The worst hand in poker--are you sure?

A couple of weeks ago, while playing at the Hilton, I was in the big blind with 2-3 offsuit. The pot wasn't raised, so I got into the hand for no extra money. I got no help from the community cards, and at the end was playing the board, because all five cards out there were higher than mine. I got to the showdown because the action went check-check-check--it was one of those pots in which nobody made any hand worth betting on. I laughed as I exposed my cards, and said, "I don't think I win, since I have the worst possible hand."*

A player to my left said, "No, 2-7 is the worst possible hand."

I will cut him a bit of slack because he was referring to the worst starting hand, while I was referring to the worst possible hand at the end, given this particular set of five community cards.

But even after accounting for that misunderstanding of the context, the guy was wrong. Or at least he wasn't clearly right.

I first heard 2-7 (offsuit--and throughout this post I am granting that the hole cards are of different suits, because when they are of the same suit they automatically gain in potential value, due to the increased chance of hitting a flush) described as the worst starting hand in hold'em poker from Mike Sexton's commentary on one of the early episodes of the World Poker Tour, when I was just starting to understand how poker is played. And the observation stands to reason, because they are the lowest cards you can hold that can't make a straight. (That is, you can't make a straight using both cards--which means that in order to hit a straight you need help from four community cards, a considerably harder task than making a straight with just three of them.)

But anybody who makes the blanket claim that 2-7 is the worst possible starting hand just hasn't thought the matter through. In fact, next time I hear somebody say that, I think I'll test the strength of their belief by offering them a bet: "OK, I'll take 2-7 and give you 2-3, and we'll play out the hands, without any rounds of betting, just all five community cards at once. We'll do that, say, 100 times, and whoever has won the most hands gets $1000 from the other."

I sure hope somebody takes me up on that. Would you, dear reader? I hope not--because I hope my readers are smarter than that!

According to Card Player magazine's online poker odds calculator (http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_odds/texas_holdem), 2-7 beats 2-3 56% of the time, the 2-3 wins 26%, and they split the pot in 18% of hands. (All percentages in this post are rounded.) I like my chances for winning that $1000, if I can get anybody to agree to the bet.

As with nearly everything in poker, the answer to the question "What's the worst starting hand?" is "it all depends." Primarily, it depends on what you're up against.

Continuing with the 2-7 versus 2-3 comparison, let's see how they stack up against some sample opponents. I'm using two different tools for doing the calculation: the Card Player calculator and the application called Poker Stove (available for free download from http://www.pokerstove.com/). They come up with slightly different results, mostly because the latter doesn't spit out a separate percentage for ties, but takes the frequency of ties (e.g., the 18% above) and splits it between the hands being compared (in that case, it gives an extra 9% to each, and reports the result as 65% for the 2-7 and 35% for the 2-3). There are also probably differences in how the calculation is run, though I don't know the details of either one's operation.

In the table below, I show the results of pitting the 2-3 and the 2-7 against a variety of other hands, as shown. The results are, in each case, using the CP calculator first and Poker Stove second. The dollar sign shows which is superior (i.e., between the 2-3 and 2-7):

A-A versus 2-3: 86/13, 86/14 $
A-A versus 2-7: 87/12, 87/13

A-K versus 2-3: 65/34, 65/35 $
A-K versus 2-7: 67/33, 67/33

9-9 versus 2-3: 84/15, 85/15 $
9-9 versus 2-7: 88/12, 88/12

5-5 versus 2-3: 86/12, 87/13
5-5 versus 2-7: 70/28, 71/29 $

2-2 versus 2-3: 64/30, 67/33 $
2-2 versus 2-7: 65/30, 68/32

A-2 versus 2-3: 74/25, 74/26 $
A-2 versus 2-7: 74/25, 75/25

A-4 versus 2-3: 67/33, 67/33
A-4 versus 2-7: 65/35, 65/35 $

Which is kind of a long way of saying that against at least some other opponents' starting hands, 2-7 would be a better choice than 2-3, sometimes a far better choice.

(As an aside, neither the 2-3 nor the 2-7 is the worst hand to take up against somebody else's pocket aces. Top--or, rather, bottom--honors there go to the A-6 offsuit, which is a 94/6 dog in that race, which is the absolute worst scenario of any two hold'em starting hands. The point being, again, that what qualifies as the worst hand depends entirely on what one is up against. Or, to avoid ending that sentence in a preposition, it depends entirely on up against which one is. (Yuck. So much for grammar.))

