Epic Poker got some splainin' to do

You've probably heard a thing or two about the Epic Poker League and its out-of-the-gate problems with ethics and qualifications. Between Chino Rheem winning the first event and the controversy surrounding Michael DiVita's exit, a whole lot of questions were raised about the league's much-ballyhooed code of conduct.

In an apparent attempt to address such questions, Stephen Martin, ethics consultant to the league, granted an interview to Jess Welman of Bluff magazine, which was published a few days ago here. I read it last night, and at the end had more questions than answers. (I expect that this has been hashed out ad nauseum in places like Two Plus Two, but I have not read any of that. What follows is just my own reactions.)

The first uncertainty with which I was left was whether DiVita's withdrawal was actually voluntary on his part, as Martin takes pains to insist, or involuntary. DiVita submitted a comment to the Martin interview which, taken at face value, contradicts Martin's account. DiVita speaks of the Standards and Conduct Committee's "decision," while Martin is claiming that no decision was made: "[W]e didn’t take any official action since Mr. DiVita chose to withdraw."

But if Martin is telling the truth about that, then it's hard to understand his answer to the final question:

If Mr. DiVita wants to take part, he would have to request eligibility from the league based on his criminal history. We’ve set up a process where people can request a hearing and appear in front of the Standards and Conduct Committee and ultimately appeal to the Commissioner if they feel like regarding eligibility issues or for disciplinary action. If he wanted to play in our league going forward, he would have to go through that process…There is no guarantee that someone will be eligible to play.

DiVita was presumably eligible to play when he played. If the committee made no decision and took no action, then logically it must be the case that DiVita's eligibility remains intact and he would be able to show up and play at any Epic event anytime he wanted to do so. How can it simultaneously be true that the committee/league made no decision and took no action on his eligibility to play, and that if he chose to play in the future he would have to first request eligibility via a hearing?

Secondly, I'm puzzled by a set of apparent contradictions. First, Martin claims that past conduct, criminal or otherwise, will not be considered disqualifying unless it affects the league in some sort of ongoing manner:

Initially when the league and the Standards and Conduct Committee were formed, we made a general decision not to take action against players for pre-league conduct and things that happened before the league was founded, with some exceptions. One [exception] being that if an action by a player was so severe or significant that we needed to take a look at those issues or something that had an ongoing impact on the league after it started.

Yet there is no explanation of why DiVita's convictions from 20 years ago, nor his arrest (with charges subsequently dropped) in 2008, have "an ongoing impact on the league after it started." Why does Mike Matusow get a pass for his conviction on drug-trafficking charges, but DiVita has to answer for his far older convictions? Is it because the latter are categorized as sex crimes, and Epic Poker has made an institutional decision that sex crimes are worse than drug crimes? If so, where is that determination to be found in the EPL's documents?

Speaking of the league's documents, you can view online the "Players' Code of Conduct." It includes this laudable sentiment:

While criminal conduct is clearly outside the scope of permissible professional conduct (and persons who engage in serious criminal conduct are subject to League discipline), our standard of conduct as professional poker players is considerably higher. It is not simply enough to avoid being convicted of a serious criminal offense.

OK, great. But it's hard to imagine a squishier, more flexible standard than that.

Let's consider the EPL's commissioner, Annie Duke. The first time I heard of her, I believe, was when I read James McManus's great book, Positively Fifth Street. He documents having witnessed Duke picking up another player's cards from the muck and looking at them (page 181) during a satellite to the WSOP Main Event. Even though I was a novice at the game when I read that, I knew that such an action constituted a major breach of both rules and etiquette. Why does the EPL have a known cheater as its commissioner, if the standard of conduct is as high as this Code of Conduct implies?

And what about her criminal connection? She was a paid representative of Ultimate Bet both before and after the UIGEA passed in 2006. What's more, she renewed her position with them after the company was discovered to have engaged in the most extensive cheating scheme the online poker world has yet had brought to light.

In a recent TV appearance, Duke conceded that online poker was "illegal." Let's grant the assumption that this is limited to the United States and to real-money play. Let's further grant the assumption that she is not talking about players violating any federal statute (they are not, though some may be violating state anti-gambling statutes), but rather about the sites spreading the games and/or receiving deposits in connection with the same. Nothing about the legal status of the online poker offerings has changed since 2006. (April 15 of this year saw some enforcement action, but nothing about the legality--or lack thereof--changed that day.) Duke is essentially admitting on national television that the company for which she was a paid shill was engaging in criminal conduct for years, with her knowledge and blessing. How in the hell does that conform to the league's goal, as stated in that Code of Conduct, to "further...the positive public reputation" of poker?

Of course, as Commissioner, Duke is not a player. But that particular Clintonesque dodge won't work, given the Code's broad wording:

Everyone associated with the Epic Poker League is expected to avoid conduct detrimental to the integrity of and public confidence in the game of poker and the League. This expectation applies to all players, tournament officials, employees and anyone else associated with the operations of the League.

So the League's commissioner got paid by a dirty site to continue to bring them business after it was publicly known that the site was dirty, while she knew that the company's core function (even when conducted honestly) was illegal. Can somebody please explain to me how this constitutes "avoid[ing] conduct detrimental to the integrity of and public confidence in the game of poker"?

Or does Duke get the same "let bygones be bygones" pass that Matusow and other former criminals in the League get, but that is somehow not granted to DiVita?

My final question is this: How does a professional ethicist such as Martin, brought on board specifically to keep the organization's reputation white as the driven snow, fail to see these issues?

Addendum, September 14, 2011

See update on the story here.

Self-deception

Several years ago I saw a documentary about Clive Wearing. He was a successful, respected choral conductor, but he contracted a viral encephalitis that damaged his brain in such a way that he became amnestic, unable to form new memories. He has been institutionalized ever since. His odd, terribly sad condition has been the subject of books and documentaries (see the list at the end of that Wikipedia entry), and you really should try to find one of them to learn about him. It will give you a deep sense of appreciation for the role that memory plays in our lives, even though we're usually unaware of it.

For me the saddest, most shocking part of the show was seeing his journals. Wearing experiences "waking up" as if from a coma many, many times a day. He fills not just pages but whole notebooks with scribbled notations that he is finally awake, then a few minutes later that gets crossed out, and another more emphatic notation replaces it, "No, NOW I am really awake." It goes on endlessly.

When I think back on seeing that program, it reminds me of my progression in poker. Early on, I remember thinking what an easy game it was. I would have endorsed Norm MacDonald's quip that no-limit hold'em takes a minute to learn and five minutes to master.

But I have a series of points at which I looked back at how I used to play, how I used to think about the game, and conclude, "Boy, I was really clueless. Good thing I've got it figured out now." Of course, each of those successive points of smug self-confidence later gets replaced with the acknowledgement that, OK, then I didn't really know what I was doing, but now I do. Repeat ad infinitum.

I should fill my own notebooks with such scribbled messages, revealing my own insight and self-awareness, but simultaneously my perverse lack of the same.

I was reminded of all of this by reading an utterly compelling, fascinating, can't-stop-reading-it series of five long blog posts by documentary filmmater Errol Morris, starting here. (I was pointed there by a Twitter message earlier today from Iggy, to whom many thanks.) It's about our lack of self-awareness, or, I suppose more accurately, our inability to detect our own areas of weakness and ignorance. It ranges through history, philosophy, neurology, and psychology. It takes you down the rabbit hole of your consciousness, though, by definition, you can never really be aware of the depth of your own self-deception.

Just like everybody thinks they're a much better driver than those with whom they share the road, nearly all poker players think that they're better than their opponents. I do, too. Am I objectively correct? It's hard to say. All the time I see players whose self-assessment is wildly out of whack with their actual ability. They are operating at a rudimentary level of understanding of poker, but think they've got it all figured out. This doesn't require mind-reading; they'll tell you they've got it nailed down firmly, just before they spew off their chips on a series of horrendously, obviously misguided calls and transparent bluffs. Then they will calmly (or maybe not so much) explain to their opponent exactly what he did wrong.

I wrote about this syndrome three years ago, here. At the end of that post, I link to a Bluff magazine column that Annie Duke wrote. That link doesn't work now, but I found the piece here. I love the story she tells about being a complete novice in poker, with a knowledge of the game so shallow that all she had to work from was a napkin on which her brother, Howard Lederer, had written a list of the starting hands she should play, while folding everything else. When somebody beat her by playing a hand not on the list, she criticized him for not knowing how to play right! (Of course, she had The List, and he didn't, so how could he know?)

