Does a pair of D's beat a pair of R's?

An amusing and instructive post from Tommy Angelo, about how an experienced player can be yanked back to the anxiety of a newcomer:

http://learn.pokernews.com/poker-strategy-theory/tilt-for-beginners-miffed-in-montreal-2856.htm

Don't get tilted about the rules...

...no matter how stupid they may be. Excellent advice in a new blog post from Tommy Angelo.

http://learn.pokernews.com/poker-strategy-theory/tilt-for-beginners-writhing-over-rules-3157.htm

Skirmishes in the information war

This post is in the form of a letter to Tony (yes, the same Tony featured in the previous post's silly story), but because the problems I identify are common, I hope there is value to my readers in letting you all peek in on it.

Dear Tony:

Last night was the longest time I've spent in a cash game at a table with you, and it gave me my best chance yet to observe for myself something that many others have commented on in your blogs after playing with you for a while: You give away way too much information. It's not entirely clear to me if you understand the extent to which you are doing it, or the damage it does to your bankroll, so I'm going to try to lay out some concrete examples from last night and explain how they can hurt you. These are just a few of the things I saw; there were dozens more that I could chose from, if I wanted to try to make an exhaustive catalog.

My intention here is not to embarrass you or say that you're a bad player. You obviously do well enough to get by. But you could do so much better if you closed off some of your leaks, and many of your worst leaks relate to control of information.

It should also be noted that none of these are unique to you. In fact, they are things I see commonly in many players--which is exactly why I think it might be valuable to readers to list them here, because they may see the same problems in themselves. But I would expect somebody who aspires to be a professional at the game to have a better handle on these things than the average tourist. Moreover, an aspiring professional should want to improve where he can. Though I have to point out specific things I think you're doing wrong, in order to make my points, my goal is to be helpful, not just condemning.

These are in no particular order.

1.

You freely told people at the table about the current size of your bankroll. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with you writing about this on your blog, and once in a while you'll have somebody at the table who reads your blog and therefore has this information. But to give it out voluntarily is, I think, a terrible mistake.

The most obvious problem is that it invites potential crime. Somebody might think that you mean that you're carrying all that money with you. I know that you're not, but what I know doesn't matter. Just the idea that you're carrying a ton of cash could set you up for being assaulted and robbed. You worry about that possibility enough as it is. Why add to the potential?

The second problem is that nobody cares, unless they're (A) a friend, or (B) thinking of trying to steal your money. Talking about money is fraught with social problems. It makes people uncomfortable. In our society, we don't ask other people how much money they have or make, and we don't disclose that information to others unless there is some very specific reason. I'm pretty open about just about everything in this blog, but I have never and will never talk in concrete terms about how much I make at poker. It's nobody's business.

I know that you care what others think about you. Telling them how much money you have will pretty much have only negative consequences. Those who have a lot more money than you will look down on you for being nearly broke, as they see it. Those who have less might be jealous. Either way, you have sown negative feelings. Negative feelings about you from other players hurt you. You make more money from people who like you. (This is Mike Caro's most emphatic teaching.) Doing things that make people either resent or look down on you is self-destructive. Frankly, you sounded like you were bragging, and nobody likes a braggart.

Answer me this: What do you gain by sharing this information with strangers at the poker table? How does it benefit you in any concrete, identifiable way? I think the answer is that it doesn't, and the potential for several kinds of harm is real. The cost:benefit ratio here is infinite.

2.

You frequently discussed how a hand was played immediately after it was over. In one instance, you caught a pair (jacks, I think) on the river to beat a guy who had been ahead prior to that. You pointed out to him how his raise on the flop was so small that it made sense for you to call to try to catch a card. Then you told him that since you missed, if he had bet again on the turn you would have folded.

I'm not sure I can describe how awful this kind of talk is, in terms of long-term poker strategy. You were telling an opponent explicitly how to play better against you the next time! Why on earth would you do this? You should want him to continue playing as weakly as he did. That's how you won the hand, and that's how you would win the next one, too--except that you clued him in to precisely what he did wrong, and how to do it better the next time.

Frankly, I wanted to stand up and yell at you: WHAT ARE YOU THINKING???? The answer is that you weren't thinking at all. You were just reacting, with no filter between your brain and your mouth. Maybe the two dumbest things a poker player can do are criticize another player for his bad play and educate him as to how to play better. You did both at once. What did you get for it in return? A little bit of ego gratification. Was it worth it?

By the way, when you engage in such idiotic behavior as that, you cost ME money, too. If the guy smartens up and starts playing better, he will do so against everybody, not just against you. Your words are taking money out of my pocket, and I resent it.

There are plenty of resources that this guy and others can turn to if they want to learn to play better poker. It is not your job to educate him. Lots of recreational players aren't interested in investing time and work into getting better. They're just there to relax and have a good time, maybe win a little money if they get lucky. Imposing on them a poker lesson that they didn't ask for will tend to cause resentment. Sometimes they even leave the table, in search of a game where everybody is having fun and nobody will criticize how they play or make them feel stupid. Then we all lose out.

Tony, this kind of talk is self-defeating. It is precisely this kind of talk that is condemned with the common expression, "Don't tap on the aquarium--it scares the fish." There is absolutely no justification for it. It is a bigger leak in your game than things about which you have repeatedly expressed concern, such as how to play flush draws.

"The poker table is not a classroom. And you don't want recreational players to conclude that you're playing seriously. If you do that, they're likely to become self-conscious about their decisions and stop playing so liberally--which will cost you money." Mike Caro, Caro's Most Profitable Hold'Em Advice, page 242.

3.

You repeatedly told everybody at the table whether you were up or down from your original buy-in. Once you even said something like, "I have to get back another $62 and then I can leave."

First, again, nobody cares, in the sense of being sympathetic for you if you're down or rejoicing on your behalf if you're up.

