Facing the Facts

Was reading in Barry Greenstein’s Ace on the River yesterday -- always a good one just for picking up and rereading certain short chapters from time to time. In the chapter titled “Money Management,” Greenstein notes how “Most players initiate record keeping after a win since it is more satisfying to start with a win than a loss.”

I’ve written here many times about my obsession with record keeping, something I’ve done since I first started playing poker. Even so, this week I think I could be said to be somewhat guilty of what Greenstein is saying. Finding myself on a bit of an upswing, I decided at last to go ahead and get a copy of Poker Tracker Omaha and start entering hands. Call me vain, but I think I was partly motivated by a desire to see some of them green numbers (indicating wins) in the PTO program.

Have just begun to mess around with the program, and indeed have only had time to enter the last three months’ worth of play -- just under 15,000 hands. I have a ton more, though, and so hope before too long to have a more significant sample to examine. Did happen to spot a couple of interesting items, though, that I thought I’d share here.

I say I’m on an upswing, and indeed, I’ve enjoyed several good sessions here lately, although there was one very bad one mixed in there where I dropped nearly two buy-ins (almost $100) in 279 hands. Those wounds healed quickly, though, as I had a ridiculously fortunate session the next day in which I somehow won over $120 in just 69 hands. I came away from both sessions with particular ideas about how things had gone, but thought I’d use Poker Tracker to take a closer look and perhaps try to confirm those conclusions I’d drawn.

The losing session ended with a terrible last hand in which I’d turned a well-concealed six-high straight, got it all in versus a guy I thought might have a set or perhaps a wheel, and it turned out he’d also turned the same six-high straight plus a flush draw -- and the flush got there on the river. A perfect storm kind of hand for him, ending with him freerolling me, hitting, and taking about $30 from me. Up to then, I had lost a few hands with A-A-x-x, and in fact had gotten to the point where I felt myself getting a bit apprehensive whenever I picked up aces, as if anticipating losing with them yet again (not a good way to play, for sure).

Anyhow, my conclusion from that session was I’d been somewhat unfortunate and perhaps had misplayed a couple of A-A-x-x hands along the way, thus ensuring the big loss.

In the next session, I knew exactly why I’d won so much so quickly. Two hands, both of which involved me hitting nut straights, big pots developing, and my hands holding up. I hadn’t confirmed it, but I knew most if not all of the $120 had come on those two big pots.

Okay, so what do I see when I look at Poker Tracker?

Well, my impression from that first session that I’d been dealt aces a lot and had lost a lot with them was definitely correct.

There are 270,725 different starting hands in Omaha. Actually, there are only 16,432 distinct starting hands (i.e., taking into account the fact that suits have no particular value before the flop). Compare that to the 169 distinct starting hands in hold’em! But we have to consider all of the combinations in order to talk about how often one should expect to be dealt, say, a hand like A-A-x-x.

Of these starting hands, 82,368 combinations contain a single pair, and of those, exactly 6,336 combinations contain two aces only (i.e., we aren’t including the small number of hands with three or four aces here). That means one should expect to be dealt two aces approximately 2.34% of the time, around once every 43 hands or so. In my session, I played 279 hands and picked up A-A-x-x nine times. That’s once every 31 hands, meaning I got aces two or three more times than I should have in terms of what the probabilities suggest.

In those nine hands, I lost a whopping $63.45 -- basically my entire loss except for that last hand! Most of that (about $50) actually came in just two of the hands. I see one of those hands was a bad luck situation (flopped a set and got outdrawn), but the other was a poorly played gamble by me (someone else flopped a set and suckered me in).

In the second session -- the winning one -- I’m seeing that in those two big straight hands I actually won $130.15, meaning in the other 67 hands I was a ten-buck loser! In one my starting hand was 8-7-6-5 double-suited, and in the other 9-8-7-5 double-suited. One hand I played fine (flopped the straight plus a flush draw; opponent also flopped a king-high flush draw, gambled, and lost), and in the other was a bit fortunate (I took a gamble after flopping a wrap draw versus two opponents and ended up rivering my straight to win the pot).

How are aces treating me, generally speaking? Well, over the last few months, I was dealt A-A-x-x a total of 359 times in 14,729 hands. That’s about once every 41 hands, which is about what I should expect. And somehow I’ve only won six bucks in those hands, a miserable win rate (although it would have looked a lot better prior to that bad session the other day, I guess). I thought I was one of those players who knew better than to overplay aces in PLO, but perhaps I have been struggling there more than I realize.

Like I said, I’ve only barely started to root around in here to see if I can discover any other meaningful trends. Am noticing that a couple of players whom I had thought were especially strong are in fact losing quite a bit in the hands they've played with me at the table. (Perhaps they aren’t so much strong players as players whose styles make me uncomfortable somehow.) Am also seeing that in the last three months I have done much better in 6-max games than in full ring games, something of which I hadn’t necessarily been aware before.

In his list of 25 “traits of winning poker players,” Greenstein notes that among other qualities the winners are “attentive to detail,” “the ones with the best memories,” and “honest with themselves.” Seems like this here Poker Tracker could help with all three of those.

Ambitions

Tired of whimperin’ ’bout legal applesauce. I wanna talk poker.

Has been a busy week or so, but I have been able to put in a few sessions of pot-limit Omaha over the last few days. Am sticking primarily with the $50 buy-in tables these days.

