Twitch Talk

Have you looked at Twitch, that live streaming video platform that has been gaining some notice in the poker world over the last several months?

I’m trying to remember when I first heard of Twitch. I think it was last year at some point when I heard Marcel Luske talking about the site and playing on it occasionally as marcelluske, although I never looked in.

Twitch launched in 2011, and quickly became very popular among the multiplayer online gaming crowd. It took poker players a little while to find the site and start using it, with Luske and Jason Somerville among the first to gravitate to it. I did watch some of Somerville’s “Run It Up” sessions -- played under his jcarverpoker account -- which were both interesting and entertaining.

It was easy to see while watching Somerville how the medium would work well for poker coaching -- much like instructional videos, only live and even interactive (via chat). You can watch him for free, although it looks like those who subscribe for a few bucks per month get access to special sessions, too.

I learned a bit more about Twitch at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure where Somerville, James McManus, Lee Jones, and Barry Greenstein presented a panel about poker’s past, present, and future. It was there Somerville suggested how Twitch could well attract a lot of newcomers to poker, and how in his experience many of those tuning in to watch him weren’t already deep into the game (as one might expect).

I’ve looked at a few other Twitch streams over the last few weeks.

I watched David Sklansky playing tourneys on WSOP.com on a couple of occasions on the twoplustwo_poker account, his cockatoo perched on his shoulder and cats climbing all over him as he did. He offered lots of justifications for his nittiness while responding to comments and some often funny questions in chat.

I also looked in on Casey Jarzebek’s “Monday Night MTT Grind with Beers!” a couple of nights ago over on his bigdogpckt55 Twitch, watching him play several hands well and make good reads in a tournament, although by the time I looked in I think he’d imbibed enough for his self-commentary to be reduced to repeating how easy poker was for him while touting his training site. Still entertaining, tho’.

I’m imagining some real interesting applications of Twitch, including for covering both live and online tournaments. The GPI guys are already planning to use it in some fashion, apparently, for that Global Poker Masters event next month. The delay for these I’ve been watching is just three minutes, I think, which tightens the window even further from the usual half-hour or thereabouts usually observed for “almost live” streams, which I think might present issues if hole cards are shown.

I haven’t read any cultural critics discussing Twitch as yet, although I assume it is being viewed as a logical next step in social media, making it even more simple than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. for everyone to broadcast his or her own life as a performance, packaging and presenting themselves in ways that satisfy various predilections (including the desire to “monetize” one’s existence, if possible).

I’ll ask again... have you looked at Twitch? What do you think of its potential relevance to poker?

The Sklansky Minute and John Cage’s Indeterminacy

Our buds Special K and Falstaff have a new podcast, peoples. It’s called the Gambling Tales Podcast and Episode No. 1 is now available. I’ve been up to my eyeballs with work, but am going to be listening to this sucker (finally) in the car this morning.

I’m reading that there is some November Nine talk in there -- some pre-final table predictions, I believe, so we can listen and admire their accuracy, or goof on their folly. There’s a tale about the origins of gambling. And there’s a conversation with Bad Blood. Check it out!

Speaking of podcasts, one of my favorites is still the Two Plus Two Pokercast, which remains one of the most consistently good ones for news, interviews, and the occasional strategy stuff. Of course, I’ve been a fan of Mike Johnson and Adam Schwartz (the hosts) since their earlier show -- called Rounders, the Poker Show -- which they began way back in the spring of 2005. That one followed a similar format at the TwoPlusTwo show, other than usually running about an hour or so (if I recall) rather than the two-plus hours they normally go with this one.

The TwoPlusTwo show began in January 2008, and is now approaching its 100th episode. A regular feature of the show is something called the “Sklansky Minute” in which the highly regarded poker author, David Sklansky, offers strategy advice, theoretical broodings on human behavior, or perhaps a Zen koan.

I’m joking about the Zen koans, of course. Or maybe not. Here’s the beginning of a Sklansky Minute, this one from Episode 88 (the one with Tommy Angelo):

“Major tournaments have gone to great lengths nowadays to -- for lack of a better word -- prevent ‘hanky-panky.’ [Pause.] But there is one thing that they allow to this day that is an invitation to cheat. [Pause.] I speak of making change with your neighbor, a transaction that is rarely watched closely....”

And so forth. Those of you who have heard the segments are familiar with the Sklansky’s very deliberate, almost cautious-sounding style of speech. Not sure if he reads from a script or not, but the effect is the same regardless.

Anyhow, I had sort of a strange association come to me as I was listening to a recent Sklansky Minute, one which actually might help explain the “Zen koan”-like feel the segments sometimes have for me. While listening I was contemplating how there must be 60 or 70 of these little segments by now, and suddenly I found myself thinking of the avant-garde composer John Cage, in particular his work Indeterminacy, a Folkways recording of which was made (with David Tudor) in 1959.

The work has a long, interesting history which I’m not going to rehearse here. If you are curious, you can check out the website “About Indeterminacy” for more. The work is structured around a series of very short anecdotes or stories or musings or what have you that Cage wrote. On the recording, he reads 90 of them, while David Tudor provides random musical accompaniment on the piano (and various other noise-makers).

The pieces are of different lengths, yet all are read so as to fill one minute exactly. That means some are read quickly, while others contain lengthy pauses. To give you an idea of what a “Cage Minute” is like, here’s an example, the second one on the recording:

“You probably know the one about the two monks, but I’ll tell it anyway. They were walking one day when they came to a stream where a young lady was waiting, hoping that someone would help her across. Without hesitating, one of the monks picked her up and carried her across, putting her down safely on the other side. The two monks continued walking along, and after some time, the second one, unable to restrain himself, said to the first, ‘You know we’re not allowed to touch women. Why did you carry that woman across the stream?’ The first monk replied, ‘Put her down. I did two hours ago.’”

If you want to hear Cage reading them (and Tudor’s accompaniment), here is a YouTube clip featuring the first ten stories from Indeterminacy:



As I say, a few more weeks and Sklansky probably will have 90 of his “Minutes” to string together. Perhaps he should hire Tommy Angelo to provide musical accompaniment and make his own avant-garde recording?

Of course, maybe the prospect of listening to a long sequence of Sklansky Minutes doesn’t sound too thrilling. In which case, let me share another one of Cage’s stories from Indeterminacy:

“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all, but very interesting.”

(EDIT [added 12/4/09]: Shortly after this post, Sklansky contributed an especially idiosyncratic Minute to an episode of the Pokercast, prompting a thread on the forums about the segment. Eventually *TT* posted a list of all of the Sklansky Minutes -- about forty of them, which you can see here.)

Thriving vs. Surviving: John Phan & David Sklansky at the 2008 WSOP, Event No. 40 Final Table

Mentioned last post Arnold Snyder’s The Poker Tournament Formula 2. An interesting read. I’d definitely recommend it to the serious tourney player.

After focusing primarily on fast tourneys in the first one (and talking a lot about position play), Snyder looks more specifically in PTF2 at tourneys with slower structures. In both books Snyder talks about how to calculate a given tournament’s “patience factor” and therefore rank the relative “skill level” required of the event. On his website, Snyder has among other articles and information a downloadable “Patience Factor / Skill Level Tournament Calculator” -- really just an Excel spreadsheet into which you can insert the relevant numbers to compute tourney speeds. (The sheet probably isn’t of much use to you if you haven’t read the books.)

I didn’t want to discuss the book too much, but rather just mention a couple of passages that come up in PTF2 and how they reminded me of a particular event I covered at this summer’s World Series of Poker, Event No. 40, the $2,500 Deuce-to-Seven Triple Draw event.

