Muddled thinking about probability

At the Hilton today, the guy on my right lost an all-in contest with pocket kings versus pocket aces. Can't blame him--it happens, and it's very difficult to get away unscathed if you're holding the cowboys. But after it was over, he rationalized his call of the all-in bet by saying, "I didn't think he had aces, because this guy [pointing to another player] just had aces on the previous hand."

Wow.

It's hard to know how to respond to such idiotic thinking. It's the classic gambler's fallacy--thinking that previous independent events influence the outcome of the current situation.

It's true that if at any particular time we ask, "How likely is it that pocket aces will be dealt on both of the next two hands at this table?" the answer is that it's pretty small. In fact, it's easy to quantify it. Each person has a 1/221 chance of being dealt aces on any hand.* There are ten players at the table, so on each deal there is a 10/221 chance that somebody will get pocket aces (about 4.5%). For that to happen twice in a row, the probability is 10/221 times 10/221, or about 0.2%.

But once somebody is dealt aces on the first hand that we're observing, the probability that a player will get aces on the next hand isn't 0.2%; it is, again, exactly what it was before, 10/221. Neither the cards nor the shuffler has any memory about what just happened. Even if aces are shown for ten hands in a row, the probability of somebody getting them on the next hand goes right back to precisely what it was (assuming the auto-shuffler is working properly, the dealer isn't cheating, etc.).

It's amazing how people cling to this fallacy, when just the tiniest amount of thought shows how wrong it is. Casinos often set up displays showing recent outcomes of the roulette wheel, and people idiotically consult it before making their bets. Some of them see, e.g., a run of odd numbers recently hitting, and decide that there's a trend underway, so they bet on "odd." Others look at the same accounting, decide that since so many odd numbers have hit it must be time for things to head back toward parity, and therefore bet on "even." Both conclusions are equally looney.** (For empirical evidence that gamblers really do act according to these irrational beliefs, see Sundali and Croson, "Biases in casino gambling: The hot hand and the gambler's fallacy," Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 1, #1, (July, 2006), pp. 1-12, available online at http://journal.sjdm.org/06001/jdm06001.htm.)

There's nothing particular shameful in getting felted*** because you had the second best possible hand up against the best possible hand. It happens to everybody from time to time. But if any part of your decision to commit your chips in that situation was because your judgment of the probability of the opponent having aces was skewed by a previous independent event, well, then you're an imbecile. It's just as ludicrous as saying you thought you'd win the showdown because your horoscope said that today was your lucky day, or because you're wearing your lucky socks.


*In case it isn't clear how this number is derived, here it is: To get pocket aces, first you have to be dealt one ace (duh!), then a second one (double duh!). The probability of the first one is 4/52, because there are 4 aces out of 52 cards in the deck. Now the probability of the second card being an ace is 3/51, because there are 3 aces and 51 cards left unaccounted for. Multiply 4/52 by 3/51, and you get 12/2652, which reduces to exactly 1/221.

**I'm aware that there's a kind of exotic exception to this. Roulette wheels, being mechanical devices, aren't quite perfect, and with tens of thousands of observations, one can, in theory, discover small biases in how the wheel is spinning, and thus gain a statistical edge over the house. Some people have actually managed to win some decent money this way, particularly in Europe, where, I understand, roulette wheels give a smaller built-in house profit margin because they have only a "0" spot, and not the added "00" spot that American roulette games usually have. There are two problems with trying to make money this way, however. The first is that it takes an incredible amount of work to gain what is usually a relatively small statistical advantage. The second is that casinos have ways of foiling your plans, such as switching the top ends of the roulette wheels, or moving the tables around, or doing maintenance on the mechanisms, all of which will tend to occur when you're not there to see it, thus making your hours of tedious observations worthless. Even moving the table to, e.g., vacuum under it may cause it to be put back down in a slightly different place on a slightly uneven floor, thus shifting the wheel's bias by a few degrees.

***Some may not have heard this term. It's another inventive Phil Laak-ism, meaning to lose all your chips: you're down to the felt on the table.

Addendum, September 13, 2007

In this week's installment of the 2007 World Series of Poker main event on ESPN, professional poker player Hevad Khan moves all in with Q-Q against an opponent's A-A. This opponent had apparently held K-K just a few hands earlier, though this hand wasn't shown on the broadcast. Khan gets unbelievably lucky and flops the other two queens. When the hand is over, he chats with the guy who had the aces and says, "Dude, you understand it's so hard to put you on aces and kings in one orbit." So, apparently Khan felt that his queens must be good because he couldn't believe that this opponent, having recently had kings, could have either aces or kings again so soon. This tells us that even some professional players can't get their minds around the fact that each hand is completely independent of previous ones.

Blue chip beggars

I wrote recently (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/dealers-who-are-stingy-with-their-1.html) about the "Blue chip Nazis" (a term suggested by one of the commenters)--dealers who are stingy about making change for red ($5) chips. Well, there's a parallel phenomenon: Players who are blue chip beggars.

These are the guys who, like the grasshopper in Aesop's fable (see http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/36.html), do not lay in a store of blue chips in anticipation of needing them to pay blinds, tip cocktail waitresses, etc. Then suddenly they discover that they need a blue chip or two, and they have none. Shame, shame!

I really don't care much about most in this group, because they just go to the dealer and get what they need. It's one sub-group that annoys me: the ones who instead turn to their fellow players.

Here I am with my carefully protected stack of 10 or so blue chips, and these idiots ask me for change for a $5 chip. I don't want to be the bad guy, so I do it, but then that means that I have to throw in a red chip for my blinds for a round or two, to get my stock of blues back up to where I want it. Hey, pal, how did your lack of planning become my problem to solve, eh? Get your own change!

I remember in junior high school and high school, there were always a couple of kids in the class who would show up without the standard supplies, then ask to borrow a piece of paper and pencil--as if it were beyond their feeble imaginations that such things might turn out to be useful in a classroom. It was always the same morons, day after day.

I have a theory that these same kids grow up to be blue-chip beggars. The ones who don't play poker very well end up on street corners holding up "Will work for food" signs.

Hey, that gives me an idea. Next time one of these imbeciles asks me for change for a red chip, I'm going to insist that he make and display a "Will work for blue chips" sign.

Another poker dump, and a study in contrasts

I am determined to eventually play at least once in every poker room Las Vegas has to offer. Today I scratched another one off the list: Arizona Charlie's-Decatur.

It will save a lot of time if I just say "ditto" to nearly everything I previously wrote about the El Cortez (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/04/armpit-of-las-vegas-poker.html). The ACD poker "room" is just two tables roped off from the surrounding slot machines and blackjack tables. It doesn't even have a sign, so you can wander around the casino for quite a while before finding it. I had to ask a security guy, because I went around the entire perimeter and never saw a poker room or even a sign pointing to it--guess they wouldn't want to draw undue attention to it.

The main difference from the El Cortez is that ACD allows smoking right at the table. Today was only the second time I've sat in a game with smoking going on at the table. Fortunately, I was on an end seat, with a reasonably powerful desk fan right behind me, so I was upwind of all the smokers--which was literally everyone else in the game.

The other difference from the E.C. is that they were spreading a semi-normal hold'em game: $4-8 limit, with the unusual but not bizarro $1-2 blinds. I managed to lose only $26 in the course of an hour. I was actually ahead for most of the session, until losing one huge pot. After I flopped top two pairs, I pushed as hard as I could, but got called down and beaten by a backdoor flush. Now, this in itself wouldn't be too unusual, except that on the flop this guy had no pair and no draw, other than the runner-runner flush, yet he called a bet and a raise before the flop, and another bet and raise on the flop, with a suited K-5.* For readers who aren't obsessively into poker, I'll just say that this is seriously stupid play; in order to win, he had to get a club on the turn (about a 20% chance of that) and a club on the river (another roughly 20% chance), something like a 4% chance of both events happening. The point here isn't to complain about the beat or to garner sympathy, but to illustrate the level of play going on at ACD.

