Guess the casino, #688

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Answer: Excalibur

Cheap classical music (marginal poker content)

Go here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000375211&ref=tsm_1_tw_dm199x5_20101110

For a limited time, you can download five different collections of 99 tracks each of classical music, and one such set of Christmas music in MP3 format for $1.99 each. I bought all of them. Almost none of the performers will be people who are big sellers here in the U.S.; most of the names and ensembles appear to be from Russia and Eastern Europe. But so what? They have excellent performers and recording studios there, too, ya know. There's between 6 and 13 hours of music in each set. I just finished playing two Bodog tournaments, took 3 1/2 hours. I started the piano music collection on iTunes when I started, for background music, and only got up through #31 of 99 tracks. The recordings were perfectly fine (and I'm pretty much a snob about classical music) and I greatly enjoyed having it on. I even ordered a couple of extra mini-SD chips (only $6 each now!) for my MP3 player so that I'll have room to copy these new acquisitions to it. Then you, too, can listen to nice music while you PLAY POKER. (See? There's your poker content right there!)

Hat tip to OhCaptain for the tweet about this. Excellent find!

What's in a screen name? #17

Well alrighty then!

UB stays classy as ever

They're in a race to the bottom with Victory Poker.

Guess the casino, #687

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Binion's

Fun with Dick and Jane

Dick and Jane, in this case, are, respectively, Grange95 and C.K. No, their real names are not Dick and/or Jane, nor am I trying to imply that anybody is a dick. It's just that after spending a couple of hours playing with both of them at the Venetian a few days ago, that's the blog post title that came to mind, and I'm sticking with it.

It will come as no surprise to long-time readers that I'm at least slightly misanthropic. I don't like most people, and most people don't like me. It's about all I can do to tolerate them, and I think the feeling is mutual. But there are exceptions. I can think of about a dozen people that I've met since living in Vegas that I genuinely like having at the poker table with me, because they're smart, funny, and/or interesting, and don't do things that annoy me. Some I've met through blogging, others through allvegaspoker.com, two or three I've met playing, plus a couple of poker dealers. It is rare that I get two of this small group at a time, but Friday was such a day. The three of us have played together twice before, which I wrote a little about here and here.

One of the sweetest things that Cardgrrl ever wrote to me (and I hope she'll forgive me for quoting this publicly) was this, when we had been having an email exchange about how my shyness and reticence in social situations causes difficulty in making new friends: "If you showed most people what you show me ~ your humor, your kindness, your generosity, your interest, your curiosity about the world, your playfulness and creativity, and your perceptiveness ~ they would absolutely like you." Well, there's something about the people in that small group I mentioned above, specifically including Grange and C.K., that delights me enough that I relax and get to be somebody other than a curmudgeon or automaton for a while. Maybe whatever it is that Cardgrrl sees in me gets to peek out during such times, because it does seem to have the effect of causing them to like me, too.

Jeez--didn't mean to go all Sally Field on you there. Sorry. Back to the story.

So I get to the Venetian and arrange for a table change to join Grange. (He knew I was coming and yet didn't switch to the open seat on his left, so he lost the right to complain about my positional advantage.) A while later, C.K. comes along (probably attracted by the scent of easy money). I tend not to be much of a needler, and I'm usually made uncomfortable by the barbs exchanged by friends in my presence. But Grange and C.K. seem to have a rapport that makes it OK. I guess I waited too long to write up this post, because now I'm forgetting most of the zingers they exchanged that made me laugh at the time. I think my favorite was when the two of them were contesting a big pot, staring each other down, and Grange said, "I'd be looking into your soul right now--if you had one."

Something (and again, I really need to get some Alzheimer's testing done, because here we are just four days later and I can't recall what triggered this) made me think of the first time I met C.K. I suspected she wouldn't remember the circumstances, and I was right. There had been a mini gathering of poker bloggers at the MGM Grand during the 2008 World Series of Poker. We had a low-stakes mixed game going. C.K. couldn't get a seat, but she entranced the males at the table by giving Mrs. Chacko, who was in the game, a hot girl-on-girl chair massage. That was a pretty memorable introduction! (That night was also the first time that I met F-Train, Dr. Chako, Falstaff, Gadzooks, and others. The gregariousness of that group was quite overwhelming for a wallflower like me.)

Grange won two consecutive big pots from C.K. with pocket jacks, which I expect he will recount in detail on his own blog, so I'll refrain. The biggest pot between C.K. and me was soon after Grange had reminded me of the 3-6, which he and his silly Iowan ka-nigget friends call "The Spanish Inquisition," because, well, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. (If you have to ask what that's about, I'm afraid you have led a sad, sad life.) Just a hand or two later, I found myself holding the 3-6 of diamonds, and C.K. had put in a raise. I had to do it--I just had to. The flop was 3-3-x. Ding! Teh pokerz, it is such EZ game! She bet, I called. She bet again on the turn--$25 this time--and I raised to $75. She scowled a bit, but didn't take too long to fold. I asked Grange to deliver the line for me as I exposed my cards, and he humored me with his best (or worst--hard to tell) British accent: "NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

As for taking money from Grange, well, I did a little of that, too. He raised, from one seat to my right. I called with the 4-6 of hearts. The flop was, I think, 8-9-2 with two hearts. He bet $25, I called. The turn was an offsuit 10. He checked. I caught more than a hint of fear in the air, so I bet $45. He called, but seemed none too happy about the situation. The river was another 8. He checked again. My draw hadn't come in, and with 6-high, the only way to win this pot was to fire at it again. I thought I had a good chance of getting away with it, because the way the hand had played he would have to worry about me having flopped two pair or a set, or having flopped a straight draw that got there on the turn. With about $160 in the pot, I settled on $75 as an amount that would look like a "please call me" value bet. I started to cut out that many chips, but he stopped me: "You've got it. I missed everything. I can't call." And with that he folded Ah-Jh face up. It is only now that he is learning that I had even less than he did. :-)

