Doyle Brunson is wrong

I've been reading Doyle Brunson's newest book, My 50 Most Memorable Hands. In it he tells one story illustrating how winning became harder after publishing his famous book, Super/System. Doyle has K-K, Lyle Berman has 4-4 in a pot that has been raised and re-raised before the flop. The flop comes A-9-4, rainbow.

I checked. Lyle bet and I moved in on him, a very big bet. Lyle studied his
hand a moment and then called. The turn and river cards were no help; and as
Lyle was dragging in the pot, I said in a sad voice, "Didn't you think I might
have three aces?"

Lyle stood up and screamed, "Doyle, I read your book!"

After a moment I realized what he was talking about. I say in my no-limit
hold'em section, "I never give a free card when an ace comes on the flop because
unless the board is paired, the next card can always make a straight." So Lyle
knew I didn't have three aces. We have laughed about that many times
since.

Good story, but I got hung up on this assertion: "[W]hen an ace comes on the flop...unless the board is paired, the next card can always make a straight."

At first I thought he was claiming that with an unpaired ace-high flop, a straight will always be possible with any turn card that comes. That's clearly not true. For example, the flop could be A-2-6, and if the turn card is anything other than a 3, 4, or 5, it is not possible for anybody to have a straight.

So if I were wording Doyle's assertion to be more unambiguous, I would put it like this: Assuming an unpaired board, when the flop contains an ace, there is always at least one card that could come on the turn that could make somebody a straight. For example, if the flop is A-6-9, it's not possible for anybody to have flopped a straight, but a 10 on the turn will make a straight for a player holding 7-8; an 8 will make a straight for a player holding 5-7 or 7-10, etc. I was skeptical of this at first, but I played around with a deck for a while and convinced myself that it really is true.

Then I wondered whether the same was also true when there was not an ace on the flop. Turns out that it's not--but it's almost true. If I've counted correctly, there are only four possible unpaired flops for which no turn card can make a possible straight for any player: specifically, 2-7-Q, 2-7-K, 2-8-K, and 3-8-K.

Ignoring suits, there are 66 possible unpaired flops containing an ace.* As stated above, for all 66 of those, there is at least one card that could come on the turn that makes a straight possible if a player is holding just the right down cards.

There are 220 possible unpaired flops not containing an ace.** Of those, 216 (i.e., all except for the four I listed above) share that same quality--that there is at least one card that could come on the turn that makes a straight possible if a player is holding just the right down cards.

Put another way, with an ace on the flop, it is 100% certain that an opponent holding just the right hole cards could make a straight with just the right turn card. Without an ace on the flop, it is "only" 98.2% certain (216/220 = 0.982).

In other words, I can't see any reason that Doyle makes a distinction here. It is virtually always the case that the turn card could make an opponent's straight, whether or not there is an ace on the flop.

Now, this isn't to say that one should slow-play a strong hand on an ace-high flop and risk giving an opponent a free card. As with most things in poker, it all depends on the specifics of the situation: the presence of possible flush draws, one's position, the aggressiveness of the opponent(s), one's guess as to the possible range of cards an opponent might be playing, the size of the pot, the size of the players' stacks, and a zillion other factors. But it makes no sense at all to make a blanket rule against checking the flop just because there is an ace sitting out there and one fears a possible straight being made on the turn. That always has to be a consideration (except for when you have one of the four peculiar flops I listed previously), but there is no good reason to make it the dominant, determining factor above all others.

Sorry, Doyle. You're right about a whole lot of things, and you've probably forgotten more about poker than I'll ever know, but on this one specific point you're making a distinction where there is no meaningful difference (i.e., flop with an ace versus flop without an ace). I look forward to your reply in the comments section, since I'm certain you're a daily reader. (Ha!)

Incidentally, I figured out something else along the way, which I will probably never have occasion to put into a blog post again, so I'm throwing it in here as a free added bonus. I wondered how many full boards of five unpaired community cards there were for which no straight was possible. I couldn't find any systematic, mathematical way to determine this, so I had to work it out the long, hard way, with a bunch of cards laid out on the table and pen and paper in hand. If I counted correctly, there are 31 such boards with an ace (e.g., A-2-6-9-J), and 50 without an ace (e.g., 3-5-8-J-K), for a total of 81. There are 1287 possible unpaired 5-card boards (treating all suits as the same, as I have everywhere in this post).*** So of all the full, unpaired Texas Hold'em (or Omaha, for that matter) boards, 1206/1287, or 93.7%, have a straight possible, given the right hole cards. You always wondered that, didn't you? So now you know.



