Eric Doore is a doofus

I've been watching episodes of "Cash Poker: The Ultimate Gamble." In the one I just saw, we have a new player, introduced as Eric Doore. I've never heard of him before, and can't find anything about him with a Google search. Here's what I know: He came to a televised poker game wearing a big fish hat. Not a fishing hat, but a fish hat.

I assume he thinks this is funny. Maybe his closest friends think it's funny. But it's not. It's just stupid. It is "extra double super loathsome." (See http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/poker-gems-48.html.)

I realize that his purpose was primarily to garner attention, and that now I've given him more of it. Given the sparseness of web references to him, this post may quickly become the first Google hit when searching for his name. Fine. Let the world know that he's a doofus.

The only good thing that came out of this was the announcer's closing line for the episode: "A $27,000 pot being pushed to a man with a fish on his head will end this session of Cash Poker."

I joke around a lot, and I'm not always serious in my posturing and outrage over stuff. But let me be competely serious here. Dude, this is just bad taste by every possible measure. Really. No, I'm not kidding. It's dreadful. Deplorable. You look like an idiot. You make everybody at the table look like idiots for sitting down with you. You make the show's producers look like idiots.

Now, if you're already pretty well known in the poker community, and you make a silly prop bet--picking random examples, that the loser has to show up for the WSOP wearing a superhero costume (http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/pokerblog/archives/002920.php) or a bear costume with a diaper (http://www.pokervoice.com/pics/bearnappy.jpg) --OK, so be it. But if this is the way you decide to introduce yourself to the poker world, then you're just a creepy, pathetic loser.

While I'm on the subject, a few words about "Cash Poker." It's a syndicated show (translation: not even the most desperate cable networks would pick it up) that tries to copy the success of GSN's "High Stakes Poker," but misses in every possible way. They have mostly mediocre players playing a boring, mediocre game. The usual commentator, Brian Mollica, is mostly intolerable, sounding like a Saturday Night Live parody of the worst poker-show host ever. (The show had one bright spot, when Barry Greenstein came along as a guest co-host, and inserted thoughtful commentary.) He's not funny, not particularly insightful, and annoys me by trying to use exaggerated voice inflection to make the most mundane things sound exciting. "Brandon Adams picks up a PAIR OF EIGHTS!!! WOW!!!" Give it a rest, pal.

Here's another example of the wonderful commentary you get with this program. Kristy Gazes (http://www.kristygazes.com/) was a guest co-host for Episode 5. In one hand, Todd Brunson removes his baseball cap just before betting. Gazes says, “That’s a nice bet, and he took off his hat. I don’t know if I like that, superstitious-wise. He took it off in the middle of a hand. That might go against him this hand. I’m just saying for all you luck fiends out there like myself.” Brilliant, Kristy, just brilliant. First there are the grammatical gaffs. "Superstitious-wise"? "Like myself"? ("Like me" would be the correct construction there.) Really--you might try learning the language before taking on another hosting job. But even overlooking that, do you seriously believe that whether a player doffs or dons a hat in the middle of a hand affects whether he will win it? What is your IQ--12? That's the kind of cutting-edge poker analysis this show gives its viewers.

The production values are about what you'd expect from a high school class putting together their first experimental show as they learn how to use video equipment. The table they're using sounds like it's made of metal every time chips get tossed on it. The table chat is inane. The hostess, Brandi Williams, is unbearably dumb. I actually attended a taping of one of the episodes at Binion's back in February, and it was just as boring live as it is on TV.

Oh, and did I mention that they let players on wearing fish hats?

I hear that the show got cancelled after its first season. The world will not miss it.

Poker gems, #49

Todd Brunson, from an interview in Bluff magazine, November, 2007, p. 120:

If you don't respect me, I'll take your money. It's as simple as that.

Post #200

This is the 200th post in this blog. Quite a milestone.

Thanks for reading. I really mean that. This blog is itty-bitty in the scope of all blogs, averaging about 80 hits a day, but to me it's incredibly exciting and cool that every day that many people get curious about what I'm thinking. It keeps me motivated to ponder new things to say.

Superman playing poker

In my previous post (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/just-what-weve-been-needing-lead-in.html), I wrote:

Now, putting a thin layer of lead in poker cards would make a lot of sense, because then if you were playing with Superman, he couldn't use his
x-ray vision to see what you're holding. (Damn. Can't find an illustration of Superman playing poker. That would have been awesome.)

I was stunned this morning to find in my email in-box a nice note from a reader, accompanied by what he whipped up in Photoshop, as seen above. How cool is that?! Thanks, Anthony! (And here's a free plug for your video/graphics company: http://1060creative.com/.)

Now forevermore when somebody types "Superman playing poker" into a search engine, this is where he'll be sent.

Addendum, November 14, 2007

Yesterday when I did a Google search for "Superman playing poker," it was just an image search, which didn't find anything relevant. Because I was specifically looking for an image of some kind, I didn't do a general web search. Well, I just did so now, and found some, uh, interesting stuff.

This page http://www.answers.com/topic/superman-in-popular-culture?cat=technology informs me that there is an episode of "Family Guy" that includes a scene of Superman playing poker in hell. Sadly, it seems that nobody has put this clip up on YouTube.

In an episode of Family Guy, Peter Griffin imagines what hell would look like. He sees Superman playing poker with Adolf Hitler, Al Capone and John Wilkes Booth. When asked why he would be in Hell, Superman replies, "I killed a hooker; she made a crack about me being faster than a speeding bullet so I ripped her in half like a phone book."

Then there's this amusing clip:




This one isn't as good, but since the "Superman playing poker" category doesn't have a whole lot in it, I might as well include it here for the sake of completeness:





There are two more in that series, which you can watch here if you liked that one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THOPjSwz8oo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhgPmoKmb0k&feature=related

Actually, if you use different search parameters on YouTube, you can find several more, which I'll list here for no particular reason, but be warned that they're all lame:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwhK3VXb_q0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugV65Tga9FQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP0T0qdC3tg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGkp9fdTcqc



Addendum, November 14, 2007 (later in the day...)

I found a bootleg copy of the entire episode of "Family Guy" referred to above. Truly operating at the outer fringes of my technocompetence (is that a word? well, it is now), I managed to extract the relevant clip from it, post it on YouTube, and embed the result below. The video quality is terrible and the sound isn't synchronized right, but that's how I found it posted. Enjoy.

Just what we've been needing: lead in poker chips

See:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/071108/poker_chips_lead.html?.v=1

and

http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/pokerblog/archives/005827.php

OK, I'll admit that the picture above is pretty lame. After all, it's not exactly infants who are likely to be doing the most handling of poker chips. But it's hard to find photos illustrating "lead," y'know?

Still, I think there is a serious problem here. The second link, to a blog post, gets it right: The lead is a potential hazard because of handling chips, getting lead on one's fingers, then eating--or, worse, smoking, since inhalation is the most efficient means of getting lead into one's blood--without washing one's hands first. Unfortunately, this is a disgustingly common practice among poker players. (See http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-think-im-going-to-throw-up.html.)

After poker, my next recreational love is competitive pistol shooting, and we have the same problem there: shooters handle lead bullets all day long, but then just can't be bothered to wash their hands before eating or smoking. It's incredibly foolish, but that's how people are.

I know little about manufacturing processes, but I have a hard time thinking of any good reason that a company would need to use lead in the making of poker chips (unless your plant is in China, where, apparently, use of lead is pretty much mandatory for everything). So stop being defensive about it and just find an alternative already, OK?

Now, putting a thin layer of lead in poker cards would make a lot of sense, because then if you were playing with Superman, he couldn't use his x-ray vision to see what you're holding. (Damn. Can't find an illustration of Superman playing poker. That would have been awesome.)

Addendum, November 14, 2007

See also:

http://www.vegasrex.com/2007/11/12/this-is-why-us-poker-players-are-so-stupid/

and the embedded video at

http://kvbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=7339326

Sorry, Jennifer, but your movie sucked

In last night's segment of NBC's "Poker After Dark," apparently filmed in late spring/early summer, Jennifer Harman and Howard Lederer are discussing "Lucky You," which Lederer had not yet seen.

