Lee Jones, Deuce-Four skeptic

Yesterday I finally met Lee Jones, who is the director of communications for PokerStars, and author of the well-regarded Winning Low-Limit Hold'Em (which Amazon helpfully informs me that I purchased on June 8, 2006). I say "finally" because I had learned from a mutual friend that he lived around Asheville. As a result, I had expected to bump into him a lot earlier, but he moved away around the same time that I was moving here from Vegas.

He kindly reached out to me to say that he and some friends would be at Harrah's Cherokee Saturday, and would I like to join them? I would indeed, and I did.

Delightful fellow, as I had expected based not only on his writings but on reports from others who know him. But I have to say, for somebody so steeped in the poker world, he has a shockingly poor grasp of the game's most powerful hands.

The group of us split between two tables. Lee was at the other with a friend who was taking her first stab at casino poker. After a while, Lee came over to tell us her unhappy experience. She got all in with a set of fives, on a flop of A-3-5.

Would you like to guess what hand beat her? (Hint: Not pocket aces.)

Any regular reader of this blog knows the answer without a moment's hesitation: The Mighty Deuce-Four, of course!

Despite his years in the poker world, Lee has somehow not learned that this is the most powerful hand in hold'em poker. I tried to explain it to him, tried to tell him that I now have 177 blog posts documenting the invincibility of Deuce-Four. I assumed he was in one of those moments that make one subject to seeing the light, having just beheld the power with his own eyes.

Sadly, rather than embracing the truth, he hardened his heart and would not hear the message of the 2-4 Gospel--even though it was coming straight from the High Priest of the Holy Order of the Deuce-Four himself.

Lee, my new friend: I forgive you your unbelief. But I will patiently continue to try to get you to accept what must now appear to you as foolishness. I have confidence that in time the scales will fall from your eyes so that you may see clearly. And I'll be waiting to anoint you into our cult community of faith when that great day arrives.

All Hail the Mighty Deuce-Four!

Full day of poker

Yesterday Nina and I went to Harrah's Cherokee to play in the second WSOP-C seniors event. (The first was April 17.) I did decently well in it, going out with about 150 left out of 568 entrants, but not well enough to make the money (last 63). As is often the case in such things, winning instead of losing one 50/50 race would have made all the difference.

Next I played in a cash game for a while. It's actually been three years since I played a $1-2 NLHE cash game with chips and a dealer instead of PokerPro machines. I kept forgetting to tip the dealer when I won pots. I started well, but eventually made a bad all-in move and lost my buy-in. The game was already breaking up, so I decided not to start over.

But they were assembling a 10-player, $125 sit-and-go for $1100 cash, winner take all. I don't think I've ever done a tournament format like that. The closest I've come has been some WSOP single-table satellites. I figured I had a couple of hours of good poker left in me, so I signed up. Nina came by when there was just one seat left, and I persuaded her to take it.

I picked a seat card at random and ended up sitting next to a blog reader, who lives in Durham. He recognized me and introduced himself. (Hi, Matt!) It wasn't too uncommon to run into readers at the poker tables in Las Vegas, but this is the first time it's happened since I moved to North Carolina.

I started the tournament epically card-dead. Just could not pick up a real hand to save my life. And every time I thought a good steal opportunity was coming my way, Matt, on my right, beat me to it.

The structure was fast. 2000 in starting chips, blinds going up every 15 minutes, starting at 25/25, then 25/50, 50/100, etc. The whole thing took less than two hours. So after losing some chips to blinds and speculative hands that went nowhere, I had to do something. When there were a few limpers but no raise, I decided to shove with A-3 offsuit and hope for the best. It worked. Matt thought a long time about calling, but finally folded with the rest of them, and I was back to my original stack.

Then card-dead again, until I finally made a stand with pocket 8s, flopped a set, and tripled up. Then I finally had enough chips to start really playing.

We had four women starting this event, and three of them, along with me, were the final four. That's right--I was the last man standing.

One got knocked out and it was down to me, Nina, and an odd older woman. She looked rather like a caricature of everybody's grandmother, including a hat that looked like it was meant for gardening. She was impossible to figure out--not because she was particularly skilled, but because she was so random. She would show up with hands that made no sense to have been playing in the spots she was playing them, and she made bad calls that somehow worked out almost every time.

Nina went out in third place, and I was left heads-up with Grandma. She wanted to chop the prize money. I gather that chopping the last two, three, or four places is pretty much de rigueur in these events, but I politely declined her repeated offers to do so. I wanted the whole $1100, I started heads-up play with more chips than she had (1200 to 800), and I was absolutely certain I was the better player. Besides, the tavern poker league I've been meddling in for the last year or so has given me a decent amount of experience heads-up with weaker players at the end of fast-structured tournaments. As long as I didn't do anything too stupid and didn't get too unlucky, I should be able to win.

