Barry Greenstein as judge of character

The news today is that Barry Greenstein and Doyle Brunson say they believe their friends over at Full Tilt Poker may have been incompetent businessmen, but they couldn't possibly have had any malicious, criminal intention.

See http://www.pokerlistings.com/brunson-greenstein-talk-full-tilt-poker-scandal-55027.

I want to focus just on Greenstein here. He is quoted saying, “There’s no doubt in my mind that their thought wasn’t ‘We’re going to steal from customers’ but when Black Friday hit it came at the absolute worst time for them.” Further, “Most of these guys on Team Full Tilt are friends of mine and most of them definitely didn’t know what was going on." And, finally, “I don’t think anyone believes that the initial intent was to defraud the customers, it just worked out that way in their method of fixing the problem."

Well, that's fine and noble of him. But how is Greestein's track record as a judge of character?

Here he is in 2008, speaking of Russ Hamilton, after going to his house to interview him specifically to determine whether Hamilton was guilty in the UltimateBlecch scandal: “This is being investigated and there’s no doubt in my mind that it will end up that Hamilton knew who the cheaters were, but I don’t get the feeling that we’ll be saying that Russ Hamilton is one of the cheaters.” “I didn’t get the feeling that he was that knowledgeable about what was going on as we hoped he would be.” “Russ seemed like he knew a couple of the guilty parties, but in the end, I don’t think it was him.”

We all know how that story turned out.

So it seems to me we have to conclude one of two things:

(A) Greenstein is an astute reader of human minds, he correctly assessed Hamilton's soul, and the poor guy is wrongly accused, as pure as the driven snow, despite all the evidence (only some of which was known at the time of Greenstein's interview), and despite the formal conclusions of the investigating gaming commission.

or

(B) Greenstein is a nice guy and tends to assume that other people are also nice guys, and he has a blind spot to the evil that men do. Furthermore, he has a habit of trusting his own gut feeling about people in preference to objective evidence. As a result, his comments about Howard Lederer and Chris Ferguson and Rafe Furst should be viewed as the product of friendship and wishful thinking, rather than a reliable, objective assessment of the whole situation.

I know which way I'm voting.

Who not to trust in political prognostication

Barry Greenstein, October, 2007:

I'm sure it will be less than 6 months before Congress realizes that they
need to pass legislation contrary to the UIEGA. If it hasn't already happened,
it will happen in a few weeks.

Yeah, right.

I was reminded of this by reading today's post from Shamus, in which he quotes Phil Hellmuth in a recent Card Player magazine interview:

Online poker is going to be licensed and regulated very soon. There are things happening right now that the rest of the poker world doesn’t realize. I think it’s going to happen at the federal level, and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened by December.

My guess is that he'll end up looking just as deluded as Greenstein did.

Or maybe I will. One never knows. But in the matter of online poker licensing, as with predictions of the Rapture, skeptics have a far better track record than believers.

What am I missing?

During the run-up to the recent elections, I was puzzled by a series of Twitter posts from well-known professional poker players not only expressing their support for Harry Reid, but saying or suggesting that he would be good for online poker, while his opponent, Sharron Angle, would be bad for online poker. Here are the ones I remember, from Andy Bloch, Howard Lederer, and Barry Greenstein:









Erik Seidel took a more humorous approach:



I responded to a couple of these, asking what evidence they had that Reid had been or would become a friend of the online poker industry. My questions were ignored.

I have not heard of any explicit public statements from either Reid or Angle on the subject of online gambling generally or online poker specifically. (Lederer provided no pointer for his claim about Angle's stance. I checked at the time, and could find nothing about it in her web site's list of formal positions.) I thought that I was sufficiently tuned in to poker-related news that if either of them had made an election point of either supporting or opposing online gaming, I would have heard about it. But the Twitter statements from Lederer, Greenstein, and Bloch left me wondering if I had missed something.

Apparently not. In the current issue of Poker Player newspaper, Wendeen Eolis reviews what the last election did for online poker. Here are a few excerpts about Reid:

The powerful Majority Leader who won a hard fought election helped the
Democrats hold onto control of the Senate. He was the beneficiary of substantial support by online poker interests but yet to be settled is his commitment toward affirmative online gaming legislation this year.

The wily Senator, whose constituents include casinos around Nevada, has been slow to warm up to online gambling. Even in the face of vigorous support by the likes of Harrah's, Sen. Reid has done little more than give equivocal lip service toward U.S. Rep. Barney Frank's supportive bill to regulate online poker.

As of today, Senator Reid is still holding his cards close to his vest....

The online poker lobby sought to turn Sen. Reid's hotly contested re-election bid for his Senate seat into an opportunity, plowing significant support into his campaign, but Reid has continued to hold his cards close to the vest, presumably weighing the incomplete unity of the casino industry. Casino operators remain splintered over the best strategies in the development of online gambling....

Sen. Reid's continuing equivocation has been matched by Representative Frank's fading optimism toward passage of a bill during the upcoming lame duck sessions.

So I appear to have been correct: Reid has neither expressed nor demonstrated support of online poker. Here's a political truism: If a politician seeking your support during an election is unwilling to go on the record as being in favor of your interests, he's not.

Of course, the same would have been true of Angle. I would not have counted on her to support any expansion or explicit legalization of gambling. Even lacking any clear statement from her one way or the other, it's easy for me to believe that her hard-core religious views would win out over the general ideas of freedom, leaving people alone, smaller and less intrusive government, etc.

In short, neither of them could be considered a champion of liberty generally, nor of online gaming in particular. If I had to guess, Reid's loyalties will lie with the brick-and-mortar casinos, and if he ends up supporting anything at all, it will be something that favors established casino corporations entering the online realm, almost surely at the expense of established online operators such as PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker. (See, e.g., Grange95's analysis of the amendments to H.R. 2267 earlier this year.) Reid has certainly been a political friend of Nevada casinos, and I see no reason to expect him to be removed from their back pocket anytime soon.

Which brings me full circle. Reid has not been a supporter of any proposal to license, regulate, or explicitly legalize online gaming, and if one had to guess where he would throw future support, it would be toward facilitating Harrah's, MGM Mirage, etc., moving online, and making life difficult for the current online providers. (It is hard to see those two factions ever not being in opposition over legalization, as each would like to preclude competition from the other.)

So why on earth were prominent representatives of the world's two biggest online poker sites shilling for him? Either they're missing something, or I am.

More poker dreamin'

Last night I visited Barry Greenstein's mansion. No, not the one that everybody has seen on the televised tours he has done. He has a second, secret mansion. It's underneath the log flume at a major amusement park. (I was sworn to secrecy about which one.) The entire mansion is underwater. So it was a swimming tour. I had a hard time holding my breath at first, but soon I learned to breathe underwater, which is probably a really useful skill to have generally.

Also, Chris Ferguson was there. He had just received the first shipment of copies of the new book he has written, so I was one of the first to get to look through it. For some odd reason, he thought it would be more personal if they reproduced his handwritten manuscript exactly as it was--a page by page photographic reproduction. That is, you have to read the whole book in his own handwriting, mistakes and crossouts and all. He thought it was brilliant. I had my doubts, but kept them to myself.

The end.

Poker faces, #3

From this week's episode of High Stakes Poker, we see more of the faces of poker.

First, this is how you execute the fake yawn to look bored when you have pocket aces:




But then when your aces get cracked for $548,700, you first look away to hide your disgust...




...then turn back around to reluctantly settle up:








If you're Barry Greenstein and you got all your money in bad but sucked out for half a mil, you display true facial minimalism thusly:




On one of the early HSP episodes, after a big pot, Gabe Kaplan commented that Greenstein is such a consummate pro that you couldn't tell by looking at his face whether he had won or lost that hand. That's not always true--he will occasionally crack a smile or shrug his shoulders--but it is indeed usually the case, as demonstrated here. Tom Dwan, to his credit (especially given his age), is barely more animated, either in victory or defeat.

Imagine Phil Hellmuth in that spot. Oh wait--you don't have to imagine it. Just replay what happened when Dwan got lucky and cracked Hellmuth's aces, here. See if you can tell which of them is more mature, the 21-year-old or the 43-year-old.

Every time I watch Dwan play on television, I end up liking him more. I admire both his phenomenal skill and his devil-may-care attitude.

