Stinkeroo

Wow, this trailer for a poker reality show with Johnny Chan looks unfathomably awful in just about every possible way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkzGYtUJ4Mc

The only redeeming feature is that it shows The Mighty Deuce-Four winning a big fat pot at about 1:54.

Impressive fold

Saturday was the last episode of this season of "High Stakes Poker." As always, there was plenty of good stuff. But what impressed me most was, of all things, a fold.

Watch this:

I suppose I might have been able to fold in that spot, but I certainly wouldn't have been able to do it so fast. Johnny Chan had not even announced an amount; he just said "raise" and Phil Laak flicked his cards into the muck. He had had a few seconds' warning that a raise was coming, because of how Chan was counting out chips, but it was still fast. I think I would have had to take time to ponder whether Chan would raise with, say, trip aces with a king kicker, or maybe K-10 for the Broadway straight.

In the long run, we all get dealt the same cards. You can't rely on getting better cards to be a winner in poker. Instead, you have to figure out (1) how to win more money than other people when you have the best hand, (2) how to win pots when you don't have the best hand, or (3) how to lose less when you don't have the best hand, or some combination of those three things. I have become convinced over the years that #3 is both the most important and the most difficult. It is the one that I think most definitively separates the long-term winners from the long-term losers.

Phil Laak seems to have that all figured out.

Poker gems, #412

Johnny Chan, on "High Stakes Poker," commenting on Phil Ruffin's rather astonishing call of David Peat's $100,000 river bluff, holding just second pair with a bad kicker. It's pretty hard to bluff a billionaire.

Immigration

If you don't think the United States has insane policies, practices, and procedures related to immigration, go read Terrence "Not Johnny" Chan's blog post from earlier today, describing how he is not being allowed to visit here from his home in Canada:

http://terrencechan.livejournal.com/354717.html

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.

Self-deprecation

Terrence "Not Johnny" Chan posted his WSOP Main Event story on his blog a short time ago. It included this paragraph:

So it made me all the more angry at myself when I spewed away 30k in chips right at the end of Day 1. With 48k chips, a guy who had rolled up his stack from 6k to 30k in the last hour raised to 1350 early. I decided to try to take the pot away from him by 3-betting with ATs to 3250. This sometimes happens to me in NL tournaments where I just snap and try too hard [to win] a pot. He, obviously, responds with a 4-bet to 7200. I throw good money after bad and call, like the absolute fucking idiot that I am. The flop comes down king-high with two clubs, we get it in, naturally he has top set. I call for the board to pair because I deserve to lose. I don't know if I've ever been more upset at myself for any individual hand of poker that I've ever played. It makes it even more frustrating because we talked at the house at length the previous day about how we should avoid marginal spots, not get in big confrontations, and just let the easy money come flowing in, and I decide to get my stack in with ATs against a guy who has shown nothing but the nuts. I am fucking horrible at poker. I was just in a very pissy, self-flagellating mood the rest of the night, and I deserved it.

I don't re-post this here in order to make fun of Chan. I have great respect for his game. He is demonstrably not an "idiot" or "horrible at poker," and he must know this at some fundamental level. I post it because of how deeply it resonated with me--the feeling that you have absolutely no idea how to play the game, even though there is plenty of tangible evidence to the contrary. I guess I find it comforting, in a way, that players much better than I am go through periods of similar self-doubt and self-recrimination over a mistake or series of mistakes.

Chan vs. Nguyen

A post today on Doyle Brunson's blog, written by somebody identified only as "bob," reports:

Perhaps stating the obvious, but nevertheless entirely true, Johnny Chan commented that “There aren’t going to be any suckers dumping off chips, you have to earn them.” Point in case, who but a pro could fold queens full of jacks? That is exactly what Johnny Chan did against Scotty Nguyen. Granted, there were a pair of aces on the board, but even so, that must have been hard. Nguyen raised Chan on the button, who called. The flop was A-A-Q, and both players checked. The jack on the turn was also checked. When another jack came on the river, Nguyen fired a bet that almost doubled the pot. Chan folded his pocket queens face up, and Nguyen left him to wonder what could have been.

