A response to Michael Shermer (no poker content)

I wasn't planning to use this space to address gun control yet again, after having done so once just ten days ago, but a post I read on another blog today prompts me to do so.

In this case, the identity of the writer in question matters a great deal. Michael Shermer is one of the authors I admire most. He is the editor of Skeptic magazine, to which I have been a loyal subscriber and reader since I first learned of its existence with Volume 3, #1, which I think was in about 1995. I have bought and read several of his books. They are uniformly interesting and enlightening. I have a special fondness for his Denying History, which is a careful examination of the evidence for and against the claims of Holocaust deniers, leading to a broader consideration of the fascinating philosophical and pragmatic question of how we can know anything about history. His books are usually among that rare breed that forever change how you think about the subject involved.

The hallmarks of Shermer's writing are careful attention to facts, rigorously sifting the reliable from the unreliable, and sticking to logical inferences from them. He is the epitome of reason, willing to go wherever the evidence leads, regardless of his own preconceived ideas. To make matters even better, in recent years he has been more overt about his leanings toward libertarian economics and politics, further endearing him to me. He is a sufficiently interesting writer and speaker that seeing his name on an article or as a guest on an upcoming radio or TV show is all the reason I need to read it, or to tune in. Heck, I've even read a good deal from Mr. Shermer's hand about competitive cycling because it is a passion of his, and his writing is so interesting and insightful that I find it worth reading along even in subjects that are not especially important to me.

OK, enough with the sycophancy. I thought it worth a bit of space to make clear in what high regard I hold Mr. Shermer, before I turn to my disappointment of today.

Here is the blog post in question:

http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/07/31/gun-control-and-the-law-of-large-numbers/

My disappointment is not just that Mr. Shermer disagrees on a question of public policy that is important to me. Of far more importance is that it appears to me that he has abandoned his usual characteristic care about both facts and logical inference.

Points of agreement

Let me begin my analysis by stating where we agree: There are and probably always will be mentally ill among us. Some small percentage of such people will erupt with public violence. (We might add that some who are not mentally ill will do the same for political, religious, or other reasons.) Such events are largely unpredictable, especially when committed by those with no prior history of crimes or formal contact with the psychiatric or legal systems. As a result, it seems virtually inevitable that we will, sadly, continue to occasionally experience sickening scenes such as happened in Aurora, Colorado, a couple of weeks ago.

Errors of fact

Mr. Shermer's first factual errors come when he speaks of "semi-automatic assault rifles like those [James] Holmes’ [sic] allegedly used to murder 12 and wound another 58 in a matter of seconds."

The first problem with this is that the phrase "semi-automatic assault rifle" is nonsensical, self-contradictory. An "assault rifle" by definition is full automatic. See, e.g., here. If a gun is semi-automatic (i.e., one shot per trigger pull), it is not an assault rifle. This error creeps in again later when Mr. Shermer refers to "outlawing all automatic and semi-automatic assault rifles for anyone who is not in law enforcement or the military," which is the specific policy his blog post proposes.

Secondly, I'm not sure it's accurate to refer to the assaults as having happened in a matter of "seconds." My understanding from news reports is that it was several minutes at least.

The third error, or at least unwarranted assumption, is that Holmes used his rifle to kill 12 and wound another 58. News stories are quite consistently reporting that he began with the rifle, but it jammed at some point. He then turned to the shotgun he was carrying, and later to his Glock handgun. I have seen nothing yet that tells us how many of the fatal and non-fatal wounds were inflicted by which weapons, nor how many shots were fired from each. I assume that those questions are still under forensic investigation. For all we know, his rifle might have jammed after two shots, both of which missed, in which case no harm was inflicted by it. I don't think that is likely, but we just don't know yet. It is certainly premature to say that all 70 victims were shot with Holmes' AR-15-style rifle (apparently a variant made by Smith & Wesson). If it turns out that the great majority of the wounds were actually inflicted by the shotgun and handgun, and not the rifle, is Mr. Shermer prepared to retract his policy proposal? I doubt it.

Another error pops in unexpectedly when Mr. Shermer writes about assault rifles "that can be secreted into a movie theater." First, Holmes did no such thing. Eyewitnesses tell us that he entered the theater with everybody else, then left, then returned with the guns in hand and in full view. How this constitutes them being "secreted" is beyond me.

Moreover, I wonder if Mr. Shermer has ever tried "secreting" an AR-15 on his person? Teller manages such a trick in his stage magic act with Penn Jillette here in Vegas at the Rio hotel and casino (I actually think it's a shotgun rather than a rifle, but my memory might be playing tricks on me), but I doubt that anything less than a trick prop gun, a carefully constructed suit, and a bunch of well-rehearsed stagehands could get the job done.

Second Amendment considerations

Mr. Shermer defends his proposal against constitutional objection with this observation: "When the Second Amendment was written stating that citizens have a right to 'keep and bear arms,' rifles took over a minute to load one bullet at a time. The most crazed 18th century American could not possibly commit mass murder because no WMMs [Mr. Shermer's abbreviation for "weapons of mass murder"] existed at the time."

The last sentence is not quite accurate. One could presumably have committed mass murder in the late 18th century with a bomb, or a cannon, or with arson of a crowded building. But that's beside the point.

The larger point, of course, deals with the march of technology. I realize that Mr. Shermer is not writing a technical piece for a law journal, nor a legal brief for the Supreme Court. His point is a conceptual one here, not a rigorous legalistic one. And that's fine. I'll address it on the same rhetorical level.

Technology has moved on in communications as well as firearms. If we were to accept Mr. Shermer's implicit argument that the protection afforded by the Constitution stops with the technology available to those who produced that document, we would logically have to conclude that the same is true for the First Amendment as for the Second Amendment. Freedom of the press and of speech would continue to be recognized for actual speaking and for actual ink-stained printing presses, but not for more modern technologies, such as radio, television, fax machines, photocopiers, photography, and the Internet. I have a hard time believing that Mr. Shermer's view of the First Amendment is so crabbed. If I'm right about that guess, then on what logical exegetical basis does the Second Amendment get treated so differently?

Of fists and noses

Mr. Shermer wishes not to be thought of as anti-freedom: "My fellow libertarians are likely to see this as another loss of freedom, but I disagree. The principle of freedom states that all people are free to think, believe, and act as they choose, so long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. But the freedom for me to swing my arm ends at your nose."

Fair enough. But such a cute aphorism is not terribly rigorous, and is subject to such varied application as to be pretty much useless. Does it mean that I cannot swing my fist at all, lest there be an off-chance that I run into the nose of somebody I was not aware was there? Does it mean that I can swing my fist at your face, so long as I stop a millimeter short of your nose? (Current laws would call such obvious threat of bodily harm an assault, even if I did not complete the swing so as to turn it into a battery.) If taken to an extreme, it would seem to mean that I do not have the right to punch an assailant in self-defense, even if he is attacking me. Is that Mr. Shermer's view? I doubt it, but resorting to such a vague, glib talking point lends itself to that interpretation as well as to any other.

