Noses and mouths causing problems at Foxwoods

Two interesting back-to-back stories on rules and etiquette over at the "Aces Full of Ducks" blog: See here and here.

The first story is another cautionary tale about the wisdom of just habitually turning your cards face up, even if you think you lost, because otherwise once in a while you will have misread your hand, and accidentally muck the winner. I have done that three times (once where I would have won the pot outright, and twice where I would have split it) that I know of.

I wonder what happened to the dealer. He or she should have had a new orifice chewed open, for (1) not mucking the guy's cards when he pushed them forward and stood up to leave, and (2) not preventing the nosy player from looking at them. Even after the cards were revealed, the dealer should have taken them from the intervening woman and shoved them deep into the muck, just as would have happened without her injecting herself. I think the floor should have ruled the hand dead, because it clearly would have been dead if the dealer had done his or her job right.

Furthermore, the woman should have been asked to leave for the day for such an abominable violation. No matter how she gets scolded or warned, she is going to feel that she did the right thing, likely on some warped version of the "do unto others" concept. She needs to feel enough sting as a consequence that she actually makes a decision not to interfere like that in the future, even if she thinks she should intervene. I think it does no good to try to persuade her that she was wrong; she has to know that she gets penalized for breaking the rules, even if she disagrees with the how the rules work. The saying is "once burned, twice careful." Well, she needs to get burned a little bit there.

I'd probably make a really lousy poker room manager. I'd be kicking people out right and left, until there were no customers left to play. But at least then the place would be quiet and orderly, the way it should be!

Same with the woman in the second story, by the way. She should have been shown the door, too. Three times in one hand is completely inexcusable. (Incidentally, why was the dealer not shutting her up at her first peep?) And again, it's clear that she left that day certain that she had done exactly the right thing. No amount of words will convince her otherwise. You have to make it hurt, so that the next time such a situation arises, she remembers the day she got kicked out, and makes a different decision.

I've mentioned several times that my main hobby (at least before moving here) has long been competitive handgun shooting. In particular, most of my experience was with the United States Practical Shooting Association. It may not be possible to have more fun than shooting one of their matches. But because the whole deal is about people running around with guns, firing at targets as fast as they can, there have to be some pretty stringent safety rules. And the USPSA is absolutely fanatical about enforcing those rules, with a sterling safety record as a result.

There are about half a dozen things you can do that violate one of the major safety rules, such as dropping your gun, taking it out of the holster when you're not supposed to, having it loaded when you're not supposed to, having your finger on the trigger when you're clearing a jam, having any part of your body get in front of the muzzle, etc. Break even one of them, even once, for just a second, and you are done--ejected from the match, sent home for the day. No excuses, no exceptions, no mercy. It's all done with kindness, though, and you're welcome back for the next match.

I had it happen to me--once. I wasn't paying attention when I should have been, and jostled my pistol in such a way that it fell out of my holster and plopped onto the ground. There was no actual danger to anybody, but it's one of those zero-tolerance rules--because if your attention is waning enough that you can drop your gun, well, then just about anything can happen. The awkwardness and embarrassment of having everything stop while they fixed the problem and gave me the friendly boot out of the range really sank in. It was impossible to think of anything else for the entire 45-minute drive home. Shame can be a powerful motivator. As a result, I never again let my attention lapse in such a careless way. If they had just let it slide, and let me off with a warning, I might not have achieved the higher level of vigilence that thereafter accompanied me to every match.

Human brains are wired perfectly to respond to positive and negative incentives and reinforcements. We remember acutely how actions in the past have been rewarded or punished. We're all Pavlov's dogs. I firmly believe that poker rooms need to be a lot more aggressive about ejecting players for the day when they egregiously violate rules--because actual negative consequences change behavior much more effectively than just warnings do.


Addendum, May 27, 2008

I received the following email from a reader, presumably in reaction to the above post, with a couple more interesting stories of a similar nature:


I'm still reading your blog regularly. It is one of my favorite poker blogs.

I spent a few days in Vegas and have a couple of stories that you may have interest in discussing.
The first involved myself not reading my hand correctly. I was playing at Mandalay Bay. I was in seat 3 and limped with A-9 offsuit. Several people saw the flop of A-K-4. Seat 8 made a small bet and I just called with my weak kicker. I don't remember the turn. Seat 8 made another small bet and I called. The river came and seat 8 checked and I checked. He turned over A-10. I was out kicked. I then did something I rarely do, I showed my Ace.

I was about to muck my hand when the dealer said "you have to show both cards". I was confused. Initially I thought this was a new house rule like they had at the WSOP last year where if you showed one card you had to show both. I said "what?" and the dealer repeated his statement. He was looking at me waiting for me to do something. So I showed my 9. He immediately said "split pot". Shocked, I looked back at the board and realized that the river card was a 4. Because I was playing the hand passively and was happy to get a check on the river, I hadn't realized that the board had paired negating my kicker.

Seat 8 then objected and told the dealer he shouldn't have helped me. The dealer said that I didn't make a clear action if I was mucking the hand or trying to claim the split with only one card. He explained to seat 8 that he was simply instructing me of the rules. Seat 8 asked for a floor decision and after hearing the replay, the floor concurred. Since I didn't muck my hand it was not clear if I was showing the ace for half the pot. I told everyone that honestly I didn't realize it was a split and that seat 8 could have the pot (it was a very small pot). He said no just split it and we were fine.

However, seat 4 turned into an expert and he now objected. He said that my intention of mucking my hand should outwiegh my actual action of showing my hand. The floor upheld his decision and we played on. For the next 2 hours I had to endure seat 4 retelling the story to every new player at the table.

Story number two involves a situation that you often hear could happen, but this is the first time I actually saw it happen. I was playing at the Golden Nugget. At the opposite end of the table, seats 7 and 8 were involved in a hand that went to the river. Seat 7 said all in on the river and seat 8, who had a much larger stack, said call. Seat 7 turned over his cards and showed 2 pair. Seat 7 hadn't counted out his chips so the amount of the bet was unclear. Seat 8 said something and started stacking his chips next to seat 7's stacks. I didnt' hear what seat 8 said, but is was problably "that's good" or "you win" or someting like that. He was clearing counting chips to pay off the all in bet. Seat 8 still had his cards. Seat 7 said to the dealer I want to see his hand. The dealer reached over and turned over the cards. The dealer then announced "straight". Seat 8 had top pair, but didn't realize that his kicker had made a straight. Then all the money went to seat 8.

Two other players at the table objected and said that the dealer should have killed the hand in the muck before showing it. The dealer explained that it was a house rule that if any player involved in the showdown asks to see a hand then the shown hand is live. The hand is only killed if the request comes from a player not involved in the show down. There was an appeal to the floor who upheld the ruling.

I also played at Red Rock for this first time. I haven't actually been keeping track, but I think they have the most comfortable poker chairs that I have sat in.

Execrable

Last night I watched another poker movie that was just truly painful to sit through--one of those that makes you wonder how it ever got made. Did all of the actors, writers, directors, producers, etc., really delude themselves into thinking that they had something worthwhile on their hands?

The movie is "Aces" (2006); see the IMDB entry here. It was a direct-to-video sort of deal. The story is that three California babes (pictured numerous times above, in my attempt to make up for this blog's previous severe deficiency of bikini photos) concoct a scheme to cheat at poker by marking the aces with a dye that can only be seen with special glasses. See those yellow smudges on the cards? That's what they do. At first they clean up, moving from joint to joint--exclusively private and underground games, so as to avoid scrutiny from casino security. But then their plan runs into some unexpected obstacles.