Uh, if the board was AAQJJ, and Chan had pocket queens, wouldn't his hand be queens full of aces, rather than "queens full of jacks" as stated?

(I would have just left this as a comment on that post rather than writing here, but comments were listed as "closed" and the "Leave a comment" link seems to do nothing. Hmpf!)

By the way, what, exactly, is meant by the phrase, "Point in case"?

And further by the way: Folding a low full house on a double-paired board is not particularly difficult. In this case, though, my guess is that the fold was incorrect. I doubt that Nguyen would check trip aces--even with a weak kicker and out of position--on both the flop and turn. It's not impossible, of course, but I think it's more likely that he would make at least a small feeler bet on one of those streets. I suspect that Nguyen had a jack, and Chan got hoodwinked. But I could be completely wrong.

One last point: Shame on Chan for slow-playing himself into such a difficult spot. Double shame on him for folding face-up. What's the point of that? Tommy Angelo, in Elements of Poker, p. 100, gets it exactly right:

When you fold face up, the message that is sent to the table, whether you
intend it or not, and whether you realize it or not, is this: "Dear table full
of people. It is very important to me what you think of me. It is so important
that I am willing to give you the most generous gift of information I can--I
will show you my cards--just so you know that 1) my decisions were justified,
and also that 2) I am unlucky. I know it will cost me money to reveal my cards
and feelings to you. But that's okay. That's how much I value your opinion of
me."

If you always fold face down without ever showing even one card to anyone,
the message that is sent, and received, whether you intend it or not, and
whether you realize it or not, is this: "I don't care what you think about how I
play. I don't even care what I think about how I play. Oh, and by the way, I am
impervious to everything." Fussless folding fortifies.

Poker gems, #373

Terrence "Not Johnny" Chan, in his blog post today.


The intercontinental 8-game title will change hands in most pro-wrestling-esque screwjob manner. One table from the money, Jerrod drew two to 77433 on the flop in triple draw. The dealer flipped up the deuce he was meant to give to Jerrod and the floor ruled that he would not get the deuce (which is the correct ruling). The other card he drew was a five. So instead of making a wheel, Jerrod makes 97543. The opponent makes an 86 and Jerrod is eliminated from the tournament on dealer error, ugh. Bobby Heenan may as well have distracted the floorman so that someone could hit Jerrod from behind with a chair.

It never hurts to check

Terrence "Not Johnny" Chan has this cautionary tale from a WSOP pot-limit Omaha event in his latest blog entry:

There was one kind of wild hand before the dinner break. It was folded me on the
button at 100-200 and I looked down at the powerhouse hand that is TT53
double-suited. I raised to 600 and only the BB called. The flop came A96 with
two of my suit, and I checked it behind (probably a mistake). The turn came an
8, my opponent bet just 800 and I decided to float. The river was a 7 and my
opponent bet 1000. I said "raise" and tossed in the first 1000 to call and
started the process of thinking how much to raise. I was wearing earphones but
apparently the dealer said something like "turn 'em up" while four other people
at the table simultaneously said "he said raise". But the damage was done as my
opponent quickly turned up Q99x. The floor was called over, and my opponent was (justifiably) very unhappy, but of course it was ruled that my raise would
stand. Now how much to raise? I decided to raise...1000 more. My opponent said,
"bullshit" and quickly folded. Total weirdness!

This caught my attention because twice within the past few days I have unintentionally annoyed an opponent and been accused of slow-rolling when I couldn't be sure whether a bet was a call or a raise.

The first instance was at Imperial Palace Wednesday night. I can't even remember what the hand was, but I made something strong on the river and made a nearly pot-sized bet of $35. My opponent didn't ask how much it was, but just grabbed a partial stack of chips and stuck it out there. I could tell that it was a little more than I had bet--probably not enough to be a raise, but I couldn't be sure at a glance. So I asked the dealer, "Is that a call?" The dealer counted it out, tossed the extra couple of chips back to the player, and said, "Yes, it's a call." I then showed my hand. The other player, who probably had been ahead until the last street, angrily mucked his cards while saying, "Of course it's a call--what'd you think, idiot?" I didn't bother explaining myself, but the answer, obviously, was that if he were trying to raise, I definitely wanted to let him do so, rather than possibly kill the action by showing my hand.