Snyder begins his second tournament poker book with a discussion of John Phan, the highly-successful tourney player who has accumulated over $4 million in career earnings over the last decade. Snyder found himself playing with Phan a couple of times at the 2006 WSOP, and both times he experienced Phan’s especially aggressive, off-putting style of play with which he successfully accumulated huge chip stacks while punishing the table mercilessly. “Phan’s chip stack,” Snyder reflects, “combined with his aggressive style of play, literally had the rest of the table frozen, even though most of the players had very viable chip stacks in relation to the blinds.”

Snyder takes it upon himself to try to figure out what Phan was doing, and the result in large part is PTF2. He talks a lot in the early part of the book about a concept called “chip utility,” most simply defined as “the usefulness or serviceability of your chips.” Phan’s style not only won him chips, and thus gave him an increased “chip utility” at the table (i.e., he could now do more things with his chips), but it also reduced his opponents’ chip utility -- even those from whom he was not winning pots.

Reading this little tribute to “the Razor” made me think of the six-handed final table of Event No. 40, which began with Phan as the chip leader with nearly 300,000 chips. In fact, he’d led for a lot of the three-day tourney -- I know he was at the top of the leaderboard for most of the second day. Phan faced some tough opponents at this final table, including Gioi Luong, Robert Mizrachi, Ben Ponzi (who had one WSOP bracelet), and David Sklansky. Shun Uchida was the least decorated at the table, though he’d led the tourney at the end of Day 1 and would go on to finish second.

F-Train and I covered this one, and having watched Phan work the first couple of days we knew he’d be tough for the others to deal with at the final table. And indeed, he controlled the show for most of the night. If you read back through our coverage, you’ll see numerous references to Phan’s aggressive play (and table talk). I think we also mentioned in there somewhere the ten Coronas he ordered halfway through the night. I know I did in a post here, anyway.

Phan won that tournament, taking his second bracelet of the series. Although I’m not too versed in 2-7 triple draw, it struck me as a game that suited Phan particularly well in that even though it was a limit tourney it afforded numerous opportunities for bluffing and/or intimidation -- especially if one had the chips to do so.

A lot of Snyder’s advice in both of his Poker Tournament books is offered independent of one’s actual cards -- in the fast tourneys he’s talking a lot about using position, and in the slower ones he focuses more squarely on using your chips. Of course, in a game like 2-7 Triple Draw, the actual cards tend to mean even less, with the betting and drawing really moving the action and forcing most of the decisions.

I mentioned David Sklansky was also at that final table. He’s the other reason why Snyder’s book made me think of Event No. 40.

Sklansky entered the final table with 78,000 chips, making him the short stack as play began with about 40 minutes left in Level 17 on Day 3. The blinds were 3,000/5,000 and limits 5,000/10,000 when play began, meaning he had not even eight big bets -- enough, perhaps, to play one hand (sort of) comfortably. Indeed, Sklansky had been nursing the short stack for pretty much all of Day 2, and we’d thought on numerous occasions we’d be reporting his elimination prior to the final table. But he hung on and made it. Finishing in the top six of an event in which 238 players entered is certainly an accomplishment.

We knew, though, Sklansky wouldn’t be winning this one. Not without cards, anyway. And sure enough, Sklansky’s stack dwindled down quickly. Just kind of randomly looking back through the blog, I see I wrote this post about one of the last hands from Level 17:

Sklansky Looking for Cards
David Sklansky raised from the hijack, Robert Mizrachi called from the button, and John Phan called from the small blind. On the first round, all took two cards, and all checked.

On the second draw, Phan stood pat, Sklansky took one, and Mizrachi took two. This time Phan bet, Sklansky called, and Mizrachi folded. Phan stood pat again on the last draw, while Sklansky took one again. Phan bet, and Sklansky folded. Phan has chipped up to 315,000.

Sklansky folded the next hand. On the next he was in the big blind, and had to fold after someone raised. He showed a king as he did.

Sklansky is down to 29,000.

Even in this limit tournament, Sklansky had just about zero “chip utility” of which to speak. As was the case with many hands we watched that night, we had no idea what cards players had on this one. But it kind of didn’t matter, other than the fact that whatever Sklansky drew on the third round, he wasn’t comfortable risking such a high percentage of his stack (the 10,000-chip big bet on the end) to see if he was good.

Then came the blinds, and Sklansky folded both times. He’d fold another orbit’s worth, then facing a three-bet in the big blind, would fold again.

Sklansky was down to 14,000. On his very last hand, he had just 12,000 to start, meaning even if he’d won the hand, he still would have just a couple of big bets with which to continue.

In his discussion of chip utility in PFT2, Snyder gets into it big time with Sklansky over the latter’s long-held argument for “reverse chip value theory” in tournaments -- what Snyder calls the “big boner” of tourney thinking dreamt up by the “math heads” (i.e., Sklansky and Mason Malmuth). It’s a provocative (and entertaining) discussion, one I think most tourney players should at least be curious about in that it forces one to rethink some of that so-called “received wisdom” we’ve had preached to us over the years.

This post has already run on too long, so I’m not going to get into the whole argument too deeply. I will summarize it, though. The “reverse chip value thory” -- which, Snyder points out, has informed a lot of tournament strategy writing over the last couple of decades -- is the idea that “the more chips a player has, the less each of his chips are worth,” and, conversely, “the fewer chips a player has, the more each of his chips are worth.”

This, of course, is the exact opposite of Snyder’s view. Snyder feels that the more chips you have, the more they are worth, insofar as they give one an increased chip utility. And recalling all of the utility Phan had with his chips there at the final table of Event No. 40 -- and how miserably little utility Sklansky had -- doesn’t contradict Snyder’s point here.

(This argument over the “reverse chip value theory” -- and other debates brought up by Snyder’s book -- continues over on Two Plus Two, with Sklansky predictably entering fray as well to fight back.)

Snyder speaks of how “so many players voluntarily surrender their utility” and instead revert to “survival-oriented strategies” in tournaments. It probably isn’t fair to say Sklansky had “surrendered” his utility by the time the final table started, although he certainly did somewhere along the way in Day 2, choosing rather just to survive than to do what was necessary to take all of his opponents’ chips.

Snyder ultimately characterizes a poker tournament as “a battle between the utility players and the survival players, and it’s not so much a battle as a rout.” From what I could tell, Event No. 40 of this year’s WSOP seemed to confirm that view.

A Sticky Issue

Yesterday I read Bill Rini’s post in which he passed along some inside dope from Two Plus Two regarding strategy posts and “Grand Poobah” Mason Malmuth’s worry that the forums are negatively affecting the company’s book sales. If you didn’t happen to catch Bill’s post, here’s the skinny:

Back in May, 2+2 author Ed Miller put up a post on his popular “Noted Poker Authority” site announcing that “for the last nine months” he had been “receiving pressure and threats aimed at forcing me either to shut down Noted Poker Authority or to make the vast majority of its content available for pay only.” The upshot was that articles older than 30 days would no longer be accessible for free. Am not quite sure how the new system works or what the cost to view the older articles happens to be, but I do see that now one has to login in to see the older articles (such as that nice “shout out” Ed gave me back in January).

In any event, earlier this week Malmuth posted a message -- titled “Some Stickies Need to Be Modified” -- for the 2+2 moderators that begins with an allusion to Miller’s site. This message was apparently not intended to be seen by anyone other than the moderators, but a leak somewhere caused the message to be made public.

“Many of you are not going to like this,” Malmuth begins, “but we have had a terrible time with one of our authors creating a website with so much information on it that it was clearly going to destroy book sales.” 2+2 “is first and foremost a publishing company,” Malmuth points out, and apparently he has concluded that “many of our stickies are similar” in the way they deter readers from buying the company’s books.

