An unsolicited advertisement (no poker content)

About ten years ago, while I was still living in Minnesota, there came a time when I needed to hook both a Mac and a PC to my home cable internet connection. I needed a router. I kind of randomly chose one made by Belkin. I was having a devil of a time getting everything to work together correctly. (There are, by actual count, 14 billion menus and submenus in the Windows operating system just for connectivity.) Putting my male ego aside, I finally called Belkin's customer service line for assistance. The guy on the other end was wonderful. Of course he had a prepared algorithm he was working from, but it was also clear that he understood what each step did, and could improvise as needed. He was smart, friendly, and infinitely patient. It took nearly an hour on the phone to diagnose and fix the problems, but then it was done, and the router never gave a speck of trouble thereafter.

That experience was so good that I made this one of my life's pre-made decisions: If something I need is made by both Belkin and other companies, I'll buy the Belkin.* I now have half a dozen Belkin doodads, and they have all performed flawlessly. None of them has died yet, despite years of constant use.

(Let us pause to reflect on the awesome power of one experience with a company's customer service department. If good, it can win brand loyalty for life, as Belkin did with me. If negative, it can engender a foul, "never again" blood oath, the bitterness of which lingers even beyond the grave. Either way, the experience gets shared with countless friends and/or blog readers. Yet many companies seem to try to keep customer service cheap by making it so intolerably unusable that nobody really bothers with it. Penny wise, pound foolish.)

My new computer is great, but it presented me with a niggling little problem: The USB ports are near the back, instead of near the front, as on my old computer. As you can see below, this means that I couldn't push it all the way back to the wall, because the USB cable ran into the speaker. (This photo makes it look like I could just use one of the other USB ports, but the depth is such that they all cause the same problem.)

I thought, "I wish somebody made a right-angle USB connector." Which was immediately followed by, "Hey, maybe somebody does." Google quickly told me that not only do such things exist, but that one of them is made by Belkin!

Amazon.com to the rescue, and yesterday the clever little gizmo showed up in my mailbox:

It has two separate axes of rotation, so you can make it fit just about anywhere. It feels amazingly sturdy for something so flexible.

And for about $8, the problem is solved:

(OK, to be honest, the problem is not quite solved. This Dell has its power cord sticking straight out the back, which limits how close to the wall I can get it. But I found another company that makes a right-angle adapter for that issue, and I expect it to arrive tomorrow. Then life will be perfect again.)

* I have one exception: I had my Adesso keyboard before the Belkin experience, and I love it so much, and so fear that they won't have the same model still available when this ten-year-old one finally dies, that five years ago I bought a replacement, and have it stashed in the closet for when that sad day comes. Belkin makes fine keyboards, I'm sure, but they can take my Adesso when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Steve Zolotow is a fool!

Steve Zolotow's column in the May 30 issue of Card Player magazine is about becoming a tricky player, one who is difficult to read. His point is that you have to play different starting hands the same way as each other, and also play the same starting hand different ways at different times.

For his first example, he takes A-A and discusses the default play (reraise) plus some alternatives. He then does the same for suited K-J, medium suited connectors, and a small pair--in each case mentioning the default play plus how they should sometimes be played as if the cards are something else, like A-A.

Fine so far.

But then he screws up. For his last example, he uses 4s-2h. Yes, the Mighty Deuce-Four. Of this he says, "With 4-2 offsuit, your default play is to fold. But occasionally you can raise as a pure squeeze play, hoping everyone folds. If you get re-raised, it is an easy fold."

The man does not know whereof he speaks. He is clearly unqualified to be writing a poker column. I demand that he be fired at once!

However, he does mention something I had not heard before, which he says is "an old pun": When one wins with the 4-2, one can say, "It was a fortuitous hand."

Get it?

Four-two-itous.

That's one way to play it

Here's a strange hand from the Merge Network daily HORSE tournament that I just played. This is 7-card stud. Imagine the lower window directly to the right of the upper one, to read the hand history:

On 3rd street, my opponent calls the 15 bring-in, then calls my completion to 60. He's in for 65 (including his ante), and the pot is 170. On 4th street I pair my queen, so I make the optional double bet of 120. He calls. He's in for 185, and the pot is 410. 5th street looks safe, so I bet again, he calls again. He's in for 305, and the pot is 650. I don't like him pairing on 6th street, because he may well now have two pair, but in for a penny, etc. I bet again, he calls again. He is now in for 425, and the pot is 890. On 7th street, I bet once more, and he folds.

Now, this might not seem too unremarkable, except for one crucial fact that the hand history does not contain: He started this hand with 440 chips. He spent 425 of them--97% of his stack--then folded, getting a rather incredible 60:1 pot odds for calling with his last 15 chips on 7th street.

Of course, one of the good things about 7-card stud is that in some instances you can be absolutely certain that such a fold is correct, because if you can't even beat what your opponent has showing, it's impossible to win the hand, and it doesn't matter what his three down cards are. But if that's the situation you're going to be faced with, it's far, far better to put in your last chips on 5th or 6th street when you still have a shot at winning than it is to leave yourself with one quarter of one small bet when you know you've lost. He should have either folded earlier, or tried to put all his chips in earlier.

Last year I wrote about seeing a guy fold the river when getting 20:1 on a call. But I'm not sure I've ever seen a 60:1 fold before.

Solution to the Merge hand-history problem

Today I hit upon what perhaps should have been an obvious solution to the problem of Merge Network software update making it harder to get to the hand histories: You can just open the history window after the first hand, then click "next" to move forward in time. You could do that after each hand, or just when you're interested in what happened on the previous hand. I forward it up to the last hand when I'm not doing anything else and happen to think about it so there's less clicking to do when the time comes that I want to check the previous hand.

I suppose that overall it might make for more clicks, but they're all in the same spot, and not in a window that pops up behind the game window, as happens when you click on the hand number on the active table.

That's the hand-history window peeking out from behind the game table on the lower right:

Bovada sucks

I just tried using Bovada (aka Bodog) for the first time since the name change. They had given me a free ticket to a $75 WSOP Main Event satellite (actually a satellite to a satellite, but whatever). OK, it wasn't just a name change; Bodog per se still exists, but no longer operates in the U.S., instead leasing its software to another company that offers games here. The software underwent a major overhaul at about the same time as the market/company change.

How do I hate it? Let me count the ways.

First, I tried changing the background color to red, then to green. It wouldn't do it. Those options were clearly shown, and I clicked on them, but the background stubbornly stayed blue. If you can't actually change it, why do they show it as an option that you can?

Second, at seemingly random intervals, the software would not obey my pre-selected action. Below, for example, you can see that I have elected to fold my 7-2 while the action is still three players to my right.

But when it's actually my turn, the software acts as if I had not made any selection, and waits for me to tell it what to do:

Mind you, this doesn't happen every time--just once in a while, for no obvious reason. After I recognized it as happening enough not to be just a one-time fluke, I started doing a screen capture every hand just to catch it with these before-and-after shots, and it behaved correctly four times before giving me the opportunity you see above. Why? I have no idea.

Third, the anonymity is terribly annoying--much harder to keep track of players mentally as they move in and out of the table.

