Caution: Pots may be larger than they appear

Yesterday I was planning to spend the afternoon playing at Imperial Palace, but they had no game going when I arrived, so I wandered down the street to the Flamingo, where I had not played since (hang on, checking records) December 16, 2010. I generally don't like it much there, but it will do in a pinch. Sometime recently they opened a new casino. Well, it's really just an extension of the main Flamingo casino, but it is set up in such a way that it looks and feels like it's separate. It's the "Margaritaville Casino." It's tropical-island-themed, with cocktail waitresses in bikinis, Jimmy Buffet music playing overhead, clusters of faux palm trees, etc. It's actually very pleasant, as casino floors go. To celebrate the opening, they issued new chips, as shown above, which, of course, I had to add to my collection.

I was one of the players starting up a new table, and quickly discovered that I had lucked my way into an assemblage of calling stations. Instead of my usual game, I switched to what I think of as my "Bill's strategy," named for Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon, which was the first place I found myself consistently facing a table full of people who would call anything, fold nothing, and be aggressive only with the nuts. The strategy is not exactly rocket science: Value bet the strong hands, check-fold everything else, omit the bluffing. Against such opponents, it does not matter that that strategy means that you are effectively playing with your cards face up. They don't bother looking at them; they see only their own cards, and play accordingly.

The Bill's strategy was paying off well, supplemented by stacking a guy when I had the good side of a flopped set-over-set (my queens to his treys). It was getting close to the time that I needed to leave to catch the start of the Sunday night IP mixed game, when there was a touchdown in the late football game, which meant it was $100 splash-pot promotion time.

They drew a card to determine which table would get it, and mine was the one. Next hand, the floor guy brought over 20 red chips and plunked them down in the middle of the table before the cards were dealt. I was in the big blind and got A-8 offsuit.

My expectations were low. My limited experience with splash pots like this is that people go crazy, like a school of sharks in a feeding frenzy. FREE MONEY! ME WANT! Players raise and reraise crazily, shoving stacks of hundreds of dollars into the pot in an effort to win the house-supplied overlay.

Not this time. It was a family pot limpfest. I was stunned as one by one they all dutifully set two blue chips out in front of them. There was no discussion, no collusion, no collective strategy being deployed. I thought surely somebody was going to put in a raise that I would consider prohibitively large, given that my hand was one that was very likely to be dominated by somebody with a better ace, leaving me with, at best, maybe a 25% chance of winning the hand. With my nice profit for the afternoon about to be locked up, I wasn't in a mood to monkey around with a big chunk of my stack trying to get lucky with odds like that.

As the number of limpers increased, it dawned on me that these people simply could not figure out how to adjust to the radically different situation that the splash-pot promotion was presenting them. There is a very good reason that in no-limit games bet-sizing has everything to do with the size of the pot: You need to figure out what the pot is worth in order to determine how much it's worth risking in order to win it. As extreme examples, it usually would made no sense to risk $100 to win $2, but it would almost always be worth risking $2 to win $100. When the pot starts at $103, as this one did, a player who thinks he likely has the best hand--or thinks that he can convince everyone else that he does--should make a stab at the pot that is many times more than what the standard opening raise would be when just the $3 in blinds is up for grabs.

But when the action got to me, it was still just the size of the big blind I had already posted, so heck yeah, I'll take a free flop.

It came ace-rag-rag. The small blind checked. I thought about what to do. This table was so passive that there was a real chance that all ten of them would check. A pot now at about $115 (after rake) was absolutely worth taking a shot at with top pair, even with--or maybe especially with--a flock of calling stations behind me.

But how much to bet? I did not have great confidence that I had the only ace, and with ten limpers, there could easily be some weird two-pair that had hit and that might remain undetectable until I had committed a lot of money. Especially with my bad position, I didn't want to spend a lot and then have to abandon my children in the middle of the table.

It seemed to me that all of the other players were not perceiving this as a $115 pot. Instead, they were seeing it as a $15 pot with a $100 bonus going to the winner. Of course, logically that is a distinction without a difference. But perception is a fair substitute for reality in such situations, and I decided that I would play along with the table's apparent conventional wisdom. I also had in mind the general axiom that one should not bet more than it takes to accomplish the goal, which in this case was, ideally, to win the pot uncontested, and, failing that, to determine where my hand stood in relation to the strength of the others.

If the other players are seeing this as a $15 pot, then it makes no sense to bet $60 or $70 at it. So I bet $10. Frankly, this seemed like an absurd thing to do. I can state categorically that I have never opened the betting at a $100+ pot for $10 before yesterday. But I was in Rome, and doing what I thought the Romans do.

Like a row of falling dominoes, the players tossed in their hole cards one after the other, and I won a $115 pot with my little $10 bet. I have no idea why this bunch of calling stations--who previously would call three streets of 1/2- to 3/4-pot bets with top pair/bad kicker or second pair/good kicker--all suddenly decided that less than 10% of the pot was too rich for their blood, but that's how it went down.

Sitting here describing it and watching the replay in my brain, I'm still dumbfounded. None of it makes any sense from the point of view of a rational poker player. It may be that I was the only one at the table that might be able to claim that label.

I can't remember ever reading advice on how to handle a situation where your opponents think the pot is different than what it really is, because this must surely be a situation that comes up only rarely. I won't claim that being able to figure out what your opponents think the pot size is will be a skill that you need very often, but apparently it's one that can come in handy at least once in a great while.

Sweatin' with the oldies

Most people think that poker isn't an aerobic exercise, but it can sure work you up a good sweat.

Tonight I was playing at the Flamingo. We started a new table, and about 30 minutes in, I found two red kings in the big blind. There were two limpers, followed by a young man on the button raising to $10. First decision: Call or reraise? A reraise might earn me only $14 if everybody folded. The limpers were two retirees, who had a tendency to limp-call any normal-sized raise. I thought they would fold to a reraise, but stay in if I just called, making for a nice pot. Also, if an ace were to come on the flop, I could get away with little loss, because odds were that at least one of these guys had some ace-rag hand. So I went with the call, and my prediction about the oldies (sorry to use a slightly disrespectful term, but I have to justify the post title I picked--besides, I consider myself one of them, being eligible for the WSOP seniors event next year) proved to be correct. Four of us to the flop, pot about $35 after rake.

Flop: 5h-6h-2d. Though I thought the button would continuation-bet anything if we all checked to him, I didn't want to take the chance of it being checked all around, because there were too many potentially scary cards that could hit the turn. Also, going for a check-raise was not ideal here, I thought, because I was first to act after the likely bettor (the button), so if one of the retirees had hit a set, my check-raise could get really expensive. Better, I decided, to lead out, because the flop was coordinated enough that a set would probably raise to protect against draws, so I could get away, if necessary, with the cost of just my opening bet, rather than having to face a likely all-in from a slow-played set after having put in a large check-raise. I bet $30. Our senior citizens folded fairly quickly. When it was his turn, the button instantly shoved for $181. I had him covered by less than $10.

I didn't have a ton of information on him. This was the first time he had made any move this large or aggressive. The most salient fact here was the size of the reraise--six times my bet. I thought that a big overpair would be more likely to raise smaller. Would he do that with a set? Possible, given the consideration of the draws. But in my experience, most $1-2 players just LURVE to get cute with sets, and shoving doesn't give them the satisfaction of the trap. The size of the bet seemed to me to be either a big pair not wanting to get drawn out on, or a strong draw (e.g., A-Q in hearts) that was semi-bluffing. He had taken no time at all to decide on the push, and I thought that a set would take a minute to consider the options for how to play it.

I thought about it a while. I decided that I had most of the big pairs beat and was a substantial favorite against a draw. I have a really strong distaste for putting in my whole stack with just an overpair, but this seemed to me like one of the occasional places where I likely had the best of it with nothing more than unimproved kings. I called and showed.

My opponent flipped over 8h-9h, for a gutshot straight-flush draw. I was indeed a favorite, though not by as comfortable a margin as I would have liked. To be exact, it was 57% me, 42% him.

The ol' apocrine and eccrine glands went into overdrive on the turn, which was a black 8, giving him a pair. He gained more outs, but, of course, was left with only one card on which to hit, so I improved a little statistically: 64%/36% now. Still, I could just hear Mike Sexton, in that overexcited voice that he gets when all the money is in and it's down to one card: "He can hit a heart, a 7, an 8, or a 9. Vince, Grump is going to have dodge a lot of cards here!"

My sweat was extended when the dealer put out the river, but I couldn't see it, because his hand hovered where it blocked my view. (This was not purposeful on his part.) I could see a flash of red on a face card, but that was it. He actually announced the winner before I could see what had happened: "Kings." He moved his hand, and I finally saw that the jack of diamonds had joined the board. Whew!

