Today's helpful hints, miscellaneous

1

If you order the "Fudge Cake Collision" at the Grand Lux Cafe at the Venetian, bring a friend to share it with. Or two. Or three. It's that big. (See above.)


2

Try the jerk chicken at Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville" restaurant (inside the Flamingo) sometime. Very tasty. I hadn't eaten at that place before, and it was really quite nice. I liked the continuous-running Buffet music videos playing on a big screen. Different atmosphere than you'll get anywhere else in town.


3

If you should happen to lock your keys in your car in a casino parking garage--let's say, Sam's Town, to name a completely random example--their security people will not open it for you, quoting some rot about liability for damages, but will helpfully hand you the telephone number of a locksmith. A mere 45 minutes and $45 later, you can be on your merry way.


4

If you pre-pay for a line or two of late-afternoon bowling at a local set of lanes associated with a hotel-casino--let's say, Sam's Town, to name a completely random example--and then decide that you could do one more before heading off for dinner, and so you go up to the desk to pay for another game, and it happens, unbeknownst to you, to be close to the time that they will be starting their league night activities, they will not politely say something like, "I'm sorry, but we have league bowling starting in about 15 minutes, and can't have any new games start now," but instead will convey that same basic message to you in a startling mixture of incredulity and exasperation, with a combination of body language, facial expression, and tone of voice that will unambiguously convey that you are a complete idiot for not having known in advance that you couldn't start a game after 4:30, due to their league commitments, because, after all, doesn't everybody on Planet Earth know that already, you imbecile?

(I believe I just broke my own record for longest sentence there. Good thing I'm not back in junior high school, with the assignment to diagram the grammar of it.)


5

The musical dancing-waters fountain shows in front of the Bellagio really are nice to watch--no matter how many times you've seen them before--whatever song they choose to choreograph. (Hmmm. Seems like we need a different word for what it is they do. Maybe "aqueograph.") If you're entertaining out-of-town visitors, it's a near cinch that they will enjoy it.


6

The "Poker Shrink" (http://www.pokerblog.com/tags/poker+shrink) has a blog entry pointing to a BBC Science site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml) on which you can look at 20 smiles and test yourself to see how good you are at discerning the genuine smiles from the forced ones. He points out that while this specific ability is not necessarily useful for poker, it is part of a whole package of being able to gain insight into people's emotional states from non-verbal manifestations. I got 16 out of 20 right. It's an interesting way to spend five minutes of your life.

Poker gems, #72

Good advice never goes out of style. This gem comes from William J. Florence (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Florence), who in addition to his acting acclaim wrote one of the first books on how to play poker: The Gentleman's Handbook on Poker, 1890. The following excerpt is as quoted in Graham Sharpe, Poker's Strangest Hands, p. 51.

The strong point in poker is never to lose your temper, either with those you are playing with or more particularly with the cards. There is no sympathy at poker. Always keep cool. If you lose your head you will lose all your chips. Poker being as much a criterion of character as anything else, keep in the shade your personalities.

Something may have changed

I've mentioned several times that I don't play much online because I'm not particularly good at it. I'm not entirely sure if I'm an overall winner or loser. I've had two big tournament wins, for about $5000 each, one about two years ago and one about three years ago. Trust me--they were mostly flukes of luck. The amount that I have reloaded into various accounts is probably close to that, but I'm probably still a bit on the good end of it all. (That all occurred before I started keeping good records.)

Anyway, this week I decided that maybe it was time to give online poker another shot. After all, if I'm going to consider myself a professional, I shouldn't have such a glaring weak point. I should at least be working on making it less weak. So I loaded $100 into four different sites, and started playing two or three $10 single-table tournaments (sit 'n' gos) every day.

Something is different.

I'm actually winning with decent consistency.

I keep getting messages like this one from Poker Stars:

"PokerStars Tournament #74826117, No Limit Hold'em
Buy-In: $10.00/$1.00
9 players
Total Prize Pool: $90.00
Tournament started - 2008/01/23 - 04:34:53 (ET)
Dear Rakewell1,
You finished the tournament in 1st place.
A $45.00 award has been credited to your Real Money account."

Maybe the several hundred hours sitting at real casino tables since the last time I mounted any kind of meaningful attempt at playing online has had some bleed-over effect. I feel as though I have a better sense of where I am in a hand than I used to. Used to be that I felt I was groping my way through the darkness. An opponent betting with the nuts or on a complete bluff felt just the same to me, if I couldn't see him face to face. It feels somewhat less murky now. Betting patterns speak to me at least a little more clearly than they used to.

On the other hand, it may be dumb luck, because I have been saved by some absolutely ridiculous, embarrassing suckouts. Then again, I've been clobbered by nearly as many, and both sides of that tend to be true of nearly every tournament winner.

I guess time will tell whether or not something has really changed--in either my play, the opposition, or both.

But there is hope that I won't forever have to shun half of the poker world out of fear.

A pox on the "button straddle"

Every time I think I know everything about poker--at least about rules and procedures--I'm proven wrong.

Last night at the Rio a player was putting in a straddle bet from the button. This is something I had never seen before. The dealer would announce "button straddle."

Looking around the internet, it appears that this is the same thing as is elsewhere called a "Mississippi straddle." I have heard of that before, but only in the context of players asking dealers in other casinos if it was allowed, and the answer was always "no," so I never explored how it worked. I was surprised to learn that the Rio allows it.

The player on the button can post double the big blind before the cards are dealt. The pre-flop action then starts with the small and big blinds, concluding with the button. In other words, the button gets to act last on every round of betting, not just the three after the flop.

I don't like this at all. With the common straddle, the players in the blinds only have their relative position altered slightly. The big blind, instead of being last to act before the flop, is next-to-last. This isn't much of a change, and if the action has gone all the way around without a raise, the blinds can limp in with only the straddler left as a possible raiser behind. But with the button straddle, the players in the blinds have their relative order of action shifted radically, from last or almost last to first. If they choose to limp in, there is the whole table of people yet to act behind who might raise, rather than just the straddler. That makes a huge difference in whether one judges it to be worth calling from the small blind.

I don't think a player should be able to alter the order of play that dramatically.

There is nothing about this in the poker rule books that I have. It isn't even included in Michael Wiesenberg's poker dictionary (see http://www.poker1.com/mcu/mculib_dictionary.asp). I find precious little intelligent discussion of its merits and demerits in the various poker forums. All of which means that I don't have thoughtful commentary from reliable sources that might help me see aspects of this variation that are at present escaping me. For that reason, I'll keep an open mind on the subject for now. Maybe there are decent arguments that would make me revise my opinion.

But for now, I think it stinks.

(Had another small profit at the Rio today, and picked up another nice batch of colorful chips, as shown above.)

"That guy didn't bet his full house!"

Last story from tonight's session at the Rio.

I'm in the small blind of a $1-$3 no-limit hold'em game. I have a J-2, an awful, despicable hand. But about five other players limp in ahead of me, so the pot odds are probably right to throw another $2 at this trash in the hopes of hitting something juicy, like two pairs. The big blind checks behind me.

The flop is Q-Q-J. Yuck. It gets checked all around. Everybody who doesn't have a queen in his hand is suspicious that somebody else does have one and is lurking like a snake in the grass, waiting for somebody else to bet, so he can pounce on it with a raise.

The turn card is another jack. This is interesting, because now I have a full house, jacks full of queens. But, of course, I'm crushed if anybody was, in fact, slow-playing a queen, because he would now have queens full of jacks. Nevertheless, there's a decent chance that nobody is sitting on a queen. So I bet $10. I get called by the guy two seats to my right (in the cutoff seat).

At this point, I naturally assume that he has either a queen or a jack, and I see no point in wasting any more money on this hand. The river card is a meaningless brick. I check, and my last remaining opponent checks behind me. He has A-4, giving him the two pair on the board with an ace kicker.

Before he sees my cards, he says, "We must be chopping it up." In other words, he concluded that I must have an ace, too. When he sees my full house, his eyes bug out. "You didn't bet that????" (Yes, there were actually four question marks in his voice. Precisely. I counted them.) He laughed, and then I heard him turning to the people on his right, and he said to them, "That guy didn't bet his full house!" To him, it was abdunantly clear that I was the dumbest poker player the world had ever produced. He added, though, "I guess it doesn't matter--I wouldn't have called another bet anyway."

I don't give poker lessons at the table, but I don't mind giving them to my faithful readers. (I'm confident that many readers will already understand the logic behind checking instead of betting there, but surely this will be a new concept to at least some.)

