Quiz

Steve Zolotow presents an interesting little quiz in his column for Card Player magazine (November 14, 2012, issue; vol. 25, #23, page 50). He asks the reader to estimate what percentage of the time 10s-9s will win against the following hands, assuming all-in before the flop:

1. Ac-Ad
2. Ac-Kc
3. Ac-5c
4. 5c-5d
5. 7c-6c
6. 9c-8c
7. Top 20 percent range
8. Top 40 percent range
9. Top 60 percent range
10. All hands--100 percent range

If this piques your curiosity as it did mine, take a couple of minutes to jot down your answers, before scrolling down.

















Here are the answers Zolotow gives, as percentages, followed in parentheses by the estimates I had written down:

1. 22.8 (20)
2. 38.7 (40)
3. 45.9 (45)
4. 52.4 (50)
5. 62.8 (65)
6. 69.3 (75)
7. 35.4 (30)
8. 41.6 (35)
9. 46.5 (40)
10. 54.0 (45)

Clearly I did a lot better putting in estimates against specific starting hands than I did against ranges. I have a bazillion times more experience with the former than with the latter. For the former, my guesses were all good enough that they would produce the right answer in a go/no-go situation at the table nearly every time. For the latter, though I wasn't outrageously off, I still missed by enough to cause an erroneous decision in some significant spots.

And, frankly, estimating hand strength against an opponent's range is a more important skill than estimating it against a specific hand. It's something I ought to work on.

How about you?

When to look at your cards?

Steve Zolotow, in his column for Card Player magazine, June 13, 2012, writes this (page 40):

I hope everyone avoids looking at their cards until it is their turn to act. There are two reasons for this. First, you can't reveal anything about your hand because you don't know it yet. Second, you can focus on your opponents and not on your cards.

I have, of course, heard this argument before--many times, in fact. When I was first learning about poker by watching television shows like World Poker Tour and Celebrity Poker Showdown, I specifically remember hearing both Phil Gordon and Annie Duke explain that looking at one's cards before it is one's turn is an amateurish mistake.

I disagree.

I understand perfectly well the arguments made in favor of waiting to look. But what advocates of this position usually omit, or perhaps do not grasp, is that there are countervailing arguments.

First, waiting to look until it's your turn means that the whole game runs more slowly. That is not a small consideration.

Second, to quote Phil Ivey, "If you have tells, work on them." If you're giving away information by body language or facial expressions when you check your hole cards, that's a problem you need to fix pronto. Whether you give off that information a few seconds after you get your cards or only when it's your turn makes little difference. You need to not be spewing such tells, period. Of course it is the case that your action (fold, call, or raise) will also be giving off information, but that is a separate matter. You don't want your face and body to be saying one thing and your bet a contradictory thing.

Third, if you wait to look until it's your turn, all eyes will be on you as you do so, because everybody is waiting for you to act. Thus, if you do have tells, the way to be sure they get maximal attention from opponents is to wait until everybody is watching you while you check your hole cards. On the other hand, if you do it when most other players are doing it--as they receive their last down card--they're all busy with their eyes elsewhere.

Fourth, if you wait until it's your turn, you're likely to give off information by how long it takes you to decide what to do after looking at your cards. Raise or not? If so, how much? Even if your face reveals nothing, the delay in action can suggest how complicated or difficult your decision is. I say let that decisional time pass while other things are going on.

I don't usually like appeals to authority in argument, but it is definitely not the case that all the best players in the world wait to look until it is their turn to act. These days we are getting more and more live broadcasts of late stages of big poker tournaments. Just watch--you'll see that there is a lot of variation on this point among the greats. Though T.J. Cloutier seems to be pretty much vanishing from the tournament scene now that he is, sadly, in the twilight of his life, I clearly remember him addressing this controversy in one of his books. He said that he likes to give a quick glance at his cards as soon as they arrive, then direct his attention at what how the other players are reacting to theirs. I agree with him. It takes literally one second or less, so you won't be missing much.

I like having my own cards in mind as I watch the other players act. Often my default decision about what to do changes. A completely crap hand becomes raiseworthy if I'm in late position and everybody has folded. Marginal hands like A-8 and Q-J can go from being planned raises to being folds if there is any action before it gets to me, or reraises if a raise comes from a habitually frisky player. And so forth. I would be stunned beyond belief if any of my opponents can read on my face these changes in my thinking as the action unfolds.

For what it's worth, I've noticed that Cardgrrl adopts a compromise position. She looks at her cards when the action is about two seats to her right. There is an argument to be made that this tactic incorporates some of the advantages of both of the more common approaches (looking immediately, or not until it's your turn). It's worth considering.

I don't mind that there are differences of opinion, preference, and style on this question. What bugs me, though, is how dogmatic many proponents of the Zolotow/Gordon/Duke position are about it--insisting that theirs is the only right way and any deviation from it is a clear error. I just don't buy it.

Steve Zolotow is a fool!

