Unusual rule at Mandalay Bay

The Mandalay Bay poker room is rather notorious for its quirky set of house rules. (See posts here and here and here for examples.) Today I noticed another.

Most must-move games operate first in/first out. That is, the person who has been at the table the longest is forced to move to the regular game when a seat opens up there. Mandalay does it backwards: The person who has been there the longest is given the option of moving, but is not forced to move; if they go down the whole list and nobody wants to go, the last person to have joined the table is the one that will be required to move.

I like this! It is, so far, the only one of the idiosyncratic house rules at Mandalay that I think is superior to the standard procedure. Those who arrived first should be given the option to move or stay; they have the most invested in having observed opponents and having created a table image.

I had noticed the floor staff operating like this at Mandalay previously, but I thought they were just kind of casually bending the rules. Today a comment from the supervisor clued me in that this is, in fact, what their protocols dictate.

Is there any reason this idea should not be implemented universally? I can't see any down side to it. It seems like the way things should be everywhere.

Poker gems, #316

Mike Caro, in Caro's Most Profitable Hold'em Advice, p. 272.


7. When You're Not in a Pot and Don't Feel Like Observing--Don't

I believe that one of the main reasons players don't learn observational skills, and thereby sacrifice profits, is that observing constantly is agony. It's better to let your mind rest when it wants to rest. Always observe when you're in a hand. Otherwise, when it's comfortable to observe do; when it's not, don't.

Yes, you can force yourself to concentrate more and play a little better for short periods. But most people will find that they burn out quickly and are unable to play longer sessions in profitable games if they force concentration when their minds rebel. I believe that in those long, profitable games, you should let your brain relax between hands whenever it wants to.

She's got 'em

A woman sitting next to me at Mandalay Bay today had this unusual card protector: two 9mm cartridges welded or soldered together.*

By this means, whenever an opponent asks what she has, she can say, "I've got bullets," and not be lying.**



* You can see by the pierced primers that they have been fired, then reloaded, presumably without gunpowder. If you're knowledgeable about guns, you can even tell that they were fired in a gun with a traditional hammer (e.g., a Browning Hi-Power), rather than in one with an internal striker (e.g., a Glock). This is because the indentation in the primer is round rather than rectangular. If you're truly a gun nut, the kind who loads his own ammunition in the basement, you might even notice that these rounds were badly made and overpressured, probably with an excessive load of powder; the primers are flattened and backed out. If I had made these, I would throw the batch away. Continuing to use them risks blowing up an expensive gun. They're probably pretty safe to use as card protectors, however.


** The shooting enthusiast in me, though, wants to be sure that all understand that it is erroneous, though terribly common, to refer to loaded cartridges as bullets. A bullet is the projectile component of the cartridge, not the cartridge itself.

Guess the casino, #285

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Answer: Rio

Deuce-four is always good, of course...

...but I admit that I've never seen it win quite like this before. See this Twitpic from David Stucke, whose 2-3 made three pair but lost to the mighty 2-4: http://twitpic.com/k4na2

I'm going to Washington, D.C., and Atlantic City

My friend Cardgrrl has kindly invited me to come play some poker on her home turf: an assortment of tournament leagues, private home games, and underground raked cash games in the environs of Washington, D.C. I have accepted the challenge. The games begin Thursday, October 15, and run through Monday, October 26. I understand that I have at least a few readers among the denizens of those games, and it will be fun to meet and play with them. (I briefly met about seven of her "A league" crew when they were out here for the World Series in June, but I'll have to admit I was in a pretty down mood that day and probably didn't make a good first impression. I hope they'll forgive that and give me another chance.)

Plans include a side trip to Atlantic City the first weekend (Saturday, October 17, through Monday, October 19), on one of Cardgrrl's monthly Harrah's-sponsored bus junkets. Harrah's AC will be the main hang-out joint, but I'll see if I can persuade her to take a cab to the other part of town and try playing a bit at Caesars and/or Bally's and/or Showboat, since all should provide equal Harrah's credits. Besides, it will be a chance to add to my poker chip collection.

