Yappy Dave is barking no more

Date: Thu, Jul 10, 2008

I'm hopeless. I knew that Day 2b of the Main Event would be winding down about now, so after writing that last post, I decided to make one last check for anything interesting that might have happened in the 30 minutes or so it took me to write it.

I was dismayed to find this PokerNews post:

Cantu Eliminates David Irish

Preflop, from middle position, Brandon Cantu made it 4,000 to go. David
Irish, in late position, raised it up to 11,000 and Cantu made the call. The
flop ran 4-4-X and Irish led out for 15,000 after Cantu checked. Cantu fired
45,000 back and Irish shoved all in. Cantu called and showed for flopped trips
while Irish turned over pocket queens. The fours held for Cantu and Irish was
eliminated.

David Irish is a local semi-pro who is supporting himself playing poker while finished a graduate degree in music at UNLV. He's one of the most popular members of the allvegaspoker.com forums, and keeps his own poker blog there, known to one and all at that site and around the Vegas poker rooms as "Yappy Dave." I've played with him a few times, and he's the real deal--a significantly better player than I am, in most ways. He's also a decent, likable, smart, funny guy and a fellow libertarian, politically. I'm genuinely sorry to see him exit before making the money. I thought he was on his way to making a bigger name for himself. He will, I'm confident of that--just not in this tournament, I guess.

That's him in the above photo, on the right. Not the greatest photo, but the first one I could find, and I'm too tired to keep looking for a better one.

Bedtime story

Date: Thu, Jul 10, 2008

I'm about to hit the sack, and was just re-checking the PokerNews feeds from the last few hours to see what I might have missed. Found one more story to pass on.

PN has hired some exceptionally fine poker writers. (A few pretty weak ones, too, but we need not focus on them.) Here's my nominee for the best post of the day:

Tilt-a-Phil?

We picked up a hand with everybody's favorite whipping boy, Phil
Hellmuth, on the flop. The board showed 10h-As-9c, and the under-the-gun player
led out for 5,200. He was called by Hellmuth before a third player in the hand,
Tony Clark, raised to 16,000. Clark's raise folded the under-the-gun player and
brought the action back to Hellmuth. He called, then checked the 4c turn. Clark
immediately moved all in for about 29,000. That sent Hellmuth into the tank,
where he started talking to his opponent.

"If you have ace-queen, you're dead," said Hellmuth. There was no
response.

"Buddy, what are you doing?" Hellmuth asked. He then asked Clark whether or
not he was overplaying ace-queen.

After several minutes, Hellmuth still hadn't acted. One of the players at
the table called for a clock, and a floor was summoned to the table. Hellmuth
seemed surprised, and asked who called for the clock.

"I did," said Ramzi Jelassi, a player who has engaged in several verbal
sparring matches with Hellmuth today. When Hellmuth asked how long he'd been
thinking, Ramzi told him it was four minutes. Hellmuth seemed to think, based on
that response, that it was fair that a clock had been called.

As the floor counted him down, Hellmuth finally made the call, slamming his
chips into the middle. Clark turned over 10d-10s for a set of tens, far ahead of
Hellmuth's Ad-Kc. The river bricked out 2c, allowing Clark to double up at
Hellmuth's expense.

"You probably won't make it 'til the end of the day," said Hellmuth. He
then got out of his chair and went to talk to his wife on the rail.

That hand seemed to light a fire under Hellmuth. He started playing every
hand. First, after Matt Vengrin raised from late position to 3,000, Hellmuth
raised all in. Vengrin called with Ad-Kd and was a dominating favorite over
Hellmuth's Ac-Qs. The board ran out Qc-Jd-Ac-4h-Qh to make trip queens for
Hellmuth and send Vengrin to the rail.

We stepped away from the table for two minutes, only to come back and see
him involved in the very next pot, on the river. Hellmuth bet 20,000 into a
20,000-chip pot with the board showing 5d-10c-Qc-9d-Qh. Ryan Hughes made the
call; Hellmuth very confidently slammed his Qs-9s down on the table and
proclaimed, "Nuts!"

Hellmuth played one more hand immediately thereafter, getting a player to
call a raise to 9,000 on the turn (after that player bet 4,000) and a bet of
10,000 on the river. Hellmuth showed Qh-Qd, an overpair to the board. His
opponent mucked.

After all of that, Hellmuth's stack is at 143,000. He still seems to be
muttering to himself about the Clark hand, but we did hear him say, "None of
that matters now." We'll see if he actually believes it.

This is truly exceptional--live blogging of a poker tournament at its finest. I can't think of any post out of the thousands I've read in the past month that better conveyed a sense of what it's like to be there watching a table for some period of time. It's an actual story, with a beginning, middle, and end, with the pieces all fitting together. It's chock-full of details that bring the bare-bone facts to life. The writing is lively--you can tell how much work went into crafting it, which is especially remarkable given the crushing time constrainsts these guys are working under.

Anybody who has spent any time watching Hellmuth on TV will, I think, attest that this post absolutely nails his personality. Even if no name had been given, you would know it was Hellmuth being described, because of how well the writing captures him.

Aside from the merits of the post, I loved several other things here:

(1) Phil berates a player who, as far as I can tell, played his pocket tens flawlessly, getting maximum value from them. Kind of reminds me of how Freddy Deeb, in the first-ever episode of the World Poker Tour, got eliminated, and ranted to the camera about how terrible his opponent was. He said something like, "I'd like to play poker with that guy every day for the rest of my life!" The opponent? A then-unknown Gus Hansen.

(2) After criticizing a player (erroneously) for overplaying A-Q, what does Hellmuth do next? Overplays A-Q, running it into A-K as a roughly 3:1 underdog, and getting lucky. Imagine his reaction if the roles had been reversed on that one.

(3) Even after bouncing back from the hit, Hellmuth just can't let that one hand go. My guess is that in reality he's mad at himself for being so far off in his read, and embarrassed for having been so wrong in front of the cameras. No wonder people laugh when he makes over-the-top claims about his scary-good ability to look into opponents' souls and know what they're holding. (Don't get me wrong--he's no slouch in that department as pros go, but there's nothing mystical about it, and he's no better than a long list of other top names you could throw out.)

In making my comments and rants here lately about various PokerNews posts, I've almost never named the bloggers, because who wrote them hasn't been very important to the points I wanted to make. I'll make an exception here, though, and give credit where it is due: If you peruse the best-written poker blogs out there, Dave Behr's Riding the F-Train is on nearly every one of their blogrolls. If you didn't before, now you know why.

Shannon Elizabeth is as delusional as Jerry Yang

Date: Wed, Jul 9, 2008

At the end of the post I just put up a short time ago (the last substantive post; I was about to start this one when I noticed that it would be #700, so I had to take a slight detour and take care of that housekeeping before coming back to the serious stuff), I mentioned Jerry Yang and his strange beliefs about God rearranging the deck in the dealer's hand. I was about to include, in the same paragraph, mention of Shannon Elizabeth. She believes in basically the same nuttiness, except that she attributes the power to her own mind (and that of people around her) rather than to a deity.

I didn't include it there because I realized that I hadn't written about that fact in detail before, so I couldn't easily link to a previous post on the subject. This is to make up for that deficiency. Besides, it gives me an excuse to illustrate a post with a photo of Ms. Elizabeth in a bikini, and I think we'd all have to agree that, whatever positive attributes this blog might have, it has been woefully short of pictures of pretty women in bikinis.

Last year I started writing an article that I intended to submit to a magazine. It's about the weird things that poker players believe. I got distracted by other projects (including this blog), and never finished writing the article. But here's what I wrote about Elizabeth in the unfinished first draft:

Shannon Elizabeth, best known for starring in the movies “American Pie” and
“American Pie 2,” is one of the most accomplished actors-turned-poker-players,
having recently made it to the semifinals of the televised 2007 “NBC National
Heads-Up Poker Championship,” in which matches are played one-on-one—an
especially difficult format—defeating some of the world’s best players in the
process.

She claims to call on a mysterious skill: She seems to
believe that her thoughts can rearrange the cards in the already-shuffled deck.

In an interview after her first-round win in the heads-up
tournament she said, “One of the biggest things, like a change that I’ve been
making just in my overall life, is the law of attraction and positive energy,
and really trying to, to picture the cards I need and not to picture the cards I
don’t want, cuz I don’t want to attract those cards.” [1]

As
stated, she may simply be thinking that her mental energies can change how the
cards get arranged during the shuffle—which would be remarkable enough in
itself, if it were a demonstrable ability. But an incident later in the
tournament seems to show that she extends this to influences that can be exerted after the shuffle, too.

In the last hand of her quarter-final match, Elizabeth is all-in before the
flop with K-10 against her opponent’s K-3. While they wait for the dealer to
produce the first three community cards, Elizabeth can be heard chanting, “Ten,
ten, ten.” This is not too strange, as it is natural to hope for a card that
will strengthen one’s position. It does not require any supernatural belief to
possess such hope. But immediately thereafter, she hears one of her supporters
mention a “three.” She quickly turns, hold up the palm of her hand to this
friend, and earnestly rebukes him, saying, “Don’t call for that…. Don’t call for
what you don’t want, call for what you do want. Please. Ten. Seriously. Ten. Law
of attraction. Ten.” When she is still ahead with only one card to come (and no
pair to her ten having been revealed, despite her incantations), she can be
heard repeatedly saying “Five of clubs, five of clubs, five of clubs,”
apparently having arbitrarily picked a card that would help neither player, and
thus leave her with the winning hand. The ace of hearts comes, which, while not
the card she willed to appear, accomplishes the same thing. [2]

It
is difficult to interpret her apparently deadly serious instructions and actions
here as anything short of manifesting a belief that her mental exertion, perhaps
combined with that of her supporters, can actually change the order of the
shuffled deck in the dealer’s hand. The ordinary view would be that once the
shuffle and cut of the deck is complete, the die is cast, and what cards are
dealt out cannot be altered (barring, obviously, simple errors or outright
cheating on the part of the dealer). But Elizabeth appears to truly believe that
if a pair to her opponent’s three—a losing card for her—was destined to appear,
she can change that by what she and her friends think and say in the few seconds
before the dealer turns over the card.

Unfortunately, the broadcast’s host did not ask the actress in her
interviews to explain in detail the mechanism by which this influence is
supposedly exerted. Do the cards physically rearrange themselves in the dealer’s
hand? Or perhaps the printing on the critical card is supernaturally altered, so
that we would find a duplicate of some card in the deck upon inspection after
the hand has been played. Or maybe her belief is that her will acts in a
temporally retroactive fashion, affecting the shuffle that occurred a few
minutes before via some sort of space-time warp. We are left to wonder.

[1] The entire 2007 tournament, as broadcast on NBC, is available
at http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/23011821/site/21683474/.
Elizabeth's comments, as transcribed by the author, are in Episode 3, Segment 2.
Her reference appears to be to such recently popular books as Michael Losier, Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less
of What You Don’t, (self-published, 2004), and Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (Atria Books, 2006), both of which claim that one can alter the physical
universe and the actions of other people by thinking correctly and positively
about what one wants to see happen.

[2] This hand is played
out in Episode 8, Segment 5, at the URL above.

So now you know: Shannon Elizabeth is just as crazy as Jerry Yang. They simply put different labels on what is, at its root, the same basic delusion.

She looks a lot better in a bikini, though.* That doesn't put a dent in the delusional thing, but it's something.


*Clarification added in anticipation of snarky reader comments: No, I haven't actually seen Jerry Yang in a bikini. I'm just guessing here. I think it's a pretty safe guess.

700

Date: Wed, Jul 9, 2008

It has been 46 days since #600. That's about on par with my previous pace (somewhere between 42 and 50 days for every hundred posts), so I guess the World Series work I've been doing this summer hasn't slowed me down as much as I anticipated that it might. In fact, I suppose it would be hard for readers not to notice that the WSOP has provided me a lot of opportunities for commenting on all the goings-on at the Rio.

All the things I wrote 46 days ago? Still true. So I won't repeat them.

Well, except for this one indulgence I allow myself every hundred posts: Please click on the dumb Google ads once in a while when you think about it. The checks Google sends me aren't large, but they are encouraging.

Thanks, always, for reading.

Lucky charms are not magically delicious

Date: Wed, Jul 9, 2008

I've mentioned before the silver dollar that I use as a card protector. But I don't think I've told you that roughly once a week somebody asks me a question like, "Is that your lucky coin?"

I realize that the question is always intended to be friendly and inoffensive, but I think I should be offended. The implication behind the question is this: "I think you are so stupid that you probably believe in magic charms that make it more likely for you to get good cards."

Well, I don't believe in such nonsense. Not even a little bit. And what is it, exactly, that I did that made you assess my IQ as being roughly that of Cro-Magnon Man?

Here are four stories about magical thinking in poker from yesterday and today's WSOP Main Event, as reported by--come on, you can say it with me by now--PokerNews:

Hal Lubarsky and His Assistant

Hal Lubarsky is legally blind and uses an assistant who relays him the
action. He has an interesting totem on his table. It's a ceramic paw print. The
dog is a German shepherd named Nexus, who actually belongs to Hal's assistant.
Before every hand, Hal touches the paw print for good luck.

Unlucky Shoes

Sverre Sundbo woke up this morning wondering what to wear today. He
called his girlfriend and she gave him a few suggestions. One of his choices was
to wear a new pair of white sneakers. [Snarky editorial comment from the
Grump: A guy who can't decide what to wear on his own is already is such deep
life trouble that nothing is likely to pull him out of it. But he apparently has
found a match. Any woman that I would be interested in having a relationship with would, if asked such a
question, say something like, "You can't make simple decisions on your own? Have
I inadvertantly gotten myself involved with a pathetic momma's boy? I think maybe we need
to be spending more time apart for a while." If you ask me, that's about the
only sensible response to a boyfriend who can't dress himself. But no. He has a
girlfriend who not only doesn't object, apparently, to be asked such a stupid
question, but takes it seriously enough to make suggestions. I guess there's
someone for everyone out there.]

Within the first level, he had seen his double-the-average stack reduced to
less than 10,000. He called his girlfriend again and she told him to take off
the sneakers as they might be bringing him bad luck. He duly did what he was
told and, pot win after pot win, has seen his stack rise all the way up to
150,000.

Sverre can now be seen walking around the Amazon room in white socks which
may now be dirty, but the smile on his face is clean and wide.

Wait...The Lucky iPod!

Dave Colclough opened with a preflop raise before Steve Zolotow moved
all in for his last 22,100. Colclough made the call and tabled Ah-Qd, but
Zolotow held the lead with his pair of 10s-10h.

Before the flop was dealt, Zolotow asked for the dealer to wait while he
grabbed his lucky iPod off Erik Seidel. He grabs the iPod just in time to see
the board come down Kd-Js-3s-Ks-5d to give Zolotow kings and tens to double up
to 50,000. Colclough is back to 65,000.

Hoodie Power!

Alan Jaffrey raised to 2,500 from under the gun and was put all in by
the small blind for around 20,000 total. Jaffrey called.

Jaffrey held Q-Q and his opponent Ad-10d.

Board: 10c-3c-6h-Js-9h.

After the hand, Jaffrey is up to 42,100. Jaffrey attributed his win to
"Hoodie Power." He said that after he put up his hoodie, he got two big
hands.

And here's one more along the same lines, nipped from Shamus's post earlier today over at Hard-Boiled Poker. (I think nearly all of my readers will know by now that Shamus is one of the live bloggers for PokerNews at this year's WSOP.)

Had another guy asked to be included in the [chip] counts (which we did),
then subsequently start to lose hands. Figuring he’d jinxed himself, he came
back and asked to be taken out. We did that, too.

I get this stuff, at least on some level. I mean, I've read Michael Shermer's excellent book Why People Believe Weird Things. I understand that we have "modules" in our brains that cause us to seek out and perceive cause-and-effect relationships that do not objectively exist.

But c'mon, people! We went through this little thing called the Enlightenment--and it wasn't just yesterday, as if the news has yet to spread. We are supposed to be beyond thinking that every little thing in the world is governed by mysterious forces that can be controlled by talismans or strange incantations and rituals.

In my own poker playing, I have noticed the odd coincidence that at the times I'm playing Elvis Presley music on my MP3 player, I tend to get better-than-average cards. In fact, I've hit two high-hand jackpots while listening to Elvis, way out of proportion to the percentage of time I have him on. I suppose I could conclude, were I so inclined, that the ghost of Elvis is still wandering through Las Vegas, rewarding those who listen to his music with favorable shuffles of the deck or rolls of the dice. But I don't. I do not put Elvis on in order to try to bring good luck, because if there really are forces like that operating in the world, it's far too scary and mysterious a place for me to want to continue living in it. The juxtaposition I have noticed is a weird statistical anomaly, and/or selective, biased memory at work, nothing more.

How can you possibly believe that more favorable cards will come your way if you touch a ceramic dog print before each deal, and yet survive in the modern world? Too bad for Lubarsky that he is blind, because that makes it harder to avoid stepping on the sidewalk cracks, thus putting his mother's back at risk of breaking with every step. Think I'm being harsh on the guy? If so, then tell me how it is even the tiniest bit less insane to believe in a connection between a totem and how the cards get shuffled than to believe that the placement of one's feet on the sidewalk causes vertebral fractures in a parent? It is not just stupid to be convinced that such notions are true, it is positively and literally delusional.

If you want to run around the casino without shoes, well, OK, but telling the media that you're doing so because you've discovered that the shoes you put on today are unlucky is the same as announcing, "I'm a complete imbecile" and/or "I've lost my mind." I'd love to ask this idiot to explain how, exactly, the presence or absence of these particular items of footwear affect the shuffling of the cards. No good ducking the question with "I don't know." You've got to explain the physics of it in detail to me. While you're at it, please explain how wearing the tinfoil hat prevents the aliens (or maybe the CIA) from reading your thoughts.

Same with the guy that Shamus reported on. Pray tell, sir, how does having your name either on or off of a web page showing updated chip counts affect the dealing of the cards? Who is the unseen omniscient being that takes offense in seeing your name on that list, and thus punishes you by moving the cards into arrangements that are unfavorable to your success? Describe this being in detail for me, please.

I'll grant that some of this stuff may be tongue-in-cheek. I doubt that Steve Zolotow genuinely thinks the outcome of a hand will be influenced by an iPod. More likely he was playing the clown for the amusement of the table. Same with Jaffrey. He's a very bright guy, and is, I think, more likely to have been joking for the sake of the reporter. But I don't think you can so easily write off the actions of Lubarsky or Sundbo or the anonymous man Shamus described. They appear to take such crap with complete earnestness.

This is just as looney and wacked-out as Jerry Yang believing that, if he says just the right prayers at the right time, God will change the order of the cards in the deck, even after they have been shuffled--a bizarre phemonemon I have written extensively about in the past.

I'm honestly baffled at how people can be that stupid, that far afield from rational thought, that deluded, and yet succeed in a game requiring intelligence and objective, rational decision-making.

