You make the call

Playing my usual $1-$2 no-limit hold'em at the Venetian this afternoon, quite early in the session, I picked up J-J in second position. Ick. Oh well--you've got to play them even from out of position, right?

I have a system of raise amounts that varies with my position (earlier position means smaller raise, later position larger raise) and the number of limpers already in (more limpers means a larger raise). I never want my bet or raise size to be related to the strength of my cards, but it does make sense to take into account those two factors. My formula dictated $8 for that spot, so that's what I made it. A fairly loose-aggressive player on the button pushed it up to $18. I couldn't give him a lot of credit here for a big hand, so I put in the third raise, bumping it up to $38. He called. We're the only ones in this pot.

The flop was Q-9-4, rainbow. I hated the queen, but nearly half my stack was in the pot already, and with J-J if you're scared of every overcard, you'll almost never play past the flop. So I scrunched up my courage, put my remaining chips into one stack, and slid it forward across the betting line. As usual, I didn't say anything.

My opponent asked how much the bet was. The dealer eyeballed the chips--without breaking down the stack--and announced "35." Well, that's what everybody else heard. I actually thought he said "45," but he had an exceptionally heavy Asian accent, and those two numbers could sound quite similar in a noisy cardroom. Furthermore, I had not paid any attention to what the amount was, and really wasn't listening to the dealer. I was just watching to see what my opponent would do.

He plucked seven red chips from his stack and tossed them in, after thinking for a bit. I showed my jacks. He just nodded. The dealer put out the turn and river cards, and the player kept his hand face-down. He never did show it, so apparently my unimproved pair had him beat.

But now the problem arose. Another player not in the hand noticed that my stack was actually $45 (eight red chips and five whites), not $35. When he pointed this out, the dealer broke down my stack and confirmed it.

Now the other guy didn't want to put in the additional $10 for the full call. His argument was that he put in what the dealer said was the amount required to call. I didn't get involved, just sat quietly, knowing that it would all get sorted out in some manner. My reasons were that, first, because I hadn't really paid attention at the critical moment, I didn't have any useful firsthand-witness observations to contribute to the discussion, and, besides, anything I said would look petty and self-serving.

The floorperson got called over. He eventually ruled that all of my chips had gone forward across the line and were clearly visible, and that it was the caller's responsibility to know the amount, even if the dealer misstated it. His intention was clearly to call, and the floorperson couldn't believe that the player would have been willing to call $35 but not $45 in that situation. He was, therefore, required to complete the call for the additional $10.

I still don't know whether that's right or not, which is why I'm posting this for comments--especially from you dealers and floor guys who read this.

Yeah, in this particular case the difference is pretty small, which makes it likely that the guy would have called even if the dealer had stated the amount correctly. But what happens if we change the facts just a bit? Suppose that I had had a black $100 chip at the bottom of the stack, and the dealer's error had been overlooking that, and the opponent, at the far end of the table, couldn't clearly see it? Should he then be required to call off the additional $100 after thinking that he was making just a $35 (or $45) call? What if the player is known to have very poor eyesight, through no fault of his own, and has no reasonable choice but to rely on the dealer's count?

And don't I have at least some responsibility here to have noticed the error and help get it right before the guy made his decision?

When the player takes the trouble to ask the dealer for the amount before making the call, and the dealer gets it wrong, who should bear the responsibility? My opponent, when arguing with the floor guy (very civilly, I should point out; no raised voice, no swearing, no insults, no sarcasm--just thoughtful, logical questions and statements) asked, "Do I have to walk around the table and physically count it myself to be sure that the dealer isn't getting it wrong?" Good question, for which the floorperson didn't have a convincing reply.

My gestalt sense is that the floor's decision was probably the best one for this particular set of facts, but I don't like being left without a clear rule or rationale that would guide all such decisions, even if the facts were somewhat different.

Comments welcome.


Addendum, April 4, 2008

I posted this same question in the forums over at www.allvegaspoker.com. Chris Coffin, poker room manager at Treasure Island, posted a superb response, listing all of the relevant rules and considerations. Highly recommended reading, if the situation interests you: http://www.allvegaspoker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=47137.

#500

This is my 500th blog post. As Mike Sexton would say, "Oh my golly!"

I actually managed (though not intentionally) to slow down the pace just a hair; it took me 42 days to put up the previous hundred posts, and I stretched that out to 43 this time around. That was mainly because there was a five-day stretch in there in which the muse completely abandoned me, and I felt no inspiration to write anything. (And thanks to those of you who noticed and took time to tell me that I was missed.)

I can't think of anything to say here that I haven't said before (and I don't like repeating myself), so please just click back and see what I said about posts #400, #300, and #200 (I didn't do anything special to note #100). It's all still true:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/02/opus-400.html

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/300.html

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/11/post-200.html

And I only say this every 100 posts: Please click on the stupid, ugly ads on the left! They keep this thing a-goin'.

A newfound simple pleasure

At many Vegas casinos, you exit the parking garage (for non-valet-users like me, anyway) and have to go down an escalator from there to get to the main casino floor. Offhand I can think of the Venetian, Treasure Island, Harrah's, Imperial Palace, Suncoast--there are undoubtedly others.

Over the last couple of weeks I've done something new and different: I take the stairs. There is usually a narrow staircase located adjacent to the escalators, and it's almost always empty. Using it does several things: It gives me a little exercise; it allows me to avoid the irritation of the throngs of people who are too stupid to grasp the "stand on the right, walk on the left" concept (about which see the fine rant at http://www.vegasrex.com/2008/03/13/move-to-the-right/); and it actually gets me there faster, because even when I'm not hurrying, my normal pace on stairs beats the slowpoke escalators. Also, the escalator riders tend to look at me as if I'm nuts for not using the common conveyance, and I always like being just a bit different than the crowd.

When I'm done with a poker session, climbing the stairs actually feels great. If it was a winning day, I've got a little spring in my step to exert on the stairs. If it was a stinkeroo, the exercise is at least a little, um, exorcising. Either way, blood pumping through the atrophied leg muscles feels quite invigorating after a few hours of near motionlessness.

I recommend giving it a try.

I hate seat squatters

It happened again the other day at the Palms. A player went for a dinner break, leaving his chips at the poker table to reserve his seat. Then, after an hour, the guy returned, picked up his chips, cashed out, and went home.

You might wonder why he didn't cash out before leaving for dinner. The most common reason is the various incentives that casinos give players for hours spent at the poker table. In the case of the Palms, they have a freeroll tournament every week for people who put in enough hours to qualify. Players in absentia for long stretches become a real problem when they are given incentive to play longer than they really want to. The Palms guy got credit for an extra hour or so that he didn't actually play.

Some places have effective measures in place to prevent this. Poker rooms such as Treasure Island, the MGM Grand, Imperial Palace, and all the Station casinos have electronic systems built into the tables. Players swipe their cards in at the table, and the dealer can just push a button when the player is absent, so that they cease to accumulate time credit. When the Hilton had its poker room open, they had an increasing problem with this phenomenon, so they would manually take people off the freeroll tournament clock as soon as they missed a blind. (This was possible because the number of qualifying players was low enough that essentially all of the players were known by name to all of the dealers, and the room was physically small enough that it was easy for dealers to speak to the people at the desk.)

In most rooms, there is a limit to how long you can be gone before they come around and pick up your chips, so that your seat is forfeited. Typically you get 60 to 90 minutes. They keep track of this by each incoming dealer (changed every 30 minutes in most rooms) placing an "absent" button at the seat of anybody not there. Usually the third absent button gets you picked up. The most unethical players try to effectively extend this by returning after an hour, playing one or two hands, then leaving for another hour. The Rio recently instituted a countermeasure: If you get an absent button, it can only be taken back by the next dealer, not by the same one that gave it to you. That means that when you return from your break, you have to stay and play at least until the next dealer arrives, or the effect is the same as if you hadn't come back.

Personally, I don't get this behavior. I'm at the casino to play poker because I make money doing so. The longer I play, the more I make (or at least that's the plan). Furthermore, there's nothing else that the casinos offer that I want to do. I don't drink, I don't play the table games. I'm not interested in watching what's on the TVs in the sports book. I'm not into shopping at the stores. If I'm at the casino, I want to be playing poker. But that's just crazy ol' me.

