Making a stop at the Station(s)

Last night I played at two of the Station casinos--Texas Station and Santa Fe Station--each of which I had previously visited just once. I nabbed a bunch of short stories and observations about each.

The image above, incidentally, is not from North Las Vegas (where both of the above-mentioned casinos are located). Rather, it is Claude Monet, "Gare Saint Lazare: the Train from Normandy," 1877, a painting that one may see at the Art Institute of Chicago. About ten years ago that museum had a mind-blowing show, pulling together roughly 150 Monets--the largest assembly of his paintings in one place since the artist's death. I was privileged to see it. Best art experience of my life.

Texas Station

My friend James Klosty used to be a shift manager at the Hilton, then moved up to be the poker room manager at Fiesta Henderson. He sent me an email recently telling me that he had moved yet again, and is now in the same position at Texas Station. So I decided to go see what he has done with the place.

This is a small poker room--I counted nine tables. It's too smoky for my taste, with an ineffective half-wall on three sides, exposing players to smoke and noise from the surrounding main casino floor. Last night, a Friday, between 7:00 and 9:00, there were four tables in action, two $2-4 limit and two $4-8 limit hold'em games--nothing in the no-limit category. That alone will severely restrict my interest in returning. The games were pretty typical for a locals-oriented poker room. Most of the players plainly knew each other, and the dealers knew most of the players. There's a series of weekly freeroll tournaments going on now--qualify with ten hours of play--and a lot of the seats were filled with players punching the clock.

Texas Station's poker room is far from the worst of the lot, but, frankly, there isn't much there that would make me interested in visiting it again.


A variation on "I knew he had..."

One of the more annoying stupid things that people say at the poker table is "I knew he had..." (fill in: the straight, the flush, aces, or whatever). Of course, people only say this after their hunch is confirmed. It's pretty easy to be right 100% of the time when you only reveal your "prediction" after the evidence is in.

That's why it was refreshing last night to hear the very rare admission of an error. I won the biggest pot of the night with 7-8 of hearts in the hole when the flop came 4-5-6 rainbow. The betting had been capped with five players before the flop. My bet on the flop got three callers, two on the turn, and one called the river. The woman to my right said, after the hand, that she "knew" I couldn't have 7-8, because she "knew" that I wouldn't call all of that aggressive pre-flop betting with such a holding.

There have been only two or three times that I've noticed a player using the phrase "I knew" when describing what proves to have been an erroneous conclusion. Of course, nobody ever really knows what another player is holding--which is precisely why I find the whole "I knew he had..." post hoc boast to be so stupid and annoying. One's best guess or deduction does not constitute knowing in any meaningful sense. So I appreciated this young woman's honesty. Whether consciouly or not, she showed that what frequently and casually gets labeled as certain knowledge of what an opponent has is usually highly tenuous and fallible.


Applause for a unique rule

During a short stint at a $2-4 table while waiting for a $4-8 seat to open up, the player to my right asked the dealer to give the cards a scramble on the table before putting them into the Shufflemaster. This is a topic I've addressed before, here and here. I've never seen a dealer refuse the request--until last night.

To my great surprise, the dealer said, "I'm not allowed to do that. I have to call the floor." She called over the floor person, and was told that house rules do not permit giving the cards an extra "wash" before putting them in the Shufflemaster.

I wanted to stand up and cheer. Finally, a poker room that implements a rational policy that prevents stupid players from wasting everybody's time with a pointless gesture. Hoorah!

The only way this could be made better would be to have the rule specify that the dealer must administer a dope slap to the idiot player making the request, simultaneously asking "How stupid are you anyway?"


Somebody failed junior-high English

I spotted this sign just outside the Texas Station poker room last night. Notice the erroneous apostrophes in "10's" and "Ace's." Oddly, it's "Aces" in one spot and "Ace's" in another--apparently the sign writer wasn't sure, and so made one each way, figuring it was better to be half right and half wrong than to risk getting it wrong twice. Notice also that he manges to correctly make the plural of "flush" and "player" without inserting superfluous punctuation.

I'll never understand why so many people insist on using apostrophes to make a few randomly selected nouns plural. (There's an entire blog devoted to this pervasive problem. See here.)

Sante Fe Station

After I had had my fill of limit hold'em, and there was no sign of a no-limit game getting started, I left Texas Station and proceeded up Rancho Drive a couple of miles further northwest to Sante Fe Station. I had been to this place only once before. That was on opening day of "Lucky You." I took a friend out there to see the movie and try the then-new "Salt Lick BBQ" restaurant (pretty good, but mostly indistinguishable from about a thousand other barbecue places). There was a little down time before the show started, so I played maybe 30 minutes of limit hold'em while waiting.

Last night was surprisingly different. The place has 14 tables, and 12 of them were full, with waiting lists for everything. I had not anticipated it being so busy. They had only one cocktail waitress for the entire room, which just isn't enough for 12 tables. It took 45 minutes to get a lousy bottle of water.

As with Texas Station, this is primarily a locals casino. Many of the players clearly knew each other. Play was the standard weak/passive that one usually observes in such places. Easy to beat if you just pick your strong spots, and avoid bluffing, because you're surrounded by calling stations. (Hey, it just occurred to me--maybe that's why they named the casino chain the "Station" casinos!)

"All of a sudden..."

The funny line of the night came from a guy named Joe. Four players were in the hand, and nobody bet at it the whole way. The board ended up showing a straight, which nobody could beat, so the pot was chopped four ways; each player got his $2 back. Joe was at an end seat, and raised his hands like a catcher in baseball, encouraging the dealer to throw the two blue chips his way. She obliged. But at the last nanosecond, the player sitting next to Joe deftly reached out and single-handedly nabbed the two chips in mid-air--a very nice interception. He was just kidding around with his friend, and after pretending to pocket the chips put them down in front of Joe where they belonged.

Joe pointed to his buddy and quipped, "All of a sudden, he became my ex-wife!"


Whiner

I watched one guy win a small pot when he had pocket 8s and the other two 8s came on the flop. His lone opponent had nothing and folded to a small bet on the turn. He whined for five minutes about how he couldn't get paid off, and that it was his unluckiest day in poker.

The only thing worse than a player who whines when he loses is the guy who whines when he wins. (See here for a similar story.)

Don't trust your life to 911

As I was leaving Santa Fe Station, I passed through the intersection of Rancho and Lone Mountain Road, where I saw a very drunk guy stumbling around. He randomly staggered between the sidewalk and Rancho. Cars come along pretty fast on that stretch of this major street, and I was worried that he would stumble out at the wrong time and get hit. So I called 911 on my cell phone to report the situation, and hopefully have the cops take him somewhere safer to sleep it off.

I'm aware that calling 911 from a cell phone doesn't necessarily get you to the right people for help on the first try, because the systen isn't really set up to know where one is calling from. I'm used to having to specify where I am and what service is needed before being transferred to the appropriate call center. So when the call was answered, I quickly explained the location and problem, and heard, "One moment please while I transfer you." OK, that's cool.

Second call answerer. I go through it again. This time I am surprised to hear the "wait while I transfer you" again. A third person answers. I ask, "Do I really have to explain this for a third time?" She says she isn't aware of whatever I may have said to previous people. I'm annoyed, but I rattle off the information yet again. She asks which part of the intersection. I say the southwest corner. She then asks which of the two roads I'm traveling on (Rancho), and which direction. How can that matter, since I'm past it now? But I oblige. Then she wants a detailed description of the man in question--race, age, hair, shirt color and style, pants color and style, etc. After about three of these questions I'm getting seriously irritated, and finally cut her off with this: "Look, if your officers get to the intersection of Rancho and Lone Mountain Road and see a drunk guy stumbling around in the roadway, it's probably the same one I saw. And if he has left and there's a different drunk guy stumbling around into the road, then they can help him."

She apparently took the hint and stopped asking for further information. I still can't see the point of asking for all of those details. I mean, isn't it obvious that if they arrive at the intersection specified and see somebody wandering in the street drunk, that's probably the man in question, regardless of what color shirt he happens to be wearing?

I'm sure glad I wasn't trying to report a rape or murder in progress. It would have been done and the perp long gone before I (1) got transferred to the right agency, and (2) finished answering all of their pointless questions.

"Nice call with the 6-high"

There are at least four ways that I measure the success of a poker day: (1) How much money did I win or lose? (2) How well did I play? (3) Did I have a good time? (4) Did I get any good stories to write about? Last night's back-to-back sessions at the Luxor and Excalibur were exceptionally good by that last metric, this being the fourth post I've gotten out of them. I think my record is five stories from one session (check the archives for July 28, 2007, my first-ever time at the Palms).

Luxor. An early-position player puts in a substantial raise. It smells to high heaven of jacks or queens. This is a player I've identified as tight-aggressive, but inexperienced--the kind who will have a hard time getting away from a big pocket pair even when he's beat. This makes him the perfect target for a sneaky play. As luck would have it, I'm on the button, and position is huge when attempting to take down a premium hand.