Have gotten involved in some pretty big pots here lately (for yr short-stacked friend, anyway), including several $100-plus ones that have gone both for and against. I might’ve won my biggest online pot ever the other day (over $175) in a slightly hair-raising hand versus a maniacal yet untutored player. Have also dropped some biggies, too.

Now that I’ve gotten all of my old hand histories (dating back four friggin’ years!), I’m thinking I will probably go ahead and get a copy of the Omaha version of PokerTracker, mainly just to sort through everything and perhaps get a line on just how swingy PLO has been for me since I made it my main game during the middle of last year. I’d also like to get a better idea about my actual win rates over these last eighteen months or so, as well as some figures comparing how I do in 6-max. games versus full tables. I keep records of every session and could calculate some of this stuff, but I like the idea of having PT do some of the math for me.

I might’ve asked this question here once before, but I’ll throw it out here again: Anybody have any thoughts about the PokerTracker Omaha program? I have the Hold’em one and like it very much, though almost never use it anymore since I’m not playing Hold’em.

Like I say, I believe it would be very interesting (not to mention instructional) to use PT to help me see a bit more vividly how my PLO game has changed over the last year-and-a-half. Like any player who pays attention to what he or she is doing, I’ve sensed a number of changes in my own approach to the game, mainly with regard to my strategic understanding of PLO.

There have been other changes, too, such as my emotional response to playing big pots such as the ones alluded to above. I still get excited over them, but it has been a good while since I’ve found myself getting especially up or down about a given hand or session. Keeping an even keel (regardless of one’s results) is obviously an important attribute no matter one’s game, though being able to remain so is especially useful in a game like pot-limit Omaha where the variance can be especially high.

So when this hand $175-plus pot hand happened I was happy, for sure, but not overly ecstatic. Stayed at the table and ended up taking a bit more off of poor Bissonette who rebought and got a little tilty after this one. You will see I was trying to isolate the short-stacked Jeeves and ended up in a big one. There was some other history that preceded this which made me fairly certain I had Bissonette on the end (and that he’d stack off). (RSS readers might need to click through to see the hand.)



I’m still way too covetous of my bankroll to harbor serious ambitions about moving up, up, up in stakes. Will always stick with games and limits at which I’m comfortable, where losing will not represent a hit significant enough to affect me inordinately.

Always fun to find new challenges, though, and learning how to deal with bigger pots is certainly one.

Considering the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, Preface

Now that I have moneys back in Full Tilt Poker, I was able to pony up the buy-in for my first Ante Up Intercontinental Poker Series (AIPS) event yesterday -- Event No. 5, 6-handed NL Hold ’em. Not as versed these days in the multitude of strategies needed to succeed in no limit tourneys. Still, I was somewhat satisfied with my performance (finishing 23rd out of 51 entrants). Didn’t embarrass myself, at least. Was bounced by the eventual winner, in fact, when he won a duel with ace-king versus my pocket jacks. Win that coin flip and I’m middle of the pack at least with that final table not too far in the distance.

Aside from the very first hand of the tourney -- when I was dealt pocket kings (and won a whopping 105 chips with ’em) -- I didn’t see much of anything in the way of premium hands until those jacks came around nearly an hour later. Still managed to keep my stack level by stealing blinds now and then, then built it up a bit via a couple of fortunate flops and some fortunately-timed bluffs. Looking back through on Poker Tracker, I see that in the 88 hands I played prior to the last hand, I never lost more than 350 chips on a single hand, and never won more than 650. Talk about small-pot poker. I certainly played tighter than is probably recommended for a short-handed game. Like I said, I was out of my element a bit . . . . Still, a lot of fun. I may try one or two more events here before they finally award that big banana trophy on November 4th.

Meanwhile, I’ve been looking through all of the forums and whatnot in an attempt to educate myself a bit about the impending legislation. 2+2 remains the place to go for up-to-date info. You can waste some time on certain threads, but it isn’t hard to find good reporting over there. I've listened to several of this week’s podcasts as well. Ante Up! and Pocket Fives were both particularly informative. I recommend both of ’em to anyone wanting updates and/or analyses of where things stand at present. I've read I. Nelson Rose’s analysis of the Act, the response of Allyn Jaffrey Shulman (of CardPlayer) to the Act, and even the Act itself -- i.e., Article VIII (pages 213-244) of the Safe Port Act, titled the “Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.” Hell, I’ve even read Bill Frist’s victory speech-slash-column offering his view of what he managed to engineer in Congress that night.

I think I now have some idea of what is going on, and even some clues about what might be happening down the road. This week I’m going to write three posts in which I’ll offer my thoughts about the Act and what it means. I’ll also be speculating a bit about how I think it might further affect my ability to play online poker (and keep a poker blog, for that matter).

The first post will talk about how the Act tries to redefine a “bet or wager.” What was passed on September 29th is a version of the Leach Act (which was a revision of the Goodlatte Act) minus that section attempting to update the 1961 Wire Act to include more than just sports betting. Even though the attempt to update the Wire Act was taken out, there remains in this new Act an attempt to redefine “bet or wager” to include not just sports betting, but also “risking . . . something of value upon the outcome of . . . a game subject to chance.” As Nelson Rose explains, that phrase “a game subject to chance” is specifically meant to include poker.

