Are longer sessions better or worse? (Non-grumpy content)

In late 2006, Card Player columnist Steve Zolotow wrote an interesting series of pieces on the importance of record-keeping in poker. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.) I had already been keeping records adequate for tax documentation, but his writings prompted me to refine my spreadsheets (how did the world get by before there was Excel???).

But for some reason, I never got around to doing the first analysis that Zolotow recommends, which is looking at results by length of session. Well, now I've done it. There's not really any reason anybody should care about the results, but I did the hard work, so I might as well share it.

The first chart above (click to make it bigger) shows data of dollars won/lost versus hours of cash-game play (I excluded tournaments), for the first eight months of 2007; I got tired of entering it after that, and thought that I had a big enough sample.

The first thing you might notice is that there appear to be as many dots in the negative range as the positive. That is so. I've seen and heard other pros say that they book wins something like two-thirds of the time. Well, for whatever reason, that isn't how I run. In fact, I'm at 51%/49% right now. That doesn't bother me, though, because as the chart also shows at a glance, my average win is quite a bit higher than my average loss.

Zolotow advises: "Look at your five biggest wins and five biggest losses. If you played significantly more hours during those losses than you did during your wins, you have a major discipline problem. If you perform this simple exercise and change your negative pattern, it will be the most important thing you can do to improve your bottom line."

I'm pleased to see that I pass this test. My five biggest wins are in sessions varying from 2.75 to 6.25 hours. My five biggest losses are between 1.75 hours (that was a positively brutal, intense beating that session!) and 4.5 hours.

My sense going into this data analysis was that I would see no significant correlation between length of time played and result. And that basically turns out to be correct. To be precise, the correlation coefficient for the data set shown in the first chart above is 0.16. A correlation coefficient is a way of expressing how related two sets of numbers are. It can range between 1.0 (perfect positive correlation; the data points would line up exactly on a line slanting up and to the right) and -1.0 (the opposite). So I have only a slightly positive tendency for longer sessions to be more profitable.

Next I ran the analysis you see in the second chart. It's the same data set, but with the absolute dollar values converted to dollars-per-hour rates. The correlation here is even weaker: 0.12, which means that I make only marginally more per hour during longer sessions.

You can also see that I don't go for the marathon sessions that some other players make famous. It's not my thing. On those rare occasions that I've gone past the 12-hour mark, I feel crummy and I don't play well. It's just not worth it.

My conclusions:

(1) As I suspected, the hard data confirm that I'm reasonably well disciplined about quitting when things are going badly for me that day. I definitely need to improve in this, because I can't count the number of times I've spewed off one extra buy-in (usually $100) even after I recognize that I'm playing poorly, or the competition has the best of me, or I'm just impossibly unlucky that session, or whatever. I'd love to have back all of the Benjamins that I've lost that way. But at least I can honestly say that I don't let the situation turn from "problem" to "disaster" before getting out of Dodge on the days that the donkeys are having their way with me.

(2) Between roughly two and eight hours, there is basically no correlation between how long I'm sitting at the table and how much I can expect to have made. Some days I get on a huge rush early, then stagnate for a few hours, neither making nor losing anything, until I get up and leave. Other days it's the reverse, and I toil and sweat with no headway, until four or five hours in I get smacked in the face by the deck and run my stack up ridicuously fast. Other times, it's just slow, steady progress. Other times, it's up and down, up and down, and whether I book a win or a loss is just a matter of where the pendulum is when I clock out. It's absolutely impossible to predict, and it appears not to matter.

Celebrity sighting

I played a bit at the Venetian tonight. The annual Adult Entertainment Expo is going on at the adjacent property, the Sands convention center. Walking through the Venetian was quite, um, interesting.

I shared the elevator with this woman on my way back to my car. No, it's not my photo, and that's not me next to her; I got this from the web, and it took some searching to find one of her with her clothes on.

I know who she is because the conversation with the man she was with mentioned that a mainstream film she appeared in ("The Heartbreak Kid," with Ben Stiller) is now out on DVD. It wasn't difficult, looking down the cast list for that movie at http://www.imdb.com/, to deduce that this woman goes by the name of Kayla Kleevage.

You can read more about her (safe for work) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayla_Kleevage. The photo there was obviously done before she had further, uh, enhancements made.

And yes, she really looks exactly that hideous and ridiculous in person. I can't imagine the warped psychology that drives people to mutilate themselves in that manner. Ick.

Poker gems, #67

Al Alvarez.

Poker is generally reckoned to be America's second most popular after-dark activity. Sex is good, they say, but poker lasts longer.

Celebrity sighting

I walked down to Binion's this evening to take a little money from the tourists. On a couple of the big-screen televisions ESPN was replaying the WSOP main event. At one point, the entire next table over started whooping and hollering. I hadn't noticed, but Pamela Brunson (daughter of Doyle and sister of Todd) was playing (I think it was a $4-$8 Omaha game), and this was the segment of the broadcast series that had her featurette in it. She looked slightly embarrassed by the attention, but smiled and laughed through it. Incidentally, she's quite a bit prettier in person than the cameras showed her, I thought. I didn't ask to take her picture, since I wasn't at the same table, so I had to steal the one above from elsewhere on the Interwebs.

Poker gems, #66

D.L. Brook, in Poker Pro magazine, January, 2008 (well, the cover says "2007," but since the cover story is on the death of Chip Reese, I'm reasonably confident that they just screwed up the date), p. 70.

[G]ood poker players can sense blood and weakness faster than a free buffet.

#300

Isaac Asimov had it easy. Every hundredth book, he'd just make it a compilation of samples of what he had already published. He called them "Opus 100," "Opus 200," etc. That is so cheating--just write 99 books, then one tears off with no effort!

I refuse to stoop so low.

But I will concede that it's tempting to use the occasion of my 300th blog post to note that the first 100 posts took ten months to write (from 10/30/06 to 8/31/07), the second 100 took only 2 1/2 months (until 11/14/07), and this last 100 has taken less than two months. I can't promise that the acceleration will continue, but without question the increased energy I have put into it has been largely because of the favorable feedback I get from you loyal readers.

It would also be tempting to spend the 300th post sort of pre-announcing that sometime quite soon you'll be seeing this-here blog featured in a column in Card Player magazine. Learning that was one of my main motivations for the visual overhaul of the last couple of weeks; I'll be expecting more new readers, and want people to be able to navigate old stuff more easily.

Finally, it would be tempting to just use up a mile-marker post by thanking you all for visiting, commenting, emailing, and putting up on your own blogs links to this one and/or to specific things I've written. It's more gratifying than I know how to describe.

But unlike Asimov, I'm not a cheater. I would never make a post out of such mere filler material. Nothing but solid, substantive, new thoughts each and every time, that's what I say.

Time to fire the graphics guy?

So I'm watching the final table of the first event (Foxwoods) of the Professional Poker Tour. It's down to three-handed. The short stack, Ron Rose, is all-in. The two big stacks, John Juanda and Chris Bigler, have a small side pot, but employing a common tactic are just checking down the hand to maximize the chance that one of them will beat Rose, and they'll be down to one on one for the championship.

When I first started watching televised poker, it was the World Poker Tour. I was amazed at how fast Mike Sexton could figure out what cards would produce the winning hand for a player. Yeah, I know, a lot of their voiceover is done in the studio long after the original taping. But that's only for the portions for which they need access to the hole-card camera information. When there's an all-in situation and the cards are turned face-up on the table, for the most part what you hear is what Mike and Vince Van Patten say in real time. And Mike is just as fast at spitting out what cards will be winners and losers in that situation as when the dubbing is done later.

I'm less impressed now than I used to be, because I've gotten to the point that I'm essentially as fast as he is. This isn't because I'm some poker prodigy--it's just sheer repetition of thousands of hands and the subconscious development of pattern recognition. So now when I watch poker on TV, I try to see if I can count the outs and figure the percentages before they flash them on the screen. Hey, I'm easily amused, OK?

I had to hit the "pause" button when I saw the graphic above. (You can click on it for a larger version.) It wasn't registering with me how those numbers could be right. I spent a couple of minutes going through all of the possibilities, and it just didn't make sense to me.