Score one for us old guys.



Oh, and admit it: You had to look up "apocrine and eccrine glands," didn't you?

Aces cracked

Image from: http://pokerchaos.blogspot.com/2006/04/cracked-aces.html


Yesterday was, I think, the first time I have played poker during an aces-cracked promotion since moving to Vegas--and I did it twice, first at Flamingo, then again at Harrah's. Yesterday was definitely the first time I have ever been dealt pocket aces during an aces-cracked promotion, and thus had to decide how to play them. I went for the standard approach with a raise and a continuation bet. A short stack shoved and I called. I won, though less than the $100 bonus I would have earned by losing the hand.

I first encountered an aces-cracked promotion back when I was living in Minnesota and playing at an Indian casino in Wisconsin. I quickly tired of the inevitable stupid arguments that would break out over whether one should play to win the hand or play to lose it and pick up the jackpot. I maintain that avoiding having to listen to such arguments endlessly repeated is an excellent reason to stay away from poker rooms during aces-cracked promotions. They make me want to stick an ice pick in my eardrums.

The argument should be purely mathematical, though precious few of those engaging it seem to understand how to evaluate it.

The first part of the analysis is straightfoward, thanks to marvelous tools such as PokerStove: What is the probability of losing when you have pocket aces? Here's the answer, given the number of opponents (assuming that they all stay in the hand to the river):

1--14%
2--27%
3--36%
4--44%
5--51%
6--57%
7--61%
8--65%
9--69%

As you can see, you have to drag five people all the way to the river to have even as much as a 50% chance of having your aces cracked. Even in loose-passive games, that does not happen very often.

But the math gets murky after that point. If you're playing to lose--i.e., limping and check-calling--you can't control how much your opponents like their hands, and therefore how much they'll charge you to stay to the river. Furthermore, your attempts to minimize the pot will often--usually, in fact--backfire when you end up winning in spite of yourself, and raking in a much smaller pot than you might otherwise have won.

Knowing the statistically predictable frequency of loss is easy. But determining the optimal strategy also depends on knowing how much equity you'll sacrifice by having minimized the pot when you win, and how much you'll have to put into the pot on calls when you lose. Those numbers are not at all obvious, and they will vary tremendously with the style of play of your opponents at any given table. They are effectively unknowable, and at best can only be guesstimated.

If the jackpot were, say, a million dollars, the conclusion would be obvious: try to lose. Conversely, if the jackpot were one dollar, the conclusion would be obvious: ignore it and try to win the hand as usual. The problem is that the jackpot--typically $50 or $100--is in a range such that one's assumptions about the costs of trying to lose make all the difference in the world about one's conclusion as to the optimal strategy.

And that is why the table arguments about how to play aces are so pointless: nobody knows what is actually best because the answer is completely contingent on unmeasureable and constantly changing input variables.

Because of that, I had decided long ago that if I found myself in such a situation, I would play as usual, try to win, and take the jackpot as a consolation prize if I lost. That may or may not be optimal for any specific mix of opponents, but, in its defense, (1) it is not clearly wrong or suboptimal for typical conditions in a $1-2 NLHE game, and (2) it saves me having to try to run complex math at the table.

Given that aces-cracked promotions are relatively common, you might wonder how it is that I can say that I think yesterday was the first time in 4+ years I've encountered one. First, they typically run during hours that poker rooms are slow; management is trying to get games going when the room would otherwise be idle. I am usually not playing during those hours. Second, I usually try to avoid rooms running such promotions, because I seriously dislike how they distort the game. Yesterday I was seated at both the Flamingo and Harrah's before I knew that the promotions were in effect.

Since leaving the Midwest, I have therefore had a blissful respite from hearing nits criticize somebody who plays his aces aggressively, or stupid laments from a nit who is so "unlucky" as to win with his aces, or endless speculation about what would have happened if an aces hand had been played differently from however it was actually played--a respite which came crashing to a halt yesterday. These are among the most pointless and annoying, yet seemingly inevitable, conversations that will ever afflict a poker table, ranking right up there with jackpot discussions when a bad-beat bonus has become unusually rich.

Spare me. I hope it's another four years before I have to listen in on another round of it.

Seen at Bill's, plus some other ramblings

Saturday night after my successful hit-and-run at Hooters, I wanted to put in another short session someplace else, and I was in a mood to try to get somewhere I haven't been in a while. I have wanted to get out to Club Fortune. They've opened a new poker room since the last (only) time I was there, and I hear it's quite nice. But I've called a bunch of times, and they never have a no-limit game going. Last night the woman on the phone told me that it's very rare that they have one, so I might have to bite the bullet and just drive out there anyway, knowing that it will likely be a $2/4 LHE I'll be in. But I'll do it for my readers. That's just the kind of guy I am.

Anyway, then I tried the Tuscany. It's a place that sits at the very top of my records in terms of average dollars won per session, but I call and call and call, and just cannot catch them having a no-limit game there anymore. It used to reliably run one at least weekend evenings, but that has not been happening lately. They are apparently desperate; they have twice lied to me, telling me that they were just starting a game, but when I get there, nothing. So last night when the guy told me at about 8:30 that they would "for sure" have a NLHE game up by 9:30 and that it would run all night, I had my doubts. But I stopped by anyway at around 11:30. Nope.

I was then pretty close to Bill's, so finally decided to make that my evening capper. I had not played there since September, so it was due for a visit.

While I was waiting for a seat, I looked around a little. The first odd thing I noticed was this guy's hair:



Holy golden calf! I haven't seen that particular hair style since the last time I watched The Ten Commandments:



The next thing I noticed was that they were about to start up a tournament. I briefly thought about entering it rather than waiting for a cash game seat. But then I took a look at the poster of the tournament structure, and decided against it:




$30 entrance fee, of which only $20 goes into the prize pool, so 33% juice. Combine that with 15-minute levels, only 60 big blinds to start, and blinds doubling nearly every level, and I think we have us a strong contendor for the title of Worst Tournament Structure in the History of Poker. There were eight players being seated. If I joined, that would mean a prize pool of $180, or a profit of $150 for a couple of hours of work if you were to win (assuming that they made it winner-takes-all). Suppose that my skill edge is such that I have a one in three chance of winning, instead of the one in nine chance that it would be if all were equally likely to win. That would make my EV for entering the tournament about $50. I think I'll pass on that.

When a seat finally opened, the table conversation was about food bargains in Vegas. The dealer mentioned that next door at the Flamingo there's a $2 burger-and-fries special after midnight. I finished playing around 2:00 a.m., and thought I could use a late-night snack, so headed north one building to check it out. Here's the poster confirming what the dealer had told me:

I tried it, and it was perfectly decent. The Burger Joint is not exactly the most upscale place you could eat, but it will do in a pinch. It follows the modern trend of being way, way too loud (about which, see this interesting recent article). And while I'm at it, you kids get off of my lawn! It's also not the cleanest place I've ever eaten. But there were no hidden catches to the $2 special, and it was entirely acceptable, as such things go. I even splurged an extra 75 cents each for cheese and bacon on it, because my coronary arteries have been feeling just way too open lately.

Some night I might even go back and try the steak and eggs special.

Rules? We ain't got no rules! We don't need no rules! I don't have to show you any stinking rules!

And that is officially my longest blog post title ever.

Last week, before my trip to Utah, I put in a couple of sessions at the Flamingo because the World Series of Beer Pong was there, and I had a hunch that its participants would (1) want to play poker, and (2) not be very good at it. I was right on both counts.

While there, I ran into several rules problems, which isn't a particular surprise, given my previous observations there.

1.

On my second night I had at the table the same guy (Don) that I discussed here. To make it even more interesting, Orlando was dealing again, and we had the same floor guy, too--Charlie. Because it had been proven to my satisfaction previously that nobody was going to lift a finger to stop this moron from talking about every single hand in progress, I decided to just sit back and watch, rather than complain about it.

Sure enough, he ran his mouth non-stop, just as before. He would overtly announce what his cards were (at least sometimes truthfully), what he thought other players' cards were (e.g., on a three-bet, "He's got aces for sure"), what he thought other players should do ("You have to call him here--you know that, right?"), etc.

And, just as the last time I played at a table with him, not a single dealer did or said a thing about it. We went through three different dealers before Don left for the day, and none of them gave even the slightest hint that there was anything wrong with this ongoing monologue.

Why should they? It would likely cut into their tips (he is a very generous tipper), and they already know that the floor guy, Charlie, isn't going to back them up if they or a player complains about it; he doesn't care that Don talks about every hand in flagrant violation of the rules.