***
An aside. (I'm obviously feeling prone to those tonight.) I was about to end that little tale with "Sorry, Grange." But I'm not sorry. Of course I didn't set out to target him specifically due to any personal animosity, nor did I bluff him in order to rub his nose in it for the fun of the torment; I was just playing the situation that presented itself the best way that I knew how. This hand had occurred after the two big ones between C.K. and Grange, so I commented to him, "The others here know the three of us are friends, but I guess we've dispelled any worries that we soft-play each other." He told me, in return, "I'd lose my respect for you if you soft-played me." I much appreciated that affirmation. I understand and share the sense of integrity that stands behind it.

***

For once I didn't lose any big pots to either of my friends. I expect that to revert back to normal next time around. And I do hope there is a next time, and a next, and a next. I don't play poker for pleasure, but it's awfully nice to have the occasional session that is just plain fun because of who is there, regardless of how the cards fall.

Not my night, redux

I'll make this quick.

Hooters. First hand--not just the first hand I choose to play, but the first hand I'm dealt--is KJ. Flop is A-Q-10. Get it all in against a guy with A-10. Turn 10.

Rebuy.

Second hand--not just the second hand I choose to play, but the second hand I'm dealt--is AQ. Raise, several callers. Flop A-Q-10. (Sound familiar?) I get it all in against a guy with K-J. I do not improve.

I go home.

That is by far the fastest I have ever lost $400.

Here's my spreadsheet of results for the night:

Brady Bunch on Bluff

I love the cover of the new issue of Bluff magazine!

They've done at least two others in the past that I thought were wonderfully creative. In August, 2008, they had 20 or more different pictures of Phil Laak composited to make it look like a crowd of Phils. You can see it here. In November, 2006, they had an equally ingenious one featuring Daniel Negreanu. Unfortunately, you can't see what was so clever about it in the online archives, but they had him in a pose that replicated a picture of him from when he was maybe 5 or 6 years old, which was featured underneath in what amounted to a second sort of "pull-back" cover to the magazine.

Perhaps it's a symptom of the general dullness of my life, but when Bluff or other poker magazines make a real effort to do something different from the boring, predictable cover photo of the featured pro of the month, it tickles me pink.

Guess the casino, #686

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Answer: Aria

Not my night

Played at Harrah's. Lost the first chunk with Q-Q. Flop 9-2-3 rainbow. Looked safe, so I moved all-in, as my only opponent was fairly short-stacked. He called. I showed the queens. Board played out 4-5, at which point he turned over 4-5 for runner-runner two pair. Sigh.

Lost the rest in an even more diseased fashion. 10-10 in the hole. Raise. Four callers. Flop Js-9c-10s. Checked to me. I ship it all in. Pay for your draws, fellas. Two callers, so I can't show yet. Turn: Jh. Now with a full house, I relax about the draws. One remaining opponent bets enough to put the other all in, gets a call. River: 10h for quads. Now I'm really relaxed about those draws.

Until the other guy flips over his J-J for better quads.




To rub salt in the wound, Harrah's does not have a bad-beat jackpot these days (though they used to). It is the first time I have ever been in on a hand that would qualify for a bad-beat jackpot by the usual criteria.

To pour some alcohol into the already salted wound, the floor guy checks their house rule book and finds that when there are two high hands at the same time, only the winner collects the high-hand bonus.

I left with nothing but a hard-to-top cooler story, and the package of Double-Stuf Oreos I bought on the way home for self-soothing.

Your decision? (Conclusion)

In part 1 of this post, I described a difficult situation in which I found myself yesterday. If you haven't already read that note, you might want to do so now, because I'm about to tell you, in the immortal words of Paul Harvey, the rrrrrrrrrrrrrest of the story.



I decided on a shove. Given the potential win, I decided it was worth risking getting felted. If he had a bigger set, so be it. But, as I noted before, I had seen him overvalue and overplay medium-strength hands, so that possibility was a bigger part of his range here than it would be for more skilled and cautious players. I moved all my chips across the betting line.

He asked for a count. The dealer told him $202. He hesitated not more than three seconds before saying, with a shrug, "OK, I call. But I think you rivered me."

You can imagine that I didn't like that one bit, as it perfectly fit what I had feared most: He had A-A or J-J, checked the river out of fear of the flush, but finally decided he couldn't fold such a big hand.

I showed my set. He got a very surprised look on his face and said, "Wow--I didn't put you on that at all. You're good." And with that, he flipped up his A-10 offsuit.

That's right. He had three-bet from out of position with A-10 off, then, on the strength of top pair/lousy kicker had made a nearly pot-sized bet on the flop, a half-pot bet on the turn, and finally called my half-pot all-in on the river, after an obvious possible flush draw (and less obvious possible straight draw) had come in.

He topped that off with this offhand remark: "I really thought you had hit your flush there."

After I had finished stacking his chips, I texted Cardgrrl: "Can I get a GPS tag on this guy so that I'm alerted every time he walks into a poker room?"

