Dealers and players

I very much liked Andrew Brokos's blog post today at CardPlayer.com, musing about player conduct and dealer conduct. It sounds to me as if he behaves at the table much like I do. I've never met him, but I'm pretty sure we would get along famously.

Read the whole thing here.

Unusual day

Sunday was a highly atypical day for me.


Family

First I had a late lunch with my sister, her husband, one of their daughters, and her husband, all in town for the annual rodeo. Then we went bowling at Sam's Town. I won both games, scoring 139 and 150, which is pretty good for me--especially since I haven't bowled in about 18 months.

Unfortunately, in the process I somehow managed to wrench my back, so now I'm in pain and walking funny, dreading when I have to change positions. Getting old sucks.


Chinese

Came home, did some work. In the evening I sort of invited myself to a home game some friends were having--@spencer_chen, @gamble24x7, @veggiepoof, and one other whose Twitter I don't know. It was my first chance to play open-faced Chinese poker, which seems to be all the rage these days. I had never even played regular Chinese before, though I had watched it a few times and understood the basic idea.

My entire knowledge of OFCP comes from an article in Card Player magazine by Jennifer Shahade , a blog post a few days ago by Shamus, and an article by Dave Behr in the December issue of Bluff magazine, which by coincidence I had just read yesterday. So I was green as green could be, and knew I was likely to lose money. Which I did--$89, to be exact, at $1/point. But that's OK. Learning new forms of poker always costs money as one makes mistakes and, hopefully, learns from them to play better.

But ya know what? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that OFCP is not, in fact, a form of poker. For that matter, neither is traditional Chinese poker.

This is a point that I haven't seen raised in any of the three sources I mentioned, but which occurred to me as I watched the others play during the one hand out of five I had to sit out. (A maximum of four people can play at once, since each player needs 13 cards.) There are several ways to express the basic element that is missing, but they all amount to the same thing:

• There are no hole cards, no secrets that you hold which are unknown to the other players. 
• There is no betting on the strength of your hand. 
• It is a game of perfect rather than imperfect information. 
• You cannot bluff. 

Mike Matusow is generally not a font of wisdom that I turn to, but Michael Craig quotes him as saying, "If you can't steal, it ain't poker." He's absolutely right. 

Mike Caro has argued that the ability to bluff is more a defining element of poker than are cards. He describes an imaginary game of "cow chip poker," in which the players scout a nearby field for cow chips, conceal what they find in paper bags, then reassemble to bet on who has the biggest one. You can win with an empty bag by betting in such a way as to convince your opponents that you found the biggest cow chip. That's poker, even with no cards. In another hypothetical situation, he describes how two people can play poker with a deck of just three cards, because you still have the crucial elements of being able to have a secret card and bluff with the worst hand. 

Video poker is not poker, in part because it's played against the house rather than against other players, but also because it lacks secret information and bluffing. OFCP fails by that same criterion. They are both games that superficially resemble poker because they use the standard 52-card deck and poker's traditional five-card hand rankings. But resembling is not being. They are not poker. 

It was, nevertheless, highly enjoyable. I didn't find it nearly as addictive as others breathlessly describe it after first exposure, but it's definitely an intriguing game. 

Oh, and the other important thing I learned about OFCP is that people say "fuck" a lot. Really a lot. 

Television

After I got home, I watched the premier of "Sin City Rules" on TLC, which I had taped earlier. The only reason I was interested in it is because one of the stars is Jennifer Harman, whom I like. But I thought the whole thing was awful, painful, unwatchable. Jennifer is fine, but the other women are completely unbearable. They're self-absorbed attention whores. Judging by the first episode and the teaser on TLC's web site, the show exists mainly to capture and televise the catfights among them. Ick. I can't understand why anybody would watch such trash. The preview for next week's show seemed to focus more on Harman's life as a mother and poker player, so I'll probably give it one more try, but I can't see myself tuning in much beyond that. I'm kind of perplexed how she got associated with the show; she seems not at all like the others. 

And that was my completely out-of-the-ordinary day. 

Poker gems, #465

Nick Wealthall, in Bluff magazine, December, 2012, page 71.


