Royal

I think it's completely unfair that with all the hands of cards I've played over the years, I've never managed to make a Royal Fizzbin. Live poker is so rigged.

Just for funz

I've liked Wil Wheaton for a long time. I was one of the few who actually liked Wesley Crusher early on in ST:TNG (even though he had a lot of dopey lines--"We're from Starfleet! We don't lie!"), largely because Wheaton played him with such a constant sense of wonder and excitement. But he also had some genuinely great scenes, such as the dramatic confrontation with Captain Picard in "The First Duty," where he takes a serious verbal drubbing from the captain in the process of realizing that he has been loyal to the wrong ideal, and has to endure the pain of admitting he screwed up. Jumping ahead to more recent stuff, his writing is funny and insightful, and his appearances on shows such as "The Big Bang Theory" and "Eureka" are enjoyable without fail.

Wheaton and I have several friends in common, and played poker at adjacent tables once, but I've still never actually met him. Wil is also worth knowing about if you do crossword puzzles, because puzzle makers apparently find the unusual spelling of his name very useful, and it shows up a lot.

I read his blog and tweets. Recently he and his wife watched on TV a movie that he was in: "Toy Soldiers," released in 1991, when Wheaton was 19. He sent a few Twitter messages about it, including a photo of him pointing in shame to the dumb-looking earring he wore. He later wrote a blog post about the experience, and said that he still liked the movie in spite of some of its silliness.

I had either never heard of this movie or had forgotten about it. I thought it would be fun to watch, so bumped it up to the top of my Netflix queue, and watched it today. I recognized from his post the scene in which Wil gets shot (kid can handle a phaser, but not a 9mm submachine gun!), and managed to pause the DVD on the same frame that he had used in the picture, and took a screen shot of the one superimposed on the other.

Which was way more fun than is strictly reasonable.

Misfit, and mostly proud of it--a long and personal rumination

A few recent things have converged to set me ruminating today.

First, while visiting my wonderful friend Cardgrrl last week, we got talking about bad-beat stories and why people tell them when they know that nobody--themselves included--likes to listen to them. Cardgrrl tends to be patient and longsuffering with them. I try to either actively cut them off, pretend I don't know the person is talking to me, or give absolutely blank-faced feedback, so as to dissuade the storyteller from continuing.

Cardgrrl analogized the situation to baboons who, after suffering some minor injury, will make hooting sounds to call attention to their pain. Other baboons will then come over and make sympathetic hoots. It doesn't do anything to actually heal the wound, but it strengthens the tribal bonds. She sees bad-beat stories as the human/poker equivalent of this ritual. She figures that listening for a minute and making some appropriate responsive comment such as, "Wow, that really sucks," costs her nothing and makes everybody involved feel like part of the clan.

I bristled at that. I don't ask for sympathy for my bad beats, and don't like people trying to manipulate me to evoke sympathy from me on account of theirs.

Cardgrrl suggested that my aversion to participating in such exchanges might be due to not feeling like I'm part of the tribe. Damn, that woman knows me well! I wouldn't have thought of it in exactly those terms, but she's right on the money. In many important ways, I have always felt quite apart from the rest of humanity--sometimes because I perceive myself to have been excluded by the tribe, sometimes because I have exiled myself.


Second item. I was preparing another batch of "Guess the casino" posts. This involves looking through the hundreds of photos I've taken of our 60 or so local casinos that have poker rooms. In doing so, I saw some of the oldest ones--taken over a year ago--that still haven't been used in that series of posts. I saw in them something that I hadn't noticed until Cardgrrl (herself a skilled photographer) pointed it out a while back, though now that I'm alerted to it, it's embarrassingly obvious: They all tilt.

It isn't random tilt; it's the same amount and in the same direction every time. Basically, the culprit is that I hold the camera askew--rotated maybe 5 degrees clockwise--because that's what looks normal to me. Since she pointed this out, I'm a lot more careful, and most of the time I manage to remember to check the orientation of the frame with respect to some vertical or horizontal marker in the shot, so the pictures I've taken in the last eight or nine months (since she alerted me to this problem) will look more normal to everybody else.

This isn't limited to photography, either; it's how I actually see the world. If you've spent any time around me, you've probably noticed that I tend to have my head canted to the right. I've known about this since I was a teenager, when my barber, with a bit of frustration, asked me, "Do you always hold your head that way?" She was considering whether to cut my hair a little asymmetrically to compensate for it if I did. I had never noticed anything was wrong before then. So I've long been aware of it, but I mostly ignore it as just part of how things are.

It was just over a year ago that I bought a cheapo webcam for my computer so that Cardgrrl and I could have video chats. We talk a few times a week now, so I see myself in the little inset shot. As a result, I get reminded a lot more often than has ever been the case before how I look to the rest of the world--and it's tilty. It matches how my photographs turn out when I'm not paying attention. I know that my right ear is a little higher than my left, so maybe my right eye is a little higher, too, and I have to be slightly cattywompus for the retinal images to match up. I don't know. The point, though, is that I genuinely see the world slightly off-kilter.