The mathematical whiz among them is forced to play without cheating, against a murderer's row of the most dangerous poker sharks on the planet, with her friends' very lives on the line (insert ominous chord here)! Fortunately, she has been reading books, and can calculate on the fly her odds of hitting, say, two pairs. So--and I'm sure you'll all be shocked to learn this--she prevails. Because, after all, as everybody knows, all you need to succeed against the best poker players in the world is to have read some good books on the subject.

We get the obligatory scene of them driving down the Vegas strip, plus some unexpectedly nice shots of Rio, when they end up invited to a high-stakes private game there.

The writing and acting are positively atrocious, worse than you'd probably get from an average high school drama class. The villain (Asian guy in the red shirt in the photos) mainly conveys how tough and angry he is by breathing extremely heavily, to the point that they probably had to have paramedics on the set to revive him after hyperventilating on every take.

But I have to give them props for this much: They have one bitchin' car, the sweet '68 Camaro shown. Were I a billionaire, one of those would definitely be in my car collection. One of the most gorgeous automotive designs ever.

There's lots of poker in the movie, but we see almost no hands played out. Instead, we just get the end of the hand, where the winner is revealed.

Predictably, they get lots of poker details wrong. For example: (1) As you can see from the screenshots, even in regular casinos (the one pictured is the Normandie casino in southern California), they're using generic one-color chips, just like in "The Big Blind" (see here). No, couldn't possibly be any security problem with that, could there? (2) As also depicted above, when players go all in, they invariably just shove their piles of chips into the already sizable pot, without anybody bothering to count them first. Yeah, that's going to be fun to sort out when the hand is over. (3) In a home game, one of the girls takes her turn as dealer. She says to the player on her left "You're the big blind," and to the guy two seats to her left, "You're the small blind." That is definitely the strangest blind structure I've ever heard of. (4) When the heroine is heads-up with the villain, at one point he bets, she calls, then he raises. In what bizarro poker world does a call re-open the action to the original bettor?

They can't even get details of regular life right. See the next to last photo above? Take a look at the $100 bills. Now pull a real one out of your wallet, or see one here. They apparently were so short on cash that they couldn't afford a few real Benjamins to dress up the shot. Cheapskates.

Oh, and as an extra little raised middle finger to the poker community, the filmmakers cast as the dealer in the white shirt seen above a guy who is the spittin' image of the vile, hated, enemy of all that is holy, Senator Bill Frist (may he burn in hell forever). (If you have to ask why "Frist" is now the f-word that is not allowed at poker tables, you haven't been paying enough attention to politics.)

This stinker ranks way down there with "The Big Blind," "Blowing Smoke," "All In," and "Shade." Even the awful "Luckytown" at least had better acting and production values. It's so bad that it makes me want to give a special award to "Lucky You" and "Deal" for not sucking quite as much as they possibly could have.

Two more books get it wrong

Back in January I wrote about some published sources that have significant details wrong in their descriptions of one of the most famous hands in poker history, Johnny Chan versus Erik Seidel at the conclusion of the main event of the 1988 World Series of Poker.

I just found two more.

Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger, in Poker for Dummies, have a chapter on bluffing. In a sidebar on p. 140 they discuss Chan's "reverse bluff" with the nuts:

Chan had won the World Series the previous year and had been on a roll ever
since. Here he was, 12 months later, with a chance to win back-to-back titles.
But he'd need some magic to accomplish it. Seidel, a former commodities broker
from New York, left Wall Street for the life of a professional poker player; and
now he had a big chip lead on the defending champ.

At this point in the tournament, the blinds were $10,000 and $20,000. Chan
was first to act on each betting round. The flop was Qs 10d 8d.

Chan checked. Seidel bet $50,000. Chan called. The turn card was a complete
blank, and both men checked. The fifth and final card was another blank. Chan
checked.

Seidel held a queen in his hand, giving him top pair, albeit with a weak
kicker. He thought for a moment that Chan might have a queen with a better
kicker. But by checking on the turn and on the river, Chan passed up his final
chance to bet!

Seidel then pushed all of his chips into the center of the table, certainly
a sizeable enough bet to cause Chan to release any slightly better hand in the
event that Seidel had misread him. Seidel thought his all-in bet would prevent
Chan from calling with hands such as a queen with a better kicker, or two small
pair.

Seidel had, in fact, misread Chan. And not by a little, but by a lot. Chan
smiled as he turned over his hand. Chan had flopped a straight with the Jc
9c.

Here are the errors:

1. Seidel did not have the chip lead; Chan did--by about 4:1, in fact. That's why when he won this hand, the tournament was over. If Seidel had the chip lead, how do Harroch and Krieger explain the fact that the tournament was over when Seidel lost the hand? It's true that when heads-up play began, Seidel had a chip lead on Chan ($1.2 million to $470,000, according to Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan's Aces and Kings, p. 111.) However, by the time the final hand came up, Chan was way ahead.

2. The 10 on the flop was the 10h, not 10d. This can be seen clearly in the video clip from YouTube, included in the addendum to my original post.

3. Chan was not "first to act on each betting round." He had the button.

4. Chan did not check on the flop. The action was that Seidel checked, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised an additional $50,000, and Chan called.

5. Chan did not check on the river; the action was Seidel moving all-in, followed by Chan's call. Thus, Chan did not "pass up his final chance to bet," as Harroch and Krieger claim (with an exclamation mark for emphasis, even).

I'm also pretty sure that Seidel had not yet set out on the life of a poker pro at this point; the WSOP was kind of a lark for him. Kaplan and Reagan report Seidel saying that it was doing so well in this tournament that made him realize that "maybe I could make a living from poker" (p. 111).

Let me also take this opportunity to point out yet another error in David Apostolico's report, one that I overlooked in my previous post on this subject. He said that the queen on the flop was the queen of clubs. Nope. It was, as Harroch and Krieger correctly report, and as can be seen clearly in the video clip, the Qs. Seidel was holding the Qc.

When re-checking some of the above, I noticed that yet another published source has the action wrong! Kaplan and Reagan, in Aces and Kings, p. 111, repeat the Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler error, discussed in my original post, of saying that Chan checked on the turn, followed by Seidel moving all-in. This in spite of them acknowledging earlier in the same paragraph that Chan had the dealer button! If Chan checked the turn on the button, that necessarily means that Seidel had checked first (which is correct). So how can they then say that Seidel moved all-in on the turn after Chan's check? In theory, that anomaly might be explained by Seidel making his all-in move in the dark, after Chan's turn check but before the dealer had put out the river card. But as the video clip makes clear, that's not at all what actually occurred.

I remain astonished that so many prominent poker writers, with the correct facts so readily available, will get things so many things wrong when describing a hand that just might have been viewed in video replays more times than any other hand in poker history. It really makes one wonder about the accuracy of the reporting on plays for which it is not so easy to check up on the authors.

Raise it--where?

Last night at the Venetian we had a dealer who could never say just "raise." Instead, it always had to be "Raise it up."

This annoys me. (Of course, so do about a million other things, which is why this blog exists.) In what other direction does she think one might raise it, other than "up"? Would somebody "raise it down," or "raise it sideways"?*

One might raise corn in one's garden; one does not "raise up" corn. One might raise a child**; one does not "raise up" a child. One might raise oneself by one's bootstraps; one does not "raise oneself up" by one's bootstraps. One might ask one's boss to raise one's salary; one does not ask one's boss to "raise up" one's salary. One suffering from gastroesophageal reflux disease might raise the head of his bed; he would not "raise up" the head of his bed.*** One might raise a ruckus; one does not "raise up" a ruckus.

