Idiocy on display

I was at the Tropicana last night. I passed this guy at a video slot machine. As the electronic simulated reels were spinning, he would rub the glass over them, rapidly moving his hand up and down over each "reel" just before it was to come to a stop, thus moving his way from left to right.

I saw such behavior once before, at the MGM, and jeered about it here. Readers then assured me that this is actually fairly common. I spend no time playing or watching others play slots, so I wouldn't know, but I have never noticed it except for these two instances. As I wrote about the woman at MGM, I feel sure that this guy does it because he believes that it enhances his chance of winning. The reality, of course, is that the outcome of each game is determined by a microprocessor a tiny fraction of a second after he presses the "spin" button. He might as well spend the subsequent seconds splashing chicken blood on the machine, for all the good it--or his rubbing--will do.

I don't know why I am still able to be amazed by the level of stupidity people are willing to put on public display, but I am.

Odds and ends from the MGM Grand

I played at the MGM Grand tonight. Nothing especially noteworthy happened in the poker, but there were a few interesting sights along the way.

First there was this guy's hat. Click on the photo for the full-size version, and you'll see how he likes to identify himself.





Then there was a woman to my left using this as a card protector:



For some reason, my cell phone camera completely washed out the color here, but it's actually yellow. She confessed to being from Wisconsin--a cheesehead through and through.

As I was making my way to the poker room upon arrival, I passed a sight so odd that I wasn't sure I had seen it correctly, so after going about 20 feet past it, I turned around and went back for a second look. I had not been hallucinating. Here's what I saw:



This woman was playing a slot machine, and every time the reels were spinning (it's one with actual mechanical reels), she would rub the glass over one of the reels. I watched her for about two minutes, and she did this every time. Most often she would rub over the center reel. But once in a while she would instead rub over the right-hand reel, and once I saw her divide her rubbing, first on the right then on the center during the same spin.

In case you're wondering, no, this isn't some sort of touch panel. The glass does nothing. Rubbing it does nothing, except, obviously, in her mind. I was this close to asking her why she did it, but I chickened out. Nevertheless, I'm about 99% confident what she would say, if she were being honest: She has somehow become convinced that this action enhances her chances of winning.

It does nothing of the sort, of course. The electronic and mechanical innards of the machine do not respond to such inputs. But she clearly believes that they will, else she wouldn't bother expending her energy this way.

She reminded me a lot of the moron I once saw at the Riviera who would rub his magic spoon in front of him before every hand of poker. It's the same kind of lunacy that makes Jerry Yang think that a supernatural being will change the cards in the dealer's hand when he says "Lord, give me a set" in the middle of a hand, after all the chips are in. It is of a piece with Joe Bishop thinking that his dead father will perform similar magic on the deck for him, or Hal Lubarsky thinking that touching his card cap before each hand will make him luckier, or Daniel Negreanu thinking that $50 bills are unlucky, or Shannon Elizabeth believing that positive thinking and speaking will cause good cards to come while thinking and speaking negatively will cause bad ones to come, or Brian Lemke believing that his recently deceased cousin caused a miracle card to be dealt on the final hand that won him a WSOP bracelet last year (something I didn't write about at the time). It's all madness, sheer madness.

As you can tell from the links above, I've ridden this particular hobby horse a few times before, so I won't belabor it again. But I will tell you that one of the reasons I finally decided against asking this woman why she was rubbing the glass was that I was afraid she would tell me that it made the reels spins in her favor, and then I would be unable to resist asking her the only possible followup question: "Are you really that stupid?"

How we become superstitious--or not

One of my favorite radio shows is "Car Talk." On today's show, a caller from Maine named Paula told Click and Clack that sometimes her Subaru won't start in the cold weather. Her remedy is to heat up a blanket on one of her old-fashioned house radiators, tuck it under her coat, run out to the driveway, and put it on the hood of the car. Then after about ten minutes, she'll try starting the car again, and it will almost always work the second time.

