Using Visuals To Help Us See

Earlier this week I was momentarily mesmerized by this graphic included in a short piece that appeared on Slate’s culture blog. The image appeared atop an article by David Haglund called “What Geography Can Teach Us About Basketball,” and the piece alludes to yet another way increasingly sophisticated analytical tools have become part of how sports are studied as well as the basis for strategy.

The picture represents a map of shots taken in the NBA over the previous five seasons (click to enlarge). Darker cells represent more shots attempted, and the color-coding shows the relative efficiency of the shots. Cells yielding the most points per shot are shaded red and orange, while the least “potent” cells are shaded blue and violet.

The chart was devised by a geography professor named Kirk Goldsberry using techniques he’d applied to study things like traffic patterns or how access to nutritional foods can differ depending on where someone lives. The study is titled “Court Vision: New Visual and Spatial Analytics for the NBA” and was presented this week at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

As Haglund points out in his brief summary of Goldsberry’s work, the map shows what most basketball fans already knew, mainly that the most point-rich areas of the court are right around the basket and just outside the three-point line. That yellow strip up the middle also shows how players tend to do better shooting straight on than from either side.

The study includes images plotting out the shooting for particular players, and Haglund additionally asked Goldsberry to show him what Boston Celtics guard Rajon Rondo’s map looked like. The image plotting out Rondo’s shots appears to the left (again, click to enlarge) and curiously shows how when it comes to three-pointers Rondo has a kind of “sweet spot” there to the left of center where he is much more effective than he is when shooting from the right side of the court. Notice how that halo around the hoop leans to the left for Rondo, too, which is interesting since Rondo is in fact right-handed.

Reading the study and looking at these maps got me thinking about some of the analytical tools that have been used to track online poker play such as PokerTracker and Hold’em Manager and how they, too, can yield interesting information about patterns of play both generally and individually.

Once upon a time I was studying my PokerTracker stats fairly intently in an effort to learn more about what was working and what was not in my play. Early on I saw and became accustomed to the fact that everyone tended to make more money from the button and late position, as well as to lose the most from the blinds. And, of course, premium hands routinely yielded the most profit, too -- not just for me but for everyone else.

I recall noticing a few idiosyncracies for me as well, things that might be said to have corresponded to Rondo’s “sweet spot” where he hits a high percentage of threes as well as those rough areas where he misses the most. I remember once realizing I was probably losing more than I should with small pocket pairs. Overlaying my stats with everyone else’s would’ve told me more specifically whether I was outside the norm in that regard, although I don’t remember pursuing my study far enough to make any conclusions.

Not really tracking my play much at all anymore, I’m afraid, other than to note wins and losses in my little black book. Definitely worth doing, though, for those who are serious about the game and looking to improve. Just as I think this sort of analysis could probably benefit NBA players, too. Have to imagine Rondo, now in his sixth year in the league, has been shown his map, too, yes? And if he has maybe he will start passing up shots from those blue areas where he’s often cool, opting instead for the hot spots in red.

Where are your red areas or “sweet spots” at the poker table -- that is, spots that may uniquely fit with your skill set to bring you greater profit than most? And which areas make you more blue than most?

Measuring Up

Spent a good part of Saturday morning recording and mixing a new episode of The Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show. Then yesterday I put in another hour or two on it and uploaded the sucker. That’s when I found I’d skipped a step which resulted in an extra layer of fuzz, making the show not so listenable. So I’m gonna remix today and hopefully get Episode 19 out there tonight.

Part of the reason for the hiccup stemmed from the fact that I recorded the show using a new desktop computer, and so the usual routine for creating shows had been disrupted slightly. (That’s also my excuse for the long gap since the last show.)

A few weeks ago Vera and I decided to convert the mostly-unused guest bedroom into a second office. We took a trip to the Ikea to pick up a desk, chair, and bookshelves, then got myself a new computer as well. In the end, it didn’t really take much cabbage at all to furnish the new writing space. Well worth it, I’d say, making it much easier to be more productive.

