Poker Among the Ruins

There’s an interesting piece over on the Salon site today provocatively titled “Has ESPN ruined poker?” The article is by a freelancer named Argun M. Ulgen who provides a fairly well informed judgment on ESPN’s coverage of the World Series of Poker over the last decade. As the title suggests, Ulgen is mostly censorious with regard to the network’s presentation of the game, and in fact he seems ready to blame the network for online poker’s legal woes in the U.S. (even if he doesn’t pursue that idea much beyond just suggesting it).

Going back to Chris Moneymaker’s big win and the much-repeated, seven-episode presentation of it by ESPN that many point to as having been a necessary component in the “boom” that followed, Ulgen recalls those early days of the hole card camera and what for many was a kind of revelation that it could actually be interesting -- even riveting -- to watch a bunch of people sitting around playing cards.

The article severely takes ESPN to task for what was always a somewhat obvious inner contradiction in the coverage of the WSOP during those first few post-Moneymaker years, really right up until the brink of Black Friday -- namely, the jarring juxtaposition of the “skill game” argument either explicitly made in the broadcasts or implied by the whole idea of showing poker on a sports network and programming seemingly highlighted by lucky hand after lucky hand with players constantly all in and powerless to affect their fate.

The coverage “routinely failed to provide by way of non-intrusive info graphics or quick commentary fundamental, skill-based pieces of information,” argues Ulgen. Noting a general lack of context surrounding the showing of all of those key preflop all-ins (not enough about stack sizes, blind levels, and so on), Ulgen laments how viewers were “mostly treated to showdown results, which, whether it is poker, basketball, or finance, is always heavily flavored with luck.”

Most of us deep within our little niche -- or “cultish game,” as Ulgen calls it -- recognized early on the wide divide between reality and romanticism in ESPN’s WSOP coverage, noting to each other at length how all of those “Degree All-In Moments” (remember those?) weren’t really poker, but added up to a kind of glorified, exaggerated version of the game that seemed to entertain not just us, but the masses, too.

From there Ulgen moves into a discussion of ESPN’s 2011 WSOP coverage from the first post-Black Friday Series, in particular its showing of uninterrupted play on a couple of Main Event tables for hours on end for several days in July, accompanied by fairly high level commentary by Olivier Busquet and Antonio Esfandiari. I remember writing a little here at the time about ESPN’s coverage that summer, including the weird feeling once of covering the tournament then going back to the hotel room early one night to watch the tourney continue on television.

Ulgen laments the rapid shift away from that type of coverage -- i.e., the sort that lended itself well to making a much more convincing and coherent “skill game” argument for poker -- that has taken place over the last two years. (He doesn’t mention or draw any conclusions from the fact that 2011 was the year Poker PROductions took over the WSOP coverage for ESPN, taking over from 411 Productions.)

He points out how the current coverage again fails to provide adequate context when showing hands. He’s a little harsh and not entirely accurate about ESPN not currently providing information about position, blind levels, and stack sizes (they usually do give all three, in fact, although not always). But he still makes a valid point about how the shows often tend to race around from highlight to highlight, having gotten far away (again) from the studied presentation of the game that briefly popped up a couple of years ago.

Ulgen’s title employs some obvious hyperbole as an attention grab. In truth, many might say that far from “ruining” poker, ESPN on the whole done has a lot more to revive poker, bringing in new players and expanding the game considerably, even if it has done so in a way that has corrupted (perhaps permanently) the mainstream’s understanding of the game in its failure to present a convincing case for poker’s skill component.

Ulgen’s article is worth a read, but for those of us who’ve been involved with poker over the last decade, the point he’s making is very familiar to us as something we all argued among ourselves at length all through those “boom” years and after. Of course, back then -- pre-UIGEA, pre-Black Friday -- we were so distracted with our multi-tabling most of us probably weren’t as invested in the argument as we might be today, as the fate of the game hardly then seemed threatened.

We were all like the guy who gets his chips in bad and then draws out anyway. Skill... luck... who cared? We were winning.

On Being Results Oriented

Had a poker-related thought flash through my mind while running yesterday. It happens.

By the way, I am still doing two miles just about every day. Have gone three on a few occasions, and there have been a couple of rainy or cold days this month when I’ve opted to go to the gym and ride the bike instead of fighting the weather. Getting near month’s end, and I’ve managed to exercise every single day in January.