The second post will concern that part of the Act that discusses “Interactive computer services” -- a legalistic way of referring to Internet Service Providers (or ISPs). It is notable, actually, that the former name of the Act -- the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act -- was revised last week to become the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. The new version of the Act that Congress passed is mostly about how to enforce what some believe to be preexisting laws forbidding online gambling. One of the mechanisms described concerns federal agents being able to order ISPs to remove internet sites that are transmitting money to gambling sites. ISPs can also be ordered to block sites with hyperlinks to gambling sites (such as the one you are reading right now).

In the third post I’ll try to assess how various poker sites reacted to what happened in Congress last week. No one saw that coming, it seems. I imagine that Bush will have signed the Act into law by the time I post that one, so we may have even more news by then to consider.

In the meantime, I’m still playing . . . . In fact, I’ll be talking about one crazy hand in particular in my next post, one that I think helps to address this notion that poker is, indeed, “a game subject to chance.”

Image: Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.

Poker Spells Different Things to Different People

Still thinking about the many ways poker can be meaningful. Those five motives listed in the previous post (discussed by the Ante Up! guys) aren’t everything, of course. Poker can be other things as well. A creative outlet. An escape. A chance to socialize. An occasion for an amateur existentialist to explore his beliefs. You name it.

Even so, the more I think about those motives, the more I’m led to believe they might be refashioned as “principal categories” defining what poker means to (nearly) everyone who plays. In other words, poker means the following to all of us: (1) profit; (2) opponents; (3) knowledge; (4) enjoyment; and (5) risk. I don’t think I would be going very far out on a limb if I were to claim that anyone who plays poker does so because he or she wishes somehow to introduce these five things into his or her life -- to different degrees, of course.

As I mentioned before, these categories overlap considerably. It’s probably futile to try to talk separately about, say, wanting to make a profit and wanting to enjoy oneself. Indeed, it is a poker cliché to say I play to have fun but the more money I win the more fun I have. Still, we can distinguish between these motives somewhat, and part of assessing one’s own game is understanding which of these means more or less to oneself.

I thought I’d try to describe my own preferences here (or what I believe those preferences to be at this moment, anyway). To avoid becoming overly abstract, though, let me do so by discussing a particular hand I played from early last week. Rather than analyzing my play (directly), I’ll be analyzing what the hand “meant” to me given how I regard the significance of those five motives listed above. It’s a good thing, actually, that I’m not specifically analyzing my play in this hand, because it wasn’t so hot. In fact, it stunk. I’m about to share with you a (thankfully) rare instance of my having done what Miller/Sklansky/Malmuth repeatedly describe as a “disastrous” play in limit hold ’em -- I folded the best hand!

Here’s how the hand went down. It’s a 6-max, $0.50/$1.00 game. I’d been at the table for almost three orbits -- 16 hands, to be exact -- and so had just begun to pick up on some of my opponents’ tendencies. (I’d never played with any of these players previously.) The table was quite aggressive. For a hand to be checked around on any street had been a rarity. In those 16 hands I’d managed already to drop a little over $10, mainly thanks to having lost two fairly big hands. In the first, my JJ lost to AK when my opponent turned a king. In the other, I had limped into a family pot from late position with KT-offsuit, then called the big blind’s preflop raise (along with four other players). The board ended up T6249 (no flush) and I lost to the preraiser’s pocket queens.

In this particular hand I was in the BB and was dealt JJ once again. Before the flop, UTG limped, UTG+1 raised, I reraised, and both players called. So there’s $4.75 in the pot and I’m out of position against two opponents. And a little bit out of sorts, given the poor start to the session.

The flop came -- a decent flop for me, one would think. I bet and both of my opponents called. $6.25 in the pot. The turn was the and I actually checked. To be perfectly honest, my memory is a little foggy here as to why I checked. In fact, when I looked back at the hand in Poker Tracker I was surprised to see that I had. What the hell was I thinking?

I might have had an idea that one of my opponents would take a shot at stealing this pot (as I said, I’d seen very few examples of a round with no one betting out) and I would check-raise him. More likely, though, I had grown timid -- perhaps affected somewhat by having recently lost with jacks -- and didn’t like being out of position with this holding. Whatever my reasons were, both opponents seemed invigorated by my show of weakness, with UTG quickly betting and UTG+1 then raising to $2. I was sure one had at least paired his queen, and so I let it go. (Looking back, I can see how I might well have been looking for any excuse to let this one go.) The river brought the , making the board 55Q3Q. I was slightly surprised to see both players check. UTG had . UTG+1 had , winning the $10.25 pot (minus $0.45 for the rake) with his ace kicker to the two pair on the board.

Not too much worse, really, than taking a few hits in hands you play correctly (or mostly correctly), then losing a nice-sized pot after a misstep like this one. The check on the turn -- frankly an uncharacteristic move on my part -- killed me here. And the decision by the eventual winner of the hand to reraise was well-timed, since he succeeded in making the best hand fold.

