Sometimes you feel like the nuts, sometimes you don't

It happened twice over the weekend, exactly the same way both times. There was a showdown, one person had suited A-x matching the suit of three of the board cards and winning the pot, followed by an uninvolved player commenting, "Just the nuts."

Problem is, it wasn't the nuts either time. Not even close. In both cases the board was paired.

I remember the first time I ever played poker in a casino. It was at the Luxor, in about 2003, maybe 2004. It was just a stupid daily afternoon tournament, buy-in of about $40. I lasted all of 20 minutes. I went out when I had a flush. I was surprised when I didn't win the hand. The other guy had a full house.

"Well, how was I to know that he could have been that strong there?" I thought. At the time, my knowledge of the game was so crude that I did not understand that a full house was a possibility anytime there was a paired board. (I use this, my own case, as a prime example every time somebody says something about the hand in progress that they think is so obvious that everyone already knows it and so it could not possibly affect the action. You just never know how rudimentary some other player's understanding of the game is, and, therefore, what may or may not help him or confuse him.)

I later worked out on my own that a paired board meant that exactly six different full houses were possible. I drilled myself over and over again until I could spit out, rapid-fire, what they were, in descending order of strength.

When the Hard Rock briefly experimented with the game variant called Royal Hold'em, they didn't have a poker room, and thus had to quickly retrain some blackjack dealers, and they didn't know poker well at all. One time I was sitting there by myself hoping that some fish would come to play, got chatting with the very attractive young woman dealing, found out how shaky her poker knowledge was, and spent the time improving her showdown hand-reading facility. She was deeply impressed with my being able to rattle off all the best possible hands in order. Ya just never know what it will take to pick up women!

Hmm. I seem to have wandered off-topic here.

Anyway, the repeated non-nuts "nuts" this weekend got me to wondering how many possible hands there could be ahead of the nut flush with different types of boards in hold'em. I'm going to take as my slightly silly hypothetical that we're playing at a 22-handed table (thus using the entire deck, after accounting for five board cards and three burn cards).

The easiest scenario is when there are quads on the board. That's easiest because it's not possible for anybody to have a flush, so the question is moot. The same is true if there is a full house on the board.

If there are trips on the board, then obviously one person can have quads, and anybody holding a pocket pair has a flush-beating full house. Suppose the board is Ac-As-Ah-Kh-7h. The nut flush is Qh-Xh. But that poor sap is being beaten not only by somebody holding the last ace, but by anybody holding any pocket pair, and even by anybody holding any K-X hand or any 7-X hand.

In theory, the nut flush could actually be the worst hand among the 22 players at our very large table, given the board listed in the previous paragraph. As just one way of dividing up the deck, let's suppose the three burn cards are all deuces, as is the kicker for the nut flush. We could have three players with K-3, three with Q-3, two with J-J, two with T-T, two with 9-9, two with 8-8, three with 7-4, two with 6-6, and two with 5-5, giving all 21 opponents a hand that beats the nut flush. [Edit: As pointed out in the comments, I made a mistake here. Here's my second attempt: one with A-3 (for quads), three with K-3, one with Q-Q, one with Q-7, two with J-J, two with T-T, two with 9-9, two with 8-8, two with 7-4, two with 6-6, two with 5-5, and one with 4-4, and we've got our 21 hands that beat the nut flush.] If we ignore which cards can be held simultaneously and just rank-order the possible hands, the nut flush is actually the 24th nuts, falling behind 12 different quads hands (A-K down through A-2), and 11 different kinds of full houses (aces full of kings down through aces full of deuces).

But wait, there's more! If I optimize my board to, say, 9h-8h-7h-7c-7s, then the nut flush drops to the theoretical 30th nuts--behind three different ways to make a straight flush, 12 different ways to make quads, and 14 different ways to make a full house (9s full one way, 8s full one way, and 7s full 12 ways).

Suppose the board is double-paired, e.g., Ah-Ad-Kh-Kd-2h. Then there will always be a theoretical minimum of two players who can beat the nut flush--those holding quads. If nobody has quads, then there can be a maximum of five full houses lurking among the opponents (e.g., A-7 times two, K-7 times two, and 2-2).

But we can do better than that. Let's instead made the board 9h-9d-8h-8d-7h. Now the nut flush is Ah-Xh, but it can be beaten not only by up to five boats, but also by any of three different straight flushes, and two of those can exist simultaneously, for a maximum of seven players at once crushing the nut flush (e.g., 9-2, 9-2, 8-2, 8-2, 7-7, Jh-Th, 5h-6h).

Now let's look at the kind of situation that pertained in both of the examples I started this post with. The most ordinary kind of paired board will have one set of quads and six different kinds of full houses available, making the nut flush only the 7th nuts. How many players might simultaneously be sitting on hands better than the nut flush? Five. Suppose the board is Ah-Ad-9h-5h-2c. We can have, e.g., A-9, A-5, 9-9, 5-5, and 2-2 out there. So in our 22-handed game, Mr. Nut Flush can at least have the small comfort of knowing that he will be in no worse than sixth place at showdown.

But again, if we tweak the board to full ridiculousness, such as 9h-8h-7h-6h-6c, the nut flush is the 10th nuts, standing in line behind three different straight flushes (jack-high, 10-high, and 9-high), one set of quads, and six different full houses. How many of these could exist at once? Seven, maximally: two straight flushes, and five full houses. Which means that in this scenario, Mr. Nut Flush might be only eighth-best at the showdown.

Even on an unpaired board, with no quads or boats on the horizon, the nut flush might not be the nuts when a straight flush is possible. Who here has lost a stack to a straight flush while holding the nut flush? (Grump raises his hand.) No more than two players can have a straight flush at once, so at least when the board is unpaired, holding the nut flush means you have at least 19 of your 21 opponents beat, and that's not bad!

All of which is an exceedingly long way of saying this: Not only is it an error to equate "nut flush" with "nuts," but sometimes the two things are a very, very long way apart. As shown above, it's possible for the nut flush to actually be only the 30th-best possible hand for some kinds of boards. If you call "nuts" when there are 29 hands that can beat you, you're due for a serious dope slap.


(What are the chances that I've made it through all of that without having made a mistake at some point?)

LOL explainaments

It happened again. Not that it's rare, by any means. But I've been seeing it for four years now, and it still baffles me: The post-call explanation.

I was at Excalibur last night, not in the hand. There's about a $35 pot, three ways before the flop. Flop is J-7-x. Player A checks. Player B, who had been the pre-flop raiser, makes a pot-sized bet of $35. Player C folds. Player A goes all in for $53. It's $18 more to Player B. He calls, showing K-J. Player A flopped a set of 7s and wins it.

Then Player B goes for the explanation, even though nobody said a word to him: "It was only $18. I had to make the call there."

The call is, in fact, quite natural there. It's $18 to win about $123. That's almost 7:1 pot odds. If the sum of the times that your opponent is bluffing, the times that he is doing this with top pair but a weaker kicker, and the times that you start with the worst of it but catch up makes you the winner just one out of seven times, it's a break-even proposition. If you happened to know that this particular opponent would only do the check-raise all-in with a set, you could fold. But there are lots of $1-2 NLHE players who will do this with J-Q or J-10, so it's almost surely a call worth making, in mathematical terms. As Joe Sebok quipped at one point during the WSOP Main Event final table last year, you'd make the call even if all you're holding is a Snickers wrapper and a tarot card.

The puzzling thing for me is not the call, it's the speech. No matter how long I ponder it, I can come up with only one reason that a person would offer the explanation: He doesn't want other players to think he was stupid to put more money in when he was drawing nearly dead.

But that's why I don't get. If the call was correct, why in the world would he care if somebody else watching him thought it was a dunderheaded things to do? Most players seeing what happened will immediately understand the reason for the call. But even if they don't, if they're not sophisticated enough to understand the concept of opponents' ranges and pot equity, etc., what difference does their opinion make to you?

It's a poker-specific example of a general phenomenon that likewise always mystifies me. For example, somebody gets off the elevator on the wrong floor, takes two steps before realizing the error, then reverses course and gets back on. In my experience, most people doing this feel an irresistible urge to tell others in the elevator something like, "I thought that was my floor, but it's not." What--you think we didn't deduce that from your actions? Or somebody slips on a wet or greasy spot on the floor, and has to flail wildly to avoid taking a pratfall. After looking to see what he might have stepped in, it's nearly inevitable that this will be followed by a comment to whomever might have seen it: "I didn't see that slick spot there." Oh, really? Gee, we couldn't have guessed.

Why do people feel the need to explain themselves in such situations? It can only be because they care what this small group of strangers thinks about them. But why would that be? They're not a jury of your peers, holding your fate in their collective hands. Whatever they may think, it has zero effect on you. Their thoughts have no power to change your life in even the most minute way. Suppose that every one of them is thinking, "Wow, that guy is really stupid/clumsy." So what? How are you harmed in the slightest by their opinion, whether it is right or wrong? Even if somebody is rude enough to actually voice that opinion, what difference does it make to you? You ignore it and go about your day.

