The losing streak comes to a definitive end

Date: Tue, Aug 19, 2008

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Razz book review, part 2

Date: Mon, Aug 18, 2008

This is a continuation of the review begun here.

P. 50: There is a peculiar example situation given on pp. 50-51. It's labeled "You hit a good card on 5th street." The situation is, "You have (4-8) 6,2,4 and your opponent has (x-x) A,J,9.... You started with three good cards, and improved on 4th street. When you bet on 4th street, your opponent called your bet since he had a strong draw. On 5th street, you hit good and he hit bad. Analysis: This is sweet when it happens. You are in the lead and you have the best draw."

I don't get this. How does pairing a hole card with a second 4 constitute "a good card"? How am I "in the lead" here? What is "sweet" about pairing? This makes no sense at all.

I read this over several times, and my best guess is that it's not trying to discuss a card that is actually bad but looks good to an opponent, because that situation is described elsewhere. I think this is a simple typo, and that one of the 4s should have been something like a 3 or an A. But I'm not certain about that. It's a terribly confusing section, whatever the explanation.

Pp. 52-53: Here's the example where pairing a hole card on 5th street is discussed. The example uses the same cards as above, which is probably somehow connected to what I think was just a typographical error in the faulty example I just described.

Anyway, the situation is that you have (4-8) 6,2,4, opponent has (x-x) A,6,J. Mitchell gives this analysis: "Usually when you have the 'visible' lead, you should bet as a bluff. But, since he led with a bet on 4th street, he is not going to fold. In this situation, your opponent is actually both in the lead and has a better 'four-card draw.' Therefore, your best play is to check and your opponent will most likely check behind with his J low. Save your money and see what happens on 6th street."

I don't think this is terrible advice, but it's not the way I would play it. Again, this is a result of having seen literally hundreds of hands in which the opponent bet on 4th while secretly owning a pair or face card in the hole. I think it's mistaken to say flatly that "your opponent is...in the lead." Maybe, but not necessarily (assuming that one disregards my pair and his jack). It would not shock me to see in the hand history when it's all over with that the opponent actually had something like 2-Q in the hole. Even if he isn't on that level of bad as a player, he could simply have started rough. I have 8-6-4-2, but he could have 8-7-6-A or 8-6-5-A, for example. It's not something one should count on, but it's not a possibility one should ignore, either. I see it time after time, day after day.

I would bet here and see how he reacts. If he started rough or with a pair or big card down, he's probably going to give up now, and I don't want to give him a free card with which to catch up.

Perhaps more importantly, poker is a game of deception. Checking is a virtual announcement that the 4 paired one of my hole cards. I don't want my opponent to know that. If one routinely checks the betting lead upon pairing a down card, but bets when given a non-pairing good card, well, you might as well turn your hole cards face up for your opponent. I think a smarter long-term strategy is to routinely bet as if this card were a good one, and make your opponent guess whether it paired you. When he has to guess, he's likely to make mistakes.

At the very least, I think it is imperative, if one is going to check here, that one also sometimes check in the same situation if one caught, say, a 3 instead of a 4. That is, mix up checks and bets in some way that is independent of whether the card received actually improved one's hand, so that opponents can't confidently draw an inference about one's hole cards. Because I essentially never check if 5th street improved my hand, I can't engage in checking when it secretly pairs me, lest I give away my situation.

I want my opponent to think I just made my hand. Even more than that, I want him to fear that I have a made 6-4, if possible. That way, he will think he's drawing super-thin or even dead (depending on what he has in the hole), particularly if he calls here and bricks again on 6th street. I agree with Mitchell that he is probably not going to fold here, but getting him to fold is not really my intention (unless he is one of those that started much worse than would have been smart). My intention primarily has to do with setting him up to worry about my strength from this point in the hand onward, unless he catches perfect cards.

Pp. 56-57: The situation described is you with A-3-4-7-Q, opponent with x-x-6-8-9. Mitchell describes this as "On 5th street, he hit good and you hit bad." Maybe this is overly picky, but I wouldn't describe a 9 as hitting "good." Yeah, it's better than a Q, but if I'm the opponent in this situation, I don't feel very secure about my hand. Yes, the 9 might end up winning it for me if we both go brick-brick on 6th and 7th, so it's a bit of a safety net. But I consider that precious little comfort.

P. 64: Situation is you with 3-2-8-A-6-K, opponent with x-x-6-7-J-5. Mitchell writes, "You had a good starting hand, fell behind on 4th...."

Huh? How did an ace for me and a 7 for my opponent make me fall behind? I don't get this analysis. There may be another typo here, perhaps with an inversion of the cards--for example if he meant to give the example as 3-2-A-8 instead of 3-2-8-A.

P. 71: The two examples on this page describe potentially difficult decisions on 6th street after starting with 4-8-6.

Well, I have a solution for that: Don't start with 4-8-6!

Maybe I'm all wrong about this, but I've come to believe in the gospel of truly tight starting hand requirements (except for steal situations, of course). Hands like 4-8-6 are just plain trouble from the get-go, much like playing stuff like Q-J offsuit in hold'em. They have a high propensity to become second best. They also have a nasty tendency to force one into making very difficult decisions later in the hand, where it's essentially impossible to do more than guess whether one is ahead or behind. That is a situation ripe for making costly mistakes. I say avoid the problem before it begins. If I know that my starting hand requirements are, on average, significantly tighter than those of most of my opponents, that tips the balance in my favor for the entire remainder of the hand, when otherwise close calls arise.

I have almost entirely abandoned starting hands that include an 8--especially any 8-7 or 8-6. They're just not worth it, in my experience. Maybe an 8-3-A or 8-2-A or 8-3-2, but that's about it for me with the 8s. Now, admittedly, this may not be optimally profitable play. I honestly don't know. It's possible that restricting my starting hand range that way in the long run leaves some money on the table. But I am highly confident that it has had at least these beneficial effects: (1) I have fewer agonizing decisions on later streets. (2) On hands where the open cards are very close, I win more showdowns on the river. (3) Opponents defend their bring-ins against my steals less often. (4) My bluffs when I have secretly paired get respected more than they used to.

In short, I'm kind of on the extreme end of both the "selective" and the "aggression" parts of the ol' "selective aggression" advice. It's not the only way to fly, but it's working for me so far.

This is a particularly good trade-off for me, given the peculiar situation in which I play--with my attention mostly focused on other stuff, and looking at the game only when I have a good starting hand. I think it would also be well-suited to playing multiple tables at once, if one were so inclined, because playing only 10-12% of starting hands is feasible on several tables, without being faced with simultaneous difficult situations on two or more tables very often.

This leads me to discuss another general gripe I have about most of Mitchell's examples, which otherwise doesn't fit neatly anywhere in this review: The examples essentially all deal with hands in which 3rd street had one raise and a call, nothing more. My preference is to be unusually aggressive on 3rd street. I think that just about any starting hand I'm willing to go with is worth four-betting if I get reraised. That gets me additional information about how much my opponent values his hand, when he has to choose to cap the betting or just call. Also, it often traps another guy with a stinker hand, who is hoping to get lucky, into putting more money into the pot when well behind, or forces him out after he has contributed a few bets of dead money to the pot, either of which is a +EV situation for me. Again, doing so also projects strength, an image that I will use against my opponent later in the hand, if need be. Besides, because I have a narrower range of starting hands than most other players, I usually am, in fact, ahead on 3rd street, so more money in the pot is what I want.