So this was a hand I clearly botched, losing not only what I’d put in the pot but what others put in as well. What did the hand “mean” to me, though? Let’s see . . . .

rofit. I play poker for real money and keep careful records of my wins and losses. I am overall a winning player, and that is important to me as I continue forward. The fact that after this hand I had $2.00 less than I had before it started -- when I might well have added $7.80 or even more to my stack if I’d stayed in the hand -- obviously means something to me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the amount I earn in a given hand eclipses all other “meaning” for me, but it does tend to affect everything to some degree (for me). At times I think this is another potential flaw in my game, the fact that I care too much about what the chips actually represent. Indeed, fretting over losses in previous hands likely didn’t help my decision-making in this one.

pponents. I do derive a great deal of motivation from facing competition. Some time back I attended a large midwestern university. For those who liked to play basketball, at this school they could easily find several pick-up games running in the centrally-located gymnasium -- pretty much 24/7. I played in the games regularly (three times a week). Shooting around is okay, I guess, but I always preferred the games. I liked having a place where I could count on finding opponents against whom I could compete. Poker similarly satisfies such a desire. While I’m generally not interested in seeking out conflicts in other areas of life, I do so when playing poker. I appreciate skillful play. In fact, I’d call it another weakness of mine not to walk away from a table when I find myself up against one or more obviously talented players. Rather, I want to stay and see if I can compete. In this hand, I like how both of my opponents played the turn -- both had flush draws, and both pounced after I showed weakness. Hopefully I learned something from how they handled this hand. I do hate losing the hand, though. Here I competed poorly and thus (as often, but not always, happens) ended the hand one of the losers. And that, too, is meaningful to me.

nowledge. I do think I learned a bit from this hand and so it did satisfy my intellectual curiosity perhaps more than the average hand does. I learned something about these two players, obviously, as well as the situation I was in (one that will undoubtedly recur in the future). I also learned something about myself. I recognize a couple of patterns exemplified by the hand that may be of use to me in the future. I see how winning or losing previous hands can affect my decision-making moving forward. I also see how difficult it is to manage two opponents from out of position, particularly if both show aggression. (Additionally -- perhaps most importantly -- I also see in this hand evidence that I’m probably still not ready to move up a level.) Since building my knowledge base is a considerable motive for me, I see this hand as contributing significantly to that endeavor.

njoyment. Having fun playing poker is also important to me. And while I don’t necessarily equate having fun with winning money, I do tend to derive less pleasure from losing sessions. I probably have the most fun when I feel as though I’m playing well -- making good reads, value betting when appropriate, etc. So it is possible for me to lose money and still enjoy myself, although I doubt I could have fun for very long that way. The hand was hardly pleasurable for me, but I am getting a certain amount of gratification from looking back on it here. And so while adding to my knowledge base does provide me with a kind of pleasure, ultimately this hand mostly “means” pain for me.

isk. Perhaps as a consequence of the particular importance I place on my profit, I do not receive any special satisfaction from taking risks. Especially foolhardy ones. My play in this hand certainly illustrates that tendency. As does my decision to stick primarily to limit games rather than venture over into the deep end of the pool and swim with the no limit sharks. I must like to gamble some, because however much we want to claim poker is a skill game, it is also gambling. And I’m certainly getting something from that. In this hand I toyed with risk a bit, then thought it too great to continue.

Like I said, I ain’t so proud of this here hand. But it does illustrate some of the things that poker “means” to me. What might be the optimal balance between these different motives -- or attempts at “meaning-making” -- that would produce the most successful poker player? Who knows? I suppose, in the end, the answer depends on what one means by “successful.”

It's a Fish-Eat-Fish World

PokerStars currently has a reload bonus promotion in effect through Tuesday, September 19th. These don’t come around as often on Stars as they do on other sites (e.g., Party Poker). The Stars bonuses are nice because they are relatively easy to clear (unlike, say, what Full Tilt offers) and you have six months to play the necessary number of hands (unlike, say, Party Poker where bonuses often need to be cleared within one week). I’ve actually started keeping a sum over in Neteller from which I can draw in order to take advantage of these offers when they come around.

Was reading an interesting thread yesterday over on the Two Plus Two forums that began with someone publicizing the Stars reload bonus to other “Microers” (i.e., micro limit players). Subsequent posts started to describe how promotions like this tend to affect the play at the tables. Some held the position that one encounters more skillful players just after a reload bonus is announced. As one poster put it, “I feel like I’m fishing at the pier and all the lines are in the water but the fish are already in someone else’s bucket.” An interesting point, but I don’t think I'm gonna put too much stock in generalizations about how the ratio of good-to-bad players gets momentarily affected by reload promotions. As I said, one has six whole months to clear the Stars bonus, so if the waters seem too treacherous right now, just wait a few weeks for the fish to return . . . .

Speaking of fish, as I began working to clear that Stars bonus I had a fishy hand earlier today I thought I’d share. This was 6-max, $0.50/$1.00 limit Hold ’em. It folded to me in the cutoff seat where I’d been dealt . I called (fish-like, no?). The button and small blind both folded, and the big blind -- HowDareYou -- checked.

Now I’d only played about two dozen hands with HowDareYou to this point, but he’d already established himself as an aggressive player. Looking at Poker Tracker afterwards, I see he voluntarily put money in the pot over 59% of the hands I played with him. I didn’t know this exact figure while we were playing, but I could see that HowDareYou tended to play a lot of hands and didn’t shy away from pressuring opponents to fold when he thought he was good.

The flop came and HowDareYou led out with a bet. I assumed by his bet that he'd caught some part of that flop. Influenced equally by my overcards, draws, and position -- and, perhaps, simple-minded inertia -- I decided just to call. (Narrating this now, after the fact, I see that a raise from me was certainly in order here. See why?) The pot was a modest $2.25. The turn then came the and HowDareYou bet the dollar. My sense was he probably didn’t have the king and was hopeful I didn’t either.

