The PPA's Kentucky brief

I was just looking over some of the materials pertaining to the Kentucky domain-name seizure case, as collected by the Poker Players Alliance web site. I had not previously heard that the PPA had prepared an amicus brief for the court. I just read it.

Wow. This is a shamefully bad piece of work. Hey, they're preaching to the choir with me. I want to accept their arguments. But the holes are glaring. If it seems shoddy to one who desperately wants to like what the brief has to say, how bad will it look to a judge who may have no love of the game?

The first criticism I have is that this is obviously a made-in-advance brief. Somebody wrote it before having any idea what case it might be submitted for, then just added in a few bits specific to this Kentucky case. The central idea of the brief is that poker is more a game of skill than of chance. It's perfectly understandable that the PPA would have such a brief on the shelf and ready to go, because that's going to be a central question in a lot of legal cases involving the legality of poker.

But I'm not sure this is one of them, and even if it is, I'm not sure the PPA is analyzing the legal question correctly.

Most of the brief (which you can read here) is spent explaining poker and trying to demonstrate why skill is needed to play it successfully. It gives specific card situations and shows how one has to calcuate the pot odds, the odds of making one's hand, the expected value, etc. (Heck, I think they could have just handed the judge a copy of The Mathematics of Poker and asked him to pick about three pages at random to read, if the goal is to illustrate that poker problems are genuinely complex.) There follows a section of quotations from various poker authorities to the effect that skill predominates over luck, plus some excerpts from research papers making the same point, because test subjects who are taught strategy do better as novice players than those not taught strategy first. (Of course, the same would be true of blackjack. So I guess the PPA is willing to argue that blackjack and poker must either rise or fall together as games of either primarily chance or skill, right? Ha!)

The core problem, though, comes back to the pre-manufactured, cookie-cutter approach that this brief takes. "Gambling" is defined by the relevant Kentucky statute (528.010(3)(a)) as follows:

"Gambling" means staking or risking something of value upon the outcome of a
contest, game, gaming scheme, or gaming device which is based upon an element of
chance, in accord with an agreement or understanding that someone will receive
something of value in the event of a certain outcome.

Looking just at the face value of that text, it cannot be seriously maintained that poker is not "based upon an element of chance." Yet that's exactly the point the PPA tries to make.

The face value isn't the end of the matter, though. There are other states where similar language has, contrary to reason, been interpreted by the state appellate courts to mean games that are primarily or predominantly based on chance. The PPA brief quotes some of them. The problem is that it appears that Kentucky's courts have not adopted such an interpretation--at least I assume that if they had, citation of such a case would be prominantly featured in this brief.

Instead, the brief cites state attorney general opinions. Lawyers cite AG opinions when they can't find a court case that says what they want. But AG opinions are not binding on courts. Courts disagree with and politely ignore AG opinions all the time. This is partly because AG opinions are nearly always heavily political documents, rather than objective, scholarly, detached analyses of what the law says (though they are written to sound as if they are objective).

In short, it appears to me that the PPA brief is basically assuming and glossing over the main point that it should be trying to convince the court of. If it's true that the statutory phrase "based upon an element of chance" has not been given an authoritative interpretation by Kentucky's appellate courts, then it seems to me that the PPA's brief should be trying to persuade the trial court to adopt the "predominance" test, rather than trying to sweep that question under the rug as if it has already been settled. Surely no judge is really dumb enough not to recognize that this brief has a gaping hole in its legal logic.

I'm reminded of the classic Harris cartoon (which you can see here). One scientist has written a complicated scheme on the blackboard. One step of the proof says, "Then a miracle occurs." The scientist's colleague, looking over his work, says, "I think you should be more explicit here in step two."

Well, that's how I feel about this PPA brief. It's glossing over the key question of statutory interpretation, if its goal is to get poker legally recognized as not constituting "gambling" under Kentucky law. The only way to succeed at that is to take on directly that ugly "element of chance" language. On its face, that phrase is a death sentence for legal recognition of poker, so efforts should be directed at convincing the court that the facial reading is not the correct one. This brief utterly fails at that task. In fact, it doesn't even seriously attempt it.

The brief says (pp. 20-21):

The only rationale [sic; the brief really needed better proofreading!]
interpretation of this statute is that "outcome" must be based upon an element
of chance. If this reading is accepted, then poker is not included because in
poker the outcome is based primarily on the skilled play of the players.

See what I mean about glossing over? It goes directly from "based upon an element of chance" to outcome based primarily on skill. Those are obviously not saying the same thing, or even asking the same question, and it insults the reader's intelligence to pretend that they are.

Like I said, I want to be persuaded, but I'm not. A skeptical judge would read this and think, "They've got to be kidding, right?"

A few pages later I find another oddity. The brief correctly notes that whether poker is primarily based on luck or skill is a question of fact, which means that both sides would present evidence on the question. (If, that is, the judge decides that that question is relevant to the case. But if he takes the face-value reading of the statute, he could easily conclude that testimony is unnecessary, because nobody could possibly deny the proposition that poker is "based upon an element of chance.") The brief then criticizes the state for not having presented any evidence that poker is primarily a game of chance. Huh??? First, it's not yet clear that that is a question that will need answering in this case. And second, there hasn't been a trial yet! The lack-of-evidence argument might make sense if a trial had occurred, and the state had failed to produce an expert witness that said that poker was predominantly a game of chance. But it's way early to be complaining about what has or has not yet been produced in the way of evidentiary material. This is a completely frivolous argument.

Another smaller problem in the brief is that it takes things said about tournament poker specifically and tries to make them sound as if they are true for all poker. That's disingenuous. Were I the judge, the PPA's counsel would get no brownie points for honesty here.

I hate having to come to this conclusion, but this legal brief is a sloppy, shoddy, amateurish, mostly irrelevant piece of work. I recognize that it's not a primary brief, and as an amicus brief is designed to inform the court in more detail of things that the litigants' briefs may pass over, either because of lack of space or lack of expertise. That's why I'm not criticizing it for failing to tackle the big questions, like jurisdiction, and that hard-to-ignore definition of "gambling device." Those are questions best left to the defendants themselves.

But even taken for just the specific and limited role it is apparently meant to have, the PPA brief is bad legal work--bad enough that I'm ashamed that it is speaking for me as a PPA member.

Insight on the Kentucky case

A few days ago, I opined, in a completely unresearched, off-the-cuff post, that the Kentucky governor's attempt to take control of various gambling-related domain names was doomed to failure.

The minimum I probably should have done before popping off like that might have included taking the time to read the statute involved--the one under which the state claimed the right to the court-ordered seizure. Had I done so, I'm confident that the ENORMOUS hurdle identified by Bill Poser at Language Log would have jumped out at me.

Expanding a bit on Poser's point, the statute defines a "gambling device" in such a way that all of the following properties must be met:

1. It is a "machine" or "mechanical...device."

2. It is "designed and manufactured primarily for use in connection with gambling."

3. When "operated," the device "may deliver, as the result of the application of an element of chance, any money or property," or the operation of the device may entitle the operator to same.

Kentucky is rather ludicrously arguing that the Internet domain names themselves constitute "gambling devices" under this statute. I've read a ton of court cases involving statutory interpretation, and I find it unimaginable that any court could accept the argument that this definition is sufficiently broad to include a domain name.

It will be interesting to watch the state's attorneys tiptoe through this, and explain to the world how a domain name is a "machine" or a "mechanical...device," how it was "designed and manufactured" at all, let alone designed and manufactured primarily for use in connection with gambling, and how operation of this "device," as a result of the application of an element of chance, either delivers a monetary/property reward or entitles the operator to such.

The comments to the Language Log post are also well worth reading. In particular, the one touching on how Internet registries and registrars work was all new to me. That adds a complication beyond what was already puzzling me about whether ICANN is potentially subject to and/or willing to comply with state court orders, and I have no idea what to make of it. (See here for even more about how it matters where the registrars are physically located, and about ICANN's own rules for dispute resolution, responding to court orders, etc.)