Have also loaded PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Bodog on this here new computer, though as I was saying last week I’m almost exclusively playing on Stars these days. Likewise reinstalled PokerTracker Omaha on this one and have started the process of moving all of my hand histories over. At the moment, I have only put in the last few months’ worth to go along with the new hands I’ve played.

In the past, I mainly have used PokerTracker just to help keep track of my own play -- e.g., to review my overall stats, or occasionally to look back over a session. Every once in a while I’ll look up a particular, frequently-encountered opponent to try to get a better picture of his or her playing style and/or results. But really I haven’t utilized the program as much as I could.

One stat I have become a little intrigued by here lately is the “True Hourly Win Rate” which takes into account multitabling and produces an actual amount per hour of sitting there with mouse in hand. The program tells me that (over the last few months, at least) I generally average right at 1.5 tables at a time, which sounds right as sometimes I just play one table and sometimes two (and only now and then three). As you might imagine, my true hourly win rate while playing one or two tables of PLO25 is quite modest, although I’m happy enough with the figure being reported there.

Looking at a statistic like that, though -- an unambiguous dollar amount representing to the penny how one has spent one’s time -- has an interesting effect. One starts to think about one’s “true hourly win rate” in other areas of one’s life. What was my true hourly win rate when writing that article last week? What about my “real” job -- how much am I making per hour there? And what about the hours I put in creating that episode of the podcast? What was my true hourly win rate there?

I imagine this is how a lawyer tends to think, or anyone with a “billable hours”-type job whereby at any given moment one either is charging for one’s time or is not. Not unlike a professional poker player. You know, someone for whom time really is, well, money.

Like I say, I’m happy with my true hourly win rate while playing online poker. And I suppose I’m okay with it in other areas of my life, too, although I’ve become increasingly convinced I could probably earn as much or more doing something other than the “real” job.

Of course, there are many other ways to measure one’s “true hourly win rate” than by dollars and cents. Which is why we do what seem to be unproductive things like record podcasts. Or write blog posts. Or read them.

By the way, thanks again for spending another few minutes of your time here. I hope having done so helps increase your overall true hourly win rate, however you measure it.

What Do the Numbers Show?

If we’re going to be honest here, I’m basically more of a word guy than a numbers guy. Sometimes numbers fascinate me, though. Especially when they leave me at a loss for words.

Had a happy little session of limit hold’em over on PokerStars yesterday. Was two-tabling for about an hour and 45 minutes or so -- one full ring, one six-handed, both $0.50/$1.00. Played 249 hands and ended up $31.35. That’s an unusually high win rate (12.59 big bets/100 hands), way above the 1.5-2.0 rate I’ve been enjoying since Jan. 1 when I decided to move back over to LHE. Probably highlights a weakness of mine that I’m more apt to look over the stats after that kind of unusually good session than after a losing one.

Whatever the reason, I was doing a little post-game with PokerTracker, trying to see if some factor jumped out to offer an unequivocal explanation for the inordinately high win rate. I had won a lot of my showdowns -- 57.14% -- though not that much more than I usually do (54%). Other stats like preflop raise % and VP$IP (voluntarily put money in the pot) were basically the same, too.

I looked at my starting hands and saw I did get pocket aces three times -- and won all three. That helped considerably, no doubt. Playing just 249 hands, I should normally expect to get A-A just once (it is a 220-to-1 shot), so that was definitely a bonus.

Picked up A-K four times, about what I should expect. Of the 1,326 possible starting hands, there are 12 ways to get ace-king offsuit, and four more ways to get Big Slick suited. That means you normally get A-K about once every 82 hands or so (about 1.2% of the time). So being dealt the hand four times in 249 hands, I got it once more than averages would have suggested. But I lost twice with that hand, and was nearly six bucks down overall with it.

Kept hunting around a bit. Then -- FLASH! -- I saw it. A huge anomaly. Don’t know if it fully explained my high win rate for the session, but it definitely had its effect.

