Unusual day

Sunday was a highly atypical day for me.


Family

First I had a late lunch with my sister, her husband, one of their daughters, and her husband, all in town for the annual rodeo. Then we went bowling at Sam's Town. I won both games, scoring 139 and 150, which is pretty good for me--especially since I haven't bowled in about 18 months.

Unfortunately, in the process I somehow managed to wrench my back, so now I'm in pain and walking funny, dreading when I have to change positions. Getting old sucks.


Chinese

Came home, did some work. In the evening I sort of invited myself to a home game some friends were having--@spencer_chen, @gamble24x7, @veggiepoof, and one other whose Twitter I don't know. It was my first chance to play open-faced Chinese poker, which seems to be all the rage these days. I had never even played regular Chinese before, though I had watched it a few times and understood the basic idea.

My entire knowledge of OFCP comes from an article in Card Player magazine by Jennifer Shahade , a blog post a few days ago by Shamus, and an article by Dave Behr in the December issue of Bluff magazine, which by coincidence I had just read yesterday. So I was green as green could be, and knew I was likely to lose money. Which I did--$89, to be exact, at $1/point. But that's OK. Learning new forms of poker always costs money as one makes mistakes and, hopefully, learns from them to play better.

But ya know what? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that OFCP is not, in fact, a form of poker. For that matter, neither is traditional Chinese poker.

This is a point that I haven't seen raised in any of the three sources I mentioned, but which occurred to me as I watched the others play during the one hand out of five I had to sit out. (A maximum of four people can play at once, since each player needs 13 cards.) There are several ways to express the basic element that is missing, but they all amount to the same thing:

• There are no hole cards, no secrets that you hold which are unknown to the other players. 
• There is no betting on the strength of your hand. 
• It is a game of perfect rather than imperfect information. 
• You cannot bluff. 

Mike Matusow is generally not a font of wisdom that I turn to, but Michael Craig quotes him as saying, "If you can't steal, it ain't poker." He's absolutely right. 

Mike Caro has argued that the ability to bluff is more a defining element of poker than are cards. He describes an imaginary game of "cow chip poker," in which the players scout a nearby field for cow chips, conceal what they find in paper bags, then reassemble to bet on who has the biggest one. You can win with an empty bag by betting in such a way as to convince your opponents that you found the biggest cow chip. That's poker, even with no cards. In another hypothetical situation, he describes how two people can play poker with a deck of just three cards, because you still have the crucial elements of being able to have a secret card and bluff with the worst hand. 

Video poker is not poker, in part because it's played against the house rather than against other players, but also because it lacks secret information and bluffing. OFCP fails by that same criterion. They are both games that superficially resemble poker because they use the standard 52-card deck and poker's traditional five-card hand rankings. But resembling is not being. They are not poker. 

It was, nevertheless, highly enjoyable. I didn't find it nearly as addictive as others breathlessly describe it after first exposure, but it's definitely an intriguing game. 

Oh, and the other important thing I learned about OFCP is that people say "fuck" a lot. Really a lot. 

Television

After I got home, I watched the premier of "Sin City Rules" on TLC, which I had taped earlier. The only reason I was interested in it is because one of the stars is Jennifer Harman, whom I like. But I thought the whole thing was awful, painful, unwatchable. Jennifer is fine, but the other women are completely unbearable. They're self-absorbed attention whores. Judging by the first episode and the teaser on TLC's web site, the show exists mainly to capture and televise the catfights among them. Ick. I can't understand why anybody would watch such trash. The preview for next week's show seemed to focus more on Harman's life as a mother and poker player, so I'll probably give it one more try, but I can't see myself tuning in much beyond that. I'm kind of perplexed how she got associated with the show; she seems not at all like the others. 

And that was my completely out-of-the-ordinary day. 

What's the explanation?

Take a look at the first few minutes of Monday's "Poker After Dark" here. At about the 2:25 mark, we start listening in on a conversation between Jean-Robert Bellande and Mike Matusow, talking about a previous hand. The details of the hand don't matter; just listen to Matusow explaining what he was thinking. It goes something like this:

Bellande: I would have snap-folded.

Matusow: I wouldn't have. I thought it was weak. Or strong. I wasn't sure.

I see. So you thought it was either weak or strong. Wow. I wish I had such masterful hand-reading skills.

Continuing our eavesdropping:

Bellande: What are you talking about?

Matusow: I thought at the river we were going to find out if it was weak or strong.

Bellande: It looked like he was begging for a raise. It was just like, mmm, just please, there it is. Raise me. Reraise me.

Matusow: Well, that's why I was shocked when he, I thought he was gonna bet big on the river. I thought it was like I've got three queens.

Bellande: 9800 into a 42,000 pot.

Matusow: That's why I was expecting a big bet out of Phil on the river.

I have posted before about an episode of "High Stakes Poker" in which Matusow's explanation of what he was thinking during a hand was utterly incoherent. This is another example. First he says that he interpreted Hellmuth's small bet as weak. Then he seems to be attacked by a fit of uncertainty and changes it to being either weak or strong. Then, when Bellande scoffs at the possibility that the bet represented weakness, Matusow is suddenly a convert, retrospectively confident that the bet represented strength, which, he asserts, is why he was expecting Phil to follow it up with a big bet.

I'm completely baffled by this. Remember, Matusow isn't explaining what he now thinks Hellmuth had, but is explaining what he was thinking as the hand played out. If he were just arguing with Bellande about what Hellmuth most likely held, then it's perfectly understandable that he might change his mind in the face of Bellande making an argument for a different idea. But what he was thinking at a particular moment in the past cannot change.

