Poker jokes for retirement

I like jokes as much as the next guy. But some poker-related jokes have become so overused that I think we have to actually ban them from further use. I am hereby forming a new organization, Players for the Retirement of Old Poker Jokes (PROPJ, pronounced "prop-jay"). You can join simply by using the "comments" button to submit a candidate for permanent banishment from the game.

Here's my initial list:

Maybe the most common one pops up when a player wins a pot, but in the excitement of stacking up the chips forgets to return his cards to the dealer. When reminded of the need to do so, he says, "They're so good I want to use them again on the next hand!"

Not funny.

Once in a while two players will bet and raise each other with a lot of tension. Then finally when it's over, one of them reveals his hole cards, and the other, seeing them, scowls, says something like "You play that crap?" and turns over--the same hand.

Not funny.

Four or five people limp in. The subsequent three rounds of betting get checked all around. When the cards are turned over, somebody has just barely made a hand, like bottom pair with a bad kicker, and wins the pot. Some wise guy at the table will always say, "You had the nuts!"

Not funny.

A card gets accidentally exposed during the deal. The dealer shows it to everybody, announces that it will be the burn card and not in play. Inevitably, some wisecracker will say, "Well, that kills my hand," or "There goes my quads."

Not funny.

Either on the flop or when it turns out that it's a limped-in family pot before the flop, somebody who folded will ask, "Can I get my cards back?"

Not funny.

Somebody bets, say, $25. A player behind him will say, "I would have called $24, but $25 is way too much."

Not funny.

Any "joke" that involves the words "jack" and "off" in close proximity is

Not funny.

If you buy into a $100 tournament and start with, say, $2000 in tournament chips, saying that you're just going to cash them in and leave with your profit is

Not funny.

After the flop and the turn have put one card of each suit on the table, somebody will rap the table while saying, "I check my flush [or flush draw]."

Not funny.

Before folding a junk hand, a player will ask if he can double down, or make some other blackjack move.

Not funny.

Any oh-so-clever sexual double-entendre relating to "straddle" is officially declared to be...

Not funny.

A player facing, say, a $25 bet will toss out four red chips ($20), then realize his mistake, and add another one, at which point some other player will make the fake protest, "That's a string call!"*

Not funny.

In a no-limit game, one player declares himself to be all-in. The next one to act puts his hands behind his chip stacks, as if to push them forward, and says, "I'm all [pause] OUT," then folds.

Not funny.

There are many, many more of these. They all need to be done away with. I'm not sure I can stand to hear them for very much longer before I go postal at the table. So please join my new association by suggesting other lame, old poker jokes that just have to go. Maybe together we can get them banned forever. Violators will then be required to, I dunno, maybe clean up all the crap that's under the tables, or write their forbidden bad joke on a chalkboard a hundred times. (Suggestions for punishment for the unrepentant jokesters will also be gladly accepted in the comments section.)

For the good of poker, we PROPJ members must also be actively working to bring into use new material, stuff that's genuinely funny. We must take on the responsibility to elevate poker humor to lofty new heights.

For example, here's my favorite: After the flop, I have nothing--no pair and no draw. Somebody makes a big bet, and the action is to me. I ask the dealer, "How many more cards are there to come?" Of course he says "Two." I feign surprise and dismay, and say, "Oh, that's not nearly enough," and throw my cards in the muck.

Now that's funny!


*Explanation for the uninitiated: A "string bet" or "string raise" is when somebody puts out some amount of chips, then goes back to his stack to get more to add to it. Because some unethical players used to do this to watch for an opponent's reaction--then add more chips to the bet or raise if it appeared that the opponent didn't like the action--this is now universally proscribed. You have to either announce a specific amount in advance (in which case you can go to your chip stack as many times as needed to fetch the right amount of chips), or put whatever you're going to bet out in one motion. But for obvious reasons, just putting in a call of somebody else's bet doesn't have the same potential problems, so there's no prohibition against (and really no such thing as) a "string call."

"But it wasn't my fault!"

A few days ago at the Hilton I was sent to join a 10-seat table that then had only nine players. However, one of them was taking up two places. He was an obese, older man who had prosthetic limbs below the knees. He was on an electric scooter. But, oddly, the scooter was parked along the long side of the table, with its front half taking up the space where the 6 seat would usually be, the seat turned 90 degrees, and its occupant facing the table in the 5 spot. Two chairs had been removed from the table to make this possible. This wasn't a problem at long as only nine were playing, but my arrival required all ten seats to be in use.

It appeared to me that he could either move to a standard chair or turn the scooter so that it was facing away from the table, and basically sit facing the back of the scooter, thus taking up only one slot.

Linda was the shift manager. She was extraordinarily patient in working with a guy that turned out to be nasty and uncooperative. She offered to let him move to a regular chair. No, he wouldn't do that. She offerered to move players around so that he could sit on an end seat or by the dealer, where there is a lot more elbow room. No, he protested, because then he couldn't see the cards in the middle of the table.

But she persisted, and he finally, reluctantly, agreed to try to turn the scooter and sit facing its rear. It took a lot of manipulation, because he couldn't drive it himself while turned, so somebody had to help him, and there was another table in the way, and the whole thing turned into quite an ordeal. (I ended up in the 10 seat, on the dealer's right, because the player that had been there vacated it while things were being rearranged. But Linda obviously knew that the issue would come up again soon when somebody else arrived, so they might as well fix it now.) The guy complained about every aspect of the move: he was too far away from the table, then he was too close, then he was too much to the right, then too much to the left, then he couldn't get his legs where they needed to be under the table right, etc., etc., etc. He was being a real pain in everybody's butt.

Finally he got situated to his grudging satisfaction. During this interval, the button and blinds had passed him, so on his first hand back in action, the dealer gave him the choice to wait until the blinds came around again, or put in both blinds now.*

This guy's response was a new one: "But it wasn't my fault that I missed the blinds!" The poor dealer was stymied for a response. I assume that he, too, had never heard that particular form of protest.

I wanted to ask, "When did we go to a fault-based system for paying the blinds?" But I didn't. It's such a stupid concept. Is it one's "fault" if one has to get up and use the restroom? Maybe players should be given hall passes, like I remember from junior high school, as permission to use the restroom and not have to pay missed blinds upon one's return. Of course, if "fault" is to enter in, there will have to be an interrogation as to whether one could really wait a few more minutes, how full one's bladder actually is, how long it has been since one's last visit to the little boys' room, etc.

Anyway, after Scooter Guy disgustedly agreed to make up his blinds (he could have just waited, of course--it wasn't like anybody was forcing him to rejoin the game right then), he tossed in just the amount for the big blind. Then the dealer had to remind him that he had to pay both blinds, and that led to another round of eye-rolling, moaning, and complaining--for the additional lousy $1. Then, when the dealer brought that chip into the center of the table, instead of leaving it in front of the player,** there was another protest about that!

I'm sympathetic, to a degree. I mean, I can only imagine how rough it is to have had both legs amputated, and have poor eyesight to boot. But still, this guy could have chosen a completely different way of handling it. First of all, if I had a serious physical disability, yes, I'd expect some reasonable accommodation to be made for me when needed. For example, if I really couldn't see the community cards except from, say, the 5 and 6 seats, a casino absolutely should be willing to require other players to move so that I can sit where I can see. That's a pretty minor inconvenience and concession to make. Nevertheless, I'd like to think that I'd make such requests only when there was no other reasonable way of making things work, and I'd do everything I could to make the disruption minimal. Furthermore, I'd be pleasant, smiling, and grateful about it, I hope.

This guy was not like that. He was confrontational and uncooperative about every aspect of it, making it uncomfortable for everyone that had to help get things sorted out. Obviously the way things finally got arranged actually did work, despite him saying all along that it wouldn't, that he wasn't willing to try it, etc. He was just being a stubborn, obnoxious jerk. Linda was a saint in how she firmly but respectfully pressured him to keep trying various options until a solution was found.

My limited experience is that poker players--and poker room employees--are as helpful and accommodating to disabled players as they can be. On the national scene, for the last two years, there has been a player at the World Series of Poker who has no use of his arms, due to neurologic injury from a motor vehicle accident. He has learned to manipulate the cards and chips with his feet, and everybody accepts the minor disruptions of time and elbow room that this causes. This year, a blind player at the WSOP main event went deep (finished 193rd out of 6000+ entrants), despite the need to have somebody whisper to him what his hole cards were, what the community cards were, what the bets were and who had made them, and so forth.

Even at the Hilton, there is one regular player who can barely see her own hole cards, and has to have the dealer announce what the cards on the board are. There is another who has had his vocal cords surgically removed (throat cancer is the most common cause for this) and speaks with an artificial electronic larynx held up to his neck. Everybody understands this, and accepts his whisper (because it's a pain for him to have to grab his device when he's handling chips and cards) and/or hand signals as to a raise, call, or whatever.

Yesterday at the Venetian I shared a table with a woman in a wheelchair who, in addition to whatever her lower extremity disability was, had sufficient weakness in her hands that she couldn't push her cards forward to fold. The dealer would take her verbal instructions to fold her cards, and would count out and put in the pot for her the number of chips she directed for a bet/call/raise. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever complained about such reasonable accommodations, and none of the players with disabilities has been unpleasant, demanding, or unreasonable about negotiating what was needed to make the game run smoothly for everybody--until, that is, I ran into Scooter Guy, who, I hope and believe, is an unfortunate anomaly in the poker world.


