The only thing that's constant is change

Something got me thinking about how poker rooms have changed since I moved to town in July, 2006. I started down a mental list of casinos, and could think of only a handful in which there has not been an opening, closing, or move of the poker room in the time I've lived here.

What follows is my attempt to catalog such changes. This is all done from memory, and will undoubtedly have a few errors, but the point still stands: Nothing in Vegas is forever, including poker rooms.


Aliante Station: Opened, then moved.

Aria: Opened.

Arizona Charlie's--Decatur: Moved twice.

Bally's: No change.

Bellagio: No change.

Bill's: Opened, then moved.

Binion's: Moved.

Boulder Station: No change.

Caesars Palace: Opened.

Cannery: Moved three times.

Circus Circus: No change.

Club Fortune: Moved.

Eastside Cannery: Opened, then moved.

El Cortez: No change.

Excalibur: Moved; then fired dealers, went to electronic tables, then went back to live dealers.

Fiesta Henderson: Moved twice, then closed.

Fiesta Rancho: Closed.

Fitzgerald's: No change.

Flamingo: No change.

Gold Coast: Moved, then closed.

Golden Nugget: Moved.

Green Valley Ranch: Moved.

Hacienda: Closed.

Hard Rock: Opened, then moved.

Harrah's: No change.

Hilton: Closed.

Hooters (formerly San Remo): Opened.

Imperial Palace: Moved three times.

Jokers Wild: Moved.

Luxor: Moved twice.

M Resort: Opened.

Mandalay Bay: No change.

MGM Grand: No change.

Mirage: No change.

Monte Carlo: No change.

Orleans: No change.

O'Shea's: Opened.

Nevada Palace: Casino closed (later reopened as Eastside Cannery).

Palace Station: No change.

Palms: No change.

Paris: Moved, then closed.

Planet Hollywood (formerly Aladdin): Moved three times.

Plaza: Closed (I think).

Poker Palace: No change.

Railroad Pass: Closed.

Rampart: Opened, then closed.

Red Rock: No change (opened shortly before I arrived).

Rio: No change.

Riviera: Moved.

Sahara: No change.

Sam's Town: Moved.

Santa Fe Station: Moved.

Silverton: Moved twice.

South Point (formerly South Coast): Moved.

Speedway: Closed.

Stardust: Casino closed.

Stratosphere: Moved.

Suncoast: Moved.

Sunset Station: Moved.

Terrible's: Opened.

Texas Station: No change.

Treasure Island: No change.

Tropicana: Closed (reported to be reopening soon).

Tuscany: Closed, then reopened.

Venetian: No change. (Opened shortly before I arrived.)

Wynn: No change.


That's 66 properties I've listed, of which only 22 I classify as "no change" in the past 4 1/2 years. (Of course, they've all had changes in personnel, in games spread, in rules, number of tables, tournament schedule, etc. I'm talking about opening, closing, or moving, plus the one unique type of change listed for the Excalibur.)

Guess the casino, #778

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Answer: Golden Nugget

Chopped one

I'm not in the "Survive Donkey Island" game, but I was going to be stuck at home for the evening anyway, needed a break from a project I'm working on, and heard via Twitter that AlCantHang had arranged for his corporate overlords to add an extra $100 to the prize pool. For a small $1 + $1 tourney, that's a nice overlay. So I played. I'm glad I did, finishing in a close 2nd place with a proportionate chop of the money.

My table started off playing very conservatively. The other tables were, apparently, going all-in every hand, because there were unlimited $1 rebuys available. I had to rebuy one time, and took the optional $1 add-on, too, which put my total investment at $4--almost surely the lowest contribution to the prize pool among those at the final table. Among 27 players, there were 27 add-ons and a rather astonishing 219 rebuys! After the rebuy period ended, I spent a long time with the largest stack at my table, but still below the tournament chip average--which is mathematically quite an uncommon situation to be in. We were all being taunted in the chat box by people at the other tables for being so nitty. Somebody commented that if one of us won, we'd have the frequent rebuyers to thank. That is true. So, thank you!

I didn't have to kick myself for doing anything too stupid this time. I did, however, have two pretty spectacular suckouts. Here I was just bullying, trying to steal the big blind from the small blind with a pre-flop shove. He had been surrenduring his blinds most of the time, rarely defending, so it wasn't a crazy, random move on my part, but I did get exceptionally lucky to pull out a runner-runner-runner-runner straight:



Later, when I was down to being one of the shortest stacks, I thought the small blind was just purely stealing my big blind, so I pushed. I was wrong, but it was a reasonable guess under the circumstances. I was mortified to get called, but again managed to pull it out of the dirt:



Other than those two spots, I don't think I ever got big money in worse than a coin flip.*

Tournaments that are mostly poker bloggers can be a lot of fun, and this was no exception. Lots of players know each other, and the fun, bragging rights, trash-talking, Monty Python jokes, and post-game blogging are as important as the money. Listening to one's own play get live drunk podcasted on Buddy Dank Radio is a kick, too. I'm pleased that with every year that passes I know more of the screen names as living, breathing people that I've met.

Next week, I'm freerolling for about 140 rebuys.


*Addendum: A Tweet from AlCantHang reminded me of another situation I didn't think of when writing the above. On the money bubble, he was short stack, on my right. He made a min-raise from the small blind. I had suited 5-6 and called. Flop contained a 4 and 7, giving me an open-ended straight draw. When he checked, I pushed as a semi-bluff. He called--having slow-played his AA. 3 hit the river, and that was that. So I was about a 2:1 dog when the money went in on that one, I guess.

Guess the casino, #777

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Answer: Bally's

Guess the casino, #776

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Answer: Sunset Station

Benyamine knows

From the Full Tilt Million Dollar Cash Game. He got it all in on the flop against Andrew Feldman.

Guess the casino, #775

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Answer: Sahara

IBM's next challenge should be poker

That's what Chris Wilson argues in Slate, here.

Laak on cheating

I was just reading the February issue of Bluff magazine and came across another retrospective bit of insight about the Ali Tekintamgac cheating scandal. In case you haven't heard of it before, this player had at least one "blogger" secretly working for him, with media credentials so as to be able to get close to the tables. The blogger would position himself in a way that he could see other players' hole cards, and signal them to Tekintamgac. See Shamus's excellent two-part account of the whole sordid affair here and here.

Anyway, Phil Laak recounts an interesting experience sharing a table with Tekentamgac at the Partouche event:

I found the rhythm of the game rather enjoyable, except for this one poker blogger who was hell bent on seeing my cards. Yes, it was Ali's 'blogger'. I had no idea they were a cheating duo at the time. All I wanted was the for guy to stop shadowing me so hard. At the time I thought he was just curious as to how I was playing. Though slightly flattered I thought that he could get a better education sweating one of the better pros. Ahhh, but they were not at Ali's table. It is funny how the whole thing makes so much sense now that Ali got caught.

Guess the casino, #774

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Answer: Luxor

Dancing donkey

I am definitely not a fan of trash talking, rubbing salt in opponents' wounds, etc. I don't do it myself, and most of the time I don't enjoy seeing it done by others. (I'll make an exception if Phil Hellmuth is the recipient.)

