Magic words at Mirage

A couple of weeks ago I was playing the allvegaspoker.com (AVP) tournament at Mirage. A few seats to my right was a young man who was playing crazy. Within the first few hands, he open-raised to 20 big blinds, then shortly thereafter bet 4000 into a 1300 pot on the flop. This was not the stupid play of inexperience, but the carefree play of a very experienced player in a game being played for stakes he just did not really care about, trying to have some fun. Which is fine with me, but I want to get as much information as I can about what he's doing, because playing with him is going to involve high risk and variance.

He was seated next to a friend of his. One time when he made one of his stupidly big opening raises, his friend folded, then said, "Let me sweat you." So crazy guy showed him his hole cards. I knew right away that I would want to have that hand shown by the dealer if it didn't get exposed in the natural order of play. Furthermore, I was sure that the dealer had not noticed that little interaction, so I would have to be ready to explain to him what had happened. The dealer had a nametag identifying him as David, from Pennsylvania.*

At some point in the hand (I don't remember how far it went, and it doesn't matter), a bet from crazy guy went uncalled, and he won the pot. He traded his cards for the pot. As the dealer was sliding the cards toward the muck, I pointed at the cards and said, loudly and clearly, "Show those, please." I was sitting in the five seat, so the dealer and I were as close and as face-to-face as it is possible to get.

The dealer stopped his motion, the cards paused halfway between the player and the muck, and said, "What?" I repeated: "Show those, please."

The dealer absolutely, unquestionably both heard and understood me that time. But then he reacted in a bizarre way. He deliberately pulled the player's hole cards deep and irretrievably into the muck, gave me a puzzled look on his face, and only then asked, "Why should I show them?" Note that he mucked the cards before asking me that question, and did so entirely deliberately.

This seriously irked me. If he had just been moving too quickly to react in time to my first words, well, OK, such things happen. It's annoying, but I let it go. But this was intentional denial of my request, before he had even asked for, let alone heard, the reason why I was making it. Completely wrong and unprofessional.

So I explained: "That guy showed his cards to the player sitting next to him. That's why I was asking you to show them to the whole table."

The dealer said, "Oh, well you have to tell me that."

My God--can this guy really be this stupid?

I said, "I did tell you. What do you think the words, 'Show those, please' mean?"

He said, "People ask us to show hands all the time, without any good reason to. So you have to let me know that he showed them to another player."

I said--and I trust that the condescension in my tone of voice was perfectly obvious--"So the words, 'Show those, please' does not adequately convey to you that a player is requesting to see the cards?"

He said, "No."

I said, "OK, then, what are the magic words that cause you to actually do your job and show the cards that one player showed to another?"

He didn't have an answer ready for this instantly, but after thinking for a couple of seconds responded, "He showed his cards to another player, so you need to show them to everybody."

I repeated his proposed phrasing exactly, and asked him to confirm that I had it right. He did so. Then I further asked, "And that will get you to show the hand, but 'Show those, please' will not. Do I have that right?"

He was pretty fed up with me by this point, and snarled, "Yes."

I told him that I was glad to learn the magic words, because "Show those, please" worked in every other poker room in town, and it was important to know that the Mirage had a special magic phrase for that purpose. Again, I assume he could not have failed to miss the overt sarcasm in my voice.

So take this as a lesson. If you play poker at the Mirage, and if one player shows his cards to another player, and you want the dealer to enforce the "show one, show all" rule, there is only one specific sentence that you can use to accomplish that task: "He showed his cards to another player, so you need to show them to everybody." If you deviate from this specific formula one iota, the dealer will be obligated to ignore or deny your request.

At least that's what dealer David from Pennsylvania said was the rule and practice at the Mirage poker room. Surely he wouldn't lie about something like that, right?

*I never call out dealers by name for making ordinary mistakes. But this was not a mistake. This was deliberate sabotage of the standard rules and procedures of the game.

Call or fold? Conclusion

If you haven't read Part 1 of this post, you should do so first, before proceeding further. In it I describe in detail a difficult decision I had to make and invite you to ponder how you would handle the situation. I'm about to reveal the end of the story, so if you don't want it spoiled, stop reading here and click that link to Part 1.

It's only once or twice a year that I take more than about 60 seconds to make up my mind. This was one of them. I didn't watch the clock, but I'm sure it was more than two minutes, and might have been three. I thought it was a very, very close decision.

The pot was about $281 before his push, and I had to call $136 more, giving me pot odds of 2.0:1. Shifting the numbers around, that means that if I had the winner 48% of the time, I'd break even on a call. (Obviously I'm never going to break even on a call for any one hand. What I mean is that if I face this same decision 100 times and I have the best hand 48 of those times, I will break even over the long run.)

Frankly, I thought that him having one of the two higher straights was more than 50% when just considering the cards and his shove, because, frankly, a shove with anything other than the nuts is terribly dangerous there, given the plausibility that I had the nuts. My first impulse was to fold. But the more I thought about the entire situation--the rapidity of his move, his frustration in the game generally, his desire to beat me specifically, his lack of a bet when given a chance on the flop--the more I discounted the two hands better than mine, and the more I found plausible his sets, two-pair hands, and bluffs.

After shuffling the number around inside my head for as long as I thought my tablemates would tolerate without calling the clock on me, I settled on it being right around 50/50--i.e., 50% he had a higher straight, 50% my third-nuts was good. I knew that the pot odds were right around 2:1, which meant that no matter what I decided, I was not making a large error. I could literally flip a coin and abide by its outcome and I'd be OK in mathematical terms.

It's dangerous to talk oneself into a call, because we all want to win, and folding means automatically not winning. One of the most common mental errors in poker is to overestimate the probability of an opponent having a hand we want him to have--i.e., one that we can beat--and underestimate the opposite. I have certainly made bad calls due to that bias, so I try to guard against it.

