I suck

Tonight I went to the Tropicana for the opening day of its new poker room, about which I'll have more to say later.

After a while the game dried up, so I went next door to Hooters, where, if there is a game, there are bad players. The first time I had the button, it was folded to me with K-T offsuit. I raised to $13. The blinds both folded. The under-the-gun straddler looked at his cards, looked at me, grabbed about half of his chip stack without counting, and slammed it rather forcibly in front of him--$50 or so.

I had essentially no information on him--which, I'll admit, was probably reason enough all by itself to let this one go. But something about his demeanor suggested to me that his thought process was, roughly, "I see you trying to steal the blinds and my straddle. You don't need a real hand to do that from the button when everybody folds to you. I think you got nuthin', so take THAT!" I put him on a medium pocket pair, at best.

I wasn't going to be intimidated by his bluster. I announced all in--and his chips literally beat mine into the pot. Ruh-roh. He quickly flipped over pocket kings. Hmmm. Might need to get my opponent-reading radar into the shop for a little tuneup.

I was only 9% to win; he was 90%, making me a 10:1 dog. This is literally just about the worst possible all-in pre-flop situation one can be in, mathematically.

I sheepishly turned over my pathetic little K-T and said, "I think it's going to be hard to beat you with this."

Well, apparently not as hard as I thought. Flop: J-Q-4, giving me an open-ended straight draw. The other guy admonished the dealer, "Don't you do it to me!"

Turn: 9. Boom!

Now he was the one needing help--a ten for a chopped pot.

River: 7.

Hilarity ensued, naturally.

Remember back in 1992 when Ross Perot was running for president, largely on an anti-free-trade platform? One of his favorite lines was saying that if NAFTA passed, we would hear a "giant sucking sound" as all our manufacturing jobs moved south across the border.

If you heard a giant sucking sound tonight, chances are that it was emanating from the Hooters poker room.

Fun with Cardgrrl

I mentioned a few days ago that Cardgrrl was coming to town. She arrived today. I just got home from a delightful five hours of poker sitting next to her at Caesars Palace. As you might have deduced from reading her blog, she's smart, funny, and interesting, my top three favorite attributes in people.

I had aces twice, kings twice, queens twice, and A-K four times. Cardgrrl was mostly card-dead all night. Yet I ended up losing about the same amount as she won--and she had the added disadvantage of jet lag. You be the judge of who played better. Of course, I never even once got dealt the mighty 2-4, so I had no chance. (I'll let her tell her own 2-4 story, if she chooses.) And, in my defense, I was on the upswing when we left, and she was on the downswing, so it might have ended differently if we had stayed.

There was only one hand that I think is worth relating. I was on the button with Ah-Qh. (That's right, it was sooooted.) Several players limped in ahead of me. An elderly gentleman, who was under the gun, reraised all-in for $97. It was folded back around to me.

I had basically four thoughts, all of which converged on the same conclusion. First, the reraise was so big that it seemed clear that he didn't want a call, which suggested that I should frustrate his desires with a call. It would have been scarier if he had put in a raise to, say, $50. He still would have been pot-committed, but it would have conveyed a sense of "call me, sucker," rather than "go away." The way he put his chips in also seemed to me, well, defiant, for lack of a better word--overly forceful and dramatic. Second, he had played few hands, and I couldn't remember him winning a pot. I thought he was frustrated and pushing with less than a premium hand--the old "double me up or send me home" syndrome. Third, there was going to be enough dead money in the pot that it was mathematically OK to take the slight underdog position if he had an underpair, which is what I thought his most likely holding was (roughly 7s through 10s). Fourth, he could easily think my raise from the button was based more on position than my cards, as if I were just trying to pick up the limpers' money, and thus reraise me fairly light to catch me in a bluff. So I called. The big blind reluctantly folded.

I was wrong. He had Q-Q. The flop and turn gave me no help, so I was resigned to my fate--until the dealer put out an ace on the river. Whew! At that point, the woman who had been hesitant to fold said, perfectly plausibly, that she had folded A-K. Whew again! I had hit a two-outer. Hey, I'm not proud of it, but I'll take it.

The older guy who lost the hand got up in a big huff. He limped a short distance away to his mobility scooter, fired it up, and took off. But as he zoomed past the table, he called out to me, "You were only a 15:1 dog!"

And *poof*, he was gone out the door.

It's the first time I've ever been the victim of a drive-by taunting in a poker room.

The poor man would not have liked the reaction he provoked, which was laughter all around. It was so pathetic it was funny. It also became a running joke for the table. For the rest of the evening, when somebody made a bet, he or she would warn opponents, "You're a 15:1 dog here." Conversely, somebody folding would say, "I can't call--I'm a 15:1 dog."

I also managed to get a good laugh out of the dealer (who had been trying hard to maintain his professional neutrality) when I said, "He should have known a bet that big would only get called if he was beat."

I can't say that a good time was had by all, but I think a good time was had by all but one.

The poker gods show their displeasure

At the Rio the other night, I'm one of three or four players to call a pre-flop raise. I have suited 5-6. The flop is 3-4-7 rainbow, giving me the nuts. One person checks. I lead out with a bet about half the size of the pot. The guy on my left immediately moves all-in, a huge overbet. It gets folded around back to me.

Here's where I made the mistake. I made the kind of semi-snarky comment that I usually think, but keep to myself: "I guess when you have the nuts, you're supposed to call." With that, I turned over my cards and pushed my chips in.

My opponent was bluffing with an A-Q offsuit. He could not win the hand. He could only tie and get a split pot if the turn and river were exactly a 5 and a 6, to put on the board the same straight I already had.

Turn card: 5.

River card: 6.

I got my money back, as did the bluffer.

The poker odds calculator at http://www.cardplayer.com/ tells me that I had a 99.09% chance of winning the hand when the money went in, with a 0.91% chance of a tie. The worst possible suckout in hold'em is flopping quads, and an opponent hitting the only two cards in the deck that can make a straight flush. In that situation, it's 99.9% to 0.1%. So this wasn't the absolute worst suckout imaginable. But it was probably as close as I have ever come, with an opponent needing one of six cards on the turn and then one of the remaining three cards on the river just to get a chopped pot.

See what happens when you make rude or arrogant comments at the table? The poker gods hear it and snap you back into a state of humility.

Plaza: Another stinky dump

Since I got on kind of a roll of finally knocking down my list of poker rooms not yet visited, I decided to hit two more of them in one night. The Plaza, downtown, was the second stop, but I'll talk about it first.

They've moved the room sometime in the past year, because I once stopped in there when they had no game going, and the tables were out in the middle of the casino floor, roped off. Now it's near a corner, with a little half-fence around its perimeter.

There are four regular tables plus one small one that I assume is for stud games. (In seven-card stud, every player gets his own seven cards, so it's rather difficult to play ten-handed, there being only 52 cards in the deck. So stud tables are smaller, to hold just seven or eight players.) There was only one in use, for a $2-4 limit hold'em game. Ho-hum. But I dutifully played for my hour.

The strangest thing about this room, as you can see from the first image above, is that it has limited hours. I don't recall seeing this in any other poker room in the city. I was there, and they really did shut down the game at 1:45 a.m. so that they could close up and get the employees out by 2:00--even though the game was still going strong (well, with seven players anyway). Very peculiar.

The other notable thing was how smoky it was. I'm home now and I positively reek. Leaving out the couple of places where smoking at the tables is allowed, this is absolutely the highest concentration of cigarette smoke I've yet encountered. It's strange because the casino was nearly empty, yet there was always a visible haze of smoke in the room. It's as if they had installed a diabolical ventilation system that sucked all of the cigarette smoke from the casino floor and blew it out into the poker room. I don't know how else there could have been that much of it. It was truly awful. My eyes were burning, and that hasn't been so even at Arizona Charlie's and Boulder Station, where people were smoking at the table.

I might have guessed it would be that way from the third peculiar fact: there's a cigarette vending machine right inside the poker room! Kind of a hint, eh?

One notable, memorable thing happened there that was unprecedented for me, though it had nothing to do with the room per se. I got bored and threw in a straddle, which I do maybe once out of, say, four or five whole sessions of poker--which is to say, very rarely. And this time I picked up pocket aces! Of course, the story isn't allowed to have a happy ending. I didn't improve and got sucked out on by a guy with 5-6 offsuit who flopped two pair. Oh well. At least now I can say that I've had the experience of pocket aces on a straddle bet.