*Showing my work, as endless school teachers always told me I had to do: If the second card is a K, that leaves 11 different possible ranks for the third card (2 through Q). If the second card is a Q, there are 10 different possible ranks for the third card (2 through J). And so on, down to the case in which the second card is a 3, leaving only a 2 to make an unpaired flop. By this way of counting, the second card can't be a 2, because all of those possibilities were accounted for with a higher-ranked second card. (We're not concerned with the order the cards are in here; I just arbitrarily did the counting assuming the cards came in descending order of rank.) Finally, 11+10+...+1 = 66.

**Please, please don't make me show my work on this one! I'll just shorten it up to say that there are 55 unpaired K-high flops, 45 Q-high, 36 J-high, 28 10-high, 21 9-high, 15 8-high, 10 7-high, 6 6-high, 3 5-high, and 1 4-high. The sum of those is 220. Again, the order of the cards does not matter, nor do their suits.

*** I'll approach this one somewhat differently, because I think it's easier when the numbers get this high. Again ignoring suits, the number of unpaired boards is 13 x 12 x 11 x 10 x 9 = 154,440. But that counts every different order, so it vastly overcounts what we're interested in here. Each unique set of five cards (e.g., K-J-9-5-2) can have 120 different orders, so since we don't care about the order, the number of different unpaired boards for current purposes is 154,440/120 = 1287. I felt a bit unsure that I had this right, so I actually double-checked it by adding up the possibilities the same way as the previous calculations, and got the same number, so I'm confident about it. I.e., there are 495 unpaired A-high boards, 330 K-high boards, etc., down to 5 7-high boards and 1 6-high board, adding up to 1287.

For poker rules nerds only

Yeah, I'm one of them. I think it's fun reading poker rule books and figuring out ways that the rules could be worded better, or situations that the rules don't cover. I'm a poker rules nerd.

While reading an online discussion forum, I came across a link I already like a lot: http://www.thehendonmob.com/tournament_director/articles/introduction.html It's a series of situations--some real, some hypothetical--posed to six prominent poker tournament directors, and the discussions that ensue among them about how they would apply the rules. They don't always agree, and the different viewpoints and arguments is what makes this series interesting and thought-provoking--if you like that sort of thing, that is. I realize that I'm in a minority, but I love this kind of stuff. I feel like a pig that has just sniffed out a truffle.

See? Orthography is revealing after all!

I while back I commented on a press release from Absolute Poker about allegations of a security breach allowing a player to see all of his opponents' hole cards. See http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/09/getting-things-right-or-not.html. Without even examining the evidence that serious online players had amassed, I concluded from the press release that all was not well. This was because, I opined, the horrible sloppiness of the press release assuring the world that nothing untoward was going on likely signified that the claimed investigation was just as slipshod.

You can, if you wish, read how my analysis was pilloried in a forum of Absolute Poker affiliates: http://www.pokeraffiliateworld.com/forums/general-poker-affiliate-discussion/11817-what-happened-absolute-thread.html

Well, it turns out that there was indeed foul play at Absolute, in spite of the site's previous reassurance that all was well. See http://tinyurl.com/2addoj and http://wizardofodds.com/software/absolutepoker.html for details of the analysis that would leave no serious doubt, even absent the company's admission. Additionally, it appears that we do have an admission of sorts from the site: http://wickedchopspoker.blogs.com/my_weblog/2007/10/absolute-poke-2.html

Of course, it's possible that, in reality, there is no connection on any level between the sloppiness of the press release that raised my suspicions and the fact that Absolute's "investigation" (if, in fact, there was one, as they asserted), oops!, somehow failed to find the cheating. But I'd like to think that my hunch was vindicated. A company that can't even bother to proofread its official statement to the world about how there is no problem is unlikely to have actually done a careful, thorough investigation in which one can place one's trust.

