Thetournamenthost.com sucks

I have a friend back in Minnesota who is the editor of a section of the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper. There's nobody whose opinions and observations about good writing I value more. He tells me that he despises the use of the word "suck(s)" to describe something that one doesn't like. I agree that it's overused, but I sat here for quite a while trying to think of a single verb that simultaneously conveys that something is lousy and that I have a really strongly negative visceral reaction to how lousy it is. I couldn't think of one. So I'm going with "sucks." Thetournamenthost.com sucks.

I'd better explain what it is: http://www.thetournamenthost.com/ is one of many entities that have sprung up around the country to allow people to win prizes in poker tournaments with no entry fee. With this site, as with most others, the tournaments are held in bars. I assume that ultimately the prizes are paid for by the sponsoring bars, who hope they will make up in liquor sales what they pay out in prizes.

What interested me is the prizes. According to this web site, if you win two single-table tournaments over the next five weeks, you qualify for the big tournament, in which the top three finishers will win a trip to Tunica, Mississippi, to participate in a real poker tournament, with many thousands of dollars to be won. OK--sounds like it's worth giving it a shot, I thought.

I signed up at Tournament Host ("TH" hereinafter, to save me typing) about a week ago, and have now played in four of their single-table tournaments. I won two of them and came in second place in another, which kind of tells you that they're not made up of the stiffest competition in town.

But they have so irritated me along the way that I don't know whether I'll continue or not. Here are the problems I've encountered:

1. They seem incapable of making anything clear.

Consider these examples.

Here's a challenge: Try to learn from the TH web site when and where the next big tournament (the one for which the winners will receive the prizes) will be held. As far as I can tell, it's not there anywhere.

There are apparently occasional multi-table tournaments that are something apart from the single-table qualifiers, but I'll be damned if I can discover what they are about. There was one today. The web page announcing it has a link that says "Click here for event and prize information." But the link calls up a blank page.

I can't tell from the web site whether winning any two events will get one qualified for the next big tournament, or if, perhaps, one has to win two events at the same venue. I used the "contact" link on the site to ask them this question, as well as the one about when the next big tournament will be. I got an automated email in response, telling me that they would be responding "shortly." You guessed it--haven't heard any answers yet.

The second event I attended was the last tournament of the evening (Wednesday), scheduled for 9:30. I arrived at about 8:45 and sat where I could see the table, which was playing out the end of the previous match. That one ended just before 9:00, so I sat down at the table to announce my presence, since there wasn't any obvious place or person to check in with. I figured that if I was sitting at the table, it should be clear to everybody that I was there to play the next event. Sure enough, somebody came over and took my name. Then about ten minutes later they were getting ready to start. To my surprise, all the seats were claimed by players who had been given seat cards. (The most common way for seats to be assigned in small tournaments is that when you register, they have you pick a card with a table and seat number on it from all the ones that are left, face down, so that it's basically random.) So they weren't going to let me play. Apparently the guy who had asked my name wasn't the one in charge of assigning seats. Like I'm supposed to know this? Some miscommunication between the organizers (and I use the term "organizers" very loosely) made them think that I hadn't shown up to claim my seat, so they had given it to an alternate. I fussed about it enough that they ended up giving me the seat in the end--but it would make everybody's life a whole lot easier if they took the trouble to make it obvious, somehow, what one is supposed to do, exactly, to check in upon arrival. If I was supposed to do something more than sit down at the table and wait for somebody to tell me what else to do, nothing either on the web site or in the bar so indicated.

2. They don't follow their own rules.

I've noticed at least six examples of this in just the short time I've played with TH.

a. Sponsoring sites typically have three or four consecutive tournaments in an evening, but the site's rules clearly state that you can play only once a day. (See http://www.thetournamenthost.com/about.php: "You can play every day but can only play in one tournament per day.") This is sensible from a sponsor's perspective, because if they have four 10-person tournaments, they'd rather have 40 people in their bar than the same 10 people for four games in a row. But yesterday I was playing in the first match of the evening (5:00 p.m.), and the guy in charge was letting people sign up for the 8:00 p.m. tournament. Why have rules published, then not abide by them?

b. TH has posted a set of rules governing their tournaments. These appear to be just the Tournament Directors' Association rules (see http://www.pokertda.com/rules.htm) (reprinted without acknowledgement of the source, which is in itself in pretty poor taste). One of these is as follows:

8. At Your Seat: A player must be at his or her seat by the time all players have been dealt complete initial hands in order to have a live hand.

This is a standard poker tournament rule: if you're not in your seat when the last card is dealt, your hand is instantly, automatically dead, period. We don't wait for players to get back from whatever else they may be doing. But during today's tournament I put in a raise from middle position, and nobody called. Both players in the blinds were away from the table, so I should have won the pot by default, with both of those players' hands declared dead. When the dealer hesitated, I asked him, "Those two hands are dead, right?" He said no, because the guy in the small blind had announced that he would be coming back. Sure enough, he waited until the guy came back, and let him play his hand. He told me that they only follow this rule at the big tournament, where the prizes are at stake.

In this case, it worked out well for me, because the guy called and I won the pot, so I won more than I otherwise would have. But that's not the point. The point is that it's insane to publish rules, then willy-nilly decide not to follow them sometimes. If you're sometimes going to enforce rules and sometimes not, then you might as well say that--just for today--a straight beats a flush. It's crazy to run things like that.

c. In another bizarre incident today, a player fished his hole cards out of the muck and was allowed to play them. The player was in the big blind, and he and/or the dealer thought that he had a walk (i.e., nobody called the big blind). My attention was elsewhere at first, so I don't know whether he folded his cards or the dealer took them. But after his cards were in the muck, it was noticed that one player had, in fact, made the call, so the hand wasn't over. The big blind just casually reached toward the muck. The dealer allowed him to pluck two cards out. He checked them, then said, "Yep, I got the right two." They then played the hand out.

I've previously quoted the rules on this point; see the footnote at http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/09/walking-away-in-middle-of-hand-not.html. It doesn't matter whether the error was the player's or the dealer's, that hand was dead the instant it hit the muck, and the pot should have been awarded to the one player who had called the big blind. You can't fish cards out of the muck and play them. I've only seen this allowed once before (see the story at http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/dealers-who-dont-know-rules-and-dont.html), and it was clearly, unequivocally wrong then, as it was today. Even the most fundamental, universal rules are ignored by the TH people.

d. While I was watching the conclusion of the tournament before the first one I played last week, the player on the button threw in a bet after the flop before it was his turn. He took it back when the dealer pointed out that it wasn't his turn. The player who was rightly first to act checked. But then rather than making the button bet as he had done out of turn, the button checked, and the dealer allowed that to stand. This is in clear violation of another universal rule:

30. Action out of turn...will be binding if the action to that player has not changed.

The purpose of this rule is to prevent unethical players from deliberately firing a bet out of turn in order to intimidate an opponent from betting, then checking after the opponent checks, in order to get a free card. Apparently at TH, rules just don't mean much.

e. At today's tournament one of their own dealers was playing, which is fine with me. At one point he was supposed to be first to act, but was busy talking to one of his co-workers. Another off-duty dealer who was sitting with him picked up the cards, looked at them, and threw them in the muck. The actual dealer for that tournament just accepted this as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. I have never, ever witnessed a poker game--cash or tournament--in which a non-player was allowed to step in and play a hand in the place of the seated player.

f. Also at today's tournament, in a hand I wasn't in, an early-position player raised. When the action got around to the guy on the button, he addressed the raiser and said, "I know you're raising with nothing. You have something like 8-2 of diamonds. I'm calling it right now." Then he threw his cards in the muck. It took me a couple of seconds to realize what had happened, but in retrospect what he apparently meant by "I'm calling it" was not that he was calling the raise, but that he was predicting what the raiser's cards were. But any competent dealer should have considered that a verbal, binding announcement of his action, and any floor person called to settle the inevitably resulting dispute should do the same. Again, their own rule #30 repeats the universal recognition that "[v]erbal declarations in turn are binding." Universal, that is, except in TH tournaments, I guess.

3. They don't honor their commitments.

As much as laxity about rules annoys me, people not living up to their offers, agreements, or promises is even more galling. (See, for example, what I wrote about Caesars Palace when they went back on what they had offered 300+ of their players: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/06/shame-on-caesars-palace.html.)

I used the TH web site to sign up for a 5:00 tournament today. I got there just before 4:30. Again it wasn't at all obvious who to tell that I had arrived. The multi-table tournament was still going on. I walked up to an off-duty dealer and said, "I'm here for the 5:00 tournament." He said, "OK, just hold on a bit, we're getting that together now." OK, fine. So I sit down and wait. Maybe ten minutes later another dealer tells me that they're getting ready to start in the next room. So I go over to the table, and all the seats are full. Huh?

I talk to the person that I now recognize is in charge and ask him what's going on. He said they had already given out all the seats. I explain that I signed up on their web site, and when I did there were still eight seats available. He tells me that there weren't supposed to be any single-table tournaments at this place tonight--they were just throwing some together because players exiting the multi-table tournament were requesting them. "But your web site announced the single-table tournaments, and I signed up for it there." Oh, he tells me--that was a mistake. He tells me that he called "most" of the people who had signed up for it to tell them that it was cancelled. Of course, he had neither called nor emailed me.

But he tells me to relax, because they have enough demand that they're going to get a second one going in just a few minutes. OK, fine. And sure enough, they do. It even starts a few minutes before 5:00, so they're not later than what I had expected. And lo and behold, I actually win the thing--come in first place! It's my second win, which should get me qualified for the next big tournament, whenever that may be. (And, incidentally, I tried asking the dealer today when and where it was--he didn't know, predictably.)

So they report my name as the winner to the guy in charge. He proceeds to tell me, "Tonight's tournaments don't count as qualifiers." WHAT????? I politely ask what they are for, then. He says, "Bragging rights."

