Poker Miscellanies

Kind of a down time, poker-wise, these days. Sure EPT Berlin is happening, plus other tourneys around the globe (as always). Still, it feels more like the poker world is in resting up mode at the moment. Some are readying for the Spring Championship of Online Poker on PokerStars in May, while most are already planning for the World Series of Poker which is now just a little over a month away.

Of course, here in the U.S. a lot of us have been in what might be called “resting up” mode for a long time now. Or perhaps more appropriately, “wait and see.” Looking forward to the second part of the year when some of the Nevada sites start going live (for real), and perhaps even something starts to happen in New Jersey, too, before the year is out.

The items coming over the news ticker this week are arriving a little more slowly than usual, although there were a couple of odds and ends that caught my eye over the last few days.

That story out of Los Angeles about Joe Sebok, nude photos, email hacking, and an extortion attempt was kinda-sorta surprising to see. You probably heard about that one. Coupla dudes had already pleaded guilty to trying to extort Sebok and on Monday were back in a U.S. District Court to be sentenced for their crimes.

Sebok offered testimony to explain how the extortion attempt affected him, including negatively impacting his ability to work in poker. “I was no longer able to maintain my then-current level of participation in the poker industry, representing the brands that I had been previously, as well as greatly destroying my ability to do so with new companies moving forward,” Sebok told the judge.

The attempted scheme began in November 2010. Of course, by mid-April 2011 other factors arose quite suddenly also to negatively affect Sebok’s ability to represent the brands he had been previously. And by having associated with those brands, he had already more or less destroyed his ability to work with new companies in the poker industry moving forward.

There was another item from yesterday that I couldn’t help but click through to read about, a so-called “poker card murder” in China. At first I thought of that CSI episode from a couple of months ago, the poker-themed one I wrote about both here and over on PokerListings in which an actual playing card really is used as a murder weapon. I also thought of that “Killer Cards” story I’d read about not too long ago and shared here, the one involving a prisoner making a pipe bomb out of playing cards.

But reading this story, it appears the connection between poker and murder was entirely incidental. Rather the murderer had sealed up his victim in a carton box into which a few playing cards had accidentally fallen, thus igniting lots of misplaced speculation regarding the possible significance of the cards -- which, in fact, had nothing at all to do with the crime.

Even so, the story was kind of interesting insofar as it illustrated the deepy-rooted symbolic value of playing cards that transcends many cultures.

Finally, I’ll share one other, much lighter item, a National Public Radio segment in which actor, comedian, children’s book author, and hilarious Tweeter Michael Ian Black appeared with poker player Matt Matros on the show “Ask Me Another.”

The show is one of those live quiz shows performed in front of a live audience. Black and Matros were pitted against one another in a trivia game in which all of the questions were about poker. Black appeared multiple times on the old Celebrity Poker Showdown show, winning a couple of times, which I suppose partly explains how he ended up talking poker on the show.

As fans of both guys -- I wrote about Matros here once last summer -- I enjoyed the segment, which concluded with a Jonathan Coulton performance of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler.”

Matros Exceeds Expectations

Was listening yesterday to this week’s Two Plus Two Pokercast with Mike Johnson and Adam Schwartz, on which poker pro and author Matt Matros was one of the guests.

Matros recently won his third WSOP bracelet in three years in Event No. 16, the $1,500 short-handed no-limit hold’em event. He won his first in 2010 in a $1,500 NLHE event, then his second last year in the $2,500 mixed hold’em event.

I remember meeting Matros last summer and chatting with him briefly. He’s been one of those pros I’d felt like I knew even before meeting him, thanks both to his Card Player columns and his 2005 book The Making of a Poker Player.

It was right around the start of the Main Event -- just a couple of days after he’d won his second bracelet, I believe -- when we met. I jokingly said something to him about his WSOP “going okay” so far and I remember sharing a laugh over the understatement.

I also recall telling him I appreciated the column he had written just after Black Friday for The Washington Post, “After the Dept. of Justice shuts down online poker, a poker pro defends his game.” I wrote a little about that piece at the time in a post titled “Moving Forward (Not Starting Over).”

There Matros thoughtfully discussed the huge change in his life the sudden shutdown of the online game was going to mean for him. He also took the opportunity in the column to provide a argument in favor of poker as a pursuit that “teaches life skills.”

“The best players use logic, discipline, psychology, mathematics and personality to turn themselves into professionals,” Matros explained. He concluded the piece talking about a desire to work on a novel, something he thought may perhaps have more time to work on with online poker no longer available.

“I don’t know that what I’m writing is any good,” writes Matros. “But thanks to poker, I’m doing what I want to be doing. Isn’t that the American dream?”

It’s a persuasive column, perhaps made more so by that note of humility Matros includes with regard to himself and his own abilities as a writer and a poker player -- a couple of areas where he’s clearly gifted.

Matros was also humble after winning that third bracelet last week. On the podcast, Johnson brought up how Matros is now 50% as far as final tables go at the WSOP, having made six of them and won bracelets three times. Johnson also noted how Matros had been quoted saying he actually felt guilty about winning a third one in three years. “You didn’t feel guilty, come on,” chided Johnson with a chuckle.

“You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want,” responded Matros, who said he really did feel “a little bit guilty.” He then explained.

“I mean, you’re running so many sigmas [standard deviations] outside of what you would expect in terms of your normal course of results,” he said. “I think a really good player would win, I don’t know, a half or 0.6 or 0.7 bracelets if they are playing the kind of schedule that I play. And I’ve been lucky enough to win three in three years.”

What he’s saying makes perfect sense. One only has to look at the conspicuous example of Phil Ivey, who this summer has made three final tables already without yet grabbing for himself another bracelet.

“I don’t feel like what I have done is deserving of the financial rewards that have come with it,” said Matros. “So in that sense I do feel guilty.” He then went on to joke about unscrupulous, incompetent Wall Street hedge fund managers making millions and how thinking of them makes him feel less guilty about the rewards he’s earned.

You might say Matros’ attitude and understanding of his own abilities and the reality of tournament poker demonstrates a lot about his own “logic, discipline, psychology, mathematics and personality” -- those areas he identified as significant to the game itself.

And you gotta like his modesty, too. You might say such an attitude (and perspective) probably places him a few sigmas outside what you expect to find in poker.

Moving Forward (Not Starting Over)

Was listening yesterday to Change100’s interview over on PreGame.com, conducted last week just a few days after “Black Friday” smacked us all in the face like Teddy KGB holding aces full.

Change shares a lot of insight throughout the interview. And foresight, too, especially considering she was talking so soon after the indictments and civil complaint had been unsealed and the sites’ shut their doors to U.S. players. There was one moment in particular, though, where I felt particularly connected to what Change was saying.

Asked what she planned to do moving forward, she brought up Pauly and explained that even if the future is somewhat unclear for the two of them at the moment, one thing is certain -- they’ll keep writing.

“Both of us are writers,” Change explains. “That’s our chosen profession. We've written about poker because we love it. And because it was this incredible, booming industry and we had an amazing run in it. And I got to see the world through poker, which is something I certainly wouldn't have been able to do if I was still stuck in an office....”

Like I say, that kind of hit home for me in a few ways. For one, a change of careers is something I have in common with Change. I, too, had a possible future mostly spent inside an office from which I was steered away by poker.

I also identified with that reference to the past few years and all of the opportunities that have come our way via writing about poker. Would I have ever gone to the Ukraine? To Morocco? To Peru? Not likely. Hell, even getting to Atlantic City might’ve been less of a priority for me, had I not gone there on an assignment.

I like as well the reference to choosing to write about poker because of a love for the game. These other things -- the chance to travel, to get paid, etc. -- really are secondary for a lot of us. We love poker. And we love to write. And that’s where it all begins and ends, no matter where we go in between.

Been thinking some lately about the blog and why I write it. “Black Friday” certainly got me contemplating (again) the whole idea of keeping a poker blog -- especially at this present moment when I’m not even playing poker! The fact that the five-year anniversary of the sucker is coming up on Thursday has also perhaps encouraged me to indulge in such self-reflection, too.

Will I keep writing about poker? I think so. The game is too much fun and too damned interesting and full of stories for me not to.

I’ll probably be doing other kinds of writing, too, including pushing forward more earnestly on the second novel. I see another poker player and writer, Matt Matros, talking in similar terms in his Washington Post piece from last Friday, a thoughtful defense of online poker worth checking out if you haven’t already.

In that article, Matros speaks of how for him the sudden unavailability of online poker “almost feels as if I’ve been stripped of one of my college degrees -- as if a career skill I’ve been honing for all of my adult life is suddenly useless.”

That’s not entirely the case, I don’t think. As Matros himself points out later in the piece, “Poker teaches life skills,” among them “logic, discipline, psychology, [and] mathematics.” I’m going to assume poker has also taken him many places, become the means by which he’s gotten to meet and know many people, and allowed him to experience many things he wouldn’t have otherwise.