So there. Nyeah, nyeah, nyeah. (That is a sticking out of the virtual tongue at my previous naysayers.)

Poker gems, #39

Gabe Kaplan, on "High Stakes Poker," Season 2, Episode 4, when asked by A. J. Benza if Jennifer Harman is the best female poker player in the world:

I think it's between her and Bea Arthur.

More on the Hilton closure

I've written previously about how much I have liked the Hilton poker room (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/why-i-like-hilton-poker-room-non-grumpy.html) and how bummed I was to learn it was closing (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/09/my-favorite-poker-room-is-closing.html). Well, apparently I'm not alone. Here's a nicer eulogy than I could write: http://www.vegasrex.com/2007/10/16/farewell-to-the-hilton-poker-room/ . (Thanks to smudger for pointing me to this piece.)

I must have played with this guy, given his obvious familiarity with the room, but I don't know who it is. I do recognize the cast of characters he's describing, though. And, coincidentally, Rachel was my favorite dealer there, too. (It's actually "Rachel," not "Rachael"--but she fooled me, too, by having two nametags, one with it spelled each way. I never did learn why that was....)

I went by the room at 5:00 on the last day, and there was nothing happening. I had hoped for one more game there, but it wasn't to be. I went to the Venetian instead. I later learned that a game started up around 6:00 and went until 3:00 in the morning. I missed it. Oh well. There's always another game somewhere.

You can read a bit more corporate BS from the Hilton PR team here: http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/article/9937/strip-poker-hilton-poker-room-closes-its-doors

I wish I had written this

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030902272.html

If you don't catch the reference to cheese on the floor, well, it's way too filthy to repeat here, but it was one of the funniest tantrums ever on "The Sopranos." Let's just say that Silvio gets a little grouchy when he's losing at poker--worse than the Poker Grump, even.

Poker gems, #38

Steve Badger, in 1999, after winning a WSOP bracelet (as quoted in Larry Phillips, The Tao of Poker, p. 214):

I just played 22 hours of Omaha high-low.... Of that 22, 17 hours were like watching paint dry, 3 hours were even duller, and about 2 hours was like bungee-jumping from a helicopter into a vat of flaming eels.

Search engine amusements (non-grumpy content)

I was just looking over a report of where my reader traffic is coming from. One of the sources is Google, when people do a search for "poker clothes." With those words in quotation marks, I come up 16th; without the quotation marks, it's 28th. What's funny, though, is that the post such surfers get directed to is one which may discourage the purchase they were probably thinking of making when they typed "poker clothes" into Google: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/ugly-poker-clothes.html

Going south (and not for the winter)

After hanging out in poker rooms for not too long, you learn that one of the rules is that you can't take chips off the table until you take them all off when you're getting ready to finish your session. For example, you can't buy in for $200, win a big $600 pot, and put that profit in your pocket, keeping just the original $200 on the table to play with.

From the point of view of the other players, after you've had a nice win they want to have a chance to win their money back. From the point of view of the casino, more chips in play means bigger pots, higher rakes, and more players eager to join a table where there's lots of money to be won.

Those new to live play, however, sometimes don't know this. It's not terribly common, but maybe once a month or so, on average, I see somebody taking chips off of the table. It's usually quickly clear that they have no idea that this is against the rules and considered unethical. For the most part, as soon as somebody explains to them the rule and its purpose, they comply (or occasionally decide to leave, if they have made a big score and want to lock it up).

But I can recall at least two instances in which people rebelled. At Binion's once, a guy had had an amazing run and had accumulated something like $1300 in chips, which is pretty rare in a $1-2 game. A couple hundred of them had been mine. I was disappointed when he got up to leave. But I was surprised when he came back maybe 15 minutes later and bought back into the game for only about $200.

