My favorite poker room is closing

Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

I've written before about why I like the Hilton poker room better than any other in town: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/07/why-i-like-hilton-poker-room-non-grumpy.html. Well, it seems that I'm going to have to find a new favorite place. I learned today that the Hilton is closing its poker room as of October 17. Many reports of poker rooms closing in the last year or so have turned out to be rumors without merit, but this decision is apparently set in stone. The dealers are starting to look for other jobs; the shift manager today was talking about it openly with customers, and said it is official, public, and final.

This would seem to be perfect timing, because

--they just hired a couple of new dealers.

--they just started a new promotion for their limit hold'em games.

--they just started a new tournament series, a ladies-only event every Saturday.

--they just started their fall football promotion, which is tied in to the poker room (hit a straight or a flush and get an entry for two different drawings), because lots of people like to play poker while watching their football games.

--they just bought new boards for their jackpots.

Yeah, that's great timing, all right.

(Sarcasm mode now off.)

In other words, it seems like completely ridiculous timing to me. Why launch things like this, then do a full abort? Certainly looks like not very good planning on the part of somebody in management over there.

I'll freely admit that I have no clue about the profitability of poker rooms in general and this one in particular. But it seems to me that closing a poker room when it's still a phenomenally popular game is a really stupid idea, even if the room doesn't make a lot of money--and this is particularly true for the Hilton, which is so heavily dependent on convention business. Conventioneers who don't want to go to the trouble of leaving the hotel for the Strip should be able to find whatever game they want where they're staying. If they leave, whatever they win at another facility's poker room will surely get spent (in other gambling, drinks, night clubs, restaurants, etc.) at that other place, too, instead of at the Hilton. You just can't consider yourself a real Vegas casino if you don't have a poker room. Dives like the El Cortez, Jokers Wild, and Arizona Charlie's can manage to provide a place for poker for their patrons, but the Hilton can't??? Talk about marking yourself as a second-rate place!

So I'm seriously bummed out about this. The Hilton accounts for roughly half of my poker-playing time and half my poker income every month. Now I'll have to find someplace else to call my home base, and there just isn't anywhere that I find as comfortable, friendly, convenient, and profitable. And nobody else runs a monthly freeroll tournament, as far as I know--at least no place that I could stand being at for that many hours.

I'm not exactly optimistic that this rant will change anything. But ranting is what I do when I don't like something, and I hate, hate, hate this decision by the Hilton management. Please reconsider, guys.

Poker gems, #16

An exchange from NBC's "Poker After Dark," September 13, 2007. The set-up: At the end of the last show, Phil Hellmuth lost a big pot to Erik Seidel, because Hellmuth slow-played a flopped two pair (queens and threes), and Seidel caught an ace on the river for a better two pair (queens and aces). Seidel, with position, bet his top pair/top kicker all the way, and Hellmuth just checked and called. Hellmuth's whiny rant started at the end of the last show, and continues into this episode. Nobody at the table has a speck of sympathy for him.

Doyle Brunson: All you had to do was pop him [i.e., check-raise on the flop] and you'd be stacking the chips.

Hellmuth: I understand that. I mean, you know, I mean, I didn't want to pop him. I wanted to let him go for his money. It's so sick. And then he value-bet it on the river. That's so sick. Wow. [Value-betting top two pair on the river, in position, against an opponent who has been completely passive through the hand. Yeah, Phil, that's just a terrible play!]

Seidel: Anybody have Phil's nanny's phone number? She'll know how to calm him down.

Hellmuth: You're not even in the same league, Erik. [For the record, Hellmuth is a slightly more successful tournament player than Seidel; he has 11 WSOP bracelets to Seidel's 8, and a little over $9 million in total tournament winnings to Seidel's $7 million+. Seems like pretty much the same league to me, but what do I know?] Just be happy the deck saves you every pot we play. I keep slow-playing it, and you've sucked out on me like five in a row that I've slow-played, all just weird beats. And I could have won all five pots, but I want to let you...

T. J. Cloutier: I want to make a comment on that. I would think the solution to that would be not to slow-play it.

[More whining from Hellmuth, which I don't have the stomach to transcribe.]

Cloutier: Phil, that's why you make every show. You whine better than anybody alive.

Seidel: My little niece gave me a pacifier for you, and I was going to bring it, but I forgot.

[Yet more whining from Hellmuth.]

Brunson: Yeah, he's [meaning Seidel] just been lucky for 30 or 40 years.

Poker gems, #15

From Broke: A Poker Novel, by Brandon Adams, p. 70:

The World Series of Poker, especially the $10,000 main event, is the primary annual gathering spot for poker players across the world. Failure to attend is considered an admission of financial ruin. My gauge of a player's bankroll comes primarily from the WSOP. If a player is not solvent enough to afford the main event, he is advised to play at least one or two smaller but highly visible events such as the $1,000 no-limit Hold 'em with rebuys. This will show that he [is] not broke; poker is one of the few fields of endeavor where this is an exalted status.

Poker gems, #14

Stanley Kowalski, in "A Streetcar Named Desire":

Nothing belongs on a poker table but cards, chips, and whiskey.

