Guess the casino, #857

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Answer: Luxor

Talk about run-good

Check this out: http://blogs.forbes.com/halahtouryalai/2011/05/13/one-mans-blackjack-hotstreak-wipes-out-casinos-profit/

Winning one for the good guys

I took quite a long break from online poker, starting with my trip to Florida, then the whole Black Friday thing. There wasn't any particular reason I didn't get back into it in between those things; I just didn't.

This week I've played, I think, five small buy-in tournaments (i.e., $20 or less) as I'm getting back to it, but had only one min-cash to show for it--until now. Today's tournament was the kind that makes such efforts worthwhile: I took it down, for a $600 win on the $22 entry fee. There were 98 players, so it didn't quite make Bodog's guarantee, and we had a small overlay.

I entered the final three as the short stack, and ended up extremely proud of how patiently I played it, since that is rarely my strong suit. I let the big stack on my left bully me endlessly, until I lowered the boom on him the first time and got a double-up, then a second time to knock him out, in the process giving myself a 5:1 chip lead going into heads-up play. Then it took less than 20 hands to first chip away at the other guy to get him down to fewer than ten big blinds, then knock him off.

By far the most significant hand that propelled me into a commanding chip position, from which I could pretty much coast to the final table, was my old friend, the Mighty Deuce-Four. Bodog is in a big battle with the various companies that make hand-reading software, trying to prevent them from datamining and giving players heads-up displays, and as a result make it really difficult to post hand histories. This set of images is the best I can manage. It's cumbersome, but you can still see what happened, which is that I flopped the nuts and slow-played it, trapping the player with top pair:

There were two felicitous outcomes. (1) I picked up a ton of chips. (2) Hilarity ensued. Here's the chat transcript that followed:

[dukedaddiee]: u called me with ***king 2 4 off?
tms9054: nh can't believe u called with that
[dukedaddiee]: ***king dik
[dukedaddiee]: calls 1400 pre with that and flops nutz
[dukedaddiee]: what a ***king JOKE
tms9054: sry bro
MrMoose123: why can't I ever get free chips like that???
[dukedaddiee]: wpw
[dukedaddiee]: ill note u ***king dik
[dukedaddiee]: 2 4 off
[dukedaddiee]: cmon
tms9054: hard to believe he called with that
[dukedaddiee]: dude i raised to 1400
[dukedaddiee]: wow
[dukedaddiee]: cant belive that BS u u***ing dik hope u run awful for months dude
[dukedaddiee]: gl rest of u
[dukedaddiee]: couldnt write anymore notes
[dukedaddiee]: bodog suks fills up to fast
[dukedaddiee]: ***king jerk
[dukedaddiee]: 2 54 off
[dukedaddiee]: latr

I think it's safe to say that Bodog players fail to grasp the awesome power of Deuce-Four.

What's in a screen name? #24

I knew something strange was going on when I got moved to this table and the 1812 Overture was playing.

Guess the casino, #856

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Answer: Gold Coast

Whatever happened to...

...the future ban of male players entering the women's event at last year's World Series of Poker?

On June 11, 2010, WSOP Communications Director Seth Palansky was quoted by Card Player as saying, "We will have our repercussions against any man that entered the ladies tournament. There are consequences for actions, and they’ll pay the price." Also, "The good news is at the World Series of Poker, we have the right to refuse service to anyone at any time at any point that we deem, as operators of the event."

Note that the threat was phrased not as a possibility, but as a guarantee. It was not, "We may have our repercussions," but "We will have our repercussions," and not "they may pay the price," but "they'll pay the price."

This cannot reasonably be read as just an implication that those involved would suffer natural consequences of social disgrace or loss of reputation from the poker community. That would not fit the obvious implications of "We will have our repercussions," or of that bit about the right to refuse service.

So what, if anything, has the WSOP done to those male players? I sure haven't heard of anything. At the time it happened, I predicted that this would turn out to be a pure bluff:

Assuming, as would seem to be the case, that it is illegally discriminatory for a place of public accommodation to forbid men from entering the tournament, it must surely also be illegally discriminatory to refuse them equal access to public events in the future on the basis of their legitimate participation today.

