Mahjong raid

"Police had to take action. If the cops had allowed elderly mahjong players to win more than $10 at a time, middle-aged poker players might think they could get away with the same sort of thing. What a terrifying world that would be."

https://reason.com/blog/2015/11/30/florida-cops-shut-down-old-ladies-mahjon

The poker of politics

Clever, interesting, and original look at the presidential race as a poker tournament:

http://www.pokerupdate.com/articles/lifestyle/08122-presidential-poker-tournament-field-grows-beyond-expectations/

Emotional stability

New study says that experienced poker players have the emotional stability to make difficult decisions under pressure:

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/business-economics/emotional-stability-personality-poker-player-gaming-games-gambling-91987/

Ho hum, just another Sunday grind

This seems worth noting:

http://www.pokerstrategy.com/news/world-of-poker/Is-this-the-sickest-Sunday-MTT-run-ever-_87212/

Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

That's what a court in Germany said (well, approximately) to one player who had repeatedly cheated at poker, and was brought up on charges of criminal fraud.

http://www.pokernews.com/news/2014/07/germany-s-ali-tekintamgac-sentenced-to-3-years-in-prison-for-18790.htm

(This was a couple of weeks ago, but I missed the story until now.)

Maybe it has happened before, but I can't think of another time that a player has gone to prison for cheating at poker. I wish it would happen more. The prison thing, not the cheating thing.

Stupid is not malicious

Last week, the Palm Beach Kennel Club, which had hosted a WSOP circuit event, announced the results of their investigation into the unauthorized removal of a tournament chip from play when it was down to the last two players. You can read their announcement here, and the PokerNews article about the situation here.

Basically, the casino concluded that the player who won the tournament, Chan Pelton--whom I do not know and had never heard of before last week--removed a T25,000 chip to keep as a souvenir. It seems important to emphasize that the investigation determined that "the integrity of the event was in no way compromised, and the impact of the incident only caused harm to the perpetrator himself."

In spite of that conclusion, the club lowered the boom on Pelton. He was stripped of the title and the prize money, and banned from the property. Caesars, which owns the WSOP, compounded the punishment by imposing an indefinite exclusion from all their properties worldwide. Short of additionally turning him over to law enforcement on charges of theft and/or fraud, there is nothing more that they could have done to him.

And therein lies the problem, as I see it.

When I first saw the announcement on Twitter, I dashed off something about it seeming harsh, but then didn't think much more about it until Monday, when my friend Jennifer Newell addressed the subject in her column for poker.co.uk, here. She wholeheartedly approves of the maximum punishment handed out. Upon reading that piece, I knew that I disagreed, but it took some mulling before I figured out how to articulate what I think the problem is.

Let me do it point by point.

1. There should be no tolerance for cheating. 

To quote Mike Caro, "I have long-ago stated that poker cheaters should be boiled and eaten. If you think I’m not serious, you boil; I’ll eat."

Even long-time readers of mine will probably have forgotten that early in my Vegas years I was very nearly the victim of a poker tournament cheater. I still think it's a pretty interesting story, and my only personal experience with this sort of thing, so go read about it here. I cite this incident in order to quote my 2007 self, to prove that I've long been on record as advocating the severest possible penalties for actual cheating in poker:

He was, of course, disqualified from the event. I’m guessing that he is also banned from the premises permanently. I hope that he also goes into the infamous big black book of barred persons that the casinos share. In fact, I hope that they turned him over to the police and that he gets charged with criminal fraud—which this surely was. I wouldn’t even shed a tear if I learned that he received a bit of the old-school-Vegas back-room security “treatment” to help the lesson sink in a little deeper.

If there were substantial reason to believe that Pelton had broken the rules in an attempt to dishonestly boost his chances of winning, I'd be right there with the villagers, pitchfork and torch in hand, ready to burn the monster alive. But as far as I can tell from news accounts, that is not the case.

2. Pocketing the chip was monumentally stupid. 

This guy is no newbie. He has apparently won at least one WCOP circuit event plus other tournaments before. He knows the rules. He also must know that security cameras capture everything that happens on the tables. Furthermore, he's experienced enough that he surely understands the reasons behind the rule. For one with his level of knowledge and experience, stealing that chip can only be chalked up to world-class stupidity and hubris.

But.

3. Stupidity is not cheating. 

There is a fundamental difference between the act of a major-league dunderhead and the act of a cheater. To fail to recognize this is to make a category error, and a serious one at that.

