"Touch-bet"

I have twice recently come across the phrase "touch-bet" as a poker term, and I don't know exactly what it means.

Both times have been in Poker Player Newspaper columns by David "The Maven" Chicotsky. First, in the September 25 issue he wrote:

Remember also that even though our continuation bet of 375 is very small relative to the pot, it still represents about 25% of our opponent’s stack left behind. Quite often we’re able to use our stack leverage against our opponent by making polarized bets that are very small or big relative to the effective stack in the hand.  

This is one of those examples where I’d prefer to see us make a value- oriented-bluff touch-bet on the flop, or put our opponent all in. Just because you’re used to betting a certain size on the flop, doesn’t make it the optimal size for the given situation.

The second example is from his November 19 column (not available online yet):

We are able to bet larger or small in an attempt to mitigate risk; betting larger with a naked draw or betting smaller with absolute air (such as a touch-bet). Sometimes betting smaller gives off the impression that we have a strong hand against thinking players. It's possible to come up with a bunch of reasons to bet more or less than our normal default bet sizing. 

Obviously the context is virtually identical for these two instances. I can get a general sense that it's a small continuation bet after missing the flop. But is there something more precise about it than that--more conditions that define it or set it apart from other continuation bets? The fact that both instances of its use come from Chicotsky makes me suspect that it's a term that he and/or his pal Ari Engel came up with. But so far a Google search has been fruitless in coming up with a clearer description of what the phrase means.

Anyone? Anyone?



Addendum, November 13, 2012 

I asked Chicotsky via Twitter for an explanation of his terminology. His response:

"Show pool"

Bob Ciaffone is a columnist for Card Player magazine. In his column for the July 25 issue, he is describing a cash game in which he played recently:

About an hour later, I got all-in onA-K again (this time unsuited) in a three-way pot against Q-Q and 2-2. Trip deuces won this pot and I "won" the show pool.

I've never heard this phrase before, and can't figure out its meaning from the context.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Language mystery

Last month my friends Martin and Jennifer wrote a pair of essays for the Woman Poker Player web site about poker players' use of the word rape to describe bad beats, coolers, or just generally running bad. I didn't say anything at the time, because I thought they covered the matter so well that there wasn't much left unsaid. Martin in particular expressed exactly what has long been my sense of squeamishness when such terminology gets tossed around so casually. My only disagreement with Jennifer is that I'm uneasy about expanding the use of penalties for linguistic offenses. I think that over the long run social opprobrium is a better tool than the rulebook, at least in this case.

I did have one lingering question about the subject, though, and almost wrote a post about it at the time. In the end, I didn't have any good answer to my own question, so I let it drop. But it came up again Sunday evening, so once again it's on my mind.

Rob's friend "Prudence" was indisputably having a bad night, with a never-ending stream of second-best hands. At one point she exclaimed in frustration, "I'm getting murdered here!"

This was precisely the counterpoint that occurred to me when reading the essays about the offensiveness of rape language: What about similar use of various forms of the word murder? It is almost universally agreed that murder is a worse crime than rape, as evidenced by harsher criminal penalties for the former than the latter in every jurisdiction that I know of. So why is poker players' figurative use of murder less likely to provoke outrage (whether expressed or not) than the identical use of rape?

If this is hypocrisy, I confess to sharing in the guilt. I certainly noticed Prudence's language, because I spent a few minutes pondering this very conundrum just a few weeks ago, but still it didn't strike me with the same reflexive wincing and squirming that would have occurred if she had said, "I'm getting raped here!"

Why is that?

I'm still stuck with the same dilemma I had when I thought about writing this up last month: I don't have a good answer. But this time I'm going through with sending it out into the ether, hoping that somebody else does.

Spading

I just learned a new poker word, which doesn't happen very often these days. The process of spreading a new deck out on the table face up in order to prove that all 52 cards are there is called "spading" the deck.

Diseased

A couple of weeks ago PokerNews published a list of the most overused poker terms. The #1 item was, fittingly, "so sick."

Here's what I'm going to do to help vanquish this overuse. From now on, whenever I am tempted to use the word "sick" to describe a poker situation, I shall instead refer to it as "diseased."

"Did you see that diseased bluff that Tom Dwan made on High Stakes Poker
last night?"

"Yeah, but Phil Ivey calling him there with just king-high was even
more diseased."

"You caught your one-outer on me? Dude, that is so diseased!"

"If I fold here, it will be the most diseased laydown in history."