It's possible, as I assumed with the previous example, that Matusow's thoughts are so jumbled and incoherent that he honestly doesn't know what he was thinking even a few seconds ago, so an honest explanation of the state of his thoughts can shift fluidly.

But after watching this clip several times, noticing his facial expressions and body language, and listening to his tone of voice, I think there's a better explanation: He's lying.

His first sentence, "I thought it was weak," was the truth. But he quickly realizes that perhaps that was wrong and, if so, he might look foolish for saying it, so he amends it by adding, "or strong," thus covering all the bases. Then when Bellande belittles the notion that Hellmuth was weak, it suddenly becomes more important to Matusow not to lose face than to provide a faithful recounting of what he had been thinking, and he goes to some trouble to revise history in such a way that he will be seen to be in agreement with Bellande.

It seems completely outside of Matusow's capacity to say, "You know, as it was happening, I really did think the bet represented weakness, but you make a good point, and in retrospect maybe I was wrong."

Matusow is hardly alone here. It seems to be a common malady among poker players to want other players to perceive them as having figured out the puzzle that every hand provides. It seems that after every big pot, when the hands are revealed, somebody will claim, "I knew what he had."

Of course that's a lie, or at least a gross overstatement, every time. One never knows what another player has, short of seeing the cards. One might achieve a feeling of a high degree of certitude, but I'm sure we've all had the experience of feeling extremely confident about what another player's down cards are, only to be surprised when they are finally shown. Nobody ever says "I knew he had aces" after the guy shows jacks.

Of more relevance to my argument here, however, is noting that there is only one reason for such crowing: The crow wants the other players to believe he's a poker genius. What other motive could there possibly be for making such an announcement? Maybe I should refer to that kind of player as a peacock rather than a crow, because the bragging resembles an attempt at a gaudy display of feathers.

Whenever I hear somebody claiming to have known what another player's cards were, I have two instant, automatic thoughts: (1) Yeah, sure you knew, buddy. (2) There's somebody to whom it is very important to be thought well of by a bunch of strangers. Poor guy to be a slave to the opinions of every random person he meets.

I don't suppose I'm entirely immune from impulses like that, but I'm glad that they are mostly of such low force that they don't surface. (After all, a guy who routinely goes out in public in a 20-year-old car, a wrinkled shirt, a fanny pack, and a three-day beard is hardly showing desperation to garner the world's approval.) There are only a few people whose opinion of me generally, or of my poker playing specifically, really matters to me, and they are almost never the ones gathered around the table. If somebody thinks I'm an idiot and a bad player, fine, I don't care, and, moreover, I'll try to find a way to use that impression against him.

Anyway, I'm opening the door to a somewhat different understanding of Matusow's contradictory claims. I'm now thinking that they may be the result of a desperate desire for others' approval instead of (or in addition to) being the result of thought processes that are actually as disorganized as a literal interpretation would suggest.

Confidential to Mike Matusow

The next time they invite you to go on "Poker After Dark," where they use these things called hole-card cameras, you might consider washing your hands and cleaning under your fingernails first.

Addendum

There's a Twitter bot called "Pokerize" that automatically sends a Tweet with the title of any new blog posts I put up. Apparently Mike saw his name that way, read the post, and replied: "for all u idiots that play only online poker its called real poker where you get green on hands from felt #morons"

Dancing donkey

I am definitely not a fan of trash talking, rubbing salt in opponents' wounds, etc. I don't do it myself, and most of the time I don't enjoy seeing it done by others. (I'll make an exception if Phil Hellmuth is the recipient.)

But I'm watching the new season of the Full Tilt Million Dollar Challenge, and I can't help smiling at the dancing donkey that Mike Matusow brings to the proceedings. It's just so silly that it would be hard to get offended at it.

(I realize that it would make more sense to splice these four clips together into one, but I haven't learned how to do that yet in MS Movie Maker. It was something of a technological breakthrough for me to figure out how to snip out the relevant segments from the shows. I'll tackle the resplicing problem another day.)

I can be really, really stupid

Yesterday while I was playing at Binion's, there was a guy across the table from me reading a book when he wasn't in a hand. The book was Check-Raising the Devil, nominally by Mike Matusow, but with more than a little help from Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli.

I have not read this book and do not own a copy. But I have, naturally, seen plenty of reviews of it in my poker reading, in blogs and in magazines. The reviews almost always include a picture of the front cover, so I was familiar with what it looks like:




I was, therefore, surprised when I saw the book yesterday, because it was plain black, with the title in simple lettering across the front. No photo of Matusow with a satanic 6-6-6 flop in front of him.

At first I thought maybe this was a translation into another language and, hence, with a different cover for some foreign market, because the guy reading it was clearly not a native speaker of English. But no, when he tipped it down to watch a hand, I determined that it was in English. Could it be some sort of special book-club edition? I've had book club memberships, and sometimes the covers differ from the publisher's usual output of a title. I doubted it, though, because I recognized the logo of Cardoza, the publisher, on the spine.

I finally decided that what I was looking at was most likely some sort of pirated, black-market copy, probably produced dirt-cheap in a sleazy third-world country back alley and sold at a price to undercut the legitimate publisher. Even as I settled on that as the most likely explanation, however, I was aware that it did seem a little weird. After all, the book sells to a niche market of poker enthusiasts--not exactly the kind of runaway bestseller that you'd tend to think would attract rogue printers itching to cash in on the frenzy of some girly fictional romance that Oprah had gushed about. I dismissed it as a minor mystery that I would probably never get the answer to, turned my attention back to the poker game, and had forgotten about it by the time I got home.