Howard tells Jennifer that http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ had compiled seven reviews of the movie so far, and they were all bad. Jennifer, who appears in the movie as a character trying to win a seat in the World Series of Poker through a satellite tournament, explains, "You know what I think it is, is most of the reviewers don't know poker, and it has a lot of poker in the movie."

Well, first, Jennifer, a well-made movie shouldn't require its viewers to know any particular subject in order to enjoy it; a good movie explains a technical area enough for a previously uninformed viewer to understand and enjoy it, perhaps even makes the viewer want to learn more about the subject later. "Lucky You" didn't do that.

If Howard were reporting to Jennifer today, he'd have more data--specifically, that site now lists 132 reviews, of which only 38 (29%) were considered positive, with an average rating of 5/10. It includes gems such as these:

"The Bellagio's fountains give a more expressive performance than Bana."

"An empty shell of a film, devoid of heart and soul, leaving us to wonder how in the world this movie ever got released."

"Staying home and playing solitaire would be two levels more interesting than watching this movie."

"If watching endless reruns of the World Championship of Poker is your idea of a hot weekend, there's finally a movie for you and your sad life."

"Below average, overlong drama that fails to deliver an emotional punch, largely because it's unsure of whether it wants to be a father-son drama or a romcom."

"Lucky You is long, utterly predictable and always bland."

"Curiously lifeless, Lucky You feels like poker without stakes; it goes through the motions with nothing to play for."

"Hanson’s an excellent director, and there are swaths of 'Lucky You' that are admittedly very well executed. But without a main character to root for, a believable romance or any reason to give a crap about the story, the whole thing just rolls over on its back and dies like a big, bloated, poker-flavored dead fish."

"Rather tepid going...the title obviously doesn't refer to the viewer."

Similarly, http://www.metacritic.com/ lists 29 reviews, with an average score of 49/100, including 10 in the green zone, 14 yellow, and 5 red. Check these excerpts:

"So what's Hanson exploring this time? His boring side, apparently."

"This spring, boredom has a new name: Lucky You. In the poker flick, an announcer calling a climactic poker match uses a Texas hold 'em term frequently, saying, 'And the flop. And the flop. And the flop.' This movie reviews itself."

"Poker has proven itself a popular spectator sport on television -- at least in the short run -- but as scripted drama, where you can pretty much guess the winner of a given hand, it's dull, dull, dull."

"The result is dull and lifeless."

Could all of those raspberries be just because the reviewers don't know the game of poker, as Jennifer lamely claims? No. Consider this one from Bob Pajich at Card Player magazine (http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news/article/8828/movie-review-lucky-you):

The people who made Lucky You took unprecedented access to the world’s most respected poker players and blew a chance to make an authentic movie about what
it’s like to live and compete in their world. Instead, the players become merely background in a movie that fails in just about every way.

Even the scenes of the “big game” at the Bellagio... are poker-chip flat. Sure, the sets look incredible..., but the games come off more like a council meeting than a
high-stake poker match.

After about two years of waiting for Lucky You, expectations may have gotten out of hand, but who could blame us? Looking at all the poker players the producers manage to assemble, it’s hard to believe the end result. It’s been almost nine years since the last good poker movie, Rounders, came out. Who knows how long poker fans will have to wait for another one.

I've written before about how bad this movie was (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-do-poker-movies-have-to-be-so-awful.html), so there's no need to repeat it. I'm obviously not alone. Actually, in all the poker-table conversations I've had and heard about this movie, not a single player has admitted to liking it.

If I had been Danette (barely seen in the screenshot above), dealing at the time this Lederer-Harman conversation was going on, I think I'd have stopped the action to say, "You're kidding, right? You really don't know how bad that film was?"

Jennifer, you're a sweetheart, but your movie sucked.

Poker gems, #48

From Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, this excerpt is an imaginary foray into the mind of Admiral Yamamoto. (Editing by Eugene Volokh, who posted this recently on his blog, http://www.volokh.com/, in a context having nothing whatsoever to do with poker.)


To those Army fuckheads, [the decision not to deliver the declaration of war until after the Pearl Harbor attack] is nothing--just a typo, happens all the time. Isoroku Yamamoto has given up on trying to make them understand that the Americans are grudge-holders on a level that is inconceivable to the Nipponese, who learn to swallow their pride before they learn to swallow solid food. Even if he could get Tojo and his mob of shabby, ignorant thugs to comprehend how pissed off the Americans are, they'd laugh it off. What're they going to do about it? Throw a pie in your face, like the Three Stooges? Ha, ha, ha! Pass the sake and bring me another comfort girl!

Isoroku Yamamoto spent a lot of time playing poker with Yanks during his years in the States, smoking like a chimney to deaden the scent of their appalling aftershave. The Yanks are laughably rude and uncultured, of course; this hardly constitutes a sharp observation. Yamamoto, by contrast, attained some genuine insight as a side-effect of being robbed blind by Yanks at the poker table, realizing that the big freckled louts could be dreadfully cunning. Crude and stupid would be okay--perfectly understandable, in fact.

But crude and clever is intolerable; this is what makes those red headed ape men extra double super loathsome.

[Editorial comment from your Poker Grump: "Extra double super loathsome" just became my new favorite phrase. Do not be surprised if it shows up on these pages again.]

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.

Reading level

According to http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx, the reading level of this blog is "Elementary school"!

Horrors! If that's accurate, I have not been doing my job! Since I write pretty much as I think, well, I'd hate to confront actual evidence that my thinking is stuck at an elementary-school level.

I'm suspicious of the accuracy of the rating, though. A legal blog that I regularly check, The Volokh Conspiracy (http://www.volokh.com/), where I spotted a link to this readability rating service, only ranked as "junior high" level, even though it's filled with highly technical discussions of academic legal issues. So I'm dubious.

But in an attempt to bump up the average reading level for the entire blog, I hope readers will bear with me as I make the next few entries about things like the search for Higgs bosons in non-Einsteinian condensates, the futility of denominating Emerson as a transcendentalist in light of his post-modern predelictions vis-a-vis the Hegelian dialectic, and the debate over non-Mendelian equilibriums as a mechanism of microevolutionary destabilization in founder populations subject to intrinsic genetic re-randomizations. All as they relate to poker, of course.

Addendum:

I had a hunch, based on how fast the rating web site ran its test, that it was only checking the most recent one or two posts. So, after putting up the foregoing bit of claptrap, I ran the test again, and just that one long sentence managed to push me up into the "junior high" reading level. Progress!

Idiots blame the dealer

One of the most baffling things I see and hear at poker tables is players who blame the dealer for bad cards or bad outcomes.

Of course, there's always at least a bit of this from everybody, mostly joking and good-natured. For example, after 15 or 20 minutes of unplayable hands, I'll occasionally request that a dealer see if she can find it in her heart to pass me one face card before she completes her shift. After an especially bad beat, I'll sometimes try to lighten my own mood by telling the dealer, "You understand that I have to hold you personally responsible for that pot." I think, though, that I have always made it abundantly clear through tone of voice and facial expression that I'm kidding. Many times I have seen off-duty poker dealers sitting at a table as players, and they needle the dealers about bad cards and unlucky outcomes, too—and I have always had the impression that these comments were both made and taken with a wink and a nod.

Some players, though, aren't kidding about this. Some sincerely believe that particular dealers have it in for them. There was a regular at the Hilton who would always take a 30-minute break when a particular dealer came to the table, convinced that it was impossible for him to win a pot from that dealer. Dealers get cursed at, have cards and chips thrown at them, and in other ways take personal abuse from angry players—not for any breach of protocol, but simply because of an unfavorable outcome in the play of a hand.

