Don’t Egg Me On

More than 10 years ago, I picked the name of this blog along with a pseudonym -- “Short-Stacked Shamus” -- and at the time both the blog and the persona resided firmly within a poker-only world.

As such, most who came across either “Hard-Boiled Poker” or that nom de scribble at least had some idea what they meant. “Short-stacked” was a clear enough adjective for poker players, and while not everyone knew what a “shamus” was, it wasn’t difficult to bring up the genre of hard-boiled detective novels and films as a kind of thematic inspiration.

Now both the blog and the “Shamus” name exist outside of poker, too, which means I find myself in spots where I’m explaining the name of the blog (or “SSS”) to people who aren’t familiar with either poker or detective stories. The fact that I (crazily) use “shortstackedshamus” as part of my primary email address doesn’t help matters, either.

It all can be a little humorous, sometimes, especially when the “hard-boiled” adjective is first understood as having something to do with eggs.

It is a weird adjective, if you think about it, meant to convey the “hardness” or tough-natured quality of the characters populating those stories of crime and corruption. The protagonists -- guys like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and the Continental Op -- are forced to deal with the worst examples of humans behavior while remaining somehow unmoved or impervious.

Thinking of eggs, though, couldn’t be further removed, in terms of what they suggest. Even hard-boiled eggs are pretty easy to smash, and when you get to the jelly-like whites and crumbly yolks they are kind of the opposite of hard.

Eggs don’t have a lot to do with poker, either. Unless, of course, we’re talking about eggsposed cards. Or eggspected value.

Okay, those were both pretty bad. Rotten, even. Really laid an egg there. Boy, do I have egg on my face. But hey, you can’t make an omelet without....

Now That’s a Lot of Cabbage

Something recently reminded me of that specialized “hard-boiled” lingo one finds in novels by writers like Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and others. I think it must have been a delayed echo from that Robyn Hitchcock show I was writing about a couple of days ago, specifically his tune “Raymond Chandler Evening” I’ve continue to hum all week.

I was going back through some posts on the blog recently -- just cleaning up some dead links here and there. Ended up lingering for a while, reading several including a few early ones where I tried (somewhat vainly) to write using that “hard-boiled” patois.

That didn’t last very long (thankfully), although a few phrases and words have stuck over the years, including using “cabbage” to refer to money. It wasn’t my normal voice, of course, and while my detective novel Same Difference has a few hard-boiled elements (including style-wise), I didn’t go for the lingo so much there, either, finding it hard enough to tell a story without giving myself that additional challenge.

I’ve toyed with another novel idea, a story set in the late 1920s, actually, where it would be not inappropriate to include characters sounding like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. So ripe for parody, that. Can only really be done with tongue partially in cheek.

Probably wouldn’t have made it to one year on here writing about poker had I tried to keep up that applesauce. Let alone ten, a milestone that’s coming up in just over a week. (No shinola.)

Robyn Hitchcock at the Grey Eagle

Took a nice, leisurely trip up to Asheville this past weekend with Vera Valmore, kind of a mini-vacation inspired by Robyn Hitchcock -- a longtime fave of mine -- having come to play a gig at the Grey Eagle on Saturday.

Hitchcock is someone I’ve been listening to for more than three decades, which means I started picking up his records not that long after he started making them. I wore out the Soft Boys albums, his solo LPs, and those he made fronting the Egyptians, picking up and studying just about everything right through the ’90s and after. And I have continued checking in on the more recent stuff as well, including his latest, The Man Upstairs, released a couple of summers ago.

I saw him play a couple of times way back when -- once during late ’80s, then another time around ’91 -- and in fact I even dragged Vera to the second of those shows. Since then he’s slowed down somewhat, having evolved from a loud, electrified rocker with psychedelic tendencies into a softer, acoustic-based act that strikes newcomers as a kind of weird neo-folk, although the inspired, surreal lyricism remains the most conspicuous common thread tying together the different eras.

Seeing him again kind of paralleled the experience I was describing last week when I located and listened to a boot of a Bruce Springsteen show I’d attended over thirty years ago. I say that because of the uncanny deja-voodoo I experienced as Hitchcock happened to play some of the same songs I’d heard him perform before all those years ago.

One I know he played at the earlier shows was the meditative “Raymond Chandler Evening,” a kind of homage to the hard-boiled writer filled with dark, gritty imagery that contrasts with the sweet arpeggios carrying its catchy melody. (Was delighted when he tossed in an extra verse I’d never heard before, introducing another crime scene into the proceedings.) He followed that Saturday with another one from the same 1986 album Element of Light -- “Bass” -- a song I’m also pretty sure he played when back when I last saw him.

