Leaving

Everything has been shipped or packed into my car, except the two items (suitcase and computer case) that I'll be living out of until I get settled in my Asheville apartment. I expect to turn in my keys and hit the road in about two hours, arriving at my new home sometime Monday--which, by happy coincidence, will be the fourth anniversary of the day I first met Cardgrrl, in the poker room at Harrah's. (I think if you go back and reread the post I wrote about that first meeting, you'll see that I liked her right off the bat.) My goal is to have a home office setup sufficient to allow me to resume work by Friday, a week from today.

Cardgrrl's house, meanwhile, is showing real progress. The foundation is nearly finished, despite lousy weather for construction through most of January. Three or four more months, and it will be ready for her. Then we'll both be settled in our new places, and poised to see what we can make of our lives in North Carolina. (We're not quite ready to actually share the same zip code--that would be too scary--but we will move to the next level of relationship, which is adjacent zip codes.) You can, as always, follow both her house progress and her photographic adventures in her blog, "Something Beautiful."

I am equal parts sad, nervous, and excited about this transition. This past 6 1/2 years has been fun and challenging, and I've learned a lot about myself and the world. I've grown in important, interesting, and unexpected ways. It's time to see if Asheville can reshape me as profoundly as Las Vegas has.

I am immensely grateful that so many people have found my meandering thoughts worth reading. Your enthusiastic reception has made the hours of writing and rewriting a rewarding pursuit. I cannot sufficiently thank you for your support.

I'm sure I'll pipe up here once in a while with a thought, rant, story, or joke. Plus, I expect that occasional trips back to the Land of Many Poker Rooms are inevitable, and you'll read all about them right here.

But for now, take good care of yourselves, play good poker, and don't be grumpy. That's my job.

Photo credit: Terry Hassan

Mentions

A couple of other bloggers have kindly spent a good chunk of a post on my impending departure from Las Vegas in their blogs. If that interests you, check out these links:

http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2013/01/exploring-obsessions-in-alan-zweigs.html

http://dadspokerblog.com/playing-a-grumpament/

http://www.thetapoker.com/homage-to-the-grump/

Thanks for the attention and kind words, guys.

Tighten up or loosen up against an ultra-loose table?

My friend Rob did a blog post the other day that was ostensibly about an over-the-top wild woman at the table. But along the way, he said this:

I was paying more attention to Natalee’s comments and her outrageous behavior than the poker, but I was following enough about the poker to quickly figure out how to play in this situation. With Natalee being so loose-aggressive and so many players going on tilt because of her presence—playing even crazier and more aggressive than they ordinarily would—I knew that the only way to play was to be extremely tight. I’m a tight player anyway, but now I became uber-tight. I wasn’t going to play any speculative hands, any borderline hands. No, I was going to wait for a true premium hand to play. That’s the only way to play at a table full of maniacs and that’s what this table was.

This is a common reaction, but it's wrong in terms of maximizing profit. I submitted a comment to that effect. I first appealed to authority. In one of the very first blog posts I ever wrote (November 6, 2006), I said this:

Q-10 offsuit is a hand I would ordinarily either toss or try to play very cheaply, with a high willingness to throw it away unless I get a lot of help from the community cards, or a good bluffing situation arises. And against a loose-aggressive player, my usual reaction has been to re-tighten my already fairly tight game. Recently, however, I've read two things that are making me re-think that strategy. I include them here for the possible benefit of readers, though I didn't want to interrupt the story above.  

First, I finished Barry Greenstein's superb book, "Ace on the River." On p. 204, he has a table of "opponent's tactics," the "typical incorrect adjustment" that we mediocre players make, and the "Better adjustment" that he recommends. The first entry in the table is "Extremely loose play." The incorrect adjustment is listed as "Wait for a good hand." The better reaction is given as "Loosen your standards and reraise frequently." Seems like cogent advice, though it takes more nerve than I've usually been willing to bring to bear. I'm trying to change that, a little at a time.  

Second, just a few days after reading that, I read a column in Card Player magazine by Matt Lessinger, who I think is one of their best writers. He wrote,

Overaggressive Ozzie sits down in the same game, and in six of his first 10 hands, he raises to $20 preflop. Five times, he wins the blinds uncontested. One time, someone calls him and the hand goes to the river, at which point Ozzie produces Q-8 and wins with a pair of eights. I don't have to be Phil Ivey to put two and two together, and conclude that he probably did not have premium hands when he made his other raises. Therefore, I'm going to wait for something good and try to pick him off.  

But am I going to wait for pocket aces or kings? I could, but why would I want to play so timidly? In a cash game, I want to take advantage of all favorable opportunities that come along. Here, I have an opponent who is making oversized preflop raises with substandard values. If I pick up a hand such as 9-9, or even A-J, and think I can get heads up with Ozzie, I'm probably going to play it, because it figures to be the best hand against his typical raising values. And I'm certainly not going to be deterred by the fact that he is raising to $20 rather than a more normal raise to $6 or $8.  

You can read the rest of my comment in the comments section of Rob's blog post, linked above.

If you do, you might go on to read that some others piped up doubting and/or flatly disagreeing with me, including Rob himself. So late last night I whipped out an even longer reply (again, see the comments thread). I did a quick semi-quantitative illustration of the effects of tightening up versus loosening up one's starting hand standards when playing against a table of opponents who play basically any two cards and who are willing to commit lots of money without much of a hand. My conclusion:

Here's the Reader's Digest version: You want to expand your starting hand range enough that your profits go up by winning more pots, but not so much that your average starting hand range is the same as theirs. As long as you're reasonably judicious about it, the increased frequency of wins will more than compensate for the smaller profit per hand. Against a bunch of people who are playing any two cards, you can expand your range quite a bit and still on average have the strongest starting hand, which translates into the highest probability of winning the pot, assuming that you don't play worse than they do post-flop. 

