PokerNews article #118

An evolutionary biologist and George Costanza team up to teach you how to bluff better.

http://www.pokernews.com/strategy/deception-detection-bluffing-25151.htm

Bluffy McBlufferson

I just got home from 4 1/2 hours at Planet Hollywood, where I was playing with Rob and his friend Prudence. I had a good night--one of my best in several months, actually. Most of what I won came from pots where I had the best hand, but two sizeable ones were out-and-out thievery. The latter is always more fun to talk about, so I will.


1. 

Villain is a tourist, quite a bit tighter and more disciplined than most of them. Completely ABC, transparent. I had noticed that he was reluctant to put a lot of money in with one-pair hands. This is mostly a commendable and appropriate thing, but it also makes him a good target for bluffing. I had been playing tight and was getting respect when I showed any aggression.

He raised to $7 from under the gun plus one, which immediately narrowed his hand range enormously--certainly nothing outside of the top ten list, and probably only A-K, A-Q, and pocket jacks or better. I was in the small blind with 4-5 offsuit. This is a situation where I would normally fold, but some internal imp prompted me to take a flyer and see what might happen. I was the only customer he hooked.

Flop was J-7-8 rainbow. I checked, he bet $15, and I called with just a gutshot. It would have been nice to hit that, but mainly I was hoping that he was on A-K and would check behind on the turn in surrender, setting me up to steal if the river was not an ace or a king--an out-of-position float, basically.

But fourth street made it more interesting--another jack. I checked again. He bet again, $30. I decided to represent the jack, and check-raised to $80.

I'll interrupt the story to note that just a bit under 3x is my favorite check-raising amount. I mentally think of it as "3x-minus." My observation has been that 3x or more blows too many mediocre and drawing hands out of the water when I have the goods and want a call. 3x-minus does that less, yet it usually does not give the correct odds for a draw to call, the way a minimum (2x) raise would. Naturally, when I'm bluffing, I try to follow the same pattern. It's not really that I expect most players at this level to be paying enough attention to my check-raise sizes to notice if I were to deviate from my norm--I'm not doing it often enough for that. Instead, the reasoning is that a 3x check-raise is so standard that making it just a little less than that looks like I'm trying to get a call, without being the minimum raise that actually is easy for an opponent to call. To put it another way, it's either a good amount to value bet, or a good amount to look like a value-bet.

Back to the story. He thought quite a while, but eventually called. This was the first time I had seen a significant crack in his demeanor, and he looked seriously uncomfortable. I imagined that he was thinking something like, "What have I gotten myself into?"

The turn card had put a second diamond out, so I now believed that he either had an overpair, or he had the A-K or A-Q of diamonds and was calling in the hope of hitting the nuts on the river. For that reason, if another diamond had come, I probably would have had to shut down.

River was the ace of spades. I quickly moved all-in for about $120. He thought only a few seconds before mucking.

The best part was when the guy on my left, a very experienced player (and, I think, an off-duty dealer) told the villain, "I don't know what you had sir, but that was definitely a good laydown." Hee hee!

I take it back. That was the second-best part. The best part was winning the pot with complete air, and with what was very nearly the worst possible hand one could have for that board.


2. 

Much later, I had moved seats to be between Rob (on my immediate left) and Prudence (two to my right) for convenience of chatting. That seat also put me on the immediate left of the table's live one, a young man who had gotten lucky to build his stack to about $500, and was now in the inevitable process of redistributing it back to the other players.

Rob and I both had in the vicinity of $400 stacks, I believe. It is important to note that Rob had been basically spinning his wheels for most of nearly three hours at this point. He was two seats to the left of the table maniac, but had not been able to take advantage of that prime spot. He was just up and down relatively small amounts, never able to make a big score--until just a few minutes before the hand in question occurred, when he nearly tripled up in one hand. This meant that he was sitting on a meaningful profit that had not yet settled in emotionally. I judged that he would be less willing to risk losing it than usual, because his mindset would be, "I finally got ahead after three hours of nothing, I'm not going to give it away lightly."

There is a second important piece of back story. One of the disadvantages of being a poker blogger is that people who pay attention to your writing will have an enormous amount of information about how you play. I had a bit of insight about Rob that I thought would be relevant. About a month ago, he did a long post in which he talked about how reading an old post of mine (here)--which makes the point that playing scared in no-limit poker is going to lose you money--had caused him to rethink his approach to no-limit poker. In his post, Rob admitted that he had a tendency to see a significant profit in front of him and go into lockdown mode to prevent losing it. All of which meant that I thought Rob was a ripe target for stealing, because his new-found wealth should cause an exaggeration of what was already a tendency he struggles with.

With that in mind, I did something that was admittedly daring. OK, it might be more honest to call it reckless. I limped in with 6h-8d from early position, then called Rob's pre-flop raise. ("It's a position call," I told him. It took him a few seconds to get that I was joking.)

Now, I didn't take notes in the immediate aftermath of this hand, because it wasn't until on my drive home that I began thinking it might make good blog material. So I'm a little fuzzy on the details. But the flop had a 6 and two diamonds, and I believe it was 10-high. I think it might have been 6-9-10, because I recall that it had given me bottom pair, a gutshot straight draw, and the backdoor flush draw. That's pretty close, anyway.

I checked. Rob bet $20, I think. I called.

The turn was a small diamond--deuce, maybe? I checked again, though with deliberate hesitation. I had not yet decided what I would do if he bet, but if he felt inclined to give me a free card, I'd take it, and if he bet, I wanted him to have noticed the deviation from my usual rhythm, and possibly interpret it to mean that I had been wavering between betting out and going for a check-raise. I thought that impression, if I had reason to call on it, would look more like a flush had gotten there.

He bet $40. I thought a bit and check-raised to $110--the logic of the amount being the same as described in Hand #1 above. I wanted Rob to read me for the flush, because a check-call/check-raise was entirely consistent with having made a small or medium flush. I guessed that he did not like seeing that third diamond peel off, and that fact, coupled with the already-identified tendencies to protect a nice win (the acute one compounding the chronic one), would make this a convincing line.

He took a very long time to decide what to do--at least three full minutes. The longer it went on, the more obvious it became that he had either aces or kings, with one of them being the diamond. I hoped that it was kings, for two reasons. First, Rob has post after post after post about how he hates pocket kings and how he always seems to lose with them--his personal kryptonite hand. Feeding into a player's pre-existing belief system makes it that much easier to manipulate him. Second, if he had only the king of diamonds, he would have to worry that I had limp-called pre-flop with something like the A-2 of diamonds and he was already drawing dead.

There was yet another psychological factor at work. Right after Hand #1, I had texted Rob to gloat privately about having pulled off the big bluff. I wasn't sure if that fact would now cause him to think, "He's doing it again," or, conversely, "He wouldn't dare do that again after having told me about the earlier bluff." That could have worked either for or against me, and I didn't know which would predominate.

But finally Rob folded. He was visibly perturbed, and left the table for a few minutes--to clear his head, I assume. I felt bad about that. I don't like inflicting distress on my friends. But I trust that he understands and accepts the terms of the game. Chief among those is this premise: that we will all be using every legal tactic and stratagem we know, every scrap of information we have at our disposal, every bit of skill and reasoning we can muster, every means of deception and psychological trick we can pull off, in order to take each other's money. It is ruthless and cutthroat, but that is the essence of the game. When friends are involved, I will occasionally do a few playful things just for fun that I wouldn't ordinarily do, especially in small pots--play a goofy hand, show a bluff to rub it in, or whatever. But when there's a big pot brewing, I am going to try to win the money by any legitimate means available to me. Because I have more information about my friends' tendencies, I can more accurately tailor my line to maximize my chances of winning. This works both ways, naturally, since they know a lot about what I am and am not capable of doing. Which is a long way of saying this: I definitely don't soft-play friends (and I would be appalled if any of them soft-played me). I don't play them harder or in a more tricky way than I would play other opponents just because they are my friends and I'm specifically targeting them, but at the same time, knowing more about them means that I can often exploit them more than mercilessly than I can strangers. And that, in turn, means that I should exploit them more mercilessly. That might seem antithetical to friendship, but in the insular sphere of a poker game, it is not.

When Rob had had a chance to get back in the game mindset (and after he had won another good pot, which always helps remove the sting of a lost one), I offered him an honest exchange of information about the hand. He agreed, and I explained my cards and my rationale. He told me that I had it nailed--he had had pocket kings, including the diamond.

After a few seconds' pause, he realized the implication of what I had told him. "You mean, you called my raise from out of position with 8-6 offsuit?" Yes. Yes, I did.

In this case, obviously, I was not running a pure bluff as in Hand #1. It was a semi-bluff. Even if he had called me, I could have caught either of two 6s for trips, any of three 8s for two pair, any of three non-diamond 7s for a straight. At the time I made the raise, I also thought there was about a 50-50 chance that any diamond would also give me a winning flush, though this turned out not to be so.

As a side note, had Rob pushed all-in over the top of my check-raise, I would almost surely have folded. But I knew that my line put him in a difficult position, one in which it would have been hard for him to do that unless he happened to have made the nut flush, an unlikely occurrence. One of the things I was taking advantage of was the knowledge that he knew me to be capable of some way-off-the-beaten-path moves. I knew that he perceived me as a difficult-to-read and potentially dangerous opponent. He would know that I might be running a total bluff, but that I also might have him crushed, with a set, a flopped straight, a turned nut flush, or whatever. When my range contains so many hands that could cost him his entire stack if he guessed wrong, I was betting that he would not want to risk that much money in the face of that much uncertainty.