As she was saying this, I had a flashback to my freshman year of college. I started undergraduate life as a physics major, and I well remember slogging through the lectures and sections of the textbook about heat transfer equations. Even if you haven't been through that, general life experience alone might suggest to you that Paula is, well, daft. There's just no way that a blanket placed on a home radiator--one which isn't too hot to be held against one's body--placed on the hood of a car in cold winter weather, will transfer heat through the hood and subsequently through the air between the hood and the engine, in sufficient quantities to have any effect on the engine.

As the Car Talk brothers quickly realized, Paula's elaborate ritual has nothing to do with why the car starts the second time but not the first. Far more likely is something quasi-random, such as a faulty neutral safety switch (the thing that won't let current flow to the starter motor unless the transmission lever is set to neutral or park). Paula would presumably have equal success if she just waited that ten minutes warming herself at the radiator, rather than a blanket. But of course, what happened was that she got this wacky notion once, tried it in desperation (probably in a feeble attempt to replicate what she had seen or heard of other people doing with electric engine block heaters), found that it appeared to work, and therefore kept doing it.

This reminded me of a story I read about 20 years ago in a magazine--can't remember where now. The author said that every day for years he and his cat went through the same thing. He would come home from work, go to the kitchen, pull out a can of cat food and the can opener, open it, and scoop some out with a spoon. Then, just as he was going to dump the contents of the spoon into the cat's food dish, the cat would stick his head under the spoon, thus getting the cat food dropped onto its head. The cat would then eat the food, clean the excess off of his head, etc.

Again, we can easily infer how this began. One day, early in their relationship, the cat got overly eager and stuck its head where it didn't belong. For this behavior he seemed to get rewarded with a bunch of yummy food. So something in his brain clicked, and he tried it again the next time he saw that there was a spoon with food in it. Same result. His poor little brain concluded that suffering the indignity of having food dumped on his head was what it took to get fed, so he persisted in the strange behavior every day forever after.

Wouldn't it be nice if we were smarter than cats?

There's no deep mystery to be explored here. Some sort of similar tale undoubtedly lies behind every superstition. Somebody once opened an umbrella in the house and something terribly unlucky happened to him soon thereafter. He mentioned it to some friends, one of whom perhaps had, by coincidence, noticed the same temporal connection. They leaped to the conclusion of a causal connection and began telling everybody about it. Every time somebody consciously violated this new social taboo, he would be more vigilant for signs of bad luck than he otherwise would have been absent hearing about others' misfortunes, so it isn't surprising that he would notice something unlucky happening, and thus have the theory "confirmed."

My guess is that the guy with the lucky spoon ritual at the Riviera developed it by accident. Perhaps one time he was absent-mindedly twiddling it in a circle as the dealer was shuffling, and he got dealt aces. His brain seized on the connection as somehow causal, and a superstition was born. Of course he can't be bothered to undertake a scientific, statistical test of what cards he is dealt (and/or how much he wins or loses in a hand) when he does the circle-and-scoop thing versus when he doesn't. In truth, he probably doesn't really want to know. He likes the illusion of control that his ritual brings him; he is no longer simply subject to the whims of randomness, but exerts a mystical influence over the cards. It's nice to feel powerful, not buffetted by the winds of chance, even if it's nothing more than a self-delusion.

Jerry Yang suffers from the same kind of strange cognitive defect when he acts on his belief that saying the right kinds of words to the right god at the right time will change what cards the dealer is about to deliver.

But I maintain that poker success is incompatible with such hogwash. A winning poker player must, I believe, both accept and embrace randomness. I know that over the long run I'm going to be dealt exactly the same distribution and frequency of starting hands as every opponent that I face. Whether I win or lose therefore depends entirely on making sound decisions that result in winning more money with the best hand than they do, losing less money with second-best hands than they do, and winning pots with the worst hand (i.e., bluffing) more successfully than they do.