Steve Zolotow's column in the May 30 issue of Card Player magazine is about becoming a tricky player, one who is difficult to read. His point is that you have to play different starting hands the same way as each other, and also play the same starting hand different ways at different times.

For his first example, he takes A-A and discusses the default play (reraise) plus some alternatives. He then does the same for suited K-J, medium suited connectors, and a small pair--in each case mentioning the default play plus how they should sometimes be played as if the cards are something else, like A-A.

Fine so far.

But then he screws up. For his last example, he uses 4s-2h. Yes, the Mighty Deuce-Four. Of this he says, "With 4-2 offsuit, your default play is to fold. But occasionally you can raise as a pure squeeze play, hoping everyone folds. If you get re-raised, it is an easy fold."

The man does not know whereof he speaks. He is clearly unqualified to be writing a poker column. I demand that he be fired at once!

However, he does mention something I had not heard before, which he says is "an old pun": When one wins with the 4-2, one can say, "It was a fortuitous hand."

Get it?

Four-two-itous.

Poker gems, #431

Steve Zolotow, a Full Tilt Poker red pro who is either a lot more clueless or a lot more willing to lie than I had previously had reason to believe, in Card Player magazine column, July 13, 2011 (vol. 24, #14), p. 56. Emphasis in original.

If you haven't been paid by a poker site, blame the U.S. government, not the site.

I keep hearing that sites didn't or don't have adequate reserves, but no amount of reserves is adequate when big chunks of reserves are stolen and seized.... Those sites that have managed to repay some or all of their customers deserve praise, and those that are struggling to do so deserve patience and understanding.

Poker gems, #426

Steve Zolotow, in Card Player magazine column, June 15, 2011 (vol. 24, #12), passing along comments about Black Friday that he has heard from various unnamed online poker players.

I can play Texas hold'em in Dublin, but not in Dallas. I can play Omaha in Norway, but not in Nebraska.

Game, set, but no match

In the current issue of Card Player magazine, Steve Zolotow has a column about the difference in hold'em between a set (pair in your hand matching a card on the board) and trips (one in your hand matching a pair on the board). I would have thought that anybody who has played for more than a minimal amount of time would already understand why there is no contest between them, though Zolotow says that "many inexperienced players fail to realize how much difference there is between trips and a set."

He goes on to illustrate one way to view the difference: If the board is 7-4-2 and you're holding 4-4, there are only three possible combinations of cards (the three ways to make three 7s) an opponent could be holding that have you beat. But if the board is 7-4-4 and you're holding 4-2 (he picks this unfortunate example, apparently not knowing its unique power; we'll let that slide for now), there are 43 combinations of two hole cards an opponent could have that are ahead of you--even though nominally these two hands are equivalent at the moment (4-4-4-7-2).

He also points out that it's often harder to win an opponent's entire stack with trips than with a set, because the trips are more exposed, and players with overpairs tend to be alert to the obvious danger.

All true enough. But he fails to point out another way in which a set has a big advantage over trips. Suppose the board is A-9-9. You have 9-10, your opponent has A-K for top pair/top kicker. You get it all in. If he catches another ace on the turn or river, you're toast; his aces full will crush your nines full.

If, however, we keep his cards the same, but give you 9-9, with a flop of A-10-9, you have the same five-card hand as in the first example (9-9-9-A-10), but now binking another ace will do your opponent no good. He will make trip aces, but the same card will elevate you to a full house. He will have to catch both the turn and the river with some combination of aces and kings (or a straight or flush) in order to prevail.

(In this situation, when the guy with top pair sees another ace come, he often celebrates for a few seconds, thinking he has pulled off an upset, before somebody points out to him the painful truth.)

A set is, as a general rule, so much better than trips that it's not even close. I think I had figured that out pretty early on in my live play. I wonder if Zolotow is right that this truth is not widely recognized among less-experienced players.

Poker gems, #382

Steve Zolotow, in Card Player magazine column, July 28, 2010 (vol. 23, #15), p. 78.


I have noticed that the most tapped-out players are always those who think no one else can play. I mentioned to Lyle Berman that a player's opinion of the opposition correlated with his bankroll. Those with low bankrolls had low opinions of their opponents. He extended this concept by adding that the more broke they were, the more convinced they were that they could beat every game playing with your money. Yes, there are a lot of players looking to get staked.

Too close for comfort

What you see above are scans of two facing pages from the March 10, 2010, issue of Card Player magazine. (I wish I could have put them side by side, so that you see them as they appear in the magazine, but my scanner isn't big enough, and stitching them digitally is a little beyond my technical know-how.)

My first reaction upon opening this spread was, "Oh, Evelyn Ng got a column in Card Player. I didn't know that." (I admit that I then had some unkind thoughts about her qualifications as a columnist, but those aren't relevant here.) Then I started reading Steve Zolotow's column. I was puzzled when I got to the end of the page, because it wasn't finished. Instead of continuing onto the next page, an arrow directs the reader to turn the page.

