Poker plate

Seen earlier today at the Rio parking garage. What game do you suppose he was there to play?

Poker gems, #348

Matt Lessinger, in Card Player magazine column, February 24, 2010 (vol. 23, #4), p. 60.


[U]nless your name is Phil Ivey, you aren't going to scare your opponents just by staring at them.

But if we can't get our opponents to fear us, we can at least make sure that they don't start getting brave against us. There are always opponents who make me think to myself, "When they're in the blinds, I'm going to look to raise." It's not just because they are tight, but because they are tight-passive. They are either going to fold to me or not punish me for getting out of line. Their style inspires me to get aggressive. They inspire anti-fear. That's instant death in the poker world, and something that you must avoid at all costs.

Steam coming out of the ears

If, like me, you enjoy watching Phil Hellmuth boast about being the best in the world and then get his face rubbed in doggie doo, I highly recommend watching this "Poker After Dark" segment, particularly the two consecutive hands between Hellmuth and Brandon Adams, starting at about the 7:00 mark. Hilarity definitely ensues.

Guess the casino, #466

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Answer: Bellagio

Holy day

Just a reminder that today is the second holiest day in the liturgical calendar of the Holy Order of the Mighty Deuce-Four in the U.S., where we write the date as 4/2, and the holiest day in most of the rest of the world, where today's date is typically written as 2/4.

You know what you need to do to celebrate properly.

That is all.

Guess the casino, #465

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Answer: Caesars Palace

Five live

I have played in five live poker tournaments over the past ten days or so, which is highly unusual for me.

1.

The first was last Monday at the Venetian. A reader generously offered to pay my buy-in for the nightly 7:00 tournament, to give him a chance to meet me and to say thanks for the blog. (He cleverly titled his introductory email, "Free money," which effectively got my attention.) This is a pretty well-structured tournament, except for one boneheaded part in which the blinds and antes increase way too much in one step.

My favorite hand was one fairly early in the game in which I called a preflop raise, along with about six others, with 7-9 of diamonds. The flop was 9h-8d-2d, giving me top pair and a flush draw. I checked. The original raiser bet, followed by a couple of callers, then I put in a big check-raise, which narrowed the field to just me and one older gentleman. The turn was the 6s. Now I had top pair, a flush draw, and an open-ended straight draw, with about half my stack in a very large pot. Well, duh! I don't need too many instructional videos to tell me how to play this. Shove. The other guy called. He had Ad-xd for just the nut flush draw. The river was the 5c, completing my straight, though just the pair was all it took to win. The gentleman shook my hand at the next break (he was left very short-stacked, but doubled up a couple of times to survive) and told me he realized what a dumb move he had made and that he should have known better.

But that hand was all I could do. There followed a long stretch without any forward progress. Before too long I was in fold-or-shove mode. I managed to steal the blinds about as often as I had to pay them, keeping myself afloat, but without making any headway. This happened ten times or so without ever getting called. Finally I did it from the small blind with 10-10, and was called by a doofus with 10-9 offsuit. The board came with a 7, 8, and J to give him a straight, despite me being an 85/15 favorite going in. And that was that.

The tournament also gave me the chance to meet one of my Twitter followers, youknoyoulov3me. She was at my table for the latter part of the tournament. I gather she is a dealer at Bellagio, and is self-evidently a fine player.

Thanks again to Matt for the freeroll!

2.

Cardgrrl was in town, of course. One of her reasons for coming was a get-together of folks she knows from Poker Academy, an online site where she did much of her early poker learning. The group had a private tournament Wednesday at noon at Harrah's. The Harrah's structure is thin and fast, with virtually no room to recover from an error or bad beat. It's an amateur-hour luckfest.

I chipped up some early on, but within an hour suffered a pretty horrible beat. I called a raise with A-K. Flop came king-high. Original raiser shoves with K-J. I call. Jack on the river for the 3-outer. That left me short-stacked. Then I was in the big blind with Q-6 (I think; not sure of the kicker now). Under-the-gun guy had limped, so it was just us seeing the flop. It was Q-8-9, so I shoved. He called, having flopped the nuts with J-10. That left me in "any two cards" mode. I don't even remember what hand I put it in with, nor what I was called with, but it didn't turn out well.

Still, it was a fun bunch of people to play with. I even got to steal a pot holding the mighty 2-4, and showed it. After all, this crew is from "Poker Academy"--they're there to learn, right? They need to know about invincible hands.

3.

Friday night at Treasure Island was the first of two tournaments sponsored by http://www.allvegaspoker.com/. It was a kind of strange mixed-game format, with Omaha-8, deuce-to-seven triple draw, stud-8, and razz. The fun of this was that--let's face it--none of us really knew what we were doing much of the time.

My favorite hand of the tourney was at the final table when I was dealt "number one," 2-3-4-5-7, in triple-draw. I expect it will be a long, long time before that happens again. I didn't play it optimally. After David Stucke raised, I three-bet it, when it clearly would have been better to flat-call and let a couple of others in. The chance that anybody would even tie me for the pot was negligible. But the tourney ran much longer than the organizers expected (we ran several past the number of levels they had planned out), so we had been playing for seven hours at that point. To make matters worse, I had eaten something that rather unpleasantly disagreed with me, and had been focusing mostly on not throwing up all over the poker table (which I believe constitutes grounds for a time-out). Combine that with having next to zero experience with triple-draw, and it explains why I didn't play it better. David put in a few more chips and was all in. I called, obviously. (I wasn't quite so impaired as to fold the stone-cold nuts.) I made another mistake at this point, though not too critical: I put my cards face-up on the table. I'm just so used to there being no more decisions to be made after all the chips are in that I forgot that there remained three decision points in this hand, even with no more betting to be done. It didn't really matter, though. Even if you know that you have to improve all the way to #1 in order to chop the pot, it's awfully difficult to do, and the cards didn't cooperate for David. He finished in 8th place.

