"Poker & Pop Culture"

I recently finished reading Poker & Pop Culture: Telling the Story of America's Favorite Card Game by my friend Martin Harris, aka Shamus of Hard-Boiled Poker. (Amazon link here.) That's it up there on my Kindle, which is how I prefer to read most books these days. It was published six months ago, but I took a while to get through it because of my bad habits of (1) trying to read, like, five books at the same time, and (2) being easily distracted by whichever new one I just bought ("squirrel!") instead of sticking with one until it's finished.

The book has a fair amount of overlap with Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by James McManus, and that work is cited extensively. If you've read it, you'll probably feel that there are whole chapters of Martin's book that you can skip over lightly. This is especially true near the beginning, where, of necessity, he starts with the origins of the game itself and how it spread.

But then he gets to the core of his subject: how poker appears in and has shaped popular culture--particularly books, magazine, movies, music, television, and radio. Martin has written about many facets of this before, but the essays are scattered around his blog and the various online outlets he has written for; here it's all in one place, plus a ton of details I don't recall seeing before. Martin practically has a corner on the market in this subject matter. Nobody else has written about or researched it as extensively as he has. He has even taught college courses on exactly this stuff.

Let me show you screen shots of some of the things I highlighted because I found them particularly surprising or interesting:

Truth! This is what makes playing poker with tourists in Vegas profitable.

WTF? R U SERIOUS? 66 cards, five suits, and a joker? I can't even imagine how this works. So, where do I sign up?

Also truth. Well, except for the making money part of it.

I don't see how there can be any argument to the contrary.

This sounds amazing. You had me at "Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart." Here's a list of where you can find it on various streaming services.

Back-story to the Kenny Rogers hit. I did not know that Cash had recorded it at roughly the same time. You can hear it on YouTube here. Maybe it's just familiarity, but I think Rogers's version is much better, even though I love Johnny Cash.

When I read this, I said to myself, "No effin' way!" and rushed to YouTube to find this thing. Here, let me save you the trouble, because you have to see this:




Perhaps oddly, my favorite part of the book is the appendix. In it, Martin lists 100 movies either about poker or with a key poker scene, and ranks them, best to worst. (Spoiler alert: "The Cincinnati Kid" nabs the #1 spot, and some piece of dreck called "Zeta One" brings up the rear.) I don't think I could have listed a hundred such movies if my life depended on it.

Between that appendix and the main chapter on poker in the movies, I've highlighted in the text maybe a dozen that sound good enough that I plan to seek them out and watch them. Some I've never heard of before, some are classics that I've inexcusably neglected all these years. My future viewing list includes "Winchester '73," "Rio Bravo," "Silverado," "Dr. Jack," "Poppy," "Tillie and Gus," and "Thursday's Game."

One quibble: The Kindle version has a glitch throughout, in which every ellipsis in the original text is rendered as an ampersand. There are dozens of these scattered throughout the book. But one soon learns to ignore the anomaly.

If the general subject matter interests you--and, since you're reading this blog, why wouldn't it?--then order it from Amazon or directly from the publisher, here. If you're going to read it on Kindle, I suggest buying it from Amazon, because it will be available across all your devices, which the eBook version from the publisher won't do. (Once you have the eBook file, you can install it in any device you want, but you have to do it separately for each one; with Amazon, it's automatic.)

In any format, there is much to learn and enjoy here.

Things I've been doing

Work, mostly. There has been a steady stream of it, for which I'm grateful.

But I moved here primarily so that I could spend more time with Cardgrrl, and I'm very happy that that has been happening. She comes to my place every Tuesday for dinner (yes, I cook!) and to do laundry (her rental place has no laundry facilities; this will no longer be an issue by July 1, when she moves into her brand-new house, which is almost finished). Then every weekend we get together either once or twice for something fun--like the Chimney Rock hike of the previous post.

Some other recent examples:

A stroll through the gardens at Biltmore Estate (we both have annual passes).

Seeing Shakespeare's final play, "The Tempest," at an outdoor amphitheater, performed by the Montford Park Players.

An evening of barbershop-style singing by the Land of the Sky Chorus.

Reading. (This part doesn't involve Cardgrrl.) I've been plowing through books much faster than I used to in Vegas. I've been here four months now, and I've read:

Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul, by Jonathan Rauch.

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, by David Foster Wallace.

Control: Exposing the Truth about Guns, by Glenn Beck.

Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr's Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle that Changed a Nation, by Jonathan Rieder.

Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, by John Scalzi.

Bacon and Egg Man, by Ken Wheaton.

Elders: A Novel, by Ryan McIlvain.

The World Made Straight: A Novel, by Ron Rash (soon to be a major motion picture, having recently filmed right here in Asheville).

A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss.

God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales, by Penn Jillette.

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

And I'm currently in the process of reading three more:

Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks.

The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage, by Greg Gutfeld.

Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories, by Ron Rash.

How's that for an eclectic list?


And finally, a cat. If you follow my non-poker Twitter feed you are probably sick of hearing about the cat. But I can't help it. I'm in love. Cardgrrl recognized this when I had had the kitty home for only about 24 hours, and the adoption was still on a trial basis (to see if she triggered my allergies in some uncontrollable way), and she didn't even have a name settled on yet: http://www.somebeaut.com/2013/02/26/petting-kitty/

I have only become more smitten since then. Lucy is the best thing to happen to my life since Cardgrrl came along four years ago. She brings me delight and laughter every day. She sits on my lap for a couple of hours a day, sleeping and purring while I work. When not there, she is usually on her window perch about three feet away, often making the most squee-worthy series of cute, snorgling vocalizations.

