Two new (or newish) poker rooms

The Quad

Today was the opening of the poker room at "The Quad," which is the new name for the remodeled Imperial Palace. The new room is near the elevators that you pass between the parking garage and the casino, also near the escalator that goes up to Hash House. It has huge traffic going by, but of course that also means that there is a lot of noise and cigarette smoke. Stupidly, all the signs still point visitors to the location of the temporary room upstairs, where there is just empty space.

Dealers are the same, management is the same. So it all seems familiar, even with the new name, location, chips, and felt.


TI (Treasure Island) 

TI moved its poker room to a location on the main casino floor (instead of out in the corridor of shops) several months ago, but today was the first time I've been there since the move.

I like the new facility. It's not quite as isolated from smoke and noise as the old one, but it's pretty good. There's also a lot more space between the tables. This is where we had my going-away tournament tonight. 11 of the 33 entrants in the 7 pm daily tournament were friends and/or readers of mine, but all four of the players who cashed were. Good work by my peeps.

Snowing in Vegas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good read, good call, good courage

My friend Poker Lawyer (PL) is in town. She came with her friend, Texas Cardslinger (Terry). Yesterday all three of us were playing at the same table at Imperial Palace, when an interesting hand came up.

Terry raised preflop to $12. PL called. I folded. Seat 1 was a middle-aged Asian gentleman, extremely quiet, pretty tight. He reraised to $35 on the button--the first three-bet we had seen from him in a couple of hours of play. Both Terry and PL called.

The flop was uncoordinated, 10-high and rainbow. All three players checked. Seat 1 hesitated a while before checking, whereas he usually acted quickly. I thought he was having trouble deciding whether to bet.

Fourth street was the jack of spades, the second spade on the board. Terry led out betting--I'm thinking it was small, like $20, but I don't remember for sure. PL folded. Seat 1 rechecked his hole cards (about which more later), thought about it a while, then called.

Let's pause here a minute and see if we can figure out what Seat 1 has. His very rare three-bet, even with position, drastically narrowed his range: A-K, or pocket jacks or better. Maybe 10s, but that was less likely. The check behind on the flop was a complete surprise. It seemed to me inconceivable that he would check there with any overpair, giving two opponents a free card, when there was already over $100 in the pot that he presumably would like to move to his stack. The only possibilities, really, were A-K that had missed, or, much less likely, pocket 10s slow-playing top set. His call on the turn strongly suggested a draw--either A-K with the gutshot or a flush draw, possibly both.

Fifth street brought a blank--3 of diamonds, or something equally inconsequential. Terry again bet, and this time I'm sure it was $20. Seat 1 again pondered, then raised another $80 to $100.

Huh? That move surprised me even more than his check on the flop had. I was pretty thoroughly convinced that he had A-K and would fold if he failed to hit an ace, king, or spade. What in the world is he doing? And what is he doing it with? And why so much? His bets and raises had usually been on the conservative side--2-3x (though not always--once he had shoved about $55 into a $15 pot). I don't think we had seem him bluff even once, but because I could not come up with any hand with which he would plausibly take this bizarro line, I ended up concluding that my previous assessment was probably still correct, and he was bluffing a busted draw. The sealer on it was a raise size that was screaming "Go away!" rather than "Please call."

I hoped that Terry would call, both because I thought it would be correct with even weakish made hands, but also so that I would get to see whether my read of the situation was correct. I was afraid that she wouldn't, though; what I had seen of her play had been fairly timid unless she had a very strong hand. But after a little thought, she quietly told the dealer, "OK, I call."

Seat 1 said, "Good call," and flipped up his As-Ks. Terry's A-J won the pot.

A little quiet exchange between the three of us (all on one end of the table) confirmed that Terry was not just blindly looking at top pair/top kicker and deciding that was a hand she had to call with. She had followed essentially the same reasoning process I'm describing here. The inconsistency in Seat 1's pattern of betting had definitely caught her attention.

I may be making it sound like an easy call, but I don't think it was. When a player as tight as Seat 1 three-bets for the first time in hours, you naturally assume he has either aces or kings, even if he subsequently plays the hand in a way that would not be expected for those holdings. Also, the flopped top set remained a viable candidate. (10s are, along with jacks, in that range that people hate to have to play post-flop with the nearly inevitable overcards, so some players will three-bet with them in an effort to end the hand early.) A one-pair hand, even if it is TP/TK, is at best a medium-strength hand, and it would take screwing up some courage to call a big river raise. I was genuinely impressed with and proud of Terry's call.

What lessons can we learn from this hand? At least three.

1. A bluff has to tell a consistent story. His river raise was pure desperation, when he realized he had missed his draws and had only one way to win the pot--steal it. He did not stop to consider how his line would look to an opponent. Before you bluff on the river, you have to ask yourself what it is, exactly, that you want your opponent to believe. Once you've settled on that, then you have to review how the hand has been played and see if the hand you want to represent having would have been played this way. Finally, you have to assess whether your opponent is savvy enough to read the (false) clues you are giving to reach the conclusion you wish to suggest. If the story you're telling is not consistent from beginning to end, thinking players will call you from confusion, curiosity, or both. People don't like to fold, especially after they have put a lot of money into a pot. They have to be pretty thoroughly convinced that putting more chips in is throwing good money after bad. An inconsistent story will not accomplish that persuasion.

2. Consider the power of the continuation bet. Had he simply pushed out a stack of, say, $50 when both opponents checked to him on the flop, he would have seen two folds followed by the dealer pushing the pot his way. I would have concluded that he had aces or kings, and I suspect that both PL and Terry would have done the same.

3. The third lesson is about a very specific but useful tell. Note that I said he rechecked his hole cards after the second spade hit. What I didn't tell you was that on two previous occasions I had seen him do the same thing.

The first was soon after I joined the table. I bought the button, paid a little more to call a small raise, and was pleased to see a flop of K-8-8 (with two hearts), which nicely fit my 8-9 in the hole. I bet, original raiser folded, Seat 1 called. He clearly had either a king, an 8, or a flush draw. The turn was another heart. Before I acted, I noticed that he rechecked his hole cards. Aha! That strongly suggested that he had not had a flush draw that had just come in.

Here's why. Most recreational players don't memorize the suits of their cards. They retain a visual memory that they have either two red cards, two black cards, or one red and one black, but they don't know the suits with any confidence. If he had had two red cards, he would have rechecked them on the flop to see if he had a flush draw before deciding whether to call. But he didn't. He only rechecked them on the turn, suggesting that he had one red card and one black card, and wanted to see if he now had a backdoor flush draw that he might make on the river.

I had been planning to check if a heart hit, thinking that the draw was his most likely hand, but when I saw him check his cards again, that changed my mind. I bet and he folded. I think he probably had a king and nothing else.

A while later, PL had been in a hand with him in which she similarly had to decipher whether he had a flush, but again he didn't check his cards until the third spade came, implying that he did not have a made flush at that point. I don't remember enough details of that hand to recount it, and we didn't see his cards, but his subsequent fold again proved that he did not have a flush.

In the hand that is the subject of this post, his check of his hole cards on the turn implied that he had two black cards, though if a third spade had hit the river, it would have been difficult to know whether he had seen two spades or a spade and a club.

This tell is very common among recreational players, but it is by no means universal, so you have to act on it with some care. Some players do memorize their suits, but when their flush comes in they want to reassure themselves that they didn't misread their cards, so will recheck before committing a lot more money to the pot. Others, of course, are aware of this common tell and are smart enough to use it deceptively against you. Such players will check their hole cards when a third suited card hits the board in order to make you think they only now have a draw, when their flush is actually made. Or, conversely, they will check their cards when the flop has two of a suit in order to make you think they have the flush draw, so that they can bluff when the third suited card comes. But both of these species of player are much rarer than people like Seat 1 in low-stakes games.

Two mixer hands

Mrs. Lederer suggested that I should join her for the Imperial Palace Sunday night mixed game last night. I hadn't seen her yet on this trip to Vegas, so I agreed.

