The old razzle-dazzle

My table Saturday night at South Point had at least three players who were smart, experienced, and paying attention. When I have that kind of situation, one of my most reliable strategies is play completely straightforwardly for long enough that the attentive players think they have me pegged, then surprise them.

In particular, whether an opponent puts in a continuation bet after making a pre-flop raise is one of the most recognizable characteristics that attentive players will notice. I think the three most common patterns seen among $1-2 NLHE players are: (1) c-betting every time or nearly so; (2) c-betting every time one's hand is helped by the flop plus all the times that the flop looks like it should have helped a typical pre-flop raising range; and (3) c-betting when the flop is favorable to one's hand, checking when it is not.

I love to be facing opponents in category (3), because they are nearly playing with their cards face up. Reading them is easy. So when I want to lull opponents into thinking that they know where I am in a hand, I first set them up by actually playing style (3). How long I keep it up depends on how the cards fall. It needs to be long enough for my opponents have seen me raise, then either c-bet or not, with predictable results. That can take more or less time, depending on how many raising hands I get dealt early in the session. But I suppose that on average an hour or so is enough to establish me in their eyes as an easy read.

Then it's time to give 'em the razzle-dazzle--slow-play big hands to induce complacency and even larceny, win pots by betting aggressively even when I have whiffed the board.

That's what I did Saturday night. I played completely transparent, ABC poker for the first hour or so. My thinking opponents had plenty of opportunity to learn that if I checked the flop, I was basically giving up on the hand, and if I bet it, I had it. The stage was set.

The trickiest, most dangerous player at the table was, fortunately, on my immediate right. He also had a big stack of over $500. In the hand in question, he limped, then called the raise I put in with J-J. The flop was A-J-x. He checked. I checked behind, knowing that this would convince him that I did not have an ace and did not like seeing the ace on the flop. If he had an ace-rag kind of hand or a medium pair, he would be given reason to think he was probably ahead, and if he had missed completely, he would be emboldened to try to steal.

Sure enough, when some unhelpful rag fell on the turn, he bet $25. I called. He should now put me on either a jack with a good kicker (K or Q) or an unimproved pocket pair below aces. He would know by now that I did not put much money into pots with one-pair hands, especially when not top pair, giving him license to steal. One of his prime characteristics as a player was making serious stabs at pots to which opponents appeared less than fully committed. That is usually an admirable and winning strategy, but it can also be turned against you.

The river was a king. This completed no flush draws, and the only straight possible was Broadway with Q-10 in the hole. While this wasn't impossible for him to have, the odds were against it. The only other way he could theoretically have me beat would be to have A-A or K-K, and his pre-flop play made that almost impossible. I had 90%+ confidence that I had the best hand.

True to form, he took another swipe at the pot with $45 on the river. I had about $150 left. I moved all-in, hoping that he had hit some sort of two-pair hand that he would feel compelled to call with. No such luck this time. He chuckled, turned up his thoroughly unimproved Spanish Inquisition (6-3 offsuit), said, "I have a feeling you can beat this," and mucked. My jacks stayed securely face-down on their return trip to the dealer.

In retrospect, I'm virtually certain that if I had c-bet that flop, he would have folded in a heartbeat. By confounding his expectations--expectations that I had carefully cultivated for just such a moment as this--I got him to put in $70 that I could have won in no other way, with him thinking that it was a prime bluffing situation, when in reality it was anything but.

The icing on the cake was that after the hand was over, he made clear his conclusion that I had had K-K, and his bluff only failed because I had caught a lucky third king on the river. He convinced himself he had been foiled by a 2-outer, when actually he had no shot at succeeding from the get-go. This meant that even after conning him, he still had me pegged as Mr. Straightforward, and I'd be able to con him again! (Note that this would not be possible if I had succumbed to the temptation to boost my ego by showing off my tricky play. Keep your cards to yourselves, kids.) Sadly, another such opportunity did not arise before it was time to go, but I was licking my chops at the thought of it.

Razzle-dazzle 'em,
Show 'em the first-rate sorcerer you are.
Long as you keep 'em way off balance,
How can they spot you got no talents?
Razzle-dazzle 'em,
And they'll make you a star!

Remedy for a dealer error

Last night I was playing at South Point. In one hand I had a single opponent. I bet the turn, he called. I was waiting for the next card to appear when the dealer said to me, "He called you." This was not news to me. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that the dealer was gently prodding me to show my hand, and another couple of seconds to realize that the dealer had made a major mistake. Somehow thinking that the hand was over, he had dropped the stub of the deck onto the discard pile. To make matters worse, he had somehow mixed the burn cards in with all the rest. (I had been watching my opponent, not the dealer, so I can't explain exactly what the dealer did, but that was the result.)

Floor was called. The stub was not clearly separable from the muck, and I don't know where the burn cards were. The floor guy's solution was to pick up most of the cards from the table, picking what appeared to me to be a completely arbitrary point most of the way down the pile. Then he had the dealer reshuffle those cards, cut, burn one, and finally deal a river card.

In theory, if the dealer had been able to tell him where the burn cards were (i.e., did he drop the stub onto the muck, then the burn cards on top?), they could have separated those out, then counted from the bottom the known number of discards that should be present, thus recreating the stub. I'm not sure why they didn't do that.

Another player who was not involved put up quite a fuss about the procedure, saying that all of the cards, including the discards, had to be included in the reshuffle. The floor guy repeatedly but politely rebuffed him by saying, "Thank you for your opinion," then going on with his instructions to the dealer.

I didn't care much. A random card is a random card, and it makes no difference to me whether they come up with the same random card that, absent the dealer error, would have been put out as fifth street, or a different random card. One is no more likely to be either beneficial or detrimental to my situation than another.