Fourth, you are no longer given the option of a preferred position at the table. (For those of you who don't play online, this doesn't mean that you can actually choose which opponents are on your right or left; it's just a virtual rotation of the table so that you see yourself in the same screen location every game.) I like being at the bottom of the screen, and it won't let me choose that, at least not with anything I could find.

Fifth, you can't selectively turn the sounds on or off--you either get all of them or none of them. If you want a little "ping" when it's your turn and a more insistent warning when you're running out of time, fine, you can have them--but you also have to accept the cacophony of other sounds: cards being dealt, chips sliding across the table, etc.

Sixth, when it was my turn, the amount of the current bet was highlighted, as you can see toward the bottom right of the second screen capture above. I should be able to either just type a different amount to bet/raise, or first erase the amount shown with the backspace key, then type in an amount. Sometimes I could do this, sometimes not. On the "not" occasions, it just ignored my keystrokes--and that was the same whether I was using the laptop's built-in keyboard or the full-sized external keyboard (connected via USB) that I use when I have serious typing to do. As with ignoring pre-selected actions, this appeared to be completely random.

On those occasions when I couldn't use the numeric keyboard to enter a bet amount, I had to use the slider. I HATE using bet sliders generally, and this particular one is especially awful. It's way too sensitive (i.e., small movements change the bet by a large amount), and it doesn't stop at pre-specified intervals. If I wanted to raise to, say, 100, I'd have to settle for 108 or 93 or whatever other odd amount in that general vicinity the slider offered me. Trying to nudge it just a wee bit more one direction or the other would result in it being much higher or lower than I wanted, or my turn timing out. The only fixed options available with dedicated buttons are 1/2 pot and pot. I most commonly want to bet somewhere between those two choices, something like 2/3 to 3/4 pot. Good luck with that on this platform.

Seventh, the "spotlight" feature is not nearly as prominent as it used to be. This had previously been one of Bodog's better touches: The player with current action had a virtual spotlight shone on him to indicate whose turn it was. Of all of the online poker platforms I have used, I found this one by far the easiest to follow, in terms of being able to tell at a glance where the action was. Now that light has been turned down so much that you have to go searching for it. You can see what I mean in the second photo above. You just see sort of a half-assed half-circle of slightly lighter blue below my spot. (By the way, I'm player #1 solely by virtue of having been the first to register for this event.)

Those of us who have been using computers for a couple of decades know that there is a long history of software companies rolling out a grand "upgrade," only to be met with howls of protest from users about how they screwed up everything that had been good about it. Twitter recently did that with TweetDeck when they bought it and issued a new version. (I found a way to install the last good version--v0.38.2--with all of the flexibility it had due to using Adobe AIR, on my new computer, and have embedded deeply in my brain a stern reminder to always decline offers to install any newer version, at least until I'm sure they have restored all of the options they killed off in the "improvement.") Bit.ly seems to be the latest victim of this. I used to use it as my URL-shortening utility, but it no longer works as easily as it did before, instead requiring me to make a bunch of choices I'm not interested it. As a result, it is now dead to me; I removed it from my old computer the day they screwed it up, and I'm certainly not adding it to the new machine. From what I've read of Windows 8, Microsoft may be on the verge of surpassing all of these, and making the most monumental "New Coke" blunder in the history of software.

To this list must surely be added the "new and improved" Bodog/Bovada. You can read the press release, bubbling over with giddy anticipation, here. A "huge leap forward" they said. Yeah, sure it was--a leap right off of a cliff, if you ask me.

After we lost PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, Bodog was far and away my favorite of the platforms that remained usable in the states, both in terms of ease of making money and in terms of how the software functioned (with the exception of hand histories). But the "upgrade"? It's hard to be more succinct, accurate, or forceful than I was in my title above: Bovada sucks.

Ask and ye shall receive

Two readers kindly offered to send me the non-US PokerStars setup file. I just received and ran it, worked like a charm. I jumped into a play-money SNG, and it had my avatar loaded up, remembered my seating preference, and allowed me to run the animated hand history viewer, just like old times. The main lobby even shows me the real-money games, though obviously I have no money on account, and can't load any, so it's like showing a chocolate layer cake to a starving man.

So that's the solution--get a foreign friend to share the setup file with you. It won't get you back into the real games, but at least it restores full functionality to the software for your free games.

Maybe too many people know about the Deuce-Four

I'm supposed to win hands like this, not chop the pot, dammit!

How can double deuce-four not be the winner?

See the story and photo from the Pokerati blog:

http://pokerati.com/2012/06/fouled-deck-in-pokerati-plo-game/

I have seen a fouled deck exactly one time, and it wasn't nearly that dramatic. I was playing a tournament at Caesars. They were using WSOP-backed cards. They alternated between two decks with the dealer changes. The decks' backs were identical except that one had a very thin black line around the border, the other an equally thin red line.

We had been playing for a couple of hours at the table when I noticed that my two down cards were one with a red border and one with a black border. I pointed it out to the dealer, who called the floor. It was a fouled deck. But nobody had taken any action, so it was trivially easy to fix. They took the decks away for inspection. I don't know what they found. Maybe there was an extra card. Maybe one card from each deck got into the other. But we had played with those cards for two hours or so without anybody noticing anything amiss.

Lesson: If you're going to have two decks in action at a table, they should be extremely easy to distinguish at a glance.

Workaround?

Of course U.S. residents have not been able to play real-money games on PokerStars since Black Friday. But those of us who had had Stars accounts could at least keep playing the free games with the full software, whereas if you download the client software from Pokerstars.net, you get a watered down version. The two features most sorely lacking are the ability to select your own seat and the ability to immediately check the previous hand history. There was some sort of grandfather provision, that if you had had a real-money account prior to Black Friday, you got software updates that prevented you from playing real-money games, but at least kept the full functionality intact.

I've moved everything to my new computer over the last eight days. But the Stars problem is still frustrating me. I have downloaded the .net app, and it recognizes me from my old Stars account, but I'd really rather keep using the .com (or .eu) version, as I had been able to do on the old computer.

I cleverly thought that I could move the setup (.exe) file from the old computer to the new via thumb drive, then run that on the new computer, and it would install the .com software, which would then automatically update next time I logged on. Nope. New computer wouldn't run the setup file--something about the certificate being out of date.

Tech-heads: Is there some way to get my new computer to be able to run the old software the same way that I could with the old computer?

Merge Network is having, um, issues

As I noted yesterday, Merge did a full revamp of their software Monday night. It took many more hours than they had promised, and even when they were up again, they immediately had problems. I, for one, couldn't display the main lobby correctly. My friend Stacey couldn't even log in.

This morning my buddy Shamus ran into problems using Hero Poker, one of the Merge skins. He tweeted:

Merge is so very screwed up right now. Here's how my SNG is going... we're in Level 6 http://t.co/H5jFvakg @heropoker @carbonpoker

The good news is after a half-hour I am leading the SNG currently, with none of us having played a hand. @heropoker @carbonpoker

Erm, I just went from 1st to last. Somebody is playing my stack. What applesauce. @heropoker @carbonpoker

SNG finally shut down... says $ refunded. All at cash tables complaining about various applesauce. Whatta mess. @heropoker @carbonpoker

In spite of that, Josie and I decided, perhaps foolishly, to try to play Merge's daily $11 HORSE tournament. She will be in town in a couple of weeks, and there will likely be some mixed-game shenanigans at some point, so she needs more practice with games other than hold'em.

