Won't you please donate now to help cure narcolepsy?

Two Sundays ago I played the evening HORSE tournament at the Orleans. Fairly deep into it, this woman got moved to my table, on my immediate left.

She fell asleep. All. The. Time.

If she wasn't in a hand, she'd fall asleep. If she was in a hand, she'd fall asleep while waiting for her turn.

I've seen people fall asleep at poker tables before, but never as many times as this woman did. And she had two additional characteristics that set her apart from other sleepers I've encountered in the past.

First, as soon as she woke up, she was able to perceive exactly what was going on. She didn't have to ask what game we were playing or how much the bet was. It's like this information sank into her consciousness by osmosis while she snoozed.

Second, she was winning nearly every pot she contested. She was one of the most astoundingly lucky card racks I've ever seen. She just could not lose. And since she fell asleep as soon as the dealer had pushed her a pot, she never had time to stack her chips, so they just kept accumulating in a ever-growing, ever-messier pile.

As far as I could tell, she was not drunk and she was not faking, though both possibilities seemed sufficiently plausible to me that I watched her carefully to see if I could detect signs of either one. I could not.

The dealers were annoyed with her, because--surprise--they don't consider it part of their job description to wake players up from naps. The floor guy did nothing more than occasionally ask her if she was OK, to which she would give an energetic "Yes, I'm fine." And then drop off again.

She eventually knocked me out, first one to bust at the final table, about three spots short of the money. In keeping with the rabbit's foot she must have had surgically implanted, we were playing stud, all in on 6th street, me ahead with a bigger two pair than hers, and she caught her four-outer to make a full house on 7th street.

This bizarre approach to the game worked so well for her that I'm tempted to take an Ambien right before my next tournament.

Duke

The Duke of Fremont Street was on the local public radio station this morning. In case you want to listen to it, audio will be available here later.

DMLCP

I started in at Bally's a little after 3:00 pm yesterday, part of a new table that was opening. As usual in this situation, there's a lot of down time while everybody gets seated, gets chips, gets cards swiped, the dealer gives the cash and leftover chips back to the floor guy, cards get inspected and shuffled, draw for the button, etc.

I got bored with the waiting, and from my spot in Seat 1 snapped this picture of the women in Seats 3 and 4, sending it to Twitter with the message (referring, obviously, to Seat 3), "I wonder if she has any poker weapons other than distracting cleavage."

What I didn't know at the time was that I had left out of the photo the player around whom the game would revolve--the guy in Seat 2. (I guess I didn't completely leave him out; you can see his hands.) But I had definitely noticed him. In fact, immediately before sending the photo, I had Tweeted, "Game hasn't even started, and the guy next to me already slammed down a whiskey before starting on his beer."

I'll refer to him as DMLCP, because he was a Drunk Maniac Luckbox Creepy Perv.

The Drunk part is self-explanatory.

The Creepy Perv part he earned by trying ridiculously to hit on the two women to his left. Every time he would say anything to either of them, it was accompanied by reaching over and touching them on the hand or arm. This happened half a dozen times or so until, after the two friends exchanged a disapproving we've-got-to-stop-this-ickiness look, Ms. Cleavage said to him, "OK, that's enough with the touching now." He then apologized ten different times or so over the next half hour, repeating himself as drunk people tend to do.

The Maniac part comes from the fact that he raised pre-flop almost every hand--in the range of 90%--making it either $15 or $20 each time. As you can easily imagine, or perhaps have experienced, such a player completely changes the usual dynamics of a $1-2 game.

Luckbox? Well, if you've ever played with a guy like this, you have surely observed that drunkenness is highly correlated with being a card rack. There's a Nobel Prize for whoever works out the quantum physics by which a high blood alcohol level causes a temporary superhero-like ability to hit two-outers. He bought in for $200, and was up to $400 within 20 or 30 minutes, between his bullying and his card-catching.

His conduct had a predictable effect on the other players, who became much more willing to gamble than I think would be their usual tendency. Within the first half hour of play I saw a three-way all-in pre-flop with J-J, A-J, and K-Q, with K-Q taking the massive pot. (DMLCP started the madness with his usual raise, but bowed out after the reraises and shoves started.) The guy with A-J had been in Seat 6, and when he went away steaming mad, I claimed his seat, so that I didn't have DMLCP on my immediate left, where he was a real irritant in both personal terms and poker terms.

My first big confrontation with him: I had the button and Ks-Qs. Given his opening range, this was an easy call when he put in his usual $20 raise. Two limpers called, too. The flop was Kc-Qc-10c. I loved having top two pair, but three clubs and a Broadway possibility were obvious dangers. Both limpers checked. DMLCP bet $20. I raised to $60. Limpers folded. DMLCP called. This was significant, because he had shown a willingness to fold when somebody stood up to him and he had nothing. I didn't think he had a made flush or straight, both because he just called (I think he would have shoved with either made hand) and because it was just too unlikely to believe, even for a luckbox like him.

The turn was the jack of spades. Ick. While that didn't complete any one-card flushes, it did mean that if he held any ace he now had a straight. He checked, and I checked back, hoping to catch a boat card on fifth street. Before the dealer could produce it, however, DMLCP announced all-in dark. River was a blank, but I still had to decide whether to call off the rest of my chips, in the neighborhood of $200. There was $200 in the middle, plus the $200 (effectively) he was putting up, offering me 2:1 on a call. Given his undoubtedly high bluffing frequency, that was tempting.

I finally decided, though, that he most likely did have an ace, and that he had been planning on an all-in check-raise on the turn, which I had foiled with my check. That seemed the best explanation for his dark bet on the river, a move he had not previously made. So I reluctantly folded.

Bally's high-hand bonus for a club royal flush is currently sitting at over $10,000, with each player at the table when it hits getting a $599 share, so everybody was anxious to know if DMLCP had it. He flashed the ace of clubs before giving his cards back to the dealer, and I think we can safely assume that the other one was not the jack of clubs. In any event, it confirmed my read of the situation. It sucked, but I think I played the hand perfectly. I believe that if I had shoved the flop he would have called and I would have lost more.

(I'm not just being results-oriented in saying that pushing there would have been wrong. With an all-club flop, there was a real possibility that either of the limpers had flopped a flush and was trapping; I was prepared to fold if one of them moved all in after my raise.)

DMLCP's course followed that typical of his species. Like a meteorite, he burned brightly for a time, but then crashed to earth. Ironically, his downfall began when he had the best of it. He got into a pre-flop raising war with the table's other luckbox, the guy who had won the three-way with K-Q. They both ended up all-in, with the K-K of DMLCP looking good against the Q-Q of the other guy--until a queen flopped. An $800 pot went to the queens.

DMLCP rebought twice more, and lost both stakes on ill-advised bluffs that got snapped off. Sadly, I never had another bite at that particular apple before he left the table.

Within two orbits of his inglorious retreat, I got on the bad side of a set-over-set situation (first time that has happened in about a year, I think), and lost nearly my entire buy-in. The last $20 or so went in two hands later when I had J-J and lost to A-K with the classic ace on the river. I didn't feel like starting over again, so swallowed the $300 loss and called it a day.

I do hope to run into DMLCP again, though. Players like him make for an extremely high-variance game, but will be profitable for the smart, patient players much more often than not.

Too much sensitivity training?

Last night I played for several hours at Hooters. For most of that time, I had on my right a rather odd duck. He was, shall we say, sensitive.

I first became aware of this when the player to his right--a generally obnoxious pig, to be sure--sneezed directly into his own hands about a dozen times. Mr. Sensitive asked him to go wash his hands before continuing to play. Pig derisively refused. Mr. Sensitive then went to ask the floor guy to make Pig go wash his hands. I could overhear only bits of that conversation, but floor guy said something about that not being a rule that he could enforce. Mr. Sensitive returned, all huffy that his ideas about proper poker-table hygiene were being ignored.

Hey, I'm with him about how gross poker players are. But it's just silly to single out one particular instance of such filth for special attention, while pretending that everything else is all pristine. Almost four years ago I wrote in some detail about how disgusting poker chips, cards, and players are: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-think-im-going-to-throw-up.html. Getting one guy to wash his hands one time hardly makes a dent in the load of germs involved, so it doesn't make much sense to get all bent out of shape about it.