Of course, we don't get to choose either our own hole cards or those of our opponents. So probably the best way of answering the question of the worst starting hand is by running the test against a random hand. This is a calculation that Poker Stove does easily, but isn't available from the Card Player tool. The answer is that the 2-7 beats or ties a random hand 35% of the time, the 2-3 only 33%. Matthew Hilger's book, Texas Hold'em Odds and Probabilities, gives these numbers, respectively, as 35% and 32% (pp. 235-237), a difference I assume is probably attributable to just rounding.

By that most general metric, then, 2-7 is a better place to start than 2-3. In other words, if what we're interested in is the likelihood of ending up with the best hand after all five community cards have been dealt out, the worst cards to have in your hand are what I had in the story that prompted this rant: a 2 and a 3, not the infamous 2-7.

So why does Mike Sexton say that the 2-7 is the worst starting hand? And since he's not exactly the first one to make that observation, why is it found in so many sources?

The answer is that nobody plays poker the way that the calculators do the math, or the way that I would propose to run my 100-hand bet.

Given the choice, I'd rather take a 2-3 than 2-7 into battle in any given pot, even though I know that 2-7 beats 2-3 a lot more often than it loses to it, and even though 2-7 will win slightly more showdowns than will 2-3 against random opposing hands. The reason is that I want to be able to make a strong hand against an opponent who has a hand that isn't quite as good but is good enough that he's willing to bet on it (and lose).

Considering the 2-3 and 2-7, they are equally likely to make one pair, two pairs, three of a kind, a flush, a full house, or four of a kind. But, as mentioned early in this post, they are not equally likely to make a straight. And that makes enough of a difference (because straights are relatively common) that I'd prefer to start with the 2-3. It is more likely that I will hit a straight. Of course, with the 2-7 any flush or full house I hit will be higher than making the same category of hand with the 2-3. But the increased probability of the straight easily outweighs that factor, in my view.

The probability of flopping a straight with the 2-3 is only 0.7%, according to Hilger (p. 189). But the probability of flopping either a straight or an open-ended straight draw is much better: 3.8% (Hilger, p. 194). With 2-7, it's obviously impossible to flop a straight. Hilger doesn't list the probability of flopping an open-ended straight draw with the 2-7, so I had to work it out myself: 1.6%.**

To make matters worse for the 2-7, having four parts of the straight on the board (as is necessary to make a straight with 2-7 in one's hand) is much more suspicious to an opponent holding, say, trips or two pair than is having just three parts of the straight visible. This translates to the 2-7 being less likely to win a big pot even when it does manage to make a straight. Furthermore, when you're relying on four parts of the straight being on the board, it's a lot more likely that an opponent will have a higher straight (or at least split the pot with you by holding the fifth card in common) than it is when that opponent has to have both of his hole cards exactly right to have a higher straight than yours.

In that sense, yes, the 2-7 is the worst starting hand, because it's the one I would least like to have to work with. I assume that most professionals have reached the same conclusion--hence the common observation about the poor, much-maligned 2-7. But now my readers can be among the cognoscenti, those who know that the answer isn't really that simple.

Now if I can just find that guy from the Hilton again, and offer him my little contest....



*Of course, any two unpaired cards in the hole that were both smaller than whatever the lowest card on the board was (I don't remember what that might have been) would actually be equally bad, since all such hands would split the pot, all playing the board. But I obviously had the lowest possible cards that fit that description.

** In case anybody wants to check my work: There are 19,600 possible flops (we don't care what order the cards come in), from the remaining 50 unknown cards (because C(50,3)=19,600). The flop has to be 3-4-5, 4-5-6, 5-6-8, 6-8-9, or 8-9-10 to give us the draw. Each of those has 64 different ways of hitting (because there are four cards of each rank), giving a total of 320 different flops that qualify. So the probability of hitting the draw is 320/19,600, or 1.6%.


Addendum, October 9, 2007:

After writing and posting the above, curiosity drove me to do a Google search on the phrase "worst hand in poker" to see what others have written on the subject. Along the way, I came across a table of percentage wins and pot equity of every hold'em starting hand, as played out (or so the author claims) in a computer simulation against a random hand in 2,000,000+ trials each: http://www.gocee.com/poker/he_ev_hand.html/

Poker gems, #35

I hope at least a few readers have followed and enjoyed the extended excerpts from Shut Up and Deal. I loved the book. It's highly unlikely that I'll devote anywhere near as much space to snippets from other stuff, but at least now I will return to other sources for this series of posts, for those who didn't much care for May's work.


Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 201:

It ain’t like I’m getting up every five minutes to go to my [hotel] room. Some buy-ins last longer than others, and sometimes I double my stack through before I lose it and once I’m almost even for fifteen minutes or so. But there’s no doubt as the session wears on that I’m losing, and my cards are rather gruesome. There’s no flow. There’s no order. Sometimes I go for an hour without playing more than a few hands, and then all of the sudden I get about ten to play in a row and get brutalized and then it’s all over and I feel like a tornado went through my head and sucked up my chips and I’m just shell-shocked and thinking about all the hands while Louie and Porky are chortling. And then dry as a bone. Sit back and wait. And fume.

Sometimes I make a pledge like I’m gonna die right here in this seat rather than quit this game because it’s so good. And don’t it always seem to be that when you make the pledge, those are the days you really do sit there and just die in the seat. That’s what it feels like. Just sitting there and dying, man.

Poker players are political wimps

In the nearly one year since passage of the abominable "Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act" (UIGEA) I have overheard quite a bit of discussion on the subject of politics around the poker table, as well as on TV, among well-known professional players, on "High Stakes Poker" and "Poker After Dark" (the only two poker programs that have a lot of table talk). I am repeatedly astounded by how players so readily forgive--or forget?--those who tried to make online poker difficult or impossible to play.

I don't play online much, because I'm just not very good at it. (Not that anybody cares, but I think the main reasons are that (1) live players give off oodles of information, and I seem not to function well without it, (2) I get bored and impatient with nothing to do but stare at the screen, and feel compelled to play hands that I should just fold; real people are a lot more interesting to watch, (3) players enter and leave virtual tables much more quickly than real ones, not giving me the time I need to figure out how they're playing. At least I'm in good company; both Daniel Negreanu and Barry Greenstein admit that they're similarly handicapped.) But there aren't very many more victimless "crimes" than sitting at home in one's underwear playing $0.05-0.10 limit hold'em on the computer. It's insane for "the land of the free" to be making this activity of questionable legality and putting up hurdles for casual players to jump over.

I guess what brought this to a head for me was hearing Daniel Negreanu and Doyle Brunson chatting, during a "Poker After Dark" episode, about presidential candidates, with both of them endorsing Barack Obama. There aren't many people in this country who were more negatively affected by the UIGEA than these two. Both of them had online poker sites that were about a year old, and both operations went belly-up shortly after the legislation was signed. I have no idea how much money they may have lost, but it must have been millions of dollars of potential revenue. And then they're openly talking about their support for a guy who voted to close them down!!! Have you guys lost all sense of reason???

The usual canard is that this was "must-pass" legislation, because Senator Bill Frist, seeking to polish his reputation with social conservatives for an abortive presidential candidacy, used his position as majority leader to push an unrelated bill about port security into conference committee, where he attached the UIGEA. This forced members of Congress in both houses to vote on the whole package. (Never mind what might have been done in that conference committee to prevent the attachment.) So even poker players who are reasonably informed about how this law came into being tend to go easy on the politicians: They had to vote for the port security legislation, and the online gambling unfortunately came along for the ride.

I don't buy it. I won't let them off the hook that easily. There is no such thing as a "must-pass" bill, in my view. Suppose that instead of a gambling provision Frist had attached, say, a bill repealing the 19th amendment (which gave women the right to vote). Would any senator or representative have said, "Well, we have to pass the port security stuff, so I guess we'll just have to hope that women don't notice this other little provision"? Of course not. They first would have prevented Frist from attaching that amendment in conference committee, or, failing that, they would have denounced it from the hilltops, voted against it, then quickly pushed the port security bill back through committees and to a floor vote, this time unencumbered by the anti-suffrage bits.

So why didn't they have the fortitude to do the same when the unrelated amendment was about gambling? Because they either actually liked the measure, or at least decided that few of their constituents would care deeply enough about it for it to hurt them at the next election. To be blunt, even those who might have thought the bill to be bad public policy put their fingers to the wind and decided that they could be more hurt by political opponents saying "He voted against making our ports secure" than "He voted to make it really difficult to put money into one's online poker account."

They could have kept the ports bill and the gambling bill separate if they wanted to. They just didn't care about the matter enough. I, for one, think that they should have to answer for such lack of integrity when it comes to protecting individual liberties.

So who voted for the combined bill? Here's the full, official legislative history of the bill. (The part about online gambling is the “Conference Report” stuff on 9/29/06.) http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR04954:@@@X

Here’s the roll-call vote from the House of Representatives:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll516.xml. For Nevada residents, you’ll note the names of Jim Gibbons (now our illustrious governor, with more scandals accruing before he took office than most governors get in a full term), Jon Porter, and Shelley Berkley all voting for the bill. In the Senate, they were so cowardly that they passed it by “unanimous consent,” meaning that there was no roll-call vote recorded. Therefore, every member of the Senate gets the blame for it.