Poker gems, #13

From Barry Greenstein's great book, Ace on the River, p. 39:

An abusive player collapsed at the table, a victim of an apparent heart attack. He was moved away from the table and paramedics were called, but none of the players offered assistance and the game continued. A week later the abusive player was back playing and arguing with everybody. One of the other players, Sam Perleman, apologized to the table. He said, "It's all my fault." Someone asked, "Sam, are you the one who saved him?" "No," Sam replied, "But I was right there when the paramedics were reviving him and I didn't pull them off."

Another bad poker movie

"No Limit: A Search for the American Dream on the Poker Tournament Trail" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478217/; http://www.nolimitmovie.com/) is a 2006 documentary about a divorced couple with a film production company who decide to try using a series of poker tournaments to win enough money to fund some other film project (never specified) that they want to do. Only the female partner of this team, Susan Genard, plays poker, so it's all on her.

The small gripes: They have a small son named Brick. BRICK??? Who in the hell names a child Brick?

For non-players of poker, Susan's descriptions of what happened to her in tournaments will just be gibberish, because there is absolutely no attempt made to explain the game. When she says something like "I had A-A-2-3 double-suited," nobody who hasn't played Omaha high-low will get the meaning, or how good a hand it is, or what one would normally expect to happen with such a starting hand. Her ex, hearing such things, perhaps reflects the typical non-expert viewer, with a blank stare and sort of forced attempt to be sympathetic, when he has no clue what she's talking about.

There are a lot of brief snippets of interviews with well-known poker players, but I thought most of the screen time they had was wasted answering what we must assume were the same couple of questions asked of them: What is the American dream, and can you attain it by playing poker for a living? In my opinion, that's about the least interesting thing you could ask these people, but that's nearly all we get to hear them talking about.

There's almost no poker in the movie. We hear Susan talking about hands that she lost, but don't get to see any action. We don't even get periodic updates as a tournament progresses, in order to get a sense of when she's doing well or otherwise. Most of the tournament coverage shows her buying in, getting her seat assignment, then the end of the hand with which she busts out some hours later. There is more time in the movie on mundane crap like getting a babysitting for their kid than seeing the poker.

My biggest complaint, though, is how Susan deals with losing time after time. To put it mildly, she's a whiner. Her excuses are what most bad players say when they lose: She couldn't catch any cards, she took bad beats, she had bad luck, she got assigned to the toughest table there was, they gave her an unlucky table or seat number, etc. No kidding, she even blames her ex for one loss, because he "invaded [her] poker space" without her permission by leaving a shirt draped over her chair at the table, thus bringing her bad luck. She was not joking. The one time she does well in a tournament (an Omaha event at the World Series of Poker), she's one of the chip leaders when there are only about 20 players left. She's so arrogant that she says that winning the bracelet will be a "gimmee." You have to be incredibly naive or egotistical to think that any such event is going to be a cakewalk going from 20 people to the title. Sure enough, she busts out in 10th place, not even making the final table of nine. It's her biggest cash yet, a little under $9000, but there was the little matter of the $5000 entry fee reducing the profit just a bit.

Because we essentially never see her play even a single hand, I can't say whether she's a good player. But I can say definitively that that kind of crap is exactly what one expects from bad players, and not what one expects from good players. Not once do we hear her say that she played badly, either overall or just in any one hand. Her reasons for losing are always anything and everything except for the one thing that she can control, which is how she plays. I think it is unrealistic, perhaps even impossible, for a player with such an enormous blind spot to reality to have any long-term success in poker. Denial is a powerful force. It's ubiquitous among poker players. Nobody who fails to overcome it will accomplish much in this game, I believe. I found it annoying to have to listen to more complaints and excuses from a losing player, when I'm subjected to so much of the same every day.

I think Susan needs to read Your Worst Poker Enemy by Alan Schoonmaker. It's a book entirely devoted to the psychological/emotional factors in poker. One of its major themes is breaking down the walls of denial of reality that prevent people from improving, and even from playing as well as they know how to. It's much easier to blame bad luck, other players, the table you draw, or anything else, rather than look inward.

It became apparent to me early on in the year of tournaments that Susan couldn't do this, so she was virtually guaranteed to end up a long-term loser. Perhaps if I could have seen her perform brilliantly in a few hands, I'd have started with more hope for her. But because it seemed inevitable to me that she would fail, there was zero drama or tension in watching the year of tournaments play out. It was just loss after predictable loss. And there was no evidence that she took lessons, sought advice, hired a coach, read a book, or did anything else to improve. Of course not--if you fancy yourself a great player, and your negative results are all because of bad luck, why bother with such things, right?

Daniel Negreanu reviewed this movie on his blog: http://tinyurl.com/2lm7yt. (He appears in it.) His impression was vastly different from mine. In contrast to his feeling, I experienced not one little bit of sympathy for her, and actually found her to be a pretty annoying person that I don't think I'd want to spend much time around. I also think Daniel is way off base in his analysis of the relationship between Susan and her ex. She blames him for things that aren't his fault; she won't be honest with him about the money issues they're facing; and she breaks the one promise she made to him near the beginning (no cash games, only tournaments). Those aren't small things--lack of openness and trust are deadly poison to serious relationships--and we never see them get anywhere near a decent resolution of any of them. Daniel says that he can't see why they're divorced. I can, easily. In fact, I can't imagine her having a successful relationship with anybody as long as she has those traits. (Tim, the male half of the film company partnership, presumably has his issues as well, but because the movie really focuses more on Susan, it's harder to judge what they might be. However, the fact that he leaves his two other children, from a different marriage, at home in Maine while he follows Susan around the country to poker tournaments, doesn't imply good things about his parenting skills and priorities.)

