The min raise

Last night I was playing at the Golden Nugget with the visiting Lightning36. He lives in my hometown and works at one of the colleges I attended, so it's always good to catch up a bit with him when he's in town.

So I have Ah-Ks in early position and raise to $8. Three people call me. The flop is all hearts, Q-8-3. With the nut flush draw, I like how this looks. I bet $20, about 2/3 of the pot. One fold, then another player raises to $40. Another fold and it's back to me, heads-up.

The pot is about $90, and it costs me only $20 to call, giving me 4.5:1 pot odds. There are nine cards that the dealer can find in the deck to make my flush, and 47 unknown cards, so the probability of hitting on the turn is 9/47, or 19%, which is 5.2:1. Even if I have no implied odds--i.e., my opponent won't put in another dime if the flush comes and it scares him--I have favorable odds to make this call correct.

As soon as I have put in another $20, the dealer peels off the 4 of hearts. Nutterific! I had a feeling that that was going to be an action-killer, because his raising range probably did not include any hands with which he would have liked to see a fourth heart come. I was right--he checked it back to me.* That pretty much sealed the conclusion that he hated that card.

Fifth street was a blank. I led out for $55 into the $110 pot, hoping that it was small enough to tempt a call. But he thought long and hard, in apparent agony, before finally mucking face-up his pocket 8s (flopped set).

And thus we see the chief problem with the minimum raise: It almost never accomplishes whatever purpose the raise had.

Here he presumably wanted me to fold, but the size of his raise actually meant that a fold would have been mathematically incorrect.

Let's consider some other reasons that one raises.

1. As a bluff, when you sense weakness. But a min-raise also looks weak, and may just induce an over-the-top re-bluff.

2. To price out draws. But as this example shows, a min-raise often fails to accomplish that, because it sets the price of the draw temptingly low.

3. To build the pot when you have the best hand. But if that's your goal, why be so chintzy? Put in some serious money instead and hope for a call.

4. As a probe, to "see where you are." But a min-raise often doesn't clarify the situation for you. In this case, a fold would have told him that I completely missed the flop and had nothing, but my call left him in the dark as to whether I had an overpair with no heart, or was drawing to the flush. That uncertainty is what gave him the agonizing decision when I put him to the test on the river. Had he made his raise more substantial, the first advantage is that I might have given up the hand, knowing that he was unlikely to stack off if I hit. The second advantage is that he could be more confident that I was not calling with, say, pocket kings with no heart, making his later decision much more clear.

Like any poker move, the min-raise has a place. But it's really a very small niche. It's a specialty tool to be used in a few specific, rare situations. For example, you have a monster hand, know that an opponent is weak, and a minimum raise is the most you can possibly hope to squeeze out of him. Or you have an overly aggressive opponent whom you have reason to believe will read a min-raise as weak, when you actually have him crushed; the min-raise in that situation is a trap that you hope will induce a reraise that will get him pot-committed in bad shape. Or you have a lock on the hand and a whole raft of callers to somebody's initial bet; a min-raise may be the best way to swell the pot by giving every single one of those callers temptation to put more chips in when they're drawing dead.

How often do situations arise in which the min-raise is the optimal move? In my view, it's rare. I doubt I put in a min-raise more than a couple of times a month.

Imagine that you've produced a gadget that you want to sell, and you have to determine the price. If you set it too low, you'll sell a ton, but you might actually lose money if revenues are below your costs. If you set the price too high, you'll make a handsome profit with each sale, but sales will be slower than they would be if the price were lower. There is a perfect price somewhere in the middle that optimizes your profit, at the top of a bell-shaped curve of price versus profit. Finding that sweet spot is the key. Large corporations have whole divisions of financial wizards whose only job is finding optimal prices for their products.

When you bet and raise in poker, you are, in effect, offering your hand for sale. You need to set the price to maximize profit. Sometimes the way to do that is by going all-in, if you think your opponent has a second-best hand and can't get away from it, or is unusually loose and calls anything. But if you made every raise all-in, you'd lose your shirt, because most of the time worse hands won't call you and you'll make zero, and once in a while you'll get called by a better hand and lose everything. So that should not be your default or most usual raise strategy.

Similarly, if you habitually min-raise, you're setting your price much too low. Sure, you'll get called a lot--but that includes spots where you really don't want a call, and it leaves money on the table in most of the spots where you do want a call.

For any raise you make, you need to have in mind a clear purpose. What are your goals? What better hands do you think will fold? What worse hands do you think will call? Most importantly, what raise amount will make the most money? I think you'll find that the smallest raise is almost never the right tool.

Min-raises do not lead to max-profits.

Oh, about that image above: It's Min, an Egyptian god of fertility. I did an image search for "min," having no idea what I might find. When I saw that phallic image, and paired it in my mind with the concept of "raise," well, my 12-year-old self took control and decided that had to be the illustration of the day. It is, quite literally, the Min raise.

*One could certainly argue for a lead-out bet on this turn. After all, I have a big hand and want a big pot. The obvious, straightforward move is most often the right one, and putting more money into a juicy pot when one has the best possible hand is certainly the obvious play. My instantaneous analysis, however, was that calling the flop raise and then leading out was too transparent for having the flush. My plan was to let him bet at it again and check-raise; if he didn't bet, then having passed on the turn, a bet on the river might look like I'm working a non-flush overpair. That is, if there is X amount that he's going to be willing to call, he might be more prone to do so on the river after a check-check turn than immediately after the scare card hits. That was my thinking at the time.