The second episode involved me more directly. I had been pretty chatty on Twitter. I was also trying to figure out how to get my new Android phone to do various things, without a lot of success, partly because I had only spotty 3G signal coverage. So, yeah, I had had the thing out and was playing with it a lot more than I usually do. But I never slowed down the game, never failed to notice when it was my turn, and always put it away as soon as I got involved in a hand.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of this, Mr. Sensitive asked me, "What is it you're doing with that?" I told him I was chatting on Twitter with a bunch of friends. He said, kind of snippily, "Well, I'm finding it very distracting."

Mind you, we were in end seats, rotated far enough away from each other that he couldn't see anything on the screen, and the phone was on mute and not emitting even the slightest peep. The thing could have been off with me just pretending to be fiddling with it, and he couldn't have known the difference. This was not a case of something visual on the screen or audible in the air that was bothering him. No, it was just the fact that I was doing something other than watching the poker game--or maybe he had some paranoia that I was writing about him. (I wasn't then, though I am now!)

Again he tried to enlist the floor guy, but the floor guy told him that I wasn't breaking any rules, and cell phones were allowed as long as players didn't slow down the game. In fact, Hooters is the only poker room I know of that actually has a sign posted on the wall prominently announcing "Cell phones OK." (See photo of it here, though they have removed the "Smoking OK" sign since I took that picture.)

As soon as a seat opened up on the far end of the table, he spoke up for it and moved far away from me. I can't know for sure if it was because I was bothering him, but I suspect so.

Can you believe how easily annoyed some people are???

In memoriam

I just spotted this little notice in Card Player magazine about the death of Annie. Very nice, whoever did this.

You can read about my experiences with Annie here and in the posts linked therein.

Yeah, probably

I have found Sunday afternoons during NFL season at Mandalay Bay to be both profitable and enjoyable--in spite of the football, not because of it. So with the first big game day upon us, I prepared myself to be there. I went to bed early last night so I could get up early this morning, get started soon after the first kickoff, and stay as long as it seemed to be going well. Unfortunately, today it went badly from the beginning, but I'll get to that later.

The main purpose of this post is to tell you about a character at the table, an older gentleman who was one of the purest specimens of calling station I have ever come across. Two of his sons were at the table, too, apparently all here as part of a wedding week. In one of this guy's first hands, he called a river all-in bet on a board that had four to a flush and four to a straight--with bottom two pair. As it happened, he was right to do so in this particular case, as the opponent was bluffing with flopped top pair that had gone sour.

But--and you'll just have to trust me on this--the call was not the result of some deep, amazing soul read; it's just who he was. Immediately after the hand was over, one of his sons, in a shocked tone of voice, said, "Dad! What are you doing there?!" The reply: "What? I had two pair--I had to call!" He ruminated on it a bit, however, and well into the next hand, out of nowhere, muttered, "That was probably a bad call."

This became something of a refrain for him. Sometimes he would say it in anticipation, as he put out the chips: "This is probably a bad call." More often, though, it would come after the hand was over and he was reflecting on his performance. "That was probably a bad call." Mind you, this wasn't said to anybody in particular. It wasn't posturing, not a gag line, not apologizing. It was just his own mild self-flagellation. It happened whether he lost the hand (which was most often the case), or whether he won (because once in a while somebody at the table, apparently not having received the memo, foolishly tried to bluff him).

Because I'm going to be riffing here on what a terrible player this guy was, I feel an obligation to also emphasize that he was an extremely nice, pleasant person. He conducted himself with dignity and flawless manners--never got upset, never gloated, never complained. He had some sort of neurological disorder that gave him trouble with both walking (he came to the table via motorized scooter) and fine motor control. He was inadvertantly flashing his cards sometimes because of an inability to handle them with the ease that most of us take for granted. But he persevered without making a fuss about his handicap, and, fortunately, nobody was so gauche as to call attention to the technical problems he was having. (I caught one player on his left sneaking a peek at the man's poorly protected cards, shot him a dirty look for it, and didn't see him try it again. My usual approach would be to ask the dealer to help the player understand how to protect his hand better, but in this situation, that seemed like it might embarrass him, so I kept my mouth shut.) He was there to have fun, to spend some time with his boys playing cards and watching football while celebrating the wedding of one of them, and he seemed just as happy to be there as one could be. He was a pleasure to share the game with. But he was a horrible, horrible player, easily the weakest at the table.

He couldn't help himself. Calling was not just what he did, it defined who he was as a poker player. Why did he call in hopeless spots? As the scorpion famously said to the frog as they both sank into the river, because that is his nature.

At one point, he got check-raised on the turn by his own son--he called, no surprise--then was put to an all-in decision on the river. The young man even said, "Don't call, Dad." (Highly improper, I think, but under the circumstances, I wasn't going to be so nitty as to make a stink about it.) Want to guess what action he took? That's right--he called. He had top pair. His son had flopped a set, turned a full house. He exclaimed, "Dad! What are you doing???" His father just shrugged, made a remorseful face, and said, "That was probably a bad call."

He never delivered this line self-consciously. It was never directed at anybody. He wasn't needling opponents, nor explaining himself to a listener. As far as I could tell, he had no audience other than himself. It was just his own internal dialogue, made barely audible.

Of course, no matter how many times he chastised himself for making bad calls, and no matter how many times he had to go to his wallet for a reload, he didn't actually change how he played. He limped in to about 90% of hands, and would almost always call whatever raise somebody might make after having limped. One time, somebody rather ridiculously raised a bunch of limpers to $32, and got one caller. Guess who?

He calls because it's the only way he knows how to play poker. He has almost certainly heard, multiple times, from multiple sources, the standard advice that most of the time you should raise if you think you have the best hand and fold if you don't; that calling, absent specific reason for doing so, is the worst of your three options and should be the action you resort to least often. But when it comes right down to it, he can't quite bring himself to pull the trigger on a raise--what if somebody reraises him? Then what? The thought is just too scary. But at the same time, every hand seems just a little too good to fold; it has just a bit too much potential to throw away. So he splits the difference and calls. He's not trying to play badly. He's making every individual decision the best he can. But he is caught between fear and hope. Fear makes him reject the raise, and hope makes him reject the fold. Calling is what's left. To him, this likely feels not like bad play, but like carefully steering between the dual dangers of the alternatives. Raising is his Scylla, folding his Charybdis, and, like the ancient mariners, he can feel safe only by steering a course right down the middle of the Strait of Messina.

He calls because he can't help it. He calls because he has always called. It is his nature.

Hannibal Lecter tries to teach young, naive Clarice about understanding people in "The Silence of the Lambs": "First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?"

He calls. That is what he does.*

As for me, despite my best efforts, nothing was working. It was one of those maddening one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back days. Flopping sets while others flopped flushes, etc. Yada, yada, yada, no need to detail the misery, as you all know just the sort of day I'm describing. The table was so soft that I found myself wondering, "How is it possible that I do not have every dollar these good folks brought to the casino today?" But I just couldn't make it happen.

I was down to my last $134 out of a $300 buy-in several hours into the session. In middle position I looked down at Kh-Qh. Plenty good enough for a raise at this extremely passive, limpy/cally table. I made it $9. I was not surprised to pick up three callers, including the subject of this post.

The flop was Kd-4h-5h, which is about as friendly and welcoming a flop as a fella can reasonably expect to have delivered. I bet $30 and reduced the field to one caller. Yes, that one. LDO.

The turn brought me a lovely sight: the 6h. Ding! Second nut flush. With the pot now $91 (after rake), and with only $94 left, and facing an opponent who would find any possible excuse to call, I saw no need to milk him with a small bet or otherwise get sneaky. I declared myself all in. The dealer counted it down. My opponent counted out the amount for a call, checked and rechecked his hole cards, looked at how much he would have left if he lost, etc. Based on his hand motions, I was first convinced that he was going to call, then convinced he was about to fold, then back to calling again, then folding again.

But in the end, he did what he nearly always did. He called. I showed my cards. He grimaced, as if he had known the news would be about that bad, and rather sheepishly turned over the Ah-Jd. He had called--of course--on the flop with nothing but backdoor draws and one overcard, and had called--of course--on the river with just seven outs to a higher flush.

There was no time for any comment or prediction, because at nearly the same instant, the dealer was peeling off the river card: the jack of hearts, cutting me off at the knees with that effin' axe of his. Nut flush for the calling station.

When I lose my composure at the poker table, it's not in the form of a verbal harassment of an opponent, like Tony G or Phil Hellmuth will unleash. It's not anything that's going to get security called on me, or for which I'm going to feel a later need to apologize. As physical manifestations of frustration go, I'm about as undramatic as they get. But this beat resulted in one of them: I plopped my forehead down on the table in disgust.