Again I stress that this is not the kind of question on which reasonable people can have opposite but equally valid opinions, like whether strawberries are better than raspberries. The math (the real math, not just the back-of-the-envelope version I'm doing here) clearly favors widening your starting hand range. It does necessarily bring higher variance, but if the question is just long-term average profits, there's no serious question about the direction of the correct adjustment. Unlike most poker questions, here there is a factually, objectively right answer: Loosening up is more profitable, tightening up is less profitable. Those who disagree are simply wrong. 

When I woke up this morning, I was thinking about this some more, and wondered if I could make the math a level or two more rigorous than I did in that comment, without spending all day on it. (I have an apartment full of stuff to pack up, you know, and I'm planning to leave in less than a week.) I thought of a way to use PokerStove to do it.

With PokerStove you can enter your hand range as either specific cards, or use the slider to change the percentage of starting hands you'll play. It assumes that if you're playing, say, 20% of hands, it's the best 20%, which is a well-defined set.

Here are the assumptions I used: I'm playing at a 10-handed table. The hold'em is played by everybody looking at their two down cards, then deciding to play or not. To play, you put in your whole stack of exactly $100, after which the dealer puts out the five board cards and pushes the pot to the winner. After each hand, everybody either removes their profit from the table or reloads, so that everybody has exactly $100 to play each hand. (Obviously this is unrealistic, but it simplifies and clarifies the math.) There is no rake (yay!) and we can get out 40 hands per hour. My nine opponents are all willing to play any two cards. I, however, am being selective. I want to maximize my profit per hour. Note that pots are $900 when I don't play, $1000 when I do play.

Here's a spreadsheet showing the results of a variety of strategies:

(Right-click on the image to see it full size.)

Column D is simply the percentage of hands played times 40 hands per hour. Column E shows how much I'm putting into the middle of the table per hour, calculated as the value from Column D times $100. Pot size is always $1000, because the hands I don't play cost me nothing and profit me nothing. Column H is the product of the pot size, my equity, and the number of hands per hour I'm playing. Finally, Column I show my profit, which is Column H minus my investment from Column E.

In the top row, you see what happens if I play nothing but A-A. My equity (i.e., the percentage of the average pot that I can expect to win) is very high (31.1%), but my profit sucks because I'm playing so few hands.

At the opposite extreme, consider the bottom row. There I'm using the same strategy as my goofy opponents, playing every single hand I'm dealt. Unsurprisingly, my profit is zero. The ten of us are just exchanging chips across the table, with nobody having any advantage. (Good thing there's no rake, or we'd all lose everything to the house over time.)

Clearly the sweet spot for maximizing profit is somewhere in between those two extremes.

For the few lines below the A-A line, I added specific starting hands, down to any two Broadway cards. The trend is perfectly clear: I lose equity in each pot I'm contesting because I'm adding sequentially weaker starting hands to my repertoire. However, this is more than compensated for by the greater number of pots I'm playing, so my profit per hour rises dramatically.

For those not familiar with PokerStove, here's how the hand-selection tool looks like, in this case set for any two Broadway cards:

And here is what the equity calculation page looks like:

After that, I just used the PokerStove slider to select higher fractions of all possible starting hands, in 5% increments, then calculated the outcomes.

At first, going looser continues to increase hourly profit. After a while, though, as you can see, the profit trend reverses. The marginal loss in equity as I add weaker and weaker hands to my starting lineup is not compensated for by the fact that I'm making myself eligible to win more pots.

The point of maximal profit isn't entirely clear because the trend isn't perfectly linear. (It might be if I were to let PokerStove run longer for each calculation and therefore got more precise equity values. But it takes a long time to settle on these values when the software has to account for nine opponents' completely random hands.) Nevertheless, you can see that it's going to be somewhere in the range of playing the best 35-45% of starting hands I'm dealt. If you want to see what that range includes, fire up PokerStove, click on the "Player 1" box, and play with the slider. It will highlight what specific cards you're selecting. (You can find a nice tutorial on how to use PokerStove here.)

Translating the math from this over-simplified version of hold'em to the real thing requires assuming that I don't make more mistakes than my opponents do. I have to be able to read them at least as well as they read me, fold second-best hands at least as well as they do, size my bets to maximize profits when I have the best hand at least as well as they do, etc. But if that isn't a valid assumption, then I simply shouldn't be playing at this table. I shouldn't play anywhere that I don't have an edge in skill over most of my opponents.

The upshot is, as I said, that the math unequivocally supports being looser than one's usual default strategy. It would be foolhardy to try to play 35-45% of starting hands against a typical table. You'll get eaten alive. But that is demonstrably the correct strategy adjustment to make in the extreme scenario I've constructed. No real-world table will be quite that wild, but the point still stands that loosening up at least moderately is the way to go. Tightening up means that you leave lots and lots of money on the table that should have been yours.

Two new (or newish) poker rooms

The Quad

Today was the opening of the poker room at "The Quad," which is the new name for the remodeled Imperial Palace. The new room is near the elevators that you pass between the parking garage and the casino, also near the escalator that goes up to Hash House. It has huge traffic going by, but of course that also means that there is a lot of noise and cigarette smoke. Stupidly, all the signs still point visitors to the location of the temporary room upstairs, where there is just empty space.