Most casinos have a one-hour rule, meaning that if you're gone for an hour or more you can re-enter the game for whatever minimum/maximum buy-in everybody else does, but being gone for less than an hour means that you have to put back into play whatever amount you left with, if it's over the maximum. This is to prevent people from getting around the rule by leaving and immediately returning, which would effectively be no different from just pocketing chips right at the table.*

Binion's has enough tables and traffic that it's easy for somebody to leave and come back soon thereafter without anybody noticing anything unusual. But when this guy came back to the same table he had just left, we all certainly noticed. I quietly walked over to the supervisor and told him what had happened. He was absolutely perfect about it--I wish I could remember his name and give him credit. He didn't embarrass this player at the table, but just asked to speak to him in private.

Well, their "private" didn't last long, because the troublemaker quickly became very loud and agitated. He didn't deny having taken away a large amount in chips, nor that he had been gone just a short time. Rather, he insisted that the floor guy was just wrong, that there was no such rule. This is a syndrome I've seen many times, and it always perplexes me: players (particularly out-of-town visitors) telling the room supervisor what the general rules of poker are, or, even more mysteriously, as in this case, telling him what the house rules are. The guy insisted that the same thing had happened the night before, and the shift supervisor there said there was no problem with his actions. Both I and the supervisor talking to him were extremely dubious that such a conversation took place.

Anyway, this imbecile kept arguing the point for maybe ten minutes. It was just nutty. He had several easy remedies: Come back in with the same amount he took off the table (he said he couldn't, because he had given it to his girlfriend, and she went somewhere else with it); sit out for the remainder of the hour; or just walk across the street to the Golden Nugget and play there instead. He could even have spent the hour playing a limit game at Binion's, because if you switch to a different game or different limits, it's as if you're starting out fresh, and what you won previously does not have to be put into play. I never did figure out why this guy got so agitated over something for which there were so many easy solutions, or why he instead chose the harder--impossible, actually--route of trying to convince the floor person that Binion's had no such rule. Well, other than the fact that he was a complete psychopath. That would kind of explain it.

The other time was at the Hilton. A tourist tried to give his friend something like $150 in chips to place a sports bet for him. I caught the dealer's attention to point out quietly what was happening, and the dealer informed him that he couldn't do that. The player wasn't happy about it, but didn't make much of a fuss.

But then just a few minutes later, when I looked up after being involved in a hand, I noticed that the guy was gone, and there were a lot fewer chips at his seat. Obviously, he had surreptitiously taken them away. I pointed this out to the dealer, and when the guy came back the floor person confronted him. He couldn't pretend not to have known the rule, since everybody had heard the dealer explain it to him. The guy admitted it, but still protested that he thought there shouldn't be such a rule. He finally agreed to put all the rest of what he had on him into play by buying more chips, but it was only about $50. (This appeared to be sincere--he emptied his wallet and pockets, and it didn't at all look to me like he had prepared to put on such a performance. He pretty clearly thought nobody would notice what he had done.) The rest of the money was now tied up in his sports bet, and he couldn't exactly get it back. The floor person accepted this, after explaining the situation to the table and asking if anybody objected. The dude was a really bad player, so we were happy to have him come back for whatever he had, even if it wasn't as much as he had disappeared with.

I've heard the term "squirrelling" applied to players who slip high-denomination chips off the table in knowing violation of the rule. (It's hard to do that with a large volume of low-denomination chips.) I had never heard the phrase "going south," for the same conduct, until the first time I watched Season 1 of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" (the re-viewing of which today triggered this post).

In one of the episodes, Freddy Deeb left the table to go smoke a cigarette. As he left, he hiked up his pants. Johnny Chan saw something that he thought was Freddy slipping chips into his pocket. On the tape it's pretty clear that he's just tugging on his pants, though he hand is right near the pocket. The producers later verified through their ongoing chip counts that no money had been removed, but the players didn't know that at the time. When Deeb returned, it caused five minutes of heated argument.

The strange thing about how the incident ended is that the floor guy they hired for the show (Bob Thompson) never resolved the question of whether Deeb had, in fact, removed chips from the table. Maybe he just thought (correctly) that it was extremely unlikely that Deeb would do such a thing, so the accusation didn't deserve actual investigation. (It does seem highly improbable. Even without cameras rolling and producers monitoring every pot to track who has how many chips all the time for the broadcast, Deeb is supremely confident in his ability to keep winning; he's not afraid of losing his profit, and if, for whatever reason, he felt like locking up a win, he would just quit the game.) If I had been in charge of settling the matter, I would have asked the table, "Does anybody claim to have actually seen Mr. Deeb remove chips when he left?" If the answer was no, then I would say, "All right, then, no more talk about it. It's done." If somebody claimed to have seen something, then it could be investigated.