But in the end, I felt the balance was tipped by the smaller, subtler considerations of his state of mind and his timing tell. On that basis, I made the crying call.

He said, "Two pair," and flipped over 9-10 suited.

I showed the winner.

There's a coda to the story. As the dealer was pushing me the pot, the guy said, with obvious disgust, "It took you long enough to call." He then stood up and stormed off.

Well, tough beans, buster. Even if you can't understand why, that was very far from an easy call to make. It will probably rank as one of the ten most difficult decisions I'm faced with this year. I offer no apology for taking the time to consider in detail every scrap of information I had and every one of his possible hands, along with the arguments for and against them, just as I've laid out in this retelling. He might think he got slow-rolled, or just think that I'm an idiot who didn't know that a straight should be the best hand there. If so, he's wrong--period.

Rethinking the Mirage

The first two or three times I played at the Mirage, I found the games surprisingly tough to beat, with smart, aggressive players. This was a few years ago, when I was new in town. Because of that early experience, I've mostly avoided playing there. In my mind I grouped it with the Wynn and Red Rock as being one of the few most challenging poker rooms in which to make money, and therefore didn't visit much.

Still, once in a while I would decide to test it out again, or there would be a private tournament there that I was going to be in, and I'd play a cash game before or after it, or a friend from out of town would want to play there and I'd go along.

My recent experience has been far different from my early experience. Maybe I've gotten better, or maybe the games have gotten softer there, or maybe my first couple of times were just a statistical anomaly, and nothing has really changed. Whatever the explanation, my last handful of visits there have been not just profitable, but easy as well, with high hourly win rates--including a quick $122 uptick in just under an hour this afternoon.

It is certainly plausible that the player mix has changed rather dramatically. A new poker room manager, Chis Coffin (who I like a lot) took over a year or two ago, and he has instituted major changes. I have not talked to him about this, but I'm making inferences from his actions. Mirage had long kind of coasted on its past glory as the central hub of Vegas poker, and continued trying to be one of the "big boys," competing with Bellagio, Wynn, Venetian, Aria, etc. As such, the poker room refused to implement such "tawdry" player perks as a comp-tracking system and jackpots/bonuses. Those were pooh-poohed as being what the trailer-park poker rooms did to bring in the riff-raff.

Mr. Coffin seems to have taken the logical approach and bowed to reality. The room was much bigger than could profitably be supported, so he cut tables and dealers. They were losing business to other rooms that provided the perks that create low-stakes player loyalty (food comps, bad-beat jackpots, and high-hand bonuses), so he implemented them. They had a lousy, unreliable system of communication between the desk and tables, so he has recently had the Genesis Bravo system installed.

I'm not sure whether these changes are what has turned a difficult, marginally profitable room for me into one that now appears to be soft and juicy, but I'm feeling inclined to start spending more time at the Mirage than I have in the past.

Strange line

The buy-in to last night's AVP tournament included a $20 food comp. The ticket was stamped with an expiration time and date 24 hours after it was printed, so I decided to go back and use it today, despite having been told by a usually reliable source that I could safely ignore the expiration. I had long wanted to try the California Pizza Kitchen there, and today was my opportunity. I had their original specialty, the BBQ chicken pizza. Very tasty indeed. I can see why the place became so popular. I love free food.

I needed to get back home and start in on an unrelated project (from which writing this post is providing additional procrastination value), but I decided I could take time for a quick hit-and-run session in the poker room first. One hand stood out for me. In fact, it's so odd that I've been thinking about it on and off since it occurred about two hours ago, and I still can't make sense of it.

A gentleman appearing to be in his late 60s opened from the 2-hole. It was the first raise he had made in his 20 minutes or so at the table, and coming from one of his demographic, from such early position, I had to suspect a big ace or a big pair. I had pocket tens one off the button, so I warily called with set-mining in my devious little heart.

The flop was Q-J-J. He checked. I checked behind. I figured that if he had flopped huge (with, say, Q-J, Q-Q, or A-J, J-J) I would find that out sooner or later, and I didn't want to get check-raised. Besides, if he had A-K, I was not worried about him catching a 10 to make his straight, since I had half of them in my possession.

The turn was a 9, giving me an open-ended straight draw. So when he checked to me a second time, I bet $15. He called quickly.

The river was a lovely 8, making my straight, with no flush possible. Now he bet $15.

What could he have?

(1) I did not believe he had a 10 in his hand, which would be necessary to make any straight. The nut straight would be with K-10. My experience with the geriatric set is that K-10, even suited, is not strong enough for them to come in for a raise from such early position, especially his first raise of the session. 10-10 was statistically improbable, since I had the other two of them. A-10 was a possibility, but not one that I cared about, since we would chop the pot.

(2) I also could no longer put him on quads or a full house, because of how timid his play had been. If he had a boat, he pretty much had to have had it on the flop, excluding the small possibility of pocket 8s or 9s, with which I think he would have been more likely to limp pre-flop. And if he had a full house on the flop, I think he would either lead out on the turn or check-raise it. Even failing that, surely he would try to extract more value than a measly $15 river bet into a $50 pot, wouldn't he?

So if I exclude him having quads or a full house, and exclude him having a straight, then I must have him beat.

Now the question was how much he might be willing to call. If he had A-K and missed entirely, he wouldn't call any raise, so it didn't much matter if I made it $30 or $300. If he had A-Q, he might call a smallish raise, but with a paired board and four to a straight sitting out there, he would probably get scared easily and wriggle off the hook. A-J was probably the one holding that would pay off the biggest amount, but I couldn't put him on that with any confidence, because of the line he had taken.

I was really baffled. But I felt about 90% sure that I was ahead, and about 90% sure that he couldn't pay off much. So I settled on a number part way between a min-raise and a standard 3x raise: $40.