In poker we are all given the same raw materials. It is up to us--not the Fates--what we do with them. Some people find that idea frightening. I find it empowering and liberating. Divorcing myself from nascent superstitions, nipping them in the bud, before they have an opportunity to take hold of and pollute my mind is an essential part of that. No, that dealer is not especially unlucky, nor is having a $50 bill in my wallet, nor is winning the first hand of a tournament. Conversely, I cannot rely on wearing my lucky hat, carrying my lucky rabbit's foot, or playing my lucky junk hand.

I have no security blanket, heated or otherwise. Food will not just magically plop itself down into my dish like manna from heaven if I hold my head a certain way. I have to make the success happen all by myself. As William Ernest Henley famously wrote, I am the master of my fate.



(Just wondering here. If you take all of your stock certificates and stitch them together into a sort of patchwork quilt, do you now have a securities blanket?)

A spoonful of magic

I had a good time and a profitable session at the Riviera last night, so tonight I headed there again. Two seats to my left was a guy using a small souvenir collector-type spoon as a card protector. (I snuck a picture of it.) OK, that's a little peculiar, but hardly worthy of mention all by itself.

The really weird thing was what he did with it. Before every hand, he would rub the back of the spoon several times in a small circle approximately where he expected the cards to be pitched to him, then turned it on its side and made three or four consecutive scraping or scooping motions toward him, as if trying to spoon the good luck his way.

Before.

Every.

Hand.

It seemed to work. That is, once in a while he won a pot. But a lot of the time it didn't work, and he had to fold without putting any money in, or he put some (or a lot of) money in and lost it. Overall, I'd say it worked about as well as if he had, say, smeared chicken blood on the table and his chair (though many casinos, oddly enough, frown on this practice).

People are so strange.

More WSOP insanity

I had skipped ahead to glean the "Poker Fact" from the second part of this week's WSOP broadcast (so that I could write up my post on it) without watching the entire hour, until just now. I noticed a moment that showed one participant's delusional beliefs, reminiscent of those displayed by Jerry Yang at last year's final table.

Joe Bishop's father died earlier this year (April, I believe they said). At one point in the show, he has called David Rheem's all-in bluff with pocket sixes, and his hand is holding up. After the turn card, we see him sitting by himself, away from the table. He looks upward and says, "Come on, Dad. Come with me. Come on, Dad."

Now, admittedly this is not quite as explicit as Jerry Yang saying, "Lord, give me a set" before the river card is exposed. Still, it certainly seems that it's basically the same thing. Bishop appears to believe that his dead father (1) is physically somewhere above him (hence the looking up), (2) can hear him, and (3) has the ability to alter the order of the cards in the dealer's hand, such that if Bishop pleads with him correctly, his dead father will magically cause a good card to be transported into the second position in the deck, so that after the dealer burns the top card, a good one for Bishop's hand will be dealt as fifth street.

Probably by now I don't have to explain how insane this is. Believing that unseen dieties and/or ghosts and/or other mystical forces or entities can and will re-order the shuffled deck in the dealer's hand is just plain looney. It's delusional. Such beliefs are a sign of an unwell, unsound mind.

As it turns out, apparently Bishop's father isn't a particularly powerful ghost (maybe he hasn't earned his wings yet, like Clarence in "It's a Wonderful Life")--or perhaps Bishop just didn't ask the right way, or maybe his father wasn't paying attention at the critical moment, because Chino Rheem caught one of his six outs on the river to stay alive.

Heck, maybe Rheem was silently praying to one of his own dead ancestors--one who had stronger magical mojo and floated that king into position at the last second. That would be amusing, to have competing ghosts wrestling for control over the cards in the deck--much like the bizarre image we had last year of God's influence being invoked in opposite directions simultaneously by Yang's faction and Lee Watkinson's fiancee.

Will the madness ever stop?



On a more benign and more amusing note, I noticed that Nick Sliwinski's friends and family were all wearing t-shirts that they apparently had had made for the occasion, emblazoned on the back with the words, "Whose the bully now." (No question mark.) I'm guessing that not one of them noticed that it should have been "Who's," rather than "Whose." I wonder if the guy printing up the shirts noticed that his customers were asking to have their atrocious spelling/grammar skills advertised to the world, and diplomatically just kept his mouth shut and did as they directed, or whether he, too, didn't know the difference.

