"In the poker world...we only have our good name"

Many people in my Twitter feed today have posted links to and/or comments on this wonderfully ironic short video of Howard Lederer expounding on business ethics. It's just too rich not to share--especially this: "People always remember that you were that guy that stiffed everybody and didn't pay back."

Exclusive: Interview with Howard Lederer

I'm sure you've all heard the news about the U.S. Attorney in New York amending the Black Friday civil complaint to include Howard Lederer, Chris Ferguson, and Rafe Furst, alleging that they basically defrauded Full Tilt Poker players out of millions of dollars. (If not, see here for a nice digest of links and opinions.)

By a coincidence almost too freakish to believe, earlier this afternoon I ran into Lederer. I had just parked my car at the bank and was heading inside, when he was coming out. He had a garbage bag stuffed full of something hoisted over his shoulder. I only realized what was inside when a couple of $100 bills fluttered out of the top.

He appeared not to notice. I picked them up before the wind could catch them, and turned to follow him so I could return them. (Returning money to its rightful owner--what a concept!) I caught up to him just as he was opening the tailgate on his Escalade--which allowed me to see that the heavy bag on his shoulder was joining three others just like it. I can't swear that they were all stuffed full of cash, but one of them had tipped over and two wrapped bundles of Benjamins had spilled out.

"Here--you dropped these," I said as I handed him the currency.

He looked around both directions, as if wondering if he were on camera, before accepting them and muttering thanks.

"You're Howard Lederer, aren't you?"

His face clouded with suspicion. "You with the government? You got some papers to serve on me or something?"

"No, no. Just a poker player going into the bank to make a deposit. I've seen you on TV."

"Oh, OK. Sorry. I'm a little jumpy these days."

"Yeah," I replied sympathetically. "I can understand that. I follow the news."

There was an awkward silence. But I realized that I was in a unique position to get a reaction from him, when every news source reporting the story yesterday had said that calls were not returned or he was unavailable for comment. "So is it true what they were saying about you in the press yesterday?"

I assumed he'd just give me a "no comment." But he looked more tired and resigned than defiant. After thinking for a few seconds, he responded, "Mistakes were made."

"I understand that you're probably under advice from your lawyers not to say anything to anyone. But I'm just a guy here. I'm just wondering on a personal level what you're going to do."

He seemed to let down his guard a little. "Well, we had a conference call yesterday. To tell you the truth, we decided that at this point our best bet is hoping that that satellite crashes down on Preet Bharara."

He cracked a smile, but I couldn't tell if it was humorous or hopeful.

I told him, "I just heard on the news a few minutes ago that scientists were pretty sure it wouldn't hit the East Coast."

"Damn," he said, under his breath.

I asked, "Is there a Plan B?"

He straightened up, seeming to revert to his prepared defensive position: "We expect to be able to issue an official statement soon."

I was really tempted to say, "I've heard that before," but decided to pass.

"So I also heard that the Epic Poker League Standards Committee met and has suspended you. That's gotta hurt."

He snorted. "Yeah, like that's what I'm most worried about today."

I asked him, "Have you been following how the poker media has responded to all of this?"

"Of course. I have Twitter and Facebook like everybody else. I haven't said anything, but I see the cruel things people are saying. I mean, did you see all those smartasses trying to be funny with 'What FTP stands for' and 'Rejected FTP slogans'? That was just disgusting."

"Yeah, people can be real dicks sometimes," I answered, hoping that I wasn't blushing. He couldn't have known--and I didn't tell him--that I may have been responsible for more of those than anybody else.

I obviously had had no chance to prepare for such an encounter, and I was running out of things to say. "What's your next move?"

He paused. "Look, I don't know you. I really can't be talking about this stuff. Besides, I've got a plane--I mean, I have places I have to be."

It was only with that slip of the tongue that I noticed sticking out of his shirt pocket a passport and what looked like an airline ticket. He noticed my eyes shifting, and reached to stuff these items further down, but I'm pretty sure I caught a glimpse of the words "de Janeiro" just before the ticket disappeared from view.

"OK, I understand. Have a nice fligh--er, a nice day, if that's possible at this point."

"Thanks," he replied, and turned to go. He still had the two $100s in his hand. He took just one step before apparently having a thought.

"Did you play on Full Tilt?"

"Yeah," I said. "Just small-stakes stuff."

"How much did you have stuck on there when things went, y'know, downhill?"

"Not a lot. Less than you've got in your hand there."

He reached his hand out to me with the bills. "Here. Take this. I'm really sorry about how it all went down."

