Seeing red

I was at the Palms tonight--the poker room's first day in its new location and under new management. The casino has contracted out management of both the poker room and the sports book to Cantor Gaming, which some industry observers think is a trend of the future. You can read a bit about it here.

The new room is just inside the doors from the west parking garage, adjacent to the food court.

The wall of televisions in the sports book has to be seen to be believed. It's enormous, sharp as a tack, and impossibly bright. (Notice in the photos above that it completely blows out the sensor in my digital camera, so you can't see any detail.) In fact, the brightness is so intense it's a problem for the poker room. You'll think I'm exaggerating about this until you go there and experience it yourself, but when the picture on the two biggest screens suddenly changes to something really bright--a little text on an all-white background for an ad, for example--it changes the ambient light level in the poker room so much that everybody turns to see what happened. It's like suddenly turning on an additional set of lights, or setting off a camera flash: even if you're not looking in that direction, you not only know it happened, but it diverts your attention, at least briefly.

The poker players spend a lot of time looking at the wall of sports action--far more than they used to with a couple of ordinary TVs on the far side of the room. The things occupy such a large fraction of one's visual field that it's pretty hard not to be distracted. This caused the games to lag noticeably more than they did in the old room, because people weren't paying attention.

A related problem is the sound level. They don't play sports in silence--whatever is on the biggest screens has the audio track filling the room. And it is LOUD. It was so loud that it made it difficult for players and dealers to hear each other. It was so loud that it gave me a headache after an hour or so.

These two problems interact in an unfortunate way: Players are looking somewhere else when it's their turn, but the dealer can't get their attention by saying, "Sir," because nobody can hear what is being said at the table. I'm not just being hypersensitive about this--the games were at least one-third slower than has been my experience at the Palms before, all because of this combination of overwhelming sight and sound from the sports book.

My final gripe is that the room was cold--one of the coldest I've experienced in a long time. And wouldn't you know it, this was one of the rare times I didn't take a sweatshirt with me. I saw "Titanic 3D" this week, and the Palms poker room made me appreciate what it must have felt like to jump off the ship into the icy North Atlantic. No--scratch that. I would have welcomed the chance to go swimming among those frozen corpses so that I could warm up a little.

These three problems are serious enough that if they aren't fixed, my time in the new room is going to be severely limited. One of the things I most appreciated about the old room was that it was small, quiet, and isolated. The new room is none of those things. The room launches a multi-faceted assault on one's physical comfort.

On the plus side of the ledger, the appointments are plenty nice--assuming you like your red juiced up on steroids.

The new tables don't have built-in cupholders, however, which annoys me. I dislike having to find one of the portable ones and jam it under the rail.

In one of the pictures above you can see a single table inside a glassed-in room, which I assume is for private and/or higher stakes games.

They finally have the Genesis Bravo system with card readers at the table, instead of logging in and out at the desk.

No poker magazine racks are in evidence. I'm told that that will be remedied in the future.

The entire sports book area has been designated no-smoking. That surprised me, because I can't think of another sports book in town that is smoke-free, but I'm sure not complaining. When I first saw that the new poker room was actually inside of the sports book, one of my first thoughts was that there would be a lot of smoke infiltration. I was wrong. I never caught a whiff of smoke in 3 1/2 hours of play. There's also a set of restrooms inside the sports book, so you don't have to penetrate of wall of smoke to get to them.

To sum up, the place looks really nice at first glance, and it's far more smoke-free than one would guess from the layout. However, the combination of the problems of player distraction, painful noise levels from the sports book, and a temperature that made me yearn for a big dose of global warming are daunting to me, and are likely to make me choose other venues when I would have hit up the Palms if they had stayed with the old room.

The Palms used to have a poker room. Now they have a few poker tables inside a sports book. The sports-book environment is so intrusively, unrelentingly oppressive that you are unlikely to forget even for a single second that that's where you are. This is a wholesale change in the character of the place, one that I deeply wish they had not made.

Winner, winner--no chicken dinner

One of the earliest submissions in the win-a-chip contest was my favorite, and I thought was unlikely to be surpassed. From "k9dr":

I personally believe that I should win the chip because U.S Americans are unable to do so because uh, some people out there in our nation don't have chips and I believe like such as South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that Oshea's here in the U.S should help South Africa and the Iraq and the Asian countries so we can build up our future for our children and I can win the chip.