Naturally, you shouldn't pay much attention to what I wrote three years ago, because back then, as I can clearly see now in retrospect, I really didn't know what I was doing. Now, however....

Why Norman Chad is bad at poker

In Norman Chad's commentary on poker shows for ESPN, he likes to joke about how bad he is at poker. I think there is reason to believe that he is not merely being self-deprecating for the sake of humor.

I was just watching the first installment of the show they put together of the North American Poker Tour event held last month at the Venetian. The screen shot above is from Annie Duke's last hand. At this point, Chad says in his voiceover, "Annie needs a jack, nine, eight, or any diamond."

Pray tell, Mr. Chad, how will a non-diamond eight help her situation? She will be left with a jack-high straight. She will be playing the board, and her hole cards will be irrelevant. Her opponent, however, will still have the king-high straight that he just made on the turn. Last I knew, a straight to the king beats a straight to the jack.

These guys have a staff of people working on these shows. They do the commentary two or three times before they put it to bed. They have plenty of time to get it right. And yet they still get it wrong. Inexcusable.



Completely unrelated to the above, and just for fun, I give you the following screen shot:



Most of my readers will think that this is a picture of Annie Duke and Faraz Jaka. A few, however, will recognize that that is not what this is a picture of, at least not most importantly. But that's all I'm sayin'!

(If you don't get it, don't worry, and don't ask. It's an inside joke meant for just a few people.)

Fiasco

I'm a little behind in poker news, so just today learned about the disaster that occurred when UltimateBlecch tried to run a new heads-up tournament in honor of Annie Duke having won the NBC event. There were, uh, a few problems. Read all about it here.

This would also be a fitting time to remind everybody of what the site's other prominent spokesman has boasted of it: "We have the best software out there."

You sure about that, Phil? Looks to me like your company can't run a tournament right, even when it manages not to ship pots to the loser of the hand, or let its owners and friends play while looking at opponents' hole cards.

Celebrity Apprentice finale

Annie Duke totally deserved to win, but it was blatantly obvious from the outset that the prize would go to Joan Rivers, primarily because of her much higher profile in the eyes of the general public.

I'm still not willing to call myself an Annie fan, but she both played better and conducted herself so much better than Rivers that it wasn't even close.

She figured out in advance what it would take to win, and set about doing it. Every significant decision was made with an eye to advancing herself in the game. She dealt with setbacks and incredible amounts of undeserved personal attacks by not letting them get to her (at least not publicly) and staying fixated on the task at hand as well as the big goal of the quarter-mil for her charity. Everything else she shrugged off, or at least suppressed, lest it impede the path to the money. She not only completely trounced Rivers in fund-raising (by more than 3:1), but, as Donald Trump's son pointed out toward the end, she did it all in a completely focused, professional, all-business way.

The only way you can name Rivers the winner is by taking some sort of purely subjective, emotional, "I-like-her-better-anyway" approach, which seems to be what Trump did in the end.
I'm glad poker games and tournaments aren't decided that way.

"Celebrity Apprentice" is TOTALLY rigged.


Addendum

Can't sleep, so poking around the net looking for blog comments about the finale. Here's one that I think got the whole thing just about right: http://urbansemiotic.com/2009/05/11/annie-duke-wins-celebrity-apprentice/. Also, as usual, Shamus sees things the way they really are: http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2009/05/was-it-good-for-you-on-celebrity.html.

Poker gems, #242

Joan Rivers, on last night's "Celebrity Apprentice," to Annie Duke.


You're a poker player! A poker player! That's beyond white trash! Poker players are trash, darling. Trash!

[See the full rant here, because a transcription can't possibly convey the bile and venom with which the words are spoken.]

Could I end up liking Annie Duke?

I have never been a fan of Annie Duke. If you click on the "Duke" label and look at past posts about her, you'll see my reasons. But after watching "Celebrity Apprentice" tonight, I'm wondering if I'll have to modify my opinion.

I've never watched "Apprentice" before--well, maybe one or two episodes the first season, then I quickly tired of it. But I thought this lineup of celebrities might be entertaining, and Annie was the real draw for me. I thought it would be interesting to watch her move from an intensely individual pursuit (poker) to one requiring teamwork. I was right about that.

First, I think it has to be said that she is, oh, about 12 times smarter than the rest of her team combined. That is both her strength and her problem, it seems to me.

Lemme tell you a story from my own life to illustrate. I was interviewing for a job--this was back in 1994. The interviews were going well, I thought, until I had one of those panel things, and they asked me, "Are you a team player?" Oh, crap! The true answer was most definitely "no," but this was a big, extremely liberal, public university in which individualism was not going to be highly valued. So I had an instant decision to make: give them the truth, or give them the answer they want. I went with the former.

I explained that I tend to get frustrated working in groups, because when there's a problem to be solved, I can usually figure out the best answer fairly quickly, and then I have to waste time and energy convincing others why this solution is best. If I fail, then it's hard to commit myself to contributing to the subsequent group effort that I think is on the wrong track. If you need something done, I told them, point me to the problem, leave me alone, and I'll come back with it finished well and on time. But making me solve the group dynamics at the same time as solving the problem will leave me annoyed, probably get everybody else annoyed at me, and often leave the project undone. That's just the way it is.

I left not knowing whether I had just blown it. But they called me the next day and told me I was hired. A couple of years later, I shared an office with the woman who had led the hiring task force--the one who had asked me that question. One day I asked her if she remembered the question and answer. She did indeed. She admitted that it wasn't the answer they expected, but they admired the honesty and decided that it's probably good to have some people around with that different kind of personality and skill set, even if it wasn't the exact pattern they had set out looking for.

Back to Annie Duke. It looks to me like she's in the same kind of boat. She quickly homes in on what needs to be done and how to accomplish it, and grows frustrated when others less keen and quick than she is can't see it.

Their task this week was to bake and sell cupcakes to raise money for charity. The first conflict with her team arose when they needed to decide on a location for the truck from which to sell them. The team wanted a spot near Penn Station. Annie protested that on the last season, when selling hot dogs was the chore, Donald Trump had criticized a team for using that spot. His reasons (which I won't bore you with) were sound, and besides, you don't want to get on his bad side when he's the show's ultimate judge. Annie's teammates, however, didn't want to listen to her calm, rational explanation for why she thought they were making a big mistake.

The second conflict came in the kitchen. She was put in charge, and was relentless at keeping people on task. Somebody has to do this, because a bunch of people left to their own devices will stall, waste time on unimportant things, duplicate efforts, and leave crucial things undone. At least as shown in the edited tape for television, she was never rude, but she was as firm and direct as the situation called for. Well, the fragile egos of her teammates couldn't handle being told what needed to be done, so she came under a lot of criticism for it. Joan Rivers compared her to Mussolini making the trains run on time. But there was a schedule and a deadline, and they would not have gotten done what needed to be done without somebody assuming the role of taskmaster. Nobody particularly likes being told what to do, but there are situations in which the only way to accomplish the goal is to have a sergeant and a bunch of privates, and the sergeant can't spend excessive time and energy making sure that no private has his feelings hurt.

The final conflict came when they were running low on cupcakes. Another team member seemed to want to sell all that they had left to a big donor. Annie, though, was concerned that that might leave them with none if another big donor came along--and raising the most money was the goal, not selling every last cupcake. She understood, in a way that none of the others seemed to, that people paying $1000 or more for a cupcake weren't actually buying cupcakes; they were just donating to the charity, with the cupcake as a small token of appreciation. If they were actually trying to buy cupcakes, they'd go to a bakery where they could get better ones for $2 each. Therefore, it made no sense to give up the last of the available stock to one donor, because such a donor would probably be just as content to make the donation in exchange for, say, two cupcakes as for the last 24 of them, leaving them more for other donors to buy. Again, her seemingly sound logic on this point was utterly lost on the Playboy playmate who wanted to give away the store.