Betting on the river would be a classic example of what is technically known as a "zero-equity bet." Putting it more colloquially, it is commonly said that in that situation, "You'll only get called if you're beat."

My oh-so-knowledgeable opponent appears to have had at least a glimmer of insight into this, when he said that he wouldn't have called another bet on the river. Presumably, he would correctly interpret such a bet to mean that I had either a jack or a queen, and from his point of view it wouldn't matter whether I had the big full house or the little one, because he would lose either way if he called.

If my opponent had a jack, then he would probably call, and we would just split the pot, meaning that the river bet gained me no profit. If, though, he had a queen, he would raise, and I would be forced to either fold, thus wasting whatever I had bet, or make a bad call, and lose even more.

The only way I make money with a bet on the end there is if I'm up against a complete novice (or drunk) who has absolutely no clue what he's doing, or, possibly, a timid player who would fold a jack. But it's far more likely that my opponent has a queen than that either of these scenarios is happening. In other words, if I bet there every time over the course of 100 such situations, I will lose that bet to a guy with a queen more times than I will get called by a guy with no full house, or win the whole pot (rather than splitting it) from a guy with a jack. In the long run, betting at that point costs me money. It gains me nothing.

There are only two reasons to bet in poker after all the cards have been dealt out: To get a weaker hand to call, and to get a stronger hand to fold. There are no other useful goals for betting the river (assuming that you're playing in order to make money, rather than for reasons of ego, etc.). In the situation described, there is no hand stronger than my full house that will fold, and no hand weaker than mine that will call, assuming that the opponent is not a blithering idiot.

But the guy at the table tonight can't think that deeply about the game. He's what we call a "level one" player, focused only on what the cards are. To him, the logic is this: "I have a full house! That's a great hand! I'm going to bet!" The analysis stops there.

At the risk of sounding self-absorbed, it is very, very good for me that the poker rooms of this city teem with players whose thinking is that shallow. They keep my bills paid. At the same time, though, it's a little sad that there are so many people who put so little thought into a game that so richly rewards deep pondering with both intellectual satifsaction and monetary gains. (Not that this particular concept is really deep. It's not quite Poker 101, but thinking about why one should or should not bet in a given spot is certainly not much further along than, say, Poker 201.)

Another stupid Rio house policy

In addition to the miserly way the Rio handles comps (see immediately preceding post below), I observed something else there tonight that had previous escaped my attention.

I noticed a dealer give the deck a riffle shuffle before inserting it into the Shufflemaster. I thought this was odd, but didn't say anything about it--until I saw him do it again after the next hand was completed.

I asked whether that practice was mandatory at the Rio, or just his own little flourish. He said it is their policy. I asked, a bit sarcastically, "So random order isn't good enough, it has to be extra-random?"

He was a good sport and laughed. He acknowledged that it's a pointless gesture. He said that he thought it was just to placate the occasional patron who didn't trust the machine to actually be doing what it's supposed to do.

What rot! (I mean, that probably is the reason for the policy--but it's still stupid.) This is exactly like the idiocy of players asking for some special extra randomizing step (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/give-em-good-wash-would-ya.html).

Hey, Rio poker room management, hear this: You can't get the cards any more random than random. If you don't trust the Shufflemasters to be giving fair shuffles, then get rid of them. If you do trust them, then deep-six an idiotic policy that caters to the occasional dunderhead who can't grasp the concept of randomness.

Sure, it's only about four extra seconds per hand of poker, but why waste even that much time? You presumably paid out the big bucks for the shuffle machines in order to speed up the game and put out more hands per hour, right? So then what is the point of slowing things down to placate morons? It would make just as much sense to anoint your dealers priests in some voodoo religion, and have them throw salt over their shoulders while incanting a few magic words, before putting the cards in the machine. That might make some imbecile players feel that good luck has been properly infused into the deck, and wouldn't waste any more time than the superfluous shuffle, so why not? Your current policy is every bit as pointless, stupid, and wasteful of players' time as a phony magical ritual would be.


Addendum, January 22, 2008

I was at the Rio again this evening, and noticed that the dealers were not doing a pre-shuffle shuffle. So I asked the shift supervisor whether it was a house policy or not. He said that it used to be, but isn't any more. That would explain the inconsistency. Maybe last night's dealer didn't get the memo on the change, or had just developed a habit that he hadn't broken.

The Rio is chintzy with their comps

Most Las Vegas poker rooms give their frequent players $1 in credits toward food purchases at the property's restaurants for every hour of play. A couple of places (Binion's, Treasure Island) double that. A few (Sam's Town, Golden Nugget) don't keep track at all, and whether they will write you a ticket for a few bucks off the buffet is completely up the discretion of the shift supervisor that happens to be working that day.

At the Hilton, the dollars earned were cumulative, in that there was no limit to how many you used in a day, as long as you had them in your "bank." I don't eat out a lot, so in the poker rooms where I play a lot, I tend to build up comp credits faster than I can use them. My favorite way of using them is at a time when I'm not playing, but have a date, or family or friends coming from out of town that I can treat for free.

I had blithely assumed that most or all places worked roughly like the Hilton did. I was surprised to learn tonight that that is not necessarily so.

My sister is coming to town this week with her husband for a convention related to their family business, so I want to take them out somewhere nice to eat. I was thinking that the Rio had some good choices, between their popular buffet, the high-end Voodoo Steak and Lounge, and the brand-new Rub barbecue place.

So when I finished playing poker, I asked the shift supervisor about how the comps work, what I need to do to redeem them, etc. Frankly, I don't have enough built up yet to put much of a dent in a three-person restaurant tab, but I thought I might as well use what I have. I was disappointed to hear that they limit payouts to $8/day--no matter how many credits one has accumulated.

How cheap can you get??? From the poker room's point of view, what possible difference can it make if I take out $8 a day for ten straight days or $80 all at once, so that I can treat friends or family, instead of just stuffing my own face? This just reeks of somebody in upper management making a tightwad decision that favors saving a few bucks over doing something that would please customers.

It's bad enough that poker players are already universally regarded as second-class citizens as far as casino comps are concerned. I understand the reason for that--we don't give them as much profit as the brain-dead zombies that pour their paychecks into slot machines, and some poker rooms are even loss leaders for the casinos. But once you've decided to throw us a bone, how about making it one with a tiny scrap of meat left on it, rather than doing the bare minimum you grudgingly have to do just to keep up with the competition across the street? Why not at least try to give the illusion that you care about the riff-raff that sit their butts for unnaturally long stretches at your poker tables? What's next--I need a note from my mother and/or my doctor in order to cash out a few comp bucks?

To his credit, the guy on duty, when I explained the situation, said that he could do $8 a day, with a ten-day expiration on each ticket, and I could then use them all at once. So that's something--but still, what a horrible image it conveys that the employees and I have to pull such nonsense in order to wriggle around a stupid limitation that shouldn't be there in the first place.

I'm seriously still considering making the Rio my main base of operations. I've played there four sessions now--all short ones, totaling only 6.6 hours--and it has been highly profitable, three winning sessions and one loss, for a net uptick of $1026, which works out to about $156/hour. I don't expect that will be sustained over the long run, but it's an enticing start to what could be a beautiful relationship. I hate that this tightfisted, sour note was injected into it so early.

(Despite their stupid comp policy, the Rio does have an awfully nice assortment of souvenir chips, another handful of which I picked up tonight, as shown above.)

Love the shirt!

After I finished playing poker at the Rio tonight, I went for a stroll through the property to see what restaurants were there that I might want to try some day. I passed the World Series of Poker merchandise store (which I didn't even know existed). They had signs announcing 70% off of all "2007 WSOP" stuff, so I bought a $40 sweatshirt for $12. I don't usually wear poker clothing, but something innocuous that like is OK with me. I'll have to endure the occasional question of why I'm wearing the sweatshirt when I didn't set foot near the place during the Series, but that's OK.

If I were inclined to wear poker-themed clothes more than I do, I certainly wouldn't include in the lineup ones that are taunting--there's way too much potential for somebody to take it personally, or for it to get turned back against me if I get unlucky or make a bad play. I don't need that extra bit of grief in my life.

However, if I were predisposed to wearing such items, the one pictured above would go on my list. As such things go, it's a very nice in-your-face jibe. As I say, it's not my style, but I can appreciate the humor in it.

