Go Feed on These Good Reads

Today I wanted to sign off for the week by pointing you to a few interesting articles that recently turned up in the strategy section over at PokerNews. All three are genuinely interesting and present evidence of some impressive brain work by the authors, I think.

The first is from Monday, another one by our friend Robert Woolley, a.k.a. the “Poker Grump.” It is titled “‘Gut Feelings’ in Poker -- What Do They Mean?” and explains how there is actually a meaningful link between that tightness you sometimes get in your stomach at the poker tables and what’s happening in your head as you try to make a decision. It’s kind of a fascinating observation Robert is sharing.

A second article I very much liked came from Gareth Chantler, one called “Obsessed With Your ‘All-in EV’? It’s a Negative Freeroll.” Gareth talks about that stat available in tracking programs showing your “all-in expected value” that allows players to see whether they’ve been “running good” or “running bad” in all-in situations. It’s is an irresistible stat for many, but as Gareth points out it’s hardly helpful and in fact can be potentially harmful.

Finally, today Nikolai Yakovenko shared the first of what will be a three-part discussion of artificial intelligence systems and “bots” in poker titled “Artificial Intelligence and Hold’em, Part 1: Counter-Factual Regret Minimization.” He brings us up-to-date on how far researchers have gotten with their efforts to “solve” limit hold’em and start working on the much more difficult case of NLHE. It’s lengthy, but very readable and gives a great overview of where things stand at present. (Looking forward to the rest next week.)

If your stomach for interesting poker content is rumbling and you’re hungry for some food for thought, go feast on those links.

The Angle Shooters of the NFL

Am I ready for some football? Yessir.

Will be right there with everyone else tonight to see the New England Patriots host the Pittsburgh Steelers. I have picked the Pats tonight, the first of 256 picks I’ll be making in the Pigskin Pick’em pool.

Why the Pats? Two reasons. One, I saw the Steelers look only so-so in their last preseason game versus the Panthers. And secondly, I always pick the Pats.

Was today reading ESPN’s big investigative feature from a earlier this week, “Spygate to Deflategate: Inside what split the NFL and Patriots apart,” which does a fairly substantial number on New England’s frequent skirting the edges of what’s allowed when it comes to competitive fairness over the last decade-plus.

I’ve mentioned my current American Studies course, “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics.” Just this week we were starting to get into Nixon’s image and reputation, and how everything is necessarily colored by the lens of Watergate and the resignation. All of the many episodes from Nixon’s life and presidency -- including his poker playing -- is practically impossible to think about without thinking about his terrible judgment, abuse of power, and the disgrace caused by his spectacular fall from power.

In making that point, we of course had to observe how the “-gate” suffix is now readily employed to create abbreviated terms standing for any scandal. It’s a way of communicating something complicated and difficult to explain in a single, made-up word -- handy, but usually obfustactory and often full of prejudice, making it seem as though guilt or innocence is as easily applied to the figures involved.

That ESPN’s headline contains not one but two examples of such usage is impressive. I’m referring not to the headline writer (who didn’t coin either term) but that the Patriots have managed to be at the center of two such scandals. Heck, there’s a lot else in the story that recalls Watergate, in particular the systemic nature of the Pats’ shenanigans which reminds me a little of the various “operations” in effect (with varying degrees of commitment and/or effectiveness) during the Nixon administration.

But my takeaway is hardly to say the Patriots are cheaters, even with all of the unsavory evidence compiled to suggest as much. I was writing earlier in the week about poker terminology turning up in non-poker contexts. Here’s a place where I think a poker analogy would be especially appropriate to employ -- that is, to refer to New England as “angle shooters” rather than cheaters.

Like Nixon, they’ve employed “dirty tricks” that some would readily describe as unethical, others unsportsmanlike, and still others outright illegal and thus deserving of punishment. But to me all of it falls under the heading of the angle shot, which in poker sometimes can be regarded as unethical, sometimes unsportsmanlike, and sometimes against the rules (if the floor is called over and decides in that direction).

I like our friend Robert Woolley’s pair of articles over in the PokerNews strategy section outlining various examples of sort of angle shooting, “Seven Dirty Poker Tricks (and How to Fight Back)” and “Still More Angle Shooters, and How to Defeat Them.”

The actions described in those articles are the analogues to what the Patriots have done over the years. And what others could have tried to do, too, if they wished to play the game that way.

Bright Ideas: Some Recommended Reading

Wanted today just to point to a few items over in the PokerNews Strategy section published this week that I think are especially interesting, for different reasons.

One is Bob Woolley’s lengthy response to the recently-revised Poker Tournament Directors Association rule book, titled “New Poker Tournament Rules You Need to Know.”

Bob (a.k.a. the Poker Grump) highlights 14 of the new additions/edits to rules for comment, serving both to inform readers of the rules and to give us something to think about when judging the changes as positive or otherwise. In most cases, Bob is in favor of what the Poker TDA has done, although there are a couple of exceptions. Check it out.

Another article I enjoyed was Nikolai Yakovenko’s discussion “Game Theory Optimal Solutions and Poker: A Few Thoughts.” It’s another long one, but well worth it if you’re at all interested in learning more about what “GTO” really is and what it has to do with poker.