So it is with the subject of the implicit analogy. Does the use of the aphorism mean that nobody should own an assault rifle, or merely that one does not have the right to injure another person with it? Those are vastly different conclusions. I own a semi-automatic rifle, a civilian version of the AK-47, which is kept unloaded and locked in a safe when not with me at a firing range. The chance that Mr. Shermer or anybody else will ever be injured by my possession of this gun is so remote that it hardly seems within his proper purview to prohibit me from it.

It is conceivable that Mr. Shermer will some day get drunk, climb in his car, and recklessly run me over when I'm innocently crossing a street. Should I on the basis of that remote possibility be allowed to prohibit him from drinking alcohol? Or from owning a car? The chance that I will flip out and start shooting up a movie theater, or that a carelessly errant shot from my rifle at the gun range will sail for miles and hit somebody, or that a thief will break into my house and safe, steal the gun, and then use it to rob a bank, is of a similar degree of remoteness. It is a far, far cry from launching my fist forward when standing a foot in front of another person.

Collective risks

Of course, there are collective risks. The fact that I could legally acquire and can legally use my rifle for shooting competitions (which is all I have ever used it for, having no interest in hunting) means that others can, too, and some small percentage of them will eventually use the weapons criminally. If we cannot accurately predict which of the users are the vast majority in whose hands the guns will forever be harmless and which are the tiny minority who will turn them against the rest of us, then certainly one possible solution is to ban them across the board.

But then what is to stop similar considerations from being used for other things? We could put Prohibition back into place, because a minority of people who drink manifestly cause all manner of social harms--including murder--when intoxicated. Or we could outlaw automobiles in order to prevent all the accidental and intentional deaths that they cause. Any one of us could build a bomb of frightful lethality out of legally purchased fuel oil and fertilizer, as Timothy McVeigh taught us.

Mr. Shermer, what is the logical limiting principal here? Why outlaw one item that can be used to commit mayhem but not all such items? I would guess that the answer is that he sees no utility in anybody owning the guns he wants to ban, but acknowledges that there is meaningful enough social utility in alcohol, cars, oil, fertilizer, etc., that he is willing to accept the attendant cost of occasional criminal misuse. And if I'm right about that guess, then we simply have very different subjective assessments of what constitutes sufficient offsetting positive utility.

Practicality

Even if we were to learn that all or nearly all of Holmes' victims were shot with his AR-15-style rifle, that would make the incident virtually unique in modern history. I follow such things with reasonable (although not obsessive) care, and I cannot recall offhand a weapon of this type being used in any other mass shooting. Most such events are carried out with an ordinary handgun or two. (For example, the massacres in Tucson, Ft. Hood, and Virginia Tech University.) Can Mr. Shermer name another incident in the United States prior to this month that was carried out with the kind of weapon he proposes to outlaw?* [EDIT: See Addendum below, in which I more carefully research this point, and find that my memory failed me.]

If not, and if in spite of that he still sticks with his proposal on the basis of what James Holmes did, then it seems to follow that one mass shooting justifies, in Mr. Shermer's view, the outlawing of the entire class of weapon used. It would seem to follow further, then, that all semi-automatic handguns should be banned, too, on the basis of several other mass shootings in which those were the weapons used. Mr. Shermer mentions Charles Whitman, the infamous University of Texas tower shooter. He killed 14 and wounded 32 using a shotgun, an ordinary bolt-action hunting rifle, and a pump-action rifle. If the Aurora shootings justify banning one of the weapons used in it, then why would not the greater number of people killed by Whitman justify banning the categories of weapons he used?

Nitty-gritty details

While I'm speaking of practicality, let's consider the logistics of the kind of ban Mr. Shermer seems to have in mind. The first problem is one of definitions. Perhaps if Mr. Shermer is not familiar with guns, he does not understand how difficult it would be to write a legal definition that accurately and reliably distinguishes between the kinds of guns he wants to get rid of and the ones that he presumably thinks are OK (because he does not propose outlawing all guns, or even all rifles, or even all semi-automatic rifles). Congress tried this in 1994, and manufacturers quickly learned that all they had to do was leave off some unimportant features (such as a bayonet mount, and threads on the end of the barrel to which a suppressor could be attached), and continue producing what were functionally nearly identical arms. What good did that do anybody?

Consider the Ruger Mini-14, an enormously popular semi-automatic rifle. It shoots the same caliber of cartridge as most AR-15s, and can do so in equal quantities. Its two primary applications are recreational shooting and as a light farm/ranch/trail gun for shooting varmints such as gophers and coyotes. Would this be banned under Mr. Shermer's proposal? If so, on what basis? Just the fact that it is a semi-automatic rifle? If that is the case, then Mr. Shermer was apparently not being honest in the scope of his proposal, and he really wants to outlaw all semi-automatic rifles. But if it is not to be included in the ban, then what has actually been accomplished? James Holmes could acquire a Mini-14 exactly the same way he did his AR-15 copy, use the same ammunition, and kill just as many people with it. The differences between the Mini-14 and the AR-15 have little to do with how a criminal or insane person could use it. The presence or absence of a bayonet lug, flash suppressor, pistol grip, or folding stock surely have minimal impact on the weapon's destructive potential.

Next consider what happens even if we managed to find a definition that neatly distinguished between the guns that Mr. Shermer thinks you should be able to have and those he thinks you shouldn't. We then have to decide whether to "grandfather" in currently existing examples, of which there are millions upon millions. Criminalizing the possession of items commonly owned legally is an enormous problem, especially when those items are (1) expensive, and (2) highly prized by their owners. It is no small matter to turn millions of law-abiding Americans into felons (many of them unknowing) overnight. Such actions breed deep resentment for the government and a disrespect for law.

But if you don't outlaw those currently in existence, then you will have barely made a dent in the problem. The world in general and our nation in particular are awash in these guns, and with just a little care they can last far longer than any owner's lifetime. Even if all manufacture of them stopped tomorrow, one would be unable to notice any diminution in the absolute numbers in circulation for many decades.

I consider this an essentially intractable, insoluble problem no matter which horn of the dilemma you choose to skewer yourself on.

I suppose I should add that the Supreme Court, given its recent precedents, would be nearly certain to rule such a ban unconstitutional. Mr. Shermer is then put in the difficult position of pressing for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court and limit the scope of the Second Amendment. Good luck with that.

