Hello, Vegas

Have arrived at the home-away-from-home here in Las Vegas, having mostly unpacked and more or less gotten settled already. Was in a kind of serene state of mind flying out, with an hour-long delay, a super-sized neighbor sitting next to me, and a mother traveling with four children one row up all failing to cause any undue stress along the way.

The delay didn’t matter so much as I wasn’t needing to arrive at any particular time, the fellow in the next seat was amiable enough, and the kids (aged one to eight) did remarkably well keeping busy with coloring books and making faces throughout the five hours or so we were in the air.

Landed around seven-thirty local time and immediately noticed the Ultimate Poker and WSOP.com online poker advertising in McCarran. Got bag, car, and within an hour had reached my destination. Then I ran over for a quick visit to the Amazon Room in the Rio last night to pick up my credentials and see who was there.

Everything was pretty much where I’d left it a year ago.

Reunited with several folks including a lot of the PokerNews guys, some of whom were working and some of whom were not. I arrive during what is in fact a relative lull in the WSOP schedule with just four events running yesterday, two of which had shrunk down to a final table and the final three tables.

Those two were all that was playing out in the Amazon, which meant most of the spacious ballroom was empty last night. One was Event No. 29, the $5,000 H.O.R.S.E. at which Tom Schneider was sitting and in fact would end play late in the night with a big chip lead with four remaining. Going for a second bracelet of the summer after winning the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. event just last week, is the Donkey Bomber, and a fourth in his career.

I shook Tom’s hand at the break, then also shook another 2013 WSOP bracelet winner’s hand soon after, my colleague Chad Holloway. I had grabbed a copy of Poker Player Newspaper from the hallway with Chad grinning on the cover and before saying anything to him asked him if he could sign it which got a laugh from the others.

Chad missed an opportunity, as he pointed out afterwards, as he might have grabbed the pen, scribbled his name quickly, and moved on as though he had more important things to do. In any case, he made the most of an opportunity a couple of weeks ago when he won Event No. 1, that’s for sure.

Ended up grabbing a late dinner with BLUFF writer and Hard-Boiled Poker Home Games Season 3 winner Tim and had fun getting caught up with him and with how the WSOP has been going thus far. Tim is playing the $2,500 razz event later today, for which I am sure the HBP Home Games have served him well as a valuable tune-up.

After that I headed back to get some rest, leaving the unpacking until this morning, in fact. Still need to make a grocery run and get settled for real, although today I think I’ve already got a full schedule as I’ll meet Jen Newell for breakfast, then run over with a bunch of others to the Golden Nugget to play the noon $125 NLHE tourney.

Hoping also to be able to get together with folks for Game 6 of the Heat-Spurs series tonight, on which I might just have to find a reasonable bet to make. (Can the Spurs do it? Can they?)

I expect I’ll soon settle into making some daily WSOP reports here as I’ve done in the past. More to come!

To Vegas... Again!

I write today from an airport terminal (again), presently mired in full-blown what-did-I-forget mode as I await my flight to Las Vegas for another hot summer helping the PokerNews crew report on the World Series of Poker.

This will mark my sixth straight year at the WSOP, which means I’ve gone out enough times for the novelty to have long worn off and to have even developed a sense of routine when it comes to the whole idea of picking up and leaving for an extended period like this. That is to say, it doesn’t even seem like such a huge, life-altering thing to do anymore, having gone to Vegas so many summers before -- as well as made other lengthy trips, too -- in order to watch people play cards and report what happens.

Of course, it’s that feeling of routine that is probably heightening my momentary fretting over the possibility of having forgotten something. You know, like in poker when you find yourself getting used to certain patterns in your opponents or the game’s flow, then perhaps become less attentive and miss something -- perhaps even something obvious -- because you’ve become semi-hypnotized by the game’s rhythms.