I am mightily tempted to here produce a photo dump of every exposure that has her beautiful little face in it. But I shall restrain myself and post only a few of the best ones. The first two were taken by Cardgrrl, the rest by me.

Isn't she just the most gorgeous, adorable thing you've ever seen? ("Yes." The correct answer is "Yes.")

So that's what I've been doing since settling in here. To my shame, I still have not reassembled my bicycle and started tackling the hilly streets of Asheville. But that will come when I get the time and sufficient mental motivation.

I do miss all my Vegas friends*, and I miss poker. But in case you couldn't tell, I am very, very happy here.



*Not nearly as many people come visiting in Asheville as in Vegas. So far only one friend of mine has come to town: Shamus came through on his way home from a tournament reporting gig at Harrah's Cherokee in April. He, Cardgrrl, and I had lunch at Juicy Lucy's, which is very near where Cardgrrl's house is going up. This gives me an excuse to re-post my favorite photo of Shamus, International Man of Mystery:

Mentions

A couple of other bloggers have kindly spent a good chunk of a post on my impending departure from Las Vegas in their blogs. If that interests you, check out these links:

http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2013/01/exploring-obsessions-in-alan-zweigs.html

http://dadspokerblog.com/playing-a-grumpament/

http://www.thetapoker.com/homage-to-the-grump/

Thanks for the attention and kind words, guys.

Cards for pot--it's a trade

People, people, people--when will you ever learn? Do not muck what you believe to be the winning hand until the dealer pushes you the pot. This is not that difficult a concept. You gain nothing by trying to jump the gun and muck them the first instant you think the hand is over, and once in a while you'll lose a great deal, as illustrated by a story from yesterday at the WSOP:

http://www.pokernews.com/live-reporting/2012-world-series-of-poker/event-61-no-limit-hold-em-main-event/day5/post.208172.htm

(Hat tip: Hard-Boiled Poker.)

Winner take all? That would be me.

Shamus is now doing occasional home games on Stars. I took this one.

Ya gotta build that play-money bankroll with small events like this if you're gonna survive in this game long-term.

Merge Network is having, um, issues

As I noted yesterday, Merge did a full revamp of their software Monday night. It took many more hours than they had promised, and even when they were up again, they immediately had problems. I, for one, couldn't display the main lobby correctly. My friend Stacey couldn't even log in.

This morning my buddy Shamus ran into problems using Hero Poker, one of the Merge skins. He tweeted:

Merge is so very screwed up right now. Here's how my SNG is going... we're in Level 6 http://t.co/H5jFvakg @heropoker @carbonpoker

The good news is after a half-hour I am leading the SNG currently, with none of us having played a hand. @heropoker @carbonpoker

Erm, I just went from 1st to last. Somebody is playing my stack. What applesauce. @heropoker @carbonpoker

SNG finally shut down... says $ refunded. All at cash tables complaining about various applesauce. Whatta mess. @heropoker @carbonpoker

In spite of that, Josie and I decided, perhaps foolishly, to try to play Merge's daily $11 HORSE tournament. She will be in town in a couple of weeks, and there will likely be some mixed-game shenanigans at some point, so she needs more practice with games other than hold'em.

My table was going fine, in technical terms. Josie's wasn't. It was slow as molasses, and it looked to be more of a software or server problem than anything that could be blamed on the players. E.g., hands would take forever to clear off the table after the pot was awarded.

She started out strong, while I started out with everything going wrong. So of course she offered a last-longer bet when she was already up 1875 to my 1341. I accepted it, because, apparently, I'm a sick, degenerate gambler.

Then she watched in horror as I mounted a comeback. I rivered a ace-high flush (crubs, obv) in a five-way pot in stud/8 when nobody had a low, and scooped a monster. This was followed immediately by making a wheel on 5th and scoring a double elimination super-scooper-dooper. Those two hands propelled me well above Josie's stack, and she was trembling in fear:

But then--disaster:

WTF?

A few minutes later, this email showed up in my inbox:

As Shamus says, applesauce.

We thought about trying another SNG, but while browsing for one, it looked like they were in the process of shutting everything down. There were very few games with "registering" status. My guess is that right about now they're offline completely, or about to be.

While I'm complaining about their software bugs, I might as well also complain about some features of the new redesign. They have a few nice improvements, such as a double slider for setting the upper and lower limits of buy-ins for tournaments that you're interested in playing. But they also made it harder to find some customization features. And what used to be a one-button click to see the previous hand is now completely hidden. Josie pointed it out to me. You click on the tournament number in the upper left-hand corner of the game--which is not marked in any way as having this function until you mouse over it--and it brings up a cascade of folders from your hard drive where the hand histories are stored:

(Note that they even got the date wrong. Josie checked, and hers correctly showed 6/6/12. No, there is nothing wrong with the date and time settings on my computer. No, I have no idea why it would be right for one player and wrong for another.)

If you click on any hand number, up pops that hand history, in the same format as they have always used. But it takes a lot more work, time, and thought to get at it than it used to. This is an improvement?

They really screwed the pooch on this software "upgrade."

M*A*S*H

It looks like my friend Martin Harris has found a new home at Poker Listings for his occasional excellent series on poker's intersections with pop culture. (It has previously appeared at Poker News and Epic Poker.) Today's installment reviews the episodes of M*A*S*H in which poker games show up:

http://www.pokerlistings.com/blog/pop-poker-the-history-of-poker-on-mash

He mentions the episode I most remember whenever the subject of bluffing comes up--Charles Emerson Winchester's bad habit of whistling when he bluffs. (See Martin's summary of the episode, "The Merchant of Korea.") I think of it, however, because of a lack of plausibility.