If you don't understand why that's funny, you may be the only person in the world who hasn't seen the video clip it is parodying.

But a last-minute entry snatched away the win. I'm afraid it exposes that my sentimental streak is even stronger and deeper than my snarky streak. From "Andy":

I can't believe this place is closing. It has a very special place in my heart. Here's my story.

I was playing blackjack there in 2003 with a buddy. We were sitting at a table with 3 girls from CA. We started a conversation with them and I was pretty quickly smitten with one of them. We ended up handing out with these girls the rest of the night and I ended up spending most of the rest of my trip with this one girl.

To make the story short, we ended up having a long distance relationship(I lived in NC, she in CA) for two years. We tried to see each other at least every 3 months and for the most part, we did.

After two years, we decided we didn't want to live apart anymore and she moved to NC to live with me. We were married a year later and will celebrate our sixth wedding anniversary next month.

We go back to Vegas at least once a year together and always go back and spend some time there. I am going back in July for the WSOP main even and it will be strange for that place not to be there anymore.

I would love to give that chip to my wife on our anniversary next month. I know she would love it.

OK, Andy, you win, and I hope your wife will like getting the chip. (But, HINT: You might want to sweeten the anniversary gift package with something else.) Now, however, I have to find out who you are. Please submit a comment to this post with your full name and address (I won't publish the comment, so don't worry about exposure), and I'll pop the thing in the mail within a few days.

I hope the story is true. But if it's just a giant bluff (which I clearly indicated was OK), well-played.

Answering a question from Dad

After my post with the pictures of the new O'Shea's chips, my father asked me via email about the colored sections along the edges of the chips. I told him that I didn't know much about that, except that they are called "inserts" by chip collectors, and apparently make the manufacturing process more difficult to duplicate by would-be counterfeiters. He replied, "I have the impression that for the same chip design, the edge markings might vary from day to day or week to week, maybe. In most of the chips I’ve seen in your blogs the edge markings seem to be pretty irregular and sometimes somewhat sloppy."

I dismissed this at first as a not very interesting observation. There always seems to be one player at the table who, out of boredom or compulsion, stacks his chips with all the edge markings lined up neatly. I've never seen chips with which one could not do that, so they must all be the same.

And they are. Pretty much. But it finally occurred to me that right now I have means to see just how identical ostensibly identical chips are. After all, I have in my possession four brand-new ones that at a glance sure look like peas in a pod.

On closer inspection, though, not so much.

First I lined up the faces to see how much offset they were, as judged by the edge markings:

This didn't surprise me. I had noticed years ago that the inserts do not have a consistent relationship to what is printed on the faces of the chips (AKA the "inlay"). I assume that this works something like mints for coins: the chips are first made as blanks, with the obverse and reverse added later, and that as a result the orientation of the inlays is essentially random with respect to the inserts.

So then I carefully lined up the dividing line between one pair of blue and lavender marks on each of my four O'Shea's chips:

If you look closely (click on photo for larger version), you can definitely see variations in the markings.

Next I carefully turned the set of chips about 120 degrees in order to photograph the next set of inserts:

There's even more variation in this set.

Finally, I did one more 120-degree rotation to capture the last set of marks:

Again, one finds easily noticeable variations from one chip to another. Not huge, but it doesn't exactly require a microscope to see the differences.

This is obviously an artifact of the manufacturing process. It's hard to find online much detail about how casino chips are made, presumably due to trade secrets and desire to keep information from counterfeiters. This Wikipedia entry tells as much as I've found anywhere, plus having a nice photo of a broken chip so you can see what its guts look like. With respect to what causes variations in the inserts, this seems to be the key passage:

The edge spots, or inserts, are not painted on; to achieve this effect, this area of the clay is removed and then replaced with clay of a different color; this can be done to each chip individually or a strip can be taken out of a cylindrical block of material and replaced with the alternate color before the block is cut into chips.

So now you know as much as I do about the whole matter--which isn't a lot, but maybe more than you knew five minutes ago.