Any reader tips about the poker rooms, hotel/casino amenities, restaurants, sightseeing (if anything in Atlantic City can be so labeled), etc., will be warmly welcomed in the comments section.

Ever since I moved here, I have thought that I should take a week or at least weekend trip to other poker venues: Reno, L.A., or even little ol' Laughlin. But I just never get around to it. The plethora of poker rooms here just seems too cushy to provide much of an incentive to go anywhere else. I'm glad to finally get--and take--the chance to do so, especially with a travelling companion/poker pal as delightful as Cardgrrl.



(Map shot above nipped from the Atlantic City page of www.thepokeratlas.com.)

Guess the casino, #284

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Answer: M Resort

Guess the casino, #283

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Answer: Fiesta Henderson

Poker gems, #315

Mike Caro, in Caro's Most Profitable Hold'em Advice, p. 301.


[M]astering the science of poker, both tactical and psychological, is only half the job. The other half is finding the world's weakest wimps and pouncing.

You can relax now

I'm sure all of you "Guess the casino" fans were sweating, because we were getting close to the end of the batch that I had prepared a couple of months ago. Would there be more? Well, you can breathe easy. I just spent the last couple of hours uploading the next batch. "Guess the casino" is now officially safe. They will continue to deploy one a day, usually at 1:00-2:00 a.m., at least until December 4 now, even if I were to die. (That's not in the plans, but ya never know.)

Poker gems, #314

Mike Caro, in Caro's Most Profitable Hold'em Advice, pp. 298-299.


At the first event at the 2006 World Series of Poker, I held 8-8 when the flop was 8-8-6. You're right. I lost to a straight flush. Couple this with a myriad of two- and three-card "miracles" with which opponents recently eliminated me from the rare tournaments I enter and I could get to feeling sorry for myself.

Now, are those sad stories, or what? At least one kibitzer thought so. On my way out the door at a tournament, he commiserated, "I saw that beat you took with the two jacks last time, too. You really get a lot of good hands beat, don't you?"

I said, "I think I get beat, on average, with better hands than almost anyone else."

He seemed surprised that I would say that. "So, you're usually unlucky?"

"No," I corrected, "I'm not unlucky at all."

"But you just said you got beat with big hands."

"That's right," I told him. "But I don't mind."

Moral of the story

Getting beat with bigger hands on average than your opponents is not a sign of misfortune. Aspiring professional players need to understand that. If you play skillfully, if you have a winning game plan, if you succeed, then you will absolutely lose, on average, with bigger hands than your opponents. That's because the hands you play are, on average, stronger.

Players complain about being drawn out on. Even world-class players complain about it. But, if you're a great player, you should be drawn out on much more often than other players. Why? Because you usually have the stronger hand to begin with. In fact, if you always started with the best hand against an opponent, then every single time you lost, you would take a bad beat. How else could you lose?

So, now you have new goals in poker.

Your New Goals

1. To have as many of your losing hands as possible be bad beats, and
2. To never complain about it.

Poker gems, #313

Mike Caro, in Caro's Most Profitable Hold'em Advice, p. 296.


I was almost convinced years ago to establish a 900 number that players could use to phone in their most miserable experiences at poker. A fully trained and sympathetic staff would, for $4.95 a minute, listen attentively.

Our skilled Bad Beat hotline employees would know precisely when to sigh empathetically, and when to use one of the three permitted responses: "Oh, my gosh, no!" "That's just awful!" and "I can't believe you didn't kill yourself after that hand!"

I caution players never to talk about their bad luck at the poker table. The reason is simple: Opponents are inspired by your bad luck. They then think of you as someone they can beat, and they play better against you. It's not a good idea to discuss your personal poker misfortunes, because that tends to reinforce the bad experiences, even in your own mind. At my seminars I explain how complaining about missing twenty-seven flushes in a row might actually make you want to miss the twenty-eighth one so that you can show your cards and say, "See, this is what I mean."