Please, Miss, knock it off. A simple one-word announcement of "raise" is all we need to hear.



*This is not an original observation with me. I first read it in The Professional Poker Dealer's Handbook, when I was in poker dealer school. But the fact that a specific admonishment against this odd phrasing has been for many years in the premiere guidebook for poker dealers means that this dealer should darn well know better.

**Some people object to the phrase "raise a child," arguing that one raises vegetables, but rears a child. Though I can be a nit-picking purist about a lot of things, especially with respect to language, that particular complaint goes beyond what I think is reasonable.

***Lest some wiseacre rush to the comments to point this out, I'll acknoweldge that the King James Bible has 41 instances of the phrase "raise up" (see here). But many of those are the intransitive verb instead of the transitive. More importantly, that was then (1611, to be exact), this is now. Such usage sounds quaint, redundant, and out of place to modern ears.


Addendum, May 25, 2008

My father, upon reading the above, sent me this email, which I trust he won't mind my sharing here:

Your blog reminded me of a Geography teacher from England who taught us
when I was in the army at the University of Washington. One day she was
discussing the industry in some part of South America, in which, as she put it,
the major occupation was rearing asses. She repeated this phrase at least a
dozen times during the class, and each time she did so the suppressed laughter
became less suppressed. She didn't seem to catch on to the fact that this was
humorous to the average American young man.

Adding more interest was the fact that each morning we did
calisthenics, and that one of the exercises lent itself admirably to the name,
"rearing asses", a fact that was not missed the next morning by some wise guys
among us.

One hand, two stories

Venetian last night. Player A puts in a raise to about $10 from early position. Player B reraises to $35. Player C calls from the big blind. Player A calls, too. Flop is three spades, one of which is the 9, though I don't remember the others. Player C is first to act and moves all-in for about $90. Player A calls. Player B grumbles a bit, then folds A-K with no spade. Player A turns over the nuts, A-Q of spades. Player C sees this, then throws his cards face down in the muck, and walks away from the table before the rest of the hand plays out.

The turn are river are two more 9s, meaning that if Player C had any pocket pair, or had made any pair on the flop, he would have made a backdoor full house and beaten A's flopped nut flush. Now, maybe he was genuinely drawing dead, with a hand like K-10 of spades for the second-nut flush, without even any runner-runner straight flush possibilities, so that he wasn't giving up anything by his muck-and-run. But it was pretty strange nevertheless. I wish I knew what he had had. He very well may have thrown away what would have turned into the winner.

I've told other stories about players unwisely walking away from the table in the middle of a hand. This is another example of why that's a really bad idea.


Part Two of the story is that as Player A was raking in the chips, Player B started giving him grief for the bad pre-flop call: "You had a reraise and a flat call, and you still called from bad position with A-Q. Brilliant." Player A kind of shrugged, murmured something like, "OK, maybe it was a bad call," but clearly didn't want to get into an argument over it. Player B kept it up: "You were a 7:1 dog going into the flop."

Now, hold on just a dog-gone minute there, pardner. 7:1??? No way. Suited A-Q is a 70/30 dog against A-K, plus or minus 2 percentage points depending on what suits the A-K has (and I don't remember what Player B's were). That's about 2.5:1, not 7:1. The only way one hand can be anything like a 7:1 underdog pre-flop (assuming we don't know what other cards were folded, and thus no longer in the deck) is a big pair versus two undercards that cannot work together to make a flush or straight, such as A-A or K-K versus 7-2 offsuit.

It's bad enough to spew hatred at an opponent for what you think was a bad play that turned lucky for him. But if you're going to do so, at least get your facts and numbers right. No need to look like a hotheaded, immature, sore loser and an ignoramus!

Galloping along

WARNING! This is another of those occasional posts about my personal results, likely of interest to very few readers. Avert your eyes, maties, or prepare to be bored.

As I've mentioned, on May 10 I started playing around with cheap sit-and-go HORSE tournaments on Poker Stars. I've surprised myself by doing pretty well at them. I wanted to see exactly how well, so I had PS email me my tourney results, and entered them into a spreadsheet. Here's what I found:




I've played 32 of these things, almost all of them for $5 or $10 entry fees (plus the site's take), though a couple were turbo events that have odd amounts. I didn't like how fast the blinds went up in those, so have abandoned them.

I've cashed in 15 out of 32 (47%), with 37.5% being the nominal expectation (because 3 players out of 8 get paid in each one).

Here's the frequency of finishing in each possible place:

1: 8
2: 4
3: 3
4: 2
5: 2
6: 4
7: 3
8: 6

In other words, if I don't finish in the money, I'm most likely to be the first one out! I think that's a result of being aggressive. If a couple of times I either misjudge an opponent's hand strength and push hard where I shouldn't, or get unlucky on the last card after lots of money is in, I'll be out. But if I'm not the first one gone, I'm usually going to cash. And I'm taking top prize a full 25% of the time, twice as often as would be expected with equal luck and skill among eight players. Still, this is a pretty small statistical sample, and this could just be the nice side of variance, with the pendulum about to come back the other way and crush me like a bug.

My return on investment is $1.50 for every $1 spent on entry fees. That sounds spectacular by itself (conventional wisdom is that a working pro should be able to have a $1.10 ROI over thousands of such events, and that $1.40 or more is unsustainable over the long run), but there's a more humbling way to look at it: I've had a total net profit of about $107. They last about 90 minutes if I'm there to the bitter end, a whole lot less when I finish in 8th place. If we assume an average of an hour each, I'm not making even $4/hour yet. So I'm not recommending this as the road to riches. But since I'm still in the way-early learning stages, I'm content with any positive net.

A pure time/reward analysis would say that I'm better off sitting my butt in a casino for those hours, rather than at my desk. On the other hand, this is the sort of thing that I hope will bring dividends with a time horizon of years, when I get good enough at all of the games that I can play them live for something well beyond these micro-stakes.

As an added bonus, I'm having a lot more fun with them than with comparable no-limit hold'em SNGs.

"You don't look like a horrible player"

I went slumming tonight--hit the Stratosphere and the Sahara. I really dislike playing in both places, but they're such consistent money-makers that I keep them in the rotation to visit once in a while, especially after a losing streak, to get things back on a positive track.

At the Stratosphere, my second hand after sitting down with $100 I was dealt A-Q of diamonds. I raised to $12 after a couple of limpers. I was called by the big blind and the guy on my right. The flop was J-8-2 rainbow. Nothing great for me, but nothing too scary, either--good chance it missed both of them as much as it missed me. Both opponents checked, so I put out $25. Big blind folded, guy on my right called.

This didn't look to me like a check-call of great strength, as if he had flopped a set or something--more like maybe he hit the 8, and decided to stick around to see if he could make two pair or three of a kind. So I'm not worried yet, because an ace or a queen should give me the winner, and even failing that, I think he's not feeling married to his hand, and is probably susceptible to being pushed off of it. I'm an unknown entity to him, and he's out of position, so if I'm right that he doesn't have a monster, and he misses the turn, he likely isn't going to be willing to put in a lot more money.

