LOL explainaments

It happened again. Not that it's rare, by any means. But I've been seeing it for four years now, and it still baffles me: The post-call explanation.

I was at Excalibur last night, not in the hand. There's about a $35 pot, three ways before the flop. Flop is J-7-x. Player A checks. Player B, who had been the pre-flop raiser, makes a pot-sized bet of $35. Player C folds. Player A goes all in for $53. It's $18 more to Player B. He calls, showing K-J. Player A flopped a set of 7s and wins it.

Then Player B goes for the explanation, even though nobody said a word to him: "It was only $18. I had to make the call there."

The call is, in fact, quite natural there. It's $18 to win about $123. That's almost 7:1 pot odds. If the sum of the times that your opponent is bluffing, the times that he is doing this with top pair but a weaker kicker, and the times that you start with the worst of it but catch up makes you the winner just one out of seven times, it's a break-even proposition. If you happened to know that this particular opponent would only do the check-raise all-in with a set, you could fold. But there are lots of $1-2 NLHE players who will do this with J-Q or J-10, so it's almost surely a call worth making, in mathematical terms. As Joe Sebok quipped at one point during the WSOP Main Event final table last year, you'd make the call even if all you're holding is a Snickers wrapper and a tarot card.

The puzzling thing for me is not the call, it's the speech. No matter how long I ponder it, I can come up with only one reason that a person would offer the explanation: He doesn't want other players to think he was stupid to put more money in when he was drawing nearly dead.

But that's why I don't get. If the call was correct, why in the world would he care if somebody else watching him thought it was a dunderheaded things to do? Most players seeing what happened will immediately understand the reason for the call. But even if they don't, if they're not sophisticated enough to understand the concept of opponents' ranges and pot equity, etc., what difference does their opinion make to you?

It's a poker-specific example of a general phenomenon that likewise always mystifies me. For example, somebody gets off the elevator on the wrong floor, takes two steps before realizing the error, then reverses course and gets back on. In my experience, most people doing this feel an irresistible urge to tell others in the elevator something like, "I thought that was my floor, but it's not." What--you think we didn't deduce that from your actions? Or somebody slips on a wet or greasy spot on the floor, and has to flail wildly to avoid taking a pratfall. After looking to see what he might have stepped in, it's nearly inevitable that this will be followed by a comment to whomever might have seen it: "I didn't see that slick spot there." Oh, really? Gee, we couldn't have guessed.

Why do people feel the need to explain themselves in such situations? It can only be because they care what this small group of strangers thinks about them. But why would that be? They're not a jury of your peers, holding your fate in their collective hands. Whatever they may think, it has zero effect on you. Their thoughts have no power to change your life in even the most minute way. Suppose that every one of them is thinking, "Wow, that guy is really stupid/clumsy." So what? How are you harmed in the slightest by their opinion, whether it is right or wrong? Even if somebody is rude enough to actually voice that opinion, what difference does it make to you? You ignore it and go about your day.

This whole concept of caring what total strangers think of you and trying to influence it is yet another in the long list of behaviors that you humans engage in that I have precious little hope of ever understanding.*

The most hard-core of my readers may recognize that I have written about this before--three years ago, here. But it keeps happening, and keeps baffling me, and I wanted to address it again, now that I have a significantly larger audience than I did back then. I still stand by the basic thesis I had then:

Furthermore, your explanation just reveals a pathological insecurity: you
are so afraid of what people will think of your call that you feel a need to
explain it. But why on earth would you care what the other players think? If it
was a reasonable call, given the range of hands with which your opponent made
his bet, and it turned out that he was actually at the high end of that range
with one of the few hands that would beat you, then be content with your own
analysis that it was the right move. If you correctly sniffed out a bluff or a
hand that was otherwise weaker than the bet represented, great, be proud of
yourself.

Either way, what is the point of trying to change what somebody else might
think of your call by providing an explanation of it? If somebody is impressed
with a good call, they won't be made more so by your little self-centered
explanation. And if somebody is inclined to think you made a bad call
(regardless of the results), so what? Let them think you're a calling station or
a moron, and then figure out a way to exploit that erroneous impression (if, in
fact, it is erroneous). What's more, consider this: If it was actually a bad
call, your justification of it after the fact just makes you look that much
dumber in the eyes of experienced players, and they will go out of their way to
set you up to make the same mistake again, to their benefit.

*Yes, I do realize that in poker one's table image is an important entity, and it can be worthwhile to both monitor and try to manipulate it. But the post-call explanation, as far as I can tell, does not have that kind of calculated goal in mind. It is not trying to deceive in order to set up opponents to make a costly mistake later on. It is merely trying to save face, which is an entirely different thing.

Stupid policy

For the past several months, Luxor and Excalibur have had a "no photos" policy in place, complete with signs. Of course, everybody wants to take pictures of the signs as a gag. Well, it appears that the powers that be have recognized how pointless and unenforceable this policy is. Read more about it here:

http://www.vegaschatter.com/story/2010/6/2/125221/9352/vegas-travel/Luxor_and_Excalibur_Have_Lifted_the_No_Photos_Rule

A record I'd rather never beat

I have the worst luck at the Excalibur. I blamed it on a ghost in the machine when they had the electronic tables. Now I think the place just has it in for me. I must have offended the departed spirit of King Arthur or something.

Last night I played there--for the first time in six months--for 5 1/2 hours. The best hand I made was two pair. No trips, no straights, no flushes, no full houses. I had two pair twice, never even top two, winning with it once, losing to a straight the other time. As for starting hands, the only big pair I ever had was K-K, and of course that lost to A-Q when an ace flopped.

I don't even know how one might begin to calculate the odds of that sort of run of near-nothingness, but it seems astronomically improbable. Though I don't keep records that could confirm this, it was, I think, the worst stretch of cards I have ever come across. The fact that I lost only $106 was due to top pair being good in a couple of key spots, plus my necessarily stingy play earning my occasional steals a lot of respect.

To add insult to injury, the night also featured me losing $60 with top pair/top kicker (A-10) on a 2-2-4-10-8 board to, yes, the mighty Deuce-Four, which had flopped a full house. After all I've done for it, it turns on me. That hurt. It really, really hurt.

It was a thoroughly miserable experience. It appears that after a hiatus of exactly one day, the run-bad is back on.

However, I'll have to admit that an endless string of worthless hands, grating as it is, is preferable to the endless string of good-but-not-quite-good-enough hands that had characterized the previous few weeks. At least it was easy to fold all night long.


Oh, and as I was leaving the Excalibur at about 2:00 a.m., I had the pleasure of seeing a random dude urinating between cars in the parking lot. It's the third time I've seen this in a casino parking lot, the first being at South Point and the second at the Tuscany. That's keepin' it classy, Las Vegas.

Three hands, or maybe four

I'll tell you about two of the hands I played last night that were key to chalking up a W in each of two poker rooms instead of continuing my recent string of L's, plus a bonus one I saw play out the other day.


Luxor

I'm on the button with 3d-4d. The under-the-gun player raises to $12, and there is a caller before it gets to me. I realize that I have described a fair number of hands in which I have played junk like this--enough that readers might come to think that this is habitual for me. I feel some need to reassure you that it isn't; the circumstances have to come together just right. This fit the bill: UTG raise from a tight player that I can already put on a narrow range of hands, big pot brewing, on the button, and holding a hand that can either hit big or easily be determined to be no good and thrown away with just a small loss. So I call, as does one of the blinds. Pot about $45.

The flop is Jc-3c-3s. Ding! Unless the UTG guy started with pocket jacks, I should be good here. UTG checks. The first caller bets $60. He is one of two other pretty good players at the table. Interestingly, in the hour or so I've been at this table, I've seen him bet good made hands big in an attempt to prevent a flush draw, but been called and had the draw get there. He seems frustrated by this series of events. I have not seen him bet draws that I know of. He's just by general skill certainly capable of it. But this overbet of the pot smells to me like yet another in his series of "give up your flush draw, I've got top pair" bets. I call, not only to help make him think I'm drawing (and hence commit his stack if there is no club on the turn), but to be sure that the UTG player isn't going to do an all-in check-raise, which would make me leery that he flopped a full house. But the blind and he both fold. Heads-up, pot now about $165.