In addition to being a cheat on the incentive these seat-squatters are chasing, it leaves the game short-handed while they do whatever it is they're out doing, and it prevents other waiting players from joining the game because the seat is locked up.

What made the situation at the Palms more infuriating than the many other times that I've seen it happen is that the culprit was a guy that I know is a poker dealer at the Red Rock casino. He's normally a very cool guy that I like having at the table--a good player, quiet, friendly, respectful, easy-going. This is the first major etiquette infraction I'm seen him guilty of. I'm calling you out, Adam. You of all people should know better than this.

Taking a dinner break in the middle of a long poker session is perfectly fine. But tying up a seat for a long time, only to return, pick up your chips, and leave without playing again, is a crummy, unethical, low-life, rude, cheating thing to do to the casino. It is a crummy, unethical, low-life, rude, cheating thing to do to the other players that are honestly qualifying for the freeroll tournament (or whatever other incentive the hours count towards). It is a crummy, unethical, low-life, rude, cheating thing to do to the other players at the table, who would like to have the seat occupied. It is a crummy, unethical, low-life, rude, cheating thing to do to the people who are on the waiting list and would like to be able to sit down and play.

Horse, not HORSE

I usually work for a while on a crossword puzzle before I go to bed. Last night I was doing so, when I came upon this clue: "One who gives shots on a horse farm?" (The question mark suggests that it's a wordplay answer.)

When I finally figured out the solution, it was:

STUD POKER.

Hee hee hee!

How far off can my read be?

The other day at the Rio I was new to the table, sizing people up. After maybe 30 minutes, I thought that a 30-ish guy at the far end of the table was going to be a solid, tough opponent. He was kind of awkward in handling his chips and cards, so I knew that he was new to casino poker. However, his decisions seemed confident; he wasn't overly loose; he continued aggressively once he took control of a hand; and opponents seemed to give him a lot of respect. He was quiet, moved and talked very little, unflappable, showing little of any emotion about anything. I pegged him as a pretty experienced online player, making good poker decisions, but just inexperienced in the mechanics of live poker. This was somebody to watch out for.

Then came the hand that opened my eyes.

I had A-J in the big blind. Mr. Confident raised from middle position, got one late-position caller, and I joined in the fun. The flop was K-Q-10. I had flopped the joint, the Broadway straight. I checked. True to form, Mr. Confident put in a $20 continuation bet, and the third player called. I check-raised to $60. This was about half of my stack, which presumably signaled to the other players that I was perfectly willing to go all the way here. With little hesitation, Mr. Confident called, making me think he had either two pair or had flopped a set. The other guy folded.

The turn was a blank, and of course I shoved the rest of my chips in. Mr. Confident quickly said, "I call." I showed my straight. He kept his cards face down. The turn was a jack, which I hated, because if he had A-K or A-Q, he just made the same straight that I had.

But then he turned over... K-4 offsuit.

Yes. K-4 offsuit.

Raising with K-4 isn't totally crazy if it's an unopened pot, though doing so in middle position rather than late position is a bit iffy. You have to know that you're making a play based on table image and representing something stronger than what you really have; you do not want to go to a showdown, unless you happen to hit a truly miracle flop (like K-4-4). When you flop top pair with it, and the action is checked to you, a continuation bet is perfectly reasonable. But when you then get called in one spot, and check-raised by one of the blinds--who is putting in half of his stack and is therefore committed to putting in the rest--and you still have the third player to act on the check-raise behind you, it is absolute suicide to do anything other than run away as fast as you can. You're done. The jig is up. You got caught with a mediocre hand, and you have to abandon ship.

But this post isn't to poke fun at how badly he played. It's primarily to marvel at how wildly off my initial assessment of him had been. I thought he was savvy, when actually he was clueless. I thought he would show me KK or QQ or KQ, when actually he was much, much weaker than that.

So how I have to ask, where does one go to get one's poker radar repaired? Mine seems in need of some fine-tuning.

Congressional hearing on UIGEA

A simply outstanding report of the proceedings is posted over at Hard-Boiled Poker: http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2008/04/uigea-regs-burden-without-benefit.html. I'm confident you won't find a better summary of what went on.

Cows

I now have four poker chips with cows on them (only two of which are immediately accessible, and are therefore shown here). I just think that's a little odd. It's not like herds of cows often wander around the Strip.

They're, y'know, cow chips.

Poker gems, #103

Howard Lederer, in Poker Pro magazine, April, 2008, p. 21:


Unless you are drawing to the absolute nuts, I tend to pretty much ignore implied odds. The chances that A. you hit your hand and when you bet the person folds; or B. you hit your hand and it's no good...is enough...that I don't think you should count implied odds for money.

I begin to grasp the heartache of razz

This is another of the occasional posts that's completely self-absorbed and likely of a lot less interest to most readers than the majority of the stuff I try to write about, so again, all are forgiven for clicking on to something else.

My interest in razz keeps growing. I have moved both the Cogert and Sklansky books (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/03/razzberry-flavored-poker.html) off of my Amazon.com wish list and ordered them; they should be arriving any day. In the meantime, a reader who bumped into me (in the virtual way) in an online razz game kindly pointed me to a quick primer on the game from twoplustwo magazine. I read it this afternoon, but in a weird turn of events, it has disappeared from the twoplustwo.com web site within the last few hours. Trying to figure out what happened to it, I found a notice that the site only keeps its magazine articles available for three months. The article was in the January issue, so I suspect that they did housekeeping today and removed it. But never fear, entering some search terms in Google led me to the author's razz blog, where I found that the article was posted yesterday, specifically to make it available after twoplustwo removed it: http://listeningsrazzblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/introduction-to-razz-complete-newbies.html

Others in the series that I just now discovered and haven't read yet:

http://twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue39/listening_0308.php

http://twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue40/listening_0408.php

The primer introduced me to the concept (incredibly obvious once it's pointed out) that one must use at least two of the four up cards, which makes for a simple way of putting limits on how good or bad an opponent's hand can be. I also learned what "boardlock" is, a term that I had seen used in a couple of places, but without a definition that I could easily find, so it remained meaningless to me. (I figured I would just wait until my books arrived to learn about it.) I know, I know--in the ocean of knowledge of razz, this stuff is about puddle depth, kind of like realizing that there has to be a pair on the board in order to make a full house in hold'em. But that's where I am in learning this stuff, so don't make fun of me. You'll hurt my tender feelings.

The article also pointed me to this hand simulator/calculator, which will quite amazingly run several billion trials of a given hand-versus-hand that you give it, in just a few seconds: http://propokertools.com/simulator/razzSimulationEditor.jsp.

(As helpful as reading the first article today was at getting me my first real toehold on even the most basic strategy, I have to inject a note of caution about this author, whom I know only as "listening," the alias he or she adopts for both playing online and writing/blogging. There is another blog post at the same site, http://listeningsrazzblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Stop%20Loss%3A%20Measuring%20Your%20%22Luck%22, that in its grasp of the concept of randomness is, at best, just plain dead wrong, and, at worst, bordering on the looney. This makes me pretty tepid about recommending the author's work wholesale. But he or she doesn't have to know very much about razz to be able to teach me useful things at this point, and the razz stuff is well-written and easy to grasp. So you have been warned: Take what's useful, but be leery of anything mathematical.)

I've played several sessions of 0.50/$1 limit razz on Poker Stars over the last week or so. I'm using Stars exclusively because, as a reader kindly pointed out to me after my first post on the subject, they allow you to see the order in which the cards came in the post-hoc hand history, and at this stage of my development, I desperately need that in order to reconstruct what happened and figure out whether I did the right things. Full Tilt's decision to scramble the order still seems crazy to me.

Amazingly enough, even with my rudimentary understaning of the game, I've been able to break even over maybe 10 hours of playing, even when playing two tables at a time. Not only that, I've been able to make at least some general identification of the players who are better or (if you can believe it) worse than me.