To be honest, the list of essential items for me is quite short, anyway, even when making a month-long trip like this. Thankfully Vera is coming out for a mid-trip visit fairly soon, so even if I do discover I’ve forgotten something, she’ll be able to help out.

Meanwhile, I am eagerly looking forward to reuniting with lots of people, including the PokerNews and WSOP folks as well as many other players and media types whom I’ve gotten used to seeing every summer, and with whom I find myself interacting all year, too, in various ways such as via Twitter.

I remember mentioning to someone last summer how Twitter makes it feel like we’ve been passing each other in the halls for the last several months, occasionally saying hello and checking in with each other, so when we finally meet again face-to-face after a whole year it hardly seems like we’ve been apart at all. The familiar setting of the Rio also reinforces that sense that no time has elapsed between visits. Every year is different, of course. But so much is familiar, too. Comfortably so, I have to admit.

In any case, I greatly look forward to getting there. Having done it so many times before, I know how it will go, too. A month will pass quickly, and soon I’ll be packing back up and traveling home.

And wondering again if I’ve forgotten anything.

The Pushing Strategy (Pushing Strategy Away)

Was reading a post this morning written for Betfair Poker by my buddy and colleague over there, Matthew “Yorkshire Pud” Pitt, regarding what he found to be a curious conclusion to Event No. 18 of the 2013 World Series of Poker, the second of the several $1,000 no-limit hold’em tourney on this summer’s calendar.

There the Pudster describes how the event which started with 2,071 players had gotten down to heads-up on Wednesday night between Taylor Paur and Roy Weiss. After playing for a while the pair went to dinner break with Paur enjoying a commanding lead with nearly 5.5 million to Weiss’s 715,000.

Looking at the PokerNews live blog (where Matthew was reporting), Paur apparently didn’t want to take the full hour for dinner, but Weiss said he wanted to and so they did.

Upon their return, Weiss shoved all in the first few hands in an effort to try to get back into contention. On the fourth hand he did manage to double up, meaning Paur had about a 2-to-1 chip lead. Then Weiss continued to shove all in hand after hand -- i.e., every single time.

Weiss eventually scored another double to take the chip lead, and then continued to open-shove every chance he could after that. Paur eventually was dealt A-9 and called to see Weiss had 6-3-offsuit. Paur won that hand to get the lead back, then on the next hand Weiss pushed with and Paur called with .

Both an ace and king flopped, then another ace came on the turn to give Paur trips. Paur then managed to fade a club flush draw on the river and won the event.

Kind of interesting to look back at the reporting of that endgame on the PN blog. This year PokerNews is providing hand-for-hand coverage from all final tables, and this is an instance where having the full blow-by-blow of what happened is especially interesting, I think. There you can see how out of 24 post-dinner hands, Weiss pushed all in before the flop 21 times, getting a walk twice and only one time checking his option after Paur limped from the button.

Weiss had not employed his shoving strategy during the 60-plus hands he and Paur had played against one another prior to the dinner break. They’d begun heads-up play with Paur well ahead, and during those pre-dinner hands Paur had whittled Weiss down further. Matthew speculates in his Betfair post that Weiss might have looked up Paur online, discovered his impressive tourney résumé, and thus adopted the new tactic with the thought that perhaps it was his best chance of beating Paur.

The story made me think immediately of that memorable 2008 WSOP event I covered in which Vanessa Selbst won her first bracelet, a $1,500 pot-limit Omaha tourney that ended with Selbst’s opponent, Jamie Pickering, adopting a similar strategy of raising or reraising the pot before the flop every hand, sometimes without even looking at his cards. (Read this post from long ago for details on that crazy finish.)

Paur in fact asked Weiss at one point if he was looking at his cards during his sequence of all-in pushes. That picture above (courtesy PokerNews) shows Paur’s frustration at having to deal with the fact that Weiss had effectively reduced the strategic element considerably, making their endgame much more chance-based because of his one-dimensional line of attack.