The turn card is an offsuit 10. I didn't think he limp-called before the flop with an 8-10. I also didn't think that he called on the flop with a gutshot straight draw, so in all likelihood that card didn't help him. He checked, adding support to my theory. I have $63 left in front of me, and there is about $85 in the pot, so I shove. Even if he calls, I should have outs with an ace, queen, and now a king would give me the nuts, a Broadway straight.

He thinks for a while. Finally he shows me a K-J offsuit, smiles, and says, "You don't look like a horrible player, so this must be no good." And he throws it away.

I smile back and say, "I'd like to think I'm not horrible."

He says, "Yeah, you had me beat."

****
We now commence the strategic advice portion of this blog entry. This hand perfectly illustrates what's wrong with limp-calling with a hand like K-J. Of course, you might hit a miracle flop with two pair or three of a kind, but that's less than 2% of the time. If you're calling a pre-flop raise on a 2% hope, you're throwing your money away.

If you are the pre-flop raiser with K-J, a flop like J-8-2 rainbow is just about ideal. You have top pair, strong kicker, little to fear from draws, and nothing that looks like a two-pair hit with which an opponent might have called your pre-flop raise. It looks like smooth sailing.

Conversely, if you limp with the same K-J, then call a pre-flop raise, now how does that J-8-2 flop look? You have to worry that the raiser has A-J, J-J, Q-Q, K-K, or A-A, against any of which you are a huge underdog. You have no draw to save your bacon if you venture further. And being out of position, you have to either check--thus showing weakness, inviting an aggressive opponent to bet even if the flop missed him, after which you have to basically guess where you are in the hand--or bet, worried that you'll have to abandon those chips if you get raised.

That's why people call K-J and similar holdings "trouble hands," because they are frequently dominated and make it very difficult to deduce whether you're ahead or behind, so that it's easy to make large mistakes--especially when playing from out of position.

If my opponent had thought this through ahead of time, he could have saved himself $37. He could have thought, "What would be a pretty good flop for me that isn't relying on a 2% or less probability? Maybe something like J-8-2. But even if I get that, how sure can I be that my hand is good? Not very. Might be better just to wait for a better spot." He could then have let go of the $2 he had invested, or, if he ran through that mental exercise first, just folded without even putting up the $2. Another approach would have been to raise with the K-J before the flop, thus making a lead-out continuation bet after the good flop a very natural move.

Alternatively, he could have done one of two things on the flop, once he realized that the flop was about as well-suited to his hand as he could ask for. First, he could lead out betting at it, stealing the initiative from me. If I'm holding A-K, A-Q, A-10, pocket 10s, etc., it's going to be hard for me to call. If I come over the top of his bet, he can still choose to fold. An affirmative $25 bet does him a hell of a lot more good than check-calling my $25 bet, not only in terms of giving him a chance to win the pot outright if I've missed, but in terms of getting a lot more information about whether he's ahead or behind. If you're willing to invest $25 on this hand with a call, take the aggressive route and stick it in up front, forcing me to make the decision.

Second, if he wanted to be even more daring, he could check-raise me all-in after I bet the $25. There's a pretty decent chance that his hand is good here. Even if it's not, he invests $63 to potentially win the $60 or so that is already in the pot, plus my last $63 if I call, so he's getting 2:1 on his money if I call, and it's pure profit to him if I fold. Given our stack sizes (he's sitting on about $300), this is an extremely reasonable move.

For the record, if he had check-raised me, I certainly would have folded. If he had led out with a $25 bet on the flop, I would have either folded or moved all-in over the top, depending on my sense of his strength; I'm really not sure which way I would have gone. At the very least, he would have given me a hard decision, and anytime you make an opponent face a difficult decision, you open the door for him to make a costly mistake, which is basically your whole object.

Instead, though, he played it passively, like a coward, and gave away $37 when he had the best hand. Of all the ways he could have played his hand, the limp-call/check-call/check-fold was absolutely the worst option. (It is because people often do things like this that the Stratosphere and the Sahara are consistently profitable for me.)

I'm glad you don't think I'm a horrible player, sir. I don't think you're horrible, either--but you do need a lot of work on the basics of the game: use of position, aggression, and hand selection. Employing any of those three things correctly probably would have won you the pot, or at least caused you to lose a lot less.

600

Can it really be that I have managed to find 600 things to say about poker? I guess so.

After every 100, I kind of scratch my head and wonder if I still have another 100 things left to say on the subject, but somehow they keep spilling out. This time it took 50 days (slightly slower than my previous pace), so an average of twice a day I find something to write about.

You can see my previous centenary posts here.

Thank you for continuing to read. I mean that--it is gratifying and flattering. And please click on the dumb Google ads once in a while. That way, I don't have to spend quite as much time taking money from drunk tourists.

Define "new"

The scan above is from the current (May 20) issue of Gaming Today/Slots Today. Note the repeated use of the word "new" to describe the poker table at the Rio that is imprinted with hand rankings. They say it arrived "just in time" for the World Series of Poker that is starting next week.

Now look back at this post from December 19, 2007, the first time I played at the Rio. See anything familiar?

Nice to see that GT/ST is right on top of the latest breaking news.

Poker gems, #121

Richard Harroch and Lou Krieger, in Poker for Dummies, p. 107.

If you never bluffed at all in Omaha/8, you'd probably be better off.

How long is "the long run"?

One often hears it said that poker is a skill game because, over the long run, the luck evens out. That's true, at least in a theoretical sense. But just how long does "the long run" have to be for the luck to even out?

I recently read (though I can't remember where, and I'm feeling too lazy to search for it) an interview with Gus Hansen in which he estimated that perhaps 90% of his success in a given session could be attributed to luck, but over the course of a year, that number would be more like 2%. That sounds nice, and it roughly matches my personal, subjective sense of what's going on, but it's not very scientific.

I'm reading Poker for Dummies by Richard Harroch and Lou Krieger. It is actually a fine introduction to the game. Their chapters on stud and Omaha are the first pieces of strategic advice I've read on those games, and they have already helped me with both starting hand selection and deciding when to jam versus keep the pot small in the low-stakes HORSE tournaments I've been playing every day lately.

But of even more interest, and the part that is of relevance to this post, was this short snippet, from pp. 35-36:

We used a computer to simulate 60,000 hands of $20-$40 Hold'em. That's
about one year of play if you treated poker as a job and went at it eight hours
a day. The objective was to determine how long it would take to get into "the
long run," that elusive zone where luck is filtered out and only skill
determines who wins and loses.

Because identical player profiles were loaded into the computer, the
long-run expectation was zero. With identical profiles, each player should
neither win nor lose. They should have broken even in the long run.

Nevertheless, there were four losers and five winners. Seat 9 lost $3.18
per hour while seat 6 won at the rate of $1.99. That's a difference of more than
$5 per hour--and it was clear they never got into the long run, even after a
year of simulated play.

The authors then discuss extending the simulation to 50 years of play, and still differences remained, though smaller: up $0.60 per hour for the big winner and down $0.35 per hour for the big loser. They conclude from this experiment: "Maybe the best you can expect over a lifetime of poker is that only 1 to 1.5 percent of your results would be attributable to luck."

This reminded me of a startling assertion that Mike Caro made in one of his Bluff magazine columns last year:

Here’s where people get confused. They think that because luck evens out in
the long run, and skill prevails, that over their career of playing poker,
they’ll get almost exactly the same opportunities as everyone else. This just
isn’t so. A lifetime isn’t long enough for the cards to break
even.