Second, as others have told you countless times, you cannot play A-game poker if you're obsessed with always finishing up for the day. Chips are tools for gaining more chips, nothing more. In other words, you shouldn't even be thinking about being up or down for the day or for the session, let alone talking out loud about it.

Third, it opens you up to exploitation. Have you ever noticed the way that many players segregate their chip stacks into their original buy-in and their profit? As long as they're playing with their profit, they're fairly loose. After all, it's found money, free money. If they lose it, they're not really out anything, as they see it. But if the profit goes away, and they start cutting into the original buy-in stacks, they become much more serious. A player like that who is reaching into the original buy-in stacks to put in his raise is far, far less likely to be bluffing than if he is only having to play with his profit stacks.

You know that, right?

You don't keep your stacks segregated that way, but the effect is exactly the same. If sharp, observant players know the degree to which you are ahead or behind, and they know that it matters a great deal to you which side of zero you end up on (and the fact that you frequently call attention to your status makes it abundantly clear that it does matter a great deal to you), they will exploit that information. Now, I think that you're not as completely predictable as the chips-segregation guys, and sometimes you're more willing to bluff and gamble when down than when you're up. But that doesn't matter. All that matters is that it's information that smart players can use to gain extra insight into how you are thinking and playing, and thus play better against you.

I would ask again, How does it benefit you at all to tell the table how much you need to make to be back to even? In theory, you could do this to spread disinformation, knowing what people will think of you, then do the opposite of what they will anticipate. But I do not believe that you are doing this. I think you are just spewing the information because it occurs to you, because it's on your mind so constantly, and, again, you just don't stop to think about the consequences of opening your mouth.

4.

You show your hole cards unnecessarily. You do this a lot. You did it more than any other player at the table last night.

This is a complex area. There is no one clearly best strategy for deciding when to reveal your hole cards if you aren't required to do so. Some world-class players never do it. Daniel Negreanu, asked about this once for a World Poker Tour special feature, said that he does it occasionally, but always with a specific plan and purpose for what he wants his opponents to think and know. That's smart. Antonio Esfandiari recently noted in his live WSOP commentary that he never shows cards that reinforce an opponent's good decision. E.g., if they fold, he won't show them a winner--but he might show them if he was bluffing. He wants to spread disinformation and put opponents on tilt for having made a mistake, not give them a psychological reward for making the correct decision. Again, that's a perfectly justifiable strategy. It's a thoughtful way to decide what to show.

In Caro's Most Profitable Hold'Em Advice, the author spends several pages discussing how to selectively show cards in order to reinforce the erroneous tendencies of specific players. For example, show your strongest hands to players who are already inclined to fold too often when you bet. It will have the effect of making them think, "Yep, that guy always has the goods, just as I suspected." As a result, they will tighten up even more against you. Conversely, show your bluffs to players who are inclined to call you too often, in order to get them to call even more often. Again, this is a perfectly valid, well-reasoned approach to the question.

But I don't think you are following any well-thought-out strategy. I think you show when you feel like it, and there's not much more to it than that. That is unacceptable. That is unprofessional. That will cost you money.

By far the simplest approach is just never, ever show any cards unless the rules require you to show them. I think that should be your default plan. It may not be fully optimal, but it's never very much of mistake, whereas showing willy-nilly, the way you are doing now, is an egregious leak. If you asked me for advice on this point (and I realize that you didn't), I would say shut off that gushing pipe completely. Lock it down. Get in the habit of never, ever showing unnecessarily. After several months of getting used to that practice, then you can consider trying to find very selective, strategic spots in which showing your cards can increase your profits. But for now, just stop it completely.

You might also consider that the message you are sending is not the one you intended. I caught a very keen insight from Olivier Busquet the other day when he was doing live WSOP commentary. One very tight player raised, got everyone to fold, then showed some high pocket pair. Busquet was asked what it says about a player when he shows cards like that. He responded (paraphrasing here), "It tells me that he's weak and afraid. He is trying to tell the table, 'When I raise you shouldn't play back at me.' Why doesn't he want people to play back at him? Because he's afraid of tangling with them." I think Busquet is on to something there. It was a revelation to me. I had not thought of it that way before, but it's worth considering that when you intend to convey strength, it accidentally comes across as weakness.

5.

You freely discuss what you will do with certain hands in certain situations. For example, at one point last night you showed something like an A-8 that you had raised with, and said, "I'll raise with hands like that, but I won't call if somebody else has raised first."

That was another occasion on which I wanted to yell at you. What possible good is that doing? The smart, observant players will file away that information to use against you. The really bad players, who only consider hand strength and not situations, perhaps have never considered that there are hands with which one might sensibly raise, but fold if somebody else raises first. Why are you giving them an education? They didn't ask for it, and if they learn to play better, it makes it harder for you to win their money.

For about the umpteenth time I'll ask, what could you possibly hope to gain by sharing with others exactly how you play certain hands?

6.

I'm sure you'll remember the hand in which you had Q-Q and the other guy had 2-4, and hit a gutshot on the river to make a straight and win the large pot. I'll dispense with pointing out that 2-4 is the most powerful hand in poker and always wins. My point here is that you went on and on about this. You repeatedly said, "Goddammit," and other such things. Even half an hour later, long after that player had left the table, you were rehashing it, talking about how much money he had put into the pot when he was drawing nearly dead.

This is another example in the category of things you shouldn't even be thinking, let alone saying.

When I hear somebody droning on about a hand that was over half an hour ago, I know that he is not focusing on the present. I know that he is more likely to call than his baseline. (Never try to bluff a player who is obviously on tilt.) I know that he is going to be playing more hands than usual in an attempt to get back what he perceives as having unfairly lost, and will be more likely to bluff or overplay weak or mediocre hands. When you expose your feelings to the table like this, you unintentionally inform the better players what to expect from you and how to play more accurately against you. This will cost you money.

The best thing would be to get to where you don't care about the outcome, as long as you made the right decision. If you can't manage that, at least make it look to others as if that's where you are. Never let 'em see you sweat.

