Dennis Phillips is smarter than I thought

From an interview with Dennis Phillips in All In magazine, December, 2009, p. 96:

What's your favorite "bad" Hold'Em hand?

My favorite bad Hold'Em hand has to be 2-4 offsuit because I took a
six-figure pot with that hand in a cash game less than a year ago. One guy
slow-played aces before the flop and this other guy who was on the button had
pocket deuces. I was in the big blind, and the flop came 4-4-2. Two of us
flopped boats, but I had the bigger one, and the guy who had aces didn't believe
either one of us. That's what they call a cooler.

No, sir. That's what they call S.O.P. Deuce-four cracking aces and besting a smaller full house is just what it does, day in and day out. But I'm delighted to have you in the Deuce-Four family despite that little slip-up!

Faux betting lines

Some poker rooms have a line on the felt, and chips pushed forward aren't considered legally bet unless and until they cross that line.* The traditional rule, before a recent vogue of betting lines, was that forward motion with chips constituted a bet.

I don't care a whole lot whether a place uses a betting line or just the standard forward-motion rule, though on the whole I tend to think that betting lines cause more problems than they solve, and open more room for angle-shooters than they close, as expressed in this rant by Paul Phillips: http://extempore.livejournal.com/90346.html.

But I am baffled beyond words by the handful of poker rooms that have designed into the poker table felt what looks for all the world like a betting line, is assumed by all the players to be a betting line, and gets treated by the players as a betting line, only to have a dealer at some point in the festivities point out that it is not, in fact, a betting line. No, it's only decoration that happens to look exactly like a betting line.

It is no coincidence that I chose a photo of a Planet Hollywood table to illustrate this post. I was reminded of this gripe by playing there Saturday night. You can see in the picture what would look like a betting line to anybody who has seen them used before. But PH is far from the only guilty party on this point.

Listen up, poker room managers: If you don't want to have betting lines used in your facility, and you don't want players to assume that there are betting lines in use, then, maybe I'm just crazy to think this, but here's an idea: DON'T DESIGN INTO YOUR POKER TABLES WHAT LOOKS LIKE A FRIGGIN' BETTING LINE!!!

And you want to hear a wrinkle on this that's even worse? I was playing at Sam's Town tonight. I've only played there twice before, so I don't have the house rules down pat. The line on the table looked to me like it was probably mere decoration, because it was unusually far inboard--that is, one had to reach an unnaturally long way to reach it, suggesting to me that it wasn't really used as a betting line. When it was my turn to put out a blind, I put it at a normal spot in front of me, several inches short of the line, and asked the dealer, "Is that a betting line, or is it just decoration?" The oh-so-helpful dealer said, "Yes." I politely asked for clarification. He said he really didn't know, that when he had asked that himself in the past, he got told different things by different shift supervisors, so he didn't want to commit himself on whether it was a betting line or not, and if there was a problem or I wanted a definite answer, he'd just call the floor person to answer it.

Gee, thanks. Nice to know you can count on the dealer to clear up any ambiguities like that. Hey, pal, are you also a little unclear on whether a flush beats a straight or the other way 'round? I mean, I can sympathize that it would be strange to be told different things on different shifts, but if that happens, then for heaven's sake, take the initiative and go to the poker room manager to get it set in stone one way or the other. I understand that as a dealer you're the low man on the totem pole, but have some pride in your work, dude! If you see a problem, do what you can to get it rectified, rather than say, "It's not my job," and wash your hands of it. You would be doing every employee and every patron a favor by getting it cleared up--and you'd make your own job easier, too. Rather than having to repeat the speech you gave to me every time somebody asks, you could confidently say, "It's a betting line," or "It's just decoration," be done with it, and move on.


*Some places, mostly run by Nazis, say that every chip that crosses the line is automatically bet, even if you don't release it. That is, you have a stack of ten chips in your hand because you were shuffling them; you reach across the line and drop one chip from the bottom of the bunch to constitute a call; you bring your hand back with the other nine chips still in it; and then WHAMMO, you're informed that you just raised the entire amount that is in your hand, because "they went across the line." What makes this kind of house rule even more retarded is that it is never enforced consistently. There will always be some dealers who enforce it every time, some who completely ignore it, and others that will enforce it only if another player asks them to, which basically means that you get a new set of rules every 30 minutes, or at least every shift change (because the floor people are just as inconsistent about it as the dealers). Nazis, every last one of 'em.

Poker gems, #38

Steve Badger, in 1999, after winning a WSOP bracelet (as quoted in Larry Phillips, The Tao of Poker, p. 214):

I just played 22 hours of Omaha high-low.... Of that 22, 17 hours were like watching paint dry, 3 hours were even duller, and about 2 hours was like bungee-jumping from a helicopter into a vat of flaming eels.

Poker gems, #36

T. J. Cloutier, as quoted in Larry W. Phillips, The Tao of Poker, p. 196:

Just because you lost the last five hands in a row doesn't mean that you're going to lose the sixth one. The odds never change, the odds on the sixth hand are the same as they were on the first one. But you don't feel the same about it--nobody ever does.

Poker gems, #4

Paul Phillips, on playing pocket queens in hold'em (Poker Pro magazine, September, 2006, p.32):

"I pretend that they're aces, but I leave the door open to deciding they're deuces if my opponent seems to think his cards are aces more than I think mine are aces."

Poker gems, #1

I've decided to add a bit of contrast to my usual long rants and stories with occasional brief thoughts that I pick up from whatever poker book or magazine or web site I'm reading.