I could’ve let this hand go. In fact, that was precisely my first instinct. The pot wasn’t really big enough to get too excited over. My pot odds weren’t so hot, either -- only 3.25-to-1 to call. But I reconsidered when I thought about what river cards would give me the hand. I still had my double-gutshot draw to a straight. And I believed my queen was probably live, too. (The ten I was less sure about.) So that was eight outs for the straight, plus three more should the queen arrive. There was no flush draw, so all of the outs appeared reasonably clean.

So I called. I might’ve even raised, actually, though I decided the only purpose that would serve would be to build the pot, since HowDareYou wasn’t going anywhere. He’d call even if he thought I had the king, I was sure. And if I made the pot too big here, there was no way he’d fold to a bluff on the river should I fail to hit anything.

Luckily enough, the river was bingo for me, the . HowDareYou bet, I raised, he called, and I took down the $7.85 pot (minus $0.40 for the rake). “Nice runner runner,” HowDareYou sarcastically chimed in the chat box. I didn’t respond. I tightened up for the next round or two, hoping to take advantage of my newly-fashioned image as an unthinking calling station, but the table broke up too soon for it to matter much.

During the next hand I looked in the hand history to see that HowDareYou had held . Not to say I played the hand particularly well -- indeed, the act of describing this hand shows me pretty clearly I wasn't at my best here -- but here's someone calling a late position river reraise with a pair of nines while staring at two overcards and a possible straight on the board.

The fish are still biting, all right. Come drop in a line and see how it goes. By the way, if you happen to pull out a brown, medium-brimmed fedora, that's mine . . . .

A Tarantula on a Slice of Angel Food

Raymond Chandler’s second novel, Farewell, My Lovely, begins with the private detective-hero Philip Marlowe encountering a hulking man-child named Moose Malloy. Marlowe and Moose are described as both looking up at a neon sign hanging outside a place called Florian’s, a “dine and dice emporium” located in one of the rougher sections of downtown Los Angeles. We soon learn that Moose is an ex-con who has just been released from prison. The girl he went with prior to entering the joint -- a red-haired vixen named Velma -- used to work at Florian’s, and he’s looking for her. Eventually Marlowe will get involved with the search, although the way things turn out in the end, Moose would’ve been much better off forgetting about Velma altogether.

Marlowe sarcastically describes Moose as “a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck.” Standing there on the street, staring up at the sign, Moose attracts a lot of attention. “He was worth looking at,” says Marlowe. “Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

One sometimes runs into Moose Malloy-types at the low limit hold ’em tables, those players whose play is so erratic as to attract and keep everyone else’s attention at all times. I’m talking about a particular kind of (usually losing) player. The kind who enter almost every pot, even if it means cold-calling three bets to do so. The kind who routinely call to the river with bottom pairs, overcards, or draws, and who’ll even call your river bet with a Jack-high busted draw. The kind who appear utterly unconcerned or unmindful of all of those things you are sitting there thinking about as you play. Stuff like pot odds. Position. Hand selection. Other players.

When you finally get pocket kings and this Moose is at your table, you know before the hand begins that you will at least have to outlast him/her to win the hand. You know unless the board is a nightmare you’re gonna be showing down your cowboys with Moose. You know this because Moose is showing down nine out of every ten hands.

These players are also conspicuous in your Poker Tracker stats, standing out from the crowd with what seem to be unbelievable numbers (and, almost always, enormous losses). Here’s an example, a player whom I sat next to for 112 hands the other day at a $0.50/$1.00, 6-max limit table on Party Poker:




These are actual stats (click the pic to enlarge). Voluntarily put money in the pot 87.5% of the hands -- that’s 7 out of 8. Almost never folded to a raise from the small blind, and not once from the big blind (so obviously, position wasn’t much of a concern to Moose). Went to showdown nearly 6 out of 10 times, and won about half of the time. That most of the wins came on bad beats should be understood. Notice that preflop raise stat -- less than 1%. In other words, Moose only preraised once in 112 hands. (Don’t know what Moose had that hand -- it was from the BB, and s/he won the hand without having to show. Had to be aces, I’d imagine, one of the few hands we never saw Moose showdown.)

Other stats are similarly jawdropping. I sometimes like to review Poker Tracker’s “aggression factor” statistic (you get to it by clicking on “More Detail” in the “General Info” section). PT counts up the number of times a player gets to act and makes a simple calculation: Raises + Bets / Calls. Do more raising and betting out, and less calling, and you get a high number; do more calling than raising or betting, and you get a low number. PT suggests that a number of 0.70 or below indicates passive play, while a number 1.50 or above indicates aggressive play. What was Moose’s “aggression factor”? 0.24. That’s right . . . out of 500 possible actions, Moose only raised nine times (1.8%) and only open bet 58 times (11.6%). Meanwhile, Moose called or checked 395 times (79%) and only folded 38 times (7.6%).

Obviously, Moose was a big loser during this particular session, as one would expect of anyone playing in this fashion. How did I do against Moose? Well, I did have position on him/her (I was sitting to his/her immediate left), although position tends not to mean as much against players who never raise and always call. Like everyone else at the table, I had numerous showdowns with Moose, taking some decent-sized pots but also suffering some brutal beats. Won a $15 pot when I flopped a set of tens and Moose called me down with an underpair. Lost an enormous, three-way pot ($28) when I flopped a set of kings and Moose made a straight on the river. In the end, I only took $2 of the $55.50 Moose left at Table Rain Boots that day -- winning $29.50 from him/her but dropping $27.50 (!). (In fact, I ended up a $10 loser overall at the table, probably the only player other than Moose not to take a profit during this stretch of hands.)