So the beat goes on.

2.

Guy on phone gets dealt in and plays his hand while continuing to talk. Another player asks about this. Dealer says it's fine. Player says, "When I played here last night, they wouldn't deal me in because I was on my phone."

He is far from the first to notice that the rule on this point varies from moment to moment, dealer to dealer, day to day.

3.

One guy makes a bet by picking up part of a stack of chips, reaching over the betting line, and dropping a couple of them, then returning the rest of the chips to his stack. Another player asks the dealer why all of those chips aren't committed to the pot, since they all went over the line. Dealer tells him that only chips released are committed. The player very believably launches into a story about how on the previous night he lost a lot of money in a hand because that dealer said that the house rule was that all chips in your hand that crossed the betting line were committed to the pot. He was understandably perturbed that that rule, like the one about cell phones, appeared and disappeared at the whim of the dealers. His friend, who had also been playing the previous night, confirms that the first guy is relating things accurately. I reassure them that they are not the first ones to notice that this rule comes and goes without notice.

I actually remember when that rule was implemented a couple of years ago. (I thought I had blogged about it at the time, but I find no such post now.) I know somebody who was a dealer there at the time, and we talked about the problems it was going to cause. As I recall the conversation, I told him that I anticipated that it was going to get enforced with extreme variability--some dealers doing it all the time, others never, others only when somebody complained (or used it for angle-shooting against a less knowledgeable opponent). He agreed. It probably also varies with who the supervisor is at any given time, since, like dealers, some of them will be sticklers for the rules and others will be lax.

4.

Dang it. There really was a fourth example, this one involving a straddler who was allowed to raise after having first checked. Unfortunately, the notes I quickly scribbled about what happened are so brief, cryptic, and illegible that I can't reconstruct exactly what happened, and I no longer remember the details. (I had intended to write this post as soon as I got home, but then other stuff got in the way--you know how that goes.) Sorry.


The larger point is, though, that the Flamingo continues to be one of the worst-managed poker rooms in the city, in terms of having rules that make sense and that are enforced consistently. I have previously posted about times when the dealer queered the action by talking about the hand as it played out (here), and about the difficulty I have had getting dealers to replace obviously marked cards (here).

The bottom line is this: As far as I can tell, nobody in a position of any authority at the Flamingo gives a damn about consistent enforcement of either the most basic, universal rules of poker, or the house-specific rules that they choose to have on their books. Game integrity means nothing to the poker room management there, and if you play there, you can't count on what the rules are or how or whether they will be enforced. Even if you ask about some specific rule, it may well be different when the next dealer sits down.


For the last several months, Bluff magazine has been running a column titled "Call the Floor," in which a poker room manager answers sometimes difficult rules questions. The blurb about the author of the column says this: "Andy Rich is the Poker Room Manager for several Harrah’s Casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, including Harrah’s, Flamingo, and O’Sheas. He is also a Shift Manager every summer on the live side at the World Series of Poker. Got a poker rule question? Send it to Andy at arich@bluffmedia.com." (See here, e.g.) the column is consistently good--I haven't yet disagreed with Mr. Rich's discussions of the scenarios readers ask about. So I'm going to email him a link to this post and ask for his comment. If he offers any for public consumption, I'll post it here.

Addendum

Even though that email address for Mr. Rich was published in the November, 2009, issue, I got an error message in return: "User unknown."

Strangeness at the Flamingo

I just got home from a couple of hours at the Flamingo. BWOP, Cardgrrl, and I each took on a separate $1/2 table. It was a relatively short session, as the two of them had a late dinner date, and I had to taxi my visiting ex-wife on some errands. Toward the very end, my friend --S showed up, fresh from some job interviews; he's coming back to town after experimenting with jobs at New Mexico and Colorado casinos. (By the way, for those of you who enjoy reading me, you owe a tip o' the hat to --S. It was reading his blog that made me decide that I, too, might have something worth saying about poker, and that the technical aspects of putting together a blog might be manageable for even a technodummy like me.) So it was a nice evening in terms of the company. And I won money at a decent rate, which is always nice.

But I post this to comment on two oddities that happened during the session. The first was that the poker room ran out of red ($5) chips. They were so short that they were going around the $1/2 tables begging players to trade stacks of red for green ($25) chips.

How in the hell does a casino run out of chips? This wasn't anywhere close to the busiest day of the year. Why don't they have about a billion dollars' worth of chips in the vault in the basement, ready for even the most insanely overcrowded day? The things are cheap to buy and last nearly forever. It seems to me like a no-brainer to have more chips than one would need on even the busiest day they've ever experienced.

The second oddity wasn't really related to the first, but came to my attention because of the first. A dealer was trying to deal with the chip shortage by getting the floor to approve letting $100 bills play. Cash has not previously been allowed to play at the Flamingo. The floor guy came over and told him that, yes, $100 bills would play--but this was not because he was making a special dispensation. Rather, it was because they had formally changed this policy as of September 1. Black chips ($100) are also allowed to play now under the new rule.

So it was strange that this dealer didn't know that. But then we had a dealer change, and the subject came up again. A player went busto and needed to buy a stack of red chips from one of the big stacks. They traded the bill and chips. The new dealer, though, said that that wouldn't help, because cash doesn't play. Yep--a second dealer hadn't heard of the new rule, which has been in effect for nine days now.

Then, a while later, a dealer who was acting as brush and chip runner between downs walked by the table and noticed that two players had C-notes tucked under or behind their chip stacks. He helpfully offered to trade those in for chips, informing the table that "Cash doesn't play." Yep--a third dealer had not heard about this. Of all three dealers who had to deal with the question, not a single one had heard that the poker room's policy had changed more than a week ago. Each time, the floor guy had to come over and inform them of the new way things were to be done. There was not a single dealer who had to address the matter who knew the new rule.

How can a poker room's management be so incompetent and uncaring that, apparently, the majority of its dealers don't know about a rather important change in policy or procedure more than a week after it has been implemented?

Punctuation FAIL

Sign seen in the Flamingo poker room tonight.

Nice proofreading there, Flamingo!

Nathan Burton

Got some free tickets, so went to see Nathan Burton's "comedy magic" show today at the Flamingo. It's OK, but well beneath my boys Penn & Teller. (Then again, that may be true of every magic act.) He did two variations on a standard mentalist trick (appearing to have written down in advance what somebody in the audience would say), and about eight different variations on a person appearing in and/or disappearing from a box when there is no apparent way in/out. That's my main criticism of the show: there were basically two tricks, with small variations. Not a lot of variety.

There's a comedy act in the middle, but not your standard stand-up variety. Instead, this guy pulls four volunteers from the audience, puts funny masks on them, gets them to agree to make certain funny gestures when he taps them, then has them race to blow up and pop balloons. I know what you're thinking--it sounds incredibly stupid. Yes, it does. But he is a fine showman and makes nearly every second of the routine come out funny. I kept thinking, "This shouldn't be funny, but it is!"

It's certainly not a terrible show overall, but I think I'd feel ripped off if I had had to pay more than about $10 for a ticket. For free, I felt more than adequately entertained. I even shook Mr. Burton's hand afterward and told him, "Nice show." It hadn't really been my intention, but he was standing there greeting people as they left, and it would have been awkward to walk by without saying something. So I guess this counts as my celebrity encounter for the day, too.

Orlando is not blooming

Last night I started at the Flamingo before heading to Bill's. Across the table from me was an older man named Don, obviously well known to the Flamingo poker room staff, since everybody addressed him by name without introduction. He is not a slouch as a player, obviously having tons of poker experience. He even claimed to have been playing hold'em for 40 years.

He has an ugly habit of announcing what he thinks other players have while the hand is in progress. For example, a tight player open-raises to $22 in a $1-2 game, and Don says, "Big pair," while there are four people yet to act on the raise. Now, this isn't exactly an astounding leap of logic, but it's still completely improper and against the rules. In the first 30 minutes of play (we had started a new game), he does such things four times, with the dealer saying nothing about it.

In none of these four cases was the play obviously affected, but it's hard to know. For example, in one case he was not involved in the hand, and when Player A bet and Player B made a substantial raise, Don turned to A and said, "You're beat--give it up." Player A did so. Would he have done the same without the coaching? It's impossible to know. In another case, there were four parts of a straight on the board; anybody holding a 6 would have the straight. On the river, somebody bet, and Don said, "He has the 6 for sure." The last remaining opponent folded. Again, we can't know whether the outcome would have been the same anyway. But it's always possible that that player hadn't even noticed the possible straight until Don made his remark, or had noticed it but didn't believe the bettor had the straight and would have called with, say, two pairs.