But I'm watching the new season of the Full Tilt Million Dollar Challenge, and I can't help smiling at the dancing donkey that Mike Matusow brings to the proceedings. It's just so silly that it would be hard to get offended at it.

(I realize that it would make more sense to splice these four clips together into one, but I haven't learned how to do that yet in MS Movie Maker. It was something of a technological breakthrough for me to figure out how to snip out the relevant segments from the shows. I'll tackle the resplicing problem another day.)

Surrounded by celebrities

The Imperial Palace is famous for its "Dealertainers," celebrity impersonators who deal blackjack for you, then get up on a little stage and sing a song or two. Just last night during the few hours I was in the poker room, we heard from the likes of Elvis Presley, Madonna, Garth Brooks, Beyonce, Tony Orlando, and Lady Gaga.

But what you might not know about the Palace is that it also features Playertainers. Here's the proof. At my table last night we had Brett Favre:



Dennis Rodman:



and, at the next table over, Senator Harry Reid:

Guess the casino, #773

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Answer: Gold Coast

Ur doin it rong

There are a few poker dealers in town who put out the flop in a weird way. They put the three cards down in a little face-up stack, then scoot the top card to one side, then the next card to the other side. It's a three-step process, instead of the one-step normal way.

This bugs me greatly. I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's because it takes an extra second or two every hand, for no good reason. Maybe it's because when I went to poker dealer school they taught us to be really snappy about putting out the flop. The goal, they told us, was to get all three cards exposed at essentially the same time, so that players would not be able to get a read off of an opponent's reaction to any one particular card.

But in any event, it's a practice that is slow and irritating without a single redeeming quality, as far as I can tell. I claim the right to bring a ruler to the casino and smack the hands of the dealers who are doing this, like a nun in parochial school dealing with a naughty student.

Guess the casino, #772

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Answer: Circus Circus

Busybody

I have one more story from last night's post-tournament cash session at the Orleans.

I had been playing for an hour or so, and was down somewhat, due to a three-barrel bluff gone wrong. I was in Seat 7. Seat 6 was occupied by a young man obviously new to casino poker. The details of the hand don't matter; suffice it to say that on the turn I had top pair (king) with a queen kicker, plus a flush draw, and liked my situation very much. I was about 80% confident that I was already ahead, and I had the draw as backup in case I was wrong. Before my opponent acted, I had already decided to raise him all-in (about $110) if he bet, or bet about half of my stack if he checked.

He cut out some chips--$40 worth, in two stacks of four red chips. But he pushed them forward with two movements in rapid succession, a classic string bet. The dealer picked up one of the stacks, seemed to hesitate, not sure what to do, then put it back down and decided to say nothing. I don't know why. She clearly was a rather timid personality. But maybe she had looked away at the crucial moment and wasn't sure of what she had seen. Or maybe she had heard something before the young man's bet that made her think that perhaps he had announced an amount, though, in fact, he hadn't. (The latter is actually my best guess. The room was noisy, and her English was kind of shaky, so I imagine it's easy for her to be unsure of what she is or is not hearing.)

Of course, I was happy to have him bet $40 instead of $20, since I was hoping for a double-up. (He had me covered.) I did not protest the string bet and was glad that the dealer wasn't going to call it back.

But just as I started reaching for my chips, the guy in Seat 9 spoke up in protest. "He didn't announce an amount. That's a string bet." I said to the dealer, "It's OK, we can let it go." but Seat 9 would have none of that. "No! He can't do that! He has to take it back."

The dealer capitulated and reduced the bet to $20. I thought about reducing my raise to $50 or $60, but I thought that since he was obviously wiling to bet $40, there was a good chance he would call the all-in, so I continued with the original plan. But after my opponent thought it over for a minute, he folded.

Of course, maybe I was really behind (though that seems unlikely), or maybe if he had called he would have drawn out on me in some gross way. But the most likely thing is that the intervention of Seat 9 cost me at least $20, and may have cost me about $90 (the difference between the amount that I actually won and the amount that I probably would have won if Seat 6 had felt pot-committed with a $40 bet and therefore had called and lost).

I was understandably annoyed at him for sticking his nose in where it didn't belong and was neither needed nor welcome. Still, I wasn't going to say anything to him about it. But then he opened the subject: "Sorry if I cost you $20 there." This was not said in an apologetic manner at all. The clear sense I got from it was, "Tough luck for you, but I did what had to be done."

So I responded: "You know, between the dealer and the players who are actually in the hand, we can figure it out without you butting in." He said, "No, obviously you couldn't. The rule is clear, and his bet had to go back, and the dealer wasn't doing her job." I said, "How about this: You call the string bets on the hands that you're involved with, and I'll take care of the ones that I'm involved with."

The exchange concluded with him saying, "You can be mad at me if you want to, but if you had won that extra $20, it would have been by cheating. Just think about that."

There was no chance that I was going to change his mind, or he mine, so I dropped it and the game went on.


This incident raises some interesting questions, I think. The first is when and to what extent does one step into a problem in a hand that one is not involved in? This is a dilemma I've wrestled with many times. Just a couple of months ago I prevented a very large pot from being pushed to the wrong player when not a single other person at the table--player or dealer--noticed that there was a straight on the board and the pot should be chopped. I have no doubt that that was the right thing to do.

But other times I'm still not sure whether speaking up was (or would have been) correct, even after reflecting on it for a while later. I think the first time I wrote about this phenomenon was in a blog post in November, 2007, here. Most of that post was later incorporated into a piece in Card Player magazine by their former columnist Mike O'Malley, available here. In 2009 I wrote about an incident at the Venetian in which I intervened in order to clarify how much money a guy was playing, and essentially everybody who submitted a comment on that post thought that I should have kept out of it.

With that history, I'm not immune to a charge of hypocrisy in complaining about the busybody at the Orleans. Nevertheless, there are a couple of guidelines that I think should illuminate when to jump into the fray uninvited, which he was not following.

First, I see the main reason for speaking up to be to help protect the general integrity of the game and, more specifically, to help protect less-experienced players who may not know all the intricacies of the rules. In this case, Seat 9 was unquestionably a very experienced player who, after an hour of watching me, had to recognize that I was not a naif in need of sheltering. Just as obviously, Seat 6 was not an angle-shooter trying to take advantage of me.

Second, if it were to happen that after I pointed out what I perceived as a problem, those involved in the hand were all OK with the situation as it was, I think that I would back off and let them be. Here, Seat 6 wanted to bet $40, the dealer had, for whatever reason, decided to let him, and I expressed my assent to the small irregularity. Even if the interloper had justification to speak up initially, once those directly affected by the situation have all agreed to let it be, I think he should back off. As a similar example, a couple of years ago I wrote about a situation at Caesars Palace in which there was a question of whether one guy's cards had been mucked. The dealer thought the hand should still be live, as did both players involved. But an annoying guy at the table just wouldn't drop it, insisting that the hand be declared dead, even though he had no stake in the outcome.