Slim

News reports are saying that Amarillo Slim died a few hours ago. This is not surprising, as he has been on death's door for several days now. On April 17, Doyle Brunson tweeted, "Looks like Amarillo Slim is I'n critical shape. For the record, no way was he ever a child molester." (From what I've been able to gather from public reports on the incident that led to his plea deal, I'm inclined to agree that he was wrongly accused.) Then on April 19, Brunson tweeted, "Just talked to Amarillo Slim. He is I'n hopice but is fighting hard. Tears came to my eyes as we said bye." And, further, "Amarillo Slim had faults as we all do, but he started the poker boom as we know it. Look him up on google."

Well, Doyle, I don't need to look him up, though I agree that today's players should know more about him than they seem to. I wrote a post about him, and how strange it was that a good player I ran into had never heard of the man. I'll point readers to it as my little tribute to his passing:

http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/01/maybe-hes-never-heard-of-babe-ruth.html

A contest! With a prize!

The times they are a-changin'. Harrah's/Ceasars has a crazy idea about building a giant Ferris wheel behind what are now its mid-Strip properties, and that means some other things have to go. Among those things are O'Shea's, in its entirety, and Imperial Palace, which will be remodeled and reopened as something else. (Read about it here.)

O'Shea's is closing permanently Monday at noon. So last night I went there to play one last time. I had heard on Twitter that the casino had issued a chip in honor of its closing--a strange finale that I don't recall any other property ever doing before. You can see the front and back of it above.

I bought four of them from the cashier, uncirculated. I'll keep one for my collection and try to sell two of them on eBay. The fourth I've decided to give away as a prize to a reader.

To win, simply use the comments section to submit, in 100 words or fewer, why you should be the one to receive this exceptionally valuable prize. Be imaginative. Feel free to lie, if you think it will help you. I'm not sure exactly what criteria will be used to determine the winner, other than it will be the one I like best. That might be because of sincerity, or pathos, or creativity, or humor. We'll just have to see what tickles my fancy. You have 24 hours from when this is posted. Note: Answers based on preexisting relationships, with nothing more, will fail. I mean, heck, my dad reads this blog, and he could submit, "Because I raised you," and it would be pretty hard to top that, y'know? So I'll be judging on what is written, independent of whatever claims or baggage you may have as a person.

Winner will receive the chip in the mail, whenever I get around to making a trip to the post office. U.S. addresses only. Don't be dopey and submit your entry as "anonymous," because then I'll have no way of verifying who sent it in. Make sure that whatever nickname Blogger knows you by is linked to or matched by your blog, your Facebook page, your Twitter account, your email address, or whatever, so that when I select a winner I don't have more than one person plausibly claiming to have been the author.

Go.

Addendum, April 29, 2012

I was about to pick a winner, but then realized that this post went up in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Because my page views spike on Monday, I know that many readers don't check in here on weekends. So, in order to give more people a chance to enter my little contest, I'm extending the deadline to Monday night.

What happened Friday night...

...in the form of a rebus:

If you can't figure it out, you could look here for an explanation.

"In the poker world...we only have our good name"

Many people in my Twitter feed today have posted links to and/or comments on this wonderfully ironic short video of Howard Lederer expounding on business ethics. It's just too rich not to share--especially this: "People always remember that you were that guy that stiffed everybody and didn't pay back."

That's a mighty powerful hand you have there, sir

Because of my interest in recreational/competitive shooting, I subscribe to the Twitter feed of the web site Guns.com for news updates, etc. Tonight whoever runs that account posted the above photo with the comment, "No bluffing needed with this hand." I was puzzled for a few seconds--only four cards? But then I figured out the mystery.

Game theory on TV

One of my regular non-poker reads is a blog called "The Agitator," by Radley Balko. He posted this YouTube clip today. It's brilliant. I've never heard of this game show before (I assume it's shown in Britain), but you don't need to know the rules, the host explains enough. Watch now if you're going to, because spoilers will follow.