At this point, my lone remaining opponent does something I have not seen him do before. He rapidly puts his chips into a single stack and pushes it forward as he says, "I'm all in, in the dark." It's maybe another $130 or so. I have him covered.

I probably should have waited to see what the turn card was, but I had already decided that he was much more likely to have a made hand--AJ or KJ, maybe even QQ for an overpair--than a draw, so I didn't much care what the next card would be. I figured that even in the worst case scenario, which was him having either JJ or the case 3 with a better kicker, I'm not getting away from this hand, so I might as well call. Nothing the dealer could turn over is going to dissuade me at this point. I announce my call before the dealer turns and burns.

I was surprised and kicked myself when I saw that (1) I had been dead wrong on my read, and the guy had Ac-5c for the nut flush draw, and (2) the turn was the 8c, giving him his flush. Still, though, if I had waited to see the card before making my decision, it would have turned out the same, because I still would not have put him on the draw. The all-in dark move was much more consistent with somebody acting defensively against the draw than somebody on the draw. So I would have called anyway.

Such considerations all became moot, though, when the dealer put down the 4h on the river, giving me a full house: threes full of fours. It's a tiny little house, but it's full! And except in the sewage business, a full house beats a flush. Whew! But I got my money in with the best hand, so it's not like I was saved by an ugly suckout.


Excalibur

A short time later I cashed out my $300+ profit and scooted next door to Excalibur. Mandalay Bay would have been just as close (Luxor is in between them, so I could go either way), and is a much nicer place to play generally, but my clothes were already stinky from cigarette smoke from the Luxor, so I figured they wouldn't get any worse from the relatively smoky environment at Excalibur. Besides, I had not played there since late July, and this would be only my second visit since they canned the electronic tables. I do try to stop in to just about every poker room in town from time to time, and this was as good a chance as any to see what, if anything, was new at Excalibur.

Most of my profit there ended up being from one hand. I had A-Q offsuit in middle position. I put in my standard raise and got three callers. The flop was A-K-3 rainbow, which I thought was pretty good for me. To my surprise, the UTG player, who had limp-called before the flop, led out for $30 into the roughly $45 pot. I thought he most likely had a smaller ace and was testing the waters. I eyeballed his stack as having another $60 behind, which turned out to be exactly correct. I knew there was some small possibility that one of the two players yet to act had a monster like A-K or 3-3, but only one of them had me covered; the other was short-stacked and so couldn't do much damage. I decided I needed to raise or fold, baby. I took one chip off the top of each of two $50 stacks and slid them forward.

The next player moved all-in for his last $61, and the button folded. Back to the UTG guy, who counted and found that he had exactly the amount of my raise left, and he put it in. I flipped over what I thought was the winner. I winced when UTG turned over A-3 for a flopped two pair. I winced yet again when the third guy in the hand turn over ANOTHER A-3! Yikes! I'm beat in both places!

But sometimes the poker gods are kind to grumps, and this time they saw fit to bless me with another king on the turn, counterfeiting my opponents' second pair, and putting me in the lead with two pair (aces and kings) with my queen kicker playing. The river changed nothing, and I scooped.

I think I played it correctly, given the stack sizes, even though I ended up accidentally getting my money in as an underdog. (I was about 30% to win, 7% to get a three-way chop.) I don't mind being the one getting lucky for a change.


Bonus hand!

I had forgotten another story I wanted to tell. It involved the same guy who was UTG in the foregoing, and came a short time before the hand I just described. I had Ah-Jh in the small blind. There were a bunch of limpers. I pushed it to $16, and got only the one caller. I saw that he had just $30 left behind, so I said, "Let's make it interesting," and put out $30 before the flop came. After all, what he has left is less than the size of the pot, so there really aren't any flops on which I'm likely to fold there. It's basically a 100% c-bet situation. He was one of the weakest players at the table, and I thought I might gain a little fold equity with the intimidation factor of the dark shove. I.e., if he read that move as me holding aces, kings, or queens, he might fold even if he hit some small pair on the flop.

The flop was all small cards, two suits, all black, though I don't recall exactly what was out there. Not my ideal, but my chips were already committed. The guy thought for a minute, then looked right at me and said, "All in."

From the look on his face, it quickly became apparent to me that he thought he was being the aggressor here, and was waiting for me to call. It was only when the dealer turned and burned the next card that he snapped to and realized that I had beaten him to the punch. He had not noticed my comment about "Let's make it interesting," nor had he noticed that I had dark-shoved on him!

He had Q-10 offsuit. So he called off the last of his chips with no pair and no draw, mistakenly thinking that he might push me off of a hand with a bluff, when my chips were already in the pot before he did so! Excellent situational awareness, sir!

A-J held up. And you already know the next part of the story: I took his rebuy, too, on a lucky suckout.


Mandalay Bay

I was not involved in this hand from Sunday, but it was pretty remarkable.

Before the flop there was some limping, a raise from the blind, and three callers. The flop was Q-Q-9 rainbow. The original raiser led out with a strong bet--$50 or so. Next guy called. Third guy moved all-in.

This was the most solid, rocky guy at the table, never once even a step out of line. He also had the biggest stack there, some $800 he had amassed by waiting patiently for a monster, then capturing the stack of a weaker hand. With that bet and call in front of him, and him willing to commit the $300 or so it would take to cover his opponents, there were only two things he could have: 9-9 for a flopped boat, or Q with a very strong kicker, king or jack. (Probably not an ace, though, because before the flop he limp-called.) I thought that even Q-10 was probably below his range; he was so conservative that with that holding he would probably just call down an opponent for fear of being outkicked.

I was shocked, then, when the fourth player called off his last $150 or so. The other two quickly folded. The rock, not surprisingly, flipped over K-Q. The fourth player? As-Js. No pair, no draw. He had runner-runner flush and straight draws, but that was all. And no, they did not come to pass for him. Sadly, he left the game at that point. (This was his last rebuy. I had stacked him earlier when I flopped the nut straight and he flopped the low end of it.)

A long time ago I described what I thought was the worst, stupidest call I had ever seen in a live poker game. This one was in that same general ballpark of badness, a couple of orders of magnitude worse than the level of badness that usually prevails at $1-$2 games in town, and he didn't even have heavy drinking to blame it on. I thought it was worth memorializing here.

Perhaps I'm not losing my mind after all

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


November ups and downs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Cardgrrl on losing

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

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

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

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

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


The pain does end

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

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

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

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

Louie Anderson

The main reason that I chose the Excalibur for my play today (see post below) was that I had scored from http://showtickets4locals.com/ a free ticket to see Louie Anderson at 7:00, so I played some before and some after the show.

I have liked Louie Anderson for a long, long time. I actually remember his first appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. This is the first time I've seen him perform in person.

He was charming and funny. It seems clear that he has, now, decades of material that he can call on and mix and match as the spirit moves him. Surprisingly, I think this detracts from the show. Things aren't as sharply timed and they don't flow from one subject to another as smoothly as when he had it all prepared as an integral whole. On the other hand, he did a fair amount of interaction with the audience, and it showed off his spontaneous wit. He made some very, very funny material from just asking audience members the obvious name, where you're from, and what do you do questions. For example, he learned that one guy worked at the While Sands Missile Testing Range testing the Patriot missiles. Anderson asked him, "Can I give you some coordinates? There's this poodle next door that barks all night."

I had another of my occasional semi-insomniac nights last night, so I was feeling pretty sleepy, which probably lessened my capacity to enjoy the show. It was certainly true that everybody else around me was laughing a lot more than I was. I didn't hate the show by any means, but found it just pleasant and mildly amusing for the most part, rather than fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious.

Anderson is a known commodity. You pretty much know the kind of material he does, as well as his favorite subjects (his childhood and parents, big family, being fat, Vegas), and that's exactly what you get. That makes this whole mini-review not particularly helpful, because you undoubtedly already know whether you're going to like him or not, based on his large body of past work.

Me? I like the guy, and would go again if given the chance.

