Poker gems, #148
Date: Tue, Jul 22, 2008
Kevin Conley, in "The Players," article in The New Yorker magazine, July 11/18, 2005, p. 52.
"It's the silliest thing," [Daniel] Negreanu said, "but I feel naked unless I have some money on me. If I was going to the Rite Aid right here, just to get some shampoo, I would bring six or seven thousand, just in case. Like if, on the way, I had to buy a car."
New live poker show
Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2008
See Daniel Negreanu's blog post here. From his description, I'm only getting a fairly vague sense of what this is going to be like, but it has me intrigued.
(Thanks to "S" of the Vegas Poker Dealer blog for the tip via private email.)
Let's not feed the monster
Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2008
I've seen a couple of references to this USA Today blog post and poll, one in a user comment here a few days back, and another on some other poker blog (sorry for not giving credit, but I don't remember where it was now).
I have a real problem with this. Notice how Rep. McDermott puts his entire argument in terms of shoveling more money into the federal government's coffers. Nothing about gambling from the privacy of one's home being a simple right with which the government shouldn't interfere. He appears not to care about that. His sole--or at least chief--concern is increasing revenue to the treasury.
I think that is horribly dangerous. If the proposal were simply to regulate online gaming and assess a fee or tax that would exactly cover the expenses of running the regulatory body, I could probably hold my nose and live with that. But I absolutely hate how the PPA, Annie Duke, Lou Krieger, and others keep arguing, just like Mr. McDermott (by the way, how weird is it that a congressman pushing for federal regulation of online poker shares a name with the main character in "Rounders"?), that the government should take on the role of regulator because it will be profitable to the government to do so.
This means that these people want us--you and me--to hand over our money to the feds, above and beyond what they would need to spend for the regulatory agency, so that they can spend it on other crap: the federal debt, the war in Iraq, escalating the war on drugs, studying the sex life of a subspecies of hookworm, building a museum and monument to whatever obscure group is left that doesn't have one yet, farm subsidies, etc. In other words, we would be further fueling the increase in the size of the federal government, when it is already, oh, about 1000 times bigger than by any rights it ought to be, and when most of what it does is already not authorized by the Constitution.
Governments are endlessly greedy and ravenous. For the sake of our own freedom and economic stability, they need to be put on subsistence diets, almost starved--not indulged like the guy in "SuperSize Me," eating McDonald's three times a day for a month. Remember how the cute little "Audrey II" plant in "Little Shop of Horrors" started off just asking for a single drop of blood, but grew to be an unmanagable man-eater? That's how the federal government is. Whatever level of skimming it does at first will be only the beginning. The rate of theft from every pot will get to be more and more as time goes by. There is nothing to stop it. There is no competition to keep the greed in check as there is for, say, the rake at Vegas casinos. Look at what has happened to tobacco taxes over the years if you want a foretaste of what legalized, federally regulated poker will grow to look like.
To continue my string of bad movie images and analogies, think of the poor souls in "Dracula" (I'm thinking specifically of the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola version, though many others show the same thing) who are kept by the vampires as a source of ongoing meals, rather like farm animals. They are barely alive, left with just enough blood so that they don't die and can be bled again later. That is what I am convinced would be the end-game of federally regulated online poker--taxed to within an inch of its life, marginally profitable for anybody except the feds.
It is wrong to give this unspeakably corrupt, inept, misguided, overbloated government yet another source of its nourishment, with which it will keep growing, sucking ever more vitality out of the economy and ever more freedom from its constituents. It's like kudzo, already massively overgrown and taking over everything in sight. Our collective goals should be to chop at it wherever and however we can, not pump it full of yet more fertilizer.
I would far rather have online poker continue as it is, in a reasonably healthy condition, though with barriers to entry and uncertainty about its exact legal standing, than to have it become a source of more federal revenue. I firmly believe that such a move would ultimately be bad for poker and worse for the nation.
PokerStars: The only sensible choice for HORSE
Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2008
I continue my slow learning curve for HORSE, playing basically one $11 single-table sit-and-go tournament a day. (I reported on my early success here, and plan to file another such report when I get up to around 100 of these events under my virtual belt.)