Finally, Annie was the only one on her team who was shown working the phone. This, to me, was the most baffling aspect of the show. It seemed to me that the whole day they spent baking cupcakes could have been better spent by making, say, 100 cupcakes instead of 1000, and using the time saved for each of them to call their friends and put the squeeze on them to donate. For example, Dennis Rodman was on the men's team. How many multimillionaire NBA stars and Hollywood celebrities does he have on his speed dial? A lot, I'm guessing. Same with Clint Black in country music, Herschel Walker with his football connections, etc. But if anybody except Tom Green and Annie exploited that way of making money, it wasn't shown. Why sell 1000 cupcakes for $5 each (as they were trying to do) when with a couple hours working the phone each of them could get, say, three rich friends to donate a few thousand bucks apiece? Annie called on her old poker friends (Erik Seidel was the only one whose face I recognized), and had them come down to make the biggest donations they were comfortable with in exchange for a lousy cupcake. That's the smart approach.

In short, at every juncture, it appeared to me that Annie analyzed the problem, figured out how to solve it, but ran up against the tender egos of her overstyled, less intelligent teammates, who were all far more concerned about looking good and not stepping on each other's toes than getting the job done. Annie was smart, focused, and driven, far less concerned about diplomacy than winning the competition for her team.

In poker, of course, that's what you have to do. You're there to win the money. If you can win more by being highly sociable and liked, great--exploit that talent. But you can't be a winning player if you let concerns about other people's feelings stand in the way of taking their chips. You have to be focused on the goal, undistracted by lesser considerations than winning. My assessment is that Annie brought that skill set to this very different task in a way that her teammates could neither understand nor appreciate. But I, for one, came away admiring her more for it, not less.

It doesn't make up for continuing to take money from and be an apologist for UltimateBlecch, but it's something.

UltimateBlecch

When I was a kid, my big brother either subscribed to or frequently purchased Mad Magazine. I read it whenever I could, even though much of the humor went over my head. The very first parody I can recall them doing was "Star Blecch," which, Google now informs me, was published in the December, 1967, issue, when I was six years old.

The word "blecch" got used a lot by the "Mad" writers, and it never failed to make me chuckle when they deployed it as a substitute for some vaguely similar-sounding title or product name (e.g., Blecch Shampoo).

I wanted to come up with an insulting parodic twist on the name "UltimateBet" for use in this post, and I guess all those years of reading "Mad" stuck somewhere deeply in my brain, because the title you see came to me within just a few seconds. It was undoubtedly influenced by the waves of nausea I was experiencing as a result of having just watched John Caldwell's interview with Annie Duke over on PokerNews, available here. "Blecch" is exactly what I was feeling.

For those who haven't heard about this elsewhere, here's the Reader's Digest condensed version: In January some players uncovered and posted damning evidence that one or more high-stakes UB players, using more than a dozen accounts, had been playing with access to opponents' hole cards. Eventually, UB confirmed these suspicions. As it turns out, millions of dollars had been scammed over a period of years. UB's public statements have blamed the cheating on one or more persons in or closely associated with the previous company ownership. They claimed to have closed the software "back door" that made such cheating possible and refunded all of the money stolen. But the big-name professional players long associated with UB (Annie Duke, Phil Hellmuth, Antonio Esfandiari, and others) remained strangely, suspiciously silent about the scandal.

I realize that I'm way behind the times with this being my first comment on the whole UltimateBet mess. The two main reasons for that were that (1) I was conflicted about what I wanted to see happen, and (2) it took me a while to do the fairly extensive reading required to really understand what the problem was and is. For the best readable summary of developments, along with thoughtful commentary, I recommended this series of posts at Hard-Boiled Poker. For a detailed explanation of the evidence that players uncovered by their own investigations, see this post by Cornell Fiji. (Hat tip: I encountered Fiji's work via this post by "Foucault"/Andrew Brokos, which in turn was pointed to by Shamus at HBP.)

Even after reading sharp condemnations from other players and bloggers whose opinions and judgments I respect, I wasn't sure where to stand. My first impulse was to forgive and move on. This was different from my reaction to the similar scandal that had unfolded at Absolute Poker last year--the difference coming primarily because UB had been sold in the interim, and it hardly seemed fair to join in an effort to shame, punish, and/or destroy the company when the fault lay with the previous ownership. If the new team was willing to step up and make things right, I was willing to give them the chance. The signing of Cliff "JohnnyBax" Josephy and Eric "Rizen" Lynch added to this desire on my part (precisely the effect I'm sure UB management hoped those new affiliations would produce), them both being players of genuine skill and integrity, to the best of my knowledge.

My hopeful, forward-looking position became less tenable, however, as I read the second series of posts by Fiji to which Foucault had pointed. This material is harder to access, because it got scattered over dozens of pages of 2+2 forum chatter, most of which is, as Shamus might say, applesauce. Perhaps somebody has pulled Fiji's stuff together somewhere, but if so, I don't know of it. Anyway, in this second series of posts, Fiji dissected in detail the public statements released by UB management. He also did yeoman's work in investigating what could be found in public records about the sale of the company.

The long and the short of it is this: It's not at all clear that UB was actually sold, in any meaningful sense. Rather, Fiji presents substantial evidence that what really happened was simply the original owners retaining profitable positions, but now hidden behind deeper layers of shell companies and surrogates.

Of equal concern is that at least some of the prime movers involved make Tony Soprano's "family" look like innocents by comparison. The network of interconnections and conflicted interests among UB, the disgraced Absolute Poker, and the Kahnawake Gaming Commission (the agency that licenses and allegedly "regulates" the sites, but which did nothing to prevent either crisis, gave only the lightest, most unconvincing slap on the wrist to Absolute, and so far has apparently not lifted a finger with respect to UB's sins) is impenetrable, a tangled web of shadiness. (It is, I think, noteworthy that due to the KGC's completely loss of credibility in the wake of the Absolute nastiness, PokerStars picked up its ball and went elsewhere, taking both its servers and licensing away from the Canadian tribe. Good for them. Full Tilt Poker needs to follow suit, to free itself of the taint.)

Furthermore, the press releases by the "new" UB team, if Fiji is anywhere near correct, appear to be little more than careful, clever, artful assemblages of half-truths. Not exactly the kind of display of integrity I was hoping I might see from a company determined to bring a new broom to the housecleaning.

So why am I speaking up about it now, rather than at some earlier point in the long-unfolding story? Annie Duke. Now, I'm not a Duke fan to begin with. My distaste for her began upon reading in James McManus's Positively Fifth Street that she took a look at an opponent's mucked hand during the 2000 WSOP. As I've learned more about her subsequently, my assessment of her character has not brightened. And I strongly disagree with her political stance about federal regulation of online poker, though that's the sort of thing on which reasonable, informed people can disagree without either of them being unethical or misguided.

But this interview with PokerNews struck me as being little more than a continuation of the half-truths and glaring omissions that have characterized UB's handling of the whole affair, and it has finally lit a fire under me to cry foul.

I have deliberately avoided reading any other reactions to the interview. There are probably dozens of pages of comments now available in the various online forums and from bloggers who got to it quicker than I did. I have read none of them. What follows is purely my own reaction, both unaided and untainted by whatever others may have said. I may have missed things that others have noticed, or maybe these thoughts are unique. I don't know, and don't much care, at the moment. I might go try to catch other opinions later, but I want to leave my own mark in the sand first.

So, to the interview.

I found it interesting that Duke says that she was on the verge of walking away from UB, but was so persuaded that the new management is determined to make everything good that she not only has stayed on, but has put her name on the site. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it clearly implies something well beyond her previous level of involvement, which she characterized as has having been merely an endorser. I think it's fair to read into this that she is going to get paid more for her affiliation with UB. A cynic might say that that looks an awful lot like UB wrote a big check to keep her from bolting, which would not be good for their public relations.

To me, the most striking contradiction in Duke's interview was her claiming not to know who the thief or thieves were, yet simultaneously trying to reassure players that whoever he, she, or they were, they no longer have any association with UB. Well, Ms. Duke, how can you know that, if you don't know who the culprits were? And why won't management tell you who they were? If they're not even being transparent with you, what do you think that looks like to the rest of us?

Duke repeatedly asserts that the current UB management handled the crisis magnificently, going well beyond the call of duty. But she does not address any of the ream of falsehoods and half-truths that, if Fiji's research is even remotely on-target, these alleged saints put out in their press releases. Unfortunately, PN's interviewer, John Caldwell, did not press her for details on how she could reach the conclusion that management has been above reproach, when there is so much reason to think otherwise.

Interesting that she said that UB has made "seven figures" of restitution, but, in another part of the interview, that revenues have not been hurt. Gives you some insight into how lucrative this business is, doesn't it? Kind of makes me wonder why anybody with access to what is basically a printing press for money would feel the need to line their pockets further by using their back-door access to cheat their own customers at poker. Seems to me rather like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Human greed knows no bounds, I suppose.

