There was only one possible outcome

 KK versus 2-4, all in pre-flop. The kings never had a chance. 

Thanks to Rob for the notification. 

https://x.com/msptpoker/status/2083248470534607276?s=20

New book

 

I haven't read this new book by Matt Matros, but with The Mighty Deuce-Four on the cover, it must be good! 

The Mighty Deuce-Four on "No Gamble No Future"

 

Deuce-Four defeats Jean-Robert Bellande

 In the latest episode of "High Stakes Poker," Rick Salomon raised with deuce-four, Bellande three-bet with pocket queens, and Salomon quickly re-raised all-in. After agonizing a bit, Bellande folded. 

And this is Bellande's face after Salomon showed: 

Now, this doesn't make sense. If Bellande were any good at poker, he would be exhibiting relief. He would know that QQ doesn't stand a chance against 2-4, and that he made the right decision. 

ChatGPT knows nothing about poker

I asked it this: "Is deuce-four a strong starting hand in no-limit hold'em poker?"

It replied: 

The strength of any starting hand in no-limit hold'em poker depends on various factors such as your position at the table, your opponents' tendencies, the stack sizes, and the stage of the tournament or cash game.

That being said, deuce-four is generally considered to be one of the weakest starting hands in no-limit hold'em. It is unlikely to make strong pairs or straights, and it can be easily dominated by higher pairs or stronger hands. In most cases, it is not a hand that you would want to invest a lot of chips in, especially in early or middle positions.

Of course, there may be some situations where deuce-four can be played profitably, such as in late position or against weaker players who are more likely to make mistakes. However, in general, it is not a hand that you would want to rely on to win big pots in no-limit hold'em poker.

A betting paradox that might make your head hurt

 I read about this paradox in a Scientific American article, and could not believe it was true until I had played around with the numbers for a while. It still bothers me, even though I've accepted it. 

Suppose a casino has introduced a new table game they call "17/20." You put a bet down--let's say $100. They flip a fair coin--a genuinely random, 50/50 chance of heads or tails. If it's heads, you win 20% of your bet. If it's tails, you lose 17% of your bet. 

Sounds great, right? It's obviously +EV to play, because you'll either win $20 or lose $17. That's a positive EV of $1.50. 

Now consider what happens if you play twice, and one time it's heads, the other time it's tails. If heads comes first, you now have $120. But then the next toss is tails, so you lose 17% of $120, which is $20.40, leaving you with $99.60--less than you started with. 

If tails comes up first, you lose $17, leaving you with $83. Then it's heads, and you win 20% of that, or $16.60. Now you have $99.60--the same as when it went heads then tails. This shows that it doesn't matter what order the wins and losses come in. 

Even if you win exactly half the time and lose exactly half the time, you still bleed your money away to the house over time. And that is so even though each potential win is greater than each potential loss, before the coin is tossed. 

So this is the paradox: The game is +EV to play once, but -EV to play more than once. The reason is pretty straightforward: 17% of $120 (your loss on the second toss in the head-then-tails scenario) is a larger amount than 20% of $100 (your win on the first toss). And 17% of $100 (your loss on the first toss in the tails-then-heads scenario) is a larger amount than 20% of $83. 

You could fiddle with the percentages and change the long-term outcome. If a win is defined as 20% of your bet, the break-even point will be if a loss is 16.666...% of the bet. Any more than that, and the game is a loser. Below that, it's +EV in the long run. 

Now, I think you could game it so that you're effectively resetting it each time to be like the first toss. That is, if your first toss is a win, you take the $20 profit off the table and bet $100 again. If the first toss is a loss, you add $17 from your pocket and bet $100 again. With a balanced number of heads and tails, and each heads a $20 profit and each tails a $17 loss, you should make money over time. But I think we have to assume that the casino's rules wouldn't allow that, since they're not going to spread any game that's that easy to beat. (Let's not quibble over exactly how the rules would be written or enforced; this is just a hypothetical exercise.) But if you leave the money on the table untouched, and keep playing, it will eventually disappear into the casino's coffers. 

I was hugely surprised by this. I would not have thought it possible to devise a game--especially one so simple--that is +EV to play once, but -EV to play more than once. 

Addendum, May 24, 2021 

You'll need to read the discussion in the comments below for this to make sense. My commenters have caused me to rethink and recalculate. I did so in an attempt to show why they were wrong--but that's not exactly what happened. 