Dealers are the same, management is the same. So it all seems familiar, even with the new name, location, chips, and felt.


TI (Treasure Island) 

TI moved its poker room to a location on the main casino floor (instead of out in the corridor of shops) several months ago, but today was the first time I've been there since the move.

I like the new facility. It's not quite as isolated from smoke and noise as the old one, but it's pretty good. There's also a lot more space between the tables. This is where we had my going-away tournament tonight. 11 of the 33 entrants in the 7 pm daily tournament were friends and/or readers of mine, but all four of the players who cashed were. Good work by my peeps.

I guess I'm not moving after all

Because the apartment in North Carolina is leased to me starting at midnight (even though I won't physically be there for a while yet), I've spent the last hour or so changing my mailing address and telephone number (yes, I already have a North Carolina phone number) for all of my financial institutions, including the various online poker sites. The last one I was trying to do was PokerStars. I entered the new information in the form, and was quite surprised to get the following message:

If PokerStars is to be believed, there are "government regulations," heretofore unknown by me, that prevent me from changing my state. I find it odd that one set of regulations prevents U.S. citizens from moving from one state to another AND prevents Canadian citizens from moving from one province to another. Must be some sort of United Nations thing.

However, I suspect that PokerStars is either misinformed or lying to me. I do not believe that regulations actually exist that prevent my move. I have written to them for an explanation. If they tell me anything helpful--or amusing--I will post it here.

New Silverton poker room

I was at the Silverton briefly today and noticed that the new Cantor-operated poker room appears to be on the verge of opening. Sorry for the crappy photo quality; I didn't notice I had blurred the shots until I got home.

Kathy Liebert learns the hard way

Yesterday Kathy Liebert learned the power of the Mighty Deuce-Four the hard way at the WPT Borgata Winter Poker Open. I couldn't find a way to link to the specific live-update post, so I took a screen shot:

(I'm guessing that it was B.J. Nemeth who wrote that post, since he's the only poker tournament reporter who uses "thru" instead of "through" where space is not an issue.)

Notice that she was eliminated in the next reported hand.


Hat tip: @jakatkin.

Big birthday

I'm a day late in thinking of doing this (have had a few other things on my mind...), but won't you join me in wishing my father, Joe, a happy 90th birthday? He was born January 25, 1923.

Yesterday I asked him if 90 felt any different than 89. He said no, then added this observation: "I used to think that when I turned 70, that would be the end of having to do things I didn't want to do. That didn't happen. So then I thought when I turned 80, that would be the end of having to do things I didn't want to do. That didn't happen either. I'm guessing that 90 won't be any different."

There you have it, folks--wisdom from my favorite nonagenarian.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Send-off, part 2

I got positive responses from seven people on a poker tournament and/or Herbs and Rye, plus two more up for the latter only. I don't think eight of us is enough to try to do a private poker tournament, but I feel like accepting Poker Vixen's suggestion to just join in the Treasure Island nightly 7 p.m. tourney, details of which are here. This will be Friday, February 1. At some point after poker, we'll head over to Herbs and Rye--when we're all knocked out, or when most of us are, or at some other point to be determined. I will plan to have one of their Moscow Mules, which will make approximately the 4th alcoholic beverage I've consumed in 6 1/2 years in Las Vegas. That's just how wild and crazy I am.

Send-off?

One of my friends in town suggested last week that I arrange a private poker tournament as a sort of farewell event. I liked the idea, but when I asked on Twitter who might attend such a thing, I got only eight affirmative responses, which I thought was not enough to go on.

So let me ask here: I'm specifically thinking of Friday, February 1, in the evening. If you live in town or will be visiting here then, would you be interested in participating in:

(A) A low buy-in private poker tournament (probably in the range of $50) somewhere on the Strip yet to be determined, likely using the casino's usual daily tournament structure (read: fast),

or,

(B) A get-together for food and/or drinks and/or other random shenanigans, most likely at Herbs and Rye on West Sahara?

Please reply via comments here, or Twitter to @PokerGrump, or email to Rakewell1 at the yahoo place (but, please, just one of those means so that I don't double-count) if the probability that you would make it is greater than 50%. (Never mind whether you responded to the earlier tweet. I'm starting the count over again with hopefully a wider audience here.) Let me know, please, if you would do one but not the other, or if you would join in either type of event.

Thanks.

Neither up nor down

When I was a wee lad in Sunday School, the teachers often had us sing an action song "to get the wiggles out" before moving on to the substance of the lessons. One of the favorites was "The Noble Duke of York." This has many variants on both the words and tune, but this is the way I learned it:

Oh, the Noble Duke of York
He had ten thousand men.
He marched them up a hill
And he marched them down again.

Now when you're up you're up,
And when you're down you're down.
But when you're only halfway up,
You're neither up nor down.

We would be instructed to stand up on the "up" lines, sit back down on the "down" lines," and sort of half stand up on the "halfway" line.

I don't know whether it was due to subliminal indoctrination from that song or just a natural predisposition, but I've never liked being in between places, on the way from one location to another. I want to either be where I was or where I'm going. Of course I've heard a lifetime of advice from people telling me to enjoy the trip, stop and smell the roses, etc. And I do try. Once in a while I even succeed. But most of the time I revert back to my habitual squirreliness about being neither here nor there, and want to get the journey over with. Even though I'm shorter than average, most people have a hard time keeping up with my walking pace if I go as fast as I'm inclined to go, because I want to be there already.

