Lee Jones, Deuce-Four skeptic

Yesterday I finally met Lee Jones, who is the director of communications for PokerStars, and author of the well-regarded Winning Low-Limit Hold'Em (which Amazon helpfully informs me that I purchased on June 8, 2006). I say "finally" because I had learned from a mutual friend that he lived around Asheville. As a result, I had expected to bump into him a lot earlier, but he moved away around the same time that I was moving here from Vegas.

He kindly reached out to me to say that he and some friends would be at Harrah's Cherokee Saturday, and would I like to join them? I would indeed, and I did.

Delightful fellow, as I had expected based not only on his writings but on reports from others who know him. But I have to say, for somebody so steeped in the poker world, he has a shockingly poor grasp of the game's most powerful hands.

The group of us split between two tables. Lee was at the other with a friend who was taking her first stab at casino poker. After a while, Lee came over to tell us her unhappy experience. She got all in with a set of fives, on a flop of A-3-5.

Would you like to guess what hand beat her? (Hint: Not pocket aces.)

Any regular reader of this blog knows the answer without a moment's hesitation: The Mighty Deuce-Four, of course!

Despite his years in the poker world, Lee has somehow not learned that this is the most powerful hand in hold'em poker. I tried to explain it to him, tried to tell him that I now have 177 blog posts documenting the invincibility of Deuce-Four. I assumed he was in one of those moments that make one subject to seeing the light, having just beheld the power with his own eyes.

Sadly, rather than embracing the truth, he hardened his heart and would not hear the message of the 2-4 Gospel--even though it was coming straight from the High Priest of the Holy Order of the Deuce-Four himself.

Lee, my new friend: I forgive you your unbelief. But I will patiently continue to try to get you to accept what must now appear to you as foolishness. I have confidence that in time the scales will fall from your eyes so that you may see clearly. And I'll be waiting to anoint you into our cult community of faith when that great day arrives.

All Hail the Mighty Deuce-Four!

Lee Jones responds

Lee Jones has an article at PokerNews responding to mine of earlier this week (see post immediately below). As would be expected from him, it's thoughtful, articulate, and comes down on the side of going out of your way to make the game friendly and fun, even at the cost of "a shekel or two less that ends up in your pocket."

http://www.pokernews.com/strategy/using-poker-rules-for-a-tactical-advantage-a-rebuttal-25614.htm

I have no quarrel with the position he takes. Moreover, it is perfectly consistent with the general attitude he has shown in a couple of other recent controversies about the intersection of rules, angle-shooting, and generosity to other players--see here and here.


Though Lee addresses all three of my examples, most attention from others has focused on my first one, which has caused me to think about it more. Specifically, I've thought about how the situation is both similar to and different from the common one of a relative newcomer to poker putting out a single oversized chip after another player bets, intending it as a raise, but with no verbal announcement.

The two situations are similar in that an ambiguity has been created by a player's action. Is the tapping a check or not a check? Is the single chip a call or a raise?

The key difference is that in the latter scenario, we have a pretty robust, universal rule that dictates how the ambiguity is to be resolved. In home games or pub poker, the player might be given a chance to explain his intention and let it stand, whatever it may be. But in any other setting that I've experienced, whether tournament or cash game, the dealer will automatically announce it as a call, and, if the player protests that it was meant to be a raise, explain the applicable rule. There's no grace period; the outcome is not dependent on the player's intention or level of experience with live play, nor is it decided by asking the other players whether or not to allow it to stand as a raise. Players tend to make this mistake just once, because the consequences of getting it wrong are politely but consistently enforced.

With the questionable check, though, we don't have a comparable interpretive rule. I quoted Roy Cooke's rule book, and I think he's right to have such a rule, but it's by no means universally treated as such. This means that every time the tapping ambiguity is created, it has to get resolved on some sort of ad hoc basis: The dealer tries to determine intent, perhaps other players are questioned about whether they were misled or whether they want to allow the offending player to still be able to bet if he wants to, perhaps the decision is guided by whether others acted in turn afterward.

If we had a universally enforced rule along the lines of Cooke's wording, and, as with the oversized chip, it were universally regarded as the dealer's job to announce the ambiguous tapping as a check, it would end the need to devise a custom resolution of the ambiguity every time it occurs. It, too, would become a mistake that new players would tend to make just once. Other players wouldn't be put in the position of having to decide whether to extend generosity or protect their own interests.

Perhaps the TDA will deem this worthy of consideration for a new rule at their next meeting?

What would you do?

Interesting story by Lee Jones. How would you react?

https://www.pokerstars.com/en/blog/lee_jones_journal/2016/letting-one-off-the-hook-162093.shtml

The importance of bright-line rules

I had not previously heard of or seen the phenomenon that Lee Jones discusses in this excellent blog post--calling an all-in bet by just tossing out a single chip instead of a stack. But he effectively shows why this new fad should be definitively disallowed, and in the process has some good words about the function of rules in keeping the game fun and fair.

http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/en/blog/lee_jones_journal/2015/rules-keep-the-game-fun-154041.shtml

"I guess I should have kept my mouth shut"

One hand from yesterday's HORSE tournament is worth describing for you, I think.

I started the tournament in a deep hole, and for a while it looked like I would be among the first handful eliminated. But just before the first break I had a series of three consecutive miracle suckouts in razz hands (including one where I busted a guy when with the last card I made 8-6-4-3-A to edge out his 8-6-4-3-2) that got me back to my starting stack. Soon thereafter I got moved to a new table, which was much, much softer. Once I figured out how generally meek and passive this new table was, I was able to use a combination of stepped-up aggression and a run of good cards to build a stack that was more than double the tournament average.

(This included, unfortunately, busting my new friend Dave, with whom I had gone to the Lyle Lovett/John Hiatt concert. In an Omaha hand, he opened from under the gun with AAxx. I called for one bet from the big blind with the crummy K-9-8-4 double-suited. The flop was an amazing K-K-4, and I ended up taking his remaining stack. It never feels good to end a friend's tournament run.)