Because the club and Caesars have imposed every penalty they have at their disposal, the result is that they have no harsher punishment to hand out to a player who is caught actually cheating. And the consequence of that is that it puts these institutions in the indefensible position of saying that (or at least acting as if) there is no meaningful difference between breaking a rule in order to gain an unfair advantage--an act of cheating--and breaking it in order to take home a souvenir--an act of stupidity.

Granted, one cannot always tell the difference with perfect clarity. But here his story of seeking a souvenir checks out. Yes, it is at least theoretically possible that he intended to introduce the chip into play to his advantage in some later tournament, or that he is part of a conspiracy ring to create a bunch of counterfeits. But those seem unlikely, given the circumstances. Though one cannot achieve 100% certainty, I think we can reach a reasonable level of confidence that his actions are much more consistent with his claimed intention than one more nefarious.

4. Stupidity should not be treated like cheating. 

The most troubling part of the club's announcement is this:

The player’s intent in taking the chip is not considered by the WSOP Tournament Rules.

True enough. But they seem to be implying that, therefore, they are not allowed to take "intent" into account in setting a punishment. That is not the case. Tournament rules do not prescribe a fixed penalty for any violation. In fact, they take great pains to ensure that the tournament staff have maximal flexibility to assign variable penalties for infractions of the rules depending on circumstances. For all sorts of rules violations, it is commonplace for the tournament director to modulate the penalty imposed based on whether the offense was deliberate versus inadvertent, whether it was a first violation versus a second or third, whether the player is a newcomer who didn't know a rule versus an old pro who damn well did, whether any other player was disadvantaged by the action, whether the violator is being apologetic or defiant, and so on. This is all as it should be.

To treat an act of stupidity as being indistinguishable from an act of outright cheating--which is what the casino and Caesars are doing here--is akin to the moronic zero-tolerance policies of schools that fail to make a distinction between the kid who yells "bang" while making a finger-gun, and the kid who actually brings a gun to school intending to kill a teacher. It is akin to being unable or unwilling to distinguish premeditated murder from involuntary manslaughter (i.e., an act of reckless endangerment resulting in a death).

Were I in charge, I would have favored lesser punishments: perhaps knocking him down to second place instead of first (since he had apparently already earned at least second-place money when the incident occurred), maybe combined with a one-year exclusion from any Caesars-sponsored poker tournaments. But I don't think I'd go so far as to make him forfeit all the prize money, nor bar him from setting foot in Caesars properties, nor make his exclusion from participation permanent.

Those are the kinds of maximum penalties that should be reserved for the worst offenses, which this was not, and the worst offenders, which Pelton is not.

Ray Bitar's lament

The news today is that former Full Tilt Poker CEO Ray Bitar is in need of a heart transplant. I couldn't help but be reminded of a famous song from an equally famous movie....

When a man’s under indictment

There should be some excitement

And yet I’m torn apart

Just because I’m a-pleadin’

That I coulda had my freedom,

If I only had a heart.

I’d be happy, I’d be mellow,

I’d be really quite a fellow

With such a new restart.

I’d make up with all the payors,

Reimburse all the players,

If I only had a heart.

I’d reclaim the CEO spot

Refurbish the old yacht

And this time play it smart.

I’d suck up to Howard’s allies

Fill the board up with our own guys

If I only had a heart.

(Image from here.) 

Response to Newtown

Every time in the past few days that I've seen somebody propose something that should be done to prevent another public mass shooting, I've mentally added my response to it to a long post I've been composing in my head about all the things that either wouldn't work or couldn't possibly be implemented.* Every proposal I've heard falls into one of those two categories.

Well, rest easy, because now I don't have to write that post; somebody has done it for me. Megan McArdle's essay for The Daily Beast yesterday is far and away the most level-headed reaction to the tragedy I've seen. Her conclusion, encapsulated by her sub-head, is the same as mine: "The things that would work are impractical and unconstitutional. The things we can do won't work."

She isn't coming from heartlessness; she felt as saddened and horrified as everybody else did. Nor is she just letting ideological purity trump caring about results. Her points are entirely pragmatic, grounded in hard-core realism. And she happens to be right. (She gets wrong a few small points about firearms--such as that revolvers have stronger recoil than semi-automatic handguns--and their associated laws and terminology, but nothing important enough to lead her basic thesis astray.)

By odd coincidence, I had been talking to my girlfriend about this subject just two days before Friday's news. She had just come from a local discussion group where the conversation had been about the second amendment, and asked me what I thought could be done to reduce gun violence in the United States. My answer was not very eloquent, but was much in line with McArdle's: The things that might do anything more than nibble around the edges of the problem are simply not feasible, for a variety of reasons.