Of course I felt like a genius. But the truth is that I could just as easily have been wrong, and left dejected and kicking myself for stacking off in such an obviously dangerous situation. I happened to be right this time, but the relevant factors were so ambiguous and scary that my decision was, frankly, just a guess, and I'm never happy being reduced to guessing like that. You can, I think, make a sound argument that I should have folded before the flop, on the flop, or on the turn, and waited for a spot in which I could have more confidence that I was in the driver's seat before putting all my chips at risk. So while I am, of course, pleased with the outcome, I'm less proud of how I got there than you might think.

Guess the casino, #685

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Answer: Treasure Island

This is who you want at the table

After my session at Mandalay Bay (see previous post), I decided to spend a little time at Luxor. One of the players at the table was plainly quite drunk. He couldn't even coordinate his hands enough to stack his chips, and just kept them in a messy pile.

After I had been there for a while, a man, who we soon learned was drunk guy's brother, came along to chat with him:

Brother: "There you are. I thought you went back to the room to sleep."

Drunk guy: "I tried, but I couldn't see the room numbers well enough to know which one was ours, so I came down here instead."

Your decision?

It's time once again to play "You decide." Once in a while I'm faced with a difficult decision for a lot of chips, and I try to present the situation to my loyal readers and ask how they'd handle it. These are the decisions on which my poker success largely rides. I'd like to think I get them right more often that my average opponent does, but who knows? I have certainly posted my share of examples of blowing the big ones in spectacular fashion.

I was at Mandalay Bay this afternoon. I had been playing for maybe 45 minutes, and had increased my $300 buy-in to $392. I found 3c-3s in second position and called a raise to $10 from the under-the-gun player. Player in the small blind reraised to $30. As in most $1-2 NLHE games in town, light three-bets are not common, so this definitely got my attention. UTG folded, and it was back to me.

I'll tell you what little I can about my opponent. First of all, he's a toothpick chewer, which sets a two-digit upper limit on his IQ. He's obviously a tourist, paying more attention to the football games than the poker game. He has commented about how he's losing every sports bet he made. (I try to pay attention to such small self-revelations, because they can influence one's judgment of an opponent's mental/emotional state.) Perhaps most importantly, I've seen him overplay top-pair hands. He is no maniac or bully, but neither is he a calling station. My impression was that he basically plays his own hand pretty straightforwardly, and has little feel for where he is with respect to an opponent's holdings. He's not at all afraid of putting chips in the middle. He isn't exactly reckless, but he also doesn't really have the degree of caution that one should with medium-strength hands. He's also very friendly, doesn't get upset when he loses, doesn't gloat when he wins. It seems that he's one to whom the money really doesn't matter a lot--or perhaps he's deeply stuck between poker and the sports book (he was at the table before me, so I didn't know his history) and past the threshold of pain, beyond which further losses don't hurt much anymore. His stack had gone up and down some, but I had not seen him rebuy. I couldn't remember whether I had seen him put in any pre-flop 3-bets before. (My bad there.)

He had me covered by $50 or so, which meant that I felt I could justify set-mining in hope of a double-up. Still, $30 is a lot to pay to see a flop, when the great majority of the time I'll have to give it up thereafter. His most likely hands at this point were, obviously, any of the big pairs. A minority of players at this level will play medium pairs this way; they want to claim the pot now and not have to agonize about the inevitable overcards on the flop. Some--especially those who play more tournaments than cash games--will play A-K like this, even out of position. (I think that's a big mistake, but what do I know?)

I decided to call, but even as I did, I was wondering what sort of flop I'd like to see. I wanted a 3, of course, but what else? With any A, K, Q, or J I would have a serious worry about being trapped in a set-over-set scenario. Obviously, this can happen even after a single raise, but usually the reraise--especially from out of position--sufficiently narrows a player's range that high cards on the flop are scarier in terms of representing a big set. In other words, when I call one raise, I'm delighted to see something like A-K-3, because it is much more likely that the raiser made a big pair that he's happy with--or even two pair--than that he made a set. After a pre-flop reraise, though, I'm going to be much more leery that one of those big ones was his gin card.*

So there I was, $30 into the pot and unsure of what to do even if I were to see on the flop one of the two cards that I was praying for.

I did: Ah-3h-Jc. Good news and bad news: Loved my set, hated the fear that he had a bigger monster than mine, and I was about to get gobbled up, like T-Rex mangling the velociraptors at the end of "Jurassic Park."

He bet $60 and went back to watching the football game. Seemed pretty comfortable, but I couldn't claim to have any sort of solid feel for how strong he was. I thought about raising. A shove would be too much, but maybe a 2.5 or 3x raise. If he had, say, K-K or Q-Q, that might well end the matter. If he just called, though, I still have a dilemma: is he trapping me, or does he have A-K and I have prematurely put him on alert, thus limiting my potential win? And what if he were to come back over the top with an all-in? Could I really be sufficiently persuaded by that that I'm deep in doo-doo and must fold? My head was swimming.

I took the coward's way out and just called. I suppose I could claim that it was in the interest of pot control, but after I had embarked on the pre-flop call with the justification of stacking him, the idea of "pot control" seems pretty silly. I might also be tempted to claim that I was floating him, with the intention of seeing what he did on the turn before committing myself. There's something to that, but the real truth is that I was feeling just like the weak calling station I recently described this way:

[He]is caught between fear and hope. Fear makes him reject the raise, and hope makes him reject the fold. Calling is what's left.

I'm not proud of myself for being indecisive, but that's how it is sometimes (though hopefully not too often). I called.

The turn was the 6s. My opponent bet again, a $100 stack this time, with little hesitation and no evidence of fear in his face or hands. Was this justifiable confidence in the strength of his cards? Foolish overconfidence? Bluffing bravado? Complete nonchalance and detachment from the outcome? I couldn't tell.