Vera and I had to laugh when he began “Bass.” Earlier in the evening we’d enjoyed a very fun dinner with our poker-playing friends PokerGrump and CardGrrl, and Vera and I both happened to have ordered bass for our entrees. I joked then Hitchcock had a song by that name, though I doubted he’d play it... and then he did.

Someone’s already uploaded that particular track to YouTube, if you’re curious. In fact, I'm noticing other songs from the show on there, too, and have linked to each from the titles in this post. During one of Hitchcock’s many extemporaneous acts of word association used to introduce songs (a signature trait), he joked about skipping ahead in the YouTube video, fully conscious of the fact that many artists’ performances get instantly memorialized in this way.

Hitchcock actually split the bill with the comedian, Eugene Mirman. Hitchcock came on first, playing about 10 or 11 songs, with other highlights including “I'm Only You” and the Dylan cover “Not Dark Yet” with which he opened.

After that Mirman made us laugh for about 45 minutes, then the pair both carried on a suitably absurd conversation onstage for a while before Hitchcock closed the night with “My Wife and My Dead Wife” (another ’80s-era track I’d seen him play in the past). A great time, start to finish.

My only bit of chronicling during the show was to snap that poor-looking pic up above, one showing Hitchcock squinting out into the crowd in a fashion that seems to suit the photo’s lack of clarity. As I was telling PokerGrump and Cardgrrl after our dinner, I’ve lately found myself actively opposing the whole take-a-picture-of-everything urge that so often possesses us these days. (Not to mention the subsequent feeling of being obliged to broadcast those pictures via one’s preferred form of social media.)

I guess I archive plenty enough here on the blog, although that exercise is a little different. Here I force myself to translate experience into words, that act alone being enough to make whatever it is much more memorable than tends to happen when snapping a pic or shooting a short vid.

The whole weekend was like that, really, spent mostly unplugged -- like Hitchcock.

Travel Report, EPT12 Dublin, Epilogue -- “Hey, Shamus!”

On the way back to the train station in Dalkey on my last full day in Dublin (described here), I was walking on the platform when suddenly I heard a voice calling out behind me.

“Hey, Shamus!”

I turned around to see two Irishmen walking briskly toward a third, a fellow most obviously named Seamus (not Shamus). I laughed, thinking how occasionally people do actually call me Shamus, exclusively on poker trips. I could be forgiven for thinking perhaps the person was, in fact, calling to me.

“Shamus” of course is a slang term for a private detective, also used to refer to policemen. Starts turning up around the 1920s or so and at least one etymological explanation connects it to the preponderance of Irish-American cops (particulary in the northeastern U.S.). The word pops up in hard-boiled novels, with both Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler using it. That spelling is in truth a misspelling, a phonetic representation of the traditional and popular Irish name, Seamus.

Flying home yesterday, I thought again of that funny moment and the little double-take that followed. Then I thought a little more about Ireland and how connected I seemed to feel with the place and the people while there.

I mentioned during some of the earlier trip posts some of the reasons for my affinity with Ireland, reasons which could also explain the not entirely expected experience of feeling “at home” while there (or something). All of that helped contribute to the feeling that it would never seem all that strange for someone to call out to me by name to greet me.

On the flight out of Dublin I happened to get into a conversation with the fellow seated next to me. Soon enough we figured out we were both heading to Charlotte, and in fact he lived in the neighboring town from me here on the farm. We were about 3,700 miles from our respective destinations, which were in fact only about half-dozen miles apart.

It was nice to chat and already to be thinking about home -- my real one -- and to enjoy talking with someone about things that were familiar. But my time in Ireland was been very pleasant, too, even comforting at times in a similar way.

Photo: “A large tricolour flying from CuChulainn House in the New Lodge, Belfast,” Ardfern (adapted). CC BY-SA 3.0.

Making and Breaking Rules

The great crime fiction writer Elmore Leonard passed away yesterday at age 87.

I’m acquainted with a few Leonard titles, although wasn’t as huge a devotee as some. I remember reading several of his books long ago, well before I was old enough to appreciate either the writing or the genre, although I did enjoy them.

Later on one of his books, one with a card game-related title, 52 Pick-Up (1974), did provide some inspiration for my Same Difference both with its subject matter and ’70s setting. I suppose also Leonard’s famously “lean” style was something I tried to demonstrate in my novel, too, although I had other authors like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Charles Willeford, and Jim Thompson more consciously in mind as models.

Noticed a lot of people passing around Leonard’s 10 rules for writers yesterday, which contains a few good reminders not just for fiction writers but those attempting other kinds of writing, too.