My table was going fine, in technical terms. Josie's wasn't. It was slow as molasses, and it looked to be more of a software or server problem than anything that could be blamed on the players. E.g., hands would take forever to clear off the table after the pot was awarded.

She started out strong, while I started out with everything going wrong. So of course she offered a last-longer bet when she was already up 1875 to my 1341. I accepted it, because, apparently, I'm a sick, degenerate gambler.

Then she watched in horror as I mounted a comeback. I rivered a ace-high flush (crubs, obv) in a five-way pot in stud/8 when nobody had a low, and scooped a monster. This was followed immediately by making a wheel on 5th and scoring a double elimination super-scooper-dooper. Those two hands propelled me well above Josie's stack, and she was trembling in fear:

But then--disaster:

WTF?

A few minutes later, this email showed up in my inbox:

As Shamus says, applesauce.

We thought about trying another SNG, but while browsing for one, it looked like they were in the process of shutting everything down. There were very few games with "registering" status. My guess is that right about now they're offline completely, or about to be.

While I'm complaining about their software bugs, I might as well also complain about some features of the new redesign. They have a few nice improvements, such as a double slider for setting the upper and lower limits of buy-ins for tournaments that you're interested in playing. But they also made it harder to find some customization features. And what used to be a one-button click to see the previous hand is now completely hidden. Josie pointed it out to me. You click on the tournament number in the upper left-hand corner of the game--which is not marked in any way as having this function until you mouse over it--and it brings up a cascade of folders from your hard drive where the hand histories are stored:

(Note that they even got the date wrong. Josie checked, and hers correctly showed 6/6/12. No, there is nothing wrong with the date and time settings on my computer. No, I have no idea why it would be right for one player and wrong for another.)

If you click on any hand number, up pops that hand history, in the same format as they have always used. But it takes a lot more work, time, and thought to get at it than it used to. This is an improvement?

They really screwed the pooch on this software "upgrade."

Lock in the news

That thing I was saying yesterday about Lock Poker having a string of suspicious-looking conduct? Well, check out this story from today's poker news:

http://pokerfuse.com/news/law-and-regulation/reports-credit-card-fraud-linked-merge-gaming-accounts/

Be careful. It's a jungle out there.

Let them eat Cake

Last October I reviewed the status of the U.S.-facing online poker networks. Quite a bit has changed since then.

Bodog is now Bovada. I have installed the new software, and confirmed that they carried my balance over, but have not yet played there. I'm not thrilled about the anonymous table innovation. But I'm sure one of these days I'll see what it's like.

The Merge network is still going strong. After running through the initial $100 deposit I had made on the Black Chip Poker skin, I didn't do any more with it for a few months. Then Josie announced that she was going to restart her Very Josie poker series there (which didn't last long, because the site had stupid restrictions that severely cut into the fun factor), and Tony was frequently tweeting and blogging about winning money there. So I decided to give it another chance.

Unfortunately, I couldn't make a deposit. I tried all of my credit and debit cards (including a Visa gift card I purchased just for that purpose), and all were rejected, even though I had used one of them to make my first deposit without any problem. My guess is that this was a policy change with the credit card issuers, not with the site, because the site continues to list Visa cards as a method of deposit, even for U.S. players. But Tony's credit card still works to deposit there, and he was kind enough to let me give him cash to make a deposit and then transfer the credit to me, which worked just fine. I've been playing there more lately, and making a little profit at it. I started with $200, and I'm playing in sufficient small amounts that it would take a pretty severe downswing for me to need to deposit again.

The Everleaf network withdrew from the U.S. market in February this year. I still had about $79 sitting on the Luvin Poker site. They had given me fits trying to withdraw it, and I had basically given up, when that announcement came. They promised that deposited funds were safe, and they were going to get us our money back real soon. But it's been four months, and there has been no further word. I wrote to Luvin's customer support a few days ago, and got what basically amounts to a bedbug letter:

I see you have around 56 Euros on LP (they converted the US dollars). The money is still in your account and funds have not ben seized. ELG is working with the Maltese Gaming Commission trying to find a way to release funds. Due to the law in the US, every method they have inquired about has been shot down, including player to player transfer to our friends who can cash out. The Gaming authorities feel it would essentially be money laundering if we were to process these funds. We are even looking at hiring a mediator to retrieve funds. Again, this does you no good, but if you log into your account you will see funds there. They assure me monies are safe and I do believe that, but unfortunately no further news on how to retrieve them. Currently players who have bank accounts off shore are allowed to cash out and they are looking for alternatives. I am saving your Email, so I will be sure to update you if anything changes.

LP truly hopes to have a place in the future once legislation comes through. Although this does not solve the problem, please know our brand reputation is very important to me and if at all possible, those funds will be returned.

My sincere apologies.

As the saying goes, I'm not holding my breath.

The Yatahay network has some of my money, as mentioned in the October post, due to the skin called "America's Cardroom" taking over what had been the "Doyle's Room" accounts, when Doyle decided that he didn't want anything to do with online poker anymore. I played one $5 SNG the other day on my new computer just to make sure that the software was working, balance still there, etc. I don't know what, if anything, I'll do with the $200+ that I have sitting there.

The network, incidentally, has taken on a new name. It's now the "Winning Poker Network." Admittedly, "Yatahay" was a terrible name, but the new one is just as bad, although for different reasons.

Finally, there is the Cake network. Recently, Lock Poker, which was one of the biggest skins on the Merge network, left Merge and joined Cake. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that they took over Cake, and in the process have changed the name to the Revolution Gaming Network. (Read more about the whole deal here.)

I got a Cake account when it first came on the market, but I think I just played a few free games to test it out and never put any money there. Essentially all of my play on the Cake network was when Doyle's Room was one of their skins, before DR moved to Yatahay. (Yes, it's all very confusing--like a corporate soap opera.) I haven't wanted to do more with it because of recurring stories of what sound to me like shady goings-on at Lock, and persistent problems reported for U.S. players getting timely cashouts from Cake.

But yesterday my friend Stacey, who has been a much more serious online player than I, tweeted that she had played a few low-stakes tournaments on the new Lock site: "Verdict thus far: @lockpoker software is meh but players are terrible, decent schedule, a lot of it copies the Merge schedule so, not bad!" Then, a little later, "Ok the new @lockpoker is earning MAJOR points w/ me. Sent account verification docs to them less than 3 hrs ago. Already approved by support."

This made me think that maybe I should give the network another try. I knew I already had an account on the Cake skin (i.e., what had previously been the flagship skin), so rather than go through creating a new account with Lock, I just downloaded the new Cake software and reactivated that account. The cashier page said that they accepted Visa for deposits, and that debit cards tended to have better success rates than credit cards, so I used my U.S. Bank Visa check card, crossed my fingers, and *ding* about 60 seconds later I had $100 of credit on the site, with no fees deducted. So far so good.

I signed up for a $7 SNG just to try it out. Here's what it looks like:

It has annoying sound effects, but you can turn them off. They don't make it easy to find options and settings, but I eventually discovered how to shift the seats around to my preferred orientation, turn on the four-color deck feature, and other tweaks.