The 2+2 forums work like most in that the most recent and most popular threads appear at the top of each individual forum. Forum moderators will create a “sticky” post whenever a particularly important topic comes up that needs to continue to appear at the top of the forum and not be pushed downward when newer threads are begun. For instance, in “News, Views, and Gossip” one finds a “UB scandal sticky” atop the page where many links to relevant posts/threads have been organized for readers’ convenience.

Some of the strategy-based forums had also begun collecting links to some of the best-received strategy posts into “stickies” for the same purpose -- i.e., to make life easier for the reader hoping to find these posts amid the hundreds of thousands that have been created since the site began back in 1997. (Actually, I’m not sure the site’s archival system currently allows one read posts from that far back, but you get the idea.)

In Malmuth’s note, he recognizes that while the site “contains a lot of quality information,” such information is a bit difficult to track down since it isn’t “readily accessible and well organized.” And what he’s noticed is “the stickies are doing just that,” that is, organizing the information in ways that make it easier for readers to access it. “Having links to lots of top quality posts may be serving as a substitute for book purchases,” worries Malmuth, so he is asking the moderators “to look at the stickies in your areas and consider deleting some of the links that can substitute for book purchases.”

My initial reaction to hearing this story was to chuckle at how a website’s owner can arrive at the conclusion that making his site less user-friendly is somehow in the site’s best interest. Malmuth and 2+2 have always been stubbornly iconoclastic (to their detriment, frankly) when it comes to all phases of book publishing -- from writing and editing to promotion and distribution -- so it isn’t at all surprising to see such a strange, backwards-seeming understanding of the relationship between different types of media (print and electronic) emerge from the same source.

I then recalled that little brouhaha that came up last December regarding an allegedly plagiarized passage appearing in Seven Card Stud for Advanced Players, a book co-authored by Malmuth and David Sklansky. I wrote a lengthy post about the dust-up then; you can read more about it there, if yr curious.

That little dust-up concerned a sample hand appearing in the pair’s book that was essentially identical to one that comes up in Chip Reese’s stud section of Super/System (published over a decade before). The similarity caused some to suggest the pair had stolen the material from Reese. As I said then, it appeared to me a fairly innocent slip on the part of the authors, though the pair’s mule-headed responses to the matter (in the 2+2 forums) revealed what I then described as a overly “functional view of style” wherein Malmuth and Sklansky both insist on quantifying things that simply cannot be quantified. Let me explain.

Defending himself against the charge of plagiarism, Sklansky posted the following dismissive comment on what happened: “But duh. Cmon. How easy would it have been for me to come up with a completely different example to perfectly describe the exact same concept? To ascribe this to anything other than an oversight is completely ridiculous. Chip’s chapter was very good but it was 50 pages. Our book has 300.”

That reference to the amount of pages at the end -- our book was six times longer than Reese’s section, chirps Sklansky, suggesting somehow it is six times more valuable -- is indicative of that tendency to overvalue quantity. But it is the idea that he could’ve picked a different example to illustrate the same concept -- and that making that sort of change would’ve somehow made the passage acceptable (and not plagiarism) -- that reveals an utter misunderstanding of the importance of form and its relation to content. And I think Malmuth’s directive to his moderators comes from the same sort of misapprehension about form and content Sklansky evinces in his defense against the plagiarism charge.

Malmuth believes that a significant number of visitors to the 2+2 forums who would have bought a 2+2 book decide not to because they can get all of the good, “quality information” on the site that they need. This view suggests that the form in which this information is presented is of no consequence -- that we don’t care whether it comes in a book written by a “noted poker authority” or via a post from some dude who goes by Butterfingers123. Just tell me what to do when my continuation bet on a raggedy flop gets check-raised by that LAG from UTG and I’m happy, right?

Wrong. While the centrality of print media in our culture has certainly been threatened in our electronic age, the formal differences between books and websites are so vast -- and significant -- one cannot reasonably argue that the 2+2 forums are going to “destroy book sales” for the company. Those of us who read books and want to read more books will continue to do so, no matter what “stickies” get created. And those of us who don’t read books still won’t read them, no matter what “stickies” get created.

Malmuth isn’t entirely indifferent to form, of course. After all, his primary worry here has to do with the formal characteristics of his website. He’d prefer the content of the site be presented in a less-organized, harder-to-navigate form, and is thus asking his moderators to help him achieve this goal by removing the helpful stickies. He seems thus to have some idea that form affects content -- that the content of his site (its usefulness, its value) will be affected by these changes to the site’s form.

But the attention to form here is utterly misplaced. If anything, the changes to the site’s form are intended to lessen the value of its content.

And to end on a less theoretical note, let’s think of the practical consequences of that change. If the site becomes less user-friendly, fewer will spend time on it. And thus fewer will become aware of the books. And fewer will buy them.

(EDIT [added 8/14/08, 5:30 p.m.]: It appears the message from Malmuth to the 2+2 mods was sent some time ago -- likely near the end of May, judging from the post count listed under Malmuth’s name in the message -- although it was not until earlier this week that it became known to anyone beyond the original recipients. Also, it looks as though after subsequent discussion the directive from Malmuth contained in the message was ultimately rescinded -- good news to those who appreciate the usefulness of the “stickies.” If you are curious, start here and read further to learn a bit more about the original message and its having been leaked this week.)

Poker and Nothingness

Been intending for a while to try to explain that reference to existentialism in the descriptive subtitle to “Hard-Boiled Poker.” Partly alludes to the great hard-boiled novels of writers like Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Thompson, Willeford, and others, all of which could -- in one way or another -- arguably be categorized as notable examples of “existentialist art.”

I also have in mind a more direct connection to existentialism as defined and explained by Jean-Paul Sartre and others -- an implied argument, if you will, for a connection between poker and existentialist thought. A lot of ideas produced by the existentialists seem to me to be readily applicable to poker. They may even be useful. But that (as the existentialists would insist) is up to each individual to decide.

First there’s Sartre’s famous observation that existence precedes essence (as far as humans are concerned). We start with existence, then formulate ideas about who we are, what our “essence” or “nature” might be. Thus might we say that the experience of the poker player is what defines him. He plays a number of hands, then becomes a certain kind of player (to himself and to others). He plays more hands, and his so-called “essence” changes still again.

The way we exist -- what we say, what we do, whether we call preflop raises from late position with suited one-gappers -- defines who we are. (You might want to argue the reverse -- e.g., that my conservative “nature” is what makes me fold ace-rag preflop -- but the existentialist knows better. He knows that folding ace-rag is what makes me a conservative player.)

It doesn’t help, of course, that the world in which we exist is indifferent to our plight. At times it may appear to follow some “order” (and thus imply some sort of creator having fashioned it thusly), but in actuality such order is only the result of our own idiosyncratic perceptions -- our relentless attempts at “meaning-making.”

In a previous post, I mentioned Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth’s observation in Small Stakes Hold ’em that “cards are pieces of plastic . . . [that] have no knowledge, no memory, no cosmic plan.” In other words, despite the frequency and/or conviction of our invocations, there are no poker gods. And not only do the cards have no “memory” or “plan” -- they have no meaning, either. Not on their own, anyway. (Just like everything else, actually.)

Facing such a circumstance, we could go the route of the nihilist and say that having accepted (1) existence precedes essence & (2) that the world is indifferent to us, there is no point in going forward. It’s a common mistake, actually, to say the existentialist believes life has no meaning. Not so. It’s the nihilist who believes life is without meaning, purpose, truth, what have you. (Sartre titled his book Being and Nothingness -- not simply “nothingness” -- deliberately choosing a phrase that implies a kind of ongoing conflict.)

Unlike the nihilist, the existentialist understands and accepts that we are the ones creating meaning -- that we are free, in fact, to make whatever we want of the world. To change the world, or what it means to us . . . for the better, even (if that’s your cup of tea).