Even the politician I like the most, Ron Paul (http://www.ronpaul2008.com/) (I'm a strongly libertarian kind of guy--live and let live, and all that jazz), voted for it. I was surprised to learn that last night when I was poking around at the details of the history, because I've heard it said and seen it written that he voted against it. To be precise, he voted against a similar separate bill that the House defeated earlier in 2006. But as the links above show, he voted for it when it was attached to the ports security bill. Shame on you, Ron Paul.

But at least he has since then come out strongly in favor of either repealing this legislation or reducing its impact by carving out a provision for licensed gaming companies. There are at least two bills in the House that would have such an effect. See http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-2046 (listing Paul as a co-sponsor) and http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-2610.

Now, I'm opposed to federally licensing gambling establishments, because it's just not a proper or necessary role of the federal government, and it will inevitably lead to the licensees being subjected to more and more regulation as time goes by. That's the way of all federal regulations and licensing, unfortunately. But at least I can be confident that if outright repeal of the UIGEA ever managed to get put to a vote, Paul would unquestionably support it, as either a congressman or as president. See http://www.gambling911.com/Ron-Paul-Internet-Gambling-042707.html.

But what about the other presidential candidates? It's hard to say, beyond the fact that all of the ones who are currently senators or repesentatives voted for the UIGEA, and therefore must be presumed to be enemies of poker players, absent strong contrary evidence. And, frankly, there just isn't much contrary evidence, except for Paul.

The very fact that it's hard to find clear, definitive position statements from any of them supports the theory that they are counting on this not being much of an issue in the presidential election. For those willing to invest the reading time, there have been at least three lengthy threads in the 2+2 poker forums on the subject, though, as always, the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low, and nobody seems to have found much clear information:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=11872919&an=0&page=0#Post11872919

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12016409&page=0&fpart=1&vc=1

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=10351539&an=0&page=2#Post10351539

Bill Richardson appears to be the only candidate, aside from Paul, who has openly supported repeal of the UIGEA. See http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2007-04-30-4052419200_x.htm (page down to the third story).

Rudy Giuliani has reportedly received the most money from the gaming industry. But that's hard to interpret. It was the brick-and-mortar casinos that first pushed through the law several years back that made it nearly impossible to use credit cards to fund online gambling accounts. (And their lobbyists did this on the ironic grounds of the immorality of expanded gambling!) Unless Harrah's, Station Casinos, MGM/Mirage, Wynn, etc., start running online operations themselves, they're likely to see Internet gaming as competition to be stifled, rather than as part of the same industry. Giuliani was definitely part of the crackdown on New York underground poker rooms, so his track record is pretty suspect.

As for the other candidates, it's a crap shoot (pardon the pun). They haven't committed themselves. But to me that's pretty telling. If a politician is dodging an issue that he knows a relatively small constituency cares passionately about, it is most likely because his position will anger that group, so he decides it's better to keep quiet. In my view, this is definitely in the "if you're not clearly with us, you must be against us" category.

If you love poker and you love personal liberty, you can't logically support any current presidential candidate except for Ron Paul or Bill Richardson. As far as I can tell, there aren't any other supporters out there. If there are, we have to wonder why they're keeping mum about it.

While I'm on this rant, just a word about one of the other related things I read in poker magazines frequently. The relatively new Poker Players Alliance (http://www.pokerplayersalliance.org/) is actively seeking federal regulation in exchange for recognized legality. Other writers repeatedly urge Congress to "regulate and tax" online poker specifically, or all online gambling generally. I think this is dangerous and completely wrong-headed.

As I said before, regulation always begets more regulation. Regulation means expense to the operators--and in this case that would translate to lower profits for the players. Opponents of anything who can't get it completely banned always go for regulation, incrementally making the regulations more onerous and expensive as time goes by. Look at abortion, cigarette smoking, alcohol, nuclear energy, mining, logging, or a zillion other examples. Inviting federal regulation is letting the camel's nose into the tent, and sooner or later, inevitably, the whole camel will be in there.

We also don't need regulation to protect us. The businesses that run online gaming risk bankruptcy if they are caught cheating or letting others cheat, because their customers will flit away in a heartbeat. They have much more to fear from loss of their investments than from not following every federal regulation. Despite the number of people I have heard calling for regulation, I haven't heard even one specific proposal of what these folks think the regulations should do, in terms of protecting players, that the online poker sites aren't already doing. Not even a phone-book-sized set of regulations would make me feel any safer about online play than I already do.