One elderly guy almost perpetually looked either asleep or dead. I kept wanting to suggest that the poker room manager call the paramedics to check his pulse and see if he was still alive. But then he'd stir a bit, scrape something out of his ear, look at it, and flick it on the floor. I thought that dead people probably wouldn't do this--at least not as often as he was doing it.

After my obligatory hour at ACD, I hopped over to the gorgeous Venetian, to put in a few more hours towards their 50-hours-in-August tournament promotion. What a contrast. It's hard to imagine two poker rooms farther apart on the scale of classiness. The Venetian is the top Editor's Choice on the only site (as far as I know) dedicated to comparing and commenting on Vegas poker rooms, http://www.allvegaspoker.com/. It's also usually one of the top two as voted by contributors to that site. See, e.g., this visitor's review, which I think is spot-on (except the part about Cassandra--sorry, but I just haven't paid much attention to the cocktail waitresses, other than to note that too many of them have gone way too big on the breast implants; it's kind of hard not to notice that): http://www.allvegaspoker.com/player_review_2382.html.

Arizona Charlie's-Decatur is like the anti-Venetian. If they were to come into physical contact, they would annihilate each other in a universe-shaking explosion. (Stephen Hawking, if you're reading this, please feel free to comment on the repercussions of such contact on the space-time continuum.)

I picked up my mandatory $1 and $5 chips for the souvenir collection, but when I look at them again some day, I expect that it will give me a shudder of disgust at the memory: "Ewwwwwwwwwww, I actually sat in that nasty room for an hour? What was I thinking?!"



*Probably the most thoughtful and refined guide to profitable selection of starting hands for a game like this is Lee Jones, "Winning Low Limit Hold'em" (3rd edition, 2005). K-5, suited or not, does not appear anywhere in his charts of recommended hands to play from any position. In other words, the consensus of studious, long-time winning players (yeah, it's a single-author book, but Jones has had a ton of input over the years his book has been in print, and he comments pretty profusely on how and why he has changed his mind on some points, after thoughtful comments from other pros he respects) is that K-5 (actually, any K with lower than a 9 kicker) is a dog in every situation, with a negative expected value over the long run (i.e., you'll lose more than you win playing it). So calling a raise before the flop was already pretty boneheaded, let alone calling another bet and raise after the flop when he had not improved.

Addendum, August 21, 2007: During a session at the Venetian today, I finally spotted the aforementioned "Cassandra." I can see why she caught the writer's attention. She is truly an exotic beauty--Hawaiian, maybe. Still, attractive women are about a dime a dozen in Vegas, and even if a place had a monopoly on gorgeous young women serving drinks, that would make for a pretty piss-poor reason to choose a place to play poker.

Something that is NOT against the rules, for a change

If you've played poker more than once or twice at the Las Vegas Hilton, you've probably run into Annie, a 59-year-old (which I know because it was her birthday last week, and she was telling everybody) Asian woman who practically lives there. She's too much of a character to fit into one blog post, so for now I'll limit my observations to this: If you beat her for a large pot because you played a superior hand well, she's a pretty good sport about losing. If you suck out on her with a worse hand, there will be hell to pay. And if you beat her by being tricky and non-straightforward, she will take it personally, and decide that you're scum unworthy of the game of poker. Aces and kings and queens deserve to win; if you win with junk hands, you're a disgrace, as Annie sees it.

I should note that Annie has actually been kind to me the vast majority of the time. She has some sort of clothing business, and once gave me a nice silk shirt and a silk sofa pillow, for no apparent reason. She engages in friendly chat, asks about my life, tells me about things going on in hers, etc. When there's an especially bad player at the table, sometimes we engage in quiet conspiratorial whisperings about that fact. As far as I can tell, Annie is a genuinely decent person--she just has this prominent flaw of being incredibly judgmental and rigid about how poker should be played.

I'm mostly a classic tight-aggressive player. Probably nine out of ten times that I put in a pre-flop raise, I have the predictable range of hole cards: big or medium pairs, big but unpaired cards, suited connectors. But about one time in ten I try to throw in an oddball, to keep people guessing about me: 4-2, 6-9, K-3, or whatever. When those hands hit, they are not only extremely difficult for opponents to guess that I have, but everybody watching me make such a play will remember the unorthodoxy of it, and as a result have less confidence in future situations that they can put me on a narrow, predictable range of hands.

For example, a few weeks ago I raised with an unsuited 8-9 and had one caller (Cy--a very nice guy, and better-than-average player). The flop was 5-6-7, giving me the nuts. I bet. Cy, who knows my style of play pretty well, raised. I never saw his hole cards, but he didn't need to have anything to raise me here. All he needs to know is that usually this kind of flop won't have helped my most likely holdings (such as A-K or A-J), and that therefore my bet is really a bluff and I'll have to fold to a raise. It was a smart play on his part, even if he had nothing at all. It would usually have worked. But in this instance, I had something he couldn't reasonably suspect. I re-raised and took the pot without further contest. (I think he knows me well enough to understand that I'm very unlikely to put in that re-raise without having the goods to back it up.)

Anyway, after playing for a while this afternoon, I thought too many of my raises had been with the expected hands, and it was time to throw a curve ball, so I put in a pre-flop raise with a 4-5 offsuit, from middle position. Annie was the only caller, in the big blind. As it turned out, she had a suited A-8.

The flop was 8-6-3, giving Annie top pair/top kicker, and giving me an open-ended straight draw. She checked, then called my bet. The turn card was a 2, completing my nut straight. Now I was confident that I had her, so my thoughts turned to how to get all of her chips. (I thought she probably had an overpair--9s or 10s or jacks--which was wrong, but wrong in a way that didn't matter.) She checked again, and I bet about half of her stack, figuring that if she called that bet, she'd be pot-committed and put in the rest on the river no matter what came. She called.

The river was probably the worst possible card for her: a third 8. She clearly thought this was Yahtzee for her, and moved all-in. I called and won.

It took her a few seconds to put the pieces together retrospectively and figure out what I had done, but then the torrent was unleashed: "You raised before the flop with 4-5???" That's where the tirade started. I won't try to quote the whole speech, but among other things she invoked a curse on my immortal soul. Let's just say that Annie most definitely does not approve of non-standard plays of that nature--especially when they end up with her losing her entire stack of chips.

Well, Annie, you sweet, crazy lady, I know there's not a chance in hell you'll read this, but I'll say it anyway: It's neither against the rules nor unethical to put in a pre-flop raise with a crappy little 4-5 offsuit. Yes, it's unorthodox, but that's the whole reason for it. Poker is a game of deception. Since I know you'll think I most likely have something like A-K or A-Q when I raise, doing it when actually holding 4-5 is deceptive. It's allowed. In fact, practicing occasional deception of exactly that sort is encouraged by every poker strategist I've ever read. And the reason, obviously, is precisely because of the kind of two-fold effect I achieved today. First, you were completely blindsided by the straight. Second, from this day forward, any time the board makes something like 4-5 a very strong potential holding, you'll have to wonder whether that's what I have again, when I actually have A-K and got no help from the community cards. It will make it easier to bluff successfully in such a spot, and/or you'll play your hand less aggressively than you should because you're afraid that I'm pulling another stunt like today's. That's exactly what I hoped to accomplish, on both counts.

So spare me your self-righteous moralizing about correct play, as if you are the Moses of poker, entrusted with stone tablets engraved by the finger of God, declaring which starting hands are worthy of a raise and which ones aren't. Nothing in poker is that cut and dried. (What a boring game it would be if it were!) It appeared to me--and I'm really not vain about this sort of thing so as to imagine it--that everybody at the table, except for you, admired my play and the outcome, and was laughing at you during your rant, because you weren't able to just say, "Nice hand," let it go, and move on. With your "there's only one right way to play" speech, you were the loser today, in ways more fundamental than who was stacking up the chips, and who had to re-buy.

I'm not dead yet! (A post with zero poker content, zero grumpy content)

That's me, as one of the French knights, peeking around the fortress door to get a look at the giant wooden rabbit left by the English ka-niggets. It's not Photoshop, it's one of those silly stick-your-face-in-the-hole photo ops. It's just outside the Spamalot theater at the Wynn.