The second instance was last night at the Venetian. I was on the button and called a raise with suited 10-8, one of my favorite crAAKKer hands. The flop gave me bottom pair and a straight draw, the turn improved me to two pair, and I filled up on the river. We had a roughly $150 three-way pot by then, so when they both checked to me, I pushed out two $50 stacks. I thought they either both had straights or one had a straight and the other the overpair of AA or KK. I was not only prepared to get it all in, but hoping they would let me.

I tried, as I usually do in such situations, to look casual and unconcerned, which includes not staring at my opponents. I look their way once in a while as they think, but also look around at the pot, the dealer, the other players, the TVs, the cocktail waitresses--whatever there is. Both opponents seemed to be wary of my bet, and were taking their time to respond to it, so I had quite a bit of aimless eyes-wandering time. At some point I looked back and saw a stack of what appeared to be $100 in front of one player, and a $100 bill in front of the other. But the bill was folded, and for some reason its orientation to me (it was at the far end of the table) made it look like it might be two bills folded together. That was significant. I needed to be sure that it was just a call rather than a raise before showing. So I asked the dealer to check and be sure that it was just a single bill. He did, and it was. I then promptly showed my cards and won the pot. Hilarity ensued, both in criticizing my hand selection, and, more to the point for this post, a muttered accusation of a slow-roll.

But you can see my dilemma. Suppose in either case I'm wrong, and there really are sufficient chips for a raise, or two bills constituting a raise. If I don't verify the situation and just make the assumption that it's a call, we end up with a big mess--especially in the case of the three-way pot. Floor people get called, angry accusations and opinions fly, decisions have to be made, the game crashes to a halt, etc.

I regret that my nervous opponents were subjected to five or ten seconds' delay in getting to see my cards, but I'm not apologizing for what I did. Under the circumstances, I felt--and continue to feel--that it was not only justifiable, but absolutely necessary to clarify the situation before acting on it. The occasional chaos that results from a misunderstanding in such cases is bad enough that I'm willing to cause or endure a small delay many times to avoid the ugly mess just once.

Poker gems, #364

Terrence "Not Johnny" Chan, in his blog post today, on full-table tournament limit hold'em.


9/10-handed LHE is a super-lame game, but ... Jerrod wanted me to read Ender's Game, which I found on Kindle and subsequently purchased. I figured that instead of treating it like a poker tournament, I would treat it as just a day of classical music and reading a new novel and every couple of minutes I am interrupted by some relatively straightforward and uninteresting decision. And that's basically what it was.

Chan and Seidel--once more unto the breach

Having another insomnia night. It might have something to do with having heard six gunshots in rapid succession just outside my apartment complex as I was going to bed at about 1:30 a.m., followed by sirens and a police helicopter circling overhead. (Speaking of which, Nevada has been crowned the #1 state in crime for the seventh consecutive year! Go team!)

Killing time, I was jumping around the PokerWorks web site. I noticed a link to something about the famous final hand of the 1988 World Series of Poker, featuring Johnny Chan and Erik Seidel. I wondered if they would get it right, since, as I've chronicled here ad nauseum, writers have a nasty tendency to screw up the facts.

As Britney Spears might say, oops, they did it again.

Here's the entirety of the very brief piece:

At the WSOP 1988 final table, Johnny Chan was dealt J♣ 9♣, and Erik Seidel
was dealt Q♣ 7♥ pre-flop. They both limped.

The flop came Q♠ T♥ 8♦, giving Chan a straight and Seidel a pair of Queens.
Chan bet $40.000 and Seidel raised $50.000. Chan called.

The turn came the 2♠, which didn't change either player's hand. Chan
checked and Seidel moved all-in, the trap was set for Seidel; Chan called.

The river brought the 6♦ and Johnny Chan was crowned the Champion.

The cards are correct as stated. The action, however, is all messed up, except for the true statement that both players limped pre-flop.

Here's what really happened: Chan had the button and was therefore last to act on each round after the flop. Seidel checked, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised another $50,000, and Chan called. The action was check-check on the turn. On the river, Seidel open-shoved, and Chan called.