There are a few different pieces to this. 

The two-toss strategy

In the OP, I said that the game would be +EV to play one toss, but -EV for more than one. So suppose you walk into this casino every day and, starting with $100 on the table, play for exactly two coin tosses--no more, no less--then quit for the day. What would be your long-term results? 

As the commenters point out, there are four equally probable outcomes: HH, HT, TH, and TT. Over the long run, those should happen equally often. The net profits/losses are, respectively, +44, -0.40, -0.40, and -31.11. The sum of those is +12.09, an average of $3.02 per day profit, or $1.51 per coin toss. 

Interestingly, that's a hair more than the $1.50 profit per toss that we would calculate to be the EV of playing one toss and quitting. Which suggests that playing the two-toss strategy is more profitable. 

The three-toss strategy

So I went to the obvious next step: Suppose I always play three tosses per session. Now there are 8 equally probable outcomes. One outcome is HHH, which yields +72.80. One is TTT, which yields -42.82. There are three combinations with two heads and one tails, each of which is +19.52. there are three combinations with one heads and two tails, -17.33. Add all those up, and it's +36.55, for an average profit of $4.57 per day, or $1.52 per toss. 

So now it appears that the 3-toss strategy is more profitable--both per day and per toss--than the 2-toss strategy, which in turn is more profitable than the 1-toss strategy. 

This is not what I expected. 

Asymmetry 

As the commenters point out, the difference lies in the outcomes when you don't have an exactly 50/50 split in heads and tails. It's clearly, demonstrably true that any session you play in which the heads and tails are exactly evenly divided results in a net loss. E.g., playing 8 tosses, with 4H and 4T (in any order) yields a net loss of $1.59 on the initial $100 bet (again, with all the money left on the table until the end). 

But the interesting part happens in the asymmetrical outcomes. On the rare occasion that you play an 8-toss strategy and get all 8 tails, you're left with $22.52 on the table at the end, for a loss of $77.48. But you will equally often get a run of all 8 heads, at the end of which you will have $429.98 on the table, for a profit of $329.98. The probabilities are symmetrical, but the outcomes are decidedly asymmetrical. The same sort of thing is true for each balanced pair of possible outcomes, e.g., 7H1T/7T1H, or 5H3T/3H5T. 

In fact, if you extend the idea to, say, a 1000-toss strategy, you'll quickly realize that many days you'll lose the entire starting $100 (assuming that the casino doesn't deal in bets of a fraction of a penny) long before the thousandth toss. Your losses are capped at $100, but your wins are potentially unlimited. 

This is, I now think, the key consideration. I was previously assuming that an exactly 50/50 split was the most likely, and since the probabilities of uneven heads/tails splits were symmetrical, those could just be disregarded. 

Long sessions

With that in mind, I set up an Excel spreadsheet to simulate a 10,000-toss strategy, and ran it 20 times. I kind of suspect that Excel's random-number generator is a little wonky, because I got 15 outcomes with more than 5000 heads, and only 5 with less. But that doesn't matter for present purposes. 

In 13 trials, I had a fraction of a cent left--call it zero. In five trials, I had less than $1 left. These included, e.g., 5038 heads leaving me with $0.24, and 5041 heads leaving me with $0.73. (Remember that because an exactly even 50/50 distribution is always a loss, you have to be well above the average number of heads to ever leave with a profit.) 

But in two trials, I had hugely positive results. In one that had 5086 heads (and, of course, 4914 tails), the final amount on the table was $11,629,561! And in one extremely improbable trial, the spreadsheet somehow came up with 5125 heads, yielding--you'd better be sitting down for this--$20 trillion! 

Now, that's another outcome that makes me suspect Excel's RNG, because getting 5125 heads out of 10,000 tosses has a probability of only about 0.0064. (I used this online binomial calculator to get that number.) But the point is that in long sessions in which luck favors you with substantially more heads than tails, you can win huge amounts, while in the equally probable sessions with substantially more tails than heads, you still lose only $100 each time. 

Conclusion 

I think I was wrong about how to calculate the EV of the game beyond a single toss--as was the author of the Scientific American article. And I appreciate the two commenters for pressing me to look deeper. 