The worst offense--one that you see time and again--is to fold a legitimate hand to a bet and then show it. There is simply no way to state how utterly stupid this is.... Over and over, you'll see players open-raise a hand, get three-bet or shoved on, think and then fold, before showing one card--an ace. Let me tell you right now you might as well have taken every good player at the table to one side before play and said, "Hey fellas, I'm the soft spot at the table. Feel free to reach into my arse and pull out as many chips as you like. Seriously, beat me up. Batter me over and over again. I fricking love it. I am here to help you!"

When a player shows a semi-strong hand he's folded, his opponents don't think, "Ooh, he's so clever to make that big laydown," they think,"Wow, what a pussy! I wonder what else I can make him fold."

How do they know?

The new issue of Card Player magazine (November 28, 2012; vol. 25, #24) has a two-page article by Craig Tapscott on pages 28-29 in which he interviews Alex "Assassinato" Fitzgerald about the latter's thought processes during a hand he played in one of the 2012 WCOOP events.

Here's the second page:

It's the graphic that has me puzzled. If you read the interview, you see that the hand ended when Fitzgerald bet on fourth street and his opponent folded.

So where do they get the river 2c in the graphic? And how do they know that the villain had the Ks-Qs?

My first thought was that the whole graphic was an error, meant for another hand. But no--the cards shown for Fitzgerald perfectly match the text of the article, as do the flop and turn cards.

I also thought that maybe the opponent showed his cards before mucking them, and/or that this occurred on one of the online poker sites that allow rabbit-hunting, in order to see what the last card would have been. But that can't be, because they specify that this occurred during the WCOOP, which is on PokerStars. Stars does not have rabbit-hunting, and does not allow players to show their hole cards when folding.

So who put those false, extraneous pieces of information into the graphic? And why?

Also, am I the only one who notices stuff like this?


ADDENDUM: See comments for explanation of the hole cards, though the 2c river remains a mystery.

New Harrah's poker room

Yesterday my friend "Apollo" tweeted a picture of a new poker room at Harrah's. This surprised me, as I had not heard that a move was in the works.

Today by coincidence I was at Harrah's. I have a friend visiting from out of town, and we decided to see the Mac King magic show. While I was there, I stopped to have a peek at the new room:

I don't play much at Harrah's, because it's a place where for some reason I have historically tended to lose more than I win. But on the occasions that I did play there, the things that I especially liked were that it was basically a hermetically sealed room. It was as perfectly isolated from casino smoke and noise as any poker room I've ever been in.

No more. Now it's right out on the casino floor, with just a low half-wall marking its border. Which means that there is no protection from the noise, and people will come and stand right next to the wall and smoke while they watch a poker game two feet away. Ick.

So now I'll have even less reason to play there than I did before.

I also stopped by the old poker room to see what was being done with it. Kind of hard to tell:

This is taken from the door leading to the sports book area.

The old Harrah's poker room is also where I first met Cardgrrl. She was standing about where that plastic bag in the foreground is.

Everything changes in Vegas.

If only

Ten minutes ago I won a pot of over $1000 by rivering quads for a one-outer. Specifically, my 4-4 beat J-J on a board of J-4-2-2-4.

So why the post title? And how am I able to be posting about it so fast?

Because ten minutes ago I was sound asleep in my bed.

"Multi-Action Poker"

New way to deal live poker will be tried at Aria starting tomorrow. Kind of like multi-tabling live. See details here.

I've seen the table at Aria. It's pretty funky. Several people have Tweeted pictures of it, such as this one from John Kim.

WPBT hike

The poker bloggers of the world were in town for the annual December gathering this past weekend. It was, as always, good to see so many smart, fun, interesting, interconnected people at once. Here's the group shot of the bunch of us just before the start of the Saturday tournament at Aria, which, shockingly, I did not win. (I had the honor of Wil Wheaton mock-derisively declaring my tournament starting table "bullshit.")

This year, for the first time, Dan England organized a hike for Friday morning. I was one of the people to show up for it. Those who survived are pictured here. Those who succumbed to wild burro attacks did not get their pictures taken. (Burro bites, like moose bites, can be pretty nasty.)

