. The first half of that statement is just an opinion, but the second half is a fact. This is the curse of the poker player; always wondering if you made the right decisions. I think the self-assurance shown by most professionals is not always warranted, but is simply the result of insecure players leaving the game. You can’t stay in this racket without some measure of self-delusion.

I would say that in general, the players in this group know how to play poker, without really knowing how to play poker. By which I mean, they are not strangers to the game, but after all their years at the table, they are still casual players.

Theoretically this should be a perfect environment for someone who wants to make money, and I suspect this is indeed the draw for the big-money players. Or perhaps they also just like cruising.

My budget is small and my skills are questionable, so while I often made small profits in the cash games, my bankroll could not withstand the tough beats that came along with them, where one big hand can kill a whole session of decent play. My biggest loss was buying into the $600 Main Event, which paid nine seats out of 88. I lasted for seven hours and got knocked out in 24th place, when, slightly below-average in chips, I flopped ATQ with AT and slammed headfirst into JK. It was, as I remarked at the time, not fun.

Hazlenut cake. This is how we do it.

The Rest

The food and entertainment were fine. The buffet was crowded on the first morning, because no one had figured out where else to eat. But we know how to cruise, and we quickly found a smaller, better breakfast nook in the “adults-only” zone. They had good food, no line, and kept inexplicably giving us half-price drinks.

The opening number in the “Las Vegas” show was “Beautiful People” but it might as well have been called “Interchangeable People.” Production numbers on cruise ships have become strange, more about stagecraft and giant video screens, and less about the performers. They were good at their job, no doubt, but their job was essentially to be set dressing for a million-dollar PowerPoint. Honestly the show would have been almost the same with no one on the stage.

We caught the first three minutes of the comic, and that was enough. He told a “Joe Biden is old” joke, and then literally had to explain it, because of course he did. But cruise ship audiences eat that stuff up, and we are reminded that we live in a beautiful nation filled with a variety of valid opinions.

Our stateroom was lovely, and once in a while I even spent time there. I read Treasure Island (having just finished Black Sails on Netflix), and David Sklansky’s Tournament Poker for Advanced Players. This was a new edition, but I only got to the end of the old part, which is full of “This part is wrong now, but I’ll explain later.” It also contains a weirdly circular proof of a principle that most players take for granted, which on second reading makes me think Sklansky isn’t the mathematician he claims to be. (See notes on self-confidence, above.)

It goes like this: How can we know a player’s odds of winning a heads-up match, given his stack size? Well, if we assume that the answer is proportional to the stack sizes, then we can prove that the answer is proportional to the stack sizes. I’m like, wait, but, why?

To give a simpler example, his argument goes something like this. Suppose we know that X+Y is 30. We can deduce that X is 10 because, assuming that Y is 20, this yields the result that X is 10. And we can assume that Y is 20 because X+Y is 30, and we have already proven that X is 10.

Just for the record, it’s generally a red flag when a poker author describes his proof as “non-rigorous but compelling.” Now I’m trying to work out whether the conclusion is right even though the proof is wrong.

Also, and this is just a thought, that Jim Hawkins is a suspiciously talented boy.

Will I do this again?

Probably not. As I said, it doesn’t make much sense to pay for two cruises when I can only take one at a time. I love the BGG cruises, in part because their markup is tiny, and I love the JoCo Cruises because although they have a huge markup, it pays for a substantially more valuable and unique experience. And in that case I am not missing one set of entertainment for another, because all the reguar performers take the week off!

Obviously this evaluation has a lot to do with the people in the room, who were strangers to me. And perhaps, over time, I might get to know some of these players and enjoy sharing the time with them. But as an outsider with a budget, I can’t really afford to put in the effort to become a part of that group.

Poker with strangers? I can get that at home.