This is one of the most puzzling attitudes I run into. I'd like to interview these players in detail, and ask them, "Just how do you believe that the dealer is carrying out this plot against you? Does she spend her breaks setting up the decks in a particular order to deliver you bad beats, then slip those decks onto the table when you're not watching?" The idea that casino dealers deliberately select starting hands or outcomes of pots cannot withstand even a few seconds of critical thought by anybody with more than about three neurons connected together within his cranium.*

H. Lee Barnes, in his book Dummy Up and Deal: Inside the Culture of Casino Dealing (University of Nevada Press, 2002) eloquently, if unscientifically, explains the reason for this irrational behavior, from the player’s point of view.** From page 2:

Barnum was right about [a sucker being born every minute]. But the players
refuse to see their pictures on a poster with P.T. Barnum pointing at them. Nor
can the players see the house. What’s the house, after all? A building with
carpet and walls and chandeliers? A corporation? What the players see is the
dealer.

“How can you do this to me?” a player asks.

The dealer can’t pass the blame off onto Blaise Pascal*** or the
player’s bad judgment or the house. The dealer must shoulder the responsibility
for his or her imagined power, no matter how absurd it is to think that the
dealer exercises any control. The dealer becomes not the medium through which
chance plays out its pure odds, but rather the conduit of luck…. What is left
after all the motion is the dealer standing behind the table in her uniform. She
must face the player.

“How can you do this to me?”

The most unflinching assessment of this phenomenon I have encountered is that of prolific poker writer David Sklansky, in Fighting Fuzzy Thinking in Poker, Gaming & Life (Two Plus Two Publications, 2000), p. 113:

Players sometimes throw cards at the dealer, insult him or her, or declare that they will never tip. Sometimes this happens because the dealer made a mistake. More often, it is because the dealer dealt the abusing player a losing hand.

While I have never knowingly abused a dealer, I have a confession to make—I like it when I see someone else do it! It’s not because I am a sadist; and it’s not because I secretly wish that I had the gumption to do it myself. Rather, it is because I am delighted to know that my opponent is an imbecile!

The fact is that any player who gets mad at the dealer for his losing cards, truly, is a complete moron, and his stupidity ought to make me money…. So to repeat one more time, if you don’t think the dealer is cheating, and you still abuse him or her when you lose, you simply are an idiot.

Most of the overt signs of irrationality I complain about from low-stakes players can also be seen among high-stakes professionals, at least occasionally: superstitions, asking for new decks of cards to try to terminate a streak of bad luck, rabbit-hunting, having "feelings" about what card was coming next, getting upset when a judiciously folded trash hand would have hit big, etc. Until this week, though, I had never seen a recognizable, successful, name-brand, professional player earnestly blame a dealer for the cards.

Then yesterday, while browing around YouTube for something else, I came upon this clip of David "Devilfish" Ulliott: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyzZDCG43hI (from which the first screenshot above was stolen). In it, he and Phil Hellmuth get all their money in before the flop, and Hellmuth gets lucky to flop a third 9 to beat Ulliott's pocket aces. As soon as he sees that card, Ulliott says, "Look at this fucking dealer." (The Brits are less squeamish than we are about language on television.) He manages to make Hellmuth look like a classy gentleman by comparison--which is quite a feat in itself.

In another episode of the same series, Ulliott again takes out his bad beat on the dealer--even though he was openly reprimanded for it after the first incident (by a voice off-camera; I couldn't tell if it was the tournament director or one of the television producers). You can see the situation in the second screenshot above, and the hand is shown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSA0tzdx0yg. Again, all the money is in before the flop, with Andrew Black having attempted an all-in bluff reraise, which Ulliott called. As he walks away, he says something that is partially obscured by the commentators, but sounds like, "You'd better get coffee out to that dealer. She's fucking worse than the other one."

Yeah, Devilfish, it's the dealer for sure. Hellmuth and Black paid the dealers under the table to arrange the cards so that you would lose.

Really, what other scenario is possible by which it makes any sense to blame the dealer? But if Ulliott genuinely thinks that's what happened, then why not lodge a complaint with the tournament director, insist on reviewing the videotapes, scrutinize the security procedures, etc.? Of course, it's pretty unlikely that he actually believes this. But then, if he doesn't believe it, why say something so monumentally stupid, especially when you know it's going to be put on television?

When Hellmuth blows up, it's always at another player, whose idiotic play, in Hellmuth's eyes, resulted in whatever bad outcome he's currently bitching about. Mike Matusow, in his blowups, just blames bad luck, repeatedly claiming that he is simply the unluckiest player alive. These attitudes are stupid and demonstrably wrong, but at least they have some kernel of truth to them. Lots of Hellmuth's opponents do make bad plays, then get lucky--but he's no more a victim of this than every other professional who has to fight their way through large fields of amateurs to win modern tournaments. Matusow often blames bad luck when it was actually his own bad judgment at fault, but luck is certainly part of every hand. If he's not actually cursed with extraordinarily bad luck, in his blow-up situations it is at least true that he failed to get good luck where it might help him.

But blaming the dealer? Mr. Ulliott, in addition to being supremely ill-mannered, that's just moronic.

*I realize that there are countless schemes by which a dealer can manipulate a poker game. People playing in home games and underground cardrooms really do have to watch out for these "mechanics." But in casinos, using modern, standard security practices, it's almost unthinkable that any such shenanigans are going on. The dealer, if caught, would obviously be out of not just a job, but a career, as he or she would be forever unemployable in the gaming industry--not to mention facing criminal charges. Except at the very highest stakes, it would be impossible to win enough money from such a plot to make it profitable, after paying a dealer a large enough bribe that he or she might consider risking that much for it.


**This was written in the context of games in which the player is set against the house, with the house having a fixed edge, but the same psychology clearly carries over to poker, in which players are pitted against each other, with the house having no interest in who wins or loses.

***A 17th-century mathematician who, with Pierre de Fermat, basically invented the entire field of probability theory. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal.

No-limit straddles

Every poker room in the city, save one, has what seems to me to be a flaw in its rules: specifically, a fixed amount for a straddle bet in no-limit games. This is my call for the other 50+ rooms to get with the program.

First, the basics. A straddle is the currently more popular term for what Michael Wiesenberg's poker dictionary (the best there is; see http://www.poker1.com/mcu/mculib_dictionary.asp) calls an overblind:

********
overblind
1. (v) Put in a blind when one is already present. In a traveling blind game, this could mean someone putting in an optional blind in addition to the mandatory blinds. In a game without mandatory blinds, this would be blinding a pot (putting in a blind) after someone else has killed it. (To put in an overblind is sometimes called to kill.) Sometimes called go the overs. 2. (n) The blind put in by the person who overblinds. In a 3-3-6 traveling blind game ($12 limit or $12 minimum bet no-limit), John might put in $12 before getting his cards. He has doubled the limit (or the minimum bet) to $24, and he gets last action before the draw. Someone might say, "John acts last; he has the overblind." Also straddle, for both meanings.
**********

Because a straddle is simply a blind raise (though whether it is technically a "raise" is a point I'll deal with shortly), with the option to reraise oneself, in limit games it makes sense for it to be the same amount that a regular raise from first position (i.e., under the gun) would be. But since no-limit games don’t restrict the size of a raise, it's illogical for the amount of a straddle to be limited.

To be sure, nearly every poker room with no-limit games allows only a fixed straddle of double the big blind. Treasure Island is the exception. (The astute reader may have guessed that from the choice of accompanying photo.) There, a straddle bet in a no-limit game can be of any size the player wants to make it, up to his whole stack. After thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re doing it right, and everybody else is doing it wrong.

Personally, I think straddles are generally pretty stupid strategy. (See my full rant on this at http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/live-straddle.html.) I rarely do them, but it doesn’t bother me that others like using them. It just seems to me that if the goal of allowing them in the first place is to increase action (particularly at a tight-fisted table), then that would be better achieved by allowing a straddle of any amount. As it stands, the difference between calling the $2 big blind (in a $1-2 game) and a $4 straddle is virtually nil. But a straddle to, say, $15 would definitely alter (and make more complicated) the decisions for the other players. And from the perspective of poker room managers, it will tend to increase the chance of getting a pot large enough to collect the maximum rake.