Limit hold'em is a game where you try to have small edges many, many times, and chip away gradually at opponents' stacks. No-limit hold'em, by contrast, is a game in which the object is to swipe away another player's entire stack in one fell swoop. I live or die by looking for and creating such situations.

I held the 4-6 of spades. This is a pretty good hand for taking on a big pocket pair. If it hits in the way I need it to, with two pair or a straight or flush or a big draw, it will often do so with a flop that looks very safe to a player--especially a less-experienced one--sitting on a big pair. So I call. It's just the two of us in the hand.

The flop is a red 6 and the 2-3 of spades. I have flopped top pair with a straight-flush draw, on the button, with a board that will look completely non-threatening to a player with a big pair sitting under his card protector. I can't reasonably ask for it to get any better than this. If he has just two big cards, such as A-K or A-Q, I'm already ahead. Even if he has a big pair, I win with any spade for a flush, a 4 for two pairs, a 5 for a straight, or a 6 for trips, giving me 16 outs twice. That makes me a statistical favorite to win.

He bets. I put in a smallish raise, hoping he'll think that I'm just trying to weakly counter a continuation bet or that I have just a flush draw, in either of which cases he would be correct to come back over the top with a reraise. He does just what I hope, and moves all-in. I beat him into the pot with my chips. By the time I get my cards exposed, the dealer has already put out a red 5 on the turn, clinching my win with a straight. My opponent mucked without showing, so I'm left with my original guess of a big pocket pair. I'd be very surprised if it were anything else, given how he played.

I wouldn't bother telling this story if not for what happened next. After all, though it turned out nicely for me, and exactly the way I had set it up, it's just another hand out of millions of poker hands, and not particularly remarkable or memorable in and of itself.

My opponent had a look of mixed disgust and puzzlement on his face. He asked me directly, "What were you doing?" I thought maybe the hand had played out so fast (the dealer was very quick to whip out the turn and river, determine the winner, and push the pot) that he hadn't had a chance to grasp my situation. I don't usually explain myself, but it seemed to be an honest and non-hostile inquiry, so I pointed out, "I had top pair and both straight and flush draws on the flop." He responded, "Yeah, I see that--but I meant before the flop." Here his voice took on an unmistakable nasty/sarcastic edge: "Nice call with the 6-high."

This situation is virtually identical to one that I described here: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/you-called-raise-with-that.html. In fact, looking back on it, I see that it was another 4-6 suited that won that pot! Maybe I should make that my trademark hand (although the 2-4 still has a special place in my heart; see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/warning-do-not-try-this-at-home.html and http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/article-in-card-player-magazine-non.html for that history). This guy was just incapable of recognizing that I took a measured gamble and won. Most of the time, I would miss the flop, have to dump my hand, and he'd profit the $15 call I made before the flop.

Maybe it was an idiotic move; I'm certainly capable of patting myself on the back for things that much better players would say were stupid moves, with convincing explanations of why I was wrong to do them. But as I said after the last 4-6 story, if my opponent really is a more advanced player and I made an objectively bad play, then he should relish having me there, and welcome every knuckleheaded move I make, because in the long run he will profit thereby. Conversely, though, if it was a reasonable and clever play, then he just looks petty and shallow for not being able to recognize it as such. Either way, the nasty comment works against the one spouting it.

I suppose he got a "good" bad-beat story out of the deal: "You wouldn't believe the moron I ran into at the Luxor last night. Everybody should have been able to tell that I had a big pocket pair, and he called me with a six-high, then hit his gutshot straight draw after all the money was in! What a donkey!"

I not only walked away with the chips, but with what I think is a better story.

Paying for time

Friday night I partook again in the crazy mixed game at Treasure Island. The mechanics of it were a whole lot easier this time. But I still played like a donkey and got punished for it.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the house rakes that game by time instead of by the pot. (My best guess is that this is because the games plays a lot more slowly than hold'em, and some games are faster than others, so the number of hands per hour is lower and variable.) Each player pays $4 every 30 minutes, then nothing is taken out of the pots.

After maybe three hours, one player left and another arrived. The new player--obviously a veteran of this game, so she doesn't get unfamiliarity as an excuse--played three or four hands before the half-hour interval arrived and we all had to chuck in the $4. She complained that she shouldn't have to pay, because she had only played a few hands.

But--DUH!--she had been playing them for free!

In hold'em, the blinds are payment in advance for one full round of poker (i.e., the dealer button going around the table one time). Similarly, when paying by time, the payment is for the next interval, not the one that just passed. Were it otherwise, if a player busted out and decided to go home, he or she would have to reach into the wallet and pull out $4 for the time spent. Obviously the casino isn't going to do that.

So rather than seeing her few free hands as a bonus, a gimmee that the previous player had paid for her, she instead griped about it.

It never ceases to amaze me what petty and just plain wrong-headed things poker players will decide warrant complaining about.

Don't argue about the misdeal

One of the advantages of online poker is that you never have a misdeal. That's not enough to outweigh all of the other stuff that makes live poker so vastly superior to online games, but it's something. Misdeals are a pain in the rear.

A misdeal happens when for some reason the cards get dealt out wrong. There's a list as long as your arm of the different ways this can happen, but they all basically boil down to that one simple essence.

When the dealer realizes that a misdeal has occurred, it's a no-discretion situation. He or she has to collect all the cards, reshuffle, and start over again. OK, not a huge problem, maybe one minute out of my life wasted, but that's about it.

It seems, though, that the problem always gets compounded by one guy at the table who won't accept it. Predictably, somebody was dealt pocket aces or kings or queens before the mistake is discovered, and wants to play the hand out. So he starts kicking up a fuss, trying to find some other solution to the problem instead of just returning his cards to the dealer.

This message is for those morons: Give it up. It does no good. A misdeal is a misdeal, and nothing can be done about it. Your protests only accomplish three things: (1) They label you as a whiner. I can't stand whiners. (2) They waste everybody's time. (3) They tell everybody that you had a monster starting hand, which means that even if you somehow got your way and we played out the hand, you wouldn't get any action, because you've basically told us that you're holding one of the only three or four combinations of cards that anybody would care about relinquishing. Yes, usually the problem was caused by a dealer error, and you're the innocent, wronged victim. So what? Get over it. Things are unfair all over. Move on with your life, and let us do the same. Another hand is coming in about 30 seconds, if you'll just cooperate. The dealer already regrets the error, and piling on abuse will neither remedy the situation nor make it less likely to happen again in the future. Strange as it may seem to you, the rules on what has to be done do not change just because you happened to get two cards that you like.

While I'm on the subject, there is occasionally a related issue. Some kinds of errors in how the cards are dealt can be fixed by the dealer. For example, accidentally dealing a hand to a player who is sitting out until the blinds come back around (e.g., somebody who just came back from a dinner break) can be cured by simply killing the hand after the deal is completed. If the button gets only one card instead of two and doesn't realize that fact until it's his turn, that can be repaired by giving him the second card then, because nothing about the deck has changed. In some casinos, the accidental exposure of the first down card to the last player (the button) is an automatic misdeal, but in others it's handled with a replacement card, just as with any other player position (which, in my opinion, is the preferred approach; the reason for considering that a misdeal is just silly).

Anyway, when one of these fixable problems occurs, I frequently hear a player--always, always somebody who thinks he's an expert on poker rules and procedures, but isn't--calls out "MISDEAL" and throws his cards in towards the dealer. This triggers a chain reaction of other players doing the same thing. Then we really do end up with an untenable situation that can only be fixed by starting over again, but if the know-it-all had just kept his trap shut and let the dealer handle it, we'd be on our way already.

So here's the thing to remember: Only the dealer, not a player, can declare a misdeal. In fact, "misdeal" is a word that should not come out of your mouth at the poker table unless you're the dealer. If you're playing and you hear somebody other than the dealer call it, don't do anything unless and until the dealer asks you to return the cards. There are nearly as many false misdeals because of loudmouths who think they know everything as there are true misdeals, and every one of the former could be eliminated if players would just let the dealer run the game.

The painting above, by the way, is titled "A Misdeal," by the great Frederic Remington (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Remington). Click to enlarge it. You can buy a print of it from the same site from which I lifted the jpeg: http://www.printsoldandrare.com/oldwest/. Fortunately, I haven't yet seen anybody get quite that angry about a misdeal, and hope I never do.

I don't like Eskimo Clark

Paul "Eskimo" Clark is one of about a zillion people on the poker tournament circuit that shows up sufficiently often on television that it's almost impossible not to have seen him at some point, if you're into watching such things. I hadn't had cause to dislike him, until today.

The Professional Poker Tour was a great idea that didn't take off. It lasted one season. Instead of a bunch of amateurs with $10,000 to blow on a big tourney buy-in, or guys who got lucky in a super-satellite, you actually had to be a professional poker player with a decent track record in order to be invited to play. The competition really is impressive, with very, very few soft spots at any of the tables. From what I've seen so far, there's a lot of really great play here.

