You do not want to play poker with this man

Date: Sun, Oct 5, 2008

If you thought the last Ricky Jay performance was amazing (I described the movie scene, and readers supplied the YouTube link in the comments), prepare to have your mind blown with this one. I can't even begin to comprehend how this is possible.





While we're at it, might as well throw in a few more bits of his prestidigitation to astonish you. The man is simply phenomenal.

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It's possible that I'm at least partly human after all

Date: Sat, Oct 4, 2008

First, let me recount something I wrote in August, the day my worst-ever losing streak finally got snapped (with the bits most important to the point of this post rendered in bold):

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.

Now go read this news story from yesterday. In short, research published in today's issue of Science shows that when people are feeling that they are not in control of their lives, they are more prone to superstitions, to conspiracy theories, to seeing patterns that do not objectively exist in collections of random data.

I was absolutely feeling that my destiny was slipping beyond my control during that losing streak, and it really did make me a lot more susceptible to irrational thoughts about what was causing things to go so badly, as I tried to describe in that post. And now I learn that such connections between a sense of loss of control and the development of superstitions or other illogical explanations for what one sees happening are, well, human. Normal, even. Normal is not a word that people who know me well would tend to label me with. But at least in this one respect, maybe I am.

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Mr. Can't-Take-A-Hint

Date: Fri, Oct 3, 2008

Another story from tonight's session at Imperial Palace. I was in Seat 10. The guy in Seat 7 is basically directly facing me. At several points in the course of my time there, he tries telling new players that sit down the same start to a bad-beat story: "You should have seen what happened to me earlier today. I lost $600 in five consecutive hands, and I never had worse than ace-king."

Each time he says this, I dread that he's about to launch into a detailed recitation of the whole thing, but fortunately he doesn't. He is either interrupted by other conversation or the play of a hand, or he gets a sufficiently uninterested nonverbal reaction from his audience that he shuts it down.

But the fourth time he offers this introduction, it's to a nice young married couple who has joined us in Seats 8 and 9. They are too polite to cut him off, either verbally or by body language, and, as I feared would happen, given an apparently willing audience, he begins. "First hand. I have ace-king of hearts....." Blah blah blah.

He gets maybe halfway through describing this first hand, when he has to stop to look at his hole cards and decide what to do. Even though he calls the big blind, so he's going to be playing, he looks back to the couple, obviously about to pick up where he left off.

I take the momentary pause to try a desperation move. With exaggerated inflection in my voice, as if I were a game show host, I say, "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm afraid there's a house rule against telling bad-beat stories at the table." I smile, though it hurts. I don't want there to be bad blood among the four of us. I just want him to shut up. I want him to take the OBVIOUS hint, but not take offense. I didn't want to be, y'know, grumpy about the whole thing.

But I did want him to stop. Even the awful din of slot machines' bings and and beeps and whoops, random craps shooters hitting their points and screaming like banshees, and the bad singers that punctuate one's time at Imperial Palace is a cacophony far more welcome to my ears than a bad-beat story--especially one that is going to encompass five consecutive hands in excruciating detail.

He at least acknowledges my humerous tone by flashing me a socially acceptable smile. But it only delays him for about one second. He immediately turns back toward the couple and picks up where he left off. And yes, we got the whole litany: every card, every bet, every outcome, everything he was thinking, every word that got exchanged as those five notorious hands played out. He droned on and on. If a gun had been handy, I don't know whether I would have shot him or shot myself, but one way or the other it would have ended the torture.

I will never, ever understand why people like this believe so intensely that others care about their stories of woe. Surely if they took a little self-inventory, they would recognize that they don't give a damn about hearing anybody else's bad-beat stories. Yet they somehow delude themselves into thinking, apparently, that their own bad-beat stories will be endlessly fascinating to any captive audience they can corner. It takes a bizarrely inflated ego to be so obtuse.

I just wanted to grab this moron by the lapels and yell in his face, "NOBODY CARES! DO YOU HEAR ME? NOBODY! THERE ARE SIX BILLION PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD. YOU COULD TELL THIS STORY SIX BILLION TIMES, AND NOT A SINGLE PERSON WOULD BE INTERESTED! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU THAT YOU CAN'T SEE THAT?"

If I had my own poker room, telling a bad-beat story would be grounds for immediate expulsion. Or maybe execution. Depends on how generous I was feeling on a given day.

