Allow me to introduce you to Cardgrrl

The other day I received an email from a reader asking if we could arrange to meet while she is in town later this month. The signature file on the message pointed to her poker blog, so naturally I started reading.

Now, I have to tell you (actually, I have said this a few times before, but it bears repeating) that most poker blogs are crap, as far as I'm concerned. (Of course, their keepers might say the same about mine, but that's how tastes and opinions go.) Most of them just talk about specific hands and sessions, whining about bad beats, blah, blah, blah. I find them unreadable after about 30 seconds. Moreover, they tend to butcher the language and rules of writing the way I'd expect from a typical middle-school student. At a bad school. Who had flunked English. Twice.

So it definitely caught my attention when I quickly discovered that Cardgrrl (1) respects the basic mechanics of writing, and (2) actually has interesting things to say. Here's what little one can glean about her from perusing the still relatively short archives: After having had a variety of previous careers (including, I gather, web design, photography, and jewelry design--already an interesting set of background skills), she is now spending one year seriously attempting to see if it would be feasible to make it as a poker pro. The blog is the chronicle of her experiment, as is a book that apparently is being written as she goes. Maybe the strangest part is that she is doing this from Washington, D.C., which strikes me as one of the unlikeliest places from which to attempt launching a poker career, especially one that emphasizes live play over online play. OK, maybe Provo, Utah, would be stranger, but not by a lot.

The writing is smart, funny, and literate, qualities that one naturally assumes are shared by the author. The last time I was this impressed with a poker blog, for both having something original and interesting to say and saying it well, was when I started digging through the archives of The Vegas Year, which chronicles a somewhat similar poker-life experiment. (Still working on it, Robert, but I'll post a note akin to this one when I'm done.) Before that, it was when I first stumbled upon Hard-Boiled Poker.

So with that introduction, here are some of my favorite samples from CardGrrl, each followed by the accompanying URL, all posted with not even a semblance of permission from the author:

About an hour later, after a rebuy and a top-up (things are just not going my way at all), I find AhKh on the button. Five limpers enter the hand in front
of me, and ~ trying to learn a lesson from my previous experience ~ I raise to 10xBB this time. Surely this will induce some folding.

The big blind calls, as does a guy in middle position.

Flop comes 3s 5c 10h.

The big blind leads out 10xBB into a pot of 33xBB. Middle position guy folds.

I know this bettor. He could be leading with anything or nothing. I think there's a strong probability that my hand is good right now, and even if it isn't, I very likely have 6 outs to the winner. I also have to believe that, given my initial raise pre-flop, I have some fold equity here.

I reraise all in, an additional 31xBB to the original bet. I am called.

Turn is the ace of clubs. River is the ace of spades.

My trip aces go down in flames to... what else, the 2 and 4 of clubs.

Yes, the man called a huge raise out of position with the mighty 2-4 and took my whole stack. As he was explaining his reasoning, he said, "Well, I knew you had just wondered what raise would get people to fold, so I thought it would be fun to call with a donkey hand." He flopped an open-ended straight draw, and called a subsequent all-in bet despite not getting drawing odds.

And that was my night, right there.

I try to tell myself that I want people making these idiotic decisions, that in the long run I'll profit mightily off them.

http://raiseorfold.cardgrrl.com/2008/09/day-24-gone-in-two.html

(Obviously, this early in her poker career she had not yet learned that she had no chance from the beginning here, taking a measly A-K up against the nearly invulnerable 2-4. I wonder, in fact, if her opponent was one of my own disciples from the Holy Order of the Deuce-Four.)

I've always been a bit of an outlier on whatever normal curve you'd care to distribute the population along. I'm something of an oddball; I admit it, I'm
used to it, and mostly I'm okay with it. But with this change of profession,
such as it is, I'm really living into my differences these days. I am out-there.

Sometimes, driving the blissfully empty streets of my city in the wee hours
of the night, I feel so detached from the everyday lives slumbering in the
darkness around me that it's a little scary. I have stepped out of mainstream of
the economy, for example, in a fairly definitive way. My day-to-day activities
don't bear much resemblance to most other people's. And I spend a lot of my time
thinking about stuff that many people find either ridiculously arcane, of
dubious morality, fundamentally frivolous, or otherwise objectionable.

http://raiseorfold.cardgrrl.com/2008/09/day-27-untethered.html

The more I play poker, the more convinced I become that the single biggest component of a winning edge is the player's attitude.

As with any craft or art, one must have mastered the basics. You've got to
know the math (to a reasonable approximation, anyway). You have to be in
good-enough health to think clearly, observe, remember, concentrate, and put in
a sustained effort. You have to be sufficiently experienced to recognize the
shape of certain situations and their likely significance. And, of course, when
you get to showdown you have to actually have the winning cards often enough.

But the fact is, all of the above is useless ~ as a practical matter ~
without the right attitude. Although elements of the right attitude change with
the circumstances, there are some things about it that can be asserted
independently. The right attitude is: even-tempered, open, unafraid, patient,
focused, flexible, imaginative, rational, creative, self-aware, and resilient.

Aren't these qualities highly desirable in life as well? (Of course, one
might also add to the list: ruthless and relentless. Compassion and mercy do not
enter the equation at the poker table; whereas, a life devoid of these essential
qualities of humanity is hardly worth living.)

I watch with astonishment as decent players fall apart because their
attitude is incompatible with success. They are so highly reactive, so
emotionally labile (to get technical about it), that a bad card or an insult or
the wrong music or indigestion or too much to drink or whatever disagreeable
internal or external factor can move them off their best game. They wobble into
disequilibrium, they tilt, and then with the slightest nudge they
fall.

http://raiseorfold.cardgrrl.com/2008/10/attitude.html

Pocket aces are the best hand in Texas Hold’em. And, over the long run, they lose 15% of the time. That’s a little more than one in seven occasions, on
average. And believe me, when you’re playing for a monster pot or your tournament life, it seems like it happens a lot more often than that. Which is why, ridiculous as it may seem, there are players who actually say things like, “I hate the bullets, I always seem to lose with them.”

They don’t always lose with them, of course. But they remember the times
they do lose, because it hurts so much, and they gloss over the times when they
win with them, because they expect to win with them. This is called “selective
memory,” and it’s something poker-players should learn how to correct in
themselves, because it has all sorts of pernicious effects. We’ll talk about
that in other contexts too.

It is true, though, that your can get all your money in the middle pre-flop
with pocket aces and lose four times in a row. Or three times out of five. Or
eight times out of ten. You can lose with pocket aces over and over and over
again, to the point were someone will quote “1:6.6” at you and you will laugh
long and bitterly. When you look down at pocket aces you will see, instead, twin
headstones with your name engraved on them, and you will long for the sweet,
sweet release of death. You will develop a thirst for hemlock.

http://raiseorfold.cardgrrl.com/2008/10/do-you-feel-lucky-punk-well-do-you.html

The next post is the only long one that I will quote in full, because I couldn't find anything I wanted to snip out of it.

On Being Bad

Most mainstream religions frown on gambling.

There’s definitely something unholy about putting one’s (or, ideally, someone else’s) hard-earned money at risk — subject to the vagaries of chance — rather than to work. Should you be squandering the precious resources entrusted to you for mere entertainment? Furthermore, gambling just doesn’t seem like a godly activity; Einstein, for example, was offended by certain aspects of quantum theory, “God does not play dice with the universe.”

Gamblers come in two flavors, the superstitious and the scientific. The first subscribe to the magical property of luck and the second ascribe to the propositions of probability. Those who wish to mix luck and religion find themselves in the dubious position of asking their Deity to help them be lucky (we may pause to recall the unseemly spectacle of competing prayer-wars at the final table of the 2007 WSOP Main Event). This is particularly awkward for those who believe that God has a master plan, and all is fore-ordained. What is it you’re praying for in that case? “Let me turn out to be the one predestined to win!”