But my guess is that there is, in fact, some standard protocol to be followed in the case of this type of mistake, and that what I saw done was not it. Comments from those more knowledgeable in such arcane matters will be welcome.

Why I almost but didn't quite make it to the casino chip collectors' convention

I mentioned the other day that the year's biggest casino chips collectors' convention was in town this week, and that I would be scrupulously staying away so as to avoid any temptation to buy some collectible goodies that I can't really afford.

Well, apparently I have a lot of chip collectors among my readership, because I received a surprising number of messages through the blog comments, by email, by text, and even in person at the tables over the last few days, all passing on this thought: You really should go, because it's cool and amazing.

Today is the show's last day. When I woke up late this morning and checked the overnight Twitter feed, I learned a couple of useful things: (1) The Rio's daily deepstack event, which I've been wanting to try, had been pushed back to 4:00 pm instead of its usual 2:00 pm. (2) Daniel "Jungleman" Cates was having the last of his series of ticket giveaways for a seat in the WSOP Main Event at McFadden's at the Rio from 12:30 to 1:30. (You can read much more about Dan in the New York Times Magazine here, and in the cover story of Bluff Magazine Europe here.)

I formulated a plan. I would head to the Rio, pick up my Jungleman drawing ticket, register for the deepstacks tournament while the lines were still short, then drive to South Point, spend a couple of hours looking at poker chips--without buying any--then be back at the Rio by 4:00 to play. As my day-planning goes, this one was positively brilliant: Geographically efficient, productive, and fun.

Let me pause for a minute and tell you about the drawing, because you might not have heard of it. As reported on Cates' blog and a YouTube video, and as I first learned from the Twitter feed of my friend Jason Simon (Thanks, Jason! I owe you one bowl of soup next visit!), Daniel decided to hold a free raffle to give away a seat to the World Series of Poker main event, as his way of giving something back to the poker community from which he feels he has benefited so richly. It's a lovely, generous offer.

The only eligibility criterion was that the recipient had not previously played in a Main Event. However, in order to pick up tickets, you had to go to where Daniel was holding court, in a one-hour window of time, with just a couple of hours of advance notice on Twitter. As a practical matter, that severely limited the field of contenders to those living in Vegas, with a car, with no day job, and who checked Twitter frequently. Hey--that's me!

I don't usually enter drawings and other such things, but I did some mental math on this one. I made a guesstimate that they probably wouldn't have more than about a hundred people able to make it to the locations specified under those conditions. If I did it every time, I might therefore have 1% or maybe even as much as 2% of all the tickets in the bowl. With the prize worth $10,000, my equity in it would be something like $100-$200. If there were four ticket days, my total time expenditure would be less than four hours. That seemed like a worthwhile endeavor. So I did it. I picked up a ticket at each of the four events, scattered between May 24 and today:

Back to my day. I didn't stick around McFadden's, even though I knew they would be holding the drawing at 1:30. I thought my chances of winning weren't high enough to make it worth cutting into my chip-ogling time. Besides, they had been clear that one didn't need to be present to win, and they had promised to telephone the winner.

When I got to South Point, I found the convention center rooms where the casino chips vendors had their displays. As a bonus, though I had read online that it was $10 to enter, a sign announced that entry would be free Saturday, as the show was closing. But I decided to check my messages before strolling around inside the rooms.

You have to understand that virtually nobody calls me on my cell. I give the number to very few people, and, well, even they don't like me very much, so they leave me alone. OK, that's not quite true, but my friends know that I dislike talking on the phone except for short exchanges of information as necessary. I'm not a chatter. I literally get less than one phone call a week.

So when I saw missed-call and voice-mail alerts from an out-of-state, unknown number, with a time stamp of 1:33 pm, you can bet it caught my attention. Could that really be what I thought it might be? I sat down in an easy chair just outside the convention hall to listen to the message:

I bet every one of you would have pressed "4" to listen again. I sure did.

(If I just violated a wiretapping law or something like that with the above recording, well, I'll throw myself on the mercy of the court and hope the judge is a poker player.)

The next thing I did might surprise you. I didn't call him back instantly. Instead, I called Cardgrrl. She means the world to me, and I had to share with her my excitement even before calling to confirm that this wasn't some terrible prank or misunderstanding. She figured out where the story was going even before I got to the punchline, and was interrupting me with "No way!" and Elaine-esque "Get out!" even before I could announce, "I won!"

But I kept it short, and contacted my benefactor immediately thereafter. By the time I was done with a quick call to him, the news was already on Twitter from both @JunglemanDan and @MicheleLewis (who had been recruited to pull the name out of the ice bucket), and friends who knew my real name were translating that that was none other than @PokerGrump. In fact, I was already getting buzzed by text messages from friends urging me to check Twitter, if I hadn't already heard.

I was way too excited to care about poker chips by then, so I left South Point--having made it to within 30 feet of the show's entrance--returned home, picked up all of my drawing ticket stubs, and went back to the Rio, not yet sure when I might need to meet up with Daniel. I'm sure the chip vendors will be back next year, and who knows--by then I might have a little more money I can spend with them!

For the record, the winning ticket was the second one shown above, picked up at PT's Pub on Rainbow the afternoon of June 6.

There are still some details to be worked out, such as Daniel's publicist, Lara, getting verification from WSOP officials that I have never registered for a Main Event before (I promise I haven't), logistics of doing the buy-in, and getting together for some training from Daniel, which is thrown in as part of the offer. (Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, eh?) But that's all just details.