"Yeah, me too, " I said. "I liked playing there. And thanks."

"No problem. Take it easy. And please--don't tell anyone you saw me."

"No, sir--I promise."

He climbed into the driver's seat and sped off.

Yeah, so I lied and broke my promise to him. It seemed fitting, somehow.

More questions

Phil Gordon interviews Howard Lederer about the apparent death of the Reid bill on ESPN Radio here.

At about the 21:30 mark, Gordon asks Lederer when he first became aware that a 15-month blackout period would be part of the bill. Lederer says, casually, "A couple of months ago." Aha! This would seem to confirm that (1) Reid had this thing cooking for a while, and (2) prior to the election he had tipped off some insiders about what was coming.

This may be the answer to the question I asked last month: "What am I missing?" Reid had been an opponent of online gaming, so it made no sense to me that in the closing days of the election we suddenly heard from Lederer, Andy Bloch, and Barry Greenstein that Reid would be a champion for online poker.

But, of course, this answer (assuming my inferences are correct here) just leads to more questions. First among them is why Reid kept this under wraps. He apparently recruited poker insiders to speak up for him in an effort to win votes of poker players. So why not publicly announce what he was planning to do?

Second, I'm still completely baffled by the actions of the Poker Players Alliance. One would assume that if Lederer knew about Reid's intentions prior to the election, then so did the PPA. But when the Reid bill was announced, the PPA sure as hell looked like it was caught completely off-guard, with its first public statement being utterly devoid of any indication of support for the proposal. Today the PPA did a press release wagging its finger at Congress for not passing the legislation. Uh, well, if this bill was such an obvious win for poker, why was your first statement on it so carefully neutral? And I still continue to wonder what then happened in the subsequent 24 hours to change that bland "we dunno about this thing" attitude into salute-the-flag enthusiasm? Something very strange was going on behind the scenes there, and they're simply not being candid about it. Hey, PPA: Candor is a prerequisite for trustworthiness. Your credibility is awfully low here.

Yet another question is the overall timing. The UIGEA passed in 2006. What took Reid so long to decide to do something for poker? He gave himself very few opportunities for passage, waiting until so late in the congressional session. Was the idea for the bill a last-minute thing when he realized that he was polling behind Sharron Angle, and he became desperate to attract more votes? If so, how strong is his commitment, now that he is safe for another six years?

As an aside, you can make a fun game out of counting how many times Lederer says "y'know" during this podcast. Caution: Do NOT make this a drinking game.

What am I missing?

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









Erik Seidel took a more humorous approach:



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poker gems, #362

Howard Lederer, in the ESPN broadcast of the 2004 WSOP razz event.


After playing razz for a whole day, you really feel like you wanna go beat someone up.

Poker gems, #327

Howard Lederer, in ESPN broadcast of World Series of Poker, October 14, 2009, on the truth behind things poker players commonly say to each other.


"Nice hand" is code for "You're an idiot."

Poker faces, #4

SPOILER ALERT!!

I just watched next Sunday's episode of High Stakes Poker (season 5, #9), which GSN accidentally released prematurely on YouTube, and which was thus captured and re-released at other sites of questionable legality. So if you want to watch it without knowing how any hands turn out, avert your eyes now.

Below is Howard Lederer's confusion and consternation upon learning that not only did Tom Dwan outdraw his A-K with trash, but Dwan had put in the fourth raise pre-flop with 8-6 offsuit.




The rest of the table, though, finds the whole thing highly amusing.




Daniel Negreanu points at Lederer and says, "You just got Durrrrrrrred!"

Poker language

Something recently reminded me of a short essay I read several years ago by Richard Lederer, father of Howard Lederer, Katy Lederer, and Annie Duke. It's about the plethora of poker terms that have migrated into general use in English. Not too surprisingly, it has been put up on the web: see here. It's well worth reading.

You can read more about Mr. Lederer in a two-part profile done three years ago by PokerNews, here and here.

Another pokery dream

I'm in a computer science class in college. The instructor (who is, weirdly, Annie Duke) introduces the day's guest speaker, Howard Lederer. He doesn't have anything prepared, just asks if we have any questions. I'm the only one who does, and I have three:

1. You can't really answer any questions because of pending litigation, right?

2. Can you tell us how the Doomswitch works? (I was suppressing a laugh when I asked this--just trying to get his goat.)

3. Who actually owns Full Tilt--percentage shares, etc.?

His answers: No comment, no comment, and no comment.


It seems that I'm surprisingly aware of current poker events when I sleep.

New Lederer book

No, not that Lederer. The other one. No, not that one, either.