Again, Paur’s look reminds me a lot of how Selbst appeared when Pickering was playing similarly at the end of that 2008 tournament. Selbst had dominated the event all three days, leading nearly start-to-finish (including at the end of both Days 1 and 2) with a performance that provided a hard-to-refute argument for her skill at PLO. But that skill suddenly didn’t matter as much in the face of an opponent shoving (or raising/reraising pot, anyway) before the flop every single hand.

Matthew asks at the end of his Betfair post for readers to respond to Weiss’s strategy, evoking the question of whether or not it makes a “mockery” of the game or perhaps even raises ethical issues. To that I’d have to respond that while such play is clearly going to frustrate one’s opponent, it has to be regarded as acceptable, and even smart in certain contexts such as when the difference in skill level between the two players is unmistakably wide.

In other words, any problems with the strategy would have to be directed toward the tournament format and rules of play, not the player.

The situation calls to mind how Daniel Negreanu was raising the issue on Twitter yesterday of there being an unfortunate (to him) preponderance of no-limit hold’em events and not enough fixed-limit or non-HE tourneys on the WSOP schedule. I think the issues aren’t entirely unrelated.

An ending such as the one Weiss caused to happen in Event No. 18 is always going to be a possible consequence of NLHE tourneys, as the format allows for it. Such is a factor that can help make no-limit hold’em especially exciting, but also can frustrate those who seek to ensure poker (and the tourneys of the WSOP) remain primarily skill-based competitions.

100,000,000,000

One hundred billion hands. What is that, like 14 or so hands per every living person on the planet? Such is the milestone PokerStars will be hitting at some point this afternoon.

It took the site about 11-and-a-half years to reach that total, although the curve has turned upward sharply over the last couple of years.

It took almost five years, in fact, for PokerStars to deal 5 billion hands, the site hitting that mark in late May 2006. Almost exactly one year later the site made it to 10 billion hand dealt, then they reached 50 billion in September 2010. It has taken less than three years more to deal the next 50 billion.

All of the various prizes and associated hoopla connected with the milestone are interesting enough. Rick Dacey’s running narrative about the big countdown over on the PokerStars blog is providing some fun stories as well. But the event also helps highlight in a less specific way how much online poker has affected ideas of game play, most particularly volume and pace.

Having been around for more than a decade, the online game has presented an invitation to players to think of the game as being essentially without limits when it comes to the number of hands a person can play, or the speed with which hands can be dealt. Obviously there are still limits per se, but the difference between what an online site can provide and what happens in live poker rooms or in home games is so vast as to make comparisons seem hardly worth pursuing anymore.

Think of how long it would take to deal 100 billion hands of live poker. It’s silly. As Sweet Brown would say, ain’t nobody got time for that.

Just to make the math easier, let’s say it takes two minutes to deal a hand of poker. That adds up to more than 380,000 years to reach 100 billion.

Say there are 5,000 casinos in the world, and pretend every one of them has a poker room with a half-dozen tables at which hands are constantly being dealt without interruption. It would still take more than a dozen years -- i.e., longer than PokerStars has been dealing hands -- to reach an overall total of 100 billion hands dealt.

Not unlike the way all of the “super high roller” events, those huge games in Macau, and the nosebleed games that continue to turn up online present us with examples of poker being played for stakes that are essentially hard for nearly all of us to relate to, so, too, does an online site reaching 100 billion hands dealt remind us how different -- and in some ways, unrelateable -- online poker is to the live game.

Entrants Lists and the WSOP

Unlike the last couple of years, this summer the World Series of Poker is not making available complete entrants lists for all events. Thus the website wsopdb.com -- not affiliated with the WSOP -- has not been adding any new information to its database that makes available individual players’ histories of participation at the Series (from 2011-2012) via simple name searches. (That to the left is a pic of the first part of one of last year’s entrants lists. Always wondered why those lists were missing a few letters, as though they came from a typewriter with a busted key or two.)