Incidentally, this was another thing wrong with the poker in the awful movie "Lucky You" that I now realize I forgot to include in my previous list of criticisms (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-do-poker-movies-have-to-be-so-awful.html). On their first date, the two main characters go to Binion's poker room. She stakes him, because he's broke and she just got her first paycheck in Vegas. (Today's helpful hint: Borrowing money to play poker may not be the best idea for a first date.) He scores a pretty good win, with her watching all goo-goo-eyed at his prowess. Then she has to leave to go to work, but he's going to keep playing. He picks up a couple of stacks of chips, representing her share of the profit, and hands them to her. The writer of the script did at least have the decency to insert a line of Eric Bana's character asking the other players if anybody minds, and nobody does. That's where it became unbelievable. In the real world, somebody absolutely would protest the removal of that much of his stack from the table.

I used to be so paranoid about not violating this rule that if I received in a pot some sort of unusual, commemorative chip mixed in among the regular ones, and I wanted to add it to my collection of special-issue chips, I would ask the table if anybody objected to my keeping it as a souvenir. After doing this a few times and getting only "what kind of a dork are you?" looks, I realized that nobody is quite that obsessive about the rule. Since nobody would or could possibly object to, say, giving a cocktail waitress a $5 chip as a tip, it's a bit crazy to think that anybody would care about removing the same amount of money as a souvenir.

That said, after I had come to realize that I really didn't need to seek the other players' approval to stash away one chip, I got "caught" (I put that word in scare quotes, because I wasn't trying to hide anything about it) by a dealer at Caesars Palace. He assumed I didn't know the general rule. I told him I did, but I didn't think anybody would mind one commemorative chip. He agreed that it's unlikely anybody would care, but in the future I should ask anyway. I didn't argue the point, but I think his is a minority view. I have since then politely ignored his advice and have continued to give myself permission to put the occasional souvenir chip in my pocket without asking anybody, and without feeling guilty about it. If anybody has even noticed, they haven't said anything about it.

Some poker rooms will also allow a player to use chips from the table to buy into a tournament that's going to be starting soon. This isn't unreasonable or unfair to the other players, since the person in question is presumably going to be taking all of his chips away pretty soon to play in the tournament.

But in general, if you have some reason to want to remove, say, more than 5% of what's in front of you, you should definitely ask the dealer if it's OK. He or she can then tell you the rule, or poll the other players, or have the floor person make a decision. If you're told you can't do it, for heaven's sake don't be a dickwad about it. Find some other above-board (i.e., not squirrelling) way to accomplish whatever it is you need to do, or just end your poker session right then. There's always another game going on somewhere else, or at the same place later, that you can get into.

And above all, don't argue about it. You will lose the argument, sour everybody that's exposed to your stupid ranting, and just end up looking like a jerk in the process.


*I wish that casinos would push the time limit up to, say, three hours. There is at least one regular at the Hilton who routinely locks away any decent-sized win by leaving and watching sports for one hour, then coming back and starting out afresh. It's seriously annoying--and unfair--to the other players. Three hours would be enough that much of the table composition would have changed, and it wouldn't feel as if somebody is just skirting the usual convention. The casino I used to play at most in Wisconsin had a three-hour rule, and I was suprised, when I moved here, to learn that most places have only a one-hour rule.

Blogger championship

Finished in 800th place out of 1337 in the PokerStars blogger freeroll. Hmmm. Maybe not my most impressive performance ever. But I did outlast Wil Wheaton!

Poker gems, #37

Gabe Kaplan, on GSN's "High Stakes Poker," Season 1, episode 4, noting that Eli Elezra and Sammy Farha were sitting next to and needling each other:

Look at this. You've got an Israeli and a Lebanese, the best of friends. They should have U.N. meetings at the poker table. There'd be no wars--unless one country slow-rolled another.