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The inmates are running the asylum

Date: Fri, Oct 3, 2008

Played at the Imperial Palace tonight, only my fifth time there (mainly because of unpleasant noise and smoke issues).

There was an Asian guy on my right who repeatedly folded out of turn. Two consecutive dealers politely asked him to be sure to wait for his turn.

Then he did it again. The player two to his right was taking some time to decide whether to call a raise. Mr. Impatient looked right at him and then just picked up his cards and chucked them toward the dealer. He wasn't in a hurry to get up and go have a smoke, or any such thing. It appeared that he just got tired of waiting, and wanted his turn to be done so he could zone out again. It was so obviously intentional that for the first time I said something to him: "There are still two people ahead of you." He said, "I just don't care."

So I turned to the dealer (the third one in the box since this has been going on) and told her, "He's been acting out of turn all night, and it's obviously deliberate. He has been warned by both of the previous dealers about it."

Now in my mind, there is only one thing for a dealer to do after witnessing the player's conduct and hearing the report that he has been warned about it by the two prior dealers: Call the floor. It's obvious at that point that the player isn't responding to ordinary reminders and requests, so it's time to put some teeth behind a warning.

Right? Isn't this obvious?

Instead, the dealer just said, "I know," and then carried on as if I hadn't said anything of significance. This stunned me. Does she really care so little about keeping control of her game?

Maybe ten minutes later the guy left. At that point the dealer turned to me and confided, "He plays here all the time, and he always does that. We tell him not to over and over again, but he just keeps doing it."

So I ask the only logical question: "Why do you put up with it?"

She said, "We can't do anything about it. The floor has to take care of it, and they won't."

Ah. So maybe there is more to the story. My first thought was that obviously the floor can't and won't do anything about it if none of the dealers report the situation. But if it's really that chronic, the dealers may have developed a form of "learned helplessness"--over repeated encounters, they have learned that they call the floor, the guy gets another warning, and that scenario repeats reiteratively without anything more ever occurring. Giving up on it is still not the correct reaction for a dealer in that spot, but it's at least understandable.

Were I a dealer there, I would call the floor over to deal with it every time the guy did this. Sooner or later, the floor staff is going to get sufficiently annoyed at having to handle the same situation a hundred times in a day that they will either kick the player out or formally instruct me--in front of all of the other players--that this player is to be allowed to act out of turn whenever he wishes to without further comment or action from the poker room staff. Then at that point, I get to ask whether this treatment is unique for this player, or whether I, as the dealer, should allow everybody to act in whatever order they choose to. I also get to talk with the poker room manager and ask to have that floor decision put in writing into the house rule book. That would make an interesting item for visiting Gaming Commission representatives to look at.

Of course, all of that bravado is easy for me to muster from my safe, unemployed player's seat. If I had reason to think that my employment was viewed as expendable, perhaps I wouldn't actually turn out to be so brave and audacious. But at least I'd like to think that that's how I'd handle it: kick the problem upstairs over and over again until it actually gets resolved. I can make myself pretty damn hard to ignore when I try.

The player has obviously learned that reminders and warnings never amount to anything more than empty words, and he just doesn't care what impact his actions have on the integrity of the game or on the other players, so he continues doing what he has always done. (This is rather like Phil Hellmuth and his repeated "warnings" from the WSOP staff, which never turn into any actual penalties, so he ignores them and continues his ill-mannered behavior unabated.)

If this dealer's implication is correct, then it's a failure of the floor staff. From my little slice of watching tonight, I can't judge who is more to blame, the dealers or the floor. But one way or the other, this is a piss-poor way to run a card room. What's the point of even having rules if, when challenged, you're ultimately not going to enforce them?

The Imperial Palace hereby joins the Tropicana on the Grump's Dishonorable Mention Roll as a poker room that does not care about rules or player's ill behavior.


Their appallingly lax approach to the rules notwithstanding, I picked up a nice little profit during my visit tonight, as well as the nice commemorative chip shown above.

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My best investment ever

Date: Thu, Oct 2, 2008

I was playing at the Venetian last night. A new player came in, two seats to my right. He was under the gun for his first hand--didn't even have chips yet. Before he looked at his cards, he started asking the dealer how he could get some Advil. Could he get them from the desk? the cocktail waitress? food service, perhaps?