Four spots were paying, but we negotiated a chop when there were six of us left. I was second in chips by that point, and was one of two people to take $300. (Entry fee was $65.) Two others took $275, and the remaining two (including Cardgrrl) took $250 each.

More details, comments from the players, and lots of photos of both AVP events are available here.

4.

The second part of the AVP bash was a no-limit hold'em tournament Saturday at the Mirage. Not much to report about it. I just never got anything going. On my last hand I got it all in pretty decently, with A-K versus 5-5 for my 10-BB stack, and couldn't improve for the double-up. Oh well.

Cardgrrl did extremely well again, finishing in fourth place (six spots paid). She was the only one to cash in both AVP events, which tells you something of her ability. She is a threat to win in essentially any tournament she enters. I was, as always, very proud of her.

5.

Tuesday evening, after Cardgrrl had left, I was at Harrah's planning to play cash. But it was 7:30, and their nightly tournament was starting. It's the same rinky-dink structure as was used for the private Poker Academy tournament. But there were only five people playing, and looking at them I recognized all the classic symptoms of complete newbies--looking nervous as all get-out, not sure what to do with their chips, asking basic questions about rules, unclear as to seat numbers, etc. I watched them play one hand, and it confirmed my impression that not a single one of them had any idea what was going on. So I called an audible on myself, took my name off the waiting list for the cash game, and entered the tournament.

We finally ended up with eight players after a couple more late entries. I chipped up some, then made one bad call when I should have folded. As I said, this structure is completely unforgiving. That one mistake left me short. I lasted long enough to see three others eliminated. Once again, when I was down to exactly 10 big blinds, I got it all in good, with A-10, called by the big stack with A-6. I was in good shape, until a 6 on the turn did me in--killed by yet another 3-outer. Sigh.


So that's one cash in five tournaments--and, ironically, the one in which I made a little money was probably the only one in which I had essentially zero edge on the field. Total buy-ins: $390 (not counting the Venetian one). Total payouts: $300 (minus $15 for dealer tip). See why I don't usually play tournaments?

Guess the casino, #464

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Answer: Sandia (Albuquerque)

Guess the casino, #463

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Answer: Green Valley Ranch

Valley of Fire State Park

Sunday Cardgrrl and I went to Valley of Fire State Park. It's a pretty amazing place, and we had absolutely ideal weather. We stayed only about two hours, but you could wander around for days and days without seeing the same thing twice. We took the loop trail at White Domes and looked around Silica Dome. Friends had recommended other parts of the park, but we'll have to save those for another trip.

The photos I took are here. None of them accurately reflects what I saw. The range of light and shadow was simply too great for the camera to capture. For example, in many shots the sky looks white, when in reality it was one of the brightest blues I've ever seen; it gets washed out in order to emphasize the range of colors in the rocks and darker areas of the scene.

I think the prettiest shots are these:



















However, easily my favorite of the bunch is this one:




It nicely shows the enormous range of colors and shapes nature has on display in these rock formations, set against a gorgeous, clear sky. I think the shadow of a human figure (it's Cardgrrl, though in this case that doesn't really matter) provides both a sense of physical scale and contrasts our smallness and frailty and the brevity of our existence with the might and longevity of the mountains.

On another matter, if you want a little lesson in photo composition, which is indisputably one of the most important things setting real photographic artists apart from us mere snapshotters, look at my picture of this rock:





It's a very, very pretty rock, full of vivid and unexpected colors. But the photograph is completely boring and lifeless, I'm afraid.

Now look at how Cardgrrl saw the very same rock here. It's an actual scene, not just a rock. Well done, my friend.


Coming up next: Actual poker content!

Some catching up to do

I'm just home from taking Cardgrrl to the airport for her flight home. It was a wonderful visit, but her departure makes me sad and lonely and feel like not doing much. One of her best friends is getting married in May, and I'm thinking that might be a good excuse for a visit to the East. It doesn't take much to persuade me to hop on a plane, if Cardgrrl is at the other end of the flight.

The last thing she told me was, "Write lots of blog posts so your readers don't abandon you." Also, one of my faithful, long-time readers gently accosted me at the Mirage Friday night with, "I don't mind the 'Guess the Casino' posts, but I really need more than that for my Grump fix." Well, that shouldn't be a problem. I played in four tournaments last week, yet to be reported here. We spent some time at the Valley of Fire State Park, a place I've never visited before. We saw a great show. All of those deserve posts. Furthermore, I'm a week behind in reading poker blogs, I'm several issues behind in poker magazine reading, and I want to go back and watch last week's "Poker After Dark" (the second week of the cash-game lineup). There is potential post material in all of those activities. Besides, I still owe you the second half of my "Best of Times..." post, and I'm now four weeks delinquent in writing about my trip to the Sandia casino.

No shortage of material. I'll get to it all as the days unfold here. But I also had precious little time for cash games this past ten days (and what there was was a litany of expensive second-best hands--ick), so at the same time I need to get back to some serious earning time at the tables.

Hang in there. Much more coming.

Guess the casino, #462

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Answer: Flamingo

Guess the casino, #461

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Answer: Venetian (Thanks to Cardgrrl for the photograph.)

Guess the casino, #460

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Answer: Mandalay Bay

Guess the casino, #459

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Answer: Mirage

Guess the casino, #458

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Answer: Monte Carlo

Guess the casino, #457

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Answer: MGM Grand

Guess the casino, #456

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Answer: Mirage

Guess the casino, #455

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Answer: Mandalay Bay

Guess the casino, #454

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Answer: M Resort

How long it lasts

I'm just back from an early session at Bally's.

I bought in for my usual max, $300. Early in the session I got up by about $130 by cracking jacks with 5c-7c when the flop came a lovely 4-6-8. Things didn't move much for a while after that.