I’ve checked several sources, and there is very little advice in print about this question. Specifically, the allowable amount of a straddle in a no-limit game is not discussed in Cooke’s Rules of Real Poker or Lou Krieger’s Rules of Poker. Bob Ciaffone’s "Robert’s Rules of Poker" (never in print, as far as I know, but widely available online) specifies that the straddle amount is twice the big blind, but it’s not clear to me whether he is intending to include no-limit games in that prescription. In Paymar et al’s Professional Poker Dealer’s Handbook, p. 141 (2nd edition), they don’t discuss no-limit games, but do say that in spread-limit games the straddle amount can be anything up to the maximum raise that would be allowed. This makes sense. Extending the same logic to no-limit games, the straddle amount should be unlimited.

Two technical questions that I can think of will come up if other poker rooms were to decide to give this a trial:

1. What is the minimum amount of a reraise? If the straddle is just a raise of the $2 big blind, then a straddle of, say, $15 is a $13 raise, and one would think that the minimum reraise would therefore be another $13, to a total of a $28 bet. But it may be better to think of the straddle not as a standard raise, but more like another (optional) blind. If so, then the minimum next raise would need to be double the straddle amount (e.g., to $30 on a $15 straddle). (Robert’s Rules, version 10, #15: “A straddle bet sets a new minimum bring-in; it is not treated as a raise.”) Personally, I think this makes more sense, and would be easier to implement, though it’s only a small difference.

2. What is the minimum bet on subsequent betting rounds? Usually the minimum bet on the flop, turn, and river is the amount of the big blind. Usually the occurrence of a straddle before the flop isn’t considered to change this. However, if one sees the straddle as, effectively, a third blind, then it might make more sense to use the straddle amount as the minimum bet size on subsequent streets, too. Furthermore, if there’s a straddle to, say, $15, with a call or two, a minimum bet on subsequent betting rounds of $15 is more sensible than reverting to a $2 minimum, given how big the pot is going to be. The question may never come up, because the kind of action junkie that will throw in a sizable straddle, given the chance, isn’t going to even consider a $2 bet when there’s a decent-sized pot built by his pre-flop action. But the room staff should make the decision in advance one way or the other, to be prepared, just in case.

So how about it, Venetian? Caesars? Mirage? MGM? Mandalay? Binion's? Red Rock? Who among you will step forward, admit that you've had an illogical rule in place, and change it?

Tick tock, tick tock

Before I had a blog, I wrote about my poker experiences in emails to a friend back home. Here's one from September, 2006:

****************
I forgot to tell you about an incident the other night at Golden Nugget. The guy in seat 10 was a real asshole--slowing down the game, criticizing other people's play, thinking he was funny by pretending to push all-in, then folding, etc.

In a hand I wasn't involved in, another player raised this guy's bet by $100. The guy took forever deciding whether to call or not. Finally, I asked the dealer for the clock. Any player at the table who thinks somebody is taking unreasonably long can call for the clock, which gives the player one minute to make a decision. If he does nothing by the end of that minute, his hand is automatically declared dead (i.e., it's the equivalent of folding).

In practice, it's rare to need to use this, because the vast majority of people are pretty reasonable in taking time to make decisions. When somebody has an unusually difficult call to make, the others are understanding about letting him take the time he needs. It's only when somebody is repeatedly slowing things down that he'll likely get the clock called. And even then, just the act of calling for the clock usually is enough to prompt the recalcitrant player to act. I've only called for it a couple of times, and I've never seen it actually get down to the end of the one minute.

So I call for the clock. The supervisor comes over with an electronic stopwatch, and calls out the time as the seconds elapse. One player at the table has never seen this process, so asks the supervisor what happens if the player doesn't act. The supervisor explains that the hand is dead--so even if the guy in seat 10 didn't understand that before (and, of course, every player is responsible for knowing the rules and procedures without them being explained to him personally), he is now informed of the consequence.

30 seconds. 20. 15. 10. Then 5-4-3-2-1, and the beeper sounds. The guy still hasn't done anything. The dealer reaches over, picks up the guy's cards and throws them in the muck.
At this point, the asshole really yells up a storm. "Hey, what the hell are you doing? I want to call!" Then he addresses the supervisor. "He picked up my cards when I was going to call!"
Fortunately, the dealer and the supervisor held the line and enforced the rule. Hand is dead. The guy, of course, keeps griping for several more minutes.

The player to my right thanks me for calling for the clock. Seat 10 is annoying everybody.
Why do some people have to be jerks?

Compare this to a guy at the Hilton recently. He hadn't played in a casino before. He was faced with an $80 raise. He wanted to see what his stack would look like if he called the bet and lost, so he counted out the $80 and set them in front of his cards, then looked at what was left, and said, "Nope, I don't think I can call you." But, of course, the act of putting the chips out constituted a call, and the dealer gently informed him that he had already called and couldn't take it back. It was obviously an honest mistake. The guy just said, "OK, I'm sorry, I didn't know. My fault. Do what you have to do." He lost the hand, bought more chips, and said, "Well, that's one way to learn what the rules are," and laughed at himself.

Why can't everybody be good sports like that?

Poker gems, #47

John Blackridge, writing in 1879, as quoted in Graham Sharpe's book, Poker's Strangest Hands:

Poor players usually increase their bets when losing, on the principle that bad play and bad luck united will win. A slight degree of intoxication aids to perfect this intellectual deduction.

Monkey poker (non-grumpy content)

In the November issue of Bluff magazine, Justin Bonomo describes playing a tournament at the Borgata while on "super monkey tilt." I had never heard that phrase before, but I took an instant liking to it. I think I'm more resistant to tilting than most players, though by no means completely immune. I'm not quite growing hairy arms or flinging my own poo around, but I have total empathy with the concept of "super monkey tilt."

That phrase reminded me of another I heard sometime last year. One player had a friend who was just sitting down and asked about the play at the table. The guy who had been there for a while said, "The monkeys are swinging from the trees." I loved that. It's so true sometimes.

I remember a few months ago when the king of the monkeys came to the Hilton. I was just about to leave, because I had been spinning my wheels for a few hours, not able to build a profit, when a guy came in and sat down on my right, which is the prime spot for milking a less-experienced player. Everything about him screamed novice: he didn't know what the blinds were, didn't know what to do with his chips, always had to ask what his options were, etc. He bought in for the minimum, which is something that almost no experienced players will do (because it so severely cramps how you can play and how much you can win). He even said out loud several times, "I have no idea what I'm doing. I only play 5-card draw at home." And he wasn't sandbagging--he really was clueless, didn't even know whether he had won a hand or not until the dealer would tell him. So I stayed.

You know how in cartoons, when somebody sees an opportunity to make a lot of money fast, their pupils change into dollar signs, and you hear the cash register bell going "cha-ching"? That was me.

But this monkey won, and he won, and he won. He just kept calling everything. A couple of players kept trying to bluff him off of pots, and he would just call with minimal hands--then turn out to have the winner at the end. Or he'd catch incredibly lucky cards on the river to make a winning hand. And a couple of times--seemingly almost at random--he's suddenly announce "all in," which would cause everyone to fold, because it was impossible to know what he had. He turned $50 to over $300 in less than an hour, and to about $400 over the next hour.

Since almost none of it was my money, I was having a great time watching. It was really, really funny to watch how it frustrated the people who were losing to him. Naturally, I kept encouraging him by telling him "nice hand" when he won. When he'd say, "I don't know what I'm doing," I'd tell him, "That's the beauty of this game--you're just as likely as anybody else to wind up with the best hand."

You can't bluff a bad player. They don't know how to read the messages you're sending. They don't have enough experience to know that, e.g., top pair with a bad kicker isn't a hand to call a big raise with. So they call, and if you have less than that, you lose.