The second point of possible interest is Seat 9's contention that if the bet had been allowed to stand, I would have been profiting from "cheating." I reject this out of hand, frankly. To include this requires a very different conception of what constitutes "cheating" from what the word means to me. I see it as comparable to a football team declining to enforce a penalty on the opposing team when it is to their advantage to do so. Of course I have the right to force the player to reduce his bet when it was made in a technically illegal fashion, but I don't think there is any grand principle that should require me to do so when I am not disadvantaged by his action. That is particularly true here when the reason for the existence of the rule (to prevent an angle-shooter from watching an opponent's reaction to the bet, then deciding whether to increase the size of the bet based on that reaction) is not even remotely in effect.

Almost four years ago I wrote about the problem of players who do some sort of tapping motion while thinking about a decision, and how hard it can be to tell sometimes if this is just idle, meaningless hand activity or is intended to signal a check. I stand by the conclusion that I had then: If I'm the one being put in an awkward position by the player's ambiguity (because I have to interpret his action and act on it in some way), it is my discretion whether to look the other way and let it go, or have it enforced as a binding action, the way the rules say that I can. I view an opponent's string bet in the same way, if I am on the receiving end of his violation: I can ask that the rule be enforced, or I can waive enforcement. And, of course, I can make that decision based on what is most to my advantage. That doesn't mean that I always will; believe it or not, I'm actually capable of extending grace and forbearance. But I submit that it is not cheating, not angle-shooting, not unethical to make the decision either way--to let the errant action stand, or to insist on the player being held to letter of the law--and to make that decision based on what is in my own best interest.

(Of course, most often the dealer takes the initiative and I don't have a choice to make, but I'm discounting those situations here. Had this dealer initially disallowed the second part of the bet, I probably would have said something like I did, and then if she had continued to insist on the reduced bet size, I would not have pushed the point further.)

Questions for readers to comment on: (1) Was the guy wrong to involve himself in the first place? (2) Was he wrong to continue to press the point after I had indicated that it was OK with me to let the string bet stand? (3) Was I being unethical/dishonest/cheating/angle-shooting to say that I was OK with overlooking the technical violation and attempt to let the bet stand?

Take all of it

After bombing out of the HORSE tournament at Orleans last night, I played in a cash game long enough to win back my tournament entry fee. I realize that it's completely irrational to look at poker results that way, but I ended up a net 30 bucks on the day, which made me feel a little better about not playing particularly well in the tournament.

During one hand that I watched, the table rock had flopped a set. He bet it and got called by a headphones-wearing kid. He bet the turn, and the kid min-raised him. Rock pushed out a stack that he must have thought was enough that a call would have the kid all in. But he had slightly misjudged the kid's stack, and when the kid called he still had three white chips ($3) behind.

To my surprise, the river went check-check. Rock won. Kid rebought.

I couldn't figure out why the kid wouldn't put in his last $3 when the action was on him, nor why the rock didn't bet $3 on the river. There's no question that he knew there was still money left behind; the dealer anticipated the situation and clearly announced that the kid wasn't all-in after the action on the turn.

A guy sitting next to the rock said to him, "It says a lot about a guy's character that he has a monster hand and won't take his opponent's last three bucks." The rock replied with something like, "I don't like it when you see somebody figure out how much a guy has left and bet exactly that much in order to get every last dollar."

I do not understand this mindset. I cannot imagine how it is somehow noble to win $200 from somebody, but immoral or a sign of some sort of character flaw to win his last $3. If I am sufficiently confident that I have the best hand and that my opponent will put all of his chips in, hell yeah I'll take them all. That is why I'm sitting at the table. It is the only reason I'm there. $3 isn't going to change my life, but it's not going to change his to lose it, either. The question comes down to whether those three white chips will stay in his stack or come to sit in mine, and I see no reason not to prefer them being in front of me.

My guess is that the rock on some level feels guilty about the win, and the tiny act of mercy helps him alleviate that feeling. But this is just flat-out denial about the cutthroat, selfish, dog-eat-dog nature of the game.

In the latest issue of Card Player magazine, Alan Schoonmaker covers this exact topic--how feeling guilty about the predatory nature of poker interferes with maximizing wins. It isn't available on the magazine's web site yet, but it's well worth reading if you are plagued with a sense of guilt about taking other people's money by winning at poker.

(Incidentally, it appears that Card Player has revamped their web site recently and in the process made it much less accessible and useful. I tend to remember points made in columns by who wrote them. I've always previously been able to search the site by author, but no longer (unless I'm missing something). Now the contents are organized only by issue, and those are viewable only via a Flash player. Way to go, Card Player--make your archives unsearchable by any efficient means. Brilliant!)

I realize that some people play poker primarily for the fun of the game and/or the social interactions, and genuinely don't care about how the win/loss accounting goes. That's fine. These remarks do not pertain to them. But last night's rock can't be among those. I've played with him several times before, and he's always nearly silent, not gregarious and interactive. He doesn't appear to be having fun. (However, I realize that people think the same of me even when it's not true, so I'll take my own assessment there with a grain of salt.) His style is to lay in wait with a big hand and trap an unwary opponent. By every appearance, he is there only in order to leave with more money than he came in with. Given that, I find it incongruous that he doesn't try to squeeze every chip out of the game that he can.

Got guilt?

Dumb rule at Orleans

For a few days now I have had a hankering for a live HORSE tournament. The Orleans has one every Sunday night that is reasonably priced ($75), so I decided to give it a go. I finished mid-field after playing not my best. But along the way I learned that the Orleans poker room has a very peculiar rule.

In the first orbit we had two dead stacks reserved for late entries. Blinds and antes were taken from them as needed. I had one of them on my left. The first time it was my small blind (and hence big blind from the dead stack), everybody folded to me. When the button folded, I assumed that that was the end of the matter and I would collect the big blind. But the dealer looked at me expectantly, clearly waiting for me to act. I said, "The hand's over." He replied, "No, you still have to act."

I thought it was stupid, but for the formality of it I added enough to call the amount of the big blind. Then and only then did the dealer push me the pot and collect my cards.

As the next hand was underway, I asked him about this. He was absolutely clear that this was the house rule and they always did it that way. He specifically said that if I had folded, he would have awarded the pot to the dead stack/big blind.

This makes no sense whatsoever. The absent player's hand is killed as soon as the last card is dealt and the seat is unoccupied. If there is any definition of a dead hand, it is one that cannot win the pot under any circumstances. As soon as the button folds, there is only one live hand left on the table--that of the small blind--and the small blind is therefore only player to whom the pot can possibly be awarded.

The dealer clarified that if I had actually folded, he would have called the floor to ask what to do, but he also said that every previous time it has come up, the dead stack gets the pot.

