Background

I'm watching Season 7 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" from Netflix. In the middle of an episode, from out of nowhere pops Erik Seidel! After I noticed him there, I remembered having read about how he won the part of an extra on the show by bidding in some sort of charity auction, but I had forgotten all about it.

Poker is everywhere!

Nice touch, Ali!

In this week's installment of the NBC Heads-Up Championship, we see Erik Seidel paired against Andrew Robl. In their final hand, Seidel flops a full house and improves to a better boat on the river. Robl starts with pocket queens and has two pair on the river. Seidel moves all in. Robl is tortured about whether to call and possibly thereby lose the match. In the voiceover, Ali Nejad intones that Robl "cannot win this hand and yet he doesn't know it."

I laughed out loud. It was a wonderful tidbit of a reward for viewers who know their poker history. When Erik Seidel got heads-up against Johnny Chan, those were the exact words used by the TV commentator in their final pot, and Nejad even aped his tone and pacing. You can watch that hand play out here.

I heartily approve of such nods to history.

Erik Seidel knows

They should have put the "100%" graphic next to Seidel's cards as soon as he was dealt the Mighty Deuce-Four.

Interestingly, Seidel took a little while (maybe ten seconds) to call Selbst's bluff check-raise. When the hand was over, she asked if he had been contemplating a reraise. Clearly he wasn't. She seemed genuinely shocked that he would take any time at all to choose between a call and a fold in that spot. My guess is that Seidel has had third-nut hands beaten a whole lot more times than Selbst has, and hence plays them more cautiously than is her inclination.

Poker gems, #416

Lance Bradley, in a profile of Erik Seidel in the May, 2011, Bluff magazine, p. 81.

If you forget about the luckboxes who've made the WSOP Main Event final table, Erik Seidel has already won more money in 2011 than anybody else won in any single year since 2004. And the year's not even close to being half over.

What am I missing?

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









Erik Seidel took a more humorous approach:



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just my guesses here

Number of poker-related web sites that mentioned this week's induction of Dan Harrington and Erik Seidel into the Poker Hall of Fame: 7,862.

Number of those that misspelled Seidel's first name as "Eric": 7,804.

Bracelet race

Shamus just put up an interesting blog post about the bracelet race between Phil Hellmuth and Phil Ivey. For me this neatly coincided with having yesterday read an article by Storms Reback in the July issue of All In magazine that gave his rating of the ten greatest WSOP players of all time. In order, he listed Hellmuth, Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss, Stu Ungar, Ivey, Barry Johnston, Erik Seidel, Scotty Nguyen, and T.J. Cloutier.

As Reback recognizes, overall WSOP performance is about more than bracelets; it also involves cashing and making final tables, and doing so consistently over many years. Although I rather despise Men Nguyen, while preparing the stats below I was impressed to see that he has finished 2nd, 3rd, or 4th in WSOP events an amazing 20 times, in addition to his seven wins. I think he might have a stronger argument for a spot on Reback's list than a couple of the other nominees.

Anyway, I was curious how the bracelet race would look when graphed over the years, since those with the most have been at it for very different periods of time. So I whipped up the following graph of bracelets by years to see how their trajectories looked. I included seven of the eight top bracelet winners (Hellmuth, Brunson, Chan, Ivey, Seidel, Men Nguyen, and Billy Baxter), excluding only Moss. His trajectory is, well, dead; he is unlikely to earn any more bracelets unless the WSOP adopts Chicago-style voting to determine winners.





Brunson's line doesn't really disappear; it's just hiding behind that of Chan, as they coincide for the past several years.

What do we learn from this? Not a lot that wasn't already obvious, I suppose. Baxter has been the longest without notching up; he started off earlier than any of the others and kept a pretty steady pace for a long time, but has perhaps come as far as he is going to go by this metric. (I hope not. I'd love to see him show up the young whippersnappers another time or two before he's done, and yell at them to get off of his lawn during his acceptance speech.)

Brunson started off like gangbusters, racking up six in four years, then has a long stretch of none (I think he played very few events during those years), and just a slow trickle since then.