Even long before I played poker, the discovery of Winchester's tell struck a false note with me because of how it occurs. Mind you, I haven't seen the episodes in literally decades, so it's possible that my memory is faulty. But my recollection is that it is only after a poker session (or perhaps during a break in the game, away from the table) that BJ and Hawkeye are complaining to each other about how Charles is always winning. Then one of them chimes in with another gripe: "And it's so annoying how he whistles when he's bluffing." There's a beat, then a light bulb goes on over their heads. They smile and in unison say, "He whistles when he's bluffing!" They celebrate because they have finally discovered the chink in his armor that will allow them to start winning.

In other words, at least one of them had, while playing, noticed the association between his conduct and his bluffs, but it wasn't until later reflection that he (or they) realized that they could exploit this observation to beat him.

That's just not even remotely plausible. As I said, even decades before I ever played the game, I knew that that couldn't possibly be how such things would go. It rang as false as Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and not starting to fall until he realizes that there's nothing but air under him.

Ah well. It's not exactly a show that one watched for hyper-realism of details. But that particular plot point has bugged me for years and years and years whenever I've thought about it, and now I have finally had an excuse to express my annoyance about it.

Change to Card Player online access

I was just trying to find the link to a recent article in Card Player magazine in answer to a reader's question, when I discovered that they have completely overhauled online access.

In the good ol' days, the entire archives of C.P. were available online for free--or at least as many years back as I ever cared to look. (It was at least five.) A few months ago, they made access much clunkier and harder to get at, but if you knew pretty specifically what you were looking for, you could still find it. Recent issues were browsable using Flash.

No more. They have changed to a entirely subscription model:

http://www.cardplayer.com/digital-subscriptions

The current issue has links to individual articles, but the links just take you to the subscription sign-up page. The "archives" section shows front covers of previous issues, but with no live links.

In what I assume is just a coincidence, Shamus wrote a blog post just a few days ago about other sources of poker information moving behind pay walls, with eGamingReview and Wicked Chops' "Insider" site being the key examples. Now C.P. has joined those ranks.

Hey, it's their content and they can do with it what they please. If they think they can monetize their assets better this way, good luck with that. But I'm skeptical that they'll find a large audience willing to pay good money to see stuff they published years ago. On a handful of occasions when writing a blog post I have remembered reading something relevant in an old C.P. issue and have gone to their archives in order to quote the source accurately and link to it. But the ability to do that is not something that is sufficiently valuable to me to pay the $30 a year that they're asking.

If in the future you catch me writing something like, "I remember Matt Matros wrote about this strategy last year in Card Player, but I can't quote it exactly," well, now you'll understand why.

Jumble

Shamus pointed me to today's Jumble, which is poker-themed, here. It took me 13 minutes to solve it.

"Witty and provocative"?

My friend Shamus recently did a post for Epic Poker about the history of strip poker. It's one of his series on the role of poker in American culture, a subject about which he teaches a college course and is uniquely qualified.

The post refers to several movies I had never heard of before. Of them, the one I'd most like to see is the 1971 Milos Forman film, "Taking Off," but it is not available through Netflix. I settled instead on trying the 1940 production, "Mad Youth," which Shamus described as "witty and provocative."

I rarely disagree with Shamus as vehemently as I'm forced to here. The two adjectives I'd pick would be more like "execrable and soporific."

The whole thing is badly written and badly acted. The plot involves a lonely-hearts single mother who dates men through a male escort service, and her young-adult daughter, who likes to throw racy parties at home while mom's away. Strip poker is a part of these, though it occupies less than two minutes of the 63-minute feature. Not surprisingly, given its filming during the years of the Motion Picture Production Code, nothing is shown beyond the world's most unflattering and unrevealing underwear.

I guess we're supposed to be taught a lesson about how badly things turn out for youth as shockingly wayward as these, because the two principal female characters bizarrely end up forced into the sex slave trade in a locked-down brothel. Well, of course! Surely everyone knows that no other end is possible for people so shameless as to engage in showing their knickers to friends around a poker table!

Along the way, we have long detours for oddities like a guy pretending to be bullfighting his two dogs, and a falling-in-love story told through the turning pages of a diary. Really, the whole thing is just dreadfully bad. I'd even go so far as to call it unwatchable.

But if you want to decide for yourself whether it is better described as "witty and provocative" or "execrable and soporific," you don't even need to order the DVD from Netflix, as I did. You can just pop over to YouTube, here.

Don't say I didn't warn you, though.

Economist blog post

Shamus's blog post today points to this blog post by "J.F." at The Economist. It's a worthwhile read, and a generally good riposte to the absurdly shallow and thoughtless discussion of luck versus skill in poker that was found in the New York Times piece to which J.F. is responding.

I have just two quibbles with it.

Finally, consider losing rather than winning. Can you deliberately lose a hand of poker if you tried? Of course: bet badly, fold with winning cards, and so on. Can you deliberately lose a game of baccarat or roulette? No: to play you have to bet on an outcome that might happen, regardless of what you do.

This is just wrong. I don't even know how baccarat works, so I won't talk about that. But I do understand roulette. You absolutely can deliberately lose at roulette. Just bet the same amount on every one of the 38 spots (36 numbers plus 0 and 00). The ball will land on one of those slots, and you'll be paid 35:1 there. Suppose you bet $1 on each number. You will have spent $38 on every spin of the wheel, but win $35 back. If that doesn't constitute deliberately losing, I don't know what would. That thought experiment is, all by itself, sufficient to destroy the argument that any game at which you can deliberately lose is necessarily a game of skill.

Offhand, the only games I can think of in which luck plays no part at all are chess and go.