As partial explanation, he pointed out that when playing online tournaments, even if the big blind is sitting out, the small blind has to call in order to win the pot. This is a flawed analogy. First, I'm not completely sure that's true everywhere; I just haven't paid enough attention to the situation to know. But more importantly, during an online tournament there is no "butt in the seat" rule in play. If you have been sitting out, you still get dealt a hand, and you can click the "I'm back" button anytime before it's your turn to act. In other words, your hand is not dead before the other players are taking their turns. But under standard live tournament rules, your hand is declared dead and pulled into the muck by the dealer before the first player acts. That makes all the difference in the world. Even if an online player in the big blind is sitting out, his hand is live until/unless he fails to act on it when required, so if everybody folds to him, he can legitimately win the pot. The site is not awarding the pot to a dead hand, as the Orleans rule apparently says that they will do. Online tournaments do not use dead stacks to hold open places that might later be filled by late arrivals; they create stacks as needed when new players register.

The rule is also stupid because it benefits nobody. All it does is act as a trap for the unwary. The penalty for not knowing that this quirky rule exists is that you lose a pot if you perform the rather natural act of returning your cards to the dealer after everybody else has folded. There's nobody left to play with/against, so why wouldn't you? Worse, the pot is given to a phantom player who did nothing to earn it, didn't even have any cards when the last player mucked, and most likely won't ever collect it, as the stack is taken out of play whenever the entry deadline passes.

I'd like to speak to the poker room manager and ask him or her about this hypothetical situation: "Suppose that the big blind doesn't notice that he's the big blind and mucks his cards, quickly followed by the under-the-gun player doing the same. The discards get intermingled and are therefore irretrievable. Of course the errant player is still required to post the big blind. (Never mind that the dealer should have seen to that before pitching the cards.) Now everybody at the table folds around to the small blind, who has the last live hand. The small blind assumes that the hand is over and returns his cards to the dealer, expecting to be awarded both blinds. What is your house rule and/or floor decision about who gets this pot?" Following the logic of their rule about dead stacks, I think they would have to give the pot to the big blind, even though he mucked his cards before everybody else did.

The two situations are functionally identical, as far as I can discern. But surely everybody can see that it would be insane to give this hypothetical pot to the big blind. My point, in this imaginary conversation with the poker room manager, would be that it is equally insane to award the pot to a dead stack with a dead hand.

Frankly, I can't think of a single good argument for having such a rule in place. It's extremely minor in the big scope of things, but it's among the most ridiculous house rules I've ever encountered.

PAD annoyances

I just finished watching last week's "Poker After Dark" episodes. It's the first time I have downloaded and watched them in high definition, which was nice. People look different in hi-def, that's for sure. Other good things about the week were that it was a cash game (usually more interesting than tournaments), they had on two players I've never seen on TV before (Greg "FBT" Mueller and Olivier Busquet), and Eli Elezra and David "Viffer" Peat drove some crazy-diseased action.

But there were three things that kept annoying me through all five installments. In ascending order of irritation:

3. Helicoptering

For some reason, every time Mueller mucks his cards he does so by lofting them in a high, twirling arc. I see this frequently in the games I play, done by rank amateurs who don't know any better. It usually stops pretty fast after once or twice I tell the dealer that he or she needs to expose one of the cards to the table because I saw what it was when it was in the air. Dealers get annoyed at having to do that, and ask the player to knock it off. It's one of many bad habits people develop in casual home games and inappropriately bring to the casinos.

Mueller is a long-time, experienced pro. How can he not know that this bit of silliness frequently exposes one or both cards, and thus potentially affects the subsequent action?


2. Like it--or not

It's been about 30 years since the "Valley Girl" phenomenon introduced the use of the word "like" as a meaningless verbal tic, and, sadly, ever since then a large percentage of children, teens, and young adults have been infected by this terrible virus. I have heard some astonishing examples of likeorrhea (yes, I just made up that word) before, but I think that Peat's case is worse than any I have encountered before. It's incredibly jarring and annoying to listen to. Do these people not ever monitor their speech, and hear how stupid they sound? It got so bad that even Ali Nejad started making fun of him.


1. Laak-down poker

But the hands-down, far and away most annoying aspect of the week's shows was, well, basically everything about Phil Laak. Normally I like him a lot. I enjoy his stories, games, and prop bets. I'm amused by his quirky observations about poker, life, science, philosophy, investing, or whatever else is on his mind. But this week he was completely out of control. He had been drinking enough that his speech was slurring--something I've never seen in any of his countless previous TV appearances. He even admitted (rather confusingly) at one point, "Libations have inflected me a little bit."

He just Would. Not. Shut. Up. It was five hours of constant, non-stop, stream-of-consciousness verbal babbling. No mental filter, just free expression of every thought that was crossing through his mind. Peat once even begged for somebody to bring a muzzle for Phil.

But it wasn't just his talk. His ethanol-induced disinhibition spread to his conduct. He was obviously irritating the others at the table as well as the viewers. Here, for example, he gets into a wrestling match with Peat:




Then, a few seconds later, he pushes all of Peat's chip stacks over into a mess:



His poker was horrendous, too. He definitely does not play better drunk. He was playing stupidly and losing badly. He frequently lost track of whose turn it was, who was in the hand, what the action was, etc.

I guess I'm glad that he's a happy drunk instead of an angry drunk, but for entertainment purposes, a smart, sharp, sober Laak is a lot more fun to watch than the inebriated version. When he's not drinking, he's funny, interesting, one-of-a-kind. When he's drinking, he's just one big heap of annoying in every possible way.

Punctuation fail

I noticed this tournament board at Mandalay Bay this afternoon. Somebody in the poker room management, at some point, made this thing. I can just imagine what happened. There was just the plan word "Players" there. The sign-maker looked at it and thought, "Something's missing." The apostrophe went in, and the sign-maker said "Yes! That's it! Perfect!"

Poker riddles

Mike Caro recently posted an interesting riddle on his blog: "What's the weakest hold'em hand you can have and still end up on the river with an absolute certainty of victory?"

I got the answer right, but it took some thinking. Unfortunately, Caro doesn't explain the answer in detail, so I thought I would. Spoiler below, so don't scroll down until you've thought about it all you want to.

The answer is three queens--specifically, two queens in your hand on a board that has these four characteristics: Queen high, unpaired, no three of any one suit, and no straight possible. E.g., Qs-Jd-7c-5c-2h.

Here's why. The answer can't be any one-pair or two-pair hand, because three of a kind is always possible on any hold'em board, so you can never be sure that even top two pair is good. There are some boards on which nothing better than three of a kind is possible--if there is no pair (hence no quads or full house possible), no three of any suit (hence no flush possible), and the ranks are far enough apart that no two hole cards can bridge the gaps so as to make a straight. So the correct answer must be trips of some sort.

Why queens, specifically? Well, whatever set we're talking about has to be made with the highest card on the board; otherwise, obviously, an opponent could have the higher set. So why not three jacks, say? This is the tricky bit. It's because on a jack-high board, the remaining cards will always have a possible straight somewhere. You can try constructing a board to avoid it, but you will fail. Start with a jack, then put in a ten. Now we can't add a 9, because that makes three different straights possible. We can't add an 8 because either 7-9 or Q-9 would make a straight. We can't add a 7 because 8-9 would make a straight. So our next card on the board has to be a 6. We now have J-10-6. But you'll quickly discover that any two final baby cards we put down will make a straight possible.