The Plaza is one of five poker rooms that is within easy walking distance of my apartment (others being the El Cortez, Fitzgerald, Golden Nugget, and Binion's). I wish it had some redeeming quality, but I found none. As with most badly-run rooms, players were allowed to talk openly about the hand in progress, with not even a hint of disapproval from any dealer. I hate that.

In fact, let me list the qualities shared by a whole bunch of rooms that I've played in once, and don't expect ever to return to: Out in the open casino floor, with no shelter from smoke and noise; rarely any no-limit game going; only the lowest limit game(s) going; only a handful of tables; horrible quality of play; mostly inhabited by life losers; players primarily there to socialize and/or try to hit a high-hand jackpot or bad-beat jackpot; mostly players who seem generally unhappy with life, with few smiles and laughs ever seen; marginally competent dealers; little or no effort to enforce even basic rules; physically dirty, dingy, icky places to spend time.

That roster of dismal qualities is basically shared by the following places: El Cortez, Plaza, Gold Coast, Arizona Charlie's, Jokers Wild, Rampart, Texas Station, Tuscany, as well as the now-closed Fiesta Rancho and Stardust. They're all just dreadful, worthless places. There are a bunch of others that I don't like much, but at least have some redeeming value that I can point to, so that I can give them a C- or D+. But this list of eight (so far) are the dregs, the crap that sinks to the bottom in an ocean of poker rooms.

Cruelest game ever invented

The poker gods have a sick, sick sense of humor sometimes.

I was playing at the Orleans yesterday. I picked up A-10 on the button, so I raised in order to thin the field a bit. The guy in the big blind had just recently caught me bluffing, and he called with the A-3 of spades, presumably thinking I might be on a steal again.

Flop was K-3-3. The BB slow-plays his three-of-a-kind. I check behind, rather than put in a continuation bet, primarily because of the recent failed bluff attempt. Turn card is a Q. Now the BB bets. I think he might be pretty weak and just trying to buy it--again because of the table image I've created for myself. Besides, I suspect that any ace or jack on the river wins it for me. So I call. The river is a lovely jack. With no possible flush, my Broadway straight (A-K-Q-J-10) ought to be good, because I think it's highly unlikely my opponent has quads or a full house.

To my astonishment, he moves all-in! I nearly beat him into the pot with my chips. He shows me the flopped trips that he unwisely slow-played. I show him the runner-runner straight that I managed to catch. He is disgusted, stands up, starts to walk away. The dealer calls him back, though, because it turns out that he had $10 more than I did.

On the next hand, I look down at the A-3 of spades--the same two cards my opponent had in the last hand. Literally the same two cards, because this table is not using an auto-shuffler, so it's the same deck. That's just too delicious to throw away, because I suspect that my former opponent is going to push his last $10 in with any two cards from the small blind. Sure enough, he does. I call and show him that I now have the very cards he just lost with.

He has--get this--the same A-10 that I had on the previous hand! So he is way ahead, right? He's about 3:1 to win this one. Or at least he is until the flop is A-3-x, giving me two pair. He doesn't improve, and I felt him. He calls me by a very rude term that involves my mother, and storms off. I can't help laughing.

That one-two punch is among the sickest, cruelest things I've ever witnessed.

But I'm keeping the money.

You heard it here first: Combat poker

An excerpt from http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1102/p07s02-woeu.html:

Andreas Dilschneider was still thinking about his opening moves on the chessboard when his opponent rushed up to him and punched him. Several times.

Mr. Dilschneider didn't complain. It was all perfectly legitimate. He threw a few punches of his own. When he got back to the chessboard, he was laboring and the adrenaline was pumping. He tried to keep calm and avoid hasty moves. Four minutes later, it was back into the boxing ring again.

Welcome to chessboxing, a young and intriguing sport that prides itself on its incongruous mix of muscle and mind, the pawn meets the brawn if you like. Think jab with your right, counter with your queen. The rules are simple: six rounds of speed chess interlaced with five three-minute rounds in the ring. Each competitor has 12 minutes in total on the chess timer. Victory is by knockout, checkmate or resignation, or failing any of those, by points-based scoring system.

It shouldn't take much imagination to see where I'm going with this: mixed martial arts poker. Now we can have the perfect way of exacting vengeance for that ugly suckout: a roundhouse kick to the cranium. Some nooge stacks you by calling your raise with a 10-3 offsuit? He's got a painful and prolonged joint lock coming right up. Moron calls down your A-K with bottom pair and a bad kicker? He'll get what's coming when you leap down on him feet-first from the turnbuckle.

A nice side benefit of this new sport will be that all the players who have gotten fat and out of shape by sitting way too many hours at poker tables will suddenly have an incentive to start working out. And the smokers among us? They haven't got a prayer. I'm only 5'7", 145 pounds, and not much of a fighter, but I'll take my chances in the ring against the average middle-aged, overweight, drunk tobacco fiend who coughs up a lung after a brisk walk to the restroom--especially on the adrenaline rush of the anticipation of punching out the lights of the doofus who catches a two-outer on the river to knock me out of a tournament. I'm convinced that people will start thinking differently about their starting hand selection while they're picking up their teeth from the mat.

I would explain in fuller detail my thoughts on exactly how this will work, but if you'll pardon me cutting it short, I think I need to go work out now.

Poker gems, #46

Jennifer Tilly, in her Bluff Magazine column, November, 2007, about being knocked out of a British tournament when her Broadway straight fell to an opponent's quad 9s:

The English have a thing they do when they leave the table. They stand up, shake everybody's hand, and say, "Well played" to the person who knocked them out. This strikes me as exceedingly sportsmanlike of them. In America, they say, "I can't believe you sucked out on me!" or "What a donkey call," or (contemptuously) "Nice river!"

I stand up and shake Mikael's hand. I want to say, "Quads, you lucky son of a bitch!" but I don't. I am in England now. "Well played," I say.

Poker gems, #45

Todd Brunson, "God Save the Queen," column in Card Player magazine, vol. 20, #21, October 24, 2007, p. 54, on his recent trip to London:

We spent an entire day at the Tower of London and still didn't see everything there.... The dungeons gave me great imagery for my fantasies of what I'd like to do to some of the guys who lay bad beats on me. The rack, the thumbscrew, and the boot are OK for most, but I'm saving bowel removal before beheading for the one-outers.

Some poker stories (non-grumpy content)

While looking for a story I wrote up for a friend last year (which I hope will be in my next entry), I came across this email (now slightly edited for clarity) with what I thought were pretty amusing stories that all happened to me in one crazy week last October. Enjoy.

1. "That guy couldn't feel any better..."

This week a California couple has been putting in mega-hours at Suncoast. They both get drunk early and stay that way the whole time they play. They’re really pretty annoying, because they flagrantly talk about the hand while it’s in progress and coach each other, and the casino staff won’t do anything about it, because they’re dropping thousands of dollars a day. They’re never paying attention, so they slow the game down terribly, because every time it’s their turn, the dealer has to catch them up on what’s happening. The woman, Kelly, is actually a decent player. But the guy, Rob, is awful—he’s never paying attention, and thinks the way to play is to make ridiculous bets and raises every time, because occasionally he’ll get a call when he has a monster hand, or pull off a big suckout with lucky cards coming. He must get such an adrenaline rush when those huge pots are pushed to him, because he’s willing to lose tons of money in the process. Obviously, decent players will just wait for a big hand, and when the stars are all lined up right, spring the trap on him.

So Monday night, I think it was, Player A is a guy who, I swear, talks exactly like Paulie Walnuts on the Sopranos. Player B is somebody I haven’t seen before, but he has been waiting and waiting and waiting for a chance to nail Rob for all his chips, and he finally does it. B quickly declares that he’s done playing for the day, because he just doubled his money. He packs up his chips and leaves. After he leaves the table, Player A says (and remember, you must hear the Paulie Walnuts voice in your head when you read this), “That guy couldn’t feel any better if he had just gotten a blow job!”

I usually try not to laugh at or otherwise encourage the many crudities and vulgarities that low-class poker players engage in, but it was just too perfect a line, in too funny a voice, and I almost fell out of my chair laughing so hard.