With one exception, the other lines are rather similar, though with varying degrees of lurching in their progressions. Hellmuth's appears to me to be the most saltatory, Seidel's the most consistently stepwise, with the others somewhere in between.

The striking exception, obviously, is Ivey. He shows up for the first time in 2000, a full eight years behind the most Johnny-Chan-come-lately of the others (Seidel and Nguyen), and rockets up, with the slope of his line, from start to finish, being far steeper than any of the others.

Just for fun, and fully recognizing that it's an utterly meaningless exercise, I wondered how the lines would project into the future, if we assumed that the players would continue racking up bracelets at the same pace as they have since earning their first. Here are their respective numbers for bracelets per year:

Hellmuth: 0.52
Brunson: 0.32
Chan: 0.40
Ivey: 0.80
Seidel: 0.44
Nguyen: 0.39
Baxter: 0.20

You'll notice that one of those figures is far higher than the others, confirming what you would expect from the graph and from just the general knowledge of the relatively short time span in which Ivey has left his mark.

If we project those rates ten years into the future (a completely preposterous assumption for any number of reasons, but bear with me), we would find these rounded totals at the end of WSOP 2020:

Hellmuth: 16
Brunson: 13
Chan: 14
Ivey: 16
Seidel: 12
Nguyen: 11
Baxter: 9

And these for the year 2030:

Hellmuth: 21
Brunson: 16
Chan: 18
Ivey: 24
Seidel: 16
Nguyen: 15
Baxter: 11

So that's my back-of-the-envelope prediction: Ivey catches Hellmuth in 2020, then leaves him in the dust. (Some of the others are, actuarily speaking, also likely to be in the dust by then, in a different sense, but let's not dwell on that.)

You heard it here first.

Chan and Seidel--once more unto the breach

Having another insomnia night. It might have something to do with having heard six gunshots in rapid succession just outside my apartment complex as I was going to bed at about 1:30 a.m., followed by sirens and a police helicopter circling overhead. (Speaking of which, Nevada has been crowned the #1 state in crime for the seventh consecutive year! Go team!)

Killing time, I was jumping around the PokerWorks web site. I noticed a link to something about the famous final hand of the 1988 World Series of Poker, featuring Johnny Chan and Erik Seidel. I wondered if they would get it right, since, as I've chronicled here ad nauseum, writers have a nasty tendency to screw up the facts.

As Britney Spears might say, oops, they did it again.

Here's the entirety of the very brief piece:

At the WSOP 1988 final table, Johnny Chan was dealt J♣ 9♣, and Erik Seidel
was dealt Q♣ 7♥ pre-flop. They both limped.

The flop came Q♠ T♥ 8♦, giving Chan a straight and Seidel a pair of Queens.
Chan bet $40.000 and Seidel raised $50.000. Chan called.

The turn came the 2♠, which didn't change either player's hand. Chan
checked and Seidel moved all-in, the trap was set for Seidel; Chan called.

The river brought the 6♦ and Johnny Chan was crowned the Champion.

The cards are correct as stated. The action, however, is all messed up, except for the true statement that both players limped pre-flop.

Here's what really happened: Chan had the button and was therefore last to act on each round after the flop. Seidel checked, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised another $50,000, and Chan called. The action was check-check on the turn. On the river, Seidel open-shoved, and Chan called.

I have written about this hand, and the almost countless ways that poker authors get the facts wrong, on three previous occasions: here, here, and here. The anonymous PokerWorks writer joins at least ten other well-known poker authors that have misstated in print or online the basic facts of how the hand played out. (I'm guessing that whoever wrote this for PokerWorks is European, based on the use of periods in the bet amounts, where we Yankees would use commas.)

This is so astonishing to me because you can watch the whole hand on YouTube. It could not possibly be easier to see exactly what happened. This hand has been seen by tens of millions of people, between rebroadcasts of the event, the clip being shown in various poker shows, featured in Rounders, and available on the web for viewing at any time. It may well have been seen, in total, by more people than have viewed any other poker hand in history. And still writers continue to describe it erroneously. Why, why, why??? How can so many people be so sloppy about such readily verified facts?