And I did. The final blow came when I had pocket queens on the button. She called my raise. The flop was all low, uncoordinated, perfectly safe-looking. She checked, I shoved, and she insta-called with king-high, no pair. That was all she wrote.

Grandma shook hands politely, but walked away muttering something about my unwillingness to chop.

I liked the format. Not a huge time commitment, not too much of a financial investment, but a handsome payoff. It felt good to win.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Today I went to Harrah's Cherokee today. Got a seat right away in a $1/2 NLHE game at one of the PokerPro electronic tables. I bought in for $200.

On my third or fourth hand, I had 3d-6d one off the button. I raised to $8, because The Spanish Inquisition is awesome. The button called (sitting on $450 or so), as did the big blind (short stack).

Flop: 3s-7c-3c. Yahtzee! BB checked. I bet $12. Button called. Big blind check-raised all-in for $22. It wasn't enough to reopen the betting, so I could only call. Button called, too.

Turn: Qh. The pot was about $90. I bet $60. I was surprised when the button called. I didn't think most people would call that with a flush draw. I thought his most likely holding was a medium pair--something between 8s and jacks. If so, he was calling only as a bluff-catcher.

River: 7d. This was problematic. If the button had called me on the flop and turn because he had a 7, he had just backed into a bigger full house than mine. But I decided that was relatively unlikely, and I should stick with my read that he thought I was bluffing with something like A-K, and therefore might call again. The pot was now about $210, so I threw my last $110 at it. Sure enough, the button called, though not as quickly or eagerly as I thought he would have if he had a 7.

I was sort of right: He had been slow-playing pocket aces. Ouch! Sorry, sir, but your three pair do not beat my treys full.

The BB had As-5s, so he was just going for the flush draw.

I think it's safe to conclude that neither of them expected The Spanish Inquisition.

I kept getting hit by the deck. I raised with 7h-8h, and got a 7-7-10 flop. I raised with Q-K off, and got a Q-Q-J flop. Won them both with a continuation bet. In fact, during this session I won every single hand in which I put in money on the flop and/or turn.

The final example of the poker gods' kindness to me today was this one: I raised to $9 from the button with Qc-9c. Two callers. Flop: 7-8-J rainbow. Checked around. My only hope was really a 10 for the straight. Turn: 10 of the fourth suit! Nutterific! First guy bet $10. Next guy raised to $25. He immediately became my target, because if he's raising here, with me still to act, he might be willing to get it all in while I'm holding the nuts. Besides, I don't want to have to make a horribly difficult decision if the river pairs the board. He had about $115 left. I shoved. First guy folded, second guy called. He had J-8. He had flopped top two pair, and was probably planning a check-raise on the flop, which got foiled when I checked behind. He was springing his trap one street too late. River was a deuce, I think. I'll take that virtual stack of chips you were playing, sir, thankyouverymuch.

I folded a couple more hands, then logged out. I was up $395 in 35 minutes, and it kind of felt like I had used up more than my fair share of good luck, so I took the money and ran.

That turned out to be the shortest session I've ever played at Harrah's Cherokee.

Strange rule at Harrah's Cherokee

I was at Harrah's Cherokee over the weekend. While I was waiting in line at the cashier, I noticed this list of house rules on one of the monitors. Look at the third one.

I suppose banning Google Glass has some rationale, because one might theoretically use it to beam images of one's cards to somebody outside the game and surreptitiously get advice on how to play via an earbud. But I'm unable to come up with a justification for banning "smart watches."

Any plausible ideas?

What's the strangest thing a player has ever brought to a poker room?

I have a new answer to that question as of today, thanks to a guy who was playing at Harrah's Cherokee this afternoon with Nina and me.

A pet bird.

Not in a cage.

Inside his shirt.

My awareness of this oddity began when I heard a brief, high-pitched "tweep," which Nina later correctly compared to the chirp a smoke detector makes when its battery is running low. I figured it was some sort of notification on somebody's smart phone, and didn't think much more of it.

But a few minutes later I heard it again, and was better able to localize the direction it was coming from. I looked at the guy, and there is a BIRD POPPING ITS HEAD OUT OF HIS SHIRT COLLAR.

Mind you, this was not a stuffed bird. It was not a toy bird. It was a real, living, honest-to-goodness pet bird--a peach-faced lovebird, to be exact.

It would pop in and out of his shirt. It was out for quite a long time, sitting on his lap, as he fed it some birdseed from a little tray that he had brought along. When it chirped for attention, he would stroke and kiss it gently and talk to it softly. The bird's name is Smokey. It bit him once, and got a mild scolding, but otherwise was very well behaved. It never tried to fly away.