Here's the pithy lesson I take from this second hand: Know your enemy, especially when he is your friend.


Addendum, December 31, 2012 

See Rob's version of the story here.

Mind games

I was browsing YouTube for something else when the site suggested this clip. I watched it and liked it. I'm not sure the river raise alone would have won the hand, but the raise plus a well-conceived little speech did the trick.

It takes a thief to catch a thief--and a bluffer to catch a bluffer

See:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=liars-it-takes-one-to-know-one

Selling it

Last night I was playing at Binion's, Seat 1. Very early in the session I saw Seat 4 make a couple of very thin calls on the river (one of which was right and one wrong), and mentally pegged him as a calling station. Value-bet him, sez I to myself, no bluffing him.

Maybe an hour later I had been card-dead for quite a while, so I decided to raise with 10-8 offsuit from the cutoff seat. Most of my winning hands had been raise in position pre-flop, c-bet post, take it down. When the table is willing to let me do that, it obviously doesn't matter much what cards I have, as long as I'm not doing it so often as to arouse suspicion. I hoped that this hand would be yet another small win following the same pattern. The only caller was Seat 4 in the big blind.

Flop was A-J-9 with two hearts. Mr. Station checked. I thought this was a nearly ideal situation. I could represent the ace with a bet and have a high probability of ending the hand. If he called, I had an open-ended straight draw which, if it hit, would be thoroughly disguised, because he would never guess that I had open-raised with 10-8, given my tight image. If he were on a flush draw I could keep betting at any non-heart and likely win that way. If a heart came and he checked it, I could represent having made the flush. Lots of possibilities here for how to win this hand.

So I bet $15 into the roughly $20 pot. I was quite surprised to have him respond with a raise to $45. I didn't recall having seen him do a check-raise before. Yet I didn't get a sense from him of great strength, like a set. It felt more like a guy with an ace saying, "I don't think you have one." Very few players at these stakes check-raise a bare flush draw; rather, they use the check-raise to guard against opponents' flush draws. (The ace was one of the hearts, so he couldn't have top pair and a flush draw.) I considered my options, and settled on a call, hoping to either hit my hidden straight or get a heart which I could pretend completed my flush.

Turn was an offsuit 3. Whiff. I probably would have given up if he had made another substantial bet. But instead he checked. The check-raise/check pattern made me much more confident that, whatever he had, it was not a hand with which he was eager to get all of his chips in, which was a crucial point of demarcation. I took the free card.

River was the 4 of hearts. Now the question was what he would do. If he bet, I would have to conclude that he had flopped a pair and a flush draw, and abandon ship. But if he checked, then it would be much more likely that he hated the third heart than that he loved it.

Sure enough, he checked again. I moved all-in for my last $137. He sat back to think, and was pointedly studying me.

My usual practice when I am putting an opponent to a big test is to say nothing, no matter what. I rest my chin on my hands, remember to breathe normally, feel relaxed, kind of aimlessly look around at the pot, the TVs, the other players, or whatever else may be going on--and I try to do this exactly the same whether I have the stone-cold nuts or "what the little boy shot at."*

Here, however, the situation was somewhat different than usual. This guy was clearly suspicious, both by general disposition and because of the specific situation. Sure, I had played the flop and turn in a way that was consistent with a flush draw. The hole in the story, though, was that most of the time the pre-flop raiser will not have the flush draw when two of a suit come on the flop. The reason for that is simple: There are a lot more raiseworthy hands that contain different suits than are of the same suit, and even those that are of the same suit will be of a different suit than hits the flop three out of four times. If he was experienced enough to understand this truth, he was going to be leaning towards a thin call even more than was already his natural inclination. This was a high-risk, high-pucker-factor situation I was putting myself in. I felt that a little more salesmanship than usual was called for.

Very early in his tanking, he said, "Well, obviously you're saying that you made the flush. The question is, did you?" He quickly followed this with a friendly, "You're not required to answer that." Ordinarily I would ignore this or just give a small smile. But I wanted to stretch the envelope of my normal posture and conduct just a little toward the "I'm comfortable and relaxed" side, without overdoing it so much that he would recognize Hollywooding in me. So, playing off of what he had just said, I turned to the dealer and jokingly asked, "Do you have a player's Miranda warning here? Like, 'You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you'?" The dealer and a couple of other players chuckled, which helped me to smile along with them and, I hoped, look like everything was right in my world.

This all went on for a long time--three or four minutes, anyway. He counted out the chips for a call, and looked at what he would have left if he lost. I watched him intermittently, but remembered not to freeze up in either my breathing or where I was looking, which is one of the more reliable signs of a bluffer. At one point he asked me the classic, "If I fold, will you show?" Again, I usually ignore such questions completely, but this time I fudged just a little on the looking-relaxed side by smiling nicely at him and giving him a "Gee, I just don't know what I'll do" shrug.

I really thought he was going to call. But finally he sighed, looked dejected, took one last look at his cards, gave them that resigned snap with the index finger (what IS that gesture about, anyway?), and passed them back to the dealer face down. Pot to me.

I did not show.

He said, "I don't think you had it." I just smiled. Seat 2 immediately opined to Seat 4, "I think he had you all the way." Seat 4 asked, "You think he could beat two pair?" Seat 2 said, "Oh yeah, he looked really strong to me. I think he was stringing you along." Seat 4 said, "Well then maybe I made a good fold."

Yes sir, you absolutely did. As John-Robert Bellande likes to say, "Excellent laydown!" Excellent for me, that is.

(From the post-mortem discussion, I'm thinking that maybe he had A-9 or J-9, and checked the turn out of worry that I had top two pair with A-J, but that's just a guess, obviously.)

*Wow. I haven't heard or used this phrase in years and years. I don't know why it just leapt to mind to deploy here. When my grandmother taught me how to play cribbage, if one ended up with a nothing hand, that's what she called it--"What the little boy shot at." For a nice little exposition on the history and meaning of this phrase, see here.

M*A*S*H

It looks like my friend Martin Harris has found a new home at Poker Listings for his occasional excellent series on poker's intersections with pop culture. (It has previously appeared at Poker News and Epic Poker.) Today's installment reviews the episodes of M*A*S*H in which poker games show up:

http://www.pokerlistings.com/blog/pop-poker-the-history-of-poker-on-mash

He mentions the episode I most remember whenever the subject of bluffing comes up--Charles Emerson Winchester's bad habit of whistling when he bluffs. (See Martin's summary of the episode, "The Merchant of Korea.") I think of it, however, because of a lack of plausibility.

Even long before I played poker, the discovery of Winchester's tell struck a false note with me because of how it occurs. Mind you, I haven't seen the episodes in literally decades, so it's possible that my memory is faulty. But my recollection is that it is only after a poker session (or perhaps during a break in the game, away from the table) that BJ and Hawkeye are complaining to each other about how Charles is always winning. Then one of them chimes in with another gripe: "And it's so annoying how he whistles when he's bluffing." There's a beat, then a light bulb goes on over their heads. They smile and in unison say, "He whistles when he's bluffing!" They celebrate because they have finally discovered the chink in his armor that will allow them to start winning.

In other words, at least one of them had, while playing, noticed the association between his conduct and his bluffs, but it wasn't until later reflection that he (or they) realized that they could exploit this observation to beat him.

That's just not even remotely plausible. As I said, even decades before I ever played the game, I knew that that couldn't possibly be how such things would go. It rang as false as Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and not starting to fall until he realizes that there's nothing but air under him.

Ah well. It's not exactly a show that one watched for hyper-realism of details. But that particular plot point has bugged me for years and years and years whenever I've thought about it, and now I have finally had an excuse to express my annoyance about it.

Poker gems, #449

Mike Caro, in Poker Player newspaper, April 9, 2012 (vol. 15, #21), page 4.

Simply put, most opponents call more often than they should. And that, in itself, makes bluffing a challenge.

In fact, most bluffs are unprofitable. And all bluff attempts averaged together, throughout the history of the universe, have lost money.

Snowing in Vegas

Last night I made one of my occasional ventures into the Imperial Palace Sunday night 10-game mix. On my immediate right was a player there for the first time. He openly admitted that he had played some of these games for microstakes a few times online, but never live. That this was true was confirmed when he made common rookie mistakes (the same kind I made the first few times playing the unfamiliar games), such as getting confused between the betting rounds and drawing rounds. In the first hand of 2-7 triple draw, he announced his hand prior to the third draw, thinking the action was all over with. Oops!

On the next hand, I started with four strong low cards (don't remember exactly what they were) plus a jack. (The goal of triple-draw is to get five unpaired cards as low as possible without a straight or a flush.) I raised and drew one--a king. I bet again when the two remaining players checked to me. The only one who called was the guy on my right.

He discarded two, which meant that the chances of him improving to a really strong hand by the end were rather small. I didn't really want to turn in my king and get another bad card in return, because that would then compel me to either get lucky on the final draw or try a desperation bluff, which could easily get called by an opponent suspicious that I had tried and missed all three times.

So here's my situation: I had position, I had just one opponent (and an inexperienced one at that) who had drawn two cards on the second drawing round, I had raised and drawn just one card, then bet again, so I was telling a consistent and presumably believable story. I decided the situation was right to try snowing instead of drawing.