However, there is this strong counter-argument: If he has a set or two pair, he will actually be more willing to put in his call of X amount on the turn than on the river, because he can still hope to improve to a full house, a possibility that is foreclosed after the last card is on the board. Furthermore, if the board does pair on the river, I'm suddenly in a very awkward spot. I will have missed my chance to win the pot when I had the best of it, and will kick myself for giving him the free card. In retrospect, I'm inclined to believe that leading out on the turn probably would have been better, but I think the pros and cons come out close enough that if it was a mistake, it was a relatively small one.

Verbal is binding. Or not.

Late last night I was playing at the Golden Nugget with two friends. Poker Lawyer was on my left, Jen across the table. (The ladies love me, ya know. P.L. even dropped trou for me before she left town. OK, it was via Twitter, but it still counts.)

I had 4d-5d on the button, and so joined a chorus of limpers. The flop was 9-4-5. P.L. checked, next guy bet. I think it was $11. I decided to just call. This was partly slow-playing, partly waiting to be sure P.L. wasn't going to put in a big check-raise after having flopped a set or bigger two pair. She folded, so I was heads-up.

Turn was another 4, filling me up. Guy checked. I bet $22. He called.

I don't remember the river card--a jack maybe? Anyway, it didn't seem to change anything. He checked. As I was reaching for chips, he said, "I call."

It's getting rare that I'm faced with a poker situation that is new to me and that I don't know what to do about. I was sufficiently confident of having the best hand that I would have been willing to get my whole stack into the pot if I thought I would get called. But would he actually call? I wasn't sure of that.

My first impulse was to ask the dealer to call the floor over and get a ruling on whether my opponent's call was binding. If it was, I'd move all-in. But in the roughly five seconds I took to think about my options, I decided it was most likely that the floor would decide his declaration was done out of turn and was therefore not binding, and the very process of trying to get him hooked for his whole stack on that basis would show him how badly I wanted a call, he'd fold, and I'd end up with nothing.

I decided instead to proceed as if he hadn't said anything. I made a standard-sized value bet, about 2/3 of the pot ($45), and he called. He flashed a 9 before mucking.

The questions raised are: (1) If I had stopped the action after he said, "I call" but before taking my turn, what should the floor decide? I.e., is he committed to calling whatever I bet up to the full amount of his stack? (2) Strategically, what is the best way for me to have handled that--as I did, or take a chance on the floor saying that he is committed to a call no matter what I bet, which wins me his stack, or some other approach that I haven't thought of?

I think if he had been deeper, I would have taken a shot at the floor ruling. But as it was, his river call was for about half of what he had left, which means that the potential gain wasn't a lot more than I stood to make from ignoring his words.

He was a very experienced player. He demonstrated thorough understanding of the rules of the game. He knew how the blinds changed when players moved in or out of the game, for instance. In fact, the way he talked early in the session had made me think he was likely an off-duty poker dealer, though I never got explicit confirmation of this. I feel about 99% confident that this was not an accidentally premature call on his part. I think it is much more likely that it was essentially a verbal version of the grabbing-a-stack move I discussed recently, here. He has probably either done this himself on previous occasions or seen it done, and has reason to believe that if it comes to a floor decision it will be ruled non-binding. If so, then I would label it as angle-shooting, a way of pretending to call without actually committing any chips.

I understand that before I got into poker, a common angle-shot was this: a player wanting to inhibit a bet or raise from somebody to his right would announce "raise" out of turn, but then check or call when action actually got to him. That was quashed by instituting the rule that out-of-turn action would be binding if the action to the player in question did not change between when he announced his action and when it became his turn.

If applied here, that would probably not commit my opponent, because, the argument would go, in between his verbal announcement and when he had to actually make his decision, the action had changed by virtue of my bet.

So I'm still not sure what the ruling would be if I pressed for one, nor how I should have handled the situation. I'd like to get it figured out before the next time I'm faced with it.

Addendum, October 31, 2011

I asked Matt Savage via Twitter how he would rule in this situation. He replied:

cash game rules vary, I can guarantee you I am charging him something to get him to stop this angle, probably size of turn bet.

in tournaments the @PokerTDA has added a rule for conditional statements so we have latitude to make him call your whole bet.

He is referring to this rule, added earlier this year:

47: Conditional Statements

Conditional statements regarding future action are strongly discouraged; they may be binding and/or subject to penalty. Example: “if – then” statements such as "If you bet, then I will raise”.

I knew of this change but hadn't thought of applying it here. But on consideration, it does seem pretty reasonable (if you ignore the cash game/tournament distinction). His statement was functionally equivalent to "If you bet, I will call."

Thanks to Matt for his quick response.

"I can count!"

One incident from today's Golden Nugget tournament deserves retelling.

I had the table maniac on my immediate left, which was a serious pain in the neck. In the hand in question, I limped in with 10-10. He shoved from the button. His range there was very large, and I thought my 10s were in pretty good shape. But it was hard to estimate his stack, because he had accumulated an enormous number of the two smallest-denomination chips. He really liked them, for some reason, and would put in his blinds and antes with larger chips apparently just for the purpose of getting yet more small chips as change. I don't know if he has some sort of fetish for them, or likes having huge stacks as some sort of visual intimidation, or what.