It's Katy Lederer, author of the fine autobiographical work Poker Face. She has a new book of poetry out. It presumably has nothing to do with poker, but if you are, like me, somewhat fascinated with the entire Lederer clan, you might want to look into it. I heard an interview with her on public radio today. You can hear it and both hear and read excerpts from the book here.

Not too slow

On last night's "Poker After Dark" a hand played out between Howard Lederer and Doyle Brunson. Lederer flopped a set, Brunson a flush draw. Brunson led out on the flop with a bet. Lederer raised and Brunson called. On the turn it was check/bet/fold.

When the hand was over, Brunson began complaining about how long Lederer had taken, and said he would have to start calling the clock. Lederer wasn't sure he was serious at first and asked if he was talking about the hand they had just played. Brunson said yes, because Lederer had taken "ten minutes" of stalling before acting. Lederer was clearly annoyed by this complaint, feeling it unjustified, and retorted that he had taken only "ten seconds." At this point, it wasn't clear that either man was meaning the claimed time as literal. Both were likely knowingly exaggerating.

Still, Lederer pointed out that he had won a speed poker tournament in Australia, and would be perfectly willing to play with a time constraint (I assume that this would be only if everybody were equally limited). He asserted that he would not have "busted the 30-second clock" in the previous hand. Brunson replied, "Oh yes, oh yes." Gabe Kaplan weighed in, too, agreeing with Brunson and saying that Lederer had taken a full minute, though a few seconds later he revised his best estimate to "53 seconds." This prompted Lederer to propose a prop bet--whether his action on the turn took over or under 45 seconds. Eli Elezra inserted his opinion that it was over 0:45, but under a minute. Kaplan didn't take Lederer up on the bet, but Elezra did, for $5000. Brunson said that he thought it would be over 0:45, but that it may be "real close." Lederer's final guess was that he took "about 20 seconds," at which estimate Elezra scoffed.

So I went back and checked. It did not appear that the hand was edited; everything appeared continuous, as far as I could tell. I clocked Lederer right between 0:29 and 0:30 to make his raise on the flop and 0:28 to make his bet on the turn. Brunson, meanwhile, took 0:22 to call Lederer's bet on the flop and 0:37 to fold on the turn, after Lederer's bet was in. (I haven't finished the show yet, and so far the producers haven't announced an "official" time after checking their replay, but I suspect that will be coming up later.) [Edit: On the next day's show, the official time was given at 29 seconds, and Lederer won his bet.]

In other words, their combined thinking times were within a second or so of each other (I'm disregarding Brunson's initial decision on both streets, since he had one more decision than Lederer both times), though it appears that Brunson probably took one tick more than Lederer. (This is hard to score precisely, because it's a little fuzzy exactly when one should start and stop the clock, so it's easy to be off by a second or so either way.) Moreover, Lederer was correct that he would not have been burned by a 30-second clock for either of his decisions. Most striking is that the complainer, Brunson, easily took the longest time for any decision in the hand, and would have been in trouble with a 30-second limit!

It's really difficult to keep even the remotest track of time when thinking about a difficult poker decision. Sometimes the time is distorted to be faster than reality, sometimes slower. Can't really blame either participant in this argument for being off in their estimates, though when it came down to a clearly factual assertion (more or less than 30 seconds), Lederer was correct and Brunson incorrect.

Maybe this is already obvious, but anytime in this blog that I describe how long somebody in a poker hand took to make a decision, there is no timepiece being consulted, and any number I give is pretty much a wild guess, distorted not only by the psychological forces acting in the moment, but by the passage of time between the occurrence and the writing--so they are all to be taken with a grain of salt. I wouldn't knowingly falsify what happened, but as the televised incident demonstrates, we're all highly fallible when it comes to estimating elapsed times, particularly when distracted by the puzzle-solving task of the hand and its emotional overlays.

By the way, Brunson's hand-reading radar was as far off as his internal clock; when another player opined that Lederer had held a set, Brunson bitterly countered that he must have only had "some kind of old phony-ass draw."

Psychic abilities claimed, not proven

A trio of tales from yesterday's Day 1-D of the 2008 WSOP Main Event, all as told by the fine team of bloggers at PokerNews. See if you can spot what they have in common:

I Knew What You Had

On the turn, with the board showing Qs-10s-6d-Ks, Jennifer Tilly
checked to a player in the cutoff, who bet 1,000. Tilly called. On the river of
the 3c, the cutoff player bet out 1,250 and Tilly again made the call....