Excalibur poker room is back to the way it was

I played at the Excalibur today. As you may have heard, the electronic poker machines were recently taken away. The room looks basically indistinguishable from how it was last fall. There's nice new dark blue felt on the tables, but that's about the only change.

Oh, and some new chips, as shown above.

My first attempt at a Grump Challenge

A couple of weeks ago I proposed the Great Grump Challenges. Tonight I gave one of them my first serious attempt. I decided to go for the MGM/Mirage Challenge (Mandalay Bay, Luxor, and Excalibur), as it is undoubtedly the easiest one. I thought that if I could establish a benchmark score for that one, it would simultaneously make the others seem less daunting and encourage readers to try to best my time.

I went first to Mandalay Bay, starting at 6:30 p.m, buying into my usual $1-2 NLHE game for my usual $100. On my third hand at the table, I had pocket deuces. Well, it's no powerhouse like deuce-four, but you have to take what you're given. Several of us limped in. The flop was a lovely 2-5-7 rainbow--a set with no flush draws and minimal straight draws to worry about. A player in one of the blinds led out at it for $10. I was the only caller. The turn was the ace of the fourth suit, so again not much to worry about in terms of being outdrawn here. My opponent bet $25. I called again. The river was the fourth deuce. My opponent now bet another $30. I went all in, which was just an additional $29 at that point, and he folded. I showed the quads.

The floor person came over with the form for me to sign just as the rotating display showed me the high-hand jackpot I had won: $258. A few minutes later, she brought my chips--but it was $308! She explained that I happened to hit the bonus during their "happy hour," which is 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., during which time they add an extra $50 to any high-hand jackpot. Whee! 15 minutes at the table, and I'm up by well over $300!

(I should insert here a clarification of the Challenge rules. I hadn't thought of whether jackpots should count toward one's total. I declare that they do. Any money you win from playing cash poker--whether you win it from other players or from the casino--counts. It does not count if you, e.g., hit a winning sports book ticket while you're playing poker.)

I played the rest of that orbit and one more, picking up a couple more small pots, and left at 7:00, 30 minutes after starting, cashing out for $444, uptick of $344. This challenge was starting off like gangbusters!

As I walked over the walkway to the Luxor, I was already starting to compose this post, with boasts about how I had set a nearly unbeatable time in the MGM/Mirage Challenge. I should have remembered the old saw about counting one's chickens before they hatch....

Luxor: Sat down at 7:05 in another $1-2 NLHE game. For nearly two hours, it was just a little up, a little down, no real momentum. But then a new guy came to the table, and raised his first three hands in a row, all from early position. He was highly fidgety and talkative, manifesting all the ADD-like signs of a true action junkie. Three raises in a row from out of position immediately after sitting down, combined with those traits, means that I can't give him much credit on the third one, which he made $10 to go from under the gun.

I was on the button and found A-K suited. There were two callers between Mr. ADD and me--obviously, the other players were starting to be suspicious of his raising range, too. I pushed it to $35, about a third of my stack. Mr. ADD moved all in when it was his turn. The other players folded, leaving some dead money in the pot. Of course, he might have aces or kings, but I think the range of hands he will do this with is w-a-a-a-y broader than that. He probably thinks I'm on a position re-steal without much and will fold to his reraise. I'm not one to play A-K for all my chips before the flop in most circumstances, but this is one in which I'm likely to be ahead of most of his range. Besides, I'm getting pot odds of nearly 2:1, and unless he has exactly A-A, I can't be more than a 2:1 dog. So I call.

He has pocket 10s. An ace greets me right in the door, and nothing else comes for either one of us. This pushes me over my target profit, so I quit a few hands later, cashing out for $238 (up $138) at exactly 9:00 p.m. (When one is on a Great Grump Challenge, one cannot be too concerned about being thought ill-mannered for a hit-and-run.)

Two down, one to go. I'm up $482 in 2 1/2 hours, which should be an outstanding pace for the Challenge, if only I can keep it up.

But the Excalibur has not been kind to me since the conversion to the electronic tables. The nature of the player mix has definitely changed, with fewer of the totally clueless dropping in. That has not been the problem, though. It's no tougher there than anyplace else I play. I have simply been faced with an endless stream of bad luck. Unbelievable stretches of card-dead hell get interrupted only by bad beats and inescapable second-best hands. I realize fully that complaints like this are the common refrain of the bad player who can't recognize that he's bad. But I really do have a pretty realistic assessment of when my losses are due to my own screwups and when they are attributable to bad luck, and the Excalibur has heaped more of the latter on me in the last three months than any joint in town. I've played there four times since the changeover, with these net results before tonight: +$13, -$48, -$270, and +$7. Ick.

So I approached this third leg of the Challenge with a bit of trepidation. But still, I was on a roll, and felt that it could continue. In fact, I had felt so confident that I burned about 10 minutes waiting in a slow line at the Excalibur McDonald's for a chocolate shake to power me to my glorious finish.

It was not to be.

My first $100 buy-in was lost to a bad beat (runner-runner flush for my opponent). The second $100 was lost with my big pocket pair against a one-notch-bigger pocket pair. The third hundred dribbled away slowly in a series of making or calling pre-flop raises with promising hands that all hit zilch on the flop, and in situations where I couldn't make a convincing move to steal the pot with a bet. The last of it went in on a straight draw that actually hit, only to be crushed by an opponent's quads, after he had flopped a set and turned the four-of-a-kind.

What ironic justice (or, I would argue, injustice), to start the night so well with a set turning into quads, then have it ended in such an ugly manner with the quads hitting against me.

This is exactly typical of how the Excalibur's new infernal machines have treated me--and that after I gave them a pretty good initial review! The wretched things are supremely ungrateful. The last time I tried playing all three places in one evening (post about it here), before I had conceived of the Challenges, I ran into the same sort of obstacle: up $240 in 1.5 hours at Mandalay Bay, then up $197 in 1.3 hours at Luxor, then spinning my wheels at Excalibur for a whopping gain of $7 in three hours. I tell you, those damn machines have it in for me, for reasons I cannot understand.

Long experience has taught me that if I lose three buy-ins, it is very rare for me to do well with a fourth. At that point, tilt starts to set in, as I feel the nearly universal urge to try hard to get back to even, and start playing less than solid poker. And, of course, opponents know that I'm struggling, and swoop in like vultures.

So even though it meant giving up on what had been an extraordinarily promising start to my first serious Challenge attempt, I stood up and walked away at 10:30 p.m., after just over an hour at the Excalibur. I still had a net gain of $182 in exactly four hours. That's not horrible, but it doesn't send me home whistling a merry tune and with a lilt in my step. It was far, far short of what I had had my heart set on.

As Michael Craig has bitterly but wisely observed, "Poker's a bitch mistress who exists to break your heart."

Buncha stories

Last night I did the MGM-Mirage trifecta: Played at Mandalay Bay, Luxor, and Excalibur (which I think are the only places in the city where you can hit three poker rooms without ever going outside in between), and scored a "W" at each one. Picked up a few stories along the way.


Hooray for sanitation

The first photo above shows a hand sanitizer dispenser at the cashier's desk at the Luxor. The second one shows a similar device in the poker room at the Excalibur. These have been there for a while, but it didn't occur to me until last night to make a point of them.

These things are an excellent idea and should, in my ever-humble opinion, be added to every poker room in the city. Hey, poker room managers--do you really want your place to be known as less interested in cleanliness than the Excalibur? If that isn't motivation enough, consider this: If you get your dealers to use them religiously, you will probably cut down on them calling in sick due to respiratory illnesses they pick up from customers.


It's good to be recognized sometimes

As I was heading to my seat at Mandalay Bay, I was greeted by a guy I had met at a get-together of denizens of allvegaspoker.com. Within a few minutes he was leaving, but came over to my table to pass on a hint: "Get yourself moved to table 7." He said there were some weak calling stations there and it was an easy spot to make money.