Good Lord, were these players ever terribad! In one fairly early hand, I had Q-3 offsuit in the small blind. Nobody raised, so I limped in with the rest. Flop was Q-4-3. I meant to lead out with a bet of about 3/4 of the pot, but accidentally clicked the wrong button and went all in. That shove was for about ten times the pot. Oops! Oh well, I thought--I'll pick up the limpers' chips and that will be the end of it. But no--I got a caller, "NanasVice," who had me covered. She had Q-J, for top pair with mediocre kicker, and I doubled up. I saw players with 7 BB stacks limp in, then fold to a raise. I saw one spew off a stack of 30 big blinds calling a flop shove in a limped pot with just a gutshot and backdoor flush draw. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

I was doing some other work while I played, so only giving it half attention, and still cruised into second place money.

And you'll be glad to know that the Mighty Deuce-Four works just as well on Cake as it does everywhere else:

I am still cautious and skeptical about the reliability of this new entity, as it combines a network chronically problematic in terms of cashing out (Cake) with a site that has a history of shady-looking conduct (Lock). So my tentative plan is to try to work this $100 up to $200, then cash out $100, and see how well they handle it, before I increase my level of comfort and confidence in them. But the softness of the games--assuming my one sample is representative--makes it hard to just turn my back on them completely.

Of course, we could at any time get a repeat of Black Friday, with assets frozen indefinitely across all of these sites. Or any of them could suddenly abscond with the players' funds, or declare bankruptcy, or whatever. Thanks to our endlessly effed-up laws and government in what used to be the "land of the free," this is all quasi-black-market stuff, with every site using unknown and probably legally dubious means of moving money between them and us. It's all still kind of a house of, um, cards.

But with increasing frequency lately there are evenings when I don't feel much like going out to casinos to play, and having online options is a nice alternative. I'd happily trade all four of the small, rickety choices I have now for one usable cash account at PokerStars, but the gummint says I can't have that, so I'll take what I can get.

Stay classy, PokerNews

James Guill, aka @compncards, posted a note on Twitter about an ad he saw on the PokerNews web site. Specifically, it's one for "Arrangement Finders":

If you click on that banner, this is what you see:

Nice job, PokerNews. Good to know that we can always count on you to represent the industry at its finest.

Worst bad-beat stories

My friend Memphis MOJO writes about having recently been told of one of those incredibly rare bad beats that was not just runner-runner, but "perfect-perfect"; i.e., the player behind on the flop had to catch two exact cards on the turn and river in order to win. Mojo ends his post asking whether there are worse bad-beat stories than that.

Well, it kind of depends on how you classify degrees of badness. But for my money, I would nominate two.

First is the one that I related having heard about here (under the second bold sub-heading). See also the comments for a bit of possible further confirmation that the story is a true one.

Second is a story told many times by T.J. Cloutier. The only place I've seen it in print is in a really interesting but relatively little-known book, The Best Hand I Ever Played: 52 Winning Poker Lessons from the World's Greatest Players, by Steve Rosenbloom, published in 2005. Here's the story, from page 30:

It was against Al Krux, a cash game at the Bicycle Club about ten years ago. No Limit Hold'em. He hadn't won a pot all day. He had, like, $445 left or something and he moved all in. The guy two to his left was getting a massage. He lifted his head up and looked at it and decided not to call and threw it away. The massage girl saw the hand too.

It got around to me on the button. I had two 10's and I said, hell, I'll call him because this is his last money and he might not have too much. So I call. Now, the dealer didn't see that I made the call and she dropped the deck on the muck. That means she had to reshuffle all the cards.

The flop came K-10-4. I had two 10's. I flopped three 10's. He had two kings, so he had flopped three kings. The fourth card was a 10, so I had four 10's and I beat him in this pot.

But that's not the kicker. The kicker is, you remember the guy who was looking at his hand and getting a massage? He had the other two 10's and had thrown them away. He told us he had thrown two 10's away, and the massage girl said, "This guy threw away two 10's." So that meant the dealer had to make a mistake and drop the deck and reshuffle those 10's back in for Al to lose this hand to me. It's the worst beat in the history of poker.

Needless to say, I never won another hand that night, but I beat him out of his last $445. Story of a lifetime.

This one isn't technically a bad beat, I suppose, because both hands had pretty good equity when all the chips went in pre-flop. But Daniel Negreanu after the flop calling for two running perfect cards to make a straight flush, and getting both of them, is pretty damn unbelievable. This was in the first year of the NBC Heads-Up Championship:

As for my personal experience, I think that this hand was, in mathematical terms, the worst beat I've ever taken. The worst I can remember ever inflicting on an opponent was this hand, in which I put all my chips in on the flop as a 62:1 underdog, and caught a miraculous runner-runner combination to win. Almost as bad was when I went runner-runner full house to beat two opponents, both of whom had flopped flushes.

I have hit a one-outer on the river exactly one time, and sort of expect that it will never happen again. See story here.

I have been on the bad side of quads over quads one time, as told here.

In one remarkable session at the Sahara I folded what would have been quads for one high-hand jackpot, and would have made a straight flush for a second jackpot if my opponent had not folded. See story here.

Those are the best I can come up with, Mojo. What do you think?

You can vote for me

Ante Up magazine has an online reader survey. One of the questions asks, "What is the best poker blog?" The options are Shane Schleger (Shaniac), Hard Boiled Poker, Full Contact Poker, Phil Galfond, and Poker Grump.

You can go here to start the survey. There are small prizes to be awarded to survey participants. The caveat is that you have to give them your email address in order to answer the questions, and I have no idea how much they'll pester you thereafter with annoying emails. Furthermore, there's nothing in it for me even if I should happen to get the most votes. All of which means that this is of virtually no importance to me, and you shouldn't feel any sense of duty or obligation to participate. Furthermore, if you do decide to participate, honesty requires me to point out that there's a strong argument to be made that Shamus deserves your vote more than I do.

But it's there if you feel like it. Do as seems best to you.

Table captain

In response to the video clip I posted earlier, Josie asked how I got Seat 1. I replied in the comments that we were allowed to pick non-randomly, so I just grabbed it. Long-time readers may know that it's my favorite, for a whole bunch of reasons.

I was about to add in the comments that I took it so that I would automatically be Table Captain. But then I realized that that's more of a private joke than something readers would recognize. I think it's time to change that.

First, you must, must read the following blog post, which is one of my favorite poker stories ever, only in part because it's written by my dear friend Poker Lawyer. The story involves her October weekend in Vegas. I saw her quite a bit that weekend, but I was not present when this story occurred, and didn't know about it until she told it on her blog:

http://pokerlawyer.blogspot.com/2011/10/table-captain.html

When I read this account, I said this on Twitter:

@PokerLawyer DAYUM! Now I learn that I completely missed the best moment of the whole weekend!

@PokerLawyer You shoulda told him that Seat 1 is always table captain, and anybody who knew anything about poker would know that.

So that's where the Seat One = Table Captain idea came from: Poker Lawyer was in Seat One and declared herself to be Table Captain. Anyway, it has become something of a running joke since then. But I think it deserves to be better known, and even put into the poker rulebooks.

Seat One is the table captain. Period. That's all there is to it.