The same is true, but even more so, for those who casually say "regulate and tax it." Taxation would even more surely sound the death knell. The amount of the tax would simply get ratcheted up over time, and we would be spending our political energy trying to prevent that creep. But it would happen anyway. Just look at how the Nevada legislature treats the casinos--as cash cows to hit up for more revenue every time there's a budget shortfall. Just look at how tobacco taxes have moved over the years. The so-called "sin taxes" are the very easiest ones for politicians to support. If you think it's hard to make money playing poker now, when even good players have a fairly small percentage return on total wagers, wait until the feds hit you with, say, a 10% tax on every pot, on top of the house rake. Of course, it would start out at, say, just 1%, but there's no doubt in my mind that it would slowly increase until nearly all of the profit has been squeezed out of the game.

The message from poker players to politicians needs to be this: Leave us the hell alone. Don't ban it, don't make the financial transactions illegal or difficult, don't regulate it, don't tax it. Leave it alone. Let us play our little games in peace. You get your share from our income taxes, and that's more than enough.

As others have pointed out, it is now easier and more clearly legal to play online poker in Russia than in the United States. That's crazy. It should be unthinkable. It has come to this because we poker players haven't exercised any political muscle. Politicians have no reason to seek the support--or, alternatively, fear the wrath--of poker players, as they do with the NRA, the AARP, labor unions, etc. We're political wimps. That has to change.


Addendum:

I posted a link to this rant on the http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ forums, and soon thereafter found posted this interesting and thoughtful response, which is well worth reading, if this whole subject interests you:
http://www.allvegaspoker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=27128#27128

Addendum, November 18, 2007:

I just stumbled across this nice summary of where both parties' presidential candidates stand on internet gambling, so far as it is known:

https://pokerplayersalliance.org/news/newsandarticles_article.php?DID=289

Online freeroll tournament for poker bloggers

OK, I'm completely whoring myself with this post. In order to qualify for a free tournament for poker bloggers at PokerStars, I have to post the following. It's a small price to pay. Thanks to Wil Wheaton's blog--which should just plain be on your list of places to visit regularly--for the alert: http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 6060986

It would be unspeakably cool to win that. It would be even cooler to win it if anybody in the poker blogging world had any friggin' idea that my blog even existed! But they don't--at least not yet--and I'm OK with that. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, the extraordinarily few people in the world who know me do appear to like me.

And ya never know. Maybe the table chat will result in other bloggers checking me out, posting links, etc. Then traffic builds, and before you know it, I'm a superstar!

Yeah, that's gonna happen....

Poker gems, #34

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 163:

Player asks, How’s my game, man, my game? Your game? Who gives a fuck about your game, I want to know what you’re gonna do when they’re fuckin’ breathing down your neck they got you hooked so good and you’re so scared you’re praying you ain’t got a pair when you look down at those hole cards because Krock he just raised again with a queen up, and even though you know he’s got shit, you know it, man, I could fuckin’ swear it down to my bones. If I look down and see a pair of sickly eights my stomach is just turning, 'cause I don’t want to get there in no pot with him, where the river card is a big black snake and fate has already decided which cards are in that deck and which order they come out and odds in my favor has much less meaning to me than the pain in my stomach that feels like the lining is getting eaten away by acid—at least that feels real. I don’t know how the odds feel.

Poker gems, #33

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 162-163:

I’m a watcher. Always have been. Maybe that’s why I learned. I love to watch people, love to stare at ‘em behind my dark shades as they load up racks with new-found dollars and walk away. Or as they fall apart, as they crumple up, as their eyes become big and glassy and lose focus and they take deep drags on their cigarettes. As they come in all smiles and how ya doing and start winning and talk about how good they are and how they could have made an extra bet by checking the flop, and then a month later they’re stuck on the rail trying to borrow money from the same guys they called losers a little while before. I just watch. Don’t say nothing. Nothing. Just sit there and watch 'em night after night with a big silly grin on my face as they call me a live one.

Chip rack on the table

Treasure Island tonight. There's one player who's steaming something fierce because he lost a huge pot when the river card made his straight and his opponent's full house. Now he's raising every pot. At some point he put his remaining chips in a rack and set the rack on the table, as if he were about to leave, but then they just stayed like that.

Finally a dealer told him that the chips in the rack were fine if he was going to be leaving within the next few hands, but if he was going to be staying, his chips had to be on the table.