Anyway, I estimated his stacks to total somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000, and that was a range that I was willing to call. So I did. He had K-9 offsuit, so I was definitely right in my judgment that he was shoving very light there, and I was definitely right to call. Sadly, he got lucky and binked a king to take the pot.

Then the dealer had to count out his voluminous stacks so we could get the pot exactly right. When she got down to the 25-denomination chips, she messed it up. She assembled stacks of 10 chips and said, "500," then put those together and said, "1000." There were several stacks of 20 chips each of these. Like I said, he was cornering the market on the cheap chips.

Even though three people were telling the dealer that she was counting wrong, when she went back, she made the exact same mistake again. She concluded that the total was 17,000 and change. (I don't remember her exact number.) At that point I had lost all confidence in her, and said, "Would you please call the floor to redo the count?"

She gave me the nastiest look I've seen in a long time and spat back, "I can count!" Uh, I beg to differ with you, ma'am. You have proven that, in fact, you cannot count, at least not correctly. But I didn't say that. I just repeated, with more emphasis, "Please call the floor." I intended my voice to convey that I knew perfectly well that when a player makes this request she is obligated to comply, and that if she did not do so, I would call the floor myself and hang on to my chips until help arrived. Apparently she got this message, and put in the call.

While we were waiting, she took another stab at it. This time the maniac was simultaneously trying to count them, and they completely got in each other's way, moving chip stacks this way and that, messing up each other's count. I just made sure that they didn't mix any of my stacks in with his until it got sorted out.

The floor guy came. I don't know his name, but I've seen him at the G.N. for years now, and he's very good at his job. In fact, he's the same one who last year bailed out another dealer who didn't know how to count, in a story I related here. When he arrived, I said, "It's an all-in and call. We need his stacks counted. The dealer got it wrong the first time, and I'd like to have an independent count, please."

The dealer glared at me again, and shot back, "I did not get it wrong!" But floor guy wasn't listening. He was already counting. Just as he had done in the previous incident, he was an absolute wizard. He flew through the stacks expertly, verbalizing the amount of each stack and his running total. It took him less than 30 seconds, and when he was done, nobody doubted that he had the number right.

It was 12,325, a far cry from the 17,000+ that the dealer had counted. I had started that hand with about 56,000 (tournament average was then only about 22,000), so it hurt but wasn't fatal. But a 5,000-chip mistake was not a tiny rounding error; it was HUGE. Some at the table were getting irritated that this took so long to sort out, but it wasn't my fault. I am resolute that I did the right thing by calling for backup, and not accepting the dealer's assertion that she had things under control. She was causing the problem; I was getting it resolved. I'm not going to give away 10% of my stack unnecessarily.

Incidentally, the floor guy also had the dealer color up most of the maniac's small chips so that future hands wouldn't take so long to get right.

Lesson: Don't let dealers intimidate you into just accepting their counts when you have any reason to think there is an error. Get the floor over to verify the amount before you hand over your chips. It's your right.

Kicking it up a notch

After you play enough thousands of hands, you tend to develop a rote system: I raise with this, I fold that, I'll call in that kind of spot. I have my default plays like everybody else, and they work well enough.

I have, of course, been having lots of anticipatory thoughts about the Main Event coming up next week. One of them is an acknowledgement that my ordinary, daily game is fairly passive. I turn up the heat in spots, but I very rarely three-bet pre-flop, for example. I'm enough better at post-flop play than most opponents that I consider it an advantage not to risk turning it into a shove-fest. I play cautiously because for the most part I can wait for spots in which I know I'm a huge favorite before getting the big money in. The marginal spots, those where I'm purely guessing what another player is up to, I tend to pass on. I may be ahead, I may not be, but there's no point in reducing it to a guessing game when, with a little patience, I can get it in as a definitive favorite.

It's a serviceable strategy for cash games against the stereotypical impatient tourist, but it has problems when trying to translate it to tournaments, where patience cannot be infinite--even with two-hour blind levels.

So I decided today to try an experiment. I entered the Golden Nugget Grand series event ($135), which has the slowest structure of any low buy-in tournament in town: 40-minute levels, and Level 6 has a big blind that is just 3% of the starting stack (that's one arbitrary measure I use to judge tournament structures against each other), compared to 5% for Binion's Classic and 4% for Caesars Megastack. My goal was to play with one notch more aggression than my standard, comfort-zone tendency. I wasn't going to turn from a rock into a maniac. But I had in mind that about once each level I would find a spot in which I would raise where my usual play would be to call.

And I did it. To my great delight, every single one of them worked. For example, when the blinds were 100/200/25, and I was in the big blind with the rather awful 3-7 offsuit, six people ahead of me limped in. My knee-jerk reaction is to leave well enough alone, be glad to see a free flop, and hope for a miracle. But this time, in accordance with my goal, I picked this spot to raise. I bumped it up to 1000, and was rewarded with a cascade of folds, and a low-risk profit of 1650 chips.