We’re on our own, though. No “god” is going to help us. (Thus does such freedom produce a great deal of anxiety in us.) The poker player cannot control the cards. Nor can he perfectly control others’ actions at the table (although he can influence those actions). But he can certainly affect what those cards mean (to him). He can affect what his opponents’ actions mean (to him). And he can affect what his own actions mean (to himself). In fact, he not only can affect the meanings of those things -- he necessarily does affect what they mean. Every single hand.

In that earlier post (about Dostoevsky’s The Gambler -- another example of “existentialist” art, one might argue), I proposed that poker might be defined as “an activity in which each participant is trying to exert the most control in situations where everyone is a little out of control.”

In a way, that’s what I’m trying to say here about “meaning-making” at the poker table (and beyond). Poker is meaningful . . . because we give it meaning. And when we play, we not only confront other players, we confront that villainous “nothingness” who always seems to be following us around, showing up in the bathroom mirror, sitting across from us on the bus, waiting in line behind us at the store . . . .

And while we sometimes lose to the other players, we beat him . . . every time.

Image: Portrait of Edward James (a.k.a. Not to Be Reproduced) (1937) (adapted -- notice the book on the table), Rene Magritte, fair use.

Testing, Testing . . .

You’re in a limit game and are dealt in the big blind. It folds around to the cutoff who calls. The button folds, the small blind completes, and you check your option. So there are three of you in when the flop comes . The small blind checks. What do you do?

This is a situation that comes up frequently enough to warrant some consideration. You find yourself barely committed to a hand, then a flop comes that changes everything. Like you’d been laying low, trying to figure out where the buffet line begins, when all of sudden you’ve been asked to deliver a toast to the happy couple. Now you’re the center of attention. You are expected to speak. But what are you going to say?

Do you bet? For as long as I can remember this was an automatic bet for me. I know that flopping a flush is a statistical rarity. For the guy holding two suited cards, he’s flopping a flush something like 1 out of 118 times. In fact, if three diamonds come out like this, it is more likely than not neither of my two opponents holds a single diamond. Of course, if one does have a diamond, he’s probably going to be sticking around for the turn (especially if that diamond isn’t especially low).

So it’s very likely -- almost a certainty, really -- that I’m ahead. And there are big draws out there, flush and straight. So I gotta protect, right?

Like I said, in the past, I would always bet. If the fourth diamond came on the turn, I’d often weakly remain in the hand (by check-calling) in the hopes of filling up on the river (even if pot odds weren’t quite enough to warrant sticking around). In other words, I hated letting go of my flopped two pair, and so often ended up paying off my drawing opponent when they didn’t hold up.

The other day, though, I was in this very situation and decided to do something different. I checked. And when the cutoff bet and the small blind folded, I just called. I figured if anyone was on a draw, he wasn’t folding to my open bet on the flop, nor would a check-raise likely scare him away. Pessimistic, I know . . . but I’d made up my mind that I didn’t want to lose a lot on this hand. I thought I’d try to keep the pot small and see what the turn brought.

The turn was the . No straight. No flush. My top two pair was still the best hand, I was sure. I checked and as I’d hoped the cutoff bet. I check-raised, and he called me. The river was the . I bet, he folded, and I took the pot of $6.20 (giving up thirty cents to the rake).

I don’t know what my opponent had, but clearly he didn’t have a queen. He likely had a diamond. And he may even have let go of bottom or middle pair. Of course, if he had flopped the flush (or made a set), I was doomed. But he didn’t, and I wasn’t. As it happened, I’d probably extracted the most I possibly could have from this particular hand.

I looked back in Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth’s Small Stakes Hold ’em to see if there were any sort of justification for how I’d played the hand. It had felt right to me, and (of course) the result made me think I’d done well here.

Speaking of “Slowplaying,” the trio point out that it is never a good idea to risk large pots by slowplaying. (I hadn’t done that.) But they don’t recommend giving free cards with draws on the board, either. (I had done that.)

However, in the section about “Protecting Your Hand,” they describe situations where a post-flop raise will not protect your hand. One example involves being in the big blind and flopping two pair with straight and flush draws on the board (e.g., you have T8 and the flop comes QT8 with two hearts). “If you raise now,” they explain, your opponents “will often call anyway,” particularly when there are multiple players still involved. “The best plan is to call now, hoping for a safe card. If fourth street is a blank, plan to check-raise then.” This was precisely the plan I had followed in the hand (although I wasn’t necessarily conscious of any theoretical basis for playing it this way).

Does the math support the play? Doesn’t seem to, really. When I check-raised the turn, my opponent faced 4.5-to-1 pot odds to call; thus, he was certainly justified to call if indeed he was hoping to complete his flush (around 4-to-1 to hit). However, a bet on the flop wouldn’t have been much better, odds-wise. If I had bet, the cutoff would’ve had 4-to-1 to call (and surely would’ve, if he’s chasing that flush). If I had check-raised the flop, the cutoff would’ve had 6-to-1 to call . . . even better.

So it seems like waiting until the turn indeed maximized my profit, although it also maximized my potential loss had my opponent made his draw. Still, I’m over 80% to win after that turn card -- a good place to be with one card to come, no matter how you look at it.

Did I stumble my way into a viable strategy for this kind of situation? What do you say? Here . . . take this microphone . . . I’m gonna go see if there are any of those little shrimp thingys left . . . .

Fingering Those Four-Flushers (Redux)

That problem I discussed in my previous post continues to linger in my mind. Ran into the same situation more than once over the last couple of days of play. For example, had a hand where I was dealt in the cutoff and raised. Only one caller (the big blind). Flop comes . He checks, I bet, he calls. Turn is the . He checks, I bet, he calls. River is the . He checks, I check, and he shows . Don’t know if he’d have called a bet on the end, but given how he’d played the hand he probably would have as there would have been $6.25 in the pot. I won the hand but (likely) lost an extra big bet. I decided it was time to consult the experts about the problem.

David Sklansky has a chapter titled “Heads-Up On The End” in his The Theory of Poker where he addresses this very circumstance. The chapter is divided into “first position play” and “last position play.” Since the difficulty I face comes up most frequently when I am in last position, I reviewed what Sklansky had to say there.

He talks about those times when the last card comes and your opponent bets out and those times when your opponent checks to you. Now when I’m only holding top pair and that third heart appears, if my opponent bets out I’m definitely only going to call. That’s essentially what Sklansky recommends here -- he says to raise if I think I have a better hand or if I think my opponent is bluffing, but otherwise just to call. (Pot odds generally mean folding isn’t an option.) Since I usually don’t know if my opponent is bluffing in this situation, and since I also usually am not certain I have a better hand here, I call.

Now those times when my opponent checks to me on the end, Sklansky says “Bet your hand for value if you are a favorite,” but “don’t bet in close situations to avoid a check-raise.” As I’ve already established, I consider this a close situation, especially if multiple players saw the flop and only one or two of them decided to chase it to the river against me. So it appears Sklansky is here telling me that checking behind (as I have usually been doing) is probably a sound play.

It's important to note that Sklansky is offering only general guidelines in The Theory of Poker. For more particular advice about my game -- low limit hold ’em -- I go to Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth’s Small Stakes Hold ’em. In the back of the book they list a series of “Hand Quizzes,” and, in fact, the very last one closely resembles the “four-flusher” situation I’m investigating. In their example, you are dealt big slick on the button and two limpers call your raise. You flop a king (with two diamonds on the board), and so bet your top-pair, top-kicker. Both limpers check-call. The turn is a non-diamond blank, and both limpers again check-call. Then the river puts a third diamond on the board and your two opponents both check it to you.