Raymond Chandler was another favorite who I tried to ape, a writer whose style is decidedly not-so-lean when compared to these others. One of Leonard’s rules is “Never open a book with weather” and another is to “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.” Chandler breaks both rules in the opening paragraph of The Big Sleep, and to great effect, too.

Of the nine rules in Leonard’s list, four start with the word “never,” two with “avoid,” one with “don’t,” and the other two warn about keeping one practice “under control” while indulging in another “sparingly.”

I’m reminded of George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language” which also includes a lot of advice about trimming unwanted fat from one’s prose, including a similar catalogue of do’s and dont’s. Orwell ends his list with a final rule to “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous,” and I think it’s clear Leonard also at least indirectly qualifies all of his advice with the unstated disclaimer that rules can be broken in special circumstances.

In poker we often encounter strategy writers doing their best not to put forth rules that suggest one should “always” or “never” do this or that. But in truth, it is sometimes helpful -- in writing and in poker -- to start with an absolute as a kind of guide or default strategy, then permit yourself to do otherwise although with full awareness that you are breaking a rule.

So I might indulge in a detailed description of a character every now and then, just like I might occasionally call a raise from out of position. But I’ll do so consciously, knowing just like Philip Marlowe knows when he walks into General Sternwood’s place in the second paragraph of The Big Sleep that trouble might await.

Detour: Four Years of Hard-Boiled Poker

Four years ago today I decided to start a poker blog. Was pretty much a total whim. I’d been playing online for a while, had read a number of books, and was following a few different magazines and news sites. Was also starting to listen to poker podcasts, was spending some time reading around in the forums, and had begun to visit some of the other poker blogs.

At the time, many of those poker blogs seemed to take the “journal” approach of chronicling one’s own progress as a poker player. Lots of hand histories and discussions, along with reports on how much the player/blogger was up or down. Some would include anecdotes and other fun poker-related stuff, too. And a few would diverge entirely from poker to discuss just about anything of interest to the writer -- e.g., an update on the writer’s relationship status, a review of a movie recently seen, a report from a recent vacation, what have you.

It was clear there were many ways to go when it came to poker blogs. Having little clue which way I’d be heading, I thought it would be fun to try one myself.

As I say, it truly was a whim. The title of the blog came to me at the end of no more than five minutes of meditation on the decision, inspired by an anthology on my bookshelf, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories edited by Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian. I’d long been a fan of those stories and writers, guys like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, James M. Cain, and so forth. And when it came to writing myself, most of my attempts at fiction had been in the same vein -- including a draft of what eventually became my novel, Same Difference.

So when I thought of writing, I thought “hard-boiled.” And there seemed a reasonable connection between poker and these sort of detective stories. All poker players are detectives, more or less, right? Some very good, some hopelessly inadequate. And every hand is a sort of miniature mystery with its own dramatic arc of exposition, climax, and resolution. Some potential there, I thought.

The “Shamus” character was also pretty much an on-the-spot-type invention. A “shamus” is a detective. My understanding is that it’s a slang term that originated early in the 20th century, probably first used with reference to New York City cops, some of whom were of Irish descent. It’s an Americanization of the popular Irish name “Seamus.”

Some have wanted to argue that the word also has a connection with the Yiddish word “shammes” which comes from the Hebrew “shamash” or a synagogue beadle. The idea there is that the beadle -- a parish officer -- is a person who knows everyone and thus is a good one to go to for information about what is going on (i.e., like a detective). I’ve always thought that was a bit of a stretch, but there could be something there.

In any event, writers of hard-boiled fiction picked up the word and routinely used it to refer to their detective protagonists. Comes up in the movies a lot, too. Go watch the beginning of The Big Sleep, where Humphrey Bogart (as Philip Marlowe) introduces himself to Carmen Sternwood by saying “I’m a shamus.”

So I started the blog, and in fact thought early on I’d try to write “in character” and employ more of that hard-boiled lingo in my little first-person narratives of my pokery adventures. Found it hard to keep that up, though, and so soon settled into a voice that came a little closer to my actual self.

However, as part of that “character” I was creating, I decided to borrow the mug of Tom Neal as Al Roberts in the 1945 noir film Detour. Shot in less than a week for practically nothing (around $20,000 say most), the movie tells the story of Al’s efforts to hitchhike across the country to meet up with his fiancee, though as the title suggests those efforts get sidetracked along the way.

Lean and mean, I recommend this 68-minute gritty marvel directed by Edgar G. Ulmer every chance I get. I liked Neal’s look in the film (I mean, really, doesn’t the poor sap look like he’s short-stacked?). Additionally, the film is in the public domain, which made me less hesitant to borrow them there images. That also means Detour can be easily found online, if you are curious to see it.

