Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Date: Wed, Jul 16, 2008
OK, maybe I've still got too many Sound of Music echoes bouncing around in my head, but the title of this post alludes to the fact that today I watched both the Monday and Tuesday episodes of this week's new "Poker After Dark" (available here) and got to experience what is indeed one of my very "favorite things" in poker: watching Phil Hellmuth lose. (The photo of him above is selected because it's one of the few in which he's not sporting that blecch-inducing UB logo.) This week's PAD is a cash game, a departure from their usual format.
First, it was amusing to see him seated next to Tom Dwan, acting as if Dwan is his new best friend. This was apparently taped after the heads-up championship, because one of the other players asks something like, "Weren't you two supposed to play a heads-up cash game?" That's a challenge that was (sort of) issued and accepted when Dwan busted Hellmuth with a bad beat at the Caesars event.
In Monday's episode, Hellmuth raised with suited K-5, and Allen Cunningham called with 6-6. The flop was 5-6-X. Hellmuth bet, Cunningham raised with his set. Hellmuth goes into a rant about how he had predicted for the cameras that this exact scenario would come up: that he would get Cunningham to put all his money in drawing nearly dead. Oh yeah, great read there, Phil! LOL!
But things got even better on Tuesday. First, Hellmuth picked up suited A-K and appropriately put in a substantial reraise from one of the blinds. His opponent, an amateur I had never heard of before, called with Q-10 offsuit. The flop came king-high, but Hellmuth, following his usual idiotic habit when he is playing out of position, had checked in the dark, so he couldn't bet his top pair/top kicker. The other guy checked, too. But even more stupidly, Hellmuth checked again on a fairly non-scary turn card, and his opponent, who had now picked up a straight draw, checked behind. The river completed his opponent's straight. Hellmuth checked again, then called when the other guy bet about $12,000.
Predictably, rather than kicking himself for misplaying the hand about as badly as can be done, Phil berated his opponent for the preflop call. He then spent several minutes congratulating himself on having lost the minimum on the hand! Uh, no, Phil--you should have won it, and probably would have if you had bet on either the turn or the river. Aren't "eagle" types supposed to be bold and fearless about their strong hands? You played it like a mouse. (For those among my readers who don't know, Hellmuth's book, Play Poker Like the Pros, famously categorizes poker players into animal types: the mouse, the jackal, the elephant, the lion, and the eagle.) I was glad to hear the commentator, Ali Nejad, say "Phil has nobody to blame but himself" for the loss. That fact was obvious to everybody except Phil.
Next, Hellmuth gets stacked off when he finds himself on the bad end of a set-over-set situation with Cunningham, fives versus tens. He shoves it all in and, of course, gets called. He is 100% certain that he trapped Cunningham for all the marbles--until he sees the cards. It's a priceless moment.
Now he's well and truly steaming, and rebuys for another $100,000. (At least this time he pulled it out of a very nice black leather satchel, unlike the laughable plastic grocery bag in which he was carrying his money when he showed up on the second season of "High Stakes Poker.") He runs some junk hand (can't remember the details) into Mike Baxter's K-K. Hellmuth hits top pair, but is behind all the way, and loses a bunch more money. Again, rather than berating himself for overplaying his mediocre hand, he latches onto the fact that Baxter took maybe two seconds longer than he really needed to to turn over his cards after being called on the river, and launches into a several-minute tirade about being slow-rolled. I don't think this fit any reasonable definition of a sl0w-roll. When Baxter got called, he very likely thought that Hellmuth would only call him with a hand that had him beat. He even grimaced a bit, which I interpret to be him thinking that he must have lost. He really hesitated only a second, and I got absolutely no sense that he was doing it to prolong the losing opponent's anticipation (which I think is the essence of the slow-roll). Baxter was very classy about it, though, and apologized for the perceived infraction of etiquette, in order to smooth things over with Phil. (And maybe just to shut him up.)
Speaking of classy, I have been highly impressed by Tom Dwan so far. Other than the NBC heads-up match, this is the first time, I think, that I've seen him play on television. The guy seems to have a phenomenal poker sense, knowing when to apply pressure and when to back off. He has played nearly flawlessly in the first two hours, and is the big winner up to this point. Some of that is because of good luck, for example, flopping the nuts when his opponent flopped the second nuts, but I think he squeezed every single chip out of the guy that he could have, which takes a great feel for the game.
Just as impressive, though, is how he held his tongue with respect to Hellmuth. Before Phil mucked his A-K in his misplayed hand, he flashed them to Dwan. Dwan could easily have engaged Phil in a debate about how badly he had played it, but he just said, "No comment." I think it was clear from his facial expression that he know Phil had completely bungled the situation, and he certainly owed Phil a needle or two from their heads-up encounter. But he didn't take the shot, just kept it to himself. Smart and classy, both.
Three more days of watching Phil Hellmuth lose his money--it's like a brown paper package tied up with strings!
Addendum
It just occurred to me to check what Phil's book says about playing A-K when you flop an ace or a king to go along with it. Here it is, p. 52: "You bet, raise, and reraise quite a bit because you have hit 'top pair' with 'top kicker.' In every case where an A or a K hits the flop you will have top pair with top kicker (A-A-K or A-K-K), and this is a very strong hand in Hold'em! ... The point I'm trying to make is that A-K becomes very powerful when you catch an A or a K on the flop, and you should put in a lot of betting and raising on the flop when this is the case." (Emphasis added.)
Of course, this is in the "Beginners' Strategy" section. Probably in the "Advanced Strategy only to be attempted by Eagle players" section, it says, "Check it down until your opponent makes a straight, then call him."
Me and the Full Tilt boys
Date: Wed, Jul 16, 2008
Watched the above game for a while this evening. Fun to see $600,000 being kicked around. The waiting list was John Juanda and John D'Agostino.
I almost clicked on that "join waiting list" button, but, y'know, these guys are close personal friends of mine, and they need the money more than I do, and I really couldn't soft-play them ethically, so I'd have to bust them all, and, well, I just wouldn't have felt right about that. So I let them have their little game to themselves.
Shopping spree!
Date: Tue, Jul 15, 2008
I got an email from PokerStars today:
Dear Rakewell1,Naturally, at this point in reading the letter, I just assume that they're about to tell me that I've earned myself a new Porsche, like Dario Miniero did. After all, I've had a $0.50/$1 or $1/$2 razz game on in the background for, like, a couple of hours a day, on average, for a couple of months now. It can't take much more than that, can it? And "Silver Star VIP"--that's got to be super-duper high in their rankings, right?
Congratulations! You have achieved SilverStar VIP status.
Your VIP level lasts for the rest of this month and all of next
month.
This entitles you to the following rewards:
No such luck. It's actually their second-lowest rewards level. And they're just giving me some lame stuff.
No Porsche.
Damn.
But I took the occasion to check my Frequent Player Points status, which I've actually never done before. I had absolutely no idea how many I had accumulated, or what I could get with them. Turns out I had about 5200 of them little suckers in my account. So I went on a little PokerStars shopping spree.
I ordered Daniel Negreanu's new book about small-ball strategy, a black hoodie PokerStars sweatshirt, and a tan PokerStars hat. (Now I'll fit right in at the Palms, about this time next year.) All for FREE! (Well, sort of.) Still have about 200 points left, so maybe I'll enter one or two of the freeroll tournaments mentioned in the email.
As I looked around the FAQ section of the PokerStars site, trying to figure out what I had earned and what I could do with the point, I learned a couple of things:
The good news is that I only have to earn about another 995,000 points by the end of the year to attain "Supernova Elite" status, their highest rewards level.
The bad news is that even that would only be about a third of what it takes to get me that new Porsche.
What's Vegas really like?
Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2008
Nobody can tell it like VegasRex can. See his excellent rant here.
Last Black Standing
Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2008
OK, you might as well fire up the ol' word processors and get ready to start writing the hate mail over this one.
The man pictured above, Michael Carroll, was just eliminated from the Main Event of the 2008 World Series of Poker in 27th place, the first knockout of Day 7, on which the final three tables will be reduced to the Final Table.
He was the Last Black Standing.
Why does that matter? It doesn't. But neither does it matter that Tiffany Michelle is the Last Woman Standing, yet that fact has received oodles of attention from the media. (Her name is apparently really Tiffany Michelle Graham. I assume that "Tiffany Michelle" is sort of a stage name she adopted. Since that's the name under which she entered the tournament, I'll use it here.) On the PokerNews live feeds over the past couple of days, several times a day they would throw in a post about how many female players were left, as if this fact were somehow meaningful. They never once did a post about how many black people were left in it.
Being black is exactly as relevant to one's poker playing as is being female. So why does one immutable characteristic get lavish attention and the other none at all? I don't pretend to know the answer to that. I only know that it's both silly and wrong that so many people care so deeply about whether poker players have two X chromosomes or only one. It is my own form of mini-retaliation (and spoofing) to point out that Mr. Carroll--about whom I know nothing, by the way--is just as deserving of media attention for having more melanin than any of the remaining players as Ms. Michelle is for having ovaries instead of testicles.
Yes, women are statistically under-represented at poker tables generally and in big poker tournaments specifically. But that is true of black people, too, so that fact does not constitute a rational justification for paying attention to one group but not the other.
If you privately are glad to see that a black person will not win the Main Event this year, then you are obviously a racist. Of course, if you are upset about the fact that a black person will not win the Main Event this year, then that makes you a racist, too. Similarly, if you hope that Michelle is eliminated because for whatever reason you can't stand the idea of a woman winning, you are sexist. And, in parallel, if you were rooting for her to win solely because of her gender, that, too, makes you sexist. It's all the same. If you favor or disfavor a person because of race, you're a racist. If you favor or disfavor a person because of sex, you're a sexist. You're a bigot either way.
One of the great things about poker is that it simply doesn't matter whether you're male or female, black, white, Hispanic, or Asian, young or old, tall or short, skinny or fat, physically handicapped or a perfect specimen of humanity. Not only is the game equally open to all, but none of those characteristics intrinsically impact one's ability to learn and succeed at the game.
Frankly, I find the attention heaped on female players in the spotlight demeaning to women. Every time there is attention lavished on a female player specifically because she is female, there is at least a vague undertone that she merits the attention because she's doing something one would tend to think she shouldn't be able to do, like a pig learning to play a Brahms piano concerto.
What would be most genuinely respectful of women, in my never-humble opinion, is silently accepting, as a simple matter of fact--so obvious that it's not even worth mentioning, let alone dwelling on--that women are just as capable of playing the game as men are.
To the media outlets and bloggers who focus on the Last Woman Standing, but completely disregard the Last Black Standing, I ask you to justify why you deem one worthy of your attention but not the other. Can you do it?
Incidentally, I have no specific hopes for who wins it all this year. All of the players I was hoping to make it fell by the wayside yesterday. (Fortunately, so did all of the ones at whose success I would have been nauseated.) I certainly don't care about the sex, race, or age of the winner. My only hope is that it's somebody who is a genuinely skilled player (unlike, say, Jerry Yang), and somebody who will not be an embarrassment to the game, as I consider several past champions to be (including Russ Hamilton, Phil Hellmuth, Jamie Gold, and Jerry Yang, though all for very different reasons).
Addendum, July 14, 2008
Here's a sampling of some of the giddy, giggly, breathless, brainless rhetoric that is being spewed on Michelle's performance solely because of her sex:
On the blog of "TinaB": "Women poker players all over the world are watching Tiffany make World Series of Poker history today!"
From commenter "sdjennifer" on the same post: "Gotta love a stong, skilled woman making it this far and hopefully all the way! ... Go Tiffany!"
From blogger "aviganola": "BTW - Tiffany Michelle is the last woman standing in the WSOP Main Event right now. They are down to 27, would love to see her make the last 9. Go Tiffany!!"
From Snuffy: "This could be the greatest thing in poker history. Bigger than Chris Moneymaker."
From the pokerdonkeysblog: "However Poker Donkeys! has found a player among the chip leaders that we believe could win it all. Tiffany "HOTCHIPS" Michelle! That's right, the only girl in the bunch is not only one heck of a player but she's also HOT! Poker Donkeys! fully supports "Hot Chips" on her way to winning the WSOP 2008. You go girl!"
From "liveplayer": "Poker can use a new ENERGY and this lady looks like she might make it happen! The writers all of the web - covering the event this year are LOVING the story behind this gal... I WISH nothing but the best for Tiffany Michelle - I'm behind her all the way! You go GIRL!"