7.

You played a hand with, I think, A-Q, then immediately afterward asked me if I thought you played it right.

I will never discuss poker strategy or tactics at the table with you--or with anybody else, for that matter. (OK, "never" is too strong there. But it's almost never. And when there is a rare exception, it is sotto voce, when seated next to somebody I know and trust, not out loud for all to hear.) It's just plain bad for the game.

It is a bad mistake to clue in the recreational players that there are layers of depth to the game that they are not seeing. It is unwise to let them know who among their opponents are the most thoughtful and experienced and analytic. The fact that they can't figure that out from just watching hands is part of what makes them bad players. (You know the old saw about not being able to spot the fish at the table in the first 20 minutes.) It is self-defeating to let them listen in on discussions about how a hand could or should have been played.

I also don't want to be spotlighted at the table as a player whose advice you seek and value. That hangs a big sign around my neck telling the inattentive players that maybe they should watch out for me more than they had previously been inclined to do. That, in turn, may make them less willing to play hands against me, and therefore cost me money. It's bad form all around, and reduces both of our expected profits for the night.

Mike Caro again, page 261: "It's a very bad idea to discuss serious strategy with weak opponents--at the table or away from it. Doing so makes them self-conscious, and helps them recognize that there are levels of poker they don't understand. They are apt to play more cautiously as a result, and, worse, they may even learn to play well!"

8.

While sitting in Seat 1, at least one time you showed your cards to the dealer before mucking. The player in Seat 10 was still in the hand and saw them, though he didn't say anything about it. I know you didn't mean to show them to that other player, but you did. You might have influenced how the hand played out, because now that guy had information about what cards were out, information that was not available to his opponent(s).

It is generally really difficult to control exactly who can and cannot see your cards when trying to expose them selectively. It's just a bad idea.

Yet again, I have to ask: What possible gain is there from showing your cards to the dealer? He doesn't care what you had. If he is good at his job, he is not going to react and reward you with sympathy (which I assume is what you are seeking). He is going to act like he saw nothing. The best dealers, in fact, will turn their eyes away and refuse to look when a player is trying to share his cards that way, and explain that he doesn't want to take the chance of influencing the action by giving away anything with a reaction to what he is seeing.

This kind of action not only gives away to another player what you were willing to fold to his bet, but directly and adversely affects the integrity of the game. This was a serious breach of protocol. To be blunt, there is no excuse for it. There is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost.

Some general thoughts:

I like what John Vorhaus wrote in one of his columns: "They say that information is power; in poker, it's cash, just cash." Information is money. You should not give it away when you don't have to.

Even better is Tommy Angelo's extended discussion of poker as an "information war" (Elements of Poker, pages 86-92:

I play poker on a need to know basis. I need to know the thoughts my opponents are thinking. I need to know the feelings they are feeling. And I need to know the cards they are playing. Meanwhile, I need them to know as little as possible about me. I call this relationship the information war.

The information war is fought on two fronts--sending and receiving. To win it, send less information than they send, while receiving more information than they receive. By controlling those differences, you control information flow....

The information war at poker has an arms race, and if one were to take it to its natural extreme--which I have--one would play a style of poker I call "mum poker"--which I do.

On the outside, mum poker is the classic poker face, extended to the entire body, and maintained through sixth street. [Angelo coined the term "sixth street" to refer to everything that happens after one hand ends and before the next begins, most especially the players' discussion about what just happened.] On the inside, mum poker is no complaining, no blaming, no regretting. Mum poker is stillness. Mum poker is readiness....

Or you could just think of it as sit up and shut up.

Today, when I am playing primarily for profit, I play mum poker.... I do not speak unless spoken to, and even then, I do not react to questions or comments about poker.

I have found that the less information I send, the more I focus on the game. And when I am focused on the game, I send less information. When I employ mum poker, I fight on both fronts of the information war simultaneously....

Mum poker is not about not talking. It's about not talking about certain things, namely, poker things. Mum poker means not talking about poker plays, poker thoughts, and poker feelings, especially the recent ones. And it means not talking about poker players, especially the present ones.

Mum poker means not saying certain words and phrases when you play. Words like ace, king, queen, spade, heart, pair, straight, gutshot, river, etc. Mum poker also means not being a dickhead. If someone asks you if you like your food, answer. If someone asks you if you like your cards, don't answer. That's mum poker....

There's a big difference between ignoring the people and events in a poker game and not reacting to them. Ignoring is when you react on the inside, but not on the outside. Not reacting is when nothing happens, inside or out. Not reacting looks the same as ignoring, but it feels better....

Everything everyone does is a tell. What they wear is a tell. How they sit is a tell. What they say is a tell. What they don't say is a tell.... It's all a seamless trail of tells. And what do all these tells tell you? It depends. Tells might tell you about your opponent's thoughts. Tells might tell you about your opponent's feelings. Tells might tell you about your opponent's intentions. Tells might tell you what your opponent's hole cards are. It all depends on what you are doing. Are you listening? Or are you telling?

To the extent that there is identifiable motivation for why you do these things, I think it is chiefly that you very much want others at the table to respect you, to think that you're a good player. To that end, you try to show them that you understand the game more deeply than they do. But sooner or later you have to ask yourself what is really more important to you--controlling what nine strangers think of how you play poker, or maximizing your profit? Those two goals are mutually exclusive. You cannot give away information without giving away money. As it stands, you are giving away information on a nearly constant basis. That means that you are giving away money. I don't think you can afford it.

I have a serious suggestion for you, and for any of my readers who recognize similar problems in their own information wars. When you first read this, you'll think I'm just exaggerating to make a point, but I'm not. I'm deadly serious and completely literal in this suggestion: If you really want to plug these information leaks, you have to make your brain equate information and money in a very explicit and automatic way. I suggest that every time you catch yourself leaking information--showing a card that you didn't have to show, talking about strategy, criticizing how an opponent played, cursing about a bad beat, rehashing a hand that is long over, discussing your bankroll, telling people whether you're up or down for the day--punish yourself by giving the dealer a $5 chip as a tip. Giving away information is giving away money, and you've got to learn that association down to the deepest fibers of your being. The way to ingrain that lesson, I submit, is to make it hurt, and make the information=money connection explicit to yourself along with the pain.