You get the idea. I'm curious to see if I can get this to catch on and supplant the use of "sick" in popular poker culture. I will consider it a personal triumph if five years from now PokerNews revisits the question of most overused poker terms, and I find "diseased" on their list.

Won't you help me spread the meme?

Strange language

I was just reading Todd Brunson's column in the July 28 Card Player magazine. It included this brief story about a mixed-game tournament he was playing, with Phil Hellmuth at the table:

A few hands later, the game was razz, and Phil again tried to dump me some
chips. I raised from the one hole with like six small cards behind me, and Phil
reraised me with a 7 up. Nice hand there, Phil--lol, I mean, did he really think
I had raised into six babies with an 8 in the hole?

I had a 3 up with A-2 in the hole. The one redeeming factor for Phil was
that he might have had a 5 in the hole, as there were three out. But that proved
not to be the case, as Phil bricked on fourth street (as did three others,
including me), then hit the miracle 5 on fifth street.

The only thing remarkable about this account, for me, was the sudden realization that it would have been complete jibberish to me, say, three years ago, before I had played my first hand of razz. Even with a pretty solid understanding of hold'em, I would have had no comprehension of what this story was relating, or the underlying strategic concepts.

I have a few readers who know little or nothing about poker. They read the blog because they know me personally and want to keep up with what I'm doing and thinking. Once in a while I pause and realize how nonsensical it must sound when I write a paragraph or a story that is chock-full of poker terminology and shorthand allusions to strategic concepts that I tend to assume my readers understand without having it all laid out in detail.

The thing that most commonly reminds me of this is when Memphis Mojo does a post about bridge rather than poker, and I'm left scratching my head, trying to grasp what the hell he is talking about--since I don't even know how the game goes. Take this bit from earlier today, for example:

West led the ♦8, a singleton! This has to be an awful lead. Does he
really hope his partner will win the ace and give him a ruff? Haha.

Kate won and led a low diamond to ruff. West was now void, but couldn't
beat my ♠9. Of course, I wouldn't have opened without that card, ahem. She
now had 13 tricks: She took six spades, two hearts, two diamonds, two clubs and
one ruff.

This all means precisely nothing to me. It might as well be written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It makes me feel a bit stupid, though logically it shouldn't; I'm simply not informed about the relevant subject matter. (In my defense, I recently had occasion, on a completely unrelated writing project, to toss off a paragraph considering porphyria cutanea tarda, mononeuritis multiplex, reflex sympathetic dystrophy, and venous stasis dermatitis, and I'm guessing that Memphis Mojo would be the one left scratching his head over that. So there! Ha!)

All of which is just to say this: Thanks to the non-pokery people who put up with what must be a nearly continual sense of bewilderment at the poker jargon found here. I actually do have some sympathetic sense of how foreign it must feel.

Fade

Can anybody give me a plausible explanation for how the word fade came into its current usage in the poker world? For those who haven't heard or noticed the word, it is used to mean avoid or dodge. He will win the hand if he can fade a king on the river. Cardgrrl tells me that her Oxford English Dictionary shows no usage in other fields that would easily explain how it got ported to this meaning in poker. (However, it's a first-edition OED, so perhaps the more recent version has something newer that would help.)

I find this one of the most baffling terms in poker.

Shoe clerk

I was just reading the column by John Vorhaus in the June 30, 2010, issue of Card Player magazine (vol. 23, #13), p. 74. I was intrigued by his use of a term I don't recall having run across previously:

[Y]ou open an unraised pot for $20, which is not a bad raise with pocket aces,
since you want to thin the field, ideally to just one player, and a bet of four
times the big blind will drive out most of the shoe clerks.

It's not hard to tell the intended meaning from context, but I wanted to see if this is something idiosyncratic to Vorhaus, or more widely recognized. I quickly found this definition, here:

shoe clerk
(n phrase) 1. A player who does not stay for a raise
(with the implication that he is dropping out of fear) or, particularly in a
no-limit game, for any large bet. 2. Someone who is not serious about playing a particular pot, and thus will not call a raise. For example, for
definitions 1 and 2, you might hear an aggressive player say, “Let’s raise and
get the shoe clerks out.” Also known as ribbon clerk. 3. A weak player.

So there ya go.

Where did it come from ? I don't know. The obvious guess is that a shoe clerk is somebody who is always bending over, reaching to the floor, so by analogy a player who has dregs for a hand. But perhaps it came from the insinuation of weakness, a shoe clerk not being considered the manliest of occupations.

Poker gems, #379

Phil Laak, in Bluff magazine column, July, 2010, p. 50.