To quote myself from the last time I addressed this subject, "I remained completely unable to explain this baffling, annoying, and disturbing phenomenon. If authors get facts wrong when they are this easy to check, one cannot help wondering what else they are screwing up."

Incidentally, it has now been more than two years since Gary Wise told me via email that he would correct the errors that appeared in a piece he wrote for his web site here. I first wrote about the Chan-Seidel hand in January, 2008. My friend Shamus submitted a comment in which he pointed me to Wise's note. I emailed Wise to alert him to the errors, and he responded with a note saying that he would fix them, though I didn't write anything about it in my blog post at the time. However, by August, 2008, when the subject came up again as a result of James McManus getting things wrong in an article in Card Player magazine, I took the opportunity to chide Wise for not having corrected his mistakes. I do so again now, more than two years after he said he would fix the problems.


For the record, I'm embedding below a version of the video clip from YouTube that is somewhat easier to see clearly than the one I used in my first post on this subject.


(See here if you don't know the origin of the "once more unto the breach" used in the title of this post.)

Not again?!

I've been reading every installment of James McManus's articles on the history of poker that Card Player magazine has been running for a year or so now. Great stuff, always interesting. The August 13, 2008, issue has the third part on the history of the World Series of Poker.

So I'm innocently reading along, when he gets to the famous Johnny Chan/Erik Seidel heads-up confrontation of 1988, and says, "In the final hand, already down 300,000 to 1.4 million in chips, he [Seidel] flopped the top pair; his problem was that Chan had flopped the nut straight. The crafty champion was able to trap the New Yorker into going all in on the turn with his pair of queens."

My heart sank. Not yet another author getting this hand wrong?!

It was especially painful because I have so admired McManus's writing. His brilliant Positively Fifth Street was literally the first book about poker I ever read.* I bought it at the airport book/gift shop on my way to Vegas in either 2003 or 2004 (can't remember for sure offhand), the trip on which I tried playing poker at a casino for the very first time. (It was a cheapo daily tournament at the Luxor. You'd be shocked to know how completely clueless I was. I lasted about 20 minutes.) That trip is what hooked me on the game, and McManus's book was a large part of the allure. I've read it three times, and think it's the best non-strategy poker book I've read. (This isn't to say that strategy books are better than non-strategy books; they're just so different that it's not easy to compare across categories.) So when reading his poker history articles, I had been thinking that McManus was careful about his facts, a source I could count on to get things right. [Insert disillusioned sigh here.] I guess not.

Let's set the record straight: The action on the turn was check-check. It was only after the river card was out that Seidel pushed all in and Chan called.

I first wrote about this in January, when I noticed an article by David Apostolico getting the action all wrong, and attempting to draw lessons from the hand that were completely bogus, because it didn't happen the way it would have had to for those so-called lessons to be valid.

I wrote about it again in May, when I discovered two more books that got the basic facts of the action wrong.

I might as well take this opportunity also to call out Gary Wise for getting things wrong in a historical note that Shamus pointed out to me in a comment on my January post. I contacted Mr. Wise via email in January and he said he would be correcting the error soon, but he still has not done so--hence the chastisement here. Wise writes, "When the turn brought the brick both players were looking for, Chan checked knowing Eric [Grump notes: he even spells Seidel's name wrong!] would follow his strong move on the flop with another bet. Seidel, knowing John had some kind of hand and that he hadn’t been helped by the turn, bet all-in, hoping to take down the pot right there. Chan called, and after another brick on the river, was crowned the champion." Wise also erred in stating that Chan had a "slight chip lead" going into this hand, when actually it was a greater than 4:1 lead.