This was welcome news, because within the first three hands it had become apparent to me that I had drawn an unusually difficult table. One player had about $1000 in chips, one about $800, one about $600. The only way a table gets stacked like that in a $1-2 game is if they are gambling big-time, going all-in with low thresholds. And sure enough, there had already been big raises on every hand I had watched in my first couple of minutes. One can certainly make a lot of money in a game like that, but it's also high-risk, high-volatility, high-variance. I'm still in conservative mode, rebuilding the bankroll from the dreadful August, so if there are easier, lower-risk pickings to be had nearby, count me in.

I followed his advice and was glad I did. He was exactly right. Playing purely textbook, zero-imagination, value-betting poker, I made $240 in 90 minutes, with never a single difficult decision on my hands. Like taking candy from a baby, as the saying goes.


Which is worse--being stupid or being a liar?

Early in my time at that second Mandalay Bay table (they got me moved within just a few minutes), I watched this hand play out: Before the flop, Player A raises and B calls. Flop is 2-5-7. Player A bets $20. B raises to $70. A calls. Turn is a jack. A checks. B bets $100. A check-raises all-in for almost $300 more. B calls. A has K-K for an unimproved overpair with no redraw. B, predictably, had flopped a set with pocket deuces.

What made the story worth telling was that as soon as A saw B's cards, he said (repeating it three times for emphasis), "I knew that's what you had all the way."

I've heard this sort of thing many, many times, and I can never understand it. I mean, in one sense I get it--the guy is trying to save face by making a retrospective claim about what he knew. Apparently he thinks that this will cause others to think that he's a smarter player than he just showed himself to be. I don't know why people care so much what others think of them, but it seems to be an endemic characteristic of you humanoids.

But the actual effect--on me, anyway--is the opposite, because there are only two possibilities:(1) He really did know that the other guy had him crushed, and threw away $400 anyway, in which case he's a completely moron, or (2) he did not know it, and is lying to say that he did. In reality, it has to be (2), because it's always a lie to say that one "knew" what an opponent had, unless you have somehow seen his cards flash, or something along those lines. So all his little speech did was convince me that he's not only a bad player, but incapable of being honest with himself. That's a great combination to find in an opponent, not such a great one to find in oneself.


What's going on in that marriage?

At the Excalibur, I was surprised to see a massage therapist wandering around looking for customers. If they have been there before, I had never noticed. So now I can add Excalibur to the list of places that I know offer massages while you play poker.

One player at the table was from Boston, in town for some sort of convention. He was interested in getting himself a massage. But he did something I've never seen before: He first called his wife in Boston to ask permission.

That was strange enough. What was stranger was that she said no! He had to apologize to the massage therapist, who was standing by waiting for the go-ahead, and admit that his wife wouldn't let him get a massage.

This completely baffles me. In what kind of marriage does either partner feel obliged to seek permission from the other for a fully-clothed neck/shoulder massage from a licensed massage therapist, taking place in the middle of a public casino while sitting at a poker table? And in what kind of marriage, when that call is made, does the answer come back "no"? What is his wife thinking--that it's actually a secret cover for prostitution, and that "massage" is a euphemism for sexual favors? Or perhaps that he was actually at a strip club instead of a poker room, and what he had in mind was a lap dance? But if that were the case, would the guy be calling to ask permission?

Maybe it was him calling to ask that made her more suspicious than necessary--after all, why would he call and ask unless it were something to which she might reasonably object?

Whatever the explanation, there's something seriously peculiar going on in that relationship.

Celebrity sighting

I played briefly at the Excalibur today with Bob Bright, whom I recognized from the horrible "Cash Poker" TV show. It was only a few hands--maybe 10 minutes before he and his party left. Also playing with him were two women, who I gather from bits of their interactions were his wife and daughter.

"It can only be attributable to human error"

I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.


I was reading the forum pages of allvegaspoker.com today, and came across a story from "South Point Perry," an experienced dealer/floor person. He has been among the most vocal critics of the Excalibur's decision to install PokerTek electronic tables. Here's what Perry says happened during a recent trip to the Excalibur (full story here):

We then proceed to the Excalibur. Maybe you have heard, they made some
changes. At 1am in the morning they have 3 games going. This is only a week into
this Photodrek experiment. Mike and I ask Bruce the floor guy to set up pot
limit Omaha. We sit down and play PLO high heads up, $.50/$1.00. A third player
sits down, Justin, a dealer at Harrah's.

We play for three hands. I make a full house and the machine SPLITS the
pot. At this point we stop the game and call over Bruce. This is where the early
birthday gift comes in. It takes Bruce 45 minutes to get in touch with a
PokerTek. He lets us know that the game was mislabeled on the computer. I ask if
he can transfer the money. He says no. In a capped game, this is significant as
I would almost have the same amount as Justin.

so the machine F*#&ed up. Well, I don't like to curse, lets say it
PokerTeked up. Justin, was very patient and a totally gentleman through the
whole thing. He's an Excellant dealer too. Visit him at Harrah's. Bruce tried
everything he could to make the situation right. I bring up these two guys
because if this stupid calculator/PDA/Adding Machine/Nintendo thing is going to
work, it will be because of patient Compitent employees. Not because of the
black box.

Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

It sounds like the machine was set on Omaha/8 rather than straight Omaha. The first odd thing about this is that Omaha/8 is almost always played limit, rather than no-limit or pot-limit. It seems impossible that the players wouldn't have noticed this right away, because the menus for limit and no-limit are very different. (I've done both.) So I have to guess that they can set up an Omaha/8 game as pot-limit. I suppose that that is admirable flexibility, but I don't think they'll get a lot of call for that combination.

I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.

The other thing not explained in the story is how things were labeled. That is, were the consoles showing PLO while the game was actually playing O/8? Or did the tech simply push the wrong button, and O/8 was both playing and being displayed as such, without the players noticing until the split pot occurred? Enquiring minds want to know.


I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.


This incident reminds me of a story from the second time I used the Excalibur machines, the second night they were open. I wasn't planning on relating this incident here, because I don't have an ending to the story, and stories without endings are inherently unsatisfying. But Perry's experience makes me think I should tell it anyway. Perhaps there are other stories that need to be publicized, and this one will help call them out of the woodwork.


This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.... I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.


I opened the pot for a raise with A-J. In the end, I would have won it if I stayed in, because an ace came on the river. But when I missed the flop and turn, I was bet out of the pot. Two other players stayed in. One had a pocket 7s. The other's hole cards are unknown, which is kind of the critical point of the story.

There was a queen on the flop and a 9 on the turn. I think I bet the flop, even though I missed it, and both opponents called--but maybe it got checked around. I don't remember for sure anymore, and it really doesn't matter. There was a bet and a call on the turn, at which point I folded. The ace on the river froze the action, and it went check-check.

The computer then displayed Player A's 7-7 and pushed him the pot. Player B's cards were not revealed. Here's where the first oddity occurred. You can set your options to always muck your cards and never show them where it is not required. If you don't have that option turned on, and you either lose a pot or win one without having to show (i.e., because you make a bet that nobody calls), the system will ask you if you want to show the high card, the low card, or both. I was watching Player B, and he clearly wanted to show what he had, because he thought he had won, but he was not given that option. We concluded that he must have the "auto-muck" option on, but after the hand ended, I watched as he opened his menu, and it was not on. So the first peculiarity is that he wasn't given the opportunity to show his cards.

Of more importance, though, if he is correct, is that Player B claimed that he had a 9 in his hand and should have won at showdown. He was adamant about this right from the start. Of course, nobody else saw his cards, so there is no independent verification of this. But I can tell you that he certainly looked and acted, from the very first instant that the pot was going to his opponent, like a guy who had just been cheated out of a pot that rightfully belonged to him. I am certain that he sincerely believed that he had a 9 and should have won. On the other hand, there have been a few occasions when I have been metaphysically certain of what my hole cards were, and then discovered, to my great chagrin and astonishment, that I was wrong when I turned them over at the showdown.

The player talked to the PokerTek folks. They eventually stopped the game and, from the central monitor at the poker room desk, had the system replay the hand. That was pretty cool. Unfortunately, it didn't clarify anything, because it didn't show Player B's hole cards on the replay, which was the only meaningful question.

