Poker gems, #427

Chris Wallace, in Poker Pro magazine column, June, 2011, page 65.

This is why the players at the higher limits just nod and smile when a new player sits down and says, "I had to move up here where people play real poker, you can't beat that lower game where no one knows how to fold a hand."

If you can't beat the weak game, then you sure as hell can't beat the game you just moved up to, and the regulars all know it! When I see this happen I know that the new player is going to lose his chips, but he will be happier doing it at the bigger table and he will chalk it up to a bad run of cards.

Let go of your desire to make the table behave the way you want it to and start adapting to your table. Letting the game come to you, and taking advantage of the mistakes your opponents make, is both less frustrating and more profitable.

They got the "L" outta there

This is the lead page of the cover story of the June, 2011, issue of Poker Pro magazine. I'm not sure I've ever seen a typo in larger print in any poker publication.

Nice proofreading job, Poker Pro!

If you fire your copy editor and need to hire another one, I know some people. Let's talk.

New poker games

Within the last week I have read about two new poker variants.

1.

The April issue of Poker Pro magazine had a feature on "2-11" poker, which you can also read about here. The name comes from the structure of the game, which has a two-card flop (they call it a "flip"), turn, and river: 2-1-1. Each player is dealt four hole cards. There are four rounds of betting just as in hold'em and Omaha. You make you best five-card hand using either two from your hand and three from the board or three from your hand and two from the board.

It appears that the ability to use three hole cards increases the opportunity to sneak up on opponents with unsuspected monsters--e.g., quads can be made with three in the hand and one on board. Two of a suit on the board is enough to give somebody a flush. It is no longer the case that the board has to be paired in order to make a full house. Etc.

If I've done my math right, you can combine your seven cards in hold'em in 21 different ways to find your best hand; in Omaha (high) you can combine your nine cards in 60 different ways (6 combinations of two cards from your hand times 10 combinations of three cards from the board). In 2-11 poker you can combine your eight cards in 48 different ways (4 ways to combine two out of four cards and 6 ways to combine three out of four makes 24 ways to mix two in your hand and three on the board, plus 24 ways to mix three in your hand and two on the board). This puts it mid-way between hold'em and Omaha in the complexity of reading opponents' holdings. I would think that it would similarly fall mid-way between those two other games in how close to the nuts you'd have to come in order to expect a win.

The game can be played limit or no-limit (or, presumably, pot-limit, though that isn't mentioned anywhere), for high only or high-low split.

The magazine article says that they have been spreading this at the Bicycle Casino to great success. They're using it in some tournaments in alternating rounds with hold'em.

It's patented, which I assume means that any casino wanting to spread it will have to pay a licensing fee. Which, in turn, is necessarily going to limit its growth and popularity. Too bad--I think it would be fun and challenging to try.

2.

I was looking over the schedule for the June Deep Stack Extravaganza at the Venetian when I noticed an unusual event: June 15, "Position Poker (TM)." I found the company's web site here, and an interview with Johnny Chan (obviously a paid endorser) here.

Basically, in addition to the regular button for hold'em or Omaha (or, presumably, any other game with blinds and a dealer button, such at 2-7 triple draw), there is a "winner's button" awarded to the winner of the previous pot. The player with this button acts on each betting round after the regular button. This rewards players who are active and mixing it up; win a hand, and it increases your power to win the next hand. Play tight, and you're punished by almost never having last action.

This variant, too, has been awarded a patent, and, one would guess, they will also demand licensing fees for casinos to offer it, so we're not likely to see it on the menu for regular cash games. Just as well. This one appeals to me a lot less than 2-11, for three reasons. (1) It doesn't reward my generally tight style of play. (2) People already have a hard enough time with playing in turn. The recent proliferation of various button-straddle rules always, always, always causes confusion and slows everything down and gets the order of play screwed up because players are thrown off by anything more complex than strict clockwise action. I think this two-button thing would just be more of the same kind of problems. (3) It just isn't different enough to interest me. It might call for altered tactics, but it doesn't require wholesale rethinking of the game and how to read opponents' hands the way 2-11 will.

