What's in a screen name? #31

I defy you to stare at that for a few minutes and not get a little creeped out.

Guess the casino, #962

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Answer: Sam's Town

Guess the casino, #961

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Answer: Palms

"Take the Money and Run"

My nearly lifelong habit is to listen to the radio as I'm falling asleep at night--talk radio, not music. Last weekend when I turned on the radio it was tuned to "Coast to Coast AM." The guest was somebody I had never heard of before: Paul Bishop, an LAPD detective who specializes in suspect interrogation. (You can see a summary of the show and listen to the interview here.) He was really interesting, and I ended up staying up later than I had intended listening to the stories of his successes and how he gets suspects to confess.

The reason he was featured as a guest was to help promote a new reality TV show on which he appears: "Take the Money and Run," on ABC. I had not heard of this program before, but the premise intrigued me. They go to some city and give a briefcase containing $100,000 to two contestants. (Well, I'm sure the briefcase does not actually contain the money. In one episode, there was a clear shot of the contents, and it was obviously bundles of movie-prop fake bills. But the point is that if they win they can exchange it for a real $100,000.) They have one hour to hide the case, after which time they will be taken into police custody and jailed for 48 hours. Playing against them are two local detectives (different on every episode), who do the footwork of trying to find the hidden case out on the mean streets, plus Bishop and his partner, who do the interrogation at the jail. If the detective team finds the case within 48 hours, they get to keep the money.

The segments of the show that feature the local dicks chasing down leads, looking through the bushes, etc., aren't very interesting to me. But I'm fascinated by the segments that show the interrogations. This is interesting, first, from the perspective of having it drilled into your head that if you are ever the subject of a police interrogation, you should expect them to be lying to you and manipulating you at every point. They are not your friends. Even seemingly innocuous questions and answers are either traps or are probing you and setting you up for less innocuous questions. By far your best strategy is to just shut the hell up and not talk to them. (If you're willing to spend 50 minutes on it, there's a great lecture by a law professor about why you should never, ever, under any circumstances subject yourself to a police interrogation, because of all the ways that doing so can screw you that you would never have anticipated. See here.)

But of even more interest to me is watching how the contestants and the detectives lie to and play emotional games with each other. Some of them in the first four episodes (all of which I have watched this week) are good liars, others not so much. You can watch the detectives asking them innocent, obvious questions, which the "suspects" will readily answer. This gives the detectives a baseline picture of what they look like when telling the truth. Then you can see all sorts of things change when the questions get to ones about which the contestants must lie in order not to give away the location of the briefcase. They suddenly take more time to think about answers. Their voices change. They stop making eye contact. They lean back. They squirm. They put their hands to their faces. At least the bad ones do. One excellent liar in the fourth episode instantly concocts an answer that is positively brilliant, completely plausible, and does it so convincingly that the detective is thoroughly buffaloed into believing him. (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, but you'll know it when it happens.)

And hence the poker tie-in. As a viewer, you know before the interrogation begins how and where the team has hidden the money, so you know which of their answers are truth and which are lies. But in spite of that--in fact, maybe even more so because of that--it's worth watching to see what you can pick up on that are behavioral clues to their deception. Many of these have direct correlates to how players behave at the poker table when they are trying to deceive you into folding to a bluff or calling a value bet.

You can read more about the show (including the FAQ section, in which they explain why contestants aren't allowed to use some of the most obvious strategies that you think they would try) and watch all of the episodes here.

Ira Glass on poker books

Wil Wheaton mentioned in passing on his blog today something about Ira Glass and storytelling. I'm a hard-core Ira Glass fan, so I clicked on the link, which took me to a series of four YouTube segments, totaling about 17 minutes, in which Glass expounds on the building blocks of good storytelling. If you're interested in doing anything creative--whether or not it involves storytelling per se--I think you should watch them. After discussing what makes a good story, he shares keen insights into how long it takes to get good, and how much crap you have to produce in order to make something really worthwhile.

After I had watched those clips, I started clicking around the related videos, and found this one, in which Glass takes us around a Borders bookstore, highlighting some of his favorite items. In the first two minutes or so, he discusses the poker books he has read that have helped his game the most:

Guess the casino, #960

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Answer: Bally's

Flopping an ace

Tony "TBC" writes in his latest blog post:

almost the entire table limps $2 and the lady on my right who just sat who i thinks gay and her partner just sat on my left and she makes it $12. shed been raising a lot the $15 min shed been there, so i wasnt worried about her. i had KK and made it $40 in my blind. everyone calls but the black guy who always calls me it seems cause hes got no respect for my game. (what a fish to call $40 preflop with his hand.) she folds of course. flop comes A57 and the pots $100+ and if im beat im beat, he will bet anyway maybe but to make sure i get his money if he has a hand like QQ i bet the last of it (about $110) and he calls and wins with AT offsuit.

i think pokerdogg would say if ur going to check/fold KK heads up anytime theres a ton of money in the pot and an ace comes u way too weak.