Soon after I got to my third table, the worst hand of the day for me occurred. I called a raise in hold'em with 7-7, and four of us saw the flop of 9-7-2 with two diamonds. The betting ended up getting capped on the flop, and again on the turn of a second 2, with the other two players (i.e., not the original raiser and me) getting all in, one of them with the nut flush draw, the other with 10-10.

The interesting point was when I put in the cap on fourth street, the original raiser was obviously disturbed by how things were developing. He finally called, but as he did so he said, "I sure hope you have pocket sevens and not the pocket deuces."

The tournament director happened to be standing there watching this hand play out, and he immediately and properly warned the player not to be discussing his hand, as it could be considered collusion against the two players who were already all-in.

Well, his words were about as clear as he could be that he had 9-9, and I had stumbled into the bad end of the dreaded set-over-set situation. There was a small possibility that he had aces or kings and was cleverly trying to fool me into thinking that he had top set, in order to shut down further betting, but I didn't think so. He sounded utterly genuine to my ears.

The turn was some brick, and he and I both checked. Sure enough, he flipped over 9-9 and scooped the biggest pot I had seen all day.

(Despite the enormous stack he earned here, he ended up busting out in either 8th place for a min-cash, chiefly because he kept severely overplaying one-pair hands. Slow learner, apparently.)

As he was stacking all of his newly acquired chips, he turned to me and said, somewhat remorsefully, "I guess I should have kept my mouth shut." He realized, in retrospect, that he may have cost himself more bets on the river. Indeed he did.

He ended up with more than half of the chips with which I started that hand, and it took me down to well below the tournament average. I had to play short-stack ninja for two or three hours to recover from that devastating blow. But it could have been even worse. I don't know how much more I would have put in on the river, because the overpair theory was starting to lose force with his willingness to cap it with me, but I think at least one or two more big bets would have gone in.

There are a few players who are skillful enough to talk to an opponent during a hand and extract more information than they leak, but they are few and far between. The vast majority of players who talk about their hands give away valuable information--and this guy was a prime example.

Tommy Angelo is on my mind this week, and I'm reminded of a column that Lee Jones wrote about the experience of playing poker with Angelo. It was in Bluff magazine in 2009, and can be found here. Angelo is famous for advocating "mum poker," and Jones describes seeing it in action and trying to emulate it. It's not the only way to play poker (Mike Caro routinely denounces it as not the approach that will make the most money), but it's worthy of your consideration.

Poker gems, #417

Lee Jones, during an online discussion of the monetary value of holding pocket aces, as quoted in Tommy Angelo, A Rubber Band Story, page 73.

How much is it worth to know that those aces are two little pieces of plastic, that you control them, and not vice versa?

Random is random

There are a bunch of poker room rules and procedures that don't make any sense from a rational point of view. The ones I'm thinking of are those that are designed to preserve the order in which cards are or were "supposed" to come.

I was first sensitized to this early in my time playing live poker by a column by Lee Jones in Card Player magazine. Something got me remembering that piece today, and I found it in the C.P. archives, here, from November 15, 2005. As he emphasizes, a random card is a random card, and it makes no objective difference which random card(s) a player gets. But there is a lot of superstition about a "right" order of the deck, set in stone when the dealer makes the final cut before pitching.

For example, once in a while the dealer forgets to "burn" a card before putting out the flop, turn, or river--or, alternatively, accidentally pulls off two burn cards. This inevitably causes weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. The floor is called. Arguments ensue about which card(s) are the "right" ones to be put on the board. In reality, it makes no difference. There are no "right" board cards. In principle, I wouldn't care if the dealer always spread the stub of the deck face down on the table and arbitrarily selected three cards to make up the flop (my only objection being that that would be slightly slower in execution). The flop needs to be three random cards. It does not need to be the three random cards that were precisely at positions 22, 23, and 24 in the cut deck (assuming a ten-handed game). Every card in the deck is equally random (or, at least, equally unknown and unknowable to both dealer and players, which is effectively the same thing). Random is random.

Similarly, we have a standard procedure of dealing the cards one to each player, going around the table as many times as necessary to deal the required number of cards (two in hold'em, for example). It would clearly be faster, more efficient, and less prone to error to have the dealer pitch the requisite number of cards to one player, then move to the next, etc. Except for the fact that it would be slower, in theory it wouldn't matter if the deck were spread out face down and players allowed to choose their own hole cards (though that would introduce some game integrity problems because of dishonest players). As Jones points out, there could be a standard rule that after the deal, players pass their unseen hole cards one seat to the left, and it wouldn't matter. Of course the outcome of each hand would be different, but any player's expected value for the hand wouldn't change; he would be exactly as likely to improve his status as to worsen it. Random is random.

Once in a while the dealer skips over a player in the pitch, and this isn't recognized until the next couple of players have received and looked at a card. The rational thing is just to give the missed player the next card on top of the deck when the deficiency is noted, then go on. But no--the silly rules say that it has to be declared a misdeal, lest players start out with hole cards other than the ones they were "supposed" to get, based on the order of the deck after the cut. It's preposterous.

The most complicated set of rules where this comes into play is in stud. My eyes glaze over when I read the byzantine procedures for assuring that each player gets the cards he is "supposed" to get. E.g., if a player folds his hand when not facing a bet, there are rules about how the next street is dealt to account for that anomaly. I don't even remember what they are, but it's all done in service of the crazy idea that the game is committed to some "destiny" of how the deck was ordered at the time of the cut.

As the good doctor says at the end of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," it's "Madness! Madness!"

Lee Jones, heretic

In the March issue of Bluff magazine, Lee Jones has a thought-provoking article about how online poker rules have lagged behind real-world considerations. He provides several suggestions for how online poker sites should deal with rules problems.