Still, I'd be curious to try either one if it were offered locally. If anybody hears of them showing up, please let me know, and I'll pass the word on here.

Poker gems, #405

Chris "Fox" Wallace, in Poker Pro magazine column, December, 2010, p. 71.


Over the years I have never had a student who is losing money because he is playing too tight in cash games. Occasionally I have advised a student to play a few more hands in late position, and I have advised almost all of them to be more positional overall, but I have never had a student who really needs to loosen up.

Nice editing, morons

This notice (probably actually an ad disguised as copy; I am cynical enough to suspect that companies have to pay to get mentioned in this kind of feature) showed up in the November issue of Poker Pro magazine.

Notice a slight contradiction between the text and the image?

Well, what can you expect from a magazine that claims to cater to professional poker players, but spends the last couple pages of every issue listing hand rankings and the best hold'em starting hands?

Poker gems, #396

Al Neipris, in Poker Pro magazine, November, 2010, p. 75.


I wouldn't be surprised if a few stressed-out card players are already starting to pop up in psychiatrists' offices around the country complaining about their inability to stay off tilt.

Once the shrinks get hold of a thing, can medicalization be far behind? There are pills for anxiety, pills for depression, pills for seeing little green men. The pharmaceutical industry rakes in billions of dollars of profit every year. If they think there's money to be made, you can be sure they'll be trotting out some sort of anti-tilt pill sooner rather than later.

Poker gems, #395

Chris Wallace, in Poker Pro magazine column, November, 2010, p. 67.


He began to remind me of the tournament player who says something like: "The next time you come after my big blind, I'm raising with any two."

To a solid player this statement means: "Go ahead and steal my blinds all day. I hate when people do it, and my best defense is to try to scare them because I am not capable of reraising unless I have a big hand."

Poker gems, #391

Phil Laak, in Poker Pro magazine, October, 2010, p. 68, on discussing hands at the table.


If you spend your time learning and thinking about the game, what's the point in talking about it? It's like playing Capture the Flag, then having an open meeting about where you hid your flag and letting your opponents hear. Make it harder for them.... You don't need to impress friends or influence people and have them think you know poker. Your objective is to walk away with more than you started with.

Lying or mistaken?

In the October issue of Poker Pro magazine, Carl Sampson reviews a hand from the 2008 NBC Heads Up Poker Championship. It's Andy Bloch versus Chris Ferguson in the final round. It's played best two out of three, and Bloch won the first match. Here's the first hand of the second match:




I'm sure I watched this when it first aired, though it didn't make any lasting impression on me.

Sampson questions whether Bloch really misread his hand. If Bloch genuinely thought he had Q-8 instead of Q-5, wouldn't he have made the continuation bet on the flop? He was in position, and his hand would have been as good as he could expect it to be. He had raised pre-flop, and so could represent having the ace. Besides, the I-have-you-beat-whoops-no-I-don't schtick seems kind of phony, a little Hollywood.

Which is all true. However, I'm inclined to think Bloch was being honest about his error.

Why check behind on the flop if he thought he had caught second pair? Pot control. Avoid a check-raise, which would have meant making the difficult decision about whether Ferguson did or did not have an ace. Also, he didn't have to bet to protect against any flush or straight draws, because the flop presented almost none.

Sampson reasons that Bloch had floated Ferguson's turn bet with the intention of the river going bet-raise, an audacious bluff on the river, having sensed weakness in Ferguson. However, when Ferguson didn't follow up his turn bet with a river bet, that plan went to hell. Sampson's theory is that Ferguson is more likely to make a thin call there after a check and a bet than after a bet and a raise, so the planned river bluff lost much of its value.