There's potential cinematic gold in good documentaries about the poker tournament world. "No Limit," though, falls short by every possible measure. I suppose it's not as much of a stinkeroo as the dramas I reviewed a while back (http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/why-do-poker-movies-have-to-be-so-awful.html), but it was a big disappointment.

Poker gems, #12

Lou Krieger:

I believe in poker the way I believe in the American Dream. Poker is good for you. It enriches the soul, sharpens the intellect, heals the spirit, and—when played well—nourishes the wallet.

Poker gems, #11

Bobby Baldwin (in an interview for the documentary “No Limit”):

Most of life is understanding other people, in business, or in your personal life. If you don’t understand other people, you probably don’t understand yourself, and you’re not going to be a successful card player. It’s all about people, and it has virtually nothing to do with the cards. The cards are just there as a medium to kind of confuse the bad players into thinking it’s luck.

Poker gems, #10

Mario Puzo:

Man needs his foolish dreams perhaps more than he needs anything else. He must forget the hardship and pain of life. It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.

Poker gems, #9

Phil Laak, master of the obvious, on "High Stakes Poker," season 4, episode 2:

People are always trying to beat you. That's the problem with poker.

The punctuation of poker

The Hilton recently acquired a new board for displaying its high-hand jackpots. Today was the first time since it was installed that I sat at the table closest to it. That allowed me to notice something I hadn't seen from across the room: 13 erroneous apostrophes, a sampling of which can be seen in the photograph. (Yeah, yeah, yeah: I used my cell phone in the poker room to take a picture. So sue me!)

Hey, Hilton staff: I love you guys--I really do. But somebody there should have checked a punctuation usage guide (or just asked anybody with a little editing experience) before shelling out the bucks to have this 13-fold blunder custom-made into big lettering.

No matter how often one sees it done (and it is painfully frequent these days), apostrophes are not used to indicate plurals--with rare exceptions.* "Jack" and "queen" and "king" and "ace" are ordinary words, and just as in this paragraph I didn't write "apostrophe's" or "plural's" or "exception's" or "word's," it's wrong, wrong, wrong to have "Jack's," "Queen's," "King's," and "Ace's" up there on your jackpot board.

Using an apostrophe to make the plural of a numeral (e.g., "8's") isn't as obviously wrong, but it's still wrong, or, at best, unnecessary. It works just fine to write "8s."

Don't believe me? Check any style guide in print, or these online ones:

http://home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/a.htm#apostrophe
and
http://home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/p.htm#plurals

http://www.write101.com/W.Tips137.htm
and
http://www.write101.com/W.Tips138.htm

http://www.bartleby.com/68/50/4650.html

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutspelling/pizza?view=uk

http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/apostrophes1.html

http://www.infoplease.com/cig/grammar-style/apostrophes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Use_in_forming_certain_plurals

and about a zillion other similar works available at the click of a mouse. (This isn't exactly obscure information.)

For a delightful book-length rant on the modern misuse of punctuation, and why it matters, pick up a copy of Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. She has a whole chapter on the poor, abused apostrophe.

Does it matter? Well, yes and no. It's certainly true that nobody looking at the sign will be left wondering about the basic meaning, just because there are a few extra punctuation marks. But it matters in the sense of showing that one doesn't care about getting things right.

Let me suggest a poker analogy. It is common for card room novices to mix up the terms "bet" and "raise" and "re-raise." For example, the first person to act after the flop will sometimes say "raise" before putting in a bet. To experienced ears, this sounds like a musician hitting a wrong note. There is no previous bet to raise. Sometimes the dealer will even point out the error, saying something like, "You can't raise, because there has been no prior bet on this round. But you can bet if you'd like." Sometimes they'll just mercifully let it go in silence. There is no serious problem with anybody mistaking the newbie's intention, but it's just plain wrong to announce "raise" in that situation.

Similarly, everybody looking at this sign will understand perfectly well what it's saying. But people with experience using written language according to the traditional rules will immediately notice the errors. It's just as jarring as hearing poker terms used incorrectly at the table. In both cases, it show carelessness, and/or an unfamiliarity with the basic tools and components of the relevant language. I don't think that's an image one would want to project. So I'm going to be like the dealer who gently corrects a green player's misunderstanding of terminology.

To the Hilton poker room staff: You might check to see if the printer will make up a new sign for you without 13 punctuation errors on it. Otherwise, I might have to sneak in there some time when the room is dark, with my bottle of Wite-Out.

*See, e.g., http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/Plurals/Plurals06.html.

Addendum, September 12, 2007

Some poker rooms offer a progressive jackpot to the loser of a pot in which one very strong hand beats another strong hand. In an advertisement in this week's edition of Card Player magazine, the Hustler Casino in Gardena, CA, mentions that their so-called "bad beat jackpot" requirement is "Aces' Full of Ten's Beaten by Four-of-a-Kind or Better."