I knew, though, that the lucky streak couldn't last, and I'd get my fair share of his accumulated booty if I just picked my spots carefully. And sure enough, when he was down to about $200, I got a series of three big hands in 20 minutes or so. He'd check, I'd bet, he'd call all the way down, and nearly all of his last $200 came into my stack. Of course, I'd just shake my head, say, "Sorry, I caught a lucky hand on you there." He was very nice about it--completely an "easy come, easy go," "oh, well" kind of attitude.

It's ironic, sort of. I really took very little of his own money. He was just like the conduit for getting the other players' chips to me--the people who tried to push him around, or weren't cautious when there were possible draws on the board that he might hit. They lost the chips to him, then I took them when I was in a dominating position. It was as if the whole thing had been orchestrated. It made for an unusually enjoyable and profitable day.

I guess you could say that the monkey put most of the table on super monkey tilt.

Perchance to dream (non-grumpy content)

I suppose it's inevitable that if one spends a good portion of each day playing, reading about, and thinking about poker, at night one will sometimes dream about it, too. And as with most dream subjects, the result is often weirdly distorted.

Last night I dreamed that I was in a hand with two cards, marked "6" and "12." I was having some difficulty figuring out whether I won or lost to a guy who was holding a 6 and a king.

But even with extra cards, that was a simple game, compared to another one that played out in my addled brain one night. I found myself in a game in which one had to bet on the number of vowels and consonants that would appear in the cards. For example, "eight of hearts" has five vowels and eight consonants. The winner was the one who had most accurately predicted the total number of vowels and consonants in his final five-card hand. It was terribly complicated.

I find that I much prefer a 52-card deck, with pairs and straights and flushes determining the winner. As baffling and frustrating as the game seems at times, it's far simpler than the mutant versions that my twisted subconscious invents in the dead of night.

How to play poker, from the mouths of babes (non-grumpy content)

I played poker not too long ago with a woman who told me about a recent trip to a toy store with her 6-year-old son. He had apparently picked up on parts of the game when his mother watched it on television. In the store they passed a display of sets of poker chips. The boy said, “Mom, I know how to play poker. You push your chips into the middle of the table and say 'all in,' and you win!”

The kid might turn out to be one of the great ones.

Pokker Playar Noospapper needs gooder riting

I really enjoy reading most poker periodicals: Card Player, Bluff, All In, Poker Pro, and Poker Player.

I've mentioned previously that, as a former editor, I'm bothered more than most people by bad prose and typographical errors. Most poker publications are about average in the quality of their editing, compared to the magazine industry as a whole. Card Player is quite a bit better than average. Given its relatively small market, they do an admirable job over there.

Then there's one that is just horrible: Poker Player newspaper (http://www.pokerplayernewspaper.com/). It is riddled with more errors and just plain awful, first-draft writing than any publication that I regularly read in any subject. It's as if they don't know what a copy editor is. For them, I'll explain: it's a person whose job it is to fix at least the obvious problems with spelling, grammar, and punctuation. If this person is also authorized to help the writers with clarity, forcefulness, euphony, rhythm, and other aspects of good writing, all the better. But at a bare minimum, you have to weed out the errors that make it look like it was written by sixth-graders, or you lose credibility with readers and advertisers who care about the language.

Not the entire publication is this way. Columns by Mike Caro and I. Nelson Rose are almost always pristine, or nearly so. At the other end of the spectrum are the pieces by Jennifer Matilan and Donald Woods (who, in his most recent column, wrote that something increased "traumatically," when he presumably meant "dramatically"--hey, no problem, they mean almost the same thing, right?). It appears that for both of them having a coherent thought is a Herculean struggle, let alone putting it into words.

Given this range in the quality of writing, I get the distinct impression that the writers send their work in, and it gets shunted directly to the layout people for placement on the page, without anybody ever looking at it critically for problems with the clarity, orthography, and general writing quality. There is no copy editor mentioned in the staff listing, which, I suppose, shouldn't be too surprising.

Well, I've finally had my fill of it. I've been reading this rag consistently for well over a year without saying or doing anything about it, and the slow boil has finally set off the kettle's whistle. I'm feeling like Howard Beale in "Network":

You've got to say, "I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!" So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to
get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and
yell, "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

OK, maybe I'm not quite that hot and bothered, but it is damn annoying to have such good information sullied by such lousy writing and editing week after week after week.

So I'm going to do something about it--something possibly even more effective than sticking my head out the window and yelling at the neighbors.

I've spent the last few hours going through the current issue with a pen and circling all of the examples I could find of typos, misuses of punctuation, sentence fragments, missing words, ambiguities, and just plain bad writing. I then typed them all out in this format:

*********************
Original: Relying solely on hyper aggressive play
Corrected: Relying solely on hyper-aggressive play
Comment: I could also live with an unhyphenated hyperaggressive, but hyper aggressive as two separate words is unambiguously wrong.

Original: Yang’s a long time fan of
Corrected: Yang is a long-time fan of
Comment: This is another one of a zillion compound adjectives that, for some reason, you don’t want to hyphenate. As for the contraction, it’s usually better in formal and semi-formal writing to omit the great majority of them. There are exceptions, but this is not one of them. (Lest you think me a hypocrite, I do not judge the present communication to be either formal or semi-formal. My intention is to write just as I would speak if we were face to face. For that purpose, things like it’s and don’t in this paragraph work better than the alternative, because it is and do not would sound unnatural.) Here the reader’s eye sees Yang’s and expects the next word to be a noun, because Yang’s looks like a possessive pronoun. Yang’s isn’t technically wrong here, but you remove the ambiguity, look less lazy, and simultaneously inject a touch of elegance into the writing by omitting the contraction.

Original: just as respectable as chess…
Corrected: just as respectable as chess.
Comment: I mentioned the misuse of the ellipsis earlier. Matiran is a flagrant offender, doing this four times in one column. This is a sure sign of somebody who simply has no clue about how to use standard punctuation. Aside from the obvious case of an omission from a quotation, the only legitimate use of the ellipsis is to indicate an unfinished thought or a trailing off into silence (the technical term for which is aposiopesis). There are occasions when this rhetorical device might be appropriate in a column, but not a single one of Matiran’s four uses is of this nature.
***********************

I was planning on doing the entire issue, but just couldn't stomach it after the first six hours or so. I made it through half of the contents, and the list of problems takes up 14 pages in a Microsoft Word document--and most of them do not have extensive comments like the examples above.

Next I'm going to email this document to the publisher, editor, and managing editor, with a suggestion that they are sorely in need of a good copy editor. If they want to hire me for the job, I just might take it. Of course, it's more likely that they'll just ignore me as a raving lunatic. They can't cut off my subscription in retaliation, though, because I pick it up free at poker rooms around town. (Perhaps they'll require the rooms to post my picture with a warning, "Do not give our publication to this man!")

Regardless of what the response is, your intrepid reporter will faithfully post it here.

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.

Strange night at the Venetian

Halloween in a casino can be surreal. At a minimum, I spotted a caveman, Superman, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Ali G, a cat, a belly dancer, mob enforcers, Ozzie Osbourne, a bumblebee, a Mexican bandito, and a young woman doing a spot-on impersonation of a Venetian cocktail waitress.

OK, she may have been an actual Venetian cocktail waitress. It's hard to tell for sure.

It's the same with all the people dressed as pimps and hos. There's just no telling which of them are in holiday costumes and which are just dressed for work the same as every other day.

Weird.

Poker gems, #44

John Vorhaus, in his "Killer Poker" column in Poker Player newspaper, October 29, 2007, p. 34:

It's fine to tell lies to other players at the table; you're right that that's part and parcel of the game. But telling lies to yourself is something that simply cannot be tolerated....

Remember: Deception is what you do to others; delusion is what you do to yourself.

Funding online poker accounts is a pain

Is online poker rigged? I doubt it, but who knows, really? This I do know, however: It is a royal pain in the butt to put money into an online poker site.