I don't know whether any one piece of information that you give away is worth more or less than $5, and it really doesn't matter. What matters is that you come to grips with the fact that when you leak information, you are giving away your chips. It is literally true, whether you acknowledge it or not, so make it literally true and concrete for yourself. I predict that if you do that, it will not take long before you learn to keep your information to yourself--and all those red chips, too.

If your reaction is that you can't help yourself, that these things just happen, I will have to disagree. Suppose I offered to pay you $100,000 if you played poker for one hour without a single unnecessary information leak. Could you pull it off? Of course you could. These leaks are things you choose to do--every single one of them, every single time--and you could choose not to do them if you wanted to, if you had sufficient motivation. The question that remains is whether you will decide that making more money is sufficient motivation.

I hope you find these observations and suggestions helpful. I wish you success, my friend.

"I guess I should have kept my mouth shut"

One hand from yesterday's HORSE tournament is worth describing for you, I think.

I started the tournament in a deep hole, and for a while it looked like I would be among the first handful eliminated. But just before the first break I had a series of three consecutive miracle suckouts in razz hands (including one where I busted a guy when with the last card I made 8-6-4-3-A to edge out his 8-6-4-3-2) that got me back to my starting stack. Soon thereafter I got moved to a new table, which was much, much softer. Once I figured out how generally meek and passive this new table was, I was able to use a combination of stepped-up aggression and a run of good cards to build a stack that was more than double the tournament average.

(This included, unfortunately, busting my new friend Dave, with whom I had gone to the Lyle Lovett/John Hiatt concert. In an Omaha hand, he opened from under the gun with AAxx. I called for one bet from the big blind with the crummy K-9-8-4 double-suited. The flop was an amazing K-K-4, and I ended up taking his remaining stack. It never feels good to end a friend's tournament run.)

Soon after I got to my third table, the worst hand of the day for me occurred. I called a raise in hold'em with 7-7, and four of us saw the flop of 9-7-2 with two diamonds. The betting ended up getting capped on the flop, and again on the turn of a second 2, with the other two players (i.e., not the original raiser and me) getting all in, one of them with the nut flush draw, the other with 10-10.

The interesting point was when I put in the cap on fourth street, the original raiser was obviously disturbed by how things were developing. He finally called, but as he did so he said, "I sure hope you have pocket sevens and not the pocket deuces."

The tournament director happened to be standing there watching this hand play out, and he immediately and properly warned the player not to be discussing his hand, as it could be considered collusion against the two players who were already all-in.

Well, his words were about as clear as he could be that he had 9-9, and I had stumbled into the bad end of the dreaded set-over-set situation. There was a small possibility that he had aces or kings and was cleverly trying to fool me into thinking that he had top set, in order to shut down further betting, but I didn't think so. He sounded utterly genuine to my ears.

The turn was some brick, and he and I both checked. Sure enough, he flipped over 9-9 and scooped the biggest pot I had seen all day.

(Despite the enormous stack he earned here, he ended up busting out in either 8th place for a min-cash, chiefly because he kept severely overplaying one-pair hands. Slow learner, apparently.)

As he was stacking all of his newly acquired chips, he turned to me and said, somewhat remorsefully, "I guess I should have kept my mouth shut." He realized, in retrospect, that he may have cost himself more bets on the river. Indeed he did.

He ended up with more than half of the chips with which I started that hand, and it took me down to well below the tournament average. I had to play short-stack ninja for two or three hours to recover from that devastating blow. But it could have been even worse. I don't know how much more I would have put in on the river, because the overpair theory was starting to lose force with his willingness to cap it with me, but I think at least one or two more big bets would have gone in.

There are a few players who are skillful enough to talk to an opponent during a hand and extract more information than they leak, but they are few and far between. The vast majority of players who talk about their hands give away valuable information--and this guy was a prime example.

Tommy Angelo is on my mind this week, and I'm reminded of a column that Lee Jones wrote about the experience of playing poker with Angelo. It was in Bluff magazine in 2009, and can be found here. Angelo is famous for advocating "mum poker," and Jones describes seeing it in action and trying to emulate it. It's not the only way to play poker (Mike Caro routinely denounces it as not the approach that will make the most money), but it's worthy of your consideration.

New book from Tommy Angelo

I loved Tommy Angelo's first book, Elements of Poker (EOP), as you might have guessed from the number of snippets from it that I posted here. It's wise, pithy, insightful, memorable, unique, with the most inventive and clever use of language ever put into a poker book.

I was therefore excited recently when Angelo contacted me and asked if he could send me, gratis, a copy of his newest work, A Rubber Band Story and Other Poker Tales. Why, yes, as a matter of fact, you may. I finished reading it last week.

As advertised, it's a collection of 55 stories, all but six of them nonfictional, most or all of which have been published in various print or online venues over the last ten years. I had read maybe three of them before, but the rest were new to me. A couple are quite well known, such as his adventure in folding aces before the flop for no reason other than to prove to himself that he could do it, and his celebration of the beauty of the buy-the-button rule.

The tone ranges from grumpy (rant about the stupid "I want to see that hand" rule) to whimsical (stories of animals playing poker) to affectionate (those about his wife, Kay, and his best friend, Alex). Several made me laugh out loud--especially the punchline to a story in which he managed to make Alex positively apoplectic over how Angelo played a tournament hand. Some of them celebrate his best ideas and plays, while in others he pokes fun at his own foibles, such as acting out of turn because he was busy revising an article on the importance of paying attention.

The tales make for light reading--but if you're not careful, he'll slip in a lesson that might help your game, one about strategy or mindset or bankroll management.