There's one other thing that I have to arrange. I had already purchased airline tickets to fly out to D.C. for a visit to Cardgrrl the week that the Main Event starts. Before I had a chance to point out to her that I'd have to change travel plans, she said, "You'll have to change your plane ticket." Some girlfriends would get in a huff about a visit being postponed in order to play a game. Not her. She is the most supportive person ever, and nearly as excited for me as I am.

A couple of people have already asked me about this, so let me address it up front: I will not be selling pieces of my action. Had I won a satellite for $10,000 in lammers, I would certainly be mulling over how to reduce my variance with various kinds of deals. But this is a gift, and an almost unbelievably generous one at that. After only a minute or two of thought, I knew that selling pieces of a gift seemed, well, kind of tacky. I would frankly feel embarrassed to tell Daniel that I had commodified his kindness in that way.

When I was a little boy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl was my favorite book. I'm sure I read it more than a dozen times. The desk in our family room always had some notepaper in a little wooden holder that my brother had made, and one time, when I was in about sixth grade, it was stocked with yellow-orange paper. To my small eyes, it looked like gold. I took one of those 3" x 5" slips and copied onto it the entire text of the Willy Wonka golden ticket from the book. I had to write really small, because there were so many words to fit onto it. But when it was done, it allowed me to feel the way I imagined that Charlie himself must have felt when holding that precious piece of gold leaf. I held on to that imaginary ticket until I moved out of my parents' house when I got married at age 23.

Today is the closest I've come to that feeling since I made my own Willy Wonka ticket. Thank you, Daniel, for giving me a rebirth of that sensation of hope and anticipation of great things about to happen. I will try not to let you down.

(Image from here.)

Addendum:

I see that a couple of other sites have already beaten me to posting about the drawing results. See Wasted Aces here (though with my name misspelled), Michele Lewis here.

I understand that there will be other PR moments associated with this. Obviously I'll keep you up to date as I learn about any such things.

More pokery plates

At South Point (where, it should be noted, there was a casino chips collectors' convention going on):

At Rio:

Also at Rio, taken through my car window as I was leaving:

New poker room at South Point

I played at South Point today, for the first time since they opened their new poker room a few weeks ago. It's definitely a step up, though a small one. Nothing was made worse, and a few small items were improved.

I counted 22 tables, which seems like way more than they'll ever be able to use--but what do I know? Dealers and management remain unchanged, of course, as do the rules, some of which are silly.

Tables look like the same old ones to me, though I think the chairs are new. (Sorry for my uncertainty; I don't spend enough hours at South Point to be sure.) The most notable feature of the new room is that the tables are luxuriously far apart. It might even now boast the greatest average inter-table distance in the city, were anybody to bother measuring.

The room was admirably quiet--well, "admirable" if you like quiet poker rooms, which I do. I think that's more a function of the fact that there weren't a lot of people playing the nearest slot machines than due to the room actually being acoustically isolated in any way. As you can see, it remains wide open to the casino floor on one of its long sides. I noticed not even a whiff of cigarette smoke coming in, nor on my clothes later, though again this may have been due to a slow day in the adjacent slots area rather than any special accomplishment of the ventilation system.

A very nice touch is the addition of a self-serve coffee machine, as you can see in the last photo above--and hot chocolate, too! I don't drink coffee (can you believe I have achieved my advanced years without ever even tasting the stuff?) and the weather was too hot for sampling the hot chocolate, so perhaps my mild excitement will prove to be in vain. I wish they had a water cooler alongside it. I'd be far more likely to use that.

They're still using a paper list, but at least they do it reasonably competently.

Not much else has changed that I could tell. Basically, it's the same room, moved over 30 yards or so, expanded, with a bunch of extra dead tables and a set of new chairs and a coffee machine thrown in. Plus ca change.


So much for the room. The session? Not much interesting to report, as has been the case lately. Most of my profit came in one hand. Pocket 9s, raised to $10. Button goes all-in for his last $26. Big-stacked big blind calls. I call. Flop is A-9-2 with two diamonds. BB checks. This is a situation in which I will usually bet. However, I thought this flop missed him, and he needed to catch at least something to pay off my set. Furthermore, I had, up until this point, played flops after a pre-flop raise with perfect transparency and predictability: Bet if I hit, check and fold if I missed. I thought this guy was smart enough to have picked up on that pattern, and take a shot at the turn even if he had nothing. Time to pull a switcheroo on him.

Turn was offsuit 3. He checked again. I bet $25. He check-raised to $95, looking confident as all get-out. He had played fewer hands than anybody at the table, so I had no sense of his degree of trickiness. There was no flush possible, no paired board. The only possible straight was 4-5 for a gutshot flop turning the wheel, which seemed unlikely, given his pre-flop call of a reraise when the betting had been reopened to me behind him. The only other hand he could have that had me beat was A-A, and the pre-flop action argued against that. I thought it was most probable that we had either set-over-set, or he had aces up, both of which were fine with me and would likely earn me a call, so I shoved. He called with no hesitation and said, "Straight." He did indeed have the 4-5. Oops.

But then he made his fatal mistake: He saw my cards and told the dealer, "Don't pair the board." The next card to come was probably a going to be a queen or something else unhelpful to me, but the God of Irony clearly heard my opponent, and felt compelled to do what he does. River: 3. Full house to me, pot to me. The classic suck and resuck, thankyouverymuch.

Other than that, not a single blog-worthy hand or incident.

"You ruined it for me!"

