WTF are "Lammers"?

The Iggster over at Party Poker gives (for him) a relatively short - and interesting - trip report on a recent visit to Tunica where he remarks, almost off-handedly, on getting his wallet stolen by what sounds like a grifter team. That's an event that would have had me on full tilt, but the ice-blooded Iggy simply shrugs it off, noting,

"Thankfully (heh), I only got nicked for $1400 and not the bulk of what I had brought with me. Plus, my lammers were intact. But regardless, it hurt to be considered an easy mark."

Lammers? Now, poker has almost as many insider words and acronyms as high-tech (I just had an email in from my transcriptionist asking whether the Imeah my subject kept referring to was a place or thing. He was actually saying "EMEA" which was an acronym for Europe, Middle East, and Asia), and there are still several that I'm clueless about, but "lammers" was a totally new one.

First guess: Given context, lammers were some sort of weird Ohio nickname for dwarf cojones? But later on, Iggy notes that he sold the lammers to an "expansive cowboy." So, unless we're in some poker recreation of Brokeback Mountain, it's unlikely that the lammers are Iggy's family jewels. "Ah, yeah, Tex. You want these lammers? Well, it's going cost you, big boy."

Second guess: rico-ga hits the search engines - And here we go. Once we get past various people named "Lammer," something poker-related. They're some sort of marker? All right, but obviously they have a value to Iggy, so they're more than that. One more shot...

All righty, rgp comes through.

"A single table satellite is a winner take all event. It is not a way to
gain entry into a super. If you win a satellite you will get tournament
chips called "lammers". These can be used to enter any WSOP event. Each
lammer will have it value on it."

whew. Well, that was exhausting. But since we're on the subject, the obligatory poker report, yes? I've been feeling the need to go back and rethink my poker-playing strategy, doing almost the reverse of Iggy, who is putting more of a focus on tourneys and SnGs. Me, I give myself a $50 stake, and that will last me anywhere from 2-3 months playing multi-table $5 buy-ins SnGs two to three times a week, with the occasional low buy-in tournament. If you work the numbers, you can see I place in the money often enough to keep myself going for awhile. But eventually -ev takes over (ev stands for "expected value" and "-ev" means , at least in my case, that I've hit a losing streak), and I need to rebuy. No major ups. No major downs. Just a slow, steady shrinkage of my stake.

I took a few weeks off from the tables and went back to Wilson Turbo Hold `Em, which I had used to first learn the game, and found that my game had evolved into a loose, passive mode that I've been working to repair, with some luck. For the moment, I've walked away from the low buy-in SnGs, since I've come to the conclusion that placing in the money with them has too much to do with luck. I've have been focusing on micro-limit Limit games. Hopefully, I'll still get in the occasional Blogger tournament and Wil Wheaton challenge, but my goal in 2006 is to build a stake, not fund a hobby on a quarterly basis