But it now appears to me that that question will quickly become moot, because I doubt that the state can withstand even the most superficial challenge any defense attorney might make to the applicability of the statute.

Beer pong

I mentioned the other day taking a break from poker at Bill's by walking the short distance from there to O'Shea's.

What I didn't mention, because that story was already at risk for needing the entire team of Reader's Digest condensers to work on it, was that while at O'Shea's I saw something that wasn't there last time I visited: a whole area set up for beer pong. It has nothing to do with poker, but it's something I've never seen in a casino before, so I snapped a few photos, and I have nothing to do with them now other than posting them here.

Maybe this is a permanent set-up, maybe there was a special occasion. I don't know. In fact, I know nothing about beer pong besides that it has something to do with throwing ping-pong balls in cups of beer and drinking them. Not exactly my thing. (The sum total of the beer I've consumed in my life would not fill one of those cups. Not even halfway.)

But if you love beer pong, this is your official notice that O'Shea's appears to be the place to go for your game.

Then, please, come play a little poker with me when you're drunk and I'm sober!

Celebrity sighting

Joe Awada was at the table next to mine at the Palms tonight, playing a little $2-5 NLHE. That's him, with his head framed by the door in the background, looking off into space (looking at the football game on TV, actually). I understand he's there not infrequently. I'm not sure I'll ever grasp the economic rationale of people who routinely enter $10,000 tournaments playing what seem to be abnormally small cash games. Maybe some of them get staked for tournaments, but play cash games with their own money, and don't have nearly as big a bankroll as the tournament scene would suggest. Just a guess.


Horrible poker night. Doubled up on my first hand, which was nice, but it proved not to be a harbinger of any kind. All downhill from there. Nothing connected from that point forward. Finally busted out when my top pair/top kicker was the fourth-best hand! That, my friends, is a bad night of poker. Don't feel like saying another word about it.

My record-keeping

Warning: One of the most boring posts ever is coming your way.

Since I occasionally mention here specific results for a session or a particular location, it occurs to me that it might be useful to some readers to show you how I keep records. This is a system that has evolved over time. It works for me. It tells me what I want to know, without being gummed up with factors that I don't really care about. That's the main reason that I don't use any of the various software packages or online services that will keep and sort this data for you, if you choose: I haven't seen any that do a better job than what I've codged together on my own.

I have four Excel spreadsheets, each with a different purpose.

The first is a monthly one that I make fresh from a master template each month. It has a sheet for every day of the month, plus a "totals" sheet. Here's the entry from last Wednesday, when I entered the Green Valley Ranch HORSE tournament, then played an unsuccessful cash game for a while afterward:




I have the cursor on the "Hours" column so you can see how that works and copy the formula, if you're interested. Excel is, in my opinion, a nightmare to work with on time functions. It took me a couple of hours of work to finally put together this formula that would do the seemingly simple task of translating my start and stop times into number of hours played. The problem is that sometimes I play past midnight, so that the stop time is on a different date from the start time, and if you don't make explicit allowance for that in the formula, you'll get wonky results. Don't ask me to explain how the terms in the formula work--just trust me that this is what it takes to account for sometimes ending before midnight and sometimes after. Pain in the neck.

Here's the "Total" sheet. I made up October's in advance, because I didn't feel like showing the world my income for any actual month.



If you're at all familiar with Excel, setting up a sheet like this is completely straightforward; the cells just grab the data from the individual days' sheets, then do a bit of adding and averaging in the obvious places.

The individual months' sheets are stored in folders labeled by the year.

The next spreadsheet is "Year to date." I'm not showing you that for the same privacy reason. But it's an extremely simple page with columns for the names of the months, the running net to-date income total, and hours for that month (all automatically grabbed from the first spreadsheet), plus a simple division function to get $/hour for the month and for year-to-date.

The third spreadsheet is called "Summary by place." As you can see below, there is a separate column for each casino, with the dates running down the left-hand side. The summary lines at the top give me a running account of various aspects of my win/loss record for each place, then there is a totals column on the far right. There is an identically set up sheet for tournaments, though it gets a lot fewer entries, since I play very few tournaments.



The "discrepancies" sheet that you can see tabbed at the bottom is just a place where I can account for the rare instances in which I do some sort of gambling that isn't poker. For tax purposes, I can lump all gambling wins/losses together, because the IRS doesn't care whether the money comes from poker or a sports bet. But I care, and I don't want those other amounts to foul up my pure poker results. The final spreadsheet, described below, is the main one for tax purposes, and mixes in the poker and non-poker gaming, so the "discrepancies" page here is where I explain the three or four times a year that I make or lose a few bucks on something other than poker, which causes the sums on these "Summary by place" pages to differ from the totals on the last spreadsheet. I use it so rarely that it's not even formatted; it's just a few text entries with dates and explanations. For example, when I had a friend visiting from out of town last year, I noted this: "9/7/07, lost $5 on video blackjack at MGM Grand." Yep, that's me, Mr. Big-Time Gambler.

The "totals" tab just adds the cash games and tournaments together, formatted the same way.

The final spreadsheet is "Cumulative graph." Shown below is the first month or so that I played poker in Vegas. I have two screen shots of this, so that you can see the formulas used to calculate and display the weekly and monthly totals. The weekly one was pretty easy, but that monthly one was a bear to figure out. As you can see, I had to resort to "lookup" functions, which were new to me. As with the hours thing, don't ask me to explain how all of the terms in the formula work together; they just do. Copy it if it's helpful to you, ignore it otherwise.




There's a summary section for my entire time playing; I've blotted out the totals.

Finally there is a graph further down the spreadsheet page. Shown below is the section covering the same time period as for the data entries. The blue bars are individual days' results, and the pink graph is the cumulative amount won or lost. As you can see, I started out like gangbusters the first couple of weeks, but since I really didn't know much what I was doing, I gave it all back plus a bit, before recovering my footing. Fortunately, the graph has not come anywhere near to crossing back over that ugly net-zero line since then.



The way this all works together is that when I get home from playing, I copy the times and in/out dollar amounts from the piece of paper in my pocket into the tab for that day in the current month's spreadsheet. I then open and close the "year to date" one just so that it automatically updates itself. (Don't really need to do this every day, but I do anyway.) I then enter the totals in the "Summary by place" record and again in the "Cumulative graph" sheet. So basically every dollar amount gets entered three different places. I suppose that with something like a relational database I could get the same kinds of outputs by just entering the data once. But I don't feel like going to the trouble of purchasing and setting up such a system. The way I have it works plenty well for my needs, and takes less than two minutes, so it's not like there's a ton of time savings to be squeezed out of setting up something that might be slightly more efficient day to day.

Here are some things that I do not record, though you'll sometimes see published recommendations that you keep track of them:

Game. For now, what I play is so overwhelmingly $1/2 or $1/3 NLHE that there would be minimal benefit in entering that same data over and over. So I don't. If I graduate to consistently playing a wider variety of games and/or stakes, I may incorporate that information when it becomes needed.

Number of players. Sure, it's probably useful to know whether you make more money at full tables or when playing short-handed. But most of what I play is full ring games, and when that's not the case, it's usually just a transient state until the game fills up again. It would be incredibly cumbersome to try to break down a few hours' playing time into how much I was making per hour separated by how many players were at the table moment by moment.