I also soon decided I didn’t want exclusively to write about my own low limit struggles. There was a lot else of interest happening in poker. Indeed, not long after I began the blog, we were all blindsided by that Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, and for a short while there I actually thought I wouldn’t even be able to play online poker anymore. Suddenly there were other topics to discuss, and somewhere in there I came up with the different “sections” (On the Street, The Rumble, Shots in the Dark, High Society, and By the Book) for which I’d write.

Those first six months or so I had very few readers, and even though I got a great deal of enjoyment from writing, I did wonder sometimes why I even bothered. Vera Valmore encouraged me to continue with it, though, and so bears a lot of responsibility for my having kept at the sucker.

After a year or so I’d picked up a few more readers, and soon after that got the chance to do some poker writing for other sites, too. Then came an invitation to go cover the World Series of Poker (in 2008), something I described to many at the time as one of those “life detours” I never really would have expected even a few months before.

Other opportunities came along, and now I find myself about to head back to the WSOP for a third time. There’s been another significant development, too. For a variety of reasons -- this here freelance writing career being just one of them -- I’ve decided to move on from the current “day job” to pursue other possible futures, most of which involve doing a lot more writing.

Not quite at the moment of official transition yet, so I won’t go into other specifics. But the decision has been made. I’ve put on the turn signal. Just waiting for that green light and I’ll be going down a different road.

It has been apparent to me for a while now how that choice of the film Detour to help flesh out the blog’s motif has turned out to be weirdly prophetic, given that Hard-Boiled Poker has itself had a lot to do with the change in direction I’m now taking. Am excited, for sure. And a bit anxious, too. But again, I’ve encouragement from Vera. And, less directly, from many others, too, including all of you who have stopped by here from time to time.

So thanks again, everybody. Will let you know where this detour leads.

Playing Poker & Writing About Poker

This summer I had the good fortune to spend a great deal of time doing something I particularly enjoy -- writing about poker. Also had the opportunity to spend much of that time interacting with others who also like to write about poker. Some real talented folks, too.

I’m referring both to members of the so-called “poker media” (all duly marked by the laminated badges hanging on lanyards around our necks) and to numerous others, including some who have authored poker books, some who contribute significantly to poker websites, and some who keep personal poker blogs.

I rarely encounter other fellow “poker writers” in the circles I usually trace (not face to face, anyway), and so that was another particularly pleasing facet of my summer experience.

I mentioned a few times during my excellent adventure how covering the WSOP tended to lessen my desire to play poker. I was essentially spending almost every waking moment while there writing about others’ play, leaving myself little time and/or energy to play myself. I did put in a few sessions of low limit hold’em here and there, and there was that freeroll tournament near the end (which went well). But that was about it.

Not surprising, then, that I leave Vegas and start playing poker again.

Over the last week I have gotten the chance to return to online play and have discovered I still enjoy doing so. Am taking seats at pot limit Omaha and H.O.R.S.E. tables, again sticking to the low limits at which I am most comfortable. Did happen to get involved in a fairly dramatic three-way PLO hand yesterday in which a $125 pot was pushed my way (at a $50 max. table), but something like that represents an extreme. Usually for me the pots don’t exceed single digits dollar-wise.

Playing a bit more -- and writing a bit less -- has gotten me thinking about both activities and how closely related they are. For me, anyway. Playing poker provides me a great deal of pleasure. So does writing about it. And I think, in a way, the pleasures are very similar to one another, even if on the surface the activities seem quite different.

Almost everyone who plays poker spends at least some time reflecting about what he or she is doing, I’d imagine. And a certain percentage of those people record those reflections in some fashion or another. They might keep an exhaustive diary or journal or blog. They might write books on strategy and theory. They might post a hand or anecdote in an internet forum as a way of starting a dialogue about their play. Or they might just jot down a few numbers in a notepad as a pithy, functional chronicle of their activities.

I’ve written before about the various reasons why I enjoy poker. A good while ago I wrote a fanciful post in which I listed five motives, assigning each a letter -- P = profit; O = opponents; K = knowledge; E = enjoyment; R = risk -- as a way of addressing the subject. There I explained that I play poker because I like making a little cabbage, I like competition, I like puzzles and trying to solve them, I like the social side of the game (even if it is much muted online), and, finally, I do like taking occasional (if carefully managed) risks.

I think all of those reasons more or less apply to writing about poker, too, though the hierarchy is necessarily different.

There’s a profit motive, I suppose, but it is minimal. (Woe to any poor soul who gets into poker writing for the money.) Also, anyone who writes for an audience is probably competitive (to some extent), too. There’s a challenge that comes with trying to “win” over readers to accept one’s views, or simply to be interested in what one has to say. And, of course, there’s always some form of risk involved whenever one decides to publish those views to the world.