As you might guess, that literal fact makes a nice metaphor for other stuff, because it's not just a visual thing, it's a matter of what I notice and attend to and think about. They're all a little--sometimes a lot--different from how it seems that everybody else sees things. I'm on the verge of flooding you with examples, but this is already getting too long. Just take my word for it: my life history is chock-full of instances where what seems to me an obvious inference or interpretation or preference is 180 degrees out of phase with how everybody else is seeing things, and it has caused no end of trouble and misunderstanding for me.

Some things get me all sappy-feeling, and one of the most consistent triggers is the old "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." One of the themes running through the show is that of being a misfit. There's Rudolph himself, of course, with that shiner of a nose. There's Hermey, the elf who wants to be a dentist rather than spend his life making toys in Santa's workshop--much to the outrage and scorn of the other elves. There's Yukon Cornelius, who obviously doesn't mesh well with polite society. Even The Bumble (the abominable snowman) can be seen as a misundersood outcast who just needs friends.

Saddest of all, there is the Island of Misfit Toys. I have often thought that if were ever to get a tattoo, it would either be the single word, "Misfit," or maybe an image of the train with the caboose with square wheels--my favorite of the toys that nobody wants.

Everything works out well in the story for all of the misfits and freaks, which is nice, but not how the real world always goes.



The final thing that set off this navel-gazing was Cardgrrl, who understands me about as well as anybody ever has (and, bless her heart, still seems to like me in spite of that), forwarding to me today a lovely extended quotation from Salman Rushdie's novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet:

For a long while I have believed - this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius
Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness - that in every
generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born
not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without
strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even
be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers,
perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of
human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated,
throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that:
for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have
erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that
disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be
motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our
secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the
belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone
in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by
ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our
societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the
non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid
ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theatre, or to
read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces
of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the
thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the
traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them
our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in
every place, in every language, in every time.

This may all sound like I'm feeling morose and sorry for myself. I'm not. I can get that way from time to time--and one of the things most likely to spark that is when I am once again confronted with some stark example of how much of a "fish out of water" I am. (Again, I'll spare you the painful personal stories.)

Fortunately, I have, over the years, come to understand that being the oddball has its virtues, too. If I notice things that nobody else notices (like that "Bad Beat on Cancer" sign at the Rio the other day), I get the pleasure of being the first to point them out, rather than just jumping on the bandwagon. To the extent that others listen to me, they gain a perspective that they otherwise would have missed out on.

I remember long ago seeing some TV show that featured the late, great Stephen Jay Gould. He, too, had a decidedly odd bent to him, but found a way to use it to enlighten millions of readers in both technical and popular publications. What I remember from this particular profile of him was his account of discovering an obscure species of mollusk (probably a snail, since that was his area of specialty, though I don't remember for sure) and realizing that it was one that had never before been described in the scientific literature. It's hard to relate the sheer joy on his face as he recalled the sensation of seeing something and knowing that nobody else in the world had ever seen it before.

I doubt that there's anything I can claim to have observed with that degree of exclusivity, but I am able, at least at times, to take pleasure in my perspective being different.

On my first day in Washington, D.C., recently I was alone the whole day because Cardgrrl had a prior commitment. I went for a walk in her neighborhood. Without planning it in advance, I started noticing unusual little things--exactly the kinds of things that I have made more or less habitual to watch for in casinos as fodder for "Guess the casino" posts. I decided to take pictures of some of them and make a little visual quiz for Cardgrrl, to see if she would recognize the things she walks by all the time. The first in the series was a close-up shot of a flower design on a bench just a block away from her apartment. She didn't recognize it.

I was delighted when yesterday her own photograph of the same bench was posted as her "Something Beautiful" of the day, along with a bit of philosophizing about how easy it is to overlook bits of beauty, especially those that are so familiar that we stop really seeing them. (See here.) She is usually the one pointing out to me things that I overlooked because of my tendency to have blinders on, so it pleased me no end to have been able to return the favor for once.

Of course, as regular readers will recognize, usually the things that I notice that nobody else does (or at least few others) are not small items of beauty, but rather criticisms, problems, flaws, mistakes. That's not exactly finding hidden loveliness in the world, but it does have its useful place. I've mentioned here once before that I have some irregular consulting work. It involves scouring medical records for mistakes and inconsistencies, and writing reports about them and their significance. My weird, Rainman-like talent for spotting imperfections actually turns out to be fairly useful and lucrative when channeled in the right way. (One of my favorite characters on Star Trek is Nomad, the powerful but slightly misguided space probe in "The Changeling" whose mission was to find and destroy imperfections. Too bad he self-destructed in the end.)

I hope that my quirky way of noticing all of the things, both little and big, that I think are amiss in the poker world opens the eyes of others who are in a position to set them right, as well as at least occasionally providing insight and amusement to my readers. I was tickled pink, for instance, when one poker room shift supervisor told me that she had collected my stories of bad dealers and ran off copies to pass out to her staff, with the instruction, basically, "Don't do this stuff!" The Nomad in me was happy that I didn't have to annihilate that poker room for being flawed.