At this point, I have looked down at my cards to find the A-Q of diamonds. Since I know I'm going to be playing this hand, I really don't want to get distracted by becoming involved in this guy's medication issue. But one of the things I always carry in my dorky fanny pack is a pill case. In addition to a couple of prescription things, I keep acetaminophen and ibuprofen with me, because sometimes long hours at the table give me headaches, what with the noises and lights and concentration.

New Guy limps in. I raise to $10. Action is back around to New Guy, who is my only caller. During this time, I give in and offer him some of my ibuprofen, despite how I dislike having such things distract me from concentrating on what's happening in the hand. I plop a couple of the pills on the table for him just as the dealer puts out the flop: K-J-x, with two diamonds.

New Guy says a very sincere "thank you," and adds, "Just for that, I'm going to check, even though I'm ahead."

This gives me pause. It sounds completely honest to me. It's not hard to believe that he came in with a king or a jack, of course, but what he said and how he said it scare me. He would have to know that A-K is easily within my raising range, so he's basically telling me that he can beat that. Of course, for all he knows I could have K-K for the nuts, and I don't think he has that. But I am thinking he likely has two pair or the bottom set, either of which would give him plenty of reason to believe that he's in the lead.

Normally in this spot I would bet. I have position, I was the pre-flop raiser, it has been checked to me, and I have both the nut flush draw and the nut straight draw plus an overcard. That makes a pretty good case for betting, right? But his warning has made me wary. So I check behind.

Before the next card peels off, New Guy says, "In fact, you're so nice I'm going to check this all the way for you." Turn card is a blank. I check, too. True to his word, he checks the river in the dark. It misses me, so I check again.

He shows me K-J for top two pairs.

I don't know exactly how the hand would have played out without the Advil exchange. Perhaps he would have led out with a bet on the flop, which I surely would have at least called. If he checked, I would likely have bet, and either been called or check-raised, giving me a difficult decision. I could have even gone broke with it, if I had decided to fire three bullets at it, or if it went bet-raise-reraise on the flop, to which I might have responded by moving all in. We obviously both had hands that we'd be willing to invest a lot of money in.

But because he decided to be nice by not only checking the flop but honestly warning me of the strength of his hand, all I lost was my initial $10 raise. In other words, a few cents of generic over-the-counter ibuprofen saved me at least the $15 or so that I would ordinarily have bet on the flop, and maybe the entire $150 or so that I had sitting in front of me.

Sometimes it pays to be nice.

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"The Soprano's Last Supper"

Date: Thu, Oct 2, 2008

I got a free ticket to this show last night from showtickets4locals.com. Went to the Riviera to see it. Not the worst show I've seen in Vegas, but very disappointing. Got a couple of chuckles out of it, but just not very funny. About half of the show is the actors getting the audience members to get up and dance, which doesn't interest or amuse me.

I'm a big fan of "The Sopranos," and you'd have to be to have any shot at enjoying this thing. If you don't understand references to Adrianna's FBI friend, get the joke about Ralphie when they hold up a bowling ball bag with body parts in it, or grasp the significance of a mounted singing trout given to Tony, then the whole show will undoubtedly seem incomprehensible.

It wasn't incomprehensible to me, but it also wasn't worth an hour and a half of my life. I had hoped for a smart send-up of HBO's best show ever, but instead got a pretty pathetic song-and-dance that just happened to feature the characters.

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ESPN goes 0 for 2 on its "facts" this week

Date: Thu, Oct 2, 2008

A few weeks ago, I had an out-of-town visitor who was watching other things on TV during ESPN's World Series of Poker broadcasts, so instead I downloaded them from an online site of questionable legality. Since then, I've taken to doing it that way every week. I don't have a fancy, modern HD television set, so watching the shows on my computer gives me higher resolution (and the wider screen version). Also, my computer speakers are better than my TV speakers. (In case you couldn't figure it out, I spend a lot more time in front of the computer than in front of the TV.) And as an added bonus, somebody else has already clipped out the commercials this way! It's just better all around.

However, until tonight, I was unable to do screen captures of the "poker facts" that ESPN has been inserting lately. Tonight I discovered the key: you have to disable "hardware acceleration" in the video player. Then screen capture software works normally. (This is another of those baby steps toward something like actual technical competence for me.) So with that overly wordy introduction, here's the first of this week's ESPN poker "facts":





But, as with most of the previous ones in the series, this turns out to be wrong. There are 1326 different starting hands in hold'em (because C(52,2) = 1326). (I'm giving them the assumption that they're talking specifically about hold'em here, because the number is obviously different for Omaha or stud-type games.) How many of them have one ace? Well, each of the four aces can be combined with any of the 48 non-aces in the deck, so there are 4 x 48 = 192 starting hands that contain one ace. 192/1326 = 14.48%. Not 14.93%

It seems clear that once again ESPN just isn't being careful about matching its statements with its numbers. Apparently they included the 6 additional starting hands that contain two aces. That makes a total of 198, and 198/1326 is indeed 14.93%.

But you can see for yourself that the wording of the statement is "one Ace," not "at least one Ace." Furthermore, the voiceover accompanying the graphic explicitly said "just one ace."

That makes ESPN 0/1 so far for the week.

But viewers were treated to another "poker fact" in the second hour:



Apparently my previous critiques have sensitized some readers to be watching out for errors, because before I got a chance to watch the shows tonight, two people had already emailed me, pointing out that ESPN got this one wrong, too. One of them even posted it in his own poker blog, giving me a little shout-out for having started the trend: see here.

(Incidentally, "Mr. Subliminal" wonders why I wasn't all over this the instant it hit the air. Because there are tourists to be fleeced, that's why! I like poker on TV as much as the next guy, but it ain't my highest priority in life. I'm usually in a poker room when the show is first on, and often don't watch it until a few days later in the week. You might notice that the first post on this subject was done on a Saturday. I get to it when I get to it. If that means somebody else scoops me on ESPN's screwups, well, I'll double my Prozac dose and keep the sharp knives out of reach, lest the shame overwhelm me.)

Fortunately, I don't have to do any work on this one, because I tackled the whole "worst hand in poker" myth reasonably thoroughly last year. See this post, as well as the comments attached to it, where another important point on the subject is made.

This time, ESPN's claim isn't so much demonstrably wrong as it is incomplete. The Reader's Digest condensed version of that old post is this: Deuce-seven offsuit is the worst starting hand in hold'em against a full table of random/unknown hands. But it's not the worst hand in heads-up play (and may not be the worst in other short-handed situations, such as three players--but I haven't checked the math on that), and even at a full table is often not the worst against specific hands that opponents might have.

Nevertheless, it would have been plenty easy for ESPN to add a little more specificity to its statement, and thereby change it from being questionable to being definitely correct. For its failure to do so, and what I think is a clear error on the problem noted above with the "fact" in the first hour of the show, the network gets a solid "F" for this week in my grade book, going 0 for 2 attempts.

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Maybe not the best call ever

Date: Wed, Oct 1, 2008

Bill's last night. Final board is 10-8-8-10-3 with no flush possible. There were two players in the hand (not I). No action on the flop or turn.

On the river, Player A checks. Player B bets. Player A calls. Player B sheepishly says, "You got me. I just have a 5." He shows his pocket 5s. His hand is, therefore, two pairs (10s and 8s) with a 5.

Player A re-checks his cards, then pushes them towards the dealer face down, surrendering.

Eyes are bugging out around the table.

Player B is astonished to have the pot coming his way. He asks A, "You really couldn't beat that?" Player A's cards have not yet been brought into the muck, so he reaches out and turns them over: 3-4. His hand is, therefore, two pairs (10s and 8s) with a 4.

Double-paired boards can be confusing, so let me make it explicit for you: The only hands that Player A could beat were 3-2 and 2-2--and yet he called. He had the second-worst hand possible*--and yet he called. His opponent only needed any one card bigger than a 4 to take the pot--and yet he called.

But believe it or not, that's not the strange part.

The strange part was what he said, in complete seriousness, by way of explanation for his call:

"I thought you had an ace."



Do you see why I play at Bill's? Do you see why I advocate value betting rather than bluffing there?


*One might quibble as to whether he has the second-worst hand possible or third-worst hand possible. I think it's probably a bit more accurate to say he had the second-worst hand possible, because both the 3-2 and 2-2 hands would be playing the board. In other words, the worst hand possible was the board: 10-10-8-8-3. The second-worst hand would therefore be 10-10-8-8-4, which is what Player A had. However, one could argue that Player A could beat opponents holding both the 3-2 and the 2-2, so he had the third-worst hand possible. If somebody were adamantly of the opinion that that way of saying it were more accurate, I wouldn't waste much breath trying to argue my side of it. It's six of one, half-dozen of another.