Guess the casino, #282

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Answer: Venetian

People are rude and disgusting

No, that's not a new revelation to me. But I was reminded of the fact again tonight during the Mookie.

Look at this. My dear friend Cardgrrl, who got knocked out earlier, was watching me. When it was down to three-handed, it was clear that the other two players had it in for each other. They were raising each other light and shoving light, taunting each other in chat. At the same time, I was going through a card-dead phase: 10-3, 6-2, etc. So I decided to fold a lot more than I usually would, and let those two slug it out for a while. I was perfectly content to sit back and then take on one of them heads-up. Of course, I would have gotten involved if I got dealt something strong enough to go up against both of them with (because neither was in a folding mood), but that wasn't happening.

Anyway, that decision resulted in this chat exchange, spread out over maybe a dozen or so hands:

Full Tilt Poker Game #15046286357: The Mookie (109308627), Table 1

JOELPOKERGOD: Rake well folding up the money ladder like a girl lol
VBPro7 (Observer): yeah he sucks
cardgrrl (Observer): "like a girl"... what are you, an idiot?
cardgrrl (Observer): oh wait...
Rakewell: that would be yes
VBPro7 (Observer): nicejob Rake
VBPro7 (Observer): take these ROOKIES
JOELPOKERGOD: hes a nit
cardgrrl (Observer): better a nit than a not-nice person
cardgrrl (Observer): :)
VBPro7 (Observer): id do cardgrrrl69
JOELPOKERGOD: lol il bluff her azz later
VBPro7 (Observer): i'd rather lick it
cardgrrl (Observer): you all lead very active fantasy lives
cardgrrl (Observer): gl with that
VBPro7 (Observer): she fiesty
VBPro7 (Observer): i wanna oil her up and chase her around
cardgrrl (Observer): better save the oil for your long lonely nights dude

(At this point, Mike Maloney knocks out JOELPOKERGOD.)

Mike_Maloney: I'd say gg, but, you kind of suck
JOELPOKERGOD (Observer): Go to hell ealier
VBPro7 (Observer): lol you KINDA suck
JOELPOKERGOD (Observer): lol
VBPro7 (Observer): how rude
JOELPOKERGOD (Observer): i do suck
JOELPOKERGOD (Observer): this is a tough game tho vb
JOELPOKERGOD (Observer): lol
VBPro7 (Observer): yeah right
VBPro7 (Observer): im just here for the women
JOELPOKERGOD (Observer): Rakewell is really bad


As long as I'll live, I will never understand (1) men being sexually crude to women just because they are women, and (2) people being nasty to each other for no discernible reason at all. It makes me want to shake them and say, "What the hell is wrong with you that you get pleasure from saying things like that?"

For all the good it would do.

And yes, I do realize that this snippet is fairly tame as such things are known to go. But I don't play online much, so I can usually be blissfully unaware of it.

I haven't tried to look up who JOELPOKERGOD or VBPro7 are, or whether they have poker blogs of their own, but really, guys--it's not funny, it's not cute, it doesn't make you look smart, it doesn't make you look superior. You show off what vile, stupid, pathetic, desperate people you are. It's not at all clear to me why you would want to do that. It's a form of psychopathology that I really don't get.

The overwhelming sense conveyed, to me at least, is that these are people who are seriously screwed up, and have somehow developed such a demented, warped view of the world and its inhabitants that they think this type of interaction is normal. Perhaps it's the only way they know of to behave. If so, that's just as sad as it is annoying.

Close, but not quite

I stayed home and played the Mookie tonight. First time I've ever cashed in it, and I came in second. Of course, with only 17 players, it's not exactly a world-class accomplishment.