The "snow" is a form of bluffing unique to draw games. It means that you stand pat without having made your hand, in order to falsely project strength. It basically forces an opponent to get lucky enough in his draw to make a very strong hand, or else abandon his hand in the face of your confidence. You can do it on just the third draw, but it looks even more convincing if you do it on the second draw. You are declining two chances to improve your hand, so you must like what you have a lot, right?

I patted the table. Predictably, my opponent checked, so of course I bet again. He called and drew one. I patted again. He checked on the final betting round, and I bet once more, hoping he would fold--because I couldn't beat any hand with which he would call. He shook his head and said, "I only improved to a ten, and I'm sure you must have better than that." He indeed showed his made 10, then mucked. I.e., he had five different cards, the highest of which was a 10--only a mediocre hand in this game. He knew it was good only as a bluff-catcher, and I had given him no reason to think I was bluffing, even though I was.

My friend Troy (dealer at TI, excellent player) was on my left in the 10 seat, which made it easy for me to be sure that he--but nobody else--caught a glimpse of my king before I passed my cards back to the dealer. He caught my eye and gave me a half smile and an approving nod after realizing what it meant I had done.

I'm happy to have left back in Minnesota the cold, white powdery stuff that falls from the sky in such prodigious amounts there. But just a little snow here and there at the poker table can still make my day.

Unclear on the concept

That would be President Barack Obama, who today told Republican leaders, with respect to the debt ceiling increase, "Don't call my bluff."

You'd think a poker-playing president wouldn't be so clueless.

If it's a bluff, calling is exactly what one is supposed to do!

Who voted for this idiot anyway?

Fun and not-so-fun at the Luxor

Wow--it seems strange to sit down and start to write a real post of the kind that used to come out nearly every day. It's been a while!


Last night, I picked up Cardgrrl at the Venetian poker room, where she had been playing, and we went off to Mandalay Bay to do some fishing. After an hour and a half, we had both done reasonably well. (OK, I admit it--she had won quite a bit more than I had, thanks mostly to making a set of jacks on the turn and getting the all-in call from a guy with unimproved Q-Q.) She wanted to move on to the Luxor, so I agreed.

Good call, as it turned out.

By coincidence, we discovered in talking last night that Luxor is the place where both she and I first played casino poker--and both of us had no clue what we were doing back then. So it was kind of a return to roots, but hopefully this time with us nearer the top of the Luxor poker food chain than we were five or six years ago.


Unprofessional dealers--what's new?

Just about every time I write about a session at the Luxor, it includes a story about one of the dealers doing something stupid, unprofessional, and/or in violation of basic rules. (Just click here for a compilation of the relevant posts.) I'm not picking on the Luxor deliberately; I would complain about such things from dealers wherever they might occur. It's just that at the Luxor it happens a lot more than any other poker room I visit regularly. As I have noted before, I am not the only one with this perception; "Las Vegas Michael" spends even more time in poker rooms than I do and pays close attention to how they are run, and he agrees that the Luxor is in a class by itself in terms of how unprofessional the dealers are.

Last night it took only five minutes into the session before I had another humdinger of a bad-dealer story. The dealer was Jimmy. The final board on the hand in question was K-Q-3-7-3. Player A bet. Player B called. Player A showed K-10. Player B said, "Oh, you have a better kicker." Player B then turned a king face up, left his second card face down, and passed his hole cards back to the dealer in a clear and obvious fold.

Jimmy tapped the guy's face-down card and said, "Chop chop." Player B still didn't catch on, so Jimmy told him, "If you turn both cards up, it will be a chopped pot." Player B finally saw what he meant, complied (his other card was a 5) and the pot was split.

B's cards never hit the muck, but his intention was unambiguous, and the dealer's correct action would have been to turn the king face down, put both cards in the muck, award the pot to Player A, and say nothing about it.

Player A complained, but did so very softly, speaking quietly to the player on her right. (I was on her left, so heard it.) She didn't complain to the dealer or floor, as she should have.

If a player misreads his hand or the board or both, and wrongly decides to muck his cards, he must be allowed to do so. Neither the dealer nor another player may intervene to stop him. It is a strategic decision to muck rather than table one's cards, and dealers cannot make that decision for players, nor even help them make that decision.

I suspect that the dealer's reason for sticking his nose in where it didn't belong was the hope that he could pick up tips from two winners rather than one. He was a smart guy--he surely knew that what he was doing was against the rules. Dealers injecting themselves into poker hands and poker players' decisions is the single most frequent category of wrong stuff that Luxor dealers do that I have chronicled here. Clearly it is not going to stop anytime soon, because it has been going on for years. It is patently obvious that nobody in the poker room management cares about this stuff.

Here's another minor dealer error I saw last night: On the river, the action went check-check-check-check, then the button pushed out $35. The dealer, James, said, "Raise it up. Make it $35." Raise? Raise? How can there be a raise when there has been no prior bet? Players new to casino poker make this mistake all the time. Dealers never should.

One last dealer story: I had Tweeted about the first incident. Cardgrrl, two tables over, had apparently seen that post. A while later, she sent me a text message asking me whether Don was the dealer that I disliked. I responded that he was one of them, based on previous interactions. I guessed at what he was doing that annoyed her: being vulgar. She wrote back, "He was on about happy endings over here. Idiot." Bingo. Do I know my dealers, or what? (He's the same one that I referred to as "Dealer #5" here, when I heard him making stupid double-entendres about his "big carrot.")


An audacious bluff

Usually at the Luxor the players are such terrible calling stations that I deploy what I think of as my "Bill's strategy," which basically means no bluffing. There can be exceptions, but they must be selected with extreme care. Last night, such a confluence of circumstances occurred.

There was a large four-way pot. One player was all-in on the flop, with three of us calling. I had suited 7-8. On the turn I picked up both flush and gutshot straight draws, so I called another player's bet, as did the last guy.

The river missed me, but meant that the final board was K-5-4-3-2 with no flush possible. I didn't think either of my remaining opponents had an ace or a six, and thought that they couldn't call without a straight if I were to bet. Furthermore, they happened to be the only two players at the table that I thought were good enough (1) to have noticed that I had played my hand as if on a draw, and (2) to fold a hand like top pair or even two pair if they were sufficiently persuaded that I had just made my straight on the river. So when it was checked to me, I bet $50 at what was then a roughly $60 side pot. Both of them folded.

I had to show my cards because of the showdown with the all-in guy. As the dealer pushed me the side pot, he said, "You get this part for sure." I flipped my cards up and said, "I think that's all I'll be getting." I was right, of course--the approximately $150 main pot was won by the all-in guy who had a suited Q-J, and took it with queen high! Each of the guys I had pushed out of the pot claimed, very plausibly, to have had a king for top pair. Either one could have taken the main pot if not for folding to my river bet. I didn't profit, but the side pot was enough to make me approximately even for the hand (i.e., get me back what I had put into the pot before the river), which was good enough.

It is safe to say that my move caused quite a stir. I was massively unpopular with the two guys who folded winners, but the hand continued intermittently to be the talk of the table for about 15 minutes. Both of them admitted the obvious--that they were certain I had the straight. As one of them said, "Guy plays two hands an hour, you've got to believe he has it there."

I was exceptionally pleased with this move. At the risk of sounding overly self-congratulatory, it felt, well, professional. I understood the situation accurately, including my opponents' likely holdings, their temperaments and abilities, my table image, etc., then used that information to make an aggressive move that won me money I could have taken in no other possible way.

To make things even better, over the next 30 minutes I got three more calls from opponents who all said explicitly that they felt obligated to call me down because they had seen me bluff with 8-high. (This includes the guy in the story to follow.) So not only did I steal the side pot in that hand, but got paid quite handsomely in subsequent hands because of having had to show the bluff. I was enormously pleased with how it worked out.


The real happy ending

No, it has nothing to do with getting a massage, which is what I presume that nasty dealer Don was talking about. This is about the best way to end a poker session.

Cardgrrl and I had initially planned on leaving at around 10:00 p.m. But we both had slow starts, without much happening. So we decided (all by texting) to stay another hour or so. Good thing. As 11:00 hit, I played 8-9 of hearts, just as Cardgrrl texted me to say she was going to play two more hands, then quit.

I picked up a straight-flush draw on the flop with position on my opponent (flop 7h-5c-Jh). I called his $20 bet. As you can see from the photo below, I hit my perfect card on the turn, making the jack-high straight flush.





My opponent, who happened to be one of the two that I had bluffed off of a winner before, bet another $20 on the turn. I just called again, because his stack was short enough that if he bet anything on the river, as I thought he would, he would basically be pot-committed for any raise. Sure enough, he bet $20 again. I raised all-in and he called his last $50 or so. He mucked after seeing my cards. (He later said that he had had two pair, and I believe him. He also said that he was, of course, aware of the possible flush, but because of the eight-high bluff, he thought it was about 50-50 that I was bluffing again, so felt obligated to call.)

There was a short wait while the surveillance people were contacted and the high-hand jackpot money was prepared. I stood up and called Cardgrrl's name to get her attention (which is not something I'd do except under extremely rare circumstances--like this was). I motioned for her to come see what had happened. She responded that she was in a hand.

Was she ever! About a minute later, I heard the dealer at her table call out, "High hand, seat 3." Hey--wait a second. Isn't Cardgrrl in seat 3? I looked over again. Yes, she was. I trotted over and saw this on the table:




She started with pocket aces just after texting me the "two more hands" message. She then flopped a set, and turned quads.