Playing on TV--well, sort of (followup)

Final Table Experience has now posted a short promotional YouTube video based in part on the game we shot the other day. Don't blink or you'll miss my appearance, including the inglorious bust-out hand.

Playing on TV--well, sort of

My old computer has been driving me crazy with random crashes and shutdowns. The final straw for it was when one of its fans gave out and it started overheating, on top of its other problems. I decided it was time for a new one, which arrived yesterday. So last night and this afternoon were spent just getting everything set up the way I like it, cleaning out the bloatware, transferring files, downloading programs, etc.

That's what I was doing when a Tweet popped up from Bill Biddulph. You may know him from his long association with the Wednesday Afternoon Poker Discussion Group. He is now involved with a new poker enterprise, "The Final Table Experience." I had not heard of this company before, but apparently it's brand new, so I'm not too far behind the times.

Here's their deal: You and eight or nine of your friends can each pony up $249 (at least I think that's the price--but don't quote me), go into a television studio, and play a one-table poker tournament. FTE films it as if it were a WSOP final table: hole cards and winning percentages displayed on the screen, live commentary, bustout interviews, etc. The participants each go home with a DVD of the game.

Today they were set to film what was basically a demo to be run on continuous loop at their booth at the Rio (near the Poker Kitchen, I'm told) so that potential customers can see what the company is offering. They had a last-minute cancellation, so Bill trolled via Twitter for somebody to fill the seat. I didn't have any commitments and thought it might be an interesting new experience, so I told him I'd be there in time for the start, which was only about an hour later. They tape at a studio just south of the Palms, so basically two blocks away from the Rio.

There wasn't any prize money on tap for us (though I think they have some sort of non-monetary prize structure for paying customers), but we all chipped in $20 for a winner-take-all last-longer bet.

The only players I recognized were Bryan Micon (below, left) and John Kim (not pictured). The guy on the right below is "Seriously Sirius," who has become well-known in the poker world the last couple of years for his smart, well-produced music videos about whatever is in the poker news.

See those faint black circles on the felt in front of each player? There are RFID readers under the table there, and the cards have RFID chips embedded in them--which I found pretty amazing, since they were only marginally thicker than standard cards, and I couldn't feel anything lumpy or irregular about them. That's how the off-camera people know who is playing what. Bill does the commentary in real time. They have music playing at a moderate volume to prevent the players from hearing what he is saying. I suppose one could look over at him and try to lip-read, but I didn't try to angle-shoot that way.

The structure was ridiculously fast. I'm not sure if that is representative of what you get if you're paying for the experience, or was just for purposes of getting something on tape. We started with 8000 in chips and 100/200 blinds for 20 minutes, then ten-minute levels of 200/400, 300/600, 400/800.

I basically played only four hands:

1) Early in the game, John Kim min-raised to 400. I reraised to 1000 with A-Q offsuit from late position. He and two others called. The flop was, I think, 10-4-2 rainbow. They all checked to me, so I c-bet 2000. They all folded, though John took a long time to make his decision. He told me later that he had had J-J, which is perfectly plausible.

2) I stole the blinds once with a late-position raise, no callers.

3) The guy shown above (in the middle, just sitting down) got short-stacked and started shoving fairly light. About the third time he did this, I called him from one off the button with K-J. He had Q-10 suited, so I had, in fact, called with the best hand, but he flopped a queen and won. That took me down to a little over 6000.

4) I had 5900 left. It was the last hand of the 300/600 level. I was two off the button and everybody folded to me. With a reasonably tight image, less than ten big blinds, and facing having a stack of less than eight big blinds on the next hand, this felt like a spot with which one should shove any two cards. So I did. Unfortunately, my two cards were about as bad as they get: 9h-3h. Even more unfortunately, I got called by one of the worst possible hands to be up against: 9s-9c. I couldn't even say that I had two live cards. No miracle came, and I was the first one out. Oh well. I still think it was the right move.

It was interesting to get an up-close look at a new poker venture, and it was fun playing with lights and cameras, since that's not something I'm likely to have happen for real anytime soon in my poker career. The table chat was also sufficiently amusing. I tried to kick in a few laugh lines. When we were snickering about the strangeness of playing for no prize money (none officially, anyway), I queried whether FTE dollars were worth more or less than FTP dollars. When some of the others were talking about and showing off their chip tricks, I informed them that I was the inventor of online chip tricks. Oh, such witty repartee!

My understanding is that you'll see the resulting video playing at the Rio if you find their booth. I haven't seen it yet, obviously, so if you do, drop a comment here and let me know how it looks. Based on what I saw looking on from the sidelines for a few minutes after playing the role of Gigli, my guess is it's a very professional-looking, slick production. But I'm capable of looking dorky even under the most favorable circumstances, so I'm not expecting a call from any Hollywood agents.

Josie, again

Josie and I played some more Sunday afternoon. I told her I wasn't planning to post about the results--and it was the truth, I wasn't planning to. But I changed my mind. It was only a $5 single-table SNG, with nothing on the line between us for lasting longer except pride. But I played so well that, gosh darn it, I just have to crow a little itty bit.

Josie was hit by the deck early on, achieving the first knockout when her pocket jacks flopped a set. Meanwhile, I was going the opposite direction, with nothing working out right. She was one of the chip leaders through most of the tournament, while I was scratching and clawing to avoid elimination. It wasn't looking good for me to outlast somebody who usually had a stack several times the size of mine.

But I hung in there, didn't panic, let the big stacks get bigger as they knocked out the other shorties. I was still short on the bubble, and it wasn't clear I would cash. But then Josie knocked somebody out in 4th place and I was at least into the money.

The other guy with us in the end was a total donkey, and he spewed chips off to me so badly that I took over the chip lead for a while.

Did it annoy Josie that "Fatboy 137" (his screen name) was making me healthy again? You could say that. I think she won't mind me quoting this snippet of a rant from the chat we had going on the side:

I cannot FUCKING BELIEVE that you are the chip leader.
I dominated that game from the start
seriously
thats effing crazy
and that fat boy sucks at poker
no wonder hes givng you chips hand over fist

Heh heh heh!

But in spite of the unfairness of it all, Josie took out fatboy with this hand:

Game #56077281-118: Racoon Room - No Limit Holdem Tournament - 200.00/400.00

Seat #3: fatboy137 (BB), $2307.00

Seat #4: VeryJosie (D), $6906.00

Seat #8: Rakewell0 (SB), $3612.00

*** Blinds ***

Rakewell0 posts the small blind of 200.00

fatboy137 posts the big blind of 400.00

*** Pre-Flop ***

Rakewell0 got hole cards [ Ah 7d ]

VeryJosie raises with 800.00

Rakewell0 folds

fatboy137 goes all-in with 2307.00

VeryJosie calls 1907.00

fatboy137 shows [ 4d 4s ]

VeryJosie shows [ 6c 7c ]

*** Flop *** Pot: 5614

[ Qd 3c 9s ]

*** Turn *** Pot: 5614

[ Qd 3c 9s ] [ Ts ]

*** River *** Pot: 5614

[ Qd 3c 9s ] [ Ts ] [ 6d ]

fatboy137 is out

VeryJosie wins 5689.00

(Side note: I know that text hand histories are both difficult and mind-numbing to read. But I spent over an hour looking for a way to convert Merge Network hand histories to animation, and found none. If there's a better solution than this, let me know, because this sucks.)