As many other people smarter than me have observed, no-limit hold'em is a game of implied odds, one in which capturing your opponent's entire stack needs to be your goal. Conversely, you need to avoid giving your opponent correct implied odds to make a better hand by being able to fold when he gets there, thus protecting your stack against your opponent trying to win it.

Let's simplify this problem to clarify whether Tony's opponent is indeed being a "fish" to call with an ace, using the apparently justified assumption that Tony will pay him off every time an ace flops, but that our man will be able to fold every time an ace does not flop. In other words, suppose our "fish" knows that Tony has exactly K-K.

The action isn't entirely clear, but let's guess that there were five limpers before the raise to $12, then our man in question called, then Tony reraised to $40. (Tony says "everyone calls but the black guy," but context suggests that this is a mistake and the word should have been "folds" rather than "calls.") So now he has to decide whether to call an additional $28 into a pot of about $74.

How often will an ace hit the flop if there are three left in the deck? We have four cards known (our A-x and Tony's K-K), leaving 48 unknown. There are 17,296 different flops possible from 48 unknown cards. Of those, 6625 will contain at least one ace. (To be precise, 6486 will have one ace, 138 will have two aces, and one will have all three remaining aces--if I've done the math right, which at this hour of the night is always a little dubious.) That's about 38% of the time.

That means that 62% of the time he loses the additional $28 he invests pre-flop. But 38% of the time he will win not only the $74 currently in the pot, but also the $110 that Tony has left in front of him. If they play this hand 100 times, he will lose 62 x $28 = $1736, but he will win 38 x $184 = $6992. As poker bets go, that's a great investment.

Of course things aren't really this simple. Sometimes the flop will have both an ace and a king, giving Tony a set, and our man will lose. Sometimes the flop will be A-x-x but a king will hit the turn or river after all the money is in. Sometimes one or the other of them will hit some weird runner-runner combination for a straight or flush. Sometimes his kicker will flop trips even without an ace. Etc. Also, he can't ever know that Tony has exactly K-K. Sometimes he'll actually be up against a bigger ace (though the probability of an ace hitting the flop then goes down drastically so it's easier for him to get away from it). On the other hand, I suspect Tony will do just about the same play with Q-Q and J-J, making the call with A-x even more profitable than if K-K were the only hand Tony played this way.

The point is that it is not at all clear that one is being a "fish" to call the reraise in this spot if one has good reason to believe that when an ace flops one will get one's opponent's entire stack most of the time.

I am not saying that one has to just give up with big pairs every time an ace flops. It's more nuanced than that, depending on how many people are in, what their pre-flop calling ranges are, how often they will represent having an ace when they don't, how often they will call a shove with lesser hands (e.g., the Q-Q Tony thought he might have), and so forth.

But the reality is that A-x hands are among the most common ones with which loose opponents--both good ones and bad ones--will call pre-flop. So while one need not necessarily surrender every time an ace shows up, it is also demonstrably bad practice to blindly charge ahead, ignore the potential danger, and shove every time. That pattern is what produces the favorable implied odds for an opponent to make a big call pre-flop.

Before concluding that somebody else is the fish in the game, it's good to check one's own mouth to see if there might be a hook there.

Addendum, August 25, 2011, 1:30 p.m.:

"Jasper6294" submitted a comment politely suggesting that my math was wrong. One of these years, I'll learn that if I write a heavily math-dependent post in the middle of the night, I should not hit "publish" until I've rechecked the number after a full night of sleep. Jasper is exactly correct, though it took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong. First I failed to remove the extra aces from my virtual deck before counting how many cards we had from which to deal the other cards on the flop. Second, in doing the one-ace flops, I double-counted, forgetting that it makes no difference what order the other cards come in, e.g., 9h-6c or 6c-9h.

I want to leave the evidence of my own occasional boneheadedness intact above, so I'm not editing the post as originally written. But here are the two math-dependent paragraphs rewritten correctly:

How often will an ace hit the flop if there are three left in the deck? We have four cards known (our A-x and Tony's K-K), leaving 48 unknown. There are 17,296 different flops possible from 48 unknown cards. Of those, 3106 will contain at least one ace. (To be precise, 2970 will have one ace, 135 will have two aces, and one will have all three remaining aces--if I've done the math right, which at this hour of the night is always a little dubious.) That's about 18% of the time.

That means that 82% of the time he loses the additional $28 he invests pre-flop. But 18% of the time he will win not only the $74 currently in the pot, but also the $110 that Tony has left in front of him. If they play this hand 100 times, he will lose 82 x $28 = $2296, but he will win 18 x $184 = $3312.

I left out the sentence about that being a "great" investment. The corrected numbers make it a good investment, but not what I would call a great one.