The chosen hiking path was the 4.2-mile Oak Creek Loop, just outside the Red Rock Canyon scenic drive. I took a bunch of pictures. I wasn't going to post them, because when I got home and looked at them on my computer, I found them disappointing. Josie (who doesn't get a link now cuz she isn't writing anymore) griped at me for not having blogged about the weekend. I told her that I had no good stories and the pictures were crappy. She looked at a couple and said they were better than I thought, so fine, I'm doing it. Album of hike pictures is here.

But I still have no good stories to tell.

SlotZilla

There's always something new and crazy coming to Vegas.

Tombstone Hold'em

I just learned about this game from a post on my brother's blog. He only mentions it in passing, but the name "Tombstone Hold'em" got my attention. The rules can be found here (though I assume that several times when they refer to a "pocket pair" they really mean "hole cards," which need not form a pair). It looks like fun. I just wish I had known of it in time to organize a run of it at this upcoming weekend's annual poker blogger gathering.

"You'll get there"

(No poker content.)

Last night I was browsing bike routes that local riders have uploaded, looking for someplace new to explore this morning. I found this one out in Henderson and thought it looked promising:

I did see that hill between the 11- and 12-mile marks, but thought that after my encounter with the monster climb Tuesday, I could handle this one. Ah, the hubris of youth. Or age. To tell you the truth, I didn't even check the slopes. I just looked at the total elevation change, and made a snap-call that it was manageable. Had I peered into the numbers a little more deeply, I might have seen that most of that uphill is 7-9%, and stretches of it are above 10%, peaking at 13.6%. Those numbers may not mean much to you if you have no experience comparing them with real-world roads, but trust me--those are gnarly slopes. The one that nearly killed me Tuesday was a pretty steady 4-5%. So if I had seriously studied the map for this one in Henderson, I might have spared myself what was to come.

The first part of the ride wasn't hard. About ten miles in, I got to the base of the hill and started up, determined that I was going to do it without stopping, even if it meant going ultra-slow. If I just looked a short distance in front of my tire, I could convince myself that I could do it--just keep turning the pedals one more time, then one more time after that.* But if I lifted my head and looked at how far I had to go, and how steep it was, it felt impossible.

I was pushing through the hurt, mostly managing not to discourage myself by looking too far ahead. But then about half way up, I had a sudden collapse. I had not planned on stopping to rest, but all at once I just couldn't push the pedals any more, and had to stop. I parked the bike and sat on a big rock panting, sensing my heart about to pound its way through my sternum, feeling pathetically sorry for myself. I also felt stupid: Twice in one week I had bitten off more than I could chew (an apt metaphor for Thanksgiving week). How could I have looked at the profile of this hill--a mere three days after having underestimated the one in Summerlin--and yet again failed to realize that it was beyond my capacity? Am I really that slow a learner?

As I was wallowing in fatigue and hypoxia and pain and self-pity, I glanced up and saw another cyclist coming up the hill. He was covering ground faster than I would have thought humanly possible, given how that same slope had defeated me. What's more was that he didn't look like it was killing him, or even bothering him. He appeared to be enjoying himself, as if he were just on an relaxing Sunday jaunt. At a glance it was obvious that he was a very, very strong rider. His bike and accessories were top-shelf, and he was clearly in that elite class of riders for whom such expensive purchases were justified, in that he could really squeeze their performance potential from them. If there is a bell curve of cycling ability, he and I are at opposite ends of it.

He never stopped, but he slowed down as he neared me. He called out, "Are you all right?" "Fine," I replied. "I just couldn't make it all the way up without stopping to rest."

He gave me a smile that struck me as warm and supportive, not in the least bit condescending (as he might have reason to be, given the disparity in our abilities), and said sympathetically, "It's a hard climb." By now he was past me, and he looked back over his shoulder to add, "But don't worry--you'll get there." And he sped off.

I'm not usually one to be easily affected by cheap sentiment, breezy cliches, or generic affirmations. But something about the specific words he chose and the warmth and compassion that I detected behind them gave me a real rush of confidence. Like few times that I can remember in my life, in a flash my mood and outlook were transformed. This random stranger managed, with those last six words, to pull me out of a pit of doubt and self-recrimination and snapped me back into focusing on actually getting done what I had set out to do. As soon as he had disappeared around a bend, I hopped back on my bike to attack the hill again.

