Profound poker truth of the day

If you always get your money in with the worst of it, you will never have to suffer a bad beat.

Thought for today

Hell hath no fury like a nit with aces cracked.

Circle of confusion

I just learned a new term: "Circle of confusion." It's a technical term from the field of optics. You can read all about it here, if you wish.

Had I come across this phrase out of context, I would have assumed that it was referring to a typical $2/$4 limit hold'em table.

At this time of year I always wonder

Why isn't there a Nobel Prize for poker? And/or for blogging? Cuz I'd be a shoo-in, right?

Secrets most pros won't tell you, #2

When I wrote the first post with this title (or nearly so) last December--about the direction in which to turn one's cards upon receiving them--I hadn't really envisioned it becoming a series. But there are other nuances to the game that have never been revealed, despite hundreds of books about poker being in print. I feel that it is my responsibility to share these with you once in a while.

Let me tell you about the dealer button. Some other time I will rant about how people screw up moving it, cause problems by hiding it, irritate everybody by playing stupid games with it, and so forth. But today I just want to pass on an important tip about neatness.

Dealers, sadly, are too busy to place the dealer button correctly. This, for example, is how it was pushed in front of my during one orbit last night:




This is completely unacceptable. It's all askew. The poker gods have no respect for players who can't be bothered to tidy up.

The simplest solution is to simply rotate the button so that the word "DEALER" is directly facing you, like so:




(At a glance, this may not look placed quite right. It was. The camera, however, was a little off to the side, causing kind of a parallax thing.)

This is the minimum that is required of you. The poker gods will always smile favorably upon you for doing your share to keep the table neat and orderly when you expend this small amount of effort.

But you can do better.

On tables, such as at the Riviera, where there is a stripe, it further neatens the appearance if the button is placed touching the stripe, so that it becomes obvious that the word "DEALER" is parallel to it, like so:




The optimum solution, however, goes one step further. This involves placing the button so that the word "DEALER" is directly along the stripe, thusly:





See how nice and tidy that looks? The poker gods literally squeal with delight when they see you taking such care.

I have been studying this phenomenon long enough now to be able to report to you that you get pocket aces a full 71.4% more often when you take one or more of these steps, and, furthermore, your aces are a whopping 64.9% less likely to get cracked as a result. I'm telling you, the poker gods love orderliness.

Now, it must be said that one cannot always achieve the two more advanced stages of neatness as shown above. Some tables don't have a stripe with which to align the button. In some seats, it may not be possible to align the button with the stripe and simultaneously have it directly facing you, in which awkward situation you have to choose one or the other (and my studies have not yet been able to determine which factor should dominate). Also, even when there is a stripe, it may be so far inboard or outboard that it is not practical to place the button touching it; if you place the button on a stripe that is too far in, it may not be clear to everybody which seat the button is in, and if you place it on a stripe that is too far out, the button may sort of disappear from view. (The Riviera is really borderline in that respect.)

Finally, you should know that some dealers are really picky about where the button sits. There is often good reason for this, in terms of its visibility and not being where it interferes with pitching the cards, placing bets, etc. So if once you move the button a few inches for the sake of appearance, and the dealer sternly reaches out and moves it back to where it was, you should respect his or her wishes. (Angering the dealer is always -EV and severely frowned upon by the poker gods.) In that circumstance, you are limited to leaving it where the dealer places it and merely rotating it to a proper orthogonal orientation.

I can assure you that if you undertake this practice faithfully, you will be glad you did. You will come to see the wisdom of it and be grateful to the Grump. Cardgrrl is a fine example of this. She was, in fact, the first one to whom I revealed this secret during her visit here in February. She immediately expressed her gratitude. I believe her exact words were, "Thanks for giving me one more thing to obsess about."

It warmed my heart to have been so helpful.

New versus established tables

A long time ago I noticed a trend that I wasn't sure was real: Newly started games seemed harder to make money at than when I joined a game that had long been in progress. I couldn't tell if this was a figment of my imagination, a sampling anomaly, or a real phenomenon.