Poker gems, #222

Barry Greenstein, apparently trying to propagate a new poker catch phrase on this season's "High Stakes Poker," according to this interview with the show's co-host, A.J. Benza:


Math is idiotic.

Dreaming

So last night I was playing poker with Barry Greenstein and Dewey Tomko. Dewey pushed all-in, as did Barry. They hadn't noticed that I was still in the hand, and revealed pocket queens and pocket kings, respectively. I pointed out that I still hadn't acted, so the action held up while I made my decision.

I looked down and found something better than pocket aces: a full house. That's right, I had seven down cards, including three aces and two queens. Now, I'm not sure exactly why I got seven cards to choose from while they only got two each, but maybe that's the slight advantage they were spotting me to compensate for being more experienced players. Seems fair to me! My full house held up.

Here's the other weird thing about the game: it wasn't traditional table stakes. All-in meant whatever you had in front of you, whether or not it matched what another player had. The implication of that was that even though I was only playing a couple of hundred bucks, I won the thousands that Dewey and Barry each had! Again, I can only assume that this was part of the deal we made. We low-stakes grinders have to be given some edge against the big boys, you know!

I bet you didn't know this: Barry Greenstein uses a Mexican bank, and instead of cash he plays with these strange Mexican bank draft things. They're festooned with red and green, as on the Mexican flag. (That's right, I dream in color, all claims about how humans dream only in black and white notwithstanding.) The problem with this is that I had to sign each one in order to be able to deposit it in my bank. They were all in $100 denominations, and there were hundreds of them I had to deal with! This was all happening while I was trying to throw a dinner party for everybody I knew. Some of the guests were complaining that I was being a terrible host, neglecting them while I tried to get all of those damn Mexican checks signed for deposit.

The end.

I think I might need to have my psych medications adjusted again.

Controversy at the WPT

Hey, it's not a WSOP story for a change!

There's a World Poker Tour event going on at the Bellagio, and a bit of a controversy came up Friday between Barry Greenstein and David Williams. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it's rare that Greenstein gets involved in a dispute of any sort. Second, it's rare for the events underlying a tournament dispute to be caught on camera.

You can read the blog post and watch the video of the incident and the floor decision here. (Caveat: That URL may not be stable as they add more pages of posts to this event, and there doesn't seem to be any way to point you to the specific post. You're looking for a post titled "Floor to Table 61," so if you don't see it on this page, you may have to move forward or back a couple of pages to find it.)

A few thoughts:

First, it's good to see that Greenstein, true to form and true to how he describes himself in his book, remains calm and rational through the whole thing. He never apologizes (since he believes he didn't do anything wrong), but also never gets accusatory towards Williams, as he easily could have ("Hey, pal, my chips were right here, it's your own fault for not asking for a count!"). Williams, on the other hand, is agitated and even drops an f-bomb on the floor guy, which isn't the best way to sway a decision in your favor.

Second, I think Greenstein's explanation fits perfectly with what we observe. He seems to be recounting things both subjectively and objectively accurately.

Williams, on the other hand, I'm not sure is being completely forthright. He says that he wouldn't have called if he had known the correct amount. Well, in the first place, he never called anything. He raised both times the action came to him. He moved all in, and Greenstein called him. Maybe he just got flustered, but he is definitely not describing what occurred accurately.

More significantly, though, he claims that he would not have "called" (or, presumably, moved all in) if he had known Greenstein's stack size. This seems implausible to me. The discrepancy is only one 10,000 chip, so, essentially, whether Greenstein had about 50,000 or about 60,000. There's nearly 60,000 in the pot when Williams shoves. At that point he allegedly thought that Greenstein had only another 15,000 left, and is trying to assert that if he had known that Greenstein actually had 25,000, he would have done something different. What, folded? The notoriously aggressive and willing-to-gamble David Williams folding pocket jacks preflop in that situation strikes me as pretty dubious. And what if he had just called? The flop came 10-7-2, so he definitely would have either pushed all in or called Greenstein's all-in bet after the flop anyway, with the same result.

Williams had to know that Greenstein was absolutely pot-committed. Greenstein had raised to 35,000, so whether he had another 15,000 or 25,000 left, either way Williams had to know that Greenstein was not only willing but probably eager to get it all in. Williams had no fold equity. So when Williams had his decision to make, he thought he would be putting in about 23,500 (to call Greenstein's raise) plus 15,000 (to put Greenstein all in), or a total of 38,500 to try to win the 60,000 already in the pot plus the additional 15,000 that he figured Greenstein had behind, or a total of 75,000, for pot odds of about 1.95:1. The actual situation is that he had to put in 48,500 to win 60,000 + 25,000, for pot odds of about 1.75:1.

In other words, I think Williams was either lying or just hadn't fully thought out the situation when he claimed that he would have done something different. (He doesn't specify what different action he would have taken, but as I said before, if he just calls Greenstein's raise at that point, all the money is going in anyway when the flop comes out; folding would have been smart, but out of character for Williams.) I refuse to believe that he would have been willing to commit that much money when being offered 1.95:1, but not when being offered 1.75:1. With pocket jacks against two opponents, both out of position and both clearly willing to shove it all in, that's just asking for trouble. It was a bad move on Williams's part, just about any way you analyze it, and failing to ascertain in advance exactly how many chips he was putting up was really just a minor part of his overall problem in that spot.

Frankly, Williams's trouble began with his outlandishly sized reraise. We don't know what the blinds and antes were at this point, but we are told that the first player raised to 1475 as the opening action. Williams reraised him to 11,500, a nearly 8-fold raise! That's just silly. It's one of those raises that will only get called (or, in this instance, reraised) if he's beat. Yes, of course he was trying to isolate the original raiser, perhaps sizing his bet to be about what that player appeared to have left. But if so, it was a serious error, not taking into account that there were two players yet to act between him and his target (the blinds). Had he raised to only, say, 5000, then it might have been easier to at least stop and think about getting away from the hand when (1) Greenstein came charging over the top of him, from out of position, with the third raise, and (2) the player under the gun pushed all in. That would tend to tell me, were I in Williams's position, that J-J might be in deep doo-doo.

I think the floor decision was the correct one. There was not even an accusation, really, that Greenstein had tried to hide high-denomination chips. And Williams didn't take the simple precaution of asking for a count of Greenstein's chips before pushing. He could even have just asked Greenstein to move his hands to get a clearer view, and that would have done it. In fact, I suspect that if he had done that, so that Greenstein knew he was contemplating an all-in, Greenstein would have accommodated him and counted (or at least estimated) his remaining stack. Greenstein's bet of over half of his stack was obviously a signal to Williams that he wanted to get it all in, and he would be happy to help Williams realize that he didn't have much left behind.

Poker gems, #126

From Barry Greenstein, a guy who gets it (Card Player magazine interview, May 21, 2008; vol 21, #10, p. 48):

To me, poker is not about proving that I can beat everyone, it is about paying the bills. I want to make money so that I can enjoy my life; I have never felt that I needed to prove myself to anyone.

Almost six months

On October 30, 2007, Poker News ran a story that included this:

On a popular internet forum, Greenstein posted the following:

"I'm sure it will be less than 6 months before Congress realizes that they
need to pass legislation contrary to the UIEGA. If it hasn't already happened,
it will happen in a few weeks. I don't know how slow the process is and how much
debate there will be as to whether there is a different approach that should be
taken than the Frank and Wexler bills."

Greenstein expanded on this incredible news on a recent "The Poker Road"
show, where he explained what he witnessed during his trip.

"We met with
politicians and I can tell people that I am very confident that online poker is
going to be back strong, legal; use credit cards, bank accounts, it would really
shock me if it wasn't within the next six months."

(Full Poker News story is here: http://www.pokernews.com/news/2007/10/barry-greenstein-online-poker-to-fully-return.htm.)

When I read that I thought, Barry Greenstein may be a fine poker player, but in terms of politics, the man is completely delusional. I think he got bluffed by a bunch of politicians who are highly experienced at sensing just what constituents want to hear and saying those things, wave good-bye, and then do nothing--or even do the opposite of what they had promised.

There was just no way that Congress was going to reverse itself so soon after passing the UIGEA, let alone get Bush to sign any such legislation.

It's a bit too soon to say that I was right and Greenstein was wrong--but does anybody want to put down cold, hard cash on the proposition that Congress will, within the next 21 days enact the kind of wholesale relief that Greenstein thought was just around the corner?