Poker gems, #36

T. J. Cloutier, as quoted in Larry W. Phillips, The Tao of Poker, p. 196:

Just because you lost the last five hands in a row doesn't mean that you're going to lose the sixth one. The odds never change, the odds on the sixth hand are the same as they were on the first one. But you don't feel the same about it--nobody ever does.

This would drive me crazy!

I thought that by now I had seen nearly every kind of problem a dealer could introduce (intentionally or accidentally) into a poker game. But today, while catching up on reading some other poker blogs, I learned that the standard way of managing pots in British poker rooms is pure nuttiness--truly inexplicable why it would ever have begun, let alone been continued for so long. I can't improve on Lee Jones's description of the procedure and the problems it creates, so I'll just link to it. This whole "Bigger Deal" blog, by the way, may be the very tippy-top in the poker blogging world in terms of the consistent quality of writing. It's always a pleasure to read.

http://www.biggerdeal.com/2007/09/26/who-came-up-with-this-dealing-protocol/

The class of Doyle Brunson (non-grumpy content)

I'll confess to having pirated, downloaded copies of every episode of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" on my hard drive. I love that show. It's simply the best poker ever broadcast.

Anyway, today I was watching again an episode from the first season, and it reminded me of the conclusion of the incident, which didn't occur until the second season.

Doyle Brunson and Ted Forrest were in a hand together. Doyle missed his hand, but made a big bluff bet on the river. Ted called. Doyle knew he was beat without even seeing Ted's cards (because Doyle didn't even have a pair), and resignedly said, "Good call." But he then muttered "I know better than to bluff an idiot." He had just a hint of a smile when he said it, but you have to look closely. Doyle does not really think Ted is an idiot--far from it, he put his big money on Ted to take on Andy Beal in their famous series of heads-up matches, which isn't the sort of thing you'd do if you genuinely thought somebody was an idiot at the game. So nobody who knows their history would take it as anything more than a little needle between friends. But, of course, if you don't know them, it looked really nasty.

Nothing more is said about this until season 2, episode 13. Doyle is there, and when Gus Hansen leaves, Ted arrives to take the seat. Before he even sits down, Doyle speaks up: "Ted, I want to apologize to you." Ted is truly puzzled--he has no idea what it's about. He asks, "For what, Doyle?" Doyle says, "I called you an idiot on national television." The whole table breaks into laughter. Ted smiles and says, "Yeah, I saw that." Doyle continues, "I didn't mean to do it." Ted replies, "It's OK, I've got thick skin."

I'm sure that those two had lots of face time together between the airing of the first show and the taping of the second one, but this was the first time that Doyle had approximately the same audience, so that he could make his apology as public as the insult had been.

Lots of people have long memories for when somebody has offended them, but not many tend to remember as long and as well when they have been the offender. It's pretty classy to come back on the show a year later and use the first opportunity to make amends.

I do try hard not to insult other people at the poker table, no matter how provoked. But if I ever slip, I hope I live up to Doyle's example of setting it right again the first chance I have.

Addendum, October 22, 2007

As another example of Doyle's classiness, he writes this in his new book, My 50 Most Memorable Hands:

I've always been a stickler for rules and try to observe them. If a situation comes up when I'm playing poker--even if the floorman rules in my favor--I make it a point to ask: "If my name was John Smith would you make the same ruling?" I don't expect, nor do I want, any favoritism just because I've been around for a long time. I think most rules are made for a purpose and have to be strictly enforced to be effective.

Online poker comic strip (non-grumpy content)

This has been going three times a week since last fall, but I just discovered it today. It's a must-see. The link is to the first one, then just keep clicking on "next."

http://plusev.net/d/20060811.html

More on religion at the poker table

I previously wrote about some of the strange (in my view) things that Jerry Yang did at the final table of the World Series of Poker main event: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/mr-destiny.html At the time, I had watched the event live. Now, though, I've seen ESPN's broadcast. I taped it last night, so I can transcribe some things accurately, instead of relying on memory. Moreover, ESPN's multiple cameras and microphones caught things that weren't shown on the live broadcast. In terms of overt religiosity, there was even more strangeness than I knew.