Oh well. Either way, being ignorant isn't nearly as bad as being delusional.

Reversal of fortune?

I rarely mention how I've been running because (1) it's nobody's business, (2) I don't think anybody cares, outside of my family and closest friends, (3) it's not very interesting, (4) I'd like to think that I have interesting stories and commentary independent of whether I've been winning or losing lately, (5) when I'm winning, saying so feels like bragging, and when I'm losing, saying so feels like whining. So I mostly just shut up about the whole subject.

But I can't tell you about tonight without the recent background. August has been, well, horrible. Terrible. Awful. Painful. Grotesque. Unfathomable. Disastrous. Get the picture? I've lost more in the first half of August than in any full month since I started playing poker. Before tonight, 10 of my last 11 and 12 of my last 15 sessions had been losers, a streak unlike any I've ever had before. The downward skid in my cumulative-results graph is shocking; it looks like I've fallen off a cliff. It has been apocalyptically bad.

(This doesn't include online play. As I mentioned recently, until a couple of weeks ago, online poker has been just a few tens of dollars here and there, not even enough to bother cashing out, let alone set up a detailed accounting system for. But even though the online income is picking up, it's like a bucketful of water on what has been a house burning down.)

Everything has gone wrong. Bluffs get picked off. Strong hands get called and sucked out on. I read opponents wrong, folding when I should call or raise and vice-versa. I get second nuts beaten by the nuts time after time after time.

Lemme tell ya, this sort of streak does things to even the soundest of minds. I started sessions thinking that I shouldn't even waste time playing, because I could get the same outcome in a lot less time by just handing a few C-notes to randomly selected strangers sitting in the poker room and go home. And, of course, once you start thinking fatalistically like that, it utterly saps the self-confidence, and adversely affects the decision-making process, causing a cascading effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a downward spiral out of control. You begin to believe that you know absolutely nothing about this stupid game, and then you start playing in a way that proves it.

I've always taken a day off anytime I have two losing days in a row, in order to sort of reset myself mentally and emotionally, and feel like that bit of nastiness is well behind me before I start afresh. That hasn't worked here.

It feels like hell. It feels like being in a war zone with no escape. It feels like being unable to wake up from a nightmare. It's Kafkaesque.

If you've never read Larry Phillips's wonderful description of a bad losing streak that I posted here as my first-ever "Poker Gem," please go do so now. It is spot-on. I'm sure nobody has ever penned a more true-to-life portrayal of how thoroughly it corrodes one's mind and poker skills.

But he's leaving something out. He's neglecting the added level of sheer panic that begins to set in when you have to win in order to buy groceries, pay the rent, keep the car running, etc. The spectre of homelessness and hunger adds a depth of crushing fear that I don't think you can appreciate unless you've experienced it.

Yeah, I have enough $ in reserve by now that this downswing hasn't bankrupted me. But if I were to continue to spew this badly for the rest of the month, the needle would be into the red zone, with no gas station for miles around, and I would be in deep doo-doo. I had to snap the bad streak. But paradoxically, the more that one feels that one must win, the more one tends to force situations, to try to wrest a victory when it is not to be. Panic and desperation kill the kind of relaxed "flow" without which poker simply cannot be played well.

So I set out for the Venetian tonight with dread and foreboding. I even had to stop at the ATM on the way there to pick up cash with which to play. I hate that. It's the walk of shame, the most concrete proof of failure. I could not completely dismiss the thought that I was taking this money out of the bank and was just going to give it away across a poker table, and how stupid that was, and how I would be better off just staying home and watching TV for the next, oh, year or two.

Like I said, this sort of streak does crazy things to the mind. I've even found myself entertaining thoughts that maybe this new PokerStars sweatshirt I've been wearing is what's bringing me bad luck, because it was right around the time it arrived in the mail that I started losing. It's the sort of silly, superstitious thought that I would normally laugh off the instant it occurred to me. But desperation sometimes trumps rationality, and I can't easily shrug off even the most far-out ideas that offer to make understandable what is otherwise beyond comprehension.

