What am I missing?

During the run-up to the recent elections, I was puzzled by a series of Twitter posts from well-known professional poker players not only expressing their support for Harry Reid, but saying or suggesting that he would be good for online poker, while his opponent, Sharron Angle, would be bad for online poker. Here are the ones I remember, from Andy Bloch, Howard Lederer, and Barry Greenstein:









Erik Seidel took a more humorous approach:



I responded to a couple of these, asking what evidence they had that Reid had been or would become a friend of the online poker industry. My questions were ignored.

I have not heard of any explicit public statements from either Reid or Angle on the subject of online gambling generally or online poker specifically. (Lederer provided no pointer for his claim about Angle's stance. I checked at the time, and could find nothing about it in her web site's list of formal positions.) I thought that I was sufficiently tuned in to poker-related news that if either of them had made an election point of either supporting or opposing online gaming, I would have heard about it. But the Twitter statements from Lederer, Greenstein, and Bloch left me wondering if I had missed something.

Apparently not. In the current issue of Poker Player newspaper, Wendeen Eolis reviews what the last election did for online poker. Here are a few excerpts about Reid:

The powerful Majority Leader who won a hard fought election helped the
Democrats hold onto control of the Senate. He was the beneficiary of substantial support by online poker interests but yet to be settled is his commitment toward affirmative online gaming legislation this year.

The wily Senator, whose constituents include casinos around Nevada, has been slow to warm up to online gambling. Even in the face of vigorous support by the likes of Harrah's, Sen. Reid has done little more than give equivocal lip service toward U.S. Rep. Barney Frank's supportive bill to regulate online poker.

As of today, Senator Reid is still holding his cards close to his vest....

The online poker lobby sought to turn Sen. Reid's hotly contested re-election bid for his Senate seat into an opportunity, plowing significant support into his campaign, but Reid has continued to hold his cards close to the vest, presumably weighing the incomplete unity of the casino industry. Casino operators remain splintered over the best strategies in the development of online gambling....

Sen. Reid's continuing equivocation has been matched by Representative Frank's fading optimism toward passage of a bill during the upcoming lame duck sessions.

So I appear to have been correct: Reid has neither expressed nor demonstrated support of online poker. Here's a political truism: If a politician seeking your support during an election is unwilling to go on the record as being in favor of your interests, he's not.

Of course, the same would have been true of Angle. I would not have counted on her to support any expansion or explicit legalization of gambling. Even lacking any clear statement from her one way or the other, it's easy for me to believe that her hard-core religious views would win out over the general ideas of freedom, leaving people alone, smaller and less intrusive government, etc.

In short, neither of them could be considered a champion of liberty generally, nor of online gaming in particular. If I had to guess, Reid's loyalties will lie with the brick-and-mortar casinos, and if he ends up supporting anything at all, it will be something that favors established casino corporations entering the online realm, almost surely at the expense of established online operators such as PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. (See, e.g., Grange95's analysis of the amendments to H.R. 2267 earlier this year.) Reid has certainly been a political friend of Nevada casinos, and I see no reason to expect him to be removed from their back pocket anytime soon.

Which brings me full circle. Reid has not been a supporter of any proposal to license, regulate, or explicitly legalize online gaming, and if one had to guess where he would throw future support, it would be toward facilitating Harrah's, MGM Mirage, etc., moving online, and making life difficult for the current online providers. (It is hard to see those two factions ever not being in opposition over legalization, as each would like to preclude competition from the other.)

So why on earth were prominent representatives of the world's two biggest online poker sites shilling for him? Either they're missing something, or I am.

Lying or mistaken?

In the October issue of Poker Pro magazine, Carl Sampson reviews a hand from the 2008 NBC Heads Up Poker Championship. It's Andy Bloch versus Chris Ferguson in the final round. It's played best two out of three, and Bloch won the first match. Here's the first hand of the second match:




I'm sure I watched this when it first aired, though it didn't make any lasting impression on me.

Sampson questions whether Bloch really misread his hand. If Bloch genuinely thought he had Q-8 instead of Q-5, wouldn't he have made the continuation bet on the flop? He was in position, and his hand would have been as good as he could expect it to be. He had raised pre-flop, and so could represent having the ace. Besides, the I-have-you-beat-whoops-no-I-don't schtick seems kind of phony, a little Hollywood.

Which is all true. However, I'm inclined to think Bloch was being honest about his error.

Why check behind on the flop if he thought he had caught second pair? Pot control. Avoid a check-raise, which would have meant making the difficult decision about whether Ferguson did or did not have an ace. Also, he didn't have to bet to protect against any flush or straight draws, because the flop presented almost none.

Sampson reasons that Bloch had floated Ferguson's turn bet with the intention of the river going bet-raise, an audacious bluff on the river, having sensed weakness in Ferguson. However, when Ferguson didn't follow up his turn bet with a river bet, that plan went to hell. Sampson's theory is that Ferguson is more likely to make a thin call there after a check and a bet than after a bet and a raise, so the planned river bluff lost much of its value.