I never saw the broadcasts when they originally aired, which I think was in 2005-2006. But I recently found a place where I could download them, so now I'm starting to work my way through the season. It will take a while, because they covered the events with reasonable thoroughness, devoting ten hours of TV time to each tournament, rather than just a two-hour final table, as the World Poker Tour does. With five events in the season, that's 50 hours of play I'm looking forward to absorbing. You can expect to see more grumpy complaints posted here from what I see.

Each of the first two episodes, taped at Foxwoods, have given me reason to put Clark on my list of disfavored pros.

String raise

At the very end of the first episode we catch the tail end of a brouhaha between Clark and Paul Darden. This didn't happen at the featured table, so we can't see the actual incident that triggered the confrontation, but apparently Clark made a string bet or raise, and Darden called him on it, backed up by the dealer, and the excess portion of the bet or raise had to be withdrawn. It's hard to tell for sure, but it appears that Darden bet on the river and Clark wanted to raise, but was instead limited to a call because of the illegal movement.

This is surprising all by itself, because string bets/raises (i.e., putting out some amount of chips, then going back to one's stack to grab more to put out in a second motion, without having first made a verbal announcement) are exceptionally rare among professionals or even experienced amateurs. It's the kind of mistake you tend to make once, your first time playing in a casino, but then you catch on to how things work, and the mechanics of proper betting become automatic.

Clark wins the hand, but he stands up, shakes his finger at Darden, and says, "I'm gonna have to call it on you now since you're coming after me. I'm gonna call everything on you." Darden tells him that's fine, call whatever you want, because "I know how to play."

This is so stupid. First, it's pretty unlikely that Darden (or anybody else) is going to make the kind of blunder that Clark did. Second, whether or not to "call" another player on such infractions is usually not left to any player's discretion; the dealer should be the one speaking up about it, and do it in every single instance, whether or not anybody else at the table notices or cares. (In this case, since the dealer apparently saw it happen, I'm guessing that he would have disallowed it anyway, but Darden was just a hair quicker to point it out.) Third, the classy thing to do in this spot is say, "You're right, my mistake. I wasn't thinking," then let it go. This sort of verbal tirade accomplishes nothing except to get yourself labeled as an immature brat who can't admit to his own failings.

Personally, I would just ignore a tantrum like that, just stare at the guy like the clown he is. But if you're inclined to respond at all, Darden has it about right: Go ahead, dude, I defy you to catch me being that boneheaded!

Not knowing the action

In the second incident, the blinds are at $150/300. From early position, Chris Bigler silently pushes all-in for a huge overbet, $7025, with suited A-K. The dealer should announce the raise to the table, but doesn't, as far as I can tell from the tape. Clark, three spots to the left of Bigler, fails to notice Bigler's move, and throws $1200 into the pot, thinking that he is raising (with K-J offsuit). Annie Duke points out to him that it was raised before, and Clark takes back his chips. The tournament director is called for a ruling, and says that Clark can either call Bigler's raise or fold, but if he folds the $1200 will stay in the pot. This is a pretty standard rule. It is always every player's personal obligation to know what the preceding action was before making a decision.

At this point, the ethical and professional thing to do is say, "You're right, it was my mistake," give up the $1200 (18% of his stack--a big hit for a slip-up), smile, and move on. But no. He has to argue about what his intentions were, what the rule is, whether the raise was verbally announced, etc.

Finally, Duke says, "You know what, Eskimo, just put your money in the pot. He's made a ruling." Chris Karagulleyan chimes in, "There's no one higher you're going to go to." At last, Clark realizes that he's wasting his breath (and everybody else's time), and disgustedly throws the chips back in, along with his cards.

The delicious irony is that Bigler gets called by somebody else, so we get to see the hand played out, and Clark would have sucked out on him and won a huge pot. Hee hee hee! I love it when whiners get punished by the poker gods.

The only way to be grumpy about poker is to do it away from the table--like in a blog, maybe....

Cruelest game ever invented

The poker gods have a sick, sick sense of humor sometimes.

I was playing at the Orleans yesterday. I picked up A-10 on the button, so I raised in order to thin the field a bit. The guy in the big blind had just recently caught me bluffing, and he called with the A-3 of spades, presumably thinking I might be on a steal again.

Flop was K-3-3. The BB slow-plays his three-of-a-kind. I check behind, rather than put in a continuation bet, primarily because of the recent failed bluff attempt. Turn card is a Q. Now the BB bets. I think he might be pretty weak and just trying to buy it--again because of the table image I've created for myself. Besides, I suspect that any ace or jack on the river wins it for me. So I call. The river is a lovely jack. With no possible flush, my Broadway straight (A-K-Q-J-10) ought to be good, because I think it's highly unlikely my opponent has quads or a full house.

To my astonishment, he moves all-in! I nearly beat him into the pot with my chips. He shows me the flopped trips that he unwisely slow-played. I show him the runner-runner straight that I managed to catch. He is disgusted, stands up, starts to walk away. The dealer calls him back, though, because it turns out that he had $10 more than I did.

On the next hand, I look down at the A-3 of spades--the same two cards my opponent had in the last hand. Literally the same two cards, because this table is not using an auto-shuffler, so it's the same deck. That's just too delicious to throw away, because I suspect that my former opponent is going to push his last $10 in with any two cards from the small blind. Sure enough, he does. I call and show him that I now have the very cards he just lost with.

He has--get this--the same A-10 that I had on the previous hand! So he is way ahead, right? He's about 3:1 to win this one. Or at least he is until the flop is A-3-x, giving me two pair. He doesn't improve, and I felt him. He calls me by a very rude term that involves my mother, and storms off. I can't help laughing.

That one-two punch is among the sickest, cruelest things I've ever witnessed.

But I'm keeping the money.

Idiots blame the dealer

One of the most baffling things I see and hear at poker tables is players who blame the dealer for bad cards or bad outcomes.

Of course, there's always at least a bit of this from everybody, mostly joking and good-natured. For example, after 15 or 20 minutes of unplayable hands, I'll occasionally request that a dealer see if she can find it in her heart to pass me one face card before she completes her shift. After an especially bad beat, I'll sometimes try to lighten my own mood by telling the dealer, "You understand that I have to hold you personally responsible for that pot." I think, though, that I have always made it abundantly clear through tone of voice and facial expression that I'm kidding. Many times I have seen off-duty poker dealers sitting at a table as players, and they needle the dealers about bad cards and unlucky outcomes, too—and I have always had the impression that these comments were both made and taken with a wink and a nod.

Some players, though, aren't kidding about this. Some sincerely believe that particular dealers have it in for them. There was a regular at the Hilton who would always take a 30-minute break when a particular dealer came to the table, convinced that it was impossible for him to win a pot from that dealer. Dealers get cursed at, have cards and chips thrown at them, and in other ways take personal abuse from angry players—not for any breach of protocol, but simply because of an unfavorable outcome in the play of a hand.

This is one of the most puzzling attitudes I run into. I'd like to interview these players in detail, and ask them, "Just how do you believe that the dealer is carrying out this plot against you? Does she spend her breaks setting up the decks in a particular order to deliver you bad beats, then slip those decks onto the table when you're not watching?" The idea that casino dealers deliberately select starting hands or outcomes of pots cannot withstand even a few seconds of critical thought by anybody with more than about three neurons connected together within his cranium.*

H. Lee Barnes, in his book Dummy Up and Deal: Inside the Culture of Casino Dealing (University of Nevada Press, 2002) eloquently, if unscientifically, explains the reason for this irrational behavior, from the player’s point of view.** From page 2:

Barnum was right about [a sucker being born every minute]. But the players
refuse to see their pictures on a poster with P.T. Barnum pointing at them. Nor
can the players see the house. What’s the house, after all? A building with
carpet and walls and chandeliers? A corporation? What the players see is the
dealer.

“How can you do this to me?” a player asks.

The dealer can’t pass the blame off onto Blaise Pascal*** or the
player’s bad judgment or the house. The dealer must shoulder the responsibility
for his or her imagined power, no matter how absurd it is to think that the
dealer exercises any control. The dealer becomes not the medium through which
chance plays out its pure odds, but rather the conduit of luck…. What is left
after all the motion is the dealer standing behind the table in her uniform. She
must face the player.

“How can you do this to me?”

The most unflinching assessment of this phenomenon I have encountered is that of prolific poker writer David Sklansky, in Fighting Fuzzy Thinking in Poker, Gaming & Life (Two Plus Two Publications, 2000), p. 113:

Players sometimes throw cards at the dealer, insult him or her, or declare that they will never tip. Sometimes this happens because the dealer made a mistake. More often, it is because the dealer dealt the abusing player a losing hand.

While I have never knowingly abused a dealer, I have a confession to make—I like it when I see someone else do it! It’s not because I am a sadist; and it’s not because I secretly wish that I had the gumption to do it myself. Rather, it is because I am delighted to know that my opponent is an imbecile!

