PokerNews article #130

Poker advice from...William Shakespeare???

Yes, that William Shakespeare.

https://www.pokernews.com/strategy/five-lessons-william-shakespeare-unexpected-poker-coach-25865.htm

Poker gems, #356

William Shakespeare, in Richard III, Act 1, Scene III:

Cannot a plain man live and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abused
By silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?

[I must point out that "Insinuating Jacks" would make an excellent name for a poker blog and/or for an online poker screen name.]

Wide stance

I've had a lot of trouble lately being seated next to guys who seem to have no proper sense of other people's personal space.

It's a common sociological observation that men tend to have a far more pronounced sense of entitlement to the space around them than women do. My completely unscientific personal observation over the years is that this is directly proportionate to the man's ego. The self-centered, boistrous, chip-on-the-shoulder, don't-mess-with-me types feel an absolute sense of ownership of whatever space they may occupy, or want to occupy, and don't care whose toes they step on in the process--literally or figuratively.

The space under a poker table is tightly limited, especially those that seat ten players instead of only nine. You would think that this would necessarily impose automatic limits on how players arrange themselves. But no. There are a fairly small number of men--pardon my sexism, but I have never once observed a woman to share this tendency--who just don't care how much space they are rightly entitled to under an equitable division. They want what they want, end of story. They will sit with limbs all akimbo, and dare anybody to tell them they can't or shouldn't do so.

A couple of weeks ago at Mandalay Bay I was next to one of these boors. He was going to sit with his legs splayed far enough apart that he could get a prostate exam without changing positions, and damn'd be him who first cries, "Hold, enough!"*

The guy wouldn't take a gentle hint. Several times I "accidentally" bumped into his leg when moving mine entirely within the space directly in front of my chair. The socially normal response to this situation is to realize that one has intruded outside of one's proper bounds, apologize, and withdraw. Not this maroon. Three times he disregarded my attempts to move him off. The solution came only when he got up to use the restroom. While he was gone, I moved his chair a few inches away, and got my legs arranged to the outer edges of my rightful space, prepared not to yield. As it turned out, a good defense was indeed the best offense. Having staked out my claim in his absence, he was unable to resume his previous territorial invasion, and the conflict ended.

Of course, one could take the direct approach and simply ask the rude person to take his knees back to where they belong. But I have many times witnessed simple, stupid conflicts like this escalate at the poker table to the point that they become angry, involve the dealer and floor person, bring the game to a halt, etc. I prefer handling things under the table, so to speak.

Feet can intrude, too. Last week at Planet Hollywood I was in seat 1 next to the dealer. The tall guy on my left was at roughly a 45-degree angle to me because of how the table curves. He apparently felt like he had gotten the bonus seat and was entitled to whatever space his long legs could reach to. If I moved my feet from off of the foot-rest rail, he would quickly move his right foot there. I suppose he either didn't think about it, didn't care, or just felt that if I wasn't going to be occupying that spot for a while, he might as well do so. But then when I needed a shift in position and wanted to put my feet back up, I had to run him off.

There can also be problems aside from the physical intrusion. That same night, at a different table, I had been in seat 2 when seat 6 was occupied by an enormously obese man. He was so fat that he couldn't sit facing the table like normal people, but had to sit facing to the side. He chose to face my way. Because of the huge mass of abdominal fat, he also couldn't easily keep his legs straight out in front of him, but instead splayed them as far apart as he could, with his bulky pannus resting directly on the chair between his fat thighs. This would have been unattractive enough all by itself, but it was infinitely worsened by the fact that the zipper on his shorts (yes, shorts) was down and his fly as wide open as his knees. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! My eyezzzzzzzzzzzzzz! It burns! Or, as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz might say, "The horror! The horror!" (I whipped off a text message to Cardgrrl about this ghastly sight. She replied, "Do NOT send me a picture!")

This stuff isn't complicated. You are entitled to your chair and the space immediately in front of your chair, in roughly a wedge-shaped segment. Think of the poker table as a pie with cuts made from the center, radiating outward. You get the space between cuts. Yeah, some pieces are bigger than others, and they're all somewhat differently shaped, because the table is oblong rather than round. Tough. That's how it goes. Move to a place that has more space if you feel you need it. I'm pretty small, but I definitely like the maximal amounts of buffer space around me, which is one of the major reasons I prefer the two seats next to the dealer--they have more elbow room than any others. When the dealer "squares up" the table to re-allot the available space fairly, those two seats virtually never have to adjust, because they are farther away from their neighbors than any other.