As you might guess, I went to see that show tonight. It's great--even better than I expected. Maybe half the material is the best bits from the "Quest for the Holy Grail" movie, but half is new stuff, good stuff, stuff squarely in the Python tradition. The whole thing just works. I was delighted and forgot about my problems for a couple of hours of pure fun. Highly recommended.

Also had a celebrity sighting, because John O'Hurley (who is most famous for playing Elaine's nutty boss J. Peterman in "Seinfeld," and who plays King Arthur in "Spamalot") walked right by me while I was waiting for the doors to open.

It's Geek Week at the Hilton (non-grumpy content)

Those are two "Star Fleet officers" just outside the Hilton poker room earlier this evening. Yes, the big Trek convention is here.

It's Geek Week in another way, too. Wil Wheaton was playing in a private game with a bunch of friends in the poker room this evening. He appeared to be having too much fun to interrupt to ask for a photo (besides which, I assume he had to pose for pictures all day, selling his new book at the convention), so I left him alone. And if you don't know who Wil Wheaton is, or why it's OK to call him a geek (hint: he wrote a book called "Just a Geek," and he was actually wearing a t-shirt that said "geek" on the back tonight), then you need to explore his blog (http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/). You don't need to be a fan of Star Trek or poker or computers to enjoy it--just being a fan of interesting writing is sufficient; the rest will follow.

Addendum, 8/13/07: Here's Wil's description of his geek weekend, including the Hilton poker game: http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2007/08/briefly-recappi.html

Irony: A poker story in four parts (non-grumpy content)

I will never use this blog to relate bad-beat stories, unless there is a larger point to them. Besides, the things I experienced today technically don't count as "bad beats," because when the money went in...

Wait. I'm already getting ahead of myself.

Part 1.

Long session at the Hilton today. I started with my usual buy-in of $100, and had a hot streak early on, up to about $400 by the end of the first hour. From there I grind it up further. I'm at maybe $600 when I have my run in with Hopelatron #1. (For the definition of hopelatron, see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/hopelatrons-and-seeing-future-non.html.) He is new to the table, and has played only a few hands. He's on my immediate left. I have the button, and join a bunch of other limpers with my crummy little Ah-2s. The flop is all hearts. This give me considerable hope for this hand.

H#1 bets $10. I'm the only caller. The turn card is another heart, giving me the nuts. He checks, I check. I want him to think that I absolutely hated that fourth heart hitting. Apparently he does, because he bets in the dark, not even waiting for the dealer to put out the river card. His bet is $35, and he has maybe $100 left, so I figure he must have a high heart, and he's probably willing to put it all in. I move all-in. He calls. Sure enough, he has the king of hearts. (I don't remember what his other card was, but it wasn't a heart.) He's a very nice guy, and takes the loss in stride, though he's much more astonished by it than I think he should be.

Look at it this way. Sure, there was only one card in the deck that could beat him, but with 9 opponents each having 2 cards, there is about a 35% chance (18/52) that one of them was dealt that ace of hearts. Yes, he or she might have folded it, but people tend to hang on to aces, especially when there is no pre-flop raise. So it shouldn't have been all that surprising to him that that's what I had.

He kept marvelling at how unlucky he had been for me to have the one card that beat him. Well, yeah, it was unlucky. But as degrees of unlucky go, it was run-of-the-mill, happens-every-day, garden-variety unlucky. It wasn't oh-my-God, take-your-breath-away unlucky. But I do what I'm supposed to do, for reasons of both politeness and strategy: I enthusiastically agree with him that he just got amazingly unlucky. Hopelatrons always believe that they lose because of bad luck, and it's best to encourage them in this delusion. They are much happier that way than if they have to confront the fact that they're not very good players, and their happiness keeps them coming back to the table after trips to the ATM for more cash to spread around.

After a few more pleasantries ("Nice hand," shaking my hand, etc.; like I said, he was a good sport about the whole thing, bless him), he departs.

Part 2.

Maybe 30 minutes goes by uneventfully. Then I find pocket aces in the big blind. Because there are many limpers, I put in a hefty raise to narrow the field, but still get three callers, including Hopelatron #2. The flop is A-K-Q rainbow, giving me three aces, the second best possible hand at this point. It doesn't get much better than that. I have played with H#2 before, and know him to be overly aggressive. I'm highly confident that he'll take a pretty big stab at this pot if I check to him, so I do. Sure enough, he pushes out $50. The other two players quickly fold. I move all-in. I'm not too surprised when H#2 calls, but I have to admit I am surprised when he turns over the only hand that has me beat, J-10 for the straight. Damn. Still, there are seven cards I can catch on the turn to make either a full house or quads, and then ten more cards on the river. But it is not to be. I lose about $200 to H#2.

How unlucky is this? Well, A-A vs. J-10 is about 83%/17% by the time all five community cards are out. But I think that underestimates the rarity here, because it's giving all five cards for the underdog to catch up. J-10 will flop a straight 1.3% of the time. (See Matthew Hilger's book, Texas Hold'em Odds and Probabilities, p. 189.) That includes four different straights, however, only one of which contains an ace, thus simultaneously giving me the trips I need to abandon all caution. The probability of J-10 getting exactly the three cards needed on the flop (A-K-Q) to arrive at this situation, when two of the four aces in the deck are already sitting in my hand and thus unavailable, is 0.09%, by my calculation; that is, it will happen only once every 1081 times that these two starting hands clash.

Part 3.

About five hands later I'm in middle position when I spot another pair of aces. Again I raise, and get three callers. Again I hit a set of aces on the flop (even though, on average, this will happen only once in every 8 or so times). But this flop is all hearts. Uh-oh, potential trouble, since my aces are clubs and diamonds. Hopelatron #3, who was in the big blind, is a guy I've played with many times before. I know him to love his flush draws. He bets out $30. I raise to $100 to dissuade him. The other two callers scatter like cockroaches. H#3 doesn't re-raise me, but just calls. I am left unsure whether he has a made flush or is holding just one heart and is hoping for another one to come on the board.

The turn card is a blank. H#3 checks. I have a ray of hope, because if he's on a draw, he probably won't call a second large bet here. I push out $150. He insta-calls. Crap, crap, crap. I know this guy well enough to know now that he has it made, and he's not going away. My only chance is the river card pairing the board to give me a full house, or the last ace for four-of-a-kind. Nope. That's not happening. H#3 checks again, and so do I. I show my set of aces, and he confirms my suspicion with the measly 6-8 of hearts. I don't say anything, but I confess that an involuntary rolling of the eyes betrayed my feelings about the situation.

How unlucky is that? This is more straightforward than the previous calculation: His two suited cards will flop a flush 0.8% of the time (odds being 124:1 against it).

In the space of ten minutes, I had twice been given pocket aces, twice hit trips with them on the flop, and both times was beaten for very large pots. I had lost about $500 just that fast. I'm not whining here, but objectively speaking, that's world-class, immense-pain, put-the-poor-bastard-on-suicide-watch, please-let-me-trade-places-with-Job-and-his-body-covered-with-boils unlucky. The other players at the table understand that well, and there are groans of sympathy for me from all over. The word "brutal" gets repeated a lot. I think that "brutal" doesn't begin to cover it. I'm not sure any word does.

To the best of my recollection (and I think I'd remember it), I've never flopped trip aces and lost to either a flopped straight or a flopped flush--and here they both happen almost back-to-back.

Part 4.

Less than three minutes later, H#1 returns, and sits down next to me, where he had been before. He tells me that he hit a good streak at the craps table, and has made back the money he previously lost to me. (It is a sure sign of a hopelatron to decide that craps--a game with an absolutely unbeatable, fixed edge against him--is a better way to win money than playing poker.) He's feeling good.

He recounts once again his amazement about how incredibly unlucky he got in that hand, losing with a king-high flush to my ace-high flush, shaking his head in disbelief. I'm still reeling and dizzy from the previous two hands, feeling about as snakebit as I can recall ever experiencing. But I know that H#1 has no clue what transpired while he was gone, nor would he have any reason to care about my personal misfortune. He feels his own pain far more acutely than he could ever feel mine.

