Bracelet race

Shamus just put up an interesting blog post about the bracelet race between Phil Hellmuth and Phil Ivey. For me this neatly coincided with having yesterday read an article by Storms Reback in the July issue of All In magazine that gave his rating of the ten greatest WSOP players of all time. In order, he listed Hellmuth, Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss, Stu Ungar, Ivey, Barry Johnston, Erik Seidel, Scotty Nguyen, and T.J. Cloutier.

As Reback recognizes, overall WSOP performance is about more than bracelets; it also involves cashing and making final tables, and doing so consistently over many years. Although I rather despise Men Nguyen, while preparing the stats below I was impressed to see that he has finished 2nd, 3rd, or 4th in WSOP events an amazing 20 times, in addition to his seven wins. I think he might have a stronger argument for a spot on Reback's list than a couple of the other nominees.

Anyway, I was curious how the bracelet race would look when graphed over the years, since those with the most have been at it for very different periods of time. So I whipped up the following graph of bracelets by years to see how their trajectories looked. I included seven of the eight top bracelet winners (Hellmuth, Brunson, Chan, Ivey, Seidel, Men Nguyen, and Billy Baxter), excluding only Moss. His trajectory is, well, dead; he is unlikely to earn any more bracelets unless the WSOP adopts Chicago-style voting to determine winners.





Brunson's line doesn't really disappear; it's just hiding behind that of Chan, as they coincide for the past several years.

What do we learn from this? Not a lot that wasn't already obvious, I suppose. Baxter has been the longest without notching up; he started off earlier than any of the others and kept a pretty steady pace for a long time, but has perhaps come as far as he is going to go by this metric. (I hope not. I'd love to see him show up the young whippersnappers another time or two before he's done, and yell at them to get off of his lawn during his acceptance speech.)

Brunson started off like gangbusters, racking up six in four years, then has a long stretch of none (I think he played very few events during those years), and just a slow trickle since then.

With one exception, the other lines are rather similar, though with varying degrees of lurching in their progressions. Hellmuth's appears to me to be the most saltatory, Seidel's the most consistently stepwise, with the others somewhere in between.

The striking exception, obviously, is Ivey. He shows up for the first time in 2000, a full eight years behind the most Johnny-Chan-come-lately of the others (Seidel and Nguyen), and rockets up, with the slope of his line, from start to finish, being far steeper than any of the others.

Just for fun, and fully recognizing that it's an utterly meaningless exercise, I wondered how the lines would project into the future, if we assumed that the players would continue racking up bracelets at the same pace as they have since earning their first. Here are their respective numbers for bracelets per year:

Hellmuth: 0.52
Brunson: 0.32
Chan: 0.40
Ivey: 0.80
Seidel: 0.44
Nguyen: 0.39
Baxter: 0.20

You'll notice that one of those figures is far higher than the others, confirming what you would expect from the graph and from just the general knowledge of the relatively short time span in which Ivey has left his mark.

If we project those rates ten years into the future (a completely preposterous assumption for any number of reasons, but bear with me), we would find these rounded totals at the end of WSOP 2020:

Hellmuth: 16
Brunson: 13
Chan: 14
Ivey: 16
Seidel: 12
Nguyen: 11
Baxter: 9

And these for the year 2030:

Hellmuth: 21
Brunson: 16
Chan: 18
Ivey: 24
Seidel: 16
Nguyen: 15
Baxter: 11

So that's my back-of-the-envelope prediction: Ivey catches Hellmuth in 2020, then leaves him in the dust. (Some of the others are, actuarily speaking, also likely to be in the dust by then, in a different sense, but let's not dwell on that.)

You heard it here first.

Brad Booth

All In magazine (Spring, 2010) has an interesting feature on Brad Booth. It starts and ends with his participation in one of the most famous hands in the history of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" (see below). I had completely forgotten the pivotal role that the mighty Deuce-Four played there. Booth is obviously in on the secret. (You also get to learn what Ivey called Booth off-camera when Booth told him what he had had.)

More interesting, though, is the rest of the bio. Most pro player life stories in poker magazines are fluff pieces that sound like they were written by the subject's publicist. This one is different. With what appears to be brutal honesty, it describes Booth's huge losses in the UltimateBlecch cheating scandal, his multiaccounting, how he went completely broke, how he lied to his backer, how he lied to friends to induce them to lend him money, how he lost $800,000 that he didn't have in illegal sports betting, how he is still working on making that good, and other topics that would make your average publicist puke. The article does not appear to be online, so you'll have to find a copy of the magazine to read it.

In the meantime, you can relive his play against Ivey. It is commonly called a bluff, but Booth obviously knew that he effectively held the nuts. The only question was whether the 5 was coming on the turn or the river.