One remarkable hand was making the nuts in badugi. The goal is to get one card of each suit, and have them be as low as possible. I started with A-3-4 in three different suits, plus one useless card. I needed a low spade to make a strong hand. I invoked my new-found powers of card-calling, focusing specifically on the deuce of spades. I slid my dud card to the dealer, and he gave me in return...the deuce of spades! It's the first time I've ever made the best possible hand in this game.

The other remarkable hand was in ace-to-five triple draw. I started with four clubs, traded in my mismatch, did my mental voodoo to get myself the ace of clubs, and bingo!

That all by itself wouldn't be so remarkable, but Mrs. L. ended up drawing the king-high club flush. Between us, our ten cards consisted of ten of the 13 clubs in the deck:

I don't even know how to go about calculating the odds of that happening, but they must be pretty long. I'm amazed that she somehow knew not to raise on the last street (when she finally made her hand), and lost only one more bet there.

The only other even remotely interesting thing that happened was that when she went up to her room to get a sweatshirt (it was cold in the poker room), I swiped three stacks of $1 chips from her and hid them in my lap. I wanted to see how long it would take her to notice. The problem was that she took her sweet time about getting back, making some other stops along the way, so I ended up with about 15 minutes of paranoia that the surveillance people had seen me do that and security would be showing up any second to confront me about my theft. Fortunately, that didn't happen. And it only took her about five seconds to notice that she had been looted, so I didn't even get much fun out of my juvenile little prank.

The Force is strong with this one

Imperial Palace tonight.

As the guy across the table reluctantly called the four-bet all-in from the rock who he knew probably had aces or kings, he muttered, "This is the most overrated hand in poker." I was in Seat 1 next to the dealer, and said, "Sounds like ace-king to me." Dealer said, "Yep." And it was as we all thought: His A-K to her K-K, neither improving.

My very next hand I had 7-2 offsuit, and was about to flash it to the dealer and say, "No, THIS is the most overrated hand in poker." But right then he was busy telling somebody something, so the moment passed. I still wanted to do it, however, so I began summoning up my willpower to make myself get another 7-2 offsuit on the next hand. I concentrated. I focused my third eye. I channeled my chi through my shakras. I beamed my Kirlian aura at the electrical energy surging through the auto-shuffler to direct its activities. I remembered "The Secret" and let only positive 7-2 thoughts flow through me. I prayed to fourteen different major religions' dieties. I sent my spirit animal (it's a porcupine) on a vision quest to fetch me a 7-2. I called on the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. I scribbled 7-2 on a piece of paper, quickly burned it, and scattered its ashes to the four winds. I gotta tell you, all this woo-woo stuff is hard work!

Drumroll, please. The hand ended, the dealer pulled the next deck out of the shuffler, I got my two cards, checked them, and there it was. I had done it. I had successfully willed myself a second consecutive 7-2 offsuit. And there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly host praising the poker gods.

As the cards I had called into my possession headed to the muck, I flashed them to the dealer and delivered my line. It was a dud. Seat 10 had already called, so I had to be sure he didn't see, which means that I'm not sure the dealer saw or was even paying attention to either the cards or what I was saying.

But it doesn't matter. It was a lame joke to begin with. What matters is that I have proven that I have learned how to harness the unseen forces of the universe to bring me whatever cards I want on demand.

Now I must remember to use my powers only for good, never for evil.

Steel wheel

Playing at Imperial Palace tonight, I had the above nice hand: runner-runner 5-high straight flush, starting with 2s-4s in my hand. I won the pot plus a $100 high-hand jackpot. The dealer was Alaska Gal of AllVegasPoker.com. It was sort of a spontaneous mini-AVP meetup, with TarpieFish and Karapet1 also at the table. I believe that I made a few converts to the Holy Order of the Deuce-Four with that hand.

I have decided that Alaska Gal is the world's greatest poker dealer. In addition to giving me this steel wheel, a few minutes earlier she had saved my sorry butt with a two-outer on the river. I managed to get myself all-in with an overpair (K-K) versus a flopped set of 7s. A third king on fifth street rescued me from the precarious situation. Hilarity ensued. (One reader recently complained that I never tell stories in which I do something stupid. It's just not true, and this is another example.)

I would tell more stories, but I promised Tarpie that I wouldn't tell certain stories. For example, the time he mucked his cards when first to act on the river, only to have his lone remaining opponent show him 5-3 offsuit, which was the worst possible hand for the board, meaning that whatever Tarpie threw away, it was the winner. That's one of the stories I said I wouldn't tell, so I won't. See how faithfully I keep my promises?

How to lose $400 in one hour

I feel some sense of obligation to share my vast poker knowledge and experience with my readers. I think that most of you would not know how to go about losing $400 in just one hour of playing $1-2 no-limit hold'em. I think I should lay out a plan for how you can accomplish this. Naturally, what follows is purely hypothetical.

Step 1: Go to Imperial Palace, to pick a random spot. Perhaps you'll make it there on a Sunday evening--one very much like last night, in fact--with the initial thought that you'll make your bread-and-butter money in NLHE, then indulge in some fun shenanigans at the $3-$6 10-game mixer afterwards.

Step 2: Buy in for $200 and take your seat.

Step 3: Quickly lose about $50 with a series of good starting hands that go nowhere and must be abandoned.

Step 4 (big hand #1): Pick up A-K in early position. Raise to $8. Get three callers. See a flop of A-7-3 with two diamonds. Bet $22 at it. Get one caller who is most likely on a flush draw. See a brick on the turn. Bet $55 at it. Hear big-stacked opponent declare himself all-in. Count chips, see that you have only about $65 left. Calculate that the pot is effectively about $245. Realize that you have to call, and do so. See opponent's pocket 3s. Realize that you are drawing dead.

Step 5: Rebuy, another $200.

Step 6 (big hand #2): Pick up suited K-Q in late position after a couple of limpers. Raise to $11. Get two callers. See flop of 4-7-8 rainbow. When they check to you, make continuation-bet of about 2/3 of the pot, $22. Get one caller. Put him on overpair (9s or 10s), top pair with good kicker (e.g., A-8), or straight draw. See turn card of a king. Be happy to have connected. When lone remaining opponent checks to you again, bet $50. When he smooth-calls again, realize that something suspicious is going on. See deuce on the river, an apparent blank. Cautiously let the action go check-check. As soon as you check, see opponent smack the table in frustration. Realize that this means he was desperately hoping to get in a river check-raise and take all of your chips. Confirm this when he turns over 5-6 offsuit for the flopped straight.

Step 7 (big hand #3): For the first time in this session, look down at the Mighty Deuce-Four in early position. Let feet do happy dance under table, as you have been blessed with the most powerful hand in poker. Limp, so as to conceal the strength of your holding. Hear the guy who previously stacked you with his set of treys announce a raise to $12. Call behind two others. See totally unsurprising flop of K-4-4. Repeat happy dance under table. Check. See big stack bet $45 and get one caller. Pull the trigger on your check-raise shove. Get insta-call from big stack and fold from other player. Reveal your trips. See opponent's pocket aces. See opponent grimace and knock the table in polite acknowledgement of your superior hand. Know that he has but two outs. See one of the two remaining aces hits the turn. Throw up a little bit in your mouth. Decide that poker may not be the game for you when you do not hit your one out (for quad 4s) on the river.

I realize that this is a rather complex game plan. It requires a lot of things to go wrong in highly improbable ways, all linked together in an exact sequence. It may look like a formidable challenge. But it is possible.

Trust me on that.

Three strikes

I play at Imperial Palace enough that most of the dealers there know me by name. Last night, however, I was startled to learn that one of them doesn't even remember having seen me before, despite the fact that he has dealt to me well over 20 times. He usually makes small talk with me in a way that has previously caused me to assume that he recognizes me as a local and a regular. (He calls me by name, but only because he's looking at the Bravo display in front of him. I knew that, but still assumed that he knew mine as a familiar face, even if he didn't remember my name from one visit to the next.)