What does all of this mean? For one, you gotta demonstrate some patience with players like Moose. In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe understands this truth about Moose Malloy. He might be a bit soft (particularly in the brains department), but Moose and guys like him often can be highly destructive. Later in the novel after Marlowe discovers Moose has killed Jesse Florian, Marlowe reflects “he probably didn’t mean to kill her,” but that Moose is “just too strong.” These wild, unthinking players can create similar havoc at the table -- without meaning to, probably. One simply has to resist making any gratuitous moves against them. Bluffing is out of the question. Check-raising or slow-playing is usually not a good idea, either (although it can maximize one’s profit now and then). I haven’t broken down the entire session, but I likely became impatient in a few of my “battles of the blinds” with Moose and lost chips unnecessarily. Chips Moose then swiftly handed back to the rest of the table.

One also has to be careful not to get too carried away trying to isolate the Moose Malloys -- e.g., raising medium-strength hands only to be caught in three-way pots involving both Moose and a smarter, craftier player. Remember, just because you see the tarantula on the piece of angel food cake doesn’t mean no one else has. That other player has also pegged Moose as a ready mark -- and knows that you have, too -- and so likely has some sort of plan when entering a pot with the two of you. I’m sure I lost other pots in this fashion, watching Moose limp and then raising up a hand like QT-offsuit from the button only to have one of the blinds come along and take us both down with KQ (or better) once a queen hit the board. Know that Moose is gonna be there, crashing around the china shop, making every pot three times what it ought to have been. But know that others know, too . . . .

Finding these players now and then can be great. And they do come around -- every 20 or 30 tables or so, I’d guess. But finding one doesn’t always automatically translate into the big payoff. And if you don’t like the increased volatility these Moose Malloy-types introduce into your life, you might well consider just walking the hell away. Tarantulas are poisonous, after all.

Image: Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), Amazon.

The Power of the Draw

Had a fun hand over on PokerStars earlier today -- the kind of hand you rarely run into on the low limit tables where mugs merrily call you down with King-high. This particular $0.50/$1.00 table (6-max) was on the tight side, though. One seat was empty, and of my four opponents, one was a solid player with whom I’d played before & the other three essentially unknowns.

I was on the button with . If it had checked around to me, I’d probably have raised against this group, but Gatorhater raised from UTG. Wiseacre (sitting UTG+1) cold-called and I called as well. Both the blinds -- including the solid player -- folded, so three of us went to the flop. There was $3.75 in the pot.

The flop came . . . not too exciting for yours truly. A gutshot and backdoor flush draw. Gatorhater led out and Wiseacre called. I paused a beat and called as well. Even if I’m only going to see the turn, a quick calculation of poker odds shows I’m not too off-base here chasing the gutshot, especially with position. Four outs means it was about 11-to-1 to hit my straight. Since there was $4.75 in the pot, that made the pot odds 9.5-to-1, although the implied odds in this case were surely better than that. So it didn’t take much for me to make the call. The pot was $5.25.

The turn brought the , probably the only card other than a six that could genuinely heighten my interest in the hand. A check from Gatorhater doubled my curiosity. Wiseacre checked behind him. I now had a double-gutshot plus a flush draw -- 15 outs, most of which appeared clean. I bet and both players called. The pot had reached $8.25.

I watched the river card come down, hoping for that diamond or six or ten. Alas, it was the . Both Gatorhater and Wiseacre checked. What's my play? What would you do?

Here’s one of those hands where I cannot possibly win the hand by checking -- no way is my nine-high good. However, in a lot of those situations where checking is a sure loser, betting isn't always necessarily a good idea, either. In this case, I can bet, but I have two opponents, and if either calls he’s taking the pot. Now Sklansky would use math to justify the bluff here. I’ve got a $1 chip with which to try to take that $8.25 in the middle. If I try this move, say, eight times and only win once, I’m actually making a profit -- I’d lose $7, but win $8.25 the one time it worked. I can’t say I really was thinking of math at the time, but the check-calls on the turn from both players made me think neither probably had an ace or jack, so I bet. To my delight, both Gatorhater and Wiseacre instafolded, and I took it down.

Having the draw (and position) persuaded me to take control with that turn bet here, and it worked out. Like I said, this sort of thing rarely works so well in these low limit games. It was probably 50-50 that Wisacre had a seven (or even a five or three) and would make the call, but a coin flip is well worth taking if you only need $1 to shoot for $8. And that's not even counting the added satisfaction of winning a relatively-large pot in low limit hold ’em with what was likely the third-best hand.

By the way, I’ve noticed PokerStars has recently altered their rake structure. Previously there was no rake on pots below $5.00, a quarter on $5.00-$9.75 pots, fifty cents on $10.00-$14.75 pots, and so forth. Now they appear to be taking a nickel on every dollar, with a maximum rake of $0.50. They are continuing the “no flop no drop” policy -- i.e., there’s no rake if the hand concludes preflop. (Such a rake structure is identical to the one Full Tilt Poker uses.) Looking at Poker Tracker, I see the average pot size in my $0.50/$1.00 games is just under $5.00 -- meaning that under the former structure, the average hand on PokerStars had no rake taken; now they’ll get around $0.20 per hand. In this particular hand, PokerStars took $0.40 (whereas formerly they would’ve taken only $0.25).

We’ll see if this new structure amounts to a big difference or not. Still probably better than the punishing structure Party Poker employs ($0.50 for every $5.00 in the pot). Talk about the power of the draw . . . .

