Poker gems, #466

Jennifer Tilly, in Bluff magazine column, December, 2012, page 90. She describes a wild night of poker in Ivey's Room at the Aria, which saw her down by $400,000 at one point, gradually clawing her way back to a $6000 profit by around 6:00 a.m.


I take a taxi back to the Bellagio. The bill is seven dollars, and I give the guy 20 and tell him to keep the change. He lights up like a Christmas tree, and I realize I am back in the real world where money means something.

Poker gems, #444

Jennifer Tilly, in Bluff magazine, December, 2011, page 76.

Sometimes I wonder if I am a compulsive gambler, and then I realize I am not. If I am losing, I quit because I hate losing. If I'm winning, I quit. I like to quit while I'm ahead.

Phil [Laak] is the exact opposite. If he is down, he refuses to get up from a table until he is unstuck. Conversely, if he is winning, he won't get up either because he is on a roll. According to Phil, there is NEVER a good reason to get up from the table.

Jennifer Tilly knows

This is from the PokerStars.net Big Game, Thursday's installment.

Poker gems, #409

Jennifer Tilly, in Bluff magazine column (April, 2011, page 65), on installing a heads-up display for her online play, then abandoning it.


At the end of each day, there is a nasty little graph tumbling downhill to show how much I lost in that session. And in case the graph is confusing to me, there is also a concise summation with a minus sigh followed by a very large number....

Maybe, eventually, I will go back to the HUD again.... But for now, I think I will just go back to playing the old-fashioned way. I don't need to be reminded every time I turn on my computer that I'm not as good as I think I am. I was tapping on my own fish tank.

Jennifer doesn't know

Jennifer Tilly is back writing for Bluff magazine again. I like her columns (even if she is a bit daft). But this month she tells a story of a hand played at a WSOP event in London recently:

Right away, however, I get off to a bad start. I decide to complete the big
blind with the excellent starting hand of 4c-2c. Fabrice Soulier, the early
position raiser has just lost a big pot, and I believe that if he doesn't
connect he will quietly fold. Conversely if I connect, he will never put me on
such a donkalicious hand, and I will suck him dry.

To make a long story short, she makes two pair on the turn, but calls him down on the turn and river despite the presence of a possible straight flush in hearts--which is exactly what Soulier has.

Now we know why she has not attained the highest levels of success in the poker world: she thinks the Mighty Deuce-Four--in crubs, no less--is "donkalicious." (I gather that her first description of it as "excellent" was meant to be sarcastic.) Had she believed in the power of her hand, she would have been the one to make the straight flush. Obviously.

Jennifer, the first step toward overcoming a problem is to acknowledge it. I hereby offer you free lessons in how to play the most powerful hand in poker.

Poker gems, #385

Jennifer Tilly, in Bluff magazine column, September, 2010, p. 77, on having a short stack at a tournament final table.


My stack barely has a pulse. I have to bitch slap it back to life.

Poker gems, #375

Jennifer Tilly, on Party Poker's "Big Game," June 10, 2010.


Poker is an addiction. It really is. It takes over your life, alienates you from your friends, and empties out your bank account. I love it!

Poker gems, #345

Jennifer Tilly, in Bluff magazine, February, 2010, p. 49.


Neither of us cash in the Five Diamond. Trying to get my 15K back I play a game that is too big for me, and lose my whole stack to Viffer. He has this uncanny ability to only have a hand when you finally decide to shove on him. I feel a little sad looking at the empty spot in front of me where my chips used to be. Slowly I get up. The key to cash games apparently, is knowing when to quit. Lately, it seems, I only leave the table after someone has made me their bitch.

Poker gems, #229

Jennifer Tilly, on "Poker After Dark," after losing heads-up to Johnny Chan.


I have a tell on him now. When he has a good hand, he goes all in.

Poker gems, #183

Jennifer Tilly, in Bluff magazine column, July, 2008, p. 44.


I realize with small pots you can be wrong many times and still be in the game. With big pots you can only be wrong once.