Last night he asked whether I had just arrived today. I was baffled by the question. Arrived where? It took a little back-and-forth before I figured out that he thought I was a tourist. He would have asked the same question of whoever was sitting in seat 10 (next to him), as I was. He had no idea who I was.

Strike one.

(This is, incidentally, the same guy I wrote about 18 months ago here. Anybody who plays as IP regularly will know exactly who I'm talking about from the description I gave of him.)

I lost a big pot at one point, holding A-A. In a three-way hand, I called a lead-out bet from a drunk Danish player on a flop of 7-8-9, and a third guy came along. I improved to top set when an ace came on the turn. Danish drunk bet $70. I raised all-in, another $126 on top of that. Third guy reluctantly called for a little less, Danish guy folded. I showed my set. River was a jack, at which time my caller looked suddenly relieved and turned over his 9-10, having caught his straight. So gross.

Anyway, as always happens in such situations, there was a lot of post-hand table chatter about what had happened. What was different than usual was that the dealer--same one as mentioned above--chimed in with his opinion that I had had "no choice" but to play the hand the way I did, and I had just been unlucky. It was not hard to read into his commentary the implication that the third player had played it badly--which he had, of course, but it is absolutely not the dealer's job to even remotely hint at such a thing.

Strike two.

This dealer has a long-standing bad habit that I have noticed many times before, but have never done anything about until now. When somebody wins a big pot, he says, "Nice hand" as he pushes the chips. This is something that Cardgrrl ranted about in her blog a couple of years ago, here. He did it to me last night after I stacked another player, being on the good side of a set-over-set situation--my queens to his jacks, poor fellow. (This was just two hands after the set of aces went down in flames, and it went a long way toward making me feel that the universe was back in balance again.)

Strike three.

After I had cashed out, I pulled the shift manager, Marc, out of earshot of the tables and mentioned the problem. I said, as closely as I can remember it, "To those of us who have been around the game for a while, those words sound like, 'Don't forget to tip your dealer.' In fact, I suspect that's exactly the effect he hopes to have. But even if that's the last thing on his mind and his motives are purely to be complimentary, it's a practice that has a huge potential for causing resentment. At least one player at the table will not think it was a nice hand, and could easily lash out at the dealer for appearing to take sides. The dealer should be a neutral arbiter of the game, and avoid any appearance of playing favorites, or commenting on how a hand was played or on the outcome."

Marc appeared to immediately get why this was a problem. He was either good at faking it, or genuine in his thanks for bringing it to his attention.

Now the question on my mind is whether this dealer will change his habit. Reasons that he might not include (1) the supervisor doesn't really think it's a big enough deal to do anything about, and he was just placating me; and (2) the dealer gets talked to, but decides that begging for tips is still worth the risk of another reprimand.

So for my readers who frequent IP, I'd be curious to hear if you notice that this dealer continues his "Nice hand" reminder to winners of big pots. Comments section will remain open for your observations.

N.B.: Putting the first observation above in the context of the second and third, and labeling them all as "strikes," will likely mislead readers into thinking that I was somehow offended by the dealer not recognizing me. Truly I wasn't. For the vast majority of dealers, including this one, I don't care one little bit whether they remember me from one visit to another. But it seriously surprised me, because his small talk had, over the course of many months, repeatedly been effective at conveying the false impression that he recognized me. Calling these items three strikes is just a rhetorical device that occurred to me about halfway through composing the post, and shouldn't be taken too literally as it pertains to the first incident.

Mixing it up

Last night I spent 5 hours playing the Imperial Palace Sunday night mixed game with Mrs. Lederer. I have found her to be an unusually pleasant person with whom to share time at a poker table, and I like her more every time she visits town. It's been over a year since I tried a mixed cash game, so the itch for doing something different combined with the chance to chat with Mrs. L. made for good incentive to sign up for the mixer.

They play a rotation of ten games, all $3/$6 limit, only three of which I play fairly regularly as part of the standard HORSE mix (Omaha/8, stud/8, and razz). There are several weird and baffling variants thrown in. As it turned out, those were the ones in which I made the most money. I don't mind admitting that it was pure luckboxing; I had no skill edge.

My biggest pot of the night came in what they call 3-2-1 Omaha. It's a high-only game in which you get three simultaneous flops, then two turns, then one river. You can mix and match any flop and turn, plus the river, to make your five-card board (but you have to take one of the flops as it is; you can't just pick any three cards from the nine), then combine that with your hole cards in the usual Omaha fashion, i.e., two from your hand and three from the board. I find this game extremely confusing, because you have to examine six different combinations of board cards in order to figure out what the best possible hands would be, then judge that list against your own holdings.

Well, on the second hand of this rotation, I started with QQxx, flopped a set, and made quads on the turn, which was the nuts. The river, however, put a possible straight flush out there; somebody holding the Ad-3d would have a steel wheel. I wasn't too worried about it. My lone opponent remaining at the river bet, I raised, she reraised. Still not worried. I raised again. (There is no cap when heads-up on the river, so we could keep going until we were all in if we chose to.) She rechecked her cards, reexamined the board, and raised me back. I figured she had a strong full house. She was the least experienced player at the table, and usually timid in her betting unless she had the stone cold nuts. So I was slightly worried, but not enough to stop me. I raised yet again. Again she looked at her hole cards and again she spent some time examining the board, before announcing "Raise." Holy crap. If I have quads beaten by a straight flush, I'm going to be seriously annoyed. But I just can't believe that this particular player would turn this aggressive with anything else, so this time I end the raising war with just a call, while simultaneously asking, with some incredulity in my voice, "Did you make the straight flush?" I was stunned when she said, "No, but I have the nut flush."

Whew! I showed my four queens and took in what may have been the biggest pot of the night. As she repeatedly explained, she just didn't see the two queens out there. When she was rechecking the board, it was specifically to see if there were any pairs that somebody could use to make a full house. Not seeing any, she concluded that her nut flush must be good. She was the only player at the table inexperienced enough to make that mistake after checking the board as many times as she did. But hey, poker is all about profiting from other people's mistakes, so I'm not feeling bad about it.

In the same game, I played a hand only for the amusement of Mrs. L. and myself (she folded, so I showed her my cards and let her sweat the hand with me), since I started with a 2-2-4-x on the button. (Top poker mathematicians at MIT are still working out whether the deuce-four combinations are always winners in 3-2-1 Omaha.) The bottom flop came 6-6-2, giving me a tiny full house. The only other player in this hand was Mark, on my left, a regular in this mixer, and by far the most experienced and aggressive mixed-game player at the table. I just check-called the flop and turn, fearing that he had a better full house. But when he checked the river, I figured I was good. I bet, he called with trips.

Only once did I screw up because of forgetting the rules or format of a game. It was the first hand of 4-Card Ocean Crazy Pineapple. You get four hole cards, betting round. Flop, betting round, discard one. Turn, betting round, discard one. River, betting round. Then finally an "ocean" (6th card on the board--the river flows into the ocean, you know), and another betting round. They said that somebody always forgets that an ocean is coming and exposes his hand after the river. Well, last night it was me. I announced that I had a full house. Mrs. L. called anyway, presumably hoping to improve to her own boat on the ocean. She didn't. At worst, I cost myself only one big bet with that gaffe.

Considering the complexity and unfamiliarity of most of the games, to play for 5 hours and make only that one technical error was something of a triumph. I never lost track of what game we were playing, whether the ace played for high or low, which of three draws we were on, or whether we were on a betting round versus a discard round, never misread my hand, never tried going for a low when no low scored, etc. (Pats self on back.)

I bluffed only once. The game was badugi. Mark and I both had strong 3-card starters, and were drawing one. It was just a contest to see who got there first. I had been playing it passively, letting him bet (as was his wont), and just check-calling. I knew that he knew that I tended to do that with him, and get aggressive only when I made something. I decided to use that knowledge against him. When the final draw didn't give me the suit I needed, I led out betting. I didn't think he would raise as a bluff, so the worst that would happen is he would raise and I'd fold, or he'd call and I'd lose. That is, at most I would lose one bet. But if he had missed, too, he might give me credit for having made it, fold the best three-card hand, and I'd win the whole pot. I thought (and still think) it was a smart play.

