You steal this one, it's all over, baby

It's gotta belong to Scotty Nguyen, right?

Scotty knows

Yep, Scotty knows, baby.


Trivia: The title of this post is a sly allusion to the song "Scotty Doesn't Know," from the 2004 film "Eurotrip." In the movie, that song is performed by the character played by Matt Damon. Matt Damon, of course, was in "Rounders," which featured a clip of the final hand of the 1988 WSOP Main Event And who won the WSOP Main Event ten years after that? Scotty, that's who. Is that a freaky coincidence, or what?

Bracelet race

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And these for the year 2030:

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

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

You heard it here first.

Chan vs. Nguyen

A post today on Doyle Brunson's blog, written by somebody identified only as "bob," reports:

Perhaps stating the obvious, but nevertheless entirely true, Johnny Chan commented that “There aren’t going to be any suckers dumping off chips, you have to earn them.” Point in case, who but a pro could fold queens full of jacks? That is exactly what Johnny Chan did against Scotty Nguyen. Granted, there were a pair of aces on the board, but even so, that must have been hard. Nguyen raised Chan on the button, who called. The flop was A-A-Q, and both players checked. The jack on the turn was also checked. When another jack came on the river, Nguyen fired a bet that almost doubled the pot. Chan folded his pocket queens face up, and Nguyen left him to wonder what could have been.

Uh, if the board was AAQJJ, and Chan had pocket queens, wouldn't his hand be queens full of aces, rather than "queens full of jacks" as stated?

(I would have just left this as a comment on that post rather than writing here, but comments were listed as "closed" and the "Leave a comment" link seems to do nothing. Hmpf!)

By the way, what, exactly, is meant by the phrase, "Point in case"?

And further by the way: Folding a low full house on a double-paired board is not particularly difficult. In this case, though, my guess is that the fold was incorrect. I doubt that Nguyen would check trip aces--even with a weak kicker and out of position--on both the flop and turn. It's not impossible, of course, but I think it's more likely that he would make at least a small feeler bet on one of those streets. I suspect that Nguyen had a jack, and Chan got hoodwinked. But I could be completely wrong.

One last point: Shame on Chan for slow-playing himself into such a difficult spot. Double shame on him for folding face-up. What's the point of that? Tommy Angelo, in Elements of Poker, p. 100, gets it exactly right:

When you fold face up, the message that is sent to the table, whether you
intend it or not, and whether you realize it or not, is this: "Dear table full
of people. It is very important to me what you think of me. It is so important
that I am willing to give you the most generous gift of information I can--I
will show you my cards--just so you know that 1) my decisions were justified,
and also that 2) I am unlucky. I know it will cost me money to reveal my cards
and feelings to you. But that's okay. That's how much I value your opinion of
me."

If you always fold face down without ever showing even one card to anyone,
the message that is sent, and received, whether you intend it or not, and
whether you realize it or not, is this: "I don't care what you think about how I
play. I don't even care what I think about how I play. Oh, and by the way, I am
impervious to everything." Fussless folding fortifies.

Another intolerably bad poker movie

I just watched "The Big Blind."* It is as bad as the worst of any of the poker movies I've previously reviewed.

There's a caveat to that, however--it has a lot more poker than most. It's not very good or interesting poker, but at least the movie does largely revolve around the game. It might better be called "Scenes from a Poker Room," because there isn't any central plot. Instead, there are something like 12-15 characters, forming about five distinct story lines. The only thing they all have in common is the real-life Lake Elsinore Casino.

The production values are about half a step above home movies.

There are a few recognizable poker faces. Here are Matt Corboy, Jennifer Harman, and, in a non-speaking, uncredited role, Daniel Negreanu (looking remarkably like Worm, the Edward Norton character in "Rounders"):



Corboy is best known in poker circles as one of the commentators for the one-season, ill-fated Professional Poker Tour. Here's another shot of him, with a look that the producers of the PPT, oddly, did not ask him to recreate for their shows:



Then there's the inimitable Scotty Nguyen, who plays a character named "Scotty," a poker player. Imagine that. He stars in what I thought was the best scene in the film (though it had nothing to do with poker). He is in a store, gets treated kindly by one stranger, badly by another, and deals with them both accordingly--but never loses his cool, speaking only a few carefully chosen words.



The poker is reasonably true to life, as movies go. The most glaring bit of phoniness about it, as you can see from the next screen shot, is that in this casino they play high-stakes cash games with plain, solid-colored chips--the kind you can purchase at K-Mart. That would certainly make buying into the game a lot cheaper: pick up several dozen generic chips at the discount store for a song, then take them to the casino, where they will be honored as worth hundreds apiece. I can't figure out why they had permission to shoot lots of scenes in the casino, but not use real chips. It's a glaring error, like shooting a war movie with water pistols as props.



But the whole thing is badly written, badly acted, and badly shot, so there's really no reason to expect anything better from the props, I suppose. If you're big-time into poker, you probably need to see this stinker just so that you can say you did. But don't expect much from it.

This customer review from amazon.com (you can buy the DVD used from a few of their affiliated vendors) has it about right, though I think he's too hard on poor Scotty Nguyen:

This is a low budget widescreen movie (in LPCM audio=48 khz,16 bit, 2
chnnl--though, it sounded perfectly fine), sprinkled with a few poker stars. I
only rented this, so it was easier for me to watch the whole thing without
feeling ripped off. Jennifer Harman (top poker player), does an okay job playing
the very minor role of a woman (Linda-I think), who's temporarily playing poker
along with her boyfriend Lane (played by Matt Corboy-best known as one of the
PPT tv announcers, or as Officer Ray Carlson, in the tv series, "The Shield"),
until they win enough to get out of town. Corboy was good enough in the movie as
well (he had a goofy, yet, still charming persona), and I liked the way he would
often sing Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" (You got to know when to hold 'em...) to
annoy people or please himself. After doing well, Lane decides to stay and keep
playing, while Harman's character decides to leave town (that's the last we see
of her in the movie).

However, Scotty Nguyen is so bad, it is actually quite funny. Half of the
time I couldn't understand what he was saying. He plays a wise poker player
named Scotty. He says baby, quite often, so I guess he's just playing himself.
But he's so bad, he needs to work on even playing himself, before his next small
screen appearance. At least at the end, they showed his WSOP win (with audio
only at the very end of it). Poker star, Daniel Negreanu, is just in a brief
scene near the beginning, sitting beside Jennifer at the poker table. He says
nothing and was obviously just doing his real life friend, Harman, a favor.

The movie also features several other characters that are struggling with
poker and some who are also ultimately searching for love. It has an annoying
narrator, who comments throughout the movie, but after awhile his drab comments
blended in with the awful storylines, so I was less repulsed. There is enough
poker in the movie, but it mostly centres on bad play and angry reactions,
rather than any quality poker.

So, yes, the movie is awful, but if you're a fan of poker great, Scotty
Nguyen, and want to see him in a train wreck of a movie, then look to rent it.
Whatever you do, don't buy it, or you just might decide to stop watching poker
movies, forever! You've been warned, baby!

*The date on this movie is somewhat mysterious to me. The usually reliable IMDB lists it as 1999 (see here), while the DVD is apparently labeled as 2003, at least according to the information on the torrents directory from which I downloaded it. (It's not available for purchase, nor from Netflix, so one's choices for accessing it are limited.) Jennifer Harman is credited as "Jennifer Harman Traniello," implying that she was married when it was produced. According to a book I have, she was married in late 2000. My best guess is that it was shot in 1999, but not released until 2003.