Farewell to The Poker Beat

Without much fanfare and zero anticipatory build-up, The Poker Beat podcast posted its final episode late last week, culminating a little more than two years’ worth of solid shows. If you missed it, here’s the “Show Finale” (2/8/11) over on PokerRoad.

While I continue to follow a number of poker podcasts -- and now, online video shows like “This Week in Poker” -- there really are only a small number for which I try never to miss a show, and The Poker Beat was one of them. Indeed, it’s possible I might have been one of those who listened to all 95 episodes since the show’s debut back on January 29, 2009.

The Poker Beat was the latest poker podcasting effort of Scott Huff, primary host of the show and veteran of several previous poker podcasts including CardPlayer’s The Circuit, PokerWire Radio, and Big Poker Sundays. If I’m not mistaken, the first Circuit show dates back to late 2005, meaning Huff has been at this off-and-on (mostly on) for more than five years.

In other words -- I realize as I write this -- I’ve been listening to Huff’s podcasts a little longer than I’ve been keeping this blog (started in April 2006). Thus have I had several occasions here to respond to items discussed on his shows and commend his significant contributions to reporting on poker.

Unlike the previous shows, The Poker Beat was consciously modeled after those Sunday morning news programs that gather reporters to debate topics of the day. I think I remember Huff early on evoking ESPN’s “Around the Horn” as a possible analogue, too, which it indeed resembled (aside from the faux-game show stuff they incorporate into the ESPN show).

Huff’s “roundtable” most often consisted of poker media types like John Caldwell (a co-host for many of the shows), B.J. Nemeth, Gary Wise, Dan Michalski, and Jess Welman, with Joe Stapleton also contributing frequently with his “Tight Laydown,” a humorous postscript to the discussions in which he, too, commented on the week’s stories through a satirical lens. Other bloggers/reporters/media-types were invited into the discussions as well from time to time, too, including like Dr. Pauly, Amy Calistri, Matthew Parvis, among others.

Like I say, I don’t believe I missed an episode. Even if I was already very familiar with a news item being discussed -- perhaps having written on it myself or been present at the event under consideration -- I always looked forward to hearing what the group had to say. One big reason why I did was the relative independence (i.e., freedom from the influence of sponsors and other content-affecting forces) the show enjoyed when it came reporting.

As was the case on his previous shows -- and even “Poker2Nite,” the television show Huff co-hosted with Joe Sebok that was sponsored by UB -- The Poker Beat pretty much always featured a kind of editorial objectivity, at least relatively speaking. Some may want to disagree with me here, but the point I’m making is simply that while Huff certainly had his own opinions and predilections (as we all do), he never allowed his own P.O.V. to affect unduly the choice of topics discussed on The Poker Beat. And while his opinions on those topics were always his own (and thus, by definition, subjective), I never sensed they were shaped by sponsors or other external entities.

The same can be said for the panelists on the show, too, most of whom in fact also reported for other outlets that do depend on online poker sites and other sponsors that at times can affect coverage. However, on The Poker Beat it seemed (to me, at least) everyone spoke without constraint, with their opinions genuinely representing their own thoughts on the topics being considered.

Thus will the end of The Poker Beat leave a bit of a void in the world of so-called “poker media,” although there are other places where one can still find relatively unblinkered commentary and reporting on the poker world. The Two Plus Two Pokercast springs to mind (sponsored by PokerStars but nonetheless autonomous), as do some other sites and especially certain independently-produced blogs.

So thanks to Huff and all the others for two-plus years’ worth of The Poker Beat. And here’s hoping Huff returns -- as he intimated on that last episode he might -- with some other contribution to poker reporting in the not-too-distant future.

NAPT Back on the Map

The North American Poker Tour is back! And despite it being six months since the NAPT’s last stop the tour has nonetheless successfully grabbed most of the poker world’s attention once again.

You might recall how the NAPT first designated the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (from back in January) as its initial stop, then landed at the Venetian in Las Vegas in February. I had the chance to help cover both the High Roller event and the Main Event at that stop for the PokerStars blog, while also writing some here about that trip, too. Here are those NAPT Venetian posts again: Arrival, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, and Postscript.

It sounded early on as though a number of other stops for this Season 1 of the NAPT were possibly in the works, though only one panned out, the NAPT Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Connecticut. Finally the tour resumed this past week at the Bicycle Casino in L.A., where the Main Event ended up attracting a large field of 701 players for the $4,750+$250 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament. After three days of play, they are now down to 19 players, with Christopher DeMaci leading the way. Jason Mercier, Michael Binger, Anh Van Nyugen, George Lind III, and Matt Affleck are all still with chips as well.

Most are regarding the turnout for NAPT L.A. as impressive, especially since there was no television coverage planned for the event (unlike at the Venetian or Mohegan Sun). However, just as they were getting underway a $5,000+$250 buy-in NLHE bounty-shootout event was added to the schedule, an event which will take place at the nearby Crystal Casino and Hotel, and apparently that event will be shot and subsequently televised.

The move away from the Bike is significant here, since the World Poker Tour -- which stops at the Bicycle Casino each year as well -- has a deal which disallows the Bike from letting other tours come in and stage televised events. In fact, there was some additional chatter on Twitter yesterday suggesting that the Main Event final table might be moved to the Crystal Casino as well in order to make it possible to shoot and televise it, too.