I finally figured out what the problem was, and it is now left to the curious reader--see if you can spot the error. Hint: It is not a problem with the cards; they are correct as shown. Also, there have been no cards discarded that are unaccounted for, because the only three players left in the match are all being shown. But the graphics guy(s) made a simple mistake, which seems sort of obvious once you spot it.

Don't scroll down for the answer until you've given it some thought.











ANSWER:

They mixed up the numbers for Juanda and Rose. Rose can beat Bigler's flush with a full house if either of the two remaining queens or either of the two remaining 4s comes on the river. That's a bit under 10% probability, which they rounded up, but then assigned to the wrong player. Juanda is drawing dead, since the best hand he could possibly make, with another club on the river, would be a flush smaller than Bigler's.

Poker gems, #65

Barry Greenstein, from Ace on the River, p. 42.

I have come to expect to play with some people who are not very likeable. Most of them are not my friends, so I don't get upset if they don't act in a civil fashion. It comforts me that I am taking money from flawed people rather than from nice people. Players who are crybabies deserve something to cry about. A successful poker player looks for any flaw in his opponents' personalities and uses it as motivation to beat them out of their money. Fortunately, it is easy to find flaws. I like to beat up on the bad winners, bad losers, slowrollers, dealer-abusers, chauvinists, racists, egomaniacs, lesson-givers, coffee-housers, loudmouths, etc. The only nice people I want to beat are rich people who will not suffer financially. Poker is entertainment for them, and my poker wins are only a byproduct.

"Everybody wanna be in the picture, get up and go to the other side of the table!"

There's a fairly rare neurological condition known as "unilateral neglect," usually the result of a stroke, in which the patient loses the entire concept of either "left" or "right." Such people cannot see things in one half of their visual field, cannot turn toward that side, cannot even comprehend that there is another half of everything that they are not perceiving. They eat only the food that is on the half of the plate they can see. A woman with this condition will apply makeup to just half of her face.

Back in the days of my health-care career, I saw a man with this condition in the hospital a couple of days after he had had a stroke. He was eating his breakfast. His left hand was plopped down in his cereal bowl. I suggested that he might want to move it somewhere else. He insisted that it was not his hand! He genuinely could not grasp the fact that he had a left side of his body, so even when he turned his head so that he could see the hand in his bowl, he concluded that it must not be his. It was one of the saddest, but most fascinating, things I ever witnessed.

Patients with this condition, when presented with an empty circle and asked to fill in the details of the face of a clock will commonly make a drawing like those pictured above--either just half of the numbers in approximately their correct position, or all 12 numbers crammed into one side.

What does all of this have to do with poker? Well, not a lot, really, except for a bizarre incident that happened a couple of days ago at Harrah's, which reminded me of all of those distorted clock face drawings I've seen in textbooks.

I was one of the players on the list for $1-$2 no-limit hold'em. They were ready to start up a new table and called off the names. When this happens, sometimes it takes forever for the players to assemble and get going; other times there's a mad rush because everybody wants to grab their favorite seat. This time, it was sort of in between.

I took seat 9, on the dealer's right (Harrah's plays 9-handed, rather than 10), my usual favored place. The two seats to my right were occupied by two Russian friends. The first one to the table had been an elderly gentleman, who plopped down in seat 5, squarely in front of the dealer. Other people filled in seats one, two, three, and six, but the guy who took six left his chips there and went off to the restroom.

The last one to arrive was a young woman. Strangely, she pulled the chair out from the four-spot and wedged it in between number five and absent-guy's seat six. Why did she do this, instead of just taking the four seat where it was? Well, I don't know, but I have a strong suspicion. She quickly proved herself to be a smart, aggressive player, all business, clearly there for no reason other than to make money. Chips tend to flow around the table clockwise; that is, I will generally win more chips from the players in the seats just to my right than from other places at the table. This is because I have a positional advantage on them most of the time. Therefore, all else being equal, I'd like to have the softest, easiest targets on my immediate right. I think that this young woman made a stereotyped judgment (which turned out to be correct) that the elderly man was going to be the easiest player to bully, and she wanted him on her right. If she had taken the four seat, he would have been on her left, from which position it would be hardest to win his chips.

Anyway, when Mr. Six came back to the table, we had the bizarre picture of six of the nine players all crammed into the right half of the table, and only three players on the left half. This clearly wasn't going to work. The dealer tried to get the five seat to scoot to his right and become seat four. But he wasn't moving. He was a lot crankier about it than he needed to be, but he had two excellent points. First, he had been the first one there. Second, he chose that position because he had poor eyesight and it was the only seat from which he could clearly see the community cards. In my opinion, all players should be willing to defer to a need such as that.

I wouldn't really have minded moving, but that wouldn't have helped, because the two Russian guys on my right did not want to shift from seven and eight into eight and nine. (Most people dislike the one and nine or ten seats, next to the dealer. I'm weird; they're my favorites.)

The dealer gave up trying to manage the situation and called for the floor. Floor guy, unfortunately, doesn't ask the obvious question: "Who was last to arrive?" Instead, he just sees that the older man and the young woman are both spaced correctly for seats five and six, so he tells the guy crammed into what had been position six (now back from the restroom) to pick up his chair and move over to four.

A young woman in seat two tried to help by pointing out that the aggressive woman was the cause of the problem, because she was last to arrive, and had picked up a chair and squeezed it in where she didn't belong. The floor guy quite rudely cuts her off in mid-sentence. He doesn't want to hear it. He snidely says, "Thank you, I'm handling it."

Eventually, the guy who had been in the restroom agrees to move over, so it gets sorted out, but it was an embarrassing, juvenile situation for a while.

Clearly the chief culprit was the late-arriving young woman whose focus (apparently) on picking a victim for her aggression overrode all sense of fairness and propriety.

The poker book that has been most influential in how I approach the game is Barry Greenstein's Ace on the River. Most of what he writes about just isn't found anywhere else, particularly discussions about various aspects of the life of a professional player. He suggests that several strategies which are actually cooperative rather than competitive are good for professional players to embrace. He specifically includes (p. 159):

Not obsessively getting the best seat position. If you are jumping around
the table, continually competing with other players for best position on live
ones [i.e., the most unskilled players], you will make the game into a circus
and cause the live ones to feel uncomfortable.

The young woman from Harrah's, I think, needs to absorb some of Greenstein's lessons.


Incidentally, did you recognize the movie quotation that formed the title of this post? If not, see the scene it comes from here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA1sx-vyWVk. In addition to the distorted clock-face drawings, this classic Mel Brooks scene was what came to my mind when I saw nearly everybody sitting on one side of the table. Sadly, Leonardo da Vinci was nowhere in sight.

X-22 sighting

Fans of televised tournament poker will likely recognize Paul "X-22" Magriel in the above photo. He's hard to miss, being one of the--how can one say this kindly?--most peculiar characters in the poker world.

As I mentioned in a previous post today (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/i-dont-like-eskimo-clark.html), I spent some time this afternoon watching the first couple of episodes of the Professional Poker Tour. One of the players at the featured table was Magriel, whom I have seen before on WPT and other such broadcasts.

After I left the Poker Palace (see immediately preceding post, http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/poker-palace.html), I went to the Sahara. I really dislike the place, but it's one of my most consistent profit centers, and I was already nasty in cigarette smoke, so I decided to hit it. They had only one no-limit game going, and only one seat available. I was stunned to sit down with none other than Paul Magriel on my right. He is easily the most recognizable "name" player I've ever shared a table with.

I have no idea whether he lives in town or is just visiting. I also have no idea why somebody who can routinely either buy himself into or get staked for $10,000 tournaments was playing a $1-$3 cash game at the Sahara late into a Sunday night. It couldn't have been for fun, because he didn't appear to be having any.

An even weirder coincidence is that this afternoon I read the first review I've come across of a brand-new poker tournament strategy book titled (strangely) Kill Everyone, the sequel to Kill Phil. And guess what Magriel was doing between hands? Yep, he was reading Kill Everyone.

I remembered reading a year or two ago that Magriel, who long ago wrote what is apparently still considered the definitive strategy guide for backgammon (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Magriel), was teaming up with Gus Hansen to write a poker strategy book. I took the opportunity tonight to ask about how this project was coming. He told me it had been cancelled, and Hansen is writing his own book instead. I told him, quite sincerely, that that was a shame, because that combination of authors had potential to make a truly interesting and groundbreaking book. He said, with what I took to be deep bitterness, "It would have been the best ever written." It seemed like a sore topic, so I didn't press him for details.

