Journalistic integrity

Date: Wed, Sep 17, 2008

On July 29, I wrote this post about how KNPR, the Las Vegas public radio station, got the facts all wrong about online poker.

The same day, I emailed Kathryn LaTour, the UNLV professor who was on that show, telling her of the post and inviting any response she might have. No reply.

The slightly more interesting story is what happened with the radio station. I emailed the host of the program, Dave Berns, with this message:

Mr. Berns:

You got the legal facts about online gambling
completely wrong, repeatedly, during the 7/28 broadcast. I detail the errors in
a post on my poker blog here: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/knpr-gets-it-wrong-wrong-wrong.html

If you have any comments to make in response to my post, I’d be
happy to add them as an addendum to the blog.

I think you owe your
listeners a retraction, an explanation, and an apology.

Mr. Berns replied quickly, within a couple of hours:

Thanks for listening and writing. Give me a little time to check into this.
If I'm wrong I will certainly correct it on the air. It wouldn't be the first
time I've made a mistake, and undoubtedly won't be the last. Bear with me, and
I'll get to it within a day or two.

Best,

Dave

This was encouraging.

But nothing came of it. So on August 9, I sent Mr. Berns another email, asking about what he had learned when he looked into the matter. On August 11, I got this reply:

Just got back from vacation after six days out of town. It's my pleasure to
nail this down.

Dave

Hmmm. This is starting to sound like a brush-off. But OK, I'll give him a chance.

Not too surprisingly, I did not hear back from Mr. Berns. So on August 22, I sent him one last email:

After more than three weeks, I have to assume that correcting errors isn’t
actually as important to you as you tried to suggest here [this was at the top
of his original response to me]. Or did I miss it at some point?

There has been no reply.

Thus it became obvious that Mr. Berns had zero interest in looking into whether he had given out erroneous information on his show. It is apparent to me that he lacks the journalistic integrity to check up on his own work when it is called into question. He simply doesn't care whether the things he says on his program are true or not. Furthermore, he lacks general personal integrity, as demonstrated by twice promising to explore the problem, yet then doing nothing about it. In short, neither his factual assertions nor his personal assurances mean anything.

So I tried going up the ladder. KNPR's web site lists Florence Rogers as the "President and General Manager." I emailed her about the situation. I included all of the above-mentioned correspondence, so that she could see that I made pretty reasonable attempts to resolve it with Mr. Berns directly. After quoting those exchanges, I asked Ms. Rogers these questions:

So now, given that history, my questions for you:

1. Do you
care enough about seeing that on-air errors get corrected to do anything about
this, since it seems apparent that Mr. Berns lacks sufficient journalistic
integrity to take care of it on his own?

2. Is there any reason
that I should think that the rest of your staff cares any more about getting
things right than Mr. Berns does? Put another way, this is the first time I have
attempted to get somebody on your staff to correct a factual misstatement, so I
have to assume that the kind of reaction I got (i.e., reassuring platitudes, but
zero action; basically a “bedbug letter”) was typical. Can you provide any
evidence that this is not so?

This was on August 27, three weeks ago today.

There has been no reply.

So my conclusion, inevitably, is that neither the on-air talent nor upper management at KNPR gives a rat's ass about getting things right, or correcting false information that they broadcast.

Sadly, this is typical of my experiences with news outlets generally. There are four general areas in which I consider myself a lot more knowledgeable than most of the world: poker, firearms, medicine, and Mormonism (the religion I was raised in). It's kind of an odd assortment of things to be more or less expert about, but that's how life has worked out for me.

The majority of the time that one of these subjects is in the news, there is at least one unambiguously false or misleading statement in the story. On at least a dozen occasions over the past, oh, six or seven years I have attempted to get a reporter and/or editor and/or publisher to issue a correction, after pointing them to easily available, reliable sources that demonstrate the error. Not once has any news outlet responded with a quick retraction/correction. In fact, I can only recall one time that a correction ever got made, and it was a few months later, and only after more than 12 contacts on my part to different people within the newspaper hierarchy.

It appears that KNPR is the same as the rest. They just don't care about factual accuracy. They will, of course, endlessly claim that they do, but their actions--or, rather, inactions--prove otherwise. Yet several times a year they spend day after day of air time asking me to send them money because of what a valuable "news and information" service they provide. Yeah, right.

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Another WSOP non-fact

Date: Wed, Sep 17, 2008

Just a few days ago I questioned the accuracy of the "poker fact" given as ESPN's broadcast of the World Series of Poker went to a commercial. I wouldn't have thought they would screw it up two weeks in a row--but they surprised me.

This week they said, "When starting with two suited cards, the odds of making a flush are 118-1."

No.

The odds of flopping a flush are 118:1. But the odds of making a flush, assuming one sees all five board cards, are 6.4%, or about 15:1.

I wonder who ESPN is using as poker consultants for this stuff. Whoever it is, they need to fire him and hire me instead.

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David Foster Wallace (zero poker content)

Date: Tue, Sep 16, 2008

I've been debating for two days now whether to write a post about the death of one of my all-time favorite writers, David Foster Wallace. The problem is that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of writers more talented than I will have already written about it, and better than I could. I doubt that I have anything original to say, except perhaps this: There is no other writer whose death--especially by suicide--would sadden me more than Wallace's has.