I knew that that was enough for me for the day. I was done. So after about two seconds of wallowing in self-pity, I stood up, grabbed my things, and started to walk away, without having said a word.

I'll bet you can guess what I heard our friend say as I left the table behind:

"That was probably a bad call."


*While proofreading this, I got a feeling that I had seen somebody else use this same quotation when describing a poker player. But I read so many poker blogs--who was it? After thinking about it a bit, I decided it might have been Grange95. I searched his site, and, sure enough, back on June 21 of this year, he began a post with the same words, and the context was a discussion of calling stations. When I used it above, I was not consciously copying Grange's usage, but I suspect now that the memory of that post was, in part or in whole, responsible for my brain coughing it up when I got to thinking about the "nature" of a calling station. BTW, you should go read that post, if you haven't already. It's an insightful analysis of different sub-types of calling station, based on what psychological needs their actions are filling.

Mr. Uncooperative

I forgot to tell you about this story when it happened. It was in March, when I played a daily Venetian tournament (described a bit here).

All of you who play live tournaments know that there tend not to be enough of the lowest denomination chips. When the antes kick in, it can be tight, and the dealers often have to get whoever won the last pot or two to make change (because that's the person, usually, with the most ante chips, and the dealers don't have extras in their trays). I had never seen this be a problem, until the tournament in question.

There was one guy at our table who just flat refused to make change when asked. I guess he had some weird fondness for low-denomination chips, or some weird aversion to exchanging them for high-denomination chips. Or maybe he was just an uncooperative jerk generally. He said virtually nothing the entire game.

Because he never gave any ante chips back, after a while he had a hugely disproportionate number of them. It was becoming increasingly difficult to make the remainder of them stretch. There were just barely enough, and it was taking more and more time every hand to get the antes right before the cards were pitched. Yet still this louse would not yield to repeated requests to help make change, as he sat on a pile of the ante chips. He was cornering the market.

Finally we got a no-nonsense kind of dealer. He made the obvious request the first time and got the usual refusal. He made it through that hand, but seeing how desperately short we were and how difficult it was to make things work, on the next hand he upped his own ante, so to speak. He told Mr. Uncooperative, "If you don't make change voluntarily, we'll give you a ten-minute penalty and make the change from your stacks while you're away from the table."

This finally broke the impasse, and change was given--but it was hardly done with pleasure. Everybody at the table could see that the guy was seething mad at this dealer. It apparently put him on major life tilt, and he donked off all his chips in a rapid sequence of three hands, both of them spots where it was just crazy--bluffing into the obvious nuts, etc. He rapidly went from one of the chip leaders to busto.

When he was eliminated on the last of these, he stood up and let loose a string of invective at this dealer that was, I believe, longer, louder, and more foul-mouthed than any I have heard in a poker room, and I have been around for some doozies. The TD quickly came over and tried to calm him down, to no avail. He rapidly escalated to making threats of bodily harm to the dealer, at which point security was called. He was escorted out. And by "escorted" I mean "half-carried," still cursing and yelling out death threats to the poor dealer over his shoulder.

I have absolutely no idea what his problem was, but it was clearly a lot bigger than not liking to part with his ante chips.

I don't have any actual point to make about this cretin. I can't exactly try to draw an important moral from the story--"Be sure to help make change when the dealer asks you to"--because 99.9% of people (and, I'm sure all of my readers!) already know and do this as a matter of course. It was just one of the odder occurrences in my poker life, and I thought it deserved airing.

I emailed a short version of this story to a dealer friend of mine, and he responded with this note:

I've never seen that before. Had I been the dealer, I would have
simply reached into his stack, made the change, smiled at him, and said "Thank you, sir!" before moving on. Of course, I've always worked with floor staff who would back me up, so I would have confidence that my floor wouldn't have an issue - or at least wouldn't have one in front of the customers...

I'm still stuck trying to figure out why he wouldn't make change. There are only so many of each denomination in play, and if he has the majority of them, one would think he could figure out he would be forced to help out eventually. Weird.

Closest thing I ever saw to this was during the WSOP a couple years back. During the color-ups, the chip leader at the table is required to buy up the denomination being colored off and then floor staff colors up one person per table. This guy refused and was throwing a fit until the TD basically told him he had no choice and if he continued to not let the staff touch his chips that he would be disqualified from the tournament on the spot.

Too many weirdos in the world :)

Amen to that.

Did I get leveled?

I played at Planet Hollywood last night. An hour or so into my session, we were joined by a new player. He brought only $60 in chips to the table, and minimum buy-in is $100. So first there was some delay in explaining to him why he had to get more chips. He was Asian, with a thick accent, and seemed inexperienced in how poker rooms work, so it all took some explaining and negotiating.

Once that was settled, he asked the dealer, "This is like video poker, right?" Because of his accent, nobody understood him at first. I think I was the first one to decipher his question (after the third iteration) and restate it for the dealer. The dealer understandably laughed, because the guy was smiling, as if he were asking this as an "I'm so dumb" joke. He answered sarcastically, "Yeah, just like video poker." This may seem unprofessional as I've told it, but I think everybody assumed the question was only in jest, so a jokey answer was not out of place. After all, if he were serious, then he was sitting down with $100 in play, not even knowing that he was playing against other players instead of against the house. I have never seen a player that green at a no-limit hold'em table. But then the guy followed it up by asking whether you trade in cards to try to make quads and royal flush like video poker. Then we understood that he was not kidding about his question, and the dealer appropriately changed the nature of his answer, and explained the whole process and structure of hold'em.

In fitting with never having played hold'em before, it took the player a couple of rounds to figure out about paying blinds, acting in turn, etc. He lost his first buy in making a couple of ridiculously bad calls. He left to hit the ATM and asked the dealer to save his seat. You would usually expect a couple of unkind comments about his skill level after he left the table, but there were none here, because this entire table was overall the most inexperienced I've ever sat at. It was like sitting at one of the instructional tables where they use tournament chips just to illustrate how the game works--except that we were playing for hundreds of dollars. I posted a couple of notes on Twitter about the table generally and this player in particular.

The guy came back with another $100. The game continued. He was chatting a lot with the player next to him. I missed most of it because of his nearly incomprehensible accent, the general noise level of the PH poker room, and the music in my earphones. I wish now I had listened in more, to have gotten more clues about his understanding of the game.

Over time, I began to wonder whether his whole extreme-newbie thing was an elaborate act. The first thing that was out of character was that he was rather facile with handling chips. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time observing players new to casino poker, and most often they keep their hands completely away from their chip stacks until they need to put money into the pot. There are exceptions, such as those with a lot of home game experience, but not many. I couldn't assume this Asian guy had home game practice, or else he wouldn't have mistaken hold'em for 5-card draw. But, I reasoned, maybe he played a lot of blackjack and became adept at handling chips there. On the other hand, not everything that I noticed him doing was consistent with how a blackjack player would handle chips. For example, most new players making a bet with, say, five chips will stack them neatly and push or place that stack just across the betting line. This guy, though, would casually lay such a stack across the felt with an apparently practiced motion that left the chips in a neat row. Hmmmm.

The second thing that drew my skepticism, though, was the relative speed with which he acted. Again, my experience with true beginners is that they take forever for even the simplest decisions. He didn't. He was able to come to very quick decisions about calls and folds and raises. For example, in the only pot of any size that I contested with him, I had 9-9, and the flop was 8-high. He bet $5. I raised to $20. When it got back to him, he didn't hesitate at all to move all in for an additional $56. I called, not putting him on a higher pair, since there had been no pre-flop raise. There are so many $1-2 players who will commit their stacks (especially relative small stacks like his) with just top pair in that spot that I thought a call was warranted. He turned over 10-10. I was immediately struck by the fact that he required no deliberation at all to make this all-in raise. If he were really playing hold'em for the first time, wouldn't he be expected to stop and think about whether he had the best hand? Of course, maybe he's just naturally an impulsive person. Or maybe he's just so green that it doesn't occur to him that his tens might be no good there. Still, it definitely caught my attention that he showed none of the mental wavering that is usually seen in inexperienced players.

He left after an hour or two, cashing out something around $350. I noticed that he knew, without asking, where to go to fetch himself a chip rack and how and where to cash out. Those are the kind of things that new players usually ask about, or at least you can see them turning their heads around as they try to figure it out without asking. Also, along the way, after taking a restroom break, he knew what to do when the dealer asked him whether he wanted to make up his blinds or wait; most new players would require specific instructions about what that meant.