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The PPA's Kentucky brief

Date: Tue, Sep 30, 2008

I was just looking over some of the materials pertaining to the Kentucky domain-name seizure case, as collected by the Poker Players Alliance web site. I had not previously heard that the PPA had prepared an amicus brief for the court. I just read it.

Wow. This is a shamefully bad piece of work. Hey, they're preaching to the choir with me. I want to accept their arguments. But the holes are glaring. If it seems shoddy to one who desperately wants to like what the brief has to say, how bad will it look to a judge who may have no love of the game?

The first criticism I have is that this is obviously a made-in-advance brief. Somebody wrote it before having any idea what case it might be submitted for, then just added in a few bits specific to this Kentucky case. The central idea of the brief is that poker is more a game of skill than of chance. It's perfectly understandable that the PPA would have such a brief on the shelf and ready to go, because that's going to be a central question in a lot of legal cases involving the legality of poker.

But I'm not sure this is one of them, and even if it is, I'm not sure the PPA is analyzing the legal question correctly.

Most of the brief (which you can read here) is spent explaining poker and trying to demonstrate why skill is needed to play it successfully. It gives specific card situations and shows how one has to calcuate the pot odds, the odds of making one's hand, the expected value, etc. (Heck, I think they could have just handed the judge a copy of The Mathematics of Poker and asked him to pick about three pages at random to read, if the goal is to illustrate that poker problems are genuinely complex.) There follows a section of quotations from various poker authorities to the effect that skill predominates over luck, plus some excerpts from research papers making the same point, because test subjects who are taught strategy do better as novice players than those not taught strategy first. (Of course, the same would be true of blackjack. So I guess the PPA is willing to argue that blackjack and poker must either rise or fall together as games of either primarily chance or skill, right? Ha!)

The core problem, though, comes back to the pre-manufactured, cookie-cutter approach that this brief takes. "Gambling" is defined by the relevant Kentucky statute (528.010(3)(a)) as follows:

"Gambling" means staking or risking something of value upon the outcome of a
contest, game, gaming scheme, or gaming device which is based upon an element of
chance, in accord with an agreement or understanding that someone will receive
something of value in the event of a certain outcome.

Looking just at the face value of that text, it cannot be seriously maintained that poker is not "based upon an element of chance." Yet that's exactly the point the PPA tries to make.

The face value isn't the end of the matter, though. There are other states where similar language has, contrary to reason, been interpreted by the state appellate courts to mean games that are primarily or predominantly based on chance. The PPA brief quotes some of them. The problem is that it appears that Kentucky's courts have not adopted such an interpretation--at least I assume that if they had, citation of such a case would be prominantly featured in this brief.

Instead, the brief cites state attorney general opinions. Lawyers cite AG opinions when they can't find a court case that says what they want. But AG opinions are not binding on courts. Courts disagree with and politely ignore AG opinions all the time. This is partly because AG opinions are nearly always heavily political documents, rather than objective, scholarly, detached analyses of what the law says (though they are written to sound as if they are objective).

In short, it appears to me that the PPA brief is basically assuming and glossing over the main point that it should be trying to convince the court of. If it's true that the statutory phrase "based upon an element of chance" has not been given an authoritative interpretation by Kentucky's appellate courts, then it seems to me that the PPA's brief should be trying to persuade the trial court to adopt the "predominance" test, rather than trying to sweep that question under the rug as if it has already been settled. Surely no judge is really dumb enough not to recognize that this brief has a gaping hole in its legal logic.

I'm reminded of the classic Harris cartoon (which you can see here). One scientist has written a complicated scheme on the blackboard. One step of the proof says, "Then a miracle occurs." The scientist's colleague, looking over his work, says, "I think you should be more explicit here in step two."

Well, that's how I feel about this PPA brief. It's glossing over the key question of statutory interpretation, if its goal is to get poker legally recognized as not constituting "gambling" under Kentucky law. The only way to succeed at that is to take on directly that ugly "element of chance" language. On its face, that phrase is a death sentence for legal recognition of poker, so efforts should be directed at convincing the court that the facial reading is not the correct one. This brief utterly fails at that task. In fact, it doesn't even seriously attempt it.

The brief says (pp. 20-21):

The only rationale [sic; the brief really needed better proofreading!]
interpretation of this statute is that "outcome" must be based upon an element
of chance. If this reading is accepted, then poker is not included because in
poker the outcome is based primarily on the skilled play of the players.