Sure, if you play 10 hours a day for 50 years, you’ll get approximately the
same proportion of top pairs, flushes, full houses, straight flushes, and
everything else that others get. Some folks call it the law of averages or the
law of very large numbers. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. You need to
consider which games you’re playing when you hold that royal flush and how many
players are throwing big money against it. Are you competing for big limits at
the right times? Were you on vacation when the billionaire came to town and
dumped millions into your game?

And what about tournament winners? A top pro can go years without winning a
tournament and another with similar skill might win four times in one year. That’s luck, and – trust me – it won’t even out in 25 years of play. Skill matters a lot, but not enough to definitively determine who’s best – which is another reason I seldom play poker tournaments. I already know I’m best and if I simply declare it, some folks will believe me. If I play hundreds of tournaments and don’t win, they’ll begin to wonder. See?

Life isn’t fair. Some people spend a lot of time in hospitals. Some
businesses fail for unforeseen reasons. Your life equates to a single session of
poker. Luck won’t even out for you. But the more you steadfastly make
good decisions, the better you’re likely to do with the cards you’re dealt.

That's from the March, 2007, issue, posted here, with emphasis added.

So if you're playing several times a week, not doing anything different than your usual winning ways, yet experience a couple of months in which you lose, lose, and lose some more, can it really be due entirely or largely to a nasty streak of bad luck lasting that long?

Oh, yeah.

A brief observation about the WSOP

I think I must be the only poker blogger who has not yet had anything to say about the controversial decision to delay the World Series of Poker main event final table until November. My silence is mainly because I just don't care. The whole thing makes my shoulders shrug and my eyes glaze over. The WSOP just isn't of much importance in my life.

But yesterday something occurred to me that I haven't seen mentioned in the pros-and-cons debates. (Perhaps it has been and I just missed it.) And that is this*: If it fails as an experiment, and thus only happens one time, and next year they go back to things as they were, this year's winner will have the shortest reign as world champion on record (something like nine months).

Even more peculiar, and possibly a greater perversion of justice, is that last year's winner, Jerry Yang, would then end up as the longest-reigning one-time winner (i.e., excluding the four back-to-back winners: Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson, Stu Ungar, and Johnny Chan).

This is not merely of symbolic importance--there's real money on the line. As I understand it (it's not like I have a whole lot of personal experience as world champ), whoever is the current title holder tends to get swamped with offers to attend tournaments, with entry fees and travel expenses all covered by the sponsoring facilities, plus the various endorsement deals, etc. I don't know that cutting the duration of holding the title from 12 months to 9 months would mean an actual 25% cut in those side benefits, but there would almost certainly be some reduction in such perks.

That may be among the least compelling arguments that have been made on the decision. But if I were the winner, I think I would experience at least a bit of annoyance that I got cheated out of a quarter of my time as the champ, and that that time was given to Jerry Yang.

I'm just sayin'.



*For some reason, typing that sentence gave me a chills-inducing flashback to Richard M. Nixon saying "Let me say this about that."

Not the same thing

I just got back from a session at the Rio--thought I'd get in a couple more there before the place becomes a madhouse with the World Series of Poker next week.

The player on my right was, well, full of himself. He was a know-it-all, kind of like Cliff Clavin in "Cheers." Particularly where the question was about poker rules, he considered himself to be an expert on par with Hoyle.* We had three players at the table who, it was painfully obvious, were having their first casino poker session. They were full of questions, and Mr. Hoyle thought it was his duty to pipe up and provide definitive answers, even if the questions were directed to the dealer. And, of course, the dealer's answer was never good enough--he always had to embellish on it. Basically, he just liked showing off that he knew poker rules.

Unfortunately, he was more confident than right, and not so good at following even the rules he knew.

There was a huge hand in progress as I sat down, with a four-way all-in. Mr. Hoyle was not in it, but the player on his right was; he and one of the newbies were the last ones with chips left after the betting round on the turn. At this point, Mr. Hoyle began chatting with the player on his right, speculating about what he thought the all-in players had. When the guy he is talking to still has live cards, chips, and decisions to make, and with an enormous pot being contested by so many players, this is an egregious violation of the one-player-to-a-hand rule.

Those being potentially disadvantaged by it (i.e., the ones who were already all-in) were down at the far end of the table, and probably couldn't hear, and therefore couldn't speak up in protest. So even though I had just sat down, I took it upon myself to stop him: "You really can't be discussing the hand with him while he still has action pending." Mr. Hoyle didn't acknowledge that he was wrong, but he did shut up.

I had no idea what sort of personality I was dealing with, since I had been there only a couple of minutes (the hand was extremely slow to play out because of the involvement of the inexperienced players, who were completely bewildered by the multiple all-in bets, side pots, etc.). But as I was to find out, I had apparently caused a considerable bruise to his ego with this mildest of scoldings.

Several hands later, I injected myself again, though the situation was quite different: The dealer misread a tricky board. The final community cards were 3-3-3-4-8. Player A had pocket jacks. Player B had pocket 4s. Both players thought that A was the winner. The dealer did, too, and was starting to push the pot to A. All three of them were seeing threes full of jacks beating threes full of fours. But actually player B had the better hand, with fours full of threes. It's an easy mistake to make in that situation.

Anyway, it got straightened out, and the pot was properly given to Player B. When it was over, Mr. Hoyle nudged me and said, "You know, just like about me talking about the hand? Well, you shouldn't be helping the players there, either."

I don't like to get into arguments at the poker table, and I didn't expect that I could convince him of how wrong he was, and the situation didn't seem likely to come up again that session, so I ignored his remark and let it drop.

But he was absolutely wrong.

His error in the first hand was potentially providing information/assistance to a player who still had decisions to make. In the second hand, no player had any decision left to make. I was correcting a dealer error, not helping another player. Yes, it's true that both players had misread Player B's hand. But once both players had turned their cards face up on the table, they are not required to make an accurate determination of what their best five-card hand is, or who the winner is--that becomes the dealer's obligation.

Now, if the situation were slightly different, if B had flashed his cards, then started to muck them thinking that he had lost, I would be out of line to stop him or speak up to inform him that he had the winner, because he would have to be left alone to decide whether to throw them away or turn them face up for the dealer to read.

Cards face-up on the table speak for themselves, and the player with the best hand is entitled to the pot (absent an exceptional situation in which there is something he has done wrong or failed to do right, as in the stories discussed here).**

What's more is that players have an affirmative ethical obligation to prevent just such dealer mistakes from being made. For example, Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, p. 62, rule 9.15: "Any player who sees an incorrect amount of chips put into the pot, or an error about to be made in awarding the pot, shall point out the error to the dealer at the earliest possible opportunity." Krieger and Bykofsky, in The Rules of Poker, agree: "Although the dealer is required to determine the best hand and award the pot accordingly, cards speak, and every player at the table has an ethical obligation to speak up if he notices a dealer error." (Rule 5.22, p. 140.)

I was puzzled by Mr. Hoyle's critique of my intervention at first, but, as I mentioned earlier, as time went by, it became clear that his ego was heavily invested in always being right, and I had done damage to that fragile self-image. Psychologically, he needed to redeem himself, and finding a spot in which he could return my admonishment filled the bill for him. Getting the criticism in so as to balance the scales was far more important to him than actually being right.

Egos make people do the strangest things.




*Yes, I know that Hoyle died before poker as we know it was invented. But it's just a figure of speech. And besides, Hoyle is in the poker hall of fame, though that has always struck me as kind of an oddity.