And you know what? He was right. I did get there. Not nearly as fast as he did, but at my own slow pace I got to the top, when a few minutes before I had come very close to convincing myself that I couldn't do it and calling off the apparently futile attempt.


Not many worthwhile things in life are easy. Once in a while you are treated to an easy coast down a hill and the feeling is exhilarating. But very quickly that freeroll ends and you're back to the hard slog up the ugly side of the next challenge, step after step, day after day. Life is one hill after another after another, and we spend a lot more time trudging up them than we do sailing down the other side. Each one can feel endless, even pointless, as if you'll never beat it, as if you'll never get to the top.

It's a hard climb.

But don't worry--you'll get there.



*If you've never seen the documentary film "Touching the Void," you owe it to yourself to find it and watch it. It's an incredible, harrowing story of survival. In short, a guy with a broken leg has to climb down a mountain in the Andes all by himself, because his partner has left him behind, assuming that he had died in the fall that broke his leg. I thought the most interesting part was the psychological tricks he had to use to get himself through the ordeal. He had a master self who kept issuing commands, such as, "You have to get to that rock over there before you can rest." And the part of his mind that was actually carrying out the orders would protest that it couldn't be done. But the master self was like a slave driver who would accept no excuses for failure. So accomplishing one small goal at a time, pushing through the pain of one more short segment before resting, he made it down and survived. It took him several days of pushing himself in that way. I realize it's kind of melodramatic of me to compare a virtually risk-free suburban hill climb on a bicycle to that arduous journey, but I do flash back to it when trying to push myself to go a little bit farther, and then a little bit farther after that.

South Carolina case

I have just read the decision of the South Carolina Supreme Court in Town of Mount Pleasant v. Chimento, available here. I have not read any other coverage or commentary on it. I don't have time for as full a critique as I would like to write, but here are some scattered thoughts. And remember: I am not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV.


1. The entire case turns on the meaning of the phrase "any house used as a place of gaming," because the statute bans gambling only in specifically listed locations, and this is the only one from the list that could conceivably apply to the home poker game in question. The phrase is not defined by the statute. You can immediately intuit that the phrase cannot just mean "any house where gaming takes place," because if that is the intended meaning, then the legislature would have just said, "any house." Put another way, the broadest interpretation renders meaningless the qualifying verbiage, "used as a place of gaming." So when does a house shift from being one where gaming is taking place but is not "used as a place of gaming" to one where gaming is taking place and is "used as a place of gaming"? That is the crux of the whole matter.

2. The majority concludes that, sure, it will often be vague whether some particular defendant's conduct crosses that ill-defined line, but these particular defendants were so clearly on the bad side of the line that we don't have to decide where that line is. Moreover, the court said, these defendants don't even have legal standing to raise the constitutional defense of statutory vagueness.

3. I think the dissent has by far the better argument here. The dissent says that whether these defendants' conduct was clearly over the line is not the end of the inquiry. We also have to ask whether the fuzziness of the line is such an intrinsic characteristic of the statutory language that arbitrary enforcement is necessarily going to result. And she concludes that that is, in fact, the statute's fatal flaw, constitutionally speaking, independent of the question of whether these defendants' due-process rights were violated because the vagueness of the statute made it impossible for them to know whether their conduct ran afoul of the law.

These defendants were only arrested and prosecuted because of the regularity of the game's occurrence, the fact that they held open an invitation for anyone to join, because rake was taken to defray the costs of providing food, and because the stakes were more than "penny-ante." The police freely admitted that it was these criteria that caused them to make arrests. Yet none of these additional criteria are in the statute. When the police make up their own criteria for deciding who to arrest and who to leave alone, I don't see how anybody can deny that this constitutes arbitrary enforcement. Nor can I see how anybody can deny that arbitrary enforcement is both (1) constitutionally disallowed as a matter of due process and (2) odious and dangerous as a matter of public policy. As the dissent persuasively argues, this statue is so vague that arbitrariness on the part of law enforcement is not only a possibility, but an inevitable consequence, and that is something the Supreme Court has rightly and repeatedly said cannot be tolerated.