As he was racking up, I realized that after the first buy-in, which he donked off badly, he had never got his chips in with the worst of it. His calls were correct. He raised where he should have. He folded to strength--and without hesitation. None of these things can be said for the play of a typical tourist hitting a Vegas poker table for the first time. Even the fact of him leaving when he was up, instead of staying to give it all back, was atypical for a new player.

I was left completely unsure of what I had witnessed. If the first part of his time at the table was an act, it was the most convincing one I've seen--including throwing away $100 as part of the gig. (Well, I guess I should qualify that. Obviously if somebody else has played the role of a rube so thoroughly that I never even suspected it was an act, that would have to top this performance. But I kind of doubt that. I'm pretty observant about picking up on clues and inconsistencies, and I'd like to think that I can sniff out the pretenders.) For 15 minutes or so, I was absolutely confident (and, I admit, salivating more than a little) that I was dealing with the first person I had ever seen sit down at a no-limit hold'em table not even knowing what hold'em was. But by the end of his session, I had seen enough from him that was not consistent with that status to have grave doubts.

My best guess in retrospect is that he is a more experienced than average player who decided to try the dumb role, but just couldn't pull it off for more than a short time. He hadn't thought through all of the things that mark inexperienced players as new and how to imitate them, and thus tipped his hand. I think it is unlikely that what I observed could be found in one who was genuinely so naive that he thought poker and video poker were the same game. But I'm still not entirely sure. It is well within the realm of possibility that he was just was he first appeared to be, and the traces of fluency and lack of hesitation that I saw were borne of a natural generalized confidence and/or aided by the booze he had been drinking, plus some experience at other games.

I feel like I've been in a real-world version of "To Tell the Truth." I'm not writing down his number on my card as the genuine article--i.e., the real inexperienced player--but without the reveal at the end of the show, I'll never know for sure.

Paradox

It's not arrogance that causes me to think that I'm usually the best player at the table; it's just that it really doesn't take much to be the best at a typical Vegas casino $1-2 NLHE game. Commonly I find that there is one other player that is of comparable skill level. I spend very little time and mental energy trying to make the fine distinction as to whether it is he (or she) who is slightly the better player, or I. It simply doesn't matter much. If somebody is in my general range of experience, I pretty much know what to expect, and that's all that matters.

Maybe once every couple of weeks I run into somebody that is good enough that it makes me feel pretty sure that I'm outgunned. These are the players that have moves that are not in my repertoire. These are the ones that have an uncanny sense of timing, of where they are in every hand, and a degree of cagey fearlessness that I can envy but not yet emulate. Frankly, there aren't too many of them, because most that are substantially beyond my ability will have moved up to bigger games than $1-2.

Last night at the MGM Grand I had one of this class at my table, two seats to my left (I was in 1, he was in 3). I had him spotted within the first two hands. He was always deliberate, taking an almost unnerving amount of time to make the big decisions. He was contemplative. He was the very model of selective aggression, a nearly perfect raise-or-fold player except when he was deliberately trapping. He responded to feeble attempts to play back at him with crushing return pressure that nearly always caused the opponent to cower off. He gave off no tells. He never spoke during a hand, letting his chips do the talking instead. He never showed his cards unless required. I never once saw him get his money in with the worst of it. He was seriously good in every way.

Except one.

After every hand in which he was a participant, he would launch into a verbal post-mortem with the few players near him. This was quiet enough that those at the far end probably couldn't hear, but clear enough that it couldn't be missed by anybody within a couple of seats of him. He would explain in detail what he thought the opponent(s) had and why, how his assessment of their possible range started and how it changed with the additional information each new board card and betting round provided, etc. It was, every time, a sharp, canny, accurate, insightful analysis.

It was also incredibly moronic.

Except for the two of us, the skill level at this table was quite low. It was, I think, overall the weakest table I've played in at the MGM, and it was, frankly, quite easy pickings. So what possible effects could the Professor's lessons have?

-- Alert the brain-dead players that there are whole levels of analytic skill to which they have not had their eyes opened before.

-- Signal these same players that Seat 3 is occupied by a person who has access to some of these higher levels of thinking.

-- Make these players conclude, "Gee, I'd better be more careful and try not to make any stupid mistakes, or I'll get eaten alive at this table."

-- Clue these players in to things like what bet sizes suggested about opponents' holdings, or what factors to consider when deciding whether to value-bet versus check behind on the river--things that they may not have considered before.

Possibly the worst possible outcome is one that I think actually occurred: chasing away a bad player. After I had been there not very long, the fishiest of fish sat down in Seat 2. He was terribad, stupibad. He barely knew how to tell when it was his turn. He was completely transparent when he was not being indecipherably stupid. He burned through his first buy-in within just a few hands, and rebought, to my great delight.

On the hand that I think was the last straw for him, the fish bet weakly the whole way. Smart player called him down, making the nut flush on the river. However, that card also paired the trey from the flop. Professor then delved into the lecture, explaining to the guy on his left (but perfectly audible to the idiot in 2) why he couldn't raise there, because he didn't think Seat 2 would have been betting a lower flush draw that way, so the only hand that would call a raise would be a set that had filled up on the river. In fact, Seat 2 had shown just two pair--pocket 9s plus the paired treys on the board--and there had been an ace and a king on the flop. His plan had apparently been to just hope that a series of small bets would win it for him, with likely no thought about what his opponent might have.

Anyway, the post-hoc analysis implied pretty clearly (without being overtly insulting or name-calling) that Seat 2 had badly misplayed the hand. This was true enough, but what on God's green earth is accomplished by making this even more obvious than it already was? I tried not to look to my left to add to the guy's social discomfort, but in my peripheral vision I got the sense that he was squirming from deep embarrassment, probably induced by a combination of knowing that he was in a game that was over his head and having that fact pointed out to everybody within easy earshot.

I got up for a restroom break, and when I returned, the fish was gone. I have no idea what, if anything, he said when he left, whether he lost the rest of his chips on a hand that I missed or just cashed out what he had remaining. Either way, it was a serious blow to the profitability of the table. The most likely conclusion, it seems to me, is that his desire to play had been completely crushed by his mortification at being tagged as a bad player and an unworthy opponent.

Maybe he went to play limit instead of no-limit. Maybe he went to the craps tables instead. Maybe he went back to his hotel room, and will now spend the rest of his long-planned weekend in Vegas, and the rest of his bankroll, on strip clubs and hookers instead of on the poker that he had been looking forward to. If so, it is a loss to the poker economy.

So now it's 18 hours later, and I'm left still utterly baffled by the seat 3 Professor. How is it possible simultaneously to be so damn smart at the game, and so damn dumb at the metagame?

You might be a donkey if....

Monday evening at the Venetian I had the table donkey on my right. His oddness began with the fact that he was wearing sleeves too long for his arms, with holes cut in them for his thumbs to stick out, leaving the elastic cuff to go across his palms--because, y'know, one's palms get so cold playing poker.

I first noticed his donkitude in how little attention he was paying to the game. He was just completely zoned out. Every time it was his turn, the dealer would have to try to get his attention, then recap the action for him to that point. That gets old REAL fast.

But there were four specific points in the evening at which he might as well have bared his teeth, kicked his rear hooves, and brayed.


1.

He limped in from early position, then called a ridiculously large pre-flop raise to $25 from one of the more solid players at the table, with K-2. But, of course, it was sooted! The flop gave him a gutshot to a wheel, so of course he check-called a pot-sized bet, and hit his draw on the turn.


2.

In another hand, he limped in, and was one of four callers for a raise to $12 from the table's tightest player on the button. Pot was about $60. On the flop it was checked around to the raiser, who bet $50. It folded around to Donkey. He said, over and over again, "Wow. Great bet. Really great bet." He finally folded, but continued the admiring speech. "That was just a fantastic bet." No, there was no irony or sarcasm in it.

I took a dinner break, and as I was sitting down upon my return, caught the end of Donkey yet again bringing up that hand, and telling the opponent from nearly an hour before, "You put in a really great bet there, dude."

Yeah. The pre-flop raiser putting in a continuation bet of a little less than the size of the pot, from the button, when his opponents check it to him--that's positively ingenious. Never seen anything like that before! It's well worth continuing to marvel at FOR AN HOUR!

3.

About a minute before I stepped away for my break, he said, to nobody in particular, "Do you think the table has noticed that I'm playing, like, every hand?"

No, sir! None of us were paying any attention to such obscure, hard-to-obtain information! You should have kept it to yourself, and nobody would ever have known.