I know what you're thinking: "Pics or it didn't happen."

Well, OK then:

He gave me permission to take this picture, but for some reason wanted to partially hide his face.

Here's a super-cropped close-up of the bird from another shot I took a few seconds later:

I wonder how many bird poops there are inside his shirt.

You have to believe

It's been a while, so maybe it's time for a refresher course on the key factor in successfully playing The Mighty Deuce-Four.

Last night I was at Harrah's Cherokee, using the PokerPro tables for some $1-2 NLHE. I had started with $300, and after about two hours was down to about $200, when I caught 2-4 for the first time--offsuit, both black.

I was in the small blind. We had three limpers including the cutoff. Button raised to $16. I called, BB called.

Now it got weird: Cutoff, who had the biggest stack of around $600, reraised to $37.  A limp-reraise from late position? Who does that? I think I've seen only two kinds of hands played that way: A-K and medium pairs. I assume that in both cases, these players are thinking roughly along these lines: "This is a hand that is hard to play after the flop unless it improves in a very specific way, which it usually doesn't. Therefore, I'd either like to play it very cheaply, or put in a prohibitive pre-flop raise and end the hand." I don't recall ever seeing anybody play K-K or A-A like this from late position.

Anyway, the button called. I called, of course, since I had the best hand. Besides, I felt in my bones that I was going to flop big. In my bones, I tell you.

Surprisingly, the BB called, too, making the pot a bloated $145 or so before we even had a flop out.

Flop: A-4-4 rainbow.

Of course.

I pleaded with the poker gods: "Oh, please let him have A-K, not a medium pair."

I checked. BB checked. Cutoff bet $50. Button folded. I called. BB folded.

Turn: 7 of the fourth suit. Excellent.

I checked. Cutoff bet $75. I had $112 left. I figured he was thoroughly pot-committed. With me all-in, the pot would be about $430, and he'd only have to call $37 more to stay in. He should do that with just about anything. And he did. The computer revealed our hands. He had J-J. Two outs.

River: King. My old friend the Deuce-Four had done it for me again.

I heard the murmurings around the table: "Are you kidding me?" "I did not expect to see those two hands." "Wow." I just took it in stride. I couldn't feign surprise, since I had known I would win.

When people tell me that they have lost with 2-4, I usually tell them that they didn't play it right. Most often what they do wrong is fail to believe in it. My stock reply is this: "Does Santa bring presents to little boys and girls who do not believe in him? No, he does not. It's the same with Deuce-Four. You have to believe in it for it to work."

I believe.

Remember: it's a skill game

I drove out to Harrah's Cherokee today--first time in a couple of months. It was one of the wackiest, up-and-down, roller-coaster sessions I can remember ever having.

I started with $300 in play. Within 30 minutes that was down to $95 because of a nasty one-two punch. One was being on the bad side of AA versus KK. Two was flopping top set (queens), versus the nut flush.

I rallied back to $280 with a few small pots, then trapped a guy for all his chips on a flop of A-Q-x with my A-Q against his A-K.

Lost some with my A-J versus a short stack's A-Q, all in before the flop, flop jack high, looking good for me, but then he rivered a four-flush to beat me.

Lost about $100 more with Kc-Ks on a flop of 5c-6c-10c, versus a young woman's 5d-6d. All-in on the flop when we were both almost exactly 50% to win. I didn't catch.

Just as I was texting Nina to whine about my rotten luck, I had 9-4 offsuit in the big blind, unraised pot. Flop 9-9-4. A guy with a bigger stack and A-9 in his hand called my flop and turn bets, thinking he was trapping me, then raised me all-in on the river, giving me a clean double-up. That put me up to $356. (Flopping a full house is an advanced skill. I've been honing my technique for years now. Please don't try this at home.)

Finally, the same young woman whom I had raced before gave me her whole stack of nearly $200. I had Ac-Kc. Flop had three more clubs. (Yay, crubs!) She check-called my bets on the flop and turn with a straight draw, got there on the river and paid off my all-in bet. Only six river cards win me her stack there--it had to complete her straight but not put a scary fourth club down.

The whole session was just crazy luck, some of it good, some of it bad, but just enough more of the former than the latter that I left with $547, a $247 profit.

Probably the most skillful thing I did was walk away before the roller coaster took another plunge.


Addendum, July 11, 2014 

The flopped full house hand became the jumping-off point for a whole post from Rob: http://robvegaspoker.blogspot.com/2014/07/to-slow-play-or-not-to-slow-play.html 

Superb Owl poker (conclusion)

I finally decided to call. I can't give you even a lick of math to justify it, but my sense was that the number of ways I could be ahead, the number of ways I could catch up if I were behind, and the size of the pot made it worth the further investment.