Name of supervisor on duty. I've seen in several places the claim that you should record who the floor person or other supervisor was, in case of a tax audit. Frankly, I think that's ludicrous. I'm completely confident that the level of detail in the records that I have here would pass every legal test of reasonableness. No supervisor would ever remember, and therefore be able to verify, whether I was present on any given day, nor would they know how much I won or lost. The only potential value that I can see in this information is that theoretically the IRS could double-check with the casino and see if the name I wrote down matched their employee records, thus providing some degree of evidence that I was really there, and didn't just cook up the data. But I think that's silly. They still wouldn't know whether my income numbers were honest, because there is no possible source for that information other than me. Besides, I could presumably provide independent evidence of my attendance that matches my records by getting printouts from the casinos where they swipe my players' club card in and out. Not every place does this, but I think that if I needed corroboration, any court would accept the fact that my records match the places where it could be checked as reasonably suggesting that I was probably honest about hours at the other casinos, too. And, once again, that still wouldn't tell the IRS anything about the money, which is, in the end, all they really care about. If I ever get to playing for tens of thousands of dollars per session, and thus make a more tempting IRS audit target, maybe I'll think about following this piece of advice. For now, I think it's just ridiculously unnecessary.

So there you have it, my boring record-keeping. I hope that at least a few readers find it useful enough to use either directly as a template or as a jumping-off point for creating their own records systems.

Poker gems, #170

John Vorhaus, in Card Player magazine column, September 24, 2008 (vol. 21, #19), p. 94.


[T]hat's a fact of poker (and possibly of life): No matter what you do, you're going to look stupid to someone, sometime.

Mike Caro once wrote that in poker, everyone takes turns making mistakes, and the key to success is simply to skip your turn.

Encounter with the movie monster

Warning: Long post here--almost 4000 words. Budget your time accordingly.


I just got home from another Saturday evening at Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon. I had repeated tangles with one opponent--not at all the typical Bill's player--that are probably worth chronicling here.

After I had been playing for maybe three hours, I was a little tired and hungry, so I took a break. I walked up the street to O'Shea's, where I knew there was a small ice cream shop, and got a chocolate shake. When I got back to my seat, maybe 20 minutes after leaving, there was a new player in. As usual, I was in my favorite seat, #9, next to the dealer, and this guy was in #7, two to my right.

Almost at a glance I knew he was going to present a challenge. He was absolutely comfortable and at ease in his surroundings and shuffling his chips like a pro. He exuded confidence. He had bought in for the maximum amount allowed, which is distinctly unusual at Bill's; it signals that this is a guy who wants to be sure he doesn't miss a chance to stack an opponent because he has bought in for too few chips. He's wearing a "Bally's Race and Sportsbook" shirt, and I think he may work there.

Sure enough, he was a player. He raised essentially every time he was in last three positions, and quite often other times, too. He always raised the same amount, so no information given off there. He virtually always made continuation bets.

However, he had made a serious miscalculation. The first two biggish pots I watched him play he was trying to bully and bluff his way to a win, and he was trying it against two different calling stations--who did what calling stations do! He had no better than ace-high each time and lost both pots.

This kind of player seriously complicates my Bill's strategy. If he were tight-aggressive, OK, no problem, I can just stay out of his way when he suddenly comes to life in a hand. But loose-aggressive players, contesting so many pots, really gum up my strategy of picking on the weak players when I'm unusually strong. I have to figure out whether he has it this time or not, and his contending for the pot often causes the fishies to fold where they might otherwise have been inclined to call me.

Nevertheless, I'm confident that I can make money from him. It's going to be riskier than tangling with others, but he's not as good as he thinks he is. The fact that he could make such a monumental misjudgment as to try to bluff calling stations--twice in a row, no less!--is evidence aplenty of this. He has only one gear: foot mashed down on the accelerator. Sooner or later, he's going to overplay a hand when I've got the goods. My usual strategy against players like this is to open up my game quite a bit. Since his raising range is so broad, I can open up my calling range, especially since I have position on him nearly every hand. The dilemma is that this is directly contrary to my strategy for taking chips from most of the other players at the table, which is wait, fold, wait, fold, wait, fold, BIG HAND--take their money!

He had another weakness: He played without much respect to position. The first time I saw his hand at showdown after he had put in a preflop raise, in fact, was 3-5 offsuit, with which he had raised from second position! This makes him really difficult to put on a hand, but also is an Achilles heel of vulnerability that I might be able to exploit.

This guy annoyed me, not only because of his style, but because he's one of those jerks who never want to show their cards if they can possibly avoid it. He would take advantage of the fact that most of the other players were less experienced, and even when they called his bet on the river, he would just sit there, not exposing his hole cards, until enough uncomfortable time had passed that the inexperienced player would show first. This kind of guy really irritates me. He's violating both rules and etiquette, as well as wasting everybody's time. It's a mild form of angle-shooting, but it's still angle-shooting, and I dislike it immensely. The first time it happened I was willing to cut him some slack--he was embarrassed to be caught bluffing. But it quickly became apparent that this was a longstanding habit of his. I called him out on it: "Dude, he called you--show your hand already." It's not like he didn't know the protocol, but I wanted him to know that I knew what he was doing.

That wasn't the end of his obnoxious habits, though. He criticized weaker players for making bad calls, whether against him or against somebody else. This is horribly inappropriate. I go to Bill's precisely because I know it's the Bad Call Center of the Universe. I crave bad calls at Bill's. That's the key to making money there. The last thing I need is some jackass know-it-all taunting and embarrassing these fishy players and making them rethink their play, and start folding where they should.

And then he pushed my last button when he tried to give me a poker lesson. The situation was that I had A-K on a flop of K-Q-x. A fairly weak player, a middle-aged woman from Texas, was at the other end of the table. She bet $10, I raised to $30, and she called. The turn was a blank. She was not radiating great strength. I thought she probably had a king with a worse kicker. But she only had $42 left, so when she checked the turn, that's what I bet. I wanted a call, because I thought I was probably ahead. She did call, though reluctantly. As it turned out, she had K-Q for top two pair. OK--I misread her. It happens in a game of incomplete information. No big deal. I tell her "Nice hand," and move on with life. I was surprised, because she had the appearance of one who thought she was probably beat. In short, this was a player sufficiently inexperienced that she didn't grasp how strong top two pairs was likely to be. She didn't give off an aura of strength, because she erroneously undervalued her holding.

But Mr. Bally's launches into a taunting lecture. He informs me that "old ladies" (she was about 50!) always have it. He apparently thinks that I was trying to push her out of the pot, which wasn't the case at all. Given the stack sizes, I think the way I played it was a no-brainer. I might have been able to get away from it if she had roared over the top of me on the flop (but maybe not, because she could only charge me $42 more for what would then have been a roughly $110 pot, giving me better than 2:1), which would have been a better play on her part, but her timidity worked out for her, because it misled me. He asked me, "You didn't think she had at least top pair?" The guy must be out of his mind, or maybe didn't notice what I had. Yeah, I thought she had top pair but was still behind me. But I don't say that. I want him to stop with the lectures, not only because it's annoying, but because none of us needs the weak players at the table to smarten up. So I give him my standard smart-ass "shut up" line: "Are the lessons free, or do we have to pay extra for them?" It worked.

So by now there is definite tension between us. I have been taking stabs at pots that he raises, and doing so with speculative holdings. The first time a possible chance comes up I have 4-5 offsuit, and the flop is something like 9-4-2. I only have middle pair with a bad kicker, but I could easily be in front here. He bets $20. I call. One could argue for a raise here, but I really have no idea where I am, and I want the big pots between us to be when I'm on firmer footing than this. The turn is an ace. Ick. He has put in several raises with ace-rag. He bets again. He could well be bluffing, but I don't want to be reduced to guessing in a big pot, so I let it go.

He laughs tauntingly, points to me, and says, "This guy wants to bust me so bad he can taste it!" Well, yeah, I do, but only in small part for the reasons he thinks. My impulse is to say, "Emotionally, I don't really care where my chips come from. It's just that I recognize that some chips are easier to get than others, and yours looks like the easiest pickings." But I think better of it. I think I'm a much cooler head than he is, and I don't want to lose that edge and escalate the tension for the sake of a clever jab at him. Instead, I think of the advantages: (1) I have just convinced him that he can defeat me by continuing to bet at pots, and (2) he thinks I'm gunning specially for him, which means that he'll tend to mistakenly assume that I'm bluffing or coming at him weak, when I'm not. File that observation away and use it, I tell myself. It will feel plenty good when you take his chips--you don't need to feel good now by delivering a verbal put-down.