*The button and blinds, and all the ways they get paid and skipped and arranged, are one of the most confusing aspects of live poker for players new to casinos. The easiest way to think about the blinds is that they are payment in advance for one round of poker (that is, the button making one full lap around the table). So if you haven't paid the blinds because you were out to dinner or the restroom or whatever, you can either continue to sit out until it's your turn to put in the big blind again, or you can pay both of them at once and rejoin the game immediately, in which case there is twice as much starting money as usual in the pot for that hand. In a low stakes game, the blinds are such a trivial amount of one's gains or losses for a session that it's incredibly petty to make a big fuss about them, but people do it all the time.

**Usually, a blind bet is "live," meaning that when the action gets back around to the player who put it in, the blind can either stand alone as his bet for that round (if it hasn't been raised), or it's part of his bet if he chooses to raise or call a previous raise. But when a player has to put in both the big and small blinds at the same time, the amount of the small blind has to be "dead," meaning that it is in the pot, but not part of a player's bet. Otherwise, the effect would be to raise the stakes for that hand, and everybody who wanted to play would have to call, say, $3 (the previously absent player's $2 big blind plus his $1 small blind), instead of the usual $2.

Casinos, how about getting your dealers to agree on what the rules are?

Yesterday at the Venetian I was seated at a table with three players from Paris. (France, not Texas.) They were frequently chatting amongst themselves in French. I recall enough of the language from high school and college classes to know that they were talking about everything except poker.

(Side note: As far as I can tell, poker is so deeply rooted as an originally American game that other languages mostly adopt English words unchanged. As a result, it's usually not hard to tell when foreigners are discussing the game, no matter what language they're using, because words like "flop," "ace," "raise," and "flush" come up, varying only in the accent.)

Dealer 1 reminded them repeatedly to use only English at the table. About the third time, one of the visitors protested that the dealer was just shuffling the cards at the moment--there was no hand in play. The dealer told them that at the Venetian the rule is English only the entire time one is at the table, not just while there's a hand in play. This was a mild surprise to me, because it differs from the standard rule, and I can't remember ever hearing a casino employee announce this as the house rule.

The most vocal French player said that, like me, he had never heard the rule being used to prevent chat when there is not a hand in play, but the dealer reiterated at least five times that that's how it is at the Venetian.

OK, if that's the house rule, it's the rule. There are certainly legitimate arguments to be made for it (e.g., players could be reviewing signals that they'll use to figure out who has the strongest hand, and trap an unwary player between them). Also, if the rule is that English-only applies only when a player has live cards in front of him, a player who has folded could tell a compatriate who still has cards what he folded--information which would then not be available to others contesting the pot.

Anyway, the French chatter mostly stopped for a while. But maybe an hour later it starts up again, and a player complains to the dealer--a different one now, of course. This dealer tells the complaining player that he can't stop them, because none of the people speaking French had live cards at the time, and the rule only applies then.

Hmmmmmm. It can't be both ways.

Just a thought for poker room managers: How about having your dealers all tell players the same thing about your house rules? Or is that too much to ask?

"You called a raise with that?"

An ever-amazing number of people who play poker just have no concept of the game beyond what some introductory book told them about how to play, yet think they have it all mastered.

Venetian today. I'm on the button with 4-6 of diamonds. The guy on my right raises to $10. I call, as do two other people who had limped in ahead of the raiser.

The flop is 9-6-4, giving me bottom two pair. A young bald guy (YBG) in early position checks, the original raiser bets $10, and I pop it up to $30. YBG calls, everyone else is out.

The turn card is another beautiful 6, giving me a full house. YBG checks. I check behind him, trying to act weak, and hoping that he will catch a card on the river that will give him a flush, a straight, two pair, or something else with which he will be willing to put a lot of money into the pot--especially if this check on the turn convinces him that I was just bluff-raising with position on the flop.

River card is a queen. I didn't know it at the time, but YBG just made top two pair, with his Q-9. He checks, and I have to assume he was planning to check-raise me. I decided to put in a large bet, because a large bet on the river after checking the turn is a very common pattern for somebody who is weak (e.g., made just one pair on the flop, or was on a draw that missed) and is trying to steal the pot at the end, which is what I wanted him to think. I suspect that the size of the bet changed his mind about the check-raise, because he thought for a while, then just called. When he saw my hand, and the dealer said, "Sixes full," he flung his cards in face up, turned to the guy next to him, and gave him a look that said, basically, "Can you believe that idiot?"

I stacked up the chips, but as I was doing so, I was keenly aware that YBG was staring at me from the other end of the table. Finally he said, "You called $10 with 4-6, huh?" I just smiled sheepishly and nodded. He shook his head. A couple of hands later he left the table and didn't come back.

This is much the same attitude that I discussed recently after winning a big pot with a 4-5, with which I raised before the flop: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/something-that-is-not-against-rules-for.html.

Let me try to explain it another way. There are two kinds of players who will call a raise in a no-limit hold'em hand with a 4-6: Beginners, to whom any two cards look like they have good potential, and moderately advanced (or truly advanced) players who recognize that there really is potential for big payback with such hands. I'm not comparing myself to the pros who play for tens of thousands of dollars per pot, but you'll see the best players in the world put themselves in situations like this all the time on shows such as GSN's "High Stakes Poker."

I could even quote the godfather of poker, Doyle Brunson. In fact, I think I will (Super System 2, p. 617):

I always make exceptions when I'm in position, even with the trash hands. For
example, if I were on the button with a hand like A-8 offsuit, I might call a
raise before the flop if enough people, say four, were in the pot in front of me
and I didn't think there'd be any more raises. I might call a small raise and
take a flop with a trash hand because it's a good percentage play. I'd be trying
to make a full [house], trips, or two pair. But if I don't get a real good flop
to the hand, I'll throw it away. I won't get involved and burn up a bunch of
money with one of those trash hands. I'm not going to call any bets on the flop.
I'll be raising or I'll be gone.

And therein lie the differences between the novice and the expert (or, in my case, at least the reasonably well informed intermediate player) calling a raise with something like a 4-6: (1) recognizing the combination of circumstances (especially position) in which there is enough potential for occasional big profit to be worth taking a shot with a low-percentage hand, and (2) being smart enough to get away from it if it doesn't produce a very strong hand.

In this case, as with my previous story, I had been playing tight and showing down mostly premium hands, so I knew that if this 4-6 connected with the flop in a significant way, opponents would assume I was playing big cards and had missed. I suspect that that's exactly what happened here.

But I don't really need to justify my play here. Maybe I'm overrating myself, and it was objectively a complete donkey move that no expert would make, and I just got ridiculously lucky. Suppose that's the case, and YBG is a much better player than me and sees that I'm a bonehead that caught a miracle. What does he accomplish by the snide little comment? It seems to me that he should want to be at a table where there are idiots playing any two random cards, who are relying on luck to save their sorry butts from ruin. Those are just the kind of opponents that make poker profitable for the better players.

The only things that he can accomplish with that little shot of nastiness are all bad--or should be, from his point of view: (1) He makes a fishy player feel bad and leave the game, taking the money with him, probably to be replaced by somebody from whom it will be harder to win chips. (2) He makes the stupid player start thinking more critically about his play, and maybe get better and harder to beat. (3) He sours the mood at the previously light, enjoyable table. (4) He shows himself to be a bad loser. (5) As I think is the case here, if he's really not as advanced a poker theoretician as he fancies himself to be, he risks revealing to more skilled players that he's pretty limited in how he thinks about the game.

And incidentally, YGB, in case you're reading this, Q-9 isn't exactly a premium hand either, ya know, especially to be trying to play against a pre-flop raiser from out of position. Unless, of course, you're so skilled that you can outplay opponents even after spotting them both the likely better hand and position. Which I kinda doubt, in your case.

Annie Duke isn't one of my favorite professionals (I think she's generally overrated, has a track record of unethical behavior at the table, and from what I gather of her personal life, well, I'm not certain I'd want her as a friend). But she does tend to write effective columns in Bluff magazine, and recently she addressed this very subject in a piece I'd highly recommend reading, if you've been in the habit--even occasionally--of openly critiquing other people's play the way YBG did today. I especially like the revealing story of her own unpleasant history in this regard, in the last three paragraphs: http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/2007/03/2007_03_72.asp

Lee Jones made the same point perhaps even more forcefully in a column in Card Player magazine: http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/41/9511

YBG, I sincerely hope to see you at the table again, now that you've shown me that you have blinders on as to what constitutes smart play--and especially now that I'll have you scared that as a stupid, fishy, luckbox, I might be playing any two cards against you in any situation. Heh heh heh!

Radio show, again

I'm invited to be on "Poker, Straight from the Hilton," again this Friday, August 31, 2007, with another list of things to complain about in the world of poker. The show goes from 3:00 to 4:00 PDT. They tell me to expect to be on from roughly 3:30 to 3:45. It's on in the Las Vegas area on KLAV, AM 1230. You can also listen on the web through http://warpradio.com/single.asp?id=6224, click on the "listen" button.

Several people told me about technical difficulty hearing much of the show last time I was on. Apparently it was a glitch at the station, and affected both the radio broadcast and the webcast. I hope my presence doesn't cause a repeat of whatever the problem was.

Poker gems, #5

From Matt Matros, The Making of a Poker Player (2005), pp. 72-73:

The first few months after Yale were otherwordly. I was supposed to be this educated intellectual, but I didn't feel like one. I thought I had wasted four years without accomplishing anything, with my best days behind me. Although this sulking was foolishness, it wasn't foolish to me then. This period was the first of several since I took up the game that poker got me through an upheaval. It's ironic that a game of constant bankroll swings, changing fortunes, and uncertainty would be a stabilizing influence, but it has been. Why? Because I love the game. I love analyzing hands and determining the best way to play them. I love taking money from people who think they are better than everyone else. I love meeting brilliant game theorists and calling them friends. I love the rush of making the final table of a tournament. I love having $2,000 in chips in front of me. I love winning a hand. I love that the next hand is a minute or so away. I love figuring out exactly what a person is thinking.