Those who are die-hard probability fans may start to wonder where God is in the grand scheme of things. If it’s all chance, given enough time and the laws of physics, pretty much everything that can happen, will happen. Why bring God into it all? There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there are plenty at the poker table. (Believe me, run bad long enough and you will start to question the existence of a loving God.)

Poker, with it’s skill component, [Grump scolds: Cardgrrl! You know better than to put that apostrophe there!] brings some further concerns into play. Now, in addition to the gambling, there’s the matter of using your presumably God-given talents to take other people’s money. Specifically, to take other people’s money by means of deception, aggression, and by taking advantage of their weaknesses. You are to feed on your opponents as the wolf feeds upon sheep. The apparent lack of sharp teeth and overt bloodshed should not mislead anyone: poker is a predatory pastime. This is not the stuff of saintly behavior.

The wish to exercise the cardinal virtues of compassion and generosity, the commendable impulse to heal the sick and nurture the helpless, the desire to educate and enlighten the ignorant, and the natural human tendency to bond and form groups for mutual aid — these are all deprecated to the point of being out-and-out liabilities when playing poker. Poker is a caricature of Darwinian competition, “nature red in tooth and claw,” survival of the fittest. It’s a bit like capitalism, except without the productivity part. It’s hard to see how this is a good thing.

Various people have tried, in my view completely without success of any kind, to make a case for poker having some socially redeeming value. The closest that I, personally, have ever been able to get is the notion that poker facilitates the redistribution of wealth from stupid people to smarter people. This seems like a pretty feeble proposition (on a factual basis) to begin with, and I’m not sure that it would represent much of a social good even if it were proven to be true. I see no evidence that people who are good at poker are, in fact, any more likely to do worthwhile things with money than their less-skilled counterparts.

Does boxing have any socially redeeming value? Two people get into a ring. There are certain rules that govern their behavior, which are intended to ensure that the fight is fair. The combatants bring differing levels of preparation, skill, stamina, experience, intelligence, aggression, discipline, and desire to the competition. And then they hit each other. A lot. Let’s face it: somebody is gonna get hurt.

It has always baffled me that some people find watching boxing to be entertaining, and I am stymied even more by the fact that there are people who actually like to box. I don’t like to see people fighting, and I really don’t like to see people hurt. (I especially abhor the idea of hitting or being hit, myself.) Then I wrote the previous paragraph, and now — although it still doesn’t appeal to me — I think I may have an idea why they enjoy it.

Poker is like boxing, without the physical part. The key to both activities is that the participants come to the table voluntarily. 1

When you climb into a boxing ring, you accept that you are going to get punched. Repeatedly. Hard. When you belly up to a poker table, you accept that everybody there is going to do his or her best to TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY. There are rules and referees, it’s not a free-for-all scrum. It is not the case that “anything goes.” If you don’t abide by the rules, you won’t be allowed to stay, and you may even be sanctioned. But within the magic circle of rope or felt, you are permitted to — nay, encouraged and rewarded for it! — exercise all your faculties to prevail. Hit as hard as you can, float and dodge, outwit and baffle. It may not be nice, but it cannot be described as unethical.

In a word: compete. Bring out your bad self and go medieval on their asses. As the teenage son of some dear friends asked drily the other night, over dinner, “You’re not going to trot out the catharsis argument, are you?”

(Smart kid. Let him write the damn book.)

Where was I?

I was raised to be a good girl. I was brought up to be nice. I was taught not to be selfish and to tell the truth. I wanted people to think well of me.

Enter the poker table and Enter the Dragon.

At the poker table I am not nice. I am utterly selfish. I am devious. I am aggressive. I am ruthless. I lie my ass off. I don’t care if people think well of me or not. In fact, if they think I’m stupid, it’s good. If they fear me, it’s good. If they like me, it’s good. I can work with whatever they think. At the poker table, I am not a good girl.

And that’s really, really good. It’s the thrill of defying a taboo. It’s satisfying, on the level of an inchoate itch that you didn’t even know required scratching until you dug in your fingernails for the first time. I can reinvent myself however I please. It’s fun.

But part of the reason it’s fun is because, on a very basic level, it’s safe. I’m playing poker. There are rules. It’s a game, not my whole life. And although, while playing poker, I may not be a good girl, I am always an honorable girl. My integrity remains intact, and it is important to me that others know and can rely on that.

I despite cheaters. They blur the boundary between the game and the rest of life in a destructive way; the “bad” that should be confined to the context of the game leaks out into the world, where it absolutely does not belong. That decompartmentalization is a breach of the poker-player’s social contract, and it undermines the very nature of the undertaking. It renders the game unconstrained, unsafe, and therefore not fun. In the context of a poker game, cheating is sociopathic behavior.

1 I set aside, here, the case of those addicted to gambling. This a topic that deserves separate consideration.

http://raiseorfold.cardgrrl.com/2008/10/on-being-bad.html


When things are going well, it's difficult to remember how awful it feels when things go badly. And, conversely, when everything is going to shit, it's difficult to remember what life was like when things were easy and pleasant. In fact, I maintain, except for the very most highly evolved persons, virtually impossible.

This trip to Atlantic City was a classic arc. Things started out pretty well. I went deep in a tournament or two. I was up a couple of hundred bucks at the cash table. I was flirting with my tablemates, with the dealers, the floor staff ~ let's be honest and say just about everyone ~ and they were flirting right back. Fun was being had by all concerned. The cards, while not spectacular, were well within normal and acceptable parameters. Poker was being played. And life was good.

(I add, on an entirely and purely personal note, that one cannot truly claim to have lived, as a poker player, until one has closed down a cash table in a casino and proceeded, whilst stone cold sober, to make out with the player immediately to one's left, as the dealer sits by and does his or her best not to hear or see anything. The entertainment value alone of this experience is enormous, quite apart from any other enjoyment that may be derived from it.)

And so one quite naturally thinks to oneself, "things are going swimmingly, yea verily I shall extend my stay in this paradise of gaming, where the rooms are cheap or free, the people pleasant and accommodating, and the cash runs like milk and money, err, honey."

But no paradise is without its snake, no rose without its thorn. Or, if you are me, your paradise becomes a snake pit, and your rosebush becomes a thicket of thorns without a bloom of any sort.

That horrible, perhaps unfamiliar, but indisputably ominous creaking noise you hear in the background, is the sound of the doomswitch being pulled from the OFF position to the ON position. You don't know it, yet, but you are FUCKED. Everything that was fun and good is now going to become very, very unfun and very, very bad. It's as if the Apocalypse had five horsemen, not four, and the guy after Death (Death’s really, really mean older brother) is coming specifically for you. Did I mention: really, really not good?

You will go through the stages of grieving. You will deny. You will rage and you will make stupid decisions. You will bargain. You will be very, very depressed. And eventually you will accept. Or you will kill yourself.

You know, one or the other.

In short: you will tilt. Welcome to my world.

http://raiseorfold.cardgrrl.com/2008/11/day-74-scorched-earth-and-other-signs.html


Women’s liberation and the feminist movement in general notwithstanding, women in our culture are still brought up to want — first and above all — to be loved. We are encouraged to do everything possible to be desirable, acceptable, and emotionally unthreatening. We are taught to avoid or swiftly resolve conflict, not to engage it, take it on, or god forbid escalate it. Few men, for example, would put "intimidating" high on the list of desirable attributes in a mate. (It was, in fact, a source of some consternation to me throughout my youth that people did sometimes characterize me as intimidating, especially since I had no intention of being so, nor could I really understand why others perceived me that way.)