Now, if a dealer told me this, I'd say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know," take the stupid chips out of the rack, and be done with it. It's one of those things that nobody could possibly really care enough about to make a fuss over. Unless, of course, you're just a misanthrope to begin with and can't stand having anybody tell you what to do, even over the tiniest point.

You guessed it, this guy was just that sort. He argued that his chips were on the table--just that there was a rack under them. The dealer told him again that he needed to remove the rack. So he tried going halfway and taking out just one stack. No, all of them, the dealer said. A couple of other players who were obviously TI regulars had encountered this before and chimed in, confirming that it's a consistently enforced house rule. This idiot kept arguing and fighting about it. Finally he gave in and said that he would remove his chips after the current hand was over. Instead, though, he got up and left. Maybe he thought to himself, "This will teach them not to boss me around!" But nobody really cared that he was gone.

Not all casinos care about having chips out of the rack. I've played in some places where they're positively anal about it, and won't even let you start racking up during your last few hands--you have to have actually stopped playing. Other places say that you just have to keep one stack of chips out on the table. And in some it's common to see most of the players playing directly out of the rack the whole time they're at the table.

It seems to depend on what the casino's reason for the rule is. In some places the motivation seems to be security; that is, they're worried that somebody might hide a card under the rack, to be put back into play when the situation is favorable. (At one place in Wisconsin where I used to play a lot, any player having a rack on the table would invalidate the bad-beat jackpot. This motivated players to police each other even more carefully than the dealers did. "Wait! Don't start dealing the hand yet! There's a rack on the table!") In rooms in which cash plays, there's a legitimate concern that somebody could stash a few $100 bills under the rack, and an opponent might seriously underestimate how much an all-in bet or call could cost him. Some places seem to emphasize the efficiency aspect--it just plain takes longer for most people to remove a few chips from a rack than from a stack on the table, so everybody playing out of racks slows down the game substantially. And although I've never heard this expressed directly as a reason behind the prohibition, it's obviously quite a bit harder to estimate at a glance how many chips an opponent has when they're laid flat in a chip rack, rather than standing in stacks.

But this is really about more than what rule a particular card room has in place on this point, or the reason(s) for it. It's about the kind of antisocial personality that would argue such a small point so vehemently and for so long, instead of just shrugging it off and complying. It's unimaginable to me that somebody could care so deeply about playing from a rack that he'd want to cause a dustup about it--and if you really just cannot function as a poker player unless your chips are laid out in neat rows in an acrylic rack, well then for God's sake call and ask what the house rule is before you choose where to play. In this city you've got 50+ places to choose from. Give your business to the place that will let you use your precious rack, if you must; don't try to buck against the rule where you are, even if you don't like it.

I know, though, that for this kind of demented individual, we could quote Roseanne Rosannadanna: "If it isn't one thing, it's another." That is, he was itching for a fight over something, anything, to make himself feel better (in some perverse way) after having had a big loss. If it wasn't the chip rack, it would have been talking about the hand in progress, or whether he had to post both blinds after being away from the table for a while, or acting out of turn. Or he would have pounced on a dealer for making some small error, or yelled at the cocktail waitress for not getting his order quite right. I think it's clear that his ego was bruised, and he would have taken the opportunity to contend over any little point on which he could assert himself, as a salve to his wounded self-image.

It's frightening how many people there are in the world so eager to lash out over anything, with the least provocation. Fragile egos are terribly dangerous to society at large. If nothing else, it's really annoying to have to share a poker table with such deranged jerks.

So do something about it, pal!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poker gems, #32

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 158:

Yeah, but about the eighteen [losing sessions] in a row. I didn’t start out trying to break any record. I guess maybe I finished trying to. I mean I remember distinctly one time in the Taj Mahal where I had been playing almost five hours and I was ahead like seventy-five bucks or something and I thought to quit and Morty advised me heavily to quit. It was the same night I had gotten my hair cut for the first time in two years and I’d lost about nine or ten in a row at this point and I just should have gone home and cursed the streak. But maybe I needed to see that doom doesn’t have to have an end and just because the roulette ball has come up black fourteen times in a row, don’t go betting on red again. Just walk away.

And maybe I learned the lesson vividly. Because that was the only end for that streak. Just walk away. Or go broke. Or run through the valley of the shadow of death because you get through the valley quicker that way. Or go home, lock your door, pace the floor, pace the house, flip the channel, grind marijuana stems, listen to every CD, go to the market and construct elaborate huge meals not to eat because everything makes you sick, mumble, talk out loud, put your palm to your forehead, cry out and groan, and want to go back into that poker room but be so scared to do it that in the end I just had to leave town, had to leave the country, in fear of what might happen with me in proximity to my money.