I’ve mentioned that wsopdb.com site here a couple of times before, most recently after last year’s Series in a post titled “ROI at the WSOP.” I’ve also written posts here before about the whole idea of tracking tournament participation and making it public along with results.

For example, in a post titled “For the Record (Thoughts on Tracking Tournament Winnings),” I made the (obvious) observation that sites like Hendon Mob only report cashes and not entries, thus perhaps giving the superficial impression that “everyone is winning and no one is losing.” But there I also pointed out how I understood some of the reasons why most players wouldn’t be very enthused by the idea of their full tournament participation being publicized for all to see.

I’d noticed the WSOP wasn’t providing the entrants lists this year, but was reminded of this fact yesterday while following a Twitter conversation about it begun by players who were seeking information about players’ participation in the 2013 WSOP on wsopdb.com and failing to find it.

I believe Josh Brikis kicked off the conversation by asking WSOP Tournament Director Jack Effel if he “could get the wsopdb.com up and running” and Effel responding to say that this year the WSOP was not releasing the entrants lists (not that the WSOP had anything to do with the site, anyway). From there a few others joined in to talk about uses for the information, including Jonathan Aguiar who mentioned how helpful it was for staking arrangements, specifically as an assurance to those doing the staking that their horses had actually participated in certain events.

Jessica Welman, Managing Editor of the WSOP website, chimed in to confirm again to Aguiar and others that indeed, the WSOP had changed its policy this year with regard to the release of entrants lists, noting that “Customer privacy is a priority” and that “there are many ppl who don’t want their ROI out there for public consumption.”

I found the discussion diverting, noting how it appeared the stakers -- a small but significant subset of WSOP players -- seemed to be the ones most interested in having the entrants lists made public, while others (I assumed) probably weren’t so curious.

I thought about how from a tourney reporter’s perspective such lists can occasionally be helpful, although in truth they aren’t so necessary. At some of the WSOP Circuit stops this year, I did get a look at some entrants lists and seating assignments during Day 1 flights, mainly just to help locate notable players and perhaps help identify a few during the afternoon and evening. But at the WSOP it usually isn’t such a challenge to find and identify players even in the large field events, and so I can’t think of much reason why I’d need to see an entrants list in order to report on a specific event.

Of course, if I were wanting to write some sort of feature or study about a particular player’s Series, one that would include a rundown of his or her entries, having such lists would make the task a little easier. I could probably think of other kinds of reporting for which the lists might be of use, but as I say, from the live reporting perspective, they aren’t so vital.

I thought a little bit, too, about how besides wanting to protect players’ privacy, the WSOP likewise has a practical interest in not making such information public. I wrote in that earlier “For the Record” post about how the WSOP and other tours “would have little to gain, I would think, from showing all of its players (and the rest of the world) exactly how much they’ve lost over the course of their respective series.”

Kind of interesting to think about this whole issue of personal privacy amid the huge furor currently raging over the recent revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) ordered Verizon to turn over all phone records of calls placed within the U.S. or originating in the U.S. to those abroad over a three-month period (starting in April and extending through July) -- a discovery which has led to increased speculation about the extent of other types of governmental surveillance and heated debates over privacy rights.

Obviously the WSOP can employ any policy it likes with regard to publicizing entrants lists. Somehow, though, it feels correct not to publish them, not so much from any particular policy standpoint, but as a practice that conforms somewhat with etiquette emanating from the game itself.

We can tell which players are winning by all of the chips sitting in front of them. Meanwhile, if we’re paying attention we also generally can identify who has been losing, but there’s often a tendency not to draw undue notice to such. That’s because everyone -- the winners and losers -- for various reasons understands there’s little (or no) benefit to be had from advertising the plight of the losing player.

Makes me think of a tweet sent out by Andy Bloch a few days back responding to one sent by WSOP Communications Director Seth Palansky reporting that through the first 14 events “Players at the @WSOP have won $27,352,360 thus far, up from $19.99 million last year.”

While the comparison is a little off anyway thanks to the fact that the first 14 events from the two years aren’t really parallel to one another, Bloch came up with a different rejoinder:

“Players at the @WSOP have won $27M thus far, lost $30M, net -$3M.”

Racing Presidents, the Future of No-Limit Hold’em, and the Significance of Context

Over the weekend I was able to take a quick trip with Vera up to Washington, DC to enjoy a couple of days’ worth of leisure.

We’d been a few times before in the past, and thus had already done much of the usual sightseeing stuff. This time we mostly just enjoyed some good eats in various restaurants, checked in on a museum, saw the Washington Monument being repaired, and did a lot of walking around. We made it to a Washington Nationals game, too, and had a laugh watching the Racing Presidents run around the field between innings.

The huge-headed mascots include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt. Of those I know Lincoln played a little poker. Taft isn’t known so much for his poker-playing, I don’t think, although he was a member of the Queen City Club in Cincinnati that had some card rooms. TR, though, was the big poker player of the bunch, and as it happened Roosevelt won the race on Saturday afternoon.

I was searching around online a little this morning and found a piece about the Racing Presidents visiting Mount Rushmore a few months back. While there, it looks like Teddy took a trip over to the famous Old Style Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, the site of the famous poker game in which Wild Bill Hickok met his demise. In fact, old “Square Deal” Teddy took the opportunity to sit in on a poker game while there (pic above via the Black Hills Travel Blog).

Got a chance to visit a number of cool bookstores while in DC as well. At one of them I picked up several poker-related titles on the cheap, some of which I’ll be sending out as prizes in the Hard-Boiled Poker Home Games. One of the books I picked up was Mason Malmuth’s Poker Essays.

First appearing in 2000 and including a lot of previously published items (among them several revised Card Player columns), it is the first of three volumes’ worth of similar essays published by Malmuth. Like a lot of titles published back then, the book is probably more interesting in the way it provides evidence of an earlier, pre-boom era of poker than for specific strategy advice. Also included are several pieces offering opinions about the staging of tournaments and talk about structures, as well as some thoughts on how card rooms were being run at the time, thus providing more interesting reading as reflections on the Las Vegas and California poker scenes circa 1990s.

This is the book that also contains a couple of Malmuth’s most quoted lines about the future of no-limit hold’em and tournaments. You might have run into these statements before somewhere, which in retrospect obviously read a little differently than they might have back when they were made.

In a chapter called “The Future of Poker,” Malmuth discusses 11 different variants then being spread in card rooms, offering his thoughts about the current and future popularity of each. He’s high on fixed-limit hold’em and seven-card stud (at the time the most popular variants in most rooms), and down on both pot-limit Omaha and fixed-limit Omaha (the latter having been spread during the late ’80s and ’90s, but hardly at all since). He thinks razz and Omaha/8 will survive, while draw poker probably won’t.

Of course, it’s his assessment of no-limit hold’em -- the first game on his list -- that grabs the attention the most while reading today. “The problem with no-limit hold’em,” writes Malmuth, “is that the expert player has too great an edge over weak players and will virtually never lose to these people.” He adds that “since bad players almost never win, they either go broke, find another game, or quit playing poker altogether.”

Those thoughts then inform what seems an inevitable conclusion for Malmuth.

“Unfortunately, there is not much future in no-limit hold’em.”

There’s another essay titled “Are Poker Tournaments Dying?” that offers a similarly bleak forecast. “I suspect that as years go by, there will be fewer major tournaments in Nevada casinos,” speculates Malmuth, although he does think things might play out differently in California. He also recognizes that there are “a few events, like ‘The World Series of Poker,’ [that] are spectacular successes and probably will continue to be so.”

“But as far as Nevada is concerned,” he says, “the great poker tournament boom is, in my opinion, past its peak.”