In contrast to his wild tournament style, he was the tightest player at the table. Perhaps this was because he was reading the book, or maybe he was just killing time waiting for somebody in the tournament that was going on, or maybe he just adopts completely different styles of play for tournament and cash games. I don't know. I saw him seriously contest only one significant pot in the hour I was there, and he won it with the nut flush on the river. He spent a lot of time away from the table. He also seemed at least as interested in his drinks as in the game. The cocktail waitress obviously knew his order by heart, because when he saw her, he would just raise a finger to get her attention, and she would point at him and say, "Another vodka-cranberry?" and he would nod.

Magriel is famous for, among other things, his weird tics and mannerisms at the poker table. On television he is constantly squirming, fidgeting, grimacing, moving his tongue from one side of his mouth to the other, etc. I wouldn't be too surprised if he has Asberger's syndrome, or one of the related disorders (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome). On the other hand, I've heard others quote him as saying that those things are all deliberate, an act to throw off opponents. I have always been highly skeptical of that--they just look way too deeply ingrained. But I have to say that he demonstrated essentially none of that stuff during the hour I was observing him. Maybe it is an act after all. Or maybe it's involuntary, but only brought out by the nervousness and adrenaline of the television lights and/or the pressure of a big-money tournament. Or maybe it's involuntary and there most of the time, but suppressed when he's drinking. I have no clue.

He was very quiet the whole time, but perfectly polite when addressed. He even graciously agreed to let me take the picture you see above. He wasn't looking his best, so I was prepared to have him decline and I would have respected that and not tried to sneak one. But he just chuckled and said, "Sure."

All told, it was one of the least expected and oddest personalty encounters I've had during my time in Vegas. And more than a little sad, too; I can't help feeling that he has been in better situations in his life than he seems to be now.

Poker Palace

I have knocked off one more place from my long-term goal of playing in every poker room in the valley. I'm glad it's done and I won't have to go back. The Poker Palace joins that special group of dives that, in my opinion, have no redeeming qualities and no reason to exist, as far as poker is concerned.

You get a sense of the clientele from the sign, shown above, in the parking lot. Really, now--if you have to remind your customers not to leave their children unattended in the car while they go in to gamble, you may not be catering to the highest echelons of society. I presume that they wouldn't have bothered having such a sign made up if it were not a recurrent problem.

Despite that being my first impression of the place, I had a moment of hope when I saw that the casino has two separate entrances, one of which is marked "Non-Smoking Entrance." I chose that door, and it was indeed wonderfully free of smoke. But I quickly discovered that that's not the section of the casino with the poker room, and traversing the doorway between the non-smoking and the smoking sections was like leaving one's house on a foggy San Francisco day. Ugh. The poker room is technically non-smoking, but like many other places, there's only a half-wall that separates the tables from the open casino floor, so it's pretty nasty.

When I arrived, there was no cash game going, only a tournament. But it was clearly in its last stages, which meant that I could expect players busting out to be looking for a cash game. They also told me they had four names on the list for a no-limit game, so I grabbed a magazine. I had to wait about 30 minutes before the game started. It peaked at six players, but usually had only five, and broke up completely 90 minutes after it began.

Oddly, they play no-limit hold'em with just one $2 blind. The players were all curmudgeonly tight, except for one guy who, once he got his stack down to about $25, had only one move: all-in before the flop. He picked up the blind often enough to stay at about that stack size.

I made a grand total of $6 in the 90 minutes I played there. Whee! Well, I also pocketed a handful of souvenir chips commemorating various minor events, but I don't include those in my winnings.

One dealer seemed to be an unusually bright guy, smart and personable, conversant on subjects of interest to me, and somebody it might be good to know. Other than that, I found nothing likeable about this place whatsoever.

Incidentally, before heading out to North Las Vegas, I called the Speedway Casino to see if they had a live game going. The guy on the phone (a pit boss) said that they hadn't had a poker game there in about six months. Crossing that place off my list may prove an insurmoutable challenge.

Play a hand with me

It's pretty rare that I post stuff dealing with strategy and analysis of hands, because, first, there's about a billion other places you can go for those topics, so I have little new and original to contribute. Second, I just think it's usually pretty boring to read about somebody else's poker play. It's a "you had to be there" kind of thing. Besides, if you don't know the author personally, it's hard to care much if he won or lost on a given hand or in a given session.

But I've been musing today on a hand that I played last night in a $1-2 no-limit hold'em game at Harrah's, one that required more thought and finesse than usual, and I think maybe some readers might learn something from it. I'll warn you in advance, though, that it's going to take a lot of words to explain what on the surface was a pretty straightforward hand of cards, because all of the interesting stuff was going on below the surface. This is a hand that would have been totally different if played online. In fact, it illustrates perfectly, in large part, why I'm so much more successful playing in casinos than I am on the Internet.

When Greg Raymer won the main event of the World Series of Poker in 2004, he had to deal with the usual nay-sayers calling him a luckbox, and put up with critiques of some plays that seemed, well, a little crazy. But then ESPN did a special show where he got to comment on what he was doing, play by play, and it was eye-opening: The guy is very smart, highly analytical, and always, always, always, had a thoughtful, intelligent rationale for doing what he did. It was an impressive performance. (Had I been a follower of the http://www.twoplustwo.com/ forums, I would have already known that he had, long before the WSOP win, distinguished himself as a first-rate hand analyst.) I hope to do something similar here, in microcosm, because there is so vastly much more going on in poker than who has what cards, and this hand shows that abundantly, I think.

The nature of the opponent is absolutely crucial here. She is a classic tight-weak player, meaning that she plays very few hands, doesn't bet them strongly when she has them, and seems to be easier than average to intimidate. To make matters worse for her, she's playing in a seat next to a girlfriend, and they're openly commenting on the action as hands play out (not to the point of actually violating rules, but just things like "Wow," and "oooo" and "uh-oh" when unexpected things happen). In other words, she's spinning off loads of extra information about whether she likes the situation or not.

Conversely, I've been lucky enough to establish a highly tight-aggressive image, not showing any of my bluffs, showing down only strong hands, and making good laydowns when beat, all of which adds up to the table seeing my bets and raises as deserving healthy respect. It's just the way I like it.

I have only tangled with this young woman in one pot before. She folded to my raise on the river, and I showed her that I had made the nut straight on the turn and had trapped her for that last river bet. I have no doubt that that memory will influence how she plays against me in the future.

These facts are critical, because I'm about to do something unorthodox, and wouldn't attempt it without those circumstances having set it up.

I limp in from early position with Q-10 of hearts. It's not a hand I'm thrilled with, and I won't take much heat with it, but it does have potential. Ms. Tight-Weak raises to $10, which is a pretty standard opening raise for this table. Everybody else folds.

Normally I would fold here, too, and with good reason. As Dan Harrington points out in his essential treatise on tournament hold'em, you have four weapons at your disposal: your cards, your chip stack, position, and table image. You don't need to have all four of them going for you in any hand, but it's unwise to go into battle without at least two of them on your side.

Here I have only one: table image. I'm out of position. She has a few more chips than I do. And given the narrow range of hands with which she has been raising, she almost certainly is starting off with stronger cards.

It is terribly arrogant of me to think that I can outplay an opponent without the advantage of position, without an intimidating stack of chips, and with a weaker hand. It's really rare that I would attempt it. But, as I hope I have adequately established above, the peculiar mix of factors here seems just right that I might be able to negotiate an unusually dangerous situation. At the very least, I believe that it will be easy to determine if I'm beat and get away from the hand without too much loss.

So I call her raise, and we see the flop of K-Q-2 rainbow. I check. She bets $20. I think she probably has either pocket aces or a king with a strong kicker to bet into me here, and if she had aces, she likely would have raised more before the flop. But I decide to call, mostly to see what she does with the turn card, in the hope that a steal opportunity will present itself. Lots of players like her will fire on the flop, but not have the heart to keep betting if they are called. In her case, this could be because the flop missed her (e.g., she has pocket 10s or jacks, and really didn't like the flop, but was willing to take one shot at it), or because the flop helped her, but she's worried about being trapped by me slow-playing something like two pair or a flopped set of deuces. In addition to all of that, having made second pair here gives me outs even if she has the king; a 10 or another Q will likely give me a better hand.