I have written about this hand, and the almost countless ways that poker authors get the facts wrong, on three previous occasions: here, here, and here. The anonymous PokerWorks writer joins at least ten other well-known poker authors that have misstated in print or online the basic facts of how the hand played out. (I'm guessing that whoever wrote this for PokerWorks is European, based on the use of periods in the bet amounts, where we Yankees would use commas.)

This is so astonishing to me because you can watch the whole hand on YouTube. It could not possibly be easier to see exactly what happened. This hand has been seen by tens of millions of people, between rebroadcasts of the event, the clip being shown in various poker shows, featured in Rounders, and available on the web for viewing at any time. It may well have been seen, in total, by more people than have viewed any other poker hand in history. And still writers continue to describe it erroneously. Why, why, why??? How can so many people be so sloppy about such readily verified facts?

To quote myself from the last time I addressed this subject, "I remained completely unable to explain this baffling, annoying, and disturbing phenomenon. If authors get facts wrong when they are this easy to check, one cannot help wondering what else they are screwing up."

Incidentally, it has now been more than two years since Gary Wise told me via email that he would correct the errors that appeared in a piece he wrote for his web site here. I first wrote about the Chan-Seidel hand in January, 2008. My friend Shamus submitted a comment in which he pointed me to Wise's note. I emailed Wise to alert him to the errors, and he responded with a note saying that he would fix them, though I didn't write anything about it in my blog post at the time. However, by August, 2008, when the subject came up again as a result of James McManus getting things wrong in an article in Card Player magazine, I took the opportunity to chide Wise for not having corrected his mistakes. I do so again now, more than two years after he said he would fix the problems.


For the record, I'm embedding below a version of the video clip from YouTube that is somewhat easier to see clearly than the one I used in my first post on this subject.


(See here if you don't know the origin of the "once more unto the breach" used in the title of this post.)

What happened to the real Johnny Chan?

Apparently somebody kidnaped him and replaced him with the freak shown above, who appears under Chan's name on this week's "Poker After Dark."

Seriously, dude--WTF?

Not again?!

I've been reading every installment of James McManus's articles on the history of poker that Card Player magazine has been running for a year or so now. Great stuff, always interesting. The August 13, 2008, issue has the third part on the history of the World Series of Poker.

So I'm innocently reading along, when he gets to the famous Johnny Chan/Erik Seidel heads-up confrontation of 1988, and says, "In the final hand, already down 300,000 to 1.4 million in chips, he [Seidel] flopped the top pair; his problem was that Chan had flopped the nut straight. The crafty champion was able to trap the New Yorker into going all in on the turn with his pair of queens."

My heart sank. Not yet another author getting this hand wrong?!

It was especially painful because I have so admired McManus's writing. His brilliant Positively Fifth Street was literally the first book about poker I ever read.* I bought it at the airport book/gift shop on my way to Vegas in either 2003 or 2004 (can't remember for sure offhand), the trip on which I tried playing poker at a casino for the very first time. (It was a cheapo daily tournament at the Luxor. You'd be shocked to know how completely clueless I was. I lasted about 20 minutes.) That trip is what hooked me on the game, and McManus's book was a large part of the allure. I've read it three times, and think it's the best non-strategy poker book I've read. (This isn't to say that strategy books are better than non-strategy books; they're just so different that it's not easy to compare across categories.) So when reading his poker history articles, I had been thinking that McManus was careful about his facts, a source I could count on to get things right. [Insert disillusioned sigh here.] I guess not.

Let's set the record straight: The action on the turn was check-check. It was only after the river card was out that Seidel pushed all in and Chan called.

I first wrote about this in January, when I noticed an article by David Apostolico getting the action all wrong, and attempting to draw lessons from the hand that were completely bogus, because it didn't happen the way it would have had to for those so-called lessons to be valid.

I wrote about it again in May, when I discovered two more books that got the basic facts of the action wrong.