Our next encounter comes when he has raised from early position (which, again, means nothing for him), and I have called with 9-10 offsuit. The flop is a beaut: 9-9-6, rainbow. He bets $20. I call. Turn is a king. He checks, unexpectedly. The problem with my overall approach to him has been that if I don't bluff back at him sometimes, but only wait for strong hands, if he's smart he can just run away when that happens. That would leave him collecting the majority of the pots we contest, but without me getting the occasional big one to make up for having abandoned a lot of smaller ones. Fortunately, I think the observation above--about how he is now persuaded that I'm targeting him more specifically than I should--should counter this.

I'm torn between checking behind him here and letting him bluff again on the river, versus betting, in the hope that he'll think I'm trying to buy it. I settle on the latter approach. To my delight, he apparently thinks just that, and calls my $30. I don't think he has a king, or he surely would have bet the turn, but maybe he has a 6, or some medium pair. The river is a deuce, as I recall, and he checks again. He has convinced me that he has something, and that he thinks I'm bluffing and he will want to pick off that bluff. I push out a stack of $50, and try to look just a little nervous, without being all Hollywoody about it. He thinks for about 30 seconds, then finally calls. I must have come close to that magic number--the most that he would have been willing to put in without folding. Score one for me!

He looks pretty disgusted at my 9-10. Predictably, the comments start up again. This time he directs them, well, at nobody in particular, but sort of at the table as a whole. "This guy folds folds folds for round after round, and when he finally goes for it, it's with 9-10 offsuit!" He laughs, as if I'm the biggest idiot he's ever played against. I just smile. If he can't see that I'm deploying a reasonably smart strategy against his style of play, so much the better for me. And if he helps convince less perceptive players at the table that I don't know a good hand from a bad one, hey, maybe that will enhance their temptation to call me down light, too, further fattening my stack. So jabber away, Bally's Boy--I've got more of your chips than you have of mine now, and I sense more coming my way.

And then the inevitable final confrontation occurred. It was only a matter of time.

As usual, he raised from middle position to his standard $12. I had A-K suited (hearts), which is huge against his raising range. But I don't want to tip him off. I haven't reraised him even once preflop, so if I do so now, it will set off alarms in his head. I don't want to flip a coin for our stacks. I want to see a flop, and either get away from the hand cheaply if I whiff, or let his overaggressive tendency hang him if I hit.

But, OOPS, a wrinkle develops in the plan. A short-stacked player in the big blind has moved all in for $25. This re-opens the betting to Mr. Bally's. He surprises me by pushing out most of his chips in one big stack, about $200. I'm sitting on about $310 at the time.

I have to tell you about my mental state at this moment. I had been playing for about five hours, which is pushing the limit of how long I can stay attentive and sharp. I'm up by a little over $200, which is a decent day's wages for me. I had been planning to have this orbit be my last, and go home, having resigned myself to not getting the perfect opportunity to felt Mr. Bally's. I was in my "I will not get myself into a big pot" mode. At this point, ready to head for home, I did not want to be put to a decision for my whole day's earnings. If I lost, I would have to either eat the loss and record an "L" in my books for the day, or hunker down and start over again, when I wasn't fresh. Those were both unpleasant prospects.

But, geez--this may be too juicy to pass up. I do not habitually overplay A-K in deep-stacked cash games. I'm smarter than that. But given the huge range that Mr. Bally's raises with, I'm way ahead of about 90% of what he could have. The fact that he put in this enormous reraise is actually kind of encouraging. If he had the only two hands that I'm really scared of--A-A and K-K--he's smart enough that he would try to suck me in, not push me out. This bet is absolutely screaming, "Go away and leave me alone with the short stack." I had just called his initial raise, rather than reraising, largely so that my strength was disguised, in order that he would assume I was calling with junk and hoping to get lucky, just as he had previously seen me do with the 9-10. I had thought to spring my surprise on him later in the hand, but it looked like I would have to do it now instead.

My job is to figure out what opponents want me to do, then do the opposite. He obviously wants me to fold, which means that I have to not fold. I hesitate for longer than usual, because of (1) my general aversion to putting a ton of money on A-K before the flop, and (2) my dread of losing in one fell swoop what I've carefully built up over the last several hours. But I know that the mathematically right thing to do here is to be willing to risk it all. He can't fold, no matter what cards he has; he has 2/3 or 3/4 of his chips in already. Our stacks are so close in size that I can't tell who has whom covered, so this is basically for stacks here.

I hate it, but I push. He calls, of course.

He has the two red jacks (for once, he showed as soon as the bets were all in), near the very tippy-top of the range with which he would play as he just has. Ouch. Mr. Short Stack has the two black queens. Yowza! I am in deep doo-doo here! But the good news is that all of the aces and kings should be live, because I am in desperate need of finding one of them. Also, I'm guaranteed to see all five community cards, so I have maximized my chance for catching what I need. I don't care much about losing the main pot, which is only about $75. It's the side pot between Mr. Bally's and me that matters, since it is worth $600 or $650.

The flop is a bad one: 10-5-2, one heart. Ugh. My chances for the side pot just dropped from about 45% to about 30%.

The turn was the queen of diamonds. Mr. Short Stack jumped up, clapped his hands, and shouted "Yes!" My heart sunk a little lower. No flush will be heading my way on this hand, and there is only one card left to come with which to catch my ace or king.

The river was a jack. Mr. Bally's lets out a triumphant whoop. Damn. No ace or king for me, and both of my opponents hit sets on me! I guess it's home with nothing to show for my day's work, and actually down by my initial $100 buy-in. I turn my attention to the stack sizes to see if I have anything left. But just then I hear the dealer say, "Straight. Ace-king is gonna take it all."

I swear I had not even noticed this possible way of winning the hand when the queen came on the turn. To my slightly-overwrought brain, the queen had written off the side pot to the short stack's set, as well as killing my backdoor flush draw, and I was looking for only an ace or king to save the main pot for me. A straight never even entered my mind, in the couple of seconds I had for processing the situation. But there it was: My A and K, a 10 on the flop, and Q-J on the turn and river. With no three of any suit out there, I not only had the winner, I had the stone-cold nuts!

As it turned out, I had Mr. Bally's covered by a small amount. He lost the hand in arguably the most painful way possible: His incessant raising and pressuring with mediocre hands had gotten me to put it all in against what had to be one of his strongest hands of the day. He was ahead at every point, and, to apparently put the lock on it, had hit his three-of-a-kind on the river. Both he and I overlooked the straight at first. (I'm completely confident that I would have spotted it a few seconds after the dealer's announcement, by the way. I wouldn't relinquish my entire stack without giving the whole situation one last looking over.)

Mr. Bally's must have felt sick when the runner-runner miracle was pointed out to him.
It's quite a pleasant sensation to go, in an instant, from thinking that you just lost $300 to realizing that you just made $300. But riding that little emotional rollercoaster in reverse would surely induce motion sickness.

For A-K to beat two different big pairs, both of which have hit sets, without itself making a pair or a flush is really quite rare and remarkable. Not only did I have to make the straight with exactly a queen, jack, and ten coming--with two queens and two jacks already out--but I had to do so without any pairs to those three cards hitting the board, because if two of any of those cards came, it would make full houses and/or quads for my opponents.

Mr. Bally's slinked away without another word to anybody. Good riddance. I kind of wish I had gotten a chance to rub it in a little because, frankly, he's the rare asshole that I would say deserves such treatment. But on the other hand, if I had done so, I would now be feeling worse about myself, because it would be a violation of the standards of decorum that I both want and try to hold myself to. Kicking a guy when he's down might feel perversely satisfying at the moment, but I'd be ashamed of it after the fact.