Conclusions

I understand the impulse to read of a heinous crime such as Holmes committed and feel that we should do something. But before such impulses are translated into public policy, they must be carefully processed through filters that take into consideration things like constitutionality, costs, and benefits. I do not see that Mr. Shermer has undertaken that gargantuan task, or even that he grasps how difficult a problem it is. It seems to me that he has simply jumped to what seems an obvious remedy without serious thought put into such crucial questions as (1) would the proposal actually prevent future such incidents (I don't see how it could), (2) what would the costs be (enormous), (3) can the distinction he wishes to make actually be written as law (probably not), and (4) would it violate current judicial interpretations of the Constitution (almost surely).

I find myself dismayed that an author I admire for his rigorous fidelity to facts and logical thinking could suffer such an egregious lapse of exactly those qualities, writing about a subject on which he is self-evidently poorly informed, one to which it appears that he has dedicated precious little deep thought, and for which he has amassed precious few facts. (I speak here of the guns, not of his statistics about mental illness or what is implied by the "law of large numbers.")

Mr. Shermer, won't you please spend some time in more careful background reading (I recommend the several books by economist John Lott as an excellent starting point), then revisit your proposal and see if you still think it holds water?

By the way, Mr. Shermer, if you've read this far, I have rattling around inside my head an outline for an article that I think would be great for Skeptic magazine--about some of the examples of magical thinking and cognitive errors (such as the gambler's fallacy) that I run into day after day at the poker tables of Las Vegas. Interested?

*After writing this, I put a little more thought into it, and came up with one case that I think most people will have forgotten about: In 2005, a man unloaded a bunch of rounds from a semi-automatic rifle, patterned after the AK-47, in the Hudson Valley Mall. Two people were wounded, but none killed.

Addendum, August 1, 2012

I found this list of deadly mass public shootings in the United States from 1984 to the present, and looked up the Wikipedia entry (where available, or other reasonably reliable web sources in the few cases where not available) for each one to find out what types of firearms were used. I am not including the gunmen's own deaths (where they occurred) in the body counts. I am listing here only the incidents in which a semi-automatic rifle was the (or one of the) weapons used.

1989, Stockton, California: 5 deaths, all caused by a semi-automatic version of the Type 56.

1989, Louisville, Kentucky: 8 deaths, all caused by a semi-automatic version of the Type 56.

1990, Jacksonville, Florida: 9 deaths, all caused by an M1 carbine.

1997, Orange, California: 4 deaths. There is no Wikipedia entry for this incident. An L.A. Times story says that he was armed with an "AK-47." However, reporters are notoriously inaccurate at describing weapons. A true AK-47 is fully automatic. It's not impossible that this one was, but it was more likely a semi-automatic version, simply because those are vastly more common in the United States. He was apparently also armed with a shotgun and pistol, and nothing I can find quickly specifies how many deaths were caused by each weapon.

1998, Springfield, Oregon: 2 deaths in school shooting, plus he had murdered his parents at home before going to the school, apparently all using a Ruger 10/22 rifle. This is a semi-automatic, but chambered for the low-powered .22 LR rimfire cartridge. I include it here not because it is even remotely a military/law enforcement weapon, but because if one is contemplating outlawing all semi-automatic rifles, this is one that would be included.

2000, Wakefield, Massachusetts: 7 deaths. The Wikipedia entry states that he used an "AK-47 variant," a 12-gauge shotgun, and a .32 pistol, without specifying how many deaths were inflicted by each weapon.

2001, Omaha, Nebraska: 8 deaths, claimed to be from an "AKM 7.62 x 39 mm semi-automatic rifle," which would be an AK-47 variant.

2011, Carson City, Nevada: 4 deaths, apparently from an AK-47 variant. News reports at the time were claiming that this was manufactured as a semi-automatic rifle but had later been illegally converted to fire in full-auto mode. I have seen no definitive confirmation of this, however.

2012, Aurora, Colorado: 12 deaths, inflicted by an unknown combination of a semi-automatic AR-15-style rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun.

But the AmericanProgress.org listing is clearly incomplete, for reasons that I don't understand. It omits at least the following incidents:

• 1991, Ridgewood, New Jersey: 4 deaths, attributed in this article to "a semiautomatic 9 mm pistol [and] an Uzi semiautomatic assault weapon." The latter phraseology is clearly incorrect, however, I can't discern what he's trying to get at. As far as I know, all Uzis (both fully automatic and semi-automatic) are chambered in pistol calibers, not rifle calibers. Because of this, not even the automatic versions are assault rifles, and so would presumably not fall within Mr. Shermer's proposed ban.
• 1991, Royal Oak, Michigan: 4 deaths using a Ruger 10/22 rifle. (See comments about 1998, Springfield, Oregon, above.)
• 2006, Goleta, California: 6 deaths using a 9 mm pistol.

So to the extent that the information I could quickly find on such incidents and the weapons used is accurate, then a maximum of 10 out of 32 mass shootings with multiple deaths over the past 28 years in the United States employed a semi-automatic rifle to inflict some or all of the killings. The great majority used one or two handguns.

Although my memory was admittedly terribly faulty when writing the main blog entry above late last night (i.e., I couldn't offhand recall any of these incidents having used semi-automatic rifles), this compilation gives some idea as to the upper limit of the damage that could be avoided even if we magically removed all semi-automatic rifles (both military-style and others) from existence. I see little reason to hope that crazed gunmen would not simply turn to other weapons of comparable destructive capacity, such as semi-automatic shotguns and semi-automatic pistols, to carry out their schemes.

Addendum 2, August 1, 2012

I keep poking around the web more in search of other mass shootings not accounted for above. There is a whole category of them that some people refer to as "familicides," in which one person shoots and kills several family members inside their home, often ending with the suicide of the shooter. As just two examples, there was this one in California in 1989, and this one in Alabama in 2009. It's hard to pin down numbers on such incidents. They are obviously as sad and tragic as the mass shootings of strangers in public places, which are the focus of all of my discussion above, though they tend to frighten us less because they are less apparently random. I don't want to ignore this type of crime, nor to be accused of deliberately omitting them. But at the same time, I really don't want to invest the time and energy to suss out a comprehensive list of such incidents. That they occur in private and have victims with special relationships to the killer clearly means that some potential deterrents to public mass murder might help prevent these, while others would not. I'll leave it at that.

Oldie but goodie

I think it's been about three years since I first saw this little animation, but it still makes me LOL every single time I watch it. I've been reminded of it by how my online tournaments have been going the last few days.

Warning: Extremely naughty language. Avert sensitive ears.

Excellence

By age and physique, Kimberly Rhode is not what you would probably think of as the archetypal Olympic champion. But in terms of attitude, discipline, and results, she is, in fact, the epitome of one.