To my surprise, he thought long and hard about what to do. The longer he thought, the more it became clear that he did not have a badugi. With a strong badugi he would raise. With a weak one he would call instantly. I realized that he must have a pretty good three-card hand, or he wouldn't take so long to think it out. When he finally called, I said, "Well, I was bluffing, but now I think I might have been bluffing with the best hand." I showed my three-card 6. He winced and showed his three-card 7. Yes!

Late in the evening, there was one remarkable hand of badugi. Playing four-handed, three of us made strong badugis. I made an 8-7, Mrs. L. made a 7-6, and Mark made the nuts, a 4. I'll wait here while you go figure out the odds of that happening.

I twice made a #1 (the nuts) in 2-7 triple draw. I haz mad drawing skillz.

A little after midnight, I was finally too tired to continue, and cashed out with $66 more than I had bought in for. I'm not sure, but I think that is the first time I have ended winner in a mixed game. On top of that, I had a great time. The other players were friendly, smart, funny people that were just plain enjoyable to be with. All of us except Mark, I think it's fair to say, had to struggle to keep straight all the rules and mechanics of each game. It's not like we were playing deep, third-level, mind-game poker. I mean, go ahead--just try triple-range-merging your Double-Flop Omaha hands while everybody else at the table is just trying to remember how many cards from their hands they have to use and whether low gets half the pot. Fat lotta good it'll do ya.

I don't think I'll exactly become a weekly fixture in that game, but I do think that I should pay it a visit more often than I have been doing.

When the lights go down in the city

Last night was "Earth Hour." For the third year in a row, most casinos on the Strip agreed to turn off their outside lights for one hour. It's some crock of $%&@ about showing their commitment to reducing energy usage and thus saving the planet.

I was playing at Imperial Palace, so I stepped outside a couple of minutes before the bewitching hour of 8:30 p.m. and took some quasi-panorama shots of the Strip before and after the lights went out.

For orientation, I was standing on the curb in front of the junction between IP and O'Shea's, and took these pictures in a nearly 360-degree circle, from left to right. You'll have to forgive a little blurriness; most of the exposures were about 1/5 of a second, which is hard to hold with a small, lightweight camera using no support. And the pedestrians and vehicles, believe it or not, refused to hold still for me. But you'll still get the general idea of how the scenery changed.

Before:



After:



As you can tell, some of the casinos were pretty half-hearted about their participation. Not that it matters. The whole thing is completely idiotic posturing anyway. Does anybody seriously believe that Las Vegas casinos care about reducing energy consumption in a selfless act of global altruism? Please.

Let's assume that outside lighting constitutes 10% of a casino's electricity use. (It's probably a lot less than that, but it doesn't matter for my point.) There are 8760 hours in a year, so one hour is 1/8760th of annual power usage, or about 0.01%.

So what the casinos are saying is this: "We are so fully committed to helping out with this terrible problem of global warming that we are willing to reduce our annual electricity consumption by a whole 0.001%. No need to thank us. That's just the kind of generous, caring, giving, self-sacrificial people we are."

"I never change seats"

I was playing at Imperial Palace last night. The first open seat was #2, so I took it. I immediately asked for a seat-change button, hoping to move either to one of my favorites (1 and 10), or someplace else if it seemed that strategy were to dictate it.

There was a very pleasant man in seat 1. He heard my request, which prompted him to set about telling me how he had made up his mind long ago that he would never, ever change seats under any conditions. His reason? He played in California rooms with bad-beat jackpots, and he never wanted to have to face the realization that he had moved out of a seat where the jackpot later hit and thus have the regret of having missed it.

Maybe I'm overly steeped in statistical and probabilistic thought, but it took me, oh, about one-tenth of a second to see the gaping hole in his logic. I asked him, "What about the regret of failing to move into the seat where the jackpot would later hit? What if you pass up the chance to move to seat 6, and a few minutes later the new player there wins hundreds of thousands of dollars?"

He got a slightly puzzled look on his face and said, "I hadn't thought about that."

You can influence your chance of being part of a bad-beat jackpot by your initial hand selection, so it's not completely random. But given a particular style of play, which seat you're in makes no difference in your chances of winning a jackpot. It also makes no difference whether you decide to stay in one seat for the entire session, or play musical chairs at every opportunity. I think this guy was smart enough to understand that.

He made up his mind about never moving based on a purely emotional factor: avoiding regret. But for some reason, he was only able to see one side of that coin. Having regret for an affirmative action that he had taken loomed large enough that it decided the entire issue for him. He was willing to pass up any strategic advantage, in terms of having certain players to his right or left, in order to avoid wishing he had not moved. But in years of living with and implementing this decision, the possibility of regret over inaction had never even crossed his mind, even though the chance of that outcome is exactly the same as the chance of the one he so desperately wishes to avoid.

You human beings are kind of funny creatures, what with your emotions and cognitive biases and all.

Incidentally, for a thorough discussion of all of the "what-if" questions surrounding poker jackpots, see Grange95's post here. Cliff Notes version: A bad-beat jackpot requires lots of random outcomes (e.g., the shuffle) and arbitrary decisions (e.g., when a player decides to take a restroom break) all to be aligned just so; it makes no logical sense to assign special value to some of them while ignoring others.

Surrounded by celebrities

The Imperial Palace is famous for its "Dealertainers," celebrity impersonators who deal blackjack for you, then get up on a little stage and sing a song or two. Just last night during the few hours I was in the poker room, we heard from the likes of Elvis Presley, Madonna, Garth Brooks, Beyonce, Tony Orlando, and Lady Gaga.

But what you might not know about the Palace is that it also features Playertainers. Here's the proof. At my table last night we had Brett Favre:



Dennis Rodman:



and, at the next table over, Senator Harry Reid:

What not to wear

I forgot to post this soon after I took it, which was a couple of weeks ago at Imperial Palace. What you can't see here is the finishing touch: a big, skull-themed Ed Hardy watch.

Imperial tales

Oops

Last night at Imperial Palace I inadvertently did something that I had managed to avoid doing in five years of casino poker.

As I often do when playing at IP, I took a break after a couple of hours to get an ice cream cone. With a restroom stop first, I was gone for at least 10 minutes, maybe closer to 15. I returned to the room and sat down, mostly focused on preventing drips and spills. (The ice cream was disappointingly soft and melty, obviously having been kept in an insufficiently cold counter freezer.)

Even before I sat down, I noticed that there had been a dealer change--no surprise, given how long I was gone. I said, "Hi, Matt." He said, "Hi, Grump." (He always calls me that.) Then I noticed that the guy directly across from me was a new player. OK, somebody had left and been replaced while I was gone. No problem. Next I noticed that the guy next to him was different, too. And my bottle of water was missing. And all of the chip stacks at the table were gray ($1), not red ($5).

This was all very disorienting. Just as I was processing why so many things had changed, Matt teasingly asked, "You need some chips?" It was only then that I noticed that my chip stacks were gone, as was my silver dollar card protector.

The conclusion finally hit me just as Matt tried to resolve my puzzlement: "You're at the wrong table."

Indeed I had sat down at the first table past the desk instead of the second one. When I moved to the right table, all was well--the same dealer I had left, the same opponents, my chips and card cap, my water bottle.

This was mildly embarrassing, but there was no harm done. I've seen other people make this mistake before, and always wondered how they could be so dumb. Now I know.

I guess you could say I got the wrong IP address.


No jackpot

I saw somebody flop quad queens, but get no bonus. I checked the list of bonuses on the wall, and it listed only $200 for a royal flush. I've never seen the IP not have high-hand bonuses for quads and straight flushes. I asked the dealer about it, and he said that they had had an accounting error in their jackpot fund, and as a result had to cancel almost all their payouts until they build the reserve back up. Which means that for now they're collecting the jackpot dollar but giving out essentially nothing.

Oh well. It's a minor thing. I just hope it wasn't the same kind of "error" that the folks at Planet Hollywood had with their jackpot money.


