The results are in

Four months ago I told you that I was among the choices available for a reader survey by Ante Up magazine. I subsequently forgot all about it.

Yesterday afternoon I was at Caesars Palace waiting for a seat be available and started flipping through the October issue. When what to my wondering eyes should appear...


 

So there you have it.

Maybe there's another way to play it...

I was at the Stratosphere last night. I witnessed a hand that left me completely baffled.

Our contestants both look to me like celebrities. Seat 5 reminds me of Captain Kangaroo, while Seat 6 looks and sounds just like William H. Macy's character, Jerry Lundegaard, in "Fargo." So I'll refer to them as Captain and Jerry.

Those two plus both blinds (including me, big blind, in Seat 9) limp in. The flop is 5-5-x. It's checked all around. Turn is a king. Captain checks. Jerry makes a pot-sized bet. We blinds fold. Captain calls. I don't remember the river card, but Captain checks, Jerry checks. Captain shows 5-5 for flopped quads. Jerry shows a king and mucks. Captain wins the special $599 flopped-quad jackpot that the poker room has going this month.

Let's consider some of the possible reasons that Captain would play his hand this way.

1. He misread his hand, didn't know what he had. Nope. Even before he revealed it he called out, "High hand bonus!"

2. He misunderstood the rules and thought that if his opponent folded before the showdown he would lose out on the jackpot. This is fairly common among inexperienced players who hit a monster hand, and suddenly realize that they don't know how the promotion works, and can't stop in the middle of the hand to ask. But that's not this guy. He's a local whom I have played with several times before. He shuffles chips expertly. He knows how things work, no doubt about it.

3. He was out of position, so was going for a check-raise. Implausible. This was an incredibly passive table generally, and Jerry was no more likely to get out of line than anybody else. Anybody who tried to play a trapping game was misreading the table unbelievably badly.

4. He was hoping that giving free cards would help somebody make a big enough hand to pay him off. This is plausible for the flop and turn plays, but not for the river. After all, you can't get your monster hand paid off if you don't bet. In fact, as soon as the hand was over Captain explained that he was hoping that Jerry would make a hand that would qualify them for the bad-beat jackpot, which was at $18,000+. Frankly, I don't remember for sure whether a straight flush was possible on the final board, but I don't think so. It was not double-paired, so quads-over-quads was impossible. Worse, by not betting he risked the pot not being big enough to qualify for the $599 bonus. The pot was only $8 before and after the flop. If nothing else, he should have bet at least $2 at some point, hoping to get a call to get the pot to the minimum $10 required for the jackpot.

In short, I can't think of any sound reason why one would not bet out on the river, even if you can imagine a justification for passive play prior to that. Suppose that a straight flush were potentially out there when the board was complete. Are you really going to assume that your opponent has the exact two cards that make that hand, and check out of fear of losing your stack to the only hand that can beat you? That is "monsters under the bed" syndrome on steroids. There will be far more losing hands (straights, flushes, and full houses) that your opponent can have with which he will call a bet or even raise you than ones that can make a straight flush, even when a straight flush is possible (which I don't think it was). Besides, even if you lose your $200 stack to a rivered straight flush, you will win many times that from the bad-beat jackpot. So why not go for some value?

As I said, going for a river check-raise seems unwise, even given Jerry's bet on the turn, because a generally passive player like him will frequently take one stab at a pot, then not bet again. There is clearly more value in leading out with a river bet and hoping for a call or raise than checking with the fairly slim hope of a check-raise.

When I posted the bare bones of the story on Twitter and expressed my puzzlement, my friend Shamus quipped: "He's setting you all up for later when he checks with nothing."

It might be the best explanation anybody can come up with.


CODA: When Captain received his $599 in chips, he asked whether he had to keep them in play. This is a point on which house rules vary quite a bit. Some places require the chips to stay on the table, some require any that will put you over the buy-in cap to be pocketed, some let the player decide. Captain wanted to immediately cash out the whole $599, and just keep playing with what he already had in front of him, which the floor told him was fine. But then an argument broke out about what he would be allowed to do if he happened to want to keep all of that money in play--would he be allowed to? Note that this was not the situation--it was purely hypothetical. Nobody was objecting to Captain pocketing the money. The only question was if he could keep the bonus chips in play if he wanted to. Yet the argument droned on for ten minutes, with players vehemently insisting on one rule or another, claiming that it's done this way or that way everywhere else, blah, blah, blah. Good Lord, it was pointless. The only thing worse than an interminable argument at the poker table over an esoteric rule question is an interminable argument at the poker table over an esoteric rule when there is no possible resolution that will affect the current situation in any way.

Life update

I have some work I need to do here at home, but had a technical malfunction that is temporarily halting the process. I'm waiting for a fix that I hope will come through any minute, so thought I would kill a little time by telling you about some things that nobody could possibly care about.

1. Poker has been going great, though, unfortunately for the blog, without much good story material. August and September were two of my most profitable months in a long time. Which is nice, after having just made the biggest expenditure of my six years in Vegas....

2. I brought the new car home Friday and sold the old one Sunday. It was sad to say good-bye to the car that has taken me everywhere for the last 20 years, but overall I know that it's a change for the better. The new one doesn't have the speed or the handling of the old one--to say nothing of its character and memories--but it wins hands-down in economy, reliability, flexibility, and practicality. That's a trade that I finally not only became willing to make, but realized that I had to make.