This whole concept of caring what total strangers think of you and trying to influence it is yet another in the long list of behaviors that you humans engage in that I have precious little hope of ever understanding.*

The most hard-core of my readers may recognize that I have written about this before--three years ago, here. But it keeps happening, and keeps baffling me, and I wanted to address it again, now that I have a significantly larger audience than I did back then. I still stand by the basic thesis I had then:

Furthermore, your explanation just reveals a pathological insecurity: you
are so afraid of what people will think of your call that you feel a need to
explain it. But why on earth would you care what the other players think? If it
was a reasonable call, given the range of hands with which your opponent made
his bet, and it turned out that he was actually at the high end of that range
with one of the few hands that would beat you, then be content with your own
analysis that it was the right move. If you correctly sniffed out a bluff or a
hand that was otherwise weaker than the bet represented, great, be proud of
yourself.

Either way, what is the point of trying to change what somebody else might
think of your call by providing an explanation of it? If somebody is impressed
with a good call, they won't be made more so by your little self-centered
explanation. And if somebody is inclined to think you made a bad call
(regardless of the results), so what? Let them think you're a calling station or
a moron, and then figure out a way to exploit that erroneous impression (if, in
fact, it is erroneous). What's more, consider this: If it was actually a bad
call, your justification of it after the fact just makes you look that much
dumber in the eyes of experienced players, and they will go out of their way to
set you up to make the same mistake again, to their benefit.

*Yes, I do realize that in poker one's table image is an important entity, and it can be worthwhile to both monitor and try to manipulate it. But the post-call explanation, as far as I can tell, does not have that kind of calculated goal in mind. It is not trying to deceive in order to set up opponents to make a costly mistake later on. It is merely trying to save face, which is an entirely different thing.

Genius in the house

I just remembered a little incident from Sunday night at the Rio that I neglected to include in my collection of stories.

Often at a poker table you will have a guy who likes to show off how well he can figure out what cards people have, and so announces his predictions just before the reveal. Well, we had one of those. But, like most such people, he wasn't really very good at it.

The situation was two players left in the hand, final board Q-4-5-6-7, no flush possible. First guy bets $100. Second guy moves all-in. First guy insta-calls.

Our genius hand reader announced, "One of them's got a straight. Maybe both of 'em."

Wow. Just wow. I am awed, sir, by your divine and borderline mystical way* of knowing your opponents' hands. I will now be looking for a thick lead card protector so as to keep you from peering at my hole cards, given that you clearly have x-ray vision.

Fascinating how some of the things that people do in an attempt to show how smart they are actually reveal their profound stupidity, though they themselves never notice it.



*Yes, that was a random "Carnac" reference, for those paying attention.

Who's got the nuts?

Saturday I was playing at Caesars Palace. A hand in which I was not involved had a final board of 3c-6c-7c-Qh-3d. At showdown, a woman tabled Ac-Jc (giving a wave to BWOP), and won.

This is where it got interesting. One guy at the table said, "She had the nuts." The guy next to him said, "No, straight flush would be the nuts. She only had the second nuts." First guy said, "Well, yeah, OK, but she had the nuts if you don't count the straight flush." Second guy said, "That's right."

At this point, I feel like giving them both a dope slap.

For the record, the woman with Ac-Jc had the ninth nuts. She would be beaten by any player holding:

1) 4c-5c
2) 3h-3s
3) Q-Q
4) 7-7
5) 6-6
6) Q-3
7) 7-3
8) 6-3

No, I did not speak up to correct the dopes. Not my job to teach them how to read the board. Better for me if they can't figure it out.

The cultural awareness of poker players

Last August I wrote a post titled, "The geopolitical awareness of poker players." It might be worth rereading that as background for these two stories.

During a session at the Venetian with Cardgrrl last month, there was a young guy who thought he knew everything at the far end of the table. [Edit: Dangling modifier alert! But I decided it's amusing enough to leave it as originally written.] We also had at the table a pleasant young man who had introduced himself as "Wolfgang," and who had a classic German accent. But for reasons that remain unfathomable to me, oh-so-smart young guy put in his guess that Wolfgang was from--are you ready for this?--Finland. Yes, Finland. Excellent guess, sir!

I was reminded of that story today. Again I was at the Venetian. Two seats to my right was a gentleman of classic Indian-subcontinent appearance and accent. That is, one might reasonably guess him to be from either India or Pakistan, but certainly not, oh, I dunno, FINLAND. India was strongly favored over Pakistan if you happened to notice that his card protector was a very large silver coin, on one side of which was writing that appeared to be Hindi, and on the other side of which was the figure of a multi-armed Hindu god, flanked by elephants. His wife was sitting subserviently beside/behind him, wearing a sari. I'm no expert on Asian languages--I couldn't tell spoken Hindi from Dravidian or Punjabi or Pashto if my life depended on it--but if what he and his wife were speaking were not one of the major languages of India or Pakistan, I'd be a monkey's uncle.

Which, now, is enough background for you to see why I wanted to run and hide in shame at being a fellow American with the guy who casually asked this gentleman sitting beside him, "So, are you Spanish?"

Our brains are not wired for poker

This is a whole post devoted to telling you of a roughly three-second mental malfunction that I had the other night.

It was the unplanned mini-bloggerpalooza at Imperial Palace. I was in the big blind with some sort of king/baby offsuit hand, but nobody raised, so the flop came for free. It was king-high with two spades. I decided to take a stab at it and see what happened. Player A called. Player B called. OK--probably at least one of them has a flush draw, so if another spade were to hit, I was going to shut down. (Note that this isn't always so by any means. But the combination of being out of position and having an unraised pot pre-flop, so that opponents could have anything at all, meant that it was not a situation in which I was going to press hard with top pair/crappy kicker.) Turn was, indeed, another spade. I checked, Player A bet, Player B called, I folded. I don't recall the river action, but B won it with a small flush.

Next hand, I had some jack/baby garbage in the small blind. Again an unraised pot. Again the flop came to give me top pair, and again with two spades. I took the same tack. (I don't always do this, but the players left in were pretty passive, and a bet could often take down a pot uncontested, so I thought it worthwhile.) Same two players called me as in the previous hand. Again the turn was a third spade. I felt like I was Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day."

I checked, Player A checked, and B led out. My first reaction--which is, finally, getting to the point of this post--was approximately this: "There's no way that two hands in a row this guy can have been dealt two spades, flop a flush draw, and then hit it on the turn." I even went so far as to recall explicitly that if you start with two suited cards the probability of making a flush by the river is only about 6%, so must obviously be somewhat lower than that to hit it by the turn. Surely, I thought, he can't have had a less-than-6% event happen twice in a row--especially not in the same suit.*

The thing is, I know better than to think like this. I have had it drummed into me very thoroughly that things like hands of poker are independent events. The cards have no memory. What happened on the previous hand has zero bearing on the current hand. Hell, I even did well in a post-graduate statistics course back in the day. I know this stuff backward and forward.

What's more, I have an archive of posts making fun of players who don't grasp this simple fact. Here's one typical example. I'll even throw in a story I haven't told here before. In Minnesota, no-limit cash games are illegal, so the card clubs spread only limit. One time I watched a guy with pocket fours hit a set on the river, having called bets and raises from two opponents all the way, with every card on the board larger than his fours. His explanation? "I only called because fours have been hitting so often tonight." Brilliant, eh? In his mind, apparently, the cards had had a meeting at the beginning of the shift, and decided to have the fours be the stars of the show. He believed that enough to bet a substantial amount of money on the theory. (And, wonderfully, he was rewarded for it, thus perversely reinforcing his views.)

All of that history of me both feeling and actually being superior to many typical opponents in the degree to which I have internalized this simple concept is precisely the reason that I think it's so interesting that it would all abandon me, even if only briefly. I actually considered calling Player B in this spot. I might even have done it, if not for fear that Player A was setting a trap for a check-raise with the nut flush. And the only reason I contemplated the call was that kooky notion that he couldn't have made a spade flush on the turn twice in a row.

Fortunately, that thought lasted only about three seconds before rationality grabbed the steering wheel back from the stupid driver who was about to send it careening off the road.

Thinking about this mental lapse afterwards made me realize, for about the millionth time, how fragile our rational understanding of the world can be, and how easily it is penetrated, suppressed, and overwhelmed by erroneous, distorted, biased guesses about what is happening around us.

No matter how much I make fun of players who ask for a new deck of cards or a seat change** in order to change their luck, who play a junk hand on the basis of how lucky it has been for them (obviously the Deuce-Four is not included in the phrase "junk hand"), perform some weird ritual before each hand is dealt, won't touch $50 bills, believe in various good luck/bad luck totems, and so forth, I guess I have to admit that at some scary brain level I am only one odd coincidence away from potentially reverting to a caveman's grasp of the universe. We are deeply hard-wired to see patterns and infer cause-and-effect relationships even where they do not, in reality, exist. It requires constant vigilence to keep that tendency on a very tight leash.