Here's a hand I played this evening against a guy I had pegged in a previous session as really bad and a too-frequent bluffer. (The full hand history is below, in case anybody wants to dig through it.)

I get dealt 7-3-A. Only about 10% of starting hands are unpaired cards 7 or below, so this is definitely one to put some hope into. I raise. BIGDOG006 is the only caller. He has (as I was later to learn) A-3-8. Not a bad hand, but using the calculator linked above, I find that I was 59/41 favorite.

Fourth street brings me a 6, BIGDOG006 another ace. This is huge for me. I'm now an 87/13 favorite. I bet, he calls.

Fifth street: I get a 9, he gets a 4. So at least I now have a made hand with a 9-7-6-3-A; not great, but definitely workable. He has nothing. I'm still a 70/30 favorite. He is, as his screen name implies, a Big Dog. He bets, I call. (I know that I have a 9. He's showing an 8. Since I know he bluffs a lot, I could easily be ahead, but I'm playing cautiously.)

Sixth street: I get a jack, which doesn't help or hurt me. BIGDOG006 gets delivered another 3, so that he is now double-paired. He bets--the obvious thing to do when you have a horrible, horrible hand. I call again. I'm a 77/23 favorite.

In hold'em, I've seen enough hands that I can almost instantaneously figure out, once the hands are shown, what cards will make the underdog the winner. With razz, though, it's like learning to read all over again. I had to think long and hard (after the Stars session was over) to deduce what had to happen at this point for BIGDOG006 to win the hand: He needed to catch a 7, 6, 5, or 2 (we have a dead 7 and a dead 5), and even if he does, I still win if my last card comes a 5, 4, or 2.

You know I wouldn't be telling this story if it didn't end badly. PokerStars sees fit, in its infinite wisdom, to give him a 5 and to pair my 3. This gives him an 8-5-4-3-A, me a 9-7-6-3-A. At least I didn't lose another dollar at the end, because I knew my 9 was playing and I couldn't be sure if his 8 was his worst card or not.

In short, I was ahead at the first four of five decision points in the hand--all except the last, which, in the end, is the only one that matters.

This is why people hate razz! I get it now! It is certainly enough to make one want to blow raspberries at one's opponent (or perhaps at one's computer screen, if one doesn't mind viewing the remainder of the session through little globs of spit)--which I'm thinking is how the game got its name.

No, I'm not genuinely upset about the hand. It was a $10 pot, which doesn't even make a pixel of difference when I graph my overall profit/loss in Excel. And, of course, the same general thing happens all the time in hold'em (start with A-K, hit two pairs on the flop, opponent catches runner-runner jack and queen to make a straight with his 6-10 offsuit) or any other form of poker. So far, I don't see that it's really any more frustrating in razz, unless one has a selective memory. But I am starting to see why razz has the reputation that it does.

Perhaps the most encouraging revelation of the last few days is that, terrible as I am at the game, I am measurably and demonstrably better than at least some of the other people that inhabit the low-stakes games. I may be a razz donkey, but I am no longer the king of the razz donkeys.




(Hand history below, for the obsessive/compulsive.)
PokerStars Game #16427278923: Razz Limit ($0.50/$1.00) - 2008/04/02 - 02:08:47 (ET)
Table 'Celaeno II' 8-max
Seat 1: BIGDOG006 ($7.60 in chips)
Seat 2: Katty Bear ($18.10 in chips)
Seat 4: gas05 ($16.20 in chips)
Seat 5: Rakewell1 ($17.15 in chips)
Seat 6: Android982 ($8.90 in chips)
Seat 7: Wetdog13 ($23.85 in chips)
Seat 8: PokerWiz84 ($17.55 in chips)
BIGDOG006: posts the ante $0.05
Katty Bear: posts the ante $0.05
gas05: posts the ante $0.05
Rakewell1: posts the ante $0.05
Android982: posts the ante $0.05
Wetdog13: posts the ante $0.05
PokerWiz84: posts the ante $0.05
*** 3rd STREET ***
Dealt to BIGDOG006 [8s]
Dealt to Katty Bear [Th]
Dealt to gas05 [7h]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [7s 3s Ah]
Dealt to Android982 [7c]
Dealt to Wetdog13 [9c]
Dealt to PokerWiz84 [5s]
jbrennen has returned
Katty Bear: brings in for $0.25
gas05: folds
Rakewell1: raises $0.25 to $0.50
Android982: folds
Wetdog13: folds
PokerWiz84: folds
BIGDOG006: raises $0.50 to $1
Katty Bear: folds
Rakewell1: raises $0.50 to $1.50
BIGDOG006: raises $0.50 to $2
Betting is capped
Rakewell1: calls $0.50
*** 4th STREET ***
Dealt to BIGDOG006 [8s] [As]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [7s 3s Ah] [6s]
Rakewell1: bets $0.50
BIGDOG006: calls $0.50
*** 5th STREET ***
Dealt to BIGDOG006 [8s As] [4h]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [7s 3s Ah 6s] [9s]
BIGDOG006: bets $1
Rakewell1: calls $1
*** 6th STREET ***
Dealt to BIGDOG006 [8s As 4h] [3c]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [7s 3s Ah 6s 9s] [Js]
BIGDOG006: bets $1
Rakewell1: calls $1
*** RIVER ***
Dealt to Rakewell1 [7s 3s Ah 6s 9s Js] [3d]
Wetdog13 said, "sup bro"
BIGDOG006: checks
Rakewell1: checks
*** SHOW DOWN ***
BIGDOG006: shows [Ad 3h 8s As 4h 3c 5c] (Lo: 8,5,4,3,A)
Rakewell1: mucks hand
BIGDOG006 collected $9.15 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $9.60 Rake $0.45
Seat 1: BIGDOG006 showed [Ad 3h 8s As 4h 3c 5c] and won ($9.15) with Lo: 8,5,4,3,A
Seat 2: Katty Bear folded on the 3rd Street
Seat 4: gas05 folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 5: Rakewell1 mucked [7s 3s Ah 6s 9s Js 3d]
Seat 6: Android982 folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 7: Wetdog13 folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 8: PokerWiz84 folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)

Two books

A friend emailed me this link to a review of two new books that may be of interest to readers: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/31/AR2008033102361.html?sub=AR. I hadn't heard of either of them before, but they both sound pretty good--added to my amazon.com wish list.

New poker podcast, with a bit from the Grump

I'm pleased to point you to http://hardboiledpokerradioshow.blogspot.com/, where you will find the first installment of the world's newest poker podcast, "The Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show," put together by Short-Stacked Shamus of the Hard-Boiled Poker blog (http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/). As his invitation, both Tim Peters of the "Literature of Poker" blog (http://web.mac.com/tbpeters/pokerbooks/My_blog/My_blog.html) and I contributed segments. When you have an hour to spare, please go give it a listen. I think you'll enjoy it.

Makes my poker adventures seem tame

Go read: http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/2008/03/sucker-punched.html

Poker needs this

I know essentially nothing about console video games. But I use Yahoo as my browser's home page, and their lead story when I logged on just now was about how Microsoft has implemented some sort of upgrade that detects players who have used other software to post higher scores in some games than the players have actually achieved. (See http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/87620.) Those accounts will still be usable, but when their accomplishments are displayed publicly, they will be branded with the "cheater" label shown above. (I don't know why it was blurred for news release.)

Poker SO needs something like that. Of course, it's really better to perma-ban the cheaters from all games everywhere. But as long as we're dealing in fantasy, I'd love it if a player caught cheating at poker--internet poker, casino poker, home poker, whatever--would have a scarlet "C" burned into his forehead and both hands for all to see. Even in my fantasy world, I can't really get an exact equivalent to what Microsoft is doing online, because the player wouldn't be allowed to establish or use an online account at any site anywhere on the planet, so the electronic labeling would not be necessary. But having the poker gods sear it into the most visible parts of the cheater's flesh would be quite satisfying. Every casino in the world would have a rule not to even let such a marked person in. People running home games would be warned about who is in their midst.