Out of curiosity, and because I thought I might be able to help him explain what had happened (English was his second language, so he sometimes had a bit of difficulty conveying his thoughts, as well as the technical aspects of what he did with respect to the menus, trying to show his cards, etc.), I followed B to the central desk while he and the PokerTek people tried to resolve the claim.

They couldn't. As it turns out, players' hole cards that are not revealed in the usual course of play are stored in the computer, but in an encrypted form, and by design nobody at the Excalibur can unencrypt them. They have to send the data files back to company headquarters for analysis. This makes some sense from a security standpoint, but is understandably frustrating to the player who thinks he got swindled out of a pot, and can't get an answer right away.

So they took the player's name and contact information and promised to get back to him when they had an answer.

My guess is that it is more likely that the poor guy honestly had a memory glitch, and he did not actually have the winning hand. But ya never know.


Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.


(For those who haven't gotten it on their own, the title of this post and the italicized inserts are all quotations from the very scary HAL 9000 computer in the Kubrick/Clarke classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, as captured on IMDB's "memorable quotes" page for the film. Of course, any perceived resemblance between HAL and the PokerTek computer is purely coincidental.)


Addendum

LasVegasMichael, another participant in Perry's game, gives this additional information about the incident:

The machine was labeled (on the screens) as PLO, not PLO 8. His computer
said that it was PLO High Only, yet the program was PLO 8.

Come to find out, Excal only had the program at the .50/1 level for PLO8.
Ot play PLO high only, you would need to play 1/2.

I'm childish, apparently

I was playing at the Excalibur again tonight. A woman in her mid-50s sat down on my left when the seat opened up.

I need to tell you, before continuing with the story, about how the PokerPro machines work with respect to the blinds. If the action is folded around so that only the two blinds are left in the hand before the flop, they can agree to "chop"--that is, each gets his money back, the hand is aborted, the button moves, and we're on to the next hand. There are two ways that a player can signal to the computer his willingness to chop. First, at any time you can go to the "options" menu and select "auto-chop blinds." This is what you do if you will want your answer to the chop question always to be "yes." Alternatively, you can wait until the situation arises. The computer will then ask both players if they want to chop (or ask just one, if the other has auto-chop already selected). Only if both agree (either by clicking "yes" at this point or by having pre-selected the auto-chop option) will this occur. There is something like a three-second window to answer affirmatively, if you do not already have it set to "yes" as your default. Failing to answer the question is taken as a "no," and the hand plays out. Once either player clicks "no" or fails to respond in the allotted time, there is no way to go back and do a chop; the hand must play out. Several of us discovered this fact last night.

I had auto-chop turned on. The woman to my left did not. Furthermore, she was watching the Olympics on TV when the hand in question arose. She only noticed the chop question being presented to her just as the screen was about to disappear, and she wasn't quick enough to click on either answer, so the computer took that as a "no."

She and I had not discussed what to do if the situation came up. I didn't realize that she was distracted, because I was just kind of looking straight ahead, waiting for her to decide one way or the other. Personally, I don't care much about whether the blinds get chopped or not, as long as it's either yes or no every time. I would have a slight preference for playing every hand, because I think I'm probably on average a little bit better than my opponents, and should be able to show a profit from playing heads up. However, so many players dislike playing when it's down to just the blinds that as a social concession I'll do whatever the other player prefers.

When her time expired, my screen indicated that the action was on me, and gave me the usual choices. I assumed from this that she had chosen not to chop. I had Kh-3h. I know that this is statistically likely to be the best hand here, so I raised to $7. I was actually a little worried that she had peeked at her cards, found a monster, and would be reraising me, because I wasn't sure at that moment whether she had wanted not to chop or had simply missed her window of opportunity.

It is just as I'm putting in the raise that she is getting flustered about having missed the chop opportunity. She doesn't understand that when the screen asking her the question vanished, that was the end of the matter. She still wants to chop, and is trying to figure out how to bring that option back. I already know that it is not coming back, so I finish registering my raise.

Now the action is on her. She sees that I have raised, and correctly concludes that chopping is no longer an option. However, she mistakenly thinks that this is because of me--that I refused to chop so that I could raise and steal her blind.

She said in a huff, "That is so childish! Go ahead--take it!"

I got a bit defensive here, and told her, "Whether we chopped was entirely up to you. I had pre-selected yes. You decided not to chop, which is OK with me. I'm just playing the hand because you chose to."

She folds, spits out an excuse about not having been given enough time to respond, and repeats that I--I--was being childish about it. She then logs out, stands up, and leaves, never to return.

So let's review. My actions: I had taken the responsible approach and pre-registered my approval of chopping if the other player wanted to do so. I was paying attention to the action and acted quickly when the computer signalled that it was my turn. When it became inevitable that we would play the hand out, I put in a modest raise that was by any standard the correct poker move, based on my cards. Her actions: She did not bother to pre-register her preference. She was watching TV and missed her chance to chop if that had been her desire. By her action or inaction, she forced us to play the hand. Once that die was cast, she objected to how I played it. She responded to the loss of her $2 not by apologizing for having missed the boat, but by getting angry enough at me that she decided to leave the game entirely.

But I'm the one who was being childish.

Ri-i-i-i-ght.

Sitting and waiting--part 2

A few months back I posted a note on my observation that there are lots of Asian women who sit for hours doing nothing but waiting while their male partners play poker. Why this practice is so heavily skewed demographically towards Asians remains a mystery to me.

Anyway, I was amused by seeing the above-pictured two men, who did not appear to know each other, sitting in adjacent seats at the Excalibur last night, each accompanied by a bored-looking female partner, sitting slightly behind, doing nothing--not reading, not interacting meaningfully with their menfolk, not watching TV, not paying attention to the poker game. Just sitting.

I want to ask these women, "Why are you here? Are you actually enjoying this? Don't you have anything else you'd rather be doing?" But I don't, of course. I just wonder.

Excalibur's electronic tables--first impressions

Let me jump to the conclusion first: I ended up liking these tables quite a bit more than I thought I would. I expected to feel essentially neutral about them, with the pros and cons basically balancing each other out. In fact, a couple of acquaintances who talked to me there fairly early in the evening asked me what I thought, and that's basically what I told them--I didn't mind the newfangled tables, but didn't love them, either. As the hours went on, however, my impression became more favorable. By the end of my first session, my assessment was this: If I walked into a poker room in which there was an open seat at each of two tables of the same game and same stakes, one a traditional dealer-run game with cards and chips, and the other a PokerPro table, I'd have them put me into the latter.

May all my dealer friends forgive me.

And, no, I'm not being paid anything by anybody for this opinion. (I tried to score a free PokerPro hat, and was told that they were all out. That's as close as I came to any sort of bribe or compensation.)

The official announcement had put the opening at 6:00 p.m. I arrived at about 5:45, and there were already two full tables going, so obviously they got underway early. I had to wait in a line for about ten minutes before I could even enter the room. I found the sign-up process needlessly cumbersome and time-consuming. First I had to give them my MGM card and driver's license, select a PIN, pick a nickname that the system would display for me, and thus get entered into the system. Then I had to go wait in another line in order to put money in the account just created. As it turned out, for some reason the account creation process hadn't worked right, so they made me go through the whole MGM card/driver's license/PIN selection/nickname rigamarole AGAIN, which seriously annoyed me. Then it was back to the cashier with $200 cash. I had to sign a stupid receipt of some sort for that to work. Then I had to get in yet ANOTHER line to swipe my card at an automated kiosk and sign up for the games I wanted.

Cashing out was a pain, too, involving signing another receipt.

Probably due to opening-day glitches, they seemed to have no idea where there were open seats. Presumably, a person at the central desk can see this instantly on a monitor, but they sure weren't acting as if they could. Instead, a woman was constantly running between tables to see where there were open seats. When I signed up for a $1-2 NLHE game, I was about 8th on the list. But since I hadn't been hearing names called out, it wasn't clear to me how I was to be notified when it was my turn. So I asked somebody, and was told they had a seat open. I pointed out that there were a bunch of people ahead of me on the list, and they said to never mind that. I still have no clue what that whole mess was about.

