Razz is easy!

Date: Fri, Jul 11, 2008

I have sort of figured out the basic strategy for low-stakes razz well enough that I can play it fairly automatically now. Although detailed knowledge of opponents' tendencies would surely make for even more profitable play, one of the things that I like about razz is that I can have a single game on in the background, with the edge of a window visible so that I know when cards have been dealt. I then click on the game window and make my move in advance, folding about 85% of hands. The 15% or so that I play I do while paying attention, then go back to email or web browsing or whatever other computer stuff I have going on. That's what I'm doing right now, in fact.

I wouldn't do this with any other form of poker. If I move up higher in razz with more skilled opponents, I probably wouldn't try it, either. For anything other than this, I would want to pay more attention to how opponents play. But here I can get away with being pretty mechanical about it. I keep notes on who the most frequent bluffers are, and a few basic things like that, but that's about the extent of my effort to characterize my opponents.

When I have the bring-in, I'll click "fold to any bet" unless it's the rare one that's worth defending.

That's what happened in the following hand--I clicked "fold to any bet" because I had the bring-in with a K-3-J, an unplayable hand by any standards. I went back to what I was doing and forgot about it. Next thing I noticed, a minute or so later, was that another hand was being dealt. But the chat box was saying that I had won the hand that just finished. Even stranger, it showed me having won it with a 7-6 low--that is, an actually decent made hand. Huh? How could that be? I was horribly confused, trying to figure out what had happened. Did I have a stroke? Maybe I had been the victim of an alien abduction and was missing a chunk of time from my life.

Nope. When I opened the hand history, it was all revealed. Nobody raised on 3rd street, and I had two opponents who checked it down all the way. The software checked all the way for me, too.

I'm certain this is the first time I've started with a hand like K-J and won a showdown--against two other players, even! Heck, it might be the first time in the history of razz that that has happened!

Full details below, for the morbidly interested.

Incidentally, I'm averaging about $10/hour profit playing this way, which isn't bad for something that is only occupying about 20% of my attention, while the rest of the time is spent productively (well, more or less!) on other things.



PokerStars Game #18735192404: Razz Limit ($1/$2) - 2008/07/11 - 03:01:22 (ET)
Table 'Antigone' 8-max
Seat 1: kernifex ($28.85 in chips)
Seat 2: S Blanco ($29.35 in chips)
Seat 3: Fast Normie ($33.20 in chips)
Seat 4: LVMichael ($34.95 in chips)
Seat 5: HookEmHorns ($15 in chips)
Seat 6: 2hotrod ($67.50 in chips)
Seat 7: Sabre31 ($29.10 in chips)
Seat 8: Rakewell1 ($75.90 in chips)
kernifex: posts the ante $0.10
S Blanco: posts the ante $0.10
Fast Normie: posts the ante $0.10
LVMichael: posts the ante $0.10
HookEmHorns: posts the ante $0.10
2hotrod: posts the ante $0.10
Sabre31: posts the ante $0.10
Rakewell1: posts the ante $0.10
*** 3rd STREET ***
Dealt to kernifex [Th]
Dealt to S Blanco [2h]
Dealt to Fast Normie [8s]
Dealt to LVMichael [9c]
Dealt to HookEmHorns [6c]
Dealt to 2hotrod [7s]
Dealt to Sabre31 [4h]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [Kd 3c Jc]
Rakewell1: brings in for $0.50
kernifex: folds
S Blanco: folds
Fast Normie: folds
LVMichael: folds
HookEmHorns: folds
2hotrod: calls $0.50
Sabre31: calls $0.50
*** 4th STREET ***
Dealt to 2hotrod [7s] [9d]
Dealt to Sabre31 [4h] [8h]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [Kd 3c Jc] [7d]
Sabre31: checks
Rakewell1: checks
2hotrod: checks
*** 5th STREET ***
Dealt to 2hotrod [7s 9d] [5c]
Dealt to Sabre31 [4h 8h] [2d]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [Kd 3c Jc 7d] [2c]
Sabre31: checks
Rakewell1: checks
2hotrod: checks
*** 6th STREET ***
Dealt to 2hotrod [7s 9d 5c] [6h]
Dealt to Sabre31 [4h 8h 2d] [Js]
Dealt to Rakewell1 [Kd 3c Jc 7d 2c] [5d]
2hotrod: checks
Sabre31: checks
Rakewell1: checks
*** RIVER ***
Dealt to Rakewell1 [Kd 3c Jc 7d 2c 5d] [6d]
2hotrod: checks
Sabre31: checks
Rakewell1: checks
*** SHOW DOWN ***
2hotrod: shows [Qh 5s 7s 9d 5c 6h Ad] (Lo: 9,7,6,5,A)
Sabre31: mucks hand
Rakewell1: shows [Kd 3c Jc 7d 2c 5d 6d] (Lo: 7,6,5,3,2)
Rakewell1 collected $2.30 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $2.30 Rake $0
Seat 1: kernifex folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 2: S Blanco folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 3: Fast Normie folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 4: LVMichael folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 5: HookEmHorns folded on the 3rd Street (didn't bet)
Seat 6: 2hotrod showed [Qh 5s 7s 9d 5c 6h Ad] and lost with Lo: 9,7,6,5,A
Seat 7: Sabre31 mucked [Ah 8c 4h 8h 2d Js Kh]
Seat 8: Rakewell1 showed [Kd 3c Jc 7d 2c 5d 6d] and won ($2.30) with Lo: 7,6,5,3,2

Another question

Date: Fri, Jul 11, 2008

I don't mean to turn this into "Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy" here, but I'm playing a little razz online at the moment, and this just occurred to me.

When describing a normal poker hand in which one has failed to make even a pair, the usual shorthand is to call it "king-high," for example, if a king is one's highest card.

When describing a lowball hand, though, it's different. For example, if I've come up with 8-6-4-3-2, we call that "eight-low."

Seems to me that we should refer to it as "eight-high," since an 8 is the highest card.

So why don't we?

Question for the philosophers and other deep thinkers

Date: Fri, Jul 11, 2008

How come the only time I get dealt rolled-up aces, kings, or queens is when I'm playing razz?

"Dead Man's Hand" review, part 3

Date: Fri, Jul 11, 2008

I'll admit it: I'm a lot better at starting books than finishing them. My formal higher education (at least that's what they call it) lasted a sickening 11 years, and when it was over, I vowed that I would never again read a book I didn't want to read (because I was so tired of reading things that were required), and if I wasn't enjoying a book, I would feel no obligation to finish it. I've stuck by that, and it has meant abandoning a lot of them part-way through.

Back in January, I started reading Dead Man's Hand, a collection of poker-related, crime-genre short stories edited by Otto Penzler. You can access the first two things I wrote about the book with this tag. Then other reading priorities came along, and Penzler et al kind of got lost in the shuffle. This wasn't deliberately deciding not to finish it because it wasn't enjoyable--just slipped in priorities for a few weeks, and then basically got forgotten.

Well, the other day it popped up again, and I'm making another run at it. This afternoon I had a few hours to kill in the waiting room of Precision Tune while my car had some work done, and I took the book along.

So here's the next installment in my serial review.

The next story in the collection is "In the Eyes of Children," by Alexander McCall Smith. This is a stupid, forgettable story with one of those damnably ambiguous endings. It barely even involves poker. Some kids' schoolteacher gets humiliated in a poker game, no details of which are described, and that's their motivation for what they decide to do. That's the only poker connection there is. The whole thing is a waste of space.

Next up is Michael Connelly's "One-Dollar Jackpot." This is not a bad crime story. It involves the murder of a female poker player after she has left the casino with a lot of cash. Looks like a robbery-murder, but the detective quickly suspects the woman's husband is the real killer, having made it look like a robbery gone bad. The story boils down to a battle of wits between the detective and the suspect. A key point in this contest is a game of Liar's Poker.

I enjoyed the story just fine. But as with the story I wrote about in the previous part of this review back in January, there's a critical flaw in the poker part. (I realize that it's a stretch to include Liar's Poker as "poker," but let's give them that much.) A basic safeguard in playing Liar's Poker is that you have to use dollar bills that you know haven't been pre-selected by your opponent. For example, you might request them from the bartender's till. If you don't, it's like agreeing to play regular poker with a deck that your opponent has either stacked or marked.

The suspect here, a professional poker player, does not take this fundamental precaution, which is virtually unthinkable. For me it broke the spell of realism that the story otherwise had.

Next up is Joyce Carol Oates, with "Strip Poker." By no stretch of the imagination does this fit under the crime genre, but it is a first-rate piece of writing, as one would expect from Oates. It's a first-person recollection of a 14-year-old girl's harrowing encounter with some older, seedy men, alone in an isolated cabin in the back woods. Oates employs a nontraditional, sort of free-form writing style, with stream-of-consciousness sentences. Ingeniously, this effect gets more pronounced as the tension hightens, and the girl's head is increasingly swimming with fear and her first experience with the beer with which the men are plying her. The reader thus gets a vivid sense of the terror and confusion and panic she is experiencing. It's scary, scary stuff. As she finally gets a grip on herself and starts to reassert control over the situation, the writing gradually normalizes, and we see her smart, rational self emerge to worm her way out of danger.

Poker, which the men first teach the girl, then turn into a game of strip poker, is at the heart of the story:

But the cards don't come now. Or anyway, I can't make sense of them. Like adding
up a column of numbers in math class, you lose your way and have to begin again.
Like multiplying numbers, you can do it without thinking, but if you stop to
think, you can't. Staring at these new cards, nine of hearts, nine of clubs,
king of spades, queen of spades, four of diamonds. I get rid of the four of
diamonds and I'm excited, my replacement card is a jack of spades, but my eyes
are playing tricks on me, what looks like spades is actually clubs, after
raising my bet I see that it's clubs and I've made a mistake staring and
blinking at the cards in my hands that are kind of shaky like I have never seen
a poker hand before. Around the table the guys are playing like before, loud,
funny-rude, maybe there's some tension among them, I can't figure because I am
too distracted by the cards and how I am losing now, nothing I do is right now,
but why? When Croke wins the hand, Deek mutters, "Shi-it, you goddamn fuckin'
asshole," but smiling like this is a joke, a kindly intended remark like between
brothers. I'm trying to make sense of the hand: why'd Croke win? why's this a
"winning" hand? what's a "full house"? wondering if the guys are cheating on me,
how'd I know? The guys are laughing at me, saying, "Hey, babe, be a good sport,
this is poker."

I don't know how much of a poker player Oates is, but she certainly understands the core essence of the game, in a way that many players don't:

Doesn't it matter what your actual cards are, I ask Deek, if they are high
or low? Deek says sort of scornfully like this is a damn dumb question he will
answer because he likes me, "sure it matters, but not so much's how you play
what you're dealt. What you do with the fuckin' cards you are dealt, that's
poker."

At some level the narrator takes this message to heart, and it is the essence of how she turns her situation around. We learn a lot about her--she's been dealt a whole bunch of bad cards in her life, and this mess she has gotten herself into is only the latest of them. But she ends up playing what she has been dealt brilliantly. It's a masterful, chilling ending that I won't ruin by even hinting at it here.

Good, good stuff. Easily the best in the book so far, and darn near worth the cost all by itself.

More later.

Variation on a theme

Date: Thu, Jul 10, 2008

Here we go again, just a few hours after the last incident. Once again, as presented by PokerNews:

Hand Killed, Table Flips

A controversy erupted over on the high Green tables. A player was all
in and another player called. Both players turned their cards over, and the
raiser walked away, refusing to look at the board. The dealer, thinking that his
cards were now dead, mucked his hand and started pushing the pot toward the
other player.

That's when the controversy started. The floor was called and the players
were asked what their hands were - but neither player could remember exactly
what they were. Ultimately, the pot was reconstructed and then split between the
two players.

This one is a little trickier, but the same bedrock rule applies: Each player is responsible for protecting his hand. Before the cards are revealed, that usually involves capping them and/or keeping a hand on them. But the responsibility extends all the way until the hand is over.

The usual safe practice is that you keep your now face-up cards directly in front of you, and only relinquish them to the dealer in exchange for the pot. The pot should be coming your way before you turn your cards in, because at that point the dealer will have killed all of the other hands, and anybody who thinks he has a claim to the pot or a portion thereof should have spoken up.

However, in some tournaments (especially at televised tables) dealers are instructed to bring the players' hole cards in toward the center of the table so the camera can capture everything important on the table in one shot. That means that you lose physical control of the cards. But even then, your minimal obligation for protecting your hand means staying right at the table, so that if the dealer makes a move to kill your hand erroneously you can instantly speak up. Most dealers will pick up the hand to be killed, check it one last time, tap it on the table once or twice, then turn it face down, then put it into the muck. If the dealer is doing this, then you should have several seconds of warning of the impending muck in which to yell "Wait!" before the cards get lost irretrievably. Of course, in that situation you have the added protection of all the other players (and the cameras) having seen what the cards were. But the primary obligation is still on the player himself.

Yes, certainly the dealer made a mistake here. I can only guess that he or she assumed that the player walking away had decided he had no chance of winning. That happens sometimes. (In fact, it happened at the WSOP yesterday. I don't remember all the details of the PN story, but one player made a full house when three of a kind came on the flop, and his opponent gave up, thinking he couldn't win, and headed for the door. Well, he was right that he couldn't win the hand outright at that point, but he had forgotten about the one in a squintillion chance of ending up with a chop--which is what happened when the final board was quads with an ace! Other players had to run to catch up with him and bring him back to the table.) When a player basically abandons his hand, what is the dealer supposed to do--push chips to a now-empty seat? So it's an understandable mistake, and one that could easily have been avoided if the moron had just stayed at the table.