The vast majority of these have been on PokerStars. But in the last couple of days I looked around at other sites to see what they had to offer that might be similar.
The answer is: not much. As far as I can tell, there are no HORSE STTs available on UltimateBlecch or Absolute Puker (which would be the sites of choice if you like having opponents look at your hole cards while you play), Doyle's Room, Poker Host (and, by the way, the software for those two sites looks suspiciously similar; I suspect they are skins for the same underlying site, though I haven't looked into that to confirm it), Carbon Poker, the Cake network, or Bodog.
So basically your only choices are PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, on which I have played two of these suckers. Which is the better offering? No question, hands down, it's Stars. I can't post the entire tourney structure here (or, to be more accurate, I could, but I can't do it with an easy cut and paste, and I don't feel like bothering to type out the whole thing), but you can get a sense of the difference from the screenshots posted above (FTP on top, Stars underneath).
Both sites start you with 1500 in chips, and the progress in blinds, level for level, is fairly similar. The crucial difference is the length of the levels: 10 minutes each for Stars versus just 6 minutes for FTP. That means that at the end of an hour of play, on Full Tilt you will be starting Level 11, 300/600 Hold'em, in which one big bet is costing you 40% of what your starting stack had been. After the same amount of time on Stars, you will be starting Level 7, 150/300 Omaha Hi/Lo, in which one big bet is costing you 20% of what your starting stack had been.
The Stars structure is vastly better, and skill is given a far more decent chance to outrun luck. You get a lot more play for your money, and if you're one of the better players, you have more of a shot at coming out on top. I mean, if I wanted a turbo event, I'd sign up for one. But I don't. I want more playing time, more time to be patient and wait for a strong hand, more time to recover from a bad beat before the blinds and antes gobble up my chips.
After looking closely at the difference, I won't play another one of these games on Full Tilt, and, frankly, I can't see why anybody would.
Actually, there is one other potentially interesting and worthwhile choice, from an unexpected source: Bugsy's Club. They start you with 2500 in chips, with the following structure:
Notice that the levels are 12 minutes long, meaning that after one hour of play, you will be starting Level 6, 500/1000 Hold'em, in which one big bet costs 40% of what your starting stack had been. It's not clearly better or worse than Full Tilt; you just go through the games half as fast, and whether you think that's good or bad is basically a subjective determination. In terms of total game play, though, Stars still comes out ahead.
As you might guess, the huge disadvantage to Bugsy is the lack of opponents. I still haven't played a tourney there, because I can sign up and wait hours without getting even a second person registered. It's a lonely place.
I'm thinking that it might be getting to be about time for the long-promised second private readers' tournament. And I'm thinking that it might be HORSE, and might be on Stars. We'll see.
How to win at poker in Vegas
Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2008
Who else could tell it better than Vegas Rex?
A quick trip back in time
Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2008
A couple of days ago, out of nowhere, I had a sudden flashback to the moment when I first came across the word "blog."
It was about five years ago. I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room, reading the local newspaper. There was a feature article introducing readers to the whole "blog" concept. (I thought it was one of the ugliest word coinings ever. Still think that, in fact.) The article was written in sections, with the first one at the bottom, and subsequent pieces farther up the page, so that one had to read the article nearly backwards, compared to regular newspaper writing--obviously to sort of simulate how blogs are written.
I managed to read the whole thing before being called in for my appointment.
I distinctly remember having this reaction: What a dumb idea. Who would read such a thing? Who would write one?
So you want to move to Vegas, eh?
Date: Mon, Jul 21, 2008
Every so often somebody will email me because of having read this blog and ask me about living in Vegas, should they move here, can they really make a living playing poker, etc.
Well, in addition to the various monsters that inhabit the casinos, we have other kinds to lurk in the rest of the area. Take a gander at the "insect" that I saw outside a friend's apartment a few days ago:
That's not my hand, not my photo. I found it here. But it's the same species, specifically, Derobrachus hovorei, a.k.a. the Palo Verde Root Borer. There it was, just sitting on the sidewalk, waiting for somebody to walk by so it could have its human dinner. Not me. I went around the long way.
And I don't suppose I've ever mentioned the tarantulas....