Something peculiar happened when I got to the Venetian. The parking spot I found was between two Honda Fits. Just about as soon as Honda released the Fit to the U.S. market a couple of years ago, I decided that that's probably what my next car will be, when my current one finally collapses into a pile of shards, like Oliver Wendall Holmes's Wonderful One-Hoss Shay. They're great little cars, just right for my needs. But demand for them has vastly exceeded Honda's initial projections, so they haven't been making enough of them, and it's still quite uncommon to see them on the streets.

With the way my thinking has been warped and distorted and made vulnerable to all manner of loopy ideas by this losing streak, something in my head clicked about this fortuitous parking spot. It's a sign of some sort--an affirmation that, yes, things will turn around and I'll be able to afford a new car when I need one. No, I don't seriously believe deep down that the universe caused these two cars to be where they were just as a personal manifestation to me, but my ability to banish such absurdities has been mightily compromised.

Things started OK inside the Venetian poker room. I had increased my starting stack by $50 or so in the first hour. I had the strategically best seat at the table, with the loose-passive frequently bluffing bad player on my right, and the ultimate rock on my immediate left.* But when I got pocket kings and got into a raising war with another player, it turned out he had the other two kings, and we just got our money back. (Still, that seemed a vast improvement from how things had been running for me lately.) Then I lost my whole stack to the loose-passive horrible player the one time in the evening he found A-A. Argh! It's happening again! The streak is going to continue!

But I rebought and patiently kept looking for good spots. I built things up slowly again. Finally the moment of truth arrived. Mr. Loose-Passive's wife came to get him. He gave her the "let me play one more hand" line--and it was one too many. He had J-Q to my A-Q, and when a Q hit the flop and another on the turn, his chips became mine. I was up by a net profit of $210, and I took the money and ran, before the poker gods could notice that they had slipped up and let me win.

(By the way, Ron Rose was at the Venetian, two tables away, playing $1-2 no-limit. It seemed very strange to me that he would be playing at that level, when he can and does routinely buy himself into $10,000 tournaments.)

I also left because it was 11:15. The Sahara has an 11:00 p.m. tournament, and catching players on tilt from busting out of that tournament has been one of the most consistently profitable moves for me. I hate the Sahara poker room and nearly everything about it. But it's a cash cow, and has been the way I've broken bad streaks in the past. (My records tell me I've played 12 sessions there, 10 highly profitable and 2 small losses.) I had hopes that it would serve that purpose yet again.

I sat down in Seat 1. This proved to be a fortuitous choice, because the table maniac was in Seat 10, on my immediate right. (I didn't know this at the time, of course.) On my very first hand, I saw A-A, just as I heard Mr. Maniac announce a raise to $10. I reraised to $35. It folded back around to him. He looked at my stack (I had bought in for my usual $100), then said, "Let's get it all in." I replied, "That sounds OK to me." He had K-10. But they were sooted! A flop of A-10-8, with only one of his suit, left him drawing very thin, and a second 8 on the turn gave me an unbeatable aces full. I doubled up on my first hand. (The guy was a very good sport about it. Nothing deterred him from having fun, bless his heart. He quipped, with faux shock and dismay, "That guy cracked my king-ten!")

The very next hand, Mr. Maniac announces before he looks at his cards that if there's a face card, he's going all-in. He peeks, says, "I've got one," and shoves. I have A-K. I am not afraid, especially now that I'm playing with his chips. I call, show my cards, and hit a king on the turn. He mucks without showing, and rebuys.

A few hands later I flop two pair and raise Mr. Maniac's flop bet yet again. This time he seems to have learned his lesson and reluctantly folds top pair. I show. I want this table to be afraid of me. It seems to work. From then on, when I bet or raise, I get only token opposition. Now, this isn't really the best way to build up a stack, because hands end early, before a lot of chips get into the middle. But given recent history, tonight Ill be content with small, safe steps forward.