As a side note, if UB can make all of that restitution without it affecting revenues, it makes Duke's assertions of management's magnanimity less credible. If they're doing nothing that causes them any significant pain or loss, there's not much reason to be in awe of their integrity.

One tidbit of news from the interview is that UB is about to announce the signing of a few more well-known pro players to their team. Should be interesting to see who has sold out.

I think the height of Duke's slickness comes when addressing Caldwell's question about why UB hasn't publicly released the name(s) of the criminal(s). Duke's answer dodges the question, or, more accurately, answers a different question than the one asked, which is the favorite trick of politicians and PR people when being interrogated. She addresses not why UB can't or won't announce who the culprits are, but the difficulty of having them prosecuted.

She is certainly right on that point; the jurisdictional legal problems about where the crimes were actually committed are not trivial. (Can they be prosecuted where they were sitting at their computers? Where the victims were located? Where the servers were? Where the company was licensed? This is made even more complicated, I assume, if the thieves operated from Indian tribal lands, with the additional jurisdictional thorniness that comes with quasi-sovereignty.) But that should not be either her concern or that of UB. If UB has reliable information about who was involved (and surely they do; if not, their investigation has been unforgiveably shallow), they could make public both the name(s) and what evidence they have against those people. UB can't control whether law enforcement does anything about prosecution, but they can let the world know who cheated hundreds or thousands of its customers out of the money that UB has had to refund.

If I ran UB, and were genuinely interested in doing everything I could to set things right, that announcement would be high on my list of priorities. If the guilty party or parties truly have now been completely cut off from any meaningful ties to UB, then UB presumably would have no reason to want to protect them from exposure.

Offhand, I can think of only two reasons why UB management would decide not to make public the names of the thieves. First is a concern about liability for defamation of character. As far as I know, nobody, including Annie Duke, has explicitly claimed that this is the reason, or a reason, why they are not releasing the names, but it's easy to imagine that that excuse might be forthcoming at some point.

It should not be taken seriously. Perhaps their evidence is not enough to yield a conviction in which "beyond a reasonable doubt" is the legal standard. Duke mentions, for example, that they can identify from which computers the cheating occurred, but that it is harder to prove exactly who was sitting at the keyboard at any particular time. Granted. (But you can narrow the list of possibilities pretty far. And following the money as it is taken out of the corrupt accounts would tell you who is behind it.) But to defend against a possible civil suit for defamation, they need, in the end, only persuade a jury with a preponderance of the evidence. Surely they have enough evidence to convince objective onlookers to be at least 50% confident that they have the right people, don't they? Moreover, do they seriously believe that the criminals involved are going to sue for defamation? A truly innocent person might, but surely not the guilty. The last thing they'd want is the increased exposure of a court battle, with all of the evidence against them being laid out for all to see. Cockroaches run from the light, not towards it.

If UB is not worried about civil liability from naming names, then the only remaining plausible reason I can think of for nondisclosure is that they are protecting guilty parties who are still associated with the company in some manner, whether as owners, ongoing payees, shadow owners, investors, regulators, employees, whatever--and that smells about as rotten as it can get. If UB will not name names, then they cannot provide plausible assurance that the guilty are gone for good from any and all association with the company.

The last thing that Duke said that really chafed me was her complaint about online muckrakers who continue to poke at this particular sore spot, not letting it heal. She says, in essence, fine, I understand if you remain sufficiently suspicious that you don't want to play on UB any more, but at least stop talking trash about the site and the scandal, because it's bad for the industry.

This is a little like Richard Nixon complaining that the press coverage of Watergate was bad for America. No, sir--what was bad for the country was break-ins and cover-ups and illegal wiretappings and using the IRS to hound political enemies and all of the other misdeeds you committed and authorized. The publicity given it is not the problem, but part of the cleansing process.

I would say the same to Annie Duke. The problem here is not people talking about the crimes that were committed by, apparently, the former (and possibly still current) owners of the site you're endorsing, or those closely tied to them. The problem was the theft of your customers' money. Complaints about publicity resulting from the scandal sound a whole lot more like sweeping under the rug than sweeping clean.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven. The actions by and statements from UB do not, in my view, reduce the smell by very much. In terms of reducing the stench, hiring on new high-visibility players and increasing the paychecks of the ones already on the team are like spraying Glade in a sewer.

Ideally, I would like to see UB continue as a big player in the online poker world. I think it is better for the players if there are lots of large, healthy sites competing for their loyalty. Because of the loss of credibility of Absolute Poker, I really wanted to believe that UB's scandal would be handled differently, in the kind of up-front, above-board, transparent, responsible way that, say, Johnson & Johnson handled the Tylenol cyanide poisoning scare back in the 1980s, which probably saved the company from ruin. So far, they have fallen woefully short of any such lofty standard, Annie Duke's overblown claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

I am willing to believe that the software hole at UB has been plugged, and no more cheating is going to occur there. (Well, at least not the special kind of cheating that only insiders can do. As for bots, player collusion, account selling, multiaccounting, etc., I don't know how UB compares in its security measures to other sites, but I'm not very worried about such things.) I also doubt that the people who had access to seeing hole cards ever bothered with cheating at tournaments with buy-ins of $10-30, which is most of what I played on the site. So it's not that I feel that I was personally cheated, or am afraid that I would be cheated if I played there now. It's that I hate knowingly giving money to criminals and sleazebags, if I can avoid it. And UB has not taken the definitive--and, actually, very simple and straightforward--steps it would need to take in order to convince me that that's not where the money is going.

It's too bad, really. I have enjoyed playing on UB. Before I recently started spending most of my online poker time trying to learn low-stakes razz and HORSE (which UB technically has, but the tables are empty every time I check), UB was usually my first choice to hit for a NLHE sit-and-go (well, after the loss of the ultra-fishy Party Poker, anyway) or a low-buy-in multi-table tournament for fun.

I have a small amount of money there on account still (about $40). For now, I'm letting it sit, keeping the "Rakewell" screen name on the books there. Does it make me a hypocrite, to write a screed like this but then not go all the way and cut off UB completely? Maybe. And if readers want to roast me for that, go ahead. But I do it in the hope, however naive and Pollyannaish, that continued pressure from its customers, from the press (like the "60 Minutes" piece we keep hearing is forthcoming), and maybe from regulators, will, sooner or later, prompt UB management to really come clean, and prove that they have severed all ties with the evildoers (as President Bush might call them). If they do, I will be happy to return as an active player on the site.

Until then, whenever I think about UB, or hear crap from their shills and spokesmen, my reaction will remain a deeply felt "Blecch."


Addendum, June 30, 2008

A few additional thoughts.

1. Last night I did a Google blog search for comments on the Duke interview and found nothing of substance, just a few pointers to it. Even a full web search finds no substantive comment yet. I guess it didn't bother anybody else as much as it did me.

2. Shamus reminds me in an email that "Cornell Fiji" on the 2+2 forums is professional player Steven Ware. I vaguely knew this, because I have seen those two names associated in news reports of Ware's tournament success, but for whatever reason I didn't consciously connect with the forum moderation/posting work done under the pseudonym. So this extra note is just to give credit where it's due.

3. Rather than linking to just the one post from Foucault, I perhaps should have used this link, which will take you to all of the posts he has written on the subject.

4. I had also intended to include in the main post above a note about a specific, well-known television producer associated with UB about whom Wicked Chops Poker had posted a note tentatively identifying him with one of the apparently corrupt UB poker accounts. But when I scanned back through the WCP archives for that post in order to find the name (which I couldn't remember offhand), I couldn't find it. I thought maybe I was hallucinating, or had read such a post elsewhere, but then thought to do a Google search using the terms "Ultimatebet" and "producer," and, sure enough, it pointed me to a WCP post. See screen shot below.



But links to that post are now dead. The date on the post, according to Google, was June 18, but if you search the WCP archives for that week, you won't find it. The fifth post here appears to be the WCP post that I remember, reposted without explicit credit, although it is introduced with a (now dead) link to the WCP post. Another reference to and summary of the WCP post can be found here. All of which means, apparently, that WCP took down the post in question, for reasons unknown. The source for the WCP post was this post on the twoplustwo.com forums by "trambopoline," who has been one of the main drivers behind the whole player investigation into the fraud.