Not sure if that is really happening or not, but Andrew Feldman of ESPN Poker has tweeted that ESPN2 will be broadcasting three hours’ worth of coverage of the bounty-shootout event, plus one more hour of the Main Event final table. If indeed that is the case, one assumes the Main Event turnout would have been even higher had news of the final table being televised been known prior to the start of the event.

I suppose one could look at this little territorial skirmish as another round in the intermittent “WPT vs. NAPT” battle, something I wrote about before here back in the spring when the NAPT Venetian event had taken place just a few days before the WPT L.A. Poker Classic, and thus may have caused some players to have to make a choice between the two.

Will be interesting to see how the NAPT L.A. event plays out -- both in terms of the result and where they end up staging the sucker. Thus will I be checking in frequently over at the PokerStars blog as well as on PokerNews to find out what happens. Might also have to dial up the latest episode of The Poker Beat (recorded last night) to see if those folks have any further info to share on this one.

(EDIT [added 11/17/10]: The rumor turned out to be true -- the final table of the NAPT L.A. Main Event was indeed relocated to the Crystal Casino, thereby allowing it to be shot and shown on ESPN2.)

The Skill of the Players, the Skill of the Game

Played in the first of those invitationals in the Battle of the Bloggers Tournament 5 last night. There were 79 runners in this one I believe, and the top 15 spots paid. Thanks again to Sir AlCantHang for pulling the sucker together!

After a couple of hours and around 150 hands, I hadn’t been running particularly well though I felt okay about how things were shaping up. I sat with a little over 4,000 chips, which was below the average (about 5,000) with 47 players left. Blinds were 100/200, and I had just been moved to a new table that had several short stacks, plus a couple of folks in the top ten with about 10,000 each.

Soon I picked up pocket kings in the small blind, and it folded around to one of the big stacks who raised to 450 from the cutoff. The button folded, and I decided to put in a hefty reraise to 2,850, essentially saying I was ready to put the rest of my stack in here. The big blind folded and the LP player called.

Flop looked all right to me -- Q-7-7. My opponent had just called off nearly a third of his stack preflop, so for him to hold a seven felt unlikely. A queen seemed very possible, and as I went ahead and stuck the rest of my chips in the middle it occurred to me he’d probably have to call with a lesser pair or maybe even worse. He did call.

Alas, he did have a seven. Actually, he had two of them.

“Oof,” I typed, seeing he’d flopped quads. “Rigged,” he responded sympathetically. Two community cards later I was on the rail.

The hand made me think of a few weeks ago when I managed to flop quads a few times in short stretch while playing limit hold’em (wrote about that here). I remember looking around then to see the chances of doing so was something like 1 in 408 or something. The Poker Grump had calculated this once.

The hand also made me think about an exchange on The Poker Beat from a couple of episodes ago that I had meant to write about but forgot to -- one concerning that age-old “skill-vs.-luck” debate in poker. It was on the 4/8/10 episode, during the panel’s discussion of that recent ruling in a Pennsylvania appeals court that poker was “predominantly a game of chance.”

Host Scott Huff came up with what I thought was an interesting approach to the topic, even if it didn’t sound quite right when he proposed it. “Is it possible,” asked Huff, “that the way these courts are looking at it is that ‘Yes, while poker may be a game of skill, most people -- and I think we can all agree on this -- most people play poker as if it is a game of chance?”

Huff suggested going down to Hollywood Park Casino at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning to see how much “skill” was being employed in the games. Huff wondered if this state of affairs helped create the impression to non-players that poker really was “predominantly” luck-based. “Because in order for poker to be a game of skill,” concluded Huff, “you must be skillful at it. You must study the game.”

Like I say, it sounded like an interesting approach, although I remember at the time sensing there was something a little off about it. Gary Wise brought up one of those studies that shows most hands aren’t shown down -- not quite answering the question. B.J. Nemeth said it was a good point and jokingly wished Huff wouldn’t give poker’s opponents ammunition like this. Finally, Dan Michalski said that while he agreed poker was a game of skill we nevertheless “have to acknowledge that there’s so much chance involved, and when it comes to the politics of it, they are always going to be looking at it as gambling because it is something that is run by casinos.”

I didn’t think too much more about it, but then was reminded of Huff’s question again a couple of days later when I looked at the PokerRoad forums and saw that a poster had challenged his thesis that “in order for poker to be a game of skill, you must be skillful at it.”

You see the logical fallacy there, yes? A game can require skill regardless of how people play it. Indeed, how can one be skillful at a game if it does not require skill?

Such was the 6th Wilbury’s point on the forums, which included his noting that the presence of bad players in fact “supports the argument that poker is a game of skill” insofar as the difference between them and the skillful players is discernible.

Even so, I do think that when it comes to considering how non-players sometimes perceive poker, Huff probably has a point. Heck, even a game like golf can look mostly chance-based to the non-player. Makes sense to suggest that to those who don’t play the game -- who are often the ones drafting legislation or presiding over cases in which the question comes up -- poker sure can look like luck sometimes.