The two most similar motives, though, are the social aspect of writing and the intellectual stimulation writing provides.

Those of us who do keep poker blogs and/or contribute to poker forums have all experienced (more or less) the fun of interacting with others with similar interests. This is one way we find each other -- by writing about ourselves, responding to others’ words, etc. And I think for most of us this is probably the primary reason why we write, namely, to communicate (and not simply “broadcast”).

Writing is also a manner of problem solving, of working out a kind of intellectual puzzle. One has something to say. It might be quite clear and explicit what that something is, in which case the puzzle isn’t too difficult to solve. Like folding eight-trey offsuit from under the gun. Or that something might be a bit more elusive, in which case one writes in order to solve the mystery. (We learn to write, then we write to learn.)

Raymond Chandler once claimed that “everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.”

A bit of bluster, there, as well as another subtle shot at literary critics, of whom Chandler was no fan. But if I understand what he’s saying, Chandler seems to be indicating that as long as the writer keeps writing, he or she is still trying to figure out what writing is. It remains an unsolved puzzle.

Much like poker, yes?

Playback

To commemorate President Bush having signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act into law on Friday, I decided to play some online poker.

I played a hundred hands or so of limit on PokerStars. Actually did pretty well for the day, though I ended up a little down for the week. Looking back over the last couple of weeks, it appears that I’m just a few bucks up since having banked most of what I had had out in the various sites and in Neteller. So I’m still sitting on modest balances in both Stars and FTP at present.

I was just about to sign off Stars Friday when I decided to try one of those 375 FPP satellites into the big Sunday Million tournament. This was a turbo tourney (no limit Hold ’em), so the blinds went up every five minutes. There were 36 entrants, and only the winner won a seat in the big one. No consolation prizes here.

Never in the tourney was I able to build up much of a stack, really. I had gotten lucky very early on (in Level 2) on a big blind hand where I’d flopped trips and slow played, then recklessly ended up all-in after an opponent had turned a flush. Fortunately I filled up on the river and survived. After that I mostly stayed out of trouble and hit just enough hands and flops to stay afloat. Then I made a couple of decent reads once we had gotten to the final table to accumulate a few more chips.

Before long we were down to six players. Then came a hand about which I’d like your opinion. Let me set the stage.

We had reached Level 11, with 600/1,200 blinds and 75 for the ante. I was sitting on exactly 6,035 chips -- putting me in fourth place ahead of a player with 3,618 and another with 610. The top three players had approx. 20,000, 13,000, and 11,000 respectively.

I was in the big blind -- after posting 1,200 I was suddenly down to 4,835 -- and was dealt . With an “M” of not even three, I had all but decided that any pair would probably do, so as I awaited the action to come around to me, I had already mentally prepared to push. I watched as the super short stack went ahead and put his last 535 in the pot. Then I saw the fifth-place player push all-in with his remaining 3,543. Then I saw the button also push his entire stack -- around 11,000 -- in the middle.

What would you do here?

I thought about it, but went ahead and pushed. I know that it isn’t necessarily good form to call an all-in raise and an all-in reraise like this, but it made sense to me in this situation to go ahead and gamble. If I fold, I’ve barely got the chips to play a couple of rounds (and the blinds are going up up up). And, as it happened, I actually only had one opponent who could bust me here, as the other two had shorter stacks than I did. I clicked the button to go all-in and watched . . . .

Alas, the board came , and the button knocked out three of us at once having made aces up with big slick.

Did I do the right thing? Does it matter that I was eliminated there?

I hope not, because that’s not what happened.

Truth be told, I lied. I hit my set. The board actually was . The super short stack held 97 and so survived the hand, taking the small (3,125) main pot. Meanwhile, I took the rest -- almost 14,000. The other short stack was bounced (he had pocket queens). The button indeed had big slick, and so not only lost to my set but had to endure making two pair as well.

I ask again: Did I do the right thing? Does it matter that I won the hand?

It mattered to the button, who was a little miffed afterwards. Down to about 5,000 in chips for the next hand, he typed “what a clown 3 way allin calls with 66.” “Sure,” I responded ambiguously. A buddy of his from the rail described the play as “sick.”

I’d agree that if some of the circumstances were different -- for instance, if it weren’t the case that only first place carried any sort of prize -- the call might have been sketchy. But was it here? Never mind the result . . . you tell me. What would you have done?

Thanks largely to that hand, I ended up surviving until there were just two of us left. When heads-up began, my opponent had a 3-to-1 chip advantage. The first hand I had T7 and folded to his preflop raise. The second hand I had AJ and he folded to my preflop raise. Then on the third hand I was dealt and decided to push. He thought for a while and called with . The flop looked terrific -- . According to the CardPlayer calculator, I’m 81% to win from here. The turn was the . Still right at 81%. Unfortunately, the river was the , and I found myself finishing second, winning exactly what the guy who finished thirty-sixth received. Nada.

I wish I were lying this time -- that I could play it back with a different ending. But I can't. Still, it was a fun hour of online poker. Think I’ll play again tomorrow. Can’t think of a reason why I shouldn’t.

Image: Playback, Raymond Chandler (1958), Amazon.

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.

An Existential Pause

A very interesting conversation on this week’s episode of Card Club on Lord Admiral Radio between Cincinnati Sean and Iggy, a.k.a. “The Blogfather.” Iggy, of course, is the man behind the always-readable Guinness and Poker blog. His “uberposts” -- massive blog entries compiling tons of (mostly) poker-related material and links -- are well worth the time. (If you haven’t been there, check it out.) The pair touched on a number of topics during their wide-ranging dialogue, including the relative worth of participating in poker affiliate programs, the recent gathering of the World Poker Blogger Tour in Vegas, the progress of H.R. 4411 (the version of the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act that recently passed through the House), the recent lawsuit brought by seven prominent pros against the WPT, and the implications of CardPlayer’s status as the “exclusive content provider” for the WSOP this year.

That latter topic -- about how poker gets talked about and reported on -- led Sean to ask Iggy to comment on the current and future state of poker blogging. Iggy suggested that pros like Daniel Negreanu and Phil Hellmuth having their own blogs surely indicated poker blogs had moved from the periphery to the “mainstream” (of the poker world, anyway). Sean disagreed, saying that in his eyes those “diary”-type blogs kept by pros (and others), while interesting, weren’t really blogs at all. “Anyone can write on their web page what their feelings are and how much they love their girlfriend,” explained Sean. Such “vanity blogs,” as Sean described them, hardly participate in the blogging community and thus in his mind didn’t really indicate much of anything about the current and future state of poker blogs.

Sean then made what he humbly described as an “academic distinction” between blogs and simple web pages, saying that while a web page merely reports (or transmits) information (such as a person’s experiences), a blog includes links and invites comments. According to Sean, a blog isn’t simply a monologue to no one in particular, but deliberately participates in a dialogue or exchange of ideas.

Iggy disagreed. “You can write a blog and not be part of the community,” Iggy replied. “There’s something to be said for that . . . that you just want to get out your thoughts, your opinions, [and] what you think is cool.” In fact, argued Iggy, for pros like Negreanu and Hellmuth to blog at all actually “legitimizes us” (i.e., those who write the kind of blog Sean prefers). Sean granted Iggy that point, and the pair moved on.

Both Sean and Iggy made good observations here. What do I think? I believe a blog can be any number of things -- a personal diary, a virtual soapbox, a promotional tool, a news outlet, a discussion-starter, a confessional . . . you name it. Ultimately, a blog shapes itself according to the personality of its creator. Some personalities -- like Iggy’s -- become more interesting and expansive as they develop, thereby contributing significantly to the “world” in which they participate. Others develop differently, although as Iggy points out, “there’s something to be said for” the value of even the most obscure, inward-looking blog. I agree that keeping a blog does mean entering into a “community” of sorts -- whether one purposefully intends to or not. With poker blogs, even just providing a daily report of one’s wins and losses with the occasional hand history thrown in is a way of joining an ongoing, many-voiced conversation about strategy and/or the experience of playing poker.

What is Hard-Boiled Poker? A babbling three-month old? A mere babe in the blog wilderness, its identity still uncertain? So far I’ve considered it a place to work out (mostly) poker-related thoughts and ideas, soliciting advice and opinions from others as I do. In an earlier post I mentioned that professional player Kenna James suggests writing about poker makes one a better player. Being forced to reflect on your decisions -- and explain them in a way that makes sense -- helps you become more aware, more knowledgeable. That’s certainly part of what I’m hoping to accomplish here -- to improve my game by describing (in a hopefully coherent way) what I think I’m trying do while playing. Putting it into words helps me see a little more. Hearing what others think provides further clues . . . .

That's why writing a poker blog is like being a detective. Raymond Chandler once described the detective story as “a man’s adventure in search of hidden truth.” All poker bloggers are shamuses, really. Investigating themselves.

Spillane Punches Out

Mickey Spillane might well have sold more “hard-boiled” fiction than any other writer of the twentieth century. When his first novel, I, the Jury, was released as a 25-cent Signet paperback in 1947, it was a genuine worldwide blockbuster, selling something like four million copies within five years. Spillane took advantage of his newfound fame, quickly producing four more novels featuring his narrator-private detective, Mike Hammer, over the next five years. (He'd ultimately produce over a dozen Hammer novels.)