Finally, after about an hour, and after a dry spell of cards, I decide to throw a curve. I raise from the cutoff position with 7-9 offsuit in a straddled pot. The straddler is my only caller. The flop is J-10-X. Nothing for me there except a gutshot straight draw. My opponent checks. I make the continuation bet. He calls. Uh-oh. Now what do I do? Well, I guess not everything can go my way in a session.

Or maybe it can, because the dealer just put out an unbelievable 8 on the turn, giving me a jack-high straight--the second nuts. I'm only beat if he happened to be playing Q-9, which seems incredibly unlikely. He checks again, and I move all-in. He calls. He has A-J for top pair/top kicker, and is already drawing dead, poor guy. It was sick, sick, sick. But am I giving back the chips? Nooooooooooo.

Soon thereafter, I felted yet another player when I flopped top two pair (K-J) to his flopped top and bottom pair (K-7).

Once again, I got the impression that this was as good as things were going to get, and I should hightail it out of there before the chips started migrating back to where they had come from.

So between the lovely Venetian and the nasty Sahara I managed to erase about a quarter of the deficit I had accumulated thus far in August. For once, I'll be thrilled if I end the month having broken even. Maybe tonight was the first step toward achieving that goal. Whatever happens the rest of the month, tonight was a breathtaking turnaround. All of a sudden, winning was as easy and automatic as losing had been before.

But I'll tell you, next time I set out to play, I'm gonna keep driving around the parking garage until I find two Fits to park between. And I'm leaving that damn unlucky sweatshirt at home.



*This guy was far and away the tightest player I've ever seen. It was astonishing. The first time I saw him voluntarily put chips into the pot I was so startled that I checked the clock. It had been exactly 90 minutes since I sat down. He put in a pre-flop raise. The guy on my right called, then called again on the flop and turn. Mr. Rock had--say it with me, because you all already know--pocket aces, and won. He stayed another 45 minutes, never played another hand except for his blinds, and with them he never once called a raise before the flop or a bet after the flop. He appears to be that rarest of poker life forms: the guy who literally plays only pocket aces. Maybe he changes it up now and then with pocket kings when he's feeling adventurous, but it was still quite amazing.

Lucky charms are not magically delicious

I've mentioned before the silver dollar that I use as a card protector. But I don't think I've told you that roughly once a week somebody asks me a question like, "Is that your lucky coin?"

I realize that the question is always intended to be friendly and inoffensive, but I think I should be offended. The implication behind the question is this: "I think you are so stupid that you probably believe in magic charms that make it more likely for you to get good cards."

Well, I don't believe in such nonsense. Not even a little bit. And what is it, exactly, that I did that made you assess my IQ as being roughly that of Cro-Magnon Man?

Here are four stories about magical thinking in poker from yesterday and today's WSOP Main Event, as reported by--come on, you can say it with me by now--PokerNews:

Hal Lubarsky and His Assistant

Hal Lubarsky is legally blind and uses an assistant who relays him the
action. He has an interesting totem on his table. It's a ceramic paw print. The
dog is a German shepherd named Nexus, who actually belongs to Hal's assistant.
Before every hand, Hal touches the paw print for good luck.

Unlucky Shoes

Sverre Sundbo woke up this morning wondering what to wear today. He
called his girlfriend and she gave him a few suggestions. One of his choices was
to wear a new pair of white sneakers. [Snarky editorial comment from the
Grump: A guy who can't decide what to wear on his own is already is such deep
life trouble that nothing is likely to pull him out of it. But he apparently has
found a match. Any woman that I would be interested in having a relationship with would, if asked such a
question, say something like, "You can't make simple decisions on your own? Have
I inadvertantly gotten myself involved with a pathetic momma's boy? I think maybe we need
to be spending more time apart for a while." If you ask me, that's about the
only sensible response to a boyfriend who can't dress himself. But no. He has a
girlfriend who not only doesn't object, apparently, to be asked such a stupid
question, but takes it seriously enough to make suggestions. I guess there's
someone for everyone out there.]