Especially when dudes are flopping quads on you.

Poker and the English Language

I occasionally talk here about how impatient I sometimes get with poker-related analogies. For instance, about a year ago I referred to the Poker Shrink noting how he wasn’t “a big fan of the ‘Poker is like Life’ books and articles” because, in his view, most of them end up being “too general to carry any more wisdom than a dribble glass.” I agreed with the Shrink in saying I also didn’t care much for these analogies -- most particularly when they end up making one’s meaning more vague rather than helping clarify what it is one is trying to express.

In other words, I ain’t too keen on someone proclaiming “Poker is like life” and leaving it at that, though I do often appreciate the many ways poker presents us with situations that resemble those we face elsewhere, and thus occasionally provides interesting ways to talk about and assess those non-poker situations. And yeah, I, too, will indulge in such making comparisons now and again, as it is both fun and occasionally even useful.

That said, one has to be careful not to introduce unwanted vagueness when making such comparisons. Another danger one faces when choosing to employ poker-related metaphors is to fall into stale, overused phrases and clichés -- also not recommended if the goal is to engage an audience.

The abundance of poker terms and phrases in everyday English is testament to the game’s popularity and significance. But this abundance also means many of these terms and phrases have become pretty well worn by now. People everywhere are constantly bluffing each other. Or upping the ante. Or noting when the chips are down. Or passing the buck. Or trying their hand at something. Or singing that he can’t read my, can’t read my, no he can’t read my poker face. Or warning you about that guy being a wild card, with an ace in the hole. Or up his sleeve. Or simply being an ace.

I’m reminded of George Orwell’s still relevant 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” in which he laments the decline of the language in various contexts, but most especially in political speech and writing. Among his many warnings listed there, Orwell advises readers to avoid “dying metaphors” if at all possible. In his list of examples Orwell does include one poker-related one -- “playing into the hands of” -- and I’d imagine he’d list most of those appearing in the previous paragraph, too, as often introducing an unwanted “loss of vividness” in one’s language.

Last week Tiffany Michelle appeared on Fox News to chat with Neil Cavuto, ostensibly to discuss the current status of President Obama’s efforts to introduce health care reform and all of the legislative tangling -- and political fallout -- that has occurred in connection to those efforts thus far. Why Michelle? Well, because she’s “a professional black jack and poker player” -- i.e., a gambler -- and someone thought it would be a good idea for a person who understands risks and rewards to comment.

Bill Rini wrote a bit about the segment last week in a post that also has the embedded video. Then he came back and transcribed the whole sucker. As Rini points out, the conversation between Cavuto and Michelle -- coming in at just under five minutes -- is more than a little cringe-worthy, primarily because of the not terribly successful attempt to describe everything in terms of poker or gambling metaphors.

It appears that Cavuto (and Fox) mainly wanted to say that Obama has “a bad hand” here and should fold. And perhaps -- as Cavuto hastily adds at the end -- also to charge that the President isn’t playing with his own money, but with the taxpayers’. So they brought Michelle on to help communicate that message, but Cavuto’s questions were so imprecise those (essentially banal) observations barely came through, if at all.

If you’re curious, check out Rini’s transcript and/or watch the video. I actually wouldn’t fault Michelle too much here -- she does pretty well, I think, to try to respond to Cavuto’s garbled clichés, and in fact probably saves the whole segment from becoming utterly inscrutable.

The hosts of The Poker Beat discussed the segment a bit on their show last week, and there tourney reporter B.J. Nemeth did a good job summarizing why it failed -- and why I am sometimes impatient with poker-related metaphors that tend to obscure more than clarify. “The whole point of an analogy is to try and make something easier to understand,” said Nemeth, “and I think what they did is took something the [viewers] had some grasp of and made it incomprehensible.”

Then again, as Orwell notes, what Nemeth is describing is often what happens when language is employed for political purposes. Writing in the wake of the second World War, Orwell notes how “Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Perhaps the stakes were a bit higher then (to use a dying metaphor). But Orwell’s desire for us to view “language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought” is still worth reiterating.

Tunes, Talk, and a Place to Raise My Lonely Dental Floss

Been listening to some cool stuff on the iPod these days. A few new things, including the latest Tortoise album, called Beacons of Ancestorship. Released over the summer, but I’m just now getting to it. Awesome grooves, soundscapes. The instrumental outfit’s 1996 album Millions Now Living Will Never Die is probably one of my all-time-top-ten-most-listened-to records -- a “desert island” disc, for sure -- and this one might be their best since that one.

Also have Metric’s latest (from the spring, I think), called Fantasies, which is pretty hard not to dial up again and again, especially thanks to the start of that gripping opening track “Help I’m Alive” (“I tremble... tremble... tremble... tremble...”). Not as stunningly satisfying as Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?, their 2003 debut, which I go back to repeatedly, but a nifty collection of idiosyncratic pop, nonetheless. (Can you tell I’ve been thinking of starting a music blog?)

Mixed in there, too, as usual, has been Frank Zappa, for whom I noticed the other day I have exactly 600 songs loaded on the little music player. Some might think that obsessive, but FZ fans understand the requirements for uncovering conceptual continuity. Have been once more working through the You Can’t Do This On Stage Anymore discs here lately. Up to the start of Volume 4 and that cool sequence at the start that moves from “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama” to “Willie the Pimp” to “Montana.”