I might as well take this opportunity also to call out Gary Wise for getting things wrong in a historical note that Shamus pointed out to me in a comment on my January post. I contacted Mr. Wise via email in January and he said he would be correcting the error soon, but he still has not done so--hence the chastisement here. Wise writes, "When the turn brought the brick both players were looking for, Chan checked knowing Eric [Grump notes: he even spells Seidel's name wrong!] would follow his strong move on the flop with another bet. Seidel, knowing John had some kind of hand and that he hadn’t been helped by the turn, bet all-in, hoping to take down the pot right there. Chan called, and after another brick on the river, was crowned the champion." Wise also erred in stating that Chan had a "slight chip lead" going into this hand, when actually it was a greater than 4:1 lead.

So here's a list of the authors that I know of so far who have misstated one or more basic facts about how the hand went down:

• David Apostolico
• Gary Wise
• Dana Smith, Tom McEvoy, and Ralph Wheeler, in The Championship Table at the World Series of Poker, Cardoza Publishing, 2nd edition, 2004, pp. 112-113
• Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger, in Poker for Dummies, p. 140
• Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan, in Aces and Kings, p. 111
• James McManus

Ten poker authors, all writing about what is perhaps the most famous and most viewed hand in poker history--one which can be viewed in full at one's leisure on YouTube (the video clip is included in an addendum to my original post back in January)--have all gotten it wrong.

I remained completely unable to explain this baffling, annoying, and disturbing phenomenon. If authors get facts wrong when they are this easy to check, one cannot help wondering what else they are screwing up.


*It's not really relevant to this post, but it's time I got a confession off of my chest. I always thought that McManus's title was kind of odd. I mean, sure, I got the "Fifth Street" part, but why "Positively"? Don't laugh at me, but it was not until last year that I somehow stumbled across a reference to a 1965 Bob Dylan song called "Positively 4th Street," and it finally dawned on me where McManus's title had come from. I can be incredibly dense and oblivious sometimes.


Addendum, April 11, 2010

The McManus article is now available online, here. Sadly, McManus repeated exactly the same errors in the book version of his history, Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, published late last year, on page 290.

Two more books get it wrong

Back in January I wrote about some published sources that have significant details wrong in their descriptions of one of the most famous hands in poker history, Johnny Chan versus Erik Seidel at the conclusion of the main event of the 1988 World Series of Poker.

I just found two more.

Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger, in Poker for Dummies, have a chapter on bluffing. In a sidebar on p. 140 they discuss Chan's "reverse bluff" with the nuts:

Chan had won the World Series the previous year and had been on a roll ever
since. Here he was, 12 months later, with a chance to win back-to-back titles.
But he'd need some magic to accomplish it. Seidel, a former commodities broker
from New York, left Wall Street for the life of a professional poker player; and
now he had a big chip lead on the defending champ.

At this point in the tournament, the blinds were $10,000 and $20,000. Chan
was first to act on each betting round. The flop was Qs 10d 8d.

Chan checked. Seidel bet $50,000. Chan called. The turn card was a complete
blank, and both men checked. The fifth and final card was another blank. Chan
checked.

Seidel held a queen in his hand, giving him top pair, albeit with a weak
kicker. He thought for a moment that Chan might have a queen with a better
kicker. But by checking on the turn and on the river, Chan passed up his final
chance to bet!

Seidel then pushed all of his chips into the center of the table, certainly
a sizeable enough bet to cause Chan to release any slightly better hand in the
event that Seidel had misread him. Seidel thought his all-in bet would prevent
Chan from calling with hands such as a queen with a better kicker, or two small
pair.

Seidel had, in fact, misread Chan. And not by a little, but by a lot. Chan
smiled as he turned over his hand. Chan had flopped a straight with the Jc
9c.

Here are the errors:

1. Seidel did not have the chip lead; Chan did--by about 4:1, in fact. That's why when he won this hand, the tournament was over. If Seidel had the chip lead, how do Harroch and Krieger explain the fact that the tournament was over when Seidel lost the hand? It's true that when heads-up play began, Seidel had a chip lead on Chan ($1.2 million to $470,000, according to Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan's Aces and Kings, p. 111.) However, by the time the final hand came up, Chan was way ahead.

2. The 10 on the flop was the 10h, not 10d. This can be seen clearly in the video clip from YouTube, included in the addendum to my original post.

3. Chan was not "first to act on each betting round." He had the button.

4. Chan did not check on the flop. The action was that Seidel checked, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised an additional $50,000, and Chan called.