Sampson also argues that Bloch's plan was to keep Ferguson from knowing that Bloch had raised pre-flop with a hand as marginal as Q-5. But that doesn't make sense to me for two reasons. First, Ferguson well knows that proper heads-up strategy means raising in position a hefty percentage of the time, including with hands like Q-5. It's not like he's going to recalibrate his idea of what Bloch is capable of by gaining that bit of data. And Bloch knows that Ferguson knows that. In other words, the fact that Bloch had raised on the button with Q-5 is not something that he needs to keep secret, as if it's some wildly creative bit of play that will give away his game plan. Second, if Bloch was lying about the misread of his hand, and if Sampson's theory is correct, then Bloch would have simply mucked his cards unseen after Ferguson showed the winner. That would have left Ferguson wondering if Bloch had raised pre-flop with a big ace that missed, with a tiny pair (2-2 or 3-3), or with air.

Something that Sampson doesn't address is the breach of ethics that Bloch would be guilty of if he had deliberately miscalled his hand, announcing to Ferguson that he had him beat. It's inconceivable that he would shoot an angle trying to get Ferguson to pick up his tabled hand and throw it in the muck; there's no way that Ferguson would do that, or that Bloch would think such a trick would work, or that Bloch would be so sleazy as to try. But even the phony announcement of having the winner, quickly followed by the truth, is a pretty scummy thing to do to an opponent, especially one that you respect and consider a friend (and in this particular case, one that is Bloch's business partner in Full Tilt). I have a hard time believing that Bloch would do that. What is there to be gained by it? As a joke? Nobody is going to think that's funny in such a high-pressure situation. Maybe in a penny-ante home game, but not on this stage.

Overall, my conclusion is that it is more plausible that Bloch genuinely made a mistake here. At some point, his brain saw the 8 on the flop and translated that into a memory that he held Q-8 in the hole. (I have done such a thing a few times. I get in my mind what cards I want to see come, and crossed mental wires lead me to believe that what I want to see is what I have and vice-versa.) I think his play, his actions, and his words are reasonably consistent with that scenario. However, it is not wholly out of the question that Sampson is right and that Bloch was lying about misreading his hand. If he was, though, I'm hard-pressed to understand what he hoped to accomplish with the song-and-dance.

What do you think?

More from Caesars Palace

It's a gorgeous day here in the high desert, 73 degrees, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. Convertible tops are down, though I'm sure the drivers' pleasure is muted by the fact that no car in the city is going over 10 mph, because every road is clogged with NASCAR visitors--a couple hundred thousand of them, we're told. It's a day when your left leg becomes hypertrophied from working the clutch, and you wonder why they bother making cars with five gears, when you just go from first to second to first to second.

But none of that matters, because we've got us a poker match!

You can get updates on the NBC "National Heads-Up Poker Championship" every few minutes here: http://www.pokernews.com/live-reporting/2008-nbc-heads-up-poker-championship/main-event/. Michael Craig is also doing live updates: http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/poker-blog/.

My guesses for the first-round first bracket were horrible. I only picked two out of eight. (Fortunately, I knew they were mostly coin tosses, so unlike everybody else, I didn't put any bets down. I just highlighted my picks on a printed schedule.) I got Andy Bloch over Shannon Elizabeth and Jamie Gold over Tom Kelly. But who would have guessed Orel Hershiser would knock out Ted Forrest? That's kind of like last year, when Don Cheadle beat Phil Ivey in the first round. I also thought that Antonio Esfandiari would make mincemeat of Vanessa Rousso; after watching her on TV several times, I think that she's just not very good.

There's a lot more disorganization about this event than one would think, given that it's now in its fourth year. I found no fewer than five different starting times listed various places for the first matches today, including two different ones on different signs at Caesars! I arrived at about 9:30, which is what a sign I saw yesterday had said, though I didn't really believe they'd get things underway that early. There was already a long line for spectator seats.

I thought it was pretty dumb to wait for what turned out to be another two hours for a seat. After all, the thing goes on well into the evening, and not many will stay through the whole thing. (People quickly discover that you can't really follow the action, and things only get interesting when there's an all-in.) I noticed in last year's broadcasts that there were lots of empty seats showing in the background, so I decided to--what else?--play some poker and see what developed.

It was another bad poker day for me. After I had taken enough abuse, I went to check out the status of the viewer seats. More complete chaos. There are two clusters of seats, one on each end of the room, totalling maybe 100 seats. The main entrance to the room leads directly to the left bank of seats. But there's another entrance that goes to the right-hand end.

I went to the main one, and there were a whole bunch of people milling around. It was impossible to tell whether they were all waiting to get in, or just watching from the doorway. I asked a security guard what the procedure was. She told me to go back to the front desk and sign in, and as seats opened, they would call off names. I found the list-keepers. But they said that they had ditched the list. All I could do was wait in a line way back at the entrance to the poker room (which is maybe 50 yards from the entrance to the tournament room, where the taping was going on). She said they had been told not to let any more people in until 2:00. This was at about 12:30. I asked how they were going to fill empty seats as people left before then. She said they weren't going to.