The fact is that any player who gets mad at the dealer for his losing cards, truly, is a complete moron, and his stupidity ought to make me money…. So to repeat one more time, if you don’t think the dealer is cheating, and you still abuse him or her when you lose, you simply are an idiot.

Most of the overt signs of irrationality I complain about from low-stakes players can also be seen among high-stakes professionals, at least occasionally: superstitions, asking for new decks of cards to try to terminate a streak of bad luck, rabbit-hunting, having "feelings" about what card was coming next, getting upset when a judiciously folded trash hand would have hit big, etc. Until this week, though, I had never seen a recognizable, successful, name-brand, professional player earnestly blame a dealer for the cards.

Then yesterday, while browing around YouTube for something else, I came upon this clip of David "Devilfish" Ulliott: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyzZDCG43hI (from which the first screenshot above was stolen). In it, he and Phil Hellmuth get all their money in before the flop, and Hellmuth gets lucky to flop a third 9 to beat Ulliott's pocket aces. As soon as he sees that card, Ulliott says, "Look at this fucking dealer." (The Brits are less squeamish than we are about language on television.) He manages to make Hellmuth look like a classy gentleman by comparison--which is quite a feat in itself.

In another episode of the same series, Ulliott again takes out his bad beat on the dealer--even though he was openly reprimanded for it after the first incident (by a voice off-camera; I couldn't tell if it was the tournament director or one of the television producers). You can see the situation in the second screenshot above, and the hand is shown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSA0tzdx0yg. Again, all the money is in before the flop, with Andrew Black having attempted an all-in bluff reraise, which Ulliott called. As he walks away, he says something that is partially obscured by the commentators, but sounds like, "You'd better get coffee out to that dealer. She's fucking worse than the other one."

Yeah, Devilfish, it's the dealer for sure. Hellmuth and Black paid the dealers under the table to arrange the cards so that you would lose.

Really, what other scenario is possible by which it makes any sense to blame the dealer? But if Ulliott genuinely thinks that's what happened, then why not lodge a complaint with the tournament director, insist on reviewing the videotapes, scrutinize the security procedures, etc.? Of course, it's pretty unlikely that he actually believes this. But then, if he doesn't believe it, why say something so monumentally stupid, especially when you know it's going to be put on television?

When Hellmuth blows up, it's always at another player, whose idiotic play, in Hellmuth's eyes, resulted in whatever bad outcome he's currently bitching about. Mike Matusow, in his blowups, just blames bad luck, repeatedly claiming that he is simply the unluckiest player alive. These attitudes are stupid and demonstrably wrong, but at least they have some kernel of truth to them. Lots of Hellmuth's opponents do make bad plays, then get lucky--but he's no more a victim of this than every other professional who has to fight their way through large fields of amateurs to win modern tournaments. Matusow often blames bad luck when it was actually his own bad judgment at fault, but luck is certainly part of every hand. If he's not actually cursed with extraordinarily bad luck, in his blow-up situations it is at least true that he failed to get good luck where it might help him.

But blaming the dealer? Mr. Ulliott, in addition to being supremely ill-mannered, that's just moronic.

*I realize that there are countless schemes by which a dealer can manipulate a poker game. People playing in home games and underground cardrooms really do have to watch out for these "mechanics." But in casinos, using modern, standard security practices, it's almost unthinkable that any such shenanigans are going on. The dealer, if caught, would obviously be out of not just a job, but a career, as he or she would be forever unemployable in the gaming industry--not to mention facing criminal charges. Except at the very highest stakes, it would be impossible to win enough money from such a plot to make it profitable, after paying a dealer a large enough bribe that he or she might consider risking that much for it.


**This was written in the context of games in which the player is set against the house, with the house having a fixed edge, but the same psychology clearly carries over to poker, in which players are pitted against each other, with the house having no interest in who wins or loses.

***A 17th-century mathematician who, with Pierre de Fermat, basically invented the entire field of probability theory. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal.

Phil Hellmuth is bad at math

I thought I couldn't dislike Phil Hellmuth more than I already did. Turns out I was wrong about that. In fact, I'm thinking now that my capacity for disliking him may actually be infinite. Still, I didn't know, until last night, that I would end up including "poor math skills" on my list of reasons for disliking him.

On this week's installment of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" an interesting situation came up. The hand itself was pretty unremarkable, as you can see from the cards shown in the accompanying screenshot. What was interesting was whiny Phil Hellmuth's negotiations for "insurance" on the hand.

In this game, $67,000 pots are bigger than average, but not all that unusual. In most episodes there are one or two pots that climb into the $100,000-$200,000 territory. So to start off with, it's strange for a player to be so afraid of losing that he'd seek insurance on a pot of this size. Nobody else at the table would even think of it--only Phil, who, for some reason, just can't stand losing a biggish pot. This is particularly strange, since he is up by a couple hundred grand for this session, as he has already bragged.

But OK, it's his right in this game to try to reduce the chance that Eli Elezra will catch a lucky card and steal this pot from him. They could agree to run the last card twice, for example, and it would be highly unlikely that Eli would luck out twice in a row, so Phil would be almost guaranteed at least half of the pot. Another possibility is one that Eli explicitly offered: give Eli a quarter of the pot and take three-quarters for himself. I've seen Phil make this kind of arrangement when he's in a dominant position and all-in against Barry Greenstein in a previous season; if I recall correctly, Phil was something like a 90% favorite, and Greenstein agreed to give him 80% of the pot, and they didn't even play out the rest of the cards. In Greenstein's more rational view, he'll take the expected value that Phil is giving up, and not worry about the variance.

For some reason, though, Phil this time wants to go the "insurance" route. That is, he wants to pay somebody a small amount if he wins the hand and, in exchange, be paid a larger amount in the event that Eli draws out on him. This is where it starts to get strange.

I have the episode on my hard drive, so I can play it back and do a verbatim transcript. Phil says, "Queen is a chop. All right, I'm just going to insure against a nine or a jack."

Here's Phil's first mistake. It's true that a queen on the river chops the pot, because both players would have two pairs, kings and queens with a 10 kicker. But Phil fails to notice that a 10 also produces a split pot, because it gives both players tens and kings with a queen kicker.

Phil continues: "So it's eight outs.... 36 to eight is the actual odds. I'm a 4 1/2 to 1 favorite."

That's his second and third mistakes. Eli actually has only seven outs to win the pot outright: the four remaining jacks to make a straight, and the three remaining 9s to make a better two pairs. Additionally, Phil is strangely counting the cards that make for a chopped pot as being on his side. (Sam Farha folded a 9 and a 10, which would affect the calculation if Phil knew about them, but he doesn't, so we'll consider them as unknowns, treating them the same as the ones still in the dealer's hand.)

The actual odds, not counting the queens and 10s, are 31 cards for Phil and seven cards for Eli, which is 4.4:1 (which, by coincidence, happens to be close to what Phil said, though he was wrong in how he got there). If you account for the pot-splitting cards by adding them to both players' sides of that ratio, it's 37:13, or only 2.8:1.

Phil asks for insurance at 4:1. "I'm 4 1/2 to 1. I'll take 4 to 1. I'm letting you have above 10%. You're getting 12 1/2% juice. That's pretty good."

Brandon Adams takes him up on it for $40,000 to $10,000. That is, Hellmuth is to pay Adams $10,000 if he wins the hand, and collect $40,000 from Adams if Elezra sucks out on him. Then Farha joins the deal for an additional $8000 to $2000.

The dealer puts out the river card: a queen, and the pot is split.

Now Hellmuth says, "It's a split pot, nobody has to pay any insurance."

Farha objects, but then both Jamie Gold and Daniel Negreanu remind him that Phil specified that he was only insuring against a jack or a 9, and Farha, for some reason, accepts that.

But that's what is most strange here. You would expect Adams and Farha to collect their insurance payment, because the event against which they were providing insurance did not occur. Phil said he wanted insurance against a jack or a 9, and none came--so he owes his "premium" to his insurers. What's more, he was unambiguously including the pot-chopping cards as being for him in his proposal, when he claimed that he was a 36:8 favorite. He never said that a chopped pot would mean no money going either way as part of his offer.

So one of two things happened: The insurance deal was made with the understanding that a split pot meant Phil owed insurance, and he reneged on his end of it, or he misrepresented the terms of the offer. By coincidence, he happened to state the odds approximately correctly for the situation in which a chopped pot meant no payment either way, but his explanation clearly included the implication that he would pay up in the case of a chopped pot. It's a very strange situation, and I wonder whether debate among the participants continued after the taping stopped, and whether any money ended up changing hands. (This was the last hand of the night.)

However they worked it out amongst themselves, we're left with these conclusions: Phil Hellmuth doesn't know how to count an opponent's outs. He's a high-stakes dweeb who, uniquely among these players, can't tolerate the swings that inevitably come with playing for these amounts. Finally, he either misrepresented the offer he was presenting to Adams and Farha or welched on it after the hand was over.