As with using a card cap, this is really, really simple. Basically all you have to do to prevent loss of your hand in such a situation is stay at the friggin' table and pay a little attention until the hand is over. What the hell is so hard about that???

And, by the way, what is this nonsense about not looking at the community cards as they come out? Probably some sort of stupid superstition he has developed. If so, his allegiance to bizarre unseen forces (apparently some being that will take offense if the player looks at the cards, and will thus magically change the order of the cards in the dealer's hand so that they come out unfavorably to the offending player, I guess) is greater than his commitment to protecting his hand. What brilliant, wonderful priorities. Frankly, he deserves whatever happens to him.

I will never understand poker players.

As for the floor decision, it may have been the best (or the least bad) of the options available at that point. Another option would be to check the security camera tapes, pull those four cards out of the deck, reshuffle the remainder, and play the hand out. Might be more trouble than it's worth, though.

Jason Alexander is as delusional as Shannon Elizabeth

Date: Thu, Jul 10, 2008

Some people just won't learn

Date: Thu, Jul 10, 2008

Sigh. It has happened yet again, according to PokerNews:

Simon Says "All In"

Simon Rinoldi was all in under the gun for 13,600. He was called by
Gabriel Chuang, and Rinoldi stood up to await his fate. As he stood up and
stepped back from his chair though, the dealer pulled all of the cards into the
muck, including Rinoldi's.

The floor was called over, and eventually the supervisor, Charlie Cresi had
to be summoned. He took a minute to survey the situation before making his
ruling.

"It's definitely a dead hand," he said, indicating that it was impossible
to retrieve the cards from the muck. "In essence, it's the player's
responsibility to protect their cards," he added. The decision was made to save
Rinoldi's tournament life though. Cresi ruled that a minimum raise -- 3,200
chips -- had to be taken out of Rinoldi's stack, and the pot was awarded to
Chuang. Rinoldi was given a 10,200-chip rebate to use in another spot.

Rinoldi was unhappy with the decision, but he very easily could have lost
his whole stack in the incident. "I'm making a ruling in fairness to the game,"
Cresi said. The dealer apologized profusely, though by the rules, Rinoldi was
at-fault for failing to cap his cards to prevent them being prematurely
mucked.

This is at least the third time this has heppend during this World Series--see here and here for the previous stories and associated rants from me. I don't get what players find so difficult or repugnant about using a card cap that they refuse to do it. But tough noogies. They have had ample warning. It's in every rule book, including the standard Tournament Directors Association rules and the WSOP rules. If players haven't bothered to read the rules, or if they know the rule but decide to risk going without a card protector anyway, I have zero sympathy for them. This is especially true if, in addition to leaving your cards uncapped, you step away from the friggin' table! (See here for other similar stories.) As Bugs Bunny would say, "What a maroon!"

Incidentally, this Charlie Cresi made a horrible decision. He was obviously right that Rinoldi's hand was dead, but was absolutely, completely, 100% wrong to give him any chips back. Assuming that Chuang had more chips than Rinoldi did (which is not stated but sort of implied in how the story is told), Rinoldi's entire stack should have been shipped over the Chuang, and Rinoldi shown the door. Thanks for playing. Thanks for the money. Buh-bye.

His chips were in the middle, matched by an opponent, and he had a dead hand. Only a live hand can be awarded the pot or any portion of it. We don't give refunds in poker. Once your chips are in the middle of the table, and that bet has been called, you have to win them to get them back, and you cannot win the hand when your cards are dead in the muck. Period. End of story.

Mr. Cresi's pathetic excuse that he was giving Rinoldi a break "in fairness to the game" is hogwash. It was not fair to Chuang, who was the innocent party here. This decision was just as bad, unfair, arbitrary, and contrary to the rules as if, out of nowhere, Cresi had wandered over to the table between hands and ordered Chuang to give Rinoldi 10,200 chips. Those chips rightly belonged to Chuang the instant Cresi's hand was declared dead. Had I been Chuang, that's a decision I would have appealed all the way to the tournament director.

I'd love to hear Cresi justify his numbers. On what possible grounds, other than "I say so," did he settle on the amount of the refund? This is an all-or-nothing situation. We either award pots (or portions of pots) to players with dead hands, or we don't. If the WSOP staff is deciding, against every rule and tradition of the game, that we do, in fact, award pots to players with dead hands, what basis is there in the rules for deciding on what proportion to give to each player? None whatsoever.

Giving part of a pot to a player with a dead hand is yet another in a growing line of astonishingly bad decisions by WSOP floor staff. I don't know where these people got their training, but they are becoming an ugly reflection on what should be our game's pre-eminent event.