At the very end of the piece comes what was for me an entirely surprising idea:

The following is going to sound heretical, but stick with me. One or more
online poker sites may choose to embrace bots. They could set up an Application
Programming Interface (API) which allows a bot-developer to have his program
talk directly to the poker server at that site. That site might even make its
hand history database available for review, download, etc. I promise you that
such a site would be fascinating to watch. Computer science departments in
universities the world around would fall over themselves trying to develop the
best poker bot. Hackers in tiny apartments would compete byte-for-byte with the
computer science departments. It's hard to overestimate the academic
breakthroughs that might come out of such competition. Create the same profit
motive available to automated stock and optoins traders, and we'll see poker
played in ways that we never thought possible.

I think this is a great idea. As long as people know that they are or may be playing against a bot, why not let them?

It seems to me that what would happen is approximately this: The bots would start off playing pretty badly, as at present. (I'm talking no-limit, full-ring games here.) Good players would spot the programs' weaknesses, exploit them, and win money. The programmers, in turn, would have to figure out what holes in their games had been their downfall, patch them, and play with an improved version. Presumably the improved version could beat some players to whom it had lost before, thus generating revenue for continued investment in research and development and/or allowing the bot to have enough bankroll to play at higher stakes. Again, though, the best players (attracted by the bots now playing at stakes that interest them) would pick apart what the programs are doing, find weaknesses, and pounce on them. This arms race would continue until the bots are good enough that they can't be beat by humans.

Of course, as Jones says, at the same time the bots would be competing directly against each other. It seems likely that at first it would be the best human players driving the development, but eventually, one has to believe, the best bots will be competing only against each other, because no human will be willing to challenge them--at least not for more than occasional recreation.

What could we learn about optimal poker from such a competition? I have no idea, but I would love to zip ahead in my time machine about 20 years and see what has come of it.

Poker gems, #200

Lee Jones, in Bluff magazine column, January, 2009, p. 65.


A couple of years ago, Greg Raymer won a Pot Limit Omaha event during PokerStars' WCOOP tournament series. When it got down to heads-up play, I instant-messaged a colleague and said, "Greg is going to take this thing down and it's not even close." How did I know? Well, it was like this: when Raymer had the button, he'd raise, and his opponent would call. When the opponent had the button, he'd limp in. So to a first approximation, every pot in which Greg had the button was three times as large as the pot in which the opponent had the button. Who would you put your money on?

At a major tournament about a year ago, I was chatting with Daniel Negreanu about the value of position. Steeling myself against a potentially fatal blow to my ego, I said, "Daniel, suppose you and I are playing PLO heads up. But one thing: I've always got the button. Who wins?" Daniel thought briefly and said, "You'd win." ...Now, just to be clear, Daniel Negreanu is ten or a hundred times the poker player that I am. But faced with me having the button on every hand, he fancied my chances better than his.

Poker gems, #197

This is a special two-for-one, because I came across basically the same point expressed by two different people in just a couple of days.


Lee Jones, in Bluff magazine, September, 2008, p. 96:

I think that it may be profitable, if boring, to play PLO in such a way that all you do is wait to suck out on aces. Some PLO players, bless their hearts, never reraise pre-flop unless they have aces. So you call and then if you're beating aces on the flop, you get all the money in.


Jeff Williams, in Card Player magazine interview, December 17, 2008 (vol. 21, #25), p. 26:

You see many players trying to get as much money in as possible before the flop with A-A-X-X hands. I usually make this play only if I can get 35 percent of my stack in preflop, since then you can easily shove in the rest of your money on almost any flop. If you get too little of the money in preflop, all of your opponents know that you have A-A-X-X, and it's quite easy to put only the remaining chips in the pot when they have your hand beat.

Poker gems, #182

Lee Jones, in Bluff magazine article, July, 2008, p. 41 (available here).


Look, as I said before, I work for CardRunners.com, so I hope you’ll come check us out. But whether you do or not, consider this: If you’re not studying poker training videos at some site to improve your game, the guy in the #3 seat, and the lady in #7 — they are. When they take your money, please don’t complain to me.

Touching all the bases

Yesterday I saw this one-minute clip from ABC's "Good Morning, America": http://www.yahoo.com/s/871415. You can also read the story and see a longer video feature about it here. In brief, at the end of a college softball game, a player hit the game-winning home run over the fence, but tore a ligament in her knee going around first base, and couldn't complete the circuit. Umpires informed the team that if her teammates helped her, the home run would be voided. So two players from the opposing team carried her around the bases, thus making the run count, but losing the game for their team.

Predictably, these two young women are being lauded as the epitome of sportsmanship, and the video is played with swelling violin music, blah, blah, blah.

I'm not so sure.

The news story mentions something about the coach having been about to send in a pinch runner. I don't know the rules, so maybe that would be legal, in which case scoring the run for the team was inevitable, one way or another. (If that's so, then it greatly reduces the sacrificial nature of the opposing player's gesture, which is being touted as so grandly heroic.) But for the sake of argument, let's assume a situation in which that can't be done--the player hitting the ball has to personally make it around the bases, or the run doesn't count. Should members of the other team help her do it?

On the one hand, you could say, "Well, she hit the ball over the fence, she deserves the home run, and touching the bases is merely a symbolic formality." That seems to be the prevailing attitude, judging by reactions to this week's story.

But the rules don't say that hitting the ball over the fence scores a home run. They say that such a hit followed by a trip around the bases is what constitutes a home run. Yes, the hit is the hard part and the circuit the easy part (at least usually), but they are both essential ingredients, as the rules stand. Suppose that instead of injuring a knee, the player in question had suffered a fatal heart attack halfway around. Would the opposing teammates carry her corpse the rest of the way? Should it count if they did? There have certainly been home runs invalidated because the hitter subsequently failed to touch all of the bases, often because teammates gather around home plate for congratulations, and the batter never touches down there.