Addendum, May 24, 2021 

Not all Scientific American articles are available online, but the one that started this for me happens to be. "Is Inequality Inevitable?" by Bruce M. Boghosian: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/

Here's the relevant section: 

In 1986 social scientist John Angle first described the movement and distribution of wealth as arising from pairwise transactions among a collection of “economic agents,” which could be individuals, households, companies, funds or other entities. By the turn of the century physicists Slava Ispolatov, Pavel L. Krapivsky and Sidney Redner, then all working together at Boston University, as well as Adrian Drgulescu, now at Constellation Energy Group, and Victor Yakovenko of the University of Maryland, had demonstrated that these agent-based models could be analyzed with the tools of statistical physics, leading to rapid advances in our understanding of their behavior. As it turns out, many such models find wealth moving inexorably from one agent to another—even if they are based on fair exchanges between equal actors. In 2002 Anirban Chakraborti, then at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata, India, introduced what came to be known as the yard sale model, called thus because it has certain features of real one-on-one economic transactions. He also used numerical simulations to demonstrate that it inexorably concentrated wealth, resulting in oligarchy.

To understand how this happens, suppose you are in a casino and are invited to play a game. You must place some ante—say, $100—on a table, and a fair coin will be flipped. If the coin comes up heads, the house will pay you 20 percent of what you have on the table, resulting in $120 on the table. If the coin comes up tails, the house will take 17 percent of what you have on the table, resulting in $83 left on the table. You can keep your money on the table for as many flips of the coin as you would like (without ever adding to or subtracting from it). Each time you play, you will win 20 percent of what is on the table if the coin comes up heads, and you will lose 17 percent of it if the coin comes up tails. Should you agree to play this game?

You might construct two arguments, both rather persuasive, to help you decide what to do. You may think, “I have a probability of ½ of gaining $20 and a probability of ½ of losing $17. My expected gain is therefore:

½ x ($20) + ½ x (-$17) = $1.50

which is positive. In other words, my odds of winning and losing are even, but my gain if I win will be greater than my loss if I lose.” From this perspective it seems advantageous to play this game.

Or, like a chess player, you might think further: “What if I stay for 10 flips of the coin? A likely outcome is that five of them will come up heads and that the other five will come up tails. Each time heads comes up, my ante is multiplied by 1.2. Each time tails comes up, my ante is multiplied by 0.83. After five wins and five losses in any order, the amount of money remaining on the table will be:

1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 0.83 x 0.83 x 0.83 x 0.83 x 0.83 x $100 = $98.02

so I will have lost about $2 of my original $100 ante.” With a bit more work you can confirm that it would take about 93 wins to compensate for 91 losses. From this perspective it seems disadvantageous to play this game.

Addendum, June 10, 2021 

I emailed the author of the article about my concerns. He responded, saying that many people had raised similar questions, so when the article was reprinted in a book, he took the opportunity to revise the section in question for greater clarity. 

 Here's the relevant portion of the revised version of the article he sent me: 

(The revision is posted here with Mr. Boghosian's kind permission. Source: B.M. Boghosian, “The Inescapable Casino”, reprinted in “The Best Writing on Mathematics 2020”, M. Pitici ed., Princeton University Press (2020).)

This revision sounds correct to me: the EV is positive, but you'll lose more often than you'll win. I still quibble with the last sentence, that "it seems decidedly disadvantageous to play this game." I mean, there's a sense in which that's true, but only if you're tallying wins and losses, while taking no account of their magnitudes--which seems like not the best method of accounting. It was this sentence that made me think that Mr. Bohosian was saying that the game's EV was negative when played more than one toss. I see now that that wasn't actually what he was trying to say. 

Of course, you have to be able to tolerate the losses without going broke. In his email to me, Mr. Boghosian mentioned the Kelly criteria for determining what fraction of one's bankroll can be risked. I think Kelly's formula is pretty well known among serious poker players. Phil Laak is particularly vocal about it--e.g, this 2009 Bluff magazine column. For an introduction, see here or here. 

 

What are the odds?

 Yesterday Poker News published this article about a remarkable hand at the final table of an event in the Lone Star Poker Series. It was all-in pre-flop, Troy Clogston's JsJh against short-stacked Don Iyengar's AdJc. Nothing remarkable about that, or about the way the board fell. What was remarkable was Clogston calling every card of the board before seeing it. Read the article and watch the embedded video there for the details of how it played out. 

Last night I was telling Nina about this. She asked what the probability was. Offhand, I guessed one in a million. This was an actual quick estimate on my part, not just thoughtlessly spouting the cliched "one in a million." Nina thought that was low by an order of magnitude--more like one in ten million. 

