PokerNews article #97

I don't always come up with my own titles, but I did this one:

"Rebel Without a Hand: Playing 'Chicken' with the All-In Bluff" 

Hypothetical questions about Phil Ivey

Suppose Ivey had set up his advantageous situation, with the casino's defective cards, automatic shuffler, etc., but had then had a streak of terrible luck and lost millions of dollars instead of winning millions, and the casino bosses later learned of what techniques he had been using. Would they have rushed to issue him a check to refund his losses? If he sued them trying to reclaim his losses, on the grounds that the conditions of the game were unfair, would they agree and cheerfully pay him back?

Put another way, is it the casinos' position that the conditions of the game were only unfair if they lost?

Bracelet race

Shamus just put up an interesting blog post about the bracelet race between Phil Hellmuth and Phil Ivey. For me this neatly coincided with having yesterday read an article by Storms Reback in the July issue of All In magazine that gave his rating of the ten greatest WSOP players of all time. In order, he listed Hellmuth, Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss, Stu Ungar, Ivey, Barry Johnston, Erik Seidel, Scotty Nguyen, and T.J. Cloutier.

As Reback recognizes, overall WSOP performance is about more than bracelets; it also involves cashing and making final tables, and doing so consistently over many years. Although I rather despise Men Nguyen, while preparing the stats below I was impressed to see that he has finished 2nd, 3rd, or 4th in WSOP events an amazing 20 times, in addition to his seven wins. I think he might have a stronger argument for a spot on Reback's list than a couple of the other nominees.

Anyway, I was curious how the bracelet race would look when graphed over the years, since those with the most have been at it for very different periods of time. So I whipped up the following graph of bracelets by years to see how their trajectories looked. I included seven of the eight top bracelet winners (Hellmuth, Brunson, Chan, Ivey, Seidel, Men Nguyen, and Billy Baxter), excluding only Moss. His trajectory is, well, dead; he is unlikely to earn any more bracelets unless the WSOP adopts Chicago-style voting to determine winners.





Brunson's line doesn't really disappear; it's just hiding behind that of Chan, as they coincide for the past several years.

What do we learn from this? Not a lot that wasn't already obvious, I suppose. Baxter has been the longest without notching up; he started off earlier than any of the others and kept a pretty steady pace for a long time, but has perhaps come as far as he is going to go by this metric. (I hope not. I'd love to see him show up the young whippersnappers another time or two before he's done, and yell at them to get off of his lawn during his acceptance speech.)

Brunson started off like gangbusters, racking up six in four years, then has a long stretch of none (I think he played very few events during those years), and just a slow trickle since then.

With one exception, the other lines are rather similar, though with varying degrees of lurching in their progressions. Hellmuth's appears to me to be the most saltatory, Seidel's the most consistently stepwise, with the others somewhere in between.

The striking exception, obviously, is Ivey. He shows up for the first time in 2000, a full eight years behind the most Johnny-Chan-come-lately of the others (Seidel and Nguyen), and rockets up, with the slope of his line, from start to finish, being far steeper than any of the others.

Just for fun, and fully recognizing that it's an utterly meaningless exercise, I wondered how the lines would project into the future, if we assumed that the players would continue racking up bracelets at the same pace as they have since earning their first. Here are their respective numbers for bracelets per year:

Hellmuth: 0.52
Brunson: 0.32
Chan: 0.40
Ivey: 0.80
Seidel: 0.44
Nguyen: 0.39
Baxter: 0.20

You'll notice that one of those figures is far higher than the others, confirming what you would expect from the graph and from just the general knowledge of the relatively short time span in which Ivey has left his mark.

If we project those rates ten years into the future (a completely preposterous assumption for any number of reasons, but bear with me), we would find these rounded totals at the end of WSOP 2020:

Hellmuth: 16
Brunson: 13
Chan: 14
Ivey: 16
Seidel: 12
Nguyen: 11
Baxter: 9

And these for the year 2030:

Hellmuth: 21
Brunson: 16
Chan: 18
Ivey: 24
Seidel: 16
Nguyen: 15
Baxter: 11

So that's my back-of-the-envelope prediction: Ivey catches Hellmuth in 2020, then leaves him in the dust. (Some of the others are, actuarily speaking, also likely to be in the dust by then, in a different sense, but let's not dwell on that.)

You heard it here first.

Who's a celebrity in Vegas?

The Las Vegas Weekly has put up their list of the top 50 celebrities in Vegas. Here are three names and descriptions from the list that might ring a bell with my readers:


17: Phil Ivey
Poker player
There are poker faces and then there are poker faces. And then there’s Phil Ivey’s poker face, the most feared and recognizable in the game today. It scorns opponents for even bothering to scan for emotion even as it baits them into messing with the man many consider the best in the world. Bluff? The nuts? Or is he just running down the grocery order he’s gonna put together on his way home? When 6,500 card players enter a room intent on taking one guy down, and he still makes the final table of the World Series’ Main Event, you’ve gotta wonder how he does it. Good luck finding the answer on Phil Ivey’s face.