I'm also reminded that I saw in a blog post from the WSOP (sorry, don't remember whose it was) claiming that the author had seen a player at the table wearing a T-shirt that said, "Your sunglasses can't hide that you suck." Now that's a message that more players need to hear!

Poker gems, #71

Graham Sharpe, in Poker's Strangest Hands, pp. 38-39. The story involves Wild Bill Hickok and a frequent opponent identified only as "McDonald."


They sat down again in a no-limit, one-on-one game, drinking as they played. Midnight came and the game was still going strong. Bill had picked up what he thought was a winning hand and was betting accordingly.

Finally, McDonald showed his hand--three jacks.

"I have a full house--three aces and a pair of sixes," declared Bill, throwing his cards face down on the table.

McDonald lifted them one by one. "I see only two aces and one six."

Bill whipped out his six-shooter, saying, "Here's my other six." Then he produced a knife--"And here's my one-spot."

McDonald knew when he was beaten and conceded the pot.

[Grump's editorial note: This kind of conduct is now frowned upon in most of the better Las Vegas casinos.]

Stratosphere upgrades by making things, uh, worse

The Stratosphere was on my mind yesterday, for a pretty strange reason. As I woke up in the morning, my radio was tuned to public radio, and they had a story about fire safety. The Stratosphere was mentioned as an example of a new breed of tall buildings that rely on elevators to evacuate occupants in case of fire, rather than the instructions we've all gotten used to, telling us to use the stairs, not the elevators, in an emergency. See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18212200.

So when I couldn't get anything going at Harrah's and was headed home, it occurred to me that it was probably a good day to check out the brand-new poker room that the Strat has been advertising lately.

I liked the old poker room there. It was small and homey, maybe six tables. It had consistently among the softest competition in town. The main thing that kept me from visiting more frequently was the inconsistency with which they had any action going. I hadn't been there since April.

The first thing I inevitably noticed about the new room is that it's a long hike from the parking garage. The old one was right at the base of the escalator, as convenient as it could be. Now you have to walk to the far end of the casino. A small point, but an annoyance. At least, though, they did change the signs, so it's easy to navigate your way there.

The new room is much larger, probably twice as many tables. I was stunned to see how many were in action--at least eight, including both the midnight tournament and several live games. This was more than the old room could have handled at full capacity. So in that sense, the move was both smart and necessary.

Fortunately, the competition appeared not to have gotten any better. There was a nice mix of frightened players that I could bluff and push around, calling stations who would pay off my big hands, and a couple of completely predictable rocks, who basically played with their cards face up. There was only one smart, tricky player who could pose a serious threat of taking my stack if I weren't careful, but I was lucky enough to tangle with him only twice, both of which times I had the second nuts, and was pretty sure he didn't have the joint. My kind of table, for sure. Uptick $348 in 2.7 hours.

One mildly interesting hand: I ended up on the bad end of another set-over-set situation (unusual in that it's the second time in a week this has happened; see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/news-flash-grump-hits-one-outer-on.html), and made money from it, even without sucking out. I had J-J and put in a raise. Two previous limpers called. Limper A was the smart, tricky player. Limper B was new to the table, bought in for the minimum, and didn't have much left. I had no read on his play. Flop was A-J-x, rainbow. It was checked to me, so I put in a bet of about 2/3 of the pot. Limper A called, Limper B went all-in for maybe $4 more than I had bet. With no straight possibilities, I had the second nuts and was not worried. The turn put a second spade on the board, but still no possible straight. I bet $50 when it was checked to me. Limper A reluctantly called. Same on the river, which was another blank--I bet another $75 and got called. I showed my set of jacks. My opponent nodded grimly and quietly mucked. (I'm guessing he had A-K or A-Q.) I was stunned as all get-out when Limper B flipped over the only hand that could beat me: pocket aces. But the $125 I got from the other guy on the turn and river far outweighed the $40 or so that I lost to the higher set. If he had started with more money, I would have lost it all to him, never suspecting in a million years that he was sitting on aces.

The other good news from the Stratosphere is that they have dropped the rake. This doesn't really matter much to me, though. My tight-aggressive style means that most of my profit (or loss) come in a handful of big pots in a session. If the house takes a max of $3 (Stratosphere, Palms, and I think a couple of other places) versus $4 (standard) versus $5 (Harrah's properties), it's an undetectable change to my hourly earning rate. Still, all else being equal, I'm happy to have an extra buck or two left in the pot.

They also have a dizzying array of promotions. Aces cracked gets you $25, 24 hours a day (most such promotions are only on slow days or during slow times of the day). There is a freeroll tournament for frequent players. There are high-hand and bad-beat jackpots. One that I've never seen before is that for all daily tournaments on the first Monday of the month the winner gets double the payout, because the house matches his share of the prize pool (if I read the sign correctly).

Unfortunately, the new poker room is open to the casino. The old one had walls on three sides, and was only open to the sports book on the fourth side. That made it one of the better rooms in the city for keeping down the noise and smoke. The new room just has a half-wall around three sides, and inconsiderate jerks in the casino lean right over the wall with their cigarettes, blowing their smoke in. There is also a lounge right next door, and the salsa music was loud enough that it was difficult for players at the table to hear each other, or hear the dealer. Dealers had tremendous difficulty getting attention from the floor (for fills, decisions, bonus payouts, or whatever), because they couldn't shout loudly enough to be heard over the racket. I had a headache within an hour.

I hate smoke and noise in a poker room. They are the two biggest deterrants for me (after a place being impracticably far from my apartment and being so slow that there is no game going).

Overall, the new Stratosphere poker room now reminds me of the Sahara in nearly every respect. It's a place I'll visit when I want an easy score and I'm willing to put up with the repulsive level of noise and smoke to get it. I preferred the peace and quiet of the old room, even if it meant I could only find a game at peak hours.

Superman playing poker, part 2

From Anthony Proctor, the reader who brought us the original Superman-playing-poker image (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/superman-playing-poker.html), comes this imaginary chip. He notes in the email to me, "It's a lead-clay composite, of course."

Maybe the best poker chip ever

Oh yeah! I think every casino ought to issue at least one "Dogs Playing Poker" commemorative chip. It should be, like, a federal law or something. Good for Harrah's for leading the way!

Miscellaneous online poker annoyances

Installing updates

I find it irritating that when I feel like playing, the sites won't let me on until I have installed their latest software upgrade. This is particularly true for the sites like Full Tilt that, for whatever reason, release new versions every few days. This is most obnoxious when there's a specific tournament I'm signed up for, which is about to start, and then I have to endure the delay of the download before I can join in. Thankfully I'm past the days of using a dial-up connection, but I can imagine how painfully slow this process would be for those users.

If I were in charge of such operations, in the dialog box that asks for permission to install the latest version of the software, I'd also have an option to allow the user to play the current session with the older software, then download and install the newest version when logging off. That way it can occur in the background, and doesn't delay me getting to the games. It's such a simple and obvious fix--can it really be that nobody else has thought of this?

Desktop shortcuts

Every time you use some of the online poker sites, their software checks to see if you have a shortcut on your PC desktop, and if you don't, it sticks one there, without asking if you want it or not. I'm looking at you, Bodog, and you, Ultimate Bet. If I wanted a desktop shortcut, I would have put it there! It's not exactly the most complicated operation in the world. Instead, after every time I play on one of those sites, I have to delete the shortcut it installs. Yeah, it's only three seconds out of my life, but it's irritating nonetheless.

Drug-related screen names and avatars

For the life of me I can't figure out what the hell is wrong with people that they would choose a poker screen name with reference to their recreational drug use, particularly the ubiquitous "420." Look, as a good libertarian kind of guy, I don't care one bit what you ingest, inject, or inhale. But is that really the aspect of your life that is most important to you, or of which you are most proud, such that you decided to advertise it to the poker-playing world?

Let me put it this way: If your blazin' is such a prominent feature of your existence that when presented with an opportunity to select a screen name (and, on some sites, upload a graphic representation of yourself), something by which you will be uniquely recognized by every other user of the site, you decided that "Canabus" or "Toke dealer" or "420player" was what best encapsulated who you are, you're a loser, with problems much deeper than you realize.

Phony Rakewells

I created an account on the newish "Players Only" site last night, and discovered that somebody had already taken the screen name of "Rakewell." This is theft, pure and simple! I am the one and only Rakewell! That is my name on Full Tilt, Absolute, UB, Party Poker (if they ever let U.S. players back in), Bodog, Cake Poker, and a bunch of other minor ones that I've never even used, but signed up just to stake my claim to the name. (The exception is Poker Stars; several years ago somebody had already taken the name there before I signed up.) It is also what I use on all the online poker forums. Now I'm stuck with the lame "Rakewell1."