This is on my mind at the moment because Josie emailed me this morning to ask how the move to North Carolina was going. I dashed off a grumpy reply saying that it sucked. I then started to enumerate the ways in which it sucked, which is what has me on this little tantrum.

I have to sell a bunch of stuff, give away other stuff, and just throw away yet more items. My apartment is in more disarray than it ever has been because of the process of figuring out what to do with everything. I still haven't completely settled on what means of moving the things I'm keeping will be. I can't tell how much will fit in my car and how much I have to ship separately. My bike is all taken apart for shipment so I can't go riding. I don't sleep well because I'm fretting about the thousand and one decisions I have to make and worrying about getting them wrong. I sweat that I'm not going to get everything coordinated and done in the time frame I've set out. (I'm shooting to head out of town February 7th or 8th and arrive in Asheville four or five days after that.) I'm constantly thinking about all the things that might go wrong at the last minute, even with the best-laid plans. There are large expenses to be incurred in shipping, gasoline for a cross-country drive, in paying temporary double rent and utilities, down payments, deposits, fees, etc.--and at the same time my income will drop to zero for a couple of weeks while I get a work space outfitted out east. I have one of my largest-ever consulting jobs waiting to be done, having promised to try to finish it before I move. I don't know if I'll have time or opportunity to get together with friends for any sort of proper good-bye before I'm gone. All in all, I'm just feeling pretty damn sorry for myself, in the most whiny, juvenile, embarrassing, and pathetic way possible.

To anticipate a likely thought going through readers' minds: no, this angst is not reflective of doubt about or resentment for the move itself. I am fully at peace with that. Sure, I'd be happy to be staying put. But I'd also be entirely happy to be in Asheville, in my new apartment, with everything already settled, maybe even with an adopted kitty as a companion (which I can't have where I am), with a lot more space than my current apartment gives me (and ten times nicer to boot), free to get together with Cardgrrl whenever we feel like it. It really is just the disruptive, unsettling, in-between-ness of it all that is gnawing at me all day every day. It's existing in a state of limbo that I hate, being not quite hither and not quite yon.

I think it must be a universal experience that parents teach their kids far more life lessons thoughtlessly, by accident, just in the course of daily life, than they do through the occasional carefully planned chat or activity. (Don't worry. This is going somewhere, and it will all connect back.) My dad's 90th birthday is Friday, and I'll be driving up to Salt Lake City for the weekend for a family get-together. The impending occasion has caused me to reflect on some of the things he taught me in moments that he was probably not intending to be life lessons, and which he likely does not remember as vividly as I do.

He is an inveterate tinkerer. Over my growing-up years, he made a lot of improvements to our modest home. One of the biggest additions was turning the long wall of our family room into bookshelves, storage cabinets, and a window seat. While he was in the middle of that project, which seemed to be taking forever (everything seems to take forever when you're 7), I commented about how much work he was putting into it. He replied, "Yes, but you just get it done, and then you get to enjoy it for a lot longer than it took to do it."

I'm trying to keep that in mind over the next several weeks of chaos and uprooting. (Uprooting--that's an interesting word that popped into my brain there. Like moving a plant to a larger pot so that it has more room to grow.) I just want it to be done so that I can get on with enjoying what awaits me on the other side.

Just for fun

A friend from Minnesota tweeted a link to this YouTube video this morning, with the intriguing caption of "What Lutherans do for fun, as recorded at St. Luke's Lutheran Church, Park Ridge, Illinois, May 6, 2007." It's so thoroughly delightful that I felt compelled to share it. Please enjoy.

"My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest"

A blog post I read today reminded me that I have never read Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." That fact embarrassed me, and I decided that there could be no more fitting day than today to rectify that lapse. I'm glad I did. It is a beautiful, stirring piece. I do not idolize King; I'm well aware of his faults and shortcomings. But I stand in awe of his courage, the clarity of his moral vision, and his rare ability to rouse both emotion and action in his readers and listeners by of the sheer power of his words and ideas.* History has produced few that could equal him in those admirable virtues.

My favorite excerpts:

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. 

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. 

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. 

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." 

Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." 

Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong. 

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. 

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." 

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. 

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. 

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. 

We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. 

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained.... If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. 

So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? 

Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. 

One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." 

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

*David Foster Wallace liked to say that King deployed "totally ass-kicking Standard White English." See Consider the Lobster, page 109.

The dreaded pocket kings

Actually, I don't dread pocket kings. I win with them at least as often as would be predicted statistically, so I'm happy when I see them. The post title is an homage to my friend Rob, who hates pocket kings ("dreaded" is his label for them) almost as much as he loves breasts, cleavage, vaginas, hookers, and inappropriate touching.

Story the first

This happened at Harrah's Cherokee when I was there with Cardgrrl on my recent North Carolina scouting trip. I had bought in for just $100, because I didn't know what to expect from the locals and wanted to be cautious and conservative, at least at first. Over the course of about three hours, I had worked that up to a bit over $300. Our table had only one aggressive player--a middle-aged Asian guy who had amassed the biggest stack (over $800) by stealing all the orphan pots and putting his far more conservative opponents to difficult decisions. He was not crazy, but he was the only unpredictable player I had to tangle with, while the others had well-defined styles and were generally not too difficult to decipher.