Card Player never splits editorial material this way; they run things continuously. (Thank heaven. I hate the "continued on page 93" kind of searches to read the rest of an article.) That was the first time it occurred to me that Ng's piece might be an advertisement. So I looked more closely, and, sure enough, it says so at the top of the page.

Now, if I had been thinking about it a little more, I might have realized that no other writer in the magazine gets half of the page taken up with the identifying photograph, so something was amiss. But I think it's perfectly obvious that the Bodog ad is designed to mislead the reader, at least initially. It cannot possibly be a coincidence that Ng's piece (and, incidentally, I'd bet a hefty sum that she didn't even write the copy that shows up under her name) uses exactly the same typeface and size as the actual columnists, such as Zolotow, for both the body of the piece and the headline.

I am surprised that Card Player is complicit in this attempt to deceive its readers. If I ran the magazine, this kind of camouflaging of an ad to look like editorial copy would not be allowed. Responsible publications have unmistakably clear delineations between the editorial contents and the ads. Even meaningless little blogs like this one make sure to keep that line bright, if their authors have any sense of integrity. That was a large part of the reason that so many of us reacted unfavorably to PokerStars making a pathetic effort to bribe us into blurring the distinction last month.

I think Card Player should require Bodog and other advertisers not only to put the "advertisement" disclaimer at the top, but to use distinctly different fonts, so that even at a glance it is immediately apparent that a piece such as Ng's is an ad rather than part of what the magazine is offering its readers.


Addendum

Soon after posting the above, reader "qdpsteve" emailed me a photo that stitches together the two pages, so you can more easily see what it looks like when you open the magazine. The result lost some resolution, which makes it harder to see how the fonts are identical, so I'm adding it here rather than replacing the two separate pages above.

Thanks, Steve!

Poker gems, #341

Steve Zolotow, in Card Player magazine column, January 13, 2010 (vol. 23, #1), pp. 72-74.


[Zolotow's friend Ray] was playing in a $2-$5 cash game [at the Borgata], and made the nuts on the river against an obnoxious opponent. He shoved for around $300, and his opponent said, "OK. What do you have?" Ray, as would many players not used to angle-shooters in casinos, assumed that this meant he was calling. He turned up his hand. His opponent mucked, but insisted that he had never said, "Call," or put his chips into the pot. The floorman made the obvious ruling: Ray hadn't been called. Later in the session, this same player was sucking on a lemon drop (to sweeten his disposition). Somehow, he managed to inhale the lemon drop, and couldn't breathe. Ray leaped out of his seat, remarking, "I can't believe I have to save your miserable (bleeping) life!" He walked around the table and performed the Heimlich Maneuver. The lemon drop shot halfway across the room. The man's life was saved. Someone else remarked, "Ya should have let him choke." But Dr. Ray did the right thing.

Poker gems, #336

Steve Zolotow, in Card Player magazine column, December 16, 2009 (vol. 22, #25), p. 78.


That is why I always tell young players to finish college and get a degree. There are a lot of mediocre doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and accountants who grind out a comfortable living. There are no mediocre poker players who do.

Poker gems, #332

Steve Zolotow, in Card Player magazine column, December 2, 2009 (vol. 22, #24), p. 78.


Avoiding getting involved with trouble hands, especially for a large opening raise with bad position, takes no particular poker skill except discipline, but it will have a bigger impact on your bottom line than making the occasional great laydown or the heroic bluff-catching call. And, it is a lot easier to do correctly.

Poker gems, #267

Charles Victor Cherbuliez, as quoted in Steve Zolotow, Card Player magazine column, May 20, 2009 (Vol. 22, #10), p. 70.


What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one's ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.

Poker gems, #266

Anne Tyler, as quoted by Steve Zolotow, in Card Player magazine column, May 20, 2009 (Vol. 22, #10), p. 68.



People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.

Poker gems, #171

Steve Zolotow, on "Poker After Dark," last night.


You always hear about gambling gets you involved with drugs. I think gambling in a way saved me from drugs, because I loved playing games, and when I was doing all the drugs, I couldn't win at, y'know, even in the small games in Gardena.... It was one of the big incentives to stop, that I could be better as a poker player and a bridge player. That was a big incentive for me.

Lucky charms are not magically delicious

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

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

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

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

Hal Lubarsky and His Assistant

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

Unlucky Shoes

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

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

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

Wait...The Lucky iPod!

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

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

Hoodie Power!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poker gems, #130

Steve Zolotow, in Card Player magazine column, May 21, 2008 (vol. 21, #10), p. 80:

In general, I'm not a big fan of firing multiple bullets with nothing. My experience has been that after the first bullet misses, players fire the second one into their foot and the third one into their brain.

Keeping the store open

In Steve Zolotow's Card Player magazine column this month, he pays tribute to the late Chip Reese. He tells the story of having once found Reese, Doyle Brunson, and "two other very strong players playing." When the game broke up, Zolotow said,

"Chip, I know you're a great player, but why do you waste your time playing
in a tough game like that? If you wait around, there will be a lot of better
opportunities."