First, I try not to brag. Second, I don't know a single soul at any of these things so far, so who would I brag to? Third, I don't waste time playing poker when there is nothing of value at stake--especially when I have to drive out to Henderson for it. I assume that this "not counting" thing is related to the apparent "mistake" of having the tournaments announced and available for sign-up on their web site.

I left in a huff. I was, for once, actually too stunned by this declaration to do or say anything more about it at the time. I thought that just maybe he was joking with me, but I really don't think so.

I will be trying to call whoever I can tomorrow and figure this all out. They announce a series of four qualifying tournaments for tonight on their web site. I follow their procedures and sign up for one. I show up, only to be told that that was a mistake. Fortunately, though, they've decided to hold the tournaments anyway. I win, and only then do they tell me that these aren't counting for anything.

I seriously don't get that. If they decide to at least partially correct the web mistake by actually holding the single-table tournaments, what in the world prevents them from counting them as qualifiers? It's not like there is a state statute or some larger tournament association with rules that prevent them from treating these events as if they were the regular qualifiers that were announced. I can't figure out why they would handle the situation this shabbily. It has me seriously aggravated. If they had bothered to tell us in advance that the winner would get nothing, I wouldn't have wasted my time playing!

4. Summary.

With five days and four events under my belt, my conclusion is that this outfit is completely unworthy of participation. They make rules but don't follow them. You can't get from anyone the most basic information about what's going on. Most egregiously, they don't abide by what they announced they were going to be doing. This is an organization (and, as with "organizers," the term has to be viewed as only loosely applying here) that appears, to me, to be completely undeserving of any trust or support--not because they're dishonest scammers, but because they're just utterly incompetent and uncaring about doing anything in a sensible, straightforward, professional manner.


Addendum, October 3, 2007:

A dealer I know occasionally checks in on my blog. By coincidence, he's the one who first suggested I give TH a try. I ran into him today. He, too, has noticed the sloppy enforcement of rules, and told me of another example. A player announced a raise, arranged his chips in several small stacks, then pushed the stacks forward one at a time without having announced an amount of the raise. The first stack was the amout of the call, and the second one would have constituted a legal raise. My friend protested that this was a string raise, and that the player's raise should have to stand at the amount that was out after his second stack was pushed. He's absolutely right. The dealer, however, said that because the guy had announced "raise," he could put out as much as he wanted.

Anybody even minimally familiar with casino play would know that this isn't the way it works. Basically, you have three choices for putting in a raise. (1) You don't announce anything and just push out the entire amount of the call and raise all at once. (If you've never seen Chris Ferguson raise all-in, it's a thing of beauty to watch. He has mastered, somehow, being able to move his entire mass of chips all at once, even when it's dozens of individual stacks of 20 chips each. He wraps his hands around them, and they all move forward a few inches as if they were glued together. Amazing.) (2) You can announce "raise," without a specific amount, put out the amount needed to call the previous bet, then in a single, separate motion push out the amount of the raise. (3) You can announce the amount of the raise, after which it doesn't matter how many trips your hands have to take back and forth to collect that amount and put it into the pot. I won't bore the reader with quoting the various rule books on this point--just take my word for it that this is one of those undisputed, universal rules. Except, of course, at TH, where otherwise universally recognized rules get ignored at the whim of the dealer.

Poker gems, #28

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 73-74:

Like at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City when Floyd has been playing seventeen or eighteen hours in a row without stopping to eat, sleep, or go to the bathroom because he’s so fuckin’ stuck he don’t want to move. And finally he can’t take it any longer so after he folds his hand he says, “Deal me in,” and starts sprinting for the bathroom, which in the Taj isn’t so close—no, you have to go out of the whole poker room and down the hall—and so the hand ends and the dealer shuffles and says, “Should I deal him in?” and Virginia says, “Yeah, give him a hand…he’ll make it.” And sure enough it hasn’t even been thirty or forty seconds and you can see Floyd through the plate-glass windows separating the poker room from the hall coming at a dead run, full sprint, waving frantically so we can see that he wants to be dealt in and there’s no way that the guy had time to finish let alone wash his hands, but when you’re stuck you don’t want to miss even one hand, not even after eighteen hours and five or six hundred of them. And it’s not just Floyd—I mean we all been there. And I heard that’s why Tom H got booted from the Stardust casino because the game was so rocking and wild and he didn’t want to miss a hand and walk all the way to the bathroom so he went in a corner and pissed in a garbage can.

Apparently the next poker movie will be awful, too

I know nothing of this firsthand, but the entities of Wicked Chops Poker (the only poker blog I check daily, without fail) explain:

http://wickedchopspoker.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/09/poker-movie-dea.html

Poker gems, #27

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 65-66:

My friend and roommate Jimmy put it in perspective about two years later when he told me a story about one day down at the Taj Mahal when he was playing with Hot Mama Earl in a Hold’em game. Now Earl thinks Jimmy is some sort of superhuman… possessing some special knowledge about poker that’s way beyond him. At one point Jimmy does something stupid—I mean really stupid—like he calls before the flop with a hand that’s way bad against a guy who maybe hasn’t played a hand in a while. Calls the flop with nothing and then check-raises on the turn with almost zero except maybe some twenty-to-one-shot draw that miraculously makes a straight on the river, so when he flips his hand over at the end everybody’s eyes widen in disbelief, and the poor chump who Jimmy beat in the hand gets out of his seat to make sure he’s not seeing things. And Jimmy is keeping on his cool-rider face, but inside he’s laughing hysterically because he knows how lucky he just got. Jimmy’s not the sort to rub it in or show his emotions and admit that he made a stupid play so he’s just looking down and raking the pot, and meanwhile Earl is sitting across the table with stars in his eyes, enraptured, drinking it all in because he thinks he has just witnessed a world-class player making a world-class play and not an ordinary sod who just had a snake charm stuck up his ass. Later when Jimmy and Earl both happen to be walking to the bathroom together and they’re out of earshot of the other players Earl says, “Now I understand if you don’t want to give away too many secrets, but could you explain to me about that play you made with the ace-six?” And Jimmy wants to look Earl dead in the eye and say to him, Earl, sometimes I just don’t know what the hell is going on and I just do stupid things and get lucky. But Earl doesn’t want to hear that and he says, “No, stop. Don’t tell me. It’s probably too deep to understand.”

So Jimmy instead smiles and looks mysterious and says, “Poker is a very complicated game,” which is what Hot Mama Earl wants to hear anyway and he walks away thinking Jimmy is a poker god and Jimmy takes a deep breath and goes to the bathroom and tries to figure out how he’s going to get back the five thousand dollars that he’s stuck in this 75-150 Hold’em game and how the hell is it possible to be losing in a game where everybody is playing so bad. But luck is strange and the short run in poker is very unpredictable, so even though he’s tired from eight hours of poker and hurting and feeling like a good seafood meal and a nice cold beer and a long sleep, he freezes his face in his cool-rider mask and trudges back toward the table. But all anyone can see is a relaxed smile, dark glasses, and impeccable concentration. And Earl is able to walk away thinking poker is deep, mysterious, and romantic, wonderful to be involved in, and not base, crude, and filthy.

Poker gems, #26

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 50-51:

Poker players keep ledgers because they need them. They need them to show that they got it all under control. But it’s never under control. No matter how many wins you got in a row, no matter what your hourly win rate is, no matter what. A few things go this way or that way and you’re sitting there counting your money, cursing under your breath, shuffling your chips, heart a-pounding, gasping for air, and making those questionable decisions when you’re stuck in a big game after twenty-four hours wondering what the fuck’s happening and why it’s going on now.

Poker gems, #25

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 45:

I live in Vegas now, been here three months. It’s almost two years since I dropped out of college. I had classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and our poker games were Monday and Wednesday nights. Irreconcilable differences.

Poker gems, #24

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 37:

And now he’s telling me that he’s making the jump [to playing poker for a living] and what can I tell him about his play or the game or the big game and so on and is he good enough. And I say, “Jamie, all I can tell you is that it’s lonely out there, real fuckin’ lonely, and your play doesn’t matter so much as how tough you are and whether or not you fall apart.”

Walking away in the middle of a hand--not recommended!

Tonight at the Hilton I witnessed another very strange occurrence in a poker hand--a player walking away from the table, leaving behind his would-have-been winning hand, and thereby forfeiting the pot. This also reminded me of a somewhat similar event from last fall.

For those who want the Reader's Digest condensed version without slogging through the stories, here's the moral: If you walk away from the table, you can't win the money, even if you have the best hand! Nobody should be that stupid.

Story #1:

Three players were involved. I folded before the flop and was just watching. Marty is a solid, above-average player in seat 4. Two people I don't recognise are in seats 5 and 6. The flop is J-Q-x, with the two face cards both being spades. Seat 5 pushes all-in, and both opponents call him. Seat 5 then makes his first mistake by flipping his cards face-up, even though the other two players can continue betting into a side pot after the turn and river cards are revealed. I don't know if he didn't realize that two people had called him (his action would be fine against just one opponent, since nobody would have any decisions left to make), or he just didn't understand why he shouldn't do that. (People develop strange bad habits in their casual home games, and tend to bring them to the casino, where they cause trouble.) He has the A-4 of spades, for the nut flush draw, with no pair.

Marty and Seat 6 both check after the turn card and again after the river, both of which are blanks. But as soon as Seat 5 sees that he didn't make his flush on the river, he makes his second mistake: he turns and walks away from the table, without waiting to see the other players' hands or to watch the pot being awarded. I suppose he must have assumed that at least one of the other two players had him beat. This was, in fact, pretty likely, but you never know for sure what people are doing in this crazy game.

So then the next bizarre thing happens: Seat 6 mucks his cards without showing them. He certainly could determine that he didn't have Seat 5's ace-high beat, but Marty hadn't shown yet. This means that Seat 6 couldn't possibly know for sure whether he won or lost.* I think that Seat 6 didn't grasp the implication of Seat 5 walking away (that is, that he was effectively forfeiting any claim to the pot, even if he had the best hand).