If you didn't have enough reasons to dislike Hellmuth before, there's at least three more for you.

Addendum, October 30, 2007:

I've been discussing the math of this with a bunch of other people at the http://www.twoplustwo.com/ forums, and one of them just posted a link to this entry from Hellmuth's blog, apparently made soon after the taping of the show in question: http://www.philhellmuth.com/phil-hellmuth-poker-blog.html?id=1866 In this post, he says, "Later on, I figured out that I owed $12,000 to Brandon ($10,000) and Sammy ($2,000), because they insured the very last hand of the night. By the way, Brandon doesn't even know that I owe him $10,000, because I decided that I owe him after the fact! He will be pleasantly surprised, that's for sure."

Glad to know that he finally did the right thing. Still hard to know why they didn't get it sorted out on the spot.


Addendum, November 4, 2007

Brandon Adams just posted a note about this situation to the twoplustwo forums:

Yo, I should have commented on the Hellmuth insurance thing earlier. First off,
Phil is one of my favorite guys in poker. He's not cheating anyone. I'm going
off memory here....The deal was only partially clear in my head at the time of
the insurance. it was obviously a good deal for me. when we chopped, i didn't
know what we were supposed to do, though since insurance naturally is protection
against something bad happening (in this case, a bad beat) and something bad
didn't happen, my first thought was that a chop went to me. but then i started
thinking about it and i realized that the deal was good for me even if a chop
was a chop. so i was confused and decided to let it go. this is just what i
remember thinking... as of now, i have no recollection of the cards and i
haven't read the above. The next day phil runs into mori at the coffee shop and
tells mori that he should have paid me. Phil emailed me to tell me he owed me
10k. I thought about it some more and told him not to pay me. I said this b/c if
i had won with a chop, then that implied some ridiculous vig for me (i still had
a decent edge counting a chop as a chop). He insisted on paying me, I told him
we'd flip a coin for it, then he said he'd pay me $6k. he paid me $6k the first
time i saw him at the series. ba

This is pretty reasonable of Adams. Here's the math on what he's saying: Suppose the deal had been explicitly made that no insurance money went either way in the event of a chopped pot. There are 31 cards that win the whole pot for Phil, 7 for Eli, so the odds against an insurer having to pay out are 31:7, or 4.4:1. That's what Adams is calling the "decent edge counting a chop as a chop." On the other hand, if a chopped pot meant that Phil still had to pay his insurance "premium," then there are 37 cards on which he has to pay it (the 31 that are an outright win, plus the 6 cards that result in a split pot), and only 7 on which he collects insurance. 37:7 is 5.3:1, which is what Adams is here calling "some ridiculous vig for me" (32%, actually, compared to the 11% he decided was "decent").

In any event, it sounds like they ended up settling it like gentlemen.

So do something about it, pal!

I was on the receiving end of an unpleasant complaint from somebody at my Hilton tournament table today.

There's a guy I've seen there several times before, though I don't know his name. He always seems grouchy and ready to tear into somebody for some perceived offense. Today it was me. He got moved to my table, two seats to my left. After being there maybe an hour, it was folded around to me on the button, so I raised with an A-7 offsuit. This guy looks at his cards, then shoots me a dirty look, and says, "You just have to raise on your button every time, don't you?" Then he mucked his cards.

Usually I let this sort of idiocy go unchallenged. But he was so far off-base that it irked me. I had not been at all out of line with late-position raises. I was playing pretty much textbook A-B-C poker. Yeah, if it's folded around to me, and I'm on the button with only the two blinds yet to act, and I have an ace, of course I'm going to raise! That is absolutely the standard, obvious, and correct thing to do, because any ace is statistically likely to be the best hand when put up against two random hands.

Soon after this guy moved to the table, I did the same thing with a suited K-3, and the big blind moved all in for just a little bit more, so I naturally called. He had an A-3 and won. OK, no big deal. K-3 was likely to be better than either of the blinds held, and this time it just happened not to be. The call of the raise was a no-brainer because of how little it cost me. But apparently, this planted the idea in this guy's mind that I was routinely stealing with nothing.

Yeah, a couple of times it was folded to me on the button or in the cutoff seat (one to the right of the button) and I raised with garbage, for a couple of reasons. First, I had a larger-than-average stack, and, second, the three players to my left (including this guy) were ones who tend not to play back at a raiser unless they have a strong hand. Again, raising in such a situation is exactly what every strategy book written since Super System would recommend. Stealing blinds is absolutely crucial to tournament success.

I've been on a short stack when there's an aggressive big stack one or two spots to my right, stealing the blinds every chance they had. It's a helpless feeling, because there's nothing you can do about it, other than fire your one all-in bullet and hope that it isn't the one time the thief has a real hand. Yeah, it sucks, but that's just how the game is played. Big stacks have a huge advantage over smaller stacks in a tournament, and the blinds are in a strategically weak position. Put those two things together, and it's not hard to predict who will be preying on whom.

But this curmudgeon apparently felt like it was personal, as if I were reaching into his wallet and absconding with his cash. No, pal, I was just playing the game exactly the way every expert recommends--probably somewhat tighter than optimal, in fact, stealing the blinds less often than I maybe could and should have.

I actually responded a bit testily to him: "If you had been paying attention, you'd know that it hasn't been anywhere near every time." He said it literally had been. Absurd. I just don't play that loosely/aggressively. I pointed out that I had even folded on the button a few times, which he claimed was untrue. But I remembered doing it, because I felt a twinge of remorse when I did, thinking, "I should probably be raising rather than folding here," but couldn't get myself to pull the trigger with, e.g., 9-3 offsuit.

It doesn't really matter, though. Suppose I had been raising every single time I had the button--so what? What earthly good does it do to complain about it? It just makes the griper look like a whiny Phil Hellmuth wannabe. It certainly isn't going to slow down an aggressive position player--in fact, it might make him even more determined to steal, steal, steal.

If you want to break somebody of the irritating habit of stealing your blinds too often, the remedy is simple and universally recognized: You re-pop them. Put in a huge re-raise. It doesn't even matter much what cards you're holding at the time, because if he's raising every time, and you've let it slide four or five times in a row, he's going to have to give you credit for having a big hand, whether you actually do or not.

The first time I played a tournament at Caesars Palace, we were down to the final six or so. Sure enough, I got a habitual button-raiser two seats to my right, and he had a bigger stack. After about four times in a row, I decided to stick it to him, to try to make him a bit more selective about his steal attempts. I re-raised all-in with a K-6. He insta-called, and I knew I was in deep doo-doo. But to my delight, a 6 came on the flop, his A-K didn't get any help, and I doubled up! He exited soon thereafter; I went on to take first place.

On the other hand, the same situation arose at a tournament at Binion's a few months back, and I did the all-in reraise with a J-10, and again learned that my timing was off, since the aggressive big stack had the A-K that time, and knocked me out. But that's still the thing to do. Most of the time he'll fold and start being a little more careful about his steals. Sometimes you'll get unlucky and lose. Sometimes you'll get lucky and double up. That's just how the game goes.

Being a sourpuss about having your blinds stolen--even if it is flagrantly more often than the raiser could possibly have a strong hand--is counterproductive. It makes you stew in your own juices, which isn't good for your game, and it lets the raiser know that he's getting to you, which will only encourage him. Rather than complain about it, act--put in the re-steal. It's risky, but it feels great when it works (which is most of the time), and it's far more effective at accomplishing what you want. For those of us who are physically kind of like the 97-pound weakling who gets sand kicked in his face at the beach, the big re-raise/re-steal from the blinds is the poker equivalent of giving the bully a black eye, a bloody nose, and a fat lip after he tries to steal your lunch money once too often. It feels tremendously empowering (and, compared to the fistfight, has the added advantage of being perfectly legal and relatively safe).

There's this old joke: What's the difference between a puppy and a poker player? After six months or so, the puppy will stop whining.

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.

Another bad poker movie

"No Limit: A Search for the American Dream on the Poker Tournament Trail" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478217/; http://www.nolimitmovie.com/) is a 2006 documentary about a divorced couple with a film production company who decide to try using a series of poker tournaments to win enough money to fund some other film project (never specified) that they want to do. Only the female partner of this team, Susan Genard, plays poker, so it's all on her.

The small gripes: They have a small son named Brick. BRICK??? Who in the hell names a child Brick?

For non-players of poker, Susan's descriptions of what happened to her in tournaments will just be gibberish, because there is absolutely no attempt made to explain the game. When she says something like "I had A-A-2-3 double-suited," nobody who hasn't played Omaha high-low will get the meaning, or how good a hand it is, or what one would normally expect to happen with such a starting hand. Her ex, hearing such things, perhaps reflects the typical non-expert viewer, with a blank stare and sort of forced attempt to be sympathetic, when he has no clue what she's talking about.