See what I mean about glossing over? It goes directly from "based upon an element of chance" to outcome based primarily on skill. Those are obviously not saying the same thing, or even asking the same question, and it insults the reader's intelligence to pretend that they are.

Like I said, I want to be persuaded, but I'm not. A skeptical judge would read this and think, "They've got to be kidding, right?"

A few pages later I find another oddity. The brief correctly notes that whether poker is primarily based on luck or skill is a question of fact, which means that both sides would present evidence on the question. (If, that is, the judge decides that that question is relevant to the case. But if he takes the face-value reading of the statute, he could easily conclude that testimony is unnecessary, because nobody could possibly deny the proposition that poker is "based upon an element of chance.") The brief then criticizes the state for not having presented any evidence that poker is primarily a game of chance. Huh??? First, it's not yet clear that that is a question that will need answering in this case. And second, there hasn't been a trial yet! The lack-of-evidence argument might make sense if a trial had occurred, and the state had failed to produce an expert witness that said that poker was predominantly a game of chance. But it's way early to be complaining about what has or has not yet been produced in the way of evidentiary material. This is a completely frivolous argument.

Another smaller problem in the brief is that it takes things said about tournament poker specifically and tries to make them sound as if they are true for all poker. That's disingenuous. Were I the judge, the PPA's counsel would get no brownie points for honesty here.

I hate having to come to this conclusion, but this legal brief is a sloppy, shoddy, amateurish, mostly irrelevant piece of work. I recognize that it's not a primary brief, and as an amicus brief is designed to inform the court in more detail of things that the litigants' briefs may pass over, either because of lack of space or lack of expertise. That's why I'm not criticizing it for failing to tackle the big questions, like jurisdiction, and that hard-to-ignore definition of "gambling device." Those are questions best left to the defendants themselves.

But even taken for just the specific and limited role it is apparently meant to have, the PPA brief is bad legal work--bad enough that I'm ashamed that it is speaking for me as a PPA member.

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Insight on the Kentucky case

Date: Tue, Sep 30, 2008

A few days ago, I opined, in a completely unresearched, off-the-cuff post, that the Kentucky governor's attempt to take control of various gambling-related domain names was doomed to failure.

The minimum I probably should have done before popping off like that might have included taking the time to read the statute involved--the one under which the state claimed the right to the court-ordered seizure. Had I done so, I'm confident that the ENORMOUS hurdle identified by Bill Poser at Language Log would have jumped out at me.

Expanding a bit on Poser's point, the statute defines a "gambling device" in such a way that all of the following properties must be met:

1. It is a "machine" or "mechanical...device."

2. It is "designed and manufactured primarily for use in connection with gambling."

3. When "operated," the device "may deliver, as the result of the application of an element of chance, any money or property," or the operation of the device may entitle the operator to same.

Kentucky is rather ludicrously arguing that the Internet domain names themselves constitute "gambling devices" under this statute. I've read a ton of court cases involving statutory interpretation, and I find it unimaginable that any court could accept the argument that this definition is sufficiently broad to include a domain name.

It will be interesting to watch the state's attorneys tiptoe through this, and explain to the world how a domain name is a "machine" or a "mechanical...device," how it was "designed and manufactured" at all, let alone designed and manufactured primarily for use in connection with gambling, and how operation of this "device," as a result of the application of an element of chance, either delivers a monetary/property reward or entitles the operator to such.

The comments to the Language Log post are also well worth reading. In particular, the one touching on how Internet registries and registrars work was all new to me. That adds a complication beyond what was already puzzling me about whether ICANN is potentially subject to and/or willing to comply with state court orders, and I have no idea what to make of it. (See here for even more about how it matters where the registrars are physically located, and about ICANN's own rules for dispute resolution, responding to court orders, etc.)

But it now appears to me that that question will quickly become moot, because I doubt that the state can withstand even the most superficial challenge any defense attorney might make to the applicability of the statute.

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Beer pong

Date: Mon, Sep 29, 2008

I mentioned the other day taking a break from poker at Bill's by walking the short distance from there to O'Shea's.

What I didn't mention, because that story was already at risk for needing the entire team of Reader's Digest condensers to work on it, was that while at O'Shea's I saw something that wasn't there last time I visited: a whole area set up for beer pong. It has nothing to do with poker, but it's something I've never seen in a casino before, so I snapped a few photos, and I have nothing to do with them now other than posting them here.