Fingering Those Four-Flushers

So you’re in an online game of limit hold ’em (6-max, $0.50/$1.00). Table’s on the loose side -- no surprise there. You’re UTG and get dealt big slick, . You raise and the button and both blinds call. There’s $4.00 in the pot when the flop comes . You bet out and everyone calls. Now there’s $6.00 in the pot. The turn is the , an apparent blank. You bet the $1.00, the button calls, and the blinds fold. The pot is now a handsome $8.00. Then comes the river . . . . What do you do?

This scenario comes up very frequently in these games. If your opponent is sitting over there with two hearts, all of his postflop calls have been mathematically correct. On the flop he had 9-to-1 to call -- potentially 11-to-1 if the blinds also called, which they did. Even if one of the blinds check-raised here, he’d still be priced in to continue the chase. Then on the turn he had 7-to-1 to call, and although again there was a slight risk with two to act behind him, it would have been wrong to fold his draw here as well.

So how do you play it with your top pair, top kicker? In this situation, I’m often check-calling. I’m not folding, but I don’t want to give my opponent an extra big bet here on the river. Sometimes I’ll see his flush and kiss my $3.50 for the hand goodbye. Sometimes I’ll see he’s got and has backed into aces up or some other hand that beats me. Rarely he’ll show something wacky like and beat me with a runner-runner straight.

Then there are times when he shows down a middle or low pair, an ace-rag hand that didn’t spike a second pair, or a busted backdoor straight or some other garbage and I win the pot. In that case, I probably have won about all I can on the hand, although some suckers with middle pairs will go for the check-raise. Being out of position, though, I’m pretty comfortable with check-calling -- I might lose a bet or two on the end, but I’m saving more by not paying off the flushes.

Now switch the positions -- say you’re on the button and the one player who’s followed you all of the way to the river is UTG. The comes and he checks. Now what? This is where I’m less confident about my play. When I bet out and he check-raises, I have to call (there’s $11.00 in the pot). When I check behind him and he shows that middle pair or ace-rag, I know that while I’ve taken down the pot I’ve likely lost a big bet. Having position -- which should be an advantage -- has hurt me, overall, because of the way I’ve been handling this common situation. (I haven’t checked through my Poker Tracker stats to prove this is the case, but my overwhelming impression is that I have not done as well in this situation as I could have.) The real question here is this: How does one tell whether or not one’s opponent is chasing a flush or not?

That term “four-flusher” comes up quite a bit in old noir films of the forties and fifties. (Click here to listen to an example.) It is one of many instances of the language of poker spilling over into that of “hard-boiled” narratives. The term refers to a faker or sham artist, someone who deceives. It derives from draw poker, where a player with four of a suit claims at hand’s end to have made his flush, quickly reveals his hand with the fifth, non-suited card obscured, and tries to scoop the pot. (Michael Wiesenberg actually discusses this term and a few others a bit in his latest CardPlayer column.)

One might reappropriate the term for online play to refer to the guy who represents a flush on the end even though he doesn’t have it -- the guy with the middle pair or ace-rag in my hypothetical who bets out after I’ve checked the river to him, or who has checked to me in that case where I have position. (In fact, sometimes the guttersnipe really does have four to a flush at the end.) How can I finger these “four-flushers” and extract the maximum from them on the end?

I have a few ideas about how to identify a real flush draw from a pretend one. One is to pay attention to how many saw the flop. If (as in my example) four players see a flop with two hearts, the chances are good the one guy with two more hearts in his hand is going to be sticking around to the end. If, on the other hand, there are only two to the flop, odds are he’s a “four-flusher” and doesn’t have the goods come showdown. Another is to note whether your opponent has appeared to have been doing a lot of chasing previously (calling down and then folding on the river, or showing a few made straights or flushes that only came in at the end).

Still, I feel like I could certainly stand to improve in this particular department. Losing to the suck-out is going to happen and can’t be helped, but missing bets on the end with the best hand is a different story. Gotta figure how to squeeze those second-best stooges for all their worth.

169 Ways to Showdown

The chart at the left is a fairly useless, though somewhat interesting piece of trivia I picked up some time ago that ranks all 169 starting hands in hold ’em. (Click the chart to enlarge.) The color-coding indicates whether a hand is ranked in the top 25% (green), the second 25% (yellow), the next 25% (red), or the bottom 25% (black). I suppose the colors could be read as indicating whether to “go” or “use caution” or “stop” or whatever.

I’m afraid I’ve lost track of the source of this here information. I do recall that the rankings come from a computer simulation, not actual play, which involved dealing a 100,000 or 1 million hands (or something) to a ten-handed table and then showing down all ten to see which hand came out the winner -- an occurrence that might well have never happened a single time in all of the billions of hands of hold ’em ever played on the planet. That is to say, these rankings are strictly theoretical and not based on actual play. (I have seen attempts to produce hand rankings that were based on hands that were really, truly played; for example, here’s a fairly popular chart I’ve seen posted in more than one place.)

The only time I can see this chart ever being of any real value is in a no-limit tourney where you are heads-up and deciding whether or not to push all-in or call an all-in bet. Since you know you’re going to show down the hand, you might check to see how your hand rates (e.g., is it a “green” or “yellow” hand and thus above average?) as a way of helping you make your decision. As with all mechanically-derived decision-making solutions, though, I imagine doing this would likely cause more harm than help. (For another, more useful heads-up strategy that also focuses on the all-in decision, see Lee Jones’s article about his SAGE system in CardPlayer.)