Poker gems, #360

Brad Booth, on meeting Guy Laliberte for the first time in a live $10/$20 game, and not knowing who he was, in All In magazine, Spring 2010, p. 73.


One of the guys at the table was a French guy. Since I was Canadian, I asked him where he was from. He said Montreal, and we got chatting. I had no idea who he was, and he never said anything about it. We hit it off, but it was obvious to me that he had no idea what he was doing at the poker table. He wasn't dressed like he had money, he just looked like a tourist, and he told me he was only in town for a week. I felt a little bad for him, 'cause I thought he couldn't afford to lose the money. There was even a hand where I had the absolute nuts on the river, and he checked to me and I checked behind. At one point, I even offered to give him some lessons and suggested he move down to the $1/$2 table so that he didn't lose as much. I remember him laughing and saying, "I'll be okay."

Poker gems, #357

Ilari Sahamies (who apparently has hired Phil Hellmuth as his poker etiquette coach), in the Full Tilt Poker chat box, on January 30, 2010, upon losing a $602,000 pot to FTP red pro Cole South, as quoted in All In magazine, March, 2010, p. 85.


i hate him so f much

i really hoped that someone would shooted a newyears rocket to his eyes so he couldnt play without helper and couldnt see how f lucky he is

Dennis Phillips is smarter than I thought

From an interview with Dennis Phillips in All In magazine, December, 2009, p. 96:

What's your favorite "bad" Hold'Em hand?

My favorite bad Hold'Em hand has to be 2-4 offsuit because I took a
six-figure pot with that hand in a cash game less than a year ago. One guy
slow-played aces before the flop and this other guy who was on the button had
pocket deuces. I was in the big blind, and the flop came 4-4-2. Two of us
flopped boats, but I had the bigger one, and the guy who had aces didn't believe
either one of us. That's what they call a cooler.

No, sir. That's what they call S.O.P. Deuce-four cracking aces and besting a smaller full house is just what it does, day in and day out. But I'm delighted to have you in the Deuce-Four family despite that little slip-up!

Poker gems, #334

Eric Raskin, editor-in-chief of All In magazine, in an unusually candid assessment of Darvin Moon's play at the final table of the World Series of Poker main event; from All In magazine, December, 2009, p. 8.


He freely admitted to the press that his path to the November Nine was paved with extraordinary luck. Still, we all assumed he had to be an above-average player to take advantage of all that luck and build such a dominating chip stack.

At the final table, we found out differently. Moon played some of the worst poker imaginable. He tried to bully opponents at all the wrong times, made a couple of calls that only a true amateur would make, and made it to the final two on sheer good fortune. He tried an all-in bluff on Antoine Saout after whiffing on the flop, doubling up the Frenchman. He made a terrible bluff-raise against Steven Begleiter on the flop, then folded to Begleiter's all-in move despite getting about 7 1/2-1 on his money to call. He got lucky to eliminate Ivey despite being dominated, then did the same to Begleiter. He ran an all-in move with K-9 smack into Cada's aces. He made an unforgivably loose all-in call with K-J and drew out to eliminate Eric Buchman. And on the final hand of the tournament, his call of Cada's all in with Q-J was utterly mystifying.

Again, nothing personal against Moon. He seeems like a nice enough, humble enough guy. But he would have been a horrible ambassador for the game, shunning media opportunities and potentially removing all of his winnings from the poker economy. Cada appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman a week after winning. It's not a stretch to wonder whether Moon even knows who David Letterman is.

Poker gems, #320

Greg Raymer, in All In magazine, October, 2009, p. 35.


One reason you don't trap is because the next card might kill your action. Sometimes when you're thinking of slow-playing, go ahead and bet it, because this might be your last chance to get action.

Poker gems, #319

Tom McEvoy, in All In magazine article, October, 2009, p. 33.


Phil Hellmuth says he has to be at least a 70-30 favorite before he'd be willing to put his tournament life on the line early on [in a tournament] because he thinks he can find a better spot. Meanwhile, Greg Raymer says that he's happy with about a 52-48 situation, where he has just a slight edge. I'm more of a 60-40 guy, right in the middle. If I think I've got about a 60-percent chance of my hand holding up, I don't mind taking a risk early on.

More professional poker cheaters

The newest issue of All In magazine (vol. VI, issue 6; no date given) has a feature about Chad Brown and Vanessa Rousso (pp. 56-61). I was very surprised to find this confession in it:

That's not to say that poker romance is without its own unique pitfalls.
For one thing, there's the potential of having to compete against your partner
in an activity so rooted in individual success. "Early on in our relationship,"
recalled Rousso, "we had to acknowledge the possibility that we'd end up at the
same table." Both considered the idea of soft-playing one another to be
unethical--not to mention antithetical to their competitive instincts. "We
basically have an agreement that in the rare occasions we're at the same table,"
said Brown, "the one thing that we don't do to each other is to trap ... That
can, uh, ruin the romance."