 

 Of course, the problem presented to the contestants is just a minor variation on the age-old "Prisoner's Dilemma." But I love, love, love how the guy on the right solves it. He presents an utterly convincing case that he is going to steal, and therefore the only way that the guy on the left has any chance of getting half of the money is by selecting "share," trusting that Mr. Right will be as good as his word and split the money after the show. This is perfectly plausible to Mr. Left, because he can't think of any reason that Right would be lying about which ball he is going to select (though of course he might be lying about his post-show intentions). But in fact, the whole song-and-dance was just a ruse to manipulate Left into picking "share." It was Right's way of making sure that Left didn't try to steal. Right had me completely convinced. I was stunned when he revealed "share." It took me a few seconds to process what had happened, but then when I got it, I wanted to tip my hat to him for a stunning piece of applied game theory. Absolutely perfect!

You know that poker concept of thinking one level deeper than your opponent? Well, my hunch is that the guy on the right would be one fearsome player.

In case you missed it

Just a few minutes ago, Jennifer Harman posted the above photo on Twitter along with an explanation that it came from a hand of Stud-8 she had just played at Aria. Four players made ace-high flushes. Three players had low hands, including (if I'm reading the blurry image correctly) one wheel for the nut low (second hand from the left). She said that they generated a $27,000 pot in this $300/600 game.

Live poker is SO rigged.

Betting versus check-raising

I like Ed Miller's columns in Card Player magazine. He is the writer who is most likely to have a specific idea that offers a relevant way to tweak my game, something concrete that I can implement the next time I play.

In the April 4, 2012, issue, he discusses a hand played by one of his students. In a $1-2 NLHE game, the student raised under the gun with Js-Jc and picked up three callers. On a flop of 9d-7d-4s the student checked, had an opponent bet, which folded the other two still in the hand. The student then check-raised. When asked about his play, the student said that his goal with the check-raise was to get his opponent to fold.

Miller spends most of the column discussing (appropriately) how wrong-headed this is. Not that he needs my two cents, but here's how I would have phrased the general idea:

I don't make money when my opponents make correct decisions. I make money only when they make mistakes. The most fundamental categories of mistake they will make are bad folds (when they have the best hand) and bad calls (when they don't). Of these two basic types of error, bad calls are far more lucrative overall. This is because of two factors. First, bad calls result in bigger pots than bad folds. Second, bad calls are a much more frequent error than bad folds, especially among low-stakes players such as those that populate Vegas's $1-2 games.

The consequence of these observations is that opponents' bad calls are the single most important key to making money in poker. Well, I'll qualify that. One could argue that avoiding making bad calls oneself--or, more generally, making fewer and less costly mistakes than one's opponents--is even more important. But in terms of what you might be able to manipulate opponents to do, inducing bad calls is the vein of gold.

One of the most frequent post-hand commentaries that bad players offer shows how poorly they grasp this concept. Hardly an hour of play goes by without somebody making a prohibitively large bet on the flop, folding the field, then showing an overpair with a comment like, "I didn't want anybody drawing at that flush/straight." If you ever want to show the poker world that you're unclear on the concept, be one of the guys who does that. What you should really want, of course, is for players to call too much money with inferior or speculative holdings, while simultaneously being able to deny them proper implied odds for the call by being able to get away from your hand on the occasions when they hit their draw, miracle two pair or trips, etc.

All of which is a long way of introducing what I thought was the most mysterious lacuna in Miller's column: the near-total lack of comment on his student's check on the flop. At the end, he does add this: "The irony of all this [i.e., his long criticism of his student's stated goal] is that I like his raise just fine. (I would have simply bet the flop, but given his check, I like the raise.) It's just his reasoning that was bunk. I like the raise specifically because lots of worse hands--tens, nines, diamonds, straight draws, and so forth--will call. My student raised thinking he would get folds, but in fact his bet is going to get action from all the right hands."

I don't disagree, but I would have put much more emphasis on what is passed over lightly with just the parenthetical remark. I would insist that betting out should be the default plan, with a check-raise an acceptable alternative only if the student can articulate very specific facts about his opponents that can justify it. Perhaps there's an aggressive player on the button who always bets when everybody checks to him. Maybe the student has been playing in a perfectly straightforward manner--check/folding flops when he has less than top pair, betting them only when he has better than that--and he has reason to think observant opponents have noticed this tendency and will try to steal from him. He may know one of the other players always bets draws rather than trying to take a free card. But there has to be something very specific about this particular confluence of opponents and circumstances to make going for a check-raise a viable alternative to betting.