2. Inflicting a bad beat

I have put some truly sick beats on people for big pots recently. Last night, when one of three ultra-drunks sat down, he started throwing in big raises nearly every hand, and scaring people off. I picked up A-J on the button, and decided to play back hard at him to see if I could cool his jets. He raised, and I reraised. He called. Flop had a Q and two little cards--nothing to help me, really, but he checked, so I put in a pot-sized bet. He hesitated quite a bit (and he was way too drunk to be consciously doing that to disguise a big hand), but called. Turn was a 10, which I didn’t like at all, because he could easily have either a Q or 10 in his hand, and any pair would be ahead of me at this point. But he looked at the board for a long time, as though he didn’t like it much, and checked, so I pushed all-in. To my considerable surprise and consternation, he thought a while, then said, “Fuck it, I’m calling!” and pushed his chips in. Then the blessed K came on the river, giving me the highest possible straight. Turns out he had Q-9, so he had flopped top pair, which explains why he was willing to call. So because I caught one of the few cards left in the deck (any of four kings or three remaining aces) that could save me, I made over $200 on that hand instead of losing the same amount.

There was an audible gasp from the table when we turned over our hands at the end (in a tournament, you have to both turn over your hands as soon as the betting is complete, but in cash games you can wait until all the cards have been put out), and they realized that I had moved all-in with basically nothing, and sucked out. This was obviously startling because they had only seen me bet strong with strong, made hands. Several people all at once were saying, “I would have sworn he had pocket aces,” “I thought he must have flopped a set,” etc. But somewhat surprisingly, there was general approval and admiration: the consensus was “You’ve got a helluva lot of guts to do that,” rather than “Boy, that was stupid—don’t you know you can’t bluff a drunk, bad player off a hand?” I certainly should know that by now—it’s one of those lessons I’ve had to pay to learn more than a few times.


3. Inflicting another bad beat

I didn’t get enough sleep last night because I was playing so late, so around 8 pm tonight I was really hitting the wall. I was at the Orleans again, had started with $100, doubled it up, then lost a big hand when I had A-J and another A on the flop, but I didn’t recognize that an opponent had made two pair, so got knocked back down to about $100 again. I decided I’d play one more big hand, and then win or lose, I’d go home. But then I went card-dead. I waited 45 minutes for any decent hand to play, and nothing came. I was down to about $75, because of paying the blinds and calling a few pre-flop raises, only to have to dump the hand when nothing developed. Finally I decided that I would just have to pick two cards and play them as if they were aces, and hope for the best. I got J-3 of diamonds in late position, a real crap hand. But sometimes—especially if you have a strong, tight reputation and haven’t raised in a long time—you can get away with playing like you’re holding a big pair, even when you’re not. That’s what I decided to go for.

I raised to $12 and got five callers. Yikes! That’s not what I wanted! With five others seeing the flop, it’s going to help one of them for sure, and it will be hard to push him off the hand. Oh well—the pot was now big enough that it was worth taking a major gamble on winning it.

The flop is 10-8-3. I’ve got a crummy pair of 3s, and nothing more. But it’s checked around to me, so apparently nobody else liked it very much either, and I decide to go for it. I push in my last $60 or so. One guy calls. Crap! No matter what he has, it’s got to have me beat, because nobody would call that bet with a worse hand. Oh well, I went into this hand knowing that it might blow up on me, but I had made enough at the Hilton earlier that even if I bombed out here, I’d still be up for the day. Turn card was a 7, and the river a 9. I sheepishly turned over my cards to show that I just had the 3s.

I didn’t even realize what had happened until another player said, “Oh my God, he hit runner-runner straight!” Sure enough, there was a 7, 8, 9, and 10 on the board, plus my J for the straight. The other guy had had ace-ten, giving him top pair and top kicker on the flop—a pretty good hand for him to gamble on. He was, shall we say, unhappy when he saw how it had gone down. Oh well—as they say, that’s poker, and I’ve been on the bad end of crap just like that enough times that I don’t mind a little excessively good luck flowing my way now and then.

Besides, hands like that have powerful future value, even if I lose them. To the extent that I’m known just as a rock that only plays premium hands, it’s hard to get action. When people see that I can push just as hard with nothing as I do when I’ve got the goods, it makes them more likely to call me the next time I actually have the best hand. Having opponents completely unsure what I have is at least as good as, if not better than, just having them habitually run away because they’re convinced I have the nuts.

Poker gems, #18

I realize that lately I've had a long string of these "poker gems," which I originally intended to be just occasional diversions from my rants, not the main menu of this blog. But for whatever reason, I haven't gotten myself up into a good lather about much of anything lately. The muse hasn't been pushing my annoyance buttons, which is what has to happen for me to write up a good grump. So these thoughts from other writers will have to suffice until I get unblocked. Never fear: I have a long list of topics yet to write about, as soon as I get in the mood for a good rant.

Continuing with advice for bad beats, this is from Antonio Esfandiari's book, In the Money: Strategies for Winning Texas Hold 'em Cash Games, pp. 13 and 36. Antonio does take his own advice here; I remember reading (in one of his columns for Bluff magazine, I think; it doesn't seem to be in this book) that he has a standing deal with a friend, that if either of them ever hears the other tell a bad-beat story, the teller of the tale owes the other something like $5000. I haven't gone that far, but I do make a point of not sharing my poker woes, either with friends and family or with other players. I make some exceptions when writing--but only when there's some larger point to be made from the story, never just because I'm feeling sorry for myself.



Be positive. You will never hear me tell a bad-beat story. Nobody wants to hear it. Think about it. When somebody tells you a bad-beat story, do you care? Besides, everyone who plays the game will suffer his or her fair share of bad beats. That's poker.... If you play poker, bad beats are the cost of doing business. Take it in stride and move on. If you dwell on it or let it get to you, it can only have a negative impact on your game.

...

If you let the emotions of these moments affect your play, you will lose focus. One simple way to avoid this is to never tell a bad-beat story. This is such an important point that I am going to repeat it for emphasis: Never ever tell a bad-beat story. All that does is reinforce losing--and nobody wants to hear it, anyway.

Poker gems, #17

Today I was the chip leader in the Hilton weekly tournament with only seven players remaining, the top four finishers to get the money. The player with the second most chips moved all-in (a huge overbet--really bad play) from first position with 8-8. I was on his immediate left and called with K-K. I'm an 80:20 favorite. He spikes a third 8 on the turn. I was crippled and finished in 6th place. Then I moved to a cash game, and within the first hour had K-K again. A player raised from first position. I put in a small re-raise to try to induce an all-in from him and got it. I call. He has A-Q. I'm a 68:32 favorite. He catches an ace on the river to win a $400 pot.

Neither of these is extraordinarily unusual; they're in the "run-of-the-mill" category of unluckiness. It was just unusually annoying because of the probable financial loss in the first instance (absent that 8 hitting, I would have had nearly half the chips in play just at the time that the other players were going into survival mode to be sure they made it into the money, and I could have aggressively accumulated a truly overwhelming chip lead, with a very high probability of winning the tournament outright), and the large, tangible financial loss in the second instance, both happening within such a short time span.

So I'm taking this occasion to remind myself (and any readers) of perhaps the wisest words I've read about bad beats. It comes from Mark Blade's excellent book, Professional Poker: The Essential Guide to Playing for a Living, p. 257. I can't say I'm yet able to muster the mental discipline to actually do what he suggests, but I do try to keep it all in proper perspective:


Bad Beats Are Your Best Friends

So how should you react when you experience a so-called "bad beat?" You should shout inside your head, "Yippee!" And do a little mental jig while you're at it. I'm not kidding. Bad beats mean that there are still players out there who play badly. That means the games are still beatable. The day you stop having any more bad beats is the day when you should crawl into a fetal position in the corner of the casino and bawl like a baby. Your career is over. The worst case scenario...has just played out. Your competition all plays as well as you do and you are just passing money back and forth among yourself with only the casino take coming out ahead. Don't scoff at the title for this topic. Bad beats truly are your best friends.

Both sides of quad slow-rolling in one night

From the best poker dictionary in existence, by Michael Wiesenberg (http://www.poker1.com/mcu/mculib_dictionary.asp):

slow roll
(n phrase) The practice by some players, at the showdown, when they have the best hand, of waiting till the last possible moment before showing that hand. This is usually done for one of three reasons: to see everyone else's cards first, to needle one or more of the active players, or just out of pure orneriness.

slow-roll
(v) To knowingly have the best hand at the showdown but expose it only after the losers' hands are shown, leading another player to think he has the winning hand. See slow roll.


By odd coincidence yesterday, I was both the intentional victim and unintentional perpetrator of a slow roll of unbeatable four-of-a-kind hands in one session at the Venetian.

Perpetrator:
I'm in late position with suited Q-9 and call a largish raise from one of the blinds. It's heads-up between us. The flop is 9-8-8 rainbow. My opponent hesitates, looks at his chips, looks at me, seems quite nervous, then puts all his chips into one big stack and pushes it forward. It's $103. This is well over twice the size of the pot--a huge overbet. Before that, I thought it most likely that he had a big pair, something between jacks and aces, and I was frankly just hoping to catch a lucky flop, but expecting to have to dump my hand if I didn't hit something strong.