I played for another hour or so, because there were still several soft spots at the table, and nobody with anywhere near enough chips to cause me to leave loser for the day, no matter what happened. After the big hand, I changed my mind about leaving because it had infused me with new mental energy, and because I thought I might be able to use my new-found aura of invincibility (combined with a comparatively enormous chip stack) to intimidate some pots away from opponents. But it was up and down, without much net forward progress. So I packed it in and left with my biggest Bill's win yet: up $520 in 5.8 hours, for about $90/hour. Excellent day's results. (My previous Bill's record was $416 profit on the poker room's opening day, May 13, 2008. My record there is now 9 wins and 2 losses, with a net $2326 profit, or about $211 per session.)

Saturday night at Bill's might become a habit for me. Both of the last two of them have been profitable (uptick $323 last Saturday) and generally enjoyable. Most of the table was delightful tonight. That fact kind of got obscured in telling the story of the one jerk.


So what's with the Godzilla picture and the "movie monster" reference in the title to this post? Well, in Hollywood monster pictures, there are classically three encounters with the monster. There's the first skirmish, in which the villagers (or Earthlings, if it's an sci-fi flick) become aware of the monster and take a licking, because they're not prepared. Then they assemble their weapons so that they're better prepared, and we get the second battle. But the monster is stronger than thought, and the weapons are useless. The villagers then have one last, desperate attempt to kill the monster, with all the odds against them. Just when it looks like all hope is lost, something finally works, and the tide turns their way. The monster is killed or run off, and all is well with the world again. Any number of movies follow this basic blueprint: "Godzilla" and "Independence Day," for two prominent examples.

Anyway, tonight's script deviated a bit from the norm, in that I won the second skirmish. Besides, there was the verbal jousting along the way, and a bunch of small pots that I abandoned early when I missed the flop, none of which are recounted in detail here.

Still, in its general outline, it felt a lot like I had taken on a movie monster. I had lost the first battle, plus some small ones along the way, and had basically given up on defeating the beast. Then out of the blue, we were suddenly deeply engaged in an all-out life-and-death struggle. And just when it looked like the monster was going to win this one, the screenplay dictated a runner-runner miracle straight to save the day for your hero at the last second, and the monster limped away, fatally wounded. It was as if I had used my lowly Macintosh to deliver a computer virus to the mother ship, or found a way to implant the command "sleep" in all of the members of the Borg.

Yeah, it was pretty damn lucky, but it was definitely not dumb luck. I had played him intelligently, and hadn't let my dislike for his style of play and his appalling lack of etiquette throw me off of my game. I was willing to put all my chips on the line when it mattered and when the sum total of the circumstances strongly suggested that it was the right move to make. In short, I did what is always said of poker tournament winners: I put myself in a position to get lucky, then did.

In the poker world, the monsters do sometimes win--unlike in Hollywood. But not here, not today.

HORSEing around

Wednesday night I spread my wings a bit again: I entered my first live HORSE tournament. Green Valley Ranch has one every Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. for only $45. (Well, technically it's $40, but there's a $5 add-on at the beginning that everybody takes.)

GVR is a pretty nice room. It's comfortable, smoke-free, has good dealers, and, as far as I can tell, is well run (though there are definitely conflicting reports on this count on allvegaspoker.com). For me the only problems are (1) it's too far away from where I live, and (2) it has a very low tourist:local ratio. Since there are plenty of fishier waters within a much shorter drive, I just don't have much reason to head out that way. Too bad, because it's the kind of place I would definitely make a home out of if not for those two big negatives.

But this HORSE tournament will probably give me more reason to visit Henderson than I've had. I enjoyed myself quite a bit. I've now done 107 online single-table HORSE tournaments, and it appears that they have prepared me reasonably well. I doubt that anybody at my table would have guessed it was my first time doing one live. My favorite dealer from Bill's was, by coincidence, also playing at my table, which added a bit of fun.

I finished about 10th out of maybe 20 or so runners (two tables, with a couple of alternates coming in late). Nothing spectacular. But I had been 2nd in chips at my table for much of it--propelled primarily by one hand early in the first razz round in which I made a wheel at the same time as another guy made a 7-4, and we kept raising and reraising each other. I knocked him out. My chip lead swung way over into short-stack range, though, on two hands just before the first break. First, one opponent just wouldn't fold his pocket kings despite an ace and possible flush on the board. Of course, I didn't actually have him beat, but he should have believed that I did, dammit! :-) Then in a stud round my jack-high flush got sunk by an ace-high flush.

The average age of entrants was over 50, I'm sure. In terms of skill, I had no trouble keeping up with the table. I couldn't peg anybody as being obviously better overall than I was, despite the fact that I went into this prepared to be the least experienced HORSE player there. It was 100% straightforward, level-1 play--nothing fancy or tricky going on at all, as far as I could tell. Bet or call or raise if you have something, check or fold if you don't. In hold'em and razz, the two games in which I have enough experience to make some reasonable degree of judgment about relative ability of opponents, the skill level was pretty pathetic--about what you'd expect in a typical $2-4 game.

The only problems I had with the mechanics of the game were (1) some difficulty seeing opponents' up cards in stud games, because I was at one end of the longish table, and (2) one time forgetting to return my cards to the dealer in an Omaha round (a real amateur move, that).

The dealers, by the way, were great. I couldn't detect any weakness in any of them dealing any of the games. Of course, that is what one should be able to expect, but it is not a foregone conclusion in this hold'em-dominated age.

I viewed this as a trial run--test the waters, see if I'm really ready, be sure the mechanics aren't handicapping me or showing me up as a noob. I held up well enough that the next time I enter, it will be with the thought that I should have a reasonable shot to cash in the thing.


When it was over, I headed down the road a piece to Club Fortune. It's been more than a year since my only previous visit there. As I reported at the time, they were in the midst of constructing a new poker room. I wanted to see what they made of it. Answer: Nothing. There are still three tables stuck in the dead center of the casino floor. Nobody was playing. A dealer was putting some decks of cards into order. It looked basically the same as I remembered from 13 months earlier. Back then, they had said they would have the new room in a couple of months. I have to assume, then, that those plans got cancelled. It couldn't possibly still be under construction after this much time.

Mr. Observant

At the end of the post I just put up, I mentioned being observant of some peculiar and not-too-important things at the poker table. That post was already wandering far from what I had intended it to be about, so I wasn't going to digress further. But writing that paragraph reminded me of one tiny thing I noticed more than two years ago, but it was the key to the whole hand, so it sticks out in my memory.

This was before I had a blog, but when interesting things happened to me, I would write them as emails to a friend back in Minnesota. I had sort of a vague notion that some day I would want to be able to refer to them, and having my tales of starting out playing poker in Vegas in written, contemporary form might be useful. I'm glad I did, because when I read back through them now, there's no way I would even have remembered some of them at all, and others would have all of the colorful details lost or transformed via tricks of memory.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from an email I wrote on August 20, 2006, about observing things at the table:

It’s actually not very common to find a reliable, useful tell on an
opponent. I spotted a great one the other day at the Hilton, though. This guy
would carefully stack his chips into, say, 5 stacks of 2 $5 chips each for a $50
bet, then push the stacks forward deliberately one at a time when he actually
had a good hand. If he was bluffing, though, he’d make one big stack and shove
it forcefully forward. I watched him do this twice each way, so I was pretty
confident in it. Unfortunately, he left the table before I got to exploit it.
Damn. It would have been great.