I would give two reasons for this argument. First, as Mike Caro repeats ad infinitum, the obvious, straightforward action is usually the right one, and you need special circumstances to make deviating from it profitable. A continuation bet while holding an overpair to the board is clearly the most obvious, straightforward choice, the one least likely to trigger the fatal consequences of Fancy Play Syndrome.

Second, on a relatively draw-heavy board, giving a free card to three opponents would be a mortal sin, not forgivable with any subsequent act of atonement. One would need to be highly confident that a bet from one of them was going to be forthcoming before choosing to go for the check-raise. In this particular hand, without running any numbers, offhand I'd put the requisite level of confidence in an opponent betting at something like 80-90%. In order to have that high degree of confidence, one would need to be able to articulate specific facts about the situation based on previous observations and patterns.

So my only criticism of Miller's column is that I think he passes too lightly over the bet versus check-raise decision, as if it's kind of just a matter of taste or style. That may, in fact, not be his view of it. Maybe there just wasn't room to go into it while still airing out his main point about the flawed rationale his student gave. But I think that the check on the flop (assuming there were not adequate, specific justifications for it) it as big a problem as the warped reasoning about inducing folds.

Josie...

...has a very important story to tell you about a little online poker bet that went down between us today:

http://veryjosie.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-ass-hurts.html

I cashed in one of the two SNGs we were playing, but outlasted her in both of them.

Dogs playing poker

Go look at this brief blog post:

http://www.theagitator.com/2012/04/15/sunday-evening-dog-blogging-reader-dogs-3/

Don't ask why, just trust me on this.

Ante Up magazine cover

I have now seen the April issue of Ante Up magazine, and it included a brief note from the publishers about the anomaly on the March issue cover, which I mentioned here:

On a quick side note, we'd like to thank the pranksters at Beau Rivage for putting two 9s in front of John Dolan in the Million Dollar Heater victory pose we ran on our March cover.

We were seeking a quick way to find out how many people actually look at our cover, and judging by our full inboxes and bloated voicemail from readers wondering how Mr. Dolan won an event with two of the same card, we happily have our answer.

My amazing week

To say that I am not normally a social creature would be the understatement of the year. But this week saw a confluence of events and out-of-town visitors that brought out my inner mingler. Most notably, my pals Grange95, WriterJen, and PokerLawyer all came to Vegas to celebrate my birthday a few days early. (Well, they all had other flimsy cover stories, but I know the real reason. It's all about me, obviously.) We were joined, at various times, by a bunch of others, including some I always enjoy hanging out with--LasVegasPokers, PinkLadiesPT, PokerVixen, CKBWOP, CureMTM--the last of whom tied us into a new circle of friends, as seen in the first picture below.

The festivities included, in various subgroupings of the above people:

• Penn and Teller at the Rio (my fourth time seeing their show, which is always fantastic)
• Driving and hiking around Red Rock Canyon
• Long but cheap rubdowns from massage therapy students at this place
• Dinners at Lindo Michoacan, Simpatico (former mayor Oscar Goodman's brand-new restaurant inside the Plaza Hotel--maybe the best Italian food I've had in Vegas), and Delmonico Steakhouse
• Profitable poker sessions at Binion's and Venetian

I had expected this to be a rather expensive week of socializing, but for nearly all of the things that cost much, one person or another was generously stepping up and insisting on paying either with casino comps or their own money. I have such nice friends!

Here's the gang at Delmonico. That's right--it's me and eight lovely ladies (seven here, but one hadn't yet arrived), cuz that's just how I roll. (They do not all have devil eyes as it might appear.)

Here's another gang at Simpatico:

One small bit of the scenery at Red Rock:

A nice pair of Ferrari f430s (the convertible version of the car I drove last month) parked at Red Rock:

All in all, it was one of the best weeks I've ever had since living in Vegas, and almost certainly the best one that didn't include Cardgrrl. In fact, one downside to spending so much time with other people is that, paradoxically, it reminds me more acutely of how much I miss her.

Almost all of the visitors have now flown back home, so it's back to the grind for me--which this weekend must sadly include a big chunk of time doing my federal income taxes. Ick.

I can do basic probability calculations

In my RSS feed reading today was a pointer to a site that administers a brief quiz of your ability to quantify probabilities:

http://www.riskliteracy.org/dnn/

I took it and got this gratifying summary of my results:

Congratulations on completing your statistical and risk literacy test!