This is precisely where I’ve almost always been checking down the hand, but Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth say this is a time to bet. Their reasoning is that “it is more likely that you are still ahead after your opponents check [on the river] than it is before they check.” It is also true that your opponent isn’t always going to check-raise you, even if he has hit his hand. They then add a “game theory”-type explanation that I’m not going to try to paraphrase here (see pp. 308-09 of SSHE, if'n yr innersted) that essentially says not betting here causes you to lose more bets in the long term than betting does.

I see how it is more likely that if my opponent(s) check to me in late position here -- as the fellow with the pocket fours did -- that I’m still ahead. Most who make their flush will indeed bet out on the end so as not to miss getting one more big bet on the river. Now that I think about it, I don’t recall that many instances where I check that hand down and then see my opponent has made his flush.

Every situation is different, of course, but I think I’ll probably be betting out here more often than I have been in the past. As Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth say, "Do not let every river card scare you. Bet!"

Photo: Tom Neal from the 1945 film Detour (adapted), public domain.

Raising Hellmuth

Well, the Poker Brat did it. Phil Hellmuth, Jr. won the $1,000 NL Hold ‘em with rebuys event (Event No. 34), besting a field of 754 to grab his tenth WSOP bracelet. It didn’t appear too likely once Daryn Firicano busted out in third and Hellmuth was left to battle Juha Helppi. (You might remember Helppi was the fellow who as an amateur beat out Phil Gordon in that amateurs-vs.-pros WPT event from the first season.) When heads-up play began, Hellmuth was outchipped 2-to-1. Six hands later Helppi had a 3-to-1 advantage. Then came that wild, miraculous hand that turned the tide.

Helppi was sitting pretty with about $1,850,000 in chips while Hellmuth was down to $650,000. The blinds were $15,000/$30,000 with a $5,000 ante. Helppi raised to $90,000 from the button and Hellmuth moved all in from the big blind. Helppi called and it was his versus Hellmuth’s . The flop was a crowd-electrifying , giving Hellmuth a set but also giving Helppi nine outs to a possible tourney-winning flush. The came on the turn, completing the Finnish player’s flush and leaving Hellmuth ten outs to fill up or make quads. Fortunately for Hellmuth, the came on the river and he survived, pulling about even in chips. Over the next thirty hands or so, Hellmuth slowly increased his lead before finally taking the last of the chips when his outlasted Helppi's .

Not that huge of a surprise, really, considering how the Brat has been going at this year’s series. He had already seen a couple of final tables, including a second place finish (out of 622) in the $5,000 NL Hold ’em event (Event No. 9). Of course, Hellmuth would've been the center of attention anyway. Everyone seems to have an opinion about him. His books and DVDs routinely receive a fair amount of criticism on message boards, newsgroups, and blogs. Despite his many accomplishments, it has almost become a cliché for poker players to dismiss outright his best-selling Play Poker Like the Pros.

I’d mentioned in an earlier post that I’d read Hellmuth’s book and intended at some point to say something about it, so I thought this might be as good of an occasion as any to do so. Play Poker Like the Pros is hardly the best or most helpful poker book I’ve read, but I’ll grant that it does possess some merit, especially for someone brand new to poker.

Nearly half of Play Poker Like the Pros concerns limit hold ‘em cash games. Hellmuth outlines a “beginner” strategy whereby one is encouraged only to play “top ten” premium hands, and almost always to play them aggressively (to “ram and jam” the pot). This advice gets targeted a lot by critics, particularly since Hellmuth includes 77 in his “top ten,” a hand that rarely survives the “ram and jam” approach unless one is up against a set of meek opponents (or if you’ve so well established your tight image no one will play back at you). He goes on to add other possible hands to the mix for “intermediate” and “advanced” play, and offers a lot of specific advice about post-flop play and dealing with various, commonly-faced scenarios.

Another issue Hellmuth discusses early on in Play Poker Like the Pros is how to interpret other players’ styles and act accordingly. His infamous “animal types”-approach to classifying players has been mocked by many -- Hellmuth calls the conservative rock a “mouse,” the loose-aggressive maniac a “jackal,” the immovable calling station an “elephant,” and so forth. Even if the idea is reductive (or even silly), the approach isn’t that bad of a way of introducing the importance of paying attention to what others are doing at the table.

The first poker book I ever read was David Sklansky’s Hold ’em Poker, a decent primer for learning about starting hand groupings, pot odds, and other strategies. While Sklansky does explain at times how to interpret another player’s action during a hand, he really is focusing throughout on a single kind of opponent, the kind that played the somewhat-tight $10-$20 limit game at the Mirage back in the 70s and 80s when he wrote and revised the book. Sklansky’s advice is theoretically sound, but it doesn’t always apply very well to the looser games one encounters online (esp. at lower limits). Just being aware of different styles (as Hellmuth encourages the limit hold ’em player to be) is a benefit, especially to the beginning player. (Of course, Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth go way beyond Hellmuth in this regard with their Small Stakes Hold ’em, a much much better resource for dealing with loose low limit games, though not necessarily the best book for beginners.)

Play Poker Like the Pros also includes a much briefer discussion of pot-limit and no-limit hold ’em cash games, as well as a tiny chapter (only a dozen pages or so) about limit hold ’em tourneys. I’ve never gotten much at all out of these chapters, and indeed, it is somewhat baffling to consider how little Hellmuth has to offer here to the person wanting to learn how to play hold ’em tourneys. (All ten of his WSOP bracelets have been in hold ‘em events.)

Finally, Hellmuth includes chapters on Pot Limit Omaha, Omaha 8-or-better, Seven-Card Stud, Stud 8-or-better, and Razz, as well as a cursory discussion of playing online. These chapters on other games are not bad to have around as a reference, I suppose. As I mentioned earlier, the chapter on Razz is apparently one of the few strategy discussions of that game available. Still, none of this material really distinguishes the book that greatly.

People continue to buy Play Poker Like the Pros, though certainly not at the clip they were a couple of years ago. Looking over at Amazon’s up-to-the-minute listing of top-selling poker books, there are 25 other poker books outselling Play Poker Like the Pros at the moment I'm publishing this post. Looks like the Brat’s win didn’t really cause that much of a jump in sales. Meanwhile, Dan Harrington is riding high, with both Volume I and Volume III of his Harrington on Hold ’em coming close to cracking the top 100 selling books overall. That’s among all the books Amazon sells! (Harrington did say on The Circuit the other night one of the main reasons he wrote his Hold ’em volumes was for the money . . . . Action Dan knows what he’s doing, all right.)

The loudest censure of Play Poker Like the Pros usually concerns the large amount of anecdotal material Hellmuth includes, most of which reads as more of that ego-massage-type behavior we've come to expect from Hellmuth. I’m not going to disagree with that criticism here -- especially in the chapters about non-hold ’em games, one gets the sense at times that Hellmuth's purpose is more to prove his worth in these games than to teach strategy.

As far as instruction goes, there are much better books about limit hold ’em than Hellmuth’s, no doubt. And for the NL hold ’em tourney player, the book has practically no value at all. That being said, while I don’t necessarily recommend the book outright, I’ll admit to have benefitted somewhat from the experience of having read it as a novice player. That’s why I usually don’t rush to join the chorus of Hellmuth-haters whenever the subject of Play Poker Like the Pros comes up.

I usually don't rush to defend him either, though. Hellmuth takes care of that just fine on his own.

Image: Phil Hellmuth, Play Poker Like the Pros (2003), Amazon.

Is Patience a Virtue?

Played some Stud 8/b yesterday and had a decent, brief session. Had a hand where I managed to catch a wheel on sixth street, capturing a nice pot. With the antes and bring-ins, Stud has a different character than blinds-driven games like Hold ’em. One of several ways Hold ’em plays like a circle, Stud like a straight line.