In another spot, there was a standard 3x open raise from early position followed by a call from the button. In the big blind I had AcJc. I was a big stack at this point. Both opponents were left with about 10 big blinds behind. My standard move in this spot would be to just call, first because I don't want to play a huge pot from out of position, and second because either of them could easily have a hand that has me crushed--AK, AQ, QQ, or KK. But I screwed up my courage, recognized this as a potentially good spot for a squeeze play, and moved all in. The first guy took forever to fold, and looked like he was selling his only child into slavery as he did so. Second guy was quicker, but did the same thing. As I was pulling in the chips, they said that they had folded a suited AJ and an AT, respectively. They also both agreed that my bet looked like I must have AK. Sweet!

In other situations, I check-raised where my baseline play would have been to either check-fold or check-call, or I put in a light three-bet before the flop. Like I said, every single time this worked, and won me the pot without a further fight.

I know that I can't expect such perfect results all the time. But it has made me realize that I have probably not been taking sufficient advantage of the TAG table image I usually acquire. I really can get away with more steals and resteals than has been my pattern in the past. Of course, it would be easy to overdo it, but one extra move every 40 minutes or so (which is about what I did today) is not enough for anyone to begin to suspect larceny. It is, however, enough to make a meaningful difference in the rate of chip accumulation.

I didn't make the money (went out in about 35th place out of 126 entrants, top 13 sharing the cash). Nevertheless, I enjoyed this eye-opening experience so much that I am feeling deeply tempted to do it again tomorrow in one of the Venetian Deep Stack Extravaganza events, which is an even slower structure than the Grand (though at a substantially higher buy-in, $350). Both Cardgrrl and Daniel Cates told me that they thought that would be a good practice event for me, given that I'm much more used to playing in shorter, hit-and-run sessions. I just might do it.

Dealing and ego don't mix

Today was one of the rare days of perfect, gorgeous weather that we get around here. We're in that very brief interval between when I complain about how hot it is and when I complain about how cold it is. As a result, instead of driving out to Mandalay Bay for NFL Sunday afternoon, I decided to take a stroll downtown.

When I head to Fremont Street to play poker, it's virtually always to Binion's. The only other reasonable choice is the Golden Nugget (El Cortez, Plaza, and Fitzgerald's are not "reasonable" choices), and I like nearly everything about Binion's better: it's more profitable, more comfortable, has better comps, etc. But it's been nearly a year since I played at G.N. and I decided to give it a go.

The real reason I made that choice illustrates how arbitrary my choice of where to play on a given day is, and how little it takes to influence it: G.N. was on a cool episode of "C.S.I" Thursday. In fact, it played the role of two casinos. Its famous shark-tank swimming pool was the scene of an unlikely murder by shark, while its new lobby with the indoor fish tank was used as the fictional rival casino "across the street." I liked seeing the familiar cast (I've been watching since the first season) stroll around the familiar halls. That's why the place was on my mind, and why I made the last-second choice to turn left instead of right after crossing Casino Center Boulevard.

Anyway, things didn't go well at first, and I was down to a stack of something like $120 when the hand in question came up. I was in Seat 3, and Seat 2 and Seat 4 were with me in the hand. I had J-10 and called a bet from Seat 4 on the turn with the board reading Q-A-8-7 for a double-gutter. The river was a 9, giving me the nuts. Seat 2 checked. I checked, fairly confident that the aggressive Seat 4 would bet again.

He did, $20. Seat 2 moved all in for $73. I figured he probably had the same hand I did. I put in my last $81. Seat 4 groaned, but announced a call, without putting out any more chips. He showed 5-6 for the low end of the straight. Seat 2 did indeed have another J-10.

Here's where it got interesting. The dealer pulled Seat 4's $20 into the pot, told Seat 2 and me to take back our last bets, and started chopping the pot. He had heard Seat 4's call, but somehow didn't realize that that meant more chips had to be tendered. A player at the other end of the table and I both simultaneously stopped him and said he wasn't doing it right.

He thought for a second, then seemed to have a light bulb go on. "Oh! Right!" He put the $20 back in front of Seat 4, then took more chips from Seat 4 to match my stack. He then counted down Seat 2's stack, discovering that it was $73. He took the $81 from Seat 4 and said, "So $73 of this goes to him (Seat 2)."

Uh, no.

At this point, it was clear to me that he had no idea how to do this. He was just guessing, making it up as he went along. So I stopped him and asked him to please call the floor and leave all the chips where they were until the floor could sort it out. (I could have told him exactly how to do it, but I hate it when several players are all barking instructions to the dealer in contradictory ways--because there's more than one way to go about it--and making everything even more chaotic.) He obviously didn't want to. He said, "I've got this."

I try to be nice to dealers. I don't gripe about ordinary mistakes. But this was a disaster in the making. We were on the verge of losing track of which chip stacks were which. Furthermore, it was clear that the only reason he didn't want to call the floor over to handle it was because he was too embarrassed to admit that he didn't know what he was doing. Sorry, pal, but that's just not a good enough reason, and I'm not afraid to let you know it. I told him, "No, you haven't got this. You've screwed it up twice already, and I have no confidence that you'll get it right on your third try. Please call the floor over to sort it out."

He still just sat there, obviously fuming, but not doing anything. After a few seconds, another player not involved spoke up: "A player has asked you to call the floor. Would you please do that so we can get this finished and get on to the next hand?" That finally pushed the dealer to relent.

Floor guy came over, the situation was explained, and he rapidly and efficiently determined what needed to happen, moved the chips around expertly, explaining exactly what he was doing at every step. Nicely done, sir, a flawless performance.