Incidentally, once when I apparently had too much spare time on my hands, I sat down with a deck of cards and worked out how many different 5-card, unpaired hold'em boards could be made on which no straight would be possible. I counted 81 of them, which is only about 6% of the 1287 possible unpaired hold'em boards. See here.

Here's another hold'em riddle that I heard from a guy named Steve that I used to play with frequently at the Hilton (though I'm sure it was not original with him): If you start with a 5-10 in your hand, there is one kind of straight that you will never be able to make, no matter what cards come on the board. What is it?

I'll put the answer in as the first comment.

What's in a screen name? #23

Twain on smoking (no poker content)

My friend Wolynski just put up a blog post about smoking. I wanted to post a comment there about what Mark Twain is reported to have said about smoking, but the only place I could find the story was in a Google Book. I couldn't cut and paste the text, and I couldn't post a screenshot image of it in her comments section, so I'm putting it here.


This is from the Bulletin of Pharmacy, volume 17, page 154. It is a lecture delivered to pharmacy students at the University of Michigan in 1903. I don't know where the speaker got the story. It may well be apocryphal. But it's something that Twain ought to have said, whether he really did or not. I direct your attention to the second paragraph below:






Now here's something that we can attribute to Twain much more confidently:

ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS--[Written about 1865.]

"MORAL STATISTICIAN."--I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc., etc., etc. You never see more than one side of the question. You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all the little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use of accumulating cash? It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your eyes buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full statement of your income. Now you know these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as "ornery" and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous "moral statistics"? Now I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either; but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices, and so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your reprehensible fireproof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove.

That's from Twain's Sketches New and Old, published in 1882, available from Project Gutenberg here.

Wolynski also quoted Fran Lebowitz. Many years ago there was a segment on "60 Minutes" about smoking. Mike Wallace (I think) asked Lebowitz something like this: "Doesn't it bother you that you could die from smoking?" She answered approximately this: "It would, if I thought that otherwise I wouldn't die from anything else."

I will take the liberty of telling a relevant story on Wolynski, trusting that she won't mind. The first time I met her, we had lunch, then I offered to drop her off at Circus Circus (where she was going to take some pictures) because she doesn't have a car. I had to move a case of Coke out of my front seat in order for her to get in. As I did so, she scolded me: "That stuff will kill you, you know."

Which wouldn't be funny, except that this warning was issued, without a trace of irony, between puffs on a Pall Mall.

Cruel game

I just finished a home game on PokerStars. I was heads-up with Mrs. Lederer for the title and $15 in first-prize money. She had survived into the money only because when there were five of us left, she sucked out both a low and a flush with AA3 to beat my AAK in stud/8, capped on 3rd and all in on 4th street.

I had taken a substantial chip lead when this hand came up, capped on 3rd, all in on 4th:

Then this was the final cruel blow, capped pre-flop, all in on the flop:

I had to settle for 2nd place and $9. So disappointing.

Cecilia (no poker content)

I just spent a very pleasant couple of hours rekindling an old romance.

In 1996, Cecilia Bartoli, a beautiful Italian coloratura mezzo-soprano who spoke almost no English, appeared on David Letterman's show, singing Non piu mesta, the flashy, fireworks finale to Rossini's opera La Cenerentola. As was my habit at the time, I had taped the show to watch the next day, having no idea who the guests would be. When I saw the singer, I was blown away. I nearly wore out the tape watching it over and over and over again.

Despite a lifelong appreciation for classical music, I had never understood opera. I saw it as bizarre. Not only was it not beautiful, it was downright irritating, like listening to the soundtrack of a catfight.

The discovery of Cecilia made me start to question whether there was something I had been missing. Her appearance on Letterman started what has now been a 15-year love of an entire world of artistic endeavor that had previously eluded me. I started by buying three operas on CD (La Cenerentola, Carmen, and La Boheme) and listened to them while following the libretto translation. Most importantly, I enrolled in some adult-education classes about opera at the University of Minnesota. (As an employee and could take them for free.) The more I learned, the more I liked. Boheme in particular was an epiphany as to the intensity of emotion that could be conveyed through this art form as in no other. I found myself moved to tears by O suave fanciulla, then utterly devastated the first time I heard the final, desperate words before the curtain falls, "Mimi! Mimi!"

When I get interested in something, I have a habit of going whole-hog, full-immersion, obsessive-compulsive. So it was with opera. I went on a buying spree, and ended up with something like 70 boxed sets of opera recordings. I listened to them every spare minute. (Later, when I got seriously into competitive shooting, I must have been quite an odd sight, sitting in my basement making thousands of rounds of ammunition on my Dillon loading press with Pucini blaring from a boombox.) I bought season tickets to the Minnesota Opera. I even subscribed to Opera News magazine. Opera is unquestionably an acquired taste, and I just kept on acquiring it.

Through it all, Cecilia remained my favorite performer. I bought nearly everything she recorded, anticipated and taped every TV appearance. She made my heart go pit-a-pat. My wife at the time, fortunately, joined me in this illicit little love affair, saying that she would agree to bigamy if the second wife could be Cecilia. Sadly, we were never able to make that happen.

It all reached a climax in 1998 when my wife and I went to New York City on a pilgramage to the Met. They have special weekends just for out-of-town tourists, during which they put on four different productions in three days. One of them was Le Nozze di Figaro, starring Renee Fleming, Bryn Terfel (the world's most amazing baritone), and, yes, Cecilia. It was heavenly.

When I moved to Nevada, much of my stuff had to remain in Minnesota due to lack of space. That included most of my music. As a result, I got out of the opera-listening habit, and gradually my Cecilia crush faded away.

Today, though, something reminded me of it, and I went to YouTube and found clip after clip of her in various operatic roles and singing a variety of songs. I was transported back to when she had first enchanted me. There's somebody I love more these days, but Cecilia will always own a little piece of my heart--even if she never knows it.

Here she is doing the achingly sad aria Sposa son disprezzata from a Vivaldi opera (lyrics with translation here). If it sounds familiar, it may be because this recording was featured prominently in a couple of episodes of The Sopranos on HBO.

Here she is singing what may be the most beautiful melody Mozart ever wrote (which is really saying something), Laudate Dominum (with a bonus photo gallery of her lovely face and fetching eyes):

And for the only finale that would be fitting, here she is with what has become her signature piece, the dazzling aria that first caught my attention when she sang it for David Letterman:

What not to wear

I forgot to post this soon after I took it, which was a couple of weeks ago at Imperial Palace. What you can't see here is the finishing touch: a big, skull-themed Ed Hardy watch.

The million-dollar bet

http://www.cardrunners.com/blog/internetpokers/the-million-dollar-bet-pt-1

and

http://www.cardrunners.com/blog/internetpokers/the-million-dollar-bet-pt-2

Interesting prop bet among some poker players whose names I do not recognize) about whether one of them will be able to run 70 miles in 24 hours, and the complications that ensue. Long, but worthwhile. After reading part 1, I was ready to join in the chastisement of the runner's friends for taking part in something that could seriously hurt their friend, but it's not necessary, because part 2 makes clear that they figured out that lesson on their own. Better late than never.