But it turns out that, at the poker table, Machiavelli is right. It is better to feared than loved, if you have to choose between the two. This is especially true in tournaments. Tournaments are all about survival and domination, about putting your opponents to the test. If you cannot occasionally move an adversary off a hand when you need to, for example, you are utterly at the mercy of your cards and you are essentially playing bingo, not poker. Predictable behavior is not frightening: the bogeyman does not publish a schedule of his daily activities. He jumps out of the shadows, or emerges unexpectedly in the mundane environment of the laundromat (say), and wreaks bloody havoc. That’s scary. The tyrant does not forgive and forget, or pursue civil justice under the rule of law: he punishes his enemies (and the occasional innocent, just because) all out of proportion to their sins against him, and shows up with the secret police pounding on the door in the middle of the night. That’s intimidating.

While there are some benefits to having people like you (you may gain information, you may be given the benefit of the doubt, you may even get a break when you’re behind), they pale in comparison to the advantages gained by striking fear into your opponents’ hearts. I suppose if you could really somehow persuade your table mates that you were a harmless dumb bunny who was just getting lucky over and over that might be ideal. But realistically, that’s only going to work for awhile. Sooner or later any observant opponent is going to put two-and-two together and then, no matter how charming and careless you may appear, the fear and doubt are going to begin to set in. And then you have them.

http://raiseorfold.cardgrrl.com/2008/12/move-over-machiavelli.html


Romans 7:19
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.


I know I shouldn't play when I'm exhausted. So what do I do? I play when I'm exhausted.

I know I should work out every day, and especially on days when I'm playing. So what do I do? I don't go to the gym and sit around while my legs atrophy.

Once the minimum intellectual requirements are met, the fundamental key to success in this game is pretty simple: self-discipline. That comprises physical maintenance, emotional equanimity, and mental toughness.

I have a ways to go.

http://raiseorfold.cardgrrl.com/2009/01/romans-719.html

So there you have it--a little bit of what Cardgrrl has to offer. So go subscribe or add her to your favorites/bookmarks list, why dontcha?

Our brains are not wired for poker

This is a whole post devoted to telling you of a roughly three-second mental malfunction that I had the other night.

It was the unplanned mini-bloggerpalooza at Imperial Palace. I was in the big blind with some sort of king/baby offsuit hand, but nobody raised, so the flop came for free. It was king-high with two spades. I decided to take a stab at it and see what happened. Player A called. Player B called. OK--probably at least one of them has a flush draw, so if another spade were to hit, I was going to shut down. (Note that this isn't always so by any means. But the combination of being out of position and having an unraised pot pre-flop, so that opponents could have anything at all, meant that it was not a situation in which I was going to press hard with top pair/crappy kicker.) Turn was, indeed, another spade. I checked, Player A bet, Player B called, I folded. I don't recall the river action, but B won it with a small flush.

Next hand, I had some jack/baby garbage in the small blind. Again an unraised pot. Again the flop came to give me top pair, and again with two spades. I took the same tack. (I don't always do this, but the players left in were pretty passive, and a bet could often take down a pot uncontested, so I thought it worthwhile.) Same two players called me as in the previous hand. Again the turn was a third spade. I felt like I was Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day."

I checked, Player A checked, and B led out. My first reaction--which is, finally, getting to the point of this post--was approximately this: "There's no way that two hands in a row this guy can have been dealt two spades, flop a flush draw, and then hit it on the turn." I even went so far as to recall explicitly that if you start with two suited cards the probability of making a flush by the river is only about 6%, so must obviously be somewhat lower than that to hit it by the turn. Surely, I thought, he can't have had a less-than-6% event happen twice in a row--especially not in the same suit.*

The thing is, I know better than to think like this. I have had it drummed into me very thoroughly that things like hands of poker are independent events. The cards have no memory. What happened on the previous hand has zero bearing on the current hand. Hell, I even did well in a post-graduate statistics course back in the day. I know this stuff backward and forward.

What's more, I have an archive of posts making fun of players who don't grasp this simple fact. Here's one typical example. I'll even throw in a story I haven't told here before. In Minnesota, no-limit cash games are illegal, so the card clubs spread only limit. One time I watched a guy with pocket fours hit a set on the river, having called bets and raises from two opponents all the way, with every card on the board larger than his fours. His explanation? "I only called because fours have been hitting so often tonight." Brilliant, eh? In his mind, apparently, the cards had had a meeting at the beginning of the shift, and decided to have the fours be the stars of the show. He believed that enough to bet a substantial amount of money on the theory. (And, wonderfully, he was rewarded for it, thus perversely reinforcing his views.)

All of that history of me both feeling and actually being superior to many typical opponents in the degree to which I have internalized this simple concept is precisely the reason that I think it's so interesting that it would all abandon me, even if only briefly. I actually considered calling Player B in this spot. I might even have done it, if not for fear that Player A was setting a trap for a check-raise with the nut flush. And the only reason I contemplated the call was that kooky notion that he couldn't have made a spade flush on the turn twice in a row.

Fortunately, that thought lasted only about three seconds before rationality grabbed the steering wheel back from the stupid driver who was about to send it careening off the road.

Thinking about this mental lapse afterwards made me realize, for about the millionth time, how fragile our rational understanding of the world can be, and how easily it is penetrated, suppressed, and overwhelmed by erroneous, distorted, biased guesses about what is happening around us.

No matter how much I make fun of players who ask for a new deck of cards or a seat change** in order to change their luck, who play a junk hand on the basis of how lucky it has been for them (obviously the Deuce-Four is not included in the phrase "junk hand"), perform some weird ritual before each hand is dealt, won't touch $50 bills, believe in various good luck/bad luck totems, and so forth, I guess I have to admit that at some scary brain level I am only one odd coincidence away from potentially reverting to a caveman's grasp of the universe. We are deeply hard-wired to see patterns and infer cause-and-effect relationships even where they do not, in reality, exist. It requires constant vigilence to keep that tendency on a very tight leash.

Oh, and yes--Player B did have his second consecutive spade flush. Go figure.



*If it had been crubs, then sure. Because, as I have recently learned, crubs always get there. But we're talking spades here.

**Oooo, here's another story I haven't written about before. I'm pretty sure I told it in one of my early contributions to the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show, but I can't find it in any blog post. This was at the Canterbury Card Club in Minnesota. When one player left, the guy in seat 10 claimed dibs on a seat change because, he said, he was card-dead where he was (i.e., his request was not for tactical or comfort reasons, both of which can be perfectly legitimate). But he wanted to wait until he had played his button so that he wouldn't have to post the big blind again. On the next hand, when he was on the button, he ended up hitting quads and won a large pot. The dealer then started to help the guy move his chip stacks to the empty seat. The player practically shouted at the dealer, "What are you doing?" The dealer said, "You said you wanted a seat change." Seat 10, sounding as if the dealer were the world's biggest idiot, said, "You think I still want to change seats after I hit quads???"


Addendum, February 10, 2009

Just found the following story here:

Once football season ended, we put in a Splash the Pot promotion. That is
working out great and actually bringing in some people. It has also caused a few
comical events to occur.

A couple weeks ago, we had three tables going when it was time to splash
the pot. We drew the first table - table 7. Two hours later, we drew the second
table - table 7. At the time of the last drawing, one of the players sitting at
table 7 asked if he could move to table 2. His reasoning for wanting to move was
that table 7 had been drawn two times already and there was no way that it would
get drawn a third time; he felt he improved his chances of contesting for the
extra money on a different table.

I allowed him to move...and then I had him reach into the bag and draw for
the lucky table - table 7. After the pot with the extra money was completed, he
moved back to his original seat.

It's an "I'm bored" post

Yesterday on my day off from poker one of the tasks I accomplished was buying a new pair of shoes. Not a big deal? Well, you see, for me this happens about once every three or four years. I buy a pair and wear them for essentially everything, every day, until they're ratty enough that I'm slightly embarrassed to be seen in public. Yes, I am that cheap.

This time, largely because of having had such a good poker week (which continued today, incidentally; now at $88/hour for the month of February), I decided to go for new shoes even though the old ones have only one hole in them. I splurged $29.95 plus tax. Just as significant (or, let's face it, insignificant) is that this marks a departure from years of relying on New Balance, with a trial of Skechers.