Sampson also argues that Bloch's plan was to keep Ferguson from knowing that Bloch had raised pre-flop with a hand as marginal as Q-5. But that doesn't make sense to me for two reasons. First, Ferguson well knows that proper heads-up strategy means raising in position a hefty percentage of the time, including with hands like Q-5. It's not like he's going to recalibrate his idea of what Bloch is capable of by gaining that bit of data. And Bloch knows that Ferguson knows that. In other words, the fact that Bloch had raised on the button with Q-5 is not something that he needs to keep secret, as if it's some wildly creative bit of play that will give away his game plan. Second, if Bloch was lying about the misread of his hand, and if Sampson's theory is correct, then Bloch would have simply mucked his cards unseen after Ferguson showed the winner. That would have left Ferguson wondering if Bloch had raised pre-flop with a big ace that missed, with a tiny pair (2-2 or 3-3), or with air.

Something that Sampson doesn't address is the breach of ethics that Bloch would be guilty of if he had deliberately miscalled his hand, announcing to Ferguson that he had him beat. It's inconceivable that he would shoot an angle trying to get Ferguson to pick up his tabled hand and throw it in the muck; there's no way that Ferguson would do that, or that Bloch would think such a trick would work, or that Bloch would be so sleazy as to try. But even the phony announcement of having the winner, quickly followed by the truth, is a pretty scummy thing to do to an opponent, especially one that you respect and consider a friend (and in this particular case, one that is Bloch's business partner in Full Tilt). I have a hard time believing that Bloch would do that. What is there to be gained by it? As a joke? Nobody is going to think that's funny in such a high-pressure situation. Maybe in a penny-ante home game, but not on this stage.

Overall, my conclusion is that it is more plausible that Bloch genuinely made a mistake here. At some point, his brain saw the 8 on the flop and translated that into a memory that he held Q-8 in the hole. (I have done such a thing a few times. I get in my mind what cards I want to see come, and crossed mental wires lead me to believe that what I want to see is what I have and vice-versa.) I think his play, his actions, and his words are reasonably consistent with that scenario. However, it is not wholly out of the question that Sampson is right and that Bloch was lying about misreading his hand. If he was, though, I'm hard-pressed to understand what he hoped to accomplish with the song-and-dance.

What do you think?

Poker gems, #365

Steve Fischer, author of When the Mob Ran Vegas, in an article on the demise of Binion's Horseshoe, in Poker Pro magazine, June, 2010, p. 43. The background is that Benny Binion owns the casino, but has to rent the land on which it sits from the Silvagni family, represented by Bill Coulthard. They renegotiated the rate every ten years--this time in 1972.


"You want how much rent, you sum'bitch? declared Benny. "If you think there's anyway in hell that I'm going to sit still for you doubling my rent for the next ten years, you better think again, shyster!"

Coulthard told him he didn't mind if Benny wanted to pack up his casino and get out when their current ten-year agreement expired later in the year. And then Benny told Coulthard what he could do with his new rent. And Bill Coulthard walked out of the Horseshoe into the heat, walked across the street to his car in the parking garage, sat down in his car, turned on the starter, and Bill Coulthard and his nice new 1972 Cadillac were blown all over the second level of the parking garage. The Metro police and the FBI were in agreement that it was probably four sticks of dynamite that blew him and his car to Kingdom Come.

With Coulthard out of the picture, the Binions and the next of Silvagni's relatives sat down with Benny to discuss the terms for the next ten years. For some reason, the Silvagni family, who didn't much like Bill Coulthard anyway, was very eager to reach a new rental agreement with the Binions. It took less than ten minutes to agree to terms.

"Damn shame what happened to Coulthard," Benny said. "Just a damn shame."

I think you might have forgotten someone

The May, 2010, issue of Poker Pro magazine has an article by Chad Holloway (about whom I know nothing), listing who he thinks would make the best picks for a fantasy poker team in deuce-to-seven events at the World Series of Poker.