I haven't had occasion to do that in a long time, because I just don't play online much. But last week I learned that a site I like a lot (and keep referring to, in case you hadn't noticed), http://www.allvegaspoker.com/, was having a private tournament on Full Tilt Poker tonight. I wanted to participate, because it's people I chat with often. The tournament was only $5.50--surely I had that much sitting in my FTP account, right? Nope. The cashier said I had exactly $0.01. Hmmm. I don't think that will cut it.

NetTeller used to be so slick. Once it was set up, click-click-click, money in from your checking account and zapped to the poker site in mere seconds, or back again when cashing out, all for free. *sigh* Those were the days, my friend.

No more. The nasty, stupid, detestable bill that Congress put through last year made NetTeller scared to death, and they stopped accepting business from U.S. addresses. Now we're left with all of the expensive, awkward, clunky, difficult-to-use, exasperating alternatives.

epassporte

I first tried my epassporte account. I've had this for years, and it has worked fine, except that they steal 5% of what I want to send to an online site. Fine, I'll pay their ransom this once, I thought. But I tried it several times from the FTP software, and it wouldn't go through, and wouldn't explain why. So I logged onto http://www.epassporte.com/ and found a cheery message telling me that my account had been placed into some sort of security-review hold status. So I sent their customer service center an email asking, y'know, WTF? This was six days ago. As of today, no response. So, getting desperate as the hour of the tournament approached, I called them. Got put on hold for almost 30 minutes. Finally the person at the other end confirmed what that cheery message said about my account, but couldn't tell me anything about why or what it meant or what had to be done to fix it. She promised to pass the problem on.

Well, at least they were quick about it. Within about half an hour I had an email telling me to check my messages at the epassporte site. I did, and it told me they needed more documents to verify the account. I'm guessing this is because I moved from Minnesota to Nevada since the last time I used their service, so something in my bank account routing number had changed, or maybe a public-records database search found the change in driver's license. Whatever. They needed me to scan my Nevada DL and latest bank statement and email them back. So I did. Now they tell me that they'll have somebody review those documents real soon. Yeah. Right. Just as fast as you nimrods reply to your customer-service emails, I'll bet.

GatorPay

Plan B: Last week when I couldn't put through an epassporte transaction, the FTP site suggested that I try their newest funding option, something called "GatorPay." Officially what one does at GatorPay is buy long-distance telephone charge cards. But from what I can tell, it's largely a sort of back-door way of funding online gambling, because, unlike most phone card systems, this one will let you authorize a vendor to take money off of your prepaid card. You can see how that would be handy.

So I slog through the page after page of information that they need to set up an account, including a bunch of security questions. The last step is that their computer has to call my home phone number to verify that it works. Well, that's a problem. You see, I live in a stupid apartment complex with a stupid 1970s vintage phone system that has one stupid phone number for everybody; you have to dial a stupid extension for a specific apartment after the stupid switchboard answers at the stupid main number. This is frequently a problem online, because the stupid forms almost never give you enough space to add in the stupid "extension." GatorPay's did let me put in the stupid digits, but I was confident that their stupid computer would disregard them and couldn't handle the extra business about waiting for an answer, then punching in a stupid three-digit extension. Sure enough, the verification call that I needed in order to complete setting up the account never came through.

So I called GatorPay's customer service and explained the problem. The guy was very understanding and said that it was no problem, he could call the number manually and do the verification. Well, at least he usually could, but not right then, because their whole system had crashed. I checked in a couple more times over the next few hours, and the web site was down, too. This does not inspire confidence in the technology to which one is giving access to one's bank account.

I kind of forgot about the whole thing until today. While I was waiting for epassporte's response this afternoon, I tried GatorPay again. I couldn't log onto their system because it said it had no such account. Hmmm. Well, maybe when the verification step never occurred I got deleted after a day or two, for security reasons. That would make sense. So I tried to create a new account. But after the first page of data, the system told me, "It appears that you already have an account with us." So I tried logging in again, and it wouldn't let me. I tried the "forgot my password" option, in case maybe I had typed it wrong, and that seemed to be a dead link that didn't do squat.

I called customer service and related the whole sorry tale. Predictably, they had nothing about me in their system. The guy assured me that I had no account there and it would be no problem to set one up from scratch. He didn't seem to grasp that I had just tried that, and had hit an electronic brick wall, because the system did, in fact, recognize me. This is where he started grasping at straws. He asked me if I had had accounts at other online gambling funding sites. Well, yeah, NetTeller, and a couple of others that I used to use when I was in Minnesota and brick-and-mortar casinos were few and far between. He said that was the reason, that I wouldn't be able to set up a GatorPay account, because their system recognized me from my business with those other sites.

Now, this makes absolutely no sense. First, I doubt that they can actually gain access to those other businesses. (Unless, that is, GatorPay is secretly associated with them in some way, which I kind of doubt.) Second, it would be utter lunacy to set up a business such as this that would automatically reject every potential customer that had ever dealt with their competitors. That's like Apple saying, "Sorry, you can't buy a Mac, because we see that you've owned an IBM previously." It's like Delta refusing you as a passenger because their records showed that you once flew United.

So obviously this guy is either a charlatan or a madman. Since he tells me that there is nothing more he can do, I ask to be transferred somewhere else. He sends the call to the security department. To this guy I relate the whole thing. Again. He checks, verifies that I have no account there, and tells me--wait for it--that there is no reason I can't set up an account at GatorPay. No, he has no idea why it won't let me do just that. That's not really a security matter, he oh-so-helpfully informs me. It's an IT issue. No, I can't talk to IT personally, he has to pass on a message.

Maybe I'll get an email back from somebody at GatorPay, someday. Maybe I won't. You want to place a bet on that? Well, I would take your bet, but first we have to do some background checks on you. It'll only take a few days.

A savior (which is not Christ the Lord, in this particular instance)

In the meantime, I posted a note of regret on the AVP forum, explaining my dilemma and why I wouldn't get to register in the tournament. A white knight came to my rescue and offered to transfer me a few bucks from his FTP account, somebody I don't even recall chatting with before (though presumably he recognized me from my posts). I shot him the money via PayPal, and he made the transfer on FTP. The whole thing took four emails and about three minutes. Thank you, jlindley9, whatever your real name might be! Even in this high-tech age, sometimes actual humans--even strangers--are more reliable and efficient than computers.

Oh, the tournament? I did great, just great! As per my usual lack of online prowess, I finished in 17th place. Out of 24 players. Guess I gotta keep working on that aspect of my poker game. At least now I have a little money in place to do it with, no thanks to the businesses that are allegedly set up specifically to facilitate it.

Phil Hellmuth is bad at math

I thought I couldn't dislike Phil Hellmuth more than I already did. Turns out I was wrong about that. In fact, I'm thinking now that my capacity for disliking him may actually be infinite. Still, I didn't know, until last night, that I would end up including "poor math skills" on my list of reasons for disliking him.

On this week's installment of GSN's "High Stakes Poker" an interesting situation came up. The hand itself was pretty unremarkable, as you can see from the cards shown in the accompanying screenshot. What was interesting was whiny Phil Hellmuth's negotiations for "insurance" on the hand.

In this game, $67,000 pots are bigger than average, but not all that unusual. In most episodes there are one or two pots that climb into the $100,000-$200,000 territory. So to start off with, it's strange for a player to be so afraid of losing that he'd seek insurance on a pot of this size. Nobody else at the table would even think of it--only Phil, who, for some reason, just can't stand losing a biggish pot. This is particularly strange, since he is up by a couple hundred grand for this session, as he has already bragged.

But OK, it's his right in this game to try to reduce the chance that Eli Elezra will catch a lucky card and steal this pot from him. They could agree to run the last card twice, for example, and it would be highly unlikely that Eli would luck out twice in a row, so Phil would be almost guaranteed at least half of the pot. Another possibility is one that Eli explicitly offered: give Eli a quarter of the pot and take three-quarters for himself. I've seen Phil make this kind of arrangement when he's in a dominant position and all-in against Barry Greenstein in a previous season; if I recall correctly, Phil was something like a 90% favorite, and Greenstein agreed to give him 80% of the pot, and they didn't even play out the rest of the cards. In Greenstein's more rational view, he'll take the expected value that Phil is giving up, and not worry about the variance.