The cutoff showed As-4s and Tilly mucked. She told the player, "I knew you
had the flush. I pay you off on the turn and the river." She looked clearly
disappointed.

After the hand, Tilly is down to 12,000.


Lederer Better Than Yu

We recently passed by Blue #1 and saw that Howard
Lederer was all in for 13,400 against one opponent, Charles Yu of Dover,
Delaware, on a board of 3h-Jd-10h-2c. With the cameras rolling, the table talk
commenced.

Yu: "I know you don't have it."

Lederer: "Oh, I have it."

Yu: "Maybe you should bet 10,000 and I'll call."

Lederer: "OK, I bet 10,000." He reached for his chips to take some back,
then smiled and left them in the middle of the table.

A minute or so passed.

Lederer: "If you knock me out, they'll probably put you on TV."

Yu: "OK, OK. I fold. But I know you don't have it. If you had bet 5,000, I
would have called."

As Lederer was raking the pot, he chuckled. "I like that he claims he would
have called 5,000," said Lederer to the player on his left.

The discussion continued a few hands later, with Yu still not convinced
that Lederer could beat king-jack, the hand Yu claims he folded.

"You should have made the hero call then," said Lederer. "You could have
told all your friends to watch you on TV." Then he turned more serious, and
said, "I raised you from first position, I raised you on the flop, and I moved
in on the turn. Do you really think your jack was good?"

Yu had no response.

(Before I move on to the third story, I just want to add that there were about three more posts throughout the day of ongoing verbal and card clashes between Lederer and Yu, with Lederer coming out on top of all of them. For a guy who is usually nearly silent at the table, he did a splendid job using a few well-chosen words to (1) sell his image, (2) confuse his opponent, and (3) manipulate his opponent--which, by the end of the day, he had clearly done. Just based on those few reports, it was a virtuoso poker performance by a guy that I've come to think of more as a behind-the-scenes administrator than a serious player.)

More Hot Set Over Set Action

On a flop of Q-8-4, Jeff Weil moved all in with Q-Q and was called by his
opponent, holding 8-8.

"I KNEW it! I KNEW it!" wailed the poor soul with the pocket eights, as
most of his stack was shipped across the table to Weil and the ESPN cameras
swarmed.

"If you knew it, why didn't you fold" wondered Beth Shak aloud.

OK, it's not too hard to see the thread those stories share, especially given the big hints I provided in this post's title and photo.

I don't think I've ever blogged about this (though I discussed it briefly in my little contibution to Episode 4 of the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show), but "I knew you had that" (or close variations) is one of the more common stupid things that people say at the poker table.

Beth Shak asks the most obvious question that gets at the heart of what's so stupid about it. How can you claim to have known that an opponent had you beat, yet still call? If Jeff Wile's anonymous opponent really knew that he was on the bad end of a set-over-set situation--e.g., if Wile had turned his cards face up--he clearly wouldn't have called. If Jennifer Tilly actually knew that she was up against a flush that she couldn't beat, she wouldn't have called.

There have been countless times that I have heard an opponent fold while telling me, "I know you have [some very strong hand]"--and they've been wrong.

We never know what an opponent has, in any meaningful sense of the word, until the cards are revealed. We can have varying degrees of confidence, assigning an opponent to a range of possible hands that make sense, sometimes a very narrow range. But there's always the possibility that the opponent is doing something completely irrational, so that the clues available lead to an erroneous conclusion.

It is quite rare that I experience such a high level of confidence in a player's exact holdings that I will be surprised to see him turn over anything else. Such occurrences are usually when I'm not in the hand (for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, it tends to be easier to accurately gauge what's going on when one is not participating; this may be why poker dealers often overestimate their poker-playing skills, finding that their ability to guess players' cards erodes substantially when they're participating as an opponent rather just watching than as a neutral observer), and usually only after all of the action is completed, so that I'm operating with maximal information.

One time at the Hilton I was watching a multi-way pot develop. Barry, an off-duty Hilton dealer, was one of the contestants. When he made a big bet on the river, I had the highest degree of confidence in what exact two cards he had in the hole that I have ever felt in any poker situation. I would have been positively floored if he had anything else, because only one possible combination made sense. In fact, I'm ashamed to say that I blurted out, "I know what Barry has," with a little laugh. I instantly regretted it, because it could easily have queered the action. (He had the nuts and was wanting to get paid off.) It's the only time I've violated the rule about talking about the hand in progress in a way that could unfairly influence the betting and/or help or hinder another player. It blurted out of me because I thought it was so painfully obvious what he had, that, for that split second, I imagined that that conclusion must be equally apparent to everybody else, so what harm could there be in saying something? But then just as quickly I thought better, realizing that it might not be so clear to everybody. Indeed it wasn't, and Barry did get paid by one of the lesser hands. When it was over, I apologized profusely and repeatedly to both Barry and the whole table for injecting myself.