So I smile as kindly as I can, and tell him, "Yeah, that was about as unlucky as a guy can get, all right."

"I hate (jacks) (queens) (kings) (aces) (ace-king)"

I am SO tired of hearing poker players complaining about getting premium hands. You've all heard it, too: "I hate ace-king." "I hate queens." Or whatever. Among all the things you can say at a poker table that show just how stupid you are, this ranks high on the list.

Let's look at this objectively--mathematically. At a typical table of ten players, if everybody stays in the hand until the end every time, you obviously average a 10% chance of winning any given hand. Put another way, before the cards are known, you have a hypothetical 10% equity in the pot that will develop.

If you are dealt AA, however, your equity jumps to a whopping 31%. That is, even if nobody ever folds, you will win the hand 31% of the time, while all the other random hands have their equity drop from 10% to about 8% against your bullets. The glass-half-empty types will note that that means losing 69% of the time. Yeah, but before you looked down and saw the aces, you expected to lose 90% of the time, right? Seeing that AA staring back at you suddenly tripled your chances of winning against nine random hands, and since you know that not all nine of them are going to stay in until a final showdown, your equity in the pot keeps going up every time one of your opponents mucks.

(For an excellent, free, downloadable tool you can use for running this sort of calculation, go to http://www.pokerstove.com/.)

I think I hear the "I hate ________" gripe most often with respect to ace-king and pocket jacks. This, too, is highly irrational. Suited A-K begins with 21% equity (double your usual value with a random hand), and unsuited A-K has 17%, against everybody else's approximately 9%. What--you don't like having more than twice the chance of winning as your opponents? Then you're an idiot.

Even the much-despised pocket jacks have 19% equity against everybody else's 9%. On average, you will be getting twice as much money back from this hand as you put into it. If that's a situation you hate, you need to have your medications adjusted.

Notice that people never use the "I hate _________" line for little pairs, such as 5-5. But that hand has only 12% equity in the pot, against everybody else's 10%. It's a tiny, tiny margin, compared to what the premium hands give you. So why doesn't anybody say that they hate being dealt pocket 5s? The answer is pretty clear: It's because they know how to play that hand with a single, simple, dichotomous decision. You try to see the flop cheaply, and if you hit three-of-a-kind you stay in, and if you don't you muck it.

So beneath the surface, players who say they hate jacks or kings or queens, but don't say they hate small pairs, are actually telling you, "I don't know how to play premium hands for good value." Whether they know it or not, they're actually saying, "I'm a really bad player."

The other day when I was catching up on some back issues of Bluff magazine, I was pleased and surprised to find a column by Angel Largay in which he says just about the same thing I always think when I hear that tired old complaint (March, 2007, issue, p. 100):

What preconceived notions and flat out self-deceptions about your poker
skill and knowledge are you clinging onto, and how much are they holding you
back? I guarantee that you can absolutely become a better poker player than you are now. Absolutely guarantee it, and here's how: Just cut through whatever B.S.
you're feeding yourself and get honest. Some of the stuff might be brutally
simple--like you hate pocket jacks. Well, pocket jacks have a positive
expectation. Yes, really, even in your $3-$6 game. If you don't like a hand that
has a positive expectation--then you just don't know how to play it correctly.
That's the truth. If it's your truth, then admit it, and you are well on your
way to fixing that problem. Deny it and you'll continue to find reasons to hate
a hand that should be making you money.

Well said.

And here's a thought: If you really hate your aces, or ace-king, or queens, or whatever other premium hand you've decided the poker gods are punishing you with, then do two things. First, throw it away when you get it. You'll be happy because you won't have to make any of the difficult decisions later in the hand that are obviously beyond your mental capacity, and I'll be happy to have you relinquish your lion's share of the pot, because it leaves me with a better chance of winning with my weaker hand. Second, just shut up about it. I would consider both actions to be a personal favor to me.

Stupid is as stupid does

Since I spend so much of my blogging time and energy denouncing the stupid things I see other people do at the poker table, now I have to call one on myself. I made the single dumbest mistake of my short career during a tournament at the Hilton today.

The second time I ever played in a live poker tournament, I exited under maybe the worst possible circumstances: I called an all-in bet with nothing. Note that I didn't bluff off all my chips aggressively, a mistake which is embarrassing, but understandable and forgiveable. No, I called with not even a pair. I did that because I forgot what my hole cards were. Somehow, in the course of the hand, my brain conflated the cards I actually had with the ones I wished I had, because the ones I wanted would have made a straight. The mental short-circuit caused me somehow to believe that I did actually have the straight. I called the opponent's bet with great confidence, turned over my cards, saw that I had absolutely nothing, and slinked away from the table, hoping that the other players would have the decency to (1) not laugh until I was out of earshot, and (2) forget my face.

A couple of months later, exactly the same mental error occurred yet again. This time, however, the result was favorable. I moved all in with my imaginary straight. I was apparently so convinced I had it that it showed, and my opponent finally folded. I turned over my cards in what I intended as a friendly gesture to show him that, yes, I really had the goods. I was horrified to see that there was a gap in my "straight." Oops! I tried to explain to him that I wasn't trying to flaunt a bluff--I had just been stupid. I'm not sure he ever believed me.

From then on, I vowed not to let this happen again, and I have adopted a habit of always checking my hole cards again just before the flop comes. On very rare occasions--maybe once a month or so--I still end up unsure of what they were, usually because something highly distracting has disrupted the flow of the hand (need to call the supervisor over for a ruling on some unusual event, an argument breaking out, stuff like that). I just recheck them, no big deal. As far as I can recall, I haven't had any repeat instances in which I became convinced that I had hole cards different from what they really were.

Until today.

I had K-Q. The final board was 7-8-9-10-Q. Obviously, anybody with a jack had the straight, and the K-J was the nuts (with no possible flush out there). And somehow, in the few seconds after the last card hit the felt, my brain suffered that same glitch that it had on two previous occasions. I don't know what it is about straights that makes me want them so badly that I hallucinate them into existence. It has never happened with flushes or full houses or anything else. Maybe I have some sort of a fetish for straights, and need professional counseling.

Anyway, I moved all-in with what I believed to be the second nuts (Q-J) and got called in two places. One guy had just the J, and a woman had the actual nuts, the K-J. They probably thought I had been bluffing. Nope. Just stupid.

The only thing that saved me was that I was the big stack at the time. She took maybe 1/3 of my chips, so it wounded me but didn't finish me off. I managed to hold on long enough to take 4th place. I might have done considerably better if I hadn't donked off all of those chips to her, though. (She finished in 3rd place.) I needed Homer Simpson to give me a big "D'oh!"

Of course, even if I had had what I thought I did, I would have lost to her higher straight, but the point is that re-checking before committing all my chips would have been the prudent thing to do.

On a recent episode of "Poker After Dark," Annie Duke confessed to occasionally having thought that she had a pocket pair when she didn't. This has happened because she looks first at the bottom card, then shuffles them, then looks at the new bottom card. But a few times she has shuffled two times instead of once, or muffed the shuffle in some way, and thus looked at the same card twice, only discovering her mistake when later revealing her hand, and getting quite a shock at having played, e.g., A-2 instead of A-A.

So if even successful, well-known pros can occasionally screw up that badly, I suppose I shouldn't beat myself up too much for making a dumb mistake three times in two years. Just the same, though, I'd really prefer that it be at least another two years before I cross those particular wires in my head again.

WARNING: Do not try this at home! (Non-grumpy content)

Last night at the Venetian I had my biggest cash game win yet. One pot was incredibly sick.

A hand I played a few months ago was written up in a recent Card Player magazine by columnist Matt Lessinger as an example of taking advantage of one's reputation as a non-bluffer to pull off a bluff. I did it in that case with a 4-2. Since then, I occasionally get tempted to go a little crazy with the 4-2 again. Last night was one of those times.

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: You should immediately forget having read this, and under no circumstances attempt to replicate the results!