Have also worked in a few poker podcasts of late, and had a few shows to recommend to you.

The latest installment of The Poker Beat (10/8/09) featured an interesting discussion of the marketing of the November Nine, now less than a month away. Had a lot of good comments on my post on the subject earlier in the week, and the discussion on the show added still further insight. Definitely appears as though we’re going to see more “mainstream” attention this time around. The show also featured a visit with Amy Calistri to talk about the demise of PokerPages (for which she once wrote/edited).

Daniel Negreanu was the guest on this week’s Hardcore Poker Show (10/7/09). Interesting as always, was Kid Poker, as he discussed his near miss at the World Series of Poker Europe Main Event. He was additionally asked about Phil Hellmuth’s speculations -- first aired on the 9/23/09 episode of the Hardcore Poker Show -- concerning Harrah’s new online site and the possibility of the other sites teaming up to compete with Harrah’s. Negreanu roundly dismissed the Poker Brat’s idea as wayward fantasy, particularly the notion that a site like PokerStars, which he represents, would ever enter an alliance with Hellmuth’s site, UltimateBet. “I want nothing to do with that company,” says Negreanu, adding that “personally, I don’t think they should exist anymore... we don’t owe them any favors.” Run over to Pokerati to hear the UB-related stuff, which Kevmath excerpted out for your listening convenience.

During the middle portion of this week’s Two Plus Two Pokercast (10/6/09) there’s lengthy interview with Neil Channing in which the British poker pro talks about the current state of poker in the U.K. as well as his own interesting path through sports betting, backing, and poker. As always, hosts Mike Johnson and Adam Schwartz do a great job with the interview, and the result is both compelling and at times laugh out loud funny.

Going back a little bit... they’ve been successively interviewing the various members of the November Nine over on Phil Gordon and Andrew Feldman’s podcast The Poker Edge. I think they’ve had six of the nine on thus far. For more on your favorite logger Darvin Moon, check out the 9/25/09 episode. (Moon should really start a blog and thus become the first poker-logger blogger.) Finally, a while back Howard Schwartz had poker author Arnold Snyder on his Gamblers Book Club Podcast (the 9/3/09 episode). I’m a big fan of Snyder’s Poker Tournament Formula books, and he made for a great guest on Schwartz’s show.

Speaking of podcasts, I do have a new episode of The Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show in the works (I know it has been a while). Hopefully it will not be too long before Episode 19 of that makes it onto your iPod or iPod-like device.

Meanwhile, I think it’s gonna be more Zappa this morning for me. Actually received a spammy e-mail today with the subject line “Montana Investment Property” that included this picture. No shinola! Looks like a nice place to raise a crop of dental floss, yes? Yippie-Yi-O-Ti-Yay!

On Those UltimateBet Hand Mysteries, er... Histories

Listened to The Poker Beat’s latest episode last night, and -- as I expected -- the hosts didn’t seem to pull many punches with regard to the Joe Sebok signing at UltimateBet. Pretty clear all of those who spoke -- host Scott Huff, Pokerati Dan, Gary Wise, and John Caldwell -- are less than thrilled at Sebok’s decision to sign on with UB, expressing varying degrees of skepticism and trepidation in their conversation.

The good news there, of course, is that the content of PokerRoad’s most interesting show doesn’t appear to have been unduly affected by PR’s CEO having become a sponsored pro and “media and operations consultant” for UltimateBet. As I say, I didn’t really think it would -- though I suppose that like with other matters we’ll have to wait and see how long things remain as they are at present over at PR. (Will be most interesting, of course, to hear the next episode of PokerRoad Radio, the show Sebok himself co-hosts.)

On yesterday’s episode, Pokerati Dan shared his funny story regarding his recent request to obtain his hand histories. As you might have heard, Sebok published a blog post informing everyone how to get their hand histories from UB, and Dan followed the Cub’s instructions. Apparently after his initial request, Dan was sent a form letter instructing him how to look at previous hands while playing at UB -- i.e., a useless non-response. He did get another, less impersonal reply afterwards (not discussed on the show), but it didn’t jibe with Dan’s memory of his UB (mis)adventures. (Dan’s interactions with UB support are being chronicled in the comments to this Pokerati post, if you are interested.)

Some readers of this blog might recall my own struggles with trying to get hand histories from UB, a site which I joined in the fall of 2007, then quickly decided to leave on the heels of the Absolute Poker cheating scandal. Knowing that UB and AP were owned by the same folks, I didn’t see any reason to risk remaining on UltimateBet and so pulled my money off of the site a couple of months before the scandal broke over there.

Anyhow, it was in the fall of 2008 that I put in a request to UltimateBet to get copies of all of my hand histories -- not so much because I was worried about having been cheated (I play at low stakes, and thus apparently below the range of the cheaters), but simply as part of my efforts at the time to get hand histories from all of the sites on which I have played. Incidentally, my requests to PokerStars and Full Tilt were entirely successful, with both sites able to supply me with four years’ worth of hand histories within days.