So here's a list of the authors that I know of so far who have misstated one or more basic facts about how the hand went down:

• David Apostolico
• Gary Wise
• Dana Smith, Tom McEvoy, and Ralph Wheeler, in The Championship Table at the World Series of Poker, Cardoza Publishing, 2nd edition, 2004, pp. 112-113
• Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger, in Poker for Dummies, p. 140
• Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan, in Aces and Kings, p. 111
• James McManus

Ten poker authors, all writing about what is perhaps the most famous and most viewed hand in poker history--one which can be viewed in full at one's leisure on YouTube (the video clip is included in an addendum to my original post back in January)--have all gotten it wrong.

I remained completely unable to explain this baffling, annoying, and disturbing phenomenon. If authors get facts wrong when they are this easy to check, one cannot help wondering what else they are screwing up.


*It's not really relevant to this post, but it's time I got a confession off of my chest. I always thought that McManus's title was kind of odd. I mean, sure, I got the "Fifth Street" part, but why "Positively"? Don't laugh at me, but it was not until last year that I somehow stumbled across a reference to a 1965 Bob Dylan song called "Positively 4th Street," and it finally dawned on me where McManus's title had come from. I can be incredibly dense and oblivious sometimes.


Addendum, April 11, 2010

The McManus article is now available online, here. Sadly, McManus repeated exactly the same errors in the book version of his history, Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, published late last year, on page 290.

Celebrity sighting

The Moneymaker effect has completely taken over the Palms this week, so it's appropriate to have spotted the guy it's named for playing in the poker room.

I was in the other room (the Palms has sort of a split poker room, with the two sides divided by a hallway), so I didn't get to watch the activity, just snuck over for the photo.

But one player at my table had just been moved over from a table in that room and had watched the goings-on for a while. He admitted that he didn't watch poker on TV, so he wasn't too up on putting names with faces of poker pros. But there had been, he said, another pro that everybody seemed to know playing on that side. He said it was a lighter-skinned black man, and that he was arguing with the player next to him. He thought maybe it was Erik Seidel.

I couldn't help laughing. I don't know who this guy saw, but (1) it's unlikely that anybody would describe Seidel as black (light-skinned or otherwise), (2) he's about the least likely guy in the entire poker universe to be arguing with another player, (3) he's not likely to be sitting in a $1-3 or $2-5 game (all that the Palms had to offer), and (4) he's probably not going to be at a PokerStars gathering, being a Team Full Tilt pro. Other than those small points, yeah, sure, it could have been Seidel.

Call of the day

As reported a few minutes ago by Gene Bromberg, live reporting for PokerNews on the $1,000 No-Limit Hold'em Rebuy event at the World Series of Poker:

Jack-High?

With the board reading 3s 2s 4h 8h 2c, Jamie Gold bet 500 and Erik
Seidel called. "Beat that!" Gold said, slapping 9d 5d for the busted straight
draw. Seidel tabled Jh Ts and took down the pot.

Wow.

Sure, it was not a huge bet. And they were still in the rebuy period. And it was Jamie Gold, who brags that he wants to be known as the best bluffer in poker, and who, as followers of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" show well know, is much more likely to bluff on the river than to value-bet it.

But still--jack high?

Wow.

Nice call, Mr. Seidel.


Addendum

Uh, never mind. Update, from the same source:

Oops

Before the break we posted a hand where Erik Seidel won a hand where he
called a bet by Jamie Gold holding Jack-high. That was wrong--Seidel had two
tens, not Jack -Ten. It's a testament to Seidel's paranormal skills that when
someone tells you that he called down a hand with Jack-high and took down the
pot, you say, "That sounds odd...but it's Erik Seidel...so anything is
possible". Still, my bad.

Two more books get it wrong

Back in January I wrote about some published sources that have significant details wrong in their descriptions of one of the most famous hands in poker history, Johnny Chan versus Erik Seidel at the conclusion of the main event of the 1988 World Series of Poker.

I just found two more.

Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger, in Poker for Dummies, have a chapter on bluffing. In a sidebar on p. 140 they discuss Chan's "reverse bluff" with the nuts:

Chan had won the World Series the previous year and had been on a roll ever
since. Here he was, 12 months later, with a chance to win back-to-back titles.
But he'd need some magic to accomplish it. Seidel, a former commodities broker
from New York, left Wall Street for the life of a professional poker player; and
now he had a big chip lead on the defending champ.