Today I was reading Lavalli's most recent blog post, and the question of the strangely undecorated book came to mind again, because there's a little ad for it in the margin of the page. It occurred to me that I could pretty easily contact Lavalli and ask him if he knew of any pirating of his work, since I know that he at least periodically stops by here for a read, and has left at least one comment that I remember.

I started composing a note to him. Then, fortunately, I was saved from the embarrassment that would have resulted. I don't know how it happened, but in some sort of weird deus ex machina moment, the answer to the riddle just dawned on me from out of nowhere. In retrospect, it is so blindingly obvious that I am now seriously questioning my sanity:

The man was simply reading a copy of the book with the dust jacket removed.

New nickname for Matusow

I'm watching this week's "Poker After Dark." In Wednesday's first segment, Jean-Robert Bellande is short-stacked and moves all-in with K-Q offsuit. He is called by Mike Matusow, with 10-10. Bellande catches a queen on the flop, but Matusow hits his two-outer on the river for trips.

As you may know, for the past couple of years Matusow has been on a "positive thinking" kick. From various interviews and on-camera statements during televised tournaments, it's clear that he really, sincerely, genuinely believes that keeping his thoughts positive affects for the better not just his decision-making, but how the cards come.

You all know by now how I feel about this kind of hooey, don't you? If not, go here to read what I wrote about Jason Alexander, and here to read what I wrote about Shannon Elizabeth, both of whom have publicly espoused similar nutty ideas about poker.

Want to see how stupid this crap is? Consider how it has affected Matusow. Upon seeing that lucky river card, he tells Bellande, "Now you just lost to a guy who hasn't won a coin flip in the last 30 coin flips, and was sitting there expecting to lose."

I see. So that positive thinking is pulling in great results, eh? The outcome of the channeling of your mental energies has been that you now win 1 out of 31 of your 50/50 propositions. Wow. Yeah, that's how I want my tossups to turn out, so, sure, sign me up for this awesome program that you've embraced. I wants me some results like that!

Matusow continues uninterrupted: "But, see, I stayed quiet and stayed positive."

Uh, OK. So you were sitting there "expecting to lose" while you "stayed positive." The man is so stupid he can't even utter two sentences in a row without contradicting himself.

Want another example? On this week's "High Stakes Poker," he and Daniel Negreanu both move all-in on the flop. Negreanu has an overpair--tens--while Matusow has Ac-Qc, for two overcards and the nut flush draw. Matusow says to somebody (not clear who he is addressing), "That's the worst hand he could have had." That's actually about right, given how the betting went. OK so far.

But Negreanu hears that comment and asks, "You're upset I called, Mike?" Matusow replies, "No. I knew what you had. I thought you had nines."

Right. So first you say that pocket tens was the worst hand that Negreanu could have had to make the all-in call. Then you say that you knew what he had (tens). Then you say that you thought he had nines.

It gets better. When the hand ends, they cut to an interview with Matusow conducted later, in which Kara Scott asks him his thoughts during the hand. He says that when Negreanu called his pre-flop raise, "I at this point for sure put him on tens or jacks, maybe even queens. I was hoping it wasn't queens."

So let me get this straight. You were "sure" that he had tens or jacks. Unless he had queens. Or unless he had the nines that you thought he had. But you "knew" what he had.

Matusow, do you even have enough brains to realize how idiotic you are?

Matusow is such a dunderhead that I propose dropping his nickname. I shall no longer refer to him as Mike "The Mouth" Matusow, but instead as Mike "The Moron" Matusow.

Vengeance is mine, saith Jesus

Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
--Romans 12:19, King James Version


Warning: Contains spoilers.


Last night's "Poker After Dark," a cash game, contained what was for me one of the most emotionally satisfying hands of televised poker I've ever seen. You can watch it here.

The background is crucial. At the beginning of the first installment Monday, everybody wanted to play the 7-2 bounty game: if you win a hand with 7-2 in the hole, everybody else pays you $500. Chris Ferguson was the only holdout, so it was not on. Mike Matusow was outraged at this refusal. He harped on it repeatedly, calling Ferguson the biggest nit of all time, and so on. His haranguing was so intense and prolonged that it became seriously uncomfortable for me to watch. It was way, way beyond a friendly needle between colleagues. Ferguson politely explained a couple of times that he wasn't comfortable with the game because he had never played it and hadn't had a chance to think through what strategic adjustments might be called for. He even tried a compromise, agreeing to play if they would lower the bounty amount to $200. The others thought that smaller amount would not make it worthwhile. After these responses failed to shut Matusow up, Ferguson just sat there and took the verbal abuse without replying further.

But then on Friday's show, he got his chance to stick it to Matusow. Matusow open-raised with A-8. Ferguson reraised with 7-2. Matusow called. Ferguson then proceeded to bet every street with complete air. Finally, Matusow was faced with a $12,000 bet on the river, holding top and bottom pair. But, as Ali Nejad explained in his voiceover commentary, the only hand in Ferguson's typical pre-flop reraising range that Matusow could now beat was A-K. (You might add K-K to that, though with that hand and an ace on the flop it seems less likely that Ferguson would continue to fire both the turn and river after being called.) A-A and Q-Q would have made sets; any hand with a jack in it would all have made a straight; A-Q and A-10 would have a higher two pair.