Level 9 astro-mega-tilt: The highest possible level of tilt that doesn't involve an ex-wife. Tibetan monks spent years trying to rid the world of it.

Synchro-mega-astro-tilt: When two or more players reach Level 9 astro-mega-tilt at the same time. Rumored to be the cause of multiple natural disasters.

New words

A little while ago I was playing an online HORSE tournament while chatting via IM with Cardgrrl. I confessed that I was playing because I really didn't want to tackle a big project I have sitting in front of me. I told her that this poker game should really be called a procrastament.

Because my brain works in strange ways, I started turning this word over in my mind. I decided that split-pot high/low events should be called procrustaments, but I'm afraid that most poker players would not get the joke.

(If you are among them, see here.)

Fade

Shamus recently wrote an interesting blog post on the origins of the word bluff as used in poker, a subject I had not considered before. It has re-sensitized me to noticing poker lingo, especially words that have common meanings in English but some different, specific use in poker that is not obviously related.

For example, I've been noticing the word fade a lot in recent days: "He has the best hand, but he's going to have to fade a diamond." I can sort of speculate how the ordinary senses of fade might have become morphed to this usage, but it would amount to no more than a "just-so story."

It's on my mind and I'm curious about it. If you have any solid historical/etymological information, or even a theory that's so perfect that it surely must be true, please let me know via the comments.

Origin of "case"

Every field develops its own lingo, and it can be a fascinating study. Poker is no exception. One can often make a pretty good guess at how a word or phrase developed or was modified from some other context for a new application in poker. But one of the continuing mysteries for me is the word "case" to mean "last"--as I just used it in last night's post about hitting four-of-a-kind when the "case" six came on the river. The Oxford English Dictionary betrays no knowledge of this usage or anything akin to it. It completely baffles me how it came to mean what it does in poker.

If anybody has seen or heard anything reliable about this tidbit of etymological history, or even has some plausible speculation about it, please speak up in the comments.

Poker terms

Heard a new one today at the Venetian. A guy had won two pots in a row. Then when he was on the button called a small raise, saying, "Heat test. If she [indicating the dealer] can make something out of this hand, we're onto something."

Flop was raggedy. Original raiser bet. The object of the story made a large raise, causing the other player to fold. He then showed his 6-3, with which he had flopped bottom two pair. He said, "Yep, it's a heater, all right."

The "heat test" was a new one on me: play a junk hand as a test for whether you're on a heater. It's a completely ridiculous concept, but fun.

Poker words, #6

When a new player joins the table, in many poker rooms there is a delay before he gets chips. During that few minutes, the new player can play like everybody else, but on the basis of a verbal commitment, rather than actual chips put into the pot. Things get settled up once the chips arrive.

Last night at Caesars Palace this happened. The new player was to be the big blind. The dealer announced, "Seat 5 will be our virtual big blind."

I liked that way of expressing the situation.

Poker words, #5

It's been a while since I came across a new poker term, but I liked this one right away: the butoff seat. See here for explanation.

Poker words, #4

Two new ones (to me, anyway):

chopblocker

In a facility that allows the small blind and big blind to "chop," i.e., take back the blinds and move on to the next hand if nobody before them has entered, a player, usually in late position, who limps in, thus foiling the blinds' anticipated and desired chop. "Oh, man, don't be a chopblocker!"


bring-in bitch

In stud-type games, a player who is being hit with way more than his fair share of the bring-in bets. "Looks like I'm going to be the bring-in bitch for this table."

Poker words, #3

Reading Gun Hansen's new book, Every Hand Revealed, last night, I came across two terms that were new to me.

On p. 25: "I open for 600 two off the button with Jc5c, the button click-raises to 1,200, and I call."

The term "click-raise" is apparently not original to Gus, as a Google search finds it a few other places (e.g., here), but I can't find a clear definition anywhere. I'm guessing from context that it is intended to mean the same as "minimum raise," and that it originates from the fact that most (maybe all) online sites make it easy to put in this kind of raise by having a dedicated button for it (as well as for a pot-sized bet/raise and an all-in raise, but for any other raise amount, you have to type in the size of the bet/raise or use the slider).

That said, I have to point out that in this particular situation this was not the minimum legal raise. The blinds were 100/200. Gus's opening raise was to 600, a raise of 400. Therefore, the minimum re-raise would have been another 400, to a total bet of 1000. It would be peculiar if the first time I came across a new term it was in a context in which it was being used incorrectly--but that may be the case here. Alternatively, it may be that "click-raise" refers to a raise that exactly doubles the previous bet, whether or not that constitutes a minimum raise. I don't know.