I ended up back at the limit Hold ’em tables afterwards. I joined one table (full limit, $1.00/$2.00) and got a seat just after the big blind had passed. So I clicked “Wait for the BB” (as I usually do) and watched six or seven hands. I almost always choose to wait for the BB, particularly if I am looking at calling the blind from middle position or earlier. Finally we came to the point where the next hand would bring the BB back to me. That’s when the player to my right decided to leave, thereby causing the button to pass me by yet again. So once again I sat there watching the wheel go 'round (only a few minutes, although online a few minutes can seem an eternity) until I finally got to play.

I had considered going ahead and putting my BB out there the second time I was given the opportunity to do so -- from the cutoff -- but by force of habit did not. There’s certainly a benefit to sitting and watching other players for a few hands before jumping in. A few months ago, Roy Cooke wrote an article in CardPlayer titled “Increasing Edge by Observing a Hand” in which he discussed this very topic. One can often learn quite a bit from paying attention to what the players around you are doing while you await the big blind.

Of course, by choosing to wait you are also signalling something about yourself as a player -- cultivating an image of sorts even before you play your first hand. At the low limits, folks aren’t always paying a lot of mind to this sort of thing. Still, by not playing right away, I may well be announcing (quite accurately, in fact) to attentive players that I am a somewhat conservative player, selective with his starting hands and careful not to take too many unreasonable risks.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite sentences in Miller/Sklansky/ Malmuth’s Small Stakes Hold ’em -- not so much for what it says but for the trio’s curious choice of vocabulary. “When you enter a game,” they explain, “you usually have the option either to post an amount equal to the big blind and take a hand immediately or wait for the big blind to come to you. Mathematically, the choice you make does not much matter. (Nevertheless, people seem to like to debate this picayune topic.)”

Picayune? What a word. I can just imagine the look on Sklansky’s face when he pronounces it. (Try it -- pick-uh-YOON -- you can’t help but sneer.) A fancy way of saying “trivial” or “petty.” Etymologically, the word actually refers to money, coming as it does from the French word picaillon (meaning "small coin"). Le chump change.

As the trio go on to explain, while there is little mathematical significance to whether or not you decide to wait, there can be -- as I’ve already suggested -- a significant psychological significance. “If you sit out seven hands before you play,” they explain, “you will appear too serious” to your opponents, causing them to play more carefully against you. This phenomenon is certainly more meaningful in the live game situation than online, I’d venture. Still, it makes me think that perhaps I should go ahead and jump into the fray once in a while and perhaps mislead the table into thinking I’m a looser cannon than I actually am.

I’m curious to hear what others think about this issue. Do you routinely wait for the blinds, or jump right in? This topic is probably more meaningful for limit games, although I’m interested to hear what the difference might be for NL players as well.

Or is it all just too picayune to matter?

Figuring Out If You're Out of Your League

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972) is George V. Higgins’s great hard-boiled novel about a weapons dealer who turns informant and subsequently gets himself into a heap of trouble with his mob acquaintances for squealing on them. The book was a best-seller and was soon adapted into a terrific, compelling film by director Peter Yates, with Robert Mitchum as luckless Eddie and Peter Boyle as the “friend” who eventually gets assigned the grim task of rubbing Eddie out. If you have any interest at all in well-told crime stories, I highly recommend both Higgins’s novel and the film.

Eddie’s essentially a small-time hood who gets in way over his head. His story shows (among other things) what happens when you try to operate as you normally would without recognizing you’re “out of your league” (to employ a much-worn cliché). Aside from those playing in the “Big Game” in Bobby’s Room at the Bellagio, most poker players are constantly wondering whether or not to take a shot at higher stakes. Particularly for those of us down here with the short stacks, just about any time we experience a decent run we wonder whether or not it might be time to try the next level up. If we’re human, that is. And like money.

I’ve noted before how I mainly stick with either the $0.50/$1.00 or $1.00/$2.00 limits -- technically speaking the very bottom of the “low” limit games or (more accurately) the upper reaches of the “micro” games. I’ve arrived here after starting at the penny tables on Stars and slowly inching my way upwards through the various increments available online. I’ve come to understand (for the moment, at least) that I’m now where I feel most comfortable and where I win most consistently. I’ve taken occasional shots at higher stakes, although it has never gone particularly well for me when I have. I’ll win a little, break even sometimes, and/or lose a lot, eventually having to admit that the moves I’m encountering are either unfamiliar to me or put me off my own game too much to go on. It’s a bit like what happened in little league when the kids started learning how to throw the curve. Hitting had always seemed easy, then suddenly the ball kept disappearing on me. A few dozen strikeouts later and I knew my baseball career was over.

In the final chapter of The Theory of Poker (“Evaluating the Game”), David Sklansky relates the story of a player named Jay Heimowitz from New York who started out playing in a $0.25/$0.50 game in the early ’60s. He quotes Heimowitz explaining how “I noticed I was winnning about $20 a week, and that $20 a week was the difference between my wife Carol and I going out to dinner . . . . Then I got the brainstorm that if I played in a $1 limit game, maybe I’d win $40 a week, and we could go out to dinner twice.” Sklansky goes on to say that Heimowitz eventually rose to the highest levels, playing NL Hold ’em for tens of thousands. “The point of the story,” according to Sklansky, “is that, everything else being equal, when you have the best of it, the higher you play, the more you will average winning.”

The most important part of that quote, of course, is the phrase “everything else being equal.” When you move up a level, “everything” might seem “equal” for awhile, but that impression may well be due to your lack of understanding and/or experience at the new level. For me, moving up has never been as simple as just multiplying by two. Perhaps that’s due to my own limitations as a player, but I’d venture that most players who try to move up end up encountering a lot that is utterly new to them, thus forcing them to work even harder to comprehend what is going on at the table.

George V. Higgins went on to write a number of books after The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and before his death in 1999 ended up producing several much-quoted lines about the human experience. Higgins once cleverly defined “egotism” as “the art of seeing in yourself what others can’t see.” As I've written about before, you have to spend some time analyzing your own game to succeed at any level, never mind to think about moving up. Games like Hold ’em and Omaha are “partial knowledge” games -- you know some things for certain (your cards, the community cards, the bets that have occurred), but there are other things you can only know imperfectly (your opponent’s cards, the significance of his or her bets, etc.). Yet only having partial knowledge of yourself makes the game that much more difficult.

Another quote from Higgins seems like it might be apt here: “Life is hard, and it’s harder if you’re stupid.”

Image: George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), Amazon.

Assuming the Worst

This week’s installment of Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio (an entertaining, informative podcast primarily aimed at the lower limit player) featured the conclusion of Episode 19 of Columbo’s “One Minute Mystery,” titled “The Case of the Clichéd Players.” If you haven’t heard ’em, Columbo’s OMMs generally come in two parts, and usually the Card Club guys make us wait a week to find out how each OMM turned out for Columbo. (See my earlier review of Card Club for more about both the show and the OMMs.)

“The Case of the Clichéd Players” generated a thoughtful discussion on the Card Clubs forum that was continued on the show once the hosts played the second part of the OMM. An issue that arose -- really the main issue of significance, I’d say -- concerned the quality of play in online, low buy-in, multitable tourneys. In the hand, Columbo faced what appeared to be some very loose, very questionable betting and calling before and after the flop. Having to make a tricky post-flop decision, Columbo decided he was up against a couple of inexperienced and/or inexpert players and so acted accordingly. It turned out well for him, with his correct assumption that his two opponents were playing the hand poorly allowing him to triple up.