I mentioned it to Cardgrrl when she was here last month, and, to my surprise, she quickly agreed. Here are some factors we came up with that might explain it:

• At a new table it is less likely that players have already been drinking (though that's not unheard of).
• Nobody is stuck and therefore playing wildly to try to get back to even.
• Most players sit down with a mental commitment to playing tight and conservatively, but that discipline tends to break down over time, so it is less of a factor governing play in an established game than a new one.
• The table maximum buy-in set a limit on what the biggest stacks are at first. But after the game has been going, if players are taking big swings at each other, the total chip count on the table can climb dramatically as the rebuys accumulate.

Given those considerations, and now that I've taken the time to think it through, I have decided that on the rare occasions that I am offered the choice between a game just getting started and one of the already established ones, I will hastily select the latter.

Interestingly, the opposite may hold true online. In the current issue of Poker Pro magazine, Chris "Fox" Wallace discusses the life cycle of online poker tables. (Actually, this is what brought the whole subject back to mind and prompted me to write about it.) Again, this is not something I had really considered before, but he makes a good case that it is often profitable to be the first or one of the first to start or join a new online table. This is because the fishy players are impatient and will tend to sit down wherever they can find an open seat without waiting. They do not look for particular weak opponents to play with. They do not bother checking the lobby for table stats of average pot size, number of players seeing the flop, etc. So if you can be there right when they first log on, you can be the one to take their money. As Wallace puts it, when the other sharks smell blood in the water, it will be because you have been dining.

So take heed, and choose your table accordingly.

Poker plates

Thursday night I saw in Harrah's parking garage a car with California vanity plates: AK SUTED.

The next day while driving around town, I spotted another out of state car with plates reading QUADS.

I love this game as much as anyone, I think, but don't feel any inclination to putting that fact on my license plates.

What poker rooms really need

During the Super Bowl, I played poker at the Palms for the first half and the Rio for the second half. Why? Dunno--just kinda felt like it.

I like playing when big sports events are on, because many of the other players are too engrossed in the game to really pay attention to what's going on at the table. They tend to play much more straightforwardly, with not much more than "Level 1" thinking. They're easier to bluff, because it's too much time and trouble to actually sit back and analyze whether I could plausibly be holding what I'm representing. But at the same time, strangely, they're also easier to value bet, because they tend not to think through all of my possible hands and figure out that I could have a monster. Furthermore, they tend to drink, and make rookie mistakes like not noticing possible straights and flushes on the board. I made $223 during the first half at the Palms, and $257 during the second half at Rio. Easy money.

But the price I have to pay is that the game proceeds more slowly than usual, because nobody is paying attention. (Well, nobody except me, anyway--I barely even knew who was playing today, and cared not at all who won.) It's annoying to have to wait for the dealer to get each player's attention in turn. And heaven forbid you should expect somebody to act when there is, say, an interception being run back.

Back when I used to play at the Hilton, I had told one of the dealers that I liked there (Kelly) about an early Simpsons episode where they are all in family counseling, hooked up to a system by which they could each deliver painful electric shocks to the others. I thought that poker rooms should install something like that in each seat. When a player isn't paying attention and doesn't respond to a simple, "Your turn, sir," the dealer presses a button, and ZZZZZZZZZZ! The inattentive boor is zapped to attention. It could also be used punitively, for players who swear, insult each other, blame the dealer for bad outcomes, talk about the hand in progress, etc. Every time I was at the table and Kelly was dealing, if somebody was out of line or requiring a lot of work to get to attend to the game, either she or I would turn to the other and mime pressing a button, with a knowing nod and smile in return. Yep, that's what poker rooms need, all right. During the Super Bowl, the casinos would have to switch on the back-up generators to supply enough power to the system. It would be worth it.

Here's that Simpsons clip:






Many poker rooms had special promotions to lure players into spending game time there today--money and prizes handed out, and so forth. I didn't pick up any extra cash that way, sadly, but the Rio frequently splashed pots with official NFL Super Bowl hats and shirts, so I picked up this spiffy new outfit:





I call this work, "Self-portrait with Stupid Cheesy Grin and Super Bowl Apparel." It's destined to become a classic of the genre.