Also not true. In chess, the decision about who gets the white pieces--and therefore gets the advantage of moving first--is made by chance.

But, of course, I have no quarrel with J.F.'s overall theme, which is that skill predominates over luck in poker over the long run, so taking the example of any one hand, in which luck can certainly prevail over skill, is just silly. That's what the Times reporter did, and it's worth having J.F.'s more informed view presented as a counterweight.

23 days, 100 SNGs

As I've been telling you, I have recently experimented with a pattern of doing four Bodog single-table sit-and-go tournaments a day, two in the early afternoon and another two before I go to bed. (Sometimes there's an extra one or two thrown in if I feel like it, or if I get knocked out of one extremely early.) I had been doing this for a couple of weeks before it occurred to me that I should probably be keeping track of my results. Nearly all of the SNGs I have done in the past two or three years, prior to this month, were HORSE games on Full Tilt or PokerStars, and the skills for that don't translate very well to no-limit hold'em. I thought that I probably had a lot to learn about optimal strategy, and that a spreadsheet would help me spot problems and successes.

I started on September 8 and just now completed #100. They have all been $5.50 entry fees, ten-handed, non-turbo, paying top three spots 50%, 30%, 20% (i.e., $25, $15, $10).

Results: $550 spent on entering, $665 won, net profit $115, return on investment 1.21.

Broken down by place of finish I get this distribution:

1: 17

2: 10

3: 9

4: 6

5: 12

6: 12

7: 12

8: 12

9: 5

10: 5

I am very pleased that #1 is my most frequent position in which to finish. I also like that I'm pretty good at managing to avoid going out in the first two spots, and that I bubble only rarely. I'm cashing 36% of the time, and when I make the money, I'm just about 50% to take first.

The fifth- and sixth-place finishes are mostly OK. That is, they are disappointing but mostly unavoidable. By that stage of the game, I either have a comfortable stack and can easily make the money or I'm short and have to find a spot to shove, which is just bound to blow up a good percentage of the time. It's still the right way to play.

But the fairly large number of seventh- and eighth-place finishes is an area of potential concern. Talking it over with Cardgrrl a couple of days ago, she suggested keeping notes on how those occur, which I think is an excellent idea. My sense is that most of them are bad beats and coolers, with the decision-making process correct. These are the situations that Shamus aptly calls SIGHs--"so it goes" hands. However, without keeping records on what happened, this might be wishful thinking and/or selective memory on my part.

Looking at the pattern over time, you can see that I struggled some at first, but then seemed to figure out a good formula for winning more consistently:

What I had to learn was to be extremely tight and patient through the first few levels, and to mostly remove bluffing from my repertoire of moves. These games are so filled with horrible calling stations that bluffs just spew chips. Value bet, value bet, value bet.

I hope that now that I seem to have settled into a generally winning approach, my ROI will increase, as that ugly section of early negative results fades into the distance.

Incidentally, I discovered an unexpected psychological phenomenon in myself: Being able to chalk up a first-place finish in my spreadsheet was at least as powerful a motivating factor as the money. I knew I was tracking my results, and that I would end up reporting them here sooner or later. I wanted to have good numbers and a good-looking graph both for my own pleasure and to show my readers. Neither the $5 entry fee nor the $25 top prize mean much to me in terms of my overall poker results. As a result, sometimes it was tempting to shove in marginal situations or make curiosity calls that I knew were most likely losers. In such circumstances, I would have a flash of a thought that the amount of money involved was trivial and didn't matter, but then that would be followed by the sobering realization that I'd have to enter a bad finishing spot in my spreadsheet. That usually cleared my head when the money was insufficiently motivating. I had not expected that to be the case, because winning money has always been virtually my only reason for playing poker. It is, however, another argument for keeping good records.

I have not tracked how many hours I've invested, but I know that it's a dismal hourly win rate overall. That's OK. My goal was to see if I could figure out how to beat the game with reasonable consistency--which I think I have done--then go from there. In order to increase my hourly return, I plan to start doing either three $5 games at a time or two $10 games at a time (probably some of each strategy, alternating by days), and see if I can keep up or even improve my frequency of first-place finishes while doing so.

I'll let you know how the next 100 go with those variations in place.

Who not to trust in political prognostication

Barry Greenstein, October, 2007:

I'm sure it will be less than 6 months before Congress realizes that they
need to pass legislation contrary to the UIEGA. If it hasn't already happened,
it will happen in a few weeks.

Yeah, right.

I was reminded of this by reading today's post from Shamus, in which he quotes Phil Hellmuth in a recent Card Player magazine interview:

Online poker is going to be licensed and regulated very soon. There are things happening right now that the rest of the poker world doesn’t realize. I think it’s going to happen at the federal level, and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened by December.

My guess is that he'll end up looking just as deluded as Greenstein did.

Or maybe I will. One never knows. But in the matter of online poker licensing, as with predictions of the Rapture, skeptics have a far better track record than believers.

Poker, "this party of apes"

I recently watched Elia Kazan's 1951 film, "A Streetcar Named Desire" (based on the Tennessee WIlliams play) for the first time in, well, a couple of decades anyway. I decided to do so after reading my friend Shamus's insightful essay for Epic Poker about the film's poker scenes. (See here.)

I had completely forgotten that poker even made an appearance in the movie. But as Martin points out, the game forms a crucial part of some of the film's themes, especially the separate roles and realms of men and women, and the dangers that lurk when the barriers between them are breached.

A couple of days ago I posted as a "Poker Gem" Karl Malden's line as Mitch: "Poker should not be played in a house with women." I put that up before the scene had even finished playing, pausing the DVD long enough to post it. I meant it mostly as a joke, a wry reminder of how things used to be. But as the movie continues, we learn that it is, in fact, a stern foreshadowing.