Consider another parallel from golf. On several occasions, big-name professionals have been disqualified after winning (or placing highly) in matches because they sign a scorecard that contains an error, or two players accidentally sign each other's cards. See, e.g., here. In the most famous such instance, Roberto DeVicenzo missed out on a playoff to settle a tie for first place because he signed a scorecard containing an error that put his score one shot too high, which then had to stand. He famously commented, "What a stupid I am!" (See here.) Playing a winning round of golf is the hard part, signing a correct scorecard the easy part. But you have to do both in order to pick up the trophy and the check. Them's just the rules. You might argue for changing them, but do you really want to take the position that the rules, while in place, should be disregarded?

Yeah, I'm getting to the poker part.

I've seen many cases in which the player with the winning hand does not get or is in danger of not getting the pot because of some smaller part of the process that he did wrong or failed to do.

Stories #1 and #2

Lee Jones told two such stories in an interesting recent column for Card Player magazine, which, if this general subject interests you, you should read here. Here they are:

• You're in a cash limit hold'em game. Two players are involved in a pot.
They get to the river and there's a showdown. Player A turns up a pocket pair of
nines. Player B shows and tables a single 10 and tosses his other card into the
muck. There's a 10 on the board, so Player B has a pair of tens. Where do you
push the pot? We all know the official rule, the TDA (Tournament Director's
Association) rule, and so on: Player A has a complete hand, Player B's hand is
dead, Player A wins the pot. But we also know that Player B has the best hand.
We could let Player A go through the deck and pick another card for Player B,
and he (Player A) still couldn't win the pot. Now, let's suppose it's obvious to
everybody within a 10-meter radius that Player B is a novice and doesn't know
this rule - that he comes from a home-game environment and/or has never
encountered this situation in casino game before.

Well, years ago, I was a table captain and a rules lawyer. I can produce a
dozen sober witnesses (and scores of non-sober ones) to verify this fact. But
I've changed my tune. I think you give the pot (and a warning) to Player B and
his pair of tens. You don't want to create an upset novice who's likely to walk
out and never come back. By the way, I saw this exact scene in a European casino
recently. The dealer, correctly, called the floorman, who did what I thought was
a very wise thing: He said to Player A, "Look, he's got the best hand, so give
him the pot." Player A hemmed and hawed, but ultimately did the right thing and
told Player B to take the pot. Then, the floorman explained to Player B very
clearly that he was being given a gift. That, in my opinion, is good for the
game.

• I was in a cash limit hold'em game in a European casino. I got involved
in a pot with another guy, on whom I had position. On the river, he checked. I
turned up my hand. My opponent misread my hand, thinking I had a straight. He
tossed his hand facedown in front of him, and it passed over the betting line
that you see on many poker tables in Europe. His cards were, however, a couple
of feet from the muck (we were in the No. 2 and No. 3 seats). Then he looked
again and realized that I had only a pair and a missed gutshot. He turned up and
tabled his hand - trips. The dealer reached out and mucked his hand. In her
opinion (and this may have been house policy, I don't know), his hand was dead -
as it had gone facedown across the betting line. I said, "Give the man the pot -
he's got the best hand." The dealer looked at me quizzically and glared at my
opponent. "Really - he's got trips, and I've got one pair; he gets the pot." She
looked askance at us both and pushed him the pot.

This and the previous ruling are no-brainers. You have to have a really
good reason to give the pot to anything except the best hand. I think that means
that you must suspect fraud, foul play, or, at the least, severe angle shooting
to do otherwise.

I certainly see his point, and he makes it well. I can't say that he's wrong. But I don't know that he's right, either. I'm still more in the "rules lawyer" state. Maybe I'll change with time, as Jones says he did.

Story #3

Consider this story, as recently told here:

This was at a $1/$2 no limit game.

I was in midpostion with Ace Hearts Queen of clubs and 2 had already
limped. I raise it to $10. The button called as did the Small Blind. The 2 other
limpers and BB all folded.

Flop was Queen of hearts 5 of clubs 6 of clubs.

I bet $30. button folds and small blind calls. Turn was a 4 of clubs.

She checks, I check behind her. River was a 3 of clubs.

She bets out $12. At this point I know I am beat but making the crying call
anyways. I flip over both my cards and say I have the queen high flush. I ask
her do you have the straight flush or just the ace high? She flips over her 2 of
clubs, for the straight flush. very nice straight flush. She then tosses her 2nd
card into the muck face down and the dealer ships her the pot. I pipe up and say
"Dude, she just mucked her hand." The dealers eyes got huge as he realized she
did and he had pushed the pot her way.

There was an akward pause at the table.

I said "All I really want to know is what your 2nd car was miss? Please
be honest." She says it was the 3 of hearts. So I said you caught the straight
on the turn then. Yet, I have one more question. Why did you call my raise to
$10 with 2/3 off? Her answer "because I was in the (small) blind." Yikes.

So when I told this story to a few of my friends they had differnt
thoguths.

I had a couple tell me I was wrong to ask her what her 2nd card was,
that she showed me she had me beat and I had lost.

Yet others said, they would have brought the floor over and that $100+
pot would have been theirs/mine as it were.

In my reply, I said:

Mucking one card is effectively the same as mucking both of them. I don't
think there's anything wrong with asking what her other card was, though I don't
think either the question or answer changes anything. If I had the Q-high flush
there, I'd take the pot and not feel a bit guilty about it. A flush beats a dead
hand any day of the week.

I'm sure Lee Jones would disagree, as did others in the discussion. And maybe they're right. I don't know.

The rest of the cases below are stories I've told before, so rather than re-tell them, I'll just insert links to the original posts.

Story #4

See here. The more liberal, Lee Jones, best-hand-takes-the-pot-regardless-of-technicalities argument says that my opponent gets the money because he had the best hand. The alternative viewpoint is that he didn't protect his hand as he was obligated by the rules to do, and thus forfeited his rights to it.