Marty is sharp, though, and absolutely knew what that meant. He wisely turned his hole cards face-up after seeing Seat 6 muck. He had a measly 9-10 offsuit, no pair, so he would have lost to the ace-high of Seat 5. He had been going for the straight draw and missed. But he was the only player who (1) was still at the table, and (2) showed his hand to the dealer and the table--which meant that he was the only one to whom the dealer could possibly award the pot, no matter how terrible his cards were!** The dealer can't push the pot to an empty seat, nor to a player who threw his cards away without showing them when the claim to the pot is still undecided.

The story has a coda. Former Seat 5 actually walked only to the poker room entrance, then stopped, as if he wasn't sure what to do next. After the next hand had begun, he came back over and stood next to his friend in seat 9 to watch him play. Seat 9 informs him that A-4 was actually the winning hand, but that he couldn't be awarded the pot because he gave up and left.

Now we're into the second hand after the one in question. I see and hear Former Seat 5 talking to the shift supervisor, Ken, at the front desk. Ken had no idea what had transpired. A few things seem immediately obvious to me: (1) No matter what Ken learns, he's not going to be able to rectify the situation now; it's a pretty universal rule that a player forfeits all claim to a pot if he waits until the next hand is in progress to make his protest about whatever happened.*** (2) Former Seat 5 can only relate first-hand what he saw, and the rest he's going to be recounting second-hand, and it will probably get garbled in the process. Which means that (3) Ken is soon going to have to come over to the table and query the dealer about what happened. The dealer, while a very sweet woman, speaks English as a second language, and she tends to get flustered when she feels under pressure, and when that happens, she doesn't relate events in a clear, concise manner. In other words, if Ken comes over to investigate, it's going to be a huge mess, with everybody offering facts, observations, and opinions, and it will stop the game cold for a long time while Ken sorts it all out. Moreover, Marty will probably come under at least some social pressure to give Former Seat 5 what he (Marty) won in that hand, or maybe split it. I don't think he should have to do that or even get pressed into such a gesture.

I think I can prevent the impending argument, because I know exactly what happened, and what facts are pertinent to applying the applicable rules. (It does occasionally come in handy to have graduated from a poker dealer school and to have the odd hobby of actually reading boring poker rule books.) So I hopped over and told Ken the story as recounted above. Former Seat 5 didn't deny having left his seat before seeing his opponents' hands. Ken gently explained that there was no way to give him the pot after the fact. (I didn't stick around to hear the explanation, but I assume it included both the fact that the guy had essentially forfeited any claim to the pot by leaving the area, and the fact that they couldn't correct anything this long after the hand was over anyway.) Former Seat 5 appeared to acknowledge that he had screwed up, though I'm only surmising this by body language and gestures. Fortunately, he didn't make a big stink about it.

Story #2:

This occurred the first time I played at the Suncoast last October. A new person was coming to the table, and the previous player from that seat had behind left a glass and a bottle of whatever he was drinking. The new player's hands were full with his chips, so the player in the adjacent seat graciously stood up, picked up the leftover crap, and walked over to the wastebasket near the poker room entrance to throw it away.

The problem was that this guy was, at that very moment, in the middle of a hand with a big pot, being contested by multiple players! He WALKED AWAY FROM THE TABLE, so when it came to his turn to act, and he wasn't in his seat, the dealer assumed he intended to fold and had gone out for a smoke or something. (This is very common, unfortunately. People often don't wait for their turn to fold before getting up to go to the restroom, get a snack, smoke, or whatever. They just leave their cards, knowing that the dealer will have no choice but to collect them as folded. It's rude and against the rules, but they do it all the time anyway.)

He was livid to return to the table and find that the dealer had mucked his cards. He claimed (plausibly, I thought--though it doesn't make even a speck of difference whether he was being truthful) to have had a flush, and that he would have beaten the hand that had been declared the winner. Maybe he did. But if so, it just magnifies the stupidity of walking away. He could have at least told the dealer, "I'm just stepping away to clear stuff out for this new player, I'll be back in ten seconds." That would have prevented the problem. He ranted on and on for 30 minutes about it.

Every poker room I've ever played in has posted on the wall a list of house rules. Usually near the top of the list is the universal mandate that each player must protect his or her own hand--protect it, that is, not only from being seen by other players, but from a whole variety of things that can cause it to be declared dead.**** These include the dealer accidentally collecting the cards after erroneously thinking the player has folded, another player's discarded hand getting intermingled with the player's live hole cards, and the cards falling off the table.

Walking away from the table isn't doing a very good job of protecting one's cards. It was this guy's own fault, and he just wouldn't admit it. The dealer took pretty intense abuse from him and from a couple of other players who agreed with him. She was actually close to tears. I stayed out of the controversy, except to reassure the dealer privately later that it wasn't her fault.

Moral of the stories (reprise):

If you're so stupid that you walk away from the table when you have money in the pot and it is even remotely possible that you might win the hand at showdown, you deserve to lose. All you have to do is sit there! What could be easier?!



*Even if he has no pair and both of his cards are lower than what's on the board--which means that the five community cards are his final hand, and his hole cards are ignored--that might be true for the other remaining player, too, in which case they would split the pot.


**He probably could have claimed it even without showing, since one opponent had forfeited by leaving and the other had forfeited by mucking his cards. But Marty is smart enough to make it all clean and legal and straightforward, and not leave open a possible argument somebody might have for reclaiming the pot if it came to a floor person's decision.


***E.g., Cooke, Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, p. 75:

11.13 After Showdown. ...Once the dealer has commenced the shuffle for the next hand then all rights to a decision regarding the previous hand are forfeited.


****See also:

The Professional Poker Dealer's Handbook by Paymar, Harris, and Malmuth, p. 18 (emphasis in original):
1. Players must protect their own hands at all times. This may be the most important rule in all of poker. A hand may be declared "dead" if even one card touches the muck or if another player's card touches a hand that is not protected.... Although the dealer should be aware of only mucking discarded hands, a player who fails to take reasonable means to protect his or her hand usually has no recourse if the hand becomes fouled or if the dealer accidentally collects an unprotected hand.

Poker Tournament Directors' Association rules, #28:
Unprotected hands. If a dealer kills an unprotected hand, the player will have no redress and will not be entitled to a refund of bets.

Robert's Rules of Poker, Chapter 3, under "Irregularities":
2. You must protect your own hand at all times. Your cards may be protected with your hands, a chip, or other object placed on top of them. If you fail to protect your hand, you will have no redress if it becomes fouled or the dealer accidentally kills it.

Krieger and Bykofsky, The Rules of Poker, p. 242 (I don't know why this is only in their "Tournament rules" section; it would seem to apply equally to cash games):
9.35 Killing Unprotected Hands. If a dealer kills an unprotected hand, the player will have no redress and will not be entitled to his money back.

Cooke, Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, p. 75:
11.10 Protecting Interest in the Pot. A player with a hand he believes to be the winning hand is responsible to hold onto his own hand until the pot is awarded. No player with an interest in the pot should release his hand to the dealer until his portion of the pot has been pushed to him.


Addendum, February 28, 2008

Reader Darrell Davis emailed me the following note, with an interesting story similar to those above. It is posted here with his permission.

I have been reading your blog and see you sometimes recount other peoples
stories. Usually these are from people you know, not some anonymous internet
person, but I have a story that you might be interested in. It too involves a
dealer affecting the outcome of a hand.

I live outside of Dallas Texas. I normally play at Winstar Casino in
Oklahoma. They have a really nice 46 table poker room. I really like the place.
It always seems well run and efficient. But yesterday I had a hand that was
interesting.

I was playing in a 1-2 NL game. The person to my immediate right had just
lost a big pot and was left with only $8. He did not rebuy. This player was a
regular and seemed extra familar to the current dealer. I don't remember his
name, but I will call him Ted.

The next hand Ted limped in for $2. I looked down to find KhQh and raised
to $12. I got 3 callers, including Ted all in for his remaining $6. This created
a side pot of roughly $16. The flop came Jack high with 2 hearts. It checked to
me and I made a continuation bet. One player at the other end of the table was
contemplating a call. While he was thinking, Ted said "that's not good" and
stood up and walked away behind me.

The other player eventually folded. The dealer quickly threw out the turn
and river which did not improve my hand. I was left with King high as was well
aware that Ted might have had a winning hand. The dealer pushed me the side pot
and then said "lets see them". I asked if Ted's hand was dead. He looked behind
me and said "Ted are you still in this?". I looked over my shoulder and saw Ted
at least 10 feet away talking to another dealer. Ted walked over towards the
table, still talking to the other dealer. He stood about 2 feet behind his chair
and the dealer said "lets see a winner".

I figured if I said anything else Ted would realize that he might have a
winner and turn over his hand anyway. So I went ahead and turned over mine.

The dealer announced "King high" and then asked Ted what he had. Now Ted
realized he had the winner. He came the rest of the way to the table and turned
over his hand for an Ace high to take the main pot.

I jokingly asked the dealer how long he would have waited for Ted to return
to the table before he would have killed his hand. He didn't get it. I was
tempted to call for a ruling from the floor, but I realized that this would
definately make me the bad guy at the table. I really like to play the good guy
image and didn't want to change that. I decided to just concentrate on the next
hand.

The hand didn't affect the bottom line too much, there was roughly $40 in
the main pot. But it was the most interesting hand involving a dealer that I
have been involved in.

-Darrell

I probably would have handled this about the same way. When the guy is still in the room within earshot, he hasn't quite abandoned his hand. It would seem kind of nit-like to try to insist that his hand be killed under those circumstances, especially when (1) the guy is already down, (2) it's such a small amount of money involved, and (3) you can call the player back to the table just as quickly as you can call the floor over to make a decision. But he was definitely pushing the limits of what can reasonably be tolerated before he is considered to have forfeited his interest in the pot, IMHO.