I'll list here the handful of flaws I noticed, even though it's nitpicky of me to do so. Once a copy editor, always a copy editor. Besides, I know that Angelo values getting these things right.

• There is a missing quotation mark on page 22, and another on page 90.
• "BBPH," which can stand for several different things depending on context, is an abbreviation or an initialism, not an acronym (page 44), though, to be fair, there is some disagreement on these labels (see here, e.g.).
• On page 104, a question mark should be after the quotation mark, rather than before it.
• Pages 105 and 106 are reversed in order.

That's a pretty small list of pretty minor quibbles, compared to most of the badly edited stuff I read.

A Rubber Band Story is a fun, interesting read, full of amusing stories and unforgettable characters, told in Angelo's distinctive style. If you expect it to be EOP 2 you'll be disappointed. It's not. But accept it for what it is, and I think you'll have a rollicking good time reading it. (Available from Amazon.com here.)

To give you a sample of the tone, I'm going to close this post with some excerpts from my favorite chapter, titled, simply, "Folding," written in 2006:

I played poker for ten years before I discovered folding in 1984. That's when I met Bobby. He had a big belly, a big beard, and a big laugh. Bobby was like Santa Claus, minus the giving. He just kept throwing his hand away, and he didn't seem to mind. Then he would carry the money away, and the players didn't seem to mind.

So I started folding more often, to see what would happen.... It was so new, so exciting. I was high from it, like an explorer.... But it didn't stop there. Oh no. Before long I got hooked on the hard stuff, like folding on the river when I had a good hand.

Soon I went to Vegas. After a week in the desert, I felt like Charles Darwin must have felt on the Galapagos Islands, having traveled to an isolated land, where he found strange new ecosystems populated by bizarre species. What I discovered on Las Vegas Island was that in the poker ecosystem, at the top of the food chain, sat the folders....

I couldn't get over how comfortable the folders were, with all of it, with the folding, with the comments [about their tight play], and they'd just sit there, behind their tall stacks and long smiles, and muck, one more time.

I was like, okay, I see how this works now. It's like a club. The folders club. Well, whatever it was, I wanted in.

After my first taste of big-time folding, I felt that if I could get really good at it, I could quit my job....

By 1990 I was folding enough to support my food and rent habit. This freed up lots of time for more folding....

My path became a gentle incline that coaxed me up to a sunny ledge where I stopped, and sat, and I looked around in wonder, for I could see the top of the mountain far away and high above, and I could see the bottom, waiting for me, should I neglect my folding.

Poker gems, #422

Tommy Angelo, in A Rubber Band Story, page 196.

[W]e set aside our thoughts of what went wrong, and we step away from our thoughts about what might go wrong, and for that moment, when those thoughts are gone, so too is unhappiness. By eliminating the past, and eliminating the future, we give ourselves this present.

Poker gems, #421

Tommy Angelo, in A Rubber Band Story, page 168.

I make a living at poker by choosing when to enter a game and when to leave it. These options give me the freedom to choose my state of mind, and to choose my opponents. My betting decisions are of small consequence, comparatively.

Poker gems, #420

Tommy Angelo, in A Rubber Band Story, pate 145.

So now I was well on my way to establishing my preferred [table] image, which is WET (weird-tight).

Poker gems, #419

Tommy Angelo, in A Rubber Band Story, page 137.

[There is a] common, ancient rule, which states, "If you show someone your uncalled hand, then everyone is entitled to see it, but only after they do the show-one-show-all chant with disdain."

Poker gems, #417

Lee Jones, during an online discussion of the monetary value of holding pocket aces, as quoted in Tommy Angelo, A Rubber Band Story, page 73.

How much is it worth to know that those aces are two little pieces of plastic, that you control them, and not vice versa?

Chan vs. Nguyen

A post today on Doyle Brunson's blog, written by somebody identified only as "bob," reports:

Perhaps stating the obvious, but nevertheless entirely true, Johnny Chan commented that “There aren’t going to be any suckers dumping off chips, you have to earn them.” Point in case, who but a pro could fold queens full of jacks? That is exactly what Johnny Chan did against Scotty Nguyen. Granted, there were a pair of aces on the board, but even so, that must have been hard. Nguyen raised Chan on the button, who called. The flop was A-A-Q, and both players checked. The jack on the turn was also checked. When another jack came on the river, Nguyen fired a bet that almost doubled the pot. Chan folded his pocket queens face up, and Nguyen left him to wonder what could have been.

Uh, if the board was AAQJJ, and Chan had pocket queens, wouldn't his hand be queens full of aces, rather than "queens full of jacks" as stated?

(I would have just left this as a comment on that post rather than writing here, but comments were listed as "closed" and the "Leave a comment" link seems to do nothing. Hmpf!)

By the way, what, exactly, is meant by the phrase, "Point in case"?

And further by the way: Folding a low full house on a double-paired board is not particularly difficult. In this case, though, my guess is that the fold was incorrect. I doubt that Nguyen would check trip aces--even with a weak kicker and out of position--on both the flop and turn. It's not impossible, of course, but I think it's more likely that he would make at least a small feeler bet on one of those streets. I suspect that Nguyen had a jack, and Chan got hoodwinked. But I could be completely wrong.

One last point: Shame on Chan for slow-playing himself into such a difficult spot. Double shame on him for folding face-up. What's the point of that? Tommy Angelo, in Elements of Poker, p. 100, gets it exactly right:

When you fold face up, the message that is sent to the table, whether you
intend it or not, and whether you realize it or not, is this: "Dear table full
of people. It is very important to me what you think of me. It is so important
that I am willing to give you the most generous gift of information I can--I
will show you my cards--just so you know that 1) my decisions were justified,
and also that 2) I am unlucky. I know it will cost me money to reveal my cards
and feelings to you. But that's okay. That's how much I value your opinion of
me."