It's hard to go deep in a tournament without getting insanely lucky at least once, and this one was mine. As far as I know, it was the only time I got a lot of chips in bad:



That guy had been a thorn in my side for a long time. He was always raising my blinds light, so this time I just called with my AK. I shoved the flop, he called, then I caught my 3-outer. Hee hee hee!

Other than that, I thought I played pretty well throughout. I didn't blow up, which is something of a novelty.

Guess the casino, #281

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Answer: Tuscany

This would be me

So many diamonds!

I was playing a heads-up sit-and-go HORSE tournament with Cardgrrl a little while ago when this hand came up.

The diamonds just kept pouring in! If I've ever seen a seven-card flush in stud before, it didn't make enough of an impression that I remember it. This one even included four parts of a royal flush to boot.

How rare is it? Well, let's work it out. The first card can be anything, because I'm interested in the question of getting all seven cards from the same suit, not just in diamonds specifically. The second card obviously has to match the suit of the first, or the process is foiled from the get-go. There are 51 unseen cards left in the deck, of which 12 are of the same suit, so the probability of getting dealt a second one is 12/51. Similarly, to get the third card to match, it must be one of the now 11 remaining of that suit out of the 50 unknown cards.

Continuing that logic, the cumulative probability of getting the last six cards all to match the first card in suit is 12/51 x 11/50 x 10/49 x 9/48 x 8/47 x 7/46. That works out to 0.000051 (0.0051%), or about one time in 19,491 hands.

As a double-check that I didn't screw that up, I went at it a different way. There are 1716 different seven-card combinations that you can pull from a quarter-deck of 13 cards (e.g., all the diamonds), because C(13, 7) = 1716. There are four suits, so a total of 1716 x 4 = 6864 different seven-card combinations you can draw from a standard deck that will be seven-card flushes. The total number of seven-card combinations you can draw from a 52-card deck is given by C(52, 7), which Excel tells me is 133,784,560. Therefore, the probability of drawing seven cards at random and having it be one of the all-one-suit combinations should be 6864/133,784,560, which is--TA DA!--0.000051, exactly the same as with the first approach. That give me great confidence that I have the number right.

It's meaningless, of course, since there is no bonus for having a seven-card flush instead of a five-card flush. But it sure is pretty--and quite rare.

Guess the casino, #280

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Answer: Red Rock

Dumb idea

Last night I watched the season's first installment of "The Amazing Race." I have watched this show most seasons, so I'm not tuning in just because they have a couple of poker players this time around. What can I say? I like it, and "Survivor," and "Big Brother." Sometimes my taste is hopelessly middle class.

Anyway, as most readers already know, Maria Ho and Tiffany Michelle are on it. They came up with a boneheaded idea: They were going to go the whole race without telling anybody about the poker thing. Instead, they cooked up a story that they worked in a Southern California nonprofit that served the homeless, or some such crock. Their idea was that if the other teams thought they were rich and didn't need the money, they would become targets and not get any help or sympathy.

Yeah, right.

As soon as they announced this plan, I knew it was doomed to failure. What's more, the reason it couldn't possibly work was so damned obvious that I am at a loss to understand why they thought the scheme would work. The flaw is this: They have both been on television way, way too much not to get recognized by somebody.

Surely they both have had people recognize them in, say, airports. And surely they have both watched the show in previous seasons enough to know that the contestants spend a lot of time in airports. Are they unable to put two and two together?

Sure enough, in the very first episode, it happens just like that. They ask a random stranger for a bit of help--in an airport, no less--and in addition to helping them, he says, "I know who you are," and outs them, where other teams can overhear.

Well, DUH! Of course that was going to happen. So now in addition to the negative effects that might come from other teams being jealous or resentful of their modest degree of success and fame in poker, they have the added burden of having started off the competition lying to everybody else's face, in a way that was trying to win good-guy points (helping the homeless). In other words, they got caught acting in what others will likely perceive not just as a game strategem akin to bluffing, but in a morally and socially reprehensible manner.

Brilliant, girls. Just brilliant.

I do not foresee this duo going far in the game.