An observation

After playing a few tens of thousands of hands of Texas Hold'em, I've come to a conclusion: Five is rarely the right number of community cards for the dealer to put out. About half the time, I want them to stop at four. The other half, I want them to put out a sixth one. Five is almost always either one too many (because my opponent hits his miracle card) or one too few (because I haven't hit mine).

Poker gems, #31

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 145:

Everybody has gotta draw the line somewhere. Actually, a lot of people manage to go through life without having to draw a line at all, but if you play poker, if you gamble, if you do drugs, you better draw that line because sure enough you’re gonna be slammed up against it often enough, and one step over—well, it’s just over.

Me at the table

I think it's probably safe to let the Lone Ranger's mask slip a little bit, so to speak.

Last Sunday I participated in a private tournament at Treasure Island, hosted by http://www.allvegaspoker.com/, the best web site for rating, learning about, and discussing Vegas poker rooms. I wasn't the first player knocked out, but I did earn the distinction of being the first one to be knocked out twice, since my re-buy wasn't terribly successful.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever previous taken a picture of me while I'm playing poker. I wasn't even aware that photos were being taken, being rather focused on the game. (The whole bunch of them is posted at http://www.allvegaspoker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3018, from which page I stole these. I don't know who to credit as the photographer.)

In the first one, I'm only barely visible--the guy at the far end of the table, with the brown sweatshirt. This appears to be the hand on which I lost 99% of my chips, with my pocket jacks running into a flopped set of 10s against the opponent in the foreground. It looks like the flop that killed me has just been dealt. I'm looking confident with my overpair. I don't yet know that I'm basically dead.

The second picture must have been taken very shortly thereafter. I was left with only 50 in chips after that debacle (I think we started with 3000), so they had to go in with any two cards. You can see that I'm looking annoyed (not exactly a rare occurrence), with no chips on the table in front of me (which, fortunately, is a rare occurrence).

Oh well. It was a fun event anyway.



Addendum, October 2, 2007:

Not that anybody will care, but I see now that the second picture isn't from immediately after the first. I should have noticed three things: First, there's a different player on my right (on the left in the photos) in the second picture; second, there's another table behind me instead of a wall; third, the felt on the table is completely different! So obviously this photo was taken after I changed tables. I got knocked out from the first table, then moved to this one. I lasted only about 5 or 6 hands before the second bust-out. The guy on the left of the second photo (known to me only as "The Other Dave" or "OD") was the one who beat me. I had A-K, he had 7-7. Flop missed him, but he made a standard continuation bet. The flop paired my king, so I moved all in. He had to call, because it didn't cost him much more. He caught runner-runner straight to bump me off. So this photo must have been taken right while we were waiting for the turn and/or river to be dealt, because all my chips are in, but I haven't stood up to go yet.

Poker gems, #30

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 140:

It’s not that it’s impossible to make money at poker in the long run. It’s just that you’d be better off packing up your stuff and going to Alaska to dig for gold.

You've got to be careful what you say

This blog post was originally an overly long footnote in my post from a few minutes ago about "The Tournament Host." Upon re-reading, I think it deserves to be a separate entry. So first I'm going to repeat the paragraph to which it was appended (so the story may sound familiar, if you're reading things in chronological order of posting), then carry on with my related thoughts.


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.

A very interesting incident along these lines happened at the final table of the World Poker Tour's "World Poker Open" at The Gold Strike Casino in Mississippi (season 5). Kido Pham, a well-known semi-professional tournament player, raised with K-7. An amateur, Gary Kainer, was short-stacked in one of the blinds, holding A-Q. He moved all-in, which constituted a big reraise.

Pham asked him, "Do you want me to call you?" He got no answer. Pham then told Kainer that he (Kainer) could decide--Pham would either call or fold, whichever Kainer wanted him to do. He said, "You call it--yes, no, whatever." This is an interesting ploy, one that I had never heard before. If Kainer took him up on the offer, it would make for an interesting question as to the rules, whether or not Pham's promise was binding. But it didn't come to that, because Kainer wisely just kept his mouth shut.

Finally, Pham apparently realized that he wasn't going to get any useful information from his opponent, and gave him a time limit for answering: "Three seconds. You call it." Still no response, so Pham counted down the time: "One. Two. Three. I call it." The dealer announced a call, and the announcer in the arena repeated that. But Pham quickly realized that he had been misunderstood; he didn't mean that he intended to call the bet, only that his offer to let Kainer make the decision for him was rescinded, and he (Pham) would make the decision for himself. Daniel Negreanu, also at the table, pointed out, "You said 'I call it.'"