He laughed and said, "Well, buddy, if you don't open the store, how can you
get any customers?"

It's the perfect answer, as one would expect from Chip Reese. And it reminds me of something I've been meaning to gripe about for a long time (yeah, I keep a list--and it's a long one!): Players who won't help keep a game going.

Certainly everybody has the right to stop playing at any time, because you're tired, you ran out of money, you have other commitments, the game isn't good, you're bored, or whatever. Furthermore, it's not unreasonable to perceive that a game is winding down for the night, as players leave without being replaced, and decide that the action has passed its peak, and call it quits for the day.

But there are lots of other situations in which a game gets short-handed temporarily. This might be for just a few minutes, because a group of friends that were playing together all left at once and the floor just needs to call off the names of the players on the waiting list, or it might be for longer, as when a tournament is starting and there is no waiting list, but there is every reason to believe that the game will fill up again over the course of the next 30 minutes or so as other players trickle in. That's the kind of situation I'm talking about.

There are a number of players who refuse to participate in keeping the game going. They dislike short-handed play, and simply won't stoop to it. It doesn't seem to matter to them that their leaving compounds the problem for everybody else. They are looking out for number one, as they see it, and the rest of you can fend for yourself.

Inevitably, these are the same people who won't help to start a new game until it's full. That is, let everybody else get it going, then they'll join. They won't be bothered with sitting there while the table-opening procedures are gone through, or playing short-handed while the room staff find out who from the waiting list is still there. They plunk down their chips to reserve the seat, then go play blackjack (or whatever) for a while, returning only when they see that the game is in full motion.

These people are rude, selfish jerks. Yeah, poker is perhaps the most purely self-interested game in existence, but there are some aspects of it that require a cooperative spirit, and this is chief among them. You have to get the store open, and you have to keep it open. This is equally the responsibility of every player who wants to participate in the bounty of the full game that will usually result. If the table temporarily drops down to six players, and you use that as your cue to go take a long walk until it fills up again to your satisfaction, then you're not doing your share; you're making the problem worse for everybody else, rather than helping correct the situation. If more than one or two people take this approach, the game dies, and we all suffer.

Yeah, I understand that short-handed play is generally less profitable. I dislike it, too. Some people excel at it; I'm not one of them. I have a hard time adjusting my range of hand values and bet sizes for fewer players. Virtually every time I have tried playing a game with five or fewer players for an extended time, I've lost money. (That's not an inevitability; it's a result of my own weakness in that aspect of my play. I need more practice at it.) But if we all follow the lead of the selfish boors who exacerbate the dearth of players, that's it, the game's over, and we all lose out. Conversely, if we all just stay put, keep playing for a while, they'll bring in other players with fresh money, and we can go back to the normal, profitable game.

Do you think you're special, and that you particularly should be exempted from helping out in this regard? If so, on what basis do you reach that conclusion? Were you anointed by the hand of God or something? I kind of doubt it.

What goes through your pea-sized brain when you stand up and abandon the table in that situation--that it's everybody else's job to keep the game going for you, while you take a break, and fill it up so that you can then come back and reap the benefit? Did your mother really raise you to be lazy, narcissistic, unsocial, egotistical, self-indulgent, uncooperative, stingy, and ungracious--or did you decide on your own that those were qualities you wanted to develop? Maybe she didn't read to you the story of the Little Red Hen enough times, so go remind yourself of its lessons again: http://www.elliottsamazing.com/lrh.html.

Those people really torque me off (in case you couldn't tell).

Are longer sessions better or worse? (Non-grumpy content)

In late 2006, Card Player columnist Steve Zolotow wrote an interesting series of pieces on the importance of record-keeping in poker. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.) I had already been keeping records adequate for tax documentation, but his writings prompted me to refine my spreadsheets (how did the world get by before there was Excel???).

But for some reason, I never got around to doing the first analysis that Zolotow recommends, which is looking at results by length of session. Well, now I've done it. There's not really any reason anybody should care about the results, but I did the hard work, so I might as well share it.

The first chart above (click to make it bigger) shows data of dollars won/lost versus hours of cash-game play (I excluded tournaments), for the first eight months of 2007; I got tired of entering it after that, and thought that I had a big enough sample.

The first thing you might notice is that there appear to be as many dots in the negative range as the positive. That is so. I've seen and heard other pros say that they book wins something like two-thirds of the time. Well, for whatever reason, that isn't how I run. In fact, I'm at 51%/49% right now. That doesn't bother me, though, because as the chart also shows at a glance, my average win is quite a bit higher than my average loss.

Zolotow advises: "Look at your five biggest wins and five biggest losses. If you played significantly more hours during those losses than you did during your wins, you have a major discipline problem. If you perform this simple exercise and change your negative pattern, it will be the most important thing you can do to improve your bottom line."