My table had obviously figured out that we were friends from my calling out to her, so when I came back they asked if she had really hit a high hand at the same time that I did. Yep! The floor person came by about then with two stacks of red chips (i.e., $200) for me. There was a third stack in her rack, and she told me, "That's not for you--that's for my other high hand." Indeed it was. Cardgrrl won her pot plus a $100 bonus. (If she feels like telling how the hand played out she can--obviously I wasn't there to see what had happened.)

I don't even know how to start trying to figure out the odds against two friends coming to a card room together, playing at separate tables, both down to the last couple of hands of the night, and both hitting high hand bonuses at the same time--especially with this all happening in the poker room in which, years, earlier, both had independently played their first-ever casino poker. If it were in a movie script, they'd take it out in the editing process because it would be too freakishly improbable for audiences to accept as plausible.

But it actually happened (with pictures, as you can see, for those inclined to say "Pics or it didn't happen"). We were amazed and delighted, and laughed about the craziness of it all the way home. That reality can be stranger than fiction is as true in poker as in any other field of human endeavor.

It was the perfect way to end a fun and highly profitable evening of poker with the best poker companion I've ever known.

Poker gems, #288

David "Devilfish" Ulliott, as reported by PokerNews yesterday here.


"Never be afraid to go broke on a bluff, boys. That way, you never have a bad beat story to tell."

Poker gems, #204

Barry Tanenbaum, in Card Player magazine column, December 31, 2008 (vol. 21, #26), p. 78.


Some players, probably due to proper upbringing, find it hard to escape the feeling that bluffing is somehow unethical. They rarely try, and if they do get caught bluffing, they feel just like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar....

Bluffing is part of the game. It is not theft, any more than a baseball pitcher who mixes up a fastball with a curve is stealing from the hitter. If you are ashamed to bluff, you will have a very hard time beating anyone except the most oblivious players.

Poker gems, #167

Phil Laak, on "Poker After Dark," September 24, 2008, after folding 8-8 to Mike Matusow's all-in bluff reraise with 7-4, which he showed.


How long do you think the pain will last?

Crazy times at Bill's

Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon is neither one of my favorite nor most frequent poker hangouts, but it's a reliable money-maker, so I try to hit it once or twice a month. This weekend I did something different and put in three sessions there, racking up $508 in 10.8 hours, for about $47/hour. Doing so produced a boatload of stories and observations, which I'll lump together here.


Ugly clothes

First I have to note the guy pictured above, who was standing there watching the pigs race. I don't know if you can see it well enough in the photo I snapped of him, but the sequins fastened onto the tail of his sports jacket spell out "Big Money." That's subtlety for you.


Pig props

Speaking of the pig races, I extended my perfect track record. Three of us at the table did a pig-race prop bet, and I won. Uptick $2. Thank you very much. I left shortly after that. Still at 100%, never having had to pay off a losing pig.


Fondling

Saturday evening there were two women at the table in seats 6 and 7, on vacation together from the midwest. I was in seat 9, next to the dealer. At seemingly random intervals, these two would grope/fondle/massage each other's breasts. One time, when one did this to the other, the gropee responded, "Hey, don't start what you can't finish!" It added a whole new dimension to the game. I seriously thought about breaking out my pre-planned line about bringing good luck, but didn't have the nerve.

They were openly flirting with two young men at the table. They pretty much ignored me. *Sigh*. I'm afraid that my age and looks are such that I can't even remember the last time that a stranger tried to flirt with me.


Wildness

That session was by far the most out-of-control I've ever witnessed at Bill's, and among the top five or so of my entire Vegas experience. The amount of drunkenness, inexperience, noise, conversation, and laughter at the table was such that the game slowed to a crawl. The dealers had to work to get nearly every player's attention nearly every time in order to get anybody to actually take a turn. We were down to about half the normal rate of hands per hour. This really tests the limits of my equanimity and patience. (And that of the dealers, too. They were perpetually on the verge of seriously losing it.) I hate that kind of crap, wasting time for no good reason, because my income is all about the hands per hour. But, as usual, the game was just unbelievably soft, so I tried to grin and bear it. I'm well aware, when setting out for Bill's, that it ain't the Venetian, that I will likely be the only one at the table who actually cares about making money, that for the rest it's all about the fun. So I do my what little it is within my nature to be able to do in order to contribute to a light, fun atmosphere.


There's a reason for the rule

Another thing I have to steel myself for in preparation for playing at Bill's is the looseness of rules enforcement. They are intentionally catering to first-time players, the ultra-casual players, people who have never tried real casino poker before. People buy in for $20 or $30 or $40, and get a taste of the NLHE game they've seen on TV, and it's a little thrill for them. They don't know the rules and etiquette. So I do my best to try to ignore a lot of it, put in a gentle word or two of education where I can, and not be too much of a nit.

After the gropers had left Saturday night, they were replaced by two young women who were part of a group that had lived together during college, and came out to Vegas every year for a kind of reunion. They had played poker in home games, but never in a casino, and were trying it for the first time. Another first-time guy was to their right.

They kept talking about the hand in progress, despite repeated admonitions from both me and the dealers not to. It was bad enough that at one point I even pointedly said to the guy, who was being pretty obnoxious about openly giving advice to players facing decisions, "You're kind of a slow learner, aren't you?" That seemed to finally stop his nasty little habit.

And then it finally mattered:

I was one of three people in a hand. I had 9-8 offsuit, and had called a small pre-flop raise. But everybody apparently missed the flop, turn, and river, so it just got checked down the whole way. The final board included four spades. I didn't have one, but the last card had been an 8, giving me a measly pair. I was in early position, so when the last player checked on the river, I was first to show. I was expecting one of the other players to show a higher pair or a flush, but both of them just pushed their cards forward, face down.

Before the dealer could gather them in, one of the college-reunion women said, "I can't believe none of you had a spade!" This prompted the guy on my right to pick up his cards again, at which point he got a startled look on his face, then turned over the ace of spades. He said, "I would have sworn that was the ace of clubs!"

He had not even noticed the spades on the board until the woman said that.

He got the pot that would otherwise have been mine.

I was seriously annoyed at this. I mean, sure, it was a small pot, and the person with the best hand took it, which is as it should be. But conversely, I firmly believe that players have the right to muck the best hand and thereby forfeit the pot if they are so inclined, and nobody else should interfere with them doing so.

At least this young woman had the good sense to be absolutely mortified at what she had done. She must have apologized a hundred times, and kept doing so long after I had both forgiven her and had stopped being annoyed about it having happened.

The good news is that seeing how one little stray comment can totally change the outcome of a hand (well, that, plus the floor guy coming over and giving a stern warning to everybody), the table finally seemed to catch on to the fact that you really must not say anything about the hand in progress. And, by the way, the hand is still in progress until the pot has been awarded and the next hand has begun with the beginning of the shuffle (or by the dealer removing the new deck from the shuffler).


Overheard

As I've mentioned before, Bill's attracts the most unbelievably novice players in the universe. I have overheard the following comments in the past few days there:

• Man plausibly claiming to have had 7-7 bets $6 from under the gun, folds to an opponent's bet on an ace-high flop, says, "I just wanted to take those blinds!" Remember that Bill's plays with a single $1 blind. In other words, he was claiming to have bet $6 not to start building a pot that he could later win, but simply in order to win the single $1 chip that was on the table when he made that raise. Good thinking, sir.
• Guy who limped in, then had to decide whether to call a pre-flop raise, looked long and hard at his hole cards, then at the raiser, and said, in all earnestness, "I think I might be drawing dead here," and folded. (Note to the non-poker-players among my readers, to whom this might not be obvious: There are no two cards that are drawing dead to any other two cards before the flop. Any starting hand can beat any other, given the right community cards. One cannot play the game for very long before realizing this, which is why the guy's words reveal that he has likely watched the game on TV and heard this kind of comment in a different context, but has never actually played.)
• On a paired flop, one player asked the dealer, "Do you have to use five cards to make a hand?"
• One player, who repeatedly warned us that he had never played before and had no idea what to do, was there with a friend who was trying to teach him the game. The more experienced friend took a restroom break. When he returned, the newbie excitedly told him, "While you were gone, if I had played one hand, I would have made five in a row, 6-7-8-9-10. That's something, isn't it?"
• Last night, a player with about $30 left was facing a $71 all-in bet. He asked the dealer, "Can I just play for, like, $5, or do I have to put it all in to play?"
• One player asked the dealer whether an ace could play as part of a low straight as well as a high straight.
• Last night, I saw this betting sequence on the flop: Player A checks. Player B bets $20. Player C calls. Player A decides to go all-in for $40. Player B also goes all-in, for less, a total of $36. Player C...FOLDS! There were three of us reasonably experienced players all clustered together at one end of the table, and all three of us had our eyes bug out at the fold. We quietly exchanged a few words, all of which were around this observation: There is no hand that C could have for which it makes sense to call $20 into a small pot, but then not call an additional $20 into what is now a much larger pot, on the same street. He was getting much better pot odds on the second $20 than he was on the first $20. He must (or at least should) have known when calling B's initial $20 bet that B was going to put his last $16 in on this hand, no matter what. In other words, C must (or, again, at least should) have either decided he was willing to put in $36 or not called the $20 to begin with. In fact, it would have been smarter, probably, to look at his two opponents' stack sizes, and just shoved there, trying to keep A from calling the $20 and getting pot-committed.