There are a lot of brief snippets of interviews with well-known poker players, but I thought most of the screen time they had was wasted answering what we must assume were the same couple of questions asked of them: What is the American dream, and can you attain it by playing poker for a living? In my opinion, that's about the least interesting thing you could ask these people, but that's nearly all we get to hear them talking about.

There's almost no poker in the movie. We hear Susan talking about hands that she lost, but don't get to see any action. We don't even get periodic updates as a tournament progresses, in order to get a sense of when she's doing well or otherwise. Most of the tournament coverage shows her buying in, getting her seat assignment, then the end of the hand with which she busts out some hours later. There is more time in the movie on mundane crap like getting a babysitting for their kid than seeing the poker.

My biggest complaint, though, is how Susan deals with losing time after time. To put it mildly, she's a whiner. Her excuses are what most bad players say when they lose: She couldn't catch any cards, she took bad beats, she had bad luck, she got assigned to the toughest table there was, they gave her an unlucky table or seat number, etc. No kidding, she even blames her ex for one loss, because he "invaded [her] poker space" without her permission by leaving a shirt draped over her chair at the table, thus bringing her bad luck. She was not joking. The one time she does well in a tournament (an Omaha event at the World Series of Poker), she's one of the chip leaders when there are only about 20 players left. She's so arrogant that she says that winning the bracelet will be a "gimmee." You have to be incredibly naive or egotistical to think that any such event is going to be a cakewalk going from 20 people to the title. Sure enough, she busts out in 10th place, not even making the final table of nine. It's her biggest cash yet, a little under $9000, but there was the little matter of the $5000 entry fee reducing the profit just a bit.

Because we essentially never see her play even a single hand, I can't say whether she's a good player. But I can say definitively that that kind of crap is exactly what one expects from bad players, and not what one expects from good players. Not once do we hear her say that she played badly, either overall or just in any one hand. Her reasons for losing are always anything and everything except for the one thing that she can control, which is how she plays. I think it is unrealistic, perhaps even impossible, for a player with such an enormous blind spot to reality to have any long-term success in poker. Denial is a powerful force. It's ubiquitous among poker players. Nobody who fails to overcome it will accomplish much in this game, I believe. I found it annoying to have to listen to more complaints and excuses from a losing player, when I'm subjected to so much of the same every day.

I think Susan needs to read Your Worst Poker Enemy by Alan Schoonmaker. It's a book entirely devoted to the psychological/emotional factors in poker. One of its major themes is breaking down the walls of denial of reality that prevent people from improving, and even from playing as well as they know how to. It's much easier to blame bad luck, other players, the table you draw, or anything else, rather than look inward.

It became apparent to me early on in the year of tournaments that Susan couldn't do this, so she was virtually guaranteed to end up a long-term loser. Perhaps if I could have seen her perform brilliantly in a few hands, I'd have started with more hope for her. But because it seemed inevitable to me that she would fail, there was zero drama or tension in watching the year of tournaments play out. It was just loss after predictable loss. And there was no evidence that she took lessons, sought advice, hired a coach, read a book, or did anything else to improve. Of course not--if you fancy yourself a great player, and your negative results are all because of bad luck, why bother with such things, right?

Daniel Negreanu reviewed this movie on his blog: http://tinyurl.com/2lm7yt. (He appears in it.) His impression was vastly different from mine. In contrast to his feeling, I experienced not one little bit of sympathy for her, and actually found her to be a pretty annoying person that I don't think I'd want to spend much time around. I also think Daniel is way off base in his analysis of the relationship between Susan and her ex. She blames him for things that aren't his fault; she won't be honest with him about the money issues they're facing; and she breaks the one promise she made to him near the beginning (no cash games, only tournaments). Those aren't small things--lack of openness and trust are deadly poison to serious relationships--and we never see them get anywhere near a decent resolution of any of them. Daniel says that he can't see why they're divorced. I can, easily. In fact, I can't imagine her having a successful relationship with anybody as long as she has those traits. (Tim, the male half of the film company partnership, presumably has his issues as well, but because the movie really focuses more on Susan, it's harder to judge what they might be. However, the fact that he leaves his two other children, from a different marriage, at home in Maine while he follows Susan around the country to poker tournaments, doesn't imply good things about his parenting skills and priorities.)

There's potential cinematic gold in good documentaries about the poker tournament world. "No Limit," though, falls short by every possible measure. I suppose it's not as much of a stinkeroo as the dramas I reviewed a while back (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-do-poker-movies-have-to-be-so-awful.html), but it was a big disappointment.

"But it wasn't my fault!"

A few days ago at the Hilton I was sent to join a 10-seat table that then had only nine players. However, one of them was taking up two places. He was an obese, older man who had prosthetic limbs below the knees. He was on an electric scooter. But, oddly, the scooter was parked along the long side of the table, with its front half taking up the space where the 6 seat would usually be, the seat turned 90 degrees, and its occupant facing the table in the 5 spot. Two chairs had been removed from the table to make this possible. This wasn't a problem at long as only nine were playing, but my arrival required all ten seats to be in use.

It appeared to me that he could either move to a standard chair or turn the scooter so that it was facing away from the table, and basically sit facing the back of the scooter, thus taking up only one slot.

Linda was the shift manager. She was extraordinarily patient in working with a guy that turned out to be nasty and uncooperative. She offered to let him move to a regular chair. No, he wouldn't do that. She offerered to move players around so that he could sit on an end seat or by the dealer, where there is a lot more elbow room. No, he protested, because then he couldn't see the cards in the middle of the table.

But she persisted, and he finally, reluctantly, agreed to try to turn the scooter and sit facing its rear. It took a lot of manipulation, because he couldn't drive it himself while turned, so somebody had to help him, and there was another table in the way, and the whole thing turned into quite an ordeal. (I ended up in the 10 seat, on the dealer's right, because the player that had been there vacated it while things were being rearranged. But Linda obviously knew that the issue would come up again soon when somebody else arrived, so they might as well fix it now.) The guy complained about every aspect of the move: he was too far away from the table, then he was too close, then he was too much to the right, then too much to the left, then he couldn't get his legs where they needed to be under the table right, etc., etc., etc. He was being a real pain in everybody's butt.

Finally he got situated to his grudging satisfaction. During this interval, the button and blinds had passed him, so on his first hand back in action, the dealer gave him the choice to wait until the blinds came around again, or put in both blinds now.*

This guy's response was a new one: "But it wasn't my fault that I missed the blinds!" The poor dealer was stymied for a response. I assume that he, too, had never heard that particular form of protest.

I wanted to ask, "When did we go to a fault-based system for paying the blinds?" But I didn't. It's such a stupid concept. Is it one's "fault" if one has to get up and use the restroom? Maybe players should be given hall passes, like I remember from junior high school, as permission to use the restroom and not have to pay missed blinds upon one's return. Of course, if "fault" is to enter in, there will have to be an interrogation as to whether one could really wait a few more minutes, how full one's bladder actually is, how long it has been since one's last visit to the little boys' room, etc.

Anyway, after Scooter Guy disgustedly agreed to make up his blinds (he could have just waited, of course--it wasn't like anybody was forcing him to rejoin the game right then), he tossed in just the amount for the big blind. Then the dealer had to remind him that he had to pay both blinds, and that led to another round of eye-rolling, moaning, and complaining--for the additional lousy $1. Then, when the dealer brought that chip into the center of the table, instead of leaving it in front of the player,** there was another protest about that!

I'm sympathetic, to a degree. I mean, I can only imagine how rough it is to have had both legs amputated, and have poor eyesight to boot. But still, this guy could have chosen a completely different way of handling it. First of all, if I had a serious physical disability, yes, I'd expect some reasonable accommodation to be made for me when needed. For example, if I really couldn't see the community cards except from, say, the 5 and 6 seats, a casino absolutely should be willing to require other players to move so that I can sit where I can see. That's a pretty minor inconvenience and concession to make. Nevertheless, I'd like to think that I'd make such requests only when there was no other reasonable way of making things work, and I'd do everything I could to make the disruption minimal. Furthermore, I'd be pleasant, smiling, and grateful about it, I hope.

This guy was not like that. He was confrontational and uncooperative about every aspect of it, making it uncomfortable for everyone that had to help get things sorted out. Obviously the way things finally got arranged actually did work, despite him saying all along that it wouldn't, that he wasn't willing to try it, etc. He was just being a stubborn, obnoxious jerk. Linda was a saint in how she firmly but respectfully pressured him to keep trying various options until a solution was found.

My limited experience is that poker players--and poker room employees--are as helpful and accommodating to disabled players as they can be. On the national scene, for the last two years, there has been a player at the World Series of Poker who has no use of his arms, due to neurologic injury from a motor vehicle accident. He has learned to manipulate the cards and chips with his feet, and everybody accepts the minor disruptions of time and elbow room that this causes. This year, a blind player at the WSOP main event went deep (finished 193rd out of 6000+ entrants), despite the need to have somebody whisper to him what his hole cards were, what the community cards were, what the bets were and who had made them, and so forth.