Suppose that some racist restaurant owner didn't want to serve blacks, but wanted to get around the anti-discrimination laws. So he says, "I'll serve you today if you absolutely insist, but if you do, then I'm going to ban you from the premises forever, because I'm free to take or reject the business of anybody I want to."

How does that even make sense? If Harrah's doesn't have the legal right to refuse access to a public event on the basis of sex, then it can't possibly have the right to ban that person from future events on the grounds that he accepted the open invitation. I can't imagine how a court, if asked to decide the matter, could come to any conclusion other than the obvious: The future ban is just a different means of practicing the illegal discrimination. There can't be any logical distinction between "You can't play today because you're male," and "OK, you can play today, but if you do, then because you're male, we will never let you enter one of our tournaments again." The perverse consequence of that approach would be that a place of public accommodation could freely discriminate on the basis of sex or race for a person's entire lifetime, as long as they didn't do it this one time.

That's just too bizarre to take seriously. If they really try it, I'd love to be the attorney bringing the suit. Seems like a slam-dunk win for the plaintiffs to me.

I stand by that.

So, Mr. Palansky--what have you actually done in terms of making good on your threat from last year? If nothing, as I suspect, they why did you lie about the situation? And do you have any more empty threats you'd like to issue while you're at it?

Bodog payout change

A few months ago I wrote about an endlessly frustrating experience with one of Bodog's cash-out methods, a prepaid Visa card. As a result, I can only see this email from Bodog as good news:

I'm curious, though, whether this is somehow related to all the Black Friday mess, or just another example of a payment processor moving to the "no longer usable" category.

Guess the casino, #854

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Answer: Aria

Cereus press releases compared

Cereus (umbrella company of UltimateBet and Absolute Poker) yesterday released two different versions of an announcement about an agreement with the Department of Justice as to release of players' funds. Some people have already noticed one key difference (deletion of language about third-party processors), but there are others.

Many don't know that Microsoft Word has a feature that automatically compares two versions of a document and notates the changes. In order to facilitate scrutiny of what has changed, I threw both versions, as posted on Gary Wise's web site here and here, into Word (I still use the 2003 release) and had it highlight the changes. Method for doing this is explained here.

Below is the result, captured as a JPEG screenshot. Click for full size. Additions to the original text are underlined and in red; deletions and alterations are noted in the right-hand margin.

I will leave commenting on the interpretation of changes to others. I just wanted to offer this little technical service to those interested in a shortcut method. Permission is granted to anybody who wants to either link to or copy this image; just add a notation as to this blog being the source, please.

Poker probability in non-poker life

While I was in Florida with Cardgrrl in March, somehow we got talking about refractive eye surgery (LASIK and other such procedures). I said that I would love to be free of glasses, but the life consequences of any significant visual loss are too terrible for me to be willing to risk it, even though the chance of such an outcome is small.

She agreed, and noted that playing poker has given her a greater respect for small-percentage results. Playing poker a lot, you see 1% scenarios happen often enough to make a lasting impression that they are real. On paper, that 1% looks like a trivial, negligible fraction, but playing thousands of hands of poker, of course you're going to see a fair number of them come out.

I agree with her that playing poker has changed my perspective on rare events. It's not that I think things happen more often that the math would predict, it's just that I've come to incorporate, in a front-of-the-awareness manner, the reality that small percentages multiplied by a large number of opportunities means that the rare things not just might but actually do occur with regularity.

Translated back to the surgical situation, if I had to have a tumor removed to save my life, of course I'd accept the small risk that the surgery itself would have some freakishly rare adverse outcome. But I'm not willing to accept that risk when the only advantage is losing the little bit of nuisance that glasses represent.

Today I found another example in which my occasional study of poker probability has influenced the way I think about something. I heard on the news that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals hearing one of the big Obamacare constitutionality lawsuits had "randomly" selected a panel composed of two Obama appointees and one Clinton appointee. (See here, e.g.) I'm not normally inclined to conspiracy theories, but that immediately struck me (and, undoubtedly, many others) as a stacked deck. So I looked into it.