I raised to $10 from early position with the two black kings. Asian guy reraised to $25 from one of the blinds. Reraising was pretty common for him, but doing it from the blinds instead of from position was a deviation from his standard practice, and doing it against me--my raises had been getting lots of respect from the table, including from him--was similarly outside of his usual bag of tricks. So I was certainly on notice that his hand range was stronger here than it typically was for his reraises. However, it could still easily include A-K and any pocket pair probably down as low as 8s or 9s.

I just called. I had not put in a single four-bet the entire session, and I thought that doing so now would make it too easy for him to get away from hands that I had beat; it would effectively turn my cards face up. I thought there was also a ton of deceptive value in playing it this way. After a three-bet, he was virtually certain to make a continuation bet, so with my positional advantage I hoped to be able to make more money from him by letting him continue to fire.

The flop was J-J-4. I didn't think he would three-bet me pre-flop from out of position with pocket 4s or with any hand containing a jack except for pocket jacks, and flopping quads was too remote a possibility to worry about. So this was basically about the best flop I could hope for, short of making a set. I was behind pocket aces, but everything else in his range I had beat.

He led out for $75, an overbet of the pot. I didn't expend any effort trying to interpret his bet size or body language, because they simply didn't matter to my decision. I wanted to play for stacks, period. I had deliberately underrepresented my hand pre-flop for precisely this reason: to get him to think that some smaller pocket pair was likely to be good, and/or that he could push me off of a pocket pair by aggressively playing A-K. After having done that, it would make no sense to reverse course. So I pretended to be thinking for a decent amount of time, in order to further the impression that I was unsure about what to do, then hit the "all in" and "confirm" buttons.

His head dropped and he looked dejected. I thought that presaged a fold, but nope--after about five seconds he entered his command for a call. After the computer played out the turn and river, it displayed my kings, then showed my opponent's cards, the only hand I did not want to see: aces.

I was busto. The outcome sucked but it was a situation where I was effectively predestined to lose as soon as the PokerPro table's random number generator set the order of the virtual deck. There were other opponents who were so tight and solid that I might well have been able to fold the kings at some point when facing their sudden eagerness to put all their chips in. But not this guy. He was the only player in the game against whom folding kings could not make sense, because aces were a minority of his range, even given the atypical pre-flop circumstances.

Story the second

Today I went to the Palms to play poker while other people were preoccupied with the big sportsball thingy that was on the ginormous-screen TVs. (One of the dealers asked me if I had any bets on the game. I had to admit that I didn't even know who was playing.) I still have several buy-ins worth of Palms chips in my collection. I was unable to sell them to collectors at a profit, so I'll just use them to play poker with.

This was a wild and crazy table. We had three players driving the action. Sadly, I spent most of my 3 1/2-hour session in the graveyard of card-deaditude, unable to take advantage of the juiciness. I only stayed afloat by the occasional audacious bluff, which got respect because my lack of cards was interpreted by the other players as uber-tightness.

In the hand in question, UTG was the table big stack, with about $1200. He raised to $11. The next player called. I smooth-called with K-K.

I realize that telling two stories about pocket kings without reraising makes it seem that this is my normal course. It isn't. But in both cases there were perfectly valid reasons. Here I still had two players behind me who were ramblin'-gamblin' dudes who loved to try to steal pre-flop with large reraises, and who, even when facing resistance, were willing to get all their money in pre-flop with marginal holdings and just hope for the best. I wanted to let them do their thing.

Sure enough, one of them three-bet behind me to $80. With a raise this ridiculously large, he either had a pocket pair in the 10s-jacks-queens range and didn't want to have to make difficult decisions later in the hand, or he had complete garbage and was just on a steal. With aces or the other two kings he would reraise a smaller amount, trying to induce action. He was absolutely not the kind of player who tried to shut down the action with his premium hands in an attempt to win a small, low-risk, uncontested pot.

It folded around back to me. I had about $200 left--truly a no-brainer decision here, since my opponent (a smart, experienced player) would recognize that he was being offered better than 2:1 to call my shove, and would therefore have a hard time folding just about anything. I pushed, and he called as soon as the dealer announced the amount. I showed the kings. He kept his cards face down, which I took as a favorable sign.

I don't remember how the board ran out, but he passed his cards back to the dealer without showing and began to count out what he owed me. Another player asked to see the hand, and the dealer showed it: 6-7 offsuit!

It's nice to know that the dreaded pocket kings can still manage to beat 6-7 offsuit for a $432 pot--even if Rob would have you believe otherwise.

Online site update

In June I reviewed where I stood with respect to the handful of remaining online poker sites available to U.S. players. I noted that quite a bit had changed since I had last reviewed what's available in October, 2011. Well, a lot has changed again. I haven't played online in a few months. Last night I decided to check to make sure that I could log in and play everywhere that I have money on account. The reason for this is my upcoming move to North Carolina. In the process of moving, I will get a new address, new phone number, new email address, and new bank. So I wanted to be sure that all of the sites were working with my current info on file before I go and change everything.

Bovada 

I played on the former Bodog site just once since it made its big changeover, and I hated it. See here. Last night I played a $5 SNG, and felt the same way, even though I cashed. But at least nothing has changed, so logging in and playing was hassle-free.

Black Chip Poker/America's Cardroom 

BCP had been on the Merge network, but a few months ago migrated over to the Winning Poker Network (formerly known as Yatahay). I already had an account on a different WPN skin (America's Cardroom, which took over Doyle's Room accounts when the latter closed up shop). It took a bunch of emails back and forth with BCP's customer service and security people before they would recognize me as the actual owner of the $650 or so that I still have on account there. Apparently the problem was having that pre-existing America's Cardroom/WPN account with the same screen name as I was using on BCP. They obviously can't allow two identical screen names within the same network, so some bozo at BCP arbitrarily decided on a screen name change for me, without having bothered to inform me of this.