Most will be just a sentence or a paragraph, but I'm going to start with what will probably be the longest one I ever type out, because it's so good. Although I have seen the phenomenon of the poker cold spell discussed any number of places, nobody I have read previously has nailed the feeling as well as Larry Phillips, in The Tao of Poker (pp. 163-166). Having just recently emerged from a nasty cold streak lately (mid-May to early August), this really struck home, as if Mr. Phillips had been monitoring my thoughts somehow.

I'm reproducing about two pages of text here. I'm aware that this likely runs past the safe margins of the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. copyright law, and if, as a result, the author and/or publisher object, well, I'll delete it. But I hope they won't, and, in fact, I hope they'll recognize that the description will so resonate with every serious player that they'll probably sell a bunch more books by having it posted here, because readers will want to find out what wisdom is in the other 242 pages.

So here we go:


All real gamblers know the feeling that Steve McQueen had in the movie The Cincinnati Kid or Matt Damon in Rounders: that walking-outside-in-the-cold-dawn-after-losing-it-all, completely-tapped-out feeling. They know the feeling of standing in the morning sunlight with their pockets turned out and not a cent to their names.

They know that feeling of serious re-evaluation, of taking stock of one's life. They know the feeling of: Maybe you're in over your head; maybe you never understood this game from Day One and you've been fooling yourself all along. Your opponents had your number all along and you didn't know it. Oh sure, a period occurred when you were running well, and that threw them off briefly--and allowed you to keep the fiction going to yourself--but by and large they had your number all along.

All real gamblers know the Inner Scream. It's like the face in that one painting, The Scream, the oval-headed guy with his mouth open and his hands on his cheeks. It's exactly like that, only it's on the inside. It's a scream for just average luck, not even for good luck anymore. For that wondrous state of affairs where, every time you get annihilated, there is some kind of offsetting win of some kind, somewhere. It is pleading just to break even.

Even the most calm, serene, and composed among us has a limit. It might be 7 losing hands in a row. It might be 7 bad beats in a row; it might be 7 hours or 7 weeks or 7 months. However long it is, there is a limit beyond which our sense of humor begins to leave us.

A true cold spell is a thing of wonder. It is almost breathtaking in its scope and depth. It is breathtaking in the way that it feels as if the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. It's a feeling caused by a combination of events so unlikely, so statistically improbable, that it's really hard to believe. And yet we see it happen right before our eyes, often over and over again.

Statistical occurrences that are 20-1 against, 50-1 against, 100-1 against happen routinely, in an unbroken string. And as a player you know these odds. And you know that they are even longer when combined.

So as a player, you know how unlikely it all is. You know the statistical likekihood of missing the flop a couple of hundred times in a row. You know the statistical likelihood of every player in the game getting playable hands except you--and of having this go on for days--or weeks. You know the statistical likelihood of sitting in a certain seat for eight straight hours without getting a playable hand, only to move to a different seat, and watch the guy who took your old seat start a winning streak that lasts for four straight hours. You know the statistical unlikelihood of this sort of thing, and it is this that creates the emotional component--anger, rage, resentment.

But the annoying part, really, is not the losing. And it's not the money either. Because you can always get more money. It's a feeling of betrayal almost, the appearance of a suddenly topsy-turvy world where logic no longer seems to function, where bad players win effortlessly, and good play is penalized. It's a funhouse-mirror world where logic--and the familiar laws of long experience--no longer apply. It's as if you accidentally dropped something, some object, and now the object falls up, not down. It's the dismissal of a world you knew--or thought you knew.

You question your game. You question deeper things too: your luck (ill-starred from birth?), your fate, your destiny. You start to dredge up the memories of all the losses in your life, going back to grade school and beyond. And in retrospect, they all do seem to form a pattern. You begin to question your grasp of the fundamentals, your body language ("Am I utterly transparent to the other players?"). You begin to question your religion, your God, your place in the universe.

You become the dictionary definition of "indecisiveness"--doubtful, tentative, defensive, and fatalistic. On a personal level, "feeling sorry for yourself" reaches a level you didn't know existed--and certainly wouldn't have believed you were capable of. It reaches the final level, the one that doesn't just soak itself in self pity but involves a thick seasoning of bitterness, anger, and resentment....

Is it a crisis of confidence? No. That's too small, too puny a term for it. We're talking about a complete poker breakdown. We're talking about all phases of one's game heading for the bottom, taking up residence next to the hull of the Titanic. We're talking about the poker equvilent of a nervous breakdown, where you get beat on the river so many times, for so many weeks, that you can almost no longer function in the game.

In the process, you've struggled against novices, amateurs, rookies, first-timers, locals, drunks, and greenhorns. You've struggled as you watched all manner of opponents come and go in the game, rack up chips cheerfully by the basketful and leave. And now, finally, you just lost it. Not over this game, over the whole thing....

You may have started off with a series of annoying losses, but it developed its own momentum after that. Your chief role now is just another body at the table, holding down a chair--taking up space.

For the poker player, macro-tilt is the last straw, the card player's Waterloo. Nothing he or she does seems to work, and though the nightmare may have begun with a statistically unlikely series of events, by this point you're willing to admit that a lot of it probably is your fault. The disaster is self-caused. You admit it.

You've now picked up the ball yourself and are running with it. You've gotten so gun-shy, so shocked when anything good happens that you really aren't sure how to play your hands anymore. Other players sense this too, of course, and walk all over you. Bad players have new confidence when playing against you. Even card room regulars you've intimidated out of their boxer shorts for years are starting to wonder what's the matter with you.

A man once bitten by a snake fears a rotted rope." --Folk saying