Anyway, the point is that that degree of pinpoint clarity is really, really rare in poker. And even then, it still doesn't reach what I would consider to be "knowing" what somebody's cards are.

It's another in the long list of stupid things to say at the poker table. Try to refrain from it.

Strangest "Poker After Dark" ever

Last night's episode of "Poker After Dark" was the strangest ever. It had little to do with the poker. The whole thing was dominated by a weird prop bet that started as a seemingly trivial bit of small talk.

Phil Gordon said to Howard Lederer, "I saw your mom playing poker at the Mirage yesterday." Lederer doesn't believe it. And it eventually turns into a $1000 bet. Gordon is so convincing that Robert Williamson takes $1000 of the action, too.

Before the bet is actually placed, though, Gordon's story changes several times, and gets embellished. First he decides that it was at the Venetian, not the Mirage, and it might have been two days ago, rather than yesterday. And maybe she wasn't actually playing poker, but was just in the poker room.

Then there's a big question about whether it was Lederer's mother or stepmother. Both Gordon and Lederer state that Gordon has definitely met both of them, and should be able to recognize either one and tell them apart. But Gordon is confused for a while. Apparently at some unknown time in the past there was a karaoke contest at which Lederer's mother was a judge, and she voted against Gordon. Gordon at first says that this is the woman he talked to yesterday. Then later he says, no, not that one, the other one--so presumably Lederer's stepmother.

Whichever one it supposedly was, Lederer isn't buying it. His mother hates casinos, and won't even go to a movie theater inside of one, so the idea that she was casually playing poker (she doesn't play poker, either) in the Mirage or the Venetian is just out of the question, even though she does live in Las Vegas. Lederer's stepmother does play poker, but Lederer was pretty sure that she was then in San Diego (she does not live in Vegas; I assume, though it wasn't stated, that she lives in New England, where I believe Howard's father still lives and teaches English), and that she would never hit town without calling him. On the strength of those presumptions, he's willing to bet that whoever it was that Gordon saw and spoke to, it was neither his mother nor his stepmother.

But Gordon isn't backing down. In fact, his story gets more specific, which is what draws Williamson into the bet. Gordon says that not only did he recognize the woman in question, but that she asked him if he recognized her. He said, "Yeah, you're Howard's mom," and she confirmed that. Gordon is so certain of all of this that he says he would bet up to $20,000 on it. When others at the table express interest in the bet, he is so confident that he tells them that if Howard will cover their bets, "Back the truck up!" He had temporarily forgotten Lederer's stepmother's name, but when Lederer mentions "Simone," he adds extra emphasis--yes, that's definitely who it was.

Well, after a lot of back and forth (and this is a greatly condensed version of all that took place), they make the bets, somebody gets a cell phone, and Lederer places the call to his stepmother. (They never call his mother; apparently Gordon accepts that it was not she.) She is in Florida (I think that's what she said) and has been for a few days. She has not been in Las Vegas recently. Lederer is careful not to lead the witness; he simply asks her where she is now and how long she has been there, without telling her the back story or that there is money on the line. Gordon speaks briefly to her, too, ruling out the possibility that Lederer is faking the conversation.

He pays up, but remains apparently completely baffled at how he could have it wrong. He suggests that maybe Lederer has set the whole thing up, coaching Simone in advance to deny having been in Vegas. (This seems unlikely. Not only do I not think that Lederer would stoop to that kind of rank dishonesty, but it just seems too looney a thing to set up in the hopes that it would somehow lead to a prop bet.) Williamson seems to believe that Lederer and Gordon conspired to make the whole thing up just to take Williamson's money, which they will secretly split later. (Unlikely, I think, for similar reasons.)

This is a really bizarre situation. I'm impressed that Lederer would have such reliance on his knowledge of the two women in question (particularly his stepmother, who does play casino poker; he was therefore relying solely on the presumption that she would not come to town without calling him) as to disbelieve an incredibly earnest and highly convincing Gordon. Gordon, in fact, was so convincing that Ali Nejad said that if Lederer accepted the bet, it could only be because he hated money. Gordon had me convinced, too. I thought that Lederer was going to get a surprise on the other end of the phone. (I wasn't sure enough that I would have put $1000 down on it, though, especially because of how Gordon's story changed in significant details along the way.)

