Poker Geography

A few weeks ago, Full Tilt Poker introduced a new variant called Irish poker. So, too, did PokerStars roll out Courchevel, another variant most poker players probably weren’t familiar with prior to its introduction.

Both games introduce variations to Omaha. With Irish poker, players are dealt four cards, then after seeing the flop and completing that betting round they discard two before continuing. From there the game plays like hold’em.

With Courchevel, players are dealt five hole cards, then the first flop card is dealt after which comes the initial round of betting. After that the next two flop cards come and another betting round follows, then comes the turn and river. Like in Omaha games, players have to use exactly two of their hole cards and three community cards to make a hand.

There are both high-only and high/low versions of Courchevel (fixed and pot-limit), while I believe Irish poker is only being spread as a high-only game (no-limit or pot-limit).

Hearing about these games got me thinking about poker variants named after particular geographical locations, with the coincidence of Full Tilt Poker’s Irish connections somehow making it an appropriate site for debuting Irish poker occurring to me as well.

From reading around a bit I know Courchevel was indeed named after the French ski resort where it was first thought to have been introduced. I’m not so sure about Irish poker and where it originated. (Indeed, maybe on second thought it isn’t a coincidence that FTP rolled it out.)

While historians have variously disputed Texas hold’em’s origins, it most certainly first gained its greatest popularity in the Lone Star State before spreading across the country. The Texas state legislature even officially acknowledged the small city of Robstown to have been the birthplace of hold’em.

Omaha, meanwhile, appears to be a misnomer of sorts, with the game likely not originating in Nebraska. Rather most accounts place Omaha’s origins in Las Vegas in the early 1980s, with the name simply being introduced as a way to distinguish between “Texas hold’em” and “Omaha hold’em.”

As Bob Ciaffone explains in Omaha Poker, a variation of Texas hold’em was introduced and first played at the Golden Nugget in 1982 that required players to use both hole cards to make a hand. He doesn’t spell it out, but it sounds like someone had the idea to pick Omaha as a place close to Texas, just like the game was close to the version of hold’em everyone knew in which you could also just use one or neither hole card.

Anyhow, eventually the idea of dealing four cards was brought in as well (using two of them), with the Omaha part of the name sticking and the “hold’em” part going away.

So some of these poker variants named after places are indicative of where they were actually introduced and/or played, while others are not. I don’t have time today to try to produce an exhaustive list of such games, but after brooding a bit and searching just a little online, I can start one:

Caribbean stud

California lowball

California high/low split

Chinese poker

Courchevel

High Chicago, Low Chicago

Cincinnati

High San Francisco, Low San Francisco

Irish poker

Kansas City lowball

London lowball

Manila Seven-Up

Mexican stud

Mississippi stud

Omaha

Oxford stud

Polish poker

Russian poker

Russian Roulette (stud game)

Texas hold’em

There’s got to be a ton more -- dozens, probably -- including a couple of obvious ones I’m probably overlooking. (By the way, I am talking about just poker games... there obviously a multitude of non-poker card games named after places, too.)

Incidentally, while snooping around I stumbled on an example of a town named after a poker game. There’s a place in the eastern part of Arizona called Show Low, the name of which was said to have been inspired following a lengthy poker game.

Apparently a couple of men playing in the game were each vying to claim the settlement back in the late 19th century. They decided to gamble for it, basically just drawing a card from a deck with the one drawing the lowest card winning.

“If you can show low, you win,” one said, then the other drew the , replying “Show low it is.” From there came the town's name, and in fact the main street is called Deuce of Clubs.

Now I’m curious about other towns whose names were derived from poker.

Four Kings, One Joker

Was goofin’ as usual at the short-handed, dime-and-a-quarter pot-limit Omaha tables yesterday. Had a couple of tables up and began badly, but made a comeback. Was up a bit and about to hit the road when the following hand came up.

Had the button and at this table the current big stack. One empty seat meant we were five-handed. I watched as the player under the gun limped and the next folded, putting the action on me. The previous orbits had proven my four opponents were mostly just playing their cards, and usually only if they were especially pretty-lookin’. In other words, there’d been little funny business from any of ’em. Lotsa limpin’. Bets meant made hands. Calls meant draws. And folds all else.