Due to a little insomnia, I was up at around 4 a.m. Sunday. Flipping channels, I happened to catch the final round of women's skeet shooting live, and so was privileged to see Rhode's amazing gold-medal run. Frankly, I don't think I had ever heard of her before yesterday. The shooting sports that I have participated in and that I still follow in gun magazines are not Olympic events.

Rhode has won an individual medal in five consecutive Olympics. That's Atlanta 1996 (gold in double trap at the age of 17), Sidney 2000 (bronze in double trap), Athens 2004 (gold in double trap), Beijing 2008 (silver in skeet), and now London 2012. No other American has accomplished that in any sport. What's more, she is not past her prime. In fact, she's better than ever. She crushed her competition this week, hitting 99 out of 100 clay pigeons--eight more than the silver medalist--setting a new Olympic record and tying the world record. All indications are that she will show up in Rio in 2016 and continue her streak, still with that big smile on her face.

This news story about her inspired me:

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/kimberly-rhode-unique-training-led-olympic-record-breaking-161829232--oly.html

She went out of her way to find places to practice that had wind and rain that would simulate what she would likely face in England, and shot in those difficult conditions when everybody else had quit. She doesn't beat herself up over the one missed shot, but instead sees it as an opportunity for improvement at the next Olympics.

And yet in spite of that drive for perfection, she still keeps its importance in perspective: It's a game. She does it because it's fun, and if she doesn't win, the world won't end.

This is what excellence is. I stand in awe of it.

(If you are too dense to see the obvious lessons to be learned about your poker game, well, I don't think me pointing them out is going to help.)

Thought for the day

From Wil Wheaton, on his birthday, which he asks us to recognize as "Don't Be a Dick" day:

"Live your life honestly, honorably, with kindness, compassion and generosity."

Whole thing here:

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2012/07/happy-dont-be-a-dick-day.html

Bad Grump! No brownies!

I have been playing much more online the past three days than I have in a long time. After a couple of nice wins, which I described here, my $200 deposit on Black Chip Poker had been turned into $661. Josie challenged me to try to get it to $1200 by the end of the month. It's a tall order. But she promised me the world's best brownies if I managed it. I cannot resist brownies. (They better not have nuts in them. I'll never understand why so many people ruin perfectly good brownies by adding nuts. Yuck.)

Whether or not they are the best, at this point, I'm afraid that they will be the most expensive brownies on earth--and I may pay for them and then never get to eat them. I have just been completely unable to win anything.

Tonight, first tournament I entered, second hand: AA. I raise and push it on every street, including a shove at the end. What was I up against? The Mighty Deuce-Four, which had turned trips on me:

Betrayed by the hand I have done so much to promote! It's an outrage, I tell you.

But I did take my small measure of revenge. I entered another tournament and started to beat other people's 2-4:

And as if in a feeble attempt at an apology, Deuce-Four did win me one pot tonight:

It wasn't enough, though, to overcome other horrendous beats I was taking. Here's a nice, clean five-outer, for instance:

I've been losing with K-K versus somebody else's Q-Q all in pre, with A-K versus A-Q all in pre, etc. Brutal, brutal, brutal.

But on the bright side, Josie and I were at the same table for quite a while in one of the events, and I was able to torture her, which is always fun.

Here, for example, she raised with A-8 and I called from the small blind with A-3. I flopped trips and let her bet the hand for me twice before check-raising her. She called not only that, but a healthy value bet on the river, too. The board was double-paired and she thought we'd chop it with an ace each. Uh, nope!

(Sorry I didn't do the screen grab right on that one, so it doesn't show our names or starting hands. But trust me on that history.)

A while later, I pulled this very ugly bit of nastiness on her, again with the treys:

(Ignore that colored stripe. I don't know how or why that got highlighted.)

My excuses (which admittedly is all they are): She only min-raised pre-flop, so it was cheap for me to call from the big blind. Then I flopped a pair. Who can fold a pair for one bet? She might have had A-Q and missed completely. And even if she had an overpair, my 8 gives me a draw to two pair. Then on the turn I added a flush draw. Fold a pair and a two-pair draw and a flush draw? Who ever heard of such nonsense! Then I rivered the trips, moved in, and she called with top pair/top kicker. What a donkey!!!!

(OK, truth is, if you want to tell me that I did everything wrong in that hand except shoving the river, I won't argue with you.)

Would you like to guess what that hand got me called in the IM chat? Hint: It rhymes with "door."

But Josie takes her revenge seriously. She dinged me something fierce with this hand later:

I lectured her about playing that one badly, but it likely fell on deaf ears, coming from somebody who had called her raises from out of position with A-3 and 8-3 and had gotten ridiculously lucky.

We both had barely more than min-cashes in that tournament, but it was a small prize pool, so not much more than the buy-in back.

I may try again tomorrow night. But the results had better turn around pretty quick, or I will be out both the money and the brownies. I'm not sure I could live with myself if that happened.

Vegas poker room changes

For those of you who have reason to want to keep track of the ever-shifting sands of Vegas poker rooms, "Las Vegas Michael" provides this handy summary of recent events for AllVegasPoker.com:

http://www.allvegaspoker.com/news_detail_587.html

Maybe half of those updates had escaped my attention, including that my old friend James Klotsky (I knew him first at Hilton, then at Alliante Station) was now running the poker room at Hard Rock, where I have not set foot in a couple of years. I might have to drop by there.

Binding?

Interesting rule dilemma about whether a conditional verbal declaration is binding, illustrated by a story from Rob:

http://robvegaspoker.blogspot.com/2012/07/verbal-is-binding.html

My rather lengthy comments are there, so I won't repeat them here.

Poker gems, #460

Gavin Griffin, in Card Player magazine column, July 11, 2012 (vol. 25, #14), page 60.

Losing players are trying to make hands, winning players are trying to make money.

I blame Josie, obviously

After all, she's the one that got me on this little online MTT kick the last few days.

I gave it another shot today. First two tourneys were pretty fast busts. But in the third, I caught fire early and was consistently in the top 20% of stacks through almost the whole thing, peaking at 3rd place fairly deep in the game:

I had grand visions of nearly criminal levels of abusing the poor short stacks on the bubble. But a couple of hands went bad and I ended up with a somewhat below average stack when the bubble came, so I had to just play tight through it.

When it had passed, the player to my right tried stealing the blinds twice in a row, and I shoved on him both times with mediocre hands, and he folded. This was a big boost to my chip position.

Then, to reuse a metaphor from the other day, that big ol' iceberg floated down south into the shipping lanes again.

I have KK and two players move all-in ahead of me! Wheeeeeee! Even better, when the cards are revealed, I have them both crushed:

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose!

Except that you can, in fact, lose:

They BOTH make full houses against me. (For the record, I was 68% to win when the money went in.)