For me the core obstacle to success is this: The tiny minority of people who cause all the mayhem (both mass public shootings and the enormously more common single homicides) are exceptionally resistant to the forces that cause the great majority of us to conform our behavior to societal norms--a conscience, the desire to be law-abiding citizens, a wish to not be in prison, and a preference for being alive rather than dead. A psychopath or career criminal for whom those tenets are not fundamentally controlling principles is basically beyond our power to deter until he has actually committed his felonies.

Anyway, I'm now on the verge of actually writing the threatened post rather than just writing an intro to McArdle's piece, which was my goal. So I'll shut up and suggest that you go read it.


ADDENDUM:

McArdle encountered a large number of readers who erroneously read her to have said that 6-year-olds should have gang-tackled Adam Lanza. (She didn't.) To clarify, she has this short follow-up piece.



*I suppose I should add the confession that this has not always been just a mental exercise. I have irritated a few of my friends because, when they mention that something should be done, I press them for specifics, then explain why any specific proposal they suggest is doomed to failure. I'm not naturally pessimistic or fatalistic. It's just that I've spent many, many hours reading and thinking about this subject, and long ago came to the conclusion that gun violence in the U.S. is a deeply intractable problem, that there isn't anything effective that would be achievable, politically feasible, constitutional, and affordable.

A quick comparison

Number of children killed by rifle fire in Connecticut that makes Barack Obama cry: 20.

Number of children killed by CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that does not make Barack Obama cry: 176 and counting.

Growing problem?

(No poker content.)

In the wake of yesterday's school shooting in Connecticut, I tried discussing possible solutions with various friends and strangers on Twitter--which admittedly is a pretty awful medium for such things. One of them first said that school shootings were an "epidemic." When I questioned the validity of that label, he said he was willing to settle for calling it a "growing and disturbing trend." I asked him for his statistical evidence that it was a "growing" problem. He admitted that he had none other than "being alive for the last 20 years."

I had no specific evidence in mind. I didn't know offhand whether it was a growing, shrinking, or stable problem. I am, however, aware of the very human tendency to feel that things are getting worse even if they are not. Our minds tend to emphasize recent things more than past things, making us not very reliable at judging trends in the absence of actual hard data.

This morning I was reading a piece by Nick Gillespie in Reason magazine's "Hit and Run" blog: "4 Awful Reactions to Sandy Hook School Shootings--And Thoughts on a Better Response." He points to this helpful table of data from the National Center for Education Statistics, citing it for the proposition that our schools are actually getting safer over time, not more dangerous. It's downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet. I had Excel spit out this graph from the table:

The only massaging of the data I have done is to add a five-year moving average, in an attempt to damp down some of the wide year-to-year swings. Each pink dot is the arithmetic mean of the previous five years.

If there is any directionality to the trend line, it is downward. You might say that there is no clear trend in either direction, that the variation from year to year is so great that you can't discern any definite overall movement either up or down. I wouldn't quibble with that reading.

But I don't think any fair-minded person can look at these numbers (I'm taking for granted that they are complete and accurate) and say that homicides of school children are a "growing" phenomenon, or any more of an "epidemic" than was the case 20 years ago. Moreover, this table from the same organization shows that total school enrollment (pre-kindergarten to grade 12) has increased from 46,864,000 in 1990 to 54,704,000 in 2010, a growth of about 17%. This means that even if the absolute number of school homicide deaths were steady over time, the risk per student is declining.

Of course, this conclusion does not mean that each death is not tragic, or that we should just shrug our shoulders and live with things as they are. But I firmly believe that public policy debates have to be grounded in objective facts, or they are bound to go off in the wrong direction.

I am proposing no particular solutions here. I just wanted to present the data as a starting point for figuring out what more, if anything, can and should be done about the problem.

The near future of online poker

This insightful analysis was published nearly a month ago, but it had escaped my attention until Poker Lawyer tweeted a link to it today:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/10/22/sorry-mr-online-poker-nobody-cares-about-you.aspx

Two poker rooms closed this week

So says Dave Ferrara, writing for Pokerati. Specifically, Jokers Wild and Aliante Station. See http://pokerati.com/2012/11/hpt-rolls-through-town-ante-up-tour-takes-off-jokers-not-so-wild/.