Our hole cards were revealed, and he had almost the worst possible cards: J-10. (The worst would have been 9-9, which would leave me with 8 cards for a chop, just 1 for the win.) So he had, in fact, done what I had quickly concluded he almost surely had not done--paid $25 for just a gutshot straight draw. Of course, they were soooooted, which explains his pre-flop call.

The odds were, obviously, not in my favor at this point. The Poker Pro table stats showed him at 77% to win, me only 23%.

But once in a while, the good guys win in spite of blundering. A beautiful, beautiful 6 hit the river, giving me a full house and my biggest pot of the night--about $375.

Superb Owl poker*

Yesterday Nina (aka Cardgrrl) and I drove out to Harrah's Cherokee. My idea of poker rooms during the big game was formed by years in Vegas--promotions galore, every table full, action to beat the band.

Alas, I learned last night that things are just not the same in a casino without a sports book. Apparently, if people can't bet on the game, they're not much interested in watching the game from a casino. Huh. Who knew? (This is the kind of thing that you might think would be obvious to me in advance, but since I don't engage in other forms of gambling, it isn't. I'm generally pretty ignorant about how most people approach gambling.)

The poker room had only two $1-2 tables going, and they were heavily populated with the local regulars--not what I had had in mind.

It has been a very long time since I posted about a difficult decision and let you, my adoring readers, ponder what you would do in my place. Last night I had a hand that might make for a good one.

I had bought in for $200, and at this point in the festivities was up to about $325. I was under the gun with 8c-8d and made a small raise, to $6. A few people called before the small blind (who had me covered by $100 or so) reraised to $13. She was the tightest player at the table, and I had never seen her three-bet before. That she would do it from bad position made it even more obvious that she had one of only three hands: Q-Q, K-K, or A-A.

However, her raise was small enough and her stack big enough to make it worth set-mining, so I called. One other player called behind me--by far the most inexperienced and erratic player in the game. I had already stacked him once when I made a straight and he wouldn't fold two pair to my all-in check-raise. So we're taking the flop three ways, with a pot of about $50.

The flop was 6h-7d-9c, giving me an open-ended straight draw, and mostly extinguishing my worries of getting on the wrong end of set over set. Small blind bet $25. Both of us called, pushing the pot to about $125.

Turn was the 8h, giving me a set and putting a second heart on the board. Small blind checked. I checked, too, suddenly unsure of where things stood. Rookie immediately clicked all in for about $125, just about the size of the pot. Small blind sighed and folded.

So it was to me. What should I do? What does he have? Is it worth risking that much when I could be way behind? I had about $285 left at this point; losing another $125 wouldn't break me, but it would wipe out all my profit for the session plus some, and would be pretty demoralizing.

Of course with four to a straight on the board, I had to consider the possibility that he already had a straight. But as I tanked, I kept coming back to the fact that if he had a straight, he had to have either flopped and slow-played it with 10-8 or 5-8, or he had paid $25 on the flop to draw to a gutshot. In the latter case, he could have any hand with a 10 in it (A-10 down to 10-10), or perhaps 5-5. But despite his general inexperience, I just didn't think he would put in $25 to hit one of four outs, when he had to expect that he would be charged an even heftier price to see the river. Nor did I think that he would have stuck with 10-8 or 5-8 after a preflop reraise. (I'm not going to explore what he might have thought his two opponents had, because I think he was at the level of basically playing just the strength of his own cards, and had almost no hand-reading skill.)

But if both of those surmises were correct, then what was he doing? Did he flop and slow-play a set? Two pair, perhaps having started with 6-7 suited connectors? (After all, in our earlier clash, he had proven himself willing to go to the mat for two pair when every other player at that table would have known it was no good.) Maybe he had 9-10 suited for flopped top pair and gutshot and that had been enough to keep him interested. Starting with 4-5 would have given him a flopped OESD, but surely he would have seen that hitting an 8 would make his hand yet still cause him to lose to anybody holding a 10--effectively making him want only four outs (the treys), same as a gutshot draw. Or maybe he had 8-9 suited connectors, and now had two pair and the straight draw, which might be enough to make him decide to push his hand when both of us checked in front of him. That might make sense, as flopping top pair and open-ender might be enough to get him to pay $25 for another card. But on the other hand, that theory required him to have the only 8 not accounted for, which seemed improbable.

If he had any two-pair combination, I was in excellent shape against him. If he had another set it was about 67% to be lower than mine and 33% to be higher. If he had any pair and draw combination, he might have a decent number of outs, but the math would be in my favor. But weighed against all of that, if he already had a straight, then I would be drawing to just nine or ten outs to hit a full house or quads ( the number depending on whether he had a pair to go with his straight). And, of course, a 10 hitting the river would put a straight on the board and chop the pot between us, unless he had a jack. A five would also put a straight on the board, but again could be no good for a chop if he held a 10.