Poker, it is suggested, is a males-only activity, first, because of the vices that come associated with it: drinking, smoking cigars, swearing, lewd storytelling, fighting--vulgarity of every variety. But a second and perhaps more important reason is that the game brings out the raw, brute passions of earthy men, and when they are so aroused, they are not easily controlled or contained. Women who happen to be in the environs are in danger. For these reasons, the ladies are, as Stella wryly phrases it, "cordially not invited."

In case we are too dense to make the associations between poker and men's baser passions by observation alone, the screenplay won't let us miss them. Blanche DuBois confides her opinion of Stanley to her sister (Stanley's wife), Stella:

If you'll forgive me, he's common... He's like an animal. He has an animal's habits. There's even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is. Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle. And you - you here waiting for him. Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you, that's if kisses have been discovered yet. His poker night you call it. This party of apes.

Gentle Mitch is no ape. He leaves the game to chat with Blanche, who he immediately finds charming. He actually appears more comfortable in the side room with the women than in the main room with the men. This very fact (even ignoring his schoolboy mannerisms) suggests that he is, in some sense, not fully a man--an idea further suggested later by the revelation that he still lives with his mother and is to be presumed to be a virgin. (Apparently in the stage play on which the film is based, Blanche's husband committed suicide after being exposed as having had a homosexual affair, so the fact that Mitch is deemed appropriate to fill those shoes is perhaps further innuendo.)

A drunk, angry Stanley bolts from the poker game to invade the women's space in a manner entirely different from Mitch's: angrily, violently, wreaking havoc. He hurls a radio through a window and beats his wife. Near the end of the film, he will again penetrate this same space when Blanche is there alone, again doing so in a way that the mild-mannered Mitch never would: set on violation. What happens between Stanley and Blanche could not be portrayed or perhaps even spoken explicitly, due to censorship standards of the day, but we are not left in much doubt.

That unfinished scene is followed immediately by a second poker game, which functions as the setting for the film's denouement: Blanche has been tipped all the way into frank madness. She is briefly restrained, but then allowed to walk--with assistance from a man--into the forbidden territory, past the poker table and into the car waiting to take her to an asylum. Stella, conversely, takes her newborn baby and flees to an upstairs neighbor, vowing never to return. Her apartment has been irredeemably marked--contaminated, even--as a place in which the ugliest male instincts are allowed to play out. This sadly permanent "no women allowed" status is symbolized by the poker game, which, we presume, continues after its brief interruption.

I've seen poker serve a lot of different functions in movies, but I don't recall anything like this. In "Streetcar" it is simultaneously an emblem of, arena for, and a inflamer of men's coarse, animalistic tendencies. The game has never felt that way to me, but the fact that Williams and Kazan can make it serve such roles so effortlessly in this movie has left me feeling disturbed, unsettled, contemplative. If I come to any brilliant conclusions along those lines, I'll let you know.

The image above is Thomas Hart Benton's painting Poker Night (From "A Streetcar Named Desire"), 1948. It hangs in the Whitney Museum in New York City. You can hear the museum's audio guide about it here.


ADDENDUM, March 1, 2013

Martin's excellent essay disappeared from the web for quite a while following the collapse of the Epic Poker League, along with its web site. But today he reposted it on his own blog, here.

Article on where to play

My friend Shamus just put up a piece for Betfair about choosing a poker room for low-stakes games when visiting Vegas:

http://betting.betfair.com/poker/poker-strategy/where-to-play-low-stakes-cash-in-las-vegas-180811.html

It includes some tips, both general and specific, that I suggested to him, which will probably sound familiar to long-time readers of my ramblings.

PeeGee's Big Adventure, Part 7: Day 1, the coverage

With this post I run the risk of being thought vain. But, after all, every post is always all about me--what I've been doing, thinking, reading, or whatever. It's kind of the nature of personal blogging. This is not really any different. For my own purposes, I just wanted to compile links to what other people wrote about my Day 1 experience, and if any readers find them interesting or amusing, well, fine, but please don't feel obligated to follow every one. Unless you're one of my stalkers, of course, in which case you pretty much have to.

As the day began, Shamus did a post for PokerNews about how I won the seat. He then followed it the next day with a kind, thoughtfully written post on his own blog reflecting about how it made him feel to have friends playing in the event--especially when they clashed in hands, as will inevitably happen. (Creative kudos for managing to tie "Grumpy" in with the theme of the guy who played dressed as Snow White.)

The lead photo for the Las Vegas Sun's story about the start of the Main Event caught the back of my head in the foreground, which I find pretty funny. As Glenn (aka MissingFlops) cleverly Tweeted, "Everyone keeps getting the big guy in the orange shirt in their pictures of @PokerGrump." His own example of the genre is here.

Another who stopped by briefly for an encouraging word was Stacey of Las Vegas Poker Source. Her obligatory photo is here. That is, of course, my favoritest, luckiest hoodie I'm wearing there, complete with Grumpy on it (though not seen in that photo), courtesy of Cardgrrl. The other patch you can see is that of AllVegasPoker.com. Two players at the table asked me about the site, and the logo might have been captured in a bunch of photos, so maybe I got them a little free publicity and a few more visitors. AVP kindly set up a forum page just for updates/comments on my progress, here.

Incidentally, when I saw the table lineup, I thought there was a decent chance we'd be one of the TV featured tables and I would then have some small shot at selling ad space on my clothing, but that didn't happen. Guess I'll have to wait for the final table. (Ha!)

Wasted Aces Poker clicked a bunch of photos and wrote up a brief story here.