Within the same advertisement, however, they correctly make various other plural nouns: "games," "cards," "details," and "rules." I cannot fathom why somebody there--probably more than one person, given how many people are typically involved in writing and laying out a full-page ad--thinks that there is something different about "aces" and "tens." Morons, every one of them.

What--chips into the pot aren't enough for you?

Every time I think I've seen it all, some idiotic player comes up with a new way to complain. This time it was a guy who--no kidding--thought that his opponent putting the right number of chips into the pot wasn't enough to constitute a call of his bet.

Hilton, Sunday. Player A is a 60-ish Floridian I've never seen before, one of those who likes to brag that he usually plays at much, much higher stakes than this--which is incredibly annoying and condescending. Player B, on my immediate right, is a 20-something tourist, friendly and inoffensive. I didn't learn either of their names. A is clearly a more experienced player, but B is a whole lot more fun to be around.

They get involved heads-up in a pot. The final board is A-4-3-4-5, with no flushes possible. Player A has been leading the betting all the way, with B just calling. The same pattern occurs on the river. A bets $40. B thinks quite a while, with the $40 in chips already counted out and in his right hand.

Finally he decides to call. He puts the chips well over the betting line with his right hand, and maybe half a second later flips up his hole cards with his left hand. He has A-9, for two pair (aces and fours) with a 9 kicker.

Player B nods in apparent acknowledgement. He picks up his down cards with one squarely on top of the other, and flashes the face of the bottom card to Player A. I see it, too--a 3. Then he tosses both cards face-down toward the dealer (Jessica), who dutifully mucks them. Jessica then begins to push the pot to B.

Here's where the surprising thing happened. As A sees the pot going past him toward B, he gets a startled look on his face and says, "Hey, what are you doing?"

Several of us at once say, "You mucked your cards!" He protests that Player B never called the $40 bet on the river. Apparently he was so distracted with looking at B's turned-up cards that he didn't notice that that action was preceded by B putting eight red chips out in front of him.

Player B was playing straight up, no doubt at all in my mind about that. He did nothing at all to conceal or mask his action. He wasn't shooting an angle, trying to barely have the chips touch the betting line, or any funny business like that. And I was watching him--he unquestionably put the chips in before exposing his hand (although it wouldn't have made any difference; in cash games when heads-up, it's usually allowed to expose one's hole cards to see if an opponent will react to them, before deciding what to do). He did nothing wrong whatsoever, just took the unusual (but not illegal or unethical, by any means) step of showing his hand first, rather than waiting for the bettor to show first. It's true that he never verbally announced "call," but he doesn't have to--actions with chips speak for themselves, by every rulebook of poker ever written.

Player A then compounded his problem by attempting, first, to pull the pot toward him. Jessica sternly rebuked him for this. He then attempted to fish his cards out of the muck. Again, Jessica correctly covered the muck with her hands and told him that he was not allowed to touch the cards. She did all this while calling for the floor person (Ken).

After sorting out the usual cacophony of voices and opinions offered to him all at once, Ken made the only possible decision: the pot went to Player B. Each player has the resonsibility to know what other players' actions have been, and to ask the dealer if it isn't clear.

Player A just screwed up--it's that simple. He failed to notice B putting out his chips, and, upon seeing B's cards face up, assumed, without asking, that B was folding. On the strength of that error and that assumption, he mucked his hand after flashing the 3.

His whole argument came down to two points. First, he claimed that Jessica hadn't announced the call. She says that she did. I don't know whether she did or not; because I knew by watching him that B had made the call, I would have completely tuned out the redundant announcement even if I had heard it. Furthermore, there is no rulebook in existence that says that a dealer failing to announce a player's action makes it as if that action hadn't occurred!

Second, he claimed to have had pocket 3s, for a full house (3s full of 4s). We should believe him, he said, even without having seen his second card, because he wouldn't bet $40 with just the lowest pair on the board. Oh, right--there's no such thing as bluffing in his world, I guess.

Well, too bad, dude. You folded your hand before the dealer awarded the pot, end of story.

In The Professional Poker Dealer's Handbook by Paymar, Harris, and Malmuth, p. 18, we find this (emphasis in original):

1. Players must protect their own hands at all times. This
may be the most important rule in all of poker. A hand may be declared
"dead" if even one card touches the muck or if another player's card touches a
hand that is not protected.... Although the dealer should be aware of only
mucking discarded hands, a player who fails to take reasonable means to protect
his or her hand usually has no recourse if the hand becomes fouled or if the
dealer accidentally collects an unprotected hand.

While it is not necessary for the winner of a pot to show the hand if there
were no callers, it is suggested that the player protect the winning hand until
the dealer is actually pushing the pot to him. The dealer should not ask the
player to relinquish the winning hand before pushing the pot.