While sitting at the Palms today waiting for a game, I was so bored that I took a picture of my feet. Then, having taken it, I had to post it here, right?

Today I am New Shoes Boy. (No need to send gifts or cards--but thanks anyway.)

Guess the casino, #50

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Comment: I am sort of cheating with this one, making it extremely difficult (I think) by zooming in so as to exclude the associated information that would make it almost trivially easy. To see what I have cut out of the photo before you check the answer, click here.



Answer: Hard Rock

Fun at the I.P.

As usual, I rather arbitrarily chose my work station for the evening: Imperial Palace. I'm very glad I did. It turned out both profitable and fun, a combination that's hard to beat.

Dug myself a hole early on, but just before I hit the big hand that surged me ahead into profit territory, I was, to my great surprise, joined at the table by two other poker bloggers, B.W.O.P. and F-Train. Soon thereafter, they were followed by Grubette, half of the blogger duo that is Poker Grub. I had not met her before, nor, I must confess, have I ever explored her blog, though I will promptly remedy that deficiency now. Also at the table was a guy named Ken, an uber-rock of a player whom I have met briefly a couple of times through social events and tournaments of allvegaspoker.com.

Now I have to tell you, this combination of folks promised to make the table lively, fun, and interesting--and it lived up to expectations, as far as I'm concerned. However, there was a countervailing consideration. I had chosen I.P. because (1) in my experience, it tends to be one of the softest $1-2 NLHE games in town, and (2) I was feeling tired and lazy, not completely up to taking on a more challenging game, such as is usually found at, say, Venetian or Binion's or Caesars Palace or Treasure Island. These four people at one table meant four seats that were anything but soft, when I had envisioned them filled with people who would just hand me their money. So--forgive me for this--I admit that I viewed their presence as something of a mixed blessing.

But I caught a few lucky hands and managed to walk away with a nice W to cap one of my best weeks ever: eight wins in eight sessions (spread among Palms, Rio, Binion's, I.P., Hooters, Boulder Station, and Riviera--an interesting sampling of this city's poker rooms), netting north of $80/hour. (I'm taking tomorrow off to do some other stuff, so my poker week is now closed and in the books.)

I think I also made some Deuce-Four converts. The night was simply chock-full of boards for which 2-4 would have been the winner, including, e.g., an A-3-5 flop and a 4-4-2 flop. B.W.O.P. told me that observing this through the session had convinced her never to throw 2-4 away again in her life. F-Train, I think, remains on the skeptical side, despite the plain evidence. He played it once and won the pot with two pairs, but said that he had done it just for me, and he wouldn't do it again. Sooner or later he'll come around.

Unfortunately, both of them appeared to be having relatively frustrating nights in terms of the poker. Grubette seemed to be holding her own. I was glad that none of my big pots came at their expense. I hope that the luck I was getting shifted their way when I left.

Thanks, guys, for making my time there a blast. And thanks, too, to the less-experienced players who made it profitable (though I doubt they're reading).


Bonus story, having nothing to do with poker

Snippet of conversation overheard in the parking garage elevator on the way back to my car, between two women who appeared to be in their mid-30s.

First woman: She let everybody know that she's still sleeping with the boss from her old job. She texted him a picture of her tatas.

Second woman: I'm not texting anybody a picture of my tatas. But that's just me--I'm old and stodgy.

Guess the casino, #49

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Bellagio. If you couldn't get this one, you just don't get out enough!

I'm not the biggest loser

I was unhappy to record a net loss for the month of January--down $255, to be exact. Not devastating, by any means, but unpleasant and disheartening. Some of it was due to bad luck, of course, but I'll admit that I was also afflicted by a streak of the Fancy Play Syndrome virus. Reverting back to my more habitual by-the-book, ABC, solid, value-bet approach seems to have turned the boat around. This week, though yet incomplete, is already my fifth-best since moving to Vegas, and the very best week that doesn't include a tournament score (i.e., it's my best-ever cash-game-only week).

But in the last couple of days, the news has presented me with more reasons not to feel quite so bad about a -$255 January:

1) There's this guy, who apparently owes Caesars and Rio some $14.7 million.

2) There's Tom "Durrrr" Dwan, who reportedly lost $3.5 million playing online in January. (Reached via this Wicked Chops Poker post.)

3) Then there's the Fertitta family. For a long time, it seemed that everything they touched turned to gold, but since taking their Stations Casinos company private, they are estimated to have lost no less than $3.5 billion. Now that's gotta hurt!

I guess I can take my little bad month in stride....

A spoonful of magic

I had a good time and a profitable session at the Riviera last night, so tonight I headed there again. Two seats to my left was a guy using a small souvenir collector-type spoon as a card protector. (I snuck a picture of it.) OK, that's a little peculiar, but hardly worthy of mention all by itself.

The really weird thing was what he did with it. Before every hand, he would rub the back of the spoon several times in a small circle approximately where he expected the cards to be pitched to him, then turned it on its side and made three or four consecutive scraping or scooping motions toward him, as if trying to spoon the good luck his way.

Before.

Every.

Hand.

It seemed to work. That is, once in a while he won a pot. But a lot of the time it didn't work, and he had to fold without putting any money in, or he put some (or a lot of) money in and lost it. Overall, I'd say it worked about as well as if he had, say, smeared chicken blood on the table and his chair (though many casinos, oddly enough, frown on this practice).

People are so strange.

Guess the casino, #48

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: South Point (Did I fool you?)

Dumbest floor decision I've seen in quite a while

Last night I was at the Riviera. I was in seat 10. The guy in seat 1 was not careful about protecting his hand. As many players are prone to do, he looks at them by just resting them on one long edge perpendicular to the table. Because I am in the same plane as he is, I can often see his bottom card. I have warned him about this. He is apparently a slow learner.

So a bunch of us are in a hand. Flop is A-K-Q. Misses me completely. I check and plan to fold. (I have the mighty 2-4, in fact, playing it on its holiest day, hoping to get a good story to tell here, but I think this is one of the rare instances where I have to let it go.) Slow Learner (SL) checks his cards again, and I get a glimpse that his bottom card is an ace. He bets $10 as I'm telling him, "Sir, I just saw your bottom card again."

There's a guy named John in seat 7. He's a dealer at the Venetian. I've played with him before. I actually like him a lot. He's a good player but pretty straightforward, friendly, funny, always well-behaved. He tells the dealer that if I saw SL's card, then everybody else has a right to see it, too. (He's in the hand.) The dealer is stymied by this request. John asks for the floor to make a decision.

Floor person comes over and the situation is explained to her. She tells me that I have to tell the table what I saw. My first thought is, "And if I refuse, do you have a penalty in mind that you think would apply to me?" I can't imagine what it would be. But I just don't really care here, since I'm going to fold and be out no matter what. So I say, "I saw an ace."

Simultaneously, the floor person is making SL show her his cards, apparently so that she can ascertain whether I'm being accurate. So now she asks, "Which ace?" I say, "It flashed too fast for me to see the suit." I suppose I could have added that I know it's not the ace of spades, because what I saw in my glance was a single, small, central pip, and the ace of spades mark would have been larger. I didn't bother with that additional piece of information.

The floor person said, "Well, if you can't tell me the exact card, then I can't make him show it." She said this directly to me, as if challenging me. Hey, lady, this isn't my fight! You asked what I saw, I'm telling you. If that isn't good enough for you, tough! Do what you want with the information.

So it was left at that. At the end of the hand, SL showed down the ace and deuce of diamonds.

This is a really strange floor decision. I can't think of any reasonable basis for requiring a player to announce to the table what he has seen of another player's accidentally flashed cards. I could be lying, or maybe my eyesight ain't so good and I'm simply mistaken. I'm sure that possibility is the thinking behind her checking SL's cards to see if I'm right.