Have I made it sufficiently clear yet how violently I detest poker cheaters? (See http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/search/label/cheating.)

One of these things is not like the others

Saturday night at the Palms there was a young man at the far end of the table with what looked like an unsuually small stack when I sat down. Only when he played a hand by tossing in a green $25 chip did I realize that he had a lot more money in front of him that I had realized, because some of what appeared to be $1 chips were actually $25s. I don't think I had seen $25 chips in play at the Palms before, so this was the first time I became aware of what a problem it is.

You see, their $1 chips are a white background with blue-green decoration, and a blue-green edge. The $25 are green and white, but with a solid medium-green edge. The edge colors are far, far too similar. Even after becoming aware of the problem, I could not tell from a table-length away which chips in this guy's stack were $1s and which were $25s. With a chip flat on the table, it was not too difficult to distinguish them (though a glance might still mislead), but in a stack viewed from the side, they're nearly identical.

After a while this guy moved down to my end of the table. I gradually became aware that he was deliberately inducing confusion. If he won a pot with more than a few red $5 chips in it, he would go to the cashier's desk and trade five of them for another $25 chip.

Maybe he has a serious aversion to red. Maybe he just likes to have a physically short stack. But I'm pretty suspicious that his goal was to eventually trap somebody unaware. When he had a monster, he could move all in, and hope that an opponent would see his stack as mostly consisting of $1 chips, and decide to call with a marginal hand, only to be informed that there was actually something like $300 to be matched.

The best thing the Palms could do about this would be to get rid of either the $1 or the $25 chips, and replace them with a color that won't easily be mistaken for another denomination. But they could accomplish the same thing--that is, preventing the kind of mistake that I think this guy was trying to induce--by simply making it a poker room rule that the $25 chips don't play. If somebody brings them to the table, they have to be changed for reds.

In retrospect, I think that what I should have done was ask the floor man to require, at a minimum, that this player keep his $25 chips in a separate stack from the $1s and $5s. Instead, he was constantly shuffling them, keeping them thoroughly intermixed.

There's also a warning for all players in this observation: Don't assume you can tell at a glance how much money is behind an all-in bet; always ask for the dealer to count it, unless you're certain that you're willing to put your whole stack in. You may avoid a nasty surprise. If you don't look closely, you may miss the fact that there are higher-denomination chips ($25 or even $100) lurking quietly among the expected $1s and $5s.

Paying for time

Friday night I partook again in the crazy mixed game at Treasure Island. The mechanics of it were a whole lot easier this time. But I still played like a donkey and got punished for it.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the house rakes that game by time instead of by the pot. (My best guess is that this is because the games plays a lot more slowly than hold'em, and some games are faster than others, so the number of hands per hour is lower and variable.) Each player pays $4 every 30 minutes, then nothing is taken out of the pots.

After maybe three hours, one player left and another arrived. The new player--obviously a veteran of this game, so she doesn't get unfamiliarity as an excuse--played three or four hands before the half-hour interval arrived and we all had to chuck in the $4. She complained that she shouldn't have to pay, because she had only played a few hands.

But--DUH!--she had been playing them for free!

In hold'em, the blinds are payment in advance for one full round of poker (i.e., the dealer button going around the table one time). Similarly, when paying by time, the payment is for the next interval, not the one that just passed. Were it otherwise, if a player busted out and decided to go home, he or she would have to reach into the wallet and pull out $4 for the time spent. Obviously the casino isn't going to do that.

So rather than seeing her few free hands as a bonus, a gimmee that the previous player had paid for her, she instead griped about it.

It never ceases to amaze me what petty and just plain wrong-headed things poker players will decide warrant complaining about.

I could've sworn...

A fouled deck occurs any time there are more or fewer than the standard 52 cards, or if there are 52 cards but not 52 different cards. It's a pretty rare phenomenon. In fact, I've only seen it once. In a tournament at Caesars Palace about a year ago I was dealt two cards with different backs. Oops. It's a huge problem when it happens, because the entire hand gets voided, no matter what action has taken place, and people who had put a lot of money into the pot--and especially the winner, if one has been determined before the fouled deck is discovered--tend to get upset at having a "do over" called on them. (See http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/clonie-gowen-is-cheater.html for a story of how Clonie Gowen illegally and unethically used a fouled deck to her advantage.)

At the Rio tonight I was in the big blind with Q-3 of spades. I was thinking that it's not a great hand, but it's about as good as you can hope for in the blinds. I was hoping to get to play it for free. But there was a substantial raise, then a reraise, so of course I had to dump it. I kind of zoned out of the action at that point, listening to my music.

I was quite surprised, then, when after a little while I looked up and noticed that the flop included the queen of spades. I thought maybe my mind was playing tricks on me, but I thought back and distinctly remembered seeing the Q-3 of spades and thinking that it was a decent big-blind hand. I didn't want to say anything, and hoped that maybe a bet would take down the pot and I could ignore it. But then I realized that if there really was a problem with the deck, it would be better to have it discovered now than to continue to play. There was a bet and a raise, followed by an all-in. So when the action paused while the original bettor pondered what to do, I walked around the table and whispered to the dealer to check the discards before concluding the hand, because I was pretty sure I had folded the Qs.

The hand played out and the dealer pushed the pot. He then turned the discard pile face up. There were two red queens in it, as well as a red three, but no black queens.

Wow. I wouldn't quite have been willing to go to court and swear under penalty of perjury that I absolutely did have the queen and three of spades in my hand, but I was highly confident of it. Had I not been, I wouldn't have bothered the dealer about it. It's something I've never done before.

I apologized for my memory glitch. To his credit, the dealer was absolutely perfect about it. He said, "Not a problem. It wouldn't be the strangest thing I've ever seen happen. I'm happy to check and be sure. Thanks for mentioning it." He almost made me feel like a hero instead of a dork--even though I'm pretty sure I was a dork.

Strange how memory errors occur. I could remember clearly the visual image of the queen and three--distinctly black, and complete with the spades symbol--as I had seen them when I peeked at my cards a couple of minutes before. But it was a false memory. I've had a few other occasions in my life when something I remembered with perfect confidence was proven not to have been as I so clearly remembered it. I don't think, though, that there has ever been such a short time interval between forming the memory and having it altered by subsequent events and/or by the passage of time and/or by a brain short-circuit.

Gotta start taking those memory-enhancement pills....

Mr. Unbluffable

At the Palms last night, an older gentleman was dealt A-K on his very first hand, didn't improve, but still made a heroic call of a large river bet, with a very scary board, against what turned out to be a bluffing, unimproved A-J. As the dealer pushed him the pot, he looked around the table and said, seriously, "Now you all know that I'm unbluffable." A guy at the other end of the table chuckled and said, "We'll see about that." Mr. Unbluffable got his dander up and challenged, "You just go ahead and try."

Do I even have to spell out how stupid this is, and why?

Never mind whether his initial call with the A-K hand was brilliant or folly; one could argue either way. (I.e., it was smart because he was right, or it was dumb because most of the time in that situation he would be throwing his money away.) Nobody likes to get bluffed off of the best hand. But being unbluffable is a terrible quality. It means that you make a habit of calling way too often when you have the worst of it, just to avoid losing out on the pot in case your opponent is bluffing.

Even worse than actually being unbluffable, or something close to it, is being so stupidly proud of having that defect in your game that you openly announce it to the table, and then rise to make the point even more emphatically when somebody good-naturedly questions you about it! I loved the guy throwing in the "We'll see" comment, and the response it provoked. That combination perfectly set the stage.

No, it didn't set the stage for bluffing in order to show the guy up. That might be emotionally satisfying in some sick way (and could be profitable in the long run if successful, because it would heighten Mr. Unbluffable's already exaggerated calling tendency). But the more obvious route to making money off of the guy is simply to take advantage of his habit of thinking he's being bluffed, and make larger-than-average value bets when you do actually have the goods. Bet in a way and in situations that will look to his overly-suspicious eyes as if you're trying to bluff him, then turn over the best hand when he makes what he thinks is a great call.