I read this shortly before attending poker dealer's school, and it changed how I do things. I now habitually hang on to my down cards until the pot is coming my way (if I'm the winner, or think I am). That way, if the pot is heading to somebody else by mistake, I still have a live hand I can show to claim it. I look at the transaction as a trade: my cards for the pot. Since starting this practice, I have twice accidentally mucked the winning hand (by misreading the board--until it was too late), but I have never had to forfeit a pot that was rightfully mine because of releasing my cards prematurely and letting the dealer muck them before the pot was pushed, or because the dealer uncorrectably pushed the pot to the wrong person. Retaining the cards makes any such error easily correctable.*

The same concept is expressed in Cooke's Rules of Real Poker, p. 75, rule 11.10:

A player with a hand he believes to be the winning hand is responsible to
hold onto his own hand until the pot is awarded. No player with an interest in
the pot should release his hand to the dealer until his portion of the pot has
been pushed to him.

Kreiger and Bykofsky use nearly identical language in their Rules of Poker, p. 140, rule 5.22:

A player holding what he believes to be the winning hand should retain his hand
until the pot is awarded. A player with an interest in the pot should not
release his hand until the dealer pushes the pot, or his portion of the pot, to
him.

Finally, we have "Robert's Rules of Poker," most recently Version 10 (found at numerous places around the Web, such as http://www.lasvegasvegas.com/poker/rrpprinter.php):

Cards speak (cards read for themselves). The dealer assists in reading hands,
but players are responsible for holding onto their cards until the winner is
declared.

So in terms of the rules and how they apply here, this wasn't even a close call. Player A in today's incident was just a guy who made a mistake--two mistakes, actually (not noticing that his bet had been called, then throwing away his hand before the dealer pushed him the pot) and was looking to place the blame everywhere except where it belonged--squarely on himself.

Player B rightly got the pot--not necessarily by having the best hand (because we don't know who did), but by having the only hand turned face-up on the table after the final bet and call. I was glad that he didn't apologize or appear to feel guilty over the decision going his way (as it had to, under the circumstances). He did nothing wrong--at least as far as the rules are concerned. (Making that call with his hand was pretty questionable, though!)

Player A, if you're reading this, I have a message for you: I hope that you learned a valuable lesson today. It only cost you about $240 or so--chump change for a guy who is used to playing for tens of thousands at a time, as you claim to do. Maybe it will save you from losing a pot back home in your Big Game there, and you'll come to see it as having been a cheap piece of education. Pity that in all your years of playing for such high stakes, you never bothered to learn some of the most basic rules of the game.


*Incidentally, dealers are supposed to award the pot before killing the winning hand, just to prevent that kind of problem, but unfortuntely many don't follow that correct sequence. Sooner or later, players who don't hold on to their cards until receiving the pot will lose one in an ugly controversy such as today's incident became.

Ladies at the table

Many poker rooms have rules regarding one's speech. At least as posted on the wall, the proscription is generally against something like "abusive" language. Some, though, basically enforce only a rule against dropping f-bombs.

I'm not going to rehash here the debate over the wisdom of a no-effenheimer rule. Those interested can read several columns in Card Player magazine that have argued for and against the rule, at least as applied to tournaments:

http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/34/9416

http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/34/8368

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/15063

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/15177

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/14757

http://www.cardplayer.com/magazine/article/14668

I think it's obvious to everybody that even in poker rooms with a no-f-word rule, it is enforced with hopeless inconsistency. I suspect that nearly everyone--those who like the rule and those who dislike it--would agree that arbitrary, inconsistent enforcement is worse than either alternative (having the rule and consistently enforcing it, or having no such rule at all).

For now, I just want to focus on one particular brand of inconsistency that I have heard way too many times from dealers trying to quash the f-bombs: "There's a lady at the table."

Please. What century are these dealers living in? I assume that there is no card room in the nation that has a rule that prohibits the f-word only when a female is within earshot. So why do some dealers pretend that this is the basis for enforcing the rule? Do these dealers really believe that women need to be protected from this particular word more than men do? If so, what planet are they from? This is, without a doubt, the stupidest reason I've ever heard for not swearing at the poker table, but it comes up with surprising frequency--a couple of times a month, on average, I would guess.

Dealers, you have to make peace with yourself and your employer about how aggressively to enforce your rules. And, frankly, I'll likely find some reason to gripe about it no matter what, because if you sweep the fairly harmless, passing, impersonal f-bombs along with the vicious, fighting-words variety, I'll point out how stupid it is to focus on a single word in the dictionary without regard to context and intent; if you enforce it inconsistently, I'll point out how arbitrary and unfair you're being; and if you have no rule about language or have one and don't enforce it, I'll complain that your card room is an unpleasant place to play. I understand that there's no perfect solution.

But of all the alternatives available to you, the brand of selective enforcement that kicks in only in the presence of two X chromosomes is absolutely the worst one you can pick. Please stop using this as your justification--unless, of course, you're also going to require that male players pull out and push in chairs for female players, tip their baseball caps to women, and rise when any female stands up to leave the table.

Poker gems, #8

From All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of the World Series of Poker by Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback, p. 23, on how the first World Series championship was decided, revealing something of the ego of poker players:

Jack Binion then asked the participants to vote for the best all-around player.

"I couldn't understand why the fuck anybody would vote," scoffed [Amarillo] Slim. "We played for a lot of money and that was the vote."

Everyone else voted for themselves.

So Jack refined his approach. "I asked them to vote for whom they thought was second best."

Poker gems, #7

Chris Moneymaker (http://www.texasholdem-poker.com/interviews/chris_moneymaker):

In the World Series, you'll have 8,000 people: 200 world-class players, 2,000 real good players and 5,000 complete morons who watch it on TV and think they know what they're doing.