Even at the Hilton, there is one regular player who can barely see her own hole cards, and has to have the dealer announce what the cards on the board are. There is another who has had his vocal cords surgically removed (throat cancer is the most common cause for this) and speaks with an artificial electronic larynx held up to his neck. Everybody understands this, and accepts his whisper (because it's a pain for him to have to grab his device when he's handling chips and cards) and/or hand signals as to a raise, call, or whatever.

Yesterday at the Venetian I shared a table with a woman in a wheelchair who, in addition to whatever her lower extremity disability was, had sufficient weakness in her hands that she couldn't push her cards forward to fold. The dealer would take her verbal instructions to fold her cards, and would count out and put in the pot for her the number of chips she directed for a bet/call/raise. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever complained about such reasonable accommodations, and none of the players with disabilities has been unpleasant, demanding, or unreasonable about negotiating what was needed to make the game run smoothly for everybody--until, that is, I ran into Scooter Guy, who, I hope and believe, is an unfortunate anomaly in the poker world.


*The button and blinds, and all the ways they get paid and skipped and arranged, are one of the most confusing aspects of live poker for players new to casinos. The easiest way to think about the blinds is that they are payment in advance for one round of poker (that is, the button making one full lap around the table). So if you haven't paid the blinds because you were out to dinner or the restroom or whatever, you can either continue to sit out until it's your turn to put in the big blind again, or you can pay both of them at once and rejoin the game immediately, in which case there is twice as much starting money as usual in the pot for that hand. In a low stakes game, the blinds are such a trivial amount of one's gains or losses for a session that it's incredibly petty to make a big fuss about them, but people do it all the time.

**Usually, a blind bet is "live," meaning that when the action gets back around to the player who put it in, the blind can either stand alone as his bet for that round (if it hasn't been raised), or it's part of his bet if he chooses to raise or call a previous raise. But when a player has to put in both the big and small blinds at the same time, the amount of the small blind has to be "dead," meaning that it is in the pot, but not part of a player's bet. Otherwise, the effect would be to raise the stakes for that hand, and everybody who wanted to play would have to call, say, $3 (the previously absent player's $2 big blind plus his $1 small blind), instead of the usual $2.

"You called a raise with that?"

An ever-amazing number of people who play poker just have no concept of the game beyond what some introductory book told them about how to play, yet think they have it all mastered.

Venetian today. I'm on the button with 4-6 of diamonds. The guy on my right raises to $10. I call, as do two other people who had limped in ahead of the raiser.

The flop is 9-6-4, giving me bottom two pair. A young bald guy (YBG) in early position checks, the original raiser bets $10, and I pop it up to $30. YBG calls, everyone else is out.

The turn card is another beautiful 6, giving me a full house. YBG checks. I check behind him, trying to act weak, and hoping that he will catch a card on the river that will give him a flush, a straight, two pair, or something else with which he will be willing to put a lot of money into the pot--especially if this check on the turn convinces him that I was just bluff-raising with position on the flop.

River card is a queen. I didn't know it at the time, but YBG just made top two pair, with his Q-9. He checks, and I have to assume he was planning to check-raise me. I decided to put in a large bet, because a large bet on the river after checking the turn is a very common pattern for somebody who is weak (e.g., made just one pair on the flop, or was on a draw that missed) and is trying to steal the pot at the end, which is what I wanted him to think. I suspect that the size of the bet changed his mind about the check-raise, because he thought for a while, then just called. When he saw my hand, and the dealer said, "Sixes full," he flung his cards in face up, turned to the guy next to him, and gave him a look that said, basically, "Can you believe that idiot?"

I stacked up the chips, but as I was doing so, I was keenly aware that YBG was staring at me from the other end of the table. Finally he said, "You called $10 with 4-6, huh?" I just smiled sheepishly and nodded. He shook his head. A couple of hands later he left the table and didn't come back.

This is much the same attitude that I discussed recently after winning a big pot with a 4-5, with which I raised before the flop: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/something-that-is-not-against-rules-for.html.

Let me try to explain it another way. There are two kinds of players who will call a raise in a no-limit hold'em hand with a 4-6: Beginners, to whom any two cards look like they have good potential, and moderately advanced (or truly advanced) players who recognize that there really is potential for big payback with such hands. I'm not comparing myself to the pros who play for tens of thousands of dollars per pot, but you'll see the best players in the world put themselves in situations like this all the time on shows such as GSN's "High Stakes Poker."

I could even quote the godfather of poker, Doyle Brunson. In fact, I think I will (Super System 2, p. 617):

I always make exceptions when I'm in position, even with the trash hands. For
example, if I were on the button with a hand like A-8 offsuit, I might call a
raise before the flop if enough people, say four, were in the pot in front of me
and I didn't think there'd be any more raises. I might call a small raise and
take a flop with a trash hand because it's a good percentage play. I'd be trying
to make a full [house], trips, or two pair. But if I don't get a real good flop
to the hand, I'll throw it away. I won't get involved and burn up a bunch of
money with one of those trash hands. I'm not going to call any bets on the flop.
I'll be raising or I'll be gone.

And therein lie the differences between the novice and the expert (or, in my case, at least the reasonably well informed intermediate player) calling a raise with something like a 4-6: (1) recognizing the combination of circumstances (especially position) in which there is enough potential for occasional big profit to be worth taking a shot with a low-percentage hand, and (2) being smart enough to get away from it if it doesn't produce a very strong hand.

In this case, as with my previous story, I had been playing tight and showing down mostly premium hands, so I knew that if this 4-6 connected with the flop in a significant way, opponents would assume I was playing big cards and had missed. I suspect that that's exactly what happened here.

But I don't really need to justify my play here. Maybe I'm overrating myself, and it was objectively a complete donkey move that no expert would make, and I just got ridiculously lucky. Suppose that's the case, and YBG is a much better player than me and sees that I'm a bonehead that caught a miracle. What does he accomplish by the snide little comment? It seems to me that he should want to be at a table where there are idiots playing any two random cards, who are relying on luck to save their sorry butts from ruin. Those are just the kind of opponents that make poker profitable for the better players.

The only things that he can accomplish with that little shot of nastiness are all bad--or should be, from his point of view: (1) He makes a fishy player feel bad and leave the game, taking the money with him, probably to be replaced by somebody from whom it will be harder to win chips. (2) He makes the stupid player start thinking more critically about his play, and maybe get better and harder to beat. (3) He sours the mood at the previously light, enjoyable table. (4) He shows himself to be a bad loser. (5) As I think is the case here, if he's really not as advanced a poker theoretician as he fancies himself to be, he risks revealing to more skilled players that he's pretty limited in how he thinks about the game.

And incidentally, YGB, in case you're reading this, Q-9 isn't exactly a premium hand either, ya know, especially to be trying to play against a pre-flop raiser from out of position. Unless, of course, you're so skilled that you can outplay opponents even after spotting them both the likely better hand and position. Which I kinda doubt, in your case.

Annie Duke isn't one of my favorite professionals (I think she's generally overrated, has a track record of unethical behavior at the table, and from what I gather of her personal life, well, I'm not certain I'd want her as a friend). But she does tend to write effective columns in Bluff magazine, and recently she addressed this very subject in a piece I'd highly recommend reading, if you've been in the habit--even occasionally--of openly critiquing other people's play the way YBG did today. I especially like the revealing story of her own unpleasant history in this regard, in the last three paragraphs: http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/2007/03/2007_03_72.asp

Lee Jones made the same point perhaps even more forcefully in a column in Card Player magazine: http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/41/9511

YBG, I sincerely hope to see you at the table again, now that you've shown me that you have blinders on as to what constitutes smart play--and especially now that I'll have you scared that as a stupid, fishy, luckbox, I might be playing any two cards against you in any situation. Heh heh heh!

Whining winners

Last week at the Hilton I was one of three people calling a $12 raise from a guy in first position. The flop was A-K-K. The original raiser checked, as did everybody behind him. Same thing on the turn. Finally on the river the raiser put in a small bet, and the rest of us all folded. He groaned, as he turned over his pocket aces, "Oh, man, couldn't just one of you have had a king?" Apparently, picking up an easy $30 or so (after rake and tip) wasn't enough to satisfy him. Me? I'd be perfectly happy with that result.

Just a couple of hands later, this same guy had a straight, and was facing a large bet on the river. His only concern was whether his opponent had the one possible higher straight. He showed his cards while he was thinking. He said, "I've got the second nuts. Does he really have the nuts? Could I really be that unlucky?"

I couldn't help myself. I said, "The guy who just had pocket aces and flopped a full house is complaining that he's unlucky. Do I have that right?" He glared at me without responding. (Incidentally, he made the call and split the pot; the other guy had the same straight.)

Whining is bad enough in poker when it comes from somebody who just lost a hand, but it reaches its maximal repulsiveness when it comes from the guy who won. This should be grounds for immediate, automatic, unappealable, permanent banishment from the game.