In short, the whole situation was a damned mess. I didn't know if I was ahead or behind, and if I was behind I didn't know how many different river cards might save me--and for some of them it might be for only half of the pot. If you can mentally crunch the numbers on a situation like that, you're way smarter than I am.

So, dear readers--what do you think he had? And what would you have done? What do you think I did? What do you think the outcome was? (Remember that often I tell these stories not knowing the answers because I end up folding, with no revelation of the villain's cards. No promises of a satisfying resolution to the story!)

I'm going to go write the follow-up post now, set to appear in 24 hours. Get your answers in via the comments before then.



*Titled so as not to run afoul of any copyright issues.

More actual poker

I again woke up feeling like playing some poker, so once again I traipsed to Harrah's Cherokee. I lost $200 quickly though a combination of sub-par play on my part, better-than-average opponents, and bad luck. But then the better players left, and I started the long slog to rebuild my stack. It took another four hours, but I left ahead by $252. Because of the weird psychology of poker sessions, this actually felt like a $450 win.

Sadly, again this week there were no hands that struck me as sufficiently interesting to recount in detail.

I did very much like the screen name for the Poker Pro tables chosen by the player next to me, though you'll probably have to have seen the movie "Rounders" to get the joke:

I think I might have to do this "poker" thing more often. It's fun AND profitable! Who knew?

MLK Day poker

I woke up today feeling like I needed a dose of poker, not another day of my usual work. So I drove out to Harrah's Cherokee and played for about four hours, taking home several $100 bills that had not been mine when I arrived.

In one hand, it really paid off to have been keeping track of my opponents' patterns. One older gentleman across the table from me just adored under-representing his big hands, then letting another player do the betting for him. I lost about $50 to him in a very early hand because of that. But once I adjusted to what he was doing--i.e., the fact that if he stayed in a pot he usually had a significantly stronger hand than he was letting on--it was pretty easy to handle him. And about two hours into the session, it led to an opportunity to double my money.

I had Q-9 of diamonds on the button. Several limped in ahead of me (it was a chronically passive limpfest), so I raised to $8. (All dollar amounts in this post are approximate; I did not take notes.) Mr. Passive was my only caller.

The flop was Qh-8c-3h. He checked. I bet $11 into the $21 pot. He called.

The turn was another queen. Excellent. He checked again. I bet $22. He called. This mostly ruled out the possibility that he was on a flush draw. He might pay to see one card, but he was too tight to pay to see the river if he had nothing but a draw--even a good one. There were no hands that would have flopped two pair that he would have played from early position, especially after my raise. So I could pretty much narrow his holdings down to an overpair (A-A or K-K, and yes, he would play them in this odd way) or a queen. If he had a queen, he had me beat, because I was confident he would not have called my pre-flop raise with anything less than a jack kicker, and probably not less than a king kicker.

This meant that I would have a potentially tricky decision on the river: Do I assume he has an overpair and will pay off my trips a third time, or do I assume he has a queen with a better kicker, and hope to just check it down?

Just as I was wrestling with this problem, the PokerPro table flashed the nine of hearts for our final board card, giving me the nuts. It was perfect. He probably wouldn't put me on a flush draw, and if I had been wrong about his drawing propensity, he had just gotten to the hand he wanted, not knowing it was now a loser. If he had an overpair, it probably didn't change anything. But if he had been slow-playing a bigger queen, he was sunk.

He checked again. The pot was now about $85. I had about $160 left, and Mr. Passive had me covered by just a few bucks. How much would he pay off?

Well, another factor came into play. I had twice gotten lucky after playing speculative hands aggressively, with the hands shown. Once I raised a short-stacked opponent all-in on the flop with just a baby flush draw and got there, besting her top/top. Another time I did it with my suited connectors having only flopped second pair, and the other guy called me with top pair, only to see me hit trips on the turn. So I knew that Mr. Passive might be looking to catch me trying to blow him off of a decent hand with an all-in bluff. That was the deciding factor: I was going to go for the gold and hope that he read me as being out of line again. I can no longer remember who it was, but a blogger I used to read, who played mostly online, loved the phrase, "Overbet for value," and that was screaming inside my head. It's pretty rare that I'll shove double the size of the pot on the river, but this seemed like a damned good time to make an exception.

I tapped the "all in" and "confirm" buttons, and less than two seconds later he had registered his call. He had A-Q, and had been well ahead until my lucky three-outer on the river.

Maybe the surgeon general should issue a stern proclamation to be posted in poker rooms around the country: "WARNING: SLOW-PLAYING MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH."