So then we were heads-up, Josie having more than a 3:1 chip lead, me starting with less than eight big blinds. But I doubled up on the second hand:

Game #56077281-120: Racoon Room - No Limit Holdem Tournament - 200.00/400.00

Seat #4: VeryJosie (D SB), $9888.00

Seat #8: Rakewell0 (BB), $2962.00

*** Blinds ***

VeryJosie posts the small blind of 200.00

Rakewell0 posts the big blind of 400.00

*** Pre-Flop ***

Rakewell0 got hole cards [ Ac 4c ]

VeryJosie raises with 1037.00

Rakewell0 goes all-in with 2962.00

VeryJosie calls 2325.00

VeryJosie shows [ Qs Js ]

Rakewell0 shows [ Ac 4c ]

*** Flop *** Pot: 6924

[ 4h Ks As ]

*** Turn *** Pot: 6924

[ 4h Ks As ] [ Kc ]

*** River *** Pot: 6924

[ 4h Ks As ] [ Kc ] [ 3c ]

Rakewell0 wins 6774.00

That got us to basically even. Nine boring hands later, this happened:

Game #56077281-129: Racoon Room - No Limit Holdem Tournament - 200.00/400.00

Seat #4: VeryJosie (BB), $6751.00

Seat #8: Rakewell0 (D SB), $6099.00

*** Blinds ***

Rakewell0 posts the small blind of 200.00

VeryJosie posts the big blind of 400.00

*** Pre-Flop ***

Rakewell0 got hole cards [ Td 8h ]

Rakewell0 raises with 1000.00

VeryJosie calls 600.00

*** Flop *** Pot: 2200

[ Js 8c Jc ]

VeryJosie bets 1025.00

Rakewell0 calls 1025.00

*** Turn *** Pot: 4250

[ Js 8c Jc ] [ Ad ]

VeryJosie checks

Rakewell0 checks

*** River *** Pot: 4250

[ Js 8c Jc ] [ Ad ] [ 8d ]

VeryJosie checks

Rakewell0 bets 2250.00

VeryJosie folds

Rakewell0 shows [ Td 8h ]

Rakewell0 wins 6350.00

Now I was the one with the substantial chip lead. But Josie took a chunk of it back here:

Game #56077281-135: Racoon Room - No Limit Holdem Tournament - 200.00/400.00

Seat #4: VeryJosie (BB), $3876.00

Seat #8: Rakewell0 (D SB), $8974.00

*** Blinds ***

Rakewell0 posts the small blind of 200.00

VeryJosie posts the big blind of 400.00

*** Pre-Flop ***

Rakewell0 got hole cards [ Kc 7d ]

Rakewell0 raises with 1000.00

VeryJosie calls 600.00

*** Flop *** Pot: 2200

[ 8s 6h Ts ]

VeryJosie goes all-in with 3276.00

Rakewell0 folds

VeryJosie mucks [ ]

VeryJosie wins 5326.00

Which left me with a much smaller lead, until I got her to raise-fold twice by putting in all-in three-bets:

Game #56077281-138: Racoon Room - No Limit Holdem Tournament - 200.00/400.00

Seat #4: VeryJosie (D SB), $5301.00

Seat #8: Rakewell0 (BB), $7549.00

*** Blinds ***

VeryJosie posts the small blind of 200.00

Rakewell0 posts the big blind of 400.00

*** Pre-Flop ***

Rakewell0 got hole cards [ Ad 9s ]

VeryJosie raises with 1250.00

Rakewell0 goes all-in with 7549.00

VeryJosie folds

Rakewell0 mucks [ Ad 9s ]

Rakewell0 wins 9249.00

Game #56077281-150: Racoon Room - No Limit Holdem Tournament - 300.00/600.00

Seat #4: VeryJosie (D SB), $4576.00

Seat #8: Rakewell0 (BB), $7924.00

*** Blinds ***

VeryJosie posts the small blind of 300.00

Rakewell0 posts the big blind of 600.00

*** Pre-Flop ***

Rakewell0 got hole cards [ 5h 5s ]

VeryJosie raises with 1575.00

Rakewell0 goes all-in with 7924.00

VeryJosie folds

Rakewell0 mucks [ 5h 5s ]

Rakewell0 wins 10199.00

Now I had about 90% of the chips in play and could taste the win. Not so fast, pal, sez Josie. She shoved a bunch of times when I had such crappy cards I felt I couldn't take the risk. So my lead got whittled back down to about 2.5:1 when the next big chip movement occurred:

Game #56077281-155: Racoon Room - No Limit Holdem Tournament - 300.00/600.00

Seat #4: VeryJosie (BB), $3651.00

Seat #8: Rakewell0 (D SB), $8849.00

*** Blinds ***

Rakewell0 posts the small blind of 300.00

VeryJosie posts the big blind of 600.00

*** Pre-Flop ***

Rakewell0 got hole cards [ 8c As ]

Rakewell0 goes all-in with 8849.00

VeryJosie goes all-in with 3651.00

VeryJosie shows [ Ts Ad ]

Rakewell0 shows [ 8c As ]

*** Flop *** Pot: 13400

[ Qd Th 4c ]

*** Turn *** Pot: 13400

[ Qd Th 4c ] [ Qh ]

*** River *** Pot: 13400

[ Qd Th 4c ] [ Qh ] [ 3d ]

Rakewell0 wins 4898.00

VeryJosie wins 8602.00

Dammit! She won't die! And now I'm the one in jeopardy again! But I won't die easily, either:

Game #56077281-159: Racoon Room - No Limit Holdem Tournament - 300.00/600.00

Seat #4: VeryJosie (BB), $6302.00

Seat #8: Rakewell0 (D SB), $6198.00

*** Blinds ***

Rakewell0 posts the small blind of 300.00

VeryJosie posts the big blind of 600.00

*** Pre-Flop ***

Rakewell0 got hole cards [ 9s Jd ]

Rakewell0 calls 300.00

VeryJosie checks

*** Flop *** Pot: 1200

[ 9d 2d 5h ]

VeryJosie checks

Rakewell0 bets 800.00

VeryJosie calls 800.00

*** Turn *** Pot: 2800

[ 9d 2d 5h ] [ 8c ]

VeryJosie checks

Rakewell0 bets 2100.00

VeryJosie calls 2100.00

*** River *** Pot: 7000

[ 9d 2d 5h ] [ 8c ] [ Kd ]

VeryJosie checks

Rakewell0 checks

*** Showdown *** Pot: 7000

VeryJosie shows [ 2c 7h ]

Rakewell0 shows [ 9s Jd ]

Rakewell0 wins 7100.00

That put me back in the driver's seat, and set up the final showdown:

Game #56077281-161: Racoon Room - No Limit Holdem Tournament - 300.00/600.00

Seat #4: VeryJosie (BB), $3402.00

Seat #8: Rakewell0 (D SB), $9098.00

*** Blinds ***

Rakewell0 posts the small blind of 300.00

VeryJosie posts the big blind of 600.00

*** Pre-Flop ***

Rakewell0 got hole cards [ 4d 4s ]

Rakewell0 goes all-in with 9098.00

VeryJosie goes all-in with 3402.00

VeryJosie shows [ Kh Jc ]

Rakewell0 shows [ 4d 4s ]

*** Flop *** Pot: 13400

[ 7s 5h Tc ]

*** Turn *** Pot: 13400

[ 7s 5h Tc ] [ As ]

*** River *** Pot: 13400

[ 7s 5h Tc ] [ As ] [ 8s ]

VeryJosie is out

Rakewell0 is out

Rakewell0 wins 5396.00

Rakewell0 wins 8104.00

And that was all she wrote.