The turn card is an offsuit 6. I like this, because there are no flush draws to complicate the analysis. It's possible that she has a straight draw with A-J, but it's only a one-way if so, and I really don't think she's the type to have bet just a draw. If she had J-10 for the open-ended straight draw, I think she would have just limped in before the flop.

On the other hand, the turn card obviously didn't help me. I'm going to check, and basically if she fires again, I'm bailing out.

At least, that's the plan.

But then she does something unexpected: she bets $20 again. A larger bet, and I'm convinced she has a king, I'm beat, and I'm outta there. But repeating, rather than increasing, a bet size on a later street is a tight-weak player's classic scream of fear. My assessment of her is that she has sufficient experience to overcome her fear if she had two pair (especially king-queen here) or pocket kings or queens for a flopped set, and she would be confident enough of her hand to bet strongly. On the other hand, if she had missed completely, I think she wouldn't be putting in another bet at all. That means that I can narrow down her hand possibilities with almost laser-like precision: She has A-K, K-J, or A-Q. Nothing else fits the pattern here.

Repeating the same bet size after the pot has grown larger isn't quite raising the white flag of surrender, but it definitely changes my plan. I now think there's a good chance I can steal it from her. So I calmly, quietly, deliberately put two red chips on top of a $50 stack and push it forward--a check-raise, tripling her bet.

She and her friend instantly go into frenzy mode: "Uh-oh." "What did I get myself into?" "What does he have?" I like this. Unless my radar is way, way off, this isn't acting to fake me out with a monster, but is genuine concern on her part. She cuts out the additional $40, moves it back and forth between her hands a bit, looks at what is left of her stacks if she calls and loses this, but then finally puts it in. But she is definitely rattled.

I now believe that I can eliminate A-Q from her range of possible hands, because she wouldn't call a check-raise with second pair. She's just got to have a king for top pair, and most likely A-K to be willing to call my check-raise.

Well, basically I'm done with this hand. I gave it a good try, but it didn't work. I'm beat and I can't push her off of her hand. Time to cut my losses and look for a better spot.

But wait--did the dealer just put out a third queen for me on the river? Why yes, he did! Thank you, Mr. Dealer! I am about as certain as I can be that I now have the best hand. What's more is she can't think that I have a queen, because nobody would be stupid enough to check-raise with second pair (hee hee!). So I move all-in for my last $106.

She again goes into talk-out-loud mode. It takes her at least a full minute, but finally she says, "OK, I call." She then gets the bad news, and shows me her A-K. She crabs a bit with her friend about how lucky I got--which there is no denying. I hit one of five cards that would make me the winner, without which it probably would have gone check-check at the end.

Her mistakes were excessive timidity and transparency. If she had put in closer to a pot-sized bet on the turn, I would have scampered off with my tail between my legs. And consider her call of my check-raise on the turn. She should have thought something like this: "If I call here and he pushes all-in on the river, I'm going to call that. Since I'm going to be willing to risk nearly all my chips anyway, it would be smarter to push now, because if he's just trying to bully me, he might fold, but if I wait until the river and he goes all-in, it will be too late to push back against him, and, besides, that last card might help him. I can't expect my hand to get any better than it already is, so now is the time to make my stand." If she had re-raised me there, again I run away licking my wounds. Her weakness cost her nearly her entire stack.

The transparency cost her money, too, because without making herself so easy to gauge, I would have been concerned that she started with K-Q, flopped two pair, and make a full house on the river. I might have still tried the check-raise (I honestly can't say for sure), but if she had called it without fuss and drama and emotion, I would have been seriously worried that I was beat even after making three queens, and would have checked it down with her, cutting her losses. She virtually allowed me to play as if her cards were face-up on the table, which let me extract maximum value when I got more than a little bit lucky.*

So today's lessons, kids, are these: When you have a good hand, playing it timidly will cost you money. And whatever hand you have, the more you talk and react and scrunch up your face and fiddle with your chips, the easier it will be for an opponent to deduce what you're holding, and adjust his play optimally against you, which will also cost you money. That's not what you want, is it?


*Of course, these things can go the other way, too. Just a few days ago, also at Harrah's, I made the nut straight on the turn, put in a pot-sized bet, and had an opponent move all-in on me with two pair. I called, of course, and he hit one of four cards on the river to make a full house. Nothing you can do about that except roll your eyes and pull out more cash.

Go ahead and stare, for all the good it will do you

Last night I was playing at Imperial Palace. I only recognized one other player as somebody that I've dealt with before, and I mainly remembered him because of The Stare.

First, a bit of background about one of the best-known poker "tells" (i.e., things that players do that give away information about the strength of their cards). When the flop comes, if it has helped a player, he'll often reflexively look down at his chips. He has made a snap decision to bet, and he's looking at how much he has left to start trying to figure out the amount. Conversely, if the flop doesn't help him, he'll often keep gazing at it longer than his usual practice. Again, this is a subconscious behavior. He keeps trying to see if there is something, anything, there that can help him. It's easy to imagine the train of thought: "Is there a pair for me? No. How about a flush draw? No. Maybe a straight draw? No." This sequence of analysis takes time--not an eternity, but noticeably longer than if he instantly saw something he could use.

For inexperienced players, this is one of the most common and reliable tells. Advice books routinely advise that you not look at the cards the dealer is putting out; instead, they say, watch your opponent's eyes so that you can gauge whether he likes the flop or not. The cards will still be there for you to analyze a few seconds later, but you only have a very brief window of time to catch the opponent's reaction to the flop.

Well, there's nothing especially wrong with that advice, per se, if the opponent in question is very new to live poker. I've profited from it many times myself. But after you've played for a while, and especially after you've read about this tell and caught it in other players, it's one that's trivially easy to conceal in yourself. You just have to develop a habit of moving your eyes in the same way on every flop. My practice is to glance briefly at the cards, then move my eyes immediately to the hands of the first player to act (because I think that hands give away at least as much information as the face does).

But once in a while, I become aware that a player is taking the "watch your opponent's eyes" advice a little too seriously. That's the case with the player I was with last night. He's just staring right at me every time the dealer puts out the flop, turn, or river, if I'm in the pot with him.

(Sometimes this becomes almost comical, when two players, both having diligently read the advice, just glare into each other's eyes, neither one wanting to be the first to break off and look down at the cards--kind of a weird poker version of "chicken.")

It's creepy to be stared at like that. I don't like it. But I'm sure not going to tell him that I don't like it. No, it's far better not to look back at him, once I've determined that he's doing this routinely. Instead, I'll pretend like I have no idea why he's watching me, and do a little reverse-tell thing on him. The flop hits me perfectly? OK, I'm going to keep staring at those cards, maybe make a miniscule wince or grimace (not too much--don't want to oversell the effect) to convince him that the continuation bet I'm about to make is a bluff, and let him come over the top, confident that he's got me.

Conversely, if I whiff on the flop, I zap my eyes downward to my chips as fast as I can. Then I can take a bit of time to decide whether to bet as a continuied feign of strength, or check, and let him think that I'm trapping him, and maybe peel off a free card.

Of course, I won't do either one of these consistently; over time, I'll more or less randomize it, lest he figure out that I'm reverse-telling on him and be able to use that information to his benefit.

The point is, this tell only works with that subset of players who aren't aware of it. This guy last night? He was risking eyestrain with no benefit. He picked the wrong target for his radar, because I can throw chaff at his instrumentation with less effort than he is expending to try to read me. Apparently he didn't read or remember the part of the advice book that said that tells always appear in a context, and the context can completely change the interpretation. If you have an opponent with any degree of sophistication to his play, he's not going to be just giving away reliable, consistent information for free.

Go stare at somebody else next time, pal.

(Very cool bit of art above borrowed without permission from http://ellikay.deviantart.com/.)

I don't like Eskimo Clark

Paul "Eskimo" Clark is one of about a zillion people on the poker tournament circuit that shows up sufficiently often on television that it's almost impossible not to have seen him at some point, if you're into watching such things. I hadn't had cause to dislike him, until today.