So what could possibly have occurred in Phil Gordon's life that had him 100% certain that he had had a conversation with Lederer's stepmother the day before, yet be wrong about it? That's the core of the mystery for me. I hopped over to the http://www.twoplustwo.com/ "televised poker" forum to see if there was speculation about this. A reasonably plausible suggestion was made by somebody calling himself "badatmath": "It was probably some lady that had met Phil in a poker tournament or something and when he said "yeah, you're Howard's mom!" she didn't hear what he said, thought he was joking, or just went along with it for some reason."

That does seem to be just about the only possibility that makes sense. Of course, it also requires that she coincidentally happened to resemble Lederer's stepmother, or that Gordon had a brain lapse as to what Lederer's stepmother looks like. Nobody during the show nor online has openly suggested this, but a healthy dose of alcohol in Gordon's system at the time might also be part of the answer. That would also help explain his uncertainty as to which casino this happened in, what day it occurred, which of Lederer's relatives it was, whether she was actually playing poker or just hanging around the room, etc.

Phil Gordon hasn't had any well-known nickname before now. At the close of the episode, the fill-in voice-over commentator said that Gordon, now with some egg on his face, could become known as Phil "Back The Truck Up" Gordon.

All in all, it was a weird but fascinating glimpse into human psychology generally--i.e., how we can trick ourselves so easily, and be much more certain of things that we really ought to be--and, more specifically, into the lives of professional gamblers, and how easily they turn ordinary interpersonal interactions and conversations into betting opportunities. No matter how long I stay in this racket, I can't imagine ever becoming such a gambler at heart that I would act that way. Maybe I still just value money way too much....


Addendum, May 25, 2008

It's actually even a little weirder than I reported above. I'm watching the "Director's Cut" show, where they recap the week's events. In replay, it's clear that I slightly misremembered what Gordon said in his story of the encounter. Rather than him being the one to affirmatively suggest to the woman that she was Howard's mom, he actually says that she offered this: "You remember me. I'm Howard's mom." If he's accurate about that, it effectively eliminates the suggestion discussed above about Gordon saying such a thing and it being unheard or misunderstood or shrugged off by the woman he was talking to. Of course, memory is tricky, and perhaps it did happen as suggested above, and in Gordon's memory he has accidentally inverted who made the identification. (In the twoplustwo thread on this, somebody transcribed part of the discussion, and very specifically quotes Gordon as saying that he's the one who suggested the identification. But just moments ago I saw a replay of another part in which he says that the woman is the one who affirmatively identified herself, so apparently he told it both ways, a detail that I didn't catch the first time around.)

In the post-game interview, however, Gordon remain adamant about who he spoke to. He is mystified about the whole thing, says it's the strangest thing that has even happened to him, and he is headed over to the Venetian to investigate. Perhaps he is hoping to find other people that know Lederer's stepmother and will verify that she was there.

This all transpired several months ago, so I wonder what he uncovered. Gordon has a blog, but he has only posted on it twice in the last year and a half, and there's nothing there. I submitted a question about this through his web site, but I'm not really expecting a response.

Poker gems, #103

Howard Lederer, in Poker Pro magazine, April, 2008, p. 21:


Unless you are drawing to the absolute nuts, I tend to pretty much ignore implied odds. The chances that A. you hit your hand and when you bet the person folds; or B. you hit your hand and it's no good...is enough...that I don't think you should count implied odds for money.

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.)

"I hope you had it"

"I hope you had it." That's what the guy said as he folded to a large bet on the river.

This was at the Luxor last week. (I love the Luxor's spotlight; it's one of the coolest things in this city, so since I couldn't think of anything to illustrate the point I want to make, I'm taking advantage of the fact that this happened at the Luxor as my excuse for slipping in above a fine image of the light.) He showed his cards before mucking them; he had made a small flush on the turn card (something like the 7 and 8 of spades in his hand). But when a fourth spade came on the river (a second small one to join the two large ones on the board), and his bet was met with a substantial raise, he had to lay it down, obviously assuming that his opponent had made a higher flush.

Nothing about the betting action was out of the ordinary. Nor was his comment, in the sense that I've heard the same thing said many times before (though usually not in quite as menacing/threatening a tone as the Luxor guy used). But I still jotted down a note to write a post about it sometime soon, because of how stupid it is.

I would like to ask that guy, "Why do you 'hope' that he had it? What difference does it make whether he actually had your flush beat or not? Would you be happy at losing the pot if he showed you a higher flush? Would you be angry at him if it turned out he had a lower flush, or was on a pure bluff? If so, why? Once you have decided to fold, how can you possibly care about what cards he held?"