Anyhow, stumbling across this chart again got me thinking about Poker Tracker and all of the data it contains. I purchased the program a couple of months ago, and have now entered all of the hold ’em hands I've played since January 1. Like a dutiful detective, I started snoopin’ around the numbers a bit and uncovered a few items of interest. Don’t know yet, really, how having this information around is helping my game at present. It does satisfy a few curiosities, at least.

I have now entered a total of 52,483 hands into this little monster. The great majority of the hands are from limit hold ’em, and two-thirds of those are at 6-max tables. I’m not going to get into precise numbers, but I will say that this particular sample demonstrates I’ve been a winning player. I mention that to provide a context of sorts for some of what follows -- obviously some of these stats would come out differently had I been only breaking even or losing at a high clip.

In those 52,483 hands, I have, unsurprisingly, been dealt all 169 possible starting combinations (between 100-500 times each). And -- perhaps more surprisingly -- I have “VP$IP” (voluntarily put money in the pot) for all 169. At least six times each, it appears. That’s right. I’ve willingly pursued 72-offsuit on multiple occasions. (There are lots of ways Poker Tracker can humble one, PDQ.)

I wondered if I had been dealt aces my fair share of times. I discovered I’d gotten AA a total of 223 times, a little less than the 1 in 221 the math says I am supposed to (more like 1 in 235 or so). In fact, of all 13 pairs AA is the one I’ve been dealt least often, although really the difference between my getting AA and 44 (266 times, my most frequently-drawn pocket pair) is pretty negligible. Overall I’m getting pairs just about exactly as often as I should -- 3156 times or once every 16.62 hands (slightly better, in fact, than the 1 in 17 that I should be expecting). This fact might be read as an indication that the shuffling software on the sites where I play the most (PokerStars, PartyPoker, and Full Tilt Poker) seems to be in order, not that I doubted it. It won’t satisfy the “RiverStars” conspiracy theorists, though. Nothing would.

How often do I win with AA? About 80% of the time, by far the highest percentage of all 169 hands. I’m getting the highest BB/100 rate with AA as well, considerably above the second-best hand (KK). Interestingly, of all 169 hands there are only 11 hands where my win % is above 50%: AA, KK, JJ, AQs, AKs, QQ, AKo, AJs, TT, AQo, KQs. Notice that 10 of these 11 hands are rated as top 11 hands in the chart. AQo, my 10th-best hand, is rated 18th; KJs, which the simulation ranked 9th, is only my 20th-best hand in terms of winning percentage. (Of course, I could well be playing KJs like a donk.) The small number of +50% winners confirms what most of us already know -- most hands simply aren’t going to prove winners, no matter how good a player you are.

I also learned that winning percentage isn’t necessarily related to making a profit. Scanning down the list of hands I see some glaring examples of such incongruity. I only win 14% of the hands when dealt J4-suited, yet I’m scooping the same number of BB/hand with that hand as I am when dealt a pair of sevens (a hand that wins 40% of the time). In fact, when I look at the “W$SD” column (wins money at showdown), J4-suited is the third-best hand, winning 72% of the time when I show it down.

How can this be? Thinking about it a bit, I realize a stat like this makes sense. I might be a bit jingle-brained, but I’m not insane, so I’m not showing down shinola like J4s unless I’m a likely winner. Same goes for 73-suited, which proudly sits atop the W$SD list at 89%. Closer inspection reveals why that percentage is so high. I’ve been dealt 73-suited 154 times. Only 21 times did I actually play the hand, and 20 of those 21 were from the blinds. (Once, I called from the button with 73s and -- predictably -- lost the hand before the showdown.) Of those 21 hands, I ended up going to showdowns 9 times total (seems like a lot), winning three times with flushes, twice with a pair of sevens, once with a straight, once with two pair, and once with a pair of threes. 8 of 9 showdowns comes out to 89%. (I should add that all 8 of these wins were at 6-max tables, where such crap is marginally more likely to hold up than at a full table.)

One last observation here about starting hands and limit hold ’em. You might notice how on the chart the suited hands generally rank much higher than their non-suited counterparts. For instance, A6-suited is rated the 34th best hand, whereas A6-offsuit is a crummy 113th. Looking at Poker Tracker, it seems this truth is borne out in practice. Again and again and again. The biggest losers (in terms of winning percentage) are almost all non-suited hands -- 37 out of the bottom 40, in fact. Also, in every single case I’ve won more often with the suited version of a hand than with the same hand, non-suited. That’s every time -- all 78 pairs of suited/non-suited starting hands! Sometimes the difference is enormous. For example, K8-suited wins three times as often as K8-offsuit; K5-suited wins four times as often as K5o. With all of those popular “suited connectors” (JTs through 54s), I'm doing much better than with their offsuit counterparts -- again, usually 3 to 4 times better. So I’m inclined to distrust those who claim suitedness is an overrated factor, particularly if you’re playing limit hold ’em.

If you’ve read this far, you must be at least a little intrigued by the numbers of poker and/or Poker Tracker and/or silly charts like the one posted above. If you are, let me know if any of my observations seem off-base or the result of my own idiosyncracies. I’m also interested to hear about how others are using Poker Tracker and whether (and how) it is beneficial to them.

Enough numbers, sheesh. The likelihood that the next post will not involve math in any way is well above 95%, I’d say.