Poker gems, #233

Gabe Kaplan, on the 4/5/2009 installment of "High Stakes Poker." (For more on Hickok and his final hand, see here. To see the biggest pot in televised poker history ($919,600 cash), watch part 2 here.)


I had a big rivalry with Wild Bill Hickok. Bill used to come over the top of me all the time. I was sad when he got shot, not because he got shot, but the flop on that hand came A-10-8, and I had A-10. I thought I was gonna win a lot of money finally, y’know, and boom, and it was over. Flop top two pair and the guy gets shot in the back.

Oops

On Wednesday night's "Poker After Dark," Gabe Kaplan made a bet on the river when the board was showing Jd-Ac-2d-Qs-6h. His sole remaining opponent in the hand, Dee Tiller, folded.

Doyle Brunson pointed to Kaplan and said, "Mark that one down. I'm predicting a cold, stone bluff."

Kaplan's actual cards? Kc-10d, the cold, stone nuts.

Highly amusing.

There's a party at Caesars Palace--and I'm not invited

Much of the poker world's best talent is at Caesars Palace, which I just left. Tomorrow begins the NBC "National Heads-Up Poker Championship," and tonight at Pure (the nightclub next to the poker room) is the party at which they draw names for first-round action. This is breaking news, folks--I'm posting these pictures before the event ends!

I chose Caesars for my game tonight partly to see who would pop in. I have not played there since this shameful event: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/06/shame-on-caesars-palace.html. I figure by now I've pretty much brought them to their knees with my boycott, so I'm willing to start letting them collect some rake from me again.

The photos above are the tournament room re-sculpted for tomorrow's fun. It's an amazing transformation. It's as if there's nothing of the old room left.

Anyway, the game wasn't going well. (The correct way to read that sentence is: "I was hemorrhaging money to the worst player at the table, and it was pissing me off.") So I took a break to do a little celebrity watching.

They had a red-carpet area set up, but I was way too late to get in position. So let me admit in advance how utterly horrible most of the pictures are. Without elbowing my way through a crowd, all I could do was hover at the end where the players were just getting into line for their red carpet walk--which meant that I was mostly taking pictures of the backs of heads. You may need a little imagination to see who was there....

This problem was compounded by camera glitches: shutter lag, flash intermittently not working, zoom a bit iffy, etc. My digital camera is now almost eight years old, and showing it. It was one of the first 3 megapixel models in its day, but it's reaching the end of its useful life, I'm afraid.

So no place to get good shots combined with a sometimes-working-sometimes-not camera, well, it's a bit like trying to play 9-2 offsuit from early position. It's an uphill battle, and the results usually won't be stellar. But hey, nobody's paying me to do this, and you're not having to pay anything to see, so keep that in mind before you submit your angry notes of complaint.


This would have been a nice, lucky grouping of William Edler, Greg Raymer, and Huckleberry Seed. But it was only after taking these first few photos that I discovered that my flash had been set to "off" (there were so many flashes going off that it was easy to be fooled), which meant the poor little camera was trying for a long shutter exposure. That wasn't going to work. But by the time I figured this out, my targets had moved on and a security guy had told me I couldn't stand where I was.


See that blurry figure in white in the middle? That's Shannon Elizabeth on her cell phone. Gorgeous, isn't she? Yeah, *sigh*, I could look at that photo of her all day long.


Jean-Robert Bellande, recently of "Survivor" fame. Hey, you can almost sorta see a face in this one!


Got the flash problem resolved. Still wrestling with the position problem. Gus Hansen, Phil Laak, and Huck Seed.

Scotty "You call, gonna be all over, baby" (maybe the best poker teaser line in history) Nguyen.

See that one-quarter of a back of a head with a white cowboy hat on? That's Gabe Kaplan, who had been in nice profile until the one one-billionth of a second before my shutter opened, when he sneakily turned away. You may have to take my word on this one.

That was the last photo I snapped before security shooed me away. I went back to my game, lost another buy-in, and gave up for the night. I thought all of the hullaballoo would be over, but the last few celebs were taking their turn for photos and interviews. The crowd had thinned out a lot, so I was able to get some more normal shots.

Erick Lindgren

Kenny Tran. No, not the one with the red and white earrings.

In terms of height, this was a pretty amusing grouping: Howard Lederer, Huck Seed, and Freddy Deeb. Those two had better not ever get him angry; he could punch them in the kneecaps. Sorry that this little group broke up before I could get a picture with all three of them clear at the same time. Passers-by and the official camera people kept getting in the way.

David Williams. As Williams stepped into the camera for his interview ("All right, Mr. Demille, I'm ready for my closeup"), one bystander near me asked another, "Who's that?" The second one said, "It's Paul Williams." The first one turned around and excitedly yelled at a friend several yards further back, "IT'S PAUL WILLIAMS!"