Your numeracy score is better than about 75-100% of all college educated individuals. Roughly, this means that out of every 100 people who take the test, you will do better than about 90% (90 people) of all other people. This is the highest score one can receive on this test.

Technically, relative to the general population, you are among the most statistically literate in the world.
Based on your score, you are not very likely to experience the extreme difficulty most people have when faced with common types of statistical thinking. However, you should still take care and may want to double check your calculations or seek additional advice when it comes to important decisions involving risk and statistics (e.g., some medical decisions, financial investment, taking consumer debt).

In our uncertain and complex world you are likely to find that your higher levels of risk and statistical literacy are very beneficial and important.

Indeed, your levels of numeracy reflect a skill level that very few people ever achieve… one that is the result of considerable practice.

As the saying goes: " Practice makes perfect."

Anomalies

Two odd poker-related visuals have caught my eye this week.

First, I got an email from Bovada (formerly Bodog), saying how much they've missed me since I haven't played there in a few months. It includes a nice tournament ticket, which I will definitely use, so I kept this in my email in-box to remind myself to check the schedule for when I can use the ticket. But the longer it sat there, the more I thought something didn't look right. I finally looked closely and realized the problem:

It's the geography. Paris is indeed just across the street from the Bellagio, but that establishes that we're looking south on Las Vegas Boulevard from Flamingo Road. But then we see Caesars Palace further south, and facing us. This is wrong, because CP would be behind us, and facing east, the same orientation as Bellagio.

Then there's this weird cover photo from the March issue of Ante up magazine. Pay particular attention to the cards:

This is what has become pretty much the industry standard tournament winner's photo, with all the chips, the winner's trophy, and the hole cards the winner had on the last hand. (The only thing missing is the traditional cash.)

But did he really win the final hand of the tournament holding a nine of spades and ANOTHER NINE OF SPADES? Let's all say it together: "Fouled deck. Take your bets back."

Weirdness abounds.

Poetry and photography

Cardgrrl's latest project is a collaboration with a poet friend. I hope you'll take a look at it here:

http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/361914/

M*A*S*H

It looks like my friend Martin Harris has found a new home at Poker Listings for his occasional excellent series on poker's intersections with pop culture. (It has previously appeared at Poker News and Epic Poker.) Today's installment reviews the episodes of M*A*S*H in which poker games show up:

http://www.pokerlistings.com/blog/pop-poker-the-history-of-poker-on-mash

He mentions the episode I most remember whenever the subject of bluffing comes up--Charles Emerson Winchester's bad habit of whistling when he bluffs. (See Martin's summary of the episode, "The Merchant of Korea.") I think of it, however, because of a lack of plausibility.

Even long before I played poker, the discovery of Winchester's tell struck a false note with me because of how it occurs. Mind you, I haven't seen the episodes in literally decades, so it's possible that my memory is faulty. But my recollection is that it is only after a poker session (or perhaps during a break in the game, away from the table) that BJ and Hawkeye are complaining to each other about how Charles is always winning. Then one of them chimes in with another gripe: "And it's so annoying how he whistles when he's bluffing." There's a beat, then a light bulb goes on over their heads. They smile and in unison say, "He whistles when he's bluffing!" They celebrate because they have finally discovered the chink in his armor that will allow them to start winning.

In other words, at least one of them had, while playing, noticed the association between his conduct and his bluffs, but it wasn't until later reflection that he (or they) realized that they could exploit this observation to beat him.

That's just not even remotely plausible. As I said, even decades before I ever played the game, I knew that that couldn't possibly be how such things would go. It rang as false as Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and not starting to fall until he realizes that there's nothing but air under him.

Ah well. It's not exactly a show that one watched for hyper-realism of details. But that particular plot point has bugged me for years and years and years whenever I've thought about it, and now I have finally had an excuse to express my annoyance about it.

Poker gems, #449

Mike Caro, in Poker Player newspaper, April 9, 2012 (vol. 15, #21), page 4.

Simply put, most opponents call more often than they should. And that, in itself, makes bluffing a challenge.

In fact, most bluffs are unprofitable. And all bluff attempts averaged together, throughout the history of the universe, have lost money.