At this point in the tournament, the blinds were $10,000 and $20,000. Chan
was first to act on each betting round. The flop was Qs 10d 8d.

Chan checked. Seidel bet $50,000. Chan called. The turn card was a complete
blank, and both men checked. The fifth and final card was another blank. Chan
checked.

Seidel held a queen in his hand, giving him top pair, albeit with a weak
kicker. He thought for a moment that Chan might have a queen with a better
kicker. But by checking on the turn and on the river, Chan passed up his final
chance to bet!

Seidel then pushed all of his chips into the center of the table, certainly
a sizeable enough bet to cause Chan to release any slightly better hand in the
event that Seidel had misread him. Seidel thought his all-in bet would prevent
Chan from calling with hands such as a queen with a better kicker, or two small
pair.

Seidel had, in fact, misread Chan. And not by a little, but by a lot. Chan
smiled as he turned over his hand. Chan had flopped a straight with the Jc
9c.

Here are the errors:

1. Seidel did not have the chip lead; Chan did--by about 4:1, in fact. That's why when he won this hand, the tournament was over. If Seidel had the chip lead, how do Harroch and Krieger explain the fact that the tournament was over when Seidel lost the hand? It's true that when heads-up play began, Seidel had a chip lead on Chan ($1.2 million to $470,000, according to Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan's Aces and Kings, p. 111.) However, by the time the final hand came up, Chan was way ahead.

2. The 10 on the flop was the 10h, not 10d. This can be seen clearly in the video clip from YouTube, included in the addendum to my original post.

3. Chan was not "first to act on each betting round." He had the button.

4. Chan did not check on the flop. The action was that Seidel checked, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised an additional $50,000, and Chan called.

5. Chan did not check on the river; the action was Seidel moving all-in, followed by Chan's call. Thus, Chan did not "pass up his final chance to bet," as Harroch and Krieger claim (with an exclamation mark for emphasis, even).

I'm also pretty sure that Seidel had not yet set out on the life of a poker pro at this point; the WSOP was kind of a lark for him. Kaplan and Reagan report Seidel saying that it was doing so well in this tournament that made him realize that "maybe I could make a living from poker" (p. 111).

Let me also take this opportunity to point out yet another error in David Apostolico's report, one that I overlooked in my previous post on this subject. He said that the queen on the flop was the queen of clubs. Nope. It was, as Harroch and Krieger correctly report, and as can be seen clearly in the video clip, the Qs. Seidel was holding the Qc.

When re-checking some of the above, I noticed that yet another published source has the action wrong! Kaplan and Reagan, in Aces and Kings, p. 111, repeat the Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler error, discussed in my original post, of saying that Chan checked on the turn, followed by Seidel moving all-in. This in spite of them acknowledging earlier in the same paragraph that Chan had the dealer button! If Chan checked the turn on the button, that necessarily means that Seidel had checked first (which is correct). So how can they then say that Seidel moved all-in on the turn after Chan's check? In theory, that anomaly might be explained by Seidel making his all-in move in the dark, after Chan's turn check but before the dealer had put out the river card. But as the video clip makes clear, that's not at all what actually occurred.

I remain astonished that so many prominent poker writers, with the correct facts so readily available, will get things so many things wrong when describing a hand that just might have been viewed in video replays more times than any other hand in poker history. It really makes one wonder about the accuracy of the reporting on plays for which it is not so easy to check up on the authors.

How many mistakes can you make in one paragraph?

In the December, 2007, issue of Poker Pro magazine, David Apostolico has an article on slow-playing big hands (pp. 80-81). In it, he recounts what has become one of the most famous hands in poker history, Johnny Chan versus Erik Seidel in the World Series of Poker main event, 1988. Here's what Apostolico says. If you know the history, see if you can count how many factual errors Mr. Apostolico manages to make in describing just one hand of poker.