He thought for maybe 15 seconds before calling, which makes me think I must have come close to squeezing him as hard as he would tolerate. I showed my 10-10. He got a look of relief on his face as he confidently flipped over A-J. Even though he didn't say anything, from his actions and body language I'm pretty sure he misread the situation at first and thought he had won, until the dealer announced my straight.

As I said, I'm still puzzled by the line he took. He flopped trips with the best possible kicker and slow-played it on two streets, showing a little aggression only on the river, when he was beat. What in the world would cause him to check-call the turn but then lead out on the river? His hand had not improved, but mine well might have. If I was just bluffing the turn, why not check and let me bluff again on the river, since I couldn't pay off a lead-out bet?

And was his checking the flop and turn out of fear or our of wiliness? If he were trying to trap me, why did he never spring the trap? If he was scared, then of what? The only hands that beat him on the flop would be Q-Q or Q-J. Was he suffering from "monsters under the bed syndrome"? If so, then why the lead-out on the river? If that was a blocking/defensive bet, then the logical response to my raise would be to fold.

Frankly, not a single action he took in this hand, after the initial raise, makes any sense to me. As you can tell, I've turned it over and over in my mind, and I just cannot deduce what he was thinking.

Anybody want to take a stab at psychoanalyzing his play?

Call or fold?

This is another in my occasional series of presenting you with a difficult decision I had to make during a poker session. You can figure out what you would do before I tell you the end of the story. (However, in this case, if you follow me on Twitter, I kinda already blew it there, before I decided to present it this way.) In case you haven't read any of these puzzles before, sometimes the answer is that I got it right, sometimes that I got it wrong, sometimes that I'm left wondering because I folded and didn't get my curiosity satisfied.

I was playing at the Mirage, waiting for the allvegaspoker.com tournament to start. I was in my favorite seat, #1. I had been playing tight and straightforward, so decided it was time to throw a curveball. One off the button, I raised to $12 with 7-8 offsuit. The button called immediately, as did the guy in seat 10, who had just limped.

The flop was Q-10-6, two suits, giving me a gutshot straight draw. We all checked.

The turn was a 5, improving me to an open-ended straight draw, but now also putting two flush draws up. Seat 10 bet $15. I called, as did the button.

The river was an offsuit 9, completing my straight. Seat 10 checked. I bet $35 into a $76 pot--small enough that I hoped to pick up two calls. To my surprise, the button quickly announced all-in for an additional $136. Seat 10 folded. I had at least $250 left in front of me.

Call or fold?

My hand was the third nuts. The problem was that the two hands that beat me (K-J for the nut straight and J-8 for the second nut straight) were quite plausible for him to be holding. J-8 was less likely, because he would have been calling on the turn with just a gutshot, but still plausible if he had one of the flush draws to go along with it. K-J for the nut straight was the real problem, because it's a hand with which a large percentage of players in such a game will call a raise in position, especially if the cards are of the same suit. He would have flopped an OESD, taken a free card when offered it, been happy to pay a bit on the turn for a pull at the nuts (especially, again, if he had one of the two flush draws to boot), then hit his gin card on the river. It was entirely plausible from start to finish.

But a few things gave me pause. First, he was clearly frustrated. Things hadn't been going his way. In fact, I had picked off a river bluff from him a short time before. The only hands that I could put him on in that case had been draws that failed to materialize, so after thinking a while I had called him very light, with just third pair. Turns out I had nailed it--a busted draw. He seethed out a grudging "Good call" for that, but I sensed that being forced to show the bluff had embarrassed him and he was looking to put me in my place.

Second, there was a potential hole in the story he was telling. Why wouldn't he have bet the flop with his OESD in position when I checked if he had K-J? I sure would have bet in that spot, though I realize that not all players play the same way. If he had the flush draw to go with it, all the more reason to bet in order to either take the pot right then or make it bigger; if he didn't flop the flush draw with it, he would not want to give either opponent with a flush draw a free card to get there. If he had J-8, I think he would not have called pre-flop unless it was suited. Again, hitting a flush draw plus gutshot is plenty of reason to bet there, and even just the gutshot should be tempting when the original raiser gives him a green light.

Third, his all-in move was instantaneous. If I'm holding the stone-cold nuts in that situation, I have to take a little time to figure out what both opponents have and gauge how much they'll be willing to part with. He might still settle on a shove, but I think he would have to take some time to decide that that was his most profitable option.

Were there possibilities other than a higher straight? Sure--he could have yet another busted flush draw. He had learned that a smallish river bet earned a suspicious call from me, so maybe he decided to do this one in grand style when he missed, with the plan to rub my nose in it when I folded. Alternatively, maybe he had flopped or turned a set, had slow-played himself into deep doo-doo, and seemed so confident because he didn't suspect he was in trouble. After all, he's not going to put me on 7-8 after my pre-flop raise. (Exactly the reason, of course, to occasionally raise with that kind of hand--when it hits, it's well outside the range that opponents suspect of me, so they tend to disbelieve that that's what I have.) But he certainly should be wondering whether I was the one with K-J who had just made the nuts. I tended to discount the range of sets and two-pair hands precisely because of that; if he had any brains, he would have hated seeing the river 9, fearing that he had just experienced a horrible suckout. In theory, that should make him cautious enough to just call rather than shove. Conversely, though, he might be frustrated enough that he was blinded to having been outdrawn, and decided to forge ahead with a flopped set in spite of the obvious danger.

After considering all of the above, K-J seemed not just plausible but his most likely holding, despite my niggling wonder about why he had been so passive with it. Maybe he's just not one who likes to bet draws, out of fear of a check-raise, and was especially gun-shy after having had a series of hands go bad on him. Still, there was enough doubt about a set, two pair, or a busted flush draw that I had to really take some time to decide what to do.

So what is your move if you were me?