I played at South Point yesterday. It's not one of my favorite haunts. First, it's too inconvenient to get to. Second, my track record there has been only mediocre. As a result, I've only played there nine times now, the last time being in January of this year. But I was in search of cowboy hats (meaning those attending the annual big rodeo in town--on average pretty bad players willing to lose a lot of money), and all reports from the field were indicating that South Point was the motherlode of cowboys. It turned out that there was only one at my table when I started (I was there at non-prime time), and none when the two key hands of the day played out. In fact, by that time there was not a single player at the table that I would classify as bad, and I was thinking that I should probably go find greener pastures elsewhere. Good thing I didn't act on that thought right away.

I was down to about $150 of my original $300 buy-in when the first big hand of the day occurred. I was on the button and called a raise from one of the two loosest openers at the table. I had 3-6 offsuit. Again I realize that my reporting on such hands here must make it seem like I do this all the time, and again I have to stress that I don't. I take a flier once in a while when I have position and a table image that will preclude anybody guessing that I'm playing such junk. The UTG player came along after having limped. The flop was an unbelievably lovely 4-5-7 rainbow, giving me a straight and the second nuts, in a situation where it was virtually impossible that either opponent had the one hand (6-8) that's beating me. UTG bet $25. Original raiser called. I bumped it to $75. UTG moved all in, and had me covered. Raiser folded. I called. (Duh!) I showed right away, and hoped the board wouldn't pair, since I had to assume he had two pair or a set. No pair came, and he mucked in considerable disgust without ever showing.

That brought me back up to about my starting stack, which is what set up the big win a while later--a hand that was interesting enough to relate to you in detail.

I'm in the small blind with Ks-Kh. UTG limps. The guy who doubled me up in the previously described hand is down to his last $8 and puts it all in. Guy on my right calls from the button. I make it $25. The big blind thinks for a while, then calls. To my great surprise, UTG also calls. To my even greater surprise, the button calls, too.

Sometimes a hand starts out looking simple enough, then quickly careens out of control. This was just such an occasion. I had pocket kings. Desperate, short-stacked guy goes all in and gets a loose caller. I raise to isolate, fully expecting to be heads up as the odds-on favorite, folding everybody else out with some dead money in the pot. A no-brainer hand, with no more decisions to make after the definitive reraise scares everybody away. But then mere seconds later, I'm in a horrible quagmire: There's about $105 in the pot after the rake, and I have to act first against three opponents (plus the all-in guy, who isn't really a factor here), each of whom was willing to call a $25 pre-flop reraise, all of whom are at least as deep-stacked as I am, and none of whom are idiots or donkeys. How in the hell did this happen?

And, to make matters worse, I have two kings--the ace magnets. You just know what's coming on the flop, don't you? Yep. Right in the window, the ace of spades. Norman Chad may call it the prettiest card in the deck, but I assure you I find no beauty in it in this situation. The only redeeming value is that it is followed by the 10 of spades and the 3 of spades, giving me the nut flush draw.

I lead out for $50. The big blind tanks, and when he emerges, he announces himself all-in. He is a smart, experienced player--simultaneously solid and tricky--that I have seen around town several times before. He has me covered. Just as I'm pondering what in the world I should do with this mess of a situation, it gets stickier still, as the UTG guy also shoves. I don't recognize him, but his play and conversation have made it clear that he, too, is no dummy. Our stacks are very nearly even. (I had him slightly covered, as it turned out.) The button folds, and it's back to me.

Well, I have about $225 left, and the pot is effectively $600 ($100 from before the flop, plus my $50, plus $225 from each remaining opponent), giving me 2.7:1 on a call. I have two pulls at the nut flush, which should be the winner the great majority of the time. I worry only about the board pairing to make somebody a full house and destroy my flush. My king means that the only possible straight flush would have to be a perfect-perfect kind of ending, or a one-outer to complete a steel wheel, both possibilities too remote to bother accounting for. I think it's unlikely that either of these guys has flopped a flush, and it's mostly unthinkable that either of them has A-A, given the pre-flop action. If I'm right about those two assumptions, then either of the two remaining kings should also give me the winner. So I'm counting on 11 outs twice (9 spades plus 2 kings). Again, they're not pure outs because of the possibility of getting there and yet being defeated by a full house, and, of course, one or two spades may be in my opponents' hands (and maybe a king, too, if one of them has A-K). I'm probably between about 35% and 40% to win, or in the ballpark of 1.5:1-1.8:1, so it still looks like the math says to call.

Of course I have to assume that at least one of these guys has an ace--maybe both. I hate calling off all my chips when I have to believe that I'm currently behind and on a draw, but I know that sometimes it's the mathematically correct thing to do, and this seemed like one such situation. So after sizing up the numbers the best that I can, I grudgingly stack up my chips and put them in the middle.

The big blind shows Js-Jh. He is drawing nearly dead (6.5%), needing a third jack or runner-runner straight cards, without a spade hitting. The UTG player has Ac-3c for a flopped two pair, and is the heavy favorite to win (56%). The short stack has A-5 with no spades, but he can only win the little main pot of about $40, when it's the huge side pot that holds all the money, so he doesn't matter much. Besides, he can only win if a 5 comes with no spade. I'm 37.5% to win, or 1.7:1 against, which is about what I had estimated.

The suspense ends quickly when the dealer puts the queen of spades down on the turn. I don't even remember what the river card was, but it didn't pair the board, and the biggest pot I've won in a long time came my way. Single-hand triple-ups of a maximum buy-in don't happen very often in the games I play.