The ultimate example of this is Johnny Chan's play in the final stages of
the 1988 World Series of Poker as memorialized in the movie Rounders.
Chan was heads-up with Erik Seidel when he flopped the nut straight. Chan held
Jc-9c and the flop was Qc-10d-8d. Seidel held a queen with a weak kicker, giving
him top pair. There was $40,000 in the pot and Chan was first to act after the
flop. He checked. Seidel bet $50,000, which Chan called. The turn brought a blank
and again Chan checked. However, this time Seidel checked also. The river
brought another blank and again Chan checked. This time Seidel went all in and,
of course, Chan called (right away, I might add).

Seidel was severely crippled and soon Johnny was world champ. Chan took a
big chance by checking on the river. If Seidel had checked also, then Chan would
have lost the opportunity to make a bet with the nuts.

First, let's acknowledge that Mr. Apostolico gets a few things right. Chan and Seidel were, in fact, heads-up for the 1988 WSOP championship. Chan did, in fact, hold the Jc-9c, and Seidel had a queen with a weak kicker (Qc-7h, to be exact). Chan did flop the nut straight. And the hand did famously get featured in "Rounders." But that's pretty much the entire list of things that Mr. Apostolico gets right.

The errors:

1. "[T]he flop was Qc-10d-8d." Actually, the 10 on the flop was in hearts, not diamonds. This is confirmed by three sources: Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback, All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of The World Series of Poker, St. Martin's Press, 2005, p. 150; and Dana Smith, Tom McEvoy, and Ralph Wheeler, The Championship Table at the World Series of Poker, Cardoza Publishing, 2nd edition, 2004, pp. 112-113; and Mark Rogers and Matthew Booma, 52 Greatest Moments, World Series of Poker, Amalgam Studio LLC, 2007, p. 135.

2. "There was $40,000 in the pot." I'm not certain that this is wrong, but I suspect that it is. I haven't found any source that relates what the blinds and antes were at this stage of the tournament, but it's clear that both players limped in before the flop. It's hard to think of a plausible combination of blinds and antes that would have resulted in a $40,000 pot before the flop.* I think more likely, given the other mistakes I'll discuss below, Mr. Apostolico is erroneously getting the "$40,000" figure from the initial post-flop bet.

3. "Chan was first to act after the flop." Nope. Chan had the button, as you can clearly see from the famous footage. Seidel had to act first after the flop. This mistake leads to several others that follow in the article.

4. "He checked." No. The action on the flop was this: Seidel checked first, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised another $50,000, and Chan called.

5. "The turn brought a blank and again Chan checked. However, this time Seidel checked also." Well, it did go check-check, but in the opposite order. The card was the 2s, incidentally.

6. "The river brought another blank and again Chan checked. This time Seidel went all-in and, of course, Chan called." The river was the 6d. But Seidel was first to act and moved all in. Chan called (which, I suppose, I should count as another point Mr. Apostolico gets right).

7. "Seidel was severely crippled, and soon Johnny was world champ." Uh, no. According to Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler, "When the final hand began, defending World Champion Chan had $1,374,000 in chips and challenger Seidel had $296,000." This is plausible, because this makes a total of 1,670,000 chips in play, and there were 167 players in the tournament, at $10,000 each. Grotenstein/Reback give the same figure for Chan, but don't specify Seidel's stack size. They do note, however, that Chan had "a substantial lead." It's obvious from the footage that the hand in question ends the tournament. Seidel wasn't "crippled," he was eliminated! Furthermore, Chan would not "soon" become the world champ, as Mr. Apostolico writes. This is wrong in two ways. First, Chan was already the defending world champion, having won the same event in 1987. Second, he gained the title for the second year in a row upon completion of this hand, not sometime "soon" thereafter.

8. "Chan took a big chance by checking on the river. If Seidel had checked also, then Chan would have lost the opportunity to make a bet with the nuts." No. Since Chan had the button, he didn't have to make the difficult decision as to whether to continue his slow-play on the river.