The Professional Poker Tour was a great idea that didn't take off. It lasted one season. Instead of a bunch of amateurs with $10,000 to blow on a big tourney buy-in, or guys who got lucky in a super-satellite, you actually had to be a professional poker player with a decent track record in order to be invited to play. The competition really is impressive, with very, very few soft spots at any of the tables. From what I've seen so far, there's a lot of really great play here.

I never saw the broadcasts when they originally aired, which I think was in 2005-2006. But I recently found a place where I could download them, so now I'm starting to work my way through the season. It will take a while, because they covered the events with reasonable thoroughness, devoting ten hours of TV time to each tournament, rather than just a two-hour final table, as the World Poker Tour does. With five events in the season, that's 50 hours of play I'm looking forward to absorbing. You can expect to see more grumpy complaints posted here from what I see.

Each of the first two episodes, taped at Foxwoods, have given me reason to put Clark on my list of disfavored pros.

String raise

At the very end of the first episode we catch the tail end of a brouhaha between Clark and Paul Darden. This didn't happen at the featured table, so we can't see the actual incident that triggered the confrontation, but apparently Clark made a string bet or raise, and Darden called him on it, backed up by the dealer, and the excess portion of the bet or raise had to be withdrawn. It's hard to tell for sure, but it appears that Darden bet on the river and Clark wanted to raise, but was instead limited to a call because of the illegal movement.

This is surprising all by itself, because string bets/raises (i.e., putting out some amount of chips, then going back to one's stack to grab more to put out in a second motion, without having first made a verbal announcement) are exceptionally rare among professionals or even experienced amateurs. It's the kind of mistake you tend to make once, your first time playing in a casino, but then you catch on to how things work, and the mechanics of proper betting become automatic.

Clark wins the hand, but he stands up, shakes his finger at Darden, and says, "I'm gonna have to call it on you now since you're coming after me. I'm gonna call everything on you." Darden tells him that's fine, call whatever you want, because "I know how to play."

This is so stupid. First, it's pretty unlikely that Darden (or anybody else) is going to make the kind of blunder that Clark did. Second, whether or not to "call" another player on such infractions is usually not left to any player's discretion; the dealer should be the one speaking up about it, and do it in every single instance, whether or not anybody else at the table notices or cares. (In this case, since the dealer apparently saw it happen, I'm guessing that he would have disallowed it anyway, but Darden was just a hair quicker to point it out.) Third, the classy thing to do in this spot is say, "You're right, my mistake. I wasn't thinking," then let it go. This sort of verbal tirade accomplishes nothing except to get yourself labeled as an immature brat who can't admit to his own failings.

Personally, I would just ignore a tantrum like that, just stare at the guy like the clown he is. But if you're inclined to respond at all, Darden has it about right: Go ahead, dude, I defy you to catch me being that boneheaded!

Not knowing the action

In the second incident, the blinds are at $150/300. From early position, Chris Bigler silently pushes all-in for a huge overbet, $7025, with suited A-K. The dealer should announce the raise to the table, but doesn't, as far as I can tell from the tape. Clark, three spots to the left of Bigler, fails to notice Bigler's move, and throws $1200 into the pot, thinking that he is raising (with K-J offsuit). Annie Duke points out to him that it was raised before, and Clark takes back his chips. The tournament director is called for a ruling, and says that Clark can either call Bigler's raise or fold, but if he folds the $1200 will stay in the pot. This is a pretty standard rule. It is always every player's personal obligation to know what the preceding action was before making a decision.

At this point, the ethical and professional thing to do is say, "You're right, it was my mistake," give up the $1200 (18% of his stack--a big hit for a slip-up), smile, and move on. But no. He has to argue about what his intentions were, what the rule is, whether the raise was verbally announced, etc.

Finally, Duke says, "You know what, Eskimo, just put your money in the pot. He's made a ruling." Chris Karagulleyan chimes in, "There's no one higher you're going to go to." At last, Clark realizes that he's wasting his breath (and everybody else's time), and disgustedly throws the chips back in, along with his cards.

The delicious irony is that Bigler gets called by somebody else, so we get to see the hand played out, and Clark would have sucked out on him and won a huge pot. Hee hee hee! I love it when whiners get punished by the poker gods.

The only way to be grumpy about poker is to do it away from the table--like in a blog, maybe....

Aggregator

I'm now listed on this site's aggregation of poker-related blogs: http://www.pokerwonks.com/.

I haven't yet figured out all of its ins and outs, why certain things get featured and not others, etc., but at least it makes it easy to scan and sample other blogs that I haven't heard of before.

My main concern is that they are completely non-selective in what blogs they'll list; if it's about poker, it's in. After not too long, it may get so bogged down (blogged down?) with crap as to become not very useful, because most poker blogs, like most of everything in the world, aren't worthwhile.

Poker gems, #64

Robert Turner.

A person should gamble every day, because think of how bad it would be to walk around being lucky and not know it.

Poker gems, #63

Doyle Brunson, in the new "Poker After Dark" opening montage.

We don't stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.

What Las Vegas has been needing

I've had an idea brewing in my brain since shortly after I moved here and started playing a lot of live casino poker about a year and a half ago. There's no way that I have the time, the financing, or the technical expertise to pull it off myself, so I'm just throwing it out into the ether for any entepreneur to pick up and run with.

We need a centralized web site with continuously updated information as to what games are currently being spread at the city's 50+ poker rooms.

Many times when tourists find out that I live in town, I get asked where they will most reliably be able to find a 7-card stud game, or $10-20 limit hold'em, or whatever. I can only guess.

If you read trip reports (there are new ones almost daily) on http://www.allvegaspoker.com/, you'll frequently see visitors commenting that they went to a particular poker room, but it was dead or didn't have the game or limits they wanted to play, so they had to walk down the Strip to the next casino.

I've sat near the poker room desk often enough to know that the brush or cashier has to handle lots and lots of phone calls asking what games are going on.

Since I generally prefer the smaller poker rooms, I have had times that I have had to call four or five places to find one that had a no-limit hold'em game going. It's a big time waster.

All of these problems would be eliminated, or at least reduced, if we could log on to a web site and get that information.

I envision being able to specify a game and limits, and have the site spit out a list of all of the casinos currently spreading that game, with a notation of how many tables they have going. Alternatively, I could enter my current location, and ask for a display of all of the live games within a certain radius, for example, 0.5 miles (if somebody wanted to see what was within walking distance, say).

Obviously, the big sticking point would be getting the poker room staffs to keep their data frequently updated. Maybe I've got on my rose-colored glasses, but I think they would have sufficient motivation to do so. Letting people know what games they have going brings in more business. It also avoids giving people the sour taste in their mouth that results from taking the trouble to go someplace only to find that there's no action, and have to move on. Third, I think it would take less time for a casino employee to occasionally update their list of games than to answer all the phone calls they get requesting that same information. Finally, poker rooms could advertise on the site, with information about current promotions, etc.

I'm psychic. I can tell what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Grump, wouldn't the casinos be inclined to fib, and say that they have games going even after they've broken up, just to bait-and-switch people in?" Well, they might, if given no reason not to. But I propose that the site be open to feedback from users. On http://www.allvegaspoker.com/ you can get a pretty good feel for how places treat their poker-playing customers from the aggregate reports they compile. Big sites like eBay and amazon.com's used-book dealers also get useful (though admittedly not foolproof) profiles of merchants' reliability through massed reports from purchasers. As I see it being set up, if, say, Caesars Palace were found repeatedly to be claiming to have games running that weren't (and this could be either through deliberate false advertising or simple failure to keep their list adequately updated), angry site users who wasted their time going there would quickly shame Caesars into cleaning up their act, or risk losing business.

Whoever owns and runs the site could generate income from all sorts of poker-related advertising.

I think that once a critical mass was achieved, such that the majority of poker rooms was actively using the site, it would become a significant competitive disadvantage for the others not to join in. The usefulness of such a site would clearly expand over time, as more and more consumers start carrying and relying on web-capable cell phones, such as Apple's iPhone. It is a general fact of life in this century that people will more and more be expecting--even demanding--real-time information in ways that are easier to access than making a tedious series of phone calls. Look at movie theaters as an example. Nobody calls around to theaters these days to find out show times. Even using newspaper ads to get that information is going the way of the dinosaur, as web sites can compile, update, and distribute it much faster. The way poker rooms now inform customers of their offerings is stuck in the stone age.