I'm pleased to see that I pass this test. My five biggest wins are in sessions varying from 2.75 to 6.25 hours. My five biggest losses are between 1.75 hours (that was a positively brutal, intense beating that session!) and 4.5 hours.

My sense going into this data analysis was that I would see no significant correlation between length of time played and result. And that basically turns out to be correct. To be precise, the correlation coefficient for the data set shown in the first chart above is 0.16. A correlation coefficient is a way of expressing how related two sets of numbers are. It can range between 1.0 (perfect positive correlation; the data points would line up exactly on a line slanting up and to the right) and -1.0 (the opposite). So I have only a slightly positive tendency for longer sessions to be more profitable.

Next I ran the analysis you see in the second chart. It's the same data set, but with the absolute dollar values converted to dollars-per-hour rates. The correlation here is even weaker: 0.12, which means that I make only marginally more per hour during longer sessions.

You can also see that I don't go for the marathon sessions that some other players make famous. It's not my thing. On those rare occasions that I've gone past the 12-hour mark, I feel crummy and I don't play well. It's just not worth it.

My conclusions:

(1) As I suspected, the hard data confirm that I'm reasonably well disciplined about quitting when things are going badly for me that day. I definitely need to improve in this, because I can't count the number of times I've spewed off one extra buy-in (usually $100) even after I recognize that I'm playing poorly, or the competition has the best of me, or I'm just impossibly unlucky that session, or whatever. I'd love to have back all of the Benjamins that I've lost that way. But at least I can honestly say that I don't let the situation turn from "problem" to "disaster" before getting out of Dodge on the days that the donkeys are having their way with me.

(2) Between roughly two and eight hours, there is basically no correlation between how long I'm sitting at the table and how much I can expect to have made. Some days I get on a huge rush early, then stagnate for a few hours, neither making nor losing anything, until I get up and leave. Other days it's the reverse, and I toil and sweat with no headway, until four or five hours in I get smacked in the face by the deck and run my stack up ridicuously fast. Other times, it's just slow, steady progress. Other times, it's up and down, up and down, and whether I book a win or a loss is just a matter of where the pendulum is when I clock out. It's absolutely impossible to predict, and it appears not to matter.

"Give 'em a good wash, would ya?"

I heard the request quoted in the title of this post at Harrah's the other day. It's hardly the first time.

A "wash," in dealer-ese, is the process of scrambling the cards face-down on the table before gathering them up and commencing the standard riffle shuffle. It's a routine and important part of the whole hand-shuffling procedure.

But what's odd is that sometimes players will request that the dealer do this before placing the deck into an autoshuffler. That was the case at Harrah's. There was a regular at the Hilton poker room that used to request this on a regular basis.

Maybe I'm the wrong person to write blog posts about the idiotic things that people say and do at the poker table, because I really want to be asking about them, rather than explaining them. As far as I can tell, there is no rational explanation for them. For the life of me I can't understand what goes through player's brains that makes them submit such a request.

It might help (though I really think the details don't matter) to understand how casino autoshufflers work. It's kind of mysterious if all you do is watch the dealer insert one deck and take out the next one. But how the things work isn't exactly a secret. The manufacturer, Shufflemaster (Shufflemaster's market dominance is so complete that I've never even once seen a casino using any other kind of machine, and I don't even know if any competitors exist), isn't shy about explaining it, and it's all laid out in detail in its patents.* For example (from http://tinyurl.com/yqsg8e):

The microprocessor randomly assigns potential positions for each card
within the initial set of playing cards, and then directs the device to arrange
the initial set of playing cards into those randomly assigned potential
positions to form a randomized final set of playing cards.

In other words, it has a computerized random number generator that determines a random order into which to place the 52 cards. It picks them off of the bottom of the used deck one by one and sticks them into pre-assigned spots in what will become the newly shuffled deck. This isn't to say that the machine has decided that the queen of diamonds will be at position #32 in the completed deck; it doesn't know which card is which (although I see now, looking at Shufflemaster's web site, that it has a new model that does exactly that; see http://www.shufflemaster.com/02_eu_products/utility_products/shufflers/shufflers_sd/i-deal.asp). It simply determines that, say, the current bottom card of the deck, whatever it may be, will go to position #19 in the final reassembled deck, the next card from the bottom will go to position #46 in the reassembled deck, etc.

Of course, the order that the cards are in when the dealer drops the deck into the machine is a key factor determining the order of the newly shuffled deck. So "washing" the cards, as opposed to simply gathering them up, definitely does alter the order that the cards will be in when they emerge from the machine two hands from now.

But the important thing conceptually is that it's a random order either way. You could have the dealer take a few minutes and put the deck back into the same order it was in when it came from the factory, with each suit in consecutive order of rank, and you'd still get a randomly shuffled deck out of the machine when it was done. (For stories of how poker hands go down when you accidentally use such a factory-ordered, unshuffled deck, see Steve Zolotow's column at http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/57/8510.) It would be a different order than the one you'd get if the dealer just scooped up the cards and placed them in the shuffler, which would also be a different order than the one that you'd get if the dealer were to "give 'em a good wash," which would be different from the one that you'd get if the dealer went through the full hand-shuffle routine and then dropped the deck in the machine. But they would all be random.