So I decided to do the math and see. As I write these words, I still haven't done the calculation, so I don't know the answer. By the time I finish this post, I will. 

We start with the flop. Clogston called for 8-9-10 rainbow. (I don't actually hear "rainbow" in the video, because the announcer talks over it, but I'm assuming it's there, as the text of the article says.) The flop not only comes 8s9h10c, but in that exact order. Now, I don't think the order matters, because surely everybody would give him credit for the call even if the order had been different. So let's ignore the left-to-right order. With 48 unknown cards, and none of the known cards being of the three ranks in question, what is the probability of this guess? 

There are 17,296 different ways of drawing three cards from a deck of 48. (You can find a combination/permutation calculator here.) There are 24 different ways of assembling 8-9-10 rainbow. (Each of four 8s can be matched with each of three 9s and each of two 10s, and 4 x 3 x 2 = 24.) So 24 of the possible 17,296 combinations would fulfill the first guess. Probability: 24/17,296 = 0.001388. This equals about 1 in 720. 

Now we're to the turn. We have 45 unseen cards remaining. So guessing one is the straightforward probability of 1/45, or 0.02222. 

On the river, it's 1/44, or 0.02273. 

For Clogston to get all three components of his guess correctly, we have to multiply those three probabilities: 0.001388 x 0.02222 x 0.02273 = 0.0000007010. This equals 1 in 1,426,000. 

So under the conditions as specified here, my guess was the closer one--and not too far off, for taking only a few seconds to think about it. 

However, perhaps you disagree with my decision about the order of the flop. If you want to make the challenge harder by saying that you would only accept Clogston's guess as correct if he got the order of the 8, 9, and 10 correct, it adds extra difficulty. 

Out of 48 cards, the first card must be an 8; probability 4/48, or 0.08333. The second card must be one of three nines that doesn't match the suit of the 8; probability 3/47, or 0.06383. The third card must be one of the two tens that doesn't match either of the previous suits; probability 2/46, or 0.04348. All three of those must be true simultaneously, so again we have to multiply the independent probabilities together. 0.08333 x 0.06383 x 0.04348 = 0.0002313. This equals about 1 in 4324. (A faster way to get the same result is to realize that you have the same 24 winning ways to make 8-9-10 rainbow, but now we're talking about permutations instead of combination, and a permutation calculator says that there are 103,776 unique orders of three cards that can be drawn from a deck of 48 cards. 24/103,776 works out to 1/4324 exactly.) 

If you now multiply that by the turn and river probabilities calculated previously (they are unchanged for this), you get 0.0000001168, or about 1 in 8,560,000. That is much closer to Nina's guess than to mine. 

So who won our little guessing game? As the classic poker answer goes, "It depends." 

Rick Salomon knows

 From last night's new episode of High Stakes Poker (on PokerGo): 

"Poker & Pop Culture"

I recently finished reading Poker & Pop Culture: Telling the Story of America's Favorite Card Game by my friend Martin Harris, aka Shamus of Hard-Boiled Poker. (Amazon link here.) That's it up there on my Kindle, which is how I prefer to read most books these days. It was published six months ago, but I took a while to get through it because of my bad habits of (1) trying to read, like, five books at the same time, and (2) being easily distracted by whichever new one I just bought ("squirrel!") instead of sticking with one until it's finished.

The book has a fair amount of overlap with Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by James McManus, and that work is cited extensively. If you've read it, you'll probably feel that there are whole chapters of Martin's book that you can skip over lightly. This is especially true near the beginning, where, of necessity, he starts with the origins of the game itself and how it spread.

But then he gets to the core of his subject: how poker appears in and has shaped popular culture--particularly books, magazine, movies, music, television, and radio. Martin has written about many facets of this before, but the essays are scattered around his blog and the various online outlets he has written for; here it's all in one place, plus a ton of details I don't recall seeing before. Martin practically has a corner on the market in this subject matter. Nobody else has written about or researched it as extensively as he has. He has even taught college courses on exactly this stuff.

Let me show you screen shots of some of the things I highlighted because I found them particularly surprising or interesting:

Truth! This is what makes playing poker with tourists in Vegas profitable.

WTF? R U SERIOUS? 66 cards, five suits, and a joker? I can't even imagine how this works. So, where do I sign up?

Also truth. Well, except for the making money part of it.

I don't see how there can be any argument to the contrary.