The OMM and the discussion surrounding it got me thinking a bit about how easy it is to underestimate one’s opponents at the table. I essentially agreed with Columbo’s cogitatin' in this here situation -- the minimum raises and calls of big bets by his foes did seem to indicate the likelihood that he was up against some untutored adversaries. It is easy, though, to fall into the trap of “assuming the worst” about the level of one’s opponents’ abilities, especially in these low buy-in tourneys or in low limit cash games. I know I’m guilty of making such assumptions -- sometimes on scant evidence -- and usually end up paying the price when an apparent donk turns out to be more crafty that I had realized.

In some of my recent posts I may have given the impression that I’m the only sane one at a table of lunatics -- that all of the other players at these low limits are operating at less than full capacity, thereby giving me the right to sit back and judge their awful play. Such is hardly the case. Looking back at the three hands I shared in “Life in the Land of the Blue Chips,” I can certainly question the level of my own thinking in a couple of instances (particularly “Hand 1” where I recklessly ride big slick to the bottom of the river). While those hands all certainly demonstrate some unorthodox play, none of them can be taken as irrefutable evidence that those involved (even me) are bad players. Indeed, the fellow in “Hand 1” (Underpants) who preraised with 82-suited could well have been pursuing a simple blind steal, was caught (with his pants down, so to speak) by my BB reraise and had to call, then fortunately flopped two pair and turned the boat. If I proceed from that point assuming he’s preraisin’ with any ol’ suited crap, I’m likely gonna be donating even more to his stack.

In Small Stakes Hold ’em, Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth make two sets of recommendations regarding starting hand selections, one for a “loose” table (where 6-8 players are seeing the flop) and one for a “tight” table (where only 3-5 players see the flop). When first arriving at a low limit hold ’em table where you don’t know any of the players, they recommend presuming you are at a loose table and continuing to think that way until proven otherwise. This advice goes against conventional wisdom, actually, which says to begin cautiously and try to learn about your opponents’ tendencies before mixing it up. However (argue Miller/Sklanskly/Malmuth), “at the small stakes there are so many confused and poorly-skilled players that failing to play extra hands should prove more costly those times when you should play them than they will save you those times you should throw them away.”

Notice that the authors are not saying to assume you are up against bad players -- rather, they say to assume you are up against loose players (implying, perhaps, that one or two or more might in fact be “poorly-skilled” enough to pay you off if you time things well). When I first arrive at a low limit table I try to follow the trio’s advice and assume it’s a loose table, but also try to avoid assuming the players are clueless. In fact, I attempt to give them all credit for knowing what they’re doing -- again, until they make a play that cannot possibly be interpreted as an intelligent one. In truth, I usually find it better policy to assume the worst about my own hand -- not about my opponents’ abilities -- and let folks showdown a few bottom pairs or busted draws to me before concocting any overly-elaborate theories about them.

If you haven’t done so, do check out Card Club and the OMMs. I always liked the Columbo TV series, where “who done it” was usually less of an issue than how it was done (and how Columbo is going to figure it all out). We all know the murderer will be caught in the end, so the result matters less to us than the process by which the result was achieved. The OMMs tend to operate similarly. It (usually) doesn’t matter so much how the hands turn out; what matters is process, that is, the thinking that leads to -- hopefully -- correct decision-making. And a big part of such correct decision-making is not assuming your opponents all think they’re playing blackjack.

Image: Edvard Munch, The Scream (1892) and Tom Neal from the 1945 film Detour (adapted), public domain (both).

Dostoevsky is Not Considered Summer Reading (Pt. II)

As I mentioned before, I want to discuss three ideas of interest to poker players that come up in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. The first concerns the human tendency to see patterns where they don't exist.

Alexey Ivanovitch is not the only character in The Gambler who becomes obsessed with roulette. Other characters are shown succumbing to the lure of the wheel, the most colorful being Granny. Granny is the grandmother of the family for whom Alexey works as a tutor, and for the first half of the novel most members of the family appear impatient to see Granny die and leave them her estate. Without warning, Granny suddenly appears in Roulettenburg -- in good health, at that. She’s a bit eccentric and certainly enjoys the discomfort she has produced by appearing so unexpectedly.

“I want to see everything here,” Granny tells everyone, and soon has made Alexey take her to the casino. Within minutes she’s at the roulette table. After a rapid tutorial from Alexey about how the game works, she’s ready to play. Before placing any money down, they watch as the wheel lands on zéro. Alexey explains to Granny that if one bets on zéro and it hits one wins 35 times the bet. “Why don’t they stake on it, the fools?” she asks. “There are thirty-six chances against it, Granny,” Alexey explains. “What nonsense,” she replies, and fishing out a friedrich d’or from her purse orders her servant to “Stake it on the zéro at once.”

Her bet concerns Alexey, who with the appearance of rationality explains “Granny, zéro has only just turned up . . . so now it won’t turn up for a long time. You will lose a great deal; wait a little, anyway.” “Oh nonsense, nonsense” says Granny. “If you are afraid of the wolf you shouldn’t go in the forest.”

After losing three times running, Granny decides to stake two friedrichs d’or and the zéro hits. Much to Alexey’s dismay, she bets as much as is allowed on zéro again and loses. Undeterred, she bets on zéro yet again. “Zéro!” cries the croupier, and once more she’s won a bundle. Alexey describes how he felt upon realizing the zéro had hit three times within a dozen turns: “I felt that at the moment my arms and legs were trembling, there was a throbbing in my head.” Granny puts the bulk of her winnings on rouge, wins again, then announces “That’s enough! Home! Wheel my chair out.” All told Granny had staked five friedrichs d’or and was now leaving the casino with about 220 times that, an amount nearly equal to that of her entire estate.

There are a few different ideas present in this episode familiar to poker players (e.g., running well, playing one’s rush, boldly taking risks, hitting longshots, etc.), but the one I find most interesting concerns Alexey’s claim that since the zéro had recently hit it was less likely to hit again in the near future. Earlier in the novel Alexey describes players who “sit with papers before them scrawled over in pencil, note the strokes, reckon, deduce the chances, calculate, finally stake and -- lose exactly as we simple mortals who play without calculations.” Alexey instinctively knows these players are self-deluded. He knows that one turn of the wheel has no bearing whatsoever on the next. Nevertheless, he still advises Granny against betting on zéro since it had so recently hit.

In Small Stakes Hold 'Em, Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth discuss the tendency for poker players to believe how the cards are dealt in one hand actually affects how they will be dealt in the next hand. “The human brain is terrific at identifying patterns,” they point out, though sometimes -- especially when playing poker -- “people see false patterns that they believe are real.” “Most gamblers,” they claim, “tend to ascribe meaning to purely random, independent events.” Have you ever (like Alexey) allowed the appearance of such false patterns affect your thought process during a given hand? If you are human, you probably have.

Just today I had newly arrived at a $1/$2 limit table where I was dealt Jh 3c in the BB. A late position player raised, the SB called, and after a moment I decided to let it go. Sure, I’d be getting 5-to-1 by calling, but I knew zilch about the other two players. Besides, I didn’t want to get in trouble here on my first hand and thereby create an unwanted table image from the get-go. I folded and watched as the flop came 9h 3s Jd. The SB called bets on both the flop and turn, then after an Ace came on the river fireworks erupted and the pair capped. Both had big slick and so chopped a huge pot -- $25 or so -- although they ended up only coming out even on the hand after the $1 rake (precisely what I had put into the pot).

Before I had time to grieve my missed oppportunity, I chuckled to see I’d been dealt J3-offsuit once again in the small blind. “When most people play poker,” write Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth, “they tend to expect that which has recently occurred to recur.” Hmmm . . . . As I waited for the action to come back to me I couldn’t help thinking how attractive J3 looked. Would I dare? Luckily for me, a raise and reraise kept me from pursuing my relationship with this garbage hand any further. (And yes, the flop did not bring a J or 3 this time.)