Spillane died this week at the age of 88. Since I’ve already alluded to him in an earlier post or two, I thought I’d take the occasion to share a couple of thoughts about the man and his work.

Spillane began his creative career writing comic books, and his novels all exhibit a similarly-garish, “comic book”-type quality. The violence generally goes well beyond what one finds in earlier crime fiction. When Hammer finds a recently-shot John Hanson -- one of the many bodies strewn around I, the Jury -- we read how “He lay at the foot of the bed with his head in a puddle of his own blood and brains, and with a hole squarely between the eyes. On the wall was more of his goo, with the plaster cracked from where the bullet entered. He was a mess, this John Hanson.” And on to the next chapter. And body. There’s also in Spillane’s novels no shortage of sex -- sometimes presented in vivid, softcore colors. Brazen references to anatomical riches (“Her breasts were laughing things that were firmly in place”) are the norm whenever Hammer has to interview a new female suspect or witness. And while the earlier fictional detectives tended to avoid getting too distracted by romantic liaisons, Hammer screws around like a sailor on leave. Women throw themselves at Hammer from all directions, and more than occasionally, Hammer gives in to take what they're offering (“I was only human,” he’ll explain). Usually with little in the way of consequences.

Spillane often described the structure of novels as being -- as in some comics -- like that of jokes. As he is quoted saying in Speaking of Murder (ed. Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg), “The biggest part of the joke is the punch line, so the biggest part of a book should be the punch line, the ending. People don’t read a book to get to the middle, they read a book to get to the end and hope that the ending justifies all the time they spent reading it. So what I do is, I get my ending and, knowing what my ending is going to be, then I write to the end and have the fun of knowing where I’m going but not how I’m going to get there.”

Poker players might well appreciate that. As interesting and important as the deal, flop, and turn are, the “biggest part” of the hand is the river, the ending. They don’t play to “get to the middle,” but “to get to the end and hope the ending justifies all the time they spent” getting there. Poker players might also appreciate Spillane’s unapologetic love of the green. Unlike many authors, Spillane saw actually selling books to be the point of it all, often referring to his readers not as “fans” but as “customers.” He also didn’t care much for critics, many of whom decried the overt violence and misogyny of his novels. “I don’t give a hoot about reading reviews,” he claimed. “What I want to read is the royalty checks.” The fact that most of us who were born well after his most popular novels were first published remember Spillane mainly for all of those Miller Lite ads he made in the 70s and 80s confirms the fact that “selling out” really wasn’t a concern of his.

Truth be told, novel-writing also wasn’t that big of a concern for Spillane. He often said he wrote his novels very rapidly, usually finishing one within two weeks, and also claimed never to revise. Unlike some authors, Spillane clearly wasn’t “driven” to write (other than by monetary-reasons), and on two occasions took long breaks from novel-writing (from 1953-1961 and from 1973-1989).

Still, Spillane did possess a kind of gift for crafting the page-turner. I tend not to recommend Spillane too highly as there are so many other better, more-rewarding “hard-boiled” writers from which to choose. Mike Hammer certainly collects all of those qualities we have come to expect from the tough-guy gumshoe prototype, although unlike other, better-realized fictional shamuses, he hardly exists as a character to which one can readily relate. More “comic book” than real, I’m afraid. Ultimately, even Spillane’s best novels are highly derivative of those by better writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. (In fact, some have suggested the name of Spillane’s detective -- Hammer -- to be a hybridization of the names of these two greats.) And what’s “original” about Spillane -- the puddles of blood and brains, the “breasts that were firm and inviting,” etc. -- isn’t so special, particularly today when we’ve no shortage of graphic depictions of sex and violence on the cultural landscape.

But I, the Jury is probably worth a look, mainly for its historical significance. And for that ending, which still is startling (even if the reader sees it coming).

Image: Mickey Spillane, public domain.

Raymond Chandler Said a Lot of Things

Poker is about deception. We try to deceive others. We often deceive ourselves. He must be bluffing with a busted draw, we say, justifying a river call. Sometimes evidence to the contrary sits right before us, yet we see what we want to see. Makes us wonder, sometimes, why we do it. Why play a game that causes us to act in ways that contradict what our brains tell us are reasonable ways to proceed?

There’s a quote posted all over the internet attributed to Raymond Chandler that says “poker is as elaborate waste of human intelligence as you could find outside an advertising agency.” A great line. No wonder it gets cut-and-pasted as signature files, on poker blogs, and just about anywhere someone wants to make ironic reference to his or her obsession with the game.

A great line, all right. Even if Chandler never wrote it.