Oh, and yes--Player B did have his second consecutive spade flush. Go figure.



*If it had been crubs, then sure. Because, as I have recently learned, crubs always get there. But we're talking spades here.

**Oooo, here's another story I haven't written about before. I'm pretty sure I told it in one of my early contributions to the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show, but I can't find it in any blog post. This was at the Canterbury Card Club in Minnesota. When one player left, the guy in seat 10 claimed dibs on a seat change because, he said, he was card-dead where he was (i.e., his request was not for tactical or comfort reasons, both of which can be perfectly legitimate). But he wanted to wait until he had played his button so that he wouldn't have to post the big blind again. On the next hand, when he was on the button, he ended up hitting quads and won a large pot. The dealer then started to help the guy move his chip stacks to the empty seat. The player practically shouted at the dealer, "What are you doing?" The dealer said, "You said you wanted a seat change." Seat 10, sounding as if the dealer were the world's biggest idiot, said, "You think I still want to change seats after I hit quads???"


Addendum, February 10, 2009

Just found the following story here:

Once football season ended, we put in a Splash the Pot promotion. That is
working out great and actually bringing in some people. It has also caused a few
comical events to occur.

A couple weeks ago, we had three tables going when it was time to splash
the pot. We drew the first table - table 7. Two hours later, we drew the second
table - table 7. At the time of the last drawing, one of the players sitting at
table 7 asked if he could move to table 2. His reasoning for wanting to move was
that table 7 had been drawn two times already and there was no way that it would
get drawn a third time; he felt he improved his chances of contesting for the
extra money on a different table.

I allowed him to move...and then I had him reach into the bag and draw for
the lucky table - table 7. After the pot with the extra money was completed, he
moved back to his original seat.

Misconceptions about the big stack advantage

Maybe I should have included the following in my post from earlier today about why I tend to buy in somewhat short rather than for the maximum allowed. It would have fit in well particularly with the Daniel Negreanu blog post (to which I linked) about common misunderstandings of alleged big stack advantages in cash games.

For two or three months now I've had on my desk a piece of paper on which I scribbled some quotations from players I've heard opine on the subject, and I just never got around to writing the post. (Yes, I always have pen and paper in my shirt pocket when I play--primarily for documenting cash in and out and time in and out, but secondarily for jotting down notes about blog post ideas.) Their remarks caught my attention because I heard basically the same error from two different people on consecutive days.

The first guy was at Bill's. He was nursing a very short stack--something like $30. A player at the far end of the table from us (I had just sat down) had obviously had a very successful day, and had several hundred in front of him.

At one point, Mr. Bigstack made an intimidatingly large bet at a pot and won it. Mr. Shortstack said to me, "He has enough [chips] that he can do that." I just nodded and let it go.

Not long after, Mr. Shortstack folded to what he thought was a bluff by Mr. Bigstack. He again chose me as the outlet for his lament: "He bluffed me earlier. I know he did, but I didn't have enough chips to call him."

Yes, that's an exact quotation. And no, I have no idea how he arrived at such a bizarre conclusion. If you think your opponent is bluffing, generally you call or raise. Now, you might decide to do otherwise if the bet is very large compared to the pot, or if it's more than you're willing to risk (though in that case you probably should cash out rather than continue playing with money you're unwilling to put into play). But calling what you believe to be a bluff is the very easiest if you're short-stacked, because you can't lose much! I just can't get my head around what this guy was thinking. Maybe he believed that your last money has to go in with a virtual lock on the hand, or something like that. In any event, he clearly was of the opinion that the table's biggest stack had an enormous intrinsic advantage over the smaller stacks, and he was feeling persecuted.

The next night I was playing at the Rio. There was a similar chip discrepancy at the table. A short-stacked woman watched a big-stacked player make a pushy, aggressive move, and whispered to me, as she folded, "He's got the chip equity."

Chip equity???? Are you just making this $%*&@# up?

I realize that there is a concept of "chip equity," though it's not often referred to in exactly that way. It has to do with making decisions in a tournament situation, especially very late in the tournament. There are circumstances in which you have to consider not just what action has the greatest expected value (EV) in terms of accumulating chips, but what action has the most value in tournament cashing--in real money. Those considerations can sometimes be at odds with each other; a move might be slightly +EV in chip terms, but -EV in terms of your expected prize money. The latter is often called "tournament equity," and the former could be called "chip equity"--though, again, it's a term I've only seen used rarely.

But it has zero applicability to cash games. Your "chip equity" and your win or cash "equity" are precisely the same. For all practical purposes, you should be happy to get as much money into the pot as you can when you are a tiny favorite--say, 55:45--because repeating that situation many times over the course of your poker career will show a profit. In a tournament, that might not be wise if the result of losing will be missing out on cashing altogether, or missing out on a big jump in prize money that is about to occur. (I'm not saying you necessarily wouldn't take the gamble--just that the decision becomes complicated by more factors, and isn't necessarily an easy one.)

I genuinely have no ill feelings for people who just haven't learned something yet. We all are beginnings when we start, and learn as we go, and there's no shame in being at any given point along the learning continuum.

But I do definitely feel disdain for people who pretend to know more than they actually do--who, for example, try to throw around a word or term that they've heard and think that they vaguely understand, when in reality they have no idea what they're talking about. They're trying to sound smart and knowledgeable, when they're clueless.

Naturally, I don't consider it my job to point out to them in person that they're showing off their ignorance. For reasons of both social comfort and profit, it's far better to smile and nod approvingly, make a mental note that the speaker is playing way over his level of understanding, and adjust my game accordingly to more efficiently take his or her money.

But nothing need prevent me from using my blog to let loose on their garish, willing display of ignorance!

Overheard at the Orleans

Orleans today. Player A has pocket jacks. Flop and turn are four unconnected smaller cards. Player B shoves. Player A tanks for quite a while, finally calls. The turn had made a random two pair for Player B (something like 9s and 6s), and they hold up.

So after the hand is over, A (who is sitting next to me; B is at the far end of the table) wonders out loud whether he should have called the all-in bet. A guy two to my right says of Player B, "He's an Asian guy and he got lucky. That's what Asian guys do--they get lucky. It happens all the time."

He is neither joking nor being ironic. He is dead serious, and more than a little disgusted at the whole lot of them, unless I'm badly mistaken in my read.

I think I will have to simply withhold futher comments, because I can think of nothing that sufficiently skewers the idiocy on display here.

Four stories

1.

I started at the Venetian last night. The older man to my right was having a bad time of it. Well, it was mostly his own fault, because he was a classic loose-weak player. Anyway, he finally made a full house and won a big pot, which happened to include a $100 bill in addition to the chips. He folded the C-note and put it in his pocket. This is a common thing for tourists to do, when they don't understand the rules of table stakes. Another player gently pointed out the problem, and the dealer, who hadn't noticed the action, confirmed that the money had to be left in play.

The gentleman replaced the note, and said, "OK, but it doesn't matter. Nobody's getting this from me anyway." I knew what he meant--he was going to be playing what Phil Laak calls "lock-down poker" from then on. I smiled at him and said, "The bill isn't going in unless you have the nuts, right?"

He said, "Not even then. I'd have to have the nuts, the screws, and a few washers, too!"


2.

After locking up a nice little "W" at the Venetian, I went across the street to the Mirage and bought in for my usual $100. On my second hand, I had A-K in the small blind. Several people limped in, but the button raised it to $15. He struck me as an aggressive type, and of course he doesn't need much of a hand to try to steal in that situation. But since I was out of position and completely unfamiliar with my opponents, I decided to play it conservatively by just calling, with further decisions to depend on the flop. The big blind called, too.

Flop was K-Q-J, which I simultaneously loved and hated. Top pair/top kicker is nice, but it would be all too easy for either of my opponents to have made two pair, a set, or a straight here. I checked. The big blind bet $30. The button moved all in for something like $300. I was thinking about what to do and leaning toward a call, when the big blind said, "OK, I call," and flipped up his cards: K-Q. He was so eager to get his money in that he didn't bother looking to see if it was his turn.

The dealer indicated that the action was still on me. I turned my cards up and said, "Thanks. You made this decision a lot easier. I fold."

Good thing, too. The button had A-A. I would have been drawing about as thin as one can get: a 10 for half of the pot was my only salvation--and it didn't come. The turn and river were blanks, so the K-Q held up.

Just to rub it in a bit, I told the big blind that I was definitely going to call, and he had saved me $85. In truth, I was undecided. I was leaning that way, but I was having an internal argument, because I knew how potentially dangerous the situation was. So maybe I would have made the smart fold anyway. I honestly don't know.