By my count (I'm looking at the records of where I have played), 64 different casinos currently have a poker room or have had one at some point since I moved to Vegas in July of 2006, two of which (Speedway and Railroad Pass) I never got to play at while they were open. Current count is right around 50. Thinking about each of them individually, I count only 23 that have been open continuously and in the same location since I've been in town, and I really think that two or three of the ones I virtually never visit have moved, though I can't picture exactly where they used to be, so I'm crediting them with constancy. If 23 out of 64 have gone basically unchanged in six years; 41 out of 64 have moved, closed, and/or opened in that time span.

Ya think things change fast around here?

Excellence

By age and physique, Kimberly Rhode is not what you would probably think of as the archetypal Olympic champion. But in terms of attitude, discipline, and results, she is, in fact, the epitome of one.

Due to a little insomnia, I was up at around 4 a.m. Sunday. Flipping channels, I happened to catch the final round of women's skeet shooting live, and so was privileged to see Rhode's amazing gold-medal run. Frankly, I don't think I had ever heard of her before yesterday. The shooting sports that I have participated in and that I still follow in gun magazines are not Olympic events.

Rhode has won an individual medal in five consecutive Olympics. That's Atlanta 1996 (gold in double trap at the age of 17), Sidney 2000 (bronze in double trap), Athens 2004 (gold in double trap), Beijing 2008 (silver in skeet), and now London 2012. No other American has accomplished that in any sport. What's more, she is not past her prime. In fact, she's better than ever. She crushed her competition this week, hitting 99 out of 100 clay pigeons--eight more than the silver medalist--setting a new Olympic record and tying the world record. All indications are that she will show up in Rio in 2016 and continue her streak, still with that big smile on her face.

This news story about her inspired me:

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/kimberly-rhode-unique-training-led-olympic-record-breaking-161829232--oly.html

She went out of her way to find places to practice that had wind and rain that would simulate what she would likely face in England, and shot in those difficult conditions when everybody else had quit. She doesn't beat herself up over the one missed shot, but instead sees it as an opportunity for improvement at the next Olympics.

And yet in spite of that drive for perfection, she still keeps its importance in perspective: It's a game. She does it because it's fun, and if she doesn't win, the world won't end.

This is what excellence is. I stand in awe of it.

(If you are too dense to see the obvious lessons to be learned about your poker game, well, I don't think me pointing them out is going to help.)

Vegas poker room changes

For those of you who have reason to want to keep track of the ever-shifting sands of Vegas poker rooms, "Las Vegas Michael" provides this handy summary of recent events for AllVegasPoker.com:

http://www.allvegaspoker.com/news_detail_587.html

Maybe half of those updates had escaped my attention, including that my old friend James Klotsky (I knew him first at Hilton, then at Alliante Station) was now running the poker room at Hard Rock, where I have not set foot in a couple of years. I might have to drop by there.

Gun control

Jason Alexander posted an essay on TwitLonger in response to yesterday's mass shooting in Colorado. Among his concerns was the hyperbolic tone of those who disagreed with him. (I don't blame him. I've spent a WHOLE lot of time around gun-rights advocates, and many of them really are alarmingly immoderate in tone, not to mention embarrassingly simple-minded in analysis. And I say that even though I mostly agree with them in substance.) So I whipped off a partial reply that I hope he will think sufficiently thoughtful and respectful to be worth reading. I think he's a person who can be reasoned with.

It obviously has nothing to do with poker, and it is hardly a comprehensive or rigorous argument, but if you want to read the points that I dashed off quickly, it's here:

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/if38q0

Addendum:

Jason Alexander read my reply. (How great a tool is Twitter, anyway?!) He retweeted it, then said, "Thanks4 your tone & information &thoughts. Complex subject but it is this kind of exchange that makes change. best wishes."

It pleases me greatly that I accomplished exactly what I had hoped to, which was to show him (and his many, many Twitter followers) that there is a non-crazy basis for holding a public policy position that he had come close to ruling out of decent society, and to do so without rancor. I'm sure I didn't change his mind, but if I taught him a few facts that he didn't previously know, and got him to make room in his mind for the possibility that an opposite conclusion could be a reasonable one, well, that counts for something, and it was well worth the 30 minutes or so it took me to produce it.

Addendum 2

I just reread the Eugene Volokh article that I referenced in my piece, and noticed that among the people he thanks for assistance is one "David Sklansky." There can't be that many people with that name. Does anybody know why the guy I know for poker writing would have been involved in helping research an academic article on constitutional law circa 1998?