Two hands later, I'm blessed (so to speak) with KK again. This time I'm up against AQ. Once again, all-in pre-flop and I'm a huge favorite. Until fourth street:

I feel the need to cite that Geico commercial where the guy tries to save money on a weight-loss program by just having three teenage girls follow him around, shaming him with comments on what he eats: "Ew." "Seriously?" "So gross."

I was left with only about 4 big blinds, which soon went in and lost. And with that, hopes for an $1100 score went crashing to the bottom of the ocean:

$60 cash, minus $22 entry fee is $38 profit. I think both of the earlier ones were $11, so net $16 for about 5 hours.

Ew. Seriously? So gross.

The only bit of amusement I got from it was seeing this very nice screen name/avatar combo:

"You should be playing MTTs," Josie said. "You'll make tons of money," Josie said. "You're so good at them," Josie said. "You'll have fun," Josie said.

Friggin' Josie.

Poker gems, #459

Adam Schoenfeld, in Card Player magazine column, July 11, 2012 (vol. 25, #14), page 52.

No decision in limit hold'em should take more than ten seconds.

It takes a thief to catch a thief--and a bluffer to catch a bluffer

See:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=liars-it-takes-one-to-know-one

Another nice online cash

I knew early on that today was going to be a kind of lazy, stay-home day, trying a few more online tournaments. And it was. I did four of them in the afternoon, but scored just one min-cash. Disappointing.

I went offline, had dinner, watched a movie, made a batch of absolutely perfect brownies. (Best mix is Ghirardelli's "Chocolate Supreme." That company makes about 7 different variations, but the "Chocolate Supreme" is the one to get.) I decided that I had one more shot in me for the day. I checked Black Chip Poker, and there was a $3000 guarantee $10 rebuy event underway. It had been running for 30 minutes or so already, so if I joined I would be at somewhat of a chip disadvantage. But I had the itch, and it was the only tourney of the right game type, buy-in that I wanted, etc. So I took it.

I doubled up on my second hand, so never felt the need for any rebuys or for the add-on at the first break. My investment, therefore, was minimal. The prize pool was $3820 from 160 players, so the average investment was about $24. I got in cheap.

I played my very best, made good decisions throughout. Never got outrageously lucky. The worst I ever got it in was about 2 spots off the bubble, I was down to 14 big blinds and shoved with a suited J-9 in late position, got called by A-K offsuit. Flop A-J-9. That gave me enough chips that I didn't have much of a sweat of making the money after that.

People kept going out fast, and we moved up and up the money ladder. The end came when I was third in chips with four left, but still pretty healthy stacks. The biggest stack raised with K-10, I reraised with A-10 from the small blind. He called. Flop was 10-Q-2. I shoved, he called. And you can sort of guess what happened:

Frickin' 3-outer on the river! Winning that pot would have put me in prime position to take the whole thing down, for a top prize of $1031. Sigh.

Oh well. The $347 I got instead is still the biggest online score I've had since Black Friday last year. Besides, the cash was enough to make my earning rate for the day around $40 per hour. So I shouldn't complain.

You remember that I mentioned the other day that Josie is always trying to get me to do multi-table tournaments instead of single-tables? Well, though it pains me greatly to say this, it's theoretically POSSIBLE that Josie was right.

Gun control

Jason Alexander posted an essay on TwitLonger in response to yesterday's mass shooting in Colorado. Among his concerns was the hyperbolic tone of those who disagreed with him. (I don't blame him. I've spent a WHOLE lot of time around gun-rights advocates, and many of them really are alarmingly immoderate in tone, not to mention embarrassingly simple-minded in analysis. And I say that even though I mostly agree with them in substance.) So I whipped off a partial reply that I hope he will think sufficiently thoughtful and respectful to be worth reading. I think he's a person who can be reasoned with.

It obviously has nothing to do with poker, and it is hardly a comprehensive or rigorous argument, but if you want to read the points that I dashed off quickly, it's here:

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/if38q0

Addendum:

Jason Alexander read my reply. (How great a tool is Twitter, anyway?!) He retweeted it, then said, "Thanks4 your tone & information &thoughts. Complex subject but it is this kind of exchange that makes change. best wishes."

It pleases me greatly that I accomplished exactly what I had hoped to, which was to show him (and his many, many Twitter followers) that there is a non-crazy basis for holding a public policy position that he had come close to ruling out of decent society, and to do so without rancor. I'm sure I didn't change his mind, but if I taught him a few facts that he didn't previously know, and got him to make room in his mind for the possibility that an opposite conclusion could be a reasonable one, well, that counts for something, and it was well worth the 30 minutes or so it took me to produce it.

Addendum 2

I just reread the Eugene Volokh article that I referenced in my piece, and noticed that among the people he thanks for assistance is one "David Sklansky." There can't be that many people with that name. Does anybody know why the guy I know for poker writing would have been involved in helping research an academic article on constitutional law circa 1998?

REAL winner this time

I had a horrible night of poker at the Stratosphere last night, the kind that was bad enough that I knew that I would not feel like going out to play today, which meant that I could instead dink around with the online stuff. I told Josie this, asked her when she might want to play, and she said, "Now." OK.

She picked a $10 turbo bounty tournament on Black Chip. She did great, and ended up taking 2nd place. I bombed out fairly early. She wanted to start a second game. The next MTT up was another bounty event, $15, with $10 to the prize pool and a $5 bounty. She busted from this one even faster than I had from the first, perhaps because she was focusing on her deep run. But I went on to have my own deep run this time--the deepest kind, in fact:

After Josie had finished her game, she went off and had dinner, so she didn't see my little triumph. She came back on to IM a few minutes after it was all over:

Josie: where are you?

Josie: are you still in the game?

Grump: it just ended

Grump: I winz it

Josie: omfg

Josie: congrats

Grump: you did not see.

Josie: awesome!

Grump: so sad

Josie: nooo

Josie: i wouldve loved to watch you

Josie: damn i just missed it

Josie: see what i mean?

Josie: these are the games to make money

Josie: you played 2 and cashed in one

[Editorial note: When we get together to chat and play, we always disagree on what event to pick. I always prefer SNGs for the shorter time commitment and higher likelihood of cashing. She prefers MTTs for the chance at a bigger score. She usually defers to my wishes, but today I deferred to hers.]

Grump: takes a long time though

Josie: so what

Josie: i wish i stayed

Josie: i thought you were out

Grump: 1st place $179, plus I picked up about 8 bounties, $5 each

Josie: ohh and dont think i didnt notice

Josie: omfg

Grump: didn't notice what?

Josie: i take 2nd...and you MUST take first

Josie: omfg

Grump: lol

Josie: dammit

This is Josie being a supportive friend, by complaining that I topped her outcome!