How do you win a poker tournament?

I'm reading along in the June, 2008, issue of Bluff magazine, Jennifer Tilly's monthly column. She tells the tale of finishing deep in the L.A. Poker Classic, which you can read in full here. Here's how she prepared for Day 5 of that event:

I have been reading a lot of feng shui books lately. According to Asian
tradition, gold increases personal power and diamonds attract wealth. I put on
my Very Large diamond, and my WSOP gold bracelet, and then for good measure
stack more gold bracelets up and down my arm. Around my neck I wear a bear claw
necklace Michael Horse gave me for strength, and turquoise for wisdom. I know I
look goofy, but so what? All poker players are a bit off.

Next I go in the
closet and find my ganesh (remover of obstacles) that I used to put on the
table. Until I decided it made me look weak and retired it. Somewhat
embarrassed, I hide it in my purse. The blinds and antes are really high. I’ll
need to double up almost immediately. Skill alone is not enough at this point.
I’m going to need a heavy dose of luck.

I drive to work admiring my VL
diamond in the sun, and then I suddenly decide to call my sister Meg. Family
lore has it that she possesses supernatural powers. Perhaps if she is aware of
the situation and sending me positive energy, it might be the extra push I need
to get those pocket aces.

Meg is very excited when I tell her what’s going
on. “Wait, Jenny!” she gasps, “I’ll put it on my blog! That way everybody who
reads my blog can help!” She runs out of the room and returns a few minutes later
out of breath. “I did it!” she crows happily. “I told everyone to take a few
minutes out of their day to send good wishes your way and then I included the
link so they can follow along.” I hang up feeling that all that positive energy
will surely translate to one good hand.

Feng shui. Gold to bring power. Diamonds to attract wealth. Bear claw for strength. Turquoise for wisdom. A Hindu deity to remove obstacles. A sister's supernatural powers. Anonymous blog readers sending positive mental energy.

Tell me this. If you were a member of Congress, and Jennifer Tilly visited you to convince you about the need for laws to treat poker differently from other forms of gambling because poker is a game of skill, wouldn't you just point to her own words here, and then laugh her out of your office?

If you were an attorney trying a case involving an ambiguous state law, and the case turned on the judge finding that poker is primarily a game of skill, would you want that judge to have read this article?

I've read many different books full of advice on winning poker tournaments, but not one of them mentioned gold, diamonds, bear claws, turquoise, ganeshes, magical siblings, or infusions of mental energy from distant strangers. Does Jennifer Tilly really know things that have escaped (or at least not been revealed by) Dan Harrington, Arnold Snyder, Tom McEvoy, T. J. Cloutier, Gus Hansen, the whole Full Tilt crew, etc.?

Poker gems, #157

Jennifer Tilly, in Bluff magazine column, May, 2008, p. 48.


I used to like poker because I thought I had control over my future. Now I realize we are all just buffeted by destiny. We are cannon fodder. Remember that shot in Saving Private Ryan where everybody is charging the shore? The ones who survived were lucky, that's all. They were not better soldiers. They just didn't run into any bullets.

Psychic abilities claimed, not proven

A trio of tales from yesterday's Day 1-D of the 2008 WSOP Main Event, all as told by the fine team of bloggers at PokerNews. See if you can spot what they have in common:

I Knew What You Had

On the turn, with the board showing Qs-10s-6d-Ks, Jennifer Tilly
checked to a player in the cutoff, who bet 1,000. Tilly called. On the river of
the 3c, the cutoff player bet out 1,250 and Tilly again made the call....

The cutoff showed As-4s and Tilly mucked. She told the player, "I knew you
had the flush. I pay you off on the turn and the river." She looked clearly
disappointed.

After the hand, Tilly is down to 12,000.


Lederer Better Than Yu

We recently passed by Blue #1 and saw that Howard
Lederer was all in for 13,400 against one opponent, Charles Yu of Dover,
Delaware, on a board of 3h-Jd-10h-2c. With the cameras rolling, the table talk
commenced.