I called a pre-flop raise and reraise with the 4-2. (But they were SOOOOOTED, he protests!)

I had been playing tight even by my standards, and had shown down only pocket pairs and premium hands. I was way up for the night already, and so feeling a bit loose with the cash (a terribly unprofessional attitude, I know--I'm not bragging about it, just telling it like it is). I knew that if I hit the flop, nobody could possibly put me on the hand I actually held. Of course, the probability was very low, but once in a while I just do things on a whim. I could BS about game theory and the need to throw randomizers into one's play, but the truth is I was just feeling kind of giddy and silly and reckless.) 5 people called the raise and reraise, so it was already a big pot (just another in my long string of excuses).

Flop was 9-2-2 rainbow. I led out $40 into what was maybe a $90 pot, got 2 callers, then a raise to $100. I pushed all in. The callers folded, and it was just the raiser left with a decision.
He thought for maybe 5 minutes--an exceptionally long time by the standards of $1-2 NL, anyway. He ran through what I might be holding out loud. He had watched me play for 2 or 3 hours, so certainly knew (or thought he knew) my range of hands. He was most worried about pocket 9s, appropriately. But he never once mentioned any hand with a 2 in it. Pretty clearly, he just automatically ruled those out as unthinkable for me to have called a pre-flop raise and re-raise with. (By the same reasoning, I was pretty confident that nobody was holding a 2 with a better kicker.)

He finally decided that I had JJ, and called with his QQ. I flipped over my cards. You could have gone around the table and stuck lollipops in all the mouths that were left hanging open when they saw what I had done.

My junk hand held up, and I raked in the biggest pot of the night.

It's one of the sickest, most demented plays I've ever done. And now, of course, I'll be tempted to do it again, and will probably, in the long run, give away more money trying to duplicate that moment again than I've won playing the stupid 4-2.

But it makes for a good story, doesn't it?

"He was going to get caught"

Last Saturday night I was at Treasure Island and participated in their evening tournament. I made the final table in relatively good shape, maybe 3rd or 4th in chips. But when we were down to 7 or 8 players left, I took a huge hit when the woman to my right (with a slightly smaller stack) and I got it all in before the flop. My pocket queens were a big favorite to her jacks going in, but she caught a set on the flop and took most of my chips.

I was left with only about 5 big blinds, and the blinds were going to double again in about six minutes. That means taking aggressive action, even near-suicidal action, because otherwise one has no shot. So the next four times in a row that the action was unraised before the flop when it came to me, I went all in. The first three times I picked up the blinds uncontested.

The fourth time I had A-4 offsuit, and got called by a guy with A-9. I got lucky and split the pot with him when all big cards came and our kickers didn't play.

But this post is about a comment I overheard when our hands were turned over, before the outcome of the pot was determined. I heard one player at the far end of the table tell the guy next to him, "He should have known he was going to get caught, going all-in that many times in a row." There was an unmistakable tone of derision in his voice, a "he's getting his comeuppance" attitude.

Maybe this guy didn't notice the size of my stack after the big hit. Or maybe he's a complete idiot at tournament strategy. Either way, the point is this: I wanted to get "caught." I desperately needed to accumulate chips rapidly. I certainly knew that I could only steal the blinds a very small number of times before somebody would have a hand big enough to call me. But that's the point: I wanted a call, even if that meant being in with the worst of it, because doubling up was my only chance of getting back into a position to have some control over my fate.

There were still two even shorter stacks at the table. So it's possible that I could have hunkered down, hoping that when these players were finally forced to be all-in, they'd both lose, and I'd just barely sneak into the money (top four were to be paid). But I think that's crummy strategy. It may or may not increase my chance of surviving the bubble, but it absolutely kills my chance of winning, or at least finishing deep in the money. Finishing at the top once, with no money three other times, pays better overall than finishing at the bottom of the payout schedule four times. So that's what I was going for.

As it turned out, I got "caught" again shortly thereafter, and didn't survive that encounter. I exited in 6th place. But under the circumstances, I'd do exactly the same thing again.

So, Mr. Smug Smartypants, yeah, of course I was going to get "caught." But, you see, that was the goal.

Where are the worst dealers in town?

Barry, who works at the Hilton, is one of the finest dealers I know of anywhere. He's friendly, fast, attentive, consistent, unflappable, and makes remarkably few errors. He has worked many other places, and has strong opinions of what poker dealers do right and wrong. As a result, I've chatted with him many times about problems I've encountered at other poker rooms.

A few months ago, he asked me which casino I thought had the overall worst poker dealers. That was a hard question, because every room I've visited has good and bad. But I've kept thinking about it, and I'm finally ready to answer: It's the Sahara.

I had been leaning toward that answer for quite a while, but a session there Sunday sealed the conclusion. At my table was a guy who was pretty obviously playing live poker for the first time. He made all the classic newbie mistakes: He couldn't tell when it was his turn, and so was frequently either acting prematurely or slowing us down because he didn't know the action was on him; he got confused about posting the blinds; he didn't know about getting change when needed, or pulling his change back so it didn't look like a bet; he too frequently had to ask what the bet was, and, if he already had money out, how much more it was to him; he always needed to be reminded to push his chips within reach of the dealer (Sahara's tables are bigger than average); he made string bets and raises; he'd always forget to give back his cards when he won a pot. Maybe what galled the dealer most is that he didn't know to tip. This man wasn't drunk or stupid or deliberately trying to screw things up--he was just new to the zillion little things that quickly become old hat after a few hours of live-action play.

All of this is dime-a-dozen common. I assume that dealers encounter inexperienced players like this literally every day. But one of the Sahara dealers displayed an egregious lack of patience, an unprofessional 30 minutes unlike any I've seen before. He never actually yelled at this customer, though I was expecting that to come any minute. But every time this poor guy froze like a deer in headlights not knowing what to do, or made a mistake, this dealer talked to him in the most impatient, irritated, condescending, "do-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you-AGAIN?" tone I've ever heard used by a poker dealer speaking to an inexperienced player. (I've certainly seen equally harsh manners used when a player is just being a constant jerk, and only a saint would be able to maintain a smile. But as I said, this guy wasn't being rude at all; he just needed extra help.) It was painful and embarrassing to watch.

Predictably, this dealer's annoyance rattled the player even more. He became visibly worse, presumably because he was trying so hard to do everything right to avoid getting chided again. It was obvious that a smile and a calm, reassuring manner would have been far more effective at helping him ease into the groove. It does wonders for nervous people to keep hearing things like, "It's OK, sir, you're doing fine," or, "No problem, you'll catch on sooner than you think." But this grouchy old sailor (judging from his tattoos) couldn't bear to part with a smile or a kind word for a new player. He seemed intent instead on making the guy's first casino experience one he'd never want to repeat. It was horrible.

So why do I keep going to the Sahara when they have the worst dealers in town, inconsistent spreading of my preferred game, and one of the smokiest "smoke-free" rooms? Because it's a real money-maker. Of all the places I've played five or more times, the Sahara has both the highest percentage of winning sessions and the highest average take per session. It's just a cash cow. I tend to hit it up after having two or three losing sessions in a row other places, to get a winning streak started.

But I really detest the place. I've never--not even once--had what I would consider an enjoyable time there. The smoke is one main reason for that, and having the worst dealers in town is another.

Hopelatrons and seeing the future (non-grumpy content)

That just has to be the most intriguing post title I've had yet. If you're reading to find out what it could possibly be about, it has done its job.

There's a new poker publication out, called "Under the Gun." In Vegas, so far I've only seen it being distributed at Treasure Island, though I assume they've hit other rooms, too. It's a small magazine that basically is just ads plus an overview of the contents of a DVD, which is included. All free, of course. The DVD is like a poker feature magazine for TV. It's really quite well done. Nothing like in-depth analysis, but interesting feature pieces.