Matusow goes into the tank and is obviously having an agonizing decision:




Finally, though, he reluctantly folds.

Ferguson shows the bluff and, to stick the needle in a little further, says, "I really like this 7-2 game."




He is visibly pleased with himself:




The other players find considerable humor in the situation:




Well, all except one, that is:




After that, Matusow, who has, as usual, been chatting up a storm, becomes noticeably more quiet for the rest of the show.

I love, love, love this. On the most basic level, Ferguson takes advantage of his tight reputation to pull a fast one and win a pot that he could not otherwise take. But it's patently obvious that he chose this particular situation because of the specific cards he held, the specific opponent he was facing, and the history of what had transpired earlier in the filming day.

He could have justifiably gotten angry at Matusow's relentless taunting--which really was over the top. Ferguson's IQ is probably, oh, I dunno, about 200 points higher than Matusow's, and he has just as great an edge in verbal fluency, should he choose to get into a war of words. But he didn't. He held his tongue, and instead waited for his chance to reply in the language of poker, which proved to be far more eloquent and effective than any verbal retort he could have contrived.

I'd like to think that I would handle the situation the same way--don't try to sink to the needler's level and get into a pissing contest. Instead, keep quiet and just outplay him. After all, taking his money is ultimately a lot more satisfying than getting the most clever rejoinder in could ever be. If you happen to get a chance to rub his face in your win a bit, well, that's icing on the cake.

Nh, wp, sir!

I've gone viral!

I attended some of the 2008 NBC National Heads-Up Championship at Caesars Palace, and wrote up a post about it here. Included were a few video clips I shot of hands being played out. I posted them on YouTube, then embedded them in the blog post.

Well, yesterday YouTube notified me that one of the clips--with Mike Matusow eliminating Tom Dwan--had become very popular. They were inviting me to share in the revenue from ads placed next to it.

This puzzled me, because there's nothing special about that hand or the little video I shot of it. So I went to YouTube to check out the viewing stats:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zhqBPkjRQg

Good Lord! The things has been watched 122,000 times!

This completely boggles my mind. I have no idea why it has been hit so often. None of the others that I did at the same time is over 30,000--and even that number startles me.

I didn't know it, but I guess I'm just about the next best thing to the Numa Numa kid!

I can love the WPT again

If you follow such things, you've known for a long time that there have been loud and frequent complaints among both players and serious viewers that World Poker Tour final tables have been all-in luck-fests. The blind structure was such that usually half of the last six players came in very short-stacked and had to make shove-and-pray decisions. It was not the greatest display of poker skill.

Last night was the conclusion of the two-part Bellagio Cup III broadcast--a four-hour final table, the first using the WPT's new tournament structure, which made for much deeper stacks, and therefore much better poker.

It was like watching a whole new show. I cannot praise the change sufficiently. Even after two players were eliminated, even 2 1/2 hours into the 4-hour combined show, all four remaining players had more than 60 big blinds each! Deep-stack poker is a whole different animal than what we've become used to in these programs, and it was sweet.

I also noticed that Mike Sexton and Vince van Patten were going deeper in their analysis than they used to. They take a lot of grief for saying the same things over and over again, but frankly, these guys taught me the game. The first time it came on, I had no idea how to play, but I learned through watching. They understand that their audience has grown more sophisticated in its knowledge of the game, so their commentary is now stepping up a notch to accommodate that.

For example, at one point Danny Wong (who I thought was the most impressive talent at the table, with fewer missteps than anybody else, and astonishing feel for when to press and when to back off) flopped two pair and led out betting, rather than slow-playing it. He got no customers. In past episodes, I don't think that would have received any significant analysis. But this time they showed unimportant footage of him stacking up his chips (with four hours, they have the time luxury to do this sort of thing), while Vince came to his defense and explained why this non-obvious move was actually smart. (At the risk of breaking my arm while patting myself on the back, I appreciated this commentary because I was thinking that I would have played it the same way, and for precisely the reason that Vince noted.) Wong probably anticipated that his ultra-aggressive opponent, Kevin Saul, would view the bet as a steal attempt and raise with position. Wong would therefore win more chips than if he check-raised or just called, both of which would set off alarm bells in Saul and cause him to shut down. It's the reverse-reverse thing: betting out is the first-level obvious thing to do when you flop big, so the common ploy is to reverse that and check instead, which makes betting out look like you have a small piece of the flop, rather than a monster. I agree completely with the play and the analysis, and it just happened that Saul, this one time, didn't play as per his usual style. Anyway, I appreciated the time the show took to explain why the unconventional move may have been smarter than it looked at first glance.

I also appreciated what seemed to be the commentator's newfound willingness to be openly critical of bad plays. In the past, about the most scathing critique you'd hear from the ever-positive Mike Sexton would be something like, "Well, in my opinion, that was a questionable move there." But in last night's show, Mike Matusow, way behind in third place and getting pummelled by both remaining opponents, said that if he didn't win this event he was going to go kill himself. (To which Vince rather nastily remarked, "Promises, promises, Mike!") Mike Sexton said something like, "He's going to have to start playing better if he hopes to beat these two guys." Dead on accurate. I like the pull-no-punches approach, when it's justified.

I have to admit that I was disappointed not to see Matusow break down and cry like a baby when he got knocked out, the way he did in his only other WPT appearance back in season one. They showed a clip of that again last night, and again I laughed out loud at him. No wonder he and Phil Hellmuth are such good friends--they can cry on each others' shoulders. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if that's who they are....