As usual, I'll go write part 2 of this now, and set it to publish in about 24 hours.

Pictures from around town (4)

On the way out of the Paris theater, we passed a display case with this in it:




It's an outfit that Barry Manilow wore (once? often? I don't know.) in concert for "Copacabana." I think it is otherwise best left without comment.


I walked Cardgrrl back to her hotel room at Harrah's. I wanted something to drink, so stopped at this vending machine on her floor:



I was struck by the message you can see at the bottom: "Thanks for choosing Pepsi."

Wrong! I did not choose Pepsi. Pepsi has an exclusive contract with all of the Harrah's properties. You can't choose a Coke even if you wanted to (and I would).

From Cardgrrl's 12th-floor hotel window there was a nice view of the Mirage volcano erupting, which seems a fitting conclusion to this photo series:

Five live

I have played in five live poker tournaments over the past ten days or so, which is highly unusual for me.

1.

The first was last Monday at the Venetian. A reader generously offered to pay my buy-in for the nightly 7:00 tournament, to give him a chance to meet me and to say thanks for the blog. (He cleverly titled his introductory email, "Free money," which effectively got my attention.) This is a pretty well-structured tournament, except for one boneheaded part in which the blinds and antes increase way too much in one step.

My favorite hand was one fairly early in the game in which I called a preflop raise, along with about six others, with 7-9 of diamonds. The flop was 9h-8d-2d, giving me top pair and a flush draw. I checked. The original raiser bet, followed by a couple of callers, then I put in a big check-raise, which narrowed the field to just me and one older gentleman. The turn was the 6s. Now I had top pair, a flush draw, and an open-ended straight draw, with about half my stack in a very large pot. Well, duh! I don't need too many instructional videos to tell me how to play this. Shove. The other guy called. He had Ad-xd for just the nut flush draw. The river was the 5c, completing my straight, though just the pair was all it took to win. The gentleman shook my hand at the next break (he was left very short-stacked, but doubled up a couple of times to survive) and told me he realized what a dumb move he had made and that he should have known better.

But that hand was all I could do. There followed a long stretch without any forward progress. Before too long I was in fold-or-shove mode. I managed to steal the blinds about as often as I had to pay them, keeping myself afloat, but without making any headway. This happened ten times or so without ever getting called. Finally I did it from the small blind with 10-10, and was called by a doofus with 10-9 offsuit. The board came with a 7, 8, and J to give him a straight, despite me being an 85/15 favorite going in. And that was that.

The tournament also gave me the chance to meet one of my Twitter followers, youknoyoulov3me. She was at my table for the latter part of the tournament. I gather she is a dealer at Bellagio, and is self-evidently a fine player.

Thanks again to Matt for the freeroll!

2.

Cardgrrl was in town, of course. One of her reasons for coming was a get-together of folks she knows from Poker Academy, an online site where she did much of her early poker learning. The group had a private tournament Wednesday at noon at Harrah's. The Harrah's structure is thin and fast, with virtually no room to recover from an error or bad beat. It's an amateur-hour luckfest.

I chipped up some early on, but within an hour suffered a pretty horrible beat. I called a raise with A-K. Flop came king-high. Original raiser shoves with K-J. I call. Jack on the river for the 3-outer. That left me short-stacked. Then I was in the big blind with Q-6 (I think; not sure of the kicker now). Under-the-gun guy had limped, so it was just us seeing the flop. It was Q-8-9, so I shoved. He called, having flopped the nuts with J-10. That left me in "any two cards" mode. I don't even remember what hand I put it in with, nor what I was called with, but it didn't turn out well.

Still, it was a fun bunch of people to play with. I even got to steal a pot holding the mighty 2-4, and showed it. After all, this crew is from "Poker Academy"--they're there to learn, right? They need to know about invincible hands.

3.

Friday night at Treasure Island was the first of two tournaments sponsored by http://www.allvegaspoker.com/. It was a kind of strange mixed-game format, with Omaha-8, deuce-to-seven triple draw, stud-8, and razz. The fun of this was that--let's face it--none of us really knew what we were doing much of the time.

My favorite hand of the tourney was at the final table when I was dealt "number one," 2-3-4-5-7, in triple-draw. I expect it will be a long, long time before that happens again. I didn't play it optimally. After David Stucke raised, I three-bet it, when it clearly would have been better to flat-call and let a couple of others in. The chance that anybody would even tie me for the pot was negligible. But the tourney ran much longer than the organizers expected (we ran several past the number of levels they had planned out), so we had been playing for seven hours at that point. To make matters worse, I had eaten something that rather unpleasantly disagreed with me, and had been focusing mostly on not throwing up all over the poker table (which I believe constitutes grounds for a time-out). Combine that with having next to zero experience with triple-draw, and it explains why I didn't play it better. David put in a few more chips and was all in. I called, obviously. (I wasn't quite so impaired as to fold the stone-cold nuts.) I made another mistake at this point, though not too critical: I put my cards face-up on the table. I'm just so used to there being no more decisions to be made after all the chips are in that I forgot that there remained three decision points in this hand, even with no more betting to be done. It didn't really matter, though. Even if you know that you have to improve all the way to #1 in order to chop the pot, it's awfully difficult to do, and the cards didn't cooperate for David. He finished in 8th place.

Four spots were paying, but we negotiated a chop when there were six of us left. I was second in chips by that point, and was one of two people to take $300. (Entry fee was $65.) Two others took $275, and the remaining two (including Cardgrrl) took $250 each.

More details, comments from the players, and lots of photos of both AVP events are available here.

4.

The second part of the AVP bash was a no-limit hold'em tournament Saturday at the Mirage. Not much to report about it. I just never got anything going. On my last hand I got it all in pretty decently, with A-K versus 5-5 for my 10-BB stack, and couldn't improve for the double-up. Oh well.