I hasten to add that I'm really not trying to make fun of these people for their ignorance. They're not stupid, just new. Everybody has to learn the basic rules and strategies of the game at some point, and there's no shame in not knowing something, or in asking a question in order to clear up what you don't know.

It's just that it's really rare to encounter this much absolutely bare-bones level of inexperience in no-limit casino poker. It's much more common that people learn these basics in home games, playing micro-limits online, or playing the cheapest limit hold'em in a casino. It's the incredibly low buy-in and blind structure at Bill's that prompts people to sit down and play a no-limit game, when they really would be better off in one of those other situations.


Oops, I broke up the game!

In two hands I busted four players last night. First one was with my top pair/top kicker against her top pair/medium kicker. On the very next hand I caught quad 7s (with a pair in the hand, which got me a $50 high-hand jackpot in addition to the pot) on a double-paired board, and busted three opponents at once. One had a full house, one had hit a flush on the river (I didn't pull the trigger until then, though I flopped a set and turned the quads), and one had an ace in the hole, and thought maybe two pairs with an ace was good enough to call off all of his chips with.

On the previous night (Saturday), when I arrived at about 5:00, as the floor guy was selling me chips, he said, only half-jokingly, "Don't bust the whole table too fast--I've got to keep the game going until 7:00, when my shift ends!" I guess he should have saved his warning for the next night!

(N.B.: This is a serious faux pas on his part, if you ask me. Yeah, it's nice that he has paid attention to my play, remembers my face, and recognizes that I'm probably going to be the shark in his little fish pool, but the last thing I need is for him to be saying such a thing three feet away from the table. It not only unnecessarily warns the more unsuspecting players, but it insults them, if they're alert enough to catch his meaning. Furthermore, does he seriously think I'm not going to try to maximize my profit, just so that his job is made easier? Please.)


The Internet blog guy

When I sat down for a late-night session last night, one player at the table looked at me and said, "You're that Internet blog guy, right?" He had spent some time with me during the evening described here, so had heard others mention my blog.

Anyway, for any readers who happen to run into me across the green felt, I found this guy's question so amusing in its phrasing that it is now the preferred official way to introduce yourself to the Grump: "You're that Internet blog guy, right?"


One difficult decision

Last night I was in late position with the two black 7s, so I raised to $5, and got two callers. The flop was 7-8-9, with two diamonds. It was checked to me. I deliberately overbet the pot ($25, I think) in order not to give proper pot odds to an opponent with a flush draw or straight draw. Both of them called. Ugh.

The turn was an offsuit jack. The first guy quickly moved all-in for $71. This is the same hand I mentioned above, in which the second guy then asked whether he could just play for, say, $5 more, instead of the rest of his stack. When told it was all or nothing, he folded.

I was sitting on about $400 at the time, so it wasn't like a call here would break me. But I couldn't make sense of the first guy's move. I didn't think he had flopped a straight, because with two opponents who might be on a flush draw, surely he would have either bet out on the flop or check-raised me. But it also didn't really make sense for him to have had a 10 for a now-completed straight draw, because he shouldn't have been willing to call such a large bet on the flop. He would have had to think that if another diamond came he couldn't count on a straight being good, which means that he should have reasoned that he only had six outs rather than the usual eight. Therefore, calling a bet that is substantially larger than the pot doesn't make sense. If he had miraculously gotten me in a set-over-set situation, again, surely he would go for the check-raise on the flop, rather than slow-play on such a highly coordinated board.

I thought long and hard about this, and finally decided that it was most likely that he had either two pairs or one pair plus a flush draw. Even if I was wrong and he had hit his straight, I would have ten outs to a full house. So I called.

I had indeed been wrong. He had had 9-10, for top pair and a straight draw on the flop, but with no flush draw. Now, if I had been in his spot, I would have either folded or gone for the all-in check-raise on the flop with that holding. The second guy has so little left in front of him that he's not really a factor. The guy with 9-10 should have figured that a check-raise would drive me out if I were continuation-betting a hand like ace-king that completely whiffed on the flop, and that it would price me out if I were betting a flush draw or straight draw, and he would still have outs to win against almost anything I could have, in case I called with something like an overpair.

But I forgot where I was. Players at Bill's do not think about the game the same way that I do, so when I went through the hand as if I were in my opponent's seat, figuring out what cards I would have to have in order to play the way he had done, I was simply wrong. That entire approach, which is both sound and necessary when facing opponents of comparable skill and experience, falls flat when tried against considerably weaker players, because they simply don't think the same way I do.

What I should have asked myself was this: "Would a tight/weak/timid player just call that flop bet with top pair and a straight draw, hoping that he would simultaneously make his straight without the possible flush card hitting?" And the answer to that would have been a resounding "yes."

But the poker gods were merciful to me last night, and let me slide on my lapse in clear thinking. They sent an 8 on the river, pairing the board, and giving me the winning full house.

I don't usually rely on luck to win at Bill's (or anywhere else, for that matter), but it's nice to get it once in a while.


Never bluff at Bill's--well, almost never

As I have emphasized in a couple of previous posts about Bill's, it is not a place to bluff, because one is surrounded by calling stations. But there are exceptions. This weekend I ran into a few players smart enough to lay down a hand like top pair in the face of an opponent showing unusual strength.

An opportunity arose Saturday night. One of the good players put in a straddle, then, after he got called in several spots, raised to $15. I had the distinct impression that he was full of shit, that he was just trying to take the $10 or $12 on the table and be done with it. I had suited K-Q. I had limped in with it instead of raising because I was in middle position, and didn't feel like playing a big pot with what is, after all, still a pretty mediocre hand, with three or four players acting after me. But when everybody between the straddler and me folded to his raise, I was certainly willing to take him on, since I would have position on him, and I likely was starting with a better hand. Everybody folded behind me, too, so it was to be one on one. Excellent.

The flop was J-x-x. It gave me no pair and no draw. But I also knew that most of the time it will have missed him, too. Nevertheless, he did what a strong, aggressive player should usually do, and continuation-bet at it, $20. I thought that he was still full of it, so I thought a bit, then pushed out $65. He was a smart enough player to see a pre-flop limp-call, combined with a strong flop raise, as signaling danger, such as somebody with a small pocket pair having flopped a set. Sure enough, he thought for maybe 30 seconds, then folded while flashing me a jack, to show that he had hit top pair. But he simultaneously admitted, "The other one isn't too good."

So I had been right that he was just trying to buy it with junk before the flop. I had, in one sense, been wrong in guessing that the flop missed him. But in a more important sense I had been right. That is, my bet on the flop was not a bet that he had missed it completely, because obviously I couldn't know that. Rather, I was betting that he did not have a hand strong enough to call a scary-looking raise from a solid, tight player who had not shown down a single weak hand all night. On that mark, I was exactly correct.

When he folded, I gave him a wink and a smile, and exposed my K-Q. I rarely show bluffs, but here it was entirely purposeful. I had managed to get into a situation in which I could put in a bluff with a high probability of success against one of only two players at the table whom I judged capable of folding a superior hand. To get maximal value, I wanted to be sure that all of the calling stations at the table saw what I had done, in the hope that it would reinforce their already erroneous tendency to look me up too often with medium-strength hands when I had the goods.

So to the gentleman whom I used as my advertising, my apologies. I honestly wasn't trying to rub your nose in it. I was trying to help coax additional future calls from the weaker players, whom I would not normally try to bluff. Please take it as a compliment that I recognized you to be a good enough player to fold--it genuinely is one.


A mistake that worked out nicely

Early in the session, I had flopped top two pairs with a 9-7 in my hand, and picked up a full house on the turn. I showed it, despite my bet not being called. I won another hand a short time later when the same cards caught two pairs again. It then became a running joke and/or point of commentary at the table about how often that night the board was coming in such a form that holding 9-7 would be a great hand. With freakish frequency, if you could have played 9-7 every hand, you would have been hitting two pairs, trips, straights, and full houses all evening long. One guy complained that he hadn't been dealt the 9-7 all night. Kind of odd, when you usually hear that gripe leveled about not getting aces or kings!

Anyway, after this had been going on for a couple of hours, I found myself looking at the 9-7 of hearts. I raised. The flop was A-6-4, with two hearts. I almost never bluff at Bill's, but I do mix in some semi-bluffs. This is because many of the players there are not used to seeing betting on the come, so when a third card of a suit appears, they assume that the person who had bet at the flop must not have the flush. This is, I assume, because beginning players tend to check a flush draw, figuring it's not worth throwing money at it if you don't have to, when you can just wait to see if you make your hand first. So mixing in some semi-bluffs can pay off. I decided to do it here, and got two callers.

The turn was an offsuit 3. Dang. I thought about checking, but decided to bet again, hoping that they'd read me for having a big ace and fold. But, of course, this is Bill's, and nobody's folding.

The river was an offsuit 5. Rats! No flush and no pair! The first player checked to me, and, well, my old habits took over. I'm a third-bullet shooter. In this case, my instant self-justification was that maybe both of them had been on flush draws and would fold. If I had thought for about two more seconds, I would have realized how unlikely that was. Furthermore, I had shown the bluff described above specifically so that I would get more callers! What in the hell was I thinking, trying to pull off a three-shell bluff? I wasn't thinking--that was the problem. It was completely foolish.

I bet $25 on the river, praying to see two players throw their cards in the muck, even as the more rational part of my brain was saying, "Don't throw good money after bad." They both called. Yikes!