For some reason, though, Phil this time wants to go the "insurance" route. That is, he wants to pay somebody a small amount if he wins the hand and, in exchange, be paid a larger amount in the event that Eli draws out on him. This is where it starts to get strange.

I have the episode on my hard drive, so I can play it back and do a verbatim transcript. Phil says, "Queen is a chop. All right, I'm just going to insure against a nine or a jack."

Here's Phil's first mistake. It's true that a queen on the river chops the pot, because both players would have two pairs, kings and queens with a 10 kicker. But Phil fails to notice that a 10 also produces a split pot, because it gives both players tens and kings with a queen kicker.

Phil continues: "So it's eight outs.... 36 to eight is the actual odds. I'm a 4 1/2 to 1 favorite."

That's his second and third mistakes. Eli actually has only seven outs to win the pot outright: the four remaining jacks to make a straight, and the three remaining 9s to make a better two pairs. Additionally, Phil is strangely counting the cards that make for a chopped pot as being on his side. (Sam Farha folded a 9 and a 10, which would affect the calculation if Phil knew about them, but he doesn't, so we'll consider them as unknowns, treating them the same as the ones still in the dealer's hand.)

The actual odds, not counting the queens and 10s, are 31 cards for Phil and seven cards for Eli, which is 4.4:1 (which, by coincidence, happens to be close to what Phil said, though he was wrong in how he got there). If you account for the pot-splitting cards by adding them to both players' sides of that ratio, it's 37:13, or only 2.8:1.

Phil asks for insurance at 4:1. "I'm 4 1/2 to 1. I'll take 4 to 1. I'm letting you have above 10%. You're getting 12 1/2% juice. That's pretty good."

Brandon Adams takes him up on it for $40,000 to $10,000. That is, Hellmuth is to pay Adams $10,000 if he wins the hand, and collect $40,000 from Adams if Elezra sucks out on him. Then Farha joins the deal for an additional $8000 to $2000.

The dealer puts out the river card: a queen, and the pot is split.

Now Hellmuth says, "It's a split pot, nobody has to pay any insurance."

Farha objects, but then both Jamie Gold and Daniel Negreanu remind him that Phil specified that he was only insuring against a jack or a 9, and Farha, for some reason, accepts that.

But that's what is most strange here. You would expect Adams and Farha to collect their insurance payment, because the event against which they were providing insurance did not occur. Phil said he wanted insurance against a jack or a 9, and none came--so he owes his "premium" to his insurers. What's more, he was unambiguously including the pot-chopping cards as being for him in his proposal, when he claimed that he was a 36:8 favorite. He never said that a chopped pot would mean no money going either way as part of his offer.

So one of two things happened: The insurance deal was made with the understanding that a split pot meant Phil owed insurance, and he reneged on his end of it, or he misrepresented the terms of the offer. By coincidence, he happened to state the odds approximately correctly for the situation in which a chopped pot meant no payment either way, but his explanation clearly included the implication that he would pay up in the case of a chopped pot. It's a very strange situation, and I wonder whether debate among the participants continued after the taping stopped, and whether any money ended up changing hands. (This was the last hand of the night.)

However they worked it out amongst themselves, we're left with these conclusions: Phil Hellmuth doesn't know how to count an opponent's outs. He's a high-stakes dweeb who, uniquely among these players, can't tolerate the swings that inevitably come with playing for these amounts. Finally, he either misrepresented the offer he was presenting to Adams and Farha or welched on it after the hand was over.

If you didn't have enough reasons to dislike Hellmuth before, there's at least three more for you.

Addendum, October 30, 2007:

I've been discussing the math of this with a bunch of other people at the http://www.twoplustwo.com/ forums, and one of them just posted a link to this entry from Hellmuth's blog, apparently made soon after the taping of the show in question: http://www.philhellmuth.com/phil-hellmuth-poker-blog.html?id=1866 In this post, he says, "Later on, I figured out that I owed $12,000 to Brandon ($10,000) and Sammy ($2,000), because they insured the very last hand of the night. By the way, Brandon doesn't even know that I owe him $10,000, because I decided that I owe him after the fact! He will be pleasantly surprised, that's for sure."

Glad to know that he finally did the right thing. Still hard to know why they didn't get it sorted out on the spot.


Addendum, November 4, 2007

Brandon Adams just posted a note about this situation to the twoplustwo forums:

Yo, I should have commented on the Hellmuth insurance thing earlier. First off,
Phil is one of my favorite guys in poker. He's not cheating anyone. I'm going
off memory here....The deal was only partially clear in my head at the time of
the insurance. it was obviously a good deal for me. when we chopped, i didn't
know what we were supposed to do, though since insurance naturally is protection
against something bad happening (in this case, a bad beat) and something bad
didn't happen, my first thought was that a chop went to me. but then i started
thinking about it and i realized that the deal was good for me even if a chop
was a chop. so i was confused and decided to let it go. this is just what i
remember thinking... as of now, i have no recollection of the cards and i
haven't read the above. The next day phil runs into mori at the coffee shop and
tells mori that he should have paid me. Phil emailed me to tell me he owed me
10k. I thought about it some more and told him not to pay me. I said this b/c if
i had won with a chop, then that implied some ridiculous vig for me (i still had
a decent edge counting a chop as a chop). He insisted on paying me, I told him
we'd flip a coin for it, then he said he'd pay me $6k. he paid me $6k the first
time i saw him at the series. ba

This is pretty reasonable of Adams. Here's the math on what he's saying: Suppose the deal had been explicitly made that no insurance money went either way in the event of a chopped pot. There are 31 cards that win the whole pot for Phil, 7 for Eli, so the odds against an insurer having to pay out are 31:7, or 4.4:1. That's what Adams is calling the "decent edge counting a chop as a chop." On the other hand, if a chopped pot meant that Phil still had to pay his insurance "premium," then there are 37 cards on which he has to pay it (the 31 that are an outright win, plus the 6 cards that result in a split pot), and only 7 on which he collects insurance. 37:7 is 5.3:1, which is what Adams is here calling "some ridiculous vig for me" (32%, actually, compared to the 11% he decided was "decent").

In any event, it sounds like they ended up settling it like gentlemen.

Poker gems, #43

John Carlisle, in his "Poker Counselor" column in the Poker Player newspaper, October 29, 2007 (p. 14):

Making a living at poker is more than hard. It is a daily struggle that tests the mental fortitude and internal strength of any person. There is no steady paycheck. There are big swings, with losses hitting hard. The losses don't just hit the pocketbook, though. Instead, the losses crack your ego, your spirit, your energy, and your will.

Poker is a grind, and there are innumerable vultures at those tables waiting to beat you down and pick at your bones.

A fellow grump

I've long liked the posts from a guy who calls himself "Local Rock" on the discussion forums of http://www.allvegaspoker.com/, but today he outdid himself. Have to take a hat off to this kind of grumpy writing:

http://www.allvegaspoker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=28831#28831

The strange grammar of poker

Every specialized field develops a language all its own. Poker is no exception. But even after being fully immersed in the game for well over a year now, and pretty intensely involved in it for a year or so before that, some of what is generally accepted as correct lingo still falls hard on my ears.

The first phrase I remember catching my attention as being just plain confusing was the phrase "dead to," as in "He's dead to a jack or a queen." This means the opposite of what one would initially tend to think. I first understood this to me "If a jack or a queen comes, he's dead; otherwise he'll win." But it's actually used to mean just the opposite: "He has to catch a jack or a queen, or he's dead." The syntax there still doesn't make sense to me.