Anyway, along the way I snapped off a bluff with the Mighty Deuce-Four. (To read the hand history, you have to imagine the lower screen shot here as if to the right of the upper one.)

When down to six-handed play, I was the huge chip leader and feeling like I was cruising to the win. But then my Titanic hit an iceberg. I got it all in with flopped two pair versus opponent's overpair, and he turned a set. Then on the very next hand I lost in a flopped set-over-set situation. Ugh. It was brutal.

Good thing I had had that big chip lead, and enough cushion to survive those massive hits. They took me down to below average.

Fortunately, there was not a single other aggressive player in the bunch. They were all playing ABC poker, betting/raising if they had something, folding if they didn't. So I was able to rob them mercilessly, picking up nearly every orphan pot, and gradually climbed back into parity. With three left, our stacks were so even that the chip lead changed after almost every pot, until I knocked out one, went into heads-up with the lead, and never relinquished it.

The final hand:

It's been quite a long time since I took first in an online, multi-table, real-money tourney. I have to grant this to Josie's side of the argument: It feels pretty damn good.

Winner and champeeeeeeeeeeeeen

I played in another of the occasional unofficial AVP home-game tournaments on PokerStars tonight. It was an eight-game mix (HORSE plus 2-7 triple draw, no-limit hold'em, and pot-limit Omaha). I conquered a simply MASSIVE field of eight players, taking home every last bit of the valuable prize money:

Along the way, I had this rather nice hand, though I couldn't get paid off:

That's it. End of blog post.

Poker gems, #458

Matt Matros, in Card Player magazine interview, July 11, 2012 (vol. 25, #14), page 34. Deep into a World Series of Poker event earlier this summer, he got all in with K-K versus an opponent's A-K, and lost the massive pot when an ace fell on the river.

There are going to be times when you go from the big stack to the short stack for reasons outside of your control and hopefully you've been through it enough to make a quick mental adjustment, shrug it off and continue to play your best. Having said that, I don't think I've ever experienced anything quite so drastic. Had I won that pot, I would've been the chip leader with about 1 million while second place held only 300,000. Instead, I was left with a below average stack.... I was a little shaken, but I started to look at the positives. I told myself that I was still in the hunt with 30 players left [out of] a massive field. Chances like that don't come around everyday [sic], so I could either sit back and complain about my bad luck, or really try to make the most of the opportunity.

[Matros recovered and went on to win the tournament ($1500 6-max no-limit hold'em), his third bracelet in three years.]

Red Rock Canyon

This morning I went for a hike in Red Rock Canyon with my friend Claudia, who is at the tail end of several weeks in town to deal for the World Series of Poker. We chose the trail to "Ice Box Canyon." We didn't get all the way to the end. We're both old farts and I, for one, am hardly in tiptop physical condition. Young whippersnappers were passing us as if we were standing still. Which, admittedly, we were quite a bit. Gotta rest a lot when you're decrepit. The roughly four miles we trekked was plenty, especially since at least a third of the distance was climbing over rocks rather than flat hiking in the usual Boy Scout sense. In fact, Claudia certified me as having done at least a week's worth of exercise, giving me permission to vegetate for the next seven days. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

There simply does not exist nicer weather in Vegas in July than we hit today, and if there is more spectacular scenery anywhere within an hour of the city, I don't know what it could possibly be. We chose well.

I'm afraid I may have annoyed her with my frequent stops to take pictures. I was captivated by both the grand vistas and the small details. But I was simultaneously frustrated in advance, knowing that nobody short of Ansel Adams could do justice to the beauty surrounding us. Well, I tried.

We saw lots of lizards. I kinda like lizards. I think they're cute. Most were smaller than this sunbather. (For all photos, click to see somewhat bigger. Right click and select "open link in new tab" for the full-size shot.)

When I saw this shrub, I thought it was one of a kind. It's hard to tell what's happening, but it looks like the dead part of the plant sort of erupted out of the skin of the living part. I had never seen anything like it. But a short distance later, there was another just like it, then another and another. We passed dozens of them, all looking like the careful branch-by-branch fusion of a living brush and its dead predecessor. If anybody understands this odd botanical phenomenon, please enlighten me.

I think this is my favorite shot of the bunch. I looked back at one point and saw this lone, dead tree standing out in contrast to the sky and mountain ridge behind, and it bowled me over with its stark beauty. I had to leave Claudia for a few minutes and backtrack to find the best vantage point to capture it. I guess you could say I experienced an aesthetic emergency that could be addressed only by pressing a shutter release a few times. I'm afraid the result isn't as grand as what my visual cortex recorded. You'll just have to go find the spot yourself to see what I mean.

I think I was even less successful here. Maybe I'm weird to think that dead trees are lovely, but I do. The charring of this one, and the strange geometry created when it fell over, made it even more so, in my view. But again I don't think I managed to convey that adequately in the final shot. I was going for a 3-D-ish effect, with the near end of the tree coming right into the viewer's face. It seemed cool at the time, but when I see it on my computer screen--eh, not so much.

Your humble scribe:

And his lovely companion for the day:

And now this blog is pleased to present to you an assortment of the pretty rocks and mountains we saw, without further comment:

One form of sexism in poker

I see that the final nine of the WSOP Main Event have been determined since I went to bed. Every news story I have seen so far--and, I predict, every one I will see in the future--prominently mentions that two women were eliminated just short of the final table, in 11th and 10th places.

More troubling is that as Day 7 played out, my Twitter feed was full of people openly expressing their hopes that one or both remaining women would make the final table. Poker being a zero-sum game, if you hope that a female makes the final table and/or wins, it is the same as hoping that a male does not do so.

None of the people I follow on Twitter who hoped for the women to advance did so on the basis of knowing them personally, or because of them having superior poker skill and thus deserving the victory. It was entirely because of their sex, and for no other reason.

If you want for a good outcome to happen to one person and a bad outcome to happen to another person for no reason other than their respective genders, well, we have a couple of words in our language for what that makes you: (1) sexist, and (2) bigot.

I think I expressed this as well as I'm capable of doing four years ago when Tiffany Michelle was garnering attention for being the "last woman standing":

Yes, women are statistically under-represented at poker tables generally and in big poker tournaments specifically. But that is true of black people, too, so that fact does not constitute a rational justification for paying attention to one group but not the other.

If you privately are glad to see that a black person will not win the Main Event this year, then you are obviously a racist. Of course, if you are upset about the fact that a black person will not win the Main Event this year, then that makes you a racist, too. Similarly, if you hope that Michelle is eliminated because for whatever reason you can't stand the idea of a woman winning, you are sexist. And, in parallel, if you were rooting for her to win solely because of her gender, that, too, makes you sexist. It's all the same. If you favor or disfavor a person because of race, you're a racist. If you favor or disfavor a person because of sex, you're a sexist. You're a bigot either way.