The tournament director was called in to make a ruling, and he decided--correctly, in my view--that Pham's words "I call it" were binding, regardless of whether he intended something other than calling the bet. While they were awaiting the decision, commentator Mike Sexton observed, "Vince, he would have nobody to blame but himself if they make him put his money in and he loses this pot"--which is exactly what happened. After the ruling against him, Pham stated the obvious, that he never would have called with just a K-7. (Which raises the question of what he would have done if Kainer had taken him up on his offer and said, "OK, I want you to call.") That one little mistake may have cost Pham the tournament, and a few hundred thousand dollars in prize money.

A dealer friend once told me of an instance in which a player during a hand was telling the guy next to him a story about something that had happened long ago. The story included saying "All in," and this player said those words quite loudly (apparently recreating how it had happened). His opponent thought that the story-teller was declaring himself all-in, and immediately said "I call," and turned his hand up. The story-teller had had no intention of moving all in, but had just picked an unfortunate time to be saying those words loudly enough to be heard across the table. His words were ruled to be binding, even though he hadn't intended them that way.

It has to be so. Otherwise, you could have a scenario like this: Suppose I'm facing a large all-in raise from an opponent, and I've noticed previously that as soon as he gets called on his all-in bets, he instantly flips over his cards. (One should do this, of course, but not quite instantly. It's usually wise to take a few seconds to be absolutely sure that all the betting is over, that one's opponent really said he was calling, etc. I usually just wait for the dealer to instruct me to turn them over, because then any misunderstanding is the dealer's error, not mine.) I'm not sure what to do, so I say, "I'm going to call," kind of drawing out that last word, trying to induce my opponent to flip over his cards so I can see what I'm up against. Then, if I see that he has me in a bad spot, I complete the thought with, "...my mother on the phone at the next break." I then claim that my opponent jumped the gun, and I wasn't announcing my action.

Players have to be careful with the short list of words that sound like verbal declarations of action, particular when it's their turn.


Addendum, October 3, 2007:

By odd coincidence, I saw another example of this today while playing in the last-ever Hilton monthly freeroll tournament.

Before the flop, the player who was going to be second to act started to push his whole stack in when it wasn't yet his turn. He aborted the move before the chips crossed the betting line. (I don't know whether he was honestly mistaken or whether this was angle-shooting, but it doesn't matter for the point of this story.) The player under the gun noticed this, and asked him something like, "You're all in?" The dealer announced "All in." He heard clearly those last two words from this player, but not what went before it. The player protested that she wasn't moving all in.

The dealer called the floor person over and explained that the only thing he had heard clearly was "all in." The player confirmed that she had indeed uttered those words, but as part of a question to the other player. The floor person ruled that her words constituted a binding declaration of action. (Part of his reason was that one can't ask a player yet to act what he's going to do.) Presumably, if the dealer clearly heard the words "all in," other players might have heard them, too, and we can't have players trying to be weaselly by letting those words be heard, in order to see the reaction from other players, then retract them as having been accidental or misunderstood if it looks like somebody behind him--perhaps a player with pocket aces--welcomes that move. (I'm confident the player today was not trying to be tricky in such a manner. But the rule has to be enforced the same regardless of one's intentions, because intentions are impossible to know with certainty.)

Like the heading to this post says, you have to be careful what you say at the table, particularly when it's your turn to act.

Poker gems, #29

Jesse May, Shut Up and Deal, p. 75:

It’s like when people hear that I’m a professional poker player the bulk say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re so lucky because you can do whatever you want, play whenever you want, make your own schedule. But I know a lot of guys who play poker—hell, I feel like I know all of them—and to a man it’s play poker, eat, sleep, eat, play poker…poker, poker.

And when I’m in the groove after playing for something unreal like eighteen or twenty hours and then home for five or six hours of fitful sleep and then pop out of bed, it’s not relax, flip on the TV, go out to eat, call my friends, read a book, play golf, see a movie. But jump awake, run in the shower, convince myself I don’t even have time to shave or finish listening to a song on the stereo, and run down to the kitchen and no time to cook a proper meal or even sit down and eat but whatever I can grab and run to the car and eat on the way. And fifteen minutes later, after running a few questionably yellow red lights, there I am back at the table like I never left, and as I look around it’s the same everywhere—bleary-eyed and in action.

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.