Poker is like judo, in that you need to use an opponent's moves against him. Maybe the hardest poker skill to develop is observing the other players in enough situational detail that you figure out their bad habits, then look for and create situations that exploit them. That task is made immeasurably easier when an idiot sits down and loudly announces exactly what the biggest weakness in his game is, and how proud he is of it.

Poker gems, #102

George Carlin:

Avoid people with gold teeth who want to play cards.

The real poker grump

Despite the nickname I've given myself, I'm really about as ungrumpy a fellow as you're likely to meet at a poker table. I grumble here as a catharsis for all the things I don't say at the table. But there are some genuine grumps out there.

Ted at Red Bull and Poker (http://redbullandpoker.blogspot.com) posted a YouTube video clip from a guy who plays online as "Tuff_Fish." He also makes little movies of his sessions, live-narrating his thoughts and reactions. He is, um, just a teeny bit volatile. Here are some samples. Warning: There may be profanity involved. Loud, shouted profanity.

Old poker song

I was looking around in the web site of the Library of Congress when I came upon this song from 1878, and thought I'd post it here for your amusement. You can look at (and print out) the sheet music here: http://tinyurl.com/2yzq3d. The following web site saved me the trouble of extracting the lyrics from the sheet music myself: http://www.pdmusic.org/1800s/78tgop.txt.


Dedicated to the "Home Club" New York
"That Game of Poker!" (1878)
Song & Chorus
Words & Music by Charles MacEvoy
New York: William A. Pond & Co., 25 Union Square,
between 15th & 16th Sts.
[Source: 032/104@Levy]
1.
I'm a man of the world I would have all know,
And to learn of its follies I'm not at all slow.
At the “Home Club” I first indulg’d with delight,
In an innocent game that is play’d ev’ry night!
We play’d it with cards call’d “Squeezers,” they said,
The finest assorted, with backs blue and red!
But the pastime I sing of is well-known to fame,
I like it, you all do, “Draw Poker’s” the Game.
CHORUS [sung after each verse]
But that game of Poker, O that game of Poker!
All other card-games to it really seem tame!
A square game of Poker, a good game of Poker
I like it, you all do! Draw Poker’s the game.
2.
Forty five is the number, a quiet retreat,
Where all the gay vot’ries of “Poker” now meet.
’Twas there I first “Antied” my checks, hon’t with cash,
Which were rake’d off quite fast as I bet very “Brash!”
But during the “Session” four Aces I got,
I thought it the best had, and cried “that’s my Pot!”
But, another, with fiendish delight whisper’d “Hush,
”Your hand is no good, for I have a “Straight-flush!
3.
”There’s a “Rake” in this circle call‘d “Kitty” by name:
We do not object when we sit in the game.
For the players are jolly, of good things there’s lots,
While the Landlord, he smiles as so many “Jack Pots,”
The betting is high when the game waxes hot;
I once stak’d my pile in a very large “Pot”
I held three of a kind, but alas! what a fate!
I was beaten once more by a mean little “Straight!”
4.
I sometimes stand “Pat” when my hand is quite small.
They can’t raise me out and I never will “Call.”
At this kind of “Bluff” we are all often caught.
But the limit is reach’d and the result’s a big “Pot!”
When we draw to a “Bobtail” with hopes we may fill,
Our chances are few, but we stick to it still!
The “Widow’s” made happy and all thro’ our play,
But what do we care boys as long as we’re gay?
5.
’Tis true that this pastime is often abus’d
By “Parlorgame” swells, who are justly accus’d
Of stealing, but yet they don’t give it that name,
And “I. O. U.’s” tender but ne’r pay the same!
These fellows infest the best Clubs of the town.
A few, I could mention, have gain’d some renown
For playing mean tricks which you’ve all heard about.
For my part, I play where the chaps are ruled out.
6.
Then let us be merry and bannish dull care.
Now deal the cards lively be sure ’tis done fair;
If luck is not with you, why, don’t be profane.
Have patience, you’ll win and your losses regain.
By way of a moral, to close with, I’ll say:
At Poker be careful, and don’t overplay,
Unless you are wealthy, pray be not too rash,
And cut the cards always, ’twill save you your cash.

A brief political interlude

I have concluded that John McCain is a poker player, and that he especially likes razz. At least, I'm pretty sure that's why in news stories you often see after his name the designation "R-AZ."

Elton John (non-poker content, but c'mon, Elton John!)

Vegas is a place that can get you used to things being free that aren't usually free elsewhere--like meals, drinks (which would be really great, except that I don't drink, so the whole concept is kind of wasted on me), parking, etc. It's also not terribly hard to get free tickets to lots of the shows in town, if you know where to look. But the premium ones don't get offered for free very often. So I was delighted when a friend-of-a-friend kind of connection unexpectedly brought me tickets to see Elton John's "Red Piano" show at Caesars Palace tonight. It has been one of a handful of shows on my "must-see-someday" list.

Here's the review in brief: Even better than I have spent the last few years thinking it would be, and overall the best pop music concert I've ever been to.

Sorry for the crappy photos. It's my low-resolution/wide-angle cell phone camera again. It makes it look like we had the worst seats in the house, but really they were pretty good--maybe 50 yards from the stage. And did I mention that they were free? That's right, baby, $175 tickets, gratis, because I'm so well-connected with all the VIPs and the Beautiful People in town, y'know. (Cough, cough.)

For several of the well-known songs, these concert versions are much longer, and a lot of the extra time is Elton pounding away on the piano. I thought that was the best part of the whole experience. I really wish I had recordings that included those long piano solos. (Maybe there are some concert recordings that do--I haven't looked into that.) His music is so good to begin with, in large part, because it is so harmonically complex. You don't find three-chord garage bands covering very many Elton John songs, because they require lots of interesting and unexpected musical turns. I think the only other pop songwriters that are as consistently interesting, in a musical sense, are Lennon/McCartney, Billy Joel, and Jim Steinman. This complexity reaches mind-blowing levels live with the solo riffs, with chord changes and modulations that you'd never see coming. Really great stuff. I couldn't tell how much of it was improvisational versus rehearsed, but I didn't care.

My main puzzlement was why the piano was out of tune. It wasn't horrible, but it was noticeable. It didn't sound deliberately detuned as if they were going for a honkey-tonk sound--it just sounded, well, neglected. I wondered about that many times over the course of the show.

He started the show by acknowledging that he had until recently shared the concert hall with Celine Dion. He added, "I miss that skinny bitch."

Much has been written in other reviews about the creative photography and videography projected on a giant screen behind the stage for many of the songs. It is as interesting as people have claimed. I frequently felt torn between wanting to watch Elton and wanting to watch the video interpretation of the song he was singing. I suppose that too much good stuff happening all at once is a nice problem to have.

Have to admit, though, that a couple of them were real head-scratchers--hard to interpret, at least on first viewing. For example, accompanying "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" there were clips of a naked woman with a bloody nose, sitting in an executioner's electric chair with a lighted sparkler in her crotch, interspersed with clips of a guy wearing a purple bear costume, dancing on ice skates. Maybe I just haven't done enough drugs in my life to grasp the deep significance of it all.

If you've ever felt perplexed by what's supposed to be going on in the lyrics of "Daniel" (what's this business about dead eyes and scars that won't heal and Spain?), Elton sort of clears it up for you. He just thought the lyrics as originally submitted to him made the song too long, so he crossed out the last verse--the one, unfortunately, that explained all of the previous ones. Oops. This was new information to me, though I see now that it's not exactly a deep secret--you can find it on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_%28song%29).

All in all, this was one of the three best Vegas shows I've seen, right up there with Penn & Teller and Ka. If you've loved Elton John's music for a few years or a few decades (and who hasn't?), it's well worth pencilling him in to your next trip out here--even if you have to pay for the tickets.

I'm famous

As previously mentioned (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/03/im-officially-scary.html), Monday evening I played a blogger's tournament at Full Tilt, sharing a table with Julius Goat, among others. At one point, he was involved in a hand with a full house, and I made some lame joke in chat rhyming "goat" and "boat" a la Dr. Seuss. The "Green Eggs and Ham" meter and rhyme scheme then became a running chat motif. (And Goat was much more clever at it than I could pull off, despite my best efforts.)