Cardgrrl did extremely well again, finishing in fourth place (six spots paid). She was the only one to cash in both AVP events, which tells you something of her ability. She is a threat to win in essentially any tournament she enters. I was, as always, very proud of her.

5.

Tuesday evening, after Cardgrrl had left, I was at Harrah's planning to play cash. But it was 7:30, and their nightly tournament was starting. It's the same rinky-dink structure as was used for the private Poker Academy tournament. But there were only five people playing, and looking at them I recognized all the classic symptoms of complete newbies--looking nervous as all get-out, not sure what to do with their chips, asking basic questions about rules, unclear as to seat numbers, etc. I watched them play one hand, and it confirmed my impression that not a single one of them had any idea what was going on. So I called an audible on myself, took my name off the waiting list for the cash game, and entered the tournament.

We finally ended up with eight players after a couple more late entries. I chipped up some, then made one bad call when I should have folded. As I said, this structure is completely unforgiving. That one mistake left me short. I lasted long enough to see three others eliminated. Once again, when I was down to exactly 10 big blinds, I got it all in good, with A-10, called by the big stack with A-6. I was in good shape, until a 6 on the turn did me in--killed by yet another 3-outer. Sigh.


So that's one cash in five tournaments--and, ironically, the one in which I made a little money was probably the only one in which I had essentially zero edge on the field. Total buy-ins: $390 (not counting the Venetian one). Total payouts: $300 (minus $15 for dealer tip). See why I don't usually play tournaments?

Seeing things at the Mirage

Friday evening I was at the Mirage, playing another poker session sitting next to Grange95, whom I get to like more each time I spend time with him. It was one of those poker sessions that generated a bunch of little observations and stories, none of which is worthy of a separate post in itself, but which I can string together as a hodge-podge post.

Actually, the stories begin while I was on my way to the Mirage.


Traffic

When driving to the mid-Strip from my downtown apartment, it's always hard to know whether it will be faster to take I-15 or Las Vegas Boulevard. It was close to rush hour, which tends to clog the interstate, so this time I decided to take the Strip directly.

At two consecutive intersections, the traffic lights were out. I don't know why they didn't go to their default mode of flashing red in all directions--maybe a power failure. The first intersection was the weird one near the Stratosphere, where both Main and St. Louis run into LVB. There, everybody was behaving civilly, stopping and taking turns as if there were stop signs all around. This is obviously both the safest and fairest way of handling the situation, but it requires everybody to cooperate.

At Sahara, the situation was completely different. The drivers going east and west had figured out that if they just kept going, they wouldn't run into any interference. There was a constant stream of cars heading east and west, and long backups north and south were forming. Northbound and southbound cars had to kind of wait for a little gap, then make a dash for it, often only creeping through one lane at a time and being left stranded in the middle. (For those who haven't been there, this is a very large, fast, and, when it's uncontrolled, scary intersection, with three lanes in all directions.)

I apparently got there quite early in the process of degeneration into lawlessness, because the backups weren't too bad yet. But I imagine that after a short while things got really hairy there. Of course, the retaliatory tendency will be strong; once there is any sort of break in the east-west traffic, the north-south people who were forced to sit for a long time will decide that it's their turn, and damn those east-west scumbags, I'm going to keep going. They set up their own stream that the east-westers will challenge at their peril.

The whole situation was terribly dangerous. Just in the couple of minutes it took me to get through, I witnessed several near misses, and when it came time for me to venture through the oncoming traffic, it felt about as unsafe as anything I've ever done in a car.

I have never seen such a thing happen before, and I found it kind of interesting from a sociological perspective. It's a real-world manifestation of a tit-for-tat strategy. If you come upon the St. Louis intersection, and all your fellow citizens are behaving rationally and politely, you're naturally inclined to cooperate and take your turn. But if you come upon the Sahara intersection, where it's every man for himself, you don't have much choice but to fight your way through it any way you can. If you try to stop and wait for your turn, when nobody is willing to let you have it, you'll sit there forever.

Life is all about game theory, I guess.


OK, on to the actual poker.


A bad-beat story

No, not one of my own--one I heard from somebody else. I heard it a couple of weeks ago at the Venetian, but forgot to write about it. I was reminded of it Friday night because of other bad-beat stories being told at the table, with Grange and me grousing about how irritating they are.

I'm told this happened many years ago at the Nevada Palace, which has since been renovated and is now the Eastside Cannery. The guy telling me this story said that he was playing straight seven-card stud. By fifth street he had a diamond royal flush. An opponent got a spade royal flush in the same hand. Naturally they capped the betting on every street. But when the hands were revealed, the guy discovered that the house rule was not that the hands were considered a tie for a chopped pot, but that the tie was broken by suits, in the same way as when cards are dealt for the dealer button or for the extra chip when coloring up in a tournament. Under that system, spades trump diamonds. In other words, he lost the hand while holding a royal flush.

Now, I don't have any actual confirmation that this really happened. But his manner of relating it I found to be reasonably convincing--and I'm a skeptical hard sell. I don't know whether it's true or false, but I felt inclined to believe him, even though the situation is astronomically unlikely. If I had to put my money one way or the other, I'd go with true.

And if it is indeed true, I have to admit that it pretty much puts all other bad-beat stories to shame.


Professor

So I'm in the small blind with the Qc-5c. Not a great hand, but nobody raised, so I decided to toss in the extra buck and see what developed. Flop was ace-high with two crubs (including the ace). Well, naturally I'm going to bet at that, since I know that the crubs are going to get there. I bet $7, which was about 2/3 or 3/4 of the pot size. A woman across the table, whom I had pegged as the weakest player there, raised to $15, just barely more than a minimum raise. It folded back around to me. With the second-nut flush draw, it was not difficult to decide to call.