With a pot that big, there was predictably quite a bit of post-mortem discussion. The big blind explained that he had concluded that I had kings (though he obviously couldn't know whether I had the spade draw), and that his all-in raise would push me out of the pot. He had not anticipated being called by the UTG player. He asked me whether I would have called his shove if everybody else had folded. I almost never answer such questions (my stock answer, which is sometimes true and sometimes not, is, "I don't know. I'd have to actually be in the situation and see how it felt"), but this was a player I well respected, I knew I was going to be leaving soon to head to the bloggers' meet-up, and I thought the answer was sufficiently obvious anyway that I wasn't giving away any proprietary secrets. I said, "Probably not--not big enough pot odds."

UTG guy said to the big blind, "You ruined it for me!" Big blind replied, "You ruined it for me!" UTG had been planning a shove anyway, but was startled and worried by the big blind shove ahead of him. Although neither of them was happy with the outcome, they were both taking it in stride, and these comments were made in good fun.

But, interestingly, they were both correct. A push from either one of them alone would leave me in a bind such that I would probably have to fold. However, since I had to assume that the only way I could win was by hitting my draw, and since it was no harder to beat both of them than it was to beat just one of them if I succeeded, having both of their stacks in the pot changed the math of a call from unfavorable to favorable. They did indeed unwittingly each ruin it for the other.

More card protectors

I was playing at South Point today, sitting next to a guy who was using this cute little Bugs Bunny as a card protector. Bugs has a secret. Guess what his cards are?





When the player saw my interest in card caps, he pulled out another one. He said he has a bunch of such things, and onto each he has grafted a pair of hole cards.





I had to confess that I had no idea who this was, though I assumed it was a comic book superhero that I never learned about. Indeed it was. It's Daredevil. So now you know.

Three sights that have amused me today

The author of this book contacted me and asked if I would like a copy for review. I said sure. It arrived today. As I pulled it out of the container, my eyes were a little unfocused, and those words "a novel" in small print looked like the letter "I," so I thought the title was "POKER ISLAM." View it from across the room, and it definitely looks like "POKER ISLAM." Which would be a pretty interesting book, I think.

Can't tell you a thing about Poker Slam yet, but the graphic design of the cover could have used a few minutes' more thought....





I was out at South Point today. I was greatly amused by the juxtaposition of these two signs, and the fact that both events were being held at the same facility on the same two days. It occured to me that there probably isn't a great deal of overlap in attendance. It's kind of hard to imagine there being a whole bunch of people who were planning their trips for the year, discovered these two things, and said, "Wow! I can go to the bullriding championship AND the tattoo show on the same weekend, and never have to leave the hotel!"

Let me tell you: walking around the place today, it was not particularly difficult to guess who was there for which thing--even easier, in fact, than when the porn stars were sharing the city with the electronics geeks. I think the only ones that would fit in at both events would be the bulls with rings through their noses and brands on their butts.






I started playing poker at the crack of noon today--unusually early for me--at the Venetian. This license plate caught my eye in the parking garage. I've never seen this design before. It must be aimed at the out-of-staters who think our state name is pronounced "ne-VAH-da."

A compliment unique to poker

I had an unusual experience last night with my two-fer, playing first at South Point and then at the Orleans: In both places, an opponent that I had spanked made a quite conspicuous move to take a seat to my left.


South Point: An early-position player (the guy on the right in the Esfandiari picture a couple of posts down), whom I had quickly pegged as being the smartest, trickiest opponent I had to deal with at this table, raised. I was on the button with 4-6 offsuit and called, hoping to hit something entirely disguised.

The flop was K-K-4, rainbow. My opponent bet $25. I called. My initial thought was that he probably didn't have a king, and a smooth call here would lead him to think that I did have one and that I was therefore trying to let him bluff again. In games at this level, most players in early position in such a situation will fire once on the flop, but not again on the turn unless they actually have a king. Basically, I was floating him, hoping to take the pot away when he couldn't keep firing at it. However, pairing the 4 did give me some "plan B" alternatives if needed.

The turn was an offsuit 10. My opponent pushed out a stack of $100, which was just enough to put me all in if I called. This was not what I had expected, and it made for a very difficult situation. With one of the more straightforward opponents at the table, I would pretty much have to conclude that he did, in fact, have a king. But this guy was definitely smart enough to get inside my head and, recognizing me as a fellow smart and potentially tricky player, know that I could make that flop call very light with an eye toward stealing on a later street. Therefore, he could simply be countering that move, even though he missed the flop.

Look at it from his point of view. He could expect me to have one of the following:

1) A true monster, like K-K or 4-4.

2) A nearly certain winner, especially A-K, with which I'm hoping he'll put in more money.

3) A king with a weaker kicker (K-Q, K-J, K-10), in which case my flop call was saying, "I like the trips, but I'm worried that you have A-K, so I'm reluctant to put it all in."

4) A pocket pair lower than the kings--maybe 8s or 9s, in which case my flop call was saying, "I want to see if you really have a king by watching to see what you do on the turn." An A-4 in the hole might be similar.

5) Complete air, floating him.

He understandably would have discounted (1) and (2) as improbable. Once he limited my range to (3), (4), and (5), putting me to a test for all of my chips was a very smart and bold move, because if I made my decision based on card strength alone, it was more likely that I couldn't call than that I could.

I took what I'm sure was at least two full minutes to think about this--maybe the longest I've ever kept a table waiting. It was one of the rare situations in which I had to do the thinking-one-level-deeper-than-one's-opponent thing. I finally concluded essentially what I just outlined above about what he would be thinking about me, and why he did what he did.

I didn't think he had a king, because if he had a king it would almost have to be K-K, A-K, or maybe suited K-Q to explain his early-position pre-flop raise, and with those big hands I doubted that he would lead out betting. Rather, he would check and either check-raise if I bet or let me have a free card to get something that I could call him with on the turn. I thought that A-Q or A-J was his most likely holding. I did have to worry some about Q-Q or J-J, etc. However, I thought it more likely that after my flop call he would try to keep the pot smaller and go passive to try to get to a cheap showdown with such hands.