I was surprised to notice that a guy I used to play with all the time at the Hilton is a Bellagio dealer and had a lot of time in the box on this episode. I didn't even know he was a poker dealer. There's probably not a chance in the world that he reads this blog, but just in case: Hi, Sal!

Now if they could just find a hostess that I like as much as Shana Hiatt, they'd have me completely hooked again.

Fly on the wall

Last night I logged on to Full Tilt Poker to play my nightly sit-and-go. Before joining a table, I decided to scan the big-dollar cash games to see if anybody interesting was playing that I could watch for a while. And boy, did I hit the jackpot there. As you can see, this $500/$1000 HORSE game had Eli Elezra, David Benyamine, David Singer, John D'Agostino, Mike Matusow, and John Juanda. You don't often find a lineup like that.

You might also notice that this screenshot happened to catch Matusow sticking a knife into Benyamine via the chat box. It's pretty well known that Benyamine stopped playing online for a while earlier this year after losing a few hundred thousand dollars. He's getting back into it now, but apparently Matusow wants to make the experience as painful as possible. Note the irony of Mike Matusow chiding somebody else's financial status. Anybody want to take Matusow's side on a bet as to whether he or Benyamine has the greater net worth, or the highest average annual income for the past five years?

Anyway, I had a great time watching this game for a while before closing the window. I resisted the temptation to click on the "join waiting list" button, since I think the FTP server would have sneered or laughed at me, while pointing out that I don't have enough in my account for even one small blind in this game. I moved on to my $5 STT. I won it, but it felt kind of pointless and pathetic.

Another online cheating scandal

This time it's one of the most widely known professionals: Mike Matusow. Everything I know about the situation comes from this post from Short-Stacked Shamus, at Hard-Boiled Poker: http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2008/02/wrong-focus-another-cheating-pro.html

I have only one observation to add. I propose a simple test for determining whether Matusow acted unethically and/or in violation of the rules of whatever site this occurred on (he hasn't identified it yet). Whenever and wherever Matusow does his next interview, he should be asked directly to name the site, the date, and the player who he worked with.

If he refuses, then he should be asked why he won't disclose this information. All of the possible reasons he could give--at least all of the ones that I can think of--would be negative. The mildest would be something like "I don't want to embarrass the player I helped." But if there was nothing wrong with what they did, there should be no embarrassment. More likely, he'd have to say that he won't provide the details because he's worried that the site would investigate, determine that its terms of service were violated, and take action, such as reclaiming the prize money and banning both Matusow and his partner. He might also worry about his own sponsoring site, Full Tilt Poker--whether or not that is the site that was involved--deciding to terminate its relationship with him.

But that's the rub, isn't it? No reputable site would take such actions unless its rules were violated. So if Matusow et al didn't violate any rules, they don't have anything to worry about.

In other words, if Matusow admits that he is concerned about adverse fallout (whether just the disapproval of the poker world or the tangible effects of action by the site), then he is admitting that he knows or at least suspects that he acted in violation of the rules. If he is confident that he did nothing wrong, then he should have nothing to hide.

As far as I am concerned, Mike Matusow is and should be branded a poker cheater unless and until he publicly provides the details of the incident, which would presumably result in an investigation by the site. If such investigation finds that he and his co-conspirator did not break any rules, then I'll accept that decision and revise my opinion. But for now, he's a cheat and should earn the derision of other players and banning by every online site and brick-and-mortar casino, for both cash and tournament play. If Matusow were suddenly unable to make his living at poker (except maybe for private games), it would send a powerful message to the scummy players who think there is no downside to their cheating and collusion. Besides, he has a fallback career: He can always go back to selling drugs. (For the best profile and bio of Matusow I've ever seen, check out http://www.totalgambler.com/theplayers/playerinterviews/1259/me_and_my_big_mouth.html.)

So far a Google search of blogs finds only one other posted comment on l'affaire Matusow: http://randomshuffle.blogspot.com/2008/02/cockroach-theory-of-online-poker.html. I'll check again in a couple of days and see whether this is making any waves.

On a slightly related note, see Daniel Negreanu's comments on the "J J Prodigy" affair, at http://tinyurl.com/yplr98. I appreciate that he not only condemns the culprit, but comes down pretty hard on his friends at Poker Road for a softball interview:

Questions should have been more direct, a la, "What is wrong with you? You
cheat, get caught, give the poker world a lame apology, only to go right back at
it and keep cheating? Why should anyone believe you are suddenly reformed? Why
should live poker events even allow you to play?" Those are tougher questions
posed in such a way that isn't all mushy. The tone from all of the guys was just
way too apologetic to this kid.

Well said, Daniel. I hope you will soon be just as forthright about denouncing your friend Mike Matusow, however difficult and painful that may be.

I hate that I have to have a whole label for posts on the subject of cheating: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/search/label/cheating


Addendum, February 22, 2008

As far as I can tell, there are only three other bloggers who have picked up on this story:

http://kickasspoker.blogspot.com/2008/02/poker-ethos-part-whatever.html

http://randomshuffle.blogspot.com/2008/02/cockroach-theory-of-online-poker.html

http://www.pokerblog.com/poker-cheating-online.html

http://www.pokerroad.com/_/pokerazzi/2-14-08/

Idiots blame the dealer

One of the most baffling things I see and hear at poker tables is players who blame the dealer for bad cards or bad outcomes.