You know that old joke about how you can tell a politician is lying because his lips are moving? Well, Barry, I think you just learned how to pick up a "tell" on congressmen.

Peeking at another player's cards

Somebody posted this question on the allvegaspoker.com forums:

"If a player is holding their hole cards in a way that you can see them, do you tell the player, do you keep on playing, if you tell the player and they still keep doing it do you look away, or do you still keep looking?"

I wrote up my answer and posted it. But since I'm a shameless recycler of my own material, I decided that it might make for a worthwhile post here, too. So here's my response:

I used to think that he got one warning, then all was fair game. And I wouldn't criticize somebody who took that approach. It's a pretty reasonable one.

Just "not looking" is, IMHO, not really an adequate response, because there are times when it's almost impossible NOT to see--for example, when the flasher is on your right, and you have to be looking there to see when his action is done and it's your turn.

What has changed my mind is being in situations where I'm in, say, seat 10, and I can observe that seat 6 is frequently able and willing to look at seat 5's cards. Well, I sure don't want to be in a multi-way pot with those two, when seat 6 has a huge information advantage. Therefore, when I see that happening, I first point it out to seat 5. If it happens again, I talk to the dealer (loudly enough that everybody at the table can hear it): "Can you please help seat 5 protect his hand better? Seat 6 keeps seeing what his cards are, which is an advantage the rest of us don't have."

That puts everybody on notice as to what's happening, and hopefully shames seat 6 into not looking anymore, even if 5 doesn't protect his hand better, because he feels everybody is watching him and he's not getting away with anything.

If it still keeps happening, I speak up every time I see it, hopefully annoying the dealer into doing something definitive about it. I'll even suggest that seat 5 be required to play the pot with his hand face up, since it's not fair that he showed it to seat 6 but not to the rest of us.

Anyway, since I won't tolerate a situation in which somebody else is able to peek at an opponent's cards when I can't, the "do unto others" principle, I believe, requires me to react the same way if I'm the one with the opportunity to take advantage. So basically I do the same thing if I'm the seat 6 guy. I tell seat 5 once or twice, then, if he is a slow learner, I ask the dealer to intervene.

I have ended up feeling better about this than I did with the "warn him once" solution, because I don't end up with an endless string of further decisions to make (e.g., am I leaning back just a tad further than comfort really requires, in order to get a peek? am I deliberately looking in that direction well before the action gets there, using the "I have to know when it's my turn" excuse to glean a little extra information?).

Again, I'm not going to insist that this is the only correct or defensible approach, but it has reduced the number of uncomfortable questions I have to confront myself with, which works well for me. Being naturally a kind of hyper-self-critical type, having to do less introspection and less retroactive moral second-guessing makes life easier.

I like to try to avoid difficult ethical dilemmas, and this solution makes everything clean and clear and out in the open and simple. It takes the responsibility off of me to repeatedly figure out what the right thing to do is and to do it every time.

That's the end of what I wrote in the forum. I'll just add here a quotation from Barry Greenstein's excellent book, Ace on the River, p. 84-85, where he lumps this problem together with several other ethically marginal/questionable situations:

I follow a stricter set of ethical guidelines than most of my opponents,
even if it costs me money in the short run. It has given me inner peace, and in
the long run I have actually profited from it.

...I try to be honest even in borderline areas.

Some players believe that they are justified when they disregard the rules
against someone who has cheated. Others believe it is acceptable to disregard
the rules against someone who may cheat them. Still others believe that
they are above the rules and everyone is fair game. If you are scrupulously
honest, no one is likely to cheat you in retaliation or because he thinks you
may cheat him.

Dishonesty gets in the way of a winning player. If losers are in a game
with suspicious activity, they will have a reason to stop playing. Conversely,
players will like to play with you as long as they know you play honestly. I try
to set a standard for obeying the rules against all opponents. If I can gain the
respect of the other players, they may follow my lead.

As for the illustration to this post, I thought maybe the "Dogs Playing Poker" series of paintings (Has the human race ever produced finer artwork? I think not.) had a scene of one of the dogs peeking at another one's cards surreptitiously, but, alas, it is not so. I had to settle for the card-sharing one instead.

"I hope you had it"

"I hope you had it." That's what the guy said as he folded to a large bet on the river.

This was at the Luxor last week. (I love the Luxor's spotlight; it's one of the coolest things in this city, so since I couldn't think of anything to illustrate the point I want to make, I'm taking advantage of the fact that this happened at the Luxor as my excuse for slipping in above a fine image of the light.) He showed his cards before mucking them; he had made a small flush on the turn card (something like the 7 and 8 of spades in his hand). But when a fourth spade came on the river (a second small one to join the two large ones on the board), and his bet was met with a substantial raise, he had to lay it down, obviously assuming that his opponent had made a higher flush.

Nothing about the betting action was out of the ordinary. Nor was his comment, in the sense that I've heard the same thing said many times before (though usually not in quite as menacing/threatening a tone as the Luxor guy used). But I still jotted down a note to write a post about it sometime soon, because of how stupid it is.

I would like to ask that guy, "Why do you 'hope' that he had it? What difference does it make whether he actually had your flush beat or not? Would you be happy at losing the pot if he showed you a higher flush? Would you be angry at him if it turned out he had a lower flush, or was on a pure bluff? If so, why? Once you have decided to fold, how can you possibly care about what cards he held?"

As with so many things about poker players' reactions and attitudes, I just don't get it.

But if I had to guess at what that player's response to my questions would be (assuming he didn't punch me in the nose), I suspect he might say something like this: "Well, based on his raise at the end, I assumed that he must have a higher flush, because it would be very easy for him to hold any one of the five cards that would have me beat. I hoped that he had it, because if he didn't, then my fold was a mistake, and I don't like making mistakes."

By design, poker is a game of incomplete and imperfect information. The best players in the world get bluffed sometimes, call large bets with what turn out to be weaker hands, and make other kinds of errors. It's inevitable. And, of course, we'd all like to minimize both the number of mistakes that we make and their impact on our poker income.

But did this guy really make a mistake? One answer is that we can't know, since the opponent never showed his hole cards. But I think there's a better way of looking at it.

If I had been the one in his situation, here's how I would talk to myself about it, when deciding to fold: "I don't know and can't know whether he actually has a higher flush or not. But from a lot of experience in similar situations, I know that a raise like that usually means that I'm beat. Very few players without a strong flush would be willing to raise my bet with a lower flush or as a pure bluff. So maybe 80% of the time I'm beat, 10% of the time I'm facing a dolt who actually thinks that his lowly 5 of spades gives him the winner here, and 10% of the time the raise is coming from a maniac who will raise with zilch or an exceptionally good player who has picked up on some small sign of weakness that I'm giving off here. I can't reliably distinguish between those various scenarios based on any information available to me at the moment, so I have to go with the probabilities. If I call, I'll win maybe 20% of the time and lose maybe 80%. That makes this an easy laydown."

Of course, I don't actually have to run those words through my brain; I've been in that situation enough times that I can just take the shortcut from the facts of the situation to the conclusion about what the right thing to do is. But if I found myself, for whatever reason, obsessing about whether I had made the correct move there (and, occasionally, I can get irrationally fixated on such things), that script is what I would tell myself.

At the end of Barry Greenstein's superb book, Ace on the River, he poses a series of demonically, agonizingly difficult poker situations. In discussing what he actually did when faced with these conundrums, and whether he did the right thing, he makes a distinction between the "correct" play and the "perfect" play. The "perfect" play is what you would do if you could magically see your opponent's hole cards. But since that information is not available to us when it would be useful, he puts more emphasis on the "correct" play, which is based on a rational analysis of the range of hole cards that this opponent might be holding, with some weighting as to the relative probability of each.

The correct move then is based on a weighted sum of what would be the "perfect" play against each of the opponent's possible holdings. If you make every poker decision based on that kind of assessment, you will minimize errors as much as humanly possible, and thereby maximize your poker income. If you can accomplish that, then it makes no difference whatsoever whether you made the "perfect" play in any specific case; as long as you are making more "correct" decisions than your opponents, you will win their money in the long run.

When you hold only a small flush, with four flush cards on the board, and somebody raises your river bet, the "correct" move against most opponents (leaving aside for the moment the exceptions that would tend to give one pause, such as the morons, the maniacs, and the ultra-drunks) is to fold, even if once in a while the "perfect" move would be to call or even reraise. The player whose comment inspired this little rant made the correct play. The key concept that he is lacking is the realization that he made the correct play even if his opponent was bluffing, because if he called or raised every time he found himself in the identical spot, he would lose a lot of money over a lifetime.