Here it is, just before I drove it home from the dealership:

3. My bike rides have gradually been getting longer and more ambitious. Today, for instance, I went 13.3 miles, starting at--get this--7:29 a.m.! The old Honda could not carry a bicycle unless you first ran it through a metal shredder, but the new one accommodates it easily. This means that I will no longer be restricted to rides that start and end at my apartment building, which will allow me to branch out and explore more interesting rides than are accessible from downtown. This consideration was, in fact, one of the final things that pushed me off of a couple of years of teetering indecision and to the new-car purchase. I'm enjoying my rides, and don't want to be confined to what's immediately around where I live.

4. I found a great Android app for my phone: Velodroid. For $3.09 it elegantly handles GPS tracking of bicycle rides. With a couple of clicks, you can then upload the resulting data to the free RideWithGPS.com site, which spits out lovely, detailed graphic/numeric analyses like this:

That strip along the bottom doesn't need to look so cluttered; for this screen shot I had it overlay elevation, speed, and grade, which makes it too busy, but you can look at any one or two of those parameters at a time. Moreover, you can mouse along that strip and a blue dot retraces your route on the map while you get a read on the elevation, speed, and grade at that point. Very cool. Yes, there are free apps that do basically the same thing, but I tried a couple of them and found them unintuitive or maddening or unreliable or otherwise badly designed. Velodroid is easy to use. It does everything I want and basically has no extra complicating, cluttering features that I don't want. It's damn near perfect. 

5. I am a mechanical dunce. Nothing about the way things work comes easily to me. Nothing is obvious. I'm about as quick a study as you'll ever meet in nearly anything I put my mind to, but the workings of machines is a glaring exception. So when I tell you that I have now learned how to remove the wheels from my bike, remove and replace the tires, and get the wheels back on (including that tricky rear derailleur), you might think, "So what? Most 10-year-olds can manage that." But I'm telling you that for me this is a major accomplishment, which took way more hours and boneheaded mistakes and false starts than a supposedly smart person should require. I started with the most highly recommended guide book on bicycle maintenance and repair (this one), but found that even with its dumbed-down approach, it assumed more basic mechanical competence than I possessed. So I gritted my teeth at the insulting title and purchased this one, which has helped, though incredibly I still need some things spelled out in more painstaking detail than either book does. Sigh. It's hard being stupid. 

6. My friend PokerLawyer sent me a copy of Maus, which, I'm now embarrassed to say, I don't think I had ever heard of before. That's embarrassing because I have come to understand what an important piece of art/literature it is. I don't know how it escaped my attention all these years. Mine is a "complete" edition that P.L. bought while in Germany, and which does not appear to be available in the U.S., unless I'm overlooking something. I finished reading it night before last. It's terribly sad and painful, but at the same time amazing to see what horrors people can survive. The elder Spiegelman's resourcefulness is really astonishing. At various times, he only escaped being sent to the ovens because of being able to speak English, or translate between Polish and German, or mend shoes the way he had observed professional cobblers doing, or garner favors with police or guards, or because he had made previous social connections that he could exploit. It's a story that would be important to tell in any medium, but his son's choice of a graphic novel with the characters drawn as animals somehow makes it feel more universal, even though it's obviously a unique set of experiences. 

7. Remember this adorable little thing? It now hangs from the rear-view mirror of my new car. It's not like I really need googahs to make me think often of Cardgrrl, but it nevertheless gives me pleasure to have this tangible reminder of her affection in my field of vision.

8. I saw this license plate Sunday and liked it: 

9. For old times' sake, here a "Guess the Casino" picture for you from a session Saturday night: 

Well, the techno-fix I had hoped would come is not going to, so I'm throwing in the towel on any more work from home for the day. Off to the tables. I hope that I can bring home not only the mobneys, but a good tale or two to share. 

Who I look like--the latest suggestions

For some odd reason, I seem to remind random strangers of a bunch of different celebrities. No, I'm not hallucinating. It's true. People that I play poker with will tell me that I look like somebody famous. In the distant (as blogs go) past, I've mentioned that people have told me I resemble Bill Gates, Zeljko Ivanek, Robert Varkonyi, Scott Adams, Joe Pantoliano, and David Cross. (See posts here, here, here, and here.) I've also been told John Malkovich, though I don't think I ever blogged about that one. ("Mr. Son of a Bitch--let's play some cards!")

Well, in the last two days I've had two more names added to the list. While playing at the Hard Rock Saturday night, the guy sitting next to me out of the blue asked me if I read comic books. Not since I was a kid, I told him. He said that that very day there was some sort of gathering going on at the Hard Rock involving a comic book artist named Grant Morrison, and I looked a lot like him. I had never heard of him, but here's his Wikipedia entry, and here's the accompanying photo they display:

Then last night, while I was playing in a HORSE tournament at the Orleans, the player on my left was watching music videos on his phone. He paused one of them, showed me the frame it was stopped on, and asked me, "Recognize this guy?" He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't put a name to the face. He told me, "It's Moby. You look a lot like him." 

I suppose there's some truth in that, at least if you pick the right photo: