Encounter with the movie monster

Date: Sun, Sep 28, 2008

Warning: Long post here--almost 4000 words. Budget your time accordingly.


I just got home from another Saturday evening at Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon. I had repeated tangles with one opponent--not at all the typical Bill's player--that are probably worth chronicling here.

After I had been playing for maybe three hours, I was a little tired and hungry, so I took a break. I walked up the street to O'Shea's, where I knew there was a small ice cream shop, and got a chocolate shake. When I got back to my seat, maybe 20 minutes after leaving, there was a new player in. As usual, I was in my favorite seat, #9, next to the dealer, and this guy was in #7, two to my right.

Almost at a glance I knew he was going to present a challenge. He was absolutely comfortable and at ease in his surroundings and shuffling his chips like a pro. He exuded confidence. He had bought in for the maximum amount allowed, which is distinctly unusual at Bill's; it signals that this is a guy who wants to be sure he doesn't miss a chance to stack an opponent because he has bought in for too few chips. He's wearing a "Bally's Race and Sportsbook" shirt, and I think he may work there.

Sure enough, he was a player. He raised essentially every time he was in last three positions, and quite often other times, too. He always raised the same amount, so no information given off there. He virtually always made continuation bets.

However, he had made a serious miscalculation. The first two biggish pots I watched him play he was trying to bully and bluff his way to a win, and he was trying it against two different calling stations--who did what calling stations do! He had no better than ace-high each time and lost both pots.

This kind of player seriously complicates my Bill's strategy. If he were tight-aggressive, OK, no problem, I can just stay out of his way when he suddenly comes to life in a hand. But loose-aggressive players, contesting so many pots, really gum up my strategy of picking on the weak players when I'm unusually strong. I have to figure out whether he has it this time or not, and his contending for the pot often causes the fishies to fold where they might otherwise have been inclined to call me.

Nevertheless, I'm confident that I can make money from him. It's going to be riskier than tangling with others, but he's not as good as he thinks he is. The fact that he could make such a monumental misjudgment as to try to bluff calling stations--twice in a row, no less!--is evidence aplenty of this. He has only one gear: foot mashed down on the accelerator. Sooner or later, he's going to overplay a hand when I've got the goods. My usual strategy against players like this is to open up my game quite a bit. Since his raising range is so broad, I can open up my calling range, especially since I have position on him nearly every hand. The dilemma is that this is directly contrary to my strategy for taking chips from most of the other players at the table, which is wait, fold, wait, fold, wait, fold, BIG HAND--take their money!

He had another weakness: He played without much respect to position. The first time I saw his hand at showdown after he had put in a preflop raise, in fact, was 3-5 offsuit, with which he had raised from second position! This makes him really difficult to put on a hand, but also is an Achilles heel of vulnerability that I might be able to exploit.

This guy annoyed me, not only because of his style, but because he's one of those jerks who never want to show their cards if they can possibly avoid it. He would take advantage of the fact that most of the other players were less experienced, and even when they called his bet on the river, he would just sit there, not exposing his hole cards, until enough uncomfortable time had passed that the inexperienced player would show first. This kind of guy really irritates me. He's violating both rules and etiquette, as well as wasting everybody's time. It's a mild form of angle-shooting, but it's still angle-shooting, and I dislike it immensely. The first time it happened I was willing to cut him some slack--he was embarrassed to be caught bluffing. But it quickly became apparent that this was a longstanding habit of his. I called him out on it: "Dude, he called you--show your hand already." It's not like he didn't know the protocol, but I wanted him to know that I knew what he was doing.

That wasn't the end of his obnoxious habits, though. He criticized weaker players for making bad calls, whether against him or against somebody else. This is horribly inappropriate. I go to Bill's precisely because I know it's the Bad Call Center of the Universe. I crave bad calls at Bill's. That's the key to making money there. The last thing I need is some jackass know-it-all taunting and embarrassing these fishy players and making them rethink their play, and start folding where they should.

And then he pushed my last button when he tried to give me a poker lesson. The situation was that I had A-K on a flop of K-Q-x. A fairly weak player, a middle-aged woman from Texas, was at the other end of the table. She bet $10, I raised to $30, and she called. The turn was a blank. She was not radiating great strength. I thought she probably had a king with a worse kicker. But she only had $42 left, so when she checked the turn, that's what I bet. I wanted a call, because I thought I was probably ahead. She did call, though reluctantly. As it turned out, she had K-Q for top two pair. OK--I misread her. It happens in a game of incomplete information. No big deal. I tell her "Nice hand," and move on with life. I was surprised, because she had the appearance of one who thought she was probably beat. In short, this was a player sufficiently inexperienced that she didn't grasp how strong top two pairs was likely to be. She didn't give off an aura of strength, because she erroneously undervalued her holding.

But Mr. Bally's launches into a taunting lecture. He informs me that "old ladies" (she was about 50!) always have it. He apparently thinks that I was trying to push her out of the pot, which wasn't the case at all. Given the stack sizes, I think the way I played it was a no-brainer. I might have been able to get away from it if she had roared over the top of me on the flop (but maybe not, because she could only charge me $42 more for what would then have been a roughly $110 pot, giving me better than 2:1), which would have been a better play on her part, but her timidity worked out for her, because it misled me. He asked me, "You didn't think she had at least top pair?" The guy must be out of his mind, or maybe didn't notice what I had. Yeah, I thought she had top pair but was still behind me. But I don't say that. I want him to stop with the lectures, not only because it's annoying, but because none of us needs the weak players at the table to smarten up. So I give him my standard smart-ass "shut up" line: "Are the lessons free, or do we have to pay extra for them?" It worked.

So by now there is definite tension between us. I have been taking stabs at pots that he raises, and doing so with speculative holdings. The first time a possible chance comes up I have 4-5 offsuit, and the flop is something like 9-4-2. I only have middle pair with a bad kicker, but I could easily be in front here. He bets $20. I call. One could argue for a raise here, but I really have no idea where I am, and I want the big pots between us to be when I'm on firmer footing than this. The turn is an ace. Ick. He has put in several raises with ace-rag. He bets again. He could well be bluffing, but I don't want to be reduced to guessing in a big pot, so I let it go.

He laughs tauntingly, points to me, and says, "This guy wants to bust me so bad he can taste it!" Well, yeah, I do, but only in small part for the reasons he thinks. My impulse is to say, "Emotionally, I don't really care where my chips come from. It's just that I recognize that some chips are easier to get than others, and yours looks like the easiest pickings." But I think better of it. I think I'm a much cooler head than he is, and I don't want to lose that edge and escalate the tension for the sake of a clever jab at him. Instead, I think of the advantages: (1) I have just convinced him that he can defeat me by continuing to bet at pots, and (2) he thinks I'm gunning specially for him, which means that he'll tend to mistakenly assume that I'm bluffing or coming at him weak, when I'm not. File that observation away and use it, I tell myself. It will feel plenty good when you take his chips--you don't need to feel good now by delivering a verbal put-down.

Our next encounter comes when he has raised from early position (which, again, means nothing for him), and I have called with 9-10 offsuit. The flop is a beaut: 9-9-6, rainbow. He bets $20. I call. Turn is a king. He checks, unexpectedly. The problem with my overall approach to him has been that if I don't bluff back at him sometimes, but only wait for strong hands, if he's smart he can just run away when that happens. That would leave him collecting the majority of the pots we contest, but without me getting the occasional big one to make up for having abandoned a lot of smaller ones. Fortunately, I think the observation above--about how he is now persuaded that I'm targeting him more specifically than I should--should counter this.

I'm torn between checking behind him here and letting him bluff again on the river, versus betting, in the hope that he'll think I'm trying to buy it. I settle on the latter approach. To my delight, he apparently thinks just that, and calls my $30. I don't think he has a king, or he surely would have bet the turn, but maybe he has a 6, or some medium pair. The river is a deuce, as I recall, and he checks again. He has convinced me that he has something, and that he thinks I'm bluffing and he will want to pick off that bluff. I push out a stack of $50, and try to look just a little nervous, without being all Hollywoody about it. He thinks for about 30 seconds, then finally calls. I must have come close to that magic number--the most that he would have been willing to put in without folding. Score one for me!

He looks pretty disgusted at my 9-10. Predictably, the comments start up again. This time he directs them, well, at nobody in particular, but sort of at the table as a whole. "This guy folds folds folds for round after round, and when he finally goes for it, it's with 9-10 offsuit!" He laughs, as if I'm the biggest idiot he's ever played against. I just smile. If he can't see that I'm deploying a reasonably smart strategy against his style of play, so much the better for me. And if he helps convince less perceptive players at the table that I don't know a good hand from a bad one, hey, maybe that will enhance their temptation to call me down light, too, further fattening my stack. So jabber away, Bally's Boy--I've got more of your chips than you have of mine now, and I sense more coming my way.

And then the inevitable final confrontation occurred. It was only a matter of time.

As usual, he raised from middle position to his standard $12. I had A-K suited (hearts), which is huge against his raising range. But I don't want to tip him off. I haven't reraised him even once preflop, so if I do so now, it will set off alarms in his head. I don't want to flip a coin for our stacks. I want to see a flop, and either get away from the hand cheaply if I whiff, or let his overaggressive tendency hang him if I hit.

But, OOPS, a wrinkle develops in the plan. A short-stacked player in the big blind has moved all in for $25. This re-opens the betting to Mr. Bally's. He surprises me by pushing out most of his chips in one big stack, about $200. I'm sitting on about $310 at the time.

I have to tell you about my mental state at this moment. I had been playing for about five hours, which is pushing the limit of how long I can stay attentive and sharp. I'm up by a little over $200, which is a decent day's wages for me. I had been planning to have this orbit be my last, and go home, having resigned myself to not getting the perfect opportunity to felt Mr. Bally's. I was in my "I will not get myself into a big pot" mode. At this point, ready to head for home, I did not want to be put to a decision for my whole day's earnings. If I lost, I would have to either eat the loss and record an "L" in my books for the day, or hunker down and start over again, when I wasn't fresh. Those were both unpleasant prospects.

But, geez--this may be too juicy to pass up. I do not habitually overplay A-K in deep-stacked cash games. I'm smarter than that. But given the huge range that Mr. Bally's raises with, I'm way ahead of about 90% of what he could have. The fact that he put in this enormous reraise is actually kind of encouraging. If he had the only two hands that I'm really scared of--A-A and K-K--he's smart enough that he would try to suck me in, not push me out. This bet is absolutely screaming, "Go away and leave me alone with the short stack." I had just called his initial raise, rather than reraising, largely so that my strength was disguised, in order that he would assume I was calling with junk and hoping to get lucky, just as he had previously seen me do with the 9-10. I had thought to spring my surprise on him later in the hand, but it looked like I would have to do it now instead.

My job is to figure out what opponents want me to do, then do the opposite. He obviously wants me to fold, which means that I have to not fold. I hesitate for longer than usual, because of (1) my general aversion to putting a ton of money on A-K before the flop, and (2) my dread of losing in one fell swoop what I've carefully built up over the last several hours. But I know that the mathematically right thing to do here is to be willing to risk it all. He can't fold, no matter what cards he has; he has 2/3 or 3/4 of his chips in already. Our stacks are so close in size that I can't tell who has whom covered, so this is basically for stacks here.

I hate it, but I push. He calls, of course.

He has the two red jacks, near the very tippy-top of the range with which he would play as he just has. Ouch. Mr. Short Stack has the two black queens. Yowza! I am in deep doo-doo here! But the good news is that all of the aces and kings should be live, because I am in desperate need of finding one of them. Also, I'm guaranteed to see all five community cards, so I have maximized my chance for catching what I need. I don't care much about losing the main pot, which is only about $75. It's the side pot between Mr. Bally's and me that matters, since it is worth $600 or $650.

The flop is a bad one: 10-5-2, one heart. Ugh. My chances for the side pot just dropped from about 45% to about 30%.

The turn was the queen of diamonds. Mr. Short Stack jumped up, clapped his hands, and shouted "Yes!" My heart sunk a little lower. No flush will be heading my way on this hand, and there is ,only one card left to come.

The river was a jack. Mr. Bally's lets out a triumphant whoop. Damn. No ace or king for me, and both of my opponents hit sets on me! I guess it's home with nothing to show for my day's work, and actually down by my initial $100 buy-in. I turn my attention to the stack sizes to see if I have anything left. But just then I hear the dealer say, "Straight. Ace-king is gonna take it all."

I swear I had not even noticed this possible way of winning the hand when the queen came on the turn. To my slightly-overwrought brain, the queen had written off the side pot to the short stack's set, as well as killing my backdoor flush draw, and I was looking for only an ace or king to save the main pot for me. A straight never even entered my mind, in the couple of seconds I had for processing the situation. But there it was: My A and K, a 10 on the flop, and Q-J on the turn and river. With no three of any suit out there, I not only had the winner, I had the stone-cold nuts!

As it turned out, I had Mr. Bally's covered by a small amount. He lost the hand in arguably the most painful way possible: His incessant raising and pressuring with mediocre hands had gotten me to put it all in against what had to be one of his strongest hands of the day. He was ahead at every point, and, to apparently put the lock on it, had hit his three-of-a-kind on the river. Both he and I overlooked the straight at first. (I'm completely confident that I would have spotted it a few seconds after the dealer's announcement, by the way. I wouldn't relinquish my entire stack without giving the whole situation one last looking over.) He must have felt sick when the runner-runner miracle was pointed out to him.

For A-K to beat two different big pairs, both of which have hit sets, without itself making a pair or a flush is really quite rare and remarkable. Not only did I have to make the straight with exactly a queen, jack, and ten coming--with two queens and two jacks already out--but I had to do so without any pairs to those three cards hitting the board, because if two of any of those cards came, it would make full houses and/or quads for my opponents.

Mr. Bally's slinked away without another word to anybody. Good riddance. I kind of wish I had gotten a chance to rub it in a little because, frankly, he's the rare asshole that I would say deserves such treatment. But on the other hand, if I had done so, I would now be feeling worse about myself, because it would be a violation of the standards of decorum that I both want and try to hold myself to. Kicking a guy when he's down might feel perversely satisfying at the moment, but I'd be ashamed of it after the fact.

I played for another hour or so, because there were still several soft spots at the table, and nobody with anywhere near enough chips to cause me to leave loser for the day, no matter what happened. I changed my mind about leaving because that hand infused me with new mental energy, and because I thought I might be able to use my new-found aura of invincibility (combined with a comparitively enormous chip stack) to intimidate some pots away from opponents. But it was up and down, without much net forward progress. So I packed it in and left with my biggest Bill's win yet: up $520 in 5.8 hours, for about $90/hour. Excellent day's results. (My previous Bill's record was $416 profit on the poker room's opening day, May 13, 2008. My record there is now 9 wins and 2 losses, with a net $2326 profit, or about $211 per session.)

Saturday night at Bill's might become a habit for me. Both of the last two of them have been profitable (uptick $323 last Saturday) and generally enjoyable. Most of the table was delightful tonight. That fact kind of got obscured in telling the story of the one jerk.


So what's with the Godzilla picture and the "movie monster" reference in the title to this post? Well, in Hollywood monster pictures, there are classically three encounters with the monster. There's the first skirmish, in which the villagers (or Earthlings, if it's an sci-fi flick) become aware of the monster and take a licking, because they're not prepared. Then they assemble their weapons so that they're better prepared, and we get the second battle. But the monster is stronger than thought, and the weapons are useless. The villagers then have one last, desperate attempt to kill the monster, with all the odds against them. Just when it looks like all hope is lost, something finally works, and the tide turns their way. The monster is killed or run off, and all is well with the world again. Any number of movies follow this basic blueprint: "Godzilla" and "Independence Day," for two prominent examples.

Anyway, tonight's script deviated a bit from the norm, in that I won the second skirmish. Besides, there was the verbal jousting along the way, and a bunch of small pots that I abandoned early when I missed the flop, none of which are recounted in detail here.

Still, in its general outline, it felt a lot like I had taken on a movie monster. I had lost the first battle, plus some small ones along the way, and had basically given up on defeating the beast. Then out of the blue, we were suddenly deeply engaged in an all-out life-and-death struggle. And just when it looked like the monster was going to win this one, the screenplay dictated a runner-runner miracle straight to save the day for your hero at the last second, and the monster limped away, fatally wounded. It was as if I had used my lowly Macintosh to deliver a computer virus to the mother ship, or found a way to implant the command "sleep" in all of the members of the Borg.

Yeah, it was pretty damn lucky, but it was definitely not dumb luck. I had played him intelligently, and hadn't let my dislike for his style of play and his appalling lack of etiquette throw me off of my game. I was willing to put all my chips on the line when it mattered and when the sum total of the circumstances strongly suggested that it was the right move to make. In short, I did what is always said of poker tournament winners: I put myself in a position to get lucky, then did.

In the poker world, the monsters do sometimes win--unlike in Hollywood. But not here, not today.

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HORSEing around

Date: Fri, Sep 26, 2008

Wednesday night I spread my wings a bit again: I entered my first live HORSE tournament. Green Valley Ranch has one every Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. for only $45. (Well, technically it's $40, but there's a $5 add-on at the beginning that everybody takes.)

GVR is a pretty nice room. It's comfortable, smoke-free, has good dealers, and, as far as I can tell, is well run (though there are definitely conflicting reports on this count on allvegaspoker.com). For me the only problems are (1) it's too far away from where I live, and (2) it has a very low tourist:local ratio. Since there are plenty of fishier waters within a much shorter drive, I just don't have much reason to head out that way. Too bad, because it's the kind of place I would definitely make a home out of if not for those two big negatives.

But this HORSE tournament will probably give me more reason to visit Henderson than I've had. I enjoyed myself quite a bit. I've now done 107 online single-table HORSE tournaments, and it appears that they have prepared me reasonably well. I doubt that anybody at my table would have guessed it was my first time doing one live. My favorite dealer from Bill's was, by coincidence, also playing at my table, which added a bit of fun.

I finished about 10th out of maybe 20 or so runners (two tables, with a couple of alternates coming in late). Nothing spectacular. But I had been 2nd in chips at my table for much of it--propelled primarily by one hand early in the first razz round in which I made a wheel at the same time as another guy made a 7-4, and we kept raising and reraising each other. I knocked him out. My chip lead swung way over into short-stack range, though, on two hands just before the first break. First, one opponent just wouldn't fold his pocket kings despite an ace and possible flush on the board. Of course, I didn't actually have him beat, but he should have believed that I did, dammit! :-) Then in a stud round my jack-high flush got sunk by an ace-high flush.

The average age of entrants was over 50, I'm sure. In terms of skill, I had no trouble keeping up with the table. I couldn't peg anybody as being obviously better overall than I was, despite the fact that I went into this prepared to be the least experienced HORSE player there. It was 100% straightforward, level-1 play--nothing fancy or tricky going on at all, as far as I could tell. Bet or call or raise if you have something, check or fold if you don't. In hold'em and razz, the two games in which I have enough experience to make some reasonable degree of judgment about relative ability of opponents, the skill level was pretty pathetic--about what you'd expect in a typical $2-4 game.

The only problems I had with the mechanics of the game were (1) some difficulty seeing opponents' up cards in stud games, because I was at one end of the longish table, and (2) one time forgetting to return my cards to the dealer in an Omaha round (a real amateur move, that).

The dealers, by the way, were great. I couldn't detect any weakness in any of them dealing any of the games. Of course, that is what one should be able to expect, but it is not a foregone conclusion in this hold'em-dominated age.

I viewed this as a trial run--test the waters, see if I'm really ready, be sure the mechanics aren't handicapping me or showing me up as a noob. I held up well enough that the next time I enter, it will be with the thought that I should have a reasonable shot to cash in the thing.


When it was over, I headed down the road a piece to Club Fortune. It's been more than a year since my only previous visit there. As I reported at the time, they were in the midst of constructing a new poker room. I wanted to see what they made of it. Answer: Nothing. There are still three tables stuck in the dead center of the casino floor. Nobody was playing. A dealer was putting some decks of cards into order. It looked basically the same as I remembered from 13 months earlier. Back then, they had said they would have the new room in a couple of months. I have to assume, then, that those plans got cancelled. It couldn't possibly still be under construction after this much time.

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Mr. Observant

Date: Fri, Sep 26, 2008

At the end of the post I just put up, I mentioned being observant of some peculiar and not-too-important things at the poker table. That post was already wandering far from what I had intended it to be about, so I wasn't going to digress further. But writing that paragraph reminded me of one tiny thing I noticed more than two years ago, but it was the key to the whole hand, so it sticks out in my memory.

This was before I had a blog, but when interesting things happened to me, I would write them as emails to a friend back in Minnesota. I had sort of a vague notion that some day I would want to be able to refer to them, and having my tales of starting out playing poker in Vegas in written, contemporary form might be useful. I'm glad I did, because when I read back through them now, there's no way I would even have remembered some of them at all, and others would have all of the colorful details lost or transformed via tricks of memory.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from an email I wrote on August 20, 2006, about observing things at the table:

It’s actually not very common to find a reliable, useful tell on an
opponent. I spotted a great one the other day at the Hilton, though. This guy
would carefully stack his chips into, say, 5 stacks of 2 $5 chips each for a $50
bet, then push the stacks forward deliberately one at a time when he actually
had a good hand. If he was bluffing, though, he’d make one big stack and shove
it forcefully forward. I watched him do this twice each way, so I was pretty
confident in it. Unfortunately, he left the table before I got to exploit it.
Damn. It would have been great.

A couple of weeks ago at Golden
Nugget, I raised from middle position. Guy on the button made a slight move of
his hand to his cards before reaching instead for chips—I was certain that he
had made a last-second change of mind to call me rather than fold, which meant
that he wasn’t very strong. We were the only two in the hand. I bet on the flop,
even though it missed me completely. He thought a few seconds, then raised. I
instantly said “all-in.” He agonized for at least 60 seconds, then finally
folded. I’m sure that he had deduced that the flop of rags probably didn’t help
me, and if I had something like AK or AQ I wouldn’t even have a pair and I’d
have to fold to a raise. And he would have been right, except for that little
slip of his hand pre-flop. I was *expecting* him to try to take the pot away
from me, and I was prepared for it. He might easily have made a pair with that
flop, but he couldn’t risk me having AA or KK or QQ for all his chips. It was
one of the purest poker moments I’ve experienced here: completely playing the
player, not the cards. The whole thing could have been done exactly the same
with any two cards in my hand. He probably still has no idea that that little
slip of his hand cost him about $50. Without that, I wouldn’t have dared make
that move on him.

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Entertainment while you play

Date: Fri, Sep 26, 2008

Played at Bill's again this evening. One of the sidelights of playing there is that if you time your visit right, you get to hear Big Elvis, who sings in the lounge maybe 30 or 40 yards from the poker room, so it's not hard to listen in. (They have the good sense to shut off the canned overhead music while he is performing.) According to Big Elvis's web site, he's there Monday through Friday at 3:00, 5:00, and 6:30 p.m.






When the game broke up unusually early at Bill's, I walked next door to the Flamingo. They had something going on I'd never seen before: Performers from the Flamingo's "X Burlesque" show (see review here) were dancing to loud music just inside the door. (Sorry for the blurry photos. They wouldn't hold still.) Maybe this has been going on for a long time, but never while I've been there. It appears that other girls from the show--or at least ones dressed as if they might be in the show--do some blackjack dealing in this area near the wide-open front door of the casino. As at Bill's, the poker room is close enough that you can listen in on the music, but you can't see the dancers from the tables. Probably a good thing--might be a bit too distracting. I liked Big Elvis's music better anyway.

Sorry, no interesting poker stories from tonight. I came home with more money than I left with, which is always plenty interesting to me, but not especially to anybody else.

Oh, but wait--I do have a story, though not much to do with poker. Bill's takes the rake in half-dollar increments, so you sometimes get 50-cent pieces back as part of the pot. You can also play two of them as if they were a $1 chip. Somebody did that, and I noticed that the sheen of one of them looked quite different from the other. I'm fairly sensitized to the appearance of real silver, because of having my one-ounce silver coin always in use as my card protector, and I thought this half-dollar looked much more like silver than most. And when the dealer picked them up and put them in the tray, replacing them with a $1 chip, the "clink" was definitely different from the usual cheap, tinny sound that American coins have been making since they stopped using silver and copper, and instead went to crappy metals like nickel and zinc. I could even see in the dealer's tray that the second one down looked different on its edge. So I asked the dealer to sell me two half dollars from her tray (she probably thought I wanted to use them to tip the cocktail waitress or some such thing). Sure enough, the second one was a 1968, when the alloy used was still 40% silver (see here for coinage history). It's about one-eighth of an ounce of silver, so, I dunno, something like $2 worth, that I purchased for 50 cents.

When Shamus was in town for the World Series of Poker and we played a little poker together at the Palms, he mentioned in his blog the next day about how observant I seemed to be at the table. Nobody had ever said this of me before, though I do try hard to pay attention to what's going on. I suppose it's true, given my irritating (to the dealers, anyway) tendency to be able to identify cards from tiny rub marks or creases I notice on their backs, pick up and later blog about snippets of other players' conversations, get grossed out by untidy dealers' ear and nose hair, notice illegally small raises, spot all sorts of nervous tells in opponents, etc. Now I have to add to the list that I notice the peculiar look and sound of coins in play! There are undoubtedly more important things to be noticing, but one really can't help what things catch one's attention.

The strange thing is that I'm completely obtuse and unobservant in life outside of the poker room. My friends will tell you that I can walk past some prominent object a thousand times before finally noticing it and asking them, "Has that always been there?"

Wow. This post really veered far from where it started. Sorry for rambling.

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ESPN gets one right

Date: Fri, Sep 26, 2008

I'm watching the second half of this week's WSOP broadcast. ESPN has another "Poker Fact." They say, "There are 2,598,960 possible 5-card combinations in poker." And, as it happens, that is correct!

It shouldn't be cause for amazement when ESPN gets something like this right, but given their recent track record, it is.

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Poker gems, #169

Date: Thu, Sep 25, 2008

Phil Hellmuth, apparently completely earnest, in "Poker After Dark" Wednesday night:


I'm huge on etiquette.


[You can see the astonishingly un-self-aware declaration here, at the 0:55 mark.]

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Poker gems, #168

Date: Thu, Sep 25, 2008

Warren Buffet (who was not talking about poker, but might as well have been):


Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

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My million-dollar idea

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

I actually had an original poker-related idea last night. An invention. Or, rather, an improvement on an existing invention.

Shufflemaster should add a sterilizing function to its card shuffler. My first thought was a powerful ultraviolet light bathing the cards as they get sifted. It would turn off when the lid is open, of course, like the magnetron in a microwave oven. I suppose that gamma radiation would work, too, though perhaps the shielding required would be prohibitive.

But though these methods might sterilize the cards, which would be nice, given all the grime that they accumulate, it would really be better if there were a physical scrubbing/washing mechanism. Like a little dishwasher. Heck, the machines already sound like a dishwasher, if you're in a poker room quiet enough that you can hear the things working. This would probably take a little time, so they might have to go to three or four decks being cycled through, rather than just two. But every time, the dealer would lift out a freshly washed, sterilized deck, perfectly safe for handling (until the gross players put their greasy, filthy, unwashed, poo-smeared, nose-picking, licked fingers all over them again). No disease transmission between the players! I could even settle for regular shuffling most of the time, with the "wash" cycle only turned on, say, every half hour, when the dealers change and there's an extra delay before the next hand starts anyway.

Of course, the problem is that it's hard to imagine most casinos caring enough about clean cards to spend the extra bucks on my upgraded machine. Maybe the Wynn and Venetian. But a place like Jokers Wild, where the dealers lick their fingers before pitching the cards? No way.

We'd also have to do something with the chips, which get even nastier than the cards do.

But it's a start. And I'm giving away my idea free of charge to Shufflemaster or anybody else who cares to work on implementing it. It's my public service for the day.


(What does a baby elephant have to do with this? Nothing, really. But I did a Google image search for "scrubbing" to see what might come up, and I found this picture of people scrubbing a baby elephant. I'm a sucker for pictures of baby elephants, and, as you might imagine, the subject matter of this blog doesn't lend itself to such photos very often. I have to grab the opportunities when I can. I don't know when my next real vacation might be, but if I can make it to a place where I can scrub baby elephants, that's where I'm going!)

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900

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

Oops, I did it again! Another hundred posts. It has been 46 days since post #800. That seems to be about my average pace. Every time I have to say that I really can't believe I have this much to say on the subject of poker. How can there possibly be that much to be said that is worth reading? Yet the readership continues to grow apace, for which I am inexpressably grateful and flattered.

Special thanks this time to MemphisMOJO, a fairly new reader, for the heart-warming shout-out he posted this morning on his poker-and-bridge blog.

As always in these centennial posts, I'll ask you to do me the favor of clicking on the silly Google ads when time allows, which keeps the lights on in my fabulous downtown penthouse suite. (Ha!)

And thank you for reading. Your eyeballs on the page and your encouraging feedback are what make me look forward to sitting down at the keyboard every day to pound out another rant or two.

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Phil Hellmuth acting badly--again? Say it ain't so, Jen!

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

I cannot tell the facts or give the commentary any better than California Jen already did, so just click on over to Pokerati and read.

In the comments, Jen says that Hellmuth is like the abusive boyfriend, always trying to bring flowers to make up for his misdeeds, and the WSOP is the woman who can't leave him.

Perhaps.

But the analogy that comes to my mind is this ultra-great scene from the 1979 movie "Kramer vs. Kramer. Hellmuth is the little boy. The WSOP is Dustin Hoffman with his repeated insincere and ineffectual warnings. The analogy breaks down, though, because I don't believe that the WSOP will ever tell Hellmuth he is a "spoiled rotten little brat," call him "you little shit" and throw him in his bed crying for his mommy--though they clearly should do just that.



(By the way, is there something wrong with me, that I always think of things in terms of movie scenes?)

Oh, and as another BTW, while I'm on the subject of the guy I most love to hate, I greatly admired how Clonie Gowen handled him on Monday night's "Poker After Dark." He guessed out loud about what she was holding, and was WAY off. But instead of showing him, or telling him he was wrong, she lied, and acted all impressed at how good he was at reading her. She even asked, with magnificently faked sincerity, how he knew. This naturally stoked his ego so much that he had to go into a little lecture about how he had figured it out. What a maroon! Now that she has planted the seed, it will be interesting this week to see if she manages to find a way to use it against him.

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Poker gems, #167

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

Phil Laak, on "Poker After Dark," September 24, 2008, after folding 8-8 to Mike Matusow's all-in bluff reraise with 7-4, which he showed.


How long do you think the pain will last?

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Kentucky is bluffing

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

Shamus thoughtfully asks whether the governor of Kentucky actually has a hand, in his bid to take control of a bunch of online gambling sites and thereby cut off Kentucky citizens' access to same. (See also Pokerati's reports on the matter here, here, and here.)

Legal blogs are often great sources for informed commentary on such breaking news, but I couldn't find anything on them, not even on one dedicated to Kentucky legal issues. So I'm going to have to wing it alone. I'm not an attorney, but I've been involved in a number of legal cases, and kind of by osmosis gained a reasonable familiarity with how the system works. Here's my quick reaction:

I'm not worried about this, and I wouldn't be even if I lived in Kentucky.

First I'll address one of Shamus's questions--the one about the UIGEA. I think it's pretty safe to conclude that the UIGEA is not being invoked here. The statute says:

§ 5365. Civil remedies(a) JURISDICTION.—In addition to any other remedy
under current law, the district courts of the United States shall have original
and exclusive jurisdiction to prevent and restrain restricted transactions by
issuing appropriate orders in accordance with this section, regardless of
whether a prosecution has been initiated under this subchapter.

The key here is that the federal courts have "original and exclusive jurisdiction" over civil remedies. The simple fact that, according to news reports, Kentucky is filing its action in a state court, rather than federal court, is a pretty clear signal that the UIGEA is not involved here.

But the bigger issue is one of jurisdiction. When you file a suit, one of the first things that you're supposed to do is demonstrate, or at least assert, that the defendants are within the jurisdiction of the court, or take steps to have the court assume jurisdiction. In some situations, if the defendant just shows up in court for the hearing, or has an attorney do so, that is enough for jurisdiction to lie--which is why it won't surprise me if many or all of the sites simply ignore the hearing.