Oskar Garcia covers poker, gaming generally, and other stuff about life in Vegas for the Associated Press. His stories about Day 1A are here and here. Shockingly, he does not mention me. (Do I need to add the #sarcasm hashtag there?) But he did come by my table, so we finally got to meet and chat a bit, following a few months of conversing via Twitter (he is @OskarGarcia, and well worth following for the topics mentioned), which was very nice.

In fact, I am generally privileged to have an unusual number of friends in poker media circles, and nearly every one of them at some point sent encouraging messages electronically, stopped by to chat, or just gave me a knowing smile, nod, or wink while passing by on their news-gathering way. There were obviously much more famous players at my table, but, with the exception of Greg Raymer, none of them had as much personal attention as I received. I really don't think I'm an attention whore (the appearance of posts like this notwithstanding), but I'm grateful that my friends are willing to pause for a bit of discreet well-wishing while carrying out their reportorial duties.

That's all the links that I can remember offhand. I am, of course, mentioned in the official end-of-day chip counts here, but you'll have to scroll a long, long, long way down to find me (#545, 11 spots below Maria Ho)--almost the very shortest stack surviving from my flight.

Tomorrow: Last post about Day 1, to include some of the more interesting hands I played.

PeeGee's Big Adventure, Part 6: Day 1, the lineup

Photos courtesy of Wolynski. (And in case you're wondering what I'm doing with my left arm in that last shot, well, both Wolynski and I are wondering, too. My best guess after looking at it for a while is that I was pushing up my shirt sleeve, but I really don't know.)

Last night I dreamed that I was back at my WSOP Main Event Day 1 table, just as I had been all day Thursday--except that in the dream I had horrendous body odor. Everybody at the table had their noses wrinkled up in disgust at the stench, and they were all trying to figure out who smelled so bad. I knew it was me, but rather than confess that I had forgotten my deodorant, I tried to pretend that there was nothing wrong.

I don't usually put much stock in dream interpretation, but in this particular case there is undoubtedly something profoundly symbolic going on. Even if I consciously tried to conjure up a literary device to convey how I felt at that table, I doubt I could make up anything so perfect. I have never felt so out of place and outclassed at a poker table. I have never had any illusions about being a great player, but it is nevertheless deeply humbling to be faced, in such an up-close and personal way, with the reality of how much better some other people are at the game. I'm used to being the best player at the table--not because I'm exceptionally good, but for the simple reason that anybody who is significantly better would play higher than $1-2 NLHE, my bread-and-butter game. It is, therefore, quite a novel and unsettling experience to feel like the one who is not only the fish, but the fish that has begun to stink.

As most readers will have heard by now, either from my Twitter feed, PokerNews coverage, or other sources that were reporting on the day, I got unbelievably unlucky in my table draw. I was in Seat 2. In Seat 3 was David "The Maven" Chicotsky, Bluff Magazine Online Player of the Year for 2008. In Seat 4 was Tom Schneider, who won two bracelets and WSOP Player of the Year honors in 2007. In Seat 5 was Eugene Yanayt, whom I had not heard of before, but is definitely on my radar screen now. He is a 2-7 triple-draw specialist, apparently playing online under the names "FishosaurusREX" and "Oogee." In Seat 8 was Greg Raymer, 2004 Main Event champion. Finally, in Seat 10 was Olivier Busquet, widely considered one of the top handful of high-stakes, heads-up, online players in the world.

To be blunt, this table was an assemblage of just completely ridiculous, phenomenal poker talent. It got the dreaded label of "table of death" from PokerNews. Raymer commented at one point that it was the single toughest Main Event table he had ever been seated at. He then paused a beat to consider his words, and added a qualification: "If it's not the toughest of any Main Event table I've ever had, it's definitely the toughest Day 1 table." After the first level, he Tweeted, "1st break #wsop58. Somehow only up to 33K at this ridic soft table @DonkeyBomber livB Maven pokergrump oogee. #sarcasm" (He surely didn't know or care who I was when he sat down. He probably learned my moniker by checking PokerNews coverage and/or by overhearing me introduce myself to Schneider, with whom I have several mutual friends. Furthermore, I'm certain that his inclusion of me in that list was sheer politeness, not an objective assessment that I was one of their peers. The mention did skyrocket my Twitter followers, though!)

Funny story: I didn't recognize Chicotsky at first, even though I certainly should have. (E.g., I recognized him and took his picture at a charity tournament at the Venetian over a year ago, as reported here.) He had briefly introduced himself as "David" when he sat down, and I was kinda busy futzing with all my stuff at the time and wasn't really paying attention. After that, when I looked at him it was in profile and from about 12 inches away, so it didn't trigger my facial recognition from photographs. I sent a message on Twitter about the stars at my table, not mentioning him. One of my readers is Donna Lawton (@Cure _MTM on Twitter), who is head of the Utah chapter of the Poker Players Alliance. She and I have met on some of her Vegas trips, and even played a cash session in adjacent seats at the Venetian on one of them. Anyway, she sent me a private message via Twitter: "Hey it looks like the Maven is at ur table too yes?" I brushed it off with my reply: "Don't think so." I mean, I would have noticed that, right? Duh! But she was persistent and pointed me to Chicotsky's own Twitter feed (which I wasn't following), where he had commented on having Raymer, Schneider, and Busquet at his table. Well, that evidence was pretty hard to ignore, so I took another hard look around the table at the people I hadn't recognized. I had to stifle a laugh when it finally dawned on me that not only was he sitting right next to me, but he had introduced himself and shaken my hand earlier! Sometimes I can be unbelievably oblivious to my surroundings.