The larger point remains, though with a qualification that I should have added the first time around: One is not being a "fish" to call the reraise in this spot if one has good reason to believe that when an ace flops one will get one's opponent's entire stack most of the time and if the opponent's stack is large enough to make it worth the gamble. I understand this caveat deeply enough that I routinely check an opponent's stack size before calling a pre-flop raise with a speculative, tricky hand such as suited 6-7. That's because I know that it will be relative rare that I make a strong hand at the same time that he has enough of a hand that he will call off his stack. That means that the payoff has to be quite large when it happens to compensate for all the times that I miss and all the times that he gets away from a second-best hand.

In this case, as you can see from the revised math, Tony's stack was not huge, but was nevertheless large enough to make it worth an 18% chance of busting him. From a mathematical point of view, it was a perfectly justifiable call, given the assumptions stated above.

Guess the casino, #959

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Answer: Sahara

Don't match stacks

Very Josie tells in her blog about an unfortunate incident in a recent tournament at Foxwoods, in which she lost more chips than she should have because a careless dealer screwed up an all-in situation between two deep-stacked players:

He had a helluva lot more chips than I thought he did. The dealer was a novice who didn't speak english well. She started matching his stacks against my stacks. She brought in his stack of 5k chips and matched mine up against his. Let's say for arguments sake his stack was 5 inches high and mine was 8 inches. She took the additional 3 inches off of mine and put them in the other guys general area, like they were his. With the remaining 2 even 5k stacks, she divided them and gave one to him and one to me, like it was a split pot. Right when she gave him my extra 5K chips I said 'Hey, those were mine!" and she agreed, but she was like in a fog, not really understanding what was going on, and then the guy said they were his. I said they weren't. I had more fucking chips than him and he knew it but he started screaming and yelling. The guys in the 8 & 9 seats agreed they were his. omfg. Floor came over and asked dealer to explain it and she couldn't, so all the guys at the table yelled out their version. In the end floor woman said more men agreed with the asshole so those chips were his. I cannot tell you how upset I was at this point. upset about the needless donkey call and upset that I was getting royally screwed. I asked for ANOTHER floor person to come down but I was refused. So the guy gets MY 5k chips and then he says, now match them. you have to match all of my chips. OMFG - I just got fucked again. yep, I had to use most of my left over 25k chips to match those extra 5k chips. How I didn't cry in frustration at the table I'll never know, but I didn't.

This is one of those things that isn't in any rule book and you basically have to learn in the school of hard knocks, as Josie just has. Here's the take-home lesson: Whether in a cash game or a tournament, never let a dealer make the pot right by matching stacks. If it's one normal-sized stack or less, OK, I'd let it go, while still muttering under my breath, "Ur doin it rong." Any more than that, and I politely decline to allow my chips to be mishandled that way.

Whether you are the one paying off or the one being paid, you have the right to have both stacks COUNTED. Counted--as in find out how many there are numerically. If you have to pay, then you can either count out the right amount and have the dealer verify it, or let the dealer do it for you while you keep an eagle eye on the procedure.

Matching stacks is done only by lazy or poorly trained dealers. The process is fraught with potential for major mistakes. The one Josie experienced (losing track of which stacks are which) is just one of them. Another is that one or two stacks collapse into each other and/or into the pot and become an unsortable mess. Less drastic but still possibly game-changing is that not all chips are the same thickness (some casinos have both old, worn-thin chips and new, full-sized ones circulating together), such that, say, one stack of 19 can appear to be the same height as another stack of 20.

You can and should be calm and polite, yet insistent: "Please count his chips, then we can count out an equivalent amount from my stacks." Ignore other players who might complain that it takes longer that way. They have no stake in it, so they should just shut up. (No need to tell them that, just think it and act accordingly.) If for any reason the dealer refuses to do it that way, politely ask that he or she call the floor. I suppose it's possible that there is a rare floorperson out there somewhere who won't grant your request for separate counts of the stacks, but I've never seen that happen.

In poker, as in life, you have to look out for #1. That means protecting your chips as well as your cards.

Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health

Yesterday I had occasion to go to the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, a Frank Gehry-designed facility that opened near downtown a couple of years ago. I used to work a stone's throw from another Gehry building, an art museum on the campus of the University of Minnesota, so I had no difficulty recognizing who had designed the Ruvo Center the first time I saw it. Wacky curves made of stainless steel? That's a Gehry.

I walked all around, taking pictures from every angle, and went through as much of the interior as they would let me (which turned out to be not very much, surprisingly--it's mostly off-limits unless you have some demonstrable reason for venturing past the lobby). Striking building, without argument. Whether you like it or not is a matter of taste. I would really like to explore the inside more, especially to see the rooms that abut the exterior curves--are they just as weird looking out as looking in?

You can see all the pictures I took here.

For the obligatory, minimal poker tie-in, try to spot the name of a former winner of the World Series of Poker Main Event on the donor wall (photo #22).

Guess the casino, #958

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Answer: Luxor

Duke

The Duke of Fremont Street was on the local public radio station this morning. In case you want to listen to it, audio will be available here later.

Guess the casino, #957

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Answer: Aria

Guess the casino, #956

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Answer: Riviera