A couple of weeks ago at Golden
Nugget, I raised from middle position. Guy on the button made a slight move of
his hand to his cards before reaching instead for chips—I was certain that he
had made a last-second change of mind to call me rather than fold, which meant
that he wasn’t very strong. We were the only two in the hand. I bet on the flop,
even though it missed me completely. He thought a few seconds, then raised. I
instantly said “all-in.” He agonized for at least 60 seconds, then finally
folded. I’m sure that he had deduced that the flop of rags probably didn’t help
me, and if I had something like AK or AQ I wouldn’t even have a pair and I’d
have to fold to a raise. And he would have been right, except for that little
slip of his hand pre-flop. I was *expecting* him to try to take the pot away
from me, and I was prepared for it. He might easily have made a pair with that
flop, but he couldn’t risk me having AA or KK or QQ for all his chips. It was
one of the purest poker moments I’ve experienced here: completely playing the
player, not the cards. The whole thing could have been done exactly the same
with any two cards in my hand. He probably still has no idea that that little
slip of his hand cost him about $50. Without that, I wouldn’t have dared make
that move on him.

Entertainment while you play

Played at Bill's again this evening. One of the sidelights of playing there is that if you time your visit right, you get to hear Big Elvis, who sings in the lounge maybe 30 or 40 yards from the poker room, so it's not hard to listen in. (They have the good sense to shut off the canned overhead music while he is performing.) According to Big Elvis's web site, he's there Monday through Friday at 3:00, 5:00, and 6:30 p.m.






When the game broke up unusually early at Bill's, I walked next door to the Flamingo. They had something going on I'd never seen before: Performers from the Flamingo's "X Burlesque" show (see review here) were dancing to loud music just inside the door. (Sorry for the blurry photos. They wouldn't hold still.) Maybe this has been going on for a long time, but never while I've been there. It appears that other girls from the show--or at least ones dressed as if they might be in the show--do some blackjack dealing in this area near the wide-open front door of the casino. As at Bill's, the poker room is close enough that you can listen in on the music, but you can't see the dancers from the tables. Probably a good thing--might be a bit too distracting. I liked Big Elvis's music better anyway.

Sorry, no interesting poker stories from tonight. I came home with more money than I left with, which is always plenty interesting to me, but not especially to anybody else.

Oh, but wait--I do have a story, though not much to do with poker. Bill's takes the rake in half-dollar increments, so you sometimes get 50-cent pieces back as part of the pot. You can also play two of them as if they were a $1 chip. Somebody did that, and I noticed that the sheen of one of them looked quite different from the other. I'm fairly sensitized to the appearance of real silver, because of having my one-ounce silver coin always in use as my card protector, and I thought this half-dollar looked much more like silver than most. And when the dealer picked them up and put them in the tray, replacing them with a $1 chip, the "clink" was definitely different from the usual cheap, tinny sound that American coins have been making since they stopped using silver and copper, and instead went to crappy metals like nickel and zinc. I could even see in the dealer's tray that the second one down looked different on its edge. So I asked the dealer to sell me two half dollars from her tray (she probably thought I wanted to use them to tip the cocktail waitress or some such thing). Sure enough, the second one was a 1968, when the alloy used was still 40% silver (see here for coinage history). It's about one-eighth of an ounce of silver, so, I dunno, something like $2 worth, that I purchased for 50 cents.

When Shamus was in town for the World Series of Poker and we played a little poker together at the Palms, he mentioned in his blog the next day about how observant I seemed to be at the table. Nobody had ever said this of me before, though I do try hard to pay attention to what's going on. I suppose it's true, given my irritating (to the dealers, anyway) tendency to be able to identify cards from tiny rub marks or creases I notice on their backs, pick up and later blog about snippets of other players' conversations, get grossed out by untidy dealers' ear and nose hair, notice illegally small raises, spot all sorts of nervous tells in opponents, etc. Now I have to add to the list that I notice the peculiar look and sound of coins in play! There are undoubtedly more important things to be noticing, but one really can't help what things catch one's attention.

The strange thing is that I'm completely obtuse and unobservant in life outside of the poker room. My friends will tell you that I can walk past some prominent object a thousand times before finally noticing it and asking them, "Has that always been there?"

Wow. This post really veered far from where it started. Sorry for rambling.

ESPN gets one right

I'm watching the second half of this week's WSOP broadcast. ESPN has another "Poker Fact." They say, "There are 2,598,960 possible 5-card combinations in poker." And, as it happens, that is correct!

It shouldn't be cause for amazement when ESPN gets something like this right, but given their recent track record, it is.

Poker gems, #169

Phil Hellmuth, apparently completely earnest, in "Poker After Dark" Wednesday night:


I'm huge on etiquette.


[You can see the astonishingly un-self-aware declaration here, at the 0:55 mark.]

Poker gems, #168

Warren Buffett (who was not talking about poker, but might as well have been):


Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

My million-dollar idea

I actually had an original poker-related idea last night. An invention. Or, rather, an improvement on an existing invention.

Shufflemaster should add a sterilizing function to its card shuffler. My first thought was a powerful ultraviolet light bathing the cards as they get sifted. It would turn off when the lid is open, of course, like the magnetron in a microwave oven. I suppose that gamma radiation would work, too, though perhaps the shielding required would be prohibitive.

But though these methods might sterilize the cards, which would be nice, given all the grime that they accumulate, it would really be better if there were a physical scrubbing/washing mechanism. Like a little dishwasher. Heck, the machines already sound like a dishwasher, if you're in a poker room quiet enough that you can hear the things working. This would probably take a little time, so they might have to go to three or four decks being cycled through, rather than just two. But every time, the dealer would lift out a freshly washed, sterilized deck, perfectly safe for handling (until the gross players put their greasy, filthy, unwashed, poo-smeared, nose-picking, licked fingers all over them again). No disease transmission between the players! I could even settle for regular shuffling most of the time, with the "wash" cycle only turned on, say, every half hour, when the dealers change and there's an extra delay before the next hand starts anyway.

Of course, the problem is that it's hard to imagine most casinos caring enough about clean cards to spend the extra bucks on my upgraded machine. Maybe the Wynn and Venetian. But a place like Jokers Wild, where the dealers lick their fingers before pitching the cards? No way.

We'd also have to do something with the chips, which get even nastier than the cards do.

But it's a start. And I'm giving away my idea free of charge to Shufflemaster or anybody else who cares to work on implementing it. It's my public service for the day.


(What does a baby elephant have to do with this? Nothing, really. But I did a Google image search for "scrubbing" to see what might come up, and I found this picture of people scrubbing a baby elephant. I'm a sucker for pictures of baby elephants, and, as you might imagine, the subject matter of this blog doesn't lend itself to such photos very often. I have to grab the opportunities when I can. I don't know when my next real vacation might be, but if I can make it to a place where I can scrub baby elephants, that's where I'm going!)

900

Oops, I did it again! Another hundred posts. It has been 46 days since post #800. That seems to be about my average pace. Every time I have to say that I really can't believe I have this much to say on the subject of poker. How can there possibly be that much to be said that is worth reading? Yet the readership continues to grow apace, for which I am inexpressably grateful and flattered.

Special thanks this time to MemphisMOJO, a fairly new reader, for the heart-warming shout-out he posted this morning on his poker-and-bridge blog.

As always in these centennial posts, I'll ask you to do me the favor of clicking on the silly Google ads when time allows, which keeps the lights on in my fabulous downtown penthouse suite. (Ha!)

And thank you for reading. Your eyeballs on the page and your encouraging feedback are what make me look forward to sitting down at the keyboard every day to pound out another rant or two.

Phil Hellmuth acting badly--again? Say it ain't so, Jen!

I cannot tell the facts or give the commentary any better than California Jen already did, so just click on over to Pokerati and read.

In the comments, Jen says that Hellmuth is like the abusive boyfriend, always trying to bring flowers to make up for his misdeeds, and the WSOP is the woman who can't leave him.

Perhaps.

But the analogy that comes to my mind is this ultra-great scene from the 1979 movie "Kramer vs. Kramer." Hellmuth is the little boy. The WSOP is Dustin Hoffman with his repeated insincere and ineffectual warnings. The analogy breaks down, though, because I don't believe that the WSOP will ever tell Hellmuth he is a "spoiled rotten little brat," call him "you little shit" and throw him in his bed crying for his mommy--though they clearly should do just that.