I found that the court currently has 13 members, of which five are Republican appointees and eight are Democratic appointees. (See the tally here.) I've run enough poker scenarios to have become reasonably familiar with the math on permutations and combinations, and quickly determined that there are 286 different ways of selecting groups of three judges from a pool of 13. There are only ten ways of drawing panels of three Republican appointees, 56 ways of drawing panels of three Democratic appointees, and 220 ways of drawing a mix.

If, therefore, you ask the question, "What is the probability that a random assignment would result in a three-judge panel of all Democratic appointees?", the answer is 56/286, or about 20%. It's not the most likely outcome, but it's hardly in the range of rarity that makes sensible people don tinfoil hats. It's in the same ballpark as your opponent hitting his flush draw on the river after all the money is in on the turn--i.e., run-of-the-mill unlucky, not extraordinarily unlucky.

I understand probability a lot better now than I did after taking a graduate course in statistics, and it's entirely because of poker. The optimist in me would like to think that teaching everybody poker would have a beneficial effect on the populace's generally abysmal understanding of probability and statistics. But the realist in me remembers all of the stupid ideas about randomness that even experienced poker players develop ("I never win with aces," "I figured he couldn't have diamonds two hands in a row," "Jacks are coming up a lot today," "A new deck of cards will end my bad streak," etc.), and it crushes any sprouts of hope.

Guess the casino, #853

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

Answer: Sunset Station

LOL

http://pokersmell.com/?p=204

Good interview

As I woke up this morning, on my radio was the tail end of an interview on the local public radio station's daily current-affairs show. The guest was Dan Deveau, an online professional player living in Henderson. I don't think I had heard of him before, but I was impressed. He makes a fine spokesman for the cause. He seems forthright and articulate, passionate but not arrogant.

You can listen to or download the 25-minute show segment here: http://www.knpr.org/son/archive/detail2.cfm?SegmentID=7830&ProgramID=2228

Guess the casino, #852

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Answer: Riviera

Aha!

A month ago I opined that the fountains seen through the "window" in the set of "High Stakes Poker" were not what they appeared, but were actually video footage played in the background, or added in post.

In the newest episode, there is conclusive proof that I was right:

This is being shot somewhere inside the Bellagio, but behind the fountains you can see--the Bellagio! This view is from the street or sidewalk.

Nobody expects...

...the Spanish Inquisition!

Guess the casino, #851

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Answer: O'Shea's

Where I win

There are plenty of things about poker that I do wrong. But there is one thing that I always do right, and that is keeping meticulous records. In nearly five years living here, I have never once failed to accurately record the results of my casino poker play. (Conversely, I keep no records at all about online play, other than deposits/withdrawals.) As a result, I accumulate a lot of useful data.

It has been close to two years since I last reviewed my records to find out where my play has been most profitable. I did a detailed post on it then, and all the caveats and explanations remain valid, so if you have questions about these data, first go check that post (with its comments), because I may well have addressed them previously, and there's no point repeating myself. Lists here include only rooms that are still open, and in which I have played at least five cash sessions. No tournament results are included.

Interestingly, the results have shifted quite a bit.

My top ten rooms in terms of percentage of sessions that are winners are, in descending order:

1. Sunset Station

2. Tuscany

3. Binion's

4. Hooters

5. Sahara

6. Aria

7. Mandalay Bay

8. O'Shea's

9. Caesars Palace

10. Venetian

But it doesn't do much good if you can score $1 session wins consistently, even though such performance would look lucrative by the above metric. What matters more is dollars per hour, or dollars per session, which is the way I mostly keep track of it. By that accounting, my best ten rooms are, in descending order:

1. Tuscany

2. Suncoast

3. Sunset Station

4. Sahara

5. Bill's

6. Binion's

7. Hooters

8. Mandalay Bay

9. Orleans

10. Aria

The high placement of a couple of rooms on the list is sort of unintentionally deceptive. The Tuscany, for example, is a place in which I have not played since November, 2008, and I've played a total of just six sessions there in five years. But they were just ridiculously profitable, as I wrote about here. Likewise, Suncoast and Sunset Station are places that I almost never go these days; it's been over two years since I last set foot in either of those rooms, and Sunset Station just barely meets my minimum five-session threshold. So the outstanding results could easily be just random statistical variation in small samples. There are a few others on the other end of the scale that, after just a handful of sessions, have equally impressive negative results.