Give me back my God-given screen name!

"Luckytown"--another poker movie to avoid (spoiler alert)

A recent thread in the discussion forums at http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ asked for opinions on the worst poker movie ever. Somebody mentioned "Luckytown" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160495/), which had previously escaped my attention, so I ordered it from Netflix and watched it last night. Yep--another dog.

The only bright spot is that it has Kirsten Dunst in it, whom I would marry. She's always nice to look at on the screen. But even that pleasure is turned to disgust when she is made to give such Shakesperean soliloquies as this:

"My feeling is that life hands you things, and nine out of ten times you can’t do anything with them. And then it hands you something you can do something with. And you ought to just grab it, and hold it tight. And hope you never lose it. And then you’re not alone."

You've got to be a member of a union of professional writers, like the Writers Guild of America, to come up with brilliant lines like that. Long may the strike last.

The plot centers around Dunst, who has just turned 18 and run away from her mother to Las Vegas to find the father who abandoned the family long ago. Played by James Caan, he allegedly is the greatest poker player in the world, or at least was before he became a washed-up, degenerate, has-been drunk.

Caan aims to get a big bankroll back by taking on a rich, mob-connected strip-club owner in heads-up poker. Caan's former girlfriend is now the rich guy's moll. In another bit of scintillating dialogue, she warns Caan not to play against him:

"It’s not like before. He plays a mean game now. Even when you win, you lose. Kind of like with you and me."

Meanwhile, Dunst picks up along the way to Vegas another teenager who, we are led to believe, is God's gift to poker. We see him play exactly one hand--against Caan, of course. Caan sees his talent and says he'll become one of the best ever. That all gets thrown away at the end of the film, though, because Dunst disapproves of the gambler's lifestyle, so they trade giving up vices: She quits smoking and he quits playing cards. Yeah, that makes sense. Smoking is a filthy habit that costs you money and destroys your health, while true poker talent is a rare gift that can bring fabulous wealth and freedom. So they're pretty much equivalent.

The match between Caan and his nemesis is reduced to one hand, which you can pretty much piece together from the photos above. As per the pathetic standard in poker scenes, they completely ignore the string-bet rule. It's as if Hollywood writers are incapable of conceiving of any way of putting in a raise other than the hackneyed: "Your 50" (push chips forward, followed by a dramatic pause) "plus another 100." When the two characters involved are unambiguously portrayed as old-time pros at Vegas casino poker, this just falls flat.

For more plausibility, nothing beats pocket aces versus pocket kings in a one-on-one match, first hand, with both players making sets with the board. Yeah, that's pretty much how every hand of poker is.

In "Annie Hall," Woody Allen says, "There's an old joke. Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, 'Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.' The other one says, 'Yeah, I know, and such small portions.' Well, that's essentially how I feel about life--full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly."

One might say the same about the poker in this movie: It's really awful, and there's far too little of it. Two hands in an hour and a half of screen time. It's a stretch to call this a poker movie. And yes, it really is a lot worse than "Lucky You."

(To see my previous reviews of poker movies, just click on the "movies" label at the end of this post or in the list of labels in the left-lower corner of the page.)

I can't vote for Ron Paul (grrrrrrrrr) (non-poker related)

After writing the post below, I started looking for information on where I needed to go Saturday for the Republican caucuses to put in my vote for Ron Paul. I discovered, to my chagrin, that I can't. It turns out that the stupid Republican party put in place a rule that one has to have registered as a Republican 30 days before the caucus in order to participate. I'm not thrilled about changing my registration from Libertarian to Republican (I think it should be illegal for the state to collect data on one's party affiliation as part of voter registration, but that's another issue), but I would have done so temporarily for the purpose of voting for Paul.

I moved here from Minnesota, which had open caucuses--just show up and you can participate. I had just blithely assumed that things would work similarly here. The Democrats basically do the same in Nevada. But not the Republicans.

Why does everything have to be stupid and difficult?

On top of that, I have a painful stye in my left eye, and it was 28 degrees here a couple of hours ago, which is way too cold for existence. I am super grumpy today.

Funding online poker accounts is still a pain

I wrote a couple of months ago about my frustrations trying to get money into one of my online poker accounts (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/funding-online-poker-accounts-is-pain.html). I don't play particularly well online, so don't do it often, but once in a while I take another stab and see if I'm getting any better at it.

My epassporte account works, but there's a $5-$10 charge every time, and it's slow, with the money I send to it from my online bank not available for a week or two. Completely ridiculous and unacceptable in an age of instant transactions for everything else.

I had read several places that Visa gift cards worked like a charm, and were accepted at online poker sites where regular credit or debit cards would not be. So I decided to try it. I stopped at a local Walgreens and purchased a $100 Visa gift card for $105.95. I figured the worst that could happen would be it got rejected, and I'd be out the $5.95, but still be able to spend the $100 on whatever expenses came up in my life.

I naively assumed that all Visa gift cards were equal. Turns out not to be so. When I found that the one I bought would not be accepted at Full Tilt, Poker Stars, or Ultimate Bet, I did a little more searching around the poker forums where this subject is discussed. Various cards are issued by different banks, and some of them tend to get accepted and others not. By coincidence, the one I bought ("gift2go") is one that many users have reported success with, but for whatever reason, I couldn't make it work. Other users say that whatever brand is sold through Target has the best track record of being accepted, but I haven't tried that yet.

In the process of this after-the-fact research, I also came across favorable reports for gift cards purchased through http://www.giftcards.com/, so I gave that a try. The most detailed account I found online described the whole thing going through in a couple of hours. That wasn't my experience. They only gave me the option of buying the card via a direct withdrawal from my checking account (i.e., I couldn't use another credit or debit card to buy it), and my bank doesn't process such transactions any faster than two days. I put in the request Monday afternoon, and got the approval about noon today. It cost $105 for a $100 card.

I sent the "virtual gift card" to myself, and received an email telling me how to access it. That all worked fine. Then the big test: will it be accepted for online poker? Full Tilt: No. Poker Stars: No. Ultimate Bet: Yes! The card issuer charged a transaction fee of $0.06, and $99.94 showed up almost instantly in my UB account. (Yeah, I know about their association with Absolute Poker and the big scandal. But I still like playing on UB more than the other two big ones.)

There is another potential problem with funding an account this way: you can't withdraw by the same means, which probably means that if I start turning an actual profit and want to cash out, I'll have to settle for a slow paper check to be mailed to me. But that's a small problem, and I'll deal with it when the time comes. (Nevertheless, I'm bracing myself for a possible nightmare of an experience, after reading this account of trying to make a simple withdrawal from UB: http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2007/11/ub-kidding-me.html.)

When Full Tilt rejected the card, it suggested instead a new option, something called an Ultra account. So I went through the tedious process of signing up for one of those accounts, typing in all the usual redundant information, answering its questions to see if I was really who I was claiming to be, etc. Then I clicked "submit," and got one of those horrible error screens that tells me their server crashed or something. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHH!

This is all so pointless and stupid, and all due to that idiotic, anti-American UIGEA passed in 2006. If you vote for a presidential or congressional candidate who is on record as supporting that awful piece of legislation, well, you deserve all of the obstacles and frustrations that are now attendant upon trying to engage in the simple pasttime of running a bluff in your underwear. It is said that people get the government they deserve, so if people of this country are so ignorant and/or apathetic not to punish politically the people who visited this insanity upon us, I guess we're just getting what we deserve. (Quick hint: Ron Paul is far and away the most freedom-loving presidential candidate this country has had in my lifetime. Shame on us all if we let slip away this opportunity to have such a man in the White House. I'm afraid he'll be too old to run ever again.)

Addendum, January 18, 2008

I created accounts at two new (to me) sites last night, Carbon Poker and Players Only. The "gift2go" card mentioned above was rejected (as with every other place I tried it) at Carbon, but sailed through at Players Only. If there is any logical reason for this discrepancy, it completely escapes me.

Addendum, January 18, 2008

An amazing breakthrough! One of the commenters said that Poker Stars can be funded diretly through one's checking account. I was skeptical of this, because nothing has been that easy since Netteller stopped doing business in the U.S. But I dutifully went to PS to try it. It's the "E-check" option. And it worked like a charm! In about two minutes, I had $100 sitting in my Stars account--with zero fees! Simply amazing. It's just like the old days. I wonder if it will last.