(By the way, is there something wrong with me, that I always think of things in terms of movie scenes?)

Oh, and as another BTW, while I'm on the subject of the guy I most love to hate, I greatly admired how Clonie Gowen handled him on Monday night's "Poker After Dark." He guessed out loud about what she was holding, and was WAY off. But instead of showing him, or telling him he was wrong, she lied, and acted all impressed at how good he was at reading her. She even asked, with magnificently faked sincerity, how he knew. This naturally stoked his ego so much that he had to go into a little lecture about how he had figured it out. What a maroon! Now that she has planted the seed, it will be interesting this week to see if she manages to find a way to use it against him.

Poker gems, #167

Phil Laak, on "Poker After Dark," September 24, 2008, after folding 8-8 to Mike Matusow's all-in bluff reraise with 7-4, which he showed.


How long do you think the pain will last?

Kentucky is bluffing

Shamus thoughtfully asks whether the governor of Kentucky actually has a hand, in his bid to take control of a bunch of online gambling sites and thereby cut off Kentucky citizens' access to same. (See also Pokerati's reports on the matter here, here, and here.)

Legal blogs are often great sources for informed commentary on such breaking news, but I couldn't find anything on them, not even on one dedicated to Kentucky legal issues. So I'm going to have to wing it alone. I'm not an attorney, but I've been involved in a number of legal cases, and kind of by osmosis gained a reasonable familiarity with how the system works. Here's my quick reaction:

I'm not worried about this, and I wouldn't be even if I lived in Kentucky.

First I'll address one of Shamus's questions--the one about the UIGEA. I think it's pretty safe to conclude that the UIGEA is not being invoked here. The statute says:

§ 5365. Civil remedies(a) JURISDICTION.—In addition to any other remedy
under current law, the district courts of the United States shall have original
and exclusive jurisdiction to prevent and restrain restricted transactions by
issuing appropriate orders in accordance with this section, regardless of
whether a prosecution has been initiated under this subchapter.

The key here is that the federal courts have "original and exclusive jurisdiction" over civil remedies. The simple fact that, according to news reports, Kentucky is filing its action in a state court, rather than federal court, is a pretty clear signal that the UIGEA is not involved here.

But the bigger issue is one of jurisdiction. When you file a suit, one of the first things that you're supposed to do is demonstrate, or at least assert, that the defendants are within the jurisdiction of the court, or take steps to have the court assume jurisdiction. In some situations, if the defendant just shows up in court for the hearing, or has an attorney do so, that is enough for jurisdiction to lie--which is why it won't surprise me if many or all of the sites simply ignore the hearing.

What the judge should do at the hearing, if there is nobody representing the gambling sites, is inquire of the state whether the opposing parties were properly served with notice of the hearing, and ask for evidence of that. He shouldn't be willing to do anything permanent without such evidence. (He might be able and willing to issue a temporary order of some sort, but what would happen with that is the same as what I will predict below would happen with an eventual permanent order.)

But suppose the worst happens, and the judge either disregards the question of whether any of the sites have been properly served and/or have a physical presence in the state such that they fall under the jurisdiction of the state's laws and courts, and he agrees completely with the governor's arguments. He either finds the sites in default for not appearing or he finds against them on the merits. He issues an order transferring control of the domain names to the state.

So what? When one kid threatens to do bodily harm to another, sometimes the rejoinder will be, "Oh yeah? You and what army?" Well, that's about what a site like PokerStars would say to Governor Beshear. You've got your fancy, autographed, embossed piece of paper ordering transfer of the site, but now what are you going to do with it? To whom can the state now deliver that order with any credible enforcement mechanism behind it?

They can mail it, or have it delivered by courier, to, say, the Isle of Man, or the Kahnawake tribe that owns the company that hosts the servers for many gaming sites. But Kentucky's laws don't extend there. Even if the sites disregard the order (as they surely would), and the judge eventually finds them in contempt--again, what, exactly, are they going to do to enforce the contempt order? I promise you, they are not going to try to send the Kentucky State Police to Canada or Great Britain to try to arrest the site owners or operators. And as I understand international treaties, contempt of court is not among the offenses for which foreign governments will use their own law enforcement agencies and courts to arrest you and have you extradicted to Kentucky. Murder? Sure. Contempt of court? Nope.

So I think it's all a sham, a show, grandstanding for purely political purposes. There is no end game that I can see that works out in favor of the plaintiffs.

Gov. Beshear is bluffing. Hollywooding. The floor is going to rule against him.

Have no fear.


Addendum

I see now, reading the court order that Shamus linked to, that this is an in rem action. That's a special kind of civil action that only governments can use, taken against the legal fiction of property as the defendant, rather than against people or corporations. You occasionally run across a case title such as "State v. 2003 Chevrolet Tahoe, VIN ___________," or "United States v. $34,566.92." Those are in rem seizure cases. They are a unique brand of legal action to which all sorts of special rules apply. Most particularly, statutes shift the burden of proof after the government initiate such a case; if you are the owner of the property, you have to prove that the seizure was not justified. Here, it appears that the initial seizure order has already been signed by the judge, and the upcoming hearing is the first point at which the owners of the sites are being given the opportunity to refute the state's claims to the property, which has been seized on allegations that it was used to further criminal activity, as if it were a car transporting crack cocaine.

Nevertheless, the ultimate jurisdictional problem remains. The governor may crow that the state now owns the sites, but good luck actually taking control of them, when the servers are where you can't reach them.


Addendum #2

In the comments, Richard Brodie raises a point I hadn't thought through clearly, and that is the role of ICAAN. Trust, me--Richard Brodie has forgotten more about computers than I'll ever know. (Hey, just because I'm that Internet blog guy doesn't mean I actually understand how this whole Rube Goldberg thing works.)

So suppose that ICAAN does accept the judge's order. If I'm right about how this stuff goes, what they then do is switch what server your browser goes to when you instruct it to take you to, say, http://www.pokerstars.com/. But, unless I'm grossly misunderstanding the basics of the system, Kentucky still could not take over the content of the PokerStars site, since ICAAN can't and doesn't control that; they just control the correlation between a particular web address and what server a command for that address goes to. So the sites would just have to register new names, like Bodog did. Servers owned by the state of Kentucky wouldn't suddenly be running the Stars software and its poker games. This could, of course, cost the sites a lot of money for the changeover, but it wouldn't accomplish what the governor says he is trying to do, which is actually control and modify the sites so that everybody except for Kentucky citizens can use them.

You smart guys out there, is this about right?

As for what it takes to convince ICAAN to recognize a court action, I have no clue. I have no idea where ICAAN is physically located, or in what legal jurisdiction(s) it operates. I also don't know whether it is prone to respecting such judgments voluntarily, even if there is no real enforcement mechanism to which it must bow. All good questions. I'll have to punt the ball at this point.

Three in a row???

Two weeks ago, when ESPN messed up on its weekly "Poker Fact," I thought it would be a one-time thing. They surprised me the next week by doing it again. I would not have believed they could hit the trifecta, but they somehow managed.

This week they say, "When holding any pocket pair, the probability of flopping a set is 11.76%."

Wrong.

The usual way of running this calculation, which is apparently how ESPN's people went about it, is to calculate the probability of the flop not having another of the rank in question. There are 50 cards left, so the probability of the first card of the flop not completing one's set is 48/50. If that happens, then the probability of the second card of the flop also not completing one's set is 47/49. If you have gotten that far without a set, then the probability of the third card of the flop still not completing one's set is 46/48. Multiple those three together (because all must be true simultaneously), and the probability of the flop not bringing a third card to one's pocket pair is 0.882449. Subtract that from 1.000000 (because the flop must either contain another of the rank in question or not), and you get 0.117551, or about 11.76%.