Perhaps even more crucial to grasp, though I think this should be obvious, is that how the final order of the deck changes as a result of the wash is precisely as likely to hurt any given player as to help him. For all you know, when the dealer does the wash you request, it sets you up to have pocket kings when an opponent has pocket aces, or to be the one with the aces when the guy with the kings will hit quads against you with them, outcomes that would not have occurred without the wash.

In short, it's just a waste of time and effort.

I assume that players do this when they've had a run of unplayable hands or bad beats and they want to change their luck, in much the same way that they ask for a new setup (i.e., a different pair of decks to be brought to the table; see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-setup-youre-moron.html), or insist that the dealer make the final cut of the deck higher or lower. Yes, you change the circumstances of the next hand, but in a way that has exactly zero positive expected value for you and for every other player.

I really wish I could get one of these imbeciles to explain to me in detail what they believe they're accomplishing with the wash request. Presumably they must believe that it acts to their advantage, or they wouldn't bother, right? But no rational mind could possibly believe that--which is why my rational mind can't grasp what's going on.

My best guess is that their thought process--if that term can be applied at all--is something like this: "Well, the standard procedure that the dealer is using every time is resulting in me getting crummy cards for the past half an hour. So I should have the dealer do something different." And that's as far as the analysis goes. Standard process is treating me about as bad as it can get, so anything different must necessarily be an improvement.

But even as I type that out, I think that surely can't really be it, because two seconds of critical thought would dash the notion all to pieces, and I'd like to believe that most of my fellow humans are capable of two seconds of sustained rational thought.

The evidence, though, is to the contrary, sad to say.



*Incidentally, Shufflemaster didn't used to sell its devices to non-institutional buyers, but it has apparently recently changed this policy, so if you'd like to have your own to speed up your home games, it can be yours for just $15,795 (see http://www.shufflemaster.com/02_eu_products/utility_products/shufflers/shufflers_sd/deck_mate.asp). I guess I'm a tad late with this announcement for those who wanted one for Christmas. Sorry about that.


Addendum, March 1, 2008

See the story about Sam Grizzle at today's heads-up championship round, at http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/poker-blog/2008/03/362_nbc_headsup_championship_12_highlights_from_high_noon.php.

Lying about your hand

"Did you know that it's OK to lie about your hand, but you're not allowed to tell the truth about it?"

I heard that from a woman at the table yesterday at the Flamingo. It's not the first time that I've heard somebody make such an assertion. Most famously, Annie Duke said essentially the same thing during one of the 2006 World Series of Poker episodes. I suspect that the 700 million re-broadcasts of the series are ultimately the source by which most players "know" this rule.

But it's not true. The fact that so many people hear this and instantly believe it is just one tiny manifestation of the general societal problem that most people have precious little training or experience in critical thinking.* Even if I weren't pretty well attuned to the subject of poker rules, just an overall skepticism about accepting as fact things that people say would have caused me to raise a quizzical eyebrow at Ms. Duke's claim. I would immediately think, "Can that really be true? If so, it doesn't make any sense at all."

Let me address this under three headings: (1) Why the "rule" as stated would be stupid and pointless, (2) What the rule actually is, and (3) What I think the rule should be.

The alleged rule would be stupid and pointless

Suppose for a moment that there really were a rule that said that you could say any lie you wanted to about your hand, but couldn't tell the truth about what you were holding. Two prominent poker columnists have recently addressed this in detail, apparently both believing that there actually is just such a rule. They both do a nice job of explaining why it's ridiculous.

First is Steve Zolotow, writing for Card Player magazine (http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/57/10074):

Someone in the main event told the truth about his hand, saying, "I have a king." His opponent folded, but he received a one-round penalty for telling the truth. Obviously, he should have said, "I don't have a king," then paused and added, "but there is a penalty for telling the truth." Thus, he could have conveyed the same information by lying about his hand. As long as we know that our opponent must be lying, we can assume the opposite is the truth. Unless players are allowed to use some mix of truth and lies, they effectively are telling the truth.

Next up is Mike Caro, who calls this "the idiot rule," because it prevents people from disclosing whatever they want about their cards only if both players are idiots (http://www.pokerplayernewspaper.com/viewarticle.php?id=2351):

But the worst rule in poker states that you can't tell the truth about your hand. For instance, you can't say, "I have three aces," if you actually do. That sucks. It sucks because, by rule, anything I say must be a lie to be legal. So, if I say I have a full house, opponents are given information. They know I can't have a full house or I'd be in violation of the idiot rule. So, I guess, if I wanted to tell someone I had aces full, I'd have to say something like, "One thing I can say positively is that I don't have aces full." If I said that and didn't have aces full, I'd be telling the truth and in clear violation of the idiot rule. For that reason, astute opponents would know that I'm lying--which is legal--and that I absolutely do have aces-full.