Story #5

See what I labeled "Story #1" here. In theory, the casino staff could have gone out of their way to find the guy who had had the best hand, but after he had walked away from the table, is that really their job? Here I support them having awarded it to the second-best hand. The erstwhile winner had done the hard part of the job by having the best hand, but failed to do the easy part, which was staying put until the hand was over, and that negligence cost him the pot. See also the addendum to that post for a similar story that a reader emailed to me.

Story #6

See here. I don't recall whether the Floridian's cards were identifiable/retrievable from the muck, or so thoroughly mixed in that they couldn't be pulled out again. But suppose for the moment that the dealer had simply placed them on top of the muck, so that they could be easily recovered. Should they be? Should he be given the chance to show that he had the best hand, as he claimed, and thereby win the pot? I think Jones would argue yes, since there was no attempt at either cheating or severe angle-shooting going on, just an honest mistake.

Story #7

See the second story, the one from the Hilton, here. This wasn't quite a question of who got the pot, but it was along the same lines in that it involved a question of whether to enforce the rules strictly versus giving a break to somebody who acted unintentionally.

Story #8

See the third story, the one from the Orleans, here. In this case it didn't matter, because the hand that accidentally landed face-down on top of the muck wasn't the winner. But suppose it had been. Should he get the pot, on the view that he didn't deliberately throw his hand away, or should he forfeit it, on the grounds that he didn't table his cards in the manner the rules prescribe (i.e., face up, and not in the muck)?

Story #9

See "The Undead Hand" here. Should cards off the table before everybody sees them be grounds for forfeiting a pot that one would otherwise win (or share)?

In each of the cases I've witnessed personally, I have been and remain in favor of the more strict/legalistic reading and enforcement of the rules, what Jones called the "rules lawyer" approach. This isn't because I want to punish people for inadvertant mistakes. Rather, it's because I don't trust either myself or poker room staff to be able to reliably distinguish between innocent mistakes and deliberate angle-shooting. The easiest way to be fair is to strictly enforce all of the rules all of the time. (Granted, there are situations that no set of written rules anticipates, and judgment calls have to be made. I'm talking about situations where a rule clearly pertains, but may be harsh in its consequentes.) I can't think of a case in which I have asked for, needed, or been given the "benefit of the doubt" when I've screwed something up at the poker table.

I just don't think it's asking too much of players to perform the simple act of turning both cards face up, without putting them in the muck or tossing them off of the table, and to speak up quickly if the dealer accidentally kills their winning hand.

Still, I have nagging doubts about whether this approach is actually right and/or best for the game in the long run. Jones's column has amplified my discomfiture.

Card caps/protectors

Lee Jones, in his Card Player magazine column (Vol. 21, #1), p. 112:

When did it stop being cool to cap (protect) your cards? I see virtually nobody doing it now, and I just don't get it.... [S]uppose that you're
sitting there with unprotected cards, and somebody's hand headed toward the muck
hits your hand. I mean, such that there's legitimate doubt as to which cards are
yours. I think any floorman would have to rule that your hand is dead.
I don't see a reasonable alternative. But of course there will be massive
consternation, arguments, recriminations, and so on. Not only is somebody going
to lose a monster pot because he didn't protect his cards, but it will put a bad
vibe on what was previously a happy, enjoyable poker game or tournament.

Please, let's make it cool again to cap your cards.

I agree.

There are two main problems with uncapped cards. Lee Jones mentioned one of them. Don't think it happens? It happened to me again just last week. I was at Planet Hollywood, sitting in seat #1, and the guy in seat #2 flicked his cards toward the dealer. But his aim was off a bit, and they crashed right into my card protector, and bounced back a few millimeters.

The dealer reached over, picked them up, and added them to the muck. I said, "And that, boys and girls, is why we use card protectors." The dealer added, "Abso-freakin-lutely." He has obviously seen this happen before. Without it, my hand would have been declared dead.

With a fairly hefty card cap (something more substantial than a poker chip--although a chip will do in a pinch, and is better than nothing), cards headed for the muck that go astray into your hole cards will either bounce off (as was the case here), get lodged slightly under the edge of the thing, or land on top of it. No matter which of those things occurs, they will be easily distinguishable from your cards, and there will be no need to kill your hand.

The other main potential trouble for unprotected cards is the dealer swiping them accidentally, thinking you have folded. This happened to me once. Ironically, it was during a poker tournament in Sacramento, California, while I was attending poker dealer school. Back then, I had a habit of not capping my cards until I had decided to play the hand. That is, if I came in with a call or a raise before the flop, that's when I would put the card cap on. I think I had some rationale for that approach--leaving the cards uncapped until my initial entry into the pot--though I can no longer recall what it was.

The tournament was at a place called the Lucky Derby. Its tables were shallower, front to back, than most. I was seated directly in front of the dealer. I didn't know back then that this, too, is a vulnerable seat. For some reason, the dealer got distracted for a moment, then when he turned his attention back to the game, he tried to catch up to the action, and in the process was scooping up the folded hands. He grabbed mine, too. I had A-K, and was planning to come in for a raise. I was shocked to see my cards get stolen from under my nose! Fortunately, I reacted quickly enough that the hand could be saved before it hit the muck, but that experience was all it took to convince me that the card cap needed to go on as soon as my hand is off of the cards (after peeking to see what I have been given). I have never done otherwise since, and have never had the same problem again, even though when given a choice I preferentially take the two seats next to the dealer, which are the ones most vulnerable to this mistake.

If this happens to you, there won't be much that can be done about it. You'll get an apology (of varying sincerity) from the dealer and the floor person, but that's about the end of what will be done for you. The rules are pretty consistent on this point:

The Professional Poker Dealer's Handbook by Paymar, Harris, and Malmuth, p. 18 (emphasis in original):

1. Players must protect their own hands at all times. This may
be the most important rule in all of poker. A hand may be declared "dead" if
even one card touches the muck or if another player's card touches a hand that
is not protected.... Although the dealer should be aware of only mucking
discarded hands, a player who fails to take reasonable means to protect his or
her hand usually has no recourse if the hand becomes fouled or if the dealer
accidentally collects an unprotected hand.