Of the star players at my table, I was most bowled over by Busquet in terms of who most consistently had a nose for the right play. He was just dominatingly good. I saw him lose a few small pots, but never a big one. I tussled with him a few times and could never win, no matter what I tried. He also had the advantage of running like God yesterday (e.g., cracking one player's aces with a flopped flush, starting with Jd-9d, and elsewhere calling Maven's four-bet with 5-8 suited and flopping another flush). He ended the day as one of the overall chip leaders. Watching him play I had weird flashbacks of the lyrics of "Pinball Wizard":

Even on my usual table
He can beat my best
His disciples lead him in
And he just does the rest
He's got crazy flipper fingers
Never seen him fall
That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball

Tom Schneider had a lousy day in spite of playing well. The most impressive thing I saw all day--in fact, one of the most impressive things I've ever witnessed at a poker table--was him face-up folding pocket tens after flopping a set, and being proven correct to have done so when Raymer showed him a flopped set of queens. He was in the tank for a long time on that decision (politely apologizing to the other players a couple of times for taking so long). It gave me time to send up the Bat-signal to my buddy Shamus, who was reporting for PokerNews. I knew that whatever the outcome, this was likely to be a newsworthy hand, and I also knew that Shamus trusted my judgment and would just come without question when he caught my eye. I cannot improve on the excellent way he told the story here.

We usually think of the best moves in poker being the audacious bluff, the razor-thin hero call, or the perfectly sized value bet. Folds aren't sexy. But I tell you, this was a world-class move by a world-class player. Not reported by Shamus was the fact that Schneider talked a bit as he was thinking. He said, "I just think you have me beat here," and, after a while longer, "I can't get over the feeling that I need to fold this." Logically, he was only beaten by Raymer having pocket queens or pocket aces (the flopped straight not fitting the action well). Furthermore, Raymer is easily capable of putting Schneider to the test in that spot with just a big ace, just a draw, or even as a pure bluff. For Schneider to get that sharp a read on Raymer's actual holding by nothing more than feel, and trust it enough to fold, after having already put a substantial percentage of his dwindling stack into the pot, well, I cannot adequately express how much it impressed me. As Raymer said, with sincere admiration in his voice, "That's a helluva fold."

Very early in my learning about poker, I heard somebody famous say that what separated the great players from the merely good players was not how much they win when they have the best hand, but how little they lose when they have the second-best hand. (I think it was Mike Sexton on an early World Poker Tour broadcast, quoting Doyle Brunson, but I'm unsure of that attribution.) At the time, I dismissed it as a cute but not terribly important observation. The longer I play, though, the more I come to appreciate it as a profound truth of the game. Schneider's fold becomes a foremost example of this principle for me. His tournament would have been over if he had not trusted his finely tuned Spidey senses there.

You've probably heard that I later took the last of Schneider's chips. I certainly didn't outplay him. It was a pure cold-deck situation, my aces against his kings. Again, I had managed to catch Shamus's attention in time for him to witness the outcome, as reported here.

In an opinion shared, apparently, by nearly everyone who has contact with him, Raymer is a smart, interesting, funny guy. He's very chatty, and an excellent raconteur of his many poker stories. But he's also willing to let the conversation veer off into the bizarro world. For a while, he got the table discussing correct strategy for playing poker heads-up with an omniscient being. Later in the day, after he had pre-ordered some sushi for his dinner break, he went on a riff about lobsters, and whether it would be worth being basically anencephalic as a trade-off for the ability to regrow severed limbs. That one thoroughly cracked me up.

More times than I could count during the day, Raymer was approached by people from one poker media outlet or another to chat. These weren't full-out interviews, but they still constituted frequent distractions from the game. He was unfailingly welcoming and respectful with them. Furthermore, I happened to see him on breaks in the halls, and he could barely take three steps in a row without a fan stopping him to ask for an autograph or to pose for a photo. With every one of them he smiled and did as requested, showing not a trace of boredom or resentment, as far as I could detect. I don't think I could pull that off for five minutes before I started going postal and yelling at strangers to leave me alone, but he has managed it for seven years straight. My hat's off to him for his patience and good will with the public--not to mention his tireless efforts on the poker political front. (He's a fellow libertarian, doncha know. We're all saints, obviously!)

The only blemish in my admiration of Raymer came when I rivered a lucky second pair to beat him in a very early pot, and he gave me the disdainful "Nice catch" line used to not-so-subtly tell an opponent, "You stupidly stayed in when you were behind." It's far from the most insulting thing I've ever been told, but I consider it slightly unclassy--whether or not the underlying message is true. It sounds dismissive and sarcastic, which, in my view, isn't cricket at the poker table. But it's not awful, either, and I'm not inclined to be overly judgmental about one stray comment in a moment of irritation. It just isn't my style, and I was a little surprised to see that tiny crack in his otherwise uniformly deserved good-guy image.

His bust-out hand got paused in the middle while the TV cameras and other media swooped down on the table like vultures. If ESPN does any coverage of Days 1A through 1D (there seems to be some disagreement among poker reporters as to their plans), this hand will surely be included, because it had a dramatic river suckout. I was pleased to be able to help my PokerNews friends reconstruct the action, as they had not been there when it began. Read about it here. From a strategic perspective, Raymer made a cagey move to open-limp-reraise, representing possible aces, as Yanayt (unnamed in the blog post) could easily have been just stealing from the limpers). But when the field folded and Yanayt reraised, Raymer's subsequent call with just 2-2 was highly questionable, a fact that he admitted when it was all over and he was packing up his things. He signed for Yanayt a large, beautiful fossil with a gracious note (which I looked at closely, but stupidly forgot to photograph for you all).