Why so chintzy on the Coke?

Every casino that I know of provides free drinks for their gamblers, including poker players. That's nice. But I can't figure out why they're so stingy with the Coke.

Coke is my only vice, really. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs. But I loves my Coca-Cola. (Pepsi will be tolerated in an emergency, but with my nose turned up.)

The problem while playing poker is that essentially every casino offers me an itty-bitty glass that is filled to the brim with ice, followed by a little squirt of Coke thrown in as an afterthought. One swallow and it's gone.

I don't get this. I could request a Red Bull, which probably costs the casino a buck a can. I could request whiskey or vodka or a decent beer, all of which the casino would presumably get for me. By comparison, Coke is dirt cheap. At any 7-11 store, you can buy a Ginormous Gulp (or whatever they call it) for, like, 79 cents, and it's about the size of a 55-gallon oil drum. I assume that they're making a profit on the stuff, even after paying for the several pounds of plastic it takes to make a cup that big. Nobody can actually drink that much, at least not without having a urinary catheter surgically implanted. And if you did, the caffeine jolt would be like getting a cardiac jump start from a Nevada Power high-voltage transformer.

So the manufacturer obviously sells the syrup for the dispensers pretty darn cheap. It's probably even cheaper for them to give me a glass of Coke than a bottled water, for Pete's sake. Why, then, does the casino treat the stuff as if it's liquid gold?

Can't a guy get a decent glass of Coke in this city?

Both sides of quad slow-rolling in one night

From the best poker dictionary in existence, by Michael Wiesenberg (http://www.poker1.com/mcu/mculib_dictionary.asp):

slow roll
(n phrase) The practice by some players, at the showdown, when they have the best hand, of waiting till the last possible moment before showing that hand. This is usually done for one of three reasons: to see everyone else's cards first, to needle one or more of the active players, or just out of pure orneriness.

slow-roll
(v) To knowingly have the best hand at the showdown but expose it only after the losers' hands are shown, leading another player to think he has the winning hand. See slow roll.


By odd coincidence yesterday, I was both the intentional victim and unintentional perpetrator of a slow roll of unbeatable four-of-a-kind hands in one session at the Venetian.

Perpetrator:
I'm in late position with suited Q-9 and call a largish raise from one of the blinds. It's heads-up between us. The flop is 9-8-8 rainbow. My opponent hesitates, looks at his chips, looks at me, seems quite nervous, then puts all his chips into one big stack and pushes it forward. It's $103. This is well over twice the size of the pot--a huge overbet. Before that, I thought it most likely that he had a big pair, something between jacks and aces, and I was frankly just hoping to catch a lucky flop, but expecting to have to dump my hand if I didn't hit something strong.

His hesitation, nervousness, and the peculiar size of the bet made me re-think this, however, and suggested to me that he actually had A-K, missed the flop, and really, really, really didn't want a call. At this point, I had only $110 in front of me, so the call is for essentially my whole stack. I finally convinced myself that hitting my 9 actually did put me ahead, so I call.

Then several things happen basically all at once. My opponent turns over his cards, and I see that I was dead wrong in my post-flop read of him: he had pocket aces. Oops. Oh well. So without even watching the dealer put out the turn and river cards, I start counting out what I'm going to have to pay him.

While I'm doing that, I glance up at the now-completed set of community cards. The last two cards have come 9-9, giving me quad 9s, but it doesn't register that way with me. For some reason I can't explain, my brain reads the board as 9-8-8-8-9, instead of the actual 9-8-8-9-9. Just at this moment, I get more confused because the dealer announces my opponent's hand as "nines full of aces." I'm frozen like a deer in the headlights, simultaneously trying to figure out (1) how he can have nines full when there are only two 9s on the board (or so I think), and (2) whether my full house is bigger or smaller than his. I haven't turned over my cards because I'm a little embarrassed to have twice called big bets from a guy with aces when I was so far behind.

It takes me probably five seconds to clear my head and realize why I'm so confused. Then I see that I got just obscenely lucky to turn my measly pair into quads. So I sheepishly flip over my hole cards. Several people at the table gasp. My opponent--to his credit--didn't whine or complain, just let his head roll back for a second, then stood up and walked away.

The dealer seems to understand my situation, and quietly says, "You didn't see it, did you?" No, I didn't.

So to the guy I beat, I apologize for the slow roll. I'm well aware of how rude it is. I swear it was completely unintentional. I thought for sure I was dead. All those 8s and 9s blurred in my visual cortex, and I just didn't grasp what had happened for a few seconds. I would never do that on purpose. You left the table too quickly for me to explain, though I did attempt to tell the other players at the table what had happened, once it became clear to me in retrospect.

Victim:
Earlier in the evening I had A-J. The flop was A-K-x. A guy in the big blind checks, I bet, he calls. The turn card is another K. This makes me think he probably doesn't have a king and my ace is probably good. I only have in front of me about the same amount that's in the pot, so I move all in after he checks again. He calls. The river is a blank. I turn over my A-J.

He looks at my cards, looks at me, nods, but doesn't move. Then oh-so-slowly he turns over first one king, then another one. He has all four of 'em.