The response to my October request was that “unfortunately, due to the amount of information, we are not able to send you all your hand histories.” Of course, we’re only talking a couple of months’ worth of play on the site, so while I was skeptical, I didn’t pursue the matter.

Then on 12/14/08 Annie Duke appeared on Sebok’s PokerRoad Radio podcast and said "We'll send anybody who requests it their lifetime hand histories." So again I sent in a request, and this time was told it would take a couple of weeks, but I could get my hand histories. After three weeks of nothing, I wrote back, but received no response. Tried one more time later in January, but once more my email went unanswered.

So I gave up, but decided this morning to try again. My request concludes with the following paragraph:

“I played on UltimateBet for only a couple of months -- Aug.-Sept. 2007 -- and according to my records only played a small number of hands, relatively speaking. I also played low limit stakes, and so while it is likely I was not affected by the cheating that occurred on the site, I would like to see my hand histories nonetheless. UB’s response to my request will determine whether or not I wish to return to the site, and also whether or not I will be recommending to others that they consider playing on the site.”

I’ll note in the comments to this post what sort of response I get from my request (if any). Perhaps some -- including those handling the hand history requests at UB -- might for various reasons view my case as relatively unimportant. Indeed, I wouldn’t disagree that there are those who played on the site for whom there is much greater urgency here than is the case for myself.

Nevertheless, I was a customer at UB. And I’d like to know with utter certainty I wasn’t cheated while playing there. Indeed, I recall how during my last session on UB -- not long after the Absolute Poker merde had hit the fan -- a weird hand or two led to thoughts of the possibility that someone could see my hole cards. Which led to the realization that I couldn’t keep playing on the site, whether or not my paranoia was justified. (As it happened, the cheating was still going on at UB at the time -- although as I say probably not at my low limit table.)

So, we’ll see. Can’t believe, really, we’re all chirping about UltimateBet again like this.

Of course, some are worried about other highly important stuff. No, I am not referring to Phil Hellmuth threatening to mastermind an alternative poker site/series to compete with the World Series of Poker/Harrah’s (check it out). I’m referring to the pressing need for casinos to ready themselves for the possibility of pot being legalized in California and Nevada. No shinola! What is this, poker news or freshman comp? Got nothing but love for my bud-loving buds, but legalization is still a huge longshot. And casinos letting players get high in the poker rooms? Pure fantasyland. (Of course, the author does suggest at one point he thinks most of his readers might well be high, so maybe I’m somehow missing the big picture here, man.)

To be honest, I think it is only slightly more possible that all 31 names of the cheaters alluded to in the KGC “final decision” on the UltimateBet cheating scandal will be named. And maybe a little more likely all these friggin’ hand histories will finally be shared. Even so, I think we can all agree these are still matters worth discussing.

On the Economy & the 2009 WSOP

We’re getting close, peoples. Just a week more and satellites get crankin’ at the Rio. On Wednesday, May 27th, Event No. 1, the Casino Employees Event, a $500 buy-in no-limit hold’em tourney, gets started. Then on Thursday at noon the real World Series of Poker begins with the “Special 40th Annual No-Limit Hold’em” event (Event No. 2), that $40,000 buy-in event everyone’s been talking about for weeks now.

Then all hell breaks loose.

One new event starts each day from Wed. through Sat. next week. Then the following week, we’ll slip into the routine of having two separate events start each day, meaning there will usually be around five or six different tournaments going on at once, with a couple of final tables each day.

Am noticing that on Wednesday, June 3rd there will be a whopping seven different events going on, including three final tables, all starting at 2 p.m. Vegas time. (I think that has to be a record.) I don’t see any other days on the 2009 schedule with seven events running. It’s the conclusion of that $1,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em Event No. 4, the “stimulus special,” that’s causing the pile-up there, I believe. That’s a four-day event, though really five days as it will have a couple of day ones.

So whaddya think? Too many events? There are 57 bracelets being awarded at this year’s WSOP (a new record). Is the WSOP spreading itself too thin?

Everyone’s wonderin’ about the numbers, specifically whether recent economic woes might affect turnouts. Casino revenues have certainly experienced a significant downturn. The Las Vegas Sun reported in late January that casino revenues had decreased markedly in 2008, and that the trend was expected to continue in 2009. A more recent article over on PokerNews Daily reports how Nevada has seen fifteen straight months of decline in gaming revenues (when months are compared year over year), with the drop-offs over the last six months ranging from 11.61% (March 2008 to March 2009) to 22.33% (October 2007 to October 2008).

There was another interesting article over on Poker News Daily yesterday in which Dan Stewart, the owner of PokerScout (that site that tracks traffic on all of the sites), is interviewed regarding the current health of online poker.

That article appears to have been specifically occasioned by the recent spate of overlays in Full Tilt Poker’s FTOPS XII, including an eye-popping $200,000-plus overlay in the $2.5 million-guaranteed Main Event. According to Stewart, Full Tilt’s decision to run a “mini-FTOPS” alongside the regular FTOPS -- mirroring the main events with similar events costing one-tenth the buy-ins -- appears to have affected turnouts for the big events. Says Stewart, the decision to run a mini-FTOPS was a “mini-disaster” that “cannibalized the business from the big tournaments.” Of course, Stewart also points out that Full Tilt nevertheless is doing just fine, as is the rest of the online poker world, which is “quite healthy” clicking along at an overall 30% increase in revenue over last year.