If I had been in his shoes and that opponent showed me the higher flush, I would not feel any sense of joy or pride or relief--just an unexcited, ho-hum, "yeah, that's pretty much what I guessed" resignation. If, on the other hand, he showed me a lower flush or a bluff, I would not feel enraged, nor would I kick myself for not having been able to see through the backs of his cards. I'd just shrug, think to myself, "Oh well, these things happen," try to make a mental note of any motions or gestures he had been making that might serve as a sign of weakness or bluffing in the future, then let it go and start thinking about the next hand.*

To "hope" that one's opponent was not bluffing is just as silly and pointless as Phil Laak praying that the community cards to come after he folds do not turn out to be ones that would have helped him (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/whats-done-is-done.html).

To the player who uttered the words in the title of this post: Sir, you did the right thing. Too bad your emotions blinded you to that fact.


*Full Tilt Poker has some great television advertisements. One of them showed Howard Lederer losing a pot to an idiot who dances around, whooping it up, celebrating his victory the way so many buffoons think is cool these days. All the time, Howard sits there impassively, unperturbed. In a voiceover he says, "He's not thinking about the next hand. You should be." That's a great, great piece of advice. What did you just learn about that opponent? What mistakes might his new state of mind cause him to be more prone to make now? What did losing the hand change about your own table image? Did your relative chip stacks shift enough that you now have to adjust tactics accordingly? And how might you be able to exploit all of these altered dynamics over the next few minutes? With that ad, Howard provided me with one of the best mental/emotional tools I've ever come across for preventing myself from going on tilt after a bad hand: Start thinking calmly and rationally about the next hand, even before the cards are dealt.

Poker gems, #65

Barry Greenstein, from Ace on the River, p. 42.

I have come to expect to play with some people who are not very likeable. Most of them are not my friends, so I don't get upset if they don't act in a civil fashion. It comforts me that I am taking money from flawed people rather than from nice people. Players who are crybabies deserve something to cry about. A successful poker player looks for any flaw in his opponents' personalities and uses it as motivation to beat them out of their money. Fortunately, it is easy to find flaws. I like to beat up on the bad winners, bad losers, slowrollers, dealer-abusers, chauvinists, racists, egomaniacs, lesson-givers, coffee-housers, loudmouths, etc. The only nice people I want to beat are rich people who will not suffer financially. Poker is entertainment for them, and my poker wins are only a byproduct.

"Everybody wanna be in the picture, get up and go to the other side of the table!"

There's a fairly rare neurological condition known as "unilateral neglect," usually the result of a stroke, in which the patient loses the entire concept of either "left" or "right." Such people cannot see things in one half of their visual field, cannot turn toward that side, cannot even comprehend that there is another half of everything that they are not perceiving. They eat only the food that is on the half of the plate they can see. A woman with this condition will apply makeup to just half of her face.

Back in the days of my health-care career, I saw a man with this condition in the hospital a couple of days after he had had a stroke. He was eating his breakfast. His left hand was plopped down in his cereal bowl. I suggested that he might want to move it somewhere else. He insisted that it was not his hand! He genuinely could not grasp the fact that he had a left side of his body, so even when he turned his head so that he could see the hand in his bowl, he concluded that it must not be his. It was one of the saddest, but most fascinating, things I ever witnessed.

Patients with this condition, when presented with an empty circle and asked to fill in the details of the face of a clock will commonly make a drawing like those pictured above--either just half of the numbers in approximately their correct position, or all 12 numbers crammed into one side.

What does all of this have to do with poker? Well, not a lot, really, except for a bizarre incident that happened a couple of days ago at Harrah's, which reminded me of all of those distorted clock face drawings I've seen in textbooks.

I was one of the players on the list for $1-$2 no-limit hold'em. They were ready to start up a new table and called off the names. When this happens, sometimes it takes forever for the players to assemble and get going; other times there's a mad rush because everybody wants to grab their favorite seat. This time, it was sort of in between.

I took seat 9, on the dealer's right (Harrah's plays 9-handed, rather than 10), my usual favored place. The two seats to my right were occupied by two Russian friends. The first one to the table had been an elderly gentleman, who plopped down in seat 5, squarely in front of the dealer. Other people filled in seats one, two, three, and six, but the guy who took six left his chips there and went off to the restroom.

The last one to arrive was a young woman. Strangely, she pulled the chair out from the four-spot and wedged it in between number five and absent-guy's seat six. Why did she do this, instead of just taking the four seat where it was? Well, I don't know, but I have a strong suspicion. She quickly proved herself to be a smart, aggressive player, all business, clearly there for no reason other than to make money. Chips tend to flow around the table clockwise; that is, I will generally win more chips from the players in the seats just to my right than from other places at the table. This is because I have a positional advantage on them most of the time. Therefore, all else being equal, I'd like to have the softest, easiest targets on my immediate right. I think that this young woman made a stereotyped judgment (which turned out to be correct) that the elderly man was going to be the easiest player to bully, and she wanted him on her right. If she had taken the four seat, he would have been on her left, from which position it would be hardest to win his chips.

Anyway, when Mr. Six came back to the table, we had the bizarre picture of six of the nine players all crammed into the right half of the table, and only three players on the left half. This clearly wasn't going to work. The dealer tried to get the five seat to scoot to his right and become seat four. But he wasn't moving. He was a lot crankier about it than he needed to be, but he had two excellent points. First, he had been the first one there. Second, he chose that position because he had poor eyesight and it was the only seat from which he could clearly see the community cards. In my opinion, all players should be willing to defer to a need such as that.

I wouldn't really have minded moving, but that wouldn't have helped, because the two Russian guys on my right did not want to shift from seven and eight into eight and nine. (Most people dislike the one and nine or ten seats, next to the dealer. I'm weird; they're my favorites.)

The dealer gave up trying to manage the situation and called for the floor. Floor guy, unfortunately, doesn't ask the obvious question: "Who was last to arrive?" Instead, he just sees that the older man and the young woman are both spaced correctly for seats five and six, so he tells the guy crammed into what had been position six (now back from the restroom) to pick up his chair and move over to four.

A young woman in seat two tried to help by pointing out that the aggressive woman was the cause of the problem, because she was last to arrive, and had picked up a chair and squeezed it in where she didn't belong. The floor guy quite rudely cuts her off in mid-sentence. He doesn't want to hear it. He snidely says, "Thank you, I'm handling it."

Eventually, the guy who had been in the restroom agrees to move over, so it gets sorted out, but it was an embarrassing, juvenile situation for a while.

Clearly the chief culprit was the late-arriving young woman whose focus (apparently) on picking a victim for her aggression overrode all sense of fairness and propriety.

The poker book that has been most influential in how I approach the game is Barry Greenstein's Ace on the River. Most of what he writes about just isn't found anywhere else, particularly discussions about various aspects of the life of a professional player. He suggests that several strategies which are actually cooperative rather than competitive are good for professional players to embrace. He specifically includes (p. 159):

Not obsessively getting the best seat position. If you are jumping around
the table, continually competing with other players for best position on live
ones [i.e., the most unskilled players], you will make the game into a circus
and cause the live ones to feel uncomfortable.

The young woman from Harrah's, I think, needs to absorb some of Greenstein's lessons.


Incidentally, did you recognize the movie quotation that formed the title of this post? If not, see the scene it comes from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA1sx-vyWVk. In addition to the distorted clock-face drawings, this classic Mel Brooks scene was what came to my mind when I saw nearly everybody sitting on one side of the table. Sadly, Leonardo da Vinci was nowhere in sight.

Phil Hellmuth is bad at math

I thought I couldn't dislike Phil Hellmuth more than I already did. Turns out I was wrong about that. In fact, I'm thinking now that my capacity for disliking him may actually be infinite. Still, I didn't know, until last night, that I would end up including "poor math skills" on my list of reasons for disliking him.

On this week's installment of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" an interesting situation came up. The hand itself was pretty unremarkable, as you can see from the cards shown in the accompanying screenshot. What was interesting was whiny Phil Hellmuth's negotiations for "insurance" on the hand.