I don't know why the WCP post was taken down. Speculating, maybe they got some additional information that the TV producer wasn't behind the apparently cheating account that bore a name strikingly similar to his. Maybe they got threatened with legal action, or just decided that it wasn't good to make the accusation without more evidence than similarity of names. It doesn't matter much. The point is that UB's failure to name names means that there will forever be speculation--right or wrong--about who among the UB insiders might have been on the take.

5. Yet another thing I had intended to mention in the original post, but forgot, was that to this date, as far as I know, UB has never communicated directly with its customers about the scandal. Sure, they've released public statements. But if you're a small-time recreational player who doesn't troll the various internet poker forums and blogs, you would never have heard from UB about the problem. I know that I have never received an email from UB or a notice upon logging in that would have alerted me to the issue. That is shameful behavior, an unforgiveable neglect, and again puts the lie to any claims that the company is working with the utmost integrity to come clean.

Poker gems, #131

Annie Duke, as quoted in Michael Craig's blog (specifically here):


I love Razz because when you are out, you feel happy to be away from the torture, so it is all upside.

An empirical test of luck versus skill in poker

You can read the full research report here: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/glr.2008.12105

or the newsy summary of it here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080321125835.htm.

The fundamental conclusion: "The question at the start of this study was Is poker a game of luck or skill? The unequivocal finding is that poker is a game of skill. In both studies, participants who were instructed outperformed those who were not instructed."

Well, yeah, but....

I'm confident that the same would be true of blackjack--those receiving, say, printed cards instructing them in the mathematically optimum strategy for each combination of their cards and the dealer's shown card would surely do better than those given no instruction at all. But they would simply lose less, rather than actually being winners over the long run. In fact, the same is undoubtedly true of slot machines; the simple expedient of pointing out to a new player that typically there are proportionately higher jackpots available when you play the maximum amount of money at a time rather than the minimum would produce a statistical edge for the player following that advice (though you'd have to watch for a long time to see it emerge). Even with craps and roulette, there are bets that have larger or smaller house edges. Just teach a new player which are the bets with the smallest house margins, and you've got a player that will lose his money to the casino more slowly than somebody who is given no instruction.

Does the fact that one can learn to lose less, all by itself, make something a game of skill rather than luck? I don't think so.

Annie Duke argued, in a column for Bluff magazine last year (http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/Is-there-really-any-luck-in-poker%3F-Annie-Duke-830.htm) that there is, in reality, no luck in poker, not even in the short run; it's all skill. This is based on a theoretical computerized player that makes each move randomly from among the legal options available--her definition of a zero-skill player. OK, but then by the same argument you would have to accept that blackjack is a game of all skill and no luck, too, because any player trained in the basic strategy would do far better than a computer player that simply chose to hit or stay randomly. Especially considering the political consequences, does Duke really want to be stuck with the conclusion that blackjack is 100% skill and 0% luck just the way poker is? Wouldn't that logically mean that online blackjack is just as deserving of legal protections and/or exemptions as poker is?

There's also a problem with Duke's definition of "short term." Her argument is based on the fact that the random player would never win even such a short-term game as a single-table tournament. (I don't think that's correct; given enough trials, it would eventually win at least once. But that's just an academic point that I don't think is really important.) But even if that's true, it's a very convenient definition of "short-term." What if "short-term" is considered, instead, to be one hand? Would she argue that her zero-skill player will never win even one hand? I doubt it. Readers who follow this kind of stuff in ridiculous detail, as I tend to do, may recall the idiotic court decision last year in North Carolina in which a court determined that poker was predominantly skill, on the evidence provided by one "expert" about one televised poker hand in which a player was something like a 9:1 dog when the money went in, but still won the hand. In other words, I think Duke's argument breaks down when you don't let her set the definition of "short-term" to one that proves her point.

Duke has also argued (http://www.annieduke.com/journal.php?journalID=1708) that the fact that one can deliberately lose at poker shows that it is a game of skill rather than luck, because one cannot deliberately lose at, say, roulette or baccarat. The obvious rejoinder to that, again, is that by that criterion, blackjack must also be all skill and no luck, because one can certainly lose every blackjack hand on purpose, should one care to do so. One can also lose money on every spin of the roulette wheel by simply betting the same amount on every number as well as the 0 and 00; one of them will hit and you'll get paid $35 on that spot, but it costs you $38 to put down this assortment of bets. You lose. By Duke's argument, roulette is therefore a game of pure skill.

Still, I think she's right (even if only in a way that's fairly obvious to experienced players) in saying that the smaller the difference in skill level between two players, the longer it will take for the skill difference to show itself in tangible results, and the more luck will control (or I think she would say, appear to control) the results in any one session.

I have still not found anything that persuades me away from what seems the only rational conclusion: luck can be (though isn't always) the dominant factor over skill in any one hand, but as the time frame is increased, the importance of luck diminishes and skill becomes the dominant factor in determining who is a long-term winner or loser. At some undefinable point of sufficiently long duration, luck has been rendered very small, perhaps even negligible--though never truly zero--as a factor.

I wish courts would follow Mark Twain's lead on this question. Back in about 1867 he wrote about a group of men criminally charged with playing a game of chance, known as "old sledge" or "seven-up." Their attorney convinces the court to convene a jury of six experienced players and six novices. When the novices lose all of their money to the better players, over the course of a night of playing, they unanimously conclude that it's a game of skill, and the defendants are acquitted. (See http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1540/.)

That's the essence of what happened in the study with which I started this post, though without the judicial aspect. The outcome is hardly a surprise. The "unequivocal" conclusion, though, that poker is a game of skill is, or should be, subject to the caveat about the time frame of the observation. I think it is reductio ad absurdum ever to state that the game is either all skill or all luck.

I don't like Eskimo Clark

Paul "Eskimo" Clark is one of about a zillion people on the poker tournament circuit that shows up sufficiently often on television that it's almost impossible not to have seen him at some point, if you're into watching such things. I hadn't had cause to dislike him, until today.

The Professional Poker Tour was a great idea that didn't take off. It lasted one season. Instead of a bunch of amateurs with $10,000 to blow on a big tourney buy-in, or guys who got lucky in a super-satellite, you actually had to be a professional poker player with a decent track record in order to be invited to play. The competition really is impressive, with very, very few soft spots at any of the tables. From what I've seen so far, there's a lot of really great play here.

I never saw the broadcasts when they originally aired, which I think was in 2005-2006. But I recently found a place where I could download them, so now I'm starting to work my way through the season. It will take a while, because they covered the events with reasonable thoroughness, devoting ten hours of TV time to each tournament, rather than just a two-hour final table, as the World Poker Tour does. With five events in the season, that's 50 hours of play I'm looking forward to absorbing. You can expect to see more grumpy complaints posted here from what I see.

Each of the first two episodes, taped at Foxwoods, have given me reason to put Clark on my list of disfavored pros.

String raise

At the very end of the first episode we catch the tail end of a brouhaha between Clark and Paul Darden. This didn't happen at the featured table, so we can't see the actual incident that triggered the confrontation, but apparently Clark made a string bet or raise, and Darden called him on it, backed up by the dealer, and the excess portion of the bet or raise had to be withdrawn. It's hard to tell for sure, but it appears that Darden bet on the river and Clark wanted to raise, but was instead limited to a call because of the illegal movement.

This is surprising all by itself, because string bets/raises (i.e., putting out some amount of chips, then going back to one's stack to grab more to put out in a second motion, without having first made a verbal announcement) are exceptionally rare among professionals or even experienced amateurs. It's the kind of mistake you tend to make once, your first time playing in a casino, but then you catch on to how things work, and the mechanics of proper betting become automatic.

Clark wins the hand, but he stands up, shakes his finger at Darden, and says, "I'm gonna have to call it on you now since you're coming after me. I'm gonna call everything on you." Darden tells him that's fine, call whatever you want, because "I know how to play."

This is so stupid. First, it's pretty unlikely that Darden (or anybody else) is going to make the kind of blunder that Clark did. Second, whether or not to "call" another player on such infractions is usually not left to any player's discretion; the dealer should be the one speaking up about it, and do it in every single instance, whether or not anybody else at the table notices or cares. (In this case, since the dealer apparently saw it happen, I'm guessing that he would have disallowed it anyway, but Darden was just a hair quicker to point it out.) Third, the classy thing to do in this spot is say, "You're right, my mistake. I wasn't thinking," then let it go. This sort of verbal tirade accomplishes nothing except to get yourself labeled as an immature brat who can't admit to his own failings.