Turn was a blank. I checked. She bet $10. Well, if she intended that to dissuade me, she didn't pick her bet size very thoughtfully. I called. River was the jack of crubs. I bet $35, which she paid off before showing her second-best A-K.

As you can see, she played her hand about as badly as could be--not raising before the flop, min-raising the flop, making a tiny bet on the turn, then paying off the river when she might have recognized that my line that looked an awful lot like a flush draw was, in fact, a flush draw.

Nothing too strange so far. But then one of the more experienced players at the table, sitting to this woman's left, launched into a little lesson for her about bet sizing, protecting her hand against draws, etc. He was right on the merits, of course, but completely wrong as to the meta-game. What does he gain from teaching the bad players how to play better? I suppose he gets some sense of self-satisfaction. He gets to feel superior. He also gets to feel magnanimous, that he is helping his fellow human being. But he is costing himself money. More to the point, he is costing me money. I want this woman to play A-K against me exactly the same way every time she gets it.

If she finds herself losing money at poker and wants to improve, there are countless resources she can turn to from which to learn. The poker table is not the place for tutorials. It's rude to presume that somebody wants to hear your opinion about optimal play when they haven't asked for it, and it's rude to educate the fish at the expense of everybody else. It's also self-defeating, which is why it's so hard for me to understand it.

It wasn't the only time. Once while Grange was off on a break, our self-appointed professor analyzed the hand just played by a couple of other people, explaining what each of them did wrong, thus giving her pointers on how to avoid those errors.

Geez, dude--smarten up, will ya? If you're not getting paid to teach somebody else at the table how to play, then, as Archie Bunker was fond of saying, "Stifle!" And if you are in a formal student-teacher relationship (which I'm sure was not the case here), I think it would be courteous to inform everybody else in the game of that status.


That's how to straddle

Our professor had a nice bit of luck come his way. He straddled for double the big blind, was dealt pocket sixes, flopped a set, rivered quads, and got raised all-in by somebody who had made a full house. I'm pretty sure I have never before seen a straddle turn into a high-hand jackpot. It was only $75, but still....


Half-bet rule

In a hand I wasn't in, there was an early-position raise to $15, followed by an all-in for $26, which got called in a couple of spots before action returned to the original raiser. He tried to move all in. Both Grange and I had already done the arithmetic mentally and realized that the all-in bet was too small to re-open the betting, so the original raiser would only have the options of calling or folding. I immediately pointed this out to the dealer.

The dealer, though, got confused. When the player asked why he couldn't reraise, the dealer said, "The all-in would have to be at least half the size of your raise." Well, it was! But that's not the rule. The so-called "half-bet rule" is applicable only in limit games. In no-limit games, an all-in bet is not considered a true raise unless it is at least the size of the bet or raise that preceded it. In this case, the original raise was an interval of $13 over the $2 big blind, so the betting would be re-opened only if the all-in amount were an additional $13 over that, or $28 total. It wasn't. The dealer ended up having to call the floor over to get it clarified.

I continue to be flabbergasted at how many professional dealers don't grasp this simple concept. It's not that complicated. But trying to enforce and/or explain the half-bet rule when such a situation arises in a no-limit game is astonishingly common. I haven't kept careful track, but I'd estimate that at least a third of dealers get it wrong. I'm dumbfounded by this, because it's a situation that must come up every day. How can they keep getting confused by the same question over and over and over again?


Ouch!

Somehow Grange and I ended up talking about cringeworthy things. I told him about having seen a video clip from a kickboxing match in which one guy's leg breaks in the middle of his shin in a truly horrific manner. I found the clip on YouTube. I'm not going to embed it; I want you to have to click through to see it. Warning: I'm not kidding, this is seriously painful to watch. It will make you squirm and cringe, and you will never forget it; it will be seared into your retinas forever, even though it's only a few seconds long. If, given that notice, you still want to watch it, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kzhFfLtp5U&NR=1. While looking for that, I came across another clip that is virtually identical in what happens, though it's a much more recent fight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGJFOOncRMs. Same warnings apply.

Release the Grange!

This week on Poker After Dark the ads between segments have frequently been a shortened version of the trailer for the movie "Clash of the Titans," so I've seen it a couple dozen times now. (You can see the full-length version here.) At one point, a bearded man with a deathly serious tone commands, "Release the Kraken!" (If you don't know about kraken--pronounced cracken--see here.)

Grange's blog is titled CrAAKKer, because, as you can see from the stories he tells, a major part of his successful strategy is to identify nits who he knows will overplay their big pairs, call their raises with junky, sneaky little hands, and hit something with which to crack those aces and kings. This is not only profitable in and of itself, but often leads to the nits thereafter playing on Super Monkey Tilt. As he likes to say, hilarity ensues.

Anyway, his presence in town this week has done weird things to my mind. (That isn't too hard. It's pretty weird to begin with.) Every time I've heard, "Release the kraken!" I imagine the line actually being, "Release the CrAAKKer!" I envision a multi-armed and fearsomely toothed Grange being turned free from captivity to wreak havoc on the poker tables.

This amuses me far more than could be considered reasonable.


A non-poker blog

Before bidding Grange a fond farewell for this trip, I got to briefly meet his spousal unit, Chad, as well as Brian, a long-time friend of Chad's, and Brian's girlfriend. Grange mentioned my blog, which caused Brian to whip out a very cool business card with his blog name and information on it. I was instantly jealous. I want a Poker Grump business card! (I'm not sure what I would do if I had one, but that's not the point, is it?)

But for now the best I can do is provide a pointer to Brian's blog. It's a potpourri of whatever is on his mind, so tough to assign it to any particular subject or pigeonhole. But take a peek--maybe you'll like the way he thinks and writes: http://blosblahblahblog.blogspot.com/.


Those are some beads!