The magazine does have one bit of content that isn't on the DVD, and that's part of an interview with Phil Laak, who I think is one of the most interesting poker pros. I think he's an unusually bright guy. Hmmm. I should perhaps explain that comment. Nearly all poker pros are reasonably bright people. But there are a few who strike me as having the kind of IQs and general intellectual capacity that would allow them to successfully take on just about any subject if they found an interest in it. These include Barry Greenstein, Eric Seidel, Howard Lederer, Allen Cunningham, Chris Ferguson, David Sklansky, Paul Phillips, and Andy Bloch. I would not make the same statement about most pros, including, e.g., Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth, Hoyt Corkin, Gavin Smith, T.J. Cloutier, Johnny Chan, Doyle Brunson, or a zillion others. They are all highly talented and successful poker players, and undoubtedly a standard deviation or more above the population average in intelligence, but I see some much broader "smarts" in those on my smaller list. I would include Laak in that elite category, though I think he has less formal education (and less of the typical demeanor of those who have survived a PhD program) than most of the others.

Anyway, I try to read or watch anything about Laak that comes my way, because he always has something interesting to say. And the "Under the Gun" interview is no different. He introduces a term I hadn't heard before, one of his own coining:

"The best way to describe a hopelatron would be to imagine the middle earth soldier guys from Lord of the Rings. Collectively very strong, but from individual to individual very weak. None the less [sic; this new publication could seriously use a good copy editor], their strength is that there are so many of them. You are sure to take a beating from a hopelatron from time to time. Even thought [sic; see what I mean?] they can nail you in a hand, they are lifetime losers at poker. It is the hopelatrons that keep the pros in the money. Thank the good lord for each and every one of them. Basically it is a term of affection for all the army of weak players that comprise the poker universe."

I love that word. It has already eased the sting of a couple of bad beats I've received recently from their numbers. Just thinking of the Tolkienesque mass of the hopelatrons at poker tables all over the city is sufficiently amusing that it makes the inevitable occasional loss to one of them a tad more bearable.

The other amusing thing about him for discussion here is this story from the DVD (any errors in transcription are my own fault):

"I never feel that I can see the future. The only time in my life I saw the future was about six hours into Day 1 of the [World Series of Poker] Main Event last year, and I saw that I was winning the twelve million. It was really weird. I saw it. It was like I was prophetic, and it was as real as seeing, like, that table right there. It was so strange, and I was like, "Wow!" ... So two hands later, this guy enters the pot, and I went, "Wow," and I just knew that if I made a huge raise, he would have to fold. And I knew that if I made a huge raise and he re-raised I would be pot committed anyways if he had ace-king, so I decided to go all in. It was so smart a play. Except he had two kings and I had 8-3, and his kings held up handily, and I was eliminated from the tournament. So I've gone back to not seeing the future. It's a lot safer, y'know?"

Isn't it nice to know that even successful pros can make completely dumb-ass moves just like the rest of us?

The blue-chip Nazis

Final post today, I promise.

I usually play either $1-2 or $1-3 blinds no-limit hold'em, and in nearly every casino that means using $1 chips and $5 chips. (There are a few exceptions, such as Caesars, Red Rock, and Excalibur, which also use $2 chips, and Wynn with their notoriously confusing $3 chips. I dislike both arrangements. They're completely unnecessary and inefficient departures from the norm.)

I like keeping roughly 10 (between 5 and 15, anyway) $1 chips (which are usually blue, though sometimes white or gray or something else) in my stack. This allows me to tip cocktail waitresses and floormen as needed. More importantly, it allows me to make a bet of any size I want without having to verbally announce the amount. If I have no $1 chips and want to put in a bet of, say, $8, I would have to throw in two red chips ($5 each) while saying "make it eight." I want to keep silent during a hand as much as possible, and having a supply of $1 chips helps make this possible. If I have a big stack of blue because of winning a pot that contained lots of them, I use them to pay my blinds and make small calls. Then when my blues have been whittled down to about ten, I use red chips for those purposes so that I get a bit of change, and thus keep my blue stack between 5 and 15.

The dealers have a little problem, as chips from the table gradually get squirrelled away in the drop box: Because the rake on these games is usually between $1 and $4, they run out of the $1 periodically and have to call for a refill from the cashier. This process slows down the game. As a result, some dealers are highly protective of their tray full of blues.

One Hilton dealer is almost funny in how consistently she will decline to let players get change for their red chips when they request it. Once I saw her tell a player she couldn't make change because she was almost out of blues. Then, a few minutes later, after she had gotten her tray restocked with blues, the same player asked again, and this time she said, "I can't, because I just got a fill." The absurdity of her logic made me laugh out loud, though I'm pretty sure she had no clue what I found so funny.

I'm inspired to write about this today because during this afternoon's session at the Palms, I was faced with two consecutive dealers who openly resented my blue-chip practice. With both of them, I had about 5 blues, yet tried to pay a blind with a $5 chip. Each one of them looked at my stack and said, "You still have some ones there. You can use those" (or words to that effect). It was obvious that they were trying to minimize the number of blue chips they gave out in change. They were like mother birds defending the eggs in their nest from predators.

But here's the crazy thing: The way I do this makes no difference whatsoever in the overall flow of the $1 chips from the cashier to the dealer's tray to the table to the drop box. The net rate of loss is exactly the same no matter how many blue chips any player keeps in front of him, as long as each player is more or less consistent over time. If I keep approximately 10 at all times, the dealer will have to get a fill exactly as often as if I started out with 50 of them and kept that number all the time, or started with zero and tried to keep as few of them as possible at all times (as I've seen some players do). It's the net flow that determines how often the dealer will have to stop the game for a fill, not the number of blue chips sitting on the table.

Of course, if I and/or other players for some reason really liked hoarding blue chips, and continuously put in red ones in order to get blue ones in change, that would quickly deplete the dealer's tray. But even then, after a while the whole system would simply reach a new point of equilibrium. From that point on, the rate of loss from the dealer's tray would be precisely the same as it usually is. The only way to change the overall dynamic would be if there were no red chips in play, and thus no need ever to make any change. But with the size of pots in these games, that's obviously impractical; the dealer would lose far more time counting chips in large bets than is currently lost with getting occasional fills.

So I'll continue my peculiar (but not irrational) little habit of defending a stack of about 10 blue chips. Fortunately, the vast majority of dealers either understand what I'm doing, or don't notice, or don't care one way or the other; they just make change from a $5 chip when I need it, without comment. And I'll continue to chuckle at and be baffled by the occasional dealer who acts like a blue-chip miser, unwilling to part with any unless absolutely necessary. It's dumb, but it's also pretty harmless, and it's usually over in 30 minutes, when the next one sits down, and I can go back to my usual pattern.

Addendum, 7/30/07: I liked the phrase from the first comment to this post so much that I stole it to make a new title.

"You don't like me, do you?"

If you haven't read the post below ("Good bluff,") read it first, because this story is sort of a continuation of it. It involves the same opponent, maybe 30 minutes after the hand described in that post.

I'm in the big blind with pocket kings. The same player as previously described is in middle position and raises to $25. This immediately conveys some useful information, because he raises frequently, but in virtually every previous case it had been to either $15 or $20, not $25. Instantly the most likely cards he's holding are pocket jacks, maybe pocket queens or tens, because those are hands that are really difficult to play after the flop, which induces many, many players to put in unusually large raises before the flop in the hopes of not having to make any difficult decisions later in the hand.

(Strategy note: It is virtually always a mistake to vary the size of an opening pre-flop raise according to the strength of the hand with which you're raising. This is true whether you make the variance direct [i.e., weaker hands get smaller raises, and the strongest hands get the biggest raises], or inverse [smaller raises with the biggest hands, hoping to get several callers to build a big pot; bigger raises with junk hands because you don't want to get called]. It's fine to vary the size of the raise based on position and number of people who have already limped in ahead of you, but it is never wise to relate the raise size to the cards you're holding. Experienced players will pick up on any such pattern very readily, and you thereby give away a ton of information about what you're holding.)

One other player in late position calls the $25. I reraise to $90. My goal is either to win the pot right now ($50 profit is fine with me), or get it down to one opponent. I predict that the original raiser will call, both because of what I suspect he's holding and because I think he still wants to get back at me for the previous hand in which we tangled. I'm right--he calls, the other guy folds.