Within the first level, he had seen his double-the-average stack reduced to
less than 10,000. He called his girlfriend again and she told him to take off
the sneakers as they might be bringing him bad luck. He duly did what he was
told and, pot win after pot win, has seen his stack rise all the way up to
150,000.

Sverre can now be seen walking around the Amazon room in white socks which
may now be dirty, but the smile on his face is clean and wide.

Wait...The Lucky iPod!

Dave Colclough opened with a preflop raise before Steve Zolotow moved
all in for his last 22,100. Colclough made the call and tabled Ah-Qd, but
Zolotow held the lead with his pair of 10s-10h.

Before the flop was dealt, Zolotow asked for the dealer to wait while he
grabbed his lucky iPod off Erik Seidel. He grabs the iPod just in time to see
the board come down Kd-Js-3s-Ks-5d to give Zolotow kings and tens to double up
to 50,000. Colclough is back to 65,000.

Hoodie Power!

Alan Jaffrey raised to 2,500 from under the gun and was put all in by
the small blind for around 20,000 total. Jaffrey called.

Jaffrey held Q-Q and his opponent Ad-10d.

Board: 10c-3c-6h-Js-9h.

After the hand, Jaffrey is up to 42,100. Jaffrey attributed his win to
"Hoodie Power." He said that after he put up his hoodie, he got two big
hands.

And here's one more along the same lines, nipped from Shamus's post earlier today over at Hard-Boiled Poker. (I think nearly all of my readers will know by now that Shamus is one of the live bloggers for PokerNews at this year's WSOP.)

Had another guy asked to be included in the [chip] counts (which we did),
then subsequently start to lose hands. Figuring he’d jinxed himself, he came
back and asked to be taken out. We did that, too.

I get this stuff, at least on some level. I mean, I've read Michael Shermer's excellent book Why People Believe Weird Things. I understand that we have "modules" in our brains that cause us to seek out and perceive cause-and-effect relationships that do not objectively exist.

But c'mon, people! We went through this little thing called the Enlightenment--and it wasn't just yesterday, as if the news has yet to spread. We are supposed to be beyond thinking that every little thing in the world is governed by mysterious forces that can be controlled by talismans or strange incantations and rituals.

In my own poker playing, I have noticed the odd coincidence that at the times I'm playing Elvis Presley music on my MP3 player, I tend to get better-than-average cards. In fact, I've hit two high-hand jackpots while listening to Elvis, way out of proportion to the percentage of time I have him on. I suppose I could conclude, were I so inclined, that the ghost of Elvis is still wandering through Las Vegas, rewarding those who listen to his music with favorable shuffles of the deck or rolls of the dice. But I don't. I do not put Elvis on in order to try to bring good luck, because if there really are forces like that operating in the world, it's far too scary and mysterious a place for me to want to continue living in it. The juxtaposition I have noticed is a weird statistical anomaly, and/or selective, biased memory at work, nothing more.

How can you possibly believe that more favorable cards will come your way if you touch a ceramic dog print before each deal, and yet survive in the modern world? Too bad for Lubarsky that he is blind, because that makes it harder to avoid stepping on the sidewalk cracks, thus putting his mother's back at risk of breaking with every step. Think I'm being harsh on the guy? If so, then tell me how it is even the tiniest bit less insane to believe in a connection between a totem and how the cards get shuffled than to believe that the placement of one's feet on the sidewalk causes vertebral fractures in a parent? It is not just stupid to be convinced that such notions are true, it is positively and literally delusional.

If you want to run around the casino without shoes, well, OK, but telling the media that you're doing so because you've discovered that the shoes you put on today are unlucky is the same as announcing, "I'm a complete imbecile" and/or "I've lost my mind." I'd love to ask this idiot to explain how, exactly, the presence or absence of these particular items of footwear affect the shuffling of the cards. No good ducking the question with "I don't know." You've got to explain the physics of it in detail to me. While you're at it, please explain how wearing the tinfoil hat prevents the aliens (or maybe the CIA) from reading your thoughts.