None of his chatter had affected hands that I had been in, but I wanted his talk to stop before a situation arose in which it cost me money. So I resorted to my usual approach when this sort of thing is going on. Immediately after Don's latest violation, I asked the dealer, "Are players allowed to speculate out loud about what other people are holding when there is still action pending?" I know perfectly well that the answer is no, but I think that phrasing it as a question, and one posed to the dealer rather than to the offending player, is the least confrontational way I can get the issue addressed. Virtually every time I have done this, the dealer has been prompted (finally) to speak up and remind players not to do it.

Not this time. This dealer, a guy named Orlando, hesitated a moment (which I interpret to mean that he knew exactly what was going on and what his response should be, but he didn't want to do anything about it), then said, "It's OK." I don't think he literally meant that what was happening was not against the rules; he was just trying to get me to drop the matter. No chance, pal. So I asked more directly: "Really? It's OK by your house rules for somebody not in the hand to say what he thinks other players have when there are still decisions to be made?"

Orlando's face clouded. He was obviously unhappy to be challenged. Through nearly gritted teeth he snarled, "Everything is fine, sir."

OK, so for whatever reason this guy isn't going to do his job. Fine. Next up the chain, then. "Would you call the floor, please?"

Orlando's response: "Oh, you're one of those guys, huh?" Then, louder, to the whole table, "Watch out, folks, we have one of those guys at the table."

So I repeated more firmly, "Would you call the floor, please?" He finally did.

Now the floor man comes over, a guy named Charlie. I tell him, "We have a player who is repeatedly commenting out loud on what he thinks other players' cards are, and the dealer says that that's perfectly OK under your rules."

Orlando chimes in, "It's only Don."

Aha! That tells me pretty clearly that this is a recurring issue, and that the dealers have decided to just ignore it for this particular player. Don is, I have to admit, a generous tipper. I suspect that that is more than a small part of why things are the way they are.

But ignoring Orlando's interjection, I ask Charlie, "Is it true that players are allowed to speculate out loud about other players' hand while there is still action pending?"

Before Charlie can answer, Orlando pipes up again: "It was heads-up, Don and just one other player."

Well, this is the very definition of a half-truth. It was certainly true that Don was very free to talk about what he thought his opponent had when it was just two of them left to contest a pot. But I know perfectly well that this isn't against the rules, and it doesn't bother me. When I mentioned above that Don had done this four times, I wasn't including such instances--wasn't even trying to keep track of them.

The game has continued during this discussion, and I turn my attention briefly to the cards I have just been dealt--pocket aces! Ick. What rotten timing. I turn back, and see that Charlie is walking away! Another dealer has called him to the next table for something. I say, "Excuse me...." Charlie says, "Just a minute, I'll be right back." OK, so I'll play my aces.

I win a small pot when nobody calls my raise. Charlie doesn't return. It seems apparent to me that, just like Orlando, he would rather not have to address the issue at all.

But at least the discussion has caught Don's attention, and he mostly stops the infractions. There is one more, about 45 minutes later. Four players in the hand. First to act makes a $40 bet. Don is second. He says, "I think you have pocket queens. I call." There are still two players left to act. We have a new dealer at this point, of course. Just like Orlando, he says not a word about it.

When I finally decide to leave, I corner Charlie and again ask the question he never answered. First he tries to duck it by saying, "The dealer says that it was heads up." I'm aware that Charlie is disadvantaged, not having witnessed the events in question. Still, I'm highly suspicious that he knows that this has been going on with this particular player for a long time. But I give him the benefit of the doubt, and ask him to address it as a hypothetical, assuming that the offender is not in the hand, or he is in the hand but there are multiple other players yet to act. Charlie agrees that in such cases, it is not acceptable.

So why do your dealers let it go on without saying anything? Charlie's first excuse is that Don was drunk. I ask, "So it's not against your rules to talk about the hand in progress if the player involved is drunk?" Charlie says no, that's not the case. (Hard to figure why Charlie mentioned that as a defense, then.) He speculates that the dealers didn't suspect any collusion between Don and other players. I point out that I don't think that formal collusion is the chief concern; inadvertant helping of another player is, in my view, a far more frequent problem. Charlie agrees that for both reasons, such conduct should be stopped. We also agree that it's commonly an innocent violation made by a player new to casino poker, with bad habits developed in casual home games. Such players, in my experience, are highly amenable to a gentle explanation of why they can't make comments like that in a public poker room. They apologize, quickly grasp the potential problems, and stop doing it. Don does not fall into this category. He has tons more experience than the greenie who just doesn't realize it's against the rules. Charlie is thus left, finally, without any good excuse for why his dealers ignore repeated, flagrant violations. "I would need to speak to them to find out why they let it go on," he says. I leave it at that.

I do not consider it a negative reflection on the Flamingo that Don, or other people like him, do what they do. But it is a negative reflection on the Flamingo that the dealers ignore it. Worse, in my view, is that they appear to selectively enforce the rule, as suggested by Orlando's explanation: "It's only Don"--as if that actually justifies the whole situation, somehow. This is also clearly suggested in Charlie's explanation that the player involved was drunk. He seems to think it's OK not to enforce rules against drunk customers, though the reasoning behind this decision escapes me.

But in my opinion, the most shameful part of the whole episode was how my concern was addressed. Orlando clearly knew what was going on. He had heard the improper comments and decided to ignore them, and openly resented being called on it. But the way I addressed the problem initially was so non-confrontational that he need not have lost face in the least. Just saying something like, "That's a good point. Players, please remember not to talk about the hand while it's in progress," would likely have solved the problem without getting anybody upset. Instead, he chose to lie about what the rule is, then just try to get me to shut up, in order to avoid having to deal with it. To make matters worse, when I saw that he wasn't going to do his job and asked for the floor, he mocked me for it. I can't remember ever being treated with such rudeness and overt hostility by a dealer.

Then, to top it off, we had a poker room supervisor who also tried his hardest to avoid having to actually step in and do anything about the problem, and who, when eventually confronted directly about it, made lame excuses for his dealers' inaction, rather than admitting, even in the hypothetical, something like, "If what you're telling me is really what happened, then the dealers should have stepped in earlier."

Between Orlando and Charlie, it was perhaps the most unprofessional conduct I've ever witnessed in poker room staff. Absolutely shameful.

I deliberately skipped one part of the story, leaving it for the end here. After Charlie walked away from the table without having said or done anything meaningful, and without having resolved the problem, Don clearly felt some sense of vindication. He looked right at me and snarled, "I can say anything I want." When I ignored him, he repeated more loudly, "I can say anything I want!"

Sadly, at the Flamingo poker room, that appears to be true.

Entertainment while you play

Played at Bill's again this evening. One of the sidelights of playing there is that if you time your visit right, you get to hear Big Elvis, who sings in the lounge maybe 30 or 40 yards from the poker room, so it's not hard to listen in. (They have the good sense to shut off the canned overhead music while he is performing.) According to Big Elvis's web site, he's there Monday through Friday at 3:00, 5:00, and 6:30 p.m.






When the game broke up unusually early at Bill's, I walked next door to the Flamingo. They had something going on I'd never seen before: Performers from the Flamingo's "X Burlesque" show (see review here) were dancing to loud music just inside the door. (Sorry for the blurry photos. They wouldn't hold still.) Maybe this has been going on for a long time, but never while I've been there. It appears that other girls from the show--or at least ones dressed as if they might be in the show--do some blackjack dealing in this area near the wide-open front door of the casino. As at Bill's, the poker room is close enough that you can listen in on the music, but you can't see the dancers from the tables. Probably a good thing--might be a bit too distracting. I liked Big Elvis's music better anyway.

Sorry, no interesting poker stories from tonight. I came home with more money than I left with, which is always plenty interesting to me, but not especially to anybody else.

Oh, but wait--I do have a story, though not much to do with poker. Bill's takes the rake in half-dollar increments, so you sometimes get 50-cent pieces back as part of the pot. You can also play two of them as if they were a $1 chip. Somebody did that, and I noticed that the sheen of one of them looked quite different from the other. I'm fairly sensitized to the appearance of real silver, because of having my one-ounce silver coin always in use as my card protector, and I thought this half-dollar looked much more like silver than most. And when the dealer picked them up and put them in the tray, replacing them with a $1 chip, the "clink" was definitely different from the usual cheap, tinny sound that American coins have been making since they stopped using silver and copper, and instead went to crappy metals like nickel and zinc. I could even see in the dealer's tray that the second one down looked different on its edge. So I asked the dealer to sell me two half dollars from her tray (she probably thought I wanted to use them to tip the cocktail waitress or some such thing). Sure enough, the second one was a 1968, when the alloy used was still 40% silver (see here for coinage history). It's about one-eighth of an ounce of silver, so, I dunno, something like $2 worth, that I purchased for 50 cents.