Unfortunately, by setting up his examples to all have just a single raise/call on 3rd street, Mitchell is unable to discuss how the information one might have gained from watching an opponent's reaction to a 3rd-street reraise influences decisions on later streets. For example, if my opponent capped the betting, it makes it more likely that he's on the best end of his starting hand range, which in turn means that an A or 2 hitting on 4th, 5th, or 6th street is more likely to have paired him--especially if there is an added little pause before he acts (in which you can sense, from hundreds of miles away, his brain working on whether to pretend that he really liked that ace, rather than instantly reacting with glee that he caught it). Mitchell does discuss, on pp. 29-31, tips for deducing where on the strength spectrum an opponent might be sitting on 3rd street, but then he doesn't incorporate this information at all, as far as I can tell, into decision-making on the big-bet streets. For me, this is crucial data. What degree of strength an opponent showed on 3rd often tips the scales for me between a bet and a check, or a call and a raise, on 5th, 6th, and 7th streets.

P. 79: The situation described is you with A-3-2-6-Q-4, opponent with x-x-4-5-9-3. Mitchell advises: "You have a 6-4 made low hand. Your opponent could already have a bike. If he bets into you, you need to call. If he checks, you don't want to be check-raised, so check behind him."

Wow. That strikes me as extraordinarily conservative advice, perhaps even veering into the "weak and timid" range. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but there are very few situations in which I would be unwilling to cap the betting with a 6-perfect. It's kind of like having a king-high flush with three of one's suit on the board on the turn in hold'em. Sure, an opponent might have two of the same suit, with one of them the ace, but that happens so rarely that I'll usually be willing to bet the farm in that spot. In Mitchell's example, the opponent would have to have exactly an A-2 in the hole to be ahead here--no other cards will work. Yet the range of hole cards with which he could have played the hand as described is a lot broader. I'm willing to put my money in saying that he doesn't have the only possible two-card combination that has me beat. I'm going to jam the pot here on both 6th and 7th, and I'm confident that if I do so in this situation a thousand times, I'm the winner well over the 50% that I need to be for this to be profitable.

P. 92: I have exactly the same criticism of the example here. It shows you with (A-3) 2,5,J,K (6), and opponent with (x-x) 3,8,6,Q (x). Mitchell recommends raising his bet. Good--I agree. But then if the opponent reraises, he says just to call. Not me--I'm jamming here. I simply refuse to believe that he has a 6-5 beat. It's not impossible, of course, and once in a while I'll lose a huge pot for my disbelief. But think about it: First, there's only a very few specific combinations of three down cards he could have that beat a 6-5. Second, my opponent here is looking at my J-K showing. He could easily think that I'm bluffing with a third brick on the river and believe that an 8-6 is way good, and it is on that basis that he is pushing. If we both caught a miracle on the end, and his miracle turns out to have edged out my miracle, well, OK, that's how it goes sometimes. But a made 6-5 in a situation in which my opponent can have only the narrowest possible range of down cards to win (i.e., he needs all three of them to be perfect) is so rare that I'll take my chances.


Now for other general comments about the book that aren't really tied to specific pages.

1. I gather from comments I've seen from Mitchell that the contribution of which he is most proud is the analysis of made hands versus drawing hands on 5th street. I absolutely agree that 5th street is the big pivot point in the hand--for the most part, you make it or break it here. It is not always obvious whether a mediocre made hand or a strong draw is favored. So I heartily applaud the work Mitchell did in working this out once and for all. His list of the various made-hand-versus-drawing-hand scenarios, on pp. 55-62, and again summarized neatly on p. 115, is an extremely valuable piece of work. I haven't yet played since reading this stuff, but I'm going to figure out some way of making my own cheat sheet to keep at hand, because this situation comes up all the time, and I'm often not confident what the right move is. With Mitchell's list of all of the possibilties, I'll know what to do.

2. Every single example in the book is against just one opponent. Granted, this is the most common situation, especially on the later streets. But I think it's a disservice to the reader to have zero discussion of multi-way pots. It is the three-way and four-way pots that have been the most profitable ones when I have won them--and, conversely, among the most costly ones when I have lost them, because of the raising wars that they frequently generate. It makes no sense to me to pretend that they don't exist or are unimportant.

3. I think a book like this needs a list of resources--blogs, online forums dedicated to razz, online calculators/simulators, etc. With only 130 pages of text, the author obviously doesn't believe he has taught the reader everything there is to know about the game, so why not point the reader to other places in which to learn more?

4. There is no discussion of razz tournament strategy versus cash game play, and only little scraps here and there about short-handed versus full-table play. A thorough treatment of razz would include large sections devoted to those subjects.

5. I think it would also have been helpful to the novice reader to have some discussion comparing the online sites for razz, since probably 99% of all of the razz played in the world is done online, rather than in casinos.


OK, that's the end of my observations. I want to again reiterate my two big caveats--that I'm no expert and I could easily be dead wrong in my opinions here, and that many or most of my disagreements may be based on differences in how people actually play at low stakes versus medium or higher stakes. In fact, I should perhaps add that caveat to my general list of omissions for which I criticize the author--explicit discussion of how play differs at low versus medium stakes would probably be highly valuable for the beginning razz player.

Even with the differences in opinion in the spots I've detailed above, please remember that there is page after page after page where I worked out what I would do in the situation described, and then found that Mitchell came to exactly the same recommendation--which obviously means that he's a friggin' genius! It looks like less than ten spots where I disagreed with his recommended action, out of well over a hundred examples given in the book.

This book has its flaws, but I still wouldn't hesitate to recommend it as an excellent introduction to sound basic strategy. And given the dearth of competition, it's hard to think of anything else that one could recommend. (Possible exception: A couple of days ago, I received in the mail Ken Warren's new book on straight stud, stud/8, and razz. Haven't read it yet, so I can't say how its razz section will compare to Mitchell's work.) So if you want to learn razz, go buy it. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

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Book review: "Play Razz Poker To Win"

Date: Mon, Aug 18, 2008

I mentioned Mitchell Cogert's book back in March when the subject of razz first caught my attention. Mitchell has a poker blog here (mostly about razz, but with some stuff on hold'em) and a web site about his book--which appears to be self-published--here. When the book arrived in the mail, I spent an hour or so reading the first couple of chapters, then put it aside and never finished it. Based on that initial reading, I recommended it to a couple of people.

Well, tonight I finally got around to really tackling it head-on. I have read it carefully, except for the final section, which is basically a description of every hand that the author played in a $5/$10 razz session last December. I'm interested in going through those hands, but it won't affect my analysis of the book, so I'm writing up my impressions now.

I should mention at the outset that Mitchell and I have exchanged several emails, and I've found him to be friendly, smart, analytical, and open to suggestions.

First, the minor stuff. This book really needed an editor. It's far from the worst I've seen in terms of typographical and grammatical errors, but enough of them slipped through that it leaves readers--at least a reader as picky as I am--with a sense of unprofessionalism. For example, "odds" as a singular noun on pp. 12 and 44, the strange use of the word "flop" on p. 22, a missing possessive apostrophe on p. 29, confusion between "affect" and "effect" on p. 29, "maybe" versus "may be" on p. 35, "goods odds" on p. 44, "whose" instead of "who's" on p. 47, "weary" instead of "wary" on p. 54, "you was called" on p. 64 and again on p. 65, "there was two or more raises" on p. 115. Stuff like that drives me crazy.

Now for the substantive matters. Here I have to introduce a caveat so large that you may want to disregard the entire rest of my review: I'm not an expert at razz by any means, and it may be laughable for me to be reviewing a book on the subject as if I know what I'm talking about. Furthermore, my understanding of the game is still in rapid evolution, the steep part of the learning curve, and it may be that where I disagree with Mitchell, he's absolutely right, I'm absolutely wrong, and six months or a year from now I'll reread these words and cringe at how foolish I was.

However, as I have occasionally reported here, I have been more successful at the game than I thought I would be, at least for the past month or so. I'm in a much better position to do a book review now than I was when it came in the mail in, I think, early April.

There's another caveat: In many, perhaps most, cases, my disagreements on strategy choice are based on my experiences playing PokerStars razz at $0.50/$1, $1/$2, and $2/4, plus the razz component of my almost-daily $10 HORSE single-table tournaments on the same site. What works at these lowest stakes may not be good advice upon moving up to $5/$10 and above. Similarly, I found Sklansky's book on razz not only quite poorly written, but almost completely useless as an introductory text, because he focuses very specifically on live $15/$30 and $30/$60 games. That's a whole different razz world than the one I inhabit.

I also want to mention that I'm diligent about checking the hand history (either the text-only form or PS's snazzy new animated version) immediately after virtually every hand I'm involved with, so I really do know what people have been playing against me. Unlike on Full Tilt (where I believe Mitchell puts in most of his time), Stars lets you see the cards in the order they were dealt, so you don't have to guess what starting hands players took to battle. In my view, that's such a big advantage that it makes playing razz on FTP a vastly inferior choice to Stars, if you care about understanding your opponents' play.

So with those preliminaries out of the way, I'll plunge ahead.

Because I'm going to list my specific disagreements, it's worth pointing out explicitly that I agreed with maybe 90-95% of the advice and analysis and statements about what he would do in specific cases. It's easy to lose sight of that fact when looking at what will appear to be a litany of differences of opinion.

P. 19: Mitchell advises not defending the bring-in if one's up card is two ranks or more above the up card of the raiser. Frankly, I think this is pretty silly. If I'm defending my bring-in, I don't really care if I'm showing a K, a Q, a J, or a 10. Nor do I care whether my opponent is showing an A or a 7 or a 9. Let me explain why.

There are really only two possibilities. First, I think my opponent in late position is simply trying to steal with a bad hand. In that case, I assume that, regardless of what he's showing, he has at least one stinker card, a pair or a face card. When that's so, we're basically on even footing, even if my bad card is a K and his is a J, because neither of us is going to be pressing on later streets if we're including that bad card in our best five-card hand. In other words, if my bad card on 3rd is still part of my best hand on 7th, I'm not going to be putting any more money into the pot anyway. I'm either going to make a hand in which the bad card doesn't play, or I'm going to give up--so I don't care if it's a K or a 10.

The other possibility is that I actually believe my opponent is starting off strong, with three unpaired small cards, and I'm just hoping that I get lucky and he gets unlucky. Now, this may be utter donkey play, but I think it makes sense, with specific constraints. I have no mathematical justification for this, but my practice has been to defend against a single opponent for a single raise if my hole cards are both 5 or lower. If I catch bad on 4th, I'll shut down and fold to a bet even if my opponent caught bad, too. I'm not going to try to catch three good cards in a row to beat him. But if on 4th I catch good and he catches bad, then we're on roughly equal ground, and I'm often a favorite, since I've probably been pickier about selecting my two down cards to go to war with than my opponent has been. If on 4th I have A-3-K-6, and he has X-X-6-J, I'm very happy with the situation. Yeah, I'm officially behind as the hands are, but most likely neither my K nor his J will be a factor at the end, and my 6-3-A is quite likely to be ahead of his best three cards.

That's why I think Mitchell's "two level" rule doesn't make sense. It keeps coming up in other contexts through the book, and I disagree with it in those spots, too, for similar reasons.

Again, this may be specific to the bad players in the low levels at which I play and not a valid observation at higher stakes. I don't know. But I see a lot of players raising quite indiscriminately, with a hidden bad card and without good position.

P. 24: Mitchell introduces his point system for evaluating razz starting hands based on the cards, position, what other cards are showing, and the action before one makes a decision.

I'm highly suspicious of all attempts in poker to reduce decisions to formulas, and I have to include this one in my doubts. I would feel better about it if Mitchell could tell us that he had run thousands of simulated hands using a variety of differently tweaked point systems, and this is the one that yielded the best results. But as it is, it looks homemade and like guesswork to me.

A point system is undoubtedly better than if somebody does nothing but look at his own three cards, because it does incorporate all of the relevant factors (at least all those that are quantifiable--it doesn't and can't include factors such as whether the raiser is a known maniac). But I'm not at all sure that it's better than a non-quantitative, gestalt evaluation of the situation. I think it would work just as well to give general advice, such as "Be less inclined to call or raise when more of the cards you need to catch are showing," as to try to make a mechanical point system. But if it helps new players force themselves to notice and account for the relevant facts, perhaps it's more useful to them than I'm giving it credit for.

P. 30: "If a player raises with a 4 showing and a player calls with a 6 showing, the raiser may be on a steal but the caller most likely has three cards to an 8 or better."

Well, this is certainly how it should be, but, trust me, it ain't necessarily so at low stakes. People call raises with K-A-3 or 2-2-4 all the time.

P. 37: The example given is me with a 6-7-4-K against an opponent's X-X-7-7. Mitchell writes, "Don't bet here.... Wait till 5th street to decide the relative strength of your hand. Otherwise, if he hits good on 5th street and you hit bad, you have wasted a bet."

I couldn't disagree more strongly here, though yet again this may be because of the bad average quality of opposition that I'm used to. When a substantial fraction of opponents here actually have a hidden bad card (high one or a pair), both of us hitting bad on 4th becomes a great time to discover that fact and take down the pot with a bet. If I get called, then I can be reasonably confident that he is not in that category. In other words, this is a juicy time to set up a screening test by betting. It usually chases away the hands that now have two bad cards. So you either win the pot or you more clearly define your opponent's hand.

Moreover, because I'm so dang tight with my 3rd-street starting requirements, by the same logic I explained above (i.e., that if both my opponent and I have one bad card each now, neither of us will be using that bad card by the end of the hand), I should on average be ahead here, because both of us catching bad on 4th street leaves the status basically as it was on 3rd street. Perhaps if my opponent reraised me on 3rd and I just called that would imply a different situation. But if my opponent just called me on 3rd, he probably doesn't have one of the ultra-premium starting hands.

Even if we're very close at this point, I don't mind getting an extra bet from each of us into the pot, because I believe that I make, on average, better decisions on the later streets, so more money in the pot works to my advantage.

Finally, betting instead of checking projects more strength, and may help make a bluff more likely to succeed on later streets. Checking seems to be saying, "I not only didn't like that card, but I'm no longer as thrilled about my first three." Betting, conversely, seems to announce, "Yeah, 4th street didn't help me, but I started out this race ahead of you, I'm still ahead, and you, my sad little friend, are running out of streets on which to catch up."

P. 43: Mitchell writes, "As a result, you have an outcome you wanted to avoid: putting in three bets on 4th street and still having two opponents."

I don't think it's correct that this is necessarily a situation one wants to avoid. If I'm in a close race with a good opponent, but there's a bad one with an awful hand desperately trying to catch up, I'm delighted to have him stick around and continue contributing money to the pot. Hell, it's best for me if he raises when he's way behind!

It's kind of like in high/low games: if you and another player are going to be taking the high and low, but there's a third player who is drawing nearly dead for both parts of it, by all means let him put as many chips in as he is willing to!

In razz, of course, the pot won't be chopped like that, but the idea is the same: welcome into the hand the player who has the worst chance of winning it, and cap the betting if you can. If one opponent and I are roughly equally likely to take it down at the end, it is in both of our best interests to suck as many chips as possible out of the guy who is trailing. Repeat that scenario a thousand times, and if I win 40% of the pots, my good opponent 40%, and the lagging-behind guy only 20%, it's hugely +EV for both me and the other good opponent to pump the pot as far as the bad opponent will tolerate.

A couple of years ago, Mike Caro opened my eyes about the flawed concept of "thinning the field" in poker. In brief, overly aggressive raising tends to weed out the wrong players. You may keep the strongest players with the best hands, and drive away the weakest players with the worst hands, which is not what you want to accomplish. There is also, for each poker hand, a mathematically optimal number of opponents to maximize long-term profit, and that number is often something different from one. See his eye-opening article from Bluff magazine here. He was writing about hold'em specifically, but surely the same concepts are valid in razz. Yet Mitchell seems to sort of blithely assume that one always wants to contest a pot heads-up. It's just not true.