Of course, there's always at least a bit of this from everybody, mostly joking and good-natured. For example, after 15 or 20 minutes of unplayable hands, I'll occasionally request that a dealer see if she can find it in her heart to pass me one face card before she completes her shift. After an especially bad beat, I'll sometimes try to lighten my own mood by telling the dealer, "You understand that I have to hold you personally responsible for that pot." I think, though, that I have always made it abundantly clear through tone of voice and facial expression that I'm kidding. Many times I have seen off-duty poker dealers sitting at a table as players, and they needle the dealers about bad cards and unlucky outcomes, too—and I have always had the impression that these comments were both made and taken with a wink and a nod.

Some players, though, aren't kidding about this. Some sincerely believe that particular dealers have it in for them. There was a regular at the Hilton who would always take a 30-minute break when a particular dealer came to the table, convinced that it was impossible for him to win a pot from that dealer. Dealers get cursed at, have cards and chips thrown at them, and in other ways take personal abuse from angry players—not for any breach of protocol, but simply because of an unfavorable outcome in the play of a hand.

This is one of the most puzzling attitudes I run into. I'd like to interview these players in detail, and ask them, "Just how do you believe that the dealer is carrying out this plot against you? Does she spend her breaks setting up the decks in a particular order to deliver you bad beats, then slip those decks onto the table when you're not watching?" The idea that casino dealers deliberately select starting hands or outcomes of pots cannot withstand even a few seconds of critical thought by anybody with more than about three neurons connected together within his cranium.*

H. Lee Barnes, in his book Dummy Up and Deal: Inside the Culture of Casino Dealing (University of Nevada Press, 2002) eloquently, if unscientifically, explains the reason for this irrational behavior, from the player’s point of view.** From page 2:

Barnum was right about [a sucker being born every minute]. But the players
refuse to see their pictures on a poster with P.T. Barnum pointing at them. Nor
can the players see the house. What’s the house, after all? A building with
carpet and walls and chandeliers? A corporation? What the players see is the
dealer.

“How can you do this to me?” a player asks.

The dealer can’t pass the blame off onto Blaise Pascal*** or the
player’s bad judgment or the house. The dealer must shoulder the responsibility
for his or her imagined power, no matter how absurd it is to think that the
dealer exercises any control. The dealer becomes not the medium through which
chance plays out its pure odds, but rather the conduit of luck…. What is left
after all the motion is the dealer standing behind the table in her uniform. She
must face the player.

“How can you do this to me?”

The most unflinching assessment of this phenomenon I have encountered is that of prolific poker writer David Sklansky, in Fighting Fuzzy Thinking in Poker, Gaming & Life (Two Plus Two Publications, 2000), p. 113:

Players sometimes throw cards at the dealer, insult him or her, or declare that they will never tip. Sometimes this happens because the dealer made a mistake. More often, it is because the dealer dealt the abusing player a losing hand.

While I have never knowingly abused a dealer, I have a confession to make—I like it when I see someone else do it! It’s not because I am a sadist; and it’s not because I secretly wish that I had the gumption to do it myself. Rather, it is because I am delighted to know that my opponent is an imbecile!

The fact is that any player who gets mad at the dealer for his losing cards, truly, is a complete moron, and his stupidity ought to make me money…. So to repeat one more time, if you don’t think the dealer is cheating, and you still abuse him or her when you lose, you simply are an idiot.

Most of the overt signs of irrationality I complain about from low-stakes players can also be seen among high-stakes professionals, at least occasionally: superstitions, asking for new decks of cards to try to terminate a streak of bad luck, rabbit-hunting, having "feelings" about what card was coming next, getting upset when a judiciously folded trash hand would have hit big, etc. Until this week, though, I had never seen a recognizable, successful, name-brand, professional player earnestly blame a dealer for the cards.

Then yesterday, while browing around YouTube for something else, I came upon this clip of David "Devilfish" Ulliott: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyzZDCG43hI (from which the first screenshot above was stolen). In it, he and Phil Hellmuth get all their money in before the flop, and Hellmuth gets lucky to flop a third 9 to beat Ulliott's pocket aces. As soon as he sees that card, Ulliott says, "Look at this fucking dealer." (The Brits are less squeamish than we are about language on television.) He manages to make Hellmuth look like a classy gentleman by comparison--which is quite a feat in itself.

In another episode of the same series, Ulliott again takes out his bad beat on the dealer--even though he was openly reprimanded for it after the first incident (by a voice off-camera; I couldn't tell if it was the tournament director or one of the television producers). You can see the situation in the second screenshot above, and the hand is shown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSA0tzdx0yg. Again, all the money is in before the flop, with Andrew Black having attempted an all-in bluff reraise, which Ulliott called. As he walks away, he says something that is partially obscured by the commentators, but sounds like, "You'd better get coffee out to that dealer. She's fucking worse than the other one."

Yeah, Devilfish, it's the dealer for sure. Hellmuth and Black paid the dealers under the table to arrange the cards so that you would lose.

Really, what other scenario is possible by which it makes any sense to blame the dealer? But if Ulliott genuinely thinks that's what happened, then why not lodge a complaint with the tournament director, insist on reviewing the videotapes, scrutinize the security procedures, etc.? Of course, it's pretty unlikely that he actually believes this. But then, if he doesn't believe it, why say something so monumentally stupid, especially when you know it's going to be put on television?