This sounds amazing. You had me at "Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart." Here's a list of where you can find it on various streaming services.

Back-story to the Kenny Rogers hit. I did not know that Cash had recorded it at roughly the same time. You can hear it on YouTube here. Maybe it's just familiarity, but I think Rogers's version is much better, even though I love Johnny Cash.

When I read this, I said to myself, "No effin' way!" and rushed to YouTube to find this thing. Here, let me save you the trouble, because you have to see this:




Perhaps oddly, my favorite part of the book is the appendix. In it, Martin lists 100 movies either about poker or with a key poker scene, and ranks them, best to worst. (Spoiler alert: "The Cincinnati Kid" nabs the #1 spot, and some piece of dreck called "Zeta One" brings up the rear.) I don't think I could have listed a hundred such movies if my life depended on it.

Between that appendix and the main chapter on poker in the movies, I've highlighted in the text maybe a dozen that sound good enough that I plan to seek them out and watch them. Some I've never heard of before, some are classics that I've inexcusably neglected all these years. My future viewing list includes "Winchester '73," "Rio Bravo," "Silverado," "Dr. Jack," "Poppy," "Tillie and Gus," and "Thursday's Game."

One quibble: The Kindle version has a glitch throughout, in which every ellipsis in the original text is rendered as an ampersand. There are dozens of these scattered throughout the book. But one soon learns to ignore the anomaly.

If the general subject matter interests you--and, since you're reading this blog, why wouldn't it?--then order it from Amazon or directly from the publisher, here. If you're going to read it on Kindle, I suggest buying it from Amazon, because it will be available across all your devices, which the eBook version from the publisher won't do. (Once you have the eBook file, you can install it in any device you want, but you have to do it separately for each one; with Amazon, it's automatic.)

In any format, there is much to learn and enjoy here.

Oliver

My second cat, Oliver, died yesterday. He had had low-grade chronic renal disease for a long time, and for unknown reasons it rapidly worsened over the past several days, to the point that his kidney were irreversibly shut down.

I don't know how old he was. The shelter from which I adopted him told the story in a newsletter a short time later:

It still makes me choke up to see how sick and miserable he was. Compare that to how cozy-comfy he got once he had settled in with me:

His favorite place to perch was on top of my recliner:

He thought it was an even better spot when I would sit in the chair with him above me:

Sometimes this would result in a head bath that I thought was unnecessary, but Oliver obviously thought otherwise. This was the first of what would turn out to be many:

My main regret is that I could never get Oliver and Lucy to be friends. Mostly, they just barely tolerated each other. This isn't a great photo, but it nicely illustrates the prevailing mood:

But once in a while, there would be a real dust-up. Oliver usually picked the fights, and always came out the loser:

Sometimes they would nap calmly in fairly close proximity, showing a glimmer of mutual tolerance:

And once in a great while, there were moments of what appeared to be affection, which would always send my hopes soaring that a better inter-feline relationship would come:

The best I can say is that in the last several months things were improving between them--though at a glacial pace.

He was a pretty derpy, messy cat. His tongue often stuck out, and he would make giant messes out of his food, water, litterbox, and everything else. But he did have his moments of letting his handsome flag fly:

One of his best features was that he had eyeliner on fleek. Women would die to get their eyes done this perfectly:

He was constantly affectionate.

He was endlessly funny and entertaining.

Looking through my photo/video archives, I just want to show you all of it. But that would be self-indulgent, rather than a proper tribute. So I'll call it quits with this:

For the last time, Oliver says "blep."

I already miss him terribly.

Historic playing cards

Mars Hill University is a small college just a little north of Asheville. I was at an event there today in the library, and the library had an exhibit about historical games. Nina spotted this on one of the walls. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a wider picture of the whole deck, and the lighting didn't allow me to get good quality photos of the individual cards. But you can still see the general idea.

Memphis Mojo on the Mighty Deuce-Four

See here: http://pokerandbridge.blogspot.com/2019/02/mighty-deuce-four-strikes-again.html

It hasn't forgotten me

Yesterday I played online poker for the first time in a couple of years, I think. Just an easy $15 single-table sit-and-go.