Some poker stories (non-grumpy content)

While looking for a story I wrote up for a friend last year (which I hope will be in my next entry), I came across this email (now slightly edited for clarity) with what I thought were pretty amusing stories that all happened to me in one crazy week last October. Enjoy.

1. "That guy couldn't feel any better..."

This week a California couple has been putting in mega-hours at Suncoast. They both get drunk early and stay that way the whole time they play. They’re really pretty annoying, because they flagrantly talk about the hand while it’s in progress and coach each other, and the casino staff won’t do anything about it, because they’re dropping thousands of dollars a day. They’re never paying attention, so they slow the game down terribly, because every time it’s their turn, the dealer has to catch them up on what’s happening. The woman, Kelly, is actually a decent player. But the guy, Rob, is awful—he’s never paying attention, and thinks the way to play is to make ridiculous bets and raises every time, because occasionally he’ll get a call when he has a monster hand, or pull off a big suckout with lucky cards coming. He must get such an adrenaline rush when those huge pots are pushed to him, because he’s willing to lose tons of money in the process. Obviously, decent players will just wait for a big hand, and when the stars are all lined up right, spring the trap on him.

So Monday night, I think it was, Player A is a guy who, I swear, talks exactly like Paulie Walnuts on the Sopranos. Player B is somebody I haven’t seen before, but he has been waiting and waiting and waiting for a chance to nail Rob for all his chips, and he finally does it. B quickly declares that he’s done playing for the day, because he just doubled his money. He packs up his chips and leaves. After he leaves the table, Player A says (and remember, you must hear the Paulie Walnuts voice in your head when you read this), “That guy couldn’t feel any better if he had just gotten a blow job!”

I usually try not to laugh at or otherwise encourage the many crudities and vulgarities that low-class poker players engage in, but it was just too perfect a line, in too funny a voice, and I almost fell out of my chair laughing so hard.


2. Inflicting a bad beat

I have put some truly sick beats on people for big pots recently. Last night, when one of three ultra-drunks sat down, he started throwing in big raises nearly every hand, and scaring people off. I picked up A-J on the button, and decided to play back hard at him to see if I could cool his jets. He raised, and I reraised. He called. Flop had a Q and two little cards--nothing to help me, really, but he checked, so I put in a pot-sized bet. He hesitated quite a bit (and he was way too drunk to be consciously doing that to disguise a big hand), but called. Turn was a 10, which I didn’t like at all, because he could easily have either a Q or 10 in his hand, and any pair would be ahead of me at this point. But he looked at the board for a long time, as though he didn’t like it much, and checked, so I pushed all-in. To my considerable surprise and consternation, he thought a while, then said, “Fuck it, I’m calling!” and pushed his chips in. Then the blessed K came on the river, giving me the highest possible straight. Turns out he had Q-9, so he had flopped top pair, which explains why he was willing to call. So because I caught one of the few cards left in the deck (any of four kings or three remaining aces) that could save me, I made over $200 on that hand instead of losing the same amount.

There was an audible gasp from the table when we turned over our hands at the end (in a tournament, you have to both turn over your hands as soon as the betting is complete, but in cash games you can wait until all the cards have been put out), and they realized that I had moved all-in with basically nothing, and sucked out. This was obviously startling because they had only seen me bet strong with strong, made hands. Several people all at once were saying, “I would have sworn he had pocket aces,” “I thought he must have flopped a set,” etc. But somewhat surprisingly, there was general approval and admiration: the consensus was “You’ve got a helluva lot of guts to do that,” rather than “Boy, that was stupid—don’t you know you can’t bluff a drunk, bad player off a hand?” I certainly should know that by now—it’s one of those lessons I’ve had to pay to learn more than a few times.


3. Inflicting another bad beat

I didn’t get enough sleep last night because I was playing so late, so around 8 pm tonight I was really hitting the wall. I was at the Orleans again, had started with $100, doubled it up, then lost a big hand when I had A-J and another A on the flop, but I didn’t recognize that an opponent had made two pair, so got knocked back down to about $100 again. I decided I’d play one more big hand, and then win or lose, I’d go home. But then I went card-dead. I waited 45 minutes for any decent hand to play, and nothing came. I was down to about $75, because of paying the blinds and calling a few pre-flop raises, only to have to dump the hand when nothing developed. Finally I decided that I would just have to pick two cards and play them as if they were aces, and hope for the best. I got J-3 of diamonds in late position, a real crap hand. But sometimes—especially if you have a strong, tight reputation and haven’t raised in a long time—you can get away with playing like you’re holding a big pair, even when you’re not. That’s what I decided to go for.

I raised to $12 and got five callers. Yikes! That’s not what I wanted! With five others seeing the flop, it’s going to help one of them for sure, and it will be hard to push him off the hand. Oh well—the pot was now big enough that it was worth taking a major gamble on winning it.

The flop is 10-8-3. I’ve got a crummy pair of 3s, and nothing more. But it’s checked around to me, so apparently nobody else liked it very much either, and I decide to go for it. I push in my last $60 or so. One guy calls. Crap! No matter what he has, it’s got to have me beat, because nobody would call that bet with a worse hand. Oh well, I went into this hand knowing that it might blow up on me, but I had made enough at the Hilton earlier that even if I bombed out here, I’d still be up for the day. Turn card was a 7, and the river a 9. I sheepishly turned over my cards to show that I just had the 3s.

I didn’t even realize what had happened until another player said, “Oh my God, he hit runner-runner straight!” Sure enough, there was a 7, 8, 9, and 10 on the board, plus my J for the straight. The other guy had had ace-ten, giving him top pair and top kicker on the flop—a pretty good hand for him to gamble on. He was, shall we say, unhappy when he saw how it had gone down. Oh well—as they say, that’s poker, and I’ve been on the bad end of crap just like that enough times that I don’t mind a little excessively good luck flowing my way now and then.

Besides, hands like that have powerful future value, even if I lose them. To the extent that I’m known just as a rock that only plays premium hands, it’s hard to get action. When people see that I can push just as hard with nothing as I do when I’ve got the goods, it makes them more likely to call me the next time I actually have the best hand. Having opponents completely unsure what I have is at least as good as, if not better than, just having them habitually run away because they’re convinced I have the nuts.

Poker gems, #24

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 29:

So all in all it’s a pretty good game. It’s a very good game and the pots are big, but the live ones have all the money and they might leave. I just wish I could pick up a hand soon because this game doesn’t have a lot of staying promise. I mean two guys already left with big loads and all the wrong guys are stuck. And if the three live guys with all the chips take off as they maybe are wont to do, the game will break up in ten minutes flat and I’ll be left with no option but to put what’s left of my money and chips in my box, go up the escalator, trudge to the parking lot, climb in my car, and when I’m sure that no one can hear me, yell “Aarghh” at the top of my lungs before driving home and collapsing into a fitful sleep plagued by poker nightmares of cards, chips, and disreputable characters robbing and cheating me ad infinitum.

Bigfoot (zero poker content whatsoever)

A friend took me to my first monster truck race/show last night. I captured the coolest moment on video, and made it into my first YouTube clip. Now I'm going to see if I can successfully embed it here, since I have no other place to experiment with this kind of stuff.

Monster truck show, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Sept. 21, 2007. This dirt mound was used as the landing ramp during a motorcycle-jumping event. During the monster-truck freestyle competition, Bigfoot drove up the steep side of this ramp and down the landing side. Not a single other truck driver even attempted to surmount this obstacle, from either direction. Bigfoot should clearly have won the freestyle for this feat alone, but with obviously fixed judging, they gave it to TMaxx instead.

Here it is:

Poker gems, #23

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 16-17:

Ever since I started playing poker it seems like it’s always been the same. Win a little. Lose a little. Stay in action, afford the buy-in, keep my head above water and keep moving, always moving. And watch people go broke. Watch 'em fold up and go broke.

Then I go on a losing streak. Or have one bad night, or whatever. Just something that makes me question everything I know about poker—no, everything I believe—and consider giving up and be scared to go in the card room and not know when to fold or when to raise or when to play or when to stop.

And then it turns around. Pop. Just like that it turns around and I start winning and don’t stop winning and start playing higher and faster, and then the cycle starts again. Over the last six years this cycle has been perpetual, and always vicious, and always of lunar-type proportions. And these cycles have been punctuated by leaves of absence, lots of them, because basically I can’t deal, I’m dysfunctional, I need to reorient myself, my place in space, my poker philosophy…. And every time I’m away, I’m away from the table, but the game is right there next to me, it’s living with me as I replay hands and people and conversations and games and days and plays and angles. And every time I come back, I break through, my thoughts are different, my understanding feels deeper. And here’s the funny part. I always think I understand. And everybody else doesn’t. And they’re all thinking the same thing.

The Las Vegas police (only tangentially related to poker)

My car was stolen August 10 from the Hilton parking lot while I was inside playing poker. This rant is about how the local police handled the whole thing.

The Hilton security guy filled out his forms and called the police for me. They took a bunch of information over the phone, then asked me to wait there until an officer could come by to complete the incident report. After an hour, nobody had showed up, so the security guy suggested that they probably had all the information they needed, and I could just call them the next morning to be sure. Sounded like a good idea to me.

Wrong. When I called the next day to tell them about nobody showing up to complete the report, I was told that it's often three or four hours, but that one has to wait, or the report doesn't get entered into the system. So for the first nearly 18 hours that my car was missing there was no report on it anywhere, because they deleted the information I had given them over the phone when I wasn't there to give the officer the rest of what they needed. (And thanks, too, Hilton security team, for the great advice on this point. I assumed you had dealt with this situation before and could be trusted to know what needed to be done.) I had to go down to the nearest precinct station, wait in line, and give all the information--again--to a woman through a plexiglas window.

I just assumed the car was gone and never coming back, rented one for a week, then bought a used car. The dealer issued a temporary (30 days) permit for driving it.