Poker gems, #4

Paul Phillips, on playing pocket queens in hold'em (Poker Pro magazine, September, 2006, p.32):

"I pretend that they're aces, but I leave the door open to deciding they're deuces if my opponent seems to think his cards are aces more than I think mine are aces."

Missed it by THAT much!

For those who have never heard some of the phrases made famous by Don Adams as Agent Maxwell Smart--including the title of this post--hear them at http://www.wouldyoubelieve.com/sounds.html.

There was another odd occurrence during my hour at Jokers Wild on Sunday. Its poker room, like many others, has high-hand jackpots. If you get four-of-a-kind or a straight flush (with certain conditions on the size of the pot, the number of people at the table, etc.), the casino pays you a jackpot, which grows over time when it isn't hit. There are, sadly, many players, especially at the low levels, for whom hitting such jackpots is the entire point of playing.

Anyway, an elderly woman won an unremarkable hand with pocket queens. I thought nothing of it.

On the next hand, the turn and river were both queens. When the second one hit, both this woman and the dealer let out loud groans, and then a couple of other players chimed in with sympathetic comments, like "Look at that," and "Oh, yeah--almost."

I remembered that this woman had shown queens on the previous hand, but didn't think it was possible that the occurrence of two queens on THIS deal was being fussed over. On the other hand, I couldn't see anything else remarkable going on that would cause the clucking.

When the dealer looked in my direction, I caught his eye, gave him a deliberately puzzled expression, and spread my hands, meaning, "What's going on?" He said, "She had pocket queens on the previous hand."

I asked him, "So what?"

He pointed out the high-hand jackpot. I told him that I knew about that, but it didn't qualify if two of the four cards came on one hand, and the other two on the next hand. He said, "Yeah, but it was so close."

I could hardly believe that these people were actually this stupid. I said, "Well, it's a whole lot easier for two queens to hit the board if the other two of them aren't in somebody's hand."

The dealer granted that, with a facial expression that seemed to indicate he had never considered this before.*

He replied, "Yes, but it seems that they always come on the next hand." Uh, right, if you consider 4% of the time (the probability that the next hand will have a board with two queens--see the math below) to be "always."

I pointed out that it makes no difference whether the other two queens came on the next hand or 100 hands later. He said, "I know, but it was so close."

To which I could again only think, "SO F'ING WHAT?????"

The only way these morons could have any sort of emotional response to this situation is if they're imagining that two queens hitting the board is completely independent of two queens being in somebody's hand, and you get the jackpot when these two events just happen to coincide. In that case, you could think of it being a "near miss," sort of like the roulette ball falling into the slot right next to the one on which you had bet your life savings--close, but not quite.

But that's not the situation here at all. Her having those queens in her hand radically affects the probability that we'll see two on the board. It's like reducing the width of the slot into which the roulette ball can fall to make you a winner to about one-fourth of the size of all the other slots, then trying to hit it.

(I suppose that I should mention the related poker phenomenon of "flop lag." This is a great term for when, e.g., you play a 7-8, have to fold to a large bet on a flop of A-K-K, then on the next hand see a flop of 4-5-6. This is "flop lag"--seeing the perfect flop for your hand, one shuffle too late. I have heard this discussed many times, and, of course, have experienced it. But it's just a fun observation, with no connection to reality. I have never heard anybody say anything that even remotely suggested seriousness about this experience being, somehow, "close" to a great thing happening. It's just a bit of silly amusement.)

In this case, it was also not only a completely different shuffle and deal, but a different deck of cards (because they alternate; one is shuffled while the other is in use). What's more, the queens that came on the board in the second hand were both black, whereas in the first hand her pair had been one red and one black. That second board could not have occurred in the first hand. None of that really matters in terms of the statistics, but the observations add to the lunacy of thinking that this was, in some meaningful way, a case in which Agent Smart would have had occasion to say, "Missed it by THAT much!"

No, you idiots, you missed it completely.


*Here's the exact computation of the effect.

Suppose we know that no players were dealt any queens (and, obviously, the same approach applies to any rank of cards you want to posit), so that all four are potentially available to be among the community cards. We don't care about the order they come in. The number of different boards of five cards that will contain exactly two queens is C(4,2)*C(48,3), where "C(x,y)" is the standard notation for the number of combinations of y objects you can pull from a group of x. Here we're specifying that two of the five cards on the board be queens. There are C(4,2)=6 different pairs of queens. With each of those pairs, there are C(48,3)=17,296 ways of pulling another three cards from the remaining 48 cards in the deck, so the total number of different boards with two queens is 6*17,296=103,776. There are 2,598,960 total possible boards--that's C(52,5)--so the fraction of all possible boards that contain exactly two queens is 103,776/2,598,960=0.0399. That is, it will happen 4% of the time, approximately.

But if we know that a player is already holding two of the four queens, now the number of boards containing the remaining two of them is given by C(2,2)*C(50,3)=1*19,600=19,600. The number of possible boards drops to C(50,5)=2,118,760. The probability of getting a set of five community cards containing two queens thus becomes 19,600/2,118,760=0.0093, or a little less than 1%. Putting two queens in a player's hand makes it more than four times less likely that a board with two queens will appear.

Isn't math fun?!

"Did you see...?" (Non-grumpy content)

Hilton, Sunday evening. Very drunk guy joins the fun. He keeps telling us two things, over and over again. First, this is his first time playing. This was a flagrant lie, based on his facility with handling chips, his familiarity with procedures (e.g., complaining about players folding out of turn; knowing about "buying the button," etc.), and so forth. His second claim was that he had been drinking a lot. Of that there was no doubt.

Occasionally during a deal a card will wobble in the air and possibly be exposed to players, or hit somebody's hand or chip stack and partially (or completely) turn over. On one hand, this guy's second card did something like that. I didn't see it, but the dealer (Kelly) saw the card, and was just about to replace it, as per the usual procedure--because if she saw it, probably somebody else did, too. But the player said that he didn't see it, and nobody else volunteered having seen it (I believe, and would like to think, that most people are honest enough to speak up if they saw a card partially exposed).

While the dealer was trying to decide whether she needed to replace the card, the drunk guy who received it looked at his cards, then loudly asked the dealer, "Did you see the ace or the nine?"

I couldn't help laughing. It was the funniest thing I've heard in a poker room in a long time. Kelly tried--without much success--not to laugh.

Now, some people in that situation would cleverly make such a comment as a deliberate piece of misleading information, then play their pocket fives (or whatever) against a confused opponent. But this guy bet the flop, which had two hearts, and, when nobody called, turned over the ace and nine of hearts. I think he was just too drunk to think up a good lie on the spot.

I think I'm going to throw up, part 2

From time to time I'm still pursuing my quest to play at least once in each of the poker rooms in the city. Yesterday morning I saw a blog post from a poker dealer that I know from his occasional play at the Hilton. He now teaches at a dealer school part time, and some people from the school were going to visit the Club Fortune casino, where a recent graduate had just taken a job. http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/2007/08/still-no-colts-bar.html. I had never even heard of this place, but looked it up on a map on the web and found that I could also hit a couple of other yet-unvisited poker rooms on the way back up Boulder Highway, so I set out. This place is technically in Henderson, I understand, but is nearly to Boulder City. (See http://www.vegastexasholdem.net/poker/ClubFortune.htm.)

Club Fortune is kind of a dinky little nothing place. The poker "room" is, for now, just three tables in the middle of the casino, but I'm told that, like every other casino in the city, they're under construction, and within a couple of months they'll have a genuine room for poker.

Playing $2-4 limit hold'em there was fun, because the group that had assembled for that purpose was there just to have a good time and support/razz/overtip their recent graduate (who did just fine, by the way). As "S" writes in his follow-up post, http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/2007/08/little-poker-and-big-storm.html, a good time was had by all. I sure had a good time watching S call with his pocket jacks to the turn, then give them up rather than throw in another $4, then see a third jack hit on the river. (Hee hee hee!) It was fun because nobody took the game seriously. Yeah, I usually take my poker pretty darn seriously, but $2-4 is an unbeatable luckfest, and it can be fun, as long as everybody understands and accepts that fact. It's when people take poker at that kind of ridiculously low level seriously that it causes problems. If you're actually trying to win money consistently at poker, you will fail and experience endless frustration playing $2-4. Those people sour the game. So it was refreshing to have a table full of people who understood that the winners and losers were to be determined mostly by chance, rather than skill. At one point, I made what I knew to be a bad call, and announced it as such. S, sitting next to me, said, laughingly, "Isn't that the whole point?" Yeah, on some days, I guess it can be!

Incidentally, this was the first time I've played at a place where smoking at the table is allowed, and nobody smoked a single cigarette the entire time I was there! Miracle!

Anyway, after that gang broke up, I went back toward town, next stopping at Jokers Wild, another place I had never been to before. It's not quite as bad as the El Cortez or Arizona Charlie's-Decatur, but it's pretty dumpy. Only one table going (a $2-4 spread-limit), and it was never full. It was as dreary an experience as $2-4 usually is, because of the usual factors (people with unrealistic expectations of consistently beating the rake, the abominable level of mindless play, suckouts being the norm, grouchy players, indifferent management, etc). Nothing different here than anywhere else.