Exactly so. A rule requiring that everything you say about your hand must be a lie would be (1) unenforceable (because not every hand gets opened to check to see if the player was telling the truth or not) and, (2) completely ineffective. In fact, paradoxically, the more rigorously it was enforced, the less effective it would become at the presumed goal of preventing collusion.

That ain't really the rule

Fortunately, nobody has yet, to the best of my knowledge, actually been stupid enough to implement the "rule" that Zolotow and Caro rail against. I'm really quite surprised that both of these columnists took the trouble to publish a critique of a rule that doesn't exist.

So where does this poker urban legend come from? As far as I can tell, the source is this language in the World Series of Poker rules (http://www.worldseriesofpoker.com/pdfs/wsop.tournament-rules.07.pdf):

52. Players are obligated to protect the other players in the tournament at all times. Therefore, whether in a hand or not, players may not a.) disclose contents of live or folded hands....

Notice that it doesn't say anything at all about "truth" or "lies." It forbids one to "disclose" the contents of one's hand. The number of ways that one can "disclose" one's holdings are limited only by the imagination. You could show your cards. You could just say what you have. You could tap it out with your feet in morse code. You could send smoke signals (well, except that they've banned smoking at the table now). You could let an opponent keep guessing, shaking your head "no" when he's wrong and nodding "yes" when he's right until he's got it, thus never speaking a word. Maybe if you have a touch of Marcel Marceau's spirit in you, you could pantomime it. It doesn't matter--they're all equally prohibited.

The implication is that you also can't "disclose" your hand by invoking a logical game such as Zolotow and Caro propose: "I do not have XYZ, but you know that I have to be lying about that." As they note, that is the functional equivalent of straightforwardly stating exactly what you have. Both are prohibited under the actual wording of the rule in question, because both are just two of the myriad methods by which one might "disclose" one's hand.

Let me repeat: There is no currently published rule anywhere that says or implies that you can lie about your hand but not tell the truth about it.

Let's look at some other common sources for poker rules, for the sake of completeness.

The Tournament Directors Association rule 12 is nearly identical to, and the probable source of, the WSOP rule:

Players are obligated to protect the other players in the tournament at
all times. Therefore, players, whether in the hand or not, may not: 1. Disclose contents of live or folded hands....

Next is Bob Ciaffone's "Robert's Rules of Poker" (http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/poker/chapter1.php):

The following actions are improper, and grounds for warning, suspending, or barring a violator:

...Revealing the contents of a live hand in a multihanded pot before the betting is complete. Do not divulge the contents of a hand during a deal even to someone not in the pot, so you do not leave any possibility of the information being transmitted to an active player.

Cooke's Rules of Real Poker--for my money the best single rulebook yet--says this (p. 71, rule 10.20):

A player shall not intentionally expose a card or reveal it verbally in order to induce or inhibit action. However, in head's up matches (where only two players are dealt in) revealing a card shall be permitted.

I'm not sure if this is intended to cover literally only games where there are only two people playing the whole time, or if it is intended to extend to full ring games, when only two players are contesting the pot.

Lou Krieger and Sheree Bykofsky, in their book The Rules of Poker: Essentials for Every Game, go even further, and would disallow such disclosures even when heads-up (p. 79, rule 3.9):

Intentionally exposing a card to induce or inhibit action is a serious breach of poker ethics, and in certain instances can be considered a form of collusion. It is never permitted.

Notice that not even one of these sources says even a single word about lying versus telling the truth. So the next time you hear somebody make such a claim, ask him or her to point you to the actual source where the alleged rule is written. It's a safe bet that the speaker will be unable to do so.

What should the rule be?

Let's talk about cash games first.

The overarching reason for any no-disclosure rule is to protect other players. For example, perhaps a player has moved all-in ahead of me before the flop and I have pocket kings. I move all-in, too, and show my cards before other people have had a chance to act, because I would really prefer to have to beat only the guy who is already all-in; large pocket pairs don't play well against, say, five or six opponents, so my action is intended to scare off opponents. But the person who first moved all-in may have something like suited 9-10, which plays much better, in terms of risk:reward ratio, when there are several players in the hand (because the payoff for hitting a straight or flush is potentially enormous). Obviously, the same reasoning applies to saying "I have two kings, so the rest of you should fold," even though the verbal disclosure leaves more doubt about the speaker's truthfulness than does showing the cards.

What about less specific disclosures, such as "I have a really big hand here"? I would outlaw them, too, on the slippery-slope argument. If you write the rule so that it only prohibits stating exactly what your cards are, then presumably it would be acceptable to say something like "I have a pocket pair bigger than queens." That comes so close to what is prohibited that the rule ceases to be useful. So I would move the dividing line all the way down to zero: you can't say anything that suggests--truthfully or not--the strength of your hand. I would also prohibit statements that come in the form of "I might have...," which is a common ploy of some players.