His hesitation, nervousness, and the peculiar size of the bet made me re-think this, however, and suggested to me that he actually had A-K, missed the flop, and really, really, really didn't want a call. At this point, I had only $110 in front of me, so the call is for essentially my whole stack. I finally convinced myself that hitting my 9 actually did put me ahead, so I call.

Then several things happen basically all at once. My opponent turns over his cards, and I see that I was dead wrong in my post-flop read of him: he had pocket aces. Oops. Oh well. So without even watching the dealer put out the turn and river cards, I start counting out what I'm going to have to pay him.

While I'm doing that, I glance up at the now-completed set of community cards. The last two cards have come 9-9, giving me quad 9s, but it doesn't register that way with me. For some reason I can't explain, my brain reads the board as 9-8-8-8-9, instead of the actual 9-8-8-9-9. Just at this moment, I get more confused because the dealer announces my opponent's hand as "nines full of aces." I'm frozen like a deer in the headlights, simultaneously trying to figure out (1) how he can have nines full when there are only two 9s on the board (or so I think), and (2) whether my full house is bigger or smaller than his. I haven't turned over my cards because I'm a little embarrassed to have twice called big bets from a guy with aces when I was so far behind.

It takes me probably five seconds to clear my head and realize why I'm so confused. Then I see that I got just obscenely lucky to turn my measly pair into quads. So I sheepishly flip over my hole cards. Several people at the table gasp. My opponent--to his credit--didn't whine or complain, just let his head roll back for a second, then stood up and walked away.

The dealer seems to understand my situation, and quietly says, "You didn't see it, did you?" No, I didn't.

So to the guy I beat, I apologize for the slow roll. I'm well aware of how rude it is. I swear it was completely unintentional. I thought for sure I was dead. All those 8s and 9s blurred in my visual cortex, and I just didn't grasp what had happened for a few seconds. I would never do that on purpose. You left the table too quickly for me to explain, though I did attempt to tell the other players at the table what had happened, once it became clear to me in retrospect.

Victim:
Earlier in the evening I had A-J. The flop was A-K-x. A guy in the big blind checks, I bet, he calls. The turn card is another K. This makes me think he probably doesn't have a king and my ace is probably good. I only have in front of me about the same amount that's in the pot, so I move all in after he checks again. He calls. The river is a blank. I turn over my A-J.

He looks at my cards, looks at me, nods, but doesn't move. Then oh-so-slowly he turns over first one king, then another one. He has all four of 'em.


I suppose that if I were a generous soul, I would give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume that somehow he got confused about his hand the same way I did. But, frankly, this seems pretty damn unlikely. Pocket kings are the second-best starting hand, and I think everybody who looks down at them gets a little jolt of excitement at the prospect of winning the hand. Then upon hitting a third one on the flop, the excitement builds, because you're a virtual lock to win the hand. When the fourth one hits the turn, and an opponent pushes all-in, it's like having an orgasm.

It's just not plausible that this guy didn't know what he had, given the sequence of events. It played out in a completely different way from the hand in which I made quads on the turn and river after all the money went in on the flop. With about 99% certainty, this guy was just being a jerk. I have no idea why, other than a personality disorder. It happened within the first five or so hands of my session; I had just sat down, and so hadn't had any kind of history with him that would make him want to retaliate.

On one of the first seasons of the World Poker Tour (season 2's "WPT Invitational," to be exact) Harry Demetriou accidentally gave an opponent a slow roll. He had put in a pre-flop raise with pocket aces. The short-stacked opponent (I don't remember who it was) moved all-in. Harry didn't realize that a player between the all-in guy and him had folded; that is, he didn't know the action was back to him. He just sat quietly for maybe 30 seconds. Finally he realized that everybody was waiting for him to act. He obviously was going to call.

What was impressive is that he apologized over and over and over again. He would never intentionally slow-roll anybody; he just didn't realize it was his turn.* He was mortified that anybody would think he had done that deliberately. He's a classy guy.

I think most players are delighted to show their winning hands as quickly as possible. It's rare to run into a player who takes some sort of sick pleasure in slow-rolling with the absolute nuts. I don't recall ever before being the one to have done it (however unintentionally), nor being on the receiving end (though perhaps I have been, and don't remember it). It was very strange to be on both sides of it in one night.

To the guy who slow-rolled his quad kings: a pox on you, sir.


*In this case, it would be a slightly different kind of slow-roll than described in the definition above. If at any point in the hand one has the nuts--the best possible hand--so that a call of an opponent's all-in bet is eagerly and automatically given, delaying that call any longer than necessary is another version of a slow-roll. Now, sometimes there is a strategic reason to take one's time about it--most commonly to seduce another player into also calling, by acting as if it's a difficult decision. There's nothing unethical about that. But in Demetriou's case, he was the last one to have a decision to make. He would surely have acted instantly if he had known it was his turn.

Poker gems, #3

Mike Sexton, commenting on a bad beat during a World Poker Tour event:

"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."

Unlikely events (non-grumpy content) (WARNING! Math ahead!)

I played at the Venetian again today. Two mathematical long-shots occurred that are worthy of note.

1

During a cash game, I heard a sudden commotion from the next table that could only mean that something really unusual had happened with the cards. I wasn't in a hand at the moment, so I stood up, took a few steps, and saw something I had never seen before: Quad kings beat quad tens, with both players having started with pocket pairs. If the Venetian had a bad-beat jackpot, this certainly would have qualified. I don't remember the order in which the cards came on the board, and I have no idea how the betting went down, but it doesn't really matter.

I wondered about the probability of this happening. Let's take any two pocket pairs, since the probability will be the same for whichever ones we pick. And let's ignore what order the community cards hit the board, because just about any order will get all the players' money in nearly every time (probably the only exception being if the high pair makes quads on the flop with the non-matching card, and the lower pair folds, thus never seeing the turn and river cards).

Here's the ugly math. First, how likely is it that two or more players will simultaneously receive pocket pairs when dealing to a table of ten players? This is something I've never worked out, maybe never even wondered about, but now that I've crunched the numbers, it's kind of interesting. You can find the relevant equations (and a web-based calculator to run them for you) many places, including http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/binomialX.html. Here, "p"--the probability of any player being dealt a pocket pair--is 1/17 (because after you get the first card, there are 3 possible pairs to it left and 51 cards left, and 3/51=1/17), or 0.0588. We'll set "n" at 10, assuming 10 players to a table. The probability that nobody gets dealt a pair on a given hand (i.e., k=0) then works out to about 55%, which is quite a bit higher than I would have guessed offhand. The probability of exactly one player being dealt a pair (k=1) is about 34%. The probability of two players being dealt pairs is about 10%, and the sum of the probabilities of all of the other possibilities (i.e., three through ten players being given pairs simultaneously) is the remaining 1% or so.*

(The interesting implication of this: If you're dealt a pocket pair, about 3 out of 4 times you're the only one at the table with a pair. I never knew this, and don't recall seeing it mentioned anywhere else before.**)

So let's settle on 11% as a good estimate of the likelihood that two or more players will, on any given hand, start with pocket pairs.***

We now have 48 unknown cards left, after assigning our two players their pairs (and it doesn't make a bit of difference how many other players are in the hand; their cards are unknown to us, so the math is the same as if only two people were playing). There are five cards to come on the board. There are exactly 1,712,304 different combinations of five cards that we can theoretically pick from 48 cards (as long as we ignore order). (Praise heaven that Microsoft Excel has a built-in function ["COMBIN"] to calculate this for me.) In order to get quads versus quads, four of those five have to be the cards in question, so now eight cards are assigned/accounted for, leaving 44. In other words, 44 of the 1,712,304 possible combinations of five cards we could put out will have the specific four cards we need to see this clash happen, plus one straggler. That makes the probability of quads versus quads (starting with two pocket pairs) 44/1,712,304, or 1 in 38,916. In other words, pocket pairs will only end up in the kind of quads-over-quads outcome that I saw tonight once in about 39,000 times.

Now we combine that with the fact that only about 11% of the time do we even have two or more players starting with pocket pair in order to set this up, and my grand conclusion is that one will see quads over quads only once in about 354,000 hands of Texas Hold'Em. It's even rarer than that, if you account for the fact that the two paired players very often won't both see the flop, since a large pair will usually raise before the flop, causing a small pair to fold. I would guess that one of the pairs folds before the flop roughly half the time, which, if correct, means that one would have to sit through something like 700,000 poker hands before seeing quads over quads hit. No wonder I've never seen it before!