The strange thing is that before he calls, he looks at me and says, "You don't like me, do you?" As always, I say nothing and don't look at him directly.

So before the flop there is just over $200 in the pot already. I have maybe $215 left in front of me, which means that any reasonably strong bet I make at this pot after the flop commits such a high percentage of my chips that I might as well throw the whole stack in. What's more, I know that I'm going to bet at this flop no matter what comes. I really hope there's not an ace, because it would be just my luck that my opponent is sitting on an A-K. But even if there is an ace, it's still more likely that his hand does not have an ace (because of the size of his original raise), so I'm going to bet anyway. I'm confident he doesn't have pocket aces, because he didn't re-raise me before the flop, and because he looked in genuine discomfort when putting in the rest of the $90. I have to act first, and I certainly don't want to check the flop and let him check behind, thus getting another free card to catch some sort of straight or flush to beat me. All my money is going in, no matter what.

Given this unusual situation, I decide to pull a move that I use only rarely. After the dealer has verified that my first opponent put in the right amount for a call, and the second player has folded, I announce, "I'm all-in in the dark." Because I'm going to do move all-in anyway, there are some advantages to doing it before I see the flop. First, I can't give away any information about whether I like the flop by my voice or how long I hesitate before acting or how I push in the chips or anything else. Second, it just screams of extreme strength. Any experienced player will conclude that I probably have pocket aces, because I'm announcing, "I can win this hand without any help from the flop." In the event that he has A-K and an ace comes on the flop, I will have pre-planted in his mind a grave concern that that ace helps me more than it helps him.

Indeed, this guy says as much as soon as I make that declaration: "Crap, he's got the aces." The flop is 8-4-3, all clubs. This is a bit scary, since I'm not holding a club. But it's too late to take it back, and, besides, he's extremely unlikely to have made a flush. If he has a flush draw, that gives him more ways to win than he would otherwise have, but I'm still a big statistical favorite.

He thinks for a while, making assorted comments. He says to the player next to him, "This guy (meaning me) really doesn't like me." But he finally calls. He has the black jacks. The turn and river cards don't help him, and I scoop a $600 pot.

It's this business about me not liking him that prompts this grump. I can't figure it out. I haven't made a single hostile comment, action, gesture, or facial expression towards him. I don't think we've exchanged any words at all, but if we did, it was just some bit of small talk. What on earth makes him conclude that I don't like him personally? I'm just playing the hand to the best of my ability, in the way that I hope will maximize my profit. I would play it the same way against anybody else on whom I had the same information as I have about this guy. From my point of view, my actions are utterly dispassionate and impersonal. As they say, it's just poker. I'm just playing the game. I'm not out to hurt him. I have done not a single thing to target him specifically; it was just random chance that we got involved in two big pots in a fairly short time frame.

Moreover, what makes him care whether I like him or not? Is that really why he sits down at a poker table--to be liked by the other players? I'm sure that poker is primarily a social experience for many recreational players, but they're usually found in home games, or $2-4 limit games, where not much money is at stake, and the wins and losses tend to come slowly. That kind of motivation doesn't usually drive one to play in cutthroat no-limit games, where the object is to try to take every last cent of every other player's money. The mere fact of sitting down in a no-limit game announces that your intention is to take everybody else's money as quickly, efficiently, coldly, and ruthlessly as you can. Of course, you can do that while being friendly and affable and having a good time, but surely nobody is under any illusions about the real motive here: it's money, pure and simple.

Oh well. If this guy thinks that I dislike him (I don't; I have very little information on whether he would be an interesting or enjoyable person to spend time with outside of a poker room) and that, as a result, I'm targeting him, he will necessarily conclude that when I bet into him, I'm doing it with lesser hands than what I might use to go after other pots. That will induce him to make mistakes of calling or raising when he's behind, as happened here. So, my friend, if you want to believe--for whatever reasons your fevered imagination has contrived--that I don't like you, go right ahead. I'm not going to lift a finger or say a word to convince you otherwise.

But it isn't true, and even if it were true, a psychologically healthy and mature player wouldn't give a rip about it either way.

Oh, and thanks for the money!

"Good bluff"

More from today's Palms $1-2 no-limit hold'em session.

I realize that hand histories, in isolation, are pretty boring. I'm going to walk you though this one, because there is actually a point to be made at the end.

A guy in middle position open-raised for $20. I was the only caller in the small blind, with 9-9. The flop was 3-8-J rainbow.

I already know that if my opponent started with unpaired hole cards, he will only hit a pair or better on the flop about once in every three times (32.4%, to be exact), so even knowing nothing more than that, chances are that I'm ahead here. The fact that two of the flop cards are little ones makes that even more likely. I had already pegged this guy as a pretty good player, though a little more aggressive than he can really handle (i.e., I had seen him get in over his head and not get away from a pot when should have known he was beat). That made me pretty confident that he would bet if I checked. I wasn't really planning a check-raise, because I needed more information before committing a lot of money to this pot. I wanted to see what I could learn from how and how much he bet.

Sure enough, he fired out $50. Now this was a bit odd--I hadn't seen him overbet the pot before. The size of that bet plus everything about how he made it (fast, emphatically, looking right at me in sort of an intimidating way) shouted, "I want you out of this hand right now." He absolutely did not want a call there. So, naturally, I called, based on the truism that you should always do the opposite of what an opponent wants you to do. He gave me a very quizzical look, and said kind of condescendingly, "Are you serious?"

The turn card is a 4, which almost surely didn't help him. Although I think I'm ahead at this point, I don't have enough confidence in that conclusion yet to build a big pot. I suspect that my call on the flop has alarmed him. To test that hypothesis, I check again, and sure enough, he checks behind me. There is no way this guy would check here if he had an overpair to the board, had a jack in his hand for top pair, or had hit a set. This pretty much seals my conclusion that my measly nines are the best at this point. Just about the only hand that he could plausibly be holding that would have me beat is pocket tens. Now as long as no big card comes that might pair him (I think he has something like A-K or A-Q), I should be in good shape.

Another 3 hits on the river. Again, this is extremely unlikely to have helped him. So I bet $75 into an approximately $140 pot. He asks me a couple of questions, which I ignore. He thinks a while, then folds.

As he tosses his cards in, he says, "Good bluff."

It is that remark that leads me into this grumpy rant. It's not the first time I've heard this, but I hate it every time, so I need to say something about it.

The most obvious response is that if you really think that your opponent is bluffing, then you should be calling or raising, not folding. There is an incredible discordance between your actions and what you claim you're thinking when you say "Good bluff" while folding. Actions speak louder than words, so what's apparent is that you do not really believe that it was a bluff. Which means that you're lying--and it's not even a good lie, but one that is revealed as such to everybody watching even as you speak it. It's stupid.

There are, I think, two main reasons that people say this in such a situation. First, it soothes the ego by covering all the bases. If it really was a bluff, the person can tell himself that he "knew it" (though obviously he really didn't), and if it wasn't a bluff, he can reassure himself that he made a good laydown.

The second motivation is to try to goad the other player into showing his cards, to prove that it was not a bluff. In this instance, I had actually planned to show him my hand, because I was still fairly new to the table and wanted to establish that I was playing in a pretty solid manner. But because I suspect that one of this guy's reasons for saying "Good bluff" was to annoy me into proving him wrong, I decided instead to frustrate him by not showing, and leave him wondering. That's my little retaliation for the smarmy comment.

Personally, I think a much better way to get a look at an opponent's hand in a situation like this is to fold face-up, especially if you add a "nice hand" kind of comment with it. That's a pretty clear friendly invitation. I will usually, though not always, respond kindly to an opponent taking that tack, and show. In battle, when an opponent surrenders, you don't keep shooting. The face-up fold is far classier than the sniping little "Nice bluff," as a means of trying to see what your opponent beat you with. Tit for tat. Nice begets nice. Nastiness begets nastiness.