It pleases me that virtually everything I write about here--nearly four years' worth now--is original thoughts and observations. If I see something interesting that somebody else has written, I'll just post a link to it, rather than trying to be a copycat writer. After all, if somebody else has already had a thought or observation, I don't add anything to the world by saying the same thing again. (This attitude is also a large part of why I'm so quiet both at the poker table and in other social settings: I'd rather keep my mouth shut until I have something to contribute that is useful and/or funny, and is unlikely to be said by anybody else.)

It has been enormously rewarding to write up my odd perspectives, throw them out into the ether, and have so many of you react enthusiastically. It is gratifying that I have a small circle of people who have befriended me and either overlooked or actively celebrated my peculiarities. It way more than compensates for the times that those same traits make me feel like I'm not part of the tribe. They--and you--notice that I'm a little off-center, that I have some strangely square wheels, and are not only OK with it, but seem to want to share in what it is I'm seeing with my crooked eyes. I definitely march to the sound of a different drummer, but I find that others sometimes want to listen in. (Exactly how many metaphors can I mix in one paragraph?)

It all makes me feel, well, almost human. Not quite, but almost.

McLean Karr knows

(Image from here.)

I was just reading in a poker magazine a wrap-up of the Bay 101 Shooting Stars WPT tournament held in March. I had not followed it as it took place. I was intrigued when I noticed how Hasan Habib was knocked out by the eventual winner, McLean Karr. Here's how the WPT live bloggers reported it (here):

Hand #113: Hasan Habib Eliminated in 4th Place ($234,300)

Level 26: 15,000-30,000, 5,000 ante

McLean Karr raises from the button to 75,000, and Hasan Habib calls from the big blind. The flop comes J22, Habib checks (it may have been in the dark before the flop), Karr bets 115,000, Habib check-raises to 300,000, and Karr thinks for about 15 seconds before he says, "I'm all in."

Habib thinks for about 45 seconds before he says, "Alright, I've gotta call you, man." Habib shows K10 for a club flush draw, while Karr turns over 42 for trip deuces. Habib needs to improve to stay alive.

The turn card is the J, the river card is the 4, and McLean Karr wins the pot with a full house, deuces full of jacks, to eliminate Hasan Habib from the tournament.

Does WPT champion McLean Karr know the power of the mighty Deuce-Four?

To quote one of the great lines from Star Trek, "He knows, Doctor. He knows."

Incidentally, this should also answer any remaining doubts about what happens when the Deuce-Four runs into crubs: the crubs are no match. Even if they had gotten there (which, it must be noted, they didn't), the Deuce-Four had made a full house anyway.

Hodge-podge post

I collected a bunch of mostly unrelated stories and observations today, so I'm throwing them together into a garbage-can post.


New chairs at Rio

One table at the Rio poker room has these new chairs. They've been there for a couple of months, but for some reason I've never played at that table. Until today. I was pleased to get a chance to try them out. They really are much more comfortable that the plain-Jane chairs that most of the Rio tables have. The padding is deep and the construction obviously solid, the better to accommodate the growing number of 300-400 pound poker players. The photo below is terrible, because I was just trying to capture the manufacturer's name printed across the back in order to be able to look it up later. You can see better photos at their web site, here. I believe that the Rio is using the "Barona" model, covered in a reasonably breathable black cloth, but I couldn't swear to that.




Cocktail waitress declines tip

LOL--I accidentally typed that headline as "Cocktail waitress declines top." In Vegas, that wouldn't exactly be earth-shattering news. Freudian slip?

Anyway, this happened a couple of weeks ago at the Rio, and I forgot to write about it at the time. Cocktail waitress came around to take orders. I asked for a bottle of water. When she returned, she didn't get it to me, and I was in a hand so didn't notice her until she was walking out of the room. It was another 20 minutes or so before she came back for another round of drink orders. I told her I'd still like a bottle of water. She was clearly embarrassed that she had forgotten, and apologized. It was no big deal, and I told her so. She had an extra bottle on her tray and gave it to me. As per my usual practice, I handed her a $1 chip. She declined it, saying, "No, I didn't get this to you when I was supposed to. You keep it." I reassured her that it was fine, and pressed the chip on her again. But she was very insistent, and wouldn't take it. I gave up.

I have never before seen or heard of a cocktail waitress declining a tip because she felt that she didn't deserve it. Quite a sense of personal integrity.


Best hand of the day

I bought in for $300 (the max). This is a recent experiment I've been trying, a departure from my habitual $100 starting buy-in. As I gain more experience with it, I'll put up a post about what prompted me to try it, and how it has gone. For now, I'll just say that it has made for much more profit than I would otherwise have had. Sooner or later, I'll get stacked for the whole amount and regret it, but obviously if the number of times I double up greatly exceeds the number of times that I lose more than I would have with a shorter buy-in, it's a worthwhile investment. We'll see.