Nikolai keeps it interesting throughout, and the discussion at the end about three-handed play between Daniel Negreanu, Dan Colman, and Christoph Vogelsang at the conclusion of the 2014 Big One for One Drop is enlightening, not to mention a helpful example with which to highlight some of the article’s main points.

Finally, I also liked Carlos Welch’s article from yesterday titled “Note to Self: If You’re Gonna Lose a Flip, At Least Lose It Right.” Carlos explores an interesting theory in that one, namely that since position is so important in poker, if you’re going to lose chips it is better to lose them to players on your right against whom you’ll have position and thus a better shot subsequently at getting those chips back.

Like the other two articles, there’s some genuinely original thought going on in Carlos’s article as he pursues this idea, the kind of thing that is sometimes hard to come by these days when it comes to poker strategy.

Indeed, for me all three of them feature actual “light bulb” moments. Check ’em out and see if they do for you, too.

“Trust everybody, but cut the cards”

Found myself earlier today involved in one of those click-click-click loops that might’ve begun as “research” but devolved into the usual mix of curiosity and voyeurism internet surfing usually represents.

It wasn’t fruitless, however, as one of the items I ended up lingering over had to do with the origin of that often-cited pokerism “Trust everybody, but cut the cards.”

I’ve always liked that quote because of pithy way it combines both the social or “community building” aspect of poker and the fact that at its core poker is a game of self-interest. We have to “trust” others to some extent if only to get a game going, but once hands are dealt we necessarily are each looking out for number one.

You’ll see vague references to the quote as being an “old cowboy saying,” which is probably more or less a correct way to refer to the origins of a lot of similar folklore surrounding the game. In this case, though, the phrase actually should be credited to the American satirist Finley Peter Dunne.

Dunne became an editor at the Chicago Times in the 1880s, and not long after created a character named “Mr. Dooley” who would author short pieces that served as an entertaining brand of social commentary. In some respects Dunne was following the tradition of the old 18th century essayists Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson. He gets compared to Mark Twain a lot as well, of course, having been a contemporary whose concerns, use of humor, and even worldview tended to overlap with Dunne’s.

The stories touched on a wide variety of subjects, all told from the point of view of Dooley, a pub-owning Irish immigrant. In 1899 a collection of the stories was published as Mr. Dooley in Peace and War, and there would be about a half-dozen more such compilations as Dunne would ultimately write over 700 “Mr. Dooley” stories. It was Dunne’s character of Dooley who uttered the phrase, although I’ll need to click around some more to figure out the exact story in which it appeared.

The sentiment it expresses I’m also seeing linked occasionally to the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” puzzle I once took a crack at discussing here.

That gives me an excuse to point you to a neat article by Robert Woolley from a couple of days ago over on PokerNews titled “Got GTO? The Connection Between ‘A Beautiful Mind’ and Perfect Poker” in which he shows the recently-deceased John Nash’s relevance to game theory and poker -- check it out.

Meanwhile, thanks for clicking over here again. If I pinpoint the story in which Dunne’s Dooley utters the phrase, I’ll come back and share it. You can trust me.

Looking in Over at Learn

Continuing to follow the EPTLive coverage from Barcelona, marveling some today at the number of players -- more than 1,000 just for today’s Day 1 flight alone (!) -- they have been drawing this week.

Meanwhile I’ve been busy with other things, including the Learn.PokerNews site where there have been some good contributions over the last couple of weeks I thought I’d share here before signing off for the weekend.

Earlier this week Andrew Brokos offered another smart article, this one titled “Thinking Poker: Everything Has Its Price.” In the piece Andrew explains both what it means to think in terms of “price” when acting during a poker hand and how doing so can help with decision-making. It’s a nice, accessible explanation of a not-so-simple concept.

Robert Woolley, a.k.a. the “Poker Grump,” also continues to add to what has now become a growing collection of great “Casino Poker for Beginners” pieces, this week discussing in particular “chopping” the blinds in cash games. In this week’s piece Robert explains the procedure while also sharing his own thoughts about chopping the blinds and guidelines for new players.

Like other pieces by Robert, he does a great job spelling out something that I know I wondered about when I first started playing. Check out “Chopping Blinds: Expectations, Etiquette, and EV” to read his advice.

Finally I want to recommend a couple of “nuts-and-bolts”-type pieces, what I call articles that deal more directly with specific strategy advice, again geared mostly toward beginners but useful for others, too, I think.

Neil Gibson has been contributing some worthwhile strategy articles of late, including a popular piece not too long ago called “Finding Folds With Pocket Jacks” that talks about how to play that trouble hand -- and get away from it, if needed -- both before and after the flop.

And Aaron Hendrix today has a new one called “Overplaying Big Slick When Deep-Stacked in Tournaments” that touches on something I’ve seen a lot during the early and middle stages of tournaments, namely players getting crazy with A-K in spots when they needn’t necessarily do so.

Interestingly, both Neil and Aaron make reference to hands Phil Ivey has played in their articles as illustrative of the points they make.

Anyhow, just thought I’d pass those articles along for those looking for strategy and theory advice. By the way, if you have a request for an article addressing a particular strategy topic for one of the Learn contributors, let me know about it and perhaps we can work it in over at Learn.

Meanwhile, enjoy the weekend!