But--to finally get to the point of this post--I did see something there that I've never witnessed before. You know how some clerical workers, particularly those of a certain age, have an ugly little habit of licking a thumb or index finger in order to leaf through a stack of papers? Well, I saw a poker dealer at Jokers Wild doing that for the cards. Why? Because they were stickier than average (as were the chips).

It made me shudder. Think of all the ickiness that players bring to the table on their hands and spread all over the cards and chips. Imagine getting all of that crud on your hands, then LICKING your thumb to help you get a good hold on the corner of the card. Not only should this be patently disgusting to the dealer, but we get to watch him add his saliva to the mix of filth that's already on the cards. No wonder they get sticky. All I could think when watching this was one word, a whole bunch of times:

ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh

To the Jokers Wild dealer (you know who you are): Dude, you is NASTY!

Incidentally, I also tried to hit another place listed in Card Player magazine's online database of poker rooms (http://www.cardplayer.com/poker_room): Nevada Palace. But I walked around the place twice and didn't see anything resembling a poker table. I found one online report that says they do a daily tournament, then basically close up: http://www.vegastexasholdem.net/poker/NevadaPalace.htm. If so, I can't imagine why they even bother offering poker. Anyway, it's probably not worth the trip out there.

Poker gems, #3

Mike Sexton, commenting on a bad beat during a World Poker Tour event:

"If you don't like a little pain once in a while, poker is probably not your game, because as you can see, you're gonna get it."

Unlikely events (non-grumpy content) (WARNING! Math ahead!)

I played at the Venetian again today. Two mathematical long-shots occurred that are worthy of note.

1

During a cash game, I heard a sudden commotion from the next table that could only mean that something really unusual had happened with the cards. I wasn't in a hand at the moment, so I stood up, took a few steps, and saw something I had never seen before: Quad kings beat quad tens, with both players having started with pocket pairs. If the Venetian had a bad-beat jackpot, this certainly would have qualified. I don't remember the order in which the cards came on the board, and I have no idea how the betting went down, but it doesn't really matter.

I wondered about the probability of this happening. Let's take any two pocket pairs, since the probability will be the same for whichever ones we pick. And let's ignore what order the community cards hit the board, because just about any order will get all the players' money in nearly every time (probably the only exception being if the high pair makes quads on the flop with the non-matching card, and the lower pair folds, thus never seeing the turn and river cards).

Here's the ugly math. First, how likely is it that two or more players will simultaneously receive pocket pairs when dealing to a table of ten players? This is something I've never worked out, maybe never even wondered about, but now that I've crunched the numbers, it's kind of interesting. You can find the relevant equations (and a web-based calculator to run them for you) many places, including http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/binomialX.html. Here, "p"--the probability of any player being dealt a pocket pair--is 1/17 (because after you get the first card, there are 3 possible pairs to it left and 51 cards left, and 3/51=1/17), or 0.0588. We'll set "n" at 10, assuming 10 players to a table. The probability that nobody gets dealt a pair on a given hand (i.e., k=0) then works out to about 55%, which is quite a bit higher than I would have guessed offhand. The probability of exactly one player being dealt a pair (k=1) is about 34%. The probability of two players being dealt pairs is about 10%, and the sum of the probabilities of all of the other possibilities (i.e., three through ten players being given pairs simultaneously) is the remaining 1% or so.*

(The interesting implication of this: If you're dealt a pocket pair, about 3 out of 4 times you're the only one at the table with a pair. I never knew this, and don't recall seeing it mentioned anywhere else before.**)

So let's settle on 11% as a good estimate of the likelihood that two or more players will, on any given hand, start with pocket pairs.***

We now have 48 unknown cards left, after assigning our two players their pairs (and it doesn't make a bit of difference how many other players are in the hand; their cards are unknown to us, so the math is the same as if only two people were playing). There are five cards to come on the board. There are exactly 1,712,304 different combinations of five cards that we can theoretically pick from 48 cards (as long as we ignore order). (Praise heaven that Microsoft Excel has a built-in function ["COMBIN"] to calculate this for me.) In order to get quads versus quads, four of those five have to be the cards in question, so now eight cards are assigned/accounted for, leaving 44. In other words, 44 of the 1,712,304 possible combinations of five cards we could put out will have the specific four cards we need to see this clash happen, plus one straggler. That makes the probability of quads versus quads (starting with two pocket pairs) 44/1,712,304, or 1 in 38,916. In other words, pocket pairs will only end up in the kind of quads-over-quads outcome that I saw tonight once in about 39,000 times.

Now we combine that with the fact that only about 11% of the time do we even have two or more players starting with pocket pair in order to set this up, and my grand conclusion is that one will see quads over quads only once in about 354,000 hands of Texas Hold'Em. It's even rarer than that, if you account for the fact that the two paired players very often won't both see the flop, since a large pair will usually raise before the flop, causing a small pair to fold. I would guess that one of the pairs folds before the flop roughly half the time, which, if correct, means that one would have to sit through something like 700,000 poker hands before seeing quads over quads hit. No wonder I've never seen it before!

2

I entered the Venetian's 8:00 p.m. tournament. I finished in about 16th place, but only the top five split the money, so I left with nothing to show for it. Oh well. At least I got a story out of the evening.

I had Q-10, and raised with it in late position. I was called by one other player. The flop was Q-7-2. I had top pair, and not many chips left, so I pushed all-in. She called. She had pocket 7s and had flopped a set. I was pretty much dead meat at that point. But then miracle of miracles, the turn card was a 10, giving me two pairs and a ray of hope. Then the river was a lovely third queen, giving me a full house. The only way I could win that hand was with the turn and river coming 10-Q, Q-10, 10-10, or Q-Q, and it happened! An online poker odds calculator says that I had a 1.6% chance of hitting one of these combinations. That makes this an even worse suckout than when I hit a 3% chance full house over two opponents with flopped flushes (see the tale at http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/04/crazy-night-of-poker-non-grumpy-content.html). It's definitely one of my luckiest hands ever.

Incidentally, with experience I'm unquestionably getting better at making quick estimates of poker probabilities. As soon as this happened, I commented to the guy next to me, "That must be in about the 2% range to hit like that." Pat, pat pat. (That was me giving myself a pat on the back for being so smart. Maybe some day I'll be smart enough not to commit all my chips when I'm a 98:2 underdog.)


Editorial comment

If either of these hands occurred online, the chat boxes would fill with conspiratorial notes about how Internet poker is rigged to make improbable events happen more often. But given thousands and thousands of hands being dealt in a large card room like the Venetian every day, extraordinarily unlikely events are bound to occur, even with no puppetmaster manipulating the strings. Randomness is a wondrous thing to behold, given enough chances for rare events to occur. It's no different online, except that nerds sitting in their parents' basement playing poker on a computer all day can get their world view twisted pretty severely, and what are objectively pretty ridiculous theories about how improbable events occur can start to make a weird kind of sense.


*There's a little problem here, in that these occurrences aren't really quite independent, because one person getting a pair reduces the number of pairable cards available to everybody else. But this is close enough for present purposes.

**The exception, of course, is if you're dealt K-K. Then the probability that somebody else has been given A-A is about 99%. Or at least it seems that way....

***Again, this is a bit off, because of the possibility of two players both having the same pair. But I think that will only throw things off a small amount, and since I'm really just interested in ballpark figures, I'll ignore the discrepancy.

Addendum, August 23, 2007

I forgot yet another oddity that occurred during the tournament: 4-of-a-kind appearing on the board. In this case, it was 8-8-8 on the flop, and the final 8 on the turn. If we ignore what order the cards come in again, this will happen only once in 20,825 hands. I have seen this once or twice before, but it's pretty rare. Once it worked out great for me, because an opponent in a tournament flopped a full house. I had just ace-high. But with quads on the board when the river card hit, this idiot tried to bluff me. When there's four of a kind on the board, and I have an ace in my hand, I can't lose--the best he can do is tie me with an ace of his own and split the pot. So I raised, and he folded his cards face up to show his disgust at having his flopped full house go down in flames to an opponent holding just an ace. (He didn't have one.) Hee hee hee!

Addendum, August 25, 2007

If you're at all interested in the first problem I posed above, then you should read the comments. I'm putting this here, rather than in another comment, because I'm now pretty well convinced that I got something wrong, and the corrective information herein is more likely to be seen here than in another comment. (I'm always happy to be given better data or arguments; anytime I can replace bad information or logic with good, I'm better off for it.)

"Froggee" made me rethink how I approached the question of the probability that my pocket pair is the only one dealt on that hand, versus being up against another pair somewhere at the table. I posted the query on the Two Plus Two forum:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=11820546&an=0&page=0#Post11820546

A respondent there pointed me to an incredibly detailed calculation of this (which turns out to be much, much more complicated than I had imagined at first): http://www.math.sfu.ca/~alspach/comp35/ This is part of a larger set of posts on other computations problems related to poker, which, if your brain is wired strangely like mine is, makes for interesting reading: http://www.math.sfu.ca/~alspach/computations.html

Brian Alspach, author of those pages, approaches the problem as not just whether there is some other pair being held by another player, but whether there is a larger pair lurking out there. But that's OK; by using his answer for the case when you're holding pocket deuces, we get what I assume is the answer for whether there is any other pair (since any pair--other than the very rare case of somebody else having the other two deuces--will be larger than deuces). At the very bottom of the page cited above, we see that the probability of there being one larger pair is 32.69%, the probability of there being two larger pairs is 8.19%, and the probability of there being three larger pairs is 1.19%. These sum to 42.07%. The main reason the math is complicated is something I alluded to in a footnote to my original post: Being dealt a pair affects the probabilities of what other players can receive, and thus the standard formulas--which assume completely independent events--are a little off.