I also mentioned in that post my unfortunate tendency to think everybody is bluffing me online, call or re-raise them with next to nothing, type "oops" in the chat box when I see that my read was 180 degrees off, then get to type "Wheeeeeeeeeee!" when I pull the 3-outer to win the hand.

I suggested to Goat that I would make an excellent model for the next in his series of player profiles (http://jgoat.blogspot.com/search?q=table+profiles): the guy who is metaphysically certain that every opponent's bet and raise represents a pure bluff. Goat responded, "Actually, that's not a bad idea." I didn't really think I'd live to see it, but this morning my blog-browsing was pleasantly rewarded with seeing myself featured:
http://jgoat.blogspot.com/2008/03/table-profiles-010-skeptycal.html. I am officially uncredited, but the discerning reader will be able to detect the unmistakable traces of my online poker personality. (How he knew about the athlete's foot thing, though, is beyond me. And it's more than a little creepy.)

Excellent work, Goat.

Poker gems, #101

John Juanda, after a frustrating hand of razz, as quoted in The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide Tournament Edition, edited by Michael Craig, p. 392.


I was going for a full house.

Poker gems, #100

Ted Forrest, in The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide, Tournament Edition, edited by Michael Craig, p. 408.

Razz is one of the purest forms of poker, because the good players will make the money and the bad players will lose the money. It's a beautiful, beautiful form of poker.

My first razz tournament

Apologies in advance for putting up one of those posts that's of interest to very few people--how I did and specific hands from a tournament. I know--YAWN! You're all forgiven for stopping here and clicking on to your next read for the day. But playing a razz tournament on a whim was kind of exciting for me, so I need to document it.

This was part of the "Bloggament Skill Series" (see http://blogsrghey.blogspot.com/2008/03/tuesday-is-bloggament-night.html). I thought it would be fun to enter an event about which I know nothing. Well, that's not completely true. I know the rules. And I've heard that good advice is to never play a hand unless you start with three unpaired cards 8 or below. That's it. That's my complete fund of strategic knowledge. (And, of course, I couldn't bring myself to actually implement that advice, because that would mean playing so few hands that it just wouldn't be any fun!)

So naturally I played like a complete donkey. I have very little sense of where I am in a hand for the most part, so I did what any beginner does: check-call, check-call, check-call. Horrible, horrible way to play, as I am well aware. But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

It helps if you get cards like this, for the very first hand of tournament razz I ever played (OK, technically the second hand, but I just folded the first one, so it doesn't really count):



Let's analyze this: The best possible hand is 5-4-3-2-A, and I had, let's see, mmmmmmm, 5-4-3-2-A! Whee! This game is going to be easy!

The next big confrontation is shown below:




This earned me an "OMFG" in the chat box from Pushmonkey. Apparently she thought I should have folded. Note, though, that there was no point in the hand in which she was ahead, except with the first three cards. Her gripe, in other words, is that I called her bluffs with a mediocre hand. Obviously, then, the fault is mine for suspecting that her hand wasn't as good as she was representing, rather than being hers, for picking the wrong spot and the wrong opponent to bluff. And I really was suspicious of her; she was instabetting every street, not taking even a half a second to analyze the cards that hit, which suggested to me that she was just trying to push me off the hand. Whaddyaknow, I was right. So of course she has to bitch at me about it. Whiner. I hate whiners.


With that pot, we're only about 7 minutes into the tourney, and here are the standings:




So far so good.

Not too long after that came this hand:



This got more nasty comments in chat for me, including "disgusting but classic" from Emptyman. Notice, though, that I was ahead at EVERY point in this hand. I was definitely unsure whether I was ahead or behind, but I thought that the chance that I was ahead was great enough to be worth calling him down. Apparently he and others thought I was being an idiot. And maybe I was--I don't have anywhere near enough experience to make an objective evaluation of my own play here. But calling with the best hand on every street can't be all bad, can it?

The biggest moment for me was the following hand, which got completely out of control because Pushmonkey had declared in advance that she was tired of the way the game was going (apparently referring primarily to my bad but successful play). She bet, raised, capped at every opportunity, clearly just trying to lose all her chips and be gone. (Wouldn't it be easier just to click "sit out," then close the windows?) I had no difficulty believing that I was likely going to be able to beat her, but the situation was greatly complicated by one of the better players, crackinKK, being tangled up in it, too. I thought I was behind her, but the pot had grown so large from pushmonkey blindly getting it all in that I felt compelled to see it through:



In retrospect, I can see how incredibly lucky I got. Basically, both of my last two cards had to be 7 or under, without pairing me, in order for me to end up the winner, and that's what happened. To her credit, crackinKK didn't whine or fuss about it--at least not publicly. That enormous pot put me into the friggin' chip lead of the entire tournament:



Unbelievable, given that this is a game I've only played once before (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/03/mixing-it-up-just-little.html). I also picked up $2, because this was a knockout tournament. Pushmonkey was the first one out--at my hands, which was quite satisfying, since she was the first one to openly criticize my play.

At the first break, I still held the slimmest of leads:



I managed to stay one of the chip leaders for another 30 or 40 minutes, but then my donkish tactic of calling down opponents with mediocre hands predictably, inevitably caught up to me--as I knew it must, at some point. I harbored no fantasies of winning this thing, even after being a huge chip leader for a while.

It's really strange being the object of derision for my poker play. In hold'em, essentially the only times I get criticized are when weak, ABC players, who think they have a firm grasp on the One and Only True Method of Hold'em, can't see merit in something advanced or tricky that I tried (successfully or not). In such situations, the comments are more amusing than irritating, because I know that I have a deeper understanding of the game than they do, and their words reveal the narrow mindset with which they're approaching it. It's kind of like a third-grader, who has never heard of negative numbers, boldly and confidently announcing that you can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number.

Here, though, I was well aware that I would be the least experienced razz player at the table. In fact, I almost announced that fact in the chat box at the beginning, but then decided against it--after all, they'll probably be able to deduce it on their own fairly quickly.

It's incredible how free people feel to post nasty remarks when they think an opponent plays badly, after all of the imploring that has been done in every possible forum and venue about how rude and harmful to the game such conduct is. If somebody is being an idiot, that is a Very Good Thing for the better players, and they should logically do all in their power to (1) keep the idiot playing, and (2) make sure he doesn't learn how to play better. That means being nice and friendly, telling him "nice hand" when he stumbles into a winner, etc.

But a huge percentage of players--especially online--just can't bring themselves to treating a bad player decently. Their blistering criticisms can only accomplish a couple of possible things: Making the fish feel bad enough that he picks up his chips and leaves, or making him see his mistakes and start playing better. Being overtly hostile to a bad player is the stupidest, most self-destructive thing you can to at a poker table, but still it happens all the time. I really don't understand how typing nasty remarks into the chat box can make the writer feel better about himself, unless he has significant "issues" that have nothing to do with poker.

Anyway, I understand that being a fish/donkey/live one/idiot is just part of the process of learning a new game, and I'm willing to accept the mantle for a while as I catch on to better strategy. Razz isn't something I'm going to try to excel in anytime soon, but it is definitely a fun and intriguing game, so completely different from hold'em that it's hard to believe that they can both be called "poker."

Addendum

Two commenters have already pointed out that the hands as shown are not in the order that they played out. This makes sense, because a couple of times when I checked the hand history immediately after the hand was over, I knew that they weren't in order (because, e.g., two of the first three cards made a pair, and I wouldn't have played it if that's how they had been dealt). But they're not in any obvious order, perhaps just random. Also, in some the down cards are indicated by slashes, and in others not, for reasons that I can't deduce.

So ignore everything I wrote above that has anything to do with the order in which the cards came. Maybe as a result my play was worse than what I thought, maybe in other spots not quite as bad. Impossible to know now, I suppose.

I don't know why FTP would scramble the cards in the hand histories. As far as I could tell, when there was a showdown I could see the order in which opponents' cards were dealt (although maybe that was an illusion, too), so why not in the hand histories? Also, in a live game you can certainly reconstruct what an opponent hand at any point along the way, so why not allow the same information out for an online game? Very odd.