Reraise

Here was my best move of the night. After I had been in Seat 1 for a while, somebody I didn't know joined us in Seat 2. He was about as good a player as one ever sees at these limits, playing a very effective, difficult, loose-aggressive style. Among other things, he straddled both UTG and on the button every time, and nearly always exercised his option to raise it.

I was getting a little tired of that, so I determined to limp-reraise one of his straddles whenever I had a half-decent hand. The very next time it was my big blind and he straddled, I found Ah-Kh. Nobody raised before me, so I added an extra $2 to my bet, anticipating that it was a mere down payment. Sure enough, Mr. LAG bumped it up--another $25, his biggest opening raise yet.

Well, apparently several other players had noticed his pattern and were ready to look him up. I was quite surprised when three others called him before the action was back to me, making a $100 pot. It was not enough to pot-commit any of them. I had not originally planned to reraise all-in, but with that much in the pot, it was suddenly worth taking down right then, rather than put in a smaller raise and have to make further decisions from out of position. I thought it was a near certainty that I had the best hand or, at worst, would be racing against a medium pocket pair. So I announced all-in, and moved my last $208 across the line.

One by one, they all folded, and I won a nice pot without a showdown or even seeing a flop. The suited AK made it a pretty easy decision, but I think I would have done the same thing with a wider range than that--any pair about 8s or more, any ace, and any strong king, maybe.


The French connection

We had at the table a man visiting from France. The conversation turned to the state of online poker there. I vaguely remember a while back hearing that France had authorized online poker, but with various restrictions. Here's how our French friend described the situation:

They have lots of choices of online rooms, including Full Tilt, Stars, Party Poker, etc., but they are all segregated from the rest of the world pool. That is, they're playing on, e.g., Pokerstars.fr, not Pokerstars.com. People from anywhere in the world can, in theory, join the games, but few actually do, because the sites have to collect a 6% tax (capped at 3 Euros) in addition to the rake.

Our visitor said that the situation sucks, because there are, obviously, a lot fewer players per site than there were previously, so they have fewer choices in cash games, and essentially no tournaments with big prize pools.

It was my first indirect foretaste of what online poker might become if the whole things gets balkanized, as it is threatening to do. If the U.S. gets separated from the rest of the world (as required, at least for a while, under the Reid bill), it would be bad, though not as bad as in France, since we have a large enough group of players to be workable. But if we start having individual states broken out into their own player pools, it's just going to completely suck.

There are lots of kinds of services that, in order to be useful, have to have large numbers of people using them--telephones, fax machines, and, in the Internet age, things like Facebook and Twitter. Online poker is among them. Sites with small player pools tend to shrivel up and die, because players don't find games going and turn elsewhere. Conversely, the most popular sites become more popular, because there's lots going on and players find what they're looking for and tell their friends. It's a rich-get-richer sort of thing. (See Bill Rini's perceptive post, "Why Smaller Poker Operators Should Shut Their Doors Right Now.")

It's just not going to work to have states run isolated player pools--even the most populous states, such as California, don't have enough people to make for really good poker sites with a wide variety of offerings. We can hope that states would be smart enough to authorize reciprocal or collective arrangements, as they do with lotteries, but I wouldn't count on it.


Playing with Mr. Magoo

In the first 30 minutes at my table, I saw one player twice, twice, call off his entire stack--at least $200 each time--after misreading his hand and/or the board. Both times he thought he had a straight, and even announced it as such, but the first time had just one pair and the second time nothing at all. Seeing it happen once is odd enough, but two times in less than half an hour? Truly bizarre. He was not drunk, as far as I could tell.

Maybe casinos should offer vision tests while you play, in addition to massages.

Two diseased hands

Some nights the money comes in by dribs and drabs: a raise and c-bet here, a small pot there, here a bluff, there a bluff, etc. Other nights, essentially the whole session's profit comes in one or two big chunks. I don't have any real preference, as long as the "check out" amount is greater than the "buy in" amount was. But tonight was most definitely in the "big chunks" category. Moreover, both hands were, to use my new favorite poker word, highly diseased.


Diseased hand #1

When playing at the Imperial Palace, where I was parked for the evening, I often go to either a little ice cream shop between the parking garage and the casino, or pop next door to an ice cream place in the food court at O'Shea's. I've been eating ice cream while I play poker, given the opportunity, since back in the Hilton days. I've even been caught in the act on Twitpic.

And here's the crazy thing. In a weird effect so consistent that it has become close to a superstition with me (and I have very few of those), while I have the ice cream and for a short time thereafter, all sorts of good pokery things happen. I can't explain it, but it's true, and has been for four years now. Quad queens happened right after my ice cream, e.g., at the very same table as I was at tonight.

Tonight I made my usual ice cream run about an hour into my session, returning with a single scoop of Nestle Toll House Cookie ice cream. In a waffle cone--obviously (as if one really needs to specify that). I returned to my place at the table, seat 1. Usually I'll wait for the big blind, because that gives me a chance to reduce the mass of the ice cream before I have to juggle playing and eating simultaneously. But as it happened, I was just one off the button, and didn't want to wait nearly a full orbit. So I tossed in my $3, and was rewarded with Q-Q.

There was a button straddle from Seat 2. Seat 3--in a move unprecedented for him--open-raised to $25 from the small blind. (At Harrah's properties, a button straddle forces the action to start in the small blind, which I think is an awful rule, but there's not much I can do about it.) Anytime a player makes a conspicuously large opening raise, I immediately think that his most likely hand is J-J, and I prove to be right about that a large fraction of the time. But you have to be careful, because once in a while you run into somebody who plays aces that way--the regular at Mandalay Bay that I wrote about here, for instance.

Even stranger than an open-raise that large was that it was called in two spots--specifically, seats 4 and 6--before action got to me. This was already causing me to wonder what the hell was going on, because nothing even remotely like this had transpired during my time at this table. The two callers happened to be exactly the players that I had identified as the weakest and least potentially tricky ones in the field, which was helpful, because I didn't think either of them would play aces or kings that way.

I raised to $60. Seat 3 folded, though he seemed reluctant, which solidified my sense that he probably had jacks. Seat 4 moved all in, as I had expected him to do, because he had only about $25 more behind the first $25 he had committed.

I turned over my queens, at which point the man next to me kindly pointed out that Seat 6 had yet to act. Oops. This is a level of boneheaded error that I make pretty rarely, on the order of once or twice a year. The reasons it happened are obvious in retrospect. First, even though I had seen Seat 6 call the $25, and even though his money in the pot was one of the reasons I picked $60 as the reraise point, I had subsequently forgotten about him, because I was focused on whether Seat 3 was going to fold or four-bet it, the latter action likely meaning I'd have to surrender. After he had folded, I just focused on the expected action of seeing the rest of Seat 4's chips go in, and, with that happening, I felt done with the things I had been anticipating. Balancing the ice cream cone and watching for drips at the same time surely didn't help, nor did the fact that Seats 3 and 4 were in my immediate field of vision, while Seat 6 was off in the periphery.

But what's done is done and cannot be undone. (Bonus points for naming the original source for that, without Google.) I shrugged, smiled at the guy in Seat 6, and said, "I guess you get the advantage of playing the hand knowing what I have." To make matters even crazier, Seat 4 had taken the cue from me and turned over his cards, too! He was showing a suited J-9.

By the way, let's pause and reflect on Seat 4's decision-making here. He called a $25 raise--half of his stack--from an early-position, solid player, when there were still eight people left to act behind him, with J-9. Let's call that Bad Call #1. (There will be others, as you shall see.)

So Seat 6 got to make his decision seeing both opponents' hole cards, a rare luxury for him. He thought for a while, then called. Call me crazy (you probably already do, and, really, who could blame you?), but my read of his thoughts while he considered this was that he was plotting to take the pot away because of my error. That is, he thought that if he bet after the flop, I would have to conclude that I was beat, because surely he wouldn't bet a hand he knew to be losing. Maybe he was really thinking that, or maybe I was just projecting on him what I would be thinking in that spot--which is exactly that. But in either case, he ended up making the call. I thought his most likely holding was A-K. Surely he wouldn't put that much in just set-mining with a smaller pair after seeing my Q-Q, I thought, and I had already ruled out A-A and K-K when he had flat-called the initial $25. A-K seemed the only thing left in the likely range that would put in the second call of that huge initial pre-flop raise.