When it was all over, I did not tip the dealer, which for me is a rare act of protest at his conduct.

I actually know exactly how the dealer felt in that spot. I went to poker dealer school just before moving to Vegas, thinking I'd get a job in the box. I vividly remember the first time I took the skills test and had to make right a pot with three side pots. I screwed up, and got myself so confused that I could neither finish the way I had started nor retrace my steps and get back to baseline to start over again. I went into deep brainfreeze and had no idea what to do next. I was embarrassed in front of the instructor and my classmates, and mad at myself for bollixing something I knew in theory how to do. But there was nothing to be done at that point except 'fess up: Sorry, I've made a big mess of it and now my mind has locked up to the point that I can't figure it out. I flunked, though I redeemed myself the next day on the retake.

Dealers make mistakes. That usually doesn't bother me. But not being willing to admit that you made a mess that you can't clean up, when it's my money you're about to give away to other people? That bothers me.

Being unable to admit that you're in over your head is as fatal a flaw in poker dealers as it is in poker players.

New tower at Golden Nugget

After playing (badly) at the Golden Nugget tonight, I swung by their new tower to see what all the fuss was about. It's pretty nice, all right.

If you want to see more and better photos, I recommend Vegas Rex's post about the opening last week.

I win a $9 pot

I played at the Golden Nugget tonight. I knew it had been a long time since I played there, but I was surprised when I got home and looked it up--it was December 24, 2008. Basically, every time I think about going there, I end up making a last-second change of plans and veering over to Binion's instead. I not only like Binion's poker room better, but I have a much better track record there.

But GN just opened a new wing, and photos I've seen of it looked nice, so I decided to make an exception and play there instead and take a look at the new place while there.

The first hand I played is shown above. My J-10 of spades fit nicely with the 4s-8s-9s flop, and the Qs on the turn made the whole thing just seem to glow.

Sadly, though, I couldn't win the $137 jackpot. I bet $3 (tiny bet, trying to induce a call, so that I might squeeze in another tiny bet on the river), and neither opponent called. Total pot was just $9, and there's a $20 minimum to qualify for the jackpot.

I showed the hand anyway--it's too pretty to keep to myself. Everybody at the table--and I mean everybody including the dealer--chided me for not speaking up and thereby inducing somebody to call. Nobody seems to care that it is explicitly against the bonus rules in every place that I know of (including GN) to talk about the possibility of a jackpot during the hand.

I discussed the rules and ethics and pragmatic problems about this issue last year when I missed the jackpot requirement at the Palms by $1. My feeling remains the same. I would feel worse about gaming the system by trying to use some manipulative code word or other shenanigans than I do about having missed out on the bonus money. Even if the dealer says it's OK, it's not. (See here for the story of a dealer who honorably and admirably refused to bend the rules for himself.)

Overall, it was just a whole heckuva lot less fun than the last time I had a straight flush, about three months ago.

Predictably, that was the high point of my luck for the session. It was all downhill from there. Next time, it's back to Binion's.

Gordie Brown

Late yesterday afternoon I scored a free ticket to see Gordie Brown last night at his new home at the Golden Nugget (after finishing his run at the Venetian, then spending a while at Planet Hollywood). This impressionist show is one I've been wanting to see the entire time I've lived here.

I liked it. I was in the fourth row, so a nice, close-up view. The obvious comparison is to Danny Gans, since their acts are very similar. I think that Gans is a better mimic, with more impressively spot-on vocal imitations of various singers and celebrities. But Brown, I thought, was overall funnier and more entertaining. If I had an out-of-town visitor who wanted to take me to see one or the other of these guys, I'd lean toward Brown.

It's really difficult to explain with text what bits were funny and why--sort of the essential "ya had to be there" sort of thing. But I thought the best moments were (1) a duet between Cher and Joe Cocker (Brown doing both parts, of course), (2) switching between Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achey Breaky Heart" and Barney the Dinosaur doing his "I love you" song to show how amusingly similar the melodies are, (3) Aaron Neville's rendition of the national anthem at a baseball game (complete with stadium reverb) that is so slow it lasts through an entire double-header (Brown rapidly moving back and forth between the never-ending song and the announcer's play-by-play).

Well worth seeing, if you get a chance.

Odd sight at the Golden Nugget

I'm not sure what a mariachi band was doing sitting/standing around the slot machines, but there they were.

The fine art of counterfeiting

I was playing tonight at the Golden Nugget. When a new player joined the game on my immediate right, I fairly soon realized that he was the most inexperienced person at the table, and I was happy to be positioned perfectly to take advantage of him.

My opportunity came when I was in the small blind with Kc-3c. The pot was unraised, so I limped in along with several others. The flop was K-Q-3 rainbow, giving me top and bottom pair. I bet out $7. One player called, then the button (the new guy) raised to $20. I pushed all-in for a total of $68. The caller folded and the button went into the tank.

First he asked, "You got big slick hiding under there?" I said nothing. After a while more he asked, "Will you show me if I fold?" By this point, I was highly confident that I was ahead, or his money would already be in the middle. I wanted a curiosity call, so I told him, "I can't promise you that." He hemmed and hawed a while more, then finally counted out the chips for a call and slid it half-heartedly across the betting line.