Anyway, I conclude from this that Froggee's method of estimation is better than mine was, and that when one has a pocket pair, about 42% of the time somebody else at the table will have another pair.

Incidentally, this doesn't affect the calculation I was aiming at (about quads over quads). I was correct that at a ten-handed table there will be two or more pocket pairs about 11% of the time. I just erred in my side note about what that implies about other players' holdings when I have been dealt a pair.

My thanks to "Froggee" for alerting me to the mistake.

Addendum, August 26, 2007

I thought of another way to verify the above conclusion--sort of a "poor man's Monte Carlo simulation." That is, I don't have an easy way to actually simulate 10,000 random deals, but I can do it mathematically, using the probabilities I derived in the comments:

P(0) = 0.5455
P(1) = 0.3408
P(2) = 0.0958
P(3) = 0.0160
P(4) = 0.0017
P(5) = 0.0001

In 10,000 deals, 3408 of them (ideally) would contain exactly one pair given out somewhere among the ten players. Let's say I'm in seat 1 for the whole time. I would then get 341 of these pairs. There would be 958 deals containing exactly two pairs, of which I would expect to receive 2/10, or 192. There would be 160 deals containing exactly three pairs, of which I would expect to receive 3/10, or 48. There would be 17 deals containing exactly four pairs, of which I would expect to receive 4/10, or 7 (all these are ideals or averages, of course).

Summed up, in 10,000 deals, I would receive a pocket pair 588 times (341+192+48+7) in seat 1. Of these, 341 would be the only pocket pair dealt--that's 58% of the 588 times, meaning that 42% of the time at least one other person would also have been dealt a pair.

OK, that does it, I'm convinced that 42%/58% is the correct answer. That is, 58% of the time that I have a pocket pair, it's the only one at the table, and 42% of the time there's at least one other pair given to an opponent.

Addendum, September 10, 2007

While looking around YouTube at various poker hands from televised shows, I came across this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNz-Duyx3Lc

It's from the European Open III, though I've never heard of any of the players and don't recognize the commentators' voices (the American guy sounds very familiar, but I just can't place him). But it's a phenomenally rare occurrence, worth looking at. At a 6-player table, 5 players start with pocket pairs! The probability of this is about 0.0004%, meaning that it will happen about once in every 250,000 hands. Even more bizarre, three of the pocket pairs are aces, kings, and queens. The guy with pocket kings makes a phenomenal--almost impossible--laydown, correctly reading the opponent with aces. But then he gets his heart broken when a third king flops, and he would have taken the huge pot. Even sicker, the guy with queens spikes a third one on the river, meaning that Mr. Aces not only lost the hand, but would have been in third place if the kings had stayed in!

This is the sickest game ever invented!

Poker gems, #2

David Mamet, "The Things Poker Teaches," New York Times Magazine, 1986, as reprinted in John Stravinsky, Read 'Em and Weep (Perennial Books, 2004), pp. 167-170:

Poker reveals to the frank observer something else of import--it will teach him about his own nature. Many bad players do not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge. The bad player will not deign to determine what he thinks by watching what he does. To do so might, and frequently would, reveal a need to be abused (in calling what must be a superior hand); a need to be loved (in staying for "that one magic card"); a need to have Daddy relent (in trying to bluff out the obvious best hand), etc. It is painful to observe this sort of thing about oneself. Many times we'd rather suffer on than fix it....

Last September, one of the players pointed out that five of us at the table that night had been doing this for two decades. As a group, we have all improved. Some of us have improved drastically. Because the facts, the statistics, the tactics are known to us all, and because we are men of equal intelligence, that improvement can be due to only one thing: to character, which, as I finally begin to improve a bit myself, I see that the game of poker is all about.

Why do poker movies have to be so awful?

Everybody in the poker world seems to like "Rounders," but let's face it: all the good poker and all the good lines happen in the two scenes with John Malkovich. You can skip the middle 90% of the movie and not miss much.

But "Rounders" is solid gold compared to three other stinkeroo poker movies I've seen recently.

Lucky You

"Lucky You," finally released this spring, was universally disliked by every poker player I've asked about it. We're supposed to believe that the protagonist deliberately mucks the winning hand at the World Series of Poker because he has a soft spot for his father? Oh, please! There's not a professional poker player in the world who would do that, and any poker-playing father who found out that his son had thrown the game that way would be outraged about it, not grateful. A father would presumably try to win, but might actually get more joy from seeing his son win. Knowing that he (the father) only won by his son letting him would completely ruin the experience. To top it off, what the son did was cheating, and, if discovered, could easily get him banned from future events. It's chip-dumping, and is one of the most flagrantly illegal and unethical things you can do in tournament play. Horrible, horrible, horrible ending.

I was also stunned about the scene with the satellite tournament. After the thing is over and they've awarded the seat (the entry into the WSOP), then they discover and decide to fix a problem with how the final hand was dealt??? That would never, ever happen. The dealer would have cleaned up the table by then; it would be impossible to recreate the hand.

There was no apparent reason for so many professional poker players to appear as themselves, while a bunch of others (Jennifer Harman, David Oppenheim, etc.) appeared as characters other than themselves. If they're not supposed to be themselves, why use such recognizable people? Why not use unknown actors? This makes no sense at all.

And, though it has nothing to do with poker, what's up with the relationship with the Drew Barrymore character? Basically her first three experiences with the "hero" are (1) he steals $1000 from her purse on their first date because he needs poker money; (2) she sees him throw away somebody else's $10,000, given to him as an investment by a backer for his WSOP entry fee, playing a stupid card game for pride with his father; (3) he makes a crazy prop bet to try to win a replacement $10,000, and yells at her because she wouldn't help him cheat to win the bet. Wouldn't that be pretty much all the information you'd need about somebody to decide that maybe he's not somebody you want to spend the rest of your life with?

All In

See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475217/

I just now finished watching this on Showtime. Plot synopsis (with spoilers): Father teaches his little girl how to play poker, then presumably dies in a car crash. She grows up, gets to medical school, where she and her five buddies are short on money and decide to win some playing poker. She gets to the final table of a $5,000,000 tournament, and--surprise, surprise--who is the other last player left? Dear old dad, who, it turns out, faked his own death for reasons that are too stupid to detail. And what does he do? He folds a straight flush on the next-to-last hand to ensure that his little girl wins. (Hmmm. Where have I heard of an ending like that before?)

Besides the writing and acting being just plain bad, what's so annoying is how movie makers get so many things wrong when it would be just as easy to get them right. My other hobby is competitive handgun shooting, so I notice how nearly every movie and TV show gets technical things about guns wrong, and it drives me crazy, because they could do them right with no more effort, and avoid distracting knoweldgeable viewers. It's the same with poker. For example, during the tournament's final table, the father lifts his hole cards high up off the table to look at them. There are spectators just a few feet behind the table that could easily see them. No serious player would do this, because of the possibility that a person behind will react in some obvious way ("Oh look, he's got aces!"), or furtively signal the opponent as to what he's holding.

Early in the tournament, the girl isn't doing well. Her brilliant friends suggest that because she has been playing very tight, she should loosen up, play some junk hands that might hit, and her opponents will never guess what cards she has. She suddenly brightens up--what a great idea! But this is absolutely the most fundamental strategy for both cash games and tournaments, to "mix up" one's play, to "change gears" from playing just premium hands to playing a wide range, then back again before opponents can figure out what you're doing and adjust to it. And this never occurred to her?

The night before the final table, she and her friends spend hours reviewing videotape of one particularly difficult opponent, who all the other players have declared to be unreadable. Finally, when they've just about decided that he has no tells, one of the group announces that he's found it. When the guy has a strong hand, he takes four seconds to bet, and when he's bluffing he takes eight seconds to bet, "almost to the tenth of a second every time." GROAN! This kind of tell is so obvious that every player to sit down with this guy would have figured it out in the first 30 minutes. We're supposed to believe that Erik Seidel and John Juanda (who play themselves in the movie at the final table), among all the others, never detected this pattern? Absurd. Somebody who really did that might as well play with his cards face up for his opponents to see, it's so obvious.

And I've got to add a bit about the medical stuff. I have first-hand experience with medical school, and this movie gets just about everything in that field just as wrong as the poker stuff. For instance, one patient is an 8-year-old girl with appendicitis. She just lies there quietly smiling in bed and lets the medical students poke her abdomen. Uh, no--that's not how it goes. Kids with appendicitis look really sick, they feel absolutely miserable, and it shows in everything about them. You may get one poke at the belly, but after it hurts them like hell, you'll have to fight them to do it a second time. Finally, at the close of this scene (which takes place on early morning rounds), we're told that the kid's surgery is scheduled for 1:00 that afternoon. Huh??? I guess nobody involved minds a little malpractice suit here and there for letting the appendix rupture sometime in the next six hours or so. When they finally do the surgery, the area isn't even draped the right way (you try to expose minimal skin, because that's where most wound infections come from), and the operating room is dark, with a single, dramatic spotlight on the patient, rather than the nearly blinding lights in a real OR. This kind of nonsense is all over the medical details of the movie--as, unfortunately, with most medical shows.