So anyway, I had slipped down to about $225 when this hand came up. I was in middle position and limped in with the Mighty Deuce-Four offsuit. The guy on my left was, by my estimation, the most potentially tricky and dangerous player at the table. He raised to $15. He could do this with a wide range. He got a couple of other callers, so I decided to take my favorite hand into battle and see what would happen.

Flop: J-K-2 rainbow. Action checked to the bettor, and he put out $25. The others folded. I called. I wasn't so much counting on the 2-4 being good here, nor on making trips or two pair on the turn. I just wasn't convinced that he had hit this flop, and I wanted to see what he'd do next. He could easily have raised with a small or medium pair, and my flop call could slow him down, allowing me an opening to steal it. I thought this was especially so since there weren't many good draws present on that board. In other words, if he had a small or medium pair, he'd pretty much have to assume that I had either a jack or a king in order to be able to call.

But the turn was another deuce. This was ideal. If a 4 had come, I'd have to worry at least a little that he had K-J for a better two pair already. Of course, he could have a set of jacks or kings, but that's only a small part of his possible range, and not particularly likely. To make things even better, he's not going to put me on quads now, and other than 2-2 there isn't a hand with a deuce in it that he should consider in the range of hands with which I would have called him pre-flop.

My sense of him at this point was that he felt confident in his hand and would bet again if I let him, so I did. Sure enough, he pushed forward a stack of $50. I thought a while, then check-raised all-in for my last approximately $185. He called almost instantly, and had me covered.

I showed him the 2-4, and he groaned. "You've gotta be #$^&*! kidding me!" He showed his pocket aces. I was kind of hoping for an Allen Kessler, "Oh my god! What's wrong with you?" But I didn't get it. He was drawing to just one of the last two aces for the win, and that didn't happen.

He let loose a torrent of invective like I haven't heard directed my way in a LONG time. He pulled out a thesaurus in order to be sure he used every synonym of "idiot" in the book. He recounted the hand history: "You called $15 preflop from out of position, and then you thought bottom pair with a horrible kicker was good when I bet again?" Etc. I'll spare you the whole diatribe. It continued, on and off, either out loud to anybody who would listen or under his breath for a good ten minutes. I never uttered a word of explanation or justification or apology or sympathy--just stacked the chips while he ranted.

He proceeded to go on Super Monkey Tilt and donk off the rest of his chips before storming away. I found it most satisfying and amusing.

I'm afraid he left still not grasping the fact that he was cold-decked. It wasn't his fault, it wasn't my fault. When you pit the two most powerful starting hands in poker against each other, somebody's going to get hurt. That's just the way it is.

All hail the Mighty Deuce-Four!


Another pokery license plate

After racking up a decent profit at the Rio, I felt I had a little mojo left in me, so I decided to head over to Imperial Palace and play there. On the way, there was a big traffic jam on Flamingo because of road construction. Two lanes over I spotted a California plate:





It's the blue BMW two lanes to the right. If you look at the photo full size, I think you can just barely make out what the plate says: "BIGSTAX"

Nice.


Compare and contrast

The Rio game had been stocked with laggy Scandis and Crazians who presented a more formidable challenge that I usually find there. That was actually the main reason I left--I was steadily building my chips, but they were in more danger of me making a critical slip-up than usual, and I was getting tired. Not a good spot to be playing sub-optimally in.

The Imperial Palace table could not have been more different. It was mostly occupied by highly inexperienced tourists who didn't know how to tell when it was their turn or what the current action was. They were weak, passive, scared calling stations. One guy made bad bluffs a lot and was running through his bankroll.

I played for about another two and a half hours, and walked away winner, with a rate of about 14 big blinds/hour at Rio, and 30 at IP.

I realize that this is a basic, necessary skill for success, but I was pleased to be reminded that I have in my game sufficient range and flexibility to move from one extreme style of play to the other, adapt accordingly, and still profit. It's not often I get to test that range with such dramatic contrast in one day. Most $1-2 and $1-3 games around here are interchangeable, and it's pretty easy to develop a default approach to the game that works pretty well and doesn't require too much effort or adjustment on most days.

Glad to know that I still have a couple of gears that can be trotted out when they're called for--the "keep up with the crazy table" fast one, and the "never, ever bluff" one.


Hey, that face looks familiar...

Another story from a few weeks ago, which I forgot to relate at the time. The IP tables are huge and covered in cloth on which are depicted two attractive young women in skimpy, vaguely IP-ish outfits. I just assumed that they were models hired for the photo shoot.

Well, on this particular day, the cocktail waitress caught my attention. She looked extremely familiar--a face that I had seen very recently. It took a few seconds, but then it clicked. She was one of the models on the poker tables. The resemblance was so striking that I didn't have much doubt, but I asked anyway, and she confirmed it.

Kind of a strange sensation to have been looking at a face that you sort of assume you'll not have occasion to see in real life, then suddenly have its owner standing right next to you.


I'm not trying to turn into a comp whore or anything, but what's the deal?