This is what happened:

Deuce-Four wins again

This time it was the final winning hand in the WSOP "Millionaire Maker":

https://www.pokernews.com/tours/wsop/2018-wsop/event-21-millionaire-maker/

Some news about "TBC" Tony

Some of you have already heard that Tony was arrested and jailed yesterday. I learned of it from this tweet:

Tony Bigcharles (@sevencard2003) was arrested this afternoon in what appears to be a charge related to a blog post he made today. pic.twitter.com/mZNvj3iki1

— John Mehaffey (@John_Mehaffey) April 30, 2018

The blog post in question is here. This is its final paragraph:

The blog post was quickly followed by this explicit threat of suicide posted on Facebook:

It appears from the inmate info shown in the tweet above that he has his first hearing scheduled for Tuesday, May 1 (tomorrow as I write this). You can search Clark County inmate information here.

I think it's almost inevitable that the following information will come out publicly in the legal proceedings. After all, the police officers will have to explain what information they were acting on. So here it is: I'm the one that made the report. (Of course, others might have, too. I don't know.) I've been torn about saying this, because on the one hand I don't want to sound like I'm boasting (far from it), but on the other hand, when it becomes public, I don't want it to look like I was trying to conceal my actions, as if I'm ashamed of them. I'm not.

Here's the story:

Tony has made threats of both suicide and violence against others before, of varying degrees of vagueness. But if memory serves, they've always been accompanied by disclaimers along the lines of, "Of course I would never really do that," explaining that he's a coward at heart, and/or that he wouldn't want to go to hell. It weighed on me that there was no such disclaimer in either of yesterday's alarming communications. Maybe the omission was inadvertent, but it seemed that it might be significant. The line about getting his name on TV and in the newspapers also seemed to me like it added a new element of scariness and seriousness that I had not detected in his previous outbursts.

After stewing over Tony's blog post for an hour or so, I decided that I couldn't ignore it. Threatening to join the ranks of mass public killers is a line that one simply cannot cross. Much like threatening to kill the president or saying at the airport that you have a bomb in your suitcase, I think we have a collective social obligation not to wave off such communications, even when, as here, our hunch is that they will not be acted upon.

I decided to call security at the Hoover Dam Lodge, where I assumed Tony still was. I did that rather than calling police, reasoning that casino security are better than police at quietly taking somebody into a secure location. Put another way, there would be less chance of the encounter spiraling out of control into a police shooting or some other tragic, unintended, violent outcome. The security guy I talked to was well aware of who Tony was, and that he had been in house all weekend.

I read him the crucial sentences of the blog post, and answered a bunch of his questions: No, I didn't think Tony would actually carry out his threat--in fact, I thought it was only about a 1% chance that he would. No, I didn't think he had any weapons. That sort of thing.

He called me back a few minutes later, because he had been unable to find the blog post. I walked him through getting to it. In the meantime, I had seen the Facebook post about suicide, and passed that along. Hearing that, the man said he had to call 911, and hung up.

Some more time passed, and then I got a call from a Metro Police dispatcher, asking me to repeat the information, though she was focused entirely on the suicide threat, not the murder threat. She asked me to read the Facebook post to her while she transcribed it word for word. (I offered to email a link or screen capture, and she said they couldn't take information that way, which seemed strange and primitive to me.) I answered several more questions about what I knew about Tony's mental health, whether he used any drugs or alcohol, etc. That conversation was the last I heard until I saw John Mehaffey's tweet several hours later. I don't know what transpired in between.

I feel terrible about the trouble that Tony is in, even though I knew that something like that would be the nearly inevitable result of making that initial phone call. He doesn't need more issues on his plate to deal with.

I've looked briefly at the criminal statute under which he's being charged, and my first impression is that it doesn't fit very well with what actually happened. I think a good attorney could probably get him out of this with a guilty plea on some much lower misdemeanor charge and minimal or no jail time. But, of course, he'll be depending on a public defense attorney, and it's impossible to know how skilled, experienced, and overworked they might be.

I hope with all my might that the main outcome is Tony getting some court-ordered help, rather than left in a jail cell to get even angrier than he already is. I know Tony well enough to be able to guess that he will blame me for all of the fallout from this incident. I still consider him a friend, and hope that he will do the same, but it won't surprise me if I become persona non grata, either temporarily or permanently.

I weighed that consequence before making the report, but in the end decided that I just couldn't look the other way on this one, as I and so many others of his friends and followers have done previously. Maybe I'm wrong, but this one struck me as several notches of escalation beyond what I had seen and heard before. I'm not easily alarmed, but it alarmed me in a way that I don't recall feeling with his previous antics.