One of the great things about poker is that it simply doesn't matter whether you're male or female, black, white, Hispanic, or Asian, young or old, tall or short, skinny or fat, physically handicapped or a perfect specimen of humanity. Not only is the game equally open to all, but none of those characteristics intrinsically impact one's ability to learn and succeed at the game.

Frankly, I find the attention heaped on female players in the spotlight demeaning to women. Every time there is attention lavished on a female player specifically because she is female, there is at least a vague undertone that she merits the attention because she's doing something one would tend to think she shouldn't be able to do, like a pig learning to play a Brahms piano concerto.

What would be most genuinely respectful of women, in my never-humble opinion, is silently accepting, as a simple matter of fact--so obvious that it's not even worth mentioning, let alone dwelling on--that women are just as capable of playing the game as men are.

To the media outlets and bloggers who focus on the Last Woman Standing, but completely disregard the Last Black Standing, I ask you to justify why you deem one worthy of your attention but not the other. Can you do it?

I think it should be noted that nobody either in or out of the poker media took me up on the challenge to explain why the sex of a poker player was newsworthy but race was not. I'm still listening, should anybody care to try.

I am so envious

http://lasvegasblog.harrahs.com/las-vegas-entertainment/rios-penn-and-teller-get-some-pumped-up-kicks/

Cards for pot--it's a trade

People, people, people--when will you ever learn? Do not muck what you believe to be the winning hand until the dealer pushes you the pot. This is not that difficult a concept. You gain nothing by trying to jump the gun and muck them the first instant you think the hand is over, and once in a while you'll lose a great deal, as illustrated by a story from yesterday at the WSOP:

http://www.pokernews.com/live-reporting/2012-world-series-of-poker/event-61-no-limit-hold-em-main-event/day5/post.208172.htm

(Hat tip: Hard-Boiled Poker.)

Riviera success, Tropicana fail

A few months ago, a friend of mine who lives in Australia wanted to organize a couple of get-togethers for people who, like him, participate in an online poker forum. He comes to Vegas for about six weeks every year. After consulting with potential participants about when they might be in town, he picked two dates, June 24 and July 8, both Sunday evenings. Between those two dates, nearly everybody who was interested in coming could make at least one of them.

I volunteered to make arrangements for small private poker tournaments. Because I live in town and know the poker rooms pretty intimately, I thought I was in a good position to pick spots. The poker room manager of the Riviera piped up on the forum, actively offering his facilities at a discounted rate, so that was half of the decision easily made. I could have done both nights there, but wanted to spread the business around a little, because I thought that people attending from out of town might not have seen other poker rooms and would appreciate the variety.

The first event at the Riviera was just perfect. They were great hosts and took really good care of us, taking pains to be sure that we all had a wonderful time. I could not have been more pleased. If you're ever have occasion to have a private poker tournament, I recommend that you put the Riviera near or at the top of your list of venues to consider.

The Tropicana, however, is another story. I spoke to the poker room manager by telephone in late April, explaining what we were looking for. He promised that he would come up with a proposal for a tournament cost and structure and get back to me. He did, several days later.

My first warning sign of trouble was that he clearly had me mixed up with somebody else for whom he was also negotiating a private poker event. He had the date wrong, he had the number of expected participants wrong, and he remembered that we had wanted to have pizza available, which is something I had not requested. But after getting those items corrected, he gave me his proposal, and I accepted it: July 8, 8 p.m., total of $75 buy-in. The tournament was to be followed by low-stakes cash games, and he promised (just as the Riviera had) to lower the usual rake for any cash games we started. I told him that exactly what games we played would depend on the preferences of those who showed up, but that something like the dealer's-choice mixed game that they regularly offer on Monday nights might be interesting to our guests. He said that would be fine, and if we did that, we could make it either $2/4 or $3/6 limits.

So it appeared that all was in place. Early Sunday I sent him an email as a final confirmation that all was in place. I did not get a reply (still haven't, in fact), but I didn't worry about this. I just assumed that the room manager had the day off and thus didn't see the message. In retrospect, I should have seen that lack of reply as more of a red flag than I did.

Just before 7:15, as I was getting ready to leave home, the first people to arrive were sending messages via Twitter that the staff of the poker room had no idea what private tournament they were talking about. Some small misunderstanding, I thought. So I quickly printed out a copy of the email the poker room manager had sent me containing the details and stuck it in my pocket as I headed out the door.

When I got there, it was as the others had said. The guy behind the desk knew nothing about it. Furthermore, he had in the interim called the room manager, who had claimed to know nothing about any private tournament. They had just one dealer on duty, running their one and only cash game.

I called the room manager. He said that there had been a flood in his office that destroyed his computer, and he had lost all of his emails for the last few months. I was highly skeptical of this story. (I related it to those who had arrived, and one of them quipped, "So he's telling you that the dog ate his homework." Yep--that's about it.) But he said that they always had dealers on call in case they got busy, and they could have someone there in about 20 minutes, and he would take $5 off of the house's portion of the tournament entry fee to help compensate for the misunderstanding. Fine--that was easier than trying to organize going somewhere else at the last minute.

The dealer arrived, sat into the cash game, and the one that had been in the cash game ran our single-table tournament. But when it was over, we were told that we couldn't open another cash game as we had planned; the dealer who ran our tournament was already on overtime and they couldn't keep him there any longer.

A few of us decided to go over to Bally's and play there instead. Others went their separate ways.

The whole thing was a disorganized mess from that second phone call on. I was embarrassed, because I had promised everybody that all was in place, and the failure made me look bad. (Admittedly I could have been more aggressive about rechecking before the appointed date to make sure that all was set. But I assumed that I didn't need to, that this guy was a professional at running his room, and that when he promised to be ready for a private poker tournament at a certain date and time, he would be.)

So what I said about giving consideration to the Riviera if you need to find a venue for a private poker event? Do the opposite for the Tropicana. Put them at the very bottom of your list, unless you relish the idea of your event being ignored and forgotten.

Dogs playing poker

Can this be beat for sheer adorableness? I say no!

http://lasvegasblog.harrahs.com/gaming/wsop-hosts-dogs-playing-poker-photo-op/

Deuce-Four wins a tournament

See last hand described here:

http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/micromillions/micromillions_ii/2012/micromillions-ii-jump-for-joy-for-jephoy-095919.html

Poopcorn must die

Now, see, I'm laughing out loud just typing out that post title. Sadly, only one reader will find it as funny as I do.

I was playing a few SNGs with Josie tonight, and IM-chatting with her on the side, when I had occasion to type that phrase. As I looked at it there on my screen, I thought, "There must come into existence a blog post with that title. It's too good to waste." I lamely suggested to Josie that she write one, but I don't think she will. So it falls to me.