In this game, $67,000 pots are bigger than average, but not all that unusual. In most episodes there are one or two pots that climb into the $100,000-$200,000 territory. So to start off with, it's strange for a player to be so afraid of losing that he'd seek insurance on a pot of this size. Nobody else at the table would even think of it--only Phil, who, for some reason, just can't stand losing a biggish pot. This is particularly strange, since he is up by a couple hundred grand for this session, as he has already bragged.

But OK, it's his right in this game to try to reduce the chance that Eli Elezra will catch a lucky card and steal this pot from him. They could agree to run the last card twice, for example, and it would be highly unlikely that Eli would luck out twice in a row, so Phil would be almost guaranteed at least half of the pot. Another possibility is one that Eli explicitly offered: give Eli a quarter of the pot and take three-quarters for himself. I've seen Phil make this kind of arrangement when he's in a dominant position and all-in against Barry Greenstein in a previous season; if I recall correctly, Phil was something like a 90% favorite, and Greenstein agreed to give him 80% of the pot, and they didn't even play out the rest of the cards. In Greenstein's more rational view, he'll take the expected value that Phil is giving up, and not worry about the variance.

For some reason, though, Phil this time wants to go the "insurance" route. That is, he wants to pay somebody a small amount if he wins the hand and, in exchange, be paid a larger amount in the event that Eli draws out on him. This is where it starts to get strange.

I have the episode on my hard drive, so I can play it back and do a verbatim transcript. Phil says, "Queen is a chop. All right, I'm just going to insure against a nine or a jack."

Here's Phil's first mistake. It's true that a queen on the river chops the pot, because both players would have two pairs, kings and queens with a 10 kicker. But Phil fails to notice that a 10 also produces a split pot, because it gives both players tens and kings with a queen kicker.

Phil continues: "So it's eight outs.... 36 to eight is the actual odds. I'm a 4 1/2 to 1 favorite."

That's his second and third mistakes. Eli actually has only seven outs to win the pot outright: the four remaining jacks to make a straight, and the three remaining 9s to make a better two pairs. Additionally, Phil is strangely counting the cards that make for a chopped pot as being on his side. (Sam Farha folded a 9 and a 10, which would affect the calculation if Phil knew about them, but he doesn't, so we'll consider them as unknowns, treating them the same as the ones still in the dealer's hand.)

The actual odds, not counting the queens and 10s, are 31 cards for Phil and seven cards for Eli, which is 4.4:1 (which, by coincidence, happens to be close to what Phil said, though he was wrong in how he got there). If you account for the pot-splitting cards by adding them to both players' sides of that ratio, it's 37:13, or only 2.8:1.

Phil asks for insurance at 4:1. "I'm 4 1/2 to 1. I'll take 4 to 1. I'm letting you have above 10%. You're getting 12 1/2% juice. That's pretty good."

Brandon Adams takes him up on it for $40,000 to $10,000. That is, Hellmuth is to pay Adams $10,000 if he wins the hand, and collect $40,000 from Adams if Elezra sucks out on him. Then Farha joins the deal for an additional $8000 to $2000.

The dealer puts out the river card: a queen, and the pot is split.

Now Hellmuth says, "It's a split pot, nobody has to pay any insurance."

Farha objects, but then both Jamie Gold and Daniel Negreanu remind him that Phil specified that he was only insuring against a jack or a 9, and Farha, for some reason, accepts that.

But that's what is most strange here. You would expect Adams and Farha to collect their insurance payment, because the event against which they were providing insurance did not occur. Phil said he wanted insurance against a jack or a 9, and none came--so he owes his "premium" to his insurers. What's more, he was unambiguously including the pot-chopping cards as being for him in his proposal, when he claimed that he was a 36:8 favorite. He never said that a chopped pot would mean no money going either way as part of his offer.

So one of two things happened: The insurance deal was made with the understanding that a split pot meant Phil owed insurance, and he reneged on his end of it, or he misrepresented the terms of the offer. By coincidence, he happened to state the odds approximately correctly for the situation in which a chopped pot meant no payment either way, but his explanation clearly included the implication that he would pay up in the case of a chopped pot. It's a very strange situation, and I wonder whether debate among the participants continued after the taping stopped, and whether any money ended up changing hands. (This was the last hand of the night.)

However they worked it out amongst themselves, we're left with these conclusions: Phil Hellmuth doesn't know how to count an opponent's outs. He's a high-stakes dweeb who, uniquely among these players, can't tolerate the swings that inevitably come with playing for these amounts. Finally, he either misrepresented the offer he was presenting to Adams and Farha or welched on it after the hand was over.

If you didn't have enough reasons to dislike Hellmuth before, there's at least three more for you.

Addendum, October 30, 2007:

I've been discussing the math of this with a bunch of other people at the http://www.twoplustwo.com/ forums, and one of them just posted a link to this entry from Hellmuth's blog, apparently made soon after the taping of the show in question: http://www.philhellmuth.com/phil-hellmuth-poker-blog.html?id=1866 In this post, he says, "Later on, I figured out that I owed $12,000 to Brandon ($10,000) and Sammy ($2,000), because they insured the very last hand of the night. By the way, Brandon doesn't even know that I owe him $10,000, because I decided that I owe him after the fact! He will be pleasantly surprised, that's for sure."

Glad to know that he finally did the right thing. Still hard to know why they didn't get it sorted out on the spot.


Addendum, November 4, 2007

Brandon Adams just posted a note about this situation to the twoplustwo forums:

Yo, I should have commented on the Hellmuth insurance thing earlier. First off,
Phil is one of my favorite guys in poker. He's not cheating anyone. I'm going
off memory here....The deal was only partially clear in my head at the time of
the insurance. it was obviously a good deal for me. when we chopped, i didn't
know what we were supposed to do, though since insurance naturally is protection
against something bad happening (in this case, a bad beat) and something bad
didn't happen, my first thought was that a chop went to me. but then i started
thinking about it and i realized that the deal was good for me even if a chop
was a chop. so i was confused and decided to let it go. this is just what i
remember thinking... as of now, i have no recollection of the cards and i
haven't read the above. The next day phil runs into mori at the coffee shop and
tells mori that he should have paid me. Phil emailed me to tell me he owed me
10k. I thought about it some more and told him not to pay me. I said this b/c if
i had won with a chop, then that implied some ridiculous vig for me (i still had
a decent edge counting a chop as a chop). He insisted on paying me, I told him
we'd flip a coin for it, then he said he'd pay me $6k. he paid me $6k the first
time i saw him at the series. ba

This is pretty reasonable of Adams. Here's the math on what he's saying: Suppose the deal had been explicitly made that no insurance money went either way in the event of a chopped pot. There are 31 cards that win the whole pot for Phil, 7 for Eli, so the odds against an insurer having to pay out are 31:7, or 4.4:1. That's what Adams is calling the "decent edge counting a chop as a chop." On the other hand, if a chopped pot meant that Phil still had to pay his insurance "premium," then there are 37 cards on which he has to pay it (the 31 that are an outright win, plus the 6 cards that result in a split pot), and only 7 on which he collects insurance. 37:7 is 5.3:1, which is what Adams is here calling "some ridiculous vig for me" (32%, actually, compared to the 11% he decided was "decent").

In any event, it sounds like they ended up settling it like gentlemen.

Poker players are political wimps

In the nearly one year since passage of the abominable "Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act" (UIGEA) I have overheard quite a bit of discussion on the subject of politics around the poker table, as well as on TV, among well-known professional players, on "High Stakes Poker" and "Poker After Dark" (the only two poker programs that have a lot of table talk). I am repeatedly astounded by how players so readily forgive--or forget?--those who tried to make online poker difficult or impossible to play.

I don't play online much, because I'm just not very good at it. (Not that anybody cares, but I think the main reasons are that (1) live players give off oodles of information, and I seem not to function well without it, (2) I get bored and impatient with nothing to do but stare at the screen, and feel compelled to play hands that I should just fold; real people are a lot more interesting to watch, (3) players enter and leave virtual tables much more quickly than real ones, not giving me the time I need to figure out how they're playing. At least I'm in good company; both Daniel Negreanu and Barry Greenstein admit that they're similarly handicapped.) But there aren't very many more victimless "crimes" than sitting at home in one's underwear playing $0.05-0.10 limit hold'em on the computer. It's insane for "the land of the free" to be making this activity of questionable legality and putting up hurdles for casual players to jump over.