If I restrict the list to places in which I've logged ten or more sessions, trying to reduce that small-sample variance, the lists change to this:

Percentage of winning sessions:

1. Binion's

2. Hooters

3. Sahara

4. Mandalay Bay

5. Caesars Palace

6. Venetian

7. Orleans

8. Suncoast

9. Planet Hollywood

10. Palms

Profit per session:

1. Suncoast

2. Sahara

3. Bill's

4. Binion's

5. Hooters

6. Mandalay Bay

7. Orleans

8. South Point

9. Venetian

10. Palms

So there ya go. Make of it what you will. There's not a lot of rhyme or reason to it. E.g., Suncoast and Hooters and Venetian are about as radically different from each other as three poker rooms could be, yet all three are on both lists. As far as I can tell, there is no clear tendency for me to do better in upscale rooms versus the dumps, locals rooms versus tourist places, or Strip versus off-Strip. I don't know why. To borrow a line from Fox News, I report, you decide.

Guess the casino, #850

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Answer: Flamingo

How many stories does the Stratosphere have?

Tonight, just four.

Story 1

I was in Seat 8. A middle-aged Asian gentleman, who kept falling asleep between hands and had an almost incomprehensibly thick accent, was in Seat 9 next to the dealer--one of my two favorite spots. He appeared about to leave. He picked up his chips and cash and took a step toward the aisle, apparently heading for the cashier. I told the dealer, "I'll take that seat." I was in the middle of a hand, so I didn't start moving my stuff right away.

But then the oddest thing happened: The guy did an about-face to his right, walked behind his seat, pulled it out, sat back down, and put his chips and cash back on the table.

I asked him, "Change your mind about leaving?" He said, "No, I do that for good luck. I haven't had any good cards in an hour. Now everything's gonna be changed." I asked him how that works. He replied, "I dunno. I'm just superstitious."

Really? I never would have guessed.

Story 2

Maybe 15 minutes later, I had my only all-in confrontation of the night. I had pocket aces. My sole opponent, a very pleasant young woman, had raised pre-flop to $8 and then called my $25 reraise. Then she led into me on the flop of 4-9-10 with two clubs. It left her with about $100 behind, and I had her covered. I thought a bit, and decided that it was pretty unlikely that she had me beat at this point, but if she were on a draw, she might call when the odds were in my favor. So I shoved. She agonized for a while, then settled on a call, even while saying that she knew I was ahead. I showed the aces, she showed Jh-Qh. The board ran out blanks.

As I was stacking the chips, I turned to the man next to me and said, "I think you did that for me. That little walk around the chair made me have good luck!"

He apparently didn't catch that I was joking with him. He adamantly denied it. "I had nothing to do with that! I do only for me, not for you!"

I wasn't done kidding him. I said, "I dunno. You know, sometimes when the gods throw lightning bolts, they miss. They may have intended to send you the good luck, but they missed and hit me instead."

This time he smiled, apparently having now figured out that I was just joshing him, and not actually trying to steal his mojo. But he still would have no part of it. He said, "My voodoo is only for me. You do your own voodoo!"

I laughed, and was going to make a Cole Porter quip, but I was pretty sure he wouldn't get it.

Story 3

At the far end of the table was Larry. I've played with him several times before, previously always at the Sahara. Apparently he has found a new venue, now that the Sahara poker room is virtually closed.

Larry is an ornery cuss. He's in his 60s, always disheveled, with a perpetual scowl etched into his face. I've never seen him smile or laugh. He's terribly slow to play, because he's never paying attention. He's an alcoholic, and has been drunk every single time I've played with him. In fact, on at least three occasions he has been a seriously obnoxious drunk, has been cut off from more booze, then spent the next couple of hours scheming ways to get around his ban. E.g., he'd find a different cocktail waitress, or wander off to one of the bars and sneak his bottle of beer back to the table under his coat, etc. I had some of his beer spill on me once when he tried that--immediately after I had asked him to put his beer on the table so that he wouldn't drop it, and he denied having one.