(Later, after about the seventh Jagermeister, he changed his tactic to raising every hand. I was salivating in the hopes of picking up something good. But I went card-dead about then, and by the time I hit some good stuff the booze had pushed him to nearly falling asleep at the table, and complete passivity in play. I still took nearly $100 from him on my last hand of the night when my K-K was apparently good enough.)

4.

I had A-A under the gun. I raised. Button reraised. Donkey folded. (Dang!) I put in the third raise, and the button called. Flop A-K-10 rainbow. Bet and call. Turn a 6. Big bet, reluctant fold.

I show the aces as a bit of false advertising. Donkey says, "Nice hand, but you must have hated that flop." I'm kind of stunned--I flopped the second nuts, and just wasn't too worried that my opponent had called the third raise (from a tight player in first position) with J-Q. Actually, I was about to pee my pants with the hope that he had either A-K or K-K, and I would stack him. And Donkey is saying I must have hated the flop??? All I can croak out is a stammering, "It was OK." Donkey says, "That's sure not the kind of flop you want when you've got aces."

He is not kidding.

I'm flabbergasted into silence. The thought running through my mind is, "Just shut up. Keep it to yourself. No teaching at the table. Let him think whatever he wants to think."


To the young man in Seat 9 Monday night: In case anybody tries to pin a tail on you in the near future, there's a damn good reason.

Smelly and me

I ran into Smelly again a couple of weeks ago. He got up and left the table. It was one of the most tangible markers I've yet been given that I have gotten better at this game.


Back to the beginning of the story: As most readers know by now, the Hilton was the first poker room that really caught my attention as a quiet, friendly, comfortable, convenient, and profitable place to use as my default poker destination when there was not some reason to go elsewhere. I naturally ran into a lot of the same people frequently. One of them was a guy that I'll call Allen (not his real name).

Allen is a sourpuss. He could call himself the Poker Grump more accurately than I can. He also had questionable personal hygiene. One day when I was waiting for a table, I chatted with the person at the front desk. One of the high-hand jackpots had been capped at its maximum for an unusually long time, but that day I noticed that it had been reset to the minimum, meaning that somebody had hit it the previous day. I asked if it had been won by somebody I would know. She said, "Yeah, it was Allen." There were two frequent customers named Allen, though. One of them was dating one of the Hilton poker dealers. So I asked, "The one who's dating [so and so]?" She replied, "No, Smelly Allen."

I almost died laughing. Up until that point, I had no idea that the dealers had adopted that nickname for him for use behind his back. When they needed to make the distinction, there was "Nice Allen," and there was "Smelly Allen."

My first few months in town, I found Smelly to be a challenging opponent. Here's how I described him in an email to a friend back in Minnesota on September 20, 2006: "He’s erratic and tricky, very unpredictable, and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost more to him than I’ve won from him. When we’re in a hand against each other, he seems to be able to get away from me when I’m strong more easily than I get away from him when he’s strong."

Over time, though, I started noticing patterns to his play. For example, one of his favorite moves was a huge raise from the big blind when several people had limped in. After a while, I could even predict when he was going to do this, which meant that he was doing it largely independent of what his cards were. I also noticed that he would fold to a reraise, and wouldn't take any heat after the flop if somebody called him in that situation. So although in any one hand, that move might look like he has a big pair, seeing it occur many times made it clear that he was often doing it with air.

Another pattern that I started to notice was that he would usually put in a continuation bet after the flop, if he had raised before the flop, but he wouldn't fire second and third bullets if he missed the board.

The reason for that 9/20/06 email was to describe my turning point with Smelly. I limped in with 9-9. He raised, I called. At that moment, I had something of an epiphany. I could see the different paths that this hand might take at each decision point, all simultaneously. It wasn't a vision, exactly, but a weird sense that I knew the things he might do at each decision point, what each of them implied about his cards, and, therefore, how I would need to respond to them, for all of the remaining three betting rounds. Basically, most flops were going to go check-bet-call, because I knew that I needed to see what he did on fourth street to know whether he had (1) either started with a big pair or started with two big but unpaired cards and had hit one of them, or (2) he had started with two big cards and whiffed on the flop.

The flop was 10-10-2. Check-bet-call, as expected. Turn was a rag. Check-check. Aha! I was confident then that he didn't have an overpair. His pattern would have been to fire again if he did, and let my response dictate what he would do next. (I.e., if I check-raised, he would probably fold.) Now my only concern was that the river not be an overcard that might pair him up. It was another small card. I bet, and Smelly insta-mucked.

The hand had followed one of the paths that I had foreseen. Now that I have about a billion more hands of experience, nothing about that seems particularly remarkable. But it was the first time that I ever had an advance sense of the ways in which a whole hand could play out, instead of just taking each decision separately as it came. It was also one of the first times that I had been able to apply betting patterns of a particular opponent from previous sessions to a specific current hand. (Of course, I had at least some facility with observing and adjusting to players over the course of a session, but cumulatively gathering information on people over weeks and months was a skill I was just developing.)

The pot wasn't very big, but it was a huge turning point for me. From then on, I didn't fear Smelly. I realized that he wasn't nearly as tricky and unpredictable as I had mentally labeled him. The tide turned between us. I started winning more of our encounters.

By the time that the Hilton poker room closed about a year after that, Smelly largely stayed away from me. It was crystal clear that he had been burned enough times that he decided it was better to pick on other people and stay out of my way.*

Since the closing of the Hilton poker room, I have bumped into Smelly only three or four times, all but one of them, I think, at Harrah's. Our old pattern on those occasions seemed to continue--he would rarely contest pots in which I was taking the lead. He seemed to want to avoid me.

Then, as I alluded to at the top of the post, a most interesting thing happened a couple of weeks ago. I joined a game at the Monte Carlo where Smelly was playing. Within five minutes, he stood up and cashed out without saying a word.

It's impossible to know for sure that I'm the reason he decided to leave, but I have a strong hunch. He hadn't just lost or won a large pot, and didn't have a particularly short or large stack that would suggest itself as the reason for him calling it a day. I believe that he simply decided that he could find an easier table somewhere else. (That wasn't entirely due to me. I discovered that there were other good players at that table. But I think that I was the final straw in his decision to look for better hunting elsewhere.)

I can't think of any other opponent with whom I have that kind of history--starting off with me intimidated by him, and ending up the other way 'round. It's highly satisfying, because it's a pretty unmistakable sign that I have made progress (and had even made measurable improvement between early July, 2006, when I started here, and late September of the same year, when we played what proved to be that pivotal hand). Smelly, I'm afraid, has basically stayed at the same level of play.

And he still has questionable personal hygiene.



*Every time I write something like this, I feel the need to throw in my usual disclaimer: I do not view myself as any sort of poker prodigy. I'm not especially good at the game. No real pros would find me scary or difficult. I have a basic level of competence that is probably about as low on the scale of poker talent as one can possess and still manage to squeeze a living out of the tourists. Readers should not mistake what are intended as fairly objective statements about me being a better player than some particular other one as suggesting swagger on my part.

Some sights at the Venetian

Not much about the poker itself to discuss from today's session at the Venetian, but I have a few odd sights to share. Apologies in advance for the fuzzy pictures. I had to take them all quickly, and bad focus and motion artifact were the results.


First, high on the list of things not to do at a poker table: flossing.



Yeah, really--that's what he was doing. Please, folks: Just don't. Srsly. Ew.


This next thing I can't really say is a violation of etiquette. Nor is it terribly uncommon. But I'm still greatly amused by it every time: The gangsta look. Maybe it's a poka gangsta look.





We've got the faux designer shades, the pin-striped baseball cap with the flat, broad brim, the earrings, the mouth-breathing, the wifebeater undershirt with the hoodie over it, complete with dollar signs across the shoulders, and the ho nice young woman waiting subserviently in a chair behind him.

It's all just silly. I'd really love to ask him things such as, what is it that you like about this look? What it is you want people to think about you when you dress yourself this way? And, most of all, do you have any idea how ridiculous you look?

I think that if you're going to attempt this nonsense, you should at least have the guts to go all the way: shift the cap over to the side, get the gold bling around the neck, put rings on every finger, and wear the grille on your teeth. Then you have an actual ensemble. When you go just halfway like this dude, it just screams "wannabe" (though why anybody would wannabe that escapes me).


Finally, just a quickie shot of the final board on one hand. Can you look at this and still doubt the power of the deuce-four? This hand was won by a guy with an A-2. He would have been squashed like a bug by the 2-4.