When Shamus was in town for the World Series of Poker and we played a little poker together at the Palms, he mentioned in his blog the next day about how observant I seemed to be at the table. Nobody had ever said this of me before, though I do try hard to pay attention to what's going on. I suppose it's true, given my irritating (to the dealers, anyway) tendency to be able to identify cards from tiny rub marks or creases I notice on their backs, pick up and later blog about snippets of other players' conversations, get grossed out by untidy dealers' ear and nose hair, notice illegally small raises, spot all sorts of nervous tells in opponents, etc. Now I have to add to the list that I notice the peculiar look and sound of coins in play! There are undoubtedly more important things to be noticing, but one really can't help what things catch one's attention.

The strange thing is that I'm completely obtuse and unobservant in life outside of the poker room. My friends will tell you that I can walk past some prominent object a thousand times before finally noticing it and asking them, "Has that always been there?"

Wow. This post really veered far from where it started. Sorry for rambling.

Game integrity not worth much at the Flamingo

One of the TV commercials that I probably saw a thousand times in my misspent, lazy youth featured some grizzled old cowboys playing poker, while one of them (or maybe more--I can't remember for sure) is eating a chocolate bar. One of them scowls, "These cards are marked!" Another one chimes in, "They're a mess!" A third one says, "A chocolate mess!" Sure enough, there are chocolaty fingerprints all over the cards. The players are up in arms--literally. But just before they shoot the guy with the sticky fingers, the M&M guys show up and save the day, because you can enjoy those candies without getting chocolate all over your hands. (Sadly and astonishingly, it seems that nobody has put this classic spot up on the web anywhere. I wanted to link to it or embed it here, but couldn't locate it.)

You see, there was a time when poker players and dealers actually cared about marked cards.

It appears that those days are gone--at least at the Flamingo, where I was playing last night.

I was one of ten players starting up a new table. On one of the first hands, when I looked down at my face-down hole cards, I instantly noticed a crease along one of the short edges of one of the cards. I noted that it was the 7 of spades. I was in Seat 1, so as I folded, I pointed out the crease to the dealer and suggested having the card replaced. She squinted and tilted the card this way and that, but said she couldn't see the crease. I pointed to it again. She finally saw it, but said, "I don't think anybody could see that from across the table," stuffed it in the muck with the rest of the deck, and moved on.

I wonder who at the Flamingo decided that the standard for deciding to replace a card is whether the distinctive flaw can be seen from "across the table," and when this rule was implemented, and where it is written down. It's an absurd criterion. I only need to be able to see it when it's lying on the table in front of the player next to me in order to gain an advantage. Additionally, if I'm sitting next to the dealer and can see every card from up-close as it is mucked, I don't need Superman's telescopic vision to see prominent marks or creases.

Suppose I'm in the big blind and get to see a free flop while holding the 7-2. The flop is, say, 7-7-K. Now, I like my trip sevens, but I would normally have to worry that somebody else has the last 7 in the deck with any kicker bigger than my deuce. On this hand, however, maybe I noticed that creased 7 of spades pass right in front of me as the player to my left mucked it from first position before the flop. Knowing that that card is out of play gives me an enormous amount of leverage in the hand--and I didn't have to be able to spot the flaw from "across the table."

Anyway, I decide not to put up a big fuss about it yet. I'll just wait and do my usual process (which I explained in a previous post here). Maybe an hour later I looked down at my hole cards and spotted that pesky edge crease again. Sure enough, it was the same 7s. Now I had proven to myself that I could identify it with confidence, and would prove that fact to the dealer at the next opportunity. It was maybe half an hour later that the crease caught my eye again as it headed for the muck, folded by another player. I asked the dealer to check the card, and if it was the 7s, they should probably replace it. It was, and they did. This dealer didn't fuss or argue about it, just called for a new card. I liked her for that.

She lost my endorsement, however, just a few minutes later. I was dealt the ace and king of spades. The ace had an enormous dimple in the center. I have no idea what caused it, but it looked as though somebody had tried to punch a hole in the center, but didn't quite penetrate. It was large enough that the other card couldn't lie flat on top of it, but wobbled like a teeter-totter. This had to be quite new, because I surely would have noticed it before.

When the hand was over, I pointed out the dimple to the dealer. She called for the replacement, but clearly didn't think it necessary. No less than three times while she was waiting for the floor to respond, she told me that I could find flaws like that in every deck in the room, and it really didn't need replacing. She ended each of these little speeches with a chuckle, presumably so that I wouldn't resent her comments, but they were unmistakably calculated to try to keep me from asking for any more card replacements. She said that the fingernails of female players often put little marks in the cards.

I understand that, and know the kind of tiny marks she's talking about, but this was ten or twenty times more prominent than that. It was a preposterous comparison to make.

A few weeks ago I was playing at Imperial Palace. On my first hand, I noticed a small but visible crease in one of the cards. I dutifully pointed it out to the dealer, who smiled, and told me that I'd find those on most of the cards. At first I was annoyed that he was ignoring my concern, but as I was dealt more hands, I learned that he was entirely correct. Apparently that room has one or more out-of-tune Shufflemasters that is putting a little crease on cards as they run through it. The majority of the cards have one or two such marks, all in the same location (or in symmetrical locations, if the card has been marked twice, once in each orientation). It's kind of strange, but it's not a problem, because the ubiquity of the marks means that they don't give away any useful information.

That was not the situation at the Flamingo with either of the two damaged cards I noticed. I'm not making mountains out of molehills.

When I was in poker dealer school, I bought, for practice purposes, a deck of top-grade Kem plastic cards, the brand used in most poker rooms. I think it cost $30. I assume that the casinos get them substantially cheaper than that, buying in large quantities--especially a huge chain like Harrah's that is buying thousands of decks at a time. So let's assume that the Flamingo can get a deck for about $10 each. That's about 20 cents per card, or about 4% of the amount of the $5 maximum rake that they take on one hand. Yet they balk at replacing cards that have become so damaged that they are readily identifiable to any player who is paying attention.

How much is game integrity worth to the people that run the Flamingo poker room? Less than 20 cents, for sure, since they put up a fuss about spending that much to protect it.


Addendum, July 5, 2008

Many thanks to commenter "Michael" for pointing me to this:

Makes my poker adventures seem tame

Go read: http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/2008/03/sucker-punched.html

Today's helpful hints, miscellaneous

1

If you order the "Fudge Cake Collision" at the Grand Lux Cafe at the Venetian, bring a friend to share it with. Or two. Or three. It's that big. (See above.)


2

Try the jerk chicken at Jimmy Buffet's "Margaritaville" restaurant (inside the Flamingo) sometime. Very tasty. I hadn't eaten at that place before, and it was really quite nice. I liked the continuous-running Buffet music videos playing on a big screen. Different atmosphere than you'll get anywhere else in town.


3

If you should happen to lock your keys in your car in a casino parking garage--let's say, Sam's Town, to name a completely random example--their security people will not open it for you, quoting some rot about liability for damages, but will helpfully hand you the telephone number of a locksmith. A mere 45 minutes and $45 later, you can be on your merry way.


4

If you pre-pay for a line or two of late-afternoon bowling at a local set of lanes associated with a hotel-casino--let's say, Sam's Town, to name a completely random example--and then decide that you could do one more before heading off for dinner, and so you go up to the desk to pay for another game, and it happens, unbeknownst to you, to be close to the time that they will be starting their league night activities, they will not politely say something like, "I'm sorry, but we have league bowling starting in about 15 minutes, and can't have any new games start now," but instead will convey that same basic message to you in a startling mixture of incredulity and exasperation, with a combination of body language, facial expression, and tone of voice that will unambiguously convey that you are a complete idiot for not having known in advance that you couldn't start a game after 4:30, due to their league commitments, because, after all, doesn't everybody on Planet Earth know that already, you imbecile?

(I believe I just broke my own record for longest sentence there. Good thing I'm not back in junior high school, with the assignment to diagram the grammar of it.)


5

The musical dancing-waters fountain shows in front of the Bellagio really are nice to watch--no matter how many times you've seen them before--whatever song they choose to choreograph. (Hmmm. Seems like we need a different word for what it is they do. Maybe "aqueograph.") If you're entertaining out-of-town visitors, it's a near cinch that they will enjoy it.


6

The "Poker Shrink" (http://www.pokerblog.com/tags/poker+shrink) has a blog entry pointing to a BBC Science site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml) on which you can look at 20 smiles and test yourself to see how good you are at discerning the genuine smiles from the forced ones. He points out that while this specific ability is not necessarily useful for poker, it is part of a whole package of being able to gain insight into people's emotional states from non-verbal manifestations. I got 16 out of 20 right. It's an interesting way to spend five minutes of your life.