A guy at the far end of the table was always inadvertantly flashing his cards by doing that stupid repeated one-over-the-other shuffle that so many players like to do. (Why, why, why, why, why? How can people be so oblivious as not to realize that in the process of lifting one up by its end to bring over the other, they're exposing it to at least half of the table? And what is the upside of this mindless revealing of your most crucial information? It's utterly incomprehensible to me. Look at your cards, put them on the table, cap them, and leave them the hell alone! Geez, people, it just isn't that complicated a process. OK, parenthetical mini-rant over.) I told him that he was showing his cards when he did that. A young woman two seats to my left asked me, "Are you a nice poker player?"--as if such a thing were mythically rumored to exist, but not to be expected in the real world. I replied, "Not especially. Just one who likes everything to be fair."

Maybe an hour later I took a restroom break, leaving just before my big blind, as is my usual practice. When I returned, the button at my seat said "Missed small blind." Ignoring that, when the next hand started I put the button and a single $1 into the middle, and another $2 in front of me, making up both blinds. The dealer tried to correct me: "You only missed the small blind." No, I told her, I missed both. She said, "Are you sure?" I said, "Absolutely." So she relented.

The same young woman on my left said, "You definitely get good karma for honesty." She was right. The cards were dealt, I had A-A, and won about $50. I wouldn't ordinarily show my cards just because of having aces, but given her "good karma" comment, it was irresistible. Everybody got a smile out of that.

A couple of hands later I was one of several players to call a small raise, holding Q-10 offsuit. The flop was Q-10-x with two clubs. I made a pot-sized bet. Guy on the button shoved all-in. It folded back to me and I called. He had Ac-9c for the nut flush draw, no pair. Turn: 9s. River: Ah, giving him a backdoor better two pair. Ugh.

That took away nearly all my profit. I was sitting at about $330. A couple of hands later, I limped with 10-10 from first position, then called a raise to $10 from the small blind. We were the only two to the flop, which came 10-9-8, two-suited. SB bet $2, something he was fond of doing whether he had nothing or the nuts, so the bet size told me nothing. I raised to $15. He raised another $20 on top of that. I raised an additional $50, he added yet another $100, I moved all-in, and he called. He had me covered by a small amount. He rolled over Q-J, and the board did not pair to save me.

To nobody in particular, I said, "What happened to the good karma I was supposed to have?"

The guy who had been sitting to my left said, "Sorry, it only lasts one hand."

Guess the casino, #453

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Answer: Excalibur

Poker gems, #347

John Vorhaus, in Card Player magazine column, March 10, 2010 (vol. 23, #5), p. 64.


The type of bluff that you can successfully run is utterly dependent on your table image. Therefore when bluffing, to bastardize Shakespeare, "To thy known self be true."

Seeing things at the Mirage

Friday evening I was at the Mirage, playing another poker session sitting next to Grange95, whom I get to like more each time I spend time with him. It was one of those poker sessions that generated a bunch of little observations and stories, none of which is worthy of a separate post in itself, but which I can string together as a hodge-podge post.

Actually, the stories begin while I was on my way to the Mirage.


Traffic

When driving to the mid-Strip from my downtown apartment, it's always hard to know whether it will be faster to take I-15 or Las Vegas Boulevard. It was close to rush hour, which tends to clog the interstate, so this time I decided to take the Strip directly.

At two consecutive intersections, the traffic lights were out. I don't know why they didn't go to their default mode of flashing red in all directions--maybe a power failure. The first intersection was the weird one near the Stratosphere, where both Main and St. Louis run into LVB. There, everybody was behaving civilly, stopping and taking turns as if there were stop signs all around. This is obviously both the safest and fairest way of handling the situation, but it requires everybody to cooperate.

At Sahara, the situation was completely different. The drivers going east and west had figured out that if they just kept going, they wouldn't run into any interference. There was a constant stream of cars heading east and west, and long backups north and south were forming. Northbound and southbound cars had to kind of wait for a little gap, then make a dash for it, often only creeping through one lane at a time and being left stranded in the middle. (For those who haven't been there, this is a very large, fast, and, when it's uncontrolled, scary intersection, with three lanes in all directions.)

I apparently got there quite early in the process of degeneration into lawlessness, because the backups weren't too bad yet. But I imagine that after a short while things got really hairy there. Of course, the retaliatory tendency will be strong; once there is any sort of break in the east-west traffic, the north-south people who were forced to sit for a long time will decide that it's their turn, and damn those east-west scumbags, I'm going to keep going. They set up their own stream that the east-westers will challenge at their peril.

The whole situation was terribly dangerous. Just in the couple of minutes it took me to get through, I witnessed several near misses, and when it came time for me to venture through the oncoming traffic, it felt about as unsafe as anything I've ever done in a car.

I have never seen such a thing happen before, and I found it kind of interesting from a sociological perspective. It's a real-world manifestation of a tit-for-tat strategy. If you come upon the St. Louis intersection, and all your fellow citizens are behaving rationally and politely, you're naturally inclined to cooperate and take your turn. But if you come upon the Sahara intersection, where it's every man for himself, you don't have much choice but to fight your way through it any way you can. If you try to stop and wait for your turn, when nobody is willing to let you have it, you'll sit there forever.

Life is all about game theory, I guess.


OK, on to the actual poker.


A bad-beat story

No, not one of my own--one I heard from somebody else. I heard it a couple of weeks ago at the Venetian, but forgot to write about it. I was reminded of it Friday night because of other bad-beat stories being told at the table, with Grange and me grousing about how irritating they are.