I guess what brought this to a head for me was hearing Daniel Negreanu and Doyle Brunson chatting, during a "Poker After Dark" episode, about presidential candidates, with both of them endorsing Barack Obama. There aren't many people in this country who were more negatively affected by the UIGEA than these two. Both of them had online poker sites that were about a year old, and both operations went belly-up shortly after the legislation was signed. I have no idea how much money they may have lost, but it must have been millions of dollars of potential revenue. And then they're openly talking about their support for a guy who voted to close them down!!! Have you guys lost all sense of reason???

The usual canard is that this was "must-pass" legislation, because Senator Bill Frist, seeking to polish his reputation with social conservatives for an abortive presidential candidacy, used his position as majority leader to push an unrelated bill about port security into conference committee, where he attached the UIGEA. This forced members of Congress in both houses to vote on the whole package. (Never mind what might have been done in that conference committee to prevent the attachment.) So even poker players who are reasonably informed about how this law came into being tend to go easy on the politicians: They had to vote for the port security legislation, and the online gambling unfortunately came along for the ride.

I don't buy it. I won't let them off the hook that easily. There is no such thing as a "must-pass" bill, in my view. Suppose that instead of a gambling provision Frist had attached, say, a bill repealing the 19th amendment (which gave women the right to vote). Would any senator or representative have said, "Well, we have to pass the port security stuff, so I guess we'll just have to hope that women don't notice this other little provision"? Of course not. They first would have prevented Frist from attaching that amendment in conference committee, or, failing that, they would have denounced it from the hilltops, voted against it, then quickly pushed the port security bill back through committees and to a floor vote, this time unencumbered by the anti-suffrage bits.

So why didn't they have the fortitude to do the same when the unrelated amendment was about gambling? Because they either actually liked the measure, or at least decided that few of their constituents would care deeply enough about it for it to hurt them at the next election. To be blunt, even those who might have thought the bill to be bad public policy put their fingers to the wind and decided that they could be more hurt by political opponents saying "He voted against making our ports secure" than "He voted to make it really difficult to put money into one's online poker account."

They could have kept the ports bill and the gambling bill separate if they wanted to. They just didn't care about the matter enough. I, for one, think that they should have to answer for such lack of integrity when it comes to protecting individual liberties.

So who voted for the combined bill? Here's the full, official legislative history of the bill. (The part about online gambling is the “Conference Report” stuff on 9/29/06.) http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR04954:@@@X

Here’s the roll-call vote from the House of Representatives:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll516.xml. For Nevada residents, you’ll note the names of Jim Gibbons (now our illustrious governor, with more scandals accruing before he took office than most governors get in a full term), Jon Porter, and Shelley Berkley all voting for the bill. In the Senate, they were so cowardly that they passed it by “unanimous consent,” meaning that there was no roll-call vote recorded. Therefore, every member of the Senate gets the blame for it.

Even the politician I like the most, Ron Paul (http://www.ronpaul2008.com/) (I'm a strongly libertarian kind of guy--live and let live, and all that jazz), voted for it. I was surprised to learn that last night when I was poking around at the details of the history, because I've heard it said and seen it written that he voted against it. To be precise, he voted against a similar separate bill that the House defeated earlier in 2006. But as the links above show, he voted for it when it was attached to the ports security bill. Shame on you, Ron Paul.

But at least he has since then come out strongly in favor of either repealing this legislation or reducing its impact by carving out a provision for licensed gaming companies. There are at least two bills in the House that would have such an effect. See http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-2046 (listing Paul as a co-sponsor) and http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-2610.

Now, I'm opposed to federally licensing gambling establishments, because it's just not a proper or necessary role of the federal government, and it will inevitably lead to the licensees being subjected to more and more regulation as time goes by. That's the way of all federal regulations and licensing, unfortunately. But at least I can be confident that if outright repeal of the UIGEA ever managed to get put to a vote, Paul would unquestionably support it, as either a congressman or as president. See http://www.gambling911.com/Ron-Paul-Internet-Gambling-042707.html.

But what about the other presidential candidates? It's hard to say, beyond the fact that all of the ones who are currently senators or repesentatives voted for the UIGEA, and therefore must be presumed to be enemies of poker players, absent strong contrary evidence. And, frankly, there just isn't much contrary evidence, except for Paul.

The very fact that it's hard to find clear, definitive position statements from any of them supports the theory that they are counting on this not being much of an issue in the presidential election. For those willing to invest the reading time, there have been at least three lengthy threads in the 2+2 poker forums on the subject, though, as always, the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low, and nobody seems to have found much clear information:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=11872919&an=0&page=0#Post11872919

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=12016409&page=0&fpart=1&vc=1

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=10351539&an=0&page=2#Post10351539

Bill Richardson appears to be the only candidate, aside from Paul, who has openly supported repeal of the UIGEA. See http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2007-04-30-4052419200_x.htm (page down to the third story).

Rudy Giuliani has reportedly received the most money from the gaming industry. But that's hard to interpret. It was the brick-and-mortar casinos that first pushed through the law several years back that made it nearly impossible to use credit cards to fund online gambling accounts. (And their lobbyists did this on the ironic grounds of the immorality of expanded gambling!) Unless Harrah's, Station Casinos, MGM/Mirage, Wynn, etc., start running online operations themselves, they're likely to see Internet gaming as competition to be stifled, rather than as part of the same industry. Giuliani was definitely part of the crackdown on New York underground poker rooms, so his track record is pretty suspect.

As for the other candidates, it's a crap shoot (pardon the pun). They haven't committed themselves. But to me that's pretty telling. If a politician is dodging an issue that he knows a relatively small constituency cares passionately about, it is most likely because his position will anger that group, so he decides it's better to keep quiet. In my view, this is definitely in the "if you're not clearly with us, you must be against us" category.

If you love poker and you love personal liberty, you can't logically support any current presidential candidate except for Ron Paul or Bill Richardson. As far as I can tell, there aren't any other supporters out there. If there are, we have to wonder why they're keeping mum about it.

While I'm on this rant, just a word about one of the other related things I read in poker magazines frequently. The relatively new Poker Players Alliance (http://www.pokerplayersalliance.org/) is actively seeking federal regulation in exchange for recognized legality. Other writers repeatedly urge Congress to "regulate and tax" online poker specifically, or all online gambling generally. I think this is dangerous and completely wrong-headed.

As I said before, regulation always begets more regulation. Regulation means expense to the operators--and in this case that would translate to lower profits for the players. Opponents of anything who can't get it completely banned always go for regulation, incrementally making the regulations more onerous and expensive as time goes by. Look at abortion, cigarette smoking, alcohol, nuclear energy, mining, logging, or a zillion other examples. Inviting federal regulation is letting the camel's nose into the tent, and sooner or later, inevitably, the whole camel will be in there.

We also don't need regulation to protect us. The businesses that run online gaming risk bankruptcy if they are caught cheating or letting others cheat, because their customers will flit away in a heartbeat. They have much more to fear from loss of their investments than from not following every federal regulation. Despite the number of people I have heard calling for regulation, I haven't heard even one specific proposal of what these folks think the regulations should do, in terms of protecting players, that the online poker sites aren't already doing. Not even a phone-book-sized set of regulations would make me feel any safer about online play than I already do.

The same is true, but even more so, for those who casually say "regulate and tax it." Taxation would even more surely sound the death knell. The amount of the tax would simply get ratcheted up over time, and we would be spending our political energy trying to prevent that creep. But it would happen anyway. Just look at how the Nevada legislature treats the casinos--as cash cows to hit up for more revenue every time there's a budget shortfall. Just look at how tobacco taxes have moved over the years. The so-called "sin taxes" are the very easiest ones for politicians to support. If you think it's hard to make money playing poker now, when even good players have a fairly small percentage return on total wagers, wait until the feds hit you with, say, a 10% tax on every pot, on top of the house rake. Of course, it would start out at, say, just 1%, but there's no doubt in my mind that it would slowly increase until nearly all of the profit has been squeezed out of the game.

The message from poker players to politicians needs to be this: Leave us the hell alone. Don't ban it, don't make the financial transactions illegal or difficult, don't regulate it, don't tax it. Leave it alone. Let us play our little games in peace. You get your share from our income taxes, and that's more than enough.

As others have pointed out, it is now easier and more clearly legal to play online poker in Russia than in the United States. That's crazy. It should be unthinkable. It has come to this because we poker players haven't exercised any political muscle. Politicians have no reason to seek the support--or, alternatively, fear the wrath--of poker players, as they do with the NRA, the AARP, labor unions, etc. We're political wimps. That has to change.