From pablosplace: "I'll probably now be pulling for any American, but specifically, I'd like to see Tiffany "Hot Chips" Michelle, the lone female, make a deep run."
From albiezushi: "Over $9mil goes to this year's winner and I really hope that the only girl left in the event wins as that would be HUGE news--for not just the poker world but for the general media as well. It'd be great for poker and hey, she's not bad looking either...GO TIFFANY MICHELLE!"
From $mokkee: "Who isn’t rooting for her at this point?"
From Gaming Alerts: "There’s no telling what would happen to the poker world if a woman won the tournament, but many in the industry are excited by the prospect and believe it would be a positive for the game."
Jeffrey Pollack, Commissioner of the WSOP, as quoted in the Gaming Alerts piece: "If a woman made the final table...that would be terrific. And if a woman won, that would be terrific."
Hmmm. So, Mr. Pollack, I take it you think that a man winning would not be terrific. Either that, or your point is the rather idiotic, "It would be terrific if a man won and it would be terrific if a woman won." Please explain whether your point is the idiotic one, or the one in which you think it would, for some reason, not be "terrific" for a male to win.
I wonder if these people stop to consider that when they say they want Michelle to win because she is female, they are simulataneously telling the other 26 of today's contestants, "I don't want you to win, because you're a male." That is not one bit different than walking up to Michael Carroll and saying, "I'd glad you busted out. I wouldn't want you to win, because you're black."
On the other hand, I rather liked this thoughtful commentary from a blogger calling herself "sarawaraclara." My only disagreement is that rather than complain that her raises get insufficient respect because she is a female, she should relish that error on the part of apparently sexist male opponents, and learn to exploit it.
Controversy at the WPT
Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2008
Hey, it's not a WSOP story for a change!
There's a World Poker Tour event going on at the Bellagio, and a bit of a controversy came up Friday between Barry Greenstein and David Williams. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it's rare that Greenstein gets involved in a dispute of any sort. Second, it's rare for the events underlying a tournament dispute to be caught on camera.
You can read the blog post and watch the video of the incident and the floor decision here. (Caveat: That URL may not be stable as they add more pages of posts to this event, and there doesn't seem to be any way to point you to the specific post. You're looking for a post titled "Floor to Table 61," so if you don't see it on this page, you may have to move forward or back a couple of pages to find it.)
A few thoughts:
First, it's good to see that Greenstein, true to form and true to how he describes himself in his book, remains calm and rational through the whole thing. He never apologizes (since he believes he didn't do anything wrong), but also never gets accusatory towards Williams, as he easily could have ("Hey, pal, my chips were right here, it's your own fault for not asking for a count!"). Williams, on the other hand, is agitated and even drops an f-bomb on the floor guy, which isn't the best way to sway a decision in your favor.
Second, I think Greenstein's explanation fits perfectly with what we observe. He seems to be recounting things both subjectively and objectively accurately.
Williams, on the other hand, I'm not sure is being completely forthright. He says that he wouldn't have called if he had known the correct amount. Well, in the first place, he never called anything. He raised both times the action came to him. He moved all in, and Greenstein called him. Maybe he just got flustered, but he is definitely not describing what occurred accurately.
More significantly, though, he claims that he would not have "called" (or, presumably, moved all in) if he had known Greenstein's stack size. This seems implausible to me. The discrepancy is only one 10,000 chip, so, essentially, whether Greenstein had about 50,000 or about 60,000. There's nearly 60,000 in the pot when Williams shoves. At that point he allegedly thought that Greenstein had only another 15,000 left, and is trying to assert that if he had known that Greenstein actually had 25,000, he would have done something different. What, folded? The notoriously aggressive and willing-to-gamble David Williams folding pocket jacks preflop in that situation strikes me as pretty dubious. And what if he had just called? The flop came 10-7-2, so he definitely would have either pushed all in or called Greenstein's all-in bet after the flop anyway, with the same result.
Williams had to know that Greenstein was absolutely pot-committed. Greenstein had raised to 35,000, so whether he had another 15,000 or 25,000 left, either way Williams had to know that Greenstein was not only willing but probably eager to get it all in. Williams had no fold equity. So when Williams had his decision to make, he thought he would be putting in about 23,500 (to call Greenstein's raise) plus 15,000 (to put Greenstein all in), or a total of 38,500 to try to win the 60,000 already in the pot plus the additional 15,000 that he figured Greenstein had behind, or a total of 75,000, for pot odds of about 1.95:1. The actual situation is that he had to put in 48,500 to win 60,000 + 25,000, for pot odds of about 1.75:1.