I'm told this happened many years ago at the Nevada Palace, which has since been renovated and is now the Eastside Cannery. The guy telling me this story said that he was playing straight seven-card stud. By fifth street he had a diamond royal flush. An opponent got a spade royal flush in the same hand. Naturally they capped the betting on every street. But when the hands were revealed, the guy discovered that the house rule was not that the hands were considered a tie for a chopped pot, but that the tie was broken by suits, in the same way as when cards are dealt for the dealer button or for the extra chip when coloring up in a tournament. Under that system, spades trump diamonds. In other words, he lost the hand while holding a royal flush.

Now, I don't have any actual confirmation that this really happened. But his manner of relating it I found to be reasonably convincing--and I'm a skeptical hard sell. I don't know whether it's true or false, but I felt inclined to believe him, even though the situation is astronomically unlikely. If I had to put my money one way or the other, I'd go with true.

And if it is indeed true, I have to admit that it pretty much puts all other bad-beat stories to shame.


Professor

So I'm in the small blind with the Qc-5c. Not a great hand, but nobody raised, so I decided to toss in the extra buck and see what developed. Flop was ace-high with two crubs (including the ace). Well, naturally I'm going to bet at that, since I know that the crubs are going to get there. I bet $7, which was about 2/3 or 3/4 of the pot size. A woman across the table, whom I had pegged as the weakest player there, raised to $15, just barely more than a minimum raise. It folded back around to me. With the second-nut flush draw, it was not difficult to decide to call.

Turn was a blank. I checked. She bet $10. Well, if she intended that to dissuade me, she didn't pick her bet size very thoughtfully. I called. River was the jack of crubs. I bet $35, which she paid off before showing her second-best A-K.

As you can see, she played her hand about as badly as could be--not raising before the flop, min-raising the flop, making a tiny bet on the turn, then paying off the river when she might have recognized that my line that looked an awful lot like a flush draw was, in fact, a flush draw.

Nothing too strange so far. But then one of the more experienced players at the table, sitting to this woman's left, launched into a little lesson for her about bet sizing, protecting her hand against draws, etc. He was right on the merits, of course, but completely wrong as to the meta-game. What does he gain from teaching the bad players how to play better? I suppose he gets some sense of self-satisfaction. He gets to feel superior. He also gets to feel magnanimous, that he is helping his fellow human being. But he is costing himself money. More to the point, he is costing me money. I want this woman to play A-K against me exactly the same way every time she gets it.

If she finds herself losing money at poker and wants to improve, there are countless resources she can turn to from which to learn. The poker table is not the place for tutorials. It's rude to presume that somebody wants to hear your opinion about optimal play when they haven't asked for it, and it's rude to educate the fish at the expense of everybody else. It's also self-defeating, which is why it's so hard for me to understand it.

It wasn't the only time. Once while Grange was off on a break, our self-appointed professor analyzed the hand just played by a couple of other people, explaining what each of them did wrong, thus giving her pointers on how to avoid those errors.

Geez, dude--smarten up, will ya? If you're not getting paid to teach somebody else at the table how to play, then, as Archie Bunker was fond of saying, "Stifle!" And if you are in a formal student-teacher relationship (which I'm sure was not the case here), I think it would be courteous to inform everybody else in the game of that status.


That's how to straddle

Our professor had a nice bit of luck come his way. He straddled for double the big blind, was dealt pocket sixes, flopped a set, rivered quads, and got raised all-in by somebody who had made a full house. I'm pretty sure I have never before seen a straddle turn into a high-hand jackpot. It was only $75, but still....


Half-bet rule

In a hand I wasn't in, there was an early-position raise to $15, followed by an all-in for $26, which got called in a couple of spots before action returned to the original raiser. He tried to move all in. Both Grange and I had already done the arithmetic mentally and realized that the all-in bet was too small to re-open the betting, so the original raiser would only have the options of calling or folding. I immediately pointed this out to the dealer.

The dealer, though, got confused. When the player asked why he couldn't reraise, the dealer said, "The all-in would have to be at least half the size of your raise." Well, it was! But that's not the rule. The so-called "half-bet rule" is applicable only in limit games. In no-limit games, an all-in bet is not considered a true raise unless it is at least the size of the bet or raise that preceded it. In this case, the original raise was an interval of $13 over the $2 big blind, so the betting would be re-opened only if the all-in amount were an additional $13 over that, or $28 total. It wasn't. The dealer ended up having to call the floor over to get it clarified.

I continue to be flabbergasted at how many professional dealers don't grasp this simple concept. It's not that complicated. But trying to enforce and/or explain the half-bet rule when such a situation arises in a no-limit game is astonishingly common. I haven't kept careful track, but I'd estimate that at least a third of dealers get it wrong. I'm dumbfounded by this, because it's a situation that must come up every day. How can they keep getting confused by the same question over and over and over again?


Ouch!

Somehow Grange and I ended up talking about cringeworthy things. I told him about having seen a video clip from a kickboxing match in which one guy's leg breaks in the middle of his shin in a truly horrific manner. I found the clip on YouTube. I'm not going to embed it; I want you to have to click through to see it. Warning: I'm not kidding, this is seriously painful to watch. It will make you squirm and cringe, and you will never forget it; it will be seared into your retinas forever, even though it's only a few seconds long. If, given that notice, you still want to watch it, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kzhFfLtp5U&NR=1. While looking for that, I came across another clip that is virtually identical in what happens, though it's a much more recent fight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGJFOOncRMs. Same warnings apply.

Release the Grange!

This week on Poker After Dark the ads between segments have frequently been a shortened version of the trailer for the movie "Clash of the Titans," so I've seen it a couple dozen times now. (You can see the full-length version here.) At one point, a bearded man with a deathly serious tone commands, "Release the Kraken!" (If you don't know about kraken--pronounced cracken--see here.)

Grange's blog is titled CrAAKKer, because, as you can see from the stories he tells, a major part of his successful strategy is to identify nits who he knows will overplay their big pairs, call their raises with junky, sneaky little hands, and hit something with which to crack those aces and kings. This is not only profitable in and of itself, but often leads to the nits thereafter playing on Super Monkey Tilt. As he likes to say, hilarity ensues.