The definitive way to do a Vegas poker trip

Read the three-part trip report:

http://www.allvegaspoker.com/trip_detail_1276.html

http://www.allvegaspoker.com/trip_detail_1277.html

http://www.allvegaspoker.com/trip_detail_1278.html

Well done, Grange.

It was a pleasure to meet these guys during the Saturday night AVP tournament at TI briefly described in part 3.

I'm officially scary

Last night I played in the weekly MATH ("Mondays at the Hoy") bloggers' tournament. I was at a table for most of my time with Julius_Goat ("The Goat Speaks" at http://jgoat.blogspot.com/) and Al Can't Hang (http://alcanthang.blogspot.com/).

When playing online, I have an unfortunate tendency to think people are bluffing at me a lot more often than they really are. Two or three times Julius saw me reraise all-in into a better hand that I was confident was nothing--and win, with horrible, ugly suckouts. In fact, one of those was against Julius himself.

After about the third time that I showed my prowess at misidentifying bluffs and catching incredily lucky, I had built an embarrassingly large stack by virtue of this repeated folly. That's when I screen-captured this lovely moment: Julius announcing in the chat box that he stands in fear of me.

When I'm playing tournaments online, there is very little reason for anybody to fear my poker talent, especially in a six-max tournament, since I suck even worse at shorthanded play than regular full tables. (Nobody ever has real hands when playing short, right? This moral certainty on my part exacerbates my already tragic tendency.) But once in a while, there is indeed reason to fear my frightening ability to catch absurdly lucky cards.

It didn't last, though. It never does. It was inevitable that somebody would put the reverse suckout on me, following which my next misidentification of a bluff didn't work out quite as well as the previous ones had, and I was gone. I was really close on that read, though--he only had A-K.

So, Julius, when do we get to see the player profile based on me--you know, the guy who is metaphysically certain that everybody is always bluffing at him?

Three things I know are true (but would have a hard time proving)

1. You are far more likely to flop a set (three of a kind) if the pocket pair you start with are of different colors than if you have either the two red ones or two black ones.

2. A flush draw in hearts is much more likely to hit than a flush draw in any other suit.

3. You get dealt better cards while listening to Elvis than with any other music in the MP3 player. At least this is true in Las Vegas; I can't swear to it being valid elsewhere.

"It's definitely due"

A couple of weeks ago I was playing at Harrah's. The Harrah's properties in Nevada (well, most of them, anyway) have a linked system for bad-beat jackpots, so that when it hits at any poker room in the system, everybody logged in at all of the properties gets a piece of it. Of course, the winner and loser of the hand get the biggest chunk. The threshold qualification for it drops over time as the pot gets larger.

At the time, the jackpot amount was something like $75,000 with a requirement, as I recall, that four-of-a-kind nines had to be the losing hand. The dealer was explaining the rules to a new player. The player noted that the jackpot was quite large. The dealer responded, "Oh yeah, it's definitely due to hit."

This was very similar to a comment I heard at Mandalay Bay in February, when one of their royal flush high-hand jackpots had swollen to unusually large proportions. A woman at my table commented that she had switched her play to Mandalay because the jackpot was "due" to hit very soon.

I don't understand how people can play so much poker and still be completely out to sea about the most rudimentary concepts of probability.

It is certainly true that over a long period of time one will find an average amount that is in a bad-beat or high-hand jackpot when it is hit. But if an unusually long time goes by without a qualifying hand, so that the jackpot money grows larger than average, that does not mean that it is "due" to hit. A qualifying hand is no more likely to be dealt on the next shuffle, or within the next 24 hours, than it was the week before.

The probability of a jackpot hand occurring is precisely the same every time the cards are dealt. It is exactly the same the very next hand after the jackpot has hit as it is when months have gone by. If we assume for the sake of simplicity that a given card room deals the same number of hands every day, the probability of having a qualifying hand is exactly the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow, completely independent of when or if the jackpot was last awarded.

Think what would have to be true for it to be otherwise. There would have to be some central respository of information about all of the hands that have been dealt, and somebody (one of the lesser poker gods who couldn't get a plum assignment, perhaps?) would have to be constantly reviewing them, noticing that they hadn't seen, say, a royal flush in quite a while, which entity would then have to actively intervene in the shuffle to arrange it to happen. If you believe that things like that happen in this universe, then you have bigger issues than being mentally ill-equipped to play serious poker.

The cards have no memory as to what arrangements they have been in in the past, nor any consciousness to use such information, nor any means of organizing themselves into particular configurations as a result of a decision based on that information. This isn't like some slot-machine jackpots, which are programmed to have a guaranteed big payout within a certain time frame or before they reach a certain capped amount. Poker hands are random and fully independent events. The probability of a certain type of high hand or bad beat occurring remains exactly the same every time a deck comes out of the Shufflemaster.

If you find yourself saying, or even thinking, that such a jackpot is "due," get thee to a remedial math class. You need a refresher in the basic concepts before you play another hand of a game for which a decent grasp of probability is indispensible.

Not everybody rechecks

I just started watching "The Best Damn Poker Show." I've had to download the episodes from a site of questionable legality because my dumb cable service doesn't include Fox Sports.

The show would be more accurately titled "The Most Annoying Damn Poker Show," because the producers apparently think that Annie Duke and Phil Hellmuth arguing with each other makes for great, great television--better than actually watching poker. Wrong. It makes me never want to spend a minute with either one of them.

The players are typical amateurs, making lots of weak, unsound plays. The only redeeming quality of the show is Phil and Annie when they are civilly debating the merits (or lack thereof) of various plays. IMHO, Annie comes off better in these exchanges because she is more flexible, willing to acknowledge value in what would normally be dubious moves, when there are special circumstances. Phil, predictably, is far more rigid about what is proper play.

On the second episode, there's a hand in which one player flops the nut flush in position. His opponent bets into him three times. Mr. Flush smooth-calls twice, then moves all-in on the river. When Phil and Annie critique the aggressor's play, they both agree that he should have taken a clue from the fact that Mr. Flush didn't recheck his hole cards when three hearts came on the flop. That, they said, should have been the key clue to figuring out that he had flopped the flush.

Now, it's certainly true that many players are less likely to recheck their cards when they are suited and make their flush or flush draw than when they have hole cards of two different suits. This is because when they're suited, they have already formulated a wish for a flop with two or three of that suit. With offsuit cards, they tend not to hope for a flush in their immediate future, so when the possibility arises, they don't remember for sure whether they have it or not, and so recheck.

Still, it seems a bit much to me for Phil and Annie to make such a big deal out of the fact that Mr. Flush didn't recheck his hole cards. Isn't it possible that he's somebody who never does, who has managed to teach himself to devote a couple of brain cells to memorizing his two cards before the flop, precisely so that he never gives away a tell by needing to recheck them after the flop? A few of us can pull that off. It's not exactly difficult.

I am frequently surprised, in watching televised poker, how many top-flight poker professionals have not made a habit of this, and genuinely don't know, without rechecking, whether their red ace was a heart or a diamond without looking again after three diamonds come on the flop (or whatever). I'm far, far from a poker savant, but I make it a habit to recheck and memorize my cards just before the flop comes so that I never have to check them again when doing so might give away information about whether I have a flush or a flush draw. It just isn't that hard!

That said, I'm capable of getting confused occasionally between what I am holding and what I am hoping to see, particularly when I have connectors and there are two or three cards in the same neighborhood that might make a straight for me. In about four years of playing I have on five occasions believed I had a straight when I didn't, because of exactly that mental misfiring. It almost happened again last night, when I couldn't remember on the river whether I had 8-9 for one pair and a missed straight draw, or 7-8 for two pair, because the brain cells that were silently calling out to the poker gods to deliver specific straight-making cards got their signals mixed up with the cells that were supposed to be devoted just to remembering my down cards. But having been punished for that mistake several times, at least this time I recognized that there was a state of confusion and checked again, rather than plunging ahead into disaster. Something akin to this happens maybe once a month or so. Since I play roughly 120 hours of poker a month, that's pretty infrequent.