In 249 hands, I was dealt A-Q a total of 14 times. That’s right -- nearly five times as often as I should’ve expected. Got ace-queen offsuit 12 times, and suited twice.

Even crazier, I was dealt ace-queen at one of my tables -- the full ring one -- 11 times in just 112 hands. That means I was getting A-Q about once per orbit, when normally I shouldn’t expect to get it but once every eight orbits or so.

How did I do with ace-queen? Okay, I guess. I won half of the hands (7 of 14), for an overall profit of $6.90 (about half a big bet per hand). Looking at the individual hands, I notice most of the pots were small, with only a couple creeping up to four or five bucks. I raised preflop most of the time with A-Q (11 of 14 hands), though I also folded it once preflop from UTG+1 after a tight player had raised from UTG at the full ring table.

Even if I didn’t necessarily make most of my profit from A-Q, getting dealt the hand so frequently at that full ring table did have a significant effect on my image, I’m sure. My preflop raising percentage was actually higher at the full ring game than it was at the six-max. game yesterday, and while I didn’t necessarily consciously note the frequency with which I was getting ace-queen, I did pick up on the fact that the rest of the players at the table (most of whom were tight, with one notable exception) were starting to react to my relative aggression.

Ace-queen can be a frustrating hand in LHE, no doubt. Especially in full ring games. I think that explains my being relatively unfazed by getting it so often -- I wasn’t necessarily glad to see it over and over again. But I should have been. Not only was it a winning hand for me yesterday, it probably helped me win other hands, too, given the way it helped shape my image.

Am still enjoying the return to LHE after my lengthy sojourn with pot-limit Omaha. Of course, the “stories” about individual hands aren’t nearly as riveting as happens with PLO. I suppose one reason for that is the fact that LHE really is more of a “numbers game” than is PLO.

For some of us, though, the stories numbers tell can still be interesting.

Some of us (of a certain age) may also recall that vaguely suggestive picture above of the men in trench coats flashing numbers as coming from an old Sesame Street short from the 70s. Really, was that appropriate for the kiddies...?

Here is another Sesame Street short, which perhaps also helped inspire for some viewers a fascination with numbers. Or pinball. Or mind-altering chemicals....

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Was idly skimming 2+2 recently and saw someone had begun a thread with some version of the “online poker is rigged” claim. A half-hearted search to relocate the thread came up empty -- I can’t remember exactly what the claim was or how it was presented. It was the usual applesauce, though. Since he’d opened his PokerStars account, the OP had discovered he was getting way, way more than his fair share of bad beats. No, really he was! He was sure of it!

For the next few pages the OP meekly tried to fend off cynics asking for further evidence. Somewhere in there a PokerStars representative joined in the discussion, and explained that if the OP wanted all of his hand histories, all he had to do was ask for them. Reading that, I exchanged messages with the PS rep and he confirmed that if I wanted all of my cash game hand histories, all I needed to do was email support and they would accommodate me.

I began playing on Stars four years ago. As I’ve written about here before, I first opened a play money account, and after spending three months or so building a play fortune decided to make my first cash deposit in November 2004.

I’d never even considered that I could request all of my hand histories from Stars. When I first started playing for pennies on the site, I had been meticulous about saving copies of all of the hand history files that get written to the hard disk. At some point -- in early 2006, I think -- I bought PokerTracker and entered all of those saved hand histories. Then in the summer of 2006 I suffered a hard disk crash. For some reason, I’d thought it necessary to make back-ups of unimportant items like bank account records and various correspondence, and completely neglected preserving the truly imperative stuff like my PT database!

So I started over with the record-keeping, then in the spring of 2007 gravitated over to pot-limit Omaha and soon thereafter stopped fretting over hanging onto hand histoires. I don’t own the PokerTracker Omaha program, and so didn’t see any need to keep the files.