Anyway, his presence in town this week has done weird things to my mind. (That isn't too hard. It's pretty weird to begin with.) Every time I've heard, "Release the kraken!" I imagine the line actually being, "Release the CrAAKKer!" I envision a multi-armed and fearsomely toothed Grange being turned free from captivity to wreak havoc on the poker tables.

This amuses me far more than could be considered reasonable.


A non-poker blog

Before bidding Grange a fond farewell for this trip, I got to briefly meet his spousal unit, Chad, as well as Brian, a long-time friend of Chad's, and Brian's girlfriend. Grange mentioned my blog, which caused Brian to whip out a very cool business card with his blog name and information on it. I was instantly jealous. I want a Poker Grump business card! (I'm not sure what I would do if I had one, but that's not the point, is it?)

But for now the best I can do is provide a pointer to Brian's blog. It's a potpourri of whatever is on his mind, so tough to assign it to any particular subject or pigeonhole. But take a peek--maybe you'll like the way he thinks and writes: http://blosblahblahblog.blogspot.com/.


Those are some beads!

As I was leaving the Mirage, I saw this guy with the largest bead necklace I've ever seen. He graciously--even eagerly--consented to letting me take a picture of him.




Photo problem

By the way, this is as good a time as any to apologize for my pictures getting crappier over time. I have increasingly noticed that shots taken with my cell phone camera have been coming out pretty awful--light sources streaky, and objects appearing blurred no matter what I do. It has finally dawned on me that the problem is that the glass plate covering the camera lens has become hopelessly scratched up from being carried around unprotected in my fanny pack for a year and a half or so. I suppose this development is sufficiently foreseeable that a smarter guy would have done something to prevent it, but it didn't occur to me until the last few days, when it was obviously too late. So now I'm stuck with it, at least until I break down and get a new phone. Deals come along often enough that I suppose I will do so before terribly long. But until that happens, you and I both will have to put up with the photos looking terrible. Most of the "Guess the casino" pictures were taken in early 2009, when the phone was new, and are not so afflicted, but once in a while one of them is a more recent shot, as are, of course, most of the ones that I use to accompany some story from the tables.

Sorry about that.

Too close for comfort

What you see above are scans of two facing pages from the March 10, 2010, issue of Card Player magazine. (I wish I could have put them side by side, so that you see them as they appear in the magazine, but my scanner isn't big enough, and stitching them digitally is a little beyond my technical know-how.)

My first reaction upon opening this spread was, "Oh, Evelyn Ng got a column in Card Player. I didn't know that." (I admit that I then had some unkind thoughts about her qualifications as a columnist, but those aren't relevant here.) Then I started reading Steve Zolotow's column. I was puzzled when I got to the end of the page, because it wasn't finished. Instead of continuing onto the next page, an arrow directs the reader to turn the page.

Card Player never splits editorial material this way; they run things continuously. (Thank heaven. I hate the "continued on page 93" kind of searches to read the rest of an article.) That was the first time it occurred to me that Ng's piece might be an advertisement. So I looked more closely, and, sure enough, it says so at the top of the page.

Now, if I had been thinking about it a little more, I might have realized that no other writer in the magazine gets half of the page taken up with the identifying photograph, so something was amiss. But I think it's perfectly obvious that the Bodog ad is designed to mislead the reader, at least initially. It cannot possibly be a coincidence that Ng's piece (and, incidentally, I'd bet a hefty sum that she didn't even write the copy that shows up under her name) uses exactly the same typeface and size as the actual columnists, such as Zolotow, for both the body of the piece and the headline.

I am surprised that Card Player is complicit in this attempt to deceive its readers. If I ran the magazine, this kind of camouflaging of an ad to look like editorial copy would not be allowed. Responsible publications have unmistakably clear delineations between the editorial contents and the ads. Even meaningless little blogs like this one make sure to keep that line bright, if their authors have any sense of integrity. That was a large part of the reason that so many of us reacted unfavorably to PokerStars making a pathetic effort to bribe us into blurring the distinction last month.

I think Card Player should require Bodog and other advertisers not only to put the "advertisement" disclaimer at the top, but to use distinctly different fonts, so that even at a glance it is immediately apparent that a piece such as Ng's is an ad rather than part of what the magazine is offering its readers.


Addendum

Soon after posting the above, reader "qdpsteve" emailed me a photo that stitches together the two pages, so you can more easily see what it looks like when you open the magazine. The result lost some resolution, which makes it harder to see how the fonts are identical, so I'm adding it here rather than replacing the two separate pages above.

Thanks, Steve!

The week ahead

I have a few (well, four, to be exact) posts in mind to write tonight and tomorrow. Then there is likely to be a relative lack of posting for the following nine or ten days. My dear friend Cardgrrl is coming to town for a little over a week, starting Monday, for a confluence of events, including the allvegaspoker.com tournaments (details here), and some get-togethers for members of Poker Academy. The schedule is already filling up with tournaments, dinners, meetings with friends, shows, and sight-seeing day trips. And, of course, any unstructured time that I can spend alone chatting, relaxing, and/or playig poker with Cardgrrl, I'll take. Also, an out-of-town reader that will be here next week has generously offered to enter me into the Venetian nightly 7:00 pm tournament Monday, so I'll be playing that.* The predictable result of all this is that I'll be building up a bunch of experiences to write about, with no time to do the writing until after Cardgrrl leaves March 30.

So once again I must ask your forbearance. I know it's a strange concept, but the order of priorities is (1) life, (2) play poker, (3) write about poker. I do realize that so far this year there have been more than the usual number of blocks of time in which (1) has had to be tended to above (2) and (3), but that's just how it is sometimes.