I suppose some readers will think I did the right thing, while others will think I was being petty or vindictive or grandstanding or dramatic or whatever. All I can tell you is that it felt awful to do, and still feels awful now. Not awful in the sense of being wrong, but awful in the sense of dreading the consequences but still feeling like it was what needed to be done. I can only imagine how terribly angry and miserable and scared Tony must be in jail today, and I hate that that is so, and that there's nothing I can do to make it any less terrible.

In life, as in poker, all we can do is make the best decision possible with imperfect information and imperfect judgment, then let the cards fall where they may.

Memphis MOJO on the Mighty Deuce-Four

Good story here:

http://pokerandbridge.blogspot.com/2018/01/wsop-circuit-is-in-tunica.html

Life update

I adopted a second cat. His name is Oliver. He's had a hard life. He was abandoned by persons unknown, and left to die--and he very nearly did. He has no teeth and no tail. But now he'll have enough love that it won't matter.

Confederate monuments

I can recall only one unexpected encounter with a Confederate monument.

In December 2015, Nina and I went for a hike in Pinnacle Park, near the town of Sylva, NC. Afterward, we decided to poke around the town and see what was there. We quickly found our way to what seemed to be the highest point: the courthouse. 

From the front of the building, there's a spectacular view down the main drag, with mountains in the background, as seen below. If I took a photo of that view, I didn't save it, but here's a good one: 

(Source) 

From behind, I thought that statue was probably a WWI soldier. I went down the steps far enough to see it from the front, and was surprised by what you can see in the photo below: "Our Heroes of the Confederacy." 

I'm no PC snowflake, but the statue and its engraving instantly made me feel, well, icky. The Confederacy was the enemy of everything I cherish, ideologically; it was awful in every conceivable way, from its conception to the moment it was destroyed. 

A speech that Frederick Douglass gave in 1878 sums up the matter more eloquently than I ever could: 

Nevertheless, we must not be asked to say that the South was right in the rebellion, or to say the North was wrong. We must not be asked to put no difference between those who fought for the Union and those who fought against it, or between loyalty and treason.... 

I admit that the South believed it was right, but the nature of things is not changed by belief. The Inquisition was not less a crime against humanity because it was believed right by the Holy Fathers.... 

It was a war of ideas, a battle of principles and ideas which united one section and divided the other; a war between the old and new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization; between a government based upon the broadest and grandest declaration of human rights the world ever heard or read, and another pretended government, based upon an open, bold and shocking denial of all rights, except the right of the strongest.... 

There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war, which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget, and while to-day we should have malice toward none, and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.

(See here for the whole thing.) 

I am not in the "tear them all down" camp--especially when that is decided by mob rule rather than through the processes of representative democracy. But neither am I in the "we need to honor our heritage" camp. It is preposterous to worry that we will erase the Civil War, the Confederacy, and its important lessons from our collective conscious if all the flattering monuments were to be hit by wrecking balls. 

But I'm not sure that's the right approach, at least not across the board. 

One of the most interesting things I saw on my one and only trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was the city's central plaza. It is home to an obelisk monument erected in 1868:

(Source.) 

The obelisk itself is forgettable, indistinguishable from a million others. But I was intrigued by the combination of the original inscription and the explanatory plaque added much, much later: 

(You will note that the word "savage" has been defaced out of the original, presumably after this plaque was added. This was vandalism, not an official act. I don't approve of it; your mileage may vary.) 

I like this general approach. It allows the visitor to see what was important to the people who erected the edifice, in their own words. But then it adds a modern comment, gently (perhaps too gently) expressing a collective, contemporary disavowal. 

Maybe the added plaque should go further, and express remorse over the entire genocidal enterprise, rather than being apologetic only for the use of two words that make those of modern sensibilities cringe. But my point is not that this one example is done exactly right; rather, I think the general approach is a worthy one, and it's one I don't recall having seen done anywhere else. 

I can imagine approving of a heroic-appearing Civil War monument, with its original inscription intact, but augmented by an updated perspective--one explaining that while we do not wish to erase the past, we also do not wish to condone or leave unchallenged the views that cloaked Confederate evil in the glory of a heroic public statue. It would not displease me one bit if some of Douglass's wonderful prose, such as that quoted above, made its way onto these new additions to the memorials. 

Those who built all these monuments did so in order to speak to people of the future. Fine, let them. We don't need to silence their voices in order to add our own.