As I said, I was pretty pleased with myself for hanging in there so long, striking at pretty much all the right times (after the first few hands I played went bad), and getting fatboy to donate most of his stack to me.

Josie played well, too.* In fact, I think the only fair way to describe the overall story is that she crushed the game for the first 80% of it, then I rallied at the end just enough to snatch a W from her.

Things went less for both of us in the rematch. Josie was first out when her 9-9 ran into my A-A. I survived just long enough for the 3rd-place min-cash. Meh, but I'll take it.

Josie was much less trash-talky today than yesterday; she only called me a whore eight times (by actual count). Maybe it was her Sunday church-going good behavior. But she was actually very nice and complimentary to me (in between blasts of "WHORE!"), which made the whole thing a fun, enjoyable time, and would have been so even if the outcome had been different.

(EDIT: Josie's account of the game is here.)

*The only time I thought she made a clear mistake was when we were three-handed. She raised, I shoved, and she folded, but stack sizes were such that she really should have called with whatever she had. (To quote the great line from Joe Sebok's WSOP final table commentary when Darvin Moon made an eye-poppingly bad fold, she should have called even if all she was holding was "a Snickers wrapper and a tarot card.")

"Get ready for a butt kicking"

That right there is what Josie said upon accepting my suggestion of a little heads-up poker this afternoon.

We didn't make any side bets on the outcome, but decided on a best-of-seven series of $10 heads-up SNGs on Black Chip Poker.

But I quickly took down the first two matches--including an epic comeback from a short stack in game #2--prompting Josie to tell me, "I dislike you very very much." (This is on top of her calling me a whore practically every time I won a hand.)

She won game #3 by hitting a backdoor flush draw after all the chips were in. I guess for some people that's the only way they can win. I'm just sayin'.

I took #4, then she won #5 when my computer suddenly crashed and I lost a bunch of chips while offline trying to revive the stupid beast. Again, for some people that's what it takes for them to win at poker.

But with the computer recovered, I won game #6, our longest of the bunch. Which, for those keeping track, means that I won the series by the extremely appropriate score of 4-2. Cuz that's just how I roll. Or I should say, that's just how I roll over Josie.

If that's a "butt kicking," I guess I'm a masochist, because I liked it.

Poker gems, #456

Ed Miller, in Card Player magazine column, May 16, 2012 (vol. 25, #10), page 38.

Whenever you beat players in a hand and they complain about how you played it, you're officially in their head.

Poker gems, #455

Andrew Brokos, in Card Player magazine column, May 16, 2012 (vol. 25, #10), page 37.

There is one reason to check and call on the river, and that's to induce bluffs. If you don't expect your opponent to bluff the river, then your options are either to value bet the hand yourself or to check and fold. Checking and calling makes no sense in this situation because virtually any player's calling range will be wider than his value betting range.

Poker gems, #454

Roy Cooke, in Card Player magazine column, May 16, 2012 (vol. 25, #10), page 32.

Deceptive plays have value when being deceptive prevents your opponent(s) from defining your hand and therefore playing correctly against it. There is no point in being deceptive if your opponent can't read the situation anyway or would play incorrectly even if he knew your holding. That might be due to a lack of your opponent's hand reading ability or deficiencies of his play knowledge; but it is also becomes [sic] the case when your hand range widens and even quality hand readers wouldn't be able to narrowly define your hand.

Convert

Praises be, we have another convert to the Gospel of the Mighty Deuce-Four!

http://robvegaspoker.blogspot.com/2012/05/most-powerful-hand-in-poker.html

Language mystery

Last month my friends Martin and Jennifer wrote a pair of essays for the Woman Poker Player web site about poker players' use of the word rape to describe bad beats, coolers, or just generally running bad. I didn't say anything at the time, because I thought they covered the matter so well that there wasn't much left unsaid. Martin in particular expressed exactly what has long been my sense of squeamishness when such terminology gets tossed around so casually. My only disagreement with Jennifer is that I'm uneasy about expanding the use of penalties for linguistic offenses. I think that over the long run social opprobrium is a better tool than the rulebook, at least in this case.

I did have one lingering question about the subject, though, and almost wrote a post about it at the time. In the end, I didn't have any good answer to my own question, so I let it drop. But it came up again Sunday evening, so once again it's on my mind.

Rob's friend "Prudence" was indisputably having a bad night, with a never-ending stream of second-best hands. At one point she exclaimed in frustration, "I'm getting murdered here!"

This was precisely the counterpoint that occurred to me when reading the essays about the offensiveness of rape language: What about similar use of various forms of the word murder? It is almost universally agreed that murder is a worse crime than rape, as evidenced by harsher criminal penalties for the former than the latter in every jurisdiction that I know of. So why is poker players' figurative use of murder less likely to provoke outrage (whether expressed or not) than the identical use of rape?

If this is hypocrisy, I confess to sharing in the guilt. I certainly noticed Prudence's language, because I spent a few minutes pondering this very conundrum just a few weeks ago, but still it didn't strike me with the same reflexive wincing and squirming that would have occurred if she had said, "I'm getting raped here!"

Why is that?

I'm still stuck with the same dilemma I had when I thought about writing this up last month: I don't have a good answer. But this time I'm going through with sending it out into the ether, hoping that somebody else does.

Eclipse

I didn't prepare any special eclipse-viewing glasses or apparatus. Vegas is 20 or 30 miles south of where one would have to be to see the true annular eclipse, anyway. But it's still a sufficient rare event that I wanted to see what little effects could be seen. This was made more difficult than I anticipated by the fact that it occurred so late in the day, so both sunlight and its resulting shadows were nearly horizontal. But I wandered around my neighborhood looking for spots where light was diffracting around edges or through holes. None of them are exactly worthy of National Geographic, but you can certainly tell that something strange was happening with the light.

When it was over, I drove to the MGM Grand, where I knew that fellow bloggers Grrouchie and Rob were already playing. I had met Grrouchie once before, but not Rob. I got there, found them, and moved to their table. I was there with them for about three hours, during which time we absolutely did not EVER talk about either Josie or Tony. Not even once. Isn't that amazing?

Grrouchie epitomized the danger of playing with fellow poker bloggers when he said to Rob, ""I can't wait to get home and make fun of you."

Of course I had to impress upon them the awesome power of the Mighty Deuce-Four, so that they will join me in spreading the gospel. The only time I was dealt it, I called a small pre-flop raise in position, and flopped 2-2-Q. My opponent was the woman Rob refers to in his blog as "Prudence." She bet $10, I called. Turn was a jack. This time she bet $15, I raised to $45. She called, but with apparent consternation. At about this time, Grrouchie was shooting me a look from his end of the table that said, "Do you really have what I think you have?" I gave him a little nod of affirmation. (Prudence was not looking anywhere in my direction, so I didn't risk giving anything away. Besides, she doesn't know who I am, so even if she noticed an exchange of glances, she wouldn't know what it was about.) River was an ace. She checked, I moved all in, she folded. I showed the hand, obviously. So now I have two more bloggers who have personally witnessed the power at work.