Every time that Cardgrrl takes a trip to either Atlantic City or here, she seems to have the room comped for basically as long as she wants, along with at least some of the food, and the round-trip bus trip when it's A.C., all through Harrah's. This has puzzled me greatly--even intense sessions a few days at a time just can't add up to the number of hours I put in routinely. At least that's how it seems to me. (She wrote a post on this subject earlier this year here, and admits that it sort of puzzles her, too.) Sure, I get the $1/hour food comp credit, but that's it, as far as I know.

Last night we got chatting about this via Skype. She asked me about my points and status. I had no idea. I didn't even know one could check such things on the Harrah's web site. Turns out that I have a big mess of "rewards" points, but very few "tier" points, and it's the latter than translate into the generous room comps. Oh, and I have zero "offers" pending. Harrah's never contacts me by mail or email to offer me stuff. With Cardgrrl, her "offers" box has stuff they're wanting to give her all the time.

It's so unfair.

Frankly, I'm not sure what I'd do with room comps even if they were pushing them at me. But last night I was experiencing a sense of outrage over it anyway. Why does Harrah's throw everything at her, and nothing my way? Well, apparently Harrah's in A.C. has for a long time been giving "tier" credits for poker hours, while the Vegas properties don't--or didn't. Harrah's just recently changed this, I learned, and now one racks up "tier" points at 28/hour. (See, e.g., here and here.) Don't ask me about any other details. I still find the whole system baffling and opaque, and I had never even heard of "tier credits" until last night. (Well, that's probably not completely true. When Shamus and I went to the Wednesday Poker Group at Binion's in April, there were some news items, and something about new Harrah's credits was mentioned. I paid no attention at the time, but that was probably it.)

But maybe there are other factors at work. Maybe the system is tweaked to offer rooms and other stuff more liberally to those coming from out of town than for locals. Maybe women get more than men. I don't pretend to know.

I just know that I have my butt in a Harrah's chair a helluva lot, and they have never seemed to notice or care.

Cardgrrl suggested that I try an experiment of dropping $20 or so in a Harrah's slot machine, and see if that primed the pump, so to speak, suggesting to them that I might be a more lucrative customer than I have appeared to be in the past.

So I decided to try it tonight on my way out of IP. I spotted the bank of four "Star Trek" slots. I thought that might be fun. It wasn't. I found it to be just like the "Sopranos" slot machine was when I stuck a dollar in it in December, 2007: completely perplexing. I had no way to judge whether it was better to request 1 line, or 5, or 10, or even 25. It was not at all obvious what combinations of things would win. There was a bunch of stuff thrown up on the screen about bonuses, but it was all gibberish to me. I just threw a $20 bill in, hit "max credits per line," and let it go. It took only about 5 spins for me to be down to zero credits. Nothing interesting whatsoever had happened, except that at one point it said I had made some sort of bonus (see picture below). It wasn't clear to me what, if anything, I was supposed to do about it. I never got to whatever point it is that causes the machine to play cute little clips from the original Star Trek series. It was all just completely stupid and pointless. I cannot understand why people sit at these machines for hours upon hours, draining both their bank accounts and their souls.

But anyway, maybe a switch has now been thrown in the Harrah's computer system that says, "Oooo, this guy gives us money," and the offers will start coming in the mail and/or electronically. We shall see.

Brief life update

Go ahead--guess the casino. Answer later.



Life sometimes gets in the way of poker, y'know?

Yesterday I did what little I could to help my friend Cardgrrl deal with an impossibly maddening situation with the condo that was supposed to have been all arranged and nailed down long ago. Then we had dinner at Jason's Deli (highly recommended).

Today it was more of the same, plus dealing with getting her a rental car for the month (through a desk agent that I found intolerably annoying). Then tried to leave the problems behind by dinner and a movie out at Sam's Town.

The movie, by the way, was the new Star Trek. Truly excellent in every way. Well written, well acted, good pacing, lots of action, lots of drama and emotion, funny, well integrated with the existing canon but with new twists and angles. Plenty of gems for those in the know, but, I would guess, entirely entertaining for Trek newcomers, too. E.g., you don't have to know anything about what happens between Kirk and Spock and Pike "after" the events of this prequel, but it makes watching their interactions a lot richer if you have already seen "The Menagerie" from the original series.


Did you guess the casino? OK, I admit, it was a trick question. The Elvis glass etching shown is not in a casino at all, but in the entrance to the men's room at the airport car rental facility. Kind of an unexpected find.

For "Star Trek" fans

Every fair-minded Star Trek fan sees "The Next Generation" as the best series in the whole franchise. Every poker-playing Star Trek fan knows that ST:TNG had our favorite game as a recurring theme. I have many times thought about doing a post or series of posts about the episodes that most prominently feature poker, but just never got around to it. Now it appears that I won't have to, because what I would have written would have ended up a lot like this excellent PokerNews piece from a couple of days ago by Martin Harris. So just go read that, and pretend that it came from me.