Poker Tournament Directors' Association rules, #28:

Unprotected hands. If a dealer kills an unprotected hand, the player will have
no redress and will not be entitled to a refund of bets.

Robert's Rules of Poker, Chapter 3, under "Irregularities":

2. You must protect your own hand at all times. Your cards may be protected with
your hands, a chip, or other object placed on top of them. If you fail to
protect your hand, you will have no redress if it becomes fouled or the dealer
accidentally kills it.

(I should add here, though, that using one's hands to protect hole cards is a seriously bad idea, and one that I think should expressly be against the rules. Players with big hands basically hide their cards, and it's one of the most common causes of people acting out of turn. Everybody should be able to look around the table and at a glance know who is still in the pot by who has cards on the table in front of them.)

Krieger and Bykofsky, The Rules of Poker, p. 242 (I don't know why this is only in their "Tournament rules" section; it would seem to apply equally to cash games):

9.35 Killing Unprotected Hands. If a dealer kills an unprotected hand, the
player will have no redress and will not be entitled to his money back.

Recently I've heard two contrary opinions from people who should know better. First, Adam Schoenfeld (about whom see http://www.poker-babes.com/bio/adam-schoenfeld/), in a rerun of the WSOP from a couple of years ago, was asked about his poker pet peeves, and he listed card protectors among them. I've never met him, but he's one of my favorite players from television--smart, and maybe the funniest of all the pros. (He seems to have dropped off the face of the poker planet in the last couple of years, though. Anybody know what has become of him?) He didn't explain what it is, exactly, that he has against card caps.

Second, Paul Wasicka (about whom see http://www.pokerpages.com/players/profiles/53777/paul-wasicka.htm) wrote an otherwise interesting and thoughtful column late last year for Bluff magazine about the structure and rules for an ideal poker tournament (see http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/readarticle.asp?aid=566). But sticking out like a sore thumb (to me, anyway) was this stipulation: "No card protectors or other paraphernalia allowed on the table." Huh? I can understand the desire for no "other paraphernalia" (family photo albums lining the rail, etc.), but has this experienced, professional player really never encountered any situations in which a hand had to be killed because of either of the two main problems associated with unprotected cards? I don't understand his gripe with card caps. I'm going to try getting a note to him through his web site, http://www.kwickfish.com/, and see if he'll explain it in more detail.

For now, I hope readers will take my advice and that of Lee Jones--and the various rule books--over these two minority opinions. Sooner or later, you will regret it if you don't.

The photo above, incidentally, is of a comemmorative silver dollar that the U.S. Mint produces every year. You can order them at http://tinyurl.com/yqav2l. That's what I use as a card protector. Mine is from 1999; I got it free as a bonus with something that I ordered online. (Now I can't even remember what it was that I had purchased. The coin sat in a drawer until I was sorting through my possessions in preparation for moving to Nevada. When I came across it again, I realized it would serve perfectly as a card cap--especially in the Silver State.) It's an ounce of silver, which has a nice heft to it. It's not going to be pushed off of my cards even if an angry player throws his cards into mine forcefully, deliberately trying to foul my hand. (And yes, I've seen players try to do that to each other.) I've run into a dozen or so other players that use the same item, though everybody else keeps theirs in protective plastic cases. Not me. I like handling it. The silver just has a nice feel to it, and I find it aesthetically pleasing to run my fingers over the varying textures of the designs and edges when I'm bored. Besides, the dings and scratches that it picks up lend it character.

(Note to those who are unclear on the concept: The advice in this post does not apply to you if you play exclusively online. You do not need to tape a silver dollar over the little image of your cards on the computer screen. But if it makes you happy....)


Addendum, March 10, 2008

Paul Wasicka was kind enough to take the time to reply to this post. (The delay was partly my fault, because I accidentally sent him a bad link initially.) Here it is:

Okay, thanks for sending me the link. I read the article, and I agree
with the points that were made, but still maintain that card protectors should
be disallowed. First, I'll tell you why I agree with the things you said
in your article. Yes, I have had my cards mucked by the dealer a couple
times throughout my career because they weren't protected. Furthermore,
though I was very upset at the time, the rules specifically state that you are
responsible for protecting them and that the dealer is not at fault, which I
have come to accept as fair. Where my distaste for card protectors comes
from is when people have either offensive, obtrusive, or otherwise unnecessary
objects on the table that aren't part of the game. I think that a chip on
the cards accomplishes the same thing. Also, what I like to do is just
hold my cards in my hand throughout the hand until the preflop action is over.
I guess the bottom line is that I play many tournaments and never really
have problems with dealer's mucking my cards. I see card protectors and
annoying distractions that supposedly serve a purpose, but when it comes down to
it they accomplish nothing more than a single chip would otherwise do.

Paul

I agree that "offensive [or] obtrusive" objects are a potential problem, though in my experience they're pretty rare. Holding the cards is OK with me, as long as they remain easily visible to all players, so as not to trigger inadvertant out-of-turn action. (I should have mentioned in the original post that at least two Vegas casinos--Planet Hollywood and Palms--are better than most at enforcing the rules that cards have to remain easily visible. If a player's cards are, e.g., halfway hiding behind chips, their dealers are better than most at asking the player to move the cards forward so all can see them.)

A chip is OK, though it has two possible problems. First, a chip is light enough that it can easily get bumped off of the cards in the situation when another player forcefully flicks his cards toward the muck and misses. You might end up with the cards intermingled, the chip off, and a dead hand if it isn't entirely clear which ones are yours.