As with so many things about poker players' reactions and attitudes, I just don't get it.

But if I had to guess at what that player's response to my questions would be (assuming he didn't punch me in the nose), I suspect he might say something like this: "Well, based on his raise at the end, I assumed that he must have a higher flush, because it would be very easy for him to hold any one of the five cards that would have me beat. I hoped that he had it, because if he didn't, then my fold was a mistake, and I don't like making mistakes."

By design, poker is a game of incomplete and imperfect information. The best players in the world get bluffed sometimes, call large bets with what turn out to be weaker hands, and make other kinds of errors. It's inevitable. And, of course, we'd all like to minimize both the number of mistakes that we make and their impact on our poker income.

But did this guy really make a mistake? One answer is that we can't know, since the opponent never showed his hole cards. But I think there's a better way of looking at it.

If I had been the one in his situation, here's how I would talk to myself about it, when deciding to fold: "I don't know and can't know whether he actually has a higher flush or not. But from a lot of experience in similar situations, I know that a raise like that usually means that I'm beat. Very few players without a strong flush would be willing to raise my bet with a lower flush or as a pure bluff. So maybe 80% of the time I'm beat, 10% of the time I'm facing a dolt who actually thinks that his lowly 5 of spades gives him the winner here, and 10% of the time the raise is coming from a maniac who will raise with zilch or an exceptionally good player who has picked up on some small sign of weakness that I'm giving off here. I can't reliably distinguish between those various scenarios based on any information available to me at the moment, so I have to go with the probabilities. If I call, I'll win maybe 20% of the time and lose maybe 80%. That makes this an easy laydown."

Of course, I don't actually have to run those words through my brain; I've been in that situation enough times that I can just take the shortcut from the facts of the situation to the conclusion about what the right thing to do is. But if I found myself, for whatever reason, obsessing about whether I had made the correct move there (and, occasionally, I can get irrationally fixated on such things), that script is what I would tell myself.

At the end of Barry Greenstein's superb book, Ace on the River, he poses a series of demonically, agonizingly difficult poker situations. In discussing what he actually did when faced with these conundrums, and whether he did the right thing, he makes a distinction between the "correct" play and the "perfect" play. The "perfect" play is what you would do if you could magically see your opponent's hole cards. But since that information is not available to us when it would be useful, he puts more emphasis on the "correct" play, which is based on a rational analysis of the range of hole cards that this opponent might be holding, with some weighting as to the relative probability of each.

The correct move then is based on a weighted sum of what would be the "perfect" play against each of the opponent's possible holdings. If you make every poker decision based on that kind of assessment, you will minimize errors as much as humanly possible, and thereby maximize your poker income. If you can accomplish that, then it makes no difference whatsoever whether you made the "perfect" play in any specific case; as long as you are making more "correct" decisions than your opponents, you will win their money in the long run.

When you hold only a small flush, with four flush cards on the board, and somebody raises your river bet, the "correct" move against most opponents (leaving aside for the moment the exceptions that would tend to give one pause, such as the morons, the maniacs, and the ultra-drunks) is to fold, even if once in a while the "perfect" move would be to call or even reraise. The player whose comment inspired this little rant made the correct play. The key concept that he is lacking is the realization that he made the correct play even if his opponent was bluffing, because if he called or raised every time he found himself in the identical spot, he would lose a lot of money over a lifetime.

If I had been in his shoes and that opponent showed me the higher flush, I would not feel any sense of joy or pride or relief--just an unexcited, ho-hum, "yeah, that's pretty much what I guessed" resignation. If, on the other hand, he showed me a lower flush or a bluff, I would not feel enraged, nor would I kick myself for not having been able to see through the backs of his cards. I'd just shrug, think to myself, "Oh well, these things happen," try to make a mental note of any motions or gestures he had been making that might serve as a sign of weakness or bluffing in the future, then let it go and start thinking about the next hand.*

To "hope" that one's opponent was not bluffing is just as silly and pointless as Phil Laak praying that the community cards to come after he folds do not turn out to be ones that would have helped him (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/whats-done-is-done.html).

To the player who uttered the words in the title of this post: Sir, you did the right thing. Too bad your emotions blinded you to that fact.