If you're not familiar with his work, it's kind of hard to explain. See here and here for good overviews.

I first came across him when I used to subscribe to Harper's magazine. He wrote a long experiential essay for them about taking a cruise. In expanded form (or, more correctly, in its original form, because it had to be condensed for magazine publication) it became the title piece for a collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. By the time that book came out, I had found a couple of other things he had written, and was a solid fan.

I was much more fond of his non-fiction writing than his fiction. I read The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair maybe eight or ten years ago. They were OK, but never grabbed me the way his essays did. For that reason, Infinite Jest remains unread on my shelf. I also never bought Interviews with Hideous Men, after reading one story from it excerpted in Harper's. Didn't like it. But I absolutely adored his non-fiction writing, every bit of it. He had that rare gift of being able to explain a subject to somebody who previously knew nothing about it, and make it compelling. He was as good at this as Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and Steven Jay Gould were in the natural sciences, though usually tackling non-technical subject matter.

It was just a few months ago that I finished what will presumably be his last book (unless somebody puts together a posthumous collection), Consider the Lobster. It illustrates perfectly what I so admired about him: He could write about anything. I saw an interview with him once in which he said, approximately, "Anything is interesting if you look at it closely enough." And that was his trademark in non-fiction: looking at a subject more closely than you might have thought possible, thinking about it in more detail than anybody else had ever done before, then being able to express what he had learned and thought with exquisite clarity, insight, and humor.

In that book, he tackles, in order, what it's like to attend the Adult Video News awards in Las Vegas, John Updike's decline as a writer, an explanation of the humor in Kafka, dictionaries and English style guides, how 9/11 was experienced in a small Midwest town, what was great about Tracy Austin's short tennis career and what was wrong with her autobiography, life with the John McCain campaign of 2000, a Maine lobster festival, a reflection on a biography of Dostoevsky, and a profile of a conservative radio talk-show host. I simply cannot grasp how it is possible to write intelligently on a range of subjects that broad, let alone do so with such rhetorical brilliance. Those essays have become the first things that I think about when I come across anything related to those subjects. That's also true, for me, for the variety of things he wrote about in A Supposedly Fun Thing, including pieces about a professional tennis player, David Lynch movies, and a trip to the Illinois State Fair.

There's another aspect to all of this that makes it even more poignant: Wallace and I grew up in the same city (Champaign, Illinois), at the same time, he being a year younger than I. He describes, in one of his essays, having played tennis in Hessel Park, which was the park nearest to where I lived. It was the usual location for our church picnics. When I attended the nearby elementary school, there were innumerable group walks to that park. I played tennis there with my high-school girlfriend, in the same courts he was describing having learned the game on. We may have gone to the same high school. I'm not sure of that, but there were only two in the city, and if he lived as close to me as suggested by us having frequented the same park, he would have been assigned to my high school (unless he was one of the kids who instead went to University High School). Obviously, though, I didn't know him. That shared background is a large part of what makes it so seriously weird for me to think of him dead.

The main point of writing anything about this is to use whatever influence I have with my readers to urge you to make an effort to find a Wallace book and introduce yourself to him, if he has somehow escaped your attention to date.

I like what is said in the second link above, and will close with it:

Writers check each other out. If you care about the work, you invariably become
envious or just infuriated when another writer's success far exceeds his or her
talent. Others make you want to do what they do. And then there are those
special few who make you think, "Crap, I could never do that, but I don't care.
I just want to read more."

Wallace was one of those.

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Gambling911.com gets it wrong--again

Date: Mon, Sep 15, 2008

Christopher Costigan at gambling911.com is a strange bird. He sometimes has his hands on stories and/or details unavailable anywhere else. Yet just as often, he's so far off the mark of what's real that you have to wonder whether he needs his psychotropic medication doses adjusted. (See, for example, my critique of his reporting on the iMEGA case here.)

Today he posted another example of the latter, here. I'm pasting below the entire text of the story as it reads, just in case he or somebody else goes in later and revises it.

DuplicatePoker.com Operating Online Poker Room from US?

Submitted by C Costigan on Mon, 09/15/2008 - 11:25.

It is illegal to operate an online poker room in the United States
under the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act. Some companies, like
PokerStars, tread around this law by operating their business outside the US
though they still allow customers from within the States to play for "real
cash".

DuplicatePoker.com has
taken this one step further. They physically run their online poker room from -
where else?....New York City, at least that‘s what their latest press release
claims.

Duplicate Poker.com is a U.S. corporation operating a legal U.S.
poker room with headquarters in NYC, and offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. Visit the
next big thing in skill-based gaming at: www.duplicatepoker.com.

The company goes further to imply they are doing absolutely wrong in
the face of the US Government.

"Duplicate Poker has the potential to be as popular as Texas Hold'Em, Omaha
or 7-Card Stud," says Romik. "Yet unlike these games that have uncertain
origins, we have patented the Duplicate Poker process and it has the potential
to be marketed, licensed and monetized globally. Our legal status in the U.S.
also offers a competitive advantage."

Is this arrogance or something we don't know about?

In the past, US and state law enforcement has actively pursued any
online gambling operator they deemed to physically running all or part of their
business from within the States.

Betcha.com owner, Nick Jenkins, was ultimately arrested for running an
online gambling site within Washington State last year. He claimed the site was
perfectly legal since his peer-to-peer business model never accepted a bet
directly. Authorities saw things differently.

The site was run out of Seattle, Washington where online betting is a
Class C felony. Washington officials shut down Jenkins' site within weeks of it
opening to the public.

Over the last year, the US Government has aggressively set its sites on
payment processors operating within the United States. Most recently,
authorities seized millions of dollars from ZIP Payments, which had been
conducting most of its business with BodogLife.com.

DuplicatePoker may be asking for trouble if indeed they are operating
from within New York City. Long before the passage of the UIGEA in 1998, 21
online gambling operators were indicted. Partners in SBD Global (a separate
operation from what is now SBG Global out of Costa Rica), including Internet
gambling pioneer and author, Steve Budin, were among those indicted. SBD
operated a marketing office on Wall Street at the time, much to the industry's
surprise.

Law enforcement within the New York City area - both on the federal and
local level - have been especially aggressive in pursuing parties involved in
taking bets from US citizens. Until now the focus has been primarily on
interstate sports betting mostly through the Queens DA's office and the Suffolk
County DA's office.

And to be clear, DuplicatePoker.com admits to being a "real cash" online
poker room. The company also gives clear instructions on how to deposit funds,
which is clearly prohibited under the UIGEA.

"How does Duplicate Poker work? Players sitting at the same position at
different tables are dealt the same cards. As a result, Duplicate Poker
eliminates the luck of the draw and pits players' true poker skills against each
other. DuplicatePoker.com offers both free play money and real money games. Real
money players can deposit funds using Visa, MasterCard and PayPal."

Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher

(Bolded paragraph as in the original.)

Now let's go through and try to count the errors.


Online poker illegal?

We don't have to go far to find the first factual misstatement--the very first sentence carries a whopper: "It is illegal to operate an online poker room in the United States under the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act."

I cannot understand how a person who makes his living following gaming news can be so clueless about the pertinent laws.

The 2006 UIGEA, by its own explicit terms, did not make illegal the placing or accepting of any wager that was not already illegal under state or federal law. The statute (which you can read here) states: "No provision of this subchapter shall be construed as altering, limiting, or extending any Federal or State law or Tribal-State compact prohibiting, permitting, or regulating gambling within the United States." In other words, if offering online poker was legal before the UIGEA, it remained legal after passage of the UIGEA. (See Nelson Rose's article here for perhaps the most thorough non-technical analysis of what the UIGEA does and does not do.)

So for Mr. Costigan to be right in his statement, online poker would have to have been already illegal under pre-2006 federal law. (See here for general information on the handful of state criminal provisions related to online gambling.)

But, as I detailed in this post, prior federal law prohibited only the acceptance (not even the placing of) bets on sporting events. Neither playing nor hosting online poker, for free or for real money, has ever been illegal under federal law. It wasn't illegal before the UIGEA, and it isn't illegal after the UIGEA. The UIGEA is all about funding and money transfers, not about the actual placing or accepting of bets, or the playing or hosting of games.


Careless writing

This sentence appears wrong: "The company goes further to imply they are doing absolutely wrong in the face of the US Government." I'm guessing, from context, that Mr. Costigan meant to write, "...they are doing absolutely nothing wrong...." Kind of a significant omission there.

There is apparently another word missing here: "...actively pursued any online gambling operator they deemed to physically running...." I assume that he meant to write "...deemed to be physically running...." It doesn't make sense otherwise.

Next we have this sentence: "Over the last year, the US Government has aggressively set its sites on payment processors operating within the United States." Sites? Seriously, Mr. Costigan, you do not know the difference between a site and a sight? Here's a clue for you: http://dictionary.reference.com/. You might want to bookmark that one.

Is there no room in the gambling911.com budget for a proofreader?


What year?

Mr. Costigan writes, "Long before the passage of the UIGEA in 1998...." Huh? It was, of course, 2006, not 1998. It's possible that this is just a problem of a missing comma. That is, the "1998" might be referring to what follows in the sentence--the prosecutions--rather than what precedes it, "the UIGEA." But as it stands, it sure looks like a boneheaded blunder of dates.


A distinction with a difference

Mr. Costigan points to the case of Steve Budin to illustrate that the feds prosecute online gambling sites aggressively, when they are within U.S. jurisdiction. But as another article found on Mr. Costigan's own site makes clear, Budin's business was all about sports bets.

Similarly, Mr. Costigan points to the recent legal and financial troubles of Bodog. But he doesn't point out the obvious relevant fact that distinguishes Bodog from PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, UltimateBet, AbsolutePoker, DoylesRoom, and other online poker sites: Bodog also accepts sports bets. The others do not, and--surprise, surprise--are not under threat of prosecution.

Being in the business of accepting online sports bets is pretty clearly illegal under the federal Wire Act. Neither Budin nor Bodog got in trouble for online poker.

I can't tell whether Mr. Costigan genuinely fails to grasp this critical distinction, or is deliberately omitting it in order to make a false point. In other words, I can't tell if he is abysmally ignorant of the law, or intentionally obscuring/distorting the facts. Either way, he's a horribly unreliable source.


"Clearly prohibited"

Mr. Costigan says of DuplicatePoker, "The company also gives clear instructions on how to deposit funds, which is clearly prohibited under the UIGEA."

Not so fast, sir. First, we have the argument above about how pre-2006 federal law prohibited only online sports betting. I think it's pretty clear that sites, even within the U.S., that offer poker and other casino games, but not sports betting, could not successfully be prosecuted under the Wire Act or other pre-2006 federal law.

But additionally, it appears that DuplicatePoker is attempting to navigate around this UIGEA language:

§ 5362. Definitions
In this subchapter:
(1 ) BET OR WAGER.
The term 'bet or wager'—
(A) means the staking or risking by any person of something of value upon
the outcome of a contest of others, a sporting event, or a game subject to
chance, upon an agreement or understanding that the person or another person
will receive something of value in the event of a certain outcome....

The key words there are "a game subject to chance." Now, I don't really think that this can be understood to expand the scope of the 1961 Wire Act, because of the provision, previously quoted, requiring courts not to use the UIGEA to alter what bets are legal or illegal. I think DuplicatePoker is simply trying to add an extra layer of legal protection. They don't offer blackjack or roulette or other traditional casino games that are unquestionably "subject to chance."

Poker is, of course, "subject to chance." But DuplicatePoker's unusual game structure reduces the chance factor further, because each player, as I understand it (caveat: I've never explored the site, so I'm just going by what I've read in their ads and in articles I've read), each player gets dealt the same cards at different times, as was done in the man-versus-machine poker competitions in 2007 and 2008. While this doesn't exactly make poker no longer "subject to chance," it at least makes every player subject to the same chance. Nobody will get more pocket aces or cold-deck situations than anybody else, if I understand correctly how it works.

My admittedly amateurish reading of the relevant laws tells me that this precaution is neither necessary (because even regular poker is not illegal under any existing federal law) nor sufficient (because the feds could easily still argue that they are offering a "game subject to chance" in spite of the unusual game structure). But the point is that, at the very least, there are complex and non-obvious legal questions to be resolved, which Mr. Costigan blithely dismisses or ignores when he says that what DuplicatePoker is doing is "clearly prohibited." Their actions are, under what I think is the best understanding of the law, not prohibited at all, let alone being "clearly prohibited," as Mr. Costigan asserts, and his claim is made without any sort of detailed explanation as to how he interprets the relevant laws so as to arrive at this conclusion.


Conclusion

Gambling911.com's Costigan sometimes gets a scoop that the rest of the world misses. For that reason, it's a useful site to check on once in a while. But he is so careless with facts, so slipshod in his writing, and occasionally so bizarre in his interpretation and analysis of what's going on that he is, sadly, a terribly unreliable source. Today's story shows that in, uh, spades.

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How do you ruin a great razz hand?

Date: Mon, Sep 15, 2008

This is how:

'Nuff said.

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A H.O.R.S.E with no name

Date: Mon, Sep 15, 2008

Late last year, Shamus commented on the new addition to the World Series of Poker for 2008, an eight-game mixed event. He titled his post "A H.O.R.S.E. With No Name," which was impossible for me to improve on here, so instead of trying, I just stole it shamelessly (or maybe Shamusly).

He suggested the acronym SPLENDOR for the nameless mixed game, which is pretty good. But now that I've been playing a fair amount of HORSE, I've come to think that the name chosen really needs to reflect the order in which the games rotate. I don't really need it as a mnemonic device any more (I've done 98 single-table HORSE tournaments now, which is plenty to burn the order deep into my cranium), but for a long time I definitely used the letters in the acronym to remind myself what was coming up next. With eight games in the mix, I think that function is even more crucial.

Furthermore, because it is effectively an extension of HORSE, it seems to me most desirable, if possible, to keep that part of the acronym intact. It doesn't help new players if limit hold'em is represented by H in one mixed-game format, but L in the other.

I bring this up because PokerStars recently introduced an eight-game mixer, but has no good name for it. In the lobby, it is simply referred to as "8-Game." If you probe a bit further into the Stars web site, you find this half-hearted attempt at an acronym:

T - Limit 2-7 Triple Draw
H - Limit Hold’em
O - Limit Omaha Eight or Better (Hi/Lo)
R - Razz
S - Limit Seven Card Stud
E - Limit Stud Eight or Better (Hi/Lo)
H - No Limit Hold’em
A - Pot Limit Omaha

For reasons that are not at all clear to me, Stars has chosen to order the games differently than the WSOP did. Not that the WSOP is the definitive statement of how poker ought to be played, but I can't think of a compelling reason to deviate from it. The games have to be in some order, so why not use the WSOP's order as a template, and standardize it everywhere based on that? If Stars simply moved triple-draw from first to last, they would match the WSOP format.

Anyway, this all really makes coming up with a good acronym virtually impossible. You can tell that Stars was making some effort at it, because of choosing A for pot-limit Omaha, instead of the more obvious P, and repeating the H for no-limit hold'em, instead of the more obvious N. That suggests that they wanted the thing at least vaguely pronounceable.