30 Doyle Brunson
Poker player
If you’re considering sitting down at a Las Vegas poker table, and you can’t recognize this 76-year-old poker legend (he’s the dude with the cowboy hat and the toothy smile, by the way), might we suggest slots?


47 Daniel Negreanu
Poker player
He’s appeared in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Katy Perry’s “Waking Up in Vegas” video. Oh yeah, and he’s second on the World Series of Poker’s all-time money list.

Hypocrites R Us

When I watched the third season (the first one that I had seen) of "Full Tilt Poker's Million-Dollar Cash Game," one of the little incidents that stood out for me was Phil Ivey snapping at Mike Matusow because Matusow folded out of turn. He explained that he didn't know that the other player was still in, because his cards were partially hidden by his chips. Phil chided him for not knowing who was in, and claimed that he always knows who's in a hand with him. (Sorry, but it's too much work to go back through all 12 or so hour-long episodes trying to find this moment and give you the exact details and quotations.)

I thought this was dubious. Nobody can fail to make this mistake once in a while. I just don't think it's possible to maintain perfect focus forever. Particularly with Phil always watching sports, keeping track of prop bets about the flop cards, etc., I didn't believe him when he said that he always knew who was in or out of a hand.

Just now while eating lunch I was watching "Poker After Dark," which is a rerun this week, but one I haven't seen before. It's "Top Guns II," Tuesday's installment (when they do reruns, the entire week is available all at once), segment 4. In the screen shot above, you can see Ivey attempting to either call or raise a bet. But it's not his turn. Action is on Howard Lederer, immediately to Ivey's right. You can see the alert dealer's hand as she tries to wave Ivey off, recognizing what's about to happen. At the same time, Lederer chirps up: "Wait a second, sir!" Ivey replies, "I didn't even know you had a hand." Lederer's cards are in plain view out in front of his chip stacks.

Mr. Ivey, would you like to revisit your claim that you always know who is in the hand with you, and that you never make the mistake for which you so soundly criticized Mike Matusow?

Liar.

(As a side note, don't you love how I captured Patrik Antonius snorting a line of cocaine?)

Poker gems, #333

Daniel Negreanu, on NBC's "Poker After Dark," Monday, December 7, 2009, about how Phil Ivey looked playing poker on television during a tournament.


You look like a crackhead, especially that day. He did! He had his hyperfocus crack eyes going.

Poker gems, #331

Phil Ivey, on how his tournament play changed for the 2009 World Series of Poker, as quoted in Michael Craig's blog here.


I introduced the fold into my game this year and they had no idea what hit them.... Next year comes the check-call.

"Reraise"?

I'm catching up with last week's World Series of Poker broadcast. In one hand, the action on the turn card is Phil Ivey checks, Joseph Ward bets 200K, Ivey check-raises to 600K. But in the voiceover, Lon McEachern says, "Ivey with a reraise here to six hundred thousand."

Reraise? How can there be a reraise when there wasn't a raise first? A raise after a previous raise is a reraise; a raise after a bet is just a raise.

People make this mistake all the time. Somebody bets the flop, and the next player announces, "Reraise." Even people with enough experience to know better screw this up. One of my best friends does it on a fairly regular basis. And I just don't get it. I essentially never announce reraise. There is no situation in which one needs to use it. The word raise works perfectly well for every occasion where reraise is acceptable. So why not just eliminate the unnecessary word from one's working vocabulary, stick to raise for everything, and never risk making an embarrassing mistake?

I will be invisible

My WSOP debut is coming up Thursday, so it has naturally been occupying a progressively greater portion of my thoughts as the big day approaches. Yesterday it occurred to me to check where in the Amazon Room I'll be parking my butt. I looked at the map of the room found in the WSOP Staff Resource Guide, and discovered that I'll be completely insulated from railbirds. I'm at Table 26, which, as you can see above, is against a wall. There's a corridor for passage between the table and wall, but it's ostensibly accessible only to players, staff, and media. It's just about as far as you can get from contact with the outside world.

This is good in the sense that it should help minimize distractions and thus improve focus. It's mildly annoying, though, in that there are at least a couple of people that I would be pleased to have nearby for easy chatting, pictures, or whatever. So I'm not sure on the balance whether to be happy or unhappy about it. Not that my preference would affect the draw anyway....

I had thought that Twittering updates would be verboten by the WSOP rules on electronic devices. But it's clear from spending any time at all either in the Amazon Room or just watching media reports as the tournament progresses that everybody is using Twitter, openly, shamelessly, and without comment or penalty from tournament staff.