About a week into that time, I got stopped by the police not because I was doing anything wrong, but just because I had a temporary permit instead of real plates. The officer explained that it's common for car thieves to make phony temp certificates for stolen cars to avoid the registration process. (The things do look like they would be incredibly easy to produce on any cheap color-capable photocopier or computer scanner/printer. Not a very secure system, if you ask me.) He verified that the car was really mine, and I went on my way.

Yesterday I got a call telling me that my car had been recovered two days earlier. They could tell me the street and block where it was found, but not anything else about it. They said no arrest had been made, and it hadn't been in an accident, but that was all I could get from them. I have no idea what circumstances led to its discovery. They couldn't even tell me if it was driveable.

So I had to go to the lot of the towing company and pay $241 to get it out.

Why didn't they call me as soon as it was identified, so that I could claim it immediately without the tow and storage fees? I don't know. Why did they wait two more days to notify me? I don't know.

Did they set up some sort of surveillance in the hopes of catching the felon who had stolen it? Nope. Did they take fingerprints to see who had put the last 200 miles on it? Nope. Did they even bother to contact me to ask whether there was damage to the car that hadn't been there before, or to ask whether maybe the thief left something inside that might identify him, etc.? No, they did not. Basically, they seem to care not one whit about actually finding, arresting, and prosecuting whoever stole my car--at least as judged from their actions.

Now I have to get it repaired, because in the process of wrecking the ignition interlock system, the thief screwed up the whole electrical system, so the thing won't start without a jump. (No, it's not just the battery.) I have no idea how much that will cost.

I wasn't going to write anything about this, but tonight I got the icing on the cake. On my way home from the Hilton, I got stopped again. The officer says I rolled through a stop sign. I won't deny that that's possible, but by long habit even my not-quite-complete stops are awfully darn close--not the classic slow-down-and-go that one commonly sees. The intersection in question is barely even a real intersection; the "cross-street," which comes from only one side, is the private drive to a gated community, and has a lift gate for which exiting cars have to wait. In other words, of all the intersections in the city controlled by stop signs, this one may be the very least likely to have a collision result from failing to come to a complete stop.

I really hate the "don't you have anything better to do" speech that many motorists give police officers when being ticketed for minor traffic offenses. I recognize that enforcing traffic laws protects both lives and property. Still, I couldn't help but think about the insanity of the situation. I get stopped by police officers twice in a month--once for no violation at all, and once for possibly the most inconsequential, hypertechnical violation he could muster--but they couldn't ever stop the actual criminal who was driving my stolen car around for a month??? What, was he the world's most perfect, careful driver? That seems unlikely.

So the Metro police twice stop the law-abiding victim, never the car thief, and make, apparently, zero effort to actually solve the felony that was committed, reasoning, I guess, that if the car gets back to the owner all is well.

No, all is not well. This whole thing was handled with a complete lack of professionalism on the part of the police, both in terms of communicating with the crime victim and in terms of solving the crime. Harassing me twice in approximately the same month that my car was being joy-ridden by somebody else makes the whole experience so damn ironic and galling that I finally had to gripe about it.

Las Vegas Metro police, you suck. Now I know a large part of the reason that Las Vegas is the capital of car theft in the United States: it's because you guys barely lift a finger to stop it, and spend your time and energy harassing the victims instead of the criminals.

Yet another horrible quasi-poker movie

Last night I taped a movie on Showtime, because of this description from the channel's web site:

Blowing Smoke (2004): A group of eight men playing poker at a club in Beverly Hills are busy bemoaning their fate at the hands of manipulative women, when a damsel in distress shows up at their door and proceeds to take them to the proverbial cleaners in this comedy-drama starring Estella Warren, Sean Michael Allen, Jack Axelrod, Daniel Roebuck and Shaun Baker.

See also http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432257/.

So the action takes place over a poker game (at least initially), but it's not a poker movie at all. Not a single hand is shown. It's just the lame background for one of the most stupid and pointless movies I've ever sat through. Appallingly bad writing and acting--far, far worse than a typical made-for-network-TV-movie (which this isn't, by the way)--no plot to speak of, and just generally offensive dialogue, with every "joke" old and ripped off.

I've mentioned before that I notice things in movies that characters do wrong with guns, and this is another example. One character handles a part of a shotgun, after firing it, that would be so hot it would burn his hand. (I know about this because in rapid-fire shooting competition using a shotgun, one of the biggest challenges is reloading it quickly without burning one's hand on the extremely hot parts. Also, two characters consecutively pump a round into the chamber, without the gun having been fired in between--why??? Another guy makes a big show of cocking a pistol, but very shortly thereafter you can see that the hammer is down, the gun uncocked. Stupid things like this annoy me no end. Filmmakers in general just don't care about getting things right, or even plausible.

Anyway, there is absolutely nothing to recommend this piece of trash as a movie of any sort or genre. And it's definitely not a poker movie. If you think about seeing it because it looks like it might be sort of a poker movie, don't bother. And if you think about seeing it for any other reason--again, don't bother.

Where do I apply to get an hour and a half of my life back?

Poker gems, #22

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 30:

But sometimes if you can catch a guy right after a big win then he’s an easier touch and he’ll still hem and haw, but a broke might be able to squeeze a few hundred out of him that will rarely to never get paid back. Some people think that it’s kind of a winner’s tax that they pay and spread the money around a little bit and then when they run bad or go broke everybody will help them out a little too. But maybe they’re thinking that they have a peer group and they have some buddies in there and they haven’t found out that everybody hates you under their breath if you’re doing well, that poker peers feel no sympathy and no pity for you when you’re doing bad, they’re merely glad it’s not them and move in for the kill like big buzzards who know it’s much easier taking money from someone on his way down.

Getting things right--or not

There's concern in some circles about a serious security breach at Absolute Poker. This appears to go beyond the usual "online poker is rigged" conspiracy theories, though I freely admit I don't have enough expertise to render a useful opinion on whether the hypothesized problem is possible or probable. You can read more about it here: http://news.parttimepoker.com/2007/09/16/rumors-continue-to-circulate-regarding-suspicious-play-at-absolute-poker/

Anyway, a spokesperson for Absolute Poker recently posted the company's official response in an online forum. I was struck by how poorly composed this post was, for a formal corporate announcement. I wrote and posted my thoughts about how the carelessness of the writing reflected on the substantive issues involved. This is the kind of post that an online forum, if heavy-handedly moderated, might take down, because some will see it as a personal attack on the author (a woman named Danielle, about whom I know nothing). So I'm reproducing it here, since it is definitely in keeping with this blog's general critical approach to everything that's wrong in the poker world. The original thread can (at least for now) be found at http://www.pokeraffiliateworld.com/forums/general-poker-affiliate-discussion/11817-what-happened-absolute-thread.html

First, here's the Absolute Poker message:

Hi All,

Thank you for your patience in this urgent issue.

Let me start off by stating in 100% confidence that, fair play and security is of paramount importance to Absolute Poker. We have temporarily frozen accounts that have been brought to our attention while we perform an extensive investigation.

While we are continuing with our investigation, we have yet to find any evidence of wrong doing. Our game client only receives data regarding the individuals hand and no other players hole cards, except in the event of a showdown.

The player’s and their respective actions that are in question, all come from a small sample of Hands. We have researched their play exhaustively and have found no proof that they had any knowledge of other player’s hole cards.

There were hands that were played poorly -- from a poker strategy perspective -- and these players did receive a fortunate result.

So far we have no evidence that substantiates claims that any of the players were involved in chip dumping, or any other improper activity.

Because of the seriousness of these allegations, we have not closed the investigation and are continuing to look very closely into this matter.We will notify you if we obtain any new information regarding these claims.

Kindest Regards,

Danielle


And here's my reply:

Undoubtedly some readers will think I'm just nitpicking here--but there is a larger point to it.

There are at least ten obvious errors of grammar, spelling, and punctuation in Danielle's post, which is pretty remarkable in a message of only 11 sentences--pretty remarkably bad, that is.

I fully recognize that, for the most part, online chats are highly informal. I certainly don't proofread and rewrite as carefully for such posts as I do for, say, business letters or for things intended for publication. Hell, there may be little errors left undetected in this very message (though I'll try to eliminate them).

But when one is posting a formal message in one's capacity as a representative of a company, one presumably uses one's utmost care in getting things right. This presumption implies, then, that Danielle's very best writing as a spokesperson for Absolute Poker means about one orthographic/grammatical error per sentence, a level of carelessness--or outright ignorance of the basic tools of the English language--that one might expect in, say, a sixth-grader.

Here's the larger point: Danielle proves beyond any serious doubt by this post that she doesn't care one bit about getting details right. We can also assume that nobody checks her work (or that whoever does check her work is just as careless as Danielle). If she can't be bothered to care about the *form* of her official response, on what possible grounds can a reader be convinced that she pays any more attention to getting the *substance* of it right?

In my experience, people either pay attention to details or they don't, and either way it's not a phenomenon that is limited to grammar and punctuation, isolated from everything else that they do. A person who makes a large number of such errors when trying his or her best to get them right probably makes lots and lots of other kinds of errors in his or her work, too.

I know nothing about Danielle other than this one post, but I think it's a highly revealing window. To me, the message is that neither Danielle personally nor AP corporately can be trusted to care about getting things right. This isn't to say that either she or the company is deliberately dishonest, but it *is* to say that she is probably not the kind of person who would really be sure to know enough detailed facts about the situation to be reliable.

Naturally, just because a post is perfectly constructed by a bevy of skilled PR people and lawyers wouldn't mean that the claimed underlying investigation was thorough, or that the facts reported in the post were correct and honest. You don't even need a high school diploma in order to compose a short letter with good grammar, spelling, and puncutation. But the *lack* of those things pretty clear implies, to me, a general lackadaisical approach to things, at least by Danielle, and very possibly by the AP staff generally. This is not a good thing when one is attempting to convey an image that everything has been looked at in intricate detail, and all found to be in order. All is *not* in order, quite clearly.