But that opens up an obvious path for an angle shooter. Suppose the flop is all diamonds. I have the king of diamonds. My opponent bets into me. I want to know if he has the ace of diamonds. I'm in a position to possibly see his cards. So I announce that I have seen his cards, even though I haven't. The floor comes over and requires me to declare what I saw. I lie and say that he has the ace of diamonds. Now only one of two things can happen. Either the floor confirms my lucky guess that that's what he has, and shows the card to everybody, or says, "No, sir, you must have been mistaken," and the hand plays out, with me having gained an extremely valuable piece of information. Of course I wouldn't do that, but this city is filled with unscrupulous players who would, if they knew in advance that the floor is going to rule the way this did woman last night.

The only rational floor response, I think, is to tell the table, "Seat 10 claims that he saw a card of Seat 1. There is no rule that requires him to share this information. In fact, doing so would violate the rule against discussing the hand in progress. I remind you that he may be lying about having seen the card(s), or he may have thought he saw something he didn't. There is no remedy available for this unfortunate incident. Everybody please remember to protect your cards from being seen by other players in the future."

In most cases, I dislike situations that are handled differently depending on whether a player's action is deemed to have been deliberate or accidental, because that's not always easy to determine, and angle-shooters can become adept at faking things. But I don't see any good way around it here. If a player voluntarily shows his cards to another who is still in the hand, then clearly everybody else has a right to that same information before play continues. If, however, one person gets an advantage by seeing an accidentally unprotected card, in a way that isn't open to everybody, I don't think there is any immediate remedy, and you just have to play the hand out with that player having the advantage. You obviously can't automatically expose one or both cards in question, because that makes it too easy for an angle shooter to claim to have seen something that he really didn't. Adding the precaution of the floor trying to verify the assertion of what was seen introduces the hypothetical angle-shooting problem I mentioned above. Also, I must question again what this floor person intended to do if I refused to disclose what I saw. Is she going to penalize me, when I did nothing wrong? Is she going to try to torture the information out of me--maybe bring in the boys from Gitmo with a waterboard to make me talk?

There's also the problem that last night's decision in a way punishes me for having been honest. It made me the bad guy, as if this were all my fault, and put me in the situation of having to talk about the hand in progress. Put another way, SL slipped and revealed a card to one player (me), but I was asked to reveal it to eight others, arguably a far worse sin. That just doesn't make any sense to me. If this were to happen again at the Riviera, I wouldn't say anything about it until the hand was over, because I don't want to be put in that awkward situation again. Nice job, Riviera--you have caused a player to decide to be less open about breaches in game integrity.

This is actually the second time that I have been seen an opponent's card(s) in the middle of a hand, announced that fact, and been asked to tell everybody what I saw. The first time was at the Rio a month or two ago. This was just the dealer telling me that's what I had to do. I meant to write up that story when I got home, but then forgot all about it. It was so weird I thought it was just an anomaly. (Funny part of that story: The card I had seen was a 6, which was bottom pair on the flop. The player holding it folded after the dealer had me say what I had seen, because he was facing a large bet. Another 6 came on the turn. The table erupted with laughter, except for the player who had folded, who slammed his fist on the table.)

In thinking this over, I suppose there is really no reason for me to tell somebody that I'm seeing his cards in the middle of the hand. I can just wait until it's over. There is not much to be gained by passing on that warning as the hand is playing out--the damage has already been done. With two recent cases of my announcement causing complications for the hand, I guess it's easier on everybody if I just shut up until the end of the hand. My motivation in both cases was to try to say something in the very moment that the player is flashing, so that he can see what he's doing wrong with his cards. But in the future, I'm going to wait, lest the table be visited by another stupid floor decision that makes the situation worse.


*sigh* On rereading, I see that I have once again freely intermixed present and past tense in my story-telling. But once again, I'm too lazy to go back and fix it. Apologies again for my sloppy writing.

Favorite books

When I posted photos of my poker bookshelves, somebody requested in the comments that I list my top five. I started to put it together, but found that I couldn't. So I decided on a top ten list instead. That was too hard, too. I did finally manage to narrow it down to a top 15.

Note that these aren't necessarily the best books I have. Instead, my criterion was this: If I had read all of the poker books I already own (I haven't--not by a long shot), which ones woud I most look forward to reading again? Take, for example, David Sklansky's Theory of Poker. It's one of the most educational books you can read on the subject of poker. But it's hard work and deadly dull. It's like eating your vegetables--good for you, but not enjoyable. If anybody has ever actually enjoyed reading it, I'd wonder what was wrong with him. Not all of those listed here are fun, but those that couldn't be called fun at least were so informative, so full of new insights, that I lapped them up eagerly.

These are in no particular order. What's more, if you asked me in, say, a month to make this list again, it might turn out different. This is a fairly arbitrary choice based on today's mood.


Read 'Em and Weep, John Stravinsky

Aces and Kings: Inside Stories and Million-Dollar Strategies from Poker's Greatest Players, Michael Kaplan and Bran Reagan

The Professional Poker Dealer's Handbook, Dan Paymar, Donna Harris, and Mason Malmuth

The Best Hand I Ever Played: 52 Winning Poker Lessons from the World's Greatest Players, Steve Rosenbloom

Professional Poker: The Essential Guide to Playing for a Living, Mark Blade

Caro's Most Profitable Hold'em Advice, Mike Caro (This was AWOL from my photos, which I noticed only when searching for this list. I thought I had gathered them all in, but this one was hiding under a pile of papers. Oops.)

Phil Gordon's Little Green Book, Phil Gordon

Fighting Fuzzy Thinking in Poker, Gaming & Life, David Sklansky

Positively Fifth Street, James McManus

The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time, Michael Craig

Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, Roy Cooke and John Bond (I'm afraid this really exposes what a sicko I am, to put a rule book on my favorites list.)

The Tao of Poker: 285 Rules to Transform Your Game and Your Life, Larry W. Phillips

The Making of a Poker Player: How an Ivy League Math Geek Learned to Play Championship Poker, Matt Matros

The Book of Bluffs: How to Bluff and Win at Poker, Matt Lessinger

Ace on the River: An Advanced Poker Guide, Barry Greenstein (This, too, was AWOL from the photos. It's oversized and doesn't fit on those shelves.)

Guess the casino, #47

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Planet Hollywood

Don't forget what today is

Although it seems impossible that any of my loyal readers would not already be celebrating, out of an abundance of caution I will insert this important calendaric reminder (like telling the Pope that it's Christmas, just in case he might have forgotten): Today is 2/4, the holiest day of the year in the Church of the Sacred Deuce-Four.

Whatever it takes, be sure that you play 2-4 at least once today. The poker gods will be watching. For you new converts, this is a devotional obligation, much like making an annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

Blessed be the Deuce-Four. Amen.

Poker lessons from non-poker movies: "Charlotte's Web"

I just finished watching "Charlotte's Web," a movie so adorable and charming that it might even make an arachnophobe think spiders are cute. If you don't get at least a little teary during Wilbur's last conversation with Charlotte, you're an even harder-hearted SOB than I am.

What's this got to do with poker? Well, the funniest line in the movie, for my money, is when Templeton the rat, perfectly voiced by Steve Buscemi, jumps off the truck at the county fair. He's in a hurry to find all the dropped food goodies that have been described to him. He eagerly exclaims, "OK, where's the filth?"

Charlotte disapproves of his greed: "Have you ever heard that good things come to those who wait?"

Templeton retorts, "No. Good things come to those who find it and shove it in their mouth!"

****

Once in a while something I read has an immediate effect on either how I play or how I think while I'm playing. One of the most recent was this Card Player magazine column by Ed Miller. He accurately describes how in live, low-buy-in NLHE games there is an unfortunately tendency for many players to limp in with a wide range of weak hands. The column is about exploiting that weak play. He uses a phrase that immediately stuck in my brain: "make-a-hand poker."