In other words, I think Williams was either lying or just hadn't fully thought out the situation when he claimed that he would have done something different. (He doesn't specify what different action he would have taken, but as I said before, if he just calls Greenstein's raise at that point, all the money is going in anyway when the flop comes out; folding would have been smart, but out of character for Williams.) I refuse to believe that he would have been willing to commit that much money when being offered 1.95:1, but not when being offered 1.75:1. With pocket jacks against two opponents, both out of position and both clearly willing to shove it all in, that's just asking for trouble. It was a bad move on Williams's part, just about any way you analyze it, and failing to ascertain in advance exactly how many chips he was putting up was really just a minor part of his overall problem in that spot.
Frankly, Williams's trouble began with his outlandishly sized reraise. We don't know what the blinds and antes were at this point, but we are told that the first player raised to 1475 as the opening action. Williams reraised him to 11,500, a nearly 8-fold raise! That's just silly. It's one of those raises that will only get called (or, in this instance, reraised) if he's beat. Yes, of course he was trying to isolate the original raiser, perhaps sizing his bet to be about what that player appeared to have left. But if so, it was a serious error, not taking into account that there were two players yet to act between him and his target (the blinds). Had he raised to only, say, 5000, then it might have been easier to at least stop and think about getting away from the hand when (1) Greenstein came charging over the top of him, from out of position, with the third raise, and (2) the player under the gun pushed all in. That would tend to tell me, were I in Williams's position, that J-J might be in deep doo-doo.
I think the floor decision was the correct one. There was not even an accusation, really, that Greenstein had tried to hide high-denomination chips. And Williams didn't take the simple precaution of asking for a count of Greenstein's chips before pushing. He could even have just asked Greenstein to move his hands to get a clearer view, and that would have done it. In fact, I suspect that if he had done that, so that Greenstein knew he was contemplating an all-in, Greenstein would have accommodated him and counted (or at least estimated) his remaining stack. Greenstein's bet of over half of his stack was obviously a signal to Williams that he wanted to get it all in, and he would be happy to help Williams realize that he didn't have much left behind.
The UltimateBlecch mess gets uglier and uglier
Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2008
I was going to do a long, complicated post about the last several days' worth of revelations about UltimateBet, but it's just too much. Instead, I'll just point you to this Pokerati post, which, combined with the comments readers have submitted about it there, will take you to where you can read about it in as much depth and detail as you care to. You might want to put on plenty of scum repellant before wading through it.
I listened to Annie Duke's interview from July 10 on PokerRoad Radio, available here. A bunch of random reactions to it:
She says that Eric "Rizen" Lynch's main concern that caused him to terminate his relationship with UB was the impending national exposure from "60 Minutes."
Most of what she said was basically a repeat of what she had said in the PokerNews interview on which I commented extensively a couple of weeks ago. She doesn't come any closer to addressing the concerns I wrote about there.
She added some technical detail about how the cheating was accomplished that went beyond what I had heard before, though that may simply be because I hadn't read deeply enough in the right places. She insists that it was not a superuser account. Rather, it was software installed on the culprit's server that allowed him to pluck the hole-card information from the data stream. I guess the distinction is that it was not a specific account with special privileges, but rather software that was separate from the UB system and could therefore be used by anybody, regardless of what account they were using on UB. Doesn't seem like a particularly important distinction to me.
In her PokerNews interview, she was careful to say that she didn't know if it was one person or more, but throughout this interview she refers to the culprit in the singular, repeatedly and without ambiguity.
She mentioned that James Campbell is one of the new pro members of the UB team. I had missed this announcement. You can read the press release here, if you want to, though I'm not sure why you would. It laughably claims that Campbell is one of the most "revered" online players. What rot. I think I've heard of him before, but I'm not completely sure. Anybody care to admit that they "revere" him? Anybody? Anybody?
She also mentioned that a couple more pros' signing will be announced in about two weeks, and then a couple more some unspecified time after that.
There was more, but not too important, and I feel too slimy about the whole thing to keep writing.
Blecch.