OK, that's enough for now. Much more to say, but it's after 2 a.m. and I have to take my car in for a couple of new tires in the morning. I'll try to finish up this review tomorrow.

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On my non-iPod

Date: Mon, Aug 18, 2008

The first I heard of this CD was when Shamus mentioned it last week in a post detailing the poker references made in Rolling Stone magazine over the years. I zipped over to amazon.com and ordered myself a used copy right away. I've never come across anything that Ricky Jay has done or been in that I didn't like, so it was not a difficult decision. The disc arrived Friday, and I gave it a first listen today. Me likey.

There are 19 poker-related songs, plus one track that is a snippet of dialog between Jay and Joe Mantegna from the movie "House of Games"--coincidentally the same scene that I mentioned here.

The songs selected range in dates from 1914 to 2004, and come from jazz, blues, country, plus a few not readily categorized, such as Bob Dylan, or Lorne Greene narrating (rather than attempting to sing) a ballad, the plot of which might remind modern poker-playing listeners of the movie "Lucky You."

I think my favorite song on the first time through was, ironically, probably the least directly connected to poker: "Ace in the Hole," by Dave Van Ronk. Below are the lyrics, as found here:

This town is full of guys who think they’re mighty wise,
Just because they know a thing or two.
You can see them every day, strolling up and down Broadway,
Telling of the wonders they can do.
You’ll see wise guys and boosters,
Card sharps and crap shooters,
They congregate around the Metropole.
They wear those flashy ties and collars,
But where they get their dollars,
They’ve all got an ace down in the hole.

Some of them write to the old folks for coin,
That’s their ace in the hole.
Others have girls on that old tenderloin,
That’s their ace in the hole.

They’ll tell you of trips they are going to take,
From Frisco up to the North Pole.
But they’d end up on that line, in their clothes not a dime,
If they lost that old ace in the hole.

Wherever you might stray, along the Great White Way,
They’ll corner you and start in telling lies.
Of oil wells in Nebraska and gold mines in Alaska,
You’ll be immersed in bullshit to your eyes.
But every hustler knows
Bullshit buys no clothes
And only cold cash keeps you off the dole.
So some of them wash dishes,
And some of them are snitches,
But all of them have aces in the hole.

Drifters who dwell on that slippery slope,
Grifters who jump their parole,
Trying to sell bags of catnip for dope,
That’s their ace in the hole.

They’ll tell you of money they’ve made and they’ve spent
And flash a Missouri bankroll.*
But their names would be mud,
Like a chump dealing stud
If they lost that old ace in the hole.


*I had to look up this term. It's "a roll or wad of blank paper, cut to the same size as dollar bills, surrounded by a few real notes of high denomination." See here for the defintion and history.

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Mr. Helpful

Date: Sun, Aug 17, 2008

Friday night I was at the Venetian, as previously mentioned. There was another player at the table who is worthy of being memorialized here, for good or ill--mostly the latter.

When you get a seat in a poker room, in some places you buy chips from the dealer. In others they sell you chips at the check-in desk. In some you have to make a detour to the cashier's window for chips before taking your seat. And in yet others you sit down and they have a chip runner make the trek to the cashier for you. The Venetian uses the last approach. That means that for the first hand or two, you play without chips. Whatever you may lose, you have to make up to the winner of the hand(s) when your chips arrive. (One time, though, I had the pleasure of doubling up on my first hand there. The chip runner was very confused when she arrived back from the cage and I already had a stack of chips sitting in front of me.)

My first hand, I was the big blind. I know the drill. Even if I don't play the hand, I'll owe $2 to whoever takes the pot. But there was a guy on my immediate left who couldn't leave it at that. Without asking, he takes $50 in chips from his stack and plops them down in front of me. "I'm lending you $50," he says. I don't need it, and frankly I'd rather handle it in the usual way. Among other potential problems, the dealer didn't see this exchange, and will have to wonder where those chips came from. (It's against the rules for one player to give chips to another, because if somebody needs chips, the casino wants to sell them to the person in need, thus putting more money into play and increasing their revenue.) You can also imagine this causing problems if he later claims that he gave me $60, or whatever. I don't say anything about his pushy "helpfulness," but I also don't put a chip out for my big blind, preferring not to touch the chips he has given me if possible. It all got worked out quickly, and didn't end up being anything more than a minor annoyance, but it was my first taste of how intrusive this guy was going to be about everything.

He was the self-appointed table captain, though not in the usual way that term is used, with respect to dominating the action with aggressive betting. He was actually a fairly weak player. But his demeanor and actions in regard to what was happening at the table were clearly designed to convey that he knew what was going on better than anybody else.

Whenever a question arose--where is the action, what is the bet, how many chips does that guy have left, stuff like that--Mr. Helpful was the first to pipe up with the answer. If a player had a question about what his options were or what the correct procedure was for handling some situation, Mr. Helpful was right there. After all, obviously the dealer can't handle such complicated matters nearly as well as he could.

One time when I made a bet of $35, with the seven red chips in one stack, Mr. Helpful reached out and broke the stack down into two stacks of three each and one separate. He commented to me, "That way it's easier for them to see how much it is."

Yeah, well, I understand that. But there's a reason I do it the way I do. I'm not trying to be an obstructionist, but if the amount is not entirely obvious to an opponent across the table, he will need to ask the dealer for a count of the bet, and in the way he asks for a count, the way he watches the dealer count it, and the way responds to the dealer's answer, there is often useful information about his reaction to the bet--that is, is he eager to call, reluctant to call, pondering a raise, perhaps? Mr. Helpful stepping in takes away that potential bit of revelation.

Moreover, it is generally considered very rude to touch another player's cards or chips. It doesn't happen often, but you never know when some scam artist will palm a chip or two off the top when handling them, or miscount and thus cause a problem, or topple a tall stack that then falls into the pot, making it impossible to know the bet size. (The only time I do it is if a player is habitually not placing the items within the dealer's reach, even after being asked to do so. In that situation, if I can do it easily, I'll give the chips or cards a quick flick towards the center with an open hand.)

So I didn't appreciate Mr. Helpful stepping in, but I don't want to speak in the middle of a hand, and I don't want to generate animosity with a guy I have to sit next to, so I don't say anything about it.

Mr. Helpful reminds me a lot of Pauli Gualtieri from "The Sopranos." He's about that age. He has apparently taken up bodybuilding late in life, and loves showing off his muscles. He's wearing a skin-tight shirt with almost no sleeves, made of black Lyrca, or some such silly, thin, stretchy fabric, plus a ridiculous amount of cheap, fake bling, including a hugely oversized cross on a thick gold chain. He has a meticulously trimmed moustache, which looked like it belonged on one of the Village People. As you might expect from this personality type, he's full of stupid self-indulgent stories about his life, his bad beats, his money, his adventures, etc. The earbuds went in a lot earlier than they usually do, with this bozo on my left. It was worse with us being in seats 9 and 10, because he had nobody (except the dealer) on his other side to make a victim of his ramblings.

If you were to ask this guy why he injects himself into every tiny question that arises at the table, he would insist that he's just trying to be helpful. He might even believe that himself. But if so, it's self-delusion. Combined with the other aspects of his personality I described, it's perfectly apparent that what really matters to him is being noticed, being admired, being seen as the guy who has been there/done that and knows how everything works.

To be sure, there is a lot about casino poker that can be confusing and/or intimidating to a newcomer, and it's good to have more experienced players willing to step in and lend a little help when it's called for. But you have to be careful about this, for several reasons. First, it's better, overall, if the new player develops the habit of asking his questions to the dealer rather than to other players. Second, it's easy to accidentally cross the line and give more help than is proper. Third, just like guys who won't stop to ask for directions untill they've driven off the pier into the Atlantic Ocean, some people deeply resent being given assistance they didn't ask for, because it chips away at their masculinity and independence. I flatter myself that I have a pretty good sense of which pieces of advice are OK and when they will or will not be welcomed, but maybe I'm more oblivious to people's feelings that I know. Regardless, this guy was like a bull in a china shop* with his aggressively invasive advice, without respect to whether the player involved either wanted or needed his help. It was pretty obnoxious.

Mr. Helpful's veneer of excessive friendliness was proven to be a sham, a cover for deep-seated personal insecurities, when he started losing and went on Super Monkey Tilt. The first evidence of this was when Seat 5 opened up and he wanted to move there. Because of where the button was, this meant that he had to post the amount of the big blind.** He got into a huge argument with the dealer about this, insisting that he knew this was wrong because at his home casino they wouldn't make a player post in this situation. (House rules do indeed vary quite a bit on this point.) From the glances and rolled eyes and head shakes exchanged around the table it was clear that the universal opinion was this: Dude, it's two friggin' dollars--either shut up and pay it, or go back to your previous seat, but stop holding up the damn game.

The same dealer ended up in another argument with Mr. Helpful a short time later. I don't remember the preflop and flop action, because nothing about them caught my attention. (I wasn't involved.) But it was Mr. Helpful and a guy two seats to his left, who was a scary-solid player. On the turn, Mr. Helpful bet $70, leaving himself exactly $2 behind--a pretty silly move in itself. He had unimproved aces. Mr. Solid had flopped a set, as it turned out, so one way or another all of the money was going in here. Mr. Solid saw the bet, had the dealer count it out, noticed that Mr. Helpful had just $2 left, and therefore pushed out a stack of exactly 25 red chips--$75--obviously assuming that Mr. Helpful would just toss in his last $2, he'd get $3 change, and they'd quickly finish up the hand. The dealer told Mr. Helpful, "He's putting you all in."

Mr. Helpful protested. "He can't do that. That's not a legal raise." Well, technically this is true. A full raise would have to be to $140, and when Mr. Solid put out an amount slightly greater than the bet he was facing, the usual ruling would be that it was just a call. But in this specific situation, where it was only these two players involved, and Mr. Solid was obviously just trying to find the least complicated way of getting the last of the chips in, it was a completely bogus, absurd, hypertechnical complaint. The dealer tried to explain it, but Mr. Helpful was adamant in his protest. Mr. Solid, a quiet, thoughtful, smart guy, quickly relented, so as to de-escalate the confrontation. "That's fine, you can just leave it as a call." He took back one redbird.

So that's what they did. But it was completely stupid, because there was another card to come and another round of betting, so even if Mr. Helpful wanted to save his last $2 for some idiotic reason, Mr. Solid, acting last, would still have the option of making a $2 bet on the river, which Mr. Helpful would basically have to call anyway. As it happened, Mr. Helpful made the bet himself on the river, and, of course, got called, and, of course, lost. Mr. Helpful couldn't just let it go, but continued well after the hand was over to engage the dealer in an argument about how that bet should have been handled. He said, "I'm a dealer, too. I know how these things work." Utterly pointless. Unfortunately, the dealer was not level-headed enough to just shut up and ignore the rantings, but took the bait and continued the argument, thus delaying the start of the next hand for another minute or two of aggressive penis-wagging (which I understand will be an official Olympic event in 2012). I hope they enjoyed themselves.

Unlike my usual approach to story-telling, I don't really have a meaningful larger point to be made here. I just thought this guy was enough of a ludicrous tool that readers might find it amusing to read about him. The world is full of strange characters, and the poker rooms of Vegas seem to attract them in droves.



*BTW, this expression turns out not to be very accurate. For one of most surprising results in the history of "Mythbusters," one of my favorite TV shows, see here for what actually happens when you put bulls in a china shop.

**Simplified explanation: If you change seats in such a way that you will end up in the big blind sooner than you would have if you stayed put, there is no problem. But if you move in such a way that it delays your big blind by more than one or two spots, you have to post the amount of the big blind upon moving. This is to deter nits from moving around the table over and over again in an attempt to avoid paying the blind. Yeah, there really are people out there who would do that, if allowed to get away with it.

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Nice watches, horrible editing

Date: Sun, Aug 17, 2008

In Todd Bruson's Card Player magazine column in the current issue, he mentions having recently become an endorser of Hardcore Watches. So I checked out the company's web site to see what cool stuff they produce. They have a few other poker players shilling for them, though I didn't recognize any of the other names.

The first thing I noticed on the home page, though, was the invitation shown above: "Your invited" to the Grand Opening (I think that means of their new store inside the Rio). Apparently the company is so cheap it can't afford an "e" and an apostrophe. Or an editor who knows the difference between "your" and "you're."

Idiots.

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Life is all about the EV (expected value)

Date: Sun, Aug 17, 2008

-EV: Having the tread suddenly separate from my right front tire at 65 mph on I-15 on my way home from Bill's.

+EV: Having no traffic around me when this occurred, so no resulting collision.

+EV: Driving a Honda Prelude, which, when I bought it 16 years ago, was dubbed by Car and Driver magazine as the "best-handling car for under $20,000." (Amazing what a nice car one could buy for that price back then.) It has proven this with flying colors in a few emergency situations in our time together, and tonight was another. It remained unbelievably stable and controllable for having a front tire suddenly blow out, and I had no difficulty at all pulling off onto the shoulder and stopping without panic or incident. In fact, it was so perfectly under control at all times that I was stunned when I inspected the damage and found that the problem was not a loosened wheel, as I had guessed, but an absolutely shredded tire.

-EV: I was about 100 yards past the Sahara exit, which would have been very handy if I could have used it. I decided it was too dangerous to try to back up to get off of the interstate that way, and much too far to the next exit (Charleston) to proceed.

+EV: I have the original spare tire, fully inflated, which has been waiting in the trunk for 16 years for its moment on the stage.

-EV: When my car was stolen last year, the thieves apparently decided to keep the lug wrench before abandoning the car in North Las Vegas--a fact of which I have been blissfully unaware until now. Spare tire, yes. Jack, yes. Lug wrench, no.

+EV: I have a friend whom I can call even at 2:00 in the morning to rescue me, and I have a working cell phone with a good signal.

-EV: She discovers that she, too, is missing a lug wrench from her trunk.

+EV: I carry a yellow pages phone book in the car, and quickly locate a nearby towing service that will come change the tire for me.

-EV: Highway shoulders are terribly dangerous places. Lots of people get killed every year when drunk/crazy/distracted/sleeping/swerving drivers plow into disabled cars and/or their owners.

+EV: By happenstance, I have come to a stop at the very beginning of a construction zone, so there is a row of those concrete barricades that I can hop over, providing me quite decent protection from such accidents while I wait.

-EV: Soon after I call for the tow truck, a homeless guy comes up the embankment and chooses a spot about 15 yards from me as the place where he will (1) drink his bottle of booze, (2) apparently spend the night, and (3) engage in a loud argument with somebody unseen, either imaginary or hidden in the rocks and trees below. He doesn't give me any specific reason to think that he's a threat to me, but since I'm carrying about $1500 cash, this definitely adds to my level of discomfort.

+EV: I habitually have on my person implements adequate for very reasonable self-defense if necessary. 'Nuff said.

+EV: About 45 minutes and $55 later, I'm on my way again.

Overall, it was yet another unpleasant and annoying detour and obstacle in my life, but there are all sorts of ways in which it could have turned out much, much worse.