What the judge should do at the hearing, if there is nobody representing the gambling sites, is inquire of the state whether the opposing parties were properly served with notice of the hearing, and ask for evidence of that. He shouldn't be willing to do anything permanent without such evidence. (He might be able and willing to issue a temporary order of some sort, but what would happen with that is the same as what I will predict below would happen with an eventual permanent order.)

But suppose the worst happens, and the judge either disregards the question of whether any of the sites have been properly served and/or have a physical presence in the state such that they fall under the jurisdiction of the state's laws and courts, and he agrees completely with the governor's arguments. He issues an order transferring control of the domain names to the state.

So what? When one kid threatens to do bodily harm to another, sometimes the rejoinder will be, "Oh yeah? You and what army?" Well, that's about what a site like PokerStars would say to Governor Beshear. You've got your fancy, autographed, embossed piece of paper ordering transfer of the site, but now what are you going to do with it? To whom can the state now deliver that order with any credible enforcement mechanism behind it?

They can mail it, or have it delivered by courier, to, say, the Isle of Man, or the Kahnawake tribe that owns the company that hosts the servers for many gaming sites. But Kentucky's laws don't extend there. Even if the sites disregard the order (as they surely would), and the judge eventually finds them in contempt--again, what, exactly, are they going to do to enforce the contempt order? I promise you, they are not going to try to send the Kentucky State Police to Canada or Great Britain to try to arrest the site owners or operators. And as I understand international treaties, contempt of court is not among the offenses for which foreign governments will use their own law enforcement agencies and courts to arrest you and have you extradicted to Kentucky. Murder? Sure. Contempt of court? Nope.

So I think it's all a sham, a show, grandstanding for purely political purposes. There is no end game that I can see that works out in favor of the plaintiffs.

Gov. Beshear is bluffing. Hollywooding. The floor is going to rule against him.

Have no fear.

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Three in a row???

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

Two weeks ago, when ESPN messed up on its weekly "Poker Fact," I thought it would be a one-time thing. They surprised me the next week by doing it again. I would not have believed they could hit the trifecta, but they somehow managed.

This week they say, "When holding any pocket pair, the probability of flopping a set is 11.76%."

Wrong.

The usual way of running this calculation, which is apparently how ESPN's people went about it, is to calculate the probability of the flop not having another of the rank in question. There are 50 cards left, so the probability of the first card of the flop not completing one's set is 48/50. If that happens, then the probability of the second card of the flop also not completing one's set is 47/49. If you have gotten that far without a set, then the probability of the third card of the flop still not completing one's set is 46/48. Multiple those three together (because all must be true simultaneously), and the probability of the flop not bringing a third card to one's pocket pair is 0.882449. Subtract that from 1.000000 (because the flop must either contain another of the rank in question or not), and you get 0.117551, or about 11.76%.

The problem, though, is that four of a kind is not a "set," and the calculation above does not exclude flopping quads. Given that you start with a pocket pair, the probability of flopping quads is 0.2449%, if I've done my math right.* (And if I haven't, please let me know in the comments so I can fix it.)

Therefore, the probability of flopping a set but not quads is 11.7551% - 0.2449%, or about 11.51%. What the ESPN graphic was showing was not the probability of flopping a set, but instead the probability of flopping either a set of four of a kind, starting with a pair in the hole. They are not the same thing.

Be sure to tune in next week for the next exciting installment of "How Many Ways Can ESPN Get the Math Wrong?"

By the way, when starting to write this post, I pulled out Phil Gordon's Little Green Book, which has a handy section of common poker probabilities. It's my usual first place to look for quick answers. But I see that he has it wrong here. On p. 271, he says that if one starts with a pocket pair, the probability of flopping a set is 10.80%, and the probability of flopping quads is 0.20%. Wrong on both points.



*We're specifying that the flop must contain two exact cards. There are therefore 48 cards left in the deck to fill that third spot on the flop. We don't care about the order, so that's effectively 48 different flops that will work. We already know that there are 19,600 possible flops, once we've accounted for the fact that our two hole cards can't be in the flop. 48/19,600 = 0.00244898, or 0.244898%.

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Separated at birth?

Date: Wed, Sep 24, 2008

Recently I've had a couple of people mention that they think I look like Robert Varkonyi, winner of the WSOP Main Event in 2002. We were at least born in the same year, so that's something.

This now gets added to the list of people I possibly resemble, along with Dr. Pauly, David Cross, Joe Pantoliano, and Scott Adams (see here and here for the earlier installments in this series).

Addendum

Now Rocco Mediate (pro golfer who occasionally plays poker tournaments) is being added to the list of candidates--see first comment. But I don't agree. My watch isn't big enough.

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