Addendum, May 6, 2012

I see that the embedded Simpsons clip is dead. But you can still watch the scene here:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7mj99_the-simpsons-electric-shock-aversio_shortfilms

It has to hurt

In the original Star Trek series episode "Mirror, Mirror," several members of the crew get switched, via one of those frighteningly frequent transporter malfunctions, into one of the many parallel universes which is almost but not quite like our own. In this one, doppelgangers of our heros are on a ship identical to the Enterprise, except that they are all selfish, power-hungry, violent, and cruel. Oh, and they tend to wear goatees and/or have facial scars, sure signs of all that is wicked.

In this mirror universe, each crew member is required to carry a small device called an "agonizer." In case of infraction of the rules of military conduct, a superior officer will take the offender's agonizer, activate it, and apply it to his body for whatever length of time is deemed appropriate to the occasion, resulting in unspeakable pain being inflicted. For the most serious offenses, such as mutiny or assassination, the guilty party was put into the "agony booth," which we must assume was unfathomably worse than the little agonizer device. See here and here for much more than any sane person would ever want to know about these instruments. What you see above is the unfortunate alt-Pavel Chekov receiving his torture for having staged a failed coup on board the mirror-universe starship. Tsk tsk tsk. As Mirror Spock coolly notes, "The agony booth is a most effective means of discipline."

Yes, there is a poker connection here. I've had more than my fair share of cold-deck situations over the past week, and it has brought back to mind a bunch of painful memories. I remember keenly:

--the first time I drew to the low end of a straight, got there, and only then realized what a bad spot I had gotten myself into.

--the first time I flopped trips and lost it all to a guy who had flopped a full house.

--the first time I had a full house and lost it all to a guy who had quads.

--the first time I had an ace-high flush and lost it all to a guy who had a straight flush.

--the first time I misread my hand, thinking I had the nut straight, when I actually had nothing, and called off all my chips, only to be thoroughly embarrassed when I turned over my cards and saw what I had done.

There is something about the pain of these moments that sears them into our souls. Mike McDermott observes in a rueful voiceover in "Rounders":

In "Confessions of a Winning Poker Player," Jack King said, "Few players recall
big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with
remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career." It seems true to
me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I
can't stop thinking of how I lost it.

(Transcription taken from the imdb.com page here.)

I recall that once when I was a small child my mother was preparing to do some ironing. The iron was standing idle on the ironing board. She was out of the room. I wondered whether the iron was on or off, so I did what seemed like the logical thing at the time: I reached out and touched its surface with my index finger. It was on. I cried, of course. When mom came to see what the fuss was about, and I told her that I had burned my hand on the iron, she asked, "Why did you touch it?" I thought that was the dumbest question possible. "I wanted to see if it was on." Of course.

It must have been somebody with a similar childhood experience who coined the expression, "Once burned, twice careful."

Some things do get better with time and experience--and some build-up of scar tissue. These days I am never as shocked at the kind of situations I listed above as I was the first time they happened. (Fortunately, I still haven't experienced the really horrendous beats--things like quads being beaten by a straight flush, or the low end of a straight flush being squashed by the high end.) Just the other day at the Rio I had 6-7 offsuit in the big blind, so I took the flop for free. I loved seeing it come 8-9-10, two-suited. I bet, got raised by the button. It was early in the session, so I was relatively short-stacked, and moving all in was a no-brainer. Of course I knew that it was possible he had one of the two hands that had me drawing nearly dead (7-J or J-Q). But on the other hand, he would raise me and be willing to call my reraise, probably, with any two pair or trips, and maybe something like a pair and flush draw, or a combined straight draw/flush draw, or even just the nut flush draw with no pair. It was not one of those situations where my all-in raise would get called only if I was beat. But this time he did, in fact, have the J-Q. The only way I could win was with a runner-runner flush or split the pot with a runner-runner J-Q, neither of which happened. Sigh.