The problem is that the story that generated the phrase, well, it just isn't very interesting, nor is it very funny. If I bothered to type it out, you'd all read it and think, "That's it?" Which is probably what you'll think when I end up leaving it a mystery, too. Oh well. Nothing I can do about that.

I guess you'll just have to take my word for it: Poopcorn must die.

Probability of a bigger pair

Ed Miller's column in the June 27 issue of Card Player magazine is about bet-sizing tells. He walks the reader through a hand that he played while holding Q-Q, showing how opponents' bet sizes helped him deduce what hands he was up against. I have no quibbles with his reasoning. In fact, it's a highly worthwhile piece, and the sort of insight that makes me never want to miss his columns.

I do, however, have a quibble with an incidental point tossed in along the way. In explaining why he elected to just call rather than reraise when faced with an opening raise from a nit under the gun, he says:

[T]here are still five unknown hands behind me. There's about a one percent chance each player has either A-A or K-K, making about a five percent chance in total that one of the two hands I'm most afraid of is lurking behind me.

(Note: this is just one of the reasons he cites for not reraising, not the only one.)

At first I wondered why he was making a distinction between the players who have already acted and those yet to act. After all, A-A or K-K is an ugly problem for Q-Q no matter where on the table it is being held. But I think I see what he means. If he were in the big blind, and thus last to act on the raise, and nobody had reraised yet, then he could quite confidently assume that nobody was holding A-A or K-K, unless it is the UTG nit.

Or put it another way: Before there is any action, there is a fixed probability that any other player has been dealt a pocket pair higher than Q-Q. But people so reliably raise and reraise with A-A or K-K that when they fail to do so, we can safely revise downward that estimated probability.

What is the a priori probability that somebody at a ten-handed table has been dealt A-A or K-K when I'm holding Q-Q? It turns out to be a ferociously complicated mathematical problem, one that I could never solve on my own. Fortunately, though, somebody a lot smarter than me has already worked it out, and you can see both the process and the result here:

http://people.math.sfu.ca/~alspach/comp35/

The table containing the solution is at the bottom of the page. The answer for Q-Q is 0.0841. That is, if I see Q-Q in my hand, and I have nine opponents, about 8.4% of the time one of them will be holding a pair bigger than mine. That does indeed work out to a round estimate of about a 1% probability that any particular one of them has the goods. And that's a useful rule of thumb. Before there is any action (action constituting additional information to throw into our estimation math), each player in a full ring game has about a 1% chance of having been dealt a pair higher than my queens.

If I'm in the big blind and nobody has raised, then probably nobody has a bigger pair, unless they're trying the ol' limp/reraise thing. Also, if I open-raise from under the gun with my Q-Q and get only callers with no reraise, I can go to the flop reasonably confident that nobody has A-A or K-K. But really, that fact has everything to do with what we know from experience about how people play, and little to do with the math. The conclusion would be equally true if the a priori probability of somebody holding a bigger pair were 80%, or 0.8%, rather than the actual 8%.

But I think there's a problem with how Ed applies the math to the situation he describes. Once a nitty player has opened for a raise from under the gun, we no longer have the baseline 8% chance that somebody at the table has A-A or K-K. The probability now has to be estimated to be vastly greater than that. Exactly how much greater depends, obviously, on exactly how nitty this particular nit is. If he is the extreme case and will only raise UTG with exactly A-A or K-K, then our previous 8% probability goes to 100%. Of course, it's not often you'll have a player with a range that narrowly definable, so it usually won't go up all the way to 100%. But it's surely a damn sight higher than 8%.

If the nit does, in fact, have A-A or K-K, then the probability that any other player at the table also has A-A or K-K is much lower than the roughly 1% apiece that we would otherwise be using as our rule of thumb. Using the next column in Alspach's table, we see that the a priori probability that two players have been dealt pocket pairs bigger than my queens is only about 0.2%--a negligible quantity. The implication is this: The fact that a nit put in an UTG raise means that the probability of a bigger pocket pair being out there is much greater than the baseline 8% (as just discussed), but also that nearly all of that probability resides in the nit, not in the players who will be acting behind me.

It is thus no longer true that each player behind us still has a 1% chance of holding aces or kings. Our estimate of the probability that any one of them has A-A or K-K must be greatly reduced from its baseline ~1% by the fact of having observed that UTG raise from the nit. Put most simply: As the probability that the UTG nit has aces or kings goes up, the probability that anybody else at the table has aces or kings goes down.

Now, this is where it gets a little weird and mind-bendy. Because two things are simultaneously true: (A) The probability that any player is dealt A-A is independent of whether any player is dealt K-K.* (B) Alspach's calculation of a 0.2% probability of two players having A-A or K-K is no longer valid once we actually know that one player has one of those hands. The 0.2% is valid only when we have no information except for having seen our own Q-Q.

This is analogous to questions such as the probability of a roulette wheel hitting 00 twice in a row. It is 1/38 x 1/38 = 0.026 x 0.026 = 0.0007. But if we spin and the ball falls in that 00 slot the first time, now the probability of seeing 00 twice in a row greatly increases, to 0.026. Of course, the probability that the second spin will be 00 has not changed one smidgen by virtue of the result of the first spin, yet the probability of seeing two 00s in a row has changed.

So it is with the A-A and K-K. If we know that the UTG player surely or almost surely has A-A or K-K, we have to throw out the window the Alspach table numbers. They no longer apply. The 8% probability (that exactly one player has A-A or K-K when I have Q-Q) is no longer valid because we have strong reason to believe that this specific shuffle of the deck did, in fact, result in one of those 8% events. And the 0.2% probability (that two players have each been dealt A-A or K-K when I have Q-Q) is no longer valid both for that reason, and for the reason that once the UTG nit is known to have A-A or K-K, two of those eight cards are no longer available to be given to other players.

The knowledge (or at least high suspicion) that UTG nit has one of the two premium pairs is akin to opening the sealed box in which Schrodinger's poor cat has been confined. It is now known to be either alive or dead, not in some hybrid or probabilistically indeterminate state.

Mind you, I don't claim to have worked out the math so as to be able to tell you exactly what the new, revised probability is that each of the five players yet to act has a pair bigger than Q-Q, in addition to the one that we presume is hiding under the nit's card protector, but it is definitely not well estimated by the 1% rule of thumb. It must be substantially lower than that. Exactly how much lower depends entirely on the degree of confidence with which we can assign A-A or K-K to the open-raising nit.

*Note: I realize that that is not quite true, because as soon as two aces are in a player's hand and no longer in the deck from which the dealer is pitching cards, the concentration of kings in the deck rises slightly by virtue of card subtraction, so the probability of K-K goes up slightly. But it's a tiny difference.