What they selected for me was bcp-rakewello. The doofus in charge of this process read the zero at the end of "Rakewell0" as the letter O, so made it "rakewello," then slapped a "bcp-" at the front of it. It's just awful. I pleaded with them to let me change it, but they said I couldn't. Grrrr.

I certainly don't need two accounts on the same network, so I'll close one of these after I move. (I don't want a check to get stuck in the middle of the forwarding process.) Which one? Well, that depends. I hate the new screen name so much that I'm inclined to close the BCP account. But I'll have to look closely to see if my rakeback deal is still in operation. If it is, then it will be worth keeping that, despite the screen name embarrassment, and I'll cash out the AC account. But if the rakeback arrangement didn't survive the move to the new network, then I'll cash out the BCP account and keep the nicer "Rakewell0" screen name on AC.

But in the meantime, I did manage to play a $3 SNG on BCP last night. I bubbled it, but at least I know it's all working now.

Cake/Juicy Stakes 

The Cake Poker network sort of merged with Lock Poker and became the Revolution Gaming Network last year. I had had a dormant account on Cake for a few years, and threw $100 onto it last summer to try out the new entity. I played one SNG and then never went back--not so much because it was terrible, but because I was concentrating all of my online play on BCP for a while.

Since then, Cake stopped doing business with U.S. players, and transferred their accounts over to a skin called Juicy Stakes Poker. See here for details. (Why doesn't anybody consult me on these names they pick? I could tell them how awful they are in advance and save them the embarrassment.)

I downloaded the new software, and my previous Cake log-in worked without a problem the first time, and my account was at $95, where it should have been. I played a $5 SNG to test things out, busted early.

Merge 

It just occurred to me that I no longer have any active accounts on the Merge network. I believe that Carbon Poker is still a Merge skin, so I guess I could use that, though I spent out my money there a long time ago. I'll have to check on the status of it. I'd like to have an account I can use on each of the U.S.-facing networks, even if I don't use them much. ADDENDUM: Yep, Carbon Poker recognized me as an existing player, so I didn't have to go through any security steps. I deposited $100 on my bank's Visa debit card with no difficulty, and am now registered to play a test SNG, though I don't anticipate any problems. FURTHER ADDENDUM: I finished in 2nd place. Yay me.


It will be a PITA to change everything over to the new real-world information after I move, but at least now I know that I can get in and use the money I have on those sites under my current account information, which will hopefully make the transition less of a headache than it might have been if I hadn't taken last night's steps to update and check on the status of things.


Just for a bit of fun, here's a few things that happened in my three SNGs last night:

Three-way all-in pre-flop on Bovada:

I clicked the screen capture command a bit too soon, but you can see that it didn't matter what the river card was--it was a three-way chopped pot regardless. I'm #8.


The Mighty Deuce-Four strikes again:

I called a pre-flop raise from #5, then check-raised his sorry butt on the flop you see here. He flashed pocket 10s before folding. Heh heh heh.


In the game on Juicy Stakes, I was getting short-stacked, so when I had A-5 and action folded to me, I shoved with my last 7 big blinds. I got called by the small blind, who had K-K. Oops. But then the flop came a miraculous Q-5-5! There was joy in Mudville! But then, check out the turn and river:

So sick.

Here's a hand from the new version of Black Chip Poker. My opponent there went all in on the flop with just A-K, having missed completely. I snap-called with my flopped set. Then we chopped it when the board ran out to a straight:

You all know that online poker is rigged, right?

Psst--wanna buy some poker chips?

I've got a bunch of 'em. Most of them I will either keep as souvenirs or recirculate at the casinos by playing them. But I think that the collections I have made from the seven casinos below might be of interest to a starting collector, so I'm offering them here.

All of them were picked up from poker tables; amount of wear is highly variable. Shipping is for U.S. addresses only, via 2-3 day Priority Mail. Sold only as the sets shown below; i.e., no individual chips. 8 1/2" by 11" plastic sheet for 3-ring binder included. Prices are not negotiable. If you're interested in buying any of these sets, write to me at Rakewell1 at the email address for Yahoos. Offer good for only about three days, after which they're going on eBay.


Bally's 

Bally's has issued more commemorative chips than you might imagine from playing in the poker room, because most of these have been snapped up by collectors, and it's rare to see them in circulation. Most of the examples shown here I have seen just once, and I immediately took them out of play.

12 different five-dollar chips at $8 each, plus 2 one-dollar chips at face value, plus $5 shipping = $103.


Imperial Palace 

As with Bally's, so with IP. That is, they have issued more different chips than you would know from a session or two playing there. But if you keep your eyes open and put in a lot of hours, you can spot the occasional appearance of the rare ones.

15 five-dollar chips at $8 each, plus 1 one-dollar chip at face value, plus $5 shipping = $126.


Mandalay Bay 

Same basic story. Some of these are common, but a few I have seen only the one time that I plucked them from the table and stashed them away.

14 five-dollar chips at $8 each, plus 3 one-dollar chips at face value, plus $5 shipping = $120.


Riviera 

The Riviera used to be one of the most prolific issuers of commemorative chips. I was happily gathering a few new ones each time I played there, when suddenly, in 2008, they withdrew them all from circulation and replaced them with five of the last six shown. (The sixth, the soccer one, was added later.) So with the exception of the last six, you can now obtain these only by buying them from other collectors or dealers.