I especially liked this unresolved query:

Something that I've come to think about is that perhaps there's something about the world of poker players that's fundamentally unhealthy. This generation of online poker players and its culture has existed for less than ten years, yet I've always had some assumption lodged deep in my psyche that if I'm not finding happiness through poker that it's just something wrong with me. And yet, there are so many people at every level of poker who are so deeply unhappy. It leaves me wondering.

And perhaps that's what really is the most difficult challenge for this generation of poker players. To infiltrate a world that is at its root, deeply unhealthy and imbalanced. To grab this bull called poker by its horns and to try to tame it for as long as we can. We hold on, and the bull bucks and tries to throw us into the droves of insanity around us. Some hold on, some don't. And maybe some are being dragged along the ground by this bull, and think they're still okay because they haven't let go. I remember writing over a year ago that as much as we learn about the game of poker, nobody really teaches us how to live as poker players. Nobody teaches us when we're supposed to let go of the bull.

Pure speculation based on flimsy evidence

When Criss Angel first appeared at the Luxor, they put out special commemorative $5 chips with his picture on them. This is a pretty standard part of a casino's publicity blitz for a big new act.

A couple of years ago, I explained in gory detail the proper method of stacking one's chips at the table. I'm sure some readers thought I was kidding, but I wasn't. During the first few hands after joining a game, it is far, far more important to segregate out the commemorative chips and get them hidden away from view than it is to do stuff like watching the action, figuring out how opponents are playing, and so forth. This is especially true at the Luxor, because the Criss Angel chips are just plain creepy. He's giving you the stinkeye, and if you leave his face exposed to view from the tops of your chip stacks, it will curse your game. These are just scientific facts, folks. The freaky chips must be buried underneath regular chips as quickly as possible.

It is because of my habit of doing this that I noticed something recently. For the three years or so that Angel has been at the Luxor, the Angel poker chips have consistently amounted to a little under half of the total chips in circulation. I'd buy into a game, segregate my chips when I wasn't in a hand, and find that usually there were a few more generic chips than Angel chips, but a nearly equal balance.

But last month when I played at the Luxor, after having not been there for a couple of months, there was a drastic change. I bought in for $200, and only 2 of the 40 chips were Angel ones. I thought this might be an anomaly (i.e., maybe the guy who had cashed out right before I got there separated his chips, too, so the ones I got weren't representative), but I watched the rest of that session as other players' chips went into the pot, and that ratio was fairly consistent throughout.

This, however, was a one-time observation, a single data point. Last night I added a second one. I played at the Luxor again, bought in for $200, and had just one Angel chip among the 40 I was given. Again I watched chips going into the pot, and again the creepy chips were almost completely absent.

This can't be a coincidence. The fraction of commemorative $5 chips cannot go from nearly 50% to less than 5% over the course of a couple of months without the casino taking active steps to make this happen. It appears that the Luxor has instructed its cashiers (or the people behind the cashiers, in the secluded counting/sorting area) to selectively take the Angel chips out of circulation as they come through.

This is not unprecedented. I have written before about noticing that the Venetian had pulled its Gordie Brown chips out of circulation when he moved over to the Golden Nugget, and that Ceasars Palace had done the same when Celine Dion ended her run there.

But if I'm right that the Luxor is deliberately pulling Criss Angel chips out of circulation, it will be the first time I've noticed this happening before the act is terminated. It makes me suspicious that somebody at the Luxor has already decided that Angel is on the way out. Obviously, I have no hard evidence of this, just this one very peculiar observation. It's no secret, of course, that his show has been struggling since it opened, almost universally panned by critics and ordinary patrons alike.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe what I have observed is just a crazy fluke. Or maybe there's some other explanation for it. But my prediction is that before the end of the year, we will see Angel and the Luxor part ways, and this will have been one of the early indicators of it.

Ghosts in the machines

The last ten days have been my worst-ever struggles with technology. My new computer had a catastrophic failure, as I mentioned several days ago. Turns out that one of the RAM modules went bad, which was causing all sorts of random, sudden crashes. Then either that or the extensive testing of them that I did to diagnose the problem caused the operating system to get corrupted, leading to inability to perform basic tasks (like access the Internet), even when the crashes had mostly ceased. A couple of days in the repair shop and about $250 later and I'm back in business. Nearly everything is working again. Now my main problem is mess and disorganization. The repair place did a partial data backup and restoration, then I had Carbonite send me my data back. That led to a bunch of duplication and confusion, especially since Carbonite stores and retrieves even stuff that I deleted weeks and even months ago. The hard drive is just a big mess now, making it hard to find stuff. But at least things are operational. I haven't played any online poker for these ten days now. I'll try it in a day or two to be sure that's all still working normally, too. I haven't specifically looked for my "casino photos" folder, but I'm confident that it's lurking in there somewhere. Sometime in the next few days I'll locate it and restart some GTC posts.

I did lose about ten days of emails in the process--those that came in while things were haywire. It was my fault, because of how I reunited the email software with its previous cache of old messages. If you sent me something important and didn't get a reply, that's the reason. I think, though, that I managed to process all of the blog comments that came in via the Blogger dashboard.

In the meantime, I had resurrected my old computer to use temporarily as a backup, and it started to fail in strange ways, too--first refusing to play any audio files, then refusing to connect to any network. It is rapidly becoming useful only as a doorstop. I don't know what's wrong with it, but it's really not worth spending time or money investigating at this point.

To add insult to injury, last night my microwave oven suddenly went kaput. I wasn't even doing anything with it. I just glanced up at it to see what time it was, and noticed the display flashing 88:88. I tried the controls, and they were all unresponsive. Tried unplugging it for a while, but that did no good. I think I only paid about $60 for it when I moved here, but I'd still expect more than five years of life from it. I'm sure it would cost more to fix it than it would to buy a new one, so it will now just get thrown onto a landfill somewhere.

I tell you, there's a scary revolt against the establishment going on, and I'm not talking about Cairo.

The suckiest poker news of the year

That's what this is:

http://buzzerblog.flashgameshows.com/norm-macdonald-to-host-high-stakes-poker-show-goes-3d-for-season-seven/

(Hat tip: Jess Welman.)

Poker gems, #408

Donald Rumsfeld.

Weakness is a provocation.

This looks like a great gadget

http://pokerati.com/2011/02/04/the-future-of-poker-it-casino-solutions-dealer-app-for-poker-room-management/

Easy game

My computer is back and apparently healthy, but I'm still having to do lots of work to restore everything to the way it was. Carbonite backup service is really paying off, but it's going to take more than another 24 hours to get everything back to me.

For Super Bowl poker play, I decided to head to Binion's, for mostly arbitrary reasons: I hadn't been there in quite a while, didn't feel like driving anywhere, and it was a really nice day for a walk.

Good choice, as it turned out.

As I headed for the open Seat One, I noticed Tony Big Charles in Seat Two. We chatted a bit about his recent hospitalization and surgery, etc. One of my favorite dealers, Gina, was also playing.