The bottom line is that when you overlimp, you're mostly hoping to make a
hand and win a big pot, and yet it's hard to stack someone or otherwise win a
big pot when the hand starts out limped seven ways. And to top it off, your
opponents are also hoping to make a hand and win a big pot, and they're almost
as good at doing it as you are. So, you just don't have a whole lot of
edge.

...

When seven people see the flop in a limped pot, everyone is playing
"make-a-hand" poker, and you don't have it much better than anyone else. But
when you raise preflop and only one or two people call, often your opponents
will be playing make-a-hand poker while you will be playing "I win if you don't
make a hand." This scenario can offer you a much more significant edge over your
opponents.

Now, I realize that this isn't a particularly brilliant or original observation, but something about that phrase hit home with me. It has caused me to scold myself at the table when my first inclination is to jump on the limper train: "You're playing 'make-a-hand poker' again, aren't you? Do you really expect to win just by getting luckier than everybody else?"

It doesn't always change my play, but there have been a fair number of times that it has; I either dump a crappy hand and wait for a better spot, or decide instead to raise. In the latter case, I can then either make my opponents worry about how strong my holding is or surprise them when a tricky little hand hits the flop hard under great disguise.

The fact that you can take either approach successfully (dump it or pump it) is what I find so great about the little exchange between Charlotte and Templeton. You can achieve success in poker by either sitting back and waiting for the good things to come your way, or by taking the initiative--by grabbing it and shoving it in your mouth.

Some days I play Charlotte poker. Some days I play Templeton poker. I can usually make money either way, but Templeton poker is a helluva lot more fun.

Reader encounters: the other side of the story

Went to bed, couldn't sleep. Had an idea for the blog.

First, I should mention that I had another pleasant reader encounter today (well, yesterday now). I hadn't played at Binion's since December 27, according to my records. Arbitrarily chose it for today, and ran into a reader at the table. Even more remarkably, he told me that he had been hoping to see me during this trip, and it was his last couple of hours playing before leaving for home Wednesday. He had even somehow got to chatting about me with one of the Binion's dealers who knows my not-really-very-secret identity. She had told him that I used to play there fairly regularly, but she hadn't seen me in a while--which was true.

I was pleased that, once again, I both got lucky and didn't do anything too embarrassing. Strangely, though, my biggest profits came in the 30 minutes or so after he left the table, when on back-to-back hands I hit straights with suited connectors, and had opponents that couldn't get away from big overpairs. (As you may have noticed from recent posts, February is off to a rocking start, averaging $135/hour over the first three days. How long will that last???)

Anyway, I have gone back through the last year or so of posts and tagged the ones in which I met or played (live or online) with a reader, using a new label, "reader encounters." While I was at it, I added one for "reader submissions," for posts that discuss things readers send me via email.

While doing this, it occurred to me that it's kind of unfair to present only my side of those stories. Most readers don't have blogs of their own. So I propose to make a post out of whatever stories readers want to tell about me. If you have played with me, live or online, or met me in some other context, whether or not I knew you were a reader (some I learn about only after the fact), feel free to submit an email (address is in the "profile" section in the left margin). I'll give people a week or so, then put together whatever I receive into a post--the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Was I moronic? Brilliant? Polite? Obnoxious? Robotic? Inhuman? Inhumane? Fascinating? Boring? As advertised? Surprising in some way? Go ahead--tell it like it is (or was). Use your name or not, as you prefer. I'm really curious whether those who were there think I got the facts of my stories right, left out worthwhile points, etc. If you can, please include something about when and where the encounter occurred.

This might be fun. Or scary and embarrassing. I'm not sure which yet.

Guess the casino, #46

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Imperial Palace

My poker books

I recently ran out of room on my shelves, so yesterday I went to Wal-Mart and bought another top-of-the-line $12 modular shelf to join the others. Today I assembled it and redistributed my books. It occurred to me to show you my collection of poker books. (Poker-related fiction is not included here.) The photos are all slightly blurred because the flash made everything glare out, but there is little enough light in this corner of my apartment that I had to deal with a slow shutter speed. Sorry.

Here ya go:















For you nitpickers, yeah, I noticed that the Roy Cooke rule book was out of alphabetical order--but only after I took the pictures. I have relocated it properly, but it wasn't worth doing the photos over again.


Addendum

I should have waited a few more hours. One more for the collection came in the mail today. In his most recent podcast, Shamus mentioned that David Spanier had written other poker books beside Total Poker, a fact of which I had not previously been aware. So I looked them up on amazon.com and found a couple of them available used for $1 each. Can't resist that price. This is the one that arrived today:

Guess the casino, #45

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: O'Sheas

My night among the smokers

Once or twice a year, something hits me (a stroke, maybe, or a brain tumor) and I decide I should put in a session at one or more of the handful of poker rooms in town that still allow smoking at the table. (Wow--strange coincidence. I just noticed that it was exactly one year ago today that I first put up my frequently updated categorization of degrees of smokiness in poker rooms.) Tonight was such a night. I took in Boulder Station and Hooters. Nothing interesting happened at Hooters, but let me tell you about Boulder.


New room

They're advertising a new poker room at Boulder Station. Baloney. It's the same old room, with barely enough change to call it a face lift. They moved the check-in desk from one end to the other, put up new wallpaper, and are gradually replacing the chairs with more comfortable ones. That's it.


Pictures

Despite what has happened to me and other photographers in other Stations properties, I walked around snapping pictures at Boulder unnoticed and unmolested.


Massage

There was a young woman in uniform walking around offering table massages. I had not seen this at Boulder previously, though I've only played there twice before, so maybe it goes on all the time and I was just unaware of it. I've added it to my list of places where you can get a massage while playing.


Oops

On my next-to-last hand of the night, I was dealt J-J, except the second one flipped up and was exposed during the pitch and had to be replaced. I got an offsuit 4 instead. Ick. It's the first time ever, as far as I know, that I have had a big pocket pair broken up and taken away because of a dealer's bad pitch.


My big hand

OK, here's the story I really wanted to get to.

I had started with my customary $100 buy-in, and after a little less than two hours had worked it up to $201. I was two off the button and looked down at K-J offsuit. Not a great hand. Sometimes I'll throw it away, sometimes limp, sometimes raise. As is so often said in poker, it all depends. In this case, there were three or four limpers already, and it's not a hand I want to play in an unraised pot. I hadn't played a hand in a while, and hadn't raised pre-flop in a long time, so I thought that if I raised I could get credit for a bigger hand than I actually held. Furthermore, the cutoff and the button were the two tightest players at the table, so I thought that a raise had a good chance of effectively giving me the button for this hand. I raised to $13. I got four callers, including the button, which was not good.

The flop was Q-T-5 rainbow, giving me an open-ended straight draw to the nuts. The first three players checked. I bet $35 into the approximately $65 pot (a couple of limpers had folded, both blinds had called, and I think the max rake is $4--close enough), basically running a flag up the pole to see if anybody would salute, as the saying goes.

Boy, did they ever! The button reraised all-in for his last $95. The small blind pushed all-in for a little over $400. One guy folded. A middle-position maniac pushed all-in for about $250. Nothing, absolutely nothing like this had happened during the previous two hours! What in the hell was going on?! As the chatter and oooing and ahhing started, people started coming over from nearby tables to see what was developing.

I hated this situation. I probably had the worst hand among the four of us left contesting this pot! I had $153 left at this point. I estimated that I was getting better than 3:1 on a call for the rest of my chips and that I was right around 3:1 to win it. (Eight outs twice is about 33%, but you have to factor in some discount for the possibility of somebody hitting a runner-runner flush, or, more likely here, the board pairing and giving a full house or quads to an opponent currently holding a set.) It was close, but I thought the math favored a call.