The point, though, is that I have become considerably more callused to this sort of thing, and because I anticipated the possibility of being shown the nuts, it didn't stun me and send me reeling the way that those earlier stories did when they occurred. It's not that it doesn't hurt. It does. But my skin is thicker than it used to be, and I have learned to expect the unexpected. With anything short of the nuts, I'm braced to take whatever hit may come, and even with the nuts I'm mentally prepared to see my opponent turn over the same hand for a chop, when that is a possibility.

Before I started playing in real-money games online, I spent quite a bit of time with Wilson Software's simulator. It was, I suppose, useful in getting me used to the mechanics of play, and giving me some feel for what starting hands were likely to end up winners and losers, but I honestly can't remember a single hand I ever played on it. I think it's because none of them actually cost me anything. If I got knocked out of a tournament, I could say, "Oh well," and be in another one ten seconds later, with nothing lost--and nothing learned, I'm afraid, whether it was a bad beat or a bad play.

Simply put, if it doesn't hurt, it's a lot harder for the lesson to sink in. I'm sure there's some biochemical reason for that, related to neurotransmitters powerfully stimulating certain loci in the nucleus-of-whatever deep in the brain. But you don't need to know the physiology to recognize the truth of it.

Of course, the magnitude of loss it takes to inflict the kind of pain necessary for a long-term memory of the event to form will vary according to your means and past experiences. I remember reading a poker magazine story about Phil Ivey (probably in this issue of Bluff, which has an interview with him available online, but not the feature piece I'm remembering). His wife was just learning to play poker and was doing microstakes online. Phil came home on edge because he had had an unusually deep loss--a few hundred grand, as I recall. His wife was upset at her day, too; she told him that she had lost something like 70 cents, which is a lot when you're playing $0.01/$0.02 games. Talk about different pain thresholds!

Mike Sexton said it well during an episode of the World Poker Tour a couple of years ago, when somebody got knocked out of the final table on a one-outer: "If you don't like a little pain once in a while, poker is probably not your game, because as you can see, you're gonna get it."

Who needs an agony booth when you have poker?

More things I know are true (but would have a hard time proving)

Not many readers will likely remember, but this is actually the second post I've done on this topic. See here for the first.


1. Jacks are more likely to flop a set than any other pocket pair.

2. There is an inverse relationship between how good a parking spot one finds in the casino's parking garage and how successful the poker session will be. (Note: You cannot take advantage of this fact and manipulate it to success by intentionally parking far from the entrance. Sorry.)

3. Black aces are more powerful than red ones.

4. Even if a particular card room is traditionally a successful one for you, it will cease to be so if you visit it too many times in a row. After two good sessions in a row at one place, you must next play at a different room, or you will score an L. You can have infinitely many winning sessions in a row, as long as no more than two of them consecutively are in the same poker room. It is not possible to have three winning sessions in a row if all of them are in the same room.


Frankly, I don't understand why poker strategy books do not teach these simple facts.

A poker brainteaser

Playing at the Rio tonight, I saw a final board of Qh-Qd-Qs-9s-Ks. It occurred to me that almost every rank of poker hand was available with this unusual set of community cards. That made me wonder whether it is the maximum possible for a hold'em board.

What no player could have with this board are the lowest hand rankings: high card (i.e., no pair), one pair, or two pairs. Because of the trip queens, everybody will have a minimum of three of a kind. But every possible type of hand three of a kind or better is possible here. A 10-J in the hole yields a straight. Two spades makes a flush. There are a whole bunch of possible full houses (13, if I counted right, but don't quote me on that). A queen in the hole gives four of a kind. And 10-J in spades produces a straight flush. A royal flush is not possible here, but I don't consider that actually to be a different hand ranking; it is merely one type of straight flush.

So that makes six different ranks of hands possible with this board. The question is whether that is the most that any hold'em board could generate.

Here's another candidate board: Ah-Ad-Kh-Kd-10h. Here the worst hand any player could achieve would be two pairs, so at first glance I thought this might beat the previous board and yield seven different hand rankings. But as I scrutinized it more closely, I realized that three of a kind is not available here; any player who ends up with three cards of the same rank actually has a full house. So as with the previous board, six hand rankings are possible, though this time not all consecutive ones (because of skipping over trips).