Oh, and on the first day of class, the students are told to memorize all the bones and all the muscular attachments to all the bones for a test the next day. That's a pretty compressed curriculum they've got; I sort of recall that being spread out over the whole first year. In fact, I'd wager that there's not a person alive who could memorize all of that in one night--there are hundreds of muscles, each with at least two points of attachment to bones. Memorizing just the names of the bones wouldn't be too tough, since most of them are already familiar, but to get the muscle attachments, you'd also have to memorize many, many names of grooves and bumps and prominences and sulci and ridges that every bone has, just to be able to describe where the muscles attach. Here's an example picked arbitrarily from "Gray's Anatomy" (http://www.bartleby.com/107/121.html):

"The Trapezius is a flat, triangular muscle, covering the upper and back part of the neck and shoulders. It arises from the external occipital protuberance and the medial third of the superior nuchal line of the occipital bone, from the ligamentum nuchæ, the spinous process of the seventh cervical, and the spinous processes of all the thoracic vertebræ, and from the corresponding portion of the supraspinal ligament. From this origin, the superior fibers proceed downward and lateralward, the inferior upward and lateralward, and the middle horizontally; the superior fibers are inserted into the posterior border of the lateral third of the clavicle; the middle fibers into the medial margin of the acromion, and into the superior lip of the posterior border of the spine of the scapula; the inferior fibers converge near the scapula, and end in an aponeurosis, which glides over the smooth triangular surface on the medial end of the spine, to be inserted into a tubercle at the apex of this smooth triangular surface. At its occipital origin, the Trapezius is connected to the bone by a thin fibrous lamina, firmly adherent to the skin. At the middle it is connected to the spinous processes by a broad semi-elliptical aponeurosis, which reaches from the sixth cervical to the third thoracic vertebræ, and forms, with that of the opposite muscle, a tendinous ellipse. The rest of the muscle arises by numerous short tendinous fibers."

Now repeat that for a few hundred other muscles, and we'll quiz you on it all in the morning, OK? Ridiculous.

The only good thing about this movie was Lou Gossett, Jr. I've never seen a bad performance from him, and he's the only bright spot in the film. Too bad he's only on screen for about five minutes.

Shade

See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323939/

I just got this from Netflix and watched it yesterday. I had high hopes for it, because they spent some serious change on the cast: Sylvester Stallone, Melanie Griffith, Hal Holbrook, Gabriel Byrne, Thandie Newton, and Jamie Foxx. But the whole thing was just terrible, terrible, terrible.

This one focuses on the world of poker cheating, and the climax pits several cheaters against each other to see who can walk away with the money. OK, I can accept that there's a large poker underground where that stuff happens, even though it's far removed from modern casino poker. I'll even admit that there's a little bit of good stuff, particularly in how they drilled the actors to do the fancy false shuffles and phony deals, so they didn't have to cut away to close-ups of somebody else's hands doing the moves. Nice touch.

But they still get the basic rules of poker all wrong. Worse, they know it, as I discovered when watching the "making of" featurette on the DVD. The writer and director freely admit that how they broke the rules in the story drives poker players nuts, but they needed to do it for maximum drama.

The main problem involves table stakes. "Table stakes" means several things all at once. It means that you put money on the table at the beginning of a session, and you can't take it off the table (except for minor things like tipping cocktail waitresses) until you're done playing. This is to prevent people from squirreling away winnings and only keeping minimal amounts at risk. The idea is that after you've won, the winnings have to remain available for opponents to win back, until you declare yourself done for the day.

The second thing that "table stakes" means is that you can buy more chips if you've lost a lot, but you have to have them purchased and on the table before a hand begins; you can't buy chips in the middle of a hand and have them be in play. Obviously, if you could do that, it would be smart to start with just a few chips on the table at risk, and buy more during a hand if you had a strong hand.

The third thing that "table stakes" implies is that you can only win from each opponent the amount that you have in front of you at the beginning of the hand, and, conversely, you only put that amount at risk. After seeing poker scenes in old Westerns, I always wondered why the richest person didn't always win. By the way they play in those movies, if you can't match somebody's bet, you lose. That would mean that Bill Gates could beat everybody in poker by putting, say, $10 billion into the pot, which nobody could possibly call. That's not how poker works anymore (and I'm not sure it ever really was as portrayed in those old movies, though I don't know that as a point of history).* If I have $500 in front of me and go all-in, you can call my bet even though you only have $100 left. The dealer just pushes $400 back to me.

This is a common misunderstanding among casino newbies. I've several times seen players pull out their wallets, thinking they have to buy more chips in the middle of a hand in order to call a bet that is bigger than the number of chips they have left on the table. It's kind of funny, really, though I try not to laugh. They're not stupid people--they just don't understand how the rules work.

Finally, I have to say a word about string bets/raises. Again, old movies, whether or not they represent how things really were once, they don't accurately portray how things are now. You get one chance to make an unambiguous declaration of what you're going to do, either verbally or by pushing chips forward. The classic tension-filled movie moment in which the hero says, "I'll see your $10,000 [dramatic pause] and raise you another $50,000," would now get the referee's whistle blown as a foul. As soon as you say the word "call," or push forward chips that constitute a call, you forfeit the right to raise. This is to foil people from saying "call" and watching for an opponent's reaction before deciding whether (or how much) to raise.

All of which is a long introduction to what drove me crazy about "Shade." They violated these rules left and right. Now, one might argue that as long as we're dealing with underground poker cheats, who cares about the rules? But everything I've read about illegal poker clubs tells me that they follow modern conventions of table stakes and string bets--because it only makes sense to do so. It's to everybody's advantage to abide by these rules, even if you're out to cheat the other players by breaking a bunch of other rules (like using marked decks, dealing from the bottom, or whatever).

So in this stupid, stupid, stupid movie, over and over again you see things done just like in old Westerns. People announce a call and push in some chips, then pause dramatically, reach into a satchel and pull out bundles of cash, throw them on the table, and say, "And I'll raise you...."

As I said, the movie makers justified doing this because it increased the drama, even though they admit that they know this isn't how the game is played. What BS.

I guess what I find so annoying and baffling about all of this is that poker is intrinsically one of the most dramatic games I know of, which you can see every week by watching real games on the World Poker Tour, or WSOP, or High Stakes Poker. Poker doesn't need puffing up with phony rules to create impossible situations. You don't see, e.g., baseball movies putting 15 defensive players on the field, instead of nine, and excuse it by some need to increase the drama. The game is played by the same rules that pertain in real life. Poker movies can and should do the same.

It is not the requirements of drama, but the laziness of the writers and directors that cause such idiocy to be introduced into poker movies. I hate it.


*There must be at least some truth to it, because I've read a fair number of 19th-century stories involving poker, and characters will do things like leave the table and run to the bank to get more money in the middle of a hand. I assume that writers like Mark Twain and O. Henry wouldn't have such things occurring in their stories if that wasn't part of the poker reality of the day, because they weren't trying to write parodies. Their contemporary readers would have been confused if there wasn't some basic correlation between the game as it was really played and the game as it was portrayed in their fiction.

Addendum, August 30, 2007:

By coincidence, the current issue of Card Player magazine (August 29, 2007, pp. 96-97) has some useful information about 19th-century non-table-stakes games. They've been running a series of articles by James McManus about the history of poker, which I assume are excerpts from his forthcoming book on that subject. This article describes two famous games (one real, one fictional) played that way--and I learned that the term for it was "open stakes." McManus writes:

Many real games of this period were played with open stakes, but too many scams,
kited checks, deeds to twice-mortgaged farms, and other dubious IOUs eventually
led to the near-universal adoption of table stakes. Each player starts every
hand with a verifiable stake on the table, and at no point during the hand may
she remove money or chips from her stack or add any more from her purse, let
alone from a banker across the street. But once she goes all in, she retains
full equity in the main pot as whatever side pots among better-funded players
keep building.

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Poker gems, #1

I've decided to add a bit of contrast to my usual long rants and stories with occasional brief thoughts that I pick up from whatever poker book or magazine or web site I'm reading.

Most will be just a sentence or a paragraph, but I'm going to start with what will probably be the longest one I ever type out, because it's so good. Although I have seen the phenomenon of the poker cold spell discussed any number of places, nobody I have read previously has nailed the feeling as well as Larry Phillips, in The Tao of Poker (pp. 163-166). Having just recently emerged from a nasty cold streak lately (mid-May to early August), this really struck home, as if Mr. Phillips had been monitoring my thoughts somehow.

I'm reproducing about two pages of text here. I'm aware that this likely runs past the safe margins of the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. copyright law, and if, as a result, the author and/or publisher object, well, I'll delete it. But I hope they won't, and, in fact, I hope they'll recognize that the description will so resonate with every serious player that they'll probably sell a bunch more books by having it posted here, because readers will want to find out what wisdom is in the other 242 pages.

So here we go:


All real gamblers know the feeling that Steve McQueen had in the movie The Cincinnati Kid or Matt Damon in Rounders: that walking-outside-in-the-cold-dawn-after-losing-it-all, completely-tapped-out feeling. They know the feeling of standing in the morning sunlight with their pockets turned out and not a cent to their names.

They know that feeling of serious re-evaluation, of taking stock of one's life. They know the feeling of: Maybe you're in over your head; maybe you never understood this game from Day One and you've been fooling yourself all along. Your opponents had your number all along and you didn't know it. Oh sure, a period occurred when you were running well, and that threw them off briefly--and allowed you to keep the fiction going to yourself--but by and large they had your number all along.

All real gamblers know the Inner Scream. It's like the face in that one painting, The Scream, the oval-headed guy with his mouth open and his hands on his cheeks. It's exactly like that, only it's on the inside. It's a scream for just average luck, not even for good luck anymore. For that wondrous state of affairs where, every time you get annihilated, there is some kind of offsetting win of some kind, somewhere. It is pleading just to break even.