4. My preference for the dissent's conclusion really has nothing to do with my preference, as a public policy matter, that people be free to run poker games in their home. It surely has a great deal to do, however, with my personal experience with arbitrary enforcement of laws. I have been on the raw end of an arbitrary law-enforcement decision--and not in a minor way, but in a way that completely changed the entire trajectory of my life, so I have a strong visceral distaste for prosecutions that hinge on the arbitrary decisions of those charged with enforcing the laws.

5. The majority decision doesn't take issue with the conclusion of the lower court that poker is a game in which skill predominates over luck. But not a single member of the court, either in the majority or in the dissent, thought that that had any bearing on the outcome. It was completely irrelevant to the questions that the court had to answer. "Whether an activity is gaming/gambling is not dependent upon the relative roles of skill and chance, but whether there is money or something of value wagered on the game's outcome." If you hear anybody say that this court held that poker is a game of skill, they're either misinformed or deliberately misstating the facts. That language is pure dicta--i.e., a side commentary on a question that the court did not have to resolve in order to reach its conclusion. It has no legal force, and cannot properly be cited as precedent by future courts.

6. I'm appalled at Chief Justice Toal's concurrence. She effectively admits that she would vote to uphold the statute even if it is unconstitutionally vague because she fears what would happen to public decency and order if they struck it down. I consider that a flagrant abdication of her duty. In the rare instances in which a court finds that it must invalidate a statute but that doing so will leave some sort of potentially alarming gap in the state's whole statutory scheme, one compromise remedy courts can turn to is to stay (i.e., delay) the effect of the decision--say, for 30 or 60 or 90 days--to give the legislature time to enact a replacement before the old statute is declared void.

7. The dissent reads to me as if it were originally written to be a majority opinion, then tweaked later when it became a dissent. My guess is that the swing vote, Toal, was with the dissent at first, but then what became the court's opinion was amended just enough to win her over as far as the result, though she still disagreed with the main part of its reasoning. It appears that it was the section on standing that pulled her over.

8. The dissent is right, IMHO, to criticize the majority's handling of the standing question. That is, they are deciding the case (or at least settling one of its most important arguments) on the basis of a question that neither party raised to the court. Although the dissent doesn't say this, the proper thing for the court to do when it faces such a dilemma is to order the parties to do additional briefing, and perhaps even a second round of oral argument, to address the question on which the case may be turning. (This is what happened, for example, in the Citizens United case on campaign financing before the Supreme Court a couple of years ago.)

OK, that's all I have time for. Besides, it's probably more than about 99% of you are interested in already.

Climb every mountain

(No poker content.)

I found a web site, Strava, on which one can not only upload the GPS data from a bike ride, but compare it to other users who have covered the same track. I quickly discovered that one of the most popular local biking challenges is a route called the "Villa Ridge climb" in Summerlin:

I thought it would be fun and interesting to take it on and compare my time to the best that have been recorded--which, as you can see, is 13:37 for a man, 15:03 for a woman. I knew I would be vastly slower than that, but I didn't expect that I'd have difficulty even finishing the ride. After all,  I've done 24-mile rides with 1000 feet of climb, so how hard can 4.4 miles and 667 feet of climb be?

As it turns out, a lot harder than I thought. I had to stop--twice--for ten-minute breaks to catch my breath. Some of my longer rides to date have certainly left me tired, but I had never before been forced to stop because I had reached my cardiovascular limit. Until today.

The first time I must have looked a sight sitting on the curb panting, because a nice lady stopped her car, rolled down the window, and asked if I was OK. I put on a brave face. "Yes, fine, thanks--just taking a breather." Inside, though, I was dying.

When the fire in my legs and lungs again forced a halt, this time I dialed 911 and had the friendly paramedics come by and jump-start my heart a few times, as it had gone into ventricular fibrillation.