Lying about your hand

"Did you know that it's OK to lie about your hand, but you're not allowed to tell the truth about it?"

I heard that from a woman at the table yesterday at the Flamingo. It's not the first time that I've heard somebody make such an assertion. Most famously, Annie Duke said essentially the same thing during one of the 2006 World Series of Poker episodes. I suspect that the 700 million re-broadcasts of the series are ultimately the source by which most players "know" this rule.

But it's not true. The fact that so many people hear this and instantly believe it is just one tiny manifestation of the general societal problem that most people have precious little training or experience in critical thinking.* Even if I weren't pretty well attuned to the subject of poker rules, just an overall skepticism about accepting as fact things that people say would have caused me to raise a quizzical eyebrow at Ms. Duke's claim. I would immediately think, "Can that really be true? If so, it doesn't make any sense at all."

Let me address this under three headings: (1) Why the "rule" as stated would be stupid and pointless, (2) What the rule actually is, and (3) What I think the rule should be.

The alleged rule would be stupid and pointless

Suppose for a moment that there really were a rule that said that you could say any lie you wanted to about your hand, but couldn't tell the truth about what you were holding. Two prominent poker columnists have recently addressed this in detail, apparently both believing that there actually is just such a rule. They both do a nice job of explaining why it's ridiculous.

First is Steve Zolotow, writing for Card Player magazine (http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/57/10074):

Someone in the main event told the truth about his hand, saying, "I have a king." His opponent folded, but he received a one-round penalty for telling the truth. Obviously, he should have said, "I don't have a king," then paused and added, "but there is a penalty for telling the truth." Thus, he could have conveyed the same information by lying about his hand. As long as we know that our opponent must be lying, we can assume the opposite is the truth. Unless players are allowed to use some mix of truth and lies, they effectively are telling the truth.

Next up is Mike Caro, who calls this "the idiot rule," because it prevents people from disclosing whatever they want about their cards only if both players are idiots (http://www.pokerplayernewspaper.com/viewarticle.php?id=2351):

But the worst rule in poker states that you can't tell the truth about your hand. For instance, you can't say, "I have three aces," if you actually do. That sucks. It sucks because, by rule, anything I say must be a lie to be legal. So, if I say I have a full house, opponents are given information. They know I can't have a full house or I'd be in violation of the idiot rule. So, I guess, if I wanted to tell someone I had aces full, I'd have to say something like, "One thing I can say positively is that I don't have aces full." If I said that and didn't have aces full, I'd be telling the truth and in clear violation of the idiot rule. For that reason, astute opponents would know that I'm lying--which is legal--and that I absolutely do have aces-full.

Exactly so. A rule requiring that everything you say about your hand must be a lie would be (1) unenforceable (because not every hand gets opened to check to see if the player was telling the truth or not) and, (2) completely ineffective. In fact, paradoxically, the more rigorously it was enforced, the less effective it would become at the presumed goal of preventing collusion.

That ain't really the rule

Fortunately, nobody has yet, to the best of my knowledge, actually been stupid enough to implement the "rule" that Zolotow and Caro rail against. I'm really quite surprised that both of these columnists took the trouble to publish a critique of a rule that doesn't exist.

So where does this poker urban legend come from? As far as I can tell, the source is this language in the World Series of Poker rules (http://www.worldseriesofpoker.com/pdfs/wsop.tournament-rules.07.pdf):

52. Players are obligated to protect the other players in the tournament at all times. Therefore, whether in a hand or not, players may not a.) disclose contents of live or folded hands....

Notice that it doesn't say anything at all about "truth" or "lies." It forbids one to "disclose" the contents of one's hand. The number of ways that one can "disclose" one's holdings are limited only by the imagination. You could show your cards. You could just say what you have. You could tap it out with your feet in morse code. You could send smoke signals (well, except that they've banned smoking at the table now). You could let an opponent keep guessing, shaking your head "no" when he's wrong and nodding "yes" when he's right until he's got it, thus never speaking a word. Maybe if you have a touch of Marcel Marceau's spirit in you, you could pantomime it. It doesn't matter--they're all equally prohibited.

The implication is that you also can't "disclose" your hand by invoking a logical game such as Zolotow and Caro propose: "I do not have XYZ, but you know that I have to be lying about that." As they note, that is the functional equivalent of straightforwardly stating exactly what you have. Both are prohibited under the actual wording of the rule in question, because both are just two of the myriad methods by which one might "disclose" one's hand.

Let me repeat: There is no currently published rule anywhere that says or implies that you can lie about your hand but not tell the truth about it.

Let's look at some other common sources for poker rules, for the sake of completeness.

The Tournament Directors Association rule 12 is nearly identical to, and the probable source of, the WSOP rule:

Players are obligated to protect the other players in the tournament at
all times. Therefore, players, whether in the hand or not, may not: 1. Disclose contents of live or folded hands....

Next is Bob Ciaffone's "Robert's Rules of Poker" (http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/poker/chapter1.php):

The following actions are improper, and grounds for warning, suspending, or barring a violator:

...Revealing the contents of a live hand in a multihanded pot before the betting is complete. Do not divulge the contents of a hand during a deal even to someone not in the pot, so you do not leave any possibility of the information being transmitted to an active player.

Cooke's Rules of Real Poker--for my money the best single rulebook yet--says this (p. 71, rule 10.20):

A player shall not intentionally expose a card or reveal it verbally in order to induce or inhibit action. However, in head's up matches (where only two players are dealt in) revealing a card shall be permitted.

I'm not sure if this is intended to cover literally only games where there are only two people playing the whole time, or if it is intended to extend to full ring games, when only two players are contesting the pot.

Lou Krieger and Sheree Bykofsky, in their book The Rules of Poker: Essentials for Every Game, go even further, and would disallow such disclosures even when heads-up (p. 79, rule 3.9):

Intentionally exposing a card to induce or inhibit action is a serious breach of poker ethics, and in certain instances can be considered a form of collusion. It is never permitted.

Notice that not even one of these sources says even a single word about lying versus telling the truth. So the next time you hear somebody make such a claim, ask him or her to point you to the actual source where the alleged rule is written. It's a safe bet that the speaker will be unable to do so.

What should the rule be?

Let's talk about cash games first.

The overarching reason for any no-disclosure rule is to protect other players. For example, perhaps a player has moved all-in ahead of me before the flop and I have pocket kings. I move all-in, too, and show my cards before other people have had a chance to act, because I would really prefer to have to beat only the guy who is already all-in; large pocket pairs don't play well against, say, five or six opponents, so my action is intended to scare off opponents. But the person who first moved all-in may have something like suited 9-10, which plays much better, in terms of risk:reward ratio, when there are several players in the hand (because the payoff for hitting a straight or flush is potentially enormous). Obviously, the same reasoning applies to saying "I have two kings, so the rest of you should fold," even though the verbal disclosure leaves more doubt about the speaker's truthfulness than does showing the cards.

What about less specific disclosures, such as "I have a really big hand here"? I would outlaw them, too, on the slippery-slope argument. If you write the rule so that it only prohibits stating exactly what your cards are, then presumably it would be acceptable to say something like "I have a pocket pair bigger than queens." That comes so close to what is prohibited that the rule ceases to be useful. So I would move the dividing line all the way down to zero: you can't say anything that suggests--truthfully or not--the strength of your hand. I would also prohibit statements that come in the form of "I might have...," which is a common ploy of some players.

When there are only two players contesting the pot, however, a player disclosing his hand cannot do any harm to anybody except himself, and since I don't believe in protecting people from their own mistakes and/or stupidity, I'd allow it. There are times when revealing one or more cards can work to one's advantage in confusing or deceiving an opponent. Consider this absolutely brilliant ploy by Daniel Negreanu, where he combines showing one card, a statement about what the other one might be, and a scary-looking minimum raise, to get Sam Farha to fold a better hand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d33K96MGzVA. It's an ingenius trick, one of the slyest bits of deception I've ever seen deployed at a poker table.

I was on the bad end of another skillful bit of deceptive revealing by an opponent a couple of months ago. I started with a strong hand (can't remember exactly what it was), but hated seeing three hearts on the flop, when I had none. The turn brought a fourth heart to the board. I bet, my tricky opponent took a long time to decide what to do. While thinking, he turned over the 7 of hearts. He finally called. The river was a blank. I decided that with just a 7-high flush, he must be worried that I had a higher flush, so I moved all-in. He insta-called with the look on his face of the cat that caught the canary (as, indeed, he had). His other card was the king of hearts. He had flopped the king-high flush, and his showing the lower card tricked me into thinking exactly what he wanted me to think: that he just had a low flush and was in a difficult spot, when really he had the second nuts. Well played, sir--you lured me in perfectly.