Things started badly when I raised a straddle, then fired on all three streets after having missed with A-10, and Tony called me all the way on a double-paired board. He had 9-9 and won a roughly $200 pot. I had thought that (1) he was on a flush draw that missed, and (2) he would remember that the last time we played, I almost stacked him with K-K, and on that basis be cautious about calling. Nope. Oh well.

A few hands later things turned around when I flopped a set of 6s, not only stacking Gina, but earning an extra $100 because of a special Super Bowl promotion that was running.

A short time after that I doubled up with A-A versus another guy's K-K, all in pre-flop. Less than an orbit later I stacked somebody else with K-K versus his J-J, again all in pre. Maybe 15 minutes passed before my Q-Q flopped a set and won a nice pot from somebody that I think had K-K (because it was the only time I saw him three-bet pre, and he folded disgustedly when I bet at the ace on the turn). Not too much later, Tony gave me back my money when he suspected I was bluffing again, but I actually had A-Q on a Q-Q-5 flop. He called me all the way with 6-6 in the hole.

I played for about an hour and 15 minutes and left with an uptick of $573. As I was racking up, Tony asked me if I always make money that fast. Wouldn't that be nice?! No, I don't. But I'm happy to have an occasional day where all I have to do is pick the lucky seat.

Adapt or die

This week I started reading a book my sister gave me for Christmas: The Gun by C. J. Chivers. I first learned about this book just before its publication date in October, when the author appeared for a long, fascinating interview on NPR's "Fresh Air," which you can listen to here.

The book is a history of the AK-47, and how dramatically this one weapon changed the way that wars are fought. As an owner of two of the myriad derivatives of the original form (I have a Romanian-made semi-automatic rifle chambered for .223, and a Russian-made semi-automatic 12-gauge shotgun variant, the Saiga-12), I was eager to learn more about this story. However, the book's first 140 pages are spent laying out the 80 or so years of history of automatic weapons prior to Kalashnikov. This was completely unfamiliar ground to me.

What I found most interesting was how astonishingly slow even the most sophisticated armies of the day were to adopt their tactics to the new weaponry. Chivers asserts (page 113):

Military bureaucracies, as they considered incorporating machine guns into their armies, dawdled indecisively in every Western country but Germany. The thinking was fully blinkered. Senior officers recognized the effects of withering bursts of fire upon massed combatants, having heard reports of the felling of heaps of Arabs and Africans who advanced in formation toward machine guns. They were somehow unable to accept what might happen when such fire was directed against their own ranks.

Lest the reader disbelieve Chivers's claim that the world's most sophisticated military commanders were incredibly slow to figure this stuff out, he spends the next 25 pages providing the proof. His mention of "Arabs and Africans" is in reference to stories he has already told about how European colonizers in the 1880s and 1890s effectively annihilated more primitive armies of vastly larger numbers by simply mowing them down as they charged forward with their spears. It was slaughter of an efficiency and ferocity these opponents could not have even imagined when heading into the battle, with those at the rear having to clamber over piles of the bodies of the dead in order to take their turns at being gunned down.

So military commanders certainly understood the power of automatic weapons. But, as Chivers said, it somehow just could not sink into their skulls that their own men were just as vulnerable. In 1904, the Japanese skirmished with the Russians in Manchuria. Even after seeing wave after wave of men cut down, never getting anywhere near the Russian machine guns, the Japanese commanders kept ordering more troops to follow them until there were none left.

OK, so the Japanese are rather notorious for cherishing suidical acts of "courage" in warfare. They're an exception to how modern armies dealt with opponents' automatic weapons, right?

Nope. In World War I, despite having literally decades of experience with machine guns, the mighty British army was still training each recruit that the bayonet affixed to the end of his single-shot rifle was his most important weapon; practice with it constituted the majority of pre-deployment training.

Two years into the first major machine-gun war, the British had still not changed the basic tactic that they had used to attack an entrenched enemy for as long as anybody could remember: sending masses of men charging at the defended positions. This was done knowing that those in front would suffer high casualty rates. But given how long it took to reload older rifles, a sufficiently large number of soldiers would eventually be able to overrun the enemy. In retrospect, it is blindingly obvious that this same approach was sheer folly when the enemy had guns that spat out hundreds of rounds per minute. Somehow, though, this self-evident truth just could not penetrate the concrete, old-fashioned thinking of senior military types, and they kept trying the same thing over and over again, despite repeated heavy losses and little gain.

The insanty reached its zenith on July 1, 1916, in the Battle of the Somme:

Watching from behind their machine guns, German soldiers were amazed. They had weathered fear and frustration through the shelling, waiting for the immense attack they knew was coming. As they peered over their parapets in the sudden quiet, the sights astonished them: thousands upon thousands of men, strolling exposed in neat lines.... "The English came walking, as though they were going to the theatre or as though they were on a parade ground," one German soldier said. "We felt they were mad." Another saw waves in which the men were so densely packed they "were like trees in a wood." Some of the Germans whooped. They were professional soldiers, the product of a German military system in which conscription was nearly universal.... They had never seen such targets before. The time for killing was at hand. One German machine-gun team alone would fire at least twenty-five thousand rounds.

In this withering fire, a Yorkshire battalion, Company A of the Seventh Green Howards, lost 108 of 140 men in minutes. An even more galling destruction fell upon the Tyneside Irish, a brigade of three thousand men, which had to cross almost a mile of open ground behind its own front-line trenches just to reach the British edge of No-Man's-Land. It took twenty minutes under fire to complete this march. Bullets slammed into the soldiers the entire way. The surviving Irish were ordered on, to press the attack across five hundred yards of open space.... Of the three thousand men who had stepped off, fifty fighting men remained. The New Army, Lord Kitchener's grand two-year project to replace the battered British Expeditionary Force with volunteers from all walks of British life--the mines, the factories, the clerks, the schoolhouses--was being cut down in an hour. The Dervishes had fought this foolishly. So had Japanese soldiers, who saw duty in death. Now the British army was doing it, too.

A darker hour for England would be hard to measure. By one estimate, 30,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded in the first sixty minutes. The midday tally reached 50,000. By the end of the day, 21,000 British soldiers were dead, 35,000 wounded, and 600 more had been taken prisoner. The survivors were emotionally devastated. One lance corporal, a signaler who had not been assigned to advance, watched his friends try to cross, only, he said, to be "mown down like meadow grass." He stayed back, weeping.

(Chivers, pp 133-134.)

This colossal failure finally, finally caught the attention of the Allied commanders. It slowly dawned on them that maybe charging massed men across open fields into the teeth of machine gun batteries wasn't the best idea.



Why this historical reflection? Well, even those who have disdain for overly casual or frequent analogies between poker and life in general must admit that poker and war have much in common, and much to learn from each other. One particular truth that they share is this: If you do not adapt your tactics to those of your opponents, you will be defeated.

I see this as having both micro and macro applications. In the micro setting, you have to adapt to the players currently at the table. As an extreme example, I remember a guy who used to come in to the Hilton poker room occasionally. His approach was extreme: He would buy in for $100, then repeatedly move all-in blind--without looking at his cards--until he had either built up $400-$500, or had lost about the same amount. If the former, he would move to an aggressive but at least fairly rational style of play. If the latter, he'd laugh it off, decide it wasn't his day, and go home.