Addendum:

I posted a link to this rant on the http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ forums, and soon thereafter found posted this interesting and thoughtful response, which is well worth reading, if this whole subject interests you:
http://www.allvegaspoker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=27128#27128

Addendum, November 18, 2007:

I just stumbled across this nice summary of where both parties' presidential candidates stand on internet gambling, so far as it is known:

https://pokerplayersalliance.org/news/newsandarticles_article.php?DID=289

Poker gems, #13

From Barry Greenstein's great book, Ace on the River, p. 39:

An abusive player collapsed at the table, a victim of an apparent heart attack. He was moved away from the table and paramedics were called, but none of the players offered assistance and the game continued. A week later the abusive player was back playing and arguing with everybody. One of the other players, Sam Perleman, apologized to the table. He said, "It's all my fault." Someone asked, "Sam, are you the one who saved him?" "No," Sam replied, "But I was right there when the paramedics were reviving him and I didn't pull them off."

Mr. Destiny

Yesterday was an interesting day. It's the first time I have shelled out for the pay-per-view live feed from the World Series of Poker main event final table. I watched all 15+ hours of it.

It's hard to know for sure until we see the broadcast with the hole cards, but it looks like in Jerry Yang we've just crowned our most unskilled player ever as world champion. It appears that he's a far, far worse player than the other two relatively unprepared amateurs, Robert Varkonyi and Chris Moneymaker. I think that when those two won, they were both better players than I currently am, though they have taken licks from all around because they simply weren't in the same league as the poker world had become used to seeing in the title role. I'm no poker genius; I think I have a pretty good handle on where I am in the poker food chain, and it's just barely high enough to be a long-term winner at low-stakes games rather than a loser or a break-even player. I wouldn't consider myself a better player than anybody I saw at yesterday's final table, except for Jerry Yang.

So how did he win? Well, to hear him tell it, God ordained it to be so.

From early in the final table, when he was all-in with another player, he could be heard saying things like, "Lord, you have a destiny for me today," and "Father, I will use the money to glorify your name." He gave the Big Dealer in the Sky further credit in his closing interview with Norman Chad.

I have to wonder about this. Does God really care who wins poker tournaments? If so, does he actually make his picks not only during the course of the tournament, but right at the very moment that a hand is being played out? If not, then it would seem to me that entreaties made while waiting for the last cards to be dealt out are pretty useless; the deck has already acquired a particular arrangement, and that has already determined what cards will be coming. There would, then, seem to be little point in pleading to God to favor one person over another that late in the course of things.

And, by the way, does it really help your case to tell God what you plan to do with the money? That is, can an omnipotent being really be bought off with a bribe? Isn't he able to bring into existence all the money he might need to carry out whatever his plans are, without needing 10% of Jerry Yang's winnings? What if Yang's opponent at the same time promised God to donate, say, 20% of the prize money to noble charities, or to "glorifying God's name" (whatever that might mean)? Does he then decide on whose behalf to intervene based on who will be giving him the biggest cut? If so, then why didn't Barry Greenstein win, a guy who would have donated 100% of the money to children's charities? (Oh, I know: God hates Jews because they killed Jesus, right?)

Does Mr. Yang actually believe that if he says just the right prayer, God will miraculously change the order of the cards in the deck that the dealer is holding? This is just as nutty, frankly, as Shannon Elizabeth invoking the "law of attraction" in an attempt to make it more likely that cards favorable to her will be dealt out (which absurdity was shown clearly on NBC's "Heads-Up Poker Championship"). And if God really does step in in this manner, it seems to me that it's a pretty clear violation of the one-person-to-a-hand rule. After all, if it's illegal to ask a friend in the stands whether to make a tough call or to fold, how much more wrong is it to get an omnipotent supernatural being to alter the order of the cards in the deck after the shuffle?

On the other hand, maybe God really does help Mr. Yang. Maybe that's how he knew to call Lee Watkinson's all-in reraise with just a stinky little A-9: God was whispering in his ear (in a voice like that of Charleton Heston, no doubt), "He's only got A-7, so you're about 75% to win. And besides, I've peeked at the deck with my x-ray vision, and there's no 7 coming. Go for it." That would be a pretty darn handy way to win poker tournaments, all right. Maybe it's the only way Mr. Yang can win. In fact, come to think of it, maybe that's what is meant by the "glorifying your name" business: Having him as the game's ambassador for the next year tells the world, "Look, God is so powerful that he can even make a really, really bad player the world champion! Walking on water is child's play next to that kind of miracle!"

But if so, I still have to wonder how God goes about picking his winners. After watching Mr. Yang, it certainly isn't on the basis of skill and preparation. Nor is it based on conduct at the table. He wasn't over the top or downright rude, but the loud cheering every time a card fell that was favorable to him just isn't cricket, as the Brits say. When you see Phil Ivey, Chris Ferguson, Doyle Brunson, Dan Harrington, Greg Raymer, Allen Cunningham, John Juanda, T.J. Cloutier, or other classy guys start doing this, then you'll know that the rules of conduct have changed (for the worse), and it's OK. Until then, keep a lid on it, dude. It's obnoxious and annoying.

Look, I have nothing against people in general, or poker players in particular, being religious. Daniel Negreanu has said several times in his blog that when he feels his relationship with God is out of sorts or taking a lower priority than it should, his poker results suffer. OK--so be it. I certainly can't prove that that's not so. And believing that God will help you win a tournament is, objectively, no crazier than, say, Gavin Smith thinking that not cutting his hair gives him better luck than when he cuts it. On the other hand, it is, objectively, no saner and no more rational than thinking that a certain fat denizen of the North Pole brought the presents under your Christmas tree in a magical sleigh pulled by eight flying reindeer.

But putting your slightly nutty beliefs on international display in a manner that opens all sorts of unanswerable questions of logic and theology just isn't smart. It just makes you look foolish, as if you haven't given more than passing thought to what you're doing and its implications for how you think divinity operates. Keep it to yourself.

Addendum, added 7/20/07:

I just saw this article in the Las Vegas Sun:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sports/2007/jul/19/566665723.html

More evidence for Yang's peculiar thoughts about how God works is found therein. Note that apparently divine omniscience doesn't mean that God necessary understands poker, because he needs Mr. Yang to tell him what specific cards to have the dealer pull out of the deck in order to make him a winner.

Once, for instance, he risked a big chunk of his stack of chips with just a
pair of 4s and ran smack into an opponent's higher pocket pair.

It was then Yang - like a lot of poker players, including some who are probably more
reluctant to admit it - turned to prayer.

"I kept saying, 'Lord, give me a set,' " Yang said, using the common poker term for three-of-a-kind. "And there was a 4 on the flop."

Another time, Yang needed an ace or a 4 on the final
card to fill a straight and extend his tournament life.
"I said, "Lord, if you want me to win this, put the ace or the 4 on the river,' " Yang said. A 4 came, and Yang lived to fight on.

"I've seen miracles," he said.

Perfect poker

A couple of weeks ago I was at a table at the Orleans when I overheard a conversation between a player and a dealer. The dealer expressed to the player his surprise at learning that the player had placed only second in a recent tournament. The surprise was apparently because the player had gone into the final table with a substantial chip lead. The player, explaining his disappointing second-place finish, naturally proceeded with a series of bad-beat stories, complaining about what terrible players his opponents were, etc. The player--for whom the terms "loudmouth," "braggart," and "egomaniac" are woefully inadequate--concluded by griping that he had played "seven hours of perfect poker," only to fall victim to other players' stupidity.

I couldn't help myself: I laughed out loud. "Perfect poker." As Bill Cosby used to say, "R-i-i-i-i-i-i-ght."

Imagine what that would entail, were it humanly possible. It would mean perfect reads on every one of one's opponents' hole cards every hand. It would mean never giving away a speck of information about one's own hand beyond what is conveyed in the size of a bet (i.e., never a bit of hesitation or haste in the timing of a bet, not a hint of any facial expression related to the hand, not a trace of weakness or strength in the tone of one's voice). It would mean never betting, say, $100 when a weaker opponent would actually have called as much as $101.

I do not believe that any person is capable of pulling this off more than on a rare, exception hand--and it's damn hard to know that one has done it, because you just don't get the information you'd need to be able to ascertain that it had been accomplished.