*It happens with some regularity that a reader will write to say he or she will be in town and would like to meet me. I'm usually reluctant to make any particular plans along those lines, for a couple of reasons. First, I'm terribly awkward and uncomfortable in social situations, especially meeting strangers. This tendency is exaggerated when playing poker, because I'm inclined to just sit quietly and try to pay attention to the action, which usually doesn't lend itself to being chatty. As a result of this, sometimes people meeting me think that I'm giving them the cold shoulder and/or not liking them, which isn't necessarily so. Second, I'm not fond of planning my poker in advance; I like to go when and where the spirit moves me, so to speak. I often Tweet where I am, so it's not like I'm hiding, but I almost never know very far ahead of time. But the offer to stake me in a tournament--well, I'm not one to turn down free money. If this reader knew of my general reluctance to plan meet-ups with readers, he certainly devised a high-probability way of lowering my shields and making it happen!

Automated craps table

Today I played for a while at the Rio, because they have suspended their daily freeroll tournament during March Madness days, meaning that the games there should be good again temporarily (and they definitely were).

I then headed to the Flamingo for a second session. I've been kind of neglecting Harrah's properties so far this year, and would like to make at least some effort toward maintaining my platinum status, though it really does me little good. I have found that it's much easier, when going to the Flamingo poker room, to park at Bill's and walk to the Flamingo than to navigate the Flamingo parking garage, which is one of the worst in the city.

While walking through Bill's, I noticed this new computerized craps table. Maybe they exist elsewhere (in fact, almost surely so, since it's hard to believe that Bill's would be the site chosen for a first installation) but I've never known of them before. I was intrigued.

As you can see, players can sit instead of stand. They each have a private monitor. There is obviously some means of loading money/credit into them. (I'm guessing that you just hand cash to the dealer, who enters the credit on his central terminal, but I didn't witness this happening.) There is still a physical table with actual dice and a shooter, but no chips are used. Bets are made from the computer screen.

There are obvious advantages. This must surely speed up the process of placing bets. It reduces dealer errors in payouts, as well as the ancient Vegas tradition of dealers helping themselves to part of the payout, as recreational players often don't know how much they're supposed to be getting and therefore won't notice that they got shorted. It also should eliminate what I understand are the most common forms of player cheating, such as past posting (altering bets surreptitiously after the dice have landed).

I stood and watched for a few minutes. The computer system did not seem to reduce the players' fun at all. They were hooting and hollering the same as at other craps tables. The shooter was on one hell of a hot streak, and everybody was loving it. Or so it appeared. From the very little that I understand about craps, I gather that you can make yourself very unpopular by betting against the shooter. In a regular game, it is openly apparent that you have done so. But with the monitors, I assume that your bets are private (unless somebody is looking over your shoulder), so you can bet "don't pass" all you want, and nobody will know, unless you cheer when everybody else is dejected.

I wonder how the system affects dealer tips. I overheard enough to know that there are mechanisms built into the machine for tipping dealers from your credit and for posting bets for the dealers. But perhaps the social pressure to tip is reduced when nobody knows if you won or lost and the dealer isn't the one pushing you the winnings.

Another interesting feature is that the central monitors display information such as how many times in a row the shooter has won, and the highest number of times in a row a shooter has won since the table opened. If you're dumb enough to believe that certain numbers on the dice are "overdue," the screen helpfully tells you exactly how many throws it has been since various combinations hit.

I still have zero interest in playing craps, and have never put a single bet on the dice--a situation which is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. But I like seeing how technology changes gaming. If I were to decide to play, I think I'd seek out one of these tables. I think it would both speed up my learning curve about the multitude of betting options and enhance my enjoyment of the experience if I didn't have to be reaching down onto the table and figuring out which chips were mine, where to put them, when to pick them back up, and so forth. And secretly betting contrary to the rest of the table would satisfy some facet of my misanthropic tendencies.

Incidentally, while I was watching, one of the players' girlfriends rejoined him after having been off doing something else. He told her, "You should play this. You would win right away. Girls are always lucky at craps." I got the impression that he genuinely believed this, rather than that he was trying to butter her up in some way. Sigh. My campaign to make the world think rationally is a massive failure. Some people are just bound and determined to believe moronic things, and can't be educated out of it.

License plate FTW

I very much liked this plate, and the car to which it was attached, seen earlier today in the Rio parking garage.

Vengeance is mine, saith Jesus

Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
--Romans 12:19, King James Version


Warning: Contains spoilers.


Last night's "Poker After Dark," a cash game, contained what was for me one of the most emotionally satisfying hands of televised poker I've ever seen. You can watch it here.

The background is crucial. At the beginning of the first installment Monday, everybody wanted to play the 7-2 bounty game: if you win a hand with 7-2 in the hole, everybody else pays you $500. Chris Ferguson was the only holdout, so it was not on. Mike Matusow was outraged at this refusal. He harped on it repeatedly, calling Ferguson the biggest nit of all time, and so on. His haranguing was so intense and prolonged that it became seriously uncomfortable for me to watch. It was way, way beyond a friendly needle between colleagues. Ferguson politely explained a couple of times that he wasn't comfortable with the game because he had never played it and hadn't had a chance to think through what strategic adjustments might be called for. He even tried a compromise, agreeing to play if they would lower the bounty amount to $200. The others thought that smaller amount would not make it worthwhile. After these responses failed to shut Matusow up, Ferguson just sat there and took the verbal abuse without replying further.

But then on Friday's show, he got his chance to stick it to Matusow. Matusow open-raised with A-8. Ferguson reraised with 7-2. Matusow called. Ferguson then proceeded to bet every street with complete air. Finally, Matusow was faced with a $12,000 bet on the river, holding top and bottom pair. But, as Ali Nejad explained in his voiceover commentary, the only hand in Ferguson's typical pre-flop reraising range that Matusow could now beat was A-K. (You might add K-K to that, though with that hand and an ace on the flop it seems less likely that Ferguson would continue to fire both the turn and river after being called.) A-A and Q-Q would have made sets; any hand with a jack in it would all have made a straight; A-Q and A-10 would have a higher two pair.