** Funny story--at least it was funny at the time. The first day of class in poker dealer school, the instructor was trying to teach this principle, which is usually condensed to just "cards speak"--two words that this instructor kept repeating, to drill it into us. He had an extremely thick Filipino accent. A young woman sitting next to me asked at the next break what the teacher had been saying. I explained it. "Oh," she said. "That makes sense. I thought he was saying 'cod spick,' and I had no idea what that was about."

I predict that when this is posted it will be the only page on the whole world wide web in which the phrase "cod spick" appears.

Poker joke

In the mail today was the copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Poker that I had ordered. As with the Dummies book, there is a sound, non-obvious reason for me to be reviewing these--about which more sometime soon. This one was written by the late, great Andy Glazer.

I was just thumbing through it, when I spotted the word "Lollapalooza" in a sub-header on p. 147. I couldn't imagine what this had to do with poker, so I read the section. It's apparently an old poker joke, but one I had never heard. I liked it so much I decided to share it with y'all, and scanning it was much easier than typing. (Copyright, shmopyright.) Click to make it big enough to read, and enjoy:

A poker urban legend

I heard a poker urban legend today. Oddly enough, before this happened it had never even dawned on me that there is or might be an entire sub-genre of urban legends dealing with poker.

I was at the Venetian. The woman on my right told the story. It seems that her father was in an unspecified Atlantic City poker room when they first started offering bad-beat jackpots. Sharing the table with him was a quiet older woman and two young punks, who were behaving obnoxiously towards her and everybody else. At some point, a rare hand came up, with a straight flush beating four of a kind. One of the young punks had the straight flush. The older woman had the four of a kind. She flashed it to the kid, then threw it in the muck, voiding any possibility of the casino paying out the jackpot. As she did so, she said something like, "That'll teach you to be rude to everybody!" Of course, the jackpot was huge; she sacrified what would have been the lion's share of the money in order to spite the punk and deprive him of what would have been the second-largest portion of the payout, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. (Typical bad-beat jackpots are distributed something like 40-50% to the loser of the hand, 25-40% to the winner of the hand, and the rest parcelled out to the other players at the table or in the entire card room.) It turns out that the woman was independently wealthy, playing poker just for fun, and didn't care about the money, so it was worth it to her to make sure the punk didn't get rewarded for his bad behavior.

So why do I call this an urban legend? Because this now makes the third time I've heard the same story, from three different people, in different locations (one back in Minnesota before I moved here). There is some variation in details: usually it's just one bad apple at the table instead of two, for example. Of course, the jackpot is always huge, never one that was recently hit and therefore near its minimum.

It is not impossible that this has actually occurred somewhere, sometime. But it's extremely unlikely that it has happened so many times that by pure chance I have been seated at poker tables with three people who either witnessed such an event or were, as they claimed, retelling it second-hand. I would not have difficulty believing that the father of the woman at the table today did, in fact, tell her that story. However, I would be highly skeptical about his having actually been witness to it. It is far more likely that he heard the story from somebody else, and inserted himself into it in the retelling--a classic and prime feature of the urban legend.

The largest online repository of urban legends that I know of is http://www.snopes.com/. I searched that site for the word "poker," and though I found a few stories in which poker is an incidental part, there were none centered specifically around the game. So this may be a whole unexplored area.

Note how well the characteristics of this thrice-repeated (within my hearing) story fit the general outlines of the urban legend, as described in the glossary supplied by the good folks at snopes.com:

Urban legends are a specific class of legend, differentiated from
"ordinary" legends by their being provided and believed as accounts of actual
incidents that befell or were witnessed by someone the teller almost knows
(e.g., his sister's hairdresser's mechanic). These tales are told as true,
local, and recent occurrences, and often contain names of places or entities
located within the teller's neighborhood or surrounding region.

Urban legends are narratives which put our fears and concerns into the form
of stories or are tales which we use to confirm the rightness of our world view.
As cautionary tales they warn us against engaging in risky behaviors by pointing
out what has supposedly happened to others who did what we might be tempted to
try. Other legends confirm our belief that it's a big, bad world out there, one
awash with crazed killers, lurking terrorists, unscrupulous companies out to
make a buck at any cost, and a government that doesn't give a damn.

Folks commonly equate 'urban legend' with 'false' (i.e., "Oh, that's an
urban legend!"). Though the vast majority of such tales are pure invention, a
handful do turn out to be based on real incidents, and whether or not something
actually happened has no bearing on its status as an urban legend. What lifts
true tales of this type out of the world of news and into the genre of
contemporary lore is the blurring of details and multiplicity of claims that the
events happened locally, alterations which take place as the stories are passed
through countless hands. Though there might indeed have been an original actual
event, it clearly did not happen to as many people or in as many places as the
various recountings of it would have us believe.

Clearly this is told as a cautionary tale about the importance of being civil to others at the poker table, lest a victim of rudeness visit extreme financial revenge upon the taunter(s). And, as I said, perhaps it actually happened once somewhere.

Or, at least as likely, what actually happened was somebody unaware of the jackpot flashed the huge losing hand, then mucked it before anybody could stop him or her, not knowing that they were throwing away a pot of gold, following which the story was modified as a morality tale. No matter how nasty our species is (and--trust me--I operate under no false pretenses about the awfulness of which people are capable; the rose-colored glasses came off long ago), stupidity and ignorance are still responsible for about a zillion times more bad things happening than is deliberate cruelty.

If you have heard this particular urban legend or other poker-related tales you suspect to be such, I'd love to read about them in the comments.

Poker gems, #120

Comedian Steven Wright:

Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.

Additional info about marked $100 bills

Pauly, of Tao of Poker fame, picked up on my latest note about the odd stamp marks on the backs of $100 bills, and added some photos from his own wallet. See here (but note that for some reason I can't figure out the permalink on the post in question appears to go to the blog's entire May, 2008, archive, so you may have to scroll down to the one in question, dated May 20). A comment left on that post gave a very useful pointer to this page, which has lots of additional examples and some explanatory theories.

Strangest "Poker After Dark" ever

Last night's episode of "Poker After Dark" was the strangest ever. It had little to do with the poker. The whole thing was dominated by a weird prop bet that started as a seemingly trivial bit of small talk.

Phil Gordon said to Howard Lederer, "I saw your mom playing poker at the Mirage yesterday." Lederer doesn't believe it. And it eventually turns into a $1000 bet. Gordon is so convincing that Robert Williamson takes $1000 of the action, too.

Before the bet is actually placed, though, Gordon's story changes several times, and gets embellished. First he decides that it was at the Venetian, not the Mirage, and it might have been two days ago, rather than yesterday. And maybe she wasn't actually playing poker, but was just in the poker room.

Then there's a big question about whether it was Lederer's mother or stepmother. Both Gordon and Lederer state that Gordon has definitely met both of them, and should be able to recognize either one and tell them apart. But Gordon is confused for a while. Apparently at some unknown time in the past there was a karaoke contest at which Lederer's mother was a judge, and she voted against Gordon. Gordon at first says that this is the woman he talked to yesterday. Then later he says, no, not that one, the other one--so presumably Lederer's stepmother.