When Hellmuth blows up, it's always at another player, whose idiotic play, in Hellmuth's eyes, resulted in whatever bad outcome he's currently bitching about. Mike Matusow, in his blowups, just blames bad luck, repeatedly claiming that he is simply the unluckiest player alive. These attitudes are stupid and demonstrably wrong, but at least they have some kernel of truth to them. Lots of Hellmuth's opponents do make bad plays, then get lucky--but he's no more a victim of this than every other professional who has to fight their way through large fields of amateurs to win modern tournaments. Matusow often blames bad luck when it was actually his own bad judgment at fault, but luck is certainly part of every hand. If he's not actually cursed with extraordinarily bad luck, in his blow-up situations it is at least true that he failed to get good luck where it might help him.

But blaming the dealer? Mr. Ulliott, in addition to being supremely ill-mannered, that's just moronic.

*I realize that there are countless schemes by which a dealer can manipulate a poker game. People playing in home games and underground cardrooms really do have to watch out for these "mechanics." But in casinos, using modern, standard security practices, it's almost unthinkable that any such shenanigans are going on. The dealer, if caught, would obviously be out of not just a job, but a career, as he or she would be forever unemployable in the gaming industry--not to mention facing criminal charges. Except at the very highest stakes, it would be impossible to win enough money from such a plot to make it profitable, after paying a dealer a large enough bribe that he or she might consider risking that much for it.


**This was written in the context of games in which the player is set against the house, with the house having a fixed edge, but the same psychology clearly carries over to poker, in which players are pitted against each other, with the house having no interest in who wins or loses.

***A 17th-century mathematician who, with Pierre de Fermat, basically invented the entire field of probability theory. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal.

The strange grammar of poker

Every specialized field develops a language all its own. Poker is no exception. But even after being fully immersed in the game for well over a year now, and pretty intensely involved in it for a year or so before that, some of what is generally accepted as correct lingo still falls hard on my ears.

The first phrase I remember catching my attention as being just plain confusing was the phrase "dead to," as in "He's dead to a jack or a queen." This means the opposite of what one would initially tend to think. I first understood this to me "If a jack or a queen comes, he's dead; otherwise he'll win." But it's actually used to mean just the opposite: "He has to catch a jack or a queen, or he's dead." The syntax there still doesn't make sense to me.

The next one I started encountering was "running good." This has a specific meaning, which is "getting lucky." It is not to be confused with playing well, which is an entirely different concept. And the adverb good appears to be universal, even though it sounds like a grammatical clinker; nobody ever says that he is "running well." Of course, that bleeds over into the other half of the poker equation, so that people tend to say things like "I've been running good and playing good." Or this, from Kristy Gazes's blog: "70% of the time I ran bad, 20% of the time I played bad...." (http://www.kristygazes.com/tips/Jul+2007) I've mostly gotten used to the first half of sentences like those; I will probably never get used to the second half, because "good" and "bad" as adverbs (instead of "well" and "badly") are just never going to sound right.

One that I've heard much more commonly from high-level professionals than from the low-limit players I usually associate with is the use of "winner" and "loser" as adjectives, rather than nouns. You have to learn to think of them as synonyms for "up" and "down," or "ahead" and "behind." As I've mentioned several times recently, I've been re-watching all of the past episodes of GSN's "High Stakes Poker," and this comes up all the time there. "I want to be able to quit winner for a change," and "I was doing OK, but I just got loser," are a couple of examples of this peculiarity. In one episode, commentator Gabe Kaplan says that the stage is set for action, because "all the right people are loser." What he meant was that when people are losing, they tend to play more hands and bet harder and faster, in a desperate attempt to get back to even, and in the situation at hand it was the already loose, crazy players who had gotten behind and were likely to make it a wild ride for the whole table. In an episode of "Cash Poker: The Ultimate Gamble" (crummy syndicated show), Bob Bright has been losing quite a bit, then hauls in a large pot, and Gabriel Thayer, seated next to him, comments, "You might be winner now." Mike Matusow, in an interview during another episode of "Cash Poker" was asked how he was doing, and replied, "I'm $28,000 loser." In Doyle Brunson's book, My 50 Most Memorable Hands, he writes, on p. 143, about his worst year in poker, 2004: "I got loser, and instead of taking a break like I usually do when I go on an extended losing streak, I kept playing and I lost the staggering sum of $6 million." That's "getting loser," all right!

Though I'm quite a stickler for correct grammar, I understand that words and phrases and expressions just develop within an insular community, and one can't fairly judge them to be "right" or "wrong" by reference to standards for non-specialized English. This post, then, isn't intended to scold the poker world for these odd terms and usages (as if that would do any good anyway). It's just to note that, well, they're kind of weird and unconventional, and they take some getting used to.

But there are some on which I have to take a grumpy stand. For now, I'll exercise restraint and finger just one flagrant violation: "I'll put you all in."

Sorry, but you can't. Only I can put all my chips into the pot. What you can do is put all of your chips in. But I'll decide whether to put mine in, thank you very much.

I really don't get why this particular verbiage has survived and thrived, when it's so obviously wrong. If you are up against just one opponent, it is shorter, more accurate, and less affrontive to simply say, "I'm all in." The effect is the same (because an all-in bet between two players is effectively only the amount of the smaller of the two stacks). Now, if there are three or more players still in the hand, and you want to bet enough that a call on my part would have me all in, but not go all-in yourself, then the thing to do is ask for a count of my stack, and bet exactly that amount. Alternatively, you can announce to the dealer, "I bet the amount that Seat 4 has in front of him," which has the same effect. (The former route is safer, though, because with the latter you may get a nasty surprise, if Seat 4 has some high-value chips or bills hidden where you can't readily see them.)