The Grump vs. the Geeks

Last night I returned to the Venetian. I knew that the porn stars would all be at Mandalay Bay for the big Adult Video News awards ceremony, and that that would leave just the Consumer Electronics Show attendees. Sure enough, I spotted a few convention ID badges around the necks of my fellow players.

That's right---it was going to be me against the Geeks.

Let me just skip right to the end of the story. I played for exactly three hours, finishing up by $573. I never lost a big pot, never got my money in with the worst of it (except for deliberate bluffs--every one of which was successful). Compare that to Thursday night, playing against the porn stars. My stack fluctuated wildly up and down, finally ending up a fairly pathetic $115 for just under eight hours of play, and even that success was dependent on some lucky flukes.

My conclusion, based on the highly scientific sample size of one table each: Porn stars play better poker than computer geeks. Who knew?!

****

There was one seminal hand worth describing. Our table was blessed with a Geek Maniac. He was the friendliest, chattiest, smilingest guy there, very affable and enjoyable personally. But he was a maniac. He played at least 90% of his starting hands. If nobody raised ahead of him, he would do the job himself virtually 100% of the time. Sometimes it was a min-raise, sometimes to $6, sometimes $8, sometimes $12. As far as I could tell, the amount didn't vary with his hand strength. Rather, he would go in spurts of a certain amount for a while, then change to a different amount for a while, etc. He would always, always, always continuation-bet the flop. He was an inveterate bluffer--as one would have to be playing that way, because you just don't make real hands that often.

As I trust my readers know, it is impossible to play poker profitably this way. Sure, he won about three monster pots during the time I watched him, but, predictably, it would all either bleed away slowly or get lost in another huge confrontation. But he had a big wad of Benjamins and wasn't afraid to dig into it. Excellent! I recognized two other local grinders at the table, and this one guy was feeding all three of us. (We stayed out of each other's way.)

So late in the day, Geek Maniac is under the gun and straddles, as always. I'm in middle position and see my favorite hand, the 2-4 offsuit. Yay! I can't lose! Position isn't perfect, but I've played 2 1/2 hours of rock-solid poker, never showing a bluff, winning every large pot I contest, showing down nothing but strong hands. So the situation should be a good one for either making a completely unreadable hand or making a plausible bluff. I called the $4, knowing that it was just a down payment, because, as he always did, Geek Maniac raised it, this time to $12. I called again.

The flop was A-Q-2 with two hearts. (I had none.) Geek Maniac bet $15. My lowly bottom pair might be good here, and I might improve to two pairs or trips, or be able to represent the flush if another heart were to come, so I called. Besides, I wanted to see what he would do on the turn. (I should mention, perhaps, that Geek Maniac had a major tell in his bet sizing. When he had nothing or something really weak like bottom pair or an underpair to the board, he would repeat his bet size from the flop to the turn, or from the turn to the river. Huge information giveaway.)

Turn was an offsuit 2, giving me trips, which was almost sure to be the winner here. Of course, he plays any two cards this way, and could theoretically have had the case deuce--or even, God forbid, pocket queens or aces for a full house--but that's mathematically unlikely enough that I felt I could safely disregard it unless he showed real strength. (Another facet of his bet-size tell was that he didn't bluff big; his big bets and check-raises were always the real deal.) This time he bet $25, suggesting that he had top pair at least. I raised to $80. He called without too much difficulty, but with definite trepidation. Again, this let me know that he had a real hand, but certainly no monster. He was very easy to read, both from betting patterns and body language.

River was an offsuit 5, completing no possible flush or straight draws. Beautiful! Geek Maniac checked. I bet $100. He hesitated for no more than two seconds before calling, which makes me wonder if I could have squeezed more out of him. But no matter--I showed the ol' 2-4. He nodded unhappily and mucked without showing. I scooped in the roughly $420 pot. Thank you, deuce-four!

***

Geek Maniac left the table quietly maybe ten minutes later. I was surprised at the table talk after he was out of earshot. A young woman two seats to my left (I've played with her before and know her to be good) said, referring to me, "I was so happy when he won with that deuce-four! I was, like, 'Yeah! Take THAT!'" (Geek Maniac had stacked her earlier when he flopped a set of queens to beat her pocket kings.) Even more surprising, the dealer then piped up: "Me, too! I know I'm supposed to be neutral, but I loved seeing him get a dose of his own medicine!" Apparently, despite his personal affability, the Geek Maniac's playing style had been getting on everybody's nerves.

I thought this was really strange. From the dealer's perspective, not only is such an overt display of favoritism highly unprofessional (even after the other guy has left the table), but why should she care who wins or loses, or what anybody's playing style is? I could understand it if the guy was a jerk. Then it would be perfectly natural to wish to see him taken down. But as I've said several times, he was really a charming, happy-go-lucky person whom it would impossible to dislike. He was never rude, never churlish, never a sore loser, always complimenting other players on good hands and good play, an extremely generous tipper, etc.

As for the other players, they should have hated that hand--first, because it made a big chunk of chips a helluva lot harder to win than if they had stayed in Geek Maniac's stack, and, second, because it for the first time revealed me to be a lot more potentially tricky and difficult to put on a hand than they had presumably believed prior to that point. Logically, it made no sense for them to be happy with the outcome. But I guess for some people, the emotional revenge satisfaction factor meant more than the implications for their chances of leaving the game winner. Personally, when I see a big pot go down between other players, I always either love or hate the result based on my assessment of whether that mass of chips just became easier or harder to take home; I'm rooting for the worst player to win. Once again, I guess I have to face the fact that the way I think about things just isn't shared by most of the rest of humanity.

****
Just a "BTW" thing that occurred to me for the first time last night: Since "Venetian" is the adjectival form of "Venice," why isn't it spelled "Venecian"?

My night at Caesars Palace

Celebrity sighting #1

I hit Caesars Palace last night. As usual, I didn't have any particular reason for choosing it--nothing better than "I haven't played there in a while." I'm glad I did. Here's what happened.

I'm one of eight people starting up a new $1-3 NLHE game. Within the first few hands, I don't like the table. There are too many very good players here, no obvious soft spots. Nobody is chatting, nobody is drinking, everybody looks like they're here to take other people's money, and nothing will distract or deter them from that goal. Frankly, they're all too much like me!

At the next table over, there is drinking and laughing galore. There are at least three players that I can see even from this distance have little experience in casino poker. Shots are being ordered for the whole table. No question about it: That is where I need to be. Fortunately, just as I'm realizing this, one player there gets up to leave and I hear the dealer announce, "Two seats open on table 7." Since we have just one open seat, that means they should allow me to move. They do, and I do.

Within two minutes of arriving at my new home for the night, a familiar face takes the second empty seat at the far end of the table. It takes me a few seconds to place it, but I'm pretty sure it's Ira Glass, host of my favorite radio program, This American Life. (How do I know the face from radio? Well, they have also done two seasons of a television version of the show for Showtime.) But you know how people look somewhat different in real life than in photos or on TV--so I wasn't completely sure it was him. The voice would have given it away, but he was chatting softly with the people near him, and I couldn't hear well enough to tell. So I asked where he was visiting from, and he said, "I live in New York now. Moved there a couple of years ago from Chicago."

Oh yeah, that's definitely a voice I recognize. I said, "From Chicago Public Radio!" He looked surprised, but said yes.

We ended up playing together for about six hours, most of it with just one other player between us. He was a delight. He kindly posed for the photo above before leaving, and gave me permission to post it. I was thrilled to have this completely unexpected chance to tell him how much I love the show. I'm not easily star-struck, but I've been listening to this program for several years now, and it's simply the best thing on the radio.

The situation was a bit weird, though, because I sensed that I was at an unfair social advantage. In the course of telling a story or making a point for the show, Ira often talks about his own life, so I realized that I knew all sorts of strange odds and ends about him: his testosterone level, what TV theme songs he sings along with when his favorite programs come on, his father's former radio career, how he can't admit to his wife that he is ever wrong, etc. Yet he knew nothing about me, save what I chose to reveal.

He quickly caught on to the fact that I play for a living. It's not something I usually disclose at the table, but I remembered having heard a segment on his show about poker, in which he revealed his secret longing to ditch the day job and play poker for a living. (You can--and should--listen to it here, Act Two, starting at about 20:45. Great piece on what it's really like to play for a living, though it primarily focuses on the highest-stakes players, not the groundskimming grinders like me.) As he said to me at one point, "You're living one of my dreams." He seemed every bit as interested in my job as I was in his, so I got to ask about how they find thematic stories and about the future of the Showtime series, and more, and he got to ask about beating passive games, how much I make, what books he should read, where I played, and more.