Anyhow, as we’ve all come to expect from PokerStars support, the response to my request was immediate. I was sent a message with links to 21 separate .zip files -- the whole, crazy story of all my cash games (ring & tourney) on Stars. Downloaded ’em, unzipped, and did a quick count to discover a total of 254,108 hands.

I then decided to see whether other sites could accommodate such a request. I emailed all of the ones where I’ve ever played, including sites on which I no longer play like Absolute Poker and UltimateBet. The only other site that could send me my files was Full Tilt Poker, and like Stars they did so immediately, sending me a couple of attached .zip files in less than an hour. Only 38,301 hands from them -- seemed fewer than I had thought it would be, but I didn’t open my account over there until the summer of 2006. And I’ve always played more on Stars.

How many hands of online poker have I played overall, then? I suppose probably somewhere around 350,000-400,000. Hard to say, though.

Have begun entering those old hold’em hands into PokerTracker. Am also now considering picking up the PokerTracker Omaha program, as I think it would be very revealing to learn more about what I’ve been doing in PLO over the last year-and-a-half. (Anybody out there ever use PTO?)

Thought my readers who play on PS or FTP would be interested to hear that those sites can provide such a service. As I say, none of the other sites could send me my requested hand histories. Absolute Poker (for instance) sent me a form letter with instructions about automatically saving hand history files to my hard disk. (Duh, thanks.) Bodog simply said “we can’t” and also told me how I could see the last hand I played.

But Stars and Full Tilt came through. Another reason why those two sites are well ahead of the rest of the field.

To commemorate the occasion, please enjoy my very first real money hand on Stars, at the $.01/$.02 limit hold’em tables. (RSS readers might have to click through to see.) Oh, how cute and innocent we all were...

Killer Poker, or Knowing What Counts

From 1942 until the early ’70s, Jim Thompson wrote about thirty novels of the “hard-boiled” variety, all crime stories involving nefarious, morally-bankrupt characters engaged in a wide range of vice and mayhem.

Some sold reasonably well, but with a few exceptions nearly all were dismissed by critics as disposable “pulp.” None of his novels were in print at the time of his death in 1977. However, his stature (and critical reputation) soon grew when Vintage Crime/Black Lizard began reissuing several of his novels in the late ’80s.

Furthering his posthumous fame were film adaptations of several of his novels, including The Getaway (the 1972 version by Sam Peckinpah with Steve McQueen; skip the 1994 one), The Killer Inside Me (1976), The Kill-Off (1989), After Dark, My Sweet (1990), and The Grifters (1990).

Jim Thompson was a hell of a writer -- to paraphrase the title of one of his novels (A Hell of a Woman, also filmed as Série noire) -- and easily my favorite among the second generation of hard-boiled fiction writers who followed Hammett and Chandler. My favorite Thompson novel is probably Pop. 1280. It’s certainly the one I’ve read the most. It seems like at least once a year I pick it up and am again hooked by the first few pages in which the hilariously unreliable narrator and protagonist, Nick Corey, introduces himself.

I found myself thinking of Nick Corey and Pop. 1280 the other day while engaged in a 6-handed $0.50/$1.00 limit ring game. I had just gotten to the table, and so didn’t really have a read on any of the other players when I noticed the player who lost the most recent showdown enigmatically type “J3 K5” in the chat box. Checking the hand histories, I saw that the player to his right had won the last two hands with these holdings (Js 3s and Kh 5d), having hit a second pair both times to suck out on the complainer. As the cards were being dealt for the next hand, he added “u dont need good cards.”

Now I’ve been suckered in by this sort of thing in the past, taking one player’s word for another player’s lack of skill and thereby gravely underestimating an opponent to my own detriment. So rather than draw any hasty conclusions, I reserved judgment and watched the complainer (whom I’ll call Bellyache) begin to challenge the alleged donk (whom I’ll call The Fool).