Second, it happens frequently in low-stakes cash games and tournaments that a player wishing to go all-in pushes his chips forward without a prior verbal announcement, and forgets the one that's on his cards. This isn't usually a big problem, because anybody that is going to call that bet will also be willing to call with the last chip added in. But at least conceivably, if a player unwisely uses one of his highest-value chips as a card cap, the difference could be meaningful. At the very least, when this happens it slows things down temporarily while the dealer and players sort out whether it's really an all-in, whether a call includes calling the last chip, etc.

All that said, it sounds as if Paul might be OK with a rule that limited card caps to a single, smallish, nonoffensive, nondistracting object (no Humberto Brenes lighted sharks, e.g.). That would be fine with me, too. (After all, we couldn't deprive Fossilman of his fossil, could we?) If so, I'm glad to have found common ground.

Lying about your hand

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

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

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

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

The alleged rule would be stupid and pointless

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

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

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

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

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

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

That ain't really the rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should the rule be?

Let's talk about cash games first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the start

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

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

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


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


Addendum, December 7, 2007

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

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

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

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

This would drive me crazy!

I thought that by now I had seen nearly every kind of problem a dealer could introduce (intentionally or accidentally) into a poker game. But today, while catching up on reading some other poker blogs, I learned that the standard way of managing pots in British poker rooms is pure nuttiness--truly inexplicable why it would ever have begun, let alone been continued for so long. I can't improve on Lee Jones's description of the procedure and the problems it creates, so I'll just link to it. This whole "Bigger Deal" blog, by the way, may be the very tippy-top in the poker blogging world in terms of the consistent quality of writing. It's always a pleasure to read.

http://www.biggerdeal.com/2007/09/26/who-came-up-with-this-dealing-protocol/

"You called a raise with that?"

An ever-amazing number of people who play poker just have no concept of the game beyond what some introductory book told them about how to play, yet think they have it all mastered.

Venetian today. I'm on the button with 4-6 of diamonds. The guy on my right raises to $10. I call, as do two other people who had limped in ahead of the raiser.

The flop is 9-6-4, giving me bottom two pair. A young bald guy (YBG) in early position checks, the original raiser bets $10, and I pop it up to $30. YBG calls, everyone else is out.

The turn card is another beautiful 6, giving me a full house. YBG checks. I check behind him, trying to act weak, and hoping that he will catch a card on the river that will give him a flush, a straight, two pair, or something else with which he will be willing to put a lot of money into the pot--especially if this check on the turn convinces him that I was just bluff-raising with position on the flop.

River card is a queen. I didn't know it at the time, but YBG just made top two pair, with his Q-9. He checks, and I have to assume he was planning to check-raise me. I decided to put in a large bet, because a large bet on the river after checking the turn is a very common pattern for somebody who is weak (e.g., made just one pair on the flop, or was on a draw that missed) and is trying to steal the pot at the end, which is what I wanted him to think. I suspect that the size of the bet changed his mind about the check-raise, because he thought for a while, then just called. When he saw my hand, and the dealer said, "Sixes full," he flung his cards in face up, turned to the guy next to him, and gave him a look that said, basically, "Can you believe that idiot?"

I stacked up the chips, but as I was doing so, I was keenly aware that YBG was staring at me from the other end of the table. Finally he said, "You called $10 with 4-6, huh?" I just smiled sheepishly and nodded. He shook his head. A couple of hands later he left the table and didn't come back.

This is much the same attitude that I discussed recently after winning a big pot with a 4-5, with which I raised before the flop: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/something-that-is-not-against-rules-for.html.

Let me try to explain it another way. There are two kinds of players who will call a raise in a no-limit hold'em hand with a 4-6: Beginners, to whom any two cards look like they have good potential, and moderately advanced (or truly advanced) players who recognize that there really is potential for big payback with such hands. I'm not comparing myself to the pros who play for tens of thousands of dollars per pot, but you'll see the best players in the world put themselves in situations like this all the time on shows such as GSN's "High Stakes Poker."

I could even quote the godfather of poker, Doyle Brunson. In fact, I think I will (Super System 2, p. 617):

I always make exceptions when I'm in position, even with the trash hands. For
example, if I were on the button with a hand like A-8 offsuit, I might call a
raise before the flop if enough people, say four, were in the pot in front of me
and I didn't think there'd be any more raises. I might call a small raise and
take a flop with a trash hand because it's a good percentage play. I'd be trying
to make a full [house], trips, or two pair. But if I don't get a real good flop
to the hand, I'll throw it away. I won't get involved and burn up a bunch of
money with one of those trash hands. I'm not going to call any bets on the flop.
I'll be raising or I'll be gone.

And therein lie the differences between the novice and the expert (or, in my case, at least the reasonably well informed intermediate player) calling a raise with something like a 4-6: (1) recognizing the combination of circumstances (especially position) in which there is enough potential for occasional big profit to be worth taking a shot with a low-percentage hand, and (2) being smart enough to get away from it if it doesn't produce a very strong hand.

In this case, as with my previous story, I had been playing tight and showing down mostly premium hands, so I knew that if this 4-6 connected with the flop in a significant way, opponents would assume I was playing big cards and had missed. I suspect that that's exactly what happened here.

But I don't really need to justify my play here. Maybe I'm overrating myself, and it was objectively a complete donkey move that no expert would make, and I just got ridiculously lucky. Suppose that's the case, and YBG is a much better player than me and sees that I'm a bonehead that caught a miracle. What does he accomplish by the snide little comment? It seems to me that he should want to be at a table where there are idiots playing any two random cards, who are relying on luck to save their sorry butts from ruin. Those are just the kind of opponents that make poker profitable for the better players.

The only things that he can accomplish with that little shot of nastiness are all bad--or should be, from his point of view: (1) He makes a fishy player feel bad and leave the game, taking the money with him, probably to be replaced by somebody from whom it will be harder to win chips. (2) He makes the stupid player start thinking more critically about his play, and maybe get better and harder to beat. (3) He sours the mood at the previously light, enjoyable table. (4) He shows himself to be a bad loser. (5) As I think is the case here, if he's really not as advanced a poker theoretician as he fancies himself to be, he risks revealing to more skilled players that he's pretty limited in how he thinks about the game.