33 five-dollar chips at $8 each, plus 1 one-dollar chip at face value, plus $5 shipping = $270.


Stratosphere 

The Stratosphere has not issued a lot of different chips. I really don't know how many they've had over the years. These are all the ones I have seen in circulation. (Though, oddly, I somehow never picked up their standard $5 chip to put in the collection. I guess I always thought I had one already, when I didn't.) As with the other places, most of these I have seen on a poker table just the one time I grabbed them, never before or since.

5 five-dollar chips at $8 plus 1 one-dollar chip at face value, plus $5 shipping = $46.


Sunset Station 

Don't laugh--I used to go out to Sunset with some regularity. Haven't played there in at least a couple of years now, though. The Hooters ones are not a mistake; there is a Hooters restaurant inside Sunset Station, so they issued a few chips accordingly.

15 five-dollar chips at $8 each, plus 1 one-dollar chip at face value, plus 1 one-dollar metal gaming token at face value, plus $5 shipping = $127.


Venetian/Palazzo 

Unlike for the other casinos mentioned in this blog post, here I'm pretty confident that this is a complete collection of all of the $5 chips issued by the Venetian and Palazzo since they have been open. At least, if I'm missing any, I'm not aware of what they would be. Some of these are very common. Two of them are brand new, just issued in the past couple of months (the second "Winter in Venice" and the "Rock of Ages" one). The "Millennium" and "One-Year Anniversary" ones are very rare; I have never come across another example of either of them in hundreds of hours watching chips get exchanged across the Venetian felt.

13 five-dollar chips at $8 each, plus 1 two-dollar drop chip at face value, plus 5 one-dollar chips at face value, plus $5 shipping = $116.

What I want to shout

Sometimes I'm seated at a poker table where attention to proper procedure by both the dealer and the other players is so lax that after a while I feel like going all Walter Sobchak on the place:

So long, and thanks for all the fish*

From time to time, somebody asks me whether I plan to stay in Las Vegas for the rest of my life. My answer has always been, no, I don't plan to stay, but I also don't plan to leave. There is no plan. I would tell anybody who asked me that question that I will leave if and when something happens to makes me think that I should live somewhere else. Otherwise, I'll stay.

Well, something finally happened to convince me that it was time to live somewhere else: I fell in love.

This won't exactly come as news to my readers, unless you're brain-dead. (In which case, congratulations on just being able to read. Quite an accomplishment.) I met Cardgrrl in February of 2009. By July of that year I knew it was something serious. During a visit I made to her in Washington, D.C., in August of 2010, I finally became convinced (1) that she was never going to move to Las Vegas (as I had not-so-secretly hoped), and (2) that I wanted to be a lot nearer to her than 2400 miles, and (3) that meant that I would have to move east.

That plan, however, entailed some serious logistical difficulties. The cost of living in Washington is much higher than it is in Vegas, and I would have to meet those increased costs without 50 poker rooms in my back yard.

By happy coincidence, around the same time some consulting work related to my formal education and my pre-poker career sort of fell into my lap, and I nurtured the source so that I would start getting more and more such projects. (I mentioned this work twice in the blog, here and here, just to drop a couple of hints that change was in the air, and to see if anybody was paying attention. As far as I could tell, nobody noticed that those hints signified that a major change was underway.)

Even if you missed those clues, surely long-time readers must have noticed that my frequency of posting dropped fairly dramatically year by year from the high-water marks in 2008 and 2009 to the present. Some of that was due to the simple fact that after a few thousand posts on one subject, it gets progressively harder to find new things to say, new topics to write about. But the drop-off was due at least as much to the fact that as time went on, I was spending more time on the growing side business and less on poker. Poker has gone from being my sole source of income when I first arrived in Vegas in the summer of 2006 to being only a small part of it in 2012.

Cardgrrl also met me halfway. Early last year she decided that she wanted to try living somewhere besides D.C., established some criteria for herself by which to judge potential target cities, and started exploring the possibilities. (Vegas was never a contender.) By about June, she had settled on Asheville, North Carolina. After several exploratory trips there over the next few months, she finally made the move into an Asheville apartment at the beginning of November, and is now having a house built in the city.

No, Asheville isn't halfway between here and D.C., but it does have a much lower cost of living--comparable to that of Las Vegas. It's also a place that I would rather live than D.C. I consider our nation's capital a nice place to visit, but not to live, for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with. Her move made it easier for me to pull the trigger on my own.

A few hours ago I returned from a week in Asheville--my first time there. It's a beautiful city, set in the midst of some of the prettiest land in the country, even in the dead of winter. Take a look at a map, and you'll see that it's surrounded by the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, the Cohutta National Forest, the Sumter National Forest, the Cherokee National Forest, plus a comparable number of state parks and forests. Heck, the famous Blue Ridge Parkway/National Heritage Area runs right through the city; turn onto it, and 30 seconds later you feel like you're in the middle of a vast, wooded wilderness.

Biking should be, um, interesting in Asheville. As far as I can tell both from maps and from driving around in it for several days, there is not a single straight or flat street anywhere. Every street is winding and sloped.

Most of this visit was spent apartment-hunting. On Tuesday I found the best prospect--an upstairs unit in a well-maintained old mansion converted into a four-plex of two-bedroom apartments (one bedroom to sleep in, one to be used as an office) in the rich part of town, so I can pretend to be wealthy. It's about four miles due north of where Cardgrrl's house will be. On Wednesday I signed a lease; the place is mine starting February 1.