It has to hurt

In the original Star Trek series episode "Mirror, Mirror," several members of the crew get switched, via one of those frighteningly frequent transporter malfunctions, into one of the many parallel universes which is almost but not quite like our own. In this one, doppelgangers of our heros are on a ship identical to the Enterprise, except that they are all selfish, power-hungry, violent, and cruel. Oh, and they tend to wear goatees and/or have facial scars, sure signs of all that is wicked.

In this mirror universe, each crew member is required to carry a small device called an "agonizer." In case of infraction of the rules of military conduct, a superior officer will take the offender's agonizer, activate it, and apply it to his body for whatever length of time is deemed appropriate to the occasion, resulting in unspeakable pain being inflicted. For the most serious offenses, such as mutiny or assassination, the guilty party was put into the "agony booth," which we must assume was unfathomably worse than the little agonizer device. See here and here for much more than any sane person would ever want to know about these instruments. What you see above is the unfortunate alt-Pavel Chekov receiving his torture for having staged a failed coup on board the mirror-universe starship. Tsk tsk tsk. As Mirror Spock coolly notes, "The agony booth is a most effective means of discipline."

Yes, there is a poker connection here. I've had more than my fair share of cold-deck situations over the past week, and it has brought back to mind a bunch of painful memories. I remember keenly:

--the first time I drew to the low end of a straight, got there, and only then realized what a bad spot I had gotten myself into.

--the first time I flopped trips and lost it all to a guy who had flopped a full house.

--the first time I had a full house and lost it all to a guy who had quads.

--the first time I had an ace-high flush and lost it all to a guy who had a straight flush.

--the first time I misread my hand, thinking I had the nut straight, when I actually had nothing, and called off all my chips, only to be thoroughly embarrassed when I turned over my cards and saw what I had done.

There is something about the pain of these moments that sears them into our souls. Mike McDermott observes in a rueful voiceover in "Rounders":

In "Confessions of a Winning Poker Player," Jack King said, "Few players recall
big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with
remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career." It seems true to
me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I
can't stop thinking of how I lost it.

(Transcription taken from the imdb.com page here.)

I recall that once when I was a small child my mother was preparing to do some ironing. The iron was standing idle on the ironing board. She was out of the room. I wondered whether the iron was on or off, so I did what seemed like the logical thing at the time: I reached out and touched its surface with my index finger. It was on. I cried, of course. When mom came to see what the fuss was about, and I told her that I had burned my hand on the iron, she asked, "Why did you touch it?" I thought that was the dumbest question possible. "I wanted to see if it was on." Of course.

It must have been somebody with a similar childhood experience who coined the expression, "Once burned, twice careful."

Some things do get better with time and experience--and some build-up of scar tissue. These days I am never as shocked at the kind of situations I listed above as I was the first time they happened. (Fortunately, I still haven't experienced the really horrendous beats--things like quads being beaten by a straight flush, or the low end of a straight flush being squashed by the high end.) Just the other day at the Rio I had 6-7 offsuit in the big blind, so I took the flop for free. I loved seeing it come 8-9-10, two-suited. I bet, got raised by the button. It was early in the session, so I was relatively short-stacked, and moving all in was a no-brainer. Of course I knew that it was possible he had one of the two hands that had me drawing nearly dead (7-J or J-Q). But on the other hand, he would raise me and be willing to call my reraise, probably, with any two pair or trips, and maybe something like a pair and flush draw, or a combined straight draw/flush draw, or even just the nut flush draw with no pair. It was not one of those situations where my all-in raise would get called only if I was beat. But this time he did, in fact, have the J-Q. The only way I could win was with a runner-runner flush or split the pot with a runner-runner J-Q, neither of which happened. Sigh.

The point, though, is that I have become considerably more callused to this sort of thing, and because I anticipated the possibility of being shown the nuts, it didn't stun me and send me reeling the way that those earlier stories did when they occurred. It's not that it doesn't hurt. It does. But my skin is thicker than it used to be, and I have learned to expect the unexpected. With anything short of the nuts, I'm braced to take whatever hit may come, and even with the nuts I'm mentally prepared to see my opponent turn over the same hand for a chop, when that is a possibility.

Before I started playing in real-money games online, I spent quite a bit of time with Wilson Software's simulator. It was, I suppose, useful in getting me used to the mechanics of play, and giving me some feel for what starting hands were likely to end up winners and losers, but I honestly can't remember a single hand I ever played on it. I think it's because none of them actually cost me anything. If I got knocked out of a tournament, I could say, "Oh well," and be in another one ten seconds later, with nothing lost--and nothing learned, I'm afraid, whether it was a bad beat or a bad play.

Simply put, if it doesn't hurt, it's a lot harder for the lesson to sink in. I'm sure there's some biochemical reason for that, related to neurotransmitters powerfully stimulating certain loci in the nucleus-of-whatever deep in the brain. But you don't need to know the physiology to recognize the truth of it.