Addendum, January 19, 2008

Another commenter mentioned the gift cards issued by http://www.allaccessgift.com/. They are sold locally at, among other places, Von's grocery stores. I needed a couple of things last night and was going right past a Von's anyway, so looked for and found the cards, right by the cash registers. The highest they had was $50, but that was fine, since it was just to see if it worked. Bought the thing for $55. The first place I tried to use it was a new account I just set up at Carbon Poker, and it went through without a hitch. Looking more closely at the card, it is issued by "Inter National Bank," which is the same place I've seen mentioned in the forums as the bank whose cards tend to work most consistently for this purpose. It seems that that information is correct. The commenter also mentioned something I hadn't seen anywhere else, which is that not all of this issuer's cards work equally well, and you need to check to see that it also gives the name "NetSpend" somewhere on the card's packaging before buying it. I can't confirm that exactly, but this one did have that label, and worked fine on the first try, so it's probably worth checking for that notation.


Addendum, February 5, 2008

I tried another one of those Inter National Bank NetSpend Visa gift cards on Full Tilt, and they wouldn't accept it. I tried it on Bodog and BugsysClub, and it went through instantly on both. There is no logical pattern to what works and doesn't work. It's all just trial and error, as far as I can tell--which is why I'm reporting my experiences here for each specific combination of funding method and site I try.

Addendum, April 9, 2008

Another of the same type of card worked like slick on both Poker Host and True Poker. I couldn't get it to work on Eurolinx, because that dumb site requires you to go to a third-party intermediary, which appears to accept only standard credit cards, not gift cards.

Hand-guessing quiz

OK, kiddies, time for a test!

Don't worry, it's only for fun.

I witnessed a hand at the Palms tonight in which I thought one player's hand was perfectly obvious, but the other was a completely mystery. That doesn't happen often. See if you can figure it out better than I did.

I had only been playing for maybe 30 or 45 minutes when this occurred. Player A is a stereotypical rock, the oldest and tightest player at the table. He has the biggest stack at the table, starting this hand with about $1200. Player B is an enigma to me. He has won a good number of hands with large bets on the river that opponents are unwilling to call, so he has had to show almost nothing, which means that I don't have a good sense if he is a frequent bluffer. He doesn't handle himself like a pro, but is by no means new to the game. I suppose if I had to classify him at this point, I would have thought him either an experienced tourist or a better-than-average local--but, as I said, that wasn't based on seeing his showdowns, so I had a lot of room for doubt there. He started this hand with what looks like maybe $350.

Player A is under the gun (first to act). He puts in a raise to $18 in a $1-3 no-limit hold'em game. This is a little larger than this table's average opening raise, which has usually been $12-$15. This was the first time I had seen him put in a pre-flop raise. Everybody folds except for Player B, who is in the big blind. He seems fairly reluctant to make the call, but does. After this point, I don't have anything that I would consider a reliable physical tell on how either player behaves during the hand, so I'll just not say any more about that aspect of things.

The flop is 2-2-4 rainbow. Player B bets $10. A calls. The turn card is an offsuit K (suits are irrelevant here; I'll give you that much as a hint). B bets $20. A raises to $70. B calls. The river card is another 4, giving us a final board of 2-2-4-K-4. B checks. A goes all-in. B quickly calls.

This is the point at which I was so confident of A's hand that I even did something very rare for me: I pointed at him and announced his hand out loud before either of them had shown. I was right. But B was a mystery to me.

Take a minute and see what you think before scrolling down.








Player A had pocket kings, making kings full of 4s. His pre-flop raise presumably hoped to chase out any weak aces. He missed the flop, but B's pre-flop call was so tentative and his bet so small that A was naturally going to at least call and see what developed. Then he hit his gin card on the turn, making the best possible full house. That's when he turned up the heat on his opponent. When the river double-paired the board, he probably guessed that Player B had made a smaller full house and would call off all of his chips. He only had to fear pocket 2s and pocket 4s.

Player B had pocket 3s. You might want to read that again. Pocket 3s. On the river he called off over $200 in the hope that his Rock-of-Gibraltar opponent was just playing the board--because he could beat almost nothing else! If A had, maybe, A-Q, his 3s would be good, but that was just not a plausible scenario, and it was the only way he could have won the pot. I could have fallen off my chair when I saw what he had.

I've previously described what I thought was the worst call ever (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/worst-call-ever-non-grumpy-content.html). This one is in contention for the same award. I have no idea what he was thinking. He sheepishly got up and left the game.

So how did you do? My guess is that nobody correctly named what Player B was holding--because he's a friggin' IDIOT, playing completely irrationally, and it's impossible to put such a player on a hand!

Thanks for taking our quiz.

Addendum

As several commenters pointed out, in the original post I accidentally switched A and B in the middle of the hand. Oops. Sorry about that. When I started writing it I knew that was going to happen, because their order of acting was different before the flop and after the flop. I blew it anyway, in spite of warning myself not to! I've fixed it now.

Addendum, January 17, 2007

Another commenter today said that I still had things messed up between A and B. I checked, and he was right--I had them reversed in the answer section. Good grief. My apologies. Now it's correct.

Hellmuth is wrong again

On last night's "Poker After Dark," Phil Hellmuth missed his straight draw, but bet on the river as a bluff. Jean-Robert Bellande (the poker player who was on "Survivor" last season) reluctantly called with third pair.

Hellmuth says, "You got it. Good call." But he doesn't show his hand or throw his cards away. Bellande waits for him to do one or the other.

Hellmuth launches into a lecture about proper poker etiquette. He insists that etiquette requires Bellande to show first in this situation, while acknowledging that the rules require him (Hellmuth) to show first. Bellande calmly and politely disagrees. Shawn Sheikhan--one of the very few players in the world more ill-behaved at the table than Hellmuth--chimes in on Phil's side.

Are there any two players in the world with less credibility on proper poker etiquette than these two clowns?

Hellmuth, as so often is the case, is dead wrong here. There is no case in which the rules prescribe one action and etiquette the opposite.

I've been in Bellande's situation countless times, and I will sit there all day or all night until my opponent figures out that the game isn't going anywhere until he fulfills his obligation. If he doesn't want to show his bluff, fine, he can toss his cards in the muck, and I'll take the pot. If he wants to see what I called him with, he can force me to show that I have the winner by turning over his cards first. But he has to do one or the other.

I've also had my share of times in the bluffer's seat. I don't think I've ever just mucked, but I don't hesitate to show my hand. I figure I've lost the pot, but at least I can get some advertising value out of showing the bluff, hoping that other players will remember it and call me down the next time when I've got the goods. And a couple of times I've been very pleasantly surprised to see the caller either muck or turn over a worse hand, and discover that I was bluffing with the best hand! Even if that happens only one time in 20, it makes it worth not just throwing away a bluff.

The reason for this rule is simple. Lots of scummy players will do what Hellmuth did, but with a hand that may or may not be the winner (rather than a stone-cold bluff that can't beat anybody who calls it), then say something like "You win" in order to induce the opponent to show first. Then, if the bettor discovers he actually has the better hand, he shows and takes the pot, but otherwise mucks. This is unethical, but perfectly legal.

I'm never going to let somebody shoot an angle that way, and the rule is set up to prevent it. I have no idea where Hellmuth got the idea that etiquette calls for the opposite of what the rule demands. It would be crazy to have every player in that situation torn between doing what the rule requires and what etiquette recommends. Fortunately, it isn't so. They are exactly aligned.

If Phil really believes that he's beat and doesn't want to show his cards, he can and should just muck them face-down--that is, make his actions match his words. If he holds out some hope that Bellande has called him ultra-thin and he might win at a showdown, then he should just flip his cards over without all the drama, fuss, argument, and time-wasting. If he loses, fine, move on to the next hand, and if he wins, it's a nice surprise bonus. The only conceivable reason that he continues to hold on to his cards while prompting Bellande to show first is the slim hope that he's holding a winner, which implies that what he wants to do is the unethical practice I just described: show if he turns out to have the best hand, and fold otherwise. Bellande is absolutely right not to let him try that slimy move.

Phil Hellmuth and Shawn Sheikhan giving lectures on proper poker etiquette. Wow. Has anybody checked on the temperature in hell today? Icing up a bit, I'm thinking?