If you always fold face down without ever showing even one card to anyone,
the message that is sent, and received, whether you intend it or not, and
whether you realize it or not, is this: "I don't care what you think about how I
play. I don't even care what I think about how I play. Oh, and by the way, I am
impervious to everything." Fussless folding fortifies.

Folding aces

In Tommy Angelo's blog post today he links to a story he wrote in 2003 about deliberately folding aces before the flop, just to experience what it felt like. It's a great read. Go check it out here.

Perhaps I'm not losing my mind after all

The chips above are two new ones that I picked up at the Excalibur poker room tonight, where I was playing for a while.


November ups and downs

As I've explained here many times, I don't usually discuss much about my results or income, for a variety of reasons. I don't usually disclose on any given day or week whether or how much I'm winning or losing, and I try to keep my writing about poker unconnected to my results of the moment.

But once in a while I break that silence for some particular reason, and this is one such occasion.

November has been a highly unusual month. It started out like gangbusters. I couldn't lose. I had nine cash winning sessions and a big tournament score, punctuated by just one losing session.

Then things went all to hell. From November 12th to the 22nd I endured six consecutive losing sessions, for a total loss of $1526. (That's fewer sessions that I would usually put in during an 11-day stretch because I was taking days off in between the losses trying to get my head straight and not play with a mindset of making up for them, which is a deadly, sure-to-lose perspective.)

Losing that much money in that short a time frame stings, there's no denying that. But I can take the loss financially. It's what the repeated losing does to my head that I'm going to try to describe.

It's not terribly uncommon for me to have a week or two in which I just spin my wheels, with losses roughly equally balancing wins. That's kind of annoying, because it feels like I've just been wasting my time without accomplishing anything useful. But six substantial losses in a row is pretty darn rare for me. Even the couple of bad, prolonged losing spells that I've written about here before haven't been loss after loss after loss; they have been, rather, a long series in which the losses continued to exceed the wins in both magnitude and number, but there has been at least some winning going on along the way.

One losing session rolls off of me like water off a duck. Two in a row annoys me, but by the next day I'm fine again. Three in a row starts escalating the frustration. And at four, frankly, I start losing my composure. I shouldn't, I know. I should be able to shrug off as many consecutive losses as there are, because such streaks will happen no matter how soundly I play, and I'd better get used to that fact. But I'm not to that point of zen-like equanimity yet. (I try, without much success, to emulate Tommy Angelo's way of seeing losing ten times in a row as practice for the next time that he will lose ten times in a row.)

I tell you, losing that many times in a row does strange things to my brain. A task that was routine, ordinary, and even habitual (i.e., winning at least modest amounts at poker) suddenly became impossible. It feels like getting in a car, and you no longer can remember which pedal is the accelerator and which the brake, or how to make the thing turn. Worse, you keep crashing into things. It's not just discouraging, it's seriously disorienting. It's like I have forgetten how to be able to dress myself, or even speak coherently, after a massive stroke.

During such a spell, it seems to cease to matter what I do. I can play tight or loose: I lose. I can play aggressively or passively: I lose. I can play well or badly: I lose. I can have a table of experts or fish: I lose. I can pick any cardroom in the city for the day's work: I lose. I can move from one table to another, or even one casino to another: I lose. None of that makes any sense. None of it is how it should be. It is, I think, what experimental psychologists (those sick bastards who come up with new and devilish ways of torturing lab animals) call learned helplessness. It is poker futility writ large.


Cardgrrl on losing

My wonderful friend Cardgrrl has written about losing in poker as eloquently and thoughtfully as anybody I know. For example, this:

I think running bad is a little like getting lung cancer when you're a
non-smoker. It happens; you didn't do anything specific to bring it on, but
people keep asking you if you did. Everyone has advice on how to get better, but
few of them will hold your hand (or your forehead) while you go through chemo. A
lot of people will just disappear from your life, or avoid talking about "it"
altogether, as if your daily routine were continuing as normal otherwise and you
ought to be able to compartmentalize, for everyone else's sake as much as your
own. But some of them, often cancer survivors themselves, will offer sound,
practical advice on diet and exercise, recommend good physicians, listen to you
vent without judgment (as, if they were lucky, others did for them), and offer
strategies for coping with the rest of your life while you're ill. When you are
in remission, they will celebrate with you and also help you find equanimity in
the face of the possibility of recurrence.

If you are fortunate, you will actually emerge from the illness stronger,
more self-aware, with better habits for maintaining your well-being and a keener
understanding of what is and isn't within your control. And if you are truly
blessed, you will have learned how to live well even under the most adverse
circumstances.

In a long post from about a year ago, Cardgrrl details one astoundingly horrendous trip to Atlantic City where nothing, nothing, nothing would go right. (Let's try not to dwell too long on the part about her making out with another player at the table, OK?) Rereading it makes me glad that I either have never experienced days quite that bad, or I have blessedly blocked from conscious memory having done so. A couple of other old posts describe painful, though somewhat less dramatically concentrated, losing streaks: here and here.

But her best work on the subject is in three posts that I think are just too good in their entirety, too insightful and eloquent and wise to excerpt or try to summarize. It would be an injustice to them and to their author. Go read them in toto, here and here and here.


The pain does end

I'm writing this now because tonight this particular fresh hell (hat tip: Dorothy Parker) seems to have run its course. One of my tricks for breaking a losing streak is to head to one of a few places that I dislike as poker rooms (because of heavy noise and cigarette smoke problems, bad dealers, etc.) but which are reliable cash cows. The Luxor was the choice of just such a place tonight. And it came through for me: Up $316 in about 80 minutes.

I crossed the tunnel into the Excalibur (another such room), and hit again: $150 in exactly one hour.

I plan to describe a couple of the hands in a separate post, but not here, because exactly how it happened is beside the point. The point is that, as suddenly as it began, the just-can't-win streak is gone. Winning was easy again, the way I'm mostly used to it being. It feels a bit like a tornado suddenly ripped me out of my comfortable home, spun me around, bonked my head against a bunch of flying debris for 12 days or so, but then dropped me down again and went on its way, presumably to torment some other grinder.