I hate this sort of thing. If I'm going to be playing a huge pot, I want it to be on my terms, when I have reason to be confident that I have substantially the best hand. I might semi-bluff all-in on a good draw like this against a single opponent if I could be the aggressor, but calling all-in on a draw? Into three opponents? It's against my religion!

But I was finally persuaded by my estimate of the numbers that it was the right thing to do, so I stacked up my chips and pushed them forward. We now had an actual crowd around the table.

The dealer put out the turn card: deuce of the fourth suit. Didn't help me, but it didn't pair the board, and it killed the possibility of a backdoor flush.

River: a 9! Yes! I spiked my gin card, and now held the absolute nuts. The button mucked without showing. The small blind had 5-5 for a flopped set. The middle-position maniac had A-Q. (I don't know why he didn't raise before the flop. That was uncharacteristic of him.) The dealer pushed me about $654, and gave the rest to the small blind.

Here's the actual math, now that I can take the time to work through it with 20/20 hindsight. First, though, I have to guess at what the button had. I think it must have been 10-10, Q-Q, or Q-10--maybe A-Q or A-A, but I think those are less likely. Given his tight nature and how I had been playing, those are really the only two hands with which he would have called my pre-flop raise and then raised me all-in on the flop. For now I'm going to assume it was Q-10.

The pot was actually offering me $501 that I could win (the $65 pre-flop pot, plus my $35 bet, plus the button's $95, plus $153 from each of the two bigger stacks). That's 3.27:1 on my money if I win. The odds calculator at cardplayer.com assigns us the following rounded probabilities to take the hand: 27% (me), 13% (for the presumed Q-T on the button), 58% (5-5 in the small blind), and 2% (maniac with A-Q). That makes my odds 2.7:1 against winning. So I was basically right that it was pretty close, but mathematically favored the call that I ended up making. [Patting self on back.]

(If we assume instead that the button had flopped a bigger set, it change the odds between him and the small blind, but doesn't change my odds meaningfully. Because he was the short stack, he wasn't eligible for any side pot and therefore wouldn't have to show his hand even if he did have a better flopped set than the small blind's 5s.)

It's nice to be presented with a moderately complex situation, work out the right decision, and have the poker gods reward it. Study your math, boys and girls--it really does come in handy!

I finished that orbit, but didn't have another playable hand (because my jacks got taken away). I packed up my chips and told the table, "Gentlemen, I know when my luck has gotten as good as it's going to get, and that would be now, so I'm leaving before it changes on me." That was my flimsy apology for the hit-and-run. But I just didn't feel like taking a chance on giving it all back, like I did the last time I had a comparable stack. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Sometimes that means take the money and run.


Good dealer

By the way, I need to add kudos for the dealer. He announced verbally each step in figuring out the pot. He showed that I had the button covered, gave his stack to me, then counted my stack and took the same amount from each of the two big stacks, gave those sums to me, then gave the rest of the A-Q's stack to the small blind. He explained clearly at every point what he was doing and why. In multi-way pots, it's easy to make mistakes, but if the dealer says everything out loud along the way, it's makes it far easier for those involved to either be reassured that the outcome is correct or recognize that a mistake is being made and speak up to make it right. I tipped him more than I usually would for being so open and clear. Dealers usually get these things right, but do the work silently, so I have to figure out what they're doing as they go. That's not always easy, because there are several ways one can go about the process. I much prefer this dealer's uncommon explicitness.


One Hooters story

OK, I forgot about the one notable thing that happened at Hooters: I saw somebody flop a royal flush. He had A-K of hearts, and the flop came Q-J-10 of hearts--in that order, even. This is, I think, the third royal flush I've seen made using both hole cards, but the first one that hit on the flop. Given how much I play, that tells you something about how rare a phenomenon it is.


So all in all, my night among the smokers turned out OK. As soon as I burn the clothes I was wearing and finish coughing up a lung or two, I'll be fine.

What poker rooms really DON'T need

Playing at the Rio last night reminded me of something: Is it possible I've been writing for nearly 2 1/2 years without ever grousing about how much I hate $2 chips?

Here are the places locally that use $2 chips in addition to $1s and $5s: Rio, Red Rock, Binion's (inconsistently; some dealers use them only as drop chips, other circulate them), Aliante Station (same), Caesars Palace. They are accursed, wretched things. They do no good and just get in the way. They increase the complexity of getting the pot right and of visually estimating the size of the pot--not to an impossible degree by any means, but it's still annoying and unnecessary. I just can't see what useful purpose they serve. As drop chips, sure--make the box fill up less quickly than with $1s. But to use on the table, they're a pain in the neck.

When I'm at one of the above-named joints, I'm in a constant battle with the dealers. I'm trying to get rid of my $2 chips and they're always trying to give them back to me. If I have to pay a $3 blind, or call that amount, I'll use two $2 chips if I have them, even if I have 20 $1 chips in my possession. I want them GONE! They just clutter up my otherwise tidy arrangement of chips. I'm not so nutty about it that I trouble the dealer to change them for me every time I get them, because that would justifiably annoy the dealer and slow down the game. But they are always the first to go when I'm putting money into the pot.

There is simply no need for chip denominations in increments smaller than a factor of four or five--with maybe one exception. A casino can do just fine with chips of $1, $5, $25, $100, $500, and $1000. (A few nosebleed-stakes players need them higher, but I won't get into that.) That last jump is the only interval less than a factor of four or five that might be useful. That's because $100 and $1000 are both obviously natural amounts to work with, and I can see that it would be helpful to have one increment in between those, though it wouldn't kill anybody if there were none. I don't think it would be at all difficult to manage with either $500s OR $1000s without the other, and then have the next increment at $2500. But it's not like I play those stakes anyway, so I won't waste any more time opining on it.

I read somewhere (but am feeling too lazy to search for it again) somebody's "theory of chip equity" (at least I think that's what they called it): every chip denomination should be divisible into the next-highest chip denomination. That makes sense to me. $2 chips fail that test. They visibly slow down the process when a dealer has to count a player's stack because of this: they add in a small mental block because about half the time they can't be stacked into an amount that is equivalent to the next-highest chip denomination or multiple thereof.

$2 chips are like $2 bills--nobody wants them, and we would all be better off if they had never been invented. A few casinos, like the stupid federal government, keep trying to foist them off on us, for reasons that completely escape me. I wish they would just give it up.

Guess the casino, #44

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Harrah's

Another strange casino photography incident

As I was leaving the Rio tonight, one of the cocktail waitresses climbed up on a little stage they have amidst the slot machines. They do this frequently, providing a bit of amateur entertainment to the gamblers. A few sing, most just dance to a recording while colored lights flash.

I thought a picture of her would make a good "Guess the casino" entry. I snapped off a couple:





Then it dawned on me that my snazzy new cell phone has rudimentary video capture capability. I hadn't even tried it out yet. I had the sudden idea that I might be able to make a video "Guess the casino" post, which would be cool if it worked. I fiddled with the controls, and got it recording. (It ran out of memory before the end of the song, because I hadn't entered my preference to save the file to the large-capacity memory card instead of to the default internal memory.)

But just after I got it going, something strange happened. If you listen closely, you might hear a female voice, a few seconds into the recording, saying something like, "That's not going on YouTube or anything, is it?"

I turned to look, because I wasn't even sure she was talking to me. She was. It was another cocktail waitress.

I think you'd have to know me to understand this, but there are many, many times in my life when I'm flummoxed into silence. This is most commonly because only a few possible things to say occur to me, and I have just barely enough social awareness to know that they're all horribly inappropriate and better left unsaid.

This was one of those moments. You might notice a pause before I reply. What I was actually wanting to say was, "Why does it matter?" Or maybe, "Are you so stupid as to think that nobody has posted such a video on YouTube before?"