Which means that if players follow the Phil-Annie advice, and assume that when I don't recheck my hole cards on a single-suit flop that means that I have flopped the flush, well, fine, I get to make them think that I'm stronger than I really am.

I just don't think it's nearly as reliable a piece of information as they're making it out to be.

What's up with the Benjamins?

Ever since moving to Las Vegas, I've noticed that a substantial fraction of $100 bills have odd little stamp marks on them. I scanned in close-ups of the ones that happen to be residing in my wallet at the moment. Most marks are found on the backs of the bills, including all except the odd little crocodilian in the last photo here, which is on the front.

Actually, I spotted a couple of such marks even when I still lived in Minnesota, though not nearly as frequently as around here. I've also occasionally seen them on 20s, but they are much more common on 100s.

Surely somebody out there can explain this oddity to me definitively, or at least posit a plausible theory. It seems most likely that they are institutional stamps, added either at banks or at casinos, perhaps to indicate spot-checks for authenticity or to mark that a bundle of bills has been counted (though when the bills come back through in re-circulation, the latter would tend to confound things, so I don't really think that's it).

Poker gems, #99

Phil Laak, in Bluff magazine column, February, 2008, p. 86:

Chris Ferguson wrote a great article a few years back. It explained why you should never limp if you are the first one in the pot. It is a long story and I don't want to get into it... but I think it is trivial, obvious, and great advice for a poker player. It is one of those golden rules that has about a million things going for it, and whever I limp first to act, a little part of me dies.

An empirical test of luck versus skill in poker

You can read the full research report here: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/glr.2008.12105

or the newsy summary of it here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080321125835.htm.

The fundamental conclusion: "The question at the start of this study was Is poker a game of luck or skill? The unequivocal finding is that poker is a game of skill. In both studies, participants who were instructed outperformed those who were not instructed."

Well, yeah, but....

I'm confident that the same would be true of blackjack--those receiving, say, printed cards instructing them in the mathematically optimum strategy for each combination of their cards and the dealer's shown card would surely do better than those given no instruction at all. But they would simply lose less, rather than actually being winners over the long run. In fact, the same is undoubtedly true of slot machines; the simple expedient of pointing out to a new player that typically there are proportionately higher jackpots available when you play the maximum amount of money at a time rather than the minimum would produce a statistical edge for the player following that advice (though you'd have to watch for a long time to see it emerge). Even with craps and roulette, there are bets that have larger or smaller house edges. Just teach a new player which are the bets with the smallest house margins, and you've got a player that will lose his money to the casino more slowly than somebody who is given no instruction.

Does the fact that one can learn to lose less, all by itself, make something a game of skill rather than luck? I don't think so.

Annie Duke argued, in a column for Bluff magazine last year (http://www.bluffmagazine.com/magazine/Is-there-really-any-luck-in-poker%3F-Annie-Duke-830.htm) that there is, in reality, no luck in poker, not even in the short run; it's all skill. This is based on a theoretical computerized player that makes each move randomly from among the legal options available--her definition of a zero-skill player. OK, but then by the same argument you would have to accept that blackjack is a game of all skill and no luck, too, because any player trained in the basic strategy would do far better than a computer player that simply chose to hit or stay randomly. Especially considering the political consequences, does Duke really want to be stuck with the conclusion that blackjack is 100% skill and 0% luck just the way poker is? Wouldn't that logically mean that online blackjack is just as deserving of legal protections and/or exemptions as poker is?

There's also a problem with Duke's definition of "short term." Her argument is based on the fact that the random player would never win even such a short-term game as a single-table tournament. (I don't think that's correct; given enough trials, it would eventually win at least once. But that's just an academic point that I don't think is really important.) But even if that's true, it's a very convenient definition of "short-term." What if "short-term" is considered, instead, to be one hand? Would she argue that her zero-skill player will never win even one hand? I doubt it. Readers who follow this kind of stuff in ridiculous detail, as I tend to do, may recall the idiotic court decision last year in North Carolina in which a court determined that poker was predominantly skill, on the evidence provided by one "expert" about one televised poker hand in which a player was something like a 9:1 dog when the money went in, but still won the hand. In other words, I think Duke's argument breaks down when you don't let her set the definition of "short-term" to one that proves her point.

Duke has also argued (http://www.annieduke.com/journal.php?journalID=1708) that the fact that one can deliberately lose at poker shows that it is a game of skill rather than luck, because one cannot deliberately lose at, say, roulette or baccarat. The obvious rejoinder to that, again, is that by that criterion, blackjack must also be all skill and no luck, because one can certainly lose every blackjack hand on purpose, should one care to do so. One can also lose money on every spin of the roulette wheel by simply betting the same amount on every number as well as the 0 and 00; one of them will hit and you'll get paid $35 on that spot, but it costs you $38 to put down this assortment of bets. You lose. By Duke's argument, roulette is therefore a game of pure skill.

Still, I think she's right (even if only in a way that's fairly obvious to experienced players) in saying that the smaller the difference in skill level between two players, the longer it will take for the skill difference to show itself in tangible results, and the more luck will control (or I think she would say, appear to control) the results in any one session.

I have still not found anything that persuades me away from what seems the only rational conclusion: luck can be (though isn't always) the dominant factor over skill in any one hand, but as the time frame is increased, the importance of luck diminishes and skill becomes the dominant factor in determining who is a long-term winner or loser. At some undefinable point of sufficiently long duration, luck has been rendered very small, perhaps even negligible--though never truly zero--as a factor.

I wish courts would follow Mark Twain's lead on this question. Back in about 1867 he wrote about a group of men criminally charged with playing a game of chance, known as "old sledge" or "seven-up." Their attorney convinces the court to convene a jury of six experienced players and six novices. When the novices lose all of their money to the better players, over the course of a night of playing, they unanimously conclude that it's a game of skill, and the defendants are acquitted. (See http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/1540/.)

That's the essence of what happened in the study with which I started this post, though without the judicial aspect. The outcome is hardly a surprise. The "unequivocal" conclusion, though, that poker is a game of skill is, or should be, subject to the caveat about the time frame of the observation. I think it is reductio ad absurdum ever to state that the game is either all skill or all luck.

Poker gems, #98

Phil Laak, in Bluff magazine column, February, 2008, p. 86:


Poker is a whipping ground of probability curves and philosophical conundrums. We enter and leave it at our own risk.

"I would have split that with you!"

Palms, earlier this evening. I'm stuck in a $2-4 limit game waiting for a no-limit seat to open up. I've only been there maybe five minutes when I have Q-8 on a flop of K-8-2 and decide to get stubborn and call down the guy who is taking the lead. I hit a lucky Q on the river to make a winning two pair.

As the dealer is starting to push me the pot, the guy on my left smacks the side of my left thigh and exclaims with a broad smile, "I would have split that with you!"

It frequently occurs in my life that people say things to me for which I can think of no reply that is simultaneously meaningful, civil, and honest. This was one of those occasions. I can't say something like, "Wow, that's really interesting," because it isn't even a little bit interesting. Why in the world would I care what he threw away? What I'd really like to say is more along the lines of "What makes you think I give a rat's ass?" But that would kind of get us off on the wrong foot, and I don't need more enemies in this world. So, as usual, I'm stuck saying absolutely nothing, because I can't think of a single thing to say that wouldn't fill me with self-loathing for having joined his level of airheadedness.

He notices my silence, and says, "You're not a talking poker player?"

Crap. Now I'm really stuck, in the social sense. I can't continue to just clam up without causing the same iciness that would result from me telling him how idiotic I think he's being. So I said, "It's not that, it's just that I couldn't think of any response that would mean anything. That's just how poker is sometimes."

It seemed to mollify him--perhaps too much, because he became the source of a litany of inane comments about the hands he wish he had played, bad-beat stories, asking me to speculate on what some other player had, asking whether he played a hand right, etc.

Dude, really, can you just shut the &%*$* up until you think of something interesting/original/substantive to say? I guess that's asking way too much of some people.

I think I will never catch on to this thing you humanoids call "small talk."