The flop was 3-4-5 rainbow. Not bad for queens, all things considered. Seat 6 quickly grabbed $45 in chips and pushed them across the line. I read him as scared. I was not ready to believe that he had hit that flop as hard as he wanted me to think, especially given what I had concluded about his likely narrow range based on the pre-flop action, combined with my suspicion about how he had been planning to take advantage of my gaffe.

So I shoved. He had just under $100 left now, and I had him covered. At first his face fell. I thought I had caught him in a bluff, and he was going to fold. But to my surprise, he thought for a few seconds, then called. To my even greater surprise, he then turned over A-Q offsuit.

That's right. He had first put in $25 pre-flop after an early-position raise and call. Let's call that Bad Call #2. Then he had called an additional $35 after seeing that I had him crushed, and after seeing that Seat 4 had two of the cards that might otherwise contribute to making him a miracle straight. Bad Call #3. Then he tried to steal the pot, knowing that he was ahead of Seat 4 and in a good spot to win a nice pot if he could drive me away. OK--I can't blame him for that attempt. But when I saw through it and put him to the test, he then called off another C-note, knowing that he had only seven outs (three aces and four deuces). Bad Call #4.

Turn and river were a 10 and a king, changing nothing, and I scooped it, in spite of my horrendous brain fart.

I'm telling you, it's the ice cream. It has magical powers.


Diseased hand #2

About an hour later, we had the same setup: the button and a button straddle at Seat 2, and an opening raise from Seat 3 in the small blind, this time to the more modest and standard $8. There were three calls before it got to me, so I gladly added my $8 after seeing that I had been dealt the Mother of All Hands, the Mighty Deuce-Four.

I rather enjoyed seeing the flop of 3-5-6 rainbow. Just the second nuts for me, in a situation where it seemed highly unlikely that anybody was sitting on the only hand that had me beat (the 4-7).

When it was checked around to me, I made a small $10 teaser bet. Let's see who wants to play. The button raised to $22. Given his pre-flop raise and this move, an overpair seemed the most obvious conclusion. I was stunned to see all three of the others in the hand each make the $22 call in turn. It's hard to figure how five players can all have enough of a hand at this point to want to continue.

I decided to reraise, not because I was afraid of any draws (really, only somebody with a 7-8 could be on a pure draw and have a decent chance of hurting me), but because I was convinced that one of these guys had a set and was slow-playing it, and I wanted to get his stack committed now. If the turn paired the board, I would have a horrible decision, and if it brought a 2, 4, or 7, it could scare off any chance of felting somebody who had a flopped set.

So I reraised to $100. Fold, fold in rapid succession. But then the folding stopped with Seat 6 (a different player than Seat 6 in Diseased Hand #1). He looked anguished. Bingo, I thought. There's my victim with the set, probably 3s, and he has now shifted from sly, confident slow-playing to a sick feeling that he is up against a bigger set. The call would require all of his $70 or so remaining. He pondered for nearly two minutes, then finally put the chips in. The final remaining opponent mucked.

I showed the Mighty Deuce-Four. Seat 6 grimaced, as if he had known it would be bad news. He revealed (drum roll, please) Ad-4d. He could win with two running diamonds, but otherwise was drawing to three cards just to claim half of the pot.

I think we can legitimately label this Bad Call #5.

I don't remember what the turn and river were, but they provided no miracle. How could they, really, when pitted against 2-4?

Ho-hum, flop the nuts, stack a guy, win a big pot. This is just what Deuce-Four does, despite there remaining a few hard-core unbelievers in the poker world.

When you've got ice cream, Deuce-Four, and a few pathological calling stations working together on your behalf, it's hard to lose.

Here we go again

Once again, I have had somebody grouse about my alleged bad behavior when he was the one at fault.

It happened at Imperial Palace tonight. I limped from early position with Jc-10c, then called a late-position raise to $8 from a big, bald, British, tattooed guy, who I shall call BBBTG. Flop 10-J-Q rainbow. I liked having two pair, but this is about as dangerous a flop as you could name for two pair. I was beaten by 10-10, J-J, Q-Q, Q-10, Q-J, A-K, and K-9, all of which were probably in his pre-flop raising range. I was obviously currently ahead of any one-pair hands, but A-A, K-K, and A-Q all had lots of outs, and even A-J, A-10, K-Q, K-J, and K-10 would give me a good sweat. I didn't want to risk a free card, so I bet $20, the size of the pot. He almost instantly moved all-in for $46 more. This only narrowed his range a little, by effectively ruling out pocket pairs lower than 10-10, which wasn't much help to my decision. The vibe I got from him was more "I'm not going to let you weasel this pot away from me" than "Let's please get all the money in because I have the nuts." So I called.

He did not show right away, so neither did I. The turn was a 4, I think. The river was another 10. That helped me, but was by no means a cinch. I was still losing to J-J, Q-10, and Q-Q. He wasn't moving, so I reminded him, "I called you, sir." He announced, "Two pair."

Not good enough. You don't get to win the pot by just declaring what your cards are, even if you're more specific than "two pair." Oddly enough, other people might not believe you. You have to show them to win. This concept seemed too advanced for the feeble mind of BBBTG to grasp, so I gave him another reminder, more slowly this time: "I. Called. YOU."

He finally took the hint and rolled over his pocket aces, whereupon I quickly showed my full house and took the pot.

Had that been the end of it, I wouldn't be writing this. But it wasn't. BBBTG was playing next to one of his friends, and I overheard scraps of their ensuing sotto voce conversation, the gist of which was that I had acted with unspeakably atrocious manners by not showing my hand when he declared himself to have two pair, because I must have known I could beat any two-pair hand.

Grrrr. How many times do we have to go through this, people? Could it be that there are, somewhere in the world, poker players who do not read this blog regularly, and thus have not heard the word about one's showdown obligations? Hard to believe, but perhaps that is the case.

If you take the last aggressive action, and somebody else calls, then you have the responsibility to show your hole cards first. Alternatively, if you're embarrassed about them, you can just throw them in the muck. But your obligation is not discharged by saying what you have, nor by showing just one card. The even more annoying practice of starting to quiz your opponent about what he has is, or at least should be, grounds for execution on the spot. At least BBBTG didn't do that. (Being a merciful kind of guy, I would be willing to commute his death sentence to castration with a dull, rusty knife and no anesthetic, thus ensuring that his rudeness and stupidity genes were not passd on to the next generation.)

No matter how long I play this game, I will never understand why so many people have such a hard time understanding and complying with this simple, universal rule and practice. Nor will I ever get why people who fail to abide by it feel comfortable bitching about those of us who do, as if somehow we are the source of the problem. It's like veering across the center line into oncoming traffic, then blaming the people who stayed on the right for the resulting head-on collision.

At least BBBTG didn't make me wait for the heat death of the universe. I hate when that happens.

It never hurts to check

Terrence "Not Johnny" Chan has this cautionary tale from a WSOP pot-limit Omaha event in his latest blog entry:

There was one kind of wild hand before the dinner break. It was folded me on the
button at 100-200 and I looked down at the powerhouse hand that is TT53
double-suited. I raised to 600 and only the BB called. The flop came A96 with
two of my suit, and I checked it behind (probably a mistake). The turn came an
8, my opponent bet just 800 and I decided to float. The river was a 7 and my
opponent bet 1000. I said "raise" and tossed in the first 1000 to call and
started the process of thinking how much to raise. I was wearing earphones but
apparently the dealer said something like "turn 'em up" while four other people
at the table simultaneously said "he said raise". But the damage was done as my
opponent quickly turned up Q99x. The floor was called over, and my opponent was (justifiably) very unhappy, but of course it was ruled that my raise would
stand. Now how much to raise? I decided to raise...1000 more. My opponent said,
"bullshit" and quickly folded. Total weirdness!