Unfortunately, if you constrain yourself to an acronym that reflects the order of the games that Stars has chosen, and also add in the constraints that the HORSE parts remain unchanged, there just isn't much wiggle room. To make matters even harder, I would insist that the letters not be repeated, as Stars has done with the H. Triple-draw is going to have to be either T or D. (Well, you could stretch and argue for a W there. But then you have an acronym that starts with WHOR, and that's just going to create other problems....) No-limit hold'em is going to have to be N. Pot-limit Omaha should be P.

I give Stars points for creativity in choosing A for pot-limit Omaha, rather than repeating the O. The problem with the selection, though, is that it doesn't take advantage of identifying the unique feature of the game--its structure--nor the unique letter that would most obviously represent that structure--P.

So something has to give way. You have to sacrifice at least one of these properties: (1) Pronounceability. (2) Consistency with the well-established HORSE. (3) Non-repetition of letters. (4) Order of letters reflecting order of the games. (5) Obvious association between the letter chosen and the game it stands for.

THORSEHA compromises on points 3 (by repeating the H) and 5 (by using A for pot-limit Omaha). It arguably also compromises point 1, in that, unlike HORSE, THORSEHA isn't a real word.

Shamus's suggestion, SPLENDOR, scores superbly on points 1, 3, and 5, but misses on points 2 and 4.

The two best ones I came up with in my comments on Shamus's original post were NOT HORSE and HERO SHOT. But those violate points 3 and 4. Also, while they are readily pronounceable, they are not single words, which is at least a minor problem for all those who have to figure out how to reduce such things to paper. (NOTHORSE just looks wrong.)

So where do we make the compromises? After thinking about this for far longer than the whole matter probably deserves, I've concluded that pronounceability is the least important principle. I would order my points, from most to least important, as 2, 4, 5, 3, 1.

And so, were I in charge of things over at PokerStars (which, shockingly, I'm not), but for whatever reason the order of the games they've selected were inviolable, I would reluctantly settle on calling the thing THORSENP, pronounced (if you must) "Thorsen-P." This pretty much offers up my point 1 on the altar, but honors the other four principles well.

If I were allowed to re-order the games, then I would follow the WSOP's lead and call it HORSENAT. This is at least a little more pronounceable than THORSENP, and compromises only mildly on point 5 (with A not being an obvious representative of pot-limit Omaha), while leaving the other points their integrity.

I don't like Stars' use of THORSEHA because it compromises both points 3 and 5 without really being any better than THORSENP in pronouncability.

I despair of a really good solution, though if my clever and creative readers have better suggestions, I'd love to hear them.


The artwork above, incidentally, is "The horse with no name" by Eddie Maier. See here.

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Praise for alert dealers

Date: Sun, Sep 14, 2008

After being evicted by the Hard Rock poker room because they didn't want my business (and consequently will be getting a lot less of it than they likely otherwise would have), I drove down the road to the Rio, which is where I had originally been planning to put in today's session, before making a last-minute change to the Hard Rock.

(The drive over, incidentally, took about 30 minutes, far longer than the usual 10 or so. I concluded from the density of traffic near the Strip that there must be some huge event in town tonight. Sure enough, when I got home and did a news search, I learned about boxing at the MGM. This is how closely I follow sports: I deduce that there is a big sporting event somewhere nearby by being stuck in the traffic jam it has created.)

Picked up the chip shown above. I have enough Rio chips now that it's become pretty uncommon for me to spot one not in the collection.

It was a mostly uneventful session, unworthy of comment, except for one hand.

I make plenty of mistakes in playing poker, of course--it's the nature of a game of partial information. But it's pretty rare that I make serious mistakes in the mechanics of the game, after a couple of years of playing 100+ hours per month. It's probably less than once a month that I accidentally act out of turn, or other error of that sort. I think there have been only two occasions since living in Vegas in which I have exposed my hand before it was time. Today was almost another one, and would have been #3, if not for an exceptionally alert dealer.

My stack had dwindled down to about $50, so I took another $100 bill out of my wallet and put it on the table. I don't like playing with cash. I always buy chips instead, and on the rare occasion that I have an unwieldy number of chips to deal with in front of me, I color them up to $100 chips, not cash. There are several reasons that contribute to this preference, but chief among them is exactly the problem I ran into today: it's easy to overlook cash. I'm so habituated to gauging chip stacks that sometimes I don't even notice the currency.

However, from the time that I plopped the C-note on the table until the critical hand occurred (just two hands), there wasn't a good time to ask the dealer to change it for chips. Furthermore, he barely had $100 in red chips in his tray, so he would have to ask for a fill as soon as he sold them to me. I decided that this time I would just wait until a chip runner was at the table for somebody else, and get chips then. I won a small pot in there, so I had maybe $75 in chips in addition to the Benjamin.

(Readers sometimes tease me in the comments for being so set in my ways. Heck, sometimes I make fun of myself for the same thing. But having well-established patterns and habits does help prevent mistakes. Today turned out to be a prime example of what can happen when you deviate from your customary practices.)

I had A-Q on the button and raised to $13. Guy on my right who had limped in then called. Flop was Q-x-x. I bet $20. He called. Turn was another Q. Here's where I made the crucial error. The pot had about $65 in it. I looked down and saw approximately $40 or $45 in chips in front of me. Of course, in the most literal sense I also "saw" the $100 bill, but because I'm used to thinking just in terms of chips, my brain didn't include that $100 in my stack. It looked like an obvious all-in move to me.

I didn't say "all in," but just gave a little shrug, stacked up my remaining chips, and moved them forward, leaving the bill behind. As soon as my opponent said "Call," I moved my silver dollar off of my hole cards and started to turn them over. They were about halfway over--players on my left would have been able to see them--when the dealer got an alarmed look on his face and shouted, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! You're not all in!" He was just in the nick of time.

It was really unbelievable how quickly he reacted. In fact, I don't think it would have been possible for him to figure it out after he saw me start to flip my cards and still intervene in time. I think that what must have happened was that he saw me put all of my chips in, and thought to himself, "That doofus might think that he's all in, if he is forgetting about that hundred-dollar bill sitting on the table. I'd better watch out for him exposing his hand before the next round of betting." Then when it started to happen as he had suspected it might, he was able to step in very fast, because he had already analyzed the situation and made his contingency plan for what to do in case I screwed up in the way he anticipated I might.

He might well have saved the pot for me. I don't remember the exact final board, but the river brought an ugly scare card, completing both a possible flush and possible straight. Had my opponent seen my cards prematurely and considered the situation, it would have been a prime spot for an all-in bluff, which would have been very difficult for me to call. As it was, it went check-check, because my opponent had second pair, not a draw that got there, and he had to be afraid that I had been on a draw that got there--a fear he would not have had if he had seen my cards.

So my hat is off to Woodrow for his admiral alertness and quick reaction. It's not often that I need a dealer to save me from making a big blunder, but I'm sure glad to have a good one in the box when it happens.

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Hard Rock blows its grand opening, makes the Grump grumpier than usual

Date: Sun, Sep 14, 2008

I had read over on Pokerati that today was the grand opening of the Hard Rock poker room. If you're thinking, "Huh? Didn't they open a few weeks ago?" you haven't been around Vegas enough. This is how things are done here. There is a "soft opening," followed later by a "Grand Opening."

I thought it would be fun to be in the room playing while keeping an eye on the progress of the invitational tournament they were holding, snapping occasional photos of the celebrities, etc. So I headed over there. I arrived at 4:15, knowing that the red carpet event would be at 5:00. Got seated in a $1-2 NLHE game. Picked up the cool chip shown above with my first buy-in; it doesn't say 2008 on it, but I'm pretty sure it's a new design for this year's Independence Day.

I had played for only about five minutes when a floor guy came over and said something about us having just ten more minutes. I didn't understand exactly what that meant. We were at a table close to where the red carpet pathway had been set up, so I thought maybe they were going to move us to another table.

To my shock, though, about ten minutes later they came by with chip racks for everybody. We weren't being moved--we were being kicked out! That's right. The Hard Rock commenced the Grand Opening of its poker room by evicting all of the poker players! There was no explanation given. I had not been told of this when I checked in. The press release said nothing about it. I would not have wasted my time driving there and parking in order to play for 15 minutes, nor just for rubbernecking the tournament.

This was completely unexpected. My initial impressions of the room on previous visits had been highly positive (see here and here for details). Nothing had given me reason to think that they would treat their customers with such utter contempt and disregard.

I have never known a poker room to close down its cash games for a tournament. Hell, even the world's largest tournament, the WSOP, imports scads of dealers in order to keep cash games going. As far as I know, Benny Binion never stopped letting cash players in, no matter how crowded the bullpen got. Even the lowly, tiny Hilton poker room kept a cash game available during its monthly freeroll tournaments, despite the tournament usually occupying all but one of its eight or so tables. I've been around all sorts of poker rooms when they have been hosting all sizes of tournaments, and I have never before seen them shoo away the cash game players. I'm not saying it hasn't ever happened, somewhere, sometime, but I've never seen it, and certainly had no reason to anticipate it today.

This was incredibly rude and insulting treatment by a poker room. They communicated very, very clearly to me how little they value my patronage. I am utterly unimportant to them. So are all of the other non-celebrities (three tables' worth, at least) that were all unceremoniously pushed out the door. And they couldn't even be bothered to put a couple of extra people to work in the cage to handle the simultaneous closing of three tables--30 people make for a long line in front of one cashier to cash in chips.

There was no explanation given, no apology, no effort to tell us what time the cash games would re-open, no attempt to offer even a token compensation or consideration for the insult and inconvenience. As far as I could tell, they hadn't even bothered to put up a lousy sign at the check-in desk warning that the room would be closed to uninvited players during certain hours.

I was too pissed off to stay and take pictures, even though I had brought my good camera along. Even now, some six hours later, I still can't believe that the Hard Rock was so stupid and clumsy as to celebrate the grand opening of its poker room by kicking out the poker players! "Welcome to the Hard Rock. Now get the hell out of here. You're in the way."