It isn’t fair, of course, to go back and isolate Malmuth’s proclamations about no-limit hold’em and tournaments almost a decade-and-a-half later like this, especially when considering that both were made well before online poker had surfaced much at all, never mind the subsequent and sudden “boom” fueled by televised that began around 2003 and which very few saw coming -- a development that directly spurred tremendous interest in both NLHE and tournaments.

Found a 2+2 thread from 2008 in which someone brought up the NLHE prediction and Malmuth responded, pointing out that “It did die as a side game. There were virtually no no-limit poker games for many years. It came back due to the interest in the TV shows and the fact that a cap was put on almost all games, something which was not done before.”

In other words, context matters. Thus when you alter the context -- say by reading predictions made long ago, or having former U.S. presidents absurdly dash around a baseball field to the delight of cheering fans -- a few grins (including unintended ones) are sometimes gonna result.

Tom Makes It Three

Was up late last night following various poker-related happenings, including that Event No. 15, the $1,500 H.O.R.S.E. event in which my friend Tom Schneider, a.k.a. the “Donkey Bomber,” was leading as the final table played out.

From a starting field of 862, they’d gotten all of the way down to three-handed with Schneider ahead of Owais Ahmed and Viatcheslav Ortynskiy when I finally hit the hay. Got up to discover Schneider had won, and thus began the day with a grin much like was the case about a week-and-a-half ago when I woke to see Chad Holloway had managed to outlast the final few players to take down that Casino Employees Event No. 1.

Schneider joins Mike Matusow atop the weekend headlines from the WSOP, as “The Mouth” also managed to claim another bracelet -- his fourth -- after winning Event No. 13, the $5,000 Stud Hi/Lo. Meanwhile the Canadians keep grabbing gold, with Mark Radoja picking up a fifth bracelet for Canada in Event No. 16, the $10,000 NLHE Heads-Up event. (The U.S. has won the other 11 bracelets thus far.)

Schneider has been cashing at the WSOP for quite some time, his first in-the-money finishes coming in 2002 and including a 36th-place in that year’s Main Event. He became better known in the poker world in 2006 after a third-place finish in the televised WPT World Poker Challenge (during which Mike Sexton first dubbed him the “Donkey Bomber”).

Anyone who missed that show finally got to know Tom the following summer when he won his first two bracelets at the 2007 WSOP on his way to winning that year’s WSOP Player of the Year. He’s continued to post frequent cashes and deep runs both at the WSOP and elsewhere during the years since, including a 52nd-place finish in the 2009 Main Event.

Long time readers of this blog might remember I first met Tom way back in 2007, just a few months prior to his breakthrough at the WSOP that summer. I’d become a fan of the podcast he, Karridy Askenasy, and Dan Michalski (of Pokerati) were doing at the time, called Beyond the Table. After having interacted with those guys several times previously online, I happened to be in LV on a trip that spring at a time when Schneider was there, and so we had a chance to meet up in person. I wrote about that meeting here in a post titled “Shamus, Get Your Ass in Here!”

Kind of interesting to look back at that post, actually, written before I’d gotten involved in tourney reporting myself or really writing about poker anywhere except here at HBP. Later on I was thrilled to see Tom soon winning bracelets, then once I started in 2008 going out to the WSOP every summer, he and I would generally get together at least once each summer to catch up.

I have continued to report on those later meetings with Tom from time to time here. This morning I’m remembering in particular one post from 2010 titled “On the Schneid” in which I shared some of Tom’s comments to me over dinner regarding the emotionally-challenging grind the WSOP can be. I’m also recalling that deep run Tom made in the 2009 Main Event, as well as an unintentionally funny text message I sent to him then which I revealed here later that summer.

You can click above to read the whole story, but I’ll sum it up quickly here to say I’d accidentally sent Tom a memorable text message that I thought I was sending to Vera. It was a message in which I had referred to the recipient as “mama” and ended with “xxx.”