I suppose I feel somewhat healthier, although to be honest I’m not really seeing any particular “results” from my regimen. I’m already a skinny dude, so we’re not watching weight or anything. I guess I do have a bit more mental energy, oft-cited as a happy consequence of keeping physically active.

Anyhow, as I was running yesterday I was pondering this whole “results oriented” idea we often hear about in poker -- usually as something to be avoided. The idea, we’re told (again and again), is to make correct decisions and not get too caught up in the fact that sometimes we lose anyway. Get yr money in as a 4-to-1 favorite and even if you lose when yr opponent makes his flush you can take solace in the fact that over the long term, if you repeatedly take that gamble, you’ll come out ahead.

What occurred to me as I ran was how the whole “don’t be results oriented” idea is, of course, based on the ultimate goal of achieving better results. So it is good to be results oriented, just not in the short term. Thus does the point of the advice occasionally get misconstrued by not-so-sharp players, as sometimes happens with other poker concepts like “implied odds” or “expected value.”

Tommy Angelo has a nifty little chapter in his Elements of Poker in which he bluntly admits to being results oriented, both with regard to individual hands and to sessions, too. “When I win, I think I played better than I did,” says Angelo. “When I lose, I think I played worse that I did.” We all do.

I won’t repeat Angelo’s examples, but instead just offer a quick one of my own from a hand of six-handed limit hold’em I played yesterday. Hand began with me limping under-the-gun with a pair of deuces. Was one of those passive LHE tables one likes to find (and frequently can find at the $0.50/$1.00 limits), so I wasn’t too worried about raises and reraises behind. The cutoff also limped, then the small blind raised, the BB called, and me and the cutoff called as well. The flop was nice: . The blinds checked and I went ahead and bet out. All three of my opponents called.

The turn was the . The blinds checked again, I bet a dollar (into the six-dollar pot) and the cutoff raised. The blinds folded and I took a moment to decide whether I’d run into the straight. I decided it unlikely he had K-J or J-8, a judgment I somewhat rashly based on the 30 or so hands I’d played with him. So I three-bet. He paused (something I took as a good sign) and just called. I figured him for two pair here, say Q-T or Q-9.

The on the river changed nothing (according to my read), so I bet out. The cutoff called, showing , and I picked up a nice $13.50 pot with my set of ducks.

Was patting myself on the back, too, for having grabbed that extra turn bet. Of course, had a king or eight fallen on the river to cause me to lose to the straight, I’d have certainly felt much less heroic. Or even worse, had the guy actually had K-J (which, really, would have been perfectly reasonable given the preflop and flop action) and thus turned his straight, I’d have felt like a moron for having pumped up the pot there with the three-bet.

Thanks in large part to that one hand, I walked away from my brief session (just under 100 hands) with a tidy 16 big-bet profit, recording such in my notebook while experiencing yet another “results oriented”-inspired flush of satisfaction. Sue me.

We’re human. When the day begins and we wake up yet again and are glad for doing so, we immediately start being results oriented. If I were pulling muscles and feeling fatigued all the time, I’d stop running for sure. But I’m not. The results, if not dramatically obvious, have been acceptable. So I keep going.

While we are on the subject, last week I read an interesting article over on Salon by Patrick Smith, an airline pilot who contributes a weekly column over there called “Ask the Pilot.” The article (dated 1/23/09) asks the question “What saved the passengers of Flight 1549?” and in it Smith makes the case that neither Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger nor the first officer, Jeffrey Skiles, the two co-pilots who safely brought down that U.S. Airways plane onto the Hudson River earlier this month, should be exalted to greater-than-human status on the basis of what happened. Writes Smith, “we are owed a sober discussion of what actually befell them, instead of the vapid and infantile yammering about miracles and the ‘heroics’ of ‘the pilot.’”

Smith’s argument throughout the article is essentially to say the media and public have been way too “results oriented” with this one. Smith maintains that while the pilots should both be commended for having performed well under pressure, “skill was not the issue” that ultimately determined the fate of the 155 aboard that flight. Rather, it was luck. A lot of it. And according to Smith, “nowhere in the public discussion has the role of luck been adequately acknowledged.”

Read the article for the full discussion. Smith has a point, sure. Of course, I don’t think I’d agree with the claim that no one has said anything about “luck” here. And frankly, I’m not so eager to join the side of the dude wanting to diminish claims of the pilots’ skill and/or heroism, either. But I get where he is coming from.

But damn, isn’t this one instance where we can allow ourselves to be a bit more “results oriented”?

That is to say, a bit more human?