2

I entered the Venetian's 8:00 p.m. tournament. I finished in about 16th place, but only the top five split the money, so I left with nothing to show for it. Oh well. At least I got a story out of the evening.

I had Q-10, and raised with it in late position. I was called by one other player. The flop was Q-7-2. I had top pair, and not many chips left, so I pushed all-in. She called. She had pocket 7s and had flopped a set. I was pretty much dead meat at that point. But then miracle of miracles, the turn card was a 10, giving me two pairs and a ray of hope. Then the river was a lovely third queen, giving me a full house. The only way I could win that hand was with the turn and river coming 10-Q, Q-10, 10-10, or Q-Q, and it happened! An online poker odds calculator says that I had a 1.6% chance of hitting one of these combinations. That makes this an even worse suckout than when I hit a 3% chance full house over two opponents with flopped flushes (see the tale at http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/04/crazy-night-of-poker-non-grumpy-content.html). It's definitely one of my luckiest hands ever.

Incidentally, with experience I'm unquestionably getting better at making quick estimates of poker probabilities. As soon as this happened, I commented to the guy next to me, "That must be in about the 2% range to hit like that." Pat, pat pat. (That was me giving myself a pat on the back for being so smart. Maybe some day I'll be smart enough not to commit all my chips when I'm a 98:2 underdog.)


Editorial comment

If either of these hands occurred online, the chat boxes would fill with conspiratorial notes about how Internet poker is rigged to make improbable events happen more often. But given thousands and thousands of hands being dealt in a large card room like the Venetian every day, extraordinarily unlikely events are bound to occur, even with no puppetmaster manipulating the strings. Randomness is a wondrous thing to behold, given enough chances for rare events to occur. It's no different online, except that nerds sitting in their parents' basement playing poker on a computer all day can get their world view twisted pretty severely, and what are objectively pretty ridiculous theories about how improbable events occur can start to make a weird kind of sense.


*There's a little problem here, in that these occurrences aren't really quite independent, because one person getting a pair reduces the number of pairable cards available to everybody else. But this is close enough for present purposes.

**The exception, of course, is if you're dealt K-K. Then the probability that somebody else has been given A-A is about 99%. Or at least it seems that way....

***Again, this is a bit off, because of the possibility of two players both having the same pair. But I think that will only throw things off a small amount, and since I'm really just interested in ballpark figures, I'll ignore the discrepancy.

Addendum, August 23, 2007

I forgot yet another oddity that occurred during the tournament: 4-of-a-kind appearing on the board. In this case, it was 8-8-8 on the flop, and the final 8 on the turn. If we ignore what order the cards come in again, this will happen only once in 20,825 hands. I have seen this once or twice before, but it's pretty rare. Once it worked out great for me, because an opponent in a tournament flopped a full house. I had just ace-high. But with quads on the board when the river card hit, this idiot tried to bluff me. When there's four of a kind on the board, and I have an ace in my hand, I can't lose--the best he can do is tie me with an ace of his own and split the pot. So I raised, and he folded his cards face up to show his disgust at having his flopped full house go down in flames to an opponent holding just an ace. (He didn't have one.) Hee hee hee!

Addendum, August 25, 2007

If you're at all interested in the first problem I posed above, then you should read the comments. I'm putting this here, rather than in another comment, because I'm now pretty well convinced that I got something wrong, and the corrective information herein is more likely to be seen here than in another comment. (I'm always happy to be given better data or arguments; anytime I can replace bad information or logic with good, I'm better off for it.)

"Froggee" made me rethink how I approached the question of the probability that my pocket pair is the only one dealt on that hand, versus being up against another pair somewhere at the table. I posted the query on the Two Plus Two forum:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=11820546&an=0&page=0#Post11820546

A respondent there pointed me to an incredibly detailed calculation of this (which turns out to be much, much more complicated than I had imagined at first): http://www.math.sfu.ca/~alspach/comp35/ This is part of a larger set of posts on other computations problems related to poker, which, if your brain is wired strangely like mine is, makes for interesting reading: http://www.math.sfu.ca/~alspach/computations.html

Brian Alspach, author of those pages, approaches the problem as not just whether there is some other pair being held by another player, but whether there is a larger pair lurking out there. But that's OK; by using his answer for the case when you're holding pocket deuces, we get what I assume is the answer for whether there is any other pair (since any pair--other than the very rare case of somebody else having the other two deuces--will be larger than deuces). At the very bottom of the page cited above, we see that the probability of there being one larger pair is 32.69%, the probability of there being two larger pairs is 8.19%, and the probability of there being three larger pairs is 1.19%. These sum to 42.07%. The main reason the math is complicated is something I alluded to in a footnote to my original post: Being dealt a pair affects the probabilities of what other players can receive, and thus the standard formulas--which assume completely independent events--are a little off.

Anyway, I conclude from this that Froggee's method of estimation is better than mine was, and that when one has a pocket pair, about 42% of the time somebody else at the table will have another pair.

Incidentally, this doesn't affect the calculation I was aiming at (about quads over quads). I was correct that at a ten-handed table there will be two or more pocket pairs about 11% of the time. I just erred in my side note about what that implies about other players' holdings when I have been dealt a pair.

My thanks to "Froggee" for alerting me to the mistake.

Addendum, August 26, 2007

I thought of another way to verify the above conclusion--sort of a "poor man's Monte Carlo simulation." That is, I don't have an easy way to actually simulate 10,000 random deals, but I can do it mathematically, using the probabilities I derived in the comments:

P(0) = 0.5455
P(1) = 0.3408
P(2) = 0.0958
P(3) = 0.0160
P(4) = 0.0017
P(5) = 0.0001

In 10,000 deals, 3408 of them (ideally) would contain exactly one pair given out somewhere among the ten players. Let's say I'm in seat 1 for the whole time. I would then get 341 of these pairs. There would be 958 deals containing exactly two pairs, of which I would expect to receive 2/10, or 192. There would be 160 deals containing exactly three pairs, of which I would expect to receive 3/10, or 48. There would be 17 deals containing exactly four pairs, of which I would expect to receive 4/10, or 7 (all these are ideals or averages, of course).

Summed up, in 10,000 deals, I would receive a pocket pair 588 times (341+192+48+7) in seat 1. Of these, 341 would be the only pocket pair dealt--that's 58% of the 588 times, meaning that 42% of the time at least one other person would also have been dealt a pair.

OK, that does it, I'm convinced that 42%/58% is the correct answer. That is, 58% of the time that I have a pocket pair, it's the only one at the table, and 42% of the time there's at least one other pair given to an opponent.

Addendum, September 10, 2007

While looking around YouTube at various poker hands from televised shows, I came across this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNz-Duyx3Lc

It's from the European Open III, though I've never heard of any of the players and don't recognize the commentators' voices (the American guy sounds very familiar, but I just can't place him). But it's a phenomenally rare occurrence, worth looking at. At a 6-player table, 5 players start with pocket pairs! The probability of this is about 0.0004%, meaning that it will happen about once in every 250,000 hands. Even more bizarre, three of the pocket pairs are aces, kings, and queens. The guy with pocket kings makes a phenomenal--almost impossible--laydown, correctly reading the opponent with aces. But then he gets his heart broken when a third king flops, and he would have taken the huge pot. Even sicker, the guy with queens spikes a third one on the river, meaning that Mr. Aces not only lost the hand, but would have been in third place if the kings had stayed in!

This is the sickest game ever invented!

Irony: A poker story in four parts (non-grumpy content)

I will never use this blog to relate bad-beat stories, unless there is a larger point to them. Besides, the things I experienced today technically don't count as "bad beats," because when the money went in...

Wait. I'm already getting ahead of myself.

Part 1.

Long session at the Hilton today. I started with my usual buy-in of $100, and had a hot streak early on, up to about $400 by the end of the first hour. From there I grind it up further. I'm at maybe $600 when I have my run in with Hopelatron #1. (For the definition of hopelatron, see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/hopelatrons-and-seeing-future-non.html.) He is new to the table, and has played only a few hands. He's on my immediate left. I have the button, and join a bunch of other limpers with my crummy little Ah-2s. The flop is all hearts. This give me considerable hope for this hand.