I didn't believe this for a second. I think every TV show director wants every seat filled, because empty seats suggest that the event is too boring for people to bother being there. So I wandered over to the secondary entrance to the room. Here there was no cluster of people, no security guards, no list-keepers. Just a few people standing in the threshold to the room watching, and a bunch of empty seats inside. So I just wandered in and sat down in the second row. People were freely coming and going. After being in there a while, I overheard the floor director trying to encourage bystanders to fill the seats, because she didn't want any of them empty--just as I had suspected.

I have no idea where the people at the main entrance to the poker room and the other entrance to the tournament room got their instructions, but they were screwing things up, and couldn't even keep their stories straight between them. What a stupid mess.

Anyway, I was in. I was far enough away from the action that I had to use the maximum zoom on my camera, and that meant amplification of even minor hand movements, so unfortunately most of the pictures still came out blurrier than I'd like. But you can at least see what's going on.

As I arrived, two matches were already done (Cunningham/Brown and Wasicka/Deeb), and one had the last hand just as I walked in (Gold/Kelly). Two matches were finished up shortly thereafter, almost back-to-back.

The first was the Forrest/Hershiser stunner.

Orel was using a baseball as a card cap, which is distinctly odd. He had Forrest sign it. Ted said he had never signed a baseball before. Kind of a turnaround of roles, eh?

Next out was Todd Brunson:

I've read several times that Scott Fischman had to give up poker dealing and turn to playing because of his rheumatoid arthritis. When I've seen him on television, I haven't been able to tell that anything was wrong with the small joints of his hands, but in person it's painfully obvious (and I mean that literally), even from about 20 feet away.

Survivor Bellande was the next victim. T. J. Cloutier dropped in to visit. If you're a big name in the poker world, they let you just kind of wander around the tables in the middle of taping. Apparently "big name" doesn't include me, because when I tried it, six burly security guys tackled me and beat the snot out of me. Or at least that's what I imagined would happen if I walked out there.

Then it was Esfandiari's turn. In the first shot, he's consulting with his family between hands. (There's a ton of down time during this thing. Whenever there is an all-in at one table, everything has to stop on the other tables. When there is an all-in and a call, the players have to wait an agonizingly long time before the cameras are all in place, and the tournament director instructs them to show their cards.) In the second, he's showing us the fine sitting posture that results in poker rooms hiring massage therapists.

The last match to conclude was the feature table, Bloch vs. Elizabeth. (If you look closely, you can see Doyle Brunson in the background.) In the third photo, Esfandiari pops over from his table to watch Bloch's A-K double him up against Elizabeth's A-Q. Antonio predicted a Q would come and eliminate Bloch, but it was not to be.

They went back and forth many times. I saw him be all-in with the worst hand and survive at least three times against her (e.g., K-3 offsuit versus her suited A-Q), and finally won it with, as I recall, a 10-8 offsuit sucking out on her K-Q. After the match, Ms. Elizabeth was comforted by Clonie Gowen, who scolded Andy Bloch for winning (but said that she still loved him). The actress was having a hard time holding back tears. I was less than ten feet away, and could see them welling up, and her lip trembling, and she was trying to force smiles. But basically she was crying. I wanted to yell, like Tom Hanks, "Hey! There's no crying in poker!"

But I didn't.

However, Andy Bloch ended up standing right beside me, so I took the opportunity to lean over and whisper to him, "Now look at what you did, you brute--you made her cry." He just smiled, shrugged, and said, "Yeah, well...." It seemed he couldn't think of any way to complete the response. I don't blame him. Hard to say anything sympathetic--and mean it--in that situation. For every winner there's a loser in this game, and nothing he can say or do changes that fact, or the fact that he's happy that he was the winner. If that makes her the loser, and she cries as a result, shrug your shoulders and move on--there's nothing else to be done. Some days you're the winner. Some days you're the loser. You have to take both in stride, or you'll drive yourself crazy.

As they say, that's poker.

Here's a shot of Clonie Gowen. She has lost weight dramatically in the last couple of years, it appears to me, to the point of looking quite unhealthy. She may have the flattest, skinniest butt on Planet Earth:


Finally, here are some random shots of the amazing equipment the TV team was using. That double-ring aluminum scaffolding is hung from the ceiling by just a few chains that look wholly inadequate to support all that weight. It's either magic, or it's going to come crashing down, killing everybody underneath:






Addendum, about 10 minutes later:

I did much better predicting the outcomes of the second set of first-round matches: I got 7 out of 8 right, wrong only in thinking that Daniel Negreanu would take down Michael Mizrachi.

That makes me 9/16 overall so far. Obviously, that's HUGELY better than random chance would predict. Isn't it?


Addendum, late Friday night:

First round action is done. I hit 19/32 overall. Glad I didn't lay out any $$$ on it. Not that anyone cares, but my picks for the second round are now:

Hearts: Bloch, Fischman, Cunningham, Deeb
Diamonds: Townsend, Mizrachi, Benyamine, Lindgren
Clubs: Kaplan, Raymer, Matusow, Ferguson
Spades: Hansen, Laak, Ivey, Tran