Once again, without being able to provide you a satisfactory justification for why, I neither folded nor pulled the trigger on a shove; I called, leaving myself $202 behind and, to be honest, having no idea what I would do with any river card except for the case 3.

The river was the 2h. I was not very worried about him having been on a flush draw, nor about him having a straight with the extremely unlikely 4-5. The deuce, like the 6 before it, appeared to have basically changed nothing. I was still either way ahead or way behind, with no way to be sure.

My opponent thought a few seconds, then checked. How should I interpret this? Maybe he had missed the flop and turn with K-K or Q-Q and was now giving up, convinced that I had an ace. But conversely, it might just mean that he did, in fact, have a bigger set with A-A or J-J, and was worried that I had rivered him with a flush (or, less likely, a straight), in which case my goose was still cooked.

So, dear readers, here's your big moment of decision. I'll give you three options.

(A) Check behind, cross your fingers, and hope that you're good. (B) Make, say, a $100 bet, in the hope of folding to save yourself one stack if he check-raises all in. After all, if he has something like A-K, he might well call another $100, but be scared off by a shove. (C) Make the hero shove. He might call with A-K, thinking that you're representing the flush when you really have K-K or Q-Q. It's possible, though less likely, that he has A-J and won't be able to get away from top two pair. Heck, maybe he is disciplined enough, or sufficient afraid of the flush, that he'd even fold J-J or A-A.

Think about it. Use the comments to submit your decision, if you like. I'll wait 24 hours, then post what I did and what happened.


*I spent some time playing with Grange95 this weekend--about which I expect to write more soon--and we were talking about the phenomenon of getting the worst possible card, the one that cinches the hand for your opponent, but makes you love your second-best hand enough to lose everything on it. E.g., the card that makes your nut flush and his straight flush. I suggested that this be called the gin card--not for the usual reason you hear that term, but because it makes you turn to a bottle of gin for solace.

AVP tournament

I have mentioned here many times the web site http://www.allvegaspoker.com/, which is where the core of my readers first came from, as I got known a little bit there before I got brave and decided to start a site for my own writing here. They sponsor two or three live tournaments a year, and I make an effort to participate. The site is a valuable resource to me for news and infomation about the city's poker rooms, and I'm eager to keep up good relationships with its organizers and its members, even though my direct interaction with the site is limited to brief, occasional comments, as most of my poker-related thoughts go here instead.

Last night was one of the AVP events, a mixed-game tournament at the Mirage. We had Omaha/8, stud/8, razz, and 2-7 triple draw. This was a tweaked version of the game structure used in late March at Treasure Island. I made the final table in that tournament, and was one of six to cash. I'm proud to report that I basically repeated that feat, again making the final table and finishing in third place. But I got just a bit less than 2nd-place money, because the last three left agreed to an even chop of the money, following which deal I went out on the next hand. After tips and giving a bit to the bubble girl (the unfortunate but lovely and charming Mrs. Lederer), I pocketed $290 in prize money on a $70 buy-in for a little under six hours of play, plus an extra $50 for knocking out one of the two bounty players ("Other Dave").

It was an up-and-down ride. I started off very well, getting an early lead and maintaining a big stack for a long time. But then I had a downfall, ended up terribly short. I finally got all in against Mrs. L., and got quartered in Omaha, so was down to a quarter of a short stack! But I survived a series of all-ins, gaining strength. The real turning point was a big pot in stud/8, in which I started with (2-4)-4, made trips on 4th street and a full house on fifth. (Yes, the Mighty Deuce-Four works in stud, too!) My opponent made two pair and so called me all the way down, but couldn't complete her low draw or boat up her pairs. That, plus a few more smaller pots in rapid succession thereafter, put me in the chip lead by the time we consolidated to the final table of eight (or perhaps approximately tied for it; there was a guy named Karl that had a very nearly equal stack).

Then I suffered another downfall, doubled up somebody in razz after heavy betting. I started with 2-3-4, added an A, then went Q-J-Q, and he beat me with a 10-low. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! From that point on, I was always one of the two or three shortest stacks, and had to carefully nurse it to the finish line. Fortunately I tripled up in a critical spot: I was under the gun with A-J-7-4 in the final minute of a level. If I folded this hand, the blinds would have gone up for the next hand when I was in the big blind, and I'd be pot-committed to a random hand. I thought what I was looking at was a better bet than the next random one, so I went with it. It held for a full triple, which bought me crucial chips and time to wait for high-percentage spots for my few remaining moves.

On one of the early rounds of 2-7, I was dealt a most remarkable hand: 7-7-7-7-8! I think I've only been dealt quads once before, and that was in a round of Omaha/8 in an online HORSE tournament. It's a pretty bad O8 hand, but a far worse 2-7 hand. I flashed it to Mrs. Lederer (seated to my right most of the night) before mucking, and she laughed out loud.

But of course I got a few good cards, too. In fact, I had been thinking earlier in the day about doing a post on the forms of poker in which I have and have not ever been dealt the best possible starting hand--a thought prompted by winning a big pot with A-A over Q-Q in a cash game at the Venetian before heading across the street to the Mirage. I have, of course, had A-A in hold'em, A-2-3 in razz, A-A-A in stud, and A-2-3 suited in stud/8. As I wrote about at the time, I was even fortunate enough to be dealt 2-3-4-5-7 in triple draw in the March AVP tournament. (In fact, somebody else at tonight's table told the story of how I messed up that hand and exposed my cards before the draws were done--not remembering that one of the people to whom he was relating the story was the one who had done it!) But I had never been given A-A-2-3 double-suited in Omaha/8. Until tonight, that is. I can now cross that one off of my bucket list, as I was delighted to look down and see Ah2hAd3d at one point. I raised pre-flop and bet the flop and took it down before showing off my enviable assortment of cards.