I'm not so territorial that I will defend my leg space to the death, but I will use whatever subtle, annoying, and sneaky tactics that I deem necessary to allow my legs and feet to move freely and comfortably within my allotted space, and make you keep yours where they belong. Good fences make good neighbors, and all that. I just wish that people had enough decency to keep things to themselves to begin with so that I didn't have to bother shooing them away.


Incidentally, I am aware of the oddness of using the word "stance" to refer to a sitting position. I chose it only because of the notoriety the phrase "wide stance" received in connection with the 2007 Larry Craig scandal and his alleged explanation of what happened. As reported by Wikipedia:

According to the arrest report prepared by Sgt. Dave Karsnia, "Craig stated
... He has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have
touched mine." Craig never used the term "wide stance" himself. According to the
transcript of the police interogation, Sgt. Karsnia asked: "Did you do anything
with your feet?" and Craig replied: "Positioned them, I don't know. I don’t know
at the time. I'm a fairly wide guy."

I don't think I'd want Larry Craig sitting next to me at a poker table.



*I suppose that this reference is obscure enough that I should probably explain it. It's from MacBeth, Act 5, Scene VII. I played MacBeth in a highly abbreviated version of the play in sixth grade, and, as I suppose the teacher hoped would happen, a bunch of random lines and phrases from it have stuck in my brain ever since, only to pop out at odd moments like this.

"Gaming" and "gambling"

Over the weekend, I spent some time reading about last week's congressional hearings about online gambling. Among the predictable gripes from the enemies of anybody having any fun is always the accusation that the word “gaming” is an industry euphemism, devised to avoid the unseemly overtones of the word “gambling.” It is dishonest, they say, to call it "gaming."

That canard came up again in the context of this hearing. Annie Duke, after testifying at the hearing, engaged in an online chat sponsored by the Washington Post. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/11/13/DI2007111301841.html. The very first question submitted was this:

Gaming? GAMING? Where I come from, playing for money -- on the Internet or elsewhere -- is called GAMBLING. And that's okay by me, but why do you insist on calling it "gaming"? How can you have an honest debate when you don't use honest language?

This person is either deliberately misrepresenting the facts or, more likely, is just ignorantly repeating something he or she has heard, without bothering to investigate it.

In fact, “gaming” is a much older term. I learned this from “The Gambler’s Guide to Taxes,” by Walter L. Lewis. An appendix in that book reproduces a short essay by Basil Nestor, in which he traces the history of both words. (I'm not sure why the essay is in a book on taxes, since it has no real bearing on that subject, but I'm glad I found it anyway.) Here's the Reader's Digest condensed version:

“Gambling” was not even a word in English when Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet," in which the title character, who plans to kill his uncle, says that perhaps he should do it when his uncle was “at gaming, swearing, or about some act that has no relish of salvation in’t,” rather than when the man was praying (Act 3, Scene 3).

“Gambling” still hadn’t been coined when the Statute of Anne (1710) declared legally unenforceable any debts arising from “gaming or playing at cards, dice… or by betting….”

George Washington in 1778 noted that “gaming is again creeping into the Army” and therefore prohibited cards and dice, whether played for money or not.

When the term “gambling” finally arose in the early eighteenth century, reports Nestor, it clearly had the connotation of cheating—a game that was covertly fixed against the player—as opposed to “gaming,” which signified honest wagering.

So now you know.

What's done is done

As I've mentioned previously (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/hopelatrons-and-seeing-future-non.html), I think Phil Laak is one of the most interesting professional players to watch and read about. But though he's smart and, for the most part, highly rational, he occasionally reveals bits of unexpected irrationality.*

On an episode of "Cash Poker," (from which the above screenshot is taken), Phil initially limps in, along with several others. Then a player behind him puts in a large raise. Phil folds, as does the player on his left. Phil then says to the other guy who folded, "This is where you pray the flop doesn’t connect you, now that you’ve folded. This is the time for a small prayer."