Moral of the story: When you act out of turn, you often cost yourself money.


3.

It is often difficult to look around a poker room and decide which of the games at one's chosen stakes is the best one to be playing in. But in Las Vegas, for about two weeks in December, during the National Finals Rodeo, which completely takes over the city, the Good Lord has seen fit to make that analysis relatively straightforward: (1) Count the number of cowboy hats at each table. (2) Move to the game with the most of them.

My Mirage table had a dismal Cowboy Hat Index of zero. I couldn't move at first, because we were the short-handed table. But as soon as we filled up, I changed to one with a CHI of three. The decision was sweetened by seeing that the table also included this guy wearing reindeer antlers on his head:



Yep, he was drunk, and getting drunker by the minute. So was his pal, two seats to his right. They ended up being the main sources of income for the rest of the table.


4.

Within a few hands, I knew I had done the right thing by moving.

I was in the big blind and folded to a small raise, because I had something atrocious like 8-3. A guy across the table had apparently expected me to call, and said, pointing at me, "This guy's so tight, I think he only plays aces." The person next to him said, "He's been playing that way all weekend."

This was a little after midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning. I had not played poker at all on Friday. I had only been at the Mirage for maybe half an hour at that point, and at this table for four or five hands. I had never seen this man before, to the best of my recollection. He apparently hadn't noticed that a new player had come into that seat, which was especially remarkable given that the previous occupant of that spot had been a woman in her late 40s with long blond hair--not exactly my doppelganger.

Excellent observational skills, sir!

How many outs?

At Planet Hollywood tonight I had Kc-Qc in the small blind, and limped in with several others. The flop was all clubs. The turn and river didn't bring a fourth club or pair the board, so I felt highly confident I had the best hand. I don't remember how all the betting went, but the guy on the button (on my immediate right) called my largish bet on the turn. This signaled me that he actually had something and might call again on the river, so I bet big again. Nope--he folded.

I showed my cards for free, because the table had just started up, and I wanted to help establish my semi-phony image of only betting if I have the goods. He said, quite plausibly, that he had had the ace of clubs plus an inside straight draw.

He then paused, cocked his head to the side, and was counting with his fingers. After a few seconds, he said, "I had 12 outs."

I just smiled and said, "Can't hit 'em every time."

Of course, what I would really like to have done was stand up, point to him, and shout, "MORON ALERT!"

Twelve outs, dude? Please. Between us and the board, we have six clubs accounted for, leaving seven in the deck. Those would indeed give him the winner, if he actually had the ace. But he seemed to think that hitting his straight draw on the turn or river would also have won him the pot. Uh, nope. Flush still beats a straight in most of your better card rooms.

I can't figure out what 12 cards he was counting. In addition to the seven clubs, he was presumably counting the other three cards that would complete his straight (erroneously)--but that still only makes ten. Maybe he was counting the two jokers, too.

Standard advice for winning poker is to get inside your opponent's head and figure out what he's thinking. But what if your opponent's thought process is an incomprehensible, jumbled mess that you can't decipher even after knowing what his cards were?

Playing with Cliff

I played this afternoon at Binion's with Cliff Clavin. No, I didn't play with John Ratzenberger. I played with Cliff Clavin--or at least somebody who acted a whole lot like him. He knew everything, or thought he did. Of course, he was no more likely than the real Cliff to be right about anything, but that didn't stop him from spouting alleged "facts" about whatever topic happened to under discussion at the moment. Naturally, this included poker.

In one hand, I was in the big blind with 9-2 of clubs, which I would have thrown away if anybody had so much as coughed. But I got to see the flop for free, and it brought two more clubs, with a non-club ace. Nobody bet at it. The turn made my flush, so I led out with a $7 bet, roughly 2/3 of the pot. Cliff, two seats to my left, was the only person to call. The river neither paired the board nor put a four-flush out there, so I bet again, $20 this time. He quickly called with two pairs--aces and fives. He had paired his ace on the flop, made the nut flush draw on the turn, and caught his second pair on the river. He may not have played his hand optimally (e.g., playing A-5 offsuit from early position was a bad idea to begin with), but he certainly didn't do anything monumentally stupid. I might have gotten trapped into making those calls, too, if I had made the initial error of playing the hand at all.

Anyway, as the pot was being pushed my way, he said, "That was gutsy to be betting a flush that small. You know, when you have a flush, there is a 33% chance that somebody else has one, too."

I'm pretty conversant with the most common probability facts of hold'em, but this is not one that I can recall having heard before. Nevertheless, I know it's wrong. It's wrong because the real number is unknowable. It is unknowable because it depends on all sorts of things that can't be calculated--for example, the likelihood that any particular player likes chasing flushes enough that he will enter the pot with suited cards. It also matters whether you make your flush with three of the suit on the board or four, since it is obviously easier for an opponent to have a flush in the latter situation, needing only one card. It would matter further when you make your flush. If, e.g., you flop top pair but then happen to back into a runner-runner flush, it's presumably less likely that somebody else did the same, whereas if you flop a flush, it's more likely that an opponent with either a higher or lower flush will stick around. In real-world situations, you would also adjust your estimate of the probability of an opponent having a flush based on the betting pattern, though I suppose technically that can't be said to affect the probability of another flush being out there or not.

So I repeat: for any actual table of real opponents, the probability of an opponent also holding a flush when you do is highly dependent on (1) how and when you made the flush, and (2) the other players' propensities, which are, for all practical purposes, unknowable. It is therefore just silly to make any sort of blanket pronouncement about the likelihood of an opponent holding a flush.

We can, however, take a decent stab at knowing how likely it is that somebody else was initially dealt two cards of the flush suit. This is, I suspect, what Cliff heard at some point, and he then warped it to the very different "fact" that he so kindly shared with the table.

OK, I have 9-2 of clubs, so there are 50 cards left, including 11 more clubs. In order to get at the probability that somebody else at the table was also dealt two clubs, we're going to have to use a binomial calculation. First, let's figure out the probability that any one randomly selected opponent was given two clubs. His first card has a 11/50 chance of being a club, and if it is, his second card has a 10/49 chance of being a club. Combine those, and the probability is 0.0449.

Here we come to a wrinkle in the math. It would be easier if the probability of every opponent being dealt two clubs were independent of that of every other opponent--but it is not. If, say, the first six players all get two clubs each, it is impossible for anybody else to start with two clubs, because there is only one left in the deck. A full-out attack on this question would require a series of calculations far more complex than I think it's worth, adding up the probabilities with each of a bunch of different conditions for who does or does not get clubs. But the binomial calculation should give us a good estimate because, as you'll soon see, the numbers drop off so fast that we really don't need to consider the tiny odds of more than two opponents also having been dealt two clubs each.

When dealing with binomials, this is my favorite site for both explaining how they work and providing a nifty, easy-to-use calculator. I'm using p=0.0449 and q=0.9551. Here is a table of the results:



Interpretation: At a ten-handed table (nine opponents), the probability of exactly one opponent also having been dealt two clubs, given that I was, is about 28%. The probability that one or more opponents were all dealt two clubs is about 34% (though that's where the estimation error comes in; the real number would be lower, because once we know that one opponent has two clubs, the probability of another player also getting two clubs drops, because there are fewer clubs left in the deck). As you can see, the probability of four players (i.e., you and three opponents) all having been dealt two cards of the same suit is negligibly small.

But we're not done analyzing Cliff's claim yet. The above calculations were done as if we were still before the flop, when all that we knew was that we had suited cards. Once we're to the river in a hand such as the one that I played this afternoon, we have more information to factor in. Now I know that three more clubs and two more non-clubs were unavailable to be dealt to the players at the start of the hand. That changes the p in the binomial equation. Specifically, we can now say that the probability of a randomly selected opponent having been dealt two clubs is 8/45 (probability of his first card being a club) x 7/44 (conditional probability of his second card being a club, given that his first card was a club), which is 0.0283, and, correspondingly, q (which is just 1-p) becomes 0.9717.

Plugging that value into the binomial calculator, the same table as above changes to this:




So here's the conclusion: At a nine-handed table (like Binion's uses), if on the river you have a flush made with exactly three board cards plus the suited cards in your hand, the probability that one or more opponents started the hand with two cards of the same suit is about 21% (and remember that this is a slight overestimate, because once one opponent has been given two clubs, there are fewer left for other players to be dealt).

Given that information, it is up to you to determine whether any such opponent actually stayed in the hand until the end, given the betting sequence, and whether his flush is higher or lower than yours. (Of course, those questions are not independent of each other, since players are more likely to stick with higher suited cards than lower ones.) As a gross ballpark figure, it seems reasonable to guess that even in a limped pot, half of all suited starting hands got thrown away before the flop. If that is approximately correct, then the probability of there being one or more opponents who caught the flush draw on the flop falls to the vicinity of 10%.