Why the seemingly flagrant discrepancy? Well, a few days ago, in an interesting debate that arose in the comments to a Pokerati post on the subject, a couple of usually reliable and well-placed sources (specifically, B.J. Nemeth and Tim Lavalli) reported that WSOP organizers have made a deliberate decision to allow text messaging, as long as there is no indication that it is being used for collusion or other nefarious purposes. The decision was made after the 2009 rules had been finalized and published, which may explain the mismatch between theory and practice.

I am mostly in agreement with Shamus's rant on the subject here. They shouldn't have rules that routinely go unenforced, for all the reasons he lists. If they really have made an official decision to allow text messaging, but didn't have time to get it into the books, then at the very least they should make an announcement about it at the beginning of every event, so that all players are on equal footing with respect to knowledge of the rules.

But that controversy aside, the point is that I apparently will be able to Tweet to my heart's content. How much will it take to content my heart? That remains to be seen. I sure don't want to be distracted by the attempt to post meaningful 140-character compositions, or by any sense of pressure that people are waiting and I should post something. I'll just have to wait and see what it feels like at the moment.

I'm also acquainted with the PokerNews blogger that is assigned to my event (#24), so I may be able to get a hand or two out to the world that way--maybe even act as an unofficial and unpaid field reporter for my table for them. They kindly gave me time off from overnight wrapup writing both Wednesday night and Thursday, and will arrange for a substitute for subsequent days if I manage to hang in longer. Their accommodation is much appreciated, so trying to help them out a bit with passing on interesting observations is the least I can do in return.

For the most part, though, my plan is to take detailed notes of significant hands, and wait until the whole experience is over to write up a mega-post about the whole thing. Since nobody will be able to watch me, that's the next best thing, right?

And just in case I haven't said this enough (and I fear that I haven't), another million or so thanks to PokerListings for the tournament seat. It's an incredible, generous, and unexpected gift of an opportunity that I would not have purchased for myself in the foreseeable future, and I am deeply grateful for it. I'll make them the same offer as for PokerNews: Send somebody over to talk to me during the tournament, and I'll do whatever I can to feed you information. (I'm aware that I have a mildly awkward conflict of interest, with reason for loyalty to two competing poker reporting organizations, but I'll just have to do my best to help both of them out as I can.)



Completely unrelated to the above, except that I came across it in the comments section of the same Pokerati post, is this report about a touch of class from Phil Ivey:

Yan Chen looked at his cell phone and actually took a call at the table
when it was down to 3 players in the 2-7 tournament that Phil Ivey won. He said
it was about his kid’s doctor appointment and Phil Ivey told the dealer to hold
on and let him take the call. I have sympathy for the situation (if true), but
either have a rule and enforce it or get rid of the rule.

I think small gestures of compassion and kindness like this deserve a whole lot more attention than the rude, immature rants of Hellmuth and his revolting ilk, which are perversely the things that make television. And I disagree with the person reporting the story, in that I think it is good for us both individually and collectively to be willing to make small concessions to other people's needs, when the cost is so low.

It has to hurt

In the original Star Trek series episode "Mirror, Mirror," several members of the crew get switched, via one of those frighteningly frequent transporter malfunctions, into one of the many parallel universes which is almost but not quite like our own. In this one, doppelgangers of our heros are on a ship identical to the Enterprise, except that they are all selfish, power-hungry, violent, and cruel. Oh, and they tend to wear goatees and/or have facial scars, sure signs of all that is wicked.

In this mirror universe, each crew member is required to carry a small device called an "agonizer." In case of infraction of the rules of military conduct, a superior officer will take the offender's agonizer, activate it, and apply it to his body for whatever length of time is deemed appropriate to the occasion, resulting in unspeakable pain being inflicted. For the most serious offenses, such as mutiny or assassination, the guilty party was put into the "agony booth," which we must assume was unfathomably worse than the little agonizer device. See here and here for much more than any sane person would ever want to know about these instruments. What you see above is the unfortunate alt-Pavel Chekov receiving his torture for having staged a failed coup on board the mirror-universe starship. Tsk tsk tsk. As Mirror Spock coolly notes, "The agony booth is a most effective means of discipline."

Yes, there is a poker connection here. I've had more than my fair share of cold-deck situations over the past week, and it has brought back to mind a bunch of painful memories. I remember keenly:

--the first time I drew to the low end of a straight, got there, and only then realized what a bad spot I had gotten myself into.

--the first time I flopped trips and lost it all to a guy who had flopped a full house.

--the first time I had a full house and lost it all to a guy who had quads.

--the first time I had an ace-high flush and lost it all to a guy who had a straight flush.