Was one of those “probably-raising-no-matter-what” kind of spots. But wait. What have I been dealt? Four kings.

I currently have about 85,000 hands or so loaded into PokerTracker Omaha -- by no means a complete run, but I’ve been lazy about loading previous years’ worth of hands in there. A quick look shows that in all of those hands, I’ve started with four cards of the same rank exactly once before -- four sixes. In that hand, I folded (promptly, I imagine) to a raise.

Poking around online, I see the odds of being dealt four cards of the same rank in Omaha are apparently a bit worse than 1 in 20,000. Not surprising, then, that there isn’t a lot of discussion about how to play such a hand. No need, of course -- most PLO players know it’s a stinker. Indeed, I’d imagine anyone foolhardy enough to create a “hand rankings” chart of the 16,432 distinct hands in PLO would probably be putting those 13 “four of a kind” hands right at the very bottom of the sucker.

I mean, really, it’s a truly miserable hand. Sort of like a used car with a couple of hundred thousand miles already on it. Not worth much, and can only depreciate further. Can’t make a straight. Or a flush. The community cards could turn the hand into two pair or a full house, I suppose, but that’s just silly talk.

I have a fuzzy memory of Bob Ciaffone talking about the prospect of being dealt four aces in Omaha. I believe it comes up in his Omaha Poker, and I’m pretty sure he was referring to Omaha/8, in which having an ace among your starting four is more crucial than in PLO. Seems like Ciaffone said something about wanting to raise that hand to see if he could force out everyone, since he’d know they couldn’t have aces. (Been searching the book and haven’t found the passage.)

Like I say, I was about to quit. And being up a bit, my capacity for mischief had been increased a touch. So, with full awareness of how loony it was to do so, I decided to play my four kings. Thinking I might at least knock out the blinds, I raised pot. But both blinds came along, as did the original limper.

Four kings. Four players. Pot four-forty. I smiled and shook my head, quietly telling myself “you deserved that.”

But then the flop came . And all three checked. The action on me, I realized that’s about the best flop I could have hoped for. So I bet. (RSSers, you might need to click through.)



The joker wins.

Shovels, Clovers, Valentines, and Squares

FerricRamsium -- who is headed this week to Cyprus to help cover the WPT Merit Cyprus Classic along with F-Train -- was telling us in Kyiv about first playing cards with a relative (an uncle?). Whoever it was, this person shunned the usual names of suits, instead assigning the names listed above.

We all instantly decided we preferred those names for the suits, and thus began using them whenever possible.

“Squares” is particularly inspired, I think. Just turn yr head a little. See?

I continue with pot-limit Omaha, almost always sitting at the PLO25 six-handed tables. Had a nice first hand yesterday in which I not only flopped a valentine straight flush, but somehow got paid off by an opponent. Check it out (RSS readers might need to click through to see the replayer):



The PokerGrump may want to say something here about the mighty two-four (his fave hold’em hand), although I think its power is less obviously applicable in PLO.

A nice way to start a session, that. Found myself thinking a little afterwards about the odds of my having flopping a straight flush like that.

In this particular hand, there were two ways for me to get there with my . I’d need either to come, or .

Let’s see... with four cards in my hand, that makes 48 unknown cards. There are 17,296 possible flops -- (48/3)(47/2)(46/1) -- and only two of them would give me the straight flush. So I think that means we’re looking at a 1 in 8,648 shot here?

I quickly moved on from that bit of trivia, though, and began thinking about how significant suitedness is in PLO. In his first book, Pot-Limit Omaha Poker: The Big Play Strategy, Jeff Hwang has a short section called “The Importance of Being Suited” where he lists a “number of useful purposes” for having even just two suited cards in your hand. In Omaha Poker, Bob Ciaffone also speaks more than once to how vital it is to have suited cards in your hand.