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Most unusual sunglasses

Date: Sun, Aug 17, 2008

This very nice man was seated to my immediate left at Bill's tonight. He had the most unusual sunglasses I've ever seen. They had no lenses, but just solid slats, occupying about 50% of the "lens" area, with the remainder completely open--sort of like looking through a horizontal picket fence. Very peculiar.

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Update on reversal of fortune

Date: Sun, Aug 17, 2008

After a quick stop at a friend's housewarming party tonight, I was off to Bill's Gamblin' Hall. I left 2 1/2 hours later with an extra $294 in my wallet. So I think I can state with some conclusiveness that the horrid skid has come to an end. Poker feels back under control again.

Both of my most profitable hands were quirky little ones with which I called a pre-flop raise with position on the raiser. The first was 7-8 offsuit, which matched rather nicely with the 5-6-9 rainbow flop, and gave me the entire stack of a nice woman who was holding pocket kings.

On the second one I called the raise from the button with 3-5 of hearts. The final board was 3-3-9-10-J, and I took all of the chips of two other players, one with an overpair (the original raiser) and one with J-9.

It definitely feels like the poker train is back on the tracks. Confidence and patience are rapidly returning to pre-disaster levels.

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Reversal of fortune?

Date: Sat, Aug 16, 2008

I rarely mention how I've been running because (1) it's nobody's business, (2) I don't think anybody cares, outside of my family and closest friends, (3) it's not very interesting, (4) I'd like to think that I have interesting stories and commentary independent of whether I've been winning or losing lately, (5) when I'm winning, saying so feels like bragging, and when I'm losing, saying so feels like whining. So I mostly just shut up about the whole subject.

But I can't tell you about tonight without the recent background. August has been, well, horrible. Terrible. Awful. Painful. Grotesque. Unfathomable. Disastrous. Get the picture? I've lost more in the first half of August than in any full month since I started playing poker. Before tonight, 10 of my last 11 and 12 of my last 15 sessions had been losers, a streak unlike any I've ever had before. The downward skid in my cumulative-results graph is shocking; it looks like I've fallen off a cliff. It has been apocalyptically bad.

(This doesn't include online play. As I mentioned recently, until a couple of weeks ago, online poker has been just a few tens of dollars here and there, not even enough to bother cashing out, let alone set up a detailed accounting system for. But even though the online income is picking up, it's like a bucketful of water on what has been a house burning down.)

Everything has gone wrong. Bluffs get picked off. Strong hands get called and sucked out on. I read opponents wrong, folding when I should call or raise and vice-versa. I get second nuts beaten by the nuts time after time after time.

Lemme tell ya, this sort of streak does things to even the soundest of minds. I started sessions thinking that I shouldn't even waste time playing, because I could get the same outcome in a lot less time by just handing a few C-notes to randomly selected strangers sitting in the poker room and go home. And, of course, once you start thinking fatalistically like that, it utterly saps the self-confidence, and adversely affects the decision-making process, causing a cascading effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a downward spiral out of control. You begin to believe that you know absolutely nothing about this stupid game, and then you start playing in a way that proves it.

I've always taken a day off anytime I have two losing days in a row, in order to sort of reset myself mentally and emotionally, and feel like that bit of nastiness is well behind me before I start afresh. That hasn't worked here.

It feels like hell. It feels like being in a war zone with no escape. It feels like being unable to wake up from a nightmare. It's Kafkaesque.

If you've never read Larry Phillips's wonderful description of a bad losing streak that I posted here as my first-ever "Poker Gem," please go do so now. It is spot-on. I'm sure nobody has ever penned a more true-to-life portrayal of how thoroughly it corrodes one's mind and poker skills.

But he's leaving something out. He's neglecting the added level of sheer panic that begins to set in when you have to win in order to buy groceries, pay the rent, keep the car running, etc. The spectre of homelessness and hunger adds a depth of crushing fear that I don't think you can appreciate unless you've experienced it.

Yeah, I have enough $ in reserve by now that this downswing hasn't bankrupted me. But if I were to continue to spew this badly for the rest of the month, the needle would be into the red zone, with no gas station for miles around, and I would be in deep doo-doo. I had to snap the bad streak. But paradoxically, the more that one feels that one must win, the more one tends to force situations, to try to wrest a victory when it is not to be. Panic and desperation kill the kind of relaxed "flow" without which poker simply cannot be played well.

So I set out for the Venetian tonight with dread and foreboding. I even had to stop at the ATM on the way there to pick up cash with which to play. I hate that. It's the walk of shame, the most concrete proof of failure. I could not completely dismiss the thought that I was talking this money out of the bank and was just going to give it away across a poker table, and how stupid that was, and how I would be better off just staying home and watching TV for the next, oh, year or two.

Like I said, this sort of streak does crazy things to the mind. I've even found myself entertaining thoughts that maybe this new PokerStars sweatshirt I've been wearing is what's bringing me bad luck, because it was right around the time it arrived in the mail that I started losing. It's the sort of silly, superstitious thought that I would normally laugh off the instant it occurred to me, but desperation sometimes trumps rationality, and I can't easily shrug off even the most far-out ideas that offer to make understandable what is otherwise beyond comprehension.

Something peculiar happened when I got to the Venetian. The parking spot I found was between two Honda Fits. Just about as soon as Honda released the Fit to the U.S. market a couple of years ago, I decided that that's probably what my next car will be, when my current one finally collapses into a pile of shards, like Oliver Wendall Holmes's Wonderful One-Hoss Shay. They're great little cars, just right for my needs. But demand for them has vastly exceeded Honda's initial projections, so they haven't been making enough of them, and it's still quite uncommon to see them on the streets.

With the way my thinking has been warped and distorted and made vulnerable to all manner of loopy ideas by this losing streak, something in my head clicked about this fortuitous parking spot. It's a sign of some sort--an affirmation that, yes, things will turn around and I'll be able to afford a new car when I need one. No, I don't seriously believe deep down that the universe caused these two cars to be where they were just as a personal manifestation to me, but my ability to banish such absurdities has been mightily compromised.

Things started OK inside the Venetian poker room. I had increased my starting stack by $50 or so in the first hour. I had the strategically best seat at the table, with the loose-passive frequently bluffing bad player on my right, and the ultimate rock on my immediate left.* But when I got pocket kings and got into a raising war with another player, it turned out he had the other two kings, and we just got our money back. (Still, that seemed a vast improvement from how things had been running for me lately.) Then I lost my whole stack to the loose-passive horrible player the one time in the evening he found A-A. Argh! It's happening again! The streak is going to continue!

But I rebought and patiently kept looking for good spots. I built things up slowly again. Finally the moment of truth arrived. Mr. Loose-Passive's wife came to get him. He gave her the "let me play one more hand" line--and it was one too many. He had J-Q to my A-Q, and when a Q hit the flop and another on the turn, his chips became mine. I was up by a net profit of $210, and I took the money and ran, before the poker gods could notice that they had slipped up and let me win.

(By the way, Ron Rose was at the Venetian, two tables away, playing $1-2 no-limit. It seemed very strange to me that he would be playing at that level, when he can and does routinely buy himself into $10,000 tournaments.)

I also left because it was 11:15. The Sahara has an 11:00 p.m. tournament, and catching players on tilt from busting out of that tournament has been one of the most consistently profitable moves for me. I hate the Sahara poker room and nearly everything about it. But it's a cash cow, and has been the way I've broken bad streaks in the past. (My records tell me I've played 12 sessions there, 10 highly profitable and 2 small losses.) I had hopes that it would serve that purpose yet again.