I suppose that if I were a generous soul, I would give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume that somehow he got confused about his hand the same way I did. But, frankly, this seems pretty damn unlikely. Pocket kings are the second-best starting hand, and I think everybody who looks down at them gets a little jolt of excitement at the prospect of winning the hand. Then upon hitting a third one on the flop, the excitement builds, because you're a virtual lock to win the hand. When the fourth one hits the turn, and an opponent pushes all-in, it's like having an orgasm.

It's just not plausible that this guy didn't know what he had, given the sequence of events. It played out in a completely different way from the hand in which I made quads on the turn and river after all the money went in on the flop. With about 99% certainty, this guy was just being a jerk. I have no idea why, other than a personality disorder. It happened within the first five or so hands of my session; I had just sat down, and so hadn't had any kind of history with him that would make him want to retaliate.

On one of the first seasons of the World Poker Tour (season 2's "WPT Invitational," to be exact) Harry Demetriou accidentally gave an opponent a slow roll. He had put in a pre-flop raise with pocket aces. The short-stacked opponent (I don't remember who it was) moved all-in. Harry didn't realize that a player between the all-in guy and him had folded; that is, he didn't know the action was back to him. He just sat quietly for maybe 30 seconds. Finally he realized that everybody was waiting for him to act. He obviously was going to call.

What was impressive is that he apologized over and over and over again. He would never intentionally slow-roll anybody; he just didn't realize it was his turn.* He was mortified that anybody would think he had done that deliberately. He's a classy guy.

I think most players are delighted to show their winning hands as quickly as possible. It's rare to run into a player who takes some sort of sick pleasure in slow-rolling with the absolute nuts. I don't recall ever before being the one to have done it (however unintentionally), nor being on the receiving end (though perhaps I have been, and don't remember it). It was very strange to be on both sides of it in one night.

To the guy who slow-rolled his quad kings: a pox on you, sir.


*In this case, it would be a slightly different kind of slow-roll than described in the definition above. If at any point in the hand one has the nuts--the best possible hand--so that a call of an opponent's all-in bet is eagerly and automatically given, delaying that call any longer than necessary is another version of a slow-roll. Now, sometimes there is a strategic reason to take one's time about it--most commonly to seduce another player into also calling, by acting as if it's a difficult decision. There's nothing unethical about that. But in Demetriou's case, he was the last one to have a decision to make. He would surely have acted instantly if he had known it was his turn.

Poker gems, #6

Max Shapiro, in his Card Player magazine column, May 23, 2007:

There's an old joke about a guy coming home late from a poker game to find his hideous harpy of a wife waiting for him with a rolling pin. She demands to know where the hell he's been, and he tells her she'll have to pack all of her things because he just lost her in a card game.

"How could you manage to do such a thing?" she screams.

"It wasn't easy, dear," he replies. "I had to fold a royal flush."

Does your mother know you're wearing that shirt? (Minimal poker content)

Sometimes I just have to wonder what people are thinking when they select clothes to buy and wear.

The other day I saw a 30-something-year-old guy in the Venetian poker room wearing a t-shirt that said, on the front, "You have a nice ass," and, on the back, "What high school do you go to?"

I assume that people wear shirts with messages on them because they want to announce to the world something about their personality or their interests. Fine--I have no problem with that. I have my share of shirts commemorating an event I've been to or a product I like. I don't wear t-shirts much*, but if I did, I'd certainly consider ones that had stuff printed on them that I found funny or interesting.** I assume that people would either get and appreciate the joke--and thus think that they have at least a little something in common with me--or not like it, and thus probably not be my type.

But what on earth could one expect people to think of a guy who wears the nice ass/high school shirt? Did he buy it saying to himself, "Wow, people will think I'm so clever"? Does he laugh at it again every time he puts it on? When going through the drawer that morning to pick out a shirt, did he see this one and think, "Yep, that's the one that will convey just the right image of me today"?

Look, I'm not a prude, nor am I unrealistic about the sexual attractiveness of teenagers.*** It's just that I can't figure out what image of oneself one would be attempting to convey to the world by buying and wearing that particular shirt. Is it, "Wow, I really hope everybody sees that I enjoy fantasizing about sex with high school girls"?**** I mean, basically, what else can it be? Is there really anything that one can conclude about the wearer other than that? I suppose there's the possibility that he's being ironic, that he's actually the father of a teenage daughter, doesn't like the thought of her emerging sexual attractiveness, and wears this shirt in ironic defiance of his own true feelings. But that's quite a stretch.*****

Or maybe I just don't find the suggestion--however remote--of statutory rape to be as funny as this guy does.

Mostly, though, I suspect that I have thought about this guy's shirt, and what it says about him, a lot more than he ever has.******


*Not that anybody cares, but the pragmatic reason is that poker rooms tend to be really, really cold, so long-sleeved shirts tend to be a lot more comfortable. I also like to carry a pen and paper in my breast pocket for recording when and where I played, my results, things to look up when I get home, ideas for this blog, etc. So even long-sleeved t-shirts aren't my favorite garb, since they lack this crucial pocket.

**I just found this bunch of t-shirts (and posters, some of which should also be on shirts), which I would totally wear: http://xkcd.com/store/ (Thanks to Wil Wheaton's blog for the pointer: http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2007/08/my-awesome-t-sh.html.)