Yu: "I know you don't have it."

Lederer: "Oh, I have it."

Yu: "Maybe you should bet 10,000 and I'll call."

Lederer: "OK, I bet 10,000." He reached for his chips to take some back,
then smiled and left them in the middle of the table.

A minute or so passed.

Lederer: "If you knock me out, they'll probably put you on TV."

Yu: "OK, OK. I fold. But I know you don't have it. If you had bet 5,000, I
would have called."

As Lederer was raking the pot, he chuckled. "I like that he claims he would
have called 5,000," said Lederer to the player on his left.

The discussion continued a few hands later, with Yu still not convinced
that Lederer could beat king-jack, the hand Yu claims he folded.

"You should have made the hero call then," said Lederer. "You could have
told all your friends to watch you on TV." Then he turned more serious, and
said, "I raised you from first position, I raised you on the flop, and I moved
in on the turn. Do you really think your jack was good?"

Yu had no response.

(Before I move on to the third story, I just want to add that there were about three more posts throughout the day of ongoing verbal and card clashes between Lederer and Yu, with Lederer coming out on top of all of them. For a guy who is usually nearly silent at the table, he did a splendid job using a few well-chosen words to (1) sell his image, (2) confuse his opponent, and (3) manipulate his opponent--which, by the end of the day, he had clearly done. Just based on those few reports, it was a virtuoso poker performance by a guy that I've come to think of more as a behind-the-scenes administrator than a serious player.)

More Hot Set Over Set Action

On a flop of Q-8-4, Jeff Weil moved all in with Q-Q and was called by his
opponent, holding 8-8.

"I KNEW it! I KNEW it!" wailed the poor soul with the pocket eights, as
most of his stack was shipped across the table to Weil and the ESPN cameras
swarmed.

"If you knew it, why didn't you fold" wondered Beth Shak aloud.

OK, it's not too hard to see the thread those stories share, especially given the big hints I provided in this post's title and photo.

I don't think I've ever blogged about this (though I discussed it briefly in my little contibution to Episode 4 of the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show), but "I knew you had that" (or close variations) is one of the more common stupid things that people say at the poker table.

Beth Shak asks the most obvious question that gets at the heart of what's so stupid about it. How can you claim to have known that an opponent had you beat, yet still call? If Jeff Wile's anonymous opponent really knew that he was on the bad end of a set-over-set situation--e.g., if Wile had turned his cards face up--he clearly wouldn't have called. If Jennifer Tilly actually knew that she was up against a flush that she couldn't beat, she wouldn't have called.

There have been countless times that I have heard an opponent fold while telling me, "I know you have [some very strong hand]"--and they've been wrong.

We never know what an opponent has, in any meaningful sense of the word, until the cards are revealed. We can have varying degrees of confidence, assigning an opponent to a range of possible hands that make sense, sometimes a very narrow range. But there's always the possibility that the opponent is doing something completely irrational, so that the clues available lead to an erroneous conclusion.

It is quite rare that I experience such a high level of confidence in a player's exact holdings that I will be surprised to see him turn over anything else. Such occurrences are usually when I'm not in the hand (for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, it tends to be easier to accurately gauge what's going on when one is not participating; this may be why poker dealers often overestimate their poker-playing skills, finding that their ability to guess players' cards erodes substantially when they're participating as an opponent rather just watching than as a neutral observer), and usually only after all of the action is completed, so that I'm operating with maximal information.

One time at the Hilton I was watching a multi-way pot develop. Barry, an off-duty Hilton dealer, was one of the contestants. When he made a big bet on the river, I had the highest degree of confidence in what exact two cards he had in the hole that I have ever felt in any poker situation. I would have been positively floored if he had anything else, because only one possible combination made sense. In fact, I'm ashamed to say that I blurted out, "I know what Barry has," with a little laugh. I instantly regretted it, because it could easily have queered the action. (He had the nuts and was wanting to get paid off.) It's the only time I've violated the rule about talking about the hand in progress in a way that could unfairly influence the betting and/or help or hinder another player. It blurted out of me because I thought it was so painfully obvious what he had, that, for that split second, I imagined that that conclusion must be equally apparent to everybody else, so what harm could there be in saying something? But then just as quickly I thought better, realizing that it might not be so clear to everybody. Indeed it wasn't, and Barry did get paid by one of the lesser hands. When it was over, I apologized profusely and repeatedly to both Barry and the whole table for injecting myself.