So live casino games are hurting. But online poker is as healthy as its ever been. What about the WSOP?

There was some discussion of the economy and its possible effect on the WSOP on last week’s episode of The Poker Beat (the 5/14/09 show). The consensus there seemed to be that the currently ailing economy would not have much effect on turnouts.

John Caldwell is now a regular co-host on TPB. Unfortunately, I won’t be working with Caldwell this summer as he is no longer with PokerNews, although I’m sure I’ll see him out there somewhere along the way. According to Caldwell, the WSOP tends to thrive no matter what the economy is doing, being, as he calls it, “the exception to the rule.” He goes on to point out that “the prestige and the cachet of the event sort of insulate it from... the [failing] economy.... Now, it may be an issue in certain specific events... [but] I don’t think it’s going to be much of a factor [overall].”

Caldwell is probably right, although I do think it will be interesting to watch how the field sizes in the $1,500-$2,500 events compare to those of the $5,000, $10,000, and higher buy-in events. The smaller buy-in events are always much more popular, but I wonder if perhaps we’ll see an even more severe “class difference” happening this year, with just the same 200-300 players turning up for the higher buy-in events, while the hoi polloi stick with the smaller buy-in tourneys. (Sort of a WSOP and a mini-WSOP, in a sense.)

I, for one, am hoping for big fields and a highly successful WSOP, although I know it could turn out otherwise. Selfish, I know, as a thriving poker economy certainly is good news for someone like me.

In any event, it’s gonna be a busy time for your humble gumshoe, no matter how the turnouts turn out.

On Something Else That Will Never Happen

On last week’s episode of The Poker Beat (3/12/09), host Scott Huff led another engaging roundtable discussion of a few different pokery topics with B.J. Nemeth (World Poker Tour), Dan Michalski (Pokerati), and Gary Wise (ESPN, Wise Hand Poker). After they were done, Huff had Matthew Parvis (Bluff Magazine) on primarily to talk about that Bluff Online Poker Challenge.

One topic the initial gang of four spent some time examining was this recent “challenge” issued by the online training site BluefirePoker whereby the site is “offering $1,000,000 to President Obama or any member of the U.S. Congress willing to play a poker game against any of their poker pros, and the winnings can go to the charity of choice.” As the site explains (I’m quoting from their presser), BluefirePoker is willing to “put up $1,000,000 against $1 for a chance to play” with either Obama, a House representative, or a senator.

The point, says BluefirePoker, is to address the issue of “whether or not Poker is a game of chance or skill,” since that issue is currently a focus of attention in most legal debates over poker. “No one in their right mind would turn down this challenge if Poker were a game based on luck,” claims Bluefire, “because the odds are so far in their favor -- putting up $1 for a chance to win $1,000,000” for one’s chosen charity. Further details of the contest were left to be determined, although Bluefire stipulates that “the length of the game must... be long enough to demonstrate the advantage of skill because Poker prowess and experience demonstrate themselves over time.”

More than a little bit cheeky, this whole challenge thing. But it did get some national press last week, with even Fox News devoting a minute to reporting it. Fox News also spent some time reporting on dogs learning how to surf, I saw, so take that however you will. In any event, a few more of us have certainly heard of BluefirePoker now.

The discussion of the challenge on The Poker Beat was interesting, though the fellas spent way too long speculating exactly how the event would go down and how it would be viewed by the public. When Parvis came on afterwards, he sensibly noted that the challenge “is just never going to happen” -- that “there is not even a remote chance of it” actually taking place.

Indeed, BluefirePoker seems to be admitting as much when they suggest that “No one in their right mind” would refuse the challenge if it were true that poker is a luck-based game. In other words, according to BluefirePoker, by not accepting the challenge, Obama and Congress implicitly admit that poker is a skill-based game. Which appears to be the whole point here. (Whether or not it is a good point is another question.)

So if even those issuing the challenge do not mean for it actually to be accepted, it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to discuss it as if it were.

The challenge reminds me of a short story written by Mark Twain back and published around 1870 called “Science vs. Luck.” Twain was himself a poker player, and often explicitly defended the game as a worthwhile pastime. I suppose you could say the story is in its own way a defense of card-playing, too.

In the story, Twain imagines a trial taking place in Kentucky in which a dozen boys have been arrested for gambling. The boys had been playing a card game called “seven up” and betting on the outcome, and their lawyer decides to defend them by trying to prove that the game is based on skill (or “science”) and not luck, thereby demonstrating that they were not, in fact, gambling.

Both sides argue their respective positions, but no verdict is reached. It is therefore decided (somewhat preposterously) to play it out to settle the issue. Six clergymen, all of whom want to say the game is gambling, sit down to play some “seven up” with six laymen who believe the game is based on skill (or “science”). After several hours of the clergymen getting crushed in the game, they finally return with all in agreement that the game is, indeed, based on science and not luck, and the boys are acquitted. (If you are interested, you can read the story here.)