Maybe this is a permanent set-up, maybe there was a special occasion. I don't know. In fact, I know nothing about beer pong besides that it has something to do with throwing ping-pong balls in cups of beer and drinking them. Not exactly my thing. (The sum total of the beer I've consumed in my life would not fill one of those cups. Not even halfway.)

But if you love beer pong, this is your official notice that O'Shea's appears to be the place to go for your game.

Then, please, come play a little poker with me when you're drunk and I'm sober!

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Celebrity sighting

Date: Mon, Sep 29, 2008

Joe Awada was at the table next to mine at the Palms tonight, playing a little $2-5 NLHE. That's him, with his head framed by the door in the background, looking off into space (looking at the football game on TV, actually). I understand he's there not infrequently. I'm not sure I'll ever grasp the economic rationale of people who routinely enter $10,000 tournaments playing what seem to be abnormally small cash games. Maybe some of them get staked for tournaments, but play cash games with their own money, and don't have nearly as big a bankroll as the tournament scene would suggest. Just a guess.


Horrible poker night. Doubled up on my first hand, which was nice, but it proved not to be a harbinger of any kind. All downhill from there. Nothing connected from that point forward. Finally busted out when my top pair/top kicker was the fourth-best hand! That, my friends, is a bad night of poker. Don't feel like saying another word about it.

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My record-keeping

Date: Mon, Sep 29, 2008

Warning: One of the most boring posts ever is coming your way.

Since I occasionally mention here specific results for a session or a particular location, it occurs to me that it might be useful to some readers to show you how I keep records. This is a system that has evolved over time. It works for me. It tells me what I want to know, without being gummed up with factors that I don't really care about. That's the main reason that I don't use any of the various software packages or online services that will keep and sort this data for you, if you choose: I haven't seen any that do a better job than what I've codged together on my own.

I have four Excel spreadsheets, each with a different purpose.

The first is a monthly one that I make fresh from a master template each month. It has a sheet for every day of the month, plus a "totals" sheet. Here's the entry from last Wednesday, when I entered the Green Valley Ranch HORSE tournament, then played an unsuccessful cash game for a while afterward:




I have the cursor on the "Hours" column so you can see how that works and copy the formula, if you're interested. Excel is, in my opinion, a nightmare to work with on time functions. It took me a couple of hours of work to finally put together this formula that would do the seemingly simple task of translating my start and stop times into number of hours played. The problem is that sometimes I play past midnight, so that the stop time is on a different date from the start time, and if you don't make explicit allowance for that in the formula, you'll get wonky results. Don't ask me to explain how the terms in the formula work--just trust me that this is what it takes to account for sometimes ending before midnight and sometimes after. Pain in the neck.

Here's the "Total" sheet. I made up October's in advance, because I didn't feel like showing the world my income for any actual month.



If you're at all familiar with Excel, setting up a sheet like this is completely straightforward; the cells just grab the data from the individual days' sheets, then do a bit of adding and averaging in the obvious places.

The individual months' sheets are stored in folders labeled by the year.

The next spreadsheet is "Year to date." I'm not showing you that for the same privacy reason. But it's an extremely simple page with columns for the names of the months, the running net to-date income total, and hours for that month (all automatically grabbed from the first spreadsheet), plus a simple division function to get $/hour for the month and for year-to-date.

The third spreadsheet is called "Summary by place." As you can see below, there is a separate column for each casino, with the dates running down the left-hand side. The summary lines at the top give me a running account of various aspects of my win/loss record for each place, then there is a totals column on the far right. There is an identically set up sheet for tournaments, though it gets a lot fewer entries, since I play very few tournaments.



The "discrepancies" sheet that you can see tabbed at the bottom is just a place where I can account for the rare instances in which I do some sort of gambling that isn't poker. For tax purposes, I can lump all gambling wins/losses together, because the IRS doesn't care whether the money comes from poker or a sports bet. But I care, and I don't want those other amounts to foul up my pure poker results. The final spreadsheet, described below, is the main one for tax purposes, and mixes in the poker and non-poker gaming, so the "discrepancies" page here is where I explain the three or four times a year that I make or lose a few bucks on something other than poker, which causes the sums on these "Summary by place" pages to differ from the totals on the last spreadsheet. I use it so rarely that it's not even formatted; it's just a few text entries with dates and explanations. For example, when I had a friend visiting from out of town last year, I noted this: "9/7/07, lost $5 on video blackjack at MGM Grand." Yep, that's me, Mr. Big-Time Gambler.

The "totals" tab just adds the cash games and tournaments together, formatted the same way.

The final spreadsheet is "Cumulative graph." Shown below is the first month or so that I played poker in Vegas. I have two screen shots of this, so that you can see the formulas used to calculate and display the weekly and monthly totals. The weekly one was pretty easy, but that monthly one was a bear to figure out. As you can see, I had to resort to "lookup" functions, which were new to me. As with the hours thing, don't ask me to explain how all of the terms in the formula work together; they just do. Copy it if it's helpful to you, ignore it otherwise.




There's a summary section for my entire time playing; I've blotted out the totals.

Finally there is a graph further down the spreadsheet page. Shown below is the section covering the same time period as for the data entries. The blue bars are individual days' results, and the pink graph is the cumulative amount won or lost. As you can see, I started out like gangbusters the first couple of weeks, but since I really didn't know much what I was doing, I gave it all back plus a bit, before recovering my footing. Fortunately, the graph has not come anywhere near to crossing back over that ugly net-zero line since then.



The way this all works together is that when I get home from playing, I copy the times and in/out dollar amounts from the piece of paper in my pocket into the tab for that day in the current month's spreadsheet. I then open and close the "year to date" one just so that it automatically updates itself. (Don't really need to do this every day, but I do anyway.) I then enter the totals in the "Summary by place" record and again in the "Cumulative graph" sheet. So basically every dollar amount gets entered three different places. I suppose that with something like a relational database I could get the same kinds of outputs by just entering the data once. But I don't feel like going to the trouble of purchasing and setting up such a system. The way I have it works plenty well for my needs, and takes less than two minutes, so it's not like there's a ton of time savings to be squeezed out of setting up something that might be slightly more efficient day to day.

Here are some things that I do not record, though you'll sometimes see published recommendations that you keep track of them:

Game. For now, what I play is so overwhelmingly $1/2 or $1/3 NLHE that there would be minimal benefit in entering that same data over and over. So I don't. If I graduate to consistently playing a wider variety of games and/or stakes, I may incorporate that information when it becomes needed.

Number of players. Sure, it's probably useful to know whether you make more money at full tables or when playing short-handed. But most of what I play is full ring games, and when that's not the case, it's usually just a transient state until the game fills up again. It would be incredibly cumbersome to try to break down a few hours' playing time into how much I was making per hour separated by how many players were at the table moment by moment.

Name of supervisor on duty. I've seen in several places the claim that you should record who the floor person or other supervisor was, in case of a tax audit. Frankly, I think that's ludicrous. I'm completely confident that the level of detail in the records that I have here would pass every legal test of reasonableness. No supervisor would ever remember, and therefore be able to verify, whether I was present on any given day, nor would they know how much I won or lost. The only potential value that I can see in this information is that theoretically the IRS could double-check with the casino and see if the name I wrote down matched their employee records, thus providing some degree of evidence that I was really there, and didn't just cook up the data. But I think that's silly. They still wouldn't know whether my income numbers were honest, because there is no possible source for that information other than me. Besides, I could presumably provide independent evidence of my attendance that matches my records by getting printouts from the casinos where they swipe my players' club card in and out. Not every place does this, but I think that if I needed corroboration, any court would accept the fact that my records match the places where it could be checked as reasonably suggesting that I was probably honest about hours at the other casinos, too. And, once again, that still wouldn't tell the IRS anything about the money, which is, in the end, all they really care about. If I ever get to playing for tens of thousands of dollars per session, and thus make a more tempting IRS audit target, maybe I'll think about following this piece of advice. For now, I think it's just ridiculously unnecessary.

So there you have it, my boring record-keeping. I hope that at least a few readers find it useful enough to use either directly as a template or as a jumping-off point for creating their own records systems.

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Poker gems, #170

Date: Sun, Sep 28, 2008

John Vorhaus, in Card Player magazine column, September 24, 2008 (vol. 21, #19), p. 94.


[T]hat's a fact of poker (and possibly of life): No matter what you do, you're going to look stupid to someone, sometime.

Mike Caro once wrote that in poker, everyone takes turns making mistakes, and the key to success is simply to skip your turn.

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