But Cliff insisted that I was bold to be betting such a relatively weak made flush, because of his inflexible and incorrect conviction that there was a 33% chance that somebody else also had a flush when I put my money in. I doubt that the guy is capable of grasping in how many ways he was wrong.

Unclear on the concept

A couple of us at the table at Binion's last night were talking about the upcoming freeroll tournament. Another guy had seen the sign for it, but wasn't sure about the details. He asked me, "How much does it cost to buy into that freeroll tournament?"

I am not of the school of thought that claims there are no stupid questions. There are stupid questions, and this was one of them. In fact, it exceeded the amount of stupidity that I can address without sarcasm and/or condescension entering into my answer. This guy got the latter.

I told him, "It doesn't cost anything. That's why it's called a FREEroll."

He replied, without a trace of humor in his voice, "Oh, I guess that's why I couldn't find what the entry fee was."

Yeah, dude--that's probably the reason, all right.

Long ago (probably about 20 years ago, in fact), I read in a magazine (I think it was CoEvolution Quarterly, later renamed Whole Earth Review) a great article that explained the Laws of Stupidity. The First Law of Stupidity states that there is always more stupidity in the world than you think. The Second Law of Stupidity states that, even after you take the First Law of Stupidity into account, there is still always more stupidity in the world than you think.

This guy proved the point.


Addendum

Immediately after publishing the above post, it occurred to me that surely somebody has put that old article on the Laws of Stupidity up on the Internet. Sure enough, here it is. I see that it was published in 1987, so I was right about the time frame. (That's because I remember where I was living when I read it, which narrowed it down quite a bit.) I was way off in my memory of what the laws are, though. Apparently I thought a lot about his First Law, and over time its implications sort of morphed in my mind to being two separate laws, when really what I have written as two laws is just one. But to tell you the truth, I like my way of stating it better than the original.

"I know what a straddle is"

I was playing at the Monte Carlo tonight. We were in the first orbit after a new player had joined the table. When it was his big blind, the player to his left put in a live straddle to $4. Several people called the $4, including the big blind. When action reverted to the straddler, he raised to $24. That's where the trouble began.

But before I can continue the story, I need to provide you with this small diversion. It's a clip from "Seinfeld." In order to understand and appreciate what went through my mind as the rest of the story played out, you really need to take a minute (OK, 2:40) to watch the following scene first:




Back to our story. So the under-the-gun player raises to $24. The big blind objects. "He can't do that. When he put in his first raise, that was his turn. He can't reraise himself." Simultaneously, about three people at the table said variants of the same thing: "Yes, he can. It's a live straddle."

To all of which the new guy said testily, "I know what a straddle is!"

I had an instantaneous flashback to Jerry Seinfeld. I wanted to raise both of my index fingers, and tell him with a smile, "I don't think you do!"

OK, that's the end of the funny part of the story. It went back and forth, and he finally accepted the action, yet still insisting that (1) it was not legitimate, and (2) he knew what a straddle was. It was kind of bizarre.

In order to assuage the pedants among my readers (that's not an insult; I consider myself a fine specimen of the species), I'll point out that I do know that the term "straddle" has had more than one meaning over time. See here, e.g. But in contemporary usage, at least in Las Vegas, the term always suggests an optional blind raise with option to raise again.

Along the way...

As I attempted my first Grump Challenge (immediately preceding post), a few extraneous stories took place. I didn't want to interrupt the main tale there, so I'm dumping them here.

1

The chip shown above was in use as a card cap by a very nice man at the Luxor. My camera couldn't focus close enough to let you see the tiny lettering clearly, but it reads, "It's sad how bad you suck at cards."

I like. (But I wouldn't ever use it myself.)


2

This one goes in the "Huh?" department.

Again at Luxor. Flop is 6c-9d-10d. Player A bets all-in. Player B thinks long and hard. He finally says, "There's only two hands that beat me." So he has pocket nines (beaten by 7-8 for the straight, and by pocket 10s for a higher set), right? Nope. He eventually folds face-up: pocket jacks.

I didn't ask, but I sure wondered what he was thinking.


3

The dealers at the Luxor continue to strive mightily to wrest the "worst dealers in town" status from the Sahara bunch. (For previous stories of their antics, just click the "Luxor" label at the bottom of this post, or here.) They seem to hit new lows of unprofessionalism every time I go there.

In tonight's first example, we had a dealer named Frank. (I don't usually name names here, but this guy is a repeat offender at ticking me off, identified in this post as "Dealer #2.") On the flop, Player A checked. Player B pushed all of his chips in. The pot was roughly $45. B's stack was about $70, so a significant overbet. Player A quite reasonably asked how much the bet was to call. (It was just those two contesting it.) Frank said to Player A, "You have him covered by about $250." This was true, but mostly irrelevant to A's decision. His decision clearly wasn't based on what fraction of his stack he was putting at risk, but on the pot odds he was being offered. Frank continued, "You still want it counted down? [exasperated sigh] All right, I'll count it down. I don't mind." But that was a lie. Everything about his tone and facial expression and body language said loudly and clearly that he did mind, and considered it an unnecessary nuisance. Well, sorry to trouble you to DO YOUR FRIGGIN' JOB, sir!

At the Luxor, the dealers empty out the tip box from the table at the end of every down. I noticed that when Frank left the table, he had a total of $2 in the box. That gives you some idea of how popular he was with the players. The amount was so strikingly low that the dealer coming in asked Frank what had happened. He gave her a lame excuse about the players taking too long to make decisions. There were indeed a couple of chronic slowpokes there. Mildly annoying, but not truly exceptional.

Another later dealer (I don't remember him annoying me before, so I'll keep him anonymous for now) seemed unusually touchy about a seat change. The most aggressive and skilled player at the table moved from Seat 6 to Seat 4 when it opened up. I was in Seat 1. I was eager to move to 6 to have good position on this guy. Before I could speak up for it, the guy in Seat 10 asked if he could move there. The dealer said yes, but then Seat 10 changed his mind and said he'd stay put. So I announced that if he wasn't going to take Seat 6, I would. The dealer threw up his hands and said, in complete seriousness,"You guys are making me crazy!"

This was nothing out of the ordinary. One player leaves, a second wants to move to the now-open spot, and a third wants to take that seat. This happens all the time, and is no big deal. It was an utterly commonplace exchange, the kind that the dealer must see transpire several times a day. I have no idea why it irritated him so. If it was just the yes/no changed mind of Seat 10, that hardly seems like grounds for feeling like the players were trying to confuse or gang up on him.

This same guy, at the end of his down, had a hand that took longer than usual to play out, while the replacement dealer stood by waiting. One player this time really was on the borderline of taking an unreasonable amount of time, and I was on the verge of asking for a clock, when he finally announced a call of his opponent's large river bet. After pushing the pot, the exiting dealer said to the other, "This is the table from hell." There was no humor or irony in his voice or body language--just anger. Hey, dude, we all had to wait just the same as you did.

Finally, there were three players at the far end of the table (when I was in Seat 1) who repeatedly and openly speculated on what various players held while the hand was in progress and decisions were still pending. I asked the dealer, "Are players allowed to speculate out loud about what others have?" I know full well that the answer is no, but this is my usual way of addressing the problem, because asking the dealer that question is much less confrontational than telling the offenders, "Hey, you can't say those things." She had obviously heard them, because she turned to them and said, "Yeah, you guys can't be talking about the hand while other players still have decisions to make." OK, young lady, so why didn't you speak up to them directly? Why did you wait for me to point out the problem, when controlling the table is your job, not mine? And, worse, why did you continue to allow it to go on from the same players in subsequent hands?

I'm convinced that the Luxor dealers reinforce each others' bad habits and practices. That room really needs an iron-fisted manager who respects the rules and demands that the dealers conduct themselves professionally. But at this point, that would be such a sea change that I'm not holding my breath.

New entry in the Grump poker rule book

Players are not allowed to utter the sentence, "That's what I'm talking about," unless the event that triggered the outburst is actually an exact enactment of something that player had, in fact, been describing within the previous 60 seconds. Penalty for violation: The offender's entire chip stack is confiscated and evenly distributed among the other players at the table.

More WSOP insanity

I had skipped ahead to glean the "Poker Fact" from the second part of this week's WSOP broadcast (so that I could write up my post on it) without watching the entire hour, until just now. I noticed a moment that showed one participant's delusional beliefs, reminiscent of those displayed by Jerry Yang at last year's final table.

Joe Bishop's father died earlier this year (April, I believe they said). At one point in the show, he has called David Rheem's all-in bluff with pocket sixes, and his hand is holding up. After the turn card, we see him sitting by himself, away from the table. He looks upward and says, "Come on, Dad. Come with me. Come on, Dad."