A trip to Harrah's Cherokee--with poker content!

Today I drove out to the only legal poker room in North Carolina, Harrah's Cherokee, and played some $1-2 NLHE for five hours or so on one of their Poker Pro electronic tables. It's the first time I had been there since September, and also the first time I've gone there without Nina. I had a nice drive, listening to some podcasts of "This American Life" in the car. The game was reasonably fun and easy. I left with a couple hundred bucks more than I started with, which is always nice. Sadly, there were no hands of sufficient interest to post histories/discussions, other than the brief accounts I posted to Twitter:

On the way back home, I stopped briefly at a roadside curiosity: The Hemlock Motel. Not a name I ever would have chosen for a business. As you can tell, it's no longer in business. Strangely, some of the rooms are wide open.

I blame my girlfriend for infecting me with her fascination with buildings and objects displaying rust, decay, and abandonment.

As the name implies, the casino is on the Cherokee Indian reservation. One of the interesting things about the town of Cherokee is that the street signs have the street names in both English and Cherokee, like this:

(For more on the language and writing system, see here.) About four years ago, Nina and I were privileged to get a look inside the periodicals vault at the Library of Congress. (I wrote about that here.) One of the things we saw on the "recent acquisitions" shelf was a collection of the earliest editions of the first American newspaper printed in Cherokee. I wonder how many people are still fluent in that language and its notation. Not many, I'd guess.

All in all, it was such a nice day that it made me think I should repeat the experience more often than I have been.

The dreaded pocket kings

Actually, I don't dread pocket kings. I win with them at least as often as would be predicted statistically, so I'm happy when I see them. The post title is an homage to my friend Rob, who hates pocket kings ("dreaded" is his label for them) almost as much as he loves breasts, cleavage, vaginas, hookers, and inappropriate touching.

Story the first

This happened at Harrah's Cherokee when I was there with Cardgrrl on my recent North Carolina scouting trip. I had bought in for just $100, because I didn't know what to expect from the locals and wanted to be cautious and conservative, at least at first. Over the course of about three hours, I had worked that up to a bit over $300. Our table had only one aggressive player--a middle-aged Asian guy who had amassed the biggest stack (over $800) by stealing all the orphan pots and putting his far more conservative opponents to difficult decisions. He was not crazy, but he was the only unpredictable player I had to tangle with, while the others had well-defined styles and were generally not too difficult to decipher.

I raised to $10 from early position with the two black kings. Asian guy reraised to $25 from one of the blinds. Reraising was pretty common for him, but doing it from the blinds instead of from position was a deviation from his standard practice, and doing it against me--my raises had been getting lots of respect from the table, including from him--was similarly outside of his usual bag of tricks. So I was certainly on notice that his hand range was stronger here than it typically was for his reraises. However, it could still easily include A-K and any pocket pair probably down as low as 8s or 9s.

I just called. I had not put in a single four-bet the entire session, and I thought that doing so now would make it too easy for him to get away from hands that I had beat; it would effectively turn my cards face up. I thought there was also a ton of deceptive value in playing it this way. After a three-bet, he was virtually certain to make a continuation bet, so with my positional advantage I hoped to be able to make more money from him by letting him continue to fire.

The flop was J-J-4. I didn't think he would three-bet me pre-flop from out of position with pocket 4s or with any hand containing a jack except for pocket jacks, and flopping quads was too remote a possibility to worry about. So this was basically about the best flop I could hope for, short of making a set. I was behind pocket aces, but everything else in his range I had beat.

He led out for $75, an overbet of the pot. I didn't expend any effort trying to interpret his bet size or body language, because they simply didn't matter to my decision. I wanted to play for stacks, period. I had deliberately underrepresented my hand pre-flop for precisely this reason: to get him to think that some smaller pocket pair was likely to be good, and/or that he could push me off of a pocket pair by aggressively playing A-K. After having done that, it would make no sense to reverse course. So I pretended to be thinking for a decent amount of time, in order to further the impression that I was unsure about what to do, then hit the "all in" and "confirm" buttons.

His head dropped and he looked dejected. I thought that presaged a fold, but nope--after about five seconds he entered his command for a call. After the computer played out the turn and river, it displayed my kings, then showed my opponent's cards, the only hand I did not want to see: aces.

I was busto. The outcome sucked but it was a situation where I was effectively predestined to lose as soon as the PokerPro table's random number generator set the order of the virtual deck. There were other opponents who were so tight and solid that I might well have been able to fold the kings at some point when facing their sudden eagerness to put all their chips in. But not this guy. He was the only player in the game against whom folding kings could not make sense, because aces were a minority of his range, even given the atypical pre-flop circumstances.