I am impressed with the far more realistic assessment that Barry Greenstein makes in his superb book, "Ace on the River" (pp. 204-205):

I typically make more than twenty plays in a session that in retrospect I
think were mistakes. Some are clear blunders that cost me the pot or caused me
to lose more money than I should have on a hand. Others are more subtle. Maybe I
should have check-called or check-raised instead of betting. Sometimes I should
have folded instead of calling, or called or raised instead of folding. Yet, I
have played with people who have told me they play almost flawlessly. I have
never respected the play of anyone who has said that....

I believe the game of poker is so complex that we all make many bad
decisions, but the best players win by making fewer than others. It reminds me
of what Lee Trevino said when he was asked if he chokes. He admitted, "Of course
I choke, but I look around and see other players choking worse than I do. That's
why I'm able to win golf tournaments."

Seven hours of perfect poker, my ass. It can't be done.

Still, I'm happy to have heard the guy say this. It's exceptionally revealing about his psychological state. First, he has a huge ego. Second, that ego is tied to his success at poker--the outcome more than how he actually plays. Third, his ego is fragile enough that he desperately needs the accolades of others--else why bother trying to convince everybody that he's so good? (The really great players don't need to talk people into believing in their skill.) Fourth, he's incapable of honest self-assessment, which perforce means that he's incapable of assessing others accurately; he'll likely think that I'm a terrible player, no matter what I do, which is just fine with me, because then when I win hands, he's that much more likely to go on tilt as a result. Fifth, he believes that any loss is due to bad luck and/or bad play by others, which means that he'll never, ever improve; after all, how can you learn to play better than "perfect"?

I'd almost feel sorry for the guy, if it weren't so much fun to ridicule his pathetic condition.

Just show your cards already

Another incident from yesterday's session at Mandalay Bay:

Another no-limit table breaks up and we inherit 3 new players. One of them quickly shows himself to be a loose-aggressive type, in almost every hand, betting and raising at nearly every opportunity. When there's a showdown, he always tries to hesitate to see if the other player(s) will show first, and he mucks without showing if he doesn't have the winner. In other words, even though he's playing a lot of hands, I'm not getting a lot of feedback on what he's playing, and he's the hardest kind of opponent to put on a specific hand.

I decide to test the waters against him when I'm on the button with Q-10 offsuit.* I call his raise, and have him heads-up with position on my side. Flop is A-Q-x. He bets. My decision basically comes down to whether I believe he has an ace or not. For all practical purposes, if he does, I'm beat, and if he doesn't, I'm ahead. I think it's most likely that he doesn't have it, so I re-raise all-in. He calls. The turn and river cards are blanks.

The dealer asks to see the hands. Normally, I'm not at all reluctant to show--in fact, that's the whole point of this rant, how some players try to protect their hole cards as if they were top-secret classified documents, which just slows down the game and irritates everybody. But once in a while there is good reason to use the rules to force an opponent to show first--and this was one of them. I wanted to know what he had played that way, and if I showed first and won, I knew he would muck, and I'd win the pot but not the information. I wanted both, if I could have them.

So I said to him, "You're first." He countered, "No, I called your raise." I told him that was irrelevant, because it was on a previous street, not on the last round. The dealer, to my surprise, told me I had to show first. As it turns out, the guy did have an ace, and won the hand. But that's beside the point here.

The standard rule is this: if there is action on the last street, then the last player to make a bet or raise has the obligation to show first. But if there is no action on the last street, then the compelled showdown (if nobody voluntarily goes first) is in the same order as everything else would be: from the small blind clockwise around to the button. (I have read that there are a few casinos with house rules otherwise, but if so, I don't know which ones they are.) Many players believe, incorrectly, that if there is no action on the last round of betting, the obligatory showdown order reverts to who bet or raised on a previous street. Not so.

I'm never surprised to run into even fairly experienced players who don't know the rules of poker well. Furthermore, it's not being stupid not to know something. But it is being stupid to assert, loudly and confidently, something that just ain't so. And that's what this guy was doing.

I was also surprised that the dealer didn't know the rule. After all, this is a situation that must come up a dozen times in every shift, if not more. I complied with his request, however, because there was always the possibility that Mandalay Bay has a idiosyncratic house rule (or at least some instruction to their dealers) that he was following. But after the fact, I approached the shift supervisor to ask him, and he confirmed my impression that M.B. follows the standard rule, and the dealer should have instructed my opponent to show first.

After the hand, there was quite a bit of debate at the table about the rule. Several people sided with the other guy: since he called me, the obligation was on me. Well, folks, you're just plain wrong about that. Here's the rule as written in "Cooke's Rules of Real Poker" (in my view, the best poker rule book available), p. 72, rule 11.01:

If there has been a bet and raise or multiple raises on the final betting
round, then the person who made the final raise shall show his hand first,
followed by all remaining players in a clockwise rotation. If there has been no
bet on the final round then the showdown begins with the player who had the
obligation of first action on the final betting round--the player under the gun
in draw and board games [which includes hold'em] or the player with the highest
board in stud games.

I always comply with this rule. If I'm in worst position and there is no action on the river, I flip over my cards without waiting for anybody else. I expect others to do the same. And if I bet or raise on the last round of betting, when the action is done I flip 'em over, without waiting to see if maybe I can get away without showing. Them's the rules. Not too complicated, really. It's incredibly irritating to have the situation where everybody stalls, nobody turns, and the dealer is left to beg and plead for somebody to please show. Cut it out, people. The rules prescribe a simple and straightforward manner of proceding. Just follow it.

And dealers, if one general request, such as "Show me the winner" doesn't get results, don't futz around--turn to the player whose obligation it is (whether by position or by dint of having put in the last bet or raise), and tell him, "You have to either show first or muck your hand." Way too much time gets wasted because both players and dealers either don't know or won't follow the rules on this matter.

As a side note, there is also a point of courtesy and etiquette that goes beyond the rules: anybody who has a likely winner should expose his cards immediately, without waiting. As Roy Cooke states it (p. 72 again):

In the interests of efficiency and speeding up the game, a player who is
reasonably certain he has the winning hand should turn over his hand
immediately, regardess of the order of showdown. If a player does so, then other
players at the showdown who can beat that hand should also turn their hands over
immediately.

There are occasionally valid strategic reasons for going by the rules rather than by this nicety, but they really should be the exception.

So, c'mon, folks--just show your hand already.




*Q-10 offsuit is a hand I would ordinarily either toss or try to play very cheaply, with a high willingness to throw it away unless I get a lot of help from the community cards, or a good bluffing situation arises. And against a loose-aggressive player, my usual reaction has been to re-tighten my already fairly tight game. Recently, however, I've read two things that are making me re-think that strategy. I include them here for the possible benefit of readers, though I didn't want to interrupt the story above.

First, I finished Barry Greenstein's superb book, "Ace on the River." On p. 204, he has a table of "opponent's tactics," the "typical incorrect adjustment" that we mediocre players make, and the "Better adjustment" that he recommends. The first entry in the table is "Extremely loose play." The incorrect adjustment is listed as "Wait for a good hand." The better reaction is given as "Loosen your standards and reraise frequently." Seems like cogent advice, though it takes more nerve than I've usually been willing to bring to bear. I'm trying to change that, a little at a time.

Second, just a few days after reading that, I read a column in Card Player magazine by Matt Lessinger, who I think is one of their best writers. He wrote,

Overaggressive Ozzie sits down in the same game, and in six of his first 10
hands, he raises to $20 preflop. Five times, he wins the blinds uncontested. One
time, someone calls him and the hand goes to the river, at which point Ozzie
produces Q-8 and wins with a pair of eights. I don't have to be Phil Ivey to put
two and two together, and conclude that he probably did not have premium hands
when he made his other raises. Therefore, I'm going to wait for something good
and try to pick him off.

But am I going to wait for pocket aces or kings? I could, but why would I
want to play so timidly? In a cash game, I want to take advantage of all
favorable opportunities that come along. Here, I have an opponent who is making
oversized preflop raises with substandard values. If I pick up a hand such as
9-9, or even A-J, and think I can get heads up with Ozzie, I'm probably going to
play it, because it figures to be the best hand against his typical raising
values. And I'm certainly not going to be deterred by the fact that he is
raising to $20 rather than a more normal raise to $6 or $8.

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/15718