Now, admittedly this is not quite as explicit as Jerry Yang saying, "Lord, give me a set" before the river card is exposed. Still, it certainly seems that it's basically the same thing. Bishop appears to believe that his dead father (1) is physically somewhere above him (hence the looking up), (2) can hear him, and (3) has the ability to alter the order of the cards in the dealer's hand, such that if Bishop pleads with him correctly, his dead father will magically cause a good card to be transported into the second position in the deck, so that after the dealer burns the top card, a good one for Bishop's hand will be dealt as fifth street.

Probably by now I don't have to explain how insane this is. Believing that unseen dieties and/or ghosts and/or other mystical forces or entities can and will re-order the shuffled deck in the dealer's hand is just plain looney. It's delusional. Such beliefs are a sign of an unwell, unsound mind.

As it turns out, apparently Bishop's father isn't a particularly powerful ghost (maybe he hasn't earned his wings yet, like Clarence in "It's a Wonderful Life")--or perhaps Bishop just didn't ask the right way, or maybe his father wasn't paying attention at the critical moment, because Chino Rheem caught one of his six outs on the river to stay alive.

Heck, maybe Rheem was silently praying to one of his own dead ancestors--one who had stronger magical mojo and floated that king into position at the last second. That would be amusing, to have competing ghosts wrestling for control over the cards in the deck--much like the bizarre image we had last year of God's influence being invoked in opposite directions simultaneously by Yang's faction and Lee Watkinson's fiancee.

Will the madness ever stop?



On a more benign and more amusing note, I noticed that Nick Sliwinski's friends and family were all wearing t-shirts that they apparently had had made for the occasion, emblazoned on the back with the words, "Whose the bully now." (No question mark.) I'm guessing that not one of them noticed that it should have been "Who's," rather than "Whose." I wonder if the guy printing up the shirts noticed that his customers were asking to have their atrocious spelling/grammar skills advertised to the world, and diplomatically just kept his mouth shut and did as they directed, or whether he, too, didn't know the difference.

Oh well. Either way, being ignorant isn't nearly as bad as being delusional.

Maybe not the best call ever

Bill's last night. Final board is 10-8-8-10-3 with no flush possible. There were two players in the hand (not I). No action on the flop or turn.

On the river, Player A checks. Player B bets. Player A calls. Player B sheepishly says, "You got me. I just have a 5." He shows his pocket 5s. His hand is, therefore, two pairs (10s and 8s) with a 5.

Player A re-checks his cards, then pushes them towards the dealer face down, surrendering.

Eyes are bugging out around the table.

Player B is astonished to have the pot coming his way. He asks A, "You really couldn't beat that?" Player A's cards have not yet been brought into the muck, so he reaches out and turns them over: 3-4. His hand is, therefore, two pairs (10s and 8s) with a 4.

Double-paired boards can be confusing, so let me make it explicit for you: The only hands that Player A could beat were 3-2 and 2-2--and yet he called. He had the second-worst hand possible*--and yet he called. His opponent only needed any one card bigger than a 4 to take the pot--and yet he called.

But believe it or not, that's not the strange part.

The strange part was what he said, in complete seriousness, by way of explanation for his call:

"I thought you had an ace."



Do you see why I play at Bill's? Do you see why I advocate value betting rather than bluffing there?


*One might quibble as to whether he has the second-worst hand possible or third-worst hand possible. I think it's probably a bit more accurate to say he had the second-worst hand possible, because both the 3-2 and 2-2 hands would be playing the board. In other words, the worst hand possible was the board: 10-10-8-8-3. The second-worst hand would therefore be 10-10-8-8-4, which is what Player A had. However, one could argue that Player A could beat opponents holding both the 3-2 and the 2-2, so he had the third-worst hand possible. If somebody were adamantly of the opinion that that way of saying it were more accurate, I wouldn't waste much breath trying to argue my side of it. It's six of one, half-dozen of another.

Crazy times at Bill's

Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon is neither one of my favorite nor most frequent poker hangouts, but it's a reliable money-maker, so I try to hit it once or twice a month. This weekend I did something different and put in three sessions there, racking up $508 in 10.8 hours, for about $47/hour. Doing so produced a boatload of stories and observations, which I'll lump together here.


Ugly clothes

First I have to note the guy pictured above, who was standing there watching the pigs race. I don't know if you can see it well enough in the photo I snapped of him, but the sequins fastened onto the tail of his sports jacket spell out "Big Money." That's subtlety for you.


Pig props

Speaking of the pig races, I extended my perfect track record. Three of us at the table did a pig-race prop bet, and I won. Uptick $2. Thank you very much. I left shortly after that. Still at 100%, never having had to pay off a losing pig.


Fondling

Saturday evening there were two women at the table in seats 6 and 7, on vacation together from the midwest. I was in seat 9, next to the dealer. At seemingly random intervals, these two would grope/fondle/massage each other's breasts. One time, when one did this to the other, the gropee responded, "Hey, don't start what you can't finish!" It added a whole new dimension to the game. I seriously thought about breaking out my pre-planned line about bringing good luck, but didn't have the nerve.

They were openly flirting with two young men at the table. They pretty much ignored me. *Sigh*. I'm afraid that my age and looks are such that I can't even remember the last time that a stranger tried to flirt with me.


Wildness

That session was by far the most out-of-control I've ever witnessed at Bill's, and among the top five or so of my entire Vegas experience. The amount of drunkenness, inexperience, noise, conversation, and laughter at the table was such that the game slowed to a crawl. The dealers had to work to get nearly every player's attention nearly every time in order to get anybody to actually take a turn. We were down to about half the normal rate of hands per hour. This really tests the limits of my equanimity and patience. (And that of the dealers, too. They were perpetually on the verge of seriously losing it.) I hate that kind of crap, wasting time for no good reason, because my income is all about the hands per hour. But, as usual, the game was just unbelievably soft, so I tried to grin and bear it. I'm well aware, when setting out for Bill's, that it ain't the Venetian, that I will likely be the only one at the table who actually cares about making money, that for the rest it's all about the fun. So I do my what little it is within my nature to be able to do in order to contribute to a light, fun atmosphere.


There's a reason for the rule

Another thing I have to steel myself for in preparation for playing at Bill's is the looseness of rules enforcement. They are intentionally catering to first-time players, the ultra-casual players, people who have never tried real casino poker before. People buy in for $20 or $30 or $40, and get a taste of the NLHE game they've seen on TV, and it's a little thrill for them. They don't know the rules and etiquette. So I do my best to try to ignore a lot of it, put in a gentle word or two of education where I can, and not be too much of a nit.

After the gropers had left Saturday night, they were replaced by two young women who were part of a group that had lived together during college, and came out to Vegas every year for a kind of reunion. They had played poker in home games, but never in a casino, and were trying it for the first time. Another first-time guy was to their right.

They kept talking about the hand in progress, despite repeated admonitions from both me and the dealers not to. It was bad enough that at one point I even pointedly said to the guy, who was being pretty obnoxious about openly giving advice to players facing decisions, "You're kind of a slow learner, aren't you?" That seemed to finally stop his nasty little habit.

And then it finally mattered:

I was one of three people in a hand. I had 9-8 offsuit, and had called a small pre-flop raise. But everybody apparently missed the flop, turn, and river, so it just got checked down the whole way. The final board included four spades. I didn't have one, but the last card had been an 8, giving me a measly pair. I was in early position, so when the last player checked on the river, I was first to show. I was expecting one of the other players to show a higher pair or a flush, but both of them just pushed their cards forward, face down.

Before the dealer could gather them in, one of the college-reunion women said, "I can't believe none of you had a spade!" This prompted the guy on my right to pick up his cards again, at which point he got a startled look on his face, then turned over the ace of spades. He said, "I would have sworn that was the ace of clubs!"

He had not even noticed the spades on the board until the woman said that.

He got the pot that would otherwise have been mine.

I was seriously annoyed at this. I mean, sure, it was a small pot, and the person with the best hand took it, which is as it should be. But conversely, I firmly believe that players have the right to muck the best hand and thereby forfeit the pot if they are so inclined, and nobody else should interfere with them doing so.

At least this young woman had the good sense to be absolutely mortified at what she had done. She must have apologized a hundred times, and kept doing so long after I had both forgiven her and had stopped being annoyed about it having happened.

The good news is that seeing how one little stray comment can totally change the outcome of a hand (well, that, plus the floor guy coming over and giving a stern warning to everybody), the table finally seemed to catch on to the fact that you really must not say anything about the hand in progress. And, by the way, the hand is still in progress until the pot has been awarded and the next hand has begun with the beginning of the shuffle (or by the dealer removing the new deck from the shuffler).