It was risky, but I finally felt best about assigning him A-Q or A-J, a standard continuation bet on the flop, and a smart analysis of what I would be holding and thinking in order to make the big bet on the turn. If I was right, then calling was the thing to do. It took a lot of courage, and was one of the most difficult hero calls I've made since living here, but I pushed my chips out.

The dealer put a blank out on the river (a 7, I think). My opponent said "ace-queen," and then showed the same. I flipped over my cards--bottom pair with no kicker--and tapped the 4. The chorus from the table of "Wow" and "Great call" was almost as rewarding as the money. OK, not really, but it was nice anyway. Actually, now that I reflect on it, I think my own personal satisfaction at having analyzed the situation so well and having had the stones to act on it was better than the admiration of the table. (Hey, nobody can admire me as well as I can admire myself!)

What's weird is how this hand would look to an player with a little experience--maybe one who has watched a fair amount of televised poker but not played a lot. Except for the long thinking pause, it would look exactly like a donkey call: idiot sees a big pair and an overcard on the board, with an opponent showing strength, and still thinks his bottom pair might be good.

The truth is that it was a deeper level of play than is usually seen (or is usually profitable) at these limits. My opponent made an excellent read of what my range of cards could be and what I would be thinking he might have, and made a strong attempt to exploit the card weakness that he correctly guessed I was stuck with. (At least I think that's what happened. Of course, I don't really know what he was thinking. It's possible he wasn't thinking much at all. But based on watching him for a couple of hours, I'm comfortable attributing to him a pretty sophisticated game.) I, in turn, was able to make a slightly better play based on figuring out what he thought I would be thinking. I earned the pot not only by having a better hand, but by getting inside his head a little bit better than he got inside mine.

But now I'm straying from my original point. I didn't really mean to get into a deep analysis of the hand (though I think it's an unusually interesting one). Getting back to the story, it was just a few minutes later that I busted Mr. Esfandiari, and my opponent in the hand in this story quickly got up to claim that seat, two to my left. I assume that he decided that I was a player on whom he wanted to have good position.


Orleans: I started off at a must-move table. My second hand after moving to a regular game I had J-Q in late position. A middle-position player put in a standard raise. He's somebody I've played with once before at the Orleans. (By the way, I don't have a phenomenal general memory, but I'm pleased that my ability to remember specific opponents and their tendencies has grown tremendously since I've started this gig. I have a long way to go in that department still, but the fact that I can remember this guy from a single session several months ago is a lot more than I would have been capable of two years ago.) He's smart, aggressive, and potentially tricky. He's a poker dealer somewhere else (can't remember where), but not very prone to the common maladies of play that I see most dealers succumb to. I called, though not really liking the situation. J-Q is way too prone to being second-best and it too often makes for painful decisions later in the hand, because it's close to but slightly behind the range of cards commonly used for making the initial raise.

Flop was 9-10-x, giving me an open-ended straight draw. He bet again. I called. The turn was a brick. He checked and looked concerned. I bet about 3/4 of the pot. He thought a long time, tried to ask me questions about what I had, etc. He finally folded.

A few minutes later, the guy on my immediate left packed up and went home. The player I had just beaten in this pot made a beeline for the now-open seat. It's hard not to conclude that he moved because of me. After all, if he just hated the 10 seat, he would have moved to the 2 seat (where I was) before I got to the table.

Maybe 30 minutes later, he was obviously still obsessing over the pot we had contested, and he asked me what I had had. I remember him as being a pleasant, polite, and friendly guy from our previous session, and, besides, I knew I would be leaving soon, so I decided it was OK to tell him the truth: I had a good draw, position, and a bit of moxie. He believably told me that he had had 8-8 in the hole. Assuming that's true, I had 12 outs (four kings and two more 8s to make a straight plus six cards that would make me a bigger pair), so I probably would have played it the same if his cards had been face up, which is always a nice thing to realize after the fact. Rather than either berate me for a stupid bluff or kick himself for not calling with his better hand, he said, in what struck me as a sincere voice, "Then it was a really nice move. I wanted to call, but there were too many ways you could have had me beat. I thought you probably had jacks."


So there you have it. One of the highest compliments one poker player can pay another is both silent and unparalleled in any other area of human activity: Moving to a different seat so as to gain a positional advantage. It is, in effect, saying, "Sir, you are a handful to deal with, and I'm going to need whatever edge I can get on you."

Thanks, guys. I'm flattered!


(It has not escaped my attention that another reason one might move to a particular player's left is that chips tend to flow clockwise, so, all else being equal, one would like to have the seat to the immediate left of the biggest donkey at the table, in order to catch as much of his chip-spewing as possible. It's possible that I'm suffering from a self-delusion of being pretty good at this game, when I'm actually the live one at the table. That seems objectively doubtful, though, based on a couple of years of a winning record. But it is certainly possible that one or both of the players in these two stories were thinking not so much, "He's the best player and I need to get a positional advantage on him," but more like, "What a moron--let me move to where I can best profit from his idiocy." It's better for my ego, though, not to consider this possibility too strongly.)

Celebrity sighting

I drove out to South Point last night, since it is a hotbed of rodeo-related events. As I had hoped, the place was lousy with cowboy hats. Strangly, though, there were virtually none in the poker room. My table had more of them than any other when its Cowboy Hat index briefly reached 2, but most of the time it was 1 or even 0. Disappointing. After a couple of hours, I headed off to the Orleans, and it was the same--cowboy hats everywhere except in the poker room. I don't get it.