--the first time I misread my hand, thinking I had the nut straight, when I actually had nothing, and called off all my chips, only to be thoroughly embarrassed when I turned over my cards and saw what I had done.

There is something about the pain of these moments that sears them into our souls. Mike McDermott observes in a rueful voiceover in "Rounders":

In "Confessions of a Winning Poker Player," Jack King said, "Few players recall
big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with
remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career." It seems true to
me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I
can't stop thinking of how I lost it.

(Transcription taken from the imdb.com page here.)

I recall that once when I was a small child my mother was preparing to do some ironing. The iron was standing idle on the ironing board. She was out of the room. I wondered whether the iron was on or off, so I did what seemed like the logical thing at the time: I reached out and touched its surface with my index finger. It was on. I cried, of course. When mom came to see what the fuss was about, and I told her that I had burned my hand on the iron, she asked, "Why did you touch it?" I thought that was the dumbest question possible. "I wanted to see if it was on." Of course.

It must have been somebody with a similar childhood experience who coined the expression, "Once burned, twice careful."

Some things do get better with time and experience--and some build-up of scar tissue. These days I am never as shocked at the kind of situations I listed above as I was the first time they happened. (Fortunately, I still haven't experienced the really horrendous beats--things like quads being beaten by a straight flush, or the low end of a straight flush being squashed by the high end.) Just the other day at the Rio I had 6-7 offsuit in the big blind, so I took the flop for free. I loved seeing it come 8-9-10, two-suited. I bet, got raised by the button. It was early in the session, so I was relatively short-stacked, and moving all in was a no-brainer. Of course I knew that it was possible he had one of the two hands that had me drawing nearly dead (7-J or J-Q). But on the other hand, he would raise me and be willing to call my reraise, probably, with any two pair or trips, and maybe something like a pair and flush draw, or a combined straight draw/flush draw, or even just the nut flush draw with no pair. It was not one of those situations where my all-in raise would get called only if I was beat. But this time he did, in fact, have the J-Q. The only way I could win was with a runner-runner flush or split the pot with a runner-runner J-Q, neither of which happened. Sigh.

The point, though, is that I have become considerably more callused to this sort of thing, and because I anticipated the possibility of being shown the nuts, it didn't stun me and send me reeling the way that those earlier stories did when they occurred. It's not that it doesn't hurt. It does. But my skin is thicker than it used to be, and I have learned to expect the unexpected. With anything short of the nuts, I'm braced to take whatever hit may come, and even with the nuts I'm mentally prepared to see my opponent turn over the same hand for a chop, when that is a possibility.

Before I started playing in real-money games online, I spent quite a bit of time with Wilson Software's simulator. It was, I suppose, useful in getting me used to the mechanics of play, and giving me some feel for what starting hands were likely to end up winners and losers, but I honestly can't remember a single hand I ever played on it. I think it's because none of them actually cost me anything. If I got knocked out of a tournament, I could say, "Oh well," and be in another one ten seconds later, with nothing lost--and nothing learned, I'm afraid, whether it was a bad beat or a bad play.

Simply put, if it doesn't hurt, it's a lot harder for the lesson to sink in. I'm sure there's some biochemical reason for that, related to neurotransmitters powerfully stimulating certain loci in the nucleus-of-whatever deep in the brain. But you don't need to know the physiology to recognize the truth of it.

Of course, the magnitude of loss it takes to inflict the kind of pain necessary for a long-term memory of the event to form will vary according to your means and past experiences. I remember reading a poker magazine story about Phil Ivey (probably in this issue of Bluff, which has an interview with him available online, but not the feature piece I'm remembering). His wife was just learning to play poker and was doing microstakes online. Phil came home on edge because he had had an unusually deep loss--a few hundred grand, as I recall. His wife was upset at her day, too; she told him that she had lost something like 70 cents, which is a lot when you're playing $0.01/$0.02 games. Talk about different pain thresholds!

Mike Sexton said it well during an episode of the World Poker Tour a couple of years ago, when somebody got knocked out of the final table on a one-outer: "If you don't like a little pain once in a while, poker is probably not your game, because as you can see, you're gonna get it."

Who needs an agony booth when you have poker?

Poker gems, #91

Michael Craig, in a blog post earlier today. (It's worth reading the story that prompted this bitter but true observation: http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/poker-blog/2008/03/359_nbc_headsup_championship_10_spades_wrapup_1.php.)


Poker's a bitch mistress who exists to break your heart.

Poker gems, #84

Phil Ivey, interview in Card Player magazine, January 30, 2008 (vol. 21, #2), p. 49:

When I first got good at poker, I played 14 or 15 hours per day. I played that much every single day for about four or five years. That is what it took for me to get good at poker, and specifically, cash games.