Now I just have to brush myself off, and go about picking up all the hundred-dollar bills that got blown out of my wallet in the process.

Mystery of the windows

Tommy Angelo just posted this intriguing insight on his blog, about the arrangement of the windows on Treasure Island, Bellagio, and probably other Strip properties. The question with which he leaves his readers is why they do this (i.e., how does this help them make money). I don't know, but I'm curious. The only answer I can come up with quickly (and it's not a particularly good one) is that it makes the windows look bigger, so one is more likely to think, "Oh, I'll stay there because it has big windows." But who picks a hotel based on window size?

I'm stumped.

My most expensive dollar ever

Fortunately for me, most days that I play poker I still actually enjoy it. After three years, I'm still not feeling burned out. I like playing, and on any given day I will basically keep playing until the game goes bad, I'm feeling too tired to continue, or I just feel like I want to go home and do something else.

There are days, though, when, for whatever reason, it feels like a grind and I'm just putting in the hours to collect the money. I don't hate the work, but I'm not really having fun, either. Which is, I suppose, how most of the world's population feels about their work most of the time. When I'm having a day like that, my tendency is to set some arbitrary goal for income for the day (usually $100 or $200 or $300--the amount depends on how ambitious and energetic I feel, how the bankroll has been doing lately, how pleasant the poker environment is, and other intangible factors) and call it quits when I get there. I very much like Tommy Angelo's advice: "[I]t's okay to quit while citing this to yourself as the reason: I want to have fun. I am not having fun. So I will stop this unfun activity, now." (See here.)

Yesterday was one of those days. I was at Mandalay Bay again. I made the first $100 fairly quickly--$70 in the first hand, in fact--so I decided that when I got to a $200 profit I'd call it a day, go home, and finish watching a Netflix movie that I was in the middle of.

About two hours into the session I counted my stack after winning a pot and found that I was up by $199. So close. Just one more pot and I'm done, I told myself.

But I lost the next one, and was then at +$183. I thought about leaving, but it felt like it would be lazy to quit short of my goal--like I hadn't really put in my honest day's work. So I kept going.

I lost the next pot, too, and was down to about +$160. Now I was annoyed because of the extra time it was going to take me to grind back to where I wanted to be. But the table was soft, I wasn't especially tired, and there wasn't anything I really needed to be doing anywhere else, so I decided to put my nose to the grindstone for a while longer.

Grindstone? That's the wrong word. Millstone is what I should have said, because there was one tied around my neck and I was sinking. Next time I counted, I was at +$120 or so, then +$101 (I remember that one exactly), then about +$85.

Just. Could. Not. Win. An. Effin'. Pot.

As far as I could tell, nothing had changed. The table had not suddenly gotten tougher. I had not gone on tilt and started seeing promise in trash hands or making desperate calls. My most objective assessment (though I recognize that one's ability to analyze these things deteriorates and may not always be reliable) was that it was just a bad streak: my draws not getting there, opponents' second-best starting hands catching up, being dealt my best hands in worst position, etc.

So I shrugged it off the best that I could and kept playing.

And I kept losing.

+$85, +$60, +$35 came and went. I finally crashed down through the break-even point.

I reassessed, still felt reasonably good about the EV of the situation, so kept going.

Long story short, I bottomed out at about -$80. I seriously thought about quitting then, because this trend showed no signs of reversing. I still couldn't see that there was anything in particular that was wrong. However, I have enough experience with poker to know that sometimes there is something that is adversely affecting me in some insidious manner and I just can't diagnose it in myself until later, in retrospect, when I'm removed from the immediate situation. I was therefore wondering if this was another of those cases, and, if so, whether I should just take my loss and run away before losing the rest of my stack.

Fortunately, right about then, I finally won the first meaningful pot of the last couple of hours, and was back to about -$20. That gave me some sense of confirmation (rightly or wrongly) that I was OK to continue at least for a while more. And, sure enough, I soon thereafter hit another winner that took me back over the most critical psychological threshold. I left with a big $4 profit to show for my 4 1/2 hours of work.

I could have stayed longer, but I had enough uncertainty about whether there was something I wasn't perceiving about my own play or about the situation that I thought discretion was the better part of valor. There's always another game another day. So I left technically a winner for the day, but, of course, feeling like I had actually lost $195. Which sucks.

My buddy Cardgrrl recently had a similar night. As her readers know by now, a few months back she set up for herself an incentive plan to help her get up from the table when she has won enough to be content with. This was to avoid the awful feeling that results from giving it all back. Last week in a cash game she had bought in for $200. Her incentive plan involves doubling the buy-in, so when she was at about +$180, she texted me to say that she should be done and heading home soon. But it was not to be. Just like me, things started heading south. If I remember correctly, over the next few hours she lost not only the accumulated profit but the original buy-in, too. (If I have that wrong, Cardgrrl, my apologies--the days all start to run together in memory after a while.) Had she been content with a $180 profit, instead of chasing that last $20, it would be in her pocket now.

These stories aren't told as criticism of either my own decision or Cardgrrl's decision to stay and win a little bit more. These things just happen sometimes. In both cases, staying was presumably +EV, and just didn't work out as expected. In both cases, the next pot could just as easily have gone my way (or hers) as the other, the goal would have been met, and there would have been joy in Mudville.

That's the thing about poker sessions--kind of like with the stock market, you can't ever tell where the peak is until after it has passed. Especially when playing no-limit, the next pot could double or triple your money, or, conversely, leave you staring at the felt, facing the awful decision whether to rebuy or go home loser for the day, and wishing you had quit one hand earlier. And on the other side of the equation, it's entirely possible that packing up for the day after hitting some arbitrary amount of win is a mistake because the next hand would have doubled your profit for just three more minutes of work. You just never know. There have been plenty of times that I've kicked myself for not leaving when it first occurred to me that I should, but there have also been plenty of times when I've gone on to win a lot more money after that point, and ended up thinking, "Good thing I didn't listen to myself!"