I was one of ten people to start up a new game (so perhaps all of the other people ahead of me on the list were also among those seated). It was slow going at first, as everybody struggled a bit to figure out how to take the actions they wanted. But after maybe ten hands, it felt pretty comfortable.

After half an hour, we were clicking along pretty fast. In fact, speed is one of the main advantages of the tables. It offers on-the-fly session statistics, so I don't have to guess at it. Neglecting the first hour, when everybody was learning the system, we consistently got 45-50 hands per hour. Standard for traditional games is something like 36 hands per hour. It's not a night-and-day difference, but it's not insignificant; one-third more hands per hour should translate proportionately to that much more profit per hour for the better players.

My impression was that the chief time savings were not in the actual play of the hands, but the clearance time between hands. It may be that most of the time advantage comes from not having to stop for dealer changes, tray fills, making change, correcting dealer errors, etc.

The press release had said that there would be a number of big-name poker pros at the grand opening. The only recognizable person I saw was David Sklansky, who did not appear to have any underage and/or developmentally disabled young women with him. Perhaps I just overlooked them. You can see him in the second photo above, standing next to my table, chatting with Michael Hamai, "LasVegasMichael," site administrator for allvegaspoker.com, who happened to be seated at the same table I was.

We were also graced by a visit from the 33rd-best razz player in the world. F-Train is correct that I failed to recognize him at first, for which I was mightily embarrassed. I knew the face was familiar, but couldn't place where I knew him from. Then again, we had met only once before, and that for maybe 30 seconds a few months back, although we exchanged about a million IMs over the course of the WSOP. By the way, while I'm talking about him, see his interesting take on the newly opened Hard Rock poker room, for an opinion dramatically different from my own.

The PokerPro interface is pretty straightforward. You touch buttons for "call $_______," fold, or all in (see fourth photo above). To prevent errors, you then have to hit a "confirm" button. You can clear it before that, if you have made a mistake. If you want to raise, you click on a row of buttons with chip amounts. This is, I think, the most clumsy part of the interface. A numeric keypad would be much better, IMHO. For example, one time the pot was $36. I decided to bet 2/3 of that, which was $24. That required hitting the $5 button four times and the $1 four times--ridiculously inefficient to require eight button presses to enter the amount of a bet.

Some people apparently had difficulty getting the screen to respond to touches with their fingers, and instead used the corner of their MGM card. I had no such problem.

Looking at one's cards requires touching the screen on the icon/image of the face-down cards (see photos above). Your cards will be readily visible to players on either side of you if you don't cup your hand around that spot. One guy next to me was just tapping the image with his MGM card, and I could see his hole cards as plain as day. I advised him to change his technique, and he did. There's nothing about this that is much different from what happens with real cards. There's almost always at the table at least one person who just lifts his cards off the table to look at them, without the slightest thought or worry about who else might be able to see them. (Some of these people do so, I think, because they are used to home games with paper-based cards, which don't take well to bending, and they just can't convince themselves that good-quality plastic casino cards really aren't harmed when you just lift a corner for a peek.)

There is an "options" menu (first photo above). Here you can view session stats, move more money from your account onto the table, quit, sit out temporarily for a break, agree to always chop the blinds, have the straddle option turned on or off, and a bunch of other stuff.

They had a few technical glitches last night. First, the system was taking a rake even if a pre-flop raise went uncalled. Players objected to this, being used to the "no flop, no drop" practice. The PokerTek guys apologized profusely, said this was a set-up error on their part, and they would be correcting it as soon as they could shut the system down for tweaking. Apparently that's not something they could adjust while it was running. (No rake was taken if the blinds just chopped.) At one of the tables, one card reader couldn't accept any cards, so that seat had to remain unoccupied. At my table, we kept having the game suddenly paused for no apparent reason. After the third or fourth time, they traced the problem to the player on my right. The system has a built-in anti-tampering lock, much like the "tilt" mechanism on a pinball machine. The console on this guy's seat was a bit loose in its fit to the table, and when he bumped it with his knee (he was a tall dude), it would lock the game down. Again, this sort of thing is probably inevitable on opening day, and I'm sure they'll get it all fixed.

There is a rabbit-hunting option. I'm guessing it doesn't get used much, because the system charges you $0.50 every time you use it. I asked one of the technical crew on hand, and he confirmed that the computer shuffles the entire virtual deck before the hand begins, rather than randomly selecting a card from the available ones when it is needed, as some online sites do--so at least it's a "real" rabbit-hunt, in the sense that the cards it shows really are the ones that would have been dealt, had the hand played out to the end. (See this post and the Hard-Boiled Poker posts linked to therein for more details on this point.)

Here's an advantage of the electronic tables that I hadn't thought of before last night. Late in my session, a young man in an electric wheelchair joined our game. He was quadriplegic, with limited use of his upper extremities. It appeared to me that he had gross motor control of his hands, but not much fine motor control. Nevertheless, he didn't seem to have any significant trouble tapping the appropriate areas of his screen. I imagine that manipulating real chips and cards would have been a huge hurdle for him, however.

The system can, I'm told, be set up to take out money for house jackpots (high hands, bad beats, etc.), though Excalibur is not doing so currently.

For the first night, they had no time limit on players' actions, though I hear that eventually they'll set it up with a one-minute limitation. I don't know if there is some way to override that for those instances where an exceptionally difficult decision requires additional thinking time.

The most common reason for delay of game was, as at traditional tables, players not paying attention. The screen changes, bringing up the action options, and a yellow bar at the top of the screen flashes, but if a player is chatting with his neighbor or watching sports on TV, he's not going to see those indicators. Really the most effective thing would be to have some sort of a buzzer or shaker built into the seats, to get your attention like the rumble strips on highway shoulders, but I suppose that's impractical. Remember that early episode of the Simpsons in which the family went into therapy, and they could all deliver to each other an electrical shock? I found myself wanting such a thing for the one or two players at the table who were chronically too busy yapping away to notice that it was their turn.

At one point it looked like our game was breaking up, so I logged off. But then we were told a couple of new players were coming, so I swiped myself in again. Interestingly, the system would not let me buy in for less than what I had just removed from the table. This is a good thing, because otherwise players could easily remove virtual chips from the table immediately after winning them, yet keep playing with less money on the table. I understand that it is set up to only let you buy in from scratch, for less than what you removed from the table, after an hour, which matches the typical house rule. Because the tables are linked centrally, you have the same restriction if you change to a different table of the same game, again matching the rule in most casinos that you can't squirrel away chips just by changing tables.

I did not like the sitting-out process. It only takes three button presses to register sitting out (e.g., for a restroom break): call up the options menu, click "sit out," then confirm it. But coming back in requires swiping the MGM card and entering one's PIN again. Maybe that's necessary for security reasons, but it's a pain in the butt.

My game did eventually break, and I went instead to a $0.50/$1 NLHE game, with a $50 max buy-in, which is something that has probably never been spread in any Vegas casino before. Very fishy indeed.

What I still haven't figured out is the degree to which physical tells will be useful. So far, it's not clear to me when an opponent's appearance of doubt and hesitation is because of the poker situation or because he's having some trouble with the computer interface. Maybe that will become clearer with time. I am pretty sure, however, that players new to casino poker stand out less at electronic tables than at tables with chips and cards. It is in things like handling chips and cards, knowing whose turn it is to act, tipping, string bets/raises, etc., that newbies most quickly and obviously reveal themselves as such. I think that a few buttons will prove easier for them to master quickly than all of the various things one has to do with chips and cards to be (and look) proficient.

What did other players think of the tables? I heard almost all positive comments, including, surprisingly, from a trio of obviously local friends, who were--how can I say this diplomatically?--of an age that I'd be willing to guess that their home VCRs still flash 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 incessantly.

I saw exactly three unhapppy people. First, while I was waiting in line just to enter the room, somebody came up to the security guard who was controlling access (letting in one person every time a spot opened up at one of the registration stations), and asked, "Where is the poker room?" The guard said, "This is the poker room." The questioner asked, "No, I mean the room where they play real poker." The guard politely informed him that this was all they had. The guy said, "Well then I guess I'll have to go somewhere else to find real poker." There was little doubt in my mind that this was a pre-rehearsed little bit of theatrical protest this guy was engaging in. I think he knew perfectly well what was going on.