When there are only two players contesting the pot, however, a player disclosing his hand cannot do any harm to anybody except himself, and since I don't believe in protecting people from their own mistakes and/or stupidity, I'd allow it. There are times when revealing one or more cards can work to one's advantage in confusing or deceiving an opponent. Consider this absolutely brilliant ploy by Daniel Negreanu, where he combines showing one card, a statement about what the other one might be, and a scary-looking minimum raise, to get Sam Farha to fold a better hand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d33K96MGzVA. It's an ingenius trick, one of the slyest bits of deception I've ever seen deployed at a poker table.

I was on the bad end of another skillful bit of deceptive revealing by an opponent a couple of months ago. I started with a strong hand (can't remember exactly what it was), but hated seeing three hearts on the flop, when I had none. The turn brought a fourth heart to the board. I bet, my tricky opponent took a long time to decide what to do. While thinking, he turned over the 7 of hearts. He finally called. The river was a blank. I decided that with just a 7-high flush, he must be worried that I had a higher flush, so I moved all-in. He insta-called with the look on his face of the cat that caught the canary (as, indeed, he had). His other card was the king of hearts. He had flopped the king-high flush, and his showing the lower card tricked me into thinking exactly what he wanted me to think: that he just had a low flush and was in a difficult spot, when really he had the second nuts. Well played, sir--you lured me in perfectly.

That kind of clever psychological gambit should absolutely be part of the game, as long as only two players are involved. So showing one or both hole cards, or announcing or hinting at your hand--honestly or dishonestly--is fine by me.

What about in tournaments? The same considerations hold for multi-way pots, but there's an added wrinkle in tournaments that makes the picture less clear for heads-up situations. That relates to the concept of "tournament equity." This isn't the place for detailed analysis, but basically, depending on the payout schedule, late in a tournament, how one player acts in a hand can dramatically affect the amount of money that other players--even those not involved in the current hand--can expect to win. This is at the heart of an interesting debate between Lee Jones and Daniel Negreanu, at http://www.biggerdeal.com/2007/10/05/daniel%e2%80%99s-wrong-i%e2%80%99m-10000-sure/. Be sure to read the comments, too. (One of the commenters is me. I'll let people guess which one.)

I don't know the optimal way to balance the advantages of allowing the kind of Negreanu-esque ploy, which has traditionally been an integral part of the game, against preventing injury to uninvolved players' tournament equity. Perhaps starting the ban on disclosing one's hand, even when only two people are in the pot, when the money is reached, or a few places before the money, or at the final table, would strike the best balance. Of course, even if it works that way, when it gets down to the final two contestants, the rule serves no purpose and could be taken out of effect again.

Back to the start

But all of that is mostly irrelevant to where I started this discussion. I began with griping about how so many players just hear somebody say what a poker rule is, and accept that as the gospel truth, without looking it up anywhere, without thinking very hard about whether the alleged rule makes any sense or not, etc. To compound the problem, these people then repeat it to others, spreading the disinformation. It makes me crazy. It's not that hard to find out what the rules really are.

So when you hear somebody claim that there's a poker rule that says ________, and you've never heard it before, ask for evidence. Hold the thought in suspension until you can verify it. Don't pass it on as it it's the revealed word of God.

And for Pete's sake, don't talk about your hand!


*I risk going off on a full-tilt tangent here, because this is one of my biggest all-time sources of frustration and dismay about the world. In fact, if I had the magical power to cure just one ill of humankind, I think it would be the lack of critical thinking. I would make every person on the planet instantly inclined to critical thinking, and skilled at it. This would immediately solve countless woes, from the relatively trivial (people wasting their money on pills that the sellers promise will cause miraculous weight loss, enlarge male genitalia, or make the user irresitible to the opposite sex) to the truly world-changing (people being led to believe that if they fly a commercial jet into a skyscraper they will be rewarded with a bevy of virgins in heaven). So don't get me started.


Addendum, December 7, 2007

I emailed Mr. Caro to tell him of my disagreement with the premise of his column (Mr. Zolotow doesn't have a published email address). He responded quickly, for which I am grateful. With his consent, I'll share his comment:

About the issue on “can’t tell the truth.” I know that rule is in existence. It only applies to tournaments, though. Many directors have since modified it. Hopefully, my urging had something to do with it. I was, I think, instrumental in arguing against it on several televised events I participated in. They even waived the “can’t show cards” heads-up rule in both the National Heads-up Championship (NBC) and Superstars, when I participated. That wasn’t my influence alone. Many others felt it made for good TV to adopt these changes.

I even had the honor of roasting the person who first put the rule into place at the WSOP.

This is useful information. I can't find any such rule in current, published sources, but it's certainly possible that, as suggested in Mr. Caro's reply, there are tournament directors who use such an unpublished rule specific to their facility, and/or that if I looked at older versions of tournament rules I would find it. I freely admit that I didn't investigate older materials, so if a must-lie rule previouly existed, I wouldn't know about it (having been in the poker world for only a couple of years now).