A clean restroom in a restaurant doesn't necessarily mean that the kitchen, too, is spotless. But if the restroom is filthy, there's a good chance the kitchen is, too--because if they don't care about uncleanliness where they know you *will* see it, they can't possibly care about uncleanliness where they know you *won't* see it. AP doesn't care if we see egregious sloppiness in public missives; why should we assume that there isn't egregious sloppiness behind the scenes as well? If they won't even bother to proofread the official, public response to these rumors, on what basis would I conclude that they bothered to do a careful investigation?

Danielle's post sounds, to me, suspiciously like a bedbug letter--and a very poorly written one at that. (Google "bedbug letter" if you don't understand that term.)

Poker gems, #21

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 6:

Everybody wants to know about skill. Who’s the best and who’s got it and who ain’t and what we’ve got here, and all I can say is that the answer is never that easy. Like for example there’s this guy, call him Ace, and he plays well, I mean he plays really well, better than me, like if we were ever to get involved in a heads-up match, Ace would clean me up. And he has. Nothing to it. But one night maybe Ace and I are in a Hold 'em game together, and we both have bad luck and we both lose five thousand dollars. Now Ace, what does he do? He gets so mad at losing that five thousand dollars that he stalks off into the pit to try and get even and blow off some steam and he ends up losing twenty thousand more playing craps. Meanwhile, I get so mad at losing my five dimes that I go home, get in my closet, stuff a pillow in my face, and scream until I lose my voice. What’s the difference? Twenty thousand dollars. Now who’s the better poker player? It ain’t that easy.

Poker gems, #20

I'm reading Jesse May's 1998 novel, Shut Up and Deal. It's brilliant, not in terms of traditional literary values, but because nothing else I've ever read, in fiction or non-fiction, has so perfectly captured the deeply cynical, selfish, and lonely existence of a poker grinder. This is a book that could be written only by one who has been through it. There are likely to be a bunch of excerpts from it posted here, because I'm finding so much in it that resonates with my recent life. I start with the most famous passage:

Poker is a combination of luck and skill. People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong. The trick to poker is mastering the luck.

Information parasites

I was about to start this grump with "Not much bugs me more than (what I'm going to talk about)." But then I realized that it's really hard to rank what annoys me most at the poker table. It varies so much from day to day. Let's just say that a whole hell of a lot of things irritate me--which shouldn't be too surprising, since I decided to run a blog that is basically devoted to complaining about all the things that other players do that make me want to throttle them.

Today it was one of those guys who want to know how a hand went down, but was too busy watching a football game to pay attention. He even missed the showdown. He just saw a big pot being pushed and the loser pulling out more money to re-buy. Then he asked, "What was the winning hand there?" Ace-king. "What did the other guy have?" Ace-queen. "Was there a king or a queen on the board?" Yes, a king hit on the river. "Did he [meaning the winner] raise before the flop?" Yes.

Fortunately, today he was asking the person next to me, not me. I wouldn't have told him.

In no-limit hold'em, only a minority of hands get played out to a final showdown. Probably eight out of ten hands end when somebody makes a bet that no other player is willing to call, and he wins the pot by default, without having to show his hole cards. Even on hands with a showdown, lots of them are pretty lackluster, in terms of betting. Often this is because there's something scary on the board (e.g., 3 diamonds flop, and none of the players in the hand has one), and nobody wants to bet at it.

So on the relatively rare occasions that a large pot has developed between two or more players, with betting and raising at every opportunity, naturally the other players--if they're paying attention--are making silent guesses about what the contestants hold, and then we get to see if we were right, or at least close. It's one of the most interesting parts of the game, in my opinion, and a skill that takes constant honing.

More importantly, this kind of hand contains a wealth of information about the players involved. To put it into useful form, though, you have to see the showdown, then mentally backtrack each stage of the hand in order to understand why each participant did what he did. You can then discover, for instance, that one of the players will pay any amount for a flush draw, regardless of his pot odds or whether he's likely to get paid off if he hits it. You can sort out which players tend to bet when they have just draws, and which wait until they have made hands to bet. You discover who was bluffing. You learn who can't let go of a big pocket pair, even when they should know that they are beat. You find out who plays in a straightforward, A-B-C style and who is tricky and deceptive. You see who's a poker savant and who's a numbskull. Who was aggressive and who was passive? Which player more accurately gauged the relative strength of his hand at each point? Who sets traps, and who is able to detect them? This is all crucial stuff.

One way to think about the game of poker is as a contest of information. Whoever has the most and best information about his opponents, and exploits that information most skillfully, will win the most money over the long haul. If you try to bluff a guy that habitually calls any bet with any mediocre hand, you'll lose. If you call down a player who only bets when he has the nuts, you'll lose. You have to know opponents' tendencies, or you'll make a lot of otherwise avoidable--and very expensive--mistakes. The kind of information revealed when there is a showdown between two or more players, with a big pot being contested, is by far the most valuable information available about opponents in a poker game.

It doesn't come easily, because, as I said, you have to remember who did what through the whole hand, and mentally reconstruct what information they had at the time. It requires paying a lot of attention--putting in some work. But the result can be tremendous insight into how the other people at the table approach the game.

It seems, though, that there is always a leech, somebody who wants that information without putting in the effort to gather and process it himself. This idiot today was one of this ilk. He couldn't be bothered to watch the hand play out, because his football was more important. But once he realized that he just missed out on one of the rare opportunities to peek inside how two of his opponents think and play, he wanted to know all about it.

These people are like the other animals in the story of the Little Red Hen (see, e.g., http://www.elliottsamazing.com/lrh.html), who aren't willing to help make the bread, but want to share in the meal when it's ready. They're information parasites.

It's rare that I lie at the poker table. I realize that most players consider lying just part of the game, but I don't like it. If I win a pot without a showdown and somebody asks me what I had, my stock answer is something like, "If I answered that directly, I'd just lie, which wouldn't do you any good." Or I'll lie in a way that makes it obvious that I'm lying ("Aces, of course--that's all I ever play!" "I can't remember--my memory just went blank!"), which I think doesn't carry the ethical problems of genuine lies. I consider both of these options to be a polite way of saying, "I'm not going to tell you."

But today's situation is one where I will lie every time. "Sorry, I wasn't paying attention," is the usual reply. Sometimes it's the truth, of course--nobody can pay full attention all the time for hours at a stretch. But even when I know exactly what went down, and have new, cherished nuggets of insight about opponents, I answer the same way. I do this because I think it's so incredibly rude to try to extract this information from other players. I'd rather lie and keep up a decent social facade than give the heartfelt response, which would be along these lines: "Look, asshole. If you really cared, you've have paid attention during the hand instead of watching the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders jiggling on the sidelines. If you want instant replays, keep watching television--ESPN will give them to you, but I won't."

I never, ever ask another player to rehash events for me; if I'm daydreaming, it's my own damn fault and I just accept that I missed out, mentally slap myself in the face, and remind myself to pay more attention. In my opinion, asking another player to give a retrospective play-by-play is every bit as out of line as asking, "Can I have your stack of chips?" Information is money at the poker table, and I'm not going to give away either one just because you ask.

Unlike money, the information is freely there in the open for everybody to take in. If you pass on the opportunity, don't come to me looking for a handout.

Poker gems, #19

More from Antonio Esfandiari's book, In the Money: Strategies for Winning Texas Hold 'em Cash Games, p. 15:


What's the best way to play fearless? First and foremost, you have to divorce yourself from how you traditionally think of money. Money outside of the poker room is different. That is money to be spent wisely or invested discriminately. The money you bring into the poker room is your means to winning. Do not think of this as money. Think of it as the tools of your trade. You should no more think about the dollar cost of an individual chip than a carpenter thinks about the cost of the nails he's driving. That carpenter will drive all the nails he needs to in order to do the job. That is what I am going to do at the poker table, and that is what you should do as well.

Consider your chips to be the cost of doing business, nothing more and nothing less. As with any buiness, you will have overhead. Think of bad beats as your overhead. Furthermore, as Doyle Brunson once wrote, when you make a big bet, you cannot think, "Oh man, I'm betting a Cadillac." Even if you're a recreational player, if you're thinking of the steak dinner you could buy with the chips you're betting, you're dead money. So look at those chips as the tools of the trade. You will free yourself from the fear of losing them, and then you can go win more.

Poker gems, #18

I realize that lately I've had a long string of these "poker gems," which I originally intended to be just occasional diversions from my rants, not the main menu of this blog. But for whatever reason, I haven't gotten myself up into a good lather about much of anything lately. The muse hasn't been pushing my annoyance buttons, which is what has to happen for me to write up a good grump. So these thoughts from other writers will have to suffice until I get unblocked. Never fear: I have a long list of topics yet to write about, as soon as I get in the mood for a good rant.

Continuing with advice for bad beats, this is from Antonio Esfandiari's book, In the Money: Strategies for Winning Texas Hold 'em Cash Games, pp. 13 and 36. Antonio does take his own advice here; I remember reading (in one of his columns for Bluff magazine, I think; it doesn't seem to be in this book) that he has a standing deal with a friend, that if either of them ever hears the other tell a bad-beat story, the teller of the tale owes the other something like $5000. I haven't gone that far, but I do make a point of not sharing my poker woes, either with friends and family or with other players. I make some exceptions when writing--but only when there's some larger point to be made from the story, never just because I'm feeling sorry for myself.



Be positive. You will never hear me tell a bad-beat story. Nobody wants to hear it. Think about it. When somebody tells you a bad-beat story, do you care? Besides, everyone who plays the game will suffer his or her fair share of bad beats. That's poker.... If you play poker, bad beats are the cost of doing business. Take it in stride and move on. If you dwell on it or let it get to you, it can only have a negative impact on your game.

...