The other two dissatisfied customers that I saw, though, were genuinely caught unawares by the electronic tables. One dude stormed off quite loudly after discovering what was happening in the room, yelling, "I don't want to play on no damn machine!" The other one was a guy who joined our table, was clearly baffled by the whole process, and didn't like it one little bit. I missed the crucial hand because I was talking with a very bright and interesting guy seated on my right, but apparently this player mis-clicked something. He didn't know how to clear the error (although the "clear chips" button is prominent enough that this shouldn't be a problem), and somehow accidentally moved all in when he didn't really want to, and lost all his money. His reaction struck me as completely sincere, that the whole thing had been a huge mistake, and he left seriously miffed.

Speaking of accidentally going all in, one player cleverly figured out an angle-shooting technique. We had just had a hyper-aggressive guy sit down and immediately try to bully the table with constant big raises. On the hand in question, he raised from under the gun to, I think, $20. The player in the small blind pressed some buttons. The screens showed him all-in. He immediately got a shocked look on his face and said, "Oh no! That's not what I meant to do!" It fooled me--it looked perfectly genuine. But when UTG made the all-in call with his pocket queens, Mr. Oops was revealed to be sitting on K-K, and broke out in a big grin. He won. Nicely done, sir. I've occasionally seen people pull a similar stunt with large-denomination chips (particularly in tournaments) "accidentally" being tossed in, but it was a novel variation on the theme to have hit the "wrong" button on an electronic table.

Some of the objections raised to electronic tables are just, well, looney. For example, a contributor to the allvegaspoker.com forums with the alias of "Railbird" wrote, "I guess I fear change in this regard. I do not see any positive side. The reality that I see is a game that is not poker because it is not played with a real 52 card deck, shuffled and put in the air. Instead the "deck" is a computer program. What's not to say that the program will be written not to simulate a random shuffle, but rather to stimulate action. I just do not want to play that game." (See here.) To that kind of idiotic paranoia, I can only suggest having one's medication regimen carefully reviewed by one's psychiatrist. And watch out for the black helicopters following you home.

One of the most frequent comments I read in advance of the room's opening was some version of this: "If I wanted to play on a computer, I could stay home and do it." Most, though not all, such objections, I think, come from people who haven't tried it. My subjective sensation was that the experience is far, far, closer to traditional casino poker than it is to Internet poker--something like a 90/10 blend. Being able to chat with other people and watch them make their moves is worlds removed from sitting solo at my desk at home. Yeah, you press buttons instead of lifting cards and pushing chips, but I think that's pretty minor. I felt that the great majority of the experience I'm used to remained intact.

As regular readers must know by now, I generally dislike handling chips and cards, because, well, they're disgustingly filthy. (See here for my full rant on this.) PokerPro pleases my aesthetic sense on this point.

There are two main things I liked about the electronic tables that will keep me coming back for more. First is the relative paucity of unnecessary delays and errors. The game just moves along better when there aren't dealer changes, fills, exposed cards to figure out, misdeals, time-consuming split pots, making change, manual shuffles, out-of-turn action to sort out, etc. I played for about 7 1/2 hours, much longer than my usual sessions, but it felt like time passed much more quickly without those kinds of delays.

The second big advantage is simply profit. To explain this, let's talk about my actual results last night. I dug myself into a $100 hole early, when my J-J lost an all-in race to A-K with a rivered king. (PokerPro is TOTALLY rigged! That would NEVER happen with a real dealer and real cards!) I rebought, then just couldn't make any headway, sitting for more than three hours at about the same amount. Finally I had a couple of big hands (especially this one: Q-4 in the big blind, unraised pot, flop of Q-4-4, and a guy with A-4 in the small blind; I think he, too, may have concluded that PokerPro is RIGGED!) and got ahead. I was up by about $150 on the night before the final hand. I lost virtually my entire profit in one of those horrible flopped set-over-set situations: my 9-9 against somebody else's A-A on a flop of A-9-4. (See? RIGGED, I tell you!) It was nearly 2:00 a.m. at that point, so I decided to call it quits, and left with exactly $13 profit for my efforts. Bleah.

Anyway, let's consider the situation if I had left one hand before I did. As I said, it had been a pretty unimpressive session, with about $150 profit. The session stats screen informed me that I had won 45 hands. That means I would have tipped the dealers $45. Furthermore, the maximum rake was only $3 instead of the $4 plus $1 jackpot that the Excalibur previously took. You might argue against counting the jackpot money, because on average you get back what you put in, theoretically, so I'll disregard that. I can't say exactly how much rake was saved, because I don't know how many pots were of what size. But I think it's fair to estimate that the average saving was $0.50. So even if flesh-and-blood dealers had put out the same number of hands per hour as PokerPro did, I would have been up by about $67 less than I actually was ($45 in tips and $22 or so in additional rake). Furthermore, as I noted earlier, human dealers on average get out about 1/3 fewer hands per hour. Put all of this together, and it constitutes a huge fraction of my profit that would not have been realized playing the same cards a week before the electronic tables were installed.

As one more small part of this equation, the tables are set up to automatically reduce the rake (I'm not sure exactly how far) when the games get short-handed, as opposed to having to remember to ask for a rake reduction at traditional games.

Those are the main two reasons I plan to keep going back to the Excalibur: I can play with less annoyance and less fatigue, while simultaneously making a greater profit. I had not anticipated that the differences would be so dramatic, but they were.

Don't mistake me for saying that I hope all poker dealers get replaced by computers. My view isn't that extreme. I'm only saying that these tables have real, tangible advantages that, for me, definitely outweigh their disadvantages. I have no desire to see them take over every poker room in the city, but I'm quite happy to have them available in the mix of rooms I visit.

I don't have a keen sense of whether this experiment will succeed or fail, in financial terms, for Excalibur. It may be that people will take to them as I did. Or they may stay away in droves, as the saying has it. I don't know. But I hope they carve themselves out a nice little niche.


Addendum

Immediately after posting the above, I went to http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ to see what other contributors to the site might have been at the Excalibur opening yesterday and what their impressions were. Perhaps the best overall observation I've seen on the controversy was just posted a couple of hours ago by a person calling himself "lesvegas." I liked it enough to quote it in its entirety here (see here for the whole discussion):

I suggest to any of you focusing on the negative aspects of the change to
an electronic poker room through emails to MGM/Mirage, boycots of the Excalibur,
posts on this site etc., that you give equal time to focus on the positives of
the developing Las Vegas poker landscape by doing the same for the companies
that have invested heavily in their poker rooms.

Railbird, have you also emailed the execs at Hard Rock thanking them for
providing poker players with a beautiful new room to play and promising to visit
their property frequently? Did you write to the owners of the new East Side
Cannery and thank them for including a state of the art live poker room when
they designed and built their new casino?

I love Las Vegas. There is something for everyone here. Locals have places
that cater to them, rich people can stay at some of the most luxurious hotels in
the world. Fremont Street offers everything the budget traveller could hope for.

And now, poker players have more options than they ever had before. We have
the class of the Venetian, the swankiness of the Hard Rock, the coziness of TI,
the nitiness of the Stations, and the low stakes, drunken, swear at the
tableness of Excal. This is great. I want to try all of them.

As with most things, people will find their favorite room to play. For me,
its the Golden Nugget. I like the vibe, the atmosphere, the comps and the way
the room is run by managemant and dealers. Nobody talks about the Nugget on this
site, and thats ok by me. Its only one of many rooms. And that is the best part.
Many rooms, and choices for everyone.

Now, with new rooms and new ideas, we as poker players have even more
choices, and I cannot see this as a bad thing. All the doom and gloomers
predicting the death of live poker really need to see the big picture here.
There is a great deal of focus and investment in poker in Las Vegas and I, for
one, am very excited and cannot wait until next week when I come to town to try
out both the Excal and Hard Rock rooms.

Excalibur's electronic tables to debut Friday

So says a news article at Card Player's web site. It also explains a bit of how the money transactions will work. I plan to be there, and shall report on the experience here, naturally.