Within about 20-30 hands, The Fool was up $15 and Bellyache was down about $7. (Looking back at the session later on Poker Tracker, I found The Fool ultimately made a cool $23.50 while Bellyache lost $6.75.) The two had been involved in numerous showdowns versus one another.

To give you an example, in one hand five of us had limped in to see a flop of 6h 3c 8c. The Fool checked from the small blind and Bellyache bet out from the BB. The table all called (including me on the button with Ad 9h), then The Fool check-raised. Bellyache called, as did one other player besides myself. The pot was $7.00 when the turn brought the Qs. The Fool bet out, Bellyache called, and the other player and I both folded. The river was the 5s, and again The Fool bet and Bellyache called. The Fool had 8h 6c, and so took down a nice pot of $10.50 after flopping top two pair. Bellyache had Js 3s, and with only bottom pair and no draw had open bet, called a check-raise, and called two more big bets.

The Fool had played the hand well, and clearly was benefitting from the fact that Bellyache refused to believe he or she could know how to check-raise a strong hand. Indeed, on that particular hand, the calls around the table of The Fool’s check-raise were probably also partially a result of Bellyache’s diagnosis that The Fool was a bad player.

This manner of playing upon others’ misreads is precisely how Nick Corey gets things done in Pop. 1280. As high sheriff of Potts County, Nick is constantly abused by others who disrespect his authority. One soon discovers, however, that Nick has a lot more going on upstairs than anyone else seems to realize, and in fact encourages others to underestimate him so as to be able to take advantage later on.

Early in the novel Nick goes to visit Ken Lacey, the sheriff of a neighboring county, with the apparent purpose of asking his advice regarding how best to handle a couple of pimps who are running a whorehouse and who don’t seem to care that Nick wants them to shut it down. He describes the neighboring town to the reader in awe-struck terms (“It was a real big place -- probably four, five thousand people”). He’s even impressed by the dogs in this town, including one “mongrel [who] would have made a fella stop and stare. Because I’m tellin’ you, he was really something! He had this high ass in the back, all spotted and speckled like a cow had farted bran on him . . . .” (This book is hi-friggin’-larious, I’m telling you.)

He continues the bumpkin-in-the-city routine with Lacey and his deputy, and they promptly make fun of him, at one point literally kicking him in the ass in order to give him “an ill-ustrated lesson” of "pre-zackly" what he needs to do to the pimps. Later on we discover Nick has hooked Lacey into a scam whereby Nick kills the pimps and frames Lacey for the murders. Nick describes Lacey’s reaction once he realizes he’s been had: “He blinked at me. Then the wild sweat broke out on his face again, and a streak of spit oozed from the corner of his mouth. And there was fear in his eyes. It had soaked in on him at last, the spot he was in.” Chilling.

The novel proceeds with further examples of such deceit. Near the end, Rose (one of Nick’s mistresses) challenges him to take responsibility for his actions. “Who planned those murders?” she asks. “Who tells a lie every time he draws a breath? Who the hell is it that’s been fornicating with me, and God knows how many others?” “Oh, well,” Nick answers. “It don’t count when I do those things.” “It don’t count!” she fires back. “What the hell do you mean?”

Here’s where I think Nick might be read as demonstrating the characteristics of one kind of successful poker player. Having tricked his enemies into underestimating him, he crushes them mercilessly, and, importantly, feels absolutely no remorse for having done so. The way Nick sees it, all of his actions are simply part of his job:

It’s what I’m supposed to do, you know, to punish the heck out of people for bein’ people. To coax ’em into revealin’ theirselves, an’ then kick the crap out of ’em. And it’s a god-danged hard job, Rose, honey, and I figure that if I can get a little pleasure in the process of trappin’ folks I’m mighty well entitled to it.

The Fool might well have felt something similar about Bellyache and the rest of the table while gathering our chips. When it comes down to it, who gives rip what your opponents think of you? And if they think less of you than they should, all the better. As Nick would say, that stuff don’t count nohow.

Image: Pop. 1280 (1964), Jim Thompson.