I showed my cards, and he turned over his K-7--exactly the kind of horrible call that I had been hoping for. But the dealer didn't see things the same way I did. She put out 10 on the turn and another 10 on the river, giving us both two pair (kings and tens) with a queen kicker. Argh!

To clinch his identity as my new ATM, the new guy said, as he was stacking up his half of the pot, "I guess I did the right thing after all." There was no humor in this comment; he was earnest, patting himself on the back, displaying a just slightly results-oriented manner of thinking about this game. Yes, friend, keep doing exactly that kind of thing!


Just a few hands later, the UTG player raised to $12. I was two to his left. I called with Ad-5d. (I know, I know. It would be a questionable call even if I were on the button, but with about fifty players yet to act behind me, it was inexcusable. I confess.) Three other people behind us called, too, making a pot of about $60. The flop was K-7-5, giving me bottom pair. The UTG player checked. I didn't have enough chips for a check-raise to have any fold equity, so it was either make a very cheeky shove now (I had $67 left), relying on my tight image (plus the table having witnessed how I handled the two-pair flop a short time before) or check and plan to fold if anybody else bet. I made a snap decision to do the former. (Yep. Second dumb thing in one hand. Mistakes have a way of snowballing that way.) The button called, and I knew I was beaten. UTG folded.

I sheepishly turned over my pathetic cards, smiled at my opponent, and said, "You couldn't just let me steal it, huh?" He showed 5-7 for bottom two pair.

Well, you can see the end of this story coming down 6th Avenue--and we didn't even have to wait for it. Turn card: BAM! Ace! River was a blank. I took it down with a better two pair than his. He politely refrained from making various and sundry comments about my play--just shook his head. I gave him the screwed-up face and shrug as the only semi-apology I could make.

There is no honor among thieves--or among us counterfeiters.

The most powerful hand in poker

After I scored a nice W at Binion's last night, I still had some time and energy left, so I wandered across the street to the Golden Nugget. While there, I had an opportunity once again to make some money from what regular readers by now understand is the most powerful hand in Texas hold'em: the deuce-four. (Today I finally got around to going back through old posts where I've talked about this particular hand and how it became my favorite, and adding a special deuce-four label to them, so that they're all easy to find from now on.)

An aggressive player in early position raised to $13. I was on the button, and calling a raise with the 2-4 from the button is my favorite way of deploying it. (The reason for that should be obvious: when it hits, nobody can possibly believe that a tight player like me could have called a pre-flop raise with crap like that, so it's completely disguised. It's a Ninja hand!) The big blind then pushed all-in for a total of $28, $15 more. The original raiser called. Well, I can't fold now, being offered more than 4.5:1 for the call!

The flop is 7-4-2 rainbow, giving me two pairs. I have only about $60 left in front of me at this point, so when it is checked to me, I shove. Sadly, the original raiser apparently didn't catch any part of that flop, so he folded. The turn card was another 4, making a full house for me. The big blind mucked after seeing my hand, so I never learned what either opponent had. But I don't really care, as long as I scooped up the chips.

As evidence by the faces and rolled eyes and post-hand conspiratorial whispering of the losers, the 2-4 once again proved not only its value as a gatherer of chips, but as an unparalleled inducer of tilt. This occurs whether you win with it in a freak hand like this, or miss and turn it into a pure bluff (which is where having position really becomes important) and show it off.

Please don't tell your friends about the 2-4, or post about it in online forums, etc. We need to keep it our little secret, OK?


The image above is lifted from this site, which chronicles the feats of battlefield courage demonstrated by one particular U.S. Army unit that goes by the nickname of "Deuce-Four." I intend no disrespect for the unit or the heroism of its members by borrowing the image for my rather silly purposes here. It was just the most useful thing that came up in a Google image search.

Mr. Observant

At the end of the post I just put up, I mentioned being observant of some peculiar and not-too-important things at the poker table. That post was already wandering far from what I had intended it to be about, so I wasn't going to digress further. But writing that paragraph reminded me of one tiny thing I noticed more than two years ago, but it was the key to the whole hand, so it sticks out in my memory.

This was before I had a blog, but when interesting things happened to me, I would write them as emails to a friend back in Minnesota. I had sort of a vague notion that some day I would want to be able to refer to them, and having my tales of starting out playing poker in Vegas in written, contemporary form might be useful. I'm glad I did, because when I read back through them now, there's no way I would even have remembered some of them at all, and others would have all of the colorful details lost or transformed via tricks of memory.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from an email I wrote on August 20, 2006, about observing things at the table:

It’s actually not very common to find a reliable, useful tell on an
opponent. I spotted a great one the other day at the Hilton, though. This guy
would carefully stack his chips into, say, 5 stacks of 2 $5 chips each for a $50
bet, then push the stacks forward deliberately one at a time when he actually
had a good hand. If he was bluffing, though, he’d make one big stack and shove
it forcefully forward. I watched him do this twice each way, so I was pretty
confident in it. Unfortunately, he left the table before I got to exploit it.
Damn. It would have been great.