H#1 bets $10. I'm the only caller. The turn card is another heart, giving me the nuts. He checks, I check. I want him to think that I absolutely hated that fourth heart hitting. Apparently he does, because he bets in the dark, not even waiting for the dealer to put out the river card. His bet is $35, and he has maybe $100 left, so I figure he must have a high heart, and he's probably willing to put it all in. I move all-in. He calls. Sure enough, he has the king of hearts. (I don't remember what his other card was, but it wasn't a heart.) He's a very nice guy, and takes the loss in stride, though he's much more astonished by it than I think he should be.

Look at it this way. Sure, there was only one card in the deck that could beat him, but with 9 opponents each having 2 cards, there is about a 35% chance (18/52) that one of them was dealt that ace of hearts. Yes, he or she might have folded it, but people tend to hang on to aces, especially when there is no pre-flop raise. So it shouldn't have been all that surprising to him that that's what I had.

He kept marvelling at how unlucky he had been for me to have the one card that beat him. Well, yeah, it was unlucky. But as degrees of unlucky go, it was run-of-the-mill, happens-every-day, garden-variety unlucky. It wasn't oh-my-God, take-your-breath-away unlucky. But I do what I'm supposed to do, for reasons of both politeness and strategy: I enthusiastically agree with him that he just got amazingly unlucky. Hopelatrons always believe that they lose because of bad luck, and it's best to encourage them in this delusion. They are much happier that way than if they have to confront the fact that they're not very good players, and their happiness keeps them coming back to the table after trips to the ATM for more cash to spread around.

After a few more pleasantries ("Nice hand," shaking my hand, etc.; like I said, he was a good sport about the whole thing, bless him), he departs.

Part 2.

Maybe 30 minutes goes by uneventfully. Then I find pocket aces in the big blind. Because there are many limpers, I put in a hefty raise to narrow the field, but still get three callers, including Hopelatron #2. The flop is A-K-Q rainbow, giving me three aces, the second best possible hand at this point. It doesn't get much better than that. I have played with H#2 before, and know him to be overly aggressive. I'm highly confident that he'll take a pretty big stab at this pot if I check to him, so I do. Sure enough, he pushes out $50. The other two players quickly fold. I move all-in. I'm not too surprised when H#2 calls, but I have to admit I am surprised when he turns over the only hand that has me beat, J-10 for the straight. Damn. Still, there are seven cards I can catch on the turn to make either a full house or quads, and then ten more cards on the river. But it is not to be. I lose about $200 to H#2.

How unlucky is this? Well, A-A vs. J-10 is about 83%/17% by the time all five community cards are out. But I think that underestimates the rarity here, because it's giving all five cards for the underdog to catch up. J-10 will flop a straight 1.3% of the time. (See Matthew Hilger's book, Texas Hold'em Odds and Probabilities, p. 189.) That includes four different straights, however, only one of which contains an ace, thus simultaneously giving me the trips I need to abandon all caution. The probability of J-10 getting exactly the three cards needed on the flop (A-K-Q) to arrive at this situation, when two of the four aces in the deck are already sitting in my hand and thus unavailable, is 0.09%, by my calculation; that is, it will happen only once every 1081 times that these two starting hands clash.

Part 3.

About five hands later I'm in middle position when I spot another pair of aces. Again I raise, and get three callers. Again I hit a set of aces on the flop (even though, on average, this will happen only once in every 8 or so times). But this flop is all hearts. Uh-oh, potential trouble, since my aces are clubs and diamonds. Hopelatron #3, who was in the big blind, is a guy I've played with many times before. I know him to love his flush draws. He bets out $30. I raise to $100 to dissuade him. The other two callers scatter like cockroaches. H#3 doesn't re-raise me, but just calls. I am left unsure whether he has a made flush or is holding just one heart and is hoping for another one to come on the board.

The turn card is a blank. H#3 checks. I have a ray of hope, because if he's on a draw, he probably won't call a second large bet here. I push out $150. He insta-calls. Crap, crap, crap. I know this guy well enough to know now that he has it made, and he's not going away. My only chance is the river card pairing the board to give me a full house, or the last ace for four-of-a-kind. Nope. That's not happening. H#3 checks again, and so do I. I show my set of aces, and he confirms my suspicion with the measly 6-8 of hearts. I don't say anything, but I confess that an involuntary rolling of the eyes betrayed my feelings about the situation.

How unlucky is that? This is more straightforward than the previous calculation: His two suited cards will flop a flush 0.8% of the time (odds being 124:1 against it).

In the space of ten minutes, I had twice been given pocket aces, twice hit trips with them on the flop, and both times was beaten for very large pots. I had lost about $500 just that fast. I'm not whining here, but objectively speaking, that's world-class, immense-pain, put-the-poor-bastard-on-suicide-watch, please-let-me-trade-places-with-Job-and-his-body-covered-with-boils unlucky. The other players at the table understand that well, and there are groans of sympathy for me from all over. The word "brutal" gets repeated a lot. I think that "brutal" doesn't begin to cover it. I'm not sure any word does.

To the best of my recollection (and I think I'd remember it), I've never flopped trip aces and lost to either a flopped straight or a flopped flush--and here they both happen almost back-to-back.

Part 4.

Less than three minutes later, H#1 returns, and sits down next to me, where he had been before. He tells me that he hit a good streak at the craps table, and has made back the money he previously lost to me. (It is a sure sign of a hopelatron to decide that craps--a game with an absolutely unbeatable, fixed edge against him--is a better way to win money than playing poker.) He's feeling good.

He recounts once again his amazement about how incredibly unlucky he got in that hand, losing with a king-high flush to my ace-high flush, shaking his head in disbelief. I'm still reeling and dizzy from the previous two hands, feeling about as snakebit as I can recall ever experiencing. But I know that H#1 has no clue what transpired while he was gone, nor would he have any reason to care about my personal misfortune. He feels his own pain far more acutely than he could ever feel mine.

So I smile as kindly as I can, and tell him, "Yeah, that was about as unlucky as a guy can get, all right."

"He was going to get caught"

Last Saturday night I was at Treasure Island and participated in their evening tournament. I made the final table in relatively good shape, maybe 3rd or 4th in chips. But when we were down to 7 or 8 players left, I took a huge hit when the woman to my right (with a slightly smaller stack) and I got it all in before the flop. My pocket queens were a big favorite to her jacks going in, but she caught a set on the flop and took most of my chips.

I was left with only about 5 big blinds, and the blinds were going to double again in about six minutes. That means taking aggressive action, even near-suicidal action, because otherwise one has no shot. So the next four times in a row that the action was unraised before the flop when it came to me, I went all in. The first three times I picked up the blinds uncontested.

The fourth time I had A-4 offsuit, and got called by a guy with A-9. I got lucky and split the pot with him when all big cards came and our kickers didn't play.

But this post is about a comment I overheard when our hands were turned over, before the outcome of the pot was determined. I heard one player at the far end of the table tell the guy next to him, "He should have known he was going to get caught, going all-in that many times in a row." There was an unmistakable tone of derision in his voice, a "he's getting his comeuppance" attitude.

Maybe this guy didn't notice the size of my stack after the big hit. Or maybe he's a complete idiot at tournament strategy. Either way, the point is this: I wanted to get "caught." I desperately needed to accumulate chips rapidly. I certainly knew that I could only steal the blinds a very small number of times before somebody would have a hand big enough to call me. But that's the point: I wanted a call, even if that meant being in with the worst of it, because doubling up was my only chance of getting back into a position to have some control over my fate.

There were still two even shorter stacks at the table. So it's possible that I could have hunkered down, hoping that when these players were finally forced to be all-in, they'd both lose, and I'd just barely sneak into the money (top four were to be paid). But I think that's crummy strategy. It may or may not increase my chance of surviving the bubble, but it absolutely kills my chance of winning, or at least finishing deep in the money. Finishing at the top once, with no money three other times, pays better overall than finishing at the bottom of the payout schedule four times. So that's what I was going for.

As it turned out, I got "caught" again shortly thereafter, and didn't survive that encounter. I exited in 6th place. But under the circumstances, I'd do exactly the same thing again.

So, Mr. Smug Smartypants, yeah, of course I was going to get "caught." But, you see, that was the goal.

By the skin of my teeth (non-grumpy content)

Poker blogs that mostly revolve around the writer's personal poker results and hands are, in my experience, deathly dull, so I've tried to avoid telling stories that are of no importance to any larger point. But once in a while something so unusual happens in a poker hand that I just have to tell the tale.