Anyway, about halfway through my time at South Point our table was joined by the very minor poker celebrity pictured below. That's Antonio Esfandiari's father on the left, with his hand on his chin. I suppose he picked South Point because of its association with "High Stakes Poker" (though I understand production is being moved back to the Golden Nugget for next season).



Mr. Esfandiari is not as good a poker player as his son. I busted him with A-Q on a queen-high flop. I bet, he raised all-in for only about 50% more, I called. When all the cards were out, he saw my hand and mucked without showing. He left before I got a chance to tell him that I enjoy his occasional appearances on "I Bet You" (which is one of the greatest concepts for a reality TV show ever). He was perfectly polite and very quiet his whole time at our table.


South Point has issued its first commemorative poker chips for this year's big rodeo celebration. Previously, it was one of the few casinos that had no special chips anywhere in sight--just complete uniformity of generic chips. (Others that I can think of offhand include Binion's, Golden Nugget, and Sahara, and Excalibur before the electronic tables.)

New (?) feature at South Point

South Point is another perfectly nice and profitable poker room that I don't get to much because of its distance. But as long as I was at Silverton, South Point is just a couple of miles further down Las Vegas Boulevard, so I gave them another visit.

They have a new thing up on the wall. Or maybe it has been there a long time and I just never noticed it before. I'm capable of an astounding degree of obliviousness about my surroundings. Anyway, I don't even know what to call it--a wall hanging, maybe. It's a large black surface that was signed by many (all?) of the participants in one of the seasons of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" (I'm guessing Season 3).

The problem is, it's difficult to both see and photograph. They did a terrible job of hanging it, because there is an awful glare from the overhead lights, no matter where you stand. It's hard to see to start with, because inexplicably they had the players sign with a very faint white ink on a black background. In the photos above, you can just barely see that there is anything written at all. From a distance, it basically looks like a solid black, well, thing, without apparent purpose. It's only when you get close that you can figure out that it's a collection of signatures.

Since I can't get good pictures of it, I guess you'll all just have to stop out there and take a look yourselves. Still, it was nice to see something that made me look forward to being treated to yet another season of my favorite poker show.

The fish bit back at South Point tonight. Lost two buy-ins. First I flopped a flush with Q-9 of spades in my hand and 10-6-2 of spades on the flop, and succumbed to a runner-runner full house. (He had A-6, including the ace of spades, so he was going for the nut flush, picked up an ace on the turn for two pairs, then caught a third 6 on the river. I correctly guessed that he was going for the higher flush, and would have shut down if another spade hit, but the extra danger his hand held with the pairs/full house was a complete blindside.) Then my pocket tens were happy to see an all-baby flop, so I moved all-in, an overbet of the pot, but still got called by a flush draw, which came on the river. So it wasn't any harder getting my money in good than it had been at Silverton--just didn't work out right. That's the way some sessions are, inevitably.

Incidentally, South Point recently announced plans for a major expansion of its poker room. They seem to be making a push to grab a bigger slice of the local players' market. See here for details.

You goof, I profit

Yesterday afternoon I was playing at South Point. It was a $4-$8 limit game with a half-kill, while I was waiting for a no-limit seat to open up. My opponent in the hand had won the two previous pots, the second with an outlandish bluff, so the half-kill was on, and the hand was being played $6-$12.

Normally when somebody has just shown a bluff, then comes out firing the next hand, he really has something. But I got a sense that this guy might try the ol' double-reverse-reverse and bluff again, on the assumption that we wouldn't think he'd do that. He raised before the flop. I was on the button with just a 6-8 offsuit, but I decided to hunt him down and see what was going on.

The flop was A-6-3, giving me middle pair. He bet, I called. Although he could easily have an ace, I thought his range of raising hands was wide enough that it was more likely he did not have one. Of course, he could also have a pocket pair bigger than 6s, but I just didn't believe him.

The turn was another 3. He fired again, and I called again, figuring that this was a safe or at least neutral card for me.

The river brought a third spade, the 4. Now he checked. I couldn't tell if this meant he never had the ace to begin with, or he had it but was now afraid that I had filled a flush draw. So I bet. He called. Oops--that must mean he has an ace after all. Oh well. That's the way it goes sometimes.

I flipped up my cards silently. He was at the other end of the table. I was extremely surprised to hear him say, "Oh, you flopped a set. Nice hand." The guy next to him said, "No, a full house," and my opponent then apparently noticed the paired board and said, "Oh yeah, even better. OK"--and he pushed his hole cards toward the dealer face down!

Both he and the player next to him had obviously misread my hand and thought that I had 6-6 instead of 6-8. Well, it's not my job to correct them. I hadn't said a word. I wasn't trying to trick or deceive anybody. I was sure that somebody else at the table would pipe up and correct the guy's misimpression, because that virtually always happens in such situations (even though it shouldn't), but miraculously nobody did this time.

The dealer had pushed up the 6, the ace, and both 3s on the board to indicate which cards constituted my best five-card hand, but he did not verbally announce my hand. This was good for me. Unfortunately, by the time my opponent pushed his cards forward, the dealer was busy stacking the chips up (I can't imagine why he was doing this--it was not a situation in which he would reasonably expect a split pot to result), and those cards just sat there for several precious seconds! I was mentally flogging the dealer: "C'mon, forget the chips! Get those cards in the muck before he comes to his senses!" But I remained quiet and motionless. I think that urging the dealer to muck the cards would both alert the other player that something was wrong and border on being unethical.