Even the most calm, serene, and composed among us has a limit. It might be 7 losing hands in a row. It might be 7 bad beats in a row; it might be 7 hours or 7 weeks or 7 months. However long it is, there is a limit beyond which our sense of humor begins to leave us.

A true cold spell is a thing of wonder. It is almost breathtaking in its scope and depth. It is breathtaking in the way that it feels as if the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. It's a feeling caused by a combination of events so unlikely, so statistically improbable, that it's really hard to believe. And yet we see it happen right before our eyes, often over and over again.

Statistical occurrences that are 20-1 against, 50-1 against, 100-1 against happen routinely, in an unbroken string. And as a player you know these odds. And you know that they are even longer when combined.

So as a player, you know how unlikely it all is. You know the statistical likekihood of missing the flop a couple of hundred times in a row. You know the statistical likelihood of every player in the game getting playable hands except you--and of having this go on for days--or weeks. You know the statistical likelihood of sitting in a certain seat for eight straight hours without getting a playable hand, only to move to a different seat, and watch the guy who took your old seat start a winning streak that lasts for four straight hours. You know the statistical unlikelihood of this sort of thing, and it is this that creates the emotional component--anger, rage, resentment.

But the annoying part, really, is not the losing. And it's not the money either. Because you can always get more money. It's a feeling of betrayal almost, the appearance of a suddenly topsy-turvy world where logic no longer seems to function, where bad players win effortlessly, and good play is penalized. It's a funhouse-mirror world where logic--and the familiar laws of long experience--no longer apply. It's as if you accidentally dropped something, some object, and now the object falls up, not down. It's the dismissal of a world you knew--or thought you knew.

You question your game. You question deeper things too: your luck (ill-starred from birth?), your fate, your destiny. You start to dredge up the memories of all the losses in your life, going back to grade school and beyond. And in retrospect, they all do seem to form a pattern. You begin to question your grasp of the fundamentals, your body language ("Am I utterly transparent to the other players?"). You begin to question your religion, your God, your place in the universe.

You become the dictionary definition of "indecisiveness"--doubtful, tentative, defensive, and fatalistic. On a personal level, "feeling sorry for yourself" reaches a level you didn't know existed--and certainly wouldn't have believed you were capable of. It reaches the final level, the one that doesn't just soak itself in self pity but involves a thick seasoning of bitterness, anger, and resentment....

Is it a crisis of confidence? No. That's too small, too puny a term for it. We're talking about a complete poker breakdown. We're talking about all phases of one's game heading for the bottom, taking up residence next to the hull of the Titanic. We're talking about the poker equvilent of a nervous breakdown, where you get beat on the river so many times, for so many weeks, that you can almost no longer function in the game.

In the process, you've struggled against novices, amateurs, rookies, first-timers, locals, drunks, and greenhorns. You've struggled as you watched all manner of opponents come and go in the game, rack up chips cheerfully by the basketful and leave. And now, finally, you just lost it. Not over this game, over the whole thing....

You may have started off with a series of annoying losses, but it developed its own momentum after that. Your chief role now is just another body at the table, holding down a chair--taking up space.

For the poker player, macro-tilt is the last straw, the card player's Waterloo. Nothing he or she does seems to work, and though the nightmare may have begun with a statistically unlikely series of events, by this point you're willing to admit that a lot of it probably is your fault. The disaster is self-caused. You admit it.

You've now picked up the ball yourself and are running with it. You've gotten so gun-shy, so shocked when anything good happens that you really aren't sure how to play your hands anymore. Other players sense this too, of course, and walk all over you. Bad players have new confidence when playing against you. Even card room regulars you've intimidated out of their boxer shorts for years are starting to wonder what's the matter with you.

A man once bitten by a snake fears a rotted rope." --Folk saying

Cell phones

You just knew I'd get around to griping about this sooner or later, didn't you? It's commonplace to read/hear people grumbling about other people using cell phones in cars, theaters, restaurants, public transportation, business meetings, etc. So I'll take it upon myself to add poker rooms to the list of places in which cell phones are potentially problematic and rude.

I have to start by saying, though, that I'm somewhat conflicted about this. As a competitor, it's to my advantage to have opponents jabbering away with Aunt Bee about coming to dinner next Thursday, or negotiating a real estate sales price, or ordering a pizza, or whatever. They have that much less attention available for the game, which means that they're more prone to making mistakes.

It also makes their play much more straightforward, in that anything distracting (eating, watching a football game, etc.) makes it much more difficult to bluff. Bluffing takes a lot more thought and attention than textbook, A-B-C, play-your-cards poker does. Anybody who is engaged fairly deeply in conversation or any other activity is only secondarily interested in playing poker, so they tend to play only premium hands, bet/call/raise if they've improved, and fold otherwise so that they can quickly get back to whatever it is that they're really interested in.* In that sense, players on cell phones are unusually easy to deal with, for the most part, because you can pretty much rule out serious trickery going on in their preoccupied brains.

Still, it's just plain tacky and rude. Just as in all those other venues, the rest of us just don't want to have your conversation inflicted on us. I really don't mind the 30-second calls that are basically, "I'm still playing poker. I'll be home in an hour." Those are, I think, harmless and innocuous, and impose pretty minimally on others' ears. The ones who get on my nerves are the idiots who yammer on and on (I once sat at a table at Caesars Palace with a guy who engaged in a 30-minute call!), or who take calls every few minutes.

For those jerks, I have a few thoughts:

1) If you're so in demand that you can't leave those calls for later, then you don't have time to be playing poker. Go attend to whatever personal or family or professional business you have obviously decided is more important than playing poker, and come back some other time when you're genuinely at leisure.

2) This is just a rumor I've heard, so I can't be sure whether it's really true or not. It seems unbelievable, but maybe, just maybe, there's something to it. I've heard that at least SOME models of cell phones have an "off" button or switch. No, really! That's what I've heard! I know it sounds crazy, but who knows?! The same people say that nearly every cell phone service has automatic voice-mail service that kicks in when the phone is turned off. Maybe it's just an urban legend, like the risk of waking up in a tub of ice with a note saying your kidneys have been stolen. But it's worth looking into.

3) You're probably not actually as urgently in demand every minute as you'd like to believe, you egomaniacal idiot. The world just might be able to keep spinning even if you didn't take calls for a couple of hours.

With that out of the way, I feel a need to address poker room rules about cell phone use. It's one of the most non-standardized areas of the rules. In some places, you can't use phones at all.** In some, you just can't use them at the table, but if you step away, you're OK. In others you can talk at the table, as long as you're not in a hand (and they won't deal you a hand if you're on the phone when the cards are dealt). In some, they say cell phones at the table are fine as long as you're not slowing down the game. Finally, some places have no restrictions whatsoever.

To make it even more complicated, some casinos impose diferent rules on cell phone use for poker tournaments than for cash-game play, a distinction that, as far as I can tell, is completely ridiculous and groundless. How can it possibly make any difference? If concern about collusion with an outside agent is the reason for the tournament restriction, then is the casino not concerned about such collusion during its regular games? I can't fathom what motivates treating the two situations differently. It seems completely irrational to me.

Anyway, if I had my own casino, and were free to impose whatever rules I wanted, I think I'd take the tack that brief calls were to be allowed at the table (say, under one minute), but if a player answered the call while in a hand, his hand is ruled dead, and he can't be given cards while he's talking. This is only secondarily to prevent collusion (which I think is a pretty remote worry); it's mainly to prevent these people from slowing down the game--because they definitely do make things creep along with their inattention. Dealers would politely ask players on phones to step away from the table after a minute or so, if it appeared that the call was going to continue. This would not only help prevent the talker from imposing his conversation on everybody, but would facilitate necessary communication at the table (as to where the action is, what the current bet is, and so forth). It would, I hope, also emphasize to people that you're either talking on your stupid phone or you're playing poker--not both.

But still, I have to admit that that would be a pretty arbitrary rule, when so many other distractions are allowed or even actively encouraged: meals delivered to the tables, big plasma TV screens all around, massages available at the table, MP3 players cranking away, etc. Maybe in my own casino I'd get cranky and ban them all, telling people that if they're there to play poker, then play poker, dammit!

Or maybe I'd side with the sharks who like their fish as distracted as possible, and encourage all such side entertainments.

Like I said, I'm conflicted about this whole thing. It's annoying, particularly to somebody like me who has purist tendencies, and who appreciates quietness, but, on the other hand, it makes it that much easier to make money, which is kind of the point of playing.



*I notice the same tendency in myself, on the occasions that I indulge in an ice cream cone while playing. It's kind of inconvenient to play while one hand is full, and my attention keeps going to preventing the thing from dripping, so I revert to tighter hand selection, and I'm more willing to fold when there's a decision to be made. There: to any opponents who hadn't already figured that out about me, now you know.

**In Vegas casinos, this is sometimes imposed by the Nevada Gaming Commission because of the proximity to the sports book. Apparently the regulators don't want people telephoning their friends with the betting lines/spreads established by a casino. This is an idiotic and woefully outdated rule, what with the lines being available within minutes after they change at about a zillion different internet sites that monitor such things constantly. It's perfectly OK to, e.g., take a photograph of a sports book's big board, step outside, and email that photo from your phone/PDA/laptop to anywhere you'd like. It's crazy, in an age of so many ways of transmitting information instantaneously worldwide, to try to stomp out one particular way of doing so (cell phones), while the others are unregulated.