Twain’s story is obviously a fabulous fiction, and so probably shouldn’t be read as necessarily corresponding to reality in a direct fashion. Even so, I have always found the story problematic, since it seems to me that after losing the clergymen would be more likely to call it a luck-based game than not.

I mean, really, in poker isn’t it the losers who usually call the game luck and winners who call it skill?

In fact, rather than “prove” the card game is skill-based rather than based on chance, Twain’s story seems to me more obviously to prove the futility of “playing it out” to try to determine the question.

As would the BluefirePoker challenge, yes? Not that it will ever happen.

The (Unexpected) Return of the Prodigal Son

So I’m listening to yesterday’s episode of The Poker Beat (2/12/09), that new podcast over on PokerRoad hosted by Scott Huff in which he has on various poker media types to discuss news of the day. After a discussion of that Russ Hamilton video and its possible significance, Bluff Magazine Editor-in-Chief Matthew Parvis came on to talk about this new “Bluff Magazine Online Poker Challenge” announced earlier this month.

The Challenge sounds interesting enough. It looks like a great chance for the sponsoring site, Lock Poker, to get some publicity, although in the interview Parvis says it was his “brainchild.” As one can read about over on Bluff, the “competition will bring together some of the best online poker players and each will be given an opportunity to build a bankroll playing multi-table tournaments and sit-n-gos exclusively on Lock Poker.”

As Parvis explained on the show, “we are basically depositing $200 into a Lock Poker account” for each player invited to play in the Challenge. The accounts are apparently “locked” (pun intended?) so no other deposits or transfers can be made with them, and as the Challenge proceeds they will be audited each night “because we don’t want any scandal to be associated with the Challenge itself” (explained Parvis). The players will have 30 days to try to build their rolls, and the one who manages to earn the most will make the cover of an upcoming issue of Bluff. I believe all of this will happen in March.

“We were lucky enough to get some really quality guys,” noted Parvis on the show. He mentioned several, including the magazine’s 2008 online poker player of the year David “The Maven” Chicotsky, Adam Junglen, Matt Vingren, Eric “Rizen” Lynch, Søren Kongsgaard, “Bodog” Ari Engel, and Jeff “Yellowsub” Williams. “A really, really good line-up of quality guys,” said Parvis, adding that he was only listing some of the 20 players who had been invited.

The article over on Bluff mentions some of the others who have been invited, including Garrett “GBecks” Beckman, Phil “USCphildo” Collins, Brett “Bhanks11” Hanks, and Maria Ho. Sorel Mizzi is also listed, he of the “account selling” incident from December 2007 that caused him to be banned from Full Tilt Poker.

Parvis talked a bit about Mizzi on the show. He also talked more than a bit about one other controversial name appearing over there on the list of invitees: Josh “JJprodigy” Field. No shinola.

You remember Field, don’t you? First banned from PartyPoker back in February 2006 (when he was just 16) after he won their $500,000 Sunday Tournament in which he was playing under two screen names (JJProdigy and Ablackcar). He was then caught cheating at other sites, as well, from which he was also banned. PokerStars even banned him from playing in their PokerStars Caribbean Adventure once he turned 18.

It was right around the time he turned 18 that Field issued some “apologies” (of a sort) on forums and in interviews. I transcribed a bit of the PokerRoad interview (the 1/14/08 episode) in a post titled “Uncorrected Personality Traits That Seem Whimsical in a Child May Prove to Be Ugly in a Fully Grown Adult.”* Among other questions, Field was asked in the PokerRoad interview whether or not he was then “playing on the sites you’re banned from and you have no plans to play on [those] sites.”

“At this moment in time, yeah,” answered Field. “I can’t tell you in a month I’ll be thinking the same, because it’ll be really hard not playing all those sites. But right now, yeah.”

On The Poker Beat, Parvis said he’d spoken with Field at the recent Aussie Millions and afterwards felt he was worth inviting to participate in the Challenge, even though Parvis admitted Field had made some “serious, serious mistakes in his life in terms of the poker world and cheating, and multi-accounting, and ghosting, and selling accounts... whatever the scandals may be.” “That’s a hell of a laundry list,” joked Huff in response.

Well, now it appears Field will not be able to play in the Challenge after all. Parvis told Huff he received an email on Wednesday which reported “there was some situation” over on Cake Poker (for which Lock Poker is a skin, I believe) with an “account hand-off” involving Field. “Whatever the case is, it appears that JJ has been involved in another sticky situation here,” said Parvis, and so will not be allowed to play in the Challenge.

To Parvis’ credit, he expressed humility to Huff about having been fooled into thinking Field had indeed changed his cheating ways. Still, one has to wonder about the initial decision to invite the notorious JJProdigy to participate in such a Challenge. They don’t want “any scandal to be associated with the Challenge itself,” but then Bluff invites the most notorious, scandal-ridden player in online poker to participate?

As I was listening, I was amazed Field could even resurface in this way as part of any story -- much less one involving selecting top online pros to participate in a freeroll like this. As Seth Meyers would say over on Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, “Really?!?”

Yet another head-scratching moment from the ethically-ambiguous world of online poker.