This is sooner than I had anticipated. As of a week ago, I was thinking it would be more like March or April when I would make the move. But things change, and I decided I needed to just do it. I'm not yet sure exactly when I'll go. I can't get everything planned and arranged to leave here by the first of the month. It will probably end up being more like February 10th to 15th time frame. Heck, I don't even know how I'll move--hire a moving company, drive a U-Haul myself, or maybe try to UPS anything that won't fit in my car. We'll see. (The new car, by the way, was an integral part of this evolving big plan, though I didn't tell you that at the time. The old car could not possibly have been trusted on a cross-country trip, nor could it carry much stuff.)

Anyway, the Las Vegas chapter of my life (actually the second Las Vegas chapter of my life, as I was here for a couple of years back in 1980-1982) is now coming rapidly to a close. With it, this blog will also mostly fade away. I won't shut it down completely. I'm sure that once in a while I'll have a story to tell, an opinion to share, a news item to comment on, a rant to get off my chest.

But poker is hard to come by in North Carolina. The only poker room that is less than a full day's drive is Harrah's Cherokee. Cardgrrl and I went there last night to scope out the place. It's about a 70-minute drive each way when there is clear weather and no traffic. The poker room for now has no live dealers, just a bunch of Poker Pro electronic tables, though they are in the process of training dealers, and have a WSOP circuit event scheduled to be there in April.

How about online? Well, we'll see. I've never been as successful at the online game as the live game, nor enjoyed it as much, though my Josie-inspired brief orgy of online tournaments in August raises the possibility that I could do better at it if I really tried.

The upshot is that I think it's inevitable that poker will be reduced to being a small, occasional part of my life and attention, and that as a result blog posts here will be few and far between. I will probably also greatly cut back on the amount of poker-related blog and Twitter reading that I do. I can't continue to saturate my reading with poker when I can't go out and play it. That would drive me crazy, I think.

I am sad to be leaving a city I've come to like very much, and to consider my home. I'm sad to be leaving behind the friends I've made in my 6 1/2 years here, and to no longer be in a place where friends and readers from across the country and around the world come to visit on a regular basis. I'm nervous about trekking across the country to a place that I really know very little about, and to be making my home in a state where I never had any reason to think I'd live, where I've only set foot once before last week--and that was just in the Charlotte airport during a layover--and where I only know two people besides Cardgrrl (Shamus and his wife live a couple hours away). I'm bummed that I won't have a ridiculous richness of choice of poker rooms running 24/7, regularly stocked with fish in a way that is the envy of the trout and salmon industries, with which I can scratch the poker itch whenever it hits me. I'm slightly nauseated at the prospect of having to face cold winters and humid, mosquito-filled summers again, after thinking that I had left them behind forever. I'm distressed that I won't be able to pop up to see my parents and my sister in Salt Lake City for weekend visits every few months, as has become my practice.

But rising above all of that is that I am excited to be able to be near the one I love, and to find out what our relationship can be when we can see each other on a regular basis. That is more important to me than what state my address is in, more important than the weather, more important than being near the Vegas friends I've made, more important than poker--more important than anything else. (As Jesus taught, "Greater love hath no man than this, that he move to North Carolina to be near his girlfriend." Or something like that.) That realization makes me confident that this move is the right thing to do. It's time for one chapter of my life to end, and for another to begin.

What story will that chapter tell? Hell if I know. But it's time to turn the page and find out.





*It seems hard to believe that anyone intelligent enough to be a reader of this blog would not know the pop-culture origin of this title. But just in case there's a lame-o out there, see here.


Addendum, January 12, 2013 

For Cardgrrl's perspective on this, see here.

Gone to Carolina in my mind

Early Friday morning I'm flying to North Carolina, which is where Cardgrrl is living these days, for a week of slightly belated holiday celebration.

I wish I were there already.



For your pleasure, two exceptionally lovely renditions of the obvious song choice:

My most-viewed post?

Something just prompted me to look at my total page-view stats via Google Analytics, which I had never done before. (Just over 1.1 million. Thanks for asking.) I used to look at my traffic reports every week or more, but now it's very rare. I just don't care much.

Anyway, in the process of setting the date range to the entire life of the blog, I noticed a traffic spike that I had never noticed before, occurring on September 14, 2011. It was nearly twice as big as the spike I got when I got backroomed by the security goons at the Cannery in 2009. I was deeply puzzled as to what I might have written that got that much attention. It appears to have been this post about the ethics controversy at the Epic Poker League. I can't tell exactly where the traffic came from, because the main referral source is listed as a link-shortening service, so I'm guessing that somebody with a big Twitter following posted a shortened link to the piece.

Strange what gets attention and what doesn't. Some posts are deeply personal and important to me and get slaved over for hours and hours. Others are just whipped off from the top of my head and involve things on my mind that day, but which I consider of no lasting consequence. The degree of correlation between how important I deem something/how much work I put into writing it and how much attention it gets appears to be pretty close to zero.

Go figure.



Update

Mystery solved. I remembered that my friend Shamus got his biggest blog traffic spike ever when Daniel Negreanu posted a link to something he wrote. Given Negreanu's outspoken disdain for the EPL, it occurred to me that he was a likely source. A little digging, and, sure enough, he tweeted a link to my EPL post using the shortening service I had found on the exact date in question. It was then retweeted by others, including Kathy Liebert, Wicked Chops Poker, and others.