Another shirt I would love to wear

While I was navigating through the crowds toward the poker room at Excalibur this evening, I saw a kid wearing a t-shirt that I would love to wear (though I wouldn't actually do it). It said, "Your lack of skills makes me sad."

It had a Nike swoosh on it, too, though I don't know whether it was an official Nike product or a knock-off. I couldn't find such an item in the online Nike store just now, but maybe they made it once and discontinued it.

Anyway, it's the sort of thing that I think about poker opponents from time to time, though I would never actually say it. But it gives me a sinister little pleasure to think about having that written across my chest.

Tales from the Excalibur

1. Huge change in the works

The way I pick a room to play in on any given day is largely arbitrary, involving a lot of eeney-meeney-miney-moe. So it was purely a coincidence that I was at the Excalibur this evening when I learned that they had made a huge announcement earlier in the day: They will be closing their traditional poker tables and going to all electronic (apparently Poker Tek brand) tables. Apparently August 18 will be the last day of poker the old-fashioned way, and August 22 the first day of operation of the new wave.

I was excited to be the first to publicize this news, but when I got home a short time ago, I checked http://www.allvegaspoker.com/, and sure enough, there have already been two threads started about it, here and here. It's tough to beat that site for poker room news, when they have several hundred pairs of eyes and ears all over town, alert for just this sort of thing.

The comments there are nearly all laments. I don't share those views, at least not entirely. Poker needs growth and experimentation and differentiation. There may well be a market niche for this. People who are comfortable playing online but are intimidated by sitting down in a casino for the first time may find this a nice intermediate step.

Some will consider me a traitor and/or a fool, but if the games stay as soft and profitable there as they traditionally have been, I'll keep patronizing the Excalibur (assuming that I don't hate the electronic tables--and I have no reason to think that I will). Heck, they might even have a lower rake, with no dealers to pay. Tipping dealers constitutes a pretty small percentage of my poker income, but I can't say I'd object to pocketing that extra $10 or $20 per session. (That's just an offhand guess; I've never tried keeping track of what it amounts to.)

I welcome pretty much any innovation that keeps variety in how the game is offered to customers. I think it is silly doomsday posturing to say that this portends the beginning of the end of poker as we have known it. No, it's just an experiment. (To be clear, I haven't heard anybody at MGM or the Excalibur say that it's an experiment, but practically everything new in casinos is. If something new doesn't bring in good money, they get rid of it. If it makes them more profit, they enlarge and duplicate it. That's an experiment, in my book. This is the same deal.) If it doesn't bring in a lot of money, they'll dump it and other rooms won't be encouraged to copy the idea. (I think MGM has an exclusive license for installing the machines in Vegas anyway.) And if it does bring in lots of money, that will be because the poker-playing public finds it enjoyable, for whatever reason. That can't be a bad thing. What Vegas really doesn't need are 50-55 rooms all offering the same thing. Variety is good.

Incidentally, I have also heard rumors that when Stations opens its newest property, the Aliante, in North Las Vegas (tentatively scheduled for November 11), it, too, will have an all-electronic poker room.

2. Funny hand

Two seats to my right was a visitor from Canada, here to celebrate his 21st birthday. He was a horrible player, just spewing money. (Welcome to gambling, young man! Please rebuy until your wallet is empty!) He also had rather unmistakable psychological problems--ADD at least, and maybe in a manic phase of bipolar disorder. I don't think it would be possible to describe him without including the word "hyper" somewhere among the adjectives: he was restless, talkative, agitated, animated. Anytime somebody won a decent-sized pot, he'd yell "WHEEEEEEEEE!"

Anyway, in one hand he and one opponent went to the flop, which was A-7-8. Mr. ADD bet $30. His opponent called. For some reason, Mr. ADD either thought that no more cards were coming or that his opponent was now all in, and turned over his pocket kings. Oops. Well, there's nothing to be done about it except keep playing out the hand. The turn card was a 9. ADD checked. His opponent--a solid, unimaginative player, whose bets had always accurately represented the strength of his hand thus far--made another bet, maybe $50. ADD called. The river was a 6, putting four to a straight and four to a flush on the board (though not one that was completed by either of ADD's kings). ADD checked. His opponent moved all in. Mr. ADD called. His opponent didn't have either the straight or the flush, but did have A-K, and won the hand.

To be sure, some players will take advantage of the exposed cards and bet as a bluff. The logic is this: I want my opponent to think that I'm not crazy enough to bet if I can see his cards and know that I have the losing hand. Therefore, he should conclude that I have the winner and fold the better hand. But given that this particular opponent was a pretty untricky guy, that he had to have something strong enough to have called a large pre-flop bet, and that he had called $30 after an ace hit the flop, it was pure kamikaze insanity for Mr. ADD to keep calling two more large bets--quite enthusiastically put out by the opponent, I should add--after his kings were revealed. Pure stubbornness on display.

I had to work pretty hard to suppress a laugh when the obvious conclusion of the opponent having a strong ace proved to be true.

3. The Grump turns junk into gold

I had A-6 offsuit in the small blind. Nobody raised, so I tossed in the extra $1. The flop was A-9-2, rainbow. I bet just under the size of the pot, and got two callers. There were no straight or flush draws, so I naturally concluded that one or both of them was/were sitting on an ace, and probably with a better kicker than mine. Oh well.

But then the turn card was another ace. Ah! I like that. Maybe only one of them has an ace, and the other hit the 9 or had a medium pocket pair to explain the call. Or, if I'm really lucky, that explains both of them, and I'm the only one with trip aces now. So I bet again to find out, this time getting only one call. Hmmm. Well, the conclusion has to be the same--he has a better ace. Oh well. Time to shut it down for this hand, check the river and hope he checks behind so that I don't have a difficult decision to make.

To my great surprise, however, the dealer found yet another ace in the deck, and added it to the board! Let's see. That's one, two, three of them out there, and one under my silver dollar. That makes four. Now I'm pretty, pretty, pretty confident that my sole remaining opponent does not have an ace of his own. The only remaining question was how much he might call. I settled on $35. He called so quickly that I regretted not trying to push it higher. He had a 9, and said that he thought that I did, too, and thought that we would be chopping the pot, even saying that he simply didn't believe I had an ace. Dang. I wish I had pushed all in, hoping that it would look like I was trying to buy the pot and push him off, and getting the hero call in response. (I consistently find that to be the most difficult decision in poker--knowing how much an opponent will call when I have an absolutely unbeatable hand.)

Excalibur is the only place in town that I know of where there is a high-hand bonus for quads and straight flushes with only one hole card playing. Unlike most rooms, where there is a progressive jackpot amount increasing daily until it is hit, at Excalibur you get to spin the wheel of fortune. There are amounts ranging from $20 to $100, as well as a "double" and a "triple" space (after hitting which you get to spin again to see what amount will be doubled or tripled). I hit $35, about an average bonus, just half a click short of the "double" slot. But it's been several months since I hit any high-hand bonus, so I was pleased with even this small amount. And I had never gotten to spin that wheel before, so it added a bit of fun to my night.



4. Odd new chip

I noticed that the dealer was using very unusual chips to do the rake. They were denominated at $2.50. I had never seen $2.50 chips before. A very nice young woman (who also happened to be a fine player) was sitting on my right. It was clear from her interactions with the dealers that she was a local and played at the Excalibur a lot more than I tend to do. She told me that they just got these new chips within the last couple of weeks.

My first impulse was to buy one from the dealer, just to have such an unusual piece in my collection. But for some reason, I was overcome with a wave of self-consciousness at being thought an oddball. (I usually fully expect to be considered an oddball, and don't let it bother me, so I can't easily explain why this stifled my action on this particular occasion.) But then this nice young woman said, "I bought one the first day I saw them, 'cause they're so unusual." Yay! A fellow oddball! I chuckled and told her that I was just thinking of doing exactly the same. And so I did.

My scanner did a horrible job capturing the color. The chip is actually an intensely bright orange, akin to reflective safety vests and flags--really quite striking, whereas my scanner somehow picked it up as a dull pink. WAY off.