The second term new to me was just three pages later. On p. 28, he describes getting all-in against an opponent on the turn, with his flush ahead of the other guy's three-of-a-kind: "He calls, shows a set of nines, and we are down to the skill-card."

I like the whimiscal, ironic phrase "skill card" for whatever comes after all the money is in. But it shouldn't be hyphenated.

Poker words, #2

Just a day after expressing my concern that I didn't come across new poker words often enough to merit an ongoing series of posts here, I happened upon another one. Lou Krieger, in his column on stud/8 strategy in the May 12, 2008, Poker Player newspaper, writes, "Even if another low card arrives on fourth street, it's not uncommon to strike out by catching three bananas, or high cards with a rank of nine or higher."

That's a new one on me!

Poker words, #1

I have occasionally thought about adding a series of posts about new poker vocabulary words--new in the sense that I'd write a post when I came across term I hadn't heard before. I haven't undertaken it because, in spite of doing a lot of poker reading, it just isn't very often these days that I find an unfamiliar word. The last new one I heard was in January: superstack, which refers to a player in a tournament who has more chips than the rest of the players at his table combined. I've been consciously trying to pay attention for other new terms to help jump-start this as a new feature in the blog, but had no luck.

Well, that just changed, so I'm introducing the feature, though I'm uncertain how often there will be posts in the series. I was reading in Card Player magazine today one of James McManus's delightful installments on poker history. In it he is talking about home poker games of the mid-20th century. He mentions that "tigers" and "skipper straights" were commonly recognized.

Easily the best online poker dictionary is this one, hosted at Mike Caro's web site. It readily provided me the answers. So here ya go, along with a few associated ones that it also became necessary to learn along the way:


skipper
(n) skip straight.

skip straight
(n phrase) In draw poker, a nonstandard hand sometimes given value in a private or home game, cards in a series separated each from the other by one rank, as 2-4-6-8-10, or 5-7-9-J-K. Some play that an ace ranks only high in a skip straight, that is, that A-3-5-7-9 is not considered a skip straight. A skip straight is also called an alternate straight, Dutch straight, or sometimes a kilter. The hand generally ranks between three of a kind and an "ordinary" straight.


tiger
(n) little cat. Sometimes the term refers to any of the hands big cat, big tiger, little cat, or little tiger.


big tiger
(n phrase) A nonstandard hand sometimes given value in a private or home game, five cards 8 to king with no pair, which ranks above a tiger and just below a flush. Also called big cat.


little cat
(n phrase) A nonstandard hand sometimes given value in a private or home game, five cards 3 to 9 with no pair (in some circles, 3 to 8 with no pair), ranks above a big dog, and below a big tiger. Also called little tiger.


big dog
(n phrase) A nonstandard hand sometimes given value in a private or home game, five cards 9 to ace with no pair, which ranks below a little tiger and above a little dog.


little dog
(n phrase) A nonstandard hand sometimes given value in a private or home game, five cards 2 to 7 with no pair, ranks below a big dog and above a straight.


I guess I just haven't played in enough crazy home games!

I don't get how these dog/cat hands work. That is, I don't see why they would be ranked higher than a straight. All other poker hands are ranked by their statistical frequency. But surely it is harder (more improbable) to get five unpaired cards between, say, 3 and 7 (a regular straight) than it is to get five unpaired cards between 2 and 7 (the little dog), because there is only one combination that will result in the former (3, 4, 5, 6, 7), while there are six ways of making the little dog (i.e., you can be missing any one of the ranks from 2 to 7). So why is a hand that's easier to hit being ranked higher than the one that's harder to make?

Furthermore, if I have 3-4-5-6-7 for a straight, couldn't I call it a little dog, since it's five unpaired cards between 2 and 7?

Or perhaps the dog/cat hands must contain both ends of the range, in which case there are only four ways to make each one rather than six (e.g., 2-3-4-5-7, 2-3-4-6-7, 2-3-5-6-7, and 2-4-5-6-7 for the little dog). Even then, though, they should rank below straights, I would think. Look at it this way: Putting all four categories of the cat/dog hands together, and ignoring suits, there are 16 card combinations that will make one of them (four different ways of making each of the four types of hand), but only ten ways of making a straight--again arguing that a straight must be rarer and should therefore be ranked higher.

But what do I know about it? Nothing, that's what. I'm just thinking out loud here.