***There's the old joke, "What do you call a man who finds 15-year-old girls sexually attractive?" Answer: "Heterosexual." The point, obviously, is that all straight guys do. For most of human history, girls of what we now consider high school age were expected to already be having children. Assuming that there is a strong genetic component to what kinds of people one finds to be sexually attractive, it appears to be nearly universal that it includes adolescents of one gender or the other.

****Nothing in the shirt's message specifically mentioned girls, so it's at least theoretically possible that the designer and/or purchaser had high-school boys in mind. But I'm pretty dubious of that.

*****I love irony, and I can appreciate irony even in t-shirts. (As opposed to appreciating ironing of t-shirts, which I don't.) At the same Venetian poker table was a woman who struck me as exceptionally bright, likely an engineer or professor of some sort, wearing a shirt that said "Math is hard!" I assume that this was derived from and/or in deliberate reference to the infamous talking Barbie. (See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002892.html for a nice summary of the history of that model, and how the "math is hard" expression emerged from it.) I further assume that this particular wearer loves math, and wears the shirt in proud irony--which I think is funny!

******This is now the most footnotes I've ever had in a blog post. Maybe I should start thinking of a better system, eh?

Poker jokes for retirement

I like jokes as much as the next guy. But some poker-related jokes have become so overused that I think we have to actually ban them from further use. I am hereby forming a new organization, Players for the Retirement of Old Poker Jokes (PROPJ, pronounced "prop-jay"). You can join simply by using the "comments" button to submit a candidate for permanent banishment from the game.

Here's my initial list:

Maybe the most common one pops up when a player wins a pot, but in the excitement of stacking up the chips forgets to return his cards to the dealer. When reminded of the need to do so, he says, "They're so good I want to use them again on the next hand!"

Not funny.

Once in a while two players will bet and raise each other with a lot of tension. Then finally when it's over, one of them reveals his hole cards, and the other, seeing them, scowls, says something like "You play that crap?" and turns over--the same hand.

Not funny.

Four or five people limp in. The subsequent three rounds of betting get checked all around. When the cards are turned over, somebody has just barely made a hand, like bottom pair with a bad kicker, and wins the pot. Some wise guy at the table will always say, "You had the nuts!"

Not funny.

A card gets accidentally exposed during the deal. The dealer shows it to everybody, announces that it will be the burn card and not in play. Inevitably, some wisecracker will say, "Well, that kills my hand," or "There goes my quads."

Not funny.

Either on the flop or when it turns out that it's a limped-in family pot before the flop, somebody who folded will ask, "Can I get my cards back?"

Not funny.

Somebody bets, say, $25. A player behind him will say, "I would have called $24, but $25 is way too much."

Not funny.

Any "joke" that involves the words "jack" and "off" in close proximity is

Not funny.

If you buy into a $100 tournament and start with, say, $2000 in tournament chips, saying that you're just going to cash them in and leave with your profit is

Not funny.

After the flop and the turn have put one card of each suit on the table, somebody will rap the table while saying, "I check my flush [or flush draw]."

Not funny.

Before folding a junk hand, a player will ask if he can double down, or make some other blackjack move.

Not funny.

Any oh-so-clever sexual double-entendre relating to "straddle" is officially declared to be...

Not funny.

A player facing, say, a $25 bet will toss out four red chips ($20), then realize his mistake, and add another one, at which point some other player will make the fake protest, "That's a string call!"*

Not funny.

In a no-limit game, one player declares himself to be all-in. The next one to act puts his hands behind his chip stacks, as if to push them forward, and says, "I'm all [pause] OUT," then folds.

Not funny.

There are many, many more of these. They all need to be done away with. I'm not sure I can stand to hear them for very much longer before I go postal at the table. So please join my new association by suggesting other lame, old poker jokes that just have to go. Maybe together we can get them banned forever. Violators will then be required to, I dunno, maybe clean up all the crap that's under the tables, or write their forbidden bad joke on a chalkboard a hundred times. (Suggestions for punishment for the unrepentant jokesters will also be gladly accepted in the comments section.)

For the good of poker, we PROPJ members must also be actively working to bring into use new material, stuff that's genuinely funny. We must take on the responsibility to elevate poker humor to lofty new heights.

For example, here's my favorite: After the flop, I have nothing--no pair and no draw. Somebody makes a big bet, and the action is to me. I ask the dealer, "How many more cards are there to come?" Of course he says "Two." I feign surprise and dismay, and say, "Oh, that's not nearly enough," and throw my cards in the muck.

Now that's funny!


*Explanation for the uninitiated: A "string bet" or "string raise" is when somebody puts out some amount of chips, then goes back to his stack to get more to add to it. Because some unethical players used to do this to watch for an opponent's reaction--then add more chips to the bet or raise if it appeared that the opponent didn't like the action--this is now universally proscribed. You have to either announce a specific amount in advance (in which case you can go to your chip stack as many times as needed to fetch the right amount of chips), or put whatever you're going to bet out in one motion. But for obvious reasons, just putting in a call of somebody else's bet doesn't have the same potential problems, so there's no prohibition against (and really no such thing as) a "string call."