Nevertheless, the poor casinos have to do what the regulators say, with threats of big fines if they're caught not enforcing the rules. I notice this problem most at the Hilton, which is one of the places that has to impose a no-cell-phones rule for its poker room. The staff seem to spend half of their time telling this to people over and over and over again. The people who have to be told this tend to fall into one of two categories. There's the idiots who never noticed the dozens of big signs hung all over the place saying something like "All cell phone use is strictly prohibited in the entire sports book area and poker room by Nevada Gaming Regulations." Then there's the jerks who are perfectly aware of the rule, and just trust that nothing more will happen to them than that they get another polite reminder to get off their phone. This group baffles me. If you don't like or refuse to obey the rules a particular establishment has, why keep going there? Either follow the rules, or boycott the place and tell them why you won't play there. It reveals a lack of personal integrity to patronize an establishment, thereby tacitly agreeing to abide by the applicable rules of conduct, then knowingly violate them time after time.

Whining winners

Last week at the Hilton I was one of three people calling a $12 raise from a guy in first position. The flop was A-K-K. The original raiser checked, as did everybody behind him. Same thing on the turn. Finally on the river the raiser put in a small bet, and the rest of us all folded. He groaned, as he turned over his pocket aces, "Oh, man, couldn't just one of you have had a king?" Apparently, picking up an easy $30 or so (after rake and tip) wasn't enough to satisfy him. Me? I'd be perfectly happy with that result.

Just a couple of hands later, this same guy had a straight, and was facing a large bet on the river. His only concern was whether his opponent had the one possible higher straight. He showed his cards while he was thinking. He said, "I've got the second nuts. Does he really have the nuts? Could I really be that unlucky?"

I couldn't help myself. I said, "The guy who just had pocket aces and flopped a full house is complaining that he's unlucky. Do I have that right?" He glared at me without responding. (Incidentally, he made the call and split the pot; the other guy had the same straight.)

Whining is bad enough in poker when it comes from somebody who just lost a hand, but it reaches its maximal repulsiveness when it comes from the guy who won. This should be grounds for immediate, automatic, unappealable, permanent banishment from the game.

Walking around in casinos

One of the most annoying things about spending a lot of time in casinos is trying to walk around in them. It's a lot harder than it should be.

The first (and, so far, only) time that I visited New York City, I was constantly astonished--and annoyed--at how New Yorkers paid no heed whatsoever to the simple habit of walking on the right. Walking down the sidewalk was a constant struggle of dodging oncoming pedestrians; a hundred times per block you have to do that stupid visual negotiation/dance of "which way are you going?" Even worse were street crosswalks. There was absolutely no effort to keep more or less to the right, and when opposing groups met in the middle of the street, well, if you'll pardon the language, there's just no better work for the resulting tangled chaos than "clusterfuck." It was insane, when such a simple convention (keeping toward the right side) would have prevented most of the conflict. No other city that I've visited has had such determined and consistent mass pedestrian mayhem.

Until, that is, I moved to Las Vegas, and started spending time in casinos. I used to think that only airports and shopping malls rivaled the idiocy of how pedestrians interact on the streets of New York. I was wrong.

Yeah, I know that casino floor plans are carefully designed to make it hard to move efficiently out of them. This is, I assume, for at least two reasons: to make it psychologically harder for people to leave, and for security reasons--to make it hard to bolt from any particular spot for the exit.

But what makes traversing a casino difficult is, I think, far more one's fellow patrons than the layout of the place. The problem is that such a high percentage of the people walking around are totally oblivious to the fact that they're sharing the space with others. I call such airheads "Oblivioids."

I have noticed many identifiable subspecies of Oblivioid:

There's the Cork in a Bottle. This is a group of Oblivioids that congregate, for no good reason, right in the middle of a high-traffic area, to have a discussion about whatever is on their tiny little minds. They have a predilection for doorways, aisle intersections, etc. Naturally, it never occurs to them that they're in the way of dozens of other people, or that by simply moving a little way over, they could clear the path.

There's the Lovebirds. These are the people who stroll holding hands, usually with quite a bit of space between then, la-di-da, paying no attention to the traffic jam they're creating by hogging the entire width of an aisle or hallway.

There's the Chorus Line. These are like the Lovebirds, but without the hand-holding, and there tend to be more of them. The common feature, though, is that they insist on walking two or three or four abreast, no matter how much space this takes up, or what traffic is coming in the opposite direction. Perhaps there's some sort of egalitarianism at work among them here, such that they're incapable of rearranging themselves into single file, even in the narrowest of passages. Heaven forbid that they have to delay their conversation for a minute, until they're in a place where they can stop and chat without being in everybody else's way.

There's the Random Walker. This is the most dangerous subspecies. This is the moron who will, without notice, suddenly dart right or left, hummingbird-like--or even suddenly decide to head the opposite direction, turn on a dime, and slam right into the person behind. It never, ever even begins to dawn on these people that there might be somebody else in the vicinity, until after the collision. When both parties are picking themselves up off the floor, the Random Walker is stunned at the realization that he wasn't the only person in the casino.

There's the Flailer. Like the other subspecies, these idiots somehow delude themselves into believing they're the only ones around. But they manifest their obliviousness by suddenly making wild gestures or other movements with their hands/arms. When out of nowhere you get poked in the eye by a pointing finger, you've just met a Flailer, who couldn't imagine that another human would materialize at the exact place and time he felt an overwhelming urge to wave his arms frantically, trying to get the attention of a friend at the craps table across the room (often with a drink in hand, which, of course, spills all over you).

There's the Misplaced Eyes Monster. It's easy to mistake this type for the Random Walker, but there's a crucial difference. The MEMs don't have eyes at the front of their skulls--or at least act as if they don't. You typically see them steadily observing something of great significance on their right or left, but they keep walking, turning the head farther and farther around, while they continue walking forward. Their version of obliviousness is to be surprised every time that they fail to notice a person in their path who would have been obvious, and easy to avoid a collision with, if their eyes were in the front, like everybody else's. The other natural habitat of the MEM is in conversation with one of their own, standing still. But then they'll suddenly start walking during the last few words of the discussion ("OK, bye, see you next Tuesday!"), while maintaining focused eye contact with their friend. Of course, the direction in which they set off wandering has no relation to where they are looking at the moment they step out. You have to kind of feel sorry for their handicap, though; it must be hard going through life with your eyes on the side of your head instead of in the front (or with your neck chronically craned 90 degrees to one side)--kind of like trying to drive while looking out the side window instead of the windshield. But, boy, are they ever a menace to the rest of us.

There's the Blind Left Turners: When turning left from one hallway to another, these Oblivioids habitually fail to consider the possibility that another person will simultaneously be making the opposite turn using what is, to him, the right-most space available. Of course, the BLTs save maybe two steps by cutting the corner as sharply as possible, and if they happen, in the process, to slam directly into somebody else, oh well, it was unforeseeable, right? A few high-traffic areas have convex mirrors overhead to help prevent injury in such places, but it matters little, because an Oblivioid could never, ever be bothered to look up at a mirror before selecting a trajectory for the corner.

There's the Elevator Stalkers. These numbskulls wait for the elevator directly in front of the door, and start stepping in the instant it opens. They are always shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that there are people already in the elevator who need to get out. Some of them take it to the extreme that they won't even observe the courtesy of letting people out before getting on, even once they realize that there are people trying to exit.

Notice that I'm not griping one bit about people who are slow because they're in wheelchairs or scooters, hobbling on canes, or just walking slowly because they're on vacation and in no particular hurry. Slowness is not the issue here. Like automobile traffic, pedestrian traffic can easily accommodate people using a wide variety of speeds, if people will just follow a few simple guidelines.

Maybe the thing that perpetually mystifies me is that these rules are the same ones that the great majority of people follow pretty much without fail when driving: keep to the right, don't jam up traffic, be careful when passing, look both ways at intersections, be aware of what's going on around you, try not to make sudden, unpredictable changes in your movement (stops or turns), keep your left-hand turns wide and your right-hand turns sharp.

I can't ever figure out why there is such a huge fraction of the population that never thinks to implement the same kind of conventions when walking among a large mass of their peers as they deploy automatically when driving. Perhaps it's because the consequences tend to be less severe than with the same kinds of violations when driving. Maybe it's because there aren't any written rules, nor pedestrian cops to enforce them. Maybe they're all just really stupid. Or maybe they're just self-centered jerks, and it simply cannot occur to them that they should take even minimal precautions to prevent colliding with, inconveniencing, and annoying their fellow walkers.

Whatever the underlying cause is that turns ordinary people into Oblivioids, the effect seems to be more pronounced in casinos than just about anywhere else. Those of us not so afflicted have to take extra defensive measures accordingly.

Addendum, August 19, 2007:

Strange coincidence. I wrote the above last night. This morning I was at the Venetian, waiting for a table. I had read all the good magazines they had, so I was reduced to perusing the awful "Action!" magazine (Summer, 2007, issue). I was startled to discover an editorial titled "Las Vegas: Litter and Slow Moving People," by a guy who just calls himself "Rude Dude." Here's the relevant excerpt:

I have ranted and raved (just a little) in past issues about tourists who
don't know how to walk in Las Vegas. You know the ones who stop right at the top
of the escalator to look around! Or the slow moving herd of people who decide to
walk side by side on Las Vegas sidewalks and in the casinos. Hellooo there are
people behind you...

I am going to run for Mayor just so I can pass my "Keep Moving" law. It
would be a simple campaign. There would be public service announcements that say, "Keep Moving." If you slow down the person behind you has the right to moo like
a cow so you will get the heck out of the way.