[Ellipsis in original.]

This is an obvious internal contradiction. If you rule out trapping, then you're soft-playing. I don't see how it can be thought of otherwise. If trapping would be the highest EV way of playing a particular hand, and you exclude it a priori as a possibility because of your relationship, that is soft-playing.

And it is cheating.

Of course, there's cheating and then there's cheating. This obviously ranks well below, say, owning an online poker site and using insider access to look at opponents' cards while you play against them. But it is clearly a violation of the rules.

I used to play frequently at the Hilton with a married couple, and they made it clear to all that if it was just the two of them left in a hand, they would check it down every time. They weren't trying to be sneaky or underhanded about it; everybody understood it, and if they became aware that somebody wasn't familiar with their practice, they made it explicit. I got to know them well enough to be completely convinced that they saw nothing unethical or improper about this.

But it is unethical. It puts other players at a significant disadvantage. My guess is that this couple never thought through how this could be so.

One of the major considerations in deciding whether to call a bet on the flop in hold'em--especially in no-limit games--is the implicit threat the bettor is making that you may have to call even larger bets on the turn and river in order to get to a showdown.

Now imagine a situation where Wife is first to act after the flop, to be followed by an unrelated player and then Husband on the button. Wife has an advantage now that she would not have if it were two unrelated players in the hand; if her husband happens to have a monster hand, and the in-between player folds, he will just call and she won't have to make a difficult decision about whether to call a raise. That effectively increases the range of hands with which she can make this early-position bet. She can also use that knowledge to her advantage in bet sizing. She can afford to make a larger bet than she otherwise might--hoping to drive out the player in the middle--because she knows that if it works, it's the end of the money she has to put into the pot. That ability puts the middle player at a direct disadvantage.

Husband also has an advantage. If the in-between player drops out, Husband can then safely call without having to worry about facing additional bets on the turn and river. If he is on a draw, say, he knows that he gets both turn and river cards for the price of the call, whereas any other player in his spot would have to figure his pot odds based on getting only the turn card for the price of the current bet. His decision is made easier all around.

Of course, what Brown and Rousso claim as their only limited version of soft-playing isn't this explicit. It would be extremely difficult ever to prove, for any given hand, that one of them played the hand in a straightforward manner, rather than slow-playing and trapping, out of consideration for the relationship. But in a sense, that makes the practice all the more insidious. At least with the couple from the Hilton, what they were doing was out in the open.

Anytime you soft-play an opponent--especially in a tournament situation, which seems to be the bulk of both Brown's and Rousso's play--you are hurting everybody else. If Brown does not maximize his chance of crippling or knocking out Rousso, he keeps a skilled player in the game longer and/or with more chips than would otherwise be the case. If he doesn't go for the kill when he could, it negatively affects every other player in the tournament, and especially the others at that table.

Of course, it is true that one tends to play more cautiously against opponents that one knows to be skillful and dangerous. Brown and Rousso obviously know that about each other, and will naturally tend to be more leery of building a big pot without the nuts than they likely would be when contesting a pot against a random donk. Taking a conservative line against an opponent known to be a thoughtful and skilled player is not soft-playing, not cheating, not against the rules. It's common sense.

But what Brown is saying goes well beyond that. If "no trapping" really is agreed upon in advance, then they each bring to the table a big advantage that nobody else has. If one of them makes a substantial bet and is called by the other, the bettor can be assured that the caller is not slow-playing a monster hand, with the intention of dropping the hammer on a later street. The call pretty much must therefore represent either a draw or a medium-strength hand. A position call is often enough to shut down the bettor on the next round, for fear that the caller is trapping. Remove that from the equation, and you greatly narrow the range of hands that you might be facing. That knowledge would be an enormous advantage, and it is one that is being granted to nobody else at the table.

That is soft-playing. It is against the rules. It is cheating.

Is it really possible that Brown and Rousso are incapable of seeing that?

Heads-up poker

Played two more matches with my snot-nosed kid nephew just now. Beat him both times. That'll show him! I was tempted to write in the chat box, "You're good, kid, but as long as I'm around you're second best. You might as well learn to live with it." But I'm about 100% certain he wouldn't catch the reference.

While playing, I was reminded of an article that Chris Ferguson wrote for All In magazine a couple of years ago. It is not to be found on their web site. I found a link to it in a forum, but the link didn't work. However, that gave me what had been the URL for the article, then using the wonderful Internet Wayback Machine, I found it here. It presents a solid basic strategy. So if you missed the article the first time around, or read it but didn't save it (like me), now you can get to it whenever you like.