For the record, THAT is Paul Williams. Not the same guy. Two very, very different people.

Just before this, two young women approached me from behind. One of them tapped me on the shoulder and asked, "Do you know who these people are?" I was trying to think of a polite way to say, "If you don't know, why do you care?" But my struggling brain was rescued by a woman standing nearby who piped up, "They're poker players." The girls seemed dejected, perhaps because these red-carpet people weren't real celebrities.

John Juanda, with a stranger that asked him to pose for a picture, which I leeched off of.

John Juanda and Lee Watkinson. No, not the guy picking his nose in the background.

The games start at 9:30 tomorrow morning. I shall attempt to be there. If they allow pictures, I'll try to get some better ones. With studio lighting, that should be much easier. However, I suspect they'll have a no-cameras rule in effect, so that flashes don't show up on tape. (I should be exempt from such a rule. I can definitely turn the flash on my camera off; it's turning it on that has become dicey.)

Alfred Hitchcock Presents...Poker!

On last night's installment of NBC's "Poker After Dark," Gabe Kaplan outlined the plot of an episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," which revolved around a game of five-card stud poker. It sounded like a terrific show, so with a little help from Google, I homed in on it. It's "Crack of Doom," season 2, #48, first aired November 25, 1956 (see http://www.tv.com/alfred-hitchcock-presents/crack-of-doom/episode/40946/summary.html).

I decided to order the DVD from Netflix. To my great delight, I discovered that the "AHP" series is among the shows one can watch instantly online with Netflix. So I dialed it up, deciding that my real work for the day could wait another half hour. I'm something of a nut for Hitchcock, so this was an easy call.

It's a first-rate story, if you like poker (and I assume you do, or you wouldn't be reading this). I won't ruin the ending--just go watch it. Trust me on this. But to whet your appetite, here's a nice little plot summary, taken from http://www.answers.com/topic/alfred-hitchcock-presents-crack-of-doom-tv-episode?cat=entertainment:

"I waited there with a dead head sitting on a dead spine waiting for the
crack of doom." This is how young businessman Mason Bridges (Robert Horton)
describes his predicament when he is forced to participate in a high-stakes
poker game with wealthy client Sam Klinker (Robert Middleton). Though Bridges
had intended to play only a few hands, Klinker bullies him into staying in the
game, raising the stakes all along the way. Ultimately, the fate of Bridges'
business -- and indeed, his future career -- rests in a single poker hand.
"Crack of Doom" is based on a story by journalist Don Marquis, best known for
his whimsical "Archy and Mehitabel" pieces. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Addendum, February 20, 2008

Let's just pause a moment (as I should have done when writing the above) to marvel at our current technological state. I heard about a specific television show broadcast 51 years ago, and five minutes later I was watching it on my computer, in higher definition than it was seen by anybody who watched it the first time around.

Ten years ago, I would have probably guessed that such a thing would be possible some day, but I don't think I would have guessed how quickly the capability would arrive.

Poker gems, #58

Gabe Kaplan, on GSN's "High Stakes Poker," December 17, 2007.

Do you think Patrick Antonius ever has a bad hair day?

Poker gems, #54

Gabe Kaplan, on GSN's "High Stakes Poker," commenting on Patrick Antonius's open shirt: "Well, when you play good poker, you gotta show a little cleavage."

Poker gems, #52

Gabe Kaplan, on GSN's "High Stakes Poker," November 19, 2007:

There is no crying in baseball, and there is no mercy in poker.

The strange grammar of poker

Every specialized field develops a language all its own. Poker is no exception. But even after being fully immersed in the game for well over a year now, and pretty intensely involved in it for a year or so before that, some of what is generally accepted as correct lingo still falls hard on my ears.

The first phrase I remember catching my attention as being just plain confusing was the phrase "dead to," as in "He's dead to a jack or a queen." This means the opposite of what one would initially tend to think. I first understood this to me "If a jack or a queen comes, he's dead; otherwise he'll win." But it's actually used to mean just the opposite: "He has to catch a jack or a queen, or he's dead." The syntax there still doesn't make sense to me.

The next one I started encountering was "running good." This has a specific meaning, which is "getting lucky." It is not to be confused with playing well, which is an entirely different concept. And the adverb good appears to be universal, even though it sounds like a grammatical clinker; nobody ever says that he is "running well." Of course, that bleeds over into the other half of the poker equation, so that people tend to say things like "I've been running good and playing good." Or this, from Kristy Gazes's blog: "70% of the time I ran bad, 20% of the time I played bad...." (http://www.kristygazes.com/tips/Jul+2007) I've mostly gotten used to the first half of sentences like those; I will probably never get used to the second half, because "good" and "bad" as adverbs (instead of "well" and "badly") are just never going to sound right.