This caught my attention because twice within the past few days I have unintentionally annoyed an opponent and been accused of slow-rolling when I couldn't be sure whether a bet was a call or a raise.

The first instance was at Imperial Palace Wednesday night. I can't even remember what the hand was, but I made something strong on the river and made a nearly pot-sized bet of $35. My opponent didn't ask how much it was, but just grabbed a partial stack of chips and stuck it out there. I could tell that it was a little more than I had bet--probably not enough to be a raise, but I couldn't be sure at a glance. So I asked the dealer, "Is that a call?" The dealer counted it out, tossed the extra couple of chips back to the player, and said, "Yes, it's a call." I then showed my hand. The other player, who probably had been ahead until the last street, angrily mucked his cards while saying, "Of course it's a call--what'd you think, idiot?" I didn't bother explaining myself, but the answer, obviously, was that if he were trying to raise, I definitely wanted to let him do so, rather than possibly kill the action by showing my hand.

The second instance was last night at the Venetian. I was on the button and called a raise with suited 10-8, one of my favorite crAAKKer hands. The flop gave me bottom pair and a straight draw, the turn improved me to two pair, and I filled up on the river. We had a roughly $150 three-way pot by then, so when they both checked to me, I pushed out two $50 stacks. I thought they either both had straights or one had a straight and the other the overpair of AA or KK. I was not only prepared to get it all in, but hoping they would let me.

I tried, as I usually do in such situations, to look casual and unconcerned, which includes not staring at my opponents. I look their way once in a while as they think, but also look around at the pot, the dealer, the other players, the TVs, the cocktail waitresses--whatever there is. Both opponents seemed to be wary of my bet, and were taking their time to respond to it, so I had quite a bit of aimless eyes-wandering time. At some point I looked back and saw a stack of what appeared to be $100 in front of one player, and a $100 bill in front of the other. But the bill was folded, and for some reason its orientation to me (it was at the far end of the table) made it look like it might be two bills folded together. That was significant. I needed to be sure that it was just a call rather than a raise before showing. So I asked the dealer to check and be sure that it was just a single bill. He did, and it was. I then promptly showed my cards and won the pot. Hilarity ensued, both in criticizing my hand selection, and, more to the point for this post, a muttered accusation of a slow-roll.

But you can see my dilemma. Suppose in either case I'm wrong, and there really are sufficient chips for a raise, or two bills constituting a raise. If I don't verify the situation and just make the assumption that it's a call, we end up with a big mess--especially in the case of the three-way pot. Floor people get called, angry accusations and opinions fly, decisions have to be made, the game crashes to a halt, etc.

I regret that my nervous opponents were subjected to five or ten seconds' delay in getting to see my cards, but I'm not apologizing for what I did. Under the circumstances, I felt--and continue to feel--that it was not only justifiable, but absolutely necessary to clarify the situation before acting on it. The occasional chaos that results from a misunderstanding in such cases is bad enough that I'm willing to cause or endure a small delay many times to avoid the ugly mess just once.

You make the call--part 2

If you have not yet read part 1 of this post, in which I explain the decision the floor guy had to make, you might want to do that and make up your own mind about the situation before reading on, because I'm about to tell you what actually happened, plus what I think should have happened.


First, I have to say that I think this is an unusually difficult call. There are sound, reasonable arguments to be made in both directions, and ultimately I don't think I could find a lot of fault with the decision going either way.

Even so, I have my prejudices and preferences and priorities. I'm a rules guy. I'm not absolutely unyielding; I'd like to think that I preserve a reasonable degree of flexibility when the situation calls for it. But at the same time, things can be bent only so far before they break, and when they break, it's bad for the game.

In this case, I would come down on the side of SLS and against DMA. DMA could have exposed his cards the normal, safe way by simply turning them over. He didn't. He tossed them, thus putting them out of his control and taking the risk that something untoward would happen to them. It usually doesn't, but once in a while it does, and the player has nobody to blame but himself. His position was further worsened by what sounded like a verbal concession of the pot, giving the dealer good reason to act as he did.

When a player does all he reasonably can be expected to do to protect his hand and it still gets mucked or otherwise killed, I'm quite sympathetic to making whatever accommodation can be found to preserve his interest in the pot. In this case, for example, suppose that DMA had turned his cards face up in front of him, but the dealer had misread the board (thinking that trip tens was the winner), picked up DMA's cards and mucked them before he could react. I would then be in favor of chopping the pot. That is, retrieve the cards if possible; if not, rely on the three witnesses as to what the cards were; if that were for some reason unacceptable to SLS or unfeasible, go to the security camera for verification. Make it right.

But DMA did not do all that he could do. Players who are lax about protecting their cards and their interest in a pot are playing with fire. Once in a while they're going to get burned, and all you can do is tell them, "I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do now." Players are assumed to know in advance how they are supposed to conduct themselves. DMA was no novice. In fact, he claimed to that he was retired and played cards full-time. (I do not believe him, but that's what he said.)

Although it's only a tangential point, I'm also not in favor of rewarding people for being loudmouthed, offensive jerks. DMA's conduct was reprehensible, unforgiveable. It was tolerated far longer than just about any tirade I've ever seen in a poker room, for reasons that still baffle me. About 30 seconds into it, I would have given him the "not one more word" warning, and then promptly made good on the threat when he didn't shut up, and have him dragged out.

Would I make the decision differently if it were a greenhorn player who really didn't understand his obligations, and behaved himself impeccably when the controversy came up? Probably not--but I'll admit that it would at least be an even closer call.

What about the additional unusual fact here that the first player to show his hand was playing the board? I say this is a red herring, without any real bearing on the matter. DMA might, for all we know, have misread the situation in several ways. He might have thought from early on in the hand that he was going to need an ace or a queen to win, and when he didn't get one, basically gave up on the pot. He might have seen the four diamonds and felt sure that SLS must have one, and thus gave up too soon. He might have seen the three tens, overlooked the straight on the board, and surrendered. In any of those situations a player might give the concession speech and muck his cards without showing, or with showing only one. In my view, he must be allowed to do so. He cannot receive any assistance in the decision as to whether to muck unseen or show his cards. It really doesn't matter whether he chooses to show them because he mistakenly thinks he has the best hand, or because he sees the situation correctly and knows it's a chop, or because he thinks he has lost and is just showing what he had to get a little sympathy for a good starting hand turning worthless. We neither can nor need to know what prompts him to table his cards face up; once he does so, the cards speak, and the dealer and the other players can and will make sure the pot gets awarded correctly. Similarly, we neither can nor need to know what prompts him to muck without showing; once he does so, his hand is dead, regardless of what its showdown value might have been. Up until the point that DMA puts his cards face up on the table, it is his prerogative to throw them away, if he decides to do so for any reason. In short, I would make my decision about the hand being live or dead independent of whether DMA had a winner, a loser, or a chopper.


Here's what actually happened. The floor guy got on the phone to his supervisor (the poker room manager, I assume). Meanwhile, SLS had the pot and the game went on. Security had DMA step away from the table and they were trying to keep him calm while the floor guy consulted about what to do.

After maybe ten minutes of continued play, floor guy came back and announced that his boss had give him instructions on how to handle it: The pot was to be chopped. Unfortunately, nobody could remember how much had been in it. The floor guy had failed to get it counted and/or set aside while a final decision was pending. With the dealer's help he came up with an estimate of what it was, divided that in half, and made SLS give up that many chips, which were then awarded to DMA. DMA was put back in the game with a warning about language, conduct, etc. (Floor guy claimed not to have heard any of the swearing, which I find completely unbelievable.) To make matters worse, SLS had given Ricky a $20 tip from the large pot. He went to Ricky and asked for half of it back so that he lost less on the hand overall.