Why so much difficulty compared to my previous rides? The answer perhaps should have been obvious to me just looking at the graph above, but it became painfully apparent as I was riding: It's the unbroken, unrelenting nature of the climb. Once it starts going uphill, there are no flat spots, no downhill portions in which to do some recovery. It's just climb, climb, climb, and climb some more.That is a condition I haven't faced before, and it makes all the difference in the world.

But I did eventually make it up the hill, mostly fueled by sheer stubbornness. Well, that plus the fact that I had left my car at the top of the hill, so turning around and heading down was not an option. I confess that I was feeling so completely whipped that I probably would have wimped out and taken that option had it been available.

My time? 51 minutes, including the rest breaks. My legs felt like overcooked spaghetti for the rest of the day. Overcooked spaghetti that was on fire.

This is mildly discouraging because I've had my eye on riding Red Rock Canyon, and that is an even more difficult climb, with more than 50% greater elevation rise in about the same distance as Villa Ridge. I had previously been thinking that it would be at the outer edge of my ability, but that I could do it. I now know that I can't--at least not without taking several breaks along the way, and maybe being carried the last mile or two by my funeral procession.

On the other hand, being faced with this stark evidence of how out of shape I am gives me some motivation to do better. And having an objective, repeatable benchmark test gives me the means to track my progress. Maybe next time I can make do with one ten-minute rest and one five-minute rest. Then with just two five-minute rests, then just one. And maybe, just maybe, in a month or two I can increase my leg strength and cardiovascular reserve enough that I can make it to the top without stopping at all. (One of the advantages of living in Las Vegas is that even in the winter it doesn't get prohibitively cold for biking.)

I still won't show up on the Strava leaderboard, but that doesn't matter. I'm really only competing against myself. As long as I can get to where I can convincingly trounce the pathetic, out-of-shape, overweight, middle-aged, whiny slowpoke who barely managed to even finish the ride today, it will be something I'll be proud of.

Quiz

Steve Zolotow presents an interesting little quiz in his column for Card Player magazine (November 14, 2012, issue; vol. 25, #23, page 50). He asks the reader to estimate what percentage of the time 10s-9s will win against the following hands, assuming all-in before the flop:

1. Ac-Ad
2. Ac-Kc
3. Ac-5c
4. 5c-5d
5. 7c-6c
6. 9c-8c
7. Top 20 percent range
8. Top 40 percent range
9. Top 60 percent range
10. All hands--100 percent range

If this piques your curiosity as it did mine, take a couple of minutes to jot down your answers, before scrolling down.

















Here are the answers Zolotow gives, as percentages, followed in parentheses by the estimates I had written down:

1. 22.8 (20)
2. 38.7 (40)
3. 45.9 (45)
4. 52.4 (50)
5. 62.8 (65)
6. 69.3 (75)
7. 35.4 (30)
8. 41.6 (35)
9. 46.5 (40)
10. 54.0 (45)

Clearly I did a lot better putting in estimates against specific starting hands than I did against ranges. I have a bazillion times more experience with the former than with the latter. For the former, my guesses were all good enough that they would produce the right answer in a go/no-go situation at the table nearly every time. For the latter, though I wasn't outrageously off, I still missed by enough to cause an erroneous decision in some significant spots.

And, frankly, estimating hand strength against an opponent's range is a more important skill than estimating it against a specific hand. It's something I ought to work on.

How about you?

The near future of online poker

This insightful analysis was published nearly a month ago, but it had escaped my attention until Poker Lawyer tweeted a link to it today:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/10/22/sorry-mr-online-poker-nobody-cares-about-you.aspx

I won the Sunday Million on PokerStars

OK, well, not me, exactly, but clearly one of my disciples in the Holy Order of the Mighty Deuce-Four, somebody using the screen name Sexylady409. See the write-up of the final hand of the tournament near the end of this piece. (Thanks to Jen for the tip.)

It's the little things that count

The little cards, that is.

Last night I was playing at Aria with my friend Poker Lawyer, who was in town for a few days. Shortly before the events described herein transpired, we were also joined by another friend, Stump.