The problem, though, is that four of a kind is not a "set," and the calculation above does not exclude flopping quads. Given that you start with a pocket pair, the probability of flopping quads is 0.2449%, if I've done my math right.* (And if I haven't, please let me know in the comments so I can fix it.)

Therefore, the probability of flopping a set but not quads is 11.7551% - 0.2449%, or about 11.51%. What the ESPN graphic was showing was not the probability of flopping a set, but instead the probability of flopping either a set of four of a kind, starting with a pair in the hole. They are not the same thing.

Be sure to tune in next week for the next exciting installment of "How Many Ways Can ESPN Get the Math Wrong?"

By the way, when starting to write this post, I pulled out Phil Gordon's Little Green Book, which has a handy section of common poker probabilities. It's my usual first place to look for quick answers. But I see that he has it wrong here. On p. 271, he says that if one starts with a pocket pair, the probability of flopping a set is 10.80%, and the probability of flopping quads is 0.20%. Wrong on both points.



*We're specifying that the flop must contain two exact cards. There are therefore 48 cards left in the deck to fill that third spot on the flop. We don't care about the order, so that's effectively 48 different flops that will work. We already know that there are 19,600 possible flops, once we've accounted for the fact that our two hole cards can't be in the flop. 48/19,600 = 0.00244898, or 0.244898%.



Addendum

I just knew I'd mess something up. Every time I've tried doing a math post in the middle of the night (note the time stamp on it), I make a mistake. As one commenter pointed out, I failed to account for full houses. If flopping quads can't be counted toward flopping a "set," neither can flopping a full house. I even noticed Phil Gordon's book separating that out, but then my sleep-deprived brain dismissed it as irrelevant. (I thought so because what flashed through my mind was the pocket pair plus three of a kind on the flop, which I dismissed as not flopping a set.) Clearly it is not.

So what is the probability of flopping a full house if one starts with a pocket pair? Well, that means a flop containing a third of our pair's rank, plus another pair. Hidden among the 50 remaining cards are 12 full ranks. There are 6 different pairs that you can pull from a group of four: C(4,2) = 6. That means that there are 6 x 12 = 72 different pairs that can hit our flop. Each of those might occur with either of the two remaining cards that would make our three of a kind, for a total of 144 flops that meet our specifications for a full house. 144/19,600 = 0.007347, or 0.7347%.

We subtract that from the previously calculated 0.115102 and end up with 0.107755, or about 10.78% for the final probability of flopping a set.

So, to summarize--given a pocket pair, the probability of flops is as follows:

Set: 10.78%. (That's 1 in 9.28 times, or 8.28:1 odds against.)
Full house: 0.73%. (That's 1 in 137 times, or 136:1 odds against.)
Quads: 0.24%. (That's 1 in 417 times, or 416:1 odds against.)

Set or full house or quads (which is what ESPN's graphic was actually about): 11.76%. (That's 1 in 8.50 times, or 7.50:1 odds against.)

(Note that "full house" here refers only to pair in the hand, third of that rank on the flop, plus a pair of a different rank on the flop. You can also flop a full house with a pocket pair and flop of three of the same rank. But since this possibility does not include the third card to the rank of one's pair, it does not enter into the calculation here. For completeness, though: There are 12 full ranks left in the deck. Each rank has three different combinations that can make up a single-ranked flop, because C(4,3) = 4. So there are 12 x 4 = 48 possible flops that would be three of a kind on the board. 48/19,600 = 0.00244898, or 0.24%. By strange coincidence, this is the same probability as flopping quads, starting with a pocket pair.)

Phil Gordon gives these numbers as 10.80%, 0.70%, 0.20%, and 11.80%, respectively. This is a little peculiar, in that he appears to have done the math correctly, then rounded off to the nearest 0.1%, then later decided to make it look more precise and added in an extra 0 digit at the end. That last step is the part that isn't right. If he had left the numbers as 10.8%, 0.7%, 0.2%, and 11.8%, he would have been fine. My apologies for incorrectly faulting his set calculation in the original post. It appears that his only error was in rounding, then "unrounding" by adding zeros.

Separated at birth?

Recently I've had a couple of people mention that they think I look like Robert Varkonyi, winner of the WSOP Main Event in 2002. We were at least born in the same year, so that's something.

This now gets added to the list of people I possibly resemble, along with Dr. Pauly, David Cross, Joe Pantoliano, and Scott Adams (see here and here for the earlier installments in this series).

Addendum

Now Rocco Mediate (pro golfer who occasionally plays poker tournaments) is being added to the list of candidates--see first comment. But I don't agree. My watch isn't big enough.

Sam the bellhop

For an amusing card trick, see http://www.noob.us/entertainment/awesome-card-trick-sam-the-bellhop/.

Playing slowly in a tournament--a sound tactic?

In the current issue of Poker Player newspaper (September 29, 2008) is a column by "Oklahoma Sarah" Hale (p. 26). Her columns are usually boring but otherwise unobjectionable.

This week, however, in a column on poker etiquette, I think she gave out some bad advice. After explaining the reasons why it is bad form to take longer than one really needs to make decisions, she adds:

The only exception to this rule is in a tournament when you are down to the
final few tables. In this situation if you are seated at the short handed [sic] table
the blinds will hit you faster then [sic again] is fair. This is the only
time I recommend playing slower than average.

I think this advice stinks. I say it is still rude to waste all of the other players' time.

But more than being rude, I think it is stupid, self-destructive strategy to stall. It is true that the blinds are coming around faster at a short-handed table than they are at a full table. But so what? If you're a better player than average for the tournament (and if you're not, why are you in it???), then you should be winning more chips per hand, on average, than the other players. You should see yourself as having a positive EV for every hand before the cards are dealt.

In that situation, you want more hands per hour, not fewer. Every hand is an opportunity to build up your chip stack, so you should want as many such opportunities as you can squeeze in. Sure, you're paying the blinds more often than your buddy at the next table, but that's completely irrelevant if an average hand at your table has you building your stack, while those of your opponents at your table are shrinking (or at least not building as fast).

Another way to look at this is that you are not paying the blinds more than players at the other tables are, you're winning the blinds more often than players at the other tables are--if you're the best player.

Good players should see every hand as another chance to take more chips from their weaker opponents. The more such chances you get, the better.

The weakest opponents just hunker down and fold, fold, fold, hoping to stay alive as long as possible. That's no way to win a tournament. For them, stalling may prolong their tournament life. But that possibility shouldn't serve as encouragement for better players to mimic such misguided tactics.

To see stalling as a smart strategy is to admit that one is such a weak player that one is just ducking one's head under the waves, rather than playing to win. So I guess we now know what Ms. Hale really thinks of her own play.

Incidentally, she fails to mention another situation in which taking time that is not really needed for a decision is justifiable: When you need to suggest to an opponent that you have a decision more difficult than it really is. Of course, even there one shouldn't overdo it. But a bit of hemming and hawing before making a call or raise is perfectly acceptable, in order to sell a false image of weakness.

I do not, however, think it is kosher to stall on what one immediately knows will be a fold. I know that Mike Sexton often says, with seeming approval, that a player who is bluffing and gets raised will often take some time before folding so that opponents will think he had a real hand. I think this is bogus. I notice that Barry Greenstein never does this--if it's going to be a clear muck, he does it instantly. I assume that this is because Greenstein has confidence that he is virtually unreadable in his actions and mannerisms, so even if he were to announce that he had been bluffing, there is nothing for an opponent to pick up on him that would be useful in a later hand.

Besides, a rapid fold does not necessarily indicate that one had been bluffing. One might have been simply putting out a probe bet with a hand of medium strength, and once the answer came in as a raise, that was all one needed to know in order to make folding the obvious decision. So if opponents erroneously assume that every quick fold after a bet-raise means that one had been bluffing, fine, let them make that mental mistake.