It was a catastrophe. I think this was mishandled in just about every possible way. If the floor guy couldn't make a binding decision on the spot, then he's got to put those chips out of play--in escrow, so to speak. The bare minimum is to count the pot, so that the amount in question is clear to everybody. But even with that, allowing SLS to continue playing as if he had won the pot is inviting disaster. What if he goes all in on the next hand and loses? When the final decision is arrived at, are you going to take chips from whomever SLS lost them to, and give them back to DMA? You can't obligate SLS to pay out of his pocket should that happen. (I suppose you could make him put up half of the pot's value in cash from his wallet before being allowed to continue playing, but I've never heard of that being done, I'm just making it up as I write.)

If the pot were smaller, one possibility is the house making up half of the pot to DMA, on the grounds that it was a dealer error. That's not realistic here. First, the pot was larger than the amount that I assume shift supervisors have it within their discretion to take out of the till. Second, it's not really clear that there was a dealer error. As far as I'm concerned, Ricky's actions were entirely reasonable and understandable, and consistent with what he was supposed to be doing. All--or at least the vast majority--of the fault lay squarely with DMA.

As it actually played out, SLS was the one that ended up pissed off, and left in a huff because of (1) what he considered a bad floor decision, and (2) having taken an unreasonable amount of abuse from DMA, with no consequences for DMA other than a warning. I don't blame him for feeling wronged on both counts. However, if he could continue playing without it affecting him, he was leaving behind a chance for another big score. There are some things that get me perturbed enough that I can't really focus well on the game. Would this have been such a case, had I been in his shoes? I don't think so, but I can't really be sure of that.

DMA, conversely, became all sweet and charming to everybody, and remained so for the rest of the time I was there. I doubled up through him in an expensive set-over-set situation (my jacks to his fours), and he didn't get one bit angry over his rotten luck. He just said, "Nice hand" repeatedly, and was a perfect gentleman about it. Go figure.

You make the call--part 1

I played at Imperial Palace tonight. When I had been there just ten minutes or so, a situation came up that required one of the most difficult floor decisions I've ever witnessed. Let me tell you about it, and you can make up your mind what you would do.


Our two contenders for the pot are Smart Local Semipro (SLS) and Drunk Maniac Asshole (DMA). Does that tell you enough about them?

Preflop action doesn't matter, except that the pot was unusually large by that stage. On the flop, SLS moved all in and DMA called. The dealer counted out SLS's chips (he had the shorter stack), matched it from DMA's chips, and made the pot right. Neither player had shown his cards yet. The dealer ran out the board, which ended up being 6-7-8-9-10, with four diamonds.

SLS showed his two black tens just about simulateously with DMA saying, "I think you've got a winner." That is, it's not completely clear to me if DMA was saying that because he felt that he missed what he needed, or because he was seeing and reacting to SLS's hole cards.

DMA then tossed his two hole cards toward the center of the table. It appeared to me that he was trying to table them face up. One landed face up, but the other hit a chip, did kind of a pirouette on its end, and spun around once before landing face down. I saw both of them clearly: an ace and a queen of different suits, neither of them a diamond. The dealer very quickly scooped up both cards, turning the face-up one down, put them either into or on top of the muck (I didn't see which, and as things played out, nobody ever asked him whether he could confidently identify which they were and retrieve them), and pushed the pot toward SLS.

As the pot was being pushed, DMA started protesting: "What are you doing? It's a split pot!" I'll forego the details of the ensuing argument, because they don't matter. But DMA was very hot under the collar.

DMA was in seat 7. I was in seat 2. The players in seats 5 and 8 both independently told the floor person, who was, of course, called to come over to make a ruling, that they, too, had seen both cards. Before I had offered my observations, they independently vouched for having seen A-Q offsuit, no diamond. DMA had not, to this point, ever vocalized what his cards had been, so it was clear to me that these two players really had seen what they claimed to have seen. Besides, if I could see the spinning card from seat 2, it's not surprising that anybody paying attention could have seen it, too. (The dealer said that he did not see it.)

The dealer, incidentally, is one that I know better than almost any other dealer in town. I'm not sure I'd call him a friend, exactly, in that we've never met or talked outside of the poker setting. But he used to deal at the Hilton when I played there, and he also played at the Hilton a lot when he was off-duty, so I may have racked up more hours at a table with him, and over a longer period of time, than with any other dealer on earth. His name is Ricky. He is a kind, gentle man, always 100% professional, unflappable, very low error rate. He is a pleasure to spend time with, whether he's playing or pitching. I have 100% confidence that is honest in how he was describing his perspective, and that he was utterly mortified at having contributed to such a horrendous mess of a situation. Throughout it, he remained absolutely calm, describing what he did and saw objectively and non-defensively.

As he perceived it, he heard DMA give what sounded like a concession speech, and the next thing he noticed was one card up, one down on the table. He did not see exactly how they got to be that way. He assumed that DMA was intentionally showing one but folding, so he scooped the cards up.

The conundrum for the floor, obviously, is whether DMA's hand is live or dead. If it's live, the pot is chopped. If it's dead, SLS keeps it all.

Here's the basic argument for the hand being dead: It is a player's responsibility both to protect his cards and to table them face up. Regardless of DMA's intention, his action was to table his cards one face up, one face down, a situation which, if uncorrected by the player, is universally agreed to constitute a dead hand. He could have just turned them face up; his decision to toss them was taking a risk that one might land face down, or on the muck, or bounce off of the table, etc. Compounding this, just before said action he had uttered words that sounded like he was conceding the pot. It is true that such concession would not be binding if he subsequently tabled a winning (or tying) hand, but it gave the dealer ample reason to assume that his one card down was a further gesture of surrender. I.e., the dealer might (and probably would) otherwise have paused to find out for sure whether DMA's intention was to muck, but the speech made that a foregone conclusion.

Although not directly relevant to the rules question, you might be influenced by this: Within ten seconds or so of the problem becoming evident, DMA was living up to the nickname that I gave him. He was on his feet, belligerent as could be, yelling, swearing. He shouted "YOU FUCKING CUNT!" to SLS perhaps ten times, loud enough that everybody for a long way around heard it. (This was in response to SLS making his case to the floor guy that DMA's hand should be deemed dead, which he did with a reasonable degree of self-control.) Security was called and was standing by in case he got further out of control, because it certainly appeared that that might happen. In DMA's favor, though, the floor guy might have been aware that the other players were secretly (and in one case not so secretly) hoping that the decision would favor DMA, because he was almost single-handedly feeding everybody else in the game, with wild play, frequently going broke and rebuying. It seemed obvious that if the ruling were against him, he would either stomp off in anger or, more likely, be bodily ejected by security.

Here's the basic argument for the hand being live: The player said that his intention was to table his cards face up. Three other players (including me) agreed that that appeared to be what he was trying to do, but he was a little over-vigorous about it and one card took a bad bounce/spin. Three players, spaced all around the table, independently witnessed what the officially-unseen card was, and there is no apparent reason to think that they are colluding or otherwise have any interest in the outcome (other than, perhaps, the consideration mentioned above about wanting to keep DMA at the table). The dealer may have been overly hasty in his action. While a literal or technical reading of the rules might suggest that the hand is dead, general principles of fairness and what is good for the game suggest that the best hand should win the pot if it is at all feasible to make that happen, and in this case that precept means a chop.

Let's add a couple of assumptions here. Assume that if they reviewed the security camera footage, it would show what the player-witnesses reported: an apparent attempt to table the cards face up, but one card accidentally spinning around and falling face down, followed almost instantly by the dealer swiping them away into the muck.

Another assumption: Sometimes in such situations, the player awarded the pot will be asked to voluntarily split it in an effort to end the controversy and preserve good feelings. I did not at any point hear the floor propose this. (At least one player volunteered that that's what he would do in SLS's place, but as far as I could tell this suggestion was disregarded.) So assume, for purposes of forcing you to make the hardest decision possible (ha!) that this request was made and refused; SLS says he did not see DMA's other card, the hand is dead, and the pot will remain his, thankyouverymuch.

So how would you call it?

Comments welcome, of course. I'll go write the conclusion of the story for Part 2, but then have it scheduled to post itself 24 hours from now, to give people a chance to decide how they would act before reading the denouement. (Pirouette and denouement in the same post. Today je suis Le Grump!)