Personally, I would just ignore a tantrum like that, just stare at the guy like the clown he is. But if you're inclined to respond at all, Darden has it about right: Go ahead, dude, I defy you to catch me being that boneheaded!

Not knowing the action

In the second incident, the blinds are at $150/300. From early position, Chris Bigler silently pushes all-in for a huge overbet, $7025, with suited A-K. The dealer should announce the raise to the table, but doesn't, as far as I can tell from the tape. Clark, three spots to the left of Bigler, fails to notice Bigler's move, and throws $1200 into the pot, thinking that he is raising (with K-J offsuit). Annie Duke points out to him that it was raised before, and Clark takes back his chips. The tournament director is called for a ruling, and says that Clark can either call Bigler's raise or fold, but if he folds the $1200 will stay in the pot. This is a pretty standard rule. It is always every player's personal obligation to know what the preceding action was before making a decision.

At this point, the ethical and professional thing to do is say, "You're right, it was my mistake," give up the $1200 (18% of his stack--a big hit for a slip-up), smile, and move on. But no. He has to argue about what his intentions were, what the rule is, whether the raise was verbally announced, etc.

Finally, Duke says, "You know what, Eskimo, just put your money in the pot. He's made a ruling." Chris Karagulleyan chimes in, "There's no one higher you're going to go to." At last, Clark realizes that he's wasting his breath (and everybody else's time), and disgustedly throws the chips back in, along with his cards.

The delicious irony is that Bigler gets called by somebody else, so we get to see the hand played out, and Clark would have sucked out on him and won a huge pot. Hee hee hee! I love it when whiners get punished by the poker gods.

The only way to be grumpy about poker is to do it away from the table--like in a blog, maybe....

Lying about your hand

"Did you know that it's OK to lie about your hand, but you're not allowed to tell the truth about it?"

I heard that from a woman at the table yesterday at the Flamingo. It's not the first time that I've heard somebody make such an assertion. Most famously, Annie Duke said essentially the same thing during one of the 2006 World Series of Poker episodes. I suspect that the 700 million re-broadcasts of the series are ultimately the source by which most players "know" this rule.

But it's not true. The fact that so many people hear this and instantly believe it is just one tiny manifestation of the general societal problem that most people have precious little training or experience in critical thinking.* Even if I weren't pretty well attuned to the subject of poker rules, just an overall skepticism about accepting as fact things that people say would have caused me to raise a quizzical eyebrow at Ms. Duke's claim. I would immediately think, "Can that really be true? If so, it doesn't make any sense at all."

Let me address this under three headings: (1) Why the "rule" as stated would be stupid and pointless, (2) What the rule actually is, and (3) What I think the rule should be.

The alleged rule would be stupid and pointless

Suppose for a moment that there really were a rule that said that you could say any lie you wanted to about your hand, but couldn't tell the truth about what you were holding. Two prominent poker columnists have recently addressed this in detail, apparently both believing that there actually is just such a rule. They both do a nice job of explaining why it's ridiculous.

First is Steve Zolotow, writing for Card Player magazine (http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/57/10074):

Someone in the main event told the truth about his hand, saying, "I have a king." His opponent folded, but he received a one-round penalty for telling the truth. Obviously, he should have said, "I don't have a king," then paused and added, "but there is a penalty for telling the truth." Thus, he could have conveyed the same information by lying about his hand. As long as we know that our opponent must be lying, we can assume the opposite is the truth. Unless players are allowed to use some mix of truth and lies, they effectively are telling the truth.

Next up is Mike Caro, who calls this "the idiot rule," because it prevents people from disclosing whatever they want about their cards only if both players are idiots (http://www.pokerplayernewspaper.com/viewarticle.php?id=2351):

But the worst rule in poker states that you can't tell the truth about your hand. For instance, you can't say, "I have three aces," if you actually do. That sucks. It sucks because, by rule, anything I say must be a lie to be legal. So, if I say I have a full house, opponents are given information. They know I can't have a full house or I'd be in violation of the idiot rule. So, I guess, if I wanted to tell someone I had aces full, I'd have to say something like, "One thing I can say positively is that I don't have aces full." If I said that and didn't have aces full, I'd be telling the truth and in clear violation of the idiot rule. For that reason, astute opponents would know that I'm lying--which is legal--and that I absolutely do have aces-full.

Exactly so. A rule requiring that everything you say about your hand must be a lie would be (1) unenforceable (because not every hand gets opened to check to see if the player was telling the truth or not) and, (2) completely ineffective. In fact, paradoxically, the more rigorously it was enforced, the less effective it would become at the presumed goal of preventing collusion.

That ain't really the rule

Fortunately, nobody has yet, to the best of my knowledge, actually been stupid enough to implement the "rule" that Zolotow and Caro rail against. I'm really quite surprised that both of these columnists took the trouble to publish a critique of a rule that doesn't exist.

So where does this poker urban legend come from? As far as I can tell, the source is this language in the World Series of Poker rules (http://www.worldseriesofpoker.com/pdfs/wsop.tournament-rules.07.pdf):

52. Players are obligated to protect the other players in the tournament at all times. Therefore, whether in a hand or not, players may not a.) disclose contents of live or folded hands....

Notice that it doesn't say anything at all about "truth" or "lies." It forbids one to "disclose" the contents of one's hand. The number of ways that one can "disclose" one's holdings are limited only by the imagination. You could show your cards. You could just say what you have. You could tap it out with your feet in morse code. You could send smoke signals (well, except that they've banned smoking at the table now). You could let an opponent keep guessing, shaking your head "no" when he's wrong and nodding "yes" when he's right until he's got it, thus never speaking a word. Maybe if you have a touch of Marcel Marceau's spirit in you, you could pantomime it. It doesn't matter--they're all equally prohibited.

The implication is that you also can't "disclose" your hand by invoking a logical game such as Zolotow and Caro propose: "I do not have XYZ, but you know that I have to be lying about that." As they note, that is the functional equivalent of straightforwardly stating exactly what you have. Both are prohibited under the actual wording of the rule in question, because both are just two of the myriad methods by which one might "disclose" one's hand.

Let me repeat: There is no currently published rule anywhere that says or implies that you can lie about your hand but not tell the truth about it.

Let's look at some other common sources for poker rules, for the sake of completeness.

The Tournament Directors Association rule 12 is nearly identical to, and the probable source of, the WSOP rule:

Players are obligated to protect the other players in the tournament at
all times. Therefore, players, whether in the hand or not, may not: 1. Disclose contents of live or folded hands....

Next is Bob Ciaffone's "Robert's Rules of Poker" (http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/poker/chapter1.php):

The following actions are improper, and grounds for warning, suspending, or barring a violator:

...Revealing the contents of a live hand in a multihanded pot before the betting is complete. Do not divulge the contents of a hand during a deal even to someone not in the pot, so you do not leave any possibility of the information being transmitted to an active player.

Cooke's Rules of Real Poker--for my money the best single rulebook yet--says this (p. 71, rule 10.20):

A player shall not intentionally expose a card or reveal it verbally in order to induce or inhibit action. However, in head's up matches (where only two players are dealt in) revealing a card shall be permitted.

I'm not sure if this is intended to cover literally only games where there are only two people playing the whole time, or if it is intended to extend to full ring games, when only two players are contesting the pot.

Lou Krieger and Sheree Bykofsky, in their book The Rules of Poker: Essentials for Every Game, go even further, and would disallow such disclosures even when heads-up (p. 79, rule 3.9):

Intentionally exposing a card to induce or inhibit action is a serious breach of poker ethics, and in certain instances can be considered a form of collusion. It is never permitted.

Notice that not even one of these sources says even a single word about lying versus telling the truth. So the next time you hear somebody make such a claim, ask him or her to point you to the actual source where the alleged rule is written. It's a safe bet that the speaker will be unable to do so.

What should the rule be?

Let's talk about cash games first.

The overarching reason for any no-disclosure rule is to protect other players. For example, perhaps a player has moved all-in ahead of me before the flop and I have pocket kings. I move all-in, too, and show my cards before other people have had a chance to act, because I would really prefer to have to beat only the guy who is already all-in; large pocket pairs don't play well against, say, five or six opponents, so my action is intended to scare off opponents. But the person who first moved all-in may have something like suited 9-10, which plays much better, in terms of risk:reward ratio, when there are several players in the hand (because the payoff for hitting a straight or flush is potentially enormous). Obviously, the same reasoning applies to saying "I have two kings, so the rest of you should fold," even though the verbal disclosure leaves more doubt about the speaker's truthfulness than does showing the cards.