After thinking about it for a little while, I came up with a board that surpasses both of these. If you enjoy puzzles, take some time and work it out for yourself, before you scroll down for my solution.


["Jeopardy" theme music plays here.]



















There are many similar possibilities, but the one I wrote down was Ah-Ad-Kd-Qd-Jd. If you held, say, 2-3 of clubs, you would have one pair. If you held J-2 of clubs, you would have two pairs. If you held A-2 of clubs, you would have three of a kind. If you held 10-2 of clubs, you would have a straight. If you held any diamond other than the 10, you would have a flush. There are six full houses possible. The other two aces in the hole gives you quads. And the 10d in your hand gives you a straight flush (the royal, in this case, though that's an unimportant distinction for this little game). That's every possible hand ranking except the lowest, a high card (no pair). This has to be the maximum, because in order to make a bare high card possible, you would have to have an unpaired board, but then you lose both the full house and quad possibilities, for a net loss of one ranking.

So eight is the maximum number of different hand ranks that might be available from one hold'em board.

If somebody wants to tackle the question of whether the answer is any different for Omaha, be my guest in the comments. Just thinking of that this late at night makes my head hurt.

Three things I know are true (but would have a hard time proving)

1. You are far more likely to flop a set (three of a kind) if the pocket pair you start with are of different colors than if you have either the two red ones or two black ones.

2. A flush draw in hearts is much more likely to hit than a flush draw in any other suit.

3. You get dealt better cards while listening to Elvis than with any other music in the MP3 player. At least this is true in Las Vegas; I can't swear to it being valid elsewhere.

They also serve who only sit and wait?

Most of the time that I'm in a poker room, there is within my field of vision at least one person who is just sitting close by a poker player, waiting, doing nothing, often for hours at a time.

This puzzles me. Don't these people have anything better to be doing? It's not like they're getting any quality time with their partner; the partner is paying attention to the game, and very little to the person waiting. Nor is the person waiting actively engaged in observing the game. Three or four times I've had friends or family members curious about this odd job of mine come to watch me play for 30 to 60 minutes, just to see what the life is like. They look at my hole cards with me and try to follow the action. That I understand--but that's clearly not what's going on with the couples that I'm talking about. No, with them it's just passing time in apparent boredom. And in the rooms that I frequent, it's often the same players and partners enduring these death watches, over and over and over again.

It's a mystery to me.

Why not go do something else? Why not bring a book to read, if you know you're going to be waiting that long? Why not go home or go to a movie, and meet back in the poker room at a pre-arranged time?

I will add two demographic observations here, and leave the cultural significance of them as a private exercise for the reader. First, as far as I can recall, I have never seen a male waiting for a female in this manner; it is always the reverse. Second, the great majority of these long-term sitters, and those for whom they are waiting, are Asian--I mean in the neighborhood of perhaps 90% of such couples, grossly disproportionate to their numbers as players.

What does that mean? I don't know.


(For those who don't catch the reference in the title of this post, see http://www.bartleby.com/59/6/theyalsoserv.html.)

A poker observation, from sad experience

The all-in bluff works just often enough to present a recurring temptation to deploy it, but not often enough to actually be profitable.

An observation

After playing a few tens of thousands of hands of Texas Hold'em, I've come to a conclusion: Five is rarely the right number of community cards for the dealer to put out. About half the time, I want them to stop at four. The other half, I want them to put out a sixth one. Five is almost always either one too many (because my opponent hits his miracle card) or one too few (because I haven't hit mine).

Poker gems, #9

Phil Laak, master of the obvious, on "High Stakes Poker," season 4, episode 2:

People are always trying to beat you. That's the problem with poker.

Poker gems, #3

Mike Sexton, commenting on a bad beat during a World Poker Tour event:

"If you don't like a little pain once in a while, poker is probably not your game, because as you can see, you're gonna get it."

Immutable law of poker

The cocktail waitress will only come right when it's your turn to play.

I have no idea why this is, but it is an undeniable, universal truth.