One that I've heard much more commonly from high-level professionals than from the low-limit players I usually associate with is the use of "winner" and "loser" as adjectives, rather than nouns. You have to learn to think of them as synonyms for "up" and "down," or "ahead" and "behind." As I've mentioned several times recently, I've been re-watching all of the past episodes of GSN's "High Stakes Poker," and this comes up all the time there. "I want to be able to quit winner for a change," and "I was doing OK, but I just got loser," are a couple of examples of this peculiarity. In one episode, commentator Gabe Kaplan says that the stage is set for action, because "all the right people are loser." What he meant was that when people are losing, they tend to play more hands and bet harder and faster, in a desperate attempt to get back to even, and in the situation at hand it was the already loose, crazy players who had gotten behind and were likely to make it a wild ride for the whole table. In an episode of "Cash Poker: The Ultimate Gamble" (crummy syndicated show), Bob Bright has been losing quite a bit, then hauls in a large pot, and Gabriel Thayer, seated next to him, comments, "You might be winner now." Mike Matusow, in an interview during another episode of "Cash Poker" was asked how he was doing, and replied, "I'm $28,000 loser." In Doyle Brunson's book, My 50 Most Memorable Hands, he writes, on p. 143, about his worst year in poker, 2004: "I got loser, and instead of taking a break like I usually do when I go on an extended losing streak, I kept playing and I lost the staggering sum of $6 million." That's "getting loser," all right!

Though I'm quite a stickler for correct grammar, I understand that words and phrases and expressions just develop within an insular community, and one can't fairly judge them to be "right" or "wrong" by reference to standards for non-specialized English. This post, then, isn't intended to scold the poker world for these odd terms and usages (as if that would do any good anyway). It's just to note that, well, they're kind of weird and unconventional, and they take some getting used to.

But there are some on which I have to take a grumpy stand. For now, I'll exercise restraint and finger just one flagrant violation: "I'll put you all in."

Sorry, but you can't. Only I can put all my chips into the pot. What you can do is put all of your chips in. But I'll decide whether to put mine in, thank you very much.

I really don't get why this particular verbiage has survived and thrived, when it's so obviously wrong. If you are up against just one opponent, it is shorter, more accurate, and less affrontive to simply say, "I'm all in." The effect is the same (because an all-in bet between two players is effectively only the amount of the smaller of the two stacks). Now, if there are three or more players still in the hand, and you want to bet enough that a call on my part would have me all in, but not go all-in yourself, then the thing to do is ask for a count of my stack, and bet exactly that amount. Alternatively, you can announce to the dealer, "I bet the amount that Seat 4 has in front of him," which has the same effect. (The former route is safer, though, because with the latter you may get a nasty surprise, if Seat 4 has some high-value chips or bills hidden where you can't readily see them.)

I'm certainly not the first one to chafe at this phraseology. I think the first place I read something that let me know that I wasn't the only one bothered by it was here: http://www.poker-babes.com/strategy/pet-peeves.html. Since then, though, I've heard a few players at the table argue about it when somebody says it to them. That, I think, is pretty pointless, and probably counterproductive. It slows down the game and results in a stupid argument that nobody is going to win. If somebody is susceptible to a reasoned explanation of why they shouldn't use those words, it is far more likely to happen from reading something like this post than from a confrontation across the green felt in the middle of a hand.

I'm also never going to yield on the common but grating "I should have went all-in." I even heard Daniel Negreanu say this during an episode of "High Stakes Poker." Geez, people--can't we even manage to conjugate the most common verbs in the language correctly? This particular piece of abuse of English just makes me shudder with revulsion. Nothing and nobody will ever get me used to it, or make me accept it as part of "the strange grammar of poker." Some things are just plain wrong.

Poker gems, #40

Gabe Kaplan and A.J. Benza, commenting on "High Stakes Poker," Season 1, Episode 11, after Barry Greenstein jokingly comments that there are now three kinds of poker players--Texans, Jews, and foreigners:

Kaplan: In 1980 I made a bet with Doyle [Brunson]. He took all the Texans in the tournament [WSOP main event]--there were only about 70 players--and I took all the Jewish players. It came down to two Jewish players and two Texans, and Stu Ungar won.

Benza: Was Stu from Texas?

Kaplan: Yeah, the lower east side of Texas.


[Note: The last four players were Ungar, Brunson, Johnny Moss, and Jay Heimowitz.]

Poker gems, #39

Gabe Kaplan, on "High Stakes Poker," Season 2, Episode 4, when asked by A. J. Benza if Jennifer Harman is the best female poker player in the world:

I think it's between her and Bea Arthur.

Poker gems, #37

Gabe Kaplan, on GSN's "High Stakes Poker," Season 1, episode 4, noting that Eli Elezra and Sammy Farha were sitting next to and needling each other:

Look at this. You've got an Israeli and a Lebanese, the best of friends. They should have U.N. meetings at the poker table. There'd be no wars--unless one country slow-rolled another.