He engaged in a lengthy discussion about politics with the woman sitting between us, a self-proclaimed right-winger who was now completely disenchanted with politics and refused to listen to the news, and had even given up listening to her beloved Rush Limbaugh because of how she hated the November election results. At one point, she spouted the standard line from conservative talk radio about how the current financial downtown was due to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac trying to be politically correct and extend mortgages to people who really couldn't afford the houses they were buying. I knew what was coming, and couldn't help smiling. Boy, did she pick the wrong person to lay that on! For those who don't know, This American Life earlier this year did a whole hour on how the mess evolved, and it's all far more complex and global and interesting than that quite wrong-headed explanation. (That particular episode has, I understand, become moderately famous in its own right. If you haven't heard it, and feel like you still don't have a grasp on what triggered the crisis, you owe it to yourself to listen to it here. While you're at it, take in the follow-up show here.) It was impressive hearing Ira tell this woman of things of which she had no inkling, and I felt unduly smug for having heard it all before.

Back to the poker. I was initially pleased that I was playing well and catching good cards, making money quite rapidly--making winning look easy. In fact, it was shaping up to be one of the best nights I've had in a few months. I had worked my initial $200 up to about $600 in just a couple of hours. (That included a $100 high-hand jackpot for hitting quad 7s.)

Then disaster struck, and I lost about $550 of that in one horrendous hand. It was one of the three or four largest single-hand losses I've ever experienced, and it was witnessed by a guy who thinks I have a great life, and who, moreover, might find occasion to tell the story to a national radio audience. (Actually, Ira, it's fine if you do, should the subject ever come up. After all, I'm telling it here.) The details don't really matter, but I pushed all-in, over the top of his $100 bet, with an open-ended straight draw as a semi-bluff against a guy who I was nearly certain had no more than one pair, and that lower than the highest card on the board. (Flop had been 6-4-?, turn a jack. I had 5-7.) I was right about his hand--he had pocket 9s--but dead wrong about what he would do. He called rather quickly. I still don't understand that call. I had shown down nothing but strong winners all night, had engaged in hardly any bluffing and had not shown a single one of them, and was playing mostly classic tight-aggressive poker. I also think it's unlikely I have any tell of such predictive power that he would rely on it for a pot of that size. Finally, in an unusual tactical slip-up for me, I had told him honestly not too long before this that I didn't want to play a big pot, as I was getting ready to call it a night. I regretted saying that instantly, and he had responded to it by starting to raise me more frequently and aggressively--a smart adjustment, given what I had carelessly revealed to him. But I thought that that slip would actually work in favor of making him fold in the big hand. Not so, apparently. I would love to have asked the guy what he thought I had there, but didn't think I'd get a straight answer. Nothing about it makes sense to me still.

Anyway, I was acutely aware that Ira would now be watching me to see how I handled it. A couple of months ago, a reader of this blog with whom I was playing told me that it helped him to have me there; it prevented him from doing anything stupid for fear that he'd have to read about it the next day. (Story here.) I felt the same way with Ira scrutinizing me for how I'd handle this setback. Fortunately, though it felt like getting kicked in the stomach, I didn't go on tilt. I kept playing reasonably well, but in the end another three hours or so passed without making any significant progress monetarily, so I took the occasion of Ira's leaving to catch his plane as my excuse to leave simultaneously. Sorry I couldn't put on a better show for you, sir. But there's the reality of poker--sometimes it hurts like hell and you go home with less than you started the day with, wondering why you bothered.

Now here's the weird part. I listen to This American Life via its podcasts, usually while I'm washing dishes. A couple of months ago, Ira introduced three consecutive episodes with a special plea, only for the podcast listeners, to contribute just a few bucks to help defray the cost of the enormous amount of bandwidth they have to use. He had said that even $5 or $10 would pay for the listener's use, plus that of a couple of other people, too. That small amount, he had said, would make you a "hero" to the program. Yeah, of course it's hyperbole, but the message was effective, and I decided to do it. I imagined that in some random encounter, I'd run into Ira Glass, and I'd joke, "Hey, I'm one of the 'heroes' who paid for bandwidth for some other listeners!" For three weeks in a row, upon hearing that, I told myself that I'd make a small contribution as soon as I was done with the show and the dishes. And, predictably, three weeks in a row I got busy with something else and forgot all about it.

And then, in a completely random encounter, as you now know, I actually did run into Ira Glass! But instead of being able to tell him that I donated to the cause, I had to confess that I had procrastinated it to the point of neglecting it altogether.

So there's your lesson. Contribute to whatever worthy cause you choose now, before you have a random run-in with somebody associated with it and have to say that you intended to send them money, but never quite got around to it--because you really, truly might have such an unexpected meeting.

Ira, I have now made my penitance complete, I hope--I just charged $20 to my credit card at this site, linked to on your show's home page. And yes, that stupid little story is really true, and yes, you can use it if you think it would be helpful and/or amusing to others.


Celebrity sighting #2

Lacey Jones was playing at the table next to mine. She appears to be as attractive in person as in photos, which isn't always the case with model types. (Here is what she looked like posing in her undies for the cover of Bluff magazine a couple of months ago, and here is what she looks like wearing nothing but body paint.)


The nutjob

For the last maybe 90 minutes of my session, we were joined by a nutjob. A crankcase. A wackadoo. A looney. A fruitcake.

We all first became aware of his loose screw when he started screaming--not the "screaming" that people say in exaggeration to make the subject of the story look bad, but literally screaming, loud enough that that entire, large poker room could hear--about how he got screwed out of a pot by an unlucky card because of the automatic shuffling machine. It seems that he had, a short time before, busted out of a tournament on some sort of bad beat. He shouted, "They don't use those machines back in the tournament area! It's the dealer! And that guy was a MECHANIC! A MECHANIC, I'm telling you!" This was so over-the-top that I was prepared to laugh at his antics, until I looked at him and realized that he was not trying to be funny in the least. He was livid. (The rant didn't really make any logical sense. He was simultaneously angry at our table's autoshuffler, but at the same time saying that it's worse being at a table without one, because you might get a crooked dealer who deliberately cold-decks you. Whatever, dude.)

When he entered a pot, it was usually for a raise to $30, a ridiculous amount in a $1-3 game. When he won a hand at a showdown, he would usually celebrate it by standing up and whooping, just like the showboating morons at the WSOP, but louder. When he won by making a bet that his opponent wouldn't call, he would taunt for no reason, yelling about how the other player had no "balls."

When he lost a pot, on one occasion, he fumed that he didn't care about the money. "I've got hundred-dollar bills coming out of my ASS!" There's a lovely image. (When Ira busted him once, I said, "Oh great. Now he's going to have to pull out the ass money.")

But as obnoxious as he was, nobody really wanted him to leave, because he was giving his money away faster than any other player. Tangling with him was classic high-variance poker, because he would shove it all in just as willingly with nothing as with the nuts, and all you could do was pick a spot and hope that it was one of the former rather than the latter. This isn't poker in any meaningful sense, but it can be very profitable. (It wasn't for me; I won one big one and lost one big one, roughly evening out in the end.)

He did not seem to me to be drunk, nor did I notice him consuming any booze. As far as I could tell, this was just his usual baseline personality disorder.

The man was in need of some heavy-duty psychotropic medication.


The deuce-four claims more victims

Yes, the mighty deuce-four struck again! I raised with it in late position and got two callers. The flop was 8-9-2. It was checked around. The turn was a third 2 for me. I was ecstatic, because I knew that my opponents would never suspect I was sitting on trips. One opponent bet, the other folded, and I raised. She called. The river was an ace--as it turned out, a terrible card for my lone remaining opponent, because she had A-8 in the hole, and had now made two pairs. She checked. I bet $50. She raised to $100. I just called, because she had been a consistently very solid player, and her check-raise gave me some concern that she had slow-played pocket 8s or 9s. That may have been the biggest pot I won in the session, thanks to the ol' 2-4 offsuit!


The new phone comes in handy

I mentioned earlier this month that I was upgrading my cell phone to one that had a web browser. I don't think I really need such a thing, but there are plenty of occasions when it would be handy.

A few days ago, I used it to look up a sports score that another guy at the table was interested in. But tonight it had the first moderately interesting application. A young man, who wasn't at our table for long, said that his name was Matthew. He claimed that this name meant "son of Christ." I was highly confident from my years of religious training that this was wrong, though I couldn't recall offhand what the real translation was. I whipped out the new toy, called up Wikipedia, and found this:

Matthew
Given Name
Gender Male
Meaning "Gift of God"
Origin Hebrew

I showed this to Ira and to Matt, who said, "Yeah, see? That's what I told you." Uh, no, not quite. But have it your way, sir. It didn't seem like a point worth arguing any further.