Poker gems, #70

Sam Grizzle, on NBC's "Poker After Dark," January 15, 2007. Phil Hellmuth is wearing and promoting his new line of poker shirts bearing his initial.


What does the "P" stand for--puke?

The next Olympic gold-medal hurdler could be a poker player

I'm an idea man. I'm full of it, er, them.

Like right now I've got this great idea for how to assure the United States Olympic dominance in every track and field event that involves sprinting, hurdles, and the steeplechase: We recruit poker players.

You see, when a poker player is away from the table temporarily, on a restroom break or dinner break or whatever, and is just heading back to continue playing, it suddenly becomes a matter of life and death to get to the table in time for the next hand. If from a distance he sees the dealer pulling the deck from the Shufflemaster, he will break into a sweat and a sprint, and cover the remaining distance to the table in a dead run.

Mind you, this isn't just the young, healthy kids we're talking about here. This includes the old, the fat, the lame, guys who haven't voluntarily exercised since the Truman administration, and those who are coming back from a cigarette break with their oxygen tanks dragging behind.

I mention the steeplechase and hurdles because that's the other amazing thing about witnessing this surge of adrenaline. These guys can leap tall buildings in a single bound. They can jump over chairs, tables, and the half-walls that surround many poker rooms. Remember the Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza is at a children's party when fire breaks out, and he pushes all the kids down in his mad rush for the door? You see the same thing with poker players desperate to get back to the table. They're absolutely ruthless in their blind dash.

This phenomenon is really only remarkable for those who are stuck. Winning players are a lot more casual about returning. But have a guy lose his first four or five buy-ins, and you've got an Olympic athlete on your hands.

I realize that this is completely insane behavior. Think about it this way: Suppose you need to catch a bus. If it's the last bus of the night, and your destination is an impossible distance away and you've just got to get there, and there's no train or taxi, and you get to the bus stop just as that last bus is pulling away, you well might run for your life and scream for it to stop and throw rocks at it to get the driver's attention, etc. But suppose you knew that, rather than being the last bus of the night, this was a route on which another bus came along every two minutes, rain or shine, day or night. Wouldn't you be inclined to look at the departing bus with a shrug and say, "Oh well. The next one will be here soon"? Of course you would. Because that's what a rational human being would do.

But a poker player who is stuck for a large amount of money loses the ability to reason in such a calm and detached manner. To him, the cards the dealer is putting out right this instant are all that matter. He just knows that they are the pocket aces that will win him the huge pot that turns the session around. Of course, it's just as likely that it will be the pocket kings that lose everything to somebody else's pocket aces, but that possibility does not occur to the stuck player. All he knows is that, by all that is holy, he needs to play this hand, and Lord help anybody or anything that stands in his way.

So here's my idea. Put old, fat, butt-smoking, arthritic poker players in the U.S. Olympic team. When they line up to start the race, all the other competitors will laugh and relax, thinking they've got it cinched. But we have a secret weapon. You see, just before the race, our degenerate gamblers will have been playing poker, in a game that they don't know is rigged, so they're doomed to lose. They'll be down $1000, $2000 just when they get the call to report for the race. Then we fit them with one of those virtual-reality headset things. It will project in front of their eyes an image of the poker game they just left, with the dealer just about ready to begin the next hand.

Bang! The starter pistol goes off, our pokeristas are running like Secretariat, and we nail gold, silver, and bronze, while the muscular, tanned, elite athletes of every backwater third-world banana republic on the planet are left in the dust.

We can't lose.

News flash: Grump hits a one-outer on the river

This is an unprecedented event for me.

Palms casino tonight. I have pocket 5s and call a pre-flop raise, as does one other guy. Three of us see the flop of K-10-5 rainbow. One opponent and I quickly raise and reraise each other all-in. He has pocket 10s. Ouch! Set over set is a rare bird. (I think I've been on one side of it or the other maybe four times in the year and a half since moving here.) It's one of the most dreaded scenarios in no-limit hold'em, because it's nearly impossible not to go broke when you've got the bottom end of it, as I did. I did not even have any runner-runner straight or flush possibilities.

The turn card was another king, giving us both full houses, mine the lower one. There was only one card in the deck that could save me--a bit over 2% chance.

Well, I've already announced the end of the story: I got there. I not only raked in a huge pot, but picked up the Palms's $50 four-of-a-kind bonus on top of it.

I might ordinarily label this post with "non-grumpy content" in the title. However, that would not be entirely true, as somebody at that table got quite grumpy indeed. I'm not naming any names, but it wasn't me.

To the best of my recollection, I have never before been in a situation in which I had just one possible card that could come on the river for me to win, and hit it. I hope it's a good, long time before I get my money in that bad again and need such a miraculous save. I'm not sure the poker gods bestow such gifts more than once in one's lifetime.

I snapped the photo above with my cell phone while we were waiting for security to OK the bonus (they have to check the surveillance camera to make sure they have captured a view of everything that happened, in case there is later a question about the legitimacy of the hand). But the dealer was just about to sweep everything away, so the combination of the motion of his hands and mine, rushing to get the shot, made the picture too blurry to really see anything. With a little imagination, though, you can see my pocket 5s in the foreground, the two other fives on the board pushed away from the dealer, and the two kings. The cards on the black shuffler are my opponent's 10s.

Although it seems hard to believe at first glance, this is not the most improbable beat I have ever inflicted on another player. That one remaining 5 in the deck gave me about a 4% chance to win when the money went in. But on another occasion I hit a 3% likely outcome with runner-runner full house to beat two opponents who had flopped flushes (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/04/crazy-night-of-poker-non-grumpy-content.html), and in another case, I got it all in on the flop as a 98.4%/1.6% underdog (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/unlikely-events-non-grumpy-content.html), again hitting runner-runner full house. (That perversely sounds like bragging; it's not meant as such.) On the bad end of things was a bluffing opponent hitting runner-runner straight to match my made straight, splitting the pot, which had been 99.1% likely to be mine alone (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/poker-gods-show-their-displeasure.html).

So it all kind of evens out in the long run, I suppose. But don't try telling that to the guy who had the 10s tonight--he might snap your head off.

If this hand had played out in an online poker room, some players would almost certainly see it as proof positive that online poker is rigged. They might run off and never come back, posting the hand history all over the forums, and demanding an investigation. Those players just have no clue how frequently bizarre, freakish improbabilities will hit when a brick-and-mortar card room deals out several thousand hands a day. It's just the way this game is, whether played at the Palms or on Party Poker.


Bonus story

Other poker bloggers might tell you just one remarkably improbable tale, make a post of it, and call it a night. Not me. Nosirree. You're getting a BONUS story thrown in for no additional cost!

Same Palms session tonight. I was one off the button and had been card-dead for a while, so decided to raise with 10-9 offsuit and just see what happened. When one has been playing tight, either by choice or by being dealt no playable cards, one can basically play any two cards as if they're a big hand. Often just a continuation bet will win the pot from a scared opponent, and sometimes you hit a flop in a way that nobody could guess. I was hoping for one of those two outcomes.

One of the blinds and two previous limpers called.

Flop: A-K-K. Action is check-check-check, and I join the table-tappers, since that flop has convinced me this is not a good spot for a bluff/continuation bet, lest I be check-raised out of my shorts. I'm not putting another penny into this pot. Period. I just know that somebody flopped a monster there, and is waiting for me to step into the trap. I politely decline so to step.

Turn: A (now with four different suits on board). Action: checkcheckcheckcheck.

River: 2. Action: checkcheckcheckcheck.

I get to show last (for which I'm grateful, so I can muck my loser while retaining some dignity). I am astonished when my three opponents roll over, in order, pocket 7s, pocket 5s, and pocket 4s. Their pairs are all counterfeited by the double-paired board. (For those not familiar with the lingo, this means that their best five-card poker hands no longer include the pairs they started with; their hands are AAKK7, AAKK5, and AAKK4, respectively.) My 10 plays! (I.e., I have AAKK10, for the winner.) I turn it over and join everybody else in a good laugh at the improbability of it all.

Then I rake in the chips, patting myself on the back for being such a genius at this game. Anybody can win when dealt aces, but beating three opponents with a 10-9 offsuit, now that takes real skill!

Maybe that's how they talk in Texas

The image above is the first part of a two-page ad for Doylesroom.com, from Bluff magazine. Their claim is to be running the "most unique" tournament in online poker.

Ugh.