If you let the emotions of these moments affect your play, you will lose focus. One simple way to avoid this is to never tell a bad-beat story. This is such an important point that I am going to repeat it for emphasis: Never ever tell a bad-beat story. All that does is reinforce losing--and nobody wants to hear it, anyway.

Poker gems, #17

Today I was the chip leader in the Hilton weekly tournament with only seven players remaining, the top four finishers to get the money. The player with the second most chips moved all-in (a huge overbet--really bad play) from first position with 8-8. I was on his immediate left and called with K-K. I'm an 80:20 favorite. He spikes a third 8 on the turn. I was crippled and finished in 6th place. Then I moved to a cash game, and within the first hour had K-K again. A player raised from first position. I put in a small re-raise to try to induce an all-in from him and got it. I call. He has A-Q. I'm a 68:32 favorite. He catches an ace on the river to win a $400 pot.

Neither of these is extraordinarily unusual; they're in the "run-of-the-mill" category of unluckiness. It was just unusually annoying because of the probable financial loss in the first instance (absent that 8 hitting, I would have had nearly half the chips in play just at the time that the other players were going into survival mode to be sure they made it into the money, and I could have aggressively accumulated a truly overwhelming chip lead, with a very high probability of winning the tournament outright), and the large, tangible financial loss in the second instance, both happening within such a short time span.

So I'm taking this occasion to remind myself (and any readers) of perhaps the wisest words I've read about bad beats. It comes from Mark Blade's excellent book, Professional Poker: The Essential Guide to Playing for a Living, p. 257. I can't say I'm yet able to muster the mental discipline to actually do what he suggests, but I do try to keep it all in proper perspective:


Bad Beats Are Your Best Friends

So how should you react when you experience a so-called "bad beat?" You should shout inside your head, "Yippee!" And do a little mental jig while you're at it. I'm not kidding. Bad beats mean that there are still players out there who play badly. That means the games are still beatable. The day you stop having any more bad beats is the day when you should crawl into a fetal position in the corner of the casino and bawl like a baby. Your career is over. The worst case scenario...has just played out. Your competition all plays as well as you do and you are just passing money back and forth among yourself with only the casino take coming out ahead. Don't scoff at the title for this topic. Bad beats truly are your best friends.

My favorite poker room is closing

Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

I've written before about why I like the Hilton poker room better than any other in town: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/why-i-like-hilton-poker-room-non-grumpy.html. Well, it seems that I'm going to have to find a new favorite place. I learned today that the Hilton is closing its poker room as of October 17. Many reports of poker rooms closing in the last year or so have turned out to be rumors without merit, but this decision is apparently set in stone. The dealers are starting to look for other jobs; the shift manager today was talking about it openly with customers, and said it is official, public, and final.

This would seem to be perfect timing, because

--they just hired a couple of new dealers.

--they just started a new promotion for their limit hold'em games.

--they just started a new tournament series, a ladies-only event every Saturday.

--they just started their fall football promotion, which is tied in to the poker room (hit a straight or a flush and get an entry for two different drawings), because lots of people like to play poker while watching their football games.

--they just bought new boards for their jackpots.

Yeah, that's great timing, all right.

(Sarcasm mode now off.)

In other words, it seems like completely ridiculous timing to me. Why launch things like this, then do a full abort? Certainly looks like not very good planning on the part of somebody in management over there.

I'll freely admit that I have no clue about the profitability of poker rooms in general and this one in particular. But it seems to me that closing a poker room when it's still a phenomenally popular game is a really stupid idea, even if the room doesn't make a lot of money--and this is particularly true for the Hilton, which is so heavily dependent on convention business. Conventioneers who don't want to go to the trouble of leaving the hotel for the Strip should be able to find whatever game they want where they're staying. If they leave, whatever they win at another facility's poker room will surely get spent (in other gambling, drinks, night clubs, restaurants, etc.) at that other place, too, instead of at the Hilton. You just can't consider yourself a real Vegas casino if you don't have a poker room. Dives like the El Cortez, Jokers Wild, and Arizona Charlie's can manage to provide a place for poker for their patrons, but the Hilton can't??? Talk about marking yourself as a second-rate place!

So I'm seriously bummed out about this. The Hilton accounts for roughly half of my poker-playing time and half my poker income every month. Now I'll have to find someplace else to call my home base, and there just isn't anywhere that I find as comfortable, friendly, convenient, and profitable. And nobody else runs a monthly freeroll tournament, as far as I know--at least no place that I could stand being at for that many hours.

I'm not exactly optimistic that this rant will change anything. But ranting is what I do when I don't like something, and I hate, hate, hate this decision by the Hilton management. Please reconsider, guys.

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.

Poker gems, #15

From Broke: A Poker Novel, by Brandon Adams, p. 70:

The World Series of Poker, especially the $10,000 main event, is the primary annual gathering spot for poker players across the world. Failure to attend is considered an admission of financial ruin. My gauge of a player's bankroll comes primarily from the WSOP. If a player is not solvent enough to afford the main event, he is advised to play at least one or two smaller but highly visible events such as the $1,000 no-limit Hold 'em with rebuys. This will show that he [is] not broke; poker is one of the few fields of endeavor where this is an exalted status.

Poker gems, #14

Stanley Kowalski, in "A Streetcar Named Desire":

Nothing belongs on a poker table but cards, chips, and whiskey.

Poker gems, #13

From Barry Greenstein's great book, Ace on the River, p. 39:

An abusive player collapsed at the table, a victim of an apparent heart attack. He was moved away from the table and paramedics were called, but none of the players offered assistance and the game continued. A week later the abusive player was back playing and arguing with everybody. One of the other players, Sam Perleman, apologized to the table. He said, "It's all my fault." Someone asked, "Sam, are you the one who saved him?" "No," Sam replied, "But I was right there when the paramedics were reviving him and I didn't pull them off."

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.

Poker gems, #12

Lou Krieger:

I believe in poker the way I believe in the American Dream. Poker is good for you. It enriches the soul, sharpens the intellect, heals the spirit, and—when played well—nourishes the wallet.

Poker gems, #11

Bobby Baldwin (in an interview for the documentary “No Limit”):

Most of life is understanding other people, in business, or in your personal life. If you don’t understand other people, you probably don’t understand yourself, and you’re not going to be a successful card player. It’s all about people, and it has virtually nothing to do with the cards. The cards are just there as a medium to kind of confuse the bad players into thinking it’s luck.

Poker gems, #10

Mario Puzo:

Man needs his foolish dreams perhaps more than he needs anything else. He must forget the hardship and pain of life. It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.

Poker gems, #9

Phil Laak, master of the obvious, on "High Stakes Poker," season 4, episode 2:

People are always trying to beat you. That's the problem with poker.

The punctuation of poker

The Hilton recently acquired a new board for displaying its high-hand jackpots. Today was the first time since it was installed that I sat at the table closest to it. That allowed me to notice something I hadn't seen from across the room: 13 erroneous apostrophes, a sampling of which can be seen in the photograph. (Yeah, yeah, yeah: I used my cell phone in the poker room to take a picture. So sue me!)

Hey, Hilton staff: I love you guys--I really do. But somebody there should have checked a punctuation usage guide (or just asked anybody with a little editing experience) before shelling out the bucks to have this 13-fold blunder custom-made into big lettering.

No matter how often one sees it done (and it is painfully frequent these days), apostrophes are not used to indicate plurals--with rare exceptions.* "Jack" and "queen" and "king" and "ace" are ordinary words, and just as in this paragraph I didn't write "apostrophe's" or "plural's" or "exception's" or "word's," it's wrong, wrong, wrong to have "Jack's," "Queen's," "King's," and "Ace's" up there on your jackpot board.

Using an apostrophe to make the plural of a numeral (e.g., "8's") isn't as obviously wrong, but it's still wrong, or, at best, unnecessary. It works just fine to write "8s."

Don't believe me? Check any style guide in print, or these online ones:

http://home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/a.htm#apostrophe
and
http://home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/p.htm#plurals

http://www.write101.com/W.Tips137.htm
and
http://www.write101.com/W.Tips138.htm

http://www.bartleby.com/68/50/4650.html

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutspelling/pizza?view=uk

http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/apostrophes1.html

http://www.infoplease.com/cig/grammar-style/apostrophes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Use_in_forming_certain_plurals

and about a zillion other similar works available at the click of a mouse. (This isn't exactly obscure information.)

For a delightful book-length rant on the modern misuse of punctuation, and why it matters, pick up a copy of Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. She has a whole chapter on the poor, abused apostrophe.

Does it matter? Well, yes and no. It's certainly true that nobody looking at the sign will be left wondering about the basic meaning, just because there are a few extra punctuation marks. But it matters in the sense of showing that one doesn't care about getting things right.

Let me suggest a poker analogy. It is common for card room novices to mix up the terms "bet" and "raise" and "re-raise." For example, the first person to act after the flop will sometimes say "raise" before putting in a bet. To experienced ears, this sounds like a musician hitting a wrong note. There is no previous bet to raise. Sometimes the dealer will even point out the error, saying something like, "You can't raise, because there has been no prior bet on this round. But you can bet if you'd like." Sometimes they'll just mercifully let it go in silence. There is no serious problem with anybody mistaking the newbie's intention, but it's just plain wrong to announce "raise" in that situation.

Similarly, everybody looking at this sign will understand perfectly well what it's saying. But people with experience using written language according to the traditional rules will immediately notice the errors. It's just as jarring as hearing poker terms used incorrectly at the table. In both cases, it show carelessness, and/or an unfamiliarity with the basic tools and components of the relevant language. I don't think that's an image one would want to project. So I'm going to be like the dealer who gently corrects a green player's misunderstanding of terminology.

To the Hilton poker room staff: You might check to see if the printer will make up a new sign for you without 13 punctuation errors on it. Otherwise, I might have to sneak in there some time when the room is dark, with my bottle of Wite-Out.

*See, e.g., http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/Plurals/Plurals06.html.