Maybe someday registered users could even put their names on waiting lists through the site, but that introduces a whole 'nuther level of complication and problems that I would avoid at first. It would be sufficient to have poker room telephone numbers listed so that once you've decided where and what you want to play, you place one call to get on the list while on your way there.

So that's my million-dollar idea, given away for free to anybody who wants to do the hard work of getting it implemented. That's just the kind of guy I am, ya know?

How many mistakes can you make in one paragraph?

In the December, 2007, issue of Poker Pro magazine, David Apostolico has an article on slow-playing big hands (pp. 80-81). In it, he recounts what has become one of the most famous hands in poker history, Johnny Chan versus Erik Seidel in the World Series of Poker main event, 1988. Here's what Apostolico says. If you know the history, see if you can count how many factual errors Mr. Apostolico manages to make in describing just one hand of poker.

The ultimate example of this is Johnny Chan's play in the final stages of
the 1988 World Series of Poker as memorialized in the movie Rounders.
Chan was heads-up with Erik Seidel when he flopped the nut straight. Chan held
Jc-9c and the flop was Qc-10d-8d. Seidel held a queen with a weak kicker, giving
him top pair. There was $40,000 in the pot and Chan was first to act after the
flop. He checked. Seidel bet $50,000, which Chan called. The turn brought a blank
and again Chan checked. However, this time Seidel checked also. The river
brought another blank and again Chan checked. This time Seidel went all in and,
of course, Chan called (right away, I might add).

Seidel was severely crippled and soon Johnny was world champ. Chan took a
big chance by checking on the river. If Seidel had checked also, then Chan would
have lost the opportunity to make a bet with the nuts.

First, let's acknowledge that Mr. Apostolico gets a few things right. Chan and Seidel were, in fact, heads-up for the 1988 WSOP championship. Chan did, in fact, hold the Jc-9c, and Seidel had a queen with a weak kicker (Qc-7h, to be exact). Chan did flop the nut straight. And the hand did famously get featured in "Rounders." But that's pretty much the entire list of things that Mr. Apostolico gets right.

The errors:

1. "[T]he flop was Qc-10d-8d." Actually, the 10 on the flop was in hearts, not diamonds. This is confirmed by three sources: Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback, All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of The World Series of Poker, St. Martin's Press, 2005, p. 150; and Dana Smith, Tom McEvoy, and Ralph Wheeler, The Championship Table at the World Series of Poker, Cardoza Publishing, 2nd edition, 2004, pp. 112-113; and Mark Rogers and Matthew Booma, 52 Greatest Moments, World Series of Poker, Amalgam Studio LLC, 2007, p. 135.

2. "There was $40,000 in the pot." I'm not certain that this is wrong, but I suspect that it is. I haven't found any source that relates what the blinds and antes were at this stage of the tournament, but it's clear that both players limped in before the flop. It's hard to think of a plausible combination of blinds and antes that would have resulted in a $40,000 pot before the flop.* I think more likely, given the other mistakes I'll discuss below, Mr. Apostolico is erroneously getting the "$40,000" figure from the initial post-flop bet.

3. "Chan was first to act after the flop." Nope. Chan had the button, as you can clearly see from the famous footage. Seidel had to act first after the flop. This mistake leads to several others that follow in the article.

4. "He checked." No. The action on the flop was this: Seidel checked first, Chan bet $40,000, Seidel check-raised another $50,000, and Chan called.

5. "The turn brought a blank and again Chan checked. However, this time Seidel checked also." Well, it did go check-check, but in the opposite order. The card was the 2s, incidentally.

6. "The river brought another blank and again Chan checked. This time Seidel went all-in and, of course, Chan called." The river was the 6d. But Seidel was first to act and moved all in. Chan called (which, I suppose, I should count as another point Mr. Apostolico gets right).

7. "Seidel was severely crippled, and soon Johnny was world champ." Uh, no. According to Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler, "When the final hand began, defending World Champion Chan had $1,374,000 in chips and challenger Seidel had $296,000." This is plausible, because this makes a total of 1,670,000 chips in play, and there were 167 players in the tournament, at $10,000 each. Grotenstein/Reback give the same figure for Chan, but don't specify Seidel's stack size. They do note, however, that Chan had "a substantial lead." It's obvious from the footage that the hand in question ends the tournament. Seidel wasn't "crippled," he was eliminated! Furthermore, Chan would not "soon" become the world champ, as Mr. Apostolico writes. This is wrong in two ways. First, Chan was already the defending world champion, having won the same event in 1987. Second, he gained the title for the second year in a row upon completion of this hand, not sometime "soon" thereafter.

8. "Chan took a big chance by checking on the river. If Seidel had checked also, then Chan would have lost the opportunity to make a bet with the nuts." No. Since Chan had the button, he didn't have to make the difficult decision as to whether to continue his slow-play on the river.

I should add that a couple of lines of dialog in "Rounders" sort of suggest that Chan was first to act and had the "patience" to wait for Seidel to "bluff." But it's not so. Also, the movie calling Seidel's move a "bluff" is inaccurate; he likely believed that he had the best hand. Top pair in a heads-up situation is usually good, especially given the way Chan played it (which was indeed masterfully deceptive).

I also see that Smith/McEvoy/Wheeler make an apparent error when they suggest that Seidel moved all-in before the river card hit. It's not quite explicit, however, and it's possible to read their text as being correct. In the actual footage, though, you can clearly see all five community cards are out when Seidel pushes his stacks forward, followed by Chan's call. That the action was check/check on the turn and all-in/call on the river is confirmed in both of the other books mentioned above.

So that's eight (plus or minus one, depending on how you count them) factual mistakes in 14 sentences of Mr. Apostolico's article--a pretty high error rate by any standards.

I'm disappointed by this, because I've enjoyed his columns in Card Player magazine. He has also written six books about poker (at least that's how many are listed on amazon.com), two of which I own but haven't read yet. One of them is Lessons from the Pro Poker Tour, a book devoted to lessons to be learned from specific hands as they played out in a tournament series.

If Mr. Apostolico can't be bothered to get the facts correct when he's describing one of the most famous hands in the history of poker, it's going to be hard to put much confidence in an entire book that depends, through and through, on getting just such hand-history details correct.


*Theoretically, blinds of, say, 9,000 and 18,000, with a 2,000 ante would make the pot 40,000, but those are kind of odd amounts for a tournament structure to use. Blinds of 7,500 and 15,000 with a 5,000 ante would work mathematically, but it would be highly unusual to have the antes be that high a percentage of the blinds. Blinds of 8,000/16,000 with a 4,000 ante would also yield a 40,000 pot, but, again, it would be strange to have an ante that was half the size of the small blind. I just can't think of a plausible set of numbers that works, which is part of why I strongly suspect that Mr. Apostolico's number is just wrong here.

Addendum, January 5, 2008

A reader pointed me to this YouTube clip, which appears to be unedited from the original broadcast. Without the editing imposed by "Rounders," it's much clearer about the order of action, and completely confirms what I had pieced together above.

Playing for a living

Anybody who ponders taking up poker for a living should read this blog post, about whose author I know nothing, save that he speaks the sober truth and should be heeded:

http://www.thepokerchronicles.com/archives/000947.html

Poker gems, #62

Kenna James, as quoted by Arthur S. Reber in "Defining Tilt," article in Poker Pro magazine, December, 2007, p. 77.

Poker is a game of me against myself.

I SO need one of these things!

http://www.dbdealer.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=cCart.details&ProductID=10

Best of the Grump (so far)

All right, I'll join the rest of the writers of the world in doing a year-end (slightly belated) "best of" list of my own. But two differences. First, since I've only been blogging for about 15 months, I'm going to take the liberty of including everything from the beginning (since the main purpose of this post is to tempt some newer readers into exploring stuff that was put up before they joined, and what the heck do I care if it's from 2007 or late 2006?). Second, it may or may not be ten items. I'll just stop when it feels like I'm done.