This immensely frustrated some of the other players--particularly the older, nittier crowd. It both offended them as the "wrong" way to play poker, and intimidated them. Their desire for a slow, conservative, low-variance approach was utterly frustrated by this tactic. In the presence of such a wild player, it is clearly a mistake to respond by tightening up even further, but that is exactly what they would do. They would welcome the chance to call his blind all-in, but only if they had aces or kings in the hole. But by doing so, they left lots of money on the table. In order to profit from that extreme degree of looseness, you have to loosen up yourself. A hand like K-J offsuit is a substantial favorite over a random hand, and one you should be willing to take against him (at least one on one; having other players also calling complicates things, however).

As more familiar examples, if you repeatedly try to bluff a calling station, you are just giving away money. If you back down to an aggressive, bluff-happy bully every time, you might as well just hand him your wallet and go spend your time doing something more enjoyable than watch your stack of chips erode.

Maybe the poker situation that most resembles the history related by Chivers is the unwillingness to let go of pocket aces or kings in the face of unmistakable evidence that they are no longer good. When the table rock calls you on the flop and check-raises you on the river when a third diamond falls, aces dwindle in stature to nearly nothing. But time after time you can see people react to such a counterattack by stubbornly moving all-in, throwing good money after bad, refusing to accept the reality of the situation. They might as well be a British recruit trying to charge an entrenched German machine gun with a bayonet.

Then there is the macro sense of adaptation, too. Poker is a game that evolves over time, and one must change with it. The first poker strategy book I ever read (because of its prominence in James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, which was the first poker book of any kind that I read) was Cloutier and McEvoy's Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold'Em, published in 1997. Consider some of the advice that the authors give on pages 152-156 about how to play ace-king. (The "I" here is clearly Cloutier, with McEvoy acting sort of as his amanuensis.)

Say that you have raised with Ace-King from a front spot and one or two people have called. The board comes with 9-7-3, three suits. What do you do with your A-K? I don't care whether or not I've raised before the flop, I never bet A-K when the flop comes three rags....

By betting you have shut off your opportunity to get a free turn card and
possibly make your hand. If you check-check, you have found out information without it costing you anything. An aggressive player like Phil Hellmuth [Grump notes: It is a separately amazing thing that Hellmuth--now taunted for being overly passive--was once considered to be an unusually aggressive player.] may have a tendency to fire on the flop head-up; that's his style of play. But you can burn up a lot of chips that way. I don't continue with A-K unless I flop a hand that relates to it in some way, a hand with some strength in it....

Now, let's change the scenario: The action is two-handed, but you're sitting behind the other player.... The flop comes three rags and your opponent checks to you. You don't bet: You check right back at him. That way, you're not shutting yourself out. For example, what will you do if he checks, you bet, and then he raises you? What are you going to do with your hand then? So, you may as well take this opportunity that his check has given you and get a free card by checking along....

A lot of players will fire at the pot one time in these types of situations. When they see a baby flop, here they come! But I think they're making a mistake when they do that: You have to give an opponent credit for having something to have been able to call your raise to start with....

If a guy bets in front of me against that nine-high flop when I'm holding A-K, he wins the pot. It's that simple. I don't care what he has, he wins it right there.

Perhaps that advice constituted "championship" play in 1997; I don't pretend to know. But I do know that trying to play either a cash game or a tournament today by following that recipe will get you run over by nearly every player at the table. They will quickly figure out your transparent strategy, bluff you out of your shorts, and not pay you off when you actually do make a hand. You will not win the tournament. You will not make the final table. You will probably not even cash. You will have circles run around you. This is not just bringing the proverbial knife to a gunfight; it's bringing a knife to a machine-gun fight, and you'll be shot to pieces. There is a reason that you don't hear about Cloutier winning any tournaments lately.



Now if you'll excuse me, it's Saturday night of Super Bowl weekend, the Guest Gauge is "very busy," due to the confluence of that game, a UFC match at Mandalay Bay, and the Chinese New Year. I go off in search of poker players foolishly charging across open fields with their pocket aces.

No more Venetian comps?

This news story seems to be saying that there will be no more $1/hour restaurant comps at the Venetian poker room:

"We know that the subject of comps has been played out all across Las
Vegas, but we've taken a different position," Adelson said. "We've essentially
cut out all our accounts except the most highly rated players. No more packaging
deals to try to be competitive with others. There's no more comp rooms given
out. There's no more food and beverage. There's no shopping credits. There's no
restaurant credits. There's no showroom credits."

http://www.lvrj.com/business/las-vegas-sands-cuts-comps-for-average-gambler-115356324.html

If that is so, I think they're being penny-wise and pound-foolish, as the old saying goes. It won't change my behavior much, but I think they underestimate the nittiness of many poker players.

Two years ago today...

...I received the following email, shown exactly as it was, with no "real world" name anywhere in it:

Hello Rakewell ~

I'm traveling to Vegas Feb. 11-16th for the Venetian Deepstack tournaments and associated cash game juiciness. It would be an honor to meet the illustrious author of Poker Grump while I'm in town!

Who knows, I might even generate a suitably usable reader report.

Please let me know if you're willing to meet-up at a table...

Best,

Cardgrrl
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Raise or Fold: A
Year of Risky Business
http://raiseorfold.cardgrrl.com/
Writing & playing poker as if they were activities worth doing well.

Fortunately, the air of mystery about the identity of the cheeky, anonymous sender piqued my curiosity, and I replied affirmatively rather than ignoring it or making some excuse. I also followed the link, started reading the blog, and was sufficiently impressed by the intelligence and personality it revealed to put up this post about it four days later. Two days after that, we met at Harrah's poker room, went across the street, and played a session at Caesars Palace, which I excitedly wrote about here. After another several days of getting to know her, there was this follow-up report. And, well, you pretty much know the rest of the story from there.

I think it safe to say that no email has ever done so much to change my life for the better.

Troubles

I have spent most of the last three days wrestling with a truly infernal computer problem, or set of problems. Found a bad RAM module, removal of which stopped most of the random crashes, but somehow in the process of testing and replacing the hardware, the system software got out of whack, and now won't let me do much of anything (like connect to the Internet). Today I finally threw in the towel and took it to a repair shop. I have pressed the old computer back into temporary service, but it's somehow gotten even crankier and quirkier than it was when I last used it in October. So I'm doing as little online as possible for the next day or two. This all happens to coincide with when my supply of pre-posted "Guess the Casino" posts ran out, so that, too, will be on temporary hiatus.

I'll let you know when I'm back in business.

Guess the casino, #771

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




Answer: It's another trick question! This huge, lovely globe is in the lobby of the Las Vegas Public Library, just north of downtown on Las Vegas Boulevard.

Guess the casino, #770

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




Answer: Aria

Guess the casino, #769

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Answer: Suncoast

What's in a screen name? #22

This one is really made by the excellent combination of name and avatar.

Guess the casino, #768

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Answer: Riviera