So, fully embarrassed, I turned over my hand and quietly said, "I guess I'll have to lose with the 9-7 for once tonight."

To my utter shock, the dealer announced, "Straight." I had been so focused on the flush that I had not even noticed that I had backed into a 3-4-5-6-7 straight. I can't remember the last time I so completely misread the board. (It might have been the third story related in this post.)

Both opponents mucked without showing their cards. Nobody said anything about what they must have thought was my weird comment about losing. I was too ashamed to admit that I had not seen the straight. I hoped that if anybody had heard what I said, they would take it as having been somehow ironic. I have no idea what they thought, if anything.

The poker gods were truly covering my backside for me that night.

Best I can figure is that they were there to bet on the pig races.



Addendum

I really wanted that pig-racing bit to be the punchline, and leave the post there. But upon re-reading it, I feel obligated to add a caveat here. I fear that the number of times in this post that I make reference to being so much better at poker than my opponents will sound far more arrogant than would be a true reflection of how I view myself as a player.

So I'd like to set that record straight. I've said this before, and probably will need to again at some point. I think I have a pretty brutally realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses as a player. I honestly believe that I am probably just about as low on the continuum of poker skill as one can possibly be and still have a shot at making a living at the game.

But it's a simple fact that even that extremely modest level of talent (modest, that is, in comparison to the world-class pros whose ability has me in awe) puts one ahead of at least 90% of the tourists that sit down in $1-2 no-limit hold'em games. At a place like Bill's, it does not require any haughtiness or self-worship to say that my knowledge and understanding of the game is far deeper than that of the great majority of the other players. It's a simple, objective, unmistakable fact, and anybody who sat and watched for a while would, I think, inevitably come to the same conclusion.

So please don't read into my stories and comments an inference that I fancy myself as one of the greats. I do not--not by a long shot. I realize and fully acknowledge that I'm simply choosing to swim in really small ponds, in which it is just not very hard to be at the top of the food chain.

Annals of perfect timing

I set out walking tonight, intending to play for a while at the Golden Nugget, but never got there. I stopped in at Fitzgeralds (which, until tonight, I erroneously thought was "Fitzgerald's"; but now I know that, like Caesars Palace, it's plural, not possessive) to see what was happening in their poker room upstairs. I've looked in there many times, hoping to see a NLHE game going, but never have, in two years. I've even played there three times in a limit game, hoping that a no-limit game would evolve. Never did.

But tonight they had three names on a no-limit interest list, and a tournament that was about 25 minutes along, implying that we'd soon see some bust-outs. So I sat down. I only had to wait about ten minutes. It was worth it. I left less than two hours later up by $211.

Fitzgeralds is not a particularly nice poker room. It's way too smoky for my taste. Dealers are below average. Minimal amenities. It's an ugly and not especially friendly place, with only six tables and, as I said, it's hard to find much action there.

There were a couple of moderately experienced players, but the table was mostly occupied by very weak opponents. Bad rooms tend to attract bad players, which is why I endure unpleasant places like the Sahara, Tuscany, Riviera, Imperial Palace, etc.

At one point, after about half an hour of being completely card-dead, I decided to try a gambit. I raised to $15 with 5-6 offsuit in the cutoff seat. I got four callers. The flop was 4-6-7 with two spades. (I had a club and a diamond, I think.) The first player bet $10 and two others called before it got to me. I raised to $50 as a semi-bluff, quite content to win the pot as it was, but I knew I had ways to win against just about any hand my opponents held in case I got called. Any observant player would conclude I had a big pocket pair and was defending against the obvious draws. The first two players folded quickly. The last one had a long think. He was talking to me, asking how big my pocket pair was, etc. He finally folded.

I rarely show bluffs, because I don't like to anger other players. But I was tempted to do so this time. Mike Caro advises showing or not showing bluffs depending on the type of opponents. Your goal is to heighten your opponents' tendencies. Those who tend to call too much are the ones to show bluffs to, because it will amplify their natural impulse to call you down when you have strong hands. Those who tend to play too tight and already fold more than they should are the ones to bluff without showing. Let them think they're making good laydowns, which will tend to make them continue doing the same.

This table had several calling stations, so I decided to show the semi-bluff. I got compliments all around: "Nice bet," "Nice play," etc. Even though two players plausibly claimed that they folded bigger pairs than my 6s, they smiled, rapped the table, and said, "Well done."

And boy oh boy did it turn out to be a good thing I advertised that move!

On the very next hand, I picked up A-K offsuit. I bet $15 again, and got five suspicious callers. This was going to be another big pot--now I just had to hit the flop, because I had no prayer of another big bluff working in this situation.

The flop was K-K-8, rainbow. Well, I guess that's hitting it, all right! Player A (one of the weakest ones) led out for $10. I called, as did the button. The turn card was a 10. Player A checked this time. I bet $35. Button folded and A went into the tank. I tried hard to behave exactly as I had on the previous hand while I had been waiting for my last opponent's decision.* There's just no doubt in my mind that the effects of that hand were working on Player A. I think he finally decided that he couldn't stand to be the victim of a second consecutive bluff. He said, "OK, if you've got me, you've got me. I'm all in." He pushed in his last $125 or so. I had him covered.

You might guess that I called. You'd be right. Though I didn't need it, the case king hit the river, giving me quads. That beat my opponent's Q-Q handily.

As I was stacking up the chips, the guy who had taken so long to fold on the previous hand said, "Showing that 6-5 worked out pretty well for you."

Funny--I had been thinking exactly the same thing.


(The photo above is one of the atomic clocks maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Get it? "Perfect timing"? OK, it's pretty lame, but I couldn't think of any better illustration.)


*One of the readers with whom I played at Bill's the other night was kind enough to email me the next day, and included this observation: "I really admired your play, you took your time on every move and you were very deliberate in your actions. Always did the same thing every time whether you had the nuts or were bluffing. Very hard to pick up a tell on you. Well played Grump, well played." It's nice to hear that at least sometimes I achieve the effect I aim for.

There oughtta be a law, or at least a rule

A couple of nights ago I was playing at Planet Hollywood, when I witnessed an action so foul, so evil, so vile, so disruptive to the entire order of the game, that I instantly became convinced that we need a new universal rule put in place to prevent its future recurrence.

There was an Asian guy about my age sitting in Seat 4, directly across the table (the short way) from me, since I was in Seat 1. I had a perfect view of him. I picked up an unusually good tell on him. Twice he made a large bet on the river, bluffing with just ace-high or with a busted draw. Both times, he verbally announced the size of the bet ("Forty," or "Eighty") quite emphatically, then grabbed and slid forward the corresponding amount of chips. Conversely, I twice saw him make value bets on the river with very strong hands, and in both of those instances he remained silent, just pushed forward the amount he was betting.

This is a fairly common type of tell: People do tend to do things differently when they are bluffing than when they have the goods. In fact, I have noticed a tendency in myself to do something similar; if I'm not careful to think about it in advance, there's a pronounced difference in how I make an all-in move when I'm hoping for a call versus when I'm hoping to see a fold. (No, I'm not going to tell you what it is!)

I got involved with this guy on a hand some time later. I raised before the flop with A-K. (It was a frustrating night because every single strong starting hand I received was when I was in early position, making them much harder to play profitably and well.) He called. The flop was 2-5-7, rainbow. I made a smallish continuation bet, which he also called.

I had decided well in advance not to try to bluff this guy, because he had a large quantity of calling station in him. As a general rule, people tend to think that everybody else plays the same way that they do. Frequent bluffers like him therefore tend to see bluffs everywhere, and call readily. He followed this common pattern. So he was definitely one from whom I was planning to make my money by (1) value bets, and (2) catching his bluffs.

Because of his call on the flop and my determination not to blow money bluffing at him, when the turn card was an 8, of no help to me, I shut down. He checked behind me.

The river was a 9. I checked. He thought a bit, then loudly announced "Fifty," and grabbed 10 red chips to put out.

Hmmm. I was quite confident, from having watched him for a couple of hours, that he was not one to make thin value bets. That is, it was highly unlikely that he had something like one pair here; if he did, he'd be much more likely to check again and just hope he was good against what he would have to worry might be my overpair. He either had a very strong hand, or nothing. Of course, I had just ace-king, no pair. But I had seen him bluff with an ace-high, which I could beat, and I had seen him bluff with a busted draw, which I could also beat.

The size of the bet, which was more than the size of the pot, also smelled of a bluff. If he had a strong hand, he would presumably want me to call, rather than to scare me off. Since I had checked both the turn and the river, he couldn't think I had a great hand that could call any bet he cared to make. He had to know that I wasn't particularly strong here. So if he was strong and wanted to get paid, he would bet smaller.

Then, finally, there was that tell. The way he announced the amount in advance was just like he had done twice before, and distinctly different from what he did when making value bets with strength.

That sealed it for me. It's not often I'll call a bet larger than the pot with just ace-high, but this combination of considerations led me to conclude that it was the right choice here.

This demon spawn had K-6, and had caught runner-runner straight.

Why did he call an early-position raise from a tight-aggressive player before the flop with K-6 offsuit? Because that's what calling stations do. Why did he call on the flop? Because that's what calling stations do. I saw similar idiotic calls from him all night long.