After a few seconds of brain lock, I finally came out with, "That's not my intention." I really hadn't formed any specific intention. I was primarily trying to see if I could figure out how to make the phone work as a video camera. If I were lucky enough to succeed at that, and the resulting clip turned out well enough to be worth looking at, then I might post it on my blog. Had I stopped to think, and had I thought that the difference mattered, I might have told my inquisitor that sometimes I post videos directly on a blog, sometimes I put them on YouTube and then embed them in the blog post, and I wasn't sure which, if either, I would do in this instance.

I added, "Why?" She said, "I'm just checking." I said, "Oh." And that was that. She gave me kind of a stinkeye and walked away.

As I left the building and reviewed this interaction in my mind, the oddness of it grew and grew. There are no signs posted saying "Please do not videotape our dancers." The woman who spoke to me never said anything direct like, "It's fine to tape this for yourself, but please don't post it on the Internet"--which seems like the obvious thing to do if one's goal is to try to prevent such dissemination. Perhaps these young women, who obviously can't very well talk to passersby while they're dancing, have agreed to sort of act as surrogates for each other, all sharing in a request for videotapes not to be posted online. But if so, why not state that request clearly and affirmatively?

But even if we assume that Cocktail Waitress #2 was acting as a stand-in for Cocktail Waitress #1 in making her inquiry, why do they care? How is it rational to be willing to get up on a platform and dance provocatively (more or less, depending on one's perception), while dressed in a skimpy outfit that one might expect to see one's new bride wearing to bed on her wedding night, in front of dozens or hundreds of strangers, and do this several times per shift, day after day after day--and then object to the possibility that the act will be seen by others on YouTube? If they're embarrassed about what they're doing, or don't want certain people (e.g., their parents?) to discover what part of their job is, then for heaven's sake don't do what it is you want kept secret in a very public place in front of countless strangers!

It's ludicrous for them to think that they will be able to prevent people from taking still photos and/or video clips, and subsequently putting them into the family photo album, or on Flickr, or MySpace, or YouTube, or a personal blog, or whatever. It's even more ridiculous to think that they can keep that kind of control through the passive, indirect, unclear style of communication that #2 employed with me. It's completely irrational, and I can't stand irrationality--which is why I have such a hard time with humanity in general.

The more I thought about it, the more it annoyed me. (That is true for much of what happens in my life.) When I got home and transferred the video file to my computer, I discovered that it is of such poor audio and video quality that, absent the verbal exchange, I probably would have deleted it as not worth posting and sharing. But because they annoyed me, I've decided to be petulant and defiant about it and post it here.

I did try to post it directly via Blogger, as a small gesture toward keeping with what I had stated my intention to have been, but the server wasn't accepting the file after two attempts, so I gave up and uploaded it to YouTube after all.

Take that, Ms. "I'm just checking."

What poker rooms really need

During the Super Bowl, I played poker at the Palms for the first half and the Rio for the second half. Why? Dunno--just kinda felt like it.

I like playing when big sports events are on, because many of the other players are too engrossed in the game to really pay attention to what's going on at the table. They tend to play much more straightforwardly, with not much more than "Level 1" thinking. They're easier to bluff, because it's too much time and trouble to actually sit back and analyze whether I could plausibly be holding what I'm representing. But at the same time, strangely, they're also easier to value bet, because they tend not to think through all of my possible hands and figure out that I could have a monster. Furthermore, they tend to drink, and make rookie mistakes like not noticing possible straights and flushes on the board. I made $223 during the first half at the Palms, and $257 during the second half at Rio. Easy money.

But the price I have to pay is that the game proceeds more slowly than usual, because nobody is paying attention. (Well, nobody except me, anyway--I barely even knew who was playing today, and cared not at all who won.) It's annoying to have to wait for the dealer to get each player's attention in turn. And heaven forbid you should expect somebody to act when there is, say, an interception being run back.

Back when I used to play at the Hilton, I had told one of the dealers that I liked there (Kelly) about an early Simpsons episode where they are all in family counseling, hooked up to a system by which they could each deliver painful electric shocks to the others. I thought that poker rooms should install something like that in each seat. When a player isn't paying attention and doesn't respond to a simple, "Your turn, sir," the dealer presses a button, and ZZZZZZZZZZ! The inattentive boor is zapped to attention. It could also be used punitively, for players who swear, insult each other, blame the dealer for bad outcomes, talk about the hand in progress, etc. Every time I was at the table and Kelly was dealing, if somebody was out of line or requiring a lot of work to get to attend to the game, either she or I would turn to the other and mime pressing a button, with a knowing nod and smile in return. Yep, that's what poker rooms need, all right. During the Super Bowl, the casinos would have to switch on the back-up generators to supply enough power to the system. It would be worth it.

Here's that Simpsons clip:






Many poker rooms had special promotions to lure players into spending game time there today--money and prizes handed out, and so forth. I didn't pick up any extra cash that way, sadly, but the Rio frequently splashed pots with official NFL Super Bowl hats and shirts, so I picked up this spiffy new outfit:





I call this work, "Self-portrait with Stupid Cheesy Grin and Super Bowl Apparel." It's destined to become a classic of the genre.

Addendum, May 6, 2012

I see that the embedded Simpsons clip is dead. But you can still watch the scene here:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7mj99_the-simpsons-electric-shock-aversio_shortfilms

Why do they have stupid people make the signs?

I spotted this sign the other day on the outside of one of the entrances to the Circus Circus hotel/casino (near the valet station). I stared at it for a while, trying to decipher its meaning, and left still uncertain.

First we have that awful apostrophe hanging out where it doesn't belong.

But then, ironically, it is the complete lack of further punctuation that leads to the ambiguity. Is it a declarative statement that only employees ask for assistance? Is it informing the reader that only employees need to ask for assistance--or even that only employees may ask for assistance?

I suppose the most likely intended sense is approximately this: "Only employees may proceed past this point. All others, please ask for assistance." Sure, that might be too wordy to fit on the sign, but they could effectively, if inelegantly, convey the same meaning simply by adding punctuation: "Employees only. Ask for assistance."

Can I trade an apostrophe for two periods?

Nathan Burton

Got some free tickets, so went to see Nathan Burton's "comedy magic" show today at the Flamingo. It's OK, but well beneath my boys Penn & Teller. (Then again, that may be true of every magic act.) He did two variations on a standard mentalist trick (appearing to have written down in advance what somebody in the audience would say), and about eight different variations on a person appearing in and/or disappearing from a box when there is no apparent way in/out. That's my main criticism of the show: there were basically two tricks, with small variations. Not a lot of variety.

There's a comedy act in the middle, but not your standard stand-up variety. Instead, this guy pulls four volunteers from the audience, puts funny masks on them, gets them to agree to make certain funny gestures when he taps them, then has them race to blow up and pop balloons. I know what you're thinking--it sounds incredibly stupid. Yes, it does. But he is a fine showman and makes nearly every second of the routine come out funny. I kept thinking, "This shouldn't be funny, but it is!"

It's certainly not a terrible show overall, but I think I'd feel ripped off if I had had to pay more than about $10 for a ticket. For free, I felt more than adequately entertained. I even shook Mr. Burton's hand afterward and told him, "Nice show." It hadn't really been my intention, but he was standing there greeting people as they left, and it would have been awkward to walk by without saying something. So I guess this counts as my celebrity encounter for the day, too.

Guess the casino, #43

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.



Answer: MGM Grand

Weird coincidence

A few days ago I posted a review of "Beat the Player," by Robert Nersesian, about overbearing casino security. Then about 24 hours ago I posted a long post about my experience with casino security while taking photos.

About six hours ago, I was in a pizza place eating dinner when I saw a copy of the January 31 Law Vegas sun sitting there, and on the front page was this story about a patron of the Tao nightclub at the Venetian winning $80,000 in a lawsuit alleging brutality at the hands of the bouncers. The plaintiff is described as a professional poker player, even, though I've never heard of him. His attorney? Robert Nersesian.

Weird, eh?