Of course, the magnitude of loss it takes to inflict the kind of pain necessary for a long-term memory of the event to form will vary according to your means and past experiences. I remember reading a poker magazine story about Phil Ivey (probably in this issue of Bluff, which has an interview with him available online, but not the feature piece I'm remembering). His wife was just learning to play poker and was doing microstakes online. Phil came home on edge because he had had an unusually deep loss--a few hundred grand, as I recall. His wife was upset at her day, too; she told him that she had lost something like 70 cents, which is a lot when you're playing $0.01/$0.02 games. Talk about different pain thresholds!

Mike Sexton said it well during an episode of the World Poker Tour a couple of years ago, when somebody got knocked out of the final table on a one-outer: "If you don't like a little pain once in a while, poker is probably not your game, because as you can see, you're gonna get it."

Who needs an agony booth when you have poker?

Oh, look--a royal fizzbin!

I was just kind of aimlessly wandering through these interweb thingies when I came upon this page of excellent "inspirational" posters based on Star Trek scenes and characters. What--I've never done a Star Trek post before? That seems hard to believe. (I just did a search for "trek," and found that I have mentioned the series at least three times before, so now I've tagged those with a "star trek" label. Don't know why I didn't do it earlier.)

Two of the posters were ones I thought I could make some sort of stretch to poker in order to justify reposting them here. The first one, above, is the great scene in which Kirk makes up a card game called "Fizzbin" that sort of vaguely starts out seeming like stud poker, though it's much, much more complicated. See the rules here.

It reminds me that one of my favorite occasional amusements when I'm bored at the poker table is making up rules. My preferred target is a tourist playing in a casino for the first time. It has to be somebody that obviously has a good sense of humor. It helps if he has been drinking. I wait for some opportune moment, then catch him off-guard with the announcement of some make-believe rule. "Oh no, sir, you don't get the high-hand bonus for that straight flush--the cards have to come out in consecutive order for you to qualify." "No, I win the pot. It's a special promotion on Tuesday afternoons: straights beat flushes." "Um, sir, if you're tipping the cocktail waitress a dollar, you have to give one to everybody at the table. House rule. It's right up there on the wall." "You can't raise. When the board is double-paired like that, one bet is the cap."

I can usually get the sucker to bite at first, because most of the time I'm very quiet and serious, so nobody is expecting me to try to be funny. It helps if the dealer is quick-witted and fun-loving enough to go along with it, though that's not common. (I usually just get dirty looks from them.)

It's all in good fun, and I never leave the victim hanging for more than a few seconds before giving them a smile or a wink to let them know they've been had, and let the game go on.






I guess that writing so much about UltimateBet recently is what made this one stand out for me. 'Nuff said.

The Grump plays with an ancient Roman naval commander, gets sunk

You really never know who you'll run into playing online poker. Earlier this evening I was at a razz table with Pliny the Elder, who, I'll admit, I thought had died some time ago.

The most astonishing thing is that it turns out this great writer is a reader of this very blog:


Pliny, Elder: Rakewell1 - you don't happen to write a blog, do you?
Rakewell1: i do
Pliny, Elder: I enjoy it quite a bit


He certainly seemed a decent fellow. Why, when I dropped a random, unprovoked Star Trek reference, he not only didn't make a nasty comment about my geekiness, but actually knew the episode in question. Who knew the ancients were so well-informed about pop culture?! (Well, of course I would expect them to have watched and rewatched "Who Mourns for Adonais?" and "Bread and Circuses" and "Plato's Stepchildren," which are the episodes about them. But I would have guessed "The Tholian Web" to be a little beyond their range of interest.)

So you'd think that with things starting off so amicably, the Grump might get a little mercy as far as the poker goes. But no.

I won't prolong the story, but simply jump to the sad, painful end:


Dealer: Rakewell1 has Lo: 6,5,4,2,A
Dealer: Pliny, Elder has Lo: 5,4,3,2,A
Dealer: Game #17877838505: Pliny, Elder wins pot ($21.15) with Lo: 5,4,3,2,A*


Cringe. Where's the love?

However, he nearly redeemed himself in my eyes with this sympathetic response to my pain:


Rakewell1: ouch
Rakewell1: thought the A nailed it for me
Pliny, Elder: A little part of me dies inside every time a 6 gets beat


I hear you, ancient brother.


Incidentally, running into the master prompted me to run to Wikipedia to refresh my rather foggy memory of his accomplishments. I learned that among his famous aphorisms is this: "True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read."

I perpetually hope that by the latter standard this humble blogger achieves a small measure of "true glory."


(Just in case it's not sufficiently obvious, the foregoing stuff about mercy is tongue-in-cheek. I do not and would not either give or expect soft-playing, whether the opponent is friend, family, or reader. It happens fairly often these days that I encounter a reader in the casinos or across the virtual felt--though usually not ones quite so elderly as Pliny. Should you find yourself in that situation, give me your best shot, because I will be doing the same, with a promise of no hard feelings however it comes out.)