I wasn't really interested in reading the article. I basically knew who had to be in the number one slot: Billy Baxter. So I flipped the page to get to the end of the list (being presented in Lettermanesque reverse order), and was mighty surprised to find that he had David Grey as his top pick. So I scanned back through the other names to see where he might have ranked Baxter. I was dumbfounded: he hadn't made the cut at all.

A digression for a moment, if I may. An event in one of the first couple of seasons of the World Poker Tour had Chau Giang at the final table. I had never heard of him before. Mike Sexton had nothing but praise for him during the player introductions. He said something like this: "People might disagree on who the best five poker players in the world are, but if you make any list of the top five and don't include Chau Giang on it, you have made a mistake."

Well, let me steal that sentiment for current purposes: If you make a list of the top ten deuce-to-seven players, and it doesn't include Billy Baxter, you have made a mistake. Period. It's like listing the best chess players without mentioning Gary Kasparov, or best superheros and omitting Superman.

Baxter has won seven--SEVEN!--World Series of Poker bracelets, every single one of them in lowball events, including five--FIVE!--in deuce-to-seven. (The others were in razz and ace-to-five lowball.) What record does Mr. Holloway think even comes close to that?

In addition to the wins, Baxter has made eight other WSOP final-table appearances, all of them in lowball events, including five in deuce-to-seven.

I mean, just look at the list of his major tournament cashes, here. Go ahead--scan down the list (it will take some scrolling) and see how many single-digit finishes you find in deuce-to-seven and other lowball events. Without even trying to do a comprehensive check, I'd bet $100 that nobody else in history has a record of cashes or final tables in these forms of poker that can top Baxter's.

Do we really need to remind anyone that he is in the Poker Hall of Fame in large measure because of his phenomenal, unparalleled, decades-long dominance of lowball poker?

When I read the Poker Pro article in a little more detail (once I had decided to rant here about it, I thought I should probably read it first--good idea, dontcha think?), I learned why Baxter got omitted. The author's methodology was just to use WSOP record books from 2005-2009. Though Baxter had a deuce-to-seven final table as recently as 2008, his last bracelet was in 2002. Hence, he is off of Mr. Holloway's radar screen.

But if you think that on that basis he should be left out of a betting pool for the events that he has dominated like no other player, well, I think you're a fool. If the event is lowball, and Baxter is in the field, only bet against him if you don't like money. It's really that simple.

Poker gems, #355

Chris "Fox" Wallace, in Poker Pro magazine column, April, 2010, p. 64.


A $5-$10 spread-limit game has been running regularly at my local cardroom (Running Aces Harness Park in Minnesota), and I've been heading out there more often lately.... Minnesota state law limits the maximum bet size to $60, so it's not possible to make the kind of money I make online, but it helps fight the cabin fever. Don't even get me started about a state that advertises its lottery all over billboards and allows a drunk to buy a thousand dollars worth of pull-tabs in most of the bars in town but has set a $60 cap on poker games. Ridiculous.

Poker gems, #354

Larry Flynt, as quoted in Poker Pro magazine, March, 2010, p. 32. [Slightly redacted to maintain my G rating.]


My two favorite things are [women] and poker--but not in that order.

Poker gems, #343

Steve Brust, as quoted in Chris Wallace's column for Poker Pro magazine, February, 2010, p. 77.


Probably the biggest thing I'm working to overcome is fear--fear of losing money, and fear of looking like an idiot. The answer to fear is math: if the numbers say it is profitable to make a certain play, then you make that play. Math overcomes fear. If word of this gets out, it may change the world.

Poker gems, #337

Andrew Robl, in Poker Pro magazine profile, January, 2010, p. 29.


My friend Alec [Torelli] topped his trip to Vegas by finishing first in the $1,000 buy-in tournament at the Bellagio two days in a row, taking down around $200,000. That's an accomplishment worth noting. So we celebrated by going to the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace and playing The Price Is Right.

In our version of the game, we visit stores like Tiffany, Gucci and Diesel, find thiings that we both like and each guess the price. Whoever is closest, the other guy has to buy the item for him.