Slim

News reports are saying that Amarillo Slim died a few hours ago. This is not surprising, as he has been on death's door for several days now. On April 17, Doyle Brunson tweeted, "Looks like Amarillo Slim is I'n critical shape. For the record, no way was he ever a child molester." (From what I've been able to gather from public reports on the incident that led to his plea deal, I'm inclined to agree that he was wrongly accused.) Then on April 19, Brunson tweeted, "Just talked to Amarillo Slim. He is I'n hopice but is fighting hard. Tears came to my eyes as we said bye." And, further, "Amarillo Slim had faults as we all do, but he started the poker boom as we know it. Look him up on google."

Well, Doyle, I don't need to look him up, though I agree that today's players should know more about him than they seem to. I wrote a post about him, and how strange it was that a good player I ran into had never heard of the man. I'll point readers to it as my little tribute to his passing:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/maybe-hes-never-heard-of-babe-ruth.html

Jason Somerville

Four years ago I wrote this:

[S]ooner or later, inevitably, somebody that we all recognize from televised and/or online poker events (even if it's somebody who is not currently well known) will out himself. Every time this little curiosity has occurred to me, I've wondered how this incredibly macho, sexist, swaggering, "I am the MAN" poker world will react to the news. My guess is that there will be a lot of public quoting of the famous Seinfeld line (a la the title of this post), accompanied by a lot of quiet, private, nasty bashing. You can imagine the kind of things that will be written by the scads of anonymous contributors to the poker forums--those who can't make a comment about a female professional player that doesn't involve judging her attractiveness or lack thereof. I don't envy whoever it is who takes on (voluntarily or otherwise) the role of the first openly gay poker pro. I think it will be a difficult mantle to wear.

It appears that now we get to see if my predictions will come true with respect to Jason Somerville, who today publicly announced his sexual orientation.

(An unstated but obvious assumption in that old post was that I was referring to men. Since writing it, Vanessa Selbst burst on the tournament poker scene, apparently perfectly comfortable with everybody knowing that she has a live-in girlfriend. It's not like I didn't know that lesbians existed in the world, but my focus was on gay men, first, because there are so few women among the top tiers of the poker economy, and, second, because my impression is that gay women are less likely than gay men to elicit cruelty and bigotry from Neanderthal poker players.)

I hope my worst fears prove to have been wrong.

Attention, readers in New York

Ira Glass is hosting a charity tournament Saturday. See details here:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/02/nyc-come-beat-ira-in-poker

Apes as poker players

Everybody has heard of dogs playing poker, but apes? Apparently they have some characteristics that would be useful to the game, according to two news stories of recent research that I saw today.

In the first, scientists found that all four species of the great apes are capable of making sophisticated risk/reward decisions. When presented with a choice between a small piece of banana with a known location or taking a chance on lifting one of several cups in the hope of finding a larger piece, the apes make their decisions based on the probability of success and the discrepancy between the size of the small and large piece. The larger the hidden piece, the more risk they are willing to take to find it. Sounds like calculating pot odds to me.

In the second, researchers found that chimps in the wild take into account whether the other chimps already know about a danger before deciding whether to sound a vocal alarm. Awareness of other players' states of knowledge is a critical poker skill. Was that guy here when I bluffed in this situation 30 minutes ago? If so, was he paying attention, and will he recognize that this hand is very much like that one? It seems that chimps have at least the rudimentary ability to process this kind of information.

In both of these traits, I'd have to say that they exceed the capacity of at least some human poker player, who display zero ability to perform such complex tasks.

Miscellaneous links

In the last day or two, Twitter has pointed me to several interesting pokery things that I might have missed otherwise.

Annie Duke at The Moth, telling the story of how she grew up in a family of game players, learned to be competitive and not to lose, and how she discovered that poker was her true life calling (about 17 minutes).

http://cdn.themoth.prx.org/moth-podcast-197-annie-duke.mp3

"Grinders," an online pay-per-view ($4.00) documentary about playing poker for a living in underground cardrooms. I haven't watched it yet, but Kevin Mathers gave it "two thumbs up," which is endorsement enough for me. For more on the movie and how to see it, go here and here.

https://prescreen.com/movie/Grinders

Forbes magazine reports on the latest filing from federal prosecutors on the Black Friday case, including some of their legal arguments.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2011/11/04/federal-prosecutors-show-their-hand-in-online-poker-case/

Entertaining article by B.J. Nemeth about the creative things poker players dream up to bet on when playing "Lodden Thinks."

http://www.epicpoker.com/news/blog-pages/2011/11/epic-broadcast-lodden-thinks.aspx

Interesting, sensitive, and self-aware blog post by Terrence Chan about how odd millionaire poker players' conversations and actions must appear to much of the rest of the working world.

http://www.terrencechanpoker.com/2011/11/pokers-1-goes-to-bar.html