Story the second

Today I went to the Palms to play poker while other people were preoccupied with the big sportsball thingy that was on the ginormous-screen TVs. (One of the dealers asked me if I had any bets on the game. I had to admit that I didn't even know who was playing.) I still have several buy-ins worth of Palms chips in my collection. I was unable to sell them to collectors at a profit, so I'll just use them to play poker with.

This was a wild and crazy table. We had three players driving the action. Sadly, I spent most of my 3 1/2-hour session in the graveyard of card-deaditude, unable to take advantage of the juiciness. I only stayed afloat by the occasional audacious bluff, which got respect because my lack of cards was interpreted by the other players as uber-tightness.

In the hand in question, UTG was the table big stack, with about $1200. He raised to $11. The next player called. I smooth-called with K-K.

I realize that telling two stories about pocket kings without reraising makes it seem that this is my normal course. It isn't. But in both cases there were perfectly valid reasons. Here I still had two players behind me who were ramblin'-gamblin' dudes who loved to try to steal pre-flop with large reraises, and who, even when facing resistance, were willing to get all their money in pre-flop with marginal holdings and just hope for the best. I wanted to let them do their thing.

Sure enough, one of them three-bet behind me to $80. With a raise this ridiculously large, he either had a pocket pair in the 10s-jacks-queens range and didn't want to have to make difficult decisions later in the hand, or he had complete garbage and was just on a steal. With aces or the other two kings he would reraise a smaller amount, trying to induce action. He was absolutely not the kind of player who tried to shut down the action with his premium hands in an attempt to win a small, low-risk, uncontested pot.

It folded around back to me. I had about $200 left--truly a no-brainer decision here, since my opponent (a smart, experienced player) would recognize that he was being offered better than 2:1 to call my shove, and would therefore have a hard time folding just about anything. I pushed, and he called as soon as the dealer announced the amount. I showed the kings. He kept his cards face down, which I took as a favorable sign.

I don't remember how the board ran out, but he passed his cards back to the dealer without showing and began to count out what he owed me. Another player asked to see the hand, and the dealer showed it: 6-7 offsuit!

It's nice to know that the dreaded pocket kings can still manage to beat 6-7 offsuit for a $432 pot--even if Rob would have you believe otherwise.

So long, and thanks for all the fish*

From time to time, somebody asks me whether I plan to stay in Las Vegas for the rest of my life. My answer has always been, no, I don't plan to stay, but I also don't plan to leave. There is no plan. I would tell anybody who asked me that question that I will leave if and when something happens to makes me think that I should live somewhere else. Otherwise, I'll stay.

Well, something finally happened to convince me that it was time to live somewhere else: I fell in love.

This won't exactly come as news to my readers, unless you're brain-dead. (In which case, congratulations on just being able to read. Quite an accomplishment.) I met Cardgrrl in February of 2009. By July of that year I knew it was something serious. During a visit I made to her in Washington, D.C., in August of 2010, I finally became convinced (1) that she was never going to move to Las Vegas (as I had not-so-secretly hoped), and (2) that I wanted to be a lot nearer to her than 2400 miles, and (3) that meant that I would have to move east.

That plan, however, entailed some serious logistical difficulties. The cost of living in Washington is much higher than it is in Vegas, and I would have to meet those increased costs without 50 poker rooms in my back yard.

By happy coincidence, around the same time some consulting work related to my formal education and my pre-poker career sort of fell into my lap, and I nurtured the source so that I would start getting more and more such projects. (I mentioned this work twice in the blog, here and here, just to drop a couple of hints that change was in the air, and to see if anybody was paying attention. As far as I could tell, nobody noticed that those hints signified that a major change was underway.)

Even if you missed those clues, surely long-time readers must have noticed that my frequency of posting dropped fairly dramatically year by year from the high-water marks in 2008 and 2009 to the present. Some of that was due to the simple fact that after a few thousand posts on one subject, it gets progressively harder to find new things to say, new topics to write about. But the drop-off was due at least as much to the fact that as time went on, I was spending more time on the growing side business and less on poker. Poker has gone from being my sole source of income when I first arrived in Vegas in the summer of 2006 to being only a small part of it in 2012.

Cardgrrl also met me halfway. Early last year she decided that she wanted to try living somewhere besides D.C., established some criteria for herself by which to judge potential target cities, and started exploring the possibilities. (Vegas was never a contender.) By about June, she had settled on Asheville, North Carolina. After several exploratory trips there over the next few months, she finally made the move into an Asheville apartment at the beginning of November, and is now having a house built in the city.

No, Asheville isn't halfway between here and D.C., but it does have a much lower cost of living--comparable to that of Las Vegas. It's also a place that I would rather live than D.C. I consider our nation's capital a nice place to visit, but not to live, for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with. Her move made it easier for me to pull the trigger on my own.