Overheard

As I've mentioned before, Bill's attracts the most unbelievably novice players in the universe. I have overheard the following comments in the past few days there:

• Man plausibly claiming to have had 7-7 bets $6 from under the gun, folds to an opponent's bet on an ace-high flop, says, "I just wanted to take those blinds!" Remember that Bill's plays with a single $1 blind. In other words, he was claiming to have bet $6 not to start building a pot that he could later win, but simply in order to win the single $1 chip that was on the table when he made that raise. Good thinking, sir.
• Guy who limped in, then had to decide whether to call a pre-flop raise, looked long and hard at his hole cards, then at the raiser, and said, in all earnestness, "I think I might be drawing dead here," and folded. (Note to the non-poker-players among my readers, to whom this might not be obvious: There are no two cards that are drawing dead to any other two cards before the flop. Any starting hand can beat any other, given the right community cards. One cannot play the game for very long before realizing this, which is why the guy's words reveal that he has likely watched the game on TV and heard this kind of comment in a different context, but has never actually played.)
• On a paired flop, one player asked the dealer, "Do you have to use five cards to make a hand?"
• One player, who repeatedly warned us that he had never played before and had no idea what to do, was there with a friend who was trying to teach him the game. The more experienced friend took a restroom break. When he returned, the newbie excitedly told him, "While you were gone, if I had played one hand, I would have made five in a row, 6-7-8-9-10. That's something, isn't it?"
• Last night, a player with about $30 left was facing a $71 all-in bet. He asked the dealer, "Can I just play for, like, $5, or do I have to put it all in to play?"
• One player asked the dealer whether an ace could play as part of a low straight as well as a high straight.
• Last night, I saw this betting sequence on the flop: Player A checks. Player B bets $20. Player C calls. Player A decides to go all-in for $40. Player B also goes all-in, for less, a total of $36. Player C...FOLDS! There were three of us reasonably experienced players all clustered together at one end of the table, and all three of us had our eyes bug out at the fold. We quietly exchanged a few words, all of which were around this observation: There is no hand that C could have for which it makes sense to call $20 into a small pot, but then not call an additional $20 into what is now a much larger pot, on the same street. He was getting much better pot odds on the second $20 than he was on the first $20. He must (or at least should) have known when calling B's initial $20 bet that B was going to put his last $16 in on this hand, no matter what. In other words, C must (or, again, at least should) have either decided he was willing to put in $36 or not called the $20 to begin with. In fact, it would have been smarter, probably, to look at his two opponents' stack sizes, and just shoved there, trying to keep A from calling the $20 and getting pot-committed.

I hasten to add that I'm really not trying to make fun of these people for their ignorance. They're not stupid, just new. Everybody has to learn the basic rules and strategies of the game at some point, and there's no shame in not knowing something, or in asking a question in order to clear up what you don't know.

It's just that it's really rare to encounter this much absolutely bare-bones level of inexperience in no-limit casino poker. It's much more common that people learn these basics in home games, playing micro-limits online, or playing the cheapest limit hold'em in a casino. It's the incredibly low buy-in and blind structure at Bill's that prompts people to sit down and play a no-limit game, when they really would be better off in one of those other situations.


Oops, I broke up the game!

In two hands I busted four players last night. First one was with my top pair/top kicker against her top pair/medium kicker. On the very next hand I caught quad 7s (with a pair in the hand, which got me a $50 high-hand jackpot in addition to the pot) on a double-paired board, and busted three opponents at once. One had a full house, one had hit a flush on the river (I didn't pull the trigger until then, though I flopped a set and turned the quads), and one had an ace in the hole, and thought maybe two pairs with an ace was good enough to call off all of his chips with.

On the previous night (Saturday), when I arrived at about 5:00, as the floor guy was selling me chips, he said, only half-jokingly, "Don't bust the whole table too fast--I've got to keep the game going until 7:00, when my shift ends!" I guess he should have saved his warning for the next night!

(N.B.: This is a serious faux pas on his part, if you ask me. Yeah, it's nice that he has paid attention to my play, remembers my face, and recognizes that I'm probably going to be the shark in his little fish pool, but the last thing I need is for him to be saying such a thing three feet away from the table. It not only unnecessarily warns the more unsuspecting players, but it insults them, if they're alert enough to catch his meaning. Furthermore, does he seriously think I'm not going to try to maximize my profit, just so that his job is made easier? Please.)


The Internet blog guy

When I sat down for a late-night session last night, one player at the table looked at me and said, "You're that Internet blog guy, right?" He had spent some time with me during the evening described here, so had heard others mention my blog.

Anyway, for any readers who happen to run into me across the green felt, I found this guy's question so amusing in its phrasing that it is now the preferred official way to introduce yourself to the Grump: "You're that Internet blog guy, right?"


One difficult decision

Last night I was in late position with the two black 7s, so I raised to $5, and got two callers. The flop was 7-8-9, with two diamonds. It was checked to me. I deliberately overbet the pot ($25, I think) in order not to give proper pot odds to an opponent with a flush draw or straight draw. Both of them called. Ugh.

The turn was an offsuit jack. The first guy quickly moved all-in for $71. This is the same hand I mentioned above, in which the second guy then asked whether he could just play for, say, $5 more, instead of the rest of his stack. When told it was all or nothing, he folded.

I was sitting on about $400 at the time, so it wasn't like a call here would break me. But I couldn't make sense of the first guy's move. I didn't think he had flopped a straight, because with two opponents who might be on a flush draw, surely he would have either bet out on the flop or check-raised me. But it also didn't really make sense for him to have had a 10 for a now-completed straight draw, because he shouldn't have been willing to call such a large bet on the flop. He would have had to think that if another diamond came he couldn't count on a straight being good, which means that he should have reasoned that he only had six outs rather than the usual eight. Therefore, calling a bet that is substantially larger than the pot doesn't make sense. If he had miraculously gotten me in a set-over-set situation, again, surely he would go for the check-raise on the flop, rather than slow-play on such a highly coordinated board.

I thought long and hard about this, and finally decided that it was most likely that he had either two pairs or one pair plus a flush draw. Even if I was wrong and he had hit his straight, I would have ten outs to a full house. So I called.

I had indeed been wrong. He had had 9-10, for top pair and a straight draw on the flop, but with no flush draw. Now, if I had been in his spot, I would have either folded or gone for the all-in check-raise on the flop with that holding. The second guy has so little left in front of him that he's not really a factor. The guy with 9-10 should have figured that a check-raise would drive me out if I were continuation-betting a hand like ace-king that completely whiffed on the flop, and that it would price me out if I were betting a flush draw or straight draw, and he would still have outs to win against almost anything I could have, in case I called with something like an overpair.

But I forgot where I was. Players at Bill's do not think about the game the same way that I do, so when I went through the hand as if I were in my opponent's seat, figuring out what cards I would have to have in order to play the way he had done, I was simply wrong. That entire approach, which is both sound and necessary when facing opponents of comparable skill and experience, falls flat when tried against considerably weaker players, because they simply don't think the same way I do.

What I should have asked myself was this: "Would a tight/weak/timid player just call that flop bet with top pair and a straight draw, hoping that he would simultaneously make his straight without the possible flush card hitting?" And the answer to that would have been a resounding "yes."

But the poker gods were merciful to me last night, and let me slide on my lapse in clear thinking. They sent an 8 on the river, pairing the board, and giving me the winning full house.

I don't usually rely on luck to win at Bill's (or anywhere else, for that matter), but it's nice to get it once in a while.


Never bluff at Bill's--well, almost never

As I have emphasized in a couple of previous posts about Bill's, it is not a place to bluff, because one is surrounded by calling stations. But there are exceptions. This weekend I ran into a few players smart enough to lay down a hand like top pair in the face of an opponent showing unusual strength.

An opportunity arose Saturday night. One of the good players put in a straddle, then, after he got called in several spots, raised to $15. I had the distinct impression that he was full of shit, that he was just trying to take the $10 or $12 on the table and be done with it. I had suited K-Q. I had limped in with it instead of raising because I was in middle position, and didn't feel like playing a big pot with what is, after all, still a pretty mediocre hand, with three or four players acting after me. But when everybody between the straddler and me folded to his raise, I was certainly willing to take him on, since I would have position on him, and I likely was starting with a better hand. Everybody folded behind me, too, so it was to be one on one. Excellent.

The flop was J-x-x. It gave me no pair and no draw. But I also knew that most of the time it will have missed him, too. Nevertheless, he did what a strong, aggressive player should usually do, and continuation-bet at it, $20. I thought that he was still full of it, so I thought a bit, then pushed out $65. He was a smart enough player to see a pre-flop limp-call, combined with a strong flop raise, as signaling danger, such as somebody with a small pocket pair having flopped a set. Sure enough, he thought for maybe 30 seconds, then folded while flashing me a jack, to show that he had hit top pair. But he simultaneously admitted, "The other one isn't too good."

So I had been right that he was just trying to buy it with junk before the flop. I had, in one sense, been wrong in guessing that the flop missed him. But in a more important sense I had been right. That is, my bet on the flop was not a bet that he had missed it completely, because obviously I couldn't know that. Rather, I was betting that he did not have a hand strong enough to call a scary-looking raise from a solid, tight player who had not shown down a single weak hand all night. On that mark, I was exactly correct.