I should add that a couple of lines of dialog in "Rounders" sort of suggest that Chan was first to act and had the "patience" to wait for Seidel to "bluff." But it's not so. Also, the movie calling Seidel's move a "bluff" is inaccurate; he likely believed that he had the best hand. Top pair in a heads-up situation is usually good, especially given the way Chan played it (which was indeed masterfully deceptive).

I also see that Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler make an apparent error when they suggest that Seidel moved all-in before the river card hit. It's not quite explicit, however, and it's possible to read their text as being correct. In the actual footage, though, you can clearly see all five community cards are out when Seidel pushes his stacks forward, followed by Chan's call. That the action was check/check on the turn and all-in/call on the river is confirmed in both of the other books mentioned above.

So that's eight (plus or minus one, depending on how you count them) factual mistakes in 14 sentences of Mr. Apostolico's article--a pretty high error rate by any standards.

I'm disappointed by this, because I've enjoyed his columns in Card Player magazine. He has also written six books about poker (at least that's how many are listed on amazon.com), two of which I own but haven't read yet. One of them is Lessons from the Pro Poker Tour, a book devoted to lessons to be learned from specific hands as they played out in a tournament series.

If Mr. Apostolico can't be bothered to get the facts correct when he's describing one of the most famous hands in the history of poker, it's going to be hard to put much confidence in an entire book that depends, through and through, on getting just such hand-history details correct.


*Theoretically, blinds of, say, 9,000 and 18,000, with a 2,000 ante would make the pot 40,000, but those are kind of odd amounts for a tournament structure to use. Blinds of 7,500 and 15,000 with a 5,000 ante would work mathematically, but it would be highly unusual to have the antes be that high a percentage of the blinds. Blinds of 8,000/16,000 with a 4,000 ante would also yield a 40,000 pot, but, again, it would be strange to have an ante that was half the size of the small blind. I just can't think of a plausible set of numbers that works, which is part of why I strongly suspect that Mr. Apostolico's number is just wrong here.

Addendum, January 5, 2008

A reader pointed me to this YouTube clip, which appears to be unedited from the original broadcast. Without the editing imposed by "Rounders," it's much clearer about the order of action, and completely confirms what I had pieced together above.

Poker gems, #16

An exchange from NBC's "Poker After Dark," September 13, 2007. The set-up: At the end of the last show, Phil Hellmuth lost a big pot to Erik Seidel, because Hellmuth slow-played a flopped two pair (queens and threes), and Seidel caught an ace on the river for a better two pair (queens and aces). Seidel, with position, bet his top pair/top kicker all the way, and Hellmuth just checked and called. Hellmuth's whiny rant started at the end of the last show, and continues into this episode. Nobody at the table has a speck of sympathy for him.

Doyle Brunson: All you had to do was pop him [i.e., check-raise on the flop] and you'd be stacking the chips.

Hellmuth: I understand that. I mean, you know, I mean, I didn't want to pop him. I wanted to let him go for his money. It's so sick. And then he value-bet it on the river. That's so sick. Wow. [Value-betting top two pair on the river, in position, against an opponent who has been completely passive through the hand. Yeah, Phil, that's just a terrible play!]

Seidel: Anybody have Phil's nanny's phone number? She'll know how to calm him down.

Hellmuth: You're not even in the same league, Erik. [For the record, Hellmuth is a slightly more successful tournament player than Seidel; he has 11 WSOP bracelets to Seidel's 8, and a little over $9 million in total tournament winnings to Seidel's $7 million+. Seems like pretty much the same league to me, but what do I know?] Just be happy the deck saves you every pot we play. I keep slow-playing it, and you've sucked out on me like five in a row that I've slow-played, all just weird beats. And I could have won all five pots, but I want to let you...

T. J. Cloutier: I want to make a comment on that. I would think the solution to that would be not to slow-play it.

[More whining from Hellmuth, which I don't have the stomach to transcribe.]

Cloutier: Phil, that's why you make every show. You whine better than anybody alive.

Seidel: My little niece gave me a pacifier for you, and I was going to bring it, but I forgot.

[Yet more whining from Hellmuth.]

Brunson: Yeah, he's [meaning Seidel] just been lucky for 30 or 40 years.