I sat down in Seat 1. This proved to be a fortuitous choice, because the table maniac was in Seat 10, on my immediate right. (I didn't know this at the time, of course.) On my very first hand, I saw A-A, just as I heard Mr. Maniac announce a raise to $10. I reraised to $35. It folded back around to him. He looked at my stack (I had bought in for my usual $100), then said, "Let's get it all in." I replied, "That sounds OK to me." He had K-10. But they were sooted! A flop of A-10-8, with only one of his suit, left him drawing very thin, and a second 8 on the turn gave me an unbeatable aces full. I doubled up on my first hand. (The guy was a very good sport about it. Nothing deterred him from having fun, bless his heart. He quipped, with faux shock and dismay, "That guy cracked my king-ten!")

The very next hand, Mr. Maniac announces before he looks at his cards that if there's a face card, he's going all-in. He peeks, says, "I've got one," and shoves. I have A-K. I am not afraid, especially now that I'm playing with his chips. I call, show my cards, and hit a king on the turn. He mucks without showing, and rebuys.

A few hands later I flop two pair and raise Mr. Maniac's flop bet yet again. This time he seems to have learned his lesson and reluctantly folds top pair. I show. I want this table to be afraid of me. It seems to work. From then on, when I bet or raise, I get only token opposition. Now, this isn't really the best way to build up a stack, because hands end early, before a lot of chips get into the middle. But given recent history, tonight Ill be content with small, safe steps forward.

Finally, after about an hour, and after a dry spell of cards, I decide to throw a curve. I raise from the cutoff position with 7-9 offsuit in a straddled pot. The straddler is my only caller. The flop is J-10-X. Nothing for me there except a gutshot straight draw. My opponent checks. I make the continuation bet. He calls. Uh-oh. Now what do I do? Well, I guess not everything can go my way in a session.

Or maybe it can, because the dealer just put out an unbelievable 8 on the turn, giving me a jack-high straight--the second nuts. I'm only beat if he happened to be playing Q-9, which seems incredibly unlikely. He checks again, and I move all-in. He calls. He has A-J for top pair/top kicker, and is already drawing dead, poor guy. It was sick, sick, sick. But am I giving back the chips? Nooooooooooo.

Soon thereafter, I felted yet another player when I flopped top two pair (K-J) to his flopped top and bottom pair (K-7).

Once again, I got the impression that this was as good as things were going to get, and I should hightail it out of there before the chips started migrating back to where they had come from.

So between the lovely Venetian and the nasty Sahara I managed to erase about a quarter of the deficit I had accumulated thus far in August. For once, I'll be thrilled if I end the month having broken even. Maybe tonight was the first step toward achieving that goal. Whatever happens the rest of the month, tonight was a breathtaking turnaround. All of a sudden, winning was as easy and automatic as losing had been before.

But I'll tell you, next time I set out to play, I'm gonna keep driving around the parking garage until I find two Fits to park between. And I'm leaving that damn unlucky sweatshirt at home.



*This guy was far and away the tightest player I've ever seen. It was astonishing. The first time I saw him voluntarily put chips into the pot I was so startled that I checked the clock. It had been exactly 90 minutes since I sat down. He put in a pre-flop raise. The guy on my right called, then called again on the flop and turn. Mr. Rock had--say it with me, because you all already know--pocket aces, and won. He stayed another 45 minutes, never played another hand except for his blinds, and with them he never once called a raise before the flop or a bet after the flop. He appears to be that rarest of poker life forms: the guy who literally plays only pocket aces. Maybe he changes it up now and then with pocket kings when he's feeling adventurous, but it was still quite amazing.

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More non-answers from UltimateBlecch

Date: Fri, Aug 15, 2008

Pokerati's California Jen has conducted an interview with Paul Leggett, the COO of Tokwiro Enterprises, which owns and operates UltimateBet and Absolute Poker. You can read her introductory remarks and get to the interview transcripts here.

Jen is quite complimentary about Mr. Leggett's accessibility and openness. Frankly, I don't see it. There may be a crumb or two of detail here that wasn't previous reported, but precious little, and nothing that I found important. It mostly strikes me as the same mind-numbing corporate PR-speak that we've gotten all along. (See my previous posts on the subject here, here, here, and here.)

For me, the most basic and central question remains, Whodunnit? Once again, everybody interested in the answer to that will be disappointed:

I cannot confirm or deny anybody that is involved or not involved at this
point. Every time I give an interview, obviously people want me to say exactly
who is the perpetrator or who is part of the investigation, and I simply can’t.
There’s nothing that would give me more personal satisfaction than to do that,
but unfortunately, our situation is very complicated.

But I have a ton of evidence – IP addresses, withdrawal information,
transfer information, addresses, names – and I’m confident in my own mind that I
know exactly what occurred. We’re involved in complicated legal action, and our
litigators have forbidden me to say anything about who is or is not involved at
this point.

I’m very hopeful that we’re going to be receiving a very large sum of money
as a result of our legal actions, something that represents some kind of justice
in this whole thing, and I’m very hopeful and committed to doing everything I
can to make sure that enough information comes out about this, whether it be
through our legal actions or whatever, to make sure that the poker community and
the public at large are satisfied at the end of this.

I wish that Jen had pressed harder on this. Not that Liggett would cough up any names no matter what she had asked, but I'd like to hear him explain exactly why he can't tell us who the culprits were. What does he fear would happen as a result of releasing that information?

One possible answer is perhaps found in a cryptic phrase in that last paragraph: "whether it be through our legal actions or whatever." It's that "whatever" that catches my attention. If the revelation of the names is to be through Tokwiro's "legal actions" seeking compensation, then it's hard to fathom any reason why revealing them now versus revealing them later in court documents makes any difference. It's not like the culprits don't already know that they've been fingered, and Tokwiro is therefore trying hard not to alert them to the investigation.

So what could that "whatever" mean? I wonder if it means that they are negotiating with the thieves for reimbursement to Tokwiro, in exchange for which their names will never be made public. (You may recall that the names of the culprits behind the Absolute Poker cheating were buried in exchange for them revealing to the company how they accomplished their misdeeds.) That would certainly explain the silence. But it would flatly contradict Leggett's assertion that he is "committed to doing everything I can" to satisfy the poker community, because no reasonable assessment of what information will satisfy the poker community could fail to include the names of the guilty.

In other words, this appears to be a statement of reassurance that "at the length truth will out," as Launcelot put it, but it is given with weasal words and loopholes; Leggett may simply later claim that the names of those involved are not part of what he defines as "enough information ... to make sure that the poker community and the public at large are satisfied." It's not hard to imagine him saying, now or later, "Uh, you don't need to know that."

Well, sir, we do need to know it, in order to find out whether the felons are still involved, in some direct or indirect way, with the company now. Your shills have claimed that there is no longer any connection, but there is considerable reason to doubt the truth of such assertions. In fact, the continued secrecy strongly fuels suspicions along those lines.

For example, suppose we were to ask Mr. Leggett whether Joe Norton, the CEO and sole owner of Tokwiro, was personally involved in the scandal. Since Mr. Leggett "cannot confirm or deny anybody that is involved or not involved," then he obviously cannot and will not deny that Mr. Norton knew about, authorized, and/or profited from the cheating. As long as that is the case, how on earth can they think that they have given even token reassurance to the poker-playing public that they have actually cleaned house?

The most nausea-inducing part of the interview, for me, was this final paragraph:

It’s our job now to do everything we can to prove to the poker community and the
world that we are open, we are transparent, we are secure, and as additional
information comes out about this investigation as it wraps up, that people are
more willing to listen to what we’re saying about security and transparency
going forward.

Oh, please! He says "we are open, we are transparent," in the same interview in which he doggedly continues to refuse to answer the single most central, basic, and nagging question about the scandal.

Does he really think we are so stupid as to believe this?



About the image above. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find tasteful images when doing a Google Image search for "vomit"? This one seemed OK to me.

Here's the information about the painting, as listed here:

Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández)
El vómito es la cultura (Vomit is Culture), 1998
Watercolor and ink on paper 121 x 91 cm. - 48 x 36"
Collection of the ASU Art Museum
Gift of the Bacardi Art Foundation, Miami

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Does Mike Sexton really think this way?