Anyway, I decided right then and there that all poker rooms need to institute a rule prohibiting players from establishing clear, distinctive patterns for their bluffs and value bets, then breaking away from those patterns at crucial moments. The remedy? I should be able to explain my observations to the floor person, point out how this cad cheated by using his bluffing action when he had a strong hand, and be entitled to the pot--or at least to a chop. Nobody should be able to get away with such nefarious actions.

Incidentally, as I kept watching him, it became clear that he had no pattern at all. He had not carefully constructed a false tell for me to pick up; rather, he was just completely arbitrary in whether he announced a bet amount in advance. There was no relationship between his betting mannerism and his hand strength. I had simply detected a pattern on the basis of too few observations that didn't hold up as I gathered more data. (That said, seeing distinctly different things on each of two bluffs and two value bets is usually a pretty reliable basis for assuming that the observation is a consistent unconscious pattern.)



The image above is one of the more famous ones from the "Dogs Playing Poker" series by C.M. Coolidge. This one is titled "A Bold Bluff." If you look closely, you can see that the St. Bernard appears to have just a pair of deuces, but he is betting into the exposed pair of aces of one opponent, and tens of another. He probably stated the amount of his bluff before pushing out his chips....

Poker gems, #130

Steve Zolotow, in Card Player magazine column, May 21, 2008 (vol. 21, #10), p. 80:

In general, I'm not a big fan of firing multiple bullets with nothing. My experience has been that after the first bullet misses, players fire the second one into their foot and the third one into their brain.

Two more books get it wrong

Back in January I wrote about some published sources that have significant details wrong in their descriptions of one of the most famous hands in poker history, Johnny Chan versus Erik Seidel at the conclusion of the main event of the 1988 World Series of Poker.

I just found two more.

Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger, in Poker for Dummies, have a chapter on bluffing. In a sidebar on p. 140 they discuss Chan's "reverse bluff" with the nuts:

Chan had won the World Series the previous year and had been on a roll ever
since. Here he was, 12 months later, with a chance to win back-to-back titles.
But he'd need some magic to accomplish it. Seidel, a former commodities broker
from New York, left Wall Street for the life of a professional poker player; and
now he had a big chip lead on the defending champ.

At this point in the tournament, the blinds were $10,000 and $20,000. Chan
was first to act on each betting round. The flop was Qs 10d 8d.

Chan checked. Seidel bet $50,000. Chan called. The turn card was a complete
blank, and both men checked. The fifth and final card was another blank. Chan
checked.

Seidel held a queen in his hand, giving him top pair, albeit with a weak
kicker. He thought for a moment that Chan might have a queen with a better
kicker. But by checking on the turn and on the river, Chan passed up his final
chance to bet!

Seidel then pushed all of his chips into the center of the table, certainly
a sizeable enough bet to cause Chan to release any slightly better hand in the
event that Seidel had misread him. Seidel thought his all-in bet would prevent
Chan from calling with hands such as a queen with a better kicker, or two small
pair.

Seidel had, in fact, misread Chan. And not by a little, but by a lot. Chan
smiled as he turned over his hand. Chan had flopped a straight with the Jc
9c.

Here are the errors:

1. Seidel did not have the chip lead; Chan did--by about 4:1, in fact. That's why when he won this hand, the tournament was over. If Seidel had the chip lead, how do Harroch and Krieger explain the fact that the tournament was over when Seidel lost the hand? It's true that when heads-up play began, Seidel had a chip lead on Chan ($1.2 million to $470,000, according to Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan's Aces and Kings, p. 111.) However, by the time the final hand came up, Chan was way ahead.

2. The 10 on the flop was the 10h, not 10d. This can be seen clearly in the video clip from YouTube, included in the addendum to my original post.

3. Chan was not "first to act on each betting round." He had the button.

4. Chan did not check on the flop. The action was that Seidel checked, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised an additional $50,000, and Chan called.

5. Chan did not check on the river; the action was Seidel moving all-in, followed by Chan's call. Thus, Chan did not "pass up his final chance to bet," as Harroch and Krieger claim (with an exclamation mark for emphasis, even).

I'm also pretty sure that Seidel had not yet set out on the life of a poker pro at this point; the WSOP was kind of a lark for him. Kaplan and Reagan report Seidel saying that it was doing so well in this tournament that made him realize that "maybe I could make a living from poker" (p. 111).

Let me also take this opportunity to point out yet another error in David Apostolico's report, one that I overlooked in my previous post on this subject. He said that the queen on the flop was the queen of clubs. Nope. It was, as Harroch and Krieger correctly report, and as can be seen clearly in the video clip, the Qs. Seidel was holding the Qc.

When re-checking some of the above, I noticed that yet another published source has the action wrong! Kaplan and Reagan, in Aces and Kings, p. 111, repeat the Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler error, discussed in my original post, of saying that Chan checked on the turn, followed by Seidel moving all-in. This in spite of them acknowledging earlier in the same paragraph that Chan had the dealer button! If Chan checked the turn on the button, that necessarily means that Seidel had checked first (which is correct). So how can they then say that Seidel moved all-in on the turn after Chan's check? In theory, that anomaly might be explained by Seidel making his all-in move in the dark, after Chan's turn check but before the dealer had put out the river card. But as the video clip makes clear, that's not at all what actually occurred.

I remain astonished that so many prominent poker writers, with the correct facts so readily available, will get things so many things wrong when describing a hand that just might have been viewed in video replays more times than any other hand in poker history. It really makes one wonder about the accuracy of the reporting on plays for which it is not so easy to check up on the authors.

"You don't look like a horrible player"

I went slumming tonight--hit the Stratosphere and the Sahara. I really dislike playing in both places, but they're such consistent money-makers that I keep them in the rotation to visit once in a while, especially after a losing streak, to get things back on a positive track.

At the Stratosphere, my second hand after sitting down with $100 I was dealt A-Q of diamonds. I raised to $12 after a couple of limpers. I was called by the big blind and the guy on my right. The flop was J-8-2 rainbow. Nothing great for me, but nothing too scary, either--good chance it missed both of them as much as it missed me. Both opponents checked, so I put out $25. Big blind folded, guy on my right called.

This didn't look to me like a check-call of great strength, as if he had flopped a set or something--more like maybe he hit the 8, and decided to stick around to see if he could make two pair or three of a kind. So I'm not worried yet, because an ace or a queen should give me the winner, and even failing that, I think he's not feeling married to his hand, and is probably susceptible to being pushed off of it. I'm an unknown entity to him, and he's out of position, so if I'm right that he doesn't have a monster, and he misses the turn, he likely isn't going to be willing to put in a lot more money.

The turn card is an offsuit 10. I didn't think he limp-called before the flop with an 8-10. I also didn't think that he called on the flop with a gutshot straight draw, so in all likelihood that card didn't help him. He checked, adding support to my theory. I have $63 left in front of me, and there is about $85 in the pot, so I shove. Even if he calls, I should have outs with an ace, queen, and now a king would give me the nuts, a Broadway straight.

He thinks for a while. Finally he shows me a K-J offsuit, smiles, and says, "You don't look like a horrible player, so this must be no good." And he throws it away.

I smile back and say, "I'd like to think I'm not horrible."

He says, "Yeah, you had me beat."

****
We now commence the strategic advice portion of this blog entry. This hand perfectly illustrates what's wrong with limp-calling with a hand like K-J. Of course, you might hit a miracle flop with two pair or three of a kind, but that's less than 2% of the time. If you're calling a pre-flop raise on a 2% hope, you're throwing your money away.

If you are the pre-flop raiser with K-J, a flop like J-8-2 rainbow is just about ideal. You have top pair, strong kicker, little to fear from draws, and nothing that looks like a two-pair hit with which an opponent might have called your pre-flop raise. It looks like smooth sailing.

Conversely, if you limp with the same K-J, then call a pre-flop raise, now how does that J-8-2 flop look? You have to worry that the raiser has A-J, J-J, Q-Q, K-K, or A-A, against any of which you are a huge underdog. You have no draw to save your bacon if you venture further. And being out of position, you have to either check--thus showing weakness, inviting an aggressive opponent to bet even if the flop missed him, after which you have to basically guess where you are in the hand--or bet, worried that you'll have to abandon those chips if you get raised.

That's why people call K-J and similar holdings "trouble hands," because they are frequently dominated and make it very difficult to deduce whether you're ahead or behind, so that it's easy to make large mistakes--especially when playing from out of position.

If my opponent had thought this through ahead of time, he could have saved himself $37. He could have thought, "What would be a pretty good flop for me that isn't relying on a 2% or less probability? Maybe something like J-8-2. But even if I get that, how sure can I be that my hand is good? Not very. Might be better just to wait for a better spot." He could then have let go of the $2 he had invested, or, if he ran through that mental exercise first, just folded without even putting up the $2. Another approach would have been to raise with the K-J before the flop, thus making a lead-out continuation bet after the good flop a very natural move.

Alternatively, he could have done one of two things on the flop, once he realized that the flop was about as well-suited to his hand as he could ask for. First, he could lead out betting at it, stealing the initiative from me. If I'm holding A-K, A-Q, A-10, pocket 10s, etc., it's going to be hard for me to call. If I come over the top of his bet, he can still choose to fold. An affirmative $25 bet does him a hell of a lot more good than check-calling my $25 bet, not only in terms of giving him a chance to win the pot outright if I've missed, but in terms of getting a lot more information about whether he's ahead or behind. If you're willing to invest $25 on this hand with a call, take the aggressive route and stick it in up front, forcing me to make the decision.