I guess the reason that it irritated me more than usual today is that, given the situation, it was so obviously not a bluff. I think any knowledgeable, experienced player who had watched the hand play out, not having seen the hole cards, would be highly confident that I had the best hand at the end, even before the other guy's fold. His betting pattern was one of weakness, while mine was one of cautious strength. If my opponent had been unsure of where he stood and asked me, as he folded, "Were you bluffing me?" I would have shown him my cards and said, "No, I think I had the best of it." No taunts or insults, just friendly honesty about the situation.

Instead, he choose to be bitchy and egotistical about it. So, in return, he got no information and scored no points for good sportsmanship. It's a loser thing to say in every situation.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease at the Palms (non-grumpy content)

I was waiting for my turn at the table at the Palms today when a series of unusually surprised and enthusiastic uproars came from a nearby table. I stepped over to see what had happened. It was A-A versus 10-10. I don't know how the betting went down, because it was all over by the time I joined the commotion. But it was obvious from how fast the last two cards came that they got it all in after the flop, if not before. Anyway, the underdog had caught a 10 on the flop for a set, then the aces made their own set on the turn. But the biggest explosion from the players had come when the underdog hit his one-outer for quad tens on the river.

Then the controversy came up. The Palms had had a bad-beat jackpot, a promotion that ended five days ago. A sign on the wall said something like "We no longer have a bad-beat jackpot. The money that was collected will be redistributed through another exciting promotion to be announced soon." Four of a kind beating aces full of tens would have qualified for the jackpot, were the promotion still running.

For the next hour or so, the guy who had lost (and subsequently stopped playing) kept coming in to the room and talking to the other people who had been at the table, including Mr. Quads. He was saying that he was going to talk to everybody in the casino management that he could, in an effort to get them to give them the jackpot money. He was trying to enlist the support of the other players, because the jackpot distribution would have given a share to everybody at the table.

I was kind of annoyed at having to hear this guy tell his loser story over and over and over again, and repeat over and over and over again how unfair it was that they had ended the promotion without giving away the money they had collected, etc. I was too polite to say it, but I was thinking, "Fat chance, buddy. They ended the promotion, and that's that. No way you're going to pry that money out of them. They're going to use it to seed something else, period."

To my great surprise, the Palms proved me wrong. Eventually, the poker room shift manager came to the table with an announcement: She had gotten approval to distribute the money in the jackpot fund just as if the promotion were still running. It took well over an hour for all the paperwork and accounting to get done, but the loser of the hand walked away with over $4000; Mr. Quads got about $2300 (though he sadly had to relinquish the $82 he had received as a high-hand bonus!), and the other people who had been at the table each got $411.

I guess it does pay to make a little noise! If it had been me, I probably would have just shrugged my shoulders at the double bad luck (losing the hand plus just missing the bad-beat payout) and walked away, assuming that nothing more could or would be done about it.

Incidentally, this was my first time playing at the Palms. I not only had a highly profitable session (up $543 in less than 3 hours), but found it an enjoyable, comfortable place to play. I expect I'll be making it a more frequent stop in my gallavanting around. I also got to meet Murph, a poker dealer whose blog I have perused and enjoyed from time to time (http://murph4qs.blogspot.com/). I found it through the blog of a Flamingo poker dealer who I have gotten to know a bit through his frequent play at the Hilton (see http://pkrdlr.blogspot.com/).

Another celebrity sighting (sans photo)

I was playing poker at the Palms this afternoon, when somebody at the table looked up at the poker desk and said, "It's Macy Gray," and chuckled.

I have to admit that I've heard of Macy Gray, even seen her sing once or twice on TV shows, but didn't care for her music, so paid very little attention. I wouldn't know her if I passed her on the street.

The woman at the counter did resemble my vague recollection of what Macy Gray looked like, but so would a thousand other people. So I couldn't tell whether the other guy was really identifiying her, or just joking that it was somebody that sort of looked like Macy Gray. I wasn't paying much attention to what was going on there, but a few minutes later, the poker room staff was doing something a little out of the ordinary for this woman, and another player at the table sniffed, "Celebrity treatment." She also was accompanied by a guy who looked suspiciously like a bodyguard. Furthermore, we had heard less than an hour earlier that Paris Hilton was at that very moment checking into the hotel, planning to attend a performance by Fergie at the Palms tonoght. So all this made me think that maybe it really was Ms. Gray.

I was less than ten feet away, so I scanned her a bit for some distinguishing feature that I could later check against Macy Gray photographs. I found one quickly: A lacy tattoo that looked like a bracelet around her right wrist.

Got home and checked a Google image search for Macy Gray. And whaddayaknow--they show her with just such a tattoo. So I guess it really was her. My claim to fame today is that Macy Gray took the seat at the table that became available when I left.

Celebrity sighting (non-grumpy content)

Once again, apologies for the poor resolution on wide angle on my cheapo cell phone camera. It may be a bit hard to tell, but that's actor Michael J. Anderson, in the background, checking in at the poker desk at the Hilton last night. He's been in lots of movies and TV shows, but is most famous for playing the red-suited, backwards-talking, dancing dwarf in "Twin Peaks," 1990-1991. He was seated at another table, so I didn't get to talk to or play with him. However, I'm told that this is the second session he has put in here this week, so I may get to see him again soon. Amazingly, he looks just like he did during "Twin Peaks"--that is, he absolutely does not look 17 years older than then. It's like he's frozen in time.

Addendum, 8/10/07: Mr. Anderson was playing poker at the Hilton again last night. While he was waiting for a table, he kindly allowed me to snap a much better picture of him, and chatted with me for a few minutes about David Lynch movies. He got seated at a different table from me, so I still don't know how well he plays. But he's very kind to strangers.

This post for men only!

OK, well, women can read it, too, but only if you have a lot of nose and ear hair.

So now that it's down to just us people with nose/ear hair problems, let's talk frankly, shall we? I have no idea why, with age, we start losing hair where we've traditionally had and wanted it, and start growing hair in all sorts of places that we're not used to having it. None of us asked for this, but it's the way things are, so we have to deal with reality.

And the reality is this: Nose hair and ear hair are just gross. Nobody wants to be seeing it on you--or, more precisely, coming out of you.

What does this have to do with poker? Well, at the poker table we are crowded together unnaturally and uncomfortably. We have to look at each other to chat, to see who is doing what, to watch facial expressions and gain information, etc. If you're across the room from me, the thick, black, gnarly stuff sprouting from your facial orifices probably won't be within the gradually fading resolution of my vision (although, let's face it, there are some guys who could get theirs to floor length without much effort). But when you're shoulder-to-shoulder with me, my view of your face is about as good as Cary Grant had of George Washington's in "North by Northwest."

And I don't want to be seeing what you've got going on there.

You get a haircut once in a while, right? You shave at least a few days a week, right? So what has motivated you to decide to just let nature take its ugly course when it comes to the nose and ears? (And if you're one of the Eyebrow People, let's throw that area in for good measure here, too, though it falls more into the category of "weird" than "disgusting.")

Hey, I'm right there with you. About the time I turned 40, some bizarre biological switch was thrown, and out the stuff came. I actually have to eat twice as much as I used to, because my body is now expending so much energy on growing unwanted hair everywhere. But I deal with it, y'know?

If you don't already know what to do or where to turn, I highly recommend ordering yourself one of these bad boys: http://www.sharperimage.com/us/en/catalog/productdetails/sku__SI679COB . I've had mine for six or seven years now, and it's going as strong as ever. It's fast, powerful, painless, and effective. About two minutes once a week and you're good to go. You'll wonder why you ever fussed with dainty little scissors or the dreadful prospect of plucking. (Of course, if you're one of the ones I'm addressing, maybe you never bothered trying those first steps.) There's really just no excuse not to.

Guys, I'm just telling it like it is: Nobody, NOBODY wants to see you looking like you just snorted up the clippings from a barbershop floor. And (WARNING: potentially nausea-inducing observation coming up in this sentence; avert your eyes if you are sensitive) we really, really don't want to see the stuff that gets tangled and matted in your little bushes after you blow your nose. If you see what I mean.

So please take care of business, men. I'd sincerely rather never have to address this subject again.