Unique means "one of a kind." It is an absolute. A thing is either unique or it is not, one of a kind or not. Therefore, logically, it is nonsensical to speak of something being "very unique." Similarly, one thing cannot be "more unique" than another.

How many people worked on putting this ad together and getting it into print, without a single one of them even understanding the basic meaning of the central word they were using to describe the product being touted?

In fairness, I need to acknowledge that some dictionaries include a corrupted, compromised definition of unique. For example, the Random House Unabridged accepted this: "5. not typical; unusual: She has a very unique smile."

This, though, is an abomination. Responsible editors should only acknowledge such usage in order to condemn it. We already have a number of ways of indicating that a thing is unusual. Our vocabulary for indicating that something is genuinely the only one of its kind is much more limited. To take the paradigmatic word for that meaning and tolerate it having a second, different meaning so that one has to then use additional words to explain which sense one intends is insane.

Consider another example: biweekly. Biweekly means, and has always meant, "every two weeks." It does not, cannot, should not mean "twice a week," no matter how many ignoramuses use it that way. If we start seeing that as an acceptable alternative definition, then the word loses all usefulness, because every time you say that something will occur biweekly, you then have to also specify whether you mean every two weeks or twice a week. And if you're going to do that, then there is no point at all in saying "biweekly" in the first place. The word literally becomes meaningless if it allowed to have two mutually incompatible meanings, a distinction between which cannot be readily discerned from context. (That last condition is important. We do have a least a few words in English that can mean either of two opposite things. E.g., cleave can mean either to cut apart or to cling to, but context almost always makes clear which the writer or speaker intends.)

The same is true with unique being expanded to include reference to things that are not unique. It doesn't enlarge the word; it destroys its meaning and usefulness.

So, Doyle's Room, what's it going to be? Is your tournament unique in the world of online poker? If so, then just say that it is "unique," not "most unique." If it's just uncommon, but not truly the only one of a kind, then say that it's the "most unusual" tournament.

But please stop contributing to the bastardization of a perfectly decent word.

Don't argue about the misdeal

One of the advantages of online poker is that you never have a misdeal. That's not enough to outweigh all of the other stuff that makes live poker so vastly superior to online games, but it's something. Misdeals are a pain in the rear.

A misdeal happens when for some reason the cards get dealt out wrong. There's a list as long as your arm of the different ways this can happen, but they all basically boil down to that one simple essence.

When the dealer realizes that a misdeal has occurred, it's a no-discretion situation. He or she has to collect all the cards, reshuffle, and start over again. OK, not a huge problem, maybe one minute out of my life wasted, but that's about it.

It seems, though, that the problem always gets compounded by one guy at the table who won't accept it. Predictably, somebody was dealt pocket aces or kings or queens before the mistake is discovered, and wants to play the hand out. So he starts kicking up a fuss, trying to find some other solution to the problem instead of just returning his cards to the dealer.

This message is for those morons: Give it up. It does no good. A misdeal is a misdeal, and nothing can be done about it. Your protests only accomplish three things: (1) They label you as a whiner. I can't stand whiners. (2) They waste everybody's time. (3) They tell everybody that you had a monster starting hand, which means that even if you somehow got your way and we played out the hand, you wouldn't get any action, because you've basically told us that you're holding one of the only three or four combinations of cards that anybody would care about relinquishing. Yes, usually the problem was caused by a dealer error, and you're the innocent, wronged victim. So what? Get over it. Things are unfair all over. Move on with your life, and let us do the same. Another hand is coming in about 30 seconds, if you'll just cooperate. The dealer already regrets the error, and piling on abuse will neither remedy the situation nor make it less likely to happen again in the future. Strange as it may seem to you, the rules on what has to be done do not change just because you happened to get two cards that you like.

While I'm on the subject, there is occasionally a related issue. Some kinds of errors in how the cards are dealt can be fixed by the dealer. For example, accidentally dealing a hand to a player who is sitting out until the blinds come back around (e.g., somebody who just came back from a dinner break) can be cured by simply killing the hand after the deal is completed. If the button gets only one card instead of two and doesn't realize that fact until it's his turn, that can be repaired by giving him the second card then, because nothing about the deck has changed. In some casinos, the accidental exposure of the first down card to the last player (the button) is an automatic misdeal, but in others it's handled with a replacement card, just as with any other player position (which, in my opinion, is the preferred approach; the reason for considering that a misdeal is just silly).

Anyway, when one of these fixable problems occurs, I frequently hear a player--always, always somebody who thinks he's an expert on poker rules and procedures, but isn't--calls out "MISDEAL" and throws his cards in towards the dealer. This triggers a chain reaction of other players doing the same thing. Then we really do end up with an untenable situation that can only be fixed by starting over again, but if the know-it-all had just kept his trap shut and let the dealer handle it, we'd be on our way already.

So here's the thing to remember: Only the dealer, not a player, can declare a misdeal. In fact, "misdeal" is a word that should not come out of your mouth at the poker table unless you're the dealer. If you're playing and you hear somebody other than the dealer call it, don't do anything unless and until the dealer asks you to return the cards. There are nearly as many false misdeals because of loudmouths who think they know everything as there are true misdeals, and every one of the former could be eliminated if players would just let the dealer run the game.

The painting above, by the way, is titled "A Misdeal," by the great Frederic Remington (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Remington). Click to enlarge it. You can buy a print of it from the same site from which I lifted the jpeg: http://www.printsoldandrare.com/oldwest/. Fortunately, I haven't yet seen anybody get quite that angry about a misdeal, and hope I never do.

Thank you, Daniel Negreanu! (non-grumpy content)

I promise that this blog will never become a platform from which I primarily discuss specific hands that I've been involved in. I realize that, for the most part, reading about somebody else's play is a lot like listening to a proud parent tell you all the details of what their kids are doing in school, or being forced to sit through a slide show of their recent vacation--you just don't really care. But once in a while, something stands out and seems to be a story worth telling. And for those who play just recreationally, maybe there's something to be learned here.

I was one of the ten players that started up a new $1-$3 no-limit hold'em game at the Palms last night. I took my usual favorite seat, #10, on the dealer's right. I didn't recognize any of the other players. (Well, I thought I recognized one, because she was the spitting image of Jennifer Love Hewitt, and it took me a while to convince myself it wasn't her. She could have a career as a JLH impersonator, though.) It was a young line-up; I believe I was the second-oldest player there, after an Asian woman in her mid-50s in seat #1.

It's only about the third hand we've played, so I have very little information on my opponents. I'm on the button and find the two black 9s. (This is the exact hand with which Phil Hellmuth won the World Series of Poker main event; I don't like being reminded of him by getting dealt this hand, but it would be a little silly to express my dislike for him by refusing to play it.) Five players all limp in ahead of me. I would sometimes raise in this spot, but I prefer playing conservatively while I'm still feeling everybody out, so I join the $3 crowd, as do both blinds.

The flop is 10h-5d-4h. Not a bad flop for my pocket pair. Everybody checks to me, so I bet $10--about two-thirds the size of the pot. The only caller is the Asian woman in seat 1. In theory, she could have any two cards, since she was in the small blind in an unraised pot. I think she probably doesn't have a pair bigger than the 10 on the board, because I would expect her to have raised before the flop with jacks, queens, kings, or aces. I don't think she has a 10 in her hand for top pair, because I would expect her to lead out betting with that if she had it, or maybe even go for a check raise (if she thought I was just putting in a position bet from the button after having missed the flop completely), though if she had a weak kicker (e.g., 10-2), she might do a conservative check-call to keep the pot small. Overall, though, I'm reasonably confident she is on a draw, with hearts being slightly more likely than a straight draw--but I'm going to be cautious of either one hitting.

The turn card is the 4c. This looks like a safe card for me, because it couldn't have completed any draw my opponent might have been on. To my great surprise, however, she bets $25. I really have to stop to think about this, because it doesn't help me clarify which of the possible holdings I had mentally assigned her she has. It's a confusing bet. If she had something really strong on the flop (three of a kind, two pair, or even a monster draw such as a simultaneous straight and a flush draw), I would expect her to do one of three things: lead out betting on the flop, check-raise me on the flop, or check the turn in anticipation of putting in her check-raise there. From out of position, it's distinctly uncommon for a player to check-call the flop, then lead out betting on the turn. Basically the only time that happens is if the turn card was exactly what the player needed.