I've heard this sort of comment many times before. For example, players are raising and re-raising each other before the flop, and a third player drops out of the action after the bets get too high for him. The two remaining players both get it all in, and the last one who folded announces that he mucked pocket 7s, and says, "Dealer, don't you dare put another 7 out there on the flop." Sometimes, when there is betting yet to come after the flop, a player who folds to a raise will not declare what he had, but will still give a generic warning to the dealer: "You had better not put out the cards that would make my hand."

This is insane! After you've folded, it can't possibly make any difference to you what community cards get revealed. A decision to call or fold before the flop isn't made retroactively correct or incorrect based on what three cards the dealer puts out. It was correct or incorrect based on the strength of the starting hand, your position, the number of opponents, your table image, your read on opponents' strength, the size of the pot, the size of the raise, and a myriad of other factors. But what happens after the point at which you have to make the decision is utterly irrelevant to any rational assessment of whether the decision to fold was correct.

I assume that Phil's implication is that if cards come on the flop that would have made him a powerful hand, had he stayed in, he will regret his decision to fold. That's ludicrous. Why would you chide yourself for not taking into account information that is unavailable at the time you had to decide what to do? Would you pride yourself on being a great player if you called a big raise with 7-2 and the flop was 2-2-7? I should hope not. So then how can it make sense to kick yourself for folding the 2-7 when that flop hits?

It's perfectly natural to see a flop that would have turned a garbage hand into a stealth monster and think something like, "I wish I could have my cards back." But you know that isn't how the game is played, so you shrug your shoulders and let it go.

(You might also take the opportunity to look back at your decision to fold and re-evaluate whether it was the smartest move, given the information you had at the time--not given what the flop was. The reason this is smart is that, if you conclude again that it was the right play, you can give yourself a little mental pat on the back to counteract what might otherwise be the insidious tendency to remember the 2-2-7 flop the next time you look down at 7-2, and play it in the futile hope of history repeating itself. I find that reassuring myself that my fold was correct helps neutralize any temporary sting of regret that I feel when the would-have-been miracle flop comes.)

However natural it is to feel a momentary twinge of regret for the mathematically and strategically correct fold that, in retrospect, would have been a lucky spot for an unorthodox pre-flop call, it strikes me as completely ridiculous to think--let alone say out loud--that you hope the flop isn't one that would have helped you. What, you can't handle that twinge of remorse, so you have to pray, beg, and threaten the dealer that circumstances don't come up that will cause you to feel it? That's just childish. Grow up already.

When I was in fifth grade, our class learned and performed a highly abbreviated (like, 30 minutes, I think) version of Shakespeare's "MacBeth." It was a great experience for me, especially since I landed the title role. I've never forgotten many of the lines I had to memorize back then, even though it has now been about 35 years.

After MacBeth has murdered King Duncan, in order to assume the throne himself, he is tormented by guilt. His wife, Lady MacBeth, says to him (Act 3, Scene 2),

How now, my lord! why do you keep alone,
Of sorriest fancies your companions making,
Using those thoughts which should indeed have died
With them they think on? Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what's done is done.

Even more famously, later Lady MacBeth herself becomes unhinged, and starts sleepwalking, reliving in her dreams the night that she pressed MacBeth to kill the king in his sleep (Act 5, Scene 1):

To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate:
come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's
done cannot be undone.—To bed, to bed, to bed!

You can't go back and unfold your hand. You can't make your decision whether to play based on what the unknowable flop is going to be. Therefore, it's silly to anguish over having made a correct decision. It's even sillier, in anticipation of such regret, to make threats or propitiations in an attempt to prevent seeing a flop that will trigger such anguish. It is a "thing without all remedy," and "should be without regard."

Regular readers know by now that I'm not particularly keen on the idea that prayers at the poker table are of any efficacy. (See http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/mr-destiny.html and http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-on-religion-at-poker-table.html.) As irrational and embarrassing as I think it is to offer up prayers to try to affect the outcome of a hand that one is in, it is ten times more foolish to offer them up to try to affect the outcome of a hand that one has already exited.


*I'm obviously aware that he's eccentric and does strange things. Some of that, I'm sure, is for show, and some is just his oddball personality. But peculiarity does not equal irrationality, and here I'm only talking about the latter trait.