I had 2c-4c on the button and called a raise to $15 from a middle-position player. PL was on my left in the small blind, and reraised to $45. I called, and it was just us to the flop. I don't remember what hit, except that it was completely uncoordinated and had a 4. Which, of course, was plenty of reason to call her $50 flop bet, knowing that I either already had the best hand (if she was playing A-K), or would improve to it with two pair or trips on the turn or river. Turn card was a blank. She checked. I moved all in for my last $110 or so. She folded. I showed. She said, "Every trip to Vegas I lose $100 to you when you have that hand!"

She is, apparently, learning, however. She won a big pot with 2-4 when I was away from the table on a phone call.

Not long after that 2-4 hand I had 6s-3s. The 6-3 is a hand that my friend Grange95 and his other Iowa poker-playing friends call "The Spanish Inquisition," because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. (I have written about this a few times before. See here.) I raised to $13. The guy to PL's left called. His play was a completely straightforward, conservative, ABC style. (He also bragged to us about his niece the porn star, but that's another story.) Flop: 6-3-6 with two diamonds. OK, that might be good for me.

I was surprised that Porn Star Uncle led out with a $20 bet, but I was happy that he had a hand that he liked well enough to do that with. I was guessing a medium pair, 7s or 8s or 9s. He tended to reraise pre-flop with 10s or higher. I didn't really think he had a flush draw, because he was not the type to take over the betting lead with a draw. I also didn't think he had a straight draw, because even if he had called me with a 4-5 (presumably suited), I didn't think he would lead out with it. I hoped against hope that he had 3-3 in the hole, though this seemed unlikely. I called.

Turn was 4d. This time he bet $35. He was not one to lead out betting twice without a hand that he liked a lot, so I felt confident now putting in a raise to $100. He rechecked his hole cards before calling. Aha! He probably has a big pair with a diamond, and he was playing it more cautiously pre-flop than most people would. I don't think he would call that raise with just an overpair unless it included a big diamond, hoping for a flush. I mentally joined him in hoping that he would get there.

He did. The river was the 7d. Now, this put a four-card straight flush on the board, which gave me a bit of pause. But he checked to me. If he had the 5d, I didn't think he would take a chance on missing a value bet if I got scared by that board and checked behind. I also didn't think he would have bet out on the flop with just a gutshot straight-flush draw. Furthermore, since both the 4d and 6d were on the board, he couldn't have started with suited connectors that included the 5d, and I didn't read him for being somebody who would play gappers after a pre-flop raise. And, finally, if I flop a full house and lose to runner-runner straight flush, well, them's the breaks, and I'm going to feel like I just got ridiculously unlucky, not that I played badly. However, failing to value-bet a full house when I think my opponent has just made a big flush, because of "monsters under the bed syndrome," would indeed be playing badly.

So I shoved. He called instantly and flipped over pocket queens, including, of course, the Qd. I showed the full house. Judging by his facial expression and sputtered words, I think it's safe to say that he did not expect the Spanish Inquisition. Our chief weapon is surprise.

Frankly, I'm still puzzled by his call. He should have been worried that I had Ad-Kd or Ad-Jd when I raised the turn, or that I had an unsuited big ace with the Ad that beat him on the river. He had seen me bluffing before, but never for anywhere near this amount. Maybe he didn't notice that those had been much smaller pots.

Anyway, he had me covered just barely, and I ended up doubling up with that $680 pot. Nice work if you can get it.

PL and I told the table about our strange Iowa friends and their love of the Spanish Inquisition. The next hand I played was again a 6-3. I raised, bet the K-4-5 flop, got a caller. Turn was 2, giving me the nuts. I bet and the other guy folded, his face registering obvious suspicion. I showed again.

Within five minutes, I had S.I. a third time. This time I just called somebody else's raise. Flop again had a 4 and 5, so I called. Turn 7. He checked. I bet. He folded.

By this time, everybody knew. It was no longer true that nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition. In fact, everybody was fully anticipating exactly what I had, and they were right.

Lesson: A hand that nobody expects has diminishing returns as they learn to expect it. Which, of course, means that you move on to other hands that they are not expecting. In big-bet poker, a disproportionate share of your profit will come from hands that are outside of the range your opponents will think you are playing in a given situation.