That kind of clever psychological gambit should absolutely be part of the game, as long as only two players are involved. So showing one or both hole cards, or announcing or hinting at your hand--honestly or dishonestly--is fine by me.

What about in tournaments? The same considerations hold for multi-way pots, but there's an added wrinkle in tournaments that makes the picture less clear for heads-up situations. That relates to the concept of "tournament equity." This isn't the place for detailed analysis, but basically, depending on the payout schedule, late in a tournament, how one player acts in a hand can dramatically affect the amount of money that other players--even those not involved in the current hand--can expect to win. This is at the heart of an interesting debate between Lee Jones and Daniel Negreanu, at http://www.biggerdeal.com/2007/10/05/daniel%e2%80%99s-wrong-i%e2%80%99m-10000-sure/. Be sure to read the comments, too. (One of the commenters is me. I'll let people guess which one.)

I don't know the optimal way to balance the advantages of allowing the kind of Negreanu-esque ploy, which has traditionally been an integral part of the game, against preventing injury to uninvolved players' tournament equity. Perhaps starting the ban on disclosing one's hand, even when only two people are in the pot, when the money is reached, or a few places before the money, or at the final table, would strike the best balance. Of course, even if it works that way, when it gets down to the final two contestants, the rule serves no purpose and could be taken out of effect again.

Back to the start

But all of that is mostly irrelevant to where I started this discussion. I began with griping about how so many players just hear somebody say what a poker rule is, and accept that as the gospel truth, without looking it up anywhere, without thinking very hard about whether the alleged rule makes any sense or not, etc. To compound the problem, these people then repeat it to others, spreading the disinformation. It makes me crazy. It's not that hard to find out what the rules really are.

So when you hear somebody claim that there's a poker rule that says ________, and you've never heard it before, ask for evidence. Hold the thought in suspension until you can verify it. Don't pass it on as it it's the revealed word of God.

And for Pete's sake, don't talk about your hand!


*I risk going off on a full-tilt tangent here, because this is one of my biggest all-time sources of frustration and dismay about the world. In fact, if I had the magical power to cure just one ill of humankind, I think it would be the lack of critical thinking. I would make every person on the planet instantly inclined to critical thinking, and skilled at it. This would immediately solve countless woes, from the relatively trivial (people wasting their money on pills that the sellers promise will cause miraculous weight loss, enlarge male genitalia, or make the user irresitible to the opposite sex) to the truly world-changing (people being led to believe that if they fly a commercial jet into a skyscraper they will be rewarded with a bevy of virgins in heaven). So don't get me started.


Addendum, December 7, 2007

I emailed Mr. Caro to tell him of my disagreement with the premise of his column (Mr. Zolotow doesn't have a published email address). He responded quickly, for which I am grateful. With his consent, I'll share his comment:

About the issue on “can’t tell the truth.” I know that rule is in existence. It only applies to tournaments, though. Many directors have since modified it. Hopefully, my urging had something to do with it. I was, I think, instrumental in arguing against it on several televised events I participated in. They even waived the “can’t show cards” heads-up rule in both the National Heads-up Championship (NBC) and Superstars, when I participated. That wasn’t my influence alone. Many others felt it made for good TV to adopt these changes.

I even had the honor of roasting the person who first put the rule into place at the WSOP.

This is useful information. I can't find any such rule in current, published sources, but it's certainly possible that, as suggested in Mr. Caro's reply, there are tournament directors who use such an unpublished rule specific to their facility, and/or that if I looked at older versions of tournament rules I would find it. I freely admit that I didn't investigate older materials, so if a must-lie rule previouly existed, I wouldn't know about it (having been in the poker world for only a couple of years now).

Not talking about the hand in progress includes dealers, too

Nearly every time the flop brings three parts of a straight flush, or especially a royal flush, there's at least one player at the table who feels the obligation to point out this fact to everybody else. That's bad enough, but it's far worse when the culprit is the dealer.

Flamingo this afternoon. I'm not in the hand. Flop is A-Q-10, all diamonds. The dealer, Stephen, instantly says, "Oh my God, here comes a royal."

I shouldn't have to spell out everything that's wrong with this, but I will anyway. Any such discussion by another player or by the dealer is clearly forbidden, because (1) it might be helping a player in the hand (and simultaneously hurting another one), and (2) it can change the action as a result.

Yeah, the fact that three-fifths of a royal flush just hit the board should be obvious to everybody--but you never know when it's not. A player could be too drunk or distracted to have noticed. A player may have bad eyesight and mistakenly think that one of the red cards is a heart. If you are lucky enough to have the K-J of diamonds in this situation, you secretly pray that somebody else will make a full house or even quads and not even notice the possibility of the royal.

Comments like Stephen made can queer the action. Players who are suddenly alerted to the possibility of a jackpot hand get a different view of their effective pot odds. A player with the jack of diamonds might decide it's worth calling big bets in the hopes of hitting the royal, either just to be able to say that he got one once in his life, or in order to claim a high-hand jackpot. (Most high-hand jackpots require both of the player's hole cards to be used, but a high percentage of tourists don't know that, and will chase the draw, thinking that they're eligible for the bonus when they aren't.)

A dealer at the Hilton used to do this every time there was a possible straight flush. The first time, I quietly pointed out to him that he's not allowed to say anything in that situation. After that didn't stop him, I would inform the shift supervisor. But even though I reported his inappropriate comments at least three different times, he kept doing it. I'm afraid the most obvious explanation is pretty venal: he wanted to be sure that somebody with a jackpot-winning hand didn't muck it, and thus lose out on a potentially big tip for himself.

Similarly, I would wager a large sum that Stephen is perfectly well aware that he's not supposed to make comments such as he did, but he figures that it's not very likely anyone will complain about it, and speaking up might nab him a big tip that would otherwise slip away. Well, Stephen, I'm complaining. It's unprofessional. It's an unambiguous violation of the general rules of poker. I'm confident it is explicitly prohibited by the written rules for employees of the Flamingo poker room. And you presumably already know all of those facts, yet do it anyway.

That's reprehensible.

Just stay home, you inconsiderate jerk!

Let's make one thing clear: you don't have to play poker in a casino on any given day. (I'll make an exception here for people who have paid in advance for a big-dollar tournament.) So if you're sick, just stay home (or at your hotel).

It happened again last night, and surely will again many more times before the currently starting cold season ends: One doofus sat down in seat 8 (I was in 10) at the Flamingo, and was instantly recognizable as being sick. First thing he did was take a bottle of God-kn0ws-what cold syrup out of a bag, and take a big swig of it. In spite of that stuff, he coughed and sniffled and snorted and blew his nose and wiped his nose with his hand, etc.

This isn't that complicated, folks: The rest of us don't want to pick up your miserable cold! Don't go into a casino and plop down for several hours (or even several minutes, for that matter) in close proximity to a bunch of other people, who will then have to share your air, and handle the same cards and chips that you're befouling with your stupid virus.

Really--how inconsiderate can you be? How about taking a few days to brush up on your online play instead?

I am not looking forward to this aspect of winter in Las Vegas. I think I'm going to become a vigilante about this. I didn't say anything to this particular jerk, but next time I am going to speak up.

Dealers who don't know the rules--and don't ask

Three stories.

1. I was playing at the Flamingo last night, my usual game ($1-$2 no-limit hold'em). I was first to act on the river. I bet $8. The guy to my left, without saying anything, put $13 in front of him in one motion (2 red chips and 3 blue chips). Therefore, it wasn't clear if he had intended to call and accidentally dragged an extra red chip along, or if he had intended to raise and miscounted or miscalculated what the minimum raise would be.

There are four possible rules that one could have to cover this situation: A. The dealer asks the player what his intention was, and then, depending on the answer, the player either retracts the extra amount or puts in more money to make the minimum raise. B. In the absence of a previous verbal declaration of a raise, any amount pushed forward that is more than a call but short of the minimum raise is deemed a call, and the extra returned to the player. C. In the absence of a previous verbal declaration of a raise, any amount pushed forward that is more than a call but short of the minimum raise is deemed a raise, and the player is obligated to complete the minimum raise. D. As a sort of compromise between the possibly harsh consequences of (B) and (C), you split the difference, and if the amount is more than halfway between the call and the minimum raise, it's deemed a raise; if the excess is less than halfway to the minimum raise, it's deemed a call.