“The importance of being suited even with little cards is obvious,” writes Ciaffone. “Even though you wouldn’t want to play a small flush-draw by itself,” he says, “there are lots of opportunities to play it in conjunction with another reason to be contending for the pot.”

So, says Ciaffone, he might raise preflop with 9-8-7-6 if it were double-suited, whereas he might just limp in if it were not. With the former hand, he can make a straight or flop a big wrap draw, then have a flush draw to back it up as well, which could put him in a situation where he’s freerolling against an opponent who has or is gunning for the same straight. Another small part of the equation is the fact that if he were up against an opponent drawing to a higher flush, he’d have a couple of his opponent’s outs in his hand.

I’ve heard some -- including top pros -- argue that suitedness can be much overrated in hold’em, noting how some players too often talk themselves into gambling with poor starters simply on the basis of their being “sooted.”

I suppose suitedness can be overrated in PLO, too, especially if a player starts getting into the habit of drawing to non-nut hands. But you’re definitely better off overrating suitedness in PLO than underrating it, I’d think. If I’m gonna see a flop in PLO, I always like to see a couple of shovels, clovers, valentines, or squares in my hand.

Have a good weekend, all.

Is PLO the “Game of the Future”?

Recently listened to online whiz Brian “sbrugby” Townsend interviewed on the 4/29 episode of PokerRoad’s Cash Plays. During the last part of the interview, host Bart Hanson asks Townsend some questions about pot limit Omaha, and the discussion is a good one. Definitely worth hearing, if you’re a PLO fan, I think.

The pair address a number of PLO-related topics, including playing aces, short-stacking (how to play & how to combat against), deep-stacked play, bluff-raising, full ring vs. 6-max play, folding after flopping the nuts, freerolling, and even PLO/8. They also touch on that myth about PLO being a game of coin flips. Regarding the latter, Townsend sounds as though he agrees with Jeff Hwang’s observation in Pot-Limit Omaha: The Big Play Strategy that PLO “is not a 50-50 game” and that “it is a pure fallacy that you have to be in a gambling situation when the money goes in.”

Near the end, Hanson asks Townsend what he thinks about the notion that “PLO is the game of the future.” This is an idea that Bob Ciaffone was suggesting way back in the early 80s shortly after the game was first formulated at the Golden Nugget by Robert “Chip Burner” Turner and -- as Ciaffone tells it in Omaha Poker -- that “Oriental lady from the Seattle area named Gwen” (nicknamed the “Dragon Lady”).

Hanson, of course, is referring more directly to recent buzz surrounding PLO, with new interest in the game being perhaps most directly influenced by all of those ongoing high-stakes ($200/$400) games occurring on Full Tilt Poker. (That photo above shows Townsend taking down a $430K pot in one of those games vs. David Benyamine and Tom “Durrrr” Dwan.)

“I think PLO is a beautiful game,” is Townsend’s reply to Hanson’s question. Hanson chuckles in response. “It’s a lot more interesting that no limit Hold ’em,” he adds.

“Really?” says Hanson, a bit incredulous sounding.

Townsend goes on to explain that in his opinion, “no limit Hold ’em really needs antes,” especially online. He notes that one finds such games in live play quite often, and that it adds an extra layer of strategy that makes the game much more fun for him. He doesn’t elaborate, but I think he also is implying that antes would force people to play more (and different) hands in different positions, thereby adding some of those “nuances and subtleties” to NLHE that Townsend was remarking upon earlier in the interview as characteristic of PLO.

“PLO doesn’t need antes because it has that deceptive factor that you think you can play so many hands when in all actuality you can’t.” It is, as Ciaffone dubbed it long ago, the “action game.”

Funny how the “deceptive factor” to which Townsend refers (if I understand him correctly) in fact concerns how one can deceive oneself more easily in PLO than in other games, not to the strategy of trying to deceive others. Although that’s a big part of the game, too.

Dunno if PLO is the “game of the future” or not, but anecdotally-speaking I do believe it has risen in popularity over the last few months, as I am routinely seeing more PLO tables running when I go online these days.

Which is good for me. ’Cos I do like the action.