Second, if he wanted to be even more daring, he could check-raise me all-in after I bet the $25. There's a pretty decent chance that his hand is good here. Even if it's not, he invests $63 to potentially win the $60 or so that is already in the pot, plus my last $63 if I call, so he's getting 2:1 on his money if I call, and it's pure profit to him if I fold. Given our stack sizes (he's sitting on about $300), this is an extremely reasonable move.

For the record, if he had check-raised me, I certainly would have folded. If he had led out with a $25 bet on the flop, I would have either folded or moved all-in over the top, depending on my sense of his strength; I'm really not sure which way I would have gone. At the very least, he would have given me a hard decision, and anytime you make an opponent face a difficult decision, you open the door for him to make a costly mistake, which is basically your whole object.

Instead, though, he played it passively, like a coward, and gave away $37 when he had the best hand. Of all the ways he could have played his hand, the limp-call/check-call/check-fold was absolutely the worst option. (It is because people often do things like this that the Stratosphere and the Sahara are consistently profitable for me.)

I'm glad you don't think I'm a horrible player, sir. I don't think you're horrible, either--but you do need a lot of work on the basics of the game: use of position, aggression, and hand selection. Employing any of those three things correctly probably would have won you the pot, or at least caused you to lose a lot less.

Thank you, Daniel Negreanu! (non-grumpy content)

I promise that this blog will never become a platform from which I primarily discuss specific hands that I've been involved in. I realize that, for the most part, reading about somebody else's play is a lot like listening to a proud parent tell you all the details of what their kids are doing in school, or being forced to sit through a slide show of their recent vacation--you just don't really care. But once in a while, something stands out and seems to be a story worth telling. And for those who play just recreationally, maybe there's something to be learned here.

I was one of the ten players that started up a new $1-$3 no-limit hold'em game at the Palms last night. I took my usual favorite seat, #10, on the dealer's right. I didn't recognize any of the other players. (Well, I thought I recognized one, because she was the spitting image of Jennifer Love Hewitt, and it took me a while to convince myself it wasn't her. She could have a career as a JLH impersonator, though.) It was a young line-up; I believe I was the second-oldest player there, after an Asian woman in her mid-50s in seat #1.

It's only about the third hand we've played, so I have very little information on my opponents. I'm on the button and find the two black 9s. (This is the exact hand with which Phil Hellmuth won the World Series of Poker main event; I don't like being reminded of him by getting dealt this hand, but it would be a little silly to express my dislike for him by refusing to play it.) Five players all limp in ahead of me. I would sometimes raise in this spot, but I prefer playing conservatively while I'm still feeling everybody out, so I join the $3 crowd, as do both blinds.

The flop is 10h-5d-4h. Not a bad flop for my pocket pair. Everybody checks to me, so I bet $10--about two-thirds the size of the pot. The only caller is the Asian woman in seat 1. In theory, she could have any two cards, since she was in the small blind in an unraised pot. I think she probably doesn't have a pair bigger than the 10 on the board, because I would expect her to have raised before the flop with jacks, queens, kings, or aces. I don't think she has a 10 in her hand for top pair, because I would expect her to lead out betting with that if she had it, or maybe even go for a check raise (if she thought I was just putting in a position bet from the button after having missed the flop completely), though if she had a weak kicker (e.g., 10-2), she might do a conservative check-call to keep the pot small. Overall, though, I'm reasonably confident she is on a draw, with hearts being slightly more likely than a straight draw--but I'm going to be cautious of either one hitting.

The turn card is the 4c. This looks like a safe card for me, because it couldn't have completed any draw my opponent might have been on. To my great surprise, however, she bets $25. I really have to stop to think about this, because it doesn't help me clarify which of the possible holdings I had mentally assigned her she has. It's a confusing bet. If she had something really strong on the flop (three of a kind, two pair, or even a monster draw such as a simultaneous straight and a flush draw), I would expect her to do one of three things: lead out betting on the flop, check-raise me on the flop, or check the turn in anticipation of putting in her check-raise there. From out of position, it's distinctly uncommon for a player to check-call the flop, then lead out betting on the turn. Basically the only time that happens is if the turn card was exactly what the player needed.

But how could that be? As I said, it definitely didn't help her if she was on a straight draw or flush draw. It could only help her if she had a 4 in her hand, and had now made three of them. That's what I spent most of the time focusing on: what cards could she be holding, one of which was a 4, that would prompt her to check and call on the flop? It would be impossible for her to have both a 4 and a straight draw, or a 4 with a flush draw. What if she had something like A-4? In that situation, she might call a not-huge bet on the flop, hoping that (1) she'd get lucky and hit two pair or trips, or (2) I'd show weakness later and she'd get an opportunity to steal the pot away with just bottom pair. I certainly might do such a thing, so I assume she could, too. But if that had been the plan, why bet out on the turn? She would, in that situation, feel quite confident that her hand was now best, and I think most players would be far more likely to go for the check-raise, turning my anticipated continued aggression against me. It's as if her bet was proclaiming, "I have three 4s"--except that no rational player would want that fact to be obvious to an opponent yet, not until it was time to spring the trap! A final possibility was a pocket pair, like 6s or 7s or 8s. Again, though, it didn't really make sense for her to change from a passive check-call mode (perfectly reasonable with such a middle pair) to aggression.

Apparently other players watching the action had approximately the same thought process, because the guy sitting next to me said quietly, "Weren't expecting that, were you?"

I picked up nothing in her body language that gave me a clue as to how strong she was feeling, and my ability to scrutinize her was severely limited by the dealer sitting smack in between us.

I just couldn't put her on a hand. Nothing fit what she had done.

At this point, I had a flashback to something I read long ago from Daniel Negreanu--probably one of his Card Player columns, though it was way early in my serious interest in poker, and I don't have a clear memory of where it was. (Here's one in which he makes the same point, though I just can't recall whether it's the one that planted the idea in my mind for the first time: http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/15262. He occasionally makes a similar comment during a televised match, something like, "Well, I can't figure out any hand that makes sense for you to have, so I'm supposed to call in that situation.")

Negreanu had said that the key to a successful bluff was telling a consistent story, such that everything one has done in the course of the hand playing out leads an opponent to a conclusion about what one is holding (a false conclusion, of course). If an opponent can't discern a consistent message from your bets and other actions, he will likely call your bluff just out of curiosity and/or stubbornness. This is what most people new to poker mess up all the time, and why their bluff attempts tend to get picked off rather easily by more experienced players. This is also why it doesn't work to try to bluff bad players, because they haven't yet learned to piece together the clues you're giving them so as to deduce that you have a hand they should be afraid of.

Anyway, one of the lessons I learned from Negreanu was that when there is no hand an opponent could be holding that is consistent with what he or she has done during the hand, that's often reason enough to call, because there's a good likelihood that a bluff is being run on you. It's a good piece of advice, but a scary one to follow, because confusion is not a state of mind you want to be bringing to a psychological battle. Nevertheless, I tucked it away in memory long ago, and it has occasionally been the piece of wisdom I have needed in particular situations. This seemed like it might be another such spot.

So I called the $25, but I wasn't one bit thrilled about it.

The river card was the 3 of clubs. My opponent pushed forward $50, again in a way that I couldn't read for being either especially strong or especially weak. That card wouldn't have helped her flush draw. If she had exactly a 6-7 in her hand, it would have completed a straight, but her leading bet on the turn didn't fit with that being what she had, so I mostly dismissed that possibility. I was back to the same dilemma, basically. She was trying to sell sitting on a 4, but in a way that I thought no good player would have undertaken to play such a hand.

I thought and thought, quite a bit longer than I usually take, because the pieces of the puzzle didn't fit together. I'm not one to call out of curiosity, because if I'm convinced I'm beaten, the little knowledge gained isn't worth what it costs me, and I have no tendency to agonize over what an opponent might have had once it's over with. But I kept coming back to Negreanu's advice about calling when you're confused, when an opponent's actions cannot be made to add up to any plausible specific hand or range of hands.

On that basis alone, I reluctantly took one of my $50 stacks and slid it forward. I admit that I was having a near slugfest inside my brain, with one half saying, "Fold, you idiot! Don't throw away another $50! She just has to have something better than a measly pair of 9s!" The other half was quietly citing Mr. Negreanu's advice. It surprised me a bit that that's the half that won the argument, given how loudly the "fold" half was shouting.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and turned over the Qh-9h. Aha! She had been on the flush draw after all! I suspect that she was planning on just playing passively to see if she got there, but then when the board paired she made a snap decision to represent having made trips. She didn't take time to think through whether she could sell that notion, or how best to sell it. If she had check-raised me, it would have been a far, far harder call to make; with a completely unknown opponent, and a list of about a gazillion scary hands that could beat me--ones that a good opponent would play in precisely that way--I almost certainly would have folded.

This was only a middling-sized pot as these games go. Still, it was, I think, one of the ten or so most difficult calls I've made during the year and a half that I've been trying to make a living playing this endlessly intriguing game. It's one of the "thinnest" holdings I can remember--holding only a single pair, smaller than the high card on the board--for calling two large-ish bets from an opponent on whom I had neither a history of frequent bluffing nor a reliable physical tell.

My heartfelt thanks to Daniel Negreanu for the "assist" on this play. I was disappointed to read recently that he's no longer going to be doing columns for Card Player, because they were consistently insightful and informative. But it's hard to begrudge him the need to do other things instead, when he has already provided a wealth of useful tips.