But how could that be? As I said, it definitely didn't help her if she was on a straight draw or flush draw. It could only help her if she had a 4 in her hand, and had now made three of them. That's what I spent most of the time focusing on: what cards could she be holding, one of which was a 4, that would prompt her to check and call on the flop? It would be impossible for her to have both a 4 and a straight draw, or a 4 with a flush draw. What if she had something like A-4? In that situation, she might call a not-huge bet on the flop, hoping that (1) she'd get lucky and hit two pair or trips, or (2) I'd show weakness later and she'd get an opportunity to steal the pot away with just bottom pair. I certainly might do such a thing, so I assume she could, too. But if that had been the plan, why bet out on the turn? She would, in that situation, feel quite confident that her hand was now best, and I think most players would be far more likely to go for the check-raise, turning my anticipated continued aggression against me. It's as if her bet was proclaiming, "I have three 4s"--except that no rational player would want that fact to be obvious to an opponent yet, not until it was time to spring the trap! A final possibility was a pocket pair, like 6s or 7s or 8s. Again, though, it didn't really make sense for her to change from a passive check-call mode (perfectly reasonable with such a middle pair) to aggression.

Apparently other players watching the action had approximately the same thought process, because the guy sitting next to me said quietly, "Weren't expecting that, were you?"

I picked up nothing in her body language that gave me a clue as to how strong she was feeling, and my ability to scrutinize her was severely limited by the dealer sitting smack in between us.

I just couldn't put her on a hand. Nothing fit what she had done.

At this point, I had a flashback to something I read long ago from Daniel Negreanu--probably one of his Card Player columns, though it was way early in my serious interest in poker, and I don't have a clear memory of where it was. (Here's one in which he makes the same point, though I just can't recall whether it's the one that planted the idea in my mind for the first time: http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/15262. He occasionally makes a similar comment during a televised match, something like, "Well, I can't figure out any hand that makes sense for you to have, so I'm supposed to call in that situation.")

Negreanu had said that the key to a successful bluff was telling a consistent story, such that everything one has done in the course of the hand playing out leads an opponent to a conclusion about what one is holding (a false conclusion, of course). If an opponent can't discern a consistent message from your bets and other actions, he will likely call your bluff just out of curiosity and/or stubbornness. This is what most people new to poker mess up all the time, and why their bluff attempts tend to get picked off rather easily by more experienced players. This is also why it doesn't work to try to bluff bad players, because they haven't yet learned to piece together the clues you're giving them so as to deduce that you have a hand they should be afraid of.

Anyway, one of the lessons I learned from Negreanu was that when there is no hand an opponent could be holding that is consistent with what he or she has done during the hand, that's often reason enough to call, because there's a good likelihood that a bluff is being run on you. It's a good piece of advice, but a scary one to follow, because confusion is not a state of mind you want to be bringing to a psychological battle. Nevertheless, I tucked it away in memory long ago, and it has occasionally been the piece of wisdom I have needed in particular situations. This seemed like it might be another such spot.

So I called the $25, but I wasn't one bit thrilled about it.

The river card was the 3 of clubs. My opponent pushed forward $50, again in a way that I couldn't read for being either especially strong or especially weak. That card wouldn't have helped her flush draw. If she had exactly a 6-7 in her hand, it would have completed a straight, but her leading bet on the turn didn't fit with that being what she had, so I mostly dismissed that possibility. I was back to the same dilemma, basically. She was trying to sell sitting on a 4, but in a way that I thought no good player would have undertaken to play such a hand.

I thought and thought, quite a bit longer than I usually take, because the pieces of the puzzle didn't fit together. I'm not one to call out of curiosity, because if I'm convinced I'm beaten, the little knowledge gained isn't worth what it costs me, and I have no tendency to agonize over what an opponent might have had once it's over with. But I kept coming back to Negreanu's advice about calling when you're confused, when an opponent's actions cannot be made to add up to any plausible specific hand or range of hands.

On that basis alone, I reluctantly took one of my $50 stacks and slid it forward. I admit that I was having a near slugfest inside my brain, with one half saying, "Fold, you idiot! Don't throw away another $50! She just has to have something better than a measly pair of 9s!" The other half was quietly citing Mr. Negreanu's advice. It surprised me a bit that that's the half that won the argument, given how loudly the "fold" half was shouting.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and turned over the Qh-9h. Aha! She had been on the flush draw after all! I suspect that she was planning on just playing passively to see if she got there, but then when the board paired she made a snap decision to represent having made trips. She didn't take time to think through whether she could sell that notion, or how best to sell it. If she had check-raised me, it would have been a far, far harder call to make; with a completely unknown opponent, and a list of about a gazillion scary hands that could beat me--ones that a good opponent would play in precisely that way--I almost certainly would have folded.

This was only a middling-sized pot as these games go. Still, it was, I think, one of the ten or so most difficult calls I've made during the year and a half that I've been trying to make a living playing this endlessly intriguing game. It's one of the "thinnest" holdings I can remember--holding only a single pair, smaller than the high card on the board--for calling two large-ish bets from an opponent on whom I had neither a history of frequent bluffing nor a reliable physical tell.

My heartfelt thanks to Daniel Negreanu for the "assist" on this play. I was disappointed to read recently that he's no longer going to be doing columns for Card Player, because they were consistently insightful and informative. But it's hard to begrudge him the need to do other things instead, when he has already provided a wealth of useful tips.

Palms chips

I played at the Palms last night. I hadn't been there since August 1, and since then they've purchased a new batch of poker chips. A sample of the old (2005) and new (2008) $1 is shown above, though it's the same with the $5 chips. You can click the image for a huge close-up view, if you'd like.

What may not be apparent at a glance is that these chips are physically quite different. The old ones have a completely smooth surface; the new ones are textured and embossed. The new ones are about 1 millimeter smaller in diameter than the old ones, and a tad thicker, too. The two chip types are made of different kinds of composite--probably from different manufacturers.

No, this isn't the greatest problem I've ever run into in a poker room, but the simultaneous use of both kinds (they didn't retire the old ones, just supplemented the supply) does cause some nuisance issues.

First, the chips don't stack nicely because of the different diameters. Imagine trying to make a neat stack of coins, half of which are quarters and half of which are nickels. It would be nearly impossible. Yeah, yeah, I'm a fussbudget about some stupid things, to be sure, but what's wrong with liking to be able to make tidy, orderly stacks of chips?

Second, for those who like to shuffle and otherwise play with their chips, everything becomes harder because of the differences in size and surface texture. This one doesn't affect me, because once my chips are lined up perfectly, I'm done handling them until it's time to put them into action.

Third, the difference in thickness is enough that it causes a problem in counting. This isn't nearly as bad as the worst discrepancy in town, which is at the Golden Nugget. There, the $5 are much, much older and more worn down than the $1 chips, as well as being from a different manufacturer, so that 21 fit in each slot in a standard chip rack. Chip racks are one of the few things that are, as far as I know, absolutely univeral and interchangeable among all casinos, and they are all designed to hold five columns of 20 chips each--except at the Golden Nugget, where if you fill the racks in the usual way with the red chips, you'll unexpectedly be looking at five stacks of 21 each; fill the same rack with their blue chips and you've got the standard 5 x 20. I don't know how they stand it, but they get by somehow. My guess is that their chip-for-cash exchange error rate is higher than elsewhere.

Anyway, the problem the Palms has now introduced isn't that drastic, but it's noticeable. I didn't get a chance to play around with a rack, but it looked to me that the thickness difference was enough that 19 of the new ones would be just about equal to a stack of 20 of the old ones. That's just asking for trouble.

Finally, there's just the appearance. I don't insist on completely uniformity in everything; in fact, I enjoy having a variety of chips of the same basic color but with different imprints. But the new ones are so different that it's kind of jarring to the eye. Different prints on chips of the same base color and design and composition, when spread out on the green felt, might be compared to a field of wildflowers of different colors. The new ones thrown in, however, is kind of like seeing a bunch of mushrooms sprouting up among those flowers. Not that there's anything wrong with mushrooms, but they don't complement flowers well. As a small additional practical problem, when I was trying to eyeball the pot during a hand of poker, I found that the strange, unexpected difference slowed me down; my brain is used to seeing two basic kinds of chips, and here there were four. Maybe that's just me, though.

I don't have any preference for one style or the other. But I can't figure out why they placed the recent order from a different manufacturer, so that they're stuck with this awkward mixture of two not completely compatible styles. Maybe the new ones undercut the old in price, but aesthetics and practicality are worth something, too, a fact that seems to have been neglected in the calculation.