Poker skills are transferable

I play a lot of "Words With Friends" (WWF) these days. In case you've been dwelling in a cave for the last few years, WWF is a ripoff of Scrabble (so close that I'm surprised there hasn't been a patent infringement lawsuit) played on Facebook or smart phones or tablet devices. My brother, David, is my most frequent and most tenacious opponent. He works for himself from home, so he can take as much time as he feels like to study out the perfect move. He routinely trounced me when we started playing, but in the last few weeks I have achieved something close to parity with him.

For the most part, there isn't much poker-like reasoning in WWF. There's just no way to know what tiles your opponent might have, except when they've all been distributed and you're on the last few moves of the game. But a couple of weeks ago David and I played a game in which thinking one level deeper than he did made all the difference between winning and losing.

Through the first half of the game, we had stayed entirely within the bottom half of the board. This wasn't planned; it's just the way it worked out when each of us took our most advantageous moves. But then something strange happened: He passed a turn. He had never done this before, except at the very beginning or very end of a game when he had no possible moves. He had occasionally done a tile exchange instead of placing tiles. But just outright skip a turn? Unheard of.

It puzzled me, but I didn't spend much effort trying to figure it out. I wrote it off as an anomaly, and just made my next move.

He passed again.

WTF? Now he had my full attention. It was time for some poker hand-reading skills.

One of the keys to high scores in the game is making "bingos," a term borrowed from Scrabble, in which you play all seven of your tiles at once. This not only makes big words, but you get a 35-point bonus for the feat. If you can do that across a double-word or triple-word square, so much the better. David's game centers on two strategies: Making high-scoring bingos, and blocking the avenues I might use to do the same.

If he had one or two tiles in his rack that made bingoing difficult (letters like J, X, V, and K tend not to lend themselves to flexibility in making words), he would play those where he could, hoping to replace them with letters of high bingo potential--vowels and easy-to-use consonants like N, D, and S. I had seen him do this hundreds of times. If he were really stuck with a completely unusable set of letters, he would trade in a few to gain playability. What on earth would prompt him to just skip a turn?

As I thought about it, there was only one logical explanation: He had a perfect rack for making a lot of different bingos, but had no "hook" on which to attach any of the possible letter combinations he could make, because our game had become so constricted in the lower half of the board. He must be thinking that the lower half was played out, and I would very soon be forced to make the first extension into the upper half, at which point he could stick a bingo onto nearly anything I put out there.

Upon deducing that, my counter-strategy became obvious. It's the same as it is in poker: Once you know what your opponent wants you to do, you do the opposite. So I did. I played one and two letters at a time, finding all the little nooks and crannies in which I could add a tile or two to the already-crowded bottom half of the grid. I was passing up opportunities for higher-scoring plays that I could make if I ventured north, but I was getting free turn after free turn without David scoring any points, so I was happy to continue. I came to think of myself as Brer Rabbit in the briar patch, not wanting to come out where Brer Fox could eat me. Or you could think of me as the tortoise, progressing slowly while the hare was taking a nap.

I knew that David must be thinking, after each turn, "OK, that's it, he has played all he can down there." Of course, he had good reason to think that. Every time I took a turn, I reduced the number of playable spots even further, so his expectation that I would be forced out of the thicket become inexorably closer to being true.

Because of this, I knew that he wouldn't deviate from his plan. With each successive round, it made even more sense for him to skip another turn, because it was ever more likely that I would have to abandon my small-ball strategy. But he badly underestimated how long I could keep playing by myself. I didn't keep track, and the game was now too long ago to be able to retrieve the history, but I'm sure I got at least 15 turns in. He was likely guessing, at first, that I could go no more than two or three.

Eventually, of course, I had indeed filled up every spot that I possibly could, and had to stick a line of letters up into virgin territory. He promptly laid down a bingo, as I was sure he would. But it was too little too late. My extended stay down in the land of the little scores had inflicted the death of a thousand cuts. Picking up five or ten points at a time had both given me an insurmountable lead and depleted the supply of available tiles. The game was over a couple of moves later.

He texted me, "That didn't work out the way I had planned." I asked him to explain his unprecedented tactic (as if I didn't already know it). He told me precisely what I had deduced: He didn't want to wreck his high-flexibility board by playing one or two tiles at a time, thus risking picking up a tile that would impair the bingo potential, and instead decided to wait for me to create a hook for him to make a big score off of--but I didn't cooperate.

I told him that I had guessed that that was exactly what was happening, and that I had intentionally devised a way to foil his nefarious plot. He replied that it was not nefarious, but, in fact, a grand and glorious plan, "opposed only by evildoers who hate America."

That gave me a genuine LOL. He is always a good sport, win or lose.

Would I have figured out what he was doing if I hadn't played so many hours of poker? Maybe. It's hard to say. But what I'm certain of is that it was poker experience that gave me the reflexive impulse (1) to crack the code of his line of play, (2) to infer from it what sort of tiles he was holding, (3) from that to project what he must be thinking about what I would do, and (4) figure out a way to frustrate his intentions.

That, my word-playing friends, is pure poker.

Poker gems, #453

John Vorhaus, in Card Player magazine column, on playing suited connectors, May 2, 2012 (vol. 25, #9), page 50.

Know how suited connectors win? By betting the flop and having nobody call. That's pretty unlikely in a multiway pot, but much more likely when the pot is shorthanded or, in the best case, heads up. Then your 8-7 suited wins without a fight. You don't have to make a hand to win. You could have 8-7, 2-7, a pair of chickens, whatever. Here it is in a nutshell, folks: Since it's hard to make a hand in hold'em, your best outcome is not making your hand. Your best outcome is winning without a hand.

A 100% true poker advertisement

I noticed this ad in a recent issue of Poker Player newspaper. I was impressed by its honesty. It says, "Many have paid thousands for poker know-how like this... but YOU won't!"

And they're absolutely right--I won't!

Home game done

We have us a winner! Congratulations, "what is 7x6"! In addition to the free Stars bucks and bragging rights, you have won an entry into the inaugural $1,000,000 buy-in bracelet event at this year's World Series of Poker! Please remit the $999,999 processing fee to me at your earliest convenience, and I will take care of getting you registered.

Thanks for showing up and entertaining me, all.

Mother's Day PokerStars home game tournament

I just had, and yielded to, an impulse to create a HORSE tournament tonight for my PokerStars home game club (ID# is 383761, invitation code "playgrumpy"). No real money involved, obviously--just 20 fake dollars and bragging rights are at stake. 9:00 p.m. EDT, 6:00 p.m. PDT.

But there is one proviso: In order to be allowed to play, you must not only be a member of the Grumpy Home Game club, but, for today's event only, you must qualify under one of the following categories:

1. You are now or at some point in the past have been a mother.

2. You now have or at some point in the past have had a mother.

3. You are now or at some point in the past have been a horse.

Please note that this requirement will be very strictly enforced, with no exceptions made.