The Hard Rock poker room is not going to survive by catering to celebrities. They can only sustain a largish 18-table room by attracting a stable clientele including a large mix of local regulars. In my opinion, they took a huge step backwards from this already-difficult task today, by insulting and chasing away players whom they should be welcoming with open arms, even groveling to make happy.

I'm not so headstrong as to say I'll never go back there again, because if I can make money in a poker room and it's reasonably accessible, I'll keep it on the list at least for occasional visits. But today's conduct was perhaps the most offensive, unnecessary, and shortsighted bitch-slap a poker room has ever hit me with, and it seriously eroded the positive impressions I had made of the place on my first two visits.

I'll go back sooner or later, I'm sure, but I'll never feel as positively about it as I did before, now that they have made explicit where I and other ordinary poker-playing Joes stand in their list of priorities: way down there at at the bottom.

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How many possible flops?

Date: Sun, Sep 14, 2008

During Tuesday night's WSOP broadcast, just before a commercial break, ESPN flashed on the screen this "Poker Fact": "There are 19,600 possible flops in Texas Hold'em."

I wonder how many people checked them on that.

I did. Yeah, that's how pedantic I can be. (This is the point as which the haters click on "submit a comment" in order to make a wisecrack about obsessive-compulsive disorder.)

The answer is not correct. Or, at least, it's not clearly correct, and it's not the answer I would have given.

The number of combinations of cards you can select is given by a straightforward (though often cumbersome-to-calculate) formula: see here for details. Fortunately, spreadsheets have a built-in function for this, reducing the work to a fraction of a second. That makes it easy to determine that C(52,3) (i.e., the number of combinations of three cards from a 52-card deck) is 22,100.

So how did ESPN come up with 19,600? Apparently they are assuming a 50-card deck, because C(50,3) is indeed 19,600. In other words, they are providing the answer to a slightly different question than the one they were asking.

Before the dealer shuffles the cards for a hand, if you ask how many different flops might theoretically come up in the next hand, you would have to say 22,100. Of course, if you are a player in the game and know your own two cards, then the universe of possible cards is reduced to 50. You might then say that the number of possible flops is 19,600, because you can eliminate the 2500 flops that contain one or both of your hole cards. But then you are not answering the question "How many possible flops are there in Texas Hold'em?" but, rather, "How many possible flops are there in Texas Hold'em, given that your two specific hole cards are known to be unavailable?"

Even that is a little bit dicey, because once the dealer has shuffled and cut the deck, there is only one possible flop that can come (barring dealer error). So if you're asking the question after the deal, as is implied in the answer that ESPN gave, the answer might better be 1 than 19,600.

The 19,600 is usually going to be the more useful number when you are doing post-hoc and/or theoretical analysis of a hand. But I submit that ESPN got it wrong. When asking the number of "possible flops," without specifying any preconditions or limitations or exclusions, the answer has to be 22,100.

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Poker gems, #164

Date: Sun, Sep 14, 2008

Norman Chad, in September 9, 2008, broadcast of the WSOP Main Event Day 1d, when Phil Hellmuth answers a cell phone call at the table.


Omar Bradley is calling--probably wants his riding crop back.

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Poker gems, #163

Date: Sat, Sep 13, 2008

Richard Taylor, in Bluff magazine column, May, 2007, available here.


There is nothing noble or gentlemanly about trying to take someone else’s mortgage payment to make your car payment. It is not a knitting circle; it is a war fought on felt.

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Foolishly showing off

Date: Sat, Sep 13, 2008

During one of the first hands I played in a session at Bill's last night, two players got it all in before the flop. The short-stacked player had A-4 suited. He was up against K-K. The guy with K-K looked at the situation and said, "You're about 26% to win." I didn't think that was quite right, and on checking now I see that it's actually about 33%.

But that's not the point.

The point is the effect that quoting the number had on me. So early in the session, I still had no clue which players were the experienced ones I needed to be a little wary of, and who were the dundering calling stations. This guy made that a whole lot clearer for me, as far as he was concerned, without me needing to invest any more effort in analyzing his play. People who know, even approximately, hand-versus-hand winning probabilities for pre-flop confrontations are not beginners.

I didn't get much chance to confirm the impression this left with me, because this player (1) was extraordinarily tight, (2) tended to wander around a lot, missing many hands, and (3) left the game not too long after this. But I was left shaking my head at his self-revelation.

One of the skills that I noticed developed most rapidly for me after moving to Vegas was the ability to figure out opponents' skill levels. You know the old saying: If you can't spot the sucker at the table within 30 minutes, it's you. It's true, insofar as inexperienced players have a hard time gauging the relative strength of their opponents. Maybe they'll eventually figure it out, but why help them with comments that instantly signal them that you know the game more thoroughly than they do?

Sometime within the last year I read a column in one of the poker periodicals (sorry--I've spent half an hour trying to find it, and I can't) suggesting that one put one's ego aside and deliberately misstate some poker fact out loud to the table. The example given was something like this: "I can't believe I haven't hit a set yet today. When I start with a pocket pair, I should be flopping a set one out of three times, but I've had nine in a row with no set!"