It's one or the other, not both

I noticed the above half-page ad in the new issue of Poker Pro magazine.

Right under the site's name it says "Exclusive gaming community." The in the copy underneath it says, "Everyone is welcome to join."

Well, which is it? Exclusive, or open to everyone?

Poker gems, #325

James McManus, in interview in Poker Pro magazine, November, 2009, p. 39, about his new history of poker, Cowboys Full.


Q: The book describes a lot of presidential poker. If all living presidents and the ghosts of dead ones visit the White House tonight for a five-table, 100 electoral vote buy-in, no-limit hold'em tournament, which one do you back? And if you're running the tournament, which ones do you keep a sharp eye on?

A: Good question! But the evidence is conclusive that Eisenhower was by far the toughest player, though Nixon did very well for himself during his stint in the Navy. So I would bet on Ike and Tricky Dick. At the same time, while there's no evidence that Nixon cheated at poker, he certainly cheated in politics, so I'd have to watch him the closest. As John Dean might put it, "There's a cancer on Table 16."

Poker gems, #243

Doyle Brunson, in Super/System, as quoted in Bob Silverstein, "Understanding 'Internal Tells' Will Give You an Edge," Poker Pro magazine, May, 2009, p. 69.


Sure you want to study the emotional makeup of your opponents. But of all the players at the poker table, the one whose capabilities and limitations are going to affect you the most is the one sitting in your chair.

This year's Phil Hellmuth WSOP embarrassment

Last year, UltimateBet's theme for ads for its WSOP satellite system was all about joining the UB army. Then Phil Hellmuth made his "grand" entrance to the Main Event as a World War II general.

I spied the above ad in the new issue of Poker Pro magazine, and I assume it will be repeated in every other poker publication. Does that mean that Hellmuth's entrance this year will be in Roman garb, perhaps as Julius Caesar wearing a toga? In other words, is it possible that they have found something more embarrassing than the NASCAR gimmick of 2007 and even more embarrassing than the Patton thing?

If so, I think I'll go dressed as Brutus and carry out my designated historical role.

Et tu, Grump?

Multiaccounting acknowledged

Last night I picked up the new (April) issue of Poker Pro magazine while at Fitzgeralds. I was surprised, but pleased, to see a feature--mentioned on the cover, no less--about online multiaccounting.

On pp. 32-35 they have short statements from ten online pros. They are of variable quality and depth of thought. The least helpful just sound like PR statements denouncing the practice without ever making clear exactly what is being talked about. But at least a few of them take the trouble to distinguish between simply having more than one account on a site and actually using more than one at a time. Some also make clear that any advantage gained is probably much more important at the higher stakes, and may be negligible at low stakes. (This certainly matches my experience. I think that only a small minority of the opponents I face are capable of noticing playing patterns, remembering them, and adjusting to them. Also, since there is a much larger pool of players at low stakes, the advantages of being disguised are proportionately reduced; most of the time one is facing a table of all unknowns anyway.) A few even acknoweldge that there are ethical "gray areas," where right and wrong are not clear.

It's not anything like a comprehensive discussion of the complex issues involved. For example, nobody mentions that among low-stakes players the most common motivation for opening a second account may be simply to get rakeback, having nothing to do with attempts to hide oneself or deceive opponents or cheat in a MTT. Still, it is something of a milestone merely to have one of the major poker magazines openly admit that the practice is going on. My friend Shamus last year did two thoughtful posts on the tension between poker magazines' roles as reporters of news and as cheerleaders for the game's image, an inherent conflict that is obviously further poisoned by the publications' dependence on the advertising revenues from poker rooms (both B&M and online ones). See here and here. That's why I was surprised to see such frank discussion of the problem in Poker Pro.

Kudos to the editor-in-chief, John Wenzel, for having the courage to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

On a tangentially related note, there is this interesting TED Lecture about research into cheating, and the psychological and social factors that make it not simply a cost-benefit analysis. (Thanks to Cardgrrl for the pointer.)