As I was leaving the Mirage, I saw this guy with the largest bead necklace I've ever seen. He graciously--even eagerly--consented to letting me take a picture of him.




Photo problem

By the way, this is as good a time as any to apologize for my pictures getting crappier over time. I have increasingly noticed that shots taken with my cell phone camera have been coming out pretty awful--light sources streaky, and objects appearing blurred no matter what I do. It has finally dawned on me that the problem is that the glass plate covering the camera lens has become hopelessly scratched up from being carried around unprotected in my fanny pack for a year and a half or so. I suppose this development is sufficiently foreseeable that a smarter guy would have done something to prevent it, but it didn't occur to me until the last few days, when it was obviously too late. So now I'm stuck with it, at least until I break down and get a new phone. Deals come along often enough that I suppose I will do so before terribly long. But until that happens, you and I both will have to put up with the photos looking terrible. Most of the "Guess the casino" pictures were taken in early 2009, when the phone was new, and are not so afflicted, but once in a while one of them is a more recent shot, as are, of course, most of the ones that I use to accompany some story from the tables.

Sorry about that.

Tiny AVP meet-up

My friend Cardgrrl had a little do Friday night at the Rhumbar lounge at the Mirage, which has a lovely outdoor setting. The purpose was to give fellow denizens of www.allvegaspoker.com a chance to meet her in a setting other than across the green felt.

The weather was just right, and, aside from a few moments of icky cigar smoke, so was essentially everything else about the setting and the attendees. The menu of exotic drinks available at Rhumbar is pretty impressive--enough to make one consider becoming an alcoholic. But I had to be content with a virgin strawberry-pineapple daiquiri thing, which was sweet and tasty. (I also had sips of a couple of Cardgrrl's selections, which were pretty interesting.) I think it safe to say that a fine time was had by all present.

Photos are here.

Tomorrow, Cardgrrl and I tackle the Red Rock poker room.

A problem and a solution

I went to the dentist today.* I have a cavity. A year ago, it was small enough that I could let it slide. Not now. Must be fixed. $200, please.


A few days ago I was playing at the Mirage. After a couple of hours, I had just broken even--a little up, a little down, but I was looking at a stack that was only a few dollars bigger than the one I had started with. I was thinking it was looking like a waste of time and I should go find someplace else to play or something else to do entirely.

Then a miracle hand happened. I had 6-7 offsuit on the button. I called a raise from the tightest guy at the table, figuring that his range was very narrow and if I hit a sneaky hand he might stack off to me. The table drunk, who had been running hot as a volcano, was in between us and came along--thank goodness.

The flop was J-6-2. Rock bets, both drunk and I call. I think if he missed (e.g., A-K) the rock won't fire again, or I might hit two pair or trips and beat his overpair, if that's what he has. Drunk guy could have anything--he has played nothing all the way to the river at times. Turn is another 6. Ahhhhhhhhh! Rock checks, drunk bets, I call, rock folds. River: the case 6. Cha-ching! Drunk bets $50. I raise to $150. He calls with A-J, and asks me, "You got that 6?" Yes, sir. Yes, I do. Net profit on hand: just over $200.

So I would like to thank the drunk guy for paying for my tooth to be mended.

(I wish I could give credit for the excellent photo posted above, but I can't. I found it here, with no indication of where the blogger got it.)


*The dentist, incidentally, is AnnaLee Kruyer, whom I can recommend enthusiastically for general or cosmetic dental issues. See her web site here. For fun, see also the rather remarkable story involving her year as a dentist in Iraq, as run in snopes.com here. The story includes a bonus side note about how playing poker can save your life!

Define "most"

I forgot to tell you about another little incident from the Mirage Saturday night. Because it's a place I don't visit often (once or twice a year), I couldn't remember if they had any jackpots that I needed to be aware of--bad beats, high hands, etc. So I asked the dealer. He said there were none. As if he felt the need to justify this state of affairs, he added, "Most of the poker rooms on the Strip don't have them. You'll find them farther out in the city and at the locals casinos, but not on the Strip."

Oh, really? This is all done from memory, but it's probably pretty accurate. The following poker rooms on the Strip do have bad-beat jackpots, high-hand jackpots, aces-cracked bonuses, or some combination of the above on a regular basis: Stratosphere, Treasure Island, Caesars Palace, Monte Carlo, Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, South Point, Riviera, Sahara, Harrah's, Imperial Palace, O'Shea's, Flamingo, Bill's, Bally's, and Planet Hollywood. The poker rooms at Paris and Tropicana also had them, though both closed recently. No such jackpots: Mirage, Bellagio, MGM, Venetian (though they occasionally throw one in as a special limited-time promotion), Wynn. Unsure (because I almost never go there): Circus Circus.

Hard to see how the list of no-jackpot Strip poker rooms constitutes "most." Looks like at least 3:1 the other way.

I should add that I don't see the absence of such things as a negative. I'm happy to leave the dollar in the pot and win it by my allegedly superior skill, rather than have it taken out and awarded by dumb luck. Besides, the net effect of most such promotions is to take money from no-limit games and transfer it to players in the limit games, because the events they are rewarding happen much more frequently in the limit games.

Four stories

1.

I started at the Venetian last night. The older man to my right was having a bad time of it. Well, it was mostly his own fault, because he was a classic loose-weak player. Anyway, he finally made a full house and won a big pot, which happened to include a $100 bill in addition to the chips. He folded the C-note and put it in his pocket. This is a common thing for tourists to do, when they don't understand the rules of table stakes. Another player gently pointed out the problem, and the dealer, who hadn't noticed the action, confirmed that the money had to be left in play.

The gentleman replaced the note, and said, "OK, but it doesn't matter. Nobody's getting this from me anyway." I knew what he meant--he was going to be playing what Phil Laak calls "lock-down poker" from then on. I smiled at him and said, "The bill isn't going in unless you have the nuts, right?"