Matusow goes into the tank and is obviously having an agonizing decision:




Finally, though, he reluctantly folds.

Ferguson shows the bluff and, to stick the needle in a little further, says, "I really like this 7-2 game."




He is visibly pleased with himself:




The other players find considerable humor in the situation:




Well, all except one, that is:




After that, Matusow, who has, as usual, been chatting up a storm, becomes noticeably more quiet for the rest of the show.

I love, love, love this. On the most basic level, Ferguson takes advantage of his tight reputation to pull a fast one and win a pot that he could not otherwise take. But it's patently obvious that he chose this particular situation because of the specific cards he held, the specific opponent he was facing, and the history of what had transpired earlier in the filming day.

He could have justifiably gotten angry at Matusow's relentless taunting--which really was over the top. Ferguson's IQ is probably, oh, I dunno, about 200 points higher than Matusow's, and he has just as great an edge in verbal fluency, should he choose to get into a war of words. But he didn't. He held his tongue, and instead waited for his chance to reply in the language of poker, which proved to be far more eloquent and effective than any verbal retort he could have contrived.

I'd like to think that I would handle the situation the same way--don't try to sink to the needler's level and get into a pissing contest. Instead, keep quiet and just outplay him. After all, taking his money is ultimately a lot more satisfying than getting the most clever rejoinder in could ever be. If you happen to get a chance to rub his face in your win a bit, well, that's icing on the cake.

Nh, wp, sir!

Guess the casino, #452

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




Answer: Santa Fe Station

Guess the casino, #451

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Answer: Texas Station

Poker gems, #346

Vinnie Favorito (comedian at the Flamingo and avid poker player), in "Poker Bustouts," a documentary about failing at poker, available here.


That's the life of a poker player, and I guess that's what makes it exciting. Y'know, one day you're a millionaire, and the next day you're hanging out in front of Jack in the Box with illegal aliens hoping someone drops a French fry.

Guess the casino, #450

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




Answer: Texas Station

St. Patrick's Day, downtown Las Vegas

It was predictably a little wild and crazy. I took a bunch of pictures, uploaded to an album here, if you want to take a peek at what was going on.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Y'know, that might make an intriguing first line of a novel. Somebody oughtta try it.

I picked that title because last night I did a study in contrasts. I saw via Twitter that my friend Grange95 was playing at the Aria poker room. It's always fun to share a table with him, and I didn't have any particular reason to select someplace else, so off I went. As I was getting ready to go, I noticed a handful of $5 chips from Hooters sitting on the table by my door. (Actually, there are chips from lots of different casinos; they kind of accumulate and multiply.*) I realized that Hooters is only a short distance from Aria, and I thought that that particular sequence might make for a fun comparison on this here blog. So I stuffed the chips in my pocket as I headed out.

It was true: the two casinos are about as polar opposite as you could make two places. But more about that later. First, let me review my session at Aria.


Stupid parking preference

The first comment-worthy thing I noticed on my way into Aria from the parking garage was that there were maybe 10 or 12 of the spaces closest to the door marked with these signs:



There's a whole bunch of stupid things about this. First, MGM Grand is in the business of making money. This kind of policy does nothing to enhance their bottom line, unless it's by some highly indirect way of making tree huggers think that that the corporation is a wonderful friend of the earth, and thus they somehow become willing to lose more money at the slot machines, which seems dubious. MGM has no corporate interest in whether its customers arrive in a Prius or a Hummer. Worse, it offends some (like me). I had already parked farther away before seeing these spaces, but as I walked past, I noticed two ordinary vehicles (both minivans) start to pull into one of the spots, then see the sign, back out, and go elsewhere. I suspect those drivers were annoyed. It is not good to annoy your customers.

Then there's the whole question of what the sign actually means--does your car have to be an alternative fuel vehicle, or a low-emissions one, or both? And what standard is being applied? Does a flex-fuel car count? If I drive a 30-year-old diesel Mercedes that I've converted to run on used vegetable oil, but it smokes like an oil well afire, is that OK? Is a hybrid GMC Yukon OK? If so, how does it make sense to allow that but not a gas-sipping little Toyota Yaris, which is conventional in its fuel system but extremely frugal? One has no way of knowing what the powers that be at the Aria will deem acceptably green to occupy these premium parking spaces.

Next problem is that I seriously doubt the threat is real. Along the lines of not annoying your customers, are they really going to lose your business forever by ticking you off by having your car towed because it wasn't on their preferred list of models? I don't think so. The Hilton has a bunch of parking spots reserved for players who accumulate points on their member cards, with dire threats of towing violators. However, when my car was stolen from their lot, and I checked with security to see if perhaps it had been towed for some inadvertant violation, the security guy in charge confided with me that they never tow for such things--only if a car is abandoned or parked in some way that blocks traffic. I suspect that all or most casinos follow similar policies. It's hard to get a customer angrier than by towing away his car for some trivial infraction. In apparent confirmation of this theory, I took time to notice the cars parked in these alt-fuel spaces as I left, and it was a completely random assemblage, including some notoriously inefficient SUVs and one pickup truck. I'm not sure which is stupider: to have this parking policy and actually enforce it, or to have it and not enforce it, but I think Aria is choosing the latter route of stupidity.

And, FWIW, I still have serious doubts about the whole fossil-fuels-cause-global-warming hypothesis. (Sorry, Al Gore.)


Dogs playing poker?