Something that is NOT against the rules, for a change

If you've played poker more than once or twice at the Las Vegas Hilton, you've probably run into Annie, a 59-year-old (which I know because it was her birthday last week, and she was telling everybody) Asian woman who practically lives there. She's too much of a character to fit into one blog post, so for now I'll limit my observations to this: If you beat her for a large pot because you played a superior hand well, she's a pretty good sport about losing. If you suck out on her with a worse hand, there will be hell to pay. And if you beat her by being tricky and non-straightforward, she will take it personally, and decide that you're scum unworthy of the game of poker. Aces and kings and queens deserve to win; if you win with junk hands, you're a disgrace, as Annie sees it.

I should note that Annie has actually been kind to me the vast majority of the time. She has some sort of clothing business, and once gave me a nice silk shirt and a silk sofa pillow, for no apparent reason. She engages in friendly chat, asks about my life, tells me about things going on in hers, etc. When there's an especially bad player at the table, sometimes we engage in quiet conspiratorial whisperings about that fact. As far as I can tell, Annie is a genuinely decent person--she just has this prominent flaw of being incredibly judgmental and rigid about how poker should be played.

I'm mostly a classic tight-aggressive player. Probably nine out of ten times that I put in a pre-flop raise, I have the predictable range of hole cards: big or medium pairs, big but unpaired cards, suited connectors. But about one time in ten I try to throw in an oddball, to keep people guessing about me: 4-2, 6-9, K-3, or whatever. When those hands hit, they are not only extremely difficult for opponents to guess that I have, but everybody watching me make such a play will remember the unorthodoxy of it, and as a result have less confidence in future situations that they can put me on a narrow, predictable range of hands.

For example, a few weeks ago I raised with an unsuited 8-9 and had one caller (Cy--a very nice guy, and better-than-average player). The flop was 5-6-7, giving me the nuts. I bet. Cy, who knows my style of play pretty well, raised. I never saw his hole cards, but he didn't need to have anything to raise me here. All he needs to know is that usually this kind of flop won't have helped my most likely holdings (such as A-K or A-J), and that therefore my bet is really a bluff and I'll have to fold to a raise. It was a smart play on his part, even if he had nothing at all. It would usually have worked. But in this instance, I had something he couldn't reasonably suspect. I re-raised and took the pot without further contest. (I think he knows me well enough to understand that I'm very unlikely to put in that re-raise without having the goods to back it up.)

Anyway, after playing for a while this afternoon, I thought too many of my raises had been with the expected hands, and it was time to throw a curve ball, so I put in a pre-flop raise with a 4-5 offsuit, from middle position. Annie was the only caller, in the big blind. As it turned out, she had a suited A-8.

The flop was 8-6-3, giving Annie top pair/top kicker, and giving me an open-ended straight draw. She checked, then called my bet. The turn card was a 2, completing my nut straight. Now I was confident that I had her, so my thoughts turned to how to get all of her chips. (I thought she probably had an overpair--9s or 10s or jacks--which was wrong, but wrong in a way that didn't matter.) She checked again, and I bet about half of her stack, figuring that if she called that bet, she'd be pot-committed and put in the rest on the river no matter what came. She called.

The river was probably the worst possible card for her: a third 8. She clearly thought this was Yahtzee for her, and moved all-in. I called and won.

It took her a few seconds to put the pieces together retrospectively and figure out what I had done, but then the torrent was unleashed: "You raised before the flop with 4-5???" That's where the tirade started. I won't try to quote the whole speech, but among other things she invoked a curse on my immortal soul. Let's just say that Annie most definitely does not approve of non-standard plays of that nature--especially when they end up with her losing her entire stack of chips.

Well, Annie, you sweet, crazy lady, I know there's not a chance in hell you'll read this, but I'll say it anyway: It's neither against the rules nor unethical to put in a pre-flop raise with a crappy little 4-5 offsuit. Yes, it's unorthodox, but that's the whole reason for it. Poker is a game of deception. Since I know you'll think I most likely have something like A-K or A-Q when I raise, doing it when actually holding 4-5 is deceptive. It's allowed. In fact, practicing occasional deception of exactly that sort is encouraged by every poker strategist I've ever read. And the reason, obviously, is precisely because of the kind of two-fold effect I achieved today. First, you were completely blindsided by the straight. Second, from this day forward, any time the board makes something like 4-5 a very strong potential holding, you'll have to wonder whether that's what I have again, when I actually have A-K and got no help from the community cards. It will make it easier to bluff successfully in such a spot, and/or you'll play your hand less aggressively than you should because you're afraid that I'm pulling another stunt like today's. That's exactly what I hoped to accomplish, on both counts.

So spare me your self-righteous moralizing about correct play, as if you are the Moses of poker, entrusted with stone tablets engraved by the finger of God, declaring which starting hands are worthy of a raise and which ones aren't. Nothing in poker is that cut and dried. (What a boring game it would be if it were!) It appeared to me--and I'm really not vain about this sort of thing so as to imagine it--that everybody at the table, except for you, admired my play and the outcome, and was laughing at you during your rant, because you weren't able to just say, "Nice hand," let it go, and move on. With your "there's only one right way to play" speech, you were the loser today, in ways more fundamental than who was stacking up the chips, and who had to re-buy.

"I hate (jacks) (queens) (kings) (aces) (ace-king)"

I am SO tired of hearing poker players complaining about getting premium hands. You've all heard it, too: "I hate ace-king." "I hate queens." Or whatever. Among all the things you can say at a poker table that show just how stupid you are, this ranks high on the list.

Let's look at this objectively--mathematically. At a typical table of ten players, if everybody stays in the hand until the end every time, you obviously average a 10% chance of winning any given hand. Put another way, before the cards are known, you have a hypothetical 10% equity in the pot that will develop.

If you are dealt AA, however, your equity jumps to a whopping 31%. That is, even if nobody ever folds, you will win the hand 31% of the time, while all the other random hands have their equity drop from 10% to about 8% against your bullets. The glass-half-empty types will note that that means losing 69% of the time. Yeah, but before you looked down and saw the aces, you expected to lose 90% of the time, right? Seeing that AA staring back at you suddenly tripled your chances of winning against nine random hands, and since you know that not all nine of them are going to stay in until a final showdown, your equity in the pot keeps going up every time one of your opponents mucks.

(For an excellent, free, downloadable tool you can use for running this sort of calculation, go to http://www.pokerstove.com/.)

I think I hear the "I hate ________" gripe most often with respect to ace-king and pocket jacks. This, too, is highly irrational. Suited A-K begins with 21% equity (double your usual value with a random hand), and unsuited A-K has 17%, against everybody else's approximately 9%. What--you don't like having more than twice the chance of winning as your opponents? Then you're an idiot.

Even the much-despised pocket jacks have 19% equity against everybody else's 9%. On average, you will be getting twice as much money back from this hand as you put into it. If that's a situation you hate, you need to have your medications adjusted.

Notice that people never use the "I hate _________" line for little pairs, such as 5-5. But that hand has only 12% equity in the pot, against everybody else's 10%. It's a tiny, tiny margin, compared to what the premium hands give you. So why doesn't anybody say that they hate being dealt pocket 5s? The answer is pretty clear: It's because they know how to play that hand with a single, simple, dichotomous decision. You try to see the flop cheaply, and if you hit three-of-a-kind you stay in, and if you don't you muck it.

So beneath the surface, players who say they hate jacks or kings or queens, but don't say they hate small pairs, are actually telling you, "I don't know how to play premium hands for good value." Whether they know it or not, they're actually saying, "I'm a really bad player."

The other day when I was catching up on some back issues of Bluff magazine, I was pleased and surprised to find a column by Angel Largay in which he says just about the same thing I always think when I hear that tired old complaint (March, 2007, issue, p. 100):

What preconceived notions and flat out self-deceptions about your poker
skill and knowledge are you clinging onto, and how much are they holding you
back? I guarantee that you can absolutely become a better poker player than you are now. Absolutely guarantee it, and here's how: Just cut through whatever B.S.
you're feeding yourself and get honest. Some of the stuff might be brutally
simple--like you hate pocket jacks. Well, pocket jacks have a positive
expectation. Yes, really, even in your $3-$6 game. If you don't like a hand that
has a positive expectation--then you just don't know how to play it correctly.
That's the truth. If it's your truth, then admit it, and you are well on your
way to fixing that problem. Deny it and you'll continue to find reasons to hate
a hand that should be making you money.

Well said.

And here's a thought: If you really hate your aces, or ace-king, or queens, or whatever other premium hand you've decided the poker gods are punishing you with, then do two things. First, throw it away when you get it. You'll be happy because you won't have to make any of the difficult decisions later in the hand that are obviously beyond your mental capacity, and I'll be happy to have you relinquish your lion's share of the pot, because it leaves me with a better chance of winning with my weaker hand. Second, just shut up about it. I would consider both actions to be a personal favor to me.