Whichever one it supposedly was, Lederer isn't buying it. His mother hates casinos, and won't even go to a movie theater inside of one, so the idea that she was casually playing poker (she doesn't play poker, either) in the Mirage or the Venetian is just out of the question, even though she does live in Las Vegas. Lederer's stepmother does play poker, but Lederer was pretty sure that she was then in San Diego (she does not live in Vegas; I assume, though it wasn't stated, that she lives in New England, where I believe Howard's father still lives and teaches English), and that she would never hit town without calling him. On the strength of those presumptions, he's willing to bet that whoever it was that Gordon saw and spoke to, it was neither his mother nor his stepmother.

But Gordon isn't backing down. In fact, his story gets more specific, which is what draws Williamson into the bet. Gordon says that not only did he recognize the woman in question, but that she asked him if he recognized her. He said, "Yeah, you're Howard's mom," and she confirmed that. Gordon is so certain of all of this that he says he would bet up to $20,000 on it. When others at the table express interest in the bet, he is so confident that he tells them that if Howard will cover their bets, "Back the truck up!" He had temporarily forgotten Lederer's stepmother's name, but when Lederer mentions "Simone," he adds extra emphasis--yes, that's definitely who it was.

Well, after a lot of back and forth (and this is a greatly condensed version of all that took place), they make the bets, somebody gets a cell phone, and Lederer places the call to his stepmother. (They never call his mother; apparently Gordon accepts that it was not she.) She is in Florida (I think that's what she said) and has been for a few days. She has not been in Las Vegas recently. Lederer is careful not to lead the witness; he simply asks her where she is now and how long she has been there, without telling her the back story or that there is money on the line. Gordon speaks briefly to her, too, ruling out the possibility that Lederer is faking the conversation.

He pays up, but remains apparently completely baffled at how he could have it wrong. He suggests that maybe Lederer has set the whole thing up, coaching Simone in advance to deny having been in Vegas. (This seems unlikely. Not only do I not think that Lederer would stoop to that kind of rank dishonesty, but it just seems too looney a thing to set up in the hopes that it would somehow lead to a prop bet.) Williamson seems to believe that Lederer and Gordon conspired to make the whole thing up just to take Williamson's money, which they will secretly split later. (Unlikely, I think, for similar reasons.)

This is a really bizarre situation. I'm impressed that Lederer would have such reliance on his knowledge of the two women in question (particularly his stepmother, who does play casino poker; he was therefore relying solely on the presumption that she would not come to town without calling him) as to disbelieve an incredibly earnest and highly convincing Gordon. Gordon, in fact, was so convincing that Ali Nejad said that if Lederer accepted the bet, it could only be because he hated money. Gordon had me convinced, too. I thought that Lederer was going to get a surprise on the other end of the phone. (I wasn't sure enough that I would have put $1000 down on it, though, especially because of how Gordon's story changed in significant details along the way.)

So what could possibly have occurred in Phil Gordon's life that had him 100% certain that he had had a conversation with Lederer's stepmother the day before, yet be wrong about it? That's the core of the mystery for me. I hopped over to the http://www.twoplustwo.com/ "televised poker" forum to see if there was speculation about this. A reasonably plausible suggestion was made by somebody calling himself "badatmath": "It was probably some lady that had met Phil in a poker tournament or something and when he said "yeah, you're Howard's mom!" she didn't hear what he said, thought he was joking, or just went along with it for some reason."

That does seem to be just about the only possibility that makes sense. Of course, it also requires that she coincidentally happened to resemble Lederer's stepmother, or that Gordon had a brain lapse as to what Lederer's stepmother looks like. Nobody during the show nor online has openly suggested this, but a healthy dose of alcohol in Gordon's system at the time might also be part of the answer. That would also help explain his uncertainty as to which casino this happened in, what day it occurred, which of Lederer's relatives it was, whether she was actually playing poker or just hanging around the room, etc.

Phil Gordon hasn't had any well-known nickname before now. At the close of the episode, the fill-in voice-over commentator said that Gordon, now with some egg on his face, could become known as Phil "Back The Truck Up" Gordon.

All in all, it was a weird but fascinating glimpse into human psychology generally--i.e., how we can trick ourselves so easily, and be much more certain of things that we really ought to be--and, more specifically, into the lives of professional gamblers, and how easily they turn ordinary interpersonal interactions and conversations into betting opportunities. No matter how long I stay in this racket, I can't imagine ever becoming such a gambler at heart that I would act that way. Maybe I still just value money way too much....


Addendum, May 25, 2008

It's actually even a little weirder than I reported above. I'm watching the "Director's Cut" show, where they recap the week's events. In replay, it's clear that I slightly misremembered what Gordon said in his story of the encounter. Rather than him being the one to affirmatively suggest to the woman that she was Howard's mom, he actually says that she offered this: "You remember me. I'm Howard's mom." If he's accurate about that, it effectively eliminates the suggestion discussed above about Gordon saying such a thing and it being unheard or misunderstood or shrugged off by the woman he was talking to. Of course, memory is tricky, and perhaps it did happen as suggested above, and in Gordon's memory he has accidentally inverted who made the identification. (In the twoplustwo thread on this, somebody transcribed part of the discussion, and very specifically quotes Gordon as saying that he's the one who suggested the identification. But just moments ago I saw a replay of another part in which he says that the woman is the one who affirmatively identified herself, so apparently he told it both ways, a detail that I didn't catch the first time around.)

In the post-game interview, however, Gordon remain adamant about who he spoke to. He is mystified about the whole thing, says it's the strangest thing that has even happened to him, and he is headed over to the Venetian to investigate. Perhaps he is hoping to find other people that know Lederer's stepmother and will verify that she was there.

This all transpired several months ago, so I wonder what he uncovered. Gordon has a blog, but he has only posted on it twice in the last year and a half, and there's nothing there. I submitted a question about this through his web site, but I'm not really expecting a response.

I'm OK, your not OK

A friend pointed this out to me in an email: Our fine, proud, local community college, the College of Southern Nevada, has this banner across its web site home page: "While your [sic] focused on learning, we're focused on you."

I guess if you attend school there and have to do a term paper, you can be pretty sure that bad spelling and punctuation won't be counted against you.

Addendum

I was looking over the list of top administration in order to find somebody to whom I could send a taunting email about this gaffe. In the process, I came across this paragraph describing the functions of one Larry Mason, "Interim Director of Diversity & Inclusion":

Provide leadership, guidance, and coordination for the college’s diversity
efforts. The Office of Equity & Inclusion was established to
address diversity and multiculturalism related issues. Those issues include
access, equity, retention, and recruitment for faculty and students.
Additionally CSN will facilitate professional development for diversity as it
pertains to Culture, Race, Gender and Religion and their impact in the classroom
and campus. As CSN and the Nevada increases it’s population of international
students and diverse students, we will work diligently to prepare our future
workforce to compete in a global marketplace and to establish bridges between
CSN and K-12

Wow. Let's proofread that together, shall we?

First sentence: This is actually a sentence fragment, not a sentence, as it has no subject.

Second sentence: "[M]ulticulturalism related" should be hyphenated.

Fourth sentence: This needs a comma after "Additionally." It is silly and pretentious to capitalize any of the four nouns used. There is no serial comma used after "Gender," though one was used in the previous sentence after "retention." One can argue for or against that function for the comma, but at least be consistent, and either use it every time or omit it every time.

Fifth sentence: "The Nevada"? What is that, a river or something? Since when do states get referred to as "the"? ("I'm going down to the Florida to see Disney World!") "[I]ncreases": you've got a double subject in this sentence ("CSN and the Nevada"); assuming that the intention is to speak about the increase in the population of both of them, this should read "increase," rather than "increases." "[I]t’s population": Ugh. Who had the bright idea of sticking an apostrophe in there? The possessive pronoun should be "their," anyway, since we're dealing with the same double subject. Finally, there is no period at the end of the sentence.