Cooke's Rules recommends option D. Some casinos appear to go with D for tournaments, but either B or C for cash games (a distinction that makes no sense to me). But clearly the worst option is A, because that's what the angle-shooter would want: ambiguity, which he can then take either way, depending on what reaction he gets from other players.

So what did the dealer do here? He went with A. I asked him whether the player really had the option, and suggested that there must be a house rule settling the issue one way or the other without giving the player the choice. The dealer said that the player had to say what his intention was. I didn't believe it, but it was a small enough amount that I was going to call it anyway, so I didn't make an issue.

Later, however, I approached the shift supervisor and asked what the dealer's move should have been. If I understood his answer correctly, the Flamingo goes with B--the extra $5 should have been returned to the player and his action deemed a call, even if he claimed that his intention was to raise. The dealer was just wrong.

I won the hand at the showdown, incidentally. I still don't know if the guy really intended a raise--he had just hit one small pair on the river, so with 2 0r 3 people left to act behind him, it was a pretty stupid raise, if that really was what he meant to do.


2. I left the Pink Chicken because I wasn't making any money this time around, and went to Tuscany, a short drive away. Late in my session, I made a pre-flop raise to $12. The button reraised to $80, all in. The big blind was gabbing away with somebody and not paying attention. He had seen my raise, but missed the reraise, so he tossed two more $5 chips forward, intending to call my raise. Before anybody else could act after him, I intervened and told him of the reraise. (The dealer hadn't noticed the problem.) He decided to fold instead and took the $10 back.

The dealer told him that the $10 he had just put in had to stay in the pot. The player protested. The dealer, rather than calling for the floor, insisted that the guy put the $10 back. Player refused. They went back and forth a couple of times, until the guy on the button (who had put in the reraise, and was an off-duty dealer there) called for the floor. Floor ruled that since it hadn't affected any action behind him, the player would be allowed to take the $10 back.

This is in accordance with Cooke's rules: "[W]hen facing a raise, if a player is unaware that a pot has been raised and places enough chips in the pot to call an unraised bet only, the dealer shall advise the player that the pot has been raise, whereupon the player may reconsider and change his action, provided that no one has acted behind the player." (10.06, p. 66.) I assume that it is also in accordance with Tuscany's house rules.


3. About two weeks ago at the Orleans, there was a huge pot--about $1000 by the end, which is about as big as pots ever get in a $1-$2 game. I wasn't in it. I was in the 10 seat. On the river, the guy in seat 8 was facing an all-in bet for something like his last $400. He stood up to think about it, and finally decided to call. He pushed forward his two tall stacks. (He was one of those guys who like the 40-chip, $200 stacks instead of the more common 20-chip, $100 stacks--a tendency that was about to cause an unforeseen problem.) He then picked up his hole cards, and attempted to drop them on the table face-up with a little forward motion.

Unfortunately, his cards caught on his tall stacks on their way down, which flipped them face down, right on top of the muck.

The dealer reached for them, picked them up, and placed them face-up in front of the player, as if nothing unusual had happened. I asked her, "Isn't his hand dead?" She said, "No, he didn't mean to muck them [which was obvious--he's not going to call, then throw his hand away before seeing the other hands], and I know it was these two." Since I wasn't involved in the pot, I didn't do or say anything more--and, to my surprise, neither of the other two players in the pot said anything about it, either. (If it had been me, I'd instantly ask for the floor person. I'll take a $1000 pot by default if I can, and not feel one smidgen of guilt about it.) As it turned out, the caller had the worst hand and lost anyway, so the outcome would have been the same. But still, cards in the muck (at least face down, when nobody else has seen them) are dead, pure and simple, end of story. I seriously doubt that Orleans (or any other casino) has a house rule otherwise, though I didn't bother asking.


The common thread in these incidents is that a dealer doesn't know a rule that he or she should know, compounded by being certain of something that wasn't so, and not asking the floor about it. As I said in an earlier post, there's (usually) no shame in not knowing something. But one should be ashamed of being confident that the rule is X when it's actually Y, and not having the humility to say, "I'm not sure what the right thing to do here is; let me call the floor person to clarify it."

Addendum, August 16, 2007:

James Klosty is one of the shift supervisors at the Hilton poker room, and co-host of "Poker, Straight from the Hilton" on KLAV, 1230 AM, Fridays at 3:00 p.m., Pacific time. (You can also listen to the show live on the web through http://warpradio.com/single.asp?id=6224, click on the "listen" button. End of free plug.) Tuesday he told me that he had been reading some of my old posts--including this one, obviously--and questioned whether my opinion was right in story #1 above. At the time, I couldn't remember the situation that had prompted the rant, so I wasn't able to provide James a very satisfactory answer. But his point was thoughtful, and worthy of an equally thoughtful reply, so here's my take on it.

James noted that his long-standing practice in such a situation is to immediately ask the player what his intention was, and go by that. A player would get to make this mistake once--after that, it's assumed he's an angle-shooter, and the bet would be ruled a call only. James is a superb and experienced dealer. I trust him to have a keen sense of BS coming from a player who is trying to pull a fast one, versus an innocent mistake. If all dealers were as consistent and reliable, this system would probably work adequately. That said, we'd still have the problem that dealers change every 30 minutes, and the next one wouldn't necessary know that the guy in seat 8 has had his one chance to have his ambiguous move deemed a genuine oversight.

Overall, though, I still think it's preferable to have a rule that clearly defines what is to happen here, and not give the player a choice. Granted, the great majority of the time there is nothing nefarious intended. But that's also true of other ambiguous actions, such as tossing in an oversized chip when faced with a bet. It is, as far as I know, universal that that action will be deemed a call in the absence of a player announcing a raise before the chip hits the felt. Again, most of the time when a player intends to raise with the oversized chip, but fails to announce it, it's an honest mistake, not an attempt to deceive, so the rule has potentially harsh consequences when it is inadvertantly violated. But we don't give players a choice; the rule clearly defines how the bet is to be treated.

I think that the situation in my story #1 above is exactly analogous, in terms of how it should be handled. That is, there should be a rule (either one standardized everywhere, the way things like the oversized-chip rule are, or ones that casinos adopt internally, which may vary from place to place) that settles the matter cleanly.

I don't so much care which of the possible rules I discuss above (B, C, or D) is implemented. But I will stick to my guns on saying that having one of those rules in place to automatically and consistently determine the interpretation of the otherwise ambiguous action is better than the practice of asking the player what his intention was--even once.

Show one, show all

I was one of six or so players that started a new $1-$2 no-limit hold'em table last night at the Flamingo. I sat down in the 10 seat, which has recently become my favorite, if there are no strategic reasons to sit elsewhere. On the very first hand, the guy in seat 9 played quite aggressively and won the pot without a showdown. As the pot was being pushed to him, he showed his hole cards to the guy in seat 8, who I think was a friend of his, and said, "Pretty good way to start, eh?"

When one player flashes his down cards to another before mucking, I usually don't ask to see them, if it's just an occasional thing. But it's uncommon for players to come out so aggressively on the first hand of a new table, so I wanted to see what had motivated this guy. Accordingly, I turned to the dealer (who had seen the interaction in question) and said, "Show those, please." (I always prefer to ask the dealer to do it, so that it doesn't seem that I'm confronting or challenging or ordering another player.)

To my great surprise, seat 9 turned to me and gave me a look as if I had just asked him to drop his pants. With what struck me as unbelievable haughtiness, he said, "Do you have any idea what bad etiquette that is?"

Huh?

I have heard only one person ever express the opinion that it's bad form to ask to see a player's cards after he shows them to another player, under the classic and universal "show one, show all" principle. That was Phil Hellmuth, in one of last year's WSOP events. I recall that another pro at his table state strong disagreement that there was anything wrong with the request.

In fact, I think the breach of etiquette is in showing your cards to one other player without voluntarily showing them to everybody, thus requiring that somebody else take assertive action to keep the flow of information equal. I, for one, never flash my hole cards to just one other player. I don't think the "show one, show all" precept just gives one a right to ask to see flashed cards; I deem it to confer on me an affirmative duty to "show one, show all." This may not be a universal sentiment, but still, I can't imagine under what ethic or rationale one concludes that asking for equal access to strategic information is bad etiquette.

Dude, you were out of line. If you don't want anyone to ask to see your hole cards, it's pretty simple: just don't show them to anybody. But if you choose to flash your aces to your buddy, you've got to expect that somebody else is going to ask to see them, too, and if you can't deal with that, just go back to your home game.

The dealer, incidentally, was great--she immediately took the onus off of me, and when she heard the player object to me, she stepped in and quite firmly told him that he was in the wrong. I love dealers who aren't afraid of offending a player when there's a rule to be observed and enforced.