Anyway, the point is that that degree of pinpoint clarity is really, really rare in poker. And even then, it still doesn't reach what I would consider to be "knowing" what somebody's cards are.

It's another in the long list of stupid things to say at the poker table. Try to refrain from it.

Poker gems, #113

Jennifer Tilly, on last night's "Poker After Dark," commenting on her uncertainty over whether her fold to Jennifer Harman's check-raise in the previous hand was a good laydown. (It was--Harman had the nuts, and Tilly was drawing dead.)


Maybe I'm gonna end up on the Internet again.


[This is an apparent reference to her first appearance on PAD, when she famously (or infamously) checked the best possible full house, in position, on the river, behind Patrik Antonius, explaining that she was worried that he had the only hand that could beat her--the highly improbable quad kings. It was a pretty stupid play, and she was raked over the coals mercilessly in the online forums for it.]

Poker gems, #46

Jennifer Tilly, in her Bluff Magazine column, November, 2007, about being knocked out of a British tournament when her Broadway straight fell to an opponent's quad 9s:

The English have a thing they do when they leave the table. They stand up, shake everybody's hand, and say, "Well played" to the person who knocked them out. This strikes me as exceedingly sportsmanlike of them. In America, they say, "I can't believe you sucked out on me!" or "What a donkey call," or (contemptuously) "Nice river!"

I stand up and shake Mikael's hand. I want to say, "Quads, you lucky son of a bitch!" but I don't. I am in England now. "Well played," I say.

The armpit of Las Vegas poker

In 1962, Edward Albee famously shocked audiences, certain religious folk, censors, and the Pulitzer Prize committee with his play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", in large part because one of the main characters, Martha, has an attention-grabbing opening line: as she and her husband, George, enter their modest home, she disgustedly proclaims, "Jesus H. Christ--what a dump!"

Surely that line will occur afresh to all right-thinking, serious poker players upon their first experience with the poker room at the El Cortez hotel and casino.

I haven't done any poker room reviews in this blog, mainly because they all have their merits and demerits, and where one likes to play is a highly subjective call; my preferences aren't any better or worse or more objective than anybody else's. But this place deserves all the negative attention I can bring to it.

The El Cortez is easily the nearest place that I could go to play; it's only a block north of my apartment building. I've avoided it for the 9 months that I've lived here because I knew that it was one of the few remaining Vegas poker rooms that allowed players to smoke at the table, and I just couldn't stand that. But I read recently that they had joined the non-smoking bandwagon, and so today I decided to give it a whirl.

Jesus H. Christ--what a dump!

Let's talk about the smoking thing first. It's only a little better than it would be if smoking were allowed right at the table. The "room" isn't a room at all, just a little nook in the main casino, three tables right next to a bunch of slot machines. Five or ten feet is all one has to move to be in the smoking area. The tables, by the way, still bear the scars of the smoking era--the cheap vinyl rail has so many cigarette burn/melt scars, it looks like the lunar surface.

The tables are ancient. Whatever layer is under the felt has warped badly (probably from absorbing liquid from spilled drinks). The taut felt over the top no more hides these flaws than spandex bicycle shorts hide the cellulite on a 300-pound cyclist. My chips looked like I had stacked them drunk; no two stacks were parallel to each other, because the surface of the table was so uneven.

What can one say about the clientele? I'll try to quantify it. Their average age is about ten times their average number of remaining teeth. The place must really liven up the day the Social Security checks hit the mail. I've honestly never seen so many scooters, hearing aids, oxygen tanks, and cataract glasses around one poker table. The game was constantly slowed down by the hard-of-hearing asking, "What's the bet? What? WHAT? I can't hear you!" and the hard-of-seeing asking what cards were on the board. In my experience, it's pretty damn rare that at age 45 I'm the young gun at the table.