What about less specific disclosures, such as "I have a really big hand here"? I would outlaw them, too, on the slippery-slope argument. If you write the rule so that it only prohibits stating exactly what your cards are, then presumably it would be acceptable to say something like "I have a pocket pair bigger than queens." That comes so close to what is prohibited that the rule ceases to be useful. So I would move the dividing line all the way down to zero: you can't say anything that suggests--truthfully or not--the strength of your hand. I would also prohibit statements that come in the form of "I might have...," which is a common ploy of some players.

When there are only two players contesting the pot, however, a player disclosing his hand cannot do any harm to anybody except himself, and since I don't believe in protecting people from their own mistakes and/or stupidity, I'd allow it. There are times when revealing one or more cards can work to one's advantage in confusing or deceiving an opponent. Consider this absolutely brilliant ploy by Daniel Negreanu, where he combines showing one card, a statement about what the other one might be, and a scary-looking minimum raise, to get Sam Farha to fold a better hand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d33K96MGzVA. It's an ingenius trick, one of the slyest bits of deception I've ever seen deployed at a poker table.

I was on the bad end of another skillful bit of deceptive revealing by an opponent a couple of months ago. I started with a strong hand (can't remember exactly what it was), but hated seeing three hearts on the flop, when I had none. The turn brought a fourth heart to the board. I bet, my tricky opponent took a long time to decide what to do. While thinking, he turned over the 7 of hearts. He finally called. The river was a blank. I decided that with just a 7-high flush, he must be worried that I had a higher flush, so I moved all-in. He insta-called with the look on his face of the cat that caught the canary (as, indeed, he had). His other card was the king of hearts. He had flopped the king-high flush, and his showing the lower card tricked me into thinking exactly what he wanted me to think: that he just had a low flush and was in a difficult spot, when really he had the second nuts. Well played, sir--you lured me in perfectly.

That kind of clever psychological gambit should absolutely be part of the game, as long as only two players are involved. So showing one or both hole cards, or announcing or hinting at your hand--honestly or dishonestly--is fine by me.

What about in tournaments? The same considerations hold for multi-way pots, but there's an added wrinkle in tournaments that makes the picture less clear for heads-up situations. That relates to the concept of "tournament equity." This isn't the place for detailed analysis, but basically, depending on the payout schedule, late in a tournament, how one player acts in a hand can dramatically affect the amount of money that other players--even those not involved in the current hand--can expect to win. This is at the heart of an interesting debate between Lee Jones and Daniel Negreanu, at http://www.biggerdeal.com/2007/10/05/daniel%e2%80%99s-wrong-i%e2%80%99m-10000-sure/. Be sure to read the comments, too. (One of the commenters is me. I'll let people guess which one.)

I don't know the optimal way to balance the advantages of allowing the kind of Negreanu-esque ploy, which has traditionally been an integral part of the game, against preventing injury to uninvolved players' tournament equity. Perhaps starting the ban on disclosing one's hand, even when only two people are in the pot, when the money is reached, or a few places before the money, or at the final table, would strike the best balance. Of course, even if it works that way, when it gets down to the final two contestants, the rule serves no purpose and could be taken out of effect again.

Back to the start

But all of that is mostly irrelevant to where I started this discussion. I began with griping about how so many players just hear somebody say what a poker rule is, and accept that as the gospel truth, without looking it up anywhere, without thinking very hard about whether the alleged rule makes any sense or not, etc. To compound the problem, these people then repeat it to others, spreading the disinformation. It makes me crazy. It's not that hard to find out what the rules really are.

So when you hear somebody claim that there's a poker rule that says ________, and you've never heard it before, ask for evidence. Hold the thought in suspension until you can verify it. Don't pass it on as it it's the revealed word of God.

And for Pete's sake, don't talk about your hand!


*I risk going off on a full-tilt tangent here, because this is one of my biggest all-time sources of frustration and dismay about the world. In fact, if I had the magical power to cure just one ill of humankind, I think it would be the lack of critical thinking. I would make every person on the planet instantly inclined to critical thinking, and skilled at it. This would immediately solve countless woes, from the relatively trivial (people wasting their money on pills that the sellers promise will cause miraculous weight loss, enlarge male genitalia, or make the user irresitible to the opposite sex) to the truly world-changing (people being led to believe that if they fly a commercial jet into a skyscraper they will be rewarded with a bevy of virgins in heaven). So don't get me started.


Addendum, December 7, 2007

I emailed Mr. Caro to tell him of my disagreement with the premise of his column (Mr. Zolotow doesn't have a published email address). He responded quickly, for which I am grateful. With his consent, I'll share his comment:

About the issue on “can’t tell the truth.” I know that rule is in existence. It only applies to tournaments, though. Many directors have since modified it. Hopefully, my urging had something to do with it. I was, I think, instrumental in arguing against it on several televised events I participated in. They even waived the “can’t show cards” heads-up rule in both the National Heads-up Championship (NBC) and Superstars, when I participated. That wasn’t my influence alone. Many others felt it made for good TV to adopt these changes.

I even had the honor of roasting the person who first put the rule into place at the WSOP.

This is useful information. I can't find any such rule in current, published sources, but it's certainly possible that, as suggested in Mr. Caro's reply, there are tournament directors who use such an unpublished rule specific to their facility, and/or that if I looked at older versions of tournament rules I would find it. I freely admit that I didn't investigate older materials, so if a must-lie rule previouly existed, I wouldn't know about it (having been in the poker world for only a couple of years now).

"Gaming" and "gambling"

Over the weekend, I spent some time reading about last week's congressional hearings about online gambling. Among the predictable gripes from the enemies of anybody having any fun is always the accusation that the word “gaming” is an industry euphemism, devised to avoid the unseemly overtones of the word “gambling.” It is dishonest, they say, to call it "gaming."

That canard came up again in the context of this hearing. Annie Duke, after testifying at the hearing, engaged in an online chat sponsored by the Washington Post. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/11/13/DI2007111301841.html. The very first question submitted was this:

Gaming? GAMING? Where I come from, playing for money -- on the Internet or elsewhere -- is called GAMBLING. And that's okay by me, but why do you insist on calling it "gaming"? How can you have an honest debate when you don't use honest language?

This person is either deliberately misrepresenting the facts or, more likely, is just ignorantly repeating something he or she has heard, without bothering to investigate it.

In fact, “gaming” is a much older term. I learned this from “The Gambler’s Guide to Taxes,” by Walter L. Lewis. An appendix in that book reproduces a short essay by Basil Nestor, in which he traces the history of both words. (I'm not sure why the essay is in a book on taxes, since it has no real bearing on that subject, but I'm glad I found it anyway.) Here's the Reader's Digest condensed version:

“Gambling” was not even a word in English when Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet," in which the title character, who plans to kill his uncle, says that perhaps he should do it when his uncle was “at gaming, swearing, or about some act that has no relish of salvation in’t,” rather than when the man was praying (Act 3, Scene 3).

“Gambling” still hadn’t been coined when the Statute of Anne (1710) declared legally unenforceable any debts arising from “gaming or playing at cards, dice… or by betting….”

George Washington in 1778 noted that “gaming is again creeping into the Army” and therefore prohibited cards and dice, whether played for money or not.

When the term “gambling” finally arose in the early eighteenth century, reports Nestor, it clearly had the connotation of cheating—a game that was covertly fixed against the player—as opposed to “gaming,” which signified honest wagering.

So now you know.

"You called a raise with that?"

An ever-amazing number of people who play poker just have no concept of the game beyond what some introductory book told them about how to play, yet think they have it all mastered.

Venetian today. I'm on the button with 4-6 of diamonds. The guy on my right raises to $10. I call, as do two other people who had limped in ahead of the raiser.

The flop is 9-6-4, giving me bottom two pair. A young bald guy (YBG) in early position checks, the original raiser bets $10, and I pop it up to $30. YBG calls, everyone else is out.

The turn card is another beautiful 6, giving me a full house. YBG checks. I check behind him, trying to act weak, and hoping that he will catch a card on the river that will give him a flush, a straight, two pair, or something else with which he will be willing to put a lot of money into the pot--especially if this check on the turn convinces him that I was just bluff-raising with position on the flop.