Maybe I should be cautious about pointing out all of these problems. They'll probably go running to the legislature saying we need a tax increase so that they can hire a proofreader.

When I worked in an office job in about 1982, typewriters with memory functions were still not common. Our office didn't have one, and I was given the task of researching the available equipment so that our office could purchase one. I remember receiving in the mail a letter advertising one model, bragging about how easy the machine would make production of perfect documents. I even remember the manufacturer: it was the ill-fated "Qwip" division of Exxon. But the letter containing these boasts was chock-full of misspellings and other typographical errors. I found maybe 20 of them, then mailed it on to my father for his amusement. He found several more than I had overlooked. He gave it to his secretary, who found one or two more that we had both missed.

You might guess: We did not buy a Qwip system. We bought an IBM. Poor mechanics of writing give a terrible impression of a business, especially one trying to sell word-processing equipment. Bad writing similarly gives a horrible impression of an alleged institution of higher learning. If you come out of CSN with a diploma, but unable to write a competent sentence in English, was your tuition money really well spent?

In putting this kind of crap on its web site, CSN is basically announcing to the world that as an institution it doesn't give a damn about the basics of English usage. One might wonder why that is, but I sure as hell don't have an answer.

How to fold

You would think that with all of the infinite complexities of poker, the one thing everybody would be able to get right is the single easiest part of the game: folding.

You would be wrong.

Online, of course, all you have to do--in fact, all you can do--is click the button. A few sites give you the option to show your cards as you fold, but only when you are the last one out of the hand, so that there is no way you can queer any action yet to come. Just about the only way you can screw up the process is by just sitting there, not doing anything, and timing out--which is extremely rude, because it wastes everybody's time for no good reason. Well, there is one other way you can get it wrong: you can type in chat about what you're folding, when there are still players actively in the hand. But that will typically get you scolded by another player, and if it gets reported to the site, you'll at least get a warning not to do it again.

But in a casino, the number of wrong ways to fold vastly exceeds the number of right ways, and it seems that the universe of poker players manages to find and employ every single one of the wrong ways, every day.

By far the most common problem with folding is exposing the bottom card inadvertantly. Anytime you lift the cards off of the table even a couple of inches, there's a good chance that you're flashing. If I really watched every player's cards, I could see at least one card inadvertantly exposed on nearly every deal. That's how ubiquitous the problem is.

On most hands, knowledge of one discard won't change anything. But you never know when it will. If I see a 7 flash by, and the flop is 7-7-K, then I know that I don't have to worry about the bad kicker in my 7-5 hole cards, because I have the only 7 left in the deck. That's an extremely valuable piece of information.

It becomes tiresome to inform the dealer every time I see a card flashed as it's being folded, so I've gradually raised my threshold for doing so. First, I have to be planning to stay in the hand; if I'm going to fold myself, my illicit information isn't hurting anybody else. Second, the violator has to be a chronic one. If it's somebody who isn't usually flashing, I let it go. But if he's doing it a lot, clearly he needs to be informed that there's a problem. Third, I have to see the card pretty clearly--be able to identify it specifically. If I just get a vague sense of a bunch of red dots, or that it's a picture card without further detail, I don't speak up.

One might question the ethics of this position, but it's seriously a problem to speak up every single time I see a flashed card, because it's happening all the friggin' time! I'm not thrilled about the decision to let it slide the majority of the time, but the rigid alternative is socially extremely awkward--being the only person at the table who ever mentions it at all (I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard another player volunteer having seen a flashed discard), and doing so on nearly every deal, if I were really strict about it, well, it's just an untenably nittish role to play. So I live with my compromise, for good or ill.

The next wrong way to fold is the loft: the guy who thinks it's somehow cool to toss his cards way up high, hoping they'll land right in the muck. These goofballs appear to take great pride in the accuracy of their arcs. But, obviously, this exposes at least the bottom card, and often both, to anybody at the table who cares to take a peek in mid-air. What surprises me most about this is how few dealers say anything about it. It should be an immediate warning, with the floor called over on a second offense, and an invitation to leave for the day the third time around. Usually, though, nothing at all is said or done. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

A third wrong way to fold is to flash your cards to another player before you toss them in. This is especially egregious if the other player still has a live hand to be played. But it's wrong even if you're showing them only to a player who folded before you. Information is the most precious commodity at a poker table, and by both rule and convention, it must be equally available to all. Hence the "show one, show all" rule. If you flash your cards to your buddy in the next seat, every other player has the right to see them, too, in order to help form a picture of what range of hands you tend to play versus fold. (If there is still action pending in the hand, the correct procedure is for the dealer to kill the mucked cards, then set them aside, to be revealed to the table after the hand is completed.) I don't often exercise this privilege, but once in a while there are two friends sitting in adjacent seats, who show each other their cards every time around. In those situations, I will indeed start exercising my right to see what they're throwing away, and--surprise, surprise--after about three times in a row, they catch on and stop doing it.

A fourth wrong way to fold is to flash your cards to the dealer. This is usually confined to the players in the 1 and 9/10 seats. The first problem with this is that the dealer doesn't care. He's cranking out hundreds of hands a day to mostly complete strangers, and cannot possibly have any emotional investment in whether you're getting the world's worst run of bad cards, or the most horrendous bad beats. What's more is that even if he did care, he can't show any reaction to what you are revealing, lest it leak improper information to the other players yet to act. Finally, it's pretty hard to show your cards to the dealer without them also becoming visible to at least one other player, usually in the seat on the dealer's other side.

Speaking of the dealer, it should--but cannot--go without saying that it is inexcusable to deliberately fire your cards at the dealer as if they were weapons. I don't see this every day, but probably a couple of times a month, on average. You're an idiot if you blame the dealer for whatever ill fortune you may have just experienced, and even more of an idiot if you decide to show the table where you place the fault. If I ran a card room, doing this just once would get you ejected for the day. No, you're not likely to send the dealer to the hospital for sutures or orthopedic surgery, but it's unspeakably rude and demeaning, and I simply wouldn't want players that hotheaded and volatile playing in my facility.

So there you have it--at least five wrong ways (that I can think of off the top of my head, though there are undoubtedly others) to do the simplest act that poker asks of its players. You literally don't have to (and shouldn't) even lift them off of the table. Just slide them gently forward.

When I first started reading poker blogs a couple of years ago, I had on my reading list several written by poker dealers, since I was interested in becoming one myself. I remember a post from one of them about this very subject. Unfortunately, I can no longer recall who wrote it, and I was unable to find it with several attempts at a Google search. But the post concluded with the observation that all you have to do is push your cards two inches forward. It then asked, "Is that too much to ask?"

It was a good question then, and remains so now. When all you have to do is slide your cards a few inches toward the dealer, how can so many people get it so wrong so much of the time?

Poker gems, #119

Johnny Moss, as quoted in Poker for Dummies, by Richard Harroch and Lou Krieger, p. 28.


In an otherwise even contest, the man with the best concentration will almost always win.

Poker gems, #118

Mike Caro, as quoted in Poker for Dummies, by Richard Harroch and Lou Krieger, p. 9. (There's a non-obvious reason that I'm reading this, which I'll probably disclose sometime fairly soon. Don't go jumping to any conclusions.)


If they're helpless and they can't defend themselves, you're in the right game.