I also saw a situation that I don't think I've noticed before. In a stud/8 hand, four players were still in on fourth street. The up cards of two of them were unpaired, but the other two were each showing paired fours. One had the reds, the other the blacks. What is the rule on who acts first in that situation? Is the person with the spade declared high and first to act? Does it revert to who was low on third street? (That wouldn't make much sense as a rule, because it might have been neither of them--and then what?)

I had a great time playing. It was genuinely a lot of fun. Even though my favorite tablemate Cardgrrl couldn't be there this time, I enjoyed it more than the one in the spring for a few reasons. First, they had the kinks worked out of the structure better. Second, I wasn't nauseous and cranky through the whole thing as I was then. Third, my starting table was just a fine group of people, all having fun. Fourth, I got to sit next to and chat with Mrs. Lederer for most of the night and my friend NerveEnding at the final table. Fifth, I was the undeserving beneficiary of some generosity on the part of the final two left, who offered an even money chop even though I had fewer than half of the chips they were sitting on at the time. Sixth, I could use Twitter to keep up on the goings-on at the Rio. (For some unfathomable reason, most of the poker media was watching some little-bitty tournament over there instead of ours. Go figure.) Seventh, I had enough presence of mind, plus enough additional experience in the games, that I made far fewer rookie errors this time around. I only once thought the game was different than what it was (we had moved from razz to stud/8, and I had missed that announcement). Luckily, I realized the mistake before the betting round on fourth street, so the damage was minimal. Lastly, it didn't go until after 2 in the morning like the previous one did, which was just killer on the brain.

I attribute all the goodness of the event to the fact that I was wearing the wonderful and ultra-lucky Grumpy hoodie given to me last year by Cardgrrl. I couldn't lose!


The photo above is one I snapped on my cell phone as I walked through the domed garden on the way to the Mirage poker room. They had several floral arrangements set up along the walkway. These orchids had the most brilliant lavender color I've ever seen. The photos I took just can't reproduce the intensity of the hues. Simply gorgeous.


Addendum

Several photos of the event can be found here: http://twitpic.com/photos/Sauza262


More photos here: http://www.vegaspokernow.com/main/index.php?action=media;sa=album;in=18

Guess the casino, #684

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Answer: Santa Fe Station

Guess the casino, #683

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Answer: Trick question! It's not a casino at all. It's McCarran Airport! (But they do have slot machines.)

Guess the casino, #682

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Answer: Mandalay Bay

What's in a screen name? #16

Nice name, but definitely should have as an avatar a tamping iron. Or maybe a stick of dynamite.

(For those in need of a little remedial education on your history of neurology, see here.)

Guess the casino, #681

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Answer: South Point

Interesting hand discussion

http://wickedchopspoker.com/this-week-in-poker-with-alex-outhred-brian-rast-and-jason-calacanis/

Jump ahead to 53:25, watch through about the 1:07:00 mark. It's an interesting analysis of an extremely difficult spot that Jason Calacanis was put in during an episode of PokerStars "The Big Game." Brian Rast runs the numbers and concludes that Jason probably made the right decision mathematically, independent of the outcome (which would have been truly ugly).

The agony of defeat

If by some chance you don't know what hand these screen shots are from, see Shamus's excellent write-up from this morning.

I'll tell ya, even knowing in advance exactly what would be coming, and exactly when it would be coming, it was still the single most painful moment I've ever seen in televised poker.

Guess the casino, #680

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Answer: Planet Hollywood

Seriously?

So I'm reading the November 8 issue of Poker Player newspaper, and come to a column by somebody called John "The Scientist" Hayes. This is part 6 of a series documenting his "$500 poker challenge." I have just skimmed through others, so I have only a dim idea of what he is setting out to accomplish. But for some reason I read this installment in its entirety.

It left me shaking my head, wondering if this is serious.

The guy comes to Vegas with a $500 bankroll. His first night, he plays $4-8 limit at Boulder Station, makes $180. The second night he goes to Golden Nugget, has two double martinis, and loses all his money, except for $60, playing $2-$4 limit. He loses the last $60 the next morning, though he doesn't say exactly how.

The penultimate paragraph, though, is the kicker: "To make a long story short, after three weeks in a homeless shelter, I finally get the wherewithal to return to Los Angeles. Obviously, I am back to square one, raising a new $500 bankroll to continue the Poker Challenge."

Does Poker Player newspaper seriously employ as a columnist somebody who didn't just take $500 from his discretionary income to see what he could make of it at poker (kind of a low-rent, live version of Chris Ferguson's famous online bankroll-building experiment), but who took the last $500 to his name for that purpose--and then blew it all in one shot playing while playing drunk at the lowest-stakes game Vegas has to offer, and had to go live in a homeless shelter?

Or is this some sort of gag, with me being the only one too dense to see where the joke is?

I think of the talented, experienced poker writers I know who have lost their jobs in the industry, and this is who PPN has putting together columns for them?

Seriously?


Addendum

Here's a link to the first five parts of his series: http://pokerplayernewspaper.com/category/authors/john-hayes

I'm rereading them now to get some perspective. Get this: At the end of each of the first five parts, the blurb about him says, "hosts Ask the Scientist, a live call-in poker instruction show on http://www.hpstv.tv/ at the Hollywood Poker School in Hollywood Park Casino." That just raises the WTF quotient another level: A guy who is so stupid and talentless that he will lose his entire bankroll playing $2-4 limit while drunk is holding himself out as a poker instructor? The mind reels. What a surprise--that bit of information has been excised from part 6 of his series.