River card is a queen. I didn't know it at the time, but YBG just made top two pair, with his Q-9. He checks, and I have to assume he was planning to check-raise me. I decided to put in a large bet, because a large bet on the river after checking the turn is a very common pattern for somebody who is weak (e.g., made just one pair on the flop, or was on a draw that missed) and is trying to steal the pot at the end, which is what I wanted him to think. I suspect that the size of the bet changed his mind about the check-raise, because he thought for a while, then just called. When he saw my hand, and the dealer said, "Sixes full," he flung his cards in face up, turned to the guy next to him, and gave him a look that said, basically, "Can you believe that idiot?"

I stacked up the chips, but as I was doing so, I was keenly aware that YBG was staring at me from the other end of the table. Finally he said, "You called $10 with 4-6, huh?" I just smiled sheepishly and nodded. He shook his head. A couple of hands later he left the table and didn't come back.

This is much the same attitude that I discussed recently after winning a big pot with a 4-5, with which I raised before the flop: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/something-that-is-not-against-rules-for.html.

Let me try to explain it another way. There are two kinds of players who will call a raise in a no-limit hold'em hand with a 4-6: Beginners, to whom any two cards look like they have good potential, and moderately advanced (or truly advanced) players who recognize that there really is potential for big payback with such hands. I'm not comparing myself to the pros who play for tens of thousands of dollars per pot, but you'll see the best players in the world put themselves in situations like this all the time on shows such as GSN's "High Stakes Poker."

I could even quote the godfather of poker, Doyle Brunson. In fact, I think I will (Super System 2, p. 617):

I always make exceptions when I'm in position, even with the trash hands. For
example, if I were on the button with a hand like A-8 offsuit, I might call a
raise before the flop if enough people, say four, were in the pot in front of me
and I didn't think there'd be any more raises. I might call a small raise and
take a flop with a trash hand because it's a good percentage play. I'd be trying
to make a full [house], trips, or two pair. But if I don't get a real good flop
to the hand, I'll throw it away. I won't get involved and burn up a bunch of
money with one of those trash hands. I'm not going to call any bets on the flop.
I'll be raising or I'll be gone.

And therein lie the differences between the novice and the expert (or, in my case, at least the reasonably well informed intermediate player) calling a raise with something like a 4-6: (1) recognizing the combination of circumstances (especially position) in which there is enough potential for occasional big profit to be worth taking a shot with a low-percentage hand, and (2) being smart enough to get away from it if it doesn't produce a very strong hand.

In this case, as with my previous story, I had been playing tight and showing down mostly premium hands, so I knew that if this 4-6 connected with the flop in a significant way, opponents would assume I was playing big cards and had missed. I suspect that that's exactly what happened here.

But I don't really need to justify my play here. Maybe I'm overrating myself, and it was objectively a complete donkey move that no expert would make, and I just got ridiculously lucky. Suppose that's the case, and YBG is a much better player than me and sees that I'm a bonehead that caught a miracle. What does he accomplish by the snide little comment? It seems to me that he should want to be at a table where there are idiots playing any two random cards, who are relying on luck to save their sorry butts from ruin. Those are just the kind of opponents that make poker profitable for the better players.

The only things that he can accomplish with that little shot of nastiness are all bad--or should be, from his point of view: (1) He makes a fishy player feel bad and leave the game, taking the money with him, probably to be replaced by somebody from whom it will be harder to win chips. (2) He makes the stupid player start thinking more critically about his play, and maybe get better and harder to beat. (3) He sours the mood at the previously light, enjoyable table. (4) He shows himself to be a bad loser. (5) As I think is the case here, if he's really not as advanced a poker theoretician as he fancies himself to be, he risks revealing to more skilled players that he's pretty limited in how he thinks about the game.

And incidentally, YGB, in case you're reading this, Q-9 isn't exactly a premium hand either, ya know, especially to be trying to play against a pre-flop raiser from out of position. Unless, of course, you're so skilled that you can outplay opponents even after spotting them both the likely better hand and position. Which I kinda doubt, in your case.

Annie Duke isn't one of my favorite professionals (I think she's generally overrated, has a track record of unethical behavior at the table, and from what I gather of her personal life, well, I'm not certain I'd want her as a friend). But she does tend to write effective columns in Bluff magazine, and recently she addressed this very subject in a piece I'd highly recommend reading, if you've been in the habit--even occasionally--of openly critiquing other people's play the way YBG did today. I especially like the revealing story of her own unpleasant history in this regard, in the last three paragraphs: http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/2007/03/2007_03_72.asp

Lee Jones made the same point perhaps even more forcefully in a column in Card Player magazine: http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/41/9511

YBG, I sincerely hope to see you at the table again, now that you've shown me that you have blinders on as to what constitutes smart play--and especially now that I'll have you scared that as a stupid, fishy, luckbox, I might be playing any two cards against you in any situation. Heh heh heh!

Stupid is as stupid does

Since I spend so much of my blogging time and energy denouncing the stupid things I see other people do at the poker table, now I have to call one on myself. I made the single dumbest mistake of my short career during a tournament at the Hilton today.

The second time I ever played in a live poker tournament, I exited under maybe the worst possible circumstances: I called an all-in bet with nothing. Note that I didn't bluff off all my chips aggressively, a mistake which is embarrassing, but understandable and forgiveable. No, I called with not even a pair. I did that because I forgot what my hole cards were. Somehow, in the course of the hand, my brain conflated the cards I actually had with the ones I wished I had, because the ones I wanted would have made a straight. The mental short-circuit caused me somehow to believe that I did actually have the straight. I called the opponent's bet with great confidence, turned over my cards, saw that I had absolutely nothing, and slinked away from the table, hoping that the other players would have the decency to (1) not laugh until I was out of earshot, and (2) forget my face.

A couple of months later, exactly the same mental error occurred yet again. This time, however, the result was favorable. I moved all in with my imaginary straight. I was apparently so convinced I had it that it showed, and my opponent finally folded. I turned over my cards in what I intended as a friendly gesture to show him that, yes, I really had the goods. I was horrified to see that there was a gap in my "straight." Oops! I tried to explain to him that I wasn't trying to flaunt a bluff--I had just been stupid. I'm not sure he ever believed me.

From then on, I vowed not to let this happen again, and I have adopted a habit of always checking my hole cards again just before the flop comes. On very rare occasions--maybe once a month or so--I still end up unsure of what they were, usually because something highly distracting has disrupted the flow of the hand (need to call the supervisor over for a ruling on some unusual event, an argument breaking out, stuff like that). I just recheck them, no big deal. As far as I can recall, I haven't had any repeat instances in which I became convinced that I had hole cards different from what they really were.

Until today.

I had K-Q. The final board was 7-8-9-10-Q. Obviously, anybody with a jack had the straight, and the K-J was the nuts (with no possible flush out there). And somehow, in the few seconds after the last card hit the felt, my brain suffered that same glitch that it had on two previous occasions. I don't know what it is about straights that makes me want them so badly that I hallucinate them into existence. It has never happened with flushes or full houses or anything else. Maybe I have some sort of a fetish for straights, and need professional counseling.

Anyway, I moved all-in with what I believed to be the second nuts (Q-J) and got called in two places. One guy had just the J, and a woman had the actual nuts, the K-J. They probably thought I had been bluffing. Nope. Just stupid.

The only thing that saved me was that I was the big stack at the time. She took maybe 1/3 of my chips, so it wounded me but didn't finish me off. I managed to hold on long enough to take 4th place. I might have done considerably better if I hadn't donked off all of those chips to her, though. (She finished in 3rd place.) I needed Homer Simpson to give me a big "D'oh!"

Of course, even if I had had what I thought I did, I would have lost to her higher straight, but the point is that re-checking before committing all my chips would have been the prudent thing to do.

On a recent episode of "Poker After Dark," Annie Duke confessed to occasionally having thought that she had a pocket pair when she didn't. This has happened because she looks first at the bottom card, then shuffles them, then looks at the new bottom card. But a few times she has shuffled two times instead of once, or muffed the shuffle in some way, and thus looked at the same card twice, only discovering her mistake when later revealing her hand, and getting quite a shock at having played, e.g., A-2 instead of A-A.

So if even successful, well-known pros can occasionally screw up that badly, I suppose I shouldn't beat myself up too much for making a dumb mistake three times in two years. Just the same, though, I'd really prefer that it be at least another two years before I cross those particular wires in my head again.