And I'll just add two more words, trusting that the reader knows whereof I speak, without the need to elaborate in nauseating detail: Body odor.

One elderly woman kept announcing what cards she folded whenever she would have made a pair with the board. After the third time--with the dealers, of course, saying nothing about it--I tried to tell her that that was against the rules. Her only response--and I am not making this up--was, "What? I can't hear you." I asked the dealer to enforce the rule about discussing the hand while it was in progress. The dealer got the same response as I did. She finally called the floor over to caution this fine patron of the game. It was obvious that the floor person did this only as a perfunctory obligation, given the complaint, but actually thought it was a point that didn't matter one little bit. The rest of the table looked at me as if I were from Mars for caring about such things. Rules? There are RULES?

When I was there, two tables were in use, both spreading the most ridiculous structure of hold'em I've ever seen--sillier, even, than the Luxor's bizarro $50 min/$50 max, 1-1-3 blinds game. At the El Cortez, they play a strange mutant spread-limit game: $1-3/$1-6. There is a single blind, which the player posting can make $1, $2, or $3. Raises/bets on the first three rounds are then $1-3 spread, with the larger range ($1-$6) applying only on the river. Among the octogenarian crowd, this produces infinite potential for confusion on every bet, every round, every hand. Half of the game is spent getting the pot right.

For the most part, the posted blind is just $1, and nearly the whole table limps in. This game would play almost identically, and move a hell of a lot faster, if they instead made the structure like this: Everybody puts in $5 blind, then gets their down cards, then the five community cards are put out all at once, and the hole cards are revealed. Winner gets the pot.

The reason this would have the same result is because nobody ever folds. Role of skill? 1%. Role of luck? 99%. Importance of position? Zero. Importance of being able to deduce an opponent's hand? Zero. Probability that the best starting hand will hold up? About 10%. Importance of selectivity in starting hands? Nil. You really can't even call what happens "sucking out," because it's the rule rather than the exception. It really would be more efficient to run it like the lottery that it is, and abandon the pretense that what they're playing is poker.

To make it even better, you can buy in for just $20--and you'd better believe that they do. Lose a hand, buy another $20. They also let even smaller denominations of currency play, so the dealers get the fun job of counting out the 1s and 5s that players toss into the pot, to replace them with the equivalent in blue chips. It's just like the worst home game you've ever been in, except a lot slower, smellier, with worse play, and the participants are drunker. (I won't venture a guess as to what fraction of them are really just there for the free drinks--but the number must be substantial.)

My guess is there isn't a single player there who can, over the long run, beat the rake by enough to average, say, more than $5/hour profit. My $100 got sucked down to nothing over the course of 90 minutes, though it was up significantly for a while. That's neither a complaint nor a boast, because the outcome either way is almost completely independent of skill.

With all the past and current smoking going on there, it's a small miracle that the El Cortez hasn't burned down yet. And though I would never advocate arson, I'll just note that if it did ever get torched, the poker world would be better off for it, and I would send up a little prayer of thanks to the firebug.

I have not yet been to every Vegas-area poker room (at my last count, there were 51, and I've played in 38 so far), but I have a hard time imagining that there is any overall worse room than the El Cortez. I will henceforth refer to it only as the armpit of Las Vegas poker--and I would dub it that even without the B.O. problem mentioned earlier.

Jesus H. Christ--what a dump!


Addendum, July 31, 2007

I just ran across one of Jennifer Tilly's columns from Bluff magazine (see here). She says, "At the El Cortez there is not much to see. A far cry from the glitz and glamour of the Bellagio, it resembles a bus station. There are rows of penny slot machines, and a shoe shine chair. The poker room smells of disinfectant, and has a distinct Wild West feel. It seems like the kind of place where you could get hit by a beer bottle if you’re caught bluffing."