My friend Michael Hamai, of allvegaspoker.com fame, just two days ago posted this picture of a dog accompanying its owner to a poker room, with the message, "Only at Boulder Station." It was a wonderful coincidence, then, to spot last night the only dog I've ever seen in a poker room:




My guess is that dogs are not generally allowed, but both of these two have somehow been legally designated as "companion animals" and are thus given access privileges equivalent to those of seeing eye dogs. The most common reason for little lap dogs getting this label is for "treatment" of some sort of anxiety or panic disorder. The owners claim that having the dog nearby calms them down. If you ask me (and I realize that nobody did), the vast majority of these are just scams by people who like having their pooches with them, and/or drama queens seeking and getting attention for their "disease." I can't believe how many doctors will sign off on such nonsense. I don't really mind having well-behaved dogs in public places like casinos, but they should allow anybody to bring them, not just those who wail, "I'm sick! I need Muffins with me every minute of the day or I can't cope!"


Stupid rule

Early in my session, I noticed the dealer just sitting there after a hand was over, with nothing happening, and no apparent reason for the delay. Just as I was about to ask what the holdup was, the green light flashed on the Shufflemaster, he exchanged decks, and went on with the next hand. I thought he was just being too lazy to do a hand shuffle. But then I noticed the same thing happen with each of the next two dealers when a hand ended quickly, so I asked the third one if that was a house rule. Indeed it is. He informed me that there are no hand shuffles allowed at the Aria unless the game is four-handed or less, and even then it requires the supervisor's approval.

I have never heard of this being a policy anywhere else, though when I sent out a Twitter message about it, somebody responded that they have the same rule at the Bellagio. I can't see any convincing reason for it. It slows the game down, without any meaningful advantage to compensate. I suppose there is some tiny reduction in risk of the dealer manipulating the shuffle for the benefit of some particular player, but is that really a serious concern? If there is some good reason for this policy that I'm not seeing, please let me know in the comments. Absent that, I'm declaring it to be just plain stupid.


Winning lucky, winning smart, winning strange, and winning ugly

Most of my profit came in three hands. In the first, I cracked aces with 5-5 when I flopped a full house. In the second, I correctly called down a three-barrel bluff by a tight player whom I had not seen bluffing in the two hours I had played with him. I had only top pair with a mediocre kicker (J-9 on a jack-high flop, to be exact). I just got the strange sense from him that he didn't really like his hand as much as his bets represented, though for the life of me I couldn't pick out any one thing in particular that was giving me that vibe. I was glad to discover that I had been right.

I took one pot that I didn't expect to. I raised pre- with something junky like a 7-8 offsuit, got one caller from the blinds. The board missed both of us, and it was just checked down. By the river, I had not improved at all. But to my surprise, my opponent just checked out (i.e., mucked instead of checking) on the river, saying, "I missed." I won without having to show that I had just 8-high. Who knows--maybe it was the best hand, but there's a decent chance he threw away the winner for no reason.

The biggest pot I won last night, though, came, unfortunately, at the expense of my friend CK, of the BWOP blog, who had also come to share the hilarity with Grange. He had to leave for dinner shortly after she arrived, though, so that didn't really work out. In this hand, I had K-K, and she was the only one to call my raise, with J-10 and position. Flop was J-10-x. I bet, she raised. I thought for a while. I was trying to decide, (1) Did she have something like A-J, and was probing to see if I would fold A-K or A-Q or a middle pair to a raise? (2) If she had two pair, J-10 was the obvious candidate, and could a reraise make her sufficiently convinced that I had flopped a set that she would fold? (3) If she had a set, would she raise here or just smooth-call? Well, by some series of mysterious mental machinations, I concluded that there was enough chance of either being ahead or getting her to fold two pair that it was worth pushing. I did. She called quickly, though with a pained look that, in retrospect, I take to mean that she suspected a set and called with top two pair anyway. I was in bad shape. But the turn and river were both 7s, landing me a better two pair and the roughly $500 pot. That is truly winning ugly.

We have now played two large pots (previous one in December, written up here and here), each of us winning one. But not only was hers the bigger of the two, both times she got her money in good, while I got mine in bad. That's not something I'm terribly proud of.

CK left after that hand (it being only the last in a series of ugly ones for her), and the table wasn't much fun without my friends there, so I cashed out less than an hour later, up about $400.

I headed over to Hooters to complete my self-amusement by contrast. But I've now taken long enough to write up the first half of the night that I need to get going on other things, so the second half of the story (that's the "worst of times," to give you a foretaste) will have to wait until tomorrow.



*Why? Well, sometimes I'm in a hurry for some reason and don't want to take the time to cash out, so I just bring the chips home and use them on the next visit to that casino. But the most common reason is that I pocket some special commemorative chip to add to the collection, get home, find that I already have one of that issue that I had forgotten, and then it goes by the door to be used again next time I play in that room. With Hooters, there are so many different chips, each with a pretty girl on them, that it's really hard to remember which ones I have and which I don't, so on my last trip I ended up with 10 or 15 that turned out to be duplicates, and were waiting to be recycled into the poker economy.

Guess the casino, #449

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




Answer: Caesars Palace

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Just home from playing at Aria first, followed by Hooters (an interesting study in contrasts). At the latter, I liked this card cap being used by another player--a four-leaf clover encased in some sort of acrylic. It seemed fitting for the day.

I'm thinking that I might stay downtown for the evening festivities tonight. The downtown crowd tends to be fun and interesting on holidays, with great photo ops. That way, I wouldn't have to fight traffic near the Strip. Maybe Fitzgerald's would have enough action for my once or twice yearly visit to play there. If not, Binion's and Golden Nugget are reliable alternatives.

Guess the casino, #448

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

(Note: I usually don't alter the photos, but on this one after I got home and looked at it I realized that the name of the casino was plainly visible on the poker table felt, so I have obscured it here.)




Answer: Aria

Guess the casino, #447

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




Answer: Sandia (Albuquerque, New Mexico)

Guess the casino, #446

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




Answer: Imperial Palace