Yanayt was with me until the end of the day, but one by one we lost the others. Chicotsky was the first of them to go broke, then Schneider. Busquet got randomly chosen to be moved to balance tables, and Raymer went out. The only semi-name-brand player to join us subsequently was Nachman Berlin, who had a $419K score for second place in Event #43 just about a week ago. (Thanks again to Donna for remotely helping me quickly figure out who he was--though as it turned out, he talked about himself so much that with a little more time I would have put the pieces together.) Unlike all the others I've named, Berlin was, frankly, an arrogant ass. While I was deeply impressed with Busquet, Schneider, and Raymer's play, Berlin is deeply impressed only with himself. His assessment of his opposition on his Twitter feed after he got moved to ol' #376: "Table is real soft. 2 good players." He's one of those who is convinced he's the best there's ever been, and likes to pretend, when a hand is over, that he knew exactly what everybody had and what everybody was thinking and doing. Moreover, he's perfectly willing to tell others, without invitation, how they should have played a hand differently. But as far as I could tell, his talent did not match his inflated sense of self. He seemed to get in trouble as often as he succeeded. His aggression was not nearly as smartly controlled as what I had seen from the others. My guess is that he is not going to become a poker commodity over the ensuing years. (Of course, I won't either, but I've never claimed or pretended greatness.)

Berlin aside, the others I've mentioned (as well as the no-names, none of whom were incompetent, and all of whom were unfailingly polite and friendly) contributed to making yesterday far more memorable than it might otherwise have been. It was an exhilarating experience. Even if my killer table draw hampered my chances at a big cash, it was sure one hell of a lot more interesting than if I had been assigned to a table full of silent hooded Internet players, and a lot more educational than if I had landed at a soft table full of donkeys. For that, I can feel genuinely grateful, even if the draw proves to have doomed me to an early flame-out.

Well, I have a ton more to tell you from my Day 1, but it has already taken me a couple of hours to write this much, and I have some other stuff I have to finish up today. I might get to another post later tonight or maybe not until tomorrow, but I promise there is more.

P L Uh-Oh

If you haven't already heard about the crazy 5-way-all-in-preflop hand at the PLO event at the World Series of Poker a few hours ago, go read about it here:

http://www.pokernews.com/live-reporting/2011-world-series-of-poker/event-42-pot-limit-omaha-championship/post.190730.htm

And if Shamus doesn't make that his hand of the day, well, dear readers, you have my personal assurance that I will flick his ear good and hard next time I see him.

Location, location, location

I have written a few times about playing against bullies and maniacs--for example, here and here. I inevitably talk about the importance of position. (Dang it. There was another long-ago post, I'm sure, about how I was faring badly seated to the right of a maniac at the Flamingo, until a seat opened on his left, I moved, and the tide turned. But now I can't find it, no matter what search strategy I use.)

In February of 2009, Shamus mentioned in one of his posts an interesting article by Rolf Slotboom, in which he challenges the conventional wisdom of trying to sit to the immediate left of a maniac. Among other points, he notes that everybody likes to adjust to the maniac by doing more check-raising, and if you're to the maniac's immediate left, you're likely to be caught in the trap with him. If, however, you're on the maniac's immediate right, then you're the last one to act after his bet, and you thus force the check-raiser to spring his trap before the action is back to you. This was the first time I had ever read a argument against the usual tactic, so it definitely caught my attention and got me thinking. About month later I was up against another maniac, on his immediate right, and that article was one of the reasons I decided not to move, as I explained here.

A recent issue of Card Player magazine had two columns dealing, in large part, with the question of position with respect to a maniac.

First, Todd Brunson explains his reasons for preferring to be a few seats to the maniac's left. Unfortunately, Card Player has recently revised its online format, using Flash, so there's no easy way for me to copy and paste a paragraph of the argument. But he makes many of the same points that Slotboom did. Most prominent is that other players will try to take the first seat or two to the left of the maniac and use raises to isolate him. If you are to their left, you can use the observation of what they are doing to trap them between the maniac and you, rather than you being the one that gets trapped in the middle, as can happen with the conventional advice.

Roy Cooke doesn't advocate any particular spot, but discusses how your strategy changes depending on where you are relative to the maniac.

Over the last five years, I have come to feel much less anxious about being stuck with a maniac on my left, probably because I have become more deft at the techniques of using his aggression against him judo-style. I find that I can manage myself from anywhere, for the most part.

As a rule of thumb, though, the more smart, adaptive players there are at the table, the more I want to be on the maniac's right, forcing those smart players to reveal their intentions before I have to act. Conversely, the more timid and unimaginative the opposition is, and the more I see that they are hunkering down and tightening up against his aggression, the more I'd prefer to be the one pulling the isolation moves from the maniac's left. The latter remains my most frequent choice, because the games I mostly play in are not exactly teeming with smart, flexible, observant players. (When they are, I try to find a softer table.)

But all three articles--Slotboom, Brunson, and Cooke--are worth reading and mulling over. The more tools and flexibility you have at your disposal, the better prepared you'll be for whatever situation you might find yourself in.

I know who robbed the Rio

In case you hadn't heard, somebody stole about $30,000 worth of chips from the Rio this morning. See, e.g., here.

Normally I wouldn't have anything to contribute to solving this crime, but a couple of details about the robber caught my attention. Police say that he was wearing a tan jacket and a fedora.

Hmmm.

My mind flashed back to a photograph of Hard-Boiled Poker's Shamus that I took about a year ago, in conjunction with this post:

What do you see there? A TAN JACKET AND A FEDORA!

What more proof could anybody ask for?

No need to call 911 to make the report. I have already done so. But I'm not going to sleep easy until this criminal mastermind is behind bars.