He said, "Not even then. I'd have to have the nuts, the screws, and a few washers, too!"


2.

After locking up a nice little "W" at the Venetian, I went across the street to the Mirage and bought in for my usual $100. On my second hand, I had A-K in the small blind. Several people limped in, but the button raised it to $15. He struck me as an aggressive type, and of course he doesn't need much of a hand to try to steal in that situation. But since I was out of position and completely unfamiliar with my opponents, I decided to play it conservatively by just calling, with further decisions to depend on the flop. The big blind called, too.

Flop was K-Q-J, which I simultaneously loved and hated. Top pair/top kicker is nice, but it would be all too easy for either of my opponents to have made two pair, a set, or a straight here. I checked. The big blind bet $30. The button moved all in for something like $300. I was thinking about what to do and leaning toward a call, when the big blind said, "OK, I call," and flipped up his cards: K-Q. He was so eager to get his money in that he didn't bother looking to see if it was his turn.

The dealer indicated that the action was still on me. I turned my cards up and said, "Thanks. You made this decision a lot easier. I fold."

Good thing, too. The button had A-A. I would have been drawing about as thin as one can get: a 10 for half of the pot was my only salvation--and it didn't come. The turn and river were blanks, so the K-Q held up.

Just to rub it in a bit, I told the big blind that I was definitely going to call, and he had saved me $85. In truth, I was undecided. I was leaning that way, but I was having an internal argument, because I knew how potentially dangerous the situation was. So maybe I would have made the smart fold anyway. I honestly don't know.

Moral of the story: When you act out of turn, you often cost yourself money.


3.

It is often difficult to look around a poker room and decide which of the games at one's chosen stakes is the best one to be playing in. But in Las Vegas, for about two weeks in December, during the National Finals Rodeo, which completely takes over the city, the Good Lord has seen fit to make that analysis relatively straightforward: (1) Count the number of cowboy hats at each table. (2) Move to the game with the most of them.

My Mirage table had a dismal Cowboy Hat Index of zero. I couldn't move at first, because we were the short-handed table. But as soon as we filled up, I changed to one with a CHI of three. The decision was sweetened by seeing that the table also included this guy wearing reindeer antlers on his head:



Yep, he was drunk, and getting drunker by the minute. So was his pal, two seats to his right. They ended up being the main sources of income for the rest of the table.


4.

Within a few hands, I knew I had done the right thing by moving.

I was in the big blind and folded to a small raise, because I had something atrocious like 8-3. A guy across the table had apparently expected me to call, and said, pointing at me, "This guy's so tight, I think he only plays aces." The person next to him said, "He's been playing that way all weekend."

This was a little after midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning. I had not played poker at all on Friday. I had only been at the Mirage for maybe half an hour at that point, and at this table for four or five hands. I had never seen this man before, to the best of my recollection. He apparently hadn't noticed that a new player had come into that seat, which was especially remarkable given that the previous occupant of that spot had been a woman in her late 40s with long blond hair--not exactly my doppelganger.

Excellent observational skills, sir!

Danny Gans is as good as they say

I took a day off from poker yesterday (except for a bit of razz on Stars). Instead I went out with a friend who had managed to get free seats to see Danny Gans at the Mirage from http://showtickets4locals.com/. The tickets are usually $110 each, so this was a great score. (It's not easy. I've tried a few times, but as soon as the email goes out that Gans tickets are up for grabs, their phone lines clog up.) Early next year Gans is leaving the Mirage and will start performing at the Encore. My hunch is that free tickets won't be offered anymore at that point, so I really wanted to see him on the cheap while I still could.

It's a good show. He is as talented as everybody says. The show must have a fair amount of change and flexibility, because I've heard of other bits and impressions that he does that weren't on display last night. My favorite parts were (1) George Burns doing a cover of M.C. Hammer's "Can't Touch This," (2) Bill Clinton doing a naughtily customized version of Gloria Gainor's "I Will Survive," (3) an excellent recreation of "Carnac the Magnificent," with current events-based jokes just like Carson would do if he were still alive and on the air, (4) recitals of famous movie scenes, including "Forrest Gump," "Rocky," and "Scent of a Woman," and (5) a funny series of impersonations of pop music stars whose lyrics are basically unintelligible. My only complaint was that the whole thing was too loud. (Does that sound like a grumpy old man, or what? Next thing you know, I'll be yelling at the neighbor kids to keep off of my lawn.)

Before the show we ate at one of the Mirage's new restaurants, "BLT Burger" (thus making the whole thing not exactly free, and surely fulfilling one of the hotel's hopes for how people getting free tickets will behave). I had recently read VegasRex's impression of the place, and thought it sounded worth a try. It was. I had their signature piece, the BLT Burger. Usually I ask restaurants to skip whatever special sauce they want to put on a burger, because, well, plain ol' ketchup is better. But I decided to be adventurous (yeah, this is my idea of "adventurous"--tells you a lot about how pathetic my life is, doesn't it?) and let them sauce away as they would. And I was glad I did--one of the rare times that I found something I liked even better than ketchup. Overall, I thought it was the best burger I've ever had. My friend, not so much. Her impression was basically, "Meh." But then again, she had warned me as we set out that she was in a foul mood and was pretty much going to hate everything about the evening, so you have to take that into consideration.

Have to say, though, that the fries were way unworthy of the $6 additional price. She had the skinny fries, I the fat fries, and neither were particularly good. You get better at "In and Out Burger." My friend's black-and-white shake, though, was quite tasty, and may have justified its $6 charge.

Oh, and their music was way too loud, too. Seriously, my friend and I tried talking a couple of times, and then basically gave up and sat there staring at each other, because conversation involved a frustrating amount of "What did you say?" and "I can't hear you." Why do restaurants do this? Doesn't everybody find this as maddening as we did?