The back story also gets simultaneously funnier and sadder. The series of columns was supposed to last for a year and a half. He managed to churn out the first five columns without playing a single hand of poker, just jawing about the parameters, what books and consultants he would use, and scouting out locations. Then he blows the whole thing in one night. It's going to be mighty hard to put out another year's worth of columns now.

The challenge is over. He says that he is going to "continue" it, but that's a lie. It's done. In his own words, the terms of the challenge were: "Start with $500 and build a poker bankroll over a period of one year into a substantial bankroll." It doesn't say, "Start with $500 as many times as necessary."

On those days when I fall into a funk and hear that ugly voice in my head accusatorily saying "loser," I'm going to think of this guy and cheer up.

Or, again, perhaps the whole thing is one big joke and I'm missing it. I kind of hope so, because I'd really rather learn that I had been leveled than that this is what passes for poker journalism.

What's in a screen name? #15

Candid self-assessment, or sly "That's what I want you to think" labeling?

What does a brain look like when bluffing?

Science now has the answer!

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/11/01/the-signature-of-the-bluffing-brain/

(Hat tip: Cardgrrl.)

Guess the casino, #679

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Answer: MGM Grand

Immigration

If you don't think the United States has insane policies, practices, and procedures related to immigration, go read Terrence "Not Johnny" Chan's blog post from earlier today, describing how he is not being allowed to visit here from his home in Canada:

http://terrencechan.livejournal.com/354717.html

Guess the casino, #678

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Answer: Hard Rock

Just for funz

I've liked Wil Wheaton for a long time. I was one of the few who actually liked Wesley Crusher early on in ST:TNG (even though he had a lot of dopey lines--"We're from Starfleet! We don't lie!"), largely because Wheaton played him with such a constant sense of wonder and excitement. But he also had some genuinely great scenes, such as the dramatic confrontation with Captain Picard in "The First Duty," where he takes a serious verbal drubbing from the captain in the process of realizing that he has been loyal to the wrong ideal, and has to endure the pain of admitting he screwed up. Jumping ahead to more recent stuff, his writing is funny and insightful, and his appearances on shows such as "The Big Bang Theory" and "Eureka" are enjoyable without fail.

Wheaton and I have several friends in common, and played poker at adjacent tables once, but I've still never actually met him. Wil is also worth knowing about if you do crossword puzzles, because puzzle makers apparently find the unusual spelling of his name very useful, and it shows up a lot.

I read his blog and tweets. Recently he and his wife watched on TV a movie that he was in: "Toy Soldiers," released in 1991, when Wheaton was 19. He sent a few Twitter messages about it, including a photo of him pointing in shame to the dumb-looking earring he wore. He later wrote a blog post about the experience, and said that he still liked the movie in spite of some of its silliness.

I had either never heard of this movie or had forgotten about it. I thought it would be fun to watch, so bumped it up to the top of my Netflix queue, and watched it today. I recognized from his post the scene in which Wil gets shot (kid can handle a phaser, but not a 9mm submachine gun!), and managed to pause the DVD on the same frame that he had used in the picture, and took a screen shot of the one superimposed on the other.

Which was way more fun than is strictly reasonable.

The Cube

I saw an ad for this intriguing device in Poker Player newspaper. You can visit the manufacturer's web site here: http://pokerhpc.com/index.php

The idea is that you keep this on the table and slide your hole cards into it from the back. It projects an image of the cards' corner markings onto a little screen, the angle of which you can adjust. They claim that the viewing angle is narrow enough that adjacent players will not be able to peek.

It's an interesting concept, but I'm a skeptic at heart, and I immediate latch on to what I see as the potential problems:

First, it's not a convenient size or shape to be casually carrying around, even though it is sold with a little tote bag.

Second, to replace the battery you have to remove a screw--a process apparently tricky enough that the web site recommends that you send it back to the company for this service. That's terribly inconvenient, especially in the middle of a tournament.

Third, surely one of the target markets for the device would be those with limited manual dexterity, such as the man I played with recently at the Stratosphere, with his wooden ramp. But it appears to me that the dexterity it would require to maneuver the cards into the opening in the back of the Cube is not much less than it would take to lift them off the table. (And will such users be able to change the battery themselves?)

Fourth, although the pictures show two hole cards being viewed at once, the thing looks just barely big enough to see one at a time. I'm not sure how well it would work for looking at two simultaneously. And if you're playing Omaha, I suspect it's a lost cause.

Fifth, if you can't demonstate a bonafide physical handicap, poker rooms may well forbid the use of the gadget. I don't know for sure that they would, but in my experience some places are very wary of foreign objects on the table, not knowing what shenanigans they may be used for. At the very least, they may worry that a card or two could be hidden underneath it and saved for when it is needed.

So while I find the idea interesting and clever, my first reaction is that the problems may outweigh any benefit conferred. I think I'd have to see it in action and play with it a bit before coming to any firm conclusions.

Karma, or lack thereof

Last night I was playing at Planet Hollywood. Or, to judge by the Halloween costumes that kept going by, Planet Ho.

I was in seat 1. The wife of the guy in seat 2 came up to see him. They chatted a bit. He coaxed her to join the game, as seat 9 (of 9) was open. She agreed, and was preparing to sit down. I really have no preference between these two positions, so I asked her if she would prefer changing with me so that she could sit next to her husband. She was eager to do so, but asked, "Are you sure?" I told her it was fine. She said, "So you're not superstitious?" Me: "Not even a little bit."