Finally, the guy says, "Hey, hold on a minute." This suddenly alerted the dealer that something was afoot, and just as the guy started to reach out to reclaim his cards, the dealer snatched them up and shoved them deep into the muck, completely unrecoverable. Whew!

That's when the talk started. People started pointing out that I just had two pair, not three of a kind or a full house. The guy said, quite plausibly, that he had had A-Q. He wanted the dealer to do something, but the dealer obviously had to explain that he couldn't do anything but award me the pot, since nobody else had seen his cards.

I didn't say a word through the whole thing, just stacked up about $70 in chips.

I have maintained here repeatedly, whenever the subject has come up, that a player's decision to either show his cards or muck them unseen is a strategic/tactical one, just like the decision to check, bet, call, raise, or fold, and the player must be allowed to make that decision unaided, even if it's a foolish one. Once he decides to reveal his cards, then it doesn't matter if he has misread either his own holding or that of an opponent--at that point both the dealer and the other players can sort out who the winner is, because, as they say, the cards speak. (Or, alternatively, "cod spick.") But the cards can't "speak" if nobody except their owner ever sees them.

I would never intentionally tell an opponent that I had trips or a full house, when I really didn't, in an attempt to get him to muck the winner--that's about as dirty as angle-shooting gets. And if he opened his hand and the dealer misread the cards and started pushing me the pot, when it rightfully belonged to somebody else, I'd speak up and correct the situation immediately.

But I feel not one iota of duty to correct another player's erroneous reading of my cards before he finishes making his decision on whether to show or muck, nor one speck of guilt for having accepted that pot. Why on earth should I stop him from throwing away the winner, if that's what he feels like doing? All that he has to do in order to prevent adverse consequences of making a mistake at this crucial juncture is the minimal effort of turning over his cards. If he's not willing to do that much, why should I or anybody else help him? If he has decided that keeping his cards Top Secret is more important to him than reducing the risk of losing the pot by mistake, who am I to try to convince him otherwise?

I'm glad to report that the guy didn't go ballistic or anything. He admitted that he screwed up--although he did have a few unflattering comments to his neighbor about my decision to make such thin calls.* That's OK, pal--we can disagree on whether it was reasonable. I'm pretty generous about such things when I have your money.


*In this particular situation, this gripe was even more stupid than usual. One of the objectives of showing a bluff--as he had just done--is to make opponents think that you're bluffing again later when you're actually not, and thus collect extra calls that otherwise would not have been reliquished. Assuming that he was rational enough to have that as one of the reasons he showed the bluff, he got exactly what he was hoping for--and then complained about it!

Once in a while, the game just plays itself

For all the times that poker causes me great weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, I must admit that there are times it seems like the easiest way in the world to make a living. Tonight was one of those times.

Triple up

I sit down at in a game at South Point, having bought in for my usual starting amount, $100. On my very first hand, I'm in the cutoff seat (one ahead of the button), and look down at the two black jacks. An early-position player raises to $10 and there are five callers. I pop it up to $40 and get four callers. (I was to learn quickly that this was a calling table--it was not easy to shake these people off of a hand.) The flop is K-x-x with two spades. Everybody checks to me.

Well, when you've got jacks, you have to expect that the flop will have at least one overcard, and you just can't be scared of it every time, or you might as well throw the hand away before the flop. There's more than $200 in the pot already, and I have only $60 left, so the only rational action, when nobody else takes a first crack at it, is to go all-in. Even if somebody else has a king, they may figure me to have A-K or A-A, and therefore fold. Only one person calls. I show my hand; he doesn't. The dealer puts out the turn and river. I don't remember what they were, except that the turn was another spade, which I hated. I didn't improve, but I won. I have no idea what that guy called me with, because he mucked it without showing. I had very nearly tripled up on my first hand.

Double up

About 30 minutes later, I'm on the button and see two aces. The first player raises to $15 and four others call before it gets to me. I push it to $50, and get three callers--again, more than $200 in the pot before the flop. This is a rare occurrence, and for it to happen twice in 30 minutes, and to have me be the one pushing the action both of those times is quite extraordinary.

The flop is 9-4-3 rainbow. My opponents check-check-check to me. I have $218 left in front of me. With $200+ in the pot, once again the only sane move is all-in. One guy folds, but the other two insta-call. This worries me, because it sure smells like one of them got stubborn with a pocket pair and hit three-of-a-kind on the flop.

I show my aces. One opponent groans and turns over pocket queens. Whew--that's pretty safe. Then the other guy smacks the table, says, "I don't believe this!" and turns over--the other two queens!

None of us can make a straight or a flush with any cards on the turn and river. Neither of my opponents can improve to three queens, obviously. In other words, I have them both drawing stone dead on the flop!

To have just one pair after the flop and yet have two opponents absolutely dead--unable even to get a split pot--is exceptionally rare. It's not terribly difficult for a flopped straight flush, flopped quads, a flopped full house, a flopped flush, or even a flopped straight to have two opponents drawing dead with two cards yet to come. But a single pair??? It would be really difficult to calculate how often it happens, and I'm not inclined to put in that much effort. But I'll say this: As far as I know, I have never witnessed the situation in which a player holding just one pair after the flop has two opponents stone-cold dead.

The dealer recognized this a bit faster than I did, and raised his hands in a gesture of futility, as if to say, "What's the point of finishing out the hand?" Then he made a funny effort of it, just tossing the turn and river card sort of haphazardly at the table, because by then everybody recognized that it made no difference whatsoever what cards got pulled out.

I started that hand with $268 and finished it with just under $650, more than doubling up. (I had more chips than either of the players that went all-in with me.)

Like I said, sometimes the game just plays itself, and I get to just sit back and stack up the chips.