One player joked to me, "I see you winning with 2-4 and 3-6, and I feel that I'm learning the wrong poker lessons here." I corrected him: "No, you are finally learning the truth about which hands are actually the strongest. The books you've read have it all wrong."

A tip o' the hat to Grange95 for cluing me in to the power of the 6-3. It's no 2-4, but clearly it will do in a pinch.

Poker gems, #464

Andrew Brokos, in Card Player magazine column, November 14, 2012 (vol. 25, #23), page 40.


I'd rather have a good hand and the best position than the best hand and poor position.

"Touch-bet"

I have twice recently come across the phrase "touch-bet" as a poker term, and I don't know exactly what it means.

Both times have been in Poker Player Newspaper columns by David "The Maven" Chicotsky. First, in the September 25 issue he wrote:

Remember also that even though our continuation bet of 375 is very small relative to the pot, it still represents about 25% of our opponent’s stack left behind. Quite often we’re able to use our stack leverage against our opponent by making polarized bets that are very small or big relative to the effective stack in the hand.  

This is one of those examples where I’d prefer to see us make a value- oriented-bluff touch-bet on the flop, or put our opponent all in. Just because you’re used to betting a certain size on the flop, doesn’t make it the optimal size for the given situation.

The second example is from his November 19 column (not available online yet):

We are able to bet larger or small in an attempt to mitigate risk; betting larger with a naked draw or betting smaller with absolute air (such as a touch-bet). Sometimes betting smaller gives off the impression that we have a strong hand against thinking players. It's possible to come up with a bunch of reasons to bet more or less than our normal default bet sizing. 

Obviously the context is virtually identical for these two instances. I can get a general sense that it's a small continuation bet after missing the flop. But is there something more precise about it than that--more conditions that define it or set it apart from other continuation bets? The fact that both instances of its use come from Chicotsky makes me suspect that it's a term that he and/or his pal Ari Engel came up with. But so far a Google search has been fruitless in coming up with a clearer description of what the phrase means.

Anyone? Anyone?



Addendum, November 13, 2012 

I asked Chicotsky via Twitter for an explanation of his terminology. His response:

Pocket guide

A bunch of copies of this book were in the magazine rack in the poker room at Mandalay Bay when I was there yesterday. Last week I saw somebody in my Twitter feed mention having picked one up at Treasure Island, I think.

It's a guide to the poker rooms of Las Vegas. Each room has either one or two pages, with details about location, contact information, games spread, tournament schedule, and promotions.

Nothing in the book indicates who compiled or published it, or why. At first glance you'd think that it's paid for by advertising. But the only ad anywhere is the back cover, which is a splash for the Venetian poker room.

A printed book is a strange medium for this kind of information these days. The details change so fast that the book was guaranteed to be out of date the day it hit the stands. And it was. Two of the poker rooms it lists have already closed (Jokers Wild and Aliante Station). One promotion listed expires December 15, another expires at the end of November, and several more at the end of the regular NFL season, further assuring that the book will very quickly be hopelessly outdated. The entry for the Suncoast poker room mentions a promotion that was good only during August!

Even All Vegas Poker, a web site dedicated to tracking what's going on in the city's poker rooms, has difficulty keeping up with the ever-changing promotions and tournament schedules. My understanding is that they call every poker room manager every week to see what's new. My guess is that it's rare that a single day passes without at least one piece of information found in this book changing. When most people are carrying around a web-enabled smart phone, a book like this just doesn't make much sense.

And, by the way, you'd have to be Captain Kangaroo to have a pocket big enough for this "Pocket Guide," which is 5 1/2" by 8 1/2".

Whoever published it also could have used a good proofreader. The table of contents lists "The Strip" a second time instead of "Off Strip" for a section header. It calls the Eastside Cannery the "Eastside Canner." There are odd errors inside, such as a reference to free meal as a "compliment buffet." Fremont Street is misspelled as "Freemont" all three times it appears. The plural of "ace" is written as "ace's." "Please" is spelled "Pleas."

This book is just an all-around mystery. Who produced it? Why? And if you're going to bother with putting such volatile information out in a book format, why such a bad job of it?

Once again, the world baffles me.