You're only making it worse for yourself

Date: Wed, Jul 9, 2008

Another story from today's WSOP Main Event, reported, as always, by the fine folks at PokerNews:

Tempers Flare

We just had a bit of commotion at Table #30 in the
Brasilia room involving a possibly exposed card. An initial ruling allowed the
hand to continue, but after there had been some action, a second ruling had the
hand declared dead.

That turn of events was not appreciated by one
player. He'd been dealt pocket aces on the hand. He objected so loudly (and
lengthily), he was eventually given a one-round penalty for his outburst.

The scene has settled over there, largely because the affected player is
currently away from the table. Play continues amid a heavy fog of
what-might-have-been.

I'm assuming here that the card(s) exposed refers to a dealer error, not action by a player (because it wouldn't make sense for them to declare a "do-over" if a player exposed his own cards).

The rules and procedures for what to do when a dealer accidentally exposes a card during the deal are not terribly uniform between casinos, but they are (usually) pretty well standardized and followed at any given place. What varies are the criteria for declaring a misdeal. I don't feel like boring you with the list of options, but it involves whether the flashed card occurs on the first or second card dealt, and whether that card was going to the button, one of the blinds, or to a seat that is neither the button nor one of the blinds.

Perhaps the discrepancy between the first and second floor decisions was because the first guy was applying rules from his home casino, which might not be the same as the WSOP uses. (Even if so, though, you'd think that after a month of tournaments, the hired help would be up to speed on such matters.)

Normally I would say that it's pointless to argue with the floor person once he has made a determination of what will be done. This story may or may not be an exception to that general observation, since it isn't clear whether it was a player's objection to the initial ruling that brought in the second supervisor. My best guess is that it wasn't a player's objection, but rather the first guy realizing that he wasn't absolutely sure what the house procedure was, so he called for backup himself.

Anyway, what's so idiotic is the player with the aces making a big stink about it. In the first place, it's highly unlikely to result in a different decision. But just as importantly, the longer and louder you object to having your hand killed, the more obvious it becomes to everybody else at the table that this was your one time in every 221 (on average) to be dealt pocket aces. After all, if you looked down at 7-2, you probably wouldn't complain about the cards being called back in.

So this moron put up a big fuss that (1) earned him a penalty, (2) didn't get the ruling changed, and (3) even if he had somehow been successful in reversing the decision, would have meant that everybody ran away and left him to pick up just the blinds for all of his trouble.

This kind of thing happens in live poker, and you just have to shrug your shoulders and move on.

As I've discussed before, it's a similar situation when the dealer prematurely puts out the turn or river card, before the current round of betting has been completed. On two different occasions, I've seen that happen with a large pot being contested, and the prematurely turned river card is the third of a suit, prompting howls of protest from one player when the floor announces (inevitably) that that card will be withdrawn and reshuffled into the deck. Well, idiot, when you put up such a fuss, you make it perfectly apparent to everybody at the table that that had been exactly the card you wanted.

(Hmmm. It has just occurred to me that this would be a clever ruse. By objecting to the decision--though not rudely--one could convince one's opponents that one was on a flush draw, after having made, say, a straight or full house. Then if the replacement card is not of the same suit, a big bet will look like an obvious bluff and maybe get paid off. It's not a bad idea--I might try that some time!)

Anyway, it's just stupid and immature to whine and complain about either type of situation when it happens. Deal with it. Take it like a man. Walk it off. Get on with your life.


The title for this post, by the way, has nothing intrinsically to do with poker. But when I was thinking along the lines of "making things worse for yourself," I couldn't help remembering the funniest scene in one of the funniest movies of all time, "Life of Brian." It's worth watching, whether for the first time or the hundredth, below.

Poker gems, #142

Date: Wed, Jul 9, 2008

95-year-old Jack Ury, oldest participant in the history of the World Series of Poker, upon his elimination from the Main Event earlier today, as reported by PokerNews:


I can't walk, can't see, can't hear, but I can still play poker! I'll be back again next year, if I'm still alive!