*By the way, that earlier post title came from Robyn Hitchcock’s twisted a cappella number “Uncorrected Personality Traits” that appears on one of my all-time favorite discs, Hitchcock’s 1984 masterpiece I Often Dream of Trains. And speaking of masterpieces, that’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by the Dutch master, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, pictured above.

Podcasts, Programs, & Presumptions from Pessimistic Poker Players

Let me start this Friday morning by passing along a few items for you poker fans out there.

First, Scott Huff (of CardPlayer’s The Circuit, PokerWire Radio, Big Poker Sundays) has started up a new poker podcast over on PokerRoad called The Poker Beat (replacing BPS). The focus of the weekly show will be to discuss current poker headlines, with Huff mostly having journalists, bloggers, and other insider-types on as guests.

For the first episode (1/29/09), Scott had lead WPT tourney reporter B.J. Nemeth, Pokerati poobah Dan Michalski, Bluff Magazine Editor-in-Chief Matthew Parvis, and ESPN poker reporter Gary Wise on to discuss the state of the WPT, UIGEA stuff, and Tom “durrrr” Dwan’s challenge. Huff’s Two Jacks in the Hole co-host Joe Stapleton also came on at the end for a humor segment.

By the way, speaking of podcasts, the plan is to have Episode 13 of the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show available for your listening pleasure tomorrow. Looking at a comedy show, this time. (EDIT [added 9 p.m., 1/31/09]: Looks like it might be a couple more days before the show is ready -- stay tuned!)

Also, if you hadn’t heard, ESPN plans to televise the 2008 World Series of Poker Europe Main Event for us Americans starting on Sunday. We Yanks never got to see the 2007 WSOPE (won by Annette Obrestad), so this’ll be our first glimpse of how they do it over in the U.K.

The first four hours of coverage airs on ESPN on Sunday night (February 1) from 6-10 p.m. Eastern time. For those who might be watching a certain football game during those hours, those four hours will be repeated over on ESPN2 starting at 10 p.m. Eastern. From what I’m reading, they outfitted many of the tables with the hole card cameras -- i.e., not just the feature table -- which will apparently add a little something extra to the coverage.

Finally, a quick anecdote from the online tarbles...

Had a longer-than-usual session of limit hold’em yesterday ($0.50/$1.00, six-handed). Started well, but ended up a loser for the day (down 20 big bets, oof!). Has been a nice week, though, and the total for the month is shaping up decently, so I wasn’t too miffed about one poor outing.

I say the session started well. I won a few small pots early, then had a sweet hand in which I’d been dealt pocket fours in the big blind, called preflop after there had been a raise and two other callers, then the flop brought a four. Ended up taking two of my opponents to the river, both of whom held (unimproved) pocket pairs of their own.

After the hand, the guy who’d lost with J-J started griping in the chat box.

GaryGripe said, “***in stinking rigged fake site”
GaryGripe said, “no matter what you ***in do not matter what table you go if this stinking rigged site wants you to lose you lose”

Interestingly enough, shortly after his tirade he started catching cards like crazy, and ended up leaving the table some twenty bucks ahead of where he was when he so eloquently offered his well-considered conspiracy theory to us all.

Like I say, things went downhill for me after that early rush. Turned into one of those days where everyone else seemed to be getting the aces and kings, making their flushes, flopping two pair out of the blinds, etc., while I kept getting dealt J-4-offsuit. The guy sitting to my left (not GaryGripe) would flop sets three times within eight hands. He left the table, another player took his spot, and damned if he didn’t flop sets twice right away.

As the late Kurt Vonnegut would say, so it goes.

After the session, I was fooling around looking at site statistics for the blog and noticed someone had come to Hard-Boiled Poker after having done a search of the key words “titan poker micro limits rigged.” Took the seeker to a post of mine from a couple of years ago called “Online Poker Is Rigged, ver. 2.0” in which I told the story of a dude at a LHE table on Bodog who kept yammering on in the chat box as he lost hand after hand, cursing someone named “Bo.”

Finally I realized the dude was cursing the site itself, having personified it as an evil antagonist out to get him. (A funnier than average post, by the way, if yr looking for a good laugh.)

The tin-foil-hat guys are certainly entertaining. Actually, I don’t think it is entirely goofy to worry about sites’ integrity, but to entertain the possibility that a site actually has it in for you in particular -- esp. when yr sitting at a $0.50/$1.00 LHE table -- seems an especially remarkable display of self-centered thinking.

Earlier this week, Thomas Steuerman wrote a post over on the Bigger Deal site called “The ‘Poker God’ Delusion” which kind of touches on that impulse to assign the cause of one’s momentary misfortune to a higher power. I think the dudes whimpering about sites screwing them are basically doing the same thing, only they’re a bit more earth-bound in their thinking.

Probably more interesting -- and more useful -- for those of us who don’t believe in “poker gods” or the targeted rigging of sites is to think about how to play back against such fatalists when we encounter them. At my table, I sensed others start to give GaryGripe more action after his comment, which probably contributed a few big bets to his suddenly-growing stack. (Maybe I did, too, now that I think about it.) Perhaps his whimpering was all part of a larger strategic metagame...?

Nah. What am I thinkin’? Lol microlimit metagames.

Have a super Super Bowl weekend, all.