Barring six limpers (and thus even greater odds than the previous hand offered), I probably would’ve let the hand go again, but not for the correct reasons. Rather, I felt like Alexey did after seeing the zéro hit the first time -- it somehow seemed less likely to flop two pair (or something else favorable, like trips) because it had “only just turned up . . . so now it won’t turn up for a long time.”

Nonsense! (As Granny would say.) Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth say the same thing in a different way: “The cards dealt on any poker hand are, for practical purposes, completely random and independent of the cards dealt on any previous hand.” The odds of my flopping two pair hadn't changed an iota. They remained about 1 in 49 -- the same as every other hand where one holds two unmatched cards.

Granny herself eventually shows that she, too, can’t resist believing in false patterns when she returns to the casino and loses all she won and then some, mostly by betting on zéro. She would have done well to heed the advice of Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth: “Stop your pattern-recognizer before it goes haywire by telling yourself, ‘There is no pattern! There is no pattern!’”

In my next post I'll say something about how The Gambler illustrates another “mind game” poker players often experience, namely the way the game can cause us to shut out past and future and live only in the moment.

Photo: “Roulette ball,” Ralf Foletschek. CC BY-SA 3.0

Dostoevsky is Not Considered Summer Reading (Pt. I)

There’s a New Yorker cartoon in which a guy reading a book on the beach is approached by a policeman. “I’m sorry, sir,” the cop says to him, “but Dostoevsky is not considered summer reading. I’ll have to ask you to come with me.”

I thought of that cartoon last week as I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler -- one of the 19th-century Russian novelist’s lesser known novels, although certainly his most popular in the poker world. References to The Gambler pop up in many poker books, particularly “literary” ones like Anthony Holden’s Big Deal, the late David Spanier’s The Hand I Played, and James McManus’s Positively Fifth Street.

The novel is set in the fictional German city of Roulettenburg -- kind of a 19th-century European version of Vegas -- where the main character, a tutor named Alexey Ivanovitch, unsuccessfully battles his obsession with the game after which the city is named. There is one card game that comes up occasionally in the novel, a game called trente et quarante (a.k.a. rouge et noir) that is essentially a kind of roulette using six decks of playing cards rather than a wheel and a ball. (You can still get a game of trente et quarante in Monte Carlo, apparently.) However, roulette is the game that Alexey plays the most, and that’s the game about which Dostoevsky (himself a roulette addict) has the most interesting things to say.

Anyone at all serious about poker will be quick to point out that poker ain’t roulette. Some go so far as to distinguish poker from gambling altogether, insisting that it’s a skill game wherein the better-equipped players always win out over time. I like how Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth treat this subject in the opening sections of Small Stakes Hold ’em. They assert that, in fact, “poker is gambling,” and the schmo who says it ain’t “does not understand poker as well as he should.” Poker is gambling because it always involves some measure of uncertainty, particularly with regard to the cards. Sure, at times we might be uncertain about our opponents’ play or holdings, but better players eventually can get a line on those things.

Yet even the very best poker player cannot get a line on precisely what card is gonna come on the turn or river. (Raise yer paw if you’ve also lost a 20+ BB pot to a river one-outer . . . . There we go.) So while in poker you can (as Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth explain) play in such a way so “that your expectation can be positive,” when you play poker you’re still gambling. That's why The Gambler ultimately touches on so many concepts of interest to poker players.

As a way of responding to the book, I thought I’d focus on a few ideas related to gambling that come up in The Gambler that might be of particular interest to poker players. I’ve pulled out three ideas or concepts, all of which could be made to relate to the “psychology of poker” -- that is, all three concern how our minds work (and, at times, fail to work) when we play.

The first has to do with how a particular sequence of hands will affect our thinking regarding what comes next. The second involves the way the game tends to consume us, causing us to forget about everything else besides the “here and now.” The third has to do with issues of control and personal responsibility, and how poker (or any form of gambling) strangely satisfies certain, contradictory desires most of us seem to possess.

I’ll discuss these ideas in separate posts over the next few days. Afterwards you can decide if you want to check out The Gambler yourself. Of course, you’ll want to keep one eye out for the summer reading cops if you do.

Image: Vasily Perov, portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1871), public domain.

How To Survive If Your Parachute Fails to Open

I’m in an online ring game of $.50/$1.00 limit hold ’em. A loose cat limps in early position. Rest of the table folds to me sitting right of the cutoff and I see a pair of ladies looking back. I put in the raise. The cutoff and button both fold. The small blind waits a beat and reraises. Big blind folds. Limper calls. I think about it for a moment then decide just to call and see the flop. Capping ain’t chasin’ anyone and I have position, so I say let’s just buckle up and see what’s what. The pot is an even $5.00.

The out-of-sync rhythm of the small blind’s reraise (combined with earlier info gleaned from playing a few dozen hands with him) adds up to big slick or maybe a pair of hooks. He could have the bullets or cowboys, sure, but something tells me he ain’t got it quite that good. The limper? Could have anything at all.

Flop comes a sweet QT7 rainbow. Both of my opponents check. I bet, the small blind calls, and the limper decides he’ll put his spoon in the dish as well. The pot is now $6.50. As I silently mouth the words “no jack” the turn comes a J. Again, both opponents check. Now what?

How often does this happen? You make a read with confidence, a sequence of events unfolds from which you may potentially benefit from that read, and yet you act otherwise? There I was in the cutoff with my no-longer-pretty set of queens and a feeling of utter certainty that I was up against an opponent slow-playing his straight.

What did I do?

I bet, of course. (“Jingle-brained” ain’t exactly a compliment, if you were wondering.) I cringe as the small blind (inevitably, it seemed) check-raises. Then the madman limper on the other side of the table surprisingly three-bets. What? Has he plugged a gutshot as well (holding K9)? Or maybe he has 98? Criminy.

Do I give up my set? I do potentially have 10 outs here that help me beat a straight (the case queen, three jacks, three tens, and three sevens) -- about 3.5-to-1 against. I’m now looking at a pot of $12.50. It’s $2.00 to call, although I’m a victim of the “sandwich effect” (as Harrington puts it) and so likely it’s gonna cost me another buck to stay in after the small blind caps. That means I’m looking at putting in a total of $3.00 for a shot at $15.50, so the actual pot odds are going to be a little better than 5-to-1.

So math is telling me to stick around. To be honest, I ain’t listening too much to math here. I flopped top set, dammit, and now I’m gonna bust that lucky palooka with the horseshoe up his ass. (After I get lucky and fill up on the river, that is . . . .) So I call (and call) and we have a pot of $18.50 when the river brings a lousy 4.

Poof. Where the hell did I put my Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook?

The small blind bets. The limper raises. The pot has grown to a ridiculous $21.50. Practically a small field of cabbage for these stakes. If I fold, I’ve lost a total of $6.00 on this hand. If I make two (or even three) more crying calls as the final round of betting gets capped, I’ll have put in $10.00 altogether. I could calculate pot odds once more and perhaps rationalize that somehow I’m still good here -- or even that I’ve got a 10% shot of being good and so should keep calling -- but that would be strictly non compos mentis. I sigh and let it go. My two friends cap it and it turns out they’re a regular chopper squad with both of ’em holding big slick.

Now there might have been ways I could have lost less on this hand, though I’m not bright enough to see them. Seems more like a cold deck to me, but if anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears. If I were a look-on-the-bright-side type, I might say I “made” $4.00 by folding on the river. (As Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth would put it, folding made my "expectation for the entire hand less negative than the alternatives.") I don’t order my eggs sunny-side up, though. Strictly hard-boiled around here . . . .

Images: The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook (1999), Joshua Piven, David Borgenicht (top); PokerStars screenshot (adapted) (bottom).