And incidentally, YGB, in case you're reading this, Q-9 isn't exactly a premium hand either, ya know, especially to be trying to play against a pre-flop raiser from out of position. Unless, of course, you're so skilled that you can outplay opponents even after spotting them both the likely better hand and position. Which I kinda doubt, in your case.

Annie Duke isn't one of my favorite professionals (I think she's generally overrated, has a track record of unethical behavior at the table, and from what I gather of her personal life, well, I'm not certain I'd want her as a friend). But she does tend to write effective columns in Bluff magazine, and recently she addressed this very subject in a piece I'd highly recommend reading, if you've been in the habit--even occasionally--of openly critiquing other people's play the way YBG did today. I especially like the revealing story of her own unpleasant history in this regard, in the last three paragraphs: http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/2007/03/2007_03_72.asp

Lee Jones made the same point perhaps even more forcefully in a column in Card Player magazine: http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/41/9511

YBG, I sincerely hope to see you at the table again, now that you've shown me that you have blinders on as to what constitutes smart play--and especially now that I'll have you scared that as a stupid, fishy, luckbox, I might be playing any two cards against you in any situation. Heh heh heh!

Another poker dump, and a study in contrasts

I am determined to eventually play at least once in every poker room Las Vegas has to offer. Today I scratched another one off the list: Arizona Charlie's-Decatur.

It will save a lot of time if I just say "ditto" to nearly everything I previously wrote about the El Cortez (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/04/armpit-of-las-vegas-poker.html). The ACD poker "room" is just two tables roped off from the surrounding slot machines and blackjack tables. It doesn't even have a sign, so you can wander around the casino for quite a while before finding it. I had to ask a security guy, because I went around the entire perimeter and never saw a poker room or even a sign pointing to it--guess they wouldn't want to draw undue attention to it.

The main difference from the El Cortez is that ACD allows smoking right at the table. Today was only the second time I've sat in a game with smoking going on at the table. Fortunately, I was on an end seat, with a reasonably powerful desk fan right behind me, so I was upwind of all the smokers--which was literally everyone else in the game.

The other difference from the E.C. is that they were spreading a semi-normal hold'em game: $4-8 limit, with the unusual but not bizarro $1-2 blinds. I managed to lose only $26 in the course of an hour. I was actually ahead for most of the session, until losing one huge pot. After I flopped top two pairs, I pushed as hard as I could, but got called down and beaten by a backdoor flush. Now, this in itself wouldn't be too unusual, except that on the flop this guy had no pair and no draw, other than the runner-runner flush, yet he called a bet and a raise before the flop, and another bet and raise on the flop, with a suited K-5.* For readers who aren't obsessively into poker, I'll just say that this is seriously stupid play; in order to win, he had to get a club on the turn (about a 20% chance of that) and a club on the river (another roughly 20% chance), something like a 4% chance of both events happening. The point here isn't to complain about the beat or to garner sympathy, but to illustrate the level of play going on at ACD.

One elderly guy almost perpetually looked either asleep or dead. I kept wanting to suggest that the poker room manager call the paramedics to check his pulse and see if he was still alive. But then he'd stir a bit, scrape something out of his ear, look at it, and flick it on the floor. I thought that dead people probably wouldn't do this--at least not as often as he was doing it.

After my obligatory hour at ACD, I hopped over to the gorgeous Venetian, to put in a few more hours towards their 50-hours-in-August tournament promotion. What a contrast. It's hard to imagine two poker rooms farther apart on the scale of classiness. The Venetian is the top Editor's Choice on the only site (as far as I know) dedicated to comparing and commenting on Vegas poker rooms, http://www.allvegaspoker.com/. It's also usually one of the top two as voted by contributors to that site. See, e.g., this visitor's review, which I think is spot-on (except the part about Cassandra--sorry, but I just haven't paid much attention to the cocktail waitresses, other than to note that too many of them have gone way too big on the breast implants; it's kind of hard not to notice that): http://www.allvegaspoker.com/player_review_2382.html.

Arizona Charlie's-Decatur is like the anti-Venetian. If they were to come into physical contact, they would annihilate each other in a universe-shaking explosion. (Stephen Hawking, if you're reading this, please feel free to comment on the repercussions of such contact on the space-time continuum.)

I picked up my mandatory $1 and $5 chips for the souvenir collection, but when I look at them again some day, I expect that it will give me a shudder of disgust at the memory: "Ewwwwwwwwwww, I actually sat in that nasty room for an hour? What was I thinking?!"



*Probably the most thoughtful and refined guide to profitable selection of starting hands for a game like this is Lee Jones, "Winning Low Limit Hold'em" (3rd edition, 2005). K-5, suited or not, does not appear anywhere in his charts of recommended hands to play from any position. In other words, the consensus of studious, long-time winning players (yeah, it's a single-author book, but Jones has had a ton of input over the years his book has been in print, and he comments pretty profusely on how and why he has changed his mind on some points, after thoughtful comments from other pros he respects) is that K-5 (actually, any K with lower than a 9 kicker) is a dog in every situation, with a negative expected value over the long run (i.e., you'll lose more than you win playing it). So calling a raise before the flop was already pretty boneheaded, let alone calling another bet and raise after the flop when he had not improved.

Addendum, August 21, 2007: During a session at the Venetian today, I finally spotted the aforementioned "Cassandra." I can see why she caught the writer's attention. She is truly an exotic beauty--Hawaiian, maybe. Still, attractive women are about a dime a dozen in Vegas, and even if a place had a monopoly on gorgeous young women serving drinks, that would make for a pretty piss-poor reason to choose a place to play poker.