*Full Tilt Poker has some great television advertisements. One of them showed Howard Lederer losing a pot to an idiot who dances around, whooping it up, celebrating his victory the way so many buffoons think is cool these days. All the time, Howard sits there impassively, unperturbed. In a voiceover he says, "He's not thinking about the next hand. You should be." That's a great, great piece of advice. What did you just learn about that opponent? What mistakes might his new state of mind cause him to be more prone to make now? What did losing the hand change about your own table image? Did your relative chip stacks shift enough that you now have to adjust tactics accordingly? And how might you be able to exploit all of these altered dynamics over the next few minutes? With that ad, Howard provided me with one of the best mental/emotional tools I've ever come across for preventing myself from going on tilt after a bad hand: Start thinking calmly and rationally about the next hand, even before the cards are dealt.

Sorry, Jennifer, but your movie sucked

In last night's segment of NBC's "Poker After Dark," apparently filmed in late spring/early summer, Jennifer Harman and Howard Lederer are discussing "Lucky You," which Lederer had not yet seen.

Howard tells Jennifer that http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ had compiled seven reviews of the movie so far, and they were all bad. Jennifer, who appears in the movie as a character trying to win a seat in the World Series of Poker through a satellite tournament, explains, "You know what I think it is, is most of the reviewers don't know poker, and it has a lot of poker in the movie."

Well, first, Jennifer, a well-made movie shouldn't require its viewers to know any particular subject in order to enjoy it; a good movie explains a technical area enough for a previously uninformed viewer to understand and enjoy it, perhaps even makes the viewer want to learn more about the subject later. "Lucky You" didn't do that.

If Howard were reporting to Jennifer today, he'd have more data--specifically, that site now lists 132 reviews, of which only 38 (29%) were considered positive, with an average rating of 5/10. It includes gems such as these:

"The Bellagio's fountains give a more expressive performance than Bana."

"An empty shell of a film, devoid of heart and soul, leaving us to wonder how in the world this movie ever got released."

"Staying home and playing solitaire would be two levels more interesting than watching this movie."

"If watching endless reruns of the World Championship of Poker is your idea of a hot weekend, there's finally a movie for you and your sad life."

"Below average, overlong drama that fails to deliver an emotional punch, largely because it's unsure of whether it wants to be a father-son drama or a romcom."

"Lucky You is long, utterly predictable and always bland."

"Curiously lifeless, Lucky You feels like poker without stakes; it goes through the motions with nothing to play for."

"Hanson’s an excellent director, and there are swaths of 'Lucky You' that are admittedly very well executed. But without a main character to root for, a believable romance or any reason to give a crap about the story, the whole thing just rolls over on its back and dies like a big, bloated, poker-flavored dead fish."

"Rather tepid going...the title obviously doesn't refer to the viewer."

Similarly, http://www.metacritic.com/ lists 29 reviews, with an average score of 49/100, including 10 in the green zone, 14 yellow, and 5 red. Check these excerpts:

"So what's Hanson exploring this time? His boring side, apparently."

"This spring, boredom has a new name: Lucky You. In the poker flick, an announcer calling a climactic poker match uses a Texas hold 'em term frequently, saying, 'And the flop. And the flop. And the flop.' This movie reviews itself."

"Poker has proven itself a popular spectator sport on television -- at least in the short run -- but as scripted drama, where you can pretty much guess the winner of a given hand, it's dull, dull, dull."

"The result is dull and lifeless."

Could all of those raspberries be just because the reviewers don't know the game of poker, as Jennifer lamely claims? No. Consider this one from Bob Pajich at Card Player magazine (http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/article/8828/movie-review-lucky-you):

The people who made Lucky You took unprecedented access to the world’s most respected poker players and blew a chance to make an authentic movie about what
it’s like to live and compete in their world. Instead, the players become merely background in a movie that fails in just about every way.

Even the scenes of the “big game” at the Bellagio... are poker-chip flat. Sure, the sets look incredible..., but the games come off more like a council meeting than a
high-stake poker match.

After about two years of waiting for Lucky You, expectations may have gotten out of hand, but who could blame us? Looking at all the poker players the producers manage to assemble, it’s hard to believe the end result. It’s been almost nine years since the last good poker movie, Rounders, came out. Who knows how long poker fans will have to wait for another one.

I've written before about how bad this movie was (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-do-poker-movies-have-to-be-so-awful.html), so there's no need to repeat it. I'm obviously not alone. Actually, in all the poker-table conversations I've had and heard about this movie, not a single player has admitted to liking it.

If I had been Danette (barely seen in the screenshot above), dealing at the time this Lederer-Harman conversation was going on, I think I'd have stopped the action to say, "You're kidding, right? You really don't know how bad that film was?"

Jennifer, you're a sweetheart, but your movie sucked.