*Here's the full hand history, for those few who are pathologically interested in such details:

PokerStars Game #17877838505: Razz Limit ($0.50/$1.00) - 2008/06/02 - 22:46:48 (ET)
Table 'Oppavia V' 8-max
Seat 1: aacda ($17.20 in chips)
Seat 2: nutOmatic ($50.70 in chips)
Seat 3: Pliny, Elder ($21.60 in chips)
Seat 4: fgrthodds ($19.70 in chips)
Seat 5: zendova ($5.50 in chips)
Seat 6: Rakewell1 ($20.20 in chips)
Seat 7: 00Hellmuth00 ($8.50 in chips)
Seat 8: Cshosz ($24.90 in chips)
aacda: posts the ante $0.05
nutOmatic: posts the ante $0.05
Pliny, Elder: posts the ante $0.05
fgrthodds: posts the ante $0.05
zendova: posts the ante $0.05
Rakewell1: posts the ante $0.05
00Hellmuth00: posts the ante $0.05
Cshosz: posts the ante $0.05
*** 3rd STREET ***
Dealt to aacda [8d]
Dealt to nutOmatic [5d]
Dealt to Pliny, Elder [Ad]
Dealt to fgrthodds [2h]
Dealt to zendova [Qs]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [2d 4s 5s]
Dealt to 00Hellmuth00 [6d]
Dealt to Cshosz [2s]
zendova: brings in for $0.25
Rakewell1: raises $0.25 to $0.50
00Hellmuth00: calls $0.50
Cshosz: raises $0.50 to $1
aacda: folds
nutOmatic: folds
Pliny, Elder: calls $1
fgrthodds: folds
zendova: folds
Rakewell1: raises $0.50 to $1.50
00Hellmuth00: calls $1
Cshosz: calls $0.50
Pliny, Elder: calls $0.50
*** 4th STREET ***
Dealt to Pliny, Elder [Ad] [3d]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [2d 4s 5s] [6h]
Dealt to 00Hellmuth00 [6d] [Tc]
Dealt to Cshosz [2s] [4h]
Pliny, Elder: checks
Rakewell1: bets $0.50
00Hellmuth00: calls $0.50
Cshosz: raises $0.50 to $1
Pliny, Elder: calls $1
Rakewell1: calls $0.50
00Hellmuth00: calls $0.50
*** 5th STREET ***
Dealt to Pliny, Elder [Ad 3d] [Kc]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [2d 4s 5s 6h] [Kh]
Dealt to 00Hellmuth00 [6d Tc] [7s]
Dealt to Cshosz [2s 4h] [Qc]
00Hellmuth00: checks
Cshosz: checks
Pliny, Elder: checks
Rakewell1: checks
*** 6th STREET ***
Dealt to Pliny, Elder [Ad 3d Kc] [6s]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [2d 4s 5s 6h Kh] [9s]
Dealt to 00Hellmuth00 [6d Tc 7s] [Td]
Dealt to Cshosz [2s 4h Qc] [Th]
Cshosz: checks
Pliny, Elder: bets $1
Rakewell1: calls $1
00Hellmuth00: folds
Cshosz: calls $1
*** RIVER ***
Dealt to Rakewell1 [2d 4s 5s 6h Kh 9s] [Ah]
Cshosz: checks
Pliny, Elder: bets $1
Rakewell1: raises $1 to $2
Cshosz: folds
Pliny, Elder: raises $1 to $3
Rakewell1: raises $1 to $4
Betting is capped
Pliny, Elder: calls $1
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Rakewell1: shows [2d 4s 5s 6h Kh 9s Ah] (Lo: 6,5,4,2,A)
Pliny, Elder: shows [2c 4d Ad 3d Kc 6s 5c] (Lo: 5,4,3,2,A)
Pliny, Elder collected $21.15 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $21.65 Rake $0.50
Seat 1: aacda folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 2: nutOmatic folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 3: Pliny, Elder showed [2c 4d Ad 3d Kc 6s 5c] and won ($21.15) with Lo: 5,4,3,2,A
Seat 4: fgrthodds folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 5: zendova folded on the 3rd Street
Seat 6: Rakewell1 showed [2d 4s 5s 6h Kh 9s Ah] and lost with Lo: 6,5,4,2,A
Seat 7: 00Hellmuth00 folded on the 6th Street
Seat 8: Cshosz folded on the River

It's Geek Week at the Hilton (non-grumpy content)

Those are two "Star Fleet officers" just outside the Hilton poker room earlier this evening. Yes, the big Trek convention is here.

It's Geek Week in another way, too. Wil Wheaton was playing in a private game with a bunch of friends in the poker room this evening. He appeared to be having too much fun to interrupt to ask for a photo (besides which, I assume he had to pose for pictures all day, selling his new book at the convention), so I left him alone. And if you don't know who Wil Wheaton is, or why it's OK to call him a geek (hint: he wrote a book called "Just a Geek," and he was actually wearing a t-shirt that said "geek" on the back tonight), then you need to explore his blog (http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/). You don't need to be a fan of Star Trek or poker or computers to enjoy it--just being a fan of interesting writing is sufficient; the rest will follow.

Addendum, 8/13/07: Here's Wil's description of his geek weekend, including the Hilton poker game: http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2007/08/briefly-recappi.html