A couple of weeks ago at Golden
Nugget, I raised from middle position. Guy on the button made a slight move of
his hand to his cards before reaching instead for chips—I was certain that he
had made a last-second change of mind to call me rather than fold, which meant
that he wasn’t very strong. We were the only two in the hand. I bet on the flop,
even though it missed me completely. He thought a few seconds, then raised. I
instantly said “all-in.” He agonized for at least 60 seconds, then finally
folded. I’m sure that he had deduced that the flop of rags probably didn’t help
me, and if I had something like AK or AQ I wouldn’t even have a pair and I’d
have to fold to a raise. And he would have been right, except for that little
slip of his hand pre-flop. I was *expecting* him to try to take the pot away
from me, and I was prepared for it. He might easily have made a pair with that
flop, but he couldn’t risk me having AA or KK or QQ for all his chips. It was
one of the purest poker moments I’ve experienced here: completely playing the
player, not the cards. The whole thing could have been done exactly the same
with any two cards in my hand. He probably still has no idea that that little
slip of his hand cost him about $50. Without that, I wouldn’t have dared make
that move on him.

Another 6-high story

In the post I wrote a few minutes ago (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/04/nice-call-with-6-high.html), I told of winning a big pot with a 6-4 at the Luxor, and the story reminded me of another in which I similarly made a big hit with a suited 6-4 at the Venetian. That got me thinking about another story that I haven't previously told here, from the Golden Nugget. I remembered that it, too, was a 6-high, and thought maybe it was yet another 6-4--but upon checking, I see that it was actually a 6-2. Shucks. So much for the trifecta. Anyway, I think it's an amusing story, though it's one for which I can't claim to have any larger point to make--it just is what it is. This is one of many stories I have in my email archives, things I wrote to a friend back home in Minnesota before I started this blog. This was written August 20, 2006:


Last week at the Golden Nugget, there was a woman who had an abnormal love for flushes. Maybe even an obsession with them. How did I know? Because if she hit a flush, bet, and an opponent folded, she’d show it, and if she missed and had to fold to another player’s bet on the river, she’d show her hand and say, "I missed my flush." People are so dumb—they have no idea how valuable information like that is, and they’re just giving it away proudly. She would call nearly any bet when she was on a flush draw, without respect to pot odds.

So there’s a hand in which I’m in late position with 2-6 diamonds. Now, normally this is a throwaway. But you have to play garbage hands once in a while, for several reasons that I think you know: You may get a situation in which a bluff will work, in which case it doesn’t matter what your cards are; when a junk hand hits a monster, they’re extremely difficult for opponents to suspect and can make lots of money; when you win with one, opponents can go seriously on tilt; showing that you played one can get you extra calls later when you have AA, because people mentally label you as a junk-hand player, etc.

On this occasion, I hadn’t seen any good cards for a while, and nobody had raised, so I limped in with my 2-6. This woman was in the big blind and checked it. Flop was 2-6-K, giving me 2 pair and almost surely the best hand—and a complete stealth hand that nobody would expect. Sweet. Two of the flop cards were hearts. This woman bet, and I suspected she was on one of her flush draws. I called.

Turn card is another 2, giving me a full house! Oh, I’m starting to feel something big happening here! She doesn’t have her flush yet, though, so she checks. I make a smallish bet just to sweeten the pot, knowing she’ll call. She does. I'm praying for another heart on the river.

The wonderful dealer provides the beautiful, glorious, perfect third heart. My ditzy opponent has made her flush. She bets. I try to look a little uncomfortable, stare at my chips, picking up little stacks of them, as if I’m not sure what to do. Finally I put in a little raise. She pushes all her chips in, looking like she has sprung her trap. Little does she know….

I call, of course. She is beaming, radiant as she turns over her A-8 nut flush. I really wanted to pretend that I was a complete novice, and say something like, “Let’s see, I just have these two 6s and three deuces. Is that any good?” But I didn't torture her that way. I just quietly said “full house” and turn over my pathetic little 2-6.

Her jaw dropped, and she stared back and forth between my hole cards and the board several times before she fully accepted that she was beat. She was at the other end of the table, but I could still overhear snippets of conversation between her and the players next to her for a LONG time afterwards, about how stupid it was to be playing crap like 2-6. In another hand later when I raised, she even said “He must have 2-6 again.” TILT TILT TILT TILT TILT!

Tee hee hee. Here’s a chip for the bus ride home, lady. Have a nice day. Thanks for the money.

The return of Mr. Obnoxious

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a story from about a year ago about having to call the clock on a chronically foot-dragging player (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/tick-tock-tick-tock.html). Here's an email I wrote not too long after that one:

***********
So you’ll remember the story about the personality-disorder guy arguing about the “clock” rule from a week or two ago? I hadn’t been back to the Golden Nugget since then, until tonight. And just my luck, I got seated on his left.

One of the fundamental rules of poker is that nobody can help any player make a decision. A corollary of this is that you can’t talk about the hand while it’s in progress, because anything you say might influence another player’s decision. Soon after I sat down, the first four community cards on one hand made a possible straight flush. One player said, “Ooo, somebody might have a straight flush.” After the hand, I gently pointed out that he shouldn’t say things like that, because it’s always possible that somebody in the hand hasn’t recognized that possibility, and pointing it out helps him, or changes what decision he would have made. The player was very polite, acknowledged that he shouldn’t have said it, and that was the end of it.

Maybe an hour later, a different player folded to a raise on the river, and while folding said to the person who had raised, “I’m folding because I think you hit your straight.” There were still two other people left to act. Again, after the hand was over I pointed out that that comment could affect how the hand plays out, and the dealer chimed in reminding the table not to talk about the hand while it’s in progress. Again, the offender said, “You’re right, I forgot that others were still in the hand. I’m sorry.”