It was Larry about whom was uttered the strangest sentence I've ever heard at a poker table, as I wrote about here: "If you hadn't taken out your teeth, I would have won that pot." Larry is also the guy whom a Sahara dealer let get away with an absent-minded tapping that should have been considered a check, as I described here.

In case you can't tell, I don't like Larry much. Scratch that. I don't like him even one little bit. His sole redeeming quality, from my point of view, is that he's a really, really bad poker player. Taking his money is like the proverbial candy/baby situation. (About which, this Mythbusters test of that cliched expression is well worth watching.)

So anyway, Larry is in a three-way hand with the nice young woman mentioned above and our second drunk, who annoyed me by being way too chatty, but at least he wasn't an intolerably obnoxious old coot like Larry. On a flop of 9-8-4, all three got their chips in. Young woman, who was the first to shove, obviously didn't like being called, and said, "I need help." She showed A-K. Drunk #2 turned over his pocket jacks. Larry didn't move a muscle.

The turn brought an ace, which delighted the young woman. The river paired the board--another 4.

Everybody sat there waiting for Larry. He didn't touch his cards. I assumed that he had lost and just didn't want to admit it. He mumbled something to the dealer, which neither she nor I could understand. She asked him to repeat himself.

He said, louder and more emphatically, "Call the floor!" The dealer was confused. "Why? What's the problem?"

Larry said, with a strange mix of irritation and triumph, "Call the floor, so they can bring me my jackpot money." And with that, he turned up his pocket 4s, still scowling.

It was without a doubt the most deliberate, prolonged, mean-spirited, and uncalled-for slowroll I have ever witnessed.

Some people are pretty much worthless human beings. Larry falls into that category, if you ask me.

Story 4

Once in a while, you run into somebody who is so fixated on the etiquette of chopping the blinds that when somebody refuses, he feels it necessary to "teach him a lesson."

We had such a kid at the table. A new player joined us to the kid's left, pretty obviously inexperienced at casino poker. When they had their first chop opportunity, and the option was explained to the newcomer, he said, "Let's play." The kid looked disgusted at him, and quickly announced a raise to $15. Newbie called.

The flop came K-Q-3 rainbow. Check, bet, call. Turn was an apparent brick. Check, bet, min-check-raise, call. River another nothing. Kid moved all in. As the new guy was trying to decide what to do, the kid said, "You shoulda chopped. This is what happens." New guy thought some more. Kid said, "I have two pair, if that makes your decision any easier." New guy finally called.

Kid's face fell. He bashfully admitted, "I got nuthin'," and turned over A-2, for ace high. New guy flipped up his K-7 offsuit and took the pot. Kid stormed off.

I couldn't help laughing. "Nice hand," I said. "Nicely done."

And I meant it.

Some people like to see what they perceive as "justice" done to somebody who won't chop the blinds. (In this case, for what it's worth, I think the guy just had no clue what was being asked, nor that he committed what some consider to be a breach of etiquette by requesting to play it out.) I, conversely, loved seeing somebody who was trying to shame a green player get his comeuppance in a rather humiliating way--kind of like seeing the playground bully trying to push somebody down, but slipping and falling face-down in the mud himself instead.

Players are free to chop or not chop, so long as they're consistent about it, and I don't like others trying to apply social pressure to influence the decision or make somebody feel like an outlaw for wanting to play. After all, isn't playing why people sit down in the game? This is especially the case when somebody is an inexperienced player. After it's over, it's fine to explain to him that he might think about chopping in the future because of the difficulty of anybody making money in such a hand, etc. But do it in a friendly, helpful way--not trying to rub his nose in it.

The kid clearly thought that his opponent was going to get what he had coming--but it was the kid who got what he so richly deserved.

Image found at http://freehotelreviews.org/hotels/stratosphere-hotel/.