I have to include my first-ever post, because it's the rant that got this whole thing started: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/10/what-you-threw-away.html


This one amuses me because it's the one by which Google searches most often stumble upon the blog. I think that's funny, because most likely people typing in "poker clothes" are looking to buy poker clothes, not find somebody taunting them about poker clothes. http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/ugly-poker-clothes.html


This was my first attempt at waxing philosophical, without really being grumpy: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/loved-or-feared-non-grumpy-content.html


This is overall my favorite post ever, perhaps my best attempt at being funny at the same time as grumpy: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/04/armpit-of-las-vegas-poker.html


This story is still the most startling, eye-opening thing that has ever happened to me while playing poker: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/05/whats-absolute-worst-thing-in-poker.html


I'm going for a double here, because these two posts, I think, were basically what got me my first poker-related radio guest spot, when they were read by James Klosty, then a host of the Hilton's weekly radio show (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-radio.html): http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/i-think-im-going-to-throw-up.html; http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/crap-underfoot.html


This is just a pointer to something else I wrote that got published in Card Player magazine, my first appearance in the larger poker publishing world. While not particularly important in the big scope of things, it was a milestone for me personally, because it confirmed my thought that I really do have things to say that others will find interesting and/or useful, even though I'm playing $1-$2 games instead of $1000-$2000 games. http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/article-in-card-player-magazine-non.html


This pair of posts remain the one most widely read, after I took the liberty of putting links to them up at a couple of widely read poker forums. I think the overt religiosity at the year's WSOP final table caught a lot of people off guard, and I had a few things to say about the subject that I think weren't said by anybody else. http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/mr-destiny.html; http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-on-religion-at-poker-table.html

I like this post because circumstances were just right to turn one of my most painful poker experiences into what I think is a story so perfectly ironic that I would think the author was making it up, had I not lived it myself: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/irony-poker-story-in-4-parts-non-grumpy.html

This post has a little bit of everything thrown in--grumpiness, movies, my medical background, some poker history, rules discussion, and the kitchen sink (well, not literally): http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-do-poker-movies-have-to-be-so-awful.html

This post isn't characteristically grumpy, but it may be the one that I learned the most from. I ended up having to do a lot of research to figure out the right mathematical approach to the question I posed, and had to revisit it a couple of times with addenda as I learned more. Writing it ended up giving me a big boost in my understanding of how to go about poker probability calculations. http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/unlikely-events-non-grumpy-content.html

I'm deeply cynical about politics and the current political scene. I find it endlessly baffling and depressing that the great majority of people, it seems, have a deep urge to control how other people behave--a trait that I do not share. Most of politics is people trying to control others, which I despise. That finally showed through with this post, my first about politics: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/poker-players-are-political-wimps.html

I'm a big fan of Doyle Brunson, so it took an investment of quite a bit of time and research before I was willing to publish a post saying that he was wrong about a point of poker advice: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/doyle-brunson-is-wrong.html

Two of my worst poker experiences ever were both at the Tropicana, stories told in two posts: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/tropicana-home-of-most-obnoxious-poker.html; http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/12/tropicana-poker-room-with-no-rules.html

This is another potpourri post (touching on game shows, probability, the stupidity of the general public, other people's blogs, and Elvis Presley, among other things) that for some hard-to-define reason I just like way more than is probably reasonable: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/chuck-woolery-and-me-non-poker-related.html

The concept of Superman playing poker is just too silly not to love. Incidentally, the "Family Guy" snippet I managed to put up on YouTube got taken down shortly thereafter by the powers that be--something about copyright infringement. http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/superman-playing-poker.html

OK, now it feels like I'm done with my Top 16 Or Maybe 19 Depending On How You're Counting List. I hope you enjoyed it.

"Give 'em a good wash, would ya?"

I heard the request quoted in the title of this post at Harrah's the other day. It's hardly the first time.

A "wash," in dealer-ese, is the process of scrambling the cards face-down on the table before gathering them up and commencing the standard riffle shuffle. It's a routine and important part of the whole hand-shuffling procedure.

But what's odd is that sometimes players will request that the dealer do this before placing the deck into an autoshuffler. That was the case at Harrah's. There was a regular at the Hilton poker room that used to request this on a regular basis.

Maybe I'm the wrong person to write blog posts about the idiotic things that people say and do at the poker table, because I really want to be asking about them, rather than explaining them. As far as I can tell, there is no rational explanation for them. For the life of me I can't understand what goes through player's brains that makes them submit such a request.

It might help (though I really think the details don't matter) to understand how casino autoshufflers work. It's kind of mysterious if all you do is watch the dealer insert one deck and take out the next one. But how the things work isn't exactly a secret. The manufacturer, Shufflemaster (Shufflemaster's market dominance is so complete that I've never even once seen a casino using any other kind of machine, and I don't even know if any competitors exist), isn't shy about explaining it, and it's all laid out in detail in its patents.* For example (from http://tinyurl.com/yqsg8e):

The microprocessor randomly assigns potential positions for each card
within the initial set of playing cards, and then directs the device to arrange
the initial set of playing cards into those randomly assigned potential
positions to form a randomized final set of playing cards.

In other words, it has a computerized random number generator that determines a random order into which to place the 52 cards. It picks them off of the bottom of the used deck one by one and sticks them into pre-assigned spots in what will become the newly shuffled deck. This isn't to say that the machine has decided that the queen of diamonds will be at position #32 in the completed deck; it doesn't know which card is which (although I see now, looking at Shufflemaster's web site, that it has a new model that does exactly that; see http://www.shufflemaster.com/02_eu_products/utility_products/shufflers/shufflers_sd/i-deal.asp). It simply determines that, say, the current bottom card of the deck, whatever it may be, will go to position #19 in the final reassembled deck, the next card from the bottom will go to position #46 in the reassembled deck, etc.

Of course, the order that the cards are in when the dealer drops the deck into the machine is a key factor determining the order of the newly shuffled deck. So "washing" the cards, as opposed to simply gathering them up, definitely does alter the order that the cards will be in when they emerge from the machine two hands from now.

But the important thing conceptually is that it's a random order either way. You could have the dealer take a few minutes and put the deck back into the same order it was in when it came from the factory, with each suit in consecutive order of rank, and you'd still get a randomly shuffled deck out of the machine when it was done. (For stories of how poker hands go down when you accidentally use such a factory-ordered, unshuffled deck, see Steve Zolotow's column at http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/57/8510.) It would be a different order than the one you'd get if the dealer just scooped up the cards and placed them in the shuffler, which would also be a different order than the one that you'd get if the dealer were to "give 'em a good wash," which would be different from the one that you'd get if the dealer went through the full hand-shuffle routine and then dropped the deck in the machine. But they would all be random.

Perhaps even more crucial to grasp, though I think this should be obvious, is that how the final order of the deck changes as a result of the wash is precisely as likely to hurt any given player as to help him. For all you know, when the dealer does the wash you request, it sets you up to have pocket kings when an opponent has pocket aces, or to be the one with the aces when the guy with the kings will hit quads against you with them, outcomes that would not have occurred without the wash.

In short, it's just a waste of time and effort.

I assume that players do this when they've had a run of unplayable hands or bad beats and they want to change their luck, in much the same way that they ask for a new setup (i.e., a different pair of decks to be brought to the table; see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-setup-youre-moron.html), or insist that the dealer make the final cut of the deck higher or lower. Yes, you change the circumstances of the next hand, but in a way that has exactly zero positive expected value for you and for every other player.

I really wish I could get one of these imbeciles to explain to me in detail what they believe they're accomplishing with the wash request. Presumably they must believe that it acts to their advantage, or they wouldn't bother, right? But no rational mind could possibly believe that--which is why my rational mind can't grasp what's going on.

My best guess is that their thought process--if that term can be applied at all--is something like this: "Well, the standard procedure that the dealer is using every time is resulting in me getting crummy cards for the past half an hour. So I should have the dealer do something different." And that's as far as the analysis goes. Standard process is treating me about as bad as it can get, so anything different must necessarily be an improvement.

But even as I type that out, I think that surely can't really be it, because two seconds of critical thought would dash the notion all to pieces, and I'd like to believe that most of my fellow humans are capable of two seconds of sustained rational thought.

The evidence, though, is to the contrary, sad to say.