Played at the Hilton again today. One opponent is Paul. He's one I like having at the table, because he's friends with lots of people, and he's always having fun, win or lose. I pride myself on never gloating when I win and never whining when I lose, and the same can be said of Paul. And, truth be told, I also like having him there because he's still relatively new to the game, and I've gotten the best of him most of the times we've tangled in big pots. It's critical to today's story that I have seen him overbet and overvalue good-but-not-great hands on many occasions. That said, he plays quite a bit looser than I tend to, which means that there's always potential danger lurking, because he can have hole cards that I wouldn't expect him to be playing.

I'm in middle position, limp in with 9-10 offsuit. Paul is in the small blind, and raises to $12. 9-10 certainly isn't a great hand, but I'll have position on him after the flop, so I decide to go for the ride. I know that I can just throw it away with minimal damage if things don't develop favorably.

The flop is J-Q-K with two spades. I flopped a straight! I have the second nuts; the only hand that can be ahead of me at this point is A-10. Now, I immediately recognize that Paul could easily have an A-10. On the other hand, there's a wide range of hands with which he might have raised before the flop, so I'm not very worried about being behind.

Paul has checked in the dark, as is his custom when he's first to act. I put in a bet that's nearly the size of the pot, to make it unprofitable for him to try to make a flush, in case he is sitting on two spades. To my surprise, Paul raises me. I'm instantly worried that he does, in fact, have the A-10, and is trying to push me off of a spade draw. Still, I know Paul's manner of play well enough to know that he could put in a raise here with two pair or three of a kind, and certainly any two-pair or trips hands he could have with this flop would explain the pre-flop raise. He might even raise me here with A-K, though that seems less likely. So I conclude that I'm still reasonably safe with my straight.

It would make no sense to just call and see what develops, because my hand is already as good as it's likely to get, but if he has one of those six other hands, he could easily improve to a full house, and I don't want to be putting big money in with a straight after he hits a full house, if he's going to. So...

I re-reraise him. He waits only about 3 seconds before pushing all-in. Uh-oh. But my previous reasoning is, I think, still valid: Paul would certainly do this with several hands that he could plausibly be holding other than the A-10. Maybe I'm beat, but it's not often as a hold'em player that you flop the second nuts and have a less-experienced opponent betting into you. I decide that I'm ahead of six out of the seven hands he could have here (3 ways of making two pair, and 3 ways of making three of a kind), and behind only one of them, so I have to go for it. I call his all-in.

As I flip up my cards I say, "I've got the second nuts. I'm just hoping you don't have A-10." He smiles and turns over--I know you're all way ahead of me here--the A-10. I have no spades, so I can't make a flush. This means that I cannot win this hand outright, no matter what cards come on the turn and river. The best I can do is split it with him if an ace comes, which would then mean that we both have the same ace-high straight. I'm drawing to 3 cards in the deck just to get my half of the money back! That's about as bad a spot as one can get onesself into in poker.

The turn card is another spade, giving Paul a flush draw, though that doesn't really matter, because he's already holding the ace of spades, so if no ace comes on the river, I can't much care whether I lose to just a higher straight or to a flush. The $300 I had sitting in front of me is just as gone either way.

The dealer puts out the river card. It's an ace. Paul and I both have the Broadway straight, and we split the pot. We actually each lost about $2 on the hand, because of the casino's rake of the pot. But you can be sure that I was delighted to have that outcome. Paul, to his credit, didn't whine or complain or yell or swear or stomp his feet. He just shook his head.

By coincidence, a couple of hours later we were both leaving at the same time. I told him that somewhere there is kept an invisible log of poker results not as they actually played out, but as they by all rights should have happened, and in that alternate-reality log book, I owe him $300. He was gracious as always. He told me that he was saying to himself, "Finally, FINALLY, I got him where I wanted him"--and then I slipped out of it! A perfectly understandable sentiment, given our history. And it's basically inevitable that sooner or later he will nail me for a big pot, if we play together long enough, because that's the nature of the game. But today wasn't the day for it.

Addendum, August 16, 2007:

Paul took almost $100 off of me two days ago. By strange coincidence, I had 9-10 again, this time in hearts. The flop paired my 9 and gave me a flush draw, too. It got checked around. The turn was an offsuit 10, giving me two pair and the flush draw. Paul bet, and I liked my hand enough to move all-in. He had pocket tens, and had made a set with the card that made my two pair. Oops! I didn't hit the flush, and he won, quite deservedly--he was ahead every step of the way. Nice hand, Paul. You got me good there, and this time I couldn't slip out of the net.

The poker threat

I'm glad that it's rare that I hear actual threats of bodily harm at the poker table. But I'm puzzled that once or twice a week I hear a poker threat. These take many forms, but the most common are warnings like this: "You just keep playing that way, pal--it'll catch up to you." "Next time you raise my blind I'm going all-in on you." "I'm going to let you have this one, but I will bust you before we're done."

Last week I cracked a guy's pocket kings with sneaky little suited connectors that hit the flop just right. As I stacked up his chips, he said, "I'll be coming at you to get those back." There was not a trace of levity in his voice or demeanor.

I don't get this. Well, actually, I do, in a sense: It's purely about ego. A player who lost a hand or was forced to fold takes it as a personal affront to his dignity, and makes that kind of stupid comment to repair the psychic damage. But what I may never understand is why people let their egos get caught up in whether they win or lose a hand.

It's just not possible to win every hand in poker. It's not even possible to win every hand that you contest all the way. All that matters is that, over the long run, you win more money than you lose. That might mean giving up a lot of small pots in exchange for winning a few big ones, or, if you're a "small ball" kind of player, winning a bunch of little pots but reducing your chances of winning a huge one. Nobody keeps track of the number of pots won, because it simply doesn't matter.

So why do people take it as some sort of dent to the ego when they lose or have to lay one down? That fact is not a comment on one's worth as a human being, or skill as a poker player. It's just part of the game.

The poker threat doesn't intimidate any sensible opponent. It only accomplishes a few things, all of them bad for you: (1) It tells everybody at the table that you can't play dispassionately, that your fragile self-image is, in essence, put into the pot along with your chips on every hand. Any smart player will recognize this as a huge leak in your game, because you will do things like make bad calls to avoid the agony of being bluffed, or just to show that you can't be pushed around; you'll loosen your play in frustration, trying to give yourself more chances to get lucky, which will spew more chips to your opponents. (2) It changes your future play for the worse, because now you'll feel some weird obligation to carry through on your threat, targeting somebody who may be a better player or who is just on an unusally lucky streak--to your detriment. (3) It sours the previously light, friendly mood at the table. (4) If the opponent you threaten really was playing stupidly, it just might smarten him up enough that he'll play better, making those chips that much harder to win back.

You pay these steep prices all for the sake of a little phony self-soothing when your poor, delicate ego has been bruised. What a rotten trade-off.

So don't be an egotistical idiot (unless, of course, you're on national TV, in which case it might make for good viewing). Keep the threats to yourself.

What's the absolute worst thing in poker? A cheat, that's what.

I won a poker tournament today, in spite of—and, in part, thanks to—a cheater. It’s a strange story, but worth telling as a warning to other players.

I don’t consider myself much of a tournament player. Except for the occasional freeroll, I’ve pretty much avoided them. Too much of a crapshoot for my taste. The roller-coaster ups and downs of success (and income) from cash games is bad enough; for tournament players, it’s multiplied ten-fold.

But in early April I did well in the Hilton’s monthly freeroll, which prompted me to try a few others this month. To my surprise, I’ve done well and shown a substantial profit. One that I especially like is the Hilton’s weekly Saturday afternoon tournament, which I’ve now entered for several weeks in a row.

Today I was short-stacked near the bubble (the boundary between the players who finish high enough to get paid and those who don’t), and really thought I wasn’t going to make the cut. But I got ridiculously lucky at a key moment (all in with pocket 10s against a guy with pocket jacks, and I caught a third 10 on the turn, which made *him* the short stack, and, soon thereafter, the bubble boy). Then I got ridiculously lucky yet again against one of the two remaining big stacks (my A-9 paired on a flop of K-Q-9; opponent flopped two pairs with his KQ, and I got a third 9 on the river to beat him), and suddenly I was the big stack.

In the end, it was me and one other guy. At a glance, we appeared to have roughly equal chip stacks, though I thought I had a bit more. I offered to chop the first and second-place money proportionate to whatever our chip counts were. He wanted to chop, but he insisted that it be 50-50. Strangely, this wasn’t because he wanted more than his fair share, but because, he said, it would take too long to count the chips, and if we were going to take that much time, we might as well just play it out.

Huh? It would take maybe two minutes to count, and we each had more than 20 big blinds, so playing it out could easily take well into the next 30-minute level. The chip count is the standard way of making the chop. But I thought our stacks were close enough to equal that it wasn’t worth quibbling about, so I agreed to the even split.

While we were waiting for the tournament director to make the arrangements, I counted my chips, because I wanted to know for my own satisfaction whether I had actually ended up in first place. I had 10,575. There were (or should have been) 17,000 chips in play. Eyeballing the other guy’s stack, it looked like he had nearly 10,000, also. This seemed peculiar to me, but I dismissed it as bad estimation of the other guy’s chip stacks on my part. But it reminded me that I had noticed the same thing when it was down to four players: I checked my own chip count every ten minutes, and tried to estimate the others’ stacks, and the sum always exceeded 17,000. Again, I chalked it up to bad guessing on my part.

Then the odd happenings began. A Hilton security man came in, tapped the other winner on the shoulder, and asked him to step out to have a chat. Now, this was weird—what could security want to do with a poker tournament winner? As I was left pondering this, I was getting some weird looks and smiles from the poker room staff. They clearly knew what was going on, and that it would turn out good for me. (I’m pleased that I seem to be reasonably well-liked at the very friendly Hilton, which is where I play most often.)

A few minutes passed. Then Marc Nelson, director of the poker room and today’s tournament director, came in, shook my hand, and congratulated me on having won the tournament and first-place prize money. He explained what had been going on.

The highest-denomination chip we had gotten to at that point in the tournament was a pink $500 chip. Marc said that he had put five of them on the table during a break, removing an equivalent amount in black $100 chips. But a while later, he noticed that there were *eight* pink chips in circulation. I’m not sure of all of the details, but he obviously alerted other poker room staff and security, and they caught this guy both by direct observation and on the security cameras sneaking pink chips out of his pocket and onto the table. He had swiped them during a previous tournament, and brought them back today to pad his chip count. When they pulled him out of the room, they had him empty his pockets, and found that he had even more that he hadn’t yet added to the table.

He was, of course, disqualified from the event. I’m guessing that he is also banned from the premises permanently. I hope that he also goes into the infamous big black book of barred persons that the casinos share. In fact, I hope that they turned him over to the police and that he gets charged with criminal fraud—which this surely was. I wouldn’t even shed a tear if I learned that he received a bit of the old-school-Vegas back-room security “treatment” to help the lesson sink in a little deeper.

It’s amazing how cheaply some people will sell off their integrity. I have read rumors of such things happening in big-money tournaments. It’s just as inexcusable, but at least it’s easier to understand the temptation, when first place pays a million dollars or more. But in a $150 buy-in weekly tournament that never fills more than 3 or 4 tables, and for which the top prize is well under $2000? That’s where you focus all your scheming??? How pathetic. I was genuinely stunned that anybody would stoop so low over so little reward.

Hey, Mister would-have-been-second-place: I hope you’re reading this, you lowlife, scum-sucking cheat. You miserable, wretched piece of slime. Stay away from poker forever, you lout. We don’t need or want maggots like you infesting our game.

I feel most sorry for the guy who finished in 5th place—the bubble boy. The cheater’s 2nd-place prize money was divided evenly among the other three money finishers, because that’s all they could do. The guy who finished 5th wasn’t known to the room staff and didn’t leave his name, since he assumed he wasn’t getting any money. I’d gladly give back part of my winnings to help make it right with him, if I could.

So, sadly, the lesson has to be that when, in a poker tournament, you notice that something is off in the chip count, you should—you must—consider the possibility of cheating going on.

My heartfelt thanks to the Hilton poker room people for, first, being alert enough to notice and identify the source of the problem, and, second, for handling it so fairly and professionally. I wouldn’t expect anything less from them, because they pretty much do everything just about right there. Still, this was exemplary. It was happening right under my nose, but I was oblivious to it, even though in retrospect I realize that I had a lot of clues about the nature of the problem. Nevertheless, the tournament director and other employees were there unobtrusively watching and fixing the problem of which I was blissfully unaware. Strong work, all of you.

Addendum, December 20, 2007

I forgot to add the end of this story. A month or so after this happened, I ran into the "bubble boy" while I was playing at Caesars Palace. He had no idea what had happened after he left. I told him the story and gave him $100 of my prize money. I really didn't have any idea what the fair amount to give him would be, since that would require figuring out a proportionate amount from each of the people who cashed. But I thought that $100 was in the right ballpark. It make both of us feel better, and it fulfilled the commitment that I had written above.

Crazy night of poker (non-grumpy content)

Nothing profound herein--just two stories from a wild night of play.

Went to the Hilton, played normally, built up my $200 investment to a little over $700, and was feeling ready to quit, when....

HE walked in.

HE is this insane dude that comes in once in a while. I've only seen him there once before, but everybody that plays with him even once remembers him, and the poker room staff know him well. I won about $300 off of him a couple of weeks ago.

Here's how he plays: He buys $100 or $200 or $300 in chips, sits down, and announces himself all in before the cards are even dealt. He's just daring people to call. He doesn't even look as his cards until the hand is over. He considers this tremendous fun, whether he wins or loses. If he wins and doubles or triples up, then he starts actually playing, although even then he goes all in at the drop of a hat. But he thinks the game doesn't really start until after he's doubled or tripled his chips through dumb luck at the beginning.

Tonight he lost 8 times in a row, never winning once. And he left laughing.

Well, I got more than my fair share of that, because on about his 5th rebuy, I was in the big blind (last to act before the flop) with pocket aces. And 3 other people called the maniac's $100 raise before the action got to me. Aces are a big favorite against any other hand, and even against any 2 other hands. But start putting them against 3 or 4 other hands, and the probability of winning drops. Against 5 hands, the aces are less than 50% to hold up. So I reraised to $400 (I was very glad I had enough chips to do that). One of the callers had only about $170 total, so he was pretty much obligated to call, but the other two callers dropped out, which meant that there was $200 in dead money in the pot. My aces held up nicely against both remaining opponents.

So I finished up with my biggest Hilton cash-out ever: $1239, a $1039 profit.

It was just after midnight. The Sahara runs a popular midnight tournament, usually getting 50-75 people. If you can time it right, getting into a no-limit cash game when people are busting out of a tournament can be very profitable, because they tend to be angry and frustrated, and they play a little crazy. So I went there. Within the first few hands, I doubled up my initial $100 against a guy who really should have known he was beat.

Went card-dead for maybe 30 or 45 minutes. Then the crazy hand occurred.

I have the two red 8s. I limp in. Guy on the button raises to $15. Six or 7 people call, because he raises way too often to always have good hands when he does. The flop had three hearts, K-10-9. First guy checks. Second guy bets $25. It's my turn.

I've got three pieces of a straight flush. I don't really expect the next two cards to both be the perfect ones to give me that, but I can make a flush with any heart, and there are some combinations that can also make me a straight. But most importantly, I've been playing very few hands while I get to know the table, so I think I can pull off a big bluff here. I assume that the first two players don't have flushes right now; the first guy could have nothing at all, since he checked, and I think it's most likely that the guy who bet has a king, maybe even 2 pair, and likely also has one heart for a flush draw as sort of a backup plan. If I go all-in here, they will have to guess that I have 2 hearts and I flopped a flush. With my tight image, it has a decent chance of working. There's already about $100 in the pot, so it's worth trying to win it.

At first it looked like it might work, as the players behind me folded. But then the guy who checked went all in, and so did the guy who bet the $25! Yikes! That wasn't supposed to happen! Even worse, my guess about their hands was completely wrong--they BOTH had 2 hearts in their hands, so they had BOTH already made their flushes. And both were higher than the flush I could make, even if another heart came! (One was the ace-high nut flush, the other a queen-high flush.) Disaster! Oh well. Sometimes these things work and sometimes they blow up in your face. But I wasn't devastated, because (1) I felt like I was already playing with free/found money; and (2) getting caught bluffing can repay any losses later when people call me when I have a really strong hand, because they tend to think I might be bluffing again.

But hold the phone--the next two cards were another king, then the 8 of clubs. I made a full house (three 8s and two kings), and beat both flushes! When I got home, I used a web-based poker odds calculator to enter the scenario: when all the money went in after the flop, I had only a 3% chance of winning.

That is one of the worst suckouts I've ever pulled off. To get the two perfect cards to make a full house to beat TWO other all-in players who weren't on draws, but already had made flushes, is just extraordinarily lucky. One of them got pretty pissed off. The other just said, "Unbelievable. Oh well--it happens." I should have lost about $130 on that hand, and instead ended up making almost $300.

This is the cruelest game ever invented. But it's nice to be on the giving side of the cruelty for a change, instead of the receiving end.