I'm certainly not the first one to chafe at this phraseology. I think the first place I read something that let me know that I wasn't the only one bothered by it was here: http://www.poker-babes.com/strategy/pet-peeves.html. Since then, though, I've heard a few players at the table argue about it when somebody says it to them. That, I think, is pretty pointless, and probably counterproductive. It slows down the game and results in a stupid argument that nobody is going to win. If somebody is susceptible to a reasoned explanation of why they shouldn't use those words, it is far more likely to happen from reading something like this post than from a confrontation across the green felt in the middle of a hand.

I'm also never going to yield on the common but grating "I should have went all-in." I even heard Daniel Negreanu say this during an episode of "High Stakes Poker." Geez, people--can't we even manage to conjugate the most common verbs in the language correctly? This particular piece of abuse of English just makes me shudder with revulsion. Nothing and nobody will ever get me used to it, or make me accept it as part of "the strange grammar of poker." Some things are just plain wrong.

"Things are good all over"

Tom is a regular at the Hilton who, as far as I can tell, is a decent enough fellow, but I dread getting stuck at a table with him, because virtually all he does is complain about what bad cards he's getting. And I mean constantly. He doesn't talk about sports or other players or the weather or poker strategy or his family or politics--he only opens his mouth to gripe about getting dealt bad cards.

Oh wait--there is one exception. This monologue is occasionally punctuated by complaining about how the rare good starting hand he receives gets outdrawn. That's how awful his constant moaning is: a bad-beat story is actually a welcome reprieve from the stream of ordinary gripes. It's not just like fingernails on a chalkboard; it's as if somebody had invented a machine that relentlessly scrapes synthetic, never-wearing-out fingernails across a chalkboard 24 hours a day, with a constancy that no human could hope to match. He is the Energizer Bunny of whining. If Mike Matusow is the John Henry of poker complaining, Tom is the steam hammer that runs poor John Henry to his death.

Last week, though, he actually made me laugh out loud for the first time, with a line that almost--almost, mind you--made me want to forgive him his incessant, drive-me-up-the-wall diatribes.

He was at the next table over. One of his friends, sitting at my table, hit four of a kind and won a high-hand jackpot. He leaned back in his chair, got Tom's attention, and told him the good news.

Tom replied, "Oh yeah? Well, things are good all over. Half an hour ago, I almost hit a pair."


Ah, if only his sense of humor showed through the river of griping a bit more often....

I think I'm going to throw up

Earlier this week I was playing at Sunset Station. Two middle-aged women, obviously friends, got some food delivered to the table and started sharing it. They were on the other end of the table, and the little cart with their meal on it was behind them, so I couldn't see exactly what they were eating, but it was some sort of finger food. They didn't wash their hands--just dug right in. They, when it was their turn to play, they'd LICK THEIR FINGERS OFF and resume play, as if nothing had happened.

It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.

How can people be so clueless? Poker chips and cards are filthy, disgusting things. Pick up any chip, and you can see globs of crud adhering to it. ("Table boogers," I once heard a dealer fittingly call them.) I know all too well that the majority of men leaving the public restrooms in casinos haven't washed their hands. Whatever is now on their hands, from their butts and genitals, gets spread all over the chips and cards.

And then you ladies want to handle those chips and cards for a few hours, then pick up and ingest food without first washing your hands, and then, to top it all off, LICK YOUR FINGERS??????????? What the hell is wrong with you? Are you just mentally ill?

Here's an interesting article from Bluff magazine about an experiment to determine the bacterial inhabitants of Vegas poker chips: http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/2007/02/2007_02_54.asp. I only wish they had tested for viruses as well as bacteria.

And have you two ladies never, ever seen guys who openly pick their noses at the table? I have, many times, in a series of images that are seared into my retinas. Coincidentally, here's Daniel Negreanu's video blog from just yesterday, in which he discusses Mike Matusow doing the same thing--and the camera pans over to Mike, who freely admits he goes digging for gold openly, and doesn't care who sees it or knows about it: http://www.rawvegas.tv/watch.php?vID=6259beb58303c9d0ed2626fbab1eb6. Trust me: Mike is not alone in his lack of discretion about this activity.

So these ladies handle the chips and cards that have players' snot dribbled about on them, and then LICK THEIR FINGERS! Perhaps they think, somehow, that the rest of us sharing those cards and chips really, really want these women's saliva added to the already disgusting blend of crud we have to touch.

I remember an episode of Bravo's "Celebrity Poker Showdown" featuring the famously germophobic Howie Mandel. It was seriously bothering him to be handling the cards and chips, so he passed out latex gloves for everybody to wear. It was funny, but it was also pretty clear that this wasn't just a joke for him--he really couldn't handle thinking about all the microbes that were getting passed around. I'm not a germophobe--really--I just have a decent understanding of and healthy suspicion of the microbial flora that will invariably contaminate objects that get handled by so many members of the general public, many (most?) of whom have highly questionable habits of personal hygiene.

I'm not advocating that poker rooms hand out or require the use of rubber gloves while playing. But common sense suggests that one take care not to touch anything the cleanliness of which you care about (like, say, your face, or your food) after handling such manifestly foul things as poker cards and chips, without first washing one's hands pretty thoroughly.

Lordy, lordy, lordy--there's just no understanding some people's lack of good sense.

Addendum, May 6, 2011

I see that the link to the Bluff magazine piece no longer works. Here's the new link to get to the article: http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/Dirty-Vegas--Bluff-Staff-750.htm