5. Chan did not check on the river; the action was Seidel moving all-in, followed by Chan's call. Thus, Chan did not "pass up his final chance to bet," as Harroch and Krieger claim (with an exclamation mark for emphasis, even).

I'm also pretty sure that Seidel had not yet set out on the life of a poker pro at this point; the WSOP was kind of a lark for him. Kaplan and Reagan report Seidel saying that it was doing so well in this tournament that made him realize that "maybe I could make a living from poker" (p. 111).

Let me also take this opportunity to point out yet another error in David Apostolico's report, one that I overlooked in my previous post on this subject. He said that the queen on the flop was the queen of clubs. Nope. It was, as Harroch and Krieger correctly report, and as can be seen clearly in the video clip, the Qs. Seidel was holding the Qc.

When re-checking some of the above, I noticed that yet another published source has the action wrong! Kaplan and Reagan, in Aces and Kings, p. 111, repeat the Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler error, discussed in my original post, of saying that Chan checked on the turn, followed by Seidel moving all-in. This in spite of them acknowledging earlier in the same paragraph that Chan had the dealer button! If Chan checked the turn on the button, that necessarily means that Seidel had checked first (which is correct). So how can they then say that Seidel moved all-in on the turn after Chan's check? In theory, that anomaly might be explained by Seidel making his all-in move in the dark, after Chan's turn check but before the dealer had put out the river card. But as the video clip makes clear, that's not at all what actually occurred.

I remain astonished that so many prominent poker writers, with the correct facts so readily available, will get things so many things wrong when describing a hand that just might have been viewed in video replays more times than any other hand in poker history. It really makes one wonder about the accuracy of the reporting on plays for which it is not so easy to check up on the authors.

How many mistakes can you make in one paragraph?

In the December, 2007, issue of Poker Pro magazine, David Apostolico has an article on slow-playing big hands (pp. 80-81). In it, he recounts what has become one of the most famous hands in poker history, Johnny Chan versus Erik Seidel in the World Series of Poker main event, 1988. Here's what Apostolico says. If you know the history, see if you can count how many factual errors Mr. Apostolico manages to make in describing just one hand of poker.

The ultimate example of this is Johnny Chan's play in the final stages of
the 1988 World Series of Poker as memorialized in the movie Rounders.
Chan was heads-up with Erik Seidel when he flopped the nut straight. Chan held
Jc-9c and the flop was Qc-10d-8d. Seidel held a queen with a weak kicker, giving
him top pair. There was $40,000 in the pot and Chan was first to act after the
flop. He checked. Seidel bet $50,000, which Chan called. The turn brought a blank
and again Chan checked. However, this time Seidel checked also. The river
brought another blank and again Chan checked. This time Seidel went all in and,
of course, Chan called (right away, I might add).

Seidel was severely crippled and soon Johnny was world champ. Chan took a
big chance by checking on the river. If Seidel had checked also, then Chan would
have lost the opportunity to make a bet with the nuts.

First, let's acknowledge that Mr. Apostolico gets a few things right. Chan and Seidel were, in fact, heads-up for the 1988 WSOP championship. Chan did, in fact, hold the Jc-9c, and Seidel had a queen with a weak kicker (Qc-7h, to be exact). Chan did flop the nut straight. And the hand did famously get featured in "Rounders." But that's pretty much the entire list of things that Mr. Apostolico gets right.

The errors:

1. "[T]he flop was Qc-10d-8d." Actually, the 10 on the flop was in hearts, not diamonds. This is confirmed by three sources: Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback, All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of The World Series of Poker, St. Martin's Press, 2005, p. 150; and Dana Smith, Tom McEvoy, and Ralph Wheeler, The Championship Table at the World Series of Poker, Cardoza Publishing, 2nd edition, 2004, pp. 112-113; and Mark Rogers and Matthew Booma, 52 Greatest Moments, World Series of Poker, Amalgam Studio LLC, 2007, p. 135.