Date: Thu, Aug 14, 2008

I'm watching this week's "World Poker Tour" (as the previous post probably suggested). Mike Sexton just said one of the dumbest things I've ever heard come out of his mouth.

Two amateurs are involved. One of them, Andrew, won a huge pot with K-K on the "previous" hand. (The reason for the scare quotes will become clear later.) Now a guy named Robert is on the button and raises with J-J. Andrew is in the big blind and reraises with 7-7.

While we're waiting for Robert to decide what to do, Mike Sexton says, "Well, Robert knows that he [Andrew] had two kings the last pot. You're never gonna put a guy on aces, kings, and queens back to back."

Huh????

Why not?

Does Mike Sexton actually believe that the fact that a player had K-K on one hand makes it mathematically less likely that he has A-A, K-K, or Q-Q on the next hand? If so, how in hell has he managed to make a living at poker for the last 20 years or so, with such a fundamental distortion in his grasp of randomness?

The cards have no memory. The auto-shuffler has no memory. What a player had on the previous hand has exactly zero effect on the analysis of what he might have in this hand. He is every bit as likely to have K-K here as if you wait 200 hands and then try to figure out what he's holding. When the K-K hand was over, everything reset, and he became just as eligible to get K-K again as he ever was.

Yes, it's rare to get K-K (or any other combination of cards you care to specify) in consecutive hands. For any given two-hand sequence you name, them both being K-K will happen only once in 48,841 times, on average. But the probability of the second hand being kings is completely independent of the probability of the first hand being kings. Once you know that the first hand was K-K, you know nothing more or less about the likelihood of the next hand being kings than you did before. It is 1 out of 221, just as it was on the first hand, and just as it will be on every subsequent hand. In fact, even if somebody miraculously gets K-K 10 times in a row, the probability of getting K-K on the very next hand, to make 11 in a row, is still precisely 1 in 221 (barring some shady dealing going on, obviously).

I've talked about this common fallacy at least twice before that I can remember, here and here. I'm not really terribly surprised when I hear a recreational player fail to distinguish between a priori probabilities (e.g., the probability that two specified consecutive future hands will both be K-K) and conditional probabilities (e.g., the probability that the next hand will be K-K, given that the previous one was), which is the essence of the mistake here. After all, our public school systems are about as lousy as they can be in teaching kids to understand statistics and probability.

But how can a guy who has spent so much of his life playing, thinking about, and talking about poker as Mike Sexton has still hold on to such a simple, rudimentary error in understanding how randomness affects the game? It's kind of like an obstetrician still believing that babies are brought by storks.

The other possibility is that Sexton understands this perfectly well, but is being condescending towards Robert--saying, in effect, "This guy isn't smart enough to understand that what Andrew had on the previous hand should not be taken into consideration when assessing his range of hands here." If so, then he's being unfairly demeaning to the amateur player, with no reason to make such an unflattering assumption about him.

There's another factor making this statement even more stupid, if that's possible. Because of editing, this was clearly not actually the hand immediately following the one in which the player named Andrew had K-K. I went back and checked where the button was, and it had moved two seats. So there was at least one intervening hand not shown, and maybe 7 or 13 or 19 hands (beause there are six players at the table) that were not shown. This doesn't affect the probability, of course, but it means that both the factual basis and the theoretical basis for Sexton's statement are wrong.

To his credit, I don't recall hearing Sexton say anything quite this boneheaded before. But it was sure a doozy.

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Poker gems, #158

Date: Thu, Aug 14, 2008

Ted Forrest, interview on World Poker Tour, season 6, Foxwoods Poker Classic, aired August 11, 2008.


Everybody has their breaking point. You can just watch the wheels come off, so to speak, and players kind of crumble one by one, and if you can be the last one to crumble, then you're gonna be there at the end to win it.

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What should I do? (Part 2)

Date: Thu, Aug 14, 2008

If you haven't yet read the original description of the difficult decision I faced the other day, I suggest doing so here before reading the rest of this post.

It has been about 24 hours since I posted the problem, and there have been 22 comments left--far more than any of my other 800+ posts! I really appreciate the interest so many of you showed, and the thoughtfulness of the answers. It's a little hard to tell for sure, because I'm not positive how many of the "anonymous" commenters are duplicates, but my best count is 11 votes for shoving, 8 for folding. I guess that means that I presented it reasonably even-handedly, as was my goal.

So what happened?

I announced "all in." The middle-position guy instantly folded, as he had been impatient to do the entire time I was thinking about my decision.

The obnoxious jerk didn't do anything at first, just sat there. Then he s-l-o-w-l-y started counting his chip stacks. This took him maybe a minute and a half. At some point he apparently lost track and started over again. Finally he reached his mathematical conclusion, pushed the stacks forward, and said, "$288."

(By the way, this sort of nonsense is completely unnecessary. The dealer cannot take his word for the amount, and will have to count it up again anyway if he wins as the obviously shorter stack. One need merely say "call," and not rudely waste the time of 10 other people who are waiting.)

I turned over my hand, since I think that's the proper and polite thing to do in this situation, though not required. He did not reciprocate. The flop was three unremarkable cards, something like 10-7-2. The turn was an ace. Uh-oh. The river was a third queen.

However, between the turn and the river, Mr. Personality finally decided to show what he had been hiding: two aces.

So I lost, and got the nastiest slow-roll of my life at the same time.

(I was down to about $90 at that point. That went away about 15 minutes later. I had A-Q, raised to $15, got three callers. The flop was Q-10-3. With about $60 in the pot and maybe $75 left, I pushed it in when they all checked to me. An even worse calling station than the one I have been talking about called with just a 10-9 offsuit--second pair, bad kicker, and no draw. But he caught a J and an 8 on the turn and river for runner-runner straight. I took this as a sign from the poker gods that it was time to go home. Ugh.)

One commenter on the original post said something about it being good to learn to fold Q-Q before the flop. Actually, I have very little difficulty doing so, as a general rule. It was the particulars of this situation--the oversized raise and our previous history--that made it a very close decision for me. Absent those factors, it might have taken me ten seconds to decide to muck, but probably not even that long.

It's incredibly difficult to evaluate this in retrospect without being influenced by knowing the outcome. I still find myself going back and forth about it. The arguments for folding are both strong and obvious: a rational player won't call unless he's ahead or you're in a coin flip, and you can wait for situation where you're more clearly a favorite, besides, if you fold he's only taking $15 from you. But then, that confluence of the prior history (and his apparent attitude towards me) and the very peculiar size of the raise just can't be ignored, either. He is not necessarily a rational player, and one can't just assume he will behave like one. In fact, he is plainly a highly emotional player, and it can be presumed that he will act accordingly. Problem is, it's not clear exactly what that implies for a given situation.

So I'm still torn. Obviously, in the most superficial sense I wish I had folded. On the other hand, I analyzed the situation carefully, weighed all of the facts that I had available as well as the best inferences I could make from them, tumbled the math around in my head, considered each of my three options and their possible consequences, and then went with my best conclusion. There's not a whole helluva lot more that one can do in this game (well, other than be right all the time!). It was a lot of money to be risking on such a guess, but, conversely, it would have been a lot of money to leave on the table by folding if I had been right and he had had J-J (my best guess), or even A-K, and was willing to gamble with them for his revenge.

Nineteen other poker players have now read a detailed description of the relevant facts and recorded what they would do, coming out split right down the middle about it, which gives me some measure of cold comfort that the right answer truly is not obvious. Furthermore, even with all the time in the world to ponder it, none of the commenters came up with an argument that I did not consider in the moment--again, some small comfort that my analytic mechanism isn't completely off-kilter.

Of such messy situations is my grocery money made or lost. Guess it's the ramen noodles for me for a while.

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