A short time later I raise with AJ. There is one caller. The flop is Q-8-2. The Obnoxious Guy says (ostensibly to the player on his right, who is not in the hand, but loud enough that I could hear it), “Goddammit, I threw away my hand. I had queen-eight.”

Now, I want to bet at this hand even though the flop missed me. I want to represent that either the flop helped me, or my hand is strong enough that I didn’t need help (i.e., AA or KK). Fortunately for me, the opponent is an 80-ish guy who I’m pretty sure didn’t hear the comment. But you can see how it would influence his decision about calling. If he knows that two of the cards I might be holding that would have been helped by this flop were folded by another player, it makes it much easier to call with a mediocre hand, when I really want him to fold. That is, it makes it harder for me to successfully bluff at the pot.

Fortunately, however, he did fold. As I was stacking the chips, I asked the dealer to call the floor person (supervisor) over. I told the floor guy that since I had been sitting there, the table had been cautioned twice about discussing a hand in progress, and in spite of that, Obnoxious Guy announced that he had folded Q8 when there was a Q8 on the flop. Obnoxious Guy says, “So I said it a little too loud. So what?”

Floor guy says, “OK, rack up your chips. You’re done for the day.”

OG: “I didn’t do anything!”

Floor: “Pack it up. You’re done.”

OG: “Just give me a warning.”

Floor: “No. We warn you about the same thing every day, and you keep doing it every day. No more warnings.”

Aha! So I’m obviously not the first one to complain about this. He's a serial blabber, and there's no doubt that he knows it's against the rules. The first two offenders just weren't thinking, either not knowing the rule or temporarily forgetting it. I'm quick to forgive such infractions. But when somebody does it in full knowledge of the rule, after many previous warnings, my compassion and tolerance is exactly zero.

So OG is racking his chips, and snarls at me, “Thanks a lot, pal.” I say, “Hey, it’s a simple rule. Just follow the rules and there wouldn’t be any problem.”

After he leaves, two other players and the dealer all thank me for speaking up about him. Once again, apparently he annoys everybody. I don’t understand why the other players and dealers aren’t more assertive about enforcing the rule, if he’s violating it that often.

Why does the world have to be filled with jerks?

************

Just a note added in retrospect: My thanks to the floor guy (whose name, I'm sorry to say, I don't recall) for acting so definitively that night. I haven't run into OG since then. I wonder if being booted out finally got his attention.

Tick tock, tick tock

Before I had a blog, I wrote about my poker experiences in emails to a friend back home. Here's one from September, 2006:

****************
I forgot to tell you about an incident the other night at Golden Nugget. The guy in seat 10 was a real asshole--slowing down the game, criticizing other people's play, thinking he was funny by pretending to push all-in, then folding, etc.

In a hand I wasn't involved in, another player raised this guy's bet by $100. The guy took forever deciding whether to call or not. Finally, I asked the dealer for the clock. Any player at the table who thinks somebody is taking unreasonably long can call for the clock, which gives the player one minute to make a decision. If he does nothing by the end of that minute, his hand is automatically declared dead (i.e., it's the equivalent of folding).

In practice, it's rare to need to use this, because the vast majority of people are pretty reasonable in taking time to make decisions. When somebody has an unusually difficult call to make, the others are understanding about letting him take the time he needs. It's only when somebody is repeatedly slowing things down that he'll likely get the clock called. And even then, just the act of calling for the clock usually is enough to prompt the recalcitrant player to act. I've only called for it a couple of times, and I've never seen it actually get down to the end of the one minute.

So I call for the clock. The supervisor comes over with an electronic stopwatch, and calls out the time as the seconds elapse. One player at the table has never seen this process, so asks the supervisor what happens if the player doesn't act. The supervisor explains that the hand is dead--so even if the guy in seat 10 didn't understand that before (and, of course, every player is responsible for knowing the rules and procedures without them being explained to him personally), he is now informed of the consequence.

30 seconds. 20. 15. 10. Then 5-4-3-2-1, and the beeper sounds. The guy still hasn't done anything. The dealer reaches over, picks up the guy's cards and throws them in the muck.
At this point, the asshole really yells up a storm. "Hey, what the hell are you doing? I want to call!" Then he addresses the supervisor. "He picked up my cards when I was going to call!"
Fortunately, the dealer and the supervisor held the line and enforced the rule. Hand is dead. The guy, of course, keeps griping for several more minutes.

The player to my right thanks me for calling for the clock. Seat 10 is annoying everybody.
Why do some people have to be jerks?

Compare this to a guy at the Hilton recently. He hadn't played in a casino before. He was faced with an $80 raise. He wanted to see what his stack would look like if he called the bet and lost, so he counted out the $80 and set them in front of his cards, then looked at what was left, and said, "Nope, I don't think I can call you." But, of course, the act of putting the chips out constituted a call, and the dealer gently informed him that he had already called and couldn't take it back. It was obviously an honest mistake. The guy just said, "OK, I'm sorry, I didn't know. My fault. Do what you have to do." He lost the hand, bought more chips, and said, "Well, that's one way to learn what the rules are," and laughed at himself.

Why can't everybody be good sports like that?