I got my stuff moved over, and was prepared for the universe to reward me for going out of my way to be nice to a stranger. I looked down at my first hand and saw the two red jacks. Ah! That's good! The player to my right open-shoved for his last $20. I called. The woman to whom I had given up my seat instantly moved in her entire buy-in of $100.

It folded back around to me. I thought for a while. The obvious conclusion is that she has aces or kings. I had zero read on her level of skill or experience, obviously, so I had to wonder whether she would do this with A-K. If we expand her range from just A-A and K-K to include A-K, then my equity jumps from 19% to 40%, which at least approaches being a good call, with what is already in the pot. But after pondering it for a minute, I decided that at a minimum she would have taken a while to think about whether to shove or just call if she had A-K. So I reluctantly folded.

Sure enough, she had A-A, which had the A-8 of the short stack in horrible shape.

The flop came jack-high. The aces held two ways, but I would have stacked them both if I had stayed in.

In poker, no good deed goes unpunished.


Oh--the picture? That's a Fisker Karma. See other photos of this gorgeous machine here. And no, I don't have that kind of Karma either.

Freerolls

I just got knocked out of a special blogger freeroll held by PokerStars. I had been running in the top 10% until this happened:



I was out two hands later. Boo hoo.

But the game got me to thinking again about how people play freeroll tournaments. Anybody who has played an online freeroll will have noticed that some meaningful percentage of participants play as if the results don't matter. They open-shove starting with the first hand, any two cards.

As with so many things in poker--and in life generally, for that matter--I just don't understand people. This makes no sense at all.

Surely what they must be thinking is along these lines: "I have nothing invested in this tournament, so I have nothing to lose by going out early." But that's just plain wrong. They do have something to lose. By playing stupidly, they lose their chance at whatever the first-place prize money is. (In this case, PokerStars put up $5000, though I don't check to see how it was to be distributed.) If the amount you might win isn't worth your time and energy, fine, don't bother signing up. But once you've made the determination that your equity in the prize pool merits the investment of however many hours you estimate it will take to play to the end, it's completely irrational to play a suboptimal game. The fact that you had to pay nothing to register is an utterly irrelevant fact, but these crazy players seem to view it as not only relevant, but as the determining factor in how they approach the tournament.

Interestingly, I have not noticed the same phenomenon when playing live freerolls, or at least not to the same degree. I used to do a freeroll every month at the Hilton, and there were very few players who were willing to be more reckless than I think they would have been if they paid to play. Perhaps the difference is because they feel invested in the tournament seat through the many hours they spent qualifying for it (and, for many, the cash they lost in the process)--as opposed to an online freeroll, which is most often given without having had to invest anything at all.

Today I lost my chance at whatever percentage of the $5000 was set aside for first place, but I'm not embarrassed about how it happened. I played my best, got my money in good, got unlucky in a crucial spot, and won nothing--which, in the nature of tournament play, is always the most likely outcome, even for the best players (a group in which I do not include myself). Had I shoved in the first orbit for 75 big blinds with J-6 offsuit and been busted by Q-Q, I wouldn't just tell myself, "Oh well, it was a freeroll anyway." I'd look myself in the mirror and ask, "What the hell were you thinking, you moron?"

Guess the casino, #677

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Answer: El Cortez

Guess the casino, #676

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Answer: Texas Station

Guess the casino, #675

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Answer: Paris

Guess the casino, #674

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Answer: Mandalay Bay

Inconsistency

You may remember this little controversy from the 2008 World Series of Poker. Nikolay Losev moves forward an entire stack of chips as if to bet. But before releasing them, he apparently has a change of heart. He pulls them back, then instead puts out a smaller amount. Brandon Cantu--along with other experienced players at the table--basically says WTF, man? He can't do that! Floor is called, says it's fine because he didn't release the chips. Tournament director Jack Effel is called over, gets what appears to me to be a clear description of what happened, and then confirms that that's the rule: as long as the chips weren't released, it's not a binding bet. (When Michael Carroll acts out for him a hypothetical of moving his stacks forward, pulling them back, then betting a single chip, Effel says that that would not be allowed. But he never explains how Carroll's hypothetical is any different from Losev's actual action.)

See for yourself:




Now we fast forward to the 2010 WSOP, with the installment broadcast this week. Filippo Candio moves forward a bunch of chips as if to bet, but at the last second has a change of heart. Instead of releasing them, he pulls them back to his stack and checks. Dealer calls floor. Floor says forward motion is binding, the chips must stay in. Once again, see for yourself:




As far as I can tell, there are only three differences between the situations. (1) Chips being slid forward versus moved forward in the player's hand, off of the table. (2) Retracted movement being followed by a smaller bet versus being followed by a fold. (3) The betting action in question being a bet versus a call. None of these seems to me to have any bearing on how the decision should be made. That is, I can't imagine any rational set of rules that would make any of these factors the determining criterion in whether the action/retraction should be allowed.

Has there been an intervening rule change? Not that I can make out. I scanned through the WSOP rules for 2008 and for 2010, and noticed nothing in either one that talks about forward motion constituting a bet, with or without release of the chips.

How does a move that is perfectly legal in 2008--with the explicit endorsement of the tournament director--become illegal in 2010, when there has been no change in the published rules? Why didn't the WSOP adopt an explicit rule to govern this situation in either 2009 or 2010, after having received tons of criticism in the online forums for the 2008 ruling? Has Effel or anybody else ever publicly acknowledged that the 2008 ruling was in error and should not be taken as reflecting the WSOP rules and practices?

