Mixing it up--just a little

Without doubt, the most boring poker blogs (constituting, unfortunately, a majority of them) are the ones that are basically somebody's online diary of games played and results. Try to read them, and your eyes glaze over with boredom. That's why I try to write here sort of as if I were columnist for a poker magazine (which would be a cool job). I realize that almost nobody cares about whether I won or lost on any particular day, and hands have to be truly off-the-charts unusual or interesting to be worth trying to describe.

But today is a departure, because my poker playing was a departure. Before today, I had never played any poker game other than hold'em. Well, that's not quite true; in poker dealer school, we rotated through playing Omaha and stud, in order to give each other practice dealing those games. But no money was involved, so there was zero attempt for anybody to play by sound strategy; it was literally just going through the motions.

Treasure Island occasionally spreads a mixed game. Today I saw a notice on http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ that tonight would be one such occasion, and I decided to give it a try. I suspected that badugi would be included. I'm so clueless that I had to look up how to determine the winning hand, which I knew was different from all other forms of poker, but I didn't understand how it worked.

TI has about a million large, orange, plastic disks, each representing one poker variant, and they allow participaing players to sort through them and settle on what mix of games they want to include in the mix. Tonight's group voted for razz, crazy pineapple double-flop, Omaha high double-flop, badugi, deuce-to-seven triple draw, Omaha eight-or-better, stud eight-or-better, and baduci. I had never even heard of baduci before today. It's a mish-mash of badugi and triple draw, split sort of like a high-low game, in that the best four-card badugi, if there is one, takes half the pot, otherwise the best 2-7 hand scoops it. It was definitely the most confusing one for me.

I ended up losing about $30 for the night, which I considered spectacularly good; I had mentally prepared myself to lose my entire $200 buy-in (with $3 and $6 betting rounds), and write it off as education. Poker education always costs money. I wish I could say that the better-than-expected results were because of general poker acumen pulling me through, with brilliant reads and savvy calculation of my pot odds. But it was really just dumb luck. Heck, in four of the eight games I won or chopped the first hand I contested. The technical term for this phenomenon is "beginner's luck."

My basic problem, once I understood the form and goals of each game, was that I was clueless about where I stood. In hold'em, after tens of thousands of hands, I have a pretty good idea of what can and can't reasonably be expected from any two hole cards, and further into the hand I have a pretty sound feel for how likely it is that a particular hand will be the winner. Obviously I'm wrong sometimes, but I'm rarely completely at sea. With these games, though, I have no inkling of what constitutes the great starting hands, the good ones, the mediocre ones, and the complete dogs. As a result, I did what most beginner hold'em players do, and put money in about 90% of the time, always looking at how good the hand could theoretically turn out to be. Horribly defective strategy, I'm sure, but I didn't have any better guide to go by. After I took half of an Omaha double-flop hand with a pretty ugly two pair, having started with a rainbow A-Q-7-4, I kind of sheepishly said, "I probably shouldn't even have been playing that hand, should I?" The chorus of "nope" came so fast that it was obvious the more experienced players were already thinking exactly that. *blush* Oh well.

As for play on later streets, again I was often completely in the dark about whether I was ahead or behind my opponents. I was reduced to "level 1" playing--just going by the strength of my own hand, since I didn't have any reserve brainpower to devote to figuring out what other players held. It made for a completely different poker experience from what I have become accustomed to.

For example, in one memorable spot playing crazy pineapple double-flop, I had the king of hearts and the two red tens in my hand. One flop had two hearts including the ace; the other flop had the ten of clubs. I had to decide which of my three cards to throw away--do I go for the nut flush on the top board, or take the set of tens on the bottom board? I just didn't have time to mull over which move had the higher overall expected value. It's the sort of dilemma to which, I think, the solution would be obvious if I had played the game much before, but caught me completely off-guard. I finally went for what I thought was nearly a certain win for half of the pot with the set of tens. As it turned out, the turn brought another heart to the top board, and if I had gone that way I would have scooped both halves of the pot. That doesn't mean it would have been the right thing; in fact, I still don't know the correct move in that spot, because I haven't taken time to work it out.

During our first round of badugi I had two good low cards, an A-5. I traded in the other two, and was stunned to receive in return two more 5s. Three of a kind instantly turned a promising start into a complete dud, with virtually no hope of improving to anything worthwhile. My opponent bet, and I took forever to figure out what to do. I even said something like, "You wouldn't believe what that draw did to my hand." She's smart, and responded, "Did you trip up" (i.e., get dealt three of a kind)? Yep. I didn't even know there was a term for it, but she was astute and experienced enough to figure out what I was going through just by how far it had thrown me off-balance. Again, having never even comtemplated the possible hand combinations that one can get puts me in a terribly awkward spot in such situations. I have to reinvent the wheel (no pun intended...), all by myself, with every deal. It is very, very far from what I am used to.