Waking up this morning to see Tom had claimed his third WSOP bracelet -- just a week after his wife, Julie, made her second career WSOP final table in Event No. 5, the $2,500 Omaha/Stud Hi/Lo event -- I couldn’t resist sending him a text in acknowledgement:

“Congratulations, mama!”

Canada Brings Eh-Game to 2013 WSOP

Taking a quick trip today for a weekender up in Washington, DC. A little vacation before I head to Las Vegas a little over a week from now to join the PokerNews crew at the 2013 World Series of Poker.

I’ve been following some of the events and noting results from the WSOP thus far. The story standing out up to now would have to be the four bracelets won by Canadians already, with U.S. players having claimed the other seven won through last night. That total is one more than Canada won during the entire 2012 WSOP.

The U.S. dominated the bracelet race last year (as it usually does), winning 46 of the 61 total bracelets awarded in Las Vegas, with Canada’s three a distant second. France pulled into a tie with Canada with three overall after picking up a couple at the WSOPE last year.

I suppose with the WSOP APAC this year, Canada can count one more 2013 bracelet won with Daniel Negreanu’s triumph in the Main Event in Australia. The U.S. picked up three there as well (won by Bryan Piccioli, Jim Collopy, and Phil Ivey), so I guess the overall bracelet race this year currently has the U.S. leading with 10 and Canada next with five.

I’d noticed during this year’s Spring Championship of Online Poker at PokerStars that Canada was being represented especially well among the results, too, with players from Canada winning 18 of the 132 events (second behind the U.K.’s 19), while ranking first in final tables and third in overall cashes.

Of course, for the SCOOP those totals are skewed more than a little thanks to the fact that a number of those players listed as being from Canada are in fact American ex-pats having scurried over the border in order to be able to play on Stars.

Will be one story to keep an eye on, particularly if Canadians pick up any more bracelets going forward. Meanwhile, I’m going to see if I can’t disconnect a little over the next couple of days in our nation’s capital.

Nothing Funner: New Trailer for Poker-Themed Runner, Runner

Not much time available today for scribbling, and so I’m just going to pass along this item that popped up today, the trailer for the film Runner, Runner, due out in late September.

The film has captured the attention of poker people thanks to its subject matter and the fact that it was scripted by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the same duo who wrote Rounders. Indeed, if you go back a couple of years, some of the first references to Runner, Runner suggested the film might be a sequel, although it clearly isn’t that.

Rather the film looks like some sort of thriller that uses the Absolute Poker and UltimateBet insider cheating scandals as partial inspiration. A talented player and grad student (played by Justin Timberlake, who also played some poker in the ludicrous sci-fi flick In Time) gets cheated, then decides to go to Costa Rica to confront the site’s owner (played by Ben Affleck) who persuades him to work for the site. All is hunky dory until the FBI enters the picture, and from there it looks like the student becomes embroiled in a larger criminal plot that appears to extend considerably beyond just being able to see players’ hole cards. Also, there are crocodiles.

Here’s that trailer:

I’ve read a few items about Runner, Runner over the last several months, but I haven’t really looked into it that deeply as yet. I did exchange several messages with Koppelman at one point a long while back -- over a year ago -- and in fact he agreed to an interview with me about the project.

I was quite eager to speak with Koppelman after having taught Rounders several times in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class. I also liked Koppelman’s Grantland piece from a couple of years ago called “The Beauty of Black Friday” which I shared with my class on a couple of occasions as it fit fairly well inside the larger historical narrative we construct in the course.

Alas, the interview never happened. Koppelman strung me along for a while with postponements and requests to get back to him. But after he put it off a third time I gave it up, as he clearly had more important things to do than talk to me.

Interesting to see this trailer this week amid all of the hubbub surrounding Ben Mezrich’s Straight Flush: The True Story of Six College Friends Who Dealt Their Way to a Billion-Dollar Empire -- and How It All Came Crashing Down (mentioned here on Monday), a book that purports to tell the story of Absolute Poker but weirdly tries to fashion the site’s criminal and fraudulent founders as unfairly-treated heroic figures.

Have been reading Mezrich trying to defend himself on Twitter and in a 2+2 thread about it, but the more he says about his book the more he reveals a lack of knowledge about what happened at AP, the recent history of online poker, and what is meant by the label “True Story.”

It looks like Runner, Runner probably takes a few liberties here and there, too. But it ain’t a documentary, and so in that context embellishments -- including crocodiles -- are obviously fair game.

Luck and the Muck

Was up late last night with work, and thus ended up following a lot of that lengthy heads-up match between Matthew Waxman and Eric Baldwin that came at the conclusion of 2013 World Series of Poker Event No. 7, a $1,000 no-limit hold’em event. It took close to seven hours and numerous all-ins and survivals for the pair’s duel to reach an end, with Waxman ultimately prevailing to win the bracelet and $305,952 first prize.

It happens every year, it seems -- or really, multiple times per year -- that I am disappointed to find live streaming of WSOP-related content being reserved for those whose internet and/or cable arrangements allow them access to ESPN3. Neither of mine do, and so once I again I found out that I’m shut out from watching the “primary” live streams featuring hole cards and commentary. (Meanwhile, the “secondary” streams that are basically just cameras pointed at tables are available to all.)

So instead of watching I checked in from time to time to read the PokerNews updates. I was kind of curious to follow this one as I happened to have helped cover Baldwin’s first WSOP bracelet win back in 2009. PN has reverted back to hand-for-hand coverage at WSOP final tables this year, something that was done regularly in the past (including during my first couple of years helping cover events in ’08 and ’09). Thus we can say with specificity that Waxman and Baldwin played exactly 187 hands of heads-up before Waxman finally took the sucker down.

Interestingly, this morning I’m reading some references back to a hand Waxman played on the previous day when there were 16 players left. It was a three-way hand involving Waxman, Jason Koon (who’d go on to finish ninth) and the paradoxically-named Angel Pagan (who’d go out in 15th).

You might have heard about it, a hand involving a dealer mistake that ended up saving Waxman a lot of chips, and Koon some, too. After a Koon open, Pagan had reraised all in, then the dealer mistakenly mucked Pagan’s hand. The floor was called, and as we’ve seen happen before in these situations the ruling was that Pagan’s hand was dead, but he’d only lose the chips needed to call Koon’s raise, not his whole stack.

The hand continued with Waxman calling Koon from the blinds, then the pair playing it out with Koon winning a small pot. Post-hand conversation revealed Pagan had pocket queens (and would have won the hand), and also that Waxman had planned to reraise-shove from the blinds which would have squeezed out Koon and resulted in Waxman losing about half of his stack to fall down to the lower reaches of the counts with 16 left.

Lots of “what if” involved there, thereby encouraging some to suggest Waxman probably wouldn’t have made it as far as he did, let alone win the event, had not the dealer’s error taken place.

The heads-up battle with Baldwin provided lots of evidence of skillful play, and indeed just the fact of those two players making it to heads-up out of a field of 1,837 provides further evidence that skill matters in tournament poker. That said, the many instances between the pair in which the all-in player managed to win and survive, as well as the Waxman-Koon-Pagan hand from the day before, also remind us how much luck matters, too.

The role of luck in poker can seem overly conspicuous sometimes, but if you think about sports in which a bad call by an umpire or referee, an untimely injury, or other happenings fortunate or otherwise can affect outcomes, poker isn’t all that different.

Perhaps it’s the starkness of the contrast between a “lucky” event in poker (e.g., hitting a two-outer) and other events in which luck is less obviously apparent that so readily attracts our attention. In any case, as has been said many times before, such surprises are a big reason why the game can be so compelling both to play and watch.