Addendum, September 12, 2007

Some poker rooms offer a progressive jackpot to the loser of a pot in which one very strong hand beats another strong hand. In an advertisement in this week's edition of Card Player magazine, the Hustler Casino in Gardena, CA, mentions that their so-called "bad beat jackpot" requirement is "Aces' Full of Ten's Beaten by Four-of-a-Kind or Better."

Within the same advertisement, however, they correctly make various other plural nouns: "games," "cards," "details," and "rules." I cannot fathom why somebody there--probably more than one person, given how many people are typically involved in writing and laying out a full-page ad--thinks that there is something different about "aces" and "tens." Morons, every one of them.

What--chips into the pot aren't enough for you?

Every time I think I've seen it all, some idiotic player comes up with a new way to complain. This time it was a guy who--no kidding--thought that his opponent putting the right number of chips into the pot wasn't enough to constitute a call of his bet.

Hilton, Sunday. Player A is a 60-ish Floridian I've never seen before, one of those who likes to brag that he usually plays at much, much higher stakes than this--which is incredibly annoying and condescending. Player B, on my immediate right, is a 20-something tourist, friendly and inoffensive. I didn't learn either of their names. A is clearly a more experienced player, but B is a whole lot more fun to be around.

They get involved heads-up in a pot. The final board is A-4-3-4-5, with no flushes possible. Player A has been leading the betting all the way, with B just calling. The same pattern occurs on the river. A bets $40. B thinks quite a while, with the $40 in chips already counted out and in his right hand.

Finally he decides to call. He puts the chips well over the betting line with his right hand, and maybe half a second later flips up his hole cards with his left hand. He has A-9, for two pair (aces and fours) with a 9 kicker.

Player B nods in apparent acknowledgement. He picks up his down cards with one squarely on top of the other, and flashes the face of the bottom card to Player A. I see it, too--a 3. Then he tosses both cards face-down toward the dealer (Jessica), who dutifully mucks them. Jessica then begins to push the pot to B.

Here's where the surprising thing happened. As A sees the pot going past him toward B, he gets a startled look on his face and says, "Hey, what are you doing?"

Several of us at once say, "You mucked your cards!" He protests that Player B never called the $40 bet on the river. Apparently he was so distracted with looking at B's turned-up cards that he didn't notice that that action was preceded by B putting eight red chips out in front of him.

Player B was playing straight up, no doubt at all in my mind about that. He did nothing at all to conceal or mask his action. He wasn't shooting an angle, trying to barely have the chips touch the betting line, or any funny business like that. And I was watching him--he unquestionably put the chips in before exposing his hand (although it wouldn't have made any difference; in cash games when heads-up, it's usually allowed to expose one's hole cards to see if an opponent will react to them, before deciding what to do). He did nothing wrong whatsoever, just took the unusual (but not illegal or unethical, by any means) step of showing his hand first, rather than waiting for the bettor to show first. It's true that he never verbally announced "call," but he doesn't have to--actions with chips speak for themselves, by every rulebook of poker ever written.

Player A then compounded his problem by attempting, first, to pull the pot toward him. Jessica sternly rebuked him for this. He then attempted to fish his cards out of the muck. Again, Jessica correctly covered the muck with her hands and told him that he was not allowed to touch the cards. She did all this while calling for the floor person (Ken).

After sorting out the usual cacophony of voices and opinions offered to him all at once, Ken made the only possible decision: the pot went to Player B. Each player has the resonsibility to know what other players' actions have been, and to ask the dealer if it isn't clear.

Player A just screwed up--it's that simple. He failed to notice B putting out his chips, and, upon seeing B's cards face up, assumed, without asking, that B was folding. On the strength of that error and that assumption, he mucked his hand after flashing the 3.

His whole argument came down to two points. First, he claimed that Jessica hadn't announced the call. She says that she did. I don't know whether she did or not; because I knew by watching him that B had made the call, I would have completely tuned out the redundant announcement even if I had heard it. Furthermore, there is no rulebook in existence that says that a dealer failing to announce a player's action makes it as if that action hadn't occurred!

Second, he claimed to have had pocket 3s, for a full house (3s full of 4s). We should believe him, he said, even without having seen his second card, because he wouldn't bet $40 with just the lowest pair on the board. Oh, right--there's no such thing as bluffing in his world, I guess.

Well, too bad, dude. You folded your hand before the dealer awarded the pot, end of story.

In The Professional Poker Dealer's Handbook by Paymar, Harris, and Malmuth, p. 18, we find this (emphasis in original):

1. Players must protect their own hands at all times. This
may be the most important rule in all of poker. A hand may be declared
"dead" if even one card touches the muck or if another player's card touches a
hand that is not protected.... Although the dealer should be aware of only
mucking discarded hands, a player who fails to take reasonable means to protect
his or her hand usually has no recourse if the hand becomes fouled or if the
dealer accidentally collects an unprotected hand.

While it is not necessary for the winner of a pot to show the hand if there
were no callers, it is suggested that the player protect the winning hand until
the dealer is actually pushing the pot to him. The dealer should not ask the
player to relinquish the winning hand before pushing the pot.

I read this shortly before attending poker dealer's school, and it changed how I do things. I now habitually hang on to my down cards until the pot is coming my way (if I'm the winner, or think I am). That way, if the pot is heading to somebody else by mistake, I still have a live hand I can show to claim it. I look at the transaction as a trade: my cards for the pot. Since starting this practice, I have twice accidentally mucked the winning hand (by misreading the board--until it was too late), but I have never had to forfeit a pot that was rightfully mine because of releasing my cards prematurely and letting the dealer muck them before the pot was pushed, or because the dealer uncorrectably pushed the pot to the wrong person. Retaining the cards makes any such error easily correctable.*

The same concept is expressed in Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, p. 75, rule 11.10:

A player with a hand he believes to be the winning hand is responsible to
hold onto his own hand until the pot is awarded. No player with an interest in
the pot should release his hand to the dealer until his portion of the pot has
been pushed to him.

Kreiger and Bykofsky use nearly identical language in their Rules of Poker, p. 140, rule 5.22:

A player holding what he believes to be the winning hand should retain his hand
until the pot is awarded. A player with an interest in the pot should not
release his hand until the dealer pushes the pot, or his portion of the pot, to
him.

Finally, we have "Robert's Rules of Poker," most recently Version 10 (found at numerous places around the Web, such as http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/poker/rrpprinter.php):

Cards speak (cards read for themselves). The dealer assists in reading hands,
but players are responsible for holding onto their cards until the winner is
declared.

So in terms of the rules and how they apply here, this wasn't even a close call. Player A in today's incident was just a guy who made a mistake--two mistakes, actually (not noticing that his bet had been called, then throwing away his hand before the dealer pushed him the pot) and was looking to place the blame everywhere except where it belonged--squarely on himself.

Player B rightly got the pot--not necessarily by having the best hand (because we don't know who did), but by having the only hand turned face-up on the table after the final bet and call. I was glad that he didn't apologize or appear to feel guilty over the decision going his way (as it had to, under the circumstances). He did nothing wrong--at least as far as the rules are concerned. (Making that call with his hand was pretty questionable, though!)

Player A, if you're reading this, I have a message for you: I hope that you learned a valuable lesson today. It only cost you about $240 or so--chump change for a guy who is used to playing for tens of thousands at a time, as you claim to do. Maybe it will save you from losing a pot back home in your Big Game there, and you'll come to see it as having been a cheap piece of education. Pity that in all your years of playing for such high stakes, you never bothered to learn some of the most basic rules of the game.


*Incidentally, dealers are supposed to award the pot before killing the winning hand, just to prevent that kind of problem, but unfortuntely many don't follow that correct sequence. Sooner or later, players who don't hold on to their cards until receiving the pot will lose one in an ugly controversy such as today's incident became.

Ladies at the table

Many poker rooms have rules regarding one's speech. At least as posted on the wall, the proscription is generally against something like "abusive" language. Some, though, basically enforce only a rule against dropping f-bombs.

I'm not going to rehash here the debate over the wisdom of a no-effenheimer rule. Those interested can read several columns in Card Player magazine that have argued for and against the rule, at least as applied to tournaments:

http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/34/9416

http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/34/8368

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/15063

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/15177

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/14757

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/14668

I think it's obvious to everybody that even in poker rooms with a no-f-word rule, it is enforced with hopeless inconsistency. I suspect that nearly everyone--those who like the rule and those who dislike it--would agree that arbitrary, inconsistent enforcement is worse than either alternative (having the rule and consistently enforcing it, or having no such rule at all).

For now, I just want to focus on one particular brand of inconsistency that I have heard way too many times from dealers trying to quash the f-bombs: "There's a lady at the table."

Please. What century are these dealers living in? I assume that there is no card room in the nation that has a rule that prohibits the f-word only when a female is within earshot. So why do some dealers pretend that this is the basis for enforcing the rule? Do these dealers really believe that women need to be protected from this particular word more than men do? If so, what planet are they from? This is, without a doubt, the stupidest reason I've ever heard for not swearing at the poker table, but it comes up with surprising frequency--a couple of times a month, on average, I would guess.

Dealers, you have to make peace with yourself and your employer about how aggressively to enforce your rules. And, frankly, I'll likely find some reason to gripe about it no matter what, because if you sweep the fairly harmless, passing, impersonal f-bombs along with the vicious, fighting-words variety, I'll point out how stupid it is to focus on a single word in the dictionary without regard to context and intent; if you enforce it inconsistently, I'll point out how arbitrary and unfair you're being; and if you have no rule about language or have one and don't enforce it, I'll complain that your card room is an unpleasant place to play. I understand that there's no perfect solution.

But of all the alternatives available to you, the brand of selective enforcement that kicks in only in the presence of two X chromosomes is absolutely the worst one you can pick. Please stop using this as your justification--unless, of course, you're also going to require that male players pull out and push in chairs for female players, tip their baseball caps to women, and rise when any female stands up to leave the table.