*Incidentally, Shufflemaster didn't used to sell its devices to non-institutional buyers, but it has apparently recently changed this policy, so if you'd like to have your own to speed up your home games, it can be yours for just $15,795 (see http://www.shufflemaster.com/02_eu_products/utility_products/shufflers/shufflers_sd/deck_mate.asp). I guess I'm a tad late with this announcement for those who wanted one for Christmas. Sorry about that.


Addendum, March 1, 2008

See the story about Sam Grizzle at today's heads-up championship round, at http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/poker-blog/2008/03/362_nbc_headsup_championship_12_highlights_from_high_noon.php.

Will grump for food

Yes, I've gone the way of so many other blogs and added a tip jar. Two, in fact, so that anybody who cares to throw in a buck or two can use either PayPal (the upper button) or Amazon.com (the lower button). No, I won't do anything noble with donations, like save the whales or bring peace to the earth. But it will make me feel that the time I spend writing instead of sitting at the green felt is actually contributing to keeping myself financially solvent.

This isn't meant to be begging or to impose some sense of personal or social obligation. But after getting so many kind words from readers, it occurred to me that somebody out there might actually use such a thing if I put it up. It took me a while to figure out how to set them up (I find that every new thing that I try to do with HTML makes me feel like I'm retarded, like I'm the last kid in the class to catch on to something simple), but there they are.

There's only one quotation that would be fitting here, I think. Yeah, I alluded to it not long ago, and it's honestly not the only movie dialog I know, but it's just irresistably perfect here:

And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.

Incidentally, I had considerable difficulty in selecting an illustration to go with this post. I finally settled on a classical motif, with Rembrandt's "Self-Portrait as a Beggar." My disclaimers above notwithstanding, it seemed undeniably appropriate.

Wow. Mixing Rembrandt and "Caddyshack" in one post. How many poker bloggers you know can pull that off, huh?

Poker gems, #61

Nick Brancato, in Bluff magazine column, December, 2007, p. 96.

The game is so simple on the surface, yet it's exceedingly complex. People could play for years before they even realize how little they actually know about poker.

Crass, tacky, and distasteful

While I was at O'Sheas the other day, I had to visit the men's room, and saw two of the above-pictured devices above the urinals. For a quarter, you can having a contest with your buddy about who has the fastest and/or greatest volume of output. (I was a little unclear on the details, and it's creepy enough taking a photograph in a public restroom that I didn't want to also lurk around long enough to read the fine print.)

This reminded me of something I always meant to gripe about from the Hilton: In their men's room, above the urinals, is a bunch of photographs of attractive women looking down on those using the facilities. The women are looking closely at what's being exposed, some of them reacting with obvious delight and admiration, others pulling out rulers and tape measures. If you see what I mean.

I'm sure that many visitors to these two facilities find these installations hilarious and enjoyable. As the title to this post suggests, I think they're just plain in bad taste.

I don't belong to that segment of society that experiences any sense of shame about human waste elimination. Personally, I wouldn't care a whole lot if all restrooms were unisex, because I don't really care if anybody is watching me; conversely, I have neither interest in nor disgust from seeing somebody else, male or female, urinating. I remember once being at the zoo in New Orleans, using the men's room, when an unfortunate female elementary school teacher, with her class on a field trip, had to enter and keep an eye on her young male charges--I suppose to be sure that they didn't get kidnapped or molested or something. She was a whole lot more embarrassed about the situation than I was. It's just not that big a deal.

But at the same time, I can't go so far in my relaxed attitude as to want to elevate it to institutionalized humor. Surely O'Sheas and Hilton management must realize that at least some of their guests will find such attempts at humor loathesome and vile. Why would you do something that you know will offend some substantial fraction of your customers, at least when there's little or no money to be made from doing so? (I put that condition on it because other things in casinos are likely to offend some people, but are undoubtedly revenue-enhancing, which at least makes the decision to have them understandable from a business point of view.) I can't imagine that whatever little enjoyment some segment of the population derives from crudeness like this outweighs the undoubtedly stronger negative thoughts and feelings that another segment will experience.

I guess I just don't get businesses going out of their way to be offensive.

Addendum, January 2, 2007

A friend pointed me to the following story about a downtown casino that has a piece of the Berlin Wall in its men's room: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/sights/sightstory.php?tip_AttrId=%3D12552. I'd have to agree that that is in even poorer taste than the two examples I cited above, though for different reasons.

Visuals

You've probably noticed that in the last few days I've fiddled a bit with the colors and type size for this blog. I think it's easier to read now than when I first went with the new template a week or so ago, but I don't trust my own eyes as the exclusive judge. Comments pro and con (public or by private email) are welcome.

Poker the Harrah's way

Last night I took in three of the adjacent Harrah's properties on the Strip. I started at Harrah's. I've played there twice before, and liked it OK, but yesterday, for some reason, it impressed me more, and I think I'll be spending more time there. Part of it is that I discovered the back way into the parking garage, so I don't have to battle Strip traffic now. Soft, easy-to-read competition, extremely low noise and smoke, competent dealers. And good hot chocolate, served fast!

I then walked next door to Imperial Palace. I've been there once before and thought I'd never return. But lately I've seen reports on allvegaspoker.com about how incredibly easy the games there are to beat, so I decided to buck up and try to win some $$. The room is different than it was when I visited previously a year ago or so. The noise and smoke are pretty bad, but it was true that winning was easy. Also, the tables have been revised; they're no longer the infamous, huge monsters that they were before. They might be a tad larger than average, but before they were completely ridiculous, so wide that the dealers couldn't reach the player's bets or cards.

Finally, I stopped in at O'Sheas, one of the last remaining places on my "haven't tried yet" list. The definitive collection of stories and observations of O'Sheas is at http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/, a blog kept by a Flamingo poker dealer, because they also staff O'Sheas. I set foot in the place once before just to grab an ice cream cone, so my only mental picture of poker there is the couple of tables they have set up right inside the front door. (See the bottom photo above.) Only one was going when I entered. I was stunned to find that it was a $1-$2 no-limit game, instead of the expected $2-4 limit. Maybe it was some sort of optical illusion, but it appeared to be the smallest table I've ever played at. Perhaps it was only because of the contrast of having just come from playing at the giant I.P. tables. Anyway, I was one of only four people playing, a few minutes before midnight. The game broke up after about ten hands. Fortunately, though, I doubled up on the last hand with pocket fours flopping a set and rivering a full house.

There was a live band playing about 40 feet away, making this officially the loudest place I've ever tried to play poker--painfully loud, literally. You could just barely make yourself heard by shouting. It was also the coldest place I've ever tried to play, because of being right next to the doors that kept opening. Absurdly uncomfortable conditions under which to play--impossible to concentrate.

But after I had been there about five minutes, the other table suddenly filled up, as in going from zero players to full in two minutes. I quickly realized it was a midnight tournament. The person who ushered these players in mentioned something about the "back room." I then looked around and noticed a sign towards the back of the casino: "Poker Room." Whaaaaattttt?

Somehow I had missed (or perhaps read about, then forgotten) the fact that O'Sheas at some point this year opened an actual room for poker. (See top two photos above.) I guess these tables out front are just for overflow and/or as an attention-grabber for passers-by. So when my game broke up shortly thereafter, I went back to the real poker room. To my utter shock, it's not so terrible back there! The noise and smoke were worse than I like, but after coming from the front tables seemed quite acceptable.

Two of the three tables were running the tournament, but the third had a $1-5 spread-limit game going, with a single $1 blind. I didn't stay long, because three of the players were drunk and playing unbearably slowly, prefacing every single damn bet with a series of announcements, speeches, conversations, questions, dares, challenges, jokes, etc., to each other. Every hand took three or four minutes to complete because of this. It was just intolerable. The only redeeming value in it was that one of them was genuinely Irish, with the charming accent to prove it. Still, about 30 minutes was all I could take. With a different mix of players, though, I wouldn't have minded staying longer.

If I'm counting right, I've now played poker at 55 different casinos in Nevada, plus 9 (I think) in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa before moving out here. I believe that my list of local poker rooms yet unvisited is now down to Speedway, Poker Palace, Railroad Pass, and Hacienda. The former two I'll probably knock off fairly soon; the latter two may take a long time, for reasons of distance and paucity of games being spread. After that, I may have to take on Reno!