Because of my lack of experience, I made some incredibly basic blunders:

*Once in a razz hand I flipped over my hole cards after sixth street, because
I had lost track of where we were.

*On the first 2-7 hand, I kept an ace all the way to the end, only realizing
just before the showdown that aces were only high, not low, in this game.
(Ironically, though, I won that pot with my horrible A-Q [!!!] because I had the
only hand with five unpaired cards. The other players, I'm sure, felt about the
way that I do when a donkey tourist calls me down to the river with a pair of
deuces with a five kicker--and wins.)

*In one Omaha high double-flop game, I started with what I knew was a great
hand for making the nut low and raised before the flop. Only after the flop did
I realize that we weren't on a high-low round, and I therefore didn't have
squat. The idiot move consisting of the pre-flop aggressive raise, followed by a
timid fold on the flop when one realizes that it's a different game than one had
initially believed, is hereby christened a "Rakewell."

*I often had no idea where the action started on the stud games, because I was
so focused on remembering what cards I had and what I needed that I just
couldn't process the information of who had the best or worst hand showing
(which is how order of action in this family of games is determined). I was
completely dependent on the dealer to tell me when it was my turn.

*More times than I care to admit, I also lost track of what the bet was and
had to ask.

*I'm pretty sure that I failed to tip the dealers several times, because as the pot was being pushed to me I was still working out in my head how and why I won, what the other players were showing, etc. Again, there just weren't any brain cells left over for remembering to flip a chip to the dealer. My apologies to all who got unintentionally stiffed in this manner--honestly, it was just oversight on my part, and being overwhelmed with not understanding what was going on.

*When we started into the non-blind games, and the dealer kept moving the button after each hand, I couldn't figure out what the point of that was. It took two rounds before it dawned on me that that's how they keep track of the number of hands played; after the button makes one complete circuit, the game changes to the next one on the roster.

*In hold'em, I easily memorize what my hole cards are, and it's very rare that I get sufficiently distracted by something happening at the table that I have to check them again. There's a classic tell--about whether or not one has made a flush--that results from checking your suits again after, say, two spades hit the board, and I want to be sure I never give away that information. (It's funny seeing the whole table simultaneously diving for a peek back at the hole cards when a flush or flush draw becomes possible.) But with these other games, I just couldn't spare the memory, because of the overload of just remembering how to play the games. This was so even when I only had two down cards to remember (as in double-flop crazy pineapple [after the discard], razz, stud 8, etc.) I wanted to remember them, but just couldn't, and felt like an utter moron, having to check the same two cards 27 times over the course of one hand of poker. As for remembering four of them, no way--just wasn't going to be happening. My brain would have melted down if I tried.

These are precisely the kinds of fundamental errors and deficiencies and misunderstandings that, when I see them in tourists playing hold'em, let me know that I've found my meal ticket for the night. It was strange and humbling to be the least experienced and most clumsy player at the table. It really was like starting all over again, like the first time I ever sat down to play poker in a casino. It re-awakened a visceral sympathy for the people who work up the nerve to take their first crack at live poker in the games I usually play, where I am feeling right at home.

(By the way, I guess I've never told the story of my first actual poker experience. It was maybe five years ago at the Luxor, during a vacation trip. I entered a tournament for something like $50. I got knocked out roughly 20 minutes in. I was as surprised as can be at the loss, because I had the nut flush. Back then, I was so ignorant about the game that I didn't even understand that a pair on the board means that somebody could have a full house. I think I knew that a full house beat a flush, but my memory is even hazy on that point. When players say something that they think is obvious to everybody--such as commenting on the fact that there is a possible straight flush, given what's on the board--and I protest that they shouldn't be making such comments, and they respond that everybody already knows it anyway, I keenly remember being that over my head. It is decidedly not true that every player shares the ability to make even the most basic inferences about what's going on.)

It was simultaneously one of the most fun, humbling, and mentally challenging poker sessions I've ever had. I highly recommend trying it, if you get the chance. Yeah, it's scary, like jumping into the pool when you barely know how to do the dog paddle. But at $2-4 or $3-6, you don't really have to know how to swim like an Olympian; the water is shallow enough that you can just stand up. You'll be fine--really. If I can survive it, and come out better for the experience, so can anybody. Going outside of one's comfort zone once in a while is probably a good thing to do, in both poker and life generally.

To Eric, Michael, Sabrina, Cindy, Jimmy, and a couple of others whose names I never caught, my thanks for gently coaching me through, not whining too badly when I sucked out with horrible hands, and not laughing openly at the inexperience that I put on full and open display. I will long remember the experience and try to gently return the favor to others when I'm the one who's in my element, and they're floundering as much as I was tonight.