Most of the time I don't have any particular need to employ a stop-loss or stop-win mechanism. (I'm well aware of the arguments for and against such devices, but don't feel like engaging in that discussion at the moment.) But at least for the foreseeable future, I think that when I'm having a "poker is just a grind at the office" kind of day and I have set some arbitrary income amount, I'm going to remember the sting of last night's cost of chasing that last damned dollar, and be willing to cut things short when I get within shouting distance of whatever that amount is.

Open letter to Cardgrrl

CG:

Most--maybe all--of what follows is stuff I told you in person yesterday, but I think it deserves both a wider audience and some sort of permanence to which you can refer back later. I also know that you don't need soothing or comforting from me or anybody else. You're processing the whole experience perfectly well without help. But I still want my thoughts and feelings on the record.

I know how disappointed you are. I know how it feels to miss out on capitalizing on a rare opportunity in a very public way. The feeling of having let yourself down is not unfamiliar to me.

Yes, the play of your last hand was a mistake. If I tried to convince you otherwise, I'd be lying, and you'd know it. You have already presented an excellent analysis of the whole situation, so I'll not belabor it.*

But I hope that the self-chastisement never drowns out this simple fact: You cashed in a World Series of Poker event. That is a genuinely significant, meaningful, non-trivial accomplishment. It is a difficult task. It is something that the vast majority of poker players, including me, have not managed to do, despite trying. You outlasted 90% of the field, in a situation where, as you well know, you had precious few soft spots at your tables. Your achievement is in the record books forever, and nothing can take it away. You played very, very well overall.

More important, though, is what it portends for the future. When a marksman is first shooting at a distant target, his sights may be off or the wind not correctly compensated for. As a result, the first bullet will often completely miss. But he sees where it hits, makes an adjustment, and fires again. Closer that time. He tweaks the dials on the scope a little more and takes a third shot, this time just catching the edge of the target. Now the bullseye is in danger, because the shooter knows precisely how, where, and why he missed, and in very short order the center of that target is going to be riddled with holes. Your first two WSOP shots missed for reasons that you yourself quickly identified. You definitely compensated for those shortcomings this third time, and landed a bullet right on the edge of the target. You know what went wrong on this third shot, too, which puts you in a position to absolutely nail the sucker next time.

Or, to use another image, you had a long, hard trip across the ocean to engage the enemy in battle. After being rebuffed a couple of times, on this assault you made a landing, and stuck the CG flag in the sand. There is a vast swath of WSOP territory to be conquered. You have established a beachhead, and there is nothing to stop you from going marauding from there.

I truly believe that you are on the verge of greater accomplishments, and I am a little giddy with the anticipation of watching them come to pass.

I'm certain that you are a substantially better tournament player than I am, and I get a kick out of watching you do your thing. The excitement of the occasional big hand (most of which go your way) makes up for the long stretches in which nothing is happening. I was honored that you'd let me stand by as your "second" for this thing and do what little I could to help. I was also happy to assist in the post-hoc autopsy/decompression/blowing-off-steam process.**

I don't know most of the friends who peppered you all day with calls and text messages of support and congratulations, but I think it's safe to assume that they all share with me this perspective: Our pride and vicarious joy in your achievement far outweighs any feeling of disappointment over what might have been. I understand that you probably can't get yourself to that same emotional state right now, but I hope it helps to know that others are thrilled on your behalf.

I know that your run in this event fell short of what you had wanted and hoped for. It was, nonetheless, far more a victory than a defeat, by any objective standard. I am proud beyond words of you for that.

To quote Tommy Angelo, "Rise above it, rise above it, rise above it." I know you can, and believe that you will.

Fondly,

Your friend,

Grumpy




*In case anybody read the PokerNews description of the hand, then wondered at the discrepancies between that and CG's own report, well, P.N. got almost everything wrong except that the hole cards were Q-Q versus K-K. Come on, guys. I really do get how hard it is to do tournament reporting, but that was seriously sloppy.

**Minds out of the gutters, readers. This isn't code, or euphemism, or Seinfeldesque "Yada yada yada." To be clear, the process consisted of (1) thoroughly analyzing all of the possible lines that one could have taken in that final hand, their advantages, disadvantages, likely outcomes, etc., (2) bowling at Gold Coast (Oh, and while on that subject, I'm putting out an emergency call to Gadzooks for a little bowling help for Cardgrrl. Not to tell tales out of school, but four consecutive frames of 0, 0, 0, and 1 requires some sort of major transfusion of bowling mojo. My 120 average doesn't put me in a position of offering the kind of help she needs.), (3) grocery shopping at Whole Foods (where we saw Huck Seed), and (4) working a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle together (which we killed, by the way--one hour, no mistakes, no looking anything up).

Poker gems, #285

Tommy Angelo, in Elements of Poker, p. 240.


Even at our best, it's hard to focus on the right thing at the right time all the time. Throw in some fatigue, stuckness, television, and mind noise, and it's impossible. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could? What would that feel like? What would it look like? What would need to change? Is it unrealistic to think that we could be maximally focused all the time? Of course it is. Is it unrealistic to think that we could do better than we do now? Of course it isn't.


[With that thought, I conclude my long series of "Poker Gem" entries from this most excellent book. I hope that these excerpts have convinced you that it is a volume you should own, read, and absorb.]

Poker gems, #284

Tommy Angelo, in Elements of Poker, p. 237.


Fluctuation causes tilt.

Tilt causes fluctuation.

Poker gems, #283

Tommy Angelo, in Elements of Poker, p. 237.


Reset, reset, reset.

Rise above it, rise above it, rise above it.

Let it go, let it go, let it go.

Poker gems, #282

Tommy Angelo, in Elements of Poker, p. 237.


Tilted poker is like crooked teeth.

It's not your fault, and it can be fixed.