More generally, as I have asked many times before, why is the officiating at what claims to be the premier event in poker so bad? And why doesn't Harrah's do anything to improve it? The answer to those, I expect is actually pretty straightforward: Because Harrah's wouldn't make any more money by bothering with such apparently unimportant things.

What's in a screen name? #14

I think what I like most about this one is the subtlety.

Guess the casino, #673

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Answer: Green Valley Ranch

What's in a screen name? #13

Cinderella story. Outta nowhere.

In the immortal words of Jean Paul Sartre, "Au revoir, donkey."

License to kill donkeys by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill donkeys at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit - ever. They're like the Viet Cong - Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that's all she wrote.

Maybe the best part of having this avatar would be that even if you don't win money, you would receive total consciousness. Which is nice.

Leave the button alone

There are some posts that I think about writing, oh, 16,000,000 times or so before I actually get around to it. This is one of them. Nothing in particular prompted the timing, except that I'm sitting at home in front of the computer and it occurred to me. My basic message is in the title of the post: Leave the dealer button alone.

The first and most obvious annoyance that results from not abiding by this sage advice is that sometimes a player who is not in the hand gets bored and decides that the button is his personal plaything. He twirls it around, shuffles it from one hand to the other, or whatever. The result is that when others glance around to see where the button is, in order to figure out where action is starting and ending, they can't find it. The button does not become your toy simply because it happens to be sitting in front of you. Leave the damn thing alone.

But now for a subtler problem. Many, many players think they are being helpful by moving the button for the dealer at the end of a hand. I contend that they are mostly wrong. Here's why.

Naturally, the most common thing is that the button moves one seat clockwise when a hand concludes. But once in a while something different needs to happen--it needs to move two spots (e.g., to skip a player who just sat down), or none (e.g., if somebody is buying the button after missing a big blind). Most players who think they are being helpful don't anticipate these exceptions and mess it up.

However, even when things are normal, it's easy to create a problem moving the button. The most common way this happens is that a player moves it without saying anything, when the dealer isn't watching. Then the player who moved it gets distracted by something else (sports on TV, cocktail waitress arriving, or whatever), so the dealer--or sometimes a second player--moves it again, and PRESTO, we have a problem.

On average, it must take a dealer two seconds or less to move the button. So that's the maximum time you're saving the game if you do everything right. (It's probably a bit less, because there's a little time for the dealer to recognize that you have moved the button and process that he or she can skip that step. But let's ignore that factor for now.) If, though, you cause a problem, it's likely to take 30 seconds or so to straighten it out. "I thought he was the button." "No, I was just the small blind." "No you weren't, I was the small blind that hand." "You couldn't have been the big blind, because I put in a straddle." Etc. It's tedious, annoying, and so completely unnecessary, had the meddlers not created the problem to begin with.

In my experience, these situations--either the exceptional case where the button should be moved or not moved differently than usual, or the common case where it gets moved twice accidentally, or at least it is initially unclear whether it got moved twice--happen sufficiently often that the time wasted in solving the resulting messes outweighs the total of the time saved in two-second increments by players "helpfully" moving the button. I submit that the poker world would be better off if no players ever touched the button than we are with the current situation in which so many players think they know how to do it right, but actually don't.

The one obvious exception I would make to the above observation is the situation in which the dealer has difficult reaching the button, usually at the end seats, because the tables are too large, or the dealers are too small (or, sometimes, too fat). In such cases, there should be no problem if a player, seeing the dealer starting to reach for the button, takes the initiative and moves it. (Sometimes a dealer will verbally ask for such help, too.) That way it is done at the right time and with the dealer's knowledge.

If you insist on taking the initiative in situations other than that, here's what I think you should know about the seemingly simple process of pushing the button forward one seat: It is supposed to come at a specific point in the process of concluding a hand. If dealers are following the standard training, the sequence of events is (1) kill the losing hands, (2) push the pot to the winner, (3) move the button, (4) drop the rake, (5) muck the winning hand and begin the scramble/shuffle for the next hand.

So if you're going to move the button, you should anticipate that the dealer will be looking to do so himself or herself immediately after the pot has been pushed. Pushing the pot usually requires the dealer to have his or her eyes on it, and he or she will not be attending to what is happening to the button until that task is completed. If you move it while the pot is being pushed (the most common problem-creating scenario) and do nothing else, the dealer will often miss that fact.

You need to either be ready to move it right at the moment that the dealer's attention is coming to that task, or be ready right then to indicate that you have already moved it. If I'm doing it, I either make sure the dealer sees me do it, or, if he or she isn't watching at the expected moment (some dealers do tasks out of the standard order), I tap the button deliberately when the dealer's attention is finally my way, or announce out loud that I have moved it.

But the point is this: If you take on the responsibility of moving the button, you also thereby accept a sacred duty to (1) not screw it up (e.g., moving it when it shouldn't be moved, etc.), and (2) make absolutely sure that the dealer knows that it's done. If you fail in either of these respects, then you have cost everybody at the table time, rather than having saved time, as you like to flatter yourself that you are doing.

That, of course, is an unforgivable sin.

Guess the casino, #672

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Answer: Bellagio

Guess the casino, #671

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.




Answer: Aria

Um, not quite right

There seems to be a slight problem with the graphics at this stage of the hand. Everybody see what it is?

P.S. This is the first post from my new computer.

Guess the casino, #670

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Answer: Sam's Town

Poker gems, #394

Joe Stapleton, on the PokerStars Big Game, on Daniel Negreanu's lack of aggression:


Daniel's been calling more than a clingy girlfriend.