In other words, much like those college degrees and other life experience he’s gathered, poker has helped prepare him for what comes next. (Including the writing of that novel on which he is working.)

Same goes for a lot of us.

Like an Open Book

Everyone knows about the "Hammer" (72 offsuit). However, when 73 offsuit became the hand that won $7.5 million last July, the quickly-anointed “Hachem” emerged as a new favorite for sneaks looking for ways to send opponents tiltward by cracking their premium holdings with obvious trash.

Not too long ago, I was in a game of six-handed limit hold ’em ($0.50/$1) when a mostly-tight player, Archer, opened with a preflop raise from the cutoff. The button and SB folded to me in the BB where I’d been dealt said Hachem. Now I’m a reasonable fellow. Not too bright, mind you, but reasonable. And it was the not-too-bright part that had me hesitating, oddly contemplating putting in the dollar to call.

Now there are a few sad sacks who hate hate hate to give up their blinds, no matter how unreasonable a defense appears to be. Not I, said the fly. I’ll happily donate my cabbage when such obvious weakness warrants doing so. For some reason, though -- perhaps just “to stir things up,” as Hammett’s Op might say -- I broke routine and made the call.

In a December 2005 CardPlayer column on “Defending Blinds,” Matt Matros notes how in heads-up situations such as the one I faced, one can be marginally more liberal with the calls, although one must be cognizant of other factors as well. One does get 3.5-to-1 to call here, with $1.75 already in the pot awaiting my additional $0.50 to make a flop happen. And, as Matros points out, one can virtually guarantee a postflop continuation bet from the raiser, thus, in a sense, making the odds 4.5-to-1. However, as Matros also explains, opening raises from the cutoff generally mean more strength than do button raises. The opponent’s tendencies (as far as one has a line on them) are essential to consider as well.

Of these three pieces of advice, then, only one (the first) could possibly be twisted into something resembling a recommendation to call. In other words, I’d crawled out on this limb all by myself, and yes I was more than vaguely aware what I looked like out there.

But there I was. And there was the flop. A real looker, in fact. Ace-seven-trey, all different suits. I check-raised Archer who after a bewildered pause called. Two more crying calls and I’d scooped an $8 pot when my two pair bested Archer’s ace-queen.

Now the gist of this here parable ain’t to supply the world with yet another example of the cold unfairness of our existence. Nor is it to prove any sort of special prescience at the table for your humble whatever. Rather, the crux of the matter is in what came next, when a suddenly-vocal Archer fumes to no one in particular

Archer: who calls a raise with 7 3?

A reasonable question, to be sure. No one at the table rushed to offer our crestfallen comrade any assistance with his query. So Archer tried again:

Archer: wtf
Archer: u r one lucky FISHHHH
Archer: ****er

And so forth. Within 40-50 hands, Archer’s once handsome stack of $35 had been reduced to $11 when one player after another pushed him off pots and/or showed down two pair, trips, straights, and flushes to his unfortunate run of second-best hands. As for me, I mostly stayed on the sideline, paring my fingernails and whistling, unable to take any real advantage of the new table image I seemed to have created for myself.

Although Archer may well have loosened up his starting hand requirements somewhat (e.g., limping from UTG w/A7o, etc.), I wouldn’t describe his subsequent play as overtly tiltish. And while his temporary slide certainly involved some more bad luck, it nevertheless appeared that everyone at the table had become suddenly able to take advantage, suddenly able to know when to reraise him, when to show down hands against him, when to fold to him. Archer had become an “open book,” so to speak. I wondered if perhaps a principle of poker might be hidden somewhere in the machinations I was witnessing. Something along the lines of

WITH EVERY COMPLAINT ABOUT OTHERS’ PLAY, YOU ANNOUNCE TO THE TABLE SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR OWN.

By articulating his frustration at having been called and beaten with 73o, Archer effectively broadcasted to everyone his own tendency to play “by the book” (and, even more significantly, his yearning for others to do the same). Indeed, his complaints communicated this message much more explicitly than did his play in the actual hand, which, if one had paid attention, might well have seemed unorthodox (calling down two more big bets after a check-raise to a board with no obvious draws). Such is a consequence of which “table coaches” don’t always seem aware.

The moral? You should know I don’t go in for morals very much. Let’s just say defend your blind with seven-trey only on special occasions. When heads-up in the WSOP main event, for instance. And think twice before complaining when someone else does.