A few hours ago I returned from a week in Asheville--my first time there. It's a beautiful city, set in the midst of some of the prettiest land in the country, even in the dead of winter. Take a look at a map, and you'll see that it's surrounded by the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, the Cohutta National Forest, the Sumter National Forest, the Cherokee National Forest, plus a comparable number of state parks and forests. Heck, the famous Blue Ridge Parkway/National Heritage Area runs right through the city; turn onto it, and 30 seconds later you feel like you're in the middle of a vast, wooded wilderness.

Biking should be, um, interesting in Asheville. As far as I can tell both from maps and from driving around in it for several days, there is not a single straight or flat street anywhere. Every street is winding and sloped.

Most of this visit was spent apartment-hunting. On Tuesday I found the best prospect--an upstairs unit in a well-maintained old mansion converted into a four-plex of two-bedroom apartments (one bedroom to sleep in, one to be used as an office) in the rich part of town, so I can pretend to be wealthy. It's about four miles due north of where Cardgrrl's house will be. On Wednesday I signed a lease; the place is mine starting February 1.

This is sooner than I had anticipated. As of a week ago, I was thinking it would be more like March or April when I would make the move. But things change, and I decided I needed to just do it. I'm not yet sure exactly when I'll go. I can't get everything planned and arranged to leave here by the first of the month. It will probably end up being more like February 10th to 15th time frame. Heck, I don't even know how I'll move--hire a moving company, drive a U-Haul myself, or maybe try to UPS anything that won't fit in my car. We'll see. (The new car, by the way, was an integral part of this evolving big plan, though I didn't tell you that at the time. The old car could not possibly have been trusted on a cross-country trip, nor could it carry much stuff.)

Anyway, the Las Vegas chapter of my life (actually the second Las Vegas chapter of my life, as I was here for a couple of years back in 1980-1982) is now coming rapidly to a close. With it, this blog will also mostly fade away. I won't shut it down completely. I'm sure that once in a while I'll have a story to tell, an opinion to share, a news item to comment on, a rant to get off my chest.

But poker is hard to come by in North Carolina. The only poker room that is less than a full day's drive is Harrah's Cherokee. Cardgrrl and I went there last night to scope out the place. It's about a 70-minute drive each way when there is clear weather and no traffic. The poker room for now has no live dealers, just a bunch of Poker Pro electronic tables, though they are in the process of training dealers, and have a WSOP circuit event scheduled to be there in April.

How about online? Well, we'll see. I've never been as successful at the online game as the live game, nor enjoyed it as much, though my Josie-inspired brief orgy of online tournaments in August raises the possibility that I could do better at it if I really tried.

The upshot is that I think it's inevitable that poker will be reduced to being a small, occasional part of my life and attention, and that as a result blog posts here will be few and far between. I will probably also greatly cut back on the amount of poker-related blog and Twitter reading that I do. I can't continue to saturate my reading with poker when I can't go out and play it. That would drive me crazy, I think.

I am sad to be leaving a city I've come to like very much, and to consider my home. I'm sad to be leaving behind the friends I've made in my 6 1/2 years here, and to no longer be in a place where friends and readers from across the country and around the world come to visit on a regular basis. I'm nervous about trekking across the country to a place that I really know very little about, and to be making my home in a state where I never had any reason to think I'd live, where I've only set foot once before last week--and that was just in the Charlotte airport during a layover--and where I only know two people besides Cardgrrl (Shamus and his wife live a couple hours away). I'm bummed that I won't have a ridiculous richness of choice of poker rooms running 24/7, regularly stocked with fish in a way that is the envy of the trout and salmon industries, with which I can scratch the poker itch whenever it hits me. I'm slightly nauseated at the prospect of having to face cold winters and humid, mosquito-filled summers again, after thinking that I had left them behind forever. I'm distressed that I won't be able to pop up to see my parents and my sister in Salt Lake City for weekend visits every few months, as has become my practice.

But rising above all of that is that I am excited to be able to be near the one I love, and to find out what our relationship can be when we can see each other on a regular basis. That is more important to me than what state my address is in, more important than the weather, more important than being near the Vegas friends I've made, more important than poker--more important than anything else. (As Jesus taught, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he move to North Carolina to be near his girlfriend." Or something like that.) That realization makes me confident that this move is the right thing to do. It's time for one chapter of my life to end, and for another to begin.

What story will that chapter tell? Hell if I know. But it's time to turn the page and find out.





*It seems hard to believe that anyone intelligent enough to be a reader of this blog would not know the pop-culture origin of this title. But just in case there's a lame-o out there, see here.


Addendum, January 12, 2013 

For Cardgrrl's perspective on this, see here.