In the hand in which Jerry Yang eliminated Lee Watkinson, Yang raised pre-flop with A-9, then Watkinson moved all-in with A-7. While Yang was thinking about what to do, Watkinson's financee, whose name is Timmi Derosa (see http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=56512), is seen on the sidelines. She says, "If he calls, he's gonna double Lee up. No weapon formed against him shall prosper."

This appears to be an allusion to Isaiah 54:17: "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and their righteousness is of me, saith the LORD." (King James Version.)

So apparently Lee Watkinson is, according to his fiancee, a servant of the Lord, and as a result, he can't lose a hand of poker.

She repeats this a few seconds later, after Yang announces his call. Looking upward, she yells, "Come on, Father. In Jesus's name. No weapon formed against you shall prosper."

Note the little change of pronoun there, from "him" to "you." Now she is saying not that Yang is a weapon against Lee, the Lord's servant, but against God himself! Wow! I wonder what Yang did to deserve being accused of being a weapon formed against God, and how Derosa knows whatever this deep, dark secret is. But either way, whether one conspires to defeat the Lord or just the Lord's servant, one is obviously destined to fail.

Except that--OOPS!--Yang won the hand, and Watkinson was bumped out of the tournament. Hmmm. I guess that makes Ms. Derosa a false prophet. And what does the Bible say about false prophets?

But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I
have not commanded him to speak...even that prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously.... (Deuteronomy 18:20-22, KJV.)

I'm not sure if that bit about the false prophet dying means that the religious community has an affirmative obligation to off Ms. Derosa, or if the good Lord will take care of that himself. Assuming, though, that she believes this passage to be true, she ought to be sure she has her affairs in order.

After the flop and turn haven't helped Watkinson's inferior hand, and only the river can save him, Derosa closes her eyes and says, "C'mon. Make him a believer. Make Lee a believer, Father." I don't know how to interpret this. Is this rhetorical, or is Lee not of the same faith as his fiancee? Well, if he wasn't, I doubt that this hand converted him.

Making this hand even more bizarre was Yang's simultaneous prayers for a contrary result: "Come on, Lord. You know your purpose for me.... You have a purpose for me today.... Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, c'mon, let me win this one." Norman Chad picked up on the strangeness of these dueling prayers, and said, "I'm not sure who the Lord is listening to."

I'm just speculating here, but perhaps Derosa's prayers were less effective than Yang's because God was offended by her vanity. Based on the shots of her on the ESPN broadcast, it appears that she has had way too many collagen injections to plump up her lips, a visual effect that is accentuated by her use of dark lip-liner. Or maybe she got stung by a bee, or maybe Watkinson smacks her around. Who knows? Whatever the cause, it looks awfully strange and unnatural. "Surely God will not hear vanity, neither will the Almighty regard it." (Job 35:13, KJV.) "Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity" (Psalms 24:3-4, KJV.)

But back to the Dueling Christians. I can't help thinking of one of the coolest stories in the Bible: Elijah and the priests of Baal (1 Kings, ch. 18). Elijah sets up a contest between him and the priests of Baal, to see which deity will better respond to entreaties and an animal sacrifice, by miraculously lighting a fire under the sacrificial altar. The priests of Baal pray all day, even cutting themselves with knives in an apparent show of devotion. But nothing happens. Then Elijah takes his turn. In a showy display of confidence (and, I suppose, to ensure that nobody thinks he was cheating and somehow had fire hidden away), he has servants come and dowse the entire altar with barrels of water three times, then dig a trench all around the altar and fill that with water, too. Then he utters a simple prayer, and WHOOSH! Fire leaps down from heaven and consumes the whole thing. Then, of course, he has the priests of Baal slaughtered, because no showdown is really complete without that. When you go all-in against the Lord, he apparently takes it very seriously, man.

The difference here is that, presumably, Derosa and Yang were praying to the same god, which makes the whole thing sort of a "Heads I win, tails you lose" situation. No matter how the cards fall, one camp or the other can say that Jesus was on their side. Which makes the bizarre incident a heck of a lot less compelling than successfully calling down fire from heaven. Oh well--maybe the god Yang and Derosa were praying to isn't really the same one that Elijah had on his side. Or maybe his powers have weakened over the centuries, and now all he can manage as a manifestation of his power is a little card trick. If Elijah had been at the WSOP final table, I assume that he would have stepped back, invoked a curse on his opponents for daring to stand in his way, and the whole table would have been consumed in a massive inferno from above. That would have been a lot faster than the 14 hours or so that it took Yang to defeat his opponents the hard way--and it would have been a lot cooler to watch.