2. "There was $40,000 in the pot." I'm not certain that this is wrong, but I suspect that it is. I haven't found any source that relates what the blinds and antes were at this stage of the tournament, but it's clear that both players limped in before the flop. It's hard to think of a plausible combination of blinds and antes that would have resulted in a $40,000 pot before the flop.* I think more likely, given the other mistakes I'll discuss below, Mr. Apostolico is erroneously getting the "$40,000" figure from the initial post-flop bet.

3. "Chan was first to act after the flop." Nope. Chan had the button, as you can clearly see from the famous footage. Seidel had to act first after the flop. This mistake leads to several others that follow in the article.

4. "He checked." No. The action on the flop was this: Seidel checked first, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised another $50,000, and Chan called.

5. "The turn brought a blank and again Chan checked. However, this time Seidel checked also." Well, it did go check-check, but in the opposite order. The card was the 2s, incidentally.

6. "The river brought another blank and again Chan checked. This time Seidel went all-in and, of course, Chan called." The river was the 6d. But Seidel was first to act and moved all in. Chan called (which, I suppose, I should count as another point Mr. Apostolico gets right).

7. "Seidel was severely crippled, and soon Johnny was world champ." Uh, no. According to Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler, "When the final hand began, defending World Champion Chan had $1,374,000 in chips and challenger Seidel had $296,000." This is plausible, because this makes a total of 1,670,000 chips in play, and there were 167 players in the tournament, at $10,000 each. Grotenstein/Reback give the same figure for Chan, but don't specify Seidel's stack size. They do note, however, that Chan had "a substantial lead." It's obvious from the footage that the hand in question ends the tournament. Seidel wasn't "crippled," he was eliminated! Furthermore, Chan would not "soon" become the world champ, as Mr. Apostolico writes. This is wrong in two ways. First, Chan was already the defending world champion, having won the same event in 1987. Second, he gained the title for the second year in a row upon completion of this hand, not sometime "soon" thereafter.

8. "Chan took a big chance by checking on the river. If Seidel had checked also, then Chan would have lost the opportunity to make a bet with the nuts." No. Since Chan had the button, he didn't have to make the difficult decision as to whether to continue his slow-play on the river.

I should add that a couple of lines of dialog in "Rounders" sort of suggest that Chan was first to act and had the "patience" to wait for Seidel to "bluff." But it's not so. Also, the movie calling Seidel's move a "bluff" is inaccurate; he likely believed that he had the best hand. Top pair in a heads-up situation is usually good, especially given the way Chan played it (which was indeed masterfully deceptive).

I also see that Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler make an apparent error when they suggest that Seidel moved all-in before the river card hit. It's not quite explicit, however, and it's possible to read their text as being correct. In the actual footage, though, you can clearly see all five community cards are out when Seidel pushes his stacks forward, followed by Chan's call. That the action was check/check on the turn and all-in/call on the river is confirmed in both of the other books mentioned above.

So that's eight (plus or minus one, depending on how you count them) factual mistakes in 14 sentences of Mr. Apostolico's article--a pretty high error rate by any standards.

I'm disappointed by this, because I've enjoyed his columns in Card Player magazine. He has also written six books about poker (at least that's how many are listed on amazon.com), two of which I own but haven't read yet. One of them is Lessons from the Pro Poker Tour, a book devoted to lessons to be learned from specific hands as they played out in a tournament series.

If Mr. Apostolico can't be bothered to get the facts correct when he's describing one of the most famous hands in the history of poker, it's going to be hard to put much confidence in an entire book that depends, through and through, on getting just such hand-history details correct.


*Theoretically, blinds of, say, 9,000 and 18,000, with a 2,000 ante would make the pot 40,000, but those are kind of odd amounts for a tournament structure to use. Blinds of 7,500 and 15,000 with a 5,000 ante would work mathematically, but it would be highly unusual to have the antes be that high a percentage of the blinds. Blinds of 8,000/16,000 with a 4,000 ante would also yield a 40,000 pot, but, again, it would be strange to have an ante that was half the size of the small blind. I just can't think of a plausible set of numbers that works, which is part of why I strongly suspect that Mr. Apostolico's number is just wrong here.

Addendum, January 5, 2008

A reader pointed me to this YouTube clip, which appears to be unedited from the original broadcast. Without the editing imposed by "Rounders," it's much clearer about the order of action, and completely confirms what I had pieced together above.