I’ve had occasion previously to refer to Chandler, one of the first-tier writers of hard-boiled detective fiction. None of Chandler’s novels deal specifically with poker. Some carry Phillip Marlowe, the private dick who narrates them all, into various gambling or “dine and dice”-type establishments, such as Eddie Mars’s Cypress Club in The Big Sleep or the Montecito, a gambling ship, in Farewell, My Lovely. But even there, Marlowe (and/or Chandler) doesn’t really offer much in the way of judgment upon gamblers or gambling.

As far as I am aware, Chandler (or Marlowe) never said much of anything about poker, positive or negative. No, the quote that keeps getting passed around like a yawn in an elevator is actually a revised version of a line that turns up in The Long Goodbye.

As a way to kill time while awaiting a meeting or some other rendez-vous, Marlowe sometimes pulls out a chess board and plays out famous matches as a kind of intellectual larking about. At one point about halfway through The Long Goodbye, Marlowe receives a phone call from Eileen Wade, a woman who had earlier hired him to locate her drunkard husband. After their conversation, Marlowe decides to spend the rest of the evening working out another famous chess puzzle. Here’s how that particular chapter ends:

She hung up and I set out the chessboard. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.

Someone somewhere along the way decided to rewrite the line as referring to poker, not chess. Probably right after a bad beat. In fact, it is easier to find the inaccurate “poker” version of the quotation on the internet than the actual quote. That’s the internet. A mile wide and an inch deep.

Like I said, often we see what we want to see, not what’s really there. Even an ad exec could tell you that.

Photo: Promo portrait photo of author Raymond Chandler, Fair use.

The Long Goodbye

Had a fairly lousy session of limit two days ago. A better detective would’ve perceived the first hand as a clue of things to come. I get As Qd in the BB and watch as a player in middle position raises and the table folds around to me. I smooth call and the flop comes Qc 8h Jd. I check, my opponent bets, I raise, and he calls. Now I don’t know this gee from a horse’s caboose, but he does appear to have gotten the message of strength from my check-raise. The turn is a blank (2c). I bet and he timidly calls, making the pot 6.25 big bets. The river brings a dreaded king, so I check-call him to see I’ve been three-outed when he shows the friggin’ Kc Qh.

So I begin by dropping 4 big bets to a cold deck. A couple of orbits later I get KK cracked for another decent-sized pot. (In fact, before I was done I’d be absurdly dealt kings four times, yet would only win once with them for an overall net of -9.25 BB on the four hands.) That I subsequently started to play some dicey starting hands out of position (ace-rag, two-gappers) only aggravated the situation further. We’ve all been there -- a bad beat or two and suddenly your otherwise-solid game takes a dive. Adding to the trouble is the fact that as your short stack becomes shorter, other players tend not to respect your raises (a factor contributing to my failures with King Kong, probably, as I was usually up against multiple opponents). (Incidentally, I’d argue this phenomenon to be as true in limit as it is in no-limit, despite the fact that theoretically it makes no difference in limit that your opponent has 30 more BB than you when the two of you are dueling for a pot -- as long as you have enough to play out the hand.) For all my misfortune, however, I definitely skilled my way to that losing session, realizing along the way that one of my biggest flaws is not knowing when to get away from a table that isn’t working for me.

Finding a new table online is laughably easy, so there’s no reason to stick around and play at a table where your image has evolved into that of a much lesser player. Yet there I’ll invariably stay, sometimes even as all of the players around the table have left and been replaced by new ones equally happy to receive my chips. It’s not even that I want to win my money back from the particular palookas that took it from me. Rather, it’s like I’m saying “Okay, Table 95987 (Real Money) . . . you took my twenty bucks and I’m gonna stay here ’til get every cent back if I have to play 65-offsuit UTG to do it . . . ! Okay, until I get half of it back . . . . All right then, until I land one nice pot. Fine, gimme one blind-steal for chrissake . . . .”

At the beginning of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe talks about how he ends up getting involved with Terry Lennox against his own better judgment. “I’m supposed to be tough,” he says, “but there was something about the guy that got me.” From there proceeds his lengthy involvement with a case that in the end he knows he would have been better off avoiding altogether. Marlowe lets down his guard for a just a tic and before long finds himself in too deep.

It’s the opposite for me. “I’m supposed to be tough,” I tell myself, and thus refuse to say adios when I should. I need to develop a strategy here . . . perhaps some mechanical marker that tells me when I reach a certain point at a particular table that taking a hike is the right thing to do (and not an admission of less-than-manhood). In other words, some way to avoid the long goodbye. Suggestions will be most appreciated.

Image: The Long Goodbye (1953), Raymond Chandler.