Moving on, we have the hand in which Yang's J-8 outdrew Lee Childs's J-K to eliminate the latter. Again we get to eavesdrop on Yang's praying: "Father, I will glorify your name.... Let people see your miracle. I believe in your name." Of course, he only says this after the "miracle" 8 hits on the turn to give him the winning pair. But again, what a weak, pathetic kind of "miracle" this is, compared to, say, turning water into wine, healing the blind, raising the dead, feeding 5000 people with one loaf of bread, making a mule speak, sending manna from heaven, bringing down the walls of Jericho, etc.

Later, Yang calls an all-in bet from Alex Kravchenko before the flop. The latter has pocket 3s, and makes a set of them on the flop. Yang has just an offsuit K-Q, and is drawing dead. That is, by the usual rules of poker Yang cannot win the hand no matter what cards come on the turn and river. And in this situation there is a conspicuous absence of praying from Yang. Why? Does he have so little faith in his deity that he just assumes that he has lost? Even without going so far as to consume the entire table in a fiery blast, surely the Lord could, for example, make the dealer put out on the turn or river a card that was an exact duplicate of one already there (or of one in one of the players' hands). If there were found to be, e.g., two 8 of clubs in the deck, it would be declared to be a "fouled deck," and all the money put into the pot on that hand would be returned to the players. It's like the poker version of a children's "do over." Can't Yang's god perform even so trivial a miracle as that?*

I noticed that frequently after winning a hand, Yang and/or his family could be seen and heard saying "Hallelujah," which presumably means, to them, something akin to "Praise God." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah.) But oddly, we never see that happen when he loses a hand. I don't know how to interpret this discrepancy. Perhaps they declared their praise exactly the same either way, and it was edited out--though that seems unlikely. Assuming that they praised God when winning but not when losing, I have to wonder about the theological implications. Do they attribute winning hands to God's intervention, but not losing hands? If so, on what basis? Don't they believe that God is controlling everything that happens, for good or for ill? Wouldn't consistency require that they praise God for making Yang lose hands, too, since that presumably fulfills whatever his mysterious purposes might be? Hey, if Kevin Bacon in "Animal House" can choke out a "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" after getting whacked with a paddle (see http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=351627), surely Christians can respond to the small adversity of losing a poker hand with praise for the being that they believe controlled how the cards were shuffled and how the betting went down, right?

Overall, I'd have to say that if the best evidence for God's intervention in poker that so-called Christians can muster is that a mediocre player (and after watching the final table, there is no doubt that that's what Yang is) can get lucky and win the WSOP main event, then I'm going to have to hold to my conclusion that prayers such as Yang's and Derosa's are just a showy, weird, embarrassing, and slightly demented version of rubbing a lucky rabbit's foot--and precisely as effective.

Too bad ESPN cut out Norman Chad's great line during his post-match interview with Yang: "Do you think this is the most poker the Lord has ever watched over?"


* NBC ran an interesting invitational poker series last year: the "Pro-Am Equalizer," in which celebrity amateur players were given a substantially larger starting stack than the pros at the table. In one event, Penn Jillette (of "Penn and Teller" fame) was playing. With the river card yet to come, he was drawing dead in a hand in which he and his opponent were all-in. He said, "The only way I can win now is if they let me deal." This was a very funny line, coming from a man who is a genuine expert on slight-of-hand and card cheating. (He has even published a book on how poker cheaters work. See http://tinyurl.com/yrun4s.) I assume that if he were inclined to show off, in a situation in which nothing was at stake (so that it wasn't really cheating), that's one of the ways in which Penn, handed the deck of cards to deal the river, would resolve the dilemma in his favor. He can't win, but he could at least force the hand to be nullified by slipping a duplicate card into the deck. It doesn't say much for Yang's god if he isn't even as powerful a conjurer as Penn Jillette.

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.