Same with the guy that Shamus reported on. Pray tell, sir, how does having your name either on or off of a web page showing updated chip counts affect the dealing of the cards? Who is the unseen omniscient being that takes offense in seeing your name on that list, and thus punishes you by moving the cards into arrangements that are unfavorable to your success? Describe this being in detail for me, please.

I'll grant that some of this stuff may be tongue-in-cheek. I doubt that Steve Zolotow genuinely thinks the outcome of a hand will be influenced by an iPod. More likely he was playing the clown for the amusement of the table. Same with Jaffrey. He's a very bright guy, and is, I think, more likely to have been joking for the sake of the reporter. But I don't think you can so easily write off the actions of Lubarsky or Sundbo or the anonymous man Shamus described. They appear to take such crap with complete earnestness.

This is just as looney and wacked-out as Jerry Yang believing that, if he says just the right prayers at the right time, God will change the order of the cards in the deck, even after they have been shuffled--a bizarre phemonemon I have written extensively about in the past.

I'm honestly baffled at how people can be that stupid, that far afield from rational thought, that deluded, and yet succeed in a game requiring intelligence and objective, rational decision-making.

When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer

When I was cashing out at Planet Hollywood a couple of nights ago, the nice man behind the counter asked me if $50 bills were OK with me.

When I first moved to Vegas I was baffled by why casino cashiers always asked this before paying me in $50s. I have since learned that it is an old and well-established Vegas superstition that carrying fifty-dollar bills is unlucky, and many people refuse them.

Several times I have asked cashiers their experiences with this denomination. I did again at PH Monday, and his response was typical. He said that if he doesn't ask and just starts counting out the bills, people will often react with horror, sometimes stepping back and saying something like, "Get those away from me" or "I don't even want to touch them." I asked him what percentage of customers reject them, and he guessed that it was something like 80%. Again, this is consistent with what other poker room cashiers have said when I've asked.

Even Daniel Negreanu, usually a pretty rational, thoughtful fellow, appears to buy into this crap. He wrote in his poker blog for November 29, 2006, "Superstitions are stupid, but $50 bills are unlucky. That’s just a well known fact…." (See http://tinyurl.com/2lm7yt.) Of course, there could be a tongue-in-cheek element here, but it seems likely that the writer at least partially believes the truth of his statement.

All of which makes me wonder this: What the hell is wrong with you people? Have you all lost your ever-lovin' minds?

Did just seeing the photo of the bill at the top of this blog entry make you cringe with fear? If you are one of the apparently millions who subscribes to this looney theory, can you please explain to me the exact physics involved? That is, what is the nature and location of the force in the universe that scans people's wallets, determines who is carrying which bills, then messes with the random number generator on the Shufflemaster in specific ways so as to cause a string of second-best hands to be dealt to any person it detects carrying pictures of Ulysses S. Grant? Seriously--isn't that what you have to believe is going on to put any stock in this particular piece of insanity? How can you invest even three seconds of critical thought into this notion and still cling to it?

I'll make this blanket assertion: If your way of thinking about poker includes garbage ideas like this, you will never, ever become a winning player. Period. If you clutter your brain with thoughts about whether you're wearing your lucky underwear, whether you should really be playing on the 13th day of the month, whether this dealer is one that always delivers you bad beats, whether just having gotten your hair cut has sapped your good luck, etc. ad infinitum, then you haven't got room left for rational analysis of the factors that really do matter, such as pot odds, stack sizes, table image, tells, and position.

Now, I happen to think that it's kind of dumb and pointless that we have $50 bills; there just isn't much practical need for a denomination between $20 and $100. (The same is true for the $2--which is part of why it never caught on.) But as long as the bank will take it as part of my deposit, any poker room cashier is welcome to unload their otherwise unloved 50s on me any time, any day. You people who won't accept them because of fear of some curse, well, you're just plain stupid--that's all there is to it.

I don't know if Stevie Wonder is a poker player, but he certainly nailed one element of it: Superstition ain't the way.