Anyway, the phone lived up to what I had hoped it could do when I'm away from my computer. I was pleased with that.



I wish I had some clever punchline with which to wrap everything up and close this post. I don't. Sometimes the story just ends where it ends. I'm too sleepy to wait for a brilliant summation of some sort to occur to me.


Addendum, January 1, 2009

I realize that I forgot a really, really embarrassing element of the first story. Back at the point where I was doing well, Ira asked me something--I don't remember the exact question. But I remember answering that often winning is relatively easy, and the hard part is not giving it all back through sloppy play.

I may not be a great poker player, but at least I possess considerable self-knowledge!

Seen at the Venetian

The guy pictured above was in a limit game (probably $4-8, but I didn't check for sure) at the table next to mine at the Venetian tonight. He had such an impressive wall of chips (all white $1 chips) that I had to snap a photo of it. He cashed out maybe half an hour later, and was carrying six racks to the cashier.

I'm not sure if he just likes sheer volume, or if he has never heard of "coloring up."





This was my table. You can see, first, the new felt that the V has in place to promote "The Real Deal" show. (BTW, I expect to snag some free tickets one of these days, and of course I'll issue a full report of the experience here.)

Second, you can see the weird card protector being used by the guy in the background (the one too immersed in reading Fast Food Nation to actually pay attention to the hand he's in). It's hard to make out, but it's a clear red plastic giraffe. Things got stranger, though. A while later, I looked up and noticed that he was now using a blue one, though otherwise identical. And within an hour, that had changed to a green one. This guy carries around at least three colored giraffes and rotates them as his card caps. Don't ask me why. Poker players are strange people.


Addendum, November 13, 2008

Sharp-eyed reader "Topset" suggests in the comments that the player with the giraffes is Kevin O'Leary. I hadn't heard of him before that I can recall, but upon seeing his photo in the Poker Pages entry on him, I can confirm Topset's hunch. That's him, all right.

He had an interesting style. His requirements for putting in a pre-flop raise were approximately these:

Being on the button
Being one off the button
Being two off the button
Being in the small blind
Being in the big blind
Having put in a straddle under the gun
Having an ace
Having a face card
Having two cards

But at least on that night, his hyperaggressive style was not working particularly well. The table adjusted to his mania, and after having accumulated a biggish stack for a while, he was in a pretty clear death spiral downward by the time I left.

"Planet" Hollywood was the right place for him

At Planet Hollywood last night there was a weird guy on my left. He was really big--very tall and beefy. He spoke only fewer than ten words the whole time I was there, seeming to have a German accent. When I sat down, he had maybe $400 in chips. As I watched how he played, I could not figure out how he would have acquired them, because he was absolutely terrible.

The first peculiar thing I noted about him was that he was a complete space cadet. The dealers had a difficult time getting his attention when it was his turn. He was neither watching nor listening to anything, as far as I could determine--just staring off into space, in his own little world. It frequently took the dealer yelling at him two or three times to break his reverie. He did not act drunk, move like a drunk person, or smell of alcohol. But it would not surprise me if a urine drug screen on him turned positive for other substances.

He was in Seat 8 (out of 10), which is one of the two corners farthest from the dealer. Yet no matter how many times the dealers asked him to push his chips and cards in a little closer so that they could reach them, he never caught on. Kind of a slow learner, you might say.

The second peculiar thing I noticed about him was how often he checked out. No, not in the mental sense, which was all the time. I mean he would muck his cards when not facing a bet. He did this at the strangest times--situations in which I have never before seen anybody act that way. If he was in the big blind and didn't like his hand, he would muck when it was his turn, even if there had been no raise and he could have seen the flop for free. He would routinely muck after seeing the flop, even with no bet to him. Once I watched him bet $10 on the turn, get called by two other players, then throw his cards away before the dealer had even put out the river card.

He made completely hopeless calls, and equally hopeless bluffs. It seemed that he had absolutely no idea what any other player might be holding.

There were three other pretty good players at the table, and we would exchange astonished glances when Space Cadet did one of these things. The looks were all saying the same thing, I think: "The only question is which of us is going to be the lucky one to get all of his chips."

Well, the answer was me. I limped in with a bunch of other people with 5-5. I rather liked the flop of 9-9-5, since I don't flop a full house every day. I checked. Space Cadet bet $10. A couple of other people called, as did I. Turn card was a jack. I checked again. S.C. bet $20 this time, and it was folded around back to me.

My only concern at this point is how to get him pot-committed to double me up on the river. That required a raise, but I didn't want to scare him off. I had $93 left at that point. I finally decided on a check-raise for the minimum--$40, leaving $53 behind. If he called, then an all-in bet on the river would cost him $53 with a pot that would be about $160. I thought that a min raise would be irresistible to him, and that price on the river would be similarly a nearly automatic call with anything short of a pure bluff on his part. I didn't think he was bluffing, because he had never fired more than one shot as a bluff so far. In fact, I figured he pretty much had to have hit trip nines to explain his betting.

I didn't actually think he had any capacity for doing pot odds calculations in his thick skull, but I hoped that he would have at least a grunt-level sense that he should call the min raise as well as my anticipated river bet.

He did both. I showed him the full house. He made a face and turned over pocket queens.

The strange thing is that for once in the evening, it wasn't his terrible play that got him into trouble. Yeah, he should have raised before the flop, but I would have called any reasonable raise anyway, and the only difference is that we would have been playing for a larger pot to begin with. I still probably would have check-called the flop. I would have checked the turn again, and he presumably would have bet again (though at that point he should have yellow caution lights flashing in his head). With a bigger pot, I might have gone for the all-in check-raise on the turn rather than waiting for the river, so maybe he could have gotten away from it at that point. But who knows?

He lost the rest of his chips a short time later on a bad call that was much more like his previous just-plain-bad ones. He got up to leave. When he was out of earshot, I murmured to the good player who had been on his left, "Please go to the ATM and come back. Please!" But he didn't.


One quick story about the player who replaced him. He was extremely tight--so much so that he had been at the table more than 30 minutes before he put in his first pre-flop raise. I had 10-8 spades. It's the kind of hand that I will often happily call a raise with if I'm in late position, but I usually won't try to take it against the raiser when he is behind me. This time, I made an exception. This was partly because I thought I could put this guy on a very narrow range of hands, given how long he had sat there playing almost nothing. But I'll admit it was also because I had lost a sizable pot a couple of hands before, in which I had lost virtually everything I had won from Space Cadet. It was stinging, and I wanted to get back to where I had been. So there was an element of tilty play influencing my decision. I put up my $12.

I was glad I had done it when the flop came 10-8-3. Cha-CHING! Top two pairs against what is almost certainly an overpair, with a guy who has been waiting patiently for his big hand to play, and may not want to let it go. Sure enough, he called my substantial check-raise on the flop, and then called my all-in on the turn. He mucked (and groaned) upon seeing my cards, but later told me in an entirely sincere and believable manner that he had had pocket aces.

The only strange thing about this hand (and the point of the story, which I guess I'm finally getting to) was the dialogue afterward. I usually say nothing to an opponent after taking a big chunk of his chips, because I know from being on the other end of such an event that nothing makes it feel any better, and most things one might consider saying just make it worse. So I wasn't goading this guy or anything, just quietly stacking the chips.

But he said, half to himself and half to the guy on his left, "I should have just moved all in before the flop." The other guy gave him a puzzled look--because this would have meant open-raising for about $200 in a $1-$2 game, an utterly insane move--and said, "You'd just pick up the blinds that way. Nobody would call."

S.C.'s replacement jabbed his thumb in my direction and said, "He would have. If he'll call $12 with 10-8, he'd call any amount."

Ri-i-i-i-ght. Yeah. That's how I play, for sure, buddy.

Some people are so clueless. I mean, I can understand how it hurts to lose nearly your entire initial buy-in with pocket aces going down to a measly 10-8 on a board that looked perfectly safe. I can even understand him thinking that I was a doofus with no clue how to play the game right. But to conclude that if I would see a flop for $12 to see if I could hit gold then I would therefore also be willing to just shove it all in with such a speculative hand--well, that's just lunacy. But hey, it's OK with me if you want to think that of me. The more incorrect inferences you make about how I play, the better it is for me. Still, you might want to rethink how you judge your opponents, my friend. They're not all as crazy as you are.