The idea, fairly obviously, is twofold. First, you plant in knowledgeable opponents' minds the notion that you don't know even basic poker math. Second, you may draw out the egotistical player who can't resist openly correcting you. Knowing that somebody at the table knows basic poker math and yet values his ego more than money is a great insight into how to beat him.

I'll admit that I can't pull that off. I'm so naturally quiet that I just don't think I could be convincing. I also can't do any of the things recommended by Richard Taylor in this great piece for Bluff magazine, designed to convince opponents that you're a complete idiot and put them on super monkey tilt.

I don't act out of turn as if I don't know any better, or naively ask the dealer whether a flush beats a straight. It's just not in me. But at least I know not to flaunt the fact that I'm usually more experienced and poker-savvy than most of my opponents. (Incidentally, this is also high on the list of reasons that I have deliberately avoided ever learning any chip tricks. Excessive dexterity with chips signals a history of long hours at a poker table even to a player too clueless to figure out by other means who the good players are.) If they deduce that on their own over time, fine--but I'm not going to help them rush to that conclusion. Why put them on notice that they're up against better competition than they face at their home game in Podunk, Louisiana? It's easier to win their money when they haven't figured that out yet.

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Sights and sounds around town (minimal poker content)

Date: Sat, Sep 13, 2008

1.

Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon just got new felt on their tables. That's usually not cause for a photo and post, but these are really wild--easily the most colorful in town now. The wood looks so real that you have to touch it to convince yourself that it's not actually a wooden table.

Rumor has it that the cowboy shown on the felt, who is also on all sorts of other promotional materials around Bill's, originally had no moustache. But then the aggressive lawyers for Pixar objected, saying that the cartoon looked too much like a certain iconic character from a certain successful 1995 animated feature that that company had made, so Bill's added the moustache to better differentiate the two.

Sorry, but that's the end of the poker content for this post.


2.




I passed this car in the parking lot the other day. I liked the license plate so much I had to stop and take a picture of it.


3.

I was at Red Rock casino yesterday afternoon. All three of the remaining stories herein took place there within the space of five minutes.

I was in a stall of the men's room taking care of business, when somebody entered the stall to my right. I saw his shoes. He was standing up against the wall separating us, with his heels toward me, back against the wall. I figured he was going to engage in one of the various pre-business rituals that I've grown accustomed to hearing take place: wiping down the seat with toilet paper, putting down a paper seat cover, maybe a preparatory flush. But no, it was nothing like that. It was much stranger.

There was a series of loud, non-human noises I couldn't identify. Then I heard the slosh slosh slosh of what was unmistakably something being swirled around inside the toilet! I found this rather alarming. Lots of shuffling around. Things being wiped with a lot more vigor than expected. I couldn't figure out what he was doing.

But then I heard a sound that clarified everything: a brush. Aha! It's the cleaning guy!

Whew!


4.

As I was exiting the stall, I had to pass by the row of urinals. I saw something there that I have seen only once or twice before: An older guy accessing his, uh, parts by hiking one leg of his shorts way up. That's actually why I couldn't help noticing--the contrast of him having black shorts covering up one half of his backside, and his exposed lily-white thigh and butt cheek on the other side. It was seriously weird.

I don't get this behavior. I can't believe that it's faster, easier, or conveys any other advantage over the more traditional routes.

(That's right. This blog has now devolved into bathroom humor and observations. Maybe it's time to give it up, eh?)


5.

Upon leaving the restroom, I passed by a small decorative fountain and pool. Wherever there is such a thing in a public place, people will toss coins in. Here, though, I caught an old man bending over and fishing a quarter out. He gave it a vigorous shake to throw the water off before slipping it into his pocket. He then looked up and saw me staring at him. I'm not the confrontational type, because it's really not my business. But I hope my disapproving glare gave him a little jolt of shame.

People are so strange.


6.

My out-of-town visitor left this morning. One of the last touristy things we did yesterday, after the lunch buffet at Red Rock, was to visit the Las Vegas Art Museum in Summerlin. I had never been there before.

I can't recommend it. It costs $6, and there are only three rooms of art. Now, if these were three rooms filled with Monets and Cezannes and Rembrandts, OK, I'd consider that a treat and a bargain. But--pardon me showing my ignorance here--these pieces are mostly just crap. There were one or two things that were OK, that I wouldn't mind hanging over the sofa. But nearly everything else there, if I noticed it sitting in a Dumpster, I not only wouldn't bother retrieving it, I'd think that it had been put there with good reason.

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Electronic tables nixed for Aliante Station

Date: Fri, Sep 12, 2008

James Klosty, poker room manager for Texas Station, has been picked to also manage the poker room at what will be the chain's newest facility, Aliante Station, scheduled to open November 11, 2008 (at 11:11 p.m., which is more than a little bit silly). There has been a longstanding rumor that the room would open with all electronic tables, provided by PokerTek's rival, Lightning Gaming. This was not just idle chat; it genuinely was under serious consideration.

However, James has given me permission to quote him as follows on the final decision: "Aliante will have real dealers."

He also adds, "The entire building is gorgeous and the poker room is spectacular."

Photo above shot on August 5 by the good folks at Vegas Today and Tomorrow. See here for their Aliante updates.

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