When he folded, I gave him a wink and a smile, and exposed my K-Q. I rarely show bluffs, but here it was entirely purposeful. I had managed to get into a situation in which I could put in a bluff with a high probability of success against one of only two players at the table whom I judged capable of folding a superior hand. To get maximal value, I wanted to be sure that all of the calling stations at the table saw what I had done, in the hope that it would reinforce their already erroneous tendency to look me up too often with medium-strength hands when I had the goods.

So to the gentleman whom I used as my advertising, my apologies. I honestly wasn't trying to rub your nose in it. I was trying to help coax additional future calls from the weaker players, whom I would not normally try to bluff. Please take it as a compliment that I recognized you to be a good enough player to fold--it genuinely is one.


A mistake that worked out nicely

Early in the session, I had flopped top two pairs with a 9-7 in my hand, and picked up a full house on the turn. I showed it, despite my bet not being called. I won another hand a short time later when the same cards caught two pairs again. It then became a running joke and/or point of commentary at the table about how often that night the board was coming in such a form that holding 9-7 would be a great hand. With freakish frequency, if you could have played 9-7 every hand, you would have been hitting two pairs, trips, straights, and full houses all evening long. One guy complained that he hadn't been dealt the 9-7 all night. Kind of odd, when you usually hear that gripe leveled about not getting aces or kings!

Anyway, after this had been going on for a couple of hours, I found myself looking at the 9-7 of hearts. I raised. The flop was A-6-4, with two hearts. I almost never bluff at Bill's, but I do mix in some semi-bluffs. This is because many of the players there are not used to seeing betting on the come, so when a third card of a suit appears, they assume that the person who had bet at the flop must not have the flush. This is, I assume, because beginning players tend to check a flush draw, figuring it's not worth throwing money at it if you don't have to, when you can just wait to see if you make your hand first. So mixing in some semi-bluffs can pay off. I decided to do it here, and got two callers.

The turn was an offsuit 3. Dang. I thought about checking, but decided to bet again, hoping that they'd read me for having a big ace and fold. But, of course, this is Bill's, and nobody's folding.

The river was an offsuit 5. Rats! No flush and no pair! The first player checked to me, and, well, my old habits took over. I'm a third-bullet shooter. In this case, my instant self-justification was that maybe both of them had been on flush draws and would fold. If I had thought for about two more seconds, I would have realized how unlikely that was. Furthermore, I had shown the bluff described above specifically so that I would get more callers! What in the hell was I thinking, trying to pull off a three-shell bluff? I wasn't thinking--that was the problem. It was completely foolish.

I bet $25 on the river, praying to see two players throw their cards in the muck, even as the more rational part of my brain was saying, "Don't throw good money after bad." They both called. Yikes!

So, fully embarrassed, I turned over my hand and quietly said, "I guess I'll have to lose with the 9-7 for once tonight."

To my utter shock, the dealer announced, "Straight." I had been so focused on the flush that I had not even noticed that I had backed into a 3-4-5-6-7 straight. I can't remember the last time I so completely misread the board. (It might have been the third story related in this post.)

Both opponents mucked without showing their cards. Nobody said anything about what they must have thought was my weird comment about losing. I was too ashamed to admit that I had not seen the straight. I hoped that if anybody had heard what I said, they would take it as having been somehow ironic. I have no idea what they thought, if anything.

The poker gods were truly covering my backside for me that night.

Best I can figure is that they were there to bet on the pig races.



Addendum

I really wanted that pig-racing bit to be the punchline, and leave the post there. But upon re-reading it, I feel obligated to add a caveat here. I fear that the number of times in this post that I make reference to being so much better at poker than my opponents will sound far more arrogant than would be a true reflection of how I view myself as a player.

So I'd like to set that record straight. I've said this before, and probably will need to again at some point. I think I have a pretty brutally realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses as a player. I honestly believe that I am probably just about as low on the continuum of poker skill as one can possibly be and still have a shot at making a living at the game.

But it's a simple fact that even that extremely modest level of talent (modest, that is, in comparison to the world-class pros whose ability has me in awe) puts one ahead of at least 90% of the tourists that sit down in $1-2 no-limit hold'em games. At a place like Bill's, it does not require any haughtiness or self-worship to say that my knowledge and understanding of the game is far deeper than that of the great majority of the other players. It's a simple, objective, unmistakable fact, and anybody who sat and watched for a while would, I think, inevitably come to the same conclusion.

So please don't read into my stories and comments an inference that I fancy myself as one of the greats. I do not--not by a long shot. I realize and fully acknowledge that I'm simply choosing to swim in really small ponds, in which it is just not very hard to be at the top of the food chain.

"Oh yeah"

OK, one last Rio story from tonight's session.

I told you in the last post about the guy who was sitting on my right. This story is about the guy on my left. He was nice enough, and perfectly polite, but, well, not too bright. He revealed this at many times, in many ways. For example, after burning through about $400 in an hour, mostly with bad calls, he said, twice, "I'm forced to play bad cards now. I don't have any choice. It's the only way I can get my money back. I have to do it."

This, of course, is the kind of player I want to find every time I sit down. Unfortunately, I didn't get my fair share of his chips before he went completely broke. I won only one sizable pot, and that was by picking off an unconvincing river bluff. I did it with no pair, just ace-high. (I'm still patting myself on the back for that, as you might have guessed.)

Anyway, there was a woman at the table having one of those unbelievable streaks of luck. She was not a good player, though the guy my story is about was in awe of her. (Much later, when a new player tangled with her, my village idiot even whispered to me, "He has no idea how good she is." I had to stifle a laugh.) Her basic strategy was to play any two suited cards, for any price, muck if she didn't flop a flush or flush draw, and call any bet until she made her flush--which she did an astonishing percentage of the time. Even when she missed, she did things like back into a straight or two pair with what were, of course, completely unreadable hands, so that it looked like she was bluffing with a missed flush draw. Her bet sizing had no discernible rationale to it; she would bet $50 into an $8 pot, or $8 into a $50 pot. But she hit her hands with such unreal frequency that she cleaned up. She made at least $700 in the three hours or so I was watching her. It's not a strategy that can win over the long haul, but it was truly her lucky night.

Anyway, in one hand the flop was Q-Q-4. She bet, and all five or six opponents folded. She smiled and showed her pocket fours, for a flopped full house.

I grinned at her and said, with what I thought was obvious understatement, "I think you might have had the best hand there."

The Idiot speaks up: "No, Q-4 would have been the best hand."

I look at him. He is not joking. He is incapable of irony; it's about seven levels of thinking beyond his capacity.

He's clearly expecting me to respond. I'm stymied at first, not knowing quite what to say. Not only has he mistaken my comment about who at the table had the best hand for a remark about what the nuts theoretically would have been, but he has even that wrong.

Then, apparently because I wasn't giving him his dues for figuring it out, he repeated his observation: "Q-4 would have been the best hand." (He was saying this quietly, just to me--the room was noisy enough that nobody else heard our conversation.)

So I feel obligated to say something. I can't agree with him, and he's not going to let me get away without responding. So I point out, "Well, pocket queens would actually have been the best hand."

There is silence. He cocks his head back, looks up toward the ceiling with a furrowed brow, apparently deep in thought. I swear I'm not making this up: he holds this pose for about five seconds, before looking at me again. "Oh yeah. That would be better."

There's another bit of awkward silence. I break it and let him off the hook by saying, "But I just meant that I think she must have had the best hand at the table, not the absolutely best possible hand." This is calculated to give us something to agree on, and pull the discussion away from his error, so that the exchange ends pleasantly and sociably. He quickly echoes his agreement that she probably did have the best hand there, and by now we both have the cards for our next hand, and can move past the awkwardness.

Of course, maybe he didn't sense any awkwardness. I can't tell.

You know that old saying, "Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt"? Whoever coined that (and it's not at all clear who actually did) had, I suspect, met this player, and had him specifically in mind.


(In re-reading this, I see that my storytelling has once again fallen into a bit of grammatical ugliness--specifically, I have woven back and forth between past tense and present tense. I'm aware that I do this sometimes. It's never intentional, because, well, it's just plain bad writing to do that, and I wouldn't deliberately employ bad writing, except as a sort of special effect, which this isn't. But once something is written that way, it's a lot of work to go back and fix it, and, well, sometimes it's too late at night or I'm just too lazy or uncaring. So I apologize for this lapse in the writing craft. I apologize for this post, for all the previous posts that I have written and left in a similar sorry state, and for all future ones in which it may happen again. For the most part, this is first-draft writing, folks. I try to fix the obvious goofs, but a lot slide by, since I have no editor but myself. This note is just to let you all know that I'm embarrassed by the mistakes, including the confusing indecisiveness in verb tenses. I'm just not quite embarrassed enough to do anything about it, beyond acknowledging it with this half-assed explanation.)