The next one I started encountering was "running good." This has a specific meaning, which is "getting lucky." It is not to be confused with playing well, which is an entirely different concept. And the adverb good appears to be universal, even though it sounds like a grammatical clinker; nobody ever says that he is "running well." Of course, that bleeds over into the other half of the poker equation, so that people tend to say things like "I've been running good and playing good." Or this, from Kristy Gazes's blog: "70% of the time I ran bad, 20% of the time I played bad...." (http://www.kristygazes.com/tips/Jul+2007) I've mostly gotten used to the first half of sentences like those; I will probably never get used to the second half, because "good" and "bad" as adverbs (instead of "well" and "badly") are just never going to sound right.

One that I've heard much more commonly from high-level professionals than from the low-limit players I usually associate with is the use of "winner" and "loser" as adjectives, rather than nouns. You have to learn to think of them as synonyms for "up" and "down," or "ahead" and "behind." As I've mentioned several times recently, I've been re-watching all of the past episodes of GSN's "High Stakes Poker," and this comes up all the time there. "I want to be able to quit winner for a change," and "I was doing OK, but I just got loser," are a couple of examples of this peculiarity. In one episode, commentator Gabe Kaplan says that the stage is set for action, because "all the right people are loser." What he meant was that when people are losing, they tend to play more hands and bet harder and faster, in a desperate attempt to get back to even, and in the situation at hand it was the already loose, crazy players who had gotten behind and were likely to make it a wild ride for the whole table. In an episode of "Cash Poker: The Ultimate Gamble" (crummy syndicated show), Bob Bright has been losing quite a bit, then hauls in a large pot, and Gabriel Thayer, seated next to him, comments, "You might be winner now." Mike Matusow, in an interview during another episode of "Cash Poker" was asked how he was doing, and replied, "I'm $28,000 loser." In Doyle Brunson's book, My 50 Most Memorable Hands, he writes, on p. 143, about his worst year in poker, 2004: "I got loser, and instead of taking a break like I usually do when I go on an extended losing streak, I kept playing and I lost the staggering sum of $6 million." That's "getting loser," all right!

Though I'm quite a stickler for correct grammar, I understand that words and phrases and expressions just develop within an insular community, and one can't fairly judge them to be "right" or "wrong" by reference to standards for non-specialized English. This post, then, isn't intended to scold the poker world for these odd terms and usages (as if that would do any good anyway). It's just to note that, well, they're kind of weird and unconventional, and they take some getting used to.

But there are some on which I have to take a grumpy stand. For now, I'll exercise restraint and finger just one flagrant violation: "I'll put you all in."

Sorry, but you can't. Only I can put all my chips into the pot. What you can do is put all of your chips in. But I'll decide whether to put mine in, thank you very much.

I really don't get why this particular verbiage has survived and thrived, when it's so obviously wrong. If you are up against just one opponent, it is shorter, more accurate, and less affrontive to simply say, "I'm all in." The effect is the same (because an all-in bet between two players is effectively only the amount of the smaller of the two stacks). Now, if there are three or more players still in the hand, and you want to bet enough that a call on my part would have me all in, but not go all-in yourself, then the thing to do is ask for a count of my stack, and bet exactly that amount. Alternatively, you can announce to the dealer, "I bet the amount that Seat 4 has in front of him," which has the same effect. (The former route is safer, though, because with the latter you may get a nasty surprise, if Seat 4 has some high-value chips or bills hidden where you can't readily see them.)

I'm certainly not the first one to chafe at this phraseology. I think the first place I read something that let me know that I wasn't the only one bothered by it was here: http://www.poker-babes.com/strategy/pet-peeves.html. Since then, though, I've heard a few players at the table argue about it when somebody says it to them. That, I think, is pretty pointless, and probably counterproductive. It slows down the game and results in a stupid argument that nobody is going to win. If somebody is susceptible to a reasoned explanation of why they shouldn't use those words, it is far more likely to happen from reading something like this post than from a confrontation across the green felt in the middle of a hand.

I'm also never going to yield on the common but grating "I should have went all-in." I even heard Daniel Negreanu say this during an episode of "High Stakes Poker." Geez, people--can't we even manage to conjugate the most common verbs in the language correctly? This particular piece of abuse of English just makes me shudder with revulsion. Nothing and nobody will ever get me used to it, or make me accept it as part of "the strange grammar of poker." Some things are just plain wrong.

A poker player tries a different game, and wins (non-grumpy content)

I hadn't done anything with my UltimateBet account in a long time, so decided to see what was happening there. Sometime earlier this year, as it turns out, they added Roshambo (Rock Paper Scissors) to the games you can play. I had to try it out.

I went for the $0.50/match table (match is best of 3 throws). I knew that I would outthink myself and second-guess, third-guess, and fourth-guess myself into utter insanity if I actually tried to analyze what an opponent would throw and then take counter-measures. So instead I opened Excel, did a one-cell spreadsheet of =RANDBETWEEN(1,3), then hit F9 before every throw. This would generate a randomly selected integer between 1 and 3, and I would go with that, no matter what I thought my opponent would do. (After I got tired of switching back and forth between applications, I had Excel print out a list of 1000 of these random digits. It's easier to just run my finger down the page, but the effect is the same.)

24 hours later, I've done surprisingly well. I've made $11 in maybe 3 hours of playing online. Not exactly a huge rate of return, but it's the win rate that has me intrigued more than the dollar income. I've taken on 9 opponents and defeated 8 of them, all in sets of at least 3 matches, to a max of 19 matches.

Unless this is just the good side of variance, I don't get it. Using a truly random strategy, I shouldn't be able to win or lose. In fact, in the long run, I should lose exactly $0.02/match, which is the UB rake on the game. I'm obviously not outplaying my opponents in any meaningful sense, since I'm not even trying to strategize. But it seems to me that it shouldn't matter how "well" or "badly" opponents play, either--they could go for "rock" every single damn time and be able to tie me over the long haul. And, of course, they could have been using the same random strategy, for all I know (although I was quite sure I could pick up patterns against some of them).

What's more is that I'm confident I could have done better by occasionally departing from my random-number list, because there were times when I felt extremely confident what an opponent was about to do, and I was nearly always right in those spots. There was some definite bleed-over from poker habits involved here, because I could figure out what my opponent must be thinking that I was doing, based on what would appear to him/her to be a pattern I was engaged in.

So am I right that this initial success is just an unusually lucky run, or am I missing something? That is, is there some way that an opponent can systematically make his outcome against a random strategy worse than average? If so, I don't see how, but it's not something I've thought about in enough depth to have clear thoughts on yet.

The only things I've read about Roshambo strategy are Rafe Furst's chapter in the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide, but that's just about getting inside an opponent's head, which I haven't even been trying very hard to do. I also found a couple of pretty superficial online strategy guides, but haven't looked around enough to see if there are in-depth discussions, though I assume there must be.

For now, I'm pleased to be winning, even if it's only small amounts, and even if it is just dumb luck, because it's fun and a nice diversion from poker.


Addendum, November 11, 2007

Immediately after writing the above, the pendulum of statistical variance turned against me. Since then, I have engaged in 23 contests, ranging from 1 to 31 matches (each match being best of 3 throws), winning 5, tieing 5, and losing 13. Ignoring contests/sessions against particular opponents, and lumping together all of the results since my last post, there were 137 matches, including 62 wins and 75 losses. This is easily within the expected range given by the binomial distribution; a handy online calculator for such things (http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/binomialX.html) tells me that a coin flipped 137 times will have an outcome at least this skewed from an exactly even split about 31% of the time. That would have to be at around 5% or less to make me think that there was something other than pure chance operating.

The experiment has sufficiently convinced me of what I suspected before: that playing a random strategy basically yields random results. My initial success was a statistical blip, which has been reversed with the subsequent games. What's more, I've concluded that playing a random